international affairs | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

This Week's Show •

The Siberian Candidate

Calling on the spies we know best – all of them fictional – to explain the Helsinki summit: If it was spy-craft in plain sight, what would James Bond or Jason Bourne have seen that we ...

Calling on the spies we know best – all of them fictional – to explain the Helsinki summit: If it was spy-craft in plain sight, what would James Bond or Jason Bourne have seen that we didn’t? What would George Smiley have been observing – Britain’s shabby, morose Number Two spy in the Cold War novels of the great John LeCarré? The line is out there in a hostile press that Trump and Putin in Helsinki wasn’t a chiefs-of-state summit so much as a huddle in broad daylight of a Russian-intelligence asset and his KGB handler. Outrageous if even remotely true. Without evidence, it’s just political rage talking. But what would those spies, and their authors, know drawing on their experience and their imaginations?

The Manchurian Candidate movie script is where the Donald Trump story has been trending for almost two years now: the wild notion in the Hollywood classic from 1962 that US presidential politics could be taken hostage by a brainwashed pawn of Russian spymasters. In the movie, Lawrence Harvey played the shell of a man, Raymond Shaw, who at the sight of a playing card, a Queen of Hearts, will do anything he’s told. Frank Sinatra played his pal from Army days who trying to snap Raymond back to sanity.

From the novelist Richard Condon and screenwriter George Axelrod, The Manchurian Candidate was thriller fiction, obviously. The suspicion after the Helsinki summit – that a “treasonous” Donald Trump is the witting or unwitting stooge of Vladimir Putin – is something else: a reading of circumstances, paranoid politics, perhaps. But fiction has its own claim on authority: it’s the lie that tells the truth, people have said; it’s the work of art and intuition, and the imagination that gets to the point ahead of the plodding facts.

Robert Baer was a CIA field operative in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in the Middle East. George Clooney played the rough and tumble Robert Baer role in the hit movie Syriana in 2005, from Baer’s first book: See No Evil — all about the evil underside of oil and arms trafficking, dynasties at risk and drone assassinations in something like the Iraq war. He made fiction out of facts, Robert Baer, a storyline out of chaos in the news.

The premise is that it takes the mind of fiction, a make-it-up imagination, to see what was going on at the Helsinki so-called summit. Richard Lourie is a Boston-born Russianologist who had the nerve and verve to compose the late dictator Josef Stalin’s autobiography.

Our guest David Filipov came home this year from a long stint as Moscow bureau chief of the Washington Post. He edits the News at Northeastern University.

Olen Steinhauer joins us from New York. He’s a rising star in Spy Fi, author of five novels set in Ukraine, decade by decade since the 1940s. The third season of his video series Berlin Station begins this fall on EPIX cable.

Who’s going to explain how it is we trust the best fiction on this stuff more than we trust the so-called intelligence?

This Week's Show •

Two Guys Walk Into a Summit in Singapore

From “fire and fury” to a “terrific relationship” in less than a year sound like a happy turn in the Trump-Kim dance around nukes and North Korea. Better news coming is implied in the Singapore summit: an end of the North-South Korean War after 70 years, on what could be a nuke-free peninsula. A win for de-proliferation, an end of US war-games in South Korea, developing games for the North instead, all in a deal that great neighbor China like a lot.
Question: why do so many in our opinion class not like it at all: a dictator’s victory, goes the liberal line, a bust for the US. Is that because Trump did it? Or is there a deeper dread out there that as China rises, the American century in the Pacific is coming to an end.

If there were a simple sports score—who won, who lost?—between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim, we wouldn’t believe the scorekeepers anyway. Imagine: If it were Barack Obama going face-to-face with Kim Jong-un for a de-nuclearized Korea, would Rachel Maddow not be swooning? The Fox guys would surely be saying: Barack got “snookered.” But then, if Donald Trump had negotiated the no-nukes-for-Iran nuclear deal, wouldn’t Sean Hannity still be crowing at the sheer mastery of it. When politics gets so personal and so poisonous, the staging so obvious, the words so mechanical and indefinite. It’s Year 72 of the Nuclear Age, in Asia where the first furious mushroom clouds announced a surreal new era. Where are we really?

