← The Realignment
The Realignment
583 | William D. Hartung & Ben Freeman: The Pentagon's Trillion Dollar War Machine and the Debate Over America's Role in the World
01:06:53
The Quincy Institute's William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman, authors of Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home, join The Realignment. Marshall, William, and Ben debate and discuss the origins of America's proposed record trillion-dollar Pentagon budget, why the budget spirals upwards despite every 21st-century president's promise to disengage abroad and invest at home, the role of money and corruption in U.S. foreign policy decisions, the proper use of American power abroad, and the origin of our foreign policy debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, and Ukraine.
Loading summary
Transcript74 lines
- [00:00]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. My guests today are the Quincy Institutes, William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman. They have a new book out this week, Trillion Dollar War How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign wars and Bankrupts Us at Home. I really enjoyed the conversation and the book. Given this podcast's decently hawkish pov, though on paper there isn't much for Bill, Ben and I to agree on. I particularly disagree with the book's title. I don't think we invaded Iraq, stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years, or backed and continue to back Israel and Ukraine because of military spending and the hint of corruption that idea suggests. I think we've made the decisions we've made in the cases I listed above because of ideas and our leaders differing conceptions of the threats America faces, how easily we could handle those threats, and the ever present debates our country's founding over America's role in the world, suggesting our country's foreign policy disasters are rooted in corruption and failed audits of Pentagon spending make this seem like we're just another peace dividend, 1990s style or anti corruption law away from never going into Iraq again. But this is where history gets really, really interesting. Bush's Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was a huge proponent of defense reform. The day before 911 he gave a big speech saying the Pentagon needed to change its ways. He canceled bloated Cold War weapon systems that the Pentagon and contractors loved. He transformed the US Military into a hypothetically cheaper but definitely lighter and faster force. The Pentagon and the defense industry brass hated him. Yet he also was the Secretary of Defense that led us into Iraq, where he found his cheaper, lighter military wasn't ready to occupy a country for almost a decade. What mattered then, in my understanding of the story and the history, was not the corruption or bad spending or money going under the table, but calls that were at the time bad calls that would lead someone into that Iraq disaster. So some of these calls were the view that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were linked, that democracy promotion and regime change could be quick and easy, and that you could manage the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time. Bill and then acknowledged this point and I want to highlight their response that a bloated Pentagon budget gives leaders the hubristic backing to enact their own bad ideas. No disagreement there. But my advice to listeners is that if they're looking for the answer to why the first 25 years of our century future feel like they've gone off the rails, the focus should be on really, really, really Bad ideas enacted by both good and bad people, and not the fact that a Boeing exec was able to get a summer home in the spring of 2023. At the same time though, I am totally aware of the fact that the interest in this topic is clearly driven by the fact that listeners and Americans see that every president since George w. Bush in 2000 has campaigned on less intervention abroad and more investment at home, yet actually increased the interventions afterwards. My suggestion is that because I believe bad ideas and calls are the key things to focus on here, voters shouldn't just let candidates get away with the quote, I won't do what the last guy did. Not an intervention line. Not invading Iraq is the easiest backward facing promise a candidate can make. What we need to do is push candidates on their broader worldview and how they would respond to surprise events. Bush's 2000s non intervention promise was based off of Clinton's intervention in the former Yugoslavia's wars. One could not an agreement with that remark, if that's what you believe. But the follow up here is what's absolutely key. What will you do if a terrorist attack happens? The Chinese intervene militarily in Taiwan or the Israelis say they're going to strike the Iranian nuclear facilities and they want the US backing? These weren't just random things.
- [04:02]
B
These are things that people who work.
- [04:03]
A
On foreign policy think about every single day. And even if we look Back to the 1990s example, with me invoking terrorism as the proper response to Bush after he said he wouldn't intervene, Bin Laden declared war on the US in 1996 and the world Trade center was already struck in the 1990s. These are not and were not crazy suggestions. All that said, I think Bill and Ben have the Pentagon and the defense industry dead to rights on their specific critiques and findings of bad programs, overspending and yes, corruption. So I really hope you enjoy this conversation and read the book. Even if you like, I have a different view of America's role in the world.
- [04:40]
B
Bill and Ben, welcome to the Realignment.
- [04:43]
C
Yeah, it's great to be here.
- [04:45]
D
Thank you so much.
- [04:47]
B
Okay, so this is going to be a really, really exciting episode for me because you can reconcile competing instincts that exist within my career and sort of the nature of this podcast. The Realignment brings on a lot of listeners and guests who are very anti status quo, anti establishment and I really work to channel that. But at the same time, I work in D.C. think tanks, I run defense tech centric conferences. So I really try to balance those dynamics together while having sympathy with the audience. And your book Trillion Dollar War Machine obviously speaks to that dynamic. So let me just open with this intro and we could take it wherever we need to go. So my frustration, not with the book, because it's very well written and very interesting. My personal frustration is when you two go through all the specific instances of Pentagon centric malfeasance, whether it's the lobbyists and the money that went to things that the American people aren't excited about. If you talk about the death and destruction over the past 20 years, if you talk about how we've had multiple. Actually every single president this century has campaigned on Focus at Home. Let's dial back from abroad. But then they have not done that. They've invested, especially the Democrats, just had a little partisan. But they've then focused abroad as well, too. So I really agree and understand all that frustration, but I really object to the idea that all of the things we just mentioned are the explanations for a lot of our basically post war over the past 1960s military disasters. A good example of that is Vietnam, the Iraq war, Israel, Gaza. I don't think those things are rooted in the fact that our defense budget is probably too high or that there's waste or that there's lobbying. If we focus on those three stories, I think it's more about the realm of ideas. So the idea that we can overthrow a dictator and impose democracy quick and easy, move on. I don't think anyone was getting paid under the table to believe that idea. I think of Vietnam. No one was paid under the table or over the table in terms of the revolving door to develop a really bad theory of containment and the domino theory to really fear that, oh no, we're Democrats. So when Truman lost China in 1949, that destroyed his presidency and arguably led to the Korean War. They then apply that idea to Vietnam and it literally kills tens of thousands of Americans, millions of Vietnamese. That wasn't like the money. It was just bad, bad, bad ideas, bad leaders. So that's where I think the gap comes in. So we'll get in the ways this implements itself. But that's just my immediate. I actually read the book Reaction. Would love to hear your responses to that, Bill. We'll start with you, Ben. We'll get you in. Then we'll get into the specifics of what you two are arguing.
