[SPEAKER_01]: The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now is the time of monsters.

[SPEAKER_01]: With those words from Gramsci, I welcome you to the time of monsters podcast.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm G-tier of the nation magazine, the podcast is sponsored by the nation magazine.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it is widely available on all podcasting platforms, as well as a few radio stations.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this week I want to take up the issue of Donald Trump's America first foreign policy, which is, I think, [SPEAKER_01]: has been seen as a promise and a threat.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, a promise obviously to his supporters, but maybe not just his supporters.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think that the idea of a more restrained foreign policy, that is not so eager to get involved with wars, is something that Trump was offering that had a wider appeal than just the sort of mega base.

[SPEAKER_01]: But it's also a threat to the people who've been running American foreign policy since arguably at least nineteen forty five, if not earlier.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, bureaucratic infighting is not unknown in Washington.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that, in particular, there's been a sort of bureaucratic life fight going on that has a very strong ideological salience revolving around this issue of what does America first mean?

[SPEAKER_01]: And when it's seen, you know, as it's typical in Washington, a lot of leaks of people accusing other people of going rogue of portraying the president.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I want to get a sense of what's exactly going on here.

[SPEAKER_01]: And to perhaps talk about it with perhaps more insight than I'm normally able to offer.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it was actually close to the scene.

[SPEAKER_01]: My guess this week is just in Logan.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's director of Defensive Foreign Policy at Cato, a libertarian think tank that I think it's fair to say has a very strong tradition of being anti-intervenginist.

[SPEAKER_01]: And just in front of what's been going on.

[SPEAKER_01]: So perhaps the first of all, welcome to the podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me to a pleasure.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so maybe we can sort of set the scene like, can you give a broad picture of what is the sort of nature of this kind of ideological or factional struggle that's going on in the Trump administration?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, in normal administrations, the views and prerogatives of the president of the United States carry an overwhelming gravitational force.

[SPEAKER_00]: But this isn't a usual U.S.

[SPEAKER_00]: administration.

[SPEAKER_00]: So in this case, there's one person who's opinion matters immensely, and he resides down the street for me right now at a thousand Pennsylvania Avenue.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if you look at the people who have been installed even in cabinet positions, [SPEAKER_00]: at the Defense Department, at the State Department, they have less independent valence on policy than under a more conventional administration.

[SPEAKER_00]: So what that leaves is, again, the huge amount of impact with the day-to-day decisions of the President of the United States, as well as an unusual relevance of mid-level officials.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you look at, for example, Secretary of Defense, Pete Heggseth, I'm a sort of think tanked or lifetime member of that community, and the idea of trying to run the defense department is just a terrifying prospect, even for, again, a sort of nerdy, wonky sort of person.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Heggseth is a very telegenic sort of public TV personality.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the sort of lutenants that Heggseth would have under him matter quite a lot.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if you look at what Heggseth for example laid out as his sort of, you know, any speech in any career, there's an old saying that you can say or do three things.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Hegsett sort of had this idea that he was going to get rid of wokeness, he was going to stand up for the war fighters, and he was going to sort of regenerate this sort of toughness restored deterrence.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that was sort of the broad arc of what he laid out he wanted to do.

[SPEAKER_00]: But that leaves a lot of policy content to be filled in, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, none of those, I mean, those have been hexes priorities and it's worth emphasizing that really none of them have to do with foreign policy.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they kind of have to do with a kind of, you know, domestic cultural wars.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, whatever side wants to take on, you know, like, whether they should be trans people or how much the military should honor the legacy of the civil rights movement.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that as he does not tell you, like, you know, what you're going to do in Ukraine or the Middle East.

[SPEAKER_01]: So the I mean with thanks have I mean I think that his focus on the culture wars does actually feed into that vacuum that you're describing but continue.

[SPEAKER_00]: No so I think you have this weird dynamic where the cabinet level secretaries have a very tough job to do which is to [SPEAKER_00]: deal with and try to implement the data-day directives of the president of the United States, which can vary quite widely, which we're probably going to talk about just over the last six months.

[SPEAKER_00]: Then, at the same time, they have to run these massive bureaucracies that need some kind of coherent, reasonably long-term marching orders for how they're going to function.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so they're at that sort of full-crum point where it's very difficult to do one of those things, let alone both of them at the same time.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the president of the United States is very important and the people running the bureaucracy are very important.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the cabinet secretaries are that sort of pivot point where there are a lot of grinding and gnashing happens.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that sort of explains the general outline in.