Our guides this hour are historians of different sorts: the diplomat Chas Freeman lived it, as translator between Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao in the breakthrough talks in 1972. Jeanne Guilleman—in her Pulitzer-nominated history Hidden Atrocities—has written the germ-warfare horror story from the 1930s which East Asia doesn’t forget. The novelist James Carroll is reimagining our American bomb dilemma since the forties. And Richard Rhodes won all the big prizes for his 3-volume nuclear history.

This Week's Show •

Trump Goes Rogue In Iran

Dropping out of the Iran nuclear deal has the feel of dropping into the John Bolton phase of the Trump era. Trump in Full. Trump Extra. The theme is No More Mr. Nice Guy, or ...

Dropping out of the Iran nuclear deal has the feel of dropping into the John Bolton phase of the Trump era. Trump in Full. Trump Extra. The theme is No More Mr. Nice Guy, or America First, Last and virtually Alone. Multilateral Europe is appalled by Unilateral Trump – he pretends to consult, then ignores the old allies, first on Climate change, then trade barriers, and now Iran. “We have to stop being wimps,” they are saying out loud. But here comes John Bolton with his broad-brush mustache and the truculent air of Steve Bannon. Except that Bolton is a neo-conservative, a gung-ho regime changer, as Bannon never was. Under Bolton rules, military intervention is in again, with our nukes at the ready.

What we are coming to sense about President Trump is that if he does bring the world down on his head, his last thought will be that there’s a Nobel Peace Prize in the ruins, for him. Ripple effects and bad reviews run far and wide from Mr. Trump’s unplugging of the world’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Proxy warfare between Israeli and Iranian forces stepped up immediately in Syria. European powers snubbed on the Iran deal sound ready to end a sacred alliance with the US. Donald Trump is being ridiculed for breaking one nuclear agreement while chasing another one with North Korea. But the president himself thinks his battering of Kim Jong Un is forcing progress, as in the release of prisoners this week. So Trump crowds are starting to chant ‘Nobel, Nobel.’ And the president affirms them humbly: “The prize I want,” he says, “is victory for the world.”

Steve Walt has the opening round on the wonder and the profound worry at a dicey moment in Trump time. He is a foreign policy analyst at Harvard, who’s made a trademark of tough-mindedness. We’ll also be looking at the wounded Iran nuclear deal through the Persian end of the telescope. And trying to “follow the money” through the Trump campaign contributions to see if that’s what drives the President’s course.

Ervand Abrahamian is a prominent historian and teacher of the Iranian perspective on the world around it. There are at least two views that we probably need to distinguish this week — of the revolutionary Islamic Republic, the mullocracy that’s been in power for nearly 40 years; and the view of ordinary people, many of whom hate their government and would love to resist it.

Eli Clifton published a remarkable piece of research and reporting on-line this week. He made the Trump bailout from the Iran nuclear deal almost simple: it was the handiwork essentially of three multi-billionaires who’d contributed massively to Donald Trump’s campaign and knew what they wanted in return.

October 6, 2016

The Cyber

Can a secret still be a secret if everybody knows about it? Top brass US intelligence officials, including former NSA director General Michael Hayden, seem to think so. “Stuxnet, no comment!” echoes like a mantra ...

Can a secret still be a secret if everybody knows about it?

Top brass US intelligence officials, including former NSA director General Michael Hayden, seem to think so. “Stuxnet, no comment!” echoes like a mantra throughout the beginning of Zero Days, Alex Gibney’s latest documentary, airing on Showtime November 19th. Unfortunately for the higher-ups at NSA, the secret’s out and pandora’s cyber box has been thrown wide open.

Co-designed by NSA and Mossad to wreak havoc on Iranian centrifuges back in the mid 2000’s, the Stuxnet virus, “the Stradivarius of malware,” has ushered in a whole new world, one in which physical objects in the real world can be turned into targets for sophisticated cyber weapons.

Nations around the world have rules of war IRL—treaties and red lines for nuclear and chemical weapons—but what are the rules of engagement online? Al-Qaeda whistleblower and all-around intelligence guru, Richard Clarke, tells us about the critical need for a new Geneva Convention for cyber warfare.