- [07:43]
C
Yeah, well, I think there's a lot of truth in that. I mean, Gaza was ideological. It was America's world. It was kind of this historic commitment to Israel. Of course, the emotional attachment to Israel to support here. I think the, you know, the military industrial complex played in, in terms of, of course they're profiting from it, they're supplying the weapons. Sometimes they fund think tanks that amplify those views, but they don't, I don't think it's normally, hey, I'll give you 100,000 you support, you know, killing people in Gaza. So I think that's an element. There's overlaps, but a lot of times it is ideological. If you look at some of the big proponents of the Iraq war, I think they were more driven about this notion, yeah, America can run the table in the Middle East. We'll create one democracy after the other through the barrel of a gun sometimes. Also I think the military sector and the folks they support don't want to really look carefully at what caused the wars because it couldn't undermine their profits in other ways. But I would agree there's kind of a back and forth between the ideological and the money. And I think if they could make money without fighting, they'd be fine. It's like, let's just have an arms race and why do we have to get people killed? So they're usually, the executives are usually on the cutting edge of the push to war. But I think there's a certain reinforcement in the fact that we have the capability, or at least we think we do, to do it on short notice.
- [09:10]
D
Yeah, I think I'd agree with that too. I don't find as much disagreement with you, Marshall, as maybe I should. I think there's a lot of agreement there. And what we try to do in the book is really to show that the spending in US foreign policy strategy, they're completely linked and you're not going to have one without the other. And this sort of COVID the world, world policemen, we're going to be everything everywhere, all the time. In terms of a US military presence. If you believe that, then the money has to follow that because you can't fulfill that strategy without, without having the type of military that we in the type of military spending that we do. And then the flip side of that, then it says, you know, okay, if we are already in this situation where we have this extraordinary level of spending, we got to have stuff to justify that now because we're, we're cooked in, you know, we've got, as our book is called, you know, the trillion dollar more machine. We have a trillion dollar military budget now we need enemies to justify that. If you have a trillion dollar military budget and the world just Looks really peaceful, really nice. We're going to have our hands off, everything's good. Then you see a public that kind of says, like, hey, why are we spending all this money? Which is kind of what we saw at the end of the Cold War. Right. You know, we get that peace dividend in the 90s where people say, you know, just sort of wave the flag, it's over, we did it, everybody. Of course we didn't, but you had people who were clamoring for that military budget drawdown, and we did get it then. So there. You know, to your point, I really don't think I disagree with you. I just think that there is this ebb and this flow going back and forth between the budget and the strategy.
- [10:55]
B
And to be fair. Oh, yeah, please.
- [10:58]
C
I think another thing is, however the war starts, the industry often provides dysfunctional weapons that aren't aligned with kind of the, the wars we're fighting. And it's not always their fault. You can't predict how the war is going to play out. But, you know, the way it is now, things are locked in because, well, it's built in my district. I'm not voting against it. I'm going to put more in there, keep the money flowing. So you end up with large aircraft carriers that can be taken out by a high tech missile, tanks that are not particularly useful in most of the conflicts we're going to fight. So, you know, even if you're kind of a smart warrior, you need some change in that system because you need flexibility to invest where you need to invest in it. If you're building weapons based on where they're located, it's almost impossible. That would also align with the new strategy. I think it's part of the battle between the emerging tech sector and the old guard, which has got a lot of things locked down because they're there, the jobs are there, the factories are there, and that's going to be an interesting competition.
- [11:57]
B
Yeah. And Ben, to your point about us, the degree of surprising agreement I did cheat by opening of my intro. Here's these very specific examples. Here are these very specific cases. So obviously, like, there's a, there's a dynamic there, which something. And I guess, and this is where I just come from a position of concern. So because of the nature of podcasting and the fact that I spend a lot of years on YouTube where like, a lot of just like average people are engaging with these like, really complicated, like very inside baseball policy topics, there's sort of like the folk wisdom of how DC Works versus the like actually how DC works part. And I've just heard from a lot of people, when you host a podcast that deals with the topics that deal with on the realignment. But then I also hosted Arsenal of Democracy. I would get people who would listen to both podcasts and just like, write in with complaints and questions and trying to understand it. And my sort of thing is the folk wisdom of, here's how it works. We go to war because there's this Pentagon system and everyone's getting pandered to the table and the revolving door. What I don't like about it is somewhere the three of us are definitely in agreement on is the fact that at a baseline level, if you think about democracy, it's not good that people's cynicism about foreign defense policy are informed by the fact that, wow, since George W. Bush, every single American president has said, less war, more focus at home. I think everyone, and this isn't just folk wisdom, would be accurate in believing that that has not been the outcome we've received. So I think that's a huge problem and we have to really address that. But my frustration, though, is we have then got people who then go to the most obvious answer, which is, okay, it's because people are getting paid to do so. But my problem with that at an explanatory level is it doesn't actually explain what's happening. So, perfect example. So, as you two cite in the book, Barack Obama campaigns on limiting military conflict. We do withdraw from Iraq in 2011, but the Yemen drone strike program, terrorist fighting in, once again, Yemen and also Pakistan, obviously, we go back into the Middle east, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But at the same time, though, Obama did not give heavy weapons to Ukraine. If this were as simple as Lockheed and all these different companies just wanting to always get the most, you know, complicated arms sales with the biggest amount of money possible, you would not expect Obama to not give heavy weapons. But then Trump does give heavy weapons, so there's something called ideology that comes into play, too. So I want to just balance the fact that you could believe that it was a mistake for Trump to give heavy weapons. You think it's a mistake for us to back Ukraine, but we should separate that from the question purely of, is this because defense contractors are lobbying for it because they. They're always going to have a profit incentive, but they don't always get their way. So something else has to be going on here. And I'm fascinated by finding that balance between what's actually going on here and people's sort of folk theory of the case.
- [14:52]
D
Right?
- [14:53]
C
Yeah. Ben, you want to go first?
- [14:55]
D
Yeah, sure. I think you really touched on, you know, stuff that's kind of, kind of in my ballpark about, like, trying to unravel the influence industry that happens in D.C. because, Marcel, I think you're exactly right. People have this concern. Well, never. First of all, we got to start with people don't care about foreign policy.
- [15:14]
C
You know, if they can't, I'm going.
- [15:16]
D
To be perfectly honest. People, you know, if you ask people, you know, what their, what their issues of concern are, you get healthcare, education, you've gotta, like, rifle down the list through like, 10 other things before you get to foreign policy or international affairs. This is just not something that's typically high on people's radar. And I get it. You know, you're more worried about putting food on the table, childcare and everything, you know, the house over your head. I get it. People don't care a lot about it to start, but then when they do care about it, they do have these perceptions, like you say, like, you know, yes, this is just lobbyist driven. And, you know, it's, it's the war profiteers, you know, all that stuff. What we try to do in the book is try to unpack this system. And so we had a lot of conversations with lobbyists and with think tanks funded by the defense sector with, with some people you, you, you might not think, you know, two people who, who hail from a think tank, who, who's opposed to war would talk to. Because we wanted to hear from them. We, we, we wanted to, you know, kind of understand what their, what they, what they were going through and why they were doing what they were doing. And, you know, I had a wonderful conversation with one lobbyist in particular, and he said to me very candidly, over a nice $30 salad, said, do you think I wanted to be a lobbyist? Hell, no. He's like, but did I want to have a house, did I want to have three kids? And, you know, did I want to get out of living in downtown D.C. absolutely. And he couldn't do that on his congressional staff or salary. And it was emblematic of what we heard from a lot of other people that there is this perverse incentive system in D.C. that takes people who came to D.C. ostensibly, you know, to, to wear the white hat and to do good, and it compels them into positions where they can make a lot more money. And, you know, sometimes there's a defense contractor job. Sometimes there's a lot of other jobs that can push people in those directions. But I think that's what people miss. Instead of just vilifying somebody as being a defense lobbyist, I think it's important to understand that it's not just that individual person's decision. There's an entire incentive structure that's pushing people in these directions. That's what's driving all of this.
