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Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today we're going to discuss a topic that's front and center in everyday newspaper and every discussion in our society about foreign policy, the past and future of the U.S.-China relationship. And we're very fortunate to be joined by, I think, the person who's writing some of the most sensible, historically informed, and creative work on the topic, a good friend, Dr. Charles Edel.

Charlie was on our podcast before a little more about a year ago, a year and a half ago, and we're delighted to have him back on. Welcome, Charlie.

Thanks so much for having me back on.

Charlie is a global fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., and he's also a senior fellow at the U.S. Studies Center in Sydney, at the University of Sydney. His research and policy expertise is actually truly vast and deep at the same time. He has particular expertise in politics and security in the Indo-Pacific and U.S. strategy toward that region, as well as American foreign policy, grand strategy, and American political history. So he really covers the U.S. side of the story as well as the Asia, Indo-Pacific side of the story.

He wrote a fantastic first book, a book I assign to students all the time, on John Quincy Adams, who was probably America's greatest secretary of state. The book is called Nation Builder, John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic. And then he co-wrote a book that we had him on the podcast to discuss, co-written with Hal Brands, The Lessons of Tragedy, Statecraft and World Order. Currently, Charlie is writing a book on a fascinating topic on dealing with authoritarian regimes. I imagine China will be one of the regimes in your book. Is that correct, Charlie?

It is indeed correct.

Charlie, in addition to his extensive academic and scholarly work, he writes frequently for major newspapers and magazines and journals. He's frequently on television and the radio, and he has extensive policy experience as well. From 2015 to 2017, he served under the U.S. Secretary of State's policy planning staff, playing a pivotal role in Asia-Pacific issues at the time. And he's also worked extensively in the region. He was a Henry Luce scholar at Peking University and spent an extensive amount of time in Australia, in East Asia, and of course, in the United States. Charlie, we're delighted to have you with us today.

Before we turn to our discussion with Charlie, we have, of course, Mr. Zachary Suri's scene-setting poem. What is your poem about today, Zachary?

Well, it's called A Good Fight.

A Good Fight. A Good Fight. Okay. I hope you're not referring to our altercations. No. Certainly not. All right. Let's hear it.

Ah, the start of a good fight. It's something we all seem to crave. That moment captured on the television screen as the two boxers stare each other down across the ring. The instant when first punch flies into nose and first blood breaks.

We love a good fight. In the kitchen cooking dinner, pumping our fists to eye of the tiger, stirring our boiling pots and staring down splotches of map like the lines themselves are inimical. Others get excited for the latest cure, the latest indecency, others the latest dream, but nothing makes our salutes to the flag and slurring pledges seem more meaningful than someone who wants to tear them down.

Someone who also stands up and salutes, but to a different flag. We love the start of a good fight. Sometimes we even love the climax when our tanks roll victorious through liberated cities, when our neighbors high five us on the street on the 4th of July, when our sons and daughters can find meaning in the not yet empty missions of their parents.

We love the start of a good fight, the beginning of a smack down, but we seem to forget how they always end, how we are always left aching that our son, our daughter is gone, how they are left aching that their son, their daughter is gone, how we get stuck with our own fists up in the air, swinging them round and round until our arms hurt and our joints ache and it all doesn't seem to matter anymore.

It's a wonderful reflection, Zachary, on I guess the empty glamour of conflict and war. Why did you write that poem for a discussion of US-China relations?

That's a good question. I think that the main reason I think that this sort of American belligerence is so relevant is that part of what motivates us as a society is having an enemy. And it's something that I think has been a key part of our history in the last 100 years or so. But I think it also means that we are very quick to find enemies and a lot slower to reach out to those on opposite ends of the global stage. And I think that's part of the issue we're facing with China. And that's not the whole story, but I think that's a very important part of it.

Charlie, is that part of the dynamic as we look back, you as a historian bring a real thoughtful perspective to the current issues. As we go back to 1949, right, to the beginnings of the Chinese Communist Party regime and its difficult relations with the United States from that period up to the present, does Zachary capture an important dynamic here or is that not accurate?

I thought it was a terrific poem for a couple of different reasons. And so let me answer your question a bit of a roundabout way. So first of all, I loved the image of the start of a good fight because where we really are in terms of US-China competition is things have changed so rapidly in the state and trajectory of our relationships with China across almost virtually every sector of endeavor that people feel a little bit of whiplash. And it does seem like all of a sudden we went from being good friends with China or not great friends, but important relations to having a very competitive relationship. And it seems to be true under both Republican and Democrats now on the baton. So one of the things that, you know, when Zachary is talking about the start of a good fight, we really are at the dawn of something new at this point.

You can trace back to 2016, you can trace it back maybe a little bit earlier than that, but we really are competing with them in the ring. So I think he really does capture the sense of where we are right now. The second thing I would say is I love the analogy. It's what most people around the world talk about, right? That it's China and the US slugging it out and they don't want to get trampled in the fight in between them, but it's not quite accurate. Because the fight is not just between the United States and China and caging it in that way makes certain sense, but it is really a larger competition of systems that is much larger than the United States and China alone.

And so one of the things that I found myself talking about a lot over the last couple of years was when we phrase this as US versus China, that's not quite the accurate way of approaching this because most of the actions that the United States is responding to are issues of concern for many, many nations, not only in Asia, but around the world. Whether we're talking about maritime aggression, whether we're talking about human rights suppression, whether we're talking about economic coercion. So I like framing this in a little bit bigger of a sense. It's not just a fight between two players.

The final part, which I think is really worthy of a discussion because there are elements of the truth, but then I would add this to this about whether or not it's US aggression as Zachary was just talking about. And I think that it is true, exactly true as Zachary laid out, that nothing concentrates the mind as much as having an enemy or having a competitor that will focus and drive actions. And the United States in fact is better oftentimes strategically when it can focus on a singular threat as opposed to a multiplicity of them.

But I would caution that looking at this primarily and first off through a belligerent Washington underrates that what we are seeing is a much delayed response from Washington to a cumulating series of actions taken by Beijing to in some ways force a more competitive response from the United States. Sorry, that was a long winded response to a really good poem, but he's really captured a lot of what's happening here.

And I really like how you use the poem as a springboard to understand not just the US side of this dynamic, but the Chinese side as well. And both sides, you could argue, have a tendency toward forward action and maybe even sometime aggression. I wanted to pick up on so many good points. I wanted to pick up in particular, Charlie, on this point about American interests and American action on behalf of others in the region. I think this has been a mainstay of US-China policy since the end of World War II, that the United States policy towards China is not just about China, but about the wider East Asian and one could even argue Indo-Pacific region with regard to our interests in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Is that the correct framing? Is that the way to think about it in regional terms rather than bilateral terms?

That is one approach to thinking about it, and I happen to think it's the correct approach. So in some ways, I'd say that the United States has a bit of a yo-yo approach here, that sometimes we do this when we think about Asia, we think about Asia first and China as a subset of Asia. And sometimes we reverse that order, that Asia is China because it's the largest nation because it now has the largest economy because it's the largest military and everything else revolves around that. So there are arguments to be made for which is the better approach. I think we are always better considering we have so many allies in the region. There are so many democracies in the region. We have an economic, no less a security architecture that's predicated around keeping a stable balance of power, keeping the region as open as possible.

So again, I said there are two approaches, but I think the United States tends to err when it predicates the entire Asia relationship around stable relations with China, as opposed to making sure that China is a very important part of our Asia policy, but getting our Asia policy right means first and foremost, working with our allies in the region.

And what are America's main interests in the region? What are the things we have historically cared about, which ostensibly we would still care about today?

Yeah. So I think you could boil it down to only two things, and then a lot of other kind of sub-issues flow out of them. So I think American policy in the region, American interest in the region have been actually very consistent over the long haul. And when I say long haul, I'm not even looking back to 1949, I'm looking way back to the late 18th century. And my thinking here is really informed by Michael Green's terrific book, By More Than Providence, which looks at American grand strategy in the region over its entire history. And part of his argument is that America has always worked for one positive and one negative overriding interest in Asia.

The positive agenda is to make sure that the region is as open and as free as possible so that there can be as much trade with America, so that there can be as much transmission of American values into the region as possible. That is one kind of driving set of interest that is really a positive sum that we will, as the region gets more democratic, it's likely to get more prosperous and more stable, and we're all going to benefit on that.

The second one is a negative aim, which is we are going to work to prevent a hegemon from taking hold in the region that subsumes the rest of the region, that creates a sphere of influence. Because whenever that has happened, we have seen that it ultimately ends up threatening American interests and American territory. So obviously we're talking about China in this relationship, but if we think before that, we can go to Japan. Sorry, we think before that, we think about the Soviet Union. So I think it is a constant of American strategy that has been an American interest to prevent as much as we are able to the emergence of a single country that is able to create a closed sphere of influence in Asia.

Does it matter, Charlie, that China is still, at least in the way it refers to itself, its government, still a communist government ruled by a communist party? Does that matter?

It does matter, because the direction that China has gone, particularly under Xi Jinping, is there are communists of different stripes, and there are those like Deng Xiaoping, who argued, it doesn't matter if the mouse is black or white, as long as we all get rich together. I've now just kind of elided, unfortunately, two of his great sayings.

But the point was, as long as we had a China that was working with others in the region, that was trying to keep the region open and integrating themselves into it, that was fine. The fact of the matter is that under Xi Jinping, from his ascension to power, we have seen an increasingly domestically repressive China and externally aggressive China. And you had asked about the focus of the communism within this.

Xi Jinping is an ideologue. We could debate whether or not he actually believes it himself, but he is forcing his ideological vision of the country onto the country. Xi Jinping thought has now been added to the canon. People are required to learn it. It is being exported around the region. So, yes, it does make a difference. We are not beyond this. This is not something that the leaders of China don't take seriously internally.

What about the developing countries that China, in the Indo-Pacific, but also outside of the Indo-Pacific, that China has invested heavily in? Where should those countries fit into the United States' grand strategy when it comes to China?

Well, they should fit in greatly because if one side offers a lot or seemingly offers a lot and the other side doesn't offer a lot, we don't put ourselves in a particularly advantageous position, which is where I think we've been over the last couple of years. However, we need to think very carefully, countries do think carefully, about what it is exactly that China is offering.

So Belt and Road Initiative is a good example of this. That if it is just an infrastructure build, it's just an infusion of cash or of yen into your country, that's good. But if it is something that comes with strings attached, with collateralized debt that has convertibility onto sovereignty issues, that's a problem. If it's something where the Chinese are building out the entire technological infrastructure of the place that they then have the ability to turn on, that's a problem. And frankly, even if the Chinese don't own it, but if they are creating technological ecosystems that are much more easily controllable and repressive, frankly, that's a problem for the United States of America.

So all these issues need to play a really big role. And frankly, over the last four years, during the Trump administration, there was much talk about competition, but there wasn't a lot of resourcing put towards this, Zachary, and exactly your question, right, about what about in these other countries, where were we going to actually be competing? So I think this is an area where it of course varies greatly when we talk country by country and what they're looking for and what they're willing to do. But what happens in these other countries, seeding the field is not one that's likely to result in a happy strategy for the United States.

But how can the United States challenge Chinese aggression abroad when so many of our allies, for example, Germany, rely heavily on Chinese economic investment and trade? How can we balance the economic interests of our allies and the interests of ourselves and the world?

With great delicacy, part one, part two, by challenging Chinese external aggression. So the fact is, as you raised, I think really nicely in that question, we have a much closer overlap of values and interests with our allies, particularly our democratic allies, than we do with others. But there's never a perfect alignment, nor frankly should there be.

And this becomes more acute when some of those trade differences point in different ways. But a great example of this, Zachary, is Australia, right? I just moved back from three and a half wonderful years of living in Australia. Australia has a very different type of relationship with China than the United States does, particularly because about 5% to 6% of US trade goes to China, up to 40% of Australian external commerce goes to Beijing, right? So that's a very different type of relationship.

And yet, if you think about the type of aggression that we've seen, not only, say, in the South China Sea in some obvious places, not only on some of the Pacific islands that are actually very close to Australia, but if we think about some of the influence operations, right? Where the Chinese Communist Party has been bribing Australian parliamentarians, where they have worked itself into the Chinese-Australian community in order to make sure that fair conversations, open conversations can't happen in Australia, in Australia, not in China. So frankly, on that, the response by Australia, even with 40% of trade going there, has been quite robust

So Australia is a different case, say, than Germany. But I think the answer to your question is, there is really an impetus for pushback against the more destabilizing practices that Beijing has, but we have to see which countries are willing to do what on which particular issues. That's a vague answer, but I also think it's the correct one.

Well, and I will highlight, Charlie, a wonderful piece you recently wrote that emphasizes how the Australians, despite this trade dependence on China, have actually moved their trade relations in response to Chinese bullying and Chinese coercion. And so it does show that this is possible, and that's part of what managing relationships are about. Do you think that the Biden administration is moving in that direction? Are they moving in a direction of working, as you and Hal Brands in another article write, toward building a sort of alliance of democratic solidarity with other democratic societies like Australia and Germany to not only push back against China, but to enforce certain rules of behavior?

Yes, I do. Look, when Biden was campaigning for office, we know that China was a volatile issue for a number of reasons. But one of the critiques was not in terms of the racist card being waived by Trump himself a lot of the time, but the real critique was not, in my mind, was not that the Trump administration wasn't competing, it's that they weren't doing so effectually. And the nub of that critique was, it's great to say that you're in competition, but how the heck do you plan on doing it if you're not bringing our allies and partners on board? And how can you possibly do that if you're going after them with trade wars as well?

And so, because we know that one of the very few things that Beijing responds to is concerted counterpressure. The most important thing that the Biden administration could do was to make sure that it was working with its allies, not at cross purposes, and that it was supporting democracy as opposed to undercutting it by its own actions internally within the US. So, it strikes me as both on the campaign trail, and frankly, in the not quite state of the union that Joe Biden gave last week, his address to Congress, he talked about this explicitly, that democracy versus authoritarianism was the number one challenge that we faced.

China was a challenge that was really going to put the United States to the test about how competitive we would be in the 21st century, and that we had to do this working alongside partners and allies. So, yes, I've seen a ton of effort if you look at initiatives that have rolled out, everything from the quadrilateral security grouping, right? That's Japan, Australia, the United States, and India, kind of working together with a really substantive set of do outs.

If you look at Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, was just working with both Japan and South Korea and the US, right? That's a relationship, that trilateral configuration that's gone by the wayside. If you look about the fact that President Biden called for a summit of democracies to happen before his first year of office is out, yes, it strikes me as the number one issue is how we can work with allies together to harness and leverage our collective strengths.

Is there a danger, Charlie, and this stems in part from historical experience, that although this can be very productive, both at an international and at a domestic level in disciplining people at home, it's one of the issues where Democrats and Republicans can agree in many respects. Nonetheless, does it not create a bifurcated world? Does it not create an adversarial relationship and reinforce certain adversarial assumptions which then make cooperation, where possible, more difficult?

Yes. However, I would argue that we're already in an adversarial bifurcated world. And what we saw over the last four years, what we're continuing to see over the first couple of months of the Biden administration, is a belated response by the United States.

So the question becomes, if the free world really is under pressure, really is under assault, and has seen its wins ebb over the last couple of years, what is the appropriate strategy for that? And this strikes me as the most likely strategy that we could pursue to make sure that the world is as free and open as possible. That said, right, as we kind of put on our historian's hat and look back, there are big dangers here. And they're not only dangers on the competition spectrum, but there are real dangers on what happens at home when you are talking about rivalry with China and Asian Americans get caught in the crossfire.

This is not something that we're not going to do, compete with China, but we have to be really careful about our language, right? That's something that we have to be much better at doing than we have been doing. You know, one of the things that the China Watcher community talks about a lot of the time is, let's be really clear, right? What we are talking is the harmful effects of the Chinese Communist Party, not of Chinese people, not of China, not of Asians by any stretch of the imagination.

You know, another thing to be careful about, and Jeremi, I know I'm talking to the expert here, is, look, when we do reach back for that analogy of the Cold War, which both does not work at all and also works in some ways, is during the Cold War, we have to be careful about areas of competition that are unhelpful for the United States, chasing our tail into some areas, right? So yeah, you know, it is both a driver, it's one that will focus the mind, but it's also one that we are in and we have to be very careful about as well.

On the domestic side of this, because we did a podcast episode a few weeks ago with Madeline Hsu, and we talked about the history of anti-Asian sentiment in the United States, which as you know well, has a long history, including Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, just a number out of a long history of this. What are some of the concrete things we can do at home? Because there's no doubt we've seen in the last four to eight years, as the international competition has increased between the US and China, that we have seen more incidents of anti-Asian violence in the United States. And for a time, we had an American leader who was blaming and deriding China and many of its people for many of our health issues related to the pandemic in the US. So how do we reverse that dynamic at home? What are some of the concrete things we can do while competing internationally?

So one, I think I mentioned before, and look, I wish I had the comprehensive answer on this, because it's so important, right, that we do this so that we are protecting ourselves and our citizens, right, not taking aim at each other. So number one, we need to be really careful. And by we, I simply mean our leaders who talk about this, about what language they use. Don't get loose with the language. Don't say Chinese. You say Chinese Communist Party, right? You say Beijing's actions. We don't say China's actions, right? Because of course, you know, the Chinese people is not what we're taking aim at. No less people of Asian ancestry who reside in this country, no less are productive and valuable members of our society. So number one language, I think is really important.

The second thing which I watched play out in the Australian context, and I think is equally true here, is because we have to be very sensitive of this, that should not shy away from aggressive actions that we need to take to protect our own citizens. And by that, I mean, look, there are racial elements about this because the Chinese Communist Party is trying to use racial elements of this to wedge us, right? To make sure that we don't address this. And one issue that I saw playing out in Australia was if you don't do this, if you don't take care of your own citizens with oftentimes the Chinese Communist Party working inside of constituent communities in Australia, you are relegating your own citizens to second class status, right? Because they're not as worthy of your protection. And that makes for sometimes very uncomfortable conversations, but you need to make sure that you are protecting your own citizens against people who are working within the community but are coming from outside of the country.

