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This is Honestly, and today, a debate about American foreign policy. The day of days for America and her allies. Ever since the end of World War II, the United States has been the dominant world superpower. Reporters rush out to relay the news to an anxious world and touch off celebrations throughout the country. Joy is unconfined.
And America and Americans have understood itself, to some extent, as ready to use that power to defend certain values, or to defend our national interest, or sometimes a bit of both. On Sunday, June 25th, communist forces attacked the Republic of Korea. This attack has made it clear beyond all doubt that the international communist movement
is willing to use armed invasion to conquer independent nations. But there's always been a tension in this country between isolationism and interventionism. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Between those among us who think that we should maintain an active role in world affairs and a muscular foreign policy. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. And those who want to pull it back and focus on our many problems here at home.
The two million homeless people in our country sleeping out on the sidewalks and under the bridges are not going to win this war. There will be no money available to house them. The tens of millions of Americans who cannot afford health care today are not going to win this war. There will be no money available for their needs. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes
against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps. I oppose the war in Iraq precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force. Hands off Iraq! Hands off Iraq! That longstanding debate is being reignited right now on the Russian-Ukrainian border, where Vladimir Putin has placed over 100,000 forces and has demanded that NATO deny membership to Ukraine.
President Biden says a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be the largest invasion since World War II. There will be enormous consequences.
The Biden administration for the past few weeks has been sounding alarms about the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. It would change the world. Warning that an invasion could kill up to 50,000 civilians and trigger a refugee crisis in Eastern Europe. And that opens a Pandora's box that countries well beyond Europe will see and maybe decide to act on. The White House has already ordered 3,000 troops to Europe, and that number seems likely to increase.
All of which raises the following questions with urgency. When should America use our power and our military might to intervene on the world stage? When we see an injustice or evil being done by a powerful force abroad, and it appears likely that without our help that force will prevail, should we get involved? And how? And should America try to wrestle back the superpower status that feels like it's on the wane? Or should we just let it go?
Here to debate those ideas are Brett Stevens and Matt Taibbi. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having us, Barry. Thank you. Brett, you are a Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion columnist for The New York Times. You were the youngest editor-in-chief ever of The Jerusalem Post, which you helmed during the Second Intifada. And your book is called America in Retreat, The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder, which I think foresaw a lot of what we're living through.
Matt, you're the author of many books, most recently of Hate Inc. You are a National Magazine award-winning journalist and an author whose substack, TK with Matt Taibbi, I absolutely love. And I read that you were actually kicked out of Uzbekistan for criticizing the president, if I've got the detail correctly. And in 1997, you returned to Russia to start a publication called The Exile. So to start,
Can each of you tell me what your basic position is on American interventionism and how you came to it? Brett, maybe let's start with you. Before I say that, I just want to say what a huge fan I am of Matt. You always have to admire a great, great pro stylist. And I love Matt when I disagree with him. And I love Matt when...
When I agree with him, which is happening more and more often, I don't know what that says about his politics or about mine, but it's just such a pleasure to read a guy who writes so well and so trenchantly and so honestly. So let me just begin there. So how do I come to my position on interventionism?
I think you know, Barry, my mom was a hidden child in World War II in Nazi-occupied Europe. So to say that I owe my very life to Western interventionism, British and American, is not an understatement. It's the reality of my life. And I should say I'm not a fan of American interventionism in every conceivable circumstance, but I can think of many circumstances in which it has made the difference between
tyranny and genocide and freedom in life. If you are a South Korean, you owe your country and the freedom it has and the prosperity it has to not just three years of American interventionism during the Korean War, but the 72 years that have followed thanks to the presence of American forces.
If you're from the Balkans, you were saved from tyranny and genocide from Slobodan Milosevic, thanks to American-led intervention. If you're Western European, the United States maintained huge forces in Western Europe, still maintains them today. And that made the difference between a Germany and a France and an Italy that were free and those countries that were dominated by Soviet despotism.
So interventionism has gotten a bad name for reasons I'm sure we're going to discuss, especially because of either ill-judged or more often really ill-executed interventions in the past 20 years. But people should be aware that the world in which we live and many of the things that we love about that world are the result of America's willingness to maintain and occasionally exercise power in defense of its interests and its values.
Matt? Thank you. Thank you, Brett, for those very kind words. I, too, have been reading you and agreeing with you much more recently than in the past. And that does probably say something interesting about both of us. But thank you so much for the opportunity, Barry, to bring us together and talk about this. It's an important subject and I'm honored to be talking with you both. So my opinion on this subject is shaped quite a bit by having lived
in the former Soviet Union for about 12 years. One of the reasons that we're in the position that we're in, I think, has to do with the fact that we so badly mismanaged our intervention in both Russia and Ukraine. I witnessed close hand the efforts of the United States aid community and the political pressure that we applied to the Yeltsin regime.
We supported a regime that was so unpopular and vicious that it engendered a great deal of hostility towards the West. When I first went to Russia as a student in 1990, when it was still the Soviet Union, you could hold your passport up on the street, a blue passport, and people would run up to want to meet you because they loved Americans so much. By the time I left, I was telling people I was Canadian because I didn't want to deal with the animosity that being an American engendered.
The mismanagement of privatization and the transition to what we call Western-style democracy, or what we called anyway in Russia, I think that led directly to the nationalism that ultimately became the power base of Vladimir Putin. So, I don't think we'd be in this position if it were not for our total mismanagement of foreign policy in the region. We also did something similar in Ukraine. We backed the wrong horses there as well.
Ultimately, my opinion on all this is basically that you have to go very far back in history. I think I would probably quibble with Brett on this a little bit to find a successful military intervention by the United States. We've made an enormous mess of it every time we've done it recently. So I think the rest of the world perceives us as not, you know, some angel or white hat that's going to ride to the rescue. They often are not sure whether our presence is going to be a net negative intervention.
in the end, I think the Slavs specifically believe that very much of the United States that it would probably be better for everybody if we were not involved in the region.
Okay. Well, before we get deeper into the question of Russia and Ukraine, I want to push back a little bit on each of your positions by maybe looking at some historical examples. Brett, have our regime change wars in Iraq, in Libya, and maybe you'd even quibble with the idea that they are regime change wars, and elsewhere in the Middle East, have they backfired? And what do you say to the criticism that
As Matt just argued, that our interventions have largely caused more problems than they have solved, or that choosing the wrong leaders is a dangerous precedent that often leads to unintended consequences. Yeah, I mean, there are unintended consequences no matter what you do.
It would be stupid of me to say every single one of our interventions has worked out great and the alternative is surely a disaster and we always back the right horse. I'm just arguing for a kind of a general principle, not even a
a presumption, but at least a willingness to entertain the idea that there are circumstances, there are places where the presence of American power, and what we're really talking about, I thought, was military power, not the kind of ham-handed economic intervention that we had in the Yeltsin regime in the 1990s when we were doing what we could against actually very, I think, very large odds in Russia. So of course, there are things that often go wrong, but
you have to weigh the reality that the alternative on occasion to intervention is to allow far worse things to happen. I mean, just look at Syria, 7 million refugees, hundreds of thousands of murdered civilians, people who have been gassed, basic international norms violated, Russia's
reemergence is a major power in the Middle East. That is the unintended consequence of our non-intervention, effective, our de facto non-intervention in Syria. We allowed a refugee crisis in Syria to fester because Barack Obama would not intervene after the chemical red line was crossed in 2013. It led to the greatest refugee crisis in human history, creating a tidal wave of refugees that spilled over on European borders
sparking the rise of very right-wing nationalist parties throughout Europe, probably triggering the decision by the British for Brexit and having a huge effect on the election of 2016 and the general climate of populism that overcame the West in that year. So there are consequences to non-intervention too. Now, if you want to go down the list,
Our intervention in Libya looks bad. If Gaddafi had slaughtered half a million people in Benghazi, which is what he wanted to do, that would have been bad too. Our intervention in Afghanistan went badly to some extent, but what you now have is a possibility of mass starvation by millions of people when we just had 3,000 troops holding the line. How about Iraq, a war that both of us supported?
