Kal Raustiala 0:00
Good morning, everyone. I'm Kal Raustiala, director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations. And it's a pleasure to have you back for one of our webinars. Today, we have the pleasure of having as our special guest, Ben Rhodes, who's going to talk about his recent Atlantic article about the end of the 911 era. And so in a few minutes, I'm going to introduce Ben. Ben will speak and then he and I will have a conversation. We encourage you to pose questions through the q&a feature. And when we get to the second half of the hour, I will begin to wrap up our discussion and I'll start posing some of your questions to Ben. And we'll we'll run about one hour. So I also want to mention next week, next Wednesday, in fact, we're going to do I think our last webinar for the summer, which will be with our partner, Peter Singer of New America, talking about his new novel, Burnin, which is a kind of look into the future of warfare and cyber warfare in particular. And so Peters are really fantastic thinker and writer and, and I look forward to seeing you for that. So for today, as mentioned, Ben Rhodes. Ben is former Deputy National Security Adviser in the Obama administration, current co chair of National Security Action, co host of Pod Save the World which I highly recommend, in fact, both organizations, and a longtime friend of UCLA. So Ben, take it away. And I will be back to have some conversation with you in a few minutes.
Ben Rhodes 1:37
Great. Thanks, Kal. Thanks, everybody, for joining us for this. I'll just make some opening comments, kind of summarizing the argument I was making in this piece, and that can set up all kinds of directions that we can go in our conversation. And, you know, just to situate it, for me what was the genesis of this idea about the end of the 911 era is like everybody else, you know, the extremity of the lockdown come hit me in early March. And for me, I was taking a walk with my daughters. And we went down to Venice Beach, which was completely empty, desolate, which I'd never seen before. And my daughter picks up a dandelion. And makes you know, I said "make a wish" and she said that her wish was to make the Coronavirus go away. And for someone who worked in national security for eight years in the White House, what really hit me about that moment is that this crisis, COVID-19, is something that had hit everybody in America, including my daughter. She understood the crisis we're in in a way that terrorism never would or could. No terrorists could kill as many people as this disease already has. No terrorist act could have the economic impact that this has had. Perhaps the societal impact when we think about what the fallout is going to be, that we're already seeing in some ways. And when you consider that we've spent trillions of dollars preventing terrorist attacks, relative to what we spend on pandemics. You know, it hit me but it also wasn't a surprise. A pandemic is something that people have been warning about for many years. In the Obama administration, we dealt with H1n1, we dealt with Ebola more acutely in 2014. And, you know, by the end of the Obama administration, we're very seized with the fact that the dangers of issues other than terrorism far outweighed the risk of terrorism itself. And I'll come back to that in a second. And so for me, it recalled a sign that I saw once in a tour of the CIA operation center. That said, "Every day is September 12." And, you know, I understood the mentality that led the agency to put that sign up probably on September 12. And I also understood that that is kind of where America has been, both the American government, American politics, and in some ways American society more than we think ever since. I understood it because I was in New York, I witnessed 911, that compelled me into public service, led me down to Washington. I worked with the 911 Commission for two years kind of deconstructing that event and what it meant for our national security apparatus. I entered public partisan politics largely because of the Iraq War, which was how we had gotten the response to 911 wrong. I went to work for a guy Barack Obama who never would have been elected president were it not for the Iraq War and so in his own way, never would have been elected president with a 911. So I was someone, even before I entered government service, who had been shaped by 911. And as I reflected on the Obama administration, you know, I could see the many ways in which that presidency was shaped in part by 911. We entered office, inheriting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with over 150,000 troops and a massive counterterrorism apparatus, that it kind of reshaped the US government to prioritize this one issue, terrorism, above all others. There's probably a bank shot to the financial crisis that we inherited from the trillions of dollars that were reported to counterterrorism in those years. And in the first Obama term, in particular, you know, you could also feel working in national security, and the US government, the kind of gravitational force of 911. So a president elected to end wars, and he did remove 150,000 troops from Iraq gets pulled deeper in Afghanistan with the surge in 2009. We had very aggressive counterterrorism efforts in the first Obama term, we had controversial counterterrorism efforts like drone policy. The Arab Spring, in some ways, probably has some roots back into the post 911 environment, including the Iraq war, and the kind of hyperpolarization of the Middle East, from US military interventions, and from the kinds of leaders and places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who, in some ways legitimize themselves as partners of the US because of counterterrorism. At the same time, particularly in the second term of the Obama administration, Obama was very deliberately trying to end this error and move into a new one. And if you look at the signature components of Obama's foreign policy, in that second term, each of them in their own way are trying to move us into a post 911 world, a post post-911 world, I should say. The Iran nuclear deal meant to avoid another war in the Middle East that could have been precipitated by Iran getting a nuclear weapon and dealing with that challenge diplomatically. The Paris Climate Accord meant to kind of signal that climate change was going to be the new focus of American foreign policy. And I think people don't fully appreciate how much work went into the Paris Accord, not just in negotiating in the room, but in terms of using all of our bilateral and multilateral relationships to prioritize climate change in the second Obama term. The kind of pivot to Asia, the Trans Pacific Partnership, the focus that was put on the Asia Pacific region, was in many ways playing catch up to the rise of China, which had basically, I think, been largely ignored by the United States in the decade after 911. And so we were seeking to build an infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region that could shape the rise of China and shape the rules of the road, on everything from trade, to technology, to governance, in ways that were meant to influence Chinese behavior. Even the Cuba normalization, which I negotiated in government, was meant to kind of close