David Gibbs on how intelligence agencies shaped academia and journalism throughout the Cold War and beyond
Glenn Diesen interviews historian David Gibbs of the University of Arizona about the deep structural ties between US intelligence agencies and academic and media institutions.
Summary
Glenn Diesen speaks with David Gibbs, professor of history at the University of Arizona, about the documented relationships between the CIA, academia, and journalism. Gibbs draws on his own graduate experience at MIT — whose political science department was founded with CIA involvement — and on the 1975 Church Committee investigation, which found that over a thousand books had been published with covert CIA support and that several hundred American journalists had worked for the agency, including some with secret employment contracts. The New York Times was identified as the leading publication in this relationship. Gibbs argues that academia has functioned not as an independent check on power but as a mouthpiece for official policy, a pattern he traces from the early Cold War — including the 1949 American Historical Association presidential address explicitly calling for academic social control — through the Russiagate period and into the current war in Ukraine. He and Diesen discuss the suppression of inconvenient facts about NATO expansion, the Istanbul peace talks, and the proxy nature of the Ukraine conflict, and close on the question of whether a "Vietnam moment" — a collapse of public confidence in the foreign policy establishment — may finally be approaching.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the CIA's early penetration of academia
Glenn Diesen: David Gibbs is currently a professor of history at the University of Arizona and he joins us today to discuss how academia as well as journalism often becomes an instrument of the state and a reliable advocate for war. Thank you for coming back on the program.
David Gibbs: Thank you for having me, Glenn. Twenty-five years ago you started a big debate about biases within academia and your title was "Social Science as Propaganda."
Glenn Diesen: Yes, and as I said, this isn't just a question of academia. I feel especially these days we recognise that academics as well as journalists align themselves very closely with government narratives. But the problem goes much deeper than this. I was wondering if you could flesh out your argument.
David Gibbs: Well, let me say that a little bit of this is somewhat personal in the sense that I got my doctorate in 1989 — not in history, but in political science at MIT. MIT's political science department was closely connected to the Center for International Studies, which was founded in a sense by the Central Intelligence Agency to link MIT to the agency. It continued to exist when I was there. I was very fascinated by these extraordinary links between an academic institution — MIT — on the one hand and the CIA on the other.
It seemed very questionable because one of the complaints, rightly so, against the Soviet Union — and again this is during the Cold War when I went to graduate school — was that there was no differentiation between academia and the government. Academia was not independent. It was closely linked to government agencies. It was an expression of government propaganda. That was true. And supposedly what differentiated free societies — the free world, as we liked to call them back then — was that academia was independent. Academics were supposed to be independent agents, not agents of government propaganda. But it seemed really problematic if one of the leading institutions in the country, MIT, is so closely tied to the Central Intelligence Agency.
That got me very interested in the topic and I began reading about it. One of the things that was very clear was that in the earlier period, in the 1950s and '60s, one of the major funders of overseas research in the social sciences — not just political science but the whole of the social sciences — was the CIA and military intelligence. Bruce Cumings at the University of Chicago said that it would only be a slight exaggeration to say that either you worked for the CIA, or if you didn't work for the CIA, you would get a knock on the door from the FBI, which of course is very threatening in the early period of the Cold War. So you did have this sort of one-two punch that linked the academic fields, particularly at the prestige institutions, to the leading intelligence service of the United States.
This posed many problems as I would see it. One of them was secrecy. The CIA was created — one of the reasons it was created in 1947 — to create a super-secret agency, one that was much more secretive than the State Department or the regular military, to undertake ethically and legally questionable actions like overthrowing governments and engaging in assassination. The CIA was highly secretive, and academics who worked for the CIA had to do it in secret.
The Church Committee findings and secret book publishing
David Gibbs: The best record on the connections between the CIA and academia is a 1975 investigation by the US Senate under Senator Frank Church — the Church Committee, as it was called. They issued a huge number of reports. It was a serious investigation. It wasn't a whitewash, at least not mostly. They touched lightly on this issue of academia. For some reason they did not go into great detail. One thing they did go into, however, was secret consulting. Many academics — again, I think of the most prestigious academics, they went for the best naturally, at the most prestigious institutions — had contracts with the CIA where they would write secret reports for the agency.
