09/19/16 – Trevor Thrall – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing Trevor Thrall.
He's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
And he's got this very interesting article.
It's actually, I think, an excerpt from a new book they put out at Cato.
The excerpt is at War on the Rocks.
It's called Primed Against Primacy, the Restraint Constituency and U.S. Foreign Policy.
Welcome to the show, Trevor.
How are you, sir?
Scott, I'm great.
Thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you here.
I've been reading quite a few things by you over the last few months here.
I'm happy we've finally got a chance to speak.
And first of all, I guess tell us about this book, Our Foreign Policy Choices, Rethinking America's Global Role.
Yes, this is Cato's effort to inject the presidential campaign with an alternative to the two-headed consensus that U.S. foreign policy is today.
Democrats, Republicans, all of them pretty much sound the same these days on foreign policy.
Lots of military intervention trying to solve the world's problems.
And we just felt it was critical to offer some alternative perspective to the campaign.
So that's what this book is.
It's 17 or 18 chapters, each on a specific policy area, offering a distinctly different approach to foreign policy.
All right.
Now, well, consensus in D.C. is, you know, always intervention on any issue.
Name a crisis and it doesn't matter whether they caused it or not, they're going to solve it.
The only debate is whether we should work with the French and our European allies, you know, NATO and or the U.N., if we can get China and Russia on board to vote for it.
But otherwise, that seems to be the only real debate.
Right.
Between the Bush doctrine and the Obama doctrine is unilateralism versus multilateralism.
So are you trying to tell me that now there actually is something called a restraint constituency, not just out here in the hinterlands, but in D.C., that there's another side to this argument, there's another seat at the table besides whether, you know, we should bomb them now or bomb them once we bring the British on board with us?
I wish I could say the restraint constituency was as strong in D.C. as it was outside of the Beltway.
It's not.
There still aren't very many political leaders willing to sort of, you know, make a strong case for restraint.
But what I think is happening is that, you know, the opinion polls have now been pretty clear over the last year or so.
The American public is more and more tired of, you know, fiddle farting around in the Middle East for no purpose at great cost.
And at this point, it's clear that although their preference is still for intervention, it's harder for political leaders today to make the case.
They're actually having to argue the notion of restraint, even though they won't sort of say, you know, it's a real thing.
You can see them starting to have to argue against it, which I think is a good thing.
Right.
Well, and, you know, even it's funny because there's not really been any accountability, but it's sort of hard to deny at this point.
I mean, they'll fight a little bit about whether the the problem is that Obama pulled the troops out of Iraq.
But really, even the war party has to admit or.
Well, not the neocons, but many people who cheered for the Iraq war basically are willing to concede the consensus view now that oops, should not have done that.
That was a mistake.
Never mind.
It was a premeditated murder plot that was very deliberate.
It wasn't a mistake at all, but it was a mistake to engage in the conspiracy to start that evil war, because who could deny it?
They turn the entire Middle East upside down.
And the best argument against that anyone could make is if only Obama had somehow forced the Maliki government to allow him to leave tens of thousands of troops in the country, then everything would be fine, just like it was in 2011.
But it wasn't.
No.
And I think, you know, the saddest thing or I don't know if it's the saddest, but it's a sad thing is that despite the fact that they have to admit the mess, they continue to argue that if we could just do it again a little bit better, it would all be fine.
And this is what just sort of blows my mind.
I cannot believe the arrogance that people have that they think after this incredible mess where clearly we understood nothing about what we were doing and could predict none of the outcomes that actually happened.
We still think if we could just do it again, one more chance, we could get it right this time.
It's just sort of mind blowing.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny, too, the the the dissonance there.
I remember it was probably, I don't know, 2012 or something like that, when Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, told an interviewer that absolutely we should have relied with Saddam Hussein and told him, you have one job killing terrorists and then you can be our best friend again, like in the Reagan years.
And that was shocking even to me.
And I'm a non interventionist.
I don't want to lie with any dictator or anything.
But, you know, obviously we shouldn't have overthrown him.
But even to me, it sounded like so dissonant, you know, like a symbol crash or something, a lie with Saddam.
And yet doesn't that make perfect sense?
