 The Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely. The Taliban have taken Afghanistan. Afghans are thronging to Kabul's airport. They took over the presidential palace. Afghanistan's president fled the country. You don't get to lose a war and expect the result to look like you won. That's how historian Stephen Wertheim sums up the violent and chaotic withdrawal of the United States forces and personnel from Afghanistan. A senior fellow in the American Statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Wertheim is the author of Tomorrow the World, The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, a study of the intellectual origins of America's interventionist foreign policy. He talked with Reason about how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were doomed from their earliest days and what policymakers should be focused on as we approach the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. Stephen Wertheim, thanks for talking to Reason. It's a pleasure to be with you. So let's talk about Afghanistan. You wrote recently as the withdrawal was just being kind of clusterfucked everywhere. You said, you know, we lost the war. We shouldn't be surprised that we don't really get to set the terms of how it ends. What did you mean by that? I meant that somehow a lot of people who had favored transforming the entire country of Afghanistan by force and who failed to achieve that over two decades somehow they apparently thought that having failed to achieve that we would also set the terms of the exit so that it looked like a happy scene or something at the end. Well, unless you think that the Taliban are magnanimous and their takeover of the country is going to go smoothly and have no adverse humanitarian consequences and I don't think these people do actually. I don't think anyone believes that. It was bound to be a terrible, a terrible tragedy. So I think it's certainly legitimate to question whether the Biden administration could have conducted the withdrawal in a different way, in a better way. It's possible that over the summer it might have foreseen that the government in Kabul would have fallen quickly and therefore would have acted more quickly to evacuate Americans and Afghans from the country. But it is far from obvious that that is a reasonable expectation given that most analysts who I've heard from and spoken with thought that it would take quite a bit longer for the government to fall or that potentially there might be some ability to have a power-sharing agreement between the Kabul government and the Taliban. In fact, I heard very few people prior to the exact moment when Kabul fell predict what actually happened in the way that it happened. So what I'm afraid we've seen is a kind of repetition of the hubris that got us into the war and sustained the war over two decades. Yeah, I want to get to a question about what the U.S., and I hesitate to call it the Biden administration. I mean, he's in charge of it and he has to own it. But he's the fourth president to oversee this. But what about the collapse of the Afghan government that we put in and the army and all of that, the massive and immediate collapse of that? You know, is that an obvious kind of extension, a logical conclusion to the folly of being there in the first place? It certainly proves the point that it was a folly. I mean, it raises the question not only to be clearly not succeed in the nation-building mission. It raises the question of whether the past decade of U.S. involvement in the war actually built anything to see the government that was supposed to become self-reliant fold so quickly. Now, again, I don't want to say that it was inevitable from the moment Biden announced the withdrawal of ground troops back in April of this year that that government would collapse in the way that it did with the speed that it did, etc. But it certainly doesn't make me more inclined to think, well, if only the United States had stayed longer, tried harder, this could have been a successful mission. What could the Biden administration have done differently? Do you think that to, you know, not to save the country necessarily, but just to get people out, particularly the Afghans who we who allied with us and who we made promises to, you know, what should they have done differently? The most consequential action would have been to evacuate Americans and Afghans sooner from the country. I mean, I think it is as the time we're talking somewhere around 120,000 people have been airlifted just in the last several weeks. I think that's an extremely significant achievement. But, you know, ideally, look, not everyone who I would like to see be able to get out of the country is going to get out. Ideally, it would have happened sooner. But again, the very act of withdrawing personnel and Afghans from the country would have helped to bring about the result of the Taliban taking over the country by clearly indicating that the United States had no confidence whatsoever in the Afghan national government. And that's why, according to President Biden, the president of the country, Ashraf Ghani, said he did not want the United States to embark on that decision. Now, maybe in retrospect, that's what the United States should have done. Well, in retrospect, it certainly is, because we actually have the knowledge of what happened. But we didn't have that knowledge a month ago. We certainly didn't have it several months ago. So I think we need to, you know, take a sophisticated look at what could have gone differently rather than have this knee-jerk