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If you're looking to have a good conversation with someone who wields great political power, when is the best time to have that conversation?
The most obvious answer is while they're in office, but when they're in that vortex, they have strong incentives to not speak candidly or to just promote their agenda.
Another common time for a conversation like this is the exit interview, but the exit interview can get tied up with the exhaustion or relief regret.
Eventually, this person may publish their memoirs, and they'll do some interviews to promote the book, but by then they may be in factory production mode, churning out the same answers in every interview.
So when is the best time to have a good conversation with a person like this?
Is there maybe a sweet spot sometime after leaving office but before publishing their memoirs?
Maybe while they're still writing and spending all their waking hours sifting through their accomplishments and their what could have been.
Let's hope that is the sweet spot because that's when we caught Anthony Blinken for the conversation you're about to hear.
Blinken was Secretary of State for the entirety of the Biden presidency.
He was considered one of Biden's favorite and most trusted allies.
Their time together goes back to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Blinken has spent more than three decades working on US foreign policy.
He also served in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
Secretary of State is sometimes described as the second most important job in the world.
Past officeholders include Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, George C. Marshall and Henry Kissinger, whom Blinken spoke with regularly while Blinken was secretary.
Here's how Kissinger once described the secretary job.
Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
Today on Freakonomics Radio, we interrupt Anthony Blinken's memoir writing to talk about Blinken himself. as well as Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Gaza, China, Syria, Iran, Russia and the rest of the world.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
So first of all, just say your name and what you do.
Tony Blinken and former Secretary of State.
You shortened it quite a bit. I did. You could have gone on for hours.
Three presidential administrations, correct?
Three presidential administrations starting with President Clinton through President Obama and then President Biden.
I'm sorry to be so basic here, but why Anthony and not Anthony?
I was apparently supposed to be David and then my cousin beat me to birth and was David.
My parents had a friend, a sculptor whose first name was Anthony.
They like the name and there it was. And ever since I've had to deal with the fact that there's no age in it.
So while we're at it, you have a pretty interesting family background.
Can you give me that? What I really want to know is the degree to which your family background inform the way you think about the world, including the promises of the world, but also the perils.
I think so many of us are the product and no small measure of the conversations we have around our dining room tables, our kitchen tables and the stories we hear from our families.
That's very much me. I had my father's father, my grandfather, who came to the United States at the turn of the last century fleeing pilgrims in what is now Ukraine.
He was able to build a life in the United States.
He was welcomed here, built an extraordinary life, sent his three sons to Ivy League schools.
What did he do for a living? he started out as a lawyer he even practice before the supreme court but ultimately he started a company and did very well with that but was also just deeply engaged in the life of the mind, but also in the public square back in the 1940s as the question of Israel was emerging and the question of a Jewish state. one of the arguments against the United States supporting the Declaration of Independence by Israel was the notion that it wasn't economically viable.
At the time, my grandfather produced a study that was both definitive and considered somewhat dispositive of the question showing that in fact it would be economically viable that contributed to the policy decision the government made at the time to recognize israel for my grandfather he saw like so many others this country as a beacon of hope and maybe the last best hope.
My late stepfather Samuel Pizar. He was born in Bialistock, Poland.
Before the war that was a center of Jewish life in Poland, he went to school in Bialistock with about 900 other children.
He's the only one of those 900. to have survived the war.
He lost his mother, his father, his little sister, Frida.
First, there was a ghetto in Bialystok when the country was dominated by the Soviets.
And then, of course, it gave way to the Nazis.
He was sent to work camps and then concentration camps, death camps, Mydonic, Dachau, Auschwitz. somehow survived.
At the very end of the war, he was on a death march out of one of the camps in Bavaria. he made a break for it along with a couple of his friends and somehow they made it into the woods they hit out during the day they moved around at night and then one day as they were hiding they heard this deep rumbling sound and they looked out from where they were and they saw something that never seen before a large tank not with the iron cross but with a five-pointed white star.
My stepfather ran to the tank, which is probably a pretty foolhardy thing to do.
He's how old at this point? He is at this point about 16.
He makes a run for the tank and the hatch opens up and a large African American GI looks down at him.
He then says the only three words in the English language that he knew his mother taught him these words before the war.
God bless America. The GI lifts him up into the tank and in effect into freedom. again, America as literally the only hope.
That was infused in me and I wanted to do my small part, hopefully in continuing in some fashion, that tradition. your stepfather many years later talking about you working now in government he said he took in what happened to me. when i was his age and i think it impressed him and it gave him another dimension when he has to worry today about poison gas in syria This is during the Obama administration.
He almost inevitably thinks about the gas with which my entire family was eliminated.
Is that an accurate connection? It is. That's right.
The resonance, the connections, the progression of history is something that resonates powerfully with me.
It's also personal because of these family stories.
And then, you know, Stephen, I had the extraordinary experience of living outside of my own country as a young boy.
We moved to Paris. from New York when I was nine years old.
My mother would be married and off we went to Paris.
That was also extraordinary because it gave me an opportunity to see my own country through the eyes of others.
This was an incredibly charged time in the early 1970s.
The Cold War was on, the Vietnam War was on.
We had conflicts in the Middle East, Afghanistan.
You wind up getting into discussions, debates, arguments with your classmates, and you find yourself almost in the role of a junior diplomat because inevitably you're kind of representing your own country.
Given the climate of the times, especially having to do with the war in Gaza and many, many events surrounding that.
I'm guessing there are some people who say, oh, well, Tony Blinken, now that I've heard the stories of the persecution his family faced because they were Jewish.
And now that I know he's got Jewish roots and professors that that persecution was kind of the root of his worldview about wanting to let's say alleviate suffering, defend people and so on, but I'm sure some people are thinking, well, the simple fact that he's got Jewish roots means that he's in the bag for Israel.
That's a, unfortunately, Typical reduction that's happening in our political conversations these days.
So let's say I were to say that to you. Oh, well, you may defend your in the Biden administration's record on Israel and many, many other things, but persuade me that you're not by someone I'm really asking is how can you perform your abilities as a. political figures, a civil servant, whatever it is, while incorporating the strength of your personal and family background without biasing yourself against others.
