Trump's National Security Strategy: A Plan to Contain China or Carve Up the World? | Jamie Metzl

In Episode 454 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/national-security-strategy-a-plan-to-contain-china-or-carve-up-the-world-jamie-metzl of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with author, futurist, and U. S. foreign policy expert Jamie Metzl about the aims and objectives of the 2025 National Security Strategy and its implications for American prosperity and power in the 21st century. Jamie and Demetri spend the first hour of this conversation digging into the Trump administration's 2025 National Security Strategy and the story that the administration is trying to tell to the American people and to itself about America's place in the world, where it went astray, and what needs to be done on a strategic planning level in order to "Make America Great Again." From there, Metzl and Kofinas debate whether the strategy amounts to a "containment" of China or something closer to a 19th-century balance-of-power where the largest and most powerful countries—namely the United States, Russia, and China—will be granted the freedom to operate with impunity within their own spheres of influence, dealing a final death blow to the international rules-based liberal order that the United States sought to universalize after the fall of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago. The second hour is a wide-ranging tour through what this strategy might look like in practice, from the Western Hemisphere and Venezuela to Europe and Ukraine, and what "power politics" means when so much of modern conflict is fought through influence campaigns, institutional sabotage, and cyber operations rather than through the use of conventional arms and occupations. The two also explore the dangerous vacuum created when a superpower can no longer clearly articulate what it stands for—at home or abroad—and how that confusion can lead to a cascade of unintended consequences that further destabilize the international system, resulting in a new form of total war. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Joining our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 12/15/2025

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Jamie Metzl, an author and futurist with deep foreign policy experience, having served on President Clinton's National Security Council, in the State Department, and in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Jamie and I spent the first hour of this conversation digging into the Trump administration's 2025 national security strategy, and the story that the administration is trying to tell to the American people and to itself about America's place in the world, where

• 0:45Demetri Kofinas?

  we went astray, and what needs to be done on a strategic planning level in order to make America great again. From there, Jamie and I debate whether the strategy amounts to a containment of China or something closer to a 19th-century balance of power, where the largest and most powerful countries, namely the United States, Russia, and China, will be granted the freedom to operate with impunity within their own spheres of influence, dealing a final death blow to the international, rules-based liberal order that the United States sought to universalize after the fall of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago. The second hour is a wide-ranging tour through what this strategy might look like in practice,

• 1:27Demetri Kofinas?

  from the Western Hemisphere and Venezuela to Europe and Ukraine, and what power politics means when so much of modern conflict is fought through influence campaigns, institutional sabotage, and cyber operations, rather than through the use of conventional arms and occupations. We also explore the dangerous vacuum created when a superpower can no longer clearly articulate what it stands for at home or abroad, and how that confusion can create a cascade of unintended consequences that further destabilize the international system and leads to a new form of total war. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app,

• 2:13Demetri Kofinas?

  just like you're listening right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q and A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this spirited and vigorous conversation about the world and our place in it with my guest, Jamie Metzl.

• 2:54Demetri Kofinas?

  Jamie Metzl, welcome back to Hidden Forces.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Thanks so much to meet you. Really my pleasure to be here.

• 3:01Demetri Kofinas?

  I have a sense, just speaking to you for a few minutes, that you've been a very busy man the last six years since you were last on the podcast. Because I think it was six years ago when you were on, and you were struggling to remember some of the details of that interview. And I'm sure you've done many, many interviews in the years since, including Joe Rogan, which really like-

• 3:19Speaker 01

  I've done Joe Rogan twice.

• 3:21Demetri Kofinas?

  Twice?

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that was my prep for this interview. Joe Rogan's the warm-up act.

• 3:26Demetri Kofinas?

  That's right. And I'm glad you acknowledged that publicly, Jamie. Yeah, you were on the podcast, I think it was 2019. You'd written a book then on genomics, which was a topic that I was interested in covering, that we, it was actually one of the early topics that I sought to cover when I started the podcast. And I think the first episode we ever did with that was with Eric Schott of the Ica Institute on multi-scale biology. And so I was very excited that you had a book out on that. And you're out with a new book, and I'll have a chance to ask you about that in a second. But what brought us back in touch is, do you remember you, you met my mother-in-law in an elevator at a conference? Because she's a lab director at a large fertility institute. She's a physician. And somehow, I don't remember what, do you remember what the conversation was?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  I don't remember exactly.

• 4:08Demetri Kofinas?

  I should have asked her. Something came up and she brought you up or something. I was like, oh, I know Jamie.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 4:14Demetri Kofinas?

  Anyway, so let's just, real quick, what is your background? Tell us who you are and what have you been up to?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  So a lot of people, so educationally from Kansas City, Brown undergrad, Oxford PhD and Harvard Law School. When I was very young, 18, I worked in a refugee camp on the Thai Cambodian border and that really opened my eyes to a whole lot of different things. Ultimately led me to working, when I was very, very young, on the National Security Council for President Clinton. And when I was there, my then boss and still friend, Richard Clark, who later became famous for being the Cassandra of 9/11, used to say that the key to efficacy in Washington and in life is to try to solve problems other people can't see. And for him in those days, it was terrorism and cyber.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  And for me, it very quickly became the big picture implications of what we now know as the AI genetics and biotechnology revolution. So that was 30 years ago almost, and it's just been an almost obsessive interest of mine. And it started with educating myself and then writing, a ton of speaking, testifying before Congress. And I have multiple books now. And I first started out actually after writing a ton of papers and giving a ton of talks, writing my, writing two near-term sci-fi novels to try to get the story out there about this revolution and what it meant for people, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata. And then when I was giving those talks and I could see in people's eyes that when I

• 5:43Speaker 01

  explained the science to them in the context of stories, they suddenly got it. They recognized that something big was happening and that they were personally part of the story. And that was what inspired me to write my, I guess it's now two books ago, Hacking Darwin, where, after which you and I met. And that got a great deal of attention. It was a pretty big international bestseller. I was invited by Dr. Tedros to be a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  And when I was out in the world, I give a lot of talks to big tech conferences and medical and healthcare conferences. And I have a rule to never give the same talk twice, never stand behind a podium, and never use a single note. Because I just feel like nobody needs to have a speech where somebody's just memorized the whole thing and you just stand on a stage and press play. For me, I want to incorporate everything that's happening around me in the conference in the world. And so in every talk I would give on the future of human genetic engineering for hacking Darwin, I would say, but human genetic engineering is just one piece of this much bigger story of our time. And that story is that after four billion years of evolution, our one species suddenly has the increasing ability

• 6:58Speaker 02

  to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life. And the big question, not just for the future of humans, but for the future of life on Earth, is whether we'll use to deploy these godlike powers wisely. And so that became the foundation of my newest book, which is called, as you mentioned, Super Convergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World. And so these last two books have been translated into about 25 languages. I'm just starting, actually, as a commissioner of the Lancet Commission on Precision Medicine and Precision Health. Because all of these issues, it's what super convergence means, all of these issues and all these technological

• 7:42Speaker 02

  developments are interconnected. It's one big story of what's happening to humans as we continue to co-evolve with our technology. And that co-evolution has greater and greater implications for everything.

