All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Steve Clemens.
He's the director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and the director of the Japan Policy Research Institute.
He writes the very influential blog, The Washington Note.
Welcome back to the show, Steve.
Great to be with you, Scott.
Good to talk to you again, my friend.
Well, I think my first question is going to be about Iran today.
I just talked with General Robert Gard from the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, and he seems to think that there's still a danger that there will be an air war against Iran sometime this year before the next president takes office.
What do you think of that?
I understand why the general thinks that, given the IAEA report that essentially says that Iran has not stopped.
I don't think anyone's surprised, but it has not stopped its uranium enrichment process.
But I maintain, as he probably does, pretty good relations with military and intelligence people who tell me that nothing fundamentally has changed in the dynamic since the NIE report was issued.
And given that, it would be, I think, beyond reckless to imagine a president without having the capitalist belly there to initiate that.
And certainly there would be no international appetite to work with us on that.
So I disagree with him pretty vigorously.
Do you think that really the chances are almost nothing at this point?
I think that the only chances that we have of a direct military conflict with Iran is if there were some triggering incident that could be manufactured.
Some people have, as I talked on your show a long time ago, we had an advisor of Vice President Cheney's staff out saying that they were so frustrated that they were losing the policy battle around the president that they felt they had to tie the president's hands with an incident that would remove and undermine the diplomatic effort, sort of remove Gates and Condi Rice and the others from the table, and give them a free hand to initiate something else.
The other thing that we all really need to worry about is, one, it's a very fragile situation.
And if you remember those speedboats that were racing around some of our warships, I think that the most worrisome thing that I've heard in the last three months was our intelligence people saying that they didn't believe that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, that the IRGC guys that were in those boats necessarily broadcasted those announcements that they were going to explode something.
That is very scary, because what it means is you've got other players in the region who can try and exploit incidents, who can try and create incidents, and make it look like it was either Iran's provocative act or Israel's provocative act.
In other words, I worry about this fragile situation being hijacked by someone, and in that manufacturing a kind of Gulf of Tonkin incident, if you will, because there are a lot of players out there who do want us to see us have a war or a conflict in the region.
That worries me a lot.
The problem of accidental war worries me a lot, but I don't think we're going to see the kind of thing General Gard talked about, which was a conscious decision to issue an airstrike against Iran.
Well, you know, Gareth Porter has written that there's a danger that Osama bin Laden might stage an incident and try to frame Iran or create one that at least would give Cheney the excuse to blame it on Iran.
Gareth Porter is exactly right.
Because, of course, that's what Osama bin Laden wants, is to be rid of the Shiite ayatollahs in Persia, right?
Well, I think he essentially, what we've always wrongly done, is looked at the fact that bin Laden and al-Qaeda somehow had a beef with us and was trying to take down our government.
Not true.
What they're really trying to do is take down the Jordanian government, the Moroccan government, the Saudi government, and a number of governments that are at war with states in their region, and to some degree they're using us as a pawn in that dimension to try and radicalize the Arab street.
And in that process, you know, one of the things I would tell people, the scariest nightmare, you've got Iran that is doing an odd dance, where on one hand it's giving a lot of aid and support to Karzai's government in Afghanistan, for instance, but it's also giving a lot of aid and support to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
And why is it playing both sides?
Well, it's a strategic calculator and it's looking at, well, who's the Taliban right next to, and to some degree morphing with, is a lot of al-Qaeda elements.
So if you were to bomb Iran, one of the things I really worry about is that you blow the pressure valve off, if you will, in Iran, and they then begin looking at how can you marry bin Laden's goals and objectives of bringing down some of these governments, take Jordan, for example, with the kind of state-driven terror networks that Iran clearly has.
That kind of collaboration where you might see assassinations of some of the leading players in the region may advance both bin Laden's objectives and, frankly, also Iran's objectives.
So we want to prevent that from happening.
That's why I don't think a strike will happen.
I think it would hatch that kind of activity.
But bin Laden clearly wants, well, I should say bin Laden or his lieutenants want to see those sort of dynamics unleashed in the region, and so Gareth Porter is right on the money on that.
All right.
Now, let's talk about the big news, really, this week, which is the end of the reign of Fidel Castro in Cuba.