Sure. And look, I get that. I understand that reaction.
I certainly heard it. I guess I'd say two things, Steven.
First, I'm in the bag for the United States.
I had the extraordinary privilege of representing our country for four years around the world at Secretary of State.
And first, foremost, my job was to do my best to try to represent the interests of my country, my fellow citizens, as well as our values.
There are plenty of judgments to go around about whether I and we did that. well and differently or badly.
That's for others to make, but that's what my job was and that's what I try to do every day.
Second, it's precisely because of this extraordinary form of experience of our family stories. the suffering that my own immediate relatives had gone through that I think and I hope made me deeply sensitive. to the suffering of anyone, Jewish or Palestinian, of whatever nationality, of whatever background, of whatever faith.
I think it wouldn't do justice. to my own history and that legacy. to not be deeply, deeply sensitive to the plight of others.
There's no hierarchy of suffering. When I looked at what happened on October 7th, it resonated deeply with me because it was the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
I felt that very strongly, but I also felt very strongly what happened every day after October 7th. including the horrific suffering of Palestinian boys and girls, women and men, who were caught in this horrific crossfire of Hamas's initiation. something that they hadn't started and were powerless to stop.
When you look back over the history of Israel, how can you best describe how this country went from being a largely celebrated Middle East democracy, which was under attack almost continuously by its neighbors who oppose Western values, which aligned Israel further with the U.S. and Israel defended itself and it got stronger militarily as well as economically.
And that was the reputation for a few decades to now where the public sentiment globally in many quarters at least has been shifted towards basically called a settler colonial villain that's the progressive left configuration at least Can you describe the degree to which that was a change in perception, a change in facts on the ground? things that Israel did prima facia wrong to bring that reputation onto itself versus campaigns against it, etc.
Yeah, so much goes into that. We could probably spend the entire time on that question, but just a few thoughts.
What you'll hear many say, especially those who went through the Holocaust, went through World War II. is they despised us and disdained us when we were weak and meek going off to the slaughter.
Now they despise us and disdain us for being strong.
It's a worldview that in a sense, no matter what you do, the haters are going to hate. a good political strategy for autocrats in that part of the world.
A different version of bread and circuses, I guess.
Yes, there's something to that as well. Part of the problem that we're living through right now is an absence of any kind of historical grounding, a lack of context.
And so in brief, What happened in the Middle East with Israel?
When Israel was founded, when it declared its independence, there was a partition that was recognized and voted by the United Nations.
It was not accepted in the moment by Arab countries, which urged the Palestinians to push back against it.
There was a war of independence. And of course, many Palestinians were made refugees, just as a roughly equal number of Jews were made refugees from Arab countries at the time.
And then you had decades during which Arab countries didn't accept Israel's existence.
You had wars, you got 67, you had 73. But then ultimately you had a change and a breakthrough.
Egypt, Jordan, and then others came around.
And then efforts were made to finally resolve the question, including the question for the Palestinians, but unfortunately, in that period, Palestinian leadership. rejected many of the settlements that were proposed.
We're up to Oslo now. We're up to Oslo and then Camp David. and right up to the early 2000s.
I had an interesting conversation the other day with a young person who was really interested in this political story. and definitely knew quite a bit about the current events.
They, however, did not know about the Oslo Accords at all, which surprised me, because to me it doesn't seem that long ago and it was foundational.
This gets to what you were saying a bit ago about living in a, I don't know if it's fair to call it an a historic age.
I think that's probably pretty fair. You've got, also, you've got what President Clinton did at Camp David, where the offer on the table for the Palestinians was about 97 percent of the West Bank.
And they said, no, the leadership couldn't say yes.
And if you had to explain those decades of rejection, those various plans, maybe going back to Arafat and up through Hamas.
How would you shorthand it? I think part of it was a rejection actually of a two-state solution.
Every time things were moving in a positive direction.
Oslo, you mentioned. And then later in the early 2000s, the Arab Peace Initiative, which was a big moment when Arab countries got behind a two-state solution.
Who came along immediately and tried to literally blow it up?
Hamas, perpetrating horrific terrorist attacks after Oslo and after the Arab Peace Initiative.
The biggest opponent of the two-state solution throughout has been Hamas.
One of the things I say to Israelis and others who say, oh, we can't make an accommodation with the Palestinians now because it would be to give Hamas a big victory.
No. It's exactly the opposite. The ultimate defeat of Hamas and everything it represents would be the realization of a Palestinian state with a secure Israel.
So you have decades of Arab protection. Then you have a couple of decades of Palestinian rejection, but what do we have over the last 15 or so years?
In effect, Israeli rejection, a belief that the status quo could prevail. and that it didn't need to accommodate the rightful aspirations of Palestinians for a state of their own.
This is in some ways not hard to understand.
The Israelis got out of Gaza in 2005. They pulled up every settlement, every settler.
What happened? Hamas came in, managed to push out the more moderate Palestinian Authority. and then repeatedly launched attacks against Israel from Gaza, ultimately culminating in October 7th.
So from the Israeli perspective, it's, wait a minute, we gave up the land. we gave up the settlements we got out and what did we get we got a mass Similarly, in the north, after occupying southern Lebanon for 18 years, they left.
And what happened? Hezbollah came in. and launched attacks against northern Israel repeatedly.
So if you put yourself in their shoes, I think their feeling was, decades of rejection by Arabs, then we had extremist groups who, again, rejected our existence and sought our destruction.
But then finally, they got to a place where they thought they had a status quo that could prevail, where after the Second Intifada, there was relative quiet and relative calm.
And I think Israelis were lulled into a sense that, okay, we don't have to do anything.
Tell me any regrets you're willing to admit about how you and the Biden administration handled the Gaza war?
Oh look, there regrets every day there can't not be when you look at the toll of the suffering.
As we were looking at it, we were trying to accomplish a few things at the same time.
One was to try to ensure that October 7th never happened again.