the chapter in our history, tie up some loose ends, so that we could get past that and engage not just Cuba, but our own hemisphere without the baggage of history (obviously, a different historie than 911, but a similar mindset of seeing even an island of 11 million people is a threat). And, you know, at the same time that we were doing this, we were kind of pulled back by world events, and even more so by American politics, into this post 911 era, most acutely in terms of world events, ISIS and its emergence in the second Obama term obviously guaranteed that we were going to remain militarily involved in the Middle East, albeit with a very different model than the post 911 wars, without large us ground forces present. But even that is interesting to look back on because, you know, ISIS and ebola, terrorism and a potential pandemic, certainly an epidemic emerged at the same time. And one is so much more dangerous in a way than the other. I mean, ebola threatened to kill millions of people. And yet, you know, think about how much attention was paid to ISIS in our media and our politics versus ebola. It just shows you how hardwired we had become as Americans to see terrorism as inextricably linked to our national security, our concept of national security in a way that we don't think about pandemics. But beyond that, it's not just what 911 has done to our national security, but it's what it's done to our politics. That was so evident to me in the later Obama years, particularly as you know, the Republican party and certainly key elements in the Republican Party, kind of demonstrated almost as radicalization in a way around this kind of securitized us versus them post 911 mindset. There was this kind of toxic stew of issues. Why doesn't Obama say radical Islam? All the Benghazi investigations, of course, demagoguing refugees, demagoguing illegal immigration, that all very much tie back to this idea of fear of the other. And, you know, polarization for the purpose of security. That is very characteristic, I think, of post 911. America. And it shows you, you know, how what might have started as a very legitimate fear of terrorism morphed over time into this "us versus them" approach to politics. And into that current steps Donald Trump. And, you know, I think part of this, too, is the psychology of a nation that after 911 was promised great victories. I tried to imagine what it was like to consume, say, Fox News throughout the Bush presidency. You were constantly on the precipice of a great victory in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those victories did not materialize and never will materialize. And I think we haven't thought enough as a country about the fact that we did not win those wars. When countries don't win wars, often our politicians look for people to blame within. That's the most tried and true tactic of how these things happen in history. And so it became "blame Obama, blame Muslims" in the United States, blame people want to impose Sharia law here, blame illegal immigrants," all these things kind of got melded together in the person of Donald Trump. And as a president, despite his rhetoric about ending wars, he's done quite the opposite. He's escalated every war we inherited. There are 20,000 more US troops in the Middle East today than there were when he took office, largely because of his saber rattling with Iran. But even more so the securitisation narrative that I talk about, you know, MS-13, as his focus, immigrants, of course, as his focus, even recently, Antifa, you know, he wants to designate as a terrorist organization. It's the language of post 911 America that is weaponized, and the mindset. And so here we are in the midst of multiple crises. COVID, I think, is going to be perhaps the most transformative, but an economic crisis. And then, of course, the response to structural systemic racism in this country and police violence. This is a time to, I think, for a fundamental transformation of how we think about national security. The threats that we face, the challenges that we have to deal with, are not terrorism. It's still gonna be an issue, I'm not suggesting we don't pay attention to it. But when you measure it against climate change, against pandemics, against the emergence of new technologies, and how that's going to pose risks to privacy and economic security, when you look at the nationalist and authoritarian trend around the world that is challenging the very idea of democracy, the rise of China is a part of that. When you look at all that, we're not focused on the right things, our eye is not on the ball here. And at the same time, we have to fundamentally get our act together home, which I'll come back to in a second.So I'll just close here, because we can unpack some of this in Q&A, in terms of what does that mean, you know, I think in terms of our national security participation? I think it means wholesale shifting to the threats that I just talked about. You know, that means resourcing. We have we have a Pentagon budget that is way too big, in my judgment. It makes no sense that we have a plan as a country to spend a trillion dollars in the next decade, modernizing our nuclear weapons infrastructure. What for? Why is that money not being spent on the things that can prepare us for the world that we're actually facing? Why are we not investing more in research and development in this country, in the development of artificial intelligence, where we're being beaten by China? And the National Institutes of Health so that we're better prepared to deal with things like a pandemic? The National Science Foundation, our basic research base that helped us win the Cold War has been wholly neglected, particularly under this Trump administration? These are the kinds of investments that we're gonna have to make if climate change is an existential threat to the planet, which it is, the amount of money that we're spending on that challenge, from climate mitigation, to support for other countries, for the development of new technologies that can accelerate our ability to slow global warming, that resource allocation has to shift. So does the personnel structure of the US government, the promotion structure, the experts brought in in the last 20 years, State, DOD, and elsewhere, very focused on terrorism in the Middle East. They're great people, and they need to be a part of the answer to, but there has to be a shift to this other issue set. And so the kind of fundamental realignment of what the United States thinks about is national security and how we build a government to deal with that, I think, is what's required. And I've no illusions that that's easy to do. But one of the good things about being in government is you can say what you think should happen and recognize that it's going to take a lot of work to get there. A couple of other things. Beyond that, I think that, you know, we have to also recognize the change in mindset that has to take place here. One of the things I talked about in pieces, mindset towards government itself. There's been this multi decade assault on the role of government, "government is bad, bureaucrats are bad." I think we learned in COVID, that's who you need, that's your backstop against all these threats that we're going to face. And we