If We Could Learn From History

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

The other day, China's President Xi Jinping pulled a classic authoritarian move, abolish term limits, leaving open the possibility he could be president for life.

This was a rude awakening for a lot of folks who thought China was on an inevitable march towards liberalization and reform.

It wasn't a surprise for James Fallows.

Neither was the chaos that would emerge from the U.S.

invasion of Iraq still churning after 15 years.

Who will be vindicated by today's surprises?

And what do they expect to happen next?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic.

Over in New York is my colleague and co-host, the esteemed Alex Wagner.

Alex, how are you doing?

I am very well, my esteemed colleague in Washington, D.C., Matt Thompson.

It's great to hear your voice.

And likewise.

With me in D.C.

in the studio, I am delighted to say, are our colleagues Jim Fallows, James Fallows, the Atlantic's legendary staff writer, who returns to us on Radio Atlantic, and Kathy Gilsonen, the Atlantic's legendary global editor, who returns to us on Radio Atlantic.

Jim, Kathy, welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good to be here.

The two most genial.

Please answer in chorus for all of us.

Yeah, we will do so.

And you left out Kathy's real title, which is non-parai.

You're a non-parai global editor.

There's a whole Atlantic legend about that, which we'll get to in a later episode.

What he's saying is, I'm a legend at the Atlantic.

That is true.

Jim tells no lies.

If you don't have a little bit of French in your title, you're no one.

May we.

And so, my colleagues,

there is this fable.

We keep telling ourselves about liberal democracy.

The way the fable goes, liberal democracy is this irresistible force.

People love freedom, and they especially love the freedom to vote their rulers out of office.

And if you live in an authoritarian society that's run by a strongman, all it takes is one sweet hit of liberal democracy by military force if necessary, and folks will immediately demand it for themselves.

And it will keep on spreading across the world unimpeded until all of humankind lives together happily ever after in a progressive framework of rights and laws.

The end.

No matter how often this story gets revealed as a myth, it always comes back.

And in recent years, it was particularly popular to tell a version of this story about China.

China was this rapidly liberalizing society with lots of graduates of modern American colleges who only needed a hit of broadband American internet to demand it for themselves, to bring it back to China, to end the Great Firewall, and to start electing Bernie Sanders to be the head of the Communist Party.

Yeah, I was going to say, okay, go ahead.

The other day, once again, this fable revealed its mythical qualities.

Xi Jinping, ruler of China, managed by a complex set of maneuvers to have his term limit in office essentially removed.

A classically authoritarian move.

Many were surprised by this.

Many of those who believed the myth of China as the liberalizing, increasingly Western society were surprised by this authoritarian move.

But Jim.

Jim Fallows wasn't surprised.

Jim Fallows was not surprised.

Jim Fallows saw this coming, man.

Indeed.

How did you see this coming, Jim?

What did you see?

You've written about China for years for the Atlantic.

You've taken many trips to China.

You've lived there.

What gave you the sense that this was possibly in the cards?

I'll tell you a little cheating secret of the veteran correspondent, which is the trick that is both true to the merits in China and also useful, is recognizing that anything could happen.

And so being prepared at all times to say, well, this could just blow up in our face or something better could occur.

And here's the serious point I mean from that.

I think that the,

I actually think American history does have a plot line.

I think there is the long-term struggle with sin and failure and everything else, which generally has been moving in a certain direction.

It is not clear to me that China itself or China and the rest of the world, either of those has a plot line.

It's sort of like Brownie in motion, where many things are possible.

And the piece I did almost a year and a half ago in The Atlantic was essentially saying: over the last 30 years, the not really foreseeable course of events between the U.S.

and China has gone pretty much in one way.

You know, pretty much China has become more liberalized, and pretty much the U.S.

and China have kept things within bounds.

But what if that's changing?

What if China is going bad?

And I think that in

one part of this whole matrix, they are not going bad, but changing outside the bound.

And so it's just

the trick to dealing with China, I think, and also convenience and predictions, is that anything can happen really good and really bad.

And we're dealing with sort of the bad end of the curve, of the inflection curve now.

Aaron Powell,

Jim,

for a lot of people,

our preoccupation has been towards Russia and to some degree Europe, which we'll talk about after the break.

People don't seem to really understand how the Chinese government has become in many ways more repressive of late and the things that it's doing to its own citizens that have been aided and abetted by technology.

