Conversations with Marianne: DISCUSSING THE WAR MACHINE with Joe Cirincione

my guest today is an old friend of mine joe surencione joe is currently a distinguished fellow at the quincy institute for responsible statecraft in washington d.c he worked for nine years in the u.s house of representatives on the armed services committee and the committee on government operations he served for over 12 years as the president of the plowshares fund a public grant-making foundation focused on nuclear non-proliferation and conflict resolution he previously served as vice president for national security and international policy at the center for american progress in washington dc he was also the director for non-proliferation at the carnegie endowment for international peace a couple of his books were bomb scare the history and future of nuclear weapons and also deadly arsenals nuclear biological and chemical threats joe thank you very very much for being with me well thank you very much for having me on it's a pleasure to talk with you and to see you again thank you you know as i mentioned to you before we came on my original thought had been oh i want joe to come on so we can have an entire podcast about nuclear issues but then i saw you on television talking to i think i think yeah about afghanistan and of course i've been doing a series of reflections on afghanistan so i'm really grateful to you uh so that we can have an opportunity to talk about that um first of all give me a little thumbnail sketch of how you see the situation um what you think about the decision to leave how we left and where you think it leaves us and the afghan people today well as admiral mike mullins the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff recently said we should have left 10 years ago you know we we we could have left in 2010 after we had accomplished our initial mission which was to hunt down osama bin laden the man who attacked us and disrupt the operations of al-qaeda we did that but then we stayed and we turned it into a a nation-building exercise as some call it but for some this was really about establishing a major military presence in the middle east afghanistan was one part of the the the board for them iraq was the other syria libya yemen for some this was all about projecting american military power deep into the middle east and then deep into asia using the the middle east as a springboard this was a a terrible idea from the beginning i was against the war in iraq back in 2003 i was against staying in afghanistan and i was delighted to see president biden finally have the courage to end this war and in his speech announcing the end of the war to say that it was the beginning of a process a turning of the page he said where we would turn away from 20 years of major military interventions now the task for biden is to stick to it because i gotta tell you you you're here in washington you understand this town does not want to end this these wars this town does not want to turn the page so we're at the beginning of a major policy struggle on this issue central to to the national security of the united states well i'm glad that we're able to have the conversation because this is the time when it's so important for that establishment to know that this time the american people are watching and we're thinking and we're not going to be quiet first of all i want to go back to an effort to bust this myth that we were doing any nation building uh as sarah chase who wrote the very good article uh the eyes of august said what nation building did we do we established a puppet government we enabled and supported and established originally a puppet government which was not democratic so how can we talk about nation building when we are not even establishing a democratic government or supporting democratic processes so they use this cover of nation building i see very little nation building and what nation building i do see correct me if i'm wrong had to do with ngos had to do with private interests such as development of television stations radio stations etc so i don't think that we should let those uh guys get along uh get away with this myth that we were staying to do some nation building because if they were doing some nation building maybe that would have been a good thing that's a very very good point you know and i'm uh old enough to have protested the war in vietnam and i've seen the kind of puppet governments we put in place there calling it democracy and and when you do an effort like this there is certainly some good that is accomplished there are very is a lot of well-meaning people who are trying to do good and so you saw a lot of ngos go in and do some very serious and very credible um humanitarian work especially with women and and young girls we saw that but the problem is it's taking place in this artificial construct as you say a puppet government with it completely corrupt all right a very unpopular very undemocratic the the election that left the last president in place was highly contested he was believed to have stolen the election basically stopped the ballot box and then he stuffed uh suitcases full of cash and fled the country so when you think about the very messy end of this misadventure you know why did the afghan security forces crumble a big part of the reason is their president left town in the middle of the night in a convoy of cars stealing 164 million dollars from the government and fled with this entourage to to to gutter at that point what are you fighting for why should any afghan soldier die for government that had just collapsed that demonstrated the the shallowness the artificiality of the entire process that's what caused the collapse of the afghan government the afghan security forces more than the u.s pull-out it was the pull out of the president and his entire cabinet well there's a lot that you said there for us to deconstruct uh first of all you talk about the artificial construct yes it was an artificial construct but as you also mentioned a lot of good