"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 45

Episode 45: A Friendly Warning for America

A Friendly Warning for America

With November’s election approaching, it feels like the United States is at a crossroads — not just at home, but abroad too. Will the country continue to lead the global order, as it’s done so successfully since the end of WWII? Or will it retreat into isolationism? A distinguished foreign friend of America’s — the British soldier, diplomat, politician, and adventurer Rory Stewart — shares his views on what’s at stake, both for the world and for the U.S. itself.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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[SLOW, PLAYFUL MUSIC PICKS UP]

I’d like to start this episode with an observation. It’s not exactly a profound one, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Here goes: The best kind of friend is one who’s honest enough, and cares enough, to tell you what they really think about you. Not just a list of all the ways you’re great — though who doesn’t love that? — but also the things that are… not so great. What they think you might be getting wrong. A fresh perspective in other words. Because sometimes only a friend can tell you truths about yourself that you can’t — or don’t want to — see.

Don't worry. We're not turning this into a health and wellbeing show. But today you’ll be hearing from a good friend of America’s — someone who looks at U.S. foreign policy from a different point of view, who knows and admires the country…

Rory Stewart: I think your U.S. armed forces are extraordinary. I think your businesses are extraordinary. There are extraordinary public servants. People of immense intellect, great idealism. I mean, America is a miracle.

But he’s also a friend who's honest enough to tell us that he’s concerned for our future. Really concerned.

Rory Stewart: What’s so terrifying is the sense of this shocking division that’s emerging in society. And that is very, very worrying because democracies rest on compromise. They rest on persuasion. They rest on the possibility of educating the other side. All those things become impossible if you end up in a state of sort of suspended, frozen civil war.

[MUSIC SLOWS, SHIFTS TO BE FAST PACED, UPBEAT]

This friend… is Rory Stewart. Rory is about the closest thing we have to a 21st-century Lawrence of Arabia: a classic British archetype, fearlessly adventurous, brilliantly insightful, and with an interesting combination of humility and supreme self-confidence about the rightness of his vision for how the world should be. He’s been a soldier, a scholar, a member of Parliament, and a diplomat. And he spent time as a deputy governor of a remote marsh region in Iraq — when he was only in his early thirties. He crossed war-torn Afghanistan on foot, in winter, armed with little more than his knowledge of Dari and his insatiable curiosity about the people living there.

If TE Lawrence were alive today, he’d probably have a podcast. Rory does — and it’s the most successful political show in the UK. Lawrence was played by Peter O’Toole in the 1962 movie. Brad Pitt has bought the rights to make a film about Rory’s life.

Rory Stewart has been up close with Americans on many of the biggest geopolitical challenges we’ve had in recent history — from the marshlands of southern Iraq to private meetings advising the Secretary of State in Washington, D.C. He knows Americans well. And at a time when the world seems unstable and when America’s place in it seems to be shifting and uncertain, Rory Stewart is just the kind of friend we need: prepared to tell us the honest truth about who we are. And by we… I mean Americans — even ones like me, who grew up in the UK and ended up with a kind of funny accent located about halfway across the Atlantic Ocean.

I’m Peter Bergen, and this is In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

There couldn’t be a more pressing moment to hear Rory Stewart’s tough love than right now, when there’s the very real possibility that the U.S. will pull out of NATO, the alliance of countries that, for more than seven decades, has defended the West. It’s a threat Donald Trump has been making for several years now.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: NATO was busted until I came along. I said, Everybody's gonna pay. They said, “Well, if we don't pay, are you still going to protect us?” I said, “Absolutely not.” They couldn’t believe…

Trump is not alone. Today, on both the left of the Democratic Party and the right of the Republican Party, there’s now surprising agreement that the U.S. should get the hell out of the rest of the world’s conflicts. The United States is facing an historic fork in the road. Will America continue its deep engagement with the world that it's had since World War II? Or will it retreat into isolationism? And that’s where my discussion with Rory Stewart begins.