- [17:23]
C
Yeah, I view your statement as hopeful because you're saying not everybody is going after the money. There's members who have a lot of defense money in their districts who are quite good at scrutinizing the industry. They vote for lower budgets, against, you know, weapons that don't work. They're a minority, but they're there. And when people make those points, they spread. You know, somebody like Senator Warren has brought into the process, Sarah Jacobs of San Diego, others. So that's the core of possible change. Likewise, people tend to paint the DC Think tank world with a broad brush. It's the Blob. They all think the same. And yet I have plenty of colleagues who work in those places, and we're more or less on the same page. So you don't really want to dismiss a whole institution on that basis. And then finally, we do need a defense industry. We need a defense strategy. So, you know, if people just say, oh, this has failed, and you don't talk about what would be a replacement. You've only done half the job. And, you know, worst of all, I think there's people who will say, well, the US Is the source of all the problems. There's even people who said to me, well, if we stopped arming Ukraine, the war would end. No, they'd get crushed. We don't want that. So whatever the flaws in our policy are, you don't want to say. Just like you wouldn't want to say that civilian government doesn't work. You don't want to say we can't have a workable defense strategy. What you want to say is, are there impediments to getting there?
- [18:49]
B
You know, and it's interesting because, Bill, to your point about hopeful, I actually kind of have the opposite reaction. Because, and this is what's funny, people are sort of like, well, Marshall, you keep doing this routine of like, but isn't this about the ideas because you're trying to distract from the corruption or you're naive? They're either. I think most people take me in good faith. So they're like, you're just naive about money versus ideas. But the weird part about this is the ideas version of the story. Like basically for the past 60 years there have been some really, really, really bad, very, very dangerous ideas. I actually think is weirdly less optimistic because if the problem is that we have a defense industry and a lobbying structure, Citizens United, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, we basically have this political system that enables these bad things and that's what drives it. I think that's actually kind of more hopeful because if that's true, then there's a reform bill that you could just pass or we could say, well, you know, now that I think about it, having a defense industry where we have private companies build things creates these bad incentives. So maybe the answer, you couldn't just easily do this, but maybe the answer is to do what the Soviets did. The Soviets had industrial design bureaus, right? Like the M, the M16, the AR15. Those came from like private companies in the US. The AK47 by contrast came from like the Soviet. I forget the actual name of what they're like sort of like state run defense sort of venture was. But that's how it emerged. And you can argue if this is nationalized, that this is sort of a public versus a private thing, you wouldn't have these things. But the thing. And I'm curious what you two think to see if I'm just coping or not. I think if we had a. Let's imagine right after the Cold War ended, we just snap our fingers and we sort of go in a more state directed, state, top down defense industry. I think we still go into Somalia, I think we still do Yugoslavia, I think we still do Iraq, we still do Afghanistan, we still arm Ukraine. We definitely go back in for ISIS part for Iraq part two via isis. I guess that'd be part three in this case. I actually just think that like if we understand these stories, whether you agree or disagree with the interventions I just listed, the actual deciding point was ideas and people who were in power and people who sort of had spent their careers focusing on these different ideas. Right. A lot of the people who implemented the Iraq 2 debacle were people who weren't happy with the way Iraq one ended. They were the deputy undersecretaries during the H.W. bush administration and disagreed at that strategy. And H.W. bush was a much better foreign policy president than W. Bush was. So when you raise certain people to the top and then have a different president of different instincts, you had a different outcome. So I would just be curious how much do you think the actual Decisions that would probably draw people to this episode that they really object to were driven by the specific capitalistic nature of our defense sector versus like just really, really bad ideas. And I don't want to say bad people because I, I know some of these people, I don't think they are bad people, but I think good people can actually make really, really bad decisions and be informed by really bad ideas. So I'll throw it to you first, Ben, then you come in, Bill.
- [21:56]
D
Yeah, it's a wonderful thought experiment. And we're hearing a lot more about the privatization or I should say the publicization of the defense sector recently with moves into intel and other government control of other companies as well. So it's not science fiction to really ask this question, but to get back in our time machine and go back to say if we did this during the Cold War, which was a big year of consolidation for the defense sector too, if they had instead consolidated under the US Government. It's a good question. You know, what would happen to these conflicts? My assumption right off the top would be that you would probably be right for those early conflicts because it would take time to sort of change the narrative and change the ethos. You know, you have this system right now that were a lot of these companies, as Bill mentioned, they do profit from conflicts. And you know, we hear this on the earnings calls that, you know, they make no bones about it on earnings calls that the demand function goes up for their products when conflicts happen that, you know, they don't mince work. See, you know, if you're talking to a shareholder, you know, they know that these conflicts are good for these companies and bottom lines. So, but, but I think that takes a little bit of time to, to go away. And the people who were, who were put in place systems take a little bit of time to go away. And so, you know, maybe there's earlier conflicts, you know, maybe Iraq enough ganoussey and even to go for that that far, maybe those do still happen too. But I do think over time you, you see that simmer down. And I would say in terms of the incentive structure too, you. It's not just that the money is coming in because you have a system that profits from war. It doesn't have to just come in, you know, the money, the lobbyists, the, the think tank funding, all these other influence mechanisms, they don't necessarily have to, you know, come in with a big bag of cash to say, here's a big bag of money. Do X, Y, Z.
- [23:49]
C
That.
- [23:50]
D
That just so rarely happens. What they do instead is they just hire people who already agree with them. And you know, they hire more, tend to hire more hawkish people, people who are already in ideologically alignment with them. Whereas, you know, folks like Bill and I, you know, more, more peace oriented folks. There's not much money on this side, frankly, peace isn't profitable. There's no Lockheed Martin equivalent on the peace side of the function. So there's just not as many jobs in these administrations or in these think tanks or even in these lobbying firms, frankly, for people like us. And that creates a very different incentive system or it would create a different incentive system than what we have now.
- [24:34]
C
Yeah, I think in some ways ideas are harder to dislodge. You know, some of the industry stuff is more transactional. Although there's kind of two kinds of people that like people are hyping or over hyping to my mind, the threat from China, which is almost like a marketing plan. But there's also people who believe we're going to fight these folks and we have to prepare for it. And the old guard, you know, they're a little more like, well, yes, we're benefiting from turbulence. Whereas Palmer Lucky is a let's take them out. So there's a different mindset, a different approach. But I think you've given me an idea for my next book, When Good People have Bad Ideas. But I think American exceptionalism. We're the strongest country in the world. We have the strongest military. People are attached to that. Even though the wars we fought in this century were very difficult, we weren't really equipped to fight them. Our morale wasn't the same as people on their own turf. So they weren't really examples of peace through strength. They were examples of, you know, pick your battles.
