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- [00:00]
Michael Kimmage
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
- [00:29]
Martin DeCaro
See full terms@mintmobile.com history as it happens April 7, 2026 the limits of power,
- [00:38]
Donald Trump
where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o' clock tomorrow night. Where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again. I mean, complete demolition.
- [00:55]
Martin DeCaro
So to the remaining Hamas leaders and to the jailers of our hostages, I now say, lay down your arms.
- [01:04]
Michael Kimmage
Let my people go.
- [01:05]
Martin DeCaro
They vow to repeat the atrocities of October 7th again and again and again,
- [01:12]
Michael Kimmage
no matter how diminished their forces.
- [01:14]
Martin DeCaro
That is why Israel must finish the job.
- [01:17]
Michael Kimmage
New research estimates Russian forces have suffered more than 1 million casualties in its war against Ukraine. At the same time, its territorial gains have been some of the slowest in modern history.
- [01:28]
Martin DeCaro
World order is now disorder spiraling in a dangerous direction. Regional wars in Eastern Europe and the greater Middle east are killing and displacing societies and roiling the global economy. Powerful countries are trying to bomb and blitz their way to something called victory, but it isn't working. Wars are dragging on with all their destabilizing consequences as they can't understand the limits of power. That's next, as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [01:57]
U.S. Politician or Official
Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don't need to fight.
- [02:05]
Michael Kimmage
In Greek mythology, the goddess Athena was the goddess of wisdom, and she was also the goddess of war. You know, I think that that's a reminder to us in a way that these are two things that need to be intertwined in a way, especially for countries, as we've been talking about, Martin, especially for countries that.
- [02:25]
Martin DeCaro
In an essay for the New York Times, historian Michael Kimmage says the war in Ukraine delineates two realities, both of which reveal important new truths about 21st century international affairs. First, Ukraine has not been defeated. Russia has the larger population, economy and military. But Ukraine's resolve and the technological savvy, in particular its capacity to innovate, build and deploy drones, have slowed the Russian advance to a Crawl. An unfamiliar kind of asymmetrical warfare has emerged in which great powers are suddenly fallible and vulnerable. The world's changing quickly, Kimmage says Ukraine's been an accelerator for a distinctively 21st century kind of warfare in which smaller states can stymie powerful adversaries by employing cutting edge technology, some of it cheap and easy to mass produce. And the blocs and alliances that might once have acted in concert to deter aggressors are at best only partly effective. Only partly effective. Well, that was not how it was supposed to be. And this brings us to a hinge point in history that's been on my mind if you believe we're living through a transformational period right now, as wars on the battlefield and in the arena of global trade upend the old order. The time I've been thinking of is about 35 years ago, the end of the Cold War, when it did feel like a new world was emerging, one that President George H.W. bush hoped would be different from the past. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle, he
- [03:55]
Michael Kimmage
said, a world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice, a world where the strong respect the rights of the weak. This is the vision that I shared with President Gorbachev and Helsinki. He and other leaders from Europe, the Gulf, and around the world understand that how we manage this crisis today could shape the future for generations to come.
- [04:26]
Martin DeCaro
Well, that was in 1990. The first test of Bush's envisioned new world order was Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.
- [04:33]
U.S. Politician or Official
Iraq's President Saddam Hussein warned that he
- [04:35]
Michael Kimmage
would turn Kuwait into a graveyard if
- [04:38]
U.S. Politician or Official
any foreign country tried to intervene.
- [04:40]
Martin DeCaro
The following year, the United States and an international coalition expelled Saddam from Kuwait and and it looked like a decisive victory that would not lead to a morass. Yet in retrospect, we can now see the Gulf War was the first step in what is now 35 long years of US entanglements in the greater Middle East. Today, the region is on fire as the US And Israel try to bomb Iran into something different, something less hostile to their interests, while Russia remains stuck in eastern Ukraine after more than four long years of grinding combat. Ukraine's air force says Russia launched more than 370 drones and missiles, killing at
- [05:17]
Michael Kimmage
least one person and leaving tens of
- [05:19]
Martin DeCaro
thousands without power in the cold. Michael Kimmage is the director of the Kennan Institute and a professor of history at Catholic University. He is the author of Collisions, the War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability. Our conversation next Tap subscribe now in the show Notes for ad free listening, early access and all of our bonus content or go to historyasithappens.com to sign up. Michael Kimmage, welcome back.
- [05:47]
Michael Kimmage
Great to be back with you.
- [05:47]
Martin DeCaro
Martin, you said in the New York Times that Ukraine delineates two realities, or at least the start of the war in 2022, both of which reveal important new truths about 21st century international affairs. What did you mean by that?
