Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samherris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast,
and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. I released my second conversation
with Roy Stewart last week. Many of you found that frustrating. I understand, especially if you are listening to it after more recent events in the UK have unfolded, where even the Prime Minister had to give a speech about the pervasive problem of Islamism and jihadism in the UK and how they could no longer tolerate it. Anyway, make of that conversation what you will. I won't further comment on it here, but I am confident that the topic will come up again and again and again.
Today I'm speaking with Brett Stevens. Brett is an opinion columnist for the New York Times. He previously served as editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post and as foreign affairs columnist for the Wall Street Journal for which he won a 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Among his other distinctions in 2022, he was banned for life by the government of Russia and can't
visit that country ever again. And we talk about Russia. Among other things, we discuss America's place in the world, the waning Pax Americana, American Isolationism, Republican fondness, for Putin, Tucker Carlson, why America should support Ukraine, the significance of Alexei
Navalny, what it would mean to properly hold Putin responsible for his death, nuclear blackmail, valid criticisms of Israel, the war in Gaza, Palestinian public opinion, the need for total military defeat of Hamas, the prospects of a two-state solution, the isolation of Israel
at the UN and the International Criminal Court of Justice, waning support for the war in the Biden administration, Hesbalah and war with Iran, Israeli politics and the settlements in the West Bank, charges of settler colonialism, antisemitism as a series of double standards, the prospect of a Trump victory, Biden's age problem, the crisis at the southern border, US immigration policy and other topics. We cover a lot of ground here. And now I bring you Brett Stevens.
I am back with Brett Stevens. Brett, thanks for joining me. It's good to be on the show, Sam. So there's not much going on in the world. It's too bad we don't have anything to talk about. How's the weather in New York? Yeah, it's a quiet time of peace on earth. So the weather is just fine. It's warming up. It really is. I don't know if this is an illusion, but it seems like history is being made at an increasing pace here. Everything seems to be accelerating and this year
promises to be, unfortunately, not at all boring. I've been gathering topics to talk to you about when we originally scheduled this a couple of weeks ago. I've been just watching the news and and writing down topics and they sort of fall into five buckets and we'll see if we get through each of them, but I'll just preview them for you and then I'll lead you into the first.
The first is the the waning Pax Americana, American isolationism and the inclination among Republicans to abdicate US leadership in the world, Tucker Carlson as a font of wisdom, etc. The second, which is kind of contiguous with that is Russia and the war in Ukraine. The third is the Middle East, the war in Gaza and Iran and related matters.
The fourth is the presidential election. The trouble with Joe Biden. At one point you made a charitable case for Trump in your column for the New York Times. Well, that was a thought experiment just for the record. We'll be clear about that. Yes, this was a bending over backwards to take those who are still
inclined to vote for Trump seriously and so far as that's possible. And then finally, I thought we could touch on the crisis at the southern border and our immigration policy if you have anything to say on that topic. So I write about a lot. Great. So number one, so this new feeling of American isolationism, I've said previously on the podcast, it would be one thing to argue for a different posture for America with respect to being the world's cop or maintaining the rules based international
order. And I think we can readily argue against that. But the Republicans seem to have gone further and they've actually become fans of autocracy in various forms and certainly fans of Putin. And then you have someone like Tucker Carlson who many people take seriously as a a maverick journalist who's uncovering the real deal over there in Russia. How do you view what's happening here with respect to American leadership and and then we will turn that toward Russia and Ukraine
afterwards? You know, someone once said to me that there's a smart version of wrong and a dumb version of wrong. And when it comes to Ukraine, the smart version of wrong is the argument that we can't possibly hope to bring Ukraine into a Western sphere of influence when for the Russians it's so core to the way they have seen themselves historically that our energies have to be
husbanded to deal with our principal threats and our principal threat is China and we would be better served pushing Ukraine into some kind of negotiated settlement with Russia so that we can deal more forcefully with the threat that the Chinese pose to our position and our alliances in the far east. That's the smart version of wrong. It's wrong because I think that if Ukraine is going to fall then we will have to actually devote more resources to the to the
defense of Europe not fewer resources. It will be a NATO country that will next be in the crosshairs and we will have treaty obligations. And it's wrong because I think the collapse of Ukraine and or rather the collapse of Western and American will to support Ukraine is just going to serve as an advertisement to Xi Jinping and China to adopt an even more aggressive posture in Taiwan. But at least that position has the merit of an attempt to sort of think strategically about
