Episode 2039: KEEN ON AMERICA featuring Mark Danner by Andrew Keen
Episode 2039: KEEN ON AMERICA featuring Mark Danner by Andrew Keen
American foreign policy in a time when nowhere or nobody is really foreign anymore
Interview Transcript
ANDREW KEEN: Hello everyone, this is Andrew. Welcome to Keen on America. On July 4th, 2026, America will be 250 years old. An anniversary that will, no doubt, be greeted with a mixture of celebration, contemplation, and resignation. In Keen on America, we talk to prominent U.S. citizens, not just about their country’s past and present, but also about its future. What, I ask my American guests, will be the 21st century fate of their now venerable republic? Mark Danner is one of America’s most storied and respected observers of international politics. And when we met in his Berkeley home, I asked him, as I always do in our Keen on America conversations, to introduce himself.
MARK DANNER: Okay. My name is Mark Danner. I live in Berkeley, California. I’m from Utica, New York, in northern New York State. I write about politics, war, political violence, and also teach literature and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
ANDREW KEEN: When were you born?
MARK DANNER: I was born in November 1958, so I’m 65.
ANDREW KEEN: Do you consider yourself part of the boomer generation?
MARK DANNER: I suppose technically I am. I wouldn’t say I consider myself, but I think when you break down the numbers, I am part of that generation.
ANDREW KEEN: You’ve made a career looking outwards from America into the world, covering it, writing about it, traveling extensively. Were you always interested in the world outside America?
MARK DANNER: Yes, I was. But I think of it not as being interested in places, but being interested in conflict, in other societies which are revealed through conflict. And I think the United States has been revealed through conflict too over the last 20 years. So I’ve always considered that times of conflict are significantly revelatory of the society going through it.
ANDREW KEEN: Did you grow up in a conflictual environment?
MARK DANNER: No, not at all. I had a very stable household. My father was a dentist with a deep interest in history. And my mother was a school teacher. She taught Spanish in high school. I wouldn’t call it a conflictual environment at all.
ANDREW KEEN: So what led you to an interest in societies divided by conflict, shattered by conflict?
MARK DANNER: I suppose I was always interested in war and what it did to societies. When I read about history, it was often about wartime. There’s a little phrase that I remember from a Haitian political leader, I’ve reported on Haiti a lot, that looking at violence is like stripping bare the body, the better to place the stethoscope and feel what’s going on beneath the skin. And I think I always had the perception of that, even when I was quite a bit younger. From the time I was very young, my father used to tell me stories in the car as we were driving up into the Adirondacks. One of his favorites was Achilles, the story of Achilles versus Hector in front of the walls of Troy. He also did Samson and Delilah and David and Goliath. Those were the heart of his repertoire. So all of those very much about conflict, war, and individual conflict as well.
ANDREW KEEN: Was he telling you those stories as a warning, as a form of education, or simply as entertainment?
MARK DANNER: I think it’s a form of education. He had a great respect for classics and the Bible and, of course, the Iliad. But he also knew that a young, you know, a seven-year-old, six-year-old boy was very excited by stories of wartime and of conflict between the great giant Goliath and the little shepherd boy, David. He knew those stories would appeal to me. But he also, as I got older, because he had a great interest in history, he brought up other set pieces. He liked to tell me about the beginning of World War I, for example, when Gavrilo Princip, the assassination of the Archduke, and how that evolved very quickly and very almost mechanically into a conflict that ended up killing 20 million people. So as I got older, I got the benefit of his historical knowledge, which was very deep. He fought in World War II and commanded a gun crew on the deck of an aircraft carrier. And one day he told the story of a Zero skimming over the water and shooting at his gun crew and him almost being killed. And that it shocked him because he’d never realized before that they were trying to kill him. And from that moment on, he realized that he knew nothing about the war. He didn’t know why it was being fought. He didn’t know what the part he was playing in it was. And he began to voraciously read history and contemporary events. And he remained obsessed with these subjects for the rest of his life.
ANDREW KEEN: Did he present conflict in a tragic or a heroic sense?
MARK DANNER: I think really neither. He presented it as the advance of history. He certainly didn’t have a tragic view. I’d say he had a bit of cynicism when he looked at stories of heroism.
ANDREW KEEN: Well, he is a dentist, or was a dentist.
MARK DANNER: He was, indeed. But he became a dentist for very pragmatic reasons, about raising a family and rising out of the working class. But he didn’t have a heroic view of war at all.
ANDREW KEEN: What did he teach you, Mark, about the conflictual history of the United States where you were born? Was he born in the United States?
MARK DANNER: He was born in the United States. His grandfather was born in Germany. He taught me really that history is conflict, that the United States is quite violent, that beneath its overarching ideology that seems to draw the country together is a story of blood going back hundreds of years. So he was very much a realist, an unsentimental realist when it came to history, I’d say.
