← The Lawfare Podcast
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- [00:01]
Mike Feinberg
The Electronic Communications Privacy act turns 40
- [00:04]
Scott R. Anderson
this year and it's showing its age. On Friday, March 6, Lawfare and Georgetown
- [00:09]
Mike Feinberg
Law are bringing together leading scholars, practitioners and former government officials for installing updates
- [00:15]
Dan Byman
to ecpa, a half day event on
- [00:17]
Scott R. Anderson
what's broken with the statute and how to fix it. The event is free and open to
- [00:21]
Mike Feinberg
the public in person and online. Visit lawfaremedia.org ecpaevent that's lawfairmedia.org ecpaevent for
- [00:31]
Scott R. Anderson
details and to register
- [00:36]
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why Choose a Sleep number? Smart Bed Can I make my site softer?
- [00:39]
Mike Feinberg
Can I make my site firmer?
- [00:41]
Dan Byman
Can we sleep cooler?
- [00:43]
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- [02:24]
Scott R. Anderson
How did you guys get into Twin Peaks? What was the entree for that?
- [02:27]
Mike Feinberg
I'm old enough that I actually watched it in its original run when I was in junior high. It was just A TV show.
- [02:34]
Scott R. Anderson
I'm kind of jealous. I like a cultural icon. I actually saw an episode when I was. I think I was like four or five at the time. But I remember seeing it, like, because my friend's parents let us stay up to watch it and found it utterly beguiling and completely terrifying. I think it was like the second episode where they're really just following Josie around and introducing all the different characters, because I remember her very specifically for some reason. And that's it. And I was like. And then later, you know, 20 years later became my favorite show.
- [03:03]
Mike Feinberg
I mean, I was in eighth grade. I'm pretty sure Aubrey Horne was my first crush, My first fictional character crush, which, now that I verbalize it, I'm not sure how healthy that is as a general matter, but I wouldn't advertise
- [03:20]
Ari Tabatabai
that too much, especially not on a podcast. Thankfully, we're amongst friends here.
- [03:24]
Scott R. Anderson
I will say I had a good friend of mine before the revival Showtime. When I moved to the Middle east in 2005 or 6, I think by myself. I was an intern at the State Department. A good friend of mine burned me the first two seasons of the original show on a dvd and I watched it by myself in my weird embassy housing where I had eight bedrooms to myself and a giant condominium that was just for me because I just had way too much surplus housing. And in the middle of the night, I got to when Heather Graham disappears into the Black Lodge. And then the DVD shut off and I called my friend and I screamed at him, sorry, Spoilers alert for Twin Peaks season two, by the way. I screamed at him like, dude, you forgot to put the end of the show on the disc. I'm not going to be home for four months. I can't believe you're doing this to me. And he wrote me back. I was like, oh, buddy, you're just learning how the rest of us have felt for the last 30 years.
- [04:13]
Ari Tabatabai
Scott, I can't believe you just admitted to piracy.
- [04:15]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah, well, my friend did. Not me. It's fine, as far as I know. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Rational Security, the podcast where we invite you to join members of the Lawfare team as we try to make sense of the week's big national security news stories. I am thrilled to have some of what I like to think of as our international crew back here to talk about global affairs. We tend to have kind of three strikes stripes of Rational security these days. We have the litigation and domestic national security stripe, the tech stripe, and the international affairs stripe. This is the stripe that is closest to my heart. And I'm thrilled to have so many of my wonderful colleagues back to talk over a couple stories in the international arena that are percolating this week and that might have some real long term implications we want to get into. Joining us for this conversation is first one of our foreign policy editors, Dan Biman of Georgetown and the center for Strategic International Studies. Dan, thank you for joining us.
- [05:13]
Dan Byman
Happy to be here. Scott, thank you for having me.
- [05:15]
Scott R. Anderson
Also joining us is Ari Tabatabai, our public service fellow here at Law Firm, one of our public service fellows, I should say. Ari, thank you for coming back on the podcast.
- [05:23]
Ari Tabatabai
Good to be with you.
- [05:24]
Scott R. Anderson
And we are also joined by Michael Feinberg, our first public service fellow alumnus maybe, I guess maybe that was James. But second, maybe. And now senior editor at Lawfare. Mike, thank you for coming on the podcast.
- [05:35]
Mike Feinberg
Thank you for having me, and thank you to the larger institution for keeping me on as a public service alumnus slash editorial staff member.
- [05:45]
Scott R. Anderson
We're just going to we're just trying to burn through business cards on Mike. That's kind of the goal. So you get 500, you use two of them, throw them away, new job title, go for it. Regardless, we have a great set of folks to talk over the news because there's a lot of stuff happening on the international arena. So let's just go ahead and get into it. Topic one for this week, beer hall pushback. Over the weekend, a raft of bipartisan U.S. and European officials headed to Bavaria for the annual Munich Security Conference. Last year, of course, Vice President J.D. vance gave a real barn burner of a speech accusing European allies of restraining free speech and giving succor to the European far right. But this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a somewhat more conciliatory set of remarks that nonetheless signaled there were some fundamental changes happening in the relationship. For their part, European leaders mostly seemed to be on board with that as they increasingly leaned into the public stance that it was time for the continent to stand on its own, independent of the United States. Although how feasible that will be and on what timeline remain the big questions what should we make of the different remarks we heard from the conference and the broader messages the two sides are sending to each other? And is this a sign of an impending divorce or a different sort of shift in the US European transatlantic relationship? Topic 2 Riyadhak American and Iranian officials met again this week in Geneva to negotiate an end to the Islamic Republic's nuclear weapons program in exchange for an easing or elimination of US Sanctions on Iran. At least those are the kind of two ends of the demands that we're hearing from the two different sides. Negotiations took place amidst continued saber rattling by both President Trump and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who threatened in a speech ahead of the talk to sink US Warships in the region if Iran came under attack again. Nonetheless, some participants in the negotiations, and particularly the mediators from Oman, seemed optimistic that the two sides were getting closer to some sort of common understanding about how they might move forward. But US Military assets have continued to move into the region, leading to what some believe is early signs that a military operation is yet on the horizon. Is there space for a deal, or are we going to see another war in Iran? And topic three, Xi, who may not be named a year in the second Trump administration, has not proven to be the China hawk that many expected. Far from drawing a hard line on all things China, as the first Trump administration often seemed to do, US Officials have instead been surprisingly quiet and conciliatory in regards to China, at least outside the trade context. This has remained true even as reports have emerged of Xi Jinping purging his military of non loyalists, modernizing China's nuclear arsenal and building more submarines, all steps with the potential to significantly upset the balance of power in Asia and beyond. What is the real logic underlying the Trump administration's seemingly quixotic approach to China, and where might it lead the broader relationship between the two major powers? So for our first topic, let us dig into Munich and what we saw happen this past week. Ari, let me turn to you because I know you were following developments. There is one of those big events every year where more than I think this is the premier one, certainly for the transatlantic relationship and particularly in the security space. You know, you also have Davos and other things that have more of an economic dimension. But this is the thing that people look to every year to really get a sense of the state of the transatlantic defense and security relationship. And this is maybe more than any other time, at least in my thinking, that the tenor of the conversation has seemed to change. Last year we had one very vocal change, right? Vice President J.D. vance. But the European messages, other than some incredulity regarding some of Vance's accusations in his remarks, seemed more or less on par with saying, hey, we should maintain the status quo. This year, that's not the case. A lot of European leaders were really leaning into the message that we need to start going it alone. So talk to us about what you heard coming out of the conference and what stood out to you as particularly notable?