This is a very important point, and we've seen evidence of this at many of our universities. It's been more evident, of course, in Australia. And you're one of the leading commentators and analysts of this, Charlie, right? Which is the ways in which the Chinese government organizes groups in other countries to try to intimidate other citizens of the United States or Australia or elsewhere of Chinese descent who might be critical of the Chinese Communist Party. And tries to intimidate them.

If you don't mind, I'll just give an example of this in the Australian context. So many, of course, not all, but many people of Chinese ancestry who reside in Australia permanently read Chinese language media. That makes sense. There's been terrific investigative work that basically all of the Chinese language press is owned by CCP interests except for one. All but one. Which means that they are simply reprinting stuff that comes right out of Xinhua or China Daily.

Second point, when we're text messaging, Weibo, which is one of the apps that is used widely in China and also by Chinese communities overseas, is controlled in Beijing oftentimes. So we saw during some of the elections in Australia that when anything critical was said about the CCP, those messages got shut down in Australia. So again, it's really important when we think about how free societies operate, right? One of them is a free press. But what happens if one particular group isn't getting enough funding, right? Because it's all been sucked up. How do you support a free press in different languages, too, within your countries? I mean, I think this is a really interesting point, and we're just beginning to put our heads around it.

Charlie, you've put so many interesting issues on the table in a historical perspective, allowing us to see that the competition is real, but it's more complex than just saying we're competitors, and we're going to mobilize all the resources we have. It's a much more delicate game of balancing different interests and different communities abroad and at home. For our listeners who are concerned about this conflict, either leading us to chase our tail, as you put it, in places where we don't want to expend our resources, that's one of the lessons of the Cold War, that competing against a legitimate adversary can lead us to do things that we regret, in retrospect, and get into conflicts we regret. But also, what are the things we can do to avoid the conflict getting out of control? What are the positive steps that we can take and that our listeners can think about encouraging in their political leaders?

Great question, Jeremi. So I tend to think in order to avoid actual confrontation, we have to show that we are more willing to push back against Chinese aggression than we have been in the past, one. Two, we have to be willing to resource a real competition, right? If we think that, for instance, the commanding heights of the 21st century economy is going to be built around future technologies, AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, we have to be willing to invest in those industries. And that actually means that we're going to be spending a lot more.

You've seen some of this already coming out of the Biden administration. We're seeing calls, I mean, this is, the funny thing is, if you watch Washington at this point, right, we know that there is no bipartisanship whatsoever, except on China. And if you look at some of the major legislation that's been put forth, we have the oddest of bedfellows possible, right? You have the Endless Frontier Act, which is co-sponsored by Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton. You have some of the stuff coming out of the House would see similar alignments of the right and the left. And we're seeing major dollars, I mean, hundreds of billions of dollars that we need behind us. So I would say that if we actually want to be competitive, we have to be willing to spend in these areas, which we haven't been willing to do before.

And so part of that is going to see, and it aligns very nicely where I think the Biden administration is driving for both this reason and others. We're going to see an industrial policy. We are already seeing the beginnings of it, the likes of which we have not seen for two to three decades at this point.

It makes a lot of sense. Zachary, as a young person who follows these issues pretty closely and is concerned, do you see a pathway forward that Charlie's outlined here with his insightful comments about how the United States can compete without recreating perhaps some of the excesses of the Cold War or without going too far in certain areas in dangerous ways?

I definitely think so. And I think the Cold War analogy works to some extent, but it also doesn't because China and the United States, our societies and our populace are in many ways very connected, not just through trade, but through immigration and travel and other forms of business. So I think that the connection between our societies, people in the United States interacting with Chinese immigrants and people in China interacting with Americans, I think that in many ways, I think, allows for a framework where we can think about competition and challenging Chinese aggression without going too far.

It's interesting, Charlie. Zachary brought up a point that reminds me of one of, I think, the great insights that our mutual advisor, John Lewis made years ago, that one of the striking things about the US-Soviet relationship was how distant these societies were, how little the United States needed the Soviet Union, in fact. And it's the opposite with China. And Zachary's commenting, I think, on how that could be a positive element. That could be something that prevents some of the, let's say, mistakes and excesses of the past. Sort of as a final thought, do you agree with that? Is proximity and closeness a strength here?

Yes, but. So I do agree that that's a strength, but this takes kind of both ends playing from this. So let me kind of zoom us back into the distant history of like a year and a half ago, two and a half years ago. So look, there are times in our history, and Jeremi, I know you started with this thinking all the way back to 49, there are times when our governments enter more contentious periods with a lot more friction, with a lot more competition. That is undoubtedly what we have entered, and I think it's going to persist for a long time.

So when you enter a period like that, I think wise policy says, look, things are going to get a lot more heated, but let's make sure that this doesn't become the all-out crisis where we can never look at each other again, nor are each other citizens. I.e., let's make sure that people-to-people relations are really firmly connected. Because if the government relations are going off the rails, let's make sure that we have some good seed for the future.

And I think that's really important, some of the points which Zachary raised on that. However, and I think this is a really challenging thing to think about, the CCP's actions have made that much harder to date. Because if you think about this, they have started taking hostages, right? I mean, if we think about the case of the two Canadian Michaels, right? I mean, researchers working in China with long Chinese history, who the Chinese government decided to gain leverage against the Canadian government because they didn't like that Meng had been detained on a Huawei case, and potentially to be extradited to the United States. They just threw them into jail without any charges, and they've now languished in jail for something like 850 days.

This has also happened to Australian researchers. And what we're beginning to see, and Jeremy, I'm sure you could speak to this, is that the risk assessment for universities and think tanks about whether or not they can have relationships in China for the safety of researchers, of academics, and frankly, of students is really just going way up on this point. So I think that people-to-people relations are something that we should be investing and doubling down on right now. But because of the actions that the Chinese government has taken, that has become so much harder at this point

Charlie, you have really treated us today to a tour de force, understanding, I think, first of all, how intertwined so many of these interpersonal and geostrategic and domestic and international issues are, how relevant our history is as both an explanation for how we've come to where we are, but also as laying out a set of alternatives and lessons that can at least frame the way we think about these issues. But most of all, allowing us to see that the pathway forward is not going to be a simple one. And although slogans are attractive, it strikes me that what you're laying out is actually the real work of diplomacy and marrying power to idealism, democracy and security hand in hand. And that's at the center of what I think democratic policy is always about. So, Charlie, thank you for sharing your wisdom and insights with us today.

Well, thanks so much for having me on, guys, for a really important conversation. That, look, as China becomes the main thing that we talk about, the most important thing to talk about is why are we talking about it, right? Otherwise, how do we expect people to be willing to compete to make sure that the United States and the values that it stands for are actually protected? So, thank you, guys.

I have such high regard, Charlie, for your understanding of that point so well that it is about democracy, but that doesn't mean it's about imposing democracy upon China, but it certainly is about protecting democratic values that we believe in that are at the core of our society. And again, I think your insights and your writing and your policy work really, really capture that.

Zachary, thank you for your poem, which warned us about competition, and for your questions along these lines. And most of all, thank you, as always, to our listeners. Thank you for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. See you next time.

This is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world's most influential democracy.

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy, our first new episode of 2020 of the new decade. And we are so fortunate this morning, we are discussing Congress and war powers, an issue that's been in the news really for 240 years in American history, and an issue that's certainly at the center of American attention today. And we have with us, probably the person who's studying these issues most deeply as a historian, Clay Katsky. Clay, welcome.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Nice to have you on with us. Clay is finishing his PhD here at the University of Texas, and he's writing his dissertation on Congress's role in managing and dealing with presidential war powers, particularly in the 1970s and 80s. And so we're so fortunate to have him here. He knows more about this subject than anyone else. He's also a fantastic teacher. And so we're delighted to have you here, Clay. Before we turn to our discussion with our expert, with Clay, we have our scene-setting poem. I haven't had a chance to say that in a little while, our scene-setting poem with Zachary Suri. What's the title of your poem today?

An adaptation of Allen Ginsberg's A Supermarket in California for a Nation on the Brink of War.

My gosh. So you've taken an Allen Ginsberg, who I know is one of your favorite poets, and you have adapted one of his poems for our discussion today. Is that correct?

That's correct.

Okay. So we have the merger of Zachary Suri and Allen Ginsberg. Let's hear it.

What thoughts I find of you these days, Frank Church, for we huddled in the bedrooms listening to our radios with a headache, self-conscious, looking at the end of the world. In our nightmarish haze and shopping for semblances, we all crawled into the neon fruit supermarket with you, dreaming of the broken ghost. What nuclear bombs and what assassinations, whole battalions shopping at night, aisles full of shell-shocked soldiers, ghostly Donald Rumsfeld and the avocados, Reagan and the tomatoes, and you, Lyndon Johnson, what were you doing down by the hot dog buns? I saw you, Uncle Sam, disheveled, lonely old optimist, fumbling with the paper towel rolls and eyeing the peanut butter with a blank stare. I heard you asking questions of each, whom did I really kill today? What price for world peace? Are you James Madison? I wandered in and out of the brilliant star-spangled stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the ghost of Montesquieu and Lafayette.

We strolled down the open corridors together in our solitary remembrance, tasting empire, possessing every forbidden delicacy, and never passing the eye of the cashier's congressional oversight. Where are we going, you lost Democrat? The doors close in an hour. Which way do your reluctant guns point tonight? Maybe in some future time I will touch the founding document in my pocket and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd. Will we walk through a war among the distant highways and software engineers, the trees add shame to shame, lights out in the houses, awaiting air raid signals that still seem so inevitable? Will we stroll dreaming of the lost democracy we left in a pickle jar behind the old folks' home back to our silent cottage, maybe Lincoln's mausoleum? Ah, dear father, tip your hat, lonely old vagrant, you can lose the false individualism with me. For what America did we truly have when we handed Sharon the coin and we got out on a sinking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the blackwaters of the Potomac?

Wow. Nice. I love the imagery there, Zachary. So why did you choose this Ginsberg poem and why did you adapt it in the way you did?

Well, this poem, Supermarket in California, which was written in 1955, in it Ginsberg chases Walt Whitman through a supermarket and he's really critiquing how materialism and commercialism has undermined democracy in his view. And I am critiquing the ways that imperialism and war has undermined democracy in the U.S. today. And I think though they seem very far apart, I think both moments are very similar in the sort of aching for a more perfect union.

I think that's a perfect spot to turn to Clay. This is something the founders thought about, right? About the question of how you can maintain a democracy and still fight wars when necessary for the national defense. This is something the founders thought about, right? About the question of how you can maintain a democracy and still fight wars when necessary for the national defense. Yes. How did the framers think about this?

Well, in terms of what the framers were looking for in war making, they were looking for somewhat of a shared power between the president and Congress. And in fact, this was a major breakthrough at the time. In order to share power with the presidency was a huge break from when monarchs controlled all aspects of war.The framers didn't want to give the president authority to go to war unilaterally.

Right. And so they gave Congress particular powers. What are the constitutional powers that Congress has?

So the main power that Congress has, granted by Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11, is that Congress shall have the power to declare war. And we've seen over time this sort of power can be useful, but has eroded. The declared wars include War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II. But Korea starts this trend of undeclared wars. So the power to declare war has somewhat diminished over time.

There are other powers, though, important powers that Congress has. The rest of that clause talks about the to raise and support armies. It's interesting. It says to raise and support armies, but it also says, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for longer period than two years. So already Congress, in the Constitution, you have Congress trying to limit, or you have the framers trying to limit, the president's ability to have long, drawn-out conflicts. Even limit Congress's ability at that point.

Right. Forcing a vote at least every two years on the money for the conflict.

Yes. To revisit the issue, and so that we're not just stuck in endless wars.

Wow.

The third important power in that section is to provide and maintain a Navy, which obviously has been extended to the Air Force, and maybe in the future to a Space Force, or something like that. And then the final important power in that clause is to make rules for government and regulation of the land and naval forces. So to some extent, Congress does have control over the naval and land forces, making rules, making laws governing their conduct and such. The final thing, also, that's not exactly related, but is a part of the Congress's war powers in the Constitution, is the Senate's ability to approve and reject international agreements.

Right. Right. Right. And it's actually a two-thirds vote, isn't it?

Yes. So this is a high bar. And this has caused issues that we could even see recently, something like the Iran deal, which wasn't given to Congress because the bar couldn't be met. So here's an instance of the President going around Congress because Congress wasn't going to be able to give the President what he needed. And that's an example of the power that the President has over Congress. And I think it's fair to say, right, that from the beginning, from Washington's time, there was already tension.

Yes.

That Presidents have a tendency to want to have more of a free hand, particularly when it comes to military affairs.

How has that story evolved over time?

Well, really what you see is you see Presidents slowly taking liberties over time with Congress. As you mentioned, starting with Washington, there are issues with England and there's pressure to go to war. And Washington is able to sway Congress in his direction not to go to war by sending diplomatic people out to talk to diplomats in England. So he's sort of so Congress at that point is pushing for war and he's sort of pulling them back. He's showing his his teeth. He's showing that he can do this.

In fact, the House requests documents related to these negotiations and he refuses based on executive privilege, which is the first instance of executive privilege being used. Going forward, you know, you have Thomas Jefferson imposing embargo acts and doing things that Congress was not completely on board with, but was within the president's power. The I'd say the first real instance of the president overstepping his bounds in the war making really comes during the Mexican-American war with with James Polk. Polk, there is not enough support in Congress for war and Polk sends troops down to the border of Mexico intending to incite a war and intending for Congress to jump on board with that war.

One of the things that we see over and over again is that it's very difficult for Congress to pull back once hostilities have been engaged. And, you know, we know that it's very difficult. I mean, Congress has control of appropriations, but it's very difficult to cut off funds for troops in the field. So and this continues to unfold as each war comes, as the country becomes more involved with the outside world, you know, following the Spanish-American war and territorial conquest. Our butting up against outside powers means that the president is gaining power in in this sort of arena.

The president has what some would call an agenda setting power, right? He can send American forces. He can do something and then, in a sense, almost threaten Congress that if they don't support that, that they'll be abandoning American forces overseas. Right. And so he really gets the first move in a sense. Why have presidents been able to do this more effectively and why, as you already said earlier on, Clay, have Congress's day to day powers over the military and over military and war decisions, why have they diminished so precipitously in the 20th century and early 21st century?

Well, for one, you know, you look at the threat of national security and the Cold War coming from the Cold War. The threat of national security has been used by the executive to push the idea that only the president can protect the nation. There is some concern that a body like Congress that has endless debates and an endless number of ideas cannot come together quickly enough in order to protect the country in a proper way. A lot of people would say that too many voices are being heard and that you need a single person to make a decision. That said, in the 20th century, Congress has not necessarily used all of its powers to its best advantage. So I'd say one of the things that is not directly talked about in the Constitution, but is a constitutional power that Congress has that relates to war, is their investigatory powers and their powers of oversight.

Yes, yes. And so how do those powers work? What power does that give Congress?

So it says in the Constitution that all legislative powers herein granted shall be used by the Congress of the United States. And that's basically a general term that where the framers intended Congress to seek out information when crafting or reviewing legislation. George Mason himself said members are not only legislators, but they possess inquisitorial powers. They must meet frequently to inspect the conduct of public office. So over and their oversight powers include subpoena and contempt powers. And those, I think, are the major powers that haven't been used enough in the 20th century.

And when you think about the times that Congress has been most effective inserting itself into foreign policy in the 1920s, in the 1970s, somewhat in the 1980s, it's when Congress has embarked on ambitious investigations into the president's making of war.

Right. And oftentimes, until recently, at least, historians and journalists would criticize those moments. I mean, one of the critiques of the 1920s is of American isolationism and in particular of Congress's excessive efforts to limit presidential power after World War One with the Nye Committee, for example, which alleged that war profiteers were driving American policy. Even future President Harry Truman was involved with these hearings. You have a different view, right? On what? You have a different view in the sense that you don't see these hearings as as undermining the Constitution and undermining American power. You see them as actually crucial, correct?

Absolutely crucial. And, you know, even founders who did believe in a strong executive like Hamilton still believed that it would be utterly improper and unsafe to give the president full control over foreign policy. So the idea is that the founders wanted to make it difficult to enter war. They wanted to make they were expecting congressional debate to restrain the country from going to war.

Why have they not enforced that more than why? Why since, as you said, since World War Two, have we continually been at war? And why has Congress either done nothing or, as in the current situation, authorized military force in 2001, 2002? That's the current legislation that's used by many presidents through this current president. Why have they allowed that to go on? Why have they allowed presidents to stretch the legislation or operate without legislation at all?

Well, I'd say that the why is, you know, somewhat of a psychological factor of the threat of nuclear war that comes, you know, directly after the end with the Cold War, directly after World War Two. The country is afraid. People are afraid that of possible annihilation of possible World War III. There is a sense that there are, as I said before, too many voices in Congress that that you need one single strong person to push forward. You know, the president is tasked with defending the nation. And one thing that really comes clear in the atomic age is that the nation needs defending.

Before that, you know, an attack on Pearl Harbor is the first major attack in over 100 years. And the idea that the United States has once again been vulnerable, that this fortress America no longer exists, the seas are no longer protecting us because these missiles can be coming. It really pushed Congress and the American people into giving the president a lot of leeway in terms of war making powers, in terms of foreign policy and in what I study in terms of intelligence gathering and intelligence work.

So the Congress, even liberal members of Congress, were very, very were very, very easy or quick to give the president green lights on all sorts of covert operations and on assassinations and things like that. It was to some extent you see Congress putting their heads in the stand and allowing the president to defend the nation in whatever in whatever way is necessary. So in part, it's that members of Congress don't want political responsibility for yes.

And, you know, one thing is that, you know, Congress, they have to especially in the House, you know, they're constantly running for reelection and Congress itself is constantly running for reelection. The president only has to get reelected once. Congress is hoping to get reelected again and again and again. And so for them, their political livelihoods are at stake. And if the country, if a war is popular in the country and it's not and it's popular in your district, chances are as a as a congressperson, you're going to support that.

Right. Right. Zachary, you had a question.

Yeah. How do we get to the current legislation that we're supposed to be operating under the War Powers Act of 1973? How do we get to that? And how does that how is that contributed and played out in the past few decades?

