hello and welcome to cross up where all things are considered on peter lavelle continuity or change this is what's being asked when considering a potential by foreign policy trump made it a point to undo obama's legacy when biden do the same to trump's like this or is this all only rhetorical continuity drives foreign policy not the occupant in the oval office. to discuss this and more i'm joined by my guest peter who snake and says that he's professor of history and director of the nuclear studies institute at american university as well as co-author with all over stone the untold history of the united states in kingston we have it like petro he is

a professor of political science at the university of rhode island and we have william deane he's a former technical director at the n.s.a. originally crossed up rules and i think that means in jump in anytime you want and i also appreciate it ok nick let me go to you 1st year and there's an awful lot of speculation of what a potential biden foreign policy would be but we have to add in the last 3 and a half years almost 4 years of the the media and the foreign policy blah always going on the opposite side of whatever trump is doing which is actually quite juvenile but that's what they've been doing and now it seems like the same thing is happening anything the big orange man did has to be reversed is this how you see it because i'm watching mainstream media coverage of it and there is time and i'm also themselves into pretzels go ahead. i think the. foreign policy we're likely to see under joe biden it will be a rehash of v.

foreign policy oh the obama presidency and a continuation of what might go back as far as clinton. the issue here is there was a lot less going on in the trump administration because the truck was never able to articulate an alternative foreign policy to the mainstream and he never got control of his administration and as you say the media portrayed everything about him negatively so. there's just i think going to be a return to a sort of liberal nostalgia which will fail in the long run because that was actually done to try to get elected in 2016 peter let me go to you and then the climate brings up the most important point here i mean if they want to go back to you know be nostalgic the going back to failure but nobody's in the mainstream media seems to point that out go ahead peter. they're going back to failure is

correct the clinton obama policies were policies that doubled down on what george w. bush had brought us to for that so for the most part we said we're seeing in the new foreign policy team he supported the invasion of afghanistan supported the invasion of iraq supported the invasion of libya supported the sending of arms messam an arms into syria an operation timber cecum or that turned . a minimalist kind of uprising into this massive bloodshed slaughter that's gone on they supported the bombing of syria when obama was hesitant to do so so. these people that offer a lot of hope in terms of alternative vision i'm not quite as positive about the triumph our policy peters you seem to be no i'm not i'm. getting

it limits at all and then he didn't get us involved in any new wars but it pulls us out of all of the international agreements that the u.s. should have been in there starting with. the i.n.f. treaty the open skies treaty great world health organization the paris climate accords so that is that policy was disastrous and in many ways but truck was pushing forward this kind of existential threats that are even more dangerous than the obama clinton policies were so he let me i'm a little how push back on that i think that's coming up in debate a bill here but that's the whole point of his program well what are your thoughts here because as the last weeks of this administration before potential biden mistakes we see all hands on deck regarding iran is this is this a an intentional gift quote unquote suited by people in january when it could be

i mean i just see by one community as the others do is a throwback to old thinking and all ways of doing business in the world i mean i just don't see i.c.'s on the horizon and the more wars continued conflict around the globe and i don't see them getting into anything positive plus i don't i don't i think the u.n. needs to wake up and i'm like a lot of your other guests i think they might disagree with be on that i think the u.n. is really not doing a very good job and especially the world health organization other kinds of things late ledge they're doing an os that they're not they're not really coming across with the truth anybody and that's really bad that's why trump was elected i mean people in his country were really sick of all the lies and we've been by all the administrations prior both democrat and reap. didn't matter they were all just lying to us and leading us down of almost half well ok on it plays is that would explain delete to me at least why foreign policy wasn't even discussed during the

campaign as a maverick nothing was discussed during this cycle here whatsoever and again going back to the 2016 you know that was the 3rd presidential election cycle that people voted against war but what are we going to get in january i mean it is it's truly amazing how the media can say it on p.b.s. there was a woman talking heads she said the biden team they're professionals and they're apolitical i mean what kind of nonsense is the public being fed these are an os not julie political people stunningly ideological and they have they all have the inability to learn from mistakes mykola well i tend to agree let me say a few words about the prospect of war. i happen to believe that no american administration wants war what they want his americans supremacies

