Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 4, Episode 1: Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

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Season 4, Episode 1: Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Today I'm absolutely delighted and very excited to have with me as uh guest and author Aaron Good to talk about his remarkable book, American Exception, Empire and the Deep State.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron, thank you for joining.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron, uh, let me just introduce uh to everybody his uh fairly newly minted PhD in political science.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed, uh, American Exception is produced from a remarkable PhD dissertation in 2020 at Temple University.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron is a political scientist and a very well-known podcaster with his podcast, uh American Exception.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you're often on the other side of uh the interview line, but I'm thrilled to be able to talk about your book because I I find it very, very illuminating, uh, extremely well done, and very important to try to figure out what's going on in our world today.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so Aaron, thank you so much for for being together with me today.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell Well, it's my pleasure and uh it's an honor to be talking with you about uh my book and the subject matter of the book.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh seems all timely with the state of the U.S.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: at the moment, and uh uh I'm really looking forward to this.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Aaron, your book is uh about who runs U.S.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: foreign policy and for what purpose is U.S.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: foreign policy run.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's a question I've been trying to understand and figure out my whole career, which is a little bit longer than yours because I've been a minted uh PhD, I can't say newly minted, that happened 44 years ago, and I became an economist, uh, both an academic and a and a practitioner.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're practicing economics in the world, meaning uh you're trying to figure out what to do to help an economy and so forth, inevitably you come up against the United States government, and uh which calls a lot of the shots in the world.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so you always are, as I have been for 40 years, facing the U.S., whether it's in the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank or directly U.S.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: policy.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I was pretty naive uh when I started.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh absolutely.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, well, I'm proud to be an American, I'm an American economist, I'm out helping countries in the world, and the U.S.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: government has my back, you know, because the U.S.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: is for good uh and it does good things in the world and um it uh supports good causes and so on.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I come at this starting as an innocent, I have to say, not completely.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, I was against the Vietnam War.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I lived through as a as a young boy Kennedy's assassination.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: My first political love was Robert F.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Kennedy, who, of course, was assassinated in 1968.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I wouldn't say a complete innocent, but for 44 years I've come to have grave, grave doubts, more than doubts.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in other words, I've come to regard what the U.S.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: does in the world as a great danger to the world.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And you write about that and help illuminate that in a very deep way.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: And you you call the book American Exception, and your theory is exceptionism.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe a good place to start would be to explain what is it that you mean by American exceptionism?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean in practice about foreign policy?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then I want to get into the uh the heart of the matter.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Who is running the show and for what reasons?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because you have a very elaborate explanation that I think is very persuasive and important, and I want people to hear from you about that.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: So what what is exceptionism?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's it it calls to mind, of course, American exceptionalism, which is this the guiding mythology of US global dominance, uh, which is that the US is this special country that can do what that is better than other countries.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't have the corruption and other problems of countries that became before the US became the leader of the free world.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's a strange, it's it's a strange mythology if you start to break it down, but American Exception looks at it at a different way, or the idea of exceptionism.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: It it looks at Carl Schmidt, the German, you know, Nazi legal theorist essentially, and his arguments about what a liberal democracy can do in a state of crisis where the state faces an existential threat.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: For Germany, at the time of Carl Schmidt, it was a communist uh revolution uh in the aftermath of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, and uh he argues that the state must have the power to defend itself uh when faced with uh a very serious grave threat.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a state of emergency that uh is so important that when it comes down to it, whoever has the power in a state to say when the state of emergency exists is really sovereign.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: He is sovereign who decides on the exception.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, that's his dictum or quote that he's most famous for.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: And this is uh something that liberal democracy doesn't quite deal with really well in the United States.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: We're based on the theories of John Locke and his classical liberalism, ideas of uh you know property rights and Republican institutions, and government by consent, the idea that uh who's in charge if you ask the question?