what our options are when we have limited resources. The Republican Party now is in the dumb version of wrong. Not even the dumb version of wrong, I would say the evil version of wrong because what they are doing is abandoning an extraordinarily courageous democratic ally that has done us the service, the great strategic service of destroying about half the Russian military
without the loss of a single American or or or NATO soldier. And against a dictatorship that as we just saw with the killing really the murder of Navalny whether he was murdered in this last instance or so sort of just slowly put to death embodies the most despicable malevolent features of Soviet totalitarianism that the Republican Party used to stand against. So it's it's
ignominious what the Republicans are proposing. But it's also ignominious and stupid because ultimately an America that abandons its allies and America that thinks that our oceans are boats is going to come to the same painful discovery that our great-grandfathers had 80 years ago, more than 80 years ago, when they realize that our oceans are not boats and that we are vulnerable to attack and that we will be attacked because we are ultimately the great democratic power and
and a source of a target for dictatorships everywhere. So the Republican Party has really descended below just simply bad strategic thinking into something that looks like the head in the sand, no nothing isolationism that brought us to the brink of disaster back in the late
30s and early 40s. Well, I know I've asked you some version of this question more or less every time we've spoken and I imagine there really isn't an answer for it but I'm going to give it another go because it is the the inscrutable object and moral horror at the center of this thing on the right
politically in America now which is just how did we get here? I mean you know many of these Republicans, you speak privately with them presumably I don't know if you still do many or former colleagues, many serious people or hewstwhile serious people.
Friends. Yeah, but I mean there are people who you know who have like real bonafides as many of them as intellectuals, summers like were or you know maybe you had aspire to be serious politicians who are for whatever reason in thrall to the cult of Trump, presumably mostly for opportunistic reasons or reasons of political survival. But how is it that we have so many people acquiescing to what is just a you know at best a an amoral embrace of somebody like Putin?
Just that the list of indiscretions is so long and so obvious and so indisputable. I mean he's someone who you know the very moment that Tucker Carlson is glad handing him you know he there's a Wall Street Journal journalist imprisoned over there right? He's somebody who's who kills his political opponents not just in Russia but but he kills his critics in in the capitals of Europe, you know poisoning them with Pallonium or or nerve agents, you know he
imprisoned his own billionaires right? I mean it's just like how is it that the Republican party can even for a day tolerate an apparent fondness for this guy given what it used to stand for? You know the Republicans used to mock left liberals who would go to the Soviet Union and say you know people seem pretty happy there and yeah maybe they're a little poor than we are but there's more equality they would mock you know the nation likes to do tours of Cuba and talk
about the great health service there and and it was a source of conservative derision correctly so the kind of naive starry eyed westerner who would go to a despotic regime and take a look at the Potemkin villages that had been erected for them and say look you know
I've seen the future and it works as Lincoln Stevens a great progressive journalist from 100 years ago famously said and now it's it's the Tucker Carlson's who are doing precisely that I mean precisely that going to a grocery store in a country where the gross domestic product
per capita is hovers around I think 11 or 12 thousand dollars a year and seeing a showcase supermarket for the Nomenclattura some of our listeners will understand what that term means you know the upper crust the upper elites of Moscow and saying look how much better this is than your average
stop and shop by the way I doubt very much that it is but that was what Tucker was peddling and you know to answer your question when when Trump was first elected Sam I took some books off my shelf which I had read in in college I got to college in 1991 which was the same year that the Soviet
Union collapsed and for some reason I developed this kind of fascination with the the anti communist intelligence of the Cold War really not just anti communist anti totalitarian so from from Orwell and through you know Miloš the great the great Polish intellectual Vastlav Havl
dissidents like Sacherov all these people sort of thought deeply about the nature of totalitarian society and what's fascinating about some of the best work there is it's not really a political analysis it's a psychological analysis of what makes people succumb to ideologies that at some
level they know are false and evil and at the really interesting insight you find this in Miloš for example is is that it's not really fear that is the motivating force it's a kind of rationalization of the position that they're in so it's a kind of view that well it's all bullshit
