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It’s our pleasure to have you. Fred is the author of 10 books. He’s the author and editor of 10 books on American politics and Foreign Policy. Among my favorites and those which I know everyone has read, uh, choosing war, the Lost Chance for peace and the escalation of war in Vietnam, which really transformed our understanding of Lyndon Johnson’s choices for war in 1964 65 America’s Cold war. The Politics of Insecurity, which Fred co wrote with Campbell Craig, another historian, which looks at the influence of domestic politics on American Cold War foreign policy. Members of war. The Fall of an Empire in the Making of America’s Vietnam, which is really about early French and American activities in Vietnam. Before we would, we traditionally called the Vietnam War in the United States. Embers of War won the Pulitzer Prize as well as many other rewards and then his most recent book, which I hope all of our listeners will read and I know you’ll be reading a lot about soon as well.

Embers of War, The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, which is really about early French and American activities in Vietnam before what we traditionally call the Vietnam War in the United States. Embers of War won the Pulitzer Prize as well as many other awards. And then his most recent book, which I hope all of our listeners will read and I know you'll be reading a lot about soon as well, JFK, Coming of Age in the American Century.

The ghost of JFK yielded its head today as I spoke with my teacher of memory. As I spoke with my teacher of memory, he told me of the fateful day when he was to see JFK on the aged steps of the Capitol. On the aged steps of the Capitol, I stood on an afternoon in May and watched all the children play as we marched past to the Capitol door. As we marched past to the Capitol door, I thought of the man that day when he bled to death in a limousine and all hope went away.

It was youth that was killed from the book depository on the square in Dallas by the grassy hill. It was youth that was killed in Dallas and we're waiting again for it still.

You know, I think it comes for Jack Kennedy from, in part, a bedridden childhood. He was sick a lot as a kid and read, became a voracious reader and his preferred genre or the things he liked to read about were, in fact, politics, especially European politics, diplomacy, statecraft, tales of adventure and chivalry. He was drawn to that stuff.

It developed in college, his wartime service, which we could discuss. But you do see these early influences as well.

Well, and let's turn to his wartime service. Much of your book actually covers that. And I have to say, it's a really riveting part of the book and an area where I think you have a lot of new, many new things to say about both his wartime service and his travels.

I was really taken with the many quotations you have from his travel diary, Fred. So tell us more about how the travels and the World War II experience contributed to his development as a political animal.

I mean, one of the things that I suggest in the book is that he developed both a historical sensibility, but also an international sensibility. And here again, I think Rose, who often doesn't get enough credit, it seems to me, in the scholarship, his mother encouraged him to have this wider lens, to look to the outside world.

And as you say, he traveled, beginning in a serious way in 1937 with his good friend Len Billings during college. They traveled through Europe and then there was a major excursion, which I think is really consequential in 1939, right on the eve of war, where young JFK is traveling in about a dozen countries, meeting with officials, seeing the sites.

And I think it is probably like it was for many people who were in combat. It was, I think, a profound, had a profound effect on Kennedy. Made him, in two different ways.

The first was that it made him, I think, wary of the military instrument as a means of solving political problems that I think he had, and I trace this in the book. He continued to have this really for the remainder of his life. But secondly, I think he came out of the war convinced that the United States had to play a major leadership role on the global stage.

So it's in some ways almost a kind of contradictory, or they don't, the two attributes, the two conclusions don't necessarily mesh perfectly, but I think it's partly what he took from the war, no question. And it's worth underlining the fact, and this is a point you make, that really most of the leadership of American society for the next 50 years would have come out of this experience of World War II.

And so the most dramatic example of this, I think, is the, in effect, the split between the father and the son, between Joe Sr. and Jack on the issue of U.S. intervention, on the issue of, if you want to put it this way, isolationism versus interventionism, where Joe Sr., as ambassador to Britain, and then long after having been ambassador to Britain, was a kind of unvarnished, was an unapologetic appeaser and isolationist. And Jack decided he could not be. And I think this is where the Harvard years are especially illuminating, because you see that gradually, clearly, but gradually, but clearly, this shift away from the father's position.

I was surprised to learn of the degree to which isolationism, if we want to use that term, excuse me, the degree to which isolationism really held pretty firmly, pretty firm within the student body at Harvard. But the professors, his own reading, I think his travels that we've discussed, all of them, I think, convinced JFK by, let's say, by late 1940, or by the middle part of 1940, around the time that he completes his thesis, publishes the book, that it's really an untenable position that his father holds.

It certainly has to support the British and the French to a very large extent. And therefore, his father's position, which is that you can have a kind of fortress America in which the country more or less seals itself off from the rest of the world, just is not going to fly. And he is willing, as I've said, in a way, Joe Jr. is not, to actually confront his father with this position.

Can you say more about what Kennedy takes from what you just described so well, his emerging internationalist outlook? You called it earlier a liberal internationalist outlook to some extent, tempered with realism.

Jack, I think, is very much committed to what Truman is trying to do in 46 and 47. He endorses the Truman Doctrine. He is wholly supportive of a kind of expansive American global posture.

But alongside this, emerging, I think, in 1950, 51, and thereafter, is also a nuanced understanding of the power of decolonization, the power of nationalism in the developing world. And he argues, I think, quite presciently, when he visits Indochina in 1951, for example, but also other parts of Asia, that the United States, if it wants to be on the right side of history, and if it wants to succeed in the broader superpower struggle, needs to be attentive to what these voices are clamoring for, and including people like Ho Chi Minh.

So this is still sort of preliminary. But that tension, in some ways, exists right through to the end. He argues in his inaugural address for a...we often think of that address as being a kind of Cold War call to arms, but I don't think it really is.

If you look at the address in its entirety, it's really quite conciliatory in tone. And he says, we shall never, let us never fear to negotiate. So it's a complex picture, Jeremy, but one that I think, I hope in the second volume to further flesh out.

How does that affect your judgment of him as an early politician? Yeah, it's something obviously that I grapple with a lot, Jeremy, and I will continue to grapple with as I work on volume two, because one of the things that I conclude is that he shows a capacity for empathy, empathetic understanding, which I think is critical in a leader. And we see it maybe most notably at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he's actually able to put himself into Khrushchev's shoes, which is what empathy is, to be able to see things from the other side.

And it was, it became so evident to me as we were planning a conference on World War Two memory, how little Americans have thought critically about our own war experience. And that's in no way to trash the experience of the United States in World War Two, but how much more advanced German thinking was on this. And this is a theme that resonates, I think, in your book.

And one can say if there's any moral agreement in the world, it's that the Nazis committed the worst crimes in human history. I'll agree with that. And of course, since they were devastated at the end of the war, there was some pressure on them from the outside to, you know, do something about their history, although it was slow and faltering, certainly in the West.

And I think that's a very important message for Americans to learn. We tend to assume that the crimes of the Nazis were so awful that the minute the war was over, they fell on their knees and begged for atonement. That is not what happened at all.

In West Germany, in particular, they thought of themselves as the war's worst victims. And when I realized that, and it took me decades to realize this because it's not something they like to talk about at all. You have to work to ferret it out.

I realized that the tropes with which, West Germans in the first decades after the war spoke about the war, you know, we lost a quarter of our territory and seven million people were killed and our men were in POW camps if they survived at all. Or they were wounded and our cities were burned and we were hungry, just barely alive. Maybe you'll catch the reference there. And on top of it, the damn Yankees wanted to tell us it was all our fault.

And I suddenly realized they sound just like the defenders of the lost cause.

So what about a personal, confrontation? I remember reading recently a book called Germany and the Germans by John Arda in from the 1990s. And he describes going to, I think it was at the University of Stuttgart, where they had like the grandfathers and grandmothers who had lived through the war, [talk] one on one with students who grew up after the war. And there was very much a sort of generational tension.

So that's a really good question. And of course, it depends whether the person you're confronting is your grandfather or your father. In the late 60s, when people were confronting their parents who had served in the Wehrmacht or, you know, and certainly gone along with the Nazis. Even if they hadn't actually been members of the party, the confrontations were terrible, understandably.

And you had a sense of family structures being quite destroyed in many cases. The interesting thing, I felt like the family structures weren't destroyed. I mean, I was once invited to, you know, spend a weekend in the country with somebody who said her parents were away and said, use our house. And the parents had, you know, pictures of the father in uniform over the house. And I left the next day.

[Laughter] You know, if this is what it means to have a nice relationship with your parents, I'm not sure that I'm going for it. Look, I think so. So there are people now talking about the ways in which people, you know, didn't confront their grandparents and where the grandparent was, in particular, a Nazi criminal or even a serious Nazi, that has left real scars. One of the people I interviewed in the book, Alexandra Semft, has written about her grandfather, who was actually one of the very few people executed as a war criminal, and, you know, talked about the way that that destroyed her family.

So, you know, the confrontations didn't happen at all for decades. And they certainly happened. You know, there are sort of waves of these things.

There's a second issue that I'm only going to mention because I know we don't have time to go into it. I think we are still living in a time where the Cold War has cast its shadow over American history, which is why great, you know, civil rights activists like Paul Robeson [are] almost forgotten, which is why we don't talk about Hiroshima and we don't talk about Vietnam. But that's a question for a podcast in itself.

And they have certainly played a role in Germany with reparations to Holocaust victims, reparations to the state of Israel. And here is something that Americans tend to forget or not ever to have known about. The Wehrmacht laid waste to Poland and Russia and killed 14 million Slavic civilians.

So East Germany paid a huge amount of reparations to Poland and the Soviet Union as well. So obviously, where there's been damage and, you know, again, it's a complicated subject. The damage needs to be materially repaired if there are still people who need to be brought to justice. They need to be brought to justice. We need to think about the iconography of our cities, as I say in the book. There is no Hans Wehrmacht in Germany.

I see a lot of hope at the moment, but I think we're in a perilous time. It surprises me to complain about polarization because it's such a centrist thing to do. And I am not a centrist. I'm a Social Democrat and I'll say it to anybody who wants to hear it. I've always been on the left. But I think we need to be very, very careful in this moment.

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we're going to discuss the Vietnam War and its legacies, its continuing legacies in American society, in global policy, and particularly in light of a recent set of conflicts that produced similarly controversial outcomes for American society and global policy, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are very fortunate to be joined by a friend, colleague, distinguished author, and distinguished scholar, Mark Lawrence.

It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle. It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle, and your carpet bombings make whole nations synonymous with tragedy. It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle, and your carpet bombings make whole nations synonymous with tragedy, and you shoot your own children smack dab in the middle of their righteousness. It is hard to build utopias when they are already covered in your own rusty tanks and pierced by your own bullets, when they have already realized they don't need to be saved by you, when your own children are blowing up buildings just so you'd turn around and care a little.

This was a period of intense competition, as you well know, Jeremi, between the East and West for the loyalty and sympathy of societies all around the world. So it really mattered, I think, to Americans that they had the keys to unlocking development and democratization and progress in a broad way. Vietnam was just one of many places where Americans tried to achieve those objectives.

And why were our failures there? And of course, you and others have written in depth on the sources of our shortcomings in these activities. But why was it so disruptive? Why did it have such a deep effect at home, as Zachary refers to in his poem? And also,as your new book really narrates in such depth and in such compelling detail, why did it have such an effect on American foreign policy in so many other areas?

And I think what happens across the 1960s, and this is really what I try to get at in the book, is that Americans lose that sense of ambition. And the Vietnam War is a crucial reason, well, only one of the reasons, but a crucial reason why Americans lose that sense of ambition and American foreign policy undergoes a transformation to something quite different by the late 1960s.

But there are a lot of people who, especially nowadays, who would argue that American intervention abroad was, if not purely self-interested, was motivated mainly by self-interest. Is that accurate?

Well, I think one of the things that makes American foreign policy so difficult to understand sometimes is the ways in which self-interest and altruism blend in the way Americans think about the world. The old adage was, what's good for General Motors is good for the world. And I think that there's something really important in that kind of comment. Right? So many American policymakers believe that the United States was on the side of righteousness and had the keys to assuring progress and uplift for the whole world. But they had no doubt at the same time that the same policies would also serve the United States. So I think this distinction between self-interest and the larger global interest is clearer in retrospect than it was in the minds of the people who tended to make policy in the United States. And that was certainly true, I would say, during the 1960s.

And Mark, I think your book is really brilliant on that point because it shows, especially in your country-specific chapters, and I hope all of our listeners will go ahead and buy and read the book. Mark has chapters on Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and Southern Africa. In each of these chapters, there's kind of a similar narrative arc, it seems to me, where the United States is initially pursuing self-interested goals, but also goals that are merged to some sense of democratic hope, some sense of positive change. And then in almost every one of these chapters, Mark, to my reading, the effects of the Vietnam War to push the United States toward more support for authoritarianism and often more militaristic behavior or supportive militaristic behavior on the ground. Is that a fair reading? And if so, why does that happen?

I think that is a fair reading. I tried to pick case studies, and you've listed them, Jeremi, thank you, that would illustrate a range of patterns in American behavior across the s. Two of them, Brazil and Indonesia, are very similar in demonstrating the ways in which Americans supported right-wing coups that basically eliminated very uncertain political situations in very important countries in favor of regimes, military regimes, that would clearly serve American interests much more directly and be reliable partners of the United States.

And Mark, why this arc? Why in each case does it seem not only that the United States is less ambitious as you put it so well in your title, but also that the United States becomes, I don't know if this is fair, but it seems to me more cynical in its policies.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that it's important to recognize that the American attitude toward the wider world in the early s depended on a certain degree of confidence, right? That Americans could have their way in the wider world. It depended as well on the idea that the United States had the resources to pump into these areas to achieve the results that it wanted. And it relied as well, I think, on the idea that it was okay to take some risks, right? It might not ultimately pan out in every place, but it was worth the effort. And I think what you see across the 1960s, particularly as the Vietnam War heats up and really consumes debate in the United States, is that Americans question all of those ways of thinking that were easy to see at the beginning of the decade.

Resources are pumped into Southeast Asia in a way that makes them much less likely to want to expend resources elsewhere. LBJ becomes quite risk-averse, losing much of that tolerance for taking chances that I think had been part of the American approach in the early part of the decade, because he understood that the war was deeply controversial. And the last thing that he wanted was another controversy or another problem, another headache in the world.

So if there were reliable alternatives to be had out there in the third world, LBJ was increasingly likely to seize on those and privilege stability above change across the board, I think you could say, by the end of the decade.

And just to build on that, Mark, another thing that struck me in your book was how often LBJ, the President of the United States, was willing to work with people he wouldn't work with otherwise if they were willing to support him in Vietnam. So in a strange way, the Vietnam War became a driver of American policy rather than American interests and ideals. Again, is that fair? And what are your thoughts on that?

I do think that's true. I think by certainly, LBJ is so focused on Vietnam tha the sees every other policy challenge globally through that prism. And so even in relatively distant and perhaps somewhat unlikely places where you wouldn't think Vietnam was a major issue, LBJ is talking about Vietnam. So when he meets the generals in Brazil, when they come to visit him, I suppose I should say, or when he's talking to the Shah, Vietnam is very much on the agenda and he's looking for support. He's looking for indications that these regimes will support him, even if it's in a relatively symbolic way. That mattered a lot to LBJ as time passed.

So Mark, could you just say a little more about why that happens though? I mean, your book narrates that so well. And I was particularly struck by the Brazilian generals as well, because to me, you couldn't get farther from Vietnam than Brazil, right? But why is, I mean, this is the most powerful person in the world, President Lyndon Johnson. He's got so much experience also dealing with political failure as well as political success. Why does this small, as he says, this small country far away, why does it come to dominate everything this way?

Yeah, that's a fascinating question. And, you know, Jeremi is one of the great authorities on this issue. But the way I would answer this question is as follows. I think that LBJ, as time passed and as Vietnam consumed his agenda, became increasingly concerned with exerting control, exerting control over an increasingly chaotic situation. And that chaos was apparent not only in Southeast Asia, but also in the streets of the United States and in the streets, frankly, of other cities around the world, particularly in the all important year of 1968.

He was aware that activism and unrest was increasingly a global phenomenon. And I think for this reason, was drawn to the idea that where stability seemed to be possible, where he could find partners who would cooperate with him and clamp down on at least some of this unrest, he was ready to seize those opportunities. So, you know, I bite off a piece of that larger story by looking at American relationships with countries in the third world.

I think that the result of the trends that I write about in the book is that the United States by the early 1960s is drawn very strongly to the notion of stability in the third world. As I've said, most of that ambition that was so characteristic of the early s has disappeared. I think it really was Richard Nixon and someone you know, Jeremi, better than anyone, Henry Kissinger, who fully articulated the logic that had become clear to the Johnson administration as the 1960s passed.

What jumps out at me in connection with the history of the 1970s is how unstable some of those, many of those relationships that the United States had formed in the interest of assuring stability turned out to be. So the relationship with the Shah of Iran, very appealing, right? Under the chaotic circumstances of the 1960s gives way to massive instability in the 1970s. The quest for stability in Latin America gives rise to a new period of instability and chaos in some places, at least, as the 1970s advances. And on and on, we could go looking really around the world.

So I think what I would try to emphasize by way of the larger implications of the book is that this search for stability, which made a lot of sense under a very particular set of circumstances, gives rise to precisely the opposite as time passes and tends to confront the United States with a number of really pressing challenges. And I don't push this too far in the book, but I think it's not too much of a stretch to connect some of this instability to trends that continue to play out in the 21st century.

Southern Africa, Southern Asia, right? Southwest Asia, at least, remain areas of real contention. And they remain areas of contention for a whole lot of reasons. But I think that the history of the 1960s is not unimportant in understanding why it is that those areas remain sources of concern many years after the period that I write about.

Sure. And the Middle East, you talk about and write about Iran, and that certainly would be a major element of what you're talking about here. Mark, how then should we explain, taking in all that you've shared with us in elucidating these changes in American policy and the implications for American democracy and for international affairs, how then do we situate that in relationship to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have an eerie echo of the period you're writing about?

You are not kidding. I mean, the similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and Vietnam on the other, have been a subject of a vast amount of writing. I'm certainly persuaded that the similarities are eerie in many, many ways. And we could certainly spend some time, if you like, talking about some of the ways in which those wars were similar. The way I would tell the story of the way in which Americans have thought about and tried to draw lessons from the history of the Vietnam War would go something like this. In the 1960s, with the end of the Cold War, Vietnam lost some of its power in American politics and society.

I think that's super helpful, but then it opens up another question, right? If so many American leaders who were making policy and American voters who were voting for those leaders had the experience of Vietnam in mind in one way or another, and here I'm thinking about people like recently passed Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Vice President Richard Cheney, Obama himself, who was reading about Vietnam at the start of his presidency. How could they make mistakes of excessive ambition, if that's what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, if, as you point out, the lesson was so clearly to limit ambition?

There is an alternative set of lessons that would emphasize that really the key point about Vietnam is that you must not give up too early on American commitments overseas, that the United States really does have the wherewithal to achieve its objectives in the wider world. It's just that we don't sometimes have the staying power to see it through. I think there've been fascinating debates in connection with Iraq and to some extent in connection with Afghanistan that have really revealed the competing ways in which Americans of different political persuasions draw lessons from the war.

Well, one of the lessons I think is the predictable one and the one that we've already spoken about, that there are clear limits on what the United States has historically been able to achieve and presumably can achieve going forward in the world. I think that lesson of Vietnam, as I mentioned just a moment ago, was imperfectly learned, was learned only by some Americans. And yet I think it's a lesson that we constantly need to be reminded of and to consider as the United States confronts inescapably more Vietnam-like, Afghanistan-like, Iraq-like problems in the years to come.

But here's the other lesson that I think comes, that's a little more original, I suppose, and comes more directly to my book. And maybe there's something a little bit optimistic here. I think that my book shows the risks, the very pragmatic risks, the very practical risks that flow from pumping too much attention and resources into one part of the world. It shows the destructive impacts that can occur in connection with American foreign policy globally if Americans lose the ability to prioritize, to decide what's really important and how much resources any particular problem is worth as Americans confront it.

And the reason why I say I think there's something a little bit optimistic in that observation is that this is probably a lesson that many Americans, regardless of where they stand on the big questions of the legacy of the Vietnam War, could perhaps agree on. We recognize that there are risks in going too far in one place and sort of losing a sense of proportionality, losing an ability to prioritize. Um, so it may be that. When the problem is framed in that way, what are America's priorities? Where, where should it attach greater importance and devote more resources? We could find space for agreements or at least broad consents.

I think there's a lot to that. And there's a lot between cynicism and the utopia. You talked about it in your poem, right? I think, I think Mark's book shows that there actually are. There's a lot that can be done in between maybe that's, what's abandoned because of the obsession with Vietnam. Mark, this has been a really insightful conversation. I encourage everyone to go out and read and read your book and buy it and give it away as gifts as well. The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam era. Mark, thank you so much for joining us.

Never Again the Same. Let's hear it. Sometimes there are words when whispered they are meaningless, but they mean the world when you shout them in the shadow of a wall or on a football field under a hot sun which obscures the moon. Sometimes there are places when you see them on a map they seem hollow, a couple of old municipal buildings and a square in the town.

But you can see in the video recorded hazy from across the lawn how this was once for a few moments the center of the world. Sometimes there are moments when described to you they are meaningless, they seem so abstract, so absurd, unexplainable, a bullet flying unimagined. But you would have had to be there, had to have seen the way she held him as he was dying.

What would we give not to remember how it really was, to stay in that imagined moment when we all cried at the same time, to stay forever remembering the promise that was never fulfilled, the hope that was never realized, words and places and moments that never really were and would never again be the same.

My poem is about the huge mark that John F. Kennedy, his presidency, his assassination left on the American psyche, but also the ways in which he and his family have sort of become mythologized. And we remember them in hindsight perhaps differently than we experience them as a country.

Well, first of all, Zachary, what a magnificent poem. And we'll come back to this, I'm sure, Jeremi, but just that phrase, a bullet flying unimagined, is just an incredible way of depicting the unimaginable assassination of John F. Kennedy when it occurred in 1963. But to answer your very good question, Jeremi, yeah, there's an old adage, write the book you want to read.

Well, you absolutely succeeded, at least for this reader, in both of the things you just mentioned. It's a brisk read, as you said, but it's also a moving, cinematic, but more than cinematic, rueful and thoughtful account of his life. You open with one of the low points of his presidency, which might surprise a lot of readers, the Vienna Summit of 1961, when in a certain way, the leader of the Soviet Union embarrasses this young president. Why did you start there?

Because you mentioned Scotty Reston, who was the renowned columnist on the presidency for the New York Times. After this two-day summit that happened in early June of 1961, Kennedy, as you said, has just been ravaged by Nikita Khrushchev through these two grueling days, where Khrushchev is just constantly nipping at his heels and getting the better of Kennedy. Kennedy knows he's been bested.

He talked about the great chess match of leadership, and he knew he was outmatched by Khrushchev during those two vital days, and knows that Khrushchev leaves that summit emboldened, thinking that Kennedy was, in Khrushchev's words, too intelligent and too weak. By too intelligent, he means he's book smart, but he's not street smart. I can exploit this guy, Khrushchev thinks, coming out of this.

