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History As It Happens
Trump and the Structures of 'Forever War'
00:51:20
Since 1945, has there been an antiwar U.S. president? Is it even possible to be an antiwar president when one has at his disposal history's most powerful war machine and is expected to maintain American primacy? President Donald Trump began his second...
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Martin DeCaro
History as it happens August 1, 2025 Trump and the structures of forever war.
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Stephen Wertheim
This attack has made it clear beyond.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower
All doubt that the international communist movement.
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Jimmy Carter
Is willing to use armed invasion to conquer independent nations.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower
We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex that we shall pay any price, bear any burd the arena where communist expansionism is most aggressively at work in the world today. Because the people of the world want peace and the leaders of the world.
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Stephen Wertheim
Are afraid of war.
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Jimmy Carter
The region, which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan, is of great strategic importance. It contains more than two thirds of the world's exportable oil.
- [01:22]
Ronald Reagan
Grenada, we were told, was a friendly island paradise for tourism. Well, it wasn't. It was a Soviet Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. We got there just in time.
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George H.W. Bush
It is a big idea, a new world order.
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Ronald Reagan
NATO can do for Europe's east what it did for Europe's West. Either you're with us, either you love freedom and with nations which embrace freedom, or you're with the enemy.
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Barack Obama
Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars. We don't need to fight.
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Ronald Reagan
Those asking for a third decade of.
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Stephen Wertheim
War in Afghanistan, I ask, what is.
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Ronald Reagan
The vital national interest?
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Martin DeCaro
Since 1945, has there been an anti war president? Is it possible to be an anti war president when one has at his disposal history's most lethal sophisticated war machine whose tentacles can reach almost any part of the world? President Trump promised peace. Does he know how to get there? And what structural forces are tilting him toward conflict? That's next as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [02:33]
Donald Trump
My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That's what I want to be, a peacemaker and a unifier.
- [02:46]
Martin DeCaro
When President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, his first year in office, he openly admitted he was not the most deserving, although it may have had less to do with him personally than the structure of his new job. President of the United states.
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Barack Obama
But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the commander in chief of a military of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek, one in which we are joined by 42 other countries, including Norway, in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks. Still, we are at war, and I'm responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. And some will kill and some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict, filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace and our effort to replace one with the other.
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Martin DeCaro
Remember, Obama did not run as an anti war leftist. He opposed the war in Iraq, but wanted to refocus the nation's war making capacity on Afghanistan. Still, he could speak eloquently at times about the country's militarism and the need to come off a permanent war footing.
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Barack Obama
So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine and ultimately repeal the AUMF's mandate, and 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.
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Martin DeCaro
That was in 2013. The following year, he was intervening in Libya, a military misadventure that contributed to Libya's collapse into a failed state. President Donald Trump began his second term promising to be a peacemaker, to mediate an end to war such as the one in Ukraine, and to avoid unnecessary wars for the United States.
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Donald Trump
Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.
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Martin DeCaro
The results so far are decidedly mixed. Writing in the New York Times, the historian Stephen Wertheim says, perhaps our eyes deceived us. But there was Mr. Trump diving into talks to stop the carnage in Ukraine and Gaza and seeking a diplomatic deal with Iran. The president even sounded curiously flexible toward China. But six months into his presidency, says Wertheim, he has delivered no peace, whether in Europe or in the Middle East. His strike on Iran sums up his struggles. A frantic, fumbling attempt at negotiation cut short by a risky attack that sets the stage for further war in Artful dealings are only half the trouble, Wertheim goes on to say. Mr. Trump is a thoroughly situational man in a deeply structural bind year after year, the United States stations its military forces on geopolitical fault lines in Europe, Asia, and the Middle east. And year after year it gets exactly what it has placed itself to receive, inheriting distant conflicts as its own and lurching from crisis to crisis at times of its many adversaries. Choosing I'll share a link to Earth IM's op ed in my weekly newsletter. You can sign up@historyasithappens.com or just go to Substack and search for history as it happens. So structures what is a structure? Sounds abstract. The President of the United States, any modern president of this country possesses immense power and authority over foreign policy and war making. As we've discussed on recent episodes, we have an imperial presidency. Bombs away. But even the most powerful officeholder is influenced by structural forces the military industrial complex.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower
The total influence economic, political, even spiritual is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.