so why don't why don't you just go along with the bullshit that happens to be in power or yes the system is evil but this is the direction in which history is inexorably going and so you want to be on the right side of of history or there even sort of darker psychological tropes
Gianfrontsoir Revelle once said that you know it's easy to understand why why people want to tyrannize other people but the really interesting mysteries why people some people want to be tyrannized I mean this is this this this captures sides of the human psyche that those of us living in free
societies are low to acknowledge or see even if if we see it in some like cultures and subcultures but it's there and that's that's how people succumbed to the lure of despots cult of personality preposterous ideologies kind of things that ideas that that collapse in the face of
a moment's thought and yet that's that's what you have now in in the Republican Party and I think it's a mixture of a few things I was in a debate recently with someone on some foreign policy questions and the guy's argument basically came down to well the American people don't see it
that way and you know to what you want to say well they're mistaken and in a free society we should raise our voices and argue with the American people and and win them over right that's that's that's the task of of democratic persuasion so that's sort of the argument like well history is not
on your side and I want to be on the side of history or essentially like you know why why should we have a moral component to our foreign policy it's a doggy dog habisian world let's just accept that that's the way it is well you know most of us actually understand that it's a better world
and a smarter world when leadership contains a moral element which makes other people want to follow you and not oppose you so that I think I think you really understand something of Trumpian ideology I'm not talking about sort of the ordinary Trump voter but the Trump
ideal hogs it reading these books that came out 60 or 70 years ago about why despotism seemed to be so effective for decades on end well what what to think about the war in Ukraine at this moment I mean we're now speaking just a handful of days after there was a a recent setback there
to say that we have been dilatory in providing aid to Ukraine at this point is a bit of an understatement there's a lot of controversy as to whether we should be aid in Ukraine as you move certainly as you move right of center and there's also as you said the recent death of Navalny which
really kind of sharpens up the the moral difference between the two sides you wrote an article recently about what it would mean to properly hold Putin responsible for Navalny's death that might be an interesting way into this question but tell me how you're viewing the war in Ukraine
our wavering support for it and what we what you think we should do in light of who Putin is and what his intentions are and what and what it means to defend a struggling democracy well we should help Ukraine as much as we can not only because of the morality of supporting an embattled democratic
ally against a foe like Putin but much more importantly the self interest the self interest you know the the kind of argument that I hear on some quarters many quarters of the right sometimes on the left two is you know morality is too expensive for foreign policy foreign policies about our
interests but there is no question that the United States has an interest in seeing it's one of its two most aggressive and arguably its most dangerous geopolitical rival humbled humiliated and defeated on the battlefield not by us but by our proxy and when it comes to the question of
expense you know someone says well sixty billion dollars is is a lot of money it reminds me of a scene in one of those Austin powers movies you know where the evil guy says that his ransom is a million dollars just like come back to life from the fifties or sixties and everyone's like a
million dollars like that's nothing so sixty billion dollars as large a sum as that sounds is one percent of the federal budget okay we have a six trillion dollar budget ask yourself is it worth spending one out of every one hundred dollars that we spend on so many other things
right on defeating one of our two principal strategic rivals through the sacrifice and courage of our friends and partners in Ukraine I would argue that's an incredibly great investment for the United States we even have a few American citizens who could single handedly foot the bill and still have
sixty billion dollars left over after they picked up the tab I can think of one or two of them off the top of my head they would they would be fine for the rest of their lives but I think this is this is a task really for the American government and even the American taxpayer we are more
secure when Putin can no longer think that he can threaten his neighbors and ultimately are our treaty allies with with impunity now the other aspect is comes to life with with nivaldi you know when I was coming of age I think maybe you're a few years older than I am Sam basically we're
the same generation so we we remember that names like Solje Nitsyn Sahara of Cheransky Havl Lehwalesa the solidarity movement in Poland these were household names in in in the West and and Nivaldi should be a household name not only because of the extraordinary example of moral
and political courage but actually also the power of his thinking and and at his pros it it it is a shame he was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before he was he was murdered but Nivaldi matters because he symbolizes what all free society should stand for which is the belief in the singular
