Episode 11: Unlikely Alliance

Ro Khanna and Peter Meijer on the Trans-Partisan Effort to End Endless War

In April, President Biden announced he would withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Within months, Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, fell to the Taliban. The Biden administration’s evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies has drawn sharp criticism from Democrats and Republicans, including one of this week’s guests, Representative Peter Meijer (R-MI-3). But Meijer is also a critic of America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan, something he shares with our second guest, Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA-17).

On this week’s episode of None Of The Above, you’ll listen to our conversations from back in May with Representatives Meijer and Khanna, conversations which help us reflect on the current debate over America’s global role. As the heartbreaking events in Afghanistan unfold, their reflections on how the U.S. has found itself perpetually at war can serve as a guide for current and future policymakers who wish to avoid the mistakes of the last twenty years. These two Congressmen agree on very little, but are united in their belief of a less interventionist U.S. foreign policy.

Congressman Ro Khanna represents California’s 17th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives. He sits on the House Armed Services Committee and is the Congressional Progressive Caucus Vice-Chair.

Congressman Peter Meijer represents Michigan’s 3rd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives and is a veteran of the Iraq War. He also sits on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

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

Show notes:

Reps From Both Political Parties Deliver Anti-War Message (NowThis and Eurasia Group Foundation, June 9, 2021)

Archival audio:

Footage from inside Kunduz, Afghanistan, shows city falling to hands of Taliban | ITV News (ITV News, August 10, 2021)

How the Taliban seized Afghanistan again - BBC News (BBC News, August 21, 2021)

Chaotic scenes at Kabul airport as thousands flee Taliban (CNBC Television, August 16, 2021)

Rep. Peter Meijer on US evacuation from Afghanistan (WOOD TV8, August 16, 2021)
Phil Mudd scorches Seth Moulton and Peter Meijer for unauthorized trip to Afghanistan (August 25, 2021)

Pelosi On House Members’ Kabul Visit: ‘We Do Not Want Members To Go’ (MSNBC, August 25, 2021)

The Afghanistan Papers (SenatorRandPaul, February 13, 2020)

Rep. Barbara Lee Interview on MSNBC’s American Voices (Rep. Barbara Lee, August 17, 2021)

Biden criticized over US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan (Good Morning America, August 21, 2021)
Chaos Outside Airport with Afghanistan Evacuations Ongoing (NBC News, August 20, 2021)

Transcript:

August 31, 2021

RO KHANNA: It is simply not in our interest to be entering into these complex situations with our military. Instead, what we ought to be doing is leading with our diplomacy, involving regional players, trying to understand the area, and trying to facilitate positive outcomes. And that's what the last twenty years have shown.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. Back in May, we spoke with two of the country's youngest members of Congress, Peter Meijer and Ro Khanna, about the impending withdrawal from Afghanistan. Now, three months later, the country is in chaos.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: President Biden is receiving criticism from lawmakers within his party and across the aisle for his execution of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Among his main critics is Republican Congressman Peter Meijer, who represents Michigan's 3rd Congressional District.

PETER MEIJER: And the reassurances we had time and time and time again were that we will have months, if not years, as we are negotiating this transition. And as you clearly saw from the first provincial capital that fell, Zaranj in Nimruz Province, to when the Taliban were in the presidential palace and President Ghani and Vice President Saleh were in Tajikistan—that was eight days. Eight days.

HANNAH: Representative Meijer also taking the headlines by storm with his unexpected and unofficial visit to the Kabul airport.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: But despite the criticism of how the withdrawal was executed, many lawmakers from the left and right agree with the decision to end America's involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Congressman Meijer is actually among them, and even as he criticizes the Biden Administration, he stands by his support for withdrawal.

So does Ro Khanna, who represents California's 17th Congressional District, who argues the massive evacuation and the Taliban's precipitous takeover of the country are evidence of the war's impossible mission. While the speed of the Afghan government's collapse might have taken many by surprise, many have argued for years that America's trillion-dollar nation-building project was a futile endeavor. So, as we look to understand these dramatic, sad, and still-unfolding events, perhaps we ought to look at the policies and national security outlook which put us in this situation to begin with and the growing movement in Congress which seeks to change it.

