Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright, you guys, introducing Stephen M. Walt.
He is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University.
He's the author of The Origins of Alliances, Revolution and War, Taming American Power, The Global Response to U.S. Primacy, and, with John J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
He writes frequently for foreignpolicy.com, of course, and his brand new book is called The Hell of Good Intentions, America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy.
Welcome back to the show.
Stephen, how are you doing, sir?
I'm doing quite well.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I need to turn your volume up there a little bit.
Good to talk to you again.
Thank you for joining us.
First, I start with my joke, which is, the book should be called The Hell with Good Intentions.
I've got a little bit of editing to do there.
I hope it's not too late.
Maybe a little late for that.
Maybe when we do the movie version.
There you go.
I tried to get ahold of you before the audio book was done, but okay.
And it is out now, correct?
Yes, it is.
Okay.
I'm the lucky guy.
I got to read this thing a couple of months ago in the galley's version here.
The Hell with Good Intentions.
Very interesting book.
First of all, I guess to start here, could you explain in a nutshell, what is realism in American foreign policy?
And I guess, as part of your answer, please, how does that differentiate your school of thought on foreign policy matters with the typical consensus in D.C. as of now?
Well, realism is a school of thought in international affairs which emphasizes the lack of world government.
The fact that there's no government out there that can protect states from each other, and therefore states have to rely upon their own strategies and their own resources.
For realists, it's a self-help world.
That doesn't mean that realists are necessarily warlike and think you should be attacking countries all the time, but it is a way of thinking about international politics that I think emphasizes prudence, recognizes that if you try to remake the world in your own image, others are going to react, because that will affect their interests adversely in a variety of ways.
And in the conduct of American foreign policy, realists have generally been in favor of prudence, being careful, not trying to do things that were overly idealistic, not going on wild crusades in various ways.
And that's the kind of perspective that has led me to be very skeptical of much of what the United States has tried to do since the end of the Cold War.
Well, now, so it brings to mind, it sounds like maybe you're talking about sort of a Henry Kissinger real politic, right?
Is that the same thing?
Well, Kissinger is often regarded as a student of realpolitik, but he was among sort of American realists probably the most hardline, probably the most hawkish, and in some ways his views on world affairs were, I think, different than that of most realists.
He tended, I think, to be more worried about America's position in the world.
I think most contemporary realists are actually fairly upbeat about America's basic position.
We see the United States as very powerful, extremely secure.
We don't have any powerful enemies anywhere nearby.
And one of the criticisms that I make in the book and that realists have made for a long time is that the United States persistently exaggerates international dangers.
We have problems in the world, but we tend to treat them as though they are existential threats, when in most cases they really aren't.
Well, got that right.
I mean, yeah, so when people think of Kissinger, I think part of that, and maybe this is part of realism too, is that we're talking about the business of states, and so morality doesn't count.
It doesn't have to be—we don't have to be immoral, but we have to be amoral.
And so if a few million Cambodians got to get bombed and genocided, that was just the way things have to be in order to maintain our position in Asia.
And we can't let feelings get in the way of doing what's right for our state, which is a lot of times it seems like the wrong thing to do.
Well, this is, I think, a trickier question.
I mean, realists are often accused of being immoral or amoral, and I don't think that's quite the case.
I mean, one has to be a little bit careful here, because you can get into just as much trouble trying to do good in the world as you can just trying to be sort of selfish and prudent and maintain the security of your own country.
So I think Kissinger didn't care that much about moral considerations, but if I were to criticize Kissinger, it would be to say he saw American security as so precarious that he was willing to support policies that had enormous human consequences that were probably unnecessary.
I think, for example, in one of the criticisms I make in my book, it's really where the title comes from, is that American leaders from 1992 or so onward had in many cases good intentions.
They thought what they were trying to do was positive, would be good for America, would be good for the rest of the world.
But the consequences of their actions were actually quite harmful to the United States, but even more harmful to others.
So again, you can cause a lot of damage even though you're trying to do good as well.