ANDREW KEEN: You were born in 58, so your childhood was spent in the turbulence of the various kinds of civil wars in America of the 1960s. You went to Harvard to study international politics and international conflict. Why not just focus on America?
MARK DANNER: Well, you know, I think that serendipity is very often underestimated when it comes to people’s careers. At least that’s been my experience. When I was a senior at Harvard, I wrote a long paper for Professor Stanley Hoffman on the Salvadoran Civil War. And that paper helped get me a job at the New York Review of Books, where I immediately was supplying material to Joan Didion, who was on her way to Salvador. So I was very much involved in U.S. involvements abroad. I mean, I grew up, as you pointed out, during the 60s, during the Vietnam War, and that, even though I was quite young, that interested me enormously. Although I would say that my intellectual and political coming of age was really the Watergate hearings of the early 70s, which I watched with enormous fascination, thinking in a way that this corruption is endemic to the United States, but also that isn’t it wonderful that it can be exposed in this way and that people can go to jail because of it. At the time, I thought Watergate was really a demonstration of the ability of the United States to cure itself, to heal itself. Now, many, many years later, I think that it was kind of a one-off that we haven’t…
ANDREW KEEN: Sorry about that. I’m just thinking about Watergate.
MARK DANNER: Now I think it’s a one-off that we won’t see it’s like again, that essentially this ability of the US to investigate crime and to heal from it is much, much diminished since the late 60s, early 70s.
ANDREW KEEN: You grew up then looking overseas, looking to El Salvador. You were inspired and horrified simultaneously, it seems, by Watergate. What about earlier chapters in American history, the conflict firstly of the Civil War and then of settler American relations with the indigenous peoples? These seem to define the conflictual foundations of American history. Were you aware of that when you were growing up?
MARK DANNER: Yeah, I was very much aware of it. My father was very interested in the Civil War. He talked about, he was interested largely in battles, in how Gettysburg was fought, for example, and he would talk about that to me. So I had a very early knowledge of the Civil War. I was very interested in movies as well, and watched Civil War movies. I was a great fan of John Ford, who really tells the American story, the Western story of the United States in somewhat idealized form, obviously. But I was deeply interested in that, and that interest has continued. I was interested when I was a kid in the West and its history, the Southwest, especially the Anasazi in New Mexico, that borderline between the Spanish conquest of the Southwestern U.S. where it meets the Anglo world. So I’ve been interested in that my whole life.
ANDREW KEEN: When you were growing up, both before and after you went to college, did you think of yourself as an American? Was the idea of American identity important to you? Did you learn what it meant to be an American?
MARK DANNER: I don’t think so. I would say that the idea of being an American, I took for granted. I think that I didn’t become very conscious of being American until I started traveling the world, which really happened during college. I took a year off and traveled throughout Europe, lived for a while in France, and I became much more interested in what it meant to be an American. That was also the year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the fall of the Shah in Iran. And those two events, I think, have completely bracketed my adult life when it comes to U.S. conflict, U.S. foreign policy, and what it means to be American, indeed. You know, from Afghanistan, you had these tendrils reaching out, which led to Al-Qaeda, which led to September 11th. And from the Iranian Revolution, you have tendrils reaching out that led to all sorts of chaos in the Middle East and led to the establishment of CENTCOM and really changed U.S. foreign policy. So I covered the Iraq War. I really see my adult life as kind of bracketed between those events.
ANDREW KEEN: You… You grow up then with a sense of… perhaps the Soviet menace, or at least the way in which the Soviet Union was presented as a menace in the United States. Did you other the Soviet Union in terms of your emerging American identity, even if it wasn’t very hard or strong?
MARK DANNER: Yeah, I think absolutely. I think most people who grew up during the Cold War thought of the Soviet Union as this kind of dark place. You know, it was a revelation to me years later when I visited St. Petersburg especially, what a gorgeous city it was. You know, how amazing the art was. What just a beautiful place it was. And I realized one of the reasons that was so shocking to me was I’d had this dark, dark idea of the Soviet Union and against it was juxtaposed the light of the United States. You know, democracy, free elections, freedom of assembly, all of these freedoms contrasted with the repression of the Soviet Union. Everything that Truman put forward in the Truman Doctrine, trying to universalize the Cold War in 1947, I think that’s a duality that people who grew up during the Cold War kind of bear inside them. Certainly, I think that I do, that the Cold War frame is still very strong when I look at the world.
ANDREW KEEN: Your friend Adam Hochschild, who has also appeared in this series, suggested that he learned to be an American when he was overseas with other Americans. That gave him a sense of his identity. Did you experience that as you began to travel?
