← Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
8/4/26: Flock Camera Revolt, China Gives Iran Weapons Amid US Decline
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Krystal Ball
Hey guys, Sagar and Krystal here.
- [02:07]
Saagar Enjeti
Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show.
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Krystal Ball
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Saagar Enjeti
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- [02:31]
Krystal Ball
We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you@breaking points.com.
- [02:39]
Saagar Enjeti
so the mass spread of Flock cameras across the country has increasingly become an issue of deep concern to Americans. There's one organization that has sprung up called D Flock, which you can go to their website and you can see a map of where all the Flock cameras are located. They are doing sort of standard first amendment advocacy against the spread of this surveillance technology. The Flock CEO was asked about this group and he labeled them as a terrorist organization. Let's take a listen.
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Flock CEO
You've got organizations like the ACLU and the EFF who take an above aboard approach to fight for their point of view. And thankfully we live in a beautifully democratic, capitalistic country where we can fight in court. And I have a lot of respect for those groups because they have reasonable debates and we follow the law. And then unfortunately there's terroristic organizations like D Flock whose primary motivation is chaos. They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else. And that I think is unfortunate because we don't want chaos or I don't want chaos. I like law and order. I like a society that has a bedrock of safety. So for those groups, I think it's just disappointing that they haven't chosen a more constructive mannerism to try to get what they want, which they have a right to have. But that's why we have a democratically elected process.
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Chelsea Handler
Right.
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Flock CEO
Like I, we're not forcing Flock on anyone. Elected officials know that as a, as a community you want to be safe.
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Saagar Enjeti
I mean, this is complete insanity, Sagar. But it also fits into the rhetorical and legal framework that the Trump Admin has set up. It's not an accident that he named Antifa here because they've used NSPM7 and other tools to try to go after these left wing groups that they label as terrorists. And so he adopts that language to try to, you know, put DEF Lock in the same category as these other groups that have been identified by the Trump administration as terrorists. But literally you can go to their website, the tagline says welcome to deflock, an open source project mapping license plate readers. Like, that's just a basic service and advocacy group that is, you know, being provided to the public so that they can push back back on what's happening in their communities where they've had very little say.
- [04:50]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, I think this is absolutely insane and it's Pretty obvious that this CEO, first of all, Deflock is a nonprofit organization. So if you're going to say that it's, you know, terroristic or whatever, frankly they should be able to sue if they want to because you know, you can't just defamatory genuinely. I mean like that's an actual term which has meaning. It's a nonprofit organization which is open source, which allows people to just to flag where Flock cameras actually are. By that definition, Waze is a terrorist organization because it lets you flag where police officers are whenever they're trying to speed trap you. So let's start with that. The second thing and you know, I said this, I got such an angry message from a right wing friend of mine where I said I genuinely would trust a place like China or Singapore to surveil me to a master of ale me than I would. And I'm about to show you why is because it is a for profit company with very sketchy ability to actually hold to account and is by the way, not wholly bought in by our democratic system, also with a profit motive. Okay. So you put those three things together and oh lo and behold, you have the problems that befall all American institutions. Let's go and put this next one up here on a screen. In one California town, Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts that it sent to police. Summer of 2024, a police called a man to discuss a persistent problem with his license plate. The city's AI powered license plate reader, made up by Flock, had repeatedly misread the plate. Six times they had sent alerts to the Roseville police department identifying the vehicle as stolen or used in a felony crime. Police could see that the Flock software kept confusing the nine for an eight. The car owner said he would take off his license plate cover and soon after it happened again. So this guy is getting harassed by the police because the AI license plate reader is not, you know, is not reading his plate correctly. Now again, if you're gonna pay this company all this money, you're gonna mount all these cameras in public and make it so that we're basically eroding all public privacy. You would at the very least say, could it work? And yet in this case, it's not working. Oh, you second one is that we also know about institutional misuse and abuse. This also happened many times with the NSA with their warrantless spying program. Let's put this one up here on the screen. How rogue officers turned a nationwide camera network into a tool for stalking. So for Example, they interview a woman, Marcy Bakley. She couldn't understand how her ex boyfriend always seemed to know where she was. When she went to buy groceries, he would text her about it, sometimes within minutes, despite he was working 15 miles from her home as police chief in a small town in Atlanta. One day in 2024, when he incorrectly suspected that she'd gone to see a man against his witches, he messaged her, I didn't think you would slip up. She began to feel like she was constantly being watched. She installed cameras around her home and on her patio to see if he was stalking her. She bought hidden camera detector three times. In desperation, she drove her car to a mechanic's shop. Then one day, she pressed him for answers, and he said he was using his Flock access as a police officer. Quote, like thousands of other law enforcement agencies. His police cars. His police force can follow cars spotted by Flock's sprawling network of AI roadside cameras, which record passing license plate into a mappable database that officers can then search while investigating a crime. However, they then note that it's obviously rife and for abuse. Now, to be clear, he was arrested on charges of stalking, harassment, and license plate misreader abuse. But as you can see very clearly is that there are no actual checks within the system from stopping these small town sheriffs or any of these other places with very little accountability to be able to use it for whatever ends that they want. And I'm not against the police or any of that, but I do think it's very, very, very clear that if we're going to have a system like this and then spread it very oddly with no real, like, federal government oversight, keep it to, you know, contracts with localities and with states. That is clearly to the advantage of Flock, the company, which is way less accountable, as I said, to some nationally organized system with at the very least, you could have some ability to. To have democratic checks on this ability. And it also just gets to the point of these cameras went up. We have no say about it at all.
