The Liberal Case for American Power

Summary

Podcast Summary: Conversations with Coleman – "The Liberal Case for American Power"

Host: Coleman Hughes
Guest: Shadi Hamid, Washington Post columnist and author of The Case for American Power
Date: April 13, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features Shadi Hamid discussing his controversial thesis that American dominance, including the use of both hard and soft power, is ultimately beneficial for the world. Coleman and Shadi explore the nuances behind advocating for U.S. dominance from a liberal, progressive perspective while grappling with the complex history and recent failures of American foreign policy. Key topics include military interventions, the balance between morality and self-interest, perceptions of American power, and the roles of international organizations.

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Origins of Shadi’s Argument for American Power

[02:03]

• Shadi describes his evolution from anti-war protestor and Chomsky reader to making “the liberal case for American power.”
• He acknowledges deep reservations about American foreign policy but argues for a nuanced view: while U.S. power causes harm, it can also be used for good and uniquely enables change.
• Notable quote:

  “Power is the only way you can get the things that you want.” – Shadi Hamid [03:02]

• He appeals to left-of-center critics, progressives, and marginalized groups to reconsider U.S. power as a tool for positive global outcomes, referencing interventions that saved Kuwait, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
• Emphasizes American-led creation of post-WWII international institutions; credits U.S. power for European recovery.

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Unipolar vs. Multipolar World & Critique of U.S. Skepticism

[05:39]

• Coleman frames the philosophy as akin to the "Pax Americana"—the idea that a global monopoly on force (by the U.S.) creates conditions for relative peace, likening the world order to domestic policing.
• Shadi rejects the notion that a multipolar world or toothless international bodies (like the UN) offer a better alternative.

  "Someone is going to wield power. And if it's not America, it will be others." – Coleman Hughes [06:12]

• Refers to Cold War battlefield death statistics: average annual deaths dropped from 182,000 (Cold War era) to ~50,000 per year post-Cold War (until 2021), arguing U.S. dominance led to a more peaceful period.
• Critiques “oikaphobia”—the left's aversion to their own nation—supported by declining Democratic pride in America (Gallup poll).

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American Pride, Left vs. Right, and National Identity

[10:40]

• Coleman observes that Democrats’ pride in America is volatile, shifting with who holds the presidency, while Republican pride is steady.

  “Republicans basically are proud to be American no matter who's in office, including people that they hate.” – Coleman Hughes [11:18]

• Shadi proposes that progressives always chase improvement, leading to continual dissatisfaction; conservatives maintain pride in continuity.
• Shadi: “We should separate the sin from the sinner. America transcends our actions and whoever is in power at a particular moment.” [12:55]

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China, Authoritarianism, and the Nature of Threats

[16:23]

• Coleman asks whether China’s ambitions are less aggressive than the Soviets’. Shadi argues Chinese power still threatens democracy globally, citing their preference for authoritarian regimes—especially evidenced in their relationship with Taiwan and influence operations in Africa.
• The dichotomy is reframed: it’s not simply ideology but about the spread of authoritarianism versus democracy.

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Middle Eastern Monarchies, Democracy, and Oil

[19:40]

• Coleman notes that Middle Eastern monarchies show more stability than regional democracies.
• Shadi argues wealth from oil explains much of this and warns that dictatorships without economic windfalls (Libya, Syria, Egypt, Yemen) are unstable.

  “Dictatorships are only good as long as the leaders are wise and judicious. Once they start making mistakes, there's no mechanism for self-correction.” – Shadi Hamid [21:21]

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Iraq War: Tradeoffs of Military Intervention

[22:22]

• Coleman proposes the devil’s advocate: Was the Iraq War worth it, given that Iraq is now (however fragile) a democracy?
• Shadi: Despite improvements, the enormous loss of life and destruction are impossible to justify. Each intervention must meet feasibility and proportionality tests.
• Notable quote:

  “We can't go around toppling every regime through military force. That would just lead—like, then we would just be invading everywhere.” – Shadi Hamid [25:51]

• Algorithm for intervention: Is the regime brutal to its people? Does it destabilize the region? Is success actually likely? (Coleman [26:35])
• Shadi notes even “experts” often misjudge likelihood of success, referencing Iraq and Iran as cases of overconfidence.

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Military Interventions: Kosovo, Libya, Afghanistan

[28:49], [45:43]

• Shadi supports limited, clear-purpose interventions like Kosovo and Libya (2011), where mass killings could be averted through constrained force, but opposes open-ended, broad interventions.
• On Afghanistan: Withdrawal was a mistake, but so was an overambitious nation-building project. He draws a line between Korea-like static troop deployments and active combat police actions.

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American-Israeli Relationship and the Gaza War

[32:11]

• Coleman makes a "liberal pro-power" case for U.S. support of Israel, citing leverage and technological/joint interests.
• Shadi agrees leverage is valuable, but criticizes the U.S. for not using it to restrain Israel's conduct in Gaza, which undermines U.S. moral leadership.
• "If this is what restraint looks like, then that's not really a strong case for restraint." – Shadi Hamid [38:02]
• Argues American power must be constrained by morality, not just by international bodies, but through genuine pursuit of human rights.

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Global Perceptions, Soft Power, and Moral Leadership

[41:06]

• Coleman: Global backlash is inevitable even for justified interventions; good deeds go unnoticed, mistakes are never forgotten.
• Shadi: It’s possible to build broader coalitions (as in Gulf War I), but the U.S. must match power with moral justification.

  “Power unconstrained is dangerous. Power has to be constrained by something.” – Shadi Hamid [34:00]

• Soft power is essential. If America loses its reputation as a moral actor, allies and neutrals will turn to alternatives like China.

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Regime Change: When Does It Make Sense?

[53:10]

• On Cuba: While intervention might seem attractive, Shadi is skeptical—regime change too often relies on “let’s find out” optimism without clear plans for post-regime stability.

• “I would like us to take a breather on regime change. I think we've been doing a lot of it lately.” – Shadi Hamid [58:21]

• Stresses the need for trust in leadership before supporting interventions, and skepticism toward quick, convenient justifications.

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The United Nations and International Law

[68:32]

• Shadi views the UN as aspirational and norm-setting, not practically enforceable without real power behind it.
• He warns against dismissing international law, but also cautions against believing global institutions can meaningfully constrain sovereign actors, especially without enforcement capacity.

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"America First," Moral Foreign Policy, and Realism

[70:29]

• Coleman raises the issue of American voters' skepticism about moral interventions and makes a pragmatic case for self-interest framing.
• Shadi: Rejects America First’s transactionalism, but recognizes the need to sometimes appeal to both moral leadership and self-interest to gain public support.

