The Liberal Case for American Power

28:17Coleman Hughes:But what that emphasizes is the importance of the actual nitty-gritty military realities that determine likelihood of success, which is the thing that us talking heads sitting comfortably in America are the least competent judges of, which is why I'm so often reserving judgment on military interventions, because likelihood of success is just a huge variable. military experts themselves don't have great records on this i mean so let's just take for example the bush administration well i shouldn't say that they were military experts this is the this is actually i think one of the issues that when you have civilian control of the military it's not really the military giving totally independent viewpoints that are purely analytic analytical.

29:14They're a part of a broader administration that has political aims. But one could have said at the time of the Iraq war that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were military experts. They were engaged in previous conflicts. They had served a lot of time in government. They were seen as kind of steady hands with a long pedigree over various administrations, but they made major miscalculations regardless. And I think this is where we have to be. We have to judge the civilian leadership and we have to ask ourselves, do we think, are we sure these people are competent? And even if they seem like they're competent, it's very difficult to execute a war like Iraq in a country that we didn't really understand all that well.

30:03And I would say that goes for Iran today. We assume that Iranians would rise up and take up arms and there would be some kind of military resistance internally to the regime. That didn't end up happening, but I'm not a military expert. And I could have told you that from day one. I think a lot of us who are skeptical of the war and opposed to it would have raised all of these objections. I think those of us who are students protesting against the Iraq war, I think a lot of us intuitively sensed this is a stupid war that doesn't have a clear vision, even though we were students. But the one thing I definitely, I think you bring up a really good point that I want to just highlight though, which is one condition for military intervention is if a regime is killing its own citizens.

30:54If there's an ongoing mass killing, then we should at least consider military intervention. So I'm open to having that discussion. In Iraq in 2003, there wasn't actually a mass killing or genocide going on. There had been previous mass killings, but this is one reason I was supportive of the Libya intervention in 2011, because at that moment in March 2011, mass killings were ongoing and we actually had the capability to stop them. So I think in that kind of narrow case, I was willing to say, hey, this intervention is justified. I should say that I'm one of the few people left who are willing to actually defend the Libya intervention.

31:36I'm in very much minority company there. So I'm willing, I'm definitely open to the argument. I think we should consider the argument. But in the case of Iran, I think the rubric that you just laid out, it fit the first two conditions. But I think to a lot of us, it very clearly did not meet the third condition, which is likelihood of success. And I think that even if we're not military experts, we have a right to weigh in as American citizens and have our view based on the available information that we have.

32:11Coleman Hughes:Okay, so here's another devil's advocate case based on your principles. devil's advocate case for America supporting Israel. So you're in favor of American power, American dominance across the globe. De facto, the way we do that is by supporting allies. Sometimes that looks like having a military base in your country. We have 30 ,000 troops in South Korea. All of that has an expense. We lose$4 billion deploying those troops in Korea every year. But that's how we project power. We do the same in Europe. We have, you know, depending how you count, 130 to 700 military bases slash sites outside the 50 states.

33:00Coleman Hughes:One thing that helps us do is project power, obviously. Another thing it helps us do is that it gives us leverage over those countries that we help, right? In the case of Israel, that looks like$4 billion of military aid every year. But not only does that help us project power, we have weapons stockpiles in Israel that wouldn't be there. Otherwise, we benefit from their high-tech military defense. And not only that, we can prevent them from giving their best military technology to China, for instance. The Israelis used to sell weapons to China, and we stopped it in 2005, and they haven't sold weapons to China since.

33:43Coleman Hughes:So let's put the Gaza war to the side. We can talk about that in a second. But just the default aid we give to Israel, based on your own value of American power, isn't this a good thing for American power? A big argument, though, that I come back to in the book repeatedly is that power unconstrained is dangerous. Power has to be constrained by something. Now, the question is, what is that something? Some people say that American power should be constrained by the UN or some kind of world government. I don't think that's likely. So where I fall on this is that American power has to be constrained by our own sense of morality.

