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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our guest today is Jon Pfeffer.
His own website is JonPfeffer.com.
And, of course, you can find him at ForeignPolicyAndFocus, F-P-I-F, .org.
And here he is at TomDispatch.com with the dumbing down of American foreign policy.
Welcome to the show, Jon.
How are you doing?
Fine.
Thanks for having me on again.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining us.
So let's see here.
Well, before we get too much into smart power and all this stuff, I was just half giving Obama credit.
I was trying my best to make maybe I'm arguing with myself, trying to convince myself that actually this guy could be a lot worse on the Iran issue.
Maybe he's supporting the mercenary army of suicide bomber killers in Syria, and that could get us into a war with Iran, and that's pretty bad.
But at the same time, it seems like he's really frustrating Benjamin Netanyahu, and I like that.
So can we start with a little bit of a positive note for at least Obama's not as bad as Benjamin Netanyahu wants him to be?
Oh, absolutely.
If the Republicans had a say in the matter, Israel would, of course, be basically running our policy toward Iran.
The Republican candidates and Mitt Romney as well basically said that they would call Netanyahu first before proposing any U.S. policy about Israel or involving Israel, in a sense basically outsourcing that aspect of U.S. foreign policy, not just to Israel, which is one thing, but to Benjamin, not Netanyahu, who represents the far right wing in Israel.
So it could be a lot worse.
Clearly, Obama has attempted to put a restraining order on Netanyahu to prevent any kind of unilateral attack by Israel against Iran, at least until after the elections.
In the worst spin on Obama's conduct, he at least put a kind of a time limit on this issue.
Who knows what will happen after the elections?
So there is that positive.
At the same time, of course, the United States, under Obama, continued a policy begun by the Bush administration to conduct a covert war essentially against Iran through computer viruses, the Stuxnet virus, and others.
And so this is a very problematic program.
So even with Iran, we have some negatives thrown in there along with the positives.
Yeah, well, and the sanctions especially.
I don't know how bad they are.
I guess they can't be as bad as the sanctions against Iraq were because that was unanimous U.N. Security Council stuff where Russia and China were as in on it as the Americans were kind of a thing, at least for the first few years there, right?
So they had no one to trade with, the Iraqis.
That's right.
And Iran has quite a few trading partners and has managed to evade much of the impact of the sanctions, at least for the political elite, for the hardliners inside Iran.
I talked to Mohammed Sahimi about this, a professor at USC and a writer at Antiwar.com and PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau, and he talked about how he has relatives who are pharmacists in Tehran who verified to him that they're having severe shortages of medicine because of the way the sanctions apply on the central bank.
It just makes every kind of international transaction as complicated as hell, and every old business relationship has to be reworked around the new way things are and whatever.
And so where the rubber meets the road, that means hemophiliacs can't get the medicine that makes their blood clot, and it means that people dying of cancer can't get their chemotherapy.
America's at war with Iranian cancer patients.
That's right.
I mean, what it effectively becomes is sanctions applied to the most vulnerable folks inside Iran.
Folks who have power, whether it's political power or economic power, are able to evade, for the most part, the sanctions to get what they want or get what they need.
But for your average Iranian who has to deal with price hikes connected to the most basic commodities, that's where the sanctions really hit.
Well, you know, okay, this whole thing about smart power, this administration is coming in on the heels of the Bush administration where they were listening to Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith about what ought to be done, where the person who was supposed to be the check and balance on what the crazies wanted to do was Condoleezza Rice, who doesn't know shit from apple butter, who doesn't know anything.
And so, God, you know, Hillary Clinton, she's evil and she's dripping and soaked in blood, but at least she's got an IQ warmer than 120 or something, you know?
So, yes, smart power, it's not quite as disgraceful.
We don't spend as much time slapping our forehead with just how outright, you know, back asswards the policy is like importing the Iranian revolution to Iraq or something like that just because Richard Perle wants to do it.
Yeah, I mean, we saw...
A great amount of curve.
Yeah, we saw some improvement, definitely, when it comes to foreign policy across the board when Obama came on board.
What does that mean?
