← Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files
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This is a Global Player original podcast.
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For four years, the west had tied themselves up in knots, saying that if we took action then we could be mired in a Vietnam. I mean, you know, it was completely crazy and nothing bad happened.
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It just ended the war that got under Clinton's skin and it helped him to make this decision that was crucial to change our policy and to use military power.
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My hackles are raised and my stakes stomach is in a knot when you remind that Slobodan Milosevic had the presumptive nerve to say to President Isaac Begovic, I will give you Sarajevo, as if they had captured Sarajevo. They had not. They were not outmanned, outgunned for the entire war. They never gave up. The Catholic and the Christian churches around the world have now weighed in. They're basically saying to be pro life is not just about being anti abortion, it's about being pro life in all its aspects, including treating people as human beings and humanely.
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The diversion of research to achieve this objective has weakened our ability to crack down on crime.
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Welcome to the latest episode of the X Files with me, Christiana Manpour and.
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Jamie Rubin, two time State Department official under Clinton and Biden.
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B
Yeah, and I have been a long time CNN, in fact, 42 had a bit years. That's quite a lot in the field. And sitting behind a desk in my own studio trying to hold the powerful accountable, which is getting more and more difficult under this current administration. Nonetheless, we are here today to talk about 30 years since the end of the Bosnian war. We'll explain to you why that's important and we want to also say how it can lead to potential ideas to end the current wars that are flaring right now, that nobody's ending neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor frankly the Israel Gaza. There's a ceasefire, but there's no peace process. And we will talk about the current crackdown on immigrants, the deportation rush under the Trump administration, which is now getting massive backlash, including from a very important constituency, and that is the Catholic Church here in the United States. So let's get started. Let's talk about Bosnia. First, I would like to say that I'm wearing a hoodie because we are actually in a podcast studio and all podcasters apparently wear hoodies. So I've decided to wear a hoodie. I like the color Purple. This is the professional women's hockey league started and owned by my friend Billie Jean King and her wife, Ilana Kloss.
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You're probably staying with Billie Jean.
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I'm actually not this time.
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All Right. Well, I'm not wearing a hoodie.
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No, you're not. You're all in traditional a school suit with no tie.
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No tie.
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That's your to a concession.
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No time. Look, Bosnia is important to us because that's how the Bosnian war brought us together as a couple, frankly.
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Is that the only reason it's important?
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No. But we are the X Files, and we're doing this podcast, and I thought that was worthy of mention.
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Because it's all about us.
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No, but because that's part of podcasting. You try to bring the personal and.
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The professional together, and that is the. The mission of our podcast, X Files.
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All right, so we met first. I think you called me up. I had given you my card when you came to the Security Council, when you interviewed or discussed or met Madeleine Albright, and then you were pretty interested in why the United States hadn't picked up war criminals in Bosnia. You called me up out of the blue, cold called me card, and you called me. But then, more importantly, when Madeleine Albright became Secretary of State and we went on what you called the war criminals trip to the region, you joined her traveling press corps. And it's worth mentioning that Slobodan Milosevic tried to get you blocked from her plane.
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They specifically blocked from entering Serbia.
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Yes. And so I had to use my assistant secretary of State for public affairs powers and tell the authorities in Serbia that they couldn't tell us who to take with us on a plane. And if you couldn't go, we weren't going.
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So can I just say I appreciate that because actually, that's a principle. All for one, one for all. No foreign government tells the United States government what to do and how to treat their journalists. And it's solidarity. And there's just too little of that right now. But we'll get into that. You know, the press is under major attack here in the United States, not to mention elsewhere. And I think we should all be standing up and taking action when one is banned from here and another is banned from there, in a way, they.
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Are in the Pentagon. They all the serious journalists have refused the Pentagon's restrictions and refused back to Bosnia. So the war ended 30 years ago this week.
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That's why we're doing this.
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And I need to say that I believe the war ended because the United States changed its policy.
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That is correct.
