← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Steve Coll and Jane Mayer on Obama’s new non-interventionist national-security team.
00:18:07
Steve Coll and Jane Mayer on Obama's new non-interventionist national-security team.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:14]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, January 10th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. This week President Obama announced several new appointments. The most controversial so far is Republican Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Chuck represents.
- [01:32]
Steve Kahl
The bipartisan tradition that we need more of in Washington. In the Senate, I came to admire his courage and his judgment, his willingness to speak his mind, even if it wasn't popular, even if it defied the conventional wisdom.
- [01:46]
Dorothy Wickenden
Today, Steve Kahl, Jane Mayer, and I are discussing Obama's nominees for his national security team and how they could shape the administration's foreign policy. Steve Obama wants Hagel at Defense, John Kerry at the State Department, and John Brennan at the CIA. Do any of these come as a surprise?
- [02:03]
Steve Kahl
Well, it's a resounding vote for the status quo. And so in that sense, no. All of these candidates were the leading practitioners of the status quo, except for Hagel. The other two had been working closely with the president in similar sort of positions. Kerry as a kind of special envoy and Obviously, John Brennan has been at the President's side working on counterterrorism very closely through the first term. So yeah, it's a very conventional sort of managing the world team that arises out of, I guess, the President's sense that he doesn't have transformational ambitions abroad. He just wants to keep the world at bay so that he can concentrate on the projects he has in mind in domestic policy.
- [02:49]
Dorothy Wickenden
Some of Hagel's former Republican colleagues in the Senate and neocons outside Congress have been much more critical about this appointment than Democrats have. Tell us why that is.
- [02:58]
Steve Kahl
Hagel has a complicated record about the big foreign policy decisions over the last decade. He did support the invasion of Iraq with his party, but then he broke fairly early on as the war deteriorated. And since then he's increasingly identified himself with realists who have argued against intervention abroad on humanitarian grounds. For example, in Libya he has been skeptical about the beating of war drums in the confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. So the hawks in the Republican Party and particularly his complicated frenemy John McCain, have increasingly seen Hagel as someone who has gone over to the left, even though, you know, obviously on economic issues, on climate change and on social issues he's been quite conservative.
- [03:51]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, and there's been a lot of fuss about his so called anti Semitism. That seems sort of preposterous. Is it?
- [03:57]
Steve Kahl
It is preposterous. I mean, it just. He was representing the state of Nebraska where fine tuning speech about matters of foreign policy was not something that he worried very much about. And so he said some things in language that I'm sure he wouldn't use today. But his underlying beliefs are those of a restrained combat veteran who has made quite clear that he regards the use of force as a very solemn and, you know, sort of careful matter. And that's really why he has spoken reluctantly about going to war willy nilly for any interest other than absolutely vital ones of the United States.
- [04:38]
Dorothy Wickenden
Jane, anything to add?
- [04:40]
Jane Mayer
I mean, he is in a different place in terms of his views on Israel than for instance, AIPEC is. Hagel believes that when it comes to Israel that there needs to be a two state solution with the Palestinians and that in exchange for the Palestinians giving up the right of return, that Israel should give up on the idea of sole authority over Jerusalem and share it. And he also believes that there should be negotiations with all parties, including Hamas, and that the US should play the role of a sort of an honest broker there. So he's being attacked. There's going to be A fascinating campaign to watch against him being waged by people like Bill Kristol, the sort of neocon leader in Washington with a lot of undeclared money that seems to be flowing in from backers who haven't identified themselves. But people will see ads in the New York Times and there have been now ads on television and attacks describing Hagel's out of the mainstream and not safe for Israel, basically.
- [05:49]
Dorothy Wickenden
Steve, you talked about maintaining the status quo, but the political views of Hagel and Brennan seem somewhat at odds. I would assume that Hagel is seen as kind of appeasing Hamas and Iran and that would not be the way Brennan would proceed, correct?
- [06:04]
Steve Kahl
Yeah, I mean, there are shades of complication in that. You know, Brennan, when he was at the CIA during his career there, served as station chief in Saudi Arabia in the late 90s and he was also a sort of relationship manager, advocated engagement and a kind of a long term containment strategy to deal with Saudi radicalism in a way that's similar to what I think Hagel argues about Hezbollah and Hamas, that the best way to manage this kind of radicalism is not to inflame it by threatening violence, but to try to isolate it through multiple meanseconomic sanctions if necessary, political isolation, diplomatic strategies and so forth. So I'm not sure how much distance there is between them. And as a practical matter, Brennan these days is an operations man. I mean, he basically oversees this big opaque day to day secret war machine that is led primarily by the CIA, but involves many elements of the Defense Department and requires presidential decision making, sometimes from hour to hour about who to shoot and who not to shoot and why. And so I would imagine that he hasn't been doing a lot of, you know, big thinking about foreign policy strategy. He's just been out kind of whacking moles for most of the last few years. He is an analyst by professional training and orientation. So when he gets over to the Agency, I'm sure he'll kind of pull out of that mindset and try to think a little bit about what sort of legacy he wants to leave at Langley and what kinds of contributions he wants to make to these debates about Israel and Iran. But really, I mean, he's been just going around the clock in the job that he's had.