That means that we weren't going to see the kind of unilateral militarist policy that characterized the Bush administration in terms of outright declarations of war.
We weren't going to see the kind of hostility toward multilateral institutions, toward multilateral efforts, such as, you know, the efforts to address climate change or the international law of the seas.
Okay, so, yeah, obviously we have some intelligent people in Washington directing foreign policy.
The problem is that, unfortunately, what is characterized as smart power, smart power basically being the addition of diplomatic, economic, cultural influences alongside hard military power, in other words, Pentagon power, CIA power.
The problem with this kind of new doctrine, which is essentially a dusted-off version of what the Clinton administration had back in the 1990s, the problem with this is that we still see some of the same reprehensible programs that we experienced during the Bush years.
So what do I mean by that?
Number one, we see not only the continuation of the drone warfare in Pakistan, but actually an acceleration of that.
One could argue that we see that in part because we are seeing a drawdown in terms of boots on the ground elsewhere in the region.
A reduction, obviously, of U.S. forces in Iraq as the war there draws to a close, at least a formal close, eventually drawdown of boots on the ground in Afghanistan.
Compensation here is drone attacks, extrajudicial killings or assassination.
We no longer see the kind of extraordinary rendition at the level that we saw it under the Bush administration.
That's another reason why we see an increase in drones.
In other words, the Obama administration has decided simply to take out these folks rather than trying to take them out of the country physically and interrogate them in third-party countries.
So that's one thing.
Another issue, and then I'll throw it back to you, another issue would be military spending.
We had hoped, we being folks working to reduce the amount of money being spent on the military here in the United States, we had hoped that Obama would come in and say, look, if we're going to embrace this policy of smart power, we don't need so much money going into hard power.
We don't need the Pentagon getting everything it asks for every single year.
Unfortunately, in the first couple of years of the Obama administration, even though we were dealing with a serious economic crisis, the Pentagon budget continued to rise.
Now, of course, in the last year or so, we've seen, in part because of the debt crisis and because the debt issue has become such an important issue in American politics, finally the Pentagon itself kind of stepped forward and said, we recognize we're not going to get everything we're going to need.
We're going to start cutting a couple of weapons systems.
We're going to put forward a couple of proposals.
And so the Obama administration puts out there a $500 billion cut in Pentagon spending, but that's over 10 years, and it basically gets us back to 2007 military spending levels, so not very much at all in terms of reductions.
So those are a couple of answers as to why smart power ends up being not terribly different from the hard power of the previous administration.
All right, now, it seems to me like the dumbest thing about Obama is the way, and I just mean political-wise.
You know, if I was corrupt enough that I would accept money to give these guys advice or something like that, I would say, stop coming out with these fancy speeches about how you're going to abolish nukes, how you're going to make peace in the Middle East, how you're going to do this, that, and the other thing, and then back down every time in the face of whatever domestic opposition or foreign lobby that amounts to domestic opposition in this country or whatever.
And the way he came into power, and this was obvious.
You and I may have talked about this in the spring of 2009, was what the hell is he doing pretending like he's going to really do something about creating a Palestinian state, ending even the rate of the expansion of the settlements in the West Bank, having, I mean, what's he going to do, unify Hamas in Gaza and the PLA in the West Bank and force Netanyahu to make a deal and to stop stealing land and whatever?
Yeah, right.
He's not going to do it.
We knew he wasn't going to do it.
We knew he couldn't do it, even if he really, really wanted to, and yet he kept claiming he was going to do it.
And so, you know, like Ray McGovern says, if he was Netanyahu, he would have gotten the lesson that he can do whatever he wants, that if he wants to start a war with Iran, for example, then what's Obama going to do about it?
Nothing.
Just like last time, he's going to back down, he's going to do what he has to do in order to survive politically, and that is please the lobby.
Well, let's look at the two major issues, the nuclear abolition speech and then the second, the Cairo speech on new Middle East policy.
On the nuclear abolition issue, there is no question that having a president come out there and say for the first time that a U.S. administration embraces the principle of nuclear abolition as very powerful.
And one could argue that that kind of new rhetoric about disarmament will ultimately have a profound effect on U.S. foreign policy.
