08/08/14 – Stephen Walt – The Scott Horton Show

You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them, but still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Again, the full interview archive is there at scotthorton.org.
More than 3,000 interviews now going back to 2003.
Scotthorton.org.
And our next guest is Stephen Walt from Harvard University and co-author of the article and the book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
Welcome back to the show, Steve.
How are you doing?
I'm doing just fine.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I sure appreciate you joining us today.
And for some reason, foreign policy let me around their pay wall.
Maybe it's just because it's kind of near the beginning of the month here, but I saw a great piece for foreignpolicy.com.
Do no more harm.
I'm glad they gave it a nicer title there.
Do no more harm here.
It's time to walk away from not just Iraq, but even the Middle East, you say, and not look back.
Do tell.
Well, the basic point is to say that right now, if you look at the last 20 or even 30 years of American policy towards the Middle East region, it's had far more negative effects than positive effects.
Even when the United States had good intentions, we have not been able to deliver anything particularly positive.
We're also at a period where there really are no attractive allies there in the Middle East, whether one looks at the dictatorship in Egypt, the tyranny in Syria, the geriatric monarchy in Saudi Arabia, an increasingly right-wing Israel, where lots of disturbing developments have been taking place.
There's sort of nowhere to look where you would really want to associate the United States closely.
And moreover, there's just not very many problems there where the application of American power is likely to make them better.
And that goes as well for certain diplomatic problems like the long-running peace process there.
So the piece basically argues not that the United States should ignore the region completely, but that it should be far lower down on our set of priorities.
And we should be very, very leery of getting directly involved there.
All right.
Well, so I guess I don't know everything about it, but I mostly imagine we don't really have a policy about China's relationship with Mongolia because it's just outside of our purview, right?
But so how close to that sort of position would you like to see here?
Well, the United States does have certain interests in the Middle East, but I would argue those interests are best served by distancing ourselves from the region rather than continuing to meddle in it.
For 50 years or so, the United States' basic interest has been to make sure that no single country or hostile country dominated the region.
We didn't want the Soviet Union to dominate during the Cold War.
We were worried about Iraq dominating the oil-rich Persian Gulf for a while.
But if you look at the Middle East now, there's really no danger that anyone's going to dominate the region.
What you see instead are multiple divisions, multiple overlapping cleavages.
The idea that Turkey, China, ISIS, Iraq, or anybody else is going to exert control and impose order on all this trouble there is remote.
And the United States shouldn't be trying to do that either.
So it's not that the United States has absolutely zero interest there.
It's that our interests are best served with more of a hands-off policy.
Well, yeah, it does almost seem like a perfect stalemate, right?
Where ISIS is surrounded by enemies, but nobody really has the ability to field an army against them any more than they have the ability to field an army against their enemies.
Right.
Or to the extent that they can do anything, it's quite limited.
Now, the one exception to that, and it's the one that's in the news today, is the goal of humanitarian aid.
So President Obama has now done these airdrops of relief supplies to a beleaguered Iraqi religious minority, roughly 40,000 people in danger of starvation.
And that's been accompanied by a small number of airstrikes against some ISIS positions.
And the justification for this is purely humanitarian, I believe, that they really were concerned that tens of thousands of people might be in peril.
The question one has to ask is whether or not that very limited and, I think, defensible objective can be maintained, or whether or not it's the first step on a slippery slope that leads us back into more extensive involvement in things we don't know how to solve.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, if we just look at the last few wars, or just look at Libya, it seems like the answer there is pretty obvious.
Once they accept the premise for the no-fly zone, that these people aren't safe without one, then they're saying that they're not safe as long as Qaddafi's in power.
We've got to get rid of him.
Same thing here.
The Yezidis, the Christians, the Kurds, even the Shia will never be safe as long as these ISIS, Khmer Rouge lunatics are running around killing people.
So we've got to help them, right?
If we've got to help the Yezidis, we've got to help the rest.
No, that is the danger.
And furthermore, there are going to be plenty of actors in the region who would love to see the United States get more heavily involved to help them in various ways.
But what I think we've also learned from the last 10 or 20 years is that, first of all, military power of all kinds is a pretty crude instrument.
And air power, even in an era of precision-guided munitions and drones and things like that, air power itself has very limited utility.
You can blow things up, but it doesn't allow you to dictate political solutions or build effective institutions.
That's certainly, as you say, what we saw in Libya.
And I think that would be the consequence, but a likely consequence of a more extensive American return to Iraq, even if done without ground troops and done strictly from the air.
Well, so now my worst fear of all this is, regardless of any very particular politics this month or last month or next month, it just seems to me that basically this guy has been Baghdadi has been Laden reincarnate, and the U.S. empire just absolutely cannot let there really be such a thing as the Islamo-fascist caliphate bin Ladenistan for the long term, that one way or the other, hell or high water, they're sending in the Marines here.
Yeah, I think that it'll be interesting to see.
I guess I would bet against that outcome anytime soon.
I think one thing Obama has shown since relatively early in his presidency is a real reluctance to put American ground troops in, as you say, send the Marines back in.