and today suprema see can best be achieved not by war but by manipulation manipulation of the media in particular wars tend to be unpopular because the results are often ambivalent and certain it's much easier to achieve mastery in coersion by manipulating perceptions and i think you we're going to see a lot of that in the new administration but you know just a month ago i mean that's exactly what we got with bush and obama and the results were disastrous i mean you know what was it you know we have to save the kurds you know nobody now had ever heard of occurred until trump out of syria ok in public with no current if it hit them in the face ok i know the history of the kurds and i have great sympathy for them all right but i mean this is a sham rot peter they keep doing this year so you can go back to these these these

old rhetorical turns of hand but the results of the same. the end less the people that want i do think that people want wars people want some people a small group of people want to war with iran for example they're there rubbing their hands waiting for that possibility but of course the american people don't vote on the go ahead here the trump administration has from the very beginning been looking for a war with iran and in fact you've got people like mattis who have tried to curb them in that regard but as they don't want to war with north korea they almost provoked the war with north korea in 2017 and that was very very dangerous but it was really iran that most of these people who were thinking about it was or they were iran a phobic and hated iran so. the thing is that the defense sect. there does not necessarily need war in order to profit immensely critical people are

up to their eyeballs and dead with defense contractors whether it's west exact advisors that flora know i and blink and started or the center for a new american security miss you there all are these think tanks and organizations that are in bed with the defense contractors so they don't necessarily need war what they need is a world with fill of enemies that can justify these massive bloated defense budgets and if you look at what they're talking about it's kind of a more modern approach. when we talk about whether people learn anything and it's not clear what they learn or how much they do learn but you take somebody like robert gates who is also supporting every war we got involved in what it looks like obama was going to bomb syria was it 2014 gates said you know dates was opposed to it and he said don't these people learn anything about unintended consequences

don't they see what happened in afghanistan iraq libya you know so gay scott that a certain point and he was as hopeless as the rest of them. maybe blink and you know who can and not all these other clowns will have said well have learned something from that experience that you are have so much more hope than not did you hear from william i saw you just senting please go ahead well i just see them as continuing the old policies a regime change any regime they don't want they're going to try to change either through borzou or through you know cia operations like they did with the rim i mean this is nothing i mean these people not learned anything down through history i think everybody saying the same thing because you know it doesn't take a great deal to realize that wars don't necessarily turn out very good in any case so. for anybody and so you know it's a matter of how are we going to stay in afghanistan where you've been there 20

almost 20 years now for we're going to say when do we get out you know the british were there the russians were there all kinds of people the persians been there you know how many people or is it going to take the convinced that that we ought to stay out of afghanistan or other places like well i'm you know you let's remember there's plenty of people i mean i don't look at the whole afghan thing as a huge drift i mean they know there's there's no solution to it but plenty of people are making money hand over since right and they know the level of corruption they were just words a very profitable business as well that sense and it's a very profitable business for a very few people but a lot of others suffer for it in truck nicholai is it is this just the inability to reimagine american foreign policy i mean is there such inertia then you know even considering a change of course here because i guess you know when you look at the form of policy blob and the people that biden are thinking about their own comfortable the

weight the the the the way things have been going since the end of the cold war i mean in their mind well it's not it's not really broken so why should we really fix it. default position for us foreign policy is changed man. and we haven't really had any serious discussion of what to do after containment given that the country that we were trying to contain no longer exists so what is our foreign policy to be with a new russia it's been close to 30 years and we still have no including a what. a u.s. foreign policy toward russia if the biden ministration resorts to the traditional democratic the pattern of traditional democratic administrations starting with moralizing about democracy and human rights it will confirm that

there's nobody in this administration that has giving a thought for that either but i would have one thing because we haven't talked about the s. word yet i hang on hold that point we're going to go to a hard break and after that heart breaks continuing our discussion on a potential fight hormones the stakes are to. join me every thursday on the alex simon show and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you then. always be polite never engage with a negative a good or confrontational. don't get into any

conversation or start answering questions just ask for an attorney. survivor tira geisha. definitely don't want to be going to try to jump on cops. you're more likely to walk free if you're rich and guilty or if you're poor and. you've got 2 eyes 2 ears and one mouth. so you should be seen in here and a whole lot more than you're saying if you don't take that advice easy going to dig yourself all. right. welcome back to crossfire all things are considered i'm peter lavelle to mind you