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Martin DeCaro
Cultural forces and expectations, political pressures, public opinion, weapons manufacturers and the news media. The United States maintains an empire that is supposed to keep the peace and protect the nation's interests, yet only makes war more likely. The argument against primacy goes but why would this be the case? Historian Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow at the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and he is the author of Tomorrow the the Birth of US Global Supremacy, published in 2020, a Foreign affairs book of the year, it revealed how the United States decided to pursue global military dominance as an effectively perpetual project. Our conversation Next History is defined by.
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Martin DeCaro
Stephen Wertheim, welcome to the show.
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Stephen Wertheim
Very nice to be with you.
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Martin DeCaro
Yeah, your first time on it only took me about 460 episodes to get you on here. So we're going to talk about Trump and whether he's a principled peacemaker. But I want to start by bouncing something off of you. One of my old politics professors from Ithaca College, Naima Naitola, he used to say to me that whenever a new president takes office, we should think of A pilot getting behind the controls of an airliner. He now believes he is in control. He can steer this ship of state in any direction he pleases. But immediately he's buffeted by forces outside the airplane and within the airplane, inside the plane, you have co pilots and flight attendants speaking metaphorically here, who are whispering in the President's ears, oh, we have a commitment in this country. The CIA is operating over here, our intelligence agencies. We have this, we have a base here, we have this commitment there, this treaty here. All in an effort to convince him, you know what, you shouldn't try to fly this plane in a different direction. You'll run into too much turbulence. Is this a metaphor that maybe fits the argument in your op ed?
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Stephen Wertheim
I think that's part of the story, but I think it would be much of the story of Trump's first administration where he continually expressed a desire to do something different and seemed to be, even in his account, derailed by his own advisors or what he called the deep state. But in his second term, I think there's more drama here because Trump has been here before. He knows that he may face resistance to doing what he would ideally want to do. He appointed people who are not so traditional. This time, for example, Tulsi Gabbard Director of National Intelligence Pete Hegseth Defense Secretary Trump has been, I think, a little bit bolder in trying to get right to things he'd like to do in the world. So you think back to his inaugural address. He proclaimed he wanted to be a peacemaker and unifier. He would judge success not only by the battles we win, but also the wars we end. And even more importantly, he said the wars we never get into.
- [10:56]
Donald Trump
We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.
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Stephen Wertheim
So I think now we're seeing a little bit more of a clear expression through policy, whatever it is that Trump would like to do in the world. The problem is Trump himself often does not have a great idea of where he wants to go. So if he's the pilot in your metaphorical plane, he seems to be zigzagging and maybe not even heading overall in a clear direction.
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Martin DeCaro
Well, he certainly talks a good game. He gave an address in the Middle east, may have been in Saudi Arabia where he talked about how the interventionists were wrong and they wrought devastation in your countries.
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Donald Trump
In the end, the so called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. And the interventionalists were intervening in complex Societies that they did not even understand themselves. They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves.
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Martin DeCaro
The type of thing that if a Democrat had said it or anyone had said it really, at one point after the 911 terrorist attacks, they would have been accused of being weak, of being appeasers, of being on an apology tour. Yet Trump bombed Iran. He's launched missiles at the Houthis, which is strategically pointless. He's not standing up to Netanyahu, really. I mean, the slaughter in Gaza continues. So I don't know. He's not really a principled. Well, we know he's not a principled guy. He's a transactionalist. But it's hard to really get a read on his foreign policy ideas, his ideology. You know, this debate that's going on, restrainers, interventionists, what have you.
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Stephen Wertheim
Trump is a very situational person and a situational thinker. So he does look at the world and he says, I don't really see why it's like this. This doesn't seem right to me. And he seeks to change the terms in which the United States relates to other countries. And that's why every so often he does say something that sounds refreshing. He at least questions orthodoxies. And for Americans who have for a long time been disappointed with the results of our foreign policy, that can at least be better seeming than an alternative that they know, especially if that alternative is openly presenting itself as orthodoxy, as the Democratic campaign last year pretty much did. But the problem is that Trump himself doesn't really land in one of those grand strategic camps. Primacist, restrainer, prioritizer. You know, to be in one of these camps, you have to have a kind of worked out view of what are America's vital interests, what's worth defending through, if necessary, the direct use of military force and what's not. So where are American interests, and therefore, where should America have defense commitments and a military presence? And, you know, I've just never heard Trump, and he's said a lot of things in the 10 years in which he's been the commanding figure in American politics. He loves to talk. I've never heard him really speak on that level of things. He can say, I don't know why we have this alliance. I don't know why this war is going on. I want to do this and that. But his main position seems to be to renegotiate things so that there's an improvement, at least in his mind, compared to what came before. You know, take NATO policy a Lot of people have said he's against NATO. He really wants to pull out of NATO. Well, what we've seen is not that, but rather he wants to put pressure on European allies to pay more for their militaries, in which case Trump is then fine with continuing to protect them. And that is very different from seeking to have Europeans be able to defend themselves collectively and therefore minimize the exposure of the United States to. To the cost of a conflict, should it come.