need to kind of reinvest in the idea of what government can do for people in this country, and bring more people into serving government, and try to re energize the United States to deal with this new set of challenges that is going to shape our world. At the same time, I think obviously have to deal with our selves at home. As someone who deals with foreign policy, America is not gonna have any credibility and standing to do things in the world if we're not seen as getting our act together at home, even if we tried to do everything right in the world. You know, we're not credible in democracy if we're a country that makes it hard for people to vote, you know. There's a connection between how we get our democracy in order home and what we do around the world. We're not gonna be incredible on climate change around the world if we don't do something really substantial, significant and aggressive here at home. We're not going to be credible and dealing with the regulation of new technologies and disinformation and artificial intelligence if we're not doing that here at home with companies like Facebook. So across the board, we have to see that the lines between what we're doing here and what we're doing around the world have to go away, because these issues are all fundamentally interconnected. And of course, most profoundly, as particularly young people have reminded us the last few weeks, if we are not seen as dealing with our own systemic issues involving race and immigration and how people are treated in this country, we have no moral authority to lead the world. On the other end, if we do, if we're seen as correcting those issues, if we're seen as making progress on those issues, that gives us a lot of standing to once again have some moral authority in the world. So all of these things, you know, I think are very much connected. And I'll just end, Kal, before we move to conversation, with one anecdote I put in the piece that kind of drives this home to me is that when I taught at UCLA last year, you know, I was teaching presidential speeches. And I remember, we read the speech that George Bsh gave to a joint session of Congress after 911, which is a very sobering speech. And it was very well received at the time, I thought it was very well done at the time. But when you read that today, you know, Bush is calling for nothing less than making America's entire national purpose a global war on terrorism, that we were gonna have to reorient all government in society for this challenge and he compared terrorists to Nazi Germany and Soviet Communists. Reading that 20 years later, it was like reading another language. I understood it, but my students were 19 20, 21. It was like this document came from another planet. And we have to reckon with the fact that we got the response to 911 wrong and it's time to move on. And that the national purpose of this country has to be about bigger things than just fighting terrorism. And government and national priorities should reflect more the interest of those young people who are the future of this country, then, you know, relitigating and trying to course correct and do one more surge in the Middle East to deal with the fact that we got this wrong. It's time to move on. And in a strange, tragic way, I think this COVID moment offers that opportunity (if there's a change in presidency, certainly, but it goes far beyond the presidency). This has to be embedded in lots of different aspects of American politics, government and society. So Kal, I'll stop there and look forward to the conversation.
Kal Raustiala 20:22
Great, thanks, Ben. That was a fantastic way to open. Let me ask just the very end talked about that COVID moment as being a particular opportunity. And obviously, in the piece itself, which I recommend to all the viewers, you sort of invert the way you did your remarks, you, you have the anecdote about your daughter at the very end, but the same message comes through. And I guess I just wanted to get you to expand a little bit on what you think the particular impact of the COVID moment is for your argument. So in other words, were we already at the end of the post 911 era and COVID just makes it really clear, or did it really have kind of a causal impact?
Ben Rhodes 21:04
Well, I think, you know, personally, I think we should have been at the end of the 911 era, you know, about a decade ago, and I fought all these battles in the Obama administration then left the Obama administration with a lot of scars for fighting those battles. So no, I don't think it was a preordained conclusion. I mean, you know, Kal, one of the things I point out in pieces, almost absurdly to think about, um, you know, at the same time that COVID was already out, right, the president of the United States knew about COVID. This country came this close to going war with Iran. And that happened in like, January, I know, it seems like a decade ago...
Kal Raustiala 21:37
10 years ago...
Ben Rhodes 21:38
I mean, so that's and that... don't think that that's not a post 911 war. I mean, that, you know, this kind of, you know, if we can unpack that the fact that getting rid of Saddam Hussein emboldened Iran, which led the same people that got rid of Saddam Hussein to think that now we got to get rid of the Iranian regime. But that, to me is the clearest indicator that, you know, and look at what we talked about in terms of foreign policy, Iran terrorism, police, like, so I think we were still very much in 911, even if, you know, wasn't quite as as prominent. And I think we've still very much we're insensitive. I think Trump's brand of politics is impossible without 911. The group... this kind of xenophobic America first mentality is a very post 911 thing. So I think it was still very much the case, I think COVID... and frankly, Trump was probably a slight favorite to be reelected before COVID, you know, and that's, I think, changed. So because they think COVID kind of communicated to America the cost of having an incompetent government, and having, you know, an incompetent demagogue as president and not being engaged in the world in a way that could allow you to work with other countries to stop this disease, or mitigate it, at least, before it came here in the scale that it did. The other thing I'd say quickly about this Kal, though, is that having looked to the financial crisis, which was a seismic event, albeit one probably not as big as COVID, that transformed politics around the world. My basic theory is that that event caused a collapse of confidence around the world, particularly in the West, in globalization and democracy. And that all this nationalism and authoritarianism we've seenhas roots in the financial crisis, it's a backlash to globalization and liberal democracy, which people felt had failed. And there's going to be a backlash because of COVID. And particularly, frankly, because of the economic fallout that is going to come from COVID. Where's that backlash going to hit? What lesson are we going to draw from it? I hope and this is a first effort in this article by me, but everyone's going to have to think about this. Try to figure that out. What... this is going to play out over three to five years, you know, and what lessons does the world draw from COVID? And what do we do about that?