was done despite the terrible faults and the mistakes that we made and for those people particularly young people i mean the average age is 18 years and younger those lives where people did get a taste of freedom however corrupt the government was was not for them an artificial construct and i think that the fact that you acknowledged and others have acknowledged that this is not simple that there are so many complicated layers of things is important from a humanitarian um perspective um there were people who got a taste of some things over the last 20 years that they did not have previous and that unfortunately they are not having today now as far as the corruption of the government is concerned that did not start with ghani ahmed karzai was part of the pakistani group that originally established the taliban as we know so from the very beginning with karzai it's not just that we stood by and enabled a corrupt government and this is the question i have for you as someone who knows as much as you do who knows as much as you do about pakistan knows as much as you do about nuclear issues there must be some reason i know that rcia was very close to military intelligence in pakistan what was really going on there and also i want to ask you something else in fact why don't we take this first robert mcnamara famous famously said towards the end of his life that we didn't know anything about the vietnamese people we didn't know anything about their religion their history their culture he said we didn't have anyone to teach us that last line has always bothered me because he could have found someone to teach them if they had wanted to but it seems to me that the hubris the arrogance the disconnection from the culture of the vietnamese people is one of the worst aspects of the american behavior that was replicated in afghanistan almost a contempt for the afghan people when in fact we were the ones who were bringing in such corrupt elements the warlords the afghan people had hated the warlords initially had even been grateful to see the taliban get rid of the warlords and yet when we came in we put the warlords back in power so i'd like to hear your thoughts about all of those yeah when you see these kinds of patterns repeating over years you know you would think we would learn from them and i think two basic things were going on number one we didn't listen to the people of afghanistan we didn't listen to what they wanted and we we tried to impose an american construct a centralized government well the last time afghanistan had a centralized government that lasted was during when the greeks invaded around 350 bc and state for about 150 years that was the last time there was a sustained central government this is not the the culture the experience of the afghan people the this but not just that if i may it wasn't a democrat it's not just that it wasn't it was a centralized government it wasn't even a democratic centralized government right i mean i i think you could make the argument that the initial election was fairly democratic but even then by then you already had billions of dollars of u.s assistance flowing in to afghans who were connected uh afghans who who the contractors would bring on to help them implement their their projects and when that kind of money just starts to flow into a country with very little oversight uh going on very few checks and balances well this is the kind of corruption you're going to get building on the culture of the country but just exacerbating it making it much worse the second big mistake i think was thinking that the urban centers were the true afghanistan and you know kabul has a population of some six million people that's a big chunk of the country but about 70 of the population of afghanistan lives in the rural areas and for those people their experience with the 20 years of occupation that we had there was not one of democracy and change and social transformation it was war it was killing it was just constant destruction fighting back and forth either between the warlords or between the the afghan forces and the um the forces of the taliban so the as it turns out we now realize that the the rural population of afghanistan couldn't wait to get the united states out they wanted an end to this war and they were more comfortable with the kind of security of the taliban provided than the kind of security the afghan police force and the afghan military was saying as they as they said you know we'll pay a tax to the taliban but we won't be stopped every few miles on the road and asked for a bribe from the security forces or the the police forces that were there so those kind of two basic problems i think oh and finally here's the third is the way we constructed the afghan military was again a u.s model high highly developed contractors right now look at that when you saw the taliban enter kabul what did they enter in toyota pickups with kalashnikovs you know there was no air cover there was no complex armored vehicles that requires very sophisticated uh maintenance that you know you could see a very different kind of warfare a kind of warfare that succeeded so in a large extent this was not a military defeat as much as it was a political defeat for the united states and the um the unpopular government we tried to impose on the country the afghan people are historically known to be among the best guerrilla fighters in the world so if you're going to build an afghan army you think it would be with some respect for the traditions the military traditions uh of the afghan people but of course where is the money to be made for the military industrial complex if you do that these are well [Music] one of the things that's coming out in our um uh as people begin to look at not just what happened over the last 20 days but what happened over the last 20 years is we're starting to understand finally where the money went there's a couple of very good articles today and my colleague at the quincy institute uh um eli clifton just tweeted out a study that's talked about