- [07:51]
Dorothy Wickenden
Jane.
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Jane Mayer
Steve says he's an analyst by training. And there's always been a big divide within the CIA between the operatives who are the sort of the people that you think of more as being like James Bond, and the analysts who are desk bound and kind of study, open source material to understand the world. And they're not out there sleuthing around, you know, in dangerous places as much. But what's happened since 9 11, really, and Brennan has been a very big part of this, is that the CIA has been transformed. It was specifically not designed to be a military force. It was designed to gather intelligence for the president. But since 9 11, all the lines have been blurred. The lines have been blurred between the analysts and the operatives, so that analysts who were just getting information before, many of the best ones, are being used to come up with targeting information for the drone strikes. So they're, you know, part of the kind of military operation. And the agency itself as a whole has become much more militarized and is working hand in glove with the special Operations forces in the Pentagon. And between the two of them, they've. They've become kind of a seamless killing machine.
- [09:08]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, and talk a little bit more about that, Jane. This is a subject of particular expertise for you. Tell us about Brennan's public views on the subject of torture, extraordinary rendition, and how they square with Obama, who has repeatedly said that he is categorically against the use of torture.
- [09:25]
Jane Mayer
Brennan was. His name was floated when Obama was first elected as a potential CIA director, and it was shot down by critics of torture who thought that he was too closely involved in the program. He was the chief of staff to George Tenet, the former director of the CIA, during the period when the interrogation and detention program was designed and when the abuses were at their height. And so he was very closely identified with those programs. But because he was not nominated formally and never went through confirmation hearings, a lot's not really known about what his specific record was. Internally, I've heard conflicting things about Brannon. I have heard that he has portrayed himself as having been an internal critic of the worst abuses, things like waterboarding that are internationally regarded as incontrovertible torture and completely illegal. But the CIA did them during those years. Others have said that he went along with the program basically and, you know, certainly didn't resign during it or over it. So there are many unanswered questions here, and they're very sensitive questions. I imagine that the CIA would love to keep them as quiet as possible. And one of the things that will be interesting to see is whether any of this will be done in public, in a way, in public hearings where, you know, the US Public can begin to debate and think about these programs.
- [10:59]
Dorothy Wickenden
And Jane, on the subject of the drone strikes, he's a big champion of Them, basically.
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Jane Mayer
He's widely seen as the initiator and overseer of the use of drones, particularly in Yemen. It's interesting, there are a number of people who are Democrats who are sort of very in favor of rule of law as opposed to some kind of, you know, rogue state that's doing mindless killing. And they like Brennan because they say that Brennan has been intent upon designing rules anyway for who you can strike and when when it comes to targeted killing. But this whole area of authority on, you know, who can be killed has kind of been kept behind closed doors and in the executive branch without checks and balances, which is really unusual also. I mean, I'm sure there's congressional oversight, but it seems that there have been kind of rules drawn up between the Justice Department and the White House about what is a proper target for a drone strike, for instance, and with the CIA general counsel and Brennan all working on this. And it's a new frontier and it raises tons of questions. There are military people who think, you know, strategically, even though it's a miracle weapon, it could come back to bite us, especially when other countries get drones and the rules are so unclear about who can be killed. And Brannon, to the extent that he's spoken publicly on this, and he has a little bit, has rejected the idea that the backlash is much of a problem.
- [12:30]
Dorothy Wickenden
Steve, how successful has the drone program been politically and militarily, setting aside the legality questions and the rules and so on?
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Steve Kahl
Well, I mean, if you set aside the legality, I suppose, and measured it as an instrument against Al Qaeda central along the Pakistan Afghanistan border, it's been very effective in, in a tactical sense, it's killed a lot of people and it has weakened Al Qaeda leadership by doing so. At the same time, it has contributed to a broader sort of radicalization and backlash in Pakistani society. That's very difficult to measure. And it certainly hasn't created some path to something like strategic victory because it seems to be, at least at this stage, a kind of self justifying and even self perpetuating program that is also very difficult to judge because it's so secret.
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Dorothy Wickenden
I want to move on to John Kerry. But Steve, before we do that, I've never asked you before what you've thought sort of in broad terms of Hillary Clinton's performance as Secretary of State.