Rory Stewart: The U.S. has been withdrawing from the world, and withdrawing quite dramatically. President Biden, of course, with his very abrupt and reckless departure from Afghanistan is another example of this. This isn't just a Donald Trump story, this is a story of America becoming increasingly isolationist, and you can understand why. It's largely about playing for votes. It's very tempting to say, this is none of our business. You know, why should we be doing this? If your question all the time is what does a voter in Detroit want you to do, most of what the U.S. has been doing since the Second World War wouldn't happen. I mean, the U.S. has maintained a liberal global order on the basis of what you might almost call an elite conspiracy, which was a conspiracy between Republicans and Democrats to make the U.S. into the global policeman, and to be interested in what's happening in Eastern Congo or what's happening in Sudan. Or trying to drive through peace process in Northern Ireland. And this was never driven by popular votes.

Rory Stewart: But the detail of American foreign policy, and the detail of foreign policy in any country is complicated. It's 20, 30 years sometimes of long term ambitions. It requires a professional military and foreign service that isn't being buffeted endlessly by the question of votes in Detroit. And that's where the U.S. is beginning to falter. And the consequences of that is the world is getting much more dangerous. There are two extremes which must be avoided. One extreme is the extreme of over-intervention. The sort of things that happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, spending 3.5 trillion dollars and achieving close to nothing. I mean, quite literally, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban, spent 20 years there, spent well over a trillion dollars, left, and handed the country back to the Taliban. That's not good foreign policy. But the other extreme that you have to avoid is the extreme of having nothing to do with the world at all.

In 2000, just a short time before the United States, and the world, changed forever, Rory set off on a great adventure, channeling his boyhood hero, Lawrence of Arabia. He walked — yes walked! — across much of Iran, Pakistan, the Himalayas, and, finally, Afghanistan, arriving in Kabul only a few weeks after the fall of the Taliban. Rory wrote a book about the trip, and he voiced the audiobook version. The walk had been kind of a crazy idea, and an Afghan security official told him as much:

ARCHIVAL Rory Stewart: [NARRATING:] “There are no tourists,” said the man in the stiff jacket, who had not yet spoken. “You are the first tourist in Afghanistan. It is midwinter — there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I guarantee. Do you want to die?”

Peter Bergen: You famously walked across the country, uh, when you were, uh, a younger man. Uh, what was that like? What did you learn?

Rory Stewart: Well, it was a wonderful experience. I'd been briefly in the British army and then I became a British diplomat. So I'd been in our embassy in Indonesia, then in Yugoslavia. And I was given two years leave of absence by a very indulgent boss to let me walk across Asia. So I walked across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, and I walked about 25, 30 miles a day.

ARCHIVAL Rory Stewart: [NARRATING:] The road was flat, the day was cool, my feet were comfortable, and my pack didn't feel too heavy. The pace of my legs began to transform the rhythm of my breathing and of my thinking, although I still felt unusually nervous. I wondered whether, after 15 months of walking across Asia, my luck was running out. I had promised my mother that this would be my last journey and that if I made it safely to Kabul, I would come home.

Rory Stewart: I stayed in 550 village houses on the route. And the most profound thing for me was what I learned in those village houses. I thought it would be the exercise and the walk, the adventure of the landscape, and putting one foot in front of the other, but the truth is that it was sleeping on their floors, and sharing their small houses with them. And it gave me a sense of the ordinary life of very poor people in a way that I would never have been able to otherwise. And then it totally changed my life as a diplomat and a politician because the most dramatic thing that you realize doing that kind of journey is just how extreme and mad the gap is between the way that people actually live their lives, and the way that politicians and policymakers talk about them. So in Afghanistan, I I guess the most dramatic example is, you know, I was walking through a landscape where I was seeing people growing opium poppy, where I was shot at by militia commandos, where the women had never been more than two hours walk from their village in their lives, where communities were in vendetta with each other and had been for 20 years, where one person maybe in a village could read or write and there was no electricity.

