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Making America Great: Nationalism, Terror and Forever War
Tulane
University
November
17, 2017
Making America Great:
Nationalism, Terror and Forever War
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ramazani: I
want to thank all of you for coming on a Friday evening. It’s an honor to have
Mark Danner with us today. Professor Danner is James Clarke Chace Professor of
Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College and Chancellor’s Professor
of Journalism, English and Politics at the University of California Berkeley, a
writer and reporter who for 25 years has written on politics and foreign
affairs. He has covered, among many other stories, wars and political conflict
in Central America, Haiti, the Balkans and the Middle East.
Among
Professor Danner’s books are “Stripping Bare the Body,” “The Secret Way to War:
the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History,” “Torture and Truth:
America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror,” “The Road to Illegitimacy: One
Reporter’s Travels Through the 2000 Florida Vote Recount,” and “The Massacre at
El Mozote: a Parable of the Cold War.” Professor Danner was a longtime staff
writer at “The New Yorker” and is a frequent contributor to the “New York
Review of Books.” His work has appeared in “Harper’s,” “The New York Times,”
“Aperture,” and many other newspapers and magazines.
He
co-wrote and helped produce two hour-long documentaries for the ABC News
program “Peter Jennings Reporting,” and he has appeared as a commentator on
PBS’s “The Charlie Rose Show,” “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” and “Bill Moyer’s
Journal,” on CNN’s “Prime News,” “The Situation Room,” and “Anderson Cooper
360,” on ABC’s “World News Now,” CSPAN’s “The Morning Show,” and MSNBC’s “The
Rachel Maddow Show.”
Professor
Danner is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Affairs
Council, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the Century
Association. He is also a fellow of the Institute for the Humanities at New
York University, and he was twice named the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Visiting
Critic at the American Academy in Rome.
His
work has received, among other honors, a National Magazine Award, three
Overseas Press awards, and an Emmy. In 1999 Professor Danner was named a
MacArthur Fellow and in 2016 he was awarded an Andrew Carnegie fellowship in
support of his most recent book, “Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War.” In a
review of that book, Michael Ignatieff writes, “Danner has been the most
intellectually distinguished critic of America’s war on terror. “Spiral” is a
masterly writer’s case for the prosecution, a patriot’s indictment of his own
country’s folly.”
The
title of Professor Danner’s talk here today is “Making America Great:
Nationalism, Terror and Forever War.” Please join me in extending a warm
welcome to our distinguished guest, Professor Mark Danner. [Applause.]
Danner: Thank
you. Thank you very much. I am delighted to be here. I was telling Vaheed
earlier that I was last in New Orleans in 1977. I was a freshman in college
spending the summer hitchhiking around the country, and I came to New Orleans
to visit a friend of my family’s on whom I had a great crush, who was living in
the French Quarter with a designer of carnival masks. And I stayed in the
Quarter for four to five days with them in this fantastic apartment with all
these masks hanging everywhere.
And
I think the one time that I left the French Quarter, I got on the trolley, the
streetcar, and went up St. Charles Avenue, and it poured. It was starting to
pour in the mid-afternoon. And just as I got to Tulane and got off, the rain
stopped, and I wandered off into the campus and wandered around. And I swear it
was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. I just thought it was astonishingly
beautiful. Water was dripping off the trees, and the sun was coming out, and
I’d never seen a campus so beautiful.
And
I thought I’m going to come back here. I love this city. I love this campus.
And that, of course, was 40 years ago, a blink of an eye. But I’m very excited
that I have, indeed, come back here because of Vaheed Ramazani’s very generous
invitation, and I want to thank him for that, and thank Jeanny Keck and
[Je’da], who both have arranged the trip, so thank you very, very much. And
thank you all for coming on a Friday evening.
That
was the optimistic part of my talk. [Laughter.] You just heard that. And we’re now
going to go into the less than optimistic part. As Vaheed told you, my title
today is “Making America Great: Nationalism, Terror and Forever War.”
Originally there was a question mark after “Making America Great,” and I
thought that was a little bit too snarky about Donald Trump.
And
what I want to do, I covered the campaign. I’ve written a fair amount about
Donald Trump. And also, as Vaheed described, have a long history in writing
about foreign affairs, writing about terrorism, writing about wars, human
rights. And I’d like to try to combine those things today in talking about
where we are one year after the election—I covered the campaign and the run-up
to the election, and election night—where we are one year after the election
when it comes to the new era, the new nationalism, the new era in foreign
policy.
So
I’m going to roughly divide this talk into those three subtitle units:
nationalism, terror and forever war. But all of it is in the service of trying
to explain and maybe give a somewhat dispassionate, I hope, analysis of how
we’re doing in the last year in making America great again, MAGA, M-A-G-A. I
have numerous copies, iterations of those hats at home that my two-year-old son
likes to wear. MAGA, Make America Great.
So
let’s start with nationalism. And I’m going to begin by doing a little bit of
exegesis. I hope you won’t mind that. We’re going to talk about the world, as
you see in front of you, when it comes to Donald Trump, what the world is, what
its relation is to the United States, what we owe it, what it owes us, because
that is, in a sense, the way he thinks. And I’m going to use as my subject of
exegesis “Crippled America.” Who has this book? Anybody? I wouldn’t think so.
Anyway, this is the campaign book. “Crippled America: How to Make America Great
Again.” So this is, in a sense, the urtext.
And
if we look in this book, there is a chapter on foreign policy. And we see here
that he sets out basic principles, because it is wrong to criticize Trump for
not having ideas and so on. He definitely, very definitely, has ideas, and
they’re ideas of longstanding. They go back, if you look at his history, they
go back at least 30 years. I met him for lunch in 1987, I think, and his ideas on
foreign policy were already well formed by that time. He was in his early 40s,
this brash real estate developer in New York who already was commanding the
tabloids.
And
he had just put an ad in the “New York Times.” “There’s nothing wrong with
America’s foreign policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” And this was a big
critique of America’s foreign policy. By the way, under Ronald Reagan, okay? So
this critique that he ran on, that he chanted, make America great again, at his
rallies, actually goes back into the ‘80s.
When
I look at this book I see “if we’re going to continue to be the policemen of
the world, we ought to be paid for it.” “It’s no wonder nobody respects us.
It’s no surprise that we never win. When people know that we’ll use force if necessary
and we really mean it, we’ll be treated differently,” comma, line, space, new
paragraph, “with respect.” That’s the only thing in the paragraph, a two word
paragraph.
Let’s
see. “Depending on the price of oil, Saudi Arabia earns somewhere between half
a billion and a billion dollars a day. They shouldn’t exist, let alone have
that wealth, without our protection. We get nothing from them. Nothing. We
defend Germany, we defend Japan, we defend South Korea. These are powerful and
wealthy countries. We get nothing from them. Nothing. It’s time to change all
that. It’s time to win again.”
So
there’s a degree of resentment here about the rest of the world taking
advantage of the United States. The United States, under this analysis, is a
sap, is a sucker. Basically puts its money, its treasure, its young men and
women in the armed forces out to defend various parts of the world and we get
nothing in return. And for that reason we’re the suckers of the world.
And
indeed, in this ad that I just pointed to, if you read it, as I will try to do,
“It’s time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan and others who can
afford it pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to
these countries and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours.”
So you see the roots in these early declarations of the central idea of Donald
Trump’s foreign policy, which is sovereignty, right? Sovereignty, a concept
that goes back in international affairs to 1648, the treaty that ended the 30 Years
War, is his credo. We need to act for ourselves, not in favor of other
countries.
