"Let's Talk" with Elliott Abrams | 13th & Park

Someone who helped write America's playbook on the Middle East, Latin America, and global leadership. Elliott Abrams joins Adam Goodman on this episode of 13th & Park!


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SPEAKER_02 0:00

I think the world is a dangerous place. We don't automatically win. The side of freedom wins when we lead it.

SPEAKER_03 0:09

War in the Middle East, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China's drive for world domination. Our guest is veteran foreign policy advisor, author, and diplomat Elliot Abrams, whose advised three presidents has been asked to serve a fourth, and is now speaking out on how and where America must take the lead again. From Ballard Studios in Washington, D.C., it's 13th and party.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

We give you information, not panic attack. Look what's going on. Kids were gonna be.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

That time is gone forever. This is the biggest story in America. We weren't prepared for that. Don't you want to speak proof to power, toughest thing I've ever had to do.

SPEAKER_03 0:53

Well, Elliot, welcome to the show. Look, we've got to start here. You were born in a middle-class Jewish household in Queens, New York, to two Democrats. Your father is an immigration lawyer, your mom, public school teacher. Yep. Your mother, Mildred, I think, once described you as somewhat conventional. You went on the 1968 convention, you were a Humphrey acolyte, which was apparently anathema for young people as the government was hot, and then suddenly he was nowhere. How did you make a transition from that ultimately to helping Senator Scoop Jackson from Washington State, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, onto Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Donald Trump? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

I was always uh hawk on foreign policy, and foreign policy was what I was interested in. That is why I supported Humphrey. I mean, I was a kid, but supported Humphrey in 1968, not McGovern, not McCarthy, anybody like that. And I'm one of the people who thought Jimmy Carter was a terrible president on foreign policy. So come 1980, Ronald Reagan was the nominee. I actually joined the Reagan campaign. This was, by the way, after a meeting with Carter that I and Gene Kirkpatrick and some others had spent about half an hour with Carter. Now we were all for Reagan after that.

SPEAKER_03 2:13

So we're out.

SPEAKER_02 2:14

We're out. But I uh have said for a long time, as Gene used to say, I don't feel I've changed my foreign policy views and left the Democratic Party. My feeling was the Democratic Party left me.

SPEAKER_03 2:25

You know who that sounds like, Ronald Reagan.

SPEAKER_02 2:27

Ronald Reagan. And when I joined the administration, it was as a Democrat.

SPEAKER_03 2:31

Democrats for Reagan. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Your foreign policy views, you say, have not changed pretty much at all, going back. If someone said, Elliot, where are you today, given everything that's going on, and how does what you believe maybe have direct application to trying to find remedies to the fear and violence that we're seeing across the map?

unknown 2:51

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 2:51

I think the world is a dangerous place. It isn't automatically peaceful. We don't automatically win. The democratic side, the side of freedom, wins when we lead it. I think we've seen that throughout the 20th century and 21st century. And when we don't, the bad guys start moving forward. And now when you look at the threats, China, Russia, Iran are a kind of new axis of evil. Right. What's going to stop them? The only thing that's going to stop them is an alliance of free countries led by the United States. That was my view a long time ago, and it's still my view.

SPEAKER_03 3:34

Of course, Ronald Reagan advocated very strongly peace through strength.

SPEAKER_02 3:38

Exactly right. And I worry now, for example, that we are not investing enough in the military budget. The defense budget as a percentage of GDP is way down. So as you look around the world, people recognize, I mean, the Australians and Japanese and Koreans and Filipinos in Asia, and obviously the NATO allies in Europe, and friendly countries in the Middle East, starting with Israel, the Gulf Arab countries, recognize what the threats are. They also recognize that no one is strong enough to lead except the United States.

SPEAKER_03 4:13

A lot of times these days, the argument over what America should or shouldn't do becomes financial, right? We see that in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We're seeing that again in the discussion about how open our checkbook will be, even to our one of our strongest allies in the Middle East. And it gets difficult when the economy here in America has got a lot of people concerned about the hearing now. How do you square a foreign policy imperative with the still kind of everyday concern people have about making the nation's checkbook well, it doesn't really balance, but it hasn't balanced for about thirty years.

