Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 2, Episode 10: Chris Coyne: In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace

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Season 2, Episode 10: Chris Coyne: In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
0:01
SPEAKER_01: 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.
0:16
SPEAKER_01: In this episode, I will be speaking with Chris Coyne, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and the associate director of the Friedrich Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center.
0:31
SPEAKER_01: We'll be discussing his important new book, In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace.
0:40
SPEAKER_01: Professor Coyne presents a detailed anatomy of the American warfare state and examines the costs and failures of U.S.
0:48
SPEAKER_01: military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and beyond.
0:54
SPEAKER_01: He offers a wise and thought-provoking case for a new, non-imperialistic approach to national and international security.
1:03
SPEAKER_01: Chris, thank you so much for joining.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: It's really a pleasure to be together with you.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, thank you for taking the time to speak with me.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: I'm grateful for the opportunity.
1:11
SPEAKER_01: You wrote the book clearly during the ending debacle of the long stay in Afghanistan, which actually goes back on proper count, I think, to 1979 when we first started meddling.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: But of course, in the most recent phase, it was from 2001 to 2021.
1:31
SPEAKER_01: And it seemed, I think, probably as you were finishing the book that there would be at least a respite to take some lessons from Afghanistan.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: And it seemed maybe we were a little tired of the perpetual war in this country.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: And lo and behold, within months, we're back at war.
1:51
SPEAKER_01: Maybe not so many boots on the ground.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: We don't know exactly how many.
1:55
SPEAKER_01: There probably are a few from what we're told, but certainly the American military is deeply engaged in the Ukraine crisis.
2:03
SPEAKER_01: It must have kind of amazed you that, oh, I finished, but here we go again.
2:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: On the one hand, it was not surprising given the history of U.S.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: foreign policy.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, it was quite surprising.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: I was simultaneously depressed and optimistic when I finished the book.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: I was depressed just going through just the last couple decades of this, even though, as you mentioned, it goes back much further.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: But then I was optimistic from the standpoint that the U.S.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: had finally extracted many of the troops from Afghanistan, officially ended, although the U.S.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: is still involved there as well as all around the world, of course.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: The Afghanistan papers had been released by the Washington Post, and it started to give some real insight into the dysfunction, the waste, the fraud, the systematic lies that had been perpetuated both on the American populace but internationally as well.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: And I thought to myself, okay, this is the opportunity to reflect on America's role in the world, to understand how this operates.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: The Afghanistan papers pulled back the curtain on much of how this apparatus operates, but there wasn't much of that.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: And of course, then as you pointed out, very quickly, that window, to the extent it was open at all, slammed shut because of the Russian invasion into Ukraine and then the calls for more spending, more intervention, and a renewal of American empire and the supposed centrality of American Empire for order and the spread of liberty.
3:35
SPEAKER_01: I'm an old guy, so I remember the release of the Pentagon papers on Vietnam, which at the end of the 1960s, of course, Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst at Rand, saw the debacle by reading through the history of the Vietnam War, and then he secretly photocopied them and released them.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: And my youth was spent marching on the streets of Detroit, actually, in anti-war protests.
4:04
SPEAKER_01: And then the Pentagon papers came out and they explained all the lies and all of the terrible missteps and destruction and costs, but especially the lies, the prevarications, the statements that all is well, we're about to win the war.
4:22
SPEAKER_01: And Ellsberg's conclusion of his model of what's going on.
4:27
SPEAKER_01: He said it wasn't that we were in a quagmire.
4:30
SPEAKER_01: We had created what he called the stalemate machine, which was just last till the next election.
4:36
SPEAKER_01: Don't be weak before the next election, but there's always a next election, and so it really is perpetual war.
4:43
SPEAKER_01: And you tell that story beautifully in this book, painfully, both in its general terms, where this mentality has come from, the traps of it, how it is kind of self-feeding, and the specifics around Afghanistan, which we'll get to.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: But let's uh start with the title itself, In Search of Monsters to Destroy, because that's an interesting title and it's got an interesting uh provenance, which is in the opening pages.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, of course.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: So it goes back to John Quincy Adams and his famous address where he pointed out that America as a country does not go abroad in the search of monsters because doing so would erode, in his view, the foundational values and principles of the American project.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: Those were what today we might call liberal values, liberal in the traditional sense of the term, not in the modern ideological sense of the term, but those values include things like individual freedom, a deep respect for human dignity, a respect for intellectual humility, an appreciation of voluntary association, freedom of exchange, toleration and pluralism, and a commitment to peaceful solutions to interpersonal conflicts, both domestically and internationally.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: And Adam's concern was that if the American government went abroad looking for monsters to destroy, which are always out there, there's always things around every corner, whether potential or real, that you can go after and fix and in order of kind of designing a better world, at least in principle, at least that's what we're told, you're gonna undermine those very values.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things I try to point out throughout the book, and that's one of the reasons we selected that title, is the idea of a liberal empire, which is what many of the proponents of American foreign policy and a proactive militaristic empire argue for, is a misnomer.
6:32
SPEAKER_00: You can't have a liberal empire, I argue, because it is inherently illiberal.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: The very structure of it, the nature of it in terms of the activities it carries out, and the corrosive effects it has on those fundamental liberal values that I just mentioned.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: And so the great trick that has been pulled off, and you touched upon it quite nicely with the Pentagon papers and the more recent revelations in the Afghanistan papers, is this grand effort to dress up what's really going on in terms of, well, this is necessary.
7:04
SPEAKER_00: It must be that we have to have an empire in order to have liberalism, in order to have freedom, in order to have human dignity, in order to have cooperation.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: And to my way of thinking, that just doesn't make sense in itself in terms of logical consistency, but also isn't true.
7:19
SPEAKER_00: Meaning that we both can envision conceptually, but also empirically, a world where we don't have a big gun, if you will, a big boot, either stepping on people's throat or threatening to do so, and still have cooperation in order.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, my position, and one that I think that you share based on my own reading of your work and watching you discuss these things, is that cooperating to address the most challenging global issues requires us to find ways to get along.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: And that relying on guns to secure cooperation is going to do just the opposite.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: You might think that you might want to talk to the other side to actually figure out something.
7:57
SPEAKER_01: That is uh that's my starting point.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: And it is a strange thing.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: It was very disappointing for me when Biden came in.
8:06
SPEAKER_01: His first take was the world is fundamentally in a struggle between democracies and autocracies.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: And so he set it up again that everything in our future depends on the struggle.
8:21
SPEAKER_01: Rather than saying, you know, we have a lot to discuss with our counterparts.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: Why don't we share some experience or some insights, especially since we were coming out of our own attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021?