  “If we could find a Venn diagram of America first self-interest and humanitarian intervention and...appeals to both constituencies, I think that's a very difficult thing to do effectively.” – Shadi Hamid [75:01]

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Notable Quotes & Insights

• “As you get older, hopefully you start to see things in a more nuanced way.” – Shadi Hamid [04:33]
• “Power unconstrained is dangerous. Power has to be constrained by something.” – Shadi Hamid [34:00]
• “We can't go around toppling every regime through military force. That would just lead—like, then we would just be invading everywhere.” – Shadi Hamid [25:51]
• “If we threaten a suspension of military aid, it will actually persuade the Israelis to be more aligned with where we are.” – Shadi Hamid [67:03]

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Key Timestamps

• 02:03 – Shadi’s political evolution and nuanced case for U.S. power
• 05:39 – The necessity of a global “monopoly on force”
• 10:40 – American pride and partisan differences
• 16:23 – China, Soviet Union, and global authoritarianism
• 22:22 – Was the Iraq War justified? Cost-benefit analysis
• 32:11 – U.S.-Israel relationship, leverage, and the Gaza War
• 45:43 – Afghanistan: withdrawal and nation-building debates
• 53:10 – Regime change skepticism (Cuba, Iran)
• 68:32 – The United Nations’ practical value
• 70:29 – American voters, morality, and foreign policy framing

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Overall Tone & Takeaways

The conversation is thoughtful, occasionally skeptical, and deeply self-critical—especially on the left. Shadi provides a candid, torn account of his moral and pragmatic wrestling with American power, arguing for its responsible use amid justified skepticism and historical baggage. Both speakers seek nuance, resisting easy ideological answers and foregrounding the unpredictability and tragedy that often accompany U.S. interventions abroad.

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For Listeners

If you’re interested in the moral and practical dilemmas of U.S. foreign policy—beyond easy “anti-imperialism” or jingoism—this episode offers a deep and well-argued inside look. For further exploration, Shadi’s book, The Case for American Power, is strongly recommended.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Shadi Hamid. Shadi is an author and columnist for the Washington Post. He used to be affiliated with the Atlantic and Brookings. His books include Islamic Exceptionalism, the Problem of Democracy, and the Case for American Power, which is what we're talking about today. In this episode, we discuss whether the war in Iraq was justified. We talk about why American hard and soft power is good for the world. We talk about the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iran, the America first movement, whether the United nations is a force for good or for ill, and much more. So without further ado, Shadi Hamid, Shadi Hamid, thanks so much for coming on the show.

[B]

Hi Coleman, thanks for having me.

[A]

So I guess it's been a. I think I did. I had you on a couple years ago for your last book and your new book is is really good. I really recommend people read it. The Case for American Power it's called. It fills a very interesting hole in the discourse on foreign policy because you're making a full throated argument for American power, not just American power, but as you say in the book, American dominance on the global stage. But you're making it in full view of a lot of earnest critiques you have of American foreign policy, including our support for Israel and a lot of so in other words, you share a lot of the reservations of critics of American foreign policy, but you ultimately arguing for a thesis that most critics of American foreign policy would find super uncomfortable, which is that American dominance is a good thing. So tell me a little bit how you came to that position and how you thread that needle intellectually.

[B]

Yeah, thank you. Great question. So I come at this from the left side of the spectrum. I kind of cut my chops politically during the anti Iraq war movement. I was going to protests, I was organizing die inside, doing that sort of thing. Reading Noam Chomsky so very much, I kind of was raised in this milieu of anti American sentiment, if we can call it that, or maybe that's not fair. But to say that me and my fellow comrades at this time, we were blaming America first. America was this font of evil and destruction. And I think over time I just started to come to various conclusions. Naturally, first of all, that American power wasn't intrinsically bad. It can be used for bad things, of course, as we've seen time and time again, but it can also be used for good. And I think there was also this sense that I didn't want to be on the outside looking in. I didn't Want to be powerless. I felt very powerless during the Iraq war because we were organizing all these protests. Millions of people across the globe were taking to the streets, but we couldn't stop the war. So I think there was a lesson there too, in that if you want to change what America does, you have to be comfortable with power. Power is the only way you can get the things that you want. And I've been uncomfortable seeing folks on the left, when you bring up power, when you bring up words like dominance, they feel, they feel very uncomfortable. They can't quite grasp it. And this book is my effort to try to make the case to my fellow left of center friends and colleagues or even folks who are on the far left, young people, progressives, Arabs and Muslims who are very skeptical about America now because of the Gaza war, and to say, hey, it doesn't always have to be this way, and America has at times been a force for good. We can look at the 1990s, for example. We were the only power that could have saved Kuwait from the Iraqi invasion and occupation, or the fact that we intervened to save Bosnians during the Bosnian genocide or to save Kosovars from ethnic cleansing in the late 1990s. So the record isn't entirely bad. And there's also another. Any number of other examples. We provided the security umbrella for Europe post World War II to rebuild itself. The international institutions that we take for granted now were created because of America's superpower status after World War II. So I think the picture is more nuanced and I think that as you get older, hopefully you start to see things in a more nuanced way. So in this book, I wanted to kind of trace my evolution over time. But all of that is to say that I'm not even sure my argument is full throated, because as you said, I do have a lot of reservations still. And in light of what's happened in recent months with the, with the, the war that we're waging in Iran, it's a hard, it's a hard time to make my argument. I feel like I'm facing an uphill battle and sometimes I even doubt myself. Like, wait, is American power actually the way that I describe it? Because we're using American power for awful things that I disagree with. But we can sort of unpack that, I suppose.

[A]

Yeah. So I. Let's go to the core of, of the philosophy you're arguing for, because to me it seems like the bedrock of, of your argument relates to the Pax Americana concept, or you could even broaden it just the notion that, that essentially a monopoly on the use of force is what creates the conditions for peace within that monopoly. Right. And this is a familiar concept at the government level, like the fact that there's one police force in America that you can expect to police crime and that it has overwhelming monopoly on the use of force, that any rebellion would be quashed. That creates a disincentive from violence between states, between, even between individuals. Right. The notion that you're probably going to go to jail and if you try to waco it, you're going to lose to the FBI. Right. So. And you know, in places that don't have a monopoly on, on violence, people go to their local tribal leader, their local gang, and they, that void gets filled with, with, with other power centers. And so it seems like at the core of your philosophy is that there is going, someone is going to wield power. Right. And if it's not America, it will be others. And a lot of people doubt that. I think. I, I think a lot of people, you know, this came up in, in my debate with Dave Smith. What, what is the opposite philosophy say? Right. What, what's the alternative view? That of world peace. That we can have world peace mainly through conversation and through international bodies that may technically be toothless, but in practice actually work. The liberal world order. Can you build up for me the philosophy that, that you're implicitly critiquing and then explain to me why it doesn't work?

[B]

Yeah, so I think the, the premise is that dialogue, conversation, talking to our enemies, that if we just continue doing that, that that will create a better, safer, more prosperous world. But I think it goes well beyond that. It's also this idea that a multipolar world would be better, that if China was our equal, China would actually constrain American power in a productive way. That there would be this kind of natural balance. And I think that's just factually wrong from a number of standpoints. I mean, first of all, we can look at what happened when we had a balance of powers during the Cold War. Not to say that the Soviet Union was exactly equal to us. I think the strength of the Soviet Union was overhyped considerably. But at the time it was thought that we were more or less equals. During that time in the Cold War, the average number of battlefield Deaths annually was 182,000. Once the Cold War ended and America was supreme and there was no competing power, the number of average battlefield deaths annually dropped down to about 50,000 until 2021. Basically until the Ukraine war, we had this relative period of obviously the Rock war still happened, but in terms of battlefield deaths, they still went down significantly during that period when America was dominant. So I think that's one reply that I would offer. Also, I think that China is a fundamentally nefarious actor in the world. So this idea that China can be a positive balance, I think is just based on a lot of wishful thinking. And I think it's also based on this sense of this odd thing that I sometimes see on the left, that we like other countries more than we like ourselves. We think that China would be a better world actor than we would be. And in my book, I talk about something called oikaphobia, which is the reverse of xenophobia. Xenophobia is the fear of what is foreign, the fear of what is other. Oikaphobia is the fear of what is home, the fear of what is familiar. And I think a lot of folks on the left don't feel proud to be American. And I'm not just making that up. The polling shows this clearly. The recent Gallup poll that showed that in 2004, over 80, 85% of Democrats were either very or extremely proud to be American. That number has. That number dropped down to only 36% in 2025. That's remarkable. Only 36% of Democrats are extremely or very proud to be American. So I think what that leads to is we. We give other countries and other powers the benefit of the doubt that we don't give ourselves.