Rory Stewart: And I turn up in the capital city at the end of this journey, now with my sort of diplomatic hat back on, and I find myself in a room with the President of Afghanistan, the finance minister, and for some bizarre reason Bianca Jagger [PETER LAUGHS] and they are they're all saying every Afghan is committed to a gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic, centralized state based on democracy, human rights and the rule of law. And I literally thought I cannot translate this. I don't know how I would say that in Dari. And even if I could somehow find the words, how would I make anyone in any of the villages I stayed with understand what these people are talking about? And I then realized that it wasn't just the Afghan government talking like that, the Afghan government was talking like that because the U.S. wanted to talk like that. The British government wanted to talk like that. The Swedish government wanted to talk like that. They were imposing an extraordinary fantasy.

Peter Bergen: What I loved about your book on intervention, you have wonderful sections about the way in which people who come into these very complex foreign countries, they have a sort of essentially an argot that only they understand really about capacity building and, you know, the metrics they're going to use. But it actually has almost nothing to do with what's going on in the country.

Rory Stewart: It's because we don't want to describe carefully and thoughtfully what life in an Afghan village is really like, because we're actually a bit uncomfortable with it. We don't really want to come to terms with the fact that the people in that community might be much more conservative, might be much more religious, might be much more xenophobic than we want to acknowledge. That their priorities may be quite different from ours. We want to pretend that they're just like us and they want just the same things as us. And that's important for us because if that's not true, how are we going to turn Afghanistan into the kind of liberal democracy that we dream of? But at some subconscious level, they sort of imagined they could turn it into Sweden or the United States.

At first, the U.S. also had high hopes for democratic prospects in Iraq, even though things there weren’t exactly going to plan.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster: Despite another week of setbacks on the ground in Iraq… for the cameras, White House officials have taken pains to show a brave face.

ARCHIVAL George W. Bush: We're making great progress. I don't care what you read about.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster: Behind the scenes, however, a much bleaker outlook. The concern that Iraq's reconstruction is, in fact, falling well short of expectations.

Rory had a front-row seat at this drama. In 2003, when he was only 30 years old, he was named deputy provincial governor of the Maysan province, on Iraq’s border with Iran. He was the modern equivalent of the colonial administrators sent around the world by Britain in its days of Empire. But this time around, British officials like Rory were reporting to the Americans, who were running the country. And despite everything he had learned in Afghanistan about the hubris of efforts to build Western-style liberal democracies in far-flung places… Rory was optimistic. At first.

Rory Stewart: I felt that Saddam was such a horrifying figure that we ought to be able to do better than Saddam. I mean, I set the bar pretty low. I still thought Iraq was likely to be a pretty poor, unstable, corrupt country. But I thought it should be possible to make it a better country than Saddam's Iraq. And I had completely underestimated the complexity of what happens when a state is dismantled. I'd never seen anything like it.

Rory Stewart: I suddenly found myself, as you say, as the acting governor of a province where all the electricity had vanished. And when we tried to build the transmission lines again, tribal groups would come in and steal all the copper wire and the electricity would go again. A situation in which we were one of the biggest oil-producing countries in the world, and we couldn't produce any gas at the gas pumps. A situation in which all the schools have been looted, in which there were 2000 people outside my office with placards calling for my death, in which, you know, Iranian-backed militia groups were beginning to swarm across the borders. I mean, it… it was… beyond imagining. And it, I think, has taught me to be much, much more cautious about these things, but not give up! The risk is you hear a story like that and say, “Okay, well, we'll have nothing to do with the rest of the world.” And the truth is that having nothing to do with the rest of the world is also a bad thing and has led to some very bad outcomes.

Peter Bergen: Your whole career in so many different forms as a writer, as a politician, as somebody who ran a charity in Afghanistan, has been a very deep meditation on the question of intervention, when to intervene, when not to intervene, how to intervene.

Rory Stewart: Yeah, yeah.

Peter Bergen: You've done so much thinking about this question in so many different ways. So tell us: what have you learned?

Rory Stewart: I think it's a very difficult subject, but broadly speaking, you have to find the balance between totally unrealistic optimism on the one hand and extreme pessimism on the other. And that's quite difficult in a black-and-white soundbite world. Because what you're saying is that the U.S., including the U.S. military and its diplomats and its intelligence agencies, can play a very useful role in the world to making the world slightly more prosperous, slightly more peaceful in the future than it is today.