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Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, we're all just now they're here.
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Krystal Ball
Okay, they're here. Better deal with it.
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Saagar Enjeti
And think about how terrifying this was for this woman.
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Krystal Ball
Oh, my God.
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Saagar Enjeti
He had looked up her tags.
- [09:38]
Krystal Ball
I know.
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Saagar Enjeti
And those of her teenage daughter. More than 600 times. More than 600 times. By the way, you can go to have I been flocked? And do a search that aggregates police search logs to see if your license plate has been searched. So at least that public tool is available to you. And I think it's no accident that the CEO of Flock finds this sort of, you know, open access information to be such a threat to their business model, because you do start to see the public, the more they become aware of this, the more horrified they are by it and the more sort of organic pushback there is to it. But lest you think that this was a one off case with this, you know, one bad apple who was using the technology, misusing the technology to. To stalk his ex and her teenage daughter, authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law enforcement officers of using this for unauthorized purposes. You had one dude who was tracking an ex to see if she was going to an abortion clinic. You had all kinds of stalking to see if they were with a new man or stalking the new man to see what he was up to. Threats, abuse, horrifying, horrifying stuff that is going on with this. And to your point, there's really no laws around it. And you think the police departments are going to just on their own, make sure that there's, you know, limited use of this technology? No, they want a free hand to be able to do whatever they want with it so that they can deploy it in the ways that they, you know, think are going to be useful and easy for them. It really is sort of like crack cocaine to these police departments, because even that one in California where they found the license plates were being misread 71% of the time, you might look at that and go, this seems like it might be more trouble than it's worth. Maybe they'll just get rid of it. They're not getting rid of it because in the certain cases, they find it useful. And so once this technology becomes embedded, even when it performs extremely poorly, even when it causes all sorts of civil rights violations and privacy violations, it is very difficult to dislodge because the police departments like it, they enjoy it. And just one other piece here in terms of, you know, all right, so what's the big deal if they misidentify the license plate? Who really, you know, who really cares? Okay. It's kind of awkward for the police departments, et cetera. Maybe there's misuse and expenditure of resources that they wouldn't need. Put D4 up on the screen. Just think about what this would look like for you and your family. So this is a guy who test drives vehicles. Like, that's his job. He, like, test drives vehicles and then he writes up reviews of them for this website called the Drive. Well, because of a sort of technical glitch and error in the way that they were tracking these test drive vehicles, the vehicle that he was test driving is very expensive. One was flagged as having been stolen. So police in this town tracked him and his family for days. They had all this video recording of him, you know, going about his life, going to the grocery store, et cetera. He and his wife pull into a Kohl's parking lot. Multiple police vehicles, like, race up, surround them, pin them in. He's freaking out. He's like, what is going on here? And, you know, responds in a way that sort of deescalates the situation. Fortunately, these cops listened to him and believed what he had to say. One of them, luckily, was actually familiar with the drive and was like, okay, this is legit. Cause you can imagine this sounds like bullshit. Like, no, no, I just test drive these cars for a living. These expensive cars for a living. You could see how that would sound like bullshit. And they told him, hey, you're lucky that this happened here, cuz if it happened in the city, they would have come at you guns drawn, like, that's what we're talking about here. This is complete insanity. And to the point about the, you know, the rising political consciousness and why some of this just information being accessible to the public is creating a real problem for them. You can see some response on both the right and the left as politicians try to position themselves as caring about these issues in local communities. Byron Donald's down in Florida. We can put D5 up on the screen. He is sounding the alarm about Flock surveillance cameras. He's saying that they're impinging on constitutional rights. He's calling for a full pause. And I took note of this. Francesca Hong, who I think, you know, we talked earlier about the. The whole cancel Thanksgiving situation. There's a lot to say about that. In terms of why she's leading in the Democratic primary and certainly has a shot in the general election is because of the range of issues that she has really chosen to focus on. Among them, data centers. And she gives a mention to Flock cameras in this new ad that she just put out. Let's take a listen to that. I'm here at the failed Foxconn manufacturing site. This is now a Microsoft AI data center plant. Just like in 2018 with Foxconn. Republicans will sell out our communities again.