• 7:57Demetri Kofinas?

  So let's just go back a second to Richard Clark. He wrote a book that was published in 2004, I think it came. Did it come out in 2004?

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, Against All Enemies.

• 8:07Demetri Kofinas?

  Right. He was a lightning rod of controversy during a period where the Bush administration had really locked down or tried to lock down leaks and dissidents. Because he was also, as you said, Worked for the Clinton administration, but then also was quote terrorism czar. This is the period. The Bush era was when we first started using these terms czars, I believe, right? We had these different czars, which is such an interesting term. It was also the period when Bush had looked into Putin's soul, another czar, and saw something. But Richard Clark always struck me as a very unusually honorable individual. I agree. And he's been very successful since, and that's great. But he really stood his ground, successful in the private sector.

• 8:50Demetri Kofinas?

  I mean, he's gone on to have a really great career, but he really stuck to his guns. He took incredible amounts of heat. And there was actually an interesting interview that he gave. Hmm, I can't remember when it was. Why do I feel like it was 2008 coincidentally and had nothing to do with the financial crisis? But he was interviewed by two guys named John Duffy and Ray Novashowski, who later wrote a book called Why the Watch Dogs Didn't Bark, which was a book about 9/11 and what happened on 9/11. And Richard gave this kind of explosive interview where he essentially insinuated in the interview that what had really happened in the lead up to 9/11 was that the CIA had

• 9:31Demetri Kofinas?

  been deliberately withholding critical and material information from the FBI, likely in pursuit of their attempt to embed themselves within certain terror cells on the West Coast and also in Virginia. Terror cells which included members of the 9/11 hijackers. And at some point, they became more interested in covering their tracks than they were in actually doing anything else, and that thwarted the FBI's own investigation. Basically, it was a much more detailed look into exactly what was meant by the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. Right. Which was kind of how it was presented to us when we got the National Security Director

• 10:13Demetri Kofinas?

  Office, the NDI, which didn't exist prior to the Bush administration. DNI, sorry, the Director of National Intelligence. I'm curious, like, to what degree did you ever go down that rabbit hole of what happened on 9/11? Because we're now in a phase, Jamie. Yep. And this is relevant to the conversation we're going to have because I brought you here to talk about the National Security Strategy document. But like, we're in a time right now where there's a lot of looking back and trying to... Tell new stories or understand what happened about, you know, critical moments in our history, especially in the last 20 years. What went wrong, where things went wrong as part of this whole like, you know, self diagnostic process of trying to determine what we want in the future. And the national security strategy is part of that. How much of you have you dug into the story of 9/11?

• 10:58Demetri Kofinas?

  And do you feel like we got some things critically wrong there in how we tell it? And what happened?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I worked for Richard Clark in the Clinton administration. So it was before 9/11. But like everybody else, I've been deeply curious about 9/11. And I directed the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on Emergency Preparedness and Response after 9/11. And so there's no doubt that structural institutional shortcomings, at least made the possibility of made 9/11 more possible and feasible. And then we had the commission that put together all of these proposals, including, one, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. And two, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,

• 11:46Speaker 01

  because there were so many divisions between our intelligence agencies that we had actually. It's like the people who talk about Pearl Harbor. There was a lot of information that could have been made actionable, but it wasn't because there were all these institutional divides. So there's no doubt that we got some pretty big things wrong in the run up to 9/11. And there's no doubt that we got some pretty big things wrong in the aftermath of 9/11. Because looking back, the war on terror, all in all, has been, in my view, at least massively self defeating for the United States. We've done so much harm to ourselves. And the terrorists who we were against seem to be doing okay.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  And so I absolutely think that America need and any society frankly, needs to go through phases or just regularly engaged in an honest.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Self-analysis. And unfortunately, rather than doing that, America is really, it feels like it's coming apart at the seams because rather than coming together to take a hard, honest look at what's gone wrong, we are dividing into, at least as I see it, lunacies of the far left and the far right. And we are those of us who at least think of ourselves as centrists in the middle, whether center-left, liberal Democrat, liberal centrist Democrat, or center-right. We've seeded the playing field to the crazies on the far left and the far right. And there are lots of reasons for that, including just the structure of

• 13:24Speaker 02

  how information and influence and power are distributed in our societies. And so we're just going back and forth between one crazy to the other crazy. It's like a ping pong. And I, my fear is that if, and I would say when, if we keep on this current trajectory, terrible things happen to us in the future, we're going to do the analysis of right now. And that, just like you were saying with 9/11, we're going to say, like, didn't you see it? Didn't you see that while you were tearing each other apart, didn't you see while you were turning America's young people into mindless zombies following TikTok memes,

• 14:06Speaker 02

  manipulated by the Chinese and Russian governments, didn't you see there was a ticking time bomb under your feet? And at that point, we'll say, oh yeah, I guess it was pretty obvious. So this, right now, this is the moment. It's the equivalent moment to when we missed the signs of 9/11. We're doing all of those things now.

• 14:27Demetri Kofinas?

  So let's talk about this a little bit. Where to begin? There's a tendency, I find, for people who maybe engage or are very permissive about giving airtime to all sorts of different alternative, not necessarily theories, but alternative sort of endless, endless veins of questioning. There's a tendency to respond to the criticism of any of those alternative theories, which they're not even necessarily theories, by saying, well, what about so-and-so? This is-

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Oh, it's the worst. The what-about-ism is a toxic disease.

• 15:03Demetri Kofinas?

  It is, it is. But I do want to acknowledge something, though, which is that the lack of accountability- Has been biblical.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:12Demetri Kofinas?

  I mean, there was no accountability to the Bush administration. Let's just take them because you can find examples across all administrations where there has been no lack of accountability. And I've harped on the Bush administration in particular because I was a young man. I was an adolescent. I was 18 when Bush came into office. So like this was the formative period of my political development. And there was no accountability for what was arguably the worst foreign policy, set of foreign policy decisions in American history. First of all, would you agree that Iraq in particular and the circumstances surrounding Iraq and the Iraq policy, everything that went around it and US grand strategy? Would you say that that was the worst foreign policy decision or set of decisions in American history?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  You know, worst, who knows? But it was certainly among the worst and it was so just self-defeating and insane.

• 16:07Demetri Kofinas?

