Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Case for American Power" with Shadi Hamid

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"The Case for American Power" with Shadi Hamid · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
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The United States of America is morally superior to its adversaries and shouldn't be ashamed
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of exercising dominance in the world.
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That is an uncomfortable idea, especially on the left and has become increasingly so under
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the rule of Donald Trump.
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But today's guest is going to defend it from a left-wing perspective.
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Shadi Hamid is a columnist at the Washington Post who was formerly on that newspaper's
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editorial board and was a lefty.
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He was a Bernie bro.
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He was opposed to the Iraq war.
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He's an Arab Muslim American.
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He was born in the United States, but he got his PhD in political science at Oxford University
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and got a full bright scholarship and lived in Jordan during the Iraq war where he was
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researching Islamist participation in the democratic process.
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He's worked at Brookings Institution and as a contributing writer at the Atlantic.
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His new book is called The Case for American Power.
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Exactly what kind of power and to what end, what will become of the American Empire,
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China, Russia.
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We get into it all.
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I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one and only Shadi Hamid.
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I wouldn't have picked you to be the the Jinguistic American Power Guy either would I?
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Is this intentionally provocative?
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I do want to provoke people, but it's not being contrarian just for the sake of being
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contrarian.
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And I do say early on in the book that I came to my conclusions neither easily nor enthusiastically.
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So what I want to convey to the reader is a sense of my own inner struggle that I've
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been wrestling with these questions for a long time.
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And I want the reader to kind of walk along with me and wrestle themselves too if possible.
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And I think the book is actually quite nuanced once you dive into it.
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So I don't want people to think, oh, case for American power, like this is some kind of
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aura, America, fuck yeah, book, although there are aspects of it that maybe are America,
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fuck yeah.
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I mean, we are pretty great, I think, for all of our faults.
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That is one interesting thing about the book that you're unashamed about saying that at
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a time when it's not the cool thing to say, America, fuck yeah, you're right.
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It's not a book.
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This is not written by Donald Rumsfeld, but nonetheless, you do pay no heed to the norms
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of polite liberal society at the moment, which are functioning in a very different direction.
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There's an amazing stat that I've heard you cite about the proportion of Democrats who
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20 years ago said that they're proud of America.
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Do you want to relate that?
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Yeah, sure.
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So in the early 2000s, the percentage who were either extremely or very proud to be
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American was around 85%.
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This year, that number has plummeted to 36%.
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Here we're talking about Democrats specifically, just to reiterate that.
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So to go from over 85% to 36% in just a span of about two decades, it shows that something
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really concerning has happened.
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A lot of Americans are losing their pride.
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They're losing their belief in their country.
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There's a crisis of self confidence.
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So I do want to address that.
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I want to persuade people to maybe think a little bit differently about their own pride.
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I mean, I've been in situations myself where I'll mention, I'll use the words love to
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describe America.
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I'll say like, I love America unironically.
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And then white liberals in particular will give me a look like I'm crazy, like what is
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shatty on here?
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And they're just not used to hearing that.
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And they also think that because I'm a brown person, because I'm Arab, because I'm Muslim,
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that I especially shouldn't be saying these things.
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Like if anyone should know the kind of inherent badness of America, it would be someone like
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me, right?
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So that's also why I think I'm the right person to write this book, because if it was,
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if I was some like random old white dude, it would be like whatever, but I'm not, but
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I'm not that.
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And I'm actually a pretty fiercely outspoken critic of American foreign policy.
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I think we have a terrible record in different parts of the world, depending on the time
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period, you know, some of that was in the Cold War, especially in Latin America and parts
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of African Asia, overthrowing elected governments and so forth.
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But also I think we've had a terrible record in the Middle East more recently.
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And that's something that is very meaningful to me as someone of Middle Eastern origin.
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So I don't pull my punches in my criticism of America.
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I mean, it's interesting that you say that like white people are surprised that a brown
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skinned Muslim would be proud of America, because it is, that does sort of demonstrate
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the cultural moment that we're in where there's this sanctimonious sense among a certain
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elite of white people that we know what's good for brown skinned people and religious
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minorities better than they do at a time when, when like ethnic and religious minorities
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are really diverging more than ever from mainstream elite white university educated liberal
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consensus.