Now, the problem is that Obama came at it very, shall we say, cautiously.
He said, well, we're not going to see it during my administration.
We may not even see it during the lifetime of my children or my grandchildren.
In other words, he said, don't expect me to expend a great deal of political capital on this.
Even in the same speech, he said, by the way, I'm only here to sign a deal to put radars here to make you a target for Russian nukes.
So if you're looking at the pushback he got from that, well, then we could talk about how he could have been considerably more courageous politically.
Like he did not have to make a deal, for instance, with John Kyle of Arizona, who said, look, I'm not going to support the new START treaty with Russia unless you, President Obama, support a $10 billion nuclear modernization program, some of which will come back to my state.
He didn't have to make that deal because ultimately John Kyle voted against the new START treaty anyway, so it didn't make any difference.
He could have pushed back much harder against Kyle and against the Senate Republicans and said, look, folks, I'm not going to give you all this money.
It's just totally ridiculous.
So yes, the speech rhetorically, I think it will be important ultimately, but in terms of how did it represent a politically courageous move when it came to implementation, no.
On the Middle East question, there too.
It was extremely important for an American president to get up there and say, yes, it's important for the United States to have a new relationship with Islam.
Islam is not an evil religion.
These are the contributions that Islam has made as a civilization to world culture, etc., etc.
But at the same time, remember, he was given the speech in Egypt.
He didn't say, and I'd like to take this opportunity to say that Hosni Mubarak is a dictator and we're not going to support him any longer.
In fact, U.S. policy was up until the very last moment in Egypt in support of Mubarak and his corrupt and dictatorial ways.
Nor did Obama say, look, we're not going to support Saudi Arabia any longer because Saudi Arabia has an extraordinarily dictatorial regime.
So there were definitely limits in terms of what the United States was going to do in terms of a really new relationship with the Muslim world and the Arab world.
So clearly Obama had a limit in both those cases to how far he was going to go when it came to transforming rhetoric into actual policy.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's just like people being tortured to death in Bahrain.
Sometimes you've got to break a few eggs to make an omelet or whatever.
We've got to keep our fifth fleet somewhere.
So, yeah, there are certain political realities that are going to trump human rights and lofty expressions.
You know, I mean, come on.
George Bush pretended that the invasion of Iraq was all about how much he cared for the people of Iraq, too.
You know, they all used humanitarianism and how much they care for, you know, it's really old white man's burden type stuff really as the excuse for their intervention.
And then, yeah, they've got very powerful interests at stake.
Like, well, what would happen if a regime came to power in Egypt that didn't want to abide by the old treaty with Israel anymore?
It could be really problematic.
We've set up sort of like economic bubbles.
We've set up bubbles of power in places where it wouldn't necessarily be that way if we weren't backing it all across the world, really, especially in the Middle East.
Well, the difference, I would say, between kind of how Bush approached it and how Obama approached it is Bush never really made appeals to international rules and regulations or international standards of human rights.
Bush was only concerned in terms of how the United States discussed these issues.
In other words, if we were going to help the people of Iraq, it was because of U.S. commitment to human rights.
If we were going to punish Saddam Hussein, it's because we, the United States, was pissed off at Saddam Hussein.
He would occasionally make reference when necessary for the building of a coalition of the willing.
But in general, George W. Bush was a unilateralist, and he came very strongly out of the tradition of American exceptionalism.
Obama, too, nods in the direction of American exceptionalism, especially when his political opponents accuse him of not obeying this critical principle of U.S. foreign policy.
However, Obama does, as a constitutional lawyer, as someone who comes out of a liberal tradition, he does make these appeals to international standards, to international principles of human rights.
So I think there we have a difference.
We're holding George Bush up in comparing his conduct to the principles he articulates as they come out of his exceptionalist, unilateralist tradition.
For Barack Obama, it's somewhat different the way we evaluate his performance.
It's not simply according to the traditional exceptionalist strain of American foreign policy.
It's also according to these principles that are articulated by him and his administration as liberal internationalist positions.
Now, sometimes it comes out to the same hypocrisy, but we're talking about, in some ways, a different set of principles by which we're judging their conduct.
