This is a lightly edited transcript of the October 17 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Elizabeth Saunders. She’s a professor of political science at Columbia University. She’s been a regular guest talking to us about her specialty, which is how US policymakers decide and work on foreign policy. So we’ve had her on a few times. Elizabeth, thanks for joining me again.
Elizabeth Saunders: My pleasure.
Bacon: So I’m going to go a little bit around the world, not too many places, but I want to hit some various news items that we’ve talked about. When you were on during the Iran war, the US and Israel’s decision—the Iran war we’ve been in, when it started, you talked about, as it started going on, that Trump’s choices were between escalation, meaning really trying to destroy Iran, or capitulation.
My perception is he’s actually chosen, in some ways, a weird third course, which is do not solve the issue, allow gas prices to go up, and kill his political party. That was not an option most presidents think to—most presidents would’ve been constrained by, oil prices are killing my party, I want them to win. He doesn’t seem to care. Even George Bush in ‘06 cared about those basic dynamics.
So do you still see that capitulation, escalation as where things are going, or how do you see how he’s handled Iran now?
Saunders: So I still think his choices are humiliation and escalation. I put everything you just said in the humiliation bucket. And if you believe The New York Times and The Atlantic and other outlets that reported yesterday, he’s had the Pentagon draw up and then rejected a bunch of escalation options that he may or may not use before the midterms, may or may not use after. So escalation is still apparently on the table. We’ve sent another carrier.
And I would just add to that, that the humiliation is a slow accumulation of things, including an underappreciated fact, I think, which is that the United States does not currently have an aircraft carrier in the Indo-Pacific region, which is pretty shocking if you follow US defense policy.
Now, you might say that aircraft carriers might not be the most useful tool in the Indo-Pacific, but if you believe the idea that we have an interest in the Indo-Pacific, and we’ve had carriers there indefinitely, the fact that we are stretched so thin that we had to pull the last remaining one out is a pretty shocking fact.
I think what is new about the Iran war is that there have always been other actors who could shape the way this goes. But now they’ve acted, and Donald Trump is no longer in charge of the on/off switch of this war, right? Say, by some miracle, we get a deal with Iran tomorrow, which is not going to happen, but for argument’s sake, the Houthis will have something to say about that, right? And they are an Iranian proxy with an awful lot of agency, compared to even other Iranian proxies, and so they’ve been striking airports in Riyadh and Saudi Arabia.
So this has unleashed forces that are no longer—Trump’s access to the off switch, which is full humiliation but stops the escalation maybe, is increasingly tenuous, if it exists at all.
Bacon: But a war we haven’t won and that has killed him politically is humiliation in a certain sense, right?
Saunders: Yes. I would say that’s Vietnam. And the midterms in 2006 with the Iraq War I think is only a partial analogy, for a variety of reasons. But I would say that was humiliation, and then Bush chose a course to escalate, to get to some kind of outcome he could declare a victory. And that may still happen after the midterms, which is what Bush did.
Bacon: But Trump has been hinting at escalation for months now, so my guess is he doesn’t actually want to do that, right?
Saunders: Yeah. His credibility is completely destroyed. I think that was when he backed off of his first civilizational threat.
I do want to just make a quick point about this really troubling and strange story in the UK. The bombers that were pulled very suddenly from RAF Fairford, which is a Royal Air Force base in the UK that had been hosting US bombers, and they were very suddenly taken out because of this apparent plot against the base.
And the details of this story are really odd, and it probably means there’s more that hasn’t actually come out. But the UK and the US have said that Iran is somehow behind this in some way, and we don’t know how directly.
Just imagine for a minute if this had been a plot that had blown up. There’s some thought that maybe they were mimicking the Ukrainian attack on Russian bombers, right? They use drones, they blow up some American bombers, and they kill American airmen who are stationed at the base, of whom there are many.
Unless it was by accident, I really have a hard time imagining that would not have provoked a massive American and British response. I don’t think that the reporting on this has even quite grasped—if that had happened, it would’ve been the biggest story in the UK in decades.
Bacon: Interesting.
Saunders: And would raise all sorts of questions. I don’t think most Americans are aware of just how much damage has been done to our Middle East bases. It’s really shocking. But those are forward bases close to Iran. Psychologically, blowing up a UK air base and killing Americans and British soldiers and destroying bombers, where you’d have lots of media coverage, it’s just a little odd.