[A]

Yeah, I remember when I looked at that Gallup poll, what struck me as even more interesting than the fact that Democrats that pride in America got so low was that if you zoom out and look at the past several decades, pride for Democrat varies according to who is in office. When Republicans take office, Democrats say they are not proud to be American. When Democrats take office, they're. They're proud again. Right. And they're, They're. Their pride levels are kind of similar to Republicans, but Republicans barely vary. Republicans basically are proud to be American no matter who's in office, including people that they hate. And that's a very like. I'm not exactly sure how I explain that or model that. Is it like Republicans are more likely to equate America with the group of people. And so you have pride in your people no matter what, no matter who's president. And Democrats are more likely to equate America with the governing regime or something like that. And so they don't really actually have pride as a nation or as like a group of people, they don't. That's not really what they see America as. I don't know. How do you model that?

[B]

I think part of it is that conservatives want to preserve the status quo. So for them, they want America to be the way that it was and in some sense still is. And they can be proud of that. Regardless where I think Democrats, because they're progressives, they always want America to be better than it actually is. That's why they're progressives. They want progress constantly. We're always moving towards something better. And when you're a progressive in that way, you're almost always going to be unhappy because the reality of America will never meet your expectations. I think that's a particularly progressive thing. And honestly, some of it's good. It's good to want your country to be better. It's good to be unhappy with the way things are. If you want change to happen. Right. That's how change happens. Historically, you have to be kind of discontent. So I think that's part of it. I think also we let ourselves. And I still, you know, I count myself as a progressive, even though I have critiques of what, especially social progressivism has become. I've generally been very critical of woke, for example, and that's actually how we first got to know each other at a conference that was heterodox in that sense, and criticizing the kind of woke turn in American politics when that was going on. But I think for me, I'm very anti Trump, so there's a risk that even I can fall into this. I see Trump as destroying so much of what I hold dear that I'm almost tempted sometimes to say, actually, maybe I'm not as proud of America as I once thought. Do I really want to be making this argument about American power? I have these doubts. So even I fall, I have to kind of resist that temptation and say something quite different. That even though Trump is in power and was voted in by a plurality of Americans, a majority of Americans, that that doesn't mean. That doesn't necessarily mean that America is tainted. And I think we have to separate between who is governing and what we actually feel about our country. Is it easy to do that? No, not necessarily. But that's part of what I want this book to do, is to say, hey, this is not just a case for American power. It's a case for loving America, regardless of the bad things that it does abroad. And I have a whole chapter in the book where I catalog America's sins when we supported right Wing dictatorships during the Cold War, the interventions that went wrong, including, of course, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War. We have a lot to not be proud of, but we should separate the sin from the sinner. If I can use that kind of analogy. We are not necessarily what we do. America transcends our actions and America transcends whoever is in power at a particular moment. So we can't let Donald Trump be the one who says this is what America is. We have to say that America is beyond that.

[A]

Okay, I want to go back to your point about the unipolar world versus the bipolar world. You argue that we were SAFER Starting in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell, battle deaths lowered. And that's a reason why we shouldn't expect a. A bipolar world with China to be more safe than the unip. Unipolar world. So a devil's advocate argument on the other side. What if the Soviet Union, because of its ideology of worldwide Marxism, was by definition more aggressive, more expansionist, and that's the reason why the bipolar moment of the Cold War was conflict generated, generative. Whereas what if China is really much, just much more interested in. In authoritarianism at home, doesn't have a philosophy of worldwide dominance or exporting its ideology to the world, and so it is possible for it to grow powerful? Well, like, you know, China hasn't really been to war since it's, I think, since its war with Vietnam in like the 80s or whatever. So maybe it's just a less aggressive power.

[B]

Look, we won't know for sure. I mean, the only way to know this for sure is by testing the proposition, and I hope we won't get to that point. But I think that what we see from China thus far is a preference for authoritarian regimes. China does not want to see democracies, and it's near abroad. That's one reason they find Taiwan's very presence so threatening. China is a totalitarian state. It can. It. It wants to control every aspect of its people's lives. I'm not someone who believes that you can separate the domestic from the foreign. If you're totalitarian at home, that's going to have effects on your foreign policy. And we see China aggressively trying to make inroads in various parts of the world, including in Africa. Now, do they want to export a specifically Chinese Communist Party model? Not necessarily. But do they want to be dominant? So in that sense, they are different than the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was much more ideological. They wanted to see fellow Marxist regimes, as you pointed out. I think What China wants to see is pro China regimes everywhere in the world. They want as many people and as many countries to be pro China. And that's obviously going to lead to conflict since there's US, America, that wants more countries in the world and more peoples in the world to be pro American. So that's the way that I would characterize the conflict. It's not narrowly ideological in the sense of Marxism versus capitalism or communism versus democracy, but I do think there is something, something that we can describe as a struggle between authoritarianism and democracy that I think is a fair, a fair thing to argue. And that's actually one thing that I liked about the Biden administration, as critical as I was of it on a, on a variety of other topics. They did kind of use this framing of authoritarian versus democratic, and I think that's a useful prism to look at the world in. And Russia is another example of this. Not particularly ideological, but they are quite authoritarian and they want to see other countries be authoritarian. That's one of the reasons they found Ukraine to be such a threat. Not because Ukraine had a particular ideology, but because Ukraine was democratic.

[A]

Okay, so here, here's, here's one question on that point. So you like that Biden frame thing as, framed things in terms of democracies versus authoritarian states? Sure. But then look at the Middle East. Doesn't it look like most of the states that are functioning in terms of providing service to its citizens, stability at home, lack of major civil conflict, civil unrest, aren't. Most of them aren't. The monarchies overall scored better on those elements than the democracies. And I saw something from the World bank in 2025. It's on its list of fragile or potentially unstable countries in the Arab world, at least those were largely, they were largely the republics or the democracies. And the monarchies overall scored, scored much better.