[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe we can sort of like, maybe start at the top and then maybe work our way down.

[SPEAKER_01]: That might be a useful way to deal with it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because as you've sort of gestured towards with Donald Trump, there has been like a lot of change of policies.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I guess the phrase that Democrats are trying to popularize this sort of taco Trump always chickens out.

[SPEAKER_01]: And when to see that with the sort of trade wars, [SPEAKER_01]: But also like you know in foreign policy in terms of the Middle East where initially there was like an attempt to sort of challenge the Netanyahu administration on key things and now I think that the policy can fairly be described as you know like let's try to give Netanyahu everything he wants and see how that works I would and Ukraine as well where the policy has swung back and forth a little bit now I think Donald Trump [SPEAKER_01]: You know one hand he was sort of you know one as an outsider with the I think very persuasive appeal that the you know foreign policy establishment failed and he was gonna do something different But he doesn't strike me as someone who has a lot of deeply thought out policy commitments like the yes or like maybe broad goals that he wants to gesture towards and I think that the worry about Trump, you know, there's a kind of [SPEAKER_01]: various liberal worries about you know like is he a Russian agent or whatever but like I was not like to be honest that really to be was almost that this is a very fickle material guy who uh...

listed the last person that he talks to and that you know one will have heard a weekend at Bernice presidency uh...

this actually the second weekend at Bernice presidency [SPEAKER_01]: in a role where the president is actually not that checked into policy and will be like at the beckon command of whoever is allowed to whisper in his ears but but I want to get your sense of that I mean that that's my sense of like the sort of vacuum at the top that is leading to the sort of incoherence that we're seeing but how would you analyze it?

[SPEAKER_00]: I, I would qualify it a little bit from what I think you aptly describe as the weekend of Bernie's attribute of, you know, mid and upper ranking officials under President Biden running the government in his sort of mental, I don't want to say absence, but in his less connected moments.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think with the president Trump, you have these wild swings.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not as though you have a sort of, you know, you're marching around this corpse and pretending that it's alive.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's very much alive.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's just on any given day, you could get a completely different policy.

[SPEAKER_00]: So if you look back before the Israelis bombed Iran and before the United States joined that war, Trump was asked point blank.

[SPEAKER_00]: Did you tell Netanyahu to knock it off?

[SPEAKER_00]: trying to drag the United States into a war trying to do things that would scuttled diplomacy.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he has this sort of intimate or sort of cheeky response, where he says, I want to be honest here.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I did.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he says, I'm trying to step on Netanyahu's efforts to scuttled diplomacy.

[SPEAKER_00]: A few weeks later, the balloon goes up and these really start bombing Iran and ten, you know, a few days later, the Americans are bombing Iran.

[SPEAKER_00]: So you have these wild swings from, I'm trying to push back Netanyahu efforts to scuttle diplomacy.

[SPEAKER_00]: and within the matter of a few weeks, American bombs are dropping on Iran.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the Biden one was, if anything, you know, more muted, and this sort of weekend at Bernie's attribute carried the day, whereas in this case, it's wild swings from one policy, you know, from one end one to the other end one.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, no, no.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, maybe we can at Bernie's as wrong.

[SPEAKER_01]: If what is using another movie andology, maybe Ratatouille, where there's this guy who's allegedly the chef and then it depends on which rat is hiding in his hair and pulling the strings.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like it does seem like, I mean, the example of Israel and Iran is very striking, just shifting from, but seem like an attempt at restraint.

[SPEAKER_01]: to then we're gonna let the Israelis do it to then actually like claiming this like I'd you say this is actually what we want to do and like to make this into an American war which is what doesn't yet what it all along which is like seems at the very least to go against some of the thinking of America first but but maybe I mean maybe another way to analyze this is you know beyond Trump's personal material personality and and the way he can swing back and forth there [SPEAKER_01]: Like, at the level of the president, there seems to be less coherence about what America first means than there might be at sea, the Kato Institute, or, you know, like, I'm like the sort of policy analyst.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think Trump's America first, you know, like came from a genuine recognition that the U.S.

