The Strong Do What They Can and Suffer What They Must | Jonathan Kirshner

28:20It breaks off about seven years before the conclusion of the war. And the narrative is kind of picked up by Xenophon. And Xenophon reports that, yeah, after the Athenians unconditionally surrender, there's a discussion by Sparta and many of Sparta's allies are saying, yes, give Athens the full melos. You know, these are bad guys and you should kill them all. And I think Donald Kagan has the line, the classical scholar, they were right to be concerned about this. This was on the table, right? They could have easily been completely massacred. And luckily for them, they were not. The classical scholar Hunter Rawlings makes a necessarily speculative, but to my eyes, very convincing argument that Thucydides wrote his book in a very parallel way, that things that happened in the first half of the book have parallels in the second half of the book.

29:08And Rawlings speculates that the Melian dialogue was so important because it was going to parallel this so-called Athenian dialogue that would have taken place at the end of the war. And that has a really attractive symmetry to it. And these things did come up, as Xenophon reports, in the discussion of what to do with the Athenians. And Rawlings also makes the point, as do many other classical scholars, that no one in Thucydides' original audience, remember, he was writing for all time, but his first readers had memories of this war. And that would have not been lost on them, the fact that they came very close to being massacred in the way that the Athenians massacred the Melians.

29:52So that parallel is very attractive. So those are the three big reasons, I think, why classical scholars have said Pucydides just stops the narrative in its tracks and has this invented dialogue to make all these points. And also, again, I think the Melians make a lot of good political points along the way. So that's interesting to me, too, as an IR person. But to bring it all back home, if we may now invoke Bob Dylan, so it is much, much more than that one line, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must, and much, much more than some lesson that, look, this is what can happen in world politics.

30:28You can have all the morals on your side that you want, but force will rule and you'll still get massacred. Again, as I've already said in our discussion, we see examples of that littered throughout the text. many times. Often Thucydides dwells on them. Other times he gives it a sentence. Again, the Skyon comparison is so fascinating because as I understand the Greek, and I don't, but as I'm told, he uses the exact same language to describe the massacre of the Athenians at Skyon, but he does it in one sentence. And other classical historians have described the Melian episode in one sentence because it wasn't important for the war.

31:07And so it got a sentence and they moved on. Again, the Melian dialogue was really important to Thucydides because he wanted to teach us things. Fantastic. All right, let's unpack this a bit. So you mentioned you made an allusion to the Athenian dialogue, which would have been part of this arc, this literary arc of Thucydides had he completed his histories. That would have presumably been the Athenians pleading their case to the Spartans after the Spartans won the war, right? Yes. Yes. Now, if I'm going heavily off memory here, and there are many dialogues, so this can easily get confusing. But if I remember correctly, it was during the dialogue between the Athenian envoys and their Melian counterparts, where the Athenians, echoing Pericles' warning about the hatred of those over whom Athens rules, stated that it isn't the Spartans that they're worried about, or what would happen to them at the hands of the Spartans should they lose the war, but rather what would happen to them should they be overpowered by their subjects or those over whom they rule their empire.

32:07Now, there's also another dialogue that we've already alluded to here in which you bring up in your foreign affairs article, which is the Mytilian debate that happens in Athens in 427 BC, where two opposing arguments are made, one by Cleon, and these are appeals to the Athenian people at the assembly. And one of them is by Cleon, who again, echoing Pericles says something to the effect of, your empire is a tyranny against those who plot against you or something like that, and that you would be fools not to make examples out of the Mytilians as it would only invite future rebellions. So be merciless, essentially.

32:47And the counter argument is made by Diodotus, who doesn't make a moral argument against genocide, but rather makes a very rational argument, which rests on two stools. One of which is destroying Mytilene would mean the loss of an important revenue stream for the Athenian empire. And the second was that killing everyone, including the innocent, which is what was being proposed by Cleon, would make it less likely that future rebellions would be stopped because the inhabitants would see no benefit to trying to cut a deal since no deal could be had. So, here we have what is a very cynical argument for preventing a genocide and what appear to be a series of examples, very instructive examples for how the Athenians view their empire and how they perceive the perception of those over whom they hold power.