Now, you asked the question...
Going out on his own.
I'm sorry?
On his own terms, on his own schedule.
Yeah.
Well, now, you asked the question on your blog which presidential candidate is going to step up here, and, of course, you know there's only one answer to that.
I believe we're at a time where we even ought to talk to Cuba and trade and travel to Cuba.
That wasn't a particularly popular line that you had there, particularly with John McCain.
But after Castro announced his resignation yesterday, you reiterated your call to lift the embargo on Cuba.
Why?
You know, just quickly, after I left there, although I was booed for that, I went outdoors, and we had hundreds of young Cuban-Americans who were absolutely with me.
No, this is a wonderful opportunity.
There's been several of us in Congress arguing this for years.
Sanctions don't work.
Sanctions are the first step toward war and confrontation.
Just think how much better we'd do now that we trade with Vietnam.
We couldn't accomplish in war what we accomplished in peace.
So we should have been trading with the Cubans for a long time.
And that would have undermined communism.
So I say the sooner we get back to normal relations with Cuba, the better it is for both of us.
But what do you say to people who say the only way to deal with the Castro brothers is to put the squeeze on them?
Well, it didn't work.
They've had their chance almost 50 years, and it hasn't worked.
It didn't undermine Castro one bit.
It always solidified his power.
So the worst thing that's gotten Cuba, he says, ah, see, it's the Americans' fault.
No, trade is the answer.
The founders argued this.
All free traders believe it.
The irony is, the people who claim they believe in free trade and all these trade agreements are the ones who are the strongest for all these sanctions.
There's such hypocrisy with those free traders who want sanctions, but claim they need free trade.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
All right, Steve, so which of your Democrats can top that?
Well, the only one that can top that who dropped out of the race was Chris Dodd.
Chris Dodd really set the gold standard, you know, along with Ron Paul here on basically opening up Cuba and recognizing and saying something really, really important.
And everybody needs to understand it.
The so-called squeeze has been Castro's best friend.
And people need to understand that the so-called anti-Castro Cuban exile community in Miami that I think have been led astray, because I think there's some differences in that group now.
Those groups have been the ones who essentially have propped up what we've seen in Cuba all these years.
How do you think an island nation of 11 million people can last nine presidents?
Right.
Especially without the Soviet Union.
There's got to be an excuse.
We've really not ever listened to the fact, you know, the congressman is absolutely right.
What a great clip.
Where did you get that clip?
That was from CNN's American Morning.
Wow.
Great clip.
I'll send you the link.
Yeah.
I used to, let's see, I guess back in the 1990s, I had a conversation with an open trade capitalist type where I guess I was expressing my frustration that you have such oppression in China and artificially low wages and all this American industry leaving to go over to China and how that's a problem and maybe there ought to be some sort of protection to do something about it.
The argument that won me over was that, no, no, it's opening relations with China is what killed communism there.
We still call it communist China and it kind of is an authoritarian China still, but it's certainly not communist China anymore.
The reason that we don't have to worry about the domino effect in Asia is because China's a capitalist country now.
It changes the dynamic.
It creates other challenges, but at least you're not thinking about, you know, a full-on military assault that could result in millions of deaths and ruin global economy.
I mean, I think that it changes the nature of competition.
The other thing about China, which does suppress wages, which does engage in unfair trade practices, nonetheless, it gets a lot right and China today has moved so far down the path of integrating itself into international institutions, it's out multilateraling America today in key ways and it's listed hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
I mean, one of the great concerns we have in the world is supposed to be those folks around the world that aren't up at the table of the benefits of globalization at all.
And while I think that we do need to invest in America, we do need to take care of our middle class.
It doesn't mean that you're anti-development and that you've got to be completely opposed to helping others rise and I think that empowering people and bringing these people out of poverty in China and giving them, you know, hundreds of millions of folks new resources to move in different directions, allow them to have self-determination over a much more significant part of their lives, that is the basis of the beginning of liberty.
And the beginning of liberty leads to many other factors and frankly, that is, you know, and I hesitate to say it, but it is part of the ingredient, not everything, of a democratization process from the bottom up as opposed to how the neocons were pursuing this, which is a democratization at the end of a bayonet and from top down, which I don't think works.