8:34
SPEAKER_01: You might have thought there would be a little bit of humility, but he went straight to this idea the world's fundamentally divided, and like you say, the claim that our liberty depends on this kind of militarism or this kind of conflictual approach to the world rather than actually dialogue, debate, maybe some peaceful competition and so on, but not the direct confrontational approach.
9:00
SPEAKER_01: I wanted to go back to the 19th century and the origins of this.
9:04
SPEAKER_01: It may be an odd point.
9:06
SPEAKER_01: I'd like to get your take on it.
9:07
SPEAKER_01: You mentioned Manifest Destiny briefly as part of the story.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: I have felt in my own thinking about this over the years that ironically the country was set up as a new hope of democratic self-governance.
9:22
SPEAKER_01: And as your quotation of John Quincy Adams makes clear, and also as George Washington said in his farewell address, beware of foreign entanglements, we will stick to our own knitting.
9:33
SPEAKER_01: But we did begin a military conquest across the North American continent.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: And so, in that sense, the militarism was pretty deeply dug in from the beginning.
9:45
SPEAKER_01: It was a righteous evangelical call to reach the other sea.
9:51
SPEAKER_01: Just would love your take on that and your reflections on that.
9:54
SPEAKER_00: No, you're exactly right.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: And I think that gets at an important point, which is when we point to historical figures, present-day or historical figures, and we kind of select a quote.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: So the in search of monsters quote or avoid foreign entanglements, it's important to do that.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: And it's a good grounding, of course, a good baseline.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: But of course, none of these people in reality really lived up to that ideal billing.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: And as you point out, from the earliest days, the American government was quite an expansionary.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: And so the way I briefly trace the history of this, which isn't the only way to trace it, but in my head, that's kind of how I break it down and present it in the book, is in three phases, uh, in terms of explaining the evolution of what I call American Empire.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: And what you were referring to in your comments about westward expansion is what I characterize as phase one.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: That's continental expansion during the early to middle of the 19th century.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: So this is things like the Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, the Oregon Treaty, and so on.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: And certainly, as that westward expansion happened, oftentimes it was violent.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: There was a fundamental violation of the liberal principles that people like Adams and Washington at least gestured towards in their famous speeches.
11:00
SPEAKER_01: And interestingly, by the way, of course, uh George Washington was a land prospector, uh, and his first engagement was uh trying to get land in the Ohio Valley.
11:09
SPEAKER_01: So this also goes back pretty deeply.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, certainly, certainly.
11:13
SPEAKER_00: So these are ideal principles, but of course, not always followed in practice, and that's an important point to keep in mind.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: But it doesn't, to my way of thinking, undermine the ideal principles and as something we should strive towards and that we can strive towards.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: Phase two, I kind of put the demarcation line at the Spanish-American War in 1898.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: And that was kind of the beginning of a consistent overseas imperialism.
11:35
SPEAKER_01: And and by the way, Chris, uh I always treated it as fair to say, okay, now we've got the continent, where next?
11:41
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: Certainly, certainly.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: And that's part, you know, that's part of the issue with the way policymakers today talk about American foreign policy.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: We have the Department of Defense, which by the way was the War Department prior to the Department of Defense.
11:53
SPEAKER_00: I think semantics matter a great deal here.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: A lot of it is this passive language.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: It's we are defending liberty, we are defending Americans.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: But if you actually think about it, certainly from the perspective of other people, if you can try to put yourself in the shoes of other people, let alone just think logically about what's happening, much of what the military sector does in the United States has nothing at all to do with defense.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: It's it's offensive.
12:16
SPEAKER_00: It is taking active steps to poke, to prod, to balance power.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: And it's always undertaken in very kind of kind language.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: High-minded.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, high-minded language.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: But when people actually think about what's being undertaken, you start to see the contradictions.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: The Spanish-American War, America got involved in the late 1800s, and it marked the beginning of imperialism in the Western Hemisphere.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: And of course, in the 1820s, we had the Monroe Doctrine, and that's 1823.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: And that said, look, uh, European powers don't establish any new colonies over here.
12:49
SPEAKER_00: We won't meddle in your affairs abroad or in the existing colonies, but you don't meddle here anymore.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: Well, what happens in 1904 is you get the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
13:00
SPEAKER_01: And amazing to reread, and some of the pertinent words are stunning.
13:04
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
13:04
SPEAKER_00: You can actually see someone saying exactly this today.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: And what Theodore Roosevelt basically says is that look, in many of these countries, they're unable to manage themselves.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: They're unable to govern themselves, they're unable to take care of basic functions, public finance, the provision of goods and services.
13:23
SPEAKER_00: And so when that happens, a civilized nation, what he means by that is America, of course, has the right to intervene to impose order upon them.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: And if you just go to discussions of Haiti today, let alone for decades in the past, it's almost the same exact type of language.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: There's arguments that are made that, oh, look, Haiti once again is unable to govern, is unable to have any kind of order.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: So we, the enlightened elites from America, need to intervene upon them to bring them order.
13:53
SPEAKER_01: And he he actually uses the language of international police power.
13:57
SPEAKER_01: So it's it's right there.
14:00
SPEAKER_00: You're exactly right.
14:00
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for bringing that up.
14:01
SPEAKER_00: We could literally use it today, just find and replace with countries now around the world, of course, rather than just the Western Hemisphere.
14:07
SPEAKER_00: And the same kind of logic holds.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: By the way, my colleague John Coatsworth, wonderful historian of Latin American history, wrote a paper around 2004 where he counted all of the US actions to overthrow governments in Latin America, the covert and overt operations, and its dozens in the century after 1898.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: Not a few cases here and there, but relentless activities.
14:35
SPEAKER_01: So that Roosevelt corollary really stuck and it was taken as license, not only when they can't behave, but when they can't behave in the way that we think that they should behave.
14:46
SPEAKER_01: Like, God forbid there should be land reform or social protection or something else.
14:51
SPEAKER_01: Boom! In come the Marines.
14:54
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe they want a different economic system than the one we have.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: It's interesting, and it goes even beyond the direct intervention.
14:59
SPEAKER_00: I talk a little bit about this in the chapter where I'm laying out this history.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: It normalizes violence as a means of interaction.
15:06
SPEAKER_00: It normalizes conflict.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: It normalizes the way you operate in politics in these countries is to overthrow existing regimes or partner with the U.S.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: government to overthrow existing regimes.
15:17
SPEAKER_00: The other thing it does oftentimes is it leads to a backlash against the very liberal values that at least rhetorically American leaders purport to want to uphold.
15:25
SPEAKER_00: Because again, you need to try to put yourself in the position of other people who are being intervened upon.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: And how do they view an outside alien force coming in and imposing things upon them?