33:40How important is that for us to understand if we really want to understand the nature of Athenian empire? Well, the whole story is really cool. And it's really cool because of Thucydides' narrative techniques. In fact, there were two debates over this. I'm going to keep saying mind-aligned because my language is bad. And Thucydides withholds from us the first debate. Just like in the debate over the start of the war, Thucydides says, many speakers arose to take sides on whether to have the war. But all he gives us is Pericles' pro-war speech, right? So Thucydides is constantly putting his finger on the scale in that way.

34:19By allowing Pericles to speak alone, he really gives a lot of weight to Pericles' words, even though there were opponents of the war that actually held the majority in the very beginning of that debate. Pericles' speech won the people over, as Thucydides writes at the time, because they were convinced by the wisdom of his advice. Again, contra Alison's understanding of what happened there. But in final line, sorry for the mispronunciation once again, There were two debates. I radically speculate with no evidence that in the first debate, Deodotus actually made an appeal based in morality. And Cleon said, kill them all.

35:00And they lost that debate and their decision was made to kill them all. And then Thucydides only gives us the second debate in which Cleon says, as you described, it's politics, man. We need to crush these mothers to scare the hell out of people and make sure they understand if you mess with us, this is what's going to happen. And Dionysus says, look, I'm not going to make any kind of moral argument. And that's why I think this is where he must have, or I think, made one the day before. He says, I'm going to make a narrowly interest-based argument. And let's just talk about the politics of this.

35:33What will be the political consequences of you doing this? And again, for reasons you've already articulated, in his view, I share that view. in the longer run, the political implications of Athens behaving that way would lead still more actors to lean away from Athens. And again, war is politics. And so if you're fighting a war and you get everybody in the arena disenchanted with you and rooting against you, that's not a good thing for your political power and influence and your prospects in the war itself. But we do have this second debate. the only one we're given, in which we have two competing political debates about the use of force.

36:16One says, we must demonstrate our terrifying hand so that nobody will ever dare mess with us in this way ever again. And the other to say, you will create more enemies than friends by doing this sort of thing. And that is a lesson that Thucydides repeats in the book. Again, Thucydides only rarely speaks in his own voice. He's very clever about that. But he does time and time again, have people make this observation about how certain horrifying acts tend to backfire because of their political implications, even if they win the day in the immediate military battle. So what are the lessons that we should draw, not just from this dialogue, but from the larger history of the Peloponnesian War as told to us by Thucydides?

37:04So in my view, we mostly think about the grand lesson of the Peloponnesian War incorrectly. I don't think the lesson of the Peloponnesian War is that the rise in Athenian power and the fear it instilled in Sparta caused the war and that that was some sort of tragedy or crisis. In fact, everything indicates that Thucydides supported that initial war. He was a huge admirer of Pericles. And again, you have that phrase that the crowd was persuaded by the wisdom of his advice. Those are Thucydides' words. And he even at times seems to hang the entire Athenian loss in the war on the passing of Pericles from the scene, suggesting that if Pericles had remained in power and not been killed in the plague, and that his strategy was followed throughout, that Athenian Athens would have emerged more victorious in that conflict.

37:58So the tragedy is not in that rise of Athenian power bit, although it's good IR theory for Thucydides to observe that changes to the balance of power are destabilizing and can cause wars. I like that as a lesson, but there are 30 or 40 lessons in this book that you can glean from it. That's why it rewards such careful reading. But what is the book really about? And again, I think Thucydides has a great emphasis on the fragility of civilization. It comes up over and over again throughout the war. But what is the denouement? What is the central set piece of the work? And it is the Sicilian campaign, the description of which takes up about a quarter of the entire book.