reaction that somehow the United States government should have been able to control the conclusion of the war, which I don't think the Taliban understood or predicted that it would take over the entire country as soon as it did. I realize this is probably an impossibly broad question. But fundamentally, what did we get wrong in Afghanistan? Well, I support the original goals or at least some of them, which was after 9-11 to wage war on al-Qaeda, which had perpetrated the 9-11 attacks. Now, we can talk about, you know, maybe if the United States hadn't stationed troops in the Middle East, maybe 9-11 wouldn't have happened, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, they attacked us. So absolutely legitimate and correct to go after al-Qaeda. I also think it was correct to punish severely the Taliban government for harboring Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. But then we did quite a bit more than that. Very soon, the Taliban had fled the country, al-Qaeda had fled the country, and the United States embarked on a mission that was sometimes hard for even senior leadership to define, but can be summarized as a mission to build and sustain a western-style centralized state run from Kabul. And that mission, I submit to you, was very unlikely to succeed, highly unlikely. I'm verging on saying impossible. And that is what then created what I think is properly termed a forever war, because the United States set out to pursue an unachievable mission. But even when many were coming to the conclusion that it was probably unachievable, the United States also refused to quit that mission. At that point, let's say from the end of the later years of the Obama administration, America's war in Afghanistan truly became an endless war. He, you know, speaking of Obama, he came into, you know, he won election. We're going to talk about your book Tomorrow of the World and some of your other writings where you talk about this, he essentially won the presidency in part because he was the anti-war candidate or, you know, or the anti-Iraq war, but he talked about Afghanistan as kind of the legitimate war, the smart war. But were we extemporizing the whole time? I mean, it seems the Bush administration, which famously came into office promising a humble foreign policy, an interesting kind of repudiation of both Bill Clinton, but also his father's actions in office, not to mention much of Cold War America. You know, we go into Afghanistan and then was it like when we got there, we decided, okay, we really need to civilize the brutes here and we need to, you know, create a Western-style centralized democracy and then things go from there? Or is this, you know, was there a kind of coordinating controlling intelligence all along that was going to say, Afghanistan, this is what we were going to be doing? You know, I think there is a mistake that unites not just the war effort that the United States pursued in Afghanistan, but the war in Iraq and the wider war on terror, which was that after 9-11, the United States didn't just try to provide security for Americans by going after the group that actually attacked us. We tried to prove that we were the world's indispensable nation as Madeleine Albright had put it years before on the Today Show of All Places when justifying why the Clinton administration was going to bomb Iraq. We wanted to show having been hit on 9-11 that we had agency. We were the world's superpower and we were going to utterly remake other countries and indeed an entire region of the world. So I think that's why, that's both why the mission in Afghanistan continued and why the United States went into Iraq because the mission in Afghanistan as intensive as it now appears was seen to be insufficient. A mission that merely went after al-Qaeda might have ended quickly. It might have involved more than grandiose displays of military power efforts to choke off finances, engage in some raids, assassinate bin Laden and that's about it and there was a real hunger on both sides of the aisle in the commentary at in the country for something spectacular to follow 9-11 and to be sustained for a long time and I'm afraid that's what we got. Talk a little bit about the authorization of use of military force after 9-11 because one of the things that's striking about it now and it's hard to recall, I mean it's only 20 years ago but it seems like on a different planet, a different timeline altogether, the unanimity with which people in Congress, I think what was there, one vote against the AUMF after 9-11 out of everybody in Congress, what was going on there? Because you have to go back to a few rare instances where there was that kind of unanimity in Congress to say okay we're going after the bad guys. Well under the Constitution, Congress and only Congress has the power to declare war. It's last declared war in 1942 that is against members of the Axis powers in the wake of Pearl Harbor, never declared war again. So we enter 9-11 with Congress already having substantially seated its initiative to be the body that makes decisions about whether and against whom we go to war to the executive branch. And the authorization for use of military force, the substitute for a formal declaration, gets passed a week, it's a done deal, a week after 9-11. And Congress essentially authorizes the president to go after basically any entity that is in some way involved in the 9-11 attacks. It's almost like an invitation for the president to connect a lot of different dots to be able to do whatever the president wants to take military action. There's