I've heard you say that before and I'm curious what that actually means because there are a lot of Israelis who say the only way to make sure October 7th never happens again. is that we don't have Palestinians living next door to us.
Full stop. I understand that response, but I think it's both a fantasy and a fallacy.
The reality is this, they are something like 7 million Jews in Israel, and they're probably approaching 6 million Palestinians between the West Bank and Israel and Gaza, neither is going anywhere.
Despite whatever fantasies some people may have on both sides.
The question then is if people are going to have to live together. what's the best way to do that, such that each can fulfill their aspirations in peace and security.
And I don't see any other way, despite the fact that when you say it now, it sounds incredibly naive.
I don't see any other way than through two states.
I've been reading lately about some developments in the West Bank, particularly among several Arab tribal elders. who have said they want to get rid of the Palestinian Authority.
Sounds like they're afraid that they are next after Gaza.
They called the Palestinian Authority corrupt bloodthirsty and they want to set up their own tribal Emirates that would normalize relations with Israel and join the Abraham Accords.
Is that a viable path to peace in Israel of some type or is that total pipe dream?
There's a lot that goes into this, not the least of which is yes, there are. huge challenges with the Palestinian Authority, including the corruption, including the inability to really deliver what people need and want.
The reform of the authority is one of the things I think that's essential going forward so that it can actually effectively represent the interests. and needs of the Palestinian people.
Absent that, it's going to be very challenging.
And that also breeds tremendous frustration, including what you just alluded to.
But there's something else that the authority for all of its manifest problems and faults brought to the table, which has been non-violence, finding ways to fulfill the aspirations of Palestinians without resorting to violence.
The alternative to that is something we've seen and can't possibly accept.
I was talking before about how I think the Israelis got comfortable with the status quo. and in trying to perpetuate that status quo of not having to address the aspirations of Palestinians for state.
They also pursued policies that made it very difficult for the Palestinian Authority to be effective, for instance, starving it of resources, trying to keep it down.
And even in the case of Gaza, allowing Hamas to run things, allowing it to get resources. from Qatar because Israelis believed or governments believed that Hamas's only interest was in consolidating its power in Gaza, not necessarily in attacking Israel.
And that proved to be a fatal, fatal mistake.
But also because there was a real interest on the part of some of the Israeli leadership. to make sure that the Palestinian Authority could never become strong and effective because that would mean Israel would actually have a partner with which to negotiate and to try to decide the future, including the future for a Palestinian state.
A lot of these points you're making now add up to or contribute to the argument that Netanyahu is a particular type of political opportunist.
I know that President Biden himself and many members of the administration complained about just not being able to trust him.
You've spent a lot of time with him in a variety of rooms, I assume.
Give me your best assessment of Netanyahu as a strategic thinker and as a trustworthy partner, whether for the US, or some of the neighbors.
Whatever one thinks of the Prime Minister.
It's a mistake and it's a simplification to attribute to him everything one may not like about what Israel does, at least since October 7th.
I'd say 75, 80% of the Israeli public has been behind the basic policies of the government, even the 50 or so percent that probably detest Netanyahu.
And we should say that was a big reversal because during the judicial reform debate, it was almost the opposite, was it not?
Yeah, that's right. In the case of Israelis, October 7th was truly a day that lives in into me.
The national trauma cannot possibly be overstated, just as In the days since October 7th, the trauma for Palestinians can't be overstated.
What we've had in both directions. And it was already there, of course, but it's only been accentuated and accelerated since then, is dehumanization, an inability on each side to see the humanity and the other.
Breaking through that, I think, is the most important, challenging, and difficult task that lays ahead if there's going to be a future that actually does justice to Israelis and Palestinians alike. many, many places around the globe really at any time in history.
So I guess what I'm really asking is, do you see this as a core component? of human nature that's maybe inescapable or is it something more flexible than that?
I think we are living a unique moment. President Biden referred to it repeatedly as an inflection point, something that comes along. maybe every 70, 80 years if you look at the course of history and I think it explains to a great extent. so much of what we're experiencing, including this issue of demonization.
I've been doing this now. foreign policy national security america's place in the world for more than thirty years i don't remember any point in my experience where we had a greater multiplicity, a greater complexity, a greater interconnectedness, a greater rapidity of challenges and problems, all coming together.
Let's go to Syria for a moment after nearly 15 years of civil war in Syria took only 11 days for this rebel offensive to oust Bashar.
Al-Assad, which ended his family's rule of five decades.
This came very near the end of the Biden presidency.
What did you know as that was happening and did the US contribute in any way?
I wish I could tell you that we saw it coming.
We didn't. It was a surprise to us. I think it was a surprise pretty much everyone, but.
When it came, I have to say for so many of us, especially those of us who'd been involved in the early days of the Syrian civil war and all the horrors that that brought, there was a great sense of Not just satisfaction at the departure of Assad, but also a sense of finally a possibility.
This was and is an opportunity for the Syrian people for the first time in decades. not to live either under a dictator, under the manipulations of foreign powers, or under the thumb of some kind of extremist terrorist organization, like ISIS.
We worked very hard in the very little time that we had left to try to seize that, to try to engage the new authorities as they were emerging. to work very closely with countries in the region, the Arab countries, Turkey and others, to see what we could do about helping to support the more positive forces that have been unleashed in Syria.
Tell us what you know about the new president, Ahmed Al Sharad.
This is a former al-Qaeda commander. That's right.
We had a $10 million bounty out on him, but now he's the president and he's talked. about peace and reconciliation, including with Israel.
So, and I know one of your former colleagues, Roger Carsten said he walked away from a meeting very impressed with his presentation at least, what's your take?
Yeah, I sent several of my former colleagues to engage with the new Syrian authorities, including Al-Shahra, and you're right about his past.
The real question is, what's his present?
Everything that he said over the last six to nine months. has been what you want to hear has been very positive about not only the future that he wants for his country but also for its relationships with countries in the region and around the world.
The test is of course not what he says, but what he does.