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They decided that instead of standing by and letting the war continue, that they indicated to our European allies that we were no longer going to remove peacekeepers and extremists. We were no longer going to provide NATO support to those peacekeepers and extremists. And instead we were going to make clear to the Bosnian Serbs that if they didn't agree to a peace agreement, that we were gonna use military power. If they struck Sarajevo again, they struck Sarajevo, we used military power, and that created the leverage that brought us the peace agreement.
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B
So, because I was there during this period, you know, it was after four long years of not having the right policy, of just having a humanitarian policy at best, and your administration, which was a new administration being pulled every which way by more senior European allies who did not want to intervene during the Bosnia war and who basically said all sides are equally guilty. Wrong. Who basically said this was centuries of ethnic hatred.
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Wrong.
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You know, the principles of why they allowed this to carry on, and actually, frankly, sided with the Serbs, let's face it, at the beginning. And Milosevic, who obviously Yugoslavs had helped them during World War II. So this hangover refused to allow them to understand what was happening in front of our eyes that we, as journalists were trying to transmit, which was that their. There was a massive attack, coordinated attacks by the Bosnian Serbs, directed by Slobodan Milosevic, President of Yugoslavia of Serbia, et cetera, onto the civilians, mostly Bosnian Moslems, in the besieged cities of Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Zhepa, Gorazde and the others. And that was first termed ethnic cleansing. And then we realized that actually it was genocide. And that was adjudicated later at the International Criminal Tribunal. And as you say, it was the last market massacre in the summer, the August of 1995, that prompted finally Clinton to stand by the warning that one more time and we will enter. And I think for me, Jamie, the thing that was so important was that for four years the west had tied themselves up in knots, saying that if we took action, then we could be mired in a Vietnam. I mean, you know, it was completely crazy that people would be, you know, slaughtered, that we would make it worse. And nothing bad happened. It just ended the war.
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It shows you how arguments can get taken to extreme cases. The principal person making that argument was Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had come out of the Gulf War as the hero of the United States. And he actually believed that it was a slippery slope. If you did anything, you'd end up in a ground war like Vietnam. And he was wrong. And Bosnia did something extremely important. It showed that not everywhere, but in some places, limited force can achieve limited purposes. If you think it through and come up with a plan and that's what's interesting about both Bosnia and Kosovo is the United States under President Clinton with the leadership of Madeleine Albright. And I need to say here, she has passed away, and people need to remember this, she was the driving force in the Clinton administration, demanding, insisting, being a pain in the neck every week to Tony Lake, to Warren Christopher, saying, we can do something about this with limited force for limited purposes, and we can achieve American objectives. And the memo that she wrote to President Clinton in that summer basically said, when Jacques Chirac said, there's no leader, he's the president of France, no leader of the free world anymore because the United States isn't acting, that got under Clinton's skin and it helped him to make this decision that was crucial to change our policy and to use military power. And then, and this is what's missing, combine force and diplomacy with a peacekeeping force. And you asked what is the lesson for today? Well, I believe, and I think you may know this, I wrote in the New York Times, the only way we're going to get a peace in Gaza is with a peacekeeping force that is not the Israelis. The Israelis will never be peacekeepers in Gaza.
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And that's totally stuck at the Security Council.
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They're stuck because this administration is having trouble doing the hardest work of nailing down the details. And in, in these cases, details matter. The force has to be deployed with an achievable mission. It has to be deployed in a way that the rest of the world doesn't think. They're just handing international law over to the United States. They're trying to pass a resolution in which they say Donald Trump can decide everything. There's no way 15 members of the Security Council are going to handle.
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B
And already, as you saw, Russia has put its counter proposal, China as well. Can we just park that for a second? Because it's massively important. But, you know, I think what you're saying about Bosnia and Kosovo was the classic demonstration. Eventually, again, after four years of mass slaughter of civilians, diplomacy backed by the credible first threat and then use of force. And I need to say that the use of force by the coalition of the willing, because it wasn't all NATO, it was the United States and a bunch of other allies in Bosnia. Anyway, in the summer of, in September 1994, lasted maybe 10 days, two weeks, it was specifically directed at military emplacements at the guns that were firing on Sarajevo. Yeah. It wasn't about troop concentration. It wasn't about killing Serbs. And this is important to remember because they targeted very Carefully, the United States. And they did not create a massive global backlash against ending the war in this way. And then I think it's worth saying, and you know this probably better than I do, that it led to a concerted diplomatic effort. It wasn't just ceasefire and then let's run for the hills and that. Look at something else.