Kennedy knows this. He goes back to the American embassy in Vienna and talks off the record to Scotty Reston, and he admits to Reston that he has been savaged by Khrushchev. He realizes until Khrushchev doesn't respect him that there could be a crisis that emerges out of Khrushchev's deep confidence that he can outmaneuver Kennedy.

And he admits to Restin that he has been savaged by cruise Jeff. And he realizes until cruise Jeff doesn't respect him that there could be a. That emerges out of, uh, cruise Jeff's deep confidence that he can out-maneuver Kennedy. So that becomes this crucible in, in Kennedy's leadership. He knows he needs to show Chris Jeff, that he is a strong leader or Cru Jeff will move to exploit him. That becomes this crucible in Kennedy's leadership. He knows he needs to show Khrushchev that he is a strong leader, or Khrushchev will move to exploit him.

In your vivid description of this, and it really is vivid, and you bring out Kennedy's words, you bring out his emotions, it does resonate with, I think, the central challenge of contemporary leadership, what President Biden must live with every day, which is the sense that you're in the most powerful office in the world, but you have almost unceasing opposition from external actors of Vladimir Putin or Nikita Khrushchev, internal actors, in Kennedy's case, the military that doesn't trust him.

You're really detailed in your description, Mark, also in former President Eisenhower and others who really don't think this man is up to the job, this man who barely wins the presidency in the closest election, as you say, in the 20th century. How does Kennedy deal with that? How does he move forward in this almost unwinnable situation?

But we also realize that it was so important to have a strong leader at a time when the Soviet Union was vying for hearts and minds across the world and trying to dominate much of the world landscape. That was the central crisis of the age. In that moment, Jeremi, and then at that desperate moment in his presidency, I think Kennedy shows to some degree his character. He's humble. He takes accountability. As he says in a press conference, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. But at the end of the day, the buck stops with me, as Truman might have said. He took responsibility and vowed to the American people to do better. And he does.

Well, I think he was able to convey those ideas very effectively and successfully to the American people and to a large extent the world. When Kennedy stands in front of the Berlin Wall and says, Ich bin ein Berliner, I am a Berliner because I'm a citizen of freedom, hence a citizen of Berlin, that makes a marked impression. But I think you're right, Zachary.

Right, and you certainly show that very well, in a really well-described few chapters, I think, on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I want readers to read the book. I don't want us to share all that with them. I want them to buy the book to read that, because I think the Cuban Missile Crisis, as you say, is probably the most significant Cold War crisis.

I'd like us to close, Mark, on the natural place to close, the assassination, and not so much what happens. I think everyone knows the story, but more how we should think about it today. Is it really a turning point in our history, and how do you look upon it?

It's one of the things I think you do that's very new in this book. You're looking upon that assassination now, not just about 50 years hence, but also from the perspective of what's happened in the last decade or two, to the nature of American democracy. How do you look upon that moment right now?

It's a great tragedy. We have seen this president through almost three years of, again, this incredibly consequential time in our history, and he is showing tremendous promise. Kennedy is cut down, I'm going to use Zachary's words here, by a bullet flying unimagined when he is in his prime.

He's 46 years of age. He's gone through perhaps the most dangerous hour of humankind with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and stands on the world at that point unparalleled. There is nobody who has the stature of John Fitzgerald Kennedy when he is killed in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963.

And the auto industry has been, you know, at the core of that, right? They've been, we've seen declining numbers of people. It's not so much that the, you know, the cars use fewer workers. It's that a lot of the parts that are used in cars are manufactured overseas. So increasingly, auto plants in the US are really assembly plants. They're, you know, taking things from all over the world and putting them together into a finished product, and that takes fewer workers than if you have to make those products from scratch. And that has really challenged unions like the auto, the UAW. They've responded in a number of ways.

It has to do with, you know, getting products from overseas and trade policies that affect that. It has to do with, with the compensation that goes to management, and also, more importantly, the compensation that goes to shareholders and out in profit. And I think it's important to, you know, to keep in mind that those all mean that we can actually, in many cases, it's beneficial for the broader economy to make sure that people have better wages. It stimulates consumption. And that there's certainly not a contradiction between improving conditions for workers and promoting a prosperous economy.

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.

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.

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.

But, in answer to your question Jeremi, 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week we're going to discuss a term that is thrown around almost every day in newspapers and political discussion, but a term that is rarely defined or historicized, and that term is free trade. The United States calls itself a free trade nation. Whether that's true or not is something we'll discuss, but more significantly we'll discuss what free trade really means, and how a group of thinkers, pioneering thinkers and political activists and policy makers in the 19th century pioneered a new way of pursuing free trade with certain ideals of peace attached to it.

Sometimes when the sun is setting, I wonder if a hope is nothing more than mud to scrub away with soap. I watch the darkness coming with its ominous smile, and the birds no longer humming are erased in single file. And yet each morning when it comes at last, I see a new world rising and it's rising fast. A world of peace that isn't stale, a world at sea, a world at sail. We are chasing Earth's still spinning tail, like birds who sing at every dawn. The hate has flown, the fear is gone, I spy your ports, you spot my shores, you sell my treasures in your stores. Each setting sun is now a kind of hoping that tomorrow will be in the harbours roping.

I love the imagery, Zachary, and I love the evocations of peace and peacemaking. What is your poem about?

My poem is about the ways in which, even in the points in our lives, and in our politics when we are the most cynical. That trade, and sort of physical connection across the vast seas of the world, can offer a real opportunity for peace and real hope, even when things seem sort of impossible abysmal around us. Right.

Marc. I think that's a great place to really dive into your book. So much of your book, especially the first 2 to 3 chapters is about the efforts of certain activists, seems to me, to escape what they see is the imperialism and economic nationalism and cruelty of of the 19th century of the world of empire that we all know a fair amount about. Why did these activists, Richard Cobden is one of them who stands out, why did they turn to free trade as a source of peace and anti imperialism, as you call it?

I mean, this is, you know, it gets this sort of Enlightenment era ideas that this is building off of, but it's also, I think, building off of something new that's developing in the mid 19th century was, which is, a truly global economic system in a, in ways that we, you know, understand it today and global food systems and so forth. And pushing back against the mercantilist system that had dominated the imperial order up until the mid 19th century, a mercantilist system of protectionism, of closed imperial markets and seemingly constant war, and geopolitical conflict.

And so when this free trade movement that Richard Cobden in Britain spearheads, this middle class pressure group, the anti corn law league, it's beyond just lowering Britain's trade walls and allowing for cheap goods and cheap food to flow in. He actually sees this direct connection between those domestic reforms and reforming the international order. Something that if we, I guess in international relations scholarship, we would think we call capitalist peace theory or interdependence theory, the idea that the more countries trade with one another, the less likely they are to go to war. This is kind of when this is really starting to take root, at the left of center into the political spectrum in remarkable ways. And so yeah, go ahead.

And this allows for greater democratization. It also means that if you democratize foreign policy and you minimize the power of these militant aristocratic elites on foreign policymaking, then you can create a more peaceful foreign policy system that doesn't require large standing armies and navies, which means you can lower taxes and thus, make things even more affordable to a mass majority of people. So that's the kind of in a nutshell, how they connect that domestic element with the foreign policy.

And so with their dominance of American politics throughout most of the decades that follow up, until the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, you have this republican style protectionist policy. It's a very anglophobic one. Fear, hatred of the British is a common political tact that's taken to reinforce these protectionist demands, but it's also, you know, the American industries were certainly less developed than those of the British, and so they saw this as a way to catch up to and rival, the more industrially advanced British, who had recently adopted free trade.

So this seemed like a nice counterbalance to it, and also led to all sorts of geopolitical conflicts with America's neighbors, especially the British colony to the north, Canada. And then when the United States becomes a proper, formal empire in its own right under Republican auspices in 1898 after the Spanish American war, it's a protectionist economic nationalist empire that comes into being here that the Republicans oversee. And, you know, pushing back against that common understanding that we, I think we tend to make of this late 19th, early 20th century, those decades leading up to the first world war as some sort of Gilded Age era of free markets and laissez faire run amok. One of the things I've been trying to push back against is to say that, that's actually, it was quite the opposite.

So, Marc, one of the really interesting parts of your book is your reinterpretation of the late 19th and early 20th century, just along the lines we've been discussing. Traditionally, people have argued that, this is a period of, growing trade, growing interdependence between countries, and that actually causes violence and imperialism. You see this the opposite way, right? And tell us more about that.

Yeah. And I mean, this gets into a lot of kind of historiographical minefields about, you know, why the late 19th, early 20th century is tended, tends to be portrayed as an area of free trade and laissez faire, you know, run amok, as I described. But in reality, this is aside from the British who embraced free trade from the 1840s until the 1930s, one rival empire, the British after another, led by the United States and its growing empire, turned to economic nationalism and imperial expansion across the late 19th, early 20th centuries. And this is exacerbated with the onset of a global depression in 1873. Something we can probably relate to nowadays, which is, during times of economic crises, nations tend to look inwards, tend to retreat from the international system, as we've seen so clearly, in the wake of the great recession and then the pandemic.

And so this is what's happening in the late 19th, early 20th century. Yes, ties are still growing, but that's because of these new tools of globalization, transportation costs are drastically falling, steamships and transcontinental railways and so forth. And so you can still have an increase in integration, even though you're seeing a growth of economic nationalism. And of course that imperial expansion that the United States and other rival empires are practicing, is globalizing the world in a certain sense too, through the forceful incorporation of colonies into the kind of Anglo European sphere that they're developing here.

But again, it's through these restrictive economic nationalist empires that we're seeing coming to us. And it's this growth. And if you want to take the kind of Marxist approach, the growth of the divvying up of the world amongst these rival protectionist empires that culminates in the first world war.

And just to underline a point before we get to the First World War, you make this clear in your book that the free traders criticize the United States in particular for building a closed empire, closed to external trade empire that benefited U. S. trade in the Philippines, for example. That this was not a free trade empire, as some have argued, but in fact, what the United States was doing was building an economically nationalist empire, correct?

Correct. That's correct. And if, and yeah, and one of the things that I tease out here is how it needs these former Spanish colonies that become American colonies in the context of Puerto Rico, say, or the Philippines, or informally with Cuba. Yeah, you start to see this even from the anti colonial nationalists themselves. Who are demanding free trade with the United States, who are poverty stricken from years of internal conflict, fighting the Spanish and so forth, and who are suddenly unable to afford food, afford clothes because of these new protected tariffs that are placed upon them by the protectionist Republican empire builders back in Washington.

And so, yeah, so even from the colonies themselves, you can start to see this protectionist makeup of the American empire project. And it's this American system idea. This is what it was called, right? This, this protectionist ideology that kind of grew in many ways in the United States across the 19th century that became the American system of protectionism. It's this ideology that's actually going to shape at least more shape that Imperial order amongst Britain's rivals than free trade Britain itself will.

Zachary. You mentioned in your previous answer that there's a connection between this sort of divvying up of the world's resources, and the beginnings of World War One. Could you maybe explain that in more detail? And also, maybe talk a little bit about, you mentioned as well that many leftists have taken this interpretation in particular to make a point about free trade. Could you talk about how that's been interpreted as well?

Sure, yeah, and this is a critique that's made by what we call kind of center left critics like J.A. Hobson, this famous British critic of imperialism, liberal radical critic of imperialism, writing around the turn of the 20th century. This is then going to be built upon from an even farther left framework, by V. I. Lennon, imperialism in the highest stage of capitalism, writing amidst the first world war, trying to understand and make sense of how the world had become a world in conflict, how these rival empires turn against one another. And, you know, that's one of the fascinating things about this, if you actually look at this and of course, from the, from the left wing internationalist free trade perspective in general, this is exactly what they've been saying from the get go. And that is that it's this expansion of the protectionist empires, you end up with, and yeah, so what are they trying to do? They're trying to expand empires because according to this critique, at least, you know, protectionism creates monopolies, monopolies create inefficient markets at home. This leads to the apparent necessity to search for new markets, to export surplus capital abroad and to exploit raw materials from these newfound colonies to then be used by these industrializing powers back at home.

This is how people from across the left wing spectrum are explaining the growth of imperial expansion across the late 19th, early 20th centuries. And in the case of V.I. Lennon and trying to explain the outbreak of the first world war itself. Once these empires, these expanding empires have run out of new colonies to exploit for exporting surplus capital for exploiting raw materials, they finally turn on one another. And so you can actually see these really fascinating connections and commonalities by capitalist critics of the imperial system and Marxist critics of the imperial system. Indeed, in the context of Hobson and Lenin, this is even called the Hobson Lenin thesis, because Lenin is explicitly drawing on these capitalist theories of imperialism to make his own, even more extreme critiques of the system.

So as I understand it, Marc, you have a real resuscitation of Norman Angle in your book. Norman Angle, as you point out, was this incredibly popular writer in the early 20th century who predicted that countries that trade together will not go to war together. And of course, those countries did go to war in World War I and realists, those who have dominated international relations scholarship really in the last 70 years, kind of use Norman Angle as a whipping boy, right? They say, you see these liberal internationalists, these left wing thinkers who believe that if you create a world of cooperation, you won't have war. See how wrong they are, and the world is filled with inevitable conflict and war. That's the realist argument, of course. You're bringing Norman Angle back, though you're saying he was actually more correct than realists have given him credit for. Do I understand that right?

Yeah. You know, he's often seen as an early 20th century, Edwardian disciple of Cobdenism. He puts forward this more pragmatic appeal to a businessman's pocketbook with his book, as you point out, the very, very famous and influential, The Great Illusion that gets published in 1910. And that takes the kind of Euro American Left by storm. Norman Angle clubs are getting started all over the place. So he really does pick on a moment here. But if you actually, you know, he spent much of his life actually pushing back against the misunderstandings of it. He intimately understood the growth of political nationalism that was growing across the early 1900s, as well as the economic nationalism of the early 19th century. His, The Great Illusion was not a optimistic call saying that, global, the global, the degree of globalization now means that no wars can happen, it was actually a pessimistic appeal to say that even the winners of a war would lose because the world is so integrated. And I think that's the thing that gets lost along the way, as you point out, by international relations theorists drawing on these early 20th century ideas, boiling him down to a single sentence, it actually has lost the main point, the main thrust of what he was saying.

He was trying to warn business and then he was trying to warn, you know, the political right really that this continued nationalism, this continued economic nationalism would leave few if any winners, even those who supposedly would win a war at that point.

And of course the protectionists would win that one. And then of course, Cordell holds lessons that he learned from the first world war really firmly ingrained the fact that he connects free trade with anti imperialism and peace, and he sees the first world war clearly as one that was begun by these economic conflicts, these trade wars that led up to the outbreak of the First World War.

So that, those are lessons he takes, but the question is then, how do FDR and Cordell Hull succeed where their predecessors had failed? And I think you put your finger on it there with Herbert Hoover. The Republican protectionist project that began in the 1860s finally loses the support that it was able to maintain from American laborers through these kind of political debates that dominated the scene for so long. And that's because of the infamous Hawley Smoot, or Smoot Hawley Tariff of 1930. That is this protective tariff that Hoover's administration passes just on the heels of the outbreak of the Great Depression. And it's clear to everybody by 1932, and the presidential elections that this protective tariff had exacerbated and made worse the great depression that had created these trade tensions, shrunk international trade when it needed to be increased. And so FDR and Cordell Hull are able to build on this shift happening within the American body politic to start turning it towards a freer trade direction.

Right. And this, as you describe it, becomes a kind of true golden age for free trade, if we might call it that, from the end of World War II until, I don't know, late 1960s, early 1970s, is that correct?

Or at least it could have been. It, was really, actually, when I first started thinking about this way back, you know, 10 or so years ago, that is how I kind of thought that the story was going to progress or at least in that nice, neat way. What I ended up finding, the more I dug into the, around, I guess, right after the end of the Second World War is that, yeah, it does seem from 1945 until 1950, especially, things seem to be going their way. That these supranational organizations are, are able to kind of clamp down a bit at least on nations' predilections for, for protectionism. We have a new, better, stronger supranational structure under the United Nations than they had with the League of Nations. And the left wing free traders that I'm tracing actually have, they actually have a direct line to the State Department. There's a remarkable relationship that develops between Cordell Hull and these left wing free traders.

The Young Women's Christian Association is really big on this. But it brings in a broad umbrella of these free trade advocates to support the Roosevelt administration's free trade reforms. And so this is going to lead to, yes, these Bretton Wood, you know, structures, the IMF and so forth, but even more important here is the creation of the general agreement on tariffs and trade in 1947, which Hull is broadly considered to have created. And of course this will become the world trade organization in 1995. So at least the structures of what we associate with multilaterals and with free trade had come into being in the late 1940s and the left wing free traders, you know, I think to a certain extent, plausibly pat themselves on the back for helping to bring it about.

But of course the cold war decolonization, the growth of a right wing free trade tradition that we touched on at the very beginning of this discussion, all of these things are going to start muddying the waters, so to speak, and make the, what seemed like a new freer trade system, much less easy to maintain.

Well, from the left wing free traders perspective, there's an evolution that happens. So maybe it's a generational evolution that's happening here too. They're much more sympathetic by the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s of the decolonizing world, of what we might call the global South, the G77, these demands for temporary protectionism by these recently decolonized States.

And so that's one of the big differences here. So, yes, you have Thatcher in the seventies coming onto the political scene in Britain, who's going to slam down a book by Hayek as soon as she walks in and says, you know, this is what we believe. Frederick Hayek, one of the intellectual founding fathers of neoliberalism. And in a similar way, Reagan is going to surround himself with, you know, neoliberal, right wing economists who are extremely distrustful of anti colonial nationalist demands for protectionism. They're increasingly dis trustful of democracy itself, of course of the welfare state, of trade unions, there's really quite key differences here, but I think the two biggest are where these neoliberals are willing to do at the foreign policy realm and, and how they associate free trade with democracy.

So the free, the left wing free traders of the book, the main actors in the story closely associate free trade with democratization. And a foreign policy of non interventionism, right? You don't force free trade onto another state unwillingly. This is something that neoliberals 1980s onwards are going to deviate from drastically, even though in many ways they're drawing from the same intellectual wellspring. And so this is where we have the neoliberals who are gonna you know, support Pinochet's Chile, this, you know, dictatorship in Chile and apartheid South Africa, and who are increasingly gonna see democracies, especially democracies from the left, as a threat. An impediment to free trade rather than as an accompaniment to free trade. And so using military interventionism and being suspicious of democratic movements, in the name of free trade, this shows them to be something quite different from the free trade internationalist tradition that I was tracing in previous chapters.

And you make the, you make the argument that neoliberalism, as you say, this is from your book, page 218, that neoliberals have effectively co opted free trade as a neo colonial tool. So you are clearly making the case, there's a different version of free trade that's not neo-colonial, that's not mercantilist. As you call the, the moment from 2016 on. What would that be? I mean, one of the real goals of our podcast each week is to try to use history to help uncover alternative pathways. Things we could do today that would be hopeful. So what is the hopeful alternative to the world of US-China market rivalry that often seems to disempower smaller countries and smaller cultures. What's the alternative pathway from the left wing free trade vision that you've excavated so well here, Marc?

Yeah, great. Really, really, that's a really difficult, but really important question. And maybe we can end it on a positive note if I do this correctly. Yeah, I, so we have these multilateral institutions that, It comes into being precisely to create a more peaceful and interdependent world in the late 1940s. But they increasingly become controlled, taken over by this more right leaning, internationalism of the neoliberals and of multinational corporations within the kind of context of the Milton Cold War. And so this is, I think, the beginning of it. And so because of that too, you also see a lot less of a strict adherence to free trade internationalism, especially once Cordell Hull is no longer in the State Department.

And so you still start to see, kind of the hangover of this imperialism of economic nationalism that had dictated American foreign policy for so many decades leading up to the Second World War. And you see this most visibly even today with the Cuban embargo, something done under Democratic auspices, but continued under both parties.

And so in an interesting way, the legacy of the imperialism of economic nationalism in the United States, it's still very, was very much with us even before 2016, even before we ended up electing. an avowedly protectionist Republican president. You know, it was one of those things in 2016 that I was not surprised by at all. And of course, you could point back to most of the history of the Republican party as a party of protectionism, that Trump was by no means an anomaly, but a return to the status quo, from this longer viewpoint. But it was interesting to see how the Democrats from 2020, started just borrowing from and echoing Trump's protectionist platform to the point now that we're going to have, it looks like, a Republican protectionist running for president, and we're going to have a Democratic protectionist running for president in the 2024 elections. And like you say, in the context of trade wars and steel tariffs against the EU, and geopolitical conflict that's being drawn from that, sanctions against a variety of states as well, food embargoes and blockades, and then of course the Cuban embargo itself is still very much a thing.

And so what remains of the left wing free trade movement has been still fighting this fight. We still have a variety of left wing peace organizations that have been and remain very critical of, say, the U. S. Cuban embargo. We still have organizations like the Fair Trade Movement, which was created in Oxford in 1968 with the Hasselmeyer Declaration, but which was an alternative form of globalization and an alternative form of, ethical free trade as they put it and there's something I'm sure we're all listening here are familiar to a certain extent. But you know, we see the fair trade stamped on our bars of chocolate or our coffee bags, but it actually has a history, that I argue at least, that goes back to the 1840s. And it's also putting forward this idea that we can, you know, can pay a bit more if it means making sure that the things we're buying are not using exploited labor, that people are getting paid a fair wage.

But I think maybe one way to think about it, and one thing you can draw from this book as a way of going forward here is how the left wingers, the liberal radicals, the socialists, the women's suffragists, the Christian pacifists, they all, by the early 1900s, by around the time of the First World War, came together and were working together in ways that would probably surprise us, especially with our Cold War lenses on, the idea that Marxist internationalists were working alongside capitalists to try to create a more interdependent, peaceful order. That is still a possibility, and maybe that is the only way to revitalize this if you do see the world in a way that these left wing internationals see it. It's through a new coalition form of like minded, dare we say globalists who see the kind of, inward looking, turn towards autarky and trade wars that have become so commonplace now as something that they want to oppose. It was an interesting lesson to be drawn from this book where actually, in surprising ways, there was a really broad left wing coalition that was in many ways successful in working together to overturn the protectionist system.

Certainly more so than their Republican counterparts, certainly more so. I, you know, I do try to make the point though, that even still their foreign policy credentials when it comes to military interventionism. In the case of, say, Haiti or, in the context of Clinton, for example, his sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, these are, you know, these are limiting trait. These are things that the leftwing free traders, the non-interventionists would've been vocally opposed to. But I think it, to a certain extent, they're still there. You can certainly see it in the rhetoric of Clinton, and I think with Obama, perhaps even more so in the policy practices that he was operating under, his attempts to support the Trans Pacific Partnership, despite the critiques from the alt left, that were still critical of too much of an influence for the multinational corporations. And some elements of this certainly still at play within democratic internationalism of Clinton and Obama. I think that's fair.