And he's got a massively challenging job precisely because of the nature of the country, the many different communities. in opposition to each other, including, for example, the Kurds, with whom we've had a critical partnership in trying first to defeat ISIS and then to keep it down.
But I have to tell you, Stephen, I applaud what the Trump administration or President Trump has done in trying to seize this opportunity. in removing the sanctions from Ashara and from Syria, in opening the door to investment, in trying to work on how we can support the efforts of this country to stand effectively on its own two feet.
As an American, is it naive to think, well, with Syria moving in the direction it's moving in now? then Iran really remains the last stronghold of anti-Western, anti-strong anti-Israel sentiment in that region.
And therefore, We really have reached a new stage.
Is that naive? Is this just another chapter in a book that keeps telling the same story?
I think we have reached a new stage, if.
If we take advantage of it, for example, translating the very significant military achievements of Israel into actual enduring strategic success.
Those are two very different questions because you're exactly right.
Iran really is on its heels in many ways.
It's lost its best proxies or at least had them dramatically diminished, whether it's Hezbollah, whether it's Hamas, whether it's its own capacity.
At the same time, we've seen something new.
The real possibility that this region could be integrated.
These countries could come together. in common security packs, in economic interaction that can better the lives of their people. and create a region that's focused on actually building positive things.
So that possibility is real, but I don't think it can be achieved or certainly not fully achieved. absent the resolution of the conflict between uh... israelis and palestinians that is the wrench in the works that one way or another is going to have to be dealt with because absent dealing with it It does put real limitations on how far a number of these countries can go and actually genuinely normalizing relations with Israel and building.
This new region, you can see it if you can touch it, but it still needs that resolution if it's really going to become real.
Coming up after the break, more on Iran and China too.
And we asked Blinken about the Trump administration laying off more than 1,000 employees of the State Department.
I'm Stephen Dubner, this is Freakonomics Radio, we'll be right back.
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The State Department just announced 1,300 layoffs.
What you government types call a reduction in force.
Tell me what you know about that and what you think the ramifications will be.
You know, Stephen, I've worked with colleagues in the State Department going on 30 years now.
I started there in 93 and obviously finished there just six months ago. to the extent that any administration has any, I don't know, suspicion about a deep state or the allegiances of the people who work in the department. they're totally misplaced of all the people hundreds of thousands of people i work with i doubt i could tell you for nine out of ten if not more who's a democrat who's a republican who's an independent but beyond that you've got extraordinary young and not so young men and women who dedicated their lives to public service who could be doing other things and probably making a lot more money but for one reason or another either straight out of school or more and more coming from other careers have felt the call to serve and to do things for their fellow Americans.
If you're traveling abroad, you get into trouble, you lose your passport.
There's some crime that's committed. It's likely going to be someone from our foreign service who comes to your rescue who bails you out.
If you're trying to reunite families around the world, that's what they're doing.
If we're looking for business opportunities.
They're the ones who are helping to find them, especially on the big issues of war and peace, diplomacy every single day. is all about preventing bad things from happening in the first place, or trying to deal with them effectively if they do.
It's work that Americans don't see, but they benefit from.
And so if we're diminishing our capacity to do that work, By eliminating so many jobs.
I think it's a big mistake for us. Here's what Tim Cain, Democratic Senator from Virginia, former VP candidate said. about these layoffs.
This is one of the most ridiculous decisions that could possibly be made at a time when China is increasing its diplomatic footprint around the world and establishing an overseas network of military and transportation bases.
I'd like you to talk about that. Let's imagine that Kamala Harris or some other Democrat had won the White House last year and you're still Secretary of State right now.
What would your China agenda be for the next few years?
Well Tim is exactly right. Right now, China has more embassies around the world than we do.
And if we're going to be shutting even more down, that gap's only going to increase.
What does that mean to a very practical way?
We're in competition with China over a lot of things.
And if we're in a country where the Chinese have an ambassador and we don't even have an embassy or just as bad in some ways we don't have an accredited master is the senate has refused to confirm that person and by the way here it is totally totally dysfunctional 20 years ago, it was about 40 days from nomination to confirmation for US ambassador.
Now it's 250 days on average. And that means that when something's happening in that country, And we need to get in to see the President or the Prime Minister on short notice, and the Chinese want to do the same thing for their own reasons.
They'll get in. We won't. That puts us at a disadvantage.
But beyond that, if we're looking at economic issues where we have problems with China, if we're doing it alone, we're 20% of world GDP.
If we're doing it with European partners, with Northeast Asian partners, with others, we're 40 or 50%, 60% of World GDP. a lot harder for China to ignore.
We're trying to cover a lot of ground around the world.
Even the United States can't cover it all alone.
For example, all of these specific islands. a vast amount of territory strategically located.
China's present just about everywhere. We increased our presence.
I opened more embassies in that part of the world.
If we're also allied and we're working in close coordination with let's say Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand.
We're going to cover much more ground, but all of that takes day in, day out diplomacy to actually happen.
I've been reading a lot about an axis of some sort, a word that I believe you don't use, but others do between China, Russia, and Iran, sometimes North Korea.
I'm particularly curious to know what you think about why neither China nor Russia stepped in to help Iran when they were being attacked by Israel. in the US.
I mean, maybe it's an obvious answer that they fear the US more than they care about Iran, but I thought maybe there's something there worth our knowing that we don't know.
There are revisionist powers, that's what I'd call them, to include China, to include Russia, to include North Korea, to include Iran.
And sometimes they have marriages of convenience, if not conviction, for example.
China wants to make sure that Russia doesn't fail in its war against Ukraine.
And as a result, It's providing Russia with a tremendous amount of the technology and equipment it needs to keep its war machine going even with all of the sanctions and export controls that we've imposed. and others have imposed.
China now is providing about 70% of the machine tools and about 90% of the microelectronics. that Russia needs for its defense industrial base to keep that machine humming.
North Korea is also a strong supporter and ally of Russia and its war against Ukraine is providing it with missiles and other technology.
And people. Yes, and people, exactly. But again, this is more out of convenience than out of conviction.