Kal Raustiala 24:06
Yeah, those are gonna be huge issues. And you raise there's so many things and kind of raised or implicit in your remarks and in your piece. But let me kind of focus on two for the moment. So one is China. So you talked about China, then I want to talk about the Middle East. But so let's start with China. Is it your sense... I mean, a lot of people have this view and I imagine you might, too, but tell me how you think about this... that one of the problems with the post 911 approach that you talked about, this kind of unyielding focus on terrorism that continued, even arguably, through the Obama administration, to a large degree, that it allowed us to take our eye off the real ball, which was the fact that China was rising with incredible speed, economically, politically, diplomatically, militarily, and now we face a very, very different world and in many ways, COVID maybe just accelerating that. So is that sort of the single biggest problem with what we did is that not now we are not prepared (and I'm not trying to argue that China is necessarily an enemy, but China is certainly a competitor or a rival there many ways think about China), but that we were not sufficiently focused on China as a result?
Ben Rhodes 25:18
Yeah, there's no question that's true. And I should add, I just want to say, because, you know, your point about... When I look back on the Obama administration, the things I find fault with us on, you know, were the, you know, the surge in Afghanistan, for instance, the kind of, you know, the pieces of, obviously, the, the support for the Saudi war in Yemen, the things that kind of extend out of the post 911 mindset. And what's really interesting to look back on this, Kal, is that those are not the things that we were faulted for at that time. You know, in other words, particularly in the kind of foreign policy establishment, those were basically status quo policies. It was these other things that we were trying to do that roiled the waters, and the principal thing that President Obama was trying to do was to get us out of the Middle East so we could focus on Asia and focus on China. I mean, that was the strategic point that he was making in a lot of this. The Iran deal is very much, honestly, part of China's strategy, which is, we can't afford to fight a war with these guys, like the Chinese are catching up and passing us while we're, you know, focused on a relatively small country. It's totally bizarre. I think people and historians will look back at this obsession with Iran and it makes very little sense that, at a time when there was a massive emerging superpower in Asia, so much of Washington was consumed with this relatively small country, where the only real issue for our national security in terms of like an existential threat was the nuclear issue. So if we could deal with that through a nuclear agreement, we don't have to fight that war, Iran can get a nuclear weapon, we'll continue to obviously deal with some of the issues related to Iran and foreign policy, but it's not, you know... China's a much bigger challenge in Iran. And so I think we totally, you know, I remember, you know, one anecdote I tell about this is, I remember going to Copenhagen in 2009 for the Climate Change Conference that fell apart. And we get there and the whole conference is in disarray. And basically, the reason why is that the Europeans were thinking that, you know, Europe would kind of craft this climate change agreement and the Americans come in and we'd figured out a middle and get everybody on board. The Chinese had a lot more votes in that room than we did. They had the entire block of basically the rest of the world. And I remember flying home with Obama on Air Force One, and we had this conversation where it's like, you know, "People like to write these articles back home about how China is rising. Well, they already rose, that happened in the first decade of the 21st century." And then I think, after the financial crisis they saw "Okay, now we can start flexing our muscles a bit more." And yes, I think it's very much the case that while America was focused on the Middle East, China was just steadily advancing and asserting itself. And I don't want to suggest that's all bad. You know, I mean, it's natural that a country that is lifting hundreds of millions people out of poverty, accumulating more wealth, is going to one more influence the world. But the question is, where does that influence lead? And I think with Trump, they realized they had a once in a century opportunity to essentially undo key aspects of the international order. Because the US had left the table, it just walked away from it. And when you look at everything from the Belt Road Initiative to how they're asserting themselves in territorial disputes, to Hong Kong, to their application of surveillance technologies, the kind of construction of this techno-totalitarian model, putting a million Uigyurs in prison camps, you know, I could go on... they are accelerating their behaviors to take advantage of a moment when America is maximally distracted by the fact that Donald Trump is president. And, you know, what worries me about.. I think the one way to... you could go on about this, but I just point to the fact that, you know, it's not... if you just look at it as "Okay, China's the new superpower, they're the enemy. What do we do about that?" I actually think that's the wrong prism. And not just because I worry that that prism could lead to conflict, but also because it's not just China. It's what's underneath these issues, you know. China, what do I worry about? Well, I worry about the fact that China is basically perfecting this authoritarian model where you use artificial intelligence and technology to set up kind of a perfect hermetically sealed surveillance system in your country. And you basically wipe out any possibility for political opposition, any sense of liberty and privacy as I understand it. That's what the people of Hong Kong are afraid of. That's why they're protesting, you know, because they see that coming to that. And I see that exporting beyond China's borders, that's not just a China issue though, Kal, that's a technology issue. That's what's going to be done with these technologies, what privacy constraints can be put on these technologies? What is the definition of liberty and democracy in a world in which states have access to that kind of technology, right? So yes, China's the clearest manifestation of what you worry about in terms of the scenarios. But it's a much bigger issue than just China. When you look at territorial disputes and the risk of flashpoints of war in South China Sea, in Taiwan, and even recently in the Himalayas, with India, yes, that's a more assertive China. But it also shows you that the international system has broken down in its capacity to resolve territorial disputes, that what worked in Europe is frayed and is not working in other parts of the world. You know, and I could I could keep going on, I won't, because you could go on forever. But since the point is it's... Part of this is, yes, China emerged, and they're throwing their weight around, and they're supplanting our influence in Africa and Latin America, in, certainly, in Asia, and potentially in Europe. But it also means that as they do that, they're going to be the ones answering these questions about how are these technologies used? What's the future of the Internet? What's the future of politics? They're not shy about suggesting, "Hey, we have a better model than your democracy. Everybody should sign on to this kind of model." You know, I don't want to live in that world. But that's not just because of China. That's because I don't like authoritarianism. And I don't like, you know, a world in which there's no rules except might makes right, you know. And so that's, we both took our eye off China, but we also... and what Obama, I think to his credit, was really trying to do, totally swimming against the current, not just here, but many ways what was happening around the world, was trying to put in place the new rules. TPP had standards not just on trade but labor and environment. The Paris Accord: here's a new form of international agreement and cooperation that can allow us to deal with climate change. You know, what are the rules that govern cyber? We even got China to sign on to some of those... Granted a big first step, but hopefully you would have built on that. And so to me, the China question is inextricably linked to the fact that we're paying attention to the wrong issues. It's not just not paying attention to China, we're not paying enough attention to the issues that China raises.