were discussing what a potential buy foreign policy would look like. go back to nickel and right before we went to the break he said you want to make a point go write it ya want to talk about something we haven't mentioned yet which is sanctions and thanks unions have been a mixed bag for russia but on the whole i think more benefit more beneficial than negative thanks in part to sanctions the russia i would say has outgrown the us in terms of its foreign policy thinking and it's going to continue there for its long term global. strategy of building security greater security for itself and for the world through multipole r.t. and what the us does if it's going to be involved in all sorts of shenanigans

overseas and trying to make regime changes is just going to wait for the us to come to terms with the with the creation of a new role the global reality which is going to be increasingly shaped not by the united states and western europe. but by the brics and the shanghai cooperation organization and other countries you know peter that's such a good point peter because you know living far away you know my faraway perch year the world is changing in such amazing ways but if you look at the mainstream media and many in mainstream narratives about foreign policy they come out of the networks and not of washington d.c. it into is if they decide how blind personally can they still think it was some 30 years ago and the world is really moving on and i think really the biggest difference here is that we do live in a multi-polar world except for the foreign policy refuses to recognize that they

refuse to recognize reality that they recognize a big gradually it was 9th in 98 when charles krauthammer leading the conficker and this was a you know polar moment at the soviet union is gone the united states will dominate the world for the next 30 or 40 years he said then after the invasion of afghanistan he upped it he said is that you know paul a moment is unipolarity era is going to last indefinitely nobody should be allowed to challenge the united states anywhere on the planet and then after that the sas there is in afghanistan and iraq he said well i got it wrong in 2006 he said you know paul that era is over and the unocal of moment is coming to an end so there's some recognition that the world has changed and it's even changed from 2016. so what obama i mean biden comes out there and he talks about the united states and got reassert its leadership in the world i mean he's still in that mindset it's

also a mindset that believes in american exceptionalism. all except this idea that the american united states is god's gift to humanity we've got some great wisdom that we need to that the world needs that's why we have to apply this kind of leadership that's wrong it's outmoded. the world has moved on and the united states has got to adjust to a multi-polar world with russia with china with europe and eventually other countries also surging staking a claim to being involved in that kind of leadership now well peter i think you in far away been reading my notes because i was going to just ask you a question about exceptionalism here william but this is what he really gets down to i mean i started out in my introduction change of continuity but the thing that is set in everyone's minds revolves around is exceptionalism here and that isn't dead and it's been proven to be

a dead end but they that's something that they just can't let go of and it's part of the popular culture as well ok i mean i grew up in the midwest ok that's very much our parcel of the mindset you're and in it and in the end it is you know it's benevolent in their sense ok but when you would apply it to policy it's not so benevolent here and that's the problem here go ahead well i just think you're right absolutely no they don't they don't look at a cooperative effort among other countries it's more or less it's our way or the highway you know and that's fundamentally what's going on in washington i mean even treat our own all the people united states are treated the same way we're deplorable as you know we don't even we don't really realize what's important in the world so just be quiet sit back and and just some point everything we're doing and that's been crap from the beginning that's let us down so many parents were in the you know deep debt endless mors all kinds of. crumbling infrastructure all kinds of stupid decisions made out of washington d.c.

and you know that it just they just don't make merit based descendents anymore than they don't make merit based decisions and what they've done is in and probably a topic for another program is that they've taken their regime force regime change playbook and they're playing it on the american people now that's one spot don't you hear anything. it this way although it's not containment was not the issue it was the great expansion that's why hillary clinton wanted to move nato into ukraine and move move nato right up the russian they needed an enemy and they wanted they characterize russia as an enemy so they can expand nato and their control of the world that's what's going on i mean and this is an innate goes into eternal quest to figure out why it exists ok well here you have if he does it happy we expand ok thanks and i mean that it's ludicrous and it's very dangerous nicolay let me go here you mentioned russia i mean in me you know we have in the incoming potential administration some really hard core russia gaiters i mean are they going to say

