What American Global Empire?

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Zachary Karabell: Danny, what’s the biggest misconception Americans have about US foreign policy? 

Daniel Bessner: That the United States is able to be the world leader going forward into the future, when in actuality its power is in relative decline, and that we have some very difficult questions to ask ourselves about what the US’s role in the world should be going forward,

Zachary Karabell: What could go right. I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by my co-host, Emma Varvaloucas, the Executive Director of the Progress Network. Today we’re gonna look at foreign policy, which seems to occupy less and less mind share in the American public consciousness.

We’re gonna look at this from the lens of two writers, podcast hosts and critics who are very much of the left. So Emma, let’s. Let’s have you tell us a bit more about these delightful individuals we’re about to talk to. 

Emma Varvaloucas: So today we are gonna talk to two people, first is Derek Davidson. He’s a journalist and an analyst that focuses on foreign policy and he runs a substack called Foreign Exchanges and he’s here with his podcast co-host Daniel Bessner.

The podcast is called American Prestige and Daniel is a historian and a professor at the University of Washington. Also, again, specializing in foreign policy and the author of a book called Democracy in Exile. And again, as you mentioned, they’re both firm critics of American Interventionism. So excited to hear what they have to say and especially how it pertains to the new world of the Trump administration that we are now in.

Zachary Karabell: Cool. Let’s do it. Danny and Derek, it’s such a pleasure to have you on what could go right today you are both running a really interesting substack foreign exchanges, which you both write for, but also lots of other voices are contributing to, and you have a fascinating podcast. How did you both get into the focus on foreign policy?

You know, my, my impression these days, having myself once like done a PhD in foreign policy and thought that was a thing, is that less and less. Certainly at a domestic electoral level in the United States. Does, does anybody really seem to care about foreign policy? Obviously there are exceptions to that, you know, Gaza, Ukraine to a degree, but, but as a top of mind issue relative to the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, maybe even the nineties, and certainly after 2001, it does seem like a much less engaged public when it comes to these issues.

So. I’m just curious how you got into this, given this seems to be an area that most people are running away from rather than toward. 

Daniel Bessner: Just to clarify, Derek actually runs foreign exchanges. It’s his, it’s his substack. We co-host a podcast, American Prestige. I would never steal Substack Valor, so I just needed to make that clear.

Derek Davison: I appreciate that. Thank you. 

 

Daniel Bessner: The way, the way that I got into it, I’m a millennial, I think I’m an elder millennial, so I was politicized in the wake of the Iraq war, and so the Iraq war, like you just mentioned, was a, a very hot topic of conversation during my early college years and, and really throughout college.

So my senior year of college, I actually interned in New York City at the Council on Foreign Relations, and that got me interested in thinking through the relationship between intellectuals and foreign policymaking, and that’s what I studied. For my PhD thesis at Duke University in North Carolina, and I’ve kind of been writing about foreign policy ever since.

So that’s been about, I guess, 17 years now where I’ve been writing and thinking about foreign policy. 

Derek Davison: I came to it from a failed attempt to get a PhD in early modern Iranian history, which I eventually decided was not for me, and then had to try and figure out how I could make the previous, I dunno, eight years of my life turn into a career.

Zachary Karabell: You had to figure out how to market your expertise on the Q Salton night. 

Derek Davison: Yeah, exactly. So, oh yeah. We’re actually funded by Saudi Arabia. 

Daniel Bessner: Yeah. Cont all the, all the nation. That’s a tough, Raytheon 

Derek Davison: could have tried that, I guess, but we moved to DC at the same time that I was leaving the PhD program, which for us, the idea of doing something in US foreign policy in my face, and I did it.

So, yeah, I mean that was pretty much it. I feel like I kind of backdoored my way into it, but that’s my story. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Do you both regret your choices? No, I’m joking. That was not the actual question. 

Derek Davison: Every day of my life. 

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m gonna jump into the meat here. I’m gonna actually crib from the American Prestige Podcast description ’cause I think it’s a good lead in.

And the description essentially says that media organizations generally, they assume that the United States should dominate the world through military and economic might. The podcast asked what foreign policy would look like if the interest of all the people in the world were taking into account rather than just American interests.

For me to post to you guys is what would that look like? And feel free to take any like top of mind examples or maybe some lesser known ones. 

Daniel Bessner: For sure. So I think the thing to, to really understand there is that that concept emerges from a historical investigation. I think that we now have 70 plus years of evidence of what the United States’ Global Empire actually does in the world, and, and it, it just turns out that it was actually incredibly violent, that the dreams that were set out for it in the 1940s when it was established on the global scale really didn’t come to fruition.

So for example, the United States tried to overturn foreign regimes somewhere around 65 times, succeeding in about two dozen of those cases. But if you were targeted for US intervention, you are like more likely to experience things like meth, death, displacement, et cetera. You also have the examples of the wars.

We all know Korea, Vietnam. Iraq, et cetera, which led to the death and deracination and disposition of tens of millions of people. And you also have just the sheer fact that the American Global Imperion has basically allowed Americans to promote a consumer capitalist culture. That I think in retrospect is one of the major reasons that there’s such devastating climate change, that we consume an enormous amount of energy here.