15:36
SPEAKER_00: Well, if the external force says, we're the liberal empire, this is what markets look like and capitalism looks like, well, that sounds like a terrible deal to me.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: If I'm living under that, I'm facing this churn of violence and the threat of force, if not outright force.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: And you can see why then there's a backlash against these very things.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: And then people associate markets with imperialism.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, that's not crazy.
15:57
SPEAKER_00: We have something called the Banana Wars.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I spend a whole chapter in the book talking about cronyism and how liberal empire is at its core, is state political capitalism writ large, both domestically, that's the military-industrial congressional complex, and internationally.
16:12
SPEAKER_00: And Adam Smith pointed this out, of course.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: The shopkeepers, when you start colonizing nations, the shopkeepers are going to start lobbying government to get the goodies and create monopoly rents.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: And it kind of leads to this cycling effect.
16:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the acronyism you mentioned, of course, is dark and one of the most famous examples of this of United Fruit and Guatemala and the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, because there were two brothers at the time, John Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State, but had come from the law firm that represented United Fruit.
16:46
SPEAKER_01: And Dulles' brother, Alan Dulles, was at the CIA.
16:50
SPEAKER_01: And so the law firm said, we've got a problem, they want to do land reform.
16:55
SPEAKER_01: Went through the State Department, went over to the CIA, and the next thing, the guy is overthrown.
17:00
SPEAKER_01: Chris, it's really stunning, and you tell the story extremely well and the undermining of values so insightfully.
17:09
SPEAKER_01: Most countries, if you're not so powerful as the United States or a few other powers, you think about foreign policy as how to deal with other governments.
17:20
SPEAKER_01: But America thinks about it as how to replace other governments, which is a different kind of foreign policy, after all.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: Oh, certainly.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: One of the things I try to emphasize throughout the book, and certainly in the introduction and then in the conclusion come back to, is a need to rethink this kind of thinking of the world.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: And it's hard.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's ingrained certainly in the military, the national security state in America, for people that grow up in America in the educational system, taught from a very young age that the American government is a force for good in the world, that the American government is necessary for order and to protect us, the American people, and somehow represents American values.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: And to my way of thinking, because of course the pushback on that is well, if you say this, you're anti-American somehow, or anti-members of the military.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: And nothing could be further from the truth, which is, you know, there's an important distinction between a country and the state.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: A country, to my way of thinking, is a set of shared kind of values.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: And of course, scholars, as you know, you've done a lot of work in development, break this up on all different margins, some by language, some by different cultural things, including the country.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: But for my purposes, it's some shared set of values, and typically there's some border, which of course changed through time.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: But the state is the political machinery.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: And the political machinery in a country can oftentimes take steps and activities that are at odds with the values of the country.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: And a patriotic citizen who appreciates the values of their country has to be skeptical of that state apparatus always and everywhere.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: Not only if their person is in charge, not only if the government is doing stuff that they like, but everywhere and always.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: Yep, that's the point.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: Believe the narrative.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: And of course, one of the big issues with the military sector, and this goes back to your earlier point about the Pentagon papers and the Afghanistan papers, is in economics what we call information asymmetries, which is differences in information between government and citizens in general, but in matters of national security, they are ramped up multitudes.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: And the reason why, of course, is because just number one is the bureaucratic size is enormous.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: I mean, anyone that's looked at this stuff, it's just such an enormous bureaucracy.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: Even people in the government can't track it.
19:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the Pentagon just failed another audit.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: They can't even keep basic financial records for themselves.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: But even on top of that, they can conceal information.
19:37
SPEAKER_00: We have a classification system which has been just expanded so much and is abused to conceal information that has nothing at all to do with national security, and it's used to hide information from the American public.
19:49
SPEAKER_01: At this stage of my life, 68 years old, and having lived through so many of these wars, and by luck of my work, having been able to see these conflicts from different perspectives and know and speak to world leaders about it, the lying is nonstop.
20:08
SPEAKER_01: The secrecy is pervasive, and we spend so much time just trying to figure out what's really going on here, rather than to analyze properly what to do and so forth, if we had the information that should be available to us.
20:24
SPEAKER_01: But so much of the time is just to ferret out the truth from the lies.
20:29
SPEAKER_01: I want to bring you to the third stage of this because we were on the first the manifest destiny stage, and then the phase that began in the Western Hemisphere with the Spanish American Wars of 1898.
20:45
SPEAKER_01: And then the third phase really is the one where America becomes the global superpower, and that's after World War II.
20:53
SPEAKER_01: And if you could take us through that, because I think so much of the secrecy and the change of American society came in those years after World War II.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: What I call phase three is World War II and its aftermath.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: In that time period, of course, you have the war itself, which which really needs no discussion.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: But in the wake of that, the Cold War and the blueprint for this had been laid before.
21:17
SPEAKER_00: There have been people in the US government, the Dulles brothers, and others as well, of course, had been talking about the need for a global police with America filling that role even before World War II.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: So it's not like this just came out of the blue.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: It's that the war and then the Cold War kind of opened the door and set the stage for it to exist.
21:35
SPEAKER_00: And so what you get is the entrenchment of a permanent warfare state.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: You get the National Security Act of 1947, which kind of reorganizes the military sector in the United States.
21:48
SPEAKER_00: It elevates the role of military in American society.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: You get the establishment of the permanent war economy.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: And so prior to both world wars, but especially World War II, which is one that's kind of switched, you You had a situation where there's always a war industry in America, but it would kind of ebb and flow to a much greater degree than it does now, because now it exists.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: Because what happens is in the wake of World War II, you get arguments that, well, look, we have this threat.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: It's an ideological threat because the Cold War, there was enemies, but many, much of the enemies here was ideological.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: And uh what happens, of course, then is in the name of a perpetual faceless enemy, you need perpetual preparation.
22:25
SPEAKER_01: Monsters to destroy, exactly.
22:27
SPEAKER_00: That's right, around every corner.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: It kind of sounds like the war on terror in a way, right?
22:30
SPEAKER_00: It's a faceless enemy that that's around every corner, or can be if you want it to be.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: What you get is the rise of a permanent armaments industry and not just armaments in terms of weapons, but also major investments in research and development.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: And so you get the establishment domestically of a permanent war economy and the entrenchment of all these things.
22:48
SPEAKER_00: The other thing you get, of course, which Edward Snowden made clear to us, we we brought up Ellsberg before.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: I should mention is talking to a fellow economist that Ellsberg, of course, is a famous economist as well.
22:57
SPEAKER_00: Of course.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: Which a lot of people don't know.