34:29Power and morality have to be matched together. And if you have power without morality, then you have a lot of excess. You have damage. You have destruction. I mean, I think it's hard to put the Gaza war to the side, but that's what I would come to in a second, is the Gaza war is to me an example of not using our power to stop Israel, to use our leverage. I agree with you 100%. Having leverage over Israel and other allies is important. But if we can't get them to stop prosecuting a war that many of us think is destructive and disregards civilian life, then what's the point of the relationship?

35:14if Israel doesn't listen to us, if Israel just goes and does whatever it feels like, if it drags us, and I know you had this debate with Glenn on whether Israel can be blamed for dragging us into the Iran war. I think Israel did play a role. I think it influenced our decision making to some extent. I do think that, I mean, Rubio and others made this very clear that Israel was going to attack Iran anyway. So we thought, hey, if they're going to do it, regardless, should we get in on it and have a united front? And that decision was made with that in mind. So I think that I would like to see us using our leverage with Israel and pressuring them to not kill as many civilians.

36:00I'm someone who said at the start of the Gaza war that Israel, of course had a right to defend itself. Hamas engaged in a horrific act of terrorism that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians. Of course, Israel should do something in response, but that doesn't mean that doing anything it wants in the name of that war is justified. There's always a conversation we can have about how to conduct a war in the most humane way possible and not to extend it for two years. So I, and I say this in the first chapter of the book, I was actually rereading this part this morning, where I actually say that I don't think we should abandon Israel.

36:44I think we should maintain our leverage with Israel. But I think we should also say that friends sometimes diverge and sometimes a friend needs to hear some tough talk.

36:54Coleman Hughes:Isn't it the case though, that Biden did use leverage to change the behavior of like, The way that they would have fought the war is not the same because of things Biden made them do, right? He said, don't go into Rafa. They would have gone into Rafa immediately if Biden hadn't said that, for instance. They still did go into Rafa. Right, but there was a 10-day pause. There were many points in the war where Biden said, hey, you guys want to zig? I'm asking you to zag, and they zagged within the still context of prosecuting the war. And on balance, Biden's goals there, his domestic audience, his domestic home pressure was to restrain Israel to allow for in the balance between war aims and civilian humanitarian pauses was to on the margin pull Israel in the direction of humanitarian pauses.

37:51Coleman Hughes:Right. And so, like, would we have that leverage if we weren't supporting them? How would they fight if they had to fight purely on their own? So if this is what restraint looks like, if this is what a restrained Israel looks like, then that's not really a strong case for restraint. I mean, I think that Israel could have conducted the war in an even more destructive way. It's possible. I don't know what the counterfactual is. But I mean, my argument has been that we should have used our leverage more aggressively. that if we felt that our interests were diverging from Israel's, that we should actually suspend military provisions to Israel.

38:36And that's something Israel needed to prosecute the war. We're the chief military patron. We never were willing. There was like one symbolic pause in a particular weapon shipment, but that's the most that Biden was willing to do. If we had threatened a full suspension of military assistance, I do think that it's possible that Israel would have stopped the war earlier and we could have saved tens of thousands of Palestinian lives. We weren't willing to use that leverage. And this is the same argument. It's not an argument I just make for Israel. I make it for Egypt and Saudi Arabia, their allies.

39:18Unfortunately, they're sometimes bad allies. We give them military support and we sell them billions of dollars of weapons. We should say to them, hey, Saudi Arabia, if you keep on executing people for Twitter posts from 10 years ago, then we're going to suspend our military support to you because morality matters to us as Americans. We can't be seen in bed with allies who commit destructive acts against civilian life and civilian infrastructure. I don't want America to stand for that. So when we talk about American dominance, I want Latin America. I want parts of Africa. I want them to look to America and be inspired by our example, because our example doesn't just come from military power.

