 Good afternoon, welcome to the Global Report. I'm your host, Lily Ong. We have with us today Dr. Adam Garfinkel, who's been to many places and done many things. Notably, he was the fish writer for not one, but two secretaries of state, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. Dr. Garfinkel is also the founding editor of the American Interest. His mission is to explain America to the world and vice versa. Welcome to the show, Dr. Garfinkel. Nice to be here. Nice to be here. Now, Dr. Garfinkel, we are actually in the same time zone because you're right here in Singapore. What brought you here? A fellowship offer at the Raja Ratnam School of International Studies at the Nanyang Technological University. Invited for a year. I thought that would be fun. I'm not an East Asia expert. I've been to Singapore before a couple of times, but I'm not an East Asia expert. I thought it would be a really excellent opportunity to learn more about East Asia, both the history, the culture, the politics, and everything was going great until COVID again descended on us because we had scheduled most of the regional travel we were going to do, most of it invited travel for the second half of the fellowship, and then it became impossible really to go anywhere. So, unfortunately, as great as the year has been so far, it could have been greater. Well, at least you're getting to see a side of Singapore that most of us don't even get to see, you know, the serene, quiet side of Singapore. Now, Dr. Garfinkel, I recall at one of your RSIS talks, you referred to yourself as an everything bagel. So, bear with me if I were to go from one hotspot to the next in the geopolitical sphere, because I know you have your paws on many critical issues. Hold on a second. I don't think I ever refer to myself as an everything bagel. What I tried to say was that the book that I was trying to write wanted to be an everything bagel, and it is. It's a book that tries to get arms around a synthetic understanding of the subject, so it's not me that's the bagel. It's the book that I'm trying to write that wants to be the bagel. I'm the bagel, not the bagel. Oh, that's even better. If you're the bagel, you know what goes inside the if everything bagel. Now, so I want to get your take on several critical issues that facing our world today. And I think in order to analyze that, we kind of have to look back at some of the events that led us to where we are today. So, why don't we start with the messy one? Why don't we start with the Middle East? Perhaps you, I don't know where you want to start it from, maybe from the invasion of Iraq because that was during your time in the Bush administration, is that not? That's right. That was in March 2003. That's when that started. Yeah. I mean, I'm still bad for why US went into Iraq. I knew there was some accusations of weapons of mass destruction, but those were never found. So, look, this is not a great time to refight the Iraq war. It's an extremely complicated subject, but there were really three kinds of rationales for the war. One was the fear that there were both stockpiles and programs of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And there were programs. There were many, many fewer stockpiles than American intelligence and not just American intelligence, but everybody basically expected to find they were not there, but there were programs. There were programs that were in escrow against the day when the sanctions on Iraq would lift. Dr. Jerm was still alive. All those programs were real. You have to remember that in 1991, after the Gulf War, what the United States found in Iraq showed that we had vastly underestimated the progress that Iraq had made on weapons of mass destruction. So, you know, intelligence agencies don't like to make the same mistake twice. So, in this case, they made a different mistake by exaggerating, overestimating how many stockpiles would be there. When we did a readout of what caused the error, it was pretty interesting to find out why all the intelligence agencies were wrong. Saddam wanted everybody to think that he had weapons of mass destruction. One was to intimidate his own people because he was a brutal dictator. The other was to intimidate his neighbors, including the Iranians, his arch enemy, with whom an eight-year war had been fought between 1980 and 1988. It was basically for status, and it's very ironic in a way, that his claims, which were largely believed because of the nature of his regime, are what got him killed. There was a Romanian philosopher named Emile Teodon, who once said that history is irony in motion. It's a wonderful phrase. It certainly applies in Saddam's case. There were two other reasons for support for the invasion. One was the view that, in the wake of the attacks of September 11th, simply dumping the Taliban regime in Afghanistan wasn't enough to demonstrate the verve of the United States and the determination of the United States. And so a peace had to be taken from the board that was more in the heart of the Middle East than Arab country. Afghanistan is not an Arab country. So some people thought that Thomas Friedman made that argument in the New York Times, for example, that the United States had to take another pawn from the board in order to show how serious it was. But the real reason, I mean, one of the other reasons for it was that there were some people who were thinking strategically and understood that the longer term problem the United States faced after 9-1 was not Iraq but Iran. And so the idea was to flip Iraq and turn it into an American friend or proxy and have U.S. troops in Iraq after a new Iraqi