MARK DANNER: I don’t think so. I mostly traveled in a solitary way, not with other Americans. So I don’t think the solidarity came of that. I think it really comes, or at least in my experience, it came of seeing yourself against these different backgrounds. I spent a lot of time when I was in college hitchhiking. I hitchhiked around Spain, I hitchhiked around Portugal, I hitchhiked around France and Holland. And this meant spending the day talking to people in cars and very often asking what their lives were like and having them ask what mine was like. And I think that identity, being an American, was much underlined during those experiences, you know, hitchhiking around these countries and being the American, you know, doing auto stop.
ANDREW KEEN: Did you have to apologize for being an American? About Nixon or…?
MARK DANNER: No, no, I never did. By the time I was doing it, we already were in the Carter administration. And no, I never felt the need to apologize. I mean, it’s interesting. You could be, and this is a pedestrian observation, but you could be very critical of the United States when you’re here and very often when others attack it, particularly foreigners, you feel the need to defend it. And I did find myself in that role sometimes, hitchhiking on the back roads of Spain or wherever, when people would ask me aggressive questions about the United States.
ANDREW KEEN: The shadow of Vietnam, of course, hung over the world as you were growing up. As you began to explore the world, how did people think about America?
MARK DANNER: I think they thought about it very differently than Americans thought about their country. I mean, Americans tend to see the United States through the ideology of America, that is a country born in freedom, that believes in equality, that believes in freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and that those ideas are what constitute the country, not kinship of blood. We also, I think, are taught to believe that the United States as an actor abroad is generally a benign force pushing for, for example, democracy, pushing for freedom. And of course, it’s a shock, you know, when you start to travel around and you find out that certainly during Vietnam-era America, the United States was thought of very differently. It was thought of as a hegemonic power, a colonial power, a power that had received the mantle of colonialism from the French in Vietnam and was exercising that power not only in Southeast Asia but elsewhere around the world, and was constructing during the Cold War, not simply the victory of freedom, which is how 1989, 1991 was styled in the United States, but the victory of Americanism, you know, the Americanization of the globe, which would be my favorite use of… I would use that term as opposed to globalization, that what we’re talking about is Americanization. And that was what the United States was doing during the Cold War, among other things. And I think most Americans aren’t aware of this.
ANDREW KEEN: Do you think that’s what took place in the 50 years between 1976 and 2026? The 50 years after the 200th anniversary of the country, this Americanization of the world?
MARK DANNER: Yes, but I think it was happening before then. I think it was happening beginning in the late 40s. It was happening, for example, in Europe when the United States intervened to keep the Communist Party out of power in Italy and France. It was happening in Indonesia when the United States intervened to overthrow Sukarno in the mid-60s. It was happening in Iran, for example. It was happening in Guatemala. It was happening certainly all over Latin America, where the United States exercised its sway. But if you travel in Asia now, you know, there are the malls, there are the escalators going up and these gorgeous temples of commerce and shopping. And this is very much the American idea of what capitalism is. Except in Asia, it’s much newer and more spankingly clean than it is at this point in the United States. But yeah, I think that was a great part of what was happening, that the American idea in many of these countries was winning. And indeed, it did win.
ANDREW KEEN: Is there an alternative version of capitalism to the American version?
MARK DANNER: Absolutely. There’s a kind of Leninist capitalism that you see exemplified in China. Of course, one could break that down and say it’s a capitalist economic system and a Leninist political system. I would say it constitutes one thing. It’s mixed together. And I think that we Americans generally assume that capitalism was a natural development and that as a country modernized, it would become… it would gain a capitalist economy, and that capitalist economy would bring with it democracy, so that these two things were impossible without… one was impossible without the other. And on that premise was built the welcoming China into the world economy in the early 90s. And I think the development of China has shown that it’s quite possible to have capitalism without political freedom as we know it. That’s a kind of Leninist capitalism that you see. There are other places where you see it playing out. I mean, Singapore was really the original model for it.
ANDREW KEEN: The way you presented it earlier as big shopping malls with escalators, you can have those in Leninist capitalism too. In fact, you do in Singapore.
MARK DANNER: No question. Absolutely. You do it in Singapore, you do it in China.
ANDREW KEEN: So what distinguishes the two?
MARK DANNER: You mean what distinguishes pure capitalism?
ANDREW KEEN: Well, American-style capitalism from Leninist capitalism. You get your nice malls and escalators, shiny escalators. What’s the difference?
MARK DANNER: I don’t think there is a great difference. I think the difference is the political context of those economic systems. And I think what’s been shown fairly clearly over the last 20 to 30 years is that the politics can be repressive at the same time as the economy can be relatively… relatively, I emphasize, open. But I would still say that what happened to the world during the Cold War was as much Americanization as it was political liberalization. But you’re quite right that you don’t need to have political freedom to have thriving capitalism.
ANDREW KEEN: Mark, if the world became Americanized in this period that you mostly spent your career, 76 to 2026, what about America itself? You traveled around the world. Is this the time where America became more cut off from the world, more ignorant of the outside world, happier with itself, more isolated, or is that unfair on the country?