40:07The book isn't called The Case for American Military Power. It's called the case for American power, that includes soft power. It includes cultural power, diplomatic power. But if people don't look to us as a moral leader, then they're going to give up on us and they're going to be increasingly willing to cast their lot with China. And I've seen really disturbing polling in recent months, in recent years, actually, that when you ask publics in places, even Europe, so not just Africa or Latin America, who would you side with if it's between China or America? When you have a plurality or even majority saying they would side with China, that means that we haven't showed ourselves to be a moral power.

40:53And I combine those words on purpose. Power should be moral. So that's what I would say on that, is I want us to live up to certain ideals that we're not currently living up to.

41:05Coleman Hughes:It seems to me, though, that there is a tension between these two things, because the reality is that I don't, I mean, it's very difficult to find American military interventions that are viewed by the global community as basically good, right? Like you mentioned Bosnia. The Russians hate us for Bosnia. Yeah. They consider that similar to almost the war in Iraq in terms of Americans doing whatever we want all around the world. And obviously, they have ethnic affinities with the Serbs. Al-Qaeda, in its declaration of war on America, cites as one of its many grievances that we didn't intervene in Bosnia soon enough, proving how little we care about Muslims dying around the world.

42:00Um,

42:02Coleman Hughes:the few cases of like truly uncomplicated humanitarian intervention, like I would cite the case of Liberia in 2003, where we just, this country's at civil war, brutal civil war, terrible dictator for 12 years, Charles Taylor. Bush decides, yeah, we're going to do something about it. Shows up with 2000 Marines and the civil war is over. And that country has not had a civil war for the past 20 years. It's not a perfect country by any means. but uncontroversially save tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives. And yet nobody talks about it. And that's sort of endogenous to what I'm saying is that when we do do good, basically nobody notices and counts it in our favor.

42:47Coleman Hughes:When we do arguably good, like in Bosnia, still it kind of pisses off a lot of people. And then when we really make a mess of things like Iraq, it's like that is hung over our necks forever. So if you're in favor of the Pax Americana and an American power projection, don't you sort of have to downgrade how much you care about what the global community thinks of us? At the end of the day, if they're smart, they know we're better than Russia. They know we're better than China. So not everyone's going to like us. And I think sometimes we know ourselves by our enemies. If our enemies are Al Qaeda and Russia, then we probably know that we're doing the right thing.

43:35So I'm not under any illusion that we're going to be able to persuade everyone that we're the better power, but we can still persuade. And I think that the first Gulf War in 1991, when we liberated Kuwait, had a very large coalition of support. That was seen as a broadly popular and legitimate war by much of the world, not by everyone, of course. And I think the same can be said for Bosnia and Kosovo, broadly popular, broadly supported by much of the international community, except for places like Russia, because as you said, of this kind of ethnic affinity with the Serbs and so forth. So I think it's possible to have better military interventions, not perfect ones, but at least there's a sort of continuum.

44:29And I would like us to move towards more that interventions that are moral, that we can actually justify on strong moral grounds. And this is one of the reasons that I wasn't supportive of the intervention in Venezuela because it wasn't justified on moral grounds. I mean, Trump said pretty explicitly, it's because we want them to be a pliant client state and we want control of their oil. I don't think we should be going and doing interventions based on oil. I mean, and that just isn't the country that I think we are. And I think it sends a very dangerous message to the rest of the world that, hey, America doesn't care about its own stated ideals.

45:16Now, it's worth saying Trump has never claimed to be a moral actor in this regard. He's never claimed to uphold moral ideals in our foreign policy. But up until Trump, every president has spoken about those moral values and made it, at least rhetorically, a centerpiece of our foreign policy. So I think there's something frightening right now that we don't even have the pretense. At least we had the pretense before.

46:08Coleman Hughes:Um, and, you know, the, the, the, the yearly cost of that intervention was again, relatively low in American lives. Do you think it was the right decision or the wrong decision for Biden to withdraw? I was very critical of Biden's withdrawal. Now, I think at some, at some point we would have had to, we can't stay in a country like Afghanistan forever. I don't believe in forever wars. Did we have to leave at that particular time and basically leave Afghans to their own devices and not provide any kind of military support as the Taliban was moving in? I think there was a way to not have the outcome we had.