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Diplomacy was extensive, was detailed, had teams of people. Richard Holbrooke led it in the field and then at Dayton. And he had a team of, you know, 10 people working for him from all the agencies working day in, day out. That's what they need in Gaza, that's what they need in Ukraine. Instead we have this, you know, one man show ad hoc thinking they can, can resolve all these wars like it's a real estate deal.
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B
If I'm not mistaken, we, I mean the press had access to Dayton, but I don't think there were press conferences every day. Right. They did the hard work behind the sound bite. Temptation.
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You wanna hear something funny about that?
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Yeah, that. But also remember Back to the 1979 Jimmy Carter camp David peace process with the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, really conservative, some might say right wing. And then the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat. Both, both obviously are no longer alive. But for days there they did not talk to the press. They did the hard work and then they came out. There's something in that as well.
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Absolutely. Look, Dayton and then the subsequent Kosovo efforts. I was the spokesman for the Kosovo efforts, you may remember, in Rambouillet. I was going in and out.
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So let's just explain who don't know Rambouillet. It was a town in France with a nice castle, which I don't know whether it was the Americans or the French had chosen as the location for last ditch peace negotiations, which I think. Did Milosevic come to that?
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No, he didn't. Interestingly about that. We imposed the will of the world on the Serbs. We said to them, here's a peace agreement the Kosovar Albanians have signed. It's a fair agreement. It will involve a peacekeeping force. Serb sovereignty will be protected, but the people of Kosovo will be free. The Serbia Serbs couldn't accept it. Then we used military power. Then they capitulated again. Limited force for limited purposes. And in this case, Christian, we have to say a genocide was prevented. Not four years later, maybe a few months later than it might have happened. But a genocide was prevented and the people of Kosovo were saved. And the same process was in place for with diplomacy, peacekeeping forces, an international system of UN administration And look at Kosovo today. It's a thriving democracy. We haven't fixed all the problem. It's still got a problem with Serbia. But think of how far that's come. And unfortunately, I have to say that's the last successful American intervention. Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, these are hardly successes.
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B
Not to mention Venezuela, which is happening right now. But we'll talk in a moment about that. But I do want to ask you this, because a lot of Serbs of a certain generation. Just take the great tennis player Novak Djokovic. He was a kid, I guess, when the United States was bombing Kosovo and targets inside Serbia. And he always tells a story of being the victims of this war, how I think he said, and somebody will correct me, that he learned to play tennis at that time at some point in empty swimming pools. But you remember, you did, the Americans did bomb the Chinese embassy by accident. You tell me that's what you say. Bombed the. If I'm not mistaken, the Defense Ministry bombed the television, the television station. How do you explain that to the current generation of Serbs who are also very nationalist, very proud, and who tell the world that actually they were the victims?
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They weren't the victims. The victims were the people of Kosovo who were getting slaughtered. And remember, Milosevic called them rats. And he said, we've got to get rid of these rats.
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Remember, they were the Muslims.
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They were the Muslims, the Muslim majority.
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90% of Kosovo, and they were getting slaughtered.
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It was an apartheid system. All they wanted was their freedom and their rights. The Serbs were slaughtering them. They were the victims, the Kosovo Albanians. And we tried every way we could to have diplomacy work. The reason why this war was so small, supported by so many countries around the world, is because we gave diplomacy a fair chance. And in the end, Milosevic preferred to receive the bombing. He did. And then when he realized that we weren't going to give up, he capitulated. And the people of Kosovo were free. So no Serbs were the victims. As a group, I am sure there were Serbs who died, and I regret that. But their leaders made decisions that made that necessary and the overall outcome, to save a million people who are under threat and to do it so well, to do it so diplomatically, to do it so successfully that there's peace now between Kosovo and Kosovo, and Kosovo is independent, and Kosovo is independent, and it's a thriving democracy. And when Serbia becomes a thriving democracy, which I would argue it isn't really right now, maybe the people of Serbia can begin to think about how all this happened. And that's where the War crimes tribunals come in. The idea of them is to expunge collective guilt. It's not all the Serbs fault. It's not all the Albanians fault. It's the fault of those who committed those policies. Those are the individuals who should be prosecuted.