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we're taught in civics class, the American people are in charge, of course.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: Precisely.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is uh the basis of liberalism.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: But as I pointed out in my book, in which other people, based on some of the research of other people as well and other theorists, uh, this, even under John Locke, he mentions the possibility of, well, what if the executive is acting in a despotic way?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the executive needs to be able to intervene to save the system if need be, but what if somebody abuses this power uh to act, you know, above the law in a time of an emergency?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he essentially comes to the conclusion that if, well, if that happens, if you have someone who abuses the state of exception, he doesn't call it that, but it's what he's talking about.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: If you have an abusive authority, then only a revolution is there to help you.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and we have been ruled by a regime that has institutionalized this dynamic, this power, this prerogative power to break the law uh and to basically break every law under the sun.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: The innovation of the US compared to the Mongols or other empires is that they really refine covert operations.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so the the lawlessness is typically denied.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: They just break whatever laws, overthrow governments, assassinate people.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is a starting point, also.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe uh listeners abroad, because uh book club has a a worldwide uh uh uh participation, but Americans are certainly not brought up to think that uh we have a government that breaks the law, even is institutionalized, as you say, to break the law.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, it's a routine part of American foreign policy to break the law.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And not just foreign policy, because you talk about domestic policy also.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, domestic policy on the most fundamental level, uh the Constitution of the United States, the supremacy clause establishes that ratified treaties are the highest law on the land.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: The United States has ratified the UN Charter, and therefore it is according to the Constitution, the highest law on the land, and we violate it all the time.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they come up with different, almost comical legalistic arguments as to why this is okay, but it's it's fundamentally uh just unconstitutional.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting you use the example because I I work with and for the UN and have done so for the last 24 years, and I have never, ever heard a single U.S.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: official, I think it's fair to say, ever heard a single U.S.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: official say, well, we'd like to do this, but we can't because of the UN Charter.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the whole idea that an American official would say, well, we're bound by the treaty of the UN Charter is almost unimaginable for me.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And sad, of course, but also deeply ironic because the UN is, in my view, one of the great accomplishments of who I regard as uh America's greatest president.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't hold most of them in very high repute, but Franklin Roosevelt.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: But in any event, we don't take pride in the UN in terms of actually enforcing the UN charter.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: We ignore it completely.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: And don't even won't acknowledge that that's what we do.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's a legal argument that you don't need to have taken any pre-law course to understand.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you are literate, you can understand why we're actually forbidden from launching all these wars and overthrowing these governments.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's illegal to even threaten aggression against other countries.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: There are no consequences for it whatsoever.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact that that is taken out of the conversation is very fundamental to why.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I've followed your career and I understand the trajectory of your career.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: And as you were saying, it took you a while to understand some of these aspects of the U.S.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: Empire.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I understand that because these civilizations and empires create their own cosmology, and you people cannot but absorb these dominant ideas.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're going to be successful, the more successful you are, and you were very successful, the more you kind of successfully internalize those ideas, typically.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, for me, it was very interesting.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, I had, as I said, the Vietnam War era skepticism, Watergate skepticism, and I learned about Watergate from you also, so I want to talk a little bit about that later on.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I I was a skeptic, but on the other hand, I viewed US bad behavior abroad as mistakes or errors or deviations, maybe not even from the norm, but just as deviations that were correctable.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I had, in my own life experience, uh I started as an economic advisor abroad in the mid-1980s in Latin America, and I was very unhappy with how the U.S.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: was handling the debt crisis.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew there were powerful interests, U.S.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: banking interests.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I wasn't completely naive, you know, in la la land, but I thought this is solvable.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: And in a particular case or two, I've actually solved a problem.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then in the late 1980s, I worked with Poland, and the US government more or less did what I recommended.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought, you see, it's not completely uh off the tracks.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Then I advised the Soviet government under Gorbachev briefly, uh, and then the Russian government and Ukrainian governments, by the way, at the same time in the early 1990s.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And uh then I started to say, whoa, this is weird.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they don't want to do even the most US that is, doesn't want to do even the most basic things to help these two countries.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then that was really for me a puzzle, I have to say.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is you know where my innocence came in.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Why isn't the U.S.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: helping Russia, which wants to be a democratic country?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's post-communist.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: We used to say communism was the enemy, but there's no communism anymore.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: They want just the opposite.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: But the U.S.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: won't take the most minimal steps to help this country.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that was part of my journey.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: But your point is there's an underlying continuity to what the U.S.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: is trying to do.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it wouldn't, given your research, uh it wouldn't surprise you or have surprised you based on your understanding in 1991, why the U.S.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: would say, hell no, we're not going to help them.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I followed these events as a kid because my mother worked for a congressman in Indiana.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was there through the end of the, you know, at the end of the Cold War, I was like in junior high or something like that.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: And uh when it happened, it's it seemed like, well, this is a good thing.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And uh my earliest political memories of Ronald Reagan and Ron Contra.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I it's a different experience in a sense.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't that difficult for me to become fairly radical, but I did in part because I didn't, you know, after college, I went to teach abroad for a year, and there was a lot of anti-Americanism among people that were over there around 2000.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I come back and 9-11 happens, and I never watched the footage on 9-11.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I I'm not that I'm squeamish about it.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: I just thought I don't want to see this because it just sounds pretty terrible, and I'll read about it later.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: But then all these flags come up, and it's kind of insane to me at the time because I didn't watch the event.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: I I think it was a psychologically searing event for people that I really missed out on because for whatever reason I was kind of didn't have a big plan for life and had just returned from being overseas for a year, and I didn't follow it.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it didn't really impact me in the same way, except I read about it.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: But the the Bush administration seemed so criminal to me that it seemed to be blatantly criminal what they did with Iraq.