And
it’s based on a certain attitude toward what’s happened since the Second World
War and since the period of American of hegemony, okay? Essentially, my theory
would be that he imbibed with his breakfast cereal, in the ‘50s, this idea that
the United States, during World War II, not only won, but instead of seizing
territory, as other countries would do, the United States rebuilt Japan,
rebuilt Germany, was not in it for itself in any way, was completely an
altruistic power, and acted entirely for the rest of the world.
That
was the propaganda—propaganda that the United States told itself during the
‘50s and ‘60s, that we’re an altruistic power. And essentially young Donald
Trump, eating his breakfast cereal at the New York Military Academy or wherever
else he was, took this very seriously. And what he got from that was not that
the U.S. was a great nation that didn’t want anybody else’s goods or anything,
he got from that that we’re suckers, we’re saps.
And
to, I think, critique this a little bit, one has to look at the system that
grew up after the Second World War that it seems to me Donald Trump is ending,
that he is trying to end, and that he is—and this is where we get personal—is
pretty much unable to understand. Not because he’s stupid, because I certainly
don’t believe that he is in any way stupid, but because he has certain ways of
thinking that he cannot escape. He’s a transactional thinker. Someone always
wins, someone always loses, okay? He thinks in terms of money, in terms of
trade, in terms of who’s doing better in trade, who’s doing worse in trade. He
has no room in his thoughts for an idea of international power.
Let
me see if I can make this work. Okay. This is the system that we’re living
under right now, okay? This is the U.S. military footprint on the world. We
have various fleets basically protecting, as we would call it, or imposing our
will on, as you might call it, the entire world. We have a Pacific fleet, we’ve
got an Atlantic fleet, we’ve got a Mediterranean fleet, we’ve got the Fifth
Fleet in the Persian Gulf. Each of them is led by one or more aircraft
carriers.
We
have a fleet stationed in Japan whose job it is to patrol the Pacific and keep
the Japanese, as it were, from developing nuclear weapons of their own, because
these fleets have nuclear weapons on them. This is sort of the world hegemonic
system, if you want to call it that. Or you can simply call it the world system
of world order, if you want to be less tendentious about it.
Now
this was set up after the Second World War, after what Isaiah Berlin called the
worst century in history. The beginning of the century—let’s see. This won’t be
to scale, but… Let’s say 1914 to 1945 90 million people were killed in wars,
right, World War I and II. Then we have the Cold War to 1991. Then the War on
Terror, 2001. Okay, this is a kind of, what historians call the periodicity I’m
working with.
Huge
number of people killed, and then the system set up after the Second World War,
in the late ‘40s, where the U.S. will, indeed, do this. The United States will
provide freedom of navigation. It will provide international stability. The
Soviet Union, of course, did not agree to this. It will provide an international
monetary system started with the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank.
It
established NATO, which is, let’s see… Yes, that works. The relationship of the
United States with Europe, treaty organization, North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
It set up the mutual defense treaty with Japan. So this is the way by which the
United States dominates the Atlantic. The one with Japan and eventually South
Korea is the system by which the United States dominates the Pacific. All of
this has been—I mean, this is kind of international relations 101. It has
existed since the late ‘40s, was built up during the ‘50s, and is still in
existence.
And
I would argue to you that Donald Trump, if you want to positively analyze it,
thinks it’s unfair. I mean, my analysis, I would say he doesn’t really
understand it fully. Which is to say when you do a defense treaty with Japan
and you’re able to keep your fleet in Japanese waters and in a Japanese base,
you are getting something from that. In other words, you’re spending money, but
you’re getting something from that. You’re projecting power. The same thing
with Europe and our base in Italy.
So
even though it is true that they actually do pay us something—he says they pay
nothing. That, as is usual with Trump’s speeches, is factually incorrect. They
do pay us a considerable amount. Nonetheless, there is an added value, and the
added value comes from the international system that the United States has
established. So my argument really is here that because he thinks in terms of
dollars and cents, because he thinks largely in terms of trade, and he sees the
enormous trade surplus that China has with us, the enormous trade surplus that
Japan has with us, the enormous trade surplus that Germany has with us, in effect,
we’re suckers. We’re not, in fact, getting the right end of this deal. In fact,
we’re being taken to the cleaners.
So
you’ve seen, since he’s been in office, what has he done? He hasn’t eliminated
any of these forces. What he has done—those are aircraft carriers, by the way.
What he has done is started to undermine the political basis of these
relationships. When he went to Europe on his first trip as President, even
though there was a statement in his main speech emphasizing that the United
States would stand by what are called its Article 5 responsibilities—that’s Article
5 of the NATO treaty which says an attack against one nation is an attack against
all—President Trump eliminated that line. He didn’t say it. Which is a very
canny way of basically undermining NATO. Now does it make NATO collapse? Of
course not. But it gives a certain degree of doubt about what the United States
would do when it comes to military pressure on Europe.
Similarly,
he talked about, during the campaign, that the Japanese and the Koreans might
want to get their own nuclear weapons. American policy, since the war, has been
all about the United States providing a nuclear umbrella and stability. That’s
the big word, stability. So he’s essentially, in what he’s doing, when it comes
to the Korean crisis, as you know, he said the North Koreans would be met with
fire and fury, a threat of nuclear retaliation which is never done.
No
American president, even though there have been considerations in U.S. history
of using nuclear weapons before, notably in the Korean War, no one has ever
made a public threat like that, to my knowledge. He just threatened it, fire
and fury. And he went to the UN then and threatened to completely
destroy—totally destroy is the quote—North Korea. Absolutely unheard of. And of
course one of the key attributes of Donald Trump is that every day he’s doing
things that were formerly unheard of. It’s one of the key attributes of his
presidency.
One
other thing to comment about, it seems to me, when it comes to, call it, the
new nationalism, there’s a focus on sovereignty. He went to the UN and gave the
traditional President UN speech in which he used the word sovereignty 21 times.
He mentioned human rights only once, and that in a denunciation of the Human
Rights Commission of the United Nations. So this focus on America first,
basically our allies are screwing us, we’re going to end this situation and
we’re going to do it now. Which has started, I would argue, to undermine the
international system because the President himself is showing the fact that he
doesn’t have faith in it.
Now,
does it matter—and actually, this is an important point I want to make—does it
matter that after all, he’s just one man, and this system has been up and
running for 70 years? Can he undermine it by himself? Well, there’s something
else he’s doing. He’s demolishing the State Department. They’ve imposed a
hiring freeze of the top State Department ambassadorial staff, the people who
are the equivalent of three star generals. Sixty percent of them have left. The
second level 50% of them have left. So the diplomatic arm of the United States
government is being destroyed as we speak.
When
he was asked about that by Laura Ingraham on her new Fox show, she said, you
know, how can you run a foreign policy when you don’t have a State Department, he
said let me tell you, the one that matters is me. I’m the only one that
matters, because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be.
You’ve seen that. You’ve seen it very strongly. So the second element of the
new nationalism is personalization. He certainly is kind of an authoritarian
personality. We could argue about, perhaps in the questions, what that exactly
means. But he personalizes power. And his idea of making foreign policy is he
decides.
There’s
an entire bureaucratic system within the American government that’s grown up
since the Second World War that started with the National Security Act of 1947
where you have the National Security Council pulling in all this bureaucratic
wisdom from the Defense Department, State Department, Department of Treasury,
etc., and it gets finally up to the President to make a decision. All of that essentially still works, but it’s
been detached from the President. You simply have a person who’s working with a
small number of aides and making decisions. So when he says I’m the only one
that matters, in fact that is, to some extent, true.
So
these prejudices of his or this understanding of the world system that I
described earlier that goes back 30 years is, to some extent—these alliances
are not breaking down completely—but it’s having, I would argue, a surprisingly
large effect on America’s place in the world.