[SPEAKER_01]: has overextended that it has gone into like these, you know, like, I really mindless foreign wars that have done incredible damage with like no real logic behind them.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so like a wanting what desire to avoid those but like with not a real sense of what's to replace it and you know one instinct to replace it is you know this sort of more rubble less trouble like but just you know like use the buying capacity and not do nation building and there's another [SPEAKER_01]: of a variation of that, which is to do deal-making.

[SPEAKER_01]: And to me, it has never been clear that Trump has a coherent America-first ideology and that the people around them necessarily have that.

[SPEAKER_01]: Although one can find a more coherent policy, maybe at lower levels.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I think that there are several different coherent interpretations of America first that Trump [SPEAKER_00]: Deploy is at various moments.

[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is that as you change those policies dramatically, you know, the previous episode, you have Trump the deal maker, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: He's going to send Steve Whitkoff, who's going to fix the Ukraine war.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's going to get a ceasefire in Gaza.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's going to do a new deal with Iran.

[SPEAKER_00]: You could like or dislike that, but that's a coherent story.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then you have the sort of Jacksonian will just bomb people to the stone ages and then keep doing it if we need to.

[SPEAKER_00]: You, again, you could like or dislike that.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a coherent story.

[SPEAKER_00]: But when you start swinging wildly from the deal maker to the more rubble less trouble, it turns out people aren't going to want to make deals with you if you're bombing them.

[SPEAKER_00]: They may even throw out AA inspectors, which is, of course, what the Iranians have now done.

[SPEAKER_00]: So you kind of, and this is like, I understand, I'm a think tank dork.

[SPEAKER_00]: I get it.

[SPEAKER_00]: We like coherence and sort of linear stories.

[SPEAKER_00]: politicians don't operate like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm self-aware enough to know that.

[SPEAKER_00]: But you have to realize that these wild swings are sort of cannibalizing the other policy options as they go back and forth.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's exactly right.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I've always thought that some of the more conventional liberal critiques of Trump as kind of unilateralists or as Putin's puppet or whatever.

[SPEAKER_01]: as an isolationist, sorry, or as Putin's puppet, didn't actually line with any real evidence.

[SPEAKER_01]: But the actual worry about Trump was this in coherence, because it seems to me, it's not just a dorky thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: On an analytical level, I think it's very clear that this is actually how war starts.

[SPEAKER_01]: That if you actually don't have a career in foreign policy, people don't know what you're going to do, [SPEAKER_01]: the likelihood of misunderstanding, of misinterpretation rises dramatically.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think the argument that is one of the causes of the Korean war, that there was no sense of, you know, from the side of Stalin, Mao, and the North Koreans of what the Americans were going to do.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think that Germany administration did not send very clear singles.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that led to like, you know, like a catastrophic war whose shadows still haunts us.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's a system for me, like if what is making a critique of Donald Trump, like that incoherence seems like to me the real problem here.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and you have, again, presidents are strong-willed individuals in any circumstance, but particularly I would argue in this circumstance, and you have a bunch of cabinet secretaries that have shown, you know, before they were appointed to be cabinet secretaries, [SPEAKER_00]: their willingness to interpret America first as the ero story or as the one hundred story as the president sees fit.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they can't say, well, sir, this is going to have these effects on the other policy and we have to take this all into account.

[SPEAKER_00]: Your sort of job is to click your heels and say, yes, sir.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's why we've seen the sort of seamless transition [SPEAKER_00]: It seemed a bit incoherent transition from one incarnation to the other, and that's what I, as a supporter of some aspects of this approach, worry about, which is that you're going to wind up with the worst of both worlds.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, no.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I think we've like sort of given a good outline of the problems with Trump.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you've already sort of talked about Hegg said a little bit, but I think it's maybe worth emphasizing that if there's a kind of, you know, I wouldn't say like a power vacuum at the level of Trump, but this is sort of these wild swings and willingness to shift from these radically different interpretations of America first.

[SPEAKER_01]: With Hegg said, I think what we mentioned before is that the priorities that he laid out [SPEAKER_01]: You know, whatever one says about them, I think can be like neutrally described as culture-world politics.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that is what he's concerned about.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it is not to my mind a foreign policy vision.

