YouSaid · the spoken record

James Rubin

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2024-02-26
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2024-02-26
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  1. “It's true, it's pretty powerful, and it's a different time. America doesn't have the relative power. Today, that it has then.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I do too Was the highest, I believe it was the height of Western civilization. I mean, think about it we all work together. We had a mission that we didn't have to do anything about. It was the Kosovo Albanians were being threatened by the Serbs. We could have let it happen. We work together for a moral purpose because we could do it and we did it well. It worked. When we go to Albania and Kosovo, you know, you see these people, most of whom probably would have been dead. And that's very powerful stuff. And for me, that was still the highlight of my career.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And then a time came that you paid off the debt and the toll booth went away and the bridge was still there. And we need that kind of vision that we don't have anymore. And that's why it's so hard to build infrastructure in America. That's what I learned.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Who help prevent a genocide in Kosovo? You and I played our part in that. And he said, and now the New York Port Authority, I mean, what happened to you? And he still can make me laugh about it. But I did learn something. And I learned that one of the problems with our infrastructure is an unwillingness to play tolls that our infrastructure has to be paid through tolls. And the politicians want to ask to raise toll prices. And our infrastructure, you know, port authority was responsible for the bridges and the airport. The building of the New World Trade Center and all that stuff. And I watched these politicians and leaders try to figure out a way to build things without asking the user to pay any money. And when you look back at all the bridges and tunnels that were built, they were built through tolls.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “You know, it's funny, Alistair knows the prime minister of Albania's name is Eddie Rama. And when I met him for the first time properly about a year ago in Albania, and he heard that I had worked for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, remember, he had known me from Albania as the Kosovo helper of Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think the democratic world is seeing the threat from Russia and China very starkly and is responding extremely well. If we were on the radio two years ago, would we have predicted that Germany would send leopard tanks into Ukraine? We wouldn't have. So I think Japan doubling its defense budget. No, we wouldn't have. So I think that's why I get a little defensive, I admit it, Rory, about the doom and gloom about democracies.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Have Asian allies working with us on the Russia problem. Never happened before. And meanwhile, in China, you could go down the list of the problems that they're having economically. And I would simply point out that the alternative of having Plato's wise men of nine people sitting around the table deciding everything is a fantasy. I think democracy definitely has had its ups and downs and people obviously overplayed their hands after 1989 and thinking there was the end of history and all that. I agree with all that. But nor is it fair to say that the democratic world is shrinking that much. I think it's getting stronger.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, that was a common theme about, I would say, about five, ten years ago when the rise of China first happened, people would say, look at that Chinese government system. They can sit down and make long-range plans. And a small group of people can sit and do long-range planning and then implement it without the messiness of democracies. And now we're seeing that the PRC, broadly speaking, overreached in many different respects. President Biden has found strength in Japan, in Germany, in France. We have European allies working with us on the China problem. Never happened before.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “He'd say that this is the, he had some phrase like my daughter or something in the bathroom. He would say that people would ask the United States back then, what were we going to do about something that happened 10,000 miles away and why we let it happen? When we obviously had no control over it, we obviously weren't responsible for it. And there was probably nothing we could do about it. And yet we're now facing a world in which Russia, China, Iran in certain cases are picking these three crises, which clearly were not started in Washington and blaming the United States. And so that's the information war at its most pure sense. Then there's all the secret, covert stuff. And then there's our democracies debating what the right course of action is for the United States or Britain or whatever.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “America's blamed by communist China and Russia. And then from a defense intellectual like you, you know, I'm trying to fight a war on multiple fronts. And it gets pretty tricky. And so I was probably a little sensitive. But Sandy Berger used to say, I remember this line, it was great. And you remember Sandy.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “American companies are making money of it. All the Russian arguments are repeated by the Chinese government. Same with Gaza. We know whether you like the Israelis response or you don't like the Israeli response to October 7th. This war began on October 7th when Hamas invaded Israel and slaughtered a thousand plus people in this gruesome way and the Israelis responded. For the Russians, for the Chinese official sources, they're blaming the United States. And it kind of reminds me, and Alistair's and I are closer in age, you might remember the Republicans used to call the Democratic Party the Blame America First Crowd. And that's what we're dealing with in the world. And Rory, I will confess I was probably a little defensive and sensitive when you try to assign, I don't believe that what America decides is as definitive to what happens in the world as you seem to think. So when...”