Let
me give you one statistic. When it comes to Japan and South Korea, where the
current crisis is going on, the place from which, if there is a nuclear war in
the near future, it will be there, the place about which I am sincerely
nervous, under Obama 88% of Japanese were confident in Obama’s abilities to
protect them. A key thing about our alliance, confident. Seventy-eight percent
of South Koreans were confident in Obama’s ability to protect them.
Under
Trump, the number goes from 88% of Japanese under Obama to 24%. Eighty-eight to
24 under Trump. South Koreans, 78% were confident in Obama’s ability to protect
them. Seventeen percent are confident under Donald J. Trump. Okay, so this is,
you know, politically speaking this is extremely important because these are
democracies, first of all, and this will be reflected, I would argue, in their
policy, one way or another. So that change, indeed, is happening.
I
want to leave time for questions, so let’s get, for a quick moment, to Part 2,
which is to say terrorism. Donald Trump, as you remember, ran in the campaign
basically threatening, when it came to ISIS, to bomb the shit out of them,
right? An amazing quote. I usually have to apologize for that quote, sorry I
said that. But it was the President or the candidate for President of the
United States, that was his policy, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.
And
indeed, since he has come to power, when it comes to the Islamic State, he has,
indeed, bombed the shit out of them. He’s basically taken Obama’s policy, which
was using air power to support Kurdish and Iranian backed Iraqi troops, and added
much increased air power, which is to say he’s bragged about the fact that he’s
completely rewritten the rules of engagement.
What
are the rules of engagement, or as the military calls them, the ROEs? Basically
that says when you can drop a bomb. If there is a risk that you’re going to
kill 20 people, you cannot drop a bomb. If there’s a risk you’re going to kill
40 people you cannot drop a bomb. In other words, you can’t do a drone attack
if there’s a considerable risk of civilian casualties, etc. I mean, obviously
it’s more specific than that, but that’s essentially it. It’s put down in
bureaucratic language. Everybody gets it. It determines how much bombing you
can do, among other things. And it also determines how many civilians you kill.
So
one of the main things that Trump has done since assuming office, he has kept
Obama’s policy against the Islamic State. We are still, indeed, backing these
militias from Iraq, we’re still backing the Kurds. But what we’re doing is
truly bombing the shit out of them, which is to say that the number of civilian
casualties have more than doubled. The numbers of civilians killed, according
to the UN, have gone up by 67%. I mean, these numbers are very hard to find.
The number of bombs being dropped have more than doubled. Did everybody know
that? Who here knew that? Okay, several people, which is good.
I
mean, in general, of course, one of the characteristics of our forever war,
which is Part 3, is that no one cares. It’s not really covered. It’s on the
inside of the paper. It isn’t putting American forces at risk, normally.
They’re drones. Drones are the perfect American weapon because no Americans are
put at risk. You’re just killing other people, right? So what he’s done is
cranked it up. We’re killing more people.
Now
has that had an effect? He would claim that by changing the rules of
engagement, it has allowed the United States to defeat ISIS. I would say that
there’s no evidence of that. In fact, the war was going pretty well when it
comes to getting back territory, which is what this was about. It was about
destroying the footprint of the Islamic State.
Let’s
see, in Raqqa, which is right over there, in Mosul, which is over there. This
is kind of where the Islamic State was. And it was about taking back this territory.
The United States forces, very few on the ground, most air forces, and the
Kurdish forces, and the Iraqi Shia forces were, indeed, winning that war, if
winning is taking back territory. And under Donald Trump they have finished it,
albeit with killing a lot more people.
So
what is the problem with this? You know, I did a book essentially devoted to
the forever war. One of my theses was that the beginning of this war in 2001,
the beginning of the new age of the war on terror, which we are still part of,
this began with Al Qaeda adopting a strategy of provocation. In other words,
what do you do when you attack the Twin Towers? Why did they do that? What was
the point? Obviously they wanted to kill people, and they did kill about 3,000
people. But the bigger point was it was a recruitment poster.
In
other words, they are an insurgency, and what an insurgency does is carry out
attacks in order to build political base, to get more people joining their
movement, more people sympathetic to it. So in effect, those pictures of the
burning towers and the collapse of the towers were a recruitment poster, and
the entire point of their attacks, and the entire point of ISIS’ attacks is to
build a political movement that will overthrow these American allied states in
the Middle East, notably the Saudis and the Egyptians.
Both
of those states are autocracies. Both of those states are dependent on American
relationships for protection and for money. And the idea behind the terrorist
attacks, I mean, they’re not interested in overthrowing the United States.
They’re interested in overthrowing these states and others besides.
So
if you look at what has happened in the war on terror, we are looking at 16
years during which the key metric should be the number of terrorists. In other
words, how do you win the war on terror? If you want to call it the war on
terror. It’s not a very good name. The way you win is you try to do things that
will decrease the number of terrorists.
And
the United States, since 2001, has regularly and methodically and continually
increased the number of terrorists. We went from a point in 2001 where we had
Al Qaeda, a couple of thousand people in the mountains of Afghanistan, actually
down here, to a point in 2014 where the Islamic State was occupying territory
the size of Belgium. That was the progress of the war on terror.
And
I would argue the major reason for that was the occupation of Iraq, among other
things, which is the single geopolitical blunder of the era, worse than a
blunder, a crime. That was key to establishing ISIS and it is key to the
current dynamic in the Middle East.
I
have this map up here, by the way, to show something that is rather obvious,
which is when things start to happen in the Middle East you have increasing
instability, which indeed is the case since 2001, largely, I would argue,
because of American actions and the law of unintended consequences. It affects
the alliance in Europe. You have an enormous influx of refugees coming from
here. And it has destabilized various states within Europe. And it has helped
alter the political complexion in Europe. It has contributed to the rise of a
new right that again we can talk about in the question period. But the politics
of our European allies are tightly tied to what’s going on in the Middle East.
I
mentioned a minute ago the Iraq War, which began in 2003 and supposedly ended
in 2011, although in fact it continues to this day. There are American troops
there. There are American troops here. There are American troops, some of them,
here. We’ll in a minute show where all the American troops are. But the key
element to remember from the Iraq War is that it made of the Iraqi state, which
was beforehand a balancing state to the Islamic Republic of Iran, it made of
Iraq a vassal of Iran. In other words, having been an opponent of Iran, having
balanced out Iran in the Middle East, Iraq has now become a vassal state of
Iran.
The
key here is the Shia-Sunni divide, Shia being the form of Islam practiced by
90% of Iranians, Sunni being the form of Islam practiced all the way over here.
And that dividing line used to be here, so Iraq was the front line of the Sunni
states, Iran the front line of the Shia states. The Iraq War essentially moved
that dividing line over to here. And the Iranians now are fighting in Iraq, as
I mentioned, and they have basically established a line toward the sea that
goes from Iran through northern Iraq, through Syria, all the way into Lebanon.
And
if you look at the headlines today, what’s going on with the Saudi, you know,
our great allies the Saudis—Donald Trump loves the Saudis. He went on a trip to
Saudi Arabia. They projected his face on the front of his hotel seven stories
high next to the king. I mean, it was a beautiful image. If I was better about
preparation I’d have the image here for you to see. It was beautiful. But they
treated him, you know, they played to his vanity. They treated him as this
great star.
And
as it happened, he gave his imprimatur to a rather dramatic policy that they
had begun, which is Saudi Arabia is now, as we speak, transforming itself from
a patronage state, where you have 30,000 princes, you’re giving them all some
money, you have a kind of consensus in the royal family, they’re very slow in
how they take decisions, they’re not very aggressive regionally, into a police
state. They’re arresting a lot of princes, they’re consolidating power, and
Trump has been completely on board with this transformation.