23:01
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: The Ellsberg paradox in game theory and uh but um exactly what Snowden revealed was the the operation of the U.S.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: surveillance state, which again is not a new phenomena.
23:12
SPEAKER_00: For those who are familiar with the Church Committee, run by Senator Frank Church, when of course it was revealed by Seymour Hirsch on the front page of the New York Times that the CIA uh was violating its charter by acting domestically within the U.S.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: borders against U.S.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: citizens.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: That then uncovered the operations of the FBI as well and the uh NSA and what they were doing, which was a global surveillance network to control people.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: So what you get is just a massive expansion in all areas of life.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: And one of the targets in my book, I try to make it accessible to everyone, but one of my targets are those on the American ideological spectrum who are more kind of conservative and right-leaning and limited government.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: Because oftentimes they'll say government is terrible at health care, they're terrible at education, but we need a strong military and we need all the military to do all this stuff or you won't have order.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: And to my way of thinking, this is an enormous mistake.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: The military is all the things they point out writ large.
24:10
SPEAKER_00: And so one of the things I hope that they'll realize that target audience, there, and again, it's hopefully accessible to all people, but I hope they realize that tension because it's something that bothers me a great deal about interacting with that group of people is the fact that they don't realize it.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, you get people like Milton Friedman who will on the one hand say things like, Well, if the government was in charge of the desert, they'd run out of scent.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, just a few pages later, like, we need the American government to have a strong national defense because left to their own device, it's the standard kind of Samuelsonian public good argument.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: You know, people can't do it, and so we need this Leviathan to do it.
24:45
SPEAKER_00: And it just kind of runs throughout.
24:47
SPEAKER_00: That's just one example.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: And your theme is how pervasively that undermines the standards of a free society, and one that can act honestly and straightforwardly because it's a world of secrecy, cronyism, where perpetual war and violence is actually part of the industry itself.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: And it has to be.
25:09
SPEAKER_00: I think people have to realize the nature of the beast, the nature of the apparatus is force.
25:14
SPEAKER_00: The very idea of intervening abroad, intervening on anyone, it requires that the intervener is unhappy with the status quo.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: If they like the status quo, there'd be no urge to intervene in the first place.
25:24
SPEAKER_00: But then what does an intervention mean?
25:26
SPEAKER_00: Again, you can dress it up so it sounds nice.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: But it is, I want you to do X, you're not doing X.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: I can ask you to do X and say, please do X, but what happens if you don't do it?
25:36
SPEAKER_00: Well, then I can either go home and just say, okay, I asked and they didn't do it, or I can force you to do it.
25:41
SPEAKER_00: And that force can come through direct force.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: I can literally stick a gun in your face and say, do it or else.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: Or indirect, I can use the political apparatus to force you to do it.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: But that requires illiberalism and authoritarianism there.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: I can use kind of intermediaries, whether they're warlords or a host of other intermediaries to get you to do what I want.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: But at the end of the day, it is forcing people to do what you want.
26:05
SPEAKER_01: Another trick of it, Chris, is that we often say, we don't like what somebody's doing, what other another country, another leader's doing.
26:13
SPEAKER_01: We need to use force because otherwise, you know, we'll be endangered.
26:17
SPEAKER_01: And there's no use in talking.
26:20
SPEAKER_01: It's hopeless to talk.
26:22
SPEAKER_01: There could be no negotiations.
26:24
SPEAKER_01: You could never trust this person.
26:26
SPEAKER_01: It would be a sign of weakness to talk.
26:28
SPEAKER_01: So part of what's built into it is not only of course the recourse to force, but the denial that there could be a peaceful path to anything almost on these issues.
26:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're exactly right.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: It fundamentally frames the world as a zero sum, if not negative sum, game, if you will, which is in order for someone else to gain, we have to lose.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: And so we have to stop them from doing that.
26:55
SPEAKER_01: And we know that they're going to be perfidious, because uh I remember, you know, I'm deeply annoyed about the anti-China approach that we're taking.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: We'll come back to that later.
27:06
SPEAKER_01: But uh, senior White House officials said, we know what China's going to do.
27:12
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we have to counter it, rather than saying we're going to have discussions about these things.
27:17
SPEAKER_01: And so the very idea that there could be a peaceful cooperative approach is ruled out beforehand because God forbid you sit down and maybe there would be a cooperative approach, but that would defeat the point, wouldn't it?
27:32
SPEAKER_01: You know, with this standing apparatus, you don't want to find those off-ramps.
27:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
27:38
SPEAKER_00: It's set up precisely to do that, to avoid those off-ramps, right?
27:41
SPEAKER_00: That's the nature of it.
27:41
SPEAKER_00: And of course, I forget the exact numbers, but the amount the U.S.
27:44
SPEAKER_00: government spends on military-related activities relative to diplomacy is just enormous when you look at these differentials.
27:52
SPEAKER_01: If you add the defense budget, the CIA, the intelligence agencies, Homeland Security, it's at least a trillion dollars a year.
28:00
SPEAKER_01: And on diplomacy, the government 150 account, which is the diplomatic account, which adds, by the way, a lot of military diplomacy and so on, is 50, so it's at least a 20 to 1 ratio.
28:12
SPEAKER_01: It's unbelievable.
28:13
SPEAKER_01: We just don't invest in the non-military alternatives.
28:17
SPEAKER_01: I want to turn to Afghanistan, which you have two fantastic chapters about.
28:22
SPEAKER_01: But to come back for one more moment on the National Security Act, because I see that as so terribly transformative.
28:29
SPEAKER_01: If I'm correct, it's also the act that created the CIA.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: And to my mind, the worst part of the CIA is not that there is an intelligence agency, but that there is a covert operations agency, and it's the same thing.
28:44
SPEAKER_01: And the covert, by definition, is completely unaccountable.
28:48
SPEAKER_01: Once in a while, once every 30 years, you have congressional hearings on it, like the church committee hearings.
28:54
SPEAKER_01: And Truman knew in 1947 this is trouble, but he couldn't stop it.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that's the problem.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: And once established, it's even harder to stop.
29:04
SPEAKER_00: And you are exactly right about the covert nature, and it really undermines all or most checks and balances.
29:10
SPEAKER_00: Because, first of all, when it comes to matters of war, the checks and balances in America, to the extent they existed, went away a long time ago.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: Historians talk about the idea of the imperial presidency.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: We have this deep state that operates outside of electoral or even congressional oversight.
29:24
SPEAKER_00: But congressional oversight itself in matters of national security is oftentimes extremely weak, and for at least two reasons.
29:31
SPEAKER_00: One is that many members who are involved in oversight have an interest in seeing the apparatus itself continue if not expand, whether that is because of connections to the military sector itself or because of connections in their home districts for their constituents, of course.
