Neglect of Responsibility

Welcome to Shield of the Republic. A podcast sponsored by The Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. I’m dedicated to the proposition articulated by Walter Lippman during World War two that has strong and balanced foreign policy is the indispensable shield of our Democratic Republic. I’m Eric Edelman, counselor at the center for strategic and budgetary assessments. A Bulwark contributor, and a nonresident scholar at the Miller Center at UVA.

My co host and my partner in all things Strategic is Elliot Cohen, the Robert E. Ozgood professor of Strategy at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in the Arleigh Burke Sheerin Strategy at CSIS. Elliot, welcome. Well,

thank you. It’s it’s good to be here since I I know we’re gonna be talking a lot about the follies of the United States. I wanna bring you a little bit of good news from the Heartland. So I was in Columbus, Ohio over the weekend for convention of about thirteen hundred magicians. And they’re waiting in line was none other than Lance Burton.

Now if you remember, Lance Burton, he was probably the most famous magician in the world. He had a an entire theater built for himself at the Mona Carlo Resort in Las Vegas. And after he finally retired, because it was just such a physically demanding thing. What does he do? Well, he goes back to his Kentucky roots, and he’s living as a farmer in Kentucky, helping young magicians along, and tending to his thirty Angus beef cattle.

So, you know, it was a a great American reverting to being, you know, someone from the the heartland. It was very, very encouraging. Now we can get back to the disastrous of the

tornado.

Let’s start. Don’t we start the program now?

So let me introduce our special guest. I’m really pleased to have him. Robert William Kagan, whom I’ve known for almost fifty years now is a renowned scholar of American foreign relations He’s a senior fellow, I think, at the at the Brookeings institution. I’m not sure what your title is at Brookeings

Bio.

I’m working at I’m working up to Senior Fellow. I’m hoping to get there in a couple of years.

But Bob is a renowned author. He is the author of Paradise and Power, the return of history, the World America made, the jungle grows back, and of course, dangerous nation and the next volume in that series, the ghost at the feast, America, and the collapse of World Order nineteen hundred to nineteen forty one. Bob, welcome to Shield of the Republic. We’re really glad to have you.

Well, it’s great to

be here. It’s great to be with old friends. It’s great to talk to you both. So let me let me start by asking you to tell our listeners a little bit about the main themes. You start the book with the Spanish American war and America America’s arrival essentially as a world power on the international scene and the the sort of ambivalence with which many Americans receive that sort of news and and take on that road.

Tell us a little bit about how you see that playing out and what

you think the book is really all about?

Well, one of the things that I discovered in as I was researching, especially that that early period where of the the Spanish American war in its aftermath and and a and a journalist writing at the time said for Americans, world power had not been on the menu. And I think that it’s true that when we we talk about America as a world power, I assume what we mean by that is a power that is, in fact, taking part in world affairs and has certain ambitions in the world. And I think it’s fair to say that even after the Spanish American war and even after the accidental acquisition of the Philippines that the American people did not pick up themselves as a world power. They thought of themselves fundamentally as a regional power. Roosevelt Daniel Roosevelt himself and Henry Cabot Lodge were not interested in expanding beyond what they regarded as the hemisphere, which which included what they called the outworks.

Which included Hawaii and some of the other islands, but they did not have imperial ambitions in Asia despite what Legions of historians have written. And and so I would say most Americans really were perfectly content to live in what they’ve regarded as a as a world that was quite conducive to their needs without them having to do anything about it. I didn’t even think they were conscious of the fact that they lived in a world order that was protected by others, in that case, the British, but they certainly had no desire to run the the world order themselves. And so it really was that there was increased American foreign policy activity in this period, but it was pretty quiet during the Roosevelt years if if as you recall, I mean, after the Spanish American war, Roosevelt never fires another shot in anger in the United in his seven years as president. And No one expected that Woodrow Wilson was gonna be very active in foreign policy.

So in a way, the the world order part of it, the world sort of world power part of it snuck up on the United States, and they were sort of thrust into that position primarily by the circumstances that led to World War

one. Bob, is it fair to say that another big theme of the book is that the United States had the opportunity to reshape the world order at the end of world war one and muffed it. And not only we, but a lot of others, paid a price for that.

Yeah. And thanks, you know, thanks for getting right to the core of it. I think if I don’t know whether there’s there’s many themes in the book, but if there was one message that I that I think I’d like to get out of this book, and which I think is a little bit contrary to sort of conventional wisdom, both as it refers to American foreign policy, but also as it refers to Versailles and the peace agreement that that ultimately failed. I do think that if you look at where the United States and the rest of the world were in nineteen nineteen, there never was a more sort of accommodating world in terms of building a relatively peaceful liberal world order at at relatively minimal cost. If you think about what the situation was at the time, the only potential challengers to a liberal world order in that period.

We’re all on their backs at week incapable of wielding any influence on, you know, whether you’re talking about the the Bolsheviks in Russia, they were, you know, still in in the throes of civil war. Germany, of course, was completely flat on its back. And really, Mussolini had yet to build up any steam other than his own movements in Italy. And so who were the other great powers that really had power at that time? Democratic Britain and Democratic France, both of whom wanted the United States to continue to play a role.

And I think if you think about what we had to do after World War two, the United States could have actually played a significant role in imposing a world peace at much less cost to the United States, exercising much less global hegemony, around the world requiring fewer troops to be deployed around the world, etcetera. All the things we wound up doing after World War two we could have done after World War one at a much lower price. Bob, can I press

you a bit on that? Because I’m not sure I entirely agree with that. I mean, it seems to me, on the one hand, yes, obviously, the United States had tremendous resources. The imperial powers were not done with Empire. Where they really were by the end of World War two or there were such weak positions that they couldn’t hope to sustain it.

The kind of chaos that you had rampant in Eastern Europe and in Russia or China. Was not really amenable to our control. It’s true that there was wasn’t anybody in a position to challenge us directly, but the giant the Japanese were out there. Russia was bound to recover at some point. And And the kind of threat posed by radical politics was certainly one that was gonna be hard for us to deal with.