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Martin DeCaro
And when it comes to his aversion to sinking the United States into another pointless war, unwinnable war in the Middle east, for example, well, he hasn't had an opportunity yet, if you know what I mean. If something were to happen somewhere in the world to our troops, for instance, if the Iranians had really retaliated and killed a lot of American troops, say, in Iraq after, you know, there's always a chance something like that could happen. He's no dove. So let's talk, though, about structures. Of course, a US President has a lot of power as an individual, but there are always constraints. I was talking about the forces buffeting the airplane from the outside. This is often called the blob. I don't really use that term because I don't think people know what it means. We're talking about a set of institutions and a set of ideas. Trump doesn't really talk about an ideology. We have all these ideas about restraint or primacists. It was easier during the Cold War. You were a cold warrior. We know what that meant. So why don't we start with the set of institutions that makes up the structures here that influences U.S. foreign policy? I have a book here in my study, Washington Rules, by Andrew Bacevich, where he talks about this is not just the Pentagon and the presidency and the Congress. This extends to a wide range of institutions that set the rules, so to speak. What are they, Stephen?
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Stephen Wertheim
So institutions, shorthanded, the blob. You know, we could call them the national security community, but they maybe center on the executive branch. That directly makes most of U.S. foreign policy. But Congress matters as well. You have institutions like the military, the intelligence community, that has some insulation, even though they're in the executive branch, from the President himself, although perhaps less so with this particular president, and then outside of Congress, which of course, is influenced by a range of actors, domestic donors, constituents, think tanks, foreign lobbies, people like me who work in think tanks around D.C. even academics who are involved in the policy discussion, and the media, which is a very important vector for all participants in this. And I'm not one of those people who thinks, you know, that we should lump everybody together as the blob metaphor suggests. Right. Like a blob is undifferentiated. Every piece of a blob is made up of the same stuff. I mean, this is a term blob that Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama's deputy national security advisor coined or at least popularized.
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Martin DeCaro
I didn't know that he was the one who made that up. Go ahead.
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Stephen Wertheim
Yeah, yeah, check me on who exactly made it up. But I heard it from him basically, and that's where I think most people have gotten it from. So that's interesting in and of itself. Right. Because we've had since the debacle of the George W. Bush administration, two two term presidents, one from each party who perceived that they were facing a blob in Obama's advisor's words, or a deep state in the words of President Trump, and yet they also had their policies heavily influenced by those same set of actors or constrained by them.
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Martin DeCaro
Yeah, Obama was not an anti war president. Yeah. The government bureaucracies, military intelligence agencies, Congress, as you say, mainstream media, the op ed pages, and today this extends to podcasts. You know, the media landscape has changed dramatically since the time Andrew Bacevich wrote his book Foreign lobbies like aipac. There's also, though, a set of ideas. I kind of stumbled through my question a little bit before, but this even operates, I think, on a cultural level. Americans take it for granted that the United States is number one. And anyone who wants to buck that has to face the possibility. They're susceptible to the charge of, well, not being for American greatness and exceptionalism or weakness. I mean, this happens all the time. It happened all the time during the Cold War too. Weakness on communism, you're going to be another Truman lost China. This weighed heavily on LBJ's thinking before.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower
Vietnam, that this is really war. It is guided by North Vietnam and it is spurred by communist China. Its goal is to conquer the south, to defeat American power and to extend the Asiatic dominion of communism.
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Martin DeCaro
Mind you talk a little bit, if you don't mind the set of ideas that influences leaders no matter who they are.