- [09:36]
Ari Tabatabai
Yeah, I think that after last year's comments by the Vice President, basically the bar was so low that with Secretary Rubio going in and kind of giving a speech where he was more polite than maybe the Vice President was or the President can be toward European allies. It was sort of seen, I think, especially in the United States, less so in Europe as a, as a departure. Great. We're back to business as usual. And I'm not sure that that is how we're actually what the discussion is in Europe. Following that, I think the conversation in Europe is fundamentally shifting and it is increasingly one, as you said of Europe needs to become more self reliant. It needs to diversify away from the United States. That's true economically, technologically, politically, militarily and intelligence wise. And so, you know, a couple of nice speeches by Secretary Rubio by actually the other event that was going on also was the NATO Defense Ministerial where Bridge Colby, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, was representing, not the Secretary of Defense, which is noteworthy as well on its own. But he also gave a more normal speech about, you know, the importance of allies. And they both kind of stressed, you know, we're, we're not divorcing, we're not getting divorced from Europe, we're not getting divorced from allies. We just need to do more burden sharing and so on and so forth. I think all of that, though, discounts the fact that the fundamental challenge today is not about burden sharing or divergences on China policy. It is much more significant, much more fundamental than that. You have European allies whose intelligence communities are increasingly putting out public assessments about the United States as a threat, not as an ally, not as a partner, not even as just unreliable as a threat. We've had now weeks and weeks of conversations about whether or not we're going to be invading Greenland. And yeah, now that seems like it's behind us, but it's not in Europe. Right. Like we have moved on from that conversation, it seems. But if you read European press, if you listen to European experts, that is still front of mind for them. Likewise with Canada and the whole conversation about the 51st state. We can come back to this, but the Canadians are, you know, they just put out this kind of big national defense industry strategy and they're increasingly talking about diversifying away from the United States. And then you have the piece where the administration has been asserting itself in domestic politics across Europe, often to kind of put its finger on the scale to help, frankly, fringe movements and parties and individuals in many countries there. So all of these things, I think, are viewed very acutely and felt very acutely in Europe. Europe. And that's not going to get fixed with a couple of speeches by Bridge Colby and Marco Rubio. But it seems to me that there is a delta where in Washington the conversation is kind of like, great, we're kind of back to normal now. We're just talking about policy differences and burden sharing, whereas I think the discussion in Europe is very different from that. And I think the sooner we kind of catch up with that fact, the sooner we can start to prepare for what comes next, as opposed to kind of waiting for the next crisis, whether it's over Greenland or something else, because there will be a next crisis to kind of force us to have that conversation again.
- [13:05]
Dan Byman
So let me chime in on something Ari said, Scott, which is this idea of comparing the speeches, right? So comparing what Vance said, what Hegseth has said with what Rubio has said, I think we have to recognize the kind of staggering events in the transatlantic relationship that have happened in, in the intervening year. So when Munich happens last year, there's a genuine question, which is, what is this new administration? Is it going to continue Biden policies? In some ways, is it? Trump won. And then there's, oh, my God, it's in another realm. This is far worse than even many pessimistic people were expecting. So now the bar is so much lower in terms of what is expected of the United States. Rubio can give a speech that if we had had that happen seven or eight years ago, it would be a very challenging, confrontational speech, but now it's much less so. And that's because the Europeans really are going their own way. They've set in motion a number of efforts that they're just beginning. They have a long way to go. There are questions on whether they'll succeed, but they're quite real and the discourse is quite real. And what Ari said about seeing the United as a threat, not just saying the United States is no longer a close partner, that is quite real. And so I think people were looking and saying, oh, this is much better than we feared, but that's because we're in a place really a kind of an abyss when it comes to the transatlantic relationship. And therefore, even limited good news is still good news.
- [14:48]
Mike Feinberg
It's funny, I'm a little more reluctant, I think, than a lot of people to refer to Rubio's speech as conciliatory. He made a real effort to talk about a Shared European and sort of New World American civilizational tradition, shared culture, what have you. But it was really a selective view of history and culture that I think really alludes all the things in that history and intellectual ecosystem that the Europeans are actually drawn to. This was not the multiple accomplishments shared by modern Europe and the United States in developing the classical liberal model that we would see touted somewhere, like a Columbia University seminar under the tutelage of Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzan. This read like a really bad syllabus from a Hillsdale dropout. And I think in trying to talk about the intellectual tradition that binds Europe and the United States, by not focusing on any of the liberal tradition, Rubio actually alienated the Europeans and made as clear, in his own way as Vance did, that we really do now have, at least at the level of our governments, two totally distinct ways of looking at the world.
- [16:32]
Scott R. Anderson
It is notable. And, you know, I tend to think what's interesting about this is that the conciliatory description of Rubio's remarks is really a US Press description, I would say. I think everybody acknowledges that. It's not like deliberately poking buttons like Vance's speech was. Like Vance's speech was antagonistic. It was not just something that may be delivering hard truths, like it was deliberately trying to get under European skins. But like you, you had Rubio soften on those points. His substantive point isn't that different. What the Trump administration's been saying for many years now, right, is that Europe needs to stand more alone. There is some, you know, there's some nod towards a collective tradition imperfectly executed. Right? But it's the sort of thing that Europeans, a year ago would have been like, great, okay, we get this. Like, there's a. There's a sober guy behind the wheel, at least one of the wheels of the US Government. And that's enough for us to say, yeah, we think it's going to be status quo. We calmed our senses, and this worked for the Europeans. I remember a conversation I had with Shashank Joshi, defense editor of the Economist, in Aspen this past summer, in August, I think, July, I guess it was at the time. He pointed out, like, I've talked to a lot of European leaders. He's very tied into the European defense community. And he said, they're all feeling pretty good because it seems like the Trump administration's come around in Ukraine. They're not ditching them. That was the big concern for a long time. They've done some weird things around Ukraine, but net they're seeming on board here and they're making saying enough of these conciliatory things that, yeah, okay, 5% defense spending, stuff like that. It's a little bit of a bitter pill to swallow, but we'll come around on it. We get that this reaction is wildly different. And I really do think it comes back to a Dan said, like Greenland was a seminal moment where the Europeans really completely shifted how they see this relationship. The UK May be slightly less than others, but even the UK Right. I think it got confused because people coincided with Venezuela and people lump Venezuela and Maduro with this. I don't think the Europeans really care about Maduro. I just don't. I think they like, will say we don't think this will comply with international law, but it's not something they're going to fall on their swords over. Because he was a problem for many of them too. Right. It is. The Greenland case they took really seriously, maybe to the extent that like half of me suspects there was intelligence or other information they had that made them think that the Trump administration was much more serious about doing something aggressive because it just represents such a psychological flip. It's really extraordinary. I can't think of anything I've really seen that mirrors it. So there's another part of the conference I think was really interesting, and that is the fact that the United States message was much more fractured because we had not just the Trump administration officials, we also had congressional delegation, I believe Governor Newsom was there, a number of other people making remarks on the margins of this conference, specifically counter message messaging the Trump administration. Dan, what do you, what do you make of that inclination? Like what? What do we see? What is the impact of that? What message does that send to Europeans, good or bad?