38:43And it comes right after Milos. And it was the opposite of what Pericles had advocated for. And it was a terrible idea. And Nicias, maybe not the world's greatest general, but there was a debate about whether to go on and try and conquer Sicily. He speaks in what sounds to me like Thucydides' voice, in which he says, guys, this is crazy. And he has a great line about how you go and seek out enemies elsewhere while you've still got some pretty serious enemies here. This is a very bad idea. He fails in that debate. That part of the war is the catastrophe for Athens, is the central set piece of the war.

39:22And therefore, I believe, if I had to say what the singular most important lesson of the Peloponnesian War was the danger of great power hubris, that great powers are not undermined or destroyed by ships in the balance of power so much as they are undermined by their own arrogance. And if there's a lesson, it's that great powers need to be alert to the fact that they get very arrogant and eventually bite off more than they can chew. And so I think that's, if he was only reduced to being able to give us one lesson, although I do think the civilization thing is very important to him, it would be that, which would be, you know, what us old school realists come to call prudence, great power prudence, right?

40:07Not pacifism, right? Thucydides was a general. He led men into battle. He had, you know, he had the values of, you know, Greeks from 2 ,500 years ago. He didn't shy away from war. Oh, war, that's horrifying. Rather, it had to do with war in its political context. Again, that's kind of centuries and centuries later, but it's very Klaus Wittsian, right? What are your political objectives? How will the introduction of the use of force help you advance those political objectives? But the political objectives must always predominate. You don't destroy things for the sake of destroying them. That repeatedly rubbed Thucydides the wrong way, the gratuitous exercise of violence.

40:47So how war can undermine a society and how great powers, the greatest, the gravest threat to a great power is their own arrogance and hubris, I think is the grand lesson of the Peloponnesian War. Although again, I think Thucydides has a lot of lessons to give us in a brilliantly written book. Do you see some of those same parallels between the United States and Athens? Yes, definitely. And do you also feel that war has undermined American democracy and the United States in similar ways? Well, we have to be cautious here because the US hasn't fought the type of war that is as massive as the Peloponnesian War.

41:33And so the links there are not direct. There are two links that I would want to call attention to that I think are important and indirect, which is, especially in the second Trump administration, we are governed or ruled, I guess they would prefer ruled, I'm going to say governed, by an administration that holds the more Cleon-type view, that the world is a jungle and the way you succeed in it is by the uninhibited use of force without without hesitation, and that if you use it in that way, people will be cowed and they will submit to you. I think the track record on that is mixed. I mean, maybe it works in Venezuela.

42:17Venezuela is not what you'd call a peer competitor, but it's not going to work elsewhere. But I think when you think about American society in a larger sense, one of my great teachers, Robert Gilpin, wrote, and he was not someone who liked to mix it up in contemporary politics. He very rarely spoke to current events. But as the Iraq war in 2003 approached, he wrote an essay in which he said presciently and brilliantly that this war, which he thought was a ridiculous idea, will have consequences for the nature of American society that we have not even begun to comprehend. And it did. I mean, the two long wars that the U.S.

42:58fought did not threaten the physical integrity and security of the United States, but it did contribute to the larger hollowing out of American society that we've seen in the 21st century. Now, we could also throw in the global financial crisis and its aftermath. But if you look at those two decades of the 21st century, we do see American society paying the price for hubristic behavior. The idea that, well, we'll just go, you know, knock off Iran and remake society and everyone will see our power, be awed by it, and the world will be a better place. Now, it was pretty easy to knock off the Iraqi military in 2003, and that's not surprising, but it's harder to remake a society.

43:42And so, in retrospect, that vision of, we'll do this, and again, shock and awe, it was the expression of the day, that the entire region would be transformed by the exercise of American power. That was wrong. And even the Afghan war, the U.S. on paper, it looks a tad stronger than Afghanistan, I will say, making a little joke there. But, you know, the Afghans weren't going anywhere, right? All they had to do was stay where they were long enough and resist American power. And eventually the Americans would leave. You could argue over how long they should have waited before they leave, but they were going to go before the Afghans were going to go because, again, the Afghans lived there.