I mean, was this simply a matter of great power politics and, you know, if we just kept an army twice as large and kept twenty thousand troops in Europe, all would have been well. I mean, I I I find it hard to imagine us being able I’ll just give one example and stop. You know, we we really bludgeoned the British into giving up imperial preference and to in effect dismantling their empire, which they couldn’t sustain anyway at the end of world war two. Well, that was not the situation in nineteen eighteen, nineteen nineteen. The British Empire had never been bigger.

Its sense of itself was certainly such that they weren’t ready to throw in the towel yet, places like India, where the circumstances really that propitious?

Well, you’re treating you’re treating the situation as if the biggest problem was getting Britain to stop being an empire, that that was not the biggest problem. I mean, the biggest problem was How do you bring a a piece in Europe? How do you allow which is was the problem after World War two? How do you allow Germany to recover? Because Germany is the engine of Europe economically.

How do you allow Germany to recover economically without imposing a a threat again? To France and others. You know, Germany was too big for the continent with no United States involved. It was not too big for the continent if the United States was involved. I mean

We’re gonna go to that.

Say say a

little bit more about you mean by

Let’s just think about it. If you think about World War one, the the Germans had won at least from a continent on the Continental side. They’d already accomplished the conquest of the continent for the most part. By the time the Americans entered the war and certainly as as the war proceeded once the Russians were out, Germany really did control everything from as they used to say Brussels to Baghdad. And so, you know, that was where things were headed.

The only reason that was that that was a reflection of the actual balance of power in Europe. Germany was too strong for France. It was too strong for France and Russia. It was too strong for France and Russia and Britain as it turned out. And the only thing that that that ended the war was the arrival of the Americans.

In fact, even before the American of playing a significant role, the Germans realized that the game was up because there were just gonna be millions of French troops coming in. So when the United States came into the war, we completely shifted what the balance of power in Europe was with the United States becoming a major factor. In terms of that balance of power. Now, what did we do immediately? We pulled that back out.

So we create when people talk about what was wrong with Versailles, what was wrong with Versailles is the Americas didn’t play the role that was envisioned for the United States. Versailles could never work without the United States because it required this balance of power. So once the United States pulled out, we were back to where things were, which is that as long as Germany was able to restore itself. It was once again going to be too strong for the rest of the continent. And that which is what which is what we learned after World War two.

So the only way we’ve been able there is a peace in Europe is because the United States stayed in Europe and allow Germany to both become wealthy when it was Western Germany and then to UNIFY, ultimately, in a way that was nonthreatening. That’s

about a world in place in Europe. Bob, let me let me pursue this and and to get it, you know, how the failure took place because you described in the book Wilson as, at the end of the war, being the most powerful person in the world, arguably. Because

of the activist in the world. It’s not the most powerful person in America.

Awesome. Because you’re getting it precise you’re getting it precisely the point that I wanted to get at. Because one of the one of the things I think is terrific about your book is the degree to which all of the discussions of strategy and policy are really embedded in the domestic political side of the United States. You’re not the first historian, obviously, to do that, but it’s one of the most thorough interweavings of the domestic politics with the international politics that I’ve that I’ve seen and I applaud you for it. But you describe Wilson as arguably the most powerful person in the world.

Yet at Versailles, he’s not able to get his way with everything he wants among the big four even. And then of course, he’s not able to sell the piece at home and explain that for our list why why wasn’t he able to get what he wanted given the relative power of the United States, the fact the United States had become the world’s greatest creditor power after he moved from being a debtor nation to the world’s biggest creditor. And we had millions of men under arms at that point. You know, what made it impossible for him to convert the, you know, the potential of power into actual power.

Well, I’m not I’m not actually sure what it is you are referring to when you say that. There were things that Wilson lost on at at Paris. One was Shantung, for instance, the the the Japanese wanted to hold onto it and not give it back to the Chinese which everybody regarded as vaguely outrageous. But nevertheless, Wilson wanted Japan to, you know, be part of the league of nations. So we gave in on that question.

There were disputes obviously about you know, which territory was gonna go to Germany, which was gonna go to other countries. There were a lot of there were compromises going But if you think about what the main the main problem at Versailles was the Franco German relationship. Right? The French wanted to dismember Germany. They wanted Germany basically to cease to exist.

They wanted the Rhineland to be part of France or at the very least be independent and under French control. Control, etcetera. And both the British and the Americans thought it would have been a disaster to to just try to do away with Germany because it would have created the desire for revenge that they were worried about. And also, they wanted again, especially the British and the Americans were very conscious, but they wanted the German market back. They wanted the German economy back.

So Wilson had to find a way to get the French to accept an agreement that provided them some security without dismembering Germany. And he accomplished that. You know, that is what the treaty accomplished. It it it it is set up the the situation in the Rhineland where you had foreign powers occupied the Rhine, which in guaranteed as long as those foreign forces were there, but guaranteed French security. And and then there were questions, you know, about reparations and and such, which were going to be dealt with later.

And the problem was that when the United States voted again, when the Congress voted against the league in the United States, not take part in either the league or the treaty, it was unable to fulfill the critical role that it was going to play. Under those circumstances and one of the most critical roles was as chairman of the Reparations Commission because we haven’t gotten into this, but the role of the United States with regard to the war debts, the debts owed by Britain and France and some other countries to the United States on the one hand and the German reparations question on the other. The United States basically drove that both by absentia and by refusing to negotiate the war debts and really created a disastrous crisis in Europe, which led to the French invasion of Germany in nineteen twenty three, the French invasion of the war to collect what they regarded as their reparations payment, which sent Germany into the economic tail been in the hyperinflation and created a hatred in Germany that that the Germans never got over and basically fueled Hitler’s rods. I mean, nobody thinks about those events in the nineteen twenties, but it was in the nineteen twenties that everything was lost in my view.

And that’s one of the things that I think I’m I mean, we’re we can continue discussing this. But one of the main points I’m trying to make in the book, and I think this is true in general about foreign policy. Is that by the time you get to the thirties, everything is already messed up. It’s not what happens in the thirties. It’s a disaster.

