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- [00:00]
A
At this summit, I think it became apparent to a lot of them that he is in some early stage of dementia. Welcome to Shield of the Republic, a podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller center of Public affairs at the University of Virginia. I'm Eric Edelman, counselor at the center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a non resident fellow at the Miller Center, Bulwark contributor. And I'm rejoined and I'm rejoining my partner in all things strategery, Elliot Cohen, professor emeritus of strategy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a contributing writer to the Atlantic. Both of us have been on vacation, but we're back tanned, ready and rested. As somebody once said of Richard Nixon, Elliot, how are you and where are you?
- [00:51]
B
I'm doing very well. I think you and I are going to talk about our two interesting trips, yours to Transylvania, of all places, and mine to France later on. But at the moment I'm in Calgary, home of the Calgary Stampede, and I promise not to wear this for the rest of the show. But actually, you know, we, we're going to go to the, the Stampede fairgrounds this, this afternoon. But this morning we went to the military museum that they have here. The military museum is actually eight different museums for the Canadian Army, Navy, Air Force, and then for a number of the regiments in the Canadian army that were raised here. And I wanted to mention first, it's a terrific museum, really well laid out, a lot of artifacts, a lot of dioramas. Very, the interpretation is done very, very well. But on a serious note, what I have to say, what really struck me is when you go to the one of the regimental museums was for the Princess Patricia's Corps of Light infantry, the ppcli, sometimes called either the Patricias or the Princess Pats. It was the first Canadian unit that went into Afghanistan actually shortly after 9 11. But they served there throughout. And they like most regimental, like all regimental museums that I've ever seen, they had a memorial room with the names of all those from the regiment who had fallen. I counted 60 names from Afghanistan. And, you know, it was just a part of me which wished, I wish I could drag Donald Trump and some of his minions here and make them stare at that wall for a little bit before they say some of the things they say about people who fell fighting at our side in war that began on American soil. So that I had that somewhat grim, grim thought. But I guess, as always, I mean, we have so much jackassery to catch up on. Eric, why don't, why don't you begin, and then I'll make my modest contribution.
- [02:59]
A
All right. Well, I've got a couple of instances of jackassery. One is the White House released a report called Saving Saving America's Story, which is a indictment of the Smithsonian Institution for being subject to ideological capture by the Woke Mind virus, replete with an endorsement from the Wall Street Journal. You know, I have my own criticisms. You and I have had criticisms of the academy and how it teaches American history, and certainly I've in the past had criticisms of the Smithsonian, particularly the Enola Gay exhibit that they had a number of years ago about the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. But this, you know, having perused this report, it is just a. It's bad faith. Whatever criticisms they make that have merit are washed away by the selective quotation and by the fact that this is part of a larger ideological project to whitewash American history. And you see it in Trump's firing of the head of the National Portrait Gallery because he wanted the references to his impeachment removed from below his portrait. You see it in his own presidential portrait gallery, which has all these tendentious things about presidents he doesn't like, as well as what's been done in our national parks, where various historical exhibits have been Baudelarized. So that's my first instance of Jack
- [04:42]
B
Gassery, if I can just comment on that.
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A
Sure.
- [04:45]
B
And as always, you and I always have these small but sometimes interesting differences. On that one, I think I'm kind of where Chuck Lane, our friend Chuck Lane, was on Harvard where he. He said the problem is that the administration is framing a guilty man. Yeah, no, I. I think that's probably a bit too harsh on the Smithsonian. But I have to say, last. I mean, I last went to the American History Museum a few years ago was during the Biden administration. Frankly, I thought it was kind of a mess in terms of telling the American story. It really didn't. And. And you could tell that they were leaning over backwards to. In the direction of what the French would call bien passant opinion. And I think it's probably the difficulty really, is the American past is tremendously important to who we are and how we became that way. There are large parts of it which have to be contested, some parts which are very problematic. I have to say, last time I was at Monticello, I was fairly impressed that they managed to tell the Jefferson story, I thought, in a pretty reasonable way. That is to say, you know, there's a big exhibit on the lives of the slaves There. And the sometimes complicated relationship that Jefferson had with slaves. But. But it didn't.
- [06:08]
A
Including Sally Hemings. Yeah, there's a big exhibit there. Yeah.