the fact that we spent about 2.3 trillion dollars 2.3 trillion dollars in this war 2 trillion of it went directly to u.s contractors so while this was a horrible war for many people some people got very rich off of this war the contractor stocks went through the roof their profits increased there was a fifteen hundred percent return on uh on their stock prices during these twenty years so there was profit a lot of profits were made in this war selling the kinds of products that the us government would buy but not what the afghan people actually needed war profiteering used to be considered a crime now it's an industry and of course also when they come around and say hey you guys need this new equipment and they said what are we going to do with the old equipment they say send it to the boys back home which is how we got these highly militarized domestic police forces in the united states which are hardly what we need okay now the president had said in his speech that we were spending something like 300 million a day he's also uh very well known for having opposed the surge that obama ordered uh in 2010. biden is pretty much on record as having been deeply suspicious of this war for quite a while uh there's a well-known story of his having had dinner with karzai walking out he was so disgusted by something karzai said he was definitely clear definitely clear about the corruption now when he decided that we would leave and i think there is universal um approval of the basic decision to leave like you said uh mullen said we we could have left in 2010. seems to me we might have been able to leave 2004 2003 2005. i don't know i would know more about that yeah okay now um but the president even though he said as you have mentioned and i want to hear more about that he said we need to turn the page on how we see national security but at the same time joe was only within a few days that another 25 billion amendment was passed uh granting uh that to the military industrial complex to the defense budget what are your thoughts about that yeah let me just be i have lots of thoughts about that but let me just talk about your point that this is a popular decision just a few days ago there was a new washington post abc poll that showed that 77 of the american people approve of the withdrawal this is after the chaotic nature of the initial days of that withdrawal this is after two weeks of being hammered by the the national media um on on the on the the problems with the withdrawal 77 percent approve of it including 74 of republicans 76 percent of independents and 84 of democrats so this is an extremely popular decision you wouldn't know that if you just listened to the talking heads in washington dc i would think that it's a completely reverse i think 74 percent of the pundits in washington disapprove of the decision they they're more interested in protecting their own reputations and their privileges than they are in looking at what really went on with this war and why they were so wrong over all these years they weren't the only ones who go ahead hold on one moment first of all they were not the only ones who were wrong our civilian leadership is to me equally uh culpable in what occurred here but i also want to say something else about that poll the american people are able to walk and chew gum at the same time the fact that there is overwhelming approval of the decision to leave does not mean that the american people are not horrified by that evacuation and i personally have a lot of problems with um biden calling it an extraordinary success it was not an extraordinary success joe uh women who were the most vulnerable women who are on the kill lists of the taliban who we knew would be most vulnerable were not prioritized for evacuation and if you talk to the humanitarian groups particularly humanitarian groups working with women you hear of one tragedy after another including those students who sat on the runway for seven hours from the american university and then we're told that they would not be able to leave so the fact that they took the military out first to me is a is a terrible black mark on on america you can be because i know i am and many people are approving of the decision to leave and equally horrified and ashamed of the way we left uh yes there's there was a lot of mistakes there i i think you know we'll do we'll be investigating this that the the senate of the united states is finally going to have a hearing on afghanistan after years of ignoring the war they're going to concentrate on on the the withdrawal process they're bringing secretary of state tony blinken up to talk about it i believe that the administration made a mistake in believing the military the military told the president and the national security council that the government of afghanistan would survive for for months the after estimate was three months to 18 months and so they thought they would have more time to do this planning and could do it that was one of their big mistake i know but even you're more charitable to those guys than i am we'll talk but go on okay but once once they realized what a mess they had in their hand i think i do believe they did a remarkable job on getting them out and they're still trying to keep it open here's the interesting point it's not it's the the doors are not closed yet the administration is making a major diplomatic effort to work with the taliban with the people who won the war to keep it open to get people out that's going to be extremely difficult but so far it's only been a week we haven't seen the kind of horrors that we thought we might start getting in mass killings roundups some terrible things happening but the door is still open people are still leaving so the the the story is is still being written on this first of all joe i think one of the reasons they finally woke up and stepped up and did at that point performed some real miracles trying to get people out was because of the public outcry before that there was apparently no real plan i mean there was the once