Of course, that is a disaster. But it’s how did you get to the thirties? And the way you got to the thirties was by being irresponsible in the twenties. And I do wanna address Elliot’s points. I don’t know if you’d want me to go continue and move on with another question.

No. No. No. Go ahead. Wanna the interesting things about the period you mentioned in Japan.

The Japanese after World War one really felt that it was an American liberal world. And they actually, as as the Japanese are want to do, they adjusted themselves to what they regarded as the prevailing current. So if you look at your Japan in the early twenties, at least from nineteen twenty to the to the, like, nineteen twenty five or twenty six. Japan was moving in a very liberal direct and include and also in a non militaristic direction. You had you had a civilian leader, I think, for the first time, perhaps in Japan, but in any case, you it it was a it was a rarity, and you had the military’s defense budget being cut.

So it really was a pretty as I say, it was a pretty permissive environment. The Russians were they were out of Europe. I mean, once they were defeated, you know, by Polish forces on the outskirts of Warsaw, they were done, you know, making revolution in Europe. They were on their backs. Germany was obviously on its back.

When

you

get to the questions of the empire, you know, I didn’t know that it was our goal in in life to undo the British and French empire. I’m hoping to hold on a

second. But that’s not fair. But but the treaty was not failing because we’ve done to the British empire. Hey, Bob, you’re distorting what I said. The the question is whether the United States have the ability to impose a the kind of order that it could impose in nineteen forty five after Germany had been devastated, totally disarmed, occupied and was gonna be reconstructed by us, ditto, Japan.

And what I’m trying to say is that I don’t I I mean, I take some of your argument, but I think you’re pushing it very far. It’s very clear, for example, the Germans did not accept the outcome of world war one period. Now they particularly did not accept it in the east, and that’s why someone like Gustaf Stressemann is very very careful not to be okay with Germany’s borders in the east, and he makes it clear that they’re open to revising them. And I I have to say I also find it very hard to understand Okay. What exactly would that active American role have been that would have prevented world war twos?

Okay. We could have done a better job with war debts. Do you think we’re gonna guarantee France’s borders with a, you know, a hundred thousand troops stationed in France.

I actually go into this in great detail in the books. Specifically talking about what not all this is not me talking in retrospect either. This is not, you know, twenty twenty hindsight. There were significant and important officials in Europe American officials, the US ambassador to Germany, for instance, his name was a lumps and hoping he was part of the Corning Glass. He was a Corning Glass Air, and he was a political appointee.

And yet and very much trusted by the Harding administration. And he spent all his time in Germany in the early nineteen twenties warning that American policies were in fact driving Germany toward radicalism. He was specific specifically talking about the connection between war debts and reparations and the resulting French policies that were very aggressive toward Germany. The US ambassador in France, another political appointee, bagged the the the state department to look into at least having some kind of forgiveness for debt, maybe not a complete forgiveness, but even a willingness to talk about the debt, which the United States was not willing to do. We had incredibly capable general whose name was Allen.

General Allen who was the commander of the American forces in the Rhineland. And even though he really operated without instructions, he did a tremendous job of of sort of negotiating among the French and the Germans and the British and sort of keeping everything relatively stable. When the crisis over the war that I mentioned before arose, every single country in Europe, Germany, Britain, and France particularly bagged the United States to just keep a few thousand troops in the Rhineland. Because the existence of those few thousand troops, it wasn’t nobody was talking about the need for the men States to go to war, they were they viewed those troops as a stabilizing presence. And you were right that the Germans never accepted the the Versailles settlement.

But as long as they had foreign troops sitting in the Rhineland, they had no choice, and they did accept it. And one of the great contributions of American Farm Policy, which we can get into why this happened, was that we put pressure on the French to withdraw their forces early from the Rhineland ahead of the Versailles treaty schedule. And as it happened, when Hitler took power, the troops were already gone. I don’t think, by the way, the Germans would have allowed Hitler would have given Hitler power if the troops were still in the mind land. And I’m certainly confident that Hitler himself would have had a much more difficult time if he had been deal if he had come to power and there were still American French and British troops still sitting in the Rhineland as it was as they were supposed to under the Versailles agreement.

And so is is it could actually have been done at a very low very low cost to ourselves. And you know, and then you get into the question of whether we, you know, there was no way in the world that we were ever actually going to do that, and we can have that argument that because I think that becomes a political issue and, you know, states as much as anything else. Howard Bauchner:

I I mean, okay, I think we’ll we we should move on to something else. I I I guess I’ll just stake out my position, which is you know, although I certainly agree with you, you know, there’s a lot more than United States could have done, the war debts thing was a particularly stupid policy. It probably would have been a good idea to try to maintain some sort of American military presence in Europe. I I think it just It seems to me there’s something of a danger in assuming that the only agency in this situation is America. And that the only variable that really matters is what the United States does as opposed to all the stuff that’s churning on in German society throughout Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

And that if, you know, all the United States pulls the right levers, everything’s good. And I guess I’m part of my promise, I’m not entirely convinced about that. But let’s let’s move on, Eric, over to you. Well, I just wanted Bob to I don’t wanna completely move on yet. Right?

Because, you know, I wanna get at kind of what it was that kept Americans from behaving more responsibly as you suggest. Part of it is, you know, we we’ve rewritten the history to say, oh, there was, you know, this you know, United States went completely isolationist in the twenties and thirties. But we’re very active diplomatically in the twenties. Now part of it is because we’re solving problems we created. Right?

That you’re inverting to, the absence from the reparations commission, the refusal to reschedule all the debt, I mean, or to forgive the debt. I mean, Coolidge says president says they hired the money, didn’t they? So we insist that the debts be repaid, which forces the Brits and the French to insist on the reparations because they can’t repay the debts without the reparations. So we get and then after the crisis breaks out, It’s American bankers essentially and diplomats who solve the problem, at least temporarily, with the doll’s plan and the young plan. And I I think it’s important to remember how vital that was.