So Iraq is a bit of a difficult case because... How is it difficult? Well, no, I'll explain why. Because for 12 years, Saddam Hussein was universally considered a menace to stability and global order in the Middle East.
Now, that was based on bad information and based on a view of the world that, in hindsight, we could have revised. But you don't actually walk through history that way. By the way, if we had gone in, taken Saddam out, right, and installed or supported some kind of...
regime that we could have backed that would have been less than fully democratic if we simply made our aim the end of Saddam's regime rather than the creation of a robust democracy in Iraq, things would have worked out very differently. Things would have also worked out very differently if after we'd gone through the surge, we
Barack Obama had maintained a presence of American troops rather than allow the country to descend into the tyranny and destruction of the ISIS caliphate. So again, I'm not, there's no cut and dry answer, but I think it's simplistic to say, gee, if we hadn't gone in, our problems would have been resolved. If we hadn't gone in, we would have just walked down a different path with a different set of problems.
Matt, you want to respond? Yeah, I mean, first of all, I would argue I'm not sure that the Syria crisis is happening if we hadn't destabilized the entire region with the Iraq invasion to begin with. The Iraq war was based upon the ridiculous notion, now completely disproven, that Saddam Hussein was preparing for.
weapons of mass destruction to armed terrorists who would attack us. Iraq posed absolutely no security risk to the United States. Yes, it was a terrible regime, but there are lots of them around the world, many of which we support. And the idea that we're going to go in there and install
better regime. First of all, think about how that sounds to a foreigner, this idea that we get to pick and choose who gets to be somebody else's leader. But we didn't do it correctly. We went in there on terrible information based upon what I think was a political desire at the time of the Bush administration to respond to 9-11 in some kind of a way that was
a bigger move than going into Afghanistan. But it had no connection to 9/11. It was completely absurd, destabilized the entire region, caused a mess of problems, cost us trillions of dollars in resources that we could have been spending here, and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. So it was a total disaster. And it's predicated on the notion that
we can always do something about problems that happen in foreign countries. You mentioned Qaddafi, what if he had committed these massacres? We can't always do something about these things. What we can do is not participate in worsening situations, which I think is a choice we've made far too rarely in recent history. So just to give a counterexample, in 1994,
Bill Clinton had been a little spooked about what had happened in Somalia a year earlier, the Black Hawk Down incident. And so when the leaders of the Hutus decided to eliminate their ethnic rivals, the Tutsi,
Bill Clinton decided on a course of absolute non-intervention, which included, by the way, refusing even to destroy the radio towers, which were broadcasting orders and directions for Houthi militia to find Tutsis who were in hiding and to slaughter them by the hundreds of thousands, typically using machetes and other sorts of instruments.
So maybe a cruise missile hitting that particular radio tower may not have been decisive, but there are steps that the administration could have taken to credibly prevent or at least prevent
tipped the scales in favor of 800,000 or so people not being slaughtered with machetes. And those are the sorts of decisions that leaders have to make. Now, Clinton made the decision not to intervene. He spent the rest of his presidency apologizing for it. And maybe it has something to do with my own personal story.
But I tend to come from the position that there are millions of people around the world whose lives hinge on whether the United States is willing to put a finger on the scales for the sake of people who are about to be slaughtered as opposed to those who aren't. When I think of shameful episodes in American history, I think of the refusal of the United States to bomb the rail tracks that
were bringing Hungarian Jews by the hundreds of thousands to Auschwitz, an easy decision the Roosevelt administration could have made, which it failed to do. So that's also on my mind. And I, by the way, Matt, I completely agree that there are
Any number of ways in which you can rightly describe American intervention as ham-fisted and stupid and counterproductive, that happens. The real question I think we're debating is what our fundamental attitude ought to be about intervention. Do we rule out every possible intervention as a guaranteed catastrophe, or do we think that we can do perhaps a lot of good in the world?
So just to lay my own cards out on the table, you know, I worked with Brett at The Wall Street Journal. I supported the war in Iraq. I was a huge proponent of the Arab Spring. And I've historically been, you know, much closer to where Brett is in this conversation. And I did it because basically for bleeding heart reasons. I think tyranny is bad and I think people have the right to live in freedom.
But I'd be lying if I didn't say that looking back, I feel like I was foolish to have taken those positions. And like a lot of Americans, I've sort of come to question whether we can do the good we aim to do or that we're promising to do when we intervene.
And on the other hand, weakness really scares me. And I fear that an America that projects weakness just leaves the door open for much scarier prospects, Chinese dominance being one of them. And the rising isolationism that I'm seeing, obviously on the left, but also very much on the right, to me is sort of...
I fear an embrace of American weakness or some kind of resignation to the notion that America's in decline and there's nothing we can do about it. And Matt, that's kind of what I want you to respond to. Brett has made the argument in many columns in the past.
in more elegant terms than I'll say right now, that essentially America needs to be the world's policeman, because if it's not the policeman, we're going to get a much scarier cop on the block, either ineffective like the United Nations or more nefarious like China. So I'd love for you to respond to that. Well, first of all, when I think of terrible decisions in past history involving American policy, I don't think of times that we didn't
bomb somebody or we fail to act militarily. I think of things like the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the bombing of civilian populations in North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the installation of dictators like the Shah in Iran, CIA-backed massacres in Indonesia. We are seen as a power to be feared in many cases, that our arrival is going to make things worse for the people on the ground.
And this has been absolutely the case in our two most recent big interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, where we made a complete mess of both of those situations. Hundreds of thousands of deaths resulting from our invasion of Iraq.
somewhat less in Afghanistan, but still a complete bloodbath there. And that was a disaster. We left that situation worse than it was than we went in. There was originally a military reason for going in, which I agreed with, but we should have left at least when we completed that mission. When I look at these things, I think of it in terms of
Are we going to make things worse by our involvement, or are we not going to make things worse by our involvement? Do we have a strategic interest, or do we not? If we are going to go in, I do agree in some limited circumstances you can do it, but you have to have the full cooperation of all your allies. It has to be like an international effort where everybody goes in. If we were going to have intervened in Rwanda, we would have had to have done it with Rwanda.
the cooperation of all of our important European allies. And this again plays into the situation in Ukraine, which we're going to get to because we have a fractured coalition at the moment. And we're going to end up once again doing something unilateral, which is going to backfire on us. So I as a taxpayer and as somebody
who wants to see my country loved and respected around the world. I don't want to see my name attached to massacres and drone assassinations and other policies that I don't agree with. I think we can start with that. This is like the Hippocratic Oath: begin with, do no harm. And we have, again, too often failed to make that decision in recent history.