If you could go back in time and redo it, wouldn't you have George Bush tell Saddam Hussein, listen, I won't kill you as long as you promise to keep shaving your chin and keep Zarqawi down.
Otherwise, we're going back to the 1980s.
I don't want to see any tanks moving toward Kuwait there, buddy.
And then that wouldn't have been ideal, but certainly that would have been better than overthrowing the government and then fighting a five year civil war on the side of the Shiites.
Totally agree.
And what I think you're seeing is this horrendous tendency in D.C. to act the way we wished it was and not the way it actually is.
The fact is there are bad guys out there.
The fact is that there are countries run by people we despise and loathe.
But the reality is that you can't just wish that away, replace them with wonderful people and then move forward as if you weren't causing chaos.
It turns out that stability is worth a lot.
And we're having the same problem with Syria.
Every effort to get rid of what was a stable, horrendous place has caused even more chaos.
The same was true in Iraq.
It's happening in Yemen.
We're helping Saudi Arabia do the same thing in Yemen over and over and over again.
Afghanistan, how's that going?
There's something to be said for stability.
Now, it really was support for dictatorships in the region that provoked the attacks against us.
I think there ought to be a pretty easy common ground where we can, all of us, left, right, libertarian and everyone else can agree.
How about we don't overthrow dictatorships and also how about we don't support Mujahideen revolutions against them either like we've been doing in Syria.
How about we just call it off, see if Saddam can survive on his own, see if Assad can survive, whatever, with help from Hezbollah or not.
What do I care?
I totally agree.
It seems pretty obvious.
And as we now try to excavate the information about this latest guy, Rahami, in New York City, what was his connection?
Was he a lone wolf inspired by whatever?
It seems pretty clear to me that the more we put the Middle East on full boil, the more likely this sort of onesie-twosie stuff is going to happen in the United States.
If it wasn't in the news all day long, every day, I think we'd have a lot less of that lone wolf problem here in the United States.
It just seems like there are so many reasons this would be a good strategy that you outlined.
And we're trying to make the case here, but it's a slow go.
Well, anytime anything happens, I mean even the false alarm in Charlottesville, Virginia the other day where it was a power transformer had exploded.
Comments immediately on Twitter were, oh yeah, right, the religion of peace, blah, blah, blah.
Islam is the enemy.
People who believe in Islam are the enemy.
And just the same time as we had this attack in New York, there's a stabbing attack at the mall in Minnesota.
And they're blaming a Somali-American for that, for this lone wolf attack.
Thank goodness he only had a knife and ended up being killed by an off-duty cop on scene.
But this is something that I've been predicting on this show, me and my guests have been predicting on this show for, well, going on a decade now.
And I think, you know, I don't know how else to describe it other than extreme luck that of all the Somali-Americans, and there are dozens, at least two, maybe three dozen Somali-Americans who have traveled to Somalia to fight with the Mujahideen against the American-backed sock puppet government there, that it took until 2016 before one of these idiots figured out that he could just stay in America and attack Americans here and save himself the trouble of having to go all the way over there and become a suicide bomber.
And this is something that, this could have happened a hundred times by now.
There's a huge Somali diaspora in Minnesota, and America has been brutally slaughtering Somalias for going on a decade straight now, since the regime change was nine and a half years, since the regime change of Christmas 2006 there.
And, I mean, we got off lucky, and people are going to say, oh yeah, it's because he's a Muslim, because they don't know that America has been killing Somalis for ten years straight now.
They might have heard one or two things about a drone, but they would assume that the terrorists came first and the drones came second, instead of the other way around.
And so, instead of people finally getting it and saying, man, all this intervention is not working, they only, and I'm talking regular people now, I'm sure it's even worse in D.C., the only conclusion that they can come to is, I guess we just got to commit genocide and kill all of them, because killing some of them isn't working.
Yeah, I'm afraid you're right.
People are not really looking at the alternative hypothesis there, that maybe all the killing is what's causing the problem.
And, you know, the point you make is a really important one that gets overlooked time and time again, and that is, in our open society, you know, I think we're pretty good at homeland security at sort of an institutional level.
We have smart agents doing smart things, and so on and so forth.