- [25:33]
B
What is it is interesting, Ben, when you said peace isn't profitable. And this is where, and this is so hard to do because obviously we want to focus on the really bad side of the ledger here. So we need to, need to need to focus on Vietnam, Iraq.
- [25:51]
A
2.
- [25:53]
B
I will always defend going into Afghanistan after September 11th. Just like we tried the sort of FBI centric version, the policing version in the 1990s, it didn't work. We were always going to go in after September 11, but when we start focusing on 2003, 2004, we've changed from we need to degrade Al Qaeda's ability to launch a strike on the homeland to now we're going to engage in a 20 year democracy building project that no one actually defends at the Time that's so I think we really need to separate and this is like a generational thing because I'm like a, I was in fourth grade during 911 so I'm about as young as you could be and like remember it. What's been frustrating when I talk to Gen Z and like some precocious gen Alphas about Afghanistan, they merge Afghanistan together into one thing and I'm like no, like you have to there's Afghanistan from September to December once out, once bin Laden now kind of flee into the mountains of mountains of Tora Bora from like what you're really, really really pissed about which is why were we there for the next 16 years? Or there's even Afghanistan part three which is what happens after we take out bin Laden in Pakistan after we've had the base of Afghanistan. But I think that so we focus on the bad side of the ledger. But what I think we also need to focus on though is if the military industrial complex, if the US foreigner policy establishment does have one thing to its credit, it's the fact that we haven't had a great power war in the past 60 years. And I think at a very literal level the pieces profitable side of the ledger here is that think of how awful from a capitalism perspective, from a tariff perspective, how awful it's been transitioning from a world where our default assumption is like hey, all these big players we're going to transact with each other and we're going to compete but we're only going to compete in a business sense. Us transitioning from a world that's more premised on well, we actually could be fighting a war with these people and actually we see this relationship getting worse and worse and worse that actually has been profitable. I don't think anyone's been particularly happy about that beyond people obviously in a incumbent or anti incumbent defense sector perspective. But I just think it's important that we because the question I want to ask you too, I'll let you respond to my point here but a question I want to ask later is just this. I think the way that we get the Pentagon budget in check, I think the way that we actually have presidents be able to retrench and not engage in foreign policy adventurism while also investing at home if we actually just answer the question of what are we trying to do here? And my answer to the like what are we trying to do here is look, I think we want to serve as global hegemon, not in the sense of we're always intervening everywhere but we just want a stable, great power piece. I'm going through this like I just had a kid, so I'm doing lots of like long form audiobook listening as I sort of just like sit there kind of doing nothing. I'm going through a World War I phase. And I think, you know what? We're not doing Verdun, we're not doing the sum 20,000 men aren't getting killed in a single day. We're not doing World War II. We did actually have, have a deterrent ability during the Cold War that led to military conflict not reaching great power status. And I think that's very, very important here. So my sort of answer to what should the Pentagon budget be? I wouldn't start with the number. I would start with what is the bare minimum we need that preserves a global deterrence structure that leads to World War III not happening or leads to great power war not happening. So like that's my answer to the question. Then we could get to the actual number. But I just think if I were to critique the presidents that we just listed here, W. Bush, Obama and Trump, I don't think if you'd sat them down second day in office and said, okay, you've made this promise to retrench at home and not intervene. What are you actually trying to do? So I think that'd be President Marshall's answer of I'm trying to preserve the peace. I don't want there to be great power conflict and anything that like exceeds that. Preserving the peace falls into the optional category. And we're going to be very, very, very precise about what's optional and what's not. And I think all three of the presidents have, or four we could include Biden have failed in the optional part of the ledger, but threw a lot at you, but would love for you, Ben, to respond however you want to respond. But then answer the question of like, what do you think we should be trying to do here? From the perspective of us having a.
- [30:07]
D
Pentagon bill, you want to tackle it first? Marshall keeps making these just brilliant statements and then I have the unenviable task.
- [30:14]
B
Of going to what's the order?
- [30:19]
C
I gotta bail him out sometime. He does all the research. Well, I think, you know, the Cold War, you know, the developing world paid the price in some ways because the interventions were kind of proxy wars and so forth. You know, part of it certainly was, you know, you don't want to go to war with a country that's got nuclear weapons. But we were lucky in certain respects. There were A lot of near accidents. You know, Nixon says, you know, they're not going to believe me unless I go right to the edge. You don't know whether somebody's going to be a little off their head and actually try this. So I think it, it worked. It's working less now. You know, there's tension between the US and Russia, some quite justified because the face of Ukraine, there's people who don't want China to be the next big power. And so, you know, the neocons back in the day hated Kissinger because it's like, why are you talking to these people? Kissinger was like, you know, we don't want them to unite against us. We want them to see a divergent interest. There's reasons to work with us. Now. It's like, oh, let's bully everybody and hope for the best, which is the worst possible strategy. It does drive some of these folks together who might not otherwise be so. And we're building new generation of nuclear weapons, all kinds of stuff, as if the weapons are the answer.
- [31:38]
B
So.
- [31:38]
C
But I think you're right. You would need a president who said, you know, this is not helping us build the world we want to build. You know, we want prosperity, we want there to be tolerance on countries who feel like they have a stake in the international system. The thing about not having great power conflicts is some of the smaller things we thought were going to be smaller turned out otherwise. Like the, you know, Brown University says, Maybe we allocated 8 trillion to the wars of this century, or it used to be, they'd say, oh, you know, send arms instead of troops. There's less risk. But obviously in the case of Gaza, that was not the case. But ultimately, yes, I think to just say, yeah, we need an audit, we're wasting money. Some people might say, oh, but we still need this stuff. But which stuff, and for what purpose, I think is the least discussed item. I watched a congressional hearing about this paper on what should be our strategic posture. Almost all the members didn't talk about strategic posture. Said, I've got this nifty missile in my state that can intercept hypersonic weapons. So at least it could get to the point where the conversation is had in a public way. So I think to some degree, the money maybe blunts our ability to have the real conversation. It's not that it's driving the wars, but it's sort of clouding. You know, there's kind of this fog of influence that makes it harder to get to the heart of it.