During the Vietnam War, there was an idea similar to what Matt is describing that as soon as we got out, things would be okay. We were the problem. But actually, as soon as we got out, what happened in Cambodia was the killing fields in which a third of the Cambodian people were not decimated, were tertiated by the Khmer Rouge, by our enemies.
When we got out, you had the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of the so-called boat people who are now our wonderful Vietnamese friends and neighbors and great citizens of the United States, who, by the way, Joe Biden, this is an aside, wanted not to lift a finger for. As we get out of Afghanistan, we're looking at the possibility already of a million refugees and mass starvation in that country. So I think, though, to me, what bothers me is not sort of
having my name connected to an effort to help vulnerable people. It's having my name connected to an effort or to an impulse not to lift a finger on their behalf. The great tragedies that have unfolded in the past century have always
almost consistently unfolded when Western powers, especially the United States, refused to get involved. And I just happened to be watching this film on, I think, Netflix, Edge of War, about the Munich debacle, where Neville Chamberlain's famous line was, why on earth should we go to war
over a distant quarrel, I'm paraphrasing, over a distant quarrel for people who mean nothing to us. Well, it was precisely the failure of the West and the Sudetenland, which led to catastrophic consequences just a year later for the rest of the world. So I think the moral issue here is definitely more complicated than what Matt is suggesting. I don't see how it's complicated to dumping a toxic exfoliant all over a
Vietnam so that generations afterwards, kids are being born with horrible birth defects to remind everybody in the country of what American foreign policy meant to the Vietnamese. I don't see how that's morally complicated at all. So we did. We also acted with a tremendous amount of aggression in Korea to stop North Korea from overrunning the South. And I'm willing to wager that
that most South Koreans are very glad not to be living under the dispensation of Kim Jong-un and the rest of his family. So, you know, people like to focus on interventions that have gone wrong. We should remember that a number of these interventions have saved millions of people from, you know, atrocious despotism. But there's more than that. And I want to, I'm sure this is where you're going to go, Barry, but
I'm sure a lot of people listening to this podcast say, well, it's all very well and good to argue about what we can do for other people. But one of the reasons I think that a posture that occasionally, occasionally favors American intervention is that Americans themselves are better off when the United States makes
maintains a reputation as a reliable ally and as a fearsome enemy. And when we got out of Afghanistan, we lost a great deal of that reputation. We had said that we would stand with the people of Afghanistan through thick and thin.
And what we proved was the last thing you want to be if you're an Afghan is, say, a translator for American forces, because we're going to screw you in the end, which is what happened to too many of our friends in that country. It's also not an accident that
Just months after we leave Afghanistan, you have this crisis on the Ukrainian border. You have a brewing crisis between China and Taiwan because, and I know Matt will be delighted with this quote, as the late Donald Rumsfeld liked to say, weakness is provocative. After the break, more from Matt and Brett on the proper role of America on the world stage. Stay with us.
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Brett, you just mentioned what's good for Americans, right? And it seems to me that if you look at the data and you look at survey after survey lately, more Americans are on Matt's side of things increasingly. There's tons of statistics, but, you know, a Washington Post-ABC poll from September showed that 78% of Americans supported the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. There's a new data for Progress poll that found the majority of Americans favor diplomacy with Russia over sanctions or going to war.
I could go on. What are they seeing that you aren't? Well, I think they're wrong. You know, I mean, I'm sorry that I'm not going along with the wisdom of the majority, but I think what they're not seeing is
is that there are huge costs to living in a world in which the United States is not seen as a major factor in global affairs and in which revanchist dictatorships, whether it's Khamenei in Iran or Xi in China or Putin in Moscow, feel that they can pretty much get their way in their so-called spheres of influence
totally unopposed. This was a lesson that, by the way, if you go back to the 1920s and 1930s, you would find huge majorities of Americans who were absolutely on the side of what was then called the America First movement, the isolationist movement, that wanted to remain willfully blind to what was happening in the Far East and in Europe. And presumably we were cured of that illusion that we could turn our back on the world and the world would turn its back on us on December 7th, 1941.
But it's congenital for America because we are so distant from other countries and from most other zones of conflict in the world to think that we are in some ways immune from their crises. But as you said at the beginning of your intro, Barry, if American power folds, it's not like
the world will naturally take care of itself, right? It's not like the UN will suddenly get its groove back and start organizing the world in a way that's beneficial for the freedom and prosperity. It will be quickly overtaken by the worst regimes on earth. And so, you know, it's not fun to be the world's superpower, but you know what's even less fun? It's even less fun to live in a world where there is no policeman.
And that's the world that we risk living in if we would take Matt's advice. I've been thinking a lot about the
strange political realignment that we are living through. This is on 20 different topics, but foreign policy being only one of them. And to choose one of so many examples of late, you know, last week, the sort of rising star of the national populist right, Josh Hawley, called on President Biden to block acceptance of Ukraine's inclusion into NATO. And he was praised from not just other people on the sort of new right, but from
high profile figures that are just in a totally different realm like Mehdi Hassan. So first, I wanted to ask you if you agreed with Hawley and also to get you to comment more broadly, if you would, on this sort of broader political realignment on foreign policy. Agreed with Hawley about blocking Ukraine's...
I do agree with him. Yeah, I think it's a provocation if it were the shoe were on the other foot and Russia brought Mexico into an alliance, a military alliance, that we would see that as a provocation and that would make the world less safe. I think the American public doesn't understand what NATO expansion to Ukraine or Georgia, what that looks like to a Russian or a former resident of the former Soviet Union.
But just to get back to the realignment,
Brett, you talked about how people are just wrong. Well, some of those people who are wrong are the veterans who were fighting in these wars. And they came back from their experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq and had extremely negative feelings about American intervention, not just because the missions tended to be a total failure or because there was an awesome amount of contracting corruption, which they witnessed firsthand.
or because they left the countries in worse shape than when they arrived, because the people hated them for being there. The reasons for being there, they were lied to by their commanders. And when they came back,
It was a lot of those people, and I saw them when I covered Donald Trump's campaign in 2016. There were a lot of vets in the crowd, increasingly, as his campaign went on. And I think what we're seeing is that the sort of populist right got an enormous boost
from the failure of the kind of bipartisan military consensus in the West or the neoliberal consensus to recognize
how badly these interventions have gone and how unpopular they've been and how confusing and negatively the people we asked to fight these interventions feel about those wars. They are incredibly angry and resentful about it. And so it's not just that by our presence in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq that we're engendering enormous amounts of discontent in those places. We're also doing it at home.
by sending our sons and daughters to fight in these places for causes they don't understand or don't agree with. It's an overlooked aspect of all of this, is that, you know, we can say, well, we have to act here, we have to act there. Well, somebody actually has to do it. And would you send your kids over to defend that?
Ukraine from Russia? I wouldn't. I have three kids. There's no way. Of course you wouldn't. Your children would make their decision freely. We don't have a conscript army. Go ahead. I don't think any sane person would send their kids to defend or participate in the military action in Ukraine. Let's clarify, actually, what we're talking about when we're talking about Russia and Ukraine. Let's actually establish what the hell is going on there. Brett,
What is your understanding of what is happening right now? And why do you think that America should stick its nose into what's happening? Let me say, I'm publicly on the record that the United States should not send troops to defend Ukraine.