- [19:23]
Dan Byman
So it sends them a message of, you know, you can wait this out. That's at least one possibility. Whether they'll actually believe it is another question. And, and I'd also stress, as Ari mentioned, you have military leaders nearby giving a much more traditional the US And Europe will cooperate sort of message as well. And that does matter tremendously. So one kind of takeaway is, hey, Trump is a blip, but I don't think that one's going to go that deep. It was one thing to do this in 2017 or 2018, that America had kind of a spasm and can come back to its senses. But this is the second time. And there's no question that the Trump tradition, if we want to call it that, call it maga, whatever you will, is now very much at the heart of American politics. In the next election and the one after that and the one after that, there will be candidates who will be pushing some of these themes. And the Europeans have to ask, even if some Gavin Newsom type becomes US President in a couple years, what comes after that? So I think that the fractured message, in part, was intended to contrast with Trump, but I'm not sure it's going to be successful, and frankly, I'm not even sure it should be successful, which is it's very hard for any leader to speak on behalf of America's future when there's not a bipartisan consensus. And therefore foreign leaders may always have to kind of fear the worst and plan accordingly. And I suspect that will be happening, although with less urgency should there be a different administration.
- [21:05]
Scott R. Anderson
Mike, how about you? We had a conversation about some remarks that AOC made, in particular, I think mostly related to China, which we can circle back to our third topic that have gotten a lot of controversy. But it was kind of an interesting set of remarks. So AOC was there with Jason Crow, representative from Colorado. They were presenting what they described as a working class view on foreign policy. It was, in part counter messaging, the Trump administration's anti globalist rhetoric, anti transatlanticist sort of rhetoric to some extent. But there's also a big element there saying like, and by the way, this is a uniquely progressive vision that's still very grounded in the U.S. domestic economic needs and politics in a way that has more, maybe parallels with certain aspects of the Trumpist worldview than a conventional commitment to transatlantic joint sort of security. What do you make of that? How does that fit into how you see the domestic politics kind of playing out around this?
- [21:59]
Mike Feinberg
So I think there's one historical point and one contemporary point we can extrapolate from that. I'll start with the historical one. I may be dating myself here, but in the early 2000s, Walter Russell Mead came out with a book called Special Providence that attempted to delineate four strands of American foreign policy that had been present at various times. And each one was associated with a certain figure. Three of them were presidents, one was Alexander Hamilton, and they had differing degrees of isolationism versus engagement and monetary power versus military power. But what's interesting to me about the Munich Conference this year is that this is the first time I can recall in my life where we see all of those visions forwarded by different representatives from the same country. It's just odd. Normally you have one, maybe two visions about America's role in the world presented by individuals from different parties we had a lot at this conference, and I think that speaks to. We can call it ideological diversity, we can call it ideological confusion, but I think both parties are very much groping for some sort of unified vision. There are no grand strategists yet who have come to the forefront of either party that can really articulate a vision that is agreed upon by a majority or even a plurality of that party. And that leaves a lot of uncertainty if you're Europe, which gets to my second point, that if I'm a European intelligence agency, seeing that Trump has been reelected, I'm no longer engaged in what used to be called sort of Kremlin ology. I'm not looking just at the characteristics of the leaders in American government. I'm looking at his after his reelection in 2024, at a seismic shift among the American polity. And Dan talked about this in the sense of future leaders who will be Trump's intellectual progeny. But if I'm Europe, I'm realizing that something in at least some part of the United States has fundamentally changed that, even if leadership changes is going to constrain that leadership. And I think that explains why we are seeing such a visible shift, not in degrees, but of kind, in how Europe is talking about the United States.
- [25:00]
Scott R. Anderson
That's really interesting. I read it slightly differently, although I think it could arrive at a similar spot, which is that the transatlantic relationship has never been good, or at least has not for several decades been good at selling itself domestically in the United States, which is why you've had a consistent critical strain, particularly through right wing, more conservative politics, but to some extent, an element to the left, too. And that is in part because the transatlantic relationship was always seen as a bit of an elite project. It was this idea that, yeah, but the people who actually do national security understand the importance of us and why it's there. And what I see read this as is more that, yeah, there's been this domestic gap here, and maybe it's worse now than it is. There's facilitating element, but that the people in charge, at least at this given moment, and maybe people following his political tradition in the future, aren't part of that elite consensus that thinks that this is worth doing. I think they would expressly say we're not part of that elite consensus. Right. They actually are actively trying to disrupt it. I think you end up at the same spot there. But it's almost trickier because in some ways, I think a big part of what AOC and others are trying to signal is that this is not a big cultural change in the United States. This is a political outcome that is unique to a lot of factors, but is not a groundswell. I actually think that's true. Trump in the end won election very narrowly and a lot of people voted for him for reasons that were unrelated to mega and whatever that means. But I don't think that's what the Europeans care about. The Europeans care about that elite consensus that this relationship was good for us, that Republican presidents, even as they were elected by Euro skeptic constituencies, still stuck by. Does that make sense to you, Ari? How do you think about this? Where does the domestic politics and the global politics intersect? And what lessons do Europeans have to take for from this historical moment as they look to their own future security well beyond the window of a four year US Electoral cycle?
- [26:50]
Ari Tabatabai
I agree with that. I do think that also, and I think Dan kind of mentioned this in passing, I think it was hard to even make the case that we were going to be back to normal during the Biden administration. We heard this pretty frequently from counterparts when I was at the State Department or, or at dod, where we would talk to them about various things and they would say, well, we don't know that this is going to stick in three years because we don't know what your politics is going to look like. And by the way, you can't really guarantee that the things you're doing today are going to continue. And so I don't think that the allies were fully sold on this notion of continuity even before this last election. And I think it's even harder to make that case today. And adding to that, again, I think Dan's point was really spot on, that there's this. Mike mentioned this too. The values piece, I think is really important, gets lost a lot in the kind of, you know, more part security conversations we're having and the political conversations we're having, which is that you have, you know, again, you have this fundamental shift. Mark Carney kind of said that pretty eloquently this past week between this divergence in the way this administration sees American values and the way many Europeans still see their values. Right. Like, you know, when Rubio talks about this notion of, you know, this common Western heritage, as Mike mentioned, he's talking about a very specific slice of that, whereas that's not how many Europeans see their own values and their own kind of cultural legacy and historical and history. So, you know, I think that is a really hard sell to be making. And I don't think that, you know, I don't know that the administration was trying to do that, but if they were, they didn't really succeed to do it.