SPEAKER_02 4:50

But first, uh we ought to be taking the steps to have more economic growth. When I look, for example, at the Biden administration energy policy, it's bad. It is not maximizing American energy production. It seems to be relying on Iranian and Venezuelan energy production. So yes, we need to get our economic house in order, that's clear. But you know, we never were this rich before. We weren't this rich 25 years ago, 50 years ago, 75 years ago. But during the Cold War, we dedicated a significantly larger percentage of our GDP to defense. We are not so poor that we can really say, well, we you know, we just can't, we just can't afford it. I don't buy that excuse. I do believe that we're not taking the steps that we need to be to cut the deficit and to maximize economic growth. I'm not an economic specialist, but you know, I think the deficit is way, way out of control. It is not out of control because of defense spending. It's domestic spending. So I think we just have to spend what is needed to protect ourselves, because if we don't and we get into a war, well, the costs are going to rise exponentially.

SPEAKER_03 6:08

You wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal recently talking about Iran as one of the new actors, where you said that, you know, paying ransoms for hostages is a zero-sum game. This is not something we should be doing. And yet the media, you know, when the hostages were released, played this out like a great triumph for America. So let me play this clip if I could for you and see what you think.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

Five American citizens now free. Imagine, just imagine what they're they're going through. This is a controversial deal, but there's no denying the emotion, the nightmare has ended.

SPEAKER_03 6:48

The emotion, the nightmare has ended. I think the nightmare's just begun because six billion dollars that was released or is being released to Iran, that should scare all of us. And yes, we're joyous about the release of hostages, always, but at what price?

SPEAKER_02 7:06

When I was special representative for Iran in the Trump administration, I dealt with the families of all of those people. I met with brothers, I met with wives, sisters. It's murder, it's terrible because they feel as you would feel and I would feel. I don't care about the money. I don't care about the national interest, I don't care about foreign policy. Get him out. I would do the same thing. But as a country, it's not in our interest to incentivize hostage taking. We did in the Trump administration, this is before I joined, so I don't get any credit. Right. But the administration does, the president does. We got several people out of Iran without paying. We exchanged prisons we had in U.S. prisons, Iranian, for the Americans. Not one cent, however. This is a big payment. I mean, six billion dollars. From the Iranian point of view, this is wonderful. And if you think these are the last hostages that we're gonna have in Iranian prisons that we're gonna have to ransom, I don't think so. I think they've got a business here, and it's very lucrative. Why would they not continue in this business? So the danger, of course, is to tomorrow's prisoner. And one of the things I proposed in that article is we should not allow U.S. passports to be used for Iran. We don't allow it for North Korea. It's a message, sure. Some of the people who go there are dual citizens, U.S. and Iran. They may still go. But let's send the message that every American who sets foot in Iran is in terrible danger of getting imprisoned. We're not doing that now. And I think it's wrong, it's really unconscionable to continue to allow American passports to be used in Iran.

SPEAKER_03 8:51

Well, you were a special representative dealing with Iran and Venezuela, which I'm gonna try to get from you at later in this interview how those two pieces fit together. But Iran, so you have you know hands-on experience. What is really going on, do you think, in the minds of the leaders in Iran? They are certainly involved, directly and or indirectly, with what's going on with Hamas. Do you think they've been encouraged greatly by the events of the last few months?

SPEAKER_02 9:16

I think they've been encouraged by everything since 2015, the Iran nuclear deal. I think if you go back, it's almost ten years, they've had a very successful foreign policy. They got the Americans to agree they can enrich uranium. They got the Americans to agree no more sanctions until Trump came in. They've been killing Americans since the 1980s, and we have basically done nothing about it. Now, in the last couple of weeks since the massacre of Israelis by Hamas, they've been shooting at our guys in Iraq and Syria again and again. Every couple of days you see it on the front pages. Right. What have we done? What have we done to show Iran you may not do this? You kill an American, let's just say you'll pay for it. I think if you were an Iranian official looking back on these years, you'd say, I can shoot at Americans, with the exception of the assassination of Solani, which we did in the Trump administration. They've paid no price. So from that point of view, I'd sit back in Tehran and say, look, we got a good thing going here. Hostages get to shoot at Americans, billions and billions of dollars more every year in oil revenue. They have a more successful policy toward America than America has toward Iran.