The Internet began with beautiful dreams of free-flowing information, of unfettered access to all the world’s information, of technology making the world a better place. But behind all the promises and wonders lay hidden vulnerabilities. Now with each hack, each breach, each leak—all spawning thousands of news stories around the world—we’re all being forced to confront the other side of paradise.

This hour, it’s digitally assured destruction, with Walter Isaacson, Richard Clarke, Alex Gibney, Jeremy Allaire, Sara M. Watson and Jonathan Zittrain.

Timeline: Weaponizing the Web

1952: The National Security Administration (NSA) is founded secretly by the Truman administration to surveil communications and provide intelligence to governments.
1952: Israel’s intelligence corps Unit 8200 founded.
1989: Tim Berners-Lee conceives of the internet at CERN.
2007-10: The US and Israel sabotage Iran’s uranium enrinchment facilities at Natanz with Stuxnet, malware coded by the NSA in conjunction with Unit 8200. It’s the first time a cyber attack affects real-world infrastructure. (Reuters)
2009: United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) created under the Obama administration as the “offensive” outgrowth of the “defensive” NSA. (Washington Post)
2010 Iran creates their own cyber command organization, قرارگاه دفاع سایبری‎‎ (The Cyber Defense Command).
2012: Iran’s Cyber Defense Command releases a virus that erases three-quarters of the files at Aramco, Saudi’s national oil company. (New York Times)
2013: Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald leak NSA documents, revealing the scope of the U.S. executive branch’s global surveillance powers. (The Guardian)
2015: Obama administration releases official cyber policy. (The White House)
2016: Justice Department indicts seven Iranian hackers for breaking into major US banks and attempting to shut down a dam in NY. (Bloomberg)
2016: Alex Gibney documentary reveals large-scale offensive cyber program, Nitro Zeus. (New York Times)

Extended interviews

This Week's Show •

Can China Lead?

The People’s Republic has arrived and is applying for co-trusteeship of the globe. We got a good look at the co-trustee, China’s enigmatic president Xi Jinping, through the deep sourcing of The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos and from Professor William Kirby, who says that China’s prosperity (and Mr. Xi’s headaches) are a hundred years in the making. We are looking at a “conquest regime,” in Kirby’s phrase, a government ruled by “princelings” of the Communist Party that won the civil war in 1950. Through thick and thin the party line and party practice have been chameleonic marvels of adaptation, but the clock is running on the old elite from which Xi Jinping springs. The Kirby picture is of a mighty state now strangely insecure; he gives no simple answer to the question posed by his new book: Can China Lead? He raises a new thought here: Maybe China cannot be ruled from horseback.

[Xi’s] political toolbox–that of the Chinese Communist Party, it’s ideological toolbox–is so old and so weak… He lives in world in which the people, what they know to be true and what they are told to be true, the distance between these two things, gets larger every day. And so it is a heroic, but in my view ultimately hopeless, effort to think of how one convinces people to study again dialectical materialism again, to study Marxism and Leninism… and the glorious history of the Chinese Communist Party.

The challenge for Xi Jinping, Kirby told us, goes back to the under-credited founder of China’s revolutionary century, Sun Yat-Sen, who set in motion the deep and continuous drives to rebuild the country’s enterprise, infrastructure, and mass education. “Sun Yat-sen once said, ‘The mandate of heaven does not last forever.’ The question that must worry Mr. Xi is when and how there is a political transition in China, how and what his position will be when that challenge comes?”

The premise this week was simple. If the 19th century belonged to the Europeans and the 20th century was America’s, then the 21st century belongs to China. The question is: what will China — and the rest of us — do with this moment?

Professor William Kirby, the Harvard Sino-guru who just tossed a big online China course over the Great Firewall, is fond of ticking off the titles of nervous Western books: The Dragon Awakes, The Ascent of China, and (his favorite) The Rise of China: An Unwelcome If Inevitable Occurrence. Then he reveals that those titles, which seem at home in any airport bookshop, were all published at the turn of the twentieth century.