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought Obama would change it.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: I worked for Obama and uh on his campaign staff, and I went to the inaugural ball and uh everything, and then he basically said, we're gonna look forward, not backward, which is as a legal constitutional scholar, is an insane.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you could apply that argument to uh, you know, uh Ted Bundy or something.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, imagine if Eichmann said that.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: It would, or it's just insanity.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is fascinating.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, the night that Obama got elected, my wife and I were in tears.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: We cried, we were so happy.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: I have to say, our kids who were early Obama boosters already by late summer of 2008, before the election said, one of our daughters said, Dad, something's wrong.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Something's wrong.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is not what it looks like on the surface.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And indeed, he turned out to be a war-mongering Nobel Peace Prize laureate, you know, who got a peace prize for nothing, uh, and then uh launched many wars.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And this raises the fundamental question.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so let's go back to uh the beginning: who runs American foreign policy?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: And your experience with Obama as having been on the campaign, even in the inaugural gala as president, is my sense of this question.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Every president of my well, there's Reagan and Bush, that's the 1980s, starting with Clinton at the end of the Cold War, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, you would have said before each one came to office, this is going to be a big change.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: And not one of them changed anything in the general direction of American foreign policy, which continued to be a policy of war and regime change abroad.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it's Democrats and Republicans, so-called uh internationalists or nationalists, so-called liberals or conservatives, even uh with Obama, we thought an idealist, constitutional lawyer.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: I would argue, and I think your book makes the point, and you argue, I don't want to put words in your mouth, that not one of them changed course.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't matter who was elected.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: They all basically did the same thing.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: As strange as this sounds, because my book ends, and I want to write a sequel to it eventually that picks up where this one ends, because I think the Reagan presidency, it ends with the Reagan Revolution, which I see as uh the ultimate victory of kind of the forces that drive the deep state.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Essentially, there were no real international liberal internationalists like Kennedy in any part of the political spectrum anymore that were close to power.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: However, Reagan and Bush I had uh I think they had different ideas about neoconservatism.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Then I think that they tried to accommodate a lot of the neoconservative forces, but they uh they also tried to dial some of them back in the in the national interest.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Reagan, one of the last things that Reagan did was to recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization uh after they had renounced terrorism.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: And he does this right at the very end of his presidency.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's so interesting.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of I didn't pick that up.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's interesting.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: And what power, I mean, and the main person I associate with the neoconservative policy, you know, in Bibi Netanyahu, his most uh, I think, significant emissary in the United States is um the Prince of Darkness, uh Richard Pearl, right?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and he and he ends up being the person that for somehow is able to overrule, you know, George Sultz and these other people at Rykovic over the nuclear issue.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's strange.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, he's working later for um during the H.W.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: Bush administration, these people are behind that Pentagon policy planning document.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: And Bush says, you know, send this back to the crazies at the Pentagon.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: George H.W.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: Bush also attempts to force the Israelis to negotiate with the Palestinians.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: He says, We're going to be able to do that.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just to interject a couple things for listeners.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you mentioned Reykjavik, which was the summit of Reagan and uh Gorbachev in 1986, I believe.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the leaders wanted to end nuclear weapons, and their aides were aghast.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Are you crazy?
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: You can't do that.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but you know, the they wanted actually to do something very, very ambitious and forward and peacemaking, but the deep state came in and said, Oh no, that's not how it works.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can't do that.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of these questions.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: What do presidents uh have to do with any of this?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because they're told what to do.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not and not by the American people.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the neoconservative takeover of U.S.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: foreign policy, which I don't I think that George H.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: W.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: Bush, for example, represented some pretty nefarious old boy CIA types like the people that I imagine uh were largely responsible for the killing of the Kennedy brothers.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: However, the neoconservatives represented something worse.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: They were more fanatical.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, remember uh that Bush Sr.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: was CIA director before he became president, and you and I uh agreed that the CIA was uh part of uh a coup in 1963 that assassinated and overthrew the U.S.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: government, and there was Bush as president.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: But you're saying that's not the worst of what happened, because I think you're getting to the point that after Reagan and Bush Sr., with the arrival of Bill Clinton, who I would have said politically 32 years ago, well, he he's one of us, but something happened afterwards, yes?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: I have no idea exactly why Bill Clinton ended up sort of pursuing hardline neocon policies in a way that but didn't it didn't come across that way at the time.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: But now it seems more clear.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: Not just the Yugoslavia business, which actually is kind of the Kosovo war, is like the precursor to the Iraq War in terms of ultimately being pretty criminal.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and you don't have to make that hard of an argument for that.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: And just to remind everybody, 1999, the US-led NATO bombed Belgrade 78 straight days.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Bombed a European capital.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: NATO, this is no UN justification, and why to break Serbia in parts.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: We're supposed to hold borders sacrosanct, that's what we hear all the time, but the whole idea was the US would bomb Serbia into letting go or breaking apart uh Kosovo.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens with Kosovo, by the way, quite fascinating.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes home to the largest U.S.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: military base in Southeast uh Europe.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: They break apart a country and then they put a huge military base there.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, surprise, that's Bill Clinton.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it's also a kind of narcotics trafficking epicenter as well.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's run by essentially a mafia.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the Kosovo Liberation Army was involved in organ trafficking, arms smuggling, drug smuggling, every crime under the sun.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: And we just made a little principality out of it and uh had, I think it was KBR that got that huge contract to create that Camp Bond steel, which can be seen from outer space.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's really and and Bill Clinton pursued other policies as well with these sort of jihadi networks in places like Chechnya, you know, Azerbaijan.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: That was really under probably under Bush, but it continued.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's this clandestine foreign policy of using al-Qaeda types.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um the Brits at one point tried to use Al-Qaeda to assassinate Gaddafi in the late 90s.