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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to another lunch with Jamie. Safe to say the world's in a strange place right now with Donald Trump admitting that part of his reasoning for wanting to take over Greenland is because he didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize. To the recent capture of Venezuelan President Maduro, to Trump's threats to strike Iran. Things are complex and uncertain, which is why I couldn't be happier to introduce today's guest, Richard Haas. To say Richard is an experienced diplomat is an understatement. He worked for Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2. He served as the President of the Council on Foreign relations for almost 20 years. He's written 13 books, most recently in 2023, the Bill of the 10 Habits of Good Citizens, which I think is a must read for all people. Richard also writes a substack called Home and Away, which you subscribe to and he co hosts a podcast called Alternate Shots with John Ellis. And he also is the go to for all news outlets as expert on foreign affairs. You know, in the conversation we talked about the biggest shocks of the administration, tariffs, the publication of the national Security Strategy. We went from the Russia, Ukraine war, looked at Israel and Gaza and obviously talked a lot about Iran. He talked about why the US has zero chance of restoration to the pre Trump world regardless of who we elect next and how much damage been done to the future. We also talked about why Iran isn't ready for regime change yet and that's one of the biggest challenges and why there's so many other ways it could have gone about what recently has been going on there that unfortunately are not the choices that were made. You know, we talked about the Board of Peace. You know, Richard is definitely scared about the elections in 2026 and beyond. A lot of what's been happening with ICE and a lot of the Trump administration is definitely making a lot more people nervous and setting us up for potentially a whole host of things that could go wrong with those elections. We also did talk about things that made him hopeful, which I appreciated. You know what Jerome Powell's response was to Trump's comments, what Mark Kelly's been doing, Jack Smith, some of the advancement in technology, the ability to combat climate change and health medicine, and most importantly, he probably talked about how Fernando Mendoza from Indiana gave him hope after the extraordinary performance that he had in their win over Miami. So the conversation wasn't heavy at all times. I am also concerned a little bit about Richard's delusions to his, how he thinks that Harbaugh is being the savior for the Giants. But we'll Wait and see what happens there. So, anyway, hope you enjoy this conversation. Hope you get something out of it. Now, here's my interview with Richard Haass. Hello, everybody. Great to see you all. Welcome to another lunch with Jamie. Please turn your camera on if you're able to. It is safe to say that the world's in a strange place right now. Between Trump's obsession with taking over Greenland to the recent capture of President Maduro, to Trump's threats to strike Iran, things are complex and uncertain. Which is why I couldn't be happier to introduce our guest today, Richard Haas. Richard, welcome. Thank you for joining us.
- [03:31]
B
Thank you, sir.
- [03:32]
A
To say Richard is an experienced diplomat is an understatement. He worked for Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush 1 and 2. He then served as the President on Council of Foreign relations for almost 20 years. He's written 13 books, most recently in 2023, the must read, the bill of obligations, the 10 habits of good Citizens. He's got a substack called Home and Away, which you should all subscribe to. He co hosts a podcast called Alternate Shots with John Ellis and is the go to for all news outlets as the expert on foreign affairs. So to say we're lucky to have him is an understatement. Richard, I'm going to start with the most, the most challenging question. I always start with all my guests, which is if I'm coming to New York City, where are you taking me to eat?
- [04:13]
B
Tell me a little bit more about your food preferences.
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A
Oh, I like, I don't like super high end. I like, you know, so I'd rather, I'd rather go to like, you know, just a local restaurant or just kind of a cool spot than hit up Per Se or Le Bernardin. But if you're treating, I'm happy for you to take me there too, though.
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B
Zero chance of that.
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A
Okay,
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B
dream on. You get your old man to take
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A
you to Bernie Anthony Scaramucci said Rao's, which again, which is hard, hard to pass up.
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B
Rao's. Yeah, but Rao's I don't have access to. Right, yeah, to Rao's. So now I gotta think.
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A
I like, I love. Peter Luger's is probably my favorite restaurant in New York.
- [04:56]
B
Maybe Peter Luger's. There's a couple of good steakhouses I like. Yeah, there's a couple of good Italian restaurants I like. I like Elgato Pardo and all that kind of like, I. I'm with you. I don't really like fancy stuff. I like good restaurants and a bit of kind of value. I go to Avra some days for lunch just because it's in the the hood. I mainly turn to my kids. They're my restaurant guys. I got like everyone else, my kids are in there and they're in their 30s and they live in Brooklyn.
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A
Well, any of those places sound great and I.
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B
You should get them to choose the restaurant. You'll do much better. Perfect. All right.
- [05:36]
A
That was the toughest question of the whole day.
- [05:38]
B
I guarantee I blew it. Also, I blow it. So go ahead.
- [05:41]
A
So unintentionally we are having this conversation on the one year anniversary of Trump's second inauguration. He just finished his two hour plus press conference, which I can't even begin to comprehend what, what he talked about. And if you had to pick, three of the most consequential moments of this administration so far are the things that were the biggest kind of shockers. Are you able to do that?
- [06:08]
B
Say a couple of things. One is the tariffs, the unilateralism to upend the global trading system, to not treat friends differently or better than foes. So I think tariffs were a massive, as much political and psychological shock as they were an economic shock. Maybe the publication of the National Security Strategy about what now six weeks, two months ago, just because it codified essentially what we knew. But when you actually put it down in one place, it was a bit of one of those moments where you go, okay, this is for real. The emphasis on the Western Hemisphere then reinforced by what happened in Venezuela, the unilateralism, I said anti European almost diatribe, which began early on in Munich with Vance, but then again was captured in that, in that document. The last thing I would say was not such a moment so much as moments, Jamie, which was the. When you think about what is probably the biggest foreign policy issue of the first year, it's not Venezuela, it's not Iran, may or may not yet be Greenland, but it was Ukraine and Russia, I think that raised fundamental questions about the submit. So again, it wasn't an event, but it took place over chunks of time, still take place, it's still unfolding. And in some ways Greenland plays into it because it reinforces the sense that Europe, rather than being the place, the venue where our best friends happen to be, rather than being a strategic priority, has become a place from which we are distancing ourselves and we don't see it as populated by friends. So again, it's not a single day. It's not like the bombing of Iran or the snatch of Maduro, but I actually think in terms of what's the most consequential. It's quite possible that the, the distancing from Europe is. Might be the single most. The movement towards the Western hemisphere and away from Europe. The combination of the two might be the most basic.
