Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Thursday at 11 AM ET (not our usual Friday at Noon). Our guest will be Sally Abed, a member of the national leadership of Standing Together, which advocates for peace, equality, and climate justice in Palestine-Israel. Sally is one of the sharpest observers of what Israel’s intra-Jewish civil war over judicial overhaul means for its Palestinian citizens. As that struggle resumes with the Knesset’s return to session this week, I’m grateful she’s decided to join us.
The problem I think is that there has been a "generational failure" in foreign policy where the United States has conducted itself not as "a nation like any other" in Jean Kirkpatrick's formulation but rather as the singular pole in a unipolar world. That arrogance has spawned massive amounts of discontent overseas in countries that should be at least nominally friendly to US interests (see India where the majority of the population is nakedly pro-Russia in the war in the Ukraine).
It is possible to agree that Carlson’s world view is fundamentally racist and yet recognise his importance to the political discourse and support his having a national platform. He is, after all, not only a critic of the Iraq war and imperialism. He also talks about the uniparty consensus in Washington, the homegeneity of mainstream media, and supports the release of Julian Assange, among other important issues that are almost never mentioned by anyone else in the MSM
Indeed. When inflation increases, the dollar sinks, banks start failing, the economy produces less and consumes more, and the US standing worldwide plummets, every American is paying the price. I did not mean what Israel does in terms of collective punishment (house demolitions, deportations, bombing entire neighborhoods, etc. etc.) which is a war crime and must stop. I do hope you understand the difference.
Ah, I see what you mean. You didn't mean what Palestine does in terms of collective punishment (rocket attacks on entire neighborhoods, suicide bombers into restaurants, etc.). Got it.
So when Israel "bombs a neighborhood," that's collective punishment, but when Hamas rocket attacks a neighborhood, it's not? Amazing how these things work, always so that Palestine never ever does anything wrong.
This is a thoughtful and rounded piece, as always...
I think it's significant you talk about corruption and the 'built-in bias for war'. That's sort of the part of the particularist argument re. why and how the US conducts its imperialism. You know - the vulgar form of it is, oh, X and Y are just to benefit the arms companies, or X and Y are happening just so Bush can increase his vote share by strutting around looking like a martial president. The more developed form is the one you've articulated.
The contrast is the more universalist argument (viz. - the US acts as an imperialist power because that is in the interests of the 'broad elite', the corporations, concentrations of private wealth and power etc.).
It strikes me that Noam Chomsky, who you've interviewed, favours the latter. The 'merchants and manufacturers' - he often quotes Adam Smith - are those whose needs were and are peculiarly attended to. American foreign policy is a product of broad corporate interest, from the United Fruit Company shenanigans to the Iraq war. That's the Chomsky view. It's interesting that Chomsky rejects the particularist view at every turn: this is clearest in his response to the 'Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy' article by Mearsheimer and Walt. He disputes that the Israel Lobby is pushing the state department to do something it wasn't inclined to do; and cites many examples where the U.S. has told Israel to jump, as it were (for instance, an abortive arms deal with China in 2002 I think) without effective protest by the lobby. He then tackles a part of the article where the authors say that even if the lobby narrowly conceived isn't that strong, conceived more widely (to include all sorts of groups, arms manufacturers etc.) it is; Chomsky says that it gets so wide it starts to look more like corporate power and less like the 'Israel Lobby', so the authors' position effectively collapses into his own.
Chomsky always maintains that the rich (paraphrasing) 'don't want society to be corrupt, they want it to be run in their interest'. This is why, he says, Watergate triggered a flurry of genuine investigative sallies. Corruption is somewhat ephemeral and hard to use as a permanent and fundamental motivator of imperialism; broad elite interest is quite different.
First of all, I am so excited for Thursday. I love The Standing Together Movement! Thank you for giving them this platform.
Secondly, how wonderful that your son is organizing, educating, and using his agency to come into his own. What a gift he brings to his peers! I truly wish him the very the best. :)
Finally, thank you for this point of view about Carlson, progressive anti-imperialists, conservative anti-imperialists, and the (most pressing for me personally) critique of The Biden Administration. I voted for him, but you express my shared concerns. It can feel like a very lonely perspective in liberal spaces sometimes, so I appreciate you articulating the issue so well.
Why do the underlying motivations of Carlson’s foreign policy views matter? He may have had an enormously positive influence on the Trump Administration’s foreign policy decisions. I’m thinking specifically of his caustic advocacy against war with Iran and deeply satisfying eviceration of the John Bolton.
Psychoanalyzing the underlying motives of peoples’ stated positions would make consensus building virtually impossible. We’re all complicated and our views are informed by tons of life experiences and impulses. How would Omar do on a lie detector test that asked whether the US is a “terrorist state”?
