Spiral of difficulties that 2020 has posed the need to adapt so be called to me very quickly its also speeding up this process of digitalisation and the country out also speeding up the evolution of. The tech sector and indeed the legislation as well because too much of the rate at which that is progressing is was. Down hawkins reports now you watching out internationally to have a company well back again at the top of the. Join me every thursday on the alex simon show and ill be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business im show business ill see you then. Hello and welcome to cross talk were all things are considered on people about continuity or change this is whats being asked when considering a potential by Foreign Policy trump made it a point to undo obamas legacy when biden do the same to trumps like this or is this all only rhetorical continuity drives Foreign Policy not the occupant in the oval office. To discuss this and more im joined by my guest peter who is making those that hes professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies institute at American University as well as coauthor with all over stone the untold history of the United States in kingston we have it like petro he is a professor of Political Science at the university of rhode island and we have William Deane he was a former technical director at the n. S. A. Originally crossed up rules and i think that means in jump in anytime you want and i also appreciate it ok nic let me go to you 1st year theres an awful lot of speculation of what a potential biden Foreign Policy would be but we have to add in the last 3 and a half years almost 4 years of the the media and the Foreign Policy blah always going on the opposite side of whatever trump is doing which is actually quite juvenile but thats what theyve been doing and now it seems like the same thing is happening anything the big orange man did has to be reversed is this how do you see it because im watching Mainstream Media coverage of it and there is time and im also themselves into pretzels go ahead. I think the. Foreign policy were likely to see under joe biden it will be a rehash of v. Foreign policy oh the Obama Presidency and a continuation of what might go back as far as clinton. The issue here is there was a lot less going on in the Trump Administration because the truck was never able to articulate an alternative Foreign Policy to the mainstream and he never got control of his administration and as you say the media portrayed everything about him negatively so. Theres just i think going to be a return to a sort of liberal nostalgia which will fail in the long run because that was actually not attorney general election in 2016 peter let me go to you and then the climate brings up the most important point here i mean if they want to go back to you know be nostalgic the going back to failure but nobodys in the Mainstream Media seems to point that out go ahead peter. Theyre going back to failure is correct the Clinton Obama policies were policies that doubled down on what george w. Bush had brought us to for that so for the most part we said were seeing in the new Foreign Policy team he supported the invasion of afghanistan supported the invasion of iraq supported the invasion of libya supported the sending of arms messam an arms into syria an operation timber symptom or that turned. A minimalist kind of uprising into this massive bloodshed slaughter thats gone on they supported the bombing of syria when obama was hesitant to do so so. These people that offer a lot of hope in terms of alternative vision im not quite as positive about the triumph our policy peters you seem to be now i know im. Getting it limits i didnt get as involved in any new wars but it pulls us out of all of the International Agreements that the us should have been in there starting with. The i. N. F. Treaty the open skies treaty great World Health Organization the paris climate accords so that is that policy was disastrous and in many ways but trump was pushing forward this kind of existential threats that are even more dangerous than the Obama Clinton policies were so he let me i dont know how pushback on that i think thats coming out and debatable here but thats the whole point of his program william what are your thoughts here because as the the last weeks of this administration before potential by the administration we see all hands on deck regarding iran is this is this a an intentional gift quote unquote suited by people in january when it could be i mean i just see behind camions as the others do is a throwback to old thinking and all ways of doing business in the world i mean i just dont see i see us on the horizon with a more wars continued conflict around the globe and i dont see them getting into anything positive plus i dont i dont i think the u. N. Needs to wake up and im like a lot of your other guests i think they might disagree with be on that i think the u. N. Is really not doing a very good job and especially the World Health Organization other kinds of things late ledge theyre doing an os that theyre not theyre not really coming across with the truth anybody and thats really bad thats why trump was elected i mean people in his country were really sick of all the lies and weve been by all the administrations prior both democrat and. It didnt matter they were all just lying to us and leading us down of almost half well ok on italy as it is that would explain delete to me at least why Foreign Policy wasnt even discussed during the campaign as a maverick nothing was discussed during this cycle here whatsoever and again