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “That's a fair point. Rory Stewart, I agree with you. Completely and utterly. But no, seriously, the information war has many parts to it. I think we should all acknowledge that in... Major crises that have happened. We've had three biggies. We've had COVID. We've had Ukraine, and now we've had Gaza. It's been troubling that Russia and China official documents, official spokesmen, official media, have united in blaming all three on the United States. So when COVID started, the Chinese government blamed COVID on an American sportsman or some chemical made some story up. We know it was from Wuhan. We don't know whether it was a lab leak or an animal, but we know it was from Wuhan. And they and the Russians both blamed the United States. Ukraine happens. Russia blames America for the war in Ukraine. And Russia is joined by China in the information space on Ukraine, whether it's biological weapons, America's responsibility or...”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Lot more than we are, Alistair, and that's what I'm doing here. The purpose I basically figured out I have two parts of my job. One is to expose these operations when we can. We can work within our government to find things out uniquely and early and expose them. And we did that in Africa. We did that in the Western Hemisphere. And the second is to organize and galvanize. And by that I mean to sensitize our leaders in all the places we've been talking about to this danger so that they can use their own tools. And that's what this framework to fight disinformation, this document that's like building a coalition that each country will treat its information domain as sovereign and ensure that when Russia and China try through their communist party mechanism or through Kremlin operations, intelligence services, that they will choose to insist on labeling or exposure. That's the coalition building that I'm doing.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I'll give you a good example. So let's say you find a journalist who calls himself a journalist in Bulgaria, and they are repeating Russian lies. Flat out inventions that could lead Bulgaria to vote for politicians who would pull them out of NATO or not support Ukraine. Well, in our system, we can't sanction such a person. For having views we find abhorrent, that's the limitation that freedom of the press imposes on us. We can call them out. We could have try to say we disagree and why and let people know about it, but we can't impose a penalty where that politician we find is paid by the Russians to say that, meaning it's a maiden, the Kremlin covert operation through that politician, then we can use the powers of prosecution and exposure and disruption to damage the ability to get it.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Exactly. What I'm trying to do is alert the political leaders in Europe, in Asia, and ultimately around the world to the dangers of disinformation, that it's not just a communications problem. It's a national security threat in each of their countries. I'd like them to think of their information domain as sovereign. Way territory is sovereign, and if Russia and China are interfering in their information domain without labeling, that would be a covert influence into their sovereignty.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I have a job, it's to fight Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation. That's what I work on. I don't comment on the political class and their pluses and minuses, except with respect to foreign policy decisions, as we've discussed. So I just don't know what I could possibly say to that.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Look, the simplest thing is translations. If there are hundreds of languages in the world that you have AI translating and applying cultural sensitivity to, and you're the Russians, and you want to use an information operation, and you don't need 500 people to translate just into this part of Africa, and you can use a machine, and it can be culturally sensitive to all those places. The dangers of disinformation are multiplied significantly. AI can tailor disinformation to individuals, have a particular strain of thought that this person is particularly vulnerable to, and that can be used by the Russians and the Chinese. I can go on.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I think I deserve a fair shot at responding to the word naive after working in this field for 25 years Worked very hard on subjects that are very, very difficult. And Naive Tay is something I don't ever remember being called until today. And so, with what I actually said about the AI companies was, isn't it interesting that this time around, in response to Alistair's point, they are more willing to be regulated and have come together and asked to be regulated, as opposed to the last time around when they refused and have caused, I think we can all agree, social media has had negative effects in the information domain around the world. So I was merely pointing out a trend, not saying that everything was wonderful.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “The battleground is largely in the rest of the world that I'm fighting this information war essentially. And the Europeans have tools that the United States officials like me don't have. And so when we put in this framework to fight disinformation, social media companies must ensure compliance with their terms of service. That's the whole ballgame. How much effort will they make to comply with their terms of service? Will they spend the money? Will they buy the translators? Will they help do it? And Europeans are in, frankly, a better position than I am to make that happen.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Let me give you an example why all is not lost, as Rory was implying. The world is not chicken little isn't coming. In the AI area, the latest technology, the companies that are making them are asking to be regulated because they know that the last time around they didn't do it right. They've united and formed consortia to ensure that this time around they do better. And I think in AI there's some ideas for ensuring that there's watermarking, that people know what's AI and what's real. And I still use the word real versus AI. But again, government is slow. In America, we have freedom of the press and we have no regulation of the social media companies. In Europe, they have the Digital Services Act. And so I've been working with Europeans because I believe that”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “When people imagined the CIA was responsible for killing John Kennedy because he was going to be against the Vietnam War. And so conspiracy theories have been a problem in America for a long, long time. And it's not new.