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and then they did assassinate Gaddafi by 2011.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and it's a a really neoconservative agenda uh for global dominance.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: That that's the shift that takes place.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: You see it starting to surface immediately under H.W.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: Bush.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: Something that's even more fanatical than the Reagan Council on Foreign Relations Wall Street Empire plan for the world is this neoconservative plan.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that has shifted the U.S.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: into being so aggressive that it's actually undoing all the work of people in the past.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it's making people like George H.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: W.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: Bush, who I would consider him pretty villainous by and large, and yet he seems like a wise statesman because he was he seemed to understand that you had to rationally manage the empire.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: You had to have some sense of predicting cause and effect.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: You couldn't be guided by eschatological imperatives.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: At least that's what I would say now when I think about his thought process.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's exactly also my trajectory.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: You go back and you look at Nixon, Reagan, Bush.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Whoa, they were moderates compared to what we have with Clinton or Obama or Biden.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's really something because I do think that Reagan, you can trace his career and his what he did in the 60s and so on, and he seems it's not very hard to make a case against Reagan.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I do, and I would anytime.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: But these people that have come after, it can't be blamed on the individuals.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: It must be that the regime and the system itself has changed and become more hardline about certain aspects because Obama actually seems, as bad as Obama was, he seemed to try to moderate some of these things.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: You've talked about what he did in Syria, which was horrible and he spent billions on it, but ultimately he pulled back from the abyss, which to me says he al he knew that it was probably a bad idea all along.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: Cy Hirsch wrote about it in The New Yorker in 2007 as a plot they were hatching to use jihadi types to destabilize Syria.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: But Obama aids and abets that, approves that covert operation, but then he finally says, well, it's not a slam dunk, or that's what his CIA director says about these chemical weapons attacks, and he doesn't invade.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: At least there's that, or at least the invasion is a small thing at the end of the day.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's very interesting.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a good characterization of Obama.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Again, you campaigned for him.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: I I certainly voted and supported uh him, uh, knew him in his presidency, but he definitely uh ceded the territory in the end to the neocons and to the uh imperialists uh in Washington.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll come to who those are in a moment, I hope.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: But he did have a little bit, uh he did more than that.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: He had some break.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: He did a lot of acceleration, a lot of damage in Syria, in Libya, in Ukraine, because it was in the Obama administration that the US participated in the coup in February 2014 that overthrew the Ukrainian government that started this war that we're in right now.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: So that was under Obama.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: But he did three things uh that we could say put the brakes on to his own mischief.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, one was he didn't go all the way in Syria after having started the overthrow.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, he didn't uh go full force into Syria, he held back a bit, but still it's been an incredibly disastrous period, which I blame the United States for entirely in this case.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: In the case of Iran, of course, he negotiated the JCPOA, the uh joint comprehensive plan with Iran for denuclearization of Iran, and then Trump abandoned that, and uh Biden did not return to it.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: And after instigating a coup in Ukraine, which was a disaster, he at least seemed to know well, let's not escalate.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: Russia will escalate on top of anything we do.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it was Biden, more than anybody, who took us into a complete disaster for Ukraine, 600,000 dead on Biden's watch of Ukrainians, because Biden kept escalating with the losing hand.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so Obama, at least I would agree, gets I don't know whether it's C minus or D, uh, but he doesn't fail like the others.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think that if you look at the trajectory of these presidents and the how more how much more brazen they are that the general regime is.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Obama said to people when they talked about prosecuting Bush officials for torture and such, he said, Well, I'm I'm worried if we do that, they'll overthrow me in a coup.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: So you get the sense that Obama's trying to accommodate these forces, and it seems to take a lot to accommodate them.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: You have to do some pretty crazy things, or else they will be, you know, who knows what they will do.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I don't know how much that entered into his thoughts, but the fact that he ever said that in the first place about the prosecution of Bush officials for pretty obvious crimes, that to me says that he understands that there's this control there and that you're really limited in what you can do.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because also the fact he pulls back from these policies ultimately, to me says he probably understood that they were reckless from the beginning because he's smart and all those things were kind of apparent, those other drawbacks to these policies.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: So for moral cowardice, he's pretty terrible.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then he leaves office and he could tell the truth about some of these things, and he really doesn't.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: He's there to make sure Bernie Sanders doesn't get elected and uh to bring the NBA players back.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he just comes in and intervenes for the establishment that need at the drop of a hat, and he has all the money in the world.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't have much respect for him uh at this point.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron, I I want to read to you, I think, a very interesting statement by Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, uh, and then uh use that as a segue to your discussion and structuring of the tripartite state, which is how you explain how U.S.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: foreign policy is really made.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a very, very important set of ideas.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, let's start with uh Putin, because I I thought it was a kind of brilliant remark.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh this is President Putin in an interview to the French newspaper Le Figaro on the 29th of May 2017.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I quote, I have already spoken to three U.S.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: presidents.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: They come and go, but politics stayed the same all the time.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know why?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because of the powerful bureaucracy.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: When a person is elected, they may have some ideas.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits, just like mine, except for the red tie, since they were black or dark blue ones.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: These people start explaining how things are done, and instantly everything changes.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is what happens with every administration.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: I found it hilarious.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, Putin says, My experience is I could talk to a U.S.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: president in the morning, get some kind of agreement, but by the afternoon, uh the president explains to me, no, no, no, that's not how things work.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: So somebody has gotten to the president, uh, the people in dark suits and blue or black ties.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you present in the book in a very detailed way.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh, I'd say the core of the dissertation, both in your literal sense of PhD dissertation and the dissertation of the book, that America is not what it looks like on the surface, what we learn in civics or what we read in the Constitution.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you call it the Madisonite state, that is the government that we think we have when we elect officials and they have the constitution, but in fact, we have a tripartite state, a three-part state.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd love for you to explain what are the three parts, how do they work, how do they relate to the goals of American foreign policy?