29:46
SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
29:47
SPEAKER_01: And connected if I may say, because the congressmen that choose to go to the Armed Services Committee are the ones that have that interest, and then they get showered with money.
29:55
SPEAKER_01: Exactly right.
29:56
SPEAKER_01: From the military-industrial complex.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: Showered with money.
29:59
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: And then the other issue is goes back to what you and I were discussing before about information asymmetries, which is because of the secrecy, how do members of Congress who are on the oversight committee, so let's put aside the special interest logic for a moment, how do they get information to monitor members of the agencies?
30:14
SPEAKER_00: Well, they typically rely on members of the agencies to deliver the information that they're going to use to monitor them, to hold them accountable.
30:21
SPEAKER_00: And verification of that, because of secrecy, is near impossible.
30:24
SPEAKER_00: And of course, just basic interests, what information you're going to provide to people overseeing you, things that make you look good.
30:30
SPEAKER_01: When you point out the inevitability of failure of this, uh you point out two factors the ignorance and the incentives just being completely wrong.
30:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
30:41
SPEAKER_01: Just as you pointed out.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: And that runs throughout the whole system.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: This is just one manifestation of it.
30:45
SPEAKER_00: It's inherent in the industrial organization of this massive apparatus and the nature of it and the end goals.
30:51
SPEAKER_01: As I say, I came of a political age, 13, 14 in the Vietnam War protests, but we had Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, we had the Contra wars, we had the first Iraq War, the Second Iraq War, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and on and on and on.
31:09
SPEAKER_01: It seems always the same.
31:11
SPEAKER_01: You just cannot believe the mistakes that are made.
31:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: And so I want to bring us to one of the biggest in modern times, and that is Afghanistan.
31:20
SPEAKER_01: And the book was written very much with the Afghanistan papers in mind and the end of the debacle.
31:27
SPEAKER_01: So you were kind of putting a wrapper on what had happened.
31:31
SPEAKER_01: As I mentioned briefly, our involvement in Afghanistan, which is not the most obvious involvement in the world, after all, if you look at a map, it's not so clear why the United States should be involved in Afghanistan ever.
31:43
SPEAKER_01: But we got involved in 1979 when Rzyzinski thought he'd set a trap for the Soviet Union by saying we'll fund the Mujahideen, actually, we'll fund an Islamic insurgency against the government and try to draw the Soviet Union into an invasion.
31:58
SPEAKER_01: And he chortled when they invaded afterwards.
32:01
SPEAKER_01: So Afghanistan got involved with us starting 40 years ago.
32:06
SPEAKER_01: I can't say it's been a very happy outcome for them.
32:08
SPEAKER_00: No, it's certainly not.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: And of course, then at the time of the U.S.
32:11
SPEAKER_00: involvement with the Soviets, what would become ultimately the Taliban, the U.S.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: called them freedom fighters at the time.
32:17
SPEAKER_00: So today, that's one of the lessons of the book is effects of foreign intervention because you're intervening in a complex system are long and variable.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: And so what looks good today, there's good reason to believe it won't necessarily look good tomorrow.
32:28
SPEAKER_00: And that's a reason for caution, to my way of thinking.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, there was a lot of ripple effects as well in the region.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: So it's Afghanistan, but of course, remember that the U.S.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: government was funding the resistance through funneling arms through Pakistan, which led to corruption and dysfunction in Pakistan, as well as uh continued resistance on the United States government uh for a variety of foreign aid, oftentimes military-aid handouts, which has kept that repressive government in place, which imposes costs both in that country and in the broader region.
32:57
SPEAKER_00: But in Afghanistan, it's just dysfunction after dysfunction.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: So the United States government gets involved, and people debate whether it's a just war or not.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: And that's outside my purview.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: I understand just war theory broadly understood, but it's not my research specialty.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: So I'll leave it to others to determine if it was a just war.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: Whether it was just or not, I don't think the U.S.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: government should have occupied Afghanistan, even if they went after Osama bin Laden.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: Those are two different things.
33:23
SPEAKER_01: Just to be clear for people listening, I think both of us would agree the 1979 covert meddling was unjust in every way.
33:32
SPEAKER_01: Just a complete misuse of Afghanistan for U.S.
33:36
SPEAKER_01: Cold War machinations, and not known, not made public, not explained.
33:42
SPEAKER_01: It took an interview by Brzezinski 35 years later to explain what actually happened, because, like so many secret things, this disastrous period was not explained to the public or even to the specialists or even to close observers for a very, very long time.
34:03
SPEAKER_01: So when you talk about the war now, you're talking about after 9-11, the US invaded and then occupied Afghanistan at the end of 2001 to overthrow the Taliban regime, which it accused of harboring Osama bin Laden, which we happened to have funded earlier as part of the first round.
34:25
SPEAKER_01: But in any event, the U.S.
34:27
SPEAKER_01: came in in 2001.
34:28
SPEAKER_01: So pick up the story there.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's important to remember, and by the way, you're exactly right about the 70s, that's an important point, which is a lot of these interventions undertaken under the guise of liberalism treats entire societies as a pawn.
34:40
SPEAKER_00: They're a political football to get what I want through some proxy war, which just oftentimes has devastating consequences on these societies.
34:48
SPEAKER_00: And that's that's important to remember for those who care about liberal values.
34:52
SPEAKER_00: But we have to remember, too, that the Taliban had negotiated with the Bush administration, or at least talked to them, going back to your point about talking to people, and was willing to talk about turning over Osama bin Laden, but not to America, to a third party, because they were not confident that he would receive fair hearing in America, which isn't a crazy thing to say or to think.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: And the Bush administration said, no, we're not, we're not doing that.
35:16
SPEAKER_00: Okay, fine.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: Well then what are you gonna do?
35:18
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna invade.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: And so what happens?
35:20
SPEAKER_00: Well, we know what happens on the backside, meaning on the decades-long disaster, but now we know from the Afghanistan papers that throughout the time there, it was just disaster after disaster.
35:30
SPEAKER_00: And it is disgusting from the standpoint that not just American members of the military, but innocent people in Afghanistan, which oftentimes is, again, neglected.
35:41
SPEAKER_00: All these discussions, which is something I point in the book, to the extent they talk about anything, they talk about American lives lost and expenditures.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: If they even talk about that, by the way.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes they don't even talk about that or they downplay it.
35:53
SPEAKER_00: But these interventions lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan, displacement of millions of people, and just devastation with no outcome.
36:05
SPEAKER_00: No outcome, nothing to speak for.
36:08
SPEAKER_00: Literally nothing.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: So one of the chapters in the book I talk about, which I think encapsulates so much of this, is the U.S.