And in a way, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
But when it comes to Iran, What you saw was quite extraordinary.
Russia certainly didn't come to Iran's assistance in large part because it was bogged down in a war of its own making in Ukraine. and bogged down in large part because we took the lead in making sure that Ukraine could effectively defend itself.
That made it very difficult for Russia to do much of anything else anywhere else.
I think the Chinese on one level can sometimes talk a big game, but then when push comes to shove, especially if there's a conflict, they tend to look the other way.
Let's talk a little bit more about Iran.
First of all, what kind of relationships did you have with counterparts there during your time in state? oh very little it's one of the deficits that we've had with iran for many years is obviously the absence of diplomatic relations is meant that we're not there We have very little direct engagement.
The Iranian regime refused direct engagement with us as we were trying to see if we could revive the nuclear agreement that President Obama had signed in the President Trump the first time around. that makes it more difficult.
We're often acting through intermediaries.
Now, we do have some direct contact, including, for example, through the Iranian ambassador of the United Nations in New York.
But much of everything else is indirect.
It might be through the Kataris, it might be through the Ammanis, but it's not direct.
What about the IAEA, the Atomic Energy Agency?
Yes, they play a critical role. eyes and ears that we don't have in the same way on the ground in Iran to verify, for example, when we have the nuclear agreement that Iran was actually abiding by its terms, and it was.
Our own intelligence, of course, worked to verify that, and that was their conclusion, too.
But the IEA plays a really essential role in making sure that we have some visibility on what the Iranians are actually doing.
I've read numbers about the Iranian population that wants regime change and those numbers are all over the place.
Yeah, I can imagine that's a hard survey to conduct for a variety of reasons.
I'm just curious what you think that the country wants.
What share of the population you think wants regime change and what you think that regime looks like a year or three from now?
The real answer when it comes to what does the regime look like a year, two, or three from now is that when it comes to an autocratic regime, it's there until it's not. anyone who tells you with precision that they know that it's got another six months it's got another year five years i wouldn't abide by that because no one knows look at a side exactly our own absence of real connectivity with the Iranians, our own absence of being on the ground and having diplomatic relations not only with the government, but actual connections with the people makes it really hard to answer that question.
In terms of popular support, you're right.
They're very different assessments. I would imagine that probably a majority of Iranians do not support the regime, whether that's 51% or 75% or 80%.
I can't tell you, the country is divided.
It's divided in some ways between urban and rural.
You may have many more opponents of the regime. in urban areas and fewer and rural areas.
There really is a conservative element but there are different reasons for opposing the regime.
One of them is the fact that This is a regime that's focused more on doing bad things to others than on doing good things for the Iranian people.
If your slogan is death to America, not long live Iran, you've got a problem.
Can you explain the Iranian leadership devotion to that path, not only death to America, death to Israel, arming and training those proxy militias throughout the region.
How would you, looking at it as a kind of political economy question, assess the leadership's motivation there.
What's the end game? What are they trying to accomplish?
For the clerical regime, it is in many ways that raise on Dutch.
If they lose that, they fear that they lose, period.
And so opposition to America, opposition to the Great Satan has been a driving force, has been a glue. that's kept things together now for decades.
It's produced costs for the population, electricity, transportation, all these things have become difficult there.
Why would that be a good reason for their existence? i don't think it is a good reason but beyond that one of the more astute around watchers kind of support i think called the uh... regime recently basically a zombie state It's institutionalized over these many decades, this repressive apparatus.
And even though the state is kind of operating on an ideological autopilot that doesn't actually comport with the interests of the Iranian people the repressive apparatus is so deeply ingrained And of course, it's got a monopoly on arms and force.
It's got the repressive tools of any such regime in terms of information, intelligence, spying on people. that even if a large number, even if an overwhelming majority poses the regime, it's one thing to oppose it.
It's another thing to do something about it.
But again, I just come back to what I said earlier.
I think we have to have some humility in predicting what the longevity of this regime is.
Let's go back to the State Department for a minute.
In addition to the reduction in force, there have been many changes, whether procedural, philosophical, etc.
I know you've got a relationship with Marco Rubio going back to Senate Foreign Relations.
I've heard you speak. respectfully about Marco Rubio current secretary of state.
I've also heard you speak relatively respectfully about Donald Trump himself more than many high profile Democrats.
I also know you're not the kind of guy who wants to take a flamethrower to the next administration, but there are enough substantial changes in policy that I'm guessing you have some major points. want to bring up.
Some of these were brought up with certain ideals about public discourse. the public square, public service, and those are being challenged.
Now, maybe we're archaic, maybe we're naive, maybe we're missing new realities, but that's who I am and I try to be. faithful to that leaving that aside i uh... obviously have profound concerns about some of what we've seen over the last six months Take foreign aid cuts and the dismantling of USAID.
You know, it's interesting. You see this in survey after survey.
You ask Americans how much money are we spending on foreign aid and the State Department?
And they say, oh, God, we're spending 20% of our budget on it.
Well, how much should we be spending? 10%.
How much are we spending? 1%. One penny on every dollar.
That's the budget of what used to be AID, the State Department, our assistance programs.
And if I say to you, Tony, even 1% for a big country like this is a lot.
What's the ROI on that 1%? What have we been getting for that?
How do you answer that question? Yeah, the ROI is two things.
One, it's the extraordinary amount of good that we've been able to do around the world.
That, to some people, may not be something that resonates although i actually think for most americans it does especially when you look at the bargain that it is in terms of our budget Just take one of, to me, the greatest achievements of our foreign policy over the last decades, and that's something that President Bush did, PEPFAR. the presence program to deal with HIV AIDS and Larry around the world, some 25 million lives that otherwise would have been lost. were saved, and so many stories got to continue, and so many people got to contribute. to making their countries better.
The Lancet, a very reputable journal, came out with a study a couple of weeks ago that extrapolating from the good that was done by our assistance programs and particularly AID over the last decades and the lives that were saved calculated that with the cuts that are being made.