I mean, doll’s, you know, is is really young. I guess he puts a plan together, but it’s in Dodge’s name. And then he ends up being the vice president. There’s a there’s

a lot going on here and it’s and and this is why, you know, ultimately, if your readers would if they want to, they can read my book and and see see how they feel about this. I’m but I do wanna make it clear I’m not just saying I think something could have happened that didn’t happen. You know, I don’t believe really in counterfactual history, and I and I don’t write a counterfactual history here. Right. But what but what I do point out is that this was a policy choice that was presented to American officials, which they rejected.

It it isn’t that no one ever thought that and it could you know, and it and it no one thought that it was either remotely possible that they did. And and Elliott, I just have to say, it isn’t enough to say Germany was a mess. I I go into great detail about exactly in what way Germany was a mess. And exactly in what way out, you know, there’s no such thing as especially Germany at this time. As there are things going on in Germany, and then there are the things that the rest of the world is doing.

Germany is an occupied country. Germany is entirely dependent on the rest of the world.

Germany is not an occupied country. There

there are no But the Rhineland is occupied at the end. But but where is far much

The Rhineland, is it you said Germany is an occupied country. The Rhinland was occupied. Berlin was not

signed in the Rhinck part of

Germany? Yes. But come on. This is nothing like nineteen forty five. Berlin

was occupied by allies. It was enough. Germany was not allowed to have larger than a hundred thousand forces and there were there were tens of thousands of foreign troops sitting on German territory. Were they not? And

do you think it would have been possible to keep Germany down to an army of

a hundred

thousand. It definitely

wasn’t about keeping them down with an army. It was about the fact that their government was constrained as to what they could possibly do by the existence of these great power foreign forces sitting in their territory. Story. That was what

In the early in the early twenties, undoubtedly. But the I mean, well, I I don’t wanna beat it. A dead horse.

And it’s like how do you see Right. And then the question is how do you get from the early twenties to the thirties? And it is not just stuff happened. You know, it isn’t just that it was a depression and it isn’t just hit or got elected. All of those events are actually intertwined with policy decisions that are being made by the great powers, including by the United States.

And, you know, let’s talk about the doll’s plan because Eric, I’m sure you’re referring to there is this school of thought about the nineteen twenties has grown up in the American Academy. And my our dear friend, Noel Loeffler, is one of the is one of the proponents of the idea that Americans were not doing nothing in the nineteen twenties. They were very active and diplomatically, and they They came up with the Kellogg Rehan pack, which is also not really true. And they were involved in all this economic diplomacy. The economic diplomacy was a failure.

The doll’s plan was a failure. All the doll’s plan did. If you really think about it and this is what Keynes wrote time. Keynes was complaining about the gauze plan, not because he didn’t wanna help Germany, he certainly did. But all the gauze plan did was take private loans for American citizens, private bankers, send them to Germany so that Germany could then pay them in the form of reparations so that the reparations could then go to Britain and France so that Britain and France could pay the United States.

It did

not,

in fact, lead to the improvement in the German economy because it didn’t lead to greater investment, greater exports, greater anything. It just was a way to keep money flowing so that the reparations payments could keep flowing. That was not of any benefit. It was an entirely selfish activity on the part of the United States. And it also in the process, one of the great mistakes, one of the great tragedies of the Dodds plan is it was not US government policy.

The doll’s plan was shaped by bankers, four bankers. And in order to get bankers to lend money to Germany, you had to do a few things to guarantee that to their loans. And one of those things you had to guarantee was that France was never gonna attack Germany again. So the minute that you said that France was never gonna attack Germany again that blew up the entire security apparatus set up by Versailles. Right?

The Americans undid Versailles, not only did they not participate in it, But through their economic manipulations, they also undid it as as any kind of force to contain German power. So I don’t know what would have happened. I’m not saying that if you get everything right, then the world is perfect. There obviously would have been all kinds of other kinds of crises, and I’m sure that would have happened. But I just want to be clear, we’re not talking about saying we’re a hundred thousand troops enough to keep Germany down.

Germany would not have gotten to where it got to if we had if we had conducted, we and the French and the British conducted a more intelligent policy, it seems to me.

Yeah. And I I’m I don’t disagree with anything you just said. I the point I was making about the economic diplomacy, which was, as you say, bankers diplomacy, and it was done in order to get bankers to loan money to Germany to keep this whole ramshackle system going. But I guess the point I was making was or trying to make was that it was this persistent refusal of the United States to undertake any kind of political commitment or any kind of military commitment to the security of Europe. That undermined the whole situation.

And so this goes to the one of the themes I’ve, you know, found in the book, which is this the persistence of ideology as an influence on American policy. You know, and and part of that ideology was we don’t take on political obligations. And part of what is fascinating to me about your book is how we get from that point to FDR in nineteen forty one and how we get to the point where Americans become persuaded that whether they want to or not, they have to undertake a more active role and more you know, and a more political and military role in the security of of Europe and and ultimately Asia as well. Right.

I mean, look, there’s a there’s obviously the United States is a is paradoxical or contradictory in this way. Right? I mean, here’s the the conundrum is as follows. The United States is invulnerable. It’s certainly invulnerable in that period.

I think it’s invulnerable. It’s been invulnerable throughout the entire period. There there was no way that if the United States, you know, did sufficient took sufficient steps that they could be attacked and invaded by anybody else. So it’s not hard to understand why Americans who were operating in that situation might say, We don’t care what happens to the rest of the world. It can only bring us trouble.

We’re fine, and we don’t need to be involved. Therefore, That means that everything we do in the world is a choice. And, like, I I don’t get into this in the book, but this whole dichotomy we’ve set up between wars of choice and wars of necessity. I don’t think the United States has ever fought a war of necessity. And I’m not sure there is such a thing as a war of necessity.

You can always not fight. You know, we we told the checks not to fight. Right? So, obviously, it wasn’t necessary. But, certainly, in the case of the United States, which does not have vulnerability to fire and attack.

It’s always a choice when we act. So we have a natural feeling that that we don’t need to get involved in why should we? However, we also are, as you say, we’re a highly ideological people. We’re probably the most ideological people in the world, given that our our founding principles are our nationality. You know, it’s not blood and soil.