Yeah, well, and of course, I think we all remember, well, those of us who are old enough now, time's gone on, but certainly a huge part of the debate about attacking Iraq was that now, finally, we have a morality-based foreign policy that says we have to do the right thing and start this war, and that these realists like even Brent Scowcroft, the president's father's alter ego, best friend, co-author of his memoirs, writing in the Wall Street Journal, Don't Attack Saddam, well, that's just old thinking.
And that, in fact, the idea that the Iraq war is going to be at America's expense is the proof that it's the right thing to do, that this is not about our national interests necessarily as much as it is about helping the poor people who need help and a chance to live free in a democracy like we can give them and all of this stuff.
I think that's right.
The problem that the United States has faced ever since the Soviet Union fell apart was, first of all, the fact that we were incredibly powerful and incredibly secure so we could afford to run around the world interfering in a variety of places without really placing our security at risk.
And second, we thought that transforming the world in our image, spreading democracy, pursuing human rights, opening up markets in a variety of places, would be easy to do, would be welcomed everywhere we did it, and would have no negative consequences.
There really was this sense back in the 1990s in particular, but it continues beyond that, that the wind is kind of at our back.
And because what we're doing is well-intentioned and really will be good for everyone, they're going to welcome it.
Other countries are going to be happy to be incorporated into institutions that America leads.
Even if this involves overthrowing a few governments here and there, the populations will welcome this, will be greeted as liberators, or if governments are toppled in Eastern Europe and replaced by something that looks kind of democratic, the population is going to welcome that too.
And I think we failed to realize that this was going to have some negative consequences as well.
It was going to be much harder than it looked, and that when you overthrow a government, the people who have been thrown out of power often resent it and often do things to try and reverse it.
Or other governments, say Russia, China, begin to worry that you might try to do something in their country, and they take steps to prevent that from happening.
Yeah.
Constantly causing reactions that, well, are easy enough to anticipate and are good for the war business anyway, or for the think tank business, the arms industries, the generals, everybody.
That if this crisis creates the next crisis, then that's okay.
You know, it's not that bad.
Which actually, I guess, goes to my question about the title of the book and maybe the premise really of kind of, you know, not all of it, but much of the text here.
I wonder if you're begging the question about good intentions here, and whether or not, you know, possibly liberal humanitarian democracy promotion is simply a ruse.
I mean, they didn't go to set out to create democracies in America's dozen or so sock puppet monarchies in the Middle East.
They went to Iran, Iraq, and Syria, the three countries they didn't control.
You know, or they want Iran.
They haven't gone there yet, but you know what I mean.
So maybe this is just what has to be said by, you know, militarists and nationalists and corporate interests to get a bunch of liberal Democrat Hillary voters at the Brookings Institution to feel like they're on a sociology project to go do some good in the world, because that's the kind of thing that is necessary, really, to create a left-right consensus for interventionism.
You've got to get the liberals on board somehow, so wave the baby blue UN flag and make it all about humanitarianism, that kind of thing.
Yeah, I guess where you and I might part companies, I don't see it as quite that organized or quite that almost conspiratorial.
I mean, it's not like a bunch of people are sitting around at the Council on Foreign Relations or at the Aspen Institute or the meetings of the Bilderberg Seminar and saying, well, here's what we want to do in order to maximize corporate profits, and here's the sales pitch we're going to use to bamboozle the American people into supporting it and get a bunch of idealists on board.
I mean, there are undoubtedly some people in the broad foreign policy— Well, wait, can I clarify something real quick?
Because I didn't say anything about the Bilderberg group, but you know what?
Donald Rumsfeld is not so much a liberal, right?
So the idea that all he really wanted to do was help people is kind of— I understand that a lot of people at Brookings supported the war because they wanted to help people, but I'm just saying, are they really the ones in the driver's seat, or they just kind of are useful?
Well, I think that they are sometimes very much in the driver's seat.
And the key to remember this is in order to get any country to do something big and ambitious, and what we were doing after the Cold War was quite ambitious.
We weren't just concentrating on sort of defending the United States and maybe upholding the balance of power in a couple of key areas.