Now, they modeled funding cuts of about 85%, which is what the administration announced. that on that basis, it is likely that as many as 14 million people who would otherwise be alive will die by 2030, one third of them children under five years old.
Causes of death would be what? malnutrition, disease, lack of access to healthcare.
There must be Republicans in state who understand this the way you understand it.
Let's use this as a microcosm of how the Trump presidency has been unfurling, assuming that there are Republicans who see the excellent ROI as you're describing a foreign aid like this.
Why was that spike then? Look, as a political matter.
If you're talking about foreigners, foreign aid, government workers or elite institutions, you're not on strong political ground.
And so if that's what the conversation is about, yeah, I see where it goes.
But that's why it's so important to try to connect the dots and also tell the stories about what does this actually mean.
Even if you are not moved by the fact that for one penny on the dollar, we can actually save all these lives, we have an interest in doing it. that goes beyond what's the good and right thing to do.
What's the self-interested thing to do? We know that left unattended, a problem halfway around the world, easily comes and bites us.
There's a very good reason that when COVID was running rampant, we ended up leading the way in getting vaccines free of charge.
No political strings attached. to countries around the world who needed them.
That's because even if we were doing everything right at home and COVID went into a bans here, if some new variant emerged somewhere else. it was going to come and hit us, and we'd be right back to square one.
This gets back to Stephen Do the way we looked at the world after World War II and that we're getting away from.
And that's something very powerful called enlightened self-interest.
After World War II, we had a choice to make.
Very much like the choice we had to make after World War I. Do we pull back?
Do we retreat from the world? Do we hunker down?
Do we become somewhat isolationist? Do we become somewhat protectionist?
Do we put walls up against people trying to come to these shores legally? to make a better life, or do we lean in?
Do we engage? And after World War I, we made one series of choices.
After World War II, we made a different series of choices.
At the heart of that choice was in light and self-interest, the notion that The success of others is actually to our benefit.
What happened with these investments we made after World War II?
We got new markets for our products because countries were successful and they could buy things.
We had new partners to deal with challenges that we were not capable, really effectively dealing with alone.
And we ended up with new allies so that we could prevent aggression from happening in the first place because we all banded together. and set an attack on one of us as an attack on all of us.
That was really smart, and it produced with all of the incredible imperfections, nonetheless.
80 extraordinary years of progress. When you talk about enlightened self-interest, it made me think of there was a Nobel Prize speech given by Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher.
This was in 1950. He talked about there were four drivers, four key drivers of all human action.
They are acquisitiveness. rivalry, vanity, and love of power.
Nowhere on that list is enlightened self-interest.
So I guess I'm getting to a more basic or philosophical question, which has to do with the nature of humankind.
And this also might connect us to a conversation about the famous Francis Fukuyama argument about the end of history, which basically declared that democracy has won.
And in the decades since then, we've seen obviously a return to a political style in many countries that looks much more like the might is right argument versus the enlightened self-interest model.
Do you feel then that you and I and many others had the fortune to be born into that period where there was a relative moderation, but that now we're returning to the natural state of punching each other in the nose and taking what we can.
Yes, but the notion that life is nasty, brutish, and short has real salience.
It may be, and there's one theory of history, that the natural state of things is not what we experienced broadly speaking over the last 80 years. that nasty British and short is more than norm, that poverty is more than norm than productivity and progress, and that it is only through exceptional. decisions and endeavors that we can break out of the norm.
Do you buy that argument? Are you saying, no, we've superseded it?
No, I guess I see it differently and I think looking at the extraordinary sweep of history, it does seem to me that we've been on an arc of progress. albeit one that sometimes bends in the wrong direction, and occasionally breaks.
The question is whether that arc can continue and we can try to make sure that when it's under incredible strain as it will be in this period, it doesn't break.
I'm guessing you know the work of scholars, Tom Schelling and others who've argued over the years that for many, many, many generation civilization really was built around competition and conflict, right?
There weren't many resources, so you fought over them.
But that we've entered a period where we know how to make stuff at scale, we know how to grow food at scale.
And so you would think that we would have transitioned over into a period of. collaboration and cooperation versus competition and so on.
But it feels to me as if we've retreated from that.
Competition's a good thing. It's the basis of our system.
It's a driver of progress. I think done right, done fairly, it tends to bring out the best in people.
Certainly I think that's been the experience in the United States.
So I don't see it as being detrimental or undermining. of collaboration, cooperation, and non-zero-sum outcomes on the contrary.
Yes, you've got to have often individual ingenuity and innovation, but so many of these things to be successful are collective enterprises.
For example, I was talking about the extraordinary engine for innovation and progress that the United States has been since the end of World War II.
At the start of the 20th century, there was no branch of science in which the United States led the world.
At the start of the 21st century, there was no branch of science in which the United States did not lead the world.
How did that happen? I think it happened because some profoundly Smart decisions were made about the country and how it should operate mostly after the Second World War. maybe the most important among them was this extraordinary public-private partnership between the government private sector and especially our universities by about a year ago We had something like 3.5% of our GDP that was dedicated to research and development, a trillion dollars a year, 40% of that coming from the federal government and much of that. going to universities to make these advances.
We've managed to be this extraordinary pull of attraction for the most talented people in the world who come here, think here, invent here, create here, and many stay here, which is what we want.
I was really struck by something the other day.
You saw that Mark Zuckerberg went on this extraordinary, what do you call it?
Hiring spree. Buying spree, hiring spree to find the best possible talent for AI. he wound up bringing in 11 extraordinary talents.
I was kind of curious about it because I saw their names and it really jumps out at you.
It's not John Smith. The 11 people, they're from China, they're from India, they're from the UK, they're from South Africa, they're from Australia, each one of them an immigrant. to this country.
Each one of them I believe came here to pursue academic studies, research, work.
And now they are in the vanguard of what in a positive sense is going to carry our society and our civilization forward.
That is, AI for good. But if we wind up in a place where that talent no longer comes here, because it can't or doesn't want to, what are we going to be condemning ourselves to?
Coming up after the break, what are we condemning ourselves to?