44:25So you had these two long losing wars, both rooted in the idea that we are the hyperpower. We have the capacity to do this. We will impose our will and get what we want. That's not what happened, but also, as Gilpin and others pointed out at the time, the prosecution of those wars and who fought them and how they were fought and what happened when those soldiers came home had a deleterious effect on American society more generally. And again, I would combine that with the global financial crisis, which was also brought about in part by an act of American hubris. The American hyperpower of the late 1990s said, we believe in financial global liberalization and we will impose it on you because we know it's the right thing.

45:19Well, actually, it wasn't the right thing, but the arrogance of that power, those things that the US did also contributed to that crisis. And it was another way in which you had a sort of hubristic overreach. So it was a bad couple of decades for America in this century. And both of those problems, I think, were rooted in that arrogance and that hubris. And so in that sense, it links up very nicely to Thucydides' warning about what will undo a great power. And what will undo a great power is not being overtaken by adversaries. It will be undone by the mistakes it makes with the full head of steam of its own arrogance and hubris.

46:03I'm not a scholar of this period. Obviously, I'm not a classicist, so I may be misremembering here. But as I recall, the Sicilian expedition came after a prolonged period of frustration on the part of Athens at its inability to conclude the war. Of course, the strategy that Pericles had put forward at the beginning of the war was one of retreat into the city walls and relying on the Spartans to eventually exhaust themselves, which hadn't occurred or not occurred fast enough to satisfy the Athenians. And so the Sicilian expedition was in some sense, it seems to me, at least from my remembrance of it, a way of fighting a war on Athens' terms and in a manner that could disrupt the status quo, that for a restless city state like Athens, I mean, what was that quote by the Corinthians that the Athenians are restless so they cannot give rest to anyone else.

46:57That also seems to be a parallel. Our restlessness, we're always looking for enemies. We're always looking for regimes to change. We cannot rest. We cannot let the world rest. And that's what this administration in particular has felt like to me. It's felt like a ceaseless percussion of conflict and chaos and now war. And so I wonder, do you feel that as well? And do you see a parallel there between the restlessness of the Athenians and their frustration and impatience over the inconclusion of the war and their need to overturn the status quo with American restlessness during its period of hegemony and its time as a hyperpower, whether that be in efforts to effectuate regime change in Iraq or Syria or now in Iran.

47:42I mean, we seem to continue to create problems for ourselves. And the more we move in response to this restlessness, the faster we seem to be sinking, such that, yes, to your point, we didn't transform the Middle East the way we intended as a result of our inability to exercise patience and above all humility, but we certainly transformed it, just not for the better. Yes. I want to be very cautious about how much I can say to try and unpack the logic of the current administration's behavior. In that, I'm an IR theorist, and I think in a different project unrelated to the Thucydides stuff I've been talking about, I think that my discipline of international relations is facing what I call a second crisis in IR theory.

48:30I don't think we have good off-the-shelf explanations to explain the behavior of the United States in its foreign policy at this time. It is idiosyncratic. It is not obviously pursuing any definition of the American national interest that most IR scholars would draw up. Its behavior, again, seems to be causing more enemies than friends. Even if you agree with some of the underlying instincts of the ways in which the administration is trying to slightly rejigger the American orientation and its grand strategy, the way it is going about it is absolutely illogical and catastrophic. And I call it a second crisis in IR theory because we had one before.

49:18My discipline did not do a good job anticipating the end of the Cold War and understanding the way in which the Cold War ended. And that was a big crisis for my discipline of IR theory back then. And there were some really good debates where they said, you know, we really got to think about this and how we can better be IR scholars, since we really missed a big one here. Didn't see it coming and didn't end the way we kind of thought it would end, and it happened very suddenly. Similarly, the behavior of the United States right now does not fall into accord with any of our existing theories. In different writings I've explained, some people call this realism.

