11/05/15 – Daniel Larison – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Now on with the interviews.
First up is our friend Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative Magazine.
Welcome back to the show, Daniel.
How you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, I'm really appreciative of you joining us again and really all the stuff that you write.
I read pretty much everything, I think.
And, you know, I did want to just talk with you all about the wars, but I think maybe it'd be better to go ahead and talk about the wars through the lens of these Republican primary candidates running for the presidency.
You've been doing, you know, pretty good analysis of the lot of them and their views on the different conflicts we find themselves in.
I guess I know the least about Carson, the doctor, Ben Carson.
He seems like a pretty typical right wing Fox News type conventional wisdom sort of a guy.
But I don't know.
Is there anything really interesting we need to know about him and his views on foreign policy?
Well, sure.
And thanks for the question.
Carson has been able to slip under the radar to some extent because I think because he's generally not expected to know a lot about policy details, he doesn't often get the right sorts of questions, especially about foreign policy.
So a lot of people get the impression that he doesn't talk about it very much.
And he doesn't talk about it as much as some of the others.
But some of the things that he said just earlier this week, for instance, when he was on one of the Sunday shows, was very revealing.
He kept talking about how the U.S. needs to oppose Russia, both in Ukraine and Syria.
And specifically, he advocated for sending weapons, even called them offensive weapons.
He didn't hide behind the defensive weapon euphemism.
He clearly wants to stop conflict in Ukraine.
And he called for no flies on Syria and was talking about taking measures specifically in order to show that the U.S. is opposed to Russia being there.
And so on both of those fronts, he's fitting in very much in the same mold as any of the most hawkish candidates he could care to name.
And it kind of sounds like he's memorized some talking points.
It doesn't sound like he's betraying much understanding.
I mean, I guess, you know, maybe he could, it's possible he could know a lot and still come out with the same cookie cutter talking points.
But that sounds pretty much like just cookie cutter talking points.
This is what I'm expected to say, huh, boss?
Okay.
And then out there he goes.
Well, I think that's right.
And some of that was revealed when he talked to Hugh Hewitt earlier in the year when Hewitt pressed him on certain foreign policy issues.
And Carson didn't seem to have a very good grasp on some of the details.
At one point, he seemed to suggest that he didn't understand that the Baltic states were part of NATO, but that he was very much in favor of bringing them into NATO.
And so even when he doesn't have a very good grounding in the fact, he's very much inclined to pursue confrontational policies.
In fact, that's what I called my post earlier this week, Carson's confrontational foreign policy.
Well, and that seems to pretty much go for the lot of them, right?
I mean, Rubio, as you noted, a few months ago, I guess now, got all caught up a couple months ago, at least got all caught up implying that the Islamic State was working for Iran when they're in the middle of a war with each other here.
And like, none of these guys understanding seems to go much deeper than the piece of paper that they read that told them what they were supposed to regurgitate.
Yeah, well, his views on ISIS and Iran are sort of odd, but they actually come out of this neoconservative assumption that if you are going to go after ISIS, you have to go after Assad at the same time.
And so he sees the administration's relatively less aggressive policy towards Assad compared to what he would want as proof that Obama is trying to make nice with Iran.
And therefore, to have a really strong anti-ISIS policy, you would go after both sides of the civil war in Syria at the same time, which, of course, I mean, as we understand is craziness, but I mean, that's where that...
I think you might be giving him a pretty charitable interpretation there.
I think you're trying to make some sort of sense out of total buffoonery where I don't think he was being, you know, maybe he just didn't make himself clear.
Maybe you're right.
But I thought it sounded much more like, you know, that time McCain said, yeah, Iran is training al Qaeda when, you know, back in 2007 and Joe Lieberman had to whisper in his ear the right line.
Well, right.
It's also possible that he's just spouting off nonsense.
But there is definitely a faction within the GOP that holds to this idea that we need to fight both sides in Syria.
And therefore, there shouldn't be any accommodation with the Syrian government or Iran in a common front against ISIS.
But I take the view that we shouldn't even be fighting the war that we're fighting.
So it's sort of irrelevant to me in that way.
All right.
Now, so, well, what about Donald Trump?
He's by far the front runner.
And it seems like a lot of things he says, or at least he sounds like he's forming his opinion somewhere else other than at Elliott Abrams' feet.
But what do you think?
Well, I think it's true.
He's not listening to a lot of the conventional foreign policy professionals in the GOP.
But I don't think he's listening to anybody, really.
He's making it up as he goes along.
And sometimes along the way, that ends up producing better results than you're going to get from some of the other candidates.
So, for instance, when all of them, practically all of them, endorsed the idea of a no-fly zone in Syria, Trump saw no reason to do that and saw that as potentially leading to World War III.
And to his credit, Rand Paul said something similar.
Those sorts of statements also come along with very strange pronouncements about how we were going to steal people's oil, or how we have to police the Iran deal and look for violations so that we can cancel it.
So he's all over the map, I think, because he doesn't have very much grounding in this stuff.