MARK DANNER: I think there’s not a single answer to that question, because on the one hand, the United States became more integrated in the world economy. I mean, I use the example of Velveeta cheese, which used to be cheese in the United States. I mean, now you can get brie, you can get all kinds of different things, and when you talk about consumer culture, it’s become broader and more open. I think when you talk about political culture, it’s become narrower, and our political culture in the last 30-odd years has become degraded, I think. It’s a time of, it’s a kind of fin de siècle time of not only corrupt politics but weakening politics. The system is weakened. The faith of the public has collapsed in its politics. Conspiracy theories are not held by extremes but are held by, you know, in some cases, the majority of the country. So I think its politics have become increasingly fragile and fragmented in a way that was probably unpredictable in the early 60s. Perhaps it would have been predictable during Watergate, but we see a kind of corruption and lack of faith that I think is very striking now. The kind of collapse of political faith is shocking to me. But there it is.
ANDREW KEEN: An ongoing Watergate.
MARK DANNER: Yeah, I would say so, although very distinct from Watergate in that Watergate was a process that promised a healing and an ending and a tying up of the story around notions of justice. And in fact, people did go to jail. People did lose office. Nixon did resign. And the current situation is the opposite of that. I mean, there’s a, in some sense, a coup attempt, and it’s been impossible to punish those responsible for it. The system has shown itself to be unequal to the challenges facing it. And I think that also causes a lack of faith that’s dramatic and striking, and it has its own secondary political consequences.
ANDREW KEEN: Might confirm those stories of antiquity your father taught you, stories not having traditional straight narratives, linear narratives, and going around and around and around, stories without beginnings or ends.
MARK DANNER: That’s true, although one thinks of the Iliad, even though in some parts of it, you feel that it’s simply a tale of blood that will never end. There is a certain ending to it. The war doesn’t end, but you reach the end of Achilles’ sulking. So there’s even more of a feeling of progression in that most bloody story from antiquity than there is in our present circumstance, I think. I was going to say, the great comparison would be with the Oresteia, which shows the establishment of justice in Athens, which is kind of a hymn to political process, to a hymn to the advancement of man through politics. And we’re living, it seems, through the opposite now.
ANDREW KEEN: The narrative you present of the America of the last 50 years, is it something that you expected, something that confirms what you already thought, that you’re disappointed with or shocked with?
MARK DANNER: The narrative of the last 50 years, I think I would in no way have expected. When I look at it, I don’t look at it as going back 50 years. I would look at the roots of it in the 90s and the most obvious sign of it in the election of 2000 and then the collapse of 2008, the election of 2008, which led not only to a great deal of progress and racial progress, you would think by having a black president but also led to incredible hate, incredible resentment, so indeed brought up a kind of racial resentment and made it a vivid factor in our politics in a way that hadn’t been true, I think, since the 60s. And then indeed the pandemic, you know, we’ve had a series of, and the election, obviously, of Donald Trump. I mean, I think historians will look back at this period and see this series of events as tightly concentrated and very meaningful, leading to the collapse of public faith. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted it myself, but I’m very strongly aware of it, and it starts to become more comprehensible the more you look back in history, I think.
ANDREW KEEN: Is there a dominant figure of the age? Reagan, perhaps?
MARK DANNER: You know, I think Reaganism is, if he were going from that point in 76, he’s the dominant president. I think that’s absolutely true. I mean, one thing, you asked what I expected in 76, and I’d say, you know, then we seemed to be in the backwash of the 60s. Liberalization, liberal ideals, sexual liberation, social, cultural liberation. It seemed to be this ongoing process of liberalization, which made it a great time to be alive. But in fact, it was the clarion call of a conservative era. I mean, Reagan is certainly the most consequential president we’ve had in my lifetime. He completely changed the overarching narrative of American politics, and no one since has changed it back. I mean, they may well do if Biden is reelected. Who knows? But I would say if you had to pick a dominant figure of the age, I’d say it would be Ronald Reagan. I think if Trump were to be reelected, he might be the candidate as dominant figure of the age. And I say that with some trepidation.
ANDREW KEEN: Mark, you’re a foreign policy guy. You spent the last 50 years traveling around the world observing one kind of American disaster or other overseas. Is this a period where America has declined in power around the world? Does it reflect, will historians report that it reflects the end of America as the sole power or perhaps even a great power in the world?