- [33:02]
D
And I think I would Just add to Bill's commentary there that, you know, Marshall, to your point of, you know, starting with the strategy, start with the strategies, not the budget, like that is the right way to conduct a foreign policy. What do we want to do in the world? What do we hope to get out of it and what do we hope to give to the world? Start from there. Unfortunately, that is the opposite of what our government does. We do not have a zero based budgeting process. You know, talk to anybody who's involved in the Pentagon budget process. Talk to anybody who's involved in it on the Hill. You start from where you're at there is everybody has a memory of exactly where, where the budget is, you know, down to the line item, what was the budget in the previous year? Is something getting a pot plus up or heaven forbid, you know, something in your district is getting cut. You know that very well and you fight tooth and nail to make sure that doesn't happen. The current system unfortunately doesn't remotely resemble what I agree with you on is the way we should be doing it. We do it the opposite. We start with a budget that we have that is, we're on this path dependent, you know, military, heavy train, and then we sort of reverse engineer the strategy out of that. We don't have, unfortunately, that optional category to where presidents can say, well, we gotta do this stuff. There's that optional stuff. In fact, the Pentagon actually goes the opposite way. Every year they submit an unfunded priorities list to Congress and it's effectively a wish list. Here's all the things we absolutely need and here's a few billion more of stuff we'd really like in most years. Congress said, all right, go ahead, we'll give you, we'll give you the wish list stuff too. You know, everything like your kids, you know, if they want the extra stuff for Christmas, you say just pile it on. That's how the system is, frankly. And to get to the point where you're talking about, we've got to change that. You know, we got to have a president who comes in and has a serious, you know, conversation about what the national security strategy really should be, independent of where the money is sitting right now. What should we really be doing in the world? I think if we do that, it's no question to me that we pare back a lot of the military force posture that we have. We have nearly 800 military bases overseas right now. You can make an argument for some of them, sure. We need some of these bases abroad to maintain everything you said to maintain that American hegemony, maintain our economic interests all over the world. Maintain some of those, sure. But do we need nearly 800? I think the answer is no. And I think, you know, when you look at basing as an issue, the army says right now they have around 20% excess capacity in their US basing. So just imagine what they have overseas. And I think if we take a hard look at some of these stuff, you can make the cuts and still get done everything in the world that we need to get done.
- [35:53]
B
Careful on the 20% excess capacity at a US domestic side because it's, you know, if you go to the Northeast, you actually really see this. And this is where it's not as if. Because it's easy to sort of, when you focus on the lobbying and sort of defense contractor version of this story, it's easy to say, man, so the Lockheed VP who just got a vacation home or added a pool because all this money that just benefits these far away elites. One of, I think the things that incentivizes against retrenchment is there are whole towns in the Northeast that were wrecked by, you know, the closure of bases are in the 1990s. Right. Like so, like so I think, I think it's very important that we just speak frankly about like what's actually going on here. There are towns that are supported via basing and these different genomics. I think one thing I want to, I want to add to, and it's just like a complicating factor because I transitioned into think tank mode instead. American hegemony. And I think that sounds awful and I need to, I'm going to have a co host for the podcast soon. And she was like, you need to stop with your think tank talk. So I'll do think tank that. It's not that I sort of wake up with like a big. As if I'm some dude in the British Empire saying, you know, American hegemony, like, that's the objective.
- [37:05]
C
It's.
- [37:05]
B
That's not a good way of putting what I, what I care about is, and this is a legitimate achievement of the US having a good relationship with allies and with potentially rivalous powers. Like, from a pure foreign policy academic perspective, it was really unique in the 1990s that the US was the most powerful country in the world and other countries didn't say versus what happened with Great Britain and Germany and leading up to World War I. Oh no, the US is actually so powerful that our only choice is to build a big military to defeat them or we see all that power, and there was trust, there was actual trust that we're going to disagree on Iraq 2, we're going to disagree on all these other different things. But at a core level, we actually benefit from the US Having a powerful role in the world at a minimum, because we don't want to live in a world where we have to build a big army and can't spend money on health care of those other different things. So that's what I'm really talking. I'm talking about, like, the version of this, I think, was most viable in the 1990s, where we had power, but we didn't have the bullying and the lack of trust in those, like, different dynamics. I just want to really say, but. Sorry, Bill, come in.
- [38:14]
C
Yes, well. Well, the base thing, you know, there's. Think of the Senate ICBM coalition, and they have missile bases, and they're small. You know, it's Wyoming, it's North Dakota. It's important to them, but they've had quite a policy impact. They have a law that you can't reduce the number of ICBMs below 400, or if there's an empty silo, you can't get rid of it in case you want to build up again. So in that case, the dependents bled over into implicating policy. But I think, you know, the United States, for all our flaws, people trade with us, they relate to our culture. They move here to live, you know, given the alternatives. I mean, they're not warm enough to, let's be like China, although they certainly trade with them. Or Russia, which was sort of defined as a declining power. But declining power can do a lot of damage, as we're seeing in terms of our strength. I think what's happening now is we've been a declining power just by the dynamics of world affairs. And I think what this administration do is accelerating that process because they're building this uneven sort of colossus. Like one guy goes to the gym, but he can't lift his arms above his shoulders. We get rid of aid, which actually is a tool of foreign policy. We denigrate international institutions, we insult the Europeans.
- [39:35]
A
We.
- [39:35]
C
And then we think somehow that makes us tougher and stronger. It actually makes us weaker. So somehow you need an understanding of that. There's different tools for different purposes. And I think different presidents have had more or less understanding of that. You know, I think when Obama pushed the nuclear deal with Iran, it was kind of an amazing accomplishment because not only did the Europeans support it, Russia and China Support it. When have we seen an agreement in recent years where that happen? It didn't make sense to just throw that out the window and hope for better. So I still think, you know, because of the dynamism of our society and so forth, there's an attraction. You know, it's, it's, of course, my, my fear is really what's happening domestically now. The deployments of troops, ice unleashed, the attacks on free speech. Those, to me, you know, Eisenhower said, if you don't have a healthy, vibrant, well educated population, you can't ultimately have a strong defense. And it seems like they're attacking both the soft power tools of foreign policy and the underlying strength that a democracy has in global competition.
- [40:41]
B
I'd be curious, and this is another how the world works Martial Inconvenient truth, that I think both is very frustrating, but I think gets to the core of the problem. So in the introduction, you two do some really useful accounting where you sort of point out 8.5 trillion expanded on the broad war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan. We add in sort of like the ancillary stuff to that too. And you just point out, hey, like, 1.7 trillion student loans or, you know, another trillion, we've decarbonized our economy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I think what's missed, and I think this is also why the whole we're going to go abroad but not invest a home thing ultimately fails across administrations is we do have consensus. Consensus defined as like 50 plus one consensus belief that America should defeat its enemies abroad. America should be strong, America should have a defense industry or in this specific program. Okay, I get why that makes sense. We're going to keep that. What we don't have is consensus in our society around let's get rid of student debt or let's decarbonize the economy. Right? The Trump administration is cutting clean energy projects right and left, like another example of sort of that thing. So I'd love for you two to. I would, because it's actually kind of funny. Like, this has really been a real bipartisan. Like Richard Haas's, like, 2015 book was all about, like, America. Like, really? Haas was president of the Council on Foreign Relations. There's, like, limits to how, like, radical you can be in that thing. So this is not a book that a leftist would read or like a right wing sort of like internationalist skeptic and read and be like, oh, man, this is the sauce. This is the thing you're not going.
- [42:21]
C
To read it and understand.