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Exactly.
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And I think children of immigrants somewhat counterintuitively, we have it, we sometimes have
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more pride, we sometimes get America better than the so-called, you know, natives or those
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of longstanding ancestry here, because I mean, my parents came from an authoritarian regime.
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I've lived under authoritarian regimes.
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I do know what the alternative is like.
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If you don't know that alternative, I think it's very easy to take America for granted.
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And I do think there is the sanctimonious thing where, you know, it is hard for white
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liberals to accept the fact that brown and black people are kind of going their own way.
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Some of them are shifting right word.
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Some of them have politics that they wouldn't expect.
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And that's I think a bigger challenge in American politics today.
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Kind of that divergence that, although I think Trump is squandering it, but that's a whole
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another story.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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That's interesting.
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I mean, it's also worth noting that the 90% of Democrats or 85% of Democrats who at
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the beginning of the century said that they were proud of America, which has dwindled
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now down to a third of the Democrats are also answering that question in a context of America
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having just been attacked at the beginning of the century.
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And now them feeling shame, regret, disbelief, bafflement about the Trump administration.
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So it's probably at least partly contaminated by those considerations.
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Absolutely.
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Yeah.
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I think that the first Trump term was seen as a fluke that people could sort of get their
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heads around it because it was just an aberration along the longer march towards justice,
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the arc bending towards justice and all of that, the moral, the moral arc of history
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bends towards justice, the arc of history, all of that.
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And I think now the arc has been like dismantled.
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Like how can we think of this as an, as an arc of, arc of justice when Trump won a second
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time around and he won fair and square?
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So there's I think a sense of shame that where the previous time we could say this isn't
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us.
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I think now we can't help but say this is partly us.
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And that's a really hard thing and I'm a, I'm a big opponent of Trump.
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I think he's destroying a lot of what I hold dear in this country and he's challenging
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the premises of the books.
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I'm kind of angry at him for putting me in an uncomfortable position.
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I mean, it would have been better, I guess, you know, if Kamala or like some other Democrat
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I'd been president.
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I think that it would be easier to make my case.
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And now there's a risk of people seeing me as Trump, Trump sympathetic, which I'm definitely
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not.
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So when you said it would have been easier to make your case under a Harris administration
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than a Trump one, what is your case?
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Yeah, my case is that America's worth fighting for and believing in despite all of our
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faults.
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And I want to be able to say two things at once that yes, let's criticize our past and
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what we've done.
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But just because we've done bad things in the past doesn't mean we're doomed to repeat
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them in the future that America has a capacity for self renewal and self correction.
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And that's because we're a democracy and that's really at the heart of my argument in
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the book as to why America is morally superior.
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Those are the words that I use morally superior to China and Russia because of our regime type.
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If we were an autocratic regime, I would not be writing this book.
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There's something about democracies that make them more aligned with human nature, the
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way that we are meant to be.
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And I'm also a believer in God so that plays into this as well.
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What our human nature is.
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And I think that God wants us to be free individuals who have agency, who make our own choices
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because the whole point of, you know, vice and virtue is virtue means a lot more when
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you're faced with the potential for vice.
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They kind of go hand in hand.
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So I think that there's that kind of more philosophical aspect to my argument, but there's
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also the more practical one, which is power is a fact of life.
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It needs to be wielded.
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And if we don't wield it, someone else will.
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And I think that that alternative is a scary one to me.
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And I think it's one of those things that we don't realize it until we lose it.
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So I don't want Americans in 30 years to kind of like look back and let's say China has
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somehow risen and been more successful and we kind of squandered our role in the world.
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And then we're like, oh, when China playing more of a role in global affairs in a more
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multi-polar world, if only we could go back to the way things were.
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I just, I think now is the time for us to realize where we're at and to not seed the
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ground to countries like China.
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And that's it.
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That's a message, I think, especially progressives need to hear.
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But in some ways too on the right, there is a kind of isolationist streak in some parts
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of the MAGA coalition.
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Yeah.