And
as a result you have a kind of new aggressiveness from Saudi Arabia. They have
blockaded Qatar right here. Qatar, they think, is too close to Iran, which is
to say close to them in relations. Qatar, as it happens, shares a natural gas
oil field with Iran, so has to have good relations with them. It’s a
complicated story. But they have blockaded them. They have also started a war
against Yemen, pushing back against the Iranian designs in Yemen.
So
essentially, the short version of what’s going on in the Middle East now, when
it comes to the United States, is that a movement that began—and one could go
farther back on this, obviously—but a movement that began in 2003 with the Iraq
War, which was this disaster, left in its wake a failed state that is
essentially a vassal of Iran, has now turned into Saudi Arabia pushing back. Saudi
Arabia is also holding the prime minister of Lebanon prisoner, it seems. Maybe
or maybe not prisoner. A lot of people think so. He’s resigned, but he is still
Saudi Arabia. He’s not returned to Lebanon.
So
the short message here is you have a great deal of instability that’s been
caused a secondary consequence of, I would argue, the Iraq War, but also is
being made worse by Donald Trump’s love for the Saudi autocracy and his hatred
for Iran, because he joins… Whereas the Obama administration was trying for the
beginning of a rapprochement with Iran—I don’t want to overstate this—and
concluded the Iranian nuclear deal, as it’s known, in fact Trump has
decertified the nuclear deal, as he has withdrawn from Paris and withdrawn from
the Pacific trade initiative, so there’s three big steps, and he has gone all
in with Saudi Arabia in pushing back against Iran. And we seem close, perhaps,
to some kind of regional blowup in the Middle East.
So
terrorism, just a word about it. My fear during the campaign was that Donald
Trump, if he were elected, was going to benefit, because he’s very
opportunistic, a very intelligently opportunistic politician, that he would benefit
from a terrorist attack in the United States to consolidate power. And I wrote
this in the “New York Review” during the campaign. It’s been what I had feared
throughout because I thought the Islamic State would also see it in their
interest to create a terrorist attack in the United States and see this kind of
autocratic power emerge. I’m less certain of that now, partly as a result of
the Halloween attack in New York, the consequences of which were much less than
I would have thought when it comes to coverage and so on.
I
think there is a degree of terrorist fatigue which has affected the coverage
and has been affected by, as well, the mass shootings. People are so used to
now seeing these mass violent deaths in the United States that terrorist
attacks are not quite so shocking. I mean, having said that, who knows what
would happen if you had a 9/11 scale terrorist attack. I don’t know. So I’m
less concerned now about a terrorist attack leading to a kind of autocratic
consolidation.
What
I am concerned about is that the forever wars that we’re in now, in which the
United States is actually fighting wars, I believe, in seven countries—seven
countries, is this right? Let’s count. The United States is fighting in Iraq
and in Syria. The United States is using its drones extensively still in Yemen.
The United States is using its drones in Somalia. The United States is fighting
in Afghanistan. The United States is using its drones in Pakistan. We could add
Mali, Niger, as we recently learned, and various other places where we have
special forces, and, to some extent, drone forces. Is anybody counting? Is that
seven? I think it’s seven. It was eight? All right, well, maybe I’m overdoing
it.
But
in fact there are these things called forever wars, which, you don’t really see
any end of them, because what they are is this attempt to use what Obama called
the light footprint, meaning Special Forces. The number of Special Forces since
2001 has doubled. Special Forces command now has 70,000 troops, and they are
all over the world. Did I have a map showing that? Well, this shows U.S.
personnel and where they are. It doesn’t quite do it. You see the numbers
there. Green is more than 1,000, dark green. Lighter green is more than 300.
Anyway, you see.
Basically
we’re using this light footprint, using Special Operations forces and drones.
And these wars are going on. They’re under the justification of the
authorization for the use of military force which was voted a week after
9/11—not even a week—six days after 9/11 in 2001. Most of the terrorist groups
that are being fought by these drones did not exist when that authorization for
the use of military force was passed. So it’s very possible to argue, as
various people have, that these are illegal wars, that they don’t really have
the imprimatur of Congress. But indeed they go on. They go on.
And
the question is, one of my theses here is that—and this predates Donald
Trump—that the United States has created a perpetual motion machine, that in
fact, because we’re continuing with these wars using drones, killing a fair
number of civilians, we are increasing or continuing the effort to recruit
terrorists. And we continue it and continue it and continue it, and we kill
them, and kill them, and kill them, and kill them.
The
Israelis call this cutting the grass, or mowing the grass. They talk about
Gaza. You know, every few years we have to mow the grass. We have to go in with
our drones, we have to go in with the army, we have to kill a lot of
terrorists, as they call them, or Hamas members, or whatever you’d like to call
it, and then they’re done mowing the grass, and in a few years they’ll have to
mow the grass again.
And
the United States has essentially adopted this model in six or seven countries.
And the difference with Donald Trump is that he’s not only mowing the grass,
but he has decided to change the rules of engagement and kill a lot more
civilians, which would seem to me to be likely to exacerbate the original
problem.
As
I said at the beginning, how do you decide you’ve won the war on terror? You
decide you’ve won it when there are fewer terrorist attacks and fewer
terrorists. And in fact the war on terror, or the terrorist war on us, if you
want to put it that way, is a global insurgency. And the point of an insurgency
is to keep itself going, keep itself growing, gather more recruits. And
terrorist acts are used to basically gather more recruits.
It’s
as if we said we want to overthrow the United States. Well, how do you do that
with a handful of people? Well, one way you could do it is stage a terrorist
attack in New Orleans and cause a police crackdown. And maybe that police
crackdown will cause a lot of people to get pissed off, right? So you’re using
the power of the state to form your army. And this is what has happened
internationally, and it’s what the United States supposedly has been trying to
fight since 2001. But my argument is that we have fought it in a dramatically
counterproductive way.
So when it comes to the Middle East, the war
on terror, what is the difference with Donald Trump, he has gone all in on the
new Saudi aggressiveness. He has gone all in on fighting the Iranians. He’s
gone all in on not only decertifying, but possibly ending observation or
observance of the Iran nuclear accord, which would be a disaster which would
mean we’ll have a nuclear problem not only in north Asia with the North
Koreans, but in the Middle East with Iran. But he is basically on that path.
And
this is an example, too, where a single man, as President, can make the
difference, right, because none of his national security advisors, to my
knowledge, believe that that Iran deal should be thrown out. Mattis, the
Secretary of Defense, has explicitly said to Congress he doesn’t believe it
should be thrown out. But Donald Trump, because he hates it so much, for
reasons that are somewhat obscure—he thinks we’re suckers again. You know, it
all has to do with these very personal—a lot of it has to do with these very
personal emotions about being taken for granted, not being respected, being
treated as suckers and so on. For these reasons he hates that deal and seems on
the verge, one way or another, of getting rid of it. It’s now up to Congress to
decide.
Anyway,
that’s the Middle East. The relationship with NATO he’s tried to undermine.
It’s not going away, but the relationship is not good. The relationship in Asia
is, I would say, in very bad shape with the Japanese and the North Koreans.
So
I’m basically trying to say here that a system that was established in the late
‘40s, that has essentially ordered the world—I mean, this is euphemistic.
Obviously the Cold War had many wars. A lot of people died. The United States
and the Soviets essentially fought its cold war using Korean bodies, using
Vietnamese bodies, you name it. But in retrospect, there was a degree of order
there.
That
order Donald Trump essentially, through his love for sovereignty, through his distrust
of multilateral treaties and organizations, through his distrust of human
rights, his attitude that this is simply politically correct, human rights—for
example, we’re not bombing enough, we need to use more bombs in the fighting
the Islamic State. Why aren’t we bombing enough? Why are we caring for
civilians? Because it’s politically correct. In other words, the idea that
there’s a pragmatic reason for not killing a lot of civilians in fighting this
war he completely rejects.
