The Past Is Ever-Present For Bret Stephens

>> Andrew Robert: A former columnist on the Wall Street Journal, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Bret Stephens has been Editor in Chief of the Jerusalem Post and for the last five years has been a columnist on the New York Times. Brett, history matters to you, doesn't it? And I think it's obvious why.

Your paternal grandfather experienced a tsarist pogrom in Moldova in 1901, and your maternal grandparents had to flee both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. So history is visceral for you, isn't it?

>> Bret Stephens: I get to correct Andrew Roberts, 1903, as a matter of fact, there was-

>> Andrew Robert: There were the two pogroms, weren't there?

 

>> Bret Stephens: It was the pogrom of 1903, and my paternal grandparents were barely spared from one of the most vicious and infamous pogroms of the early 20th century, which is what forced the decision to leave for the United States as soon as possible. A good decision in light of what happened to Bessarabian Jewry in the subsequent decades.

 

>> Andrew Robert: And so history is its family, as well as an intellectual experience.

>> Bret Stephens: This wonderful line from Faulkner, the past is never dead. It's not even the past. That's been particularly true for my family on my mother's side. Her grandfather was arrested by the Dzerzynski's secret police in Moscow in 1918.

He was considered an unreliable element, and he was never heard from again, which sent the family fleeing to Berlin until the Nazis came to power, which sent them fleeing again to Italy just before the race laws of 1938. My mother was born shortly thereafter. So on both sides of my family, my experience of the world has been shaped by these antecedents.

And, of course, on my father's side, his mother was an artist who came to Mexico in the 1930s to paint murals with some of the great muralists of the time, Orozco, Siqueiros and Rivera, and that's how I wound up growing up in Mexico. So there's no escaping it in my case, or at least there was no escaping its obviousness in my life.

 

>> Andrew Robert: And you attended school in Concord, Massachusetts, at one point, which is obviously, is a place with unfortunate historical overtones for an Englishman like me.

>> Bret Stephens: Depends on your accent.

>> Andrew Robert: Well, absolutely, but today the founding fathers are under attack as never before. Well, never before since the days of Concord and Lexington.

Is there any hope for Jefferson and Washington and these other people who I was always brought up to believe were absolute giants of your country. But now, their names are being taken off schools, their statues are being moved in New York and so on. What's the story there, do you think, for the future?

 

>> Bret Stephens: Well, I hope there's hope, because what is happening in the United States is dangerous, not just for our memory of the past. I think it's dangerous for our future as well. Countries that rear their children to hate their own history are not necessarily countries that are prepared to struggle to preserve themselves.

If indeed you think, as some people now believe, that the history of the United states is an unremitting history of racism and white supremacy, then what is there to fight for? And that ought to worry us, I mean, on many grounds. I think there's hope, because the side of American life that cares about history in a deep way, I think, is less ideological and less simplistic than the other side.

But we're doing great damage to American children these days by telling them that Jefferson was nothing other than a hypocritical slave owner or that Washington wasn't the man who led us to an independence. And a republic which could conceive of the end of slavery as a foundational principle, but again, just another, another slaveholder.

So we're one of these periods that almost feels, in its own way, reminiscent of what the Taliban did on the eve of 911. Remember when they blew up those statues of the Buddhas? There's an aspect of this now that's very much afoot, and whether we can turn it around, I think is an open question.

I think when I wrote a lengthy piece in the New York times denouncing the 1619 project, I got a lot of support for that. But the support, it struck me, seemed to come from older voices, and I wonder how much it resonated with younger ones.

>> Andrew Robert: The magazine you edit, the SAPIR Journal, now in its 7th courtly edition, it's devoted this latest issue to cancellation.

And in it, in your editorial, you say cancel culture is a cancer at the heart of liberal society. You break it down into five component parts, an action, a method, a capitulation, a mentality, and a culture. Tell us more about that, because obviously it does lead on the 1619 project.

Those who are criticizing it, some of those people have been cancelled already. Talk us through the action method, capitulation, mentality, and culture, if you can.

>> Bret Stephens: Well, the action, strictly speaking, is cancellation, but really it's a form of annihilation. It's not simply a matter of losing a speaking gig, or a book contract, or even a job.