no sunset on this authorization and so this is the single authorization from Congress that has underpinned America's post 9-11 wars except for the 2002 AUMF which was passed specifically to authorize the war in Iraq. And so all this time the Congress has I would say knowingly, willingly seated its authority over war and peace to a succession of presidents which have then very much used those authorities and justified a whole range of military operations sometimes against groups that didn't even exist on 9-11. You know the 20th anniversary of 9-11 is coming up and I sometimes think about, I hope with the withdrawal from Afghanistan that we're entering the end of the global war on terror period and I think about it in terms of two images, one from 9-11, people jumping out of the World Trade Center towers, diving to their deaths because they know it's a lost cause. And then the images from the Afghanistan withdrawal of some people falling off of US military planes that they were holding on to that took off which is a sign of mayhem that they were close enough to a plane taking off. Are we, there's this 20-year chunk of time now, are we done with the global war on terror? Yes or no? And then what are the essential lessons that we need to really kind of focus and learn as we think about the 20th anniversary of September 11th? Those two tragic images suggest to me that the United States tried to seek a measure of control in the world after 9-11 and we've ended up two decades later after trillions of dollars spent thousands of service members, contractors, many more thousands of civilians killed, realizing that we do not have full control over events in the world. There's nothing called perfect security, infinite security, and particularly in other countries our power to shape their politics is extremely limited even if we're the world's sole superpower. We can't say today that the global war on terror has ended. It's no longer called the war on terror. It was renamed a campaign to counter violent extremism in the Obama administration. I'm not even sure what it is now, but there's certainly counter-terror operations that in recent years have been ongoing and depends how you count. It's actually hard to figure out exactly how many countries we're at war with right now, but about nine or 10. So in geographical scope, the war on terror has actually steadily increased and the U.S. withdrawal of ground troops from Afghanistan doesn't change that fact and I expect that the United States will be involved making over-the-horizon missile and drone strikes in Afghanistan in the months and probably years to come as well. So part of what we are seeing now is a although it seems dramatic that the Biden administration has decided to end the U.S. war in Afghanistan in terms of ground troops and in terms of the objective of trying to build and sustain a western style Afghan government and that is significant. Let me be clear. In another sense, the Biden administration is continuing a trend in terms of the methods of fighting the war on terror, a trend that began late in the Bush administration, continued in the Obama administration, even continued in the Trump administration and now seems to be continuing again under Biden, which is a shift from putting boots on the ground in large numbers to adopting a low and no footprint approach to fighting terrorism through commando raids and aerial strikes. Is that a better strategy? I mean that keeping in mind the idea that the goal of U.S. foreign policy is generally understood to be keeping Americans safe. Is that a more effective form of fighting terrorism? Will it keep us safer or is it not neither here nor there? It runs the risk of making the war on terror more endless precisely because the costs to most Americans are so low of running an aerial drone by remote to strike a country instead of stationing thousands of U.S. troops in a country. That might have perverse consequences and we do know of drone strikes, absolutely terrifying people and motivating people to become insurgents and to fight the United States. It's not clear that this is a better approach. It certainly is lower in cost for our service members, puts fewer of them in harm's way and to that degree it seems like an improvement, but I think we still don't have a very clear answer to the question that Barack Obama himself posed which is how do we know we are not generating more terrorist enemies for ourselves than we're killing? When you look at our experience in Afghanistan, which I mean it's really right to underscore that it's not over yet even if we've withdrawn, but did we accomplish anything good in the world? Forget about keeping Americans safe. Did we help the Afghans of the past 20 years? Did we at least give them a sense of what's something? I'm hesitant to say freedom, but clearly women and a lot of men, you get rid of the Taliban, people can live lives that are a little bit a lot less repressed and stultified, but now they're back. Is there anything that we can say positive about our experience in Afghanistan, either for America or for the people in Afghanistan? One ongoing issue is the admission of refugees from Afghanistan or people who may not qualify as refugees, but are vulnerable to Taliban rule. So there's an opportunity now to do good beyond the people that have already been evacuated from the country. But as to the war effort, for two decades almost, there were Afghans, particularly women and girls in urban centers, who were able to have much more freedom than they would have had under Taliban rule, that