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B
I mean, and it was complicated, but. But, you know, they also did. Made it clear that, I mean, Jefferson is not simply famous for having business. Slave owner.
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A
Yeah. I was just, I, you know, Trish and I were just at Monticello last fall, and I agree. I think they've done an excellent job. I. Look, I think that. I don't think you and I actually disagree about this. No, I think. I think the real issue here is that, you know, there are, there are excesses here on both sides. There is the, you know, there is the. The world of the 1619 project, which is a, you know, a very flawed view of American history, which has been denounced by a number of liberal historians, like my former graduate school classmate Sean Wilentz at Princeton.
- [06:58]
B
Yes, yes, he was eloquent on that subject.
- [07:01]
A
Yeah. But then there's 1776 project that, you know, the Trump administration in the first term released. And this report to me was very redolent of that, which is, you know, the other extreme, which is to paper over all the, you know, the ugly stuff. I agree in general, general, that the way we teach history now, American history now, both in the secondary schools and in university, is, you know, it's a series of problems. It's the problem of women, it's the problem of race, it's the problem of class, as opposed to anything that, you know, is redemptive or uplifting about the American story. But again, you know, I think that there are, you know, good, I would say, liberal historians like Jill Lepore, who writes a lot for the New Yorker and who has just written two kind of monumental histories of the United States, one of the Constitution and one of the pursuit of American rights. There are ways to do this that make clear how. I mean, you said the history is problematic. That's one of the words that the White House was taking issue with the Smithsonian using.
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B
There's. There's also, you know, there's another angle as well, which is the, the effort that you see periodically to really invent parts of the American past. I mean, the person who's really guilty of this is J.D. vance, who say, you know, the United States was founded as a Christian nation. Like a news for you. Christianity is not mentioned in the Declaration or the Constitution.
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A
I don't even know Nature's God. Nature's God.
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B
And that was done very, very deliberately because actually, most of these people were not particularly devout. And that's in some ways even worse. It is a real problem. And we'll talk more about this in a moment. But one of my great fears is that when the pendulum swings, and I firmly believe, as you know, in the laws of political gravity, the pendulum will swing back, that it'll be like the Bourbon Restoration after the, the fall of Napoleon. They will have forgotten nothing and learned nothing. And, and you know, you'll, you'll be back where you started. I hope not. Certainly not if the shield of the Republic has anything to say about it.
- [09:20]
A
But anyway, well, while, while we're on the subject of history, I think we should inform our, our viewers and listeners that we are going to inaugurate in, in. We were going to do this before the Atlantic published its really depressing article about the death of reading in America. But whatever other people are doing, you and I still spend a lot of time reading and I think we've had a lot of authors on for books that we have thought well of some books we didn't think so well of. I think in future we're likely to by mutual agreement have people on who have either written books we're passionate about or who are authors we are passionate about, but we're also going to be reviewing some books that have come our way that speak to different subjects of interest, whether it's national security or history or warfare, the things that we normally devote our time to. So that's a advance warning for everybody.
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B
I hope people like it. I think one of the other things we agreed read is not just brand new books. We might bring together a cluster of books on a topic and some of them may not be brand new. And that's, I think it's an important thing to, for us as we encourage some of the readers out there is don't, don't just go for the new stuff. There are a lot of older books that are really repay a reading so
- [10:53]
A
back virtue of all books.
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B
What. What is your. What is your. You said you had another jackassery.
- [10:58]
A
Oh my second jackassery is the gift that the host of the NATO summit this week, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey gave to all the heads of government, which was a Turkish hand tooled.357 Magnum with the name of each recipient etched in it and live ammunition, six gold bullets to go into the revolver. You know, as the historian speaking of historians, you know, Simon Montefiore, you know, tweeted, this is the sort of, you know, macho mafia wannabe authoritarian dictators idea of what all of his fellow wannabes wants to get as a gift.
- [11:46]
B
Yeah, well, there's a lot we should talk about that summit. Let me just throw in my jackassery and then we can return to the various things that were going on there. So my jackassery really is a kind of a collective award to those leaders of the Democratic Party who enthusiastically or reluctantly endorsed Graham Platner until it just became absolutely impossible. And, you know, I have to say, just watching that spectacle of hypocrisy stunned me. So, you know, all these people who, under other circumstances, other circumstances were. Would be saying, believe the women, didn't believe the women. All those people would be willing to denounce somebody's a fascist. Totenkopf, okay? So he had it for a couple of decades. You know, boys would.