And so the reason I say that is because surely Iran, which for all its many evils as a regime, has been very careful about exactly what it has done. And so this would have been crossing a line that is way over the line, right? It’s the equivalent of—the Russians apparently tried to bomb a train carrying Boris Johnson a couple weeks ago. I still wonder if that was a mistake in targeting, because that’s such an escalation.
So if you play the logic through, I’ve never been that worried that Trump would use nuclear weapons, because I just don’t think he would in the end. But there are some things he hasn’t done short of nuclear weapons that he could do.
He would maybe then actually fulfill his civilization-ending threat. So it’s so odd that I do wonder how real it was, or what stage, or who’s really behind it. And so I just find the reporting around it a little strange, given the magnitude of what would have happened.
Bacon: I’m glad you brought it up. I hadn’t really followed it. We talked about Greenland last time I talked to you, and so now we have some kind of security agreement. Was that humiliation as opposed to escalation, what happened with Denmark and Greenland, or something more complicated?
Saunders: I think what it is basically is like asking for your regular allowance from your parents at gunpoint, and then enduring all the costs of having done that, right?
Bacon: Of having used the gunpoint.
Saunders: So I think they got plenty of things out of it that maybe are good, an improvement on the status quo. For example, if Greenland becomes independent, it agrees that all the things in the agreement stay. So there’s no connection between Greenlandic independence and US national security access. That’s a change. From a US national security perspective, one could say that’s a win.
On the other hand, almost everything in the agreement they could have just negotiated without these dreadful verbal attacks, and the fears of real attacks on a US NATO ally. And the cost of that—this is what caused Mark Carney to say we are in the midst of a rupture. The costs of that, the loss of trust, it was way out of proportion. It was unnecessary, and they probably could have gotten it for free.
Bacon: Was Biden pursuing a policy like this? Do we need to have more access to Greenland than we had before, our military and so on? I never understood the rationale entirely.
Saunders: Yeah, it is true that the Arctic is a far more important area than it used to be. I think nobody would disagree with that, because the Russians and the Chinese transit. There are no Russians in Greenland, right, other than undercover. But it is very strategic. It’s the path the missiles would fly, the shortest path.
And so that’s why you got a lot of early warning, and you might want more of that. But this just would’ve been an under the radar issue that was negotiated with Denmark and Greenland. And I wonder if it was because Trump really wanted to be able to say he bought Greenland, right? So he could enlarge. There was never any reason why it had to be part of the United States in order to get any of these things. They’re separate questions, really.
Bacon: One area where he’s been successful in a certain sense would be in South America, the removal of Maduro and the sort of takeover of Venezuela, which appears that Marco Rubio is running the country now. So that policy has actually worked out the way Trump wanted. So I wanted to talk about then the context of Brazil.
In this election, it appears that the Trump allies have finished ahead in the first round. Looks like Bolsonaro’s son is probably going to win the presidency. So in a certain sense, has Trump succeeded in reshaping South America in his way, or is that more where things were going regardless of Trump?
Saunders: So, stipulating that I’m not a Latin American politics expert and don’t pretend to know the details, I think from what I’ve read from commentators, this was very much a surprise. Which means it was probably closer. This is not like a wave. On the other hand, incumbents are just disliked everywhere right now, whatever flavor they are.
Bacon: Spain. Britain. South America. Hungary. Yes, exactly.
Saunders: And so voting out whoever’s in is the—and I think that you would know better than I, but from what I’ve seen in polling in other places, like Minnesota, that’s true of domestic politics in the US. If there’s a Democratic incumbent, they’re not going to do as well as the average Democrat who isn’t an incumbent. So I think some of that is accounting for what happened.
I don’t even know how much Trump really put effort into this particular election, as opposed to the Javier Milei election in Argentina, in part because there wasn’t an economic crisis that offered him the opportunity to do that. I think the implication, though, which is disheartening, is the narrative around Brazil had been, they had a January 6 and they solved it, in the sense of, they jailed Bolsonaro, and he couldn’t run again.
Bacon: He was jailed and he couldn’t run again, both.
Saunders: Both, right. They handled it the way a lot of people wish we had handled our January 6. And their Supreme Court was a part of that. And so for that to have happened and then to get this—the people still get to decide, and they apparently have decided to bring back a Bolsonaro.
Bacon: But if Donald Trump Jr. was the president in November 2024, that would not have been a reassuring outcome compared to Donald Trump winning. You’re like, “Both were bad.”
