The FRONTLINE Interviews

Jeffrey Goldberg

Editor-in-Chief, The Atlantic

Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and previously served as a Middle East correspondent for The New Yorker. He is the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore on April 14, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

America After 9/11

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Jeffrey Goldberg

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The Reaction to 9/11

So, Jeff, let's start with where we're starting the film, which is 9/11 and the afternoon of 9/11, when the congressmen all come to the steps of the Capitol building.They break out in singing “God Bless America.” Just overall, where is America on 9/11?It seems to have been very bipartisan.The world was in support of us.Take us back.Just looking back, what was America like on 9/11?

Yeah.Boy, it's hard to imagine that scene today, huh?Impossible.I mean, you know, one argument has that America was coming out of a long sleepwalking phase, right?The Clinton period was a period where the most important thing seemed to be Monica Lewinsky, which in retrospect seems awfully silly.But that's where we were.

I mean, all through the '90s, though, all through the late '90s in particular, Al Qaeda was busy being Al Qaeda.History was returning to the United States in the form of a potent adversary, but we didn't obviously focus on that.And even when we did focus on it, even when there was an attack, there was not an understanding of how bad it could get.

In 2001, it seemed like a partisan-divided Washington.Today we look back and think, you know, are we kidding ourselves?I mean, compared to what was to come, that was a Washington of bipartisanship, relatively speaking; comity; people working within the boundaries of acceptable-for-Washington discourse.

When the attack happened, most of the country was fully prepared to get behind George W. Bush and very pleased when he visited the 9/11 site, Ground Zero, and stood with the firefighters.You know, as hard as it is to remember now, Rudy Giuliani behaved like a real leader in those first 24 to 36 hours.He really was America's mayor, and he provided strength and comfort at the same time.

And it's interesting to think back about how the left-leaning half of the country was ready to accept the idea that George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani, among others, were there to represent them.I don't know if that could be replicated today.

So let's talk about Bush on 9/11.He gets back to Washington, and he makes a speech.He quotes the Bible.He says, “This is a fight between good and evil.” He will later go on to sort of talk about the fact that our role is to spread democratic values, that this is bigger than just—

—fighting a group, yeah.

What does that say about the way Bush viewed, his administration viewed this fight to come?Did we understand the enemy?Where were we at that point? Did we really understand what we were getting into?

We did not understand what we were getting into.It's not entirely clear that Bush and people around Bush understood the difference between Shia and Sunni, for instance.Not casting aspersions, just noting.But, you know, there were questions about what we understood about this group.

Look, this is not to absolve Bush of anything, but Bush was 10 months in office.The real experts, or the people who should have been experts on Al Qaeda, by that point, and Al Qaeda ideology were people who had lived through Al Qaeda attacks in the Clinton administration.But clearly, the Clinton administration did not treat this with the level of seriousness necessary to deal with.Obviously, a lot of mistakes made in the first 10 months of the Bush administration as well in recognizing what was coming.

But, you know, it's interesting.The attack fit neatly into an ideological or almost idealistic framework that was then prevalent in the Republican Party especially—the export of democracy, the export of American values.And so this was refracted almost immediately through a prism of, if only people in the Middle East could have access to the ideas that we have, the systems, the processes that we have, then these sorts of things wouldn't happen.Very idealistic American response to something that obviously, in retrospect, was an incomplete understanding of what was going on, and also what America would be capable of doing in the Middle East.

The Dark Side

But at the same time, you've got—or soon after, you've got Dick Cheney talking about the fact that we're going to have to fight this on the "dark side."This is going to be a secret war to some extent, which leads, of course, to CIA black sites and torture.It's 180 degrees different.Why the dichotomy vis-à-vis between what Cheney was talking about and the way that President Bush was defining it?

We're a very diverse nation.We have different kinds—you know, you have a basically sunny personality like George W. Bush, looking at this as an opportunity to spread American values.You have a more pessimistic, darker person like Dick Cheney, seeing us in a—more for survival.

There's good arguments on both sides of the dispute, let's say almost the ideological dispute between Bush and Cheney, which is to say, Cheney's right; it's a really nefarious foe, and they have to be taken very seriously.And they could get possession of biological weapons, say, and so, you know, we have to be very, very careful.Bush is right to say that American values—freedom, democracy, transparency, modernity, religious freedom—that these are good American values that you would like to see exported around the world.It's just, they're two sides of the same coin.