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Kosovo, if I could say it this way, you tried diplomacy, didn't work. You did force, it did work. Bosnia, you did force and then diplomacy. So it's slightly the opposite. And actually in Bosnia, you've talked about how long it took two weeks, I think, at Dayton, if not more, to get everybody together and everybody around the table. The piece is not perfect. It froze the lines in place. It created a rump Serbian entity known as Republica Serbia Srpska, which is still agitating, still agitating, backed by Russia, backed by Serbia, still agitating not to have a coherent, independent, sovereign Bosnia Herzegovina. And I wonder what you think about that 30 plus years later.
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Well, it wasn't perfect, Dayton. No question about it. I think the crucial moment came when Slobodan Milosevic turned to president Izabegovitch of Bosnia and said, I'm going to give you Sarajevo. You earned it. You suffered for it. And essentially giving Sarajevo to the Bosnian government, the Bosniaks, as they were called.
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As they then were called after Duck.
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Dayton, not before, was a symbol that they had not fought for nothing, because otherwise the lines were not that different than some of the peace agreements that were proposed. And I should just modestly correct you, there were massive diplomacy all those four years. It just was hopeless because the Serbs weren't going to agree to anyone.
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But it wasn't backed by anything. It was diplomacy backed by nothing.
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Correct.
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Backed by carrots and not sticks.
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That didn't work. Peacekeeping that didn't work because there wasn't a peace to keep. And there was massive suffering. Then when diplomacy was backed by force, with the September use of careful military power, the diplomacy worked. Milosevic realized he had to make a peace agreement, and he did. And I think the lesson was that it wasn't perfect. And if somebody's asking me 30 years later, did we construct the lines perfectly? Is Dayton working? Well, no. Dayton isn't working the way it was envisaged, where people would find a way to live together and work together and have legitimate government taking care of their people. It's too, too ethnically divided. Some of the politicians are too tied into ethnicity rather than to serving the needs of their people. But it's better than war.
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Yeah, the killing has stopped. Let me just say that my hackles are raised and My stomach is in a knot when you remind that Slobodan Milosevic had the presumptive nerve to say to President Izak Begovic, I will give you Sarajevo, as if they had captured Sarajevo. They had not. They were not. The Sarajevins fought like, unbelievable, you know, outmanned, outgunned for the entire war. They never gave up.
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And so that was one of the most powerful images, I should tell you, because you were a journalist at the time. Those of us sitting in Washington still am. I know those of us who were sitting in Washington, in New York, watching your reports, the reports of John Burns in the New York Times, bringing to life what the people of Sarajevo were going through, both the horror, the bravery and the culture and the intellectual rigor of the people there. It was a powerful moral message of why we should do this.
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B
And that's what we're getting from the people of Ukraine every single day for the last four years of this terrible, illegal war. And. And just like everybody somehow thinks that, like Putin thinks that he's gonna win, how long has it taken? Not four years of this war. 14, 15 years since he first annexed Crimea and took over bits of Donbass, he still hasn't won. Let's try, if possible, to transpose the end of the Bosnia war, because the forces at work are very, very similar to Bosnia, in my view. A much stronger for a weaker force. The stronger force, you know, miscalculated, thought it could, you know, collapse Ukraine. In days, it has been unbelievably defended Ukraine. Why? Why can't we transpose that vision and. And get them all together around a Dayton like peace table? Because right now, the Russians, unfortunately, are making some progress in the east, especially that town of Kokrovsk.
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Yeah.
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But it's grinding. But as soon as they get Pok Crofts, if they do, they're going to make a big deal about it. That's going to affect President Trump, who's suddenly going to think maybe the Russians.