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Steve Kahl
Oh, I thought she was a success. I mean, she really loved the job. She got out there and did the public side of it very effectively and with real energy. And she did all of that, I thought, quite well. And she did one other thing, which is she's sitting on top of a bureaucracy that has practiced diplomacy in a certain way for 200 years without really examining whether the kind of diplomacy and the kind of cable writing and meeting preparation and attempts to influence foreign governments and foreign publics really needs updating. And she thought about that and she had some ideas. She started to talk to ambassadors and to State Department career foreign service officers about radical new approaches to public diplomacy using social media. But also, you know, look, everybody in the world has a Twitter strategy that doesn't make you innovative. But what's interesting was that she was willing to give ambassadors freedom to make public comments and to generate public controversy in their countries that I don't think any other Secretary of State has ever authorized. You think of McCall in Russia, for example. That was very deliberately constructed. She had to keep the President on side to say, look, we're going to generate headlines. Normally that's not what diplomats try to do. So I admired her tour. She did the job itself with a lot of sort of flair. And then she thoughtsome big thoughts about the future of diplomacy.
- [15:01]
Dorothy Wickenden
And so John Kerry as her successor, how is he likely to operate in those realms? Will is he going to have some of the same new ideas and try to rethink the job?
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Steve Kahl
I haven't heard him talk about diplomacy that way. I think he's more of a classicist. This is the final chapter of a career that had one big disappointment in, in 2004, from which he recovered with, you know, sort of admirable resilience. And this is his reward for hanging in there and staying serious and staying engaged after the disappointment of failing to win the presidency. And so I think he comes to this with a sense of diplomacy in a classical sense. He is very effective at troubleshooting. He's done quite a lot of it over the first Obama turn. And he had some successes. He talked Karzai down during the failed fraud ridden 2009 presidential election in Afghanistan, where Kerry walked with him in the rose garden of the presidential palace and told him how hard it was the night that Ohio came in and he wondered if the vote count was right and yet he conceded and so forth. And then he went to Pakistan and got Raymond Davis out of prison in difficult circumstances or got the ball rolling. And so he's, I think, more of a traditional envoy. He knows world leaders because sitting at top of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, people come to visit him, he knows the opposition, he's traveled extensively. So I think he'll be active but probably not transformational in his ambitions.
- [16:36]
Dorothy Wickenden
He's going to have some really big troubles ahead of him in some ways perhaps more challenging than what Clinton faced in the post Arab Spring world. Do you think he'll just take these on a case by case basis, which has sort of been the Obama administration's policy up until now?
- [16:52]
Steve Kahl
Yeah, I think there's an alignment within this cabinet that's been appointed to do just that. And that is Kerry's history. And, you know, he was a kind of an Assad engager before the Arab Spring and maybe pushed that line of thinking a little bit beyond the facts that somehow Assad could be talked out of his own alignment with Iran and his own policies of repression at home. My main thought reflecting on this trio is it reminds me of Bush 1, Bush 41, and also maybe a little bit the first Clinton term. Those were two presidencies where you had an alignment of decision makers around the president who were very cautious about foreign intervention and really willing to watch other people in the world suffer if there were no pressing American interests that justified intervention. I think of the Balkan war that unfolded during the Bush presidency and then during the beginning of the Clinton presidency and the degree of violence and humanitarian suffering that two presidents watched before Clinton finally decided enough was enough. And I also think of Rwanda. And one thing you can say about this team is that Libya would not have happened on their watch. There would be no Libyan intervention. We already know that the president is very cautious about risk taking in Syria, despite the enormous crisis that is unfolding there. And so whatever it is, the world's going to throw up over the next two or three years. I think the United States is not going to save populations from disaster except in the most extreme circumstances. And you could argue we're already watching the United States make that decision about Syria.
- [18:50]
Dorothy Wickenden
Okay, thank you. Both Steve Kahl and Jane Mayer are staff writers. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [18:58]
Steve Kahl
You can subscribe to this and other free New Yorker podcasts in the iTunes store. The weekly audio edition of the magazine is available at audible.com subscribers can read.
- [19:08]
Dorothy Wickenden
The magazine online@newyorker.com and also in the tablet edition on the iPad and the Kindle Fire.
- [19:22]
Katie Drummond
What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who shaping our right now Big Interview conversations are fun. I want a shark that that eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [19:55]
Steve Kahl
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the.
- [19:58]
Katie Drummond
Unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False.
- [20:21]
Jane Mayer
Tell me more.
- [20:23]
Katie Drummond
Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [20:34]
Jane Mayer
From. PRX.