  Because it wasn't just tactical, it was strategic.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Oh, no, it was purely strategic. It was purely strategic. So, so the decision, I mean, whatever we did with Afghanistan, that was where Al Qaeda was. So we went into Afghanistan, then we withdrew our troops from Afghanistan. So while we had this advantage, we actually started the process that ended up with our losing in Afghanistan, among other things. We pulled those guys away to go fight a war with Iraq that had nothing to do with 9/11. As a matter of fact, I remember when I worked for Joe Biden, and we can talk about Joe Biden and why I really feel like he will go down in the annals of American history as probably one of the most disastrous presidents in our history, even though I'm a Democrat and

• 16:52Speaker 01

  he's my former boss and I, I respect him in certain ways as a human being. But I remember Senator then Biden coming back from the White House during Afghanistan. And he said, they've already made the decision, there's going to be a war in Iraq. And at that time, it just seemed like, wait a second, didn't we just go into Afghanistan? And so it was already like, there's the old saying, don't miss the opportunity of a crisis, that these guys had this plan with nothing to do with 9/11, that they wanted to remake the Middle East. And this was their way of doing it. And it was just such a disaster for the United States on, on so many different levels. And then even after doing that.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  The, the, the decision to just disband the military with no real process. I mean, there was the insanity of these young people going in.

• 17:44Demetri Kofinas?

  You're talking about the Ba'athists and the Iraqi military.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Well, the de-Ba'athification was necessary, but when Bremer, kind of on his own, it seemed, just said, all right, we're now abolishing the armed forces. It almost guaranteed the problems that came after. So not only was it a bad decision, not only was it poorly planned, the way that it was executed made some kind of defeat almost inevitable. I mean, Iraq isn't absolutely a basket case now, but it started out this whole chain of events that's really been disastrous. And so I would have thought, I mean, George W. Bush, at the end of his presidency, I remember thinking, God, it doesn't get any worse than this. But it turns out, I'd never say that.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  There can always be worse than the, the last thing you thought was worst.

• 18:35Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, so some historical context for folks. Bremer was Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority? Was that the name of it?

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Correct, yes.

• 18:43Demetri Kofinas?

  I won't get into a conversation with you about whether de-Ba'athification was necessary or not. This is part of the problem when you go into nation building. You start having to make decisions like, do we want to get rid of this particular party? And what is it going to mean for the fractures, the tribal fractures within the nation? And blah, blah, blah.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  All those things.

• 18:59Demetri Kofinas?

  We were so unprepared to go into Iraq that we didn't even consider whether or not we could form a unified democratic government of a country of three large ethnic groups with different percentages, one of which was a majority and which was also the same constitution as your neighbor, Iran, which is supposed to be your largest geostrategic adversary in the region. The whole thing is so absurd. And now there's also a narrative that this was a war that was architected by Israel. And the response that I've given to this sort of idea, this revisionist idea, that it was primarily the Israel lobby that drove the wars. Number one, that's just when you lived through that period, and this again is so important to me, and I think it's important that we do episodes like this, where we talk about

• 19:42Demetri Kofinas?

  this, because those of us that lived through it, and you were much closer to this than I was, so I'm looking forward to your sort of memory of this. But my memory was very clear, like, the people that were advocating for this were advocating for American empire. This is part of a hegemonic strategy to control oil resources, and at least primarily, whether they said it or not. And that was about having leverage over the Europeans, continued leverage over our allies, as well as China and other potential adversaries. And also, it was an ideological war. And to the extent that there was Israeli support for it, I think that the divisions within Israel, there were starker divisions and starker debates within Israeli society about whether or not this is actually in Israel's interest or not than there was in the US, because at least the Israelis lived in the region. They had some idea of how

• 20:26Demetri Kofinas?

  dangerous it would be to empower a Shia majority in Iraq.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So a bunch there. So first, the State Department developed an extensive Iraq day-after plan. And Secretary Rumsfeld said that nobody in the Defense Department can have any contact with the State Department. So the United States did have a plan that was completely thrown out. Secondly, you know, I was in the US Congress, working for Senator Biden at that time. So all of the influencers came through. It was not the Israeli lobby, and you're exactly right. The Israelis got, understood very, very well

• 21:10Speaker 01

  what the dangers were in Iran. And the idea that the Israelis would want to empower the Ayatollahs of Iran, who were actually even bigger adversaries of theirs than the Ba'athists in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere. It's just, it's preposterous.

• 21:29Demetri Kofinas?

  Did Ariel Sharon support the war?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  You know, I don't know the specific, I don't have all of the details on that. But certainly, you know, for an Israeli president, I mean, maybe Netanyahu, who I think his strengths and weaknesses is a little bit different. But it wouldn't be like, at least in the history of Israel-US relations, it would have been very rare for a sitting Prime Minister of Israel to come out and oppose publicly a war by Israel's greatest ally. And so for sure, there were a lot of concerns in Israel about everything. But I think that I totally agree with you that this idea that some kind of secret cabal Israel lobby was responsible for this, it just, it doesn't pass the smell test.

• 22:18Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah. So maybe we'll have a chance to revisit Iraq in the course of this conversation. There might be lessons there. But let's dig into the national security strategy document, which is the primary reason I brought you on the show. And I should mention this, the people that may remember. Your first appearance on the podcast, which actually I think it was after we started doing the second hour. It was after we started monetizing the show because I believe in the second hour, we spoke a little bit about foreign policy. And heading into that conversation, I had no idea that your background was actually an IR. And so this is a conversation that I've wanted to have with you for a long time, even though you've done two books on genomics and genetic engineering and evolution and biological sciences. I actually wanted to have a conversation with you about foreign policy.

• 23:01Demetri Kofinas?

  So the Trump administration recently released its 2025 national security strategy document. And there has been, I think, a lot of misinterpretation of what's actually in the document to say nothing about whether or not the document itself is internally consistent and also consistent with some of the other public statements of the administration as well as their actions. So first of all, what is a national security document? And who are the audiences that it's seeking to target?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  So national security, at least in the context of our government, is a document that the White House puts out every year. And it basically says, here's what we stand for. Here's what we're trying to do. And our intention is to allocate our energy and resources in order to do these things. So it has the potential to be an important signaling document for people, certainly within the United States government, to coordinate policies and also for our allies and others in the world to give them some indication of what we're trying to do.

• 24:01Demetri Kofinas?

  So these documents usually have a theory of a case or a story about the world that they seek to tell as part of this sort of diagnostic process, followed by a prescription for what to do. What is that story that the document tells?

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, what I would say is that the post-war, the organizing principles of the post-war international are wrong and that America is better served in the type of balance of power, great power, balance of power structure that characterized the world in the 19th and the early 20th century. I fundamentally disagree with that. But if I had to say what I get as the essence of the message here, it's that.

• 24:47Demetri Kofinas?