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Can win all that. So to transpose the lessons of Bosnia, you have to remember that Russia is a nuclear power and that Russia is defended by a massive army. It's defended by thousands of nuclear weapons. The kind of pressure that was placed under Serbia cannot be placed on Russia. The only way to persuade Putin in the way we persuaded Milosevic is to show there is no end. This is what Trump hasn't done. He hasn't really told Putin. Clearly, we are going to arm the Ukrainians. Remember, the difference between Bosnia and Ukraine is the world is arming Most of the world, the serious world, the good world, is giving Ukraine defense weapons, giving it help. We didn't give that help to the Bosnians. They had to do it all by themselves. We put an arms embargo on the poor Bosnians here. The French, I think, just announced hundreds of airplanes are going to be sent, modern French fighter aircraft. Until Putin knows, the world is going to continue to arm Ukraine. Ukraine's showing massive capabilities in their drones. They're teaching the world a lesson in how to use drone warfare. Putin is going to have to realize that they can't win. They cannot win. And once he realizes that he can't win and losing the war is what he's really doing, if he calculates the effect on Russia, the sanctions, the loss of revenue, the effect on their people, we gotta have to get in the minds of Putin. And to do that, Donald Trump has to change the way he thinks about, about this and stop looking at it as some simple chessboard that he can just walk in and end the game. It doesn't work like that.
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B
You have to do the hard work. Yeah. He himself admitted that, having said during the campaign, this is going to be the, quote, unquote, easy one 24 hours. He, after many conversations with Putin, has said, you know, variously, that, you know, he thinks Putin's stringing him along and worse, that he thinks Putin thinks that he can win. Meantime, the poor Ukrainians for the fourth winter in a row are being hammered in their electricity, gas, water, all that infrastructure to try to break their will. It won't break their will. And so many people are being killed by these overwhelming Russian drone and missile strikes on cities and towns, and not just on the front line, as you know, but in the civilian neighborhoods. So really, I do believe that Bosnia is important. Important to remember for all these reasons. Right. Jamie, we're back. We are going to talk about the very, very significant backlash against the, you know, mass deportation and arrests of. I didn't even know what to call them because, you know, the administration says they're all criminals and this and that, but polls show that actually they are not. New York Times says that fewer than 40% have any criminal conviction. Only about 8% have been convicted of a violent crime versus what the US government says that 70% of the arrests of immigrants charged or convicted of a crime is apparently not true. So what I find incredibly important is the moment that, that the Catholic and the Christian churches around the world have now weighed in. They're basically saying, for instance, Pope Leo and the Conference of Catholic Bishops in the United States are saying to be pro life is not just about being anti abortion, it's about being pro life in all its aspects, including in treating people as human beings and humanely. So this is a big issue for the Catholic Church from Rome to weigh in on. And the Catholic Church here in the United States this Sunday and previous Sundays at the pulpits, at Mass have been talking about this because just about every one of their communities is being targeted. And the horrendous stories about people living in these communities where their neighbors are trying to protect them, where people are not going to school, not going to church, hiding in their homes, in their basements, worried, not going to work, worried that they are going to be swept and snatched off the streets. What do you think about the power of the church in this case?
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A
Well, I'm hoping that this has an impact because I guess looking at the statistics, Catholics voted for Trump more than they voted for Kamala Harris. But they've changed their views partly because of this immigration.
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B
And that showed up in this latest election.
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A
Yes. And they've changed their views because Catholics, like their pope have said believe in the treatment of people humanely. But what I think may make a bigger difference, and there's some electoral evidence for this, is that the misuse of our resources, the diversion of our resources towards this immigration enforcement. I was stunned to read New York Times investigation of the Department of Homeland Security, which now they're jokingly calling the Department of Deportation. So Homeland Security has multiple missions, Customs enforcement, immigration enforcement, protecting the president, protecting the homeland from terrorism, protecting the country from international crime, from pedophiles. And they have proven the New York Times that the diversion of resources in, in to, to achieve this objective the Catholic Church regards as immoral, has weakened our ability to crack down on crime, on pedophilia, because of resources, because they are diverting people's efforts. Something like one third of the entire workforce is diverted towards the Department of Deportation mission. And when the Democrats can show that Donald Trump's obsession with immigration and as you know, I've said, you know, I just don't understand it. This is a country which was built by immigrants, which was strengthened by immigrants. Our power is that we are an attractive force.