So just just to be clear about what we're talking about, I think we should help Ukraine defend itself. And I think we have ethical, strategic and actually legal obligations. People don't remember this because memories are short. But in 1994, we strong armed Ukraine into giving up a huge nuclear arsenal.
through something called the Budapest Memorandum. We were worried about a fledgling country like Ukraine having possession of all those nukes. And so we, along with Russia and Britain, insisted that Ukraine return the nuclear weapons and in exchange they would get guarantees for their territorial integrity. That ought to mean something, by the way, for a variety of reasons, not just for Ukrainians, but it also means something in our efforts if we ever try to get another country to give up its nuclear weapons, what those paper assurances
might mean 20 or 25 years down the road. But I do think beyond the legal and diplomatic obligations,
We have a stake in making sure that Ukraine can at least defend itself by helping to arm the Ukrainians. The United States was not involved in the 1973 war between Israel and its neighbors, but we did send munitions to Israel because we saw it as an embattled democracy that should have had at least the means to defend itself. We should be raising the stakes for Russia so that they know that the costs of invasion are
are going to be punitive. And we should do everything we can to reassure every country that is inside NATO
that they're not going to be the next country to be eaten alive. Because the conflict that Russia purportedly has with Ukraine is one that it has in various forms with every other Soviet republic. There are Russian ethnicities in Lithuania or Estonia or Latvia that might claim that they want to be under the protection of Russia. There are all kinds of reasons why
Putin might choose to swallow at least a portion of Ukraine and then look for his next meal elsewhere. We have to move very, very swiftly to make sure that we don't allow that to happen. What Putin wants to do isn't simply to reclaim parts of Ukraine. In fact, Ukraine would probably be like the anaconda swallowing a donkey or something. It would be almost indigestible.
But what he really wants to do is break the back of the NATO alliance. What he wants to do is cement the worldview that, frankly, Matt is putting forward, that the United States has no real obligations towards our allies around the world.
And when he does that, he's going to pick off Europe one by one. Hungary is already moving into his orbit. There are vulnerable countries like Moldova or even Montenegro that he can start picking off. But we live in a world in which Russia dominates or effectively dominates the politics of much of Western Europe, including through energy blackmail.
We are going to be far less secure, far less prosperous, far less safe in the United States. And by the way, one of the things we'll have to do in that event is we are going to have to jack up defense expenditures in a way we haven't seen in generations. Despite all the talk about how much money we spend on defense, we spend...
a pittance on defense compared to what we were spending when I was growing up. We spend about three and a half percent of GDP. When Kennedy was president, it was close to 10% of GDP. So instead of having a defense budget that's about $800 billion, we might have to spend $2.4 trillion on defense against a much more aggressive
and much more dangerous world, not just Putin, but Xi and China. Matt, do you agree with Brett's description of what Putin's aim is? And if not, to tell us in your view, what you think is happening right now between Russia and Ukraine and why you think we should stay out of it? First of all, I don't think it's a given that he's going to invade. I think...
It's entirely possible that the endgame here is just getting assurances that Ukraine's not going to be part of NATO. But let's just start with the beginning. We're not going to go in and defend Ukraine. Everybody knows it. Barack Obama said it out loud when he was president. He said, the fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do, which is
Everybody knows to be true. So all the rest of it is just saber-rattling. We actually look weaker by sending troops to the region and pretending we're going to do something about it when we're not. The idea that we're going to send weaponry to Ukraine seems to me a stupid substitute idea. We're going to get into a proxy war with a nuclear adversary over, again, an area that is just not strategically important to us.
If Ukraine were a NATO country, it would be different. They're not. They're not our allies, technically. And as for reassurances and our word meaning something, yes, what Brett said about 1994 is true. But it's also true that when we were negotiating with Gorbachev and Edward Shevardnadze about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that we promised that we would not take one step
forward towards the Soviet Union. I talked to a CIA agent who interviewed both Shevardnadze and James Baker, who were part of those discussions, and they both talked about how we used the word leapfrog. We will not leapfrog any countries in the direction of your borders. So we made promises to Russia about NATO not expanding ages ago, and we broke those promises already. So the idea that we have to live up to some other promise
to Ukraine, look, it's just not going to happen. We're not going to intervene on behalf of this country. Everybody knows that we might as well just admit it. Our own allies in the region aren't going to stand for it. They can't. Germany can't risk conflict with Russia because they're too dependent on them economically for energy and also as a trade partner. They're not going to go along with it. Turkey doesn't want to go along with it. There are other countries in NATO that don't want to go along with it.
It's this isn't happening. Matt, sort of echoing Brett's view, Secretary Blinken has said that if we allow Russia to sort of fulfill its expansionist vision, then we're opening a Pandora's box around the world, which is sort of the argument that Brett's making. Tell me why that's wrong. I mean, this is just the rehashed version of the domino theory back from back in the Vietnam days, which I also disagree with. Brett mentions the idea that the same argument exists everywhere.
to one degree or another for every former Soviet state. That's not exactly true. The eastern Ukraine is a completely different situation from the Russian ethnic minority in Lithuania or Latvia or a place like that. Those borders have changed countless times over the histories of those countries. And having traveled extensively in that area, you can't really make the comparison between the Russian-speaking minority in a former Soviet country, or even what they used to call the 16th
Republic of Bulgaria and the eastern portion of Ukraine, which is legitimately, you know, predominantly Russian-speaking, ethnically Russian. I'm not in favor of Putin going in there. I sincerely hope he doesn't. But it's a completely different argument from this idea that he might invade Lithuania or Latvia or Estonia someday. That would be a very serious thing. I think Americans have an overblown sense of
of how big and how dangerous Russia is. Militarily, yes, it's still a very powerful country, but economically, it's tiny. It's smaller than South Korea or Italy. It's a basket case of a country in many ways. And what Putin is trying to do is exactly what's happening. He's trying to make us look weak by checkmating us diplomatically.
in this region. And I think that any kind of involvement by the United States in this area is only going to lead to worse outcomes, as it has in that region now for almost 30 years. So when we got out of Afghanistan, the argument was we should get out of Afghanistan because we have to concentrate on the countries that really matter to us, especially the Far East and Europe, right? Now, notice that when we're out of Afghanistan, suddenly what we've really done is said, oh, well, actually...
Ukraine doesn't really matter to us. Or now I'm hearing increasingly that Taiwan doesn't really matter to us, right? So we're always shrinking the orbit of the world that really matters to us. And at the end of the day, we're going to shrink it basically to zero. Again, let me stress, because I think
Matt, in his comment just now shaded this. When we talk about sending troops to the region, okay, we are talking about sending them to reassure NATO states. I am not talking about sending American troops to put their lives on the line for Ukrainians. But we have, and this is contrary to what Matt said, we have had proxy wars with nuclear armed states for a very, very long time. Korea was a proxy war with the Soviet Union. We had proxy wars in Afghanistan.
We had a big proxy war in the 1980s in Afghanistan where we provided the Afghan Mujahideen with Stinger missiles, which were very effective. And that turned out great, didn't it? Actually, it did turn out great in the sense that it achieved a devastating disaster for the Soviet Union, which ended up bringing down Russia.
are probably most formidable geopolitical foe of the 20th century. And we ought, at a minimum, we ought to help the Ukrainians defend themselves. I don't even see why that is...
remotely should be remotely controversial. We're already sending equipment, although it's not particularly in large numbers, but why not at the least say, if we're going to stand up for them, to say, we want to help you fight for yourself, not us do the fighting for you, but
but fight for yourself. Now, I agree with Matt, by the way, it's very unclear what Putin's end game is. I'm not sure even he knows it. But what he absolutely aims to do is achieve a diplomatic result that materially weakens the American position and the Western position in Europe. And what he will do after that is by means of intelligence gambits, subterfuge,
energy diplomacy, support for extremist parties, both on the far right and the far left. He's going to try to destabilize politics throughout all of Europe. What happened in 2016, and by the way, no, I don't buy the Russia conspiracy theory, but I do think that Russia has been trying to interfere in Western elections for a very long time.