- [08:34]
A
Yeah, I mean that gets into. And I think talking about this national security document which I think doesn't get enough play because as you're right, he's kind of spelled out what they're doing and people just, I mean it's hard to keep up, unfortunately. But you know, it does seem like we've changed inherently for the foreseeable future, you know, what America's role is. And I guess one of the questions which I hate to even ask is how hard will it be to kind of turn the ship around, you know, in, in 2028, by the way, no matter who's elected to some extent. I mean, I'm hoping ob. There's a lot of candidates I'm excited about. But you. We're not a small little, you know, boat here, like. Right. I mean, to turn what. What's been done as far as a national policy. I mean, we no longer are the reliable country. We have been for decades, you know. Right. I mean, how do you say a couple.
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B
I say a couple of things. One is there's no consensus among the would be successors. There's a big difference between Vance and who could possibly double down on a lot of this? The Western hemisphere, the anti European bias, the unilateralism. Other Republicans might feel differently, I don't assume. I don't know what a Marco Rubio would do if he were out from under or Glenn Youngkin, Nikki Haley, something of a neocon. So I think there's a big difference. If a Republican were to win which Republican then on the Democrat side, most of the strong candidates, at least that I would imagine, I think would be more in what you might call the old foreign policy mainstream. Might be degrees of difference, but I don't think we would see massively radical, if you will, the progressive equivalent of what we've seen. I don't foresee that. But all that said, you can't go back to where you were. One or two areas you might not want to. It wasn't like we had achieved perfection, but let's put it, you just can't. You've raised fundamental doubts about American reliability and predictability. You've raised fundamental doubts about exactly who we are. You've done a lot of damage. So after three more years, by the way, which could, one assumes, add to the Damage. Hard to imagine that we've bottomed out. The idea that you're going to basically say, well, never mind, and let's just put that aside. That was then, now is now. Life doesn't work that way. World moves on, people's thinking moves on, there's knock on effects. So this is, I'm not saying you can't dial some things back and you can't make some adjustments, but the idea that there's a return to the status quo ante, zero chance, zero chance. World's moved on. Countries now, friends and foes alike see us differently. So there will still be choices to be made. But restoration, if you will, a return to what was, that's not in its pure form, not even close.
- [11:44]
A
How long does that take to return, if there even is a commitment to it in your mind?
- [11:48]
B
Well, again, I don't think there is a return. My point is simply that you're not going to put Humpty Dumpty back together. And are there things you could do that would be constructive? Absolutely. Are there things you could do to try to resurrect elements that you thought were desirable about the old order? Absolutely. But there's no going back, there's no return. And I think we ought not to kid ourselves. This will have. Look, you may love Donald Trump, you may hate Donald Trump, but he's going to be on the short list of the most consequential presidents of the United States. And he will even more internationally than domestically, because domestically maybe a little bit optimistic here. There's more pushback because of civil society and the structure of our political system, the structure of our society and so forth. There's less structural pushback. In a good way there's pushback, but in a bad way from the Chinas and Russias and North Korea's and others. But I think his consequences internationally will be greater than his consequences domestically. And so he's ended an era. You know, we've basically had an 80 year, eight decade run. That's over. That is over. But now when I'm not smart enough, maybe you should get somebody else in your podcast. I'm not smart enough to tell you exactly what's going to take its place. And I don't think we know the answer to that. And that gets into your question a little bit. There's a range of possibilities. It's not only one future that could, but the choices are limited because what will be the inheritance?
- [13:25]
A
Yeah, I heard on some podcast recently just about this, how Donald Trump's always been more concerned with his standing in the international kind of world than he has domestically. Even going back, I heard someone say, 40 years ago, and talking about his relationship with Gorbachev, I'm not sure I agree with that.
- [13:41]
B
I mean, I've spoken with him about foreign policy. He's got some strongly held views, sees allies as free freeloaders, hates trade and all that. But I tends to be pretty isolationist, though. Now, in the last year, he's gotten a little bit more unilateralist. I think he's kind of gotten excited about what limited, focused amounts of military force can accomplish. But I, I never thought his big interests were international and still don't. You know, it's usually for presidents, it's less difficult to make a difference internationally under the Constitution. In our political system, presidents enjoy a freer hand. The role of Congress and the courts is negligible in foreign policy or modest domestically. They at least potentially got a much bigger role. But I still think when you look at the Trump administration in terms of, you know, his policies, I think immigration is change on the border is a significant change, and I would say, on balance and accomplishment, some other changes culturally in the country significant. So I'm not sure, I'm not sure if I would put things international at the forefront, though I agree. In recent weeks in particular, I think he's been excited by what happened in Venezuela to some extent excited what happened months ago when he attacked the three Iranian installations. So I think he's a little bit caught up in the commander in chief role and what he can accomplish. But so far, if you think about it, he's also avoided anything that's enduring in terms of, or costly. So the trade off he's made. Yeah, he can act in dramatic ways, but in very limited ways. He didn't act in Iran, ultimately, at least so far. What we did in Venezuela was leadership change in a very narrow way, not regime change. The jury's out on what his policy is towards China. We'll see what happens with Ukraine. We'll see what happens with Greenland. So I don't see massive investments in foreign policy so much as momentary or circumscribed interventions in a very, in the general sense of the word.