We consume an enormous amount of raw materials. So the notion that American primacy, that the United States needed to be the world’s prime military and economic power has actually done incredible damage to the world. So the question is, what would that look like going forward? And I think we. Come from a couple of assumptions.

The first and most important thing is that we don’t believe any other nation really has the global designs that the United States had for a couple of reasons. One, after World War II and even more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991, the United States was genuinely, uniquely powerful.

It was able to do something like construct a global empire with hundreds of military bases. We presently have about 750 global military bases. Neither China, let alone Russia, which is absolutely in a weakened position, could do that. And even more important, perhaps it doesn’t seem like either China or Russia wants to be genuinely global.

The way that the United States has been, it’s very clear given Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, that Russia seeks a form of regional hegemony. And I think it’s also pretty clear that China seeks to be the dominant power in East Asia, broadly speaking, or what we in the United States, christened about a decade ago.

Right. Derek? The Indo-Pacific region. But these are regional projects. These are not global projects like the United States itself has been regionally hegemonic in East Asia for decades. So I think what that would look like is the United States restraining its military might first, and then you see the emergence of other powers in their regions.

And in an ideal world, this would be something that would be managed. It wouldn’t just happen, for example, that the United States just retreats. If China decides to invade Taiwan, that there would be years of planning for this. What we think, I think believe is an inevitable contingency, an inevitable thing that’s going to happen.

So that’s what I think it would look like. It. Look like the United States moving back from some of its forward positions in the world. It would look like the United States trying to actually genuinely cooperate with other powers in a way that it really hasn’t done in a century or so. If you wanna look back that long.

And so it would be a, a total reformation of the United States is approach to, and really American’s approach to the world. I, I just wanna say we don’t think that’s in the ing, but that’s a counterfactual world we’d like to live in. 

Zachary Karabell: That is all.

It is definitely true that Americans, when they conceive of their post-World War II global system, think of it as a peace and prosperity system, you know, a Madeline Albright indispensable nation system, that we are the hinge of a global order that has created a sphere of prosperity globally. So my, my pushback is, isn’t there some degree in which, at least the sphere of prosperity part is accurate?

Until the past few years, there had been a gradual decrease of global violence. It’s certainly true that there was much more violence than we either acknowledged and certainly more violence that we were at the origin of than, than we usually tend to acknowledge. But it is also true that the past 20, 30 years have seen this kind of emergence of a global middle class that end of the Cold War did unleash a certain amount of economic.

Growth around the world. That certainly isn’t attributable to the United States per se. I mean, the fact that India finally became more of an economic powerhouse, or China has, has, has some relationship to the United States, but also a lot of relationship to their own. Just internal development. Reflect on that and, and then there’s a whole course now, particularly someone like Robert Kagan, who at Brookings, he’s talked a lot about.

We remain this indispensable thing and if the United States retreats, it’ll just be some sort of anarchic world. 

Daniel Bessner: Yeah, that’s a historical, so the metaphor of physics used like this idea of vacuum, a metaphor borrowed from physics in like the 1930s because everyone was reading Physics back then is not an accurate reflection of historical reality.

If a power retreats, it doesn’t mean that a great power just. Goes in to take its place. The, the problem with a lot of international relations thinking broadly, is that was literally forged in the fires of World War II. So it’s framed by that experience. So a lot of the metaphors, a lot of the assumptions of it, I think are just empirically wrong.

And I, I’ve written about this in relation to John Heimer and Michael Wa and other people like that. This is a question that that I think we often receive. And then how do you disentangle US global imperialism and economic development, which basically occur at the same time? It is my personal opinion that you would be able to get economic development and economic modernization and really industrialization and post industrialization without the US Global Empire, and that in a lot of instances, the particular way that the United States Empire actually funneled money might have.

Distorted things on the ground, for example, in Vietnam, in in South Korea and elsewhere. I think that, to get to your point, it was really good to be in the core during the era, during most of the era of American Empires. Great. If you’re the United Kingdom or France or West Germany and and Germany, it was much less great if you were in Vietnam or if you were in Latin America, or if you were in Asia and the United States was constantly intervening in your politics.

For example, about 20 million people historians have discovered, died in Cold War era conflicts, and I think that the historical record shows that the United States bears prime, if not total responsibility for the Cold War. So in effect, I think you could have the sorts of processes of modernization that you were describing and that they were not in fact reliant on the American global position, the United States being prime in that many instances, that primacy, again, wound up distorting things on the ground.

Derek, I don’t know what you think. 

Derek Davison: I mean, to go back to the original question, I think what, what we would like to see, and I can draw from a very recent example, Lebanon just formed a new government. It’s been, you know, two years or since Lebanon’s had a. Prior to that, the government formation process, Lebanese politicians had to deal with the interference of the United States at such a granular level that we were complaining about who was gonna be finance minister.

We were dictating cabinet choices to another country. The world that I would like to live in is a world where the United States doesn’t do that. And really the ideal world, I think is the world where the United States can’t do that, where the levers of power, the dollar, the military, the bases. Aren’t there anymore, but that’s not realistic.