Rory Stewart: But the kind of countries that you're talking about working in these are countries that have been through trauma. And maybe a good way of explaining it to a voter would be that it's like working with individuals who've been through trauma. If you were trying to assist or support somebody who'd been through a terrible childhood or a terrible traumatic situation, you shouldn't kid yourself into believing that you're going to be able to come in and turn their lives around overnight, or even that at the end of the process, there's going to be completely, uh, as though none of that happened. Instead, you should think about yourself in a supporting, facilitating role — having huge confidence that, if you're sensitive, if you listen carefully, if you support in the right way, you can make the world a bit more prosperous and peaceful, but that it's an exercise in extreme sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and patience.

Peter Bergen: It was going to take decades for Afghanistan to be a semi-functional Central Asian country, given the fact that it had just gone through 30 to 40 years of war, um, and given the fact that it was a quasi-medieval country in places even before the wars began. Because the United States was sort of born as an anti-empire project, do you think there's something actually in the American psyche that prevents them getting these things right?

Rory Stewart: It's probably impolite of me to make generalizations about American culture any more than I do about Afghan culture. But, it is true, if I give you some examples, I remember Strobe Talbott, a very distinguished American diplomat, when I was trying to explain why I felt that what they were doing in Afghanistan was impossible, saying to me, “Rory, we're Americans. You can't tell us something's impossible.” [PETER LAUGHS] And effectively, you know, don't give me problems, give me solutions. You know, what have we got to do here? And somebody like me, who's saying, “Look, this is very complicated. This is very difficult,” just sounds like the kind of naysayer that you don't want to have on your football team, or you don't want to have in your company. [PETER LAUGHS] And Peter, I think the other thing that we've not been good at is trying to find analogies from within our own countries, to explain why it's difficult. Because if you said to the same American policymaker who was talking about transforming Afghanistan, said to them, okay, what would it take to transform Flint, Michigan?

Peter Bergen: Well, I think that's a brilliant point. Because, if any American politician says, I've got a magic plan to transform Flint, Michigan, into, you know, Manhattan in the next decade, I mean, they would just be laughed out of court.

Rory Stewart: It's only abroad that people can project fantasies with such energy, because the closer it is to home, the more we can see that these things are complicated, that there are many, many different layers of challenge, and that many people have been trying for a very long time. But there is a flip side of my criticism, And I had a version of that serving alongside the U.S. military in Iraq, when the U.S. tried to do something, it did it seriously. I thought, “At least they're trying.” The other extreme would be the Italians that I served with in Iraq, who were sort of world-weary and had decided the whole thing was impossible and therefore were not really making any effort at all and that's another kind of problem.

Today, the United States is dealing with its latest international crisis. What is probably the most dangerous situation in the Middle East since the 1973 war between Israel and a coalition of Arab states. It’s a giant — and spreading — regional conflict. Tens of thousands of people have already died, but unless high-level diplomacy succeeds, the situation could soon get worse. Much worse.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: One of the biggest concerns as the war goes on is the prospect of the conflict widening.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: There's a gradual spiral of violence now in which it's increasingly looking like a sort of convergence of chaos.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: Stopping the spread is proving difficult. As the New York Times puts it, the regional war no one wanted is here, and it asks, how wide will it get?

Rory has recently returned from a few years living in the Middle East, in Jordan, where his wife ran a charity. And he told me that the current conflict is a perfect example of why the world still needs the U.S. to stay engaged internationally…and how it’s actually in our own best interests to do so.

Peter Bergen: As somebody who's lived in Jordan — now the 10th country to get involved in the conflict, after the strikes there by Iran-backed militias — what would you do to solve this?

Rory Stewart: The answer has to be a two-state solution. There must be a viable, autonomous Palestinian state. And that is the only long-term sustainable solution for the Palestinians and for the Israelis. The U.S. is the only country with the credibility, the wealth, the firepower, the foreign policy experience — has been the only country for 70 years — with a shot of making this happen, and it would be immensely beneficial for the world, but also beneficial for the U.S. I mean, the U.S. is not benefiting from the fact that ships are unable to get through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal at the moment. The U.S. is not benefiting from the fact that U.S. soldiers are being killed in bases. The U.S. is not benefiting from the fact that we'll end up with the Straits of Hormuz — where a lot of the oil goes back and forth — being threatened. So, stability in that region is in the U.S. interests.