Saunders: Exactly, yes. Those are the choices, and the people have spoken. It’s democracy. But there is this idea that a democracy should not actually allow criminals to stand for election, that you are allowed to draw lines about who is eligible. So I don’t know enough about the son to say if he’s—
Bacon: If he’s actually the—exactly.
Saunders: But let’s just assume that he’s innocent of any outright criminality and is just a kind of far-right figure. Oh, you there?
Bacon: I can hear you, yeah.
Saunders: Yeah, sorry, my screen blacked out for a sec. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is still in some way what the people want, right? And there’s only so much you can do. When you have an explicit threat against the Constitution and violence like January 6 and their equivalent, they addressed it, and this still happened. So maybe it’s just anti-incumbency that explains it, but it’s still disheartening.
Bacon: Because your point is that, as far as we know, Trump was not super involved in winning this election. I remember JD Vance flew to Hungary before the election actually happened. We think Trump was, as far as I can tell, less involved in the result in Brazil, obviously less involved than they were in controlling Venezuela. Your point is this election is about Brazil and not really about Trump in any sort of formal way.
Saunders: I think so. That’s my perception, and I may be wrong. But I think the fact that in Hungary you had a far-right incumbent who had been around for a long time, it fits the pattern, right? And although I understand that it’s now considered kind of a done deal that he will win, it’s not as though this was a landslide. But it’s still very disheartening.
Bacon: I’ll finish with Marco Rubio’s speech in Greece. I’m having a hard time summarizing it, so just tell me. I guess this generally fits into, like, the West needs to defend its civilization from the others, from the inferior. He didn’t quite use the word inferior, but it was clearly implied. I guess this is America first abroad, or nationalism abroad, but more formally stated. What did you make of the speech?
Saunders: I turned it off, actually, after I started, and I read some of the coverage after.
Bacon: It was clearly something he wanted to—this was a high-profile speech. It was important to him. Not sure if it was important to Trump, but I think it’s important to him.
Saunders: And I think this is part of him trying to position himself as Trump’s heir, outbidding JD Vance for this kind of civilizational stuff. I think the old Marco Rubio in another life would’ve probably, if he had gone to Greece at all, would’ve made a speech about democratic values. And I think there’s a lot of, but the slickness and the backdrop—
Bacon: It was very presidential. It was all—
Saunders: An announcement. Yeah, it was very, yeah. And I think Dan Drezner had a really good—he’s play acting at oratory, or something like that.
Bacon: I’ve seen oratory as well, so yeah.
Saunders: So I think what’s so odd about it is there’s hardly any diplomacy in it, right? He’s just going there to be able to have these clips and show them. And he is the national security adviser and the secretary of state, the nation’s top diplomat, right?
Every time I post on Bluesky about him, I always say the nation’s top diplomat, because I just do not think we can forget that he does this in the name of the United States. He is supposed to be the top diplomat. And diplomats for sure do things that are performative. That’s part of their job, is the pageantry.
But it’s just not clear who this was aimed at, and what the positive benefit to the United States of going over there and basically saying, “Your civilization is ancient and wonderful,” which they agree with, but they don’t want weaponized in this way, “and you’re letting it be polluted by these people who don’t look like me or you.”
It’s bigoted and it’s many things, but it’s not diplomatic. And there’s why to do that in Greece, right? Be undiplomatic when you go visit an adversary.
Bacon: I guess the idea is Greece is the cradle of—I think that’s what he was getting at. “Today we find ourselves at a crossroads. The next decade will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy, servitude, and decline. We’ll either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.” I guess in some ways I read the speech as being a more articulate version of what Trump says, with better speech writers.
Saunders: Not that much better.
Bacon: Not that much better. Fair enough. He’s trying to give a grand speech. That’s what I’m trying to get at, the idea is to say something grand, but I’m not sure if he’s saying anything particularly interesting. Is he saying anything interesting?
Saunders: No, he’s basically doing the same thing that Vance did at the Munich Security Conference. Vance is doing it the first year, and then Rubio did it at the Munich Security Conference this past year, 2026. It already feels like 10 years, right?
Bacon: This has been a long two years.
Saunders: And Rubio’s speech at Munich got a slightly warmer reception, because it was viewed as a recommitment to Europe in some way. But it was still a weird speech. And this one, it’s just, what was the point of it, right? Other than for him to be able to give a grand speech that features mostly himself.
