07/21/16 – Christopher Preble – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Christopher Preble.
He is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at Cato.
And he's the author of quite a few books, including The Power Problem, How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free.
Got that right.
And co-edited with John Mueller, A Dangerous World, Threat Perception, and U.S. National Security.
I hope I remember to ask a little bit more about that later in the interview.
But welcome to the show, Christopher.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me on the show.
Yeah, I appreciate you being here.
Funny phenomenon, I'm not sure if you're on Twitter or not, but on Twitter everybody is saying, oh my God, can you believe Donald Trump says, and he doesn't even say this really, but never mind that, says he would abandon our NATO allies and he would not protect them from Russia.
And don't we all agree that that's absolutely insane?
And which allies are we talking about again, guys?
And it just goes on like that.
Absolute consensus that this is as crazy as anything that Donald Trump has ever said when he told the New York Times that, you know, I'd like to try to get more in tribute from our satellites in Eastern Europe is basically all he said.
But what's your take here?
Well, I think this is one of those cases where a blind squirrel finds a nut from time to time.
You know, you look at Donald Trump's statements over the course of this long campaign and there's no common theme, there's just sort of incoherence, there's no theory or there's no kind of sensible or discernible approach to the world.
That doesn't mean that occasionally he doesn't stumble upon something entirely by accident.
And I think the idea that the United States does not get as much out of its alliances as the consensus has claimed over many years is worthy of serious discussion.
Now, again, that doesn't mean that Donald Trump is right.
I'm especially concerned about the suggestion that these sorts of commitments would be abrogated quickly and without much thought.
But it is not unreasonable that we would ask some serious questions about whether or not these alliances need to be at a minimum reformed and reframed in the context of a very different international security environment than when they were created.
Well, yeah, I mean, I guess if nothing else, the good that will come out of it, even from the false framing in the media that, oh, my goodness, Donald Trump wants to abandon all of our allies, is, hey, at least we're discussing this for the first time since forever.
That even when they expanded NATO, they didn't really discuss it other than, hey, Polish voters, turn out to the polls and vote Clinton in 96.
That was all it was as far as that was concerned.
But there was no real national debate over whether it made sense or not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe.
No, there wasn't a debate.
One of my colleagues likened the way we've added allies to the way we've added Facebook friends.
The idea that adding allies into NATO carries with it very serious obligations on the part of the United States, it just wasn't a subject of serious conversation.
And, again, I have to say, not for lack of trying on the part of my colleagues, especially my predecessor here, Ted Galen Carpenter, and also Doug Bondow, who's written about NATO over the years, but a number of others.
Cato was talking about this.
But to be very honest, very few other think tanks or scholars, especially here in Washington, were willing to push back on the consensus that NATO was good and forever would be, and the more countries in it, the better for everyone.
Well, it's funny.
You know, everybody always uses the term begging the question wrong.
Whenever they mean raising the question, well, that raises the question.
That's the figure of speech they mean to use.
But they always say begging, which I don't know.
I probably used to use it wrong until I got it straight or something.
But, anyway, this seems to me the perfect case of question begging when you watch, for example, Newt Gingrich, of all people, sticking up for Trump's view on the morning news show.
And they're saying, but our alliances, our alliances.
The whole question was whether it makes sense to have these alliances or not.
Why should I have to trade my hometown of Austin, Texas, for towns in Estonia that honestly I've never even heard of?
Is Vilenius, is that in Estonia or in Latvia?
I don't even know.
But I'm supposed to give up my hometown for them in an H-bomb explosion?
Sorry.
But I'm the crazy one, and they're the question beggars.
I think you can look at this in a slightly less, shall I say, hysterical way, Scott.
But just the thing, if U.S. security guarantees were sufficient to ensure that it never came to that, right, to ensure that it never came to trading Austin for Vilenius.
And I think that a lot of the discussion and debate, such as it existed at all inside of Washington, was that that question would never be called.
That the credibility of the U.S. commitment would never be called, the bluff would never be called.
And I'm not suggesting even that it was a bluff necessarily.
I think there are some people who actually believe it, who actually believe that we should follow through on our commitments in that way.