He's been doing elsewhere. Russian support for groups like the National Front, the quasi-fascistic party in France, is an open secret. Look at also right-wing parties in Austria and elsewhere. And the effort is to undermine democracy, to support populist ideas,
authoritarian, anti-liberal forces throughout the West. And the West doesn't stop in Europe. The West also includes the United States. So yeah, you're right. Someone once said that the Soviet Union was like Upper Volta with nuclear weapons. That was Helmut Schmidt in the 70s.
Now you could call it like Burkina Faso with nuclear weapons. It's an economically poor country, but it has a massive military arsenal. Germany might be a strong country economically, but it has almost no military to speak of. So we haven't escaped the world of the 19th century where military power actually counts for a lot. And if we want to maintain a world, you can call a free world in which there are democracies
in North America, in Europe, in East Asia, in South America, and so on, it's always going to depend on the credibility of American power. You know, I was thinking throughout this conversation, when we talk about American interventionism, you know, we usually think of like sending troops into Iraq. But American interventionism happens
when not a single American troop is deployed anywhere. It happens when a country like Australia or New Zealand that spend relatively little on their defense have it in the back of their mind that if things go really wrong, America will be at their side, right, as we were in World War II. That's also a function of American interventionism.
That sense that the United States is a serious, incredible ally. When you take that away, when you take that away, then a country like Japan is going to nuclearize immediately with thousands of nuclear warheads. You're going to have chaos in the Middle East. You're going to have all sorts of countries that you wouldn't want getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction, acquiring their own arsenals because they see it as their only way to safety. So you are inviting a whirlwind.
I think a lot of people would argue, and I'm curious, Matt, if you would see things this starkly, that we're already living in that world. Yeah, I think that's true. I think a lot of countries around the world and a lot of people don't view us as...
all-powerful anymore. They've seen our inability to perform in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And, you know, Brett, again, you mentioned the disaster of withdrawing from Afghanistan. What was the alternative? Everything we tried there failed, and we were not
going to succeed no matter how long we stayed there because we have a total inability to win the quote-unquote hearts and minds of these places. We don't understand the local populations. In many cases, we don't agree with their customs. We try to impose a cookie-cutter view of the world that doesn't fit in many of the places where we try to intervene. And so...
I think what people look at when they look at our tendency to intervene in foreign countries is that we're not capable of pulling off everything that we say that we're capable of pulling off. They see us as a declining superpower that's unable to take care of its own people.
We've lost credibility with our own voters, and that's why we've seen drifts towards people like Trump. We have to concentrate more on strengthening our own democracy, building at home. And we've undercut the message about the—your most recent column was what happened to the free world. Well, I don't think you promote that by—
Starting campaigns of torture, drone assassination, mass surveillance, secret prisons, rendition, you know, Guantanamo Bay. That's the image that we've projected to the rest of the world. And that's the reason that we've lost the confidence of people around the world. That plus the fact that we're no longer the economic juggernaut that we once were. We've become...
more like the upper Volta with rockets in this modern scenario than we were previously. I think we need to focus more on building ourselves back and rediscovering our values,
and building ourselves back up. So everything Matt says is wrong. Let me begin. The war in Afghanistan that we had for the last six years was not the same war that people remembered from 10 years ago. We were maintaining fewer than 10,000 troops for much of that time, mostly on air bases in Bagram and...
making sure providing the Afghans with intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and some special operating teams to make sure that the Taliban couldn't win outright.
Not a great situation, not what we thought we were going in for, but you know, something vastly preferable to a country that is returning to some state of medieval darkness, whether it's a humanitarian catastrophe or just the medievalism of the Taliban. The idea that we do no good in these countries is just not true. Yeah, we screwed up a lot. There are plenty of mistakes. You can
You could catalog them till the cows come home, right? But millions of Afghan schoolgirls actually got an education because we were there. But the larger point, the larger mistake Matt makes is this idea that it's either we intervene in the rest of the world
or we repair our fraying social fabric. You know when the greatest civil rights advances were made in the United States? In the 1950s and the 1960s, when we were fully engaged in a Cold War that was frequently hot with the Soviet Union and its proxies. The United States is actually a country that has proved that it can walk and chew gum at the same time, unlike the Ford administration, but that's another story. So there is this false and I think really facile rhetorical argument
trope out there, which is like, well, if we do, you know, if we help out in Ukraine, what is that taking away from what we could be doing in terms of homeless clinics in New York or dealing with the opioid crisis?
In the United States, it's actually not either or. We spend a remarkably little amount of money, about 3.5% of our GDP on defense. If you add up other aspects of foreign policy, maybe it comes out to about 4%.
That's 96% of GDP that is being spent in some ways domestically. And what does that 4% get us? It gets us a world in which you hop on a flight, Barry, and you land in Japan and they don't want to kill you. They're friendly. And you go to an ATM machine and you take out cash and you can't even understand the writing on the machine, but it comes up and there's an English option. You take out cash.
You live in, nested in a free world that is not dominated by characters like Putin and Xi. And the last thing, and I feel this is like being lost a bit in this conversation. When NATO expanded, it didn't expand by conquest. It expanded because little countries like Lithuania and Latvia felt threatened by their old neighbor, the bear, Russia. They volunteered to join a defensive organization. What Vladimir Putin is doing is an act of
of military bullying and aggression with a purpose of imposing dictatorial rule on people who do not want it. There's like a basic moral difference. After the break, China. Matt, what is your understanding of what
the Ukrainian people want. I know that in 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea, one thing that didn't necessarily get a lot of attention is that the majority of people in Crimea were sort of open to becoming a part of Russia. In fact, many of them seem fine with it. Well, of course they were. They were ethnically Russian and linguistically Russian. Right. So explain to us what you think the Ukrainian people actually want, majority of them.
It depends on where you are in the country. The farther west you go, the farther away it gets from the Russian tradition. The eastern portion of the country has either been outright a Russian territory in the past or has been,
you know, part of Russia's sphere of influence for centuries. There's a sort of a vast difference depending on where you are in the country about how people think about Russia and the possibility of Russian intervention. I wouldn't claim to know how most ordinary Ukrainians think about the situation, but I can tell you absolutely from living in Russia that when we were once welcomed into that
THAT COUNTRY, AND MOST RUSSIANS EXPECTED THAT WE WOULD BE FRIENDS TO RUSSIA FOR DECADES GOING INTO THE FUTURE, THAT MINDS WERE RADICALLY CHANGED RELATIVELY QUICKLY
YOU KNOW, IN THE PERIOD OF ABOUT TEN YEARS. THE AMERICAN PRESENCE WAS SEEN AS OVERWHELMINGLY NEGATIVE. WE CAME IN, WE PRIVATIZED THE COUNTRY, WE TOOK AWAY PEOPLE'S HEALTH CARE, WE TOOK AWAY THEIR FREE EDUCATION. THAT'S THE WAY THEY SEE IT ANYWAY. OUR PRIVATIZATION PROGRAMS ESSENTIALLY TOOK AWAY THE SOCIAL SAFETY NET THAT RUSSIANS HAD ENJOYED, WHICH IS ONE OF THE FEW GOOD THINGS ABOUT THE SOVIET REGIME.