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I mean, I think it's worth explicitly disentangling America's domestic situation from its foreign
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policy because a lot of the America fuckier crowd, I mean, there's a component, which is
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about an interventionist and aggressive America, American foreign policy.
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But there's also a component which is America domestically does things better than anywhere
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else.
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And there's nowhere you'd rather be where that's more where I am.
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Yeah.
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Is like a, I think a harder, well, I think they're both hard claims to defend like the when
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you talk about democracy, the majority of people who live in well functioning, wealthy
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liberal democracies are not Americans and their Europeans and Japanese and Australians
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and Canadians and South Koreans, they most of them probably wouldn't give up their citizenship
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and don't think of the reality of domestic life.
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If you had a rosy and veil of ignorance and you were just going to be plonged into the
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United States, not knowing what your station in life was going to be, if it was a dart
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at a dartboard and you could either be born in the depths of poverty in the United States
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or you could be born into Opel and Sinorange County, but you didn't know in advance.
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I don't think a lot of people in France and Australia would take that bet.
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Yeah, they probably wouldn't.
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And I think that's actually a good thing that people are proud of the country is they
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like the countries that they're born in and they appreciate what is familiar.
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But that's more than an appreciation of what's familiar.
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I mean, I'm making a stronger claim about their preferences here, which is that they
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think that their societies, not just for parochial bias reasons, but for objective reasons,
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are more equitable and more pleasant for a large bottle of the middle class.
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Yeah, yeah, I'm aware of that.
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Yeah, I think less dysfunctional and less likely to throw up a Donald Trump and, you
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know, more stable.
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Well, with the rise of far-right parties in Europe, and I also think the issues with Muslim
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immigrants and the difficulty of integrating them, I think for me as a child of immigrants
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and as a Muslim, I've often said that America is the best place in the world today to be
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a Muslim and I think that's very much the case if we compare America to Western Europe
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and anyone who follows the headlines can see that there's real tensions in these countries
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between their kind of three to seven percent Muslim populations and the rest of the country.
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And I think part of that is because Western European countries are more secular, so they
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have more difficulty integrating religious minorities, ones that are, like Muslims tend
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to be more religious on average than non-Muslims in Western Europe.
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So I think the fact that America is much more comfortable with public religiosity is
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one of the keys to our success when we can integrate whether it's Catholics from Latin
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America or Muslims from the Middle East.
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So I think I would probably emphasize that, but I think that what's different though between
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say America and Norway or Sweden is that we were founded with a distinct moral purpose
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that were not just a traditional nation state.
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So it goes that, so we're, we have democracy at home, we have our constitution, the bill
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of rights, the declaration, and those things state our values in a really powerful way,
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but then there's also this sense that we have a moral obligation to share those values
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outside of our own borders.
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So this is where the domestic, I think, intertwines with the foreign.
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You don't really have a strong sense in Sweden or Denmark that, oh, Sweden has a moral
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mission to spread its values throughout the world, we're going to go like crusading and
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doing that.
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And that's probably, and I think a lot of Swedes probably feel that that's better, that
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they don't have a mission, they're not going around lecturing people about values and
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all of that.
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But the fact that America was founded on this idea that we're not content, content with
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these values just in our own borders, but that there is a sense of mission.
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I think that is both a blessing and a curse, but I would say on balance, it's more of
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a blessing.
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Is there a risk that the zeal for proselytizing that mission actually makes it harder to sell
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because soft power can be more persuasive than hard power and that maybe just being the
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change that you want to see in the world is enough to persuade people that your way of
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doing things is superior without having to invade them or blockade them or don't get
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me wrong.
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Actually I'm quite skeptical of overusing the military to promote our values.
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The book is a part memoir in a way and I talk about my own evolution from the time of
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the rock war.
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That's where I really got my political chops.
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That's when I started protesting and organizing dions and tentins.
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That was before tent and campings were cool.
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We actually had in my Georgetown University where I went to undergrad, we had a continuous
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presence for the full duration of the war until George W. Bush said mission accomplished.
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We had one tent in the square, so it wasn't like a big thing, but we had one person staying
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at the tent at any given time and we took that pretty seriously.
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I was kind of, my fellow travelers were socialists, we saw each other pretty much in those
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terms and I went through an evolution.