- [06:03]
Michael Kimmage
Well, maybe we should go back here to the 1990s and to an important episode after the end of the Cold War, which is a series of somewhat murky conflicts in, you know, the former Yugoslavia, in the Balkans, and the United States never completely disentangled them. Some of those conflicts still very much exist, and yet the US Was able to exert force at low cost and with few casualties to basically terminate the worst of these problems as the US Saw them, to subdue Serbia and to bring a relative peace to the southeast of Europe. And that enabled many different forms of European integration. And that part of Europe, you know, sort of kept the regional order. You can make a strong argument for, again, from a US Perspective, the effectiveness of that, and that speaks to a particular moment in time, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the preeminence of certain forms of American hard power that seem to define the moment. Now, of course, you know, we can, if you wish, go back into the aughts in the early, you know, years of the 21st century where we have two quite inconclusive wars that the US initiates, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. But I would want to compare, you know, especially the war in Ukraine. Of course, we can do our best with the ongoing conflict in Iran to try to figure out what that is and what it might signify. But I would just want to contrast what happened in Ukraine with what happened in the 1990s. In Ukraine, you do have a great power or, you know, something close to a great power, Russia, which is a nuclear power, 140 million population. Ukraine is a country of 40 million. There's quite a big economic difference. Russia has one of the world's largest and most modern militaries, and yet after four and a half years of war, Russia has not achieved its ends and Ukraine has not been defeated. And to me, there's something significant about that simply beyond the terrain of Ukraine in what it tells us about military power. It's also the case that Russia has not lost, although it's a raid against all kinds of coalitions and countries that have more money and in some cases more technological sophistication than Russia does. And Russia has not been defeated either. But the inability of Russia to win I think is significant and we can get into that further if you wish. But it feels to me much more typical of 21st century conflict than of that sort of brief moment of the 1990s when it was possible with military force to put an end to things. And we could skip over the Cold War and go back to the mid 20th century when major large scale warfare was horrific and bloody and awful, but it was also decisive. Right. 1945, the war comes to an end. Germany and Japan are defeated. There really is a post war order. The German delegation headed by General Jodl, Germany's chief of Staff, have arrived for the fateful ceremony.
- [08:48]
Martin DeCaro
The general puts his signature to the
- [08:49]
Michael Kimmage
document which acknowledges the complete defeat of the German armed forces by those of Britain. Russia. And there's a demarcation and an endpoint. And what we seem to be living through now is a series, a growing series of just ambiguous, unended and almost unendable conflicts.
- [09:04]
Martin DeCaro
So it's interesting how you bring up the Balkans in the 90s. There were two major NATO interventions there. Correct me if I'm wrong. There was one in the early to mid-90s dealing with Serbia and then at the end of the decade with the Kosovo situation. And wasn't that also a case where from the vantage of Moscow it was in a way provocative or even humiliating because that had always been the southern Slavs that had been Imperial Russias near abroad or an area of interest to Russia and in this case NATO was out of theater. Is that relevant to what you're saying here?
- [09:41]
Michael Kimmage
Well, historical Russian terrain, I'm not so sure about that. In the southeast of Europe. And Russia participates in the Balkan wars before the First World War. And of course there's a very fraught relationship between communist Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. It was probably the most defiant, it was the most defiant part of the communist world. So I think it would be a stretch to say that the former Yugoslavia was a sphere of Russian.
- [10:00]
Martin DeCaro
No, but Kosovo operation was, was very unpopular in Russia, wasn't it?
- [10:06]
Michael Kimmage
Sure. Part of it is later to be revived as a kind of propaganda point that as you did in Kosovo, we can do with Crimea and eastern Ukraine. So there's, there's that, but that's sort of on the level of, of talking points, what matters, and it's a bit different from the point about ambiguous versus unambiguous warfare, but what matters on the Russian side with former Yugoslavia is that Russia is not in a position to write the rules for the region. And Russia extends that to a broader point, that Russia is no longer in the position to write the rules for Europe, which is of course very different from the Cold War, when the Soviet Union bestrode half of Europe like a colossus. So, yes, there's a degree of humiliation, but there's also a sense that just Russia has lost its power to control or even to influence a very broad region. And Yugoslavia was seen to be indicative of that. But you have to disentangle these two storylines. It's kind of the propaganda one, and then there's the security line. And. And it does take us to later conflicts between Russia and the west, to be sure.
- [11:00]
Martin DeCaro
You know, I haven't thought of the Balkan interventions, the Serbian issue, as an example of decisive warfare, the one that I've had in my mind recently, because I've written about it, that went down in history for a time as clean, decisive, did not result in a morass or a decades long quagmire, was the first Gulf War. But I believe the main point you're making here, pardon my digression, is what has happened with warfare today when powerful states that have arsenals of conventional weapons that can do amazing amounts of damage can't win wars anymore. Is that new?
- [11:40]
Michael Kimmage
No, it's not entirely new. I mean, of course, everything is. Is relative. And we could go back to the First World War and discuss the ways in which that too. And I guess all wars are sort of ambiguous in the way that they end, even though there are narratives of victory and defeat. Right. The First World War ends with a British, French, American victory, but very quickly, the seeds of the next war sort of start to emerge after that in German resentment and a kind of inability to subdue Germany after the First World War. And, you know, that cycle does seem to kind of repeat itself and repeat itself. That one war ends and becomes the pretext for the next round of conflict. And of course, we could talk about Vietnam within the Cold War as a conflict for the United States that was deeply ambiguous. Right. It ends in a kind of American defeat. And then, you know, history being the template always for irony. I mean, Vietnam eventually becomes a kind of friend and partner of the United States over time after the Vietnam War. So there too you can have ambiguities that run in, not always in catastrophic directions. You know, bearing all that in mind, you know, I think Vietnam, or maybe France and Algeria is another example of France as a relative great power that doesn't succeed in that conflict. There are many more examples that you can come up with. And yet it does seem to me, interestingly, the case for the United States and Iran so far and for Russia in Ukraine, that military power has pretty profound limits. You can accomplish certain ends and you can threaten to accomplish certain ends. But it's fascinating that the middle powers, in this case Iran and Ukraine, are somehow able to punch above their weight or punch above their perceived weight. There is this interesting disjunction. The middle powers are stronger than they seem.
