Peter Beinart on Hubris, Humility, and War

Episode originally aired March 11, 2020.

Peter Beinart is a CNN political commentator, a columnist for The New York Times, and an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents magazine. He is the author of The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris and The Crisis of Zionism. You can follow Peter on Twitter at @PeterBeinart

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

March 11, 2020

PETER BEINART: There's a certain way in which American foreign policy discourse doesn't really grapple with the really hard questions, and the hard questions often have to do with the limitations of our power.

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MARK HANNAH: My name is Mark Hannah, and I'm your host for None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation that seeks new answers to America's foreign policy questions. Today, we're joined by the columnist, journalist, and political commentator Peter Beinart. Peter is a contributor to The Atlantic and CNN, as well as the author of several books on American foreign policy. Peter teaches at CUNY's New School of Journalism and was recently named an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, which is a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left.

Today, we're covering a variety of subjects from Russia and China to Israel and the Middle East, bound by one central theme: realism. Peter, glad to have you with us.

In an article you recently wrote for The Atlantic, you mentioned that the trauma of America's post-9/11 wars and the reduction in America's resources are pushing Democrats toward policies of retrenchment that can only be defended in the language of realism, and that's a language few Democrats speak. Are we at an inflection point here, or are we at a moment where decades of bipartisan consensus on what America's role in the world should be is being tossed aside or reevaluated?

BEINART: There have always been ebbs and flows in the United States in terms of America's willingness to take on greater economic and military burdens, to push forward the frontiers of American power. In general, I think what has happened to some degree is—and I think Trump has disrupted this a bit—there is still a strong inclination to see things this way among a lot of people in both parties in Washington, to equate American power or even equate the well-being of ordinary Americans with the footprint of American military power. Essentially, the further we extend our footprint, if we can extend further into Eastern Europe, into the former Soviet Union, and further into Asia and the Middle East, we are stronger. If it looks like some other rival power, whether it's Russia or China or Iran, seems to be gaining more leverage, more influence, we are weaker. That, to me, is misguided.

HANNAH: You don't think it's a zero-sum game where, for example, an increase in Russian influence in Ukraine necessarily equates to a loss of American influence or power.

BEINART: Yes. If you think back to the Cold War debate in the 1970s into the 1980s, there were a lot of people who were saying America was growing weaker in the world because the Soviet Union now had stronger relationships with governments in Ethiopia or Somalia or Angola. In reality, it turned out that actually having those client states didn't strengthen the Soviet Union. In some ways, they weakened the Soviet Union. These were not countries that were actually offering the Soviets very much, and then many of our client states—the United States spent enormous amounts of blood and money trying to make sure that Vietnam, or early South Vietnam, would remain on our side of the Cold War chessboard.

Interlude featuring archival audio

BEINART: In fact, the value of having an anti-communist regime in Vietnam was pretty negligible, it turned out, and what really hurt the United States was trying to maintain that commitment. One of the notions Walter Lippmann wrote about in the middle of the twentieth century that has had an impact on my thinking is what he calls “solvency in foreign policy.” He argues that just as a nation's expenses can't be over the long term, can't exceed its financial resources, its foreign policy commitments cannot exceed its power. What we've seen is that starting at the end of the Cold War in the 1990s and escalating after 9/11, the United States took on a whole series of commitments that in some ways ultimately turned out to be insolvent and basically commitments, checks the United States was writing that we couldn't really cash. Afghanistan—which is what I was talking about there—is a classic example that we have never had the power to defeat the Taliban and create a unified Afghanistan under the control of a pro-American regime.

HANNAH: People are going to say that sounds awfully defeatist. What do you mean we, the United States, the world's only superpower, can't defeat the Taliban?