And can a 19th century worldview work? in the 21st.
I'm Stephen Dubner speaking today with former Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and we will be right back.
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I don't know the president. Never met him.
I've not met him. Of course, I know many people who know him.
And look, I think the president has extraordinary instincts when it comes to the American people, and he taps into that very powerfully. maybe the most important economy that we have now is the attention economy and his ability to dominate that economy is a source of great strength and great power.
I mean those are fairly faint praises with which you're damning him in terms of bigger thinking strategic thinking political alliances and so on.
I know you're too polite to give him a failing grade, but- No, I just have a very different worldview.
As I try to understand where President Trump is going and how he sees the world, I think it's an interesting combination of the 19th century and the 1980s, by which I mean this.
The president seems to, this is not a secret, respect first and foremost, people he perceives as strong leaders in strong countries.
And maybe, until very recently, that was Vladimir Putin.
Xi Jinping, maybe it's Erdogan in Turkey, maybe it's the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia.
In that worldview, and in the 19th century, remember, we had spheres of influence.
The big guys, and I mean guys, got to basically run things in their part of the world.
Regional hegemonz. Regional hegemonz. And in that view, Russia would be one, and so what it does in its part of the world, including Ukraine, that's its business.
China would be another with the exception, and this gets to the 1980s piece of economic and trade issues.
Because I think the president does have a being as bonnet about that.
They get to do whatever they want in their part of the world, which is why I do have concerns about what does this mean for Taiwan?
What does it mean for? Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea, and we get to do what we want in our part.
Maybe that's Greenland, maybe that's Canada, maybe that's the Panama Canal.
What's interesting about that, Stephen, is that, yes, in the 19th century, actually having the land, owning the land, dominating the land was important.
That's no longer the case. That's not necessary.
You can cut a deal. You can make an agreement to get the benefits you want without actually having to take over the country or the land.
In Greenland, we've got a really important military base.
We have access through trade and commercial relations to whatever raw materials can actually be gotten from there.
It's a really difficult climate. So I think there's that view.
The 1980s pieces again coming up in New York in that period, Japan ink, the perception that we were being ripped off to use a diplomatic term. taken advantage of.
And maybe there's the real estate piece too, which was very zero sum.
You're in a deal, you're either a winner or you're a loser.
That's very antithetical to the what I was talking about earlier, enlightened self-interest in the notion that actually no, you want to strive for win-wins and that others doing well means actually you can do better.
What I worry about is this. Yes, others may have to make an accommodation one time around.
Maybe they have to give in on something to avoid a tariff.
But then what's the likely motivation an instinct going to be?
It's going to be instead of figuring out with us how to de-risk from China, it's going to be de-risk from the United States.
How do we make sure that we're not in a position? where the whims, the material nature of US policy puts us at risk.
And that means trying to find ways to work around or away from the United States to band together.
One of the things that we also avoided after World War II was what typically happens when one power emerges dominant over others, which is everyone else gets together.
They bandwagon to try to hold it and check.
Because of enlightened self-interest, because we tried to create a rules-based order, however imperfectly, where we bound ourselves.
Again, imperfectly. to the same rules as others.
We constrained our own power. We avoided what usually happens, that bandwagoning.
I'm afraid now we're actually going to see that if we continue on this course.
On the other hand, all of a sudden, NATO seems to be quite fond of Donald Trump.
At least, you know, as of this conversation a few weeks ago, there was an amazing press conference, which I'm guessing you saw. then the statement from Mark Ruta, and it seems as though, I mean my reading of that, and I'm probably wrong, so I'd love you to tell me, but it seems as though Trump by making himself the least bad of the strong has made himself appealing to the European NATO community.
What do you see there? Let's put this in perspective.
First, there's this whole question of, you know, where our allies spending enough on defense. the president complained a lot during his first term about free riders and how we're picking up all of the uh... the burden there was a kernel of truth to that state the obvious but here's the reality Back in 2014, all of the NATO countries came together at one of their summits in Wales, and they said, we're all going to spend 2% of GDP on defense.
That was the mark that they said for themselves.
When President Trump left office, a grand total of nine of our allies were spending the 2% of GDP.
Out of how many? Out of at that point, 30.
By the time President Biden left office, 23 of the allies were spending 2%.
So pretty big difference between the 9 at the end of Trump 1 and the 23 at the end of Biden.
I think this is very positive. The agreement that came out of that summit was that all allies agreed that the goal would now be to spend 5% of GDP. on defense, which is a pretty extraordinary number.
We spend about three and a half percent.
But I have to say, if I really want to give credit to anyone, it's less President Trump or less, for that matter, President Biden, than it is President Putin.
Yes, a dark way of looking at the accomplishment, but I understand.
Now, Donald Trump has been discussed as a potential winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
I'm guessing you've read about that somewhere.
I'm curious how much Biden thought about winning the Nobel Peace Prize?
I never heard him talk about it. I don't think that was, at least to my knowledge, what motivated him.
You think it's in the back of the mind of any president?
Oh, look, I imagine it is. It's just, as I think about it, I can't remember hearing him talk about it.
So that doesn't mean it wasn't there. Now you were in the Obama White House when Obama won the Peace Prize in 2009, which was his first year in office.
And a lot of people thought it was, you know, kind of nuts.
Oh, I think President Obama was probably first among them.
I think he recognized that this was, in a sense, a triumph of hope.
A down payment, maybe? Maybe a down payment?
What could be? What people hope would be?
And I think his speech, which is remarkable, reflected that.
I'd urge people to go back and read it. I think it actually does a very good job of grappling with the world as it is, including what we were talking about a little bit earlier.
What is the actual state of nature. And how do we think about that?
But no, I think he recognized that it was yes, as you would say, a down payment.
I want to ask about a lunch you had with President Biden a few weeks after his debate with Trump.
This was his. disastrous debate which ultimately led to his deciding not to run but with a lot of chaos in the interim.
What I've read is that at this lunch you said to him, look, everybody gets remembered in one sentence. and it sounded as if from what I've read that you were questioning him you don't want your sentence to be old man. becomes senile while sitting in the White House.
