Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at our regular time: Noon EDT.
Our guest will be Avi Shlaim, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford and author of the new book, Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew, which has garnered attention because of Shlaim’s claim that he has uncovered “undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks” in Baghdad in the early 1950s that helped spark a Jewish exodus from the country.
As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Maggie Haberman, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
Nearly 1 In 5 defendants in the January 6 insurrection served In the US military.
Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper both feared Donald Trump would try to use the military to overturn the 2020 election.
Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn proposed that Trump impose martial law to rerun the 2020 election in states where he lost.
Spencer Ackerman’s book, Reign of Terror, which details the ways in which the “war on terror” paved the way for the presidency of Donald Trump.
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane interviews Fatima Mohammed, whose CUNY Law School commencement address, which denounced Israel, sparked a furor in May.
An illuminating twitter debate between Dov Waxman, Mitchell Plitnick, and Raffi Magarik about newly declassified documents detailing Ehud Barak’s offer to Yasser Arafat in 2000.
What it was like to be Leon Trotsky’s grandson.
Trying to be Indian while Muslim.
In response to last week’s newsletter about the death of Daniel Ellsberg, I received this insightful note from Larry Rosenwald, Professor of English Emeritus at Wellesley College. I’m reprinting part of it with his permission:
“For me, the story about Ellsberg has always been a story about how a more radical person – [Randy] Kehler, in this case, who did indeed go to jail for draft resistance [during Vietnam], and later to jail for war tax resistance - a more radical person who’s also further from the centers of power, can…move a person who’s in some ways less radical, but is much closer to the centers of power, to take an action that only the person closer to power can take, but which that person can take only once, because after taking that action, the person is exiled from power. You can be a draft resister and tax resister all your life, as Randy has been (there's an overly sentimental but moving film about him made by Robbie Leppzer, called An Act of Conscience); you can only release the Pentagon Papers once… Which means, for me, that in addition to the question you ask - what can Jews learn from Ellsberg’s actions - there's another question, which is, what can Jews learn from Kehler's actions?”
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Our call this Friday at noon ET, our normal time, will be with Professor Avi Shlaim who’s a Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Oxford, actually was someone who I was lucky enough to study with a long time ago when I was there. Avi Shlaim has a new book out, a memoir, which is entitled Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew, about his life growing up in Baghdad, moving to Israel, and then to Britain where he became a very well-known scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the book has already gotten a fair amount of attention because of the revelations that Shlaim claims to produce evidence that at least some of the bombings in the early 1950s that contributed to the exodus of Jews from Iraq mostly to Israel actually we’re done with the involvement of agents of the Zionist movement. So, we’ll talk about that in particular, and about the book, on Friday at noon for paid subscribers. As always, paid subscribers also have access to all our previous kind of library of interviews with people like Noam Chomsky, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Bret Stephens, lots of interesting folks.
The big news over the last couple of days in the United States certainly has been what appears to be an attempted coup in Russia by Yevgeny Prigozhin of the Wagner group leading his forces for a time against Moscow to overthrow Vladimir Putin before taking a deal to go to Belarus and stand down. And in some of the commentary, there have been kind of comparisons to the attempted coup in Russia in 1991 where kind of hardline communists attempted to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev and then they failed when Boris Yeltsin led forces, and this was a kind of key moment in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
And hearing that comparison makes me very nervous. It makes me very nervous because it reminds me of the discourse that became prevalent in the United States starting in the late 1980s and the early 1990s as the Soviet Union was collapsing and losing its empire and showing its deep dysfunction, and the sense of self-congratulation and moral superiority that became such a powerful and dangerous force in American foreign policy and political commentary, in which I unfortunately myself was complicit at an earlier time in my life. And so, I worry that in this discourse now as we see new evidence of the deep dysfunction and rot in Vladimir Putin’s profoundly despotic political system, and as his army fails to meet its war aims in Ukraine, that we tend to somewhat unconsciously draw a very bright line between them and us. And it fuels this American exceptionalist tendency to believe that that’s what happens in dysfunctional, rotting authoritarian systems unlike the strong liberal democracy that we have in the United States. And I think it’s worth resisting that temptation not because we should sugarcoat in any way how terrible a leader Vladimir Putin is and how deeply, deeply troubled Russia’s political system is, but to remind ourselves that we may share more in common with their problems than we want to admit.
And it’s funny how when foreign policy conversations tend to take fore, a lot of the things we remember about America’s own domestic political systems tend to fall away. So, think about the relationship between Prigozhin and Putin in the light of what we have learned over the last several years about what happened under Donald Trump. The last president of the United States incited an insurrection to overthrow the results of the last election. And according to studies, 1 in 5 of those insurrectionists at the Capitol had served in the US military. Trump’s head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, and one of his defense secretaries, Mark Esper, both have said since Trump left office that they had real fears that Trump wanted to use parts of the US military in an attempt to launch a military coup. Mike Flynn, who was a former lieutenant general of the United States and Trump’s national security advisor, said in December of 2020 that Trump should impose martial law in various states so that they could be forced to redo their elections that Trump had lost.
And one of the critical points to remember about this close call that the US had with its own coup, with its own potential military involvement in undermining an election was that, as in the Russia case, that was deeply connected to our failed military efforts abroad. One of the points that Spencer Ackerman makes in his book Reign of Terror, which is subtitled, How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, is to notice how many of the guardrails that might have prevented someone like Trump were eroded by the quote unquote war on terror, the strengthening of an unconstrained national security state, the demonizing of Muslims and of migrants in general, and also this dynamic whereby even as the national security state became much more powerful in response to 9/11, there was also this deep sense of disillusionment and even rage against it because it had failed to defeat America’s enemies abroad.
And I think that’s similar to what you see in Russia. What Prigozhin represents is this kind of sense of rage and disillusionment that this massively empowered Russian national security state has failed to meet its goals in Ukraine, its invasion in Ukraine. And so, then you turn against it domestically, which is what we tended to see with a lot of Trumpism, which is that once the external enemy couldn’t be defeated, you started to look for enemies within. And, in fact, Trump and his allies basically made an enemy of the supposed quote unquote deep state itself: the FBI, the CIA, etc. It’s worth remembering that Michael Flynn, you know, Trump’s national security adviser who has since become a very vocal proponent of essentially a kind of a coup by Trump, made his name, became a lieutenant general, because he was so deeply involved as an architect of America’s counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So again, I’m not obviously claiming that the situation in Russia and the situation in the United States are the same. Of course, they’re not the same. There are profound differences. My point is if we now see Russia going down a spiraling towards internal chaos, civil war, instability, whatever, we should resist the temptation towards self-congratulation, and to use that to erase what we know about how close our own system has come—and very well could again—to some of the same dynamics. And we should use that knowledge to redouble our efforts to try to fortify the rule of law and liberal democracy and constraints on executive power in the United States, and also to be very, very wary of new American military interventions or new cold wars that empower an unconstrained national security state in ways that can lead to be very corrosive of the rule of law and the survival of liberal democracy in the United States. Liberal democracy may be a distant dream in Russia, but it’s certainly not secure in the United States either. Again, our call will be this Friday at noon ET with Oxford Professor Emeritus Avi Shlaim, and I hope many of you will join us.
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