And they saw us as the people that sort of instantly enriched this oligarchical class that became, you know, like a mob state. They saw us as the sponsors of the worst kind of regime. Under Putin, what people say—and I was there for that transition from Yeltsin to Putin—the difference for Russians is that, yes,
They're stealing, they're horrible, they're dictatorial, but at least they're ours, right? So whereas Yeltsin was seen as a puppet of the West,
and it became immensely unpopular for that exact reason. So we can have a negative effect on countries just by being in the area, just by our support. Unless we intervene and make sure that our allies don't do terrible things in our name, it has a negative effect going forward. I think that this is the problem that we haven't reckoned with since World War II. We've been so caught up in this idea of
expanding our sphere of influence, that we've ended up supporting regimes that make people feel negatively toward us. If you want people to be close to the United States, you have to do something that makes them feel positively about us. And our record on that is extremely mixed. And I would say tilts towards the negative. Well, I mean, I think it's unequivocal that the majority of Ukrainians do not want to live under Vladimir Putin's Russia. And in fact, many, many ethnically Russian Ukrainians living in Luhansk and Donetsk
who have had to deal with the Putin-declined states there, have had a change of heart as well. Unmistakably, the vast majority of Ukrainians have voted time and again for political leaders who want to draw much closer to the West. And I think that trend has accelerated. And it's a really great question, Barry, because, again, we talk about this
And there's this attitude that, well, wherever we go, we screw up, we're not wanted. I think Ukrainians very much want any evidence of support
that we are not going to allow them to become yet another country like Belarus, which is what Vladimir Putin would gladly do to Ukraine if he had his way. Look at the mass protests that you saw in Minsk, the torture of dissidents, the police state there. And Ukrainians know very well that that's what awaits them if the West and the United States abandons them.
Brett, what do you make of the fact that Ukraine's president has sort of urged calm, criticizes, you know, the U.S. moves to pull diplomats out of Kiev? What do you make of all of that? I think he's doing the right thing. If you were in his position, of course he would do that. You've got to, you know, look, panic isn't going to serve anyone, whether there's an invasion or not.
And to the extent that he can project a sense of calm and that there are alternatives to war, and I think there are alternatives to war. Again, I am not for intervening militarily in Ukraine other than supporting them with armed shipments.
And I hope there's a diplomatic outcome short of war that doesn't cripple Ukraine, doesn't cripple NATO. But of course, that's what he's going to do. We should be astounded, by the way, that you have in Ukraine a character like Zelensky, who is probably as
liberal and democratically minded a president as Ukraine has ever had. One of the reasons why Ukraine is so threatening to Vladimir Putin isn't because of the possibility that it might join NATO. I don't think Ukraine is ever going to join NATO, at least not in our lifetimes.
It's the possibility that Ukraine is going to at last become a thriving democracy and in doing so be a rebuke to the style of kleptocratic leadership that you have in Moscow. If we're willing to promise tomorrow that Ukraine is never going to become part of NATO, this whole thing can be over in five minutes. They likely wouldn't invade in that situation.
And I think the Russians would be more than happy if Ukraine were to turn out to be a thriving democracy because Ukraine would be and has been traditionally a huge trading partner with Russians. So the wealthier they are, if they were to become thriving and wealthy, that would be good for Russia. Hang on a second. But let me say that again for me, Matt.
If Ukraine gets rid of the kind of reputation of being a sort of sleazy oligarchy, corrupt, inefficient, and actually became a country that looked more like a Western European state, you think Vladimir Putin would be made happy by having this example of a post-Soviet republic that is doing well, where people are free, where elections are real? Or do you think that would terrify him because...
He is, after all, a guy who is now, what, 20 going on 23 years in office. I don't think he would be invading. Let's put it that way. He's invading in part because he wants to
I mean, among the many reasons, I think in part it's that the idea of a prosperous Ukraine, of a democratic Ukraine, is an embarrassment to a regime like his. So this is they hate us for our freedom again? I mean, like, come on. Really? Like, they're not threatened. They wouldn't be threatened by Ukraine unless...
The threat to Russia is if Ukraine becomes part of NATO. If militarily the United States extends its reach that much closer to Russia's borders, that is what they see as a threat. Matt, are you saying that Vladimir Putin would not have expansionist ambitions were it not for the threat of Ukraine joining NATO? I think that if we promise tomorrow to not have Ukraine be part of NATO, to have it
that I think likely that he wouldn't invade. I think that's a big possibility. That's probably what's going on right now, this massing on the border. It's intended as a show of force to try to make us drop our ambitions to bring Ukraine into NATO's orbit. Just my guess. I think that's what would happen. I think there's a bad history of Western powers projecting weakness in the face of
And by the way, by free elections, do you mean the ones like the ones we rigged in 1996 in Russia? I mean, so like our record in terms of supporting democracy in that region is pretty crappy. It's the one that Yeltsin rigged. I think you're overstating the extent of, you're vastly overstating the extent of American influence in Russia in the 1990s.
I wonder to what extent this conversation is actually a proxy for a broader and maybe more urgent, scary debate about China. Matt, early on, you sort of summed up your point really simply when you said, yes, bad things happen in the world, but we can't always do something about these things. And I kind of like the realism of that, but I want to push back on the question of like,
What about when we can do something or when we ought to do something? You mean like give China most favored nation trading status when they're one of the worst, world's worst human rights violators, like exporting our entire manufacturing economy to China, devastating our own population, helping theirs at a time when they were –
Again, one of the world's worst human rights violators. That's what I'm talking about. We have to get our own house in order before we start thinking about saving the free world from somebody else. I just think this whole idea of the threat of China, I mean, who's more responsible for the rise of China than us?
We moved our entire manufacturing capacity to China in the 90s. We disenfranchised essentially our own working class by moving all of our technological and financial capability, industrial capability over to the Chinese. Why? Because we wanted cheap labor, because our corporate leaders were greedy and greedy.
wanted to save a buck not paying American workers wages and benefits. Why do that when you can pair up with a country that will allow you to use their territory, don't have to worry about pollution standards or workers' rights? You essentially have slave labor. And, you know, what's not great about that from the point of view of an American CEO, except for the fact that it
destroyed America from within and empowered one of the worst regimes in the world. Brett, I would love for you to respond to that because I remember, you know, back in the Wall Street Journal days, there was very much a decade ago this sense of, you know,
sort of following the Cold War playbook that if China gets enough good genes, essentially they'll liberalize. And I think everyone agrees now that that was naive and foolish and wrong. So Matt's making this argument from his seat on the sort of progressive left, but you could hear those same words coming out of lots of our friends on the conservative right. So I'd love for you to respond to it.
Yeah, so I don't entirely disagree with what Matt just said. I don't think the initial bet that the Nixon administration took on the opening to China was a bad one. It gave us vital leverage against the Soviet Union in the 1970s when the United States seemed to be on the defensive. Let's not forget that we actually did a lot of good in China in the sense of raising hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty.