- [28:37]
Scott R. Anderson
It's fascinating. Well, speaking of complex shifts, international relationships and some, you know, far off negotiations in exotic locales, let us turn our eyes a little bit to the east of Munich and a little bit to the south to wait. No, it's not Oman. Where did the last negotiations go? I started with say, Oman. That was the first round. That was the last round. Geneva still to the south and the east. I think I'm technically right in the direction, just not quite right. The same trajectory to Geneva. For our second topic, we have seen another round of negotiations around Iran nuclear program. In a lot of ways, this is the Trump administration's effort to fill the gap left by the JCPOA and other arrangements that prior administration that pursued. Of course they ended in during the first Trump administration, but that the Biden administration did not really make a serious effort to re engage me. That's not entirely fair. But to some extent made some effort to reengage but did not successfully do so. And we're now in this moment where the Iran nuclear program is again front and center in part because U.S. military strikes that at the time the Trump administration trumpeted as eliminating that program do not appear to have been successful, at least to that same scale over this past summer. In exchange, Iran is making fairly strong demands about economic relief to the broad maximum sanctions that they have. We've been here before and in particular President Trump and many of people in his party, many people close to him in his foreign policy apparatus, were highly critical of the negotiations the way they went under the Obama administration. Do we have reason to think we may see a better deal that's more amenable to different parties here? Dan, let me start with you and then, Ari, I want to come to
- [30:17]
Dan Byman
you after that, I will say that Iran is in an exceptionally difficult spot right now. There are multiple crises. There is a tremendous political crisis with mass demonstrations being brutally suppressed that took a regime that already had legitimacy issues and greatly multiplied them. Part of the reason there were mass demonstrations was an ongoing economic crisis that has gotten even worse. And then there is a broader, I'm going to call it a security crisis, which is Iran went to war and lost decisively. There wasn't even the kind of symbolic we got one good punch in before we were left on the mat. Right. It was a rather one sided humiliating defeat. And now this is the world's most powerful military, the United States, along with a very impressive military Israel. But that said, Iran has claimed it's been preparing for this for decades and did very poorly. So the Iranian regime desperately needs something to move the country forward and whether it's willing to make concessions on dramatic concessions on enrichment and proxies and so on. I think there's at least potential for real concessions here, and I'm very interested in what Ari has to say. However, there are some real issues. One is a kind of timing question. Where the us, of course, already went to war with Iran last year and didn't really include a lot of this in the ceasefire deal, there was a moment of leverage there that was not used and to tie them to the demonstrations. While somewhat emotionally appealing, the demonstrations are over. They were brutally put down. They're done now. Perhaps they'll recur. But bombing various local security facilities is not going to recreate the demonstrations and allow the demonstrators to win. So there is a disjunction between events on the ground and the threatened use of military power. The last thing I want to say, though, is, at least in my opinion, the possibility of a US strike is extremely real. The United States is putting a lot of assets into the region. We're putting a lot of air defense into the region, we are putting a wide range of strike aircraft into the region, as well as, of course, carrier groups. And we're also putting some of the less kind of glamorous aspects of military force that are vital, such as electronic warfare and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets. So there's a real package that is pretty massive and would allow sustained strikes for a long period of time that is being put into place. So I think it's quite possible. But the US demands are exceptionally extensive. And one thing that I think we don't have a good sense of is, is the elite politics in Iran. You have a supreme Leader who is declining in terms of simply being old and seems to be less hands on. It's unclear who various power brokers are. There is presumably a kind of secret primary going on in terms of who's vying to be successors for key positions. And to compound all of this further, Iran has a counterintelligence problem, which is the penetration that Israel revealed of Iran's security apparatus was so massive that Iran has to redo a lot of its procedures. And even then, it has to always ask itself, are Israel and the United States listening to every conversation? Are they secretly present at every meeting? And even if that's grossly exaggerated, the fact that they have to worry about it is going to mess up decision making. And so I think there's a tremendous weakness on the Iranian side and potential here, but it's a very difficult diplomatic dance.
- [34:13]
Scott R. Anderson
Arya, what about your thoughts on this? I mean, you've worked on these issues in government and outside of government. Talk to us a little bit, to the extent you can, obviously, about where you see the factors kind of aligning here in regards to a deal or a military strike and what comes next.
- [34:29]
Ari Tabatabai
I mean, I think d' Angelo's put everything I would have said very elegantly, so I don't have a whole lot to add. I think I'm a bit skeptical that I agree with Dan that there are concessions that Iran could make and now would be the time to make those concessions. I am not sure that I'm seeing a lot of seriousness in the negotiations right now. And part of the reason I say this is because, having done the whole sunken dance of indirect negotiations, they're not a real thing. They're a real thing in terms of preparing the ground for future negotiations, et cetera, et cetera. If you want to actually negotiate on these very complex issues that are very technically challenging, which is on Iran's nuclear program, on sanctions relief, you need the two sides to actually sit down and talk to one another. We did this in the Biden administration. It was part of the reason it didn't really go anywhere. And to me, it signals that there is not a seriousness on behalf of regime decision makers, the Supreme Leader being kind of the chief among them, because if they really wanted a deal, they've seen this before. They know that is not going to work, and they would be engaging in a different way. So that's part of it. My other concern, though, is that I'm actually, you know, to the point about timing. I don't think that this is a time for us to be negotiating with Iran. Dan described it really well. Like, you know, the weakness that the regime is facing internally and externally is tremendous. It is probably the worst kind of security, internal and external security landscape that the regime has faced since the 1980s, since the Iran Iraq war. And you know this because of what we've seen in terms of the degradation of Iranian. The Iranian proxy architecture, the penetration into the nuclear program, the fact that they responded with just absolute brute force to the protests. You know, that this is a regime that is feeling this challenge very acutely. And so what we're doing here by negotiating at this particular point in time, right after they stop massacring thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, is actually just kind of legitimizing this regime to some extent. Right. And I think the second mistake, Scott, I think we talked about this last time we talked about Iran on the pod. There was a mistake that President Trump came out and said, I'm not going to engage with Iran until they say stop killing their people. And then he started negotiating again. And he's also now siloing the nuclear issue from all the other problems. And look, in the past, I've been in favor of siloing the nuclear issue from other things because it is a very complicated issue set. You don't need to be negotiating on all the things at the same time. I think in this current environment and in this current moment, it is incredibly difficult and it sends a really bad signal to silo. It communicates completely from the human rights issue that is going on domestically. So I'm not sure that the negotiations are going anywhere anytime soon. That might be part of the reason why the buildup that Dan was describing is occurring. Part of it might be a signal to Iran that the president is ready to actually go for a second round of strikes if Iran is not serious about the negotiations, which is what he's been saying rhetorically, but maybe kind of putting assets in place to really make that point more, more concretely, more practically. But part of it might be that there is information that we don't know that, you know, is indicating that there are activities that are happening that we should be responding to. That's also a possibility. And it might also be that, you know, the administration is kind of acknowledging that there is not really that seriousness that, that seriousness on behalf of Iran. And so it's preparing for and for a Plan B, essentially. The last piece I'll say is part of my challenge with the administration's Iran policy right now is that it is really just kind of flip flopping between use of force and diplomacy. There are so many other things we could and should be doing, and it's not clear to me that we're actually doing those things right. The spectrum of tools that we have at our disposal are not just go strike facilities and engage Iran right after it kills many, many people. And in the first Trump administration, we had sort of the opposite problem where it was just sanctions and nothing else really for a long time until, of course, we went and killed Soleimani. But now we're kind of doing the opposite thing where we have this binary choice instead of actually using all of the other tools that are at our disposal and that could actually yield results in a better way in this current moment. Than either the use of force or diplomacy.
- [39:07]
Scott R. Anderson
Can you give an example of one or two of the tools you're thinking of on that spectrum?
- [39:11]
Ari Tabatabai
I mean, sanctions being a really good one, right? Like we're not really doing that much in terms of building up the sanctions infrastructure, for example. There's a lot of things we could do covertly that obviously I'm not going to get into. But there's a lot of different things that we could be doing on that spectrum that we're just not really doing in the same way.