- [42:22]
B
But from A center left perspective, like, whoa, this is edgy, radical stuff. But what I think people who write these books or presidents who come into office who give that rhetoric, they just undercount how you need for domestic investment real consensus on those things that we should be doing. So part of what makes like the post war, like, so what we do is we GI Bill, we help veterans get homes, like we do all these very specific things. But there was an underlying societal consensus in favor of that reinvestment at home. Like we had like the cutting of the budget that accompanied that before it got jacked up again with the launch of the Cold War. But I would just love to hear from the two of you, whoever wants to take this can go first. What is your theory of how you actually would translate? Let's say you get the world that you want. We actually reduced the Pentagon budget. My frustration being a political realist is we're not going to see that translated into domestic reinvestment. If when we don't see that translated into domestic reinvestment, you wouldn't actually get the useful antibody that would lead people to then not letting it get ramped up again because it hasn't translated into anything. Right. So like it's not that there's literally a trade off between we're gonna spend like 400 billion on making Americans feel better about their economic situation. No, we weren't gonna do any of that. Instead we just have this like money printing gap. But I would love to hear how you two think about this conundrum.
- [43:48]
D
Yeah, I love this question. And you know, I frankly, you know, I think you're right. If you ask the American public, the American public, like, we want to win, you know, we want to be number one. You know, if you ask the average member of the public, they want to have the biggest and best military in the world, no questions asked. They don't want to believe that we'll go into a conflict and lose that period. You know, in the statement there, that's.
- [44:13]
B
Your stump speech, right? That is like that. That is the actual stomach. That's the deal. Real.
- [44:19]
D
Yeah. Buy the trillion dollar war machine.
- [44:21]
C
Yes.
- [44:22]
D
No, but the thing about that is that American mentality is, is actually a part of this system that when we talk about this, a good deal in the book, that has been ingrained in us, you know, from our childhood, long before our childhood. And the military's involvement with the entertainment industry is just absurdly huge. And it's, I think it's bigger than, it's bigger than I knew about before. I started writing this book, and I think it's bigger than probably 99.9% of the people realize there are more than 2,000 movies and TV shows that have had direct Pentagon involvement in them. This goes all the way up to. To rewriting scripts, censoring content outright, refusing to bankroll, you know, big blockbuster movies who went on to win Academy Awards. There is just enormous involvement. A lot of the big. Every movie you can think of that, you know, that involves any sort of military conflict, it very, very likely had Pentagon involvement on some level, whether that was adjusting the script, giving them toys to play with, either for free or at a highly subsidized rate. And so from really the time you start consuming this constant, you're getting this baked in that you're, you're getting this Pentagon censored or at least influenced media just poured into you. No, I'm. I'm a little older than you, Marshall, So I'm an 80s kid. I grew up just loving Top Gun. In really any military movie of the time. That was my jam. And, you know, to learn as we were writing this book, we talk a lot about Top gun, you know, 1 and 2 on that and the military's involvement in that and Top Gun 2, it might as well be a commercial for Lockheed Martin. I mean, there's a Lockheed Martin logo, you know, literally in the movie. And so with all of that influx, it's no surprise that the American mentality is that we gotta be number one. And then there's always a military solution to a problem. Again, you just don't see that influence on the peace side. You know, there's no, there's no peace complex that's going to Hollywood and just saying, hey, you've got to rewrite your movies this way or you're not going to be able to use the State Department. You know, that's just not happening. Is not as sexy.
- [46:43]
C
You can't have tables and chairs to show diplomatic interaction.
- [46:47]
B
Yeah, real quick to. And Bill, you could answer this before it goes back to Ben. The thing I would push you on is having interviewed a lot of these defense tech founders, what they would respond to that with is, come on, guys, like, it's Hollywood. There's like a lot of, like, military skeptical movies. Because, because it's, because it's actually very interesting because, like, if you listen. So like, let's say you read a Free Press article, right? So this is very much for the free press is sort of ideological thing they would say. So obviously you don't have, you know, Peace centric state. I love that. I'm going to steal that because that's very funny. You're not having, like, the State Department logo in the same way, right? Like the. The farmer who was getting his, you know, crop sent to Africa, USA idea. There's no, like, sponsorship there. But that said, like, there is this, like, clearly late stage American liberalism is running out of juice. Skepticism and ambiguity about America that played itself out in Hollywood. So, like. But what's so interesting, though. Sorry, this is just so fascinating because I haven't thought about it this way. That isn't quite the same thing as, like, peace building. So, like, there are always movies that are anti Iraq war, and they're always like Afghanistan centric movies. But the way this sort of operationalized itself is more like, man, I'm sort of bummed out. Bummed out about America. I'm sort of like, bummed out about, like, this project. It leads kind of like, to apathy. It doesn't lead to like, a very. It would lead someone to watch, like, a movie about Iraq and then say, like. So let's say you watch the Hurt Locker or you watch American Sniper, though American Sniper is kind of in a weird place here. I would watch those movies and I was sort of like, man, what was this all for? That's my reaction. But it doesn't scale. But that skepticism doesn't scale up to a broader reconsideration of the system or this broader thing. So I just sort of answered your question of my own answer. But, Bill, I'll throw it to you and Ben, I'd love to get your response.
- [48:40]
C
Yeah, well, on your first point, you're right. I mean, you could reduce the Pentagon budget. There's no automatic reason. It would go to reducing student debt or environmental issues. It would clear the way to have that discussion, but it would not determine it. And even the way Congress does the budget, those are separate lines. They have to be. If you want a better domestic, you have to fight for that directly. And also, ideally, programs that work. It's not just moving money. It's making sure what you're investing in is helping people. Otherwise, you just fuel that cynicism that makes people really not want to use their power in a democracy to push for change. I was so into that. What was the.
- [49:22]
B
No, no, I was just sort of saying, like, I was just pushing hard on the. Like, I was just sort of channeling the sort of defense tech part of my identity where they would just say, like, come on, Hollywood does plenty of movies that are like, America skeptical and lead to someone being skeptical of engaging in war. But my point was there's a difference between skepticism over specific military interventions and what you were talking about, Ben, which is like, hey, like, we could build a different world through different means. Or like, basically, like, it's easy to be against bad things that happen. There's a gap between that and, like, doing something. And I do think that too much of if we were to sort of get the defense tech world to sort of list the movies they, like, really object to in terms of, like, this is What, Top Gun 2. Because I'll tell you, I came out, like, sometimes, like, when I want to just get pumped, I watch Top Gun. I'm not sponsored by Paramount plus, but Paramount plus has Top Gun 2 available as part of my relatively useless subscription there. And sometimes I just watch it because it's just like an awesome movie. You know what I mean? It's just a really awesome, like, it's. It's my. It's my. It's, you know, like a movie you could watch where you're doing, like, think tank work where you don't have to actually pay attention. It's just really great. And like, is Mav going to pull it off? That's totally the moral equivalent of me finishing my podcast script to prep on a thing. But like, those movies, like, speak to something. And I think those movies, we don't need, like, the Lockheed Martin sort of placement there. But like, I think when the defense tech people talk about those movies meaning something, it really means something. And I don't know what it looks like to do a pro, A pro piece pro. We have these other things we could do, or we can trade up each other. We can work together. We can. I think this was an instinct we.