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “It would enable the people of Egypt to go to Tahrir Square and talk to each other that would enable the Arab Spring was enabled by Facebook. But I don't believe that the social media tools in the end are the decisive factors. And I don't believe that when we figure out a way, it will take time. It's every new technology has a period where it causes pollution, essentially, and causes damage. And then you have to figure out a way to minimize the damage. I think the decline in support for authority has been going on since Watergate, essentially. Prior to that in the 50s, people believed their anchors, they believed their presidents, the killing of John Kennedy probably did more to ruin authority than anything social media has ever done. That was when conspiracy theories began, really, in the modern era.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Sure, that's a problem. Big problem in the Western democracies. And what's ironic is that the social media that was created by Americans in Silicon Valley, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all of them. And we thought it was a tool to spread democracy and instead it's being used against us, as Rory puts it, authority, what I would simply say is, you know, in the early days, it was thought as a democratization tool.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Makes me want to prevent the Russians from deterring Africans from getting their needed health care. And that's one of the most successful programs the United States has ever had. And being able to reveal the Russian attempt to discredit it was one of the highlights of my time in government.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Give you an example. They have a conference in West Africa and they bring in a bunch of local people they hire and intelligence officers posing as journalists. And they have a meeting in which it says dengue fever was started by U.S. healthcare. And then they get one little story and one little newspaper or one little radio report or one little African outlet says something. And then they use their tools to spread that story regionwide. We were able to stop it. And to get to the point, and then I will shut up and answer any other question, but this is important. Think about what they were doing. They were dissuading Africans from getting health care that could save their lives just to engage in geopolitical warfare with the United States. They were using Africans as fodder. Now, as an American, the same values that I put in Bosnia that made me want to help the people of Sarajevo, that made me actually believe that America should intervene.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Absolutely not, but we can work with the Bulgarians so that they impose rules requiring labeling. And it becomes the minimum standard. So we've developed this framework to fight disinformation, which is essentially a list of rules that are not laws, that are ways to ensure truth in labeling. But let me get to the Africa thing because it's really interesting. It's the ultimate cruelty. So we were able to reveal in the early stages of Russian intelligence operation in Africa, which was intended to dissuade Africans from believing in the value of Western medical care. You know, this is PEPFAR, the program that saved millions of lives. We've spent $100 billion in Africa, the America that Rory thinks is so disrespected in the world. $100 billion to save African lives. And the Russians are jealous of the respect that we have in Africa because of the spent money we spent and the lives we've saved.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Or a maiden, the PRC stamp on information. So when somebody sees a story, let's just start with Bulgaria and biological weapons, you're in Bulgaria, you speak Russian, and you see on your screen, whether it's social media, old media, new media, the US has biological weapons in Ukraine. You might or might not believe it. Especially if it's in Russian and you speak Russian. But if you saw Russia says the U.S. has biological weapons in Ukraine, you know you're getting the Kremlin point of view, and I think it would have less power. So labeling, putting a label on it, I think is the one safeguard we ought to have to prevent the Russians and the Chinese from doing...”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Good. Well, thank you for getting back to my job instead of defending America for the last 25 years, which is, you know, depending on which president is easier or harder. The disinformation challenges, the hardest thing I've ever worked on. I worked on arms control and the Balkans, all these interventions we discussed. This is harder than all of that because we're trying to maintain a free and open information system in which the vulnerable still have a chance to get their views heard. And you don't want to be a censor. You don't want to block freedom of the press. You don't want to decide what's true or not true. But you still want to be able to stop the Russians and Chinese from exploiting this incredibly open information environment. It's hard. It's really hard. So after a year of working on this, what I've kind of figured out, the one thing we can do is try to make sure there's a made in the Kremlin stamp on information.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And the use of you here is interesting. We're trying to have a conversation, and you're assigning to me the role of explaining every single government policy going back 25 years and throwing out phrases like what the world thinks of you. And I just don't think it's constructive. I think we should pick the issue, discuss it, either agree or disagree. But to just throw a bunch of things together, MBZ and MBS are dissing the United States. That is flat wrong.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “What does that mean? You mean opposing Flying a few cruise missiles in what were you for? Just throwing a few in, like Trump did.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Well, as it happens, I wrote a public article about Syria that advocated the use of military power to work with the Turks to do something about it. And so on that one, if you're saying you were actually in favor of using military power in Syria, we might agree. If you were actually for that, I don't know whether you were for that. Maybe you can tell us, were you?”