Black Box ‘Realism’ | Interview: Elliott Abrams

This episode of The Remnant is brought to you by our friends at the Pacific Legal Foundation. PLF is a national nonprofit law firm with more than 200 active lawsuits representing Americans hurt by government overreach. Across the country, PLF is fighting to free up more land and resources. They represent a California family who have oil reserves but can't drill because of a state ban. Alaska lumber companies that can't operate because of a federal rule. and a retired pediatrician in Florida whose property was wrongly declared a wetland. And they represent all their clients free of charge because they believe all Americans should live fearlessly in pursuit of happiness. If you agree, check out the Pacific Legal Foundation at pacificlegal.org slash flagship. Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention? Daniel Diggins! Greetings to your listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Just a heads up to listeners. I have a classic Goldberg head cold, and I have taken probably pushing the legal limit of drug medicine to deal with it. So if I am more incoherent than normal, that is why. I'm very excited about today's guest. Elliot Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. He served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor in the administration of George W. Bush, where he supervised U.S. policy for the Middle East and the White House. He was a special representative for Iran and Venezuela in the administration of Donald Trump. And he is thick in the world of, I would call, second wave neoconservatism. In some ways, I would call third wave, but we can talk about that a bit later. But to start, I really want to get into Venezuela and Iran and the state of things. So, Elliot, thanks for being on The Remnant. Sure. Happy to do it. Let's do it a little strange way. I'm sure you've had to go be a visiting professor or lecturer at fancy pants universities from time to time. Let's say you're doing a seminar and someone asked you to come up with a label for the second Trump administration's foreign policy. Is there a useful one in the existing canon of foreign policy? incoherent. There are large elements of it that are hardline, let's say, conservative, Republican, and then there are digressions from that that make it incoherent in my view. What I'm trying to tease out is like in domestic affairs, I have come to the conclusion that it's sort of silly to analyze Trump's domestic policy on ideological lines as the foreign policy or the political science, it's personalist, right? It's just what he wants to do. And, and it feels increasingly like that's his approach to foreign policy too. And if you let yourself get caught up in any mode of analysis, realism, even nationalism, right? Certainly not isolationism. Sovereignism comes close, but basically that stuff, just all the isms lead you astray. Yes, I think that's right. I would call it personalist in two ways. One of them is that he doesn't seek countries. There's no Russia. There's no China. There's Putin. There's Xi Jinping. Kim in North Korea. And we'll work something out. And personalist in the sense it's how I feel today, what I want to do today, what my buddies, Lutnik, Witkoff, want to do today. And I'm afraid how much money we can make. Also very personal. I don't know if you've seen it, but there's this international relations paper that had come out about neo-royalism. How many IR papers are written in a year that ever get a mention in Politico or the New York Times? Pretty few. So it's kind of broken through a little bit. But basically, they make the cases that you need to look to the Habsburgs, right? That this is all about competing clans and dynasties and groups and networks of groups. It's kind of post-national in many respects. Do you think that makes any sense? Yes. It obviously makes sense when you're dealing with places that are actually monarchies, You know, all the Gulf countries, for example, or that have a single leader who's kind of like a king, Russia, China. And of course, the odd part of it is that you're trying to cram that onto a democracy, us. And it also doesn't work in Europe where you're dealing with people, you know, Starmer, Macron, Mertz, who are not kings. I mean, I think it's an interesting insight into what is not working. Let's just go across the risk board, as it were. The good, the bad, the ugly, if that's how you want to categorize it, or just what's the state of play with Venezuela? Like, how are you feeling about it today? Mixed. I'm very glad that the president did what he did in arresting Maduro, seizing him. It was obviously fabulous from a military point of view. But the reason it's mixed is that he doesn't seem to have any particular desire to move Venezuela toward democracy. And he's playing footsie with the regime. I mean, where they are today is, you know, in a certain sense, where they would be had Maduro had a heart attack and he's been removed. That's not quite fair because we've obviously put some pressure on to get political prisoners out, for example. Where we ought to be now, it seems to me, is making it clear there's got to be a transition to democracy. It's going to take, you know, one year, let's say. The negotiation over all of this, for example, releasing all political prisoners immediately, political exiles are able to come home immediately, political parties are able to get all their property back. media access, all the things you would do negotiating an amnesty that Latin American countries have done for decades to move to democracy. I don't see those. Some of them may be under discussion and, you know, I just don't know about it. But the president seems truly uninterested in moving Venezuela to democracy. Do you think that the two months of blowing up drug boats was what they said for those two months, that it was about the drug war? Or was it all preparatory to this, correct me if I'm wrong, decapitation? I mean, because it's not regime change, as you said, right? And that Trump was just looking for a way to vindicate his 1990s stuff about taking the oil? This is a very