That seems indisputable to me. But, then again, neither Rory nor I are running for President.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: And as I did for four incredible years, I will put America first every single time, every single day. [APPLAUSE]

Peter Bergen: It's not unlikely that Donald Trump, A, will become the Republican nominee for president, and B, if the election was tomorrow, he would probably win it. He's repeatedly said to his staff that he wants to pull out of NATO. If that happened, what does that look like?

Rory Stewart: I think the election of Donald Trump, or indeed, the empowerment of isolationist Republicans, will have a very, very profound impact. In the era where the U.S. was confident, the era of the liberal global order from 1989 to 2004, the number of democracies in the world doubled. Every year the world was becoming more peaceful, there were fewer refugees, there were fewer civilians killed in conflict, and since 2004, it's been the reverse. Every year we've had more internally displaced people, refugees, civilians killed in conflict. The number of democracies has been decreasing. The world has become more dangerous. In an era of isolationism, it's very tempting for Donald Trump and even many people in the Democratic Party to feel that the whole world has been free riders, that the U.S. has been generous for 70 years, and it's time other people carried their weight.

Rory Stewart: Well, no! The truth of the matter is that this period, from 1945 to the current day, has been an astonishing American success. And whatever America was doing in the world has really benefited America, right? There is a direct relationship between those two million troops, that incredible expenditure on defense, its investment in NATO, and the prosperity of the United States. You've benefited enormously. You've made incredible technological discoveries on the back of this investment. So the “free rider” story is missing the story that when America was most involved in the world America was at its most prosperous.

The United Nations, NATO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the International Court of Justice were all essentially American creations, a network of global institutions designed to further peace, prosperity, and security in the aftermath of WWII. But the truth is no one really voted for them. They were built and operated by elites, perfectly confident that they knew what was best. For a long time, the system worked. Now, populist politicians in Europe and across the world are calling that system into question.

Peter Bergen: You've thought a lot about the issue of populism, which is often tied to this sort of anti-immigrant, ethnocentric view, whether it's the rise of Modi in India, who's destroying what remains of Gandhi's India as we speak, obviously Trump, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom with Brexit, Italy, Hungary, Holland, France, or pick your European country. Uh, this is a new reality. It also undercuts a lot of the things I think that you believe in, which is the liberal international order that actually functioned pretty well for a long time. Why are populists doing so well?

Rory Stewart: So I think that the old liberal international order, the kind of way that things were run in the '90s depended on ideas about how we run our economies and how we run our politics and how we run our foreign policy that have been terribly, terribly devastated. So, the 2008 financial crisis had a shattering impact on people's confidence in the old economic models, particularly in their confidence in markets and globalization. The rise of social media has created incredible potential for polarization and echo chambers and driving people to the extremes, and that's had a profound impact on our politics, as has the success of China. I mean, we always believed that there was a natural, logical relationship between being a successful economy and being a liberal democracy. And China had a smaller economy than the UK in 2005, it's now got an economy seven times larger than the UK. And even though the Chinese economy is not where it was, it's still, for many people around the world, an example of a successful authoritarian state. And that's true of Saudi, that's true of UAE, other successful authoritarian states.

Rory Stewart: And then the final thing, I think the humiliations in Iraq and Afghanistan really exposed some of the fantasies about the liberal global order and and the, the general result was that if you're Trump, it's pretty easy to stand up and say, “these guys in the 1990s had no idea what they were doing. Right, they signed up to dumb deals with China, which injured us. They launched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that bankrupted us.” And the only solution to this is that the old moderate liberal forces that were the glue of democratic politics need to up their game. They need to provide a charismatic, attractive, vigorous, serious, compelling alternative to the populists, and they're failing to do that.