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A
Yeah, I think, you know, he always seems to amaze me in saying kind of the quiet part out loud. The fact that he, you know, has now publicly, you know, indicated that not getting the Nobel Peace Prize is part of the reason that he's making a push for Greenland is. I still think it's maybe I apologize, maybe it's like I did read the wrong thing and it was actually like a Saturday Live tweet and not a Donald Trump conversation.
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B
But it's pretty worrisome. And you know, it wasn't just that the Nobel Prize is done by committee, not the government. And it wasn't just that it was done by the Norwegian. It's Norwegian rather than Danish, so they have nothing directly to do with Greenland. But the equation, if you will, of his own aims or desires or needs, choose what you want and the countries is quite stunning. It really was a kind of l'tat, c' est moi moment, I thought for the, for this country and quite as a result, disquieting. I'll be diplomatic, but quite disquieting.
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A
Yeah, I'm not gonna try and fact tech Donald Trump ever. Cuz most of it's not true. He likes to use this term, how he's solved. I think he's negotiated eight and a half wars. But one thing I'm curious about in relationship to that is it feels like we've never had as many international conflicts going on at the same time. You know, you've been around doing this a little bit longer and maybe I'm just naive in that sense, but it feels like every day there's a new skirmish and a new, a new war somewhere. Maybe it's just we see more of it on social media, but what's, what do you, how do you feel when you look at the international world? Obviously there's some horrific.
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B
Yeah, I think you're on to something with a slight caveat. Look, during the Cold War, the four decades of the Cold War, there were fewer conflicts. There were conflicts, but there were fewer because it was a highly structured, highly regulated system and there were certain largely informal rules of the road, arrangements, understandings between the superpowers. Each policed an awful lot in their own respective blocs, particularly the Soviets in Eastern Europe and with the Soviet Union itself was an empire. And in other parts of the world, as I said, there were certain understandings, let's just use that word, about how competition was to play out. So it limited the scope, the number and scope of conflicts, in part because they were worried that if there were too many, what they might lead to at the end of the Cold War. I think we've seen an uptick. I think I'm right. I haven't looked at the data anytime recently, but essentially we've become a less tightly knit world. The fact that one of the first events of the post Cold War era was Saddam Hussein's, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was to me telling. It's the kind of thing the Soviets never would have let take place during the Cold War. So it became a looser international system and I think that's true. Then had the breakdown of the Soviet empire, both the internal empire as well as Eastern Europe, which led to conflicts in the former Soviet space. You've had the proliferation of various capacity which is added to things. You also have a lot of state weakness. So a lot of countries, the problem is not that they're strong, but that they're weak and they can't police what goes on in their territory or they won't or can't. And then I think in recent years what you have also is the United States pulling back, particularly under Obama, elements of it happened on the Trump one to some extent. Biden pulling out, implementing the Trump deal on Afghanistan and now Trump too. So yeah, I think all things being equal, we are living in a messier world where there's more capacity and more scope almost for, for mayhem. And I think that's happening. It's a less controlled, it's a less top down world and sometimes some interesting things happen. It's not all bad. I mean, I think what the Israelis accomplished against Hezbollah to some extent, what happened in Syria, what happened against Iran, some of these things are pretty benign. On the other hand, what Hamas accomplished October two plus years ago was obviously as malign as things got. So we're seeing a lot of dynamics. But I think your point, I think your insight's a good one. I think we're seeing a world that is less controlled from the top down and it's a function of scope for action and increasing access to capacity for one second. Which is not to say that the President is right when he talks about all these so called wars he's ended. I mean, let's take two of the most prominent, Israel, Palestinians or Israel, Hamas and Gaza, that's continuing. The Palestinian conflict is as alive, unfortunately as it ever was. And the Gaza ceasefire is not total. And to use words like peace, there's an enormous gap between the word cease fire and peace and whatever else. Yeah, you don't even have a fully fledged ceasefire. You certainly don't have peace in Gaza. They haven't even attempted the process of disarming Hamas or take India, Pakistan. I mean, I was involved when I was in government and trying to diffuse Indo, Pakistani border conflicts and every decade or so usually there's exchanges and there was one recently and it was good. The United States got on the horn and talked to people. But the idea that we've brought peace to India Pakistan is preposterous. Kashmir is still unsettled. There's fundamental frictions between the two. India continues to charge at times with more than little evidence that Pakistan is carrying out terrorist actions in its territory. These are two nuclear armed countries which have each other's in their sights. So to say that this is somehow, this is. Do you put this in the check, this is in the peace column is preposterous. So, I mean, the president, which is not to say that American diplomacy hasn't done good or can't do good, when Marco Rubio or whatever, whoever gets on the phone and calms people down good. That's what, last I checked, that's why God invented diplomats. That's what the State Department is meant to do. The President just has a penchant for claiming considerably more than he or his administration has accomplished.
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A
We're going to try and get to as many of the conflicts as we can and unfortunately, just in a very superficial way because we need an entire weekend with you to really dig deep. I would like to start.
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B
I do superficial really well though, by the way.
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A
You are amazing at being able to help the people like myself who aren't that knowledgeable in all the different conflicts in different parts of the world and dispel and just make it understandable and to the layman. So thank you.
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B
Thank you.
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A
Let's start in Iran because I think that's top of mind for people, you know, what's the sort of lay of the land there right now? What's a realistic. Trying to understand the Trump administration as much as possible, which is obviously next to impossible. What do you see the kind of next steps happening and what time period?