SPEAKER_03 10:42

You once wrote that in Arab capitals, not taking on the nuclear deal with Iran is seen as weakness. And weakness in the Middle East is death, literally.

SPEAKER_02 10:54

This is really why the Israelis know they have to take down, crush, eliminate Hamas. Otherwise, they'll be seen as weak. And they believe what you just said, uh, as I do, that in that region, you don't get sympathy for being weak. You get killed for being weak.

SPEAKER_03 11:12

In the United Nations recently, we've seen the square off, an unpredictable square-off, between Israel and its detractors. Let me play you this clip what the Israeli ambassador said at the United Nations, and get your perspective on how complicated what seemed to be a simple message has become. It's Israel on the side of right, and Hamas that represents, of course, something that's on the opposite side of right. And yet it seems to get muddled, and you see the Israeli ambassador who's almost having to plead with the United Nations not to see this as, well, there's some good arguments on this side, and there's some good arguments on that.

SPEAKER_02 12:28

He mentioned the U.N. Charter. Who signed the U.N. Charter? We did, and so did Joseph Stalin. I mean, the U.N. has this problem from the very beginning, and they have it now. And what he's complaining about is what the Secretary General did, where he said, Well, yes, I mean, massacres and all it's a terrible thing, but you know what doesn't come in a vacuum. It is the product of Israel's occupation, blah, blah, blah. It is classic UN, meaning moral relativism and anti-Israel activity. There's no more damaging center of anti-Israel activity in the world than a whole bunch of UN agencies. I didn't expect it from the Secretary General, frankly, just because I thought he'd be more careful. But I think the Israelis are right to say it was disgusting to see the Secretary General of the United Nations making those statements, you know, while Israel is still trying to count bodies. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 13:26

Right. Well, there's been a lot of talk about what led up to this. One, of course, is the fact that the intelligence services that seem to be the model for the world were called asleep with the switch. Another explanation has been the internal dissent that we've seen coming from Israel over the last uh year or two, including the former head of Mossad and others who started to speak out against what they didn't like internally within Israel. Does that portray weakness for Israel in the Middle East? Is that a concern as much as Iraq is coming at them from the north and from Gaza?

SPEAKER_02 14:03

Aaron Ross Powell The internal disunity, I think, was watched carefully by friends and by enemies. And it made them wonder if Israel was weakening. Now, of course, that's over. I mean, it's a completely unified society now. I remember the reservists saying, well, we are not we may not serve if called up. There was a call-up, and they didn't get 100 percent. They got 150 percent. People weren't calling up. Take me, take me. I don't think that was the basic problem, though. I think the basic problem here was the problem of you might say Pearl Harbor, of uh 9-11, of the Yom Kippur War. That is, you think you understand what the threats are. It didn't seem to occur to us the Japanese would do what they did in Pearl Harbor. We never thought, you know, Al-Qaeda, these are primitive guys. The notion they would steal airplanes, and the Israelis thought Hamas wants calm in Gaza. It wants terrorism, it wants murder, it wants violence in the West Bank. But you know we have a modus vivendi, and what they've learned now is you can't live with Hamas, you die with Hamas.

SPEAKER_03 15:11

Aaron Ross Powell Well, there is a difference between Hamas and the Palestinian people. Sure. I mean, even in the Gaza, we've come to learn more than ever, they were fairly unpopular, as you might say, the ruling authority in Gaza. And the media and press are focusing on the innocents. Just as much as those Israelis were innocentes, they were slaughtered on kibbutzes all over Israel, so too were some of the uh the Palestinians who are in the middle of this conflict where Hamas has no compunction about putting them up as human shields.

SPEAKER_02 15:44

Aaron Powell It's true. I mean, one of the ways of thinking about this war, I think, is we can actually liberate, or the Israelis can liberate Gazans who have to live under Hamas. The choice now for Palestinians is Hamas in Gaza or the completely corrupt and incompetent Palestinian Authority, Fatah Party, in the West Bank. That's a hell of a choice. So we are right to be thinking about what comes after Hamas because maybe, maybe there is a possibility here that Palestinians can form over time a responsible government rather than a terrorist government or a government that's, you know, permeated with corruption.