[SPEAKER_01]: Do you think that's fair or am I missing something?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, to put it more broadly, it doesn't have a lot of foreigner defense policy valence of itself, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: So you could say, we're not going to have transgenders in the military and we're going to be hawkish or we'll be like, it doesn't translate left to right into policy outcomes from the point of view of the Department of Defense.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think what you've seen recently with purges of or or attacks on [SPEAKER_00]: people that do have independent policy valence and a lot of these people are a number of these people I should say bear not necessarily in my sort of Kato Institute universe of restraint and realism but in in the view that there are trade-offs in American foreign policy when it comes to Ukraine in particular you saw [SPEAKER_00]: an article in Politico this week, taking aim at Elbridge Colby, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, who had undertaken a review several months ago, it started with the approval of the White House to look at U.S.

[SPEAKER_00]: magazine depths and to say, how many of these weapons do we have and we're supplying Ukraine, we're supplying Israel and U.S.

[SPEAKER_00]: forces arrayed in the Middle East in addition to trying to deter China, they're trade-offs among these theaters, which is just the most banal [SPEAKER_00]: fact of life.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so this attack on him on Albert Colby was about, oh, he's going rogue over there.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's doing things without telling the White House.

[SPEAKER_00]: And my response to this was to say, number one, I think that's clearly wrong.

[SPEAKER_00]: He would definitely run through the Secretary of Defense, which we already have reporting from CNN that shows.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then the question becomes, do the secretary of defense take it over to the White House and get signed off?

[SPEAKER_00]: And then it gets a little sketchier because the president of the United States famously is not big on like formal memos and emails and paper trails.

[SPEAKER_00]: You tend to go in and talk to him and he says yes or no.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then you be going that, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: So Trump seems to have had this change of heart that over going to send more weapons to Ukraine now.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he's asked by the press.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what about this review?

[SPEAKER_00]: What about this decision?

[SPEAKER_00]: He throws his hands up and says, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: Why don't you tell me who just I don't know anything about it?

[SPEAKER_00]: And if you don't have a paper trail for that, you don't have much to go back on, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: You're so sick.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Mr.

President, three Thursdays ago, you were having a diet coke.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we talked about this.

[SPEAKER_00]: You don't remember.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, that's, you know, those of us with me.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: conspiratorial mindsets say if I want something in on paper I get it on paper if I don't want something on paper we go to the coffee shop you know it's basic sort of Washington operational security yeah I know I mean Trump's philosophy here is basically from the wire like you don't like you you never take notes on a criminal like it's crazy so so so I mean [SPEAKER_01]: I think the two things that you raised up are both we're thinking about one is the basic trade-off issue and then the what we're after that I want to actually talk a little bit more about Colby and some of the other people that work with headset or had work with headset and don't [SPEAKER_01]: or recently.

[SPEAKER_01]: But first of all, I just want to emphasize on this trade-off issue.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the United States has involved in a lot of wars, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: The Ukraine-Russia War is, like, if you look at the number of casualties and the number of munitions involved, like, it is, like, you know, like a war on the scale that Europe has not seen since World War II.

[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, similarly with what's happening in the Middle East, where Israel is fighting, not just like, you know, I would even call it a war, like, you know, this horrific counter-insurgency operation in Gaza and the West Bank, coupled with, but actual, you know, wars against Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

[SPEAKER_01]: you know that's quite a few countries what is bombing as well as like you know this fabled pivot Asia where America's you know like trying to take up on greater responsibility in Asia like like that's a lot of munitions and like you know even though United States has like you know but we might both of us think of as like perhaps an excessive amount [SPEAKER_01]: of weapons and military capacity, like even the American Feptic on is not infinite.

[SPEAKER_01]: So can we just say something about that, like about the fact that this actual issue of trade-off is actually coming to a fore, like there's actually going to be real issues as to how many wars are American fight at the same time.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, if there's, you know, something that we can all agree on, it's that trade-offs exist, you know, modest claims department.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's not, you know, there are a whole array of weapons that are involved here.

[SPEAKER_00]: So some of the things were, you know, one-five-five artillery rounds, et cetera, which are actually in decreasing relevance in Ukraine as FPV drones have taken over in terms of lethality.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the one sort of fungible resource here was Patriot Air Defense, which are hugely consequential in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and in the Asia Pacific.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there was reporting this week that the US so-called magazine depth, so sort of how much of these things we have on the shelf ready to go.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're at about twenty-five percent.