again taking the military out first means that you have no real plan and i've heard enough stories from enough humanitarian particularly women's organizations uh to know that it's very clear they did not prioritize the most vulnerable women who we would have known uh would be in great danger and uh we have heard stories we there was a story the other day about the the six-month pregnant female police officer murdered in front of her family uh we know that the taliban had a kill list of women so yes and they're saying they're going to be better this time um the announcement made today about the interim government does not give one a lot of hope because no it is the hard line that's true it is it it is the hardliners um just one thing before we go on because i certainly want to hear you talk about pakistan when you said that the civilian leaders were lied to by the military first of all george washington james madison thomas jefferson etc gave these guys every constitutional authority that they needed to do this right not only civilian leadership you know i remember george bush early on saying i went in there and i asked the generals do you have everything you need i thought what is this what do you mean you ask the generals if they have everything they need it's supposed to be generals tell me everything you want to do and i'll tell you whether or not i want you to do it that's number one um number two i know you worked on the u.s house of representatives on the armed services committee where were these guys where were these guys where was the congressional oversight what did they do beyond asking generals to come in ask them some questions say thank you generals for coming in here and sharing this information with us was no one looking was no one thinking and i understand that they didn't like i do understand this i know that biden certainly but i'm told the highest of the officials to to have discussed about the corruption of the government but if your government is corrupt maybe we could have done something to try to change that so i understand that we're all lumping it on the on the military right now but i think that's a little bit of a way for the obamas of the world and the the senators of the world and the congressional people of the world not have to say hey maybe we should have been looking well that's exactly right and that's why i think you're seeing all the discussion in washington be about the withdrawal and not about the last 20 years because exactly there's there's a major cya effort going on cover your butt conversation it's so obvious and and and and you're you're right you you could go back and look at these hearings and the generals come up and say everything's fine we're turning the corner we're turning the corner and what they really meant is we're going in circles and and the chairs of the committees the committee members would all nod their heads and go well you know and they say do you have everything you need exactly congress has basically abandoned its oversight responsibility over the pentagon right now and over this militarized foreign policy and they've been doing it under democrats they've been doing it under republicans republicans think it's good politics to go forward and present the image of a strong republican party that's back in the generals and the democrats themselves are afraid of national security they don't want to touch this they think of it as a weakness as a distraction from their domestic agenda so you had 20 years during this global war on terrorism of basically congress just writing a blank check for the military for everything they need i when biden says he wants to turn the page so far that's just talk afghanistan is the first real step he's done but as you point out he's coupled it with one endorsing the last trump military budget so he he gave he took trump's budget and instead of cutting it gave it a cost of living increase and gave it a bigger budget and then the senate armed services committee and now the house armed service committee led by democrats have thrown another 25 billion dollars on the pi thank you right so we now have the the largest military budget that we've had the united states since the end of world war ii with the one exception of the the year right after the afghan the iraq invasion so it's bigger than during the korean war bigger than during the vietnam war bigger than during the reagan buildup it is an enormous military budget and even though we're leaving afghanistan and ending a war it is growing it is obscene what's going on in washington thank you for saying it seems obvious to us normal people uh out outside is like how do you say we're turning a page on the way we view national security and then literally days later at another 25 billion dollars to your defense budget so yeah so president biden says he wants to reimagine national security and when jake sullivan was introduced last november as his national security adviser he said the president has tasked us with reimagining national security to include as national security climate change pandemics racial injustice income inequity attacks on democracy they're right about this and there's a lot of good work being done at academic institutions in the ngo world saying yes now's the time we have to rethink what really threatens us look at what's happened with the pandemic the biggest national security threat we've faced in years it's not al qaeda that's the biggest threat it's what's happening on the on climate on pandemic on nuclear weapons etc but he hasn't done it yet afghanistan is one step is he going to do anything else is he going to cut the budget is going to shrink the number of nuclear weapons is he going to pull back from iraq is he going to get pressure saudi arabia to end the war on yemen these are the big debates that that were that we should be having we haven't yet engaged in them i'm a little cynical compared to you these days my friend so let's go back a little bit okay sullivan is one of the guys from the obama administration it's the