36:14
SPEAKER_00: war on drugs in Afghanistan.
36:16
SPEAKER_01: Amazing the graph and the story and the failures.
36:19
SPEAKER_01: By the way, well, go on, and I'll tell you some of my own stories about that.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: Well, please, please interject as I go along, because I'd love to hear them.
36:26
SPEAKER_01: I watched the failed war on drugs in in Latin America over the years, you know, with the same kind of outcomes.
36:34
SPEAKER_01: Complete disaster, only militarization and destruction.
36:38
SPEAKER_01: But the case in in your chapter is uh is fantastic.
36:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so Afghanistan is the main source of poppy.
36:44
SPEAKER_00: You know, if you look at the land under cultivation, and it actually started to decline pre-US occupation.
36:50
SPEAKER_00: Then under occupation, it literally goes up in a very nice upward-trending line.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: Meaning that the U.S.
36:57
SPEAKER_00: spent about what we know about$9 billion to eradicate opium production in Afghanistan, and the amount of land actually went up.
37:04
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they would have been better off just burning the money and not doing anything, assuming the status quo would have existed.
37:08
SPEAKER_00: So what did they do?
37:09
SPEAKER_00: Because I I say that somewhat jokingly, but in all seriousness, because it's not just that they increased the amount of land under cultivation, they actually did harm to ordinary Afghan citizens.
37:21
SPEAKER_00: Why?
37:21
SPEAKER_00: Because again, let's view things from their perspective.
37:24
SPEAKER_00: If you live in Afghanistan, you're relative, certainly extremely poor by Western standards, and your source of income is being a farmer, and then the U.S.
37:33
SPEAKER_00: government comes in and starts eradicating your source of income.
37:36
SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, it's criminalizing ordinary life.
37:40
SPEAKER_00: Again, to their way of thinking, these are ordinary farmers involved in this process.
37:44
SPEAKER_00: They don't view themselves as some kind of drug kingpin.
37:46
SPEAKER_00: They're trying to feed themselves and their family just like you, me, and everyone else does.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: We try to take care of ourselves by earning a living.
37:53
SPEAKER_00: So they turned to the Taliban for protection and support, significant anti-American resentment because you had alien troops who were trying to destroy their life.
38:02
SPEAKER_00: And you just had these waves of we're gonna spend more resources, and you had these massive swings in policy where at some times we were gonna arm people, and other times we're gonna literally go in and eradicate the crops, and other times we're gonna accept it.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: And it just led to chaos.
38:17
SPEAKER_01: One of the points you make is it also led to cartelization.
38:20
SPEAKER_01: It strengthened the big guys, the big heavy, violent players in this by taking the easy way, suppressing some of the low-level competition.
38:29
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
38:29
SPEAKER_00: You know, you read these programs.
38:31
SPEAKER_00: As an economist, it's like, oh, I just need someone to think about basic incentives.
38:35
SPEAKER_00: So they have these programs where they're paying warlords to demonstrate that they're doing stuff to put out of business certain producers.
38:43
SPEAKER_00: And so, of course, the warlords want the money.
38:45
SPEAKER_00: So what do they do?
38:46
SPEAKER_00: They kind of pick the low-hanging fruit, the small producers, put them out of business, say, hey, Americans, we did it, give me the money, and then the big producers are left.
38:54
SPEAKER_00: And then oftentimes those same warlords got kickbacks from the big producers.
38:58
SPEAKER_00: They've now consolidated production.
39:00
SPEAKER_00: It's the standard economics of prohibition, as you mentioned it, the war on drugs globally is just another example of this.
39:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's exactly the Latin American case, precisely.
39:09
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
39:09
SPEAKER_00: And so that in itself, to my way of thinking, even if you didn't know you're not an expert on the area, the region, you're not an expert on foreign policy, just understanding the logistics of that and how dysfunctional that one set of policies is should give you severe skepticism about the ability of intervening to accomplish these goals because that was a relatively straightforward goal compared to rebuild national political institutions and economic institutions.
39:35
SPEAKER_00: As you mentioned earlier, things even domestically in these areas are highly dysfunctional.
39:40
SPEAKER_00: What makes us think we can go abroad and set these things up from scratch?
39:43
SPEAKER_00: It's crazy to my way of thinking.
39:45
SPEAKER_01: A footnote to that is I have been lifelong friends with one of America's leading economists, older gentleman now, who's an Afghan-born PhD American economist on major faculty.
39:58
SPEAKER_01: He was never asked by the US government to even discuss the issues.
40:03
SPEAKER_01: They don't even think to try to find out something, which is stunning.
40:08
SPEAKER_01: And then we read the consequences.
40:11
SPEAKER_01: Take us through the drone chapter, because that was extraordinary for me, also.
40:15
SPEAKER_01: In effect, did America militarize drones first?
40:18
SPEAKER_01: I guess that's the case.
40:20
SPEAKER_01: I hadn't really thought about that, especially in the Ukraine war context, where drones are having such a devastating effect on both sides.
40:29
SPEAKER_01: We started that, it seems.
40:31
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, that is exactly right.
40:32
SPEAKER_00: So drones, in some sense, to the extent we're talking about automated radio controlled aircraft, have been around for a long time.
40:38
SPEAKER_00: So even going back to the world wars, the U.S.
40:40
SPEAKER_00: government used radio controlled airplanes for training, usually, for training of American troops.
40:46
SPEAKER_00: Really, it's the first Gulf War when you start to see the use of drones, mainly for surveillance purposes.
40:51
SPEAKER_00: So they would use drones to surveil territory before American troops entered.
40:55
SPEAKER_00: They were militarized from the surveillance standpoint, but it was mainly as a secondary role.
40:59
SPEAKER_00: It was during the war on terror, so post-9-11, that you really see a ramping up of the use of drones.
41:04
SPEAKER_00: Bush administration started it, but the Obama administration actually really ramped it up because they wanted to pull back, but they didn't want to pull back completely.
41:11
SPEAKER_00: And so they turned more to drones.
41:13
SPEAKER_00: And one of the really sad things that happened in America, to my way of thinking at least, is for the George W.
41:18
SPEAKER_00: Bush administration, there was not quite as strong as Vietnam, but there was a robust anti-war movement when George W.
41:24
SPEAKER_00: Bush first invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
41:26
SPEAKER_00: I'm in Northern Virginia, so if you'd gone to DC when Bush was president, this all happened.
41:30
SPEAKER_00: There would be protesters there constantly.
41:32
SPEAKER_00: Again, not on the mass of Vietnam, but still there.
41:35
SPEAKER_00: Obama gets elected, and that kind of goes away almost instantly.