Can you tell us a little bit about sort of what you have seen on the ground and what you've heard?

This is a really interesting theme because I first went there in the mid-80s when it really was a buttoned-up place.

I could only get a visa by learning Esperanto and signing up as a delegate to the the World Esperanto Congress.

We were followed every place, et cetera, et cetera.

But starting, say, from the liberalization of the early 1980s onwards, until three or four years ago, you could look back at any sequence, a five-year slice, a three-year slice, and with ups and downs, it was always getting a little more liberal.

People were traveling more.

People could move within the country and around the world.

They were having more information.

When Xi Jinping came to office five years ago, that stopped.

And the question was, is this a momentary slide like the couple-year real change after the Tennessee massacres of

1989, or is this the new normal?

And here's some indications of the new normal.

The Internet, when I was living there from 2006 through

2009 and 2011, the Internet was censored, but you could always get around it.

You could get a VPN.

It was sort of a nuisance tax that foreigners and Chinese professors had to pay.

You could always get around it because you're a techie.

But foreigners, everybody knew VPNs, and Chinese hot shots could do it.

The guy who was famously the head of the Great Firewall back then, there were some articles that he had seven VPNs running.

So he was really Mr.

Kuhl.

VPNs are being closed down.

There's a kind of extraterritoriality of China sort of trying to rebut criticism outside its borders.

Lawyers are being arrested.

NGOs are being shut down.

And this recent change, which technically was affecting only one of the three jobs that Xi Jinping has, it's the only job that limited his power.

So most people saw it as president for life.

And three or four years ago, you could get serious debates on shows like this, with eminences like this.

Was Xi Jinping cracking down so as to clean things up or just to crack down?

And it seems to be the latter now.

We should also note, I mean, and you talk about this, Jim,

the Chinese have made it sort of unfavorable in terms of a business climate for non-Chinese businesses, especially American businesses and tech companies looking to work and make money in China.

The Chinese market is, of course, an important and lucrative market for Western companies.

And there's been some really important, good reporting in other publications about the emergence of a social credit system or a proposed social credit system that the Chinese are trying to establish to rank and rate its citizens based on their trustworthiness.

It's sort of the stuff you hear in a semi-Orwellian narrative, but it is, in fact, coming to fruition in modern-day China.

Yes, very much.

And just one other point there is the facial recognition software is now ubiquitous and just flat-out creepy.

Because every place you go, there are cameras, and there have been stories both in the Chinese press, and I think we've had them too, about just how powerful this is.

And you can pick anybody out in a matter of seconds.

And so that is

a hypothetical issue for us that's happening there.

I want to bring together two threads from the questions that have been asked so far.

Starting with the myth of the forward march of liberal democracy, I think a feature of that myth has often been the assumption that once people start to get richer, once there's a middle class that has leisure time to read the newspaper and get educated and get informed, they will start to demand their rights and or start to demand to be more like America.

I think that one of the things that's been so interesting to commentators about the China model, and by the way, not all critical commentators, I recall a Tom Friedman column from many years ago talking about the wonders of the Chinese ability to bring people together to build mega-projects in a way that a messy democracy like the United States could never do.

To what extent

Why has China succeeded in threading this needle of both providing for its people in an economic sense, to a large extent,

without having to loosen up rights.

And then, secondly, what do you make of this?

You know, again, there's been this assumption that the spread of technology is naturally a liberalizing force.

But in China and elsewhere, you've seen it turn toward authoritarian impulses.

How has China managed to thread both of those needles, if you'll excuse the clichés?

So, my answer, especially on the first, is it's not clear that they have succeeded.

I mean, it's significant.

I think the U.S.

has some problems right now, as we all would stipulate.

But suppose that

the children of every prominent U.S.

business or political official were going someplace else for college and graduate school, or people were so worried about the stability of the United States that they were putting their money in German properties or in Brazilian properties or someplace else.

I know enough people from our years in living in China who are young and professional class, and they've seen the world, and they don't want this nanny state sitting on them them any more than

we do.

And so I think it is ⁇ there is a whole school of thought saying that the recent assumption or concentration of power by Xi Jinping and increasing crackdown is a sign of weakness, nervousness, failure, et cetera, as opposed to strength.

There is an old,

for any of you who go to a foreign correspondence club in China, aka a bar,

the way you can always have a lot of

foreign correspondence club in the United States is also known as a bar.