A canceled person is going to lose those things. He's also gonna lose his friends, he's gonna lose his reputation, and in some tragic circumstances, they will lose their lives. There are cases of people who were canceled and they perhaps had depressive streaks or just couldn't take the pressure, and the result was a tragedy.

I won't go through all the steps, but maybe I should mention two things that are particularly important. Cancel culture can't happen except when the people who are in charge let it happen. That is to say, if a Twitter mobile decides that Andrew Roberts has expressed some terrible opinion, well, who cares, right?

Maybe you're not the best example because you're an independent.

>> Andrew Robert: No, I am, I assure you there are lots of Twitter mobs that have said precisely. That, but as you say, a Twitter mole-

>> Bret Stephens: You're not reporting to an organization that has it within its power-

>> Andrew Robert: No, that's true, my mortgage isn't paid by an organization, exactly.

 

>> Bret Stephens: But say if your publishers were simply to decide you're too toxic to publish, that's the aspect of capitulation. It's the surrender, the institutional surrender to the mob, which is so extraordinarily disheartening that these institutions, which from the outside seem so strong and robust and talk about their values, sort of collapse on first inspection.

And we've seen it happen time and again with distinguished people with long careers having their lives ruined over either a mistake or something. That wasn't necessarily a mistake, it was just a judgment which turned out to be unpopular. But the final point is the question of culture, because what matters here isn't that person X was canceled.

I mean, it matters to person X, it matters to his family, but it creates a culture of fear. That is to say, for every person who's canceled, there are 100 people who then fear they might be canceled. And so the result is a process of self silencing, of not taking intellectual risk, of not saying certain things, of engaging in a kind of endless double think and double speak in order to avoid the risk that they might find themselves in the crosshairs.

And so what cancel culture does, even if relatively few people are directly canceled, is it casts this pall on what ought to be a vibrant, robust, open culture of disagreement and debate, which is, after all, at the heart of what makes for a lively, progressive, in the best sense, liberal society.

 

>> Andrew Robert: We've got an example going on in Britain at the moment, where a man called Nigel Biggar has written a very well reviewed book on colonialism, which attempts to put it in its historical context. And it makes absolutely no, it's a highly objective book. There's not a sentence in it that the opponents have managed to take out and disprove.

And yet Bloomsbury, his publisher, canceled him, or at least canceled the book. And it's a nerve-wracking thing when they can actually, the editor, said how good the book was before there was a backlash. It's thought to be amongst the younger, more woke employees of the firm, and so they canceled the book.

 

>> Bret Stephens: Many years ago, Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz's late wife and a great figure in her own right, wrote a book called Liberal Parents, Radical Children. I think that book came out in the seventies, and we're seeing a kind of a reprise of that, because the people who run many of these institutions, publishing houses, deans at universities, publishers and editors at magazines and newspapers, they're all liberal.

And if you had a conversation with them, they would tell you, of course we stand for free speech. Of course there has to be room for disagreement. Of course we should be pushing the boundaries of what can be thought and said. And yet they cower in the face of the editorial assistants and interns and junior editors who are a handful of years out of college and demanding that there should be sensitivity reads and other kind of somewhat maoist-style frameworks to prohibit the expression of opinions they dislike.

And what I don't understand about is, all it would take to bring this to an end is some publisher saying, if you don't like working here, if you don't like what we're publishing, you can leave, you can go. And as far as I can tell, very few of them, none that I can think of, have had the nerve to say that.

And so that issue is not simply a political issue. It's almost a psychological issue as to why these upstanding middle aged liberals who have reached the pinnacles of their profession are so terrified of upsetting the juniors who just showed up in the office, a year or two ago.

And I don't pretend to understand it, Andrew.

>> Andrew Robert: SAPIR is a Jewish magazine, isn't it, the-

>> Bret Stephens: It is.

>> Andrew Robert: It's ideas for a thriving Jewish future. Why does cancel culture have a particular resonance for jews?

>> Bret Stephens: Well, for a number of reasons. Number one, we're the most canceled people in the world.

So we should care about it because if cancel culture takes root in one part of the culture, it's bound to take root in others. And invariably, we run the risk of becoming the target of it. Secondly, we have a culture that believes in what's called argument for the sake of heaven.