- [13:12]
Martin DeCaro
As you say here in your essay, Ukraine has been an accelerator for a distinctively 21st century kind of warfare in which smaller states can stymie powerful adversaries by employing cutting edge technology, some of it cheap and easy to mass produce. And the blocks and alliances that might have once acted in concert to deter aggressors are at best only partly effective. Yeah. So new or not, and I agree it's not entirely new, we have to face the problem we have today, and that is powerful countries still don't understand the limits of power. And even though we're not having a world war, I think the point you're making here, Michael, is we have lots of regional wars that have global implications. So there are disastrous consequences when powerful aggressors, Russia, United States, Israel, I'm sure there are others there I'm leaving off the list, but those are the three that are on my mind right now. Don't get this lesson. They still believe military power projection creates positive outcomes.
- [14:14]
Michael Kimmage
We can include Iran in the list. Also, its record of failure is kind of remarkable.
- [14:19]
Martin DeCaro
Yes, the axis of resistance was a disaster for Iran. Go ahead.
- [14:23]
Michael Kimmage
Right. Its choice, its use of military force also backfired. That military force leads to unpredictable results is just an axiom, a kind of truth of warfare. But what you see is in many of these conflicts for different reasons, and of course, each is very locally specific, but a kind of misalignment of military and political agendas that military agendas and the political agendas are very hard to bring into unison. And that's where, again, I agree that there were sort of complexities in the case of former Yugoslavia, but what the US wanted more than anything in that conflict, those kind of also very localized conflicts in former Yugoslavia, US wanted regional order. It didn't get 100% of it, but it got sort of 85% of it, such that Croatia can join the European Union and just be a normal country. Right. And it's not burdened by a metastasizing regional war. To that degree, the US was able to secure a reasonable alignment between its political and its military objectives. Certainly for the U.S. iraq and Afghanistan, you see the misalignment already in evidence that in the case of Afghanistan, it was sort of nation building. And in Iraq, that worked up to a point. I mean, Iraq is now sort of a viable independent nation, but at great, great cost to the US and in Afghanistan, you have the Taliban returning to power, which is directly opposite to the political objectives of the war as it began in 2003. So certainly this misalignment between the enormous military force that certain countries are able to command and their ability to act on the political agendas that they set for themselves. You know, the US gets into that mess already after 9, 11. You know, Russia joins the club with its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And China is the odd great power out because it's not initiating these kinds of conflicts and it's not getting bogged down in these kinds of wars of choice. So it's interesting, you have powerful countries in the world, and the European Union would perhaps be another example of it. It doesn't have a lot of military force at its disposal. But Europe also is not jumping into all of these conflicts at the moment. It's really Russia and the US that have traveled down this path.
- [16:23]
Martin DeCaro
And you say here how? Because of the dynamics of the global economy, right? And as I mentioned earlier, a bunch of regional wars happening at the same time has global implications. No one really is unaffected by this yet. Russia is not a pariah. And because of the dynamics of the global economy or the workings of the global economy, it can manage to get out from under sanctions, find a way around sanctions, sustain its war effort.
- [16:49]
Michael Kimmage
What the war in Ukraine has demonstrated is that even if there's the will on the part of the transatlantic alliance, at the beginning of the war, not, not currently, but at the beginning of the war, there was the will to isolate Russia. It proved more or less impossible to do that. Russia was able to establish a good commercial relationship or to keep a good commercial relationship with China, that Russia was able to maintain trade and commerce with India, with South Africa, Brazil, really with much of the world. And of course, Russia has hydrocarbons to sell, and it has the need for certain kinds of technology transfers which it's more or less been able substantiate. It's been able to perpetuate the war. The Russian economy is not great, but it's not in a state that's really going to cause Putin to change course. And that tells us something important about the Global economy, to be sure, it's large, it's malleable, has many different centers, and the US has some unique privileges in the global economy related to currency and to the US Financial system. That can matter for a country like Iran, perhaps more than for a country like Russia, where the sanctions have been pretty crippling for Iran, but still, it's not changing the calculus in Iran. And the US has not been able to, you know, have too much of an effect on Russian decision making. You could put Europe into the mix as well, likewise. Not that we've, you know, opened this question. It's not that the US has become an economic pariah because of its war against Iran either. In fact, I haven't seen efforts, you know, sort of globally to boycott or to not trade with the US or to kind of withdraw. So the global economy, in a sense, maybe in its more amoral dimensions, is just not making choices that align with critiques of various wars, although those critiques, of course, are. Are out there. But there are lots of other ways that we could explore the question and sort of think about global economic flows and of course, what's really the topic of the hour, global economic choke points. And think about how these are crystallizing, developing, getting reformed, refashioned, both war in Ukraine and of course, maybe more profoundly with the US war against Iran, because it's touching now on some of the global center points, the kind of nodes of the global economy in a way that the war in Ukraine never quite did. At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, you had this big effect on food security. Ukraine and Russia are big grain producers. That grain goes through the Black Sea out into the world. And there was an effect, but they kind of worked out a deal. And it didn't sort of tank the world economy or it didn't cause widespread misery. Of course, we're just about five weeks into the war in Iran, but you can see many potential scenarios related to fertilizer, related to lng, related to oil, where this could have a transformative, profound, and of course, very negative effect. The more such regional wars that seem sprawling and very difficult to control, the more of those you have, the more the global economy hangs on a slender thread of stability.