It’s it’s about our beliefs. And I think it’s become I think it’s very clear. The twentieth century shows this and I think the cold war shows this and I think our current policy toward Ukraine shows this. When Americans perceive that the liberal world outside even outside America’s borders. Is fundamentally under threat.

They are unwilling to tolerate the toppling of liberalism as as the hegemonic force in the world. And that’s the way I would put it too because it’s not America’s hegemony. They’re interested in. It’s liberal hegemony. They’re to them.

And so why did we get involved in World War one? Ultimately, because Germany was an autocratic militaristic regime that was hospital to liberalism, overtly hospital to liberalism. Same thing in in World War two. And one of the things, if you would say, ask me one of the themes of this book, one of the things that I discovered is that if you ask me, what was the turning point for American for the American public as to when they decided they really needed to start doing something about what was going on in Europe. It was crystal knocked.

It wasn’t even Munich. People had mixed feelings about Munich, but but Crystal Nacht really shocked the sensibilities of America and really in the same way that the Mauritania sinking colored Americans attitudes towards Germany for the next few years didn’t lead immediately to war, but it definitely was the background behind the decision to go to war. Similarly, Germany’s behavior, believe it or not, toward the Jews was so outrageous to at least a majority of Americans, not all Americans because one of the was one of the consequences of crystal knocked in nineteen thirty eight is a rise in antisemitism in the United States. But nevertheless, the sort of outrage at that, I think set the set the stage for what Roosevelt would later bid do, which is, sort of, gradually get the United States more and more involved. You

know, the Holocaust museum had a very interesting exhibit on Christal now. Which they crowd sourced to a bunch of high school students around the country. Just what did your hometown newspaper cover about it? True that there’s an enormous

amount

of coverage across the country, which and I must say when I saw that exhibit, I was I was quite surprised. I did that’s not what I would have expected. You know, Bob, in your book, you say something which I think is really at the core of the conversation. I wanted to read it and get you to riff a bit on it. It’s bottom page three thirty seven.

You’re talking about the Kellogg Breonna pact, which I agree was stupid. And then, yeah, you say the following. This powerful almost religious conviction, however, tended to blind Americans to the underlying realities of power that had reduced the world they considered the triumph of liberal principles. They did not realize that if the world seemed to be moving in a liberal direction, It was because liberal powers had held a near monopoly of power since the end of the war, and this state of affairs was coming to an end. And that, you know, not just in this book, but I think in other things you’ve written, that seems to me just be sort of a central theme of your thinking about American foreign policy.

I was wondering if you could just expand on if you want to make it relevant to the world that we’re in today. You know, you’ve said we’re an ideological nation, so perhaps we tend to overvalue the impact of ideology on its own. Just talk a bit about that.

Well, you know, I mean, you know, we because we’re children of the enlightenment, we have a kind of built in prejudice in favor of the idea of progress. The idea that, you know, human beings are sort of as as they learn more, as knowledge expands, as science, learns more a matter than human beings get better. And this you can read this today and people like Steven Pinker and others who who think that sort of the enlightenment has sort of triumph. And it’s it’s the principle inherent in in Frank Fiedamo’s end of history thesis, which people joke about. But I think most most people still do feel roughly like there is a teleological, you know, element to to to the world and that we are heading you know, things are getting better.

And and this is a myth in my view. And what I’ve what I’ve argued in other books is that actually, liberalism is an aberration more than the culmination of human development and the reason that liberalism is spread is because the nations that believe in liberalism, chiefly the United States, have been the most powerful nations in the world since, you know, since basically World War one, except when they to show us not to pay any attention to the world and let others get more powerful. But that is what it did. Power is what sustains ideas. Ideas are important.

Ideas are what people, by the way, I believe that ultimately, we have a missed guided understanding of what interests are because we think in terms of interest only in terms of material terms, in terms of security and economics, etcetera. Whereas, it’s clear that not only for the United States, but for all countries at all times in history, People have been willing to fight and die for beliefs. They’ve been willing to to undo their own security or damage their own security in the interest of whatever it is that they’re believing or whatever they think ought to be. And so the United States gets singled out for being you know, a crusader in this in this regard. But my view is that every we’re in a constant ideological struggle.

We we thought ideology meant communism. And then after communism, there was no more ideology. But it the oldest ideological dispute is between absolutism and liberalism. At least as far as we’re concerned, which goes back a couple of hundred years. It’s the oldest for us anyway.

And that dispute has continued. I think that and we’re still fighting that dispute. And so, which gets us to today, when we see someone like Putin attacking a country that wants to be part of the liberal world like Ukraine. We do see that as and Putin is a, you know, representative of a major power with it with nuclear force and at least theoretical military potential. That’s when we start getting nervous.

Long before, there was any actual threat to America’s physical security, you know, the loss of Ukraine is not going to affect American security. And yet Americans are clearly willing they don’t say this, but they are willing to risk war in order to help the Ukrainians, because they are, in fact, representative of the idea that Americans are willing to to spend money and and even fight for to to ensure that that liberal idea is not destroyed. Bob, I wanna kind of carry this thread forward in kind of in two

ways. One, you have now in the last few minutes of our conversation, you’ve talked about the Lusitania and Crystal North and how that shaped American opinion and the ideological underpinnings of that And I think you make a very powerful case and everything you’ve written that we’ve always as a nation had these ideological predispositions that have shaped the way we see the world

A

lot of critics say, oh, look, this framing of, you know, American foreign policy is democracy versus autocracy. It’s oversimplified, you know, it doesn’t take into account that sometimes our allies are not democratic, kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etcetera. But you make that point very profoundly that it’s not just to talk about World War two, it’s not a threat to our physical security, it’s the moral and ideological considerations that ultimately drive us in what kind of world are we content to live in if we don’t do this? And then the second piece of it I’d like you to get into is you talk about the fact that it and this is also in the excerpt of your book that the Washington Post published, that Americans Seventy percent of Americans did not wanna go to war before World War two, but seventy percent of them wanted to do whatever it took to stop Hitler. It’s a little bit because you’ve raised the Ukraine framing.