government was constituted so that the United States would have military forces on both sides of Iran in Afghanistan on the east and in Iraq on the west. And the idea was that that military force would then be able to exert some leverage. It's called coercive diplomacy to get the Iranian regime to stop doing a lot of the nasty things that it had been doing. So in some people's minds, the real target of all this was not Iraq alone but basically to move the chess pieces around and to put pressure on Iran. Now that was actually not a bad idea, but it didn't work because after the combat was over, after the statue of Saddam fell in Thirudu Square, everything got screwed up. There was no phase four planning. The insurgency began. And instead of the United States putting pressure on the Iranians, American troops became soft targets for Iranian mischief and they still are. All right? So it backfired pretty bad. You can ask yourself, well, was the concept of the war itself wrong or was the implementation wrong? People will be arguing this for a long, long time, okay? But it's important to remember, two things are important to remember. There's a difference between the original concept for the war, right or wrong, and the screw above the implementation. About that, there's no doubt that it was screwed up. But one thing I want to say finally on this subject, there are a lot of people in the world who think that Secretary Powell and the vice president and Congolese Arise, who was national security advisor at the time and so forth, deliberately lied about the existence of weapons to mass destruction programs and stockpiles in Iraq. That's just not true. There's a difference between deliberately lying and inadvertently saying something that isn't so. This was an intelligence error, not a deliberate lie. I was there, I know, okay? But the hate-bush syndrome, just like the later hate-Obama syndrome, leads people into all sorts of wild ideas and suppositions. There was no deliberate lying. There was some exaggeration. There were some things that the vice president Janney said, a couple of things that Dr. Rice said, that where they were spinning, they were spinning the matter for public relations purposes. But in the serious speeches about the whole business, there were no deliberate lies told. There were mistakes made, but there were no deliberate lies told. Yeah, I was there on the onset that I have tremendous respect for Secretary Colin Powell. He was always a man of diplomacy. He would always think about deploying diplomacy before any kind of military means. But I guess what baffled a lot of us was how did 16 intelligence agencies get it so wrong? I think that will always be the question that baffled people. Well, some years ago, somebody who was in the CIA at the time, a fellow named Ken Pollack, wrote a piece in The Atlantic magazine explaining this. And it's by far the best after analysis of the intelligence error that I've ever seen. And he ought to know because he was part of the error and he was part of the team that tried to figure out what they did wrong. It really is an excellent, it's probably the definitive explanation for what screwed up. I mean, the United States has 16 different intelligence agencies. There's 16 separate agencies. They all do something a little bit different. There's supposed to be something called the DNI, the guy who's in charge of all this, director of national intelligence, who's supposed to coordinate all this and put it together. This was an office that was created in the aftermath of September 11th. It doesn't always work that well. You have very large bureaucracies like this, each one doing something slightly different. Getting them all on the same page and getting them to cooperate is not romper room work. It's not easy. And so there are bureaucratic reasons as well as other reasons why things are hard, why it's hard. But as I said, in this case, it was kind of an odd situation in that Saddam was quite clever in a lot of ways, just like Donald Trump may not know a lot about the world and he may be encyclopedically ignorant about a lot of the things that he spouts off about, but he has very shrewd political intelligence and people misunderstand or underestimate, or as George Bush would have said, misunderestimate, just how clever a political maneuver or a tactician Donald Trump is. The same with Saddam Hussein. I mean, you can be crazy with respect to ends, but be quite shrewd with respect to means. And he was in a lot of ways. So you have to be very careful how you assess people's skills and shortcomings. It's not simple. Now when we look at Bush's time in the Bush administration during that period, there was this massive projection of power onto the Middle East. Would it be correct to say that President Bush was not just looking to eliminate the regimes that he thought was unfriendly to the United States, but he was actually embarking on this mission to refashion the entire region into one that's consistent with American interests and values. Yeah, that's right. Again, this is another thing people will be arguing about for a long time. When President Bush first took office in January of 2001 in the campaign, and then once he took office, he was arguing for a more humble American foreign policy. Don't remember that now. That was before September 11. And the idea was basically the United States was doing too much after the end of the Cold War. We didn't need to be the kind of control freaks that we had been in the past. I'm sorry. You're talking about Preston, George H. W. Bush here. No, I'm talking about George W. Bush. Okay. Bush 43. His father, Bush 41, that was different. That was before the Clinton, that was eight years earlier. So that was a different time in some ways. We could talk about Bush 41 and Brent Scowcroft, two of my favorite American leaders. But the idea was a humbler foreign policy. Less kinetic, lower metabolism. George W. Bush wanted to pull back. It was 9-1-1 that forced that prematurely into the dustbin of history. Piece of people panicked, basically. 