MARK DANNER: I’d say this is certainly a period of relative American decline. I think there’s no question about that. The US reached the apogee of its power in the early 90s. If you consider its power to be military authority, it was unmatched on the world scene with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We thought, politicians certainly thought, that we were welcoming in a so-called New World Order, in the words of George H.W. Bush, in which the rules-based international order would finally have a chance to operate as those who planned the United Nations had intended. But in fact, nothing like that happened during the 90s. We had really, in retrospect, an age of genocide, which we had an enormous war in Europe, in the Balkans, in which we had a genocide in Rwanda that really continues today as a war in Central Africa. But the United States certainly was the world’s greatest power militarily. And that relative advantage has certainly diminished dramatically. Even though the United States retains an incredible capability to blow things up, it has shown itself in the last 30 years to be utterly incapable of constructing a political order to put in place of what it destroys. And the Iraq war was the great demonstration of that. Or more broadly speaking, the war on terror was, looking back on it, a catastrophe, not only in the Middle East but possibly throughout the rest of the world as well, for American power, for American credibility, for the reputation of the United States. And, you know, secondarily for its military authority, because its political authority is diminished so much as a result of the decisions it made in those years. So, yeah, I would say the United States has definitely declined in relative power. And this is, I haven’t even spoken about the rise of China and other things that would be called up by that question.
ANDREW KEEN: Mark, you made your name originally writing about the Balkans, the Balkan wars. They seem a long time ago. Do they have any relevance to the 2020s?
MARK DANNER: I think the Balkan wars are relevant when I think of them as a demonstration of what the broader world is willing or not willing to do. The United Nations had passed a genocide convention, Convention Against Genocide, and when genocide was clearly occurring in the Balkans, the consequence of that genocide convention was that the leading nations, especially the United States, simply lied about whether genocide was taking place because people in the State Department feared that if we declared the Balkan War as a genocide, then the United States might be compelled to actually do something. And that denial of genocide continued during Rwanda when the United States was heard to say that acts of genocide were taking place, but not actually genocide itself. And the State Department spokesman was asked, how many acts of genocide does it take to make a genocide? And she, of course, declined to answer that question. So I think in retrospect, one of the significance is the largest one to me of the Balkan Wars was it shows what the world community was willing to countenance, even in Europe, even a few hundred miles from Paris, was willing to countenance on its television screens every night without doing anything or doing very little, I should say, to stop it. And that problem of humanitarian intervention continued to be vivid up until the War on Terror, when humanitarian intervention was used by the United States to justify, among other things, its invasion of Iraq. We’re coming in here to remove the dictator, even though the dictator had been perfectly agreeable to the United States for the last 20 or 30 years when he was serving U.S. interests. So the Balkan Wars really gave the lie, it seems to me, to the notion that the U.S. saw its role as international, an international support of human rights. It showed in the war between national security concerns and humanitarian concerns, national security concerns not only would always win, but doing nothing would win. And that’s after the Cold War.
ANDREW KEEN: Where were you on September the 11th, 2001?
MARK DANNER: I was in California, and it was very frustrating because I very much wanted to be in New York, but I watched the towers come down from Berkeley, California. A very, very frustrating place to be. I felt myself isolated because I think of myself very much as a New Yorker and felt those attacks very strongly.
ANDREW KEEN: Were you surprised with the way in which the Bush administration used the 9/11 events to go to war in Iraq?
MARK DANNER: I wasn’t really surprised. I knew that there had been a strong interest on the Republican side and even the neocon Democratic side to take out Saddam Hussein that went back 15 years. So the move to invade and occupy Iraq did not surprise me that much. What did surprise me was how many of my friends and political sympathizers supported the invasion. That very many people who would have thought of themselves on the left or as liberals were full-throated supporters of the invasion. I first was surprised at that in the August of 2002 when I was at the Telluride Film Festival with Christopher Hitchens and we had dinner and I discovered that he was a big supporter of the invasion which hadn’t even, of course, been announced yet, but he was part of this Washington world that was readying the country for the Iraq invasion. And he was only the first of many, many people who were on the liberal left, various points on the liberal left, who supported the invasion, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Tom Friedman, George Packer. I mean, one could go down the list. So that surprised me. But that the administration wanted to do it, I wasn’t surprised about. Although, in retrospect, we’ve discovered that Donald Rumsfeld and the Secretary of Defense brought up that invasion in the very first national security meeting after the attacks. That is surprising to me. But they had the idea in their bonnet from the first moment.
ANDREW KEEN: What do you think it tells us that Hitchens and many others on what you call the liberal left were supportive of this ultimately catastrophic war? You were one of the few people, perhaps on the left or certainly the liberal left, who argued against them.
