Yes.

But they would, they would have a strong opinion that they would offer to their readers, but they would end with, uh, the Arabic words allahu alam, which means, "And God only knows." So that's really interesting because they, they were reminding themselves and their readers that God alone is the only one who knows for certain, that we as mere humans, as mere mortals, we can only go so far in our attainment of knowledge, and that's the key distinction that we outline in the book between the creator and us as creatures, that we can never put ourselves in the place of God and claim absolute certainty.

And you can think of this in terms of final judgment, too, that final judgment doesn't belong to human beings.

It belongs to God in the next life, where he will reward or punish, and we even have a chapter called "The Case for Hell," so we take that pretty seriously.

And we think that the idea of hell can relieve some pressure on our conflicts here in America because if you know that God is gonna hold the people you disagree with to account, let's say you really think that Donald Trump is awful and a terrible person, then he'll face God in the end and face some tough questions it'll have- he'll have to answer for.

That doesn't mean that we don't seek justice now, but it means that we acknowledge that final, the, the kind of final, definitive, um, judgment is not gonna come now.

It's going to come later, and that allows us to chill a little bit ideally.

Please.

I want us to delve into some of the arguments around it, but I guess I should start with what made you want to write it in particular, because I think it's a very interesting intervention into a larger conversation that is happening, not about American power, but about what's happening within American borders and about how the society looks and feels today.

So, yeah, I think my own focus has shifted somewhat over the years.

I mean, I used to be very focused on the Middle East and I lived in the Middle East during the Arab Spring.

And then I came back to the US in 2014 and I was struck by what I saw.

I saw... things that I wouldn't have expected in the US context.

I mean, I thought the US was a stable, predictable democracy, but then we see the rise of Donald Trump and we see American politics going in this very polarized direction.

So I was trying to understand, wait, why is this happening to America? And I think that the Middle East, in an interesting way, offered a preview of what was to come in America.

They experienced the sharp end of being on the other side of that faith group.

I see it done all the time.

Yeah, yeah.

But it's just not realistic.

It's sort of- know emp empires or neo-imperial um ventures like america's are naturally going to do bad things we're not a human rights organization we're not an ngo so this idea that we can act like an ngo abroad and just always be lovey-dovey and and living up to these human rights standards That's just never the way any large power, any superpower has acted.

And I think in that sense, we're not just comparing America to the current alternatives like China and Russia.

We're also comparing America to previous empires.

like the British Empire.

The bully pulpit is still very powerful.

thank

you.

Great question.

So I come at this from the left side of the spectrum.

I kind of cut my chops politically during the anti-Iraq war movement.

I was going to protests.

I was organizing die-ins, doing that sort of thing, reading Noam Chomsky.

How do you model that?

So I suppose the argument against your book would be American power doesn't succeed in doing what it wants to do, so therefore it is better not being applied in regions which it cannot change.

So I agree with that to some degree, that we shouldn't go around invading countries and toppling their regimes without a clear plan for the day after.

That's why I was opposed to the Iran-- to this Iran intervention from the start, because I didn't see a realistic plan for getting rid of the regime.

Regime change seemed like a pipe dream that was based on unrealistic assessments on the ground.

And the same thing with the Iraq War.

I mean, I, I talk in the book about how I, I came, I came of age politically as an anti-war activist.

That was a very important time in my life, and so many of us I th- I think saw instinctively that this was a stupid, preposterous war, and we were right, even [chuckles] though we were college students.

Mm

And in what ways are those memories helpful to us? And in what ways did they actually obscure our ability to analyze what's taking place now that might be meaningfully different than something that formed our viewpoints beforehand?

Yeah, so I was a freshman in college when 9-11 happened.

So I was two weeks in.

So in that sense, it was the decisive moment.

You know, it changed my life.

I was politicized after that.

I decided that I wanted to write about politics more.

summarize or characterize what you understand that American vision or American project to be about? What is the summary version of what that idealistic, optimistic project of America is that you say you believe

Or was it more the case that as you gained expertise you didn't find that, you just kinda oriented yourself about theories of power a little differently?

Well, I did find that there were occasionally things that America did well and that were net positives, and some of them had to do with, you know, saving Muslim populations in Kosovo and Bosnia in the 1990s during the Bosnian genocide.

That would en n- that would not have ended if it wasn't for US power.

Or the first Gulf War when Iraq occupied Kuwait.

Um, that wouldn't have ended if not for US power.

So there are some examples we can point to and say that America actually did the right thing.

But also I think towards the end of the Cold War we started facilitating democratic transitions in Latin America, Africa, Asia.

Which ones were you most cautious about?

(laughs)

And- and I think that at- at some point, you know, in- in my life, at that- at that point actually, I didn't- I didn't wanna be on the outside looking in.

I didn't wanna be that protester.

I wanted to actually be in the system, and I think that's what I've tried to do for the rest of my career is be in mainstream institutions, because at the end of the day, I want my country to change, and I think that American power can be used for good.

And this is sort of my roadmap for how it can be used to create a more moral and just world.

So I mean that-

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and also the reality is that someone has to wield power.

I mean, Blinken and Sullivan are both pretty moderate Democrats, but this kind of left of center squeamishness about- It has

polluted, I think, a lot of the Democratic Party And there's a term that I use in the book that is actually coined by a British philosopher, Roger Scruton, oikophobia, which is the reverse of xenophobia.

Xenophobia is the fear of what is strange or unfamiliar, the fear of what is foreign.

Oikophobia is the fear of home and the fear of what is familiar to us.

And I think that that fear of home or that fear of what is familiar is actually something that is dangerous.

Again, it goes to this point that you can be self-critical without being self-loathing.

To get to the other part of your question on coming to terms with power, I think for me, okay, I'll go in maybe some controversial territory here.

But that, I guess, is the next question here, which is, why do you think that American power would actually end up or does fill that potential vacuum better than the countries that would rush in to fill the vacuum if America really did vacate it.