It’s a little bit like that, I think, today. Right? Americans wanna stop Putin. They don’t want him to succeed. But as President Biden said, they don’t want World War three in a nuclear war either.

So how does that all end up squaring itself up in in American historical perspective.

Well, I I don’t know what, you know, it’s hard to predict where this is headed, but it it is worth is certainly true as a just historical matter that the position that we’ve taken on Ukraine right now is exactly the position as you say that we took on Europe in the late nineteen thirties with when we started doing lend lease and other activities to help help the British and the and, you know, it was sort of everything short of war. And and I think that the situations are are sufficiently different that I don’t think this needs to lead to war, but there’s nothing inherent about our position that prevents it. You know you know it’s not like we are in the fortunate circumstance that I think the last thing in the world that Putin wants is for us to get involved in the war. And in effect, we’ve been engaging in sort of remarkable amount of self deterrence in our in what we think is a very clever escalation. The reality is he’s losing to the Ukrainians or at least he’s at a draw with the Ukrainians.

Does he wanna play does he wanna play against NATO in the United States, obviously not. So we’re not in quite the same situation because unfortunately Hitler After he’s after he had succeeded in Munich, there was no stopping in short of four. You

couldn’t

bluff him out of it. You couldn’t sanction him out of it. There there does get to be a point where there’s no turning back. If you wanna look at the if you wanna try to force an analogy between that period and this period, Think about what would have happened if the checks had fought back in nineteen thirty eight. I think we have enough, you know, whether you wanna we’d wick Williamson Murray or whether, you know, you know, what you know, their I think the general consensus now is that the Czechs actually were quite formidable.

And if they had had Russian and and Russian If they had French and British support, they not only could have fought the Germans, but they might have actually beaten the Germans. Meanwhile, in Germany, the military, as you know, was at that moment, and it’s most forward leaning in terms of overthrowing Hitler. And they thought that the check the the check conflict was gonna be a disaster and that the British and French would get in the war and that Germany would be beaten, and then that would be their opportunity to overthrow Hitler. So if in fact and by the way, why didn’t the French and British wanna back Czechoslovakia? Because they didn’t they couldn’t trust the Americans to help them.

And I’m not talking about fighting. I’m talking about just giving them, you know, letting letting them have money. You know, doing anything to support them. You couldn’t be they couldn’t be sure the United States wouldn’t actually come up against them. So for lack of a willingness to fight in in Czechoslovakia, Hitler went on to be the Hitler that we now know.

The interesting thing is now we’re playing that that that sort of that pattern again, only this time the checks are being allowed to fight. This time the checks are fighting this time the checks are being armed and supported by the outside powers. And this time, I do think Putin’s rule is in jeopardy at this, you know, at this point. And what, you know, I’m not saying that his likely successor is anybody that we’re gonna be in love with, but I do think Putin is in trouble. So you know, this time give us credit for being early enough.

I wish we’d been earlier. I think we could have deterred Putin from attack in Ukraine at all if we’d been tougher in his previous activities, you know, in two thousand eight vis a vis Georgia, In two thousand fourteen, vis a vis Crimea. I think in both cases, we made we were sufficiently timid that he thought he could keep going. But be that as it may. Here we are.

And he is stuck on what is essentially step one of regaining Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe. And so I think that’s progress from where we were in the nineteen thirties.

Could I ask you about some of the states when you talk about. I I think the impression that I had as I was reading the book

is

you were a little bit more sympathetic to Woodrow Wilson than I had expected. I’d be curious to hear, you know, your take on him. I’d be even more interested to hear your take on FDR. I mean, I think you correctly point out he’s an isolationist at some level up through the mid thirties. And then, of course, he changes around.

There’s continues to be historical debate among historians. Did he kind of push as far as he could? In the period from beginning of World War one to the American entry after Pearl Harbor. Other people say no, he was being too cautious, American public opinion would have been willing to accept an even more aggressive policy, particularly towards Germany. So talk to us about that.

Howard Bauchner:

Well, on Wilson, you’re right. I I myself was a little surprised. He’s he’s he’s not an attractive man to to read about. He he was, you know, incredibly arrogant, incredibly stiff, you know, he he was not great at dealing with people who disagreed with him, etcetera. And he had a tendency as president, which made him vote very successful, but was also Ultimately, I think to some extent is undoing to speak in inflated language about everything that he was doing.

It was never you know, he couldn’t admit ever that we had an interest in something. It was always for the highest conceivable motives. And so a lot of his rhetoric is taken by historians and I think, you know, used to to caricature him. What I wound up believing was, look, he faced a very real concrete problem when he went to Versailles. It had nothing to do with making the world safe for democracy or any utopia ideas at all.

He was trying to deal with a very concrete problem, which we discussed earlier, which is how to provide French security so that Germany can be brought put back on its feet after the war. I think he did a pretty good job. What is the league about? And this is where, you know, the league is often portrayed as the most idealist stick example of sort of Wilson’s quasi religious, you know, idealism. The truth, first of all, the first person to recommend a league of nations after the start of World War one in early nineteen in in in in nineteen four early in the war is none other than Theodore Roosevelt.

He wrote a series of essays in which he basically outlined at the prim the principles of a League of Nation. Slightly different from Wilson, but nevertheless. Wilson was actually a latecomer to the idea of the league. It was not his idea at all, and he was resistant to it for the same reason that any American president would be, which is he knew the American people didn’t wanna make any commitments. So The lead was actually an article ten and all these things that we did that were debated at the time.

We’re actually a way of trying to create some halfway house that would would provide some kind of American assurance that the Americans would be around to provide security without agreeing to some kind of formal treaty. And the truth is that Arcolton never bound any United States to do anything whatsoever. It was it was demigogged into into appearing that way. But Wilson was trying to solve the equation of How do I provide the French and reasonable reassurance without doing something that American people don’t wanna do, which is commit to their defense? And the answer was the league, and it was not only Wilson’s answer, it was a lot of people’s answer.