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B
Okay, so, you know, when we land the speculation here, but let's just paint the, the setting, the context. You know, we're close to 5, 50 years since the Iranian revolution that ousted the authoritarian regime of the Shah in 1979 and brought in the, the clerics who took over in 79. For me, it was interesting because I'd just been to Iran a year before doing some research, and then I was at the Pentagon at the time. So I got very involved in all this because it led, among other things, to what became all of our Middle Eastern forces, Central Command and all that. So I was involved, shall we say, from 1979 on. I'd done my thesis on my doctoral thesis on this part of the world, what the British called east of Suez. So this has been interesting to me for a long time. I think what's happened in the last few months in Iran is the Iranian economy has really plummeted. The currency has lost an enormous amount of value. It's basically wallpaper. Inflation has really spiked and there's water shortages, there's electricity shortages. And to some extent, I would say it's hard to apportion numbers, but I'd say to a large extent by economic mismanagement and also an allocation of resources that made no sense. Way too much of Iran's resources went into supporting proxies and nuclear weapons development rather than economics. Iran did things that then made them the target of all sorts of sanctions which, which further hurt them. So it's all coming together. Plus the regime is kind of. It's really sclerotic. I think for two thirds of the Iranian people, plus or minus, this is just. It's a dead end. It isolates the Iranian people. It's over 90 million Iranian people. A lot of very educated, very worldly. It's an impressive society in many ways. This has just become boring. It's like it's the worst aspect of the old sclerotic communist regimes. I think people feel it's just repressive in every way and it's shutter on off from so much of the interesting stuff they see on the Internet or they see when they travel. So they. I think people are just tired of it. This revolution is kind of, in many ways, and it's become really cynical. There's way too much, okay, we'll repress women, but when our daughters go here, they can do what they want. The Iranian people have to do without. But we're going to make sure we get the consumer goods we want from this or that neighboring country. So I think there's real alienation and it just came together and you had in late December, protest. Things got really bad economically. And what's happening is the regime responded with a little bit of token reform, but that was nonsense. Essentially, they responded with brute brutality. I don't know how many thousands of people were killed, whether it's 3,000 or 13,000 or somewhere in between. They shut the country off from global Internet connectivity and so forth. The United States talked a good game. The President said some things and posted some things were locked and loaded, encouraging people to come out, which I thought was irresponsible. There was no way we could use military force to protect individual Iranians from the people mowing them down. It wasn't clear to me that the moment had come to urge people to confront the regime. I was far convinced that the moment was ripe for regime change. The security forces were still intact and the opposition's deeply fragmented and weak. So it wasn't obvious to me why we thought this was the moment. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see regime change in Iran with the one caveat of proviso that I can imagine different ways regime change could play out. And it doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to be reading, as I like to say, the Federalist Papers in Farsi. I can imagine successor arrangements that would be very different and not necessarily benign. But let's put that I just didn't think it was ready. So it was. So rather than trying to bring things to a head and encourage people to come out in the streets, we might have said, wow, this place is pretty week. And what I wrote the other day is the regime has never been closer to collapse at any time since 1979, but it's still not on the verge of collapse. And those two thoughts I believe can be true. So a different policy would have said, this is really interesting. How do we move it closer to collapse? So rather than getting people out in the streets to get mowed down, what could we do to ratchet up sanctions or build political opposition to the regime, or strengthen the unity and effectiveness of the opposition and so forth. That to me would have been a better policy and basically play a little bit more disciplined game. We got undisciplined. I think part of it. I can't prove this, so it's dangerous to say, but I'll say it anyhow. I think after Venezuela, the President was feeling his oats and thinking that all he had to do was say or threaten certain things and that he was the equivalent in the world of finance we say, a master of the universe and he could force things to fit his preferences. And I just think that we mishandled the situation. It seems to me the regime in the short run has re established order. I think the opposition realized that taking them on in the streets and getting shot was a just a losing gambit. But the regime has done nothing to correct the fundamental problems that they said. So this, this story isn't over. I'm not smart enough to sit here and tell you to use a baseball analogy, not to be silly, but to say, I don't know if we're in the second inning or the seventh inning or what, I don't know how far along, but this game ain't over. This regime, this system is still brittle and vulnerable. And what I'm hoping, and I wrote a piece for the Financial Times, I'm hoping we take a breath, take a step back and say, okay, we may have mishandled this. We can argue that. But in any case, how do we start handling this? Right. How do we play a more disciplined game where over the next few months or years we can use our leverage to get Iran to stop doing things in the nuclear area with proxies as well as repressing its own people? How can we use our leverage? And that ought to be the policy conversation we're having.
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A
Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, it seems like par for the course for this administration is just sort of go in, use some muscle without much brain power to back it up and to think about the afterthought. And it's sort of like a bull in a China shop type mentality.
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B
Well, nature is. Well, we didn't use any muscle to some extent. We may have in the economic sanctions era, but again, you know, our rhetoric got way out in front. It wasn't clear to me. Even if we had. Just imagine for a second we had used military force. We didn't because we didn't have many assets in the area. They're either off Venezuela, which is one of the consequences of a big re. Emphasis on the Western Hemisphere, somewhere in Asia, but just say we had attacked some Revolutionary Guard sites or whatever. It wasn't axiomatic to me. We'll never know whether that would have triggered regime collapse. Maybe not obvious to me. And just say a little bit of force didn't work. Well, then what do you then double down One of the problems in using military force, something Colin Powell, which told me he and I were having a conversation where President Bush, the father, this is when Powell was chairman, and he said, never assign to me regime change as a mission because it's not a military mission. You can assign to me the task of destroying this site or this equipment or whatever. That's a military mission. But regime change is what you hope to accomplish if you use military force. But there's no way of knowing if you were to use military force that way, that would be the result. Again, I know if you tell me to use military force against this building, I can blow up the building. That's something that is clear. But regime change, don't ever give me that mission because also it leaves the initiative with the other side. Let me put on my academic hat for a second. Whenever you use military force in a coercive way, bizarrely enough, you leave yourself the discretion of how much force to use against what, but you leave all the discretion with the other side to decide whether they've had enough and what they do. They say uncle or do they retaliate or do they simply sit it out and absorb it. So the danger in using military force coercively is you seed the initiative and many bizarrely enough to decide you're targeting. So if your goal is regime change and you use military force and 10 pounds of military force don't work, do you then do another £10 and then what? So it turns out to be a really complicated thing. And I don't get the sense anybody began to think that through.