they're likely to have now under Taliban rule. And I do find myself absolutely moved and depressed over the fact that now a life that they have built, that they had reason to expect would be able to continue, is now very unlikely to continue to be there. I mean, that's a terrible tragedy. The question is whether on the part of the United States, the problem came from making a false promise, a promise we couldn't fulfill, or giving up on the mission. I obviously think it's the former, but it is morally terrible, all the same. We have to hope also that the Taliban, after 20 years, are now going to have to try to rule. First of all, it's very difficult to rule Afghanistan, full stop. And now they're inheriting a country that at least in the urban centers has had experiences, women employed, girls at school, educate. And I hope it's not a foregone conclusion about what will happen. I hope that the Taliban do, if only for their own survival and to avoid making too many enemies to their rule in the country, will allow at least greater freedom than they did earlier. Do you think the United States, and I'll use these terms, do you think the United States is acting in a reprehensible way in terms of our kind of cheapness with which we're processing or admitting or helping to resettle Afghan refugees? Well, some representatives of districts are acting in a reprehensible way when they express an absolute aversion to taking in anybody from Afghanistan who looks like they're from Afghanistan, etc. So far, though, I think it's too soon to tell. And hopefully, United States will be, will be generous. And I actually hope that this is an opportunity to redefine what humanitarianism in the world looks like for the United States in the 21st century. Through my adult lifetime, what most American foreign policymakers would say, or in effect would would do is to say that humanitarianism, the acid test of humanitarianism is being willing to drop bombs on wrongdoers. But that is a fraught proposition. It requires us to kill some people in the hope of saving and protecting other people. And we've seen timing again that doesn't actually add up. Stopping evil is not the same as actually helping. So I think admitting refugees may be politically difficult in the United States, we'll see. But it is something that should be the hallmark of a new approach to humanitarianism where our actions help directly and don't run the significant risk of actually doing more harm than good. If one of the lessons of the war in Afghanistan and of 9-11, what came after it is that we really can't control the world. It's a difficult idea that we're going to go and build nations out of thin air, much less do region building and things like that. What are the lessons, and you kind of hinted at this earlier, what were the causes of 9-11 that we should be reevaluating in terms of our foreign policy? You talked about Madeleine Albright calling America the indispensable nation when she was Secretary of State under Bill Clinton. What went into that kind of formulation? And what about that? Was that a contributing factor to 9-11 in any way, shape, or form we should talk about? I think it absolutely was. We really have to go back to the fall of the Soviet Union. And we have to ask ourselves why the United States, instead of reaping a peace dividend that some people talked about then, decided instead to pursue global military dominance, to actually increase the number of military alliances, to actually use force more frequently since 1991 than the United States did during the Cold War itself. That, I think, is the fundamental problem. And Madeleine Albright articulated that agenda quite perfectly when she said that the United States aims to be the world's indispensable nation. What did she mean by that? I don't want to call her a ventriloquist dummy, but she's not original in that. American foreign policy predilections were speaking through her. But where did that phrase come from and why was she talking that way? In this glorious moment after we had won the Twilight Struggle with international communism. I think the phrase could have been uttered anytime after Pearl Harbor, but it was, as far as I know, I haven't done the deep history, which would be interesting to do on the phrase. As far as I know, Madeleine Albright was original in using it in the 1990s. And she explained that what she meant was we see further into the future than others do. That's why we have to use force, in this case against Iraq. And so she is saying the United States is not a nation among nations. We see our right and responsibility as guarding the world. And we don't really owe anybody an explanation for why we have that responsibility. Our people in Washington somehow know what's going to happen and what's in the best interest in the world better than other people in the world, including people who are closer to the very kinds of threats that the United States seeks to diminish. This is a good segue to talk about your book from last fall, Tomorrow, the World, the Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, which is a fascinating revision of kind of received history of isolationism versus interventionism or internationalism. And obviously there's, you know, it talks about this precise moment when the United States started to define itself as it was going to be the world's military superpower. It was going to be the hegemon. Let's talk about that a little bit. What went into that, you know, kind of consensus that got built? And as you point out in the book, what's interesting is that it's not