So

the endless ⁇ what will keep the conversation going all night, apart from the beers, is does the Communist Party know more than we do or less than we do?

By which I mean it looks like they shouldn't be as afraid as they're acting.

And are they acting afraid because they know more of how unstable it is or because they know less and they're just control freaks?

Can I mention

Pei, who's now the, I think, the director at the Keck Center at Claremont McKenna College, was interviewed by David from For The Atlantic, and he seems to ascribe more, I guess, nefarious motives to the Communist Party.

He basically says the party's a successor to a totalitarian regime, and

it is both far more ruthless and determined to protect its power than an average dictatorship and far more capable of doing so.

Should we have seen this coming?

So Minchin Pei, who is a good friend and a great guy, guy, and I've had the advantage of being able to read his books and sort of

profiteer from his thought over the decades.

And, of course, he's from Shanghai originally and now has been a prominent U.S.

academic.

I think that he has seen it coming.

He had a famous book a dozen years ago, China's Trapped Transition, about how they couldn't really make it out of this, that their model was fine for getting out of peasantry, but it wasn't so good for making it an advanced state.

I think we all should have seen it as one of the things that might be coming.

And I still think it's, you know, there's 10 different outcomes that could happen.

I think Minchin would say that too.

My other question is whether,

to your point about looking at the longer arc of history

and at risk of buying into the myth again, do you think what she is doing is sustainable?

And are we going to be having this conversation 20 years from now saying the myth of the successful China model?

So a discussion I've had with Minchin Pei and others in China China is they point out that there's no communist regime that has lasted more than about 70 years.

That was the Soviet model.

And the Chinese are coming up on the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic and a little longer than that of the Communist Party.

And history has suggested there's a sort of self-limiting contradiction, you might say,

to how the system

can work.

It is, you know, I really think almost anything is possible.

I think the breakup of China is not plausible.

The monopoly of force by the state is so great, the momentum they have, people have more to lose than to gain by that.

But I think any number of other things are also conceivable,

including sort of the lobotomization of China, by which I mean Xi

for the foreseeable future and whoever comes after him, just keep the lid on, which means they never get good universities.

And people who have choices go someplace else.

And their kids, including Xi Jinping's daughter, a graduate of Harvard College, although that was never publicized in China,

they sort of go out into the rest of the world.

So you can imagine China sort of topping off at a level below its real potential

if the boot stays on the neck.

I'm curious, we've been speaking a lot about the dynamics within the nation.

And I'm curious, what do the changes afoot within China Telegraph for its role in the broader world?

It has seemingly come into its own as a superpower, or at least recognized its sense of its powers in the broader world, perhaps.

Does that continue, and what are the implications of this perhaps authoritarian return for that role, for the role that it plays?

Well, let me start out with the one, apart from that, Mrs.

Lincoln, type of caveat here, which is that when I did the story for the Atlantic a year and a half ago about how difficult it was becoming to deal with China and know what was happening there, its entire premise is that the U.S.

side of this interaction would be strategic and thought through and informed and patient.

And all the things that had been true for as long, for the entirety of sort of the modern era, that Republicans or Democrats have all had really top-rate talent.

I think both U.S.

administrations administrations and Chinese administrations have managed this interaction better than most people would have thought.

And now we have on the U.S.

side, we got

no economic advisor, and we got Peter Navarro.

So there's no sign of the U.S.

sort of playing its part of the game.

And China's evolution for 40 years has been conditioned on the U.S.

dealing with it, shaping the environment would

work in.

So now I think China's expansion is this weird ⁇ it's like being in zero gravity.

They don't know what is possible and not.

I think the main momentum of expansion is, of course, economics mainly.

This one-built, one-road, Marshall Plan vision is mainly to sell their stuff.

And the other thing it is, is

resentful at the Japanese and Koreans in the South China Sea and East China Sea.

So those two things would be better if the U.S.

were thinking about this than that we are not.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Can I do one of those double question things?

Sorry, Jim, both of these are going to be a little bit devil's advocate.

My first question is, do you think that if we had an administration in office checking all those boxes you described as being thoughtful and strategic, how much do you think the U.S.

can actually shape and influence China's rise?

Secondly, I think that people in the Trump administration would say that the previous administration did not push back enough militarily on things like Chinese expansion in the South China Sea.

