All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show.
All right, you guys on the line, I've got Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
And of course, formerly with the National Iranian American Council, author of the absolutely indispensable Treacherous Alliance, and most recently, Losing an Enemy, and then getting it back again.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Trita?
Doing well.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us here.
So, well, first of all, I'll let you know that we're going to squabble in a second, but before we do, I'll let you promote this upcoming event a week from today at the Quincy Institute in Washington, D.C., right?
Yep.
So in about a week's time, next Wednesday, exactly a week, we will have a joint event between the Quincy Institute and foreignpolicy.com, which I think will be one of the first, at least in a long time, debates between those favoring the status quo of our foreign policy, a foreign policy based on military domination and endless war, and those who are in favor of a more restrained-oriented foreign policy, one in which we don't think that our security is going to get enhanced by dominating every corner of the globe militarily, and one that is seeking a national security that is more centered on diplomacy and collaboration rather than this more confrontational approach that we have right now.
And we got quite a lot of big names who are going to be there, including David Petraeus, who of course is an advocate of the current approach.
But we also have people like Congressman Ro Khanna, who is one of the biggest critics of this approach and who has been pushing very hard for ending the war in Yemen and for reorienting American foreign policy towards restraint.
And I think in some ways, in our view, this is an indication that this movement for restraint that of course has been growing for quite some time, has now reached a point in which Many of those who are in favor of the status quo actually have to debate us before they could easily ignore us and they were in such a comfortable situation that they just viewed critics of the foreign policy as sitting on the margins.
That is no longer the case.
And we're hoping that there's going to be a very robust conversation and a lot of challenges to those who have favored this past foreign policy.
Cool.
All right.
And it will be webcast on our website as well.
So people can go to Quincyinst.org and watch the thing if they're not in D.C.
Okay, great.
And by the way, I'm sorry, I didn't say, but I do have it here.
It's at the Congressional Auditorium at the Capitol Visitor Center, 1st Street Northeast in Washington, D.C.
It's February the 26th from 1 to 7 if people want to show up at that.
And again, they have all the information at foreignpolicy.com and at quincyinst.org.
Okay, good.
So and let me say here too, that unlike some of the people who've been critical writing about this, it has been a little bit controversial over the past week or so, as you know.
I've interviewed you like 50 times and Andy Bacevich probably at least 20 and Eli Clifton probably also around 20.
And I absolutely love you guys.
And I think your book, Treacherous Alliance, is one of the most important books I've ever read and that I constantly urge onto my audience to read, that I wish I had read years ago instead of just like one year ago.
And of course, Eli Clifton is one of the greatest critics of the American Israel lobby in America right there with Grant Smith and just years and years and years of wonderful journalism by him.
And of course, Andrew Bacevich is Andrew Bacevich.
Everybody knows what that name means.
And I'm totally for what you're doing here.
I totally dig what you're doing here.
You're living in the same America as me where the vast majority of the American people are with us, but inside the foreign policy blob, non-interventionism doesn't have a seat at the table at all.
And so, or well, let's say restraint, even realism hardly has a seat at the table at all.
And so I hear what you're saying, which is that you're bringing them to you in order to insert a good anti-war point of view into the conversation inside the blob in a way where they have not even had to deal with us in the past.
You're forcing the issue with this famously Koch and Soros provided infusion of capital into this organization.
Is that pretty much it?
I definitely think that that's a pretty accurate way of looking at it.
We're going into this eyes wide open.
We recognize and commend all of those who've been outside of DC and who's been banging these drums for years and years, including some of those who've written some of these critical articles.
They've done a tremendously important job in raising awareness and making sure that the voice of the population on the outside is heard.
We are in DC, so we are going to have to pursue the same objective, but using different means.
And that is to actually take the debate to these individuals and these movements and these institutions that have been gardeners of the status quo.
So in my view, that means that the way we do things may look a little bit different, but I don't think anyone should have any doubt or question marks about the fact that we are, as you know, for the last 20 years that you and I have spoken, or the amount of decades that Andrew Bacevich has spoken out about this, that our objectives are very, very clear and very similar to those who have been pushing for an anti-interventionist foreign policy.
Well, and your website is essentially the low blog institutionalized.
It's all my favorite writers, so you guys are doing a lot of great work, no question about that.
But, you know, of course, the concern is that there's this sort of informal, it's a qualitative sort of a ratio about how much principle you have to sacrifice in exchange for how much influence.
Right?
So at antiwar.com, we can, you know, sit up on our high horse crying all day and say it however we want because nobody's listening to us anyway, no one with any power and influence anyway.
Regular people.
I wouldn't say that, actually.
I mean, antiwar.com, I remember back during the Bush years, the number of people from inside the government that was reading antiwar.com.