MARK DANNER: Yes. What does it tell us? I spent a lot of time trying to understand this and I thought, it tells us different things about different people, but I thought in general there was a desire to be seen to think creatively and freely. That is, not to be stuck in these old nostrums of the peaceniks, to not go to war for an idea. And then people would shape the war and believe what they heard about it according to their own ideas. You had a lot of people who were taken in by this idea that this is a humanitarian war, a war to spread freedom, coming as it was from people who had done nothing to supplant Saddam Hussein when he was committing genocide against the Kurds, for example. They were in power, but they did nothing against him then. But I think people in the liberal sphere were very willing to accept the word of the administration, the Bush administration at the time, that this was an effort to spread freedom and that freedom would spread throughout the Middle East. And, you know, even the administration didn’t. There were people in it who believed this. But I think as an administration, they did not fully believe this at all, that this was a war undertaken in realist terms, that they felt they needed a permanent footprint in the Middle East. They felt that, as Henry Kissinger said, we have to humiliate them the way they tried to humiliate us, that we needed to have American tanks rumbling down the streets of a major Arab capital to restore our prestige, to restore deterrence. I think that was at the heart of what they wanted to do. But many of those on the liberal side who supported the war, and there were a lot of them, I’m talking about in the liberal intelligentsia, really believed they supported it for other reasons, reasons that were raised by the administration but were really not at the heart of the reason that the United States invaded and occupied Iraq. So I think there was a lot of self-deception going on. And I think you can read it in the documents of that period.
ANDREW KEEN: So there you were with your interest, your lifelong interest in conflict, and suddenly America gets into this never-ending conflict in the Middle East, in the Middle East itself, which as the more America got involved, the more conflictual it seemed to be. Iraq, civil war in Iraq, and civil war in Syria. What do you make of this American obsession over the last 30 years with the Middle East and with the attempts to end conflict, which only seem to compound the conflict in the zone?
MARK DANNER: Well, I think there are really two answers to that question. The first has to do with simple national security interests that the United States in the 50s built up a kind of security architecture in the Middle East that started to collapse in the late 60s. 70s with the invasion by the Soviet Union of Afghanistan and then much more by the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The Shah of Iran had been the exemplar of the so-called Nixon Doctrine where the United States would arm allies to support American interests. And it was particularly true in the Middle East. And once that regime not only collapsed, but became the absolute evil avatar of the United States, there was a kind of security panic. What do we do? And that was the creation of CENTCOM, which hadn’t existed before, and a major arming of the Middle East. You know, the Fifth Fleet, you had this major move into the Middle East, into the Gulf, especially Persian Gulf or Arabian Gulf, which hadn’t been on the U.S. radar screen before. And it had to do with traditional national security reasons, notably the export of oil through the Straits of Hormuz, because after the Islamic Revolution you had that dividing line between Iran on one side of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, the key U.S. ally on the other side. The second part of that answer really has to do with incompetence, with the incompetence of the United States national security bureaucracy. I mean, if you look at our policies in the greater Middle East for the last 30 years, they’ve been near catastrophic. I mean, the Iraq war is only the most obvious of these. The import of the Iraq war was to take a country that had been offsetting Iran which is Iraq, which was led by Sunnis and offsetting the Shiite regime in Iran and to make it an ally of Iran. Right now, you can stretch a pencil mark from Iran all the way to Israel, get Iranian allies from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon, and that is largely engineered by the United States, by US foreign policy, by deciding, I mean, as a strategic move, the Iraq invasion was a catastrophe and you don’t even have to call it incompetent, you can, you know, even if it had somehow succeeded as a tactical endeavor, it still would have been a strategic catastrophe because you’re creating a Shia regime in Iraq. So there’s a degree of incompetence there, an ideological incompetence, perhaps you could call it, that goes back a long while. And the other singular case of incompetence has to do with Israel and the fact that the United States has essentially let the Israelis have their way when it comes to not resolving the so-called Middle East conflict. It’s been 57 years of occupation and there are now 700,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And only now is the United States declaring a firm support for the two-state solution when they have no partner on the other side, when the Israelis are not willing to even give lip service to this as they did before. And this indulgence of the Israelis has to do with American domestic politics. I mean, it’s a complicated issue and there are a lot of events to go over during that time, but we can see the catastrophic consequences of that and the attacks of October 7th in the war in Gaza, a war in which 34,000 Palestinians had been killed, and now the almost war, almost wider war in the region between the United States and Iran, perhaps. So all of this has deep roots, but it doesn’t speak well for U.S. foreign policymaking. I mean, after all, The United States has fought three wars in the 21st century in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in Libya, and arguably it’s lost all three of them.
ANDREW KEEN: Any coincidence, Mark, that some of the great supporters of the war, liberals who you’ve argued with, men like Leon Weaseltier, David Frum, maybe even Christopher Hitchens, they’re all strong Zionists?
MARK DANNER: No, I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think their concern about Israel enters into their broader foreign policy view. I don’t think it explains it completely, but it’s certainly partly there. There’s—I wouldn’t call it a coincidence at all, and I wouldn’t call the fact that the invasion of Iraq was so supported by the neocon faction both in government and out—that’s not a coincidence either. I mean, there was a thought that this would secure Israel. I mean, there were even, at a certain point before the invasion, I remember people talking about renovating or reinstating the railway from Baghdad to Haifa.