So that the argument that they make is that

they're the ones who are actually putting up the barrier against which China now knows that they can't expand.

What is your comment?

So on the first about how much the U.S.

can shape China's rise internally, I think the U.S.

either has or should assume it has zero ability to shape what happens in China.

We can say we think this is how things should go.

We're going to reward this and penalize that.

But it's a big country, four times as many people as we have.

The U.S.

has no ability to kind of tell them what to do.

But we have been the crucial factor in the international environment that has made

a certain kind of behavior advantageous to them.

For example, the best thing they've done internationally in the last decade is the Paris Peace, Paris Climate Accords, which they would not have done if the U.S.

were not there trying to get this done too.

And now they may end up being a kind of a leader of that.

So we can't make them a democracy, but we can shape an environment in which they operate.

I would like to see an informed version of the critique that the sort of

Neville Chamberlain-like Obama administration was lying down in front of the Chinese.

I think that's just not true.

And the premise of my piece in the Atlantic was it's getting harder.

The Chinese government is becoming a little fuller of itself, and there needs to be a clearer line on what the sort of boundaries are,

that what things are better for everybody, what things would be worse for everybody.

And I think I would not subscribe to the, oh, we're going from Chamberlain to Churchill.

I'm curious, Jim, when we put this myth, the liberalizing democracy myth to bed, What happens on the other end of a trip?

You as a person who spent a lot of time all over the United States and all over the world and spent a lot of time, especially in China, What happens after a young person comes and spends four years studying in a U.S.

college and then goes back to a society that's structured a very different way with a different set of premises from the one that they've just spent four years of their life immersed in?

So, of course, I'll give my standard caveat.

It's a great big country.

Anything you say about it is true of someone there or of someplace.

But I think there's been in the last decade some minor theme of Chinese students coming here and becoming sort of more sinified.

You know, they room together, there are enough of them they can room together, they never learn English, they say, oh, these Americans, they're so lazy, et cetera, et cetera.

So that's always one possibility in the international experience.

I think the

more sort of median experience would be people who think, like other citizens of the world, that the U.S.

is part of their terrain.

They know places in Los Angeles, they've been to New York, they've been to DC,

and

I think it just gives them a bigger sense of the world and their place in it and makes them more resentful of being told they can't do things.

So I think that the communist government has usually been

hamhanded in international signal sending.

For example, when the Norwegians gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, that just meant the Chinese were going to lock him up forever, as they did until he died.

But they're more finely tuned in how they crack down internally.

And things that don't, if there are ways they don't have to repress the average person, you know, living his life and just sending his kids to, his or her kids to college, they'd avoid doing that.

They've maximized internally the art of minimum surplus oppression.

Just as much as

you need by.

I guess that's something to celebrate.

The French term for that is a bon mall, I believe.

With minimum surplus oppression,

stick with us.

When we come back, I'm going to ask Jim to broaden beyond China and to tell us about the rest of the world and answer a question that I'm curious about.

Who was right?

Tires matter.

They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road.

Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack.

Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy.

Fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, convenient installation options, and the best selection of BF Goodrich tires.

Go to tire rack.com to see their BF Goodrich test results, tire ratings, and reviews, and be sure to check out all the special offers.

TireRack.com, the way tire buying should be.

Jim,

we are about to mark the 15th anniversary of America's invasion of Iraq.

You have written very, many,

very smart things about that invasion as it was coming into being, including a national magazine award-winning piece called The 51st State.

One theme in that piece 16 years ago that you revisited again 10 years ago was that several individuals were loudly trying to say that what happened in Iraq was going to happen.

That the past 15 years, that much of that was telegraphed by folks who were paying close attention to a bunch of questions that just weren't at the forefront of the conversation at the time.

While in late 2002, the march to war was happening, there were a bunch of just

very

practical questions.

What would happen?

How would this unfold?

How would we deal with this aftermath of the intervention that weren't being asked?

And so, I'm particularly curious about at this moment, when especially again in the Middle East, there is much unknown about what lies ahead.

Who are you listening to?

Who was

right

To simplify the question, who are the voices that were most tamped down in our discussion of the unfolding events in the Middle East, who you pay more attention to today?

So that's something I've been thinking about and talking about with Kathy for further stories, etc.

And to me, the was rightness sort of falls into two different categories.