Kal Raustiala 32:42
I agree one hundred percent with that. And in fact, you kind of addressed along the way the issue of the focus on the Middle East, which I think we both share a view that it's been somewhat unrelenting for a period of time even before 911 to a degree that doesn't really make sense when American foreign policy perspective and definitely doesn't make sense today. But let me ask you about something else. So you talked about a, you know, a sense of new rules or lack of rules and kind of being emboldened and I'm thinking yesterday, I got a call from a reporter from a major Japanese newspaper, asking about Trump's claim that he was going to withdraw a large number of troops from Germany and what did that signal? What did that mean? And obviously, from the point of view of a Japanese newspaper, what did it mean for Japan and for American credibility in Asia? So I'm just curious about... you don't need to focus on Asia necessarily. But you know, number one, I know in the Obama administration, you did, the President and others, did at times push our allies to spend more on defense. You know, do you think that that is a legitimate problem? Or to what degree do you think? And do you think it makes sense to bring some troops back? You know, you talked earlier about our overspending on nuclear weapons, which I completely agree with, but many people today are also, (I personally agree a little bit less with this) but are also focused on our overseas basing as a kind of wasteful exercise. I hear that rhetoric around even issues around policing, and we should be diverting money from overseas bases to put into social programs to be able to defund the police, that kind of logic. So I'm just curious how you see America's footprint abroad. And do you think we need to rethink that in this current era that we're entering?
Ben Rhodes 34:28
Yeah, well, one obvious place is the Middle East, right, where I think we have, you know, too big of a footprint. To me the issue here is that... it's the bases but also what the bases represent to those countries, right? For Japan, for South Korea, for Germany, you know, anchor allies of the US, it's a manifestation of our absolute commitment to their security, broadly defined. It's not just that, you know, we'll protect them if, you know, in Europe, if the Russians come in and Asia, if the Chinese come in, right? It's also the clearest manifestation of the fact that we're on the same team, you know, so therefore we cooperate on everything. We basically we start from the premise that we want the same kind of world, you know. It's interesting being coming into government and you notice that, you know, you sit down with allies, and you pretty much agree with where you're trying to go. You might disagree about some tactics, but the starting point is that we all agree, and so therefore, let's figure out what we're going to do together about x issue, you know. And because we have that kind of role, Europeans for a long time kind of looked to us to set the direction on a lot of geostrategic issues that went beyond hard security, you know, that went into development, that went into issues of human rights, that went in into, you know, even, you know, issues where Europe was out in front of us on climate change, you know, when we come in, then we can get a Paris Agreement done. I say all that to make the point that what I see in Europe is, they don't feel like the United States, you know, cares anymore, you know, that we don't have a fundamental kind of baseline commitment to their security. And we don't have an agreed upon set of common interests that is the basis for us doing things together. And that could be very dangerous for us. You know, it's easy to say, "Well, they should spend more money on defense," and I'll come back to that in a second. But here's what they're gonna do. They're gonna make their own deals with China, you know. They prefer I think that these issues like, "Hey, what, how are we going to set standards around the internet? How we can get set standards on the development of 5g? How are we going to set standards on development of artificial intelligence technologies, all of which can implicate privacy concerns, the weaponization of artificial intelligence, all these things?" I'd rather that we sat down with Europe and figured out what our standards are (and with by the way, Japan and South Korea and others) and then went to China and said, "Okay, here's what we figured out. Now let's go share with you." What the Chinese want is to say "No, get the Americans out of there. We'll just go bilaterally, 'Hey, Germany, like, what, let's figure out what the rules are.'" And we're going to lose in that game. And so, I think people don't fully appreciate that doing things like pulling troops out of Germany like that without consulting with the German government has all these other ripple effects that will affect all these other issues. It's not just whether we have troops there. It's whether Germany thinks that we're in this together on all of these issues, you know. And so on the basic question, like, should Europe spend a bit more in defense? Yeah. But I mean, I on the scale of things I worry about, like that is way down on the list. And frankly, if you look at our defense budget, these bases are not the preponderance of the expenditures. I mean, so yeah, I think over time, we can figure out how to reduce our footprint in some places. But we should do this in consultation with our allies. And the last thing I'd say about this is that the idea that this has been a gift from us to these countries is one of the worst ideas that emanates from the kind of American pursuit. We have gotten so much out of the influence that we have because of our relationships with countries like Japan and South Korea and Germany. That is what allowed us to basically write the rules that the world operated under for 75 years. And to think that that was a charity to them when we could count on them, that we could count on them for again, not just that we have a military lines, you know, how much has Japan funded our development priorities over the years? Every time we had a development prioirity, like Japan would step up the plate with anybody. Why can they do that? Well, in part because they don't have a huge defense budget, because we have the bases there. And so there are all kinds of secondary benefits that we get from these relationships that I think people don't see in this country, but they see them in those countries. And that's why they're so offended, frankly, by -- rightly -- by how Trump is approached this.