- [33:24]
A
Yeah, I mean, that's sort of what I mean. More in sense is just thinking the whole thing through and playing out scenarios. You wrote in Foreign Affairs Journal that direct attempts at regime change by United States have ended in disaster and for good reason. What lessons do you think we've learned or should be most relevant when you look at Iran and then also, you know, looking into Venezuela as well?
- [33:47]
B
Well, just for those who didn't read the piece in Foreign affairs about a week ago, look, there's Regime change tends to come about for one of two reasons. One is the one you were getting, which was the United States adopts a policy of trying to trigger it and you, you know, often with military force, and it's not always a disaster. It worked very well in Germany and Japan after World War II. We defeated them, we occupied them, and we midwifed new political systems. Phenomenally successful. One of the greatest accomplishments or two of the greatest accomplishments in the history of American foreign policy. We got rid of Noriega and Panama in 89. More recent efforts of regime change have been disastrous. Afghanistan, Iraq, 2003 and so forth. The other way regime change happens is collapse from within. Iran in 79 is an example. Soviet Union under Gorbachev an example. And there the challenge is when the old collapses, to see that the new is better. Obviously in Iran it was worse. And after a temporary period in the former Soviet Union, in Russia got worse. So it's not a panacea as well. Whatever else Venezuela was, it wasn't. Regime change had nothing to do with regime change. Venezuela was the rejection of regime change. It's almost as if they read the textbook on Iraq in 2003 and after and said we're going to do everything 180 degrees different. So all they did was they got rid of one guy, got rid of Maduro, replaced him with his vice president, Dulcie RODRIGUEZ Otherwise it looks pretty much Venezuela today looks like Venezuela yesterday. And the only difference is we've established a transactional relationship where we hope to get American oil companies involved. And I think that's going to be dramatically exaggerated the degree to which they're going to get involved and how much oil they're going to produce given the costs and given all the uncertainties associated with Venezuela and we basically through the opposition pretty much to the, to the curb. So that's, that's that if you will and that's consistent with what you and I were talking about a couple of minutes ago. This is an administration that doesn't want expensive foreign policy, a policy of regime change in Venezuela, very hard to do regime change offshore. We would probably have to have a pretty big presence that would get ugly and messy. This administration has no appetite for that. Iran again, it's not clear to me it's ripe for regime change or again that you can do it offshore, you think if you lob some cruise missiles or whatever, maybe, but not likely. And again what I think Libya shows it's one thing to get rid of an awful regime like Gaddafi's, but bad things can get worse or as bad in a different way. So when the Obama administration got rid of Gaddafi and there was no follow up, so Libya turns into a failed state, why is that a foreign policy success? Answer is it's not. It was a fiasco. And so yeah, I think we ought to regime change that we foment from the outside ought to be done very rarely and then very carefully. I think what's interesting now if we play Iran like we can contribute to it a little bit but hopefully encourage collapse. Cuba be interesting to see how that might play out. So there may be some opportunities to work with situations but the idea that we're going to run around the world fomenting regime change strikes me almost always a pretty bad idea.
- [37:25]
A
Before we get to Greenland and Gaza and Israel, I want to stop to talk a little bit about the bill of obligations in your book which could be its own hour and everybody should read this. And you mentioned something about regimes imploding from within and I think we've lost our way a bit in our country and sort of the role and the responsibility of our citizens. And I think people who listen to this conversation and they've shown that they care and that they're interested and they're curious but we can all be doing a little more. But will you give a little bit of a summary before everybody goes and reads the book for Those who haven't.
- [38:04]
B
Sure. Thank you. Thanks. Raising. Yeah, it's a departure for me. I mean, as you hopefully have sensed in the last half hours, I am a kind of a foreign policy guy. And the reason I wrote a book about dealing with citizenship and democracy is at least until recently, I thought the greatest challenge to our national security was stuff that was happening within the erosion, weakening of the fabric of American democracy. But I also concluded that a lot of the very good ideas that were circulating about what you might call structural improvements weren't going to happen. Almost any good idea you put out there will be resisted because not everyone will agree it's a good idea because it will work against what they see as their agenda. So I basically said we had to rethink our politics a bit in order to promote desirable behavioral change, but not what. But not by changing the electoral college or making every primary open or what have you. It's not that these things would be bad. Indeed they could be good, but I just didn't think you could bring about. Bring them about. So what I wanted to do was focus on things, for the most part, where people had more agency, behavioral kinds of things like to get informed, get involved, to think about citizenship not simply through the lens of rights, but also the lens of obligations. The other side of the coin. Obligations, the two of us to one another, obligations, each of us to the country and the government. Most of these things were behavioral or normative. Get involved, get informed, reject political violence, put the country before party or person, have some responsibility, obligations to your fellow citizens, and so forth. Two of them were a little bit different. One was to promote civics, education. And just as an aside, now I'm in the final stages of producing a syllabus which I'll make publicly available for high schools and colleges to teach civics, my sense of what they ought to be teaching, and then to also to promote public service. That's something that I really. I think public service is good not only because it creates bonds between people and the government, but also I'm worried that increasingly we don't know one another, that we have different economic backgrounds and educational and religious and this and that and geographic. And were increasingly siloed in this country. And you know, when you read Tom Brokaw and about the greatest generation in the draft, I'm not. I'm not arguing to bring back the draft, but one of the good things of the draft was that it brought Americans together who would normally never interact or meet. And it gave them some common experience and it broke back. It broke down certain stereotypes and prejudices. And I worry that we're, we're. We're losing that. So again, most of the book again, is a book and arguing for how we. To rethink citizenship and civility and compromise and a lot of things that we can try to encourage. Parents can, teachers can, religious leaders can, and so forth. And then again, two things, civics and public service can be fostered by the state. What I wanted to do was really have more of a. Have something of a conversation in this country about citizenship because I think, Jamie, a lot of us would probably admit that something's gone wrong. Something's out of. It's just kind of. It's on tilt. We've got to fix it. And what I wanted to do was not. I don't claim to have all the answers, God knows, but I wanted to put something out there and say, we have got to have this conversation. And what's nice is it's had some resonance. I've been lucky. PBS made a documentary based on it. Now it's very cool. Someone came to me and there's a whole concert, orchestral and choral. It's going to be performed in all 50 states in the course of this year. And half of the libretto is based on my book. For one piece is basically about half hour choral orchestra. Another is based on Langston Hughes's poem about America. And the whole idea is to use music to bring the ideas of citizenship to a much larger slice of Americans. I mentioned my syllabus, so I'm trying to think of different ways that I can foster something of a conversation in the country about citizenship and about democracy, about why it's valuable, but also what it takes to keep democracy vibrant.