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Stephen Wertheim
Well, they're all very much in flux right now, which makes things interesting. Right. So I think if we were talking more than a decade ago, we might dwell for a while on American exceptionalism as one of these ideas where it just seems like if you question it, you get attacked by people in the institutions that we just discussed in the, in the so called blob. There was A whole set of rather absurd debates between Obama and Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, where they each competed to be the one who would say that I really, really believe with every fiber of my being that America is the greatest thing ever. That we are a light unto all nations, we are a model for all countries. So American exceptionalism encodes the idea that the United States is destined to determine the course of world history and should lead the world either through the example of its power or the power of its example. But interestingly enough, Donald Trump, when he ran for president originally in 2016, said he didn't like American exceptionalism. He said it was a bad idea. Now he ran on American greatness or making America great again. Certainly he's a nationalist America first, but he took a party for whom American exceptionalism was an article of faith and kind of redefined what America Americanness was. At the same time, though, this helps us understand it's one thing to believe in American exceptionalism or not believe in American exceptionalism, and it's quite another to believe that America should be or should not be the dominant military power projecting force all around the world, that having a set of wide ranging security alliances and partners and so forth. Those things are separate because Trump has so far been a president who, yes, he doesn't like large scale, prolonged US Military interventions, that's clear. But he also has left in place the open ended alliances and military deployments that the United States has, which I would argue pretty much guarantee that the United States will be heavily involved in the conflicts where we are positioning ourselves.
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Martin DeCaro
And there's the trillion dollar defense budget or whatever it's up to now. And if you talk about cutting that, well, what happens? You're weak on defense, you're ceding the field to China. Trump is increasing. He's calling for an increase in defense spending. So there's that structural constraint and there are treaties. The United States has a treaty to defend the Philippines. It is an ally. That term ally is misused a lot because it's just an easy synonym for friend or partner. But you know, the United States is not allied with Israel. There is no treaty calling for the United States to defend Israel against anything. There is a treaty with the Philippines which has been threatened by China. Taiwan. Isn't there not a legislative commitment on the part of the US to defend Taiwan? So a president can have his own ideas when he comes in. But then there are these other things that come up and say, well, you can't really do that because fill in the blank.
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Stephen Wertheim
But Trump has an many occasions seemingly jostled against this structure. Right. He's treated allies often in adversarial terms, particularly on economic policy, to some degree. On cultural policy, too. When you think about Europe, this discussion is opening up. I think the institutions of the national security community have people in it who are entertaining a wider set of possibilities for where American power should go. For here, it's by no means a kind of static story, and that's why I think it's interesting. Otherwise, I guess I would just sort of form my view and probably move on to something else that seemed like that more things were possible and it's been resilient.
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Martin DeCaro
So would you agree that the origins of this idea that the US Needs to be the global hegemon, or at least for its camp during the Cold War, is 1945? But after the end of the Cold War, there was maybe a missed opportunity to reconsider things. The Warsaw Pact, for example, left. Well, it really. It fell apart. It disappeared. But NATO not only stayed, US stayed in Europe and NATO remained, but it expanded all the way to Russia's borders. So my question here, I guess, is the origins of this idea and how it's been able to survive many catastrophes. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, but also major changes in the world where there were opportunities to rethink the commitment to primacy, and they were not taken.
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Stephen Wertheim
I think you can distinguish between two basic rationales for American primacy. So, first of all, to go back Before World War II, the United States had a tradition of seeking to avoid what Thomas Jefferson called entanglements in the old World, the world beyond the Western Hemisphere.
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Martin DeCaro
That was not George Washington, who often gets credit for that. It was Jefferson. But. Go ahead. Correct, Correct.
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Stephen Wertheim
But Washington did similar. Yeah. Leave office saying that the United States should avoid permanent alliances in any portion of the the foreign world. So, you know, they are pretty similar. But. But yes, entanglements comes from Jefferson. And you can trace that tradition up to the eve of World War II. And I think the real turning point comes actually a bit before 1945. It comes after France fell to Nazi Germany in the summer of 1940, because then Americans were confronted really for the first time with the prospect of living in a world in which totalitarian, expansionist powers might dominate Europe and also might dominate Asia. Americans hadn't really faced that situation in a realistic way in World War I. And that brought about a debate that really crystallized two alternatives. One was, look, the United States can be content with defending its own territory in North America and indeed, in the Western Hemisphere by keeping outside powers out of the Western Hemisphere. And that was a coherent theory of the case. Even people who disagreed tended to admit that if the bottom line is to protect the territory of the United States from outside invasion, then defending the hemisphere would be sufficient. But Franklin Roosevelt and many others looked at this situation and thought, that's not all we want as Americans. We also want a world that is broadly moving in an American style, liberal direction. We don't want to be hemmed in and always just taking the kind of defensive action of defending ourselves or defending our hemisphere. We want more limitless opportunities in the world. And so even before Pearl Harbor, a lot of people were coming to the view. Most Americans actually supported the view that it was more important to stop the Axis from achieving the conquest of Europe and Asia than it was to keep out of the war. Even if before Pearl harbor, most Americans still would prefer to keep out of the war. I think really that's the seminal debate.