What, what could be realistic, I think is a world where the United States makes the choice not to intervene in other countries affairs in that way, in that destructive kind of overarching manner. One of the things we talked about on the show very, at least early on when we were, you know, kind of explaining what the show was about, was, what I think we would like to do is, is change the way that.

Questions about world events are asked in Washington from something happens and the response is, okay, how does the United States respond to this? What is, what should the United States do about this? To at least at that first level, like the first question being, should the United States have anything to do with this?

And often I think the answer would be no. If we were being objective about it. I think just making that mental shift would be a huge development positively for the world and I think for the United States. For our politics domestically. 

Zachary Karabell: The last statement is somewhat separate from the first meaning it may be better for the United States have a less engaged, less interventionist approach to foreign policy.

The other is Lebanon, right? Without the United States intervening. You know, the Saudis and the Russians and the others wouldn’t intervene. In 2017, the Saudis held the Prime Minister of Lebanon pretty much hostage for a few days, you know? 

Derek Davison: Right. But they, they did that with the support. I mean, you know, the United States backed Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has regional reach in part because they get weapons and support from the United States. So we’re at the root of that anyway, 

Zachary Karabell: I’m just saying if we were not at the root of it. The Saudi’s perfectly capable of buying high priced weapons from another supplier. And it, there are some weapons that only we can supply, but fighter jets are kind of globally prevalent.

There are a lot of countries that make their own fighter jets. It’s a weird aspect, the global ecosystem. Not a lot of people make, you know, really good missiles, but a bunch of people make very good jets. I’m, I’m just, I’m just pushing back on the, it is certainly true that you can make an argument of a certain type of foreign policy that the United States has come to practice is not good for the United States, not good for its democracy, and is questionably good for the world, although it might be good for the US economy.

But it is equally true that in the absence of that, it’s not clear the world would be either better or worse for it. It would, it would certainly be different. 

Daniel Bessner: It’s hard to prove a counterfactual, but I don’t think there’s a question about the disaster, the disastrous role the United States have played in the Middle East since World War II.

Almost philosophically, I don’t agree with the idea that if the United States retreats another state would necessarily come in. I actually think the American fantasy of global dominance is linked to a uniquely Arian American Protestantism that goes back to before the founding of the Republic. This.

Universalistic notion that the United States could save the world. And when basically Protestantism became secularized over the course of the first half of the 20th century, a lot of those ideas were literally imported by people like John Foster Dulles former, you know, related to missionaries and things like that into the US foreign policy establishment.

And I think a lot of those ideas were actually read onto other nations. For example, if you read George Kennan’s 1946, long Telegram. He says Marxist Leninism is going to dominate the world. I think we’re pretty, pretty clear now that the Soviet Union didn’t have the capabilities or even really the will to dominate the world in the way that the United States did.

In that, what Americans do is that we read our own universalistic policies onto other nations. China has no desire to dominate in the western hemisphere. China wants to be the most important player in world regions like any emergent power, but I don’t think. If you run back history again and, and China is the world hegemon in 1945 and the United States isn’t, I don’t think that the Middle East is going to be as disastrous as what happened under the United States.

Derek Davison: To go back to the example of Lebanon, the reason that the Saudis kidnapped Ada Hari and held him in custody was because they were frustrated over. The influence that Iran via Hezbollah and its other proxies, has in Lebanese politics, but the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, yes, the Saudis could do that anyway.

They could. They could meddle in whatever affairs they want. They’ve got enough money to do that without the us. But the reason that that rivalry exists is because the US. Organizes the politics of the Middle East in an anti pro and anti-Iran alliances because that serves us foreign interest. That serves us interest in the region.

If you look at just the perception of a US withdrawal or downplaying that, that the importance of that region in US foreign policy, just the perception of that in the last few years prompted the Saudis and the Iranians to normalize. Relations. So the overarching structure of the politics of the region would be fundamentally different.

I don’t think that you can say that if the US were not involved, it would just be, you know, the Saudis being involved, you know, where the, the Saudis running amuck, or you know, some other country running amuck. It would fundamentally reshape the politics of the region, and this could happen all over the world.

If the US pulled back and showed some restraint, it would be a completely different world. As Danny said, it’s, it’s hard to prove a counterfactual, but in particularly in this case, I think to say what the world would look like if the US was not playing the dominant role that it insists on playing is very difficult to say.

’cause there’s so much of it that’s, that rests on the architecture of US national interests. 

Zachary Karabell: In the site you manage, you do a lot of articles just about history, the Janice series, the, you know, the ancient Persian. I mean, there’s a lot of interesting kind of eclectic stuff mixed in with very, very contemporary stuff.

In fact, I, I think when I was looking at the page, there’s an article about what, what are we supposed to do now under Trump part two? And then there’s something about how did the Janice or the Ma Lukes take over and, and what do medieval women have to do with society? So. Is this just because you’re a man of eclectic passions and therefore you’ve assembled a site thereof?

Or is there a, a theory of the case? 