I mean, you go back to World War II. We fought an idealistic war to defeat totalitarianism, using very, very, very hard methods, ultimately including the use of atomic bombs on two cities in Japan.But it was also true that America was fighting to save democracy, save freedom around the world.And so it's not surprising to me that there are people in the Bush administration who wanted to fight with gloves off and didn't have many illusions about the nature of the enemy or the changeability of the enemy.

And it doesn't surprise me at all that George W. Bush, who was under the influence of idealistic notions propagated by neoconservatives, who was under the influence of thinkers like Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident and later the Israeli politician, who talked about the necessity for democracy before you have peace in the Middle East, you know.These are ideas that were floating in the air at the time, and people in the administration picked up different currents.

The dark-side part of the war, the tactics used, did it undercut American values?Did it undercut the way that allies saw the fight that we were fighting?Did it undercut how the Muslim world saw us?What was the downside?

Well, I think in the first year or two, we had limited information about this dark side.Remember, now, in the fullness of time and a lot of investigative journalism, we know of the tactics used, and we know that at the same time George W. Bush was talking about freedom and justice and transparency and modernity, he was also authorizing—or at least his administration was authorizing—the use of torture.Let's call it torture, not enhanced interrogation techniques, but torture—using torture against Al Qaeda detainees and suspects.

Let's also, just to make it even more complicated, recognize that in those first months and year or so after 9/11, we thought there would be a wave of 9/11-style attacks, and that when you're the president of the United States, when you're in charge of protecting the American people's physical health and safety, and someone comes to you and says, “I have the way to do that,” you are going to be very susceptible to accepting whatever advice you're getting from experts.

And so, you know, this is not to excuse any individual decision made about what tactics to use.But it's very, very hard to remember the climate of fear and anxiety that was justifiable, because people had just witnessed the worst terrorist attack in history, and just watched people jump from the World Trade Center, you know.So it was really complicated.And it's a really complicated and contradictory mix of impulses.

And even the darkest impulses, one could argue, were motivated by a desire not to get caught again, because remember that these people are elected to protect American lives.They had failed to protect American lives, and they were going to take whatever steps necessary to protect American lives.Now that the threat has, thank God, receded, it's easier to sit in judgment of people who made what we now understand to be very bad decisions or immoral decisions about specific tactics and strategies.

Abu Ghraib

… Abu Ghraib, in April of '04, when the pictures released, seem to be a turning point.It fueled the insurgency, public trust, sort of questioning a worldview adjusted.Looking back at Abu Ghraib, what was the effect of that event and how people viewed what was going on?

It's interesting.I'd step back a little bit and note that by the time Abu Ghraib was revealed, there was a growing sense that we were losing this war, or at least not winning the war.And it's a mistake to say that American people don't like war; the American people historically don't like war.Americans don't like losing wars.The first time we went to war with Iraq, we won after 100 hours on the ground, and there were ticker tape parades, right?And that war ended in 1991 with the incineration of whole columns of fleeing Iraqi troops, burnt to a crisp, and not a lot of protest around that.We had won.Saddam was wrong; we had won; let's have a parade.

By the time Abu Ghraib comes along, there's a growing sense that the Bush administration didn't know what it was doing, that, understaffed, underplanned, made a series of disastrous mistakes early after the invasion.And so Abu Ghraib fed a narrative of a situation completely out of control.The other thing about Abu Ghraib, obviously, is that it is maddening even today to look at those photographs.It's humiliating to understand, at a deeper level, the position that Donald Rumsfeld and company put those soldiers in—not to absolve the individual soldiers of individual actions, but this was a product of structural failures as well as moral failures.

And so you're looking at these pictures, and it's maddening and humiliating.And you're thinking, why are we doing this?Americans, when it comes to war, want quick, decisive, black-and-white wins.And by the time Abu Ghraib comes along, and then everything else, there was a feeling of, we're not winning this, and we're doing some stupid stuff, and we're doing some bad stuff.And how did you get us in this jam, George W. Bush?