But the risk is that the durability, and most importantly, the long-term durability of those commitments, has discouraged our European, especially our European and to a lesser extent our East Asian allies, from doing more to defend themselves and their interests, to taking some prudent steps to protect themselves.
And therefore, that increases the likelihood that they will call on us for help.
It also creates a situation, in economics we call it a moral hazard, but my friend Barry Posen calls it reckless driving.
Occasionally, our allies engage in reckless behavior or dangerous behavior vis-a-vis their neighbors, because they are confident that the United States will come to their defense.
So, whereas many people believe that alliances like NATO are what guarantee the United States will not be drawn into a foreign conflict, it is also possible, and I think increasingly likely, that it will have the opposite effect.
That it actually will draw us into a conflict that we might otherwise avoid or at least be involved in a different way.
Well, yeah, and it all comes down to, like you said about Facebook friends, where it's all kind of public choice theory stuff, too, where, eh, national interests, national interests.
It's the interests of the individual people in charge of administering the national interests that are at question.
And so, if they can expand their bureaucracy, that's great.
And really, if they can shut off their brain and forget all the things that they know and pretend that they believe some other things, then they'll do that, too.
Like, I talk with Mark Perry, who's a Pentagon reporter, who says that, oh, yeah, the consensus is, you know, Ronchovist Russia, imperialist reactionary, or Soviet communist, or whatever it is.
Russia on the march.
Russian aggression must be contained.
We must defend Europe from what Putin is doing and how there is no honest reflection, even in the backroom smoking cigars and drinking and BSing around.
Does anyone admit that, come on, we know we're lying, and we know that we're the ones who broke the deal and expanded NATO all the way to their borders, and we know that Victoria Nuland was caught on tape plotting the Ukraine coup a week and a half, ten days before the coup even happened.
She was picking the leaders of the new government, and it was leaked on YouTube and played on TV, for crying out loud.
But, no, forget all that.
We don't need to know any of that.
You know, it's just like Israel does nothing but ever retaliate against Palestinian aggression.
That's just the frame of the argument, and they'll never let it go.
And they tell each other, right?
And then they go, yeah, I agree with that, too.
And then that's it.
It doesn't matter what we know to be true about, you know, who's overthrowing whose government and who is doing military exercises on whose borders.
In fact, Hillary even said in her speech that Russia is messing around right on NATO's doorstep.
And she means, of course, inside Russia, that they're building a base near the border of Ukraine inside Russia in reaction to what we've done there.
Scott, you understand that the trouble with making such arguments is that it sounds, not fairly, but it sounds as though you are defending Vladimir Putin's behavior.
So you have to be very kind of mindful of the fact that this guy is also a troublemaker.
And so I think that the challenge for those of us who have some, you know, some legitimate concerns about the value of the NATO alliance is to not look past Putin's behavior and to excuse Putin's behavior because he's clearly causing serious problems.
And then from a purely libertarian perspective, of course, what has happened in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union is a catastrophe for liberty in Russia for the Russian people.
So I don't disagree that, for example, the tendency of people to look past the commitments that were made by the United States, by Bush 41, President George H.W. Bush, and then President Clinton in the early days of the post-Cold War period about the United States would not expand into the Warsaw Pact and certainly not station troops in former Warsaw Pact countries.
You're starting finally to see a serious debate over that question.
There are some scholars who disagree on how strong or firm those commitments were, but at least some discussion in the academic journals and to a certain extent in some of the popular journals that these moves, even if they were motivated by, I think, the right instincts about trying to spread the idea of liberal democratic capitalism eastward into the former Warsaw Pact could be and indeed has been interpreted as hostile or at least threatening by not merely Vladimir Putin, but by many other Russians who see it as quite dangerous.
Well, and that raises the question about who comes after Putin and the post-Weimar Russia and what that's going to look like.
And of course, back to the PR thing, I never said anything nice about Putin at all, right?
All I did was state the truth about the chronology of who did what when and what was a reaction and what was the actual action in the first place.
That's all.
But you're right.
That means that I sound like I'm a big apologist for Saddam Hussein and his human paper shredders or whatever it is, you know.
I'm just saying what's true.