never mind it doesn't matter anymore because even can't unring that bell that bell is still ringing very very loud and political discourse but you can't turn around and just say well we're going to try and reset it can't happen and that's what i've warned in this program for years is that when you make these kind of claims they're very difficult it's impossible to take back and i've also said many times in this program the united states and russia do not have to be friends but they must never be enemies go ahead nick. oh i think you're right the administration the foreign policy establishment has painted itself into a corner with respect to russia which is why i think from or from the perspective of russian foreign policy makers there's very little to engage with them all the initiative in terms of setting a better tone than what we have right now has to come from the united states but

russia is in an advantageous situation because it is increasingly thanks to sanctions again self-sufficient you know in can wait out and plus it has a strategy which the united states is not out of the united states is falling back to containment without containment and without positing nato as a rationale in and of itself the united states has no strategy because of the eastern europe and. eurasia so i think russia's in the in has the ability to simply wait for. a reason to say i'm among the u.s. foreign policy elite but he it will have to be some he with a track record like nixon maybe a letter like

a nixon who has the empty russia credentials but but can find a way now to articulate what is an essential necessity just getting along with russia in order to solve some of the world's bigger problems you know peter weigh in on that here because when i look at you know listen to policymakers here and people that are very much vested in russian foreign policy they think that they basically echo what nicholai said there isn't any we've reached out her hand long enough i mean if you want to talk and you have to reach out here and. because they think the there's an exhaustion here of patients ok and and you know when we look at here with the new administration coming in is it you know i every way everyone smile see on the op ed page of the new york times and you know we should be careful you mean in the united states because russia and china are close together and i always laugh when i read these articles like have you been living under a rock the last decade or 2 decades ok i mean this is an unforced

error on the part of the foreign policy establishment in the united states go ahead but i'm not optimistic about the situation when i look at the people the jake sullivans and the anthony blinken these people have made their career based on in large part hostility toward russia they were. all in favor of the nato expansion up to russia's doorstep they were all in favor of the various wars we've been talking about and they're all in favor they're very hostile toward russian policy in crimea they're all behind the ukrainian coup so they're not very optimistic but and we look at the situation that's what frightens me a united states and russia have more than 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons between us we've got a couple 1000 and pointed at each other on hair trigger alert we've got you know there's a good reason why the believe how many scientists move the hands of the doomsday

clock 200 seconds before midnight the close as it's ever been and we don't understand each other where hostile to each other to biden has called putin a thug it's hacked trump is putin's puppy in this hit back and said that you know criticize biden's anti russian rhetoric so that. you would you agree with me i mean there's hostility in this relationship but the majority of it is on one side ok constantly. in because i think because you know i think's playing to people here isn't this is one of these historical oddities where you have hostility in a relationship but the people i meet every single day here in moscow they still have a basically a positive attitude towards the united states maybe not its foreign policy but as a country as some people it's culture and then i know people that have worked at our team that left the united states because they got so tired of the hostility you

know oh you're a russian you know what are you doing here i mean it is really one direction very on i find that on a very personal level every time i come to russia all of my colleagues everybody i meet talks about how they want to be friends of the united states i never encountered that in the united states a similar attitude kept among the handful of colleagues who are like thinkers but not in terms of the general public you turn on the media a mass media here and it's anti russia is just the wrong back position it's always assume you know we talk about russian interference and $26.00 named eric in the election you know and then you get all these talking heads saying this is an act of war russia going to europe nobody thinks about us involvement and everybody's elections including russia the elections over the years nobody talks about it talk about sanctions the need to sanction russia for this and that nobody that is good

will offer sanction and united states are baiting iraq lately illegal causing a 1000000 deaths made on a scale that's worse any of the things that i might be critical of it's a play on russia doesn't mean i love what's happening in russia or that i'm a 100 percent supporter but i think that the disk this proportion the lack of judgment is just appalling there right now it's very interesting his head i mean rapidly one out of time in fascinating discussion i want to thank my my guests and bethesda kingston and baltimore and i want to thank our viewers for watching us here in our d.c. and next time remember her. that's. why the pandemic no certainly no borders and is blind to nationalities.

has emerged with the we don't like seeing a whole world to. judge a. commentary crisis like this. we can do better we should be. everyone is contributing way but we also know that this crisis will not go on forever the challenges create the response has been much so many good people are helping us. it makes us feel very proud that we are in it together. things be. breaking not necessarily in a good way. to reality is.

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nobody objects nobody challenges. let's go slow.