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Martin DeCaro
Interesting.
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Stephen Wertheim
It was one hands down, in a very decisive fashion. In political terms, those who were for a hemispheric defense perimeter lost were branded isolationists. And that position is one that really doesn't endure in American politics since that time. And from there, I think the basic argument is quite similar. During the Cold War, we've established that the United States cares about the balance of power in Eurasia, that we want to keep a totalitarian great power with expansionist ambitions from dominating Europe and Asia.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower
Powerful and resourceful gangsters have banded together to make war upon the whole human race. Their challenge has now been flung at the United States of America. The Japanese have treacherously violated the long standing peace between us. Many American soldiers and sailors have been killed by enemy action. American ships have been sunk. American airplanes have been destroyed. The Congress and the people of the United States have accepted that challenge. Together with other free peoples. We are now fighting to maintain our right to live among our world neighbors in freedom, in common decency, without fear of assault.
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Stephen Wertheim
And therefore, if allies can't do it themselves, the United States should step in and make commitments, ultimately treaty ally commitments and station its forces. But I think, as you mentioned, there is a big opportunity, a turning point, and that is after the Cold War, you might say the original rationale for primacy goes away. There are no more totalitarian, expansionist great powers. In fact, there are really no more great powers. Some people thought the United States should go home and return to what? No less a cold warrior than Jean Kirkpatrick, an official in the Reagan administration, what she called be a normal country in a normal time. Writing in 1989, it seemed perfectly consistent to her to favor a robust Cold War posture, but also called for a major retraction of US Military power afterwards. And needless to say, that's not what happened. Successive presidents, the first Bush and then Clinton, moved quickly to preserve all of America's Cold War alliances and basically made a new rationale for American preeminence, that the United States sought to provide a kind of insurance against instability or uncertainty. We wanted to prevent rivals from even emerging. And we thought the best way to do that was to maintain the alliance system and a significant onshore presence of troops at all times. And it's that point at which American global military dominance becomes a forever project.
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George H.W. Bush
And the alliance will prove every bit as important to American and European security in the decade ahead. The importance of the alliance and its democratic underpinnings is the message I now take to Europe. NATO has been a success by any measure, but success breeds its own challenges. Today, dramatic changes are taking place in Europe, both East and West.
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Stephen Wertheim
There is no even theoretical condition that could obtain in the world that would cause Washington to say, okay, mission accomplished. Now we can take a big step back, and we think things will go pretty well for us. And if they don't, we can make adjustments from there. We decided not to do that in the best possible opportunity that we had in the 1990s. And so now we seem locked into.
- [30:59]
Martin DeCaro
This position because on the belief that it was possible to create a new world order and a permanent peace, a new, stable, permanent peace after the Cold War, which was the idealist vision of George H.W. bush in his New World Order speech after Saddam invaded Kuwait.
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George H.W. Bush
No peaceful international order is possible if larger states can devour their smaller neighbors. Clearly, no longer can a dictator count on east west confrontation to stymie concerted United nations action against aggression. A new partnership of nations has begun, and we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective, a new world order, can emerge. A new era freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace.
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Martin DeCaro
And it becomes even harder to discern between core and peripheral interests, which is a topic I bring up quite a bit on my show. It was difficult even in the Cold War. Vietnam was a peripheral interest, according to John F. Kennedy. The United States wound up getting sank into Vietnam on its own accord. For a decade or more. And that was totally unnecessary. But it becomes maybe even more difficult, or it's a different way of thinking about that conundrum, peripheral and core interests. Everything becomes important. If you're concerned about these psychological dominoes where we must maintain US Primacy everywhere. And, you know, one of the first examples of this, not only was Iraq in 1990, 91, Somalia at the end of George H.W. bush's first term, or a new purpose for our military, not necessarily fighting a ground war, but a humanitarian mission that went badly, and the United States pulled out of that.