  That's interesting. Let's dig into that a bit more because I didn't, I don't necessarily feel that it's looking for a balance of power structure or a concert of Europe structure for the world. It felt very much like a containment strategy for China.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't really, I didn't read it that way as much because if we had said, this is a containment strategy for China, we could have said, here's what we're going to do. And I'm actually, I've long been a quote unquote China hawk. And so if you said, well, here's what we're going to do, and we're going to work with our allies to make an economic alternative to China, we're going to work with our allies to have a military capabilities to resist China in a uniform way. We're going to articulate a vision of the future that is more appealing than what China is promoting or selling. Like, so if somebody asked me to say, if someone said, well, containing China is foundational for

• 25:45Speaker 01

  US national security interests, which I for sure agree with, how would you do it? The last thing I would do would be this document because so many of the areas that are foundational for that, and certainly, building relations with our allies, building our ability to stand up to China, thinking in an integrated strategic manner about economics, and that's not even to mention implementation and all of the antagonisms with everybody. And then, the theory of the case of all of these tariffs was, we're going to remake global economics to put more pressure on China. But this administration is easing

• 26:27Speaker 01

  up on China massively, while not doing the same, to the same extent with our closest allies. And so, in the strategy, and when it talks about great power competition and focus on sovereignty and hardly mentions common values, it undermines the institutions that have been foundational for the post-war international order. It feels, to me at least, and then it doesn't talk about standing up in any meaningful way to Russia for its attack on Ukraine. It seems to me-

• 27:02Speaker 02

  It's trying to bring us back to an earlier model.

• 27:04Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, to be clear here, everything you just said falls under the category of prescription. What you're disagreeing with is how is this going to be implemented?

• 27:12Speaker 02

  No, no, no. What I'm saying is I haven't, I don't see an articulation. If they were saying that our goal, China isn't even mentioned until halfway through. If they were saying our goal is containment of China, I would agree with it. I just, I don't see that. I don't read that.

• 27:26Demetri Kofinas?

  There are more pages in the document devoted to China in the subsection on China than there is on the entire Western Hemisphere Monroe Doctrine corollary argument, which has gotten the largest amount of play, which is this idea that the United States is pursuing a spheres of influence approach, which is to quote Jon Stewart in one of his recent monologues, he said, Russia gets its sphere, China gets its sphere, and we get Latin America and the Western Hemisphere.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:50Demetri Kofinas?

  But that's actually not how the document reads. In fact, the document specifically states that we want to prevent, in some cases, regional hegemony by our adversaries. So that's obviously, what are they talking about? They're talking about China. And they, in fact, double down on the Taiwan Relations Act and supporting Taiwan with arms explicitly in the document. I mean, the document reads a lot more like Elbridge Colby's strategy of denial containment than it does the Monroe Doctrine or even the Teddy Roosevelt corollary of, yeah, I mean, in some sense, we're basically saying, we're going to lock, yes, and we're going to lock down the Western Hemisphere. We're going to treat it like our colonial territory.

• 28:32Demetri Kofinas?

  And we're also going to use that as leverage as part of a larger strategy to contain China. That I still think that the document is actually a containment strategy.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that there are little pieces that could be construed if brought together under a framework of articulating a containment strategy, that you could say, oh, this little piece could be used in a containment strategy, and this little piece could be used in a containment strategy. But in my mind, in a strategy document, that is different than articulating, here is what we're trying to achieve. And that, in my view, has not been articulated. What has been articulated is a return to national sovereignty, a sense of the world where great powers have their spheres of influence, where we don't intervene in other areas unless we absolutely, absolutely have to. So I certainly agree that there are little

• 29:26Speaker 02

  pieces of that, but I do not see an articulation of containing China, because that's what a strategy is. It says, here's what we're trying to achieve. And I don't see that.

• 29:39Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe they could have been more explicit about it. Let me also state that while I think also the primary objective that I read into it was containment of China, that this was in service of a new form of American empire that is more naked in its use of power, that relies less, as you mentioned, on multilateral institutions, much more on bilateral relationships. And interestingly enough, the section on, I mean, the most, well, the least substantive section, disappointingly enough, was on Africa. And I felt that there should have been much more there, given what, again, was stated on the part of, in the section on China, about the need to build up soft power, and also to dominate the technologies

• 30:22Demetri Kofinas?

  of the future, so that we become the primary commercial partner in these key areas, rather than the Chinese. And one area where they were explicit about that was in Latin America. They want to make sure that no one gets to touch Latin America, no one develops relationships there. So part of the strategy also includes strengthening relationships with the local governments.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  But it does that without articulating why. Like, and the United States, just as powerful as we are, we're not powerful enough to do all of these things all of our own. The genius of the post-war planners of the United States was to recognize that America will be better off if we build a system and other people want to be part of it. And so this

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Strategy, quote unquote, is just decimating all of that. So these countries in Latin America, who are right now trading a lot with China, where China is certainly supporting, in a very corrupt way, lots of people who are in power in certain countries in Latin America, like Venezuela. So how are we going to do it? And so that's the thing is if we say we're not about alliances, we're not about values, we're not about norms, we're not about institutions, we're not about helping anybody else, we're just about the raw exercise of power. And then we want you, what we used to call our allies and friends and partners,

• 31:47Speaker 01

  we want you to partner with us, not because we're articulating a vision of what we can do together, but because it's just in your naked self-interest to do that. But what they're telling us, lots of people say, we're not convinced of that. So even our allies are trying to hedge against us because they don't know who we are and what we stand for. So I just think there's a, in my view, a pretty significant disconnect between taking everything that America has now for granted, and now we're all about naked, the naked exercise of national power, and just assuming that what we have that hasn't yet been eroded is just going to stick around because it won't.

• 32:27Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, no, see, that's such a key point, Jamie. It's that we're burning the furniture to heat the house.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:32Demetri Kofinas?