49:55We can talk about this, but I think we've already talked about this in the other podcast. Trust me, as a card-carrying realist. This is not realism by any stretch of the imagination. Is it a personalist kleptocracy? Is it what Steve Walt called predatory hegemony? Is it what other scholars have called neo-royalism? Whatever it is, we don't have an existing theory to explain this type of bizarre and counterproductive behavior. So I'm really going to say I just can't do that. But With regard to Thucydides, I do think the observation you made about the restlessness of the Athenians is an important one.

50:37And one of the many, many wonderful lessons that Thucydides has to pass down to us is even in the Sicilian debate, but in the debates throughout the war, it's always the young arrogant men who are the troublemakers. And so the war had been going on for a while, and there hadn't been many glorious victories. So when they were debating the Sicilian campaign, it was generally the older folks who said, you know, this may not be a good idea, but the younger members of society wanted more a taste of that action and glory. And that drive, that very Athenian drive, really won the day in that debate. So many people have observed that Athenian restlessness.

51:20And as you already observed, when the Corinthians go to Sparta and yell at the Spartans and It's like, you guys just sit there and do nothing, whereas the Athenians are constantly on the go, and they're doing this, they're doing that. The war has also been well described as a conflict between two distinct national characters. You do have this American national character, which tends to want it to do big things. If you see a problem, you can do it. And also, the absence of constraints allows it to do such things. Why could the U.S. fight the Vietnam War the way it did? Why could the U.S. fight the Iraq War the way it did?

52:00Because it had massive amounts of power and no obvious nearby security threats. That's a very rare combination. And I think Thucydides would tell us that often leads to making big mistakes, the lack of constraints, right? Having a peer military competitor can actually be very tempering of your behavior because you really have to prioritize what is actually important to you and to the so-called national interest. That's a great point. And I don't know that I would describe China as a peer competitor or certainly not Russia, but the United States finds itself in a more operationally constrained geopolitical environment today than it did in 2003.

52:43what explains its behavior in light of that fact? In other words, it doesn't seem... I mean, we're back in the Middle East again. Yes. After a generation. There's just a little over 20 years since the onset of the Iraq war, and we are back in an intractable conflict. Obviously, we don't have troops on the ground. It's not comparable to Iraq in that sense. We're back into a situation where we went into the war with an intention to effectuate change, not entirely clear what we wanted, at least not from the public statements. And now we're back in the situation where we did all this damage, we've changed the dynamic, and it's not clear whether we're even going to stick around or just walk away.

53:21And so what explains that behavior, especially if you want to add to it the politics, which is that the Trump administration ran explicitly on no new foreign wars? So what explains this again? IR theory is in a lot of trouble here. If you look either from a realist perspective, but we don't get to bog down into subdisciplinary debates, but just in a perspective of the American national interest. Most scholars looking at the American national interest would say, gosh, the U.S. is relatively less powerful vis-a-vis China than it was 10, 20 years ago, certainly. And if there is a threat, I'm going to phrase it more as a political threat that is an active military threat that's emerging on the horizon.

54:06It is China. And so if the U.S. has limited resources and more challenges, it really needs to think about prioritizing things. I'm really not aware of a scholar who says things like that. And if you chalk, you know, wrote it up on a blackboard, you'd say, from where should we pull back? And from where should we pull back? The answer is exactly the Middle East, right? And maybe it made sense to defend Persian Gulf oil in the 1970s and the world was so dependent on it and the U.S. was very energy, much an energy importer. Now the U.S. is one of the world's largest energy exporters. The Persian Gulf is much less important to the United States than it has been in the last half century easily.

54:50So if you want to rejigger your forces, you should be getting out of the Middle East and shifting some resources towards bolstering your position in East Asia. I don't think to have a war, I'm not shopping for a war with China, but again, back to politics, back to the way George Kennan would look at this. What you need to do is give like-minded powers and your political and military allies in the region the confidence that you're going to stay engaged so that they will have the confidence to resist China's dominance as it becomes increasingly powerful in the region. So investing more in the Middle East, again, is a bizarre choice.