 

>> Bret Stephens: Well, Judaism, interestingly, is a religious tradition that invites and memorializes the dissenting view. In most other religious traditions, if there are dissenting views, they're either suppressed or they become schismatic and move in another direction. But Judaism has always operated with the idea that these dissenting views have inherent value and should be maintained as part of the broader tradition, which is, I think, helps explain the jewish attraction to the legal profession, where dissenting views also have some sway.

I think the third aspect is that there is something about jewish culture which is ironic, irreverent. It takes a view of human nature, even of our patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, all of these are complex figures. Not one of them is a simple black and white good or bad type of figure.

And cancel culture frowns on all of that. In cancel culture, there are only evil oppressors and stainless victims. In cancel culture, there is a correct opinion and there is heresy. And all of this ought to threaten us because if Jews are true to those traditions of both mind and practice, then we're bound to run afoul of cancel culture.

And I guess the last aspect is this, which is that for one reason or another, Jews disproportionately are represented in the liberal institutions in which cancel culture is now taking root, right, in academia, in publishing, and so on. So just by that fact alone, Jews are that much more in the crosshair.

So we thought that this issue was sufficiently important that we had to devote an, the subject was sufficiently important that we had to devote an entire volume of essays to it.

>> Andrew Robert: Yeah, they're very powerful. You edited The Jerusalem Post during the worst Years of the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign.

Do you think that the Abraham Accords show now that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is no longer the defining feature of the Middle Eastern politics, at least in the way that it once was?

>> Bret Stephens: I mean, I would rephrase that slightly. I never think it was the defining feature, I think it was never the defining feature of Middle Eastern politics.

It's just that that has become more obvious to more people.

>> Andrew Robert: Right, yeah.

>> Bret Stephens: If you sort of do an accounting of the loss of human life in the Middle east from the creation of the state of Israel, 1947/1948, to the present, the places where the real bloodletting took place within some of these dictatorships, within Saddam's Iraq.

Or between the dictatorships between Saddam and Iran during the eight year Iran Iraq war, in Yemen, during the proxy battle between Nasser and the saudi kingdom in the early 1960s, the Lebanese civil war, all of these had a toll in lives and a significance that was much greater than what happened between Israelis and Palestinians.

It's just that Palestinians and their allies managed to fashion a narrative which suggested that this was really the only conflict that counted in the region. And it's now, in the last 10 or 15 years, as it's become apparent to more people, particularly within the Arab world, that their real enemy is not the state of Israel, their real enemy is the Islamic Republic of Iran, that that has really begun to shift.

I think the signing of the Abraham Accords effectively put an end to the Arab- Israeli conflict. Didn't put an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it means that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now kind of a secondary one to what used to be the much larger conflict. That's over, now you have a de facto Israeli-Arab alliance facing the radicalism and the encroachments of Shiite power not just in Iran, but in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere.

 

>> Andrew Robert: Yeah, well, let's talk about the Iranian nuclear deal. Because in 2014, you wrote America in Retreat, The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder, which was immensely prescient considering everything that's happened since. Do you see the Biden administration's stance over the Iranian nuclear deal as fitting into your theory?

 

>> Bret Stephens: I don't know what the Biden administration stance is anymore. They came to office promising a longer, stronger deal, essentially re-entering the old JCPOA deal but with stronger provisions and a longer duration. That was a non-starter from the very beginning. And the negotiations had effectively failed even before Iran became Russia's best friend, prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Now the negotiations have effectively been declared dead. But there's no framework that I can see the administration using in terms of what we do next. And that's profoundly problematic because Iran is moving at great speed toward acquiring all of the elements needed for a robust nuclear weapons capability.

They're in separate baskets right now, the question of nuclear enrichment in one basket, ballistic missile development in another, and weaponization in a third. But once they have everything, once those baskets are full, each basket is full. Bringing them together can be done very, very quickly. And I don't know what Biden proposes to do.

He doesn't talk about it, I don't hear Jake Sullivan or Antony Blinken talking about it, there's just a complete vacuum.

>> Andrew Robert: Do you think there might be a secret plan, or do you think there's no plan at all about what to do about it?