That’s the key perspective, says Kirby: this China moment was in the works decades before Deng, and it belongs just as much to the people and the culture as it does to the Party. So, we’ll take a hundred-year view in the hope of understanding 1.5 billion people building, working, and learning toward what President Xi Jinping has called “the Chinese Dream.”

On the Ground in China

By Max Larkin
Chris went to China last year, and we played three of our favorite clips on the show last night. You can hear much-extended versions of Chris’s conversations with Ai Weiwei and the internet hero and rockstar Kaiser Kuo below:

But there was a lot more to the tour than that — Chris spoke to authors, students, scholars, and street-vendors. So we’ve put them together in one big playlist and put in on iTunes, too. We hope you’ll tell us when your ears perk up, and take it as a whirlwind tour through a complex nation.

March 20, 2014

Putin, Ukraine and Reading the Russians

Russian troops are encircling naval bases, Crimea is locked down. We Americans are looking across an ocean, flummoxed in a familiar way by the mind and the mission of the Russian president and people. Why do we keep getting Russia wrong? Putin is only the latest in a series of Russian leaders that have divided American thinkers and policymakers against themselves. Is he a realist, or is he ruled by his emotions? by Cold War nostalgia? by a vision of Eurasian Union? Is he a fascist or a plutocrat, or is he simply reacting to the West’s expansion of NATO? Is he winning — or has he overplayed his hand?

What Would Tolstoy Say About Russia and Ukraine?

Suzanne Massie: Reagan and Russia

Suzanne Massie, who persuaded Ronald Reagan that he could hate Communism and love the Russian people in the same career, puts it this way: Why do we keep getting Russia wrong? Putin is only the latest in a series of Russian leaders that have divided American thinkers and policymakers against themselves. Is he a realist, or is he ruled by his emotions? by Cold War nostalgia? by a vision of Eurasian Union? Is he a fascist or a plutocrat, or is he simply reacting to the West’s expansion of NATO? Is he winning — or has he overplayed his hand?

We turn to Massie and other close familiars of Russian culture and history to try and figure out how to read the Russians, now and forever. Thought experiment: given that many of our best insights into Russian character and temperament come to use from their literary geniuses, can we summon some collective judgment on Putin, Ukraine and the Crimea from the contentious, often dissident wisdom of Tolstoy, the humanist; Dostoevsky, the Slavic Nationalist; Chekhov, the gentle star of both Moscow and Yalta; Solzhenitsyn, who argued forcefully that Ukraine must be an eternal part of Russia; and Vladimir Nabokov, who sailed out of Russia for the last time from the Crimea?

Podcast • May 10, 2011

Juan Cole: Through the Fog of the Arab Spring

Juan Cole‘s Informed Comment on the Iraq war made him, in my view, the Thucydides of our time — and one of the marvels of the age. That a Michigan historian of the Middle East ...

Juan Cole‘s Informed Comment on the Iraq war made him, in my view, the Thucydides of our time — and one of the marvels of the age. That a Michigan historian of the Middle East could become an inescapable, provocatively independent daily commentator and critic of the war policy owes a lot to the freedom and ubiquity of the Web. It reflects still more Cole’s own classical standard and relentless drive to give us, as Thucydides did in The History of the Peloponnesian War, a gritty black-and-white account of events, drawn from a great variety of sources, not “to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”

I’m asking him in conversation to take the killing of Osama bin Laden and this mid-Spring in the Arab revolt as a fresh starting point: are we looking at the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning, as Churchill said; or an intermission in a permanent war?

It surprises me that Professor Cole approves the drone war (and says it’s popular) in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan, even while he believes the US counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan is doomed. He sounds troubled that the democratic wave (which he anticipated in Egypt) could be broken, maybe stopped in Syria. He is certain — having advocated the Western intervention and defended even the drones in Lybia — that the Qaddafi family will be brought down, even if it takes a while.

I am wondering how many double standards we Americans can juggle in our heads when the US is too-prudently late to the people’s party in Tunisia and Egypt; uncritical of nasty repression by Saudis, Bahreinis and Israelis; cautiously displeased with variations on the crackdown theme in Yemen and Syria; and committed militarily to the rebels in Libya. Juan Cole is saying it’s allright to admit feeling dizzy in the circumstances; but we should be noticing that Barack Obama has risen to the occasion as a Realist of the traditional foreign-policy school; and that Cole has confirmed his own best instincts as those of a “progressive internationalist,” not simply an anti-imperialist liberal.