And he's simply interested in presenting himself as the nationalist candidate, a nationalist, both in a potentially good sense in that he's looking after American interest, but also that in that he thinks the best way to pursue those interests is by being blustering and aggressive and obnoxious.
Yeah, he seems to basically have no policy platform principles or anything other than a belief in himself, which obviously can lead to him changing his mind on a dime for any reason or no reason at all.
So, yeah, not much to count on there, even if he sounds kind of reasonable compared to the others on one issue or the other.
You know, yeah, like you're saying, you know, he went from, I don't know if he's really taken this back necessarily, but he went from saying, yeah, I'm going to find the meanest general in the whole Pentagon to go in there like Patton and just annihilate them.
And then, yeah, just steal all their oil from now on.
That was the worst part of the Iraq war.
We didn't steal their oil.
We'll just take all their oil and starve them out.
And that'll teach them.
And then he goes from that to that.
I don't know.
Let Russia do it.
But I don't know if he ever really changed his mind about the first thing, if he wants the Russians to fly as America's Air Force there or what the hell he's talking about.
It is all just off the cuff.
Sure.
And I think that that's generally true of his campaign overall.
He's not going to be bound by anything that he says.
And just as he hasn't been bound by his past policy positions, which were once quite different from the ones that he holds now.
So one of the things that I find kind of funny is that lots of people who hated Mitt Romney, loved Trump and lots of people who were for Romney hate Trump.
But they're actually very similar political types in that they're perfectly willing to say whatever they think the audience wants to hear.
All right.
And now, Rubio, I guess it just goes without saying kind of that he is, you know, Bill Kristol only in the Senate towing exactly the neocon party line.
Are there any exceptions to that or any examples of, you know, the real dangerous edge of that?
Well, the only real exception in terms of what he's done since he's been in the Senate that breaks with that line at all is that he did come out against the bombing of Syria in 2013.
But he qualified his opposition by saying that he wasn't going to support it because it was going to be too small.
So if Obama had been willing to do a much larger air campaign, than he was indicating he was going to do, then Rubio seemed to have no problem with that.
Yeah.
And I think it's.
Wait, hold it right there.
Hold it right there.
We'll pick this up on the other side of the break.
It's Daniel Larrison from the American conservative dot com.
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All right, you all welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Daniel Larrison from the American conservative magazine.
They're the antiwar conservatives over there at the American conservative dot com.
And we're talking about the presidential campaign and the foreign policies of these goons.
And right now we're talking about Marco Rubio.
And sorry, the heartbreaks, they screw me up worse than my guests even.
But you were going to say about Rubio, you had just said that he the one good thing you could say about his foreign policy so far is he was against bombing Syria in 2013.
But he said he was against it because it was it promised to not be horrible enough.
And he wanted a bigger bombing and a real overthrow of Assad, not just a what unimaginably small aerial campaign, as John Kerry was promising then.
Right.
That's exactly it.
And what you can see from the rest of Rubio's record that he is a reflectively interventionist.
He is, I think, more than anybody else, except maybe Lindsey Graham in the presidential race, is a true believer or makes every indication of being a true believer in this sort of very fathetical devotion to meddling in everyone's affairs.
And that comes across in his hostility to the Iran deal, his hostility to the opening to Cuba, his support for sending weapons to Ukraine.
Anywhere you can think of where the U.S. could get involved in a harmful way.
He's all for it.
Yeah.
Well, I know your latest piece here, your latest blog entry is Rubio's limited support.
And I admit I actually did laugh out loud when I was reading this piece in The Washington Post last week about Jeb's problem.
Problems.
But it's really just the one big problem.
Nobody likes him, except, I guess, the bankers behind his super PACs.
But no humans do.
No people do.
But in that article, they said, yep, that's the new wisdom.
Rubio, ascendant.
I was just going, you've got to be kidding me.
Rubio, ascendant.
Just because Jeb is going down.
OK, sure.
But who likes Marco Rubio other than his mom?
Well, whether people like him or not, there's not very much support for him being president.
His favorability numbers are actually OK among Republicans, not so much among anyone else.
But there's no enthusiasm for his candidacy.
There's no belief that he's the next coming thing that Republicans need to get behind.
And that's been clear now for months.
As I was saying in the post you mentioned, his polling support nationally and in the early states remains roughly the same as it was shortly after he announced.
So he's gone down in the interim and then he's come back to where he was.
But he's not really ascending.
He's stagnant.
Yeah.
Well, if you go back to, you know, the last cycle around or the one before that, you have Herman Cain had his moment.
Rick Perry had his moment.
Michelle Bachman had her moment.
Rubio's had no moment.
He's not been at the head of anything at all the whole time.
All he did was get the better of Jeb Bush in a debate.
But come on, he telegraphed the attack coming for a week.
You know, that was easy.
Right.
Well, even though he hasn't actually had a real moment in terms of a polling lead, he's constantly ascribed these surges of support or these new opportunities to dominate the field.
And yet it never actually happened.
And I think that reflects the fact that however much people in Washington and maybe in some among some donors really want Rubio, the voters have very different ideas.
And I think it makes sense that they're opting for candidates that are really as unlike him as possible, where you have two non-politicians who are being favored by roughly half the party.