For
all of those reasons I would say that Make America Great Again has shown, after
a year from the election, has shown extremely mixed results. On the one hand,
the system that I first presented is still in place, although a bit bedraggled.
Donald Trump is almost, partly through getting in his own way, the refusal to
fill certain government positions, the scandal with Russia, for example, which
I haven’t mentioned, which has made it impossible for him to have a true
rapprochement with Russia, which he seemed to want to do, which would have hurt
NATO a lot more, because of his very desire to do that and the scandal during
the campaign, he’s kind of gotten in his own way. The people in the bureaucracy
who still believe in the old order, the so-called deep state, all of these
things have been obstacles to him.
But
I would argue, at the end of the day, that he has made a very good start to
making America great again in the particular meaning that those words hold for
him. So I will thank you for your attention and ask for questions. And I hope
there are many. Thank you very much. [Applause.]
Yes?
Male: Has
Trump taken steps to [dis]-establish the economic [forces of] globalization,
namely the IMF or the World Bank?
Danner: No,
he hasn’t. Although I think one could say that under that rubric the most
important thing he’s done is pull the U.S. out of the TPP, the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, which is a massive trade agreement negotiated by successive U.S.
administrations that was essentially supposed to be a kind of hedge in the
Pacific against China. China is not a member of it. And both candidates,
Hillary Clinton and Trump, during the campaign, were opposed to the TPP.
But
I think it was generally assumed that if Hillary Clinton was elected, there would
have been certain changes in the TPP and then she would have adopted it. And
it’s a cataclysmic change that he has pulled the United States out of that. It
meant that the other day in Da Nang he gave this speech denouncing trade
agreements and then the rest of the conference got together to put in place
this trade agreement that the United States is outside of.
So
in a broader answer to your question, the U.S., from really the late ‘40s, has
been an animating force behind what could be called these sort of liberalizing
trade agreements liberalizing the international economic system, the IMF, the
World Bank, etc., and the U.S. is now—I read a piece the other day—it was like
the kid in the back, called it like the kid in the back of the classroom who throws
spitballs and stuff. In other words is kind of rejecting these agreements.
The
U.S., of course, is the only country to have pulled out, to not be a part of
the Paris accords. The United States, as I said, TPP and so on. But it has not,
to go back to your question, it’s not pulled itself out of the IMF, and I don’t
see any sign that that would happen any time soon. But pulling out of the TPP
is extremely important, not just economically, but geo strategically, very
important. Does that answer your question? Yeah, okay. Yeah, Tom.
Male: I
was really interested when you started to talk with the word sovereignty and
the idea of sovereignty, and then expanding on Trump’s relationship to that
idea. And I felt as though you were going to develop the notion that there was
a problem with fetishizing sovereignty, and you did develop it, but you were
talking about how things play out in the global scale from just purely from
the, shall we say, Trumpian, pragmatic, self-interested point of view. Can you
talk a bit more about why sovereignty and the emphasis on sovereignty might not
produce, even at that level, that sort of transaction level, what’s the
pushback of someone who says like come on, it’s America, we need to take care
of America first?
Danner: That’s
a very good question. I think the assumption he makes in talking about
sovereignty is an entire series of assumptions about what the U.S. gets and
doesn’t get from its current role in the international system. And it’s based
on this idea that globalization took our jobs. I mean, essentially it’s a very
old political strategy. He may not see it as such. But it comes down to running
against the Other. You’re running against the people who are taking our jobs by
coming over the border. You’re running against the people who are taking our
jobs by taking American factories to China and Japan and elsewhere. So it’s
very much a visceral political argument, and it relies on a series of untruths.
I
mean, one untruth I tried to set out is the fact that the United States doesn’t
get any value by having a base in Japan. I mean, it does. Or a base in Germany.
That we’re just kind of giving them lots of money. I think that is wrong,
demonstrably wrong. The second untruth it focuses on is that globalization has
only taken jobs away from American workers, and first of all, that that’s the
real force that takes jobs away, which isn’t true. I mean, there’s
mechanization, computerization. There are a lot of other sources of the end of
manufacturing jobs. And there’s unionization. I mean, you can point to a lot of
things, a lot of reasons that factories left the United States. But it
certainly was not only to do with the international trading regime.
So
I think that on one hand it bases itself on things that aren’t true, things
that can be shown to be factually false, and on the second hand, it’s really
about a kind of prejudice. It’s about…America first is partly simply about
disliking and mistrusting the Other. And it’s kind of a brilliant political
strategy. There’s a long history of it in the Republican Party. And of course
not when it comes to trade. Republicans recently have been free traders,
certainly. But the idea of people coming in from outside the borders, and, of
course, people of color, fear of people of color.
I
mean, this used to be called dog whistle politics, right? You’d say, well,
crime is rising. You know, lack of order in the streets, you know, chaos in the
streets. And that was a way to say, you know, African Americans, be careful.
That goes back to—remember the Willie Horton ad that George H. W. Bush ran.
Well,
Trump is a fascinating politician because dog whistle means whistling so you
can’t hear it, but the dogs can hear it. Well, he doesn’t dog whistle, he just
whistles really loudly, and he makes this politics of anti-Other explicit,
which has a kind of value about it. Only it’s dismaying because it means we
have to, as a polity, look at ourselves. There’s nowhere to hide anymore. It’s
like wow, we elected this guy on this basis. Have I answered your question? I
mean, the sovereignty question is just an extremely interesting one. Yes.
Male: I
was wondering if you’d come back to the Iran agreement for just a second. I
mean, it has its pros and cons. It’s limited in time and so forth. But what
about your views about undercutting our ability to negotiate agreements with
others when we, you know, we seem to be walking away from something where
there’s no evidence that Iran hasn’t been living up to its side of a narrow,
you know, it’s a contract, a narrowly defined deal, 10 to 15 years, certain
criteria, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Or am I overstating that?
Danner: I
don’t think you’re overstating it at all. In fact, there is no evidence they’re
not living up to it. And the administration essentially acknowledged that
President Trump’s decertifying it didn’t have anything to do with anything the
Iranians did or didn’t do.
Male: That’s
what I mean.
Danner: So
it’s an arbitrary, it’s an essentially arbitrary political step by one
administration not to honor the agreement of the last one. Having said that,
we’re not out of the agreement. He was able to decertify only because now
Congress has to deal with the consequences. But if Congress does do things that
will essentially pull us out, I think the effect on the U.S. ability to
conclude treaties will be considerable. I think that’s absolutely true. Because
we’re not living up to what we said.
I
think it was a very bad and rather frightening decision, frankly, because it
essentially showed—and I think this is important to remember—that if you’re one
of these people who says well, the adults in the room, we’re going to count on
the adults in the room—Mattis, McMaster, Kelly, and these are all generals, of
course—that we’re counting on these people to prevent Trump from doing the
worst he could do, if that makes you sleep at night, I think that what happened
with the Iranian agreement, as well as not including the line about Article 5
with NATO in his speech in Europe, both of those things should make you pause,
because whenever it seems like he’s being managed by someone he tends to strike
out and show his own independence dramatically. And the decertification, I
think, was one example.
I
hate to analyze this on such personal terms, because what do I know? I’m not
talking to him. But on the other hand, it seems the only part of it that makes
sense, because Mattis actually publicly said that he thought it was in the
interest of the United States to stay in the agreement. And then to have the
President decertify it is rather shocking. It really is rather shocking. And
the stakes here are extremely high. I mean, if, indeed, the agreement were to
go south—I mean, the Europeans have already said we will not renegotiate this.
We won’t, period. And I believe them. I don’t think they will.