  And we don't understand, we take the world as it is today for granted, not recognizing that the multilateral frameworks and fabrics and architectures that we've built have sustained the peace and prosperity that we have today. But at the same time, I do want to concede that there are clearly gripes. EU is a great example. It's become in many ways dysfunctional and a hindrance to national autonomy and national self-determination. And it's, I think, contributed to some of the sclerotic economic policies in Europe. But what's interesting is the section on Europe, it seems to promote, first of all, there's some language in the document that talks about... I might be paraphrasing here, but essentially like we want to return to a world where the

• 33:15Demetri Kofinas?

  nation state is the primary focal point of relations or whatever of self determination. The nation state still is. So I feel like in some ways that there's a kind of a narrative that, and this has been going on for a long, I mean, I remember this back in the 90s with black helicopters and German UN soldiers cited in, you know, Waco or whatever, this idea that the UN was going to invade America. I mean, on some level, this story has always existed and it's always been exaggerated, but there seems to be an effort, and I started to notice this, Jamie, after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. There was a kind of argument that was resonating among the American right that Russia and the Russian people

• 33:56Demetri Kofinas?

  and Russian culture and the anti-wokeness of Russian society had much more in common with America than some of the other European states, which were under the yoke of this transnational vampiric, you know, child molesting elite. And so I feel like part of the narrative that's being told in this story is that we want to use our, our national security objective includes supporting this transnational nationalist movement where we support parties within Europe that are on the right of center, which are nationalists, which support these quote

• 34:37Demetri Kofinas?

  anti-woke policies, which again, this is, it's a very general term, anti-woke, but basically there's concerns about censorship, there's concerns about pro-gay or pro-transgender or, so there's, it's an umbrella term for a lot of sort of what are seen as excessively liberal ideas or ways to control speech. But essentially, the, the document seems to lay out a strategy, or not necessarily a strategy, but a desire, because the document just has a lot of desires stated. I would say it's less strategic than it is like, this is what we want. And it seems that what they're saying is essentially, we want to support a transnationalist movement among right-wing parties. And this is part of our national security strategy. And I think that, that seems somewhat unique. I can't remember, but certainly the left had communism.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Unique is a word nuts is a better word. Look, the United States

• 35:25Speaker 02

  That we played the leading role in turning Europe from a place where these very powerful sovereign nation states had murdered each other for so many hundreds of years and then exported their murder and destruction through world wars, through murderous colonialisms. And the United States played the leading role in ending that and laying the foundation for the world in which we live today, which has led to the greatest period of peace and prosperity and innovation and wealth creation in all of human history. And the greatest beneficiary of all of that was the United States of America.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  And for sure, I am a big critic of Europe. Absolutely, the EU has been sclerotic. Absolutely, Merkel made a mistake, even though it was a well-intentioned, perhaps, mistake of letting a million refugees and economic migrants and terrorists into Europe all at once with no clue who anybody was. Obviously, Europe has made a terrible mistake, allowing hatred and Islamism and antisemitism to not just fester, but to be like an infectious disease infecting young people. It's happening there, it's happening in the United States, it's happening in a lot of places.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  But to say that the United States is now trying to overthrow, basically, the centrist liberal consensus that we have helped foster in Europe in the name of these right-wing parties, many of whom are outright racists, it's just preposterous. And that we're saying, oh, we're for sovereignty. And yet, we say, but we're going to try to overthrow the governments we don't like in both Latin America and Europe. And we're against multilateralism. And we're against internationalism. But our goal is to create an international network of right-wing parties. And I think this section on Europe,

• 37:33Speaker 02

  even though I share many very significant critiques of Europe, and I feel like Europe put themselves in this mess because they were willing, they didn't invest in their own defense, they didn't ask questions about Russian energy, they just took...

• 37:50Speaker 01

  The trade with China as something based solely on their narrow, short-term economic interests and didn't incorporate any strategic thought into that relationship. So there's a lot of blame to go around. But the United States' strength doesn't come from our being a lone bastion of American national self-interest. Our strength comes from standing for something and building a community of other people, all of whom are pursuing their own national self-interest in order to do something together. And we've done that. That's why NATO has been one of the most successful military alliances in history. That's why the values collaboration between the United States,

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Europe, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Korea, and others has been transformative for the modern world. And that's why countries that have become wealthier and more powerful, with the very significant exception of China, have wanted to be part of this. So now we're breaking the attractive model of what we have and trying to replace it with a model of naked self-interest. And so what we're going to get is the same world that we had in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. And the entire reason for the two world wars and for the post, all the post-war efforts was to address

• 39:12Speaker 01

  that problem, address the problem that we are now striving to recreate.

• 39:18Demetri Kofinas?

  That was the narrative after World War II, one of the narratives that emerged, which was that nationalism was primarily responsible. And part of the reason for the creation of the European Union was to bind the nations of Europe together and to unify the continent through diplomacy rather than through force. But I question how much really the issue is nationalism. And I do, while I'm sympathetic to much of what you said, at the same time, I do think the situation culturally in Europe has become untenable.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  I totally agree. I totally agree with that. Yeah.

• 39:49Demetri Kofinas?

  I used to work in Italy, and I'm Greek also. And I could tell you, and by the way, I'm going to put some additional context around this because I think it's important. Because I don't think this is just about like, oh, we let the foreigners and the savages into our countries. I think that it also is reflective of the collapsing birth rates. And Greece and Italy are two great examples. So as I said, I worked in Italy. I was based out of Florence, and I hadn't been there in 20 years. And I went there this summer. And I was, I mean, look, Florence was unique in how much it had.

• 40:17Demetri Kofinas?

  Changed from the day of the Medici. You know, back when I worked there, there were just lots of Americans there and it was not where the Italians didn't really live in the city center. But now I went there and it was basically like Africa and Pakistan and India. You'd have no idea that you were in Italy. Now, if you're in the center of Athens in certain areas, same situation. And this is true in all sorts of areas of Europe. And while I don't think of this in racial terms, which is to say that I don't view the problem that Europe is facing as one primarily of skin color and like these people don't look like Italians. It's rather cultural and how quickly you have these basically pockets of non-indigenous cultures that are taking over larger and larger footprints within these countries. So how do you go about addressing that?

• 41:02Demetri Kofinas?

  Because it seems like the American right and right-wing movements have been the only effort to really address this in the face of what has been really just perpetual gaslighting by the governing consensus in these countries.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I agree with you. I'm a liberal Democrat pluralist. I think our societies are better off if we have different kinds of people and everybody contributing. But I also agree that all of our societies have political cultures. And it's not that there's like one grand old time of where there was some monolithic political culture and everybody who joins is some kind of outsider. But that's why there need to be some kind of processes so that people coming to the new place are in some ways bought in to the new place. And so I live in New York City. And so we have someone like our current mayor, Mamdani, who I oppose.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  I think it was an absolutely horrific choice by the voters of New York, but just showed up in like five minutes after becoming a citizen is putting himself, pictures of himself on social media with his middle finger at American statues. And I think that every country has a history. No history is perfect, but if you want, if it's you're making the choice to join that country, then one, you know, I, I, I support legal immigration and I'm very supportive of legal immigration. I think it should be liberal. And two, people who are coming, there should be structures to weave people in to those societies. But if you have numbers

• 42:39Speaker 01

  that are overwhelming, if people are coming in illegally, if there's not a process for integration, I think what you get is the kind of breakdowns that we're seeing in different places. And this is really a heartbreak because I think America is better off because of immigration. I think Europe is better off because of immigration. But if we don't have structures and processes in, in place, then we're going to see what we have. And, and just in the context of all of this Islamist violence and all of the radical antisemitism that we're seeing and, and all these young people whose minds, I mean, they've, they've become mindless zombies wanting to globalize the Intifada. So we're seeing that. We're

• 43:24Speaker 01

  seeing it in the United States, seeing it in Europe, seeing it in Australia and, and a whole lot of places. And so I am sympathetic, but not entirely sympathetic to the view of the Trump administration that there's a cultural problem. But I feel when I read the national security strategy, it feels like they're talking about white Christianity in everything, but just saying those words. And I don't agree with that.