- [19:24]
Martin DeCaro
And no matter the harsh economic consequences, even if they aren't fully catastrophic, nation states will find ways to sustain their war efforts. We know this from history. I read a book about the First World War some years ago. I've mentioned this on a previous podcast with someone recently. I'll bring it up with you here. Michael Pandora's box. I can see it on my shelf over there. It was written by a German historian. Each year of World War I takes up a chapter, so the chapters are quite long. And at the end of every chapter, the historian lists all the reasons why, at this point in the war, country X or country Y should have thrown in the towel. Or it looked like they were just going to collapse and not be able to sustain the war even if they wanted to. Yet they did. Now, we know that collapse does come to Tsarist Russia, the Kaiser, eventually the Ottoman Empire, Austria, Hungary. But there are all these reasons why the war should not persist, and yet it did. We know today that the United States has the resources, maybe not the political will, depending on how the Trump administration responds to negative polling, but the United States has the resources to bomb Iran for a very long time.
- [20:34]
Michael Kimmage
True. Yeah. No, I don't think in the case of Russia or the US that it's possible. You know, it's one thing to maybe notice trends that might make these wars difficult to prosecute, but it's certainly not possible to engineer the exit of either these countries from war for purely economic reasons. I think that the US Is a different case from Russia in this respect. I mean, Russia is effectively a dictatorship at this point. Everybody in Russia, to one degree or another, is dependent on the state for their livelihood. It's very difficult to get around the machinery of the state, and at this point, the machinery of Putinism, just for people to sort of get their pensions, have their daily lives go in a kind of orderly way. Putin, who also has a lot of repressive tools at his disposal, can, I think, subdue and keep at bay economic discontent, of which I'm sure that there's a great deal in Russia and also just some of the restrictions that are there on Russians are very frustrating. It's hard for Russians to travel to Europe and elsewhere, and that's a kind of drawback of the war. But I don't think that that's going to affect Putin's decision making. I think with the US at the moment, it's anybody's guess. But, you know, you have a midterm election coming up. You have lots of real politics in the United States. I think the polity in the US Is just coming to grips with this war. Now, if gas goes to $7 a gallon at the pumps, which I don't think is science fiction, well, diesel is
- [21:52]
Martin DeCaro
already going in that direction.
- [21:54]
Michael Kimmage
I don't think that there's going to be a revolution in the US but it's impossible to imagine that that would have no political consequences and that there wouldn't be then with a lame duck president, second term president, that there wouldn't be a lot of political incentives even in the Republican Party to box. The president in Congress could, of course, activate many of its powers to constrain the actions of the executive branch. And there are lots of other things that could happen. You could have a wave of resignations from, from the military or from the executive branch. And that's much more conceivable in the US Case Than it is at the moment in the Russian case. And of course, if we think back to the Vietnam War, not that, you know, this is such a perfect analogy, but what gets the U.S. out of the Vietnam War? Well, not the U.S. out of it, but what changes the politics of the US is the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, time to coincide with the presidential campaign of that year. And that knocks Johnson out of the race. And so, you know, it is possible for outside powers to think in these terms and to use either economics or politics to have influence. And I don't think that that's irrelevant to what's happening at the present moment. It feels to me like President Trump is really starting to struggle with the domestic politics of this conflict. And I don't see where he goes from here to that makes it better for him or easier for him.
- [23:07]
Martin DeCaro
He does still have a chance to extricate himself from the problems he's created, along with Israel, too. Israeli pressure on him, although he was the decider, but he has a chance to extricate himself because he hasn't committed ground troops yet. It's easier to call off bombing than ground troops. And people will be listening to this podcast for the first time Tuesday, April 7th. If between the time we're recording it and the time you listen to it, ground troops are committed. Keep that in mind.
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Donald Trump
My view is very simple. I saw somebody said, oh, he doesn't have a plan. I have the best plan of all. But I'm not going to tell you what my plan is. You know, they want me to say, here's my plan. We're going to attack at 9:47 in the morning, and then we're going to do this and then we're going to. And if you don't do that, they say, I have a plan. These people know what the plan is. Everybody here knows what the plan is. But it's very unfair to say because I don't mind being insulted. I've been insulted for many years. By the fake news.
- [24:00]
Martin DeCaro
Michael Ona, on a deeper level here, what explains the pattern? I don't believe history repeats or rhymes. I stay away from those cliches. They don't really explain anything. But there are patterns. Powerful countries, or even not powerful countries, even non state actors like Osama bin Laden believe the initial knockout blow will decide the war. Wars drag on end indecisively.