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A
Who could have known how many.
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B
I mean, you know, boys. I mean, this.
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A
What red flags were there, right?
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B
This is a candidate who was not vetted, who was, as somebody said, I don't know whether it's the Atlantic or Times or something. So this is a DC political operative's idea of what a working class hero is. That is to say, a guy whose grandfather was a famous and wealthy architect, whose father is a wealthy lawyer, who went to a whole bunch of private schools, who, you know, interned on Capitol Hill, you know, who built. Who did go to war, enlist in the Marines, but bills himself as a. As a victim of the war, even though he re enlisted three or three or four times, and who was clearly totally, utterly unfit to be a senator of the United States of America for Maine. And, and it's. I mean, it really was a piece of jackassery, as with all of our pieces of jackassery. I think there's a serious issue here. And the serious issue is that, you know, there is this kind of demonic energy on the hard left. It is sweeping a lot before Is reckless. It is unfortunately, though, also politically somewhat skilled. There was a piece in the Free Press by Evan Barker saying, look, what's happened is, because he had been one of them, and he eventually had the good sense to break from them, saying, look, what's happened is these people have now developed their own political operatives and, you know, the kind of machinery. But there was also a number of people have pointed out they are using the Democratic Party, which they're intending to kind of eat out from the inside and then move on to something else. These are not Democrats. And meanwhile, the Democratic establishment is just sort of paralyzed, does not know how to deal with these people. Cannot Confront them ideologically is just trying to figure out on issues like Israel, which we can talk about more later as well, how do you appease them enough so they don't come after you? Which as we all know means they'll come after you sooner or later. I mean, they're, you're not going to. These, these are not ideologues of this kind are not appeasable. These people don't know how to govern who are in many cases have disgraceful, truly disgraceful opinions on the record about all kinds of things and all kinds of behaviors like wiping their hands on the American flag and who will probably, hopefully get clobbered in a number of places, but in any case don't represent where most Americans are. So one big award for Jack Asprey to the Democratic Party. I don't know what your views of this are.
- [15:09]
A
No, I quite agree. I mean, I think this DSA takeover of the Democratic Party is something Democratic leaders really need to take seriously. It is, as you know, Bill Galston said when we had him on, I think it was in the spring or maybe it was the fall, I'm losing track now, but he pointed out that this is not the DSA that was founded by Michael Harrington, which was a group of relatively tame, you know, sort of social Democrats. This is a group of hard edged Marxists who don't have any truck with the Democratic Party, just using it for ballot access. And this is the kind of thing that the kind of liberal Democratic establishment in the 1940s and 1950s during the Cold War knew how to deal with. I mean they, they basically kicked the communists out of the labor movement and they kicked them out of the Democratic Party. You would think that the example of what happened to the GOP when the MAGA crowd took over would be enough of a warning sign that people would take this seriously. And I hope people do start to take it seriously because we already are afflicted as, as you know, as our publisher Sarah Longwell has said repeatedly by politics in which we have one party that's become an authoritarian threat to democracy and the other one that's very bad at politics. That was a bad situation to be in. But to have two authoritarian parties would be catastrophic.
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B
Yeah, completely agree. All right, so let's, let's talk about the summit. Let me give you the brighter view.
- [16:58]
A
I knew you would
- [17:01]
B
reprising our the doom versus gloom conversation. So on the one hand, you know, Trump said awful things, was discussing, you know, trying to fly there in his cuttery jet. Although interestingly Enough he couldn't go back, back, fly back on it, which is for security reasons because they were afraid that the Iranians would try to kill him. He did say some awful things about Greenland and so on, but, but, but, but things he said about Ukraine were fine, actually, very supportive. He's, you know, was notably enthusiastic about licensed production of Patriot, of Patriot missiles. He then in his characteristically sort of insane way said, oh, yeah, no, no, there was a lot of love in that room. Meeting with all the.
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A
He really loved the gun, I'm sure.