Over time, what happened is academics would say, "Look, I'm a professor. I get evaluated professionally by publishing in journals and university presses, not by secret reports. Please allow me to publish this report." And so the CIA said, "We'll meet you halfway. You can publish the report if you let us edit it, sanitise it." And so you'd get sanitised reports being published, funded by the CIA. The Senate investigation found — I think the term they used was "at least a thousand" books had been published with covert support by the CIA. Note the word "at least." So it's over a thousand.
What this meant was that you could go into the library today and pull books off the shelf published by, say, Princeton University Press, by some prestigious academic, and not know it was funded by the CIA and edited by the CIA in secret. The fact that it was done in secret is a real problem because you don't know what was taken out.
Academics are supposed to be objective, meaning they engage in a search for the truth and they're not supposed to be partisan, not supposed to have conflicts of interest. It raises somewhat similar questions to those in the biomedical field about academics who do research on the efficacy of drugs and are funded by the drug company manufacturing them. This is a real problem in the biomedical sciences. But at least in that field, biomedical journals have a requirement that you must do full disclosure. If you're being funded by a drug company, you need to disclose that funding. You can weigh the potential bias against the findings. That's not true in political science or the social sciences. I've never seen a journal article or a book that said, "Ladies and gentlemen, this was funded by the CIA and edited by the CIA." If it's happened, I don't know about it. It's done in secret. In a sense, you might say it's deceiving the public that is reading these books, because they don't know about the hidden biases of the author.
The Robert Jervis debate and the absence of covert operations from journals
David Gibbs: Some people have gone public with their consulting. Robert Jervis of Columbia was a longtime consultant for the CIA — a prestigious professor and a past president of the American Political Science Association. I debated him on this issue publicly about twenty years ago on a radio program called Democracy Now. He insisted it had no impact on his research. The problem is we don't know. I think there's always going to be influence. You're always going to be influenced by the people funding you. It's a basic conflict of interest: on the one hand you're a political scientist studying international conflict, and on the other hand you're being funded by an interested party — the CIA — which means you're naturally going to be partial to that agency and probably leave out a great deal.
What's very striking is that when I engaged in this debate, I had done a survey of the journals. I looked at all the articles in five major top political science journals dealing with international relations during a ten-year period from 1990 to 2000. I did not find one single article that discussed CIA covert operations to any significant extent. It's very difficult for me to believe that CIA funding had nothing to do with that. It's a very dramatic statement that for a decade there was no significant mention of one of the major sources of US conduct in the Cold War, which is covert operations.
I think that was the direct result of CIA funding of the profession. Not only did they like the information the political scientists gave them — it meant they would capture the field and make sure that political science and other fields did not discuss issues that were not to be discussed in polite society.
This is not quite as bad now. About ten years ago, somebody named Lindsey Orr at Boston College published a book called Covert Regime Change. It's actually a pretty good book — I think there are some flaws in it, but it catalogues a vast number of CIA covert operations and it won an award and is getting attention. That's a good thing. It shows maybe there's a little bit of balance emerging. One detail: Professor Orr is a former student of John Mearsheimer, which I think is interesting. Mearsheimer is a very conservative person and very connected to the foreign policy establishment, but he has one feature that distinguishes him — he's really very honest and he's willing to stick his neck out. That's unusual.
The myth of the radical academic
David Gibbs: An interesting perspective here is that many people to this day like to believe that academics are radicals who are constantly challenging power, constantly going after powerful interests in the private sector and the government, trying to tear down everything. Nothing could be further from the truth. Academia is deeply intertwined with power, beginning with the CIA and many other agencies — Homeland Security, the military — and also the private sector, which provides enormous funding for the social sciences, which are ideologically directed.
I think people have a misperception of academia because of the culture wars. They assume that if you're arguing about some cultural issue related to gender, race, and sexuality, that proves you're some sort of radical, whereas one could look at that as a way of distracting people. On issues related to the things people in power are really concerned about — like covert operations — academia has been deeply conservative and deeply intertwined with power.