And of course the backdrop of everything is that there were no WMD found.So the underlying rationale, you know, wasn't there.The case, the historic case for WMD was plausible.Obviously, Saddam did have WMD at one point, but the case that he had WMD as a predicate for that invasion, that turned out to be wrong.So the whole thing was built on a shaky edifice by the point that that comes along.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

So when weapons of mass destruction are found not to be the case, as you said, it shapes the sort of belief of people and the way that they've been sold what the war is.The media also got it wrong a lot.What's the consequence?What's the cost to the media, for us getting it wrong?

I guess the story of the last 20 years, understood through the prism of 9/11, is the U.S. government turned out to be pretty effective at limiting the ability of terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda to kill large numbers of Americans after 9/11.That's one lesson.Another lesson is that bad decision-making, bad planning, bad suppositions, bad assumptions led to diminished trust in a whole range of American institutions, including the media.And you know, we're suffering from that to this day, I would say.

I would say this: that one way that this changed the media is that I think we became a lot more cynical about American possibility—which is to say people, including me, people who spent a lot of time in the Middle East and thought we understood America's role and capabilities in the Middle East were wrong.We thought that America, if it applied itself to a problem in the Middle East, could make the Middle East a better place.That was a wrong supposition, and I think that that carried over into an understanding about American competence, American straightforwardness, American power, American idealism.

I mean, this was the—one of the many horrible things about Abu Ghraib, obviously, is that it cut completely against a narrative that we wanted desperately to believe, which is that America's role in the world, on balance, is positive.I'm not arguing that it's not, on balance.If you want to go back to 1941 to present, we can have an interesting discussion about, on balance, is it better that America has been a superpower or not?I would argue yes, on balance.But after Abu Ghraib, after a number of screw-ups—intelligence screw-ups, behavioral screw-ups, strategic screw-ups—it was hard to argue in a straightforward way that when you introduce America into a geostrategic conundrum, the conundrum will become better; that they will solve the problem, will solve the riddle.

By the way, I think this is the biggest difference between George W. Bush and Barack Obama—one of the biggest differences between George W. Bush and Barack Obama.George W. Bush, representing a more traditional American post-World War II view, says that when there's a problem in the world, America comes to the problem, and America makes the problem better.Barack Obama was the first president I could remember who believed that part of his role was to protect the world from America's best impulses.And what I mean by that is, he understood that American idealism is sincere; he also understood that when a very, very powerful country starts exercising its idealism, things can go off the rails.

And that, you know, that's where we are today, I think.And it's interesting how consistent it was.That's where Barack Obama was.It is, in some ways, where Donald Trump was.It's certainly where Joe Biden is today.And that was the lesson.It was this Iraq pivot, where the undergirding supposition of post-World War II national security in foreign policymaking was that we're here to help, and we will help.

And what we've learned is that just because the intentions are good, our desire to make the world better is sincere, doesn't mean that it just happens that way, it just unfolds that way.We're fully capable of screwing it up.

Legacy of the Bush Years

… The legacy of Bush's wars, when he leaves, as we look back at it now, and how much of it—the cost of human lives and money, and the mistakes made, and we've got ourselves a religious war we never expected to get ourselves into, did it change America?Did all of that, by the time that Bush is leaving and Obama is coming in, did it change America?

There's one dog here that hasn't barked, which is interesting.No president—Bush, Obama, whoever—gets credit for terrorist attacks that didn't take place.So to be fair, we have to say that successive American presidents and their administrations have done very good job of keeping large numbers of Americans from being killed by Islamist terrorists.It's true.Talk about the costs, that's a separate issue, moral, physical, economic, cost in lives, most importantly—put that aside.

But there is this issue that I think you have to grapple with.I don't want to get too philosophical here.I think that this period marked the end of a post-World War II optimism about America's role in the world that was tested by Vietnam, but not destroyed by Vietnam.I think the last 20 years or so have changed Americans and their view of what they can do in the world or what they should do in the world.

If you remember, in the '90s, there were active questions about humanitarian interventions all the time.Now, I don't think there are a lot of people in America who want to go out and make the world a better place, especially by using force, by removing evil dictators and replacing them with good people, or defeating groups very, very far away from American interests or concerns.I think that's fundamentally different.