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B
But you should understand it because it's the politics of fear and it's a tried and tested and true, sadly, politics that actually wins at the polls until, and so you've just mentioned, you know, the, some of that backlash and diversion of resources. The Pew polling, just as people were going to vote, says that the Economy, of course, was number one by a massive margin for people in terms of their priorities. Then health care, then Supreme Court appointees, then foreign policy. Sorry, Then violent crime, and only then immigration. And I think that's something very important. And I remember even before Trump was sworn in, maybe just after. No, before he was sworn in, I was talking to the former Biden administration Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and he said to me that he predicted that ordinary Americans of no matter what stripe would revolt and be revolted and feel revulsion when their neighbors, when their co workers, when their parishioners, when their colleagues, when their school kids and school, you know, teachers, et cetera, were suddenly swept off the feet and off the streets in front of them. They would resist. And I think that's very important because the church is a big part. And remember, this is what I think is interesting. I don't know how much you're not, you know, the most religious of people, not really a religious scholar, but I kind of know a bit about the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church is so huge and global, and the Anglican Church around the world is so huge and global. A lot of Americans like to think that only their Christian church and their evangelical Christians set the tone of what Christianity should be. But it's a very small minority of global Christians. And I think this is what's showing up right now in the Catholic Church.
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A
Let me say something about that.
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B
And Pope Leo taking on. He doesn't want to do it, but he's forced to because of the Bible.
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A
Let me say something about that. I know I'm gonna say something that most people think is idealistic. I believe morality matters. Of course it does in politics. And that sometimes we get too focused on is this good or bad for the economy. Will this give more of a tax benefit to this group or that group? Their pocketbook? Morality matters to people. They don't want to think they're supporting immoral policies. Most people believe they are moral people. And I think where the church's power comes in is the moral voice of government. You know, some of the most famous scholars, I've studied some of these things. And we're going to get into this in our recommendation. You know, morality comes through in religion, it comes through in government. It comes through in our daily lives. And it's the immorality of this behavior to not treat people like human beings, to the stories of people getting sent to back to Venezuelans, to an El Salvador prison where they're tortured and raped. It's monstrous. Human Rights Watch we do not need to do this. We need to defend our borders. And the Democrats made mistakes in being perceived as for an open border and crazy stuff like that, in not using the power of government to crack down as appropriate. But to take this to the other extreme, which is what is happening now, I think breaks a sort of moral threshold. And I think also church is crucial in helping people to understand and partly.
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B
Because a majority of their constituents are at risk, because these are many of them Catholic Latin Americans often. So it's quite something. And just to close this out, it's remarkable. Some of the far right groups in the rest of the world, like in the UK and Europe and all the rest, are considering similar visa bans, even. Actually, not even far right. The current Labour government in the UK is considering a visa ban a la.
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A
Sort of Trump reducing their support for asylum seekers and things like. Like that.
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B
And reform, which is more far right, which is ahead in the polls, is also considering a Trump style asylum.
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A
Immigration works when it's misrepresented, when it's made seem like some party wants to allow asylum seekers to come in. Remember, the Brexit vote only happened because at that time there was a massive wave of refugees, refugees sweeping into Europe because of the Syria crisis and many other crises in Africa, landing on the shores of Italy and Greece. And the Brexit supporters made it seem like the UK was going to be invaded by immigrants.
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B
Then campaigner Boris Johnson, then he was Prime Minister and that worked. 60 million Turks, I swear to God, all of Turkey was going to come.
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To it was nonsense. But people do get scared.
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B
They do get scared.