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Daniel Besner
I think we can say this is. We can say this is the eighth
- [14:35]
Chelsea Handler
wonder of the world.
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Saagar Enjeti
Clock cameras, poison groundwater, and eyesores that don't create Future Good Jobs. $2 billion in tax breaks that you and I will be paying for. I'M the only candidate in this race to call for a moratorium on the construction of new AI data science centers. We can't afford to be Foxconned again. The people deserve a say. So there you see the mention of flock cameras being pulled into this broader issue said around, you know, pushing back on data centers, tapping into the whole Foxconn situation in Wisconsin as well. But I took note of, she was the first Democratic candidate that I'd seen put this in, you know, any of the ads. And so you ask yourself why has she quickly skyrocketed to the top of the Democratic primary leaderboard and you know, is basically fade accompli that she's gonna be the Democratic nominee against some very prominent establishment backed candidates that she was up against. And I think it's because she really has had her finger on the pulse of some of these bubbling issues that are really also cross ideological.
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Krystal Ball
Right. And that's, that's why we show the Byron Donalds thing. I mean very likely to be the next governor of Florida. He is saying that you need a full pause. We've had a number actually of GOP representatives very recently who have been talking about flock. I mean it's very obvious because at the, at the high level, like I said, there's no federal regulation on AI license plate readers. It's all state and local. The company is getting fantastically rich. These have come across the entire nation. You can just go to D Flock and actually look at the map of where they all are. Very likely it's already in your community or you drive one, at least unwittingly you have at a minimum in the last few months and you have no say in this whole like have I had been flocked? That's only because of FOIA information that you're able to see. But there's no actual regulatory body on whether this is okay, that we're outsourcing all this info completely to a private company which is now saying that if you track where they are that you're somehow a terrorist. So I think that the political dynamics around this are very important. Anybody should be deeply concerned about this ability of a private company to just come in, partner with the localities of which there's very little insight, regulation or even knowledge of the community itself. They come up everywhere. And then, you know, the justification is, is that it's vital in helping solve crime. And I think that's probably true. But there's also a significant downside we're seeing already with the abuse, with the misread. There needs to be the ability for the public to have some sort of say, to keep things actually accountable. And it's become. I mean, I've seen this spread like wildfire in terms of people who are upset about this, you know, general feeling, not just with data centers, but with the cameras, of being mass surveilled all the time. Imagine, Covid, if this type of technology had been as widespread at that time. They're like, oh, you got a ticket. You left your house during lockdown like this. It's so, so easy, I mean, to think about what, you know, the state of California would have done in the middle of a lockdown if they had this type of technology and how they easily could have made it and integrated it into their enforcement regime. If you're worried about immigration. Yeah, well, oh, you're an activist and you happen to be in the area. Here you go, here's a ticket. You know, beds are coming to your door. And frankly, I think that's already happening. I was just reading a Wall Street Journal piece as of this morning. But this is what enables it. This is the reason. And this is exactly why I think most people, at the very least, should demand a hell of a lot more regulation and safeguard as opposed to just allowing private companies, states, and localities just put these things up wherever we live, basically with no real notice, I think, to all of us.