I want you to walk us through that. I want you to give us the most thorough assessment possible of the decline in fall of Joe Biden. while understanding that you had long experience in great loyalty and great affection and admiration for him.
You were among the closest to him. You were among the few who toward the end was still getting his prime hours.
So first, the conversations we had, the exchanges we had, those are things that I try to keep to my myself.
I've seen some of these accounts and I don't want to say much more than that.
Here's what I can say and I'll give you my best judgment.
First. when it comes to how to evaluate the president his tenure what he did and how he did it i think it's actually pretty simple look at the policies the administration pursued, look at what we did, and then be the judge.
You may like it or you may not like it. But the reason I say that is every single one of those decisions and of those judgments was his. not me, not some other cabinet secretary, not some senior advisor, his.
And I can tell you from my own experience, at least, that when it comes to foreign policy, this is where, of course, I was engaged with him on everything that we did.
We had the most robust of debates, discussions, arguments that he drove.
Let me ask you this, I don't think anyone would deny the level of political partisanship in the US today, many other places of course, and it's been high in the US in the past, but it had been lower before this period. kind of getting re-aclamated to it.
Do you see political partisanship as a cause or a consequence of the political and economic problems that we're having in this country?
I think it's a product of it in some ways, but it's also an accelerant to it.
They're also much written about and much discussed systemic challenges that have exacerbated this when you have Congressional districts that are drawn in such a way as to favor the most extreme views of one party or another.
If you have an information and media environment where to get attention you have to yell the loudest.
Then, of course, all of that just feeds on itself.
On the other hand, I don't know, Stephen, I still read or see every single day some profoundly positive story of human interaction, human decency of humanization, not dehumanization. that is just as abundant and not only just as powerful, but maybe even more powerful.
I still feel strongly that these forces that drive human progress and that reflect the better angels of our nature.
They're still there. They're still strong.
They're still powerful. Part of our job is to figure out how to maximize them, how to give them flight. awful hard in the environment that we're in, but I don't believe in possible, and I do believe absolutely necessary.
It sounds like you're reading a lot. I know you had your security clearance taken away, so you're not reading classified information.
I don't know if you would have been. typically former secretary of state would you typically have been honestly probably not much if at all and there's plenty of interesting stuff to be found in what we would call the open source world So I understand you're writing a book, Tony.
I am. How's it going? It's going. It's going.
It's actually something that first is a little bit cathartic.
Second, you know, I started out actually as a journalist.
So I like to write every writer knows there are painful periods where you're looking at a blank page or a blank screen.
But it is something that I actually enjoy doing that I find is a creative outlet as well.
Can you distill what will be the juiciest bits?
No, God forbid. Your publisher would murder you.
Yeah, if they listen to this and hear it, I'm really in trouble.
Basically what I'm writing about, of course, is the four years of the Biden administration and everything that we had to deal with. and work on, and much of that is obvious.
But from that, virtually everything we did. had some kind of relationship to a resonance in, something that I went through, experienced, learned about, first encountered. during other parts of my life whether it was as a child or whether it was working for president clinton president obama whatever it was give me a for instance what do you mean by that At one point early on after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, before I could actually get into Ukraine.
I decided that I would meet my Ukrainian counterpart, Demetro Koleba, the foreign minister then, on the border between Poland and Ukraine, and technically set foot into Ukraine.
There was a border crossing. between Ukraine and Poland, I would meet him there and it was symbolic to send that message.
And then as we were researching, that crossing point, it came out that that was exactly where many years ago, my grandfather had crossed in the other direction from Ukraine heading west. to make his way to the United States.
Do you want to serve again if given the opportunity?
Look, I had the extraordinary Experience and privilege of serving in what I think is the best job in the country, best job in the world, Secretary of State.
Why is that the best? There's something in my experience at least. that was absolutely unique about serving in government for the better part of 30 years.
And that was going to work every single day with the Stars and Stripes behind my back, both literally and figuratively.
There's nothing, at least in my own experience, that equals that feeling, knowing that you had the extraordinary strength vitality and history of this country literally at your back.
That gave me tremendous confidence when I was engaging in you know, really difficult conversations or issues around the world.
Do you think by the time your kids who are young now are old enough to make a decision like this that they'll feel the same way about this country and serving the country?
I hope so. I hope so. I don't know. We have to be at least informed by history, if not imprisoned by it.
There were periods of extraordinary challenge in our history.
I imagine that people in the midst of those challenges thought that this was it.
This was fatal. This was game over. Do you believe in regression to the mean?
You're familiar with that statistical concept?
Yeah. It sounds like you're saying that our mean is higher than it is right now. and that we should regress over time.
Is that your belief? That is my belief. Successive generations usually are smarter. better than the one that preceded them.
If we can find a way to channel that effectively and make sure that the most important resource that we have are human resource. can actually fulfill itself, then I really do believe in that progress.
The problem is it's not linear. It gets interrupted.
It gets disrupted. Sometimes the moments of transition are so difficult and so challenging that you don't get. to the other side without a major, major, major problem.
If we're really off course on something, does it take a titanic moment? to put us back on course.
That's what worries me, and can we still navigate around the iceberg?
I believe so. I hope so. I know we've got to try.
I'll let you get back to your book writing.
I thank you very much, Tony. I really appreciate it.
Great to be with you. Thanks, David. That again was former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
This conversation made me think back to something another Secretary of State once said, perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.
That was Colin Powell, who served under President George W. Bush.
I hope both he and Blinken are right about the power of optimism and the power of progress.
Let us know what you thought of today's conversation with Blinken.
Our email is radio at freakingomics.com.
Coming up next time on the show, why do some obsolete technologies continue to burn on?
I think maybe having a candle at home makes you feel like you're still gonna be okay.
That's next time. On the show, until then, take care of yourself.
And if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
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This episode was produced by Alina Coleman, with help from Dalvin Abawaji.
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The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Jasmine Klinger, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly, Teo Jacobs, and Zach Lipinski.
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