[B]

So I think that the monarchies have to be taken with an asterisk because they tend to be oil rich and they're extremely rich. They have some of the highest per capita GDP numbers in the world. So I think they benefit from a kind of economic success. And I mean, success might not be the right word because it's not like they've done this on their own own. They just happen to have natural resources that help them out a lot. So I think countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE fall into that bracket. Bahrain as well, although Bahrain has not been particularly stable and has seen civil conflict during the Arab Spring, for example. But if we look at dictatorships that don't that are not oil rich in the Middle east over the past several decades, whether it's Libya, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, all of them have faced civil conflict to one degree or another. So I think the variable that we have to look at here is oil rich versus not. And I'm very skeptical that dictatorships, even in good scenarios, are sustainable in the long run because they don't enjoy the consent of the governed, or at least we don't know if they enjoy the consent of the governed because they don't hold elections. And without elections and without domestic polling, you don't really know what your own people think. And this is the same argument that I would make for China. A lot of people say, well, the Chinese people are happy with the Chinese government because it delivers effective governance. But the problem with dictatorships is that they're only good as long as the leaders are wise and judicious. Once the leaders start making mistakes, there's no mechanism for self correction. That's only something democracies have. So this is one reason why I've generally been a very outspoken advocate for promoting democracy in the Middle East. Democratization can lead to instability in the short term, but in the medium to long term, I think it's a better bet because it allows these countries to rest on a more stable foundation, which is that the people have a say in their own affairs. If you suppress people, sooner or later they're going to react against that. I think that's just a story of human nature and the story of human progress over time. People want to have a say in their own affairs. They want to be able to vote for their own representatives. That doesn't mean that I'm calling for Saudi Arabia to become democratic overnight. But I do think that we should put pressure on Saudi Arabia to be more respectful of human rights, for example.

[A]

Okay, so given that here's a devil's advocate case for the war in Iraq, based on your values, you value American power, you value democracy in the Middle East. Even if it, as per your last book, even if the results of that democracy, because of the religiosity of the Middle east yields much more religious governments than America and the west are comfortable with the war in Iraq. I mean, the, let's, let's call it the wars in Iraq, right? Not just the 2003 invasion and its aftermath, but the, you know, getting ISIS out of Iraq and so, so forth. It took 20 years. But Iraq is a democracy, right? It's a fragile one. But you can visit Iraq, right? You can visit Iraq and they have, they have elections and they're largely, the elections are like mostly legitimate. And so if we had not gone into Iraq, I mean, who knows how long Saddam Hussein would have lived? Who knows a, if the Arab Spring would have happened or if the butterfly effect of that somehow was related to the Arab Spring. If the Arab Spring did happen, who knows how what would have happened under Saddam. But you know, it's probably unlikely that it would be a democracy. So is there some case to be made that in the very long run the, the 20 year war in Iraq, if you want to call it that, like the 15 year wars in Iraq was, was a good thing?

[B]

That's a very good question. I like that. So look, I think that Iraq is better off now than it, than it was under Saddam Hussein. There's, there's just no doubt about that. As you point out, Iraq is a flawed and fragile democracy, but it is democratic at least, certainly more democratic than most of the other countries in the region. They hold elections, as you noted, which are mostly legitimate. But considering the scale of destruction and the lives lost during the war, or the wars, if you will, whether it's the own, whether it's our own treasure that we expended or the fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died as a result of the wars, I think that it's very hard to justify getting to a certain outcome if hundreds of thousands of people are killed in the process. There has to be. And I don't think, and this is the same argument that I would make about the Iran war today. In theory, I'm sympathetic to the case that Iranians should be free from a murderous regime and that they should be able to live in a free, at least somewhat more democratic Iran. But if I don't see an actual path to getting there, if the means aren't matched with the ends, and if it's going to take 20 years or however long it might take if we're going to see civil war results because we haven't planned and we don't really have a vision for the day after, I just think that I, I can't personally justify that, that level of loss of life and destruction just to get to a better end point. Now, if there are situations where we feel we can get to that end point, such as during Kosovo or Bosnia, as fairly limited interventions, mostly done through air power, when there was a clear opposition that was able to fight against the regime and we were able to basically support them through air power, I think that there, there's a much stronger justification. So I think it's a case by case analysis. But we can't go around toppling every regime through military force. That would just lead. Like, then we would just be invading everywhere. So I think there just has to be a much more judicious approach to planning and thinking. Is this war actually feasible?

[A]

Yeah. So let me give you my, my mental algorithm for when regime change can make sense versus versus when it, when it doesn't. One, is, is this regime terrible to its own people? So, you know, Saddam obviously checked that box. Iran checks that box. Two, I think maybe even more important is it destabilizing its region and destabilizing the world, which certainly Iran checks with all of its proxies throughout the Middle east, which are really unnecessary for its security, like arming Hezbollah and the Houthis are not, at least in my view, necessary for Iran's national security, though it is necessary for its ideological project of bringing about the destruction of, of Israel and America and regional hegemony over the Sunni centers of power. And then three, is success actually likely? And that's the one that I have no competence to judge because I'm not a military expert and I'm not on the ground. But if you look at the difference, for instance, between the Korean War and the Vietnam War, there was no difference in the philosophy of the war. They were both wars of Cold War containment. But the difference is that success was likelier in the one case and proved impossible in the other. And that's why, really, that's the crux of why most, I think most thinkers on American foreign policy would remember Korea as a worthwhile intervention and Vietnam as a disaster. But what that emphasizes is the importance of the actual nitty gritty military realities that determine likelihood of success, which is the thing that us talking heads, you know, sitting comfortably in America are the least competent judges of. Which is why I'm, I'm so often reserving judgment on military interventions, because likelihood of success is just a huge variable.

[B]

Military experts themselves don't have great records on this. I mean, so let's just take, for example, Bush administration. Well, I shouldn't say that they were military experts. This is the, this is actually, I think one of the issues that when you have civilian control of the military, it's not really the military giving totally independent viewpoints that are purely analytic, analytical. They're, they're, they're a part of a broader administration that has political aims. But one could have said at the time of the Iraq war that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were military Experts, they had in. They were. They were engaged in previous conflicts. They had served a lot of time in government. They were seen as kind of steady hands with a long pedigree over various administrations, but they made major miscalculations regardless. And I think this is where we have to be. We have to judge the civilian leadership, and we have to ask ourselves, do we think, are we sure these people are competent? And even if they seem like they're competent, it's very difficult to execute a war like Iraq in a country that we didn't really understand all that well. And I would say that goes for Iran today. We assumed that Iranians would rise up and take up arms and there would be some kind of military resistance internally to the regime that didn't end up happening. But I'm not a military expert, and I could have told you that from day one. I think a lot of us who are skeptical of the war and opposed to it would have raised all of these objections. I think those of us who are students protesting against the Iraq war, I think a lot of us intuitively sensed this is a stupid war that doesn't have a clear vision, even though we were students. But the one thing I definitely. I think you bring up a really good point that I want to just highlight, though, which is one condition for military intervention is if a regime is killing its own citizens, if there's a ongoing mass killing, then we should at least consider military intervention. So I'm open to having that discussion. In Iraq in 2003, there wasn't actually a mass killing or genocide going on. There had been previous mass killings. But this is one reason I was supportive of the Libya intervention in 2000, because at that moment in March 2011, mass killings were ongoing and we actually had the capability to stop them. So I think in that kind of narrow case, I was willing to say, hey, this intervention is justified. I should say that I'm one of the few people left who are willing to actually defend the Libya intervention. I'm in very much minority company there.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So for. For. Yeah. So I'm willing. I'm definitely open to the argument. I think we should consider the argument. But in the case of Iran, I think the rubric that you just laid out, it fit the first two conditions. But I think to a lot of us, it didn't. It very clearly did not meet the third condition, which is likelihood of success. And I think that even if we're not military experts, we have a right to weigh in as American citizens and have our viewers based on the available information that we have.