Well, I guess the way I look at it is it's all the American empire, and when Obama uses the baby blue U.N. flag as his fig leaf, he may do it in a more believable manner than George W. Bush, who, after all, said he was fighting to enforce U.N. resolutions and all this kind of stuff to protect the credibility of the United Nations and its word being the law of the world and all that kind of stuff.
Obama does it in a way where it's more believable, but it really is.
I mean, all of liberal internationalism is just dupes for Lockheed and the empire anyway, right?
I mean, come on.
Well, if we look at the military-industrial complex and how it's prospered over the last couple of years, during the Obama administration, it's difficult to argue that liberal internationalism is anything but a facade for the military-industrial complex and its operations.
I do think there are some important differences in terms of our relationship with our allies, in terms of our participation in multilateral institutions, but, you know, in some sense, those are separate.
So, for instance, when the Obama administration is talking about a reduction of U.S. military spending, it's at the same time pushing hard for relaxation of controls and regulations on U.S. arms exports.
And the United States is not only the number one arms exporter in the world, but it's actually increasing its lead over its major competitors.
And the Obama administration realizes, at some fundamental level, that a reduction in overall U.S. military spending is going to create a gap for U.S. military contractors that they're going to have to fill somehow.
And one way that they can fill it is by selling those same weapons, not this time to Washington, but to other countries overseas.
Now, what that means in terms of liberal internationalism is that we might expect that the Obama administration would work hard for stricter controls, for instance, on exports of military weaponry, attach more stringent human rights regulations to that, and otherwise make it more difficult for the arms market to operate so freely around the world.
But in fact, unfortunately, because of this need to encourage U.S. military exports, that becomes a less important goal for the administration.
So in this case, the needs of the military-industrial complex trump the principles of liberal internationalism.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, as always.
So now let's talk about the coin doctrine.
We had a great interview with Kelly Vlahos last week about the end of it and the end of anybody pretending to believe in it anymore.
And they're actually rewriting the coin manual now.
And John Nagel is going to be the headmaster at the little boy's school because of what a failure he is in life.
I mean, he successfully extended a war and got tens of thousands more people killed.
He was good at that, but it didn't work the way he said it was going to work.
And so in that, he's a disgrace and his name always will be.
But anyway, so was it really smart at all to even try it?
Or isn't it the case that everybody knew the surge didn't really work in Iraq, that that was just a bunch of propaganda in the first place and hardly the basis for implementing the same strategy in an entirely different country, in an entirely different situation in Afghanistan?
And isn't it already the case that the publisher, ForeignPolicy.com, already said that he knew from firsthand sources that the only reason Obama even gave in and did the surge at all wasn't because he believed in it at all.
It was only because he was afraid the Republicans would call him a wimp.
And so he decided to be a wimp and cower and do what they wanted.
I think the latter argument is a pretty powerful one.
I mean, I would add to that that it wasn't just kind of a very specific political fear by Obama of being attacked by Republicans, but the overall kind of concern that the very institutions of American foreign policy, Pentagon, State Department, are so heavily invested in the so-called rebuilding or reconstruction of Afghanistan that to pull out rapidly would undermine the legitimacy of these institutions.
So this was a greater fear on the part of the Obama administration, Obama specifically.
In other words, there was a political decision made that we can't do this for political reasons, domestic political reasons, both because of attacks by the Republican Party, but also institutional reasons inside the administration.
And we have to find a military doctrine that enables us, essentially, to remain in Afghanistan, to provide a rationale for a surge, and not just a surge, but ultimately a drawdown.
In other words, a handover of greater authority to the Afghans, the pretense that we are winning hearts and minds and not simply killing people, that this military doctrine was necessary to put in place as a justification for what was essentially a set of political motivations here in Washington.
Man, tragic.
All right, now, quickly, if we can here, and we can go over time, because there's no schedule, really.
Tell us about the relationship with the North Koreans.
I mean, really, there hadn't been any, and I guess I'll take that as well enough alone, huh?
Something like that?
Well, as you know, we saw a turnaround in U.S. policy during the George W. Bush administration, the second half.