ANDREW KEEN: Probably a poor wolf of its fantasy.
MARK DANNER: Yes, I think it was.
ANDREW KEEN: America has always been accused of many things ever since its inception, but mostly not incompetence. You’ve talked about the remarkable incompetence of American foreign policy in these wars in the Middle East over the last 20 years. Is it just that all the smart people in America over the last 25 years have gone into tech and made fortunes and the dimmer ones went into foreign policy, state service, academia?
MARK DANNER: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s any lack of intelligence in the American foreign policy establishment. It’s usually not the explanation for mistakes of that kind, that people simply aren’t smart enough. It’s usually very smart people doing very stupid things. One of the stupidest premises of all of this has to do with military force. And the US foreign policy establishment has always, it seems to me, overestimated, exaggerated the value of military power and has misconceived what can actually be done with military power. I mean, when you don’t use it, military power gives you something called military authority. That is, you’re able to exert your power without violence, but simply because you have that capability of violence looming in the background. Everything changes when you actually use that power. You can destroy things. You cannot build things with military power. You cannot do politics with military power. And the U.S. doesn’t have a colonial background. I mean, it obviously had colonies, it had the Philippines, but it doesn’t have the depth of knowledge that would have, for example, made the Iraq occupation a success. There was nobody within the State Department or within the Pentagon who knew what they were doing in Iraq. I mean, it was utter chaos. I went into the precincts of the Coalition Provisional Authority, I remember it vividly, and finding these young kids from Washington, these 20-year-olds running around in chinos and button-down shirts with clipboards. They had the idea they were running Iraq. They weren’t running Iraq.
ANDREW KEEN: They hadn’t read some of your old teachers at Harvard, Joe Nye on soft power? They hadn’t, you said, or I’m asking whether they perhaps missed that reading list.
MARK DANNER: I don’t know. I think they probably did miss it. A lot of them hadn’t really even been trained in international politics to begin with. They were people who came from the Hill in the United States. I should add, they weren’t the decision-makers, but… Paul Bremer is an intelligent man. He’s not stupid. He’s a man of some experience. He did very stupid things when he arrived in Iraq. He dismantled the army, disbanded it. That was profoundly stupid, and people told him that. I mean, there’s a whole incident that bears talking about—it’s complicated—but they did very, very foolish things. And I think the United States has suffered under the illusion, and this goes back to the ’60s, that its military power can solve complex political problems.
ANDREW KEEN: Did it—coming back to your American identity, has this period made you ashamed to be an American?
MARK DANNER: No, I wouldn’t say I’m ashamed to be an American. Sometimes I’m embarrassed.
ANDREW KEEN: What’s the difference between being embarrassed and being ashamed?
MARK DANNER: Well, I think shame is a much deeper emotion that cuts very close to the heart, to your being as an individual. I think embarrassment is a more superficial feeling of simply why isn’t the country getting it, you know, getting it? Why isn’t there a perception of how the rest of the world perceives us? And I think there’s a major problem in that area. But I do think at the end of the day that this phenomenon of when you have a hammer in your hand, you make everything look like a nail, is very much a problem of the United States when it comes to use of the military. And we’ve seen it again and again, repeatedly.
ANDREW KEEN: Meanwhile, with all these foreign disasters overseas, we have, in the period between 2000 and 2024, the rise increasingly of a more aggressive kind of populism. Is there a connection between this populism and the decline of American credibility overseas and these disastrously expensive, tragic, absurd wars?
MARK DANNER: No question about it. There’s a very tight connection. I mean, Donald Trump, one of his most memorable precepts of foreign policy was that the Iraq war was a disaster. Now, and he blamed Bush for it and the Bushes, as he would put it. Now, he claimed that he was against it from the beginning, which appears to be historically not true. But I think it doesn’t matter. It’s his perception that the Iraq War was deeply unpopular and was for many Americans a demonstration of the stupidity of its ruling class that he, in his cunning political way, seized on. That’s why he argued against the Iraq War. He perceived that not only was it deeply unpopular, which was obvious, but among many of his so-called base, and this is working class, lower middle class Americans, often rural or from small towns, from the heartland. These were the people who knew people who’d gone over to fight in Iraq, who had lost limbs, who had suffered terrible brain injuries and other things, and who felt very strongly that the elite of the country spent its time sending its working class to fight and die in futile wars. So I think Trump correctly perceived that and took a position which was pretty much unheard of in the Republican Party against the foreign policy establishment, which, of course, is bipartisan. You know, it’s Republican and Democratic. When he was in office, he called them dummies in a famous meeting in the tank in the Pentagon. He feels the whole system of alliances, which undergirds American foreign policy, is a kind of scandal and is a swindle. And he’s believed that since the late ’90s. He put ads in the New York Times and other New York newspapers saying that in 1989. So he’s believed this for a long time. I’m not saying he’s right, but it has a great resonance.