46:53And I think I was also supportive of it. I mean, I think the Afghanistan intervention was justified from the beginning. You know, as you said, it was in direct response to 9-11. Where I take issue, though, is how long the intervention went on. I think that when we were in a much stronger position in the 2000s, when the Taliban was largely destroyed or at least quite weak relative to what it would become later on, it gained strength over time in the 2010s. we could have used our position of strength to negotiate from a stronger position with the Taliban and come to some kind of diplomatic solution where they could have been reintegrated into the body politic as long as they agree to certain conditions.

47:39So what I'm critical of is the fact that we never actually focused on negotiation. That was one good thing, I suppose, that Trump did. He did prioritize negotiation with the Taliban, but I think on very bad terms. I think the Taliban got a great deal and Trump did not show himself to be a great negotiator in that particular instance. And that was kind of one of the original sins that led to Biden's withdrawal. So I think there's a lot of blame to go around. I think that at various key moments, we could have done different things differently. But I totally take your point that we shouldn't have necessarily left at that point, because what Afghans are dealing with now is a disaster compared to what they were dealing with before.

48:25Afghanistan was better off when there was a US military presence, for sure.

48:31Coleman Hughes:So you say you're against really long interventions, but it's not clear to me that that's such a bad thing. We've had 30 ,000 troops in Korea since the 1950s. Technically, that war is not over. But our troop presence there deters North Korea from ever trying anything. It projects American power, which you're in favor of. It helps us project power in that region, right? We don't lose American troops. We're not losing American lives in Korea. Again, that's like a 70-year deployment. As for the negotiations, then, you know, it seems to me, regardless of when you negotiate with the Taliban, the moment that America actually evacuates, it's just going to be another Vietnam, Afghanistan type situation.

49:24Coleman Hughes:Like it doesn't matter what's written on the paper unless the Taliban feels we're going to come back in to enforce it. As long as they really feel we're leaving for good, whatever happens the day after is what the Taliban is going to want to happen, right? So really the options are stay in there for a long time, be in there for the long haul, create stability, get to a Korea-like situation where it's a frozen conflict, and hope that in the long run, maybe the Taliban loses energy, loses will, becomes irrelevant to the people, right? As the people experience the benefits of stability and integration with the West and so forth.

50:00Coleman Hughes:Really, the only options are be in it for the long haul or cut and leave. But the notion of negotiating a great result seems to me naive given what the Taliban are and what they're going to want to do the day after we leave, right? Again, it's hard to know what the counterfactuals are. I mean, the Taliban was quite weak. Now, Now, the Taliban became more popular with Afghans over time. So this idea that if we wait for a longer period of time, that Afghans see the benefits of that and become more pro-American or more supportive of their own government against the Taliban, the opposite turned out to be the case.

50:43So I worry about this idea of these open-ended interventions. And we keep on saying, well, once the people see the benefits, then maybe we can start to step away. That wasn't happening in the case of Afghanistan. I think that maybe we were too ambitious about what Afghanistan was meant to become. We could have had, again, I think that there's the 2001 intervention could have been more limited. Maybe there didn't have to be as much of a nation building aspect to it. This idea that we can make Afghanistan into a liberal democracy. Maybe our expectations had to be a little bit more modest. But I think the main difference with Korea is that our forces are not engaged in active hostilities because, as you say, it is a frozen conflict.

51:33My concern is staying in these regions, staying in these countries when there are active combat hostilities going on. And that's where I become a little bit more concerned. There is a way to have diplomatic arrangements between people who hate each other. Bosnia and Kosovo both ended up, I mean, Bosnia with the Dayton Accords, which were not ideal by any stretch of the imagination. No one got everything they wanted. And it's a very fragile piece to this day. But that's better than civil war. It's better than endless civil conflict. And it's worth noting that even when we still had troops in Afghanistan, it was still effectively a civil war.