And in fact, they even enshrined property rights in the Chinese constitution a couple of years back.
That's right.
That's bottom up right there.
They had no choice but to do that, basically.
Yeah, and I was down in Havana, Cuba, and what was interesting is, well, these are corporations.
After 96, when the Soviet Union stopped patronizing the Cuban economy, literally the Cuban economy went and, you know, just collapsed.
It shrank by about 35% and people down there who lived through this tell me it was just incredible that the Cuban people physically, their bodies shrank because of their intake of calories decreased.
I mean, it was a really horrible time, and there were things like the revitalization of Old Havana.
It's one of the great United Nations historical landmarks, whatever they call it, UNESCO.
The World Heritage sites?
Well, it's a World Heritage site, and there was just no more money and whatnot to revitalize.
So one of the interesting things that Castro did is he gave this historian carte blanche to control Old Havana and said, it's yours.
You make the rules.
We're not going to put through any bureaucracies.
And you can go provide licenses to firms, hotels, restaurants, other countries coming in to invest, and the money from that will go into a till.
In other words, they can go make money, open a chocolate cafe, which I was in the other day, and the money from the chocolate cafe may go in to help in an art studio next door.
So if you go to Old Havana, it's really fascinating because about three-quarters of it has been completely redone and revitalized.
I saw Benetton stores, four- and five-star hotels, but what they're doing is they've used the money, like many capitalists would, to then reinvest in their community to build things for kids and playgrounds.
It's not all pretty.
There's still people living in overcrowded situations, and there's a lot of poverty in Cuba, of course.
There is a dynamic down there that isn't really the old communism that we thought.
And the biggest issue, which I don't think people think, you remember Fidel Castro was an exporter of revolution, of guns, of military people in Angola and everywhere else, a lot of other places.
Today, they export doctors.
There is no arms industry left in Cuba.
They are not buying Soviet weapons systems and exporting.
I don't know why Cuba still justifies to be on the terror watch list when we're considering taking North Korea off.
And there's a lot of it going on.
So when I listen to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama gave some very strong words last night that he would take a different direction with Cuba, but he still framed it in terms of a benchmark for action, as did Hillary Clinton, that they don't require with North Korea, they don't require with Vietnam, they don't require with China, and I find it bizarre that here we've taken this kind of people-to-people, pro-engagement stance with most of the world, and they can't say that the only place in the whole globe that the Cold War got colder in the last ten years was in U.S.
-Cuba relations, for very cynical political calculations in the United States.
And I think what's interesting about Castro moving on is there are going to be two punctuation points.
You know, February 24th, when is that, Saturday or something, or this weekend, maybe Monday, I don't know when the 24th is, is the formal date that the new president will actually be formally announced, when the National Assembly meets.
And in that process, that will then terminate, create a punctuation point for the end of the longest-serving chief of state alive today, who's not a monarch.
And I think that that's a really interesting thing, that he's going out in the Cuban version of a constitutional system on his own terms.
But what I think is also very interesting is that he may die this year.
I mean, who knows when he will die, but he's old, he's sick.
And what you're going to see when he passes on is the History Channel, CNN, God forbid even Fox News, Discovery, all going out and telling the story of Fidel Castro.
And it's not just going to be about communism and this guy that wrestled with president.
He's one of the big personalities of sort of yesteryear, leaving and moving on.
And you're going to have a lot of Americans, you know, look at this weird Cuban-U.S. relationship and say, why is it like that again?
Why are we still strangling them with an embargo?
Why is a democratic government restricting our rights to travel?
There's a guy named, a great guy, I actually like him very much, a Republican congressman from Arizona named Jeff Flake.
And Jeff is one of the most active supporters of removing travel restrictions for all Americans.
Because he says, you know, if I'm going to have my travel restricted anywhere in the world, I'd rather have a communist government telling me where I can go or can't go than my own democratic and free United States.
And many people think that this travel ban is unconstitutional.
And I wish someone would legally challenge it.
Oh, that's interesting.
Has anybody ever tried to sue over that?
I don't know if they have.
There is a pending possible lawsuit because there may be, right now there are family-related travel opportunities.