I would argue that the Obama administration harkens back to Bush senior’s foreign policy ideals, which were those of the Realist school. I think Obama is not a classical Realist: he does have a sense of morality in a way that I think Henry Kissinger does not. But the Realist school posits that great powers act according to their interests, not according to namby-pamby ideals, and that, moreover, they ought to act according to their interests; if they don’t, it messes up the world. In every instance, the Obama administration stance has been what would be in the interest of the United States. It hasn’t been an idealistic or moralistic stance. I think it’s a reaction against the muscular Wilsonianism of the George W. Bush administration, which was very gung-ho to democratize the Middle East at the point of a gun…

I’m a progressive internationalist. I think one of the things that’s wrong with the world is that we have laws inside nations, but when it comes to international affairs, we have a jungle: the strong kill the weak and eat them. What the United Nations was about, from 1945 forward, was supposed to be the attempt to craft an international order that was founded on law. Qaddafi is not allowed to roll up forty tanks and fire live shells into the midst of a peaceful demonstration. That’s a crime against humanity and there ought to be sanctions for it. When the Arab League asked for a UN resolution, and when the UN Security Council asked that there be an international intervention, I thought that was a great good thing. It is in exact contrast to the Iraq war.

“One sympathizes with the Israelis” in this whirlwind, Professor Cole added. They’re “a floating fortress on the fringes of the Middle East.” Their natural instinct in the storm is to avoid any compromise in a changing neighborhood, but the “it will serve them poorly with the new Middle East democracies.” Juan Cole’s more urgent sympathy is with the Palestinians. “At the moment Israeli settlements on the West Bank are being expanded, and there’s no prospect that the Egyptians will be able to stop that process. I think the new Egypt will support the Palestinians’ bid for recognition as a state at the U.N. General Assembly in September. And once the Palestinians are widely recognized as a state — by the Europeans and Latin America — they’ll begin to have standing to sue” against the usurpation of property and human rights.

So I think over time international law and order which, again, is my hope for the future, will be deployed in the interest of the Palestinians. The real problem with the Palestinians is that, contrary to the intent of the League of Nations, have been denied statehood — have been denied in many cases citizenship. So they’re Flying Dutchmen. They have no citizenship rights, and a person in the modern world without citizenship in a state is vulnerable, open to predatory practices, and if their property is usurped they have no law court to seek justice in. So the whole Palestinian nation is stateless, therefore without basic rights or basic human dignity. It’s a crime. It’s a blot on humanity for the situation to go on like this.

Juan Cole in Ann Arbor, with Chris Lydon in Providence, May 9, 2011.

Podcast • September 16, 2009

Rory Stewart: "nonsense" policy in Afghanistan

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rory Stewart. (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Rory Stewart in professorial mode The Kipling-esque adventurer and writer Rory Stewart — the man who walked alone across Afghanistan and ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rory Stewart. (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3)

Rory Stewart in professorial mode

The Kipling-esque adventurer and writer Rory Stewart — the man who walked alone across Afghanistan and made a best-seller of The Places In Between — was quoted by Nicholas Kristoff in the Times the other day dismissing the Obama rationale for escalating the war as “nonsense.”

In our second annual conversation yesterday, in Boston, Rory Stewart expanded on the theme. He teaches now at Harvard’s Kennedy School when he’s not running a model redevelopment project in the heart of old Kabul. I am listening respectfully here to a man who said recently in an FT interview, “I’m a bit rougher and tougher” than T. E. Lawrence! He sounds to me, through his careful Eton and Oxford delivery, like a recovering imperialist.

Short form: It’s a “mistaken” hope and theory that heavy doses of American money and military power can build a legitimate state in Afghanistan or defeat the Taliban.