good question. And to me, it's a great mystery here. Why did Trump do this at all? I mean, what were the stated arguments here? Number one, drugs. That's not true. I mean, fentanyl does not come from Venezuela. Migration, also not true because Trump had, in fact, closed the Mexican border. So, you know, there were hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who came in under President Biden, but very, very few under Trump. So that's not an argument. I can give two better arguments that may have appealed to him, whether they are true or not. One, oil. I think he's exaggerated the amount of oil we're going to get from Venezuela, but that's one. The other, which I'm sure, which appeals to me, and I think appeals to Rubio, and maybe it appeals to Trump as well. If you can cut off all the oil to Cuba, that regime is going to fall. And you will have achieved what John Kennedy and all of his successors couldn't achieve. you're going to get rid of the Cuban regime. And if you get rid of Venezuela and Cuba, Nicaragua will follow. And then you can say all of these hostile regimes are out of the Western Hemisphere. And it fits within the, you know, the national security strategy. So I think that's a better explanation. I just don't know whether it is the actual explanation. I kind of hope that's an explanation. As much of a critic as I am, I can forgive a lot if this was all in service to a plan to like liberate Cuba. I take your point and it's a perfectly valid political point. If you could topple the Cuban government or get regime change in Cuba, something that Kennedy through, you know, everybody else couldn't do. Given the state of the Cuban regime these days and the sort of ticky-tack nature of most of its allies, like if the Cuban regime was this week when Kennedy was around, maybe the Bay of Pigs would have worked? I mean, do you think that's fair? Or do you think, I mean, politically, I think you're absolutely right. It doesn't matter. But like, it is in pretty weak shape, isn't it? Yeah, it's in pretty weak shape because this communist regime has destroyed the Cuban economy. I mean, they did not need to be where they are. You know, Cuba imports tons of sugar. Cuba imports tons of sugar. Cuba has exported many millions of its most industrious citizens. That's a regime strategy. Let's get rid of all these potential dissidents. You also had, of course, a truly charismatic leader at the time of the Bay of Pigs, Castro, Fidel Castro. And today you have, you know, this guy, D.S. Canel, comes out of a novel for a kind of boring, gray-faced communist bureaucrat. And at the time of the Bay of Pigs, Castro had not yet proved to fair-minded people, I think, that he was a mass murderer and a tyrant on the order of, you know, kind of petty Stalin. He did over time. And I think one could make a good case that he already proved it really quickly after taking power. But let's give him that at the Bay of Pigs. You could be a conscientious person who wished the Cuban people well and not yet have concluded Castro was going to be a disaster. All right, so let's get back to the Venezuela part of it. It's very difficult for me to figure out how to score the intangible damage to our reputation. You can throw Greenland into this if you'd like, but I'm not going to work really, really hard to defend this operation in Venezuela as not being a military operation for oil. Does the Trump era show that the estimation and esteem of other nations actually doesn't matter as much as we once thought? Or do you think there are going to be long-term consequences to all of this that are just hard to game out or see right now? I don't think there are long-term consequences from Venezuela, partly because Maduro is impossible to defend the whole regime. And because I do think that it will end up being a democracy in a couple of years. There's more damage from Greenland because it's completely indefensible. And I think there is enormous damage from our unpredictability, well, our president's unpredictability and complete lack of interest in democracy and human rights from his complete misunderstanding and lack of appreciation for and deprecation of alliances. He's not the first president who did this. I think, frankly, President Obama didn't fully appreciate alliances either. He thought they were a problem, not an asset. But to me, the difference between us and the Russians or the Chinese is they don't really have allies. We have these fabulous alliances, starting with NATO, but, you know, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, in Asia, and the president doesn't get it, thinks it's just a cost, not a benefit. I mean, suppose the next president believes in alliances as much as, you know, most of the last 10 have. Nevertheless, what used to be unthinkable is not only now thinkable, it happened. You had a president who said, I don't care about you. I'm probably not going to defend you. If you're on the receiving end of that, you're going to adjust your foreign policy and your defense policy. Because if it happened once, it can happen again. Side note, you mentioned Trump doesn't care about human rights. In the 1980s, you were a big part of the Reagan effort to elevate human rights as an important instrument of American foreign policy. The left claimed it was all BS, that you redefined what human rights are and you used it to support bad regime. Not you personally, but the Reagan administration. And I'm sure in some cases you personally, they made that accusation. But I think it is interesting, and if people were still keeping score on this kind of stuff, to point out that the left's critique couldn't be entirely true because you were here today still talking about the importance of human rights. And so have been a bunch of the other people, you know, in the first term, Paul Wolfowitz, I remember talking about this kind of stuff. And so there had to have been more sincerity at the very least than the harshest critics were claiming. But I'm just kind of curious, in retrospect, how do you think about those debates now, right? I mean, the debates about Reagan's support for human rights in the Soviet