And you know, people like me who are researchers and writers can go to Cuba legally under license.
I went in Havana last March with Larry Wilkerson, the former chief of staff for Colin Powell.
And we went down to Havana together legally under license, but most Americans, of course, cannot go.
Students cannot go, businessmen cannot go.
You have to have an explicit purpose for going down and doing this.
But one of the things that I find egregious is that there are different rules for family members.
So those with Cuban-American families can go down because of, you know, just family concern reasons.
They have, you know, death in the family or illness in the family, and so they can go across the border once every three years.
And what Jeff Flake also said when he helped launch our Cuba initiative at the New America Foundation, he said, you know, the stranglehold that the Bush administration has tightened this to is forcing many Cuban-American families to decide whether they attend their mother's funeral in Cuba or their father's funeral.
And this has created a lot of stress and why you're seeing some real tension even inside Miami over the state of travel.
But I find it outrageous that there is a distinction in our law between an American citizen of any color or ethnic background and those with family members.
And there is some interest in looking into that issue legally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That sounds like a good one for somebody to sue over.
Well, so let me ask you, because you kind of said rhetorically in the voice of the American people, why is it still like this?
Well, why?
I mean, is it just a billion people smaller than China?
I mean, to some degree, Cuba has been able to stay in this Cold War cocoon or we've kept it in a Cold War cocoon because the number of Americans that feel any consequence of this are small.
And the political calculation has always been that the only ones that, you know, and it sounds awful, but the only ones who really care about Cuba or which Cuba is high on the list are the Cuban-Americans who live in New Jersey and Miami.
And so these communities have been effective at organizing and creating political PowerPoints, donor centers.
The Cuban-American National Foundation has been one of the most effective lobbying institutions to protect this.
They have been successful in getting earmarked grants out of the government every year, millions, tens of millions of dollars that go into various Miami-related NGO activity and others.
There's a whole industry built around the embargo and the standoff between the United States and Cuba, which I think Barack Obama, if he turns out to be the nominee, which I think he will be, and if he turns out to be the next president, I think he will shut that down.
Well, let me ask you about Barack Obama, some more about him.
It seems like the neocons definitely don't like him.
And particularly about foreign policy, it's not just that they're conservatives and dislike his kind of domestic welfareism or anything.
They're accusing him of being completely anti-Israel and seem to really be going after him.
And I know that he has Zbigniew Brzezinski as an advisor and other realists.
I know that you know Zbigniew Brzezinski and know these various different circles of foreign policy thoughts.
So really my question is, yeah, how much crazier than Zbigniew Brzezinski are the neocons?
I mean, what's the relative difference in their foreign policy?
Are you asking me between Zbigniew Brzezinski and John Bolton or Richard, well, he's not really a neocon, but a Richard Perle or something?
Yeah, Perle or Crystal or, you know, the people around Obama versus the people around McCain.
How much different is their foreign policy?
I think it's enormously different.
I think that John McCain also has a diverse set of people around him.
I'm theoretically, you know what, I'm also a fan of Brent Scowcroft, who is listed, Richard Armitage is listed on McCain's team, but, you know, so are Randy Shuneman, John Bolton.
Many other neoconservatives are now signing on to John McCain after Rudy Giuliani dropped out of the race.
So you've got heterodoxy there, but the fact is that John McCain isn't really listening to the realists who may be on his list, and I think they feel uncomfortable, perhaps, being on, you know, as they listen to him and talk about the inevitability of other wars and whatnot.
But on the Barack Obama side, the diversity tilts in other directions.
You have Gail Smith, who is the real architect and conceptualizer of Right to Protect, very concerned, like Samantha Power, over the dynamics of genocide, of poverty and disease, particularly in Africa.
I would say Susan Rice, who's one of the top advisers, is also there.
You've got Anthony Lake, President Clinton's first national security advisor, who is really wrapped up in a concept called the Concert of Democracies.
And I admire these people and respect them, however, I find them weak when it comes to prioritizing national security objectives that you're going to pursue in any ordered way and also somewhat dismissive of the fact that America has limited means, limited attention, limited times at bat to get a number of these things right.
We're in a very diminished situation in the world today, and you can't do all these things, so what do you do?