Rory Stewart in seven-league boots

These are worthy objectives but they’re tasks that really can only be performed by Afghans, not by foreigners, and which are probably very long-term goals — a question of maybe years, or much more, decades. I think that in so far as Obama’s aim is simply to prevent Al Qaeda from becoming stronger, it’s not necessary for him to defeat the Taliban, or build a legitimate, effective, stable state. The Taliban is not very strong. The Taliban is not in a position to take a major city. It’s not the Taliban of ’94. And even were they in the very unlikely event to take a city, it’s extremely unlikely that they’d invite Al Qaeda back… In fact the lesson of the last seven years is that Osama Bin Laden prefers to be in Pakistan than in Afghanistan, in part because Pakistan is a more established state and because Pakistani state sovereignty prevents US Special Forces from operating freely in their territory. A very fragmentary failed state of the sort the Taliban would be participating in if they were to increase their position in Afghanistan is not likely to provide much protection for Al Qaeda, and probably therefore unlikely to pose a considerably increased danger to the United States…

What worries me most about the troop increases is that they’re likely to precipitate … withdrawal. We tend to lurch from engagement to isolation, and from increases to withdrawal. My dream has always been to define a very limited ‘light footprint,’ because I believe a light footprint is a more sustainable footprint. What Afghanistan needs with the international community is a long-term, patient, tolerant relationship; not electroshock therapy, huge amounts of cash, huge numbers of troops, in an attempt to turn it around on a ninepin…

The international community is now in a bind… The United States has said ‘I can’t affort to fail in Afghanistan; this is the Number One threat to the world,’ and therefore it doesn’t really have much leverage over an Afghan administration. They can’t really threaten to reduce troops or leave Karzai to the Taliban so long as they say this is our front line on the War on Terror… It’s very dangerous in any relationship or situation to say failure is not an option, because it effectively renders you impotent. In order to deal with Afghanistan or Pakistan we need to be able to say our interests are not identical with yours. We don’t need to be here… The current situation, suggesting we have no alternative other than the current strategy, simply exposes us to being perpetually exploited. One way of putting is: if the Afghan administration has, as I believe, caught on to the fact that the reason we’re pumping so much money into their country is because they’re perceived to have the Taliban and Terrorists and Drugs, and that if they didn’t have those things we would treat them like Nepal, what possible incentive do they have to get rid of those things? …

I think the entire political culture suffers from an inability to be passionate about a moderate solution. The political culture finds it almost impossible to envisage anything other than increases or total withdrawal. Stuck in that binary opposition and taking into account both our obligations to the Afghan people and the risks posed by Afghanistan, you can see why the president is going for increases. Personally, though, I think he’s wrong. I think the light footprint we had in 2002 – 2003, when we were taking few casualties, when we weren’t pretending to be involved in nation building, when our troops didn’t go much outside the capital, and when at the same time Afghanistan was relatively secure and prospering, was the correct posture. And that we have been misled by our ambitions. We’ve bitten off more than we can chew. We’ve provided fuel for the Taliban insurgency by allowing them to present themselves as fighting for Afghanistan against foreign military occupation. And that our current policy is going to make all of those things worse.

Rory Stewart with Chris Lydon at Harvard, September 15, 2009.

The much longer form was delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today. The still longer text is at the London Review of Books.

Podcast • August 28, 2009

Jackson Lears: on Obama’s Sorrows of Empire

Jackson Lears‘ cultural history, Rebirth of a Nation, from the Civil War to World War One, is the flip side of Louis Menand’s dazzling take on the same period, The Metaphysical Club (2001). Menand wrote ...

Jackson Lears‘ cultural history, Rebirth of a Nation, from the Civil War to World War One, is the flip side of Louis Menand’s dazzling take on the same period, The Metaphysical Club (2001).

Menand wrote about the invention of Pragmatism. What became known as the American philosophy was conceived deliberately as an antidote to the unbridled passions that had just taken more than 600,000 American lives and nearly broke the Union.

Lears is writing about the war virus that survived the pragmatists’ “cure.”

Menand’s heroes were Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James and John Dewey.

In Lears’ rueful reconsideration of the story, Teddy Roosevelt reemerges as the poster-face of the era: the first captain of American empire and true ancestor of the bathetic George W. Bush.

The first Gilded Age and its lingering effects are almost reducible to a contest of ideas and temperaments between a great teacher and his student who became a giant president.