- [42:53]
A
Yeah, I think that's so critical. And honestly, I think national service is probably the most important thing that we could all be doing. I mean, what West Moore is doing in Maryland is great, but I think it has to be something across the country to get back to where people are communicating. And I think as you see other regimes falling. There was this great movie on Netflix called Leave the World behind, which I really thought did an amazing job of highlighting these issues, that the Enemy within is really the most dangerous thing and,
- [43:27]
B
and more serious than me. I'm busy watching suits on Netflix and you're watching Leave the World.
- [43:34]
A
Yeah, there you go. So let's talk about Greenland for a minute. I mean, is there. I mean, you keep hearing the same thing over and again, right? This makes no sense for, you know, we could have had anything we wanted. If we walked into Greenland and said, give us bases, give us rare earth, give us. They would have. But I said yes. I mean, for Trump, it's a real estate deal. I mean, it could just be this Nobel Peace Prize thing. Although he did bring it up previously. My understanding, what happens in Greenland here, I mean, again, I know you can't tell the future, but I mean, we can't take over Greenland. I mean, it's
- [44:14]
B
to circle back to what you just said, which is the basic point. We do have legitimate interests in Greenland. Let's just posit that we have strategic interests. The irony is the strategic interests have grown because of that phrase which is no longer uttered by this administration, called climate change. But the waterways have opened up, so Greenland is more strategically important than it was. Russia and China have built up certain capacities to act. So it's a legitimate set of concerns. I don't know, it's hard to get a clear bottom line on things like rare earths, but it's plausible that Greenland might be economically strategically important as well. And as you say, if Marco Rubio had taken a day and flown over there, it's what, four hour flight, five hour flight, popped up in Nuke, I'm pronouncing it right, and sat down and said, hey, we'd like to have a closer relationship with you. We want to do it in the way that you're comfortable with. We want you to participate particularly in the economic development of the place. Yada, yada, yada. My guess is they would have said, fantastic, where do we sign? This is as unnecessary, as avoidable, as self generated a crisis as I think I've ever experienced. I can be hard pressed. I might be overlooking something, but this wasn't on my bingo card, Let me just say that. And it never should have been on anybody's bingo card. How does it play out? With one caveat. It's not too late to deal with it. I mean, what I'm hoping is the Europeans come forward with a pretty forthcoming proposal for how to do what you and I have just been talking about, how to have a more intimate strategic and economic relationship there. Short of transferring ownership and dealing with the kind of symbolic issues, it's got to be done consensually, not coercively. I think it's really interesting whether at some point the Europeans call Trump's bluff and put troops on the island and basically say, you want to take it, then come take it, but we're going to defend it. I'm not sure that he would be willing to Follow through on that. I'm not sure I want to find out either way and what he might do. It just seems to me that could be lose, lose. That's why, again, I like the idea of the Europeans coming forward with a very constructive proposal, almost like they did on Ukraine when they didn't like the 28 point plan. And then it makes it harder for Trump publicly to say, well, we got to have ownership. Well, the answer is there's nothing in history that says you need to own something in order to work constructively with it militarily. Last I checked, we didn't own Europe and we somehow made NATO work for 40 years of cold War. We don't own Taiwan. I go around the world, so I find our position just. It just never occurred to me. I got to tell you, it just wasn't something I imagined being an issue. Here we are. So the question is whether you can diffuse it. Hopefully, I think the odds are still decent. That said, we shouldn't. It gets back to something you were saying before. But we don't return to the status quo anti. If even if we diffuse it, we've done real damage here and it's reinforced the sense that this is a very different United States that is on a very different political cultural page than Europe. And for Europeans, this just reinforces the what the shock to the body politic. And so hopefully we can avoid a crisis, if you will, or worsening crisis over Greenland, but we can't. Let's not kid ourselves. It's done real damage.
- [48:03]
A
His answer in his press conference when someone asked what's going to happen in Greenland, he said, you'll find out.
- [48:11]
B
So it's hard to know what's what. It's hard to know what's. If he does that, it would be. It would epitomize the phrase Pyrrhic victory. It would be an extraordinarily cost. It's already been extraordinarily costly. It would just double or triple down on the. On the cost rather than the benefits. Look, presidents enjoy tremendous latitude when it comes to foreign policy. He's not the first or the last who does. I'm not confident in the answer test about whether he continues to enjoy a blank check from Republicans in the Senate. Would they allocate funds for a Greenland policy of conquest? Be an interesting test case whether there's any limits to Republican support in the Congress for this president.
- [49:04]
A
I don't want to find out about that. Let's move to the Board of Peace, which is going to be headed by Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. It's hard to even comprehend what this is or what it could be or what the idea is. You indicated earlier the situation in Gaza and Israel is not in a good place today. What do you take away from this Board of Peace? What do you think is kind of happening, moving forward again?