[A]

Okay, so here's another devil's advocate case based on your principles. Devil's advocate case for America supporting Israel. So you're in favor of American power, American dominance across the globe. De facto. The way we do that is by supporting allies. Sometimes that, that looks like having a military base in your country. We have 30,000 troops in South Korea. All of that has an expense. You know, we lose $4 billion deploying those troops in Korea every year. But that's how we project power. We do the same in Europe. We have, you know, depending how you count, 130 to 700 military bases slash sites outside the 50 states. One thing that helps us do is project power, obviously. Another thing it helps us do is that it gives us leverage over those countries that we help. Right. In the case of Israel, that looks like $4 billion of military aid every year. But not only does that help us project power, we have weapons stockpiles in Israel that wouldn't be there otherwise. We benefit from their high tech military defense. And not only that, we can prevent them from giving their best military technology to China. For instance, the Israelis used to sell weapons to China and we stopped it in 2005, and they haven't sold weapons to China since. So let's like put the, put the Gaza war to the side. We can talk about that in a second. But just the default aid we give to Israel. Based on your own value of American power, isn't this a good thing for American power?

[B]

A big argument though, that I, that I come back to in the book repeatedly is that power unconstrained is dangerous. Power has to be constrained by something. Now the question is, what is that something? Some people say that American power should be constrained by the UN or some kind of world government. I don't think that's likely. So where I fall on this is that American power has to be constrained by our own sense of morality. Power and morality have to be matched together. And if you have power without morality, then you have a lot of excess, you have damage, you have destruction. I mean, I think it's hard to put the Gaza war to the side, but that's what I would come to in a second is the Gaza war is to me an example of not using our power to stop Israel, to use our leverage. Exactly. I agree with you 100%. Having leverage over Israel and other allies is important. But if we can't get them to stop prosecuting a war that many of us think is destructive and disregards civilian life, then what's the point of the relationship if Israel doesn't listen to us? If Israel just goes and does whatever it feels like, if it drags us, And I know you had this debate with Glenn on whether Israel can be blamed for dragging us into the Iran war. I think Israel did play a role. I think it influenced our decision making to some extent. I do think that, I mean, Rubio and others made this very clear that Israel was going to attack Iran anyway. So we thought, hey, if they're going to do it regardless, should we get in on it and have a united front? And that decision was made with that in mind. So I think that I would like to see us using our leverage with Israel and pressuring them to not kill as many civilians. I'm someone who said at the start of the Gaza war that Israel of course had a right to defend itself. Hamas engaged in a horrific act of terrorism that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians. Of course Israel should do something in response, but that doesn't mean that doing anything it wants in the name of that war is justified. There's always a conversation we can have about how to conduct a war in the most humane way possible and not to extend it for two years. So I, and I say this in the first chapter of the book. I was actually rereading this part this morning where I actually say that I don't think we should abandon Israel. I think we should maintain our leverage with Israel. But I think we should also say that friends sometimes diverge and sometimes a friend needs to hear some tough talk.

[A]

Isn't it the case though that Biden did use leverage to change the behavior of like the way that they would have fought the war is not the same because of things Biden made them do. Right. He said, don't go into Rafah. They would have gone into Rafah immediately if Biden hadn't said that.

[B]

For instance, they still did go into Rafah.

[A]

Right. But they, there was a ten day pause. All there. There were many points in the war where Biden said, hey, you're, you guys want to zig? I'm asking you to zag. And they zagged. Within the still context of prosecuting the war and on balance, Biden's goals there, his domestic audience, his domestic home pressure was to restrain Israel to allow for, in the balance between war aims and civilian humanitarian pauses was to on the margin, pull Israel in, in the direction of humanitarian pauses. Right. And so like would we have that leverage if we weren't supporting them? How, how would they fight if they had to Fight, like, purely on their own.

[B]

So if this is what restraint looks like, if this is what a restrained Israel looks like, then that's not really a strong case for restraint. I mean, that I think that Israel could have conducted the war and even in an even more destructive way, it's possible. I don't know what the counterfactual is, but, I mean, my argument has been that we should have used our leverage more aggressively, that if we felt that our interests were diverging from Israel's, that we should actually suspend military, military provisions to Israel. And that's something Israel needed to prosecute the war. We're the chief military patron. We never were willing. There was like one symbolic pause in a particular weapon shipment, but that's the most that Biden was willing to do. If we had threatened a full suspension of military assistance, I do think that it's possible that Israel would have stopped the war earlier and we could have saved tens of thousands of Palestinian lives. We weren't willing to use that leverage. And this is the same argument. It's not an argument I just make for Israel. I make it for Egypt and Saudi Arabia, their allies. Unfortunately, they're sometimes bad allies. We give them military support and we sell them billions of dollars of weapons. We should say to them, hey, Saudi Arabia, if you keep on executing people for Twitter posts from 10 years ago, then we're going to suspend our military support to you, because morality matters to us as Americans. We can't be seen in bed with allies who commit destructive acts against civilian life and civilian infrastructure. I don't want America to stand for that. So when we talk about American dominance, I want Latin America, I want parts of Africa, I want them to look to America and be inspired by our example, because our example doesn't just come from military power. The book isn't called the Case for American Military Power. It's called the Case for American Power. That includes soft power. It includes cultural power, diplomatic power. But if people don't look to us as a moral leader, then they're going to give up on us and they're going to be increasingly willing to cast their lot with China. And I've seen really disturbing polling in recent months, in recent years, actually, that when you ask publics in places, even Europe, so not just Africa or Latin America, who would you side with? If it's between China or America, when you have a plurality or even majority saying they would side with China, that means that we haven't showed ourselves to be a moral power. And I, I combine those words on Purpose, power should be moral. So that's what I would say on that is I want us to live up to certain ideals that we're not currently living up to.

[A]

It seems to me, though, that there is a tension between these two things, because the reality is that I don't. I mean, it's. It's very difficult to find American military interventions that are viewed by the global community as basically good. Right. Like you mentioned Bosnia. The Russians hate us for Bosnia like that. Like, they, you know, they consider that similar to the. Almost the war in Iraq in terms of.

[B]

Of.

[A]

Of Americans doing whatever we want all around the world. And obviously they have affinity ethnic affinities with the Serbs. Al Qaeda, in its declaration of war on America, cites as one of its many grievances that we didn't intervene in Bosnia soon enough, proving how little we care about Muslims dying around the world. The few cases of, like, truly uncomplicated humanitarian intervention. Like, I would cite the case of Liberia in 2003, where we just. This country's at civil war, brutal civil war, terrible dictator for 12 years. Charles Taylor Bush decides, yeah, we're going to do something about it. Shows up with 2,000 Marines, and the civil war is over. And that country has not had a civil war for the past 20 years. It's not a perfect country by any means, but uncontroversially saved tens of thousands, maybe. Maybe hundreds of thousands of lives, and yet nobody talks about it. And that's sort of endogenous to. What I'm saying is that when we do do good, basically nobody notices and counts it in our favor. When we do arguably good, like in Bosnia still, it kind of pisses off a lot of people. And then when we really make a mess of things like Iraq, it's like that is hung over our necks forever. So if you're in favor of the Pax Americana and an American power projection, don't you sort of have to have to downgrade how much you care about what the global community thinks of us? At the end of the day, they still mo. Like, if they're smart, they know we're better than Russia. They know we're better than China.