So I’m I am sympathetic to him. And I and I started out being more sympathetic to Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, but I wound up thinking that he behaved completely and responsibly at the end when he joined Lodge in opposing the League of Nations and the Treaty and all those other things just just at a pure partisan political spite. FDR, I have to say, I’m impressed with the OR. It’s easy to go back in second guess and say, we could have done more here, we could have done more there. You know, first of all, I don’t think he was ever actually an isolationist.

He had to be an isolationist in order to get elected. You know, William Randolf Hurst, actually basically forced will Roosevelt to come to him and promise that he would depose the lead. Even though Wilson I mean, even though Roosevelt had always favored the league. So so Roosevelt knew what he had to do His first term is devoted to dealing with the economy, and he sounds as isolation as anyone. But in his heart, he was an internationalist.

Now, Could he move faster? I think about when I think about that question, I look at his he gave this speech in nineteen thirty seven, which became known as the quarantine speech, in which he warned against what he called the bandit nations, the three bandit nations, which by mid to obviously meant Germany, Japan, and Musilini’s Italy, And he said that we have to think about putting them under quarantine in some way. And everybody was like, what do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? He was like, well, I don’t really mean anything by that, but it’s something we’re thinking about.

He got murdered for giving that speech. You know, members of Congress threatened to, you know, impeach him over violations of the new Holiday Act, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And he made this comment to one of his to one of his advisors. He said, it’s it’s frightening. It’s emparaphrasing.

It’s frightening to lead when no one is following you. And so I think he periodically did try to jump start American opinion. He definitely was trying to move Americans off of their isolationism, but I don’t know that I would second guess someone who probably was the shrewd political operator in the history of American politics and tell him that he didn’t know what he should be doing vis a vis the American public. So, you know, we do we wish he’d gone further? Henry Stinson spent all his time saying to him, walk faster, mister president, faster, mister president, you know?

But Roosevelt was very you know, and I think this is true of all presidents. They don’t wanna depart from the what they regard as the dead center of American public opinion. This was true of Wilson. It was true of Roosevelt. I think it’s true of Biden today.

You have to be very careful as president, not to get too far out in front of the people. Howard Bauchner: I

mean, I think FDR, to me, was always a a Wilonian. Right? He was System Secretary of the Navy under Wilson, he’s actually the Democratic vice presidential nominee in nineteen twenty when the Democrats are essentially running on, you know, with Sonyism without Wilson because because he’s crippled and can’t can’t run. But I guess the question I have for you and particularly the comments you made about Wilson’s rhetoric, by the way, I thought it was fascinating in the book you talk about how deep the Wilson’s antipathy to the Bolsheviks was, which I don’t think anybody really would dispute, but you talk about he really was not a man of the left, which, you know, would be news for a a large part of the current American right that thinks that Dror Wilson as the author of everything evil that’s happened in the National Penn in the last eight eighty years because he created the administrative state or something. And he was a quote progressive and woke, whatever.

But my question really is, how much scope do you think presidents have to shape public opinion on these issues as opposed to simply follow it or or trend to the center of it. I mean, the reason I asked the question is Wilson’s inflated rhetoric gets criticized. So does Truman’s in nineteen forty seven. And I have a sense given, you know, what you say about, you know, the large mass of American people, not wanting to get involved, not wanting to do these things, that it sometimes takes that kind of rhetoric to actually mobilize political action in the very messy democracy that you describe in in both this book and and in dangerous nation.

I don’t know. It’s a very interesting question, Eric, and it’s a good question. I guess my initial inclination is to say, don’t overstate the degree to which a president can move public opinion by just giving speeches. I think that one one of the thing that the president can do is take an existing feeling and reifying it. You know?

I I feel like that’s what Reagan did. I don’t think Reagan swayed Americans that they needed to, you know, reverse the decline in American power. I think they elected him because that’s what they wanted to do. But I think he put things in such a way that, you know, he packaged the idea in such a way that people could say, yes, that’s what we wanna do. You know?

And think that a president can play that role. If you really ask what Roosevelt did that pushed things along, it was the things he did more than the things he said. Right? I mean and some of the things he did I think the American people only had the Vegas sense of its significance. You know?

He had a way of always downplaying what what what he’s what he was doing. So, you know, you remember the sort of garden hose analogy about Lynde Lease, you know. He made it nice, you know, he lived your neighbor garden hose. Well, of course, he was doing a lot more than laying the neighbor garden hose. And so a lot of this holy rhetoric he used was a way of kind of easing people into what was in fact pretty serious.

Now sometimes, rule of the book gets accused of sort of hiding the ball and not letting Americans know that he was leading them essentially toward war with Germany. I don’t think that’s true. I think he was pretty honest about the rip that he was open, that this was, you know, risky behavior, but he but he thought it was absolutely necessary. But you know, if you look at what he does beginning with, you know, beginning in nineteen thirty nine and on, I mean, he basically puts the United States into the war. Which is why, you know, we haven’t gotten to this, but the sort of the puzzle of why did Hitler declare war on December eleventh and after the job after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

He didn’t have to do that. If from his point of view, the United States and Germany were already practically at war. I I don’t think he thought it was actually that big a step from where they already were because Rosalyn already had the US Navy effectively taking part in the Atlanta war. So that’s that’s what I think he led mostly by getting by getting things done. And by the way, and I’ll just end on this.

It was incredibly helpful to Roosevelt as opposed to contrast Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt’s situation with Woodrow Wilson’s. Woodrow Wilson operated with a after nineteen eighteen, with a Republican controlled Congress, a Republican controlled Senate We know how hard it is to get anything done when the opposition party is there regardless of what the issue is. Roosevelt had an overwhelming majority of democratic of control of Congress. I mean, the the the numbers were incredibly lopsided. It wasn’t even close through most of the you know, the Republicans were really in dire condition at that time.

So he was in complete control of the legislative situation. Which certainly made it easier for him to, just as I say, just doof he could get things done, which made a difference.