Union and in South America, these were huge arguments. The New York Review of Books would take 10 words on some obscure aspect of this And now I don know that most people really have a good concept of what human rights are Well I think that what the left was doing in the Reagan years was promoting if you will the left that is defending leftist regimes whether it was the Cuban regime which most leftist so human rights advocates wouldn criticize or the Sandinista regime which most leftists including leftist so human rights advocates would not criticize All they wanted to do was to attack U.S. foreign policy and defend leftist regimes. I remember speaking, I guess it was at Colgate University a couple of years ago, and a student in the Q&A period said, how can you sleep at night when you were part of an administration that gave U.S. aid to the military junta in El Salvador? And my answer to him was, that's a good, that's a perfectly fair question for a student to ask. But actually, it shouldn't be directed at me. Or Ronald Reagan, it should be directed at Jimmy Carter. We didn't invent the policy of supporting that hunter. Jimmy Carter did. He made the decision. We continued it. Why did he make that decision? If you do not ask yourself the question, why did Jimmy Carter, who I think we would all say was sincere about human rights, why did he make that decision? If you don't ask yourself that question, then you're not trying to understand U.S. foreign policy and the challenges it faced in that period. I would say, you know, I continue to be very proud of that record of those eight years. And if you think of the transitions to democracy in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Chile, El Salvador, I mean, we can go on and on, the Philippines, South Korea that Reagan supported. In some cases that you might even say we engineered, in other cases, we were just following on the desire for democracy. And respect for human rights on the part of the population. But I think it's a terrific record. It was not a record of just sitting back, you know, the famous Roosevelt quote about Somoza of Nicaragua. He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch. That was not what we did. Where he said, if he's a son of a bitch, let's see if we can help move him aside in a way that does not lead to his replacement by a worse regime, as happened in Cuba or Nicaragua or Iran. You know, I think we had a pretty good record of doing that. It's not a record that you're going to find being taught in U.S. foreign policy courses in, you know, the hundred greatest colleges and universities in America, because the professors are teaching a leftist version of American history and the history of American foreign policy. And they're misinforming a whole generation or two of students. But I think the record is actually a very good one. Now, more recently, I mean, I would say that does not seem to be what the U.S. is trying to do in Venezuela. But I think that maybe it is what Secretary Rubio is trying to do. I think it's going to work to bring democracy to Venezuela because there's another player here, you know, besides Maduro and his replacement and Rubio and Trump. It's the Venezuelans. And I think that after this terrible 20-year experience, they want to go back to democracy and they're going to be out in the streets enforcing it. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Remnant Podcast. All right, so you brought up Rubio. Rubio, there was a time at least 10 years ago, maybe even more recently where people thought, okay, he is sort of a Reaganite in Mufti in the MAGA age. And now at the very least, you can still make the case. He's the only guy who speaks fluent Reaganism. The question is whether or not it's his first language, um, or if he's just sort of code switching to talk to people who want to hear it. Where do you come down on Rubio? Like, Is he Trump's ambassador to Reaganites or is he the Reaganites ambassador to Trump? I had a very, very hard regard for Rubio and supported him in 2016 for the nomination. And I still have a very hard regard for him. And my assumption is that he has not changed his views and is trying to do what he can within the narrow confines of the Trump administration. The question he has to ask himself if I'm right is, am I being asked to do anything that's against my conscience? Would things be better or worse if I weren't here? And I think he, you know, he asked himself those questions. I'm being offered the job and is trying. You know, I would love to be a fly on the wall in some of those conversations. Obviously, there are whole areas of foreign policy. Middle East, for example, where Witkoff and Kushner seem to be in charge. the war in Ukraine, Witkoff. I mean, I don't know how policies are made in this administration. There seems to be no policy process whatsoever. And you can laugh at that, you know, and rightly about the bureaucracy and endless reams of paper and hours and hours of interagency meetings. But there's a method to that madness. I mean, it may waste a lot of time, but it also sometimes produces a better policy. Because you look at the alternatives and you try to look around corners. I don't know that anybody's doing that in this administration. I still give Rubio the full benefit of the doubt. And it's funny you mentioned that because Eli Lake made a similar point, at least obliquely, the other week when I had him on here, insofar as, and this is a good way to segue to Iran, Trump's social media posts, I cannot say his truth. Like, I will not give in to that branding. But his social media post on Truth Social, telling the Iranian people to keep fighting, take over your institutions, help is on the way, that is not a statement that would come from a president if there was a proper foreign policy process. Just because if there was a proper foreign policy process, someone would say, well, you know, we don't have the assets in place to follow through on this promise or whatever, right? it now seems that we're moving a lot of assets into the area. What do you think is going on now with our vis-a-vis Iran? I don't know. My estimate