- [51:07]
C
Had.
- [51:09]
B
During, like, the 40s and the 50s and the 60s before Franco, we had Vietnam and Watergate really just sort of break everyone's optimism. There's this sort of like, something you're talking about, Ben, where I think there's the kernel or something. I just really struggle to know, like, what it is.
- [51:25]
C
Can I say one, Ben? Can I say one thing?
- [51:27]
D
Sure, of course.
- [51:28]
C
I'll try to keep it short. There's this movie, Catherine Bigelow's new movie is about the missiles are coming. What are we going to do? There's chaos. Some of the generals don't even know the capabilities of this stuff. And the missiles, the interceptor missiles don't work. So one aspect is, oh, it's showing that technology won't save us. A different Approach. The other interpretation is God, we need better missiles. So until you get to the level of debating reality, you don't get that far. And you could love inaction. Everybody likes the pacing, the drama. It doesn't mean you have to accept the underlying message that's, you know, you're an adult, you separate that. But a lot of people unfortunately don't. So I think also the critical movies, they stand out because they're unique. You know, Dr. Strangelove is hilarious. They're just, I think they're not the majority, but they can have quite, quite the impact.
- [52:22]
D
Right. And that's actually a point I was going to make. To your point, Marshall, was that.
- [52:29]
C
The.
- [52:29]
D
Tech folks that you're talking to, they're right. There are these other movies and they are out there. But two things. They're, as Bill just said there, they're a minority. The vast majority of movies are not that or not the Hurt Locker are not these platoons, anti war movies that did not have Pentagon involvement. Most movies involving questions of war and peace have Pentagon involvement in them. And so you're getting what you're. If you're looking at this as a totality, most of what you're seeing is coming with Pentagon support. And the key to these other movies, too, is that we have to remember that this is U.S. government support. So when the Pentagon supports a movie, when the Pentagon says, hey, Top Gun, you know, we're going to let you borrow an aircraft carrier and a lot of F15s, that's your tax dollars at work. And, you know, sometimes military personnel are directly working with these folks. And so you're talking about servicemen, you know, a lot of taxpayer dollars, millions and millions of taxpayer dollars. We did in one of the scenes in Top Gun, we added up, you know, all the military hardware that was in it, and it was literally billions of dollars, you know, which were ultimately paid for by the taxpayer, were available to that movie. But some of these other movies, like the Hurt Locker and Catherine Bigelow's new movie Platoon, these other movies, they didn't get that taxpayer subsidy. And so I think that's what makes these movies distinct. You can certainly say, you know, there's a liberal bias in Hollywood, but when it comes to these military movies, I think it's just decidedly, you know, you know, pro military influence.
- [54:02]
B
Yeah, I will say. And real quick, the, this is why it's funny where it's easy to make this debate abstract, but like, in many ways, like, we're all sort of tied into this system as a person who loves. I live in Austin, so I love Alamo Drafthouse. Like, I very much support the US military supporting Top Gun 2 Maverick because they'd help keep our theater industry open. We need Hollywood spectacle to present. So it's just a funny. So when you were talking about it, it's easy for me to say in the abstract. Oh, man, 2000 movies. So much movies, taxpayer dollars. I'm sort of like, well, actually to Tom Cruise's point, in those ads that ran before the movie in theater, movies matter, community matters. Like, we need these things to kind of happen. Like, I very much, in those terms would say, you know, I'll make an excep Top Gun to Maverick because during that weird post Covid moment where like, Hollywood, desperate, needed something to near a billion dollars at the box office. So it's just so funny how, like, the more you, like, go into, like, the Ledger, and that's why you two do a great job with this in the book humor. Like, oh, wow, like, I have my own interest. This isn't just about this, like, far away DC story. It's abstract and about, like, annoying, like, rich people who you don't know you actually have a relationship to that too. Like this. Like, so it's just so funny. So sorry, Bill. Go on.
- [55:15]
C
Well, I think you're right. Like, I can't imagine an action movie about the earned income tax. And so I think you can't beat that. So some of those things have to be communicated in different ways. But, you know, people, they love the action movie, they love the pacing, they love the drama. I mean, I could imagine, you know, they make a movie about nuclear weapons and, you know, some guy turns off a switch at the last minute, and it's exciting, but it's not what would happen. So I think certain kinds of critiques can work. I think humor can work, satire can work. But then it just comes back to, can we have a debate on the merits and we're not in a great position between political divisions, misinformation, disrespect for intellectual activity, and on the other side, intellectuals making their stuff accessible, not making being an intellectual like an elite issue. But you're part of the society. You have a responsibility to make your point in a way that can be discussed broadly.
- [56:11]
B
You know, this is why we're striking.
- [56:13]
A
Yeah, please.
- [56:14]
D
I have to say about Top Gun, I loved it. I really, I love Top Gun too. So I went to the theater and I saw it and it was awesome. So I would go on the record because I agree with you. Top Gun, too, is on. Suspend your, you know, for foreign policy nerds, you got to suspend your disbelief, you know, multiple times. Just let that go and just let the movie flow over you. What we really hope and what we mentioned in the book that we would see you talk about reforms and changes in the future is that it's buried in the credits that Pentagon. Pentagon was involved in. Really quick, just so sort of reels by at the end of the movie. We'd love to see that disclaimer. Just put right up front, you know, this movie made possible via the cooperation of the Department of Defense, Department of Ward. And just put that right up front. So then you go and sit down in the theater, enjoy it. You're like, okay, okay. You know, everything's on the up and up here. I'm gonna watch the movie and, you know, I can take that and judge it however I see fit.
- [57:13]
C
And I think you.
- [57:14]
B
Yeah, sorry. No, no, please.
- [57:15]
C
I think you can separate the two. I'm kind of perceived as a peacenik and true. And except in certain situations where obviously we have to defend ourselves. But I. When I was a kid, I had toy guns, air rifles, bottle rockets. I had a battery up at nuclear submarine with torpedoes. Oh. And I was into it, but I separated that from what I think should happen in the world. Some people say I just like weapons, so I'm being anti weapons. Keeps me close to them. I'm hoping that's not the case, but anyway, yeah, you're.