Derek Davison: Yeah, so no, there really isn’t. A lot of the pieces that are on the site that are purely historical are things that I wrote years ago when I was. Fresh outta grad school and, and scrambling to find freelance work and just looking for something to do and maybe hoping to like build a website that people would be interested in reading and kind of, you know, going from there.

And that was what I had to write about because I was just outta grad school where I studied Islamic history. And so there’s a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of that stuff that I just kind of kept bringing with me to different places. It was on WordPress for a long time and then I moved to Substack. The podcast, what you’re, I think what you’re talking about with the, the Malos and the Medieval women, those are podcast interviews that I’ve done for foreign exchanges that I do, you know, one every like three months or so that, that are just interviews with.

You know, authors who, who write about things that I can plausibly not talk about contemporary politics as a break for everybody. Since the rest of the newsletter is very focused on what things that are happening in the world right now. I, I, I feel like the occasional chance that I get to do a podcast. I, I like to give people a break from that myself.

Above all really. 

Zachary Karabell: What’s your feeling about the connective tissue between the past and the present? I mean, my take has always been. The glory of learning more about history is one, recognizing that, you know, there is no golden age per se, that human beings have been muddling through whatever human beings have been muddling through in various forms kind of forever.

And, and at least for me, that gives me a certain amount of calm about the present. I mean, it doesn’t mean that we’re not gonna just, you know, is equally true, that really bad shit happens and, and that is no assurance to it happening again. But the flip side of that is. It’s a little easier to have a little more equanimity about the present when you reflect on just how complicated the past is.

Again, that’s, that’s me, like that’s my way of internalizing the past as a guide to. Either there’s a perfect analog. That’s always a mistake. There’s, at least in my view, there’s never a perfect analog anyway. I’m just wondering, like, you know, is it, is this just like, huh, I get to take a breath of fresh air ’cause I get to look at the malos?

Or is there actually a degree to which that then feeds into your sensibility about how we understand our presence? 

Derek Davison: I don’t do that explicitly with, with this stuff. There are occasional references to contemporary things. I think I did, I interviewed Eckhart who wrote a book about the Assyrian. Empire and I thought, okay, we’re gonna get through this whole interview and not talk about anything that’s happening, that’s happened in the last, you know, century, let alone the last 20 years.

But of course, we had to talk about ISIS destroying Syrian sites in the Middle East so we could talk about contemporary stuff. So, yeah, I, I mean, I, I don’t try to do it explicitly, but I think that’s a good way to look at it. You know, the, the idea that. As you say, bad things have happened. Upheavals, huge upheavals, societal challenges have happened and yet, you know, we’ve kept going.

You know, no matter how bad things got, humanity keeps, keeps finding a way to keep on, 

Zachary Karabell: you know, the only thing I remember from a Syria land is I was forced by some. Irish alcoholic, you know, private school teacher to memorize the first stanza of Byron’s, the destruction of Sora. And all I have in my mind all the time is the Assyrians came down like the wolf on the fold and their cohorts were gleaming and purple and gold.

And the Sheena, their spheres was like stars on the sea as the blue lave rolls nightly on deep Galilee. And that is all I’m gonna contribute in our podcast. About the Assyrians for fortuitous quotations. 

Derek Davison: The thing that stuck with me from, from reading this book, and, and people aren’t familiar with it, you should, you should buy it.

It’s a wonderful book. But the thing that stuck with me most from reading that book was he talks in the introduction about this letter, basically that a young Assyrian man who was living in southern Mesopotamia, like Babylonia, wrote a letter back to his mom in, you know, the northern, the Assyrian part of of Mesopotamia.

Complaining that the clothes that she was making and sending to him weren’t fashionable enough. And I thought this is like just teenagers throughout history. This is, you know, thousands of years ago. And my daughter would, would write that same letter today to me if, if she could. So yeah, it’s, it’s just like that was the thing that stuck with me is just like, how, how similar we are no matter how, how much the differences or how long the time passes between us.

Everybody kind of wants the same thing. They wanna look cool and be popular. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, some things never change. I gotta shift to Safa teenage gripes about fashion, although I’m sure we can all relate. And Danny, I actually have a question specifically for you, but of course Derek, feel free to to chime in as well.

I have had a particular drum that I’ve been banging for the last however many years. I’ve been having trouble finding bedfellows about this. And I found one on your Twitter today, and I wanna talk to you about it, which is that I have an intense frustration with people critiquing Trump by calling him a fascist.

And in particular. Then the next connection that people make is with Hitler. So if you wanna talk to people about why Trump is worrisome, you know, for whatever angle you wanna approach that, the conversation very quickly with a lot of people who vote for the Democrats is he’s gonna be the next Hitler, and you know, we’re gonna have consecration camps and blah, blah, blah.

So I would love for you to get on your soapbox about that, both why it’s wrong and what. Better ways it would be to critique what’s happening with Trump right now than to call him a fascist. 

Daniel Bessner: No, of course. So I wrote a, a long essay about this for the New Republic a couple of years ago, I believe it’s called.