• 43:51Demetri Kofinas?

  So you said for, let's talk a little bit about, or let's explore a comment you made there about young people who are, what did you, you said something like young people who are trying to export the global Intifada.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  They've become mindless zombies. I mean, like so many people are getting their information from TikTok. Like, I think it was like 50% of young people in the United States are getting their information from TikTok, and it's propaganda designed to turn them into these mindless, frothing zombies. And that's what so many of these young people have become.

• 44:20Demetri Kofinas?

  So, this topic of US support for Israel's war in Gaza and its larger war with Iran is something that I've explored on the show in great detail and with nuance. And as many listeners know, I'm very critical of simplistic takes on this subject. And also, my general view is that you don't just get to have a nation-state. So, in the case of Israel-Palestine, this has long been a conversation point. But at the end of the day, like, lots of nations don't have states. Lots of nations that existed within empires, like the Ottoman Empire, have not had a state. The Kurds are a great example of that. They have an informal state now, but they still don't have their own nation-state. They don't have a seat at the United Nations. Essentially, you have to win that for yourself. But putting

• 44:59Demetri Kofinas?

  that first item moment, I don't want to minimize the feelings of young people when it comes to the US's support for what has happened in Gaza. I think if I was a young man, I remember what I was like, what it was like for me during the Iraq War period, and how much I opposed that war on humanitarian grounds, first and foremost. Not because I had some more nuanced take on why I thought it was a bad geostrategic idea. And I do think that part of what happens as we get older is that we become a bit more cynical and a bit more detached from human suffering, in part because we become wedded to the system that's currently in place. We've worked for years. We've accumulated capital. We benefit from the status quo,

• 45:41Demetri Kofinas?

  and we've gained experiences that in some ways make us maybe a bit more desensitized to fundamental acts of violence and humanity. What do you think US policy should have been or should be when it comes to supporting Israel's war in Gaza? And is it in America's interest to support the prosecution of that war as it's been conducted?

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, a lot there. So, let me say, I'm entirely sympathetic with young people caring a lot about human rights and issues of justice. I know you did that then and now, and I certainly do that then and now. So, I certainly don't begrudge any young people for having an interest in this part of the world, or frankly, in any part of the world where people are suffering. I think it's wonderful. I also personally have for my entire adult life and teenage life have supported a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and I still support that. And I frankly feel that if there had been one Gandhi who could have had critical mass

• 46:41Speaker 01

  in that part of the world from starting to the 40s until now, that would be great. And I'm also cognizant, there have been essentially five peace deals that have been on the table, all have been rejected by, I mean, the Palestinians weren't named as the Palestinians before the 1960s, but whoever it was, the Arabs or the precursor organizations or the now as the Palestinians, five peace offerings have been rejected. I certainly think that America's investment in Israel has been a great investment for the United States and for Israel. And nobody, no sane person, no person with a heart could look at the videos or the images

• 47:25Speaker 01

  of the October 7th attacks, or the videos or the images of the Gaza War and think, oh, that's great, that's what I would like to see. And so certainly, obviously, anybody who can't look at the October 7th, and I've seen the the raw footage of October 7th, and it's just horrible. It's like Hotel Mumbai because you can hear the instructions of the handlers to the terrorists on the ground, and they're saying things like, cut off their head and film yourself playing soccer with people's heads, film yourself raping the women, crucify people and film yourself for social media.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  And so their strategy was to have it so horrific that Israel would have absolutely no choice but to invade. And they had spent 20 years building a Black Hawk Down strategy with all of the tunnels and all of the weapons in order to trap the Israeli army in a Black Hawk Down operation, which would force Israel to either lose huge amounts of soldiers, lose the narrative, and then lose the war, both on the ground and in the media. And so that was their strategy, and they thought they would get Hezbollah and Iran and others to join in. And so Israel could have at that point said, this is really complicated.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  We don't want to hurt anybody, so we're not going to do anything. They could have said, we're going to go in on the ground because they had to do something. And they knew that they were going to lose. And so the only logical strategy for Israel wasn't to do carpet bombing, which Israel didn't do, but it was to do strategic bombing of all targets that were deemed legitimate. And certainly, there was a permissive, and somebody could say overly permissive, but it wasn't that Israel was, I mean, the main targets of Israel bombing were of personal targets of people, terrorists. And the second were these shafts going into these tunnels.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  But because those shafts were kind of everywhere, under so many of these different apartments and mosques and schools and hospitals. And the tragedy is, Israel also has all of these bunkers. If the Israeli government had said, anybody who goes down into a bomb shelter in Israel will be shot immediately, the Israeli death toll would have been massive. But that's what happened in Gaza. Gaza has 500 miles of tunnels. And the tunnels have electricity, water, food, shelter. They have everything. And the shafts are under pretty much so many of the homes and apartment buildings and mosques and schools and hospitals.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  And Gazan people are just normal people. They love their kids the same as everybody else. Don't you think that somebody, that everybody in an apartment building, when there is bombing, would want to take their kids down into these 500 miles of tunnels where they would be entirely safe? They would. They couldn't go there because the Hamas strategy, it wasn't using the Gazan people as human shields. By their own words, it was as human sacrifices. They wanted to get as many Gazan people killed as possible. And their strategy was to incorporate these people outside through the NGOs and through

• 50:58Speaker 01

  this Students for Justice in Palestinians to have that as their war strategy. And so If any young person, if they had said, "This is a tragic situation. There are two groups of people. Both are equally deserving of a state. There have been injustices on both sides. There have been multiple peace plans that have been rejected largely by the Palestinians. But you can understand in a way why these kinds of situations are complicated. And I absolutely condemn the horrendous and totally unjustified terrorist attacks of October 7th. And I believe that in executing the war, Israel has been too aggressive, and I'm uncomfortable with that.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  And so I call on Hamas to immediately surrender unconditionally and release all the hostages. And I call on Israel, after that has happened, to pull back militarily. Like, I would have hugged a person like that.

• 51:55Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, so, first of all, I mean, isn't also part of the problem here that the people in power, Netanyahu and many people on the Israeli right, are not just acting defensively? In other words, they aren't just caught in this security dilemma where they're dealing with, you know, decades of blood feud and distrust and dysfunction on the part of the Palestinians and an inability to guarantee their own security. But actually, they want territorial expansion. They have promoted settler expansion. Netanyahu is on record supporting Hamas because it delegitimizes the Palestinian government within Gaza. So it's hard to talk about Israel as a unified entity, or Israeli policy as a unified entity, because you're dealing with people that are disingenuous actors that are currently in government. And they are part of the problem.