[SPEAKER_00]: of what would be required to follow through on the defense plans that are on the books for the United States at present.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm a sort of mildly conservative guy and I say, well, twenty-five percent of what we're supposed to have doesn't seem like that much.

[SPEAKER_00]: It seems like we're in the realm of trade-offs.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's been this effort by, I think, mostly the sort of Ukraine first faction in and around the administration.

[SPEAKER_00]: to say, we're going to throw everything we have at Ukraine because we're going to bleed the Russians white there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that, if that were made candidly as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made it during the Biden administration, you can engage with it.

[SPEAKER_00]: But instead, you have these surreptitious attacks on people like Colby [SPEAKER_00]: who are laying out numbers, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: The numbers, and I don't have visibility into those.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're held reasonably closely in the defense department.

[SPEAKER_00]: But you can say, you know, the implication of these numbers is one or the implication of these numbers is it.

[SPEAKER_00]: But they're the same numbers, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: They're just facts that are there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so you, instead you have this, again, sort of fertive behind the scenes effort to slime in as somebody who's [SPEAKER_00]: You know, undoing America first or not doing peace through strength.

[SPEAKER_00]: And in this case, for journalists, a political ran with it because it was a sexy story, whatever.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I just thought it was a completely absurd and pucillanimus, which is to say, part for the course in Washington.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, attack on somebody without engaging on the substance of the policy.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, I'd be tack on Kobe that you're referencing political and I'll link to it in this sort of show notes as well as your critique of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: This kind of show, I don't know that there's a faction within the White House that doesn't want to think about tradeoffs.

[SPEAKER_01]: That actually thinks that even like talking about tradeoffs is dangerous.

[SPEAKER_01]: And perhaps maybe you'll illuminate this a little bit more.

[SPEAKER_01]: We can now turn to like what I had gesture towards before, which is Colby, like Elbridge Colby, who's still at the Pentagon.

[SPEAKER_01]: And there was a group of other advisors that Heg Seth had who were kind of very mysteriously all fired earlier this year, who also kind of belonged to the sort of restrainer camp or are trying to think more about trade-offs.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mentioned a Dan called well, Colin Carroll, Darren Selmeck.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I think one way to approach this is maybe it's like outlying their kind of worldview because we talked a lot about America first and the various variations of that in terms of either restraint or more rubble less trouble.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that like Colby in particular, I think has a particular [SPEAKER_01]: kind of profile and I think it's maybe worth kind of like outlining because and it's not necessarily something I agree with but it is an interesting kind of development.

[SPEAKER_01]: Is it fair to say that like his real concern is with China and his sort of belief is that you know the pivot to each other's necessary but it's not happening because the US keeps getting dragged into these conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, so let me again put my think tank door cat on and hopefully not not annoy everybody on here.

[SPEAKER_00]: So sometimes Elbridge coldly is lumped into the group of people called restrainers.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he's not a restrainer, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: He thinks that the signal challenge to US leadership and US security is the rise, military, and otherwise are the people's Republic of China.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that is such an important problem and is such a large problem that the United States needs to sort of take a step back from both Europe and the Middle East in order to dedicate scarce resources and attention to the people's Republic of China.

[SPEAKER_00]: Somebody like Dan Coldwell, I would put very much in my universe of people restraining.

[SPEAKER_00]: I hate that term, but we'll use it anyway because it's in parlance.

[SPEAKER_00]: People who think we should basically pull our horns in and most of the world [SPEAKER_00]: and sort of keep a wary eye on China.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it's sort of counter-hegemonic foreign policy, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: We don't want one country to dominate your Asia.