It Didn’t Happen Here or does American fascism exist? They use different titles for the online version in, in the print version, but in effect that I think you actually need to historicize fascism and understand it as approximate response to several of the things that were going on in the early 20th century.

The first thing, of course, is the approximate trauma of World War I, which killed millions upon millions of people in Europe. It dispossessed people. It gave people in incredible stress and trauma, and it led to a lot of young men with war experience roaming the streets of the 1920s and early 1930s, Weimar with combat experience.

The literal development of the state was at a much earlier level, so it was possible for radical movements. In Italy and Germany, fima, Germany, what became Nazi Germany, to do something like see state power in a way that isn’t possible today. Fascism is also response to to two crises, the crisis of industrial capitalism that obviously reflected itself in the Great Depression, but also the crisis of the left.

To fail to realize its quote unquote revolutionary potential. And so fascism was organizing around the crisis of capitalism and also in response to it left. As you can see, none of those conditions hold today whatsoever. And probably the biggest one is that I don’t believe we’re living in an era of.

Mass politics where masses of people are able to organize and to do, do things like actually shift the state in a particular direction that happened both in fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany. I think if the history of the United States, for example, suggests anything over the last several decades going back.

To at least the ending of the draft in the early 1970s, perhaps even earlier. It turns out that a lot of historians are skeptical about the degree to which even the anti-Vietnam war protests wound up shaping the war. But it’s pretty clear that mass politics don’t really affect things here. There’s many studies showing that.

Even if you’re organized, the thing that matters is that you, you’re a business person and you have access to capital. That is what ensures that your feelings are actually heard in the halls of power. And there are several studies showing this. So none of the conditions for fascism hold here, and I think it actually is an analogy that occludes much more than it illuminates.

I think Trump is part of a longstanding American tradition going back to the very early republic, perhaps most instantiated in a figure like Andrew Jackson, but really present earlier, particularly amongst various constituencies around the founding fathers. But essentially he’s an authoritarian populist is that he is someone who wants to use the authoritarian structure of the American executive, the American president, and I think we need to appreciate the degree to which the president is really an authoritarian position.

The American state is effectively run through the presidency. Famously, Congress has not declared war since 1942. Good thing the United States hasn’t been at a war in war since 1942, so it’s already and very imperialist institution like Jackson or like other figures throughout American history. Liam Jennings, perhaps you would long, perhaps he’s appealing to populous sentiments in the service of an authoritarian.

That to me is what he’s doing. And I think actually importing a term like fascism is also wrong because it doesn’t work politically. If this last election showed anything, you could call Trump a fascist. Most Americans, most Americans smell Bs when they smell BS. And they don’t think that Trump is actually a fascist.

And I think in, in some almost perverse sense, importing a term that’s so distinctly tied to early 20th century European history actually. Separates Trump from American history. It’s not like racism, xenophobia. Genocide imperialism are fascist inventions. There’s quite proud American traditions of all of those things, and I think you actually have to look to American history to understand Trump, and you have to look to his proximate origins as a postwar baby.

Boom. New Yorker to understand where he’s coming from. Fascism doesn’t get you much. It’s wrong empirically. It doesn’t get you much analytically and it’s useless politically. I think it basically functions as a political curse word, which is fine. You know, like that’s great. You identifying someone as fascist, you’re effectively saying they’re outside of normal politics, just like identifying someone as Communist or Marxist does the same.

If you’re on the right, it’s the exact same function. But it doesn’t lead to understanding, and it very clearly didn’t lead to effective resistance. So for all of those reasons, it should be discarded. 

Derek Davison: I mean, it’s a bedtime story, right? For it’s, it’s a bedtime story for people who want to, for sad libs.

Yeah. Who want Trump to be something other fascism. To call somebody a fascist is sort of other coded. It’s the outside of the norm. It’s outside of the American system. But we don’t want to talk about all the ways, Danny, as you just outlined, that Trump is, fits very comfortably into American history and American traditions.

There is a certain. Group of people, and I think this is, I think this probably gets more traction among the sort of Nevertrump Republican, you know, all five of them or however many there are at this point, who really don’t wanna reckon with the fact that Donald Trump comes very comfortably out of the Republican parties, you know, history over the last few decades.

It gets play also among liberals who want to tell this story. And it’s funny how everybody’s got their own mythic version of American history at this point, and nobody seems to wanna talk about the reality of it, but they wanna tell their own myth about American history, where Trump is, you know, something completely unique that’s never been seen before and comes from, from outside and, and we can all, you know, rest our heads that this isn’t what the United States really is.

This is something different. 

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, I mean, I’ve been making this argument since, you know, 2016. I do not make it as a, as a self-identified member of the left, you know, it’s like every few years America wakes up and is like shocked that they’re a complicated, flawed society. 

Derek Davison: Can’t believe there’s gambling in this casino.

Exactly. 

Zachary Karabell: And I, and I think there’s a degree to which we, that we, and this was sort of amazing. 2021 to 2024, like nothing to see here. Kind of, you know, oh, well, oops, we had a moment. We lost our minds. We, you know. Lockdown and covid and now we’re, we’re fine. We’re back. We’re done. 