Yeah. Really good question. I mean, so, you know, War Powers Act comes at an amazing time in American history because this act probably could never have been passed at any other time other than in 1973. Nixon is completely on his heels after Watergate. People are still fuming over the Vietnam War. Nixon, Nixon actually. So and the thing that's most remarkable is that Nixon vetoes the the amendment and then it's the the act and then it's overwritten. So from the beginning, this is a major departure that that the president is against going forward. Some presidents see it as unconstitutional and completely ignore it.

So far, there's been little to no impact on the decisions of presidents due to the War Powers Act. It hasn't really restrained them from doing anything. Some. And as I said, some administrations straight up refused to recognize its constitutionality. But in 1975, Ford did submit a report to Congress as a result of his order to send troops to retake the Miagas, an operation to rescue some American hostages. He the troops were recalled within the 60 days, so it didn't actually have an effect. But he did report to Congress if the troops had remained overseas for 60 days, it would have triggered the War Powers Act.

In 1979, Carter failed to notify Congress of the operation to rescue the hostages. That's less about the War Powers Act and more about clandestine operation reporting. But it is sort of similar.

In 1981, Reagan sends Marines to Lebanon when he reported this to Congress. And and after the Marines were attacked, Congress does authorize the Marines to stay in country for 18 months. So that's really the first example of a president state adhering to the War Powers Act or at least stating that reporting to Congress and then accepting Congress's proposal for how to deal with the troops. At the time, Reagan knew that 18 months was a really long time and they probably weren't going to be there for that long anyway. He pulled them out in much less time.

If I remember, he did report to Congress, but he said he didn't believe he had a constitutional duty.

And that would his administration and Bush and Cheney, who gives a dissent to the Iran Contra report, would say that all any effort to infringe on the president's war making powers would be unconstitutional. In 1990, Bush agreed. Bush said that he didn't need congressional authorization to carry out U.N. resolutions in Iraq, but he did report to Congress and ask for congressional support for operations in the Persian Gulf. Clinton authorized airstrikes in various places pursuant to U.N. Security Council resolutions without regards to the War Powers Act, which some in Congress objected to. So the history of the War Powers Act is pretty much that it has done nothing so far. I think that at the time there was a concern.

The War Powers Act was almost written to prevent Vietnam from continuing or to prevent a continuation of what was going on in Vietnam, of leaving troops overseas for an extended time.

Yeah. So how have presidents reconciled clandestine operations with the sort of constitutional balance of powers between Congress and the executive? Because like particularly in the Reagan years, we see this giant growth of clandestine operations.

Yeah.

So and this is your book, Clay.

Yes. So the so presidents don't like the idea of Congress being involved in clandestine operations at all, starting with, you know, in the early days of the CIA, the way that Congress and the president would converse on these things would be on intelligence operations, covert operations would be done in very informal meetings, you know, in the back offices of these guys with smoke and smoke filled rooms and backs offices, you know, just lunch meetings, things like that. It wasn't until the over drinks, over drinks, mostly.

It wasn't until the 1970s that Congress really struck out and tried to solidify a way that it would be included in the intelligence process. And so what that meant was the creation of the intelligence committees that you see in the news now, these days, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the committee that Adam Schiff chairs.

This is the committee that Adam Schiff chairs.

The yes, that Adam Schiff shares in the counterpart in the Senate, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence created in the 1970s as a way to check up on presidents who, as I said, did not want to share intelligence with Congress and who did not want Congress involved in that sort of decision making process.

The main way that Congress is brought into these into these decisions is comes from the reporting requirements that says before any covert action is carried out, the president must sign a document called a finding that says that the operation is in furtherance of the national security. And this document before the operation takes place needs to be given to the intelligence committees. And the intelligence committees have no veto power over these over this. The president is basically notifying them that he's going to do something.

But what it does is it gives the chance for an exchange of ideas that that the committee will hold hearings, closed doors, hearings over this, get the insights of their members and, you know, send reports back to the president on what they think of this. You know, if the president says that he's going to, you know, take out a general of another country and and Congress says, you know, we're going to be up in arms if you do this, maybe the president then thinks twice.

Yeah. So you said, Clay, and I think the consensus among historians would agree that the War Powers Act of 1973 did not really limit presidential war making. Have these reforms of the 1970s, the reforms that include the creation of House and Senate committees, the findings requirement, the executive order that's signed after pressure from Congress to prohibit assassinations, signed by Gerald Ford, I believe. Have these efforts by Congress to limit or at least create consultation for covert activities? Have they worked?

It's hard to say definitively, but I think that anecdotally, when you look at the years before these agreements were made in the subsequent years after that, they did have a big impact. You know, the the number of clandestine operations actually lowers in as the years go after the 1970s. There's less efforts to overthrow of other governments through military organized coups. There for a while, there's no assassinations.

And, you know, these things change a little bit, as Zach mentioned, in the 1980s with with the Reagan who actually weakens the executive order for against assassinations in order to carry out strikes in Libya against the palace, which are not technically assassinations against Gaddafi, but could definitely be seen as such.

So those provisions on assassinations get weakened in the 1980s. And today, those those provisions against assassinations have been completely muddied by drone warfare and drone strikes. The taking the strikes against terrorist leaders, strikes against specific individuals who are seen as propaganda masters, these sort of things seem somewhat to follow fall under the category of assassination.

Right. And certainly a a sovereign leader of Iran, someone who's someone who's responsible for the military in Iran.

Yeah. I mean, a sovereign leader. But I think that in this case, you know, someone with a high position in the government carrying out Iranian foreign policy and leading their military. That's what this is.This isn't a terrorist group. This is a legitimately recognized country.

So it seems to me that that this rises more to a level of an assassination than than the taking out of the terrorist leaders, which I mean, and think about it in American terms. You know, one of the arguments that they're making is that, you know, he was a terrorist because he worked with these terrorist groups, you know.

But what if it was on the flip side? What if there is a an American working with pro-democracy groups in a communist country and that person is taken out? Is that not assassination?

Well, back to your discussion of Ronald Reagan, one of the things Reagan did that many people praise him for was support the Mujahideen against the Soviet military in Afghanistan. The Soviets called the Mujahideen a terrorist organization. We certainly didn't believe that justified their assassinating our president. The Soviets called the Mujahideen a terrorist organization. We certainly didn't believe that justified their assassinating our president. And thankfully, they didn't. Right. So your point is very well taken to simply say that a sovereign leader is working with people that we don't think is legitimate, doesn't justify assassinations, at least under the 1975 order.

And then, you know, when it comes to the reporting requirements, the president's required to tell Congress about covert actions beforehand. And this was in the 1980s what sparked the Iran-Contra that not only did the president not notify Congress about the covert actions, but Congress had already passed laws against these sort of covert actions. And the Boland amendments were completely violated. And so here you see an executive that doesn't really believe in being restrained by Congress, completely bulldozing over Congress and, you know, isn't in the end held very accountable.

So I think what your scholarship, Clay, and this really thoughtful analysis you've given us shows is that there's an inherent tension between Congress and the president. And perhaps the founders wanted that. Legal scholars call it an invitation to struggle. An invitation to struggle. And maybe there's something productive about that, if that's the case.

And here's where we turn to the sort of positive looking forward part of what's so crucial to our discussions each week here on This is Democracy. What are the ways that understanding this 200 years, 240 years of struggle as you do so well, what are the ways in which that understanding can help inform us going forward? What are what are the opportunities we have going forward from this moment today to have Congress more involved, more effectively, not in preventing presidents from from defending the country, but helping presidents to do a better job and still protect our democracy in the process?

Yeah, I think that, you know, there are, as I mentioned before, certain decades you can look at where this where this worked. You know, the 1920s being a really good example where a block of progressives in the Senate, especially known as the peace progressives, were able to prevent the country from going down another war path. Now, and this is significant because there were efforts by Congress to arrange conventions, to limit the arms races, to outlaw war. These were actual there were bills put forth to outlaw war. There were efforts.

Kellogg-Briand Pact, for example.

Kellogg-Briand Pact. There's efforts to prevent major efforts in Congress to prevent war.

And, you know, then if you look at the 1930s, you know, even though there's problems, of course, with the Nye Commission, this is a real effort by Congress to prevent the president from sucking the country into war. And it's, you know, somewhat successful until it shouldn't have been.

So and then, you know, you look at the 1970s and actually starting in the late 1960s. And in fact, that's something I think that it's really important to mention is the Fulbright Vietnam hearings. So holding hearings, the 1970s, you know, the uproar against Vietnam and the War Powers Act didn't just come out of nowhere in the 1970s. It came because of these public sized hearings and because of the Pentagon Papers and because of things like that, where Congress was doing investigations, you know, overseeing the executive branch as it should be.

Today, we have things like we have ridiculous investigations, not normal investigations. We have Benghazi investigations, things that are not really rooted in the restraining of executive power. Here we have recently this expose by The Washington Post about these Afghanistan papers about what really had been going on in Afghanistan. Yet there's no effort to have congressional hearings to look into this. What Congress needs to do is they need to hold hearings. They need to use their subpoena power. They need to use the power of contempt when people won't meet the subpoenas. And, you know, have public debates over these things.

How do they do that when you have a president now, and he might not be the last president to do this, who says, "I'm not going to follow. Washington said he wouldn't turn over the negotiation papers with the British. I'm not going to let people in my office and even when someone like my former National Security Adviser, John Bolton says he's willing to testify, I'm going to invoke executive privilege." What should Congress do?

I think they have to keep going hard. They have to keep the investigations going. If the president wants to block people from testifying, let him block them, find someone else. It looks bad for the president to block people. Continue to put the president in that position, continue to make it seem that there's no transparency. If you continually investigate someone who's not giving you anything, it becomes clear that they're hiding something.

What about the use of the power of the purse? One of the things where we started this conversation and where I'd like us to come to a conclusion is around the role Congress has clearly in the Constitution as the place that appropriates the money.

Yes

How can Congress more effectively make sure that it has control over money? We have fought wars since 9/11 actually off budget. Where we go to war without actually money even being appropriated by Congress and the president assumes that Congress will then follow on in the program.

Yeah. A lot of this has to do with the authorizations of force from the early 2000s, that the president points to and says, "This allows us to do this and you'll have to give us the money." Now, Johnson made a similar argument during the Vietnam War where he said, "You guys keep giving us the money. If you wanted the war to end, you could just stop giving us the money." The appropriations issue is difficult because as I said before, you have troops in the field. You have people who need this money. I think that the only thing that Congress can really do is plan ahead with scheduled decreases.

The idea that Congress is going to tell the president that you're going to get this much money for the next year's budget for this war and then the next year it's going to be less. There has to be some agreement of where the trend is going. Otherwise, the president is going to keep doing what he wants and ask Congress to pay for it later and if Congress doesn't pay for it, they're the ones who look bad.

Congress could also pass legislation saying money shall not be used for fighting a war in Iran or something like that.

Absolutely. That is the kind of thing that they should be doing there.

Gotcha. Zachary, for a long time, Americans have not really liked paying attention to Congress. Most Americans don't like Congress.

Very low approval.

Very low approval ratings, I think almost lower than dentists in some respect.

And Trump even.

Lower than the president. Americans tend to vote for their incumbent congressional representatives to go back to office but still say they hate Congress, they don't pay attention. It's not sexy to read about Congress than the way it is to read about the executive. Do you think, Zachary, that young people will start to pay more attention to these issues?

Yeah, I really think that especially in a moment where we're very dissatisfied with the trend that our politics are taking. I think Americans are paying much closer attention to what goes on in Congress and what goes on in this amazing legislative body.

I think also it's really important to remember that dissent in Congress and in other forums is really important that we need to have these discussions and have these debates. Even wars that--that history looks on favorably, they were very vehement debates. Going back all the way to World War I and Bob La Follette in the Senate, I think it's really important to remember that these debates, these public forums to discuss our country's role abroad are very important. I think that's something that younger people and all Americans are paying much closer attention to today.

I think that's very well said. Certainly, I think we've been educated in the last 20-30 years on the importance of having debates over the use of war power. I think one of the points Clay made so well is that during the Cold War, there was a premium placed on acting fast and delegating authority because of the concerns that if we acted too slow, we would be the subject of a nuclear attack or some sort of communist expansion.

Then after September 11th, concerns about terrorist activity and the need for an executive to act quickly there. I think we've learned in the last 20-30 years, Democrats and Republicans in our society, that we need more debate around these issues. I think that's such a strong and important moment for our democracy because it reminds people that we need branches of government like Congress to be standing up and offering serious debates. Part of what you're talking about, Clay, seems to me is that these investigations offer a forum for a public discussion of American politics.

Absolutely. You nailed exactly that what we should really have going on right now is public discussions about policies. Policies that are set forth should have hearings, they should have public hearings. They should be all discussed in the open for people to hear. Congress is the people's representatives. They're the closest representatives to the people, so they really are our voices. You mentioned that we keep voting in the incumbents and people who maybe are getting further away from our voices.

In the 1970s after Watergate, a new class of legislators were elected, that new young class, and major changes were made in the 1970s. Human rights was incorporated into American foreign policy. Major restraints were put against covert action. Huge secrets came out that the government had been trying to keep from people. So it can happen if people get together and they elect the right people in Congress. If there is a new class ready to go, there could be major changes. Presidents come and go and it's very difficult to steer the ship, but a new class in Congress can actually have a pretty significant impact in just a few years.

We have seen that happen in 2018.

Yes

The change whether one approves of it or not is quite significant. What we've seen with the House of Representatives is a completely different approach to efforts at holding the president accountable, whether one agrees with it or not. One can expect that the 2020 election might produce another class of members of Congress like those in the 1970s like the 2018 class that will be very intent on investigating and discussing policies surrounding a variety of American foreign and domestic issues.

That more than anything else is why citizens need to pay attention, vote and elect members of Congress who care about these issues, less about whether they're from your party or not and more about whether they have the requisite knowledge, integrity, and commitment to address these issues as Clay and Zachary have laid them out so well. I think today we've learned so much about the role of Congress and how crucial Congress is to questions of war and peace in our society. Clay, thank you so much for sharing your research with us.

Thank you, guys.

Zachary, thank you for your as always stunning poem.

Budding Beatnik.

Yes, Zachary, he's a budding Beatnik in the 21st century. So much fun and thank you all for joining us on This is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com. Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday, featuring new perspectives on democracy.

This is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world's most influential democracy.

[Music] Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we're going to discuss the topic of participatory democracy.

How have and how can people be more involved in our democracy, not just when it comes to voting, but to day-to-day activities to make our democracy more full, more rich, and more real for people. We're going to focus on a particular moment in our history when a young group of citizens came forward with a statement about the importance of participatory democracy, a statement that inspired hundreds of thousands of people and continues to inspire many people. This is the Port Huron Statement of 1962, written by Students for a Democratic Society.

And we have with us one of the foremost scholars of participatory democracy and Students for a Democratic Society and the Port Huron Statement, Dr. Vanessa Cook. Dr. Cook received her PhD in U.S. history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. She wrote a fantastic dissertation that I in part supervised and had the opportunity to learn from.

It's a dissertation that's been published as a really wonderful book that I encourage everyone to read. The book is titled Spiritual Socialists, Religion and the American Left, and it's about those issues and much, much more with some fascinating figures who contributed to our democracy in all kinds of ways. She's written articles in the Washington Post, Dissent Magazine, Religion and Politics, and she's currently the Defense POW MIA Accounting Agency Historian, in residence, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Missing in Action Project.

Vanessa, thank you for joining us this morning.

Oh, good morning. Thank you for having me.

Before we turn to our discussion of participatory democracy and the Port Huron Statement, we have, of course, Mr. Zachary Suri's scene-setting poem. Zachary, what is the title of your poem this morning?

"Port Huron Revisited."

Let's hear it.

"We are people of this generation, housed now in, we are people of this generation, do not forget the oceans of incalculable transgressions and the memory of the maimed millions. We are people of this generation, housed now in absurdity and the phosphorescent orbs of radioactive civility. We are people of this generation, standing by obelisks we're not sure make any sense to us now in a sea of so many sanctimonious automobiles. Mark them as the godly idols of our time. We are people of this generation, housed now in, and the black-white haze of centuries of ambiguous certainty. We are people of this generation, sleep, float, remember. We are people of this generation, housed now in absurdity and the windswept deserts of parking lot dystopias. We are people of this generation, standing now on a bluff overlooking the harbor, observe the Lady of Liberty, wonder what oxidized horror she holds beneath the crown. Thus is the spirit of white giant at the reflecting pool, the names in white crawling along the black marble wall."

I love all the imagery there, Zachary, from the parking lots to the Statue of Liberty. What is your poem about?

My poem is really about the sort of dissatisfaction with American society and the current sort of American political discourse that drove so many young people to the radical political movements of the 1960s. And I think what's so startling today is how relevant many of their concerns and their criticisms of American society are to young people like myself today. And...that was really what my poem was about, was connecting those two generations and those two time periods.

I love the intergenerational element of that, Zachary. Our podcast is designed to be intergenerational.

Well, and the first line of the Port Huron statement is, we are people of this generation, which is such a poignant and powerful statement in and of itself.

Well said.

Vanessa, can you give us some background on this Port Huron statement of 1962? Who wrote it and what was the message that they were trying to promote?

Sure. So in the summer of 1962, students from Students for Democratic Society or SDS met at a retreat in Port Huron, Michigan, hence the name, to really deliberately come up with a statement or an agenda for their generation, as Zachary referred to. It was about 60 students from all over the country.

SDS was a fairly young organization at that time. It was only about two years old, so there were about a dozen chapters on different campuses across the country. And they put out a notice for anyone interested to come and participate in this convention, as they called it, to write this statement, really outlining the problems and concerns that they saw in American society.

Also suggestions or possible solutions to those problems. But it was all framed around the question of how can we enhance democracy in the country and how can we expand democracy in the country?

And it became, as many listeners will know, a very influential document throughout the 1960s, distributed widely. And SDS chapters really start to crop up on most campuses across the country in the 60s.

Why at this moment in 1962, Vanessa, what led to this moment producing this document?

Well, in 1962, I think there were some valid concerns about the state of democracy and threats to democracy, having just gone through the McCarthy era and the undermining of civil liberties and attacks on civil liberties that became very serious in the 1950s. So many of those students grew up recognizing that threat.

Also concerns about ongoing war. The Cold War was becoming more tense between the Soviet Union and the US. And they talked about that in the document and identified that as a problem.