If
you had a situation—and it’s not reached that point, it has a long way to
go—where the Iranians restarted their nuclear program, we would be talking
about a Middle East war, I don’t doubt it. And Iran…I mean, America amazes me.
There’s this sort of blitheness about our foreign policy. Iran is a country of
80, 90 million people. It’s a very powerful country. And there’s this kind of
blithe attitude, well, should we bomb them or should we…? Do you know what I
mean, in certain neo-conservative circles. And you wonder don’t you think there
will ever be consequences for things that you’re, you know, killing people in
other countries? I mean, you know, there are consequences sometimes. And I
think that would be a very poor idea.
So
I agree with you that the consequences of this could be very great. And I think
in general the erratic character of Trump has now lent itself to the American
government, that he will make these statements. I mean, it is simply unheard
of, when you have a crisis going on in North Korea, for the President to tweet
and call the guy, you know, insult him personally. This just was mindboggling.
And of course we’re the frog in the boiling water, right? We’ve gotten used to
this idea. But had this happened the day after election day, it’s like what? Is
he really doing this? And in fact he is really doing it, and there’s just
no…there’s nothing to compare it to.
Male: I’m
glad you mentioned that there are other countries involved in this agreement
because I think it’s widely assumed that it’s the United States and Iran. But
there’s Germany and so forth. And we’re also treating some of our allies—the
Russians aren’t our allies—but we’re treating other countries as if they don’t
matter in any way, shape or form.
Danner: Yeah,
that’s quite true. And that again is typical of his attitude and within the
administration. Of course you can put this alongside of TPP and withdrawal from
the Paris accord. And now we’re the single country in the world that is not
part—I mean, the Syrians signed it, the Nicaraguans signed it, and we’re the
only country in the world that is not part of the Paris accord.
And
the United States simply, you know, the whole thinking after World War II
was…after World War II the United States had more than half of the world’s GDP,
and it was just monstrously powerful in a way that really had almost never been
seen before. And the idea of the so-called wise man was to bind this great
power within these international systems. You know, use it to the United
States’ advantage, which they definitely did, but also to stop the—I mean, what
would usually happen with such a powerful state, under realist theory, is other
states would band together to counterbalance it, right?
Well,
the idea was we don’t want that to happen. We’re going to create these great
alliances. And you see now this kind of anti movement from Trump, which is, in
a sense, pulling these things apart and making the U.S. an outlier. And I think
in a funny way that’s the most significant part of what he’s done, make the
U.S. the kid in the last row, the kid throwing spitballs rather than the one
leading. Yes?
Female: Thanks
again, by the way. Great lecture.
Danner: Oh,
thank you.
Female: So
you discussed President Trump’s [interest in] Saudi Arabia. I, from what I
know, and I could be totally wrong, I know that President Obama had a very
similar relationship with Saudi Arabia, and for a very long time the U.S. has
been an ally of this country.
Danner: Absolutely.
Female: How
is President Trump’s involvement with this country any different from any U.S.
president?
Danner: Well,
I think—first of all, thank you for the good words. And you’re absolutely right
that the relationship between the United States and the Saudis goes back to the
‘30s, when Aramco was created to develop the Saudi oil industry, and then to
1945, when FDR, Roosevelt, stopped in his cruiser on the way back from the
Crimea, actually, from the Yalta conference, and he had this meeting with the
Saudi king. The king supposedly brought aboard the ship all of his sheep so
they could slaughter sheep, and it’s a great little bit of history.
But
they made a deal whereby the U.S. would protect the Saudis in exchange for
keeping the Saudi royal family in power, basically, the Saudis would supply oil
to the United States and to the rest of the world in a regular way, and finally
the U.S. agreed to do something about the Palestinian problem. I’m sorry. I’m
laughing because this was 1945. So it’s gone back. You’re completely right.
It’s been this pillar of U.S. policy in the Middle East since the mid ‘40s.
But
I would argue that Trump is rather different because he has… I mean, the U.S.
relationship with the Saudis has not been simply with the king. It’s been with
the royal family. And until very recently they had this consensus system, which
I talked about before. You know, you had various members of the royal family in
control of all the ministries. You had the Saudi National Guard, the Saudi army
and the Saudi security agencies in the hands of different branches of the
family so that security organizations all would, in a sense, counterbalance one
another. I mean, it was a delicately wrought system that was somewhat
decentralized within the realm of the family, the royal family, which obviously
is very large.
And
what has happened under Trump, and since the rise of the new crown prince,
who’s in his early 30s and is very much a man on the go, is that he’s
consolidating power in his hands. He’s arresting other princes, putting them in
jail. Actually, the jail is the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. But he’s seizing—he’s put
various religious figures in jail.
And
Trump, to describe a kind of…I mean, he has undermined recent U.S. policy by
essentially putting his chips on the crown prince, and we’re completely, we’re
all in on the strategy of I’m going to centralize power, I’m going to do what I
want, we’re going to get rid of all these other ancillary powers. Which I think
is very dangerous because if there is pushback, we’re going to be essentially
standing out on a limb that will be cut off.
But
I think that is very different from Obama. By the way, the Saudi royals didn’t
like Obama very much, needless to say. The relationship was not very good. I
mean, the relationship continued that the United States had with the Saudis,
but they were very angry at Obama for letting Mubarak get overthrown and
various other things. They didn’t think he was a good enough lover of
autocracy. Yeah, go ahead.
Female: Well,
just the reason that I was asking you. To me it seems that America’s relationship
with Saudi Arabia is we’re more about just like appeasing Saudi Arabia and
anything it wants to do, so if this is [any] Saudi’s [new era of] power then
obviously [people] would consolidate it and our country would be fine with it,
so I just [wonder].
Danner: Well,
I think that’s a good point. I think there’s a lot of truth to it. I think the
larger point would be that our interesting and crazy relationships are not with
countries that are our enemies, but countries that are supposedly our allies.
The Saudis is one example, where a lot of the impetus for the Islamic State and
for Al Qaeda came from the Saudis. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi
nationals.
Another
example is Pakistan. Supposedly our ally. We give them billions in aid. And they’re
killing American troops by their support of the Taliban. So these are
interesting alliances. And I agree with you, the Saudi alliance is interesting.
I wouldn’t say it’s just appeasement, but it’s becoming more that way under
Trump, I would say. Yeah.
Male: You
said at the beginning of your talk you didn’t think he was stupid, or you
thought he was smart. And maybe there’s a lot of different dimensions of
intelligence, and some he does well on and others he doesn’t, but it seems to
me that a good case could be made that this is a majorly... [unintelligible] 01:06:06.
But
my question is, though, is sort of somewhat [bigger]. I teach national security
here, and people ask, and I try to ask myself, are we overreacting to the first
year? And do you think he has done anything in the first almost quarter of his
term irreversible, or do you think his successors so far could roll back some
of the things he’s done? Or do you think we’re moving in a way that after Trump
it’s going to, and this is a breaking point in foreign policy, it’s going to be
irreversible?
Danner: I
don’t know. That’s a hard question. What is irreversible, exactly? I mean, I
think if the… The TPP may be an irreversible step, where the U.S. is really
weakening itself. The U.S. was trying, supposedly, to pivot to Asia.
Withdrawing from the TPP is a very big step. I think by the time you get the
next administration, presuming it won’t be Trump’s, I’m not sure we’ll be able
to fix that. Who knows?
The
Iran nuclear deal is another example of something that could be irreversible.
What’s going on with North Korea, you know, I don’t know how you reverse any of
that. You could argue that he’s the first one who’s really taking this in hand
and really trying to solve it. He’s trying to pressure the Chinese to move
against the North Koreans. But I think that’s a fool’s errand. I don’t think
they will ever take steps against the North Koreans that will risk
destabilizing the regime. They just won’t. And so in essence Trump is trading
pressure on trade with the Chinese, which he promised to impose, for this
mythical deal on North Korea.