- [24:26]
Michael Kimmage
No, it's a great question, Martin. We might want to think, actually nothing comes to mind immediately, but we might want to think about where leaders succeed with this method, the quick knockout blow that gets them what they want. You know, perhaps President Trump thinks that this was the case with Venezuela. It's not how I personally would analyze that action, but it seems to have played a role in his calculus in Iran that he thinks that a quick and decisive military action was in his interest in, in Venezuela. But there are not a huge number of examples that come to mind. So it makes the question in a way all the more profound. If there are lots of examples of military leaders from Napoleon to Kaiser Wilhelm to Hitler and many others, you know, Soviet leadership with Afghanistan that believe that, quote, unquote, decisive military action is in their interest and then find differently when it takes place, it's an answer that really deserves very careful or it's a question that really deserves very careful consideration. The simple explanation is, of course, when you have huge military power as a tool, it's just tempting to use it. For most politicians, this would apply more, I think, to Trump than to Putin. But when you have domestic frustrations and you feel like domestic politics is about give and take and there's a constitutional order and you have an opposition party to deal with, and some of the things that you, you do are popular and some are not, and it's all just a kind of muddle. I think military action feels by comparison, like it's a lot cleaner, almost the redemptive power of force and military action. You know, the other temptation with the use of military force is that it very much flatters the vanity of the powerful leader who's able to make that decision. You are the one who's really deciding. Right? We say the president is the president. That's a neutral word. But then you say the president is the commander in chief, and that sounds in a way more, more formidable than just being a mere president. And there are personalities, and I think Trump and Putin would be similar in this respect to kind of enjoy being in that role of the decisive military figure and appearing in photo ops with the military and kind of having that as part of the political Persona, so that can play a role as well. And nothing, you know, these are not fully satisfying answers to me. I mean, I think just the temptation of using military force when you have it, the kind of chief executive who also feels more like a chief executive in the military domain than perhaps in the conventional political domain. You know, finally, in some ways, what may be at fault, and this is, of course, a perversion of the record, but it's a part of the record, is the enormous adulation we have for those figures in our past. This would be true for Russia and for the United States, who are successful military figures. When we think back to Eisenhower, if we revere Eisenhower, as I kind of do, in some ways, it's because he was a great wartime leader. It's not because Eisenhower had the idea of invading Mexico or the idea of invading Japan. He dealt with a conflict that fell in his lap, and he dealt with it very capably. And he was a humane person in the way that he prosecuted that war, and he was successful. And you could look at George Marshall and admire what he did for a similar set of reasons. But we do have this adulation for military figures. And I wonder if in a very superficial reading of that, figures like Putin and Trump feel like, well, I want to put myself into that narrative, and the only way I can do so is by succeeding, or in their eyes, succeeding in some military conflict. And to succeed, you have to start the conflict in the first place. There's that wisecrack that Foreign Minister Lavrov made about Putin, that his three advisors are Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great. But that wisecrack kind of alludes to that. And I think if you look at some of the megalomania of President Trump and his second term, that it does have a bit of a feeling like he wants to build himself up into a kind of great military and political figure. And so for that, you also need these moments of military valor. If that's the case, it's very unfortunate because it's a misreading of the past. But, you know, those misreadings happen all the time.
- [28:12]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah. I mean, no one does these things thinking they're going to be stuck for four years. They think they're going to have the quick victory and go down in history.
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Michael Kimmage
Yeah, we don't study enough the kind of Westmorelands and the other figures who have kind of dragged us into unnecessary conflicts or sort of push the envelope excessively. You know, you think of Ulysses Grant right outside of the Capitol building in Washington. We all know the Lincoln Memorial. It has a place of prestige in the city of Washington. But across the mall from Lincoln is Ulysses Grant. Is that used to be the largest equestrian statue in the world when it was built? Most Washingtonians don't know what it is, but there's Grant. And you could kind of say again, superficially, oh, look at, you know, what a great expression of force and power. And you have these canons and all of that. But again, Grant is not a general who advises invading anything. He just again inherits the conflict of the Civil War and he does his. His duty within it. So you know, the ones who make wars of choice, the military figures who make wars of choice, they often are remembered too little.
- [29:05]
Martin DeCaro
The conversation continues. Tap subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads.
- [29:16]
Michael Kimmage
Foreign.