But the fact remains that any day of the week, someone could pick up a knife, make a bomb, and do all sorts of damage.
And yet, there's been a massive lack, total absence, more or less, of that sort of thing happening since 9-11, even since 9-11.
You know, the former commissioner of New York City Police just said, if this is a terrorist, this is the first successful terrorist attack in New York City since 9-11.
And so, like you said, it's lucky these guys didn't figure this out.
But also, what a small problem this is, really, compared to the amount of just crazy overreaction, both by the public, unfortunately, and even worse, by our government.
Yeah, and you know, I've mentioned this a few times.
I'm sorry to pick on her.
I won't ever say her name or anything.
But it was after the most recent Paris attack, I think it was.
I was over at a friend's house, and his mom was over there, who I hadn't seen in 25 years or whatever, since we were teenage boys.
And there she was, and she was saying, you know, I guess we just have to kill all of them.
I guess we just have to nuke every capital city in the Arab world and just go in there.
Because look, hey, we've tried everything else.
And she's just some nice little old lady.
She don't really mean it, I guess.
But this is what counts as logic.
This is what counts as thinking things through in the context of just all the conventional wisdom that she has available.
They hate us because Islam makes them hate us.
We tried killing some of them as a warning to the rest, and that didn't work.
And, you know what, this goes to what I've been arguing about with Gary Johnson.
And I shouldn't say that, but it's true.
I've been trying to convince Gary Johnson to just go ahead and tell the truth and just say, and yeah, it would be controversial, but everything he says is just a flub anyway.
He might as well get something right for a change.
And just say, look, these terrorists used to be our friends back in the days of Ronald Reagan.
They worked for us.
And it was the American government that stabbed them in the back and turned them against us.
This is George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr., and Barack Obama's fault.
And what I'm going to do is end the wars.
And, yeah, I mean, the CNN lady would freak out, right?
How could you blame George H.W. Bush?
But it's true.
It's easy to blame him.
He bombed Iraq from Saudi, and he left the troops there on the Holy Arabian Peninsula.
This is so easy, and it's not even a matter of dispute anymore in 2016 for anybody who's read a thing about al-Qaeda in the 1990s.
So why not go ahead and fight about it?
Why not go ahead and get out there and just say that, listen, history didn't begin on 9-11.
History began in 1990, 1991, when George H.W. Bush occupied Arabia.
It's his fault.
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Yeah, that's still a very contentious thing to say in D.C., for sure.
You're right about that.
But I see no alternative to making the argument, because it's bad enough for your friend's mother to say that.
But what did Hillary Clinton just say at the airport after these attacks?
She was getting on a plane.
We need to accelerate the airstrikes in Syria and smash ISIS.
I mean, her logic is no different from your friend's mom.
It's just let's go kill some more people, because obviously killing people over in the Middle East is going to stop a random individual here in the U.S. from building a bomb.
Really?
I don't think so.
Time to get the heck out.
That's what it's time for.
All right.
Now, so talk to me a little bit about this new poll, because there's kind of some hopeful news in this new survey that motivated you even to write this in the first place, right?
Yeah.
I'm looking for rays of sunshine.
It's interesting, because most of the polls that get done on international affairs and foreign policy, I think, without – I'm going to be kind here – are biased, I think, unconsciously, against finding that the public supports restraint, because the questions don't usually get asked in a way that makes it clear just how people feel.
So I had to troll through an awful lot of public opinion polling to find the right questions to ask.
But if you ask the right questions, it turns out that the biggest group of Americans are folks who don't think the United States should solve all of the world's problems and don't think we should use military force to do so.
And so this is something that – I don't think I've read a single news story about that fact ever before, because it doesn't fit the – it doesn't fit sort of the elite sort of conceptions of America's role in the world.
But when you actually dig down and look at the data, it turns out that maybe 37% or so of the overall public are folks who we would call restrainers, people who believe the United States should be far more restrained.
But the actual good news, the best news to me is that the trend is moving in the right direction.
The youngest Americans are by far the most restrained in their views of foreign policy.
Actually, over 50% of millennial Americans fall into this restraint bucket.
And so I'm hopeful that moving forward as these guys start to occupy the halls of power, that slowly but surely, America's inclinations will change.