- [39:31]
Ben Wittes
Hey folks, Ben Whittis here. This episode is brought to you by the folks at Ground News. I want to talk to you about media and Trust. People listen to this podcast and read Lawfare's content because Lawfare brings people information and analysis of a particularly high quality and that generates trust in an era when trust in news and media sources is low. Ground News is another organization that is working to create trust in media and media worthy of trust. It's an appeal that doesn't just bring you news on subjects you're interested in. It curates that news so that you can see information that people of your own political persuasion are likely to miss. It's not publishing its own stuff, but it's also doing a lot more than aggregating. It's identifying stories that are filling a blind spot that is pervasive for the left or for the right, for example. The app also shows you bias ratings and factuality ratings for each news organization covering a story, so that you can see whether the story you're interested in is mostly being covered by news organizations of the left, right or center. Let me give you a specific example. I just returned from Ukraine, so I was particularly interested to see how Ground News would handle stories about the war there. Was it flagged that an important story about deadly Russian strikes in Ukraine is being largely ignored by right wing press? On the other hand, it also flagged that left outlets are ignoring a story about Ukrainian nationals in Germany charged with trying to send parcel bombs to Ukraine at the direction of Russian intelligence. These blind spot notices are really useful as a way of seeing what information you are probably not seeing on stories of interest to you. Or consider the recent story about President Trump proposing voting reforms that demand voter ID and proof of citizenship of would be voters. The Ground News app shows 29 media organizations reporting on this story, and it shows radically different headlines associated with it, depending on the ideological valence of the outlet from the free press. Washington Power Struggle Jeffries moves to block Trump's plan for federal election oversight. By contrast, the Daily coast headline Republicans bail on states rights so Trump can rig elections again. You can see information about each news organization's bias tendencies and its factuality ratings. You can even see information about its ownership. I find Ground News an impressive tool for checking my own biases and the biases of the media I consume, and for seeing the news that people like me generally don't see. I encourage you to check it out. You can get Ground News's Vantage subscription for 40% off, which allows unlimited access to the Ground News app by visiting groundnews.comlaw that's groundnews.comlaw one more time. Groundnews.comlaw check it out. I really think you'll be glad you
- [43:00]
Scott R. Anderson
did
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- [43:39]
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- [44:40]
Mike Feinberg
Perfected
- [44:43]
Scott R. Anderson
Mike, what is your sense of this stuff? I'm curious about your perspective so I
- [44:47]
Mike Feinberg
come to a Lot of the same conclusions as Ari, albeit by a slightly different route. I agree that now is not the time to be negotiating with Iran, but when a regime you dislike and which you have at various points over the past decade explicitly stated, you hope collapses and is replaced by something else, while it's self immolating and on the verge, if not already entrenched in or immediately passed massive civil uprisings unlike anything else in its recent past. It's also not the time to carry out a military strike or to threaten one if we know we're not going to put boots on the ground. And if we know anything about the use of air and naval strikes on a nation alone in the hopes of breaking support for the regime. Every study From World War II going forward shows that they actually have the opposite effect and usually serve to unify to some degree disparate factions within the affected country.
- [45:57]
Scott R. Anderson
So.
- [45:57]
Mike Feinberg
So there's this fallacy that I think is more present in the Trump administration than most, but is always with the government that you always need to do something. And this may be one of those cases where you're best off not doing anything except entirely behind the scenes. And you know, Ari and I have somewhat similar backgrounds and I'm not going to get too into it. But like, this is the sort of situation for which covert action findings exist. And if you really want to take aim at the Iranian regime, it might simply be that now is the time to lend COVID support to those in the country that want to destabilize things rather than doing it yourself. There are a lot of tools in the toolbox which are not public and are not sexy and therefore not attractive to the current administration, but which still can have very real positive effects for the United States.
- [47:02]
Dan Byman
So, Scott, I want to jump in here and I think actually disagree a bit with both Ari and Michael. So I think the idea of trying out some covert action disinformation campaigns, so on things that might shift things internally, certainly worth trying. But I do think it's right to negotiate in that. Let's try to figure out what we want, which has actually been a very difficult challenge for multiple U.S. administrations. And if it is this mix of ending the nuclear program, ending the missile program, and ending support for proxies, okay, use this moment of considerable leverage to push very hard. Not on that list is support for democratic protest in Iran. And so if that is the goal, that actually takes you down a very different path. But if the goal of this administration, which frankly is similar to the goal of previous administrations, which is we Just want Iran that behaves in a non aggressive way and if it's brutal at home, we will criticize that, but that's not going to be a priority. If that is true, then this is a moment of leverage to try to push. I'm not sure it will work. Negotiations often fail for 100 reasons and both the politics in Iran and the United States are very complex on this. But I actually do think it's reasonable to push pretty hard. And I actually think not negotiating would be kind of sending an odd message, which is we're just going to bomb as we did last year and hope good things happen in the aftermath of it.
- [48:39]
Ari Tabatabai
Scott, choose your camp.
- [48:41]
Scott R. Anderson
I think I agree with Dan, although I may take one issue and carve out my own territory a little bit to the right or the left, up, down somewhere to the side of Dan. I tend to think negotiation is important. Lines of communication are there. I think there is a moment of extreme leverage here to accomplish long term objectives that administrations have shared. Human rights issue of this is incredibly sympathetic. I do think it's important. I don't think it's a policy nullity and something that is, you know, antithetical or not in US Interests. Strategic interests. But I also don't know how it weighs in. I think the other ones are pretty substantial strategic interests. And in some ways I think it's easier to get to yes now than it might have been 10 years ago because Iran has revealed itself to be a bit of a paper tiger on a lot of the other fronts that you couldn't get them to negotiate with. Iran's proxy network has been substantially decimated. They're still there. You still got the Houthis, although in a lot of ways the Houthis are some of the Iranians like less reliable partners, more effective but less reliable. I think it's a good way to characterize it, at least in my understanding. A lot of their other regional proxies have been severely constrained. Still got a lot of influence on Iraq, but even there they're under a lot of pressure and they're not able to bring to bear the same tools that they've brought to bear in the past, particularly financially. So you've got a real moment of leverage here. But I do think there's a cabin on the US Leverage at this point. And it's because they've already tipped their hand twice now. We've seen the Trump administration stop short of regime change in Iraq. When I had an opportunity and a justification that frankly, I think most people would have Bought to some extent, did it last summer. Instead, what do we see them do? They hit the nuclear weapon program. What did they immediately do? They got Netanyahu to stop the Israeli military campaign within days that people were worried was on the verge of pushing Iran past the tipping point to some sort of regime change. Right. They had started hitting military leaders, were moving towards political leaders and reportedly considered targeting or did target Khamenei, I can't remember which. Then we have this protest coming in where the United States was moving towards military action to the point that we saw, you know, Al Aid air base. Right. Get non essential personnel removed. That is the clearest indicator. You will get that in the evacuation of the US Embassy in Iraq that you're about to see military action against Iran. And then it stopped short because Iran made some like fairly superficial concessions. And then quickly we got the reporting. Yeah, but Israelis, Saudis, Emiratis, the rare issue of consensus among all these different Middle Eastern parties is we're too afraid of what comes next in Iran. And so I do think that gives Iran some degree of leverage. But in my mind that's the sort of calculus that actually leads to the point where you might get an outcome, like a negotiated outcome that every party can kind of swallow because Iran can give up a lot, but maybe has enough leverage in the fact that the United States is going to be very reluctant to actually, I think, pull the trigger, or at least seems to be reluctant to, to pull the trigger on that sort of scenario of actually full on military regime change. Meaning they'll have enough concessions to get a couple of key points out of the Americans. And the Americans can't get everything they want. Absolutely. Meanwhile, the Americans probably don't reasonably don't care about is a lot of the stuff that people criticized the JCPOA for back in the day, a lot of the regional stuff. This is at least not as big a security issue as it was before. The nuclear program is pushed back substantially, does appear to have been damaged by the strikes last summer. And getting more visibility and access to it would be valuable for future military action or anything else. So you can see it as sort of a temporary solution. I mean, like, I actually kind of think I see the parts of the deal coming together here, particularly now that the protests have stopped and that the human rights abuses aren't going to be rubbed in the face of the Trump administration. And it's one also where I'm not sure either party is going to see an advantage in waiting it out that long. Like, like it's Going to take months. But if you talk about like a year or two from now, comedy and all them I think will be worried about like, well, what if there are leadership shifts and people begin to step. What if there's a Del C. Rodriguez who steps forward and begins to say, oh, maybe I can do a better job of this. Right? Or somebody else they can step into. Or maybe there's enough criticism, more protests that you see the moderate ish elected presidency and other people who are kind of powerless but try and say, put themselves forward saying like, but we could be that sort of figurehead for the Trump administration. It's that like how long do you want to maintain this military posture? They did a lot in the Western hemisphere. It wasn't before an election. It wasn't looking like you're on the verge of starting another war in the Middle East. It's actually not, I think a super cheap thing politically for them to just stay in this posture indefinitely. So I kind of see the parts of what I could see as a deal coming together. I'm not sure it's going to happen. Like I said, that'd be foolish. But I'm not as pessimistic about it as maybe there would other be. And not least because this president loves a deal and the man really doesn't have a lot of principles. In the end, he doesn't really care about that much about this stuff. And if he gets a win and a deal and gets to do what Biden and Obama could never accomplish six months before the election, I think it'd be very tempting for him.