Rory gave politics a try himself. In 2010, he was elected as a Conservative member of Parliament, representing a remote and beautiful English constituency on the Scottish border.Optimistic by nature and a centrist by conviction, he played the game, rising through the ranks, eventually making it to the top tier of British politics, with a seat in the Cabinet Room of No. 10 Downing Street. He even launched a longshot campaign to become Prime Minister. But Rory’s time in politics ended in disillusionment, and with not a little worry about how democratic institutions — both in his country and ours — are facing the many challenges of the day.

Rory Stewart: I remember Mitt Romney saying to me, just before I went into British politics, he said, “Get all your thinking done now, you're not going to have any time to think when you're a politician.” He was correct. Being a politician was genuinely terribly bad for my mind, my body, and my soul. I felt myself becoming a worse human being, a stupider human being, every day, because it's impossible. You know, you're completely absorbed in the party political games of promotion and loyalty and bureaucratic careerism. And there's very, very little space at a big national level for really helping to realize the kind of world which you dreamed. You can do it at a local level. But when you get into the big, big structural issues. You know, what is the U.S. going to do with Israel-Gaza? How are we really going to deal with inequality in the country? How are we really going to regenerate the Rust Belt? These questions are very, very difficult to tackle as a politician because the sense of inertia, vested interests, stupidity in the system is very profound. It's a very disheartening, dispiriting environment, and politicians don't say that because — they feel it, they don't say it, because if they say it nobody's gonna vote for them again. [PETER LAUGHS]

Rory Stewart: One of the consequences of populism is a soundbite culture. Which is good for campaigning and very bad for governing. Now in the U.S. you've seen this laid out in incredible detail, in staggering accounts of the Trump White House of the way that he behaved. But we have our own equivalent in Britain: Boris Johnson was patently unsuitable to be prime minister. His private life was rickety. His performance in office had been terrible. And we knew this, and I would say to my colleagues, How can you possibly support this man? And they would say, basically, “because he's a winner. And because my voters like him.” And that is exactly the conversation that I have with Republican congressmen and congresswomen saying to me, “Yeah, I don't really like Trump. But please don't repeat this, because 85 percent of the people in my district want him.” And it's partly the nature of a mass democracy. I mean, there are good things about it. The old WASP elite that ran U.S. politics had a lot of problems. You know, they were part of a very unequal racist society. They were not particularly accountable. On the other hand, that group was not particularly caught up with the question of soundbites. They had probably more autonomy, more time for serious policy reflection. They were less vulnerable to the kind of Trumps of this world.

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Peter Bergen: So, just going back to this very big question about America's role in the world. You know, Winston Churchill, of course, had an American mother. And, of course, he was British himself. And he said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.” Do you think the United States will do the right thing when it comes to these very big problems in Ukraine, in the Middle East, or do you think the isolationism that you've described on both sides of the aisle is sort of the new reality?

Rory Stewart: Churchill there is being hopeful he's being optimistic, and you have to be in politics But I think that statements made about how people acted and how America acted in the 1930s are not particularly applicable today. I think Churchill looking at Trump would be less certain. That we are an environment where you can’t always rely on people to do the right thing.

Rory Stewart: To take the insight of Aristotle… he says in politics you need three things. You need logos, which in the case of the U.S. means really good, clear ideas. You know, what are we going to do with the U.S. economy? What are we going to do with U.S. politics in detail? And the second thing you need is pathos, right? You need to be able to communicate, out-communicate the populist. You need a sense of humor. One of the reasons that Trump is romping home is he's just much funnier than other people. Much better communicator, right? And the final thing is you need what Aristotle calls ethos. You need a moral purpose. You need a sense of why moral character matters. You need to be able to make the case for things that are difficult to make the case for in politics. Which includes, unfortunately, making claims for truth. And it's a difficult thing for a politician to do because we're all a bunch of slimy bullshitters. But in the end, our democratic system depends on truth.

It was late afternoon in London, and Rory soon had to leave to pick up his young children at school. I have two kids myself and, like many of you, I sometimes wonder about the world they’re going to be living in. I’ve always believed that betting against the United States is a mistake. On the other hand, history tells us that no great power endures forever, as someone who comes from Great Britain, like Rory, knows all too well. So I wanted to hear his thoughts on the future of America, and the West.