is that in the end, Trump will strike something. And I say that in part because we are, you know, we're clearly preparing for it as we did in Venezuela case. And partly because I cannot believe that Trump is actually going to accept the ludicrous negotiating terms that are being offered to him by the Iranians and Witkoff. I mean, Witkoff will offer them. This is the guy who actually promoted Putin's 28-point plan for destroying Ukraine. But there's a problem in the Iran case. Trump, like just about every Republican, dumped all, including me, dumped all over the JCPOA, Obama's 2015 deal. One of the reasons for doing that was it was nukes only. It said nothing about missiles. It said nothing about supporting terrorist proxies. The deal that Trump is being offered now by Iran, from everything we read, is exactly that. It's the same. It's the same deal. Oh, okay. You know, the details will vary, but it's still a bunch of promises from Iran. Exactly. I mean, that's still that. So I don't see how Trump can actually accept that deal. I think he realizes and people around him will what everyone will say, including all the Democrats, you know, using his quotes about the Obama deal. So that leads me to the view that he'll do something in a sense to get to get out of the corner he's painted himself into. Again, I'm not trying to make this into a Trump bashing thing, but wouldn't that amount to grotesque betrayal of the Iranian people that we encouraged? I mean, we didn't make them rise up. They were rising up, but we encouraged them to stick it out and then to do some face-saving thing for Trump. The betrayal would be a deal with the regime of any kind. I mean, to me, that would be true betrayal. I mean, within weeks of this really fabulous display of nationalism, patriotism, desire for freedom on the bravery on the part of the Iranian people, we do a deal with the regime. I don't think he's going to do that. If you suppose that he doesn't do a deal that he hits missile sites, that's not a betrayal of the Iranian people. He made a terrible error. It's a moral and political mistake of saying help is on the way and encouraging. You know, we've done it before. I mean, we did it in Hungary. We did it in Iraq. It's not the first time. And it's a terrible, terrible mistake. But it isn't a direct betrayal the way a deal with the regime would be because the deal, suppose that we accept, Oh, OK, they're going to only enrich to 3.67 percent. What do they get for that? Sanctions relief, which is to say money, which enables the regime to stay longer. I mean, that's the real betrayal to enrich and empower the regime. Yeah, no, I think that's fair. I mean, I definitely think that's fair. of bailing out the regime for the sake of Trump saving face would be the worst possible outcome, right? But at the same time, I mean, I agree with you. It's happened before. Not a big fan of telling the Shiites in the Shia in Iraq to rise up and then saying you're on your own. But this, so this raises a broader question. You know, Asha, I think you were the editor of it. I've done more to promote this book than anybody in Christendom. There was a book that the, it was either Hudson or Ethics and Public Policy Center put out like 30 years ago called Honor Among Nations. I was the editor. Yeah, that's right. I just, I just, I just remembered this, right? So that, just so you know, that book actually had a huge influence on me and I've done more to prop it up. And the other day I looked to buy an extra copy used. And I, I think I am a big part of the reason why it was selling for like 750 bucks. So maybe you guys should come out with a second edition. I got one copy and you can't. I have one copy too, but I was going to give it to somebody. I was going to get one for somebody else, but you know, go have them put it out on Kindle or something. But that book, when I read it, and again, I think it was like 30 years ago, something like that, right? It is 30 years ago. Yes. That sort of sent me on my way to my much more mature and developed view that most modern foreign policy realism is garbage. My standard line, I use it a lot on here, is that the best working definition for a foreign policy realist is an ideologue who's lost an argument. And their tendency is to say, oh, if you'd only listened to me and done like the realistic thing, right? The fact-driven thing, the empirical thing, the pragmatic thing, everything would be fine. But you listen to those ideologues who care about, I don't know, human rights or whatever, right? And that book was a great illumination for me that about how caring about the honor of your nation is actually going back, you know, to the ancients. It's a huge part of foreign policy. It's this idea, as we're talking about with allies, if people don't think you're an honorable country that will honor its commitments and behave honorably, that comes at huge costs. And it also comes at costs to your own people in terms of most people want to believe they belong to a nation that is behaving honorably. This is an aspect of the unrealism of realist railpolitik as practiced, you know, for a couple of hundred years, but Let's take the case of Kissinger. To me, the great unrealism is that every state, every country is a black box and there's nothing in it. But actually, in each of these cases, Iran is a good example. There is something in it. There are Iranians in it. And Kissinger made this mistake with lots and lots of dictatorships that he dealt with the dictators. It's a mistake that Trump often makes without realizing, you know, this is a country. This has a huge population. They matter. They have principles. They have interests. You see it with Kissinger most clearly, I think, in the case of Chile under Pinochet, where it just didn't seem to occur to him that Chileans are not going to take this forever. And even if you defend Pinochet's coup, he's got to get off stage. This was Reagan policy. The time has come to get all the generals out. and it's partly because of our principles, but it's partly because what the people of the country want. And Kissinger did not really see that. And to me, to