We’re running short on time, so I wanna give Elliot the last word here before we wrap up, but we could go on for hours on these subjects. Bob, you’ve been really

I wouldn’t mind. We

we we easily could. So, Bob, in the book, obviously, you talked about presidents and a couple of key statesman, people like a Life who wrote And, you know, as I think about this conversation, here you have three of us who, I suppose, could be identified as members of the foreign policy elite. This is the period which where you see the formation beginning of the formation, they laid the foundation of things like the Council and Foreign Relations. In a way, some people would put back to the inquiry, the this collection of experts that Woodrow Wilson brings with him to Versailles. How important was that or was it not important at all?

The fact that during this period, you’re beginning to get some segment of mainly American business legally leads to some extent academic elites who are internationalists, who are very much focused on American foreign policy, who by and large want a more activist American foreign policy, was that important or was it really just in the end a kind of recruiting pool for staffing senior administration positions going forward? You know, it

it the the role of elites and intellectuals in the setting of policy in general is a very interesting subject. I I must say that from my where I look at it in this period, I would say that the intellectuals were like fleas on the back of an elephant. They were not setting the direction. They were following as much as anything. And the and the reason I say that is because if you look at the intellectuals throughout this period.

And I know you’ll be shocked to hear this. They swung wildly back and forth between what they claimed their views were. So you had, for instance, a whole raft of liberal intellectuals who were completely gung ho about world war one. They, you know, people like Walter Lippmann and Reinhold Nipper and others like that, and a whole host of others, John Dewey, etcetera, all of whom were very enthusiastic stick. And then, of course, everybody decided to be disillusioned for reasons that I, to this day, don’t fully understand, at which point, they all decided it was a terrible disaster.

And then they did this funny thing, which I love, which is they they basically after being the great cheerleaders for the war, they turned around and said, who was in who was in favor? Who got us into this war? You know? So so we need an investigation to find out who got us into this war that we supported. And by the way, when interesting point to make, yes, it was true that there were internationalist institutions growing up in this period, largely to sort of hold the flag up for the league of nations.

There was a lot of, you know, Wilsonianism organizing. But If you ask me what was new, it was in fact the arrival of people who regarded themselves as as I think we do as professional foreign policies strategists, experts, etcetera. This was really the you know, this was pretty much the birth of what would become realist theory occurred in this period. And the interesting thing about those elites, they were against the war. The the the really smart people around the country, you know, the the times military affairs correspondent, people like who is the yeah.

Speiceman Nicholas Speiceman who was sort of the founder of classical realism at Yale at at that time. They were all like, we’re good. We got two oceans. Nobody can touch us. Everything’s fine.

And they basically held to that position. Some of them changed their views after the fall France, but not all of them. And so I would say then the intellectual elite was at most divided, but but generally heading in the direction of the anti interventions.

Interesting. As you say, we could go on for a lot longer, but we have actually run out of time.

I promised we were gonna wrap, but I lied. I because your your last answer has prompted me to ask a question. I think Elliott will agree with this because we’ve done this with any number of our guests. So, you know, you you are really the kind of definition of a public intellectual. You you have a PhD in history, so you have all the formal training of a historian yet you sit at a at a think one of the most prominent think tanks in America bookings, and you’ve written both a very powerful political essays about American foreign policy and and now two rather big books and I think, what, two more two more coming at some point in the future.

What would you say is the state? And I say this advisably because having perused your footnotes I realize how prodigious your reading has been in the academic literature on American foreign relations. In the twentieth century is, and how deeply you’ve read in it, which is why I suspect

to answer this question.

Fifteen fifteen years to write this book. What is your assessment of the state of academic history

today?

Well, I I I must say I come away feeling like in terms of the history of American diplomacy and foreign policy that the Academy has really ill served the public. There are obviously some stark exceptions, but basically the predominance of a Marxist Leninist interpretation of conform policy is so overwhelming. It’s and the per crusty in nature of that model of understanding American foreign policy is so dominant. You know, and so as I say, per crustian, that I think Americans literally do not know what happened in their history. The mythology, for instance, about the Spanish American wars, is just it’s not even, you know, it it’s impossible to penetrate.

I have tried as best I could in this book to walk people through exactly how all those things happened and why I was able to discover, for instance, that even marked Twain was in favor of the intervention in Cuba, and you would never know that from reading American historians. American Airlines had bought a myth about what Theodore Roosevelt did and or did not do with regard to the Philippines for instance. That they has later was later disprove them, but it doesn’t stop them from categorizing Rosebel as this is a guy who got us into the Spanish American war, which is not true. And this is true everywhere. Again, why is why is there this myth in my view about American diplomacy, American the effectiveness of American diplomacy, and honestly in the nineteen twenties, it’s because the the those who argue for this basic economic determination explanation of American farm policy can’t say that it wasn’t happening in the nineteen twenties too.

So they have to say, yeah, the United States as always was searching for open markets, and that’s what its foreign policy always is. And and and the result is not just that they’re wrong, but as I say, that Americans therefore do not understand their own history. They do not take it seriously. I believe that historians have have turned our history into a series of cartoons. You know, politically motivated cartoons, but cartoons nevertheless.

And so What I’ve tried to do here is sort of resurrect the idea that you have to look at the world through the point of view of the people that you’re writing about. Not just from your own point of view, and to impose a a not to try to impose a theoretical construct which forces everything into one explanation as the American historical profession unfortunately does. So I think it would be nice if we could renew our historical researches, you know, and get past this absurd Marxist Lenin in this interpretation that’s so dominant.

Elliott, any orbiter, Victor?

Loads of them, but I think I’ll pass.

Well, our our guest has been Robert Kagan, the author of the ghost at the feast it’s a terrific read. I mean, among other things, it’s extraordinarily well written. Yeah. I

I will I want to second that. I mean, this is probably the most readable account of American foreign policy, particularly for this crucial period that I’ve ever seen. So

it’s a it’s a literary achievement as well as scholarly one. Well, thank you. Coming from you guys, that means a lot to me. So thank you.

And that will wrap it for this episode of Shield of the Republic. If you enjoyed this podcast, please write a review for us or give us a like on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast from. And we’ll be back with other episodes of Shield of Republic next week.