So I absolutely believe that all of these different- Well, so that's even better for my point then, right?
You guys can stay as hardcore as you possibly can and still do this at the same time?
That's the question, right?
Oh, I absolutely believe so, because at the end of the day, in order to be able to get change, you need to have different elements pursuing different tasks, but towards the same objectives.
Not everyone can do the same thing.
What's the value of having five more antiwar.com?
Agreed.
That doesn't add anything.
So you need to have other players.
And what we have been missing for quite some time is an entity inside of the Beltway pushing for these things.
But you know what?
The last time we did, it was the New America Foundation, and then it became the New America Foundation.
We don't need another one of those either.
Yeah, no, I take your point on that.
In fact, I ended up having quite a lot of conversations with Steve Clemens over the years, but also one in particular as I was making the first preparations to put together Quincy and I was reaching out to a lot of folks and bringing together this team that we have.
And I had a great conversation with Steve Clemens asking him, what happened?
Because I remember myself, I was super excited about New America Foundation back in 2002, 2003.
And I still think they did a fantastic job.
But then things changed a little bit.
You know, there was changes in personnel and other things that happened.
And as a result, it ended up being an institution that did not necessarily differentiate itself particularly from others.
So we've taken a look at what they've done and what they shouldn't have done in order to make sure that we don't walk in the same path as they did.
Because I think that is an example of a great organization that unfortunately ended up becoming more too much establishment.
I don't want to go into too much detail of what Steven shared with me, but I think I can share this.
One of the things he said is that they actually became too big too fast.
And when you become too big, whether you like it or not, your interests start to align itself with the establishment because your interests start to align itself with the status quo.
Because you're big enough so that you benefit from it.
So that is part of the reason why we've decided that although we are going to try to grow to a $10 million a year budget, we don't want to go much beyond that, particularly not in personnel because we want to continue to be nimble and be able to be disruptive until the status quo is the one that we want.
And then we'll go further.
But we don't want to grow big enough so that we become intertwined with the status quo that we're not in favor of.
Right.
I mean, I think everybody knows how this works, right?
It's not like, you know, George Soros offered you guys some bribe or some kind of thing.
I know that it would be impossible to bribe Andrew Bacevich with any amount of money to change his position on anything.
You know, I'm no fool and anybody who thinks that's crazy.
At the same time, though, you know, there's this great article today in The New York Times or maybe yesterday about all the money that Bloomberg's been passing around over the last few years.
And it starts out with what Emily's List deciding that they just can't do without this money.
So they keep their mouths shut about this.
And then the whole article is probably 10,000 words.
And it's institution after institution after institution deciding to go ahead and hold their fire.
The Center for a New American, pardon me, the Center for American Progress had a report that was going to come out that was going to talk about Bloomberg's surveillance state in New York City.
And they cut the whole chapter out of the report because they were afraid of how it would look to this guy who's been so generous to them.
So he doesn't have to really ask them.
He just has to be there and have been generous in the past to now compromise the way they feel about the job they're doing.
You know what I mean?
It's kind of subtle compared to anything explicit.
In parenthesis, the chapter cap cut from that report was co-written by Eli Clifton, who was one of the founders.
No surprise.
Yeah.
He was the best guy they ever had over there.
No, I think the points you're making are very valid.
I think there's some points of difference still in the sense that Bloomberg obviously is throwing around his money to all different kinds of causes, not asking anything in return more or less until now or in other moments in which he needed that type of political favor.
What we have done is we've gone to funders that would agree with us or would take, in the case of the Koch Institute, I mean, they're funding almost every restrainer academic in the country.
The idea, I mean, they're actually very, very narrow in the sense that what they fund in foreign policy is exclusively restraint.
I'm not particularly worried that the Koch Institute suddenly would have a change of heart and favor primacy.
I find that to be completely outside of realms of possibility.
In general, what you do when you set these things up is that you try to cultivate a large number of donors so that you don't become too dependent on any single one of them, because if any one of them either have a change of heart or whatever yet may happen, you don't want to leave yourself vulnerable.
You certainly don't want to be in a position in which any funder would have undue influence over you.
Which, by the way, Andy- I ran the National American Council for 17 years.
I think people would be, those who have followed what Nayak has done and seen that even under the toughest of toughest of times, we were still very loud and very principled in our support of diplomacy and a peaceful resolution with the conflict with Iran, rather than succumbing to all kinds of slander and pressure and things of that nature.
So I think most of the people in Quincy have already a track record of proving themselves, being able to resist all kinds of strange and unfortunate pressures.
What I think is also important is to make sure that we don't become our own worst enemies, in the sense that, yes, you can point to certain examples that are good cautionary tales as to how things can become difficult, and once you're in D.C., you have to be aware of all kinds of mindfills.