The CIA and journalism — the Bernstein investigation
Glenn Diesen: I wanted to ask about journalism and also what the main objectives of the intelligence agencies are. You mentioned they didn't want any coverage of covert operations, but are there other key issues where they essentially want to shape the knowledge or the information?
David Gibbs: I think in general what the CIA and the major agencies of government — and the whole foreign policy establishment, if one thinks a bit more broadly — want is a submissive academia that will act as a mouthpiece for official policy, which is what it is. If you look at the major journals and go beyond cultural things, it's indistinguishable from what's being said by government agencies and things like the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Academia respects power. It tends to defer to power. And for issues of international relations, the major power is the dominant geopolitical power — the United States — and to some extent its acolytes in places like Europe.
On journalism, similar things happened. There was a study done by Carl Bernstein — the Pulitzer Prize winner of Watergate fame. He and Woodward broke the Watergate story in the '70s and became very famous. He had a study in Rolling Stone in 1977 called "The CIA and the Media." You can still find it on the internet. That was the most serious study I've ever seen on the role of the media in relation to the CIA, and it has never been seriously challenged factually. He found that several hundred American journalists worked for the CIA in some fashion or other, and 200 of them had secrecy agreements and/or employment contracts in secret with the CIA. To the best of my knowledge, that violates every standard of journalistic ethics that I've ever heard of.
The leading publication was, surprise surprise, the New York Times. Why the New York Times? Well, if you want to influence the whole of the media, influencing the New York Times is a good place to start. I think even internationally, a lot of foreign publications look to the New York Times for leadership. During the Cold War and into the '90s, I would read the European press — I read French, so I read Le Monde, and I read the British press — and it was much better than the United States. It was independent. In the last twenty years, it's become almost a clone of the New York Times. When I'm reading Le Monde, it's like the New York Times in French.
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who was a longtime publisher of the New York Times through the 1960s, was a close personal friend of Allen Dulles, the longtime CIA director. There were documented instances in which Dulles asked him to cover up for the CIA and Sulzberger said yes.
The Vietnam War, the brief period of press independence, and the return to submission
David Gibbs: The role of the press is essentially as a mouthpiece for the government. This did break down during the Vietnam War as the war damaged confidence in government policy. You had the Vietnam syndrome, when the press did become much more critical — including the Times — and academia to some degree, to a limited degree, became more critical. That's the reason you had the Senate investigations into the CIA. That was a brief period, though. Right around the end of the 1970s, both academia and the press returned to their submissive role, which as I can see it they're still in. It never ended. In fact, it's deepened, I would say, with the end of the Cold War.
Now you get former CIA directors being presented as experts without any consideration given to the fact that a CIA officer is trained to lie. That's what they do. That's what you're trained to do in intelligence — lie. That's never taken into account. They're treated as serious sources of information, openly so, in a way that goes even beyond what was true during the Cold War. The sense of them all being in bed together was not only true in the Cold War — it's become even more true now.
Russiagate and the intelligence services
Glenn Diesen: I was wondering if you followed the Russiagate period closely, because I thought this was an interesting time when the intelligence agencies and the media went hand in hand. You also saw quite an interesting development building on what you said, where you had former CIA directors and NSA directors all getting jobs at the different news agencies as expert opinion. At least in the '70s they had the decency to cover these things up. Now it's all done in the open — hiding in plain sight. Did you feel it was more overt than before?
David Gibbs: Russia was an interesting case in the sense that I think you had a series of events that shook up elites on both sides of the Atlantic beginning in 2016. The first one was Brexit, which was a tremendous shock, especially in Europe. The second one was the nomination and election of Donald Trump as president. At the time he was seen as deeply hostile to NATO — it hasn't really worked out that way, and he has mostly played along with the NATO war in Ukraine — but he was seen as deeply hostile to NATO and possibly somebody who would change US foreign policy in fundamental ways. That was a tremendous shock to the American and European establishments.