Of course, you were around in the 90s.
Wasn't there a debate about this in the 1990s about, hey, Bill Clinton, are you sure you want to do this?
Because it could cause a problem.
To be honest, I don't think there was much of a debate.
And the reason why then was because post-Soviet Russia was so weak and so dependent upon the United States and Europe to help it along in its early days that they were in no position to push back.
And therefore, there wasn't, I think, much thought given on the part of U.S. policymakers, especially on how this might play out 15 or 20 years later when and if Russia became strong again.
Or I think more likely what's happening in Russia is that Russia is really quite weak politically and economically and Putin is capitalizing on public sentiment or whipping up public sentiment and anger against the West to distract attention from his abysmal record, both the failing of the Russian economy and his abuses against his own people and the violation of liberties and those sorts of things.
So it's a classic case of where an authoritarian ruler uses the excuse of foreign threat to distract attention from themselves.
Yeah, just like in America.
I'm not saying that.
Yeah, we don't have any authoritarianism here at all, not that I've heard of.
Anyway, yeah, so, well, there's one thing I'm sure you're aware that you probably may have read the thing.
William Perry has a memoir out that's all about his role in American nuclear weapons policy all this time.
And all I know is I've read, first of all, Jerry Brown, of all people, did a great review of it.
And then there's a new one by our friend Con Hallinan at Foreign Policy and Focus.
But in the Jerry Brown, Governor Brown review of William Perry's book, he talks about in 96, and I had already known about George Kennan in 98 telling Thomas Friedman that, you know, we really shouldn't be doing this.
And that as soon as Russia reacts, just like all the people promoting this promise, they won't.
Then they'll forget they ever promised that.
And they'll say, see, their reaction is the reason we have to do this in the first place, which is, of course, exactly what's happened.
Which is, you know, it's now from a word from Mr. X is what it's called in The New York Times.
But what I learned in this Jerry Brown thing was that in 96, a lot of former hawks, including McNamara and Paul Nitze, who was, you know, Kennan on steroids.
Right.
And some of these really hardcore Cold Warriors, they told and including William Perry, who was Clinton's secretary of defense at the time, told him not to do it.
And it's sort of like reminiscent of Gates telling Obama not to do Libya.
Just hide behind your secretary of defense.
If he doesn't want to do it, don't do it.
But, you know, it's true.
That's true.
But it seems amazing that Nitze could say that and that people wouldn't take that seriously, that shouldn't they be floored by that?
That Nitze is saying, hey, back off the Russians.
Even even Henry Kissinger says we're the ones precipitating this tension, not them.
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It's interesting when you when you point that out.
And I didn't know all those details myself, but they all sound they all sound make a lot of sense.
In retrospect, it is interesting that we did not have a more serious debate in this country.
There really wasn't.
I mean, and like I said, it's not it's not for lack of trying.
We you know, we here at Cato, I came here, but but we were very concerned about these things.
And and there were very, very few other people in town that really gave them much, much consideration.
And so then it begs the question, well, what exactly what was driving it?
I have to conclude it was just a sense that that this idea that that incorporating these Eastern European countries into NATO would make them more, more liberal in the classical liberal sense would help to affirm the principles of market capitalism.
And and that is a that's almost a religious belief, I think, here in Washington, D.C.
And and it should be challenged, I hope, by what's happened in Turkey over the weekend, for example.
And not just over the weekend.
Erdogan has become increasingly authoritarian over the last few years.
So and there are other instances of some other whose political system has certainly seemed to be backsliding towards authoritarianism.
All the all the other solid defenders of NATO expansion, I think, could say is that, well, had they not been included in NATO, it would have been worse.
And and that's a pretty weak read.
Right.
I mean, that's a pretty weak argument, it seems to me, because if if they believe what they claim, then it would have been impossible for a country like like Turkey to slide back into authoritarianism because they were so fully integrated into NATO.
Of course, they were brought back, brought in in in the very early days of NATO that it would have been impossible for them to to go in that direction.
I think it poses a real serious challenge for the defenders of NATO and for the idea of U.S. security guarantees to other countries, that those guarantees are what stands between these countries moving forward towards toward liberal democracies or falling backwards into authoritarianism, because clearly it has not had that effect in every case.