SPEAKER_03 16:26

You're a big part of a group called the Project for the New American Century, which is dedicated to America's global leadership. If you're advising America on what that global leadership should look like moving forward with all the things we've already been talking about and haven't talked about, we haven't talked about Russia yet. We haven't talked about China. What does that look like moving forward, Elliot?

SPEAKER_02 16:48

I would go back to Reagan. That is, what did it look like? It looked, for one thing, like economic growth, so you have the base for a successful foreign policy. It looked like adequate defense spending. Remember, Reagan did a big increase in defense spending, so that you have the power that you need. And it looks like alliances. The great thing we have that the people on the other side don't is these alliances all over the globe. And it looks like freedom. It looks like drawing the distinctions between places like Russia and China and Iran and our side. Something we don't do, for example, on Iran. Have we been firmly all these years on the side of the Iranian people? I'd say no. I mean, the greatest allies we have in Iran are Iranians. They want to get rid of that horrible regime. So I think this is an old formula. It worked during the Cold War. We are, in a certain sense, in a new Cold War. There used to be two sides, the U.S. and the Soviets. Now it's the U.S. and on the other side, China, Russia, Iran. But the formula I think still works.

SPEAKER_03 17:58

We have a difficult time trying to figure out what to do in these alliances where you just talked about, when it involves quote unquote dictators, people that were not popularly elected, that have certain things that are going on that violates our values that we don't approve of. Do we draw such a line, though, Elliot, that we are eliminating all sorts of alliances that we need with other countries, knowing that if we don't ally with them, the Chinese, the Russians, and others will?

SPEAKER_02 18:28

Aaron Powell It's a very difficult question in many cases. Because a lot of our allies in the Cold War, a lot of our allies today are not Democrats. The word I would use is legitimate governments. We want legitimate governments on the other side. Take an example, the United Arab Emirates, sober, responsible government. And the people of the country think so. And it's a legitimate government. The Saudi Arabian government, there isn't the smallest scintilla of democracy, but it's a legitimate government in the eyes of Saudis. I do think that when we ally with people who are not democrats, who are anti-democratic, and sometimes we have to, we should wince a little bit. But let's be realistic, in the world as it is, we need allies all over the place. And they want to be allied with us. So in many cases, the people on the other side of this, if the government is not legitimate, they want our help to replace it with one that is. And Iran is today the best example of that.

SPEAKER_03 19:38

What's going on down there?

SPEAKER_02 19:40

You asked what the two have to do with each other, and the answer is their lousy, rotten governments. The government of Venezuela hasn't changed. The Maduro dictatorship hasn't changed at all. But the Biden administration has just recently lifted sanctions, lifted oil sanctions. Apparently because they want to get moral oil on the market. Maybe the president's worried about the economy, maybe he's worried about the economy and the election, uh, price of gasoline. But I think it's a real abandonment of the people we were supporting in Venezuela who represent the people of Venezuela. Venezuela was a democracy for a very long time. For a long time, right. And it could be again, and it is what the people want. But they have a corrupt, brutal regime in there, really a gang of thieves allied with Russia, China, Iran. And I don't see why this policy, the new policy, is going to work. Because basically, what what did we do here? The United States lifted sanctions in exchange for a promise from this dictator, Maduro, a promise that he'll have free elections next year. Give me a break. What are the chances of that really?

SPEAKER_03 20:55

Free elections. What does that mean in Venezuela these days?

SPEAKER_02 20:57

Well, if he ever had a free election, he'd lose, he'd get about twenty, thirty percent of the vote. People of Venezuela would kick him out, for which reason we know he's not gonna allow a free election. He would go to prison in one day if they had a free election. And if we think this has to do with migration, the only way to stop the migration from Venezuela is to get them part way back to where they were as a prosperous country. You're not gonna get that under this corrupt Maduro dictatorship. Never.