same crowd uh biden is surrounded even though biden was a lone voice and we do know that uh with his known cynicism about what was happening during the obama administration he's now surrounded by the same group of people including mr sullivan so when he says that the president has asked us to reimagine national security to include climate issues now first of all the defense department is the largest polluter out there so if you want to say that you want to reconceive you want to reconceive national security and include in that um fighting climate change you don't then you do that by giving 25 billion dollars more to the defense department so i'm just watching this i'm sorry this is this is the manipulation in the gas lighting oh oh don't look over here that we're giving them 25 billion dollars more say oh but we are reconceiving national security if you're reconceiving national security to include things like racial injustice which is reasonable or uh climate change of mitigation which is reasonable why would you do that by giving more money to the defense department here's where i agree with you i i believe i disagree with you on the sincerity of the national security team here's here's where i agree with you uh well no here's where i i i we may have a different point of view on this i think that biden and the national security team are sincere that they they want to do this i don't think they have a chance in hell of doing this without making some very very difficult decisions on the budget um on support for the saudis some of our allies on our relationship with israel these are going to be extremely difficult political decisions and the culture in washington is allied completely against him in part because a lot of these governments the saudis the israelis and others have spent a lot of time and a lot of money shoring up domestic support for their agenda the defense contractors have flooded the think tanks with grants uh there's a reason you don't see brookings and csis and the center for new american security or even the carnegie endowment where i used to work for many years issuing reports critical of our national security strategy that they themselves have a conflict of interest here this town has been corrupted by 20 years of the global war on terrorism and the kinds of money that's flow through the town so therefore i think it's our job and you're doing it and i wish there were more like you to speak up about this to say we have to cut the budget we have to turn this around we have to make the president do what he says he wants to do okay i want to ask you about two things i want to ask you about pakistan i want to ask you about china which i think is also a part of the conversation that you just started so pakistan um we were giving about a billion dollars a year in military assistance to pakistan at the same time we know that pakistan was giving military assistance to the taliban which makes it reasonable to assume that there were american soldiers who were killed a military equipment that we ourselves had given to pakistan would you please explain this to me this is one of the the great blunders of this war we were basically funding both sides of this war so the pakistan government was the chief ally of the taliban they gave them safe haven in pakistan for their own domestic reasons there's a pakistani taliban and they wanted the pakistan government's approach to this is basically to buy them off and to and to stop them from waging attacks against the pakistan government and pakistan is concerned about being surrounded by foes they they were not fans of the afghan government they they thought that that that india and iran had too much that india rather too much influence in that government and they wanted the taliban as sort of a check on on on india and we didn't do anything about it to my knowledge there was never any serious pressure on pakistan to end its support for taliban some consultations some words but we never cut a dime of assistance to pakistan because of this it was one of the greatest blunders of the war so you just said that the united states government was funding both sides how can you call that a blunder and not a crime ah [Music] a crime you know you mean like treason like betrayal soldiers were talking to the united states oh how about start even with the soldiers who were out there bravely fighting yeah you know one of the people what one of the lessons he's got to hold these people accountable right you know right if this is all good there's been no serious hearings go ahead if this is just going to be a bunch of polite conversations and we're going to look into what happened as opposed to someone being held accountable it's just going to be the same thing that america always does whether it has to do the financial meltdown or a war hey sorry guys we really should have done that better and they go forward and they pretty much do the same thing in time i i would say right now um there's uh all the arrows are pointing towards a cover-up of our failures a denial of our failures rather than a true investigation two years ago craig whitlock at the washington post published the afghanistan papers these were documents that the special inspector general for the for afghanistan had had delivered interviews with key military and civilian leaders in the effort that showed that they themselves knew that we were losing this war that as far back as as 2010 you had the commanders saying we don't know what we're doing there we are not improving the economy unless you account the count the opium production as part of the economy which is better now than it was before we invaded so they knew this it was in the front pages of the washington post for for um uh two weeks he ran his special issues on this congress never convened a hearing never looked at it in any seriousness now they want to talk about the withdrawal which they should i would say the odds are that we will get one or two hearings on the afghan war and then that'll be it they'll move over they want to