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Stephen Wertheim
So, yeah, those are two really important cases. The Persian Gulf War, which I think in retrospect looks like the most successful post Cold War military operation that had, you know, major stakes that the United States has undertaken. And yet the real blunder came afterwards. Instead of saying, okay, we have removed Iraqi forces from Kuwait, we have made our point that we want to see a world where international law prevails and states don't commit territorial aggression against other states, we said, we can never allow something like this to happen again. So to prevent Iraq from committing the kind of aggression that we successfully stopped and rolled back, we will station, for the first time, tens of thousands of military forces in the region. And then we will go about containing Saddam because we really don't like him. I mean, he was analogized to Hitler to drum up support for the Gulf War. And then we made this problem into a big problem for ourselves that ended up culminating in the disastrous invasion of Iraq. There's a lot there to unpack, because in a way, this is an embryonic example of the way the goalposts have shifted since the beginning of American primacy. In World War II, the United States waited, in effect, for threats to emerge. When they did, it mobilized. Ultimately, the United States won World War II and then won or lost less the Cold War. And then, in effect, even though policymakers said, well, the fruits of our victory is leadership of NATO and things like that, so we have to maintain it. But they were actually rejecting the earlier legacy because they didn't want to pull back in the absence of a world with totalitarian great powers. They wanted to remain onshore and nip any kind of aggression in the bud. And it turned out that did not deliver peace through strength, as Donald Trump puts it, but so did Ronald Reagan, but involved the military in many more missions than it had been involved in even in the Cold War. And so that was already evident as the 1990s wore on, that the US military, even though it was by far the largest in the world was actually underfunded and strained given all the purposes that civilian leadership tried to use it for.
- [35:42]
Martin DeCaro
The Cold War provided a check on some of this, I suppose, although we shouldn't overstate, that the Cold War was a terribly violent time. But James Baker said the Cold War ended in his view when Mikhail Gorbachev announced or agreed not to block the UN Security Council resolution allowing for use of force against Saddam, a former Soviet client in 1990, 91 after he invaded Kuwait. So it kind of opens the door to a unipolarity where the only great power left can do as it pleases. Let's return to Reagan in a moment. You brought him up there. And I also want to return to the isolationist idea, if that's ever existed as well, because that's important for today's politics too. But when it comes to the Middle east and how the United States established permanent military bases there, irritating greatly people like Osama bin Laden, who thought the Saudi royal family was a sellout, not to agree with Bin Laden's worldview here. He offered to have his ragtag army from Afghanistan defend Saudi Arabia against Saddam after the invasion of Kuwait. And the Saudi royal family said, no, thank you. I think we'll go with the US military instead. But the point is that that was an irritant. Kicking the hornet's nest and wondering why you keep getting stung. What are the origins of the US militarizing its presence in the Middle East? Can we say it was maybe 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Carter doct that he announced in 1980?
- [37:09]
Stephen Wertheim
Jimmy Carter origins are always debatable, but I think that's a very good point of origin. I mean, during the Cold War, the United States wanted to prevent Soviet domination of the Middle East. It's just the Soviets didn't seem like they were in a position to dominate the region. But the United States was performing a kind of offshore balancing role where we didn't station many troops in the region. But if there was a Soviet client or a force that might seem communist inclined, we would try to thwart that force and back the opponent in addition to becoming strong partners with Israel. But in 1979, Jimmy Carter is angered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, announces the Carter Doctrine, which suggests that the United States has a vital interest in seeing the flow of hydrocarbons from the Middle East.
- [38:06]
Jimmy Carter
An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interest of the United States of America and Such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.
- [38:33]
Stephen Wertheim
The United States basically practices a souped up version of balancing in the region after the Iranian Revolution and the Iran Iraq war, which stretches through the 1980s. In a way, the US kind of supports both sides because it doesn't like the other side. But as we discussed, it's really only after the first Gulf War in 1990-91 that the US keeps large numbers of troops in the region effectively on a permanent basis. And then from there we go on to establish policies of dual containment of Iraq and Iran and get more and more militarily involved. And you made a good point, I think, about terrorism, because one thing this sort of ideology of primacy does is it prevents us from considering the possibility that if the United States were less involved in overseas affairs, maybe that would actually redound to our benefit and make us safer because it would inspire less antagonism from the people who object to US Presence and US Power. And so one of the things that we were never really able to have as a conversation after 911 as a country was to consider, well, maybe even if we have to go after Al Qaeda after it has attacked the United States directly, ultimately the solution here may be to be less present in the Middle East. And I think now we're at a point where it's quite common to suggest that the United States really doesn't have vital interests at stake in the region and would benefit from taking a huge step back and undoing the large permanent US Military presence in the region. In a way that's been like a dominant position in American politics since the Obama administration, and yet U.S. policy has not reflected that. Instead, we seem to get no lower than 40,000 troops in the region.