But not take it so far as to become deterministic and say, well, that will never, ever succeed.
And as a result, we should only play the outside game.
Never play the inside game, because if you do, you will get corrupted.
Well, that's one certain way of ensuring that we never will have an inside game.
And without an inside game, can we actually ever really win?
Yeah.
Okay.
First of all, when the Institute was brand new, I talked with Andrew, and he told me that, of course, they had never had a single meeting with any Koch or Soros person telling them what to discuss or anything along those lines.
You guys presented your proposal, said, can we have some money?
They said, yes.
That was it.
And so, and I, of course, believe that.
I take that at face value.
And that sounds like how that kind of thing probably works.
I'm kind of jealous.
I would also like a lot of money.
Go ahead.
It is absolutely correct in the sense that we're the ones going to them with an idea.
But it was not a one-time conversation.
These were conversations over a long period of time, which is not them trying to influence us, but rather them trying to see, okay, can these guys actually do this?
Just like a venture capitalist would have to make an assessment.
Can this work?
Is this the right team, et cetera?
Never has it been a conversation about trying to influence where we're going to go and things of that nature.
And in the case of Koch, it's actually quite clear.
If you're going to them with a non-restrainer proposal, you're simply not going to get to a second conversation.
You're probably not even going to have a first one, because they're very clear on what they support.
Yeah.
With Soros, it's a little bit broader spectrum.
Let's clip over to the actual event that you have coming up here, because I think part of the concern is, well, as one critic put it to me, that I don't think Ro Khanna is up to taking on David Petraeus, and he's David Petraeus, King David, and Ro Khanna is pretty good.
But is anyone on the panels on the side of the restrainers, like Matt Duss, for example?
I know he leans good.
I know that Peter Beinart is a hell of a lot less worse than he used to be.
No question about that.
And Mark Perry, of course, is my hero.
But I wonder about some of these other guys.
Are they anti enough to really balance out these hawks, who, after all, have all the conventional wisdom and inertia on their side?
Such as?
Well, Petraeus, for one.
And I'm not sure exactly which all hawks you have represented on which panels, which congressmen here are taking which stands.
So for instance, on the Middle East panel, we have Mark Perry and we have Sarah Leah Whitson, who was with Human Rights Watch and who is now at Quincy.
And she comes at it from a very interesting angle.
She's very, very much opposed to intervention in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, but she's coming at it from the perspective of someone who's worked on human rights for the last 20 years, which I think is really valuable, because oftentimes, restrainers have been accused of actually not caring about humanitarian suffering.
Whereas in reality, in my view, oftentimes, if we had pursued a restrainer-oriented foreign policy, there would have been much less suffering on all sides.
We have not yet, and we're hopefully going to secure a hawk for that panel in the next day or two.
But the entire idea is to have someone who will represent the status quo and present their best arguments in favor of that, and others who will critique it and present an alternative vision, and have that debate, a debate that I think restrainers have been seeking to have for quite some time, but it's just been so easy to ignore restrainers up until recently.
I really look forward to the conversation between Stephen Wertheim from Quincy and Tom Wright from Brookings, who is one of the foremost proponents of the current grand strategy.
They had two dueling articles in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.
I think it's going to be a fantastic conversation between the two of them, as well as Rosa Brooks from Georgetown, who used to be at the Pentagon, but as of late, at least based on her latest writing, is increasingly leaning, at least, towards restraint.
She was pretty good in the Bush years and not so good in the Obama years, as I remember.
Can you tell me a little bit more about Stephen Wertheim?
Who is he?
Stephen Wertheim is a historian from Columbia University.
He was teaching, he had a tenure position at King's College in London, and has increasingly emerged as one of the most prominent intellectuals on the left that is clearly in favor of restraint, and has just in the last year, I believe, had three or four op-eds in the New York Times and Washington Post, very much focusing on how to end the endless wars and the types of shifts we need to do in our broader grand strategy in order to make that happen.
His latest piece in Foreign Affairs is probably the most detailed explanation of what a progressive foreign policy based on restraint would look like.
Interesting.
Okay.
And then I do see that you have a couple of doves, Beinart and then Rachel O'Dell from Quincy taking on a guy from Hudson, so he must be the hawk on the Asia Pacific panel there.
Is that right?
Correct.
Correct.
Is that right?
Is that Armarar Alsham there to take on China?
No, I'm just kidding.
Wouldn't be surprised.
But again, it's, and here I have to say, you know, the debate on China has, of course, gone extremely hawkish, extremely fast just in the last three years.
And so again, here's another opportunity to be able to do some reality check on that because it's really dangerous.
It was one thing when the United States was messing around in the Middle East and making enemies out of states that probably would not be enemies otherwise.
