realism

This Week's Show •

What To Do After Paris?

Once again, France is reeling — after the second major terror attack upon defenseless Paris this year. Eight fighters — all of them young EU citizens supposed to be working for ISIS, or Daesh — took 129 ...

Once again, France is reeling — after the second major terror attack upon defenseless Paris this year.

Eight fighters — all of them young EU citizens supposed to be working for ISIS, or Daesh — took 129 lives, with guns and suicide bombs, on Friday.

At the bloodiest site of the violence, the Bataclan concert hall, the shooters told their victims they were seeking revenge for French bombing of Syria. The next day, the embattled French President, François Hollande, responded to the attack with revenge of his own: a wave of new bombings in Syria, especially in Raqqa, Daesh’s capital city.

Hollande, who pushed for a Gallic “Patriot Act” this winter after the killings at Charlie Hebdo, has now proposed a series of changes to the French constitution designed to allow military action in a national state of emergency.

It’s a script we saw after Sept. 11: lock down at home, arm up abroad. With deep condolences for grieving France, we’re all wondering how this cycle of violence finally ends?

With Amb. Chas Freeman, a freethinking veteran of foreign service, and the French journalist Sylvain Cypel, we’re in the Open Source situation room, trying to see the tragic attacks in Paris and the force called Daesh in the right light, as a hellish problem with causes — and solutions.

First we asked tourists, students, and lunch-breakers on Boston Common for their theory on how to make it out of the terror age:

October 22, 2015

Second-Guessing Syria

Syria has been burning now for four years — with millions displaced into Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq, more than 250,000 dead, and no end in sight. In March of 2014, Stephen Walt, Harvard’s “realist” foreign-policy hand, warned against ...

Syria has been burning now for four years — with millions displaced into Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq, more than 250,000 dead, and no end in sight.

In March of 2014, Stephen Walt, Harvard’s “realist” foreign-policy hand, warned against a costly and uncertain entanglement in Syria as against national security interests on our show.

Today, to his credit, Walt is wondering whether he was wrong to warn against intervention, as we all watch a human tragedy unfold on a grand scale.

What was disturbing in 2012 has become apocalyptic. Russian and Iranian forces are backing the Syrian assault on Aleppo, dislocating tens of thousands of people each day. ISIS has emerged as an uncontrollable third party in the conflict. Our guest Lina Sergie tells us her Syrian-American friends are surprising themselves: many are turning to Jeb Bush, the candidate most loudly saying that we’re “duty bound” to take on Assad with muscle.

In his column at Foreign Policy, Walt concluded “with some genuine reluctance” that holding back the Western military in Syria remained the right course. But we want to dig deeper than that: to the yet-unimagined theory of this country’s military mega-power that allows for both life-saving interventions in terrible situations and for prudence and timely restraint. (Does such a thing exist?)

What would have worked, what were the worries, and what are the war-weary Western powers to do when millions of innocent lives are on the line?