[B]

So not everyone's going to like us. And I think sometimes we know ourselves by our enemies. If our enemies are Al Qaeda and Russia, then we probably know that we're doing the right thing. So I'm not under any illusion that we're going to be able to persuade everyone that we're the better power, but we can still persuade. And I think that the first Gulf War in 1991, when we liberated Kuwait, had a very large coalition of support that was a. Broadly. A. Broadly seen as a broadly popular and legitimate war by much of the world. Not by everyone, of course. And I think the same can be said for Bosnia and Kosovo. Broadly popular, broadly supported by much of the international community, except for places like Russia, because, as you said, of this kind of ethnic affinity with the Serbs and so forth. So I think it's possible to have better military interventions, not perfect ones, but at least there's a sort of continuum. And I would like us to move towards more that interventions that are moral, that we can actually justify on strong moral grounds. And this is one of the reasons that I wasn't supportive of the intervention and in Venezuela, because it wasn't justified on moral grounds. I mean, Trump said pretty explicitly, it's because we want them to be a client, client state and we want control of their oil. I don't think we should be going and doing interventions based on oil. I mean, and that just isn't the country that I think we are. And I think it sends a very dangerous message to the rest of the world that, hey, America doesn't care about its own stated ideals. Now, it's worth saying Trump has never claimed to be a moral actor in this regard. He's never claimed to uphold moral ideals in our foreign policy. But up until Trump, every president has spoken about those moral values and made it, at least rhetorically, a centerpiece of our foreign policy. So I think there's something frightening right now that we don't even have the pretense. At least we had the pretense before.

[A]

Yeah. So what about Afghanistan? I mean, that's. That's a case where obviously most Americans supported the war in Afghanistan. It was directly linked to 9, 11, unlike Iraq. And by the time Biden withdrew, we were sustaining very few casualties in Afghanistan. We were providing stability. Women were going to school. And, you know, the. The yearly cost of that intervention was, again, relatively low in American lives. Do you think it was the right decision or the wrong decision for Biden to withdraw?

[B]

I was very critical of Biden's withdrawal. Now, I think at some. At some point, we would have had to. We can't stay in a country like getting a stand forever. I don't believe in forever wars. Did we have to leave at that particular time and basically leave Afghans to their own devices and not provide any kind of military support as the Taliban was moving in? I think. I think there was a way to not have the outcome we had, and I think I was also supportive of, I mean, I think the Afghanistan intervention was justified from the beginning. You know, as you said, it was in direct response to 9, 11. Where I take issue though, is how long the intervention went on. I think that when we were in a much stronger position in the 2000s, when the Taliban was largely destroyed, or at least quite weak relative to what it would become later on, it gained strength over time. In the 2010s, we could have used our position of strength to negotiate from a stronger position with the Taliban and come to some kind of diplomatic solution where they could have been reintegrated into the body politic as long as they agree to certain conditions. So what I'm critical of is the fact that we never actually focused on negotiation. That was one good thing. I suppose that Trump did, he did prioritize negotiation with the Taliban, but, but I think on very bad terms. I think the Taliban got a great deal and Trump did not show himself to be a great negotiator in that particular instance. And that that was kind of one of the original sins that led to Biden's withdrawal. So I think there's a lot of blame to go around. I think that at very, at various key moments, we could have done different things differently. But I, I totally take your point that we shouldn't have necessarily left at that point, because what Afghans are dealing with now is a disaster compared to what they were dealing with before. Afghanistan was better off when there was a US Military presence for sure.

[A]

So you say you're against really long interventions, but it's not clear to me that that's such a bad thing. We've had 30,000 troops in Korea since the 1950s. Technically, that war is not over. But our troop presence there deters North Korea from ever trying anything. It projects American power, which you're in favor of. It helps us project power in that region. Right. We don't lose American troops. We're not losing American lives in Korea again. That's like a 70 year deployment. As for the negotiations, it seems to me regardless of when you negotiate with, with the Taliban, the moment that America actually evacuates, it's just going to be another Vietnam, Afghanistan type situation. Like it doesn't matter what's written on the paper unless the Taliban feels we're going to come back in to enforce it, as long as they really feel we're leaving for good, whatever happens the day after is what the Taliban is going to want to happen. Right. So the really, the options are Stay in there for a long time, be in there for the long haul, create stability, get to a Korea like situation where it's a frozen conflict and hope that in the long run maybe the Taliban loses energy, loses will, becomes irrelevant to the people. Right. As the people experience the benefits of stability and integration with the west and so forth, the real, really the only options are be in it for the long haul or like cut and leave. But the notion of like negotiating a great, a great result seems to me naive given what the Taliban are and what they're going to want to do the day after we leave. Right.

[B]

Again, it's hard to know what the counterfactuals are. I mean the Taliban was quite weak. Now the Taliban became popular, more popular with Afghans over time. So this idea that if we wait for a longer period of time that Afghans see the benefits of that and become more pro American or more supportive of their own government against the Taliban, the opposite turned out to be the case. So I worry about this idea of these open ended interventions and we keep on saying, well, once the people see the benefits, then maybe we can start to step away. That wasn't happening in the case of Afghanistan. I think that maybe we were too ambitious about what Afghanistan was meant to become. We could have had again, I think that there's, the 2001 intervention could have been more limited. Maybe there didn't have to be as much of a nation building aspect to it, this idea that we could make Afghanistan into a liberal democracy. Maybe our expectations had to be a little bit more modest. But I think the main difference with Korea is that our forces are not engaged in active hostilities because as you say, it is a frozen conflict. My concern is staying in these regions, staying in these countries when there are active combat hostilities going on. And that's where I become a little bit more concerned. There is a way to have diplomatic arrangements between people who hate each other. Bosnia and Kosovo both ended up, I mean Bosnia with the Dayton Accords, which were not ideal by any stretch of the imagination. No one got everything they wanted. And it's a very fragile peace to this day. But that's better than civil war. It's better than endless civil conflict. And it's worth noting that even when we still had troops in Afghanistan, it was still effectively a civil war. So it's not as if people were benefiting from stability. We were supporting a rump government that wasn't popular, that couldn't defend itself, that couldn't stand up its own forces, that was so utterly dependent on American air power that it couldn't develop its own ground capabilities. I just don't think that that's a long term solution to a very real problem. We got ourselves into that problem and, you know, maybe, maybe we could have waited, maybe there was a better time and to have a different kind of phased withdrawal. But Afghanistan was suffering from civil, from civil war throughout much of the 2010s as the Taliban was gaining ground and, and winning over cities. So it was already in a pretty bad state and under a, under a Taliban control in certain parts of the country.

[A]

Okay, what about Cuba? The devil's advocate case for Cuba? We've allowed this communist regime to fester in our backyard since 1959. It's terrible to its own people. Right now. There's an opportunity where you have an administration willing to use force, willing to, willing to go through with regime change. And you have Marco Rubio. Yes, the, the, the opportunistic case for this is that though Trump doesn't care much about humanitarian issues, I think genuinely Marco Rubio would really care that if we intervened in Cuba, we did it the right way at minimal civilian cost and maximally and precisely targeted at the regime. I think the vast majority of Cubans would support it, especially if Marco Rubio were the mouthpiece that could explain it to the American people and to Cubans. And again, with him overseeing it, he would care quite a lot about the humanitarian motive. And that would be, that would be genuine. And it would also be the perception and, and, and then the, you know, the coda is like, we don't know the next time there's going to be a Secretary of State, national Security Advisor that can make that case credibly and mean it, and everyone will know that he's meaning it.