I think it does. I think it's also the last question in particular, last answer, was a really important reminder that oftentimes the questions that need to be asked or are not necessarily, like, ones of ideology, but of whose interests certain policies are serving. I think the sort of description of how the, at least the ages of free trade, was overtaken by neoliberalism in the 70s and 80s is a really important lesson about the importance of keeping in mind whose interests our policies serve, because, looking at it on paper, it can seem that the neoliberal policies are of the same tradition, but, in reality they were serving very different interests. And I think also this vision of left wing free trade is something that we should all take very seriously, especially at a moment when our, when the sort of liberal international institutions, which this movement created or the descendants of this movement created after World War II seem most threatened. And certainly when our, when the sort of free trade world order that developed after the end of the Cold War seems most threatened as well.

Yes, I think that's really well said, Zachary. And one thing, Marc, I've been thinking about as I was re-reading your book, and as I've been listening to your really thoughtful and inspiring comments today, you know, we are entering a moment where it does seem that protectionism is the main valence of politics. As you say, both presidential candidates in the U. S. this year will be running as protectionists, as advocates of industrial policy of one kind or another. Certainly that's the way China operates. The E. U. Has been moving more in that in that direction, and of course, we're witnessing wars, economic nationalist wars across the world from the Middle East to Ukraine and Russia.

But as all that's happening, there is a desire to move beyond this moment in a search for an alternative. And especially in a world that's torn by inequalities and warfare, this vision of interdependence, of trade, of openness, of, building prosperity, shared prosperity through open connections that are not militarized and mediated by international institutions. That actually might become a more compelling vision. Much of the discussion around the International Criminal Court is in many ways a discussion about this. And so we might be on the cusp, just as we were in the late 1920s, we might be on the cusp again of another free trade international peace activist moment. That would seem to be the hopeful democratic message in much of this. Do you agree with that Marc?

You both put it so, so well as far as what might be possible hereafter. And of course, if I were to take maybe even a more cynical approach at looking back to the successes, not just of the FDR and 1930s, but, you know, why it was that the free traders succeeded in Britain in the 1840s. And, you know, for them it connected to peace and, but I think the prosperity element, I think, is the other important thing here too. And I think for maybe a lot more people, the connection between interdependence and peace is going to be less important than what it means for their pocketbooks.

Yes, I think that's very well said, Marc, and a very nice connection to one of the central issues of our world today, which is the inequalities in food and nutritional access across, within countries and across countries. Of course, this brings us full circle, as always, to, in some ways, the inspiration for our podcast, which is Franklin Roosevelt. We started this podcast with his inspiration for how each generation writes a new chapter in the book of democracy. And, as always, the new chapters build on old chapters. Chapters that might have been forgotten before. Marc, you have in your book, Pax Economica, that I recommend to all of our listeners, you have reminded us of such an important chapter in the evolution of Anglo American and international democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries. A chapter that seems more relevant than ever in this neo mercantilist age, as you call it. Thank you so much for joining us this week, Marc, and sharing your insights with us.

So if you want to go back to the origins, I think Venezuela had democracy that was oligarchic and ossified and elitist, but that used to have from the late 1950s to the 1990s two party competition and alternation in power. So it was a democracy, but it was ossified and corrupt. So that allowed for the rise of Hugo Chávez, who was military nationalist, who had actually made a coup attempt against that ossified democracy, but to then took the electoral route, and due to vast popular discontent, he was swept into office in the landslide in 1998 and he started as a democratically elected leader, but he is a populist, and populists want power, and they want more power, and they want to stay in power for a long time. And so Hugo Chávez immediately transformed the institutions to concentrate more power to get control of the legislature, soon, pack the courts, push the opposition aside. So what Hugo Chávez did he transfer? He used his democratically elected position to transform Venezuela gradually, slowly, into what we call a soft authoritarian regime. And I say soft because Hugo Chávez was tremendously charismatic. He had an electrifying personality. So Hugo Chávez could do this transformation from democracy into authoritarian rule, but not using very much violence and repression at all. So he was illiberal. He was undemocratic. He used his charisma to essentially establish his political hegemony and cement cement his authoritarian regime. But he was not brutal and repressive. Then what happens is that Chávez dies an early age of cancer, and he had these charismatic leaders are so full of themselves they don't want to nurture rivals. So he had survived himself, typically, by comparing weaklings and sycophants. And when he was about to die, he nominated one of those weaklings and sycophants, Nicholás Maduro, as his successor. So then Maduro comes in, has an authoritarian regime, but doesn't have the charismatic authority and popular support of Hugo Chávez. So soon, Maduro faces opposition challenges. What do you do if you have an authoritarian regime, you don't have a lot of popular support, you use your control of the military and you crack down. And so Maduro cracked down hard in 2014 against opposition protests. He cracked down again in 2017 he cracked down in 2019 so what he did is he transformed Hugo Chávez's soft authoritarian regime into a harsh, repressive dictatorship. By the way, much, much harsher than Victor Orbán's in Hungary. So Orbán still has a soft authoritarian regime. Venezuela has turned into a really repressive dictatorship. So these dictatorships, they don't they don't respect elections. They still hold elections to have a window dressing because they claim to have to be democratic. But they do whatever they can, ban opposition politicians. Make life hard for the opposition, control the airwaves, spent tremendously before the election, so Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, got himself re-elected in 2018 in a complete sham election that the opposition boycotted, but the opposition has no leverage against him. Protests don't work. International pressure hasn't worked, so the opposition decided this time, when Maduro came up for re-election, to challenge him in the election, thinking that the time was right for a change, because at the same time that Maduro transformed Venezuela into a brutal dictatorship, he has also ruined the economy. I mean rowing, there hasn't been a country suffering so badly outside of war, than Venezuela. Venezuela, in the last 20 years has seen its GDP drop by 75% I'm talking about 75% which is a tremendous collapse, 75% so about three or four years ago, when the economy hit, worked. Autumn, about 80, 90% of the population lived in poverty. 8 million Venezuelans have left the country in despair, and so I mean, has done total mismanagement, but holding this election, the opposition thought they could finally make dent, and opinion polls showed overwhelming support for the opposition, very low support for Maduro. The exit polls show overwhelming support for the opposition, so they clearly, clearly won, but Maduro, for reasons that I can explain later, Maduro just simply claims to have won, sits there, has support from the military, has taken over all the institutions and justice I won, and the opposition can claim whatever they want, the international community can demand whatever they want. I'll just keep governing.

So this is a good point, and I think that two reasons that it hasn't happened in Venezuela, um, the first is that Hugo Chávez faced a coup attempt in 2002 and then he got of course scared and what do you do? And he was very close to Fidel Castro of Cuba, and Cuba sent 2,000 intelligence agents that essentially helped Chávez purge the military and install an internal surveillance and control system that was very strong and very effective. And so they essentially the military, I mean Maduro is aware that the only real threat he would face would be from the defection of military. And so they try to prevent it at all cost. Through surveillance, through harsh crack downs, through purges, I mean, there are a lot of stories that military people who showed some sign of disloyalty are being tortured, are being killed. So so coercion has enabled him to keep military loyalty. The second thing is the following. What is the situation in which lower level military people defect? Essentially, if you have sustained mass protests that get suppressed with large-scale violence, and it goes on and on and on. And then at some point or other, members of the military might say, I don't wanna I don't wanna do this anymore. But in some sense, you know, and I don't know how to say that, fortunately or unfortunately, from the perspective of what we are saying, unfortunately, there were large-scale protests in Venezuela for two, three days. Then it died down because the repression was effective. And so two, three days, you know, you crack down. Yes. You you imprison 2,000 people. You kill a bunch of people. It wasn't sustained enough, and it wasn't broad enough. And when you see where the so, like, the recent opposition protest last Saturday was in the eastern part of Caracas, which is a middle class neighborhood. If the protests had led to a mass outpouring of popular protests some some popular neighborhoods like Petare protested, but the whole western part of Caracas is the real stronghold of Chavista support. And there wasn't very much protest going on there if there had been really massive outpouring. If it hadn't only been, know, predominantly educated middle class people, but if there had been, you know, millions of poor Venezuelans just pouring down from the slums and hills and poor neighborhoods of Caracas into the city center, besieging the Presidential Palace. If there have been a real kind of popular assault on the regime and that had gone on and then there had been just killing, killing, killing, killing, then you might have seen defection. But but the regime managed very quickly to contain and suppress the protests and confine them primarily to the middle-class areas, and that is just simply not enough to prompt large-scale military defection.

What what do you think US policy should be? Are we is it appropriate to keep sanctions on Venezuela? Are there any any changes you would recommend in US policy?

I I think I think that the US has tried a number of things. You know, the Biden administration was involved in a negotiation effort last year and last fall, offering easing of sanctions if the regime actually went ahead with honest elections. And as we see now, it didn't work very well. I I'm sorry that I think kind of approximation doesn't work very much. That regime has negotiated on so many accounts essentially in bad faith using it as a stalling tactic, get over temporary problems, and then just simply cement its hold again. I think the only option is essentially to sanction the hell out of them. And, you know, for from the part of the United States. I I I do not think that the US has a lot of options. I mean, it shows in some sense how weak the United States has become internationally even in its own Western Hemisphere. I mean, when you think that the United States has been unable to forestall Venezuelans descend into authoritarianism, into brutal dictatorship, into total implosion and destruction of the country, that the United States has not had any real leverage over that process in a country so import, you know, even for the oil supply of the US and the world as Venezuela. It shows you when people talk about US or Germany and US predominance and whatever. I mean, the Venezuelan case is a striking example how weak the United States has become even in the Western Hemisphere.

No. I absolutely agree. I think the international community has to face up to that terrible paradox that this legalization of international affairs has this unintended side effect. And I do not know what could be done to, you know I mean, I made the joke about Saint Helena. There would have to be some kinda international safe haven, some way of sort of emergency amnesty, whatever, and it would have to be credible and enforced by the international community, unfortunately, limiting that international regime of prosecuting violators of human rights and other norms in order to I mean, not only induce, but allow them to step down from power. I mean and how to do that? Man, that is a very, very difficult how to build an international regime in a world that is so divided between the democratic forces that are on the defensive now and sort of ascending authoritarian forces of China and Russia and Iran, whatever. I do not know how that could be done, but it's an urgent agenda.

My poem is about the temptation to become nostalgic for the politicians and the politics of the past, about maybe the kind of truth or at least representation of what we'd like to see in our politics that we can often find in looking back, but also the danger of believing that politics was ever easy, simple, honest, or good.

I think one simple reason is that we're very focused on who becomes president, and Hubert Humphrey was never able to fulfill his dream of being elected president. He loses to Richard Nixon very narrowly in 1968. He runs a kind of a pathetic campaign as the establishment candidate against George McGovern, the peace candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1972. And by 76, Humphrey is so ill with the cancer that'll kill him that he decides not to make one more try. And so he's not on that list of presidents. And I think even to the people who remember him, he suffers in the historical collective consciousness because the recollections of him are about the reviled latter part of his public life, when he's Lyndon Johnson's vice president, and they both support the escalation in Vietnam. When he gets the Democratic nomination in 1968, without having competed in any primaries, the party establishment hands it to him, and he receives it literally simultaneous to the Chicago police force attack on unarmed journalists and anti-war demonstrators. And the aforementioned runs the establishment old guard candidate in 1972. And when people remember that part of Humphrey, none of that’s incorrect, and the critical analysis is right. And Humphrey himself said that supporting the Vietnam War was the biggest mistake of his life. But all this completely effaces this valiant part, earlier part of his political career, starting as mayor of Minneapolis, going through the Senate, and really his first one or two years as LBJ's vice president, when he was essential to the passage of these key, and in fact, landmark civil rights laws in 64 through 66.

The truth is that I didn't go searching for a book about Hubert Humphrey. A part of my brain for the last 25 years was looking for a book about America immediately after World War II, deciding what kind of country it wanted to be. Because having spent all this blood and treasure to defeat fascism, America had a huge unfinished agenda with the discrimination on its home front... And I very quickly realized a couple of things that the book could do. Number one, it could fill this biographical gap about Humphrey because if people knew about him, as I said earlier, it was only the later part. And number two, it could fill a historical gap in the civil rights movement historiography... because we Americans tend to situate the start of that mass movement in the mid-50s... But there was this incredible decade of civil rights activism in the 40s led by people who don’t get nearly their due these days, like A. Philip Randolph and Walter White... and really catalyzed by the sacrifice of the Black GIs who went off to war and had this phrase they called Double V, victory over fascism abroad and then victory over Jim Crow at home.

One way I hope it will change us is to realize that the civil rights activity of the 40s... culminates with Humphrey and A. Philip Randolph, kind of Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, successfully pressuring the Democratic Party to explicitly endorse civil rights... which leads to the exile of the Southern segregationists, the so-called Dixiecrats... [and] Harry Truman desegregating the military... and then winning election in 1948 because of a surge in the Black vote... That’s an answer to that, up until that point, unresolved question of are we going to revert back and be complacent or are we going to realize that we can't have practices in this country that we just went to global war against in other countries. There’s also something heartbreaking and poignant about the fact that with the rise of the Cold War, this moment is going to end very, very quickly.

That context is really helpful... Truman does, as you say, in 1948, embrace a civil rights plank, the minority report in the Democratic Party, and he runs on that. He desegregates the armed forces. He’s also the president who recognizes the state of Israel.

Right. How does this happen? Well, Truman blows hot and cold... On civil rights, Johnson reminds me a lot more of Truman. They’re both from border states... they both had some kind of deep reservoir of personal decency that was offended... With Truman... what gets to his heart is a series of attacks on returning Black GIs... incidents of Black GIs in the uniform of their country being beaten, being killed, being denied service... and Truman cannot bear the idea of people who serve the country being assaulted this way. And that moves Truman immediately into way ahead of his past... civil rights proposals. Then it gets close to the 48th Convention, and it’s as if he forgets he ever said those things. And what he wants to revert to is what was also the worst element of FDR... who made this almost literal devil’s bargain with the South that basically said, I’ll give you Jim Crow, and you'll give me your votes and your support in Congress. And Truman, heading into the 48 election, is ready to go right back to that. And what Hubert Humphrey and A. Philip Randolph and others did was basically force Truman to own what had been his own civil rights program to begin with.

Right. You can't be Pollyanna. You can't be Panglossian about this. You have to know. That joy is accompanied by struggle, but that is part of the energy you have to struggle forward. A lot of people talked about Hubert Humphrey’s phrase, the politics of joy, at the time of the Democratic Convention. And it was both ironic, and fitting that that was brought up. Ironic, because when Humphrey used that phrase, it was right when he announced his candidacy in 1968, in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, in the midst of the horrible Vietnam War, and it sounded totally tone deaf. It was one of the times when Humphrey badly misread the mood of the country. And yet his idea that politics should have a joyful element is maybe now being redeemed because coming out of a period of time that has felt so bleak for a lot of us, so at times such despair and real dangers to democracy, that the idea that there could be something positive and exalting about the work of protecting democracy is really appealing to people. And this goes to other examples we’ve seen of leadership of whether it was, um, Fiorello LaGuardia as mayor of New York during the depression, reading the funnies over the radio mic, or whether it was FDR’s great orations about nothing to fear but fear itself. These were people speaking into bleak times, but also saying that there was reason to see something positive on the horizon.

Certainly, I think the point of the poem was not that we’ve never had political heroes or that we’ve never had, um, a politics of joy that’s successful. The point was that, um, all of those political heroes and all of the politics of joy, um, required hard work and met with stiff opposition. I think the point of the poem was that, like, politics is always messy and always difficult. Um, it’s more about how we approached it.

Not at all. Not at all. And certainly someone who’s my hero, Franklin Roosevelt, as you alluded to before, refused to sign anti lynching legislation. So the compromises, the dirty compromises of politics have a long history, unfortunately. Sam, I wanted to close us out by asking you one final question. Um, and I think it speaks to our moment and it speaks to your scholarship and it’s something that I struggle with, I know Zachary struggles with, I know many of our listeners struggle with. Um, you’re someone who’s deeply concerned and committed to combating anti Semitism. It’s in your scholarship. It’s in your journalism. It’s how I first encountered your work, actually. Oh, thank you. Uh, and you’re someone obviously deeply committed to civil rights, telling the story of civil rights. How do you think about these issues today with this historical vision with, um, uh, the challenges we face. Um, what is it? How do you as someone concerned about anti Semitism and racism approach our current world?

Well, first of all, I’m almost 69, and so I’ve been through many periods before when there’s been a discourse out there saying that the Black Jewish Alliance is all over and that Jews on the whole are going to be turning much more conservative. And, this was trotted out during the first attempt to go after Affirmative Action with the Mario De Funes and, uh, and Alan Bakke court cases. And it came up again when Ronald Reagan was running against, um, Jimmy Carter, and the argument was Jimmy Carter had been too pro Palestinian. And it’s happened again now. But at the end of the day, in almost every presidential election, of, you know, going back into the 70s, except for the Carter Reagan one, what, the Jewish vote for the Democratic Party has been the most emphatically solid vote of white Americans. It's the closest to the way black Americans vote for the party. At the end of the day, they’re voting similarly, Black Americans and Jewish Americans. On the other hand, there are real tensions and the war in Gaza is exercising them, and especially having spent a lot of time around Black Church for one book and World VHBCUs for others. It's not a surprise to me at all that many, many Black Americans look at the West Bank and Gaza and see the Jim Crow South, and they’re not, you know, and they’re not against the existence of Israel. And they’re, as I said before, steeped in the Hebrew Bible. But there is a deep empathy for the Palestinian experience that, that they feel. And I, just at a personal level, just yearn for some resolution to the war because I have despaired just individually about the strains the war has put on not only the Black Jewish alliance, but on what I felt was a really important Black and Muslim American alliance in domestic politics. And all of these groups would be losers if they didn't. Those alliances get blasted apart.

Mary Ellen is the author of two books, the book she wrote a number of years ago Black Prisoners and Their World Alabama, 1865-1900 really a pioneering book looking at convict labor and the use of convict labor in the justice and political system in Alabama and much of the South during the second half of the 19th century, and most recently, the book we're going to discuss today, the book I hope everyone will purchase and read, is called She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan's Life and Legacy in Black Politics. It's hot off the presses, and as soon as it came out, I grabbed a copy and made sure to read it. And it's really an extraordinary book about Barbara Jordan and her life. Mary Ellen, thank you for joining us.

Well, that's a good question. So I had just been finishing my first book, and I'm glad I wrote, even though the the topics are quite different in a way, where they come together is that I'm a historian of the African American, Black experience, and so in my first book, I really try and elevate the voices and experience of people who were incarcerated. And that was, you know, rather than just looking at the system from the top down, which, of course, you have to understand, but to do everything I could to try and recover those voices, the letters, the pardon papers, anything that could really shed light on how the men and women themselves who were incarcerated were experiencing forced labor, and their resiliency, and how they tried to overcome and surpass such a living in such a terrible system.

Oh, my goodness, Zachary, you ask the best questions. All right. Those, as she put it, those men did not want her there, okay, however, the Texas Legislature is a small institution. Has 31 people. On one hand, you could say she did have allies because of this redistricting. There were other liberals that she had worked with as part of this coalition who were there with her. So in theory, you have a group of about 11 who could perhaps block terrible legislation and even find some way to promote good legislation, you know, progressive legislation, especially around the issue of taxation, fairer taxation. This had been, long been, a liberal goal in Texas, right?

She brings out her guitar quite often, and she uses this as a kind of armor and and icebreaker, because people all know, you know, there's a Texas culture of songs, and this is one way she kind of establishes relationships with people. Jordan is a person who wants to establish relationships, and with friends and foes. She understands that to be effective, she has to learn the rules of the Senate and build relationships with people in the Senate, and so I think it's a, it's an important learning experience for her. She's trying to forge her own way. She understands that she wants to gain the respect of these men, both because she feels that is the way forward to efficacy.

At the same time, there's a lot of pressure on the outside from other liberals who say, if you adopt this approach, that means you are selling out. That means you're not enough of a liberal. And I think you know, she doesn't see that as an especially productive way to be. So she does forge her own way, which is about building relationships. But I don't think, from looking at all the evidence, that she ever sacrificed an issue, that she ever caved in on an issue, I think she's feeling her way and trying to figure out the best way that she can be effective, and I think she is effective to a certain extent.

It's interesting because one of the points you make so well in the book, and you make it repeatedly, is that there's a civil rights agenda that involves working in and through the system. That those who are marching in the streets, who Barbara Jordan certainly sympathizes with and sometimes joins, that's one approach, and a valuable and necessary approach. But your argument is that getting into the system and working through the system is absolutely crucial. Do you want to say more about that?

I do. I do. Thank you, Jeremi. Yeah, this is, and I don't think it's just her, like, this is when the movement is moving from the streets to the State House. This is Bayard Rustin's vision, right? From protest to politics. How can we be effective in making the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement real? And this was her quest, (yes) you know, this was really her goal, (yes) to do that. And no one knew how to do it, right? It hadn't been done before. (yes) And this is, you know, Rustin is good, like in theory, all of this coalition should work, but as we see over time, coalitions are complicated and messy, and everyone has their own agenda. How do you get people to work together who don't really have a long history and sometimes their goals clash, so people have to give and take, (right, right) and it's a hard thing. And, so, but this, I do think that she, and many others, Julian Bond, for example, we forget about him running and succeeding in the Georgia State Legislature in 1965. (right, right)

Thank you so much. Well, I think again, we know her for this speech. I also think she played an important role behind the scenes in the Judiciary Committee. Again, this was sort of the Texas Senate. Now, in this committee, she's one of 37 as opposed to one of 31. And the goal here, again, working with her chair, Peter Rodino, is to create a consensus, bipartisan consensus. So again, this means being willing to talk with people who disagree with you, and trying to persuade them, or at least stop the negative effects of others, like, I think she's always trying to neutralize Charles Wiggins from California, who was a big Nixon defender, and she's always trying to intervene and neutralize his influence among the more concerned, you know, the men in the middle. They were called the men in the middle.

So there's that going on for months and months behind closed doors and then and finally, you know, the public has no idea what's been going on behind closed doors of the Judiciary Committee. And so you have the Summer of '74 when finally the committee is going to lay out its argument for impeachment and decide how to frame their articles for impeachment, given what John Doerr has laid out. John Doerr laid out 38 enormous number of possibilities, but they only, but they ended up concentrating on just a few. And these had to do with, as you said, the abuse of power. And I think, you know, there's a reason why she hones in on that. And I think the way that she frames the speech, however, is extremely important.

And now we're suffering a pushback against those decisions, and there's gonna be some, uh, uh, consequences to that, that extraordinary people are gonna, you know, even, like, you can have a lot of Black voting, but if the vote is not made meaningful, right, (Yes) through fair districting and other methods that were used to move things along after the Civil Rights Movement, there's terrible political consequences for our system.