And servitude to whom, right? It’s one thing to give a speech to say, “We are fighting...” Lots of presidents and secretaries of state have given speeches that are exploiting some historical—think of Reagan at Pointe du Hoc, right? The boys at Pointe du Hoc.
Stirring oratory, and it’s really about a fight between good and evil. But the evil there is the Nazis, and by extension the Soviet Union, which is clearly an adversary of the US. Who is he talking about other than immigrants?
Bacon: I think he’s talking about Muslims coming to Europe. That’s the obvious part. But they’re not really a threat.
Saunders: They are not a regime.
Bacon: They’re not a regime that’s going to take power.
Saunders: That’s what I was going to say, exactly. And so the idea, it’s such an ugly image, and doesn’t resonate with any diplomatic priority of the United States other than the Trump administration’s priority to put this at the beginning of their national security strategy, right? Whatever happened to countering China?
Maybe that’s not your priority, but that has been the priority. Whatever happened to countering Russia, helping Ukraine stay sovereign? It’s just, why this, why now? It’s ugly. And it’s not as though Europe doesn’t realize that it has—you can believe that Europe is not adequately controlling its borders.
Bacon: Which a lot of European leaders on the far left and the center and the far right all think already.
Saunders: Exactly. And you can think that the southern border in the US is a problem that isn’t solved yet without wanting to see ICE shooting people in New York, as they did last night. So it’s just not clear what the point of this is. Europe is well aware of its immigration issue. And so I have to conclude it’s a way of outbidding on ugliness.
Bacon: Interesting. I mostly do domestic politics, and that’s not really your focus, but I’m curious, what’s your sense of—if the midterms go the way we think they are going to, which is the Democrats could win a lot of House seats, maybe win the Senate, and anyway it looks like there’s a rejection of Trump by the electorate. That’s what it looks like we’re headed for.
We can discuss the details of that, but I think the polls suggest we’re going to have a rejection of Trump. How does that affect anything we’ve talked about? Broadly or specifically, are there any foreign policy changes you think result from the electorate? Because Trump doesn’t have to abide by the election, doesn’t have to do anything about it, but do you think it might change anything?
Saunders: First, I think Greenland is going to be very happy that it concluded this deal before the midterms, because the thing that I really worry about is a cornered Trump lashing out, right? Traditionally, late in the second term, lame ducks go for foreign policy. They want a legacy thing.
Trump has swung so many times at that pitch already, that what’s left? He isn’t going to be able to buy Greenland and add it to the US territory. He hasn’t defeated Iran, and isn’t going to. Or at least not on terms that we would accept as legitimate, at a cost that’s acceptable. He apparently wanted to do another grand deal with Kim Jong Un, and Kim Jong Un ghosted him. So I don’t know. And he already has his photo op from that.
So if you look around the world at the big legacy foreign policy projects that he could spend his energy on, and the advantages of the presidency on, which are still massive, it’s hard to tell. And so what’s left is, if he’s under investigation, even with the pardon power and all of that, if he feels like—animals are dangerous when they’re cornered, or humans are dangerous when they’re cornered. So what could he do when cornered? He could do something non-nuclear but heavily escalatory in Iran.
Bacon: That’s not great.
Saunders: Cuba is the other one.
Bacon: Those are the—
Saunders: So I see the midterms as only—Trump is a high variance presidency, right? On any given day, the range of things that may happen is just very wide. But a Democratic Congress after these midterms, under the global conditions right now, widens it even more. Nothing would surprise me. Maybe he will undo the Greenland deal. He undoes deals all the time. Wouldn’t surprise me. It seems less likely to me than some other things.
Bacon: And will the Republican Party take any lessons from this, non-Trump? I guess we’ve already answered the question in some ways, because Rubio giving the same speech JD Vance did, the “fuck the rest of the world” speech, would suggest that we’re not changing there either.
Saunders: Yeah. I think you answered your own question with that one. But I think Bill Clinton tried to solve Middle East peace at Wye River. He apparently wanted to go to Pyongyang himself, and neither of those things came to fruition, but there was a lot of activity at Wye River.
Bacon: The Iran deal happened with Obama in the last couple years.
Saunders: Yeah. And I’m having—maybe ending the Korean War. But he’s had opportunities to do that already, and it’s not clear what leverage he has there. I don’t know. Maybe he’ll just pull a rabbit out of a hat.
Nothing would surprise me, but to me, Iran and Cuba seem the most likely, just because that’s where we have assets in place that would be available, right?