- [29:26]
Martin DeCaro
But we can apply to almost any country the degree to which genuine feelings of insecurity drive interventionism or military action versus other factors imperialism, racism, conquest. Do I look at Israel now? Of course, there are feelings of insecurity there right after what happened on October 7, 2023. And also the whole, the whole narrative, the historical narrative of Israel since the war that greeted its declaration of independence in 1948. Right. I spoke to the political theorist Naim Anaitila from one of my recent articles, and I'll share his observations with you, and I want to hear what you think of these. He says it may not be feelings of insecurity that drives Washington's interventionism. Our meaning US Military adventurism, stems from the hubris that comes with being a hegemon and a superpower combined with the ideology that goes hand in hand with those two structural positions, he says. As Thucydides shows us in the Malayan dialogue, a new potential hegemon starts by touting and believing in ideals. Each new superpower claims through its own hubris that it'll make the world a better place for freedom and equality. But that power makes the hegemon and its ideals pawns to power's own laws. The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. No superpower we have known has been able to overcome this pattern. That doesn't mean it won't happen, he says. It just means that we have yet to see it. And then you take this structure of power politics and you add in forces like racism and capitalism, and then the expectations, as you mentioned earlier, that come with being president of the United States, and you have your foundation for endless
- [31:08]
Michael Kimmage
war on the Russian side. This is an intricate question that I find is very difficult to resolve in terms of the information that we have access to. You have lots of public speeches from Putin and other Russian policymakers and strategic thinkers that address this question of insecurity, the encroachment of the NATO alliance, the growing relationship, military security relationship between Ukraine and the west prior to 2022, and the kind of age old narrative of insecurity in the Russian case, right from the east, from the south, from the West, a country that's not with natural barriers and has to fend for itself. And as many people have observed who have studied Russian foreign policy and military history, that there's a blending of offense and defense in Russian calculations. And so you just get to the very complicated question of why Russia chose to invade in 2022, when Ukraine posed no threat to Russia, when NATO had no designs on Russian territory, when Joe Biden was kind of bending over backwards to find a modus vivendi with Putin. We could look at all of that and say that there's absolutely no threat there. But it's very hard to know how Putin, whether he's sincere when he talks about the sense of threat or encroachment, whether that's a talking point, whether it's smokescreen for the desire for territory or control over Ukraine. It's not easy to resolve. And I would say with the United States as well, I wouldn't be too categorical about any of these theories. You know, there is something very startling about the war In Iran, the February 2000, 2026 war in Iran, because I think it goes against the grain of what almost everybody in Washington wanted. Yes, there were a few members of the D.C. policy establishment who were Iran hawks, John Bolton and others. But they did feel like very minority voices until the moment of invasion. You have an election in 2024 where Trump presents himself as the anti war candidate, which he presented himself as in 2016 and pretty credibly was right. No new wars that begin in Trump's first term. You have no Middle Eastern wars initiated by Joe Biden. It seems to me very much the will of the electorate. The American business elite, the foreign policy elite, is sort of on board with a much lower military profile in the Middle east to focus on Ukraine for some, to focus on Asia for others, or just to reduce the military footprint of the United States in general. And it felt like Trump was sort of a part of that process or that argument. And then we get Venezuela, which is one shock to the system, relatively small. And then we get this huge shock to the system where Trump seems to be going in a direction that nobody is asking him to go in. So I don't think that capitalism is the driving force behind the war in February of 2026 or the decision to attack Iran. And I don't even think that kind of American foreign policy and its deep structures was pushing Trump in that direction. If anything, I think American politics and the kind of texture of the moment would have suggested that Trump would have focused on other issues and not waged this war. And so I don't want to just reduce it to the whim of the president. Obviously, there are deeper roots to the conflict, and it goes back to 1979, and we need to analyze it more comprehensively. But it is a very odd decision, and it feels to me like it's one that almost lacks a context either in the Trump presidency or in American politics. And I also think it's why the American population, I think polling data bears this out, is not going to be with this war, because it's not like the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We could look back at it, you and I, and say, well, it was the wrong war, it was a mistake. It's certainly what I personally feel. But who could not have been caught up? I certainly was in the moment after 911 of this sense of threat and, you know, this 80% approval for George W. Bush when he goes into Iraq at the beginning, you know, there is a way in which, you know, the country is sort of inclining in that direction. And that just doesn't feel to me the story at all of the last year, year and a half, three years, four years. And that's why I'm baffled by my own country in this respect and at a loss in some ways to describe what's happening and how to figure it out. It just feels like it's a country that's contradicted itself in some big way.
- [34:55]
Martin DeCaro
In this case, the public is ahead of the people in power, the person in power also.
- [35:00]
Michael Kimmage
I just. Correct me if you think differently, Martin, but I don't think that Rubio was pushing for this war. I certainly don't think that J.D. vance was pushing for this war. Maybe Hegseth. Trump has suggested that Hegseth in conversations was the one who was kind of pushing for the war. Maybe, but I'm not sure. It doesn't feel consistent with a lot of other stuff he was saying before. So I don't know. It just feels like it comes, you know, perhaps out of the mind of one person.
- [35:23]
Martin DeCaro
Sure. I mean, Israel was applying pressure as well, Netanyahu wasn't visiting Washington all those times just to play checkers, but Lindsey
- [35:31]
Michael Kimmage
Graham, of course, you know, there are some people who seem very much on board with it, but it feels like a minority.
- [35:35]
Martin DeCaro
Trump's mind is stuck in the 1980s, and he is an Iran hawk, even if he has promised to keep us out of wars. And maybe in his mind that means no ground troops. A quick Venezuela operation, one and done. The next morning, you can have your celebratory victorious news conference and say, and
- [35:53]
Michael Kimmage
many people have pointed this out, but Putin also thought the war in Ukraine would be over in three days. And, you know, Russian soldiers went in with dress uniforms to have a parade in Kyiv. And so there is this expectation that the wars are going to be short, which is very important, Martin, I think, for understanding why leaders engage in these wars in the first place, the, you know, sort of one and done quick, press a button, solve the problem. That is the mentality that leads to these kinds of decisions.