Nuclear warfare, the threat of nuclear warfare and annihilation in that way, hung over them. And I think you can see that fear on almost every page of the Port Huron statement. And just a concern that there was a lot of apathy about the way that the government was running things in the United States, about the United States' role in the world, and the lack of democracy extended to groups like African-Americans in the South.

It sounds in many ways like an echo or a precursor to a number of issues we contend with today. One being the non-representativeness of the Democratic Party in some ways and other parties.

Members of SDS criticized the Southern Democrats, the so-called Dixiecrats, for resisting civil rights actions and resisting a response to the large numbers of citizens who felt disempowered within the political structure. And then also the concerns about inequality, economic inequality, both of which you mentioned so well.

What were their solutions? What were they proposing in place of what they saw as a stagnant political process that was non-representative and problems of inequality? What were they proposing?

So their sort of catchphrase or what became a concept that they put forward as a fresh take on democratic theory was called participatory democracy, which you mentioned in the opening. And participatory democracy was an open-ended term, and it could mean different things to different people.

But as I understand it, it was a concept that meant that democracy should not just be about voting in electoral politics. It shouldn't just be going on election day and pulling a lever, filling out a ballot for politicians, even though that was incredibly important and it was being denied to certain people like African-Americans. And the Students for a Democratic Society really wanted to ensure that everyone had the right to vote.

But beyond that, they wanted to expand democracy, so that really became a way of life for people. And they talked about democracy as a way of life. So it wasn't just electoral politics, but it was participating in the decisions that are going on in your community.

And that meant becoming an engaged citizen, not just apathetic, not just relying on other people to make decisions for you and, you know, assuming that you have no voice or no power. And so they encourage people to get involved in local politics, to go to board meetings, to go to town hall meetings, to lobby their local and state and national politicians with letters or calls, to express their voice and to make those connections between local politics and national politics and to really hold all those politicians accountable to democratic processes.

Why was this concept of participatory democracy so radical? What made it so new at this time?

Well, I think because people really in America did conceptualize democracy or thought of it as the right to voice your opinion, but usually that was done through, you know, electoral processes and voting. So this expansion of democracy, I think was a new, a fairly new concept that changed people's thinking about how democracy could become more embedded in people's daily lives.

The Port Huron statement has been recognized as one of the signposts for a clear demarcation between what was known as the old left, which was framed around more Marxist analyses of economic systems and workplace issues, to a new left. And so the Port Huron statement represents a break or a new chapter in leftist politics and thought in American society.

And one of the biggest differences is that students for democratic society in the Port Huron statement, they did talk about economic issues and traditional trade issues, shop issues, but they really put it in more cultural and social terms. And so it wasn't just economics or, you know, people's identity as working people or the proletariat that they focused upon.

They really expanded the leftist agenda to recognize issues of social problems, of cultural concerns, of people's identity as, you know, mothers and students and African Americans and women and, you know, all kinds of different identifiers, rather than just as working class people.

You raised a really important issue about culture and social relations. One of the criticisms that was thrown at the Port Huron statement, and that's often thrown at leftist politics, as you described them so well, Vaneessa, is the criticism of being socialist. And many would argue then and have argued now that some of these ideas are un-American because they're socialist.

How do you respond to that?

Well, socialism does have a rich history in the United States. It's not just a foreign import and it isn't necessarily Marxist in nature, doesn't necessarily call for the overthrow of the government. So these kind of ideas that people have that are associated more with the Soviet Union or other totalitarian societies that have adopted socialism, you know, that's sort of the nightmare scenario that people think of with socialism.

But obviously there are different types. Democratic socialism is alive and well in most of the advanced countries and the United States, and that began in the early to mid-20th century. But socialism in the terms that SDS understood it, they did avoid the term, especially in the Port Huron statement, because it was such a weighted concept and that it had such negative connotations, particularly in the Cold War context when everyone was being accused of communism, if they stood up for anything that seemed radical.

But socialism really comes down to equality. And I think Students for Democratic Society, they were advocating for a recognition of more equal treatment of everyone in the country. And that ties into democracy because everyone needs to be seen as equal if they're going to have an equal voice in the political process.

And do you think that this argument and the case that was made so eloquently in the Port Huron statement, did it contribute to the civil rights movement?

I think that went hand in hand. I think the civil rights movement was part of the new left umbrella term or new left umbrella movement, that social movement. And the students for democratic society, mostly white students from the North at first, but they became more aware of what was going on in the South with the Jim Crow laws and threats to voting rights there and denials of voting rights and human rights in the South.

And so when they started to see some of this coverage on the news in the late 50s or read about it in newspapers, hear it word of mouth, this was shocking to them that in this country where they grew up and they actually used this language in the opening of the Port Huron statement, we heard that we're a land of liberty and freedom and justice for all.

And yet we grew up and we noticed these contradictions, these glaring problems that didn't live up to those values. And so they saw this as an inspirational moment, the civil rights movement making momentum in the South and gaining traction there.

And they wanted to be part of that push to enhance democracy in that region and across the country.

So how did this relate to the anti-war movement of the movement against the Vietnam War in the United States? Was it a precursor or does the Port Huron statement sort of reflect an early anti-war sentiment?

There's a lot of talk about the military-industrial complex, among other sort of terms about the war machine in the United States. Yeah, I think the Port Huron statement did recognize some troubling trends that even though the Vietnam War wasn't exactly on their radar as much in 1962 as it would be two or three years later even, I think they did see that the United States government was making some decisions that, you know, were concerning to them.

They were troubled by the idea of the military-industrial complex. That's a term that comes up in the Port Huron statement. It's also something that Eisenhower identified as, you know, he warned about that problem.

And so I think that there was an inherent anti-war sentiment within the Port Huron statement because the Students for a Democratic Society did not want the US government to perpetuate war for the sake of a strong economy, for example. They realized that in World War II, the war economy had helped a lot to turn around the economic crisis of the Great Depression, the Korean War right after World War II or soon after World War II.

And then the Cold War tensions heating up did rationalize the continuation of the military-industrial complex and that tight relationship between the government, big business for, you know, military industry and the military itself. And they saw this as, you know, perhaps a worst, a military state and a endless war type of society that they thought was a threat to democracy.

Vanessa, as you're describing these issues so well with regard to civil rights and anti-war, anti-militarist activities, one can't help but think that these issues haven't gone away. Why do you think that's the case?

Well, there has been, there had been some progress with the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, but since then that has been undermined and chipped away at.

And I think that there is a fear of enfranchisement for, you know, certain politicians who would rather keep people from voting because they fear the consequences of those votes. I'm not saying that one party is more to blame than the other because there are issues with, say, gerrymandering or corruption in both parties. And so that's something people have to be very vigilant about.

But it is unfortunate that even though the Port Huron statement is in need of some updating and many things would be different if young people sat down and wrote an agenda for their generation today, it is unfortunate that some of those issues are still with us and it can be relevant for us today too.

Do you think that in some ways that we forgotten about these issues, that these issues that were put out so eloquently and in such an influential way in the early 1960s and structured many of the debates of that time, that we've sort of forgotten this history? And if so, what do you think is a good way to bring these issues back into our discussions today and to bring young people back into these discussions around these issues?

Well, it's my fear and concern in recent years and, you know, this is just anecdotal. I don't have the evidence for this, but it seems as a historian, I read much more about Americans talking about the need for democracy, valuing that concept and principle of democracy, even using rhetoric like defending democracy, which Woodrow Wilson deployed during the First World War.

That I think props up, comes up more in my reading of 20th century history than it has in recent years. I think today the rhetoric is more around defending the American way of life, which of course you can trace back to FDR and the four freedoms. But today, I think people interpreting, okay, defending the American way of life, that could mean a lot of different things to different people.

It doesn't necessarily mean democracy or include democracy. So I think if we discuss, open up more conversations where democracy is the focus and we reaffirm a commitment to that as Americans and that that's a strong tradition or at least experiment in this country that we need to rededicate ourselves to with programs like this podcast, with, you know, other, not just intellectual or academic forums, but in the general public, I think that we need to reaffirm democracy as a value.

I love what you've said there, Vanessa. I mean, it does seem to me that we use the word democracy, but we too often mean legalistic elements of our society and institutional elements, all of which are important. But the, as you put it, the culture and the personal part of democracy, what it is that brings people together to work together, to participate and address common concerns. That seems strangely to be absent from a lot of our discussions.

And strangely, it seems that that is actually undermined by social media, which often encourages us to yell at each other, not to actually have these deliberative moments where we participate in conversation, bringing our various points of view together. How practically do you think we can build on the SDS and the Port Huron model today to maybe get past these limitations in our current democratic culture?

Well, having those conversations is an important and practical, you know, practicing that discourse, opening that dialogue, even with people who disagree with you. I mean, that's practicing democracy. And I think what you said about social media is right on point.

I think people always want to be entitled to their opinion, and that's important, but they get kind of lost in their stance or their opinion, or they frame things as, you know, Republican versus Democrat, or, you know, this president versus this president-elect, or conservative versus liberal or leftist. And I think that if the conversation were directed more towards democracy and, hey, can we at least agree that democracy is important, that that might bring people together and find some sort of common ground rather than just, you know, pitting this divide against each other.

I know democracy as a concept isn't perfect. There have been many scholars and politicians who found it to be a very slippery concept and not something that could always, that American people could always understand or rally behind. But it's my hope that democracy can still carry that weight of deferring opinions and, you know, multiple worldviews.

And if we reaffirm that, if we use the hope of the Port Huron statement, that we can come together and respect common values and, you know, a common commitment to democracy, that maybe we can heal some of these divides.

How can we inspire young people to think about democracy today? It's something that a lot of young people take for granted or quickly become dissatisfied with. How can we, how can we get young people as excited about democracy as those who wrote the Port Huron statement were?

That is a tough question. I think having a engagement with whatever's going on in your community is a good first step. That can be, like you said, a frustrating experience and it might turn off people pretty quickly. But you need good people in there.

You need to actually, if you do value these principles and you want to make a difference, you know, you can't just, you know, let it up to fate. You actually have to get in there and to make a difference directly. Taking to the streets as some people have done for Black Lives Matter and those more spontaneous eruptions of democratic pressure, that is important as well.

I think also reading, you know, people really could be inspired by just reading about activists in the past, including the Students for Democratic Society in many respects, that that might inspire them to get involved in the process, just keeping that hope alive rather than getting bogged down in the negative.

And of course they could read your book on many activists who valued and stretched and opened the concept of democracy in our society, that these are your spiritual socialists in many ways and they're as spiritual and as democratic as they are inspired by socialist ideas.

Zachary, I wanted to ask you, do you see this work that Vanessa is describing, this work of opening, discussing democracy, bringing more people in, putting ideology perhaps aside and encouraging participation among different kinds of people, do you see this germinating among young people today and do you see a possibility for more of this among your generation of young people who care so deeply about these issues? Where do you see this going?

Yeah, I definitely think that there are a lot of young people, really talented young people thinking about democracy and issues of our democracy today, but I do think there is a sort of lack of a willingness to think creatively and radically about how we can reshape not just policy but our democratic institutions themselves.

And I think that's kind of because our educational system has sort of failed to educate us about how our democracy has shifted and changed throughout its history and how often we've relied on the work of young people to change it for the better and to protect our democracy.

It's very well said, Zachary. It's like Vanessa pointed out earlier, we use the word democracy in our education, but we don't really talk about what it means and as Vanessa put it, how one practices democracy. And maybe a focus on that and a focus on bringing young people together to write and think about it, as Vanessa described, is something we should do more of in our communities and in our educational institutions among other places.

Vanessa, are you hopeful that this work will happen and that it will be done?

I am. I think that some of the troubling signs we're seeing today with the electoral process, I'm hoping will open people's eyes to the need to reevaluate this, to reaffirm it, to actually offer more education about it like Zachary said. You know, everyone wants to add something to the curriculum of our high schools or undergrad courses, but my husband had a course, I think in high school, called "Problems of Democracy."

And I thought, wow, how amazing to have a course that really unpacks that and shows the promise of it but also the problems and issues that have happened throughout our history but also continue today. So that would be a step in the right direction for people in high school who many times don't even have civics classes anymore to start to really think about these issues.

It's such a perfect title, Vanessa.

In many ways, our podcast is designed to be a nationwide course in problems and opportunities of democracy. And one of the really fascinating parts of democracy as a concept is that it encompasses so many different issues and it can encompass so many different people and produce new kinds of ideas, new kinds of solutions to problems.

It's the ever experimental element of democracy that inspires our podcast. It inspired Franklin Roosevelt, in many ways, the historical mentor for our podcast and it is so well embodied. This notion of historical experimentation among diverse groups, it's so well embodied by your work, Vanessa, and what you shared with us today.

Looking back on the Port Huron Statement in 1962, as you've done, really provides us a lesson and inspiration, not to rewrite the statement per se but to think about what an agenda for a new generation and what a more expansive democracy would look like in the 21st century. We need that conversation now more than ever. Vanessa, thank you so much for the work you've done to help ground and inspire this conversation.

You've really shared so much with us today. Thank you.

Yeah, for sure. You as well. I'm inspired by young people like Zachary who are taking this seriously. I know we'll do great things.

It's so true. Zachary and his generation are a new greatest generation in the making. We're fortunate to have them as part of our podcast.

We're particularly fortunate to have Zachary's poems every week. Thank you for your Port Huron revisited reflections, Zachary. Most of all, thank you to our audience for working hard to improve and expand our democracy every day.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy. [Music] This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com. Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday featuring new perspectives on democracy. [Music]

This is Democracy. A podcast about the people of the United States. A podcast about citizenship. About engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues. And how to have a voice in what happens next.

Welcome to our new episode of this is democracy. This week, we are going to return to the Middle East. We did an episode a few weeks ago with Peter Beinart on the conflict between Israel and Hamas. And today we're going to take an even more historical deep dive. We're going to look at the 1970s, which I think historians have come to agree is a period of major transformation in the region. And we're going to look at what happened in the 1970s and how the experience of that crucial decade had deep influence upon the events that we're seeing today and probably will continue to have deep influence upon where we go from where we are today in the region. This is a case where history is not only part of the past, but really is ever present in our contemporary conflicts and our contemporary efforts to understand the conflicts around us. We're fortunate to be joined by a person who's a close friend and someone who I think is one of the really great scholars of the Middle East from the 1960s to the present. This is Salim Yaqub. He's a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. and director of UCSB Center for Cold War Studies and International History. Salim, it's so good to have you on the podcast.

It's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Salim Yaqub is the author of three books that I highly recommend to all of our listeners. His first book, Containing Arab Nationalism, is really, I think, as close to the definitive work as is possible on the Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East, which was really the first American Cold War Doctrine for major influence, even perhaps for attempted dominance in the region.

Salim's second book, which is really one of my favorites, "Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and the US Middle East relations in the 1970s". This is a book that looks at events in the Middle East, but also within the United States and the emerging Arab American community, which becomes very important as Salim shows to American politics in the 1970s. It's also a book filled with wonderful anecdotes about Woody Allen. and Henry Kissinger and various other individuals. So I encourage all of our listeners to read it.

And Salim's most recent book, "Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord". What a great title. The United States since 1945. And that title would certainly apply to the present as well as the entire period from 1945 to the present. Salim has written many important articles and other chapters on U.S. foreign policy, on the Middle East, and on Arab American political activism.

Before we turn to our conversation with Salim, we have, of course, our scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Zachary, what's the title of your poem today? "To Israel, a Widow". "To Israel, a Widow". Wow. Let's hear it.

Isaac Singer once said you were an encounter with the supposedly dead, and I suppose he is right. You're a land of old men and infants held tight and sandy ancient ruined coasts. All of them were always supposed to be ghosts. Few wars can be fought with history, but you have fought them all, have saved a generation from fighting back the fall. Yet, though you have somehow survived on promises that you revived, it must be said you've built yourself a cage. No war should be fought with rage

The grandchildren of the widower, the children of the hollowed, held in their tunnels underground, are lost and must be found. Your neighbors remain, to say the least, uncharitable, Lips smacking for the feast, break through the garden fence. Can there be any recompense? No, I am convinced all moral questions will remain unanswered. You are alive, and soon you must have peace. If only so, it might be said, all had a chance to count their debt.

I love the doggerel in there Zachary. What is your poem about?

My poem? It's hard to explain. I'm not sure I perfectly understand what I was trying to get at either. But. I think it's sort of an attempt to understand the place of Israel today, but also in particular from the perspective of the 1970s, a period when Israel was still led in large part by a generation which was defined by the Holocaust, but it was also beginning to really develop its own sort of distinct Israeli identity that still shaped by that, the sort of last exile to Israel from Europe and other parts of the Middle East, and in some cases from within the territory of Israel.

And to understand that mindset, but also to apply that to today and how that history informs this moment of violence. between Israel and Hamas and maybe the lessons we can draw from these many decades of conflict.

I love the arc in your poem, Zachary, from Isaac Bashevik Singer, who sort of represents the early generation of European Ashkenazi Jews who settle Israel. And then, of course, the generational change that I sort of feel in your poem as it goes through to where we are today, which is a Middle East that looks very different, of course, from The world of Isaac Petrovic Singer in the 1950s and 60s, right? Yes, very much so.

Salim, maybe that's a great point of entry. As I mentioned at the top of the episode, you're one of a number of historians, you're one of the leading historians, making the case that the 1970s, this period about a quarter century after World War II, that the 1970s is a real turning point for the region and also for U.S. policy. How should we begin to understand that?

Sure. And first I just want to say, thanks for sharing that poem, Zachary. It's very powerful. I'm going to want to go back and read it again, listen to it again and linger over it.

But, in answer to your question Jeremy, the the seventies really are a very pivotal decade for a lot of reasons and in a lot of places, but certainly for the history of the Middle East and the history of U.S. involvement in that region. I mean, what you see in the 70s is the you know, sort of the last vestiges of European imperialism being removed with the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf region in the, in the first couple years of the decade. You know, the French had vacated North Africa in the previous decade and earlier than that. And so what you see then is a new, or maybe the continuation of a previous era in which the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union becoming more and more active in that region.