going back to the 2016 you know that was the 3rd president ial election cycle that people voted against war but what are we going to get in january i mean it is its truly amazing how the media can say it on p. B. S. There was a woman talking heads she said the biden team theyre professionals and theyre apolitical i mean what kind of nonsense is the public being fed these arent oss not julie political people stunningly ideological and they have they all have the inability to learn from mistakes mykola well i tend to agree let me say a few words about the prospect of war. I happen to believe that no American Administration wants war when they want his americans supremacies and today supremacy can best be achieved not by war but by manipulation manipulation of the media in particular wars tend to be unpopular because the results are often ambivalent and certain its much easier to achieve mastery in coersion by manipulating perceptions and i think you were going to see a lot of that in the new administration i mean you know just a month you know i mean thats exactly what we got with bush and obama and the results were disastrous i mean you know what was it you know we have to save the kurds you know nobody now had ever heard of a kurd intil from out of syria ok in public with no current if it hit them in the face ok i know the history of the kurds and i have great sympathy for them all right but i mean this is a sham rot peter they keep doing this year so maybe you can go back to these these these old rhetorical turns of hand but the results of the same. The end lets the people that want i do think that people want wars people want some people a small group of people want to more with the ran for example there are there rubbing their hands waiting for that possibility but of course the American People dont vote on the go ahead here the Trump Administration has from the very beginning been looking for a war with iran and in fact youve got people like mattis who have tried to curb them in that regard but as they dont want to war with north korea they almost provoked the war with north korea in 2017 and that was very very dangerous but it was really iran that most of these people who were thinking about it was there they were iran a phobic and hated iran so. The thing is that the defense sect. There does not necessarily need war in order to profit immensely critical people are up to their eyeballs and dead with defense contractors whether its west exact advisors that flora know i and blink and started or the center for a new American Security miss you there all are these think tanks and organizations that are in bed with the defense contractors so they dont necessarily need war what they need is a world with fill of enemies that can justify these massive loaded Defense Budgets and if you look at what theyre talking about its kind of a more modern approach. When we talk about whether people learn anything and its not clear what they learn or how much they do learn but you take somebody like robert gates who is also supporting every war we got involved in what it looks like obama was going to bomb syria was it 2014 gates said you know dates was opposed to it and he said dont these people learn anything about unintended consequences dont they see what happened in afghanistan iraq libya you know so gay scott that a certain point and he was as hopeless as the rest of them so maybe maybe blinken and you know who can and not all these other clowns will have so well have learned something from that experience that that youre now so much more hope not to do here william i saw you just sending please go ahead well i did see them continuing the old policy is a regime change any regime they dont want theyre going to try to change either through wars and were through with you know cia operations like they did with the rim i mean this is nothing i mean these people are not learned anything down through history i think everybody is saying the same thing because you know it doesnt take a great deal to realize that wars dont necessarily turn out very good in any case so. For anybody and so you know its a matter of how are we going to stay in afghanistan where youve been there 20 almost 20 years now for were going to say when do we get out you know the british were there the russians were there all kinds of people that persians went there you know how many people or is it going to take the convinced that we ought to stay out of afghanistan or other places like tell them you know he is lets remember theres plenty of people i mean i look at the whole afghan thing is a huge drift i mean they know theres theres no solution to it but plenty of people are making money hand over since right and they know the level of corruption they were just words a very profitable business thats what that sense and its a very profitable business for a very few people but a lot of others suffer for it interact nicholai is it is this just the inability to reimagine american Foreign Policy i mean is there such inertia then you know even considering a change of course here because i guess you know when you look at the form of policy blob and the people that biden are thinking about their own comfortable the weight the the the the way things have been going since the end of the cold war i mean in their mind well its not its not really broken so why should we really fix it and then the default position for u. S. Foreign policy is to change. And we havent really had any serious discussion of what to do after containment given that the country that we were trying to contain no longer exists so what is our Foreign