BEINART: We can't defeat the Taliban at a price ordinary Americans are willing to pay, which was exactly the same problem we faced in Vietnam, in Korea, and in Iraq. America is a powerful nation, but America is not an omnipotent nation. When we're talking about wars in far off countries where the threat to the United States is not obvious, there are real limits to the price Americans are willing to pay. In a democracy, that's the way it should be. Part of what I was talking about in that piece is if the United States withdraws all its troops from Afghanistan, the consequences for Afghanistan could be really rough. Things in Afghanistan, which are pretty bad as they are, might get worse. But, one of the things I think politicians need to grapple with is the consequences of America having bitten off more than we can chew, and we are going to continue to face those consequences. Think about the American relationship with Taiwan. We have a semi-de facto, implicit promise to protect Taiwan. It's ambiguous, but that's probably not something the United States can actually do. If China really decided it was going to impose its will on Taiwan—

HANNAH: We could make it a little more costly for them to do that. We could make it inconvenient. We could ratchet up the trade war.

BEINART: Right. The question I really wish presidential candidates were asked in a very blunt way—because I think it's important to have these conversations in blunt ways—is: “Are you willing to go to war for Taiwan? Are you willing to potentially consider a war with China and all that would mean for a country that is much, much closer to China than it is to us, and in which China has a much greater investment?” There are tremendous, tremendous costs. I don't want to downplay them, to the idea that China would impose its will on Taiwan, which is a really, really impressive society. The point is there's a certain way in which American foreign policy discourse doesn't grapple with these really hard questions, and the hard questions often have to do with the limitations of our power.

HANNAH: That's exactly right. There are people right now who are saying, in the case of Hong Kong, the United States should stand up to China or should speak out. When I probe further and ask, “What do you mean, stand up to China? Do you mean should we actually go in and send our aircraft carriers?” They’ll often back off. So, America likes to think it can do anything. But, when you really think it through, maybe our power is more limited. Do you think the problem of American foreign policy is, what you cite in your book The Icarus Syndrome, essentially a delusion of grandeur?

BEINART: The point I tried to make in this book is that there have been moments in the last one hundred years of American foreign policy where Americans’ sense of America's ideological, military, and economic power and America's ability to reshape the world has become hubristic. We have lost the sense that we are just one country among many countries, that we are a fallible group of human beings just like every other group of people in every other nation are fallible. While America can do good things in the world, and while we can contribute to hope and moral progress in the world, humility and self-consciousness about our own flaws are really crucial ingredients in the mix of an effective foreign policy. I think that has been lost at great cost at certain moments, and I still think it's not central enough to our conversation. Your point about Hong Kong was really important. There is a lot of moral preening that takes place in American foreign policy debates, which is divorced from a set of consequences.

Interlude featuring archival audio

BEINART: What China is doing in Hong Kong is horrible. Anyone who cares about freedom feels an enormous sense of identity with the people in Hong Kong. Just as Americans felt with people who stood up against Soviet tyranny in 1956 in Hungary and in 1968 in the Czech Republic, not to mention the absolute horrors taking place in Xinjiang in western China of Uighur Muslims—probably one of the greatest crimes of our age. Not to mention North Korea, which is certainly the most evil regime on earth. This is all absolutely true. But when one talks about American foreign policy, one has to ask the question, “What steps can America take to alleviate these human problems, and at what price for Americans?” The reality is that America's ability to influence those situations is quite limited. Tragically. Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 and Lyndon Johnson in 1968 were not willing to risk war with the Soviet Union, even though there was a tremendous moral case for identity and sympathy with people in Hungary and the Czech Republic. We face our own version of those same tragic realities today, and it doesn't actually help people in Hong Kong if we are not able to be honest with ourselves.

HANNAH: This reminds me of another philosopher and theologian who you mentioned, and that's Reinhold Niebuhr, who famously wrote the Serenity Prayer: “the serenity to accept the things you can't change, courage to change the things you can, and wisdom to know the difference.” It sounds to me like the people conducting American foreign policy ought to keep that framework in mind. We want to wield our power effectively where we can, but also know the limitations of our power.

BEINART: Yes. The question is what's the nature of that influence, and in what ways can it be deployed? One important element of American power is the power of our example, and I think one could make an argument that one of the most important things America could be doing for people who are fighting against the rising tide of global authoritarianism, whether it's in Eastern Europe, Poland, Hungary, Hong Kong, or Iran, is actually to show we still have a government whose leaders abide by the rule of law and in which liberal democracy can solve pressing problems.