- [53:32]
Mike Feinberg
I think we should note at least that true to form, the two State Department alumni are optimistic about a negotiation and the DoD and I see alumni are not quite in kill them all territory. But we are urging covert action rather than discussions at a table. So do not come to rational security to see professional stereotypes shattered.
- [54:02]
Scott R. Anderson
We all have our priors. What can you say?
- [54:04]
Ari Tabatabai
Can I add to the stereotype here, please? I'm actually concerned, Scott, to your point about you're not pessimistic that a deal will emerge that actually gives me even less the warm and fuzzies than not having a deal emerge, partially because 1. Yes. To your point, like having IAEA inspectors back into Iran. Sure I can. Fine. Yeah. Great. Nice. I don't know that it would do the same thing for us as it would have done even two years ago. Right. So I don't know that there are that many concessions that really would kind of shift the way I think about the Iranian utilization nuclear threat today, if they were to be made. That's number one. Number two, we do need to talk about personalities a little bit. You know, on the Iranian side, you have a foreign minister who's been involved in these negotiations for 10 plus years, for 15 years at this point. He knows this file inside out. On the US Side, we have Steve Witkoff, who is new to this, to all of it, and who's doing all the things everywhere. Right. Like, he's basically the special envoy for Global affairs at this point, Jared Kushner, apparently. And not a ton of folks who are left who have that continuity, even at lower levels. Yeah, sure. There are still some folks who do you know who know the file fairly well, but a lot of those people who really had been there, who had been instrumental in our understanding of the Iranian nuclear program, of the negotiations, that. Providing that continuity, continuity across, across Democratic and Republican administrations are gone. So that also makes me a little nervous that you have basically this mismatch in continuity and knowledge of this file. And it just makes me worried that you're going to end up with a deal that, you know, these folks think is really great, when actually maybe it's not, and maybe we would have had a shot at it a year and a half, two years ago and would have been fine, but it just doesn't meet the moment today, given the advanced nature of Iran's nuclear program, even after the strikes that occurred over the summer,
- [56:05]
Scott R. Anderson
it's a fair criticism. One thing I did not say, I did not say it was going to be a good deal. I just said I'm not sure the pieces aren't lining up for some sort of deal. Well, having touched on Europe and the Middle east, let us turn to one of those other major strategic domains, and that, of course, is Asia, where we have a topic that, frankly, we've almost talked about, like four or five weeks in a row, we never really thought the piece of the line and it was time to blow the dust off and bring it to the fore, as there are a lot of little pieces that keep coming up in the news and everything else, but never quite jumps to the front of news pages or the top of people's minds, because when you're only picking three topics from the day's news, and that is course, is the question of China. There have been a lot of interesting stories about China recently, to say the least. You have confused remarks by AOC at Munich that are getting a lot of criticism. You have similarly confused remarks by President Trump a few weeks ago, seeming to walk Back a little bit of the soft security commitment to Taiwan. Security commitments not quite right, but strategic ambiguity, plus a little bit traditionally Iran, probably not Iran, Taiwan has gotten from the United States. And then this past week, we've seen a number of stories from folks watching China about China. First, Xi Jinping taking steps to purge its military corps to, you know, establish loyalists, kind of reinforce a hierarchy that follows his directive, including very high levels and down to lower levels. We've seen stories about them reinvigorating their nuclear program and expanding it, something that's being dovetailed a little bit with the end of the New START agreement and the talk about a new new start that would include China that the Trump administration, frankly, has been talking about since the end of the INF Treaty in 2018 and has not really made any progress towards, but who knows, maybe they will. And then also the mass manufacturing of submarines that China is engaging in, expanding its submarine, something that has huge strategic implications for a variety of reasons, at least that they can carry nuclear weapons. So normally this would be a kind of period where all these little pieces, they never really rise to a crisis, and that's kind of China's secret. Except for trade talks and kind of TikTok and a couple of these economic issues. China has almost never in the last few years really been the front page crisis that the Trump administration had to address. Instead, it's adopted a fairly conciliatory tone, I think it's fair to say. Whereas the first Trump administration was rabidly anti China, President Trump used, you know, rhetoric against China and Chinese people that raised a lot of problems, concerns domestically as well as internationally. Now we're seeing this much more conciliatory tone. A lot of things seem to be secondary to the trade file and to some extent, the critical minerals file, both areas where negotiations are ongoing on the former and the latter, an area where China has substantial leverage over the United States. So, you know, we are in this weird moment where China, where the Trump administration is nominally fairly hawkish on China, includes a lot of very real China hawks, is, you know, the head of a party that has historically been the far more hawkish party on China and far more defensive of Taiwan, dating all the way back to, you know, the Truman administration. And yet this administration is pivoting towards a less confrontational stance towards China in a way compared to even the Obama and Biden administrations. At least that's, that's my read of it at the moment. So, Mike, you, you are a close China watcher on this. Let me bring you into this conversation, talk to us about how you make sense of this. What are you seeing in regards to how the Trump administration appears to be thinking of the China threat, if it is even a threat, and what that's translating into in terms of policy?
- [59:39]
Mike Feinberg
So there's actually quite a bit to unpack in your intro to the subject because your description of our relationship with China or the way we view China being a series of small events that never fully lead up to a crisis or inflection point sort of forms the backbone of the complaint that Sinologists are trying to hands what have you within the US Government have always had, which is that the nation being China, the PRC is always taking steps that strategically disadvantage the United States, but never do so in so confrontational a way as to push the moment to its crisis. And as a result, they are content rather than taking a giant leap to help their strategy to just take a half step every couple of years and they get to the same point. But they do it in a way that there's no way to respond without seeming disproportionate. You know, for example, the building of artificial islands during the Obama administration is sort of the best example of this. Was it something that could be militarized? Yes. Was it something that would definitely push the US military further out of the first island chain? Absolutely. Was it overtly confrontational? Not at the time. And as a result, the Obama administration understandably really struggled with how to respond to it. And at the end of the day there really wasn't much of a response. And it's not going to become a crisis until and unless there is an actual military conflict. And I think the building of the submarines is another step in that direction because with the Aukus agreement, it is hard for us to say with a straight face that there should be an undersea warfare limitation between great powers. And China has always wanted a blue water navy. It is something they have always built toward and now they're taking a major step to that, if they're not already there, that we don't really have a seemingly objective way to push back on. And ditto with the nuclear tests. It's not a secret. I think we talked about it as a group the last time we were all on rational security. Non proliferation is not really a priority of this administration. And the way that it is devalued, valuing allies means that the US nuclear umbrella is much less of a security guarantee than it used to be. Now, China was never protected by that umbrella. But if we on the world stage are willing to sort of stand by while other nations ramp up their development and production of nuclear weapons. Again, it's hard for us to advocate against China doing so. So when you fold into that the. And I'm not saying this even in a derogatory way because there are situations where it could be okay, but the largely transactional nature of U.S. foreign policy under Trump means that we are going to for or are going to be willing to forego military capability or military supremacy in order for economic advantage means that even if we had the moral authority or the seeming objectivity to push back on events like these, I don't know that we would. All of which is a really long winded way of saying I think we have one of the least hawkish administrations when it comes to China in the past two and a half decades states the best indicia of this was that a US President explicitly said to Xi Jinping, Taiwan is in your backyard. That's really your own problem to solve. That is, I would say that's more than walking back strategic ambiguity. I say it's entirely abandoning it. And it's abandoned imagining it in a way that is not going to comfort any of our allies whatsoever. And the real irony is that for an administration that seems to be so focused on economic gains, allowing China to take over Taiwan would be economically deleterious. If China takes over Taiwan and they get the TSMC chip factories that are there, the effect on the world economy and consumer production worldwide is going to be unlike anything we've ever seen in our lifetimes. And if China is allowed to dominate the South China Sea in area where I think something like 70% of the world's commercial shipping takes place, that's going to enable China to enact a economic protectionist regime that is really going to disadvantage the United States economically as well. So I think we are looking at a China policy that is not only not hawkish, but is quite frankly unwilling to look at any consequences beyond the immediate next deal. There's just as somebody who worked China for his whole career, this is really disheartening because we seem to be pursuing policies that do not care whatsoever not just about second and third order consequences, but even about first order consequences that are not in the immediate term.