I agree with the point about the Iraq War playing a major role with shaping Tucker Carlson’s views—or more importantly—in shaping the views the millions of his watchers/followers with whom his views are resonant.
Trump populists, like Tucker Carlson, and foreign-policy Jacksonians (in Walter Russell Mead’s formulation some years ago) were among the most strident pro-Iraq War supporters back in 2002-2004 when that was the definitive “own the libs” position. They’ve now grown completely disillusioned with and cynical (e.g., Ukraine) about such adventurism. Furthermore the “zeal of the converted” has put them in the position of being the most outspoken critics of the US foreign policy establishment, in which 1990’s era neo-conservatism and American Exceptionalism are now taken for granted as dogmatic conventional wisdom among the ambitious and career-minded sort.
I’m not sure I follow the anti-anti-anti-Tucker Carlson theme suddenly coming from dovish liberal progressives like Peter Beinart, Matt Duss, Mehdi Hasan, and others. I get it that Tucker Carlson’s noxious white grievance politics and domestic views will be used by his foreign-policy detractors to discredit his newfound anti-imperialist / anti-interventionist foreign policy views as some kind of “horseshoe theory”, but that’s not a serious argument and holds little water outside of the nuance-free binaries of the Twittersphere. As a liberal dove long stranded into a politically-impotent minority, one can only welcome such political alliances into the antiwar camp, however superficial and ephemeral they may be.
Rather than a “horseshoe theory” in supposedly which crazies on the right are aligning with crazies on the left-- or something--it’s an indication of just how unhinged and hellbent on sloppy foreign policy interventionism our political right/left center establishment has become when disparate camps like Tucker Carlson and Noam Chomsky are aligning against it. It’s the “sensible center” elites that have gone rogue and are out of step with the American public with respect to historical policy norms.
Foreign policy that emphasizes American global leadership, military force and the promotion of democratic values around the world helps maintain peace and stability. When there is a power vacuum, it tends to be filled by aggressive and expansionist regimes. The rise of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan is the best example of this. Today, China and Russia are increasingly assertive in their foreign policies and seeking to expand their influence.
Democracies tend to be more friendly to the United States and each other. Isolationism is dangerous and shortsighted because what happens in other countries can have a direct impact on the United States. Tucker Carlson, Rand Paul, Pat Buchanon, the America First movement of the 1930's have this myopic view in common.
We are headed for a multipolar world. We're already there. American's hegemony is on the decline with the ascendancy of China.
Emphasis on militarism is also on the wane as people are learning about the futility of war; unwitting young men die for nothing to benefit the military industry complex. Lately lots of articles about low number of military
recruits in US.
Democratic values? Who's the arbiter on what's democratic and what is not? America? No thanks. Countries around the world have their own versions of democracy even Saudi. America actually gives Saudi a nod.
We've seen how America's quest to spread its version of democratic values, nah imperialism, around the world has exacerbated political woes around the woes instead of the vaunted peace and stability. What are talking about?
China and Russia look intent on upending US power. Rooting for China. Go China!!
Well, at least your ignorance isn’t limited to Israel-Palestine.
The Chinese government represses political dissidents and human rights activists and routinely arrests, imprisons, and tortures people who speak out against the government or its policies. They use surveillance technology to monitor and control their citizens, detain people without charge or trial, use torture to extract confessions from detainees, force detainees to work in factories, and censor the internet, media, and other forms of communication.
One either sees the hegemonic nature of USA foreign policy or not. My eyes are wide open to usa hegemony; others are closed. To those closed eyes I say let's open together our eyes and deal together with OUR problems in our Nation and let's tolerate other nations rights to nstionhood and let their citizens decide their nation's fate.
The United States has repeatedly stated its commitment to multilateralism and avoiding global hegemony, consistently supporting international organizations and treaties. On the other hand, China's pursuit of economic and military dominance in the Indo-Pacific, and Iran's expanding influence in the Middle East, are the ones guilty of pursuing regional and potentially global hegemony. Ignoring these threats with isolationist head in the sand thinking is what is most dangerous.
Both China and Russia are repressive regimes I agree with that. I've no evidence, but I suspect they both use Israeli spyware.
Pegasus is spyware developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group that can be covertly installed on mobile phones (and other devices) running most versions of iOS and Android. Pegasus is able to exploit iOS versions up to 14.7, through a zero-click exploit. As of 2022, Pegasus was capable of reading text messages, tracking calls, collecting passwords, location tracking, accessing the target device's microphone and camera, and harvesting information from apps. The spyware is named after Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology. It is a Trojan horse computer virus that can be sent "flying through the air" to infect cell phones.