Policy to be with a new russia its been close to 30 years and we still have no including a what. A u. S. Foreign policy toward russia if the biden ministration resorts to the Traditional Democratic the pattern of Traditional Democratic administrations starting with moralizing about democracy and human rights it will confirm that theres nobody in this administration that has giving a thought that either but i would add one thing because we havent talked about the s. Word you have my hang on hold that point were going to go to a hard break and after that heart breaks will continue or not our discussion on the potential by the state party. Elderly forward to talking to you will. That technology should work for people. I robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except when such orders to conflict with the 1st launch show your identification for should be very careful about Artificial Intelligence and the point only a scene is to trace transfer. Areas or with Artificial Intelligence where some of the team and. The obama must protect its own existence is excessive. Welcome back to crossfire all things are considered im Peter Lavelle to mind you were discussing what a potential biden Foreign Policy would look like. Go back to nickel and right before we went to the break he said you want to make a point go right ahead yeah i wanted to talk about something we havent mentioned yet which is sanctions and sanctions have been a mixed bag for russia but on the whole i think more benefit more beneficial than negative thanks in part to sanctions the russia i would say has outgrown the u. S. In terms of its Foreign Policy thinking and its going to continue there for its long term global strategy of Building Security greater security for itself and for the world through multipole r. T. And what the u. S. Does if its going to be involved in all sorts of shenanigans overseas and trying to make regime changes is just going to wait for the u. S. To come to terms with the with the creation of a new role the Global Reality which is going to be increasingly shaped not by the United States and western europe. But by the brics and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and other countries you know peter thats such a good point peter because you know living far away you know my faraway perch year the world is changing in such amazing ways but if you look at the Mainstream Media and many in mainstream narratives about Foreign Policy the come out of the networks and not of washington d. C. It into is if they decide how blind personally can they still think it was some 30 years ago and the world is really moving on and i think really the biggest difference here is that we do live in a multipolar world except for the Foreign Policy refuses to recognize and they refuse to recognize reality that they recognize it begrudgingly it was 9th in 98 when Charles Krauthammer leading the conficker and this was a you know polar moment at the soviet union is gone the United States will dominate the world for the next 30 or 40 years he said then after the invasion of afghanistan he upped it he said is that you know paul a moment is you know poli era is going to last indefinitely nobody should be allowed to challenge the United States anywhere on the planet and then after the disaster is in afghanistan and iraq is said well i got iraq in 2006 said you know paul that era is over and the unocal of moment is coming to an end so theres some recognition that the world has changed and its even changed from 2016. So what obama biden comes out there and he talks about the United States reassert its leadership in the world mean hes still in that mindset its also a mindset that believes in american exceptionalism. All except this idea that the american United States is gods gift to humanity weve got some great wisdom that we need to that the world needs thats why we have to apply this kind of leadership thats wrong its outmoded. The world has moved on and the United States has got to adjust to a multipolar world with russia with china with europe and eventually other countries also asserting staking a claim to being involved in that kind of leadership now well peter i think you in far away been reading my notes because i was going to just ask you a question about exceptionalism here william but this is what he really gets down to i mean i started out in my introduction change of continuity but the thing that is set in everyones minds revolves around is exceptionalism here and that is a dead end its been proven to be a dead end but they thats something that they just cant let go of and its part of the Popular Culture as well ok i mean i grew up in the midwest ok thats very much our parcel of the mindset youre and in it and in the end it is you know its benevolent in their sense ok but when you would apply it to policy its not so benevolent here thats the problem here go ahead well i just think youre right absolutely no they dont they dont look at a cooperative effort among other countries its more or less its our way or the highway you know and thats fundamentally whats going on in washington i mean even treat our own all the people United States are treated the same way and were deplorable as you know we dont even we dont really realize whats important in the world so just be quiet sit back and and just some point everything were doing and thats been crap from the beginning thats let us down so many parents were in the you know deep debt endless mors all kinds of. Crumbling infrastructure all kinds of stupid decisions made out of washington d. C. And you know that it just they just dont make