YouSaid · the spoken record

James Rubin

lines on the record
63
first
2024-02-26
most recent
2024-02-26
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1
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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “It was the Cheney Rumsfeld period of the Bush administration Early years after 9 11, the years in which we alienated the world. You know what's so ironic about this is that Bush seems like normal now because of what followed him. And I have to be very careful about American politics and what I say. But it seems normal. But we have to remember, imagine this. Go back to 2000, change 500 votes in Florida. Al Gore is president. We don't invade Iraq. And we start global warming as an American mission 25 years ago. Think of where America would be and the hinge of history hinged on 500 votes.”

    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. “Was dominant. And now the conventional wisdom, which always is wrong because it's behind the curve, is now swinging back towards the recognition that without American leadership, things don't 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

  3. “And that's why we've stuck together. So after the failures of the Bush administration, the views I hold became very unpopular because they were seen as too willing to use American power and influence in the world. And the view that it was all hopeless and we can't do any good in the world. Kind of the view I associate with you, Rory, from reading your book on Afghanistan.”

    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. “That the United States, in my opinion, is still what Madeleine Albright called the indispensable nation. It doesn't mean we have the power today that we had then, relatively speaking. But it does mean that without America leading, things probably won't happen. things, good things won't happen. And to the extent America is not leading, more bad things will happen. That was the lesson that I learned. And I think that the unique thing about it is that Joe Biden is closer to Bill Clinton than he is to Barack Obama. And that's why he has confronted Putin in Ukraine and put together a Western alliance because he's been around for 40 years and he learned one big thing. When the West sticks together, as Alistair and I wrote in that article, the Russians fold ultimately have to.”

    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. “Because Richard was jealous that Madeleine Albright and Wes Clark were running this, and he wasn't. And he was also substantively differing with us in thinking that we should have made a deal. And he was wrong, I think, demonstrably wrong because Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright confronted Milosevic. And it's the last war in which we absolutely won. We achieved our objectives. Milosevic went to prison and then democracy actually came to Serbia for a brief period of time. And we did it without losing substantial American life that I can think of.”

    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. “We floated in the same circles. We weren't buddies because at that time, he wanted to be Secretary of State and Madeline Albright became Secretary of State and he didn't like that very much. Get to your Secretary of State question. And so he saw me as a rival who was helping his rival become Secretary of State. But he also was wrong about Kosovo because he wanted to continue negotiating with Milosevic till the bitter end. He didn't realize that Kosovo friend Milosevic was different than Bosnia, that he wasn't going to make a deal, that he wasn't going to capitulate. And so it took the use of military power. And then when we started to use force, Richard told Wes Clark, the Supreme Allied Commander, that Wes Clark has a gun named at his own head.”

    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. “Well, it's interesting because Alistair and I met each other during the second Clinton term. And this is when Madeleine Albright became Secretary of State. And in the first term, the United States didn't really decide to intervene in Bosnia until very, very late in the game. But once we decided, it was a different time. We really had, and we were called by the French then the hyperpower. We had so much influence around the world that a decision by the president to go this way or that way changed everything. And it did. It brought peace to Bosnia. We used military power. The Serbs recoiled and were finally stood up to. And then they agreed to a peace agreement. We then faced the same situation in the second term. Richard Holbrook was famously the diplomat who implemented President Clinton's policy. I knew Richard Holbrook extremely well. He knew my ex-wife extremely well.”

    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. “Because she was the only administration official in the first year of the Clinton administration that actually believed we should use military power in Bosnia.”

    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. “War ended and I evolved. And then the next issue for me that had the same salience, the same drive. And this is the lesson I tell younger people. I did all this stuff because there was an issue I really cared about. I wasn't trying to climb the political ladder. That wasn't my objective. I'm not saying I wouldn't have enjoyed it, but it wasn't what drove me. What drove me was nuclear weapons and then Bosnia. When the war in Bosnia started, I was working for Joe Biden and I brought him there. And the only trip he took in those five years, because he had a young daughter at the time, he didn't travel. And we went to Bosnia. He confronted Slobodan Milosevic. He met the leaders of Sarajevo in the airport, in the bunkers, traveled to Tuzla, saw the horrors of the war in Bosnia, and became an advocate on the left, which wasn't common for the use of military power. And then that's how I met Madeleine Albright.”

    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. “So I started out as a young student without any clarity about what I wanted to do, and Ronald Reagan became president in 1981 and again in 85. And I actually thought he was going to blow up the world. I thought there was like a 50-50 chance we were going to have global thermonuclear war in which the world would virtually end. Some of my colleagues protested and there was a million people in the street back then in the freeze movement. But I learned and studied nuclear weapons and became one of a handful of people in Washington who knew every nuclear weapon, knew every treaty, knew every article of every treaty. And in the course of that became, met Joe Biden in 1987, and he hired me and I worked for him for five years. And then nuclear weapons weren't the 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

  11. “Well, ouch. I think you're right, though. I would have had probably a higher job had I picked Obama over Hillary, but I'll answer your question. What's unique about our system is that when a president wins, everything changes. They can change the entire administration from not just the top levels.”

    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. “This issue of disinformation, I think, is the issue of the future because the information domain is how we're going to live our lives, how democracies thrive or fall if we're not in a fact-based world. We're in an authoritarian world. And the Russians and the Chinese have figured this out. They've closed their information space. So we, the free world, can't operate inside Russia or inside China. And they, Russia and China, can operate in the whole rest of the world and do as much damage as they want, say the truth, not the truth, propaganda, disinformation, whatever. It's an asymmetry that is now built into the system. And the United States, frankly, built these tools, social media, Facebook, Twitter. We used to be promoting them as great mechanisms of spreading democracy 10 years ago. Now we realized they contain the dark side of globalization that Russia...”

    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. “Well, the article you sent me as well, and I was pretty impressed with it too. I mean, it was seven years ago, and mostone was sort of still thinking that Vladimir Putin was someone you could do business with or something like that. And you and I pointed out that everything had changed and the disinformation area and the intelligence operations in the military area, they were now a huge threat and neither the UK nor the United States were dealing with 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