Kal Raustiala 39:31
I agree 100%. So let me go...we have so many great questions from viewers. So I'm gonna go to them and I want to apologize in advance to the many people who post questions whose questions I won't get to you. But let me start off with this one. So a bit of a long question, but a good one. So the question is, is part of the problem in absence of long term strategic thinking? We spent a decade and trillions of dollars expanding the national security state reacting to a single terrorist attack. But of course, 911 was a more focusing event than the multitude of challenges we face now. So what's at the root of the problem? Is it the media, a failure of leadership, our education system, polarization politically? What do you see as the chief kind of driving force?
Ben Rhodes 40:16
That's a fantastic question, is the question...
Kal Raustiala 40:20
Ben, you're muted.
Ben Rhodes 40:21
I should be unmuted now, right? Yeah. Okay. That's a fantastic question. And the question, and I think about this all the time, because some days, I think it's one thing... I will I'll tell you what it's not. It's not the fact that some people haven't sat down and written like a grand strategy. It's not about the strategic thinking. It's not about the national security strategy. It's not about that we need a new Long Telegram like George Kennan. It's about our politics. Because ultimately, you know, our national security is responsive to our politics, you know, our grand strategy... like, just, you know, if Obama had a grand strategy, it was to get us out of the Middle East and to deal with all that stuff. It was politics and media culture in this country that kept pulling us back in. I mean, if you look at the the... you know, I mentioned, you know, ISIS. ISIS, you know, when that became the hyper focus of, of this entire country in 2014, it was when they killed four Americans, tragically, and I not minimizing the loss of any American life. But what is it about our politics and society that a terrorist organization can kidnap and kill four Americans and turn this country completely upside down? There's, I remember, you know, even early in the Obama administration, we're in the depths of a financial crisis, we've got 150,000 troops and failing wars. And you had the Christmas Day bomber, who didn't even succeed in hurting anybody except himself, lighting his underwear on fire. And it consumed our media or politics for weeks. And this is what I'm talking about, this this kind of mindset. You can have the best grand strategies in the world. But if the politics of this country that Congress responds to, that the media responds to, you know, is hardwired to be afraid of certain things and not others, you're going to do, to quote my old boss, "stupid stuff," you know, like, you know, going to war after war in the Middle East. And
Kal Raustiala 42:26
I don't think you're really quoting your boss, if I remember right, but can I just interject on that? Isn't part of... I'm not going to defend that position was vociferously, but isn't part of the issue that people fear that if you don't react strongly, you will embolden? And so at bottom there's a deterrence rationale and a credibility rationale. I totally agree, we go overboard, but it's not like being hit by lightning, though...
Kal Raustiala 42:53
But Kal, what I'd say here is, how many Americans are killed by gun violence in this country? Clearly, Americans can be resiliant, too resiliant in my view, I mean, we can be resilient to tens of thousands of Americans getting killed by weapons, that we know that if you just remove those weapons, if you look at other countries, that wouldn't happen. Why is it acceptable that tens of thousands of Americans get killed by gun violence in this country, but it's unacceptable four Americans get killed in the Middle East? There's something... that happens, because politicians..
Kal Raustiala 43:28
I agree 100%.
Ben Rhodes 43:28
And by the way, to answer the question, and I don't wanna go too long, because I know there are others, it's all the things you said. It's a politics in which after 911, Americans were told that by their leaders that terrorism can can wipe us out, you know, that they'll get nuclear weapons and the wipe us out. That was the rationale for the Iraq War. It wasn't true. You know, it's the media that loves to cover a scary story about brown people trying to kill Americans, um, to put it very bluntly. And just every time a terrorism story popped up, it was like a herd, you know, that they're going to cover that. A lot easier to cover than climate change, you know. I remember when we went to Paris for the Paris talks around climate change. You know, we kept getting this question, "What's the bigger threat, ISIS or climate change?" And they, you know, which is an insane... of course climate change! But that was a controversial thing to say, you know, in our media environment. Our education system, I think, is the least appreciated of this and I absolutely agree and unfortunately I'm not an expert on this, but something has broken in our education system that led us here and I this one, I... All the smarter people about this at UCLA can figure this out, but there is something about how Americans, their basic understanding of history in the world. And I'm not saying this, I don't want to come across... but we're just not on the kind of... well, I'll leave it at this. The fact that America is the only country in the world that has a major political party that does not believe that climate change exists, that denies the reality of science, that's directly linked to the fact that there are Americans who refuse to wear masks today. Something is wrong in our education system when science and facts are not viewed as science and facts. So I'll stop there. But that question is the whole ballgame in my view.
Kal Raustiala 45:34
Great, great. Okay. So next question. How does the issue of insecure nuclear facilities which terrorist groups try to infiltrate, such as those in Pakistan, factor into the end of the 911 era that you identify? Sorry, one more sentence, the last part. Could one say that the insecurity of certain weapons of mass destruction and the desire for terrorist organizations to obtain them means a new wave of the 911 era? In other words, could it come back?