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Saagar Enjeti
And so, yeah, well, and Sagar, you're. You're making an important point point here, which is, while it may help serve certain. Solve certain types of crimes, it's also opening up an entirely new vector of potential criminality, as you can see, with all of this stalking and harassment that is going on here. So, yeah, I mean, in kind of a similar way with the immigration crackdown, where on the one hand you could say, oh, this is law and order. On the other hand, you saw the chaos it created and all the criminal behavior from the ICE agents in the street, which just went completely unpunished. You can see a similar nexus here where, yes, on the one hand, it may make it easier to track some of the bad guys. On the other hand, it enables a whole other series of bad guys to do things that are really horrifying and terrifying and infringe on our liberties. There's always a balance in a society between, you know, this sort of like, authoritarianism, but, you know, maybe the crimes get solved versus people having some liberty that has to be struck. And I think most Americans are saying this goes way too far in the direction of just a. A total surveillance state.
- [19:15]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. Because it comes down to enforcement. You know, it comes down to. And you could do it in multiple different directions. If you are in Seattle, people are literally smoking crack on the bus. But if you speed, you're gonna get a ticket. That's insane. That is a complete insane. Now let me do the other way. So I just talked about the lowest common denominator of society. A literal crackhead or a fentanyl head. Well, let's switch it. If you are one of these people who Trump just pardoned for a multibillion dollar Ponzi scheme, right, and you get out of prison, but I run a red light and I get $25 ticket, that's bullshit too. So that's what it comes up. There's no consistent enforcement. It comes down to run of the middle. Actual everyday citizen is dually screwed. And there's this type of system where you have a lot of compassion here you got a federal government on the side of the ultra rich. But if you're just a normal everyday guy and you're just, you know, you're not a fentanyl addict, you're not an ultra rich billionaire, you're the person who actually, who has the most consistent law enforcement directed at you. And I think that's what is wrong with our country. So anyway, some free from free law and order discourse there for some of the candidates that are out there. All right, let's get to Japan.
- [20:28]
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Krystal Ball
Yeah, it's pretty wild.
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Daniel Besner
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- [22:55]
Krystal Ball
Joining us now is Daniel Besner. He is the author of the Imperious Realism substack, the author of Imperious, the book which we could show all of you, and the host of the American Prestige Podcast. That's a record intro here for a guest. But again, someone I've corresponded with a few times and who really caught my interest with some of his writing and some of his analysis. So thank you very much for joining us Dan. We appreciate it.
- [23:20]
Daniel Besner
Thank you so much for having me. Really happy to be here.
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Krystal Ball
Absolutely. So you've been really lasered in on this theory of imperious realism which you've developed. Kind of the fallout of post Cold War liberalism and the rise of a new multipolar world. One of the things topics that we cover pretty extensively here on our show. Just to link it to today's news, let's put this one up here. For example on the screen about Iran is set to get some Chinese shoulder launched missile systems in weeks. Made me think of some of your analysis. This is exactly the same type of tactics the United States undertook during the Cold War against the Soviet Union, but more Generally, maybe give the audience an idea of your framework here around imperialist realism, what it means for the United States and the future of the world, and connect it here to the Iran situation.
- [24:10]
Daniel Besner
Absolutely. So I think there's something interesting happening in how Americans understand their role in the world and what I would term the American empire, which is this notion that there's really no changing it, that there's really no way to transform the American empire to transform geopolitics. And I think this is a transformation from how Americans understood their world role as recently as the 1990s, when someone like Madeleine Albright could say on the Today show that the United States sees further than other countries, which gives us license to act in the world. I think the failures of the global war on terror and also the end of what I would call mass politics, the inability of people to actually affect foreign policy and economic policy and a number of other issue areas has engendered this cynicism about American power. But this idea that we must nevertheless act in the world, but then we feel guilty about it and don't think that anything could really change. So the way that I think about imperialist realism is that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of the American empire.
- [25:16]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, I mean, fascinating kind of to put it in that perspective, but just break it down more towards the path towards multipolarity and how it fits within that framework.