>> Bret Stephens: I get the sense that the administration is consumed with Ukraine and with China, and Iran is a tertiary note there.

 

>> Andrew Robert: You mentioned Ukraine, obviously the Abraham Accords took place under Donald Trump's presidency. He's on record as calling you a lightweight journalist, one of the Pulitzer Prize winning lightweight journalists, presumably. And you're on record as having likened him to Mussolini. Were he to become president again, what happens in Ukraine, would you guess?

 

>> Bret Stephens: I don't know, Trump, there's an incoherence at the heart of Trumpism that makes its actions difficult to predict. Trump likes to say, well, if he were still president, he would have solved Ukraine and the Ukrainian issue in a day. He has gone out of his way to flatter Putin, but his administration also did much more to sanction Putin than either his predecessor or Joe Biden did, at least up until the Ukraine war began.

And obviously, Trump's first impeachment had to do with his efforts to strong arm the Zelensky government into providing political dirt on the Biden family, which didn't work out too well. So I'm leery of people who say, well, if Trump were president, either Putin would never have invaded or we would have taken care of this a long time ago.

You can look into the Trump record and see instances where he acted quite decisively, as with the killing of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian terror supremo, if you will. He was killed by a drone strike in Baghdad. But I also remember that Trump did nothing to respond to Iran after Iran used drones to take out some huge percentage of the world's oil supply with an unprovoked attack on Saudi Arabian refining facilities in 2019.

So I don't know how to answer your question other than to say that I am confident that Trump will not again be president of the United States.

>> Andrew Robert: So tell me more because this is interesting. You think that there won't be a huge number of people who stand or just that he won't get enough votes to slip between the large number of candidates.

 

>> Bret Stephens: I don't think he can possibly win another general election.

>> Andrew Robert: I see, even if he became the Republican-

>> Bret Stephens: Even if he became the nominee.

>> Andrew Robert: Nominee, he would be beaten by any Democrat.

>> Bret Stephens: Well, I don't want to say any Democrat, but by most Democrats, including by-

 

>> Andrew Robert: All the likely ones, yes.

>> Bret Stephens: Including by Joe Biden. Remember, Joe Biden beat him by 7 million votes. You can look at a number of states that were close, but in many of those states, those states have only gone more blue since Biden's election, Arizona being a great case in point.

Trump did himself profound damage by his refusal to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election and by holding on to the lie of a stolen election. And in 2016, there was just enough discontent in the country and just enough for belief that maybe an outsider and a bit of a loose cannon could shake things up.

I don't see this country voting for that again. I say this with humility because I've been wrong before, but I would add further, I don't see the Republican Party nominating him again. It could happen, but I would be exceptionally surprised if it did. Not simply because Trump lost in 2020, but because Trump lost the Senate in 2021 when his insistence on a stolen election cost the Republican Party two Senate seats in Georgia.

He lost it again in 2022 by endorsing a succession of losers in senatorial races in Pennsylvania, in Arizona. And I'm missing another close race that will come to me. But he'll also lose it because Ron DeSantis, his likeliest challenger, was re elected as governor by 20 points. And DeSantis has shown that he's an exceptionally disciplined, an intelligent Republican.

He won't allow himself to be baited by Trump the way Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush did six or seven years ago. He has many of the qualities that voters liked about Trump, his willingness to take on liberal shibboleths and progressive media without the rougher edges, without the coarseness, without sometimes just the stupidity of it.

And he's also made inroads with the two other constituencies that a Republican needs to win. The Republican nominee will have to win over a sufficient percentage of people who like Trump because of his manner and his whole affect. He will need, or she will need, to win over Evangelical Christians.

And DeSantis has done that with his bills like parental rights and education misnamed, but don't say gay bill. And he has to win over chamber of commerce type Republicans, business minded Republicans, and anyone who's been in the United States in the last year or so, even throughout the pandemic, knows that Florida is booming.

It's where it's happening in the United States, much as Texas was booming in the seventies, or California in the 90s. The fact that he has mastered the three legged stool of the Republican Party inclines me to think Ron DeSantis will be the nominee.

>> Andrew Robert: And if he's the nominee, does he beat Biden?