And for a variety of complicated reasons, the administration decided that it was possible to pursue a kind of engagement policy with North Korea beginning in 2007 or so.
And we saw the fruits of that, an actual kind of walking back by North Korea from its plutonium processing facilities.
The Obama administration comes in, and frankly, it's skeptical about the progress that's been made under the Bush administration.
It's not particularly interested in North Korea.
That doesn't rank very highly on its set of foreign policy priorities.
It's additionally overwhelmed with domestic issues, economic crisis much deeper than it anticipated.
So North Korea is not a big issue for the Obama administration coming in.
Now, it could have sent a memo, for instance, to North Korea and said, look, we understand what took place under our predecessor.
We want you guys to know that we will continue this policy.
So don't worry.
Just because there's been a change in administration doesn't mean that there's been a change in policy.
However, the fellow in the National Security Council who was in charge of Asia policy, Jeff Bader, decided no.
No, this did not send a good signal to the North Koreans.
So he axed the memo that would have gone from the State Department along those lines.
And the North Koreans were not happy.
The North Koreans were not happy to see, once again, a change in administration result in a change in policy, because, of course, this had happened when the Clinton administration transitioned into the Bush administration.
And so we saw an increase in hostile rhetoric.
We saw, you know, a deterioration already in the relationship between North Korea and South Korea and Japan.
And basically the Obama administration saying, look, we don't want any part of it.
Let Seoul, let Tokyo, two pretty hardline administrations there in terms of their North Korea policy.
Let's let Tokyo and Seoul basically run the show.
And this is in kind of marked contrast to what some people anticipated based on what Obama had said as a candidate.
In other words, if our adversaries, if U.S. adversaries approach us with an open hand, we'll respond with an open hand.
But that was not the case with North Korea.
And unfortunately we saw a continued deterioration in U.S.
-North Korean relations until where we are today, where there's basically very little contact between the two countries.
We have a new leader over in North Korea, a potential for new policy with the United States, but a very cautious attitude here in Washington because, again, we're in the electoral season.
Obama doesn't really want Mitt Romney to stand up in a debate and say, hey, you are sitting down and talking with tyrants over in North Korea.
Obviously you are not a human rights president.
You are not fit for re-election.
So he doesn't want to hand the Republicans an easy debating topic.
Yeah.
Well, you know, if I was the Democrats on that one, I might even be generous to the Republicans and just call them off the clock and warn them, don't pick a fight about North Korea with me because I will destroy you on that issue because, you know, in fact it was Gordon Prather's last article that he wrote before he retired was how Bush pushed North Korea to nukes.
And how everything was fine until the Republicans came in and screwed everything up and pushed them to nuclear weapons.
And it's, you know, all right there in 750 words, no problem.
And every word perfect, too.
Well, that's true.
I'm sure Barack Obama can make that argument.
That might be advice to Karl Rove to tell his little sock puppet, Mitt Romney, to keep his mouth shut on the DPRK issue because that could end up blowing up in their face pretty bad.
You would hope so.
But unfortunately, you know, we've seen other issues in which obviously the Democrats have plenty they can use to, you know, destroy Republican arguments, whether it's the debt issue.
And Romney still goes ahead and does it anywhere.
Ryan goes ahead and does it anyway.
So I wouldn't be surprised.
I mean, so far we haven't seen North Korea really emerge as an issue.
Romney has said, for instance, that the Obama administration hasn't been tough enough, has not used sanctions, tough enough sanctions, hasn't put enough pressure on China.
But, you know, that hasn't really gone beyond, you know, talking points.
Well, and I think that really goes to show how bad the Democrats in power, I don't mean all the voters out there in the world or whatever, but the Democratic Party in power in D.C. really is and just how powerful those institutions that we've been talking about are in, you know, the so-called national security state in general and their interest in pushing this thing forward.
Because, you know, I have to be James Carville or some expert, you know, political analyst to point out that if the Democrats just did the right thing on any of these issues, they would be able to easily make a mockery of the Republican position and be completely bulletproof from any attack that they're weak.
Say, weak?
What are you talking about?
We made peace.
You guys are crazy.