Ben Rhodes 46:02
Yeah, it could come back. And this is... I don't want to minimize, you know, that there is... I don't want to suggest there's no threat from terrorism and obviously, nuclear terrorism is the worst threat, but what I encountered in government, right, is... So we did this series of nuclear security summits, which is entirely devoted to nuclear terrorism, bringing together dozens of countries to do very hard and steady work on how do you set better security standards at nuclear facilities? How do you dispose of certain nuclear materials? Preventing nuclear terrorism is about that. It's not about invading and occupying Iraq, you know. And so actually, it's not that we shouldn't do counterterrorism, it's that the most impactful counterterrorism is like good intelligence work, good law enforcement work, cooperative approaches, you know, about what security standards at nuclear facilities should be. So that's what's so baffling to me about this, is that even if you do the things that you need to do to prevent these truly catastrophic terrorist scenarios, those are not the things that we've been doing. I mean, I'd like... well, we have been doing them, but they are not the the focal point, which was the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Kal Raustiala 47:15
Prevention is never very exciting to people, unfortunately,
Ben Rhodes 47:17
It's not exciting, but that's, you know, thousands of American lives have been saved because of America's counterterrorism infrastructure and the very good, well-meaning hard working brilliant people that work within it. But the point is that that work can continue without fighting war after war in the Middle East like that. That's my basic problem.
Kal Raustiala 47:39
Great. Okay, next question. Do you believe that the way the US has handled our COVID response will affect its previous quote "number one superpower standing" relative to the East Asian countries who had rapid and strong responses? So in other words, how will this you know, obviously, we do not look good... So how do you think this will play out geostrategically over time?
Ben Rhodes 48:02
Well, I think we're no longer seen as the superpower in the world and I think Americans don't fully appreciate the extent to which everybody else has already moved on, you know. They kind of took the measure of this... I mean, this was already happening, I think, because of Iraq. You know, we had kind of an artificial hegemony after the Cold War that was never gonna endure, you know, no country is that powerful for that long. I think Iraq really accelerated people saying, "Well, this is unstable, having America be so powerful they can do something that stupid is not a good approach." And you see, at that point, Russia beginning to push back more into Putin, you see the Chinese beginning to kind of emerge from their shell a bit more. But I think with Trump and Obama (Obama, in many ways, is trying to manage this process), America remaining the kind of number one superpower, but adjusting to a world in which America is not dominant. And I think part of what is was so controversial about Obama's foreign policy in Washington is he was acknowledging like, "We don't dominate the world." And I think, to, like, you know, the John Boltons of the world that was that was offensive, right? Now, because of Trump, like we don't we're not seen as having a unique moral standing. And we're not seen as competent, you know, and that's new. Five years ago, when ebola happened, we took over the whole response (when I say we wasn't me, I'm not you know, I'm giving credit to other people who are the experts in the government). But you know, Obama stepped in. The WHO failed, so we basically went and said, "Okay, WHO, we're taking this whole thing over, but we're working through the WHO. And so we're gonna become the captain of the team. We're going to send the US military to West Africa. They're going to build logistics hubs. We'll divide this up, you know, the US will take the Liberian response, the French will take the response of Guinea, the British will take the response in Sierra Leone." Then we went around the world to everybody and said, "Send us health care workers, send us health care equipment, give us money." Basically passed the hat around. Obama convened dozens of countries at the UN to do that. We got all the health care infrastructure we needed, we surged into West Africa, and we stamped out the outbreak there. That's what America did five years ago. And this we didn't even try. And so absolutely, I think it's going to create a sense that the Chinese may have been responsible for this initial outbreak but, like, they're more, they have a more competent way of dealing with it in ways that's going to be damaging to US standing. I do think where there's still an opening for the US is, but look, nobody else could really fill that void. So it's a world without American leadership, but there's not a... China's not leading the world. I mean, they may be more capable of shutting down whole cities, but South Korea is not leading the whole world. They're just doing this the best. So I think the opening for the next administration, if it's a Biden administration is that there's still a need for someone who can kind of mobilize collective action. I don't think we'll ever get back kind of what we had. But we can still be the, you know, the kind of the first among several certainly in mobilizing collective action. And that's what I think we need to do.
Kal Raustiala 51:11
Agreed, agreed. I want to turn to something about the Biden administration, but I resisted raising john bolton, but since you mentioned him... Do you want to just take 30 seconds to talk about what you think should happen with his book and what's happening right now in terms of the lawsuit? And, you know, whether you whether you think, you know, this is the kind of appropriate behavior for a presidential administration to clamp down on books of this nature?
Ben Rhodes 51:36
I mean, like, number one, you... anybody should be able to publish their book. We had plenty by the administration write books critical of us, including former Cabinet Secretaries. Both Secretaries of Defense Bob Gates and Leon Panetta created news cycles for whole weeks about things that they didn't like about Obama's policies. Number two, John Bolton, if he cared so much about... I mean, this is not, you know, Solzhenitsyn here, you know. I mean, if he cared so much about the truth, he could have testified in the impeachment inquiry. So what I think should happen, I think he should be able to publish his book. And then I think everybody should read the newspaper summaries of his book, and they don't have to, you know, buy it. Because if he really wanted the truth out he could have delivered it at the impeachment. But it is... you know, as much as I don't care for john Bolton's views, it is pretty extraordinary that they're just saying "No, like, we don't like this, you can publish it." I mean, that that's, you know, exhibit 999 of things happening in this country that we usually associate with authoritarian systems.