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But I still stand by the fact that the rock war was a mistake, it was worse than a mistake.
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It was a blunder of just like epic proportions.
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So I don't want to come in and say let's use our military to invade countries.
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Do I think we should use our military to stop mass killing when we have a chance to do
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so?
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Yes.
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And that's why during the Syrian Civil War, when Barack Obama backed down from his red
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line in August 2013, I was very much a proponent of using military force against Bashar
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Lessed because there was an ongoing slaughter that was happening.
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The Syrian opposition was calling on us to intervene.
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They were saying where is America?
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This is another, I think, important point, that when when dissidents are struggling for
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their freedom, they don't turn to China or Russia, they don't say where is China?
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Why don't they come to our defense?
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They say where is America?
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Why is America coming to our defense?
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And I remember this also in Tahir Square in Egypt during the Arab Spring, when people
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in the square were hanging on every word of Barack Obama because they understood that even
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if we weren't always great, there was a chance that we would actually rise to the occasion.
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And for a brief moment we did, Barack Obama did pressure Mubarak out of office and helped
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force his ouster.
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So that tells me something about, there's still a sense, even if people get pissed off
20:54
at us, they think we lecture too much.
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They also see something in us that were capable of being better than we actually are.
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And that's, I think, for me as an American that's inspiring.
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Yeah, I remember the Syrian, the failure very vividly.
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I got into an argument with Phil Dollyhue of all people who was on Huff Post Live to
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campaign against intervening in Syria.
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And yeah, I was on your side of that one saying, like, aren't we at risk of taking too
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many lessons from the Iraq war and saying that because that one didn't work, we can never
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use power in the interests of human rights in the Middle East.
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And he was just saying, he was basically taking the fatalistic progressive assumption that
21:41
America is too clueless to be able to do anything.
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But even if it wasn't even a moral thing, it was just like, there are so many unintended
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consequences from these kinds of actions that we only make things worse by intervening.
21:57
You know, Americans can sort out what's right for America.
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And Syrians can sort out what's right for Syria.
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Yeah.
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What do you make of that worldview?
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I think it's totally wrong.
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I think Syria actually showed that not only can intervention make matters worse, but
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the lack of intervention can also make things worse.
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So it's a kind of be careful what you wish for a situation.
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When the US chose to not act militarily in Syria around that time of 2013, it allowed
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the war to continue and for tens of thousands more to be killed brutally.
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And it took more than 10 years for Syrians to recover and actually have a chance at a
22:37
better life.
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Finally, earlier this year, when the rebels took over, and now it's not perfect, but at
22:45
least, at least there is a new possibility there.
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So I think that what that shows is America is capable of doing good, and we can sometimes
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see that through its absence.
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But we can also sometimes see that through its presence historically.
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There have actually been times recently, in recent decades, where the US has militarily
23:12
intervened for good, I would argue, helping to end the Bosnian genocide in the 1990s, also
23:19
to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
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And those are both Muslim majority populations, also the first Gulf War, where Iraq invaded
23:30
and then occupied Kuwait, that would have not ended if not for American power.
23:36
I was also, I should say, for full disclosure, I don't know if we really want to get into
23:41
it, we probably don't.
23:43
But I was a proponent of the NATO intervention Libyan 2011, I still stand by that, that Libya
23:49
would have been worse off today, if not for that intervention.
23:54
Libyans themselves were calling on American to intervene.
23:58
There was actually a picture I was just looking at for something I was working on.
24:01
And it had Libyan protesters with signs saying, we love NATO.
24:08
And they did actually love NATO at that time, because Gaddafi's forces were marching towards
24:14
Benghazi, there was about to be a mass slaughter.
24:17
And the US and its allies had an opportunity to stop that mass slaughter, and we did.
24:23
Now did Libya then descend into civil war, yes, but it descended into civil war a little
24:28
bit later on.
24:31
And we have to understand that fledgling democracies often go through civil conflict.
24:37
We as Americans went through our own.
24:39
So we have this kind of very unrealistic idea that every country should just become a perfect
24:46
kind of locky in democracy right away.