put it in the past because they're complicit in it they're complicit congress is complicit in this failure and they just don't want to talk about it anymore unless we make them absolutely and the reason we made them with the evacuation is because the american people are decent we don't like to see people suffer it takes a lot to get our attention but that evacuation put so much unnecessary suffering caused at least indirectly by the policies of the united states right in our face and that is what has happened with war that started the day that uh clinton said we can't show the returning coffins as soon as they started doing various things both domestically and internationally to peripheralize the images of human suffering caused by our policies it became much easier to distract the american people because when we see something like that we don't like it and that's of course why we're having this conversation because it's incumbent upon all of us to not let this conversation die you can see it already joe the news programs are already starting to focus elsewhere and not put as much uh coverage uh in front of us and if if we do not work to stay awake uh to this we will just go back to sleep and that's an ambulance is is deadly uh for other people in the world in cases like this and ultimately to us last year the uh nightly news broadcast of nbc abc and cbs devoted a total a total of five minutes to the war in afghanistan i read all of last year now remember we had the pandemic we had a lot of but but that that is outrageous when you think about it so it the problem goes even deeper than the the congress the military-industrial complex it's how the media covers these things what kind of what kind of stories they're interested in what they think will catch people's attention and therefore lead to improved advertising rates etc we have a lot of things we have to work on to change in order to get to the point where we can really reimagine national security and i don't think we should forget that it was still the role of the commander-in-chief the civilian commander-in-chief to ask much deeper questions than obviously he was asking um their whole idea of fighting a war is you apply ferocious forms of brute force and if that's not working apply more ferocious forms of brute force and if that's not working apply more ferocious forms of brute force they know how to destroy things they don't know how to create things they don't care to even try to create things because if if you are not going to win the hearts and the minds of the people then of course there is no quote-unquote military solution and yet never did you have a serious conversation about something that could actually be done including taking on the corruption of the government to do that this is why i want to stay on the conversation about pakistan i know that you are the guy you are the go-to guy who knows about nuclear issues pakistan has a nuclear bomb are these two issues related um well right now when you think about the nuclear threats we face um most people think about north korea which has nuclear weapons iran which doesn't but is trying to build the material that you could use build upon very few people think about our own weapons even though that is 7 000 or so uh with united states and russia together have uh the majority of nuclear weapons in the world we have about five thousand five hundred the russians have about six thousand two hundred so these are the things that can really destroy the world very few people talk about india and pakistan each of those countries have 150 nuclear weapons they have fought four wars um since they're in independence with each other they both have fundamentalist religious forces extremists in their military and intelligence apparatus pakistan has a failing economy a corrupt government and oh by the way al-qaeda and taliban forces operating within their national territory so the risk factors in pakistan make it what i call the most dangerous country in the world there are a whole lot of things that could go wrong that could lead to one terrorist getting control of those nuclear weapons or to a conflict between india and pakistan perhaps over the contested kashmir region escalating quickly into a nuclear exchange and that would be devastating not just for the people of south asia but uh scientists now calculate that that such a war involving as few as a hundred nuclear weapons a hundred weapons of the kind that india and pakistan have could put enough smoke and particulate into the atmosphere to shroud the earth and cloud for two or three years dropping global temperatures two or three degrees leading to a nuclear winter where forty percent of the crops in the world would die leading to a famine that would probably kill a billion people so you realize we have been looking at for threats in all the wrong places you know we think that what we got to do is hunt down isis in afghan in afghanistan and we do and and but there are bigger more problems with with global implications happening next door in pakistan that we aren't even close to tackling so yes we have to rearrange our national security priorities to address the real threats we face and the american people have actually thought that we were paying the salaries of all these people in government to be thinking about these things now let me ask you a question what has been both the reason and the application of that billion dollars a year in aid to the pakistanis what have we been giving them that aid for well it's technically it's for military assistance and for training and to help them buy military equipment that is u.s military to fight who to to fight who the u.s government is very delicate about this because clearly what they're using it for is to is to is to shore up their military against an indian invasion and the argument in washington is that this is this is what you need to keep the government stable and to give them security so that they um they'll be more restrained in their force but doesn't mean while they're helping to