We really thought that our mission now was to use American power to spread American values and institutions as far as we could.
If you're going to get the country to do something like that, you need a combination of arguments to make it work.
And I think those arguments were not advanced in a sort of cynical fashion by many people.
I think people genuinely believed it.
They genuinely believed that there was a big security problem we were facing from somebody like Saddam Hussein or even from somebody like Muammar Gaddafi.
They genuinely believed that if these countries could be turned into democracies, that would be good for the world, it would be good for those societies.
They, I think, genuinely believed, many of them, that this would be relatively easy to do.
It was going to be just like the Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe.
I think they were delusional in a variety of ways.
But, again, a lot of pretty smart, pretty well-educated people and people who I don't regard as sort of cynical Machiavellians really thought this was the case.
And you even find somebody like Barack Obama, who's, I think, a pretty sensible, level-headed guy, succumbing to this at various points, particularly when something like the Arab Spring happens.
He really wants to back that.
He really wants Mubarak out of Egypt because he thinks moving Egypt towards democratic rule would be a good thing.
The problem is that they, I think, overestimated the degree to which history was really running in their direction.
And they certainly overestimated the American ability to shape those events in a predictable and positive way.
Well, I mean, I think Egypt's a great example.
I guess I have a little bit different take on that, which maybe I'm wrong about this.
But the New York Times take on it was that the Obama administration did everything they could to keep Mubarak as absolutely long as possible.
And then they wanted the head of the secret torture police, Omar Suleiman, to come and be the runner-up.
They didn't want to have real fair elections or anything like that until, basically, it was forced on them.
And then as soon as the Muslim Brotherhood won, they worked with the Egyptian military and the Saudis and the Israelis to overthrow that elected government, only a year and a half later, and reinstall the military dictatorship.
And then John Kerry said, this is the restoration of democracy to Egypt.
I think, again, it's a more complicated story than that.
I think there's no question that when the Arab Spring hit, and particularly when it started to affect countries like Egypt, the U.S. government wasn't sure what to do.
Do we back these forces, or do we go with the people that we've been doing business with for a long time?
And the Obama administration was internally divided on that, but ultimately came out in favor of pushing Mubarak out, much to the consternation of some of our other friends in the region.
We did the same thing, of course, when the civil war or the uprising begins in Syria.
Even before it's a real civil war, they say very quickly that Assad must go in Syria.
And Bashar al-Assad and his gang is a pretty bloodthirsty set of thugs here, and we wanted them out of there.
Now, it turns out we had no idea how to pull that off.
It's another indication of sort of the limits of American power in this regard.
But I think the idealistic impulse was there all along, even if it got compromised in a number of cases.
Part of this, too, is it's easy to see conflicts of interest as they exist without impugning, necessarily, motives.
But it's a fact of history that Lockheed vice president Bruce Jackson moved mountains in order to push and lobby for NATO expansion in the 1990s, and then went on to create the Committee to Liberate Iraq.
And by all accounts I've ever read of the man, he's absolutely a true believer in American air power to deliver freedom to Arabs or whatever.
But we can't really ignore that he's the Lockheed executive vice president for selling weapons to the Pentagon.
And really, a lot of the neocons had ties to Lockheed and to other firms.
So we talk about, and of course you wrote a whole book about their close ties and ideological connections with the Likud party in Israel.
But they had professional interests as well.
And I don't think anyone denies that Paul Wolfowitz had entire, well-developed daydreams about how easy, as you said, how easy Iraq War II would be and what the region would be like later.
But all these things can be going on at once.
And yet it seems like maybe there's a little more than just an ideology and a grand strategy when you have so many interests that really are at play.
And I don't want to just sound too leftist like I'm focusing on corporations as though that's the bottom line of all this.
Of course, the generals and the admirals and their departments have a lot at stake as well, right?
Well, the central theme of the book, of my book, is to say that in fact there's a strong or pronounced imbalance of power inside the foreign policy establishment in the United States.
It's not like you don't have dissident voices in various places saying we should act with greater restraint, we should be more attuned to not just moral issues but the sensible pursuit of those moral interests.