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A
Where the Catholic Church really helps is by showing that you can protect your borders, you can be fair in the treatment, distinguishing between citizens and immigrants, which we should do, but not be immoral, not waste our resources. And this is where I think it's going to hurt Trump. If the New York Times story plays out politically, where we can show the Democrats that we're weakening our national security, we're weakening our ability to fight terrorism, to fight international crime, to put in prison pedophiles. I mean, whatever.
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B
Keep saying pedophiles. I feel like you want to say.
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A
Epstein, I didn't say that.
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Apropos of absolutely nothing but entering the United States, which I just did, you know, sailed through, thank God, But a little bit concerned that the Secretary of State has now put cancer, diabetes and something else on the list of reasons that immigration affects obesity. I think obesity can deny us visas. Right, we're back and we're going to have our recommendations. I'm going to go first. My recommendation this week is the phenomenal, enduring Slow Horses. I love it.
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A
I'm still only on season three.
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B
Oh, my goodness. It is so good about. I mean, Gary Oldman is just so phenomenal in Slow Horses. Kristen Scott Thomas. And it's just so English, but it's translated all over and people just love it. It's about, you know, a. A sort of a rogue MI5 domestic security group that have been put out to pasture and yet seem to keep solving all the mysteries.
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A
It's a great. All right, here's mine. It's a bit different. I know that some of these books that I read are not easily, you know, widely read, but I need to recognize.
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B
Because you're such an intellectual.
- [34:21]
A
No, it's because I like to read.
- [34:23]
B
It's because you've got a lot of time to read.
- [34:25]
A
Yeah, I just make time. Make time. So Immanuel Kant.
- [34:30]
B
Yes.
- [34:31]
A
A revolution in thinking. It's a new sort of intellectual, actual biography of Immanuel Kant. And the reason I.
- [34:38]
B
The philosopher.
- [34:39]
A
The philosopher lived in Konigsberg his whole life. Brilliant man. But what I love about him is he was ultimately an optimist. He believed that despite all the troubles, despite all the difficulties, morality and politics will win out. He famously wrote in a piece called Perpetual Peace. And this was, you know, well, this was during the French Revolution time. So, you know, 1789, he talked about a world of democracies which was essentially operating under a United nations like system. He predicted the world. We live in, nation states, operating under law and living in perpetual peace. Now, obviously, we don't have perpetual peace, but what he would say to that is, we move in that direction, the world does get better slowly. Two steps forward, one step back. We're in a one step back time right now, no question about it. But the ideas behind his thinking talk about the morality of decisions, that ultimately people progress and they understand the world better. Their children understand the world better. And they do. And I know for our children it's very hard to see light at the end of the tunnel with climate change and AI and all of those things. But I do believe that the world does get better. What happens is our expectations change and we somehow pocket all the progress and then think it isn't better, but we.
- [36:11]
B
Have to fight for it to keep staying, we have to fight.
- [36:14]
A
And he shows how to think about life in a way where you don't pocket the progress, where you recognize the progress, but then try to make more.
- [36:23]
B
So I take your point and I believe always in the morality of public policy. Some people might call me self righteous on this on on this count. But what I would like to say is you said Immanuel Kant. Just want to show everybody. Can you see EK there? That is Emmanuel Khan. I don't know whether this designer took Immanuel Kant as expression or inspiration, but those are my sunglasses. Emmanuel Kahn. That's it.
- [36:55]
A
We can say bye.
- [36:56]
B
We can say bye from New York City. Goodbye from New York City, the two of us. But I just have to say goodbye properly. So thank you for listening. Make sure you follow our feed so that you never miss an episode. And remember you can watch every episode of as well. You can watch it, not just listen on YouTube. Just search for Christiana Manpur presents the x files on YouTube and subscribe to our channel. You can also listen for free on Global Player, download it from the App Store or go to globalplayer.com and we'll see you of course on Thursday for our bonus Q and A episode where we answer your questions. Keep them coming. We do love hearing from you. It's another excuse for us to just go on. Email us at amanpoolpod@global.com or find us on social media @amanpool pod.
- [37:39]
A
So bye bye goodbye from New York City. Again, This has been a Global Player original production.