- [49:40]
B
I used to think I had a pretty good imagination. Kind of prided myself on that. Man, I'm a piker. I wasn't even close. The Board of Peace is. I mean, if George Orwell could have joined us today, he would have liked it aptly named. Look, I'm not a big fan of the un. My enthusiasm for the un, shall we say, is distinctly finite and I, in three decades I've been writing about coalitions of the willing. So I'm all in favor of ad hoc arrangements of entities, countries and others that are like minded, have relevant capacities, willing to use them to deal with particular challenges. And we've, we've used that over the years pretty well. This is a little bit like that, except it seems to want to institutionalize goes beyond Gaza. It's not like Gaza has been a raging success by the way, then the membership is passing. Strange would be a diplomatic understatement. The idea that countries have to pay up to do it seems to me has it exactly backwards. If you were going to create a capacity to promote peace, you should pay those whose only interest was promoting peace. This suggests to me that if countries have to pay to join it, they have, shall we say, alternative agendas of self interest rather than simply so. I think this is a terrible idea. Let me just say I hope it dies of its own weight. That's probably the best thing that could happen to. But it seems to me, and again, don't get me wrong, I'm not against ad hoc forms of multilateralism because formal standing multilateralism like the UN is increasingly irrelevant. So I think you need to tailor responses to specific challenges. Again, coalitions of the willing, whatever you want to call them, various kinds of. But this institutionalization, given this membership, given these terms, seems to me truly misguided.
- [51:45]
A
Do you have any optimism in Gaza and Israel today? Obviously elections are going to be next year. That's the big, you know, elections in
- [51:54]
B
Israel before this October.
- [51:56]
A
Oh, this October, Okay.
- [51:57]
B
So yeah, it's already 2026, unless my dates are wrong.
- [52:02]
A
But I think now you're right
- [52:07]
B
and I'm not smart enough to know how those will play. I don't rule out that Bibi Netanyahu will form a new government I think there's a respectable chance he will, but it's hard to know. You've never had a majority government in Israel's history. This would be some kind of an unwieldy coalition. There's lots of fault lines in Israeli society, dealing with the orthodox, dealing with judges. So I'm not smart enough to know how this is going to. But I don't think you've got much of a consensus in Israel to deal with the Palestinians. Much more of a consensus to deal with Iran than the palace statements. By deal, I mean be tough with Iran, but there's no consensus there. I've been involved with what's called with disarming groups. I was the US envoy to Northern Ireland. There we called the decommissioning. The idea that you were going to disarm Hamas and know you've done it. I think the odds of that are negligible, negligible. So I'm not optimistic about Gaza. I'm also very pessimist. I'm very worried about what's going on in the West Bank. It doesn't get the attention. But settlement expansion, settler violence. Also you still don't have a Palestinian partner to work with. So I once wrote a book about ripeness, R I P E N A S S and the whole argument was, in negotiations, yeah, you needed agreements and yeah, you needed processes. But what you really needed more than anything was leadership on the various sides that was one, willing and two, able to cut a deal. And in Israel and in the Palestinians, I don't see that. I just don't think the situation is right because you don't have circumstances where you have leadership that's willing and able to compromise. And Hamas has zero incentive to compromise. It doesn't want a Jewish state. There's no Palestinian alternative to Hamas. The Israelis won't let one materialize. Israelis themselves aren't having come together to cut a deal. And a growing percentage of Israelis don't want to accommodate Palestinian nationalism. So I'm sorry to be so pessimistic. And I think both Palestinians and Israelis are going to lose from this. I hope I'm wrong, but at the moment I don't see much to work with. And the United States is acting passively. If I were involved and I would say, hey, there's not a lot of work to work with, so if we're just passive or wait for it to emerge, we're going to be waiting for Godot. So I would say if we think this is a situation, that time will not benefit by inattention, then I would basically be asking, how do we change the dynamics? How do we basically light a fire under diplomacy? And I don't see us doing that. So I think it's a difficult situation, extraordinarily difficult, being badly handled.
- [55:00]
A
We only have a few minutes left and a couple of important things to get through. So we're gonna.
- [55:06]
B
Paul, I don't mean to.
- [55:08]
A
No, I could talk to you for hours. You know, I'm sort of shocked at sometimes of what takes. What sucks up the air in the news and the news cycles and, you know, and Steve Bannon's flood the zone philosophy works really well. But the idea that we're not talking about Ukraine, Russia every day on the front page, the fact that there's been 35,000 children, at minimum, that have been kidnapped, the fact that at the same time, nobody seems to care that Trump still, including Putin and his Board of peace, I'm sort of bewildered. I mean, it doesn't seem like there's any sort of road to an end there. I know Donald Trump was going to solve that on day one, but let me interrupt.
- [55:51]
B
There is a road to an end there. What we have to do is disabuse Putin of his confidence. The time is on his side. So Trump wants peace. Good for him. What he won't do is combine his goals with his ends and his means. If we want to have peace, we've got to be much more supportive of Ukraine. Not that they're going to militarily liberate Crimea, but they've got to persuade Putin that more war will not give him more results. We will not do that. We continue to leave Putin with the expectation of hope that our support for Ukraine is essentially a diminishing asset. So the war is going to continue. But if we wanted to end the war, we could end the war. I believe we could get a ceasefire, which the President should have supported. Then he was persuaded in Alaska to move away from. And the way to do it is by being very supportive of Ukraine again, not to liberate all its lands militarily, but to be strong enough so Putin understands that more war will not give him more results, give Ukraine the ability to inflict some greater costs on Russia. That, to me, would set the stage for a ceasefire. I think it's. I actually think this is doable. The President is sabotaging his own policy. Why he's doing it, that's the land of speculation about what explains his policy towards Putin and Russia. I defer to you.
- [57:13]
A
Well, let's Hope he follows your advice at some point. I'm going to give you the final question on this test. Is going to be something hopeful to leave with us with, but before we get there, I've heard you and others talk about a lot on, you know, what's going on in Minnesota with the ICE troops, with everything kind of going on is leading towards this push to how do we limit free, you know, elections and even in 2026, how real do you think that is and how concerned?