There's all the tactical

stuff where I'm thinking of a man named Conrad Crane and his counterparts and his colleagues at the Army War College at Carlisle in Pennsylvania, who, in the six or eight months before the war in Iraq, they did a very, very careful sort of future history of what is going to happen if we do this.

And they laid out, and I was just spending a lot of time on them and sort of hearing all the things that they had thought through.

And what made their

work prescient and tragic in being ignored is that

it had

an application of famous General William Tecumseh Sherman's War is Hell outlook, which is these were people whose lifetime was thinking about waging and studying war.

And the main lesson was

This always was terrible.

It always didn't go the way you planned.

There were always ramifications for decades into the future.

And they tried to think all of that through.

And so, although although the circumstances differ in Iraq from, let's say, North Korea or Syria or Iran or any place else,

I place very strong weight on the people who say, okay, what happens next?

What then?

The person who asks the what happens next question is one I listen to.

The one who says, we'll worry about it later when we're talking about the military.

is the one I don't want to hear from.

The other category of rightness or wrongness is something that is never right through U.S.

history but is always recalibrated, which is the balance between

the ideals we might practically like to apply every place and a tragic imagination of what can go wrong when you do that.

And from my point of view, and the person who was right about this was young state Senator Barack Obama in the fall of 2002 with his famous speech saying, don't do this, and former Vice President Al Gore saying at the same time, don't do this.

And so people with a sense there's going to be a trade-off in the ideals you don't pursue, the lives you don't save, but this can go more wrong than you are imagining.

So I have respect for tragic imagination not spilling over into Neville Chamberlainism.

And I have respect for people asking, what happens then?

Is it your feeling that those questions, to move ahead a little bit, if I may, to the counter-ISIS campaign,

that in large part ISIS grew out of the intervention in Iraq.

So now we find ourselves following a war of choice with wars that we no longer consider to be of choice, that this is a direct threat to America, ergo, intervene.

Is it your feeling that anybody was asking the what happens next question when it came to

doing a narrow counterterrorism intervention in Syria to defeat ISIS?

I'm going to

confess something no writer of mature years should confess, which is I don't really know enough to have a strong opinion about this.

It was sort of, I haven't ever been to Syria.

I don't really, that is something I don't know enough about, but I will buttress this.

I think of a sort of, there's a constellation of military-related issues we're dealing with now.

North Korea, very notably, Iran, certainly, China in the south and east China seas, and of course, Syria and that whole

arena.

And in all of those, the what happens next?

Where does this go?

Five years from now, how does this end?

The how does this end question, I think, is a very important one.

And my

instinct is to

sympathize with the very messy-looking decision Obama made to draw a red line, but then not enforce it.

I think he shouldn't have drawn the red line, but the not enforcing it, I think, reflected his tragic imagination, as Jeff Goldberg said in his famous piece about it.

But

if it were up to me, I'd be pushing how does this end?

Where does it lead?

What do we do next?

Aaron Powell,

Jim, as we talk about liberalism's circuitous path around the globe, I want to get your thoughts on what transpired in Italy this week.

I don't know how to say make Italy great again in Italian, but they were basically wearing red trucker hats that said as much in the north.

How do you read the contours of that election?

Aaron Ross Barrett,

in a way, they were there first.

If you look at

old newsreels of Il Duce giving his speeches, you see a lot of things that are familiar from Make America Great Again styles and Berlusconi, of course,

had his,

still has his role.

I have one degree more sympathy.

for the Italian or continental European version of this sort of,

I won't won't call it fascism, but this sort of révancheism that we're seeing there in many other countries than the U.S.

version for this reason.

There's a U.S.

factor and a continental factor.

The U.S.

factor is from the get-go, with all of the caveats of slavery and of enforced white privilege in various ways and all the rest, we have accepted the bargain that this was a country of an idea rather than of a people.

And that through our history, new people have been brought in and and it's always been disruptive.

But on the whole, the arc of American history, in my view, has been towards bringing more people in.

Side note, when I was working for Texas Monthly in the late 19th, in the 1970s, the idea was that the Vietnamese immigrants of Louisiana and Texas would never be assimilated.

Now, half the graduating class of the Ivy League schools or the children of those immigrants, et cetera.

The Europeans, Italy is a semi-invented country, but they are also a people.

And so in various ways, so it's harder for them.

I think they should try harder, but my American bias is that they should assimilate.

So

that is one factor.

And I guess the other factor is I think

they have what I was calling a tragic imagination on this front.