 

>> Bret Stephens: Yes, he is half Biden's age, or seems that way. And, all DeSantis has to do is prove to a wavering middle that he's not crazy and he's not nasty. And that's not necessarily a particularly tall order for him, he's a canny politician. People say that on closer acquaintance, he seems more high handed, not as warm as most politicians should be.

It's not a crippling defect if he's aware of it, and if he at least makes the efforts to glad hand ingratiate himself with donors, lose some of the arrogance that has sort of typified him. Remember, he's only, I think, 46 years old or 45 years old. He can still grow as a political figure, and I think he will.

 

>> Andrew Robert: Is there a Thucydidean trap regarding Chinese American relations that's pushing them towards confrontation? What would America do if China were to invade Taiwan, for example?

>> Bret Stephens: I hope we would come to Taiwan's defense, and I hope we don't have to, because we could dissuade the Chinese from doing that by rapidly arming Taiwan with weapons that are easily distributed and easily hidden.

If it comes to that in the next few years and China decides to invade, we will right now have a tougher time defending the island for a few obvious reasons. It's an island, unlike Ukraine, there isn't a land border to resupply it. Taiwan has hollowed out its military.

People forget that prior to this last year's invasion, the Ukrainian army had become a battle hardened army by constantly fighting Russia in the Donbas, the Taiwanese don't have that advantage. And China has advantages of scale that are massive, we said that about Russia, the only difference is that Russia and Putin, I don't think we're sufficiently aware of just how weak, what a Potemkin village their military really was.

I would assume that Xi and other Chinese military planners are looking very carefully at Russian mistakes in Ukraine and organizing, not to repeat them, should they decide to invade Taiwan. So at the present time, I think the only real hope we have is to give Taiwan the means to defend itself, to make itself, I don't know, a sea urchin that the Chinese are not gonna wanna step on.

And the best way to do that is by what military planners call distributed lethality, which means fewer F-16s taking off of runways that can be bombed, more NLAWS, javelins, stingers. And other weapons that can pop up, that can be hidden in basements and elsewhere and do devastating damage to an invading army.

 

>> Andrew Robert: And America would stand by Taiwan, it would have, the Biden administration would have the necessary intestinal fortitude to actually put your fleets and your troops at risk.

>> Bret Stephens: So this is the great question, and it's one of the imponderables. Biden has said to his credit repeatedly that he will defend Taiwan.

And I actually think the strategy that he has adopted, which is he goes out and says it and then his people walk it back, is very clever because what it signals to the Chinese is that if push comes to shove, he's gonna do it., that's where his heart is.

And staff people are just pretending that the boss has lost his marbles and they're papering over his missteps.

>> Andrew Robert: It's that slightly risky though, isn't it? Because what if it's the other way around? And the Chinese think actually his people will stop Biden from doing anything that they need to worry about.

 

>> Bret Stephens: So the Chinese, I think, are reasonably savvy and make, although you're right, that's a perfectly possible interpretation. The bigger question, Andrew, is what happens? We've been supporting Ukraine because it's been. Other than financially speaking, it's been a costless exercise for us. No American soldiers have been lost in the effort to defend Ukraine.

We've given them sort of our, not even our first line of our military inventory, we've essentially given them hand-me-downs that would have been consigned to scrap had the Ukrainians not been desperately in need of them-

>> Andrew Robert: Or left for the Taliban to capture.

>> Bret Stephens: Or left for the Taliban to capture.

By the way, it tells you something about the strength of the US military, that our third rate equipment is consistently destroying Russia's first rate equipment. And I hope the Chinese are noticing that. But let's imagine that the Chinese launched an amphibious assault against Taiwan, and we send a carrier battle group in that direction.

At a distance of 1500 miles or so from the Chinese mainland, they managed to get off a shot that sinks an American aircraft carrier. American aircraft carrier is not just a $6 billion piece of kit, it's 5500 airmen and sailors aboard. So it would be the most catastrophic loss of life from a military perspective that we've endured in a single strike ever.

That's how concentrated the force is. How would America react at that point? Quite possibly, rage and a kind of a firm sense, as we felt after Pearl harbor, that this was gonna be avenged. Or we could say, let's cut our losses. And I just don't know where the administration or where the American people would come down.