I also think, though, that she believed in coalition politics. And, now we're hearing all kinds of criticisms about the party and, and perhaps, you know, there is gonna be a realignment, and a reckoning about what it means to be in a coalition. I think this is something that she and Shirley Chisholm and many others were always grappling with, and you can never really resolve, but it has to be faced head-on. So I think that's one thing she would say, too.

Probably. I mean, I think she is a realist in that she would say it's very important to look at, you know, the evidence. From my mind, thinking about this, again, I don't know how you overcome, though, these Supreme Court decisions that have weakened the Voting Rights Act (yeah) and have really led to a very strange phenomena where you have places like North Carolina voting for a Democratic governor, but then they're so, but then you have overwhelmingly conservative representation in Congress, right? (Yes, yes.) Because of redistricting. How do you fix, I don't know how you fix that. I don't know. I mean, I just don't know. But I think those are the kinds of things that we really need to look closely at: how can we overcome that weakness in (right, right) in the power structure? (Right.)

It is the lesson. And I would add one thing, again, that makes her extraordinary, is that not only could she mobilize Black voters and people who agreed with her, she was also really good at talking to people who had not experienced oppression (yes) and making them understand it. So she could speak to conservative White audiences, as she did time and time again in Texas, editors, White elites, and persuade them that it was in their interest to support change.

Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. Today, we are going to talk about US Latin American relations. We're going to focus on one of the most important and enduring crises of US Latin American relations, the Cuban Missile Crisis, which everyone knows about. And then we're gonna also talk about the legacies of that moment for our own moment today, when the United States appears to be, uh, in a major crisis with Venezuela. We are fortunate to be joined by, uh, someone who I think is doing, uh, the most important and groundbreaking work on US Latin American relations. Uh, this is Professor Renata Keller. She's an associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno. Uh, thank you for joining us, Rennie.

Uh, so we have Bob Dylan, uh, and this is from one of, uh, my favorite Bob Dylan songs. I have so many. Um, this is called Masters of War. This was originally written by Bob Dylan in late 1962 in the days and weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then first recorded in early 1963. So here we're getting, uh, this extraordinary artist's reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis. And, um, if he had Rennie Keller's book, then he would've been reacting to that too, I'm sure. So here we have, uh, the first three stanzas of this incredible song about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Come you Masters of War, you that build the big guns, you that build the death planes you that build all the bombs, you that hide behind the walls, you that hide behind the desks. I just want you to know, I can see through your masks, you that never done nothing but build to destroy. You play with my world like it's your little toy. You put a gun in my hand and you hide from my eyes and you turn and run farther when the fast bullets fly. Like Judas of old, you lie and deceive a world war can be won. You want me to believe? But I see through your eyes and I see through your brain, like I see through the water that runs down my drain Rennie as, uh, as a scholar of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a scholar of US Latin American relations. How do you think about Bob Dylan's angry words in the context of that moment?

That is also one of my favorite songs that he wrote. And no surprise, right? Because they studied the crisis. But I think he actually expresses a lot of what a lot of people in Latin America were feeling, this, this outrage that that the United States was even contemplating nuclear war without consulting them, with risking their lives for what a lot of people argued was capitalist gain. There were congressional debates in Chile where people were saying these exact same things, that this is all about capitalism and US imperialism, and that if there is a war, there's there's not going to be any winners, we're all going to lose a nuclear war.

Yes, that was one of my main initial findings when I started this project, was that there was a huge range of reactions, and that's what drove my curiosity through, you know, a decade of research was finding out all the different ways that people responded. Some people sided enthusiastically with the United States. All the governments of Latin America voted unanimously in the Organization of American States to set up, to set up the quarantine and approve this idea that they didn't want nuclear weapons on Cuba. Pretty much everyone in the governments or in, you know, the executive branches of Latin American governments agreed on that. But when you look beyond that, there was a huge amount of disagreement about whether Cuba should be allowed to have these weapons. A lot of people argued that they were defensive weapons, just like Castro said that Cuba was clearly under attack and should have the right to defend itself, whereas other people said, No, you're increasing the danger for everyone in the hemisphere. This is unacceptable to have these weapons and you so you get divisions among Latin American countries and within Latin American countries, whereas you get huge protests. In contrast to what we see in the United States, there were a couple major peace protests, but in Latin America, they were huge, and they were all over the place, and in some cases, they devolved into riots, like in Bolivia, I was shocked to find out that more Bolivians died as a result of the Cuban missile crisis than Cubans, and that's because they also felt invested in the outcome, and it played the crisis, played into these existing divisions within Latin American societies like Bolivia, and kind of ignited the these conflicts that had been simmering for a long time.

That's a great question. We know more about what the United States was doing based on availability of US records, and they definitely were watching what was going on in Latin America. I read the Kennedy tapes, which was it's a transcription of secret recordings that Kennedy kept during his meetings in the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's an amazing resource. And in these meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council or EXCOM, they were discussing what was going on in Latin America even before they decided to set up the quarantine, they were concerned. How is this going to look in Latin America? Are people going to see this as just the latest episode of US imperialism? Could the missiles in Cuba destabilize the balance of power in the region? Could it give Cuba like equal power as the United States, since they also would then have nuclear weaponry that they could use to kind of throw their weight around. And then during the crisis, they were discussing reactions in Latin America, and they were worried when they saw these riots and these very strong responses among Latin American publics against their own governments. They were worried about stability in Latin America, and worried that this crisis could spin out and destabilize countries like Mexico and Brazil and Bolivia. And so they were very closely following what was going on in Latin America. And then on the Soviet side, we do have evidence that they were also watching what was going on in Latin America, and they were aware of clearly, the OIS vote that had been all over the news. And they also knew which OAS countries were actually participating in the quarantine around Cuba. A lot of countries offered their air bases and their naval bases. Some countries, like Argentina and Venezuela even sent destroyers to participate in the quarantine. And the Soviets knew that a lot of countries were participating and were uniting against Cuba.

I'm glad you brought up the Kennedy tapes, Rennie, because, as you say, they're an extraordinary resource. We have recordings and transcripts from basically every one of the meetings of this special committee of his closest advisors that President Kennedy put together during the two weeks of the crisis. The editors of one version of the Kennedy tapes, Philip Zelikow and Ernest may are among a group of historians who have seen the Cuban Missile Crisis as a great triumph for Kennedy, not because of the danger that came with it, but because of the way they believe he managed, managed the communications with the Soviet Union, managed communications with the American public, and negotiated out of this crisis that could have gone to nuclear war. You don't seem to have the same heroic view of the Kennedy administration. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you're view differs from what I think is that more conventional view.

Mm-hmm, that's a good point. I would say that, yes, I do differ a little bit from that conventional view, while I do also recognize that we came very close to nuclear war, and I'm grateful that Kennedy and Khrushchev decided to step back from the brink. I do see it as not as much of a clear victory, if when you look at the results for Latin America of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it brought a lot of death and destruction for decades to come. I mentioned Argentina earlier. That's an example of a country that, as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, became a lot closer to the United States, especially in terms of military relations. And there was one military leader in particular, Juan Carlos Ongania, who came to the attention of the United States during the missile crisis. He was the head of the Army, and he very enthusiastically supported the United States during the crisis, he organized a 3000 man unit that could be deployed in case of a land invasion. And then after the crisis, the United States was appreciative and especially trained him. Paid a lot of attention to Ondania, but also the United States signed a military assistance approach, military assistance program with Argentina, and Argentina was the final country in the Americas to really become much more closely aligned militarily with the United States. And then, four years after the missile crisis, Juan Carlos Ongania staged a coup in Argentina, a military coup that would usher in more than a decade of other military coups that brought a death 10s of 1000s of people, mostly civilians, were killed or disappeared during Argentina's dirty war. And you can trace some of the roots of that back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so, yes, I would say the idea that this was a victory or or a near escape is not true when you look beyond the United States.

One of the really interesting conclusions you draw. And I guess it's really two conclusions in one is that, on the one hand, you say the Cuban Missile Crisis shattered some of the solidarity among Latin American countries. You've talked about this already, the ways in which different countries reacted to it. At the same time, you make a very powerful argument that the crisis contributed to the negotiation of the first nuclear-free zone treaty, the Treaty of Tlatelolco in 1967, which most people don't know about, but created a nuclear weapons-free zone, which remains the case to this day in that region. I'd love to hear you reflect on what brought us from the Cuban Missile Crisis to this moment of horror to this moment of nuclear disarmament.

Yes, so the crisis, like I said, forced everyone to realize that they were living in a nuclear age and that they were living in the Cold War, that the Cold War wasn't just, you know, a faraway conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that they could ignore. And so this experience of really being at the center of nuclear conflict revealed to a lot of Latin Americans their vulnerability. Their countries were unlikely to get nuclear weapons, except for places like Argentina and Brazil. And so a lot of countries within Latin America said, We don't want another missile crisis this, this was too close. And so Brazil and a number of other countries have been pushing before the missile crisis for a nuclear-free zone or some kind of agreement. And then Brazil came out of the crisis in not with a great relationship with the United States, to put it, to put it mildly. And so Mexico actually stepped into the breach and picked up where the Brazilians had left off. And the Mexicans did come out of the crisis with a very strong hemispheric position and relations with the United States. And so they started pushing for a nuclear weapons free zone, and it took about five years, but they were able to get another country, enough other countries, to sign on to establish the Treaty of Tlatelolco in 1967 like you mentioned, and that made Latin America the first nuclear weapons free zone in the world, and that set a precedent for other regions of the world to set up regional nuclear weapons free zones. And I think it was that experience of coming so close to nuclear war during the missile crisis, and this feeling of powerlessness that made a lot of people in Latin America willing to change their position and take action.

And I guess that, to me, is is a bridge to where we are today. It does seem that in the decades after the Cuban Missile Crisis, there are a number of efforts that are made not only to limit nuclear weapons in the region, but also to limit American and Soviet and other, I guess, Chinese military activity in the region, and although the United States is involved in many covert activities supporting groups like the Contras and Nicaragua invading Grenada, nonetheless, you could argue that we at least avoid another big crisis like The Cuban missile crisis. But then I look at Venezuela today, and I wonder, if you, as a historian, see certain parallels to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Obviously, there's no Soviet presence in the region, but, but there is, of course, a Russian and a Chinese presence. And you know, it does seem, as the United States is has mobilized the largest force in its Southern Command, present and at sea around Venezuela, and is using force to destroy boats rather than interdict boats on the high seas. How do you think about this moment in relation to what you've just written about.

I think there's a lot of parallels between our current moment and the Cuban Missile Crisis. One that jumps out to me is it's kind of the danger of saber rattling, right when we look at the causes of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I think that one of the main reasons that Khrushchev offered nuclear weapons to Castro in the first place was this clear sense that Cuba was under attack. You have the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 you have Cuba being kicked out of the Organization of American States. You have Operation Mongoose, in which the United States is organizing all these covert activities against Cuba. And that sends a very clear message that the United States and the rest of the countries of Latin America do not intend to put up with Castro's government, and they want to undermine it and get Castro out of Cuba. And so I think we can see parallels today in Venezuela, where we are taking all these steps to undermine Maduro's government. I think, just like Castro, he is, he is incredibly unpopular in the Inter American community. And you know, we're building up this sense of threat. And what I wonder is this, how is Maduro going to react? How are countries like Russia and China is how are they going to react? And could this escalate into, I'm guessing, probably not, another nuclear conflict, but it could be a very drawn out war if the United States decides to actually. We militarily intervene in Venezuela, and the fact that we still live in a nuclear era means that any major conflict, even if it doesn't appear to be a nuclear one on on the face or at first, could potentially escalate into one.

That's very well said. Rennie. I also wonder if there's a lesson about the difficulties, perhaps the hazards of regime change the Trump administration is in a long line of American presidents, Democrat and Republican, who have perhaps overestimated the ability of the United States to force someone like Castro, who Kennedy was obsessed with, of course, or Maduro, who Trump seems to be obsessed with, they've overestimated the ability of the United States to overthrow them. What would you say about that?

I agree completely. I think there's a long history of the United States overestimating, overestimating its abilities to to determine other countries, political regimes, to target specific leaders. You know, in the case of Kasher, they tried so many ways to get him out of power, up to an including assassination and and invasion, and none of it works. And Cuba is a much smaller place than Venezuela, and so I would say there have been very few instances of success in that regard in Latin America. And then there's a question of, what happens next. So even if you do manage to remove a specific leader or change a specific government, like in the case of Chile, what happens next is, is the result or the conclusion any better? I would say, in most cases, know that the consequences have been extremely harmful for Latin Americans and for Inter American relations.

That's a great question. I don't think it's unfair at all. I think these are the kind of questions that people should be asking. My opinion is that we should work within regional organizations, like the Organization of American States. I think that's one of the overlooked lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis, was that by working with regional allies, Kennedy was able to find to set the world on a path toward a peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis by taking multilateral action instead of unilateral action. And so that would be my first recommendation was to would be to work with regional partners like. I said Maduro is extremely unpopular within the region, but by taking unilateral action, we are turning potential allies like Colombia against us, instead of working with them against Maduro,

That makes a lot of sense. That's That's well said, and I think it resonates with our friend Bob Dylan, getting us to think not of ourselves as Masters of War. But I think what Rennie is talking about is masters, perhaps, of peace and negotiation. And I love Rennie. I love everything about your book, but I love in particular the way in which you do take us to the story of the Treaty of Tlatelolco and the efforts to to build peace in the region after this horrible, horrible crisis and the the nearness of extinction. I really think there's, there's a there's a lesson in that. I want to encourage all of our listeners to buy Rennie's book and read it the fate of the Americas, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the hemispheric Cold War. It has a beautiful paperback version that's already out so it's readily accessible and can be read in all settings. Rennie, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your wisdom on our podcast this morning.

Hello and welcome to our latest episode of This is Democracy. I'm Zachary Suri, today we will return to a topic we've already discussed many times on the show, the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, but there are a lot of developments to discuss, to say the least, for the first time in more than three years of war in Ukraine, both sides seem to have expressed hope, whether genuine or not, that there might soon be a diplomatic solution to the war. Meanwhile, further fissures seem to be opening in the US European Alliance, and Ukrainian President Zelensky's administration faces a wide-ranging corruption scandal. Joining us to discuss is our good friend Michael Kimmage. Michael is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America and the director of the Kennan Institute from 2014 to 2017 he served on the Secretary's policy planning staff at the US Department of State, where he held the Russia, Ukraine portfolio. His latest book is collisions the war in Ukraine and the origins of the new global instability. Thank you for joining us today, Michael, great to be back with you both. We're also joined as always, by Jeremi Suri. Hello.

Well, Michael, I wanted to start by asking a question that I think we've touched on a lot in our many discussions on the war in Ukraine, but I think is probably critical to understanding the movement we're in now as you understand it, what do you think Putin needs to end the war, and what does Zelensky and the Ukrainian administration need to bring a peaceful resolution to the conflict? Right?

Well, let me start backwards with what on paper is possibly a solution to the to the problem of the war. And I do think that the outlines are becoming visible of something. And this something is territorial concessions that Ukraine will make Crimea, plus some portion of territory in the SouthEast of Ukraine, and a security guarantee that Ukraine will get in return, either from Europe or from Europe, plus the United States. And so you can imagine, again, in theory, sort of seminar style, that if these two ingredients can be combined, you have the recipe, if not for a permanent stable piece, then for some long standing cessation of hostilities. But you know, I emphasize seminar style and on paper or in theory, because even with this formulation, there is the paradox of the war, or the dilemma of the war from the diplomatic side, which is that the very security guarantee that Ukraine would require for an end to the war, and that can't just be some kind of theoretical, you know, hypothetical commitment. It has to be real for it to work. And of course, Ukraine is highly aware of that. They've been sold down the river in the past and 2014 and in 2000 you know, in the in the in the 1990s and we can get into that, if of interest. But they can't be sold down a river. The River yet again, but that very commitment is going to be unacceptable to Russia that the war was fought in the first place. 2022 probably going all the way back to 2014 to break up the relationship between Ukraine and the West, and to break it up, most importantly, in the security space. And I don't think that Putin is going to give up that ambition. And so we arrive at the first part of your question, Zachary, which is what Russia wants? I think it's possible, possible to put that in quite blunt terms, what Russia wants, and it is not X amount of territory, as some American negotiators seem to believe, it is control over Ukraine's geopolitical destiny, and Ukraine is fighting the war to prevent Russia from acquiring that control. So the final point, of course, is that we're very far from some real diplomatic solution.

Let me give one charitable explanation and one uncharitable explanation, with the caveat that, although there's a lot of reporting on this, we don't really know what's motivating the White White House, you know, with the negotiations in general, and even more, with the timeline, which is indeed so surprising. But the charitable explanation is, I think, that Trump has a correct insight into this war, which is that neither side is going to win completely. And the end, when it comes, you know, if there is a diplomatic end, is going to be messy rather than clean. And I think, you know, President Trump is to be respected for arriving at that insight. Because it's, you know, it's real. It's a genuine insight. A lot of European countries and leaders, I think, are not quite there, so they look like they're a little bit in LA, LA land with all of this. And Trump is not, he's, you know, I think, a bit closer to the realities. And so again, in the charitable explanation, having come to this realization, you want to get there sooner rather than later. And, you know, here Jeremi, we could go back into the history of the Vietnam War, right at a certain point, the US realizes it's not going to win. And I think all of us, in retrospect, would prefer that that realization had been acted on seriously in 1968 or 1969 rather than a few years later. So that's the most charitable explanation I can give. But there are, of course, less charitable explanations. I think there's been a long phase of hubris in the White House about many things, but certainly about the peacemaking skills of the President, which have been, you know, effectively applied in certain crises. But, you know, I think that President Trump thought in September, October, that he was on a roll, and so he had solved all these problems, and Ukraine was just going to be the next one. And so let's get it done before Thanksgiving. So a kind of domestic political argument could be made, I think that that's, you know, sort of a less charitable explanation of why things are so rushed and are sort of working in this way. And you know, an additional and it's not mutually exclusive with the first uncharitable explanation, but an additional explanation is that they really want to get this war behind them, the Trump administration, so that they can focus on other things, the Indo Pacific, perhaps, and certainly the western hemisphere. And that takes us back to Trump's second inaugural address, and the focus on the Western Hemisphere that apparently is going to figure prominently in the new national security strategy. And you know, that's not a terrible explanation, because a conflict of the magnitude of the war in Ukraine is not to be swept under the carpet. And it's not like you can just rush past it and move on to other crises. Either you address it seriously or you don't address it at all. And I think that that's why the diplomacy has effectively gone nowhere in the last couple of weeks,

I think that the variable that matters here is Russian exhaustion, and we can say Putin will fight forever, and it's, you know, an authoritarian regime, and you can get people to follow Him, and, you know, or even you can look at some recent levada pollings, a sort of respected polling institution in Russia, and you can see fairly high levels of support for Putin and for the and for the war in those numbers. But I really don't know. I wonder. I mean, maybe it's my outsider's perspective. I think that this is a empty feudal war for Russia, in addition to being, you know, immoral and and criminal and execution. But, you know, I think it just doesn't bring Russia anything. And if you're a Russian sitting, you know, somewhere in Russia, and you're not, maybe enamored of Putin in the first place, and. You know, you sort of see all of this death and destruction and money and all of that for the sake of conquering Mariupol, you know, a medium sized city in Ukraine. You have to wonder what it's all what it's all for. So I do think exhaustion is a possible variable on the Russian side. It's not going to be next month or six months from now, but it could come. And if it does, then I think Putin will be obligated to cut his losses and think about some point of termination for the war. And so I think he will hold on to territory. I don't even think at this point that Eastern Ukraine is, you know, such attractive territory. And you know, gradually it may be possible for Ukraine to give some of it up. And Crimea, tacitly, has been given up already, so Putin can focus on that. And because of that exhaustion, he would have to tolerate this closer security bond between, you know, a big portion of Ukraine and Europe, or between Ukraine and the Transatlantic Alliance. He is not there at the moment. You know, as mentioned before, he's fighting the war to prevent that security bond from solidifying, but he may reach a point where it just seems like it's unpreventable, and the sacrifices on the Russian side are too great, and for domestic political reasons, it's necessary not to give up on every aspect of the war, but to compromise if that comes to pass. You know, I think that there's quite a bit of room to negotiation, but it's a big, you know, hypothetical, because there are lots of reasons why Putin might not want to go down that road. And, you know, he's been relatively successful at insulating big parts of Russia from the costs of the war. So it's, it's a hypothetical scenario for two, three years from now,

It does seem to be true at the moment. Of course, this is the Trump administration. So we could go back over the last eight, nine months and detail statements on social media and interviews, and sometimes, you know, Trump seems to be quite supportive of the Ukrainian military effort and supportive of Zelensky, and speculates even about, you know, sending Tomahawks to be used on Russian territory. And he can appear hawkish now and then, but that's not the prevailing mood, and hasn't been for the last sort of 10-11, months in the White House. I think it's correct. I think it is the assessment both of President Trump and Vice President Vance. You could put it in two ways that Ukraine is losing that it's the weaker country, and they do place a great premium on countries they believe to be strong in countries they believe to be weak. And I think Ukraine falls in the weaker category, and Russia falls in the in the stronger category. And in that sense, you know, if Ukraine is going to lose, then get a deal now and cut your losses and face reality. I think that that's probably the discourse and the tone in a lot of White House conversations. But I think in a different sense, when they look at Ukraine, they see it as a losing proposition for them. It's not just that the war is being lost, but the whole issue is a losing issue. So you could spend a lot of resources and put a lot of effort into it and work with the Europeans, which they don't really want to do, and you're not going to get much more than a kind of marginal set of gains from where we are at the present moment, the American population is not going to vote on the issue of the war in Ukraine. So you could put a lot of effort in, it won't yield you a big success. And so in some ways, it's just better to distance the American body politic from the conflict altogether, because it's a losing political proposition, Proposition they find. And there, there are, of course, you know, issues of the Trump campaign in 2024, and you know, sort of MAGA issues about the uses of American power and spending money, and Ukraine being sort of a distant country. And I think those two things combine to create this very hurried tempo and a kind of fantasy diplomacy aimed at ending the conflict, because in multiple ways, they see it as a loss. Interesting.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's serious business. I don't mean to be flippant in making this point, but we want to be careful about what's particular to, let's say, Ukrainian politics and history in the last 30 years, and what's maybe particular to the world. War. And I'm not aware of any countries that become less corrupt during wartime. You know, wartime is a, is a is a motor of corruption, because it often diminishes media attention on the chief executive it. You know, there's a lot of spending in wartime, and, you know, just a lot of opportunities to feed at the trough. And that's definitely what's been happening with members of the Zelensky government who are quite close to Volodymyr Zelensky himself. The scandal focuses on, you know, sort of kickbacks and people making money off of off of contracts, and many of them, you know, perilously close to the to the inner circle of of of Volodymyr Zelensky. But the other story, and I don't think that we do Ukraine a service by not telling this story, is that since 1991 as in many post Soviet countries, there's just not a good separation of powers. And in particular, the judiciary and the executive are too intertwined. And in fact, the Maidan revolution of 2013 2014 we might think about that as geopolitics, and about Europe and about Russia and Ukraine's place in the world, and it was but the 2013 2014 revolution is an anti corruption revolution. When it's called the Revolution of Dignity, that's part of what's meant about the extreme corruption of the then president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, I don't think Poroshenko, the president who followed Yanukovych, was hugely corrupt, but he was an oligarch, and people around him sort of continued the old patterns. Zelenskyy also runs in 2019 as an anti corruption candidate. Kind of rises to fame in Ukraine as a protagonist of a television show that's about cleaning up Ukrainian politics. And I take him at his word. I don't think that Zelensky himself is personally corrupt, but perhaps there is inattention. He is jealous of his own authority and power, and I think he hasn't been great on media freedom in Ukraine since the start of the war, and that probably contributes to corruption, and it's just very hard. There's not really an incentive once you're in power, to diminish the power of the executive branch. And for that reason, the judiciary in Ukraine just never has the oversight that it that it needs. So it's a very, very serious issue because it damages Ukraine's chances of entering quickly into the European political fold, and it's just not what Ukraine needs at the present moment. And of course, Russia is exploiting it to the hilt. And to go back to Jeremi's question, when you look at Ukraine as let's use the term a kind of a loser, which I think Trump may well see when he looks at Ukraine, this is just further evidence, or could be used as further evidence for that. So it's completely unfortunate.