“Unless we keep the barbarian virtues,” Teddy Roosevelt wrote in 1899, “gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.”

William James, who’d tutored Roosevelt at Harvard, made precisely the opposite point in The Moral Equivalent of War (1910) : that the claw-and-fang ferocity that bred the species was now undoing us. “And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the sciences of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity.”

Vice President Roosevelt promoted the US war in the Philippines (1899 – 1902), then as President inherited the waging of it.

James — in league with Mark Twain, Samuel Gompers, Andrew Carnegie and others — denounced America’s colonial venture, anticipating the over-the-top curses of President Obama’s onetime pastor in Chicago, Jeremiah Wright. “God dam the U.S. for its vile conduct” in the Philippines, said James, our greatest public intellectual. American intervention would destroy “the one sacred thing in the world, the spontaneous budding of a national life” among the Filipinos. “We can destroy their ideals, but we can’t give them ours.”

But this story of the two cordial enemies, Professor James and President Roosevelt, is just a piece of the contest over Republic and Empire, as old as the European settlement of the continent: were we to be a city on a hill, or an empire of liberty? It is an argument that raged recently through the punditry around the war in Iraq, with Paul Krugman, Jon Stewart, Gore Vidal and Andrew Bacevich in what could be called (but never is) the Party of the Republic, and Christopher Hitchens, George Packer, Robert Kagan and Tom Friedman in the Party of Empire. It is a story as current today as Barack Obama’s difficulty reconciling the health of the people (call it: healthcare for all) and extended war in Afghanistan.

Jackson Lears explains that he undertook his new book “in sadness and anger” in 2003, asking why Americans keep talking themselves into faraway wars of choice – to wit: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – knowing the horrific price in blood and treasure and reputation. Lears’ answer took him back more than a century to an American longing for regeneration after the Civil War: it’s a longing to start over, maybe to be born again, one-by-one and as a nation, to exercise a manly, muscular Christianity, with a wispy wish that maybe war makes us stronger, no matter the evidence to the contrary.

In our conversation, Lears’ answer extends to a melancholy reflection on the Obama doldrums of August, 2009:

JL: Like a lot of other people, I was moved profoundly by the victory of Obama. Moved to tears, in fact, about the sense of possibility that this seemed to restore. I kept thinking about the term ‘deliverance’ — I thought of this as a deliverance from a nightmarish period in our history, and a period where really there had been a kind of unfolding coup d’etat, [the Bush administration] running roughshod over civil liberties and certainly the republican tradition. And Obama seemed to promise, certainly in his campaign rhetoric, a fundamental departure from the kind of imperial abuses that Bush and company had specialized in and had deployed so effectively and relentlessly while they were in power. Obama seemed to promise deliverance. That was the word that came to mind for me. And regeneration, of course, along with that.

CL: You’re putting a lot of those Obama hopes in the past tense…

JL: I don’t see the kind of leadership that Obama had a mandate to provide. He could have made more things happen, certainly with respect to health care, and could have taken command of the debate and framed it more effectively rather than bending over backwards to create this bipartisan solution that I think is an utter delusion when you are dealing with the kind of rabid free market ideologues that are left on the Republican side, now that all of the moderates have been defeated by Democrats.

I am very dispirited by this—I haven’t given up hope altogether because I think that Obama represents, in some ways, the soft imperial side of the American imperial tradition rather than the hard Teddy Roosevelt side. He represents the Woodrow Wilson side, the side that, at least, sees war as a last resort, rather than something that is actually desirable. It is less bellicose in rhetoric and it can be persuaded to sit down and talk about things in ways that the more extreme militarists cannot. Nevertheless, in its very benign quality, the humanitarian interventionist argument can be quite seductive and ultimately quite dangerous as well, and that is what I fear I see happening in Afghanistan…

I am concerned that even as he embodies a more multicultural and more pluralistic perspective, and certainly a more diplomatic perspective than a militarist one, his willingness to talk to Iran, for example, is a sign for some cause for hope. But I also think the universalist aims — the old Wilsonian tradition — is not dead by any means: we can go marching abroad in search of monsters with the best of intentions and those adventures can go horribly awry. There is a great deal of hubris involved in either case, it seems, whether you are taking the harder line or the softer line.