- [36:14]
Martin DeCaro
But even with that, Trump is still operating in a certain context, to borrow your term from before that. He inherited hostility to Iran going back to 1979, failure to re establish normal relations with that country, canceling the JCPOA because it was Obama's deal, not his. He's always kind of been an Iran hawk. As I mentioned, he assassinated Soleimani in his first term, bombed Iran last June. That supposedly obliterated. Did not, of course, Iran still has heavily enriched uranium. This is called the logic of escalation. Once you dip your toe in and you create a new set of problems while trying to resolve the old problems, well, now what do you do? You can either back out and lose face or apply even more pressure, hoping that that will be.
- [37:00]
Michael Kimmage
But let me play devil's advocate just for a moment in this regard, because I want to emphasize at. Because it's what I think. I want to emphasize what's so strange about all of this. And of course, you're absolutely right. The 2018 decision to get out of JCPOA, the bombing over the summer. There is a pattern there, and the pattern is revealed on 28 February. But, you know, go back to the campaign of 2024. I don't remember Iran coming out much. You know, sort of conciliatory toward Russia, which is one of Iran's partners in the world.
- [37:32]
Martin DeCaro
And no other countries thought that they need to bomb Iran to stop some threat.
- [37:36]
Michael Kimmage
Go back to the second inaugural, which is a clue in many ways to Trumpism, to be sure, with the references to McKinley and, you know, activities in the Western Hemisphere and, you know, a kind of more bellicose Trump than you saw in the first term that you can get from the second inaugural. But nothing about Iran that I can recall.
- [37:53]
Donald Trump
Like in 2017, we will again build the strongest military the world has ever seen. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but, but also by the wars that we end and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.
- [38:14]
Michael Kimmage
Nothing about Iran that's memorable in the National Security Strategy that was published in November of last year. Nothing about Iran and the State of the Union address, because apparently that was subterfuge for not signaling to the Iranians that the war was going to come. But it's a pattern. But there's also this other pattern which was the message that was sold to the American population, that this is going to be a period of retrenchment, that the US Is going to focus on problems at home, that there's the need to revive manufacturing in the United States. The kind of stupidity of the foreign policy elite, as Trump is often saying, is a stupidity about waging wars in the Middle east and, you know, sort of forever war. So it's just that part of it I do find baffling. I guess we could answer the question by saying that that was smokescreen or that was salesmanship, but it didn't feel that way at the time. It felt like Trump was offering himself to the American public as something of
- [39:00]
Martin DeCaro
a restrainer president, and he believes he's smarter than his predecessors, so he'll get it right this time where they screwed up. My final question to Michael Kimmage deals with one of the final arguments you make in your essay, and that is the importance of supporting Ukraine. You say Russia cannot be allowed to extinguish Ukrainian statehood because that would have serious negative consequences for this thing we call the world order. So let me play devil's advocate here.
- [39:27]
Michael Kimmage
A lot of devils in the conversation.
- [39:29]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, the rules based order was never entirely rules based or orderly. There have been losses of territory, territorial conquests, or territorial disputes such as the Kashmir, that just go on and on and on without resolution. This may sound cold hearted because I don't want Ukrainians to lose their independence and I don't want Ukrainian statehood to be extinguished. So why is the fate of Ukraine so important?
- [39:57]
Michael Kimmage
Sure. Well, I think it really follows very organically from the conversation that we've been having that there's an uptick in military conflicts internationally. US Is not responsible for all of them, but the US has been responsible for some of this uptick over the last 12, 13 months. So the quotient, the kind of gradient of instability is rising. We've already mentioned that this is potentially very, very dangerous for the global economy. So that's a kind of structural danger that's out there. We could go back to 2011, into the Syrian civil war, which was in some ways a foretaste for the era that we're living in. That was not one great power, you know, intervening in another country. It's not what we've been discussing. But, you know, there are lots of powers that were involved in the Syrian civil war. But you have a population of 22 million people in Syria, and because of the civil war, 11 million of those people become refugees who then succeed in sort of destabilizing politics across Europe and in other places. So we are spinning toward what you could describe as a kind of global anarchy. And there are two places or more. Western hemisphere has its tensions, but is sort of not a part of this narrative. Much of Asia also, you have sort of tensions, but not part of the narrative that we've been discussing. That's not the story for India or for Japan or for China, many other countries in that part of the world. Africa has lots of instability, but it's largely, you know, sort of internal to. To Africa. And so we're sort of left with the Middle east, which is now inclining in the direction of a major regional war, with all the consequences that could follow from that. Refugees, destabilization of the global economy, etc. And so the question mark then is about Europe. And Europe has been. I'm just thinking about it from a pure perspective of American interests. I'm not talking about liberal international order or global order in the abstract. American national interests, which are sort of listed in that New York Times piece. And so Europe is a major trading partner in the United States. It's a huge source of investment. There is a flow of technology and cooperation, goods and services that pass in both directions. That's integral to the success of the American economy. And also, and we could debate whether, you know, this power is used to good or bad effect internationally. But US Is also a hugely important area for power projection for the United States and the outside world, basing air force bases, medical services, troops that are stationed there, et