KHANNA: The foreign policy establishment is just totally out of touch with what most Americans want.

HANNAH: That's Representative Ro Khanna. He's the Congressional Progressive Caucus Vice Chair, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and is part of a growing bipartisan movement in Congress which seeks a more realistic and less militarized U.S. foreign policy.

KHANNA: The reason I think the foreign policy establishment is out of touch is that they are focused on some balance of power politics or power maximization still rooted in the Cold War—the idea that we can't allow one country to become too powerful in any region, so we need to go intervene to prevent that. This calculus has led to American intervention and interference in many other countries and made us less safe. And I think intuitively, most Americans say that doesn't make much sense.

Now, Americans are not isolationist. We want to care about people outside our borders. We want to make sure we're engaged. But we don't want our military to be the first thing people outside know about. And there's been a real pushback against that. We shouldn't have fifty-three percent of our federal budget on the military. We should be investing in our own people—in education and health—to develop our potential. We shouldn't have our military footprint all around the world in wars that have been unwinnable. What we actually ought to be doing is engaging with other countries to solve climate change, to solve pandemics, to improve human life for Americans and people around the world.

HANNAH: In some ways, it seems pretty self-evident that these protracted nation-building wars don't work, whether we're talking about Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan today. So, why does the foreign policy consensus still seem to push the same approach? Why are we still spending trillions of dollars on defense and getting embroiled in other conflicts?

KHANNA: For two reasons. One: people are afraid of being labeled weak on defense, and that has been an attack which often makes for an easy attack ad. But we have to have the strength to say, “No, we have a better vision of national security.” The biggest threat to security in the past year was a pandemic. That's what cost us 500,000 lives. The threat of climate change is significant. And even when we're looking at other actors, it's often cyber-attacks and advanced technology attacks. We don't need the same national security strategy of the twentieth century in the twenty-first century. We have to be able to articulate our vision that just spending more on legacy industries isn't actually enhancing national security interests.

HANNAH: Representative Peter Meijer, an Iraq war veteran who has also spent time working on the ground in Afghanistan, is a Republican from Michigan who sees the issues in somewhat the same way. He says his foreign policy vision is based on one thing: what actually works.

MEIJER: My biggest challenge isn't that we're going to enter some “kumbaya” moment of peace and solidarity, but more that what we're doing right now is not working and is failing in a transparent way. So, more of the same is dumb.

HANNAH: While these two congressmen sit on different sides of the aisle and agree on very little, they are united in their ideas about America's role in the world and America's tendency to overreach. They share something else as well, something shared by all younger Americans. Their political and policy views were shaped during the so-called global war on terror, which has dominated two decades of American foreign policy.

MEIJER: We're talking about a younger generation—I think it’s apt to call this a post-9/11 generation—that has both had the feeling of being under attack—and not just on 9/11, but also the ways in which the threat of terrorism has really altered our lives and created the psychic equivalent of hiding under the desk in class during the Cold War. That has pervaded. And so, we have had to reckon with the differing interpretation of the world and our place in it. On a very simple level, my instinct is that I want the U.S. to not lose. It sucks seeing one of the most advanced fighting forces in the world being humbled by ragtag groups of militants. I mean, it’s something that is an ego blow. And you can keep believing and trying to spin and making the excuse of how hope is just around the corner. If we do this, and if we do that, we can win. But when the winning never comes, and the losing continues, I think for the younger generations, that’s all we've known. That's all we've seen, and we're sick of it.

HANNAH: Has this generation—and for that matter, have you—rejected this kind of guiding principle of American exceptionalism?