When you look at the broader set, there's many of them, Big Brzezinski, who frankly, I think, is a serious realist who's focused on progressive ends.
And I think that he believes that the challenges America is facing today in the Middle East are the defining challenges in this era, and thus we just can't get them wrong.
He thinks we need to be out of Iraq, but use the leverage of leaving Iraq to try and create a different equilibrium, both within Iraq and with the neighboring regions, and to do Some of the things that people like Flint Leverett have written about in the American Prospect magazine of trying to simultaneously deal with a number of these issues in the region, from Syria to problems with Iran to rejectionism in Jordan and Egypt around Israel, Palestine issues, and Brzezinski believes that, a lot like Chuck Hagel, of whom I'm a fan, that you cannot make a false choice between Israeli security and Arab grievances, and that you need to manage both and push both forward.
And I don't know if you saw the New York Times today, you know, the window may be closing where you've got Arab League states finally saying, you know, we keep putting these proposals of normalization forward to Israel, and they've not been taken up.
And each time these governments did that, they're putting themselves to some degree at odds with their own population, their own citizens.
And Israel has been, I think, very slow in finding a way to reach some sort of deal with its Arab neighbors, and so now they're talking about maybe we abandon the two-state solution and we just stay with the one-state solution.
I have to tell you, the one-state solution with Israel is one that decays very rapidly.
I was with the Deputy Prime Minister of Israel just a couple of months ago, Chaim Ramon, and he says Israel cannot be both Jewish and democratic in a one-state system because they'll be overrun by demographic realities, and two, it will force them into an apartheid-like situation, which is exactly the same words not to, you know, that Ehud Olmert, even before I mentioned Jimmy Carter, Ehud Olmert used those words about what kind of fate Israel faces if it doesn't reach a two-state solution.
But now you see the Arabs losing heart on this.
So, you know, Brzezinski, in my mind, is as close to a, you know, a Kissinger or a Dean Acheson, a kind of a wily strategic thinker who can think in the many different levels and complexities of how to move an international system, and there aren't a lot of these people on the democratic side.
Richard Holbrook is another.
And I think that it's very good that Barack Obama has someone of the firepower of Brzezinski near him.
He's not going to be an astronaut or have any, you know, role, but at least he'll be there as a sounding board, and I think that that's important.
On the neocon side, I think you have a lot of people who want to reject any movement forward at all, and who think that the status quo is preservable, and I keep telling them it's not.
It's exactly like the levies in New Orleans, and you're going to have a big storm come along, and the security levy of America's provision of security to Israel is becoming weaker and weaker as we show more and more limits in the world.
So you've got to achieve a different kind of security and a different kind of arrangement in that neighborhood that is stable and that has some sustainability over time.
And otherwise, I think, you know, I am a fan of Israel, too.
I think this is the pro-Israel position.
I keep telling people on the neocon side, I said, you guys are anti-Israel because you're undermining Israel's survivability and its interests, and to some degree we need to turn that around.
So there's a huge distinction between Barack Obama's team on the neoconservative side, and then the realists and the kind of global justice crowd around Barack Obama.
Well, I like to think that in a Barack Obama administration, there would be a lot of progress toward peace in Palestine, and I guess I like to hope that the realist types could temper some of that imbalance and lack of priorities among the humanitarian interventionist crowd.
I have to tell you, when I read about, you know, Samantha Power and some of these others, I'm not very reassured that any of their proposed humanitarian missions are really any better conceived than our current adventure in Iraq.
Well, I think that this is an important distinction, and, you know, Samantha Power is a friend of mine.
I greatly admire her.
I greatly admire Susan Rice.
The issue is, you can't just walk into a system.
Let's take Kenya, for example, and I just finished reading a book that I highly recommend to everyone when it comes out.
I got it before.
It's written by Helene Cooper.
Helene is an African-American, actually, now.
She was born and raised in Liberia.
She was descended from some of the early founders of the, you know, black Americans, or, you know, they weren't Americans then, but, you know, sort of, you know, black citizens in the States who were returned to Liberia to help found it, Eliza Johnson and others.