A friend who's a Dutch intellectual, Rob Riemann, was here a month or so ago, and he was saying, Europeans recognize that Americans hear racial aspects of commentary because for all of, even if you're a Klan member, you know that race is the axis of American life.

And he said, for us, it's fascism.

That's something we have experience with.

We recognize it.

So I somehow feel there's more protective fabric there.

Aaron Powell, you mentioned Berlusconi.

He's almost a moderate force

at this point because

Italy swung so far to the right in terms of xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Does the severity, does the virulence of that rhetoric surprise you, given the fact that this is more a fabric of Italian society than it is in American society?

Aaron Powell,

or this sentiment around immigration.

I guess it's interesting that at any previous point in American history, or at least in my life, we never would be talking seriously about what Italian politics meant,

because it's always been this sort of carnival, and they recognize that themselves.

So I think it's a sign of the

severity or the seriousness of this issue for all democracies now.

So yes, this is not not entertaining to see, nor is the Hungarian spectacle, nor that in Czech Republic, nor in Poland, nor in the UK.

So there is a lot of attention to be paid.

Aaron Powell, Trevor Bowie, Well, and in contrast to the Hungarian spectacle and

other of the illiberal trends that we're observing in Eastern Europe, I think one of the things that's been alarming about the Italian election is that it's the first time Eurosceptical parties have a majority in Parliament in the heart of Europe, in one of the core European countries.

So that raises a lot of questions post-Brexit about whether the European experiment, you know, what the future of the European experiment is.

The other thing, we've had some great dispatches from our excellent correspondent, Rachel Donadio, observing the election, and she observed that people are mentioning this in the same breath as Brexit and Trump as a similar kind of populist earthquake.

And as with anything, there are commonalities and differences there.

And Italy, in fact, was ahead of the curve on this.

You know,

this populist five-star movement that has now solidified most, not a majority in parliament, but got 33% of the vote, so is the largest party in parliament and will have to be a partner in any government that's formed.

It got...

25% of the vote several years ago.

This was the original populist wave, and the center left managed to hold it off.

So the question that this raises in my mind is whether, you know, we were all very relieved by results in France and the Netherlands, and we all started to, you know, change our cliché from

the populist tide to stemming the populist tide or whatever it was.

And now I'm wondering as we look out

longer in history, again,

whether it was too early to call the top of the populist wave or whether in fact, you know, history is history and countries vote for parties for different reasons.

And maybe it's not all part of one grand thing.

Would you like to hear one of my favorite theories?

What is

I would.

So way back at the dawn of time when I was in college, what I studied was, to the extent I studied, was American history and literature.

And the message I took from that about the U.S.

was it's always been a big mess.

You know, that just every decade has this emergency and struggle, and every gain that's been made is conditional and not automatic.

And I think it was

a combination of the fall of the Soviet Union and a lot of sort of simplistic newspaper columns and political speeches, which made people think, oh, yeah, politics is over.

We don't need to think about the ongoing fight for liberal values, for peace versus war, et cetera.

And to me, the message is politics will go on forever and needs to be fought out in every country.

And yeah, they all do things for different ways.

But China is going to be a struggle for all the rest of our lifetimes and these forces in Europe.

So

it's always been tough, and the fight goes on.

To that end,

I wanted to call up a moment from our esteemed co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg's conversation with Steve Call, who recently published a book, Directorate S, a history of the CIA.

And Jeff talks with Steve Call about the lessons that Obama learned and the way that he learned the lessons, particularly of Vietnam, and how much that haunted his thinking as he was making decisions about American power during his presidency.

Let's hear a clip.

One of the themes that really struck me when I went back to that material was: they don't want to hear about Vietnam.

I was there,

but Obama almost has like an allergic reaction if you raise the comparison between what we're doing with this escalation in Vietnam.

And this was the line that really stuck with me.

They shouldn't be afraid of history.

No, Obama, I think what you're suggesting is that Obama saw Johnson.

I mean, he saw this in Syria and Iraq, obviously, as well.

He saw Johnson as the Democratic president he doesn't want to be, the guy who gets just sucked into the mire.

And by the end of 2010, he knew enough about the process and about Afghanistan to have decided, I'm done with this war.

I've got to play out some commitments I've made.

But it's those first two years where I think he's still formulating this.