And you have Rubio, who's a career politician his entire life, who's getting maybe 10 percent, maybe 15 percent and no more, because there's simply no demand for that kind of candidate.
Well, and the establishment is in real trouble here because they just don't really have an alternative to Jeb.
They thought they had Scott Walker as an attorney, as an alternative to him.
But he's long gone.
Now, Rand was in the perfect position here to say, OK, it's true.
I'm a senator.
But, hey, I'm a Paul and I'm way more of an outsider than some billionaire from New York.
Come on.
He could have pulled that off.
But instead, he's running as Jeb Bush.
So he's going nowhere whatsoever either.
But so I guess that just leaves Trump way out ahead.
And who could stop him?
Well, at this point, it seems like if Trump were to fade, his supporters would just go to Carson.
So I don't I really don't know who would be able to stop one or the other of them.
I doubt very much that both are going to end up flopping enough to help someone else.
Well, now, but Jeb does have the Super PAC money to stay in for the long term, right?
But, yeah, that seems to be the case.
And he seems to be stubbornly hanging on, I think, partly just out of pride or trying to keep the family name flying high or something like that.
He doesn't want to admit that he's the one Bush who completely flopped.
Well, but I mean, there's got to be at least some wisdom in the idea that once the rest of these guys all start dropping out, if it comes down to him versus Trump, then he's got a easier sales pitch in the sense of, look, only I can beat Hillary.
Only I, the liberal rhino Republican, the John McCain, as it were of this election, has the ability to win the swing voters and keep Hillary Clinton out of the presidency.
Right.
That's the same way from the other side that John Kerry got the nomination in 2004, for example.
Because I know you guys like Howard Dean, but Howard Dean can't beat Bush.
Only the conservative centrist John Kerry can have the chance.
That kind of deal.
That will certainly be the argument.
But I, as many surveys have found, most Republicans actually find they believe Trump in person to be the most electable candidates they have.
I don't happen to think that's true, but that's what they say they think.
So if you attack Trump for being unelectable, I don't think it's going to carry much weight with these folks.
Well, so this would be the first time since, I don't know when, since Goldwater, then that the, you know, so-called, I mean, he's a very, he's very centrist on a lot of issues, it seems like, but, you know, anyway, the perceived ideological kind of wing candidate instead of the moderate centrist would get the nomination then, right?
Of a major party for president?
That's what it's looking like.
That's what it's looking like.
Obviously, things could change in the next few months and all of this could be overturned again.
But I, it seems very unlikely that there's going to be that much of a shift in opinion in just the next few months.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, Jeb, I mean, mostly what's hurting him is his last name and the fact that he just has no charisma, et cetera, like that.
But just on the technicalities, is it all indications are he'd be just like his brother and put Richard Perle and the boys right back in power?
Or is he a little better than them?
Well, if he would be, he's given no indication of it during the campaign.
He's obviously, he's gone out of his way to defend his brother's record, both regarding the Iraq war and with his repeated insistence that my brother kept us safe, that he keeps wanting to stay.
So he doesn't want to offer any criticisms of the Bush record.
On contemporary issues, he doesn't seem to be any different from the rest of them.
And in fact, his relaunch speech just the other day, he made the ludicrous claim that the US has helped to create an existential threat to Israel through the nuclear deal.
So this is the sort of thing that he's saying, because he thinks that's what people in the party want to hear.
And so that's whether or not he really believes it.
I have no idea.
But he certainly seems happy to pander to that part of the party.
Well, you know, I guess this is really before Trump came in and was such a huge lead.
But even recently, I've been saying, I still kind of think that Jeb has a 51% shot at this just because of that whole only the moderate can win the general theory that most political professionals ascribe to and all that.
But I got to tell you, Dan, I just couldn't imagine that Jeb could be this bad at campaigning for president.
He's just the worst.
I ain't seen him smile an actual smile yet.
It's pretty easy to tell, you know?
Well, it's it is a little surprising because he was a fairly successful candidate when he ran in Florida and then obviously was reelected very easily.
I think part of the problem is he's simply been out of competitive politics for so long and he's been away from contemporary political debates for such a long time that he has no feel for where the country is and he has no idea how to talk about a lot of these things.
Yeah, it's hilarious.
Yeah, well, that's the best part about it then for me is just it's so funny to watch and to watch Trump make fun of him and all the rest of it.
Here's a guy who's never really been bullied.
You know, he always was, you know, don't you know who my dad is kind of a guy or whatever, you know, and here he's getting bullied as he's running for president.
He's being treated like a punk by his competition.
He has no manners and and is completely uncouth.
And at least it's funny.
You know what I mean?
That's all we're left with, Daniel.
At least there's a riot going on this time.
Oh, yeah, it's definitely been amusing to see them pondering.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
All right, man.
Well, thank you very much for coming back on the show.
It's always great to talk to you.
All right, thanks, Scott.
All right, child.
That is the great Daniel Larrison.
He writes at the American Conservative Magazine, theamericanconservative.com.
He's got a great blog there.
We'll be right back in just a minute with Patrick G. Eddington from Cato.
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