uh fund the taliban meanwhile millions of this goes to the taliban that's exactly right the pakistanis have been celebrating the taliban victory ah they they won you know they basically more than anyone seems to have won this more okay yes i'm sorry you were saying no that's right go ahead uh can we move to china for a minute sure um we have now lost three wars in a row and none of us are stupid so we can it is reasonable to assume that there are many leaders in many capitals around the world who are clinking their champagne glasses um even if they don't drink champagne they are celebrating they are laughing and it is reasonable to assume that both she and putin have some questions going on in their minds and in the military commanders around them such as this might be the time to strike they're weak they're in trouble the chinese came after hong kong much harder and faster than anyone expected in ji's last major speech he said that their patience was beginning to wear thin regarding taiwan we know that there's been activity in the south china sea do you have any thoughts about any of this because it seems to me we're watching some really fun funky things already going on i think that's a possibility i think that's a possibility but that would be a big role of the dice i mean you really have to make a distinction between the failure of the counter-insurgency strategy in iraq and afghanistan the horrors of the our backing of the saudi war in yemen with the power of the pacific fleet the alliance with japan the alliances with uh korea the united states military is no pushover it is still the most powerful military on the globe a great deal of the forces are arrayed against china to prevent exactly that kind of scenario i don't think the chinese government is is that stupid frankly and i think they believe that time is on their side so i i i hear what they're saying it's it's something to watch but i think it's highly unlikely that the chinese would take a a such a provocative step it's it's a much smarter strategy for them to to wait to continue to grow their their government president xi is more adventurous more aggressive now than he was before and more adventurous than the other governments before him but i still think the just looking at it from a chinese perspective it it makes sense to wait and build up their economy and get um some of the people who are now allied with us uh to soften those alliances through the the diplomatic tools that they're now just bringing out demonstrating particularly with their their belt and road initiative and their um and to build up their military i would guess that they need another decade maybe two decades to have the kind of military force that could actually um allow them to to do something as bold and aggressive and as massive as invade taiwan i'm really that is no smaller thinking thank you i'm glad to hear that and uh i was sort of waiting to ask you that question so obviously joe you see the landscape for what it is what do you think the next six months will bring in terms of our political and uh military establishment how they transition away from this um what do you think will be the long-term consequences for the united states for afghanistan and for how we operate i think a lot is in flux right now because of the unprecedented confluence of crises that we face climate change pandemics a greater awareness of the racial injustice in our own country our economy is is still struggling to recover from the pen from the pandemic or it a lot of uncertainties about that so we so i and i think joe biden has an idea of what he wants to do his basic frame is that he believes that the last 20 years of these wars has been a big mistake have have cost us too much have diverted our attention and that we are in a struggle now that has almost nothing to do with afghanistan and iraq or for that matter the middle east and it's a struggle between democracies and autocracies and right now the autocracies are gaining strength right so how do you win he and he says it he said it in his foreign affairs article back in january february of last year he says in his his speeches you've got to show that democracy can deliver for the people so that means you've got to to shore up democratic institutions and that for him means things like the infrastructure bill this 3.5 billion dollar infrastructure bill this is his way of retooling the american economy of of retooling the role of government in american life so that 3.5 trillion dollar infrastructure pill that is a big part of what i think he wants to do in reimagining national security and put the kind of money there at the same time he's i think one of the reasons the military budget is so high is that made a very cynical calculation that this is like keynesian economy that the congress has bought in on big military budgets why fight it why exert political capital now let them let's throw more money at the military yes it's inefficient but it's also a stimulus it's also jobs programs very inefficient jobs programs very cynical view and we'll get to that later we'll work on the military budget later so we ask what the next six months are going to be i think we're looking at some major government expenditures i think we're going to see biden struggling with the pandemic i think we're going to see a big effort partially across the infrastructure bill but also in diplomacy on on climate change and this is biden's way of sort of trying to put in place as quickly as he can that is during his first year in office the kind of instruments he thinks you need to to begin to reimagine national security he's going to face heavy heavy resistance on all those fronts so it's going to be big political infighting in washington over these plans well i certainly agree with you about much of what you just said and i i i too believe that the 3.5 trillion infrastructure bill is an effort on biden's part to prove to the american people that democracy can work on their behalf on the other hand even though they're very good elements in