Bacon: I’ll finish on, what are you working on, anything you want to tell people about, or are you writing anything that we should look at?
Saunders: I’m going to write with Dan Drezner a piece basically about what will happen after the midterms, for Foreign Affairs, hopefully. Not sure exactly when that will happen.
But yeah, I’m working on a bunch of things. Working on some stuff about Europe’s reaction and what’s rational about it and what’s not, in terms of defense spending. And starting a new project trying to think through what is the blob, what isn’t the blob.
Bacon: The blob, for people who don’t know, is the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. That word also has a non-meaning, but yeah, similar.
Saunders: Yes, exactly. And it’s bandied about in ways that are just imprecise, and so trying to—
Bacon: Yeah, imprecise is what I’m trying to say.
Saunders: Yeah. So trying to understand—
Bacon: The blob is the Ben Rhodes term, right?
Saunders: That’s what it came from originally. It’s Ben Rhodes’s term. Yes. But lots of people have used it, or some variant. And there’s real backlash against it, and there’s cost. The apparent elite impunity, that’s a real phenomenon.
But I think you also have to understand why we have such a thing as an establishment. What is that? And might it have a place in a democratic society, paradoxically?
Bacon: Wait, the people who do foreign policy at Brookings and then come in and out of government, is that the idea, they’re the blob?
Saunders: It’s more like the revolving door, right? The soft landings, which in the extreme can look like giving a job to somebody who started a war. But there’s lots and lots of people below that who—
Bacon: Who might just be experts in their field, in country X.
Saunders: And once you start a war, you obviously don’t want—there’s people who work on civilian harm, there’s people who work on lots of dimensions of the war that you would like to be handled expertly, right? Even if you opposed it in the first place. So I would call it more like an elite ecosystem.
And we can think about—to me, everything is trade-offs, right? Fine, imagine a world where you get rid of the entire establishment. That has costs too, right? Would you ever get people going back in, investing their expertise, and devoting a career in government if they didn’t have a safe place to land, and they were in fear of prosecution and all that, right? So it’s lowering the stakes of democratic politics for foreign policy officials, to be in a democracy and take risks and handle issues like foreign policy that are pretty tough.
Bacon: I know you’ve written about elites, but your work is not necessarily in defense of elites. Your work is almost to understand elites more, in a more sophisticated—we’re in this anti-elite culture, and that’s bipartisan across the world, in the US, racially. And I think your work, my perception is, is not necessarily to say elites are great, but to say maybe we should understand the elites and their own thinking more precisely.
Saunders: Yeah, and also career incentives, right? You have to be able to make a living. There’s nothing wrong with a career incentive, or even partisan. Take members of Congress. Everybody’s always talking about members of Congress playing politics with national security, right, for their own political gain. Isn’t that what we want them to do?
Part of the problem we have right now, and I have written about this in a Foreign Affairs piece, we need more politics in our foreign policy. The problem we have right now is there’s no incentive to have expertise that pays politically, right? It has to pay politically for you to be seen as an authoritative voice on foreign policy who has a foreign policy position that isn’t necessarily reflexively with your party. It used to be that you could be a Sam Nunn, right?
Bacon: Oh, I see what you’re saying. I get it.
Saunders: Anything nuclear had to go through Sam Nunn in the late part of the Cold War. And it meant that sometimes he was with the Democratic president, sometimes he wasn’t, and Jimmy Carter and the SALT II Treaty is an example.
The real thing I’m working on is trying to think about what comes after, right? How do we think about elites and expertise, which we all on some level reflexively dislike, but I think of it as, we can’t live with them and we can’t live without them, right?
Bacon: Those words are so different, because I blanked when you said it, because I was like, I don’t necessarily like elites, but I like expertise. But those things are obviously tied together.
Saunders: They’re related. And it’s uncomfortable to think about, but we do have a different kind of elite running the Pentagon right now, but it’s not an experienced elite with expertise that you need to run the Pentagon. And we’re witnessing in real time the costs of that, right?
So you can say that the blob, or make arguments about how they got us here—I would definitely say in my work that elite politics has costs, right? In my book, elites do sometimes make it easier to go to war, but they also are a source of accountability. And if you take them away, or take away their ability to hold each other and the president accountable, you’ve really lost something.