importance of individual conscience in the face of the overwhelming power of the state that we as members of democratic societies should always look at those exemplars of individual conscience and descent as models for what we in our societies try to protect and I fear even now that within a
week the conversation about Nivaldi is is going to be you know a part of the remote past and I think that's that's not only a failure on our part it says something I think about the degraded state of a democratic discourse but it's also a foreign policy failure because in standing up for
people like Nivaldi in punishing the regime for what it did to him we're actually helping to embolden some unseen number of future Nivaldi's who could at some point profoundly threaten the state it's not for nothing that Putin took a singular interest in Nivaldi and was so threatened by him
because he understood that the power of Nivaldi's example his courage and his conscience were a threat to his regime the best thing we could do this was suggested to me by Bill Browder the the the financier and activists who was behind the magnet ski sanctions is is what he called the
Navalny act Russia has north of 300 billion dollars in frozen assets in western institutions they were frozen after the war we should seize them and give them to Ukraine if if if the republicans want to say it's too expensive for us to underwrite Ukraine's defense will give them
Russia's money and let a portion of that money go to the purchase of weapons from the west it would be a real signal to Putin that this kind of action has devastating consequences and hits him right next to his most precious assets right in his wallet that would be one thing the next thing
is there's an election in Russia a quote unquote presidential election next month Gary Casper off the great chess player and also human rights activist he said just don't recognize Putin's legitimacy that's another thing that Putin craves in addition to money he craves the trappings of
political legitimacy stand up for other dissidents and let's finally let's just give the Ukrainians the weapons they've been asking for for two years so they can start to hold Russian targets at much greater risk what about the concern that I haven't heard it voiced much of late but it was
certainly voiced early on in the war when we began to support Ukraine that we're poking a a nuclear tiger with a stick and perhaps not a you know more and more a tiger that has nothing left to lose and so it's really the threat of nuclear blackmail here that would that
we should we're being told we should acquiesce to on some level we can't afford to help we meaning not just the US but Europe we can't afford to help Ukraine win truly win here because that would leave Putin with more or less nothing left to lose and the kind of existential threat you know
politically and even mortally on his own side and he might in fact just decide to let the big bombs fly at that point well look Putin has been blackmailing us is blackmailing us with nuclear threats his his sidekick midvedia routinely issues these unsuttle threats I look you can't ever discount the
possibility that bad people with nuclear weapons might use them on the other hand it's we've lived now what since Soviet Union detonated its first bomb in 1949 so we've lived with 75 years of bad guys having nuclear weapons and they haven't used them yet and and the reasons for that
turn out to be pretty good ones take just one side of this sand which is the question of tactical nuclear weapons people were very worried that Putin might deploy these so-called small nukes you know one kiloton five kilotons I mean they're they're major they're huge bombs but by by the
standard of strategic nuclear weapons they're they're relatively small and seen from a military angle they really don't make a lot of sense not least because if Putin were to deploy them A we would know at least a week in advance because of our intelligence I'm told this by people who know
B the Russians would have to clear the battlefield that is to say they would have to retreat from the front lines if they were going to deploy one of these weapons and not incinerate their own people so that would give us further advance notice the third thing is they're destroying the very ground
they seek to conquer and not just destroying it but rendering it you know uninhabitable for decades and D the Russians would need thousands of nuclear suits you know radioactive suits for their troops operating the vicinity and they just don't have them so those are just they add up to a very good
reason not to use these bombs these bombs were first developed and deployed with the idea of massive concentrations of Russian armor coming across very narrow defined places in West Germany during the Cold War where a one kiloton Western nuclear weapon would make sense in killing a lot
of Russian troops it doesn't work quite as well on the Ukrainian battlefield which again doesn't make it impossible it just makes it highly unlikely and it's also important not to allow ourselves to be implicitly threatened by by this kind of blackmail because it of course it just advances
Russia's warms I mean Putin wants very much to win in Ukraine but what he really doesn't want is to be completely incinerated and someone made the point remembering COVID when Putin would sit on one end of some 40 foot table and you know Macron or whoever was visiting him would sit at the end a guy who's this afraid of COVID probably doesn't want to start a thermonuclear exchange with the West which would be considerably worse than COVID for his own personal health.