- [66:17]
Scott R. Anderson
All right, let me turn over to you. What is your perspective on that? I mean, I'll just say I think that accounting makes a lot of sense to me. And we see it because the administration has more or less said it in its national security strategy, like a national security strategy basically said our Biggest issue with China is a balance of payments imbalance that we need to correct. Yeah, we got a couple of bilateral issues, reliance on Taiwan for chip manufacturing. We're going to onshore that. But it's a vision that obviously a lot of people in the administration don't share. We know we have Elbridge Colby, who is like the China hawk of all China hawks to the point that he wants to drop European security commands to focus on China. We have Marco Rubio, who's like a more conventional, conservative China hawk historically. And even though he doesn't sound like that now, he did just say at Munich, yeah, we can't defend Europe because we have to pivot Indo Pacific about China. That's still a very real strain in the Republican Party, including plenty of people in this administration. So. So how do we make sense of it? Is this just Trump channeling whoever wrote the National Security strategy, whoever's got his ear, the people at the nsc, people at Policy Planning at State, or is this really reflecting a more monumental shift in the perspective of the people at the top?
- [67:24]
Ari Tabatabai
Brilliant question. I don't know the answer there. I agree with everything Mike said. I do think that we have a situation where China is growing its capabilities basically across the board. Right. Maritime, Navy wise, nuclear wise, et cetera, et cetera. And meanwhile, we have an administration that not only has kind of deprioritized China, it feels like it's kind of now behind Latin America, obviously the Middle east again, even though for now, over a decade, administration after administration, Republicans, Democrats, including the first Trump administration, said that they wanted to deprioritize the Middle east and focus more on the Indo Pacific and China specifically, and, by the way, fighting with allies over all kinds of things. So I do think you're right. We're seeing the national security strategy and the priorities that set out really clearly play out. I don't know what to make of a Rubio or of a Bridge Colby, who. Whose entire raison d' etch for so long in terms of foreign policy was to focus on the Indo Pacific and on China and how they go to work every day thinking to themselves, well, I'm doing all these other things that I didn't think I wanted to do, and I don't think we should be doing and not doing the thing that I think we should actually be doing. But I do think that all of that means that we are really missing a strategic opportunity to be focusing on this issue that I think we should be focusing on, focusing on this issue set and instead kind of seemingly going back to the same challenges and policies of a decade, decade and a half ago. I think the nuclear piece is really important. Mike kind of brought it up a little bit. Just, I think it was this past week the State Department came out and said that we have reason to believe that in 2020, China conducted a nuclear test. Now, there are some questions surrounding that. There is an organization in Norway and the CTBTO that kind of came out and said, well, know, maybe so there are questions there. But nonetheless, we know that China has been building its nuclear capabilities for years. It's been building out its arsenal. There's been some conversations about including them in some sort of arms control arrangements with the Russians, but we don't even have arms control arrangements with the Russians anymore as, as you mentioned, Scott. So, and I don't know that that sort of, you know, trilateral format that, you know, has been discussed is really possible, realistic. I have zero indication, although I don't know, that the Chinese are particularly interested in engaging in a trilateral format. Maybe, Mike, or you have ideas there. So, you know, I, I think barring something like a arms control arrangement or some sort of massive change internally within China domestically, which I don't see happening, you're going to see this. The, the, the increase, increase in their capabilities, the depth and breadth of their capabilities. They're going to continue their modernization. We can maybe talk about the purges and I would kick that question over to Mike to opine on that. But there is questions there on readiness and the future of the PLA that are important to think about. But I do think that we're essentially ceding the ground to China at this point and allowing them to continue doing what they're doing while we're kind of busy fighting about whatever it is with the Euros and by the way, signaling to Indo Pacific allies that we are not going to be reliable partners in the future. Right. If we can't even be reliable with our closest allies, what reason do Taiwan or South Korea or Japan have to believe that we would be there to follow through on the commitments that we have to them?
- [71:13]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah, it's a really, you know, just interesting shift. I mean, it is a sign of the mercurial nature of our president and the extent to which the people around him have shifted so dramatically since the first Trump administration in ways that are hard to read. Like the internal terrain of the decision making apparatus seems to be driving, like half the policy decisions and half of it is, which varies a lot depending on the issue set and what comes through and half of it is Trump himself, who does personally like his comments, as Xi Jinping really does suggest to me that he's actually bought into this spheres of influence sort of worldview that's reflected in the national Security strategy, which is not what I thought. I mean, when I read it, I assumed this was a couple of the Claremont Institute folks, Michael Anton and other folks who were involved in drafting it and have always kind of had this sort of eclectic view. And it did an effort to kind of be a bricoleur about that and like other intellectual threads within the kind of broader mega movement. But, you know, Trump seems to bought into or at least that part of it, or maybe that's just his rhetorical way to approach this thing. It's just really, really hard to tell. But it does mean just kind of attrition at a certain point. If you don't have a proactive examination of these sorts of issues, and if all the other priorities are being made secondary purely to the economic relationship, I think maybe this is being justified in part off of the idea that everyone's going to get so rich over off of AI that there's not going to be a reason to have these sorts of tensions anymore. But that seems wildly optimistic. But that does seem to be the way the direction the administration is kind of leaning in regards to these things these days.