MEIJER: I would push back a little bit on the notion that this is antithetical to belief in American exceptionalism. I am a strong proponent of American exceptionalism, but I'm also a strong proponent that just because we're exceptional doesn't mean the laws of gravity don't apply to us. We need to be smart in how we apply that exceptionalism, and getting bogged down in conflicts where we're stuck in the middle of a civil war is just a dumb thing to do.

I think this is more fundamentally the problem of our foreign policy world. We look at the entire globe as problems to solve. We want to fix it and forget it. We want to check that block, when in reality we should have continuous engagement. We should have smart engagement. We should view the world as a series of challenges that we need to manage, but it's not things that we can just surge and retreat. We can't have this drought and deluge approach because that's just making sure we're stuck in an inherently reactive mindset.

HANNAH: In this era of hyper-partisanship, the emerging interest around a more realistic and less interventionist foreign policy offers a unique opportunity for bipartisan action,

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: Representative Khanna put that into play in 2019 when tensions with Iran flared.

KHANNA: There is a recognition that the last thing we need is another war in the Middle East. I was very proud that we had over twenty-seven Republicans join my amendment to restrict the president from getting into a war in Iran—President Trump, that is. You'll remember John Bolton almost took us there, and I think it was the Congress speaking out so strongly which had that impact. Americans realize this isn't in our national interest. China isn't getting into wars in the Middle East, and they're more dependent on the oil out of the Strait of Hormuz than we are. They want America to get entangled there. That is not in our interests. And people realize that around this country.

HANNAH: Do you receive any criticism from your colleagues in the Democratic Party who don't think it's necessarily wise to work with Republicans? And if so, what do you say to that criticism?

KHANNA: I say that it's important not to just be for “team blue,” but to be for our principles. There are a lot of places where I disagree, obviously, with Republicans. They tend to have a view of deregulation and neo-liberalism and faith in the markets that just hasn't worked for over forty years. But there are places now where we're finding common ground, and we’re working with Representative Gallagher from Wisconsin, a Marine on the endless frontiers, about investing in our innovation and our capacity in the United States. It’s industrial policy that is enjoying bipartisan support. And I've worked with people like Andy Briggs and Thomas Massie in trying to keep us out of wars. If I can save thousands of lives in Yemen and save kids and women from starving, it's my moral obligation—my duty—to work to get that legislation passed.

I can only work with people who are sent here, and I think everyone knows we don't get to choose our colleagues. You don't get to choose them in a workplace, and you certainly don't get to choose them in the United States Congress. So, if you want to be effective, you have to work with who your constituents send here. So, when it comes to issues of war and peace and foreign policy, we ought to be consistent with principles, and America's interests ought to transcend party interests

HANNAH: That appeals to progressive principles, and at the same time, it also has purchase with the right and fits Representative Meijer's vision of conservatism,

MEIJER: Conservative values are not wasting money, not wasting lives, and trying to make what the government sets out to do actually be within the realm of plausibility. I think we've seen an utter futility and failure in the expansion of our conflicts. If we view the goal narrowly as eliminating sanctuary for al-Qaida in Afghanistan, we can claim that. Kind of. But the broader notion of changing the world—again, solely through military application, which has undermined our diplomatic efforts, our soft power cultural strengths, and all of these other things that have actually worked—gets lost by the wayside. I'm not anti-government completely. I am very pro a government operating in a smart way to actually achieve something. I'm against the government doing dumb things that fail time and time again and then believing its own propaganda and doing the same thing. I mean, that's the definition of insanity.

HANNAH: And this insanity is becoming clearer and clearer to an increasingly wider range of lawmakers who come with all kinds of perspectives

MEIJER: When it comes to the moment of bipartisan agreement—when it comes to not just our wars overseas but also the congressional prerogative around war powers and an authorization for the use of military force, this is an issue that unites the squad, that unites hardcore MAGGA folks, that unites libertarians. It's a very weird issue that crosses a lot of traditional ideological boundaries. And in some ways, there may be a bit of a generational issue where younger generations that have grown up in this—my vantage point was not defined by a rapid, thirty-hour air war to liberate Kuwait and strike back at Saddam. That smart bomb, “our forces can do anything at any time” approach really falls before the reality.