I think people kind of lost their minds. They really did go crazy and they looked for a bogeyman. They didn't want a complex answer. The complex answer, of course, is that the public had lost confidence in much of the establishment and looked for anti-system candidates. In the United States, those anti-system candidates, ironically, were two: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. In some ways they're obviously very different; in other ways they're flip sides of the same coin. They're anti-system, and that's why people supported them. Bernie Sanders also came out of nowhere — he was a senator, yes, but an obscure senator, and he almost won the presidency. But the establishments could not admit any fault, could not admit they had done anything wrong. And so the question became: what caused these things? And the answer was Russia did it. Must have been a Russian conspiracy.
The newspapers in the United States kept hammering away at how the election of Donald Trump had been engineered by the Russians. The New York Times was filled with this. I remember initially thinking the claims were so outlandish that nobody would take them seriously. But then everybody was taking them seriously. All my friends were taking them seriously. The next thought I had was: this looks to me like somebody is trying to lay the groundwork for a war with Russia. I remember thinking that already in 2016. Well, here we are.
The outlandishness of this has to be emphasised. The claims were that there were some social media campaigns criticising Hillary Clinton and this must have been a massive campaign by the Russians to elect Donald Trump. There have been three studies on the effectiveness of these social media campaigns. One was done by the National Academy of Sciences, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The second was in the British peer-reviewed journal Nature. A third was by the Institute for New Economic Thinking in New York City, by top academics. They came to identical conclusions through different methodologies: zero influence. The social media campaign had no influence on the public. The term they used was "undetectable." They could not detect anything in terms of influence. And yet this was one of the top stories for years — Russian disinformation electing Donald Trump.
It did look to me fairly obviously like a lot of this was coming out of the intelligence services, openly being stoked by retired CIA officers. There's a phrase: once CIA, always CIA — you can quit, but you can never leave. Somebody was cooking this up, and it wasn't based on anything substantive. It helped to poison American politics, but also poisoned international relations. I'm convinced it did play a significant role in the lead-up to the war currently going on in Ukraine.
Academia's silence on the Ukraine war
Glenn Diesen: What I find shocking is how academia as well as journalists have aligned themselves completely with government talking points in this war. The whole argument by the NATO countries that the war was unprovoked — I find it shocking because if you go through the literature there is endless evidence that the political and military leaders of the West knew that NATO expansionism would likely trigger a conflict with Russia. Former CIA director William Burns once said that Ukraine in NATO is the reddest of all red lines, making the point that Russia would feel compelled to intervene even if it didn't want to. There's all this evidence that the Russians saw this as a threat, we knew it was a threat, it can't really be disputed — but it's ignored by the academics. They do not discuss it.
And the whole idea that Ukraine should be allowed to choose which alliance it should be in — every single poll between 1991 and 2014 showed that only a small minority of Ukrainians wanted that. The Americans primarily pushed for it and the Europeans fell in line. Again, all of this can't be disputed, so what did the academics do? They ignored it.
Same with the full-scale invasion in 2022, where the argument was that the Russians invaded with the intention of conquering all of Ukraine. But you have ample evidence — Zelensky himself saying on the first day after the Russian invasion that he was already contacted by Russia to start negotiations to put a quick end to the war based on restoring Ukraine's neutrality. They dropped fewer bombs on Ukraine in the first month than the US dropped on Iraq in the first 24 hours, with the understanding that excessive violence would undermine diplomacy. You can't conquer a country of 35 million with 100,000 troops. None of this can be disputed. But no academics in Europe that I know of will even discuss the fact that the Russians and Ukrainians began to talk about peace on the first day.
Same with the Istanbul talks. You can have all the evidence — a Turkish foreign minister arguing that the Russians and Ukrainians both very desperately wanted a deal, but the US and the UK torpedoed it. It can be confirmed by the former Israeli prime minister, Bennett. Still, it doesn't appear in any academic discussions. I would like to know what other explanation there would be. How can you leave out these key events? They're just slandered as something the Russians would say.