- [25:26]
Daniel Besner
Sure. So I think this is why it actually matters, because I think that the world is becoming a more multipolar world. The United States was uniquely powerful both after World War II, where it controlled something like half of the world's manufacturing base, had an atomic monopoly, that is a monopoly of atomic weapons, really had the world's only real air force. And the more we learn about the Soviet Union, particularly in the 50s, 60s and 70s, the more we learned that it was actually incredibly weak, much weaker than Americans could have really known at the time. And then, of course, after the end of the Cold War, the United States was the last remaining superpower. It was really the global hegemon. This was the so called unipolar moment, which Charles Krauthammer, a term that Charles Krauthammer basically identified. But I think that two things have happened in the last 25 years. One, the United States squandered its global power, you see, with the global war on terror, and just failure after failure there, whether you're looking at Iraq, Libya or Afghanistan, just total disintegration of American foreign policy. There. And then you also have the Great Recession, which I think has really damaged the United States global position. And so you have those two things coupled with the quote, unquote, rise of China, but really the reemergence of China as a major global power, which it was for most of human history, and also the re emergence of Russia as a global power. So you have this new multipolar world. And just to wrap up here, why this is important is that this is precisely the moment where we need to imagine alternatives to American global empire. Empire, because this alternative is going to happen. The question is not a matter of if, but when. And the real issue for us in this country is how we manage this transition to multipolarity. Is it going to be violent or is it going to be not violent?
- [27:10]
Saagar Enjeti
Daniel, talk a little bit about the shift away from even rhetorical support for the quote, unquote, liberal international order. So for my entire life, you know, all of our wars and interventions have been framed in these liberal international values. We all know the ways that the American empire has fallen, fallen short of that rhetoric, but the rhetoric was deployed. We're going to bring freedom to the Iraqis, et cetera, et cetera. And now between the genocide in Gaza and, you know, the, the attacks on Iran and the enabling of any number of continued Israeli war crimes, there's really not even a sort of gesture towards that liberal internationalism. You could see it also with just kidnapping Maduro and saying, we're going to take Venezuela. There's no wrapping it in, oh, human rights. And he was a bad guy. It's all just like, no, we want their stuff and we're going to take it and we're going to be overt about it. You write that this is effectively a sign of the times and that we're moving into an era where no longer will there be this sort of overarching ideological frameworks that are used to justify actions in the world. So talk a little bit about what that shift, how that shift is occurring and what it means.
- [28:18]
Daniel Besner
Absolutely. And it's a really important question. So it's perhaps the easiest way to see this is to compare something like the George W. Bush administration's national security strategy with national security strategies. And this is where I think it's interesting from not only the Trump administration, but the Biden administration. When you look back on the war on terror, George W. Bush national security strategies, you see consistent references to democracy promotion, to democracy promotion being the key to American security. And this, you know, I'm an elder millennial this really defined American foreign policy in the 2000s and really even into the 2010s. Obama, him itself also talks about things like democracy and humanity and humane war and bringing effectively liberalism to the international space. But I think that this is, as you said, Crystal, this is just impossible to believe after the global war on terror. And what you see, and this is really interesting, this transition to begin, not even really in the first Trump administration, but more so in the Biden administration. So if you remember, Biden came into office framing international politics as a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. But when you actually look at how policymakers in the Biden administration talked, for example, about the Ukraine war and Russia's invasion of Ukraine and why the United States should, for example, send weapons to Ukraine, they almost never talked about democracy or protecting Ukrainian democracy. They talked totally in the language of interests. Blinken says, like the United States needs to do this, otherwise there'll be another power and that will be bad for American interests. They never talk about democracy. And obviously this is tripled down with the second Trump administration, who never even pretends to have this sort of global human rights vision. And what I think is really interesting here is that this is something that you don't only see in the United States, you also see it in China, and you also see it in Russia. When you look at the national security strategies of China and Russia, there's almost no discussion of ideology. For example, the Chinese national security strategy, you'd think they'd mention communism or socialism. They mention it like something 13 times. And they mentioned security hundreds and hundreds of times. And in the Russian national security strategy, they barely mention ideology. So what you see here, I think, and then we could talk more about this. This is the consequence of what happens when all major nations on earth, basically every nation except North Korea, has embraced a capitalist form of organizing the industrialist and industrial and post industrial economies. There's nothing really ideological to fight over any longer. No one's promoting a fascist way to organize an economy. No one's even promoting a communist way to organize an economy. We're all different forms of, of capitalism. So where Francis Fukuyama said that the end of history would mean the triumph of liberalism, what we see is that the end of history, which is to say the spread of capitalism, actually just means that liberalism itself is withering away. And I think this explains a lot about international politics and also domestic politics.
- [31:05]
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- [31:35]
Chelsea Handler
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- [32:30]
Ashley Iconetti
This is Ashley Iconetti from the Ben and Ashley I Almost Famous podcast Ben I've been reflecting a lot lately on how many big life moments our listeners have experienced with us.
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Krystal Ball
Yeah, it's pretty wild.