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “They would like to describe them as dismissing the United States means that you're operating at a very facile level behind the scenes when the door is shut, when the diplomats are talking and working together, the two men that you mentioned, MBS and MBZ, which you called, are dismissive of the United States, that's not what I'm seeing. And I think for you to say that, it's just a little flippant.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “I need to stop there because you can't just throw these things out. What Muhammad, the three names that you've talked about are begging the United States to get involved in the Middle East peace process. The three men that you mentioned are working every day with the United States asking us to do more, wanting us to do more.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Countries. And the diplomats that I meet with believe the United States has done a very, very good job in managing the U.S.-China relationship and leading the world to build AUKUS, to build the Quad, to build the trilateral with the South Koreans and the Asians. And for you to just say there's a feeling in the world that the United States is retreating, I think is overstating it just a wee bit.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Rory, it must be nice to be able to declare what the feeling of the world is. You said there's a feeling in the world. How do you assess that? I'm actually in the diplomatic And I think what you just said is nonsense that the United States is retreating from the world. Yes, they would prefer some of them to have more free trade agreements and less of a use of trade. And what you've missed here is that there's a new development in the global world. It's called China. And you've assigned the trade policy solely to politics and ignored this fundamental problem that we face in terms of the Chinese role in the world. And the trade issues that you're addressing are mostly about what Jake Sullivan has called the small yard and the high fence. And so to just pick one of Jake Sullivan's remarks and miss the other one, you've left out a billion people. And the leader of that billion people country that we believe in a system, authoritarianism, and is trying to change the world to be a good place for authoritarian.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I think President Biden has shown that he believes in American leadership. He uses the phrase indispensable nation. He has his own formulations for it. He has rejected the views that you're describing in building a coalition on Ukraine, in building a coalition vis- ⁇-vis China. He's rejected the isolationism that you're describing. And has won widespread support in Congress and the country for his foreign policy. You're focused on trade, and I would ask you to separate trade from the larger issues of American leadership. If you're going to push them together, it's a very tough conversation because it needs to be disaggregated. Trade has been globalization, the perception that free trade only benefited the rich is widely held in Europe and in the United States. But that doesn't mean that American leadership and globalization, whatever that means, needs to be affected. It's a trade issue.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Aucus, these are the terms of art of the diplomats in Asia. And that's been done by President Biden because he knows how to build alliances. That's what he's done in Ukraine. That's what he's done in competing with China, competing where we need to, confronting where we need to, and working together where we must.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “President Trump had one term and President Biden has brought America's resilience and successful leadership in the world brought our allies back under our as partners rather than people to be dismissed. And I have to be very careful of going much beyond that other than to say that I think we have managed to take what was a change in the world over China where the Chinese president changed his policy and began to change the way in which he posed risks to the rest of the world. Trump recognized that but handled it ineptly because he didn't have allies supporting him. And so we've put those alliances together in Asia, in South Korea, Japan. Trilaterals never happened before.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Madeline loved America. She used to call herself totally American Madeline. She was an immigrant. She came from Czechoslovakia. And, you know, I was very, very close to her in the 90s. Then I moved here and I spent less time with her, but I did stay in pretty close contact. I'm familiar with her views during the 2000 till she died about two years ago. The post 2016 period in America was a very tough time. I mean, you saw me during that period. I had a tough time. Because everything I had been taught Believed in terms of American values was challenged. But in the end,”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “About it, and you know more about Afghanistan than I ever will. Maybe not as much as my sister, but a lot. And they clearly bit off more than they could chew. And President Biden's original policy was one that we ended up, well, anyway, let me just leave it there.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Vietnam was one of the reasons President Obama had a problem with Holbert because he compared everything to Vietnam. And I think comparisons to Vietnam are not very helpful in the modern American culture. The people that I learned to work with during the Clinton administration saw the Vietnam analogies harm their willingness to engage in Bosnia. They were constantly fearing they were getting into another Vietnam. It took Madeleine Albright, who was older than the Vietnam generation, to say, no, hold on a minute. Bosnia is not Vietnam. The use of military power, even as Colin Powell saw it, if we used a little military power, we'd get sucked into a quagmire. That's what he said. So these things are tricky. I think analogies are generally not helpful. I think it's useful to treat each issue on its own merits. Yes, we probably overestimated, we definitely overestimated our ability to affect change in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “To the cynicism of the Conservative Party to believe in doing something in Bosnia, doing something in Kosovo. Remember, John Major didn't want to do anything. Maggie Thatcher did, but John Major didn't. And it took Blair for the British to act in Bosnia. They were treating it as a hyper-realist problem. And they're all the same. And we should just let them kill each other pretty much.