It's also, and also, you know, they're bringing the Cold War struggle, you know, to the region in a way that hadn't quite happened previously. Also, I mean, certainly the 1973 war is very key for all sorts of reasons that we'll probably get into. It's, you know, during and shortly after that war that the power of the oil producing Middle Eastern states, and in this case, particularly the Arab states, because they actually mount an embargo against the United States and some Western countries becomes, you know, unavoidable, you know, it becomes impossible to ignore.

And of course, the lingering after effects of the oil embargo and of the OPEC price increases are gonna last for the remainder of the decade and into the following one. And, you know, also the manner in which the Arab Israeli War of 1973 ends and the kind of diplomacy that comes in its wake sets the agenda for Arab Israeli peacemaking for years and in some cases, you know, arguably decades to come.

So it's, and then I guess you could, I would just add that, if you fast forward to the closing years of the decade, you start seeing the emergence of political Islam as a really powerful force, primarily with the Iranian revolution of 1978 to 1979. But there also were some pretty important events taking place in the Arab world. The seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, you know, right around the same time that the Iranian hostage crisis begins.

And if, you know, if you want to count, consider the Middle East in its more, in a broader geographical frame, you could look at the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, also right around that time in December 1979 as ushering in a whole new set of issues that will define the last years of the Cold War and set the agenda for the way in which the Cold War ends.

Certainly you've given us a sense of the density of conflict and change occurring in that, in that decade. Zachary, you had a question? Yeah.

Why was the 1973 war, which you mentioned, so transformative for Jews, Arabs, Muslims, and also for, for many Americans?

Yeah, that's a great question. Well certainly it's transformative for Arabs and Israelis because it's sort of place puts the Arab Israeli conflict into a new dimension, you know, the immediately preceding years, you know, between 1967 and 1973 were ones in which the Israelis were occupying the lands that they had taken over in that war. And they sort of felt invincible. They didn't think that they really needed to, take seriously the diplomatic overtures that the Egyptian government under President Sadat had extended to them early, you know, earlier in the decade. They felt that they could really hold out for a much more dramatic set of concessions coming from the Arab side.

And essentially what happens with the 1973 war, which is on the Arab side, waged by Egypt and Syria primarily, is that it kind of shocks the Israelis out of their complacency and forces them to confront the fact that they actually really are still vulnerable. And that in turn, you know, makes it increasingly clear to them that they have to reach some kind of political accommodation with their Arab neighbors perhaps on terms, you know, not quite as favorable as the ones that they had been holding out for previously. And it's also, it's from the Arab side, it's important because it rekindles a sense of pride or restores a sense of pride that had been very seriously damaged by the debacle of 1967.

And in fact, I mean, from the standpoint at least of Egypt. It's psychologically very important because Egypt and Sadat feel that they need to show the world, and maybe more particularly the United States and Israel, that they're not total pushovers, that they are, you know, that Egypt is a force to be reckoned with. And having made that case, even though Militarily, the war ends up going quite badly for both Egypt and Syria. Nonetheless, because they do a lot better than they did in 1967, that restores a measure of respect, and maybe more importantly, self respect, and that gives at least Sadat the confidence to move forward and enter into increasingly intimate peace negotiations with Israel, you know, at first brokered by the United States, but eventually face to face.

I don't want us to jump too quickly to the present. I want us to stay in the seventies, but the question really has to be asked. Many have made an analogy between the October, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the 1973 attack by the Arab states on Israel, do you see an analogy between those two events?

Well, I mean, there are some similarities, but in the end, I would say they're kind of superficial. I mean, I guess the, you know, one, obviously, it's an attack on Israel. Although in the 1973 case, it's not an attack on Israel per se. It's an attack on Israeli forces in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. But nonetheless, it's an attack that the Israelis are not prepared for. And, is much more damaging to the Israelis than anyone thought possible.

Of course, the major difference between 1973 and 2023 is that this is, the attack by Hamas is, you know, primarily against civilians. It entails not traditional military methods, but really horrific, and, you know, close up forms of attack that were, of course, recorded in very grisly ways that, and so that the level of shock, I think extends, it's a different kind of shock. It's a much more visceral sort of shock. And I think it is extended, it has extended much more, powerfully around the world then and especially the Western world than the shock of 1973 did, you know, partly because of the nature of the attack, and also because of the nature of media now as opposed to 50 years ago.

One of the things that's striking about the '73 war to me as a historian, Salim, and I wonder if you react the same way, is how this terrible war, and a war that initially looked like it might lead to the collapse of Israel and then, as you said, turns around relatively quickly with Israel occupying for a short time more territory than it had before the war. Correct. How, this terrible war then leads to a peace process? First of all, do you see a connection between what many call the Camp David process that eventually leads to an agreement between Israel and Egypt brokered in part by the United States? Do you see a strong connection there? And how should we understand that connection?

Oh yeah, there is a very strong connection. I mean, I would frame it in the following way, that the war and its immediate aftermath opened up a new phase in which it was widely recognized that some sort of diplomatic process between Israel and its Arab neighbors was both possible and necessary. I mean, on that, virtually everyone agreed. The difference was on the scope and nature of that diplomatic process.

There was, at the end of the war, an emerging international consensus that what really needed to happen was, as some sort of comprehensive settlement, between Israel on the one hand and its Arab neighbors on the other, you know, with the Palestinians playing some kind of role, although that was not clearly understood as yet. And as a result of this process, you know, according to this vision, you would have a full Israeli withdrawal from all of the territories occupied in 1967. That would be the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, and in exchange for that withdrawal, the Arab states would extend recognition to Israel and commit to living in peace with Israel, which was something they had not previously done.

And in most cases continued to refuse to do in the years after 1960 and 1973. So that was the emerging consensus that you start to see in late '73 early 1974. But there's also, there's a contrary scenario and this is the one that is put forward most powerfully and resourcefully by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who does not think that it would be a good idea for the United States to pressure Israel to withdraw from all of the territory occupied in 1967. He thinks that a more stable scenario is one in which Israel is allowed to hold on to significant portions of that occupied territory. Now, we can later talk about why he felt that way, but that's was what he wanted to do. And so what Kissinger sets out to do, and it's really a pretty remarkable diplomatic performance, is he brokers or he encourages the development of a dialogue between Egypt and Israel.

He quite early intuits that Anwar Sadat of Egypt, although he would much prefer a comprehensive settlement in which Israel withdraws from all of the occupied territory from 1973, nonetheless, I'm talking about Sadat now, would be willing to accept some, a more bilateral arrangement where Egypt gets back the Sinai and the remaining Arab territories are either, you know, either remain under Israeli control or their status is you know, less certain. I mean, the sine qua non for Sadat is getting back the Sinai, and he's willing to take a less hardline view regarding the other occupied territories. Kissinger, you know, very brilliantly senses this. You know, almost immediately after the war ends. So Kissinger, you know, very skillfully cultivates Sadat and, you know, takes advantage of the fact that Sadat is willing to be a lot more conciliatory in negotiations with Israel than other Arab parties, especially, Assad, Hafez al Assad of Syria is prepared to be.

And so through a series of very complicated and clever diplomatic initiatives, he manages to sideline Syria, although that takes, that process takes a couple of years and it's something that Asad himself is not quite aware is occurring until it's too late for him to stop it. He ends, he brings an end to the Arab oil embargo and he, essentially puts in place a diplomatic process where Egypt withdraws from the confrontation with Israel, and the beauty of that, from Kissinger's perspective, is that it results in the subtraction of Egyptian power from the Arab Israeli equation.

And once that has been accomplished, the ability of the remaining Arab actors, Syria, Jordan, the Palestine Liberation Organization, you know, these, the other parties that have territorial claims, that they want to see satisfied, their ability to get those claims satisfied is sharply diminished in the absence of Egyptian power. And that in a sense makes it impossible for another Arab Israeli war like the one that occurred in 1973 to break out. And indeed, if you look over the history over the last five decades, there's been plenty of really, really horrific strife, but there has been no general Arab Israeli war of that sort.

And, you know, that achieves Kissinger's objectives of first removing a flashpoint that he fears could spark a superpower confrontation, but it also eases the pressure on Israel. And makes it possible for Israel to take its time about considering withdrawal from any other occupied territories. And you know, as we've seen, the extent to which Israel has relinquished territories after giving up the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, that was the big key that Egypt, that was the key gain that Egypt made. And that was realized, not under Kissinger, but under Jimmy Carter a few years later with Camp David.

Once Egypt has the Sinai Peninsula back, it's out of the war. And then Israel's occupation of the remaining territories is fortified. Now obviously the conflict has taken ups and downs. The diplomacy has gone through ups and downs ever since that time. But I think the key ingredients. The key sort of strategic realities that we need to keep in mind to understand, you know, what kind of diplomatic scenarios have been possible in the years since 1973, we need to keep in mind this achievement of Henry Kissinger of pulling Egypt out of confrontation with Israel and thereby, in his view, making the diplomacy more manageable. Right.

And this is something many of us have chewed on for a long time, right? How to evaluate Kissinger's diplomatic shuttle diplomacy and his efforts to, as you say, take Egypt out of what had been a coalition of anti Israeli states. One other point I thought I'd add for you to comment on, and then I know Zachary has a question too, is part of what he's also doing is making the United States the most powerful external actor in the region. He's sidelining the Soviet Union, which had been an ally of Egypt, right? And that, of course, has implications for the United States in the region, taking us all the way up to the Iraq war, correct?

Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, essentially what Camp David accomplishes, and this is often missed because it wasn't something that Jimmy Carter, I think, really was focusing on. I mean, he really, I think Carter genuinely was trying to make peace between Arabs and Israelis. But one byproduct of the Camp David Agreement is that, you know, Egypt is removed from confrontation with Israel. It enters into an alliance with Israel. I mean, with the United States, whereby it starts receiving nearly as much economic and other kinds of aid as Israel does for some years.

And that's a huge strategic blow to the Soviet Union. And again, that gets masked because the Soviet Union in some ways is more visibly active in the region in the years thereafter. I mean, it really, you know, it flexes its muscles. It, you know, has all kinds of agreements and makes various diplomatic gains on the Arabian peninsula with its relationship with South Yemen and, you know, further to the East, it's invading and occupying Afghanistan. It's cementing its strategic alliance with Syria. It's doing all these things that are on the surface fairly menacing, but that masks the underlying diplomatic reality, which is that the Soviet Union has basically been frozen out of Arab Israeli diplomacy and becoming increasingly irrelevant to it. And then, of course, it's not too much longer after that, that the Soviet Union itself ceases to exist.

In the United States, even though it had already been flexing its muscles pretty aggressively in the Middle East during the 1980s. And for that reason, I sometimes argue that, the cold war, the post cold war era began a decade earlier, a decade early in the Middle East. Nonetheless, by the time we get to the early nineties, it's unmistakable because the Soviet Union has ceased to exist. And the United States really is now the sole remaining superpower. And its ability to call the shots is made even more unmistakable by the victory in the first Gulf war of 1991.

Right. Right. Zachary. In this context of bilateral agreements, and a sort of cooling of the conflict during this period, why do these efforts fail to produce a Palestinian state and achieve a two state solution? Was that the point of these efforts or why do the sort of claims to statehood of the Palestinian people during this period fail to be represented at these, in these major agreements?

Well, that's a great question. I mean, there are lots of different aspects to it. I mean, on one level, you can answer it by pointing out that the gap between, if we're talking first in the early 1970s and in the aftermath of the 1973 war, the gap between Palestinian aspirations and, reality was just unbridgeable. Now that gap narrows in the years ahead, because essentially what happens is the Palestinians. scale back their ambitions in ways that make them at least theoretically compatible with Israel's continued existence. So if, you know, in the early 1970s, the formal position of the Palestine Liberation Organization was the liberation of all of Palestine, essentially the dismantling of the Zionist state and the creation of the so called democratic state.

Sometimes it's referred to as the secular democratic state, but usually the term secular was not attached to it. It was just, you know, the democratic state in which, at least on the surface, Arabs and Jews, you know, Muslims, Christians and Jews would all have equal rights. If you look closer at the proposal, you could see that it wasn't quite that because there were, there was this expectation that a large portion of the Jewish Israeli population would actually leave. And so it's really not, it's not a very serious proposal. But it's also not serious because it's just, there's just no way that it can be realized militarily.

Now, what you see happening over the subsequent years, you know, the years after 1973, is that the Palestinian movement, and in particular Yasser Arafat, who is the chairman of the PLO, they start inching towards a compromise where they, you know, the first there's all sorts of qualifications and disclaimers, but, essentially they're moving closer to accepting a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. And essentially, disavowing or at least setting aside their claims to the rest of Palestine. And over the years, this becomes increasingly explicit, you know, it becomes official in the late 1980s where the Palestinian, the PLO basically, you know, disavows its claims to the rest of Palestine and says that it is ready for a two state settlement, in which a Palestinian state will live alongside Israel.

So because the Palestinians have scaled back their demands, have essentially become more realistic, the international community takes note of this and starts becoming more forceful about pushing this two state settlement. And that's one of the reasons why I believe the 1970s are such a pivotal decade is that it's really during that decade, especially the second half, that the scenario for a two state settlement comes into existence. Now, at first, neither Israel nor the United States embraced this idea. Carter comes pretty close to doing so. I mean, if he, didn't have to think about domestic politics and other, you know, diplomatic obstacles, I think Carter, you know, during his presidency, probably would have. You know, come out in favor of a two state settlement himself, but he lands somewhere short of that because of, the issue from his standpoint just isn't quite ripe yet. But in subsequent years, you get to the point where, you know, even the United States embraces the idea of a two state settlement.

Well, the Israelis are, I mean, they've talked about the desirability of that, but they're not, they haven't made the same kinds of official undertakings that would bring that into being. And of course, I mean, a major obstacle to that is the continuing colonization of the West Bank, where you do have Israeli settlers increasing their number at a rate and, you know, in various configurations that make a viable Palestinian state harder and harder to imagine, but nonetheless, you know, the idea of a two state settlement gets enshrined, not just in, you know, international politics, but in American diplomacy as well.

Salim, the PLO, the Palestinian Palestinian Liberation Organization, which is the predecessor to the Palestinian organization led by Mahmoud Abbas today in the 1970s, it's often depicted at least within the United States, accurately or inaccurately as a terrorist organization. First of all, is that accurate? And how do we understand the intersection between concerns about terrorism, airplane hijackings, various other events, and the issues that you've laid out so well for us here?

Well, I mean, the PLO back then and in subsequent years was a very broad based organization, essentially a confederation of many disparate parties, some of which were committed to acts of terrorism and, you know, some of which actually did commit some pretty gruesome terroristic acts in the 1970s as in subsequent years.

The position of Yasser Arafat is somewhat ambiguous in that one gets the sense that he's not really crazy about this tendency and he would much prefer to see it ended, but he also feels limited in his ability to oppose some moves taken by Palestinians in the name of liberation, just because these movements have captured the imagination of Palestinian opinion, and to some extent have gained a certain cachet internationally, and there are also, you know, various, you know, more internecine disputes that he's navigating that, you know, from time to time, make it very difficult for him to stand in the way of groups like Black September. That's the organization that conducted the attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972 and similar groups. And sometimes he, you know, he goes further and actually pays lip service or, you know, praises groups that have not too long in the past committed acts of terrorism. So his position is definitely compromised. I mean, his hands are not clean in that respect.

And that of course is a, you know, a terrible political obstacle that he faces. I mean, in one respect, it, you know, his ambiguous stance on terrorism allows him to keep the Palestinian movement united. But it also serves to blacken the name of the PLO and the Palestinian movement in the eyes of many outside observers.

Is it effective though, Salim? I mean, I'm guessing that leaders of Hamas would look back and say, that the more radical PLO of the early seventies, when, for instance, Yasser Arafat comes to the United Nations and displays a weapon in his holster. And, you know, that image of radicalism and violence was more effective at getting attention than the scaling back of ambitions, as you put it before.

It's really hard to say. I mean, my overall inclination is to be, you know, very strongly opposed to the use of violence, especially terrorist violence, as a, you know, that's of course a more like a normative or moral stand. You know, when it comes to looking at it analytically and trying to assess, you know, in as detached a way as possible, you know, to what extent this move towards violence or these moves towards violence helped to put the Palestinian issue on the map I think there definitely there is a sense in which that kind of activity drew attention to the Palestinian cause and gave it a kind of visibility and stature that it might not otherwise have gained. But at the same time, it's also, as I said, blackened the name of the movement. So I would, I guess, you know, if I had my druthers and if I could wave a wand and change history, none of this, of these at least none of the really heinous forms of violence would have taken place.

I mean, obviously resisting occupation, you know, when you're confronting armed occupiers, that's a whole different ball game. So I would, I definitely, I very much regret that this move towards violence has occurred and has been embraced by so many. And of course, you know, even to, especially today, seeing, you know, what it's leading to makes me all the more firm in that conviction now, even today, though, there you're going to get arguments and they won't necessarily be completely off base that the October 7th attacks revived the Palestinian issue in a way that perhaps few other events could have done.

You know, because if you think about where things were, just, you know, in the weeks and days leading up to the attack with, Jake Sullivan, you know, kind of gloating that, oh, we've got the Middle East under control. Now we're moving towards normalization between Israel and its Arab neighbors and Arab countries further afield like Saudi Arabia. And the implication of all of that was, We're not going to be so hung up on the Palestinian issue that, you know, the Arab states will make peace with Israel and they will not condition their willingness to make peace on serious movement on the Palestine issue. I mean, there may be some fig leaf that they demand, but seriously, you know, fundamentally, they're not letting the Palestine issue stand in their way.

So there was the scenario that was coming into view of Israel normalizing relations with a whole bunch of Arab countries, especially very prosperous ones, developing all kinds of lucrative trade relations and joint ventures, you know, with these wealthy Arab states and essentially being able to continue colonizing the West Bank. And, you know, I was very depressed by that scenario. I didn't see any way of breaking out of it. Now I am utterly aghast at what's happened on October 7th. And I don't by any means favor breaking out of the impasse by those means, but that is what has happened. And the Palestine issue is on the map and on the diplomatic agenda in ways that it wasn't two months ago. So, you know, so that's the kind of logic that people will invoke. To make the case that there is a place for this kind of violence, even though I very firmly reject that argument.