55:30It cannot be explained by any off-the-shelf IR theories. It can be explained a little bit if you think of the U.S. government as a personalist kleptocracy. I mean, it is a matter of fact. And I know that many people would say, oh, this is just Trump derangement syndrome. But no, not to recognize this is Trump delusion syndrome. This is the singularly most overtly corrupt presidential administration in American history, full stop. And the behaviors are astonishing. And if you had written them down in advance and said, would the president do that? You would say, oh my God, not a chance. You know, would President Biden or Obama sell cryptocurrency from the White House and make a billion dollars doing it?

56:18I mean, these are beyond the imagination. So if you start to think of the U.S. foreign policy as run by a cotier of kleptocratic leaders, then the Middle East is a place where they have a lot of personal business interests. And so not from the U.S. national interest, but from the kind of personalist interest, staying involved in the Middle East has a little more of a logic to it. But for U.S. foreign policy, it's absolutely catastrophic. One is it does reveal the limits of what bombarding a country can do, especially a large country. If you wanted to take out Iran, you probably would have to put boots on the ground.

56:57And I don't think that would work either. It's a very large country. I think that would be a terribly stupid idea, but it's just not going to happen from the air, even with our impressive air might. And we have depleted many of our most important munitions in that effort. The types of munitions that my Asian studies scholars tell me, we had been building up with an eye towards a possible military confrontation in Asia. So if Asia is where the action is, we've really undermined our position there with this, I'm going to reach for the word ridiculous, Iran war. And so again, IR theory cannot explain it.

57:37But if we get into theories of what is motivating this particular administration and stop thinking about the national interest and start thinking about the personalist interest, then we can at least, through the weeds, see some logics to this behavior. But even then, it's hard to explain. It's hard to explain why this morning or this afternoon in Europe, the president of the United States would announce that Spain is a country of losers who he wants nothing to do with and should cut off all trade with. I mean, you may want to take a tougher line with Europe on international trade or be irritated with European support for NATO, but that's just not the way a thoughtful strategist would comport themselves.

58:26So I do want to ask you about our alliance networks. One question before I do that. The way I learned about the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater and the Republicans coming up to the White House was that there came a point where the revelations of the break-in at the Watergate Hotel and the subsequent been cover up became too much for institutional Washington to allow and for the Republican party to allow. And so Nixon had to go. That institutional integrity seems to be missing today. And my question is, was it always missing? If not, what explains this?

59:08There seems as though there's been a hollowing out of the institutions and also corruption of our culture as a nation. I think you're exactly right about all of those things. I do want to pause to make a public service announcement, which is Vice President Vance said that Watergate would be a 12-hour story today. And I need to add that what J.D. Vance doesn't know about Watergate could fill stadiums. This was a very big deal. It was not about the break-in. It was about a vaster range of crimes by the executive branch. I'm not going to dive into that here, but you can read up on this. It was a very, very big deal.

59:45I mean, not perhaps what we see done on a daily basis today, but in the context of the political behavior in American history, it was unprecedented. It was a constitutional crisis. It was a very big deal. And finally, as you said, Goldwater, Mr. Conservative, goes to the president and says, this is enough. And what was being invoked there was something we have lost, which was the phrase I would use is institutions defending their institutional prerogatives. And I do think we've lost that. And I do think that is also sort of unprecedented. it. Even if you were, say, a Democratic president dealing with a Democratic Speaker of the House, you did not mess with the authority of the Speaker of the House on the things that the Speaker of the House thought was the business of the House of Representatives, and similarly, the Senate.

1:00:40Today, we have a Speaker of the House who serves at the pleasure of the president. So this is kind of shattering the notion that we have these distinct epicenters of authority throughout society, you know, with the three branches of government, for example. It is shocking to me the extent to which our legislative institutions and our judiciary, for that matter, at the highest levels, has ceded its authority as a peer institutional power of this executive branch. I don't understand why that has happened. It probably roots to the underlying dysfunctional crisis of American society today. That's something that's happened internally that has brought that about.