- [40:38]
Martin DeCaro
I was just about to ask you, I think you mentioned that figure in your op ed in the Times. 40,000 troops. Well, we can't do that, Stephen, because we know if we pull back, the vacuum will be filled by one of our adversaries. And then what? There is some validity to this argument. It's not the 1800s anymore where you had to sail across a huge ocean to wage war months later. We do need to have some presence somewhere, right, to deal with modern threats. But it's gone way, way too far. As you say 40,000American troops still permanently based in the Middle east, plus all the Air Force and the Navy and everything like that. Well, you know, you can look at it this way. If 40,000 Saudi troops asked for permission to occupy Texas, I'm sure we'd Be fine with it. You mentioned Reagan before. He read Menachem Begin, the riot act in 1982, saying that you're committing a holocaust in Beirut, which Begin did not appreciate because he had family members who died in the Holocaust. This was Reagan becoming furious with the Israeli siege of West Beirut after the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The following year, when the US Marines were attacked, and this is the origins of Hezbollah, the Israeli invasion, and then the US Returning to Lebanon after the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
- [41:56]
Ronald Reagan
Israel must have learned that there is no way it can impose its own solutions on hatreds as deep and bitter as those that produce this tragedy. If it seeks to do so, it will only sink more deeply into the quagmire that looms before it.
- [42:09]
Martin DeCaro
The Marines blown up in the barracks by the suicide bombers. Reagan cut and run.
- [42:14]
Ronald Reagan
At the wheel was a young man on a suicide mission. The truck carried some 2,000 pounds of explosives, but there was no way our Marine guards could know this. Their first warning that something was wrong came when the truck crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain link fence and barbed wire entanglements. The guards opened fire, but it was too late.
- [42:36]
Martin DeCaro
Presidents today, members of Congress today, are afraid of cutting and running, are afraid of criticizing Israel and withholding arms to Israel the way the conservative lion did Ronald Reagan. Do leaders trail public opinion? Do they overestimate the negative backlash to taking a different policy? I think most Democrats at least say the United States needs to take a different policy toward Israel. And it seems that politicians are afraid of doing it because they're worried about the backlash.
- [43:07]
Stephen Wertheim
Yeah, I think you're right about Israel policy. And at least the Democratic Party today, you know, in a more general sense, it is hard to know, to be fair how the American public will react to things. The American public overwhelmingly supported leaving Afghanistan and actually continued to do so even as the public thought that the withdrawal itself was a mess, reflected incompetence by the Biden administration. You know, people in the Biden administration concluded that withdrawals were very risky. That kind of politics was to be avoided, which I think is a shame. I guess my view is the American public seems quite open to hearing different new approaches to foreign policy. If they weren't, Donald Trump wouldn't have got to be president twice. So I think it's a permissive environment. The problem is the elites who really set the terms of the debate, emphasize certain problems as opposed to other problems, tend to be skewed in a primacist and interventionist direction. So if you recall the airwaves watch cable news. After Biden made the decision to leave Afghanistan, things started to turn south in August and September 2021. And the airwaves are dominated by people saying, you know, we had a stable equilibrium in Afghanistan. This withdrawal is what's screwing things up. The violence of the war in Afghanistan, as well as the fact that we were losing more and more each year, had not been receiving much media attention in the years prior. So to most Americans, nothing's happening. Essentially. Suddenly there's chaos, there are people falling off of planes. It's a terrible scene. The Taliban takes over the country. Americans are killed on the way out. Of course that's all bad, but I think there just weren't enough people pointing out at the time the war itself was awful. And the reason that we left a mess and a Taliban victory behind is that we had no strategy. It was unwinnable.
- [45:15]
Martin DeCaro
After 20 years, the US still did not defeat the Taliban, period.
- [45:20]
Stephen Wertheim
As we weigh the possibility of US military retrenchment elsewhere, a lot of other experiences aren't going to look like Afghanistan. We don't have that kind of a war going on. So, you know, I think one of the best opportunities to relieve US military burdens today is to gradually hand off responsibility for European defense onto European allies. I think it should be done over a period of several years. But I think the odds are are low that, you know, Russia will be so stupid as to be tempted to commit aggression against NATO territory, especially as it's trying its best to make gains in Ukraine. And that is not exactly going well if the goal is to gain a lot more territory.