[SPEAKER_00]: We wouldn't want one to dominate the Middle East, but those look like remote prospects so we can kind of ride it out.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then just as one other quota, I think that Colin Carroll and Darren Selnick, because they were defenestrated at the same time Dan called well was, were lumped in with him ideologically [SPEAKER_00]: when I don't know either of them personally, but my understanding is there's sort of career DOD types without, there's sort of like in the weeds, uh, switchmen, you know, turning the switches in the bureaucracy.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't know, and Dan has told me, you know, he doesn't know a lot of their policy views and he worked with them.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, I would just distinguish Colby from Coldwell and then certainly can Carol from the other two.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I know that that's actually very useful to kind of like lay out.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think I'm partially want to make these kind of distinctions just to show you.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's a variety of sort of points of view that are out there.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think that maybe like [SPEAKER_01]: One commonality is that you know, even though they might not have specific policy views or might disagree about China, they all seem to like at some level, like at least be a little bit more skeptical of the sort of, you know, one can call [SPEAKER_01]: the military industrial complex of views like to use the most neutral possible to like they sort of standard you know like Washington foreign policy uh blob view which I think is a very status quo politics which might not even be ideological it is just like you know this is the way we've done things for like seventy years and we know we should keep on doing it and I think that the you know the people that takes that brought on we're partially brought on with the idea [SPEAKER_01]: that, you know, they might not have specific ideologies, but we need sort of people with new eyes and who can look at these questions.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, is it fair to say like one thing that's going on is kind of resistance of the sort of, you know, party of the status quo to like any sort of like outside view or any attempt to like think about these questions in a new way?

[SPEAKER_00]: I think if it's a mere coincidence that we're seeing these attacks on Colby, the Caldwell was escorted out of the Defense Department a few months ago, and it has nothing to do with policy.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a huge coincidence.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't know the sort of causal story here.

[SPEAKER_00]: But you really have to strain crudulity pretty hard to say policy has nothing to do with it, particularly given that both called well and Colby, as you point out, are not exactly the same page ideologically, but again, agree on a baseline that trade-offs exist, that solvency is important for the defense department, that we need to have resource, whatever our aims in the world are, that insolvency is a bad thing, to go back to Walter Lippman, type talk, [SPEAKER_00]: And that's, you know, again, if you're arguing with people who think the trade-offs exist in solvency matters, you probably want to take a long hard look in the mirror and think about your ideological commitments.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think we spent a lot of time trying to outline where someone like Colby and Colby are going out.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I want to maybe try to define the ideology of the kind of resistance.

[SPEAKER_01]: What I've said is the sort of status quo politics.

[SPEAKER_01]: But it is this bipartisan [SPEAKER_01]: kind of foreign policy thinking, you know, the U.S.

[SPEAKER_01]: is that we all know the rhetoric, the U.S.

[SPEAKER_01]: is the indispensable nation.

[SPEAKER_01]: It has, you know, kept the peace since the end of World War II.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it has these foreign policy commitments that these alliances are good for the world.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that, you know, like maintaining American global hegemony [SPEAKER_01]: indefinitely is really the only way to go and that you know like any string from that path is dangerous and we'll lead to you know global anarchy or chaos.

[SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to like am I giving this like too much ideological coherence or whatever but is that kind of the basic thinking here or is there something I'm missing?

[SPEAKER_00]: No, I mean there is still a rump part of the GOP foreign policy establishment that I would call [SPEAKER_00]: the Liz Cheney Adam Kinsinger Tom Cotton constituency, which like sort of bourbon kings has learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the past several decades.

[SPEAKER_00]: They think that the world needs more America always and everywhere.

[SPEAKER_00]: And these nerdy green eye shade talk about tradeoffs and things is just an excuse to be isolationist and to cause America to pull up the drawbridge and retreat in the face of a world of menacing threats.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it is literally unreconstructed neoconservatism, and of course [SPEAKER_00]: You know, Cheney and Kinziger are now, I don't know, partisans of the Democratic Party, I guess.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what happened to them.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if you look at people like Tom Cotton or Lindsey Graham, they use different rhetoric when they go on Fox News because they know that the president of the United States watches Fox News.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if you look at the substance of their policies, it's like the past twenty-five years never happened.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that this is a big part of the story that sort of resilience of that sort of neo-conservative point of view, which on the one hand, you're not really seeing anyone in the Republican Party kind of defended openly, but it still seems to have like a lot of kind of sway.

[SPEAKER_01]: I guess the thing I'm struggling with or maybe I I'm hoping you could illuminate is like where does this the power of this ideology come from?