ANDREW KEEN: We are not saying he’s wrong either.
MARK DANNER: Well, I think he and I happen to agree when it comes to Iraq. That’s certainly true. I certainly don’t agree with him when it comes to NATO. I think NATO has been enormously helpful to the United States. I do think that NATO shouldn’t have been expanded in the way it was, and I argued against it at the time, against NATO expansion. In fact, I debated the senator who was the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden, at the time, against NATO expansion. So I think that NATO should be much different than it is today, that the United States made a terrible error in expanding it right up to the Russian border, which, in effect, the United States tried to do. But I disagree with them that NATO is simply a swindle. In fact, I disagree with a lot of his foreign policy views.
ANDREW KEEN: I know you should bring up Joseph Biden. Does he stand for somehow encapsulate everything that’s gone wrong with American foreign policy over the last 50 years?
MARK DANNER: Well, he certainly stands for the tradition of American foreign policy over the last 50 years. There’s no question about that. And he was a supporter of the Iraq war. So the consensus in Washington has been all-encompassing, just about. One of the reasons why the Iraq War, its inception, was so frustrating, one of the reasons why I debated against it before the beginning and throughout the beginning of the Iraq War, was because there was a consensus in Washington that all of the Democrats who had voted against the so-called First Gulf War in 1990 decided they weren’t going to make that mistake again and they were going to support the Iraq War. Anybody who had serious presidential ambitions on the Democratic side supported the Iraq War. So there were marchers in the street, sometimes as many as a million Americans who were against it, at the same time as the elite was in a bipartisan way for it. And it’s one of the reasons why I think the press got it so wrong in the run-up to the Iraq war as well, that they didn’t have any reliable leakers from the opposing side among the elite.
ANDREW KEEN: Two final questions, Mark. As America gears up for its 250th anniversary in July 2026, what should Americans be celebrating and what should they be mourning? Easy question.
MARK DANNER: It’s not an easy question. I think it’s very hard at the moment to think of what the United States should be celebrating. I think it’s a perilous political time in the US. I think you now have almost half the country that believes that the last presidential election was stolen when there’s pretty much no evidence to support that. You’ve got this widespread belief in conspiracy theories. You’ve got on one side a kind of noxious populism led by a charlatan and the other side a kind of exhausted liberalism that has been successful in some areas but is not creative and it is run by geriatrics. This is not a very encouraging situation, I would say. So I think that we’re in a perilous position in the United States right now. And when you think of the number of errors, and we haven’t even spoken about torture, we haven’t spoken about drone killings, or Afghanistan.
ANDREW KEEN: We have to do another show on that.
MARK DANNER: We haven’t spoken about the fact that the United States tortured prisoners under color of law and still has 30 of them in Guantanamo that it can’t prosecute because they’ve been tortured. Astonishing reality. And who thinks about Guantanamo? Just about nobody. So I think it’s—I hate to be unremittingly grim, but I think this is rather a grim time. And the populist urge, I think, comes out of the grimness of the time. The difficulties of the last 30-odd years have produced a kind of populism that’s very dangerous. But it didn’t come out of thin air. It came out of stupid decisions, ill-founded decisions, and national decline.
ANDREW KEEN: So you haven’t given America a very good report card. What does it need to concentrate on, Mark, in the next 50 years, between 2026 and 2076?
MARK DANNER: Well, there is… I don’t want to be a Pollyanna, and I think I haven’t been up to now, but there is an American ideology that if the country would adhere to it, would be a bit more faithful to it, offers a kind of future. I think the vision, the multilateral vision that the United States put in place after the Second World War that’s embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the United Nations, the vision of international law, and even, I would say, George H.W. Bush’s vision of a new world order, all these things are promising. They’re not silly. They’re not simply bits of propaganda to which the US acts hypocritically behind the scenes. They’re real ideological accomplishments. The problem has been that the country, when push comes to shove, is unwilling to adhere to them. It’s unwilling to stand up for the ideals that it professes. One could conceive a different past in which the United States, when the beginning of rumblings in the Balkans started in 1991, used its enormous power that had been bolstered by the Gulf War to essentially tell Milosevic to not act. And I don’t think it would have taken a full-on war by the United States to stop the Bosnian war. I don’t think it would have taken a full-on war for the United States to have stopped the genocide in Rwanda. I think these things actually would have been possible in not just the United States, but a multilateral force. And we proved unwilling to do that for various reasons that seemed important at the time, but now seem distressingly weak. I think if we could adhere to some of these precepts that we’ve put forth so eloquently over the last 50 years, 70 years really, because we’re talking about the post-war vision that was born in Nuremberg and that was incorporated into the United Nations, that vision still exists. The United States simply has to stand by it or be willing to stand by it in a way that it hasn’t been willing up to now.
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