Will
it be irreversible? I don’t know. It’s hard to see the end game in this.
Eventually they are… Trump has said that if the North Koreans test again
they’ll be met with fire and fury, and the North Koreans are going to test
again. They are. So then it’ll be a choice between some kind of reaction by
him, possibly a military one, a limited military reaction, or simply doing
nothing, in which case you think, well, what is his policy exactly going to be.
And
I think if they tried, say, a limited strike where they took out a missile on
its launch pad or something like that, it’s an enormous risk. It’s an enormous
risk that you would have a war on the Korean peninsula. And I’m afraid that the
taunts and the threats he’s made are going to leave him little room to
maneuver. So that’s an example of something that would really be irreversible.
I mean, Iran also, I think, would really be irreversible.
And
the broader question, though, is this weakening of the U.S., of the system that
I tried to describe. And all the aircraft carriers are there, the stuff’s still
happening, the IMF still works, people are still trading, all this stuff’s
going on. But at what point does the U.S., as the kind of lynchpin of the
system, lose a degree of political respect and therefore political power where
the system doesn’t continue to work very well? That’s another much broader and
more complicated question. So I’m sorry not to be able to answer, but… Yeah.
Male: Thank
you for speaking, first of all. And also to build off what you were talking
about earlier with Saudi Arabia and authoritarian regimes, how has Turkey’s
shift as a more authoritarian regime closer towards Russia, as well as their
dislike for Obama, which is, now that Trump’s in office, I don’t know how
that’s a little different, but how is that changing the regional politics? As
well as possibly could you put into context what’s going on in Egypt now that
their economy is sort of getting its feet a little bit, I believe? I think they
received foreign investment from China. Is that correct?
Danner: Yeah,
that’s correct.
Male: So
how is it happening? Because the U.S. doesn’t really want to get involved in
foreign investment, and it’s seeming like China is trying to snatch up where
the U.S. isn’t stepping in anymore.
Danner: Well,
that’s about four questions. It’s a big question. I’d say Egypt is the great
tragedy of the Arab Spring, that you had this chance for a kind of opening, and
it all disappeared in a military coup. And I think it’s very deeply…should be
of deep concern to Americans because even if your main concern when it comes to
the Middle East is terrorism, in fact the Arab Spring, if it had succeeded in
Egypt in establishing a moderate Islamic state that would then have an
election, it would have been an absolutely revolutionary step.
So
I think I’m immensely sad about what happened in Egypt. A lot of people have
been killed there. There have been a lot of massacres. The government has,
after spending 30 odd years letting the Muslim Brotherhood serve as a kind of
shadow opposition, they basically massacred a great number of them, and the
United States essentially stood by and watched. And it’s very terrible.
And
I think from the point of view of our policy against Al Qaeda and against
Islamic extremism and Islamic terrorism in general, Egypt is a catastrophe,
because the greatest threat to Islamic extremism is the success of a moderate
Islamic government that shows that in fact you don’t have to use terrorism, you
don’t have to overthrow states in revolutions, you don’t have to use violence,
there can be—although that was, obviously, a kind of revolution—there can be
Islamism as a moderate force. And in Egypt the great tragedy is that that was
destroyed. So yeah, I think that’s extremely important for the United States.
I’m sorry, what was the—you had another.
Male: It
would be good to do—I don’t want to impose on what anyone else wants to ask,
but I’d like to hear about Turkey.
Danner: Oh,
yeah. That’s a large question. It’s interesting to me what will become of the
discussion about Turkey in the weeks ahead because of course Michael Flynn, the
first national security advisor to Donald Trump, was on Turkey’s payroll, and
was apparently in negotiations to send back the cleric who the Turks claim was
at the heart of the coup attempt.
I
think Turkey is another example of what’s called by—oh, my god, I’m losing his
name, the professor at Stanford who’s a great scholar of democracy—has called democratic
recession, that regimes that seem to be strengthening democracies are
essentially falling back, if you can use that metaphor, into authoritarianism.
And again, it’s very sad and it’s also somewhat threatening for the region
because I think it was… Well, I would say it’s turning into a less stable
country, and Erdogan is what he is. He’s establishing authoritarian rule.
I
mean, from the point of view of the Trump administration, Trump tends to admire
leaders like that. He admires Putin, he admires Duterte in the Philippines, and
he clearly admires Erdogan. So it may be helpful to them in dealing with
Washington, conceivably. But I think for U.S. policy writ large it’s troubling,
very troubling.
It
should be said, by the way, that the Turks have been one of the major
supporters, along with the Iranians, of Qatar since the embargo was launched.
When I was in Qatar in July, if you went into the supermarkets, the milk, for
example, was all from Turkey. They’d been flying it in, because the milk could
no longer come over the Saudi border. So Turkey’s foreign policy within the
Gulf, especially, is fairly interesting. Anyway, sorry not to be… Yeah, go
ahead. Right there.
Female: I’m
curious about your opinion of what happened recently in Niger, like the media response
to that. Just because like it seems similar to like the whole Benghazi thing,
like [unintelligible] 01:15:33
failing miserably to handle the situation and protect U.S. troops. I feel like
the only thing you really heard about in the media about that was like [unintelligible] 01:15:44 responses like that, like the
soldier’s wife, but you didn’t hear, you know, it’s not like the same response
as [unintelligible] 01:15:52 were getting [unintelligible] making that a huge thing. And I feel
like there’s not very much about what actually happened, like what the
government actually did in the situation.
Danner: Yeah,
well, I couldn’t agree more. I think we don’t know the real story of what
happened there yet. And I think that’s part of a larger phenomena, which is
that the U.S.—I thought I had a map that showed where Special Forces troops
are. They’re in more than 100 countries now. And the United States, the
expansion is particularly acute in Africa. The United States is trying to set
up security regimes throughout Africa to prevent ungoverned spaces, which is an
uncharacteristically poetic Pentagon term, ungoverned spaces, from being used
by terrorists.
So
Africom, which is the relatively recent U.S. command that governs Africa, is
now in all of these countries. And one of the results of those deaths is that
Americans suddenly know about that. But I think that we don’t have a clear, at
least I don’t have a clear conception yet of what exactly happened and why.
Presumably we’ll hear more from Congress about what exactly happened. But are
you saying that Benghazi, there was an enormous amount of publicity about it,
but not about Niger?
Female: Yeah.
It was interesting to me that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of, like, interest
or focus on like let’s figure out what happened here.
Danner: Yeah.
Well, I think, you know, there’s certainly some obvious political reasons for
that, which is that the Republicans were very strong and very ruthless when it
came to Benghazi. I mean, I was in a press pen. You know, sometimes when you’re
covering a campaign they have this pen that you go into. And I was in a press
pen when covering a Romney rally during the 2012 election. This woman with a
Benghazi t-shirt, and a Benghazi hat, and Benghazi stuff came up and stood next
to me. I was in this pen and she came up and stood next to me right outside the
pen and started shaking this stuff. She was like sort of a witch doctor or
something, you know, Benghazi, Benghazi, what about Benghazi?
So
I don’t think any Democrats are doing that when it comes to Niger. Anyway, not
yet. But it still is early days when it comes. I’m just glad that people maybe
are starting to know how far-flung U.S. troops are, because people don’t really
know that, which is remarkable. Any other questions? Tom, did you have? Well,
maybe you first.
Female: Earlier
you touched on the idea that Trump has these goals to have a closer
relationship with Russia and that he was kind of getting in his own way, and
then you sort of like pivoted away from that. So I was wondering if you could
elaborate on like maybe what his goals are and how he’s getting to them.