simply the result of Pearl Harbor. That shift had been in place for, you know, some time before that. That's right. The key years or even months were the 18 months after the fall of France to Nazi Germany in the middle of 1940. And up to that point, U.S. foreign policymakers and many commentators and observers thought that, of course, the United States would stick to its traditional aversion to entering into political and military commitments, so-called entanglements, in Europe and Asia. That was widely seen in the country as a mistake, as unnecessary and counterproductive to American security, with the experience of World War I having only reinforced that lesson. But when Hitler conquered France in just six weeks in the middle of 1940, that was an unexpected event. And it posed the specter, at least for a while, that totalitarian powers might become the dominant powers in Europe and Asia, or Eurasia, which was a very important construction at the time. And that confronted Americans with a situation that hadn't really existed before, partly because totalitarian powers were novel, and partly because, at least for this moment, Hitler had achieved what nobody since Napoleon had, which is attained mastery in Europe. And at that point, the country engages in what I still think is the most fundamental foreign policy debate, maybe ever, but certainly since then, in which some people say, well, we may hate the Axis powers, but as long as we guard the entire Western hemisphere by force, the United States will remain safe in North America, and its economy will remain prosperous. Coming out of the Depression, the economy didn't depend very much on foreign trade. And others, including the people closest to power, including people in FDR's administration, came to a different conclusion. They didn't really contest their opponent's point that American security and prosperity didn't depend on entering World War II and attempting to police the world thereafter. But instead, they argued that that just wasn't enough. The United States had a kind of identity, what we call today an exceptionalist identity that made it want to define the future of the world. And Americans also wanted to be able to interact with the world and engage in liberal-style intercourse like trade. And that would become impossible if the Axis were able to win. And I think what's most remarkable to me is not only did the decision then get made, essentially, to enter the war, even though Pearl Harbor didn't bring that about, sorry, even though it didn't happen until Pearl Harbor, but the United States was already aiding the Allies to prevent an Allied loss in the war. What's most remarkable is they decided their entire notion of international relations had been changed. That there was no way to really have peaceful, liberal American-style interaction without backing that interaction by force, without the United States becoming the preeminent power and stopping future aggressors before they were able to amass the kind of power that the Axis powers were able to achieve at least for some number of years early in World War II. So that decision, I think, sets us down the course of trying to dominate the world militarily. That seems to be the real kind of the original sin of the past 70 years of American foreign policy, if we're going to be critical of it, which obviously we both think we should be. One of the most interesting things about Tomorrow the World is the way that it talks about isolationism and kind of how, where does the charge of if in World War II, before World War II, nobody really was saying America should have nothing to do with the world. We should just stick to our own borders and things like that. You talk about how people who were later defined as isolationists were totally into the idea of trade and of commerce with all parts of the world. It's just that what they got hung up on was the idea that we should do everything from the barrel of a gun. Talk a little bit about how that charge of isolationism became a concept. And then how did that end up winning so that we're still today? And I'm thinking back to in your book you mentioned, or in your writings you mentioned this, when George W. Bush came into office, even as he was promising a humble foreign policy, he was like, hey, don't worry, I'm not an isolationist. I'm not saying we shouldn't invade countries or things like that. So this charge of isolationism versus internationalism or interventionism is still one of the dominant axes of foreign policy. And your book kind of shows there's a lot of sleight of hand going on there. So the term isolationism only emerges into widespread usage in the United States in the 1930s and then even more in the 40s. And it's used almost exclusively by people who are using the term to condemn it. Not many people thought self-identified as isolationists and thought that that described their worldview. This term was instead applied to people who actually were quite traditional and some of them self-identified internationalists. They wanted the United States to engage in many peaceful ways, including through trade, including through international law, which was a big, big cause for people at the time, much more so than it is today. They just didn't want the United States to engage in war in Europe and Asia. And for this they were labeled isolationists. So this term functioned then, as it does today, to make anybody opposed to the use of force seem to be opposed to engagement altogether. And what that does, the importance of this term doesn't lie in anything it says about people