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Ashley Iconetti
They've watched us go from dating shows to engagements, weddings, babies buying homes. Every stage comes with new decisions.
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Krystal Ball
The milestones are the fun part, but the planning is where things get real.
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Ashley Iconetti
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Krystal Ball
Since life moves so fast, the right tools can help you feel more confident. Download the Klarna app today or visit klarna.com to learn more.
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Daniel Besner
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Daniel Besner
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- [33:32]
Krystal Ball
One of the things that you said which is important there is World War II at the most reductive level could be understood as this battle between authoritarianism and fascist organization alongside democracy or the people's way. One way is literal Bolshevism, other is democracy. A lot more complicated than that, but that's an easy way to understand it. However, the Chinese are just better capitalists than we are at a certain point. Russia itself is state sponsored capitalism. We're not fighting about that in the language of interest. But as I understand it, I actually think that maybe what makes the world more dangerous, because if we're all just scrambling for interest and not even having ideological underpinning, it seems to make conflict more likely. I'm curious for your reaction.
- [34:18]
Daniel Besner
Well, it could go either way because when you look at what the United States thought about the Soviet Union, particularly in the 1950s, effectively until the Cuban Missile crisis, American policymakers viewed the Soviet Union as totally illegitimate because it was so ideologically different. They thought that you couldn't actually make it deals. Now wise foreign policymakers in a world organized around interests might actually find it easier to reach deals because there are just these quote unquote objective. Now nothing's objective, but you know what I'm saying here? There are these spaces where you could agree, you could agree to work together about climate change, you could agree to work together about global inequality. The problem is that American foreign policy is still ideological in the sense of not, not liberal based. But Americans still believe they need to dominate the world. The Americans still believe, many Americans at least still believe that there's no genuine alternative to American empire. So an American foreign policy elite that embraces a form of imperialist realism even as they know the United States is not going to make the world a better place, actually makes international politics more dangerous because then maybe you're not going to leave East Asia. Maybe you genuinely believe that you have to stay in East Asia for American security. And even someone who's genuinely good on some of these things, like most John Mersheimer, he argued that the United States needs to maintain its forward position in East Asia basically now, until the end of time. So I think it's those types of ideas that the United States needs to maintain a global primacy now and forever that could actually make the world more dangerous. Saga like you're like you're claiming. But it doesn't have to be that way, but it currently is now.
- [35:49]
Saagar Enjeti
Interesting, Dan, how does AI development fit into your analysis? You've got Elon Musk in a recent interview saying not only is everyone going to have universal high income, but money is not going to be a thing. You've had books written from the left about, you know, fully automated luxury communism that could potentially be enabled by AI. You have all of these tech oligarchs who are basically talking about how we need to rip up the current social contract and do something completely different. I mean, doesn't that potentially augur for a new ideological valence and you know, new systems that break significantly from the capitalist order that we have now that could come into, could come into play over the next next decade or so?
- [36:34]
Daniel Besner
Absolutely. I think it's really important and I think to my mind, and I think I'm perhaps a little unique on the left where I situate myself on this. I think the major problem with AI is that it's going to exist under capitalism because to some degree you could view it as achieving Marxist fantasy where you no longer have to engage in the types of BS jobs that someone like David Graeber wrote about, that it would actually free you to rear cattle in the morning and criticize in the afternoon and drink beer in the evenings. But in actually existing capitalism, all it's going to do basically destroy labor. And I view AI primarily as related to the falling rate of profit, which is this idea put forward by Marx and other economists, not just Marxists, which is that over time profits become more difficult to basically squeeze out of a capitalist order. I mean, the way that I talk about it to my students is if you build St. Louis in the 19th century, you're going to make a lot of money. But now in the 21st century you have to basically manipulate financial derivatives in order to, to achieve a stable level of growth. So I think that the capitalist class, whether consciously, unconsciously, is trying to de. Industrialize the white collar and professional managerial class. So that's what I think artificial intelligence, primarily its economic incentive is. And when it comes to international politics, I think the major issue that we could face is something that we saw in Iran, which is AI doing target selection based on outmoded data. And you get the, it seems to be, you get the destruction of, you know, children's schools and there's also potential for AI arms races and things along those lines. But I think the technology is a bit too immature to see where that will go. But like atomic weaponry, you would ideally have some form of international regulation of it. But again, in this interest based world where the United States thinks it has to be prime now and forever, it's unlikely you're going to get that.