- [46:09]
Martin DeCaro
But you know how this goes. The US withdrawal in Afghanistan emboldens bad actors all over the world. We look weak. So, you know, to Biden's credit, he went ahead with a withdrawal. How he did it did not go well, of course, but the fact that he still did it, even after 20 years, I mean, it's a low bar to cross here. But in a democracy, it is still a difficult decision for any politician to make because of the ammunition you're giving your opponents who can charge you with weakness or botching the entire thing. And of course, as we've discussed, the final withdrawal did not go smoothly. But my last question for you, Stephen, is about the isolationist charge because that also factors in here today. He can be accused of being an isolationist, wanting to cede the field to America's foes. You talked about the so called isolationists, the America Firsters. Charles Lindbergh PRE Pearl Harbor David M. Kennedy historian, has argued that it is a myth that most Americans were steadfast isolationists. And then they woke up on the morning of December 7, 1941, and they all changed their minds. Most Americans understood the United States was going to be in World War II at one point or another, and they had come around to that because of Roosevelt's leadership and other factors. But those so called isolationists, the Lindberghs, who were of course immediately discredited after the Japanese bomb Pearl harbor, they weren't really isolationists, were they?
- [47:31]
Stephen Wertheim
I would argue no, and I would go further than David Kennedy. So in my book called Tomorrow the World, what I show is that, you know, essentially nobody considered themselves to be an isolationist. The term isolationism becomes widely used in the United States only in the 1930s, and it is used almost exclusively as an epithet by people who want to denounce the people that they're calling isolationists. So what's going on there? So the people that they're denouncing generally maintain that the United States should defend and maintain military supremacy across the Western Hemisphere. That's a large portion of the world. So is that isolationism? That's a very poor analytical term and just should not be used. And you cannot escape the negative connotations. And yet it is routinely used. But if you jump ahead to our present moment, if Lindbergh and company were an isolationist, then I don't know how basically any major American political figure could be called an isolationist today, because nobody really says, you know what, the United States should return to a hemisphere defense perimeter. That would mean getting rid of all of our alliances beyond the Western Hemisphere and our military deployments. And to be clear, I don't favor that. I think the United States should remain militarily present in Asia. Long discussion about my views on that, but I think we should be getting out of the Middle east and hand off the defense of Europe onto European allies. I think all those things will take time to do. But that would leave the United States as not just a great power in the world, but the leading military power.
- [49:17]
Martin DeCaro
So, yeah, I mean, in your op ed, isolationism, no, in your op ed, you talk about it might be wise strategically for the US to pull back to the second island chain in the Pacific to not be so, maybe provocative to the Chinese. But you're, you're having a debate within a certain set of ideas, which is the United States should maintain its presence in Asia. Isolationism, as you say, is a smear. Means you're an ostrich with your head in the ground. How could you be so naive to think we can stay out of the war with Hitler? Well, maybe some people were naive to think that Lindbergh wasn't just naive, he was an anti Semite, et cetera. But I mean, it's a ridiculous thing.
- [49:52]
Stephen Wertheim
To call people today, then as now, the coalition of people who wanted to avoid entry into the second World War, totally cross cutting, ideologically diverse group, started.
- [50:04]
Martin DeCaro
Out as students, actually started out as students.
- [50:07]
Stephen Wertheim
Yep. And included, you know, democratic socialist Norman Thomas, Gerald Ford. So today we see, you know, a coalition of people who think the United States has too large a military role in the world and people get all confused by it because they're strange bedfellows. Well, there are strange bedfellows on the other side. You know, John Bolton loves American military preeminence in his own way. Donald Trump so far seems to as well. So did Joe Biden. So they're just all strange coalitions. And I think we should just focus on what we think is the right policy for the interests of the United States.
- [50:43]
Donald Trump
America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world. A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. And we will restore the name.
- [51:07]
Martin DeCaro
Of.
- [51:07]
Donald Trump
A great president, William McKinley to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs.
- [51:20]
Dwight D. Eisenhower
To.
- [51:21]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of history as it happens. Actually, the next five episodes. My series on the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, August 1945. We begin with Hitler's war and our guest will be military historian Antony Beaver. That is next as we report history as it happens. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter comes out every Friday. Sign up at history as it happens.com.
- [52:12]
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Sam.