 

>> Andrew Robert: Well, 911 was only 20 years ago, but then, I suppose they didn't have nuclear weapons in the way that the Chinese do.

>> Bret Stephens: And for the Chinese, they have more than doubled their nuclear forces in the last three years. And they are working their way quite sedulously towards nuclear parity, strategic nuclear parity with the United States.

And we've been immobile, basically this whole time, and essentially modernizing but not enlarging our nuclear fleets. So we face a very daunting challenge. The one area you mentioned that the acidities is trap. And that tends to happen when a rising power confronts an incumbent power. The case of China, I think, is a little bit different in that I think China is a declining power.

I think Chinese power actually peaked some time ago. Its population just at last month, it is now losing more people than it is gaining, obviously, from a huge base, 1.4 billion people. But demographic decline that is almost irreversible and poses profound economic challenges to the Chinese, their economy has slowed terribly and they're being poorly led by Xi.

Now, maybe this makes them more aggressive, but it's a little bit different-

>> Andrew Robert: Well, that's what I was about to say, there are some examples of that, aren't there? The Kaiser's Germany felt itself it was losing out vis-a-vis Russia, and all it did was make it more aggressive rather than.

 

>> Bret Stephens: Yeah, and other countries that have found themselves in trouble, Argentina before the Falkland invasion, tried to stir trouble abroad to distract from problems at home. So that's certainly a possibility too. My bet is that the Chinese will attempt to take Taiwan, and that their calculation is the sooner they do it, the likelier they are to succeed.

 

>> Andrew Robert: Absolutely terrifying. This is a history podcast. So tell me how you think that the Iraq war will be seen by historians in 50 or 100 years time.

>> Bret Stephens: I think in 100 years' time, Kanye, historians will see it a little bit differently than we do today. In that they will conclude, correctly, that we marched into war, Britain, the United States, and our partners, first of all, fully believing the intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which was faulty intelligence but sincerely believed.

Secondly, because the real weapon of mass destruction in Iraq was Saddam Hussein himself, who had presented a 25 year security challenge to the Middle east and the west at large. And would do so again if he had been able to free himself from the shackles of sanctions, which in fact he was in the process of doing by the end of the Clinton administration, the beginning of the Bush administration.

So we went to war really speaking about weapons of mass destruction, because it was our best legal justification. The best justification for going to war was to get rid of this uniquely sinister and malign and genuinely dangerous character named Saddam Hussein, and the war accomplished that purpose. If you look at Iraq today, whatever else you can say about Iraq, Iraq is not a threat to the security of the world.

Iraq does not seize the attention of western policymakers. The second point, I would say, is that for all of that, the real question is whether the game was worth the candle, to use an expression from your side of the pond. And there, I think the judgment, it'll be a harder judgment to make.

I guess the third point is this. If you're going to go into a country intent on turning it into something like a functioning society, you need to think a lot harder about how you actually make societies work. And I think what historians will recall as the great failure, it wasn't, in fact, the question of WMD.

The great failure was how it was that the United States of America could not get the lights to go on 24/7 in Baghdad. And that failure, which is a failure of bureaucracy in government and management, is inexcusable and almost inexplicable.

>> Andrew Robert: There's something that I ask all my guests on this podcast.

The first one is what book? What history book or biography are you reading at the moment? It rather assumes, it takes for granted that all the intelligent people that I have on my podcast are reading either a biography or a history book, but so far nobody has not.

So I'm assuming you've got one on the go.

>> Bret Stephens: So, at my wife's recommendation, and it's apropos our discussion of cancel culture, I am reading Joseph Anton, which counts, I think, as both history as well as biography, not to mention memoir. It's Salman Rushdie's account of his years in hiding after the fatwa From the Ayatollah Khomeini.

And Rushdie was forced by the security crisis he faced to adopt a pseudonym, he chose Joseph Anton, Joseph from Joseph Conrad, Anton from Anton Chekhov, and lived in hiding those many years. And he writes about himself, really quite movingly and fascinatingly in the third person. So it's Salman Rushdie looking at this character named Joseph Anton, whose story he's intimately familiar with.