The bet started to go wrong probably sometime around 10 or 15 years ago when it became clear that as China gained economic power, it wasn't remotely interested in liberalizing politically. But I don't think on its face it was a terrible bet, a terrible decision. Again, everything has crystal clarity with historical hindsight.
But there were really, I think, perfectly defensible and reasonable arguments to be made that allowing China to develop economically was not a bad idea. And by the way, at a certain point, it was not up to us anyway. China was going to develop economically, even if it had not been brought into the WTO or given most favored nation status.
Could we have put more manufacturing jobs in, say, friendlier countries like Mexico or the Philippines as opposed to China? Could we have done much more to insist on the rights of workers, particularly to ban the import of any goods that had the imprint of slave labor, which is what's ubiquitous in China? We should have done a lot. The reality, though, is now we're faced—this is actually one of the
happy points of more or less bipartisan agreement, okay, that we are faced with a serious threat of a China that not only is rising in its region, not only is threatening its neighbors, threatening our allies,
but is actually fundamentally threatening the idea of democracy itself with a concept of sort of efficient surveillance-based authoritarianism. Yeah, there's some of it in the United States. I completely granted it. I'm freaked out when Amazon knows my reading habits or whatever. Let's be serious. It's nothing like what China is, the model that China is developing.
And people should be really frightened about this. I mean, it plays into my larger argument, which is that when the United States sort of walks off the stage or the United States becomes weak or the United States doesn't support liberal democracies in both the spirit of liberal democracy and its practice...
Someone steps into those vacuums, and the model of efficient authoritarianism that China is pioneering is in many respects a very attractive or at least superficially attractive model. You just only later learn the
The price that comes with it. In the 1920s, people used to say it was a cliche at the time, well, Mussolini might be a dictator, but at least the trains run on time in Italy. And that led to a kind of a new strain of kind of neo-fascism throughout much of the Western world.
I look at some of the commentary that's coming out of the right, some of the people that, in fact, I used to work with, you used to work with, Barry, and it's starting to sound like something of a trend, of a movement here in the United States. So one of the reasons why I dislike this idea that the United States should just sort of walk away from the troubles of the world, stick to its own knitting, hope problems resolve themselves, is that it is an invitation to powers like China to export not only their power and their economic muscle,
but their political model. And there are a lot of countries that are going to be vulnerable to it, including here in the United States.
Why don't we stop funding the transfer of American businesses to China? We can start with that. We could economically withdraw from China if we wanted to, and we haven't done that. We haven't used our economic power to lean on the Chinese at all, because what the Chinese provide is just far too convenient for us. It's a gigantic financial
free labor source. I agree with Matt, but just notice that what he's actually talking about right now is advocating a form of interventionism. I'm not saying that we should invade China. I'm saying that we shouldn't be sending auto factories and have American banking financing its economic rise if they're not going to give human rights to its citizens. And
and have workers' rights? Oh, 100%. I mean, we are in total agreement. I believe in using the instruments of American power in order to advance American interests. Matt?
Do you think it's possible for the U.S. to be neutral on the world stage when sometimes the choice really is between freedom and totalitarianism? Like, let's imagine Russia invades Ukraine, China invades Taiwan, and a trend begins and the influence of these authoritarian powers grows.
Do you really think that the solution, let's imagine that worst case scenario, you know, is just sort of to focus on health care for all? No. Look, the United States does have formal allies. If any of those were invaded, I think we would have to respond militarily.
But that's not what's going on in Ukraine. There are limits to our influence. And what we've done time and time again, especially in the last 25, 30 years, is assume that we can go into a country and not just install leaders who are going to be sympathetic to us, but also keep those countries politically stable.
when sometimes that's just not possible. We have to recognize the limits of our influence. Sometimes we just can't do it. The nation-building thing doesn't work in a lot of parts of the world, in part because, you know, sort of our way of life is not the same. We assume that people are all going to behave like Americans when we go into places like Iraq and Afghanistan and we bring all these institutions and we think it's going to work everywhere the same way, and it doesn't.
Russia invading Ukraine is a very different thing from China invading Taiwan, which is very much in the United States national interest. I think we would have a very different attitude about that than we would about Ukraine. But why should we? Because we have longstanding connections to the Taiwanese, and it's important to us economically.
We have no formal military obligation to Taiwan. What's the principle that makes it different? I think in very limited circumstances, we can think about acting militarily, but it has to be an absolutely desperate situation. And, you know, Russia going into eastern Ukraine is not it.
I mean, I think it's you know, it's like that at the Potter Stewart thing. I, you know, I don't know how to define it, but I know when I see it, Putin going into eastern Ukraine is not the thing that I want to risk nuclear war over. And I think most Americans would agree with me about that. Brett, what do you see as the sort of bright line if there is one between Russia and Ukraine and China, Taiwan? Or are they sort of the same, but they're just sort of in different points along the spectrum?
Look, again, I'm just repeating myself because I think it's so important that this point not be lost. I am not in favor of sending American sons and daughters to fight in Ukraine. I am simply in favor of trying to get them to save, to help themselves.
In the case of Taiwan, I feel exactly the same way. The Taiwan Relations Act that we have with it from the late 1970s obliges us to provide them with weapons so that they can defend themselves. And by the way, they have not been doing a very good job of it. Taiwan spends scandalously little on its own defense. And one of the things that we should insist upon is that they start becoming serious about their defense.
But here is my fear, that it's a case of like salted peanuts. Once you eat one salted peanut from a little bowl of salted peanuts, you are going to eat every single one of them. So when you're no longer willing to defend Afghanistan, you're going to discover arguments that you're no longer willing to defend Ukraine. You're going to discover arguments you're no longer willing to defend Taiwan. And after that, you're going to start asking yourself, why the hell should
which is what Donald Trump asked, why the hell should the United States risk nuclear war for the sake of Lithuania or Latvia, even if they are treaty allies through NATO? And so you embark on a kind of a real slippery slope. Now, I grant it, I understand America has to pick its spots
We absolutely have to ask ourselves, what are the countries that engage our vital national interests? Which ones of them are like, well, wish we could help or wish we could do more? In the case of Ukraine, there are a few vital interests. If we allow Russia to seize Ukraine,
parts of Ukraine or all of Ukraine, it will be the single greatest violation of territorial sovereignty probably since World War II, with the exception of Saddam Hussein conquering Kuwait in 1990. We don't want to allow that to happen. We have obligations to Ukraine, actually legal ones going back to the Budapest Memorandum, which we should take seriously. And finally, if we allow Ukraine to fall, the rest of NATO is on the table. That is a vital alliance.
And Brett, for those Americans who have sort of been following this story out of the corner of their eye and really not reading past the lead because they kind of couldn't care, it feels so far away, it feels irrelevant. Explain to that person what the stakes are for them as an American. So for all of the costs that we have borne since the end of World War II when maintaining what I like to call the free world, the
the benefits have been immeasurably bigger. We have not had a world war, for one thing, in 77 years. That's actually a big deal when you think about the broader course of history that the United States had to fight two world wars in the first part of the 20th century alone. We have an amazingly prosperous world. People forget it. You know, I was once asked that question after I wrote my book,
by someone on a radio show. And he said, you know, why should I be paying to keep American troops in South Korea? And I said, just out of curiosity, what kind of phone do you have? And he had a Samsung phone.