One of the things that potentially enfeebles people who want to struggle against various forms of authoritarian dictatorship is the sense that the U.S. as a democratic model doesn't shine as brightly as it once did, which makes it much easier for China to say, “You have to give up these personal freedoms. That's the only way you're ever going to get anyone out of poverty. That's the only way you're going to make any progress on building infrastructure.” The fact that China is an authoritarian regime and seems to be taking climate change more seriously and moving more effectively toward that than liberal democracy, seems to me a tremendous blow to the prestige of liberal democracy around the world, given the magnitude of the threat of climate change.

HANNAH: Speaking of China, the New York Times came out with documents that were leaked from the Chinese Communist Party, justifying the massive imprisonment and detention of Uighur Muslims. You saw in those documents that they were pointing to how America responded after 9/11, almost as a justification for what it was doing.

BEINART: This is a really, really important point. It goes back to the controversy when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the phrase “concentration camps” to describe what was happening at the border. There is a certain strain in American thinking—you especially see it on the right in the Republican Party—that wants to draw an extremely bright line in which to say, “We are incapable of these kinds of acts of evil. This is something that only non-Americans do. We are some different breed of human being.”

HANNAH: The notion of American exceptionalism

BEINART: Exceptionalism. I think this is very, very dangerous. To me, one of the most compelling things about Niebuhr was the way he challenged that, which is not to say he thought America was the moral equal of the Soviet Union. He did not. But, he recognized it was only by recognizing our fallibility, our capacity to do evil, that we could build in the institutional restraints that make us different from communist China or the Soviet Union. There's nothing inherent about us as Americans that means we could not do these things. It's not only the Chinese who say they learned some of this evil, or that they're copying the United States. We know now—there is a lot of literature, and there has been some really important writing about this—that the Nazis themselves, in coming up with their anti-miscegenation laws, were studying the American South. When the Nazi Party wanted to come up with racial categorization to try to figure out how to keep Jews and Slavs and other groups away from Aryans, they said, “Who is the world leader in doing this? The United States in the early twentieth century, especially in the South.” They sent Nazi lawyers to the United States to study Jim Crow in order to figure out how to build the system of racial segregation and supremacy they wanted to build.

The point is obviously not to suggest that the United States was the equal of Nazi Germany. The point is to suggest we are not incapable of these things, particularly in this moment when the United States government is doing such horrific things domestically. I think it's really important for us to integrate that into our conversation. The last point I just want to make about how the United States deals with the horrors that take place in China or North Korea or Hong Kong—what's happened, especially on the right, is there is an idea based on a complete misreading of the Reagan administration, that the way we help people usher in freedom is by taking a militantly hostile position and having no diplomacy with foreign bad actors. That doesn't really help the populations that are suffering very much at all. If you look at how the Soviet Union ended, the single biggest contributor was the fact that Ronald Reagan engaged in intensive diplomacy and thawed the Cold War with Mikhail Gorbachev, and that was what created the political context that allowed Gorbachev to let Eastern Europe go free. Reagan recognized that part of the reason the Soviet Union was maintaining its dominance over Eastern Europe was the fear of the United States, especially in tandem with Germany, given the history of Russia's experience with invasion from the West. He realized that if the United States wanted the Soviet Union to allow Eastern European countries to be independent, we actually had to make America less threatening, not more threatening. This is critically what Reagan started to do in ‘84, ‘85, ‘86, ‘87.

HANNAH: I think we haven't learned those lessons, because anytime an American policy maker brings up these kinds of military coordination and exercises that could be perceived as threatening to North Korea, to Russia, or to whomever and tries to take a moment of empathy, they're perceived as being eccentric or even heretical or treasonous to some extent. That might be an overstatement. You mention the power of America's example, but it feels like that is slipping in recent years. In fact, the Eurasia Group Foundation just put out a study that found the number of people who think America is exceptional for what it represents has decreased by seven percent, and the number of people who think America isn't exceptional has likewise jumped by that same seven percent. Why do you think that might be? To what do you attribute that?