cetera. US Wouldn't be a military power in the Middle east without that connection to Europe. So Europe really matters to American national interests, and Ukraine matters enormously to Europe, especially in the scenario that's indicated by the language of that New York Times piece. So, yes, if it's a muddied conflict that goes on indefinitely, where the line of contact is largely where it is now, Europe will do fine. We'll have an adversarial relationship with Russia, but Europe will muddle through as Ukraine will muddle through. If not, if Russia is able to extinguish Ukrainian statehood. It is my conviction, which is very debatable, that the conflict doesn't end, the conflict moves westward, because then you have countries, Poland potentially Romania, Bulgaria, certainly the Baltic republics that are going to feel that they're next and that the precedent that has been set in Ukraine, which has already been set in Belarus, right, Russia has swallowed up yellow roos kind of gradually over the last couple of years, is going to be the precedent that's coming for them. And so I think that they and I think even in that scenario of this extinguishing of Ukrainian statehood, Ukraine is not going to disappear off the map. Part of it is still going to be Ukrainian. There's going to be an insurgency against the other part of Ukraine that's occupied by Russia. And I think it's very likely that Poland and the Baltic republics join in that insurgency. And so the war that we now have, which is a Russia Ukraine war, becomes a Russia Europe war, of course, with tens of millions of refugees and a major destabilization that comes in that regard. Now maybe NATO is already sort of half dead anyway. And so this is is not the perfect framing for it, but if NATO is still a viable alliance, that means a NATO Russia war. And I don't think that Germany is going to stay neutral in that case and sort of stay out of it. I think Germany will probably get dragged in in the direction of Poland and the Baltic republics. And so there we would now have a scenario where the Middle east is at a regional war, Europe is engulfed in a regional war, and the natural partner for the United States, Europe is no longer sort of a viable natural partner. And so I think in all those respects, catastrophe beckons. But very important to note my language, if Russia is able to extinguish Ukrainian statehood very far from the current reality, not what we have now, but a scenario we're thinking about. And I think to me, not a scenario that stabilizes, but a scenario that destabilizes. And so the one really helpful point of order that we have at the moment is Europe. Europe is the place that could go either way at the moment. It's basically stable. That is not a guarantee if it becomes unstable, you know, I think for the US it would just be terrible, terrible news. So I'm not speaking sentimentally here about supporting Ukraine, although there might be sentimental reasons from my perspective, and it's. It's absolutely a debate that has to be had in terms of pros and cons. But from my perspective, it's a matter of basic national interest that the US should support Ukraine.
- [44:49]
Martin DeCaro
And in the end, what benefit to Russia? Destroying Ukraine, conquering Ukraine, how does that help Russia? That's the craziness of all of this. You're better off trading with Ukraine, not destroying and conquering Ukraine. But we know. We know through history, rational decision making and war. There's a disconnect.
- [45:09]
Michael Kimmage
Let's conclude our conversation.
- [45:10]
Martin DeCaro
Passions, jealousy, national pride. Go ahead.
- [45:13]
Michael Kimmage
Let's conclude our conversation maybe on a somewhat optimistic or positive note. You know, there's so much to chastise now in the, in the leadership of the United States, leadership of Russia and many other countries with this intoxication with military force and over reliance and crossing various lines of common sense. But in Greek mythology, if I'm not screwing things up, the goddess Athena was the goddess of wisdom, and she was also the goddess of war. I think that that's a reminder to us in a way that these are two things that need to be intertwined in a way, especially for countries, as we've been talking about, Martin, especially for countries that are powerful. This is maybe not the dilemma of Liechtenstein or the dilemma of Honduras or the dilemma of Madagascar. I mean, those are countries that are going to be shaping to a great degree by the world around them. But for the Chinas, for the Russias, for the United States of the world, these are countries that are able to shape the world with their military power. So it's all the more important to harness that power to wisdom. You know, it's not because this is an inevitable combination. It's because it's a crucial combination, the connection of wisdom to strategy or of military power. And it feels to me like we're living through a moment where these are very, very far apart from one another. Wisdom and, and military power. But it's the job of us, in a way, as citizens or as thinkers and people who worry about these things. It's the job of us to think about what it means to bring them together. Not just to observe what happens when they go apart, but to think about how we can bring them together.
- [46:34]
U.S. Politician or Official
All these issues remind us that the choices we make about war can impact, in sometimes unintended ways, the openness and freedom on which our way of life depends. And that is why I intend to engage Congress about the existing Authorization to Use Military Force, or aumf, to determine how we can continue to fight terrorism without keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing. The AUMF is now nearly 12 years old. The Afghan war is coming to an end. Core Al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP must be dealt with. But in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves Al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars. We don't need to fight more or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine and ultimately repeal the AUMF's mandate. I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That's what history advises. That's what our democracy demands.
- [48:20]
Martin DeCaro
Coming up on History As It Happens, we'll speak to historian Antony Beaver about his new biography of Rasputin. We'll also take a look at parallels between today's war in Iran and the suez crisis of 1956. Plus, where is Russia in the Middle East? All that and more coming up on History As It Happens. Keep up on the show by signing up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for History as it Happens.