• 52:40Demetri Kofinas?

  They're part of why we're in the situation that we're in. Isn't that fair to say?

• 52:43Speaker 01

  I'd say it's a piece of it, but not entirely. I mean, Netanyahu, who I'm not a big fan of in certain ways, is a very political animal. And Netanyahu...

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Whatever, 20 years ago, put his whole career on the line, calling for pulling back on the expansion of those settlements. So there was a time when Netanyahu was pushing forward in the opposite direction of what you're saying.

• 53:09Demetri Kofinas?

  And I don't know when that was, but I've seen a lot of interviews of Netanyahu going back to the 1990s.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  More recently, yes.

• 53:14Demetri Kofinas?

  He's always been a hawk.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  And the entire Israeli left was wiped out on this issue by Oslo, because Israel negotiated Oslo. They elected two governments with the specific mandate of bringing peace with the Palestinians and fostering really an aggressive move forward. And that's when the Second Intifada was launched. So it's a, once that happened, when Israel and Israelis felt that they had gone further than most people had been comfortable with, to try to make peace, and the result wasn't a negotiation, the result was war. So I'm not a fan of many things in Netanyahu. I'm obviously not a fan of Ben Gavir and Smotrich. I'm against

• 53:59Speaker 01

  the settlers in the West Bank. But I just think that that's why this thing is complicated. And that's why, my feeling is, anybody who's out in the street and they're just saying, this is a simple story, and all we have to do is globalize the Intifada and have from the river to the sea liberation, that person is frankly functioning as a terrorist auxiliary.

• 54:18Demetri Kofinas?

  So I'm going to move us to the second hour, Jamie. Let me just say some thoughts here. The problem that I have with this framing, in general, is that it's based in a sense of right and wrong. Who has a moral claim?

• 54:32Speaker 01

  But I don't think so.

• 54:33Demetri Kofinas?

  I'm not saying you're saying that.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  I think both have a moral claim.

• 54:35Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, what I'm saying, yeah, but it comes down to power. Israel's more powerful. They have a more powerful international lobby. The Jewish diaspora has always been more powerful and more capable, which is why they got a state in the first place. And that was my point. You don't just get to have a nation-state, just because you want one. And so during the Oslo Accords, like, what the Palestinians were offered, wasn't really a viable state. It wasn't a contiguous state. It was partitioned. And the interim Palestinian Authority would have only had so much power over this territory, and Israel would have maintained the top-level security authority in those areas. There still would have been some...

• 55:06Speaker 01

  But...

• 55:07Demetri Kofinas?

  But to be clear, I want to be clear, though. I'm not saying that because I'm saying that Israel was wrong, or bad Israel. I'm saying that, at the end of the day, the current dynamic in the Middle East reflects the realities of power. And the Jewish diaspora also used, I mean, the founders of Israel also used terrorism to create the state. So you can't really argue that it's because the Palestinians rely on terrorism that they're bad and the Israelis don't.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  I'm not saying you are.

• 55:32Demetri Kofinas?

  I'm not saying you are, but I'm just saying that this is such an effed up debate. Because it's like, and the kids and young people are especially vulnerable to these sort of black and white ideas because they're like, oh, the poor Palestinians, you know, like this and that. But actually, it's not about that. At the end of the day, there has been a long, multi-century effort on the part of nations within these sort of disintegrating empires, and the Ottoman Empire is one of them, to create independent nation-states because that was the political unit after the post-Westphalian world. And the Palestinians haven't been able to achieve it. And they don't just get to have it at the expense of Israel's security because Israel ultimately holds the cards. Israel is the more powerful actor in the region. And it isn't just Israel. The Saudis wanted to deal with the Israelis,

• 56:16Demetri Kofinas?

  and they were willing to bypass the peace issue or find some way to placate those that were on the Palestinian side in order to get a deal done. And in fact, this was what Netanyahu was referring to when he said that they were on the verge of a historic peace right before the October 7 attacks.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  That was a catalyst for it. And so, yes, so that's the basic point. I mean, nobody would benefit from a stable, secure, peaceful Palestinian state more than Israel. And so,

• 56:43Demetri Kofinas?

  And more than everyday Palestinians, by the way, to the extent that they felt, though, that it was a dignified end of the conflict.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  The everyday Palestinians have been absolutely betrayed most, first and foremost, by their own leaders. Like I said before, one Gandhi, one Gandhi, if you had had one Gandhi in 1947 who could have led a movement, there would have been a Palestinian state. It would have been like such a great situation. And frankly, when the UN made that decision for partition in 1947, the Jewish community there in Palestine, they weren't saying, no, we reject it, we want the whole thing. They were dancing. All the Arab states say, we won't allow any of it. And that led to the independence war, which was lost, and

• 57:32Speaker 02

  then the 67 war, which was lost, and then the 73 war, which was lost.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  And so I just think that this whole thing is a strategy, and I'm not saying that Israel is morally blameless. I don't think that at all. But I think that exactly with what you said, these young kids may be well intentioned, whose minds are being rotted by, in many cases, foreign government propaganda on TikTok. On top of this, kind of, there's the oppressor and oppressed stuff, which the national security strategy, in some ways rightly, criticizes, have been led to believe there's a right and wrong, and all you have to do is take out your Pantone charts from Home Depot, and you can figure out where somebody fits on the right and wrong spectrum.

• 58:20Demetri Kofinas?

  So, I mean, again, I want to move us into the second hour. But at the same time, Jamie, I have spoken with many Jews over the years, American Jews, who don't actually really know anything about the founding history of Israel, and are confused even about the origins of the conflict, and are pro-Israel. Also, I don't know that, you mentioned Gandhi, I don't know that terrorism doesn't work. I don't know that the Palestinians would have even gotten the Oslo Accords if the PLA hadn't engaged in terrorism. So again, like, terrorism has been used throughout history, because sometimes it can be effective to get more powerful and otherwise unwilling parties to the table.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  But I totally disagree with that, because in 1947, there wasn't a Palestinian terrorist organization, there wasn't a Palestinian self-identity. There were people there who were, you know, had been, didn't even call themselves Palestinians, but they were there, and some of them had been there for a long time, and some of them were short time, and some of them were people who were moved around, or moved around themselves in all of the chaos of the 1940s. If in 1947, people had said, you know, it's a complicated world, there's a bunch of people here, and they're not going anywhere, and we're here, and we're not going anywhere, why don't we see what we can do, and how we can live together and have two states live side by side?

• 59:37Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, but you go a year before that, with the bombing of the King David Hotel, and that was part of the movement to create a state of Israel. So was that counterproductive?