24:49
But no, there are going to be growing pains and it's up to Libyans themselves to sort
24:54
that out.
24:55
That's not really our fault that they're having a civil war.
24:58
Well also didn't Libya correct my misapprehension, I might be misremembering this, but didn't
25:03
Libya partly fall into civil war because the Europeans didn't follow up in a way that
25:08
the Americans thought that they would, that America brought in the firepower to head off
25:13
the humanitarian catastrophe and was trying to pressure like the French to send in peace
25:18
keepers and stuff and thought that it was going to be more of a multilateral thing.
25:22
But then once the bombing was over, the Europeans held back and what happened?
25:26
Yeah, once the Europeans saw that the US wasn't really interested, they also didn't got
25:31
uninterested themselves.
25:33
So there was a real vacuum and other bad actors filled the void.
25:39
Egypt played a native role, the UAE supporting different factions in the civil war in this kind
25:46
of proxy situation.
25:49
And Barack Obama has talked about his regrets, but the question is what is the regret?
25:53
Is there a regret intervening in the first place or is there a regret intervening and
25:58
then not actually following up?
26:00
This is the lesson of any kind of military intervention is that you can just intervene
26:07
and then hope everything is fine, similar to what we expected in Iraq that people would
26:12
just be throwing flowers at us.
26:14
There has to be a real plan for the day after and there wasn't in Libya.
26:19
So I think that's right that we have to be very careful about who we attribute the blame
26:25
to and was it because we weren't involved or weren't involved enough or too involved
26:31
and that's a debate that we're going to have for decades to come.
26:34
But at least Libyans now, there are parts of Libya, there are safe and secure that have
26:44
democratic representation that actually have the promise of a better future.
26:48
That would not have happened under Qaddafi.
26:51
Can you imagine if Qaddafi was still in power now or if it took another 10 years to get
26:55
him out of power?
26:56
God forbid.
26:57
I mean, one of the lessons there then if the problem of the Libyan civil war was a problem
27:03
of coordination and commitment between NATO Allies is the failure of multilateralism as
27:12
a way of addressing global problems.
27:14
I mean, this brings us to part of one of the interesting things about your book which at
27:19
once the book is very optimistic and patriotic, but I also found it quite defeatist in its
27:27
attitude towards the possibility of a world in which there isn't just one great power
27:34
or great powers in competition.
27:38
Because if you're going to call for a better world, why spend time calling for a world
27:44
in which there is only going to be one hegemon standing astride it and therefore that hegemon
27:50
might as well be the United States because the alternative is China or Russia.
27:54
Why not pull for a world in which democracies of all stripes can band together and formulate
28:02
a more consensual and longer term approach towards addressing global conflicts?
28:08
I agree that democracy should ally and work together and I've loved the idea of a sort
28:14
of stronger, more robust league of democracies, but unfortunately most democracies defer to
28:24
the US.
28:26
So there still is going to be a dominant democracy and whether it's the UK, France, the
28:32
list goes on, they can't really rise to the occasion without the US.
28:38
There is a sense that they still depend on the US for their own security umbrella, for
28:43
example.
28:44
Trump has been trying to get its house in order for a long time and have a unified kind
28:50
of collective defense and it just has simply failed to do so.
28:56
And this is part of the free rider problem that results when you have a superpower like
29:00
the US, other countries free ride on those benefits and they don't necessarily take responsibility
29:08
to get European countries to commit just 2% to their own defense budgets, has been a struggle.
29:18
And one of the things I would give Donald Trump some credit is that his tough talk and
29:23
his tough love has pushed some of our allies to get more serious about their own defense.
29:29
I think that the future of the world is going to be one where democracies are in tension
29:35
with autocracies because these are fundamentally irreconcilable modes of power and irreconcilable
29:45
regime types.
29:47
And you can have maybe a multipolar world where China carves up its own domain and has
29:51
its own sphere of influence and then we focus on things closer to home in central and
29:57
Latin America.
29:58
But that to me is a frightening world and it's one that was pretty frightening world to
30:03
me sitting in Australia because I don't know which bit of the pie we end up in.
30:09
Exactly.
30:10
And then Japanese and South Koreans would be frightened silly about that as well.