[SPEAKER_01]: What is the actual like basis for its continued ombie like hold on in Washington?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it far be it for me to play a Marxist on the nation podcast, but there's a huge amount of sort of financial and political support in Washington within the blast radius of where I'm standing right now to keep these ideas alive.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so there are various syndicers that Pete politicians who are out of office can go into [SPEAKER_00]: If you look at somebody like Mike Pompeo, for example, there's a lot of ways to keep paying your mortgage if you hold and espouse these views.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they stay there and I think there is a generational split.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you look at somebody like Mitch McConnell, there's a certain sense in which the elder faction of the Republican Party [SPEAKER_00]: is still by and large committed to this view, but the younger sort of upstart, look at the median fifty-year-old, Republican congressman, they don't buy end of this.

[SPEAKER_00]: You've heard Marjorie Taylor Green, you know, really just going after the idea of a war with Iran, which if you would told me that ten years ago or something, I would have thought, really?

[SPEAKER_00]: Is that for real?

[SPEAKER_00]: And you see, at the ideas level, people like Steve Bannon, people like Tucker Carlson, [SPEAKER_00]: the American conservative magazine um and it really is a more uh uh uh young and sort of energetic part of the party that is saying to me it seems like much more organic too like like or you know like bubbling up yeah I look I mean [SPEAKER_00]: We've been reading the newspapers for twenty years.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's the real problem is that, you know, these ideas have bad foundations.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that, you know, there was no reckoning for the people who drove the country into a ditch.

[SPEAKER_00]: in the two thousands under George W.

Bush.

[SPEAKER_00]: The Obama administration, excuse me, is going to do the, as you mentioned before, the pivot to Asia, but got distracted, respectively by the rise of ISIS in the Middle East, the Russian invasion of Crimea in twenty-fourteen.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then we just, the United States foreign policy establishment gets distracted by any shiny object.

[SPEAKER_00]: so easily that there's a real inability to focus and if strategy is, as we nerds think about it, about choice about prioritizing among scarce resources, then the United States foreign policy establishment is really bad at strategy.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, no, it is bad at strategy, but it seems like pretty good at like sort of maintaining the sort of status quo.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the materialist explanation that you give [SPEAKER_01]: is a very convincing one and I mean there's different ways one can formulate it I guess so the maga conspiratorial ways to talk about the deep state but you know like I always prefer to Eisenhower is a formulation of the military industrial complex I mean like that seems like just a very sort of common sense description of something that you know one can verify exist [SPEAKER_01]: in the world.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so society there is a sort of you know defense contractors and industries and financial security that former politicians and I would add former members of the military can get.

[SPEAKER_01]: But then there's also this other aspect in I think the sort of media think tech world and in the alliance system.

[SPEAKER_01]: that actually is also a very sort of powerful force.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think the resilience of NATO and of this sort of constituency in Europe and in Canada had to keep this alliance going and to lobby on its behalf and to make it seem like this is in America's best interest.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's a very powerful thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: It does seem to have a lot of whether the median fifty-year-old Republican thinks that way [SPEAKER_01]: It's something that has a lot of sway in the world of think tanks in the media.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, it's also, you know, Eisenhower was talking about the military industrial complex in the fifties, but the thing has been standing up now for seventy years.

[SPEAKER_00]: So then you develop, if you want to call it the deep stator, whatever, you know, it's the sound of two hands clapping, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: You have institutions within the federal bureaucracy that have an interest in keeping the thing going as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: So to me, not to be sort of refusing to pin down exactly one explanation, but I think [SPEAKER_00]: You know, both of these are real lubricants for the machinery of the military industrial complex and the American foreign policy project.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, I just think that it's a very difficult thing to kill.

[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, as you point it out, the media didn't really have a big reckoning.

[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, they're huge incentives for people in offices like mine, although, thank God, not mine itself.

[SPEAKER_00]: To go along with this stuff, I mean, there was the famous quote from Les Gelb, the sort of president of the Council on Foreign Relations, very serious scholar for decades, who attributed his own support for the Iraq War to unfortunate tendencies in the foreign policy establishment to support wars, to maintain professional credibility.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you think to yourself, that's the president of the Council on Foreign Relations saying that, imagine what a thirty-five-year-old analyst feels.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: So you have one acknowledges that there's these very powerful structural forces in the American state, and in America's allies to be honest, to keep this thing going.