It's interesting that he didn't want to hear about Vietnam then, because I think the entirety of his second term was about avoiding a Vietnam-like experience in Syria.

Maybe he wouldn't articulate it as a Vietnam experience.

Does that ring true based on your study of this?

Yeah, definitely.

I think he decided also at the end of 2010 to announce that he would be leaving Afghanistan as he announced that he was going into Afghanistan heavy up for a couple of years.

And that decision was,

you know, born of his two years of coming to terms with the fact that this was actually not a war he wanted to escalate, that he did not want to go down a path that Johnson had gone down.

Speaking about learning or mislearning the lessons of history, Jim,

this year is also the centennial of the end of World War I.

And you in your writing have mentioned a book that has been

a useful history for you, Daniel Frumpkin's History, A Peace to End All Peace of the Ottoman Empire's decay in the early 20th century.

What did you learn from that book, written now 20 years ago?

What does it tell us about the Middle East at this moment or about power more broadly?

Aaron Ross Powell,

for me as a person who's been around the world a lot, but I don't think of myself as a Middle Eastern expert, what I found so useful about this book when I read it 10 or 15 years ago was its sense that from the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the way in which things were put back together in Versailles, essentially all the sorrows of the modern Middle East were born.

This was interesting to me because a field I do know more about is economics.

And of course, John Maynard Keynes's work about Versailles and why the punitive economic terms placed on Germany after the World War I essentially preordained what would happen over the next 30 years in terms of conflict in Europe.

And so I think that

when David Frumkin's book, he was saying that the ways in which the boundaries were drawn, the ways in which rivals were put together or separated, this essentially set up the problems of the Arabian Empire and of modern-day Iraq and of Iran, too.

So I think that this has been a useful guide for me.

One other thing I can, if I could just add on here, two professors of mine in college who I really respected and learned from were Ernest May and Richard Neustadt.

Ernest May, an American historian, Neustadt, a presidential scholar.

And they wrote a wonderful book called Thinking in Time, the Use and Misuse of History.

And their point was,

you always need to learn from history, but only so much, because it never actually happens the same way again.

And Lyndon Johnson learned the lessons of Munich too much.

And Barack Obama either did or did not learn the lessons of Vietnam too much.

And so finding ways to recognize what is learnable and having respect for what is not, that is the part of the ongoing, continuing struggle.

I think that's where we got to leave it.

That's

the beautiful struggle.

The beautiful struggle.

Shout out to Tanahashiko.

Shout out to Tanahashi.

Very honored.

Thinking in time, peace to end, all peace.

We're going big here.

Let us turn.

Speaking of history and not forgetting things and learning the lessons, let's turn to Keepers, our closing segment, in which I ask you all the question: what have you read, heard, listened to, watched, experienced recently that you do not want to forget?

Kathy, why don't we start with you?

Okay, mine's pretty dorky, though.

And it's on theme with this conversation.

Here for it.

So I recently, as one does, picked up a book on a new book on grand strategy.

It described strategy as matching ends with means, which is the common description of strategy.

But the way that it described why that's important is, I think, important to many of the themes that we've discussed today.

Ends exist in your mind and therefore are potentially infinite.

So your ends in Iraq might be to rid the country of WMD and create a stable, vibrant democracy.

That is infinite.

And you can imagine that.

It's where you get to means that you actually have to enact the thing that you have imagined, and that's where you actually start getting in trouble.

And I've been thinking about that as I operate in a world of means and constraints and trying to

enact my very ambitious ends.

But a woman's reach must exceed her grasp, or what's a heaven for?

Thank you very much, Kathy.

Jim, what would you like to keep?

I was tempted to go low road and to mention a sci-fi novel.

Aren't we all?

But then I threw down the gauntlet and now you got to bring it.

I was going to mention a sci-fi novel called The Alley God by Philip Jose Farmer about the last Neanderthal on Earth.

And I have a particular affinity for Neanderthals, which I'll describe at another time.

Actually, the keeper I'm going to describe is that I think I mentioned the last time we got together, the only thing I can read anymore is histories and fiction of 1880 through 1920 or so, of just

what we can learn from previous times like this in American life.

And for my either sins or rewards, I've read the entire oeuvre of Theodore Dreiser in the

past year or so, or listened to them on tapes or whatever.

And I mentioned this in Keepers not to forget, because a book I'd read 50 years ago, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, is actually the great American novel.