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, I talk about the tripartite state, which builds upon the ideas of a dual state.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the dual state argument came from a German who came to the United States, uh Ernst Frankel, and he was describing how the Nazi state had emerged, that there was this normative state, which was the government as it ran, you know, with uh certain policies for how things would be run and so on.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: But then eventually, in a moment of crisis, this prerogative state emerges.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it's supposed to protect the regular state, uh, the normative state, but it ends up being, you know, taking on a life of its own because it's so it's omnipotent essentially, and uh it's this dark force of top-down control.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: And people have tried to adapt that to other governments in the West, other regimes in the West.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: And Turkey was the most famous example where it turned out that a whole lot of coups and paramilitary false flag terror and other incidents uh and narcotics trafficking and so on, were actually the work of a shadow government that could intervene and overthrow democratic governments and do basically whatever for political means.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so they had a word for it, Darren Devlet, which was the deep state, and that's where that deep state term comes from.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: But even before that, Peter Dale Scott, a Berkeley uh professor of English, but a political science PhD and a former Canadian diplomat, he wrote about the deep political system in the U.S.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: in the early 90s, and he was saying that if you look at the intelligence agencies and the networks of organized crime, intelligence, and different political actors in the overworld, uh, or the richest oligarchs of private wealth in the United States, the richest people, there's a different kind of system in the US that operates inside and outside of the official channels of power.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he eventually comes to embrace uh the deep state idea.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I build on that work and say that you can look at this uh top-down sort of darkest version of power that you don't even necessarily know where it comes from, but it's it seems to always be connected to oligarchy and empire ultimately.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of money, and it's counterposed to the democratic state.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, what you call the deep state, you could also call the oligarchic state if you wanted to, because it's kind of counterposed to that.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the security state, the national security state in the US, is something that gets created at the end of World War II, and it's supposedly to protect us against this threat of communism.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: But if you look back at it, you can really see that it's most useful as a tool for running the world, which the powerful oligarchs of the U.S.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: decided was going to be U.S.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: policy after World War II.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: They decided they would go for global dominance, and so they needed a new bureaucracy or set of bureaucracies, and they create the national security state with the joint chiefs, uh, the the Pentagon, the modern Pentagon emerges at that point.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: The uh Central Intelligence Agency gets created with the ability to do covert operations, which the president claims to not have understood he was signing at the time, and he may not have.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: It was written in a very innocent way.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: In 1947, the CIA is created as an intelligence agency, but then there's a clause in the National Security Act that says, and other things, uh basically, and the other things became the president's private army, the assassination squads, the overthrow system, and so forth, and it probably the one that took out the Kennedys and many others.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it became uh the murder squad of the U.S.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: government.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Precisely.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: And even when the reason that I say it's not just a dual state kind of situation is that at times you see even the national security state does not seem to be functioning in the way that we would think that it does.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: So the reason that I say that there is this additional deep state or oligarchic factor is that in times of uh political crisis, the national security state will not necessarily respond to the public state or the democratic state.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: This seems to have happened to most obviously to John F.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: Kennedy, but even with Richard Nixon, the way that he is trying to use the CIA, he fires the CIA director and then tries to use the CIA to help him against this campaign that he believes the CIA is pretty much behind uh in terms of leaking all these things to the press and and so on.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and for good reason he thought that.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so you see Nixon being under attack from national security state type forces or or forces that are behind the scenes, but you don't he even he can't get to the bottom of it when he is uh the president.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: And to me, this points to something besides the national security state, and besides the democratic state, it's a kind of deep oligarchic part of our regime.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: So you could use the term deep state.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's interesting.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: You use the term for that, the overlords.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Over overworld.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: Overworld, excuse me.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: And overworld is the counterpart of the underworld, of course.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting for the security state, the underworld, that is really organized crime, has been a partner of the security state from the very beginning.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, uh the CIA was funded from drug trade, for example, starting back in Thailand and the late 1940s.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: So the underworld is not just a thing in the mafia and so forth.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's part of it's a partner of the security state.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: But then you talk about the contrast of the underworld, the overworld, which I think is a wonderful expression, by the way, and living in New York City, you can't help but see the overworld uh in its various uh various manifestations uh all over this city, whether it's Wall Street or uh the billionaires uh in Midtown and so forth, and the Council on Foreign Relations, of which I am a member.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: But uh when you look at the history of that organization and the role that it's played, that's the uh overworld organization Par excellence.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, thank you for pointing out the War and Peace Studies project of the Council on Foreign Relations, which I had no idea about before reading your book.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: But those were studies already in the early 1940s about how the U.S.