And I think that’s the big difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2. Jim Mattis, John Kelly, trying to think who else. The sort of, quote unquote, “adults in the room” from Trump 1. In some tellings they’re part of the blob, and so they deserve some of the blame for the things that happened that brought us Trump. On the other hand, they showed what elite constraint really can be.
They stopped Trump from doing a lot of his most extreme impulses. And so now we see a completely unconstrained Trump, because there’s no blob—I don’t like the term blob, because I think it’s imprecise, but just as a shortcut. There are no establishment figures. None. Bessent is maybe the closest, and he even has seemed to—The Wall Street Journal had all this reporting this week.
So I think a lot about, it’s trade-offs, right? Nothing is all good or all bad, right? Except the Nazis. But in a democracy, you have trade-offs. If you want to delegate something that’s specialized, requires expertise, diverse expertise, different countries, different issues.
It’s not just one kind of expertise, right? Like bond market expertise. You need a group of people who feels like they can earn a living and respect the alternation of power, and go in and out, and feel that is a viable path within the democratic system.
Bacon: So that might be a—I should talk to Ben Rhodes. I’m guessing on the career path of foreign policy, this might be a place of disagreement. I agree with you that I’m in a career, I think careers matter, I get that. But I do think the critique has become that the revolving door is bad, and that term itself has become fraught, because to me, working at Brookings and then working for the government is different than working for a defense contractor.
But I can see where you gain expertise from the defense contractor too. It’s not necessarily inherently immoral, and the contractor might pay more. People have to pay their bills, and so on.
But I do think it’d be more precise—because Ben Rhodes himself is working at some kind of foreign policy organization to earn income, or maybe he does the podcast. I don’t know. But inevitably, I think the point is, you do have to have a job where you’re not in government, and the question is probably, are you in government to therefore get a job outside of government?
Saunders: It’s a longer conversation. He has pointed out, I think rightfully, and this is the part where I don’t defend—elites make all kinds of mistakes, and they introduce all kinds of—my book’s conclusion is that basically we have a hawkish bias in our foreign policy because of elites, which is more or less what he’s saying, right?
But it’s trade-offs, right? The issue is, OK, so what do you want to do about it? You could just get rid of all the elites, and we’re witnessing that. Doesn’t seem that great right now.
Bacon: How do we rebuild the—
Saunders: Yeah, what is an ecosystem where—political science is basically about what costs are you willing to tolerate. Tolerating some mistakes, which may have been genuine, like they tried really hard and they just got it wrong. Robert Jervis, who’s the most famous scholar of decision-making ever, had a lot of sympathy for policymakers, because they’re dealing with difficult things under fog of information and war and so forth, right?
They may just make a bad call. They may not be biased. They just may make a bad call and get unlucky. How do you set up a system of accountability that can hold people accountable for really egregious failures that they should have seen coming, versus giving people the space to make decisions under highly uncertain conditions?
Bacon: But the context here is 2024, right? Joe Biden ran a foreign policy on Gaza a lot of people don’t think was effective and ended up not working quite well. And so what do you do with the implementers of that policy? I’m not saying you feel that way, but some people feel that. I think that’s the conversation we need to have right here.
Saunders: Yeah. I think it’s also just thinking about the complete hollowing out of foreign policy expertise in the government right now.
Bacon: In the government right now. In Trump.
Saunders: Yeah. And how do we think about rebuilding it in a way that doesn’t demonize expertise? Because demonizing expertise is part of what’s gotten us here. In addition to the failures of elites, demonizing expertise is a big problem, right?
Bacon: Although is the blob critique slightly different? I don’t think Ben Rhodes debates—he wants USAID to come back in some form.
Saunders: Yes, of course. But they’re related in a way that is often not acknowledged by blob critics. They’re only highlighting one piece of it. So I’m trying to put the whole thing into trade-offs.
Bacon: Oh, I see. Anytime we’re talking about the blob, in some ways—that’s why we use the establishment as sort of blanche, because I don’t know that word can become—like, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund is surely a part of the civil rights establishment. There’s no way—they’ve been established for a long time. But I would never criticize them, because they, to me, are defending poor African Americans in the South’s ability to vote. I’m trying to take the issue aside here.
Saunders: Or even think of the political parties’ infrastructure, like the RNC and the DNC, which at the moment are just totally hollowed out entities. Julia Azari has said strong partisanship and weak parties, and nobody likes the RNC. You want the opposite. But the absence of a strong RNC is what got Trump the nomination in 2016, because there was no coordination.