Danner: Yeah.
You know, Trump’s relationship with Russia is somewhat mysterious, right? It
was, in some ways, in his career as a developer, the great white whale. He
always wanted to build buildings in Russia, and for various reasons he wasn’t
able to. And talks were still going on for him to build a building there during
the campaign, so this is very recent.
During
the campaign he promoted the idea that U.S. relationships with Russia should be
better. And I actually happen to agree with him on that. I don’t think that’s a
particularly controversial point to make. But he has had this peculiar
unwillingness to speak in any way critical about the Russians. It’s as if
people are trying to get him to say something he doesn’t want to say.
Having
said that, it’s clear that there were a lot of contacts between his campaign
and the Russians, without a doubt. And the Russians played a very substantial
role during the campaign, both through bots, through the use of WikiLeaks as a
cut out to leak Democratic campaign emails. And we’ll never be able to analyze
precisely how much this stuff influenced voters. They also, of course, hacked
into 21, I think it was the election databases in 21 states, which is
astonishing.
And
we’ll never be able to say well, they turned the election to Trump. But it was
an incredibly close election, so that you could say if it rained in
Philadelphia on a given day or whatever a lot of things could have turned the
election the other way. So it’s quite possible that those things they did
turned the election in his direction.
What
I was trying to say is there’s an irony in this in that on the one hand Putin’s
strategy, from what we know, the Russians didn’t think Trump would win, as no
one else thought Trump would win. They did think what they were doing was
trying to damage Hillary Clinton before she took office. That was what a lot of
these operations were about.
The
irony is that he, of course, did win and the scandal about what happened during
the election is making it very difficult for him to carry out the policy
initiatives he seemed to want to carry out during the campaign, which is a kind
of rapprochement with the Russians, which presumably would have involved
lifting some of the sanctions that have been imposed on the Russians since they
took over Crimea and began fighting in Eastern Ukraine. He has not been able to
take those steps, both because of the political backlash that would have come
as a result of the investigation of the campaign and also now the Congress
passed a bill keeping the sanctions there and basically stripping him of power
to remove them unilaterally.
So
that’s really what I meant, that the irony is that the great Russian dream of a
Trump presidency has actually, to their surprise, come to pass, but it’s been
to some degree checkmated by what they actually did during the election, so
there’s a bit of a contradiction or an irony there, I think. Tom?
Male: I
just wanted to ask you about what I feel is almost a sort of submerged parallel
narrative to your discussion of these global affairs, which is to say your role
as a witness and a writer. I mean, I could hear about milk and Qatar and the
Benghazi witch doctor lady for another two hours.
But
I wanted to ask you a specific question about your process as a writer in one
particular episode, which is the El Mozote book initially appeared as the
entire issue of a “New Yorker” magazine, and if I’m not mistaken, I think
that’s something that happened with John Hersey with his Hiroshima and Janet
Malcolm with her silent woman piece about Sylvia Plath and so forth.
And
I wanted to ask you what was involved in closing a magazine piece, specifically
the El Mozote magazine piece, you know, there’s a certain point in the night
when it’s over. So can you just take us the previous 12 hours, closing an
entire issue length article, what was going on? Who stayed late at the office?
Danner: Well,
thanks for that question. You know, that piece was originally, it was about
45,000 words, which is really a—I mean, it is a book now, of course. And
originally I wrote it to be two parts. The first part went up until the actual
massacre, you know, included the massacre and the second part included the
aftermath.
And
Tina Brown, then the editor of “The New Yorker,” who had a great nose for
publicity and promotion, read it and said no-no-no, this is going to be a whole
issue. So she was the one who made that decision. And I’m very grateful to her
for that because it certainly had much greater impact because of that.
Closing
it, of course, was very fraught, and it went on for weeks, literally. What
happened in the last 24 hours I remember rather well because there was a Marine
major named John McKay who was in Salvador and who was involved in—this is, for
those of you who don’t know, a book about a massacre that killed about 800
civilians in El Salvador, and it was kind of the story about the way the U.S.
covered it up. And one of the investigators was this guy Major John McKay, who
was then a colonel when I was writing the piece, and who had talked to me, to
my great surprise, and did it off the record.
And
I asked him about a day, you know, as the piece was closing—it’s very hard to
do when this guy is in a particular position in El Salvador, it’s very hard to
put his comments in off the record because people will know who he is, so
there’s a great deal of art to trying to disguise his identity, and you can’t
use this quote, and you can’t use that quote, and it’s very, as you know, it’s
a very fraught process, and you’d much rather have his name attached. That way
you could use all the quotes.
Well,
about 24 hours before the piece closed, he let me understand—he was then a NATO
liaison officer in Belgium, in Brussels, and so I was talking to him every day
on the phone, and we were fact checking some of his stuff, and I told him I
can’t use that quote, I can’t use this quote because we can’t use your name.
And he said, you know, if you could get me clearance in the Pentagon you can
use my name. And so the last 24 hours were this horrendous attempt to…you know,
the Pentagon, you know what I mean? [Laughter.] It’s like dial the Pentagon, you know,
it’s…
So
we had to—and thank goodness there was a member of “The New Yorker” editorial
staff whose name I will not publicly mention, but who had had—I might
conceivably tell it to you later—but who had a relationship with a high
official in the Pentagon at the time, and it was a very off the record
relationship.
And
at the end of the day we prevailed upon this particular person to make a phone
call to his friend, and she was able to—I could not believe it. I ended up, in
those 24 hours, doing two versions of the piece that had his quotes in it, one
version off the record and one version on the record, which was extremely
maddening to do. It may have to do with his greatness as a lover or I don’t
know what, but he was able to get this approval at the very, really the very
last moment, and so we completely changed those sections of the piece that had
to do with McKay and published his name. So most of the last part was taken up
with that. I hadn’t expected it to be.
But
there were also, you know, “The New Yorker” fact checking process is rightly
legendary, and there were all these last minute things that, you know, when you
turn down the road to El Mozote you say you turned right, but it’s actually a
left, maddening things like that. And there was another official in the story
in the opposite direction. His name was Thomas Enders, who was the Assistant
Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs in the Reagan administration. He
claimed, when the fact checker called up to check his quotes, which they do,
which I think is not a good thing to do, but they do that, this guy claimed it
was all off the record, that he never said I could use his name.
And
so that was a complete tussle where I essentially said, you know, I never used
the phrase off the record, I never promised him anonymity. We had breakfast at
the St. Regis Hotel. I remember it very well. All these businessmen and us. And
I had never said it. I never said off the record. And some officials,
particularly diplomats, tend to assume, when they talk to journalists, it’s off
the record, but to me you have to say it. So I prevailed on “The New Yorker” to
leave those in quotes, and they did.
But
it was stuff like that over the last 24 hours. But it’s a great excitement to
close that kind of piece, great excitement, and that magazine has an amazing
staff, so I’ll never forget it. So thank you for that question, because those
are good memories.
Male: And
I just, because life is short, want to share with the room that when there was
this time, like you and eight editors at like 11:00 p.m., 10:00 p.m. in the
lunch room talking about it, and you all left, I was in the lunch room, and I
talked to somebody in that group. I said, who is this guy Mark Danner? And this
one person turns to me and goes, who the hell knows?
Danner: [Laughs.]
Male: And
a day or two later I realized the person who said who the hell knows was you.
Danner: [Laughs.] I don’t remember that, but I’m glad I was eloquent. That was the only answer to give. Thank you for that memory. I like that. Well, I think who the hell knows is a very good point for me to say thank you very much for your attention. I really enjoyed being here. And thank you for coming. And thank you for bringing me to Tulane. [Applause.]