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: would achieve global dominance after World War II.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: I have to go read that because I haven't read it, uh, but it's fascinating.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: The the studies are worth reading themselves, but the book by Shoop and Mentor is a very good summary of it uh called Imperial Brain Trust.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: And they did essentially map everything out.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: Some one volume written by Alan Dulles on security and sovereignty, uh, if I remember correctly.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: That volume is still not declassified.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh some wow.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: Some people speculate that he may have called for the creation of uh what eventually becomes this the Central Intelligence Agency.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Alan Dulles wrote this.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: He was the person in charge of it.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: He was like the vice president of the council at the time.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: He was really the most extraordinary dark force, perhaps.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: He's quoted in something I just read.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've come across it, supposedly saying in 1941 or 42, we're fighting on the wrong side in World War II, but uh very dark person.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, absolutely.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: He made common cause with Nazis and such after the war and helped to rescue them, actually.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they that's one of the strangest facts of the U.S.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: uh post-war era is that they rehabilitate a lot of these Nazis and Japanese and Italian fascists and they incorporate them in the new regime uh because essentially, I mean, remember that the Axis was the anti-communist international, the anti-comintern pact.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like the U.S.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: basically picks up the mantle of the anti-communist international.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: They become the anti-communist international.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: And and today's uh German intelligence agency, the BND, was established by the U.S.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: with the leadership of one of the top Nazis, Galen.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: So it became a post-World War II Nazi-led organization as partnered with the CIA.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: Essentially, yes.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: And in Japan, the LDP is the one-party state of Japan, essentially, and they were founded with a slush fund of over a hundred million dollars worth of war loot that was stolen by a yakuza drug trafficker who was made a rear admiral and it was a class A war criminal.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: The CIA sprang him from jail, and all of that money has fueled a one-party state, essentially, and they have these slush funds that over the years there's scandals.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: Because how does the LEP have all this money?
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: But it's like it goes back to war crimes, essentially.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so Japan is just not what we think, but it's like this whole American era is not what we think in general, and I it's falling apart, and I don't think people understand why.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, it's so that's what we're trying to explain.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: So just to underscore, because I think you've got it beautifully, and I'd been grappling with this, trying to uh find the right words and the way to describe it.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: The public state, so people understand that, is what we think we elect.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: We have an election coming up, we're we're gonna elect a president, we think it's a big deal for foreign policy, but it's just the tip of the iceberg, uh, if it if you want to put it that way.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because then is the security state.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's the uh CIA, uh, Pentagon, National Security Council, and all of the rest of the intelligence uh system and all of the specialized uh Senate and House committees, armed services committees, and others that are part of this security state.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: And you talk about it operating uh with secrecy, expediency, and hierarchy, I think it is.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but basically, that's the hard permanent state of uh the administration to exercise uh American control as much as possible over the rest of the world.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then the deep state or the overworld, that's the drivers.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the drivers are uh the the business leaders, uh the wealth holders who say we need to control that oil, we need to control those ports, we need to control these natural resources, we need to control this land, and they ultimately are in a way driving this uh desire or this uh underlying grand strategy, sometimes called for American domination to the extent possible.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, I've had the experience uh as all my career has been advising other governments, uh, not the U.S., but developing countries, because my concern has been economic development.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: I I've never taken a penny for it because I don't want any question about this.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: I've worked on my academic salary and don't take a penny from another government and never have.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: But I've had the experience that I go to another country and the American ambassador says, come for a courtesy call.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then I'm given a lecture by the American ambassador about some American large company operating in that country.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the words are please tell your friends X, Y, or Z about such and such company, often a company that is later exposed as doing criminality and corruption and so on.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: But that's part of the job of the American ambassador.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how the overworld operates uh to influence the security apparatus, which includes our embassies abroad, certainly.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: It does.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the other aspect of the deep state, I would say, that differentiates it from just the security bureaucracies is when, in a pinch, they will create new institutions to make sure that they can win the day.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: So in the 70s, when after Watergate, there were all those intelligence investigations, and people like Helms and Bush and Shackley, they essentially create a CIA cobbled together from their networks of foreign intelligence agencies and corrupt banks and so on, so they're able to carry out essentially the CIA operations that the CIA isn't able to carry out because they keep having to testify in front of Congress and you know, dealing with headlines in the New York Times and so on.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, Aaron, that's that's the network of other intelligence agencies or uh something else that you're referring to?