Well, yeah, I mean, reminiscent of Bill Clinton, I remember his constant refrain about all of this stuff, whether it was subsidizing corporations, not just allowing them or whatever, but subsidizing corporations to offshore or, you know, overthrowing a government here or bombing one there is always free markets and democracy, free markets and democracy.
Why, geez, he almost sounds like Doug Bandow, except, well, wait a minute.
What he's talking about is expanding a military alliance.
But, of course, from, as you say, his beliefs from from Bill Clinton's eyes, Mr.
Centrist, conservative, moderate, Democrat type, whatever he is, internationalist type.
Of course, NATO expansion.
We have our EU cocktail parties and we have our NATO cocktail parties.
And this is how we expand our, you know, political hegemony in the world.
And it's working great.
And hey, the Eastern European countries are rushing to line up to join.
So it must be great, you know?
Yeah, I think this is where it's really important for us to believe in liberty as a foundational concept of legitimate governance, that the rights of the of the individual to live their lives as they see fit is so critical.
And we've seen it expand around the world.
And it's and it's occurred in so many places that have not been subject to, certainly not U.S. military intervention, but not even in U.S. security, security guarantees.
It's not just happening in NATO.
It's happening around the world.
And then you have to ask the question, like, well, why is this happening?
Why is liberty continue to spread if the United States is enforcing it?
And the reason, the answer is quite simple, because it works, because people understand that a free society is a better society.
It functions better.
And so if we if we suggest or we buy into the argument that Western, Western, Eastern Europe would not have become relatively liberal and relatively capitalist in the 1990s and 2000s, were it not for NATO expansion, then it suggests that we don't really believe in the ideas that we're promoting in the first place.
Right.
Right.
And that that's deeply troubling to me as a libertarian, the person who believes in these ideas and believes in it.
And I try I spread these ideas and I'm not, you know, not not through force, obviously.
Right.
So so I think it really it calls on us to to push back against this argument that if it were not for the U.S. military serving as the world's policeman and especially in these alliances like NATO, that that it is impossible that that the the international order as we as we know it today would move forward.
I think there are definitely grounds for challenging that claim.
Yeah.
Well, if anything, they've completely corrupted our entire sales pitch.
If free markets and self-government means American invasion and occupation and a million dead and a million widows and all this, then she's I don't know who want who prefers that.
You know, and you see and you see that that in a place like Iraq, tragically, where what what do many Iraqis want?
They don't want they don't want liberty.
They they want authoritarianism.
They want order because the utter chaos that was unleashed by the Iraq war has actually made people turn away from the idea of liberty, which is a tragedy on many levels.
And so, again, I think we have to be aware of the things that work and the things that don't work, and especially if those things don't work and they make they make the problem worse.
They actually compound the problem.
And that's why I remain.
I'm just very, very worried about that, that the very notion of a classical liberal order is being undermined by the idea that the only way it can it can succeed is is through warfare, frankly.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so you co-edited this book with John Mueller and I'm a big fan of his book, Overblown.
And I spoke with him about that.
And there's there's different sections of the book and some of it goes into this.
And I must assume co-edited with you here that you guys have a great collection of essays here on this subject.
And you must and you're kind of referring to it here, but I'm just assuming, you know, the answer.
So I'm going to put you on the spot about can you talk a little bit about, for example, the vast decreases in the infant mortality, the vast increases in, you know, working and middle class living in the formerly poorest nations of the world just over the last 10, 20 years.
I know it's been absolutely incredible all around the world.
Everywhere America's not bombing is doing much better.
Yeah.
I mean, I have to give a shout out to another Cato project.
It's called Human Progress.org.
I encourage all your listeners to check it out.
This is a Web site that is hosted here at Cato.
It's organized by my colleague, Marion Toopey, which assembles the data on human progress.
And if you look at the quality of life for the average human being, not just people in wealthy countries, not just people in the United States, but globally, you know, as you know, the health effects, the nutrition and even, you know, affluence.
This is a remarkable story and people completely look past it because, of course, why is this?
Well, because, you know, as the old saying goes, the news media never covers the planes that land safely, right?