Peter Bergen:If we accept that the United States is the “leader of the West,” quote unquote, is the sun setting, not on the British Empire this time, but on the West in general?

Rory Stewart: Well, I think the West is coarsening. I think coarsening is a good word. I think we're losing a sense of democratic propriety. We care less about the rule of law and many voters care less about the rule of law. Our systems were based on a reverence for our constitutions, for our legal systems, for the way that we did things, which relied on trust. And we've become very, very cynical and brutalized somehow. And so what we need to do is make, ultimately, the moral case for our systems. But we live in a world in which nobody really believes in moral truths anymore, so it's quite difficult to make an earnest, ethical case for the things that we care about: Human rights, equality, all these things which underlie democracy are difficult to articulate. So we're in a world in which the domination of the West is much less something that you can take for granted. The West has in many ways lost direction, lost confidence. You can see it, partly in the way that we failed properly to stand up to Putin in 2014 when he went into Crimea. We took our eye off the ball in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Syria, in Crimea, and we massively took our eye off the ball in terms of the Middle East peace process. And we've sown and are now reaping the consequences of that lack of seriousness and that lack of focus.

Peter Bergen: If we were having this conversation a hundred years ago, there would be a dim realization, if you were a Brit, that the Americans sort of did pretty well in World War I. And then, if we had a conversation after World War II, it's basically, well, Britain's bankrupt, America won the war. If Rory Stewart and Peter Bergen in the 23rd century were having a conversation about this issue, would we be saying, “Well, yes, the United States was doing pretty well on some levels, but, you know, the rot set in, this kind of politics as a branch of entertainment, it was no longer really serious. It was pulling back from the world. it didn't really use its leverage in all these difficult places, and basically threw up its hands and said, ”Well, we're out of here?” Or, is it impossible to tell?

Rory Stewart: I think it's very difficult to tell. Britain went into the First World War, 1914, at a time of unrivaled peace and prosperity, you know, with an empire that was shortly to be kind of a third of the world. And within 25 years — that's a very very short period of time, right? That's just taking us back to, taking us back to the year 2000 which for you and me doesn't sound very long ago — it had lost it all. I think though, that looking at the U.S. at the moment, the thing that would worry me is not U.S. power or U.S. economy, it's U.S. democracy. It's perfectly possible that, sort of, Trumpian authoritarian figures can come in and preside over a U.S. that will continue to be rich and powerful, but that along the way, you will lose what made American culture, American civilization, the beacon of the world, which is human rights, the rule of law, separation of powers, a functioning democracy. That's what's under threat. After all, Rome went from being a republic to becoming an empire. It didn't become poorer. It just became more authoritarian and brutal.

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If you enjoyed this episode and want to know more about Rory Stewart, we recommend his memoir, titled How Not to Be A Politician in the U.S. and Politics on the Edge in the UK. He’s also written two great books about his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan: The Prince of the Marshes and The Places in Between. They’re all available on Audible, and read by Rory himself.

If you enjoy the show, please rate, review, and tell some friends.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original. Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.

This episode was produced by Paul Berczeller with help from Luke Cregan.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Erik German, Laura Tillman, Holly DeMuth, Sandy Melara, and JP Swenson.

Our theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore and Jason Ross.

Our Head of Development is Julian Ambler.

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.

Maureen Traynor is our Head of Operations.

Our Production Manager is Herminio Ochoa.

Our Production Coordinator is Henry Koch.

And our Delivery Coordinator is Ana Paula Martinez.

Audible’s Chief Content Officer is Rachel Ghiazza.

Head of Content Acquisition & Development and Partnerships: Pat Shah.

Audible Executive Producer: Lara Regan Kleinschmidt.

Special thanks to Marlon Calbi, Allison Weber, and Vanessa Harris.

Copyright 2024 by Audible Originals, LLC

Sound recording copyright 2024 by Audible Originals, LLC

Please note: This episode includes excerpts from Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, copyright Rory Stewart; and an excerpt of a broadcast by the BBC.