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think that, well, in the after during Watergate, and under Stansfield Turner as well, under uh Jimmy Carter, where he fires a lot of people uh in the post-Watergate hearings, you know, church committee era and so on, the CIA is unable to conduct business as usual.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: But these old boys, some of whom have been cast out, like uh Richard Helms, uh, you know, he's sent to Iran, but he works with the Shah and he works with Saudi intelligence and other people, and he works with uh the guy who becomes the richest man in the world, Adnan Khashoggi, and they establish uh this uh this thing called the Safari Club, but it was essentially just a network of uh of spooks and so on who are able to carry out CIA covert operations, but not even really with the CIA.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: People suspect that this is uh part of the outfit responsible for the October surprise business in uh the 1980 election, but it's you know that's uh speculative, but it's there's a it sort of tracks with what these people are up to.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so the control, it doesn't even have to be so much the CIA running everything, it's the power of the oligarchy to really set the narrative across all these institutions.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, look at how academia and the mainstream media all essentially reify and affirm the central mythology of the US, even, and this is where it's becoming kind of scary these days.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's this power that animates all of these institutions and it makes them affirm ridiculous and basically discredited and untenable ideas of what the US is and what US foreign policy is.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's this kind of inertia of organized money that has corrupted all.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Of our institutions, I would say.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's what animates the deep state.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the security state is more or less the way that they've bureaucratized, institutionalized their norms and preferences into a full-on regime.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron, one thing that I try to understand, maybe you can give some insight into it.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many lies and false narratives with the Ukraine war, which I've been quite knowledgeable about for a lot of reasons, and watching Ukraine for more than 30 years, to my mind, NATO enlargement and all of the U.S.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: attempts to destabilize Russia around its uh periphery and so on have been the cause of the war.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: None of this is discussed by the mainstream media at all.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: You can't get five words in the New York Times that counter their favorite word, unprovoked.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is just Putin being an imperialist.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: It has nothing to do with the fact that the United States has been trying regime change in Russia, trying to surround Russia, trying to put missile bases around Russia, trying to expand NATO.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: They won't talk about any of that.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: And there are countless areas like that, uh Syria, which uh we've mentioned briefly, where Obama signed the order to the CIA to overthrow the uh government of Syria, uh Bashar al-Assad, in what is known as Operation Timber Sycamore.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was mentioned in the New York Times three times in a decade.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_00: Just you don't hear about it at all, other than uh in passing once, but I got to know about it in a number of ways, including from top international diplomats that were watching the U.S.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_00: keep the war going and they were describing to me what was going on.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, my question is, and we could add the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission cover-up and all the rest.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: It seems to me the American people don't believe anything that they're told, but the narratives persist, they're used, and maybe it's not even the goal of the narrative makers to try to convince the public of these things because sometimes the stories are so stupid, so ridiculous, like, well, it wasn't the US that blew up uh the Nord Stream pipeline, it was six people in a sailboat.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: What is the point of this kind of repetition of nonsense that you wouldn't pass a high school essay paper, but it's repeated by our journal of record, uh, the New York Times, repeatedly.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_00: Why do they do this?
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: Why do they go along with this stuff?
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it's as America has shifted more and more to the right politically, in terms of just being a top-down empire run for the benefit of oligarchs, the policies become less and less diff defensible uh over time.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: The the amount of lying was not so great in the 50s and 60s.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: People were shocked when Eisenhower said uh came out after the U-2 incident, you know?