41:38
SPEAKER_00: Even the citizen pressure from the bottom up, or what could have been citizen pressure, was uh but in any case, that you can see why they want to use drones if you control them.
41:48
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to put troops in harm's way, or fewer troops, or so the argument goes.
41:52
SPEAKER_00: The language that's used, which I quote in the book, is that these things are highly accurate.
41:56
SPEAKER_00: So you see policymakers talking about this is the equivalent of a scalpel, almost where you can just take out the target.
42:02
SPEAKER_00: And so you combine it with supposed strong intelligence, and we're just gonna get the bad guys.
42:07
SPEAKER_00: That sounds really great, except none of it's true.
42:10
SPEAKER_00: The intelligence is highly imperfect.
42:12
SPEAKER_00: The bad people, which are oftentimes, you know, it's not like people walk around with a sticker that says I'm a bad person that you can just see.
42:18
SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes, who the bad people are and or not is subjective to the people controlling the drone or those above them in the hierarchy.
42:25
SPEAKER_00: And they're embedded in civilian populations.
42:28
SPEAKER_00: And when you launch a drone strike, they're not a scalpel.
42:32
SPEAKER_00: They have devastating effects on the surrounding community, both immediately in terms of carnage of killing civilians, which the U.S.
42:40
SPEAKER_00: government gave up counting a long time ago, as Tommy Franks, and I have this quote in the book, said, America doesn't do body counts.
42:46
SPEAKER_00: Like, we we don't worry about that.
42:47
SPEAKER_00: That's you know, war is hell, and you know, we need to break a few eggs, that kind of mentality.
42:52
SPEAKER_00: So go back to where we started with the fundamental liberal value of human dignity.
42:56
SPEAKER_00: Uh, we have the Geneva Conventions about how we treat civilians because we know the brutality of war.
43:01
SPEAKER_00: And that kind of just goes by the wayside.
43:02
SPEAKER_00: And again, for the Bush administration, you have this legal maneuvering of just rewriting rules and laws to allow the government to do whatever they want to do, whether it's torture, whether it's the use of drones, and just justifying it all rather than the kind of laws of war and international law.
43:17
SPEAKER_01: One of the strangest things, Chris, for me, maybe you could discuss it a little bit.
43:21
SPEAKER_01: It seems that we have presidents of the United States choosing individual targets.
43:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean, almost in the White House saying, we take out that one, we take out that one, we take out that one.
43:34
SPEAKER_01: To me, this is grotesque, actually.
43:38
SPEAKER_01: It's a you know, it's state murder.
43:40
SPEAKER_01: Maybe in some cases, and these are murders against people that we are not at war with in places we don't have a declared war.
43:50
SPEAKER_01: So it is a kind of state murder.
43:52
SPEAKER_01: But you sit in the White House choosing individuals to target.
43:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so there's a kill list, and we don't.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: Know, or at least to my knowledge, we don't know the, and again, this is part of the secrecy.
44:04
SPEAKER_00: We don't know the process of how that is decided.
44:07
SPEAKER_00: We know the president is involved, but we don't know the kind of the chain of command of who's involved in that decision-making process.
44:12
SPEAKER_00: But we do know, to go back to your point, what's the oversight on this?
44:15
SPEAKER_00: Again, think about the which is an ideal, but what's a separation of power supposed to do?
44:20
SPEAKER_00: We don't want one person, an authoritarian, running the show.
44:24
SPEAKER_00: It is not right to have a single person that has the power to kill people and to be judge, jury, and executioner.
44:32
SPEAKER_00: Because that leads both to immediate effects, but also sets a terrible precedent.
44:37
SPEAKER_00: The precedent being that it's okay to murder people, both domestically and abroad.
44:42
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things I try to point out in the book is that one of the really dangerous aspects of the use of drones is the precedent it has set.
44:49
SPEAKER_00: And the precedent it has set now for the world, because to the extent that the US government holds itself up as kind of the beacon of liberty, the leader of the free world, if you will, as the as the rhetoric goes, then people can say, well, look, the leader of the free world is using robot technology to assassinate people that it determines to be bad with no domestic checks, let alone international checks.
45:11
SPEAKER_00: Well, we can do it too.
45:13
SPEAKER_00: And so, to my way of thinking, the rise of robotic warfare and this idea now of lethal autonomous systems, domestically, we are investing a significant amount of monetary resources investing these things uh and developing these things is a really scary scenario.
45:28
SPEAKER_01: And we always think, well, we'll stay ahead, but you know, these days uh the technologies are everywhere, and the lessons of, well, now you need to go in that direction are everywhere.
45:38
SPEAKER_01: So whether it's Iranian drones or Russian drones or these drones, this becomes the norm and incredibly destructive.
45:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and now the table is set.
45:46
SPEAKER_00: There's still time to reverse it, but to my way of thinking, going back to your point about talking, a much better strategy, if the American government cared about liberal values, would have been we're not going to use this technology because of precisely the points you raised, and we are gonna take actual steps, proactive steps to have an international conversation to come up with some kind of protocol and set a treaty or treaties plural to make this technology off limits.
46:10
SPEAKER_01: I was at a uh conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, uh, three or four years ago, listening to NATO generals about how we were gonna win the AI autonomous weapons race.
46:22
SPEAKER_01: And they went on and on.
46:24
SPEAKER_01: We'll be in front of the Chinese, we'll do all of this.
46:27
SPEAKER_01: They never once, Chris, had the idea that there should be any diplomacy at all.
46:33
SPEAKER_01: Not even in this our discussion in this theater that we were watching these generals, the notion that maybe both sides would limit it rather than have an arms race wasn't even mentioned.
46:46
SPEAKER_01: Not even dismissed, just not even mentioned.
46:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, which in some sense is depressing, right?
46:51
SPEAKER_00: On a massive scale.
46:52
SPEAKER_00: But I think is what makes these conversations so important because one of the shifts, and I talk about this in the concluding chapter of the book, Kenneth Balding's a famous economist who talked about a lot of conflict and peace issues, and he had this idea of the stable piece.
47:05
SPEAKER_00: And the stable piece, to his way of thinking, is a situation where violence doesn't enter the calculation as a means of resolving dispute.
47:13
SPEAKER_00: And his point was look, conflict is ubiquitous.
47:16
SPEAKER_00: All of us experience conflict in our daily life.
47:18
SPEAKER_00: We get up in the morning and we have either family members or a roommate, and we both want to use the coffee maker at the same time.
47:25
SPEAKER_00: We don't have a fist fight about it.
47:26
SPEAKER_00: We have norms and we have rules, and you say, well, that's silly.