It's impossible to speak for 330 million Americans.But if you look at polls, and you look at the disposition of the elected officials who represent the 330 million Americans, there's just no desire for the kind of—the Washington cliches are "robust and muscular," "a robust and muscular foreign policy" that sets the rules of the road for the way people are supposed to behave in the world.

It's why Americans have very little interest in the Middle East these days, except to say that they just don't want to be involved in the Middle East.There's just no percentage in getting involved, I think, is one of the lessons of the last 20 years.I can't attribute mistrust of government or toxic partisanship or any of the other ugly manifestations of our age specifically to a set of decisions made by this president or that president in response to 9/11.But the controversies of the last 20 years have certainly not helped make Americans confident in their government and its ability to make good decisions.

The Obama Years

So Obama comes in, and he's elected, due in large part because he's not Bush. That he's just himself—

He's not Bush, and he's also not Hillary Clinton, yeah.

And he comes in saying that Afghanistan is the "good war," and Iraq is the "bad war," basically.Does he underestimate what it's going to take to do some of the things to win that war in Afghanistan, to build democracy there?When he comes in, looking back now, what are his views, and was he somewhat naive about it?

Obama made a cogent moral and strategic case that Afghanistan was a war worth winning.He comes in inexperienced in matters of national security and foreign policy, and he knows that the Democratic Party doctrine is that this is the good war, that's the bad war, and so embraces it, and then begins to understand that perhaps Afghanistan isn't winnable.You know, at a certain point in the Obama administration, they went from thinking that we can win Afghanistan to something that was jokingly referred to as "Afghanistan good enough."

It didn't take long for Obama to realize that he was not going to be able create Afghanistan into a noncorrupt feminist paradise of electoral representation.He was not turning Afghanistan into a Vermont town meeting.He's a realistic guy.

One of the things Obama was up against was a military, was a set of generals who believed that they could win.This was not an unusual phenomenon.Since the 1850s, there had been sets of Western generals who believed that they can win in Afghanistan.One of the enduring mysteries of our age is why people didn't read more about British history in Afghanistan and Soviet history in Afghanistan before committing large numbers of troops to Afghanistan, you know.The unchangeability of Afghanistan was probably something worth studying a bit more.

And I think Obama latched onto this over time.But the national security complex was lagging.NATO was lagging.And of course, the controversy for Obama was that he was so adamant about getting out of Iraq, and at the time, trying to argue to get out of both at once would have handed the Republicans, you know, a dynamite weapon against him.

Obama’s Use of Drones

He embraces drones and targeted assassinations.How did he see this as a just war?And what were the consequences, and how it was seen by the Muslims eventually, and the rest of the world?

First of all, there's a billion and a half Muslims, and the Muslims who were being targeted by the Muslims that the drones were targeting were happy about the drones.So let's not—I'm not going to play the whole, like, left-wing, you know—there are plenty of Muslims who were happy to see the Taliban destroyed, right.I mean, don't quote me as doing the whole, like—you know.But it's like, there's no such thing as "the Muslim community," right?It's a billion and a half people, spread across all countries of the earth, and majority 54 or 55 different countries.

But going to Obama, one of the aspects of Obama's presidency that he finds darkly amusing is that he is the greatest terrorist hunter in presidential history.But his opponents on the right viewed him as a, you know, a pacifist, a softie, a Ben & Jerry Vermont socialist, you know.And this guy was—and I'm not using this pejoratively; I'm just noting it—was a cold-blooded killer.Every day, every week, someone would come from his national security team and say, you know, “We've got this band of six terrorists in Pakistan, on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border,” or in Somalia, or in some other place around the world.“We believe, based on our intelligence, that they're planning to kill Americans or allies in this place and that place.We have a 45-minute window in which we can kill them.

What do you want to do?” And very, very often, he would say, “Kill them.” I mean, he's made commentary about this—that he didn't know, when he became president, how quite adept he would be at ordering lethal strikes, you know.And so we remember the assassinations that he ordered.We don't remember the assassinations that he stopped from happening.But nevertheless, he assassinated a lot of people.He blew a lot of people off this earth using drones, based on intelligence that people in his administration were bringing him.

And he saw it as necessary.He's not a pacifist.He was never a pacifist.And I come back to this point: the way Republicans portrayed him, the way Fox portrayed him, was completely counter to reality on a whole basket of issues, but especially on the use of lethal force to protect American lives.