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: A US spy plane was shot down, and Eisenhower said it was a a weather uh a weather plane that had gone off course, and then the Soviet Union produced the pilot and the U-2 spy plane that it had shot down.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: So he was caught in a direct lie.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that was significant at the time, and it's not that they always told the truth about everything back then, but it was they really they didn't get caught in brazen lies that often.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: So this was something new.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: But as the policy gets more and more belligerent and really less defensible, and as information technology allows details to come out sooner, because you know, Eisenhower had lied about events in Iran and Guatemala earlier in his presidency.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't as if the government wasn't lying there, but here they they get totally caught.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's every area of policy in every area, significant area where there's some conflict with the U with the US.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_01: You can expect most of what you hear to not be true, either lies of omission or outright lies.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it's overwhelming.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's a tapestry of lies.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think that that's what maybe it was Putin that called some of these American narratives that.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: But really, I mean, if you were if you had to be a propagandist for a country, being a propagandist for the China or Russia would be a pretty easy job because you really mostly just have to try to accurately point out what the U.S.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: is doing.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the more you editorialize, you probably are hurting your cause.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: The U.S.'s policies are indefensible across the board in an in so many areas, you can't even keep track of them.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's now coming to a point that we've united most of the world against us, and I think that this moment is sort of of passing of dominance, and it's the lying is so ever-present, and the strategy, as you say, has not really been to mobilize the public behind a national mission anymore.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think in the after the 60s, they came to the conclusion that the public should just be managed and kind of atomized, and they they wanted to get rid of the draft too.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, take away any pressure points from the public, the draft being uh the real flashpoint.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then you could let the deep state and the overworld just go on and do its business, the security state and the deep state, to use your terminology, to go on and do its business.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: And the ironic thing is that Biden, I think, may be most remembered uh decades from now as saying to those oligarchs, under me, nothing will fundamentally change.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: And but because he was such so slavishly devoted to the main drift of US, you know, unipolarity and was oblivious to where it was leading, I think everything is fundamentally changing.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so he was lying to them too.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: So give us hope as we come to the closing minutes.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, the failures, to my mind, are pervasive, especially if we date it now in our talk, and just I think it's helpful for the listeners.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the idea of U.S.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: exceptionalism goes back to the start of the U.S., the U.S.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: as overseas empire is after World War II.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: The neocon takeover, which is we're really gonna run the world, is after 1991.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_00: And now we've been 30 years with this uh attempt by the deep state and the security state to run the show abroad, many wars, perpetual wars, dangerous wars.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing seems to be working, and the American people don't like it.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: Is there some way out of this?
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let me say something grim and then also hopeful.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: If you go back to, we were talking about the Council on the Foreign Relations, Wall Street funded, and they just say the U.S.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: is going to try to rule the world after World War II, and their pitch man is Henry Luce, Time Lap magazine, saying it was going to be an American century and we're gonna make lots of money too.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then he's he's argued against by the vice president at the time, Henry Wallace, who is really kind of an internationalist who says we should try to run the world based on international cooperation, no empires, no master races, nothing like that.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: He is basically removed less violently than John Kennedy from the political system in 1944.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you get Harry Truman and they go for empire.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the next internationalists to come along are like people like Daghammer Skald and JFK at that moment there in the early 60s, it seemed hopeful.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: And they both end up getting killed, and then people like the Kennedys get killed.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so you don't end up with kind of a more lawful internationalism prevailing as U.S.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: policy.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then H.W.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: Bush himself and Gorbachev, they were both sort of in different ways, and definitely H.W.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: Bush's internationalism had a more corporate and capitalist flavor than Gorbachev, but both of them were more or less calling for different kinds of internationalism and cooperation as opposed to this neocon policy that prevailed.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: But now I think that it's coming to it that the people like Wallace and JFK and Gorbachev, the internationalists, seem to have the history on their side.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a positive thing for humanity, but it could lead to great shocks for the U.S.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: The biggest threat of all, obviously, is nuclear war.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: Is the U.S.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: going to give up its empire or is it going to fight to the bitter end and provoke some sort of nuclear exchange that ends human civilization or at least the northern hemisphere?
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's the pessimistic side.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: The optimistic side is that this should end.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: The U.S.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: is eventually getting to the point that it can't dictate outcomes anymore.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_01: All it can do is dictate narratives in a dictatorial way that is becoming obviously dictatorial and detached from reality.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: They're headed for a defeat in Ukraine that I think is going to be so monumental and catastrophic.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's even more catastrophic to the mystique of the U.S.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_01: Empire.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is fading.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_01: The mystique is fading.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_01: The ability to determine material outcomes in the world is fading.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: That is bad for the U.S.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: oligarchy, will could cause problems for the US population like myself, but is ultimately hopeful for humanity because the Chinese and Russians and other countries around the world are essentially calling for international law cooperation and uh adherence to international law.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_01: And the US is the main force standing in the way of that.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it's pretty obviously the continuation and culmination of five centuries of Western imperialism as the dominant force of the world and a kind of commercial white supremacy over the world that is, I think, going to end and that deserves to end because uh all empires end, and all empires should end because imperialism should end, and cooperation should reign to try to solve the problems uh that humanity faces.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna end on that very hopeful note.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: I want to mention again that triumvirate that you mentioned, Henry Wallace, who was vice president of the United States under Roosevelt, who, in response uh to the American century of Henry Luce, that grandiosity, called for the century of the common man instead.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_00: John F.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: Kennedy, who of course called for peace and gave the greatest speech on peace uh ever given, in my view, the American University Commencement Address on June 10, 1963.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: And Mikhail Gorbachev, who inspired me in trying to help the Soviet Union and Russia already more than 30 years ago, and was absolutely the great statesman of peace.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, Aaron, you've said that it's going to be Wallace Kennedy and Gorbachev that have their day now because they're on the right side.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna hold you to that.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: But let me say this has been a wonderful discussion.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_00: We've been discussing American Exception, Empire in the Deep State by Aaron Good.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's a fantastic book, Aaron.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: Really a great contribution.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for joining Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs and wish uh everybody uh peace in the world and look forward to being with you on the next uh episode.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 55:03
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