[B]

Doesn't that require a lot of trust in the person of Marco Rubio? That just seems a lot to put on one man. And there just seems to be a lot of hope there, which doesn't seem to me to be entirely justified. I mean, look at Venezuela, that we left the same regime basically intact. The people who overseed the torture and the prisons, the Minister of Defense, the Minister of Interior, none of those people were changed. And then there were reports in the days and weeks after that the Venezuelan government was becoming more repressive, not less. So I think that it depends what is the goal? Who is going to govern Cuba? Who is going to replace the communist regime? If there's an answer to that, I'm willing to listen. But I have not heard any viable plan for who's going to actually govern the country. And I don't want us to make the same mistake we made in Iran where we just thought, hey, if we start to target the regime, someone else will take its place, and maybe it will be better, maybe it won't be. But let's find out. I mean, we can't go into it with a let's find out kind of. Kind of attitude. So I'd be curious to hear from you. I don't know if you have a better sense of what Marco Rubio envisions, but again, the likelihood of success condition doesn't seem to be met in this particular instance, at least not that I've seen.

[A]

Yeah, like I said, I always really reserve judgment because I'm a guy that lives in New York. Like, what do I know about the likelihood of success of any given military intervention? But it does seem to me that Marco Rubio would. He would know more about the Cuban case. We probably have really good intelligence on Cuba because it's in our backyard. It's a less fractured society than Iran is. It's not fractured along religious lines, really, to the extent that Iran is, and the people really hate the regime, there isn't that much. The regime just exists, basically through force and through fear. There are very few regime supporters in Cuba at this point.

[B]

How sure are we of that, though? I mean, are we 100% sure that there's barely any support for the regime? It's just hard to know. It's. It's hard to know. I take your point that there's probably a lot of Cubans who are angry at this regime and want something different. But to say that they don't even have a base of support that there is, because usually regimes can't survive for the number of decades that the Cuban regime has survived without at least some base of support. That base of support is going to have to be accommodated in some way. I just worry about this assumption that everyone hates the regime, you know?

[A]

Yeah, well, you know, almost any regime might have a 20 base of support. Maybe it doesn't bottom out less than that because of national pride and human nature. But if that's the case, then there are basically no. Like, are there any cases of regime change that you. That you do favor in the world that you're looking. Looking at right now? Or do you think we should be out of the regime change business, period? And if so, how do you square that with America's role as the dominant power?

[B]

Honestly, Coleman, I would like us to take a breather on regime change. I think we've been doing a lot of it lately and talking about it a lot. I mean, I don't think that believing in American dominance or American power means that you have to be looking for regimes to overthrow again. I think if there's very clear cut cases where we can stop a mass killing, we can stop a genocide largely through air power, then I'm willing to consider it. And that's again why I supported the 2011 NATO, Libya intervention, unlike, you know, so. But right now I'd like us to, I'd like us to focus on using our leverage of pressuring regimes to open up their political systems and be more democratic if they're dictatorships. I want us to focus more on moral leadership, especially when it comes to Gaza and our relationship with Israel and to create some distance between us and Israel so we're not tainted by that association in the eyes of the world. I want us to find ways to counter China's right. Well, I mean, rise isn't quite the right word. I think China's rise is wildly overstated. But to counter China's influence in different parts of the world, including Asia and throughout Asia and Africa. So I think there's ways to be for US power in the way that I am without just wanting to go in and toppling regimes because I just don't think we're great at it. And I think part of the issue too, and maybe this is an example where I'm so anti Trump that I can't see clearly. I don't trust this administration and I think to be comfortable with military interventions, you have to trust the leadership. We don't go to war with the leadership we wish we had. We go to war with the leadership we actually have. Right. And I am, I just see this administration as being so morally suspect, so destructive at home and abroad that it's very hard for me to have an open mind. I just have to be honest about that.

[A]

Yeah. So another, so one more, one more try on the Israel question. So let's say I'm putting myself in the point of view of Hamas, of the axis, the axis of resistance, the self styled axis of resistance. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah. My theory and hope, if I'm, if I'm these, these folks, is Israel is this kind of fake rump state arm of the American empire over here. They only exist insofar as the Americans support them. Right. That's what makes them a sort of fake colonial entity. Used to be the British that supported them, then it was the Russians, now it's the Americans. But regardless, they've always been in the mind of the axis of the resistance, this like, fake, fake limb of Western colonialism. And the strategy is to, through terror attacks and increasing the cost, the, the human cost of, of the Israelis living there, to ratchet up the humanitarian toll of their response and then get rid of America's support for them as the first step to eliminating them. Right. First we get this, the, the Americans to stop aiding Israel. Then without that aid, because they're a fake colonial entity, we'll be able to destroy them. Right. So on the margin, if America gives less to Israel, Right. As a result of this, isn't that just the strategy working and therefore an incentive for more attacks against Israel and therefore not really good for regional stability? Like, don't. If I'm Hamas or I'm, I'm, I'm Iran or Hezbollah, and I see tomorrow Congress passes a resolution saying we should stop giving aid to Israel. Don't I go to, to my fellow fighters and say, guys, strategy is working. Let's double down.

[B]

But the reason that so many Americans are turning against Israel is because of what Israel has done in Gaza. They've seen the images, they've seen the pictures, they followed the news, and they don't feel comfortable with it. They don't want that to be done in their name. So I wouldn't say that. Well, we're falling into Hamas's trap or whatever. I'd say Israel fell into Hamas's trap when Hamas did what it did on October 7th. This is what terrorist groups always, always try to do. They want to provoke the target to overreach and to do things they otherwise wouldn't do. I think Hamas, unfortunately, was successful in this. They got Israel to wildly overreact and to go too far and to be too destructive and to kill too many Palestinians. And in that sense, Israel was somewhat foolish. This was the same argument that I think a lot of us made after 9, 11. What is Al Qaeda trying to do? It's trying to drag us into the Middle East. It's trying to provoke a regional conflagration. So I think we should be very careful. But, but just because Hamas wants to limit aid to Israel doesn't mean it's the wrong position. Bad people can come bad or evil people can come to the right conclusion. I don't think we should be basing what, what we as Americans think on aid to Israel, on whether Hamas agrees with it or not.

[A]

So I'm making a different point, though. I'm making a slightly different point. I'm making a point about what is actually likely to happen if we do it. So just like, purely predictive. My point. Right. You've heard of the mantra weakness is provocative, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So again, if we, if we pull out eight from Israel, forgetting the morality of anything for a moment and just focusing on what is actually likely to happen as a matter of game theory, doesn't that on the margin make it more likely? Isn't that an encouragement and an incentive to Israel's regional enemies to attack precisely because they're in a weakened position?

[B]

Look, it could be. But even when Israel was strong and aid wasn't being questioned, that's precisely when Hamas decided to attack on October 7th. So I don't think there's a thousand.