• 59:45Speaker 01

  No, I'm not saying that there aren't-

• 59:47Speaker 02

  You know, acts of terrorism or and even acts of violence that don't play a role in international affairs.

• 59:54Demetri Kofinas?

  In getting you what you want is specifically what I'm saying.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  No, they can, but I'm just saying is in India, the opposition to the British, they could have done terrorism. And there were some people who were saying, hey, our best strategy is terrorism. Gandhi, who it wasn't because he just thought violence was inherently evil. He just thought this, I think, this is the best strategy for getting what we want. And so I, I absolutely believe that in 1947, had there been a, you couldn't call it a Palestinian peace movement because there weren't a self-defined Palestinian people at that time. But had there been among the Arab Muslims in that region, a recognition that actually there's a group of people here and they have a legitimate claim to a state.

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  And there's another group here that has an equally legitimate claim to that state. We can have wars forever. We can try to wipe them out, which was what they said their stated goal. Or we can say, how can we find a way of living together? The whole history would be different. Just like you look at Poland and Ukraine now, they have these very old divisions over territorial boundaries. And they said, you know what, rather than fighting these crazy old battles, let's just find a way to live together. So we have, we have choices. Does that mean that violence works?

• 1:01:15Demetri Kofinas?

  Right. But those are two nation states. The Palestinians don't have a nation state. They have no, as you said, they have no really effective leadership. They have very corrupt political leadership. They have no control over their own borders. They don't even have borders.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  In 1947, both the Israelis were in the same state.

• 1:01:32Demetri Kofinas?

  Sure. But how many Palestinians were expelled from their homes? What was it like 2 million of them?

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  No, so there were about 800 to 900,000 people who are, were Arab Muslims who were living in what is now the state of Israel, who for whatever mix of reasons, and it's complicated, left or were expelled from Israel.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  In the second half of the 1940s and early 1950s, there were the exact same number of people who were Jews in the Arab and Islamic states who were expelled at the same time in the ethnic cleansing that happened in those states.

• 1:02:10Demetri Kofinas?

  You're talking about in the rest of the Middle East?

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:02:13Demetri Kofinas?

  You're saying in the same year, in 1947, that whatever it was, 2 million Palestinians were expelled from their homes as a result of the creation of Israel, 2 million Jews.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Not expelled. I mean, so the numbers are almost exactly the same of the number of Arab Muslims who fled, and some of them of their own accord, some of them in a context of a war, and some were expelled, and the number of Jews who were expelled within that roughly same period of time in the ethnic cleansing.

• 1:02:46Demetri Kofinas?

  As a result of the creation of Israel?

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  As a result of all of these, I mean, as a result of a lot of things that were happening, in the sense that those communities had been there for many hundreds of years. And so as a result is kind of aggressive language. And so that in the context of the divisions that were happening, because even if Israel had not been created, there was conflict that was brewing. It's not like, you have to articulate some other vision of what might have happened.

• 1:03:20Demetri Kofinas?

  All I'm saying, Jamie, Jamie, to be clear, all I'm saying is that it's one thing, I don't remember how this came up, but you were insinuating somehow that the Palestinians should have been okay in 1947, right after the creation of Israel, and right after so many Palestinians had been expelled from their...

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  No, but some things, there were mutual expulsions. It's like India, Pakistan.

• 1:03:40Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, but those expulsions were happening in the rest, in other countries in the Middle East.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  No, but there was no, but there wasn't a thing, you're assuming there was a thing Palestine, and it had a boundary.

• 1:03:48Demetri Kofinas?

  No, I don't assume there was. I literally said there wasn't. There wasn't such a thing. I said there was no nation-state of Palestine, but there were Palestinians living in their homes who had to leave as a result of the creation of the Jewish state.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  As a result of a war, they were not there as a result of the creation of the Jewish state, because the constitution of the Jewish state actually afforded rights to these people. It was a result of a major war that was launched by the Arab states.

• 1:04:12Demetri Kofinas?

  Against Israel.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  So it would be one thing if this was a Rwanda situation where this group said, we're going to do an expulsion. That's not what happened remotely. This group was saying, actually, it was foundational. It's enshrined in the constitution of the state of Israel that everybody has equal rights.

• 1:04:30Demetri Kofinas?

  Okay. This is for war. So, look, to be clear, again, what is always challenging with these discussions is that people come in with a presumption about people's views and they bring in their own context and so they infer certain things.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:04:43Demetri Kofinas?

  To be clear, again, my view on this is that, first of all, the one thing is I have a policy not to come down on a moral view on other people's blood feud or other people's intergenerational conflict, which is largely my position on this. And then, two, the other point is that I don't think that Israel has something to apologize for for being a successful nation-state. And I think there are conversations to be had about whether or not US policy, foreign policy in the Middle East overly favors Israel at the expense of US foreign policy. That's a whole different conversation. But the larger point I'd simply make is, it is a tragedy what goes on in Gaza. There are other tragedies that happen in the world that look like that and that have happened historically. And ethnic conflict is one of the features of disintegrating empire in the post-Westphalian

• 1:05:28Demetri Kofinas?

  world as nations try to develop nation-states. And so I think the conversation is far more complicated and I don't view either side as a villain or as a victim, as so oftentimes, I think, both supporters of Israel and supporters of the Palestinians seek to paint either side as. So, in the second hour, I want to really focus on, a bit more on China, on the China policy. The report talks a little bit about the Middle East. I don't want to necessarily talk anymore about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I do want to talk a bit about what the national strategy is with respect to some of the other Gulf states and capital investment in the Middle East, etc. And then also, ending the Ukraine war, kind of where we are with that. And lastly, Venezuela, this has just been a source of confusion

• 1:06:11Demetri Kofinas?

  for me as well. It's really unclear to me what the administration's policy is in Venezuela, how much of it is theatrical, how much of it is part of this effort to kind of assert US dominance over... Latin America and using Venezuela as a kind of signaling mechanism to get other states in line. It kind of in some sense like Iraq and like, you know, hoping for additional situations like Libya, you know, where when I say Libya, I mean, we were going to give up our chemical weapons program because you guys invaded Iraq and hoping that that would happen to other countries as well. So as I said, that's what we're going to talk about in the second hour. Jamie, for anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you.

• 1:06:55Demetri Kofinas?

  If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Jamie, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Jamie, stick around. We're gonna hopefully not light any more fireworks in the second hour of our conversation.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Great. And I'm gonna tell all kinds of really intimate secrets in the second hour. So if you're here for the first and you liked it, it's gonna be so awesome in the second hour. So we'll see you there.

• 1:07:31Demetri Kofinas?

  I love having somebody promote my second hour. Thank you, Jamie. See you all soon. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at @Kofinas and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.