Michael, what are the chances that these two men at the center of this war, Putin and Zelensky, that they continue to go on as they've gone on? I mean, what's so striking to me as a historian, just just building on your last point, is how much of this war has been about the two of them, how much they have been front and center. Putin in launching this war, which was a completely unnecessary war, and Zelensky in rallying, at least initially, Ukrainians, and I think he continues to do this effectively, and rallying Europeans now, rallying Americans at different moments. So much of it has been about these two men, but history would lead us to believe that the conflict will will deteriorate their authority as well. So where do you see that going?

Yeah, that's a very you know, that's a profound question. And the nature of their authority is quite different, given the systems in which they operate, and also given that the war is not the same at all on the Russian side and and the Ukrainian side. So let's start with Zelensky. The man has his shortcomings. We've mentioned corruption that he's been unable to eradicate. I think the deeper shortcoming with Zelensky is that he overestimates his strategic ability, which we've seen, you know, Jeremi. We could go through a lot of examples of that with Churchill and others. Hitler, that's not, you know, the most useful example. But you know, sort of political leaders who think that they have too much, you know, sort of strategic acumen, or more than they do. And you know, Zelensky has made a lot of bad calls militarily, or has signed off on a lot of, a lot of bad calls. And, you know, I wonder about that. And one wonders, in the future, if you're to speculate about something bad happening in Ukraine, I don't think it's that Zelensky is going to fall because of corruption. And I don't think it's because Zelensky is going to lose the support of the Europeans. And over the US, Zelensky has some control. He's managed Trump really well over the last couple of months, but the US is going to do what it's going to do on its own terms. But where Zelensky can face real difficulties in his relations with the military, and you do see now certain figures, most importantly Zelensky, who had been the kind of head of the Ukrainian military and was. He was sent to London to be ambassador for a time, and is now, apparently back in in Ukraine, and he has an independent base of political support, and he does constitute something of a threat to Zelensky. I don't think that Zelensky or anyone else is just going to knock the system down during the war for the sake of gaining power, because it's too dangerous. But you know, there's where you see a certain shakiness on the Ukrainian side. And also, people talk about a bad deal for Ukraine, resulting in mutiny and resistance from the Ukrainian army. In other words, Zelensky goes to Washington, signs some kind of deal, giving the Donbas, all of the Donbas to Russia, and the Ukrainian military says, No way, and we're going to do what we're going to do, and that could become a real political crisis. I don't think we're there yet, but those, to me, seem the ways in which Ukraine is shaky, and even the personal charisma of a Volodymyr Zelensky probably can't paper over those tensions if they would get, you know, greater than they are, than they are now, you know, Putin is it's a very frustrating thing to analyze. I find one can't let one's emotions or sort of moral principles get too much in the way. It's important to see a system in its own light. Putin is quite secure in his power at the moment. He commands a very, very vertical and repressive state, but one that has traction and almost complete control over Russian politics, and it's hard to imagine the war dislodging that, you know, I think the shakiness that's there with Putin is connected to the realization that will come, I think, one day in Russia, that the war was a mistake. And you know, when that comes and when that instantiates itself. It may be that not just Putin loses his position, or that realization may come after Putin leaves the scene, but it could well be that Putinism itself unravels in Russia because it's based on something that is not in the national interest of the country, and it's based on something that's coded in deceptions and lies and and manipulations. And you know, if you could put the point in a general way, it's as if Putin has bet. Putin ism on the war. And I think over time it's going to be a losing bet. But over time could, unfortunately, mean 1015, 20 years, right?

Definitely. No, there's the devilish symmetry of this war, which I've mentioned already, this sort of dilemma that the closer Ukraine draws to the security structures of the West, the more Russia has incentives for continuing or perhaps for intensifying the war, I don't see a solution to that problem in the short to medium term. You could even be more pessimistic than that and say that there is no solution to that problem, that there's something zero sum about Ukraine's aspirations to independent statehood and participation in the European story and Russia's understanding of what Ukraine is and what Ukraine should be, or Putin's understanding at the very at the very least. And so that doesn't exclude the possibility of an operational pause, of a cessation of hostilities. It doesn't exclude the possibility that documents could be signed and what appears like conventional negotiation could take place. And here, you know, I'm sure our listeners are versed in these topics, but you do have the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 which was a document signed after Ukraine had given up its nuclear weapons in the post Soviet period, and a security guarantee was given to Ukraine by the US, by European countries, by by Russia. That proved to be, of course, meaningless. And more recently, you have minced diplomacy from 2014 to 2015 which was a very decorous series of meetings and agreements. And, you know, it really seemed like something was resolved, but it truly wasn't, in a way, the seeds of the 2022 war are planted in the very inadequate diplomacy of 2014 2015 so it's not to say that there isn't a role for diplomacy in all this. I think that there is a bit of crisis management, escalation management, conflict management. It's not wrong for Washington and Moscow to talk at any point, but that diplomacy can really wedge itself into the war at the present moment and solve the war's fundamental problems. I simply see zero evidence of that.

What about the other sort of line in the in the sort of triangular relationship on the Ukrainian side of the war, that between the United States and Europe, if anything, the sort of negotiations between the US and Russia at this moment seem to seem to hurt the US-European alliance the most is that you think an accurate reading and and what, might, what might these negotiations do to that sort of tenuous alliance between the United States and Europe in support of Ukraine?

I completely agree with that interpretation. And if Putin has any real objective here, it's not ending the war. You know, there are clearly 100 steps Putin could take to end the war that he's not taking, such as withdrawing troops and and scaling back the hostilities, etc. But that's, you know, not his bid and not his not his game. It's clear that he's going to create interest in Trump's Washington in an end to the war, and then string Washington along for as long as he can without changing the basics of the of the of the war. So you could ask the question, you know, going back to your first question, Zachary About What Motivates Putin, like, why do it in the first place? If you're not interested in ending the war, you know, why pursue this charade of diplomacy? And I think he does it in part, because it exhausts Ukraine. You know, it takes time and attention of Ukrainian policymakers, Zelensky, rushing from place to place, and just focusing on this. And that has its uses in wartime. But more than anything, what Putin is trying to do successfully, I would say, for him, is to shine a light on the space between the United States and Europe. And so for Europe, an unprincipled end to the war is certainly undesirable and it may really be impossible. In other words, it may not be possible for the EU, plus Germany, you know, France, UK, many other countries in Europe to sign on formally to the transfer of territory from Ukraine to Russia. That just for Europe, sets a precedent that is so dangerous that it runs counter to the core interests of the key European actors, even though there is domestic disagreement in Europe and each country has a different threat assessment. But rearranging Europe in that way is not going to work for Europe, and so that's why you see heightened defense spending, high levels of support for Ukraine, and the backing of Macron merits, Starmer and others for Zelensky as he goes into these negotiations, that Europe is serving as a backstop for Zelensky, and that's because of very clear European interest. Now the US, in my view, should adhere to those interests and support them. They seem to me like American interests, but the White House has a different read, of course, and the White House wants to for the reasons we were already talking about, wrap up the war, you know, park it, put it somewhere where it's no longer visible, sweep it under the carpet, move on to other things. Call it a great diplomatic success for the for the US, and that's a totally different approach from the mainstream European approach. So it's not a cosmetic transatlantic difference, it's a profound transatlantic difference. And so the more Putin can shed a light on that, put a spotlight on that, the weaker the transatlantic relationship seems, and the weaker the transatlantic relationship is. If there's no longer a shared threat assessment on an issue as significant as the war in Ukraine, is there really a transatlantic alliance in the full sense of the word. And I would just put a question mark there, and Putin really wants that question mark to be in bold face.

A couple of things that it's not doing. And I think you want to start just with a, you know, believable, accurate understanding of the war itself. And some of this is is so basic that it's almost embarrassing to repeat, but I'm not sure it's been internalized by by President Trump and some of the people who work for him, but that the war is Russia's fault. That the war begins with an outright Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and of course, earlier, that the war was unprovoked, that the war reflects a will to control Ukraine on Russia's part. These don't seem to me like complicated arguments. They're almost statements of fact, but they do have to be internalized. So that would be the first point. The second point is that hastily planned, sloppy diplomacy is probably worse than no no diplomacy at all. So if you are to pursue, you know, and I think it's fine to inquire with diplomacy to just see where you stand and, you know, figure it out. But if you do that, you can do that privately. You don't necessarily have to do it in public. And this constant building up of expectations, you know, Secretary Rubio saying we made a huge amount of progress in Miami about a week ago, and there's no visible progress. President Trump going into. Alaska, implying that the, you know, the war is going to come to an end, they're kind of there. They've, they've, they've had a breakthrough, and there was no breakthrough. So that, I think, really weakens the US position, these kind of promises and claims that are so at odds with the with the reality. So you can do less in public, you can lower expectations, and at the same time, I think you can still explore and talk. You know, I think a third sort of and final point to make is that the US needs to have a very careful understanding of what its real leverage is in the situation. And this is no longer the 1990s when you can send Richard Holbrook somewhere to quote, unquote, end the war. To end a war, the title of Richard Holbrooks book about the Balkans in the 1990s that's not the role the US is going to play here. The US is one piece of a very big puzzle, which does include China and non European countries. US can facilitate. It can put forward ideas. It can convene. It can do things, but it has to understand its leverage, and its leverage has a lot of limits, which I think are not well understood in the White House, and most baffling of all the US is diminishing its leverage at the same time that it's trying to be the number one country solving the problem. So it's lowering its support to Ukraine, which diminishes us leverage. It's fouling up the transatlantic relationship, which is diminishing us leverage, and constantly suggesting that it would be in the interest of the United States to withdraw from Europe in general, which also diminishes us leverage in Europe, objectively. So there seems to be a very hazy understanding of what us leverage is, and that too makes the diplomacy just almost destined to fail.

I wanna avoid, uh, not trying to be rude here. I wanna avoid a think tank answer to that, uh, question. Cause I do think it's easy to sit in a think tank in Austin, Texas, or Washington DC or, uh, or New Haven, Connecticut. Uh, it's easy to sit in, think tank mode and say yes, we can resolve the problem of the war, uh, with a security guarantee to, to Ukraine. I do think that that's true, and I think it matters, but I also think that there's a real problem of domestic politics, uh, in Germany, uh, in France, in the UK, and in the United States, and I don't know how we overcome that problem in the short to medium term. In other words, sending troops to Ukraine is not a non-starter for strategic reasons, but it's a non-starter for domestic political reasons in all the countries, that I mentioned. Even large groups of technical experts and assistance to operate, you know, western weaponry in Ukraine, would I think be tricky. And then there are thresholds when it comes to financial support to Ukraine. All of these countries are puzzling through. You know, Trump does win the 2024 election on a campaign that includes lowering support to Ukraine. And I wouldn't wanna factor that out of the equation. So the question is, what's the credible commitment to Ukraine that can be managed, uh, that suits the contours of domestic political, domestic politics in the US and in the key European. Uh, actors and there, I think we arrive more at a strategy of containment than in a strategy based on NATO like security guarantees. Um, and you know, I think that if it's the next best thing, then it's worth focusing, uh, on that. Uh, and containment means close levels of cooperation, you know, the kind of intelligence sharing and targeting that the US does. Uh, with Ukraine, defense, industrial production. Maybe that's the real elixir, uh, in this, in this mix that if Europe and the US and Ukraine can get together and really succeed at defense industrial production, which actually they're not doing, uh, at the present moment. But, uh, if they could do that, then maybe that becomes the TA at security, guarantee for Ukraine, but a kind of formal NATO like commitment. I think it solves the problem, but I also don't think it's, it's realistic unless our domestic politic politics changes, uh, so much. So it's not a particularly satisfying answer to your question, but to me it's the most honest one I can, I can muster.

If I could Zachary just jump in with one further point, uh, since it sort of popped up at the end of my last, uh, last answer. I am, you know, all in favor of diplomacy. I'm all in favor of grand strategy. I'm all in favor of being able to think in abstract terms about the war in Ukraine. It's, it's necessary. It's important, it's necessary. The academic side is necessary on the, uh, on the policy side, but if there's any. Message in a way to leave listeners with when it comes to what can be done in a practical sense, a non defeatist, non fatalistic sense of supporting Ukraine. It resides very much in defense, industrial production, uh, and the production of drones, uh, in particular. Maybe the war will take on a new phase a year from now, or six months from now, and it'll be a different technology. But I was shocked to hear a briefing from Michael Kaufman noted, you know, military expert on the war. That Ukraine had an edge in drone warfare for the beginning of 2025, and that was helping Ukraine on the battlefield. For the last five, six months, Russia has had an edge in drone production and drone use on the, on the battlefield, and that's why Russia's making incremental gains. Now, how can that be when Russia's economy is one 10th the size of Europe's economy? And if you put the US into the mix, it's just such a small, uh, entity economically there, I think you can balance the equation. In ways that will really work in Ukraine's favor, uh, over time. So for, for all the abstractions that we just talked about in the last 40, minutes or so, the particulars of defense industrial production should demand a lot of our attention.

I don't really know. It's a question to ask a person who would be really inside of that question. All I can say, just as a general answer to, to your question, Jeremi, is that. The Russian economy is on a sort of mobilized wartime footing. The economy is the society is not, but the economy is with huge levels of defense spending at purchasing power parity, which of course we can say Russia has the eco, an economy the size of Italy's. But within the Russian economy, high levels of defense spending can, can bring about big results, and they're running factories 24 hours a day. And it's an authoritarian government, so they can force people to work there and sort of push production, uh, lines and levels at a, at a very, very high clip. And so in that sense, what we wanna be aware of, um, is the level of urgency on our side. It's way too low, uh, in the US. That feels clear to me. Uh, but I think it may even be too low in, in Europe, the level of urgency, uh, when it comes to this war, its potential consequences, uh, and the need to act quickly, uh, and resolutely so. You know, there, when you think of what Russia has done over the last four years, uh, to stick with the war and to gain certain kinds of advantage, that should be pretty sobering for us.

I think that’s so well said. Steve, one would think listening to you that there would be easy consensus around this and one would expect that, particularly in a state like Texas where you and I both teach that this would resonate with, Know more politically conservative ears, political conservatives who care about and claim to care a lot about presidential leadership, and executive power. why has this been so challenging? You’ve been involved deeply, through the American Historical Association and other organizations and trying to work on Texas history standards, and you have faced a lot of resistance. What’s the challenge at the state level?

Both sides believe rightly or wrongly, that the other side is acting in bad faith. When I read on Twitter from the Texas Public Policy Institute that the National Council of Social Sciences in the American Historical Association are fighting to advance a radical secular Marxist agenda. I wanna throw up my hands. As I’ve tried to explain to the State Board of Education, what concerns me is that students are coming into my class having never heard of the Enlightenment, the very philosophical foundation of this nation. How can that be? And part of the answer is that in our emphasis on mathematical literacy. And language arts. We’ve downplayed civics and social studies. We need to devote more time to this. I want students who are well prepared to take part in serious discussions, and I worry that’s not happening. But when I hear criticisms that. Seem to imply I have an ideological agenda or that the American Historical Association has an ideological agenda, my spine stiffens.

Yeah. Where do you think these, criticisms of historians, but not just historians, this is criticism of curricula in particular. it’s striking that this is a moment when, high school and middle school history curricula is at the center of national political debates. Why this attention to these questions now? What is making them such, potent political issues?

And I guess why is that, Steve? That we’ve been a partisan society, speaking of political history throughout our history and, people have always distrusted the other side. Just go back to the founding moment in Jefferson and Hamilton. they, accused each other of bad faith, as did Hamilton and, Aaron Burr. So, what, is it right now that makes this so much more difficult than it was in prior moments?

I think his voice is, uh, particularly relevant in this moment. Uh, especially his unwillingness to tolerate nonsense from anyone, uh, and his sort of unflagging commitment to humanity. In, in world events. Uh, and this is a section that I think speaks to that, that maybe I hope also offers us some words of consolation, uh, and maybe also put some fire, uh, behind this as well. This is, uh, of section again from Can socialists be happy? The inability of mankind to imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain, presents socialists with a serious problem. Dickens can describe a poverty stricken family tucking into a roast goose and can make them appear happy. On the other hand, the inhabitants of perfect universes seem to have no spontaneous gaity and are usually somewhat repulsive into the bargain. But clearly we are not aiming at the kind of world Dickens described, nor probably at any world he was capable of imagining. The socialist objective is not a society where everything comes right in the end because kind old gentlemen give away turkeys. What are we aiming at, if not a society in which charity would be unnecessary? We want a world where Scrooge with his dividends and tiny Tim with his tuberculous leg would both be unthinkable. But does that mean we are aiming at some painless, effortless utopia? At the risk of saying something, which the editors of Tribune, sorry, Tribune was the paper it was published in May not endorse. I suggest that the real objective of socialism is not happiness. Happiness hither two has been a byproduct, and for all we know, it may always remain. So the real objective of socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though. What is not usually said or not said loudly enough. Mens up their lives in heartbreaking political struggles or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo. Not in order to establish some central heated, air conditioned, strip lighted paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another, and they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue. Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore things happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move. The grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

Now. Responding to Inhumanity with humanity. I think we all know what inhumanity is, right? And unfortunately, we were just talking about this before we, we started the recording. Uh, this was a year, maybe not with more inhumanity than other years, but certainly with a fair share of inhumanity. Um, and one, one can think about, uh, the murders, the cold-blooded murders, assassinations of, uh, a legislator and her, uh, husband in Minnesota. Followed a few months later by the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Uh, we can think also of the assassination that occurred of a insurance executive this year and, and many others. Uh, just this was a murderous year where extremists of one kind or another used excessive on un uh, un unacceptable illegitimate violence, uh, against individuals. Uh, of course there was mass violence as well. Thousands and thousands of deaths in Ukraine and elsewhere. Um, we saw also the violence and inhumanity of deportations within our own country. People being seized off the street sometimes when they had gone to a, um, immigration hearing that they were invited to, seized from a court. Uh, when they had come voluntarily to, uh, appear, uh, believing that they were getting, um, legal access to our country, but instead being in a sense kidnapped and often. Deported to a country that he never had any connection to. Uh, El Salvador, Sudan, uh, things of that sort. So, so there was plenty of inhumanity, uh, and plenty of inhumanity with all kinds of political stripes attached to it, uh, in all kinds of places. So I think we know what Inhumanity is and we know what Orwell’s referring to there as himself being a child of the revolutions of the 1930s and, uh, wars of the 1940s. Um. What is humanity? What, when, when, when Orwell encourages us to respond to inhumanity with humanity, to not simply respond an eye for an eye, to not simply respond to the murder of our guy by murdering their guy. Uh, what, what does he, what do you think he means? Because I think that’s the hard part here, Zachary. What do you think he means?

Well, I think what he’s saying, um, particularly when he talks about. Brotherhood. He says, the real objective of the socialists is human brotherhood. Um, the real objective of socialism is human brotherhood. He says, I think what he really means is that the, the true usefulness of ideology or political programs of any stripe. And particularly from his perspective of left-wing ideology, um, is to push us towards, uh, humanity, to, to, to encourage and goad people to fight for their fellow human beings. I mean, the examples he gives are people tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo or getting themselves killed in civil wars. All of things he, he witnessed, uh, in his life. Those are. Those are examples of people who really aren’t dying for ideology, but dying for humanity. The ideology is secondary. It’s a tool. It’s something they’re using to push towards that. I think really what he’s saying is that the most important thing is not to lose sight. Of the fact that our politics and our societies have to aim at something higher than, as he puts it, replacing a toothache with the absence of Right.

Right. Right. And, and those who don’t know his history, it’s worth just stating Orwell had been involved in the, uh, fight against fascism in Spain. And became deeply disillusioned with the socialists who were in many ways leading the anti-fascist fight for becoming, uh, in their own partisan work, a tyranny of their own against the tyranny, the horrible tyranny. They were, they were fighting. I, I think there were examples maybe to help us, uh, from this year describe what humanity in response to inhumanity is. There were examples we saw of this one that certainly moved me and I think moved you even more, Zachary. Was the experience of, uh, the hostages, uh, hostages in, um, Israel, uh, Israelis who had been taken hostage brutally by Hamas. Uh, some of them held hostage for more than two years. Uh, and the release of those high hostages, uh, in many ways, uh. Their experiences once released. Um, I know you had the opportunity to talk to a few of these former hostages yourself, Zachary. My impression is that they, after being released from this nightmare-ish horror that I cannot even imagine, um, it’s not that they. Wanted to forgive Hamas. They certainly didn’t. Uh, there’s nothing that says we have to forgive the people who do horrible things to us, but they also, it seems to me, became voices against more violence and voices for peace. Is is that right?

Yeah, I think that’s, that’s true. I think one of the things that’s been really moving to watch is to see those individuals who survived captivity in Gaza come out and, and, and either speak for peace or for an end to hostilities in the region or. Uh, to or, and or to go out into the world and speak about their experience and speak against that kind of violence. Um, often it has taken the form of very political statements or protests in Israel against the current government or, uh, in less political ways. You know, traveling around the world and just sharing their ordeal with, with audiences. And I think it’s something very powerful to think about someone who’s gone through. Uh, that kind of experience. And then it’s not only willing, but excited to, and committed to talking about it. And I, I think that that kind of human connection Yeah. Someone who’s experienced something horrible and is willing and wants to share it, that kind of human connection is part of what that humanity is.

It, it reminds me in some ways of, of watching from afar. And reading of the lives of people like Eli Viel. Yeah, Nelson Mandela. I mean, these are larger than life figures in some ways, although actually Eli Viel was a figure of very small stature. But these are individuals intellectually and in their image of they’re larger than, larger than life, but in some ways, like these former hostages, they were ordinary people who had suffered the unthinkable and then came out as voices, not a vengeance. Not of revenge nor of forgiveness, but voices of finding a common brotherhood and sisterhood in our response to the horrors that we’ve experienced. Yes.