I appreciate, Salim, the care and thoughtfulness in the way you said that, and I think it's a very reasonable position you've adopted. Zachary?

How should we understand the legacy of these sort of failed, but also to a certain extent successful peace agreements in the 1970s, and then also, of course, the war in '73, the developments that we've been discussing, how should we understand the legacies of these events today? I'm thinking in particular, of their legacy, in regards to the creation of Hamas and the situation pre-October 7th, which precipitated the current conflict.

Yeah, that's a really, uh, good question. A difficult one, but a good one. I mean, the way I think about what was achieved in the 1970s is that it, there's a scenario in which the moves towards greater cooperation between, let's say, Egypt and Israel, in that decade, could have led to broader peace settlements, but they did not. And essentially, that was what I think Jimmy Carter, and I think it was what, Anwar Sadat hoped for, but in a curious way. Anwar Sadat ultimately proved less adamant about linking peace with Israel between, you know, a bilateral peace between Egypt and Israel to a broader set of agreements between Israel and its other Arab neighbors, and especially, some arrangement for the Palestinians.

So there was kind of this. curious situation where Jimmy Carter, you know, he really wanted the bilateral agreement that he was brokering between Egypt and Israel to be a stepping stone to broader agreements between Israel and other Arab countries and between Israel and the Palestinians. But because of the kind of agreement that Carter was ultimately obliged to accept and because I know, frankly, the very hard line and determined stance that Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister at the time took. And because of, you know, Carter had other issues on his plate that were becoming more pressing, especially the Iranian revolution. You have to think, you just, when you think about the chronology, you really get a sense of how these issues fit together.

You know, the Camp David Agreement, the first agreement, the one you actually forged at Camp David, was in September 1978. The Iranian Revolution erupts in the weeks and months right after that. By the time the actual formal agreement, the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that was kind of blocked out in general terms at Camp David is achieved. That's March 1979. So that's a couple months after the Shah has fled and the new Islamist government has taken over in Iran. And you know, it's not too long after that, that the American hostages in Tehran get taken. So Carter's attention is increasingly sucked into this black hole of misery that, you know, ultimately, you know, arguably ends his presidency.

So you know, Carter really wasn't in a position to build on the peace agreement that he had brokered at Camp David in, in the way that he hoped. And in fact, there's some poignant statements by Carter, private statements that he makes around this time and, you know, the summer of 1979 or so where he says, wow, you know, if I end up leaving office without really making a dent in the Palestinian issue, people will rightly say that I was a failure. And, you know, sadly, that was his legacy. At least as far as the Israel Palestine issue is concerned.

Salim, it strikes me that one of the legacies that's unavoidable is the continued lack of Palestinian statehood, that the two state solution that you described so well doesn't come into being. And looking back over this period over the 1970s, one might have thought that things might have gone that way.

The Arab states, as you say, in 1973 are united and they show that they are not as weak as they had been in 67. The Saudis and the other oil rich states are able to use oil as a weapon in many ways to bring down the American economy or to cause enormous pain in the United States, both at the beginning of the 1970s period, and then also at the end of the decade. So there's rising Arab power.

Israel also seems to recognize, as you said, that it has to make some kind of deal with its neighbors. So why do the Palestinians continue to be victimized? Why is that one of the overriding legacies from this period?

Well, I mean, there are lots of complexities to that question, but you can also answer it in a very simple way. Which is, I would say, because of the Camp David Agreement. It pulled Egypt out of confrontation for good. I mean, Egypt was already drifting away from its prior commitments to the other Arab countries, but it, you know, it formalized it. It formalized Egypt's removal from the conflict, you know, transformed Egypt into an ally of the United States, and that really did make it a lot easier for Israel to withstand international calls for some kind of accommodation with the Palestinians.

And again, you've got, you know, I was just talking about poignant statements by Carter. There's another one that he makes in 1985, in a book that he wrote called The Blood of Abraham. Mm-Hmm. in which he very starkly and in a kind of self-incriminating way, says that. What the Camp David Agreement did was subtract Egyptian power from the Arab Israeli equation, and that made it easier for Israel to continue dominating its neighbors and continuing to occupy the West Bank. He just says that very starkly. And I think that's true.

There are, you can go a little bit further into the 20th century and look, for example, at the Oslo peace process, where there was kind of a second chance that the parties had to really come to grips with the Israel Palestine dispute. And you do have, I mean, a major transformation occurs in the sense that the United States recognizes the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Israelis, you know, get into dialogue with the PLO and with Yasser Arafat, you have, you actually do have the, you know, establishment of the Palestinian Authority. So there is some, there's like a physical presence. There's a, like a beachhead that the Palestinian movement is able to establish in both the West Bank and Gaza. And it, at least on the surface, it appears that there's an opportunity to build on that nucleus and transform it into a two state settlement.

But what happens is that the Israelis are able to continue expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the way the agreements are drafted are such that, you know, the Israelis are able to invoke certain loopholes and the Palestinians complain, but they don't have sufficient leverage with the United States to get the Americans to take that seriously.

And of course that gets complicated by the fact that you do have Palestinian militants who reject the Oslo Accords and try to sabotage them by engaging in increasingly grisly terrorist attacks against not just settlers in the West Bank, but, you know, against civilians inside Israel, and that of course gives Israel justification to conduct, you know, massive retaliatory raids against the Palestinians.

And so essentially what happens is the, you know, the settler population during the very decade in which the Oslo peace process is unfolding doubles. And so that, you know, from the standpoint of ordinary Palestinians, this is really antithetical to any notion that a two state settlement is on the horizon. And because, you know, the way in which the Palestinians react against this creeping annexation often takes violent forms, the Israelis respond in, you know, with their own forms of violence and the, you know, you get this kind of vicious cycle where each side becomes more and more entrenched in its rejection of the other.

I mean, I, you know, these issues are never simple, but, I do wish that the Clinton administration had come to grips with this settlements issue in a much more serious and thorough going way. When it had the opportunity to do so, because the, I think the consequences of that failure are very much with us today.

Right. Just one follow up question on this, because I think your explanation is so thoughtful and balanced. So many Israelis that you and I know, and Zachary knows, and others know want peace. Why, in your narrative, has it been so hard for Israel to pursue peace? In your narrative, in your description, Israel is in some ways using its alliance with Egypt to avoid hard decisions with the Palestinians. Why do you think that's the case?

Well, because it's also using its alliance with the United States to avoid hard decisions regarding the Palestinians. And this is something that I think the United States really bears some responsibility for and needs to correct if we're going to see any serious movement on this issue.

I mean, I think it's understandable that within the context of Israeli politics, you see a move to the right, you know, over the last couple of decades, and that it's politically very difficult for groups or politicians advocating compromise with the Palestinians to gain popular support, just because it's so easy to point to acts of really horrific violence coming from the Palestinian side and to make the case that there is no suitable partner for the Israelis to make peace with.

I think, I mean, again, these are very complicated issues and I don't, you know, want to sound, you know, glib you'd just be sitting back and pontificating and saying that it's easy to reverse course or change the direction. Nonetheless, I think fundamentally what needs to happen is for the United States to start to become a lot firmer with the Israelis and to set clearer limits on what the United States will tolerate. In that context, that would, in my view, create political space for forces within Israel that wish to take a more conciliatory stance towards the Paelstinians. Because essentially the only limits against which Israel is brushing up, the only limits it encounters are the limits imposed by its immediate adversaries.

There aren't really significant diplomatic constraints or other kinds of constraints being imposed by the United States. I'll give you an example of an instance where that occurred and was promising and, you know, make the case that that kind of thing needs to happen again. Back in the early 90s, there, when Yitzhak Shamir was the prime minister, you know, he wanted a loan guarantee from the First Bush administration, and President Bush refused to extend that guarantee or refused to sign off on it, unless he could get a commitment from Shamir that there would be a cessation of settlement building in the occupied territories. This created a huge diplomatic crisis between the United States and Israel, and there was enormous pressure on Bush to back down. And he didn't. He stuck to his guns and eventually that resulted in a change of government inside Israel because figures on the more dovish labor side were able to say, look, this is what happens when we follow the approach of Likud and figures like Shamir. We get into a confrontation with the one country whose help we cannot afford to lose. So if you follow our approach, the more dovish Labor Party approach, we will restore our good relationship with the United States, and that will be better for Israel's security.

And that worked, and it resulted in the election of Yitzhak Rabin in place of Shamir. Now, there are ways in which Bush subsequently dropped the ball that caused the victory that he had achieved on the settlements issue to be a Pyrrhic one, which I can go into if you wish, but I don't think that's important. But what it shows is the ability of the United States, if it flexes some diplomatic muscle, to affect change inside Israel.

And I think in the, when those sorts of things start to happen on the Israeli side, I think that also empowers Moderate forces on the Palestinian side in situations like the one we're in now with situations of polarization that tends to strengthen hardliners on each side. I mean, it's more complicated in Israel now because Netanyahu was so unbelievably unpopular but in absent those complicating political issues, the general dynamic is one in which the more polarization, the more violence you get.

The stronger hardliners on each side become. So I think in a situation in which the United States is exercising greater leverage that's nudging the Israelis toward a more conciliatory position, that will make it easier for moderate form of forces on the Palestinian side to assert themselves. And this certainly won't happen overnight, but I think you could start a process that ultimately results in the political, diminution of Hamas. I mean, we're far from that now, but we, that's where we need to start heading.

Right. Which is the opposite of full scale siege warfare in Gaza. Exactly. Exactly

Zachary, I want to turn to you now. Salim has given us a tour de force here. He's in 30 to 5 minutes, 40 minutes, he's provided a really thoughtful, balanced, rigorous overview of an entire decade and its legacies for today, many of its legacies for today. And I know you have been deeply involved in debates about these policy issues on campus with other students. We discussed this in our prior episode. How do you react to Salim's historical framing for what you're debating today among students and others regarding this region of the world?

I think it's very helpful, certainly, in pointing to places, lost opportunities, and hopefully, lays out a series of of mistakes that that cannot be made again. I worry, though, about the, I think that maybe one of the things it points to as well is a sort of dilemma that sort of maybe contradictory forces that are shaping the problem today, which is that in order for there to be a sort of viable, moderate Palestinian force with which Israel can make peace, there has to be a moderate sort of political force in Israel willing to make peace.

But in order for that to occur, there has to be a sort of cessation of radical Palestinian violence that enables those on the far right in Israel. And so, and I think, one of the key lessons that at least I will take from Professor Yaqub's, very, Yaqub's very helpful analysis and history for us is the importance of the role of the United States in maybe catalyzing that process in, at the very least, putting our thumb on the scales to sort of break out of that cycle and of that, sort of constant, sort of lost opportunity, if you will.

Yeah, no, I think one of the real strengths, one of the many strengths of Salim's account and his scholarship is that it doesn't make the United States all powerful, far from it, but it does show how the United States might be the one actor that can play a role at certain moments in bringing the different sides together or pushing them apart. I think there, Salim's account gives us evidence of both of those things. As a final word, Salim, if you had a few seconds with President Biden, then what would you say as a historian that he should be thinking about?

Yeah. I mean, I think it would be the point that I made most recently, just about the need to show some greater firmness and to really attend to the details, particularly regarding what's happening on the West bank. I think, you know, one, when I said that George H. W. Bush eventually dropped the ball. He allowed the, you know, the next president, Yitzhak Rabin, to essentially use a form of words to get around the settlement issue. What Yitzhak Rabin said was, you're right, President Bush, there should be no more additional Jewish settlements in the West Bank. I will seize the building of new settlements. But what he then promptly did was start expanding existing settlements. And, you know, Bush accepted that distinction. But, you know, from the standpoint of the Palestinians, it really was not a difference at all. So I would say that you just, you need to pay really close attention to the details of what's taking place and, you know, to think about their impact on all of the parties to this dispute.

And I think Salim, that's a perfect place for us to not really close, but sort of, no, but bring this discussion to a point. I think what your scholarship displays and what you have provided today are two lessons for us above all. You know, one is that close attention to the history really matters. The events that we're living with today, reflect long developing, many long developing historical trajectories, and we can't really understand them. And we certainly shouldn't take sides before we understand this history. We have to pause and spend some time to look at where we've come from.

And that second to that one can speak for the interests, as I think you have, the historical interests of Palestinians, without in any way embracing the most extreme forms of violence, which you have clearly renounced and also argued are ineffective, in fact. And, I think that's really important. One doesn't have to give up on the Palestinian cause or the Israeli cause because the more extreme voices and extreme actors are the ones that are getting the most attention. Absolutely. So, Salim, thank you for educating us, for providing us a really valuable and missing background for most of our discussions. I hope our listeners will take what you say, read more, and think deeply before they jump to conclusions one way or another in this conflict. Salim, it's really been a pleasure and an honor to have you on our podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Jeremy and Zachary. Thank you so much. It was wonderful to have this conversation

And Zachary, thank you for your poem that I think resonates with some of the themes and thank you for your questions and thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this week of this is democracy.

This podcast is produced by the liberal arts ITS development studio. And the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Jerez Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. See you next time.

This is Democracy. A podcast about the people of the United States. A podcast about citizenship. About engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues. And how to have a voice in what happens next.

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we're going to talk about a topic that is not only a major news story today, it has been a major news story throughout the last 50 years of American history, but particularly the last decade. And it's the story about the rise of China. Not simply the rise of the Chinese economy, but the rise of China as a military power, and the ways in which that rise has changed American calculations about security, stability, and democracy in Asia, and the ways in which recent events have perhaps shaken some of our historical assumptions about the relationship between the United States, China, Taiwan, and the region. We're joined by two scholars who are really experts, not simply on this issue, but have been thinking about the broader strategic environment in Asia for many years, and both of whom have also done groundbreaking scholarly work and policy advising around these issues. We're really fortunate to have them with us, and they have written a brand new book that I've just read and want to recommend to all of our listeners, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China. The authors and our guests today are Hal Brands and Michael Beckley. Hal and Mike, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having us, Jeremi.

Thanks so much for having us, Jeremi.

Hal Brands is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He writes frequently for Bloomberg Opinion and for many other publications, often with Mike, often with other authors, often just himself. He's written a number of important books that I've been fortunate enough to read, some I've even imposed on my students, The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great Power Rivalry Today. Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, he co-wrote that with Charlie Edel, who we've also had on the podcast, and American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump. Those are just three of his recent books that I particularly like. Michael Beckley is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Hal is also a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. I should have said that. Previously, Mike was an International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard, and he worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Rand Corporation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He continues to advise the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Defense. And Mike's first book, which is an excellent book, I highly recommend, Unrivaled, Why America Will Remain the World's Sole Superpower, that was written in 2018. And Mike and Hal have followed that up, as I said, with this new book, hot off the presses, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China. Before we turn to our conversation with Hal and Mike about China, Taiwan, and U.S. policy, we have, of course, Mr. Zachary's scene-setting poem. What's your poem title today, Zachary? ("Probably.") Let's hear it.

In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, Who wakes up in cold sweats and worries silently. The sky will fall and no one here will notice it at all. In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, Who stares themself in the face, pieces in the wrong place, And sees in the mirror's trace a blurry line of missing lace. In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, Who sees the ocean from the pier, who watches fishes swim below. Couldn't we be freer like the tuna in the undertow? In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, Who writes poetry and imagines winter scenes, Who hears and sees and sniffs adventure in the breeze. But his poetry is in his head, the winter scene he dreams in bed. And I can say what I can hear and seek adventure without fear. In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, And all I can say is probably someday there will be peace.

What's your poem about, Zachary?

My poem is really about the similarities, the societal similarities that can be lost when it comes to superpower rivalry, but also the cold realities that still define that world and the ways in which even though we may be more similar and have more in common than we think that these rivalries will continue.

Right, the geopolitics still create barriers to cooperation. (Yes, inevitably.) Well, and that's exactly front and center where Hal and Mike's book lands. Hal, maybe we can start with you. I was very taken early on in the book and in your other writings, you and Mike, you talk about the "Chinese dream." And I think it's a way of trying to understand Chinese strategic aims, the way Chinese leadership thinks about its place in the world. How should we understand what you mean by this concept of the "Chinese dream?"

It's a good question and I think it gets at one of the empirical or methodological difficulties in writing about China. Chinese intentions are often not as inscrutable as we think, but it is true that revisionist powers in general tend to have an incentive not to fully advertise what they intend to achieve over time. And the Chinese system doesn't have anything quite as explicit as the national security strategy or some of the strategic documents that the United States publishes, even though there are defense white papers and meaningful speeches and things of that sort. And so you have to piece it together a little bit from what is said and what is done and occasionally from what is not said.

And the way that we make sense of it in the book is that we should think about Chinese intentions, or Chinese aims, in four ways or as encompassing four different things. And the first one is just kind of what every authoritarian regime wants, which is to stay in power. If Xi Jinping were overthrown, if the CCP lost its grip on power, that would probably have fatal consequences for Chinese leaders. And so it's not surprising that basically every decision that the Chinese Communist Party makes is filtered through the prism of what will this do for the party's legitimacy and power. But that doesn't mean that China has purely domestically focused or limited ambitions.

I think a second goal would be making China whole again, so to speak, basically getting back the pieces of China, whether those are Taiwan or Hong Kong or parts of disputed border regions with India that in the CCP's narrative were wrested away from China when it was weak and divided and must now come back to China for China's national rejuvenation to be complete. Some of those territorial claims are actually pretty extensive. They include, for instance, basically all of the South China Sea. And so it can be hard to distinguish that second goal from a third goal, which is carving out a sphere of influence in Asia, basically a domain in which Chinese interests are privileged and other great powers, particularly the United States, are kicked to the margin. Xi once referred to this as Asia for Asians, which is, it appears to be something of a geopolitical euphemism for a region in which China is supreme because the United States has been evicted geopolitically from the region.

And then the fourth goal and the most ambitious one is to make China the most powerful country in the world. That's probably a longer term objective. To the extent that the CCP talks about it, something that it talks about happening on something like a 15 to 30-year time frame from now. But it's become more and more explicit and harder and harder to miss in a lot of the things that the CCP says and in many of the things that it does as well.

So, Professor Beckley, it sounds like China, while portraying itself as the anti-imperialist power, is in many ways molding its sphere of influence on a sort of traditional imperialism.