David Gibbs: Everything you say is 100% true. That's certainly been my experience. I'm a full professor, I'm tenured — it gives you a high level of protection, so I'm not particularly worried. But if I were untenured, I would have a great deal of reason to be worried. You will pay a price professionally. John Mearsheimer — I don't think he really cares — but he's not invited anymore to write op-eds in the New York Times. He's not invited anymore on CNN or the mainstream news programs, where he'd been welcomed before. You do pay a price professionally and personally. People may not talk to you anymore. Colleagues who feel so strongly about this will denounce you as a Putin puppet, or whatever the current term is. There's definitely a price to be paid, and most faculty, even if they know the facts, aren't willing to take the risk. To some extent I can understand it, especially if your job is at risk.
But one of the questions is why, and I think academia does look respectfully to power. It's always done that, in both the private and public sectors, and it tends to be very submissive towards power, despite the reputation of academics as feisty and against power. It's a complete myth. It has no truth whatsoever in my experience. It's a very rare academic who's willing to challenge power in any meaningful sense.
The best way to put it is this: early in the Cold War, the American Historical Association elected as its president Conyers Read, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He gave a presidential address in 1949, published in the American Historical Review, in which he said — I'll paraphrase — that all armies have to march under some symbol. In the Soviet Union it's the hammer and sickle; in America it's the stars and stripes. And the academic is no freer from this obligation than the physicist is. We must institute intellectual controls here if we're going to win this war. He acknowledged this may sound like some kind of social control being advocated — in short, it is. He was explicitly stating what I think really was the idea: that academia should fall behind official policy. He was much more explicit and blunt about it than anybody before or since would be. But I think that really is to some extent what has happened. Academics did fall in line behind the government and they stayed in line, except briefly during the Vietnam debacle.
I have to say that the level of repression of open discussion is the worst I've ever seen in my lifetime. I was around during the 1980s. It was never as bad as this. You'd have to go back maybe to the early 1950s, the McCarthy period, to really get an atmosphere as oppressive as the one we have now. And equally true — maybe even more true — in Europe. In America we do have the First Amendment to the Constitution, which gives robust legal protections, which is not the case in Europe. So it may even be worse in Europe than it is in the United States.
The language of propaganda in academia
Glenn Diesen: Have you seen academics and journalists emulate the language of the state? Orwell wrote very much about how propaganda creates a separate language for us and them. I see this in academia as well, especially in political science. We have "policies," but our opponents have "behaviour." We "socialise" them — this was very much built into the idea of the EU and NATO after the Cold War, that the role of the West was to socialise everyone else, like a new civilising mission. If the Chinese refuse to compromise, they're being intransigent; when we refuse to compromise, we're principled. Others "interfere in domestic affairs"; we "promote democracy." They "go to war"; we "intervene." The Russians "seek influence in neighbouring states"; we're "promoting the European path." You have this kind of language where you don't have to make arguments anymore — the wording replaces arguments. The whole point for academics should be to unpack these words.
I had an unpleasant experience at my own university. Thirty-seven colleagues denounced me and published a letter in the newspaper because they said they stand with Ukraine and I do not. The reason was that I argued we should do diplomacy, we shouldn't send weapons, and that NATO has contributed to provoking this conflict — which I see as important to resolving it. But from their argument, this means you don't care, because the people who care topple governments, boycott diplomacy, and fight a war they can't win. There was no unpacking of the argument. What does it mean to help Ukraine? I think we are destroying them by doing what we're doing now — sacrificing them as a proxy. But no one wants to discuss it. They just have this concept: this is pro, this is against.
David Gibbs: Another way to put it is this: it's understandable and unsurprising if government officials use propagandistic language that somehow sanctions their actions and demonises their opponents. You might even say that's their job. But academics are not supposed to do that. Academics are supposed to evaluate these things, supposed to be even-handed, supposed to be objective. There's no objectivity. Academia is just a mouthpiece — they parrot the same language uncritically.
Another one I would add is "humanitarian intervention," something I've been especially interested in. The claim is that when the United States intervenes, it's for humanitarian purposes — to protect the weak, protect minorities from persecution, prevent genocide, prevent women from abuse, and so on. This is language that governments might use as propaganda. But academics are promoting it. There's a whole industry in academia of humanitarian intervention, and pretty much they're using the language of government agencies and NGOs that are closely connected to government agencies. It's the language of political propaganda, not analysis.