Richard--the debate is great but i think we can do without the insults. Best, Peter
The problem I think is that there has been a "generational failure" in foreign policy where the United States has conducted itself not as "a nation like any other" in Jean Kirkpatrick's formulation but rather as the singular pole in a unipolar world. That arrogance has spawned massive amounts of discontent overseas in countries that should be at least nominally friendly to US interests (see India where the majority of the population is nakedly pro-Russia in the war in the Ukraine).
It is possible to agree that Carlson’s world view is fundamentally racist and yet recognise his importance to the political discourse and support his having a national platform. He is, after all, not only a critic of the Iraq war and imperialism. He also talks about the uniparty consensus in Washington, the homegeneity of mainstream media, and supports the release of Julian Assange, among other important issues that are almost never mentioned by anyone else in the MSM
Well said.
Americans, all Americans, will pay forever for the never-ending US war crimes around the world.
This classic is a good summary...https://www.addictedtowar.com/read-book
Ah, collective punishment. What a great guy Sam is, you're right Peter.
Indeed. When inflation increases, the dollar sinks, banks start failing, the economy produces less and consumes more, and the US standing worldwide plummets, every American is paying the price. I did not mean what Israel does in terms of collective punishment (house demolitions, deportations, bombing entire neighborhoods, etc. etc.) which is a war crime and must stop. I do hope you understand the difference.
Ah, I see what you mean. You didn't mean what Palestine does in terms of collective punishment (rocket attacks on entire neighborhoods, suicide bombers into restaurants, etc.). Got it.
Look up collective punishment in international law, it's a defined term. Violence is a different term.
I know exactly what collective punishment is.
So when Israel "bombs a neighborhood," that's collective punishment, but when Hamas rocket attacks a neighborhood, it's not? Amazing how these things work, always so that Palestine never ever does anything wrong.
All collective punishment is wrong and should be held accountable as also stated in international law, using the rule of proportionality
This is a thoughtful and rounded piece, as always...
I think it's significant you talk about corruption and the 'built-in bias for war'. That's sort of the part of the particularist argument re. why and how the US conducts its imperialism. You know - the vulgar form of it is, oh, X and Y are just to benefit the arms companies, or X and Y are happening just so Bush can increase his vote share by strutting around looking like a martial president. The more developed form is the one you've articulated.
The contrast is the more universalist argument (viz. - the US acts as an imperialist power because that is in the interests of the 'broad elite', the corporations, concentrations of private wealth and power etc.).
It strikes me that Noam Chomsky, who you've interviewed, favours the latter. The 'merchants and manufacturers' - he often quotes Adam Smith - are those whose needs were and are peculiarly attended to. American foreign policy is a product of broad corporate interest, from the United Fruit Company shenanigans to the Iraq war. That's the Chomsky view. It's interesting that Chomsky rejects the particularist view at every turn: this is clearest in his response to the 'Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy' article by Mearsheimer and Walt. He disputes that the Israel Lobby is pushing the state department to do something it wasn't inclined to do; and cites many examples where the U.S. has told Israel to jump, as it were (for instance, an abortive arms deal with China in 2002 I think) without effective protest by the lobby. He then tackles a part of the article where the authors say that even if the lobby narrowly conceived isn't that strong, conceived more widely (to include all sorts of groups, arms manufacturers etc.) it is; Chomsky says that it gets so wide it starts to look more like corporate power and less like the 'Israel Lobby', so the authors' position effectively collapses into his own.
Chomsky always maintains that the rich (paraphrasing) 'don't want society to be corrupt, they want it to be run in their interest'. This is why, he says, Watergate triggered a flurry of genuine investigative sallies. Corruption is somewhat ephemeral and hard to use as a permanent and fundamental motivator of imperialism; broad elite interest is quite different.
I see the merits of both arguments.
First of all, I am so excited for Thursday. I love The Standing Together Movement! Thank you for giving them this platform.
Secondly, how wonderful that your son is organizing, educating, and using his agency to come into his own. What a gift he brings to his peers! I truly wish him the very the best. :)
Finally, thank you for this point of view about Carlson, progressive anti-imperialists, conservative anti-imperialists, and the (most pressing for me personally) critique of The Biden Administration. I voted for him, but you express my shared concerns. It can feel like a very lonely perspective in liberal spaces sometimes, so I appreciate you articulating the issue so well.
Thank you! Looking forward to Thursday.
Why do the underlying motivations of Carlson’s foreign policy views matter? He may have had an enormously positive influence on the Trump Administration’s foreign policy decisions. I’m thinking specifically of his caustic advocacy against war with Iran and deeply satisfying eviceration of the John Bolton.
Psychoanalyzing the underlying motives of peoples’ stated positions would make consensus building virtually impossible. We’re all complicated and our views are informed by tons of life experiences and impulses. How would Omar do on a lie detector test that asked whether the US is a “terrorist state”?
I would love to see Peter Beinart interview Miko Peled
Miko, the generals son, shoots from the hip. One of the good guys.