deal with countries as black boxes is not realism at all. It is overlooking all of the complexities of their own populations and what they want, which in not every case, what in many cases is freedom. That's a useful way to think about it. I hadn't thought about the Kissinger part of it in a while, but I've always thought there's also kind of this patina, vestigial Marxist assumption. You know, nation states only do what is in their interest, right, which is sort of like the, it's sort of like treating nation states as homo economicus at scale. And it's just simply not true. countries do all sorts of things because they felt like they were their honor was besmirched or they were insulted or that their honor obliged them to do something and which gets to your point as well right like the people and what the people self matters And what the realists will say in response is well, that's their interest. And I was like, well, okay, so now we're just the snake's eating its tail. These are all just so stories, whatever a state ends up doing is its interest. And when the Iranian people rise up and replace the Iranian, the mullahs with democratically appointed leaders, we're going to say, that's their interest too? So it's non-false-file. No. There's a personal analog to this, which is you should not admire Mother Teresa for sacrificing her life for poor orphans. She wanted to do it. She liked doing it. It made her happy. Therefore, why do we admire her? She just made her happy. And it is, I think, an analog. There is such a thing as honor. There is such a thing as honoring commitments. And I think if you go back in the history of the last, I don't know, go back to 150, 200 years, there are examples of where countries, Britain, for example, honored commitments in the First World War and Second World War that may not at that moment have actually been in their interest. Sometimes they got it wrong. I mean, they look at the history. I happen to be reading right now, Neil Ferguson's book Empire. It's sort of interesting to look at British public opinion about the empire was often wrong in the sense that public opinion defended actions that were actually in retrospect indefensible in the way the peoples of those countries were treated. it. But I think the self-conception of a country, of its leadership, of its population matters a lot. It isn't just a kind of narrow, do we make more money this way or that way? I don't know how to get into this, but, um, and this is not the kind of question you're going to get on Ross Douthat's fancy podcast. But, um, so I have this deep seated view, which I can get deep in the weeds with you on if you like, but I think that neoconservatism as a, well, first of all, it's now essentially become a really stupid dog whistly kind of, oh, bagel snarfing, warmonger, anti-Semitic nonsense, right but um if you go back and you look at what the first neoconservacism was it was about domestic politics it was not about foreign policy it was social policy yeah it was the public interest stuff and then there's the second wave which was the commentary crowd which i associate you with when Norma Bedord started moving commentary towards the right, National Review, my alma mater, had this little editorial squib, come on in, the water's fine. But the idea that Neocon was synonymous with Hawk, military Hawk, is really an invention of the Bush era, right? Because what the stuff that we're talking about earlier, human rights, you know, or even like before that, the, what was it, the Congress of Cultural Freedom kind of stuff that Irving was about. It wasn't about war with the Soviet Union. It was about like, let's give Andrei Sakharov the limelight kind of stuff. It was ideological warfare, not physical warfare. Yeah. And meanwhile, at National Review, there were a lot of Goldwater rights. So we're talking about rollback, not containment. And so this idea that somehow neoconservatism as an actual political movement was maximalist military stuff, I just don't think it's based in fact. It's based in the suspicions that the left had of a lot of those people. Reagan's a warmonger and all that kind of stuff. And then come the Iraq war, they could realize it. I'm just wondering, do you think neoconservatism is a useful label anymore to describe a distinct foreign policy? Well, I think you're right, first of all, that it is used now, sometimes, probably more often than not, to mean warmongering Jew. But it's also used as a weapon against any form of internationalism. any. So that in retrospect, you know, someone like Jim Baker becomes a neocon. Why? Because he was not an isolationist and he believed in the use of American power. So I mean, John Bolton's not a neocon. He would say all the time, I'm not a neocon. Right. So the term is being abused now, I think, deliberately as a weapon. I think all of what you said was right. I think the change came because neocons, like so many other conservatives and hardliners, supported the war in Iraq. And that's when people say, oh, you see, all they want is war. It isn't completely useless, I think, right now and probably tomorrow because there is a struggle that's going to go on in the Republican Party. It's going on right now. It's going to continue over Republican foreign policy. What is Republican foreign policy or what is conservative foreign policy? You know, we're going to fight that out in in 2028, at least some degree, as we as we see who follows Trump in 2032. And, you know, what do we believe about America's role in the world? and isolationists are going to argue, you know, it's either having real American foreign policy, America first, or it's neoconservatism. Look at the U.S. Senate. Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Josh Hawley, and 50 Republicans, I'd say. I mean, the other 50, you know, are people who would have been very comfortable with the foreign policy of Dwight D. Eisenhower. and they're Republicans. So I think there really is going to be a fight over what Republican foreign policy is. And what is neoconservatism? There, I think, okay, what's the difference between sort of Jim Baker, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon type of hardline foreign policy? The difference is that neoconservatives would inject more support for democracy and human rights. And say that the fact that the United States leads the free world, that most of our key allies are democracies, that we lead an alliance of free countries is a very important asset of the United States. And, you know, it's a good conversation to have with John Bolton. I don't think he would say, no, that's nonsense. Sure. But, you know, how heavily do you weight it? You know, well, what about Vietnam, which is anti-China and is communist? And what about the Gulf monarchies, which, you know, don't have the slightest iota of democracy about them? That's the conversation we ought to be having rather than, you know, accusing anyone who doesn't want to leave NATO of being a neocon. Yeah, I think my shorthand has always been when it comes to foreign policy, you've got to be idealistic about ends and ruthlessly realistic about means. I think that's a really good way of putting it. Yeah. And so like and that way. And I think John Bolton would agree. And I think Scoop Jackson, your old guy, would agree. But the question is, the serious argument is not about where we want to end up. The serious argument is about how to get there and what's the cost-benefit analysis. My friend, Andy McCarthy, is very skeptical about a lot of democracy building stuff and all that. But he thinks allies are important and he would prefer our enemies become democracies. But what the cost-benefit analysis is, he grades it differently. And I think it's all perfectly intellectually defensible. Yeah. I mean, part of the problem here is that you have another generation or two of people who are simply misinformed, if I can put it that way. I mean, I guess I'd call a conservative friend of mine who is probably 40 recently said something about going to war for democracy in Iraq. Well, that's not true. That is historically not what happened. And in fact, I recommended that he read Confronting Saddam Hussein by Mel Leffler of the University of Virginia, which is a very critical account of the Iraq war, but explains, you know, that was not why Bush went there. The problem that we had then was the, if you break it, you bought it problem. Okay, now we've invaded Iraq. Now we run the place. What are we going to do? Establish another Saddam dictatorship without Saddam? No. It's, you know, Japan and Germany after World War II. Okay, fine, you won. Now what? And the American answer has always been, well, now we try to establish a democracy. We try to do it smart. We try to do it in a way that will last. It didn't work in Iraq for reasons that Loeffler goes into, but it worked in a lot of other places. So it's hard to have this debate for many reasons. One, the people on the far right who are lying deliberately and just sort of cursing out anyone they disagree with. But I think there's another reason, which is I do think that a lot of people don't know the history. where were you know as i said i don't know 20 minutes ago why would they know the history where would they get the history you know it's funny because when you mentioned the your answer to the kid at colgate about el salvador and jimmy carter starting the policy it's a very similar argument like i'll run into this still to this day on some college campuses about how the wmd thing was a lie and i was like well you have to explain to me why bill clinton thought it was true why the British intelligence thought it was true, why all the Democratic senators who voted for it thought it was true, right? And if you don't have an explanation for that, then don't tell me Bush lied us into war. You just don't know the context of it. And I think the Iraq war was a mistake in hindsight, but there are some mistakes that you only could discover sort of in hindsight. I do want to ask, so back on the neocon question, just for two seconds. So the just-so story you get from certain paleocons, which is deeply problematic, is basically they say, Irving Kristol and Matt Glazer and, or not Matt Glazer, but Irving Kristol and maybe Daniel Bell or somebody, that they were Trotskyites for like 15 minutes their sophomore year in college or something like that, right? And they never lost their, Trotskyite exporting permanent revolution, all that kind of stuff. And that's what has flavored neocons ever since. And meanwhile, if you look at, first of all, the second wave, your crowd, Bill Bennett, Gene Kirkpatrick, Richard Perl, none of these guys were communists or Trotskyites. They were, some were left on the left. Well, it's an odd charge to make. I mean, Irving Kristol was actually much closer on all these foreign policy issues to being, I don't know, I want to use the term, Pelliacon, but to being, he was closer to Jim Bakery than to me, let me put it that way. For sure. He was very, very dubious about this idea of promoting democracy and human rights. That was not his concentration when it came to foreign policy at all. So it's just wrong. And I think if you read what he wrote about foreign policy, it's just wrong. There was a division among neocons on that question that developed over time. I mean, Irving at some point was talking about getting out of NATO. And he wrote this essay about how they should stop putting the foreign policy, the international affairs stuff at the front of the New York Times because it matters so much less. I mean, he was kind of cranky. I loved Irving Kristol, but I used Cranky on some of that stuff. But part of what drives me crazy about it is, if your definition of what makes a neocon is someone who moved from left to right, then with the exception of William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk, basically the founders of National Review were all neocons. Like, James Burnham was a serious communist. Whitaker Chambers, pretty famous communist. Frank Meyer. Max Eastman was like Trotsky's translator and literary agent in America. I mean, you can go down a long list. And I just, it feels as if, again, people have these just so stories that want to make neoconservatism Jewish and