I've been especially interested in academics as lobbyists. I've looked at this also in the private sector — they use academics as lobbyists, and academics are the best lobbyists because they're perceived to be prestigious and unaffiliated, supposed to be highly critical of powerful interests. So when they act as spokespeople for powerful interests, they're especially effective because people have this image of academia that's so out of kilter with their real role. Academics themselves like to promote this — that they're radical, challenging power, and so on. What we have here is academia not really playing its proper role. If academia has a function, it's to hold the powerful to account, to challenge power. But that's not what it's doing at all.
The consequences of propaganda — will reality catch up?
Glenn Diesen: What is the consequence of this going so far? I'm thinking about all those journalists and academics who, at the beginning of the US attacks on Iran, had to repeat the same slogans — the Iranian regime oppresses women, it's going to be much better after this, they'll have a chance for freedom. And then suddenly you saw this turn very dark, with Trump talking about potentially destroying a civilisation. I don't think anyone anymore seriously believes the attack on Iran was a humanitarian mission. What happens when reality catches up? We had the same with the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine — the Ghost of Kyiv, a Ukrainian fighter pilot supposedly shooting down dozens of Russian planes. It was absurd, but everyone had to pretend it was real because otherwise you undermine the narrative and you're pro-Russian. But what happens when all of this proves to be fake? With the Ukraine war, all the "Ukraine is winning" stories, the claims about Russian casualties — at some point it will fall apart when we face defeat, much like in Iran. Will there be a day of reckoning? What happens to academics who went behind the "unprovoked" narrative?
David Gibbs: That's an excellent question. I was just the other day on Pascal Lottaz's program and we were discussing what I call the Vietnam moment. In Vietnam also, in all wars, you have the narrative of "we're winning, we're having sensational victories." In World War I, everyone was saying that. In the early years of the Vietnam War, the US government had all these narratives of "we're winning." They counted the number of dead bodies of communist forces — a ghoulish thing — and made up the numbers. It turns out very similar to what they're doing now with the Russian casualties, I suspect.
It held together up to a point, until about 1968, when it collapsed. And when it collapsed, you had what was called the credibility gap. The entire foreign policy establishment was discredited for about a decade. Public support for the war evaporated. The anti-war movement grew by leaps and bounds. The claims being made about imminent victory were not credible — openly false. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, was working for Robert McNamara and was giving him intelligence reports about how badly the war was going on the ground, and then McNamara would read these reports and go out and say how great things were going.
After a certain point, reality caught up with the propaganda and discredited not just the propaganda but the whole set of people promoting it, including much of the media. The media had to change dramatically as a result, for a brief period.
I wonder if we're getting to that point with regard to Ukraine. My read of the war — and I could be wrong — is that at some point the Ukrainian army will crack under the weight of simply larger and superior Russian forces. And when that happens, you could get a Vietnam moment where the credibility of the people making the statements simply collapses and public support for the war collapses. I'm hopeful that will happen because I fear that one of the dangers here is nuclear war. This is getting very, very dangerous. The Europeans are openly talking about breaking up Russia into pieces — Kaja Kallas talked about this, and she is virtually the foreign minister of the EU. There was the attack on the Russian strategic nuclear bomber bases, very likely with European and US connivance. These are far more reckless than anything done during the Cold War. If this keeps going, there's a very significant risk of nuclear weapons being used at some point.
What you could get instead is a Vietnam moment and a collapse of public support for the war. In Europe, this could be very dramatic because the political establishments of the leading countries are already on very thin ice. You look at people like Macron or Starmer — deeply, deeply unpopular figures, with some of the lowest popularity ratings in the history of polling. Britain has had six or seven prime ministers in ten years. That's extraordinary. The only thing keeping this project afloat is the narrative of "we're winning." If it becomes very clear we're not winning, you could get a real dramatic collapse of public confidence in the whole political establishment and extended political instability. I think that's where Europe is headed right now.