Kal Raustiala 52:44
Great. Okay, next question. The Trump administration has rescinded many of the foreign policy accomplishments of the Obama administration. How do you think future foreign policy initiatives can be insulated from domestic political volatility? Or is this risk unavoidable? And you might want to opine on what you think Biden will do.
Ben Rhodes 53:03
Yeah, I mean, I think that the risk is to some extent unavoidable. And look, even those foreign policy documents, which it's very painful to see onwound, you know, if Joe Biden wins, we'll come back into the Paris Agreement, and I think, probably resume like the Cuba opening we did, and he'll certainly try to probably get back into something like the Iran deal. So what's interesting is these things never go away, you know, the debates keep happening. I mean, you know, the tempting answers to say, well, you can insulate it by getting congressional, you know, by legislating these things, but that's not entirely true, because, frankly, Trump has also pulled out of a bunch of treaties that were confirmed by the Senate, you know. Basically every arms control treaty that the United States Senate confirmed, he's pulled out of those too. So, yes, you can make them more durable by having some legislative imprimatur on them. But the reality is that doesn't fully insulate you. It gives you some greater guardrails and makes it harder. You know, so, so ultimately, you know, you have to, you just have to win these debates in the long run. I think it is destabilizing and terrible that for the US... I mean, other countries are not, even if Joe Biden wins, are they really going to trust that we can? "Okay, we'll make an agreement with Joe Biden, but Tom Cotton could be elected in three years and rip it up." I think that's gonna be in the back of every government's head. The biggest thing I had to do to the Cuba opening is get the Cubans to trust me, that we would follow through on this. And you know, it wasn't an obvious thing for the Cubans to open embassies with us while they're still under an embargo, you know, and they got burned and the people that I negotiated with suffered for it in the Cuban system. That's a terrible precedent for what comes next. So, you know, sometimes the onus is put on the people who pursue international agreements to somehow solve this problem. No, I think people shouldn't tear up international agreements, you know, like... That's the simplest way is to not have a, you know, a foreign policy mindset that is predominant the Republican party today that just rips up any international agreement. That more than anything will solve this problem. Yeah.
Kal Raustiala 55:16
Okay, final question. So the question is your repeated use of the term the rise of China smacks of yellow peril McCarthyism. Why not promote collaboration with them as equals to deal with COVID, nuclear war, economic development, etc. So, can we do that? Is that something realistic?
Ben Rhodes 55:37
Well, first of all, I take real issue with the charge because the Chinese talk about the rise of China. You know, I mean, the Chinese talk about... If you look at Xi Jinping, the Chinese Dream, if you look at the goals he sets, you know, basically the the Communist Party measures itself on how it's rising, you know, that we are going to become a middle income country, and then we're going to become a wealthy country. So I do want to make very clear that you can talk about the rise. All the things you talk about are a problem. And I don't want to see McCarthyism. I don't want to see all this "yellow peril". But just saying that there's a rise of China? The Chinese talk about that, everybody... you know, that just the reality...
Kal Raustiala 56:16
Let alone most of Asia.
Ben Rhodes 56:18
Yeah. So I think we have to be able to talk frankly about it, you know, but you're right. I mean, if I disagreed with that part of it, what I agree with is... If you look at, you know, Steve Bannon or the language Trump uses, yes, it's driving us in this direction of, you know, racism and demagoguery. I think that the basic point is, look, I think it'd be a mistake to sugarcoat this. I, I don't I... I'm a liberal. I believe people should have... I don't like the fact that there are people with civil liberties in Hong Kong today and the Chinese government wants to take those away, you know. So that's, I think, an area where America should stand up and say, "we disagree with this." I'm not saying we should go to war about it, but that we should, you know, have that debate with the Chinese. By the way, read Chinese media about the US. It is not pleasant, right. But let's have that debate, but to your point, let's cooperate where we can, you know. We have to have a mature enough relationship here. And the way in which this doesn't have to become a Cold War is that I want to have a vigorous debate about political models with Chinese government. I want to try to put in place, you know, multilateral frameworks for how do you resolve territorial disputes in the South China Sea? I could go on, but I want to work with the Chinese on climate change. If the Chinese want to be very active in Africa, let's work together on development and investment strategies that can benefit countries. So I think you need to have space even if you are having very intense disagreements over here (and you know, I can do this on Zoom), that you still have some some, you know, some scenarios where you're working together. And the pandemic that we just went through is a classic example of that. Like, I would like us to have the kind of relationship where we could be in, you know, a fight with the Chinese about trading intellectual property and technology but when a pandemic happens, like, let's work together, let's make the... if the US and China were working together from the get go of this pandemic, it would've been a lot better for the world, a lot less people would've died. So while I don't want to minimize some of the dangers I see of the Chinese Communist Party's approach to politics in their country and around the world, I also don't want to suggest that that has to take over American foreign policy, or even America's relationship with China. It should be big enough that we can cooperate on some things well, being, you know, competitive or even confrontational on others.
Kal Raustiala 58:56
Well, I think that's a great place to end. And you know, what's interesting about the China issue is obviously, our two economies or two societies are very closely intertwined. But it is one of these things where you can occasionally see AOC and Tom Cotton signing on to the same basic position around China, which you'll see really nowhere else. So it's kind of a unique political issue at the moment. But anyway, we're at the end of our hour. Thank you so much, Ben, for coming on. Thank you, everyone for tuning in. And this will be available on YouTube, and I believe C-Span later on today. So thanks again Ben. Have a great day.
Ben Rhodes 59:28
Thanks, Kal. Thank you, everybody.