And they would win the argument that easy, lickety-split.
But they have no interest in winning that argument.
They have every interest in perpetuating the exact same policy.
Right.
That is who they really are.
Yeah.
The Democrats have effectively taken foreign policy out of the debate in the presidential elections by becoming much more hawkish than the Republicans themselves.
And it's a kind of reversal for Obama because, of course, when he was running against Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, in many ways he did present himself as the peace alternative.
I mean, there are a lot of reasons why he wasn't the peace alternative and why there were lots of complicated contradictions in his campaign.
But anyway, he did put himself forward against Hillary as the person who is much more conciliatory and diplomacy-oriented, and certainly that was the case with John McCain as well.
But it's the reverse now with Obama running for re-election, casting Mitt Romney as the incompetent when it comes to foreign policy, as someone who doesn't understand the complexities of foreign policy, and Obama himself as having no reluctance whatsoever with the use of force overseas.
All right.
So have you ever heard of this guy, Ben Swan?
He's a local news reporter, kind of a Ron Paul-y and leaning guy, but he gets himself into some controversial topics.
No.
Well, he's a pretty big hit on the YouTube, and I'll recommend to you his interview of Barack Obama that he scored.
And it's just great.
And he's so polite.
He's the cookie-cutter local news guy in everything about the way he looks and talks and everything.
But all his questions are about assassinating American citizens and their kids to death.
So you're at war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but you're fighting for al-Qaeda in Syria, right?
How do you justify that, Mr. President?
And this kind of thing.
It's so much fun to watch Barack Obama basically alone, standing on the stage next to this guy, helpless, trying to come up with some kind of answer to stutter through about how, well, we're supporting the rebellion in Syria, but we're trying to make sure that it's not bad guys who are getting the support.
And he actually seemed like a guy, a president, who's got a rock and a hard place there.
Again, major institutional interests who want a regime change in Syria, and yet the realization that you're bringing unleashed Sunni radicalism, Iraq Civil War-style Sunni radicalism at war to Syria.
Are you really sure that's what you want to do?
Anyway, I recommend the video to you.
It's a president stuck, and he does seem a bit reluctant, and yet all reporting unless you know otherwise, right?
Is that the CIA and the JSOC are helping every step of the way over there?
I'd love to see that.
On the Syria issue again, the administration is of two minds.
It doesn't want to see a major destabilization in Syria.
It doesn't want to see that spread around the region.
It has taken to a certain extent an Israeli position.
In other words, Assad is a tremendous human rights violation unto himself.
However, he is to a certain extent a force for a small measure of stability in Syria today.
And yet at the same time, of course, the administration has given the go-ahead to arming the rebels and providing other kinds of assistance to the rebels.
I think the calculation is that it will find some kind of a sweet spot in between hedging against complete collapse of the regime there and supporting the rebels so that it finds some kind of exit strategy from the current civil war.
That's a holding pattern kind of policy.
Obviously, the administration doesn't want anything to blow up before the elections, but after the elections perhaps they'll move one side to the other, probably more toward the policy of supporting the rebels.
Well, but then everything's going to work out after that.
I mean, after all, that guy Bashar al-Assad is an evil torture.
I can prove it.
He used to work for George Bush torturing people to death.
Yeah.
Well, you know, if Assad falls, or we could say when Assad falls, then we'll have to face a very different political reality in Syria and probably the region.
And that's not going to be an easy set of calculations for the U.S. government, certainly, or for the Israeli government.
You know, the rebels, as you say, there are some extremist elements in there, but there are some other elements which are not.
You know, it is at this stage a coalition of unlikely actors.
I would hesitate to say one way or another what the kind of political complexion of such a rebel force would be after the fall of Assad, but we've seen a mixed record in Libya, clearly, some interesting and good political forces, some still wretched political forces at work there.
All right, everybody, that's Jon Pfeffer.
You can find him at ForeignPolicyInFocus, that's F-P-I-F.org.
Find him at JonPfeffer.com and at TomDispatch.com, where his latest is The Dumbing Down of American Foreign Policy.
Thanks very much.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
I appreciate it, too.
Good talking to you.