What about the idea that he really just wants Ukraine and would be happy to stop there for you know reasons of the historical fictitiousness of Ukraine as a nation and it's belonging to to Mother Russia and he really has no further designs on Europe. What makes the concern that there's no stopping point no natural stopping point if we just let him take Ukraine a rational one. I would imagine the Tucker Carlson camp is highly skeptical that he
is going to be rolling tanks into the rest of Europe. Look Lithuanians who lived under the Soviet Union up until 1991, the Estonians saw all the Baltic states. They have a different view and a better informed view which is that the Soviet Russia I should say Russia almost by its nature is an expansionary power and so the argument that he satisfied with Ukraine alone defies the long
course of Russian history. So whoever would come after Putin if he were sort of a dictator in the same vein would then look for let's say softer targets moldova for example or targets to the south in the Caucasus seeking to reconstitute the Soviet Empire and it was it was observed by historian in the 20th century that when Russia is internally weak and and it is it is tends to be more expansionary in its aim. So there's a long history here which argues against the case that
Putin is satisfied with Ukraine or a portion of Ukraine alone. It's also it just runs against everything we know about dictatorships. I mean the expression drunk on power is a cliche but it's it's a good expression because power is like alcohol and dictators are like alcoholics and they're
not satisfied with just one drink. People thought that Hitler would be satisfied with the Sudate land and that was the basis for the Munich agreement in 38 or with you know the Anschluss with Austria because well Austria is in a sense you know a German-speaking country that it was
Poland that it was you know the the the the Lebins realm and so on. So it's I think it's just crazy to indulge this kind of thinking particularly given that Putin's track record before Ukraine was the invasion of Georgia in 2008 various threats against European neighbors cyber attacks on Estonia. One thing or another this is not this is not something that he's shown no example of having a restricted appetite in other theaters. No evidence. Okay well let's move to the Middle East
where Russia has also had a malign influence in Syria and elsewhere. The war in Gaza and the perception of now much of the world that Israel has lost the moral high ground if it ever retained it even for a second. I mean as you know much of the world felt that it wasn't on the high ground even on October 8th before it had done anything in response to the atrocities of October 7th
which is that was fairly bewildering. What do you make of you can take any piece of this ghastly puzzle you want first but I'm thinking of things like the isolation of Israel at the UN and the International Criminal Court of Justice the waning support in the Biden administration perhaps we could give the most charitable control of concern about the right wing side of Israeli politics and settlements in the West Bank and how that how those things are unhelpful at best.
But we've got charges of apartheid and just what seems to me a dangerous level of moral confusion on the part of many people and powers that should know better around what is happening in Israel and what Israel's strategic and really existential needs are at this point. How do you view it? Look let's separate two forms of critique of Israel. One is a critique that Israel has deferred to log the question of Palestinian statehood that its policies in the West Bank are wrong headed
in New South and it's not the same. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe at samherris.org. Once you do you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program so if you can't afford a subscription please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now at samherris.org.