52:17So it's not as if people were benefiting from stability. We were supporting a rump government that wasn't popular, that couldn't defend itself, that couldn't stand up its own forces, that was so utterly dependent on American air power that it couldn't develop its own ground capabilities. I just don't think that that's a long-term solution to a very real problem. We got ourselves into that problem. And, you know, maybe we could have waited. Maybe there was a better time and to have a different kind of phased withdrawal. but Afghanistan was suffering from civil war throughout much of the 2010s as the Taliban was gaining ground and winning over cities.

53:02So it was already in a pretty bad state and under a Taliban control in certain parts of the country.

53:09Coleman Hughes:Okay, what about Cuba? The devil's advocate case for Cuba. We've allowed this communist regime to fester in our backyard. since 1959. It's terrible to its own people. Right now, there's an opportunity where you have an administration willing to use force, willing to go through with regime change, and you have Marco Rubio. Yes. The opportunistic case for this is that though Trump doesn't care much about humanitarian issues, I think genuinely Marco Rubio would really care that if we intervened in Cuba, we did it the right way at minimal civilian costs and maximally and precisely targeted at the regime.

54:01Coleman Hughes:I think the vast majority of Cubans would support it, especially if Marco Rubio were the mouthpiece that could explain it to the American people and to Cubans. And again, with him overseeing it, he would care quite a lot about the humanitarian motive, and that would be genuine, and it would also be the perception. And then the coda is like, we don't know the next time there's going to be a Secretary of State National Security Advisor that can make that case credibly and mean it, and everyone will know that he's meaning it. doesn't that require a lot of trust in the person of Marco Rubio? That just seems a lot to put on one man.

54:52And there just seems to be a lot of hope there, which doesn't seem to me to be entirely justified. I mean, look at Venezuela, that we left the same regime basically intact. The people who oversee the torture and the prisons, the minister of defense, the minister of interior, none of those people were changed. And then there were reports in the days and weeks after that the Venezuelan government was becoming more repressive, not less. So I think that it depends what is the goal, who is going to govern Cuba, who is going to replace the communist regime. If there's an answer to that, I'm willing to listen.

55:31But I have not heard any viable plan for who's going to actually govern the country. And I don't want us to make the same mistake we made in Iran, where we just thought, hey, if we start to target the regime, someone else will take its place and maybe it will be better. Maybe it won't be. But let's find out. I mean, we can't go into it with a let's find out kind of attitude. So I'd be curious to hear from you. I don't know if you have a better sense of what Marco Rubio envisions. But again, the likelihood of success condition doesn't seem to be met in this particular instance. at least not that I've seen.

56:10Coleman Hughes:Yeah. Like I said, I always really reserve judgment because I'm a guy that lives in New York. What do I know about the likelihood of success of any given military intervention? But it does seem to me that Marco Rubio, he would know more about the Cuban case. We probably have really good intelligence on Cuba because it's in our backyard. It's a less fractured society than Iran is. It's not fractured along religious lines, really, to the extent that Iran is. And the people really hate the regime. There isn't that much. The regime just exists basically through force and through fear. There are very few regime supporters in Cuba at this point.

57:08How sure are we of that, though? I mean, are we 100 % sure that there's barely any support for the regime? It's just hard to know. It's hard to know. I take your point that there's probably a lot of Cubans who are angry at this regime and want something different. But to say that they don't even have a base of support, because usually regimes can't survive for the number of decades that the Cuban regime has survived without at least some base of support. That base of support is going to have to be accommodated in some way. I just worry about this assumption that everyone hates the regime, you know?

57:45Coleman Hughes:Yeah, well, you know, almost any regime might have a 20 % base of support. Maybe it doesn't bottom out less than that because of national pride in human nature. But if that's the case, then there are basically no, like, are there any cases of regime change that you do favor in the world that you're looking at right now? Or do you think we should be out of the regime change business period? And if so, how do you square that with America's role as the dominant power? Honestly, Coleman, I would like us to take a breather on regime change. I think we've been doing a lot of it lately and talking about it a lot.