9-1-1 came as a huge shock to American leaders, even though the Hart-Rubman Commission, which had delivered a report to the new president in March of 2001, so just five or six months before the attack, had warned of mass casualty terrorism on American soil. I know a lot about the Hart-Rubman report because I wrote it. I was the chief writer. But nobody paid any attention to us, really. They just didn't take it seriously. It was one of these low-probability, high-impact kind of events that human psychology has a very difficult time wrapping its head around. So in the new administration, they didn't pay much attention. They didn't happen. Then there was mass casualty terrorism on American soil. And they panicked. They didn't know what to do. And you will remember, maybe you won't remember, you're so young, you will remember that not long after September 1, there was anthrax in the mail and nobody knew where it came from. And there was a fear that that also was Iraqi intelligence that was now attacking the United States with bio-weapons. We didn't know. We were blinded. American intelligence had not pivoted on a dime after the end of the Cold War. We were still very high-tech oriented. We had not resuscitated our human intelligence aspects. And we really did not know much about the specifics of where these kinds of threats might be coming from. So if you've taken an oath to defend the country, you always want to err on the side of safety. You want to ask yourself, I have to take all these possibilities seriously because if I'm wrong, right, then I haven't fulfilled my oath. So there's a tendency in times of crisis and urgency and pressure to overdo it a little bit on the gruesome side. And so Vice President Cheney wanted to have the entire country re-vaccinated against smallpox because there was some evidence that the Iraqis were screwing around with the genetically modified smallpox. We found stuff. President Bush decided that wasn't a good idea, but he agreed to re-inoculate the entire U.S. military. And that's expensive and dangerous to do. So this was a time when people weren't sure they were blindsided and they sort of panicked. That was the atmosphere. And at a time, it's a little bit like with COVID-19, but not the same, right? When people are in that kind of mood, there's a tendency for people to vault themselves into a kind of heroic mindset. They get glassy eyed. They think of themselves in sort of trans-temporal times, and they just kind of assumed that if they get the basics right, that all the details will take care of themselves. But of course, all the details never take care of themselves. You have to take care of the details. Now, when you talk about the Middle East, I mean, the Middle East isn't just Iraq. The Middle East is 20-some countries. And I mean, we'd be here all week, not just for part of a half an hour if you wanted to discuss all of those countries, not to mention the rest of the world, which is vast, and not to mention all the other issues that are going on. Just very quickly, coming back to the Middle East, to where we are today, is there a strategy for the Middle East? What is the U.S. intending to do? Are they trying to get up? Are they trying to stay in? What are they trying to do? It's important, I think, to realize that we're not living in normal times when it comes to who is president and how the United States government is working. These are not normal times. They have not been since January of 2017, and they won't be until this man is out of office. There is no grand strategy. There is no strategy. What there are, what there is, what there are, reminds me of something that Lionel Trilling once said back in 1950, there are irritable mental gestures masquerading as ideas. That's what there is. Donald Trump shoots from the hip. He is an in-the-moment, present-oriented kind of person. He doesn't have strategies or policy ideas. He has impulses that he has honed over a long time, and they're actually quite primitive. He has brought back something that people thought was dead for 250 years, the idea of mercantilism. I mean, all he seems to care about is the bottom line of trade deficits and economic figures, and that's a substitute for geopolitics writ large. For example, I mean, you could justify wanting to change the nature of the Sino-American economic relationship and the broader relationship, political relationship that's attached to the economic relationship. That should have been done a long time ago, but the president only sees it in terms of dollars and cents. If you want to press the Chinese to reevaluate their behaviors, you know, stealing intellectual property rights and closing their market to foreign goods, what you do is you rally your allies, and you go at the Chinese collectively. You make common cause with your allies in the European Union. You make common cause with your allies in Mexico and in Canada, but that's not what he did. What he did he pissed off all of his allies and then alone went after the Chinese. He's not very smart. Now somebody who actually thinks strategically or who understands policy won't do things like that, all right? I mean, in the early part of the administration, even when the adults were still there, when