[SPEAKER_01]: It always seems to be that you actually need a very strong forceful president who understands bureaucratic infighting to counter [SPEAKER_01]: You know the military industrial complex and the sort of foreign policy blob and you know what one saw this like you know with Nixon and Kissinger where like you know the outreach to China was not something that the national security establishment wanted [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, like, unfortunately, a lot of the very nasty and unpleasant things that Nixon and Kissinger did were designed ways of trying to get around that bureaucracy.

[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, like on a more recent level, like someone like Obama, you know, like being able to get around what the foreign policy establishment wanted in terms of Iran and Cuba.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that took a fair amount of [SPEAKER_01]: whatever one says about Obama on other issues, a fair amount of sort of commitment and bureaucratic moxie.

[SPEAKER_01]: And like, with the Trump administration, like, you know, like, as you said, he's very strong-willed in, you know, dominating like his cabinet and, you know, like pushing his agenda of the day for that for that level.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I don't get a sense that Trump, you know, has this sort of bureaucratic wherewithal of Nixon, Kissinger or Obama.

[SPEAKER_00]: No.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, to go back to another job that I don't want besides Secretary of Defense.

[SPEAKER_00]: If I were president, that's a terrifying idea, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like I have well-formed foreign policy ideas.

[SPEAKER_00]: I have some ideas about how to implement them.

[SPEAKER_00]: But to imagine yourself taking on this sort of huge sprawling apparatus.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's one analogy that I would draw from the Carter administration.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you remember, back, Carter wanted to withdraw US forces from South Korea.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he [SPEAKER_00]: went about this in an eightly Carterish, wonky kind of way, and had circles run around him by inter-alia, the US intelligence community, the American military, the Japanese, and the South Koreans themselves, who started producing reports saying, if the Americans withdrew, the North Koreans were so strong that they would plunge into the vacuum left by US forces, [SPEAKER_00]: And that was sort of scottled.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's the kind of thing that you're going to face in any scenario like this, which I as somebody who thinks at the United States should be handing off European security by and large to Europeans.

[SPEAKER_00]: There were some glimmers of hope early in the Trump administration that they wanted to do that, that they actually wanted to cause the Europeans to step up to withdraw some US forces from Western Europe.

[SPEAKER_00]: to force the French and the Germans and others to say, oh, the party's over.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to have to pay for this thing ourselves.

[SPEAKER_00]: And now I think with the policy changes at places like, or personnel changes rather, places like the Department of Defense.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if you hear what the US ambassador to NATO is saying, if you hear what the Secretary of State is saying, it looks like they've basically given up on rebalancing the transatlantic relationship in a fundamental way.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I know.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think the carbon energy is a very good one in terms of like another outsider that sort of, you know, rise on a tide of public disgust that the status quo, but you know, like doesn't have the, the wear with all.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I mean, to serve like flesh out as a last point, this sort of, you know, this picture that we're painting of, you know, administration that is kind of getting out foxed by the establishment.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think the fact that there's no national security adviser or is like Rubio the national security adviser, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: Let's do that.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this would be like Trump has given a lot of duties to with the Marco Rubio, but I think that that also contributes to a world where the presence ability to implement policy is limited and that policy is going to be increasingly coming from different factions within his own government.

[SPEAKER_01]: We are carrying out these bureaucratic fights.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like it seems like Trump himself has contributed to this power vacuum.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, partially because walls was clearly not up to the job, but that seems to be like a problem.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, presidents tend to get the process that they want or if they don't get it to learn how to go around it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And in this case, you know, what the president wants looks to me like pretty much what he has, which is the ability to sort of either push the diet coke button or not push the diet coke button.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he either gets the diet coke, or he doesn't get a diet coke.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we have a situation in which there's a tremendous amount of power with very little constraints by the legislature, the judiciary on the president of the United States.

[SPEAKER_00]: and that individual president of the United States appears at this point to change his mind pretty dramatically pretty quickly.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a recipe for volatility and for risk.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that, you know, the people that are good people in the government that I know that are doing their damnedest to follow this thing through and to keep on a sort of steady course.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it's a tough struggle, I think.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's a good kind of like, and I think it's good to be like a pretty tough struggle.

[SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately, I think the volatility is likely to only increase.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I mean, as ambiguous as that may be, I think that's where we are right now.

[SPEAKER_01]: I want to thank Justin Logan once again for being on the podcast and for very illuminating discussion of where things stand.

[SPEAKER_00]: My pleasure.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me.