30:14
So I think the fact that our allies still think that we're the better alternative, that
30:19
they still for all of our faults say America don't leave us to and China doesn't really
30:25
have close allies.
30:26
China doesn't inspire the way that we do because at least Japan at the end of the day they
30:30
understand yeah America's annoying America can be inconsistent and chaotic but America
30:40
is still the best bet out of the available alternatives.
30:45
And I think that America not under Donald Trump and this is where I think the Donald Trump
30:50
era will be a real test.
30:51
Do we return to something better after Donald Trump or will Donald Trump be the new kind
30:58
of the new kind of American posture of this kind of transactional immoral approach.
31:03
Donald Trump does not speak in the language of morality or ideals and I think that makes
31:09
America less appealing to the rest of the world because we're not even pretending now
31:14
at least up until Donald Trump with almost every single president.
31:19
There was still the pretense of aspiration and that reassured people to some extent that
31:25
even if we even if we fail to meet our ideals, we still have them.
31:30
Donald Trump doesn't even pretend that he has those ideals, which I think is a new kind
31:35
of situation that is kind of uncharted.
31:38
Why is the pretense desirable, shuddy, I mean the you know the argument for the Trumpist
31:45
worldview or for the isolationist left wing even Chomsky worldview would be all Donald
31:51
Trump is doing is saying the quiet part out loud and being honest that which is that
31:57
countries act in their own interests.
31:59
They will intervene when they think it's worth doing and they won't, when it's not.
32:05
And you know for all the talk about spreading democracy and freedom, the history of the
32:11
United States, just like the history of any great power is a history of propping up
32:16
autocratic allies, whether that's Saharto in Indonesia or dictators across Latin America
32:23
or Saudi Arabia today and selectively taking on adversaries that it thinks will be in
32:32
its geopolitical strategic interest.
32:35
And if you're being firebombed with napalm in Cambodia or piled up in human pyramids
32:43
naked in Abu Ghraib, you probably don't care whether or not the American leader is saying
32:48
that they're doing it in order to spread freedom.
32:51
The consequence is the same.
32:52
Yeah, that's true for the people on the receiving end of American power probably doesn't matter.
32:59
I think this is more an argument for broader audiences who at least when we speak in the
33:05
language of ideals, they at least have something to call us out on.
33:09
And I would even include people who are imprisoned by pro-American dictators.
33:15
They can say, hey, America, this is against your own stated values, change, if they can't
33:22
say that.
33:23
Well, I think I can say that because they'll be tortured when I say that by the dictation.
33:27
Yeah, but I mean more dissidents who aren't yet in prison.
33:30
The ones who are protesting out there in the streets risking their lives, they can call
33:35
attention and say America, like similar to what I was saying about the Syrian opposition
33:40
or the Libyan opposition, is that they can point to our better angels and say America
33:46
live up to your own ideals when you say acid must go, actually follow through on that
33:51
and don't just pretend.
33:53
And I think that the ability to call out America is an important one.
34:01
I don't think that it's interesting.
34:03
I have a whole chapter in the book on hypocrisy where I actually make the argument that hypocrisy
34:07
can be a good thing.
34:10
That'll probably one of the more controversial parts.
34:14
But what I say that to be seen as hypocritical is the cost of being better than you actually
34:20
are.
34:21
And we can think of this in terms of the individuals we know who aspire to morality.
34:26
Let's say there's an Imam or Rabbi or a pastor and they speak a moral language.
34:36
They're probably going to fall short and we'll get angry at them for falling short.
34:40
But at least in recognizing that they're falling short, we can say to them, you have, be
34:46
better.
34:48
Don't just stick with where you are.
34:51
And that's why I think moral people are always in this kind of weird position where people
34:57
are going to be disappointed in them but people are disappointed in them for the right reasons
35:03
because they aspire to something more.
35:06
And this is sort of maybe one way of thinking about it is the difference between the cheater
35:12
and the polyamorous.
35:15
The cheater actually knows that he's doing something wrong.
35:18
So there's actually the chance that he might improve and stop cheating on his wife.
35:24
The polyamorous has no pretense.
35:28
He's saying that cheating is effectively legitimized.