And what's interesting to me above all, is who among his friends proved himself or herself to be true and who wasn't? The number of people who essentially betrayed Rushdie, said it was his own fault, is staggering. It's a roll call of dishonor in terms of the people who belong to the writing profession and basically said to him, he had it coming, he never should have done this.

And so, in its own way, he was the patient zero in cancel culture.

>> Andrew Robert: Yeah, and you also got a few people on the other side, didn't you? I mean, he had denounced Mrs. Thatcher calling her Mrs. Torture and so on. But actually, when it came to supporting him and giving him the necessary bodyguards and making sure taxpayers money was spent defending him, she actually sort of stepped up, even though she probably hadn't read a word of Rushdie.

She certainly didn't like his politics and he didn't like hers. So there were some people who did the opposite, weren't there?

>> Bret Stephens: Well, exactly. And I haven't read the whole thing yet. I'm in the process of reading it. I don't know whether he comes around on prime minister, but he lavishes praise on the security men, the state security men, who really gave over years of their lives to protect him and his family.

So I would never hold a man's liberal politics against him when he's confronted with that. His ordeal was an education in who the real fascists are in today's world, who the real torturers are in today's world. And it ain't Margaret Thatcher, and it wasn't the Tories, it was the revolutionary forces that had endeared themselves to the left in the sixties and seventies who wound up coming after him.

And so in that sense, I just think it's an absolutely stunning account of what it means to be at the receiving end of a real effort at cancellation, which, of course, just last year nearly resulted in his death.

>> Andrew Robert: Yeah, monstrous. And your, what if, your counterfactual, what's the fun counterfactual that you like to think about historically?

 

>> Bret Stephens: I think about many what ifs. What if Barack Obama had responded to Bashar Assad's chemical attack in 2013 with a decision that the Assad regime had to go? Sustained military efforts to help overthrow Assad, leading to a conclusion for Assad similar to what Muammar Gaddafi met with, which might have dissuaded Vladimir Putin from invading Crimea six months later in 2014.

Which would have prevented us from now being in the worst security situation that Europe has faced in a very long time.

>> Andrew Robert: Let's drill down on that one just slightly, because it was extraordinary at the time as a Briton and therefore a believer in America, somebody who assumed that America would stand by its word.

When he used the words red lines, I just assumed, like everybody else in the West, that that meant when that line was crossed, America was going to come down like a ton of bricks on Syria. And so when he failed to do what he was essentially promising by using the word red lines, it was a devastating blow for the credibility of America, wasn't it?

 

>> Bret Stephens: I think the second term of the Obama administration will be remembered by historians again, looking back 100 years, when it's shorn of its partisan or emotional content, as some of the very worst years in American foreign policy. Because we adopted a policy of disappointing and betraying our friends and attempting to ingratiate ourselves with our enemies.

And we did it with Iran, with the misbegotten JCPOA of 2015. We had done it even earlier, I guess you can go back to the first Obama term, with the Russia reset, an extraordinarily foolish policy. We did it in terms of our relations with both Israel and the Arab world.

We did it in our attempts to have a robust relationship with the Chinese.

>> Andrew Robert: And also not supporting those incredibly brave Iranians who-

>> Bret Stephens: In 2000, precisely in 2009.

>> Andrew Robert: And that was an extraordinary thing as well, just letting them in the lurch!

>> Bret Stephens: Yeah, I should now expand my parameters, not simply from 2013 to 16, but from the beginning of the Obama administration.

And the whole framework of the Obama administration, I should add, the complete withdrawal of the United States from Iraq, which is what created the vacuum of power in which ISIS was able to take root and create a security crisis for the west for many years. And it's a reminder that actually, in foreign policy, foreign policy can be very complex, but it really comes down to a simple thing, which is know who your friends are and know who your enemies are.

Once you've figured that one out, then you can start to make a number of decisions. But the Obama administration forgot the most basic thing, and much of what ails us today is a consequence of that act of forgetting.

>> Andrew Robert: Brett Stevens, thank you very much indeed.

>> Bret Stephens: Andrew, it's an honor.

I should say, Lord Roberts, it's an honor to be on this podcast with my favorite historian in the whole world without, that's not even a hard call.

>> Andrew Robert: Thank you very much.

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