Daniel Bessner: It does seem like Biden wasn’t there all the time, mentally, and that literally there were unelected people governing.

I mean like it’s incredibly bad what Elon Musk is doing, but to argue that only the Republicans have unelected people making crucial decisions is just a flat out lie. 

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. It’s also flat out lie to say, I mean, everybody in the executive branch except for the president is defacto unelected. 

Daniel Bessner: That’s how Henry Kissinger got in.

He wasn’t elected, he was brought into the National Security Council. It’s just a lie, and I think this is one of the reasons that the Democrats are doing poorly. They lie and they have no positive program and you don’t have to know the entirety of American history to smell BS. And I think a lot of people just smell BS around the party, which is not willing to do the one thing that would win it votes, which is redistribute money.

They don’t want to do that. So they’re trying to push the conversation onto anything else and it won’t work. 

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I mean there, there, I happen to disagree just ’cause I do think we actually do def facto redistribute quite a bit of money. We may not distribute it well or effectively or as much, but we are, I mean there is a tax code that is inherently redistributive in the United States.

Let’s not get into a whole critique of, of capitalism. 

Derek Davison: I mean, it does help to explain November, right? Like the idea that Trump is an aberration. Means, you know, we got through his first term, we voted him out of office. Now everything can go back to normal. You can all go back to brunch. We’re all fine.

Everything’s gonna just keep chugging along the way. It was chugging a lot before. And so you walk in to 2024 with nothing to say, nothing positive to say about the problems that people are, are, are facing, you know, everyday problems that people are suffering with and how you’re gonna deal with them because your whole message has been, don’t vote for Trump.

Right. I think still stuck back in 2016. America is already great and there’s nothing that we really need to do to change it or fix it. This is it. This is just what we are. So let’s talk 

Zachary Karabell: China, because I know you guys have have written a lot about that. M and i, we, there’s been a bunch of episodes. I wrote a book about this once where I made a.

What is now clearly a voice shouting in the wilderness. Except I’m in no way. I didn’t either lose my head, nor did anybody listen. So clearly we are entering something resembling a cold war with China. Although it’s, it’s, again, it’s not really the right analogy ’cause you could have counted literally on one hand the amount of economic interaction with the Soviet Union, even into the 1970s when we were buying and shipping some grain to the Soviet Union.

Daniel Bessner: I was gonna say there was some wheat in the seventies. Yeah. 

Zachary Karabell: But even then, like it was de minimus relative. Whereas the economic intertwined with China is, is not just massive directly, but it’s massive Indirectly, it may change over time, but it certainly remains the case. Nonetheless, you know, we are in this, China is well cast for a national security establishment that was looking for a unitary state enemy with, with nukes and weapons.

ISIS was never an, Al-Qaeda was never, you know, quite the right graft for that institution. I mean, I say I’m not part of the left ’cause I’m not, and I disagree with a lot of the, the analysis you’re saying. But then there, then there are things that I’m saying, but actually some of the right believe this too.

I mean, this is where these categories get a bit muddled. Anything we can do about this, I mean, from my perspective, that ship has kind of sailed. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep saying, Hey, wait a minute, and look, she has done nobody any favors. I mean, you could say, look, we, we helped create the modern version of she.

It’s a little like saying, you know, Ukraine provoked the Russia invasion. I mean, there’s truth to it, but it doesn’t justify it. So he’s been an equally toxic partner in a toxic relationship. 

Daniel Bessner: Well, I mean, I think the, the writing is just on the wall. United States is not going to be able to remain hegemonic in East Asia.

That is, this is not in 25 years, the United States will not be hegemonic in East Asia, and it’s a, it’s a total Fantasia. Of the national security bureaucracy, like as you said, I would say because it’s been so influenced by liberal thought, has basically moved from existential enemy to existential enemy from the Soviet Union to humanitarian interventions, to global terrorism, to China, to to Putin, and now back to China.

Now that no one cares about Ukraine anymore and the United States. The reality is that this is going to happen. So the question is, what is the regional transition going to look like? What I think it will look like is that China does something incredibly provocative, like attack Taiwan. In 15 years, the United States says, oh, we’re probably not going to fight World War III over this.

And in effect, abandons its allies. That to me is very much possible. What I would like to see is a more planned and rational security transition where the United States just doesn’t cut and run and abandon its allies in South Korea or Japan or Taiwan, but actually prepares them for a world in which the United States is not going to be any longer regionally hegemonic in East Asia, because of course it’s not gonna be any longer regionally, hegemonic East.

I wrote a long piece about this for Harpers. Several years ago where if you just look at the economic indicators, the United States’ share the G seven share of global GDP, its relative power has been in sharp decline. It’s in sharp decline for decades and in fact, we’ve outpaced the rate of decline that was predicted even three years ago.

We could have whatever we did, the national security establishment could, could try to sort of reinvigorate itself by concocting a ridiculous new Cold War with China. It’s just not going to change the fundamentals on the ground. That’s my ultimate take on the US China relationship. So the smart thing to do.