The good news is this could basically cause an ending of the Ukraine project and at least protect the world against nuclear war, which I see as a real danger. I hope I'm right. We'll see.
The Afghanistan failure and the pattern of moving on
Glenn Diesen: Does there have to be a Vietnam moment? I thought something similar would come after the war in Afghanistan — twenty years, all that blood and money, and everything was exposed at the end. You had the Afghanistan Papers showing that while the US government was saying "we're winning," they actually knew things were going poorly. We have leaked CIA documents showing that the Europeans were losing interest in occupying Afghanistan, and their conclusion was: let's sell it as promoting women's rights in Afghanistan, because Europeans apparently care about that. So you had people like Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, writing an op-ed with Angelina Jolie about why NATO is now the main promoter of women's rights. NATO did not occupy Afghanistan for twenty years to liberate women, and they weren't winning. So it was all fake. You would have thought that once this came out — with that dramatic footage of people falling off planes — there would be some repercussions. But we just changed the topic. How do you explain this?
David Gibbs: One of the factors is that I always thought one of the reasons you had the push for war with Russia in 2022 was to make up for the failure in Afghanistan. It came very soon after — August 2021 you had the collapse in Afghanistan, the humiliating US departure, and then February 2022 you had the war in Ukraine. There was a need to paper over that failure and make sure you would not have a Vietnam moment resulting from Afghanistan, which could have happened. After all, it was nineteen years, hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands and thousands of lives lost, and for nothing. It was a huge embarrassment by any standard, and the departure was deeply incompetent. All of that was quietly forgotten because there was something much more important in the world — the big Russian bear threatening everybody.
I think there are other reasons obviously why the US wanted to ensure there would be a war with Russia, which I think is exactly what happened — baiting Russia into invading. I have a long history of writing about this, by the way. I've written extensively about how the United States baited the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan in 1979. Very similar situation. But I think one of the triggers was indeed the failure in Afghanistan.
Now, why am I more optimistic this time? We've had multiple US failures — the war on terror was a failure, the overthrow of Gaddafi was a failure, the Iraq war was a catastrophe of remarkable proportions — and no accountability. Nobody paid any price. Not even a public apology. Part of it is this extraordinary miasma of propaganda that's suffused all discussion of it, and the fact that it's bipartisan. Both parties supported the continuation of these types of policies.
But I think this time could be different. A very telling sign was when Trump went to war in Iran. This was the very first war that I can think of where at the outset, at the very beginning, the public — at least a plurality — opposed the war. That's never happened before. The typical pattern is that initially the public supports the president and supports the war, and then tires of it over time. This time the public was opposed at the very outset.
So I'm thinking: losing two wars — first in the Persian Gulf and then in Ukraine — I'm hopeful this will be such a dramatic blow to the idea of endless intervention and endless war that this will finally lead to a collapse of public support and a Vietnam moment when the public simply says no, we're not going to do this anymore.
I admit there are some historical differences. The most striking one is conscription. America had a conscript army in Vietnam — mandatory military service for males. If you were not educated, pretty much you went to the Mekong Delta. That was a big factor in the opposition to the war. You don't have that anymore — it's a volunteer army. But still, I think the public is aware that this is lowering their living standards. There's a trade-off between guns and butter that's become clearer and clearer, even to the uneducated. And in the end, maybe I'm being too optimistic, maybe I'm engaging in wishful thinking, but I don't think so. I think this could be the set of events that will finally end public support and the political viability of the imperial project we've had since the end of the Cold War. I hope I'm right. We'll see.
Glenn Diesen: I hope you're right as well. I do suspect that as Trump is defeated in Iran, on his voyage home they will drop by Cuba and try to make a little success to make up for that loss. But I do think you're right — a defeat in Iran, a defeat against Russia, made even worse by the economic problems which are just building up and going to take on a life of their own. It's going to be hard to control the narrative after this. I rarely end this podcast on an optimistic note, so let's leave it there. Thank you so much for taking the time.
David Gibbs: Thank you, Glenn.