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I would say they were not as cynical as the British That's what I would say. The British developed a cynicism about their imperialism. And we were never an imperial country. We're still not an imperial country. The British system created a cynicism where you're always doing the hyperrealist maneuver, playing factors against each other. The famous phrase of using in Iraq or in other places to get them divided and conquered. And that cynicism is not present in the United States because largely our global power came after World War II and the Marshall Plan and all the things that we did that were so successful in Germany and Japan and keeping the world community together during the time of communism. And so we didn't have the grand collapse of our empire, the way the British had a collapse of its empire. And the result was cynicism. And it took a Tony Blair who objected.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “He had a pretty good record going in. You were right there. You know that. That was a factor. The confidence that you get when the last four times work.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Weapons. And I think that was a big difference that is so lost in the context. Remember, there was an anthrax attack in the United States. Everyone forgets about that. It was anthrax plus 9-11 that led George Bush to do Iraq. And because the fear of biological weapons was real. Anthrax attacks happened in Washington, in New York. So all I'm saying is that their tough calls, I think objectively we were too unilateral in Iraq and Afghanistan. We didn't have allies. We didn't have support. We didn't wait long enough on Iraq before using force. There are lots of things I would have done differently. I think for Tony Blair, once, let's face it, he felt like he had won a war in Bosnia, won a war in Sierra Leone, won a war in Kosovo, won a war in Afghanistan. And this was number five.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “I have the greatest respect for Prime Minister Blair for the time that I knew him in office and observed the important role he played in ensuring that the President of the United States and Madeleine Albright had a partner to win the war in Kosovo. The last war in which we really won. I think that's an objective statement. It's not a criticism that's, I think, objectively true. We achieved our objectives at a reasonable cost. Afghanistan and Iraq are more controversial. Arguably, the net cost of all that we did compared to the gains are a much tougher balance. I would say that I don't want to criticize Prime Minister Blair. I mean, you know that at the time when you were carrying around the dossier, you came by my house and I was someone who thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons of mass destruction, biological weapons of mass destruction, not nuclear weapons.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “And second guessing is a necessary part of our democracy, but we have to put the context in place. And just as President Biden was asking the Israelis now to remember after 9-11, we did too much. And they should remember that we got too mad. There was a context in which Bush and Ramsfeld and all of them were operating. And a large Tony Blair effort to do the nation building in Afghanistan. He was the one who led the Bush administration into nation building in Afghanistan. He was the one who believed that we needed to have a long war and change the Muslim world. It wasn't just the United States.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Well, Rory, you're an expert on Afghanistan, and I'm not okay, and it's not an area that I consider myself an expert on, and I consider you closer to an expert on it. And so I wouldn't dispute anything you just said except to say that it's easy to sit back and organize the perfect balance between intervention and avoidance. It's easy in the aftermath to know exactly what we should and shouldn't have done. People now, for example, say, well, if we had just given the Ukrainians all the weapons in the beginning, they would have not been in such a position. And they forget that two years ago, legitimately President Biden was managing the risk of global thermonuclear war. He was worried about World War III. And from Putin's words, there was a reason to worry about World War III. And so I believe that hindsight.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “But during that time in the critiqu This thing became called the Forever War, the quagmire, the thing that will suck all American power. And that swung the pendulum too far. And thus, when President Trump came into office, he had this weird agreement with the far left about the quagmire. And we lost our ability until President Biden took power again to see the important role of the United States. So I think you're right. I obviously think Bosnia was done better than Afghanistan and Iraq because I referred to Gore probably not invading Iraq. He would have to tell you, but that was my understanding, is that he voted for the First Gulf War and said he would vote against the second one. So these are subtle matters. And I was poking you, but the conventional wisdom at the time was that we need to stay. Away from foreign problems.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “So that's the power of the United States. We went to the Bush administration, 9-11 happened, and they went way too far. The pendulum swung way too far. Unilateralism. Remember Donald Rumsfeld saying he didn't care how the prisoners were treated in Guantanamo. I was living in London and he lost Europe with that sentence because the idea of the treatment of prisoners pursuant to the Geneva Convention was a core value of Europeans. And for an American leader to just throw that out the window alienated all of Europe, not just New Europe and Old Europe that he referred to, but all of Europe.”

    2024-02-26 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American intervention, and the fight against Russian disinformation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source