[A]

That was because of the Abraham Accords. The threat, the threat of the Abraham Accords with Saudi. If you look back at their relationship with, like, Egypt and Jordan, as Israel got stronger, they were in a position to get peace with those countries. Right. When they were weaker, those countries felt much more. Actually, we can wipe Israel off the map. They're tiny. They just got here. So weakness has been provocative in the history and peace has been achieved through strength, at least partly.

[B]

But I think Hamas and the axis of resistance are wrong on a key point. This is where we probably agree, which is, I don't think Israel is a fake colonial plant. This idea that Israel is so weak and that without American support, it would kind of start falling like a house of cards. I think Israel is a country that has deep reservoirs of strength that are internal to it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

They have a committed population that will die for their country, at least the Israeli Jewish population of Israel. And this is where I say, like, even in the book, I, I say this, and not everyone likes it, which is I think that the US can and maybe even should commit to being Israel's defender of last resort, that if Israel really was in dangerous territory in terms of its own existence, if it really was being beaten on the battlefield, then I think there could be an argument for the US Keeping Israel alive. I just don't think that's even really a plausible scenario. But I think to reassure people, because I want to be pragmatic, I'm extremely critical of Israel. I've been very outspoken on this issue. But at the same time, I want to be realistic about my policy prescriptions. So I don't think that we should necessarily say to Israel, hey, we're abandoning you altogether. Also, I think that if we threaten to withhold aid, it doesn't mean we're going to actually stop giving aid to Israel. My. My wager is that if we threaten a suspension of military aid, it will actually persuade the Israelis to be more aligned with where we are, that they'll actually listen to us because they understand how important the US Israel relationship is, and they wouldn't want to actually put their country in a situation where they lose $4 billion of aid. Now, I can't prove that that would be the case, but it's a wager like this is always what happens when we threaten to withhold aid. We don't know exactly what the other country is going to do, but that's the risk of using leverage. And I think there's only one way to find out, really. But I. I don't think. I. I don't really see it as being very plausible. It could change maybe if Democrats and even some Republicans, if Tucker runs in 2028, will be so anti Israel that we talk about abandoning Israel. I just don't think it's likely with that, even the Democratic Party, if, even if it's someone like John Ossif who's been critical of Israel, I don't think there's any real constituency in the Democratic leadership to give up on Israel entirely and abandon it. So I just don't think that's likely to happen.

[A]

How high do you rate the importance of the United nations to global peace, global stability? Is it overrated or underrated or correctly rated?

[B]

Well, you know, I don't know. It depends. I think most people have a low opinion about the UN these days. It doesn't seem to be doing a lot. So maybe in some ways it's correctly rated. But for people who love the idea of world government and think the UN is the solution to our problems, I think for those people, they're overrating it. I'm. I become more skeptical of the role of international law. I believe that international law exists. I believe it should be treated as a real concept. I don't like this idea of might makes right. Again, going back to what I said about power has to be matched by moral constraint. But I worry about people who say there's no such thing as international law, that they're basically giving carte blanche to countries to just ride roughshod over norms and conventions and legal expectations. I think the UN is good in the sense that it offers a vision of what could be possible. It gives us something to maybe aspire to. But I'm under no illusions that the UN is going to be able to be a very productive body as long as it doesn't have its own army. This is, this is where I come back to this, this issue. Power is necessary to enforce, to enforce things. Power is necessary to support your own moral aspirations. That's why America is in a very unique position historically. It's the most powerful neo empire of, or empire, if you want to use that, that term in human history. We can do good things with our power. That's the way we should be viewing it, as a historic opportunity to shape the world in alignment with our values.

[A]

I actually have one more question. America First. I meant to ask you about this. So obviously there's a big movement on the right that goes by the branding of American first which says something like, why are we spending all this money on adventures overseas, military bases overseas, when we have problems at home? And you know, you, you're in favor of moral like interventions that are actually moral and framed as moral. And like I would, I would count the Liberia intervention as a classic case of this. There was essentially no self interested reason why we ended that civil war other than the moral one and the humanitarian one. NATO, NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as well, I think was basically a humanitarian intervention.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And there's many cases where we fail to intervene like Rwanda. And I consider those to be very big mistakes. So I, I'm with you on all of that. The reality, however, is that I think Americans are very cynical about moral interventions for a couple reasons. A, because they, some of them just never believe, they always believe there must be an ulterior motive and then there's kind of a more rational case which is like, okay, maybe we, maybe we have a bleeding heart for like a year, but what if the intervention to be successful requires a much bigger commitment than that? Empathy will wane pretty quickly. And if we don't have self interest to sustain it, then we actually won't go through with it. We won't finish the job and actually achieve the moral objective. So from that point of view, is there a logic to someone like Donald Trump framing the Venezuela thing as about oil? Because realistically we know if, if Venezuela were like a great liberal democracy that had free elections, wasn't abusing its own people, and like we wouldn't invade their country to just get a better oil deal or to like get a stake in their national oil company. Right. Like Donald Trump wouldn't have done that. It's, it's also the fact that Maduro is a terrible dictator that has destroyed that country. That's like de facto. That is also a reason. Even if he frames it as purely about the oil because that's how he thinks about the world and that's how he speaks. And also he has a burden to make sure every intervention is plausibly in the American interest. Right. Because he's sort of, he has his American first constituency. Is there a case to be made for trying to find like the Venn diagram overlap cases where there's a moral reason and a like a purely self interested America first reason and to frame it in America first terms in order to. Precisely because most American voters I don't think are like you in the sense that they're like, they have like a true moral foreign policy outlook.

[B]

I think this is one of the weaknesses of America first is that it requires everything to be justified in the most narrow terms of self interest. Like we can't do anything abroad unless we can point to something very specific transactionally that we're going to get out of it. I think that that is, it goes against much of our history. We've always like, as I said before, the pretense. We've always at least had the pretense of moral aspiration. So I just want us to keep that pretense even if it's not the main thing. I take your point that it helps to have some aspect of self interest because that can keep more Americans engaged and they can see the benefits of the policy, the benefits of the intervention. If we could find a Venn diagram of America first self interest and humanitarian intervention and, and find a way to frame it so it appeals to both constituencies, I think that's a very difficult thing to do effectively and I don't think Trump has done it. I think he's very much making the, as you know, as we've said, he's making the case on a very, very much in America first terminology without talking about the humanitarian benefits. But I'm not, I have to be realistic. I'm someone who thinks that there is there it's in our self interest to be morally, to be moral really. I know most Americans might, a lot of Americans might not agree to that extent. But I think if you look at a lot of the polling on Americans views on foreign policy, they'll often respond quite positively when pollsters ask them, do you want America to be a moral leader? Do you want America to stand up for certain values in the world? I think we as Americans, we have a natural instinct that we want to do the right thing. Maybe this is where I have like some kind of inherent faith in the body politic that even Trump can't extinguish that. We just we want to be good. We want to be better than we have been. And that's actually, I think, what gives me a lot, gives me at least some optimism that there's something in the American spirit that moves us in that direction.

[A]

All right, Shadi Hamid, the book is the Case for American Power. I highly recommend everyone read it. There's also there's stuff in there that we didn't really get to in this conversation. So I recommend buying the book. It's a good read. It's a short read, but it packs a punch. So very well done on the book. And thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

[B]

Thanks so much, Coleman. Great to talk to you.