58:29I mean, I don't think that believing in American dominance or American power means that you have to be looking for regimes to overthrow. Again, I think if there's very clear cut cases where we can stop a mass killing, we can stop a genocide, largely through air power, then I'm willing to consider it. And that's, again, why I supported the 2011 NATO-Libya intervention. But right now, I'd like us to focus on using our leverage of pressuring regimes to open up their political systems and be more democratic if they're dictatorships. I want us to focus more on moral leadership, especially when it comes to Gaza and our relationship with Israel and to create some distance between us and Israel.

59:25So we're not tainted by that association in the eyes of the world. I want us to find ways to counter China's rise. Well, I mean, rise isn't quite the right word. I think China's rise is wildly overstated, but to counter China's influence in different parts of the world, including Asia and throughout Asia and Africa. So I think there's ways to be for U.S. power in the way that I am without just wanting to go in and toppling regimes, because I just don't think we're great at it. And I think part of the issue too, and maybe this is an example where I'm so anti-Trump that I can't see clearly, I don't trust this administration.

1:00:09And I think to be comfortable with military interventions, you have to trust the leadership. We don't go to war with the leadership we wish we had. We go to war with the leadership we actually have, right? And I just see this administration as being so morally suspect, so destructive at home and abroad that it's very hard for me to have an open mind. I just have to be honest about that. Yeah.

1:00:40Coleman Hughes:So one more try on the Israel question. So let's say I'm putting myself in the point of view of Hamas, of the axis of resistance, the self-styled axis of resistance, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah. My theory and hope, if I'm these folks, is Israel is this kind of fake rump state arm of the American empire over here. They only exist insofar as the Americans support them, right? That's what makes them a sort of fake colonial entity. Used to be the British that supported them, then it was the Russians, now it's the Americans. But regardless, they've always been in the mind of the axis of the resistance, this like fake limb of Western colonialism.

1:01:35Coleman Hughes:And the strategy is to, through terror attacks and increasing the cost, the human cost of the Israelis living there, to ratchet up the humanitarian toll of their response and then get rid of America's support for them as the first step to eliminating them, right? First, we get the Americans to stop aiding Israel. Then without that aid, because they're a fake colonial entity, we'll be able to destroy them. So on the margin, if America gives less to Israel as a result of this, isn't that just the strategy working and therefore an incentive for more attacks against Israel and therefore not really good for regional stability?

1:02:26Coleman Hughes:If I'm Hamas or I'm Iran or Hezbollah, and I see tomorrow Congress passes a resolution saying we should stop giving aid to Israel, don't I go to my fellow fighters and say, guys, strategy is working. Let's double down. but the reason that so many americans are turning against israel is because of what israel has done in gaza they've seen the images they've seen the pictures they followed the news and they don't feel comfortable with it they don't want that to be done in their name so i wouldn't say that well um we're falling into hamas's trap or whatever i'd say israel fell into hamas's trap when Hamas did what it did on October 7th, this is what terrorist groups always try to do.

1:03:17They want to provoke the target to overreach and to do things they otherwise wouldn't do. I think Hamas, unfortunately, was successful in this. They got Israel to wildly overreact and to go too far and to be too destructive and to kill too many Palestinians. And in that sense, Israel was somewhat foolish. This was the same argument that I think a lot of us made after 9-11. What is Al-Qaeda trying to do? It's trying to drag us into the Middle East. It's trying to provoke a regional

1:03:55conflagration. So I think we should be very careful. But just because Hamas wants to limit aid to Israel doesn't mean it's the wrong position. Bad people can come, bad or evil people can come to the right conclusion. I don't think we should be basing what we as Americans think on aid to Israel, on whether Hamas agrees with it or not.

1:04:15Coleman Hughes:So I'm making a different point though. I'm making a slightly different point. I'm making a point about what is actually likely to happen if we do it. So just like purely predictive, my point, right? You've heard of the mantra, weakness is provocative, right? Yeah. So again, if we pull out aid from Israel, forgetting the morality of anything for a moment and just focusing on what is actually likely to happen as a matter of game theory, doesn't that on the margin make it more likely? Isn't that an encouragement and an incentive to Israel's regional enemies to attack precisely because they're in a weakened position.