opposed to the use of force. What it does is it makes internationalism the opposite of isolationism seem to require U.S. military dominance. And that was truly, truly a revolutionary change in the United States. Internationalism had once been associated with pacifism, if anything, and it meant... Yeah, where trades cross borders, troops don't, right? If you're engaged in the world commercially and culturally, et cetera, you don't need an army. And, you know, we don't have to take those views to be gospel either. But that's what internationalism originally was. And it was transformed in the United States into a warrant for U.S. military dominance and the interventions that go with it. You know, let's pause for a little bit and do the David Copperfield crap that Holden Caulfield mentions at the beginning of Catcher and the Rye. You have a BA from Harvard, a PhD from Columbia. You were involved early on in the Quincy Institute, which is this kind of great foreign policy rethink that managed to get funding for both the Koch brothers and George Soros. So you're obviously a puppet who is torn in all kinds of odd insidious directions at the behest of billionaires from the right and the left, all of that kind of stuff. How did you get interested in foreign policy? And what are kind of the keys to why you think the way that you do? I grew up outside Washington D.C. I was interested in politics. 9-11 happened when I was in high school. I paid a lot of attention to the debate over how America should respond to 9-11 and then whether it should go to war in Iraq. I didn't have a huge amount of pressure at the time, but I also remember thinking, I'm paying a lot of attention as many citizens can't. And I'm not sure what to think about these things. Our debate somehow seems incredibly narrow. And so from that point on, really, I was interested both in the substance of U.S. foreign policy as it's happened historically and in the debate surrounding it. And so that's why I guess I wrote a book that not only talks about why the United States came to choose military dominance, but also how it legitimated that goal in terms of the pursuit of internationalism instead of isolationism, so-called. So do you feel, and this has been either the headline or subhead of some of the pieces that you've written, are we reevaluating our foreign policy? The entire 21st century has been a disaster by basically any metric other than if you're a military contractor, the 21st century has been a blank check, essentially. Military spending goes up and up, but in terms of winning wars, winning hearts and minds, saving people, et cetera. I mean, it's just been a disaster. Are we at a point as a society where we are actually or as a country, are we seriously reevaluating the received wisdom of the past 70 plus years of America as the indispensable nation, meaning that we need to have the biggest army in the world and we need to be ready to be in 100 countries or whatever at any given moment? I'm about to say yes. And then I think of some of the news coverage and talking heads of the past several weeks as the withdrawal from Afghanistan has come to a close. And I wonder, I wonder, but no, I think this is a quite different country now when it comes to thinking about America's role in the world and issues of war and peace. Somehow, although this country didn't have a whole lot of diversity in its foreign policy elites over the last two decades, the country itself, the public, came to quite significant conclusions about our wars. First, the war in Iraq, which, again, without people taking responsibility, without much accountability taking place, the American people came to regard as a grievous mistake and they rewarded presidents Barack Obama in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016 for vigorously opposing that war. And then the country has come to the same conclusion by similar margins about the war in Afghanistan. So somehow, although we are living through an era in which our wars don't affect that many Americans and you don't see a whole lot of people marching in the streets, they do seem to matter and that is changing our politics. And you see that in the fact that the Biden administration staffed in its senior levels by people who have been in prior administrations. No one thinks these are radicals deciding to end America's two-decade war in Afghanistan, doing things that they wouldn't have anticipated doing before. So somehow we are coming to a different place in US foreign policy, but I am concerned about where we're going next in part because I think if we make the kind of mistakes toward a rising China in the next several decades that we've made in the war on terror and in the greater Middle East, that could prove to be even more consequential. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because China, one of the things is that the minute, and I'm old enough to remember exactly when the Cold War ended and how quickly everybody started to miss it, especially in the broad-based military industrial complex, but also kind of media and whatnot. And it structured the world and it made for easy storytelling, if not a good life for people, particularly in proxy war countries and things like that. One of the things people are talking about, and groups like it doesn't exist anymore, but the weekly standard shortly before 9-11 was running cover stories about why China is the next Russia or the next Soviet Union, et cetera. And now after a 20-year pause, we're seeing those stories. China is the Soviet Union except this time they have better social media control and they understand capitalism. This is really serious. What are the things that we should be talking about when it comes to living in a world where China is a growing power in the world? Well, the first thing is that we have to accept mutual coexistence. We have to insist that China, except that it is living in a world with a vibrant and powerful United States. That's not going to change, but we have to abandon these fantasies of regime change, fantasies that we're going to be able to exert decisive leverage over the Chinese Communist Party in the way that we, well, we at least try to exert decisive leverage over governments in the Middle East. And we did depose the Taliban for a while and we did overthrow Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Even that level of quote-unquote success should be off the table when we're talking about China. I do think that China's rise, I don't see it as a positive development for the United States or the world. Why not? For the world, for the United States, I think it's kind of self-evident. But why is China's rise to global status? Why is that a problem for the world? Well, we have to see how it goes. I mean, there are some positive elements, I think, although you hear a lot of threatening noises about the Belt and Road Initiative, development assistance, you know, a source of capital for countries if it truly has no strings attached. Big if, could be a positive thing in spurring economic development. But, you know, I think the fear and it's a legitimate fear is that China will become more aggressive over time. Its military build-up hasn't outstripped its economic growth over the past several decades. But nevertheless, it's a significant growth and it could learn to project power and define its goals even more expansively than it has. So I think, you know, this is a legitimate concern. But I am also worried that a China enemy suits some interests in the United States and helps to solve this problem that has emerged over the last several years, which is, boy, American global dominance seems to have a lot of critics in the United States. These wars in the Middle East are very unpopular. But if we're able to portray China as seeking world domination as gravely threatening Americans, and by the way, we can also, you know, somewhat plausibly say, we're just going to be able to deter China so there won't be actual wars involved. Well, that kind of does everything that the military industrial complex about which President Eisenhower warned would want to do. And I submit to you that a getting into an intense zero-sum security competition with China is going to put us indefinitely on the brink of World War III. China could do us great harm if it came to that. We can also do them great harm. And China does not, you know, we're not about to be attacked by the Chinese military. I think very few people believe that that's the case. And we've got real threats to Americans where they live and work from pandemic disease, from climate change as well. All these things should incline us to have more cooperation, not with just with China per se, but with countries around the world with whom we do not need to be military adversaries. You know, it's an odd thing. You mentioned Trump and passing. And you've written in various places, including I believe the Washington Post, that Trump's foreign policy, you know, wasn't all bad. And he clearly, you know, he said the unsayable, which is that, you know, even as he was talking about making America great again, and kind of channeling and kind of insane primitive version of American exceptionalism, he was like, hey, you know what, we're not, we don't have to be everywhere. We don't have to do everything for anybody. Is there a lesson from a kind of Trumpian, you know, discussion of ideas that we should really be foregrounding? And is it potentially legitimate to say, you know, that Trump and Biden are more alike on foreign policy in the same way that Bush and Obama are kind of together? I don't appraise the Trump foreign policy highly. I've written about it very critically throughout the administration, with the exception of that last piece where I wanted to take the opportunity to say something that was promising about Trump's foreign policy. And that promising thing is that Donald Trump really didn't assume that the United States has the right and duty to police the world, to guard something called international order, which is very difficult to define by force. Now, he replaced that impulse with something that often seemed to be just power for power sake. He said, our military dominance must be unquestioned. And he raised the defense budget even higher to demonstrate that. So in many ways, he pursued this peace through strength foreign policy that really didn't improve on the record of his predecessors. But on the other hand, he did have the capacity to to allow to see other countries in a way that wasn't defined by the United States and its military. He put the war in Afghanistan on a path determination, which his predecessors proved unable or unwilling to do. He did not think the United States was exceptional or indispensable to others. And so I think in in those respects, he offers something to to build upon, even if I think he the dominant impulse was a more punitive and militaristic impulse that I very much disagree with. Do you think Biden is kind of in a Trumpian mode? You know, and this is one of the things that has come up. You know, particularly over the past couple weeks is how Biden was kind of, you know, he was a