I agree with the point about the Iraq War playing a major role with shaping Tucker Carlson’s views—or more importantly—in shaping the views the millions of his watchers/followers with whom his views are resonant.
Trump populists, like Tucker Carlson, and foreign-policy Jacksonians (in Walter Russell Mead’s formulation some years ago) were among the most strident pro-Iraq War supporters back in 2002-2004 when that was the definitive “own the libs” position. They’ve now grown completely disillusioned with and cynical (e.g., Ukraine) about such adventurism. Furthermore the “zeal of the converted” has put them in the position of being the most outspoken critics of the US foreign policy establishment, in which 1990’s era neo-conservatism and American Exceptionalism are now taken for granted as dogmatic conventional wisdom among the ambitious and career-minded sort.
I’m not sure I follow the anti-anti-anti-Tucker Carlson theme suddenly coming from dovish liberal progressives like Peter Beinart, Matt Duss, Mehdi Hasan, and others. I get it that Tucker Carlson’s noxious white grievance politics and domestic views will be used by his foreign-policy detractors to discredit his newfound anti-imperialist / anti-interventionist foreign policy views as some kind of “horseshoe theory”, but that’s not a serious argument and holds little water outside of the nuance-free binaries of the Twittersphere. As a liberal dove long stranded into a politically-impotent minority, one can only welcome such political alliances into the antiwar camp, however superficial and ephemeral they may be.
Rather than a “horseshoe theory” in supposedly which crazies on the right are aligning with crazies on the left-- or something--it’s an indication of just how unhinged and hellbent on sloppy foreign policy interventionism our political right/left center establishment has become when disparate camps like Tucker Carlson and Noam Chomsky are aligning against it. It’s the “sensible center” elites that have gone rogue and are out of step with the American public with respect to historical policy norms.
Foreign policy that emphasizes American global leadership, military force and the promotion of democratic values around the world helps maintain peace and stability. When there is a power vacuum, it tends to be filled by aggressive and expansionist regimes. The rise of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan is the best example of this. Today, China and Russia are increasingly assertive in their foreign policies and seeking to expand their influence.
Democracies tend to be more friendly to the United States and each other. Isolationism is dangerous and shortsighted because what happens in other countries can have a direct impact on the United States. Tucker Carlson, Rand Paul, Pat Buchanon, the America First movement of the 1930's have this myopic view in common.
We are headed for a multipolar world. We're already there. American's hegemony is on the decline with the ascendancy of China.
Emphasis on militarism is also on the wane as people are learning about the futility of war; unwitting young men die for nothing to benefit the military industry complex. Lately lots of articles about low number of military
recruits in US.
Democratic values? Who's the arbiter on what's democratic and what is not? America? No thanks. Countries around the world have their own versions of democracy even Saudi. America actually gives Saudi a nod.
We've seen how America's quest to spread its version of democratic values, nah imperialism, around the world has exacerbated political woes around the woes instead of the vaunted peace and stability. What are talking about?
China and Russia look intent on upending US power. Rooting for China. Go China!!
Well, at least your ignorance isn’t limited to Israel-Palestine.
The Chinese government represses political dissidents and human rights activists and routinely arrests, imprisons, and tortures people who speak out against the government or its policies. They use surveillance technology to monitor and control their citizens, detain people without charge or trial, use torture to extract confessions from detainees, force detainees to work in factories, and censor the internet, media, and other forms of communication.
I suggest you move there.
One either sees the hegemonic nature of USA foreign policy or not. My eyes are wide open to usa hegemony; others are closed. To those closed eyes I say let's open together our eyes and deal together with OUR problems in our Nation and let's tolerate other nations rights to nstionhood and let their citizens decide their nation's fate.
The United States has repeatedly stated its commitment to multilateralism and avoiding global hegemony, consistently supporting international organizations and treaties. On the other hand, China's pursuit of economic and military dominance in the Indo-Pacific, and Iran's expanding influence in the Middle East, are the ones guilty of pursuing regional and potentially global hegemony. Ignoring these threats with isolationist head in the sand thinking is what is most dangerous.
Both China and Russia are repressive regimes I agree with that. I've no evidence, but I suspect they both use Israeli spyware.
Pegasus is spyware developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group that can be covertly installed on mobile phones (and other devices) running most versions of iOS and Android. Pegasus is able to exploit iOS versions up to 14.7, through a zero-click exploit. As of 2022, Pegasus was capable of reading text messages, tracking calls, collecting passwords, location tracking, accessing the target device's microphone and camera, and harvesting information from apps. The spyware is named after Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology. It is a Trojan horse computer virus that can be sent "flying through the air" to infect cell phones.
Technology does not commit crime. People do.
Torture been used on innocent muslims from ME who have been held without charges in Guatanamo bay for decades.
Good riddance to hypocritical US.