Yeah. I think it also reminds me a lot of, some of the activism we’ve seen from students and parents after school shootings in the United States. Yes. The parents of Sandy Hook, in particular.

Right, and Uvalde people who have become committed. Not, not to political or polemical statements, but to real policy change. Yeah. And to sort of not refusing to let their friends, family, children be forgotten. I think that has been really moving to watch. And I, I think that kind of space where ordinary people, um, who’ve suffered immensely, actually speak about their experiences instead of having it filtered through political or ideological. Um. Uh, frameworks, I think is, is, is really powerful in our world. And one of the few things that I think can break through a lot of the, uh, partisan noise that we live with.

Uh, it’s, it’s, it’s easy to support a cause. That kills a lot of people when you don’t think about the people you’re killing. Right? But what these former hostages have done is they’ve brought out, it doesn’t matter what your political position is on Israeli politics or on Middle East politics, they remind you of the individuals and the suffering that cannot be justified.

Uh, is, is so startling. Um, and I, I, I do think, um, in a very different context, that’s what Orwell does so well in his, and in all of his essays. It’s, I think what makes his writing powerful to me right now, or what speaks to me about it. I mean, his most famous essay probably Shooting an Elephant, he describes basically the entire network or reality of. Imperialism, British, uh, British imperialism in Southeast Asia simply by one personal experience he had as a police officer. And it’s, it’s,

Yeah. Right. I think that’s right. I, I think also, uh, as you said, the, the, the. As someone who’s also at a university campus, I think the hardest part about the way that universities are being talked about and the worst part about how they’re being talked about, uh, on, on both sides, uh, in international discourse, uh, is, is the sort of insistence on labels, as you’ve said, the insistence on, on making every academic question. One of are is this DEI or is this anti DI is this is this anti Right. Instead of focusing on, uh, complexity. And I think, I think if there’s one hopeful. Hopeful thing that I think we can take out of this moment for universities is that, uh, I think for, I think a lot of the sort of. Urges to grasp for labels. The urge for simplification is actually rooted in a genuine frustration with the lack of complexity, if that makes any sense. Yeah. I think we’re taking, people are taking, um, frustration at academic environments that don’t allow for complexity or don’t allow for certain perspectives to be heard and actually doing the exact same thing and turning them into oversimplified labels and, and, and talking about universities in oversimplified ways in response. But I think the urge or the frustration that’s there. Is is very genuine.

Yeah. Well this is sort of replacing a toothache with a toothache, right? Yeah. They’re, they’re, they’re recreating, they’re mirroring the problem that they saw by doing the exact opposite. I think that’s definitely happened. Um, I don’t know if you agree. I think that we, and I said this before in our podcast and in many other settings, um, I think we went too far with certain elements of DEI. Demanding, you know, diversity statements from people in a kind of McCarthyite way, loyalty oaths to diversity. And I think we went too far. Um, but I think now the response to having gone too far is going much too far in the other direction, to the point where now diversity has become a dirty word for some people. And you’re not supposed to, uh, assign. Work that points to perhaps the critical and not savory parts of our history, um, that that’s overreacting in the other direction. That’s mirroring, that’s a toothache for a toothache. Uh, if you’re against, um, preference for one direction, there shouldn’t be preference in the other direction either. And, and I think, I think one of the lessons we have to learn is that if we’re not attentive to complexity, all we do is just, uh, swing the, the spectrum back and forth. It’s like a seesaw. Rather than progress. So, so that brings us to, I think, the theme we wanted to close on, which is community. Um, I, I think one of the real, um, outcomes of 2025 is I’ve seen this with my students, with my colleagues around the country. I’ve seen this with all kinds of settings I’ve been in. People seem to be returning to community. They seem to have found in many cases that the world and the lives they were living. Online and elsewhere, we’re not satisfied. Clearly people are still living in those ways. Uh, but there is, there does seem to be a return to community and, um, I don’t know. It might be worth talking about that. I think that’s been an important part of your experience also. Right, Zachary?

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today we’re going to focus on Venezuela, one of the, most significant and confusing, I think, crises of our current moment. But a crisis in a region, of longstanding, American intervention and conflict, A crisis in a region that has gone through, extraordinary changes over the last 250 years. And a region where the United States and its relations with Venezuela and other countries have. Always been, not just complicated, but often quite controversial. we are fortunate to be drawn to, this topic, not only because of the prominence that it has in the news, but because we have a colleague who I think is one of the most interesting scholars writing on the region as a whole, who has a lot to share with us today. This is my colleague and friend, Professor Kurt Weyland. Kurt, thank you for joining us.

Yes, there was really a surprise this intervention and the situation is so fluid that, you know, we have to pay attention every day to what new things are happening. So a lot of interest in that topic.

Absolutely, especially because a lot of the situation in Venezuela and the decision making in the US is quite murky. We don’t really know why Trump did this whole thing. Both sides are playing strange games. We don’t know how the opposition in Venezuela will try to get into the game. So, you know, a lot of moving parts here.

Absolutely. Absolutely. We're gonna talk about all of that. I wanted to open today, by just reading, the key section from President James Monroe’s, annual address to congress. In December of 1823. So more than 200 or more than a hundred years ago. Actually, no, 200 years. More than 200 years ago. I’m gonna have to work on my math here. This is the key passage, written in fact by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. That becomes known as the Monroe Doctrine. It wasn’t known as the Monroe Doctrine initially, but it became over time known as the Monroe Doctrine. And what Monroe said was that we, the United States, owe it to candor and to the amiable relations existing between the United States. And those European powers, he means the European powers, operating empires in Latin America. We owe it to declare that we, the United States, should consider any attempt on their parts to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety with the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power. We have not interfered and shall not interfere, but with the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and unjust principles, acknowledged we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them or controlling in any other manner their destiny by any European power. In any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States. What it seems to me, president Monroe was saying in this somewhat flowery language, was that the United States, would do all it could. To, make it difficult to not recognize, to hinder European powers from returning to colonies that they had lost in countries like Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela in this period of revolution and independence in the early 19th century. but it seems to me Monroe is not saying. United States, will necessarily intervene militarily. Kurt, how do you, as a scholar of this region, think about what the Monroe Doctrine meant for the next 200 years, bringing us to today? I, I know it’s a big question, but I’m curious your reaction to it.

So you see, you see various elements in that statement. I mean, you can read it from a more realist perspective. The United States as, even then most powerful country in the Western Hemisphere is trying to keep competing powers out of the hemisphere. It, it sounds in, as you say, it’s flowery language in some sense, more from an idealist perspective. We, the United States know, thrown off the yoke of colonialism, don’t want the yoke of colonialism, reimposed on our Latin American brothers and sisters. And you know, as you say, I mean, the Spanish and Portuguese would’ve liked to. Repose colonialism and the French and Brits might also have wanted to get into the game. And so the way it reads in some sense is, you know, quite idealistic. We wanna protect the liberty of those countries. And what you see, of course in the subsequent 200 years, a lot of shift be, I mean, in some sense, more with the increase in American power, especially after the Spanish American War, and then the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine where the unit is. States appointed itself as the policeman of the Western hemisphere. You see, in many ways the realist aspect predominate. Then of course, also kind of the economic, we wanna com keep competitors out in a number of crises in the early 20th century, but every once in a while, that idealistic aspect also came to the fore. You know, with. President Wilson in the early 20th century with JFK and the Alliance for Progress for years in the early 1960s with Jimmy Carter. And so you see the, I mean, United States foreign policy has always been shifted between a more realist focus, more that idealism. And I think you see that in the poster of the us vis-a-vis the Western Hemisphere.

That, that’s very helpful, Kurt, and insightful. And, and in a sense, recapitulates one of the classic ways of, of seeing us foreign policy toward this region, which is a tension, a constant tension between, as you say, realist, materialist impulses, and idealistic, perhaps even democratic, impulses. And you can certainly see both in the Monroe Doctrine. You mentioned the Roosevelt corollary, of course, from 19 oh. Four, which is Theodore Roosevelt’s more aggressive, contention that the United States has a right to intervene in countries that are misbehaving or are mismanaged. on the idealistic side, though, this, intervention in Venezuela, how would you characterize it? Is it, is there any idealism in it? Is it a complete rejection? Has the Trump administration gone entirely in the materialist direction? How do you think about and understand, based on the little we know so far? Of what the United States is doing in Venezuela right now.

I think you see precisely that strange mixture of different facets in that recent Venezuela intervention, and maybe less in the motivations of President Trump, which are hard to figure out because on the one hand this is, You know, if you wish, clear assertion of American predominance in the Western Hemisphere. I’m concerned that the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranis have been messing around there. And this is the, you know, so-called backyard of the United States. So get out in that realist kind of spirit. You, you see President Trump then afterwards highlighting oil, oil, oil, kind of from an economic materialist. We need our fingers unimportant. Element in. Maduro was an awful, repressive, corrupt dictator who had blatantly stolen an election in mid 2024. So while that was probably not the motivation that drove President Trump, Maduro certainly deserved his fate and he was not, I mean he was at Target that similar to Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989. Clearly, you know, had had committed so many misdeeds that an idealist would be happy that the guy was removed. and what is interesting there is, which is what I really have struggled with thinking about, is. From President Trump’s perspective, I still don’t completely understand why he would’ve done it. He has that, that urge to assert American predominance. But I wonder to what extent this was also driven by the agenda of Marco Rubio and Marco Rubio, of course, has been at the forefront at combating the left axis of evil in Latin America. Know Venezuela, Nicaragua, and. regime change if you wish, democracy promoting agenda. And so I wonder to what extent this was not only Trump asserting predominance in terms of motivation, but also Rubio pushing that regime change agenda partly in light of the upcoming presidential succession in 2028 where he might wanna put his chips into the game. And so I think. I think you might see precisely that strange mix of kind of Trumpian realism and Rubio regime change. You know, maybe not idealism, but you know, clearly trying to get rid of these left dictatorships.

Yeah, I want to ask, I mean clearly with the historical backward of the Monroe Doctrine and the, was a corollary, there was a lot of precedent, within that framework and beyond it for American intervention in Latin America, but. Is there a precedent for the kind of a targeted intervention that we saw, in Venezuela this month? Is there precedent for this kind of, you know, targeted, arrest or kidnapping, however you wanna see it, of a leader of another country? or is this a sort of unique kind of operation that the United States engaged in?

I, I would like to make several points on that. I think the case that is most similar in Early American intervention in Latin America is the case of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989, when you also had a ruthless, brutal, corrupt dictator who defied the United States. The United States in that sense did a less surgical strike by actually invading Panama at good cost of civilian lives and taking over the whole country, and then actually instituting democracy afterwards. So the target in Panama in 89 was quite similar. Some, I mean, just awful dictator who clearly deserve to be, put on trial. The Venezuelan case is different because it’s obviously not a full scale invasion, but that very, very surgical strike. but so there is a president in terms of the target, and you see in the avoidance of a full scale invasion, president Trump’s concern about getting dragged into. Regime change, potential trouble and turmoil, domestic conflict that could drag the United States into what the Trumpians would call nation building, Allah, Afghanistan, and Iraq. And so there is, there is a similarity in the target, but there’s also a different approach in doing this in a much more targeted way, which of course has, if you wish the disadvantage that you’ve. You decapitated, autocratic, corrupt, repressive regime, but most of the power structure of the regime is still in place.

There is certainly a possibility, and there is one reason why I’m surprised that then Donald Trump did this because there is clearly, there is a risk that Venezuela could dissent into internal strife and conflict and that somehow other, that could draw in the United States. And that’s of course what Donald Trump wants to avoid at all costs. So this, this is a possibility, but. I think when you think from the great powers that Trump wants to push out of Venezuela, but I think it’s much more likely not that the Chinese and the Russians, not to speak of Iran, are going to take a stand in or about Venezuela, but that this is the essentially. They will find compensation in their spheres of, in, in interest. And so what you see is that the whole Trumpian approach to international relations is kind of stone age realism. Great powers have their spheres of influence and they can do inside their sphere of influence as they wish. And so I think the. The kind of the, how should I say that? What China and Russia will get out of that is Trump’s acquiescence in them taking more control of their spheres of influence. You know, and I think you see that with Trump’s accommodation of Russia in the Ukraine war. I don’t know what it would exactly mean for China and the South China Sea in vis-a-vis Taiwan, but I think, I think kind of the game among the great powers will be less. That they will, that China and Russia will fight tooth and nail to maintain a stake in the US’ backyard, the western hemisphere, but that they will say, whoa, you did this in your own sphere of influence. Now we have a freer hand in our sphere of influence. I think that’s how that will work. And as regards to domestic power structure in Venezuela, I. I would assume that Trump knows about his own severe a tension deficit disorder, that he couldn’t pay attention to Venezuela very much. But I think he’s probably going to appoint kind of an informal Vice Roy in, in, in Ambassador in Vene in Venezuela. I bet the American Embassy in Venezuela is going to swell to hundreds of people who will keep an eye on things and the the factions. That are more radical and that are more they know, you know, have much clo, much more control of the organs of coercion in Venezuela, the defense minister, Patino and Di Caveo, who controls these thugs and goons and militias, the so-called collectives, I think they will know. That if they mess around too much and they cause too much trouble, they might get yanked out and put in the prison cell next to my daughter. And so I think they will have to swallow a lot of, what you call in Latin America, swallow a lot of toads and hang low for a while. They will of course, hope that the Trump administration will move on. You know, I, I think in many ways what, what the Venezuelan power structure is doing is what the Wolf did in the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hole. They’re eating a lot of chalk and like, Hey, you know, we can play game. And of course, they’re hoping that Trump moves on, that the United States can’t actually control what’s going on and it sooner or later they can reassert their control. They can, you know, they can. Get their fingers again into the contraband, into the corruption, maybe not the drug trafficking as they did before. I think that’s the game that is being played, and in some strange way, it serves Trump and it serves that Venezuelan power structure. And who is left out in that cold is the Venezuelan opposition.

What about the larger international reaction, not just the potential, for Russia and China to use this as a sort of prerogative to, be more aggressive in their own. neighborhoods, if that’s even possible. But, the American relationship with our allies, do, has this moment you think further strained America’s relationship with its allies, is there a possibility at all for cooperation with American allies in Venezuela? not just allies in Europe, but also allies in, in Latin America?

The reaction has, in some sense been surprisingly muted because what is, you know, on the one hand, this is a brood reassertion of American power predominance, if you wanna use the term imperialism, but the, the reaction has been surprisingly mute. I think for two reasons. One is that this reassertion of American power scales a lot of allies. And so, you know, even the center left, left wing governments in Latin America, you know, like Lula and Brazil, they spoke out and whatever, but they’re not going really on the rampage. You know, Claudia Shane Baum in Mexico has to worry that she might be next in line and Trump threatened Pedro in colo and so that. Very reassertion of American power, I think has intimidated or kind of, if you wish, coercively motivated the reaction inside Latin America. Trump, of course, I don’t know whether it’s attention deficit or brilliant strategy, immediately move to Greenland, so the Europeans have something to worry about there, rather than getting involved in Venezuela. So in some sense, American power. I think has muted reaction among the allies, at least in the short one. You know, but you think in the long run, like OMG, this is awful. The other reason why I think the reaction has been muted is that Maduro was such an awful, dictator. I mean, you know, human rights violations in Corruption. I mean, he had indictments not only from the US but from the International criminal court. The head of the organization of American States at the time asked the ICC for an indictment of Maduro. And not only was he, you know, morally just awful, but utterly incompetent. I mean, who. Who in human history has destroyed a country as much as Maduro did during his 13 years in power? So who, who wants to defend Maduro? You know what I mean? You can say, well, the United States shouldn’t have intervened, but do you wanna look like sort of siding with defending, you know, one of the worst leaders that we can think of in recent decades?

Of course, I mean, this is the challenge, right? That one can be, very angry about the US intervention if you’re sitting in, in Brasilia, but you don’t wanna look like you’re defending Maduro. That that’s the, that’s the challenge. Do you see the other, sorry, Craig, go ahead. I.

You see the two facets again, you see the realist thing. You know, other countries are intimidated by American power, and you see the idealist streak. This. The United States chose a target that deserved its punishment. You see exactly that. Again, those two facets of kind of realist, power assertion, and idealists going after the bad guys, sorry to

No, not at all. Now, on this point of realism, do you see, large countries in the region like Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia to some extent, do you see them, In, in a, in a way working closely together to combat US intervention. Now, should we view, for example, Kurt, the, Mercosur, free trade agreement that was just signed with, Europe as, as an a way of pushing back on the United States.

Definitely. You think of you know, the European Union Agreement that had been lingering and languishing and being in the, in negotiation for 25 years and it just couldn’t break the resistance and deadlock and whatever. And I think the reason why that finally got signed is. You know, kind of if you wish, some sort of soft balancing against the United States, so you, you know, that would be an instance of that. Inland America. I haven’t seen any, I don’t know, like coordination, I don’t know what you would wanna call it. Alliance formation, partly because of course the ideological divisions. So you mentioned Argentina. You know, millet. Millet was bailed out by Trump a few months ago. He’s not going to oppose what Donald Trump, did in Venezuela. He’s ideologically happy that Donald Trump put it out, Maduro. And so, you know, given that a number of Latin American countries. governed by right-wing leaders who are ideologically have affinity with or alignment with Donald Trump. I think that is one big obstacle to any really coordinated Latin American response.

Right, right. What, what, we certainly see that there are high risks, but that we don’t know, what will happen, in, in, in closing, Zachary, I want to turn to you as one of many young people in the United States watching all of this unfold. How do you see your generation of Americans, responding to this, responding to what looks so different, at least from the rhetoric of American foreign policy for so long, the rhetoric of open markets and, freedom and democracy. does this, does this contradict that or does this look like more hip hop, more, more of the same hypocrisy? How, how are people viewing this?

I think for some it’s clear and for many it, it, it’s clear that this is something. at least, you know, to celebrate in the extent, to the extent that Maduro is gone, that that is obviously a positive development, for those who have relatives or family or friends in Venezuela or who fled Venezuela, which is not, not insignificant. Number of people in the United States. but I think there’s also a lot of concern that this could, you know, draw the United States into a larger war. and I think for, for the moment, a lot of people, young and not young alike are sort of waiting to see what happens. I think, you know. Obviously most hope that this does not draw the United States into a larger war with Venezuela. but, or with, you know, in the region in general. But I think a lot of the big questions that we raised today remain unanswered. So I think there is a degree of uncertainty and certainly there’s much greater fear of war in the region than there was before.

Welcome to This Is Democracy. I’m Zachary Suri. Today we are joined by a scholar living at the center of perhaps one of the most consequential confrontations of our moment. That is, of course, the weeks long standoff between anti-ice protests in Minneapolis and the various immigration enforcement wings of the Department of Homeland Security standoff. That unfortunately, as we all know, has left at least two protestors, Renee Goode and Alex pretty dead. joining us is Professor David Iona Chang. Professor Chang is a historian at the University of Minnesota. He studies indigenous people, colonialism, borders, and migration in Hawaii and North America, focusing especially on the histories of Native American and Native Hawaiian people, as well as the history of social movements in the United States. Professor Chang, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. We are of course also joined, as always by Professor Jeremi Suri. Jeremi, thank you for joining us today. for the first time in a while. we will start not with a speech or an essay, but with an original poem that I wrote. this is called, Nicolette Avenue, which is the street where Alex Pretty was killed. At night when the street is sleeping, it tosses and turns ice cracking sounds of agony, softly rising from the salt. I think the street has nightmares, and I think it remembers the dead, the bullets that bounced off its skin and buried themselves in another. At night when the street is sleeping, it feels the boots that stomped across to the tune of swinging rifles, beating time on its surface like a song. I think the street is singing in its sleep. A Durge for the Dead and departed for the Cold Press of cold flesh. It remembers too well waking up last Sunday with Bloodstains. Yeah. So Professor Chang, would you be able to tell us just from your experience, you know, what it’s been like to live, in the Twin Cities at this moment? To live through, what all of us around the country and around the world are seeing on the news every day.

Thank you for asking that. It has been, everybody’s experiences in the cities is going to be different, and I'm speaking to you of course, as you know, a person with a lot of privilege. I’m a university professor. I have a lot of. I have a lot of privileges that softened my life, if you will. At the same time, it’s a very, intense period in the Twin Cities. It’s been a time though where I would emphasize it’s been both a time of terror and sadness, but also a time of inspiration. And hope, ter and sadness are obvious to anyone around the globe, of course, because they see that federal forces, who are heavily armed and undertrained and very much under, Under supervised, if you will. and there’s very, and under-regulated are terrorizing our neighbors and our communities arresting people, taking them into custody, abducting them, Around the clock, and we’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of people, the numbers that ICE is giving out can’t really be trusted ’cause they’re not really backed up with a lot of numbers. But clearly many people are being abducted. Many people have been physically hurt, many people have been traumatized, and their families as well. At the same time, I do think the national and global media has started to pick up on what is one of the most important parts of this story. And that’s the solidarity of the response. That’s the, the loving kindness of the community, the bravery and the courage in responding in ways that are very dramatic for the cameras, such as standing between, Ice and someone that they’re trying to abduct and also much quieter driving kids to high school or dropping off groceries or necessary SAN supplies at people’s homes. so that response has, a. It is, profoundly inspiring. It gives me great hope, not only for this movement, but also for other, for the political work, which is also of course the human work of society and community that we’ll have to do in the coming years.

I think that, I’d like to look to multiple routes. Like most things, they come from multiple. Most things that are strong, come from multiple roots. one of that is the very strong and specific social roots of the of, Minnesota. as well as the Twin Cities itself. There is a strong history. Civic nationalist, civic national engagement here with the notion that the United States is a nation of people committed to certain ideals. Those ideals are enshrined in certain documents, and those documents ensure certain rights and set up certain processes that must be followed. there is a strong commitment to this idea here, and, despite its limitations, view this kind of liberal nationalism right now, we’re seeing, what it can do in certain moments when institutions, processes, and the idea of EQ of equality under the law. Becomes threatened. That’s combined with a culture that has both religious and secular roots, that you know, everything from Lutheranism to Trotskyism that has been very strong in, Minnesota, the Northern Plains, and Minneapolis St. Paul for a very long time. And we can see this. In the strong religious, and church-based movements, that helped to create the welcoming environment that sponsored refugees from around the world after the American Secret War in Southeast Asia that welcomed people from East Africa, that west welcomed people from Korea after the Korean War, et cetera. This created a population that was, you know, diverse in a very specific way. and, and very globalized in a very specific way that combined with kind of the labor part of the farmer labor of the DFL, the democratic farmer labor, party, which is the form of the Democratic Party that we have here in the state, which has really strong, very labor left, kind of orientations, and that’s been important here. And then, so all of that’s local, right? and that’s been, it’s been nurtured here. And of course the, we’re coming here, you know, five years after the killing and the uprising following the murder of, of George Floyd on Chicago Avenue. And that created an idea. Solidarity. Many different kinds of ideas, many different kinds of soar where people understood themselves as responsible for the community. One of these ideas and practices, which is very strong here, is that of mutual aid. that we take care of us, that we stand up for us. and you see that in the everyday courage of people simply going around doing humble, simple things to support. Again, as well as the dramatic things that the cameras capture. All of that comes together with a national environment. We’re not the first city doing this, right? So there was Chicago, there was Portland, there was Los Angeles, there’s others, and already in those different places. One can find communities come together in order to support. We learned from Chicago, Chicago learned from other cities, right? The proliferation of neighborhood networks, of leaderless movements in order to, create a better, safer community that doesn’t come just from us. So and ho And I do not think it will stop just here either. Unfortunately, this is a national problem and it will continue in other cities, and I think that we can look forward to a historical moment that we can’t entirely anticipate, but it will be different because there is now a genealogy, a continuity of modes of resistance, which are drawing upon historical precedent elsewhere.