- [57:45]
B
You're. That's one of those. You know, your rosebud biographical detail is you're playing with a new plate of a battery powered nuclear submarine. But just sort of. As we're at the. As we're at the end here, we'll just give our closing sort of thoughts. I'll throw to Ben, to Bill. So we obviously could have turned this episode into like. Because I suspect we probably disagree on China, but I think there's lots of podcasts about disagreeing about China. And I think the most important takeaway for me just is like thinking about the obvious versus the non obvious. And I think at a structural level, I just think most administration and most figures just have not done the real. I'm just like the side of me that's sort of, I don't know, like structurally minded is just sort of. At a minimum, we do not. So even if I believe we need to intervene when it comes to Taiwan, the process by which we're getting there is not a good process. And I think at a fundamental level that is What I'm taking from like your book point, and I also think that I'm also just obsessed from the perspective of caring about democracy. It is just. And by the way, like, we all know this, Whoever wins in 2029 will continue the 21st century tradition of we're going to do more at home and less abroad. Like, there are a lot of people who are going to be not Jake Sullivan fans because of Ukraine, because of China, because of Gaza. But look, it's very serious paper that Jake Sullivan put a lot of thought towards was his foreign Policy for the Middle Class paper that he put together 2018, 2019, which was like this real serious effort to focus on the domestic side that we're basically talking about here, trying to get people to think hard about the failed trade offs here. And I just think that, like, the really useful point and takeaway that we should get here is just that, like, this breakdown has been bipartisan. It's been across different leaders with different perspectives. And I think just like the first order of business is we actually get people to think seriously about that side of the question. And frankly, we get voters to like, expect people. Because it just frustrates me because you get the sense when you look at politicians that. Because they get the applause for saying we're not going to do. And it should be noted, right, like when George W. Bush, and this is my call for the audience, when George W. Bush said, I'm going to retrench during the 2000 campaign, he said, I'm not going to do the Balkans. That was bad. That was dumb. So I'm going to retrench Americans foreign policy. But as we know as sort of foreign policy people, that actually wasn't that helpful from a making decisions perspective because you never do this. If there's one thing the establishment's really good at doing, they never do the bad thing. They just did. It takes like a generation of a gap, right? So the threat was not that Jimmy Carter was going to go back into Vietnam right away because he knew, okay, no Vietnam, George W. Bush, he knew, okay, if there's this like optional thing, we're not going to do that. It was easy for Bill Clinton not to intervene in Rwanda because he said to himself, whoa, look what just literally happened in Somalia, we are not. And Haiti, we are not doing one of those things. Again, at a minimum, the issue of Bush, though, was the real question to ask him. And this is obviously, I think at the time this was asking too much for the public, but the public could ask this now is yeah, but like, what if something happens, right? So put aside the Balkans. What happens if the US is like struck at home? What if it's not this foreign, far away thing? That's hypothetical. What would you do if Saddam Hussein starts acting up again? Or what would you do if we were attacked? Like we were attacked, you know, in 1993, the first World Trade center bombing. He had no good answer to that question, I think by background and personality. And that's where to push him on. So with these presidents who all say we're going to campaign and win office, not on doing that last bad thing that the public obviously dislikes. I think my ask to the public, so I thought. So here's my first question for you too. What are your asks for the public? After reading a book like yours and listening to this conversation, my ask would be don't let the politician get the applause lines for dunking on that obvious thing that we all disagree on in the past because our foreign policy disasters are the future thing that we don't see coming around the corner. And then they consistently make the wrong decision. So that's my ass. Say like, okay, great, you're not going to do Afghan with like, okay, Trump, you weren't going to do the Afghan withdrawal. But how does that impact how you think about the next withdrawal or the next thing? That's my ask. We'd love to hear Ben then, Bill, what are your asks after engaging with like your work?
- [62:14]
D
Yeah, I like your ask a lot, but I won't feel it. I think for, for me, it's for your audience to, to ask themselves where do they want their taxpayer dollars? You know, is it, is it to fight one of these conflicts? Is it to, you know, arm some of the countries that we've been talking about here? You know, if that's their answer, then fine, then well and good. But if their answer for me, I have kids too. I have a one and a three year old, Marshall. So I feel your pain by, by having to listen to everything these days. But you know, for me it's about, you know, I'd love to see my taxpayer dollars go to better child care. You know, raising a kid in this country is just insanely expensive. You know, buying groceries for a family of four now is just absurd. And, you know, we're getting to a place where the average American, you know, it's tough to, to raise a family. It's really, really tough to raise a family right now. So whenever I see, you know, these estimates, you know, Bill's done great work and the amount of money that we've given to a lot of these countries, whenever I see the billions of dollars that are flowing overseas, you know, I just think, like, man, American families could really use that here. So I, you know, you know, my takeaway for your listeners is, you know, think about when you hear about all of this money going overseas, when it comes to foreign policy, think about what that could do for you and your family.
- [63:33]
C
I would say ask harder questions, because a lot of these wars are justified. Like, exactly the same rhetoric. Peace through strength, deterrence, American exceptionalism, although you won't hear that in too many speeches. Standing, I'm for American exceptionalism, but so there's that, which means a debate about is it worth doing, what are the consequences, what are the costs? I also think they need to feel their own power. I think people feel like systems people can do a lot if they participate, come together. I think there doesn't have to be some countervailing power to the arms industry. But without dialogue, and especially I would say, you know, instead of saying, oh, yeah, there's these military folks, there should be dialogue with uniform military, with people in tech, with people who want a different foreign policy because we know different things. Like, I can't, I can't explain AI. I can't explain electricity. So. And if you want to know, Bill.
- [64:33]
B
I just want to say you get major props for being a foreign policy hand in the, in the sort of infrastructure level and just admitting you don't know AI, rather than writing a crappy book where you seek to pivot. A friend of mine who works in the industry was just joking. She, she went, I'm seeing all these people who I know from the Iraq war days pivot from, like counter terror to CI experts. So props for you for just not intending.
- [64:58]
C
I mean, you know, AI is here and we're going to have to regulate it. And people who know the technology will be better to help us figure out what that means. How could that be done if you just say, oh, yeah, we're against entirely, that's fine, but that's not how the world's going to evolve. And likewise, I think people have been in the military, some of them are much more skeptical about if there's another intervention, we want a little more information before you send us over there. So to the extent that the two sides are hunkered down, I think the policies will not be as good because they'll be slogans instead of, all right, what do we really know? How do we do this, that sort of thing.
- [65:38]
B
As I close out, I actually opened up Amazon because I think, Ben, you mentioned, or one of the two of you mentioned, just sort of the proxy or cost of the Cold War. And I just read speaking of childhood child rearing, audiobook time, the Cold Wars Killing Fields, Rethinking the long piece by Paul Thomas Chamberlain. And it's like a really, it's a great book because I think people like me who are going to advocate for a forward posture, I'll go back into think tank mode for an American defense, have to have a real answer to the question. And this is just like this is what I personally do, which is that I really try to hold myself accountable to sort of like what's the downside of the story that I'm telling and the work that I'm doing. So I just wanted to shout out Paul's book because I want people, if they want the context between the sheer millions and millions of people who died in these different Cold War wars, that's very important. So your book, though, is the Trillion Dollar War Machine. We're trying to sell one book here. Go to Cold War Killing Fields a little later. But Bill, Ben, this has been really great. Thank you for joining me on the realignment.
- [66:47]
C
Yes. I think the discussion we've had is the reason the book is going to be useful. This kind of.
- [66:52]
D
Thank you so much, Marshall.