1:04:56Look, it could be, but even when Israel was strong and aid wasn't being questioned, that's precisely when Hamas decided to attack on October 7th. So I don't think there's a necessary...

1:05:07Coleman Hughes:But that was because of the Abraham Accords, the threat of the Abraham Accords with Saudi. If you look back at their relationship with Egypt and Jordan, as Israel got stronger, they were in a position to get peace with those countries, right? When they were weaker, those countries felt much more, actually, we can wipe Israel off the map. They're tiny. They just got here. So weakness has been provocative in the history, and peace has been achieved through strength, at least partly. But I think Hamas and the axis of resistance are wrong on a key point. This is where we probably agree, which is I don't think Israel is a fake colonial plant.

1:05:46This idea that Israel is so weak and that without American support, it would kind of start falling like a house of cards. I think Israel is a country that has deep reservoirs of strength that are internal to it. They have a committed population that will die for their country, at least the Israeli Jewish population of Israel. And this is where I say, like, even in the book, I say this, and not everyone likes it, which is I think that the U.S. can and maybe even should commit to being Israel's defender of last resort, that if Israel really was in dangerous territory in terms of its own existence, if it really was being beaten on the battlefield, then I think there could be an argument for the U.S.

1:06:41keeping Israel alive. I just don't think that's even really a plausible scenario, but I think to reassure people, because I want to be pragmatic. I'm extremely critical of Israel. I've been very outspoken on this issue, but at the same time, I want to be realistic about my policy prescriptions. So I don't think that we should necessarily say to Israel, hey, we're abandoning you altogether. Also, I think that if we threaten to withhold aid, it doesn't mean we're going to actually stop giving aid to Israel. My wager is that if we threaten a suspension of military aid, it will actually persuade the Israelis to be more aligned with where we are, that they'll actually listen to us because they understand how important the U.S.-Israel relationship is, and they wouldn't want to actually put their country in a situation where they lose$4 billion of aid.

1:07:40Now, I can't prove that that would be the case, but it's a wager. This is always what happens when we threaten to withhold aid. We don't know exactly what the other country is going to do, but that's the risk of using leverage. And I think there's only one way to find out, really. But I don't really see it as being very plausible, it could change. Maybe if Democrats and even some Republicans, if Tucker runs in 2028, will be so anti-Israel that we talk about abandoning Israel. I just don't think it's likely with even the Democratic Party, even if it's someone like John Ossoff, who's been critical of Israel, I don't think there's any real constituency in the Democratic leadership to give up on Israel entirely and abandon it.

1:08:30So I just don't think that's likely to happen.

1:08:32Coleman Hughes:How high do you rate the importance of the United Nations to global peace, global stability? Is it overrated or underrated or correctly rated?

1:08:45Well, I don't know. It depends. I think most people have a low opinion about the UN these days. It doesn't seem to be doing a lot. So maybe in some ways it's correctly rated. But for people who love the idea of world government and think the UN is the solution to our problems, I think for those people, they're overrating it. I've become more skeptical of the role of international law. I believe that international law exists. I believe it should be treated as a real concept. I don't like this idea of might makes right. Again, going back to what I said about power has to be matched by moral constraint.

1:09:22But I worry about people who say there's no such thing as international law, that they're basically giving carte blanche to countries to just ride roughshod over norms and conventions and legal expectations. I think the UN is good in the sense that it offers a vision of what could be possible. It gives us something to maybe aspire to, but I'm under no illusions that the UN is going to be able to be a very productive body as long as it doesn't have its own army. This is where I come back to this issue. Power is necessary to enforce things. Power is necessary to support your own moral aspirations.

1:10:08That's why America is in a very unique position historically. It's the most powerful neo-empire, or empire if you want to use that term, in human history. We can do good things with our power. That's the way we should be viewing it, as a historic opportunity to shape the world in alignment with our values.