Sure that there’s more complexity, but that’s what vis that is what’s visible. Of course, I’m sure that there are some people are sympathetic, right to the golds and even perhaps the methods of these federal agents, right? But I have not seen, I have not that’s not apparent in on the streets, it’s not very apparent and opinion columns. It’s, you know, it’s more in the comments in social media, if you will. And that’s certainly available nationwide and you don’t know exactly where that’s coming from either. So, but no, it’s, it, is a very strong response. I think that partly this is, and this is something that I wanted to talk about, I thought it’d be interesting also to talk about, it’s partly. This is feels from here very much like a unilateral federal imposition on a state and it completely ignoring the elected leaders of that state.

And so, you know, the mayors of St. Paul in Minneapolis, the governor of Minnesota, our senators, the majority of our delegations have, are, very upset about this force coming from Washington, unbidden in which refuses resolutely to respond to explain transfer documents to, the state government. so even people who I, do think that this creates a real unhappiness even among people who might be more inclined towards the expulsion of people that they think are here illegally or they suspect they just don’t even want here.

Again, I don’t have a crystal ball, right? My specialty is the past, not the. but, but yeah, I do, I think that it’s the ending of the search, which, which probably does that mean that all immigration courts immediately close and go away. All immigration officials all go away. Probably not, right? But this is not a normal situation. What’s going on here? And the people who have control over stopping it, are not headquartered here in Minneapolis.

I can think of a number of reasons. For one thing, I mean, they came out so quickly with this term, domestic terrorists and paid protests and all that stuff, and that’s just so patently not true, and so demonstrably not true in the case. Of Renee Goodnell is pretty right. okay, now they have video that says that Alex got into a scuffle with some agents and kicked at headlights or something like that. That’s not a domestic terrorist, right? That’s not a domestic terrorist. So they got, they, they spoke too strong, too quick, and the data is too strong to, refute their narrative. on top of that, these are appealing young-ish. White people who are idealistic and good. So in other words, the media narrative on them is, cleaner. Right? So, I mean, it, these are not, racialized people, right? and so therefore they, the story plays in a certain way and I, want to take nothing away from them, right? I’m just saying that in terms of how media works. They, figure in a particular strength. And I think also it’s, it is, they are being seen as in some ways emblematic of the Minnesota movement, what’s going on in Minnesota and Minnesota. The upper Midwest, as you know, it occupies a certain kind of. Image in the American political imaginary right of innocence of community and all that sort of a thing. I’m delighted at that, frankly. but at the same time, you can see how that would, answer back in a particular way.

Yes. And a lot of people, you know, we’re trying to, people are trying to say, don’t forget, you know, the many, brown people. Who’ve been hurt in this, and black people who’ve been hurt in this, the hundreds and thousands of people who’ve been abducted, and all these other things. But it’s hard to push back. We’ve been pushing for a longer historical narrative. I and others have been saying that, remember the Bishop Whipple Building is on Fort Snelling, and Fort Snelling is federal land that was involved in a war on the Dakota and the seizing. Of this region. Right? And so there’s an effort to create that broader historical context and to try to, if you say, this is not all about these white faces, right? But it’s also about, black and brown faces and bodies and voices. we’re pushing uphill on that, right?

Yeah, I, think just to build on that, David, which you said so Well, I think. What’s happened, because of the excessive gross, excessive use of force in Minneapolis is that the issue of border security, which Trump is still relatively popular on, at least with some people that’s been lost and has become a discussion instead of brutality and federal overstep. and, there’s got, I would think that Republicans would like it to come back to a discussion of border security, which would mean taking the, the lens off of Minneapolis.

Well, I think a lot of young people, and I think people across the board are, sort of reacting in shock to this. I think there are a lot of, I, I mean, I think the public opinion polls, and, Conversations with any young person or any person, period. show the kind of anger or frustration with, this moment? I think there are varying degrees of, you know, outrage. Like some people I think are outraged, at, you know, the particular killings of Alex Pretti or Renee Good, or they, see. They see, those as the, thing to be out, outraged about. I think there are those who find who are most horrified or most focused on, the impact of the deportations on immigrant communities. so I think there are a range of political responses. I mean, here in New Haven. There is a big sort of walkout today for in solidarity with Minneapolis. so there, there, are a range of different responses that I think people are engaging in, but I would say, I think it’s, almost universal, universal shock at the shootings of, protesters in particular.

Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week we are very fortunate. We’re joined by a wonderful famous historian and also someone who I have so much, high regard for. I met her years and years ago, and I’ve been following her career for a long time, and it’s really a pleasure to finally have her on, this, podcast. This is Heather Ann Thompson. she’s a historian at the University of Michigan, where she’s a professor of course, and among many things, she’s the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for. Her book on the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 called Blood in the Water. Most recently, she has published this really, stimulating and in some ways angering, but angering in a useful way, book, about vigilantism and the Bernard Getz, episode, which we’ll talk about in New York City in 1984 and what happened thereafter. The book is called Fear and Fury, the Reagan eighties, Bernie Goetz Shootings. And the rebirth of White Rage. professor Heather Ann Thompson, thank you for joining us.

Well, I think that we as historians, even while we live so much in the past, we cannot help but respond to the world unfolding around us with huge questions about how we got here. And, there’s always a million origin stories. But there is one thing for sure about where we were in, 20 23, 20 24, 20 22, that really felt jarring. I think just as a citizen of this country, just as a resident of the United States and that jarring feeling. So much to do with what was, what, just a palpable unleashing of, vigilante rage, episodes like Kyle Rittenhouse and, this, a Subway, much more recent subway, killing of a homeless man in New York City. Even more, probably more startling for most Americans. The storming of the capitol on January 6th, and then of course against all of this was the realization that when people were carrying out this rage, they were legally vindicated. Should it ever go to court. They were found not guilty. And I was just so struck by what felt to me as a historian is this weird return to. the 19th century, frankly, the, the unleashed lynching culture of 19 19th century and, something else that was happening that resonated with the 19th century, which was this extreme reconsideration of wealth. And I thought, God, these are two really interesting sides of the same coin. Let’s go back, let’s dig into it. And the eighties seemed like a really good place to start, both because we had taken a political detour, not even detour, I mean turn, abrupt turn with the Reagan, administration. And we also were witnessing one of the most dramatic of that period episodes of white vigilantism. So. Long-winded response, but that’s what got me there.

No, and you touched on so many things, obviously the, recurrence of violence from our past, the economic inequalities, the nature of urban decay. You have a really, very persuasive discussion of the South Bronx at the beginning, of your book. It brought back a lot of memories, to me. just to set the scene here. For many of our listeners who probably don’t know this particular incident, what is the Bernard Goetz shooting? Who is he and what is it that happens that you describe in such detail and details that I didn’t know at the time, from December of 1984?

Sure. for people of a certain age, we might be familiar with the name Bernard Goetz because he is this kind of rogue figure who ends up on a subway train in 1984 sitting across from four black teenagers, and, in a very, quick encounter suddenly leaps up. And pulls a gun out of his, waistband in a hidden holster and shoots one of them into the chest, shoots another in the back as he’s fleeing, shoots the third kid through his arm that went into his chest and with the fourth kid, tried to shoot him. And then walked over and coldly says to him, you look all right. Here is another, and shot in point, blank range. severing his spinal cord, paralyzing him for life. And that guy, became an overnight, folk hero celebrated by the tabloid media, gravitated to by countless. newly resentful and disaffected, white New Yorkers. and he became the stuff of Legends. He is in the lyrics of Billy Joel’s song. We didn’t Start the Fire. He’s in the song by the Beastie Boys. He is referenced, in so many popular culture context. So for some of us, we remembered his name, but notably, Speaking for myself anyway, I don’t think any of us really knew who his victims were. And, so I wanted to dig into that story because not only does he, shoot these kids, but then he is on the lamb. There’s a dramatic manhunt to find him, he turns himself in, offers a chilling videotape two hour long, confession. Where he doesn’t candy coat anything. He admits to everything. and nevertheless, what’s gonna unfold in my book, is this incredibly interesting story of how Americans are told that, up is down and down is up. There’s, this is the birth of the misinformation media. it takes, two grand juries to get ’em to trial. And, we can then talk about the trial, but it’s really a really pivotal moment in legal history because he will be acquitted. That acquittal sets us down a path, I think from which we really still real.

And just to get a couple of facts on the table that you go through in detail and document, very well in the book, the, four African American teenagers who approached him, actually, I guess only one or two approached him and they asked for $5, but they never violently threatened him. Is that correct?

Yeah, so this was a, this is super interesting to just go back and say, well, what, what actually happened? Because certainly the lore that has been handed down is that these four black teenagers, basically threatened Bernie Getz. They approached him with sharpened screwdrivers, armed with sharpened screwdrivers, threatened him and tried to rob him. For $5, but digging into the story, including the really, very detailed confession that gets himself offered, it turns out that’s not at all what happened. These are four kids from a very, economically depressed part of New York City, the South Bronx. Who were on their way that day downtown to a local video arcade where they’re going to, break into, Jimmy Open coin receptacles to get some quarters out. That’s really quite how poor they were. And so they did in fact have two screwdrivers in pockets, but they were never wielded, never taken out. No one even knew they were there. In fact, they were only found. Later as these kids are stripped, taken to the hospital, they’re in such extreme, extremely dire situation. And, the sharpened screwdriver was completely made up by, the media. And so what did they do? Well, it turns out that they had one kid, Joseph, only one had in fact asked him for $5. he said first, hi, how you doing? Gets returns to the greeting and then embolden. He says, Hey, do you have $5? Because in the eighties in New York, panhandling was as regular as breathing air. You might remember Jeremy, like everywhere you went, right? The squeegee guys?

You know, you got five bucks, you got a dollar. Very, commonplace. And the kid who asked his name was Troy Canty. His, thought process was, we can’t go into this video arcade with no money and plausibly be there to play games while we’re gonna try to get some quarters, so maybe I can get $5 from this guy. So, was it maybe alarming to have four teenagers, boisterous, rowdy teenagers? Sure. But what will be made of this story is completely, absent of facts. And at the end of the day, it is gonna be these four teenagers that are the villains. And Bernie Goetz becomes the victim. And that kind of up is down moment was really what, made me think about like today.

it’s one of the many strengths of your book in that, as you said, the cast of characters in front of us today are all displayed here in their farm system days, in a sense, right? In, a way sharpening their knives and learning their skills that they’re going to use later on for the politics of the next few decades. And that’s of course how you. Close the book, but I don’t wanna jump ahead. Why Heather, do so many people come out in support of Bernie Goetz? you have this extraordinary statistic in the book. I did not know this, that when the, police create a helpline to find tips, as you describe in the book, Bernie Getz actually goes out on the lamb. He runs to Vermont and, with a rental car and switches hotels and, is trying to stay away for a while. And you say 1500 people. Called into the, tip line soon after it was created to offer their support for the shooter. Why are people doing that?

Well, this of course is the million dollar question, and it’s, it, it’s the question that we ask often today, how is it that people can, for example, in Minneapolis, look at the murder of Alex Preti or Renee Goode and. say it’s okay, even celebrate it. And in, in fact say that what we just saw with our own eyes didn’t even happen. this is an origin story to that, and it turns out that, that emotion, that sentiment in ways I just did not fully appreciate. Was being curated, it was being deliberately stoked and it was being stoked in aid of a much broader, behind the scenes and frankly more insidious political agenda. And that was the agenda, particularly of the Reagan Republicans, but much more broadly, very wealthy Americans who were. really sick and tired of the liberal politics of the New Deal and of the great society. They hated the high taxes that the wealthy had to pay into it. They really did not like the, civil rights advances that they saw as. Cramping their style, in terms of who they might hire or who they might rent to. of course, Donald Trump’s father was really, very resentful of those things. And, these are people that had long, wanted to undo the new deal, but the seventies, the late seventies offered them this. Opportunity, frankly, a dual crisis, an economic crisis unfolding globally and the civil rights tensions at home that are already making white folks feel nervous and, uncomfortable. And the Reagan Republicans understand that this is an opportunity to really just say, look, liberalism in general. It’s all a failure. it’s the reason why we have crime. It’s the reason why the economy is going to hell in the hand basket. It’s a reason why, you, your, unions are not doing so well. you name it, they become the scapegoat. And then the irony here is that, this global fiscal crisis, it gets back on its feet everywhere else. But in this country, the Reagan Republicans doubled down on the austerity. That just creates a greater economic crisis at home. And yet they say that crisis is not because income inequality is getting worse and worse, and it’s not because your social services are getting cut and. Libraries are shuttering their doors and public schools are closing. It’s because of those thugs and criminals, that live in places like the South Bronx that don’t wanna work, The drug addicts that, and it was just this masterful narrative, the welfare queen, I didn’t appreciate the extent to which they relied on this burgeoning conservative media to promote it.

Absolutely. And in fact, the extent to which that was true was quite startling. people are making judgment calls about who’s the victim and who’s the villain in this based on what they’re learning in the media. But if you look at what they’re learning in the media, this is when I, keep using the word curated for a reason, because, people were given the facts. Many of the media had the facts in hand, but nevertheless distorted them. So. Thus the story of the sharpened screwdrivers. Here’s another really interesting one. These teenagers had amassed, really a slew of misdemeanor citations, in their youth. for things like jumping the sur subway, turnstiles, riding the subways ’cause they had no money. Or again, jimmying opened these coin receptacles. When they are in the hospital recovering from these horrendous gunshot wounds to Bronx judges, look at these misdemeanor ju violations, and they suddenly issue this blizzard of warrants for these kids’ arrest. So what do you think that does? Of course, the headlines then become. Victims, not so much. These, are, dangerous criminals who have 13 warrants out for their arrest. Right?

It’s interesting, as you were describing that, Heather, I was also thinking of Austin, Texas, and gentrification. Yes. In Austin. It’s really interesting. I think it’s a major contribution your book is making in taking this moment and saying that’s the moment that’s pregnant for our current world. Whereas the opposite is often I think what we think, certainly what Zachary expressed is to some extent what I feel as someone who grew up in New York, I go back to New York, it has all kinds of issues, but I at least until recently thought that the New Yorker, Bernard Goetz and Edward Koch, who was mayor then and others, that that was, that has gone away. that, that heavily racialized, violent vigilante in New York had gone away. Your argument is actually, it’s the origin of where we are today. Heather?

Yeah, and I think that was, someone who, like you have, spent time in, in the city. it was hard to get my head around the continuities. but then they became quite clear, I think, as I. Kind of peeled back the layers a little bit. There’s no question today that you know, you can go into New York City and it is, times Square. Times Square is no longer a place where you see. You know so much. Homelessness is not a place where you see the drug trade playing out in front of your eyes. It’s not a place that feels so unsafe, so, so crisis filled. But at the end of the day, New York has become a place that is. Utterly unlivable for people. And that means that you can look in the window of a Gucci store, right? And it is beautiful and it’s glittery and it glistens, but you can’t afford anything in it. And I think the real evidence of why that is the case or how true that is, is what’s happened in the recent. Mayoral election. the fact that a democratic socialist like Momani can win by a landslide indicates that, this glittery city, is, not in fact delivering. For the people who actually have to try to live there. And it is, again, it’s a lifting of the veil in New York City on the inequality, what it means to be in a city without sufficient safety net anymore. what it means to have undone the New Deal and the great society in our American cities. But the other thing we’ve inherited, of course, is meanwhile, we’ve inherited the carte bl for people who feel angry when they feel that, right? they can’t afford their rent. they can’t, make it anymore. They can’t put their own kids in college. Unfortunately, a lot of ’em are still susceptible to this idea. That’s because of the immigrants. That’s because of, the criminal class. That’s because of the people who are actually worse off than they are. So it’s a lot to unpack. I hope that the book, does it through this story because the tentacles to the past and present are pretty, pretty clear. Yeah. even the NRA gets. Intimately involved in the Bernie Goetz case, and it’s, it pays attention to what happens to the outcome of his trial and then runs with it. this is where we get stand your ground laws, this is where we get Supreme Court decisions that allow police officers and individuals to merely to say they felt unsafe. And it’s okay to kill another US citizen. So, it is, it’s a lot. I, it’s a, it leaves us a little bit with our head spinning, I think about where we are today, frankly.

Yes. Yes. And also I think what Heather’s getting at so well is that there isn’t a certain way a crackdown on small scale violence from certain groups, but a permission structure, I don’t know if that’s a good way to talk about it, Heather, but a permission structure given to certain people to use more violence for their own defense. Is that sort of what you’re getting at, Heather?

Well, I so appreciate that, Jeremy, because, again, I, began by saying, I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know who the victims were, but I knew Bernie Goetz, and even to this day, he still alive. He lives in Greenwich Village. He gets to routinely tell the story through his perspective. And yet these teenagers lives were utterly destroyed. only two of them are still living and, not because they died of old age, but because of the wreckage that became of their lives and the one who is still living is paralyzed and brain damaged, and the other one has managed to escape this. He doesn’t wanna talk to anybody about this. It’s been so traumatizing and I thought it was really important that we, we, we told this story. From the perspective of the whole part of New York, that paid a huge price for all this, a huge price for the austerity politics We’ve been doubling down on with every administration since. Reagan, a huge price for the unleashing of racial violence, and I wanted to resurrect their stories, but also to end. With kind of a reminder that once we unleash this, that we, we forget about what it really looks like on the ground, when we endorse these kinds of politics. And so I wanted us to come back full circle to. The four teenagers who are going down trying to get some quarters out of a video machine because that’s what their lives are offering them, and then start back at that beginning as we imagine the future.

I am as well. So Professor Dennis, just to make sure we all have sort of a sense of what's really happened and what is happening now, given the sort of constant turnover and ongoing nature of the conflict, could you give us a sense, from your perspective at least, of what the sort of most important developments in this, what has really been a larger, longer protracted conflict in the last few days?

Yeah. So we are now in day seven of this conflict. And as each day brings new developments, it, on the one hand, becomes clearer to see some of the challenges that all sides are going to face moving forward, but also it sort of reveals some of the strategies. And so, as you know, the campaign had started from the United States and Israel, airstrikes against Iranian air defense and naval systems and nuclear facilities, missile batteries, really degrading Iranian capabilities to achieve what the U.S. military often wants, which is air superiority and sort of superiority across domains. So I'm sure there's a lot happening sort of in the space and cyber domain as well, where domain dominance has not taken place, of course, is within the ground domain. And so as of right now, the U.S. and Israel are still hitting a series of targets across the country. Now, it's not just in Iran. As you know, there have been attacks from both sides outside of the country as well. And so sort of most prominently here, the United States, a naval vessel, a submarine for the first time since World War II, used a torpedo to sink an Iranian frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka. Again, sort of a very interesting development in this conflict. Iran, for its part, has been sending out a series of missiles and one-layer attack drones to a number of countries in the region, largely hitting sort of economic targets, but also diplomatic posts as well, with the threat of more to come. And then the last sort of two developments that have happened, either yesterday or the day before, the U.S. had admitted to being in talks with some of the Kurdish factions within Iran and within the region, and for us to look to give them sort of not so much covert, but overt support to help weaken the regime. And then the second bit of information that just came out is that the Russians are sharing tactical and operational intelligence with the Iranian, basically giving them info on where U.S. warships and military personnel are stationed so that Iran can target them.

That makes sense. Thank you for that very helpful summation. I'm wondering from your perspective, what you think the Trump administration's logic for going to war was. There's of course been talk in American policy circles for decades about the potential conflict with Iran, but this seems to be something else. There's talk of an effort to stir a popular uprising, or that this might be the result of Israeli pressure. How do you understand that decision to go to war, at least from what we know now, so soon after?

Yeah, one of the big challenges here is that the motivation for this attack and the sort of the trigger, right, the timing. Iran has been a threat of varying degrees for nearly 50 years. And so why now is a real puzzle. And that's something that we have to grapple with. And hopefully in the years ahead, future historians like yourself will grapple with that. But all evidence seems to suggest at this point that in light of the recent U.S. and Israeli attacks over the last couple of years against nuclear facilities, against prominent Iranian proxy forces like Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis, that essentially Iran as a regime, and then of course with, as you noted, popular, sort of the population here with these massive protests. I mean, there have been protests across the years against the regime in Tehran. None were ever as big as they were this past year. And the response and the slaughter of, I was reading it this morning, anywhere between 3,000 and some estimates put it at 30,000, which of course seems high, but protesters slaughtered. So all of those things in combination, I think, gave from the U.S. side, from the president's side, the perception that Iran was at its weakest, that it was ever going to be, and now was just a target of opportunity, a window of opportunity. And of course, as you noted, Israel has for a very long time pressed the United States to do more. So in some ways, it's kind of this perfect storm, moment.

Yeah, I think there's two parts, and I'll float towards the second one. I think first, it's really interesting that we're doing this out of sequencing, at least as far as we can see. And that's the thing, we don't have all the information and that won't come out. But typically, when it comes to things like covert action or unconventional warfare, this is what the U.S. Special Forces and what the U.S. intelligence community, the CIA can do, it's that you go and you work with local partners, you provide material support or lethal aid or training or funding, and there's all sorts of problems with that. But you basically do that as a way to put pressure on the regime, as a way to shape conditions, and then you sort of have more kinetic action. And now, it's sort of operating in reverse, which again, it's on the one hand, we have to be very careful not to be quick in our judgment. It's the same thing with respect to the larger issues of decapitation and regime change. External regime change has a terrible record. Again, usually the external force is seen as illegitimate and they're working with illegitimate local partners, and it just never really works out. And we saw that to a degree in some of the recent conflicts that the U.S. has been involved in. But in this case, sort of decapitation without ground troops, we have to be attentive to or open to the idea that maybe this would work. And if so, how, why, and under what conditions? Now, to the idea of managing for post-conflict, this too is something that we always want to be attentive to history, right? But of course, he who remembers the past can commit the opposite mistakes. When we look at events in Iraq and Afghanistan and what seems on the face of it, how could we not know some of these dynamics and some of the violence and some of the things that happened in the aftermath, insurgencies and civil wars and proxy wars, that was not for the lack of planning. There was extensive planning across the U.S. government for that, but it just shows how difficult it is, right, to wage wars. Wars, it is far easier to start wars than end them, right? And I was just saying this to someone the other day. It's like all wars end, but they rarely end as expected. And even short, decisive wars like this can often produce post-conflict environments that are bloodier than the war itself. And not only that, the termination of one war often becomes the beginning of another. And then in doing so, the mistake that so many people make is they sort of graft on these a priori grievances and things onto the post-conflict environment. But the post-conflict environment, as we saw in Iraq, as we saw in Afghanistan, that violence unfolds over a range of complex evolving motives that can be even sort of either directly or even indirectly related to the war.