But what you really see in Washington and throughout the foreign policy elite is basically lots of people and lots of organizations who want the United States to be very busy in the world, albeit for different reasons.
So yes, arms manufacturers are going to want the United States to have an ambitious foreign policy and a strong military and have that strong military be out there in the world because that's good for their business.
Now, they may also genuinely believe that that's good for the country and good for the world, but of course it is also good for their business.
At the same time, human rights organizations want the United States to use its power to improve human rights conditions in various parts of the world.
People who are in favor of arms control and worried about nuclear proliferation think the United States should use its influence and use its power to prevent nuclear weapons from spreading around the world, even in some cases if that might involve military action.
My point is simply that you have lots of different groups running around Washington, and if each one of them gets some of what they want, the U.S. government will be very busy trying to influence and shape local politics in almost every corner of the world.
And by contrast, the number of voices who say, you know, maybe we ought to be doing a little bit less.
Maybe we ought to be concentrating a bit more on problems we're facing here at home.
Maybe some of these projects that we take on that involve trying to produce a democracy in Afghanistan or that involve trying to influence or topple governments in different parts of the world, maybe in fact we tend to cause more trouble than we solve.
Those voices are relatively few in number, tend to be less well-funded, not as influential.
The problem I'm really going after in this book is this large coalition of forces who for various different reasons have led the United States to adopt a failed grand strategy.
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When you mention the foreign governments and their lobbies and influence there, I appreciate the way you put it in the Israel lobby book about how you can't blame them.
At the end of the day, America is the global superpower, the world empire.
Every country in the world has something at stake.
If they can afford a lobby or a clandestine service or a PR firm or whatever they have to do to have influence in D.C., obviously they're going to die trying to do everything they can to get America on their side because it's the 8 trillion pound gorilla, right?
That's correct.
And lots of countries do it.
And also we have a political system, just the way it evolved historically, that's unusually open to lobbying influences of many kinds, both domestic lobbies that organize around whatever different issues.
I mean, that's how our political system works.
It's interest groups.
But it's also remarkably open to foreign influences of various kinds through public relations firms, through going up and talking to people on Capitol Hill, sitting and cultivating influential people within the foreign policy elite, funding think tanks in Washington, as some foreign governments have been doing in recent years.
I can't think of any other great power in world history that was as open to the influence of foreign governments, including on foreign policy issues, as that of the United States.
And then here's the 300 million Americans.
I mean, we have some interest groups, but the mass of most people aren't even interested, have no stake and virtually no voice in our foreign policy, where you have literally foreign nations have more to say about what our government's policy will be in any given case than the American people who aren't even consulted most of the time.
Well, I think it's not entirely true, but certainly most Americans don't care very much about foreign policy, don't stay particularly informed, can be in some cases manipulated by elites who have better access to information.
There are, of course, some Americans who are passionate about foreign policy issues, again, of a variety of sorts.
And this is the old story of interest group politics.
A small group of people who care passionately about an issue will have more impact on that issue than the great majority of the population that is largely indifferent.
And we see that on domestic policy, and we see that in foreign policy, too.
All right.
Now, so as we talked about, you're not a complete non-interventionist, but you are a realist, which is quite a few clicks toward this position from the current consensus, that's for sure.
And you define America's national interests, the ones that you think are worth having our military fight for in the world, very narrowly.
And so can you describe for us a little bit about this doctrine of offshore balancing?
Yeah, this is a sort of a broad, grand strategy.
And I would argue it's really the strategy the United States followed for most of the 20th century until sort of the end of the Cold War.
And the basic idea here is that what matters most to the United States is what the distribution of power is in the world.
And in particular, to try and make sure there is no other country that is as powerful as the United States and that dominates its region the same way the United States has long dominated the Western Hemisphere, again, where we face no really serious enemies.
The concern here, and it's kind of a long-term concern, is that if a country emerged like that, was as powerful as us and dominated its own neighborhood, it would be free to interfere around the world the way we've been doing.
And it might even start interfering in the Western Hemisphere close to the United States in ways we might find uncomfortable.