SPEAKER_03 21:28

There's a big argument being made that when we look for alliances and and allies, start closer to home, right? Central and South America. Isn't it important for us maybe to start rebuilding alliances here and then start to move out as opposed to how do we get friendlier with you know the people in Ghana? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 21:48

This is a perennial problem. We never pay enough attention to our own hemisphere. I mean, under president after president after president, and it's certainly true now. As I look at uh the State Department in Latin America. America activities, uh, to me they seem reasonably weak. When I say we don't pay enough attention, I worry most about Central America and Mexico. Because there's no country in the region more important to us than Mexico given the border. Mexico is a country where the cartels are growing in power every year, where the president of Mexico is actually not in control of every part of the country. It's really dangerous. And we don't seem to be much focused on it. But I think the problem is a long-term one where we seem never to focus enough attention on Latin America. I think the last time we did, frankly, was Ronald Reagan.

SPEAKER_03 22:43

And you would think that because China and others are more aggressively going, I mean, gosh, China has made an advance or has tried to make advances into Cuba with military aims. I mean, we've lived through this, right? We've seen this show before. And yet even that is not spurring, I think, enough of a reaction and resolve in America to recalibrate and renew our friendships here. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 23:06

It is true. And the attention we do focus tends to be on the border, which is obviously critically important. That's not a mistake. But we're not focusing enough attention on what's going on south of the border. We'll pay the price ultimately. Just think about a Mexico with a government that can't control its territory. Think about that border. It gets even worse. We're worried about the American side. What if the Mexican side blows up?

SPEAKER_03 23:33

We always felt secure, right, Elliot, for all this time when there was a separation between ourselves, say, and Europe and Asia by something called oceans, right? There is a land bridge, basically. That land bridge is being used by people right now to come north. And the more we refuse to engage properly elected, hopefully legitimately elected governments, the more that becomes not just a trickle, but a flood.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

I think that's right. And we're seeing that flood in a way we've never seen it before. The numbers are unbelievable. The border is effectively open. I mean, uh the Department of Homeland Security says there were a million and a half, I think in the last year or two million and a half gataways, meaning people who got away from border control and they're in the country. Now, one percent of that is fifteen thousand, and a tenth of a percent is fifteen hundred. Is it possible that ninety-nine point nine percent of the people who got away are people who just want to work? But one tenth of one percent are bad guys, maybe even terrorists, not just criminals. One tenth of one percent doesn't seem crazy to me. That's really dangerous.

SPEAKER_03 24:47

Right. So how would you evaluate the state of our democracy today? We've got partisanship and partisan rancor at at record highs, the country more divided than ever. What is the hope for our democracy? Is it something that your former mentor Daniel Patrick Moynihan once talked about when he referred to appeasement that you have to cease apologizing for imperfect democracy? It's the best thing out there.

SPEAKER_02 25:11

I'm worried uh about the current situation. Uh when I was a kid, we had a thing called civics, where you actually taught students two things, really. You taught them the mechanics, like what's the Congress, what's the Supreme Court, and you taught them to love their country and its history and their heritage. We learned about the greatness of the founders. That's not happening nowadays. We see a lot of people, I think, losing faith in the founding ideas of the country. And they don't just lose it, it's being kicked out of them, it's being punched out of them in what they learn in school and particularly what they learn in universities. When you have college students by the thousands coming out in favor of Hamas, you gotta wonder, what are they being taught? What are they learning? I I heard a conversation a few days ago where someone said, doesn't this prove to us that the whole Western Enlightenment model failed? And the answer was no. What it proves is it is no longer being taught. Fifty years ago, college students were taught these are the right principles. This is what the Enlightenment taught us, this is what the founders believed. Nowadays they're being taught that's all bunk. And when you see college students demonstrating for Hamas, I think you're getting a kind of bolt of lightning, an illumination of the rot that has set in in very many campuses. That's a great worry.

SPEAKER_03 26:38

Well, thank you for all your service. I didn't want to ask you who your favorite president is. We'll leave that for another day. Okay. I can tell that your fondness for Ronald Reagan still lives and burns brightly within you today. And I think a lot of the things that he talked about and represented for America coming from America should be revisited by all of us. I do too. Great to have you. Remember to subscribe today and hit the bell so you never miss another episode of the show with that trademark opener from Washington, D.C. It's 13th and park.