Jackson Lears in conversation with Chris Lydon, New Brunswick, NJ and Boston, August 27, 2009.

Podcast • June 23, 2009

Alfred Gusenbauer: Euro-Socialism in America

Maybe Newt Gingrich is right — that Americans are getting used to something like European Socialism in this Bush-to-Obama bankruptcy and bailout era. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Alfred Gusenbauer. (38 minutes, 17 ...

Maybe Newt Gingrich is right — that Americans are getting used to something like European Socialism in this Bush-to-Obama bankruptcy and bailout era.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Alfred Gusenbauer. (38 minutes, 17 mb mp3)

Alfred Gusenbauer: desperate? serious?

Alfred Gusenbauer seems to think so. Austria’s hearty 49-year-old former chancellor, who may be typical of the left-of-center professionals in European politics, likes everything he sees on his American sojourn, starting with the Obama stimulus package, the borrowed budget, and the push for big public investments in health, education and green technology: “What the US government is doing now compared with all the others in Europe is the best one could do,” he says in conversation.

Europeans may be cushioned by a stronger social safety net, but Gusenbauer is struck by a sort of “optimism net” in America. We are blessed, at last, with “a government in which the people trust.” Habitually, perhaps, self-reliant Americans tend to look confidently to their families and their own initiatives, he remarks. Americans take six months or a year to believe that their sinking economy is in serious trouble. Europeans will take six months or a year to believe the good news, if a recovery ever comes.

Gusenberg, visiting at the Watson Insitute, leads our conversation with a quip — German Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s joke about the difference between Communism and Capitalism. “In Communism, first they are going to nationalize everything, and then destroy it. In Capitalism, it’s the other way round.”

Germans and Austrians, proverbially, take different views of a crisis like this world economic shutdown: in Berlin the situation is supposed to look “serious but not desperate;” in Vienna, rather, “desperate but not serious.” The Gusenbauer view, in our non-technical ramble, is that what’s deeply serious in the crisis is the economics of it — the stark imbalances (East and West and within every society) of production and consumption, savings and debt, health and hunger. What could be desperate is the social rancor and far-out politics fermenting even in Europe among people feeling abandoned — among workers who’ll never work again, among young people who don’t believe Europe’s “paradigm of progress,” and among politicians who will put the European project at risk to save their national bacon.

We are just at the beginning of real consequences for real people. I see two vulnerable groups: Those that are older than 50. Most of the old jobs and the old qualifications are gone. The huge danger is that people over 50 losing their jobs right now won’t be able to enter the market again… The second group is the youngsters, because with this enormous increase of unemployment that we are facing right now, all those that are leaving nowadays universities, grammar schools, technical education schemes, they will enter the labor market and find closed doors. And we cannot predict what this might mean for their social and political behavior… In Greece last year, among university students… this went quite far in terms of public violence and in terms of challenging the state authority. So nobody can predict right now which social and political effects a longer duration of the crisis might have upon different groups. This will be the real challenge for European democracy and for the European welfare state, to hold the social fabric together in times when it is fundamentally challenged…

An Austrian Socialist makes a model of development and redistribution and social justice in the near neighborhood of South-Eastern Europe — the West Balkan states of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, Bulgaria and Rumania — whose GDP altogether is smaller than Austria’s today:

Within Europe, I think it’s very clear; our hope is in the East, because from there the demand will come, from there the energy will come, from there the dynamics for the future economic development will come. And we are free to decide, are we going to support such a development, with a clear redistribution of resources that we have in Europe going to the East? … Our problem is that we are losing our markets. If we are not selling cars you are going to lose your job, so we have to sell our cars. We need people that are ready to buy our cars. Where are the best, most regulated, based on rule-of-law markets in our vicinity? It’s the new member states of the European Union. And therefore I tell you, it’s much better to spend one Euro in Romania than to spend a Euro in Austria, because a Euro spent in Austria will directly go into the saving rate, not in an increase in the sales of cars.

Alfred Gusenbauer in conversation with Chris Lydon, Providence, June 11, 2009.