HR McMaster was still there and Secretary Mattis was still there and so forth, people thought, well, you know, the adults will keep this guy from doing crazy things, but the crazy guy is still there and the adults are gone. So that didn't work out. In the early part of the administration, if you didn't like a policy pronouncement, you just wait 25 minutes and it would change, right? So that's the kind of situation that we're dealing with. There is no strategy and there are no policies as conventionally construed. There are these scattered impulses, what I call a monkey in the machine room phenomenon. In other words, it's a big government, right? If you leave it alone, it will take care of business. It will hold hands with other countries. It will do the normal stuff that it's used to doing, right? But every once in a while, for reasons nobody can really predict except for the trade portfolio, somebody in the White House will reach their arm down into the government and start screwing around with it, not knowing the institutional memory, not knowing anything about the history of these relationships and just start screwing around with it. That's what I call monkey in the machine room. That hasn't happened in Singapore. There isn't even an American ambassador in Singapore. One's been named but not sent off to the red dot yet. So the president reached down into the did a monkey in the machine room thing with Kim Jong-un in North Korea. He did a similar thing with the so-called deal of the century, Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, which is a crock, right? You never know where he's going to reach his arm. What he does is, there isn't, we don't really have a foreign policy. What we have is the use of foreign policy issues for purposes of domestic political signal. That's what this president does. Everything is designed around domestic political advantage. You see it all over the, all the stuff about the Ukraine and about Russia and who actually was responsible for trying to hack the 2016 election. What these guys do is, whenever there's a problem, they do an old-school yard tactic, which is called, I know you are, but what am I? It's what eight-year-old boys say to each other on the asphalt. It was you make up an equal but opposite fantasy in order to confuse people who don't know any better about what the truth is. So if the Russians interfered with the 2016 election, and of course they did, which doesn't mean by the way that the Trump campaign colluded with it, that's a separate subject. President had that confused early on. So because that casts doubts over the legitimacy of the election, so these guys go and make up, well no, it wasn't it wasn't pro-Trump hacking, it was pro-Hillary hacking that the Ukrainians just make it up out of a whole cloth. And lately they've made up Obamagate out of a whole cloth and Biden gave. They just make the stuff up. But it's, but it's, but it's, there's a logic to it, all right? It's exactly what the bad stuff that they did, but it's just turned around 180 degrees and directed at somebody else. Now, Dr. Garfinger, you mentioned Russia. Let's, let's talk about Russia, the country that's often portrayed as the American nemesis. You know, it's been almost 30 years since the Cold War ended, but nowadays it feels like US and Russia are back in another Cold War. I want to look now. No, the Cold War, people have to be careful with language, Lily. Cold War had three unique aspects. One was that it was fundamentally an ideological phenomenon. It was about the future, the moral future of the world. The second was that it was conducted in blocks, not just individual countries, right? And, and the third thing was that it was tied up with the problem of what were then still novel nuclear weapons, all right? None of those three things is true about US-Chinese relations right now, as bad as they may be. None of those things is true about US-Russian relations. There is no ideological element of the same kind. There are no blocks. I mean, what allies does China or the, or Russia have? Russia has one, Syria, right? And there, and nuclear weapons don't really play an important role in the nature of the fears that are involved right now. So, unless you want to really dumb down what the phrase Cold War means, which you shouldn't do, right? It's, look, we have perfectly good words for these things. It's called rivalry. That word's been good for the last several hundred years. Let's just talk about rivalry. Okay, let's, let's use the word rivalry then. So, when do you think, so that the Cold War ended in 1991? And I'm tempted, I'm very tempted to point to NATO's Eastwood expansion as the retching out of the tension. Maybe you agree, maybe you don't. Well, let's put it this way. That Russia was going to become at some point a recidivist imperial power. I think was a pretty, you could pretty much guess that it would be. It's just the nature of Russian history in the Russian state. That said, the expansion of NATO, when it was done and how it was done, was arguably the stupidest thing the United States has done in the past hundred years. I remember being on a trip to Moscow with Brent Scowcroft. And, you know, Brent had been pretty taciturn. You know, you don't criticize your, your successors too much. But I remember a friend shaking his head and saying, my God, that was stupid. And it was. I mean, you know, again, the Russian, you don't have to teach a snake how to suck eggs. So the Russians were going to be problematical to their neighbors at some point. That was very likely. And, and, you know, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was. But