35:31
Maybe that's a little bit of a stretch, but you can sort of see where I'm going with that.
35:35
I don't think most people think that cheater is a bit of a polyamorous.
35:38
Okay.
35:39
You know what I mean?
35:41
The cheater is cheating and the polyamorous is just like what you see is what you get.
35:46
I'm upfront about it.
35:47
Like the lack of pretense there is actually an attribute.
35:52
I mean, I take your point about, you know, there's that old saying about hypocrisy is the
35:57
tribute that vice pays to virtue.
36:01
But it depends how far the pastor or the rabbi or the email are falling from their stated
36:06
moral positions.
36:08
If they accidentally swear once in a while, then we can cop the fact that they're not
36:14
perfect.
36:15
If they're running a sex trafficking ring in the Catholic church, then I'm sorry.
36:21
It's no.
36:22
Oh, yeah.
36:23
It's endless.
36:24
You know, it's worse.
36:25
And I think what you were saying about this being a tricky time for you to be making
36:28
this prosecuting this case because of the situation in America is salient because when
36:34
younger people look at the history of American power, yeah, okay, there's Granada and like
36:40
Bosnia going back 30 or 40 years.
36:44
But the overwhelming exercises of American power, things that most people regard as morally
36:52
unjustifiable in the past generation, you know, lying and trying to cajole people into
37:01
allowing them to invade Iraq in contravention of the UN Security Council.
37:07
And now, Donald, whatever it is that Donald Trump is in favor of, maybe invading Venezuela
37:13
at least blowing people out of the water.
37:18
What benefit is there in holding a moral posture when behavior, at least on foreign policy,
37:24
not domestically within the United States, and we can talk about your thoughts about the
37:27
fate of democracy in the US too, but on foreign policy, when there doesn't seem to be much
37:33
of a cogent coherent morality to it.
37:37
Well, so part of what I want to say is let's not give up hope and just accept that America
37:44
is bad.
37:45
Let's actually try to be better and improve our policies abroad.
37:49
I don't want young progressives to exit the political game altogether and I want them
37:55
to actually be involved to elect different leaders to run for office themselves.
38:01
If we want a better foreign policy, that part is up to us because we are a democracy.
38:06
We get the government we deserve, we get the foreign policy we deserve.
38:10
So if we don't like our foreign policy, the only people we have to blame is ourselves.
38:15
We could have done differently and we should have elected leaders who didn't support the
38:20
Iraq war.
38:21
We did ultimately support a leader who was against the Iraq war after George W. Bush.
38:26
That is a self-correcting mechanism.
38:29
We voted for someone Donald Trump who is also very critical of the Iraq war.
38:34
So there has been a shift away from those supporters who have been largely delegitimized.
38:39
But I would say more broadly, what is the case that we make for American foreign policy?
38:43
We say, look at the world America made.
38:48
And I go into some detail talking about how, for example, at the conclusion of World
38:53
War II, only about 8% of the world's countries were democracies.
38:57
By the 1990s, that number had risen to over 50%.
39:02
This is the world America made.
39:05
Because America was the superpower that had a demonstration effect and it showed other
39:10
people that democracy was the way to go and that communism wasn't.
39:15
If the Soviet Union had won out in the Cold War, we wouldn't have had the third wave
39:20
of democratization in 1990s where large parts of Eastern Europe and Latin America finally
39:26
went through democratic transitions.
39:30
And the US helped encourage those democratic transitions.
39:33
We helped facilitate them.
39:35
And through USAID and other international mechanisms, there was real support for those fledgling
39:41
democracies.
39:42
Again, they weren't perfect, but they were democracies, and some of them still are.
39:47
So, and also, the level of interstate war fell off dramatically after World War II.
39:56
And also in the 1990s.
39:58
So the US being there does, and the international institutions that we created, the Breton's
40:05
Woods institutions, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, not great, not perfect, leptist don't
40:14
like them, the WTO, all of these institutions, international law, the mechanisms of international
40:21
law as we know them, the UN genocide convention, the list goes on, these things wouldn't have
40:27
been possible without the US leading the way.
40:31
And I think it's so easy to just forget about this and say, well, and just take it for granted.