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B
Yeah, well, I'm sure he loved the gun too. But, but, you know, I, here's my, my basic feeling. I think the Europeans and I would include the Canadians in this because Mark Carney is, in some ways, he's milking this for all it's worth. But I think he's also sincere. You know, there are two different strategies that they're using. There's the Mark Rota strategy, which is you flatter him, you play along with him, you agree with him. And the truth is, as we both have said, there's. He's got a point about things like burden sharing. You cajole him, you know, you work. And then on the other hand, there's the other view, which, I mean, I think Mark Carney represents from Canada, but there are others out there as well. The French are usually this way, saying, okay, we gotta, we have to begin building our own systems. We have. And, and you're beginning to see things. So the, the apparently French bureaucrats are really unhappy. They can't use Microsoft Teams anymore. They have to use their, you know, their clunky substitute they're trying to get off Starlink. But, but, but I think that, frankly, from their point of view, I think that also makes sense. Now they can't completely delink. And I think that's. There's a danger that people will succumb to that fantasy. They can't. And for Canada, actually, by the way, I have to say this is particularly ridiculous. The US Canadian economies, not just the economies, you know, you wander around Calgary, there's loads and loads of Americans here. I mean, a lot of the bucking bronco riders here are from Texas. But it makes, it may. I think it makes a certain amount of sense and I think it kind of works. Now with Trump, you can never tell, and he could always really blow things up. But, and maybe it's just the soft bigotry of low expectations, but I think given where we could have been, it's not as, not as bad as it could be. All right, now, tell me while I'm wrong.
- [19:52]
A
No, I agree it's not as bad as it could be. But that is what Daniel Patrick Moynihan would call the dumbing down of our standards. NATO gave. NATO had a communique in which it reiterated Article 5. Hooray. You know, the raison d' etre of the alliance has been, you know, restated. And no one, you know, no one had a, you know, a conniption fit. Look, I mean, the summit, actually, there are some very positive things out of the summit, as you said, there's commitments to make defense investments. There's commitments to provide Ukraine with additional financing for defense. There was the reiteration of the basic. Not just Article 5, but NATO's deterrent strategy as a mixture of conventional, nuclear, cyber, and other domains. So all of that's good. And for all of his bluster and tantrums about Greenland and cutting off all trade with Spain, you know, etcetera, you know, the. The alliance has survived. And. And that's a good thing. I agree with you. There are some downsides, however, which we should be aware of. I have a slightly, slightly different take than you about how the Europeans now see him. I. I think what you said was true until recently. I think at this summit, I think it became apparent to a lot of them that he is in some early stage of dementia and that they don't take him seriously at all anymore. I mean, he's just not taken seriously. And that for the President, United States, as the leader of the alliance is a very bad thing. That's not a good thing. I mean, the fact that he called, you know, talked about the. First of all, he could barely walk off the plane. You know, Erdogan had to sort of guide him. And he was wandering off just the way Joe Biden used to do.
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B
I mean, mentioned the Islamic Republic of Japan.
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A
I was about to go there, the Islamic Republic of Japan, and he called Zelensky, President Putin at their press conference. You know, so Putin. But, yeah, what's the difference? You know, all have. They, you know, both have, you know, names that are hard to pronounce. So, you know, I think they just don't take him seriously. And. And I. That, as I said, is a very bad thing. I wrote about something else about the summit that particularly perturbed me, which is that there was a conspiracy of silence about what is going on in the host country, where the president is literally destroying Turkish democracy. He's closing the opposition party, choosing his own opponent, displacing duly elected mayors, 45 of whom from the opposition party he's just removed. They used to use this tactic against the Kurdish party because the Kurds were a minority. Now it's just being used as a tool of general political control against the main opposition party in the face of some serious electoral losses and ongoing economic problems, of which really, Erdogan is largely the author in which he's proven incapable of taming his persistent inflation, that's running in Turkey at 30, 40%. So despite the fact that the EU rapporteur for Turkey in June delivered himself of a. An absolute firecracker of a report about all this, and that it was adopted by a vast majority of the European Parliament with a resolution calling for sanctions against senior Turkish officials who've been involved in some of this anti democratic activity, not a word was said about this by anybody. On the contrary, the President was lauding Erdogan as a great friend who's been very loyal. He's done everything I asked him to do. I'm going to take the sanctions for Turkey's purchase of a Russian air and missile defense system, the S400, off, and we're going to put them back in the F35 program, which is not a very good idea. Also happens to be a violation of law right now. And that, I mean, it was not just that Trump has a business relationship in Turkey because he's got a very lucrative licensing agreement for the Trump Tower in Istanbul, but he also has a web of other personal and family relationships with the Erdogan family. But it's not just that. It's that the European leaders, because they knew Trump had this relationship with Erdogan, dared not say a word because they wanted Erdogan to. The Erdogan Trump relationship to help guarantee a successful summit. And they got their wish. I mean, that's sort of what happened at the dinner.