That makes sense. And I think there's a really interesting question that I hope we'll dive into a little bit more about the potential for a post-conflict or post-regime chaos in Iran. But I did want to ask first what you think, how plausible you think it is that the Iranian people, as President Trump has suggested in recent days, might actually rise up against the Iranian regime in a way that could effectively topple the regime? Is the regime really that weak in this moment?

Well, that's, again, the thing. The US and Israel have been successful at decapitating many of the senior Iranian leaders, right, from the Ayatollah down to sort of that top tier of leadership. But that is not the regime. And the regime itself, again, going all the way down to sort of sub-national municipal level, the regime is robust. You still have not just the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, you have their conventional military, the Artesh, you have what's called the Basij. These are sort of domestic kind of military forces. I mean, these folks are still ... They still have high capabilities. When it comes to resistance, one of the things that groups face are these typical challenges of coordination and collective action. And so here, thinking about, if the three of us were in Iran and we wanted to do something, how do we coordinate with the broader group of people that might want to do something? Technology is helping with that, but it also creates these vulnerabilities. Once we communicate, we're vulnerable. And of course, this has happened in Iran. But more broadly, the incentive structure is not for us to do something that is risky with an uncertain outcome that if someone else does it, we get to benefit from it. The incentive structure is to not do anything, to sit on the fence. And so when you talk about a resistance in Iran, you have to think about how are these populations going to overcome those central challenges. And there are more. There's something called sort of the GM squared guns, money, manpower. The idea is that in this type of environment, the state apparatus has the monopoly or the asymmetric comparative advantage on guns and money and manpower. And so from an insurgency perspective, you have to sort of secure those things. And it's a very, very difficult thing. And that's why most insurgencies fail right off the bat. Although in the ones that do become successful, conversely, the ones that are able to solve that problem tend to last on average about 10 to 12 years. So there are a lot of upfront sort of challenges that have to be made. The other side of this, of course, is, as I mentioned, the US has doctrine and dedicated forces to working with populations to help them overcome those challenges, to help them get the money and the guns and to give them the training. And that's where, again, we have to think analytically. When we talk about the quote unquote population in Iran, which population are we talking about? Once again, with the regime chain, I just want to say quickly, one of the big factors is you need to get regime defections to work. And we haven't seen that. But the other side is, again, what we saw in the news that I mentioned earlier. US is talking about supporting the Kurds, something that we've done for years and then withdrawn support and kind of left them in a fraught spot. But that's a different dynamic that what we're talking about here, this kind of unconventional warfare support to groups like the Kurds, or maybe even the Baluch, right, which is another ethnicity in Iran that's been fighting for independence for a number of years, and they are very capable militarily.

That makes sense. I do think, though, that there's maybe an even more basic question that hasn't been answered yet, which is, is there even will among the Iranian people for this kind of comprehensive regime change? And is there will on the American side for that? I mean, just today, President Trump said he doesn't care whether Iran becomes democratic or not. Do you think that's, at this point, a goal or even a desire of either side?

Yeah, I mean, that there is a great question. I mentioned the Kurds a moment ago. One of the things, despite our support to the Kurds over the years, and the Kurds, right, across whether you're talking about in Iran, in Iraq, in Turkey, in Syria, again, in all of these places, except for Turkey, we have supported the Kurds. But the Kurds in some places, like Iraq, have actually gotten a better deal not fighting for independence, but agreeing to regional autonomy. And so it's a great question to ask, what do these populations really want? Do they want regime overthrow, or do they want policy changes? And it seems that many of them do want some overthrow of the regime. But one of the other challenges that, again, if we go back to sort of history, it is extremely difficult analytically to gauge and to anticipate the very word that you used, will, right? Not just a word, it's a variable. The will to fight is often not just sort of revealed by conflict, but it's also sort of conditioned by conflict. And this is why during, most recently during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States sort of did not fully estimate the degree to which the government of Afghanistan had the will to persist after the US withdrawal in face of Taliban attacks. And then conversely, if just looking at Ukraine, here too, many in the US sort of, and even in the government structures, right? Not just talking about US public opinion, but many of the people that are tasked with knowing these things were really surprised that the Ukrainians not just sort of have lasted as long as they have, but even lasted outside of those original three days.

Yeah, I think, and that's a great point too. You know, what has happened over the last 50 years is in some ways, you know, kind of anomalous to much of that history. But I think the broader point that you would want to take away from that fact is just once again, going back to these post-conflict dynamics. And, you know, this is just an ever moving target. Today is again, the president, President Trump had said that, you know, well, yesterday he said that he wanted to determine who the next leader was. And then today he was talking about unconditional surrender. But in both of those instances, you are ignoring this central fact that you just described. Any sort of the greater, like the greater than an external power interferes in the domestic politics of a country, the greater to some degree that it can control those outcomes. But paradoxically, the greater that actor becomes involved, the greater the risk of instability because you are an external actor. And because for the United States, we have this history, right? Going back to 1953 and the election of Mosaddegh overthrown in a CIA coup. You know, so the US does not have a lot of legitimacy here as a particular actor, but more broadly, anytime you have these dynamics, and again, right? Under what conditions do things happen? When you have a highly nationalist population, right? With a long, rich history of proud people, it just makes it exceedingly difficult. And this is why external regime change has a terrible record for success.

Well, so here, that's another great question. And let me just say again, to take that step back, when it comes to long-term stability, that's the key word, long-term. When you look back at Iraq and Afghanistan, despite how long we were there, that was not the intent, right? The US military is optimized for decisive conventional combat. Yes, and some special operations missions, but it's about achieving that technological domain dominance, right? Own the air, own the land. But post-conflict stabilization takes political bargaining, institutional development, long-term legitimacy building. And just from our military to even our political system, right? US electoral cycles, incentivizing quick wins and visible progress and exit timelines. You need that decades-long commitment. You need the tolerance for ambiguity. You need institutional patience. That is why people point to, even though it's not exactly analogous, people point to post-World War II Germany and Japan as the exemplars of what successful post-conflict management could look like. So that being said, what could we do? I have to note that one of the things that we could have done prior to the last year in which the administration is defunded and dismantling things like Voice of America, things like the Radio Free series, which going back to the Cold War would publish the truth, right? Countering regime narratives in local languages. For me, this was a tremendous source of information. And for my own work with the Chechens, a lot of the Chechens, Radio Free Europe, Radio Marshal, Radio Freedom, I mean, this was a really valuable tool. And that's something we're not talking about here, our soft power levers, right? We have just shifted to a world, and people from the administration have said this, right? The iron law, what is it? The iron laws of power for Time Memorial, Stephen Miller said. But that's not really what has worked empirically. So when you ask, what would I do? I would say, you have to get that thing going. You have to get soft power moving. I think with respect to special forces and others, working with locals can bring great reward, right? They know the terrain. They have the local intelligence. But the challenge there is that they don't always share the same objectives beyond the most proximate. Both sides want to get rid of the regime or something like that. And what you see is a lot of times when the US or other actors have backed local groups, you tend to see that that makes conflicts more violent, more lethal. It makes them more protracted. So again, these are the things that in the policy world, it's often not the choice between good policy and bad. It's the least bad option. And when it comes to that least bad option, so things like supporting proxy groups, perhaps like the Kurds or the Baluch, that's going to give the United States some military and political advantage on the ground. But there are some real inherent latent risks. And not just latent, there could be some explicit ones like I described earlier that we should be very, very cautious and aware of.

Just building on these very insightful comments, Mike, how should we choose leaders to work with? It seems to me as a historian that our track record is pretty poor, whether we're talking Amit Chalabi, Ngo Dinh Diem, even Hamid Karzai, right? I mean, we tend to choose people who, first of all, have dubious legitimacy with certain groups that are important to the post-war environment, as you've described it so well. And also the act of choosing them often delegitimizes them further, right? So how should we do this?

That, again, is one of the really important questions. Again, by the very nature of our anointing these leaders, we have, by definition, made them in some ways illegitimate. I'm trying to think of what's the best way to get out of this. And it has to be somehow that the US just sets the conditions for the people to choose to select their own leader and to just kind of go with it from there. One of the things that's really sort of important to note too is when we look at these historical examples and think, what can we learn? What are generalizable insights? A lot has been said about how the US prosecuted the war in Afghanistan after 9-11, when they were then suddenly, small footprint, fine local actors you could work with, even though, yes, as you described, Karzai was incredibly problematic. We ignored the sort of tribal dynamics because Afghanistan was very, very heterogeneous. We ignored all of that and we seemed to have some surface level successes. When the US was thinking about the 2003 invasion, there are so many sort of memoirs and other stories that have come out where people had to tell senior leaders, Iraq is not Afghanistan. That was almost like the coffee cup, right? Hey, Iraq is not Afghanistan. And there, again, the ethnic breakdown was very, very different. Now, once again, talking about Iran, Iran is more ethnically homogenous. And on the one hand, you would think you would avoid all of that kind of potential for ethnic factionalization, but there are so many other fissure points, right? There are so many other ways in which society could either coalesce or come apart. And again, my mind automatically goes to beyond the leadership question that you asked that I'm not really giving a great answer for, which I think just in some ways, again, talks to there is no great option here. It's what's the least bad option. But even thinking about that, again, I mentioned this post-conflict sort of dynamic. One of the things that you need too are things like lustration courts and a reckoning for the crimes of the regime. And that's where, again, these cleavages that we see in conflicts, often it's not sort of the population versus the regime. That is one, but it's these very micro-level dynamics. This tribe doesn't like this tribe. This village doesn't like this village. This neighbor doesn't like this neighbor. And that too is part of the complexity, the mosaic of challenges that you find in post-conflict environments.

Right. You know, that to me, the first thing that comes to mind, as I said earlier, we should be open to the possibility that this ostensibly new way of fighting war, get away with the old pottery barn, right, from Colin Powell during the first and second Gulf Wars. When you break it, you own it, that you have a responsibility to manage post-conflict. Now people are saying that is gone, very publicly saying, you know, that is gone. And we have this new way of warfare. If that is the case, then what you've just described and what is potentially happening with the Ayatollah's son being possibly put forward and the president, not President Trump, being dismissive of that, that type of outcome, the outcome where we have encouraged the Iranian people to rise up, but given the still robust capabilities of the regime, if 30,000 are slaughtered this time, those types of conditions really put this strategy,the viability of this strategy to the test. Because to your very question, Jeremi, what do we do then? And from all indicators, I don't think, I don't see, I don't see that we have a very good plan for that. And even, you know, again, I think it was the, one of the German official, I think came to the White House the other day and came out saying exactly that. I don't see any sort of day after planning. So that puts us really, puts again, this strategy, this ostensibly new strategy to the test. To the question itself, if a leader were to come to power that we're not sort of hopeful with, you know, not happy with, here too, I think we're kind of at a crossroad moment. And I think there's a question of what should we do? And then there's a question of what is the most likely thing that would happen? Again, if that were to happen, the administration would be faced with either having to sort of escalate or to use that as an off ramp. And to basically say what I just said, yeah, it's not our preferred candidate, but it's better than before. And it just allows you to exit. So that's that side of it. But at the end of the day, I think again, if you take a long view, right, a crooked line from a distance looks straight. I think as long as local leaders are not sort of, right, acting and plotting in ways that threaten the sovereignty of your nation, like, you know, we're, we're a democracy. So you let the people have their, have their preferred leader.

Yeah, another great question. You know, in, so some of the classes I teach are, are, are on post-conflict. And I just taught this course in the fall, and we were talking about, like, you know, there's so many people in Washington at that point, we're not, you know, we're never going to do nation building again. We're never going to do these, these things again. And there was even a talk at UT with a very, with a former, I'm not going to name them, but a very senior US official. And now they're doing some consulting. And in response to a question, they said, you know, I'm going to tell you where we're telling, my company now is telling people to invest. It's the Middle East, because despite the October 7th attacks, in this person's estimation, the Middle East, because of some of the partnerships between Israel and the Gulf States, because of some of these other stabilization equilibrium that were sort of emerging, that it seemed like this was the place to invest. Liberalization was happening in Saudi Arabia, like all of these things. And it's just remarkable that we are in, you know, seven days later, we are in such a different world. You know, Iran is attacking from Azerbaijan, you know, to these Gulf states, economic targets. And, you know, for their part, I just want to say too, like the Gulf states, Qatar and the Emiratis and others, they are ready, you know, they are ready to kind of like end this right now. So there is some momentum to kind of off-ramp among some of these actors. But at this point, it just starts to go wider and wider and wider, right? The ripple effects, the kinetic ripple effects, have gone from the Indian Ocean in Sri Lanka to Azerbaijan. And what I would hope is, one of the things that I teach my students is, right, like, if you're proposing policies like this, you have to think about the unintended consequences. If you do this, what might happen? How? Why? Under what conditions? And this is very time and labor-intensive, but you need to kind of go around the map. So if the US and Israel are to start this, how does this matter for Iran, for India, for Sri Lanka, right? For Iran, you have to go through that. All of this to say, we are at a really fraught moment, and you know, things can settle down quickly. But that's not what appears to be happening right now, and not in the near term, to be sure. Again, there are sort of some ways in which this could sort of, you know, the US and Israel with respect to military operations, and we didn't even talk about that, Israel sort of expanding strikes into southern Lebanon, which has been going on for decades. You know, we can off-ramp, but then what? You know, then what? I just mentioned Lebanon, Lebanon is still feeling the effects of the civil war in the 1980s. I mean, we have destroyed so much infrastructure, and you know, it's the social rebuilding, the psychological rebuilding. You know, again, I work with the Chechens, those wars are 20 years old now, and those people still feel the scars of war.

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

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Theme 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 have with us one of the foremost scholars, philosophers, and public intellectuals in the world, writing about a topic that's very close to us. I think every day, where history matters for us every day, which is how we think about memory and the ways in which memories of the past, particularly memories of a traumatic, guilt ridden, difficult past, the ways those memories are used or not used to improve or limit our democracy. In other words, what is the role for historical memory in addressing past injustices?

Susan Neiman, who is our guest today. Susan has written some of the most important work on this. She is the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and that's central to a lot of her work. But she studied philosophy at Harvard and the Freie Universität in Berlin, was a professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University before moving to Berlin, moving back to Berlin for the Einstein Forum. She is the author of numerous books of contemporary philosophy and political philosophy as well, a number that I just like to mention, Evil and Modern Thought, particularly relevant, perhaps to our world today. Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, I'm not sure that I'm a grown up idealist, but at least give one a try.

You probably are if you're doing this podcast.

Thank you, Susan, that makes me feel a lot better. And her most recent book, the book that's really going to be at the center of our discussion today, which is really a phenomenal book. Both Zachary and I have read it: Learning from the Germans' Race and the Memory of Evil. It has just come out, in paperback, with a brand new final section, at least for now, on the Black Lives Matter movement, and how it relates to Susan's really in depth discussion of historical memory in Germany and the United States over the last century.

Susan, thank you for joining us today. It's a pleasure. Before we turn to our discussion, as always, we have our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri and today's poem is actually a bilingual poem from Zachary. This is the first of your bilingual poems in one hundred and twenty or so [episodes], I think. Zachary, what is the title of your poem?

“Herbst ich erinnere mich,” or “Fall I remember.” Let's hear it.

“Fall, I remember. You sneak up on us from behind the orchard fence. You seem cold and distant until the signs at the gas station begin to freeze. Herbst, ich erinnere mich an dich, der alte Mann in dem Supermarkt mit kaltem Haar, zwischen geöffnet und geschlossen Hoffnung. Fall, I remember you like a blessing, a prayer for the lost souls in tandem with the damp leaves trodden underfoot. The air is burning now. The earth is burning. The fires are so hot they feel as if they could be frozen. Und dann von hinter der Regalen hat ein Mann deinen Arm berührt. And then from behind the shelves, a man has touched your arm. He is memory. Er ist die Erinnerung. And there are the eyes of your underlings, and the eyes of the mistreated ones, and the eyes of your fathers, and your mothers and your great, great forgotten ones. Es gibt die Schuld deines Land. There is the guilt of your country. Es gibt die Schuld deiner Hand. There is the guilt of your hand. Wie kommt das Ende der Geschichte mit dem Ende der Erinnerung? Wie kommt das Ende der Erinnerung mit dem Ende der Zeit? Wie kommt das Ende der Schuld mit Erbst, mit Zärtlichkeit?”

That was really powerful. Very powerful. I think you should translate that last section for us and tell us what your poem's about.

Well, so I'll answer the latter question first. So my poem is really about how we think about historical memory and guilt. And it's particularly about this moment we find ourselves in in the fall of 2020, right before the presidential election, sort of thinking about our history and how it's going to affect our future.

And the last six lines of the poem in German translate roughly as how does the end of history come with the end of memory? How does the end of memory come with the end of time? How does the end of guilt come with fall, with tenderness?

It evokes a little bit of T.S. Eliot, right? Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Well, I was also thinking, Zachary, I don't know if you know, there's a fairly well known poem of Rilke. I don't know its title anymore, but it starts with es ist herbst, it's fall. Do you know that?

I think I may have come across it, but I was definitely going more T.S. Eliot.

But yeah, I prefer T.S. Eliot to Rilke myself, actually. But that, his herbst poem, is a good poem.

It is. You know, I'm glad you mentioned that, Susan. I read it years ago. I'm going to go back and find it when we're done and maybe put it up on the website with the link to your book. That's really, really wonderful. Susan, building on Zachary's poem and the sort of haunting elements of memory, maybe you can take us through a little bit about why you wrote this book, Learning from the Germans. It's a deep, thoughtful, intellectual book, but it's also a very personal book, which I loved.

Thank you. Yeah, it's not an academic book, although sometimes I call myself a recovering philosophy professor. [Laughter] But much of it's written in the first person.

Thank you for joining us from Berlin today for this discussion.

Well, it's been a pleasure, and now I'll look up your podcast more often.

I hope you will.

I will.

And Zachary, thank you, as always for a moving poem in two languages this time. You keep outdoing yourself every week and most of all, thank you to our listeners. And I do want to encourage everyone to pick up a copy of Susan's book. It's now in paperback, Learning from the Germans. The title, very easy to remember.

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 discuss a perennial topic of congressional politics and a perennial debate within our democracy, one that's becoming perhaps more important than it's been in a long time. The question of whether the U.S. Senate should continue to have a rule for a filibuster, which allows a minority, a small minority, in the Senate to prevent legislation and other matters from moving forward.

This is, as I said, an age-old question. It's central to American legislation in American politics, and we're very fortunate to have with us one of the leading scholars of Congress in general, and this topic, among many others.

My friend and colleague, Sean Theriault. Good morning, Sean. Good morning, Jeremi. Sean is a professor in the Department of Government here at the University of Texas at Austin. As I said, he is an internationally recognized, widely published author and speaker on the various pathologies of the U. S. Congress. Sean has written five outstanding books, many of which have won awards.

He began his illustrious career with the book The Power of the People, appropriately titled for a Scholar of Congress. I guess that's the aspiration of Congress more than the reality. He then published a really prescient book in 2008: Party Polarization in Congress, then another book that I really enjoyed reading. I read this book on the prize committee years ago–The Gingrich Senators–really, one of the best books at explaining how Newt Gingrich and his generation transformed the U. S. Congress.

And then more recently, The Great Broadening. And just this last year, a really important book for educating all of us about these topics, Congress: The First Branch. Sean also writes widely in every major newspaper. He appears on all kinds of news shows.

We could call you, Sean, Mr. Congress. How does that sound?

I'll take that moniker, although Congress isn't so popular these days, Jeremi. [Laughter] Yeah, well, I think it's safe to say, Sean, you are more popular than Congress. Thanks, Jeremi.

Before our conversation with Sean, as always, we have our scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri.

Zachary, what is the title of your poem today?

With a single speech.

Well, let's hear it.

“It is a kind of arrogance that we think ourselves so sacrosanct that we build for our posterity, a temple of democracy, and hand any old fool a key. It is a kind of arrogance that we think ourselves so chosen that we steal votes from cities, for a slew of empty prairies, to send their any old Tom, Harry, Dick, and Larrys. It is a kind of arrogance that we think ourselves so holy that they can stand among the rubble that they burned right to the ground; and with their fist hollowed oaken desk of storied Asia's pound, and cry out for the freedom of ten hours for their mouths to sound. It is a kind of arrogance that we think are stars so well foretold to turn away the crying of a child for the banknotes, pristinely rolled. To rest our eyes on empty promises, where they rest in rot and mold, and wake up in a stupor, still in the middle of our speech. And sing to the great portraits about the horror to impeach. But the old poets of the tattered haunts, they know it all too well, and can recall of every second to you in a cafe with a screech, as their voices swell. Old men cannot solve our problems with a single speech.”

Zachary, that's lovely. What is your poem about?

My poem is really about the irony that we consider ourselves such an important and original democracy. And we think ourselves so great that we don't actually need to maintain our democracy and perform the basic maintenance of democratic institutions. And even while we have these very archaic institutions, like the filibuster, embedded in our very houses of government.

Well, that's just a fantastic opening for our conversation. Sean, is the filibuster an archaic element of Congress?

So first Jeremi, how dare you make us go after Zachary! [laughter] If I ever sign up to do this show again, I'm going to mandate that he go last, so I don't have to follow that! [laughter]

You're not the first guest to say that. So you should listen to your guests, Jeremi. How dare you sucker punch us off! [laughter]

Sean, this was fantastic. You offer such detailed and insightful knowledge on Congress and related political matters. And you're so good at explaining things and also making it fun and interesting, so thank you, Sean, for joining us today.

Oh, thank you for having me on, Jeremi. It's a pleasure talking to you and Zachary today. And Zachary, thank you for your poem, as always, and most of all, thank you to our 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 Komotini. 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.

This podcast is produced by the liberal arts its development. Yep. And the college of liberal arts at the university of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris. Codine stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find this is democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

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.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts LAITS 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 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.

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 Haris Khodini. 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.

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.

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.

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 Cotini. 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.

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.

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 Haris Khodini. 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.

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.

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 Scott Holmes. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. See you next time.

Voiceover: 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.

Voiceover: A podcast about educating yourself on today’s important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

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 Scott Holmes. Stay tuned for a new episode every week You can find this is Democracy on Apple Podcast, Spotify and YouTube. 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.

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 Scott Holmes. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find this is democracy on Apple podcast Spotify and YouTube. See you next time you.