1:01:27But it's mind-boggling. It is mind-boggling that the House and the Senate do not insist upon asserting their institutional prerogatives. I mean, you try and tell LBJ when he was the Senate majority leader, that you wanted this to happen over his objections, and he would have eaten you for lunch, Democrat or Republican. Whereas nowadays, again, not only is that not happening, but you have a Supreme Court that has immunized the president. I feel fairly confident that if the Supreme Court had immunized the president in 1970, all of the crimes that Nixon committed during Watergate, and they were crimes, if any of us committed them, we'd be behind bars right now.

1:02:13And we would say, well, it's president. He's above the law, as the Supreme Court now tells us. And so part of the current American civilizational crisis has come from the renunciation of authority by otherwise co-equal branches of government. So Jonathan, last question for you, and that has to do with our land structures. Much of what we talked about today has been military power. And of course, military power is elemental, but so much of how America has wielded power since the end of the Second World War has been what we call soft power. It's been through the institutions that we created after the end of that war.

1:02:53I mean, one parallel with the conversation we're having earlier is the Delian League. The United States seems to be undoing many of those institutions, if not literally, certainly tacitly, or if not explicitly, certainly tacitly. What are the consequences to our alliance networks and to those sources of American power? And can any of that damage be undone after the end of this administration? It will not be easy to undo the damage because everybody around the world has to understand that this is what the American political system can produce, especially with the re-election of Trump, right? That means the American public wasn't kidding.

1:03:36This is what America must look like to the rest of the world. And even if the next president looks different, it doesn't matter in that we know that America can easily produce this. And again, IR theory, it's a world of anarchy. You have to make assessments about the behavior of other actors in the system. And so assessments of what the U.S. may or may not do must now change everywhere in the world. Now, I want to make a few qualifications to this. I'm among those who bemoaned the end of the American order. I did it in print. But many of my colleagues pointed out to me, well, everything ends, right?

1:04:18That order was forged 75 years ago. It's not shocking that we had a certain order and that order came to a close. It's really about how the order ends and what replaces it. And so you could also have good IR debates about the nature of the relationship between the U.S. and its European allies. It's understandable that the U.S. has expressed frustration for decades that Europe has not done more for its own self-defense. That's certainly a good debate to have. But what we don't have an understanding of as to why the U.S. would torch its alliances. That's right. That's a good word to use. Yeah. And turn former intimate friends into, at best, diffident affiliates, but perhaps even ultimately in the long run, adversaries, if you push it along the way, who look at the U.S.

1:05:11with wariness and suspicion. Again, I'm going to quote Bob Dylan again, because I love to quote Bob Dylan. We live in a political world. Politics rules. Most of the time, we're not deciding things by wars. We're deciding things by political contestation. And so shedding your allies and behaving in a way that makes everybody in the world not like you is simply politically unwise. But there's also, and this may be even the grandest failure of this administration, how credible are U.S. commitments to other countries? And this is the big, big question in East Asia, because the question on the table in East Asia is not, is China going to invade us all and swallow us up?

1:05:59It's rather, is China's power going to mean that its political will will ultimately be irresistible and that China will come to politically dominate almost all of East Asia? And a lot of the calculations that the states of that region have to make is, can we push back against that political dominance? And part of that will depend on whether they think the U.S. will be an engaged partner in East Asia should push come to shove. I think the U.S. is behaving in the world like a bully, and most bullies, when confronted, tend to back down. And I think a lot of actors in East Asia have to wonder if there actually does break out a war in the region.

1:06:45Will the U.S. show up, or will it throw a few punches and then scurry back home? And again, maybe the US won't do that. Maybe the US will do that. It is on the table that the US may not be a trustworthy political and military partner. And that is something that will not easily be repaired. Well, well said. And even if the US does show up, I don't know how relevant that is. Because to your larger point, I think the US has proven itself to be an untrustworthy the ally and one with which you cannot reliably collaborate. So even if you are of the view that this latest war was taken on behalf of Israel, the American administration has wavered so many times throughout the course of the war and been so often at public odds with the Israeli prime minister and has entertained conclusions of the conflict that would put the Israelis in a worse position than they were at the start of the conflict, that even in such cases where you'd think the US is working on behalf of an ally or partner, they're not, or they're not doing so reliably.