And she tells in her memoir, called The House at Sugar Beach, really growing up in this world, and she kind of was living an upper-crust life in that world there, and saw how it came apart and the beginnings of conflict and a nasty civil war.
And I don't want to prescribe what might happen in Kenya, and I'm hurt by the commentary that in Kenya there seems to be some arrangements underway between the opposition, Odinga, and the Kibaki government.
But the importance of it is it feels a lot like Helene Cooper's story of 1989 and 90.
And when Barack Obama went there in November of 2006 and gave a strongly passionate condemnation of what he called corruption, but it was just a veiled attack on the Kibaki government, one has to ask the question of, you know, nobody's looked at this lately, but they ought to go back and read this speech.
What responsibility, when you join up with a group in another country, and you basically say, you know, here are our concerns, and corruption is bad, but then it kind of morally obligates you to be attached to some of the solutions.
And as I'm going to write about Barack Obama, whom I admire and I want to succeed, they have to be careful of a naivete when they walk into one of these places and haven't thought about all the other unintended consequences that can come from the kind of good actions we'd like to do.
You know, good actions may be something that we can inspire folks to, but it takes a long time and it takes resources, it takes attention.
And I think, you know, in Africa, regrettably, but it's just the way it is, elections happen and elections are stolen.
And what probably happened, in my view, in Kenya, is the government probably stole the election, probably screwed the opposition.
The opposition is angry.
But typically, in many African states, they don't come apart like they're doing in Kenya.
They somehow find a way to get an accommodation, or the opposition exploits and extorts something from the government.
But in this case, the opposition didn't back down.
Now, is it because Barack Obama went in November 2006 and gave his speech, and that Odinga has tried to manipulate his, you know, tribal and alleged close family relationship with Obama?
I don't know.
Maybe that's true, but I think we have to be, everyone has to be concerned of just casually launching crusades on the left, just as we have to be concerned about crusades on the right.
And they can really launch us into some very irresponsible activity, in which many, many people die.
That doesn't mean that the moral order is right in these countries, but it does mean that you can't go in casually, and that you've got a responsibility to somehow be part of those pieces.
And I think that takes resources, it takes attention, it takes investment, it takes aid, it takes telling the American people why it is important, and then it takes the decision to say, okay, what are we not going to do, because we're going to do this?
And that's what I don't hear from the global justice crowd.
I don't hear any sense of how they're going to reorder our priorities and resources, and what we're not going to do.
I hear these kitchen sink addresses, where they say we're going to do everything from climate change to Israel-Palestine, to Darfur, to Latin America, I mean, name it, we're going to do it.
But, you know, what is real, and what are you going to focus on first?
Because America's in a diminished, sickly situation after this administration.
The more hype I hear, the more concerned I get, for exactly the same reasons you did.
Sorry to be so long-winded on that, but you pushed one of my buttons.
No, no, I'm glad to hear it.
You know, that's the way I look at it, too.
I mean, the neocons consider themselves humanitarians, only tough guys at the same time, or whatever, but it seems like what we have in common between the liberal internationalists and the neoconservatives is just a refusal to accept even the possibility that there could be consequences of their actions beyond exactly what they predict.
I mean, you bring up the possibility that Obama's speech influenced the violence in Kenya.
Here on this show, we've talked about violence in Darfur, and how there were peace agreements that were, you know, the ink was dry, or ready to be signed by various parties, and yet all the talk of intervention by Western powers basically scrapped the peace deal, destroyed the peace deal, as each side tried to position themselves to bring in the internationals on their side against the other, and so forth, where peace would have been achieved before.
And even the talk of humanitarian intervention has prolonged the conflict.
Right.
There are cases, and I agree with Gail Smith and some of the right to protect people, there are some cases where intervention can be justified.
But there are few and far between, and we don't have a good sense, and there's very rarely a discussion of what those benchmarks for intervention would be, but the kind of broad scale of liberal interventionism on the left, and neoconservatism on the right, carry a lot of the same DNA for how they think.
They think about moral reasons for being involved, which I think appeal to many Americans, because we try to be decent, we want decent outcomes, we want the world to live in justice, and the small guy to have rights, and women to be treated well, and, you know, not to have this kind of disease and famine and problems at large.