Bacon: And it means that Elon Musk has more power in political parties than the actual parties do.
Saunders: Yes. So elites stepping in and having a strong role, that has upsides and downsides. And I think we have had a sclerotic establishment in foreign policy. I think some of the critiques about just defending the status quo reflexively are right, and that’s a function of the system having gotten out of whack. But that’s very different from saying we shouldn’t have an ecosystem at all. No blob-like ecosystem at all.
Bacon: So what the blob should look like is probably not what you should headline with either.
Saunders: Or what’s the system? And it’s also not only a function of what the people inside the blob believe. A lot of the debate is about the substance, which is important.
Bacon: Yes, of course.
Saunders: Liberal internationalism, is that the thing that got us where we are? Or is it a militaristic mindset? And then there’s debate about that, right? But on some level, I just want to abstract away from all of that, because it’s not clear to me that just injecting some different ideas is going to work without some structural thinking about the benefits of the system. What counts as going too far in establishment reform and accountability, right?
And we think about this in tons of other contexts in our democracy, right? Just the justice system, like how much, what the line for prosecuting people is. Which of course tolerates a certain amount of tax evasion, or whatever the issue is. So it’s not as though we can’t do this as a society.
We just don’t think of—this is the first thinking about foreign policy in this democratic society kind of way. If you think that it contributed to how we got here, then we should think very seriously about the costs and benefits of that system and how to reform it, and not just say we need some new thinking, right? New thinking is a dime a dozen.
Bacon: Yeah. The challenge is, and this is why I respect you for doing this, there’s not a lot of people who are in a place to suggest anything other than, elites, the blob, the establishment are bad. Because if you’re running for office, or even you on a TV show, or you on a podcast, if you want to become famous, defending any elite even a little bit is not in your incentive structure right now.
Saunders: And I’m not defending elites.
Bacon: I’m not saying you are. You’re creating more nuance.
Saunders: This is pretty abstract institutional reform kind of stuff, but that’s the business we’re in, political scientists. That’s why it’s helpful to be able to take a step back and think about, what are the things about this that could be destabilizing if you went too far, right? And I think we actually have the answer to that.
We are witnessing a massive global shock. Things we don’t talk about: the Iran war has completely upended British politics, right? Because they don’t have any fiscal space anymore to solve their extremely difficult—they just got a new prime minister, because the previous one didn’t have a vision. This one has a vision. He can’t do anything because of the Iran war.
So we are witnessing the cost of just wholesale getting rid of expertise and experience as an input into decision-making. That’s clearly too far. Where is the optimal—
Bacon: There’s a lot of people I talk to about this, because to me the presidential campaign is a time for people to bring out ideas. So I want one of the 90 southern candidates we have who are Democrats to run on, “I’m going to rebuild the government.” But my worry is they’ve all been told cost of living, affordability. You’ll sound elite if you mention the word democracy. All you can say is gas prices and grocery prices, and I think that’s not the—
Next year should be, like, I’m hoping people like you have influence.
Saunders: No, I don’t have any influence, even within my own house.
Bacon: I hope they’re reading things other than—the government making the country more affordable broadly is actually very challenging. It is not necessarily the only thing the government should be doing, and rebuilding our foreign policy and our government capacity is a really big thing, and I’m hoping some candidates talk about that.
But I think their consultants are going to be telling them voters only care about jobs and gas, and I think that’s dismissive of voters, who I think do care about more than just that.
Saunders: Yeah. The only thing I would say is, as terrible as some of this destruction has been, it’s one thing to talk about it at a point like 2016 when all those institutions were still intact, right? It’s really hard to reform an institution except under conditions of crisis, or when it’s been destroyed.
Bacon: And now we have both.
Saunders: And now we have both, or one or the other depending on the issue. Like, USAID has been burned to the ground. And so if you believe we need to have new foreign aid, this is the time to think about the trade-offs of how you rebuild it. But I have no influence. All I can do is the incremental, “All right, your idea for how to reform this, here’s where it sits on the trade-offs. Are you willing to tolerate this cost or that?”
It’s about choosing which cost. There’s never a perfect solution to these problems, right? Giving countries foreign aid will always have some perverse effects on its economy and incentives of its politicians. So do you just not want to give foreign aid? You design a system that has features, and they’re imperfect, and this is politics, right?
Bacon: All right. Good to see you. Thanks for joining me.
Saunders: Take care. Thank you so much.
Bacon: Bye-bye.