1:10:29Coleman Hughes:I actually have one more question. And America first, I meant to ask you about this. So obviously there's a big movement on the right that goes by the branding of American first, which says something like, why are we spending all this money on adventures overseas, military bases overseas when we have problems at home? um and you know you you're in favor of moral like interventions that are actually moral and framed as moral and like i would i would count the liberia intervention as a classic case of this there was essentially no self-interested reason why we ended that civil war other than the moral one and the humanitarian one um nato nato bombing of um yugoslavia as well i I think was basically a humanitarian intervention.

1:11:23Coleman Hughes:And there's many cases where we fail to intervene like Rwanda, and I consider those to be very big mistakes. So I'm with you on all of that. The reality, however, is that I think Americans are very cynical about moral interventions for a couple of reasons. A, because some of them just never believe, they always believe there must be an ulterior motive. And then there's kind of a more rational case, which is like, okay, maybe we have a bleeding heart for like a year, but what if the intervention to be successful requires a much bigger commitment than that? Empathy will wane pretty quickly. And if we don't have self-interest to sustain it, then we actually won't go through with it.

1:12:13Coleman Hughes:We won't finish the job and actually achieve the moral objective. So from that point of view, is there a logic to someone like Donald Trump framing the Venezuela thing as about oil? Because realistically, we know if if Venezuela were like a great liberal democracy that had free elections, wasn't abusing its own people. And like we wouldn't invade their country to just get a better oil deal or to like get a stake in their national oil company. right like donald trump wouldn't have done that it's it's also the fact that maduro is a terrible dictator that has destroyed that country that's like de facto that is also a reason even if he frames it as purely about the oil because that's how he thinks about the world and that's how he speaks and also he has a burden to make sure every intervention is plausibly in the american interest Right.

1:13:13Coleman Hughes:Because he's sort of he has his American first constituency. Is there a case to be made for trying to find like the Venn diagram overlap cases where there's a moral reason and like a purely self-interested America first reason and to frame it in America first terms in order to. precisely because most American voters, I don't think, are like you in the sense that they have a true moral foreign policy outlook.

1:13:47I think this is one of the weaknesses of America First is that it requires everything to be justified in the most narrow terms of self-interest. like we can't do anything abroad unless we can point to something very specific transactionally that we're going to get out of it. I think that that is, it goes against much of our history. We've always, like, as I said before, the pretense, we've always at least had the pretense of moral aspiration. So I just want us to keep that pretense, even if it's not the main thing. I take your point that it helps to have some aspect of self-interest because that can keep more Americans engaged and they can see the benefits of the policy, the benefits of the intervention.

1:14:34If we could find a Venn diagram of America first self-interest and humanitarian intervention and find a way to frame it so it appeals to both constituencies, I think that's a very difficult thing to do effectively. And I don't think Trump has done it. I think he's very much making, as we've said, he's making the case on a very, very much an America first terminology without talking about the humanitarian benefits. But I'm not, I have to be realistic. I'm someone who thinks that there is, it's in our self-interest to be morally, to be moral, really. I know most Americans might, a lot of Americans might not agree to that extent, but I think if you look at a lot of the polling on Americans' views on foreign policy, they'll often respond quite positively when pollsters ask them, do you want America to be a moral leader?

1:15:36Do you want America to stand up for certain values in the world? I think we as Americans, we have a natural instinct that we want to do the right thing. Maybe this is where I have some kind of inherent faith in the body politic that even Trump can't extinguish, that we want to be good. We want to be better than we have been. And that's actually, I think, what gives me at least some optimism that there's something in the American spirit that moves us in that direction.

1:16:08Coleman Hughes:All right, Shadi Hamid, the book is The Case for American Power. I highly recommend everyone read it. There's also, there's stuff in there that we didn't really get to in this conversation. So I recommend buying the book. It's a good read. It's a short read, but it packs a punch. So very well done on the book. And thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much, Coleman. Great to talk to you.