Dr. Guffinkel from 1991 to 1999, when they started the Eastwood expansion, was there anything Russia did, anything at all that, you know, that gave NATO no choice but to expand Eastwood? Was there anything they did that? No, the reason, the reason for expanding the alliance had nothing to do with Russian Bay. Russia was very weak at that time. All right. And don't forget, even though the alliance was expanded to include a lot of these former Warsaw Pact countries, the number of forces the United States had in Europe and the number of equipment dropped dramatically. So it wasn't so the United States increased the physical threat to Russia, not at all. This was political stuff. And when you said political, you mean it was deliberate provocation? No, it wasn't a deliberate provocation at all. The idea was that you had these countries that had been freed from communism and from Soviet influence, and you wanted to integrate them into the West. The best way to have integrated them into the West was to have them join the European Union, which many of them eventually did. But that takes time. There is a, there is an accession protocol that these countries have to go through. It took a lot of time. These countries themselves, the Poles, the Hungarians, the Romanians, Bulgarians, they were nervous. And they wanted some kind of pledge from the United States to protect them against a recidivist Russia. And we had something called the Partnership for Peace, which was kind of a half-white house between NATO and not NATO. And as far as I was concerned, that worked pretty well. And there wasn't any Russian threat. The Russians were very weak. There was no reason to accelerate adherence to the alliance. But organizations never go out of business if they can help it, even if their raison d'etre disappears. And NATO is a good example of that. So the idea was, now that there's no more Cold War, there's no more full-de-gap, Germany is reunified, what's the alliance for? So the alliance agonized over what it was supposed to do if there was no more Soviet Union and no more Soviet threat. So it decided to become a transformational element in creating a Europe whole and free. You remember that phrase from Bush 41? And so that's really what it was about. And the United States actually thought that Russia was a partner in this whole business, and Russia was made a part of APAC when it was created. So there were all these compensatory things that the United States did that was designed not to alienate the Russians. But of course, it was inevitable that this kind of a thing, symbolically, would in fact alienate the Russians. And more importantly, it allowed Russian leadership, especially when Putin became the leader, to use the supposed threat of the West to rally domestic support for his political. And that's what he's been doing ever since. The anti-American plank in Russian foreign policy has nothing to do with the United States. It has to do with Vladimir Putin's domestic position in Russia. It's very popular. This nostalgia for Russia for the Soviet great power status. Russians are very proud. They don't want to be called a regional power, which Barack Obama unfortunately did. It's true, but you don't have to say everything that's true. So they're prideful and they have every right to be prideful. So we culture burned their history by expanding NATO. I think it was a very foolish thing to do, but it was not about threats and it was not about anything Russia did. One of the reasons that the Clinton administration expanded NATO was to get the ethnic vote as a result. I mean, you know, the Polish population, Slovak populations in Chicago and Detroit, Pittsburgh, they tended to vote Democratic because they were in labor unions, right? But they had, we had wandered from the Democratic party in recent years. So this was a kind of ethnic lobby pandering, right? So decided to get all the Polish vote, you know, and what might have been a close reelection campaign in 1976. So part of it had to do with domestic politics. I mean, Donald Trump isn't the only politician who uses foreign policy feints and signals for domestic political purposes. Everybody does it to some extent, not like Trump, but- Dr. Gafenko, just a few minutes ago, you mentioned Russian interference in the US electoral process. I just want to quickly point out that for those of us from the outside looking in, U.S. sounds like a big part calling the cattle black because we have seen U.S. interfered in the electoral process of many other countries, sometimes even in a form of perhaps outright regime overthrows. So, you know, it baffles us, why is it okay when U.S. jobs sit and it is not when others do it? I'm going to- As far as the United States is interfering in the democratic processes of other countries, it's been a really long time since that happened. You have to go back to 1948 for the really big examples where the United States interfered in both the French and Italian election in 1948 in order to prevent communists from coming to power. But interfering in the affairs of other democracies, yeah, the United States has thrown its weight around sometimes and done that in Israeli elections in the past. But- And of course, in the 50s, the United States was instrumental in getting rid of a government it didn't like in Guatemala. There's a lot of- Oh, sir, I'm sorry. I got a- We have to end here because our time is running up. But I hope it's okay to ask you back for another show because I want your take on U.S. and China too. Would that be all right? Sure. We just started. We just started. Yes, we did. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Sure.