You only hear the bad news stories.
You only focus on if it bleeds and leaks.
The simple fact is that our life, our lives collectively are much better today than they were a generation ago or two or three generations ago.
And that's why we publish this book.
There's a chapter in there that's drawn, that uses some of the data from humanprogress.org.
But just across the board, if you were to ask in terms of is the world more dangerous today than it was 50 or 60 years ago, the answer is objectively no.
It is not more dangerous than it was 50 or 60 years ago.
It is better.
That does not say that there aren't horrible things that happen.
ISIS is a particular example.
These are horrific human beings that perpetrate these horrible crimes against ethnic minorities, and it's reprehensible.
But on the whole, we are in a safer, more prosperous world today.
And actually, when you first introduced the book, you read the title correctly.
It's a dangerous world?
The question mark, right?
Because we've pushed back on the argument that you hear so often, and you heard it at the GOP convention this past week, that the world is never more dangerous than it has been.
And these people have very, very short memories, to be honest with you, because it's so obviously not more dangerous than it was during the height of the Cold War, for example, or during World War II.
Well, you know, this is the kind of thing that used to be way out of line, but I was just reading about this new biography of George W. Bush, where the guy makes the obvious case, which I'm kind of writing this case myself right now, that George Bush didn't even need to invade Afghanistan.
They wanted to negotiate, and even if they wouldn't have negotiated the turnover of bin Laden and his best friends, they still could have done much more targeted attacks just on bin Laden and whoever was between us and them, bin Laden and his friends, and then called the whole thing off.
They could have called the whole damn terror war off, you know, outside of police work, before the end of 2001.
Not trying to be all silly utopian about, and then everything on Earth would have been perfect.
For all I know, we'd have had a nuclear war between Russia and China on my timeline.
Who knows?
But it certainly seems to me like everybody's kind of got to admit that it did not have to be this way at all.
We got the entire 21st century off on the wrong foot, just completely blowing up the Middle East for no good reason.
And there's all kinds of need for reforms in the Middle East, from dictatorship to some form of self-government, you know?
Hallelujah, but boy, did it not have to be this way.
And if what you're saying is right, that everywhere we're not burning to the ground is doing great, think how much better things really could have been.
And again, nothing like magic or utopia or silly stuff, but isn't it important that we kind of allow ourselves to use our imagination a little bit instead of being bound to just say, well, this is what the democracy chose, I guess it's how it has to be.
Well, I do think the American people, you know, after 9-11, there was just this horrible trauma, understandably, in this country that hadn't been attacked in that way in anyone's memory.
And so the reaction is often to lash out.
And, you know, lashing out against the Taliban in Harvard, Al-Qaeda clearly did, was understandable.
I think what you see over time is two things.
First of all, the Iraq war was a horrible mistake.
It was something we never should have done.
The claim that there was some linkage between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda was utterly absurd.
And in retrospect, most Americans regret that war.
Increasingly, most Americans regret the Afghan war, but I don't think it's the Afghan war that we started fighting.
It's the Afghan war that we are fighting now, which is a war to try to build a functioning nation-state in Afghanistan, which is, say, a fairly complicated enterprise.
And I think the Afghan people would be, frankly, better off if they were held responsible for trying to fashion a decent society, because, after all, it is their country.
And I think that most Americans resist this idea that the United States can or should build foreign countries.
As a matter of fact, countries aren't built.
They're made.
And those are two very, very different propositions.
And I want to emphasize, this isn't a knock on the U.S. military, which I think is one of the finest in the world, without any question.
But, you know, that doesn't mean that it can do everything.
It doesn't mean that it can, you know, can do magic, basically, which is what would be required to create a functioning nation-state in a place like Afghanistan in the span of 10 or 15 years.
All right.
Hey, listen, thanks very much for your time today.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, y'all, that's Christopher Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at Cato.
That's Cato.org.
And he mentioned HumanProgress.org, too, for a little bit of the good news, for a change, if you're into that, the power problem and a dangerous world are his books.
Check him out again at Cato.org.
All right, y'all, and that's The Scott Horton Show, 4,000-something interviews at ScottHorton.org.
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