So in World War I, World War II, and in the Cold War, the United States committed itself to preventing any country from essentially becoming a regional hegemon or a dominant power in a particular region.
That's why we fought Germany.
It's why we fought Japan.
It's why we tried to contain the Soviet Union.
But when you notice it, if there aren't threats to the balance of power in places like Europe or the Middle East, then we don't have to be involved there in a big way.
We don't have to be responsible for defending them.
We can take a more measured view of what's going on, and we can turn security in those regions over to others and only intervene if things go bad.
And I argue that today the only potential peer competitor to the United States would be China, which might, and I repeat might, emerge as a dominant power in Asia.
So the United States should remain heavily engaged in Asia, relying on allies in that region, deploying some of its own forces there as well.
But we can do much less, maybe relatively little in Europe, and we should get out of the Middle East, where our role since 1992 has been almost entirely negative.
And it's pretty much unthinkable, right, that even allied with Iraq, that Iran would ever invade and conquer Saudi Arabia and then have that dominance over the Middle East, right?
And then obviously there's no USSR to come rolling in.
That's right.
I mean, certainly Iran does not have anywhere near the capabilities it would need to try and dominate the region now.
And the talk one occasionally hears about Iran dominating through proxies I think is wildly overblown.
They certainly lack the military capability to conquer any of their neighbors at this point as well.
You can imagine a world some decades from now where that might be the case, and the United States might have to rethink its policy.
But for now, what the United States should be doing is, first of all, removing its own forces from the region where they're a constant irritant and they drive a lot of anti-Americanism, and having a balanced relationship in the region where we have a sort of business-like relationship with everybody in the region, including Iran.
And we don't have special relations with anybody in the region because none of the governments to which we are currently allied, not Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc., deserve unconditional American support.
They don't deserve a special relationship.
And in fact, our influence and leverage would be maximized if we were talking to everyone.
I always like to say that when American diplomats or the Secretary of State goes off to Riyadh to talk to the Saudis, I want the Saudis to know that his next stop is going to be Tehran.
And after he goes to Tehran, when he's talking to the Iranians, I want them to know that his next stop is going to be Israel, and after that he's going to Turkey.
Because that's what gives us leverage.
It gives all those countries an incentive to do more to keep us happy instead of taking American support for granted, as they have been.
All right.
Now, I've got to get a little bit defensive here for my friend, but there's a utilitarian purpose in it, too, which is the only reason I'm bothering.
You have what I think is kind of a gratuitous attack on Ron Paul in here and say that he's linked to, I think, abhorrent opinions or some kind of thing.
And I was just going to say that I know that you also have been smeared as a bigot by the New Republic.
And just because Jamie Kerchick wrote some things about Ron Paul, I don't think that's a reason for anyone to take them to heart.
And, you know, I think you associate him with Pat Buchanan, who actually – and I love Pat personally, but there's no question that he says, like, this is a white man's land, boy, and all this stuff that actually is abhorrent and must be what you're thinking of.
But Ron Paul does not talk like that, and so I would ask you to reconsider the way that you characterize his view there, because his non-interventionist foreign policy is very well-informed and very well-developed.
Just to be clear, my point about mentioning Buchanan and Paul and some others was that these were people who had emphasized a non-interventionist foreign policy.
But they come with a lot of political baggage, not just on race issues necessarily, but also I think Paul's views on, say, returning to the gold standard are not popular and not particularly sound.
But my main point was that these were not people who you could point to as a standard bearer to move the country towards a more sensible foreign policy.
Well, that's actually why I picked the fight, because that's the part I really disagree with you about.
I mean, in fact, in the book, you even talk about loose monetary policy leading to the crash in 2008, so you don't have to agree with him entirely to see why he predicted that crash a decade out.
But the thing of it is, even if you think that his views on the gold standard are out of date or whatever, they're not abhorrent and wrong and immoral or anything like that, and that's kind of the way you characterize them.
And I think that that actually, my real point is, other than the fact of how much I love Ron and have to feel like I have to defend him, but the real point being that you are kind of giving away your own game.