BEINART: I think a lot of the sense that America maybe no longer represents something exceptional is the fact that we have a would-be authoritarian in the White House, someone who doesn't really have much respect for the rule of law, and that we have a Republican Party that's overwhelmingly abetting him in this. American democracy, the idea of the rule of law, is being threatened and challenged, and we don't know how this is going to play itself out. So, I think it's a pretty reasonable response to that. The United States is not immune from larger trends in the world, and we are in some ways at the forefront of a challenge to liberal democracy that's taking place around the world. I think people in the United States, particularly younger people, are more aware of that, and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for Americans to be more skeptical about some of the exceptionalist myths we have told about ourselves and to take a more skeptical eye about the reality of the way America’s political system has worked and the way America has acted in the world.

HANNAH: Donald Trump has been an erratic president for sure, but outside of recent events in Iran, President Trump has often balked at foreign entanglements, a lot more so than his famously hawkish advisers such as John Bolton or Mike Pompeo. So, in light of your point about the Soviet satellite states, is Donald Trump onto something here when he essentially says, “Let Russia have Syria. It's just sand.”

BEINART: If you go back to Obama, you saw there was a skepticism that Obama had of escalating conflicts in places where America's national interests were not obvious and where we might be outbid because we were in parts of the world that simply mattered more to great power actors in those parts of the world than in others. Trump has given his own kind of crass “they're ripping us off” spin on that, and also his own massive incompetence and ignorance. Whatever valid instincts or valid insights there might have been underneath some of these things, Trump has tended to go about it in really disastrous ways. Partly—I think because Obama and Trump had to go to the American people—as candidates, they saw, in a way foreign policy people don't, there was a sense among a lot of Americans in both countries that the massive expansion of America's military footprint post-Cold War had not actually made the lives of ordinary Americans better. Both of them as politicians, who have to have some sense of where the American people are, were responding to that more than the actual foreign policy establishment in both parties has responded to that, because those people tend to be much more insulated from public opinion. I think there are really important questions to be asked about how far America is willing to go.

HANNAH: Peter, you recently wrote a review of three Obama-era memoirs in the magazine Foreign Affairs. One was written by Obama's national security advisor, Susan Rice, one by Samantha Power, who was his U.N. ambassador, and also by Ben Rhodes, who was a deputy national security adviser there. After reading those books and synthesizing those reflections, what did you think were the biggest takeaways around American foreign policy during the Obama years?

BEINART: The books all have this narrative arc to some degree, which has to do with an idealism—certain moments in these author's lives when they were younger when they were impelled to enter into public service or continue public service because of a sense that there is some terrible injustice America must redeem. And then high government officials about how difficult it actually is to do that. Although it's not explicitly stated, I do think the context for all these books is a decline in the relative power of the United States, and that's part of the frustration these policymakers face.

HANNAH: But wasn't it part of their job responsibility to ensure the continuation of the power of the United States? Was there any kind of self-criticism in these books?

BEINART: To some degree, it was inevitable that America's relative power was going to decline from the high point of the 1990s. Just remember, you're talking about in the 1990s. China has just begun its ascent, which has now become much, much stronger. Russia was in a completely catatonic state in terms of its role in the world and had basically acquiesced to the United States just rolling over it again and again and again. It was likely there was going to be this kind of pushback. Certainly when you compare it to the people running Trump foreign policy, in Ben Rhodes’ and Susan Rice’s and Samantha Power’s books you can see people who genuinely do care about human rights and human dignity and are actually trying to take efforts to do things to make people's lives better. And in areas where they don't face a lot of political obstacles, they can find their way of doing it, and I think you see some really valuable things.
Ben Rhodes talks about the opening to Cuba, for instance, as, I think, a really valuable move for the United States. Samantha Power and Susan Rice talk a lot about American policy toward Africa, which is something they both care about a lot. They both write a lot about the American response to Ebola, which I think is one of the real crowning jewels of Obama foreign policy. Just imagine how different the response would be in the Trump administration to Ebola.

HANNAH: It could be catastrophic.

BEINART: It could be catastrophic, not to mention it would have been drenched with racism. The Obama administration really took this problem seriously, mobilized resources, and inside the government, you see Rice and Power really pushed—and succeeded, with the help of a lot of other countries, including China—to contain what could have been absolutely devastating.