1:07:51And the same thing has been true of its relationship to the Europeans and NATO. So the larger question, or I would say one of the larger questions is, what conclusions can we draw about the future of American foreign policy from this administration that can be applied to the next one? How much of this is a deeper expression of the polity's will, and how much of it is a unique facet of this particular administration, which I grant you, it's unique. I mean, lots of presidents are corrupt, but this one, he isn't just corrupt. He's engaged in a kind of corruption that seems inexplicable for a man of his age who is creating enmity for his family that cannot be justified by the billions of dollars that he's been able to extract through these various forms of grift and corruption.

1:08:41So it's hard to understand. I mean, I think in some sense, he really is a cinematic figure. And so much of what he does is a visceral expression of his deepest animal instincts combined with his sense of stage presence and his always on, I always got to keep the ducks quacking and keep the ratings up mentality. And I feel like that constant need to generate attention and keep the attention on him explains a lot of what he does. I don't know. I don't know if you have any other things you'd like to add, Jonathan, or closing thoughts before we wrap it up, but those are mine. Yes, I have several closing thoughts about that.

1:09:18One is that Trump's behavior is consequential and it will not be good for the US. The US will leave the Trump administration a lonelier and less politically influential entity on the world stage. But now I want to say something a little strange, which is I think Trump is analytically irrelevant. I mean, obviously, I'm not a fan, but what's important as an IR person about Trump is not what he does, but the fact of the society that has produced him. I think we are looking, I think the real problem rests within something that has happened in American society. And we've already talked about the institutional erosion.

1:10:06You talked about the making billions. Another powerful entity that has rolled over is our plutocratic class, right? Most of our billionaires sort of shied away from Trump initially and now have rolled over and are on board. I was at a workshop recently in which it was at a place where people, some of them knew billionaires, and they say, every billionaire now wants to be a trillionaire. And this is mind-boggling to me. It's like, you know, I feel like if I had$50 billion, I'd be kind of good with the cash. My goal in life would not be to chase ever more wealth. And so this is another difference, I think, in American society then and now.

1:10:46You have another possible counterweight rolling over toward the administration, and that is our most famous plutocrats, our most famous billionaires, who were really kind of sucking up to the administration in a desperate attempt to get even more money. And again, what I think we're seeing here is not a problem of Trump, but a broader social failure of all of the institutions and participants in American society that are behaving, to my eyes, differently than they behaved in the past. And so again, this is what I was talking about earlier, about what can IR theory tell us about this? I think IR theorists have to be able to do better at understanding the nature of societies.

1:11:33And that's not something we're usually comfortable doing. We like to look outward and look only at foreign policy. But part of that derives from the country that is practicing that foreign policy. And so my pessimism derives from the fact that Trump will, of course, inevitably leave the scene. But the society that produced a Trump will endure. A sobering thought. I think also what's going on here, Jonathan, is that there's a power grab in American democracy and that the desire to acquire greater amounts of wealth reflects the way in which wealth has become a gateway to power. And I think that's sort of the insight there as to why people are looking to accumulate more and more amounts of money because those folks now have a shot, whether it's at the presidency, whether it's controlling the presidency in a way that just wasn't possible 10 or 20 or 30 years ago.

1:12:27Yes. Let me give a shout out to a book by the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf. It's called The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. And he really talks about how the concentrations of wealth and the way that wealth then captures power is a large part of our current problem. Jonathan, this was wonderful. I always love talking to you. It was great to have you at our last dinner in New York. And I'm just a huge fan of your work, so I cannot recommend it enough. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure. If you enjoyed listening to today's episode and want to join in on the conversation by becoming a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q &A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can do that at hiddenforces.io slash subscribe.

1:13:16And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to info at hiddenforces.io, and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. you