- [25:13]
B
Do you think that's the only reason for it or. Because, I mean, I'm not sure how courageous most European leaders would normally be on this anyway.
- [25:28]
A
Yeah, I mean, you would think that Kaia Kallis and some of the others who, you know, are very frequently critics of human rights violations in Russia and, you know, elsewhere, would have said something about this. I mean, this, this was. I mean, look, there's, you know, part of it is there are other authoritarians in Europe. I mean, even though Orban is now out there, you know, FICO is still in Slovakia, Babish in Czech Republic, they share a lot in common with Erdogan's kind of populism. And they haven't gone nearly as far as he have has in, in damaging their own democracies. But, you know, they, they are somewhat sympathetic, I think, to him, but it doesn't change. I think the popular view in Europe, which is very, very skeptical and critical of Turkey.
- [26:19]
B
We really. One of the things we need to put on the agenda of the coming years is, is really a serious deep dive on Turkey because, I mean, there's so much going on there. I mean, that, that part is obviously important. The extent to which Turkey really dominates Syria in certain respects, I think is very, very interesting. The role the Turks are trying to play in Central Asia, where, by the way, we're also actually playing more than one might think. And this is, I think, one of the areas actually where you can say Trump foreign policy has been normal at some level in terms of relationship with Armenia and Azerbaijan and even places like Kazakhstan. You know, the Turks have a formidable military and an even more formidable military industry. In some ways, that's important.
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A
That's a very important part of why the Europeans have been quiet. Also, they know that Turkish defense industry is absolutely crucial to the re. Industrialization of European defense, I was going to say.
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B
And then they have a complex relationship with Russia and with Iran and, you know, one of the things that they've been doing.
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A
And Israel.
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B
Oh, well, that's. Alas, I don't think that one's complicated anymore. I think it's just, it's, it's, it's mainly hostility.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
Although, you know, there's also under the table, kinds of things that I think have always existed there. You know, that they're, they've been working on developing this network of pipelines basically, to try to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, which we'll be talking about in, in a bit. Plus, you know, they're in Libya and I.
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A
And Azerbaijan. They changed the, change the battlefield calculus between Azerbaijan and Armenia. They changed it in Libya, too.
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B
Yeah. So, you know, and I have to say, I wish I were in retrospect, I think back in our conversation with our friend Henri Barkey, who's a very shrewd observer of Turkey, and he was, as I recall, fairly confident that the sort of neo Ottomanism stuff goes away after Erdogan. And of course, time will tell, because like all dictators, Erdogan is mortal. But I'm no longer quite, quite so convinced as I was. I mean, I think what we're seeing is the emergence of a regional power now. It's interesting that it's regional power which as you pointed out on one hand had a terrific. Really almost half century from an economic point of view, but is now in deep trouble because of mismanagement with inflation and what have you. But it's a major regional power without. With sort of a lopsided economic base as far as I can figure out. So there's a lot of very interesting.
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A
I think they also don't understand that neo Ottomanism rings one way in Turkish years. Rings very differently in Arab years.
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B
You mean the Arabs might not have such fond memories?
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A
No, not at all.
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B
You know, and yeah, although you know, interesting, interesting fact. So the original nationalists in particularly in Iraq, the anti English then in some ways the origins of Baath Party comes from Arab officers who had served in the Turkish army during World War I. You know, we, we. This is one of the reasons why it is good to go back to history. People may have seen Lawrence of Arabia and think that there was this massive Arab revolt. Actually there were a lot of Arab soldiers, including officers who were serving in the Ottoman Empire who were willing to break when the time came. But I was told at the time of the battle of Mosul that that's actually one of the reasons why Mosul was a particularly tough nut. This had always been the sort of the home of the military cast of the Ottoman. That part of.