So there are some real successes. I do think, though, the books come to this realization, which I think is part of the Obama story, that Obama was blocked by the Republicans—but also by the permanent bipartisan foreign policy establishment—from going further in re-considering a certain set of American assumptions and relationships that were dysfunctional.

I think of Iran in particular—that Obama was barely able to get the Iran nuclear deal through, but he couldn't get toward actual reconciliation and the end of a Cold War relationship with Iran. That would have been a really, really important thing for American foreign policy, and he was blocked in being able to do so.

HANNAH: There is another book you wrote a bit more recently, The Crisis of Zionism, which explores Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government in Israel and how it's at odds with traditional liberal values. Now, President Trump is giving Israel a pass on settlements. We moved our embassy to Jerusalem, and President Trump rolled out his Middle East peace plan, which largely capitulates to Israel's interests and ignores the will of the Palestinian people. Is there less accountability now than there was back when you wrote the book in 2012?

BEINART: There's been no accountability.

Interlude featuring archival audio

BEINART: In reality, even with Democratic presidents, there's been very little accountability for Israel.

HANNAH: Why do you think that is?

BEINART: I think there is a strong impulse among a lot of Americans—not all Americans—to identify with Israel and not to identify with the Palestinians. I think that is very strong in the Republican Party and very strong among evangelical Christians, and it partly has to do with the notion of Israel as a Western nation.

HANNAH: That it shares our values.

BEINART: That it shares our values, but not just our values, that it shares our civilization. Remember, people on the right now talk about Judeo-Christian civilization. They do not talk about Judeo-Islamo-Christian civilization. This partly comes out of the post-9/11 sense that we are in a clash of civilizations with the Islamic world, and that Israel is on our side in that. It also comes out of deeper Christian notions in the United States that the Jews reasserting their rightful place in the Holy Land is part of a theology Christians buy into. It's also the result of a set of institutions that have been built, partly by Christians but partly by the organized American Jewish community groups like APAC, which wield a lot of influence and try their best to ensure—usually with a lot of success—that there's no meaningful pressure put on Israel by the United States.

HANNAH: Do you think it's driven at all by guilt?

BEINART: The guilt question is an interesting one. I think it is partly that. I also think there's a strong element of guilt in the American Jewish community, that part of the way in which groups like APAC emerged was, in a sense, out of a generation of American Jews who felt their parents had not been influential enough and had been too timid during the Holocaust in their relationship to the United States government. And they want to make sure American Jews will now use our more privileged position in the United States as we've assimilated more to ensure we will make sure the American government never allows something like that to happen again. But that always then tends to put the Palestinians in the role of latter-day Nazis, which is itself deeply dehumanizing to them. We have had a situation of impunity, even going back to Obama. In 2016, Obama, with no strings attached, said the United States was going to give a memorandum of understanding of ten years and $38 billion of military aid to Israel, even though Israel was clearly doing things and expanding settlements that were considered detrimental to U.S. interests and liberal democratic ideals. Now, Israel has gone even further, and Israel is really, I would say, at the forefront of the kind of rising hyper-nationalist, authoritarian impulse we see from Modi in India to Bolsonaro in Brazil to Orban in Hungary to Donald Trump. Benjamin Netanyahu, in some ways, is a senior figure in that cadre.

HANNAH: Peter Beinart, if you had thirty seconds with the next president of the United States, and you wanted to give them some advice about American foreign policy going forward, what would it be?

BEINART: I would say to not romanticize the Cold War with the Soviet Union. If America can avoid a Cold War with China and have a more cooperative relationship, we will spare ourselves and the world a tremendous amount of suffering.

HANNAH: Peter Beinart, thank you so much for joining us. Peter is the author of many books, including the ones we've talked about today, The Crisis of Zionism and The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris.

I'm Mark Hannah of the Eurasia Group Foundation, and this has been another episode of None of the Above. If you like what you heard, you can find more episodes like this at noneoftheabovepodcast.org, Apple podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. Thanks for listening. Please rate and review us. Tell your friends, and I'll catch you next time.

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