Yeah.
Well, I sure hope so.
And back to picking on Gary Johnson for a second here.
All they really need, the people, is somebody to tell them the simple truth.
There's a documentary called How Ron Paul Watered the Withered Tree of Liberty, something like that.
But it's such a great documentary.
And it's about how when Ron Paul stood up to Rudy Giuliani and said, I'm sorry, man, we've been bombing Iraq since long before 9-11.
And that's what caused it in the first place is bombing Iraq from Saudi Arabia and all that.
And teaching the people the term blowback, what it means and the reality of it.
He just got shouted down and they booed and they hissed and they were so mad.
And after it was over, even Chris Matthews denounced him and said, everybody knows that we never even started the no fly zone bombing until after the first World Trade Center.
Even though he knows that the troops were stationed in Saudi starting in 1990 and really even before that.
But anyway, that changed the whole world.
It changed, you know, not just Ron Paul's campaign.
It changed the United States of America.
It changed the American right and the American left, for that matter.
And just American politics overall.
And it made Ron Paul a global superstar overnight because he was willing to speak the simple truth.
Again, it's not like he explained rocket science is most complicated, you know, calculus algorithm that you got to figure out in order to see what he's saying.
It's the simple truth that George Bush senior stabbed Ronald Reagan's terrorists in the back and it made them mad.
And then they turned against us as simple as that.
And and it was huge.
It was this giant watershed the first time that anyone was willing to say that on TV.
And we don't have that now.
That's the thing is no one is willing to be.
In fact, Donald Trump is the closest when he mutters something along the lines of, well, if we hadn't messed around over there at all in the last 25 years, we'd be better off.
But he never really explains what he means or anything like that.
And so there's just no one to rally around.
You need a personality, somebody, even a lowly House member, somebody to be willing to tell this truth on TV where regular Americans could hear it.
And I think if that was the case, these numbers that you just cited me, they'd be much, much better.
I think you're right.
I think the problem that we're facing is not only don't we have anyone sort of saying the obvious truth that the emperor has no clothes, but we're dealing with a very deep seated desire by American political leaders to shape the world in their image.
And I think the problem is that you can tell, you know, maybe some of them aren't aware yet somehow that what they're doing is, you know, hasn't worked or that we had something to do with it.
But even if you convince all of them that America had something to do with the problems in the Middle East, I still think their go to thought about America's role in the world is it's our job to fix and control everything.
And, you know, we need leverage.
We need to, you know, ensure our interests are taken care of.
Liberty interests actually are.
It's not clear.
But it's clear to everyone here in D.C. that we need to be out about whacking and mulling and, you know, bases everywhere and intervening everywhere.
This is something that's so deep seated.
I'm just not sure even a truth teller is going to going to be able to do much there.
Yeah.
Well, now, so it does seem, though, that more often nowadays in the different journals and and, you know, kind of fancier publications on the foreign policy topic that people are saying things like, well, you know, our unipolar moment is over and we do have to retrench a little bit.
And this is even part of Obama's policy really is to retrench just enough that we don't have to retrench all the way.
Right.
Yes.
Back off of intervention in the Middle East, you know, in terms of massive land armies on the ground and that kind of thing.
Enough that we can try to maintain the position that we have, such as it is.
But I guess that goes back to the multilateral versus unilateral thing where if they do have to concede that the unipolar moment is over, then that really just means we got to lean harder on our European satellites.
I think you're right there to some degree.
I do think that there is a shift.
If you look at those fancy publications that academic writers publish in, there is a turn, I think, right now towards what some people would call more realist approach, a more restrained approach.
Sometimes people call this offshore balancing.
And there are many flavors of it.
But there is, I think, a turn that's occurring in academia.
The problem, of course, is that for that to then shape what policymakers think is a 20 to 25-year process.
So I wouldn't wake up next week and expect to see a lot of change in terms of the way policymakers see the world.
I think it's sadly going to take another decade or two before the reality of the world really sinks in that we just can't control the Middle East.
We could easily, to my mind, spend another 10 or 15 years doing exactly the same thing before we wake up and smell the coffee.
