Oh man, I’m such a pretentious twit. I managed to get about 20 seconds into the interview before I interrupted the host to correct him (he said the “Axis of Evil” line came from the 2003 State of the Union speech, when of course it came from the 2002 speech). The rest of it went so fast I don’t remember it very clearly, but I think I was a pretentious twit for at least some of the rest too. I think I made the following points:
-Nuclear proliferation is a bad thing. Nuclear proliferation involving North Korea is a bad thing. But let’s be clear about this: It’s not as if North Korea is suddenly going to get dangerous the moment it acquires properly working nuclear weapons. For decades now North Korea has had a massive conventional deterrent. And during this entire time millions of South Koreans and tens of thousands of American servicemen and women have lived in the shadow of its artillery fire. A frighteningly large percentage of these people would be dead within a few hours of the beginning of such an attack. This is hardly ideal, but that’s the point: we’ve lived with the very-far-from-ideal for a while now. So let’s put this in perspective.
-If I were negotiating with North Korea, I would try to offer non-aggression assurances, as well as some reasonable inducement to give up the nuclear program. But then I’d be willing to walk away if they didn’t take me up on the offer. (What I didn’t get a chance to say is that I’d probably focus on interdiction and other non-proliferation strategies and simply try to wait for the regime to collapse. These kinds of things happen incredibly suddenly when they do happen, and no one sees them coming. But I would not be at all surprised to see something very surprising happen in North Korean within five years, which would render all our current projections moot, based as they are on the assumption that the present will continue much as the past has.)
-I claimed that the United States has to get used to the idea that Iran is going to have a certain amount of influence in Iraq. Unless the US is planning to install a Sunni dictator, it’s extremely likely that large portions of the leadership of Iraq will have significant ties with Iran. Many will have spent time there in exile, they’ll have religious ties, and so on. And there’s only so much the U.S. can do about that.
-As far as dealing with Iran on nuclear proliferation, the U.S. can do lots of things. The first is to take seriously its own commitments with respect to non-proliferation agreements. It just hasn’t done that. Up until a few years ago the Bush administration was talking openly of mini-nuke bunker busters until congress finally squashed that. And they’re probably still developing them anyway. And it’s not just the US that has a serious hypocrisy problem here. How in heaven’s name can a representative of France – France, with its long history of nuclear testing in defiance of world opinion – tell an Iranian counterpart with a straight face that non-proliferation is important?
The second criticism of U.S. diplomacy I made was that it is so often incredibly undisciplined. For example, the United States needs Russia very much in its dealings with Iran. So why oh why would they choose this time to antagonize Russia completely unnecessarily with the anti-ballistic missile nonsense, especially when it will never work and everyone knows it.
We then made fun of me for being Canadian. I was asked if I speak French:
Me: Non. Un petite peu. Seulement.
Host: Huh.
Me: Monsieur Landart would be so disappointed in me.
Host: I’m sure she would.
Me: He. Um, most Monsieurs are he’s.
Host: Si.
I’m leaving out a lot. Oh yes, I claimed to be wearing a clown suit, which the host assured the audience was the national dress for Canada.
Anyway, I suppose there was a lot of talking for about 15 minutes. I had a good time, and I’m glad I enjoyed it because I doubt it’ll happen again for a long time.
anne | 10-Apr-08 at 10:54 pm | Permalink
The first step in your inexorable rise to sweaty-browed shouting opinioneer!
Kegri | 11-Apr-08 at 12:33 am | Permalink
post the audio!
Chris | 11-Apr-08 at 8:19 am | Permalink
I don’t have any audio, and they weren’t keen about the idea of mailing me an mp3. You’ll just have to imagine it.
You know, here’s another thing I wish now that I’d said. The guy started off asking me about various “threats” and what the US should do about them.
I think there at least two big traps there. One is falling into certain assumptions about the US role in the world that might be more expansive than I’d prefer on reflection. It’s not that I want the US to retreat to its own borders. But it doesn’t have the right to go around dictating some of the things it does, and part of the problem is that Americans are so accustomed to thinking that it does, and certain features of the “threat discourse,” I suppose you could call it, encourage that.
The other trap in answering questions about threats is of accepting a sort of vague and menacing view of the world. I wish I’d said, “Yes, it is of course a dangerous world, and there are of course people trying to kill us. And I do worry about nuclear proliferation. But the US is a very large country with an enormous economy and a gigantic military. It has its limits, of course, but it’s the last country that should be thinking of itself as constantly threatened. Indeed, we should resist this thought as soon as we observe the connection between a sort of hysteria about
‘threats’ and the promotion of ill-conceived foreign wars.”
Chris | 11-Apr-08 at 8:30 am | Permalink
And another thing!
So he asks me about nuclear proliferation, and as I said, I said the official nuclear powers should start to live up to their own commitments under the non-proliferation agreements, and also that the US needed to be more disciplined in setting priorities when dealing with allies like Russia, whose cooperation is essential if they want a deal with Iran.
I think someone who doesn’t live inside my head could be forgiven for wondering how the official nuclear powers living up to their own obligations is supposed to change Iran’s mind. Well, I meant to suggest those two things as helpful for starters. I don’t assume that they’re sufficient. But I do like to stress it because the school of non-proliferation thinking that I’ve been most impressed with stresses the causal role of perceptions of status, prestige and fairness in the development of nuclear weapons programs. I’ve been impressed in the past with the evidence that, for example, India and Pakistan’s nuclear programs were developed by people who were motivated in part by considerations of prestige and to whom appeals were especially pointless because the hypocrisy of established nuclear powers making the appeals was so blatant. That’s part of it, at least.
Paul | 11-Apr-08 at 9:55 am | Permalink
All of that seems sensible and impressively delivered (for being on the spot). What I want to know is, How were you introduced? Hosts typically feel the need to justify their guests’ appearance on their show. Were you introduced as Scallywag-in-Chief of a must-read indy blog? Or was it a, So, what do Canadians think about all this?, sort of deal?
upyernoz | 11-Apr-08 at 11:05 am | Permalink
i was gonna protest that nothing you said seemed like the remarks of a pretentious twit, until i got to the bit about how you spoke french. dude, get with the program. it’s called “freedom” now.
Chris | 11-Apr-08 at 2:40 pm | Permalink
I was introduced in the following way:
Him: Chris from . . . from . . expla . . . um . . explan . .
Me: Explananda
Him: Right. I just can’t say that [I tried to coach him before the show started.]
Me: It’s just the plural of explanandum.
Him: Whatever.
That, I think, qualifies as pretentious on my part.