warmongering. And it's very difficult to sort of talk them out. Most of the neocons, I mean, Gene Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, you know, Scoop Jackson, Admiral Zumwalt, Pat Moynihan, you know, the sort of left moving right that just not true. OK, we need to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon. All right. So I've for years made the argument. I'll summarize it very quickly. The U.N. sucks. That's the argument. But beyond that. Don argue with that That part of the problem with the UN is that the criteria for membership is simply existing If you are a nation state you can be a member Very Tennyson parliament of man kind of nonsense And so I I think you want to belong to a club that expects more of you You're not going to tell me you're for the Board of Peace now. I am not for the Board of Peace because they really, it's like, whenever I hear Board of Peace, I just sort of feel like the, you should say, the condo is silent, right? But I am for, I have been for a League of Democracies that sort of a political arm, not NATO, that gives an incentive structure to belong to a better kind of club. and you would have benchmarks for what defines a democracy. It would be a competing multinational institution. I'm a big believer that competition improves institutions. Every now and then, this idea kind of picks up a little steam. I think it's pretty dead. It's mostly dead right now in the Trump era. But I think it could come back. You're one of these cookie-pushing CFR guys. What do you think about this? I should have worn a striped suit today. I'm sorry. I don't think it's going to happen. I mean, there are elements of it out there, right? NATO is one, is a league of democracies. Plus Turkey. Yeah. Turkey used to be a democracy. I hope it'll be again after Erdogan. But there's the Council of Europe, which is a European kind of democracy, human rights organization. We've had various treaties in Asia. ANZUS, you know, now we have the AUKUS, Australia, UK, US. We had at one point the CETO Treaty, Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. The problem with doing what you're suggesting is ruling the fences. That is, you're going to then have to make all these decisions about exclusions. Why haven't we excluded Turkey from NATO, which is worth thinking about? Well, those who are against it don't necessarily argue, well, it really is a democracy, but rather that the cost is too great given rail politic interests. Why do we have a relationship with Saudi Arabia? It's certainly not about democracy or human rights, but the Saudis have been, and I would argue still remain an important ally, partner, I guess I'm probably against it. I mean, UN was, was, you know, founded on lies, namely the lies about Stalin, who was one of our partners in creating it. You know, you can't, you can't, you can't get away from that. The idea that there is one organization that everybody's in, I think is useful. One could argue that the UN, the whole thing should be moved out of the US because being in the US gives it much more importance than it would otherwise have. And certainly for Americans, I mean, it's on the front pages all the time. The UN voted today, you know, which you wouldn't get if it were in Timbuktu or Geneva, let's say. And that would be a really nice piece. This is an argument to make to Trump. Think of that real estate on the East River. Make a terrific hotel convention center. So I'm probably not with you on trying to create a kind of rival to NATO or the UN that would do all the things you want to do. Well, I think it would be pretty complimentary to NATO because basically, for all intents and purposes, all the members of NATO, probably including Turkey, like certainly post-Erdogan would probably, I would hope be members of it, but it would also be a place where Japan, Australia, New Zealand, you can start going down the list. It would create an incentive structure for India, which is really close to deserving to be, you know, to be in something like that. In fact, the last time we saw each other face to face, I believe was in India. I kind of felt like that museum director from Indiana Jones bumping into you in the back streets of Delhi. But we should talk for two seconds about India. I kind of, that was my first trip there. And I kind of feel like it could be, in some ways, it's analogous to a giant version of Israel. Democracy with a unique cultural distinctiveness surrounded by hostile, mostly Muslim neighbors. And with a permanent Muslim minority. And with a permanent Muslim minority. And it seems to me we could do a lot better by our relationship with India. When I was there, all of the Modi Indian nationalists were very enthusiastic about Trump. They thought, okay, this is the era of nationalist solidarity and they've been dealt a blow. Do you think this personalist relationship kind of foreign policy has served us well in that part of the world? Well, first, you know, that was my first trip. For that trip, I read three or four books about India. So in my lifetime, I've read three or four books about India. It's dangerous for me to answer your question, but I will anyway. I think, you know, we had 20 years of a very good foreign policy on India, starting with George W. Bush about 25 years ago, who made the big change and said, OK, look, they have nuclear weapons. Are we going to let that destroy our relationship with the world's largest democracy, with a sort of natural, obvious partner for us, particularly as China rises? That's crazy. And from that point until very recently, it was a better and better relationship, partly because the Chinese are a threat to India as they are a threat to us. And we were pulling India away from its traditional relationship of now 75 years, 80 years with Russia. and Trump screwed that all up with his kind of reversal, his tariffs, his distancing, his attack after starting great with Modi. And again, I think the permanent damage has been done because for Indians who are thinking, well, maybe we can jettison this relationship with Russia and we'll move. All of a sudden they realize, well, the Americans are