Dreiser was a terrible writer sentence by sentence, but so powerful in showing that all the impulses of American life of class and anxiety and gender inequality and corruption and the frontier and the metropolis, all these things, they've been with us for a long time.

So I want to remember remember how absorbed I was in the story of the protagonist and victims of American tragedy and hope other people will read it too.

Excellent.

Theodore Dreiser.

Alex,

what's cooking?

What'd you like to keep?

Well, speaking of the age of empires, the rise and fall of empires, I'm watching a new series, which isn't new, but new to American audiences, called Babylon Berlin, which is set during the Weimar Republic.

And it is,

you know, I think we think of a cabaret when we think of that period, and there are definitely elements of that sort of razzle-dazzle.

But you also get a sense of just how broken the German public was after the Great War.

You see the cost, the toll of that war on the German public and the targeting of communists, paramilitary violence, and also a Berlin that was sort of as chaotic and vibrant and alive and cosmopolitan as, well, some parts of American cities at this time.

I'm not suggesting that there are parallels, but

it is both educational and incredibly riveting, fun television to watch.

Excellent.

Alex, where can we watch this?

On Netflix.

Nice.

Yes.

As I said in the beginning, it is a German show that Netflix is bringing to American audiences.

So Alex, I agree entirely with what you said.

And one other thing that's fascinating is almost everything you see about 20th century Germany,

the overhang of the Nazis is real obvious.

And it's before the Nazis are there, which is what makes it all the more fascinating.

So you see the beginnings.

You see the Hitler youth a little bit.

You see the sort of rise of that strain of nationalism.

And, well, the rest is

just tune in, download it, whatever you do to get the Netflix.

For my keeper, I am going to say a word for the extraordinary profile of Christopher Steele by Jane Mayer in

The New Yorker.

It was interesting to read this story in particular weeks after the publication of our cover story by Franklin Forer about Paul Manafort, American hustler.

Christopher Steele, in Jane Mayer's depiction, is a person who has

left his job as an intelligence agent for the British government, for MI6,

and has founded a private concern, a firm called Orbis, Orbis, in which he produces intelligence for mostly private actors.

But along the way, he has this,

again, as Jane Mayer describes him, he has this sort of earnest devotion to Western governments, both the UK government, the U.S.

government, and so he elects at various points to try with increasing urgency to bring U.S.

and British government officials into the knowledge of some of the intelligence that he acquired, that he was paid to acquire by Fusion GPS.

One of the lines of attack against Christopher Steele is that he became more of a public figure after BuzzFeed famously published the dossier that he'd produced in his work for Fusion GPS.

One of the lines of attack against him was that he can't work both sides of the aisle.

You can't both be a private figure doing work for pay and then also selectively work for governments and ply the information that you acquire to

public actors.

And it was an interesting juxtaposition, thinking about Paul Manafort as another person who built this

private business about information and influence in part and plied his trade for different governmental and quasi-governmental actors.

The two stories are fascinating stories to read in juxtaposition with one another.

It's an extraordinary piece, and for someone who has been covered as much as Christopher Steele has, it's just striking what an amazing job Jane Mayer did of finding new textures, dimensions, and information that hadn't been reported in this tale.

Jane Mayer, Christopher Steele, check it out.

With that, that brings us to the end of Keepers and the end of another Radio Atlantic.

Alex, thank you, as always.

Matt, thank you, my friend.

Jim Fallows, Kathy Gilsonen, thank you again for joining us.

Thank you, Matt.

In chorus.

We will see you soon, and Alex, I'll talk to you next week.

Sounds good.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Diana Douglas and Kim Lau.

Thanks to my esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner, and our colleagues, James Fallows and Kathy Gilsonen, John Batiste, as always, lifts our spirits with his immortal rendition of the battle hymn.

Leave us a voicemail with your contact information and your thoughts on this episode at 202-266-7600.

Check us out at facebook.com/slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com/slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description, and if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

May your tea leaves presage only blessings.

We'll see you next week.

Martha listens to her favorite band all the time.

In the car,

gym,

even sleeping.

So when they finally went on tour, Martha bundled her flight and hotel on Expedia to see them live.

She saved so much, she got a seat close enough to actually see and hear them.

of.

You were made to scream from the front row.

We were made to quietly save you more.

Expedia, made to travel.

Savings vary and, subject to availability, light inclusive packages are at all protected.