47:29
SPEAKER_00: Well, not really, because it's proof that people can navigate conflicts peacefully.
47:33
SPEAKER_00: So let's then think about how to have those conversations in the domestic space, because of course now American politics in many cases has devolved into this very similar type of, you know, you're either with us or against us.
47:45
SPEAKER_00: That just devolves in the violence.
47:47
SPEAKER_00: And so Balding's point was we need to think about how to cooperate in a multipolar world and how to have these conversations.
47:54
SPEAKER_00: And that then means the starting point is exactly the kind of situation you're talking about.
47:59
SPEAKER_00: We need to keep emphasizing the importance of talking and the possibility of talking, because right now it's not even on the agenda for most people.
48:06
SPEAKER_00: And so just even a marginal step in that direction would have enormous gains, to my way of thinking.
48:12
SPEAKER_01: Chris, you end up by recommending three major headings.
48:16
SPEAKER_01: One, to dethrone this imperialist approach, retrenchment of our forward deployments, because the US has military posted all over the world.
48:28
SPEAKER_01: And the third, which is absolutely fascinating, is your discussion about peaceful interaction among non-state.
48:35
SPEAKER_01: Could you discuss that?
48:36
SPEAKER_01: Because I think this is really important and really a key part of the innovation that we need.
48:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so this goes back to a point you raised earlier about the way the structure is right now, is that it's a zero-sum world.
48:48
SPEAKER_00: It's US good, China bad, US good, Russia bad, and so on.
48:51
SPEAKER_00: And it's a very simple dichotomy.
48:54
SPEAKER_00: And that number one focuses only at the nation-state level and also views the world in these very simple buckets.
49:01
SPEAKER_00: And what I'm pushing for at the end of the book is a much more nuanced view of the world, which is number one, it's not that nation-states aren't important.
49:07
SPEAKER_00: They are key to our international space, but what that does is it downplays the important role that other forms of social organization play.
49:16
SPEAKER_00: So, what are those other forms of social organization?
49:18
SPEAKER_00: Well, going back to what you and I were just talking about, it starts, to my way of thinking, at the individual level, interactions between people within America, interactions within people in other societies.
49:27
SPEAKER_00: And then from there we can build up.
49:30
SPEAKER_00: And that can then turn into things like markets, for-profit markets, nonprofit markets.
49:35
SPEAKER_00: Then we move into the fascinating conversation about nonprofits and domestic nonprofits and international nonprofits.
49:41
SPEAKER_00: And those nonprofits don't have to just be giving aid and charity, even though that's important too, but also creating this space to resolve local conflicts.
49:51
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things I think is really important is the empire view is a top-down, monocentric, one-size-fits-all view of the world because we know what's best and we're going to impose it.
50:02
SPEAKER_00: What I'm talking about here is a bottom-up, emergent process through which peace is not some kind of fixed and static and giving thing, but a continual process where different people in different contexts, who are extremely diverse both in themselves but also in the challenges they face, need to navigate the world.
50:19
SPEAKER_00: But we need to give them the space to do that.
50:21
SPEAKER_00: And forcing this top-down view doesn't do that.
50:25
SPEAKER_00: And forcing that top-down view isn't just an issue of the military, but then it turns into economic issues where we have to impose sanctions and tariffs against this government and that government.
50:35
SPEAKER_00: What does that do?
50:36
SPEAKER_00: It cuts off human beings, ordinary people, from interacting and trading with each other.
50:40
SPEAKER_00: It says, person in America, you cannot trade with that person in China because they are Chinese and you are American.
50:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean, exactly.
50:47
SPEAKER_01: You can't even go there.
50:48
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you're going to end up in handcuffs, which is one of the approaches to the U.S.-China conflict that they started arresting professors who were dealing with the Chinese counterparts.
50:58
SPEAKER_00: It is a recipe for violence.
50:59
SPEAKER_00: In the name of preventing violence, you are driving it through violence or the threat thereof.
51:05
SPEAKER_00: And so that's the key point I emphasize at the end is that people, ordinary people, have an enormous entrepreneurial capability to create peace in the world.
51:13
SPEAKER_00: And again, even in violent societies that exist right now, there's pockets of peace because people live together.
51:19
SPEAKER_00: They have to get along.
51:20
SPEAKER_00: And once you start exploring this, it's really fascinating.
51:23
SPEAKER_00: I think the path forward requires a shift in focus, but we tend to neglect those pockets of peace, those islands of peace, if you will, and the power of ordinary individuals to be entrepreneurial, to be creative, and to figure things out.
51:36
SPEAKER_01: Chris, it's a great vision, very powerful.
51:39
SPEAKER_01: It reminds me also of some of the wonderful words of John F.
51:42
SPEAKER_01: Kennedy in his famous speech on peace on June 10, 1963, which I recommend everybody to listen to.
51:50
SPEAKER_01: But he he says there's no magic key to peace.
51:54
SPEAKER_01: Peace is a process, a way of solving problems.
51:57
SPEAKER_01: And that is what you are advocating: a more creative, more dynamic, more engaged way of solving problems.
52:06
SPEAKER_01: Chris, it's a wonderful book.
52:07
SPEAKER_01: It's a great service for the country.
52:10
SPEAKER_01: It's an amazing issue because it's not a left-right issue.
52:13
SPEAKER_01: It really is a different axis we have in both political parties, hardline kind of imperial vision.
52:22
SPEAKER_01: And we have in both political parties people who say we need a completely different approach.
52:27
SPEAKER_01: And so I think that this is a great issue that is different from and beyond the partisan divide.
52:34
SPEAKER_01: And that makes it very promising.
52:36
SPEAKER_01: I want everyone to read the book.
52:38
SPEAKER_01: It's uh really uh wonderful.
52:40
SPEAKER_01: In search of monsters to destroy the folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace.
52:46
SPEAKER_01: Chris, thank you so much for being on Book Club with Jeff Sachs.
52:50
SPEAKER_01: We really appreciate not only the book, but the wonderful discussion that we've just had.
52:55
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for the opportunity.
52:56
SPEAKER_00: It's been a pleasure.
52:57
SPEAKER_00: Great to be with you.
52:58
SPEAKER_01: Next time, I will be speaking with Kim Stanley Robinson, the world-renowned science fiction author known for his internationally best-selling Mars trilogy, to discuss his latest books, New York 2140 and The Ministry for the Future.
53:14
SPEAKER_01: Robinson's works have received many top awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards.
53:21
SPEAKER_01: Together, Kim Stanley Robinson and I will discuss the state of the earth, the effects of climate change on civilization, and the interplay of fact and fiction in our culture today.
53:33
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
53:35
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