HANNAH: This is a reality Representative Meijer is personally familiar with. He saw it firsthand as a soldier in the army in Iraq.

Now, Congressman, you were a believer in the war, correct? I mean, you supported George W. Bush. You thought we had a noble and achievable mission before you went in.

MEIJER: In high school, I had a pro-war poster in my backpack in case I should stumble upon an anti-war protest. To say I was sold on it, I mean, I bought it hook, line, and sinker. And I do think there was a post-9/11 mentality of we can engage and change the world for the better, and what better entity to do that than our U.S. military, the superpower of the superpower? That was my mindset going in.

I left incredibly disillusioned. We seemed to throw a lot of money, a lot of lives, and a lot of good intentions in one end, and then no matter what the inputs are, the outcome was dispiriting and counterproductive. It was only seeing failure after failure and loss after loss and realizing that those scenarios were invariably made worse by our presence that we ended up either carrying the burden of regional powers and neighboring countries or giving them an easy opportunity to kick us in the shins and take a swing at us. I walked away from Afghanistan realizing that this was a feature, a defining feature of our post 9/11 conflicts—futility, the inability to accomplish a mission, the limitations of trying to impose change through military force. And then that transition in my mind went from seeing our military force overseas as an asset, as a strength, to realizing that ultimately having boots on the ground and having a large troop presence was far more of a liability and a strategic weakness of our country's foreign policy and military posture, and that we had to pursue a new, more realistic approach which actually paired what we were willing to commit with what we were expecting to achieve.

HANNAH: This takes us to Afghanistan and the heart-wrenching events unfolding on the ground.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: What we're seeing as U.S. personnel and Afghan allies are airlifted out is eerily reminiscent of the American withdrawal from Vietnam. There are lots of brilliant, strategic minds, people at the highest level, who seem to be making the same mistakes that the “best and the brightest,” to cite David Halberstam, were making a generation ago. Representative Meijer has an idea for why that's the case.

MEIJER: The major malfunction in the foreign policy consensus in D.C. is that you have people who are forming opinions based on things they've read from other people who formed opinions based on things they've read from other people who formed opinions based on things they've read. It's the constraint of relying on narratives to assemble your worldview, and things that may pencil out in an academic setting quickly fall prey to the reality of really complex places. There is a fundamental naiveté, but more so an assumption, that the world is as someone's world has been. How you view the world depends on where you sit, and when you read these foreign policy papers and subscribe to things written by smart people in an intelligent way, there's a hubris that can come in thinking you have all the answers. Especially when we're talking about Afghanistan, you get a very different sense of the conflict if you, like me, lived in Kandahar City on the economy without armed guards or armored vehicles or weapons and interact with the population. You get a very different sense than if you're taken on the Kabul elite circuit where you're getting the dog and pony shows and things that are propped up in that artificial world behind tall walls, when you think that's reflective of the country as a whole.

I'm very much pro-humility. I'm pro-reality. And that stands in diametric opposition to folks who not only have gained their experience or knowledge in an insulated way but also don't appreciate the limitations of that experience and knowledge and probably have—I guess a little bit more fundamentally—a bias towards maintenance of the status quo, because that's what they've known.

HANNAH: Do you think people in the foreign policy establishment are essentially putting their careers above the interests of the United States? And if so, is that a conscious thing they're doing?

MEIJER: I don't think our foreign policy establishment is consciously putting their careers ahead of the interests of the country. I think it's just a blindness you can get. When I talk to folks who are not just flying above conflicts from a helicopter at 30,000 feet, who are not protected by a security detail everywhere they go, who are not getting sugar-coated briefings from underlings and subordinates, who are afraid of confronting the hard truths from generals who believe that with a little bit more time and a little bit more money and a little bit more troops, they can accomplish anything, who can sometimes—as we've seen with several generals—get very high on their own supply and very quickly lose any sense of coherence to factual reality, I am not of the mindset to defer to those individuals. I will take their input, but at the same time, there is a vested interest there because our military has become a bit addicted to combat as a means of promotion and as a means of credibility establishment. That's how you get into those upper echelons. That's how you become a leader. And what happens to that talent development pipeline if there's peace? They don't know. I don't think they really want to find out. Again, I think there's a lot of unconscious biases in here, and the knee jerk deference to me is ultimately to our country's detriment.