- [72:48]
Mike Feinberg
Yeah, I think I've got a couple points to make, all of which are variations on the theme that the Trump administration is not, nor has it ever been particularly hawkish on China. There is a lot of bloviating rhetoric, and there has been since 2016 against China from Trump, because as the nation that provides low cost production for American companies, it is an easy punching bag for him to faint at and score domestic points without having to really follow through with any actual economic consequences. But, like, I really struggle outside of a few prosecutions that the first Trump administration's Justice Department engaged in, like, I really struggle to think back to the years between 2016 and 2020 and find a US policy that was like materially tougher on China than anything that came out during the Obama years or during the W. Bush years. There just wasn't a there there. And as for the people that Trump is surrounding himself with, you guys particularly mentioned Rubio and Colby. Color me a little bit skeptical. I think it is. I will do this in as undisparaging a way as possible, but Marco Rubio has always possessed, let us say, a protean political nature. And there are many examples involving national security incidents where he was very hawkish when it would behoove his future career to be hawkish, and then he would walk back, if not explicitly repudiate those positions when doing so would also behoove his future career. He chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence when it wrote a multi volume, devastatingly detailed account of Russian interference in the 2016 election. I would humbly suggest that since then he has chosen to surround himself by people who have a slightly different view about the effects of Russian interference to the point where he is in an administration that now denies it ever happened at all. And there were a number of occurrences during the first Trump administration where the administration, I'm just going to be blunt, took actions that were very friendly to the Chinese government and he was in a position on sissy where he could have spoken up and did not. I'm thinking in particular of like, the Huawei investigation always gets a lot of press and I'm not going to get into that. But there was a previous investigation and prosecution and type of settlement agreement with another major Chinese ICT manufacturer, zte. And ZTE was under a crippling monitorship that really limited its ability to function as a threat to US national security and critical infrastructure. That monitorship was lifted roughly contemporaneously, simultaneously with an agreement with China to buy excess soybeans from a number of swing states in the American heartland. Listeners can draw their own conclusions, but I don't recall Rubio raising a peep about that. So I'm just not quite sure that hawkishness on China is as baked into his personality as he would like people to believe. As for Bridge Colby, it's funny. He was the one appointee to the Defense Department in this administration that I'm like, all right, I can live with that. I can actually support that. His book the Strategy of Denial, which is essentially a treatise on how the United States should go about preparing for a defense of Taiwan and carry out that defense if necessary.
- [77:16]
Dan Byman
Like.
- [77:16]
Mike Feinberg
Like, it's not an easily dismissible book. It's a serious there's serious thought put into it. But he's also chosen to work for Hegseth, and to the extent that his name has appeared in news stories about things that have happened under his watch, like he's coming off as kind of an amateur and a clown, taking major actions about weapons sales, for example, and curtailing them without getting SecDef's authority to do so. Like so while I think his heart is in the right place, I don't know if he's a seasoned enough government operator or bureaucratic infighter to really push his ideas forward. And I don't know that his presence there is enough to really sway any policy toward Taiwan.
- [78:13]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, it is a set of issues we will keep watching here at Rational Security, but we are out of time for today. That said, this would not be Rational Dirty if we did not leave you with some object lessons to ponder over in the week to come. Dan Byman had to leave us for that last segment, but he recorded his object lesson earlier. Let's hear that from Dan.
- [78:30]
Dan Byman
I think my role in object lessons on this podcast is to bring up different games. And one I want to highlight that I played recently is a game that came out several years ago called John Company about the British East India Company. It's a wonderful dysfunctional game about a dysfunctional company. Basically, you play different families that own parts of the company. The goal of your family is to advance socially by buying elite properties and otherwise gaining social status. And to do that you might have to invade a different part of India or otherwise wreak havoc with the lives of millions of people in a far away part of the world. And it's a kind of hostile bargaining game that is great fun. You'll end up hating your friends, but other than that it's really worthwhile. So I commend it all.
- [79:25]
Scott R. Anderson
I'm excited off to check this out. I like like near zero sum bargaining games, like not quite there but highly competitive.
- [79:33]
Dan Byman
You cannot win by yourself. But at the same time there was one winner.
- [79:38]
Scott R. Anderson
Wonderful, wonderful recommendation. Excellent. All right, Ari, what did you bring for us today?
- [79:43]
Ari Tabatabai
All right. For the context of our listeners, every time I bring up movies on this show, Mike Feinberg and I get into an argument after. Afterwards we largely agree on policy issues, but when it comes to movies, except for maybe two directors and two directors we largely disagree. So this time instead of doing a movie, I am going to talk about theater. And just a couple of weeks ago was Broadway Week in New York. And so I went up for Broadway Week and also Restaurant week and I got to see Death Becomes her which was just three hours of pure delight. It is such a fun show, incredible acting, fantastic staging, much quirkier than the movie from the 1990s I think it is with Meryl Streep. Much more queer, but highly recommended. Is so fun and everyone should go see it.
- [80:40]
Scott R. Anderson
Hey, wonderful. Well, for my object lesson I'm going to go a little low brow. You go high and I go low. That is, I'm going to go ahead and plug what we all need more of in our life. Somebody who makes Instagram and TikTok videos of humor, which is not usually a medium I really appreciate other than like dropout and occasional SNL clips. Like I'm not really a big social media video consumer generally, but I go on Instagram to see like look at pictures of my friends, kids and stuff and things like that and I get these things fed to me and I have to say there's a couple, they appear to be a Canadian couple that makes videos, their names are Jess and Quinn. That are so absurd and ridiculous and often corny, but in a very clever and self aware way that I find them absolutely entrancing. Ended up watching like a dozen of them. So check it out, Jess and Quinn, they are on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, all the things. They have some weirder YouTube videos it seems that are longer. I don't really know. I'm only endorsing the shorts at this point. That's all I've really checked out. A classic joke is a multiple references to needing a crowbar and then walk into a bar that's being run by a small black bird, which is ridiculous, unnecessary wordplay and absurd, but somehow they make it work in a way that I find quite funny. So I recommend you check it out if you have a particularly absurdist and pun oriented sense of humor, which if you listen to the show and enjoy it, you very well might with that. Mike, bring us home. What do you have for us this week?
- [81:56]
Mike Feinberg
My object lesson is something I am not recommending people get. And my experience with it is going to explain why as a relatively new father, I've been buying a lot of children's books and I've been trying to be selective in the ones I get. And I found a series called Poetry for Kids, which is selected and abridged poems for children by famous poets. Wanting to expose my son to the American canon, the first one I got was Robert Frost. I thought this was going to be great. I thought we would metaphorically, you know, stop by the woods during a snowy evening, travel down a road less taken. And I was a little shocked when the first poem I opened the book to was one entitled out out, whose title comes from Lady Macbeth's speech, Out, out, brief candle. And the subject matter of the poem is watching somebody get sawed to death in a horrible sawmill accident. And it's a beautiful poem. I can't recommend it enough, but it is not what I would necessarily recommend for a young child. So if you're looking for books to read your children, poetry maybe skip this particular entry.
- [83:23]
Scott R. Anderson
Fair call. Fair call. They used to have I used to have a wonderful app. I think I endorsed it on podcast before the Poetry foundation, which is like a great print magazine, had a great app that would randomly pull up poems based off certain like random parameters. I feel like this is before I had children is when I was using it like most avidly or like maybe I had very young children I was not yet reading to. But I think it had like a child friendly sort of filter. So maybe worth checking out. Maybe I'm misremembering, but I think I remember seeing that on there. So if you're desperate for for a constant stream of pleasant poetry, including a little more avant garde stuff and some classical stuff, that may be an alternative. Well, that brings us to the end of this week's episode. Rational Security is of course a production of Lawfare, so be sure to visit lawfairmedia.org for our show page, for links to past episodes, for our written work and the written work of other Lawfare contributors, and for information on Lawfare's other phenomenal podcast series. While you're at it, be sure to follow Lawfare on social media. Wherever you socialize your media, be sure to leave a rating or review wherever you might be listening and sign up to become a material supporter of Lawfare on Patreon for an ad free version of this podcast and other special benefits. For more information, visit lawfaremedia.org support our audio engineer and producer this week was Cara Shillin of Goat Rodeo, and our music, as always, was performed by Sophia Yan, and we are once again edited by the wonderful Jen Pata. On behalf of my guest Dan, Ari and Mike, I am Scott R. Anderson. We'll talk to you next week. Until then, goodbye.
- [84:42]
Ari Tabatabai
Foreign.
- [84:50]
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