40:37
But a lot of the peace and prosperity that the world has experienced post-World War II
40:43
is in part because of the US.
40:44
And that's even without talking about the Marshall Plan for Europe helping rebuild Europe in
40:52
the ashes of World War II.
40:53
We've done good things.
40:56
I feel like, yeah, I mean, yes, we have.
41:02
And we shouldn't be afraid of saying so.
41:05
One of the tragedies of the past quarter century is that many people see that as a depiction
41:11
of the past, what you just articulated.
41:15
Just as you say, it's hard to be pitching this book at a time of Donald Trump.
41:18
I felt like it was hard for me to be the defender of America that I was when I was in university
41:23
during the Iraq war and 9-11, because it was quite hard to make a case for the fact
41:30
that American democracy would be judicious and caring and stability enhancing at a time
41:38
when, you know, Fallujah was happening, not quite yet, but it was obvious that the institutions
41:46
that you're talking about, the international criminal court, which the US is one of the
41:51
few non-signatories to, right, and the international court of justice.
41:54
So reality is that the United States, yes, of course, was indispensable because it's extremely
42:00
populace and extremely wealthy and invests a lot in its military and has a lot of power.
42:08
So nothing's going to get done without the buy-in of the United States.
42:12
But many Europeans would regard the American posture towards many of those multinational
42:18
institutions, multilateral institutions that you cited as being one in which the US is always
42:24
the party that has to be sort of cajoled into grudgingly going along with an international
42:28
consensus.
42:30
So the, my fear, I suppose, is that there was a half century in which America was one
42:37
thing and now we've had a quarter century in which it's another.
42:44
Yeah, and this is where I think Gaza also has to be brought into the story.
42:49
I think it's kind of looms large in this account and it's sort of the elephant in the room
42:54
when I talk about the book sometimes that it's hard for anyone to take America seriously
43:01
after what I believe, what I believe the US to have done, which is facilitate what I've
43:10
said was a genocide against the Palestinian people and I've been very outspoken about that.
43:18
And the US failed to stop Israel in committing war crimes.
43:22
And yeah, so it is hard to talk about international law like there there wasn't even a pretense.
43:28
And I almost would have wished that America pretended more when it came to having empathy
43:33
for the Palestinian people.
43:35
Biden couldn't even be bothered to express that.
43:38
And Donald Trump doesn't really do sympathy with dispossessed people so we shouldn't really
43:43
expect that from him.
43:46
But it's making it harder for me.
43:48
And I say this in the first chapter of the book where how can I talk to my fellow Muslims
43:56
and Arab Americans and talk to them about believing America might still be the last best hope
44:04
or the least bad option when they've seen over the past two years what the US has helped
44:12
help bring about in Gaza.
44:14
It's really tough.
44:15
But this is where I again return.
44:18
This is where I would actually say a couple things.
44:20
One is that if you look at it from a certain perspective what happened in Gaza was an abdication
44:26
of US power.
44:29
This the US chose to not act.
44:32
It chose to not put pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu.
44:37
It chose to not use our military aid to Israel as leverage to pressure Israel to make
44:42
concessions.
44:45
That's the vision of American power that I'm trying to provide for people that we can
44:49
actually use our power for just ends for moral ends.
44:55
But that requires being very self-conscious about what our values are.
44:59
It also requires believing in America.
45:02
If we don't have any self-confidence, if we've given up hope, then we're obviously not
45:07
going to be exercising our power for moral ends, we're going to be washing our hands
45:13
of the whole enterprise.
45:15
I don't want us to do that.
45:17
And this is where I think there is a very complicated left-wing relationship with power,
45:23
which is, let's not sell our hands with the dirty business of making policy.
45:29
Let's not dirty our hands with the business of having a military and having a defense
45:34
budget.
45:35
But these things are facts of life.
45:37
And I kind of joke that in my ideal world, I wish the US was a giant human rights organization
45:44
with an air force, but we're not going to be that.
45:50
And I think that leftists would say, if only the US could just be a giant human rights
45:55
organization without an air force, but that's not possible either.
46:00
Can I human, as well, if you've listened to this much of the episode, then you must enjoy
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