HANNAH: I asked Representative Khanna about Afghanistan, whether America's presence there has made us safer and how it has affected our national security interests. In light of the last few weeks, his answer back then seemed prescient.

KHANNA: I was for the initial strike to get al-Qaida, and that was done in six months. I have no idea why we ended up staying twenty years. I think one of the problems is we didn't have a sense of what success looks like. We ought to have said, “Success will be destroying al-Qaida and making sure al-Qaida isn’t there.” Not that we're going to somehow transform Afghanistan into a liberal democracy, which both the British and the Russians couldn't do.

And Iraq was just a total mistake. If anything, it's destabilized the region. We replaced Saddam Hussein, and in that power vacuum emerged ISIS and more terrorism. Napoleon used to say, “It's worse than a crime. It's a blunder.” And that could be said of the Iraq war.

HANNAH: Do you think trying to shape the world primarily through military means undermines our diplomatic efforts?

KHANNA: Well, it's not just that it undermines our diplomatic efforts. It can't be done. I wish people would re-read John Quincy Adams’ famous passage which says that if you go in with military force, people will see you as oppressors, even if you may see yourself as liberators, and that you won't know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. And how true that is. We don't know in many cases whose side we're actually fighting on. In some cases, we're fighting on both sides. So, it is simply not effective. It is simply not in our interest to be entering into these complex situations with our military. Instead, what we ought to be doing is leading with our diplomacy, involving regional players, trying to understand the area, and trying to facilitate positive outcomes. And that's what the last twenty years have shown.

HANNAH: Representative Khanna argues that if we hadn't spent so much trying to reshape the world, we would have been better equipped to reshape our own country.

KHANNA: We've spent six trillion dollars in Afghanistan and in Iraq. That is the cost of the entire Biden agenda. Imagine, instead of having gone to Iraq and Afghanistan, if we could have funded all the things President Biden is talking about—infrastructure, climate change, child care, education. We have made choices that have hurt our national competitiveness, and we still have a federal budget that is fifty-three percent to the military. I don’t think people understand that over half of your tax dollars are going to build up the military. Let me ask you: is that going to make us safer? Or is getting more people a college education, a vocational education, or some post-secondary education going to make us more competitive? Our values need to be reexamined.

HANNAH: Right now amid the outpouring of stories from Afghanistan, America must also find time to reflect—to reflect on the long series of mistakes across multiple administrations, which led to such a disheartening end, and how it has shaped so many American and Afghan lives.

MEIJER: I had a reporter who reached out after Biden announced the Afghanistan withdrawal and was like, “Do you think there will be folks jumping with joy over this?”

I was like, “Well, maybe a few.”

The emotions here are very complex. I've known people who've been killed by the Taliban. I've known people who had trained people who were killed by errant U.S. missile strikes. I've been up in Kunduz in 2015. This is a lot more of a bittersweet moment. It's not: let's all, “Hooray!” There's a lot of death. There's a lot of tragedy. There's a lot of heartbreak. There's more than enough of that to go around. And it does make me proud to be able to bring—hopefully—a voice that, again, is not just reflexive but is based on lived experience and on, frankly, a deep well of—in some places maybe unresolved—emotion and pain.

HANNAH: I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. Special thanks go out to our None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Our producer is Caroline Gray, and our associate producer and editor is Luke Taylor. Music was composed and audio was mixed by Zubin Hensler. And EGF’s research assistants are Lucas Robinson and Alec Evans. If you enjoyed what you've heard, we'd appreciate you subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thank you for joining us. Stay safe out there, and see you next time.

(END.)

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