not reliable. If it happened once, it can happen again. So we'd better not make that such a definitive change in relationships and alliances. And I think, you know, it'll take 10 or 20 years to get over that, it seems to me. From the point of view of our national security and our economy, from the point of view of democracy in the world, from the point of view of the interests of our allies in Asia, defining Asia as going from, you know, Hawaii to Israel, it's a critical relationship. It's an absolutely critical relationship for us. And it should be one of the key goals of American foreign policy to cement a positive relationship with India. and we were doing that under Democrats and Republicans. It was getting better and better until Trump screwed it up in the last, what? The last year, the last nine months. Okay, so last question, and I promise to keep you to time. In the domestic realm, a lot of my friends, including me, worry about precedence of what Trump has done under the theory of unitary executive and all this kind of thing. And part of our argument is you think this is great when a Republican president has this power. What are you going to do when a Democrat does the same thing? I mean, like you literally had Trump's lawyer at the UN in the tariffs case arguing that a Democratic president could declare a climate crisis and do all sorts of crazy stuff with tariffs in order to promote green energy, right? And so like those precedents on the domestic front, you could see a Democrat picking up. It's more difficult to see on the foreign policy front where the precedents are going to take us. I mean, what is the thing that you worry a Democratic president would say? Well, given what Trump did, I'm going to do X. They've already done it. Okay, which is what? Well, here's an example. Barack Obama bombed Libya for 70 days, 70-0. And his counsel, who was his Yale law professor, said the War Power Act doesn't apply because these are not hostilities. We're just bombing Libya. The Democrats have already done this. Barack Obama, remember, he said, I have a pen. So I don't worry about them doing anything else in this context on the foreign policy side. On the domestic side, I would like to see the Supreme Court wrap Trump a couple of times, like on tariffs, just to set some limits. But the missing player here on domestic and foreign policy is Congress. I mean, that's the real way in which the system is not functioning properly. And I don't have any magic formulas for restoring it. Obviously, if the Democrats win the House, okay, there'll be more balance in the system and there'll be 417 million investigations of the Trump administration, some of which will be warranted. But I'm not on foreign policy. The notion that the president is commander in chief and can use force is one that has, you know, go back to Korea. We've done it time after time. Both parties have done it. That's the furthest extension of the power of the presidency, really. So I'm not worried about war being done there. Oh, that's, I mean, that's sort of part of the premise of my question was like, it's hard to see what the precedents would be that someone can abuse that would be outside of what's our, I mean, I tend to agree with you. I do think that there's room for worry. I mean, I think as our friend Abe Greenwald would say, it's worse than that. Because you can get, or it can get worse, right? In the sense that Trump is making deals all over the place, sort of like the JCPOA, without buy-in from Congress, you know, the Senate is supposed to approve treaties. We now basically have handshakes at a crypto conference in Abu Dhabi counts as a treaty for all intents and purposes. A Democratic president with that sort of the ability to say, well, it was OK when Trump did it. There could be new things that we cannot foresee how bad they are. Unless, you know, I have a very strong memory of an exchange of letters between President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. that was negotiated between the two governments. The letters were exchanged. And then there were resolutions in both houses of Congress approving the terms that had been exchanged in the deal. And then Barack Obama came in, and Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, we have no engagement here. We have no deal here. It's the letter. So the constraint on that is that it won't last. that the next president will say, well, it wasn't me. And foreigners know that, that it's a sort of a short-term deal that you're getting. And it may be a bad deal for the United States and for the American people, but at least it won't be permanent. It's not binding. All right. So I don't have to sell all of my bonds. Not all. Elliot Abrams, thank you so much for doing this. I hope you'll come back. I will, Jonah. This has been fun. All right. So Elliot Abrams has left the studio. Um, I hope I was coherent. I am so hopped up on cold medicine, you know, that I just hope I wasn't speaking Esperanto or talking about the Sean shoe prophecy, um, or anything like that. Um, and I cannot believe I went so long into that conversation without remembering that he was the editor of this honor among nations book. I've probably written a half dozen columns citing it. And it, it really was, it's weird. the things you read at the right. So, you know, the golden age of science fiction is 16. Sometimes when you read something just at the right age, at the right time, when you're thinking about things in a certain way, it really lasts with you. And that little book, almost more of a pamphlet has really stuck with me. And it's really hard to find now. I mean, I have my copy somewhere around here. Anyway, we covered a lot of territory and I think he's wrong about the League of Democracy stuff, but like not in a way I'm going to get angry about because it's not like he's an unreasonable dude. And I'm sorry for indulging my obsessions about the history of neocons, but I could have gone much longer and been much more self-indulgent about it. And other than that, thanks for listening and I will see you next time. No, you won't. This is a podcast. We'll see you next time.