- [57:45]
B
I am concerned. I wrote about it. My most recent Home and Away. I take it seriously. Look, I look at the use of ice, which is, by the way, being used not as a police force, but as a paramilitary force, which is wildly inappropriate. President talks about invoking the Insurrection Act. He's talked about it with certain frequency. Talks about deploying forces, expresses his regret that voting machines were not seized in 2020. I could go on and on. I think one of the things we've learned in the last few years is not to assume things that, oh, that couldn't happen. Well, you know what? It could happen. It could happen. So I take it seriously. And one of the things I believe we need to do, and I'm beginning to think it through, I'm not there yet is. But the way I pass the challenge is how do we build resilience into American democracy this year? How do we basically make ourselves less vulnerable to a real setback either around the midterms or anything else? And the answer is not violence. That's dumb, because that would create the grounds for using more forces. But how is it we protect the process? How do we get more people to go out and vote so it's harder to play around with the results of the elections? A third of eligible voters didn't vote in the presidential election a year ago. How do we avoid that again? How do we get people to vote? How is it we prepare the legal challenges? How do we deal with mail in voting? How do we make sure voting machines are not impounded? I'm not an expert on this and I'm trying to get smarter on it, but we ought to basically be prepared for this. In the same way I would say a hospital prepares for a mass violent incident, or the military prepares for battle, or a drug company prepares for a massive recall. We as a democracy ought to prepare for a challenge to the conduct, the run up to the election day and then election day and the aftermath of election day. We ought to basically say, how do we build resilience into our system?
- [59:57]
A
I know, well, there's great. People like Mark Elias who are working out there daily to try and deal with illegal cases, who's been doing like a superhero. At the same time, I get very scared when I think Trump's approval rating with Republicans is still around 80%. And although obviously it's, it's, you know, very low overall. All right, last question to finish up on. Give us something hopeful. Give us something that you. Do you see any light at the end of the tunnel? Do you see any places where there's some optimism?
- [60:32]
B
Okay. So, yeah, of course I'll begin with my favorite part of life, which is sports. I mean, Indiana winning last night was an amazing thing, the greatest turnaround in college sports history. It shows what great leadership can do, and I love that the hole was great. I actually thought Miami had a more athletic team, but Indiana had a better team, and I thought that was a great lesson. The fact that John harbor is going to be the head coach of the Giants, we're going to make the playoffs next year. I feel tremendous optimism about that and public policy issues. Look, I think you're beginning to see some pushback. I like the way. I like what Jay Powell did the other day with his video. I like that other people are pushing back Jack Smith or others. People aren't taking this line out. The conversation we just had about resilience, there's lots in play here. I think lots of people are disappointing or have been disappointments, I mean to say, but not, not every. I like what Mark Kelly's doing. I like the way he's taking on the Secretary of War, as he likes to be called. I'm excited about technology. You know, think about it. We got through Covid. How two technologies, mRNA, vaccines and zoom. That's how we survived Covid. Okay. You know, climate change, you know, these, these annual conferences are a joke. No, it's not a joke. Technology, solar, wind, batteries. I actually think we'll make real progress on dealing with climate through. Through technology. AI has lots of upsides as well. Yeah, it's going to be job displacing. I get it. But a lot of things in medicine and other areas, AI is going to be, I think, quite, quite promising. So, you know, in lots of cases, we know what to do. We just have to do it. I look in New York City and I think the problem with New York City is not we don't lack for revenues. We lack for spending the revenues we have intelligently. And the question is whether we can. So I don't think the. Which is a way of Saying I don't feel the stuff we're talking about is impossible. I don't feel like we're Don Quixote tilt tilted at windmills. So it's what gets me up every day and the reason I don't give up. Maybe I'm naive, but I continue to think there's, there's ways to deal, to deal with these challenges. I'm not sanguine in the sense that, well, because we've always done it, we always will. I think that's a bit of a dangerous line. Just that we can. I actually think the potential is still there to, to get it right. And I think there's enough people who are maybe seeing that they better get off their keisters and do something. I worry a little bit about too many people of authority and position and power and wealth in this country who are playing it safe. And so to me, part of the challenge is to get them more, get them on the playing field. I don't know how you feel, but if things don't work out, I don't want to go through the shoulda, coulda, woulda game. I think this is a moment where everybody's got to suit up and get on the field.
- [63:50]
A
I think there'll be a lot of people looking back at what they were doing during this time in our lives. And I know what you've been doing. You'll be proud of that and your family and children were. Everybody who's listening to this conversation I think will be proud of that. There are a lot of the people I'm concerned about. I would agree with you. Fernando Mendoza gives me hope. The fact you weren't offered a walk on role at a college, then you come back and beat them in the national championship game should give us all hope. I am. If I had it to bet on Polymarket or Kelshi, what's more likely, the Giants making the super bowl in the next five years or any of these crisis being solved? I would vote on the crisis before I'd vote in the Giants.
- [64:33]
B
So I have now. I am sorry I did this. You've hurt my feelings. We're going to have a bet on that and you're going to lose serious bucks.
- [64:42]
A
Richard, just for your wellness, that's going
- [64:46]
B
to be a very expensive comment on your part. I'm just letting you know now for
- [64:49]
A
your wellness to think that Harbaugh is going to come in and be your savior. I just, I'm concerned about you and it's important that you are. We have you fighting for us. Every day and having too much faith in the Giants is not going to help.
- [65:03]
B
The price keeps going up, my man.
- [65:05]
A
I'm a Dolphin fan. I'm in a much worse situation, so don't worry about it. Thank you very much Richard. And I listen to everything you say and I read the substack and read you in the ft and please keep it up. You were working burning the candle on both ends and so thank your family for us as well. It's great to see everybody and I'll speak to you soon.
- [65:26]
B
Thanks for doing this.
- [65:27]
A
Okay, thank you.
- [65:28]
B
Bye.
- [65:28]
A
Take care.
- [65:29]
B
Bye.
- [65:34]
A
Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Lunch with Jamie. As always, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter@jamieslist.com for my thoughts on all things food, pop culture, politics and more. And remember to join these online conversations and ask my guests questions in real time. Sign up to get my paid subscriber. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Audible and be sure to leave a review. Thanks and see you next time.