Well, you know, Donald Trump is the real wild card in this because he's just independently minded enough that if he really wanted to, I mean, assuming he hired all his own private bodyguards, he could overthrow the empire.
And he could just say, you know what, this is how we're going to make America great again is we're going to close down the global bases and whatever, that kind of thing.
But it seems like he's so incurious, even though he does have some good instincts along these lines.
But, you know, I doubt he's ever even heard the words Doug Bandow, much less realized that, wait a minute, this guy, one, you know, agrees with me about all the stuff that I say that's right, only has it down pat.
And two, he used to work for Ronald Reagan.
So I can say, hey, he used to work for Ronald Reagan.
And I can have this guy follow me around and be my national security advisor and give me like solid, well thought out academic type grounding for my little bit more hesitant foreign policy.
And yet, even after a full year of this, he doesn't even know that there's such a thing as Doug Bandow that he should be trying to bring on board to be his advisor.
And so what does that mean for his presidency, that Pence is, like he said yesterday, is going to act like Dick Cheney?
He's going to bring all the neocons back and we're going to have George W. Bush years again or what?
Yeah, I, you know, it's been a very hard campaign to watch because every time Trump says something that puts the stick into the conventional wisdom, I want to cheer.
And then I want to cringe because the way he says these things and all the other baggage that seems to come with them, it's hard to want him to be president and in charge of our foreign policy in any way, shape or form.
But you're absolutely right.
He is independent minded enough.
If he does win, I expect there could be radical changes.
I hope if that happens that he does something like hire a Doug Bandow because he desperately needs some advice.
What he doesn't need is Pence running the show with all the neocon clowns back in office.
That would be terrifying.
Can't you just see it, Liz Cheney as assistant secretary of defense?
Don't say it.
That's going to ruin my morning.
I'm sorry.
Well, there's a 100 percent chance she's going to be in the Congress next year at this point.
She's won her primary, so it's on now.
Cheney 2.0.
She'll be in Washington, D.C. forever.
I mean, was she like 45 years old or something?
Yeah, she's got another, well, yeah.
God help us.
Several decades of Cheney.
I'm almost willing to find religion just to pray for being saved from the likes of her.
You know, she's actually a really bright lady, too.
It's not just that she's as mean as hell.
It's that as far as all this B.S., she really knows what she's talking about.
You know what I mean?
If you need somebody to make this all Iran's fault or whatever, she can pretend to explain why it's so.
Yeah, exactly.
It's the smart silver-tongued ones who cause you the most trouble.
Yeah, yeah.
She is terribly capable, I'm afraid.
Yeah, for sure.
All right.
So now, before I let you go, tell me a little bit more about this book.
It's different essays by different Cato writers, is that it?
Correct, correct.
It is.
And are you guys letting John Glaser write yet or what?
John has got a policy analysis in preparation.
He's writing about military bases, and I expect that I'm hopeful that we'll see the light next year.
Great.
He's a brilliant guy.
He is a fantastic fellow.
I love John.
Very cool.
Now, okay, tell me more about the book.
Who all else is in there?
Bandow's in there?
Preble's in there?
Bandow's in there.
Preble's in there.
Emma Ashford, the carpenter, of course.
John Mueller, Gene Healy, Ben Friedman, Brad Stapleton, who was one of our fellows that was here last year, and Will Ruger, and I think that's about the cast of characters.
Sounds pretty good.
Yeah, no, it's a great book.
It's a quick read.
It's about 100 pages.
We kept everything pretty tight so that no one would have to struggle.
Good commute reading if you're on a train around here anyway.
Yeah, there you go.
You hear that, everybody?
Short chapters for reading on your way to somewhere.
A few pictures.
I've got the color pictures of my chapter, though, so that's the one you've got to read.
I need to get me a review copy.
You hear that, Glazer?
All right.
Hey, thanks very much for coming on the show, Trevor.
I really appreciate it.
Scott, great talking to you.
Thanks a lot.
Yeah, you too.
All right, y'all, that is Trevor Thrall.
He is a senior fellow at Cato and doing great work there.
And check out this one at War on the Rocks, primed against primacy, the restraint constituency in U.S. foreign policy.
And that's The Scott Horton Show.
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