I think he understands that the United States could not control Iraq when we had 150,000 troops there, and we're not going to be able to control it today if we start sending them back.
So I think his hope is that he can do a rather limited, discrete, and finite deployment here, largely for humanitarian purposes, and then basically return to a hands-off policy.
I certainly hope that that's what happens, but we have to recognize that once you start down that road, it is sometimes hard to keep yourself from going further than you wanted to at first.
Well, and even with limited airstrikes, he might just help make ISIS powerful enough that they remain a continuing threat to Erbil, which is the red line that he's drawn.
And then one ultimately has to ask, you know, if he, first of all, if the Americans remain in Erbil, do you have to continue to protect them?
Secondly, that if you're there to protect this minority, are you protecting them there essentially forever?
I mean, I think there may be some efforts to try and find ways to get them evacuated to a safer or, you know, more hospitable location, which would conceivably bring the American requirement to an end, but we haven't gotten to that point yet.
Well, now on CNN this morning, the retired generals, quote-unquote retired, were saying, well, look, I mean, we just got no choice.
It's basically 2005 all over again.
We've got to train up a more effective army and put better generals in charge and reform the Bata Brigade Army of Iraq to fight this war, Steve.
Well, that's a nice solution if it worked, but I think, you know, first of all, the United States spent billions of dollars and many years trying to train effective military institutions in Iraq and with limited success at best.
We've been doing the same thing in Afghanistan since 2002 or so and trying to develop really effective Afghan security institutions.
And of course, they remain corrupt and ineffective and at times penetrated by the Taliban.
So I think the idea that we can solve these problems through a sort of hands-off military training is, again, a little bit too optimistic.
And that's, again, why I think we're better off with a much more hands-off approach.
Well, what about if ISIS makes a real push into Jordan?
Um, I think if, you know, this is something that you do have to worry a little bit about.
I don't, I think we're not particularly concerned right now about the stability of the Jordanian monarchy.
But one of the things the United States has to recognize, I think, is that there are just limits to its ability to do social engineering in that part of the world.
And ultimately, it would not be a good thing if Jordan came under pressure from a group like ISIS.
But it's also not something that's going to be a direct or immediate threat to the security of Americans.
And we'd want to look very long and hard before we got involved in trying to settle that one.
Again, my basic read of the entire Middle East right now is that there isn't a danger to vital American interests.
And therefore, we ought to be very leery about putting American forces in harm's way.
All right.
Now, very quickly, one more thing real quick before I let you go, which is that it seems to me from here that a lot more of the establishment really agrees with your view.
Now, I've been even kind of amazed and surprised to see how many people are saying that there just is not an American military solution to this.
Is that your read on it, too?
I mean, I know it's been very exciting the last couple of days here, and now there are actual bombing campaigns going on.
But as far as further intervention, is the powerful people consensus closer to your view now?
I think there's obviously been a shift, you know, since the heyday of the Bush doctrine, or even some of the interventionist impulses back in the Clinton administration.
And that shift is based on experience.
We've watched how difficult it is to do many of these things.
And I think many Americans have realized that trying to sort of, you know, guide the politics of every part of the world with military power just doesn't work very well and isn't really necessary.
That said, you know, Obama still has lots of capabilities at his disposal.
And there's still plenty of people in the foreign policy establishment who never saw a foreign policy problem that they didn't think the United States should be trying to solve.
So in some sense, there's, I think, still a sort of activist impulse.
And that's why you see, you know, yesterday, Obama, once again, committing military power into Iraq on behalf of a group of people most Americans hadn't heard of a week ago.
Yep.
All right.
Well, thanks so much.
I've already kept you over, but I really appreciate your time, Steve.
Not at all.
Pleasure talking with you, as always.
All right.
That's Stephen Walt.
He's a professor of international relations at Harvard University, and he's the co-author with John Mearsheimer of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
That's the book and the article at the London Review of Books.
We'll be right back.
Hey, Al.
Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
Hey, Al.
Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Edited by libertarian purist Sheldon Richman, The Future of Freedom brings you the best of our movement.
Featuring articles by Richman, Jacob Hornberger, James Bovard, and many more, The Future of Freedom stands for peace and liberty and against our criminal world empire and Leviathan State.
Subscribe today.
It's just $25 per year for the back pocket size print edition, $15 per year to read it online.
That's thefutureoffreedom at fff.org slash subscribe.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
Hey, Al Scott here.
Ever wanted to help support the show and own silver at the same time?
Well, a friend of mine, libertarian activist Arlo Pignotti has invented the alternative currency with the most promise of them all, QR silver commodity discs.
The first ever QR code, one ounce silver pieces.
Just scan the back of one with your phone and get the instant spot price.
They're perfect for saving or spending at the market.
And anyone who donates $100 or more to the Scott Horton Show at scotthorton.org slash donate gets one.
That's scotthorton.org slash donate.
And if you'd like to learn and order more, send them a message at commoditydiscs.com or check them out on Facebook at scotthorton.org slash commodity discs.
And thanks.