Yeah, I think Chinese leaders, almost across the board, view China's role in the world as being naturally one of greatness. And China, it's important to remember, is a revanchist power. According to the CCP's narrative, there are lost Chinese territories that one way or another have to be reabsorbed, as Hal has pointed out. And this current situation where the United States is currently the dominant power in China has to grow as a regional power and play by the rules that it didn't have a hand in writing, they see as a giant historical anomaly that they want to set straight. And I think, in addition to all the points that Hal raised, I think it's important to note just how frequently Chinese analysts and leaders look to the United States as the main threat to that "Chinese dream." I mean, part of this is just the obvious fact that the United States prevents the reincorporation of Taiwan, that the U.S. Navy is in the South China Sea, but I think it also reflects historical legacies that color how Chinese analysts and leaders view the United States. There is definitely a dominant sort of strategic culture that tends to portray Eastern culture as harmonious and Pacific and Western culture as inherently militaristic. I think there's a holdover from the Marxist teaching that many of the leaders were raised on that views capitalist powers as inherently imperialist and just using China for its resources and sucking it dry.

And then there's the offensive realist. I mean, John Mearsheimer is incredibly popular on Chinese syllabi. Every school that I've seen in China always has The Tragedy of Great Power Politics on it. And so there's this strong assumption that a country as powerful as the United States will definitely try to hold China down and then they can find all types of evidence for that. So just the key role that the United States plays, I think it's incredible how often it comes up when you start reading through Chinese strategic writings.

And Mike, if I could follow up on that, because I think it leads right into another key part of your book. You and Hal argue here, and I think it's a really important argument I haven't seen others articulate as clearly, that the Chinese are not just a rising power, you call them a "risen power," which is to say they have increased their potential, they've increased their power, but they've now plateaued and are facing headwinds and sources of decline. And that in this position of having risen and now at their position of maximum opportunity, this makes them particularly belligerent because of their fear of decline. Did I get that right? And can you elaborate on that?

That's absolutely right. A key point of the book is that double digit growth rates and a rapid rise is not the norm for any country and certainly not for China. In fact, most of Chinese history is very much the opposite. It's strife and poverty. I mean, really from the first Opium War in 1839 until the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, China's getting ripped apart by imperialist powers and internal conflicts that are among the worst civil wars in recorded history. Even after China unifies under communist rule in 1949, it almost immediately becomes the main enemy of the United States through the Korean War. And then when China's alliance with the Soviet Union falls apart in 1960, China is the main enemy of both Cold War superpowers. And so it's not until you get to the 1970s that China is not isolated, surrounded, and impoverished. And so in the book, we try to show that China's exceptional rise since the 1970s was the result of exceptional circumstances that we think are all starting to turn into liabilities that will drag China down.

I mean, since the 1970s, you've had US engagement and that was the start also of the period of hyper globalization. So China suddenly has these opportunities to really become the workshop of the world and export its goods all over the place. You have a Chinese government after the death of Mao in 1976 that says, we don't wanna do another cultural revolution, let's try reform and opening. And so they commit to a sort of smarter form of autocracy that's more technocratic and rewards good governance, especially economically. You have the greatest demographic dividend in history with something like 10 to 15 workers per retiree in China's population in the 90s and 2000s. Most countries don't get anywhere close to 5 to 1. And then you just had relative self-sufficiency in resources and easy access to those raw materials made growth very cheap.

But now all of those tailwinds that propelled China's rise are becoming headwinds. China's plowed through its resources. Half of its water and arable land, its oil are gone. It's the largest importer of food and energy. It's running out of people. That 10 to one ratio of workers to retirees is gonna collapse to two to one by the late 2030s. The government obviously is sliding back towards this sort of brutal dictatorship and a Maoist cult of personality that is gonna sacrifice future economic growth just to centralize power in Xi Jinping's hands. And then most importantly, the world is just starting to become belatedly a less welcoming environment. The United States used to engage China. Now I would argue it's essentially engaged in neo-containment of China. And many other major economies are following suit to varying degrees. China now faces thousands of new trade and investment barriers today that it didn't even as recently as 10 years ago. So from hyper-globalization to this sort of Cold War II scenario. These things are already dragging down China's growth and we think that they're actually gonna get worse in the years ahead.

But Professor Brands, I think we've also seen China reach out to other parts of the world, in particular developing countries, to try and increase its grip, which could be seen as an aspect of this imperialism, but does seem to show at least that there is a space for China, if not in the traditional centers of power, in new centers of power.

I think that's right. And I think one way of conceptualizing that is to view it as essentially a counter-containment strategy. And so Mike laid out all the ways in which countries, particularly the world's advanced democracies, have become more and more skeptical of Chinese intentions and more and more willing to do things to limit the reach of Chinese power, even when they're not willing to say explicitly that that's what they're doing.

It's interesting that Mike's absolutely right, that we're pursuing a form of containment vis-a-vis China, but we absolutely won't call it that and most other countries won't call it that either. And so the question for Beijing becomes, and this is something that the Chinese have been thinking about for a long time, what are areas where China can expand its influence, where it's less likely to run up against entrenched resistance from the United States and other countries? And the developing world looks like a pretty good place to do that from Beijing's perspective for a variety of reasons. One reason is that democratic governance tends to be less firmly entrenched in the developing world than it is in the developed world.

And so you have governments that may be more autocratic, they may simply be more corrupt, but they're easier targets in some ways for the expansion of Chinese influence. But even where that's not the case, there is a real desire for relations with China because China has things that the developing world needs, whether that's trade or it could be surveillance technology, it could be a variety of things. And so one of the areas where we think you'll see a particular Chinese push in the coming years is to try essentially to create an economic and technological sphere of influence that encompasses much of the developing world.

And to give you one example of this, you only have to go back about three years, maybe even a little less than that, to remember that there was a time when it appeared that much of the advanced democratic world might actually fall into part of a Chinese technological sphere of influence by allowing Huawei or other Chinese companies like ZTE to build out important parts of their 5G telecommunications network. That danger has been averted now for the most part because most governments in Europe, for instance, realized with an assist from COVID that they did not wanna be technologically dependent on a company that is enthralled to the CCP. But that argument has proven less persuasive in the developing world. Price may be the all important consideration for countries in Southeast Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa that are making choices about the future of their telecommunications networks. And so the fact that the CCP subsidizes companies like Huawei to such a high degree allows them to essentially come in with lower prices than firms in the developed world can. And so you may end up with a situation where China finds that its technological influence is easier to spread in the developing world than in the advanced democracies.

So Hal, just following up on those excellent points, your book, you and Mike argue that again, China's reached a stage as Mike described, where it has had this extraordinary rise, but now it's fearful of its own decline and its own problems internally. And so that encourages a more aggressive behavior and you draw analogies to late 19th century Germany, to Wilhelmine Germany and to Japan in the early 20th century in that part of the book. Why do you think that argument makes more sense than the argument that had been put forth by people like Kurt Campbell, who is now Joe Biden's key advisor on these issues, the argument he had made years ago about China becoming a more responsible stakeholder as it becomes more dependent upon just what you're talking about, Hal, upon international connections, that globalization will in a sense, almost Gulliver-like tie the Chinese into so many parts of the international system that they won't want to destabilize this system because they themselves are now a part of it? Why do you not find that persuasive? Why should we see the revisionist aggression as more of the accurate description for today?

Well, I think the basic problem with the responsible stakeholder thesis, which was first explicitly articulated by Bob Zoellick back in 2005, and in some ways provided the intellectual architecture for a lot of US policy toward China during the post-Cold War era. The challenge is that there's just less and less evidence to support it all the time. And so if the responsible stakeholder thesis bore out, we should expect to see a China that becomes more satisfied and more reconciled to the existing international system and all the things that go with it as it became richer, more powerful, more integrated into the system. Because the logic of the idea was that once China saw all of the things it could achieve simply by inserting itself economically into the existing order, it would lose any incentive to overturn or challenge that order.

But what we've seen, and this is a trend that goes back really to 2008, 2009, and the aftermath of the global financial crisis, is a China that has become much, much more assertive over time. We saw that beginning in the South China Sea at the outset of the Obama presidency in a way that has really continued. We've seen it very markedly with respect to Taiwan, particularly in recent years. And of course, this is something that's been in the news recently with Speaker Pelosi's visit and a fairly bellicose Chinese response. And we've seen it globally in things like the Wolf Warrior diplomacy and China's increasing use of economic sanctions to punish countries that displease it diplomatically or otherwise.

And so there is just less and less evidence as time goes on to suggest that China is reconciling itself to the existing state of things. And in fact, Chinese leaders have been quite explicit in saying that they are not reconciling themselves to the existing state of things. You can find Chinese officials saying that the US-led international order is a suit that no longer fits, that it basically has to be replaced or substantially modified in order for China to achieve its national objectives. And so the revisionist nature of Chinese foreign policy becomes clearer and clearer every day. And that's going to push China in a more disruptive direction as its power peaks.

Mike, do you see the current situation in Taiwan as highlighting that point? I mean, your book came out just as Speaker Pelosi visited Taiwan, just as we've seen this extraordinary increase, actually, in Chinese military exercises around Taiwan. How do you fit that into the story?

We see that as one of the most important manifestations of this peaking power trap. China is coming off of about a decade of a massive military buildup. It's been churning out warships at a rate that we haven't seen from another country since World War II. And it's been pumping up on ammunition and developing the ability to surge amphibious forces and potentially carry out a blockade of the island. On the other hand, this window of opportunity that China has because of its own military buildup and the sort of slow pace of U.S. and Taiwanese responses in terms of spreading out their forces, making them less vulnerable to a Chinese Pearl Harbor-style attack on U.S. bases on Okinawa and Taiwan. This window of opportunity may not stay open for very long because for one thing, the U.S. and Taiwan have ambitious plans to revamp their defenses to make them much more resilient by the 2030s.

And at the same time, a lot of those strategic headwinds I talked about earlier are gonna really start to kick in within a decade or so. And so China will be in a position where it could be economically stagnant, demographically collapsing. Xi Jinping will be in his 80s by the early 2030s. And so there's just a lot pointing at this period in the 2020s as being China's vital strategic window if it does in fact intend to use force to bring Taiwan into the fold. And for a little bit, this window will open slightly wider because the United States is about to go through a mass retirement of cruisers, guided missile submarines, bombers. Many of these things were built under the Reagan administration. So there's just this moment of sort of maximum vulnerability from the U.S. and Taiwanese side. And just given this, what from a Chinese perspective is a steady slide towards upping Taiwan's international status, upping the U.S. relationship with Taiwan, upping Japan's relationship with Taiwan. Even the Europeans are sending delegations there. They just are likely to feel that peaceful reunification is becoming less and less likely. And so they have to wonder, should we start flexing some of that military muscle that we spent several trillion dollars building up while we still can? And so for us, this is just a moment of maximum danger in the Taiwan Strait.

And Professor Beckley, how does the situation in Putin's Russia and the war in Ukraine fit into this sort of Chinese self-assessment of their position?

Yeah, I think there's the lessons that we would hope China would learn, and then there's the lessons I fear that China may have learned from that. I mean, obviously we would hope they would learn that conquest is really difficult and that the West is more united than maybe a lot of people previously thought prior to the invasion. But what I fear is that one, they've learned you've got to go big and brutal from the start. Putin's, one of his mistakes was to kind of stumble into Ukraine on multiple axes and have this really uncoordinated operation and give the Ukrainians time to pick apart those offensive forces. So China may say, look, if we're going to go, we got to go hard. That means hitting American bases to cripple their combat power early. That means pummeling Taiwan with an air and missile barrage. And then second, do not allow our target to be resupplied in the way that the Ukrainians are being resupplied. So that means sealing off any possibility of convoys coming in. I think that's part of the reason why China's been showing off that it can surround Taiwan on all sides, including on the East coast, where presumably the US would have tried to resupply Taiwan in a conflict. And then third is just to rattle the nuclear saber early and often because that seems to induce caution on the American side. So those could be the lessons that they learn. I think, you know, sober defense analysts have to just assume the worst about that and proceed accordingly. Obviously, maybe it's induced some caution, but just given the show of force that we've seen over the last couple of weeks, I just, it just seems like they are, you know, gonna conclude the worst from it.

It's so fascinating and horrifying, I have to say, listening to the two of you and reading your book, because, and I think this is your intention in part, right? Those of us who are historians, it echoes World War I in so many ways, the notion of windows of opportunity, peak power, a sense of a moment when the enemy is more vulnerable than other moments, the desire to go hard, go fast, a sort of early blitzkrieg way of thinking of things. How, in light of this bleak scenario, you and Mike are clearly not determinists. You clearly, as good historians, believe there are choices and contingencies. And the last couple of chapters of your book are about what the United States should do, you see, and I'm guessing, as a Cold War historian like myself, Hal, this is really something you've spent a lot of time thinking about, you see lessons from the Cold War for the United States. What are some of the top lessons that American citizens and policymakers should take from the Cold War for thinking about these issues today?

I'm glad you asked that, because I think one of the misconceptions that sometimes emerges from reading the stuff we write is that we think that war with China is inevitable, and that is absolutely not what we are saying here. I think our hope in writing the book is to inform people that the choices that the United States makes will have a powerful impact on the choices that China makes in the coming years. And so what we need to be thinking about doing is making a set of choices that will reduce the windows of opportunity that China may see militarily and otherwise later in this decade, so that even a more risk-acceptant Xi Jinping will be deterred from making choices that could lead to a war that would just be utterly catastrophic. We want to deter a war, right, rather than fight one.

And it's interesting to look back at the Cold War, because there are some parallels between the situation that the United States faces now and the situation that it faced during the early Cold War. I think most American officials during the early Cold War believed that the U.S. system would prove stronger than the Soviet system over time, but there were moments when the geopolitical balance appeared extremely precarious, either because Western Europe was in danger of outright economic collapse in 1947, 1948, in a way that might've opened the door to Soviet hegemony in Europe, or during the Korean War, when it appeared that the United States was facing a window of military vulnerability that it had to close very quickly. And so there are a handful of lessons that we take away from this, but I think one of the things that becomes really apparent from looking at the history of the early Cold War is not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. And so a lot of the legendary policies that the United States pursued during this period, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, things of that nature, were not initiatives that were planned for months or years beforehand. They were things that were basically slapped together in moments of crisis, because the alternative to moving quickly and decisively looked far, far worse. George Kennan's policy planning staff came up with the outline of the Marshall Plan in about three weeks in May, 1947. NATO actually was a European initiative that the United States decided to sign onto. And the sense of the time was that the United States had to be willing to take risks. It had to be willing to work with new partners, including enemies that it had just defeated, like Japan and West Germany. And it had to be able to move quickly to close windows of vulnerability before they became too dangerous. And that's a similar lesson the United States needs to take away in thinking about the China challenge today.

It's interesting, if you look at the Taiwan Strait, for instance, the problem isn't that Taiwan is indefensible. It actually is a natural fortress. It would be quite possible to defend Taiwan if the United States and Taipei make the right choices. The problem is that we have not moved fast enough to address some of the vulnerabilities that have opened up, and so one of the things that we do in the book is try to explain in some detail how the United States, Taiwan, and other democratic countries actually could mount a pretty credible defense of that island, and thereby hopefully deter China from attacking by using capabilities that mostly exist today, and so we don't need to wait for perfect exquisite military capabilities to become available next decade. We just need to move faster with the things that we have or can quickly develop in order to make an invasion or an assault on Taiwan look prohibitively costly for Beijing.

And you give some very concrete suggestions in the book, which I encourage listeners to look at, and also you quote Dean Acheson quite often, and I think it's always, always beneficial to quote Dean Acheson, in particular on the importance of showing strength sometimes to prevent worse outcomes from from occurring. Mike, on this line of thinking, though, I wanted to ask you, how do we prevent ourselves from over committing in the other direction? One of the criticisms that Hal and myself and others and you have made about American Cold War policymaking is, although we did good work in many places and other places we sometimes overcommitted, went into wars we shouldn't have been in, and there were often domestic costs as well, and so you know the very period Hal is referring to in the late 40s is also the rise of McCarthyism in the United States, and I know, and I'm sure you and Hal know this better than I do, you know, for many Chinese Americans talk of more explicit American containment policy toward China raises worries about anti-Chinese sentiment within the United States, which we saw a lot of evidence of during the pandemic. How do we prevent ourselves from over committing in the other direction?

I think on the domestic factor, just making sure that you're separating the Chinese Communist Party from the Chinese people, and that our main problem is with some of the policies that the CCP is pursuing, not China necessarily as a nation. In terms of the, you know, we also try to derive lessons from history of what not to do, and you know, the United States imposed a massive oil embargo on Japan in 1941 and that pushed Tokyo to attack Pearl Harbor to try to survive, and today the United States could have a comprehensive tech embargo on China to try to trash its economy. It could enact across-the-board trade sanctions against it. It could even take some provocative pages from the Cold War playbook and start a huge covert action program to stir up Tibetan resistance, we hear resistance, foment internal violence, and sow chaos in Chinese society. And I think any of those measures would risk catalyzing the exact kind of conflict that we're trying to avoid.

So we try to argue that a danger zone strategy, you're trying to prevent war from breaking out, not catalyze it, and so you have to balance strength and caution, and so first of all, it's you have to prioritize that you should really just be focusing on key areas where if China scores a near-term success, it could radically upend the long-term trends that we currently see as favorable overall to the United States, so prioritizing a defense of Taiwan, making sure that China is not able to carve out this sort of authoritarian tech empire across the global south, but if China wants to spend lavishly on white elephant infrastructure projects across the world through Belt and Road, I think those are things the United States doesn't necessarily have to oppose everywhere and at all times. And there's also limits that the United States can draw in terms of engaging in political warfare with the CCP and potentially destabilizing the regime in ways that would make it extremely desperate in the short run, and then I think you just have to have an eyes wide open approach to diplomacy, you know, if you can build the strength and then negotiate from that position of strength, then you can do things like have you really work on crisis management and confidence building mechanisms, military to military exchanges, hotlines, all the classic kind of ways to buffer geopolitical competition. I think can be done as long as you're coming at it from a position of strength that doesn't give your rival this potential window to do a smash and grab operation over something like Taiwan in the short term.