China is a different story.
It's going to have a completely different cost.
So we definitely need that conversation.
Well, you know, I'd be interested to hear what Matt does has to say to foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders.
I know he's very much a two state solution, liberal Zionist type.
And I don't know, but I don't know what his positions are on these other things.
I'm sorry?
I'm not so sure I would describe him that way.
I'm not sure you saw Bernie's comments at CNN yesterday during the town hall.
No, I sure didn't.
He came out for a one state thing?
No, he didn't go out in the details of one state or two state.
But you know, he was saying that his words that, you know, the right wing government in Israel is a racist one.
The regime in Saudi Arabia are murderous thugs.
And he got massive applause lines from the people at the CNN town hall.
So I think what does there as a representative of Bernie will be a very different foreign policy than what we've seen in the last 25 years.
Of course, we will have representatives of Biden there as well, and we're working to make sure that the other top contenders on the democratic side also send their representatives.
And as I'm sure you would agree, we are a little bit frustrated that debates thus far have not sufficiently addressed foreign policy.
And what we're going to do at this event is try to dig deeper on that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Bernie Sanders speech in New Hampshire, he didn't even mention the wars at all.
I guess maybe my question for Dust would be, should America expect him to end any of the wars, any more than Donald Trump has?
Well, I mean, I'm going to let Dust speak for Bernie on that.
But I would personally not suspect that Bernie's approach to this is going to be anywhere near have any similarities with the way that Trump has done things.
I think he would take ending the endless wars much more seriously.
But again, I'll let Dust represent Bernie on this one.
The bottom line, though, is that we're hoping to be able to have a robust conversation about this by people who, at least one of them likely, will be the presidential nominee and perhaps even president.
And those individuals on that panel will hopefully, if that happens to them, follow and play a key role in the foreign policymaking of the next president if there's a change in government.
And we want them to hear as much of the restrainer perspective as possible and be exposed to it.
Why not bring out Colonel Bacevich to take on Petraeus?
Because he's actually up to it, I know.
I think that would be absolutely fantastic.
Andrew is not going to be anywhere near that part of the country for the next two months or so.
And as a result, we could not have him at the conference.
And so that was, yeah, very, very unfortunate.
But I agree with you.
I think that would be fantastic.
Though I do have to say at the same time, having a sitting member of Congress who is a rising star, who has been a leading voice on these issues, and who is, you know, particularly if you have a Bernie presidency, is going to play an even bigger role, take on Petraeus in that debate, I think has a specific value in and of itself.
Yeah.
Maybe we need to put Roe on the phone with Gareth and or me and get him good and refreshed on David Petraeus's actual career over the last 20 years before that debate happens.
I'd hate to see him get away with bloody murder here.
He's gotten away with plenty as it is, you know.
Yeah, I mean, again, whatever happens, I would be quite confident it's going to be more of a challenge than anything that he's faced so far in D.C., because this city has been so deferential to some of these top generals, regardless of what they've done, regardless of their failures, regardless of their bad advice, and regardless of what we now know is that they've been deceiving the American public for quite some time.
So I suspect that there's going to be some very healthy exchanges at this conference.
Cool.
All right, man.
Well, I'm with you, Trita.
I think what you guys are doing is a good deal.
And I'm only holding your feet to the fire to keep them hot.
You should.
You should.
And I appreciate that.
And the only thing I would just say again is, I think it's perfectly fine.
People should raise questions, etc.
But they should be careful not to go towards a point in which their own skepticism makes them defeatists.
And as a result, they do the job of the enemy for them, and they end up making themselves self-marginalized and irrelevant.
That's something I think we absolutely have to avoid.
But there's also a lot of value in some of the points that have been raised.
And I think it also helps us make sure that we keep that constituency in mind when we prepare these conferences and make sure that we do everything we can to maximize the likelihood of restraint being advanced.
Yep.
And you know, by the way, too, there are some real all-the-way non-interventionists, too.
Not just restrainers and realists.
And some of us have some good points.
Certainly.
Certainly.
And keep one thing in mind.
This is just our first conference.
I hear you.
All right.
This is not the first and the last one.
Well, listen, man, I think this is overall, I think the project is great.
And I think your idea for this conference is a sound one.
And I really hope it goes very well for you.
Good luck.
And thank you.
Thank you so much.
Really appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that's Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President at the Quincy Institute over there with Bacevich and Clifton and a few others, too.
I just don't know all those others so much.
But also an author of the book Treacherous Alliance, which you got to read.
The real history of America, Israel and Iran since the 50s.
Find out all about this conference at foreignpolicy.com, Quincy Institute Forum, a new vision for America in the world.
And it's also all at quincyinst.org.