Seeing that this is likely inevitable unless China implodes, which is possible, but unlikely in my opinion, is to actually start to facilitate the security transition and also start to seriously work with China on the global issues that we need to work on, which is the basic ones, climate pandemic inequality within in between countries.

Of course, the United States has no interest in doing that. Look at these aforementioned institutions. United States has gotten furious several times when China starts to assert itself in international institutions. ’cause only we’re. Allowed to do that. So I think we’re incredibly retrograde. National security establishment isn’t going to do much.

Emma Varvaloucas: What would it actually look like though to prepare Taiwan for a attack from China, though? I mean like in in no world is Taiwan going to successfully fend off the Chinese if that’s what they decide to do. No, 

Daniel Bessner: precisely. So there are certain realities of international relations that I think people abroad are going to have to accommodate themselves toward.

I mean, you could try to build up the Taiwanese defense industrial base. I think maybe you could reach a situation to sort of like. One country, two systems type situation over time. But there are just certain realities of international relations that that exist. And then you have to ask yourself, is it worth fighting a World War III over with a nuclear armed, the mega power?

I mean, these are the uncomfortable realities of geopolitics, but they shouldn’t be ignored or basically pushed off into fantasy land, which is what the United States National Security establishment, the blob. Does and has been doing for decades because they’ve been shielded by US hyper power. That hyper power, I would say, has already gone away, and it’s going to attenuate even more going into the future.

Derek Davison: I mean, I think that the appropriate way if you’re gonna continue to arm Taiwan is not to think about it in terms of resisting a Chinese invasion, but in terms of making an invasion costly enough that the Chinese government thinks maybe this isn’t such a good idea. But what it would really take, I think, is an, is an awareness on the part of the US of our own history and on the Taiwanese government, on the part of the Taiwanese government of recent US history, and the fact that what the United States Security establishment tends to do is to prop up our proxies, make them dependent on us weapons, make them dependent on US financial support.

Then eventually, because the political system in the US is what it is, pull the rug out from under them. So that’s what happened with the government in Afghanistan. That’s what happened. That’s what I think is happening with Ukraine. You know, it’s, it’s this concept of maintaining conflict and giving, you know, the proxy, whatever the proxy is, just enough to kind of continue to sustain the weapons sales to sustain whatever, you know, positive or whatever goals the US sees coming out of these conflicts.

But eventually. Not creating the kind of durable structure or, or independent structure that could allow those proxies to act for themselves and make decisions for themselves. And instead they’re left vulnerable to the eventual shift of the political winds and, and things crumble at that point. So, you know, what it would take is, is starting from that framework and I think, you know, supporting Taiwan with what it would need, not.

To fight a war, but to prevent a war. To deter a war. And then as Danny said, you could talk about things like a one state, two system type of arrangement or some kind of interaction between Taipei and Beijing that brings diplomacy into it and further forestalls the possibility of the conflict. 

Zachary Karabell: Right. And it’s also equally clear that United States domestic American public is not prepared for their sons and daughters to die on the shores of Taiwan.

Full stop, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I mean, I’m sure we could ratchet up enough heat, you’d really have to work on that for a bunch of years. We’re kind of toward the end. I wanna ask a final question of both of you, which is kind of what, what does one do now tactically? So I might disagree with the, some of the prescriptions of the left, but if, if you feel you want to exert some sort of constructive pressure, change something on trumpia, given that.

Absent some incredible implosion of the administration, it is what it is for the next three plus years. You wanna have some positive utility right in, in writing, thinking, speaking, rather than just aimlessly shouting into the wind and having a few people who agree with you, go right on, man. Right? I mean, there is something to be said for shouting to the Amen.

Course. It makes one feel at least heard, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to anything. So what do you do? I suppose this is tactical as much as strategic. What’s the constructive approach to deal with a reality that is flawed? I mean, you guys are in a somewhat better position, and to some degree you’re saying, look, the reality has been flawed.

It’s not suddenly flawed. It’s not like it wa it wasn’t like fine before January of 2025. It’s been messed up for the whole time. So you’re probably in a better position to kind of deal with the reality of flawed than others who are like, ah. 

Daniel Bessner: I mean, there’s very clearly one thing to do, and that is to subscribe to the podcast, American Prestige, which is the first step in any anti-Trump movement.

I actually think that the most important task right now is mostly analytical, because I think that a lot of the ways that we understand politics into 2020s are shaped. In an occluding way by how politics functioned in the 20th century, that we still use the language of mass politics, the metaphors of mass politics to understand how to enact political change.

But I believe the nature of politics has transformed because the American state has shown itself totally resistant. Ordinary people’s influence and, and has for out much of its history. But I think there’s been a ratcheting up in the last several decades. So the first thing to do, and I think both liberals and the left could unite on this, is actually understand how politics really functions.

Is it really just, and as it seems that the rich matter and everyone else doesn’t? And if that’s the case, we need to figure out what to do about it. But I don’t think there’s a clear tactical approach because the state is so closed off from the influence of ordinary people. 

Derek Davison: Yeah, I mean, this is one of the things that we come back to again and again on our show, which is it’s evermore removed from any interaction with everyday voters.