You know, these are complex problems that require complex solutions, and it doesn't mean they shouldn't be pursued, but dammit, you know, we need to make sure that at the end of the day, you know, you've had a calculation of interest, that tomorrow, you have at least not eroded American interest and American capabilities to such a point that you can't fight another day.
And what I find disturbing on both the neoconservative gen of the Bill Kristol folks and others with whom I've had many, many debates and arguments, is that they consider that calculation of interest and our resources almost immoral.
And to some degree, a lot of my friends in the global intervention side, and I do believe in democracy in America, but, you know, it's a bottom-up process.
It takes time, it takes resources, and it's not all going to come from us, frankly.
There are other forces out there in the world that I think move economies that way, but when you're sending troops, men and women, to potentially die in another country, the bar ought to be really darn high.
And in this case, what I see is, when I tell a lot of the folks who are very good people, again, I want to emphasize this, because I know many people on the left listen to anti-war radios, I admire them, but you have to make sure that America's national security portfolio as a whole is not so undermined that it prevents our ability to go out and do something else good the next day.
And that means you've got to make choices, and you can't do everything.
And that is what, you know, a president and his or her team need to get their heads around and have honest discussions about.
Nobody wants to do that yet, because Barack Obama is not president of the United States yet.
He's running for president, and people don't want to make these choices because they're afraid it will undermine the support that they have, even within the Democratic Party.
But you need to give some indication that you're willing to have that sort of discussion.
And I, frankly, and I've written this frequently about Barack Obama, I haven't seen it.
I keep saying that more mystique and hype and opportunity, I'm going to, you know, against John McCain, I'll support Barack Obama.
The point is, I want to see some indication of an ability to requisition experience of the Brzezinski sort, and then a serious prioritization of what our agenda and roster is and how we're going to deploy our resources in ways that were far better than we did before to try to achieve our objectives.
Because I think what's happening in the world right now is that the world looks at us as an impotent, big country that can't achieve the objectives it sets out in the world, whether they're good global justice objectives, or even whether they're neocon-driven Iraq objectives.
And the consequences of that are that our own friends, our allies in the world, don't count on us as much anymore.
And enemies are moving their agendas.
And we have this delusion that we're somehow the key player in all these regions.
Well, the world is moving on, and doesn't see us as the pivot point on which all of its decisions are made.
We've become less and less relevant in regions all around the world.
I was in China recently, and China's, you know, doing gangbusters in the world with a charm offensive.
No big challenges to its interest in the world.
And I said, you know, what are you working on?
I asked a friend of mine in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs over there, and he said, we're working to figure out ways to keep you distracted in small Middle Eastern countries.
And, you know, I said, there's a point to that.
I mean, it was a joke.
You know, to some degree, there's a kernel of truth there that we need to deal with.
And I want to see from the Barack Obama team, or anyone running for President of the United States, some sense of humility about our situation that we're in, and some sense that, yes, we need to be about big things, good ideas, solving global problems.
I'm all for that.
We need to collaborate with allies, look at institutions, but liberal interventionism in and of itself, because of bad stuff out in the world, needs to be measured against other priorities.
And we need to have, I sort of feel like we need to have a PAYGO system in foreign policy.
No discussion of any new initiative, unless you tell us what initiative you're going to put to the side.
Well, now, Steve, you're the director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation.
I know you're always putting on these symposiums and conferences and so forth, discussing American foreign policy.
What do you have coming up?
Oh, wow.
Well, we're going to have, we're going to have a couple of what I call mega-conferences.
Don't ask me for the date, because I don't have them in front of me.
But in March, we're going to do...
Okay, and quick, we just have one minute.
What's that?
And quick, we just have one minute.
Okay, in March, we're going to do a big mega-conference on the Middle East, on Israel-Palestine issues, and what else is going on in the region.
And then we're also going to do Cuba, because I think we're getting to a till point to see U.S.
-Cuba relations go in a new direction.
That's great.
I'm really glad to hear that.
And I sure wish you a lot of luck with that project.
Well, Scott, thanks.
All right, everybody.
That's Stephen Clemens.
He's the director of the Japan Policy Research Institute and the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation.
And his blog is The Washington Note.
Thanks very much for your time today, sir.
Thank you, sir.