If you are setting your policy of offshore balancing and restricted realism here as the outline position, it makes much more sense for you to play the dialectic where you go, look, you have this great guy, Ron Paul, and you know what, I think maybe his non-interventionism might be even too non-interventionist.
And so then you're setting yourself as the happy middle ground between his complete peaceful foreign policy and our current state of things.
And then you have a better way to achieve success in that sense, rather than staking yourself out as Ron because he's beyond the pale.
Well, we may have to just disagree on this one, and I'm pretty sure most people will read the book and will see my position as not quite as far out as some of the people I'm mentioning there.
I mean, that's what I mean, though, but I'm saying by calling them out in a negative way, you make yours the acceptable outlying position instead of yours the acceptable moderate position, and there's the acceptable outlying position.
Do you understand?
Not completely, I'm afraid.
Well, anyway, nobody knows what the hell I'm talking about.
So let me ask you about Trump real quick, because Trump doesn't believe in this stuff, but also he doesn't read things either.
So he doesn't have much of a grand strategy, except he's a bit of a curmudgeon, but also he's a tough guy, macho hawk who likes killing terrorists and stuff like that.
So he's got us in kind of a jumble of things, but I wonder, you know, at the end of the day, peace in Korea, maybe war with Iran, you know, what do you think this is going to mean for the future of this consensus for liberal interventionism, liberal internationalism, liberal hegemony, as you call it?
Yeah, well, the chapter on Trump is called How Not to Fix Foreign Policy, and Trump, you know, intuited, I think, that American foreign policy had gone badly off the rails over the previous 25 years or so, and he ran in 2016 being both very critical of what we've been doing in places like Afghanistan or Iraq and on some economic issues as well, but also equally critical of the foreign policy elite, which I also am critical of in the book.
The problem is that he really did not have a well-formed idea of what to do differently, and he turns out, in my view, to be one of the least competent presidents we've ever had in terms of actually getting things done.
And the consequence of that is if you actually step away from sort of Trump's Twitter feed and his rhetoric and look at what American policy actually is, it hasn't changed very much.
You know, he was very critical of NATO, but we're still in NATO.
In fact, in some respects, deeper in.
He thought we should try to improve relations with Russia.
Our policy towards Russia is harsher now than it was two years ago.
He has doubled down on all of our Middle Eastern allies, essentially giving them even more unconditional support despite the various things that they're doing.
His policy on Iran is not a sea change.
We were hostile to Iran before.
We're hostile to Iran now, and he tore up the one sort of positive thing we'd managed to achieve, which was a cap on their nuclear program.
And last but not least, he sent more troops to Afghanistan, just like Obama did.
And some books I've read recently suggest he shouldn't have.
Yeah, got that right.
By the way, I meant to say at the beginning, thank you for that.
No problem.
So, again, when you step back away from the personality and the lying and the corruption and all that stuff, the actual course of American foreign policy hasn't changed that much.
So what bothers me about Trump is, in a sense, the United States is committed to doing all the same dumb things we've been doing for the last quarter century.
But we're now doing them in an even more incoherent and counterproductive fashion with less help from others and with a global community that's got much less regard and much less trust in American judgment than it had in the past.
And that's not good.
Well, certainly it seems like kind of the veneer is off about, you know, how we're only bombing the Afghans because of how much we love them and this kind of thing when no one could believe that coming from Trump.
Right.
Sounds good enough for Obama or something like that.
But Obama didn't say that either.
But when Obama sent more troops to Afghanistan, he gave exactly the same rationale that Trump used later, which was we have to stay there to keep it from becoming a safe haven for terrorists.
And when Trump sent more troops in the first year of his presidency, he used exactly the same excuse.
So I don't think anybody now really believes that this is about idealism.
This is now just one of these wars that we can't find a way to get ourselves out of, even though nobody thinks it's really ever going to lead to a successful outcome.
But so do you think I mean, let's say he serves just one term and Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton or whoever comes next, the centrist establishment candidate wins, just like it's supposed to be next time.
How far back has Trump set liberal hegemony as a grand strategy and all that in the world?