the infrastructure bill i fear that by the time those individual elements actually trickle down into the lives of people even the child uh the child credit even family leave bill etc it will not necessarily come with a big sticker that people can see that says the democrats gave this to you uh if you want that if you want people to really see wow they did this for me you raise the minimum wage if you really want people to go wow biden did that for me you give them medicare for all if you really want people to say wow they delivered for me you cancelled the college loan debt so that issue of um you know you said something that reminds me of my friend the economist economist bob cutner who said something very similar to what you just said well we'll do this and then we'll do the next thing well you know what joe if we don't win the if we don't win the uh house and the senate in uh 2022 it's going to be difficult to build on any of this so i just hope that more and more people in washington will get out of their beltway bubble i didn't i didn't even i didn't i mean i i understood the concept of the beltway bubble bubble but until i lived here i didn't see it as clearly as i do now it's like they're having this conversation that's it's in its own kind of ivory tower and then you look at the unbelievable chronic tension and anxiety of people um who are being evicted uh who had their unemployment benefits just cut off yes who yeah uh i'm i'm with you on that i mean on the issue i spent a good deal of my life on the nuclear weapons issue you know we have an obscene amount of money pouring into nuclear weapons we don't need that actually make us less safe including for example a decision that we're about to make in the next couple of years whether to build an entirely new intercontinental ballistic missile this is a system that's going to cost 264 billion dollars we do not need it it's completely redundant but the whole thing is like is wired in from the from the contractors to get the support of the armed services committee to get the the support of the the think tank communities uh to dominate the uh the the media in washington over this joe biden could have canceled that he'd made a political calculation not to i understand why he's not canceling it but it's it's a it's a huge disappointment to us i don't frankly expect joe biden to make much change at all on u.s nuclear policy i think he's making the kind of cynical calculation you're talking about that it's that he can't win that battle so why exert the capital i'll tell you why i exerted two things first of all during my presidential campaign i talked quite a bit about the b-21 raiders that we were building with all this without power and i would point out to people five of those and civilization as we know it is over ten of those drop and the whole thing is over what are we even talking about here and you know and i think a lot of people don't realize that obama built more it's not like the democrats have slowed down the process and also when you keep saying you've said several times the political calculation i disagree with the political calculations of the obamas and the and the um uh and the bidens who say why try those forces won't let me i'll tell you the answer why so the american people can see that you're at least trying to do the right thing so the american people can see he's on our side even if they won't let him so that we can see what you were trying to do and to me that's the ultimate political calculation it's not just what the think tanks in washington are going to enroll be willing to be enrolled in but what the american people can see well i'm very glad that you're in washington to raise these issues here because quite honestly we just don't have enough voices uh saying the kinds of things that you say speaking these kinds of um iconoclastic truths to people there are so many officials there's so many illusions of official them that if you just like speak some common sense you sound like some radical out there but in a in a at a time when so many lies are made to sound that are normalized speaking common sense i suppose is a radical act but it seems to me one that we need more of well i have i really appreciate you joe like i said you are the go-to man i've always been so grateful for the clarity i know when when i first met you and the conversation about nuclear issues when i was growing up when you were growing up we went to protest banned the bomb now people don't even try it the the american people just like don't even think about it because it seems so overwhelming and uh it's it's psychologically discomforting to have to think about these things because they are so dangerous but thank you for being here uh i'm going to ask you a question would you be kind enough that we could do uh in a little bit of time and i know you must be very busy i'd like to have a um a conversation with you that is specifically about nuclear issues would you be willing to do that with me i i'd be happy to come back this is an integral part of what we need to do to redefine reimagine national security and reorient our government expenditures so they're going towards programs that actually protect the american people and not just make a small set of corporations richer and richer thank you very much for asking me for having me on yeah thank you very much i wanted to really concentrate because like you and i have agreed we we must not let this afghanistan issue go without asking the deeper questions but i am grateful to you that you'll come back so that we can talk about uh nuclear issues solely joe simencione my pleasure my friends my colleague i'm very grateful thank you so much thank you

Channel: Marianne Williamson

Views: 4,944

Rating: 4.8757062 out of 5

Keywords: Marianne Williamson, Marianne Williamson (author), A Course In Miracles, ACIM, Consciousness, Love, Happiness, Spirituality, Humanity, Our Deepest Fear, A Return to Love

Id: JPuMUinJK2A

Length: 51min 23sec (3083 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021