The system, the foreign policy system in particular, is further and further taken out of the realm of, of popular politics. It’s, it’s started with, you know, the development of the national security state. It continued with, you know, we. Talk about all the benefits of an all volunteer military versus the draft, but one of the effects that that has is it removes even the, the idea of going to war, fighting a war from the day-to-day lived reality of most people.

We’re now, you know, into automated warfare, drones, things that don’t even, things that involve at best, a, a human being sitting behind a screen somewhere. So not even on a battlefield, it’s even further removed. We’re gonna get to the point where AI is running these things, which means there’s not even gonna be a person behind a screen necessarily doing anything.

So it gets further and further automated and away from any lived reality. And I think without understanding what that means and, and how, I mean there’s still a way for people to influence, I think. Politics and to influence the direction of US foreign policy. But I don’t know that we know what that is right now because it’s a much different world than it was 50 years ago.

So I think Danny’s right, the first thing that needs to be done is we need to figure out how this world works and, and then you can understand, you can try to figure out what the levers are, 

Emma Varvaloucas: appreciate the honesty on that front.

Zachary Karabell: We will see how all this all unfolds. Keep doing the work you’re doing. I’m glad you’re engaging the conversation with us. Part of the point of the progress network is to engage a wide variety of voices that are trying to create constructive change, whether that’s from the left, the right, the center of the middle, the far out, the alien, the not.

I think you know this question of how does one. Remain an engaged citizen is is vital. And that’s true for anybody of any political spectrum. You know, that’s the challenge of democracy, right? You shouldn’t just be engaged when you kinda like what’s going on. You should be engaged. Full stop, always. So I want to thank you for that.

I encourage people to look at your work, listen to your podcast, and thanks for your time today. 

Daniel Bessner: Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, thank you both. 

Zachary Karabell: So, Emma, I thought that was. Yeah, I mean there’s obviously a lot more to unpack there. It’s an interesting time of whatever your self anointed label is.

Are you a left? Are you progressive? Are you on the right? Are you a never Trumper? Are you a radical Trumper? Are you a MAGA Trumper? You know, all these categories. While they may exist in people’s hearts and minds as static things are clearly in terms of. One of the things interesting about the conversation we just had is aspects of what Trump is doing that are kind of recognizing maybe America’s interest isn’t in being the global policeman and the global hegemon.

Maybe it’s just being a really powerful country that does what it wants, which has its own problems, but it’s very different than the model of the foreign policy establishment for the past 70 years. 

Emma Varvaloucas: We’re really just talking about horseshoe theory, aren’t we? I think that there, yeah. There are some ways in which that holds true for those guys.

I mean we, yeah, we didn’t get to talk about this very much. We referenced it, but we didn’t get directly into it about how the kind of like the new right in their sort of America first isolationism and the discussion about what should be done about Ukraine is a departure from the right, or what the W right has been doing for the past, let’s say 30 years at least.

I don’t think that those lines have completely settled yet. I mean, they clearly haven’t even settled within what I’m randomly calling the new, right? Because on the one hand you have Ukraine. On the other hand, you have Trump’s comments about Gaza and the us. You just kind of moving in and taking over there, whether that is gonna become a reality.

Who knows, but the fact is it’s not exactly a coherent message. 

Zachary Karabell: Totally. Although I think the Gaza fantasy is more of a, a non militarized real estate development project, which makes zero sense, but is, you know, from the musings of Trumplandia is more of that than it is a like imperialist expansion. 

Emma Varvaloucas: That is an imperialistic expansion, isn’t it?

And you’d have to use the military to get there.

Zachary Karabell: So yeah, that, that part remains largely unspoken also because it’s, it’s completely untenable, right? I mean, imagine Americans supporting, you know, the dispatch of American, the sixth fleet to shepherd Palestinian sales. Well, I 

Emma Varvaloucas: don’t know. It’s like you would wanna believe that, but we went into Afghanistan, we went into Iraq.

I mean, certainly it can be done. So never say 

Zachary Karabell: never 

Emma Varvaloucas: insofar as convincing people. I mean, not like, like it can be done like we should do it, but convincing people that it should be done is possible. Right. 

Zachary Karabell: I guess that’s true. Anyway, we probably should do some more in foreign policy. And these changing frameworks are fascinating and I think we’ll get more and more interesting as the kind of the way.

Out of fracturing is possibility, right? It is always opening, so you can see it as destructive or you can see it as breaking open and whether or not the likelihood of that is great. The opportunity of that is always present and, and that is definitely true in Trumplandia. You know that there is a degree or there could be a degree of breaking open that is an opening to a different way of doing things.

But I’m also prepared at this juncture to say. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Okay, let’s leave it at that. So let’s see how this ages in a month. 

Zachary Karabell: So thank you all for listening. Tune in next week, same bat time, same bat channel. Sign up for our newsletter. Hark, you go right on theprogressnetwork.org. Send us your comments, your complaints, your interests, your questions, and we will try to address them.

We value your time. We thank you for giving some of it to us and we will be back with you next week. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks everyone for listening.