I mean, the unipolar moment is already over anyway.
Right.
That's a great question, and I don't think we know the answer to it yet.
I think if you go to Washington and you sort of wander around the think tanks and talk to people, you get a lot of different views on this.
I think there are clearly some people who are still hoping that if he's a one term president, you can sort of bring the grownups back in and get us back on course with something that looks kind of like what maybe Hillary would have done or what Obama would have continued to do.
But I do think the Trump presidency has had one positive aspect to it, and that's that he's, in a sense, opened the door to a broader conversation.
That because of his own attitudes, because of some of the things he said, and because he's been politically successful, he did get elected.
It's allowed people to start raising questions, to challenging some of these orthodoxies that we've sort of taken for granted in the past and not questioned at all.
And once that process begins, you can never be quite sure where it's going to go politically, right, that there may be some other politicians who begin to recognize that questioning these things is a good idea.
You start to get more articles and books being written that suggest a different approach to a few issues as well.
So in that sense, I think that leaving Trump aside, we may be at one of those moments where people are now open to considering a wider range of possibilities.
And again, that's the principal reason I wrote the book, is to sort of try and broaden that conversation, try to suggest to people that there really were – first of all, what we'd been doing for the past quarter century really had not worked very well, and that there were some alternatives that were not Fortress America or anything like that, but that would be much better for the United States and probably better for much of the world as well.
Well, I don't know if you're – I'm sorry, I'm keeping you over time.
One more thing, Korea here.
I don't know if you're as optimistic as I am, but it seems like there's just no stopping the progress now.
Obviously, the South Koreans are leading the thing, not Trump.
They're letting him take the credit as much as he wants as long as he'll allow them to continue.
But it sure looks like North and South Korea, I don't know if they're going to reunite or something like that, but it sure looks like the war is over there.
And that can only lead to positive changes throughout the region and maybe worldwide, right?
Not necessarily.
It may be so.
I mean, first of all, we should be wary, I guess, because things have sort of flipped back and forth very rapidly.
A year and a half ago, we were talking about fire and fury and whose nuclear button was bigger, and then we got a 180-degree turn there.
It also depends on what you think is likely to happen here.
I don't think reunification is in the cards anytime soon.
I also don't think North Korean nuclear disarmament is going to happen.
What I think we can hope for, and I think is within the realm of possibility, is a stabilization of that relationship, perhaps some measures that would make North Korea's nuclear arsenal a bit more survivable or reliable or less trigger-immune, lead them to be less trigger-happy.
In other words, a more robust deterrence relationship there.
But I think there's still lots of ways in which this could go south.
Just last week, North Korea was saying that they were going to restart their testing and nuclear programs if they didn't get more progress and didn't get a lifting of American sanctions.
So I'm hopeful there, but I think we have a long way to go before that relationship is really transformed.
Well, and we still have a war cabinet full of hawks and led by the National Security Advisor, who's just about the worst guy you could have possibly put in that position.
So it ain't over yet, that's for sure.
I'm more worried about the situation with Iran than I am with North Korea, because first of all, North Korea already has nuclear weapons, which will make us very leery of taking military action against them.
And secondly, none of our friends in Asia want us to go to war with North Korea.
South Korea doesn't, Japan doesn't, nobody else does, China doesn't, etc.
Whereas in the Middle East, it's quite different, right?
Where Saudi Arabia, Israel, some of the Gulf states would probably be delighted if the United States, at least in the short term, would be delighted if the United States took a swing at Iran.
So I am still more concerned about how that situation may evolve than I am with North Korea.
Yeah, and today's the big day, right, that the sanctions kick back in?
That's correct.
Yeah, so I guess we're going to see what happens soon there.
All right, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming on the show, Stephen.
It's really an honor, I appreciate it.
Not at all.
Thanks for having me, and it was always a pleasure to talk to you.
Okay.
Hope we can do it again soon.
That is Stephen Walt at Harvard University.
The brand new book is out, The Hell of Good Intentions, America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy.
And of course, read them at foreignpolicy.com.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