- [38:16]
Krystal Ball
So just going forward, like what? Exactly. So we're going to have a new world order, obviously that loaded term but it's actually literally quite coming. So what's that? You know, what are our different options here? You just said there's one East Asia. I agree with Mir Shara for the record, we could debate that a little bit later. That's one option is kind of retrenchment, focusing on core objectives. The other is the Iran option is you break the back of the empire on a stupid foreign conflict which is completely meaningless. If you were to look at history, that's usually how an empire dies. I guess another option is that we end up potentially fighting home. You know, the mythical Taiwan conflict. Where could we end up? What do you think?
- [38:57]
Daniel Besner
I mean, I think the choice is between restraining and reduction of American presence abroad or fighting wars. I think just to put it in its starkest terms, either the United States is going to reduce its global footprint. It's, you know, at this point, 750 or so military bases. It's going to accept that it's no longer the power it was in 1945 or 1989 or 91. And it is going to come home, which I actually think is a much deeper held strand in American politics. And actually the period Since World War II is quite unique going back to.
- [39:30]
Krystal Ball
I totally agree. Yeah, that's how the normal outcome for the majority of history.
- [39:35]
Daniel Besner
Precisely. And you look at George Washington's farewell address, which was actually a letter. Fun fact. He warns against not participating in foreign entanglements in Europe. But people have talked about this elsewhere. This isn't to deny that the United States has always been an empire. Westward expansion. Native tribes are understood as foreign nations, literally, which is why Neil Gorsuch is ironically good on native relations. But I think that we're entering a moment where we really need to rethink global power. And if we don't accept novel realities, I think we're going to get violent. And let's just link this to Iran because I think it's difficult to know right now, but I think we might look back on the Iran conflict as auguring a revolution in military affairs of the type that we haven't really seen since the invention of the rifle in the middle of the 19th century and then later the machine gun. Because before the rifle and the machine gun you had basically Napoleonic battles. Armies would face and they'd go at each other. Robert E. Lee discovered that that wasn't how it worked during the Civil War. And then all the European leaders discovered that that wasn't how it worked in World War I because the machine gun could just mow you down I think that the biggest thing happening in military affairs right now is the effects of drone warfare. The way that I put it, think about what if one day the United States puts an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea and China sends literally 1 million drones at that aircraft carrier. This is a transformation in warfare that is also, as we've already seen, going to force a wise American foreign policy elite. Not sure we have the wise blob, but imagine that we did to actually rethink basing. These are structures, literal American bases. A lot of these were bases that were taken over from the British Empire during World War II. They are artifacts of a different age of of warfare and the age of drone warfare. Literally send a million drones to the Middle Eastern bases. But it doesn't seem like the foreign policy establishment is rethinking those fundamental premises. And again, this is imperialist realism, this notion that you really can't think on alternative world, which is the type of thing that could lead to violence.
- [41:34]
Podcast Advertiser
Wow.
- [41:35]
Saagar Enjeti
Well, absolutely fascinating, Dan.
- [41:38]
Podcast Advertiser
Yeah.
- [41:39]
Daniel Besner
Thank you, guys.
- [41:39]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, you're welcome. Everybody go buy the book, listen to the pod, subscribe to the substack. Any other things I need to promote?
- [41:46]
Daniel Besner
No, I mean the really, the only path forward is to subscribe to the podcast and subset. That is the first step.
- [41:51]
Saagar Enjeti
That's the only way forward for the world.
- [41:55]
Krystal Ball
I hear that one. See you, man. Thank you very much for joining us.
- [41:57]
Podcast Advertiser
Bye.
- [41:57]
Saagar Enjeti
Thanks, Dan.
- [41:59]
Krystal Ball
All right, everybody, we're gonna kick the Japan segment to Thursday. We talked a little bit too much with Dan, but we will have, of course, our lives. So you got a lot content, so you shouldn't complain. There's a live stream today, 7:30pm Eastern Time with Crystal and Ryan. There's a Wednesday show and then there'll still be our normal programming on Thursday and Friday. Don't forget, we got a free month trial going on. Go ahead and take advantage of breakingpoints.com so I guess Crystal and Ryan will see you at 7:30pm Eastern Time right here on the Breaking Points channel.
- [42:45]
Podcast Advertiser
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Daniel Besner
Watch us.
- [43:23]
Podcast Advertiser
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