skeptic of Obama's hawkishness. And, you know, he's been in power at an office for so long, you he's like the Bible, you can find a Joe Biden who will support any interpretation of him. But you know, is he for however long he has his marbles and or is it office? Is he actually pointing in a good direction for American foreign policy? You know, I'm not sure how much there's always continuities between administrations on the issue of Afghanistan. Yes. This was a Trump Biden withdrawal. If you'd like to put it that way, I think on relations with China, there may be a kind of broad continuity in that both Trump and and the Biden administration believe the United States needs to be more sharply competitive, more adversarial towards China than their predecessors. So we'll still, we still have to see how US-China relations evolve under Biden. But I get the sense that Biden has evolved in his thinking since 9-11. He was a proponent of humanitarian intervention before 9-11. He supported the Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan, et cetera. But around the middle of the decade as the war in Iraq went south and became unpopular with the public, Biden came out with a plan to federalize Iraq, which I think may have been an attempt to avoid a long-term US occupation of the country. And as you mentioned, under Obama, he did oppose the surge of troops in Afghanistan, though he's still supported continuing the war, but only for the purpose of counterterrorism. So I see him as somebody who is, first of all, I think he's undergoing his own thought process that predates the rise of Donald Trump. But secondly, he, I think, is in general as a politician responsive to where the public is. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. And so in that way, Donald Trump's rise probably matters. And that Trump showed that there was a public appetite, at least for something quite different from the foreign policy that they had gotten before. And this may be too much of a mental gymnastic that I'm trying to do in my head. But in your book Tomorrow of the World, one of the major characters in a lot of ways. And he was, if not quite an architect of American foreign policy, he was one of the people that kind of broadcasted the journalist and statesman Walter Lippman. Walter Lippman helped create this idea that America has to be everywhere and do everything. He was also famous for saying that the public doesn't really matter when it comes to setting public policy. Are we finally moving past Walter Lippman in two senses? You know, both that America has to be everywhere and shoulder every burden. And that we are now starting to acknowledge that, you know what, when the public gets tired of war, politicians, it might take a long time, but they ultimately they catch up to where the public is. I think that's clearly the trend over the past decade or decade and a half even. And again, I think sometimes it's remarkable how much the debate over foreign policy has changed and how much certain policies like the war in Afghanistan now have changed given how senior people in the foreign policy community have stridently opposed some of these actions. So that is my hope that we're moving to a new place. But I would warn that one of the frameworks for American foreign policy that is gaining steam along with a more general military restraint is a focus on so-called great power competition against China first and foremost, but also Russia. And I think one of the reasons why that has gained traction is that there isn't or doesn't seem to be a high risk of war with China or Russia in the near term. So it can seem acceptable to people who don't want to go to war. But I think over the long term, if you think about how the original Cold War went, if we get locked into a Cold War with China, and God forbid we should add Russia to that mix and try to take on both of them at once rather than attempt to drive a wedge between them, then that may offer a respite from some of the Middle East nation building wars from the last two decades. But we will probably end up intervening again in the Middle East or in the global South, much as we did in Korea, in Vietnam, and so forth during the original Cold War. I guess final question as we come close to the 20th or as we anticipate the 20th anniversary of 9-11. Do you think the next 20 years will be more peaceful than the last 20 years? I truly don't know on a global scale. I hope so for the United States. I do think that there is a widespread recognition, even among people in Washington and the United States, that endless wars have been a mistake. They've been incredibly costly and a revalorization of peace. Actually, peace is pretty good. It's a good goal. And in so many ways, war has become the norm in our system, whether that's legally in terms of Congress passing the buck to the president, whether it's in terms of lobbyists and the military industrial complex or ideologies that say that anybody who wants to wind down a war is an isolationist. So I think there's definitely a good fight brewing. And I'll say this at no other point, I think in my own adult lifetime, would it be possible to have a get traction saying the kind of things that I've been saying and so many others now in Washington and elsewhere who are joining the movement to put an end to endless war and shift to a grand strategy of military restraint. All right. Well, we're going to leave it there. We've been talking with Steven Murthime, author of Tomorrow the World at the Carnegie Foundation for Peace. Thanks so much for talking to reason. Thank you.