I really appreciate it in the book how both of you talk about the importance of maintaining diplomatic connections, because I do think one of the lessons of the Cold War is that even in the worst moments of US-Soviet rivalry, talking was important. Diplomatic connections mattered, and the moments when we had least connection were often some of the most dangerous. And I think it's a point you emphasize, and I want to emphasize too, that as one is acting perhaps to strengthen Taiwan's defense, that doesn't mean you stop talking to the Chinese. In fact, it means you talk to the Chinese while you're doing that, and hope that you can make diplomatic progress at that moment. You both make the point in your book that if at some point the Chinese were willing to agree, as the United States did with Cuba, for example, in 1962 to a non-invasion pledge, that might be something the United States would want to talk about as a compromise agreement. I'm correct on this, right, that you, you both see diplomacy as a key part of the story, even as this relationship might become more militarized, yes?

Absolutely, and I think one of the lessons of the Cold War is that diplomacy isn't silly peacenik stuff, it's actually quite useful from a competitive perspective, as well. It's a way of keeping your allies on side. It's a way of convincing your own domestic public that you are actually trying to exhaust all avenues short of confrontation for getting what you want. It's a way of maintaining contact with the other side, so that you know when a breakthrough may be possible. And so, as Mike said, you've got to have your eyes wide open about it, and we shouldn't think that simply talking to the CCP is going to lead them to change how they think about their interests, but the strategic arguments for doing so, I think, are very compelling.

And so I guess that brings us to the last question. We always like to close on an optimistic note. One of our purposes each week is to show that history opens options for thinking about policy and society and democracy, and that history offers us a reason to be optimistic, not the pessimistic image that historians sometimes have. I take from your book a very optimistic point at the end that the issues of surrounding China and Taiwan that we've talked about today are actually issues where there's a lot of agreement in Washington across party lines. Your book is not about Democrats versus Republicans. I know that that was intentional in the way you put it together, and I think it's also accurate. Maybe, Mike, I'll start with you, then we'll go to you, Hal. Where do you see the possibilities for this issue, maybe being one of those places where we can finally return to what might seem like more normal bipartisan discussions about strategy and foreign policy in the United States? How do you see that happening?

Well, I do think one silver lining of geopolitical competition is it tends to promote unity domestically, you know. I think it's no surprise that polarization goes off the charts basically after the end of the Cold War, when we can suddenly turn on each other. So one would hope that if there is this bipartisan agreement among Democrats and Republicans to get tough with China, that it can promote cooperation on on other issues, and I also think it extends to to allies, you know, another silver lining of Russia's recent offensive and China's belligerent behavior is it's forced Western allies to get back together and to really start talking about democracy a lot more than they used to, using that as a focal point of building and revamping an international order that makes the world safe for democracy, that means everything from creating new trade and investment regimes that basically prioritize democratic forms of governance and standards in those, it means more defense cooperation among like-minded democracies to uphold the law of the sea, and so what, what you would hope is that you could have this period of tension, but one that doesn't boil over to catastrophic conflict, and at the same time the fire of that geopolitical competition can actually be channeled in productive directions, everything from international institution building, comedy within countries, as well as a huge increase in research and development spending on all kinds of great technologies that will make life so much better for all of us over the long run, so one would hope that this could be channeled in productive directions, and that's sort of where we leave at the end, saying, look, this, here's some ways that you could actually make that more likely.

(Hal, your thoughts?) Yeah, well, the book I wrote before this was about lessons of the Cold War, and one of the most hopeful lessons of the Cold War is that geopolitical rivalry gives you an incentive to do things you ought to do anyway to improve your own society, and so the United States, for all of the nasty things it did to itself during the Cold War, also did some really constructive things, it invested massively in its own future by funding the world's best university education system, by developing big infrastructure projects like the interstate highway system, and through a variety of other means. The Cold War, in this case, and this is a contested argument, but one that I think it's true. Actually, helped the United States become a better version of itself, even though the progress was uneven. I hope very much that we will see the competition with China as an opportunity to do something similar today. I think there has been some initial progress in that direction with the passage of chips just recently, which Mike referred to, of course, there have also been some ugly aspects of the turn toward competition, including a surge in anti-Asian violence and a variety of other things, and so sort of the angels and demons always compete with each other, but we have been successful in the past of using competition as a way to strengthen ourselves internally, and that's the precedent we ought to try to emulate today.

And I think Zachary, that's a perfect place to turn to you to close us out here, as as a young person who I know thinks and talks about these issues quite a lot. Do you see issues surrounding China, and I don't just mean strategic issues, broader issues, economic issues, issues related to the COVID. Do you see those issues as some of the issues that are dividing us now, or do you see them as actually, as Hal and Mike are saying, as a potential area where we could come together and find agreement?

I think it is a potential area where we can come together and find some sort of agreement. I think the problem is often we see these geopolitical conflicts as inevitable, and we refuse to see the options that we actually have, the decisions that are are still yet to be made, and I do think that there is hope that this conflict can be avoided, and I don't think that we're going to have the same sort of entrenched social competition that we saw during the Cold War, namely because I think the United States, or at least parts of it, are much more connected to the Chinese people than we were to the Soviet people or to the Russian people.

Right? And our economies are certainly much more.. this is this is a point John Gaddis made a long time ago, that one of the unique features of the Cold War is that the United States and the Soviet Union actually had very few economic and trade interconnections, that's of course not the case for the US and China right now. I think your point, Zachary, is very well taken, and it echoes what both Mike and Hal said here on the podcast, and say in their wonderful book, which is that we study history, and their book is filled with useful historical analysis. We study history because it shows us that human beings have choices, they're difficult choices to make, and I think our discussion today is about the difficult choices the United States, as a democracy, has to make in order to avoid war, in order to avoid conflict, and hopefully build a more stable international system, where perhaps there's more space, as Mike just said, for a discussion about democracy, as well. I think this book and this discussion open up so many avenues, really, for thinking about current conditions in a useful way, in a way that's not simply about name calling and a kind of determinist assumption about war. And so I really, really appreciate the conversation. I highly recommend the book to all of our listeners. Again, it's called Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, written by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, filled with contemporary information, but of course, the part that's always most valuable: historical knowledge and research that's useful in understanding the present. Mike and Hal, thank you so much for joining us today.

(Thanks, Jeremi) Thanks, Jeremi. Thanks, Zach, too really appreciate it.

And Zachary, thank you for your poem. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. See you next time. Bye.

This is Democracy. A podcast about the people of the United States. A podcast about citizenship. About engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues. And how to have a voice in what happens next.

Welcome to our new episode of this is democracy. This week, we are going to return to the Middle East. We did an episode a few weeks ago with Peter Beinart on the conflict between Israel and Hamas. And today we're going to take an even more historical deep dive. We're going to look at the 1970s, which I think historians have come to agree is a period of major transformation in the region. And we're going to look at what happened in the 1970s and how the experience of that crucial decade had deep influence upon the events that we're seeing today and probably will continue to have deep influence upon where we go from where we are today in the region. This is a case where history is not only part of the past, but really is ever present in our contemporary conflicts and our contemporary efforts to understand the conflicts around us. We're fortunate to be joined by a person who's a close friend and someone who I think is one of the really great scholars of the Middle East from the 1960s to the present. This is Salim Yaqub. He's a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. and director of UCSB Center for Cold War Studies and International History. Salim, it's so good to have you on the podcast.

It's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Salim Yaqub is the author of three books that I highly recommend to all of our listeners. His first book, Containing Arab Nationalism, is really, I think, as close to the definitive work as is possible on the Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East, which was really the first American Cold War Doctrine for major influence, even perhaps for attempted dominance in the region.

Salim's second book, which is really one of my favorites, "Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and the US Middle East relations in the 1970s". This is a book that looks at events in the Middle East, but also within the United States and the emerging Arab American community, which becomes very important as Salim shows to American politics in the 1970s. It's also a book filled with wonderful anecdotes about Woody Allen. and Henry Kissinger and various other individuals. So I encourage all of our listeners to read it.

And Salim's most recent book, "Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord". What a great title. The United States since 1945. And that title would certainly apply to the present as well as the entire period from 1945 to the present. Salim has written many important articles and other chapters on U.S. foreign policy, on the Middle East, and on Arab American political activism.

Before we turn to our conversation with Salim, we have, of course, our scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Zachary, what's the title of your poem today? "To Israel, a Widow". "To Israel, a Widow". Wow. Let's hear it.

Isaac Singer once said you were an encounter with the supposedly dead, and I suppose he is right. You're a land of old men and infants held tight and sandy ancient ruined coasts. All of them were always supposed to be ghosts. Few wars can be fought with history, but you have fought them all, have saved a generation from fighting back the fall. Yet, though you have somehow survived on promises that you revived, it must be said you've built yourself a cage. No war should be fought with rage

The grandchildren of the widower, the children of the hollowed, held in their tunnels underground, are lost and must be found. Your neighbors remain, to say the least, uncharitable, Lips smacking for the feast, break through the garden fence. Can there be any recompense? No, I am convinced all moral questions will remain unanswered. You are alive, and soon you must have peace. If only so, it might be said, all had a chance to count their debt.

I love the doggerel in there Zachary. What is your poem about?

My poem? It's hard to explain. I'm not sure I perfectly understand what I was trying to get at either. But. I think it's sort of an attempt to understand the place of Israel today, but also in particular from the perspective of the 1970s, a period when Israel was still led in large part by a generation which was defined by the Holocaust, but it was also beginning to really develop its own sort of distinct Israeli identity that still shaped by that, the sort of last exile to Israel from Europe and other parts of the Middle East, and in some cases from within the territory of Israel.

And to understand that mindset, but also to apply that to today and how that history informs this moment of violence. between Israel and Hamas and maybe the lessons we can draw from these many decades of conflict.

I love the arc in your poem, Zachary, from Isaac Bashevik Singer, who sort of represents the early generation of European Ashkenazi Jews who settle Israel. And then, of course, the generational change that I sort of feel in your poem as it goes through to where we are today, which is a Middle East that looks very different, of course, from The world of Isaac Petrovic Singer in the 1950s and 60s, right? Yes, very much so.

Salim, maybe that's a great point of entry. As I mentioned at the top of the episode, you're one of a number of historians, you're one of the leading historians, making the case that the 1970s, this period about a quarter century after World War II, that the 1970s is a real turning point for the region and also for U.S. policy. How should we begin to understand that?

Sure. And first I just want to say, thanks for sharing that poem, Zachary. It's very powerful. I'm going to want to go back and read it again, listen to it again and linger over it.

But, in answer to your question Jeremy, the the seventies really are a very pivotal decade for a lot of reasons and in a lot of places, but certainly for the history of the Middle East and the history of U.S. involvement in that region. I mean, what you see in the 70s is the you know, sort of the last vestiges of European imperialism being removed with the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf region in the, in the first couple years of the decade. You know, the French had vacated North Africa in the previous decade and earlier than that. And so what you see then is a new, or maybe the continuation of a previous era in which the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union becoming more and more active in that region.

It's also, and also, you know, they're bringing the Cold War struggle, you know, to the region in a way that hadn't quite happened previously. Also, I mean, certainly the 1973 war is very key for all sorts of reasons that we'll probably get into. It's, you know, during and shortly after that war that the power of the oil producing Middle Eastern states, and in this case, particularly the Arab states, because they actually mount an embargo against the United States and some Western countries becomes, you know, unavoidable, you know, it becomes impossible to ignore.

And of course, the lingering after effects of the oil embargo and of the OPEC price increases are gonna last for the remainder of the decade and into the following one. And, you know, also the manner in which the Arab Israeli War of 1973 ends and the kind of diplomacy that comes in its wake sets the agenda for Arab Israeli peacemaking for years and in some cases, you know, arguably decades to come.

So it's, and then I guess you could, I would just add that, if you fast forward to the closing years of the decade, you start seeing the emergence of political Islam as a really powerful force, primarily with the Iranian revolution of 1978 to 1979. But there also were some pretty important events taking place in the Arab world. The seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, you know, right around the same time that the Iranian hostage crisis begins.

And if, you know, if you want to count, consider the Middle East in its more, in a broader geographical frame, you could look at the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, also right around that time in December 1979 as ushering in a whole new set of issues that will define the last years of the Cold War and set the agenda for the way in which the Cold War ends.

Certainly you've given us a sense of the density of conflict and change occurring in that, in that decade. Zachary, you had a question? Yeah.

Why was the 1973 war, which you mentioned, so transformative for Jews, Arabs, Muslims, and also for, for many Americans?

Yeah, that's a great question. Well certainly it's transformative for Arabs and Israelis because it's sort of place puts the Arab Israeli conflict into a new dimension, you know, the immediately preceding years, you know, between 1967 and 1973 were ones in which the Israelis were occupying the lands that they had taken over in that war. And they sort of felt invincible. They didn't think that they really needed to, take seriously the diplomatic overtures that the Egyptian government under President Sadat had extended to them early, you know, earlier in the decade. They felt that they could really hold out for a much more dramatic set of concessions coming from the Arab side.

And essentially what happens with the 1973 war, which is on the Arab side, waged by Egypt and Syria primarily, is that it kind of shocks the Israelis out of their complacency and forces them to confront the fact that they actually really are still vulnerable. And that in turn, you know, makes it increasingly clear to them that they have to reach some kind of political accommodation with their Arab neighbors perhaps on terms, you know, not quite as favorable as the ones that they had been holding out for previously. And it's also, it's from the Arab side, it's important because it rekindles a sense of pride or restores a sense of pride that had been very seriously damaged by the debacle of 1967.

And in fact, I mean, from the standpoint at least of Egypt. It's psychologically very important because Egypt and Sadat feel that they need to show the world, and maybe more particularly the United States and Israel, that they're not total pushovers, that they are, you know, that Egypt is a force to be reckoned with. And having made that case, even though Militarily, the war ends up going quite badly for both Egypt and Syria. Nonetheless, because they do a lot better than they did in 1967, that restores a measure of respect, and maybe more importantly, self respect, and that gives at least Sadat the confidence to move forward and enter into increasingly intimate peace negotiations with Israel, you know, at first brokered by the United States, but eventually face to face.

I don't want us to jump too quickly to the present. I want us to stay in the seventies, but the question really has to be asked. Many have made an analogy between the October, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the 1973 attack by the Arab states on Israel, do you see an analogy between those two events?

Well, I mean, there are some similarities, but in the end, I would say they're kind of superficial. I mean, I guess the, you know, one, obviously, it's an attack on Israel. Although in the 1973 case, it's not an attack on Israel per se. It's an attack on Israeli forces in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. But nonetheless, it's an attack that the Israelis are not prepared for. And, is much more damaging to the Israelis than anyone thought possible.

Of course, the major difference between 1973 and 2023 is that this is, the attack by Hamas is, you know, primarily against civilians. It entails not traditional military methods, but really horrific, and, you know, close up forms of attack that were, of course, recorded in very grisly ways that, and so that the level of shock, I think extends, it's a different kind of shock. It's a much more visceral sort of shock. And I think it is extended, it has extended much more, powerfully around the world then and especially the Western world than the shock of 1973 did, you know, partly because of the nature of the attack, and also because of the nature of media now as opposed to 50 years ago.

One of the things that's striking about the '73 war to me as a historian, Salim, and I wonder if you react the same way, is how this terrible war, and a war that initially looked like it might lead to the collapse of Israel and then, as you said, turns around relatively quickly with Israel occupying for a short time more territory than it had before the war. Correct. How, this terrible war then leads to a peace process? First of all, do you see a connection between what many call the Camp David process that eventually leads to an agreement between Israel and Egypt brokered in part by the United States? Do you see a strong connection there? And how should we understand that connection?

Oh yeah, there is a very strong connection. I mean, I would frame it in the following way, that the war and its immediate aftermath opened up a new phase in which it was widely recognized that some sort of diplomatic process between Israel and its Arab neighbors was both possible and necessary. I mean, on that, virtually everyone agreed. The difference was on the scope and nature of that diplomatic process.

There was, at the end of the war, an emerging international consensus that what really needed to happen was, as some sort of comprehensive settlement, between Israel on the one hand and its Arab neighbors on the other, you know, with the Palestinians playing some kind of role, although that was not clearly understood as yet. And as a result of this process, you know, according to this vision, you would have a full Israeli withdrawal from all of the territories occupied in 1967. That would be the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, and in exchange for that withdrawal, the Arab states would extend recognition to Israel and commit to living in peace with Israel, which was something they had not previously done.

And in most cases continued to refuse to do in the years after 1960 and 1973. So that was the emerging consensus that you start to see in late '73 early 1974. But there's also, there's a contrary scenario and this is the one that is put forward most powerfully and resourcefully by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who does not think that it would be a good idea for the United States to pressure Israel to withdraw from all of the territory occupied in 1967. He thinks that a more stable scenario is one in which Israel is allowed to hold on to significant portions of that occupied territory. Now, we can later talk about why he felt that way, but that's was what he wanted to do. And so what Kissinger sets out to do, and it's really a pretty remarkable diplomatic performance, is he brokers or he encourages the development of a dialogue between Egypt and Israel.

He quite early intuits that Anwar Sadat of Egypt, although he would much prefer a comprehensive settlement in which Israel withdraws from all of the occupied territory from 1973, nonetheless, I'm talking about Sadat now, would be willing to accept some, a more bilateral arrangement where Egypt gets back the Sinai and the remaining Arab territories are either, you know, either remain under Israeli control or their status is you know, less certain. I mean, the sine qua non for Sadat is getting back the Sinai, and he's willing to take a less hardline view regarding the other occupied territories. Kissinger, you know, very brilliantly senses this. You know, almost immediately after the war ends. So Kissinger, you know, very skillfully cultivates Sadat and, you know, takes advantage of the fact that Sadat is willing to be a lot more conciliatory in negotiations with Israel than other Arab parties, especially, Assad, Hafez al Assad of Syria is prepared to be.

And so through a series of very complicated and clever diplomatic initiatives, he manages to sideline Syria, although that takes, that process takes a couple of years and it's something that Asad himself is not quite aware is occurring until it's too late for him to stop it. He ends, he brings an end to the Arab oil embargo and he, essentially puts in place a diplomatic process where Egypt withdraws from the confrontation with Israel, and the beauty of that, from Kissinger's perspective, is that it results in the subtraction of Egyptian power from the Arab Israeli equation.