That Samsung phone is, in a sense, a kind of stand-in of the sort of prosperity, the trade, the free intercourse of people, the vibrancy in terms of what we get from Korean immigrants to our shore, a world in which free countries participate in thriving, growing, technologically advanced, scientifically progressive countries.
endeavors. That's a pretty good world compared to the worlds that we have known in our parents or our grandparents' lifetime. And that's a world that we should treasure. There's some things in life that you only understand the value of when you are dealing with their absence.
like losing a parent or something like that, when you suddenly understand just how much of your life is connected to the existence of something. And a lot of our lives as Americans is intrinsically connected to a broader view of the world in which a militarily strong and morally confident American power pushes the world imperfectly, stupidly, sometimes incompetently, and sometimes even criminally, but
by fits and starts, pushes the world in the direction of a little more freedom, a little more prosperity, a little more liberality in the way in which we conduct life. And Matt, to the person who's seeing this debate play out and thinks,
Doesn't really matter to me. Never can't really locate Ukraine on a map. Russia. What do you say to them if if Russia does invade Ukraine and Brett is saying to that person, this is why it matters to you. This is what the stakes are. What's your answer to that question?
Well, look, I think America, I don't have to say anything to that person. The person's probably already in the same place that I am. Most Americans, I think, are weary of American interventions. They've seen that we've
lied and failed, and we've gotten ourselves into quagmires all over the world that have been enormously expensive, both in terms of money and in lives. And these people who are saying, "Why should I care about Ukraine? Why isn't my government doing more for me at home?" Which is what they're saying. And I know that. I know they're saying that because I hear that from them every time I cover a presidential election, and I have been hearing it for the last four election cycles.
these people don't want to be involved in these conflicts anymore. You know, I talked to soldiers who were involved with
bases where we were sending drone aircraft out. They don't want to be killing people by remote control anymore. They don't understand it. Morally, they don't get it. They don't feel that these missions do us honor. And I think it's very, very difficult to explain to middle Americans why we need to be deploying in parts of the world where we're not wanted. I mean, I think Brett talked about how we can't
defend, we decide we can't defend Afghanistan. Well, we didn't decide it. We just can't. There are some countries where, you know, we went in and we spent a massive amount of money. We committed militarily for almost 20 years and significantly for over 10 years.
And we couldn't hold territory at all for more than a few minutes. And we systematically lied to the American people about it over and over again. So they don't trust us when we say we have to get involved militarily anywhere in the world anymore. And I don't blame them. So this whole situation with Ukraine, I think it's dangerous. I think people will look back and they'll see
You know, our history of in places like Vietnam, well, no, we're just going to send advisers over or we're just going to send weapons over or whatever it is. And then it morphs into something bigger. And soon the commitment's bigger. And next thing you know, we've got we've got a few battalions of whatever involved in the region. I don't think we want to be playing that game. I think the average American says, I don't I don't care about this place. And I understand that logic.
One more break, and then we'll get into what Brett and Matt actually agree on. Stay with us.
I think that one of the temptations in a debate like this is to cherry pick. You know, Brett or the person on Brett's side says World War II. And then Matt or the person on Matt's side says Vietnam. Then Brett says South Korea. And Matt says dictators in South America. And we could go on and on and on. And I think there's a temptation to see this in black and white. But I wonder if you guys can sort of see the wisdom on the other side. So, Brett, I'm curious whether in American history or in the present—
If you can think of an example where there's been wisdom in restraint. Yeah, I mean, look, one of the things that I badly overestimated was the ability of the United States to
to, um, uh, get the end games right. Uh, because we did actually do something very good when we ended Saddam Hussein's tyranny, which had resulted in the death of literally, uh, over a million people in the Iran-Iraq war and the Anfal campaign and Kuwait and so on. But then it turned out that we were incompetent at execution and incompetent beyond anything I could have
I think most of us, but certainly I, I didn't imagine, uh, imagine at the time. And I think a lot of, by the way, I've probably amped up my disagreement with Matt a little bit for the sake of, uh, for the sake of, uh, of a debate, you know,
Foreign policy is not an exact science. It shouldn't be called a science at all. You enter into situations that are very complex, very difficult. Sometimes you get some things right. Sometimes you screw up catastrophically. Sometimes the things that appear like screw-ups end up as something like successes and vice versa. So it's a very difficult decision. But what I want to fight back against a little bit, Barry, is what I feel, this is a Jonah Goldberg line, the tyranny of cliches. Like,
You know, the greatest cliche of all, every dollar that is spent overseas is taken away from some worthier project at home. It's guns or butter is one of those cliches or everywhere America goes. We just screw things up and we do horrible things and we make a shitty name for ourselves. The idea it's like, well, if we just turn our backs on the world, things will be better. You know, my grandmother was a friend of Leon Trotsky and he had a famous line. He said, you may not be interested in war.
but war is interested in you. And we may not be interested in the Middle East and China and Ukraine and Donetsk and Luhansk and all this shit that's complicated and difficult to explain. But ultimately, all of those places are interested in us. And we should be very careful to treat everything as a faraway conflict that has nothing to do with us, because that's what Neville Chamberlain tried to do in 1938. It worked out poorly.
Matt, are there any situations you can think of in American history or even in the present where you either believe that we should have been taking a more muscular interventionist attitude or would now? Well, I certainly agree with the interventions in World War II. I think that we should have taken a much more forceful stand against the Chinese, not necessarily militarily.
But economically, I think we should have thrown our weight around in that direction a lot more in the past. And we failed to do that. We failed to force lots of countries to have better human rights practices.
I don't want to get into the Israel debate because I know that's not going to be popular with either of you. But look, I'm generally an anti-war person. I'm a pacifist. I think war is to be avoided at all costs. When it is a necessary evil, it has to be an absolute last resort. But I also, you know, I think...
What I've seen, and I've seen the whole democracy promotion playbook up close. I lived with it for a dozen years. And Americans have a very poor idea of how people in other countries think and how they react to us.
We assume that every country that we're involved with is going to behave like the countries after World War II, when they were devastated and sort of willingly converted to the Western-style democracy with relatively little trouble. It just doesn't work. We've already had many bites of that apple in both of these countries, in Ukraine and
in Russia, and we failed despite enormous investments in both of those places because we just didn't understand either of those places. We should have been strategic and economic partners with Russia and Ukraine, frankly, and we could have been if we had behaved differently. And then we'd be in a very different position than we're in now. So each of these emergencies, we have to think about, did we contribute to
to this problem that we're currently dealing with in Ukraine by our prior actions. And I think we did. I think our sort of non-military intervention in both Ukraine and Russia led to this situation, at least in part. So I'm not one of these people who thinks that America is like a force for evil in the world. I think it's...
We have the capacity to do tremendous good, and I think there's a reason why so many people from so many different parts of the world are so anxious to be immigrants to this country, because we represent freedoms that they don't have. But I also think that we have to be extremely selective about the things that give us the worst reputations, which include military interventions, intervening and or changing the political leaders of a country, which we've done
what, over 70 times we've tried since World War II. Those are the things that turn populations against us. And I think we don't understand the cost of that well enough.
Well, I want to thank you both so much for your time and for coming to this conversation in such an open-minded, good faith way. Next time, we'll tackle the easy, not at all controversial subject of Zionism and Israel. So I look forward to that. And I'm really grateful for both of your time. Thanks, Matt. Thank you, Brett. Thank you. Thanks, Barry. Thank you, Barry. Thank you, Brett.
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