Your overview of how he might think about it, or how you view it, the effect of that strategy on the result?

I don't know.You know, the question that many generals asked—I remember hearing Jim Mattis ask this question—is, “Every time you decide to kill someone, are you then recruiting someone else to fill their spot?” The choice that President Obama faced, any president faces, is not really between a good and a bad option.It's a bad option and a worse option when it comes to this sort of thing.I think that one of the hardest things for President Obama, and any president who's being thoughtful, is, "Is this intelligence that I'm getting really good enough for me to make a decision about killing someone on the battlefield?"The battlefield, in this case, being any number of Muslim-majority countries.

I have no way of judging whether this shortened a war or elongated a war or saved American lives or cost American lives.I don't think we have the knowledge to judge.And also, then we'd be playing with alternative history in a way that's kind of a rabbit hole.

Legacy of the Obama Years

… What's the legacy of Obama's wars?Is he able to sort of move on from the 9/11 era with these continuing wars?He's handing it off again.What's your overview of Obama's legacy when it comes to fighting these wars?

Obama's legacy, first and foremost, is that he did kill Osama bin Laden.For the average American, that was a big deal.He won reelection in part because he killed Osama bin Laden.He did something that George W. Bush didn't do.In part, George W. Bush didn't do it because he put his eye on another ball, Iraq.And so let's not forget that on President Obama's watch, the greatest terrorist in history was found and killed.So that's in the plus category in the future presidential museum. …

Obama certainly didn't believe that Afghanistan could be rebuilt in America's image.And I think there's a chance that, looking back, he'll realize that maybe he should have just pulled out sooner.I think that another regret people associated with Obama might have, and Obama might have himself, is that he utilized tools in the fight against terrorism that were dangerous to hand off to presidents less prudent and responsible than he was.

That's another interesting lesson from the Obama years, is that yes, a lot of sensible-minded, middle-of-the-road Americans looked at Obama and said, “OK, this is not a guy who's going to do something crazy with all the power that we've given American presidents to combat terrorism.” But it is an interesting question to ask: Should they have been more careful about curtailing the use of those tools in their own administration so as not to pass those tools onto what came next?That's an interesting question.

But I do want to make the point, you know, it's for all the talk on the right about how Obama was soft on terrorism, he was the greatest presidential terrorist hunter in American history.There's no way around that.Again, it's funny, because there's ambivalence in the Obama camp about that legacy, because he didn't run for office to go kill terrorists.He ran for office to get everybody health care.But you can plan a presidency to the nth degree, but events intervene.

The Election of Donald Trump

Why does Donald Trump, a guy who would never have been elected, probably, if 9/11 hadn't happened, how does Donald Trump get elected?

It's interesting about 9/11, right?George W. Bush might not have been reelected in 2004, Barack Obama wouldn't have been elected in 2008 and 2012 without the domino effect of various events, and Donald Trump wouldn't have come in had there not been a President Obama before him.

I mean—frame the question again for me?

You called it a "symptom" and an "accelerant"—him—in his election.What does that mean?

Donald Trump became president in part because a segment of the country had an allergic reaction to a liberal Black president, right?Part of the reason for that allergic reaction was a very long, concerted campaign in the media, in social media and so on to cast Barack Obama as soft on terrorism, unpatriotic, foreign.And so again, going back to the irony of this, is that Barack Obama was very effective at containing and fighting terrorism.But because an image stuck to him, because a significant portion of Donald Trump's voting base had very, very hard, prejudiced feelings about Muslims in general, and a president that many of them believed was Muslim himself, in particular, Donald Trump had a much easier path to victory.

And remember, what was the implicit in birtherism, right, [Barack Obama] is a Kenyan, he's not American—implicit in that was, “We don't know who he is, and until we know otherwise, let's assume that he's Muslim.” That was undergirding everything.So could Donald Trump have defeated Joe Biden if Joe Biden had been president between 2008 and 2016?No, I don't think so.But Barack Obama was polarized by the opposition, stigmatized by the opposition in such a way that it caused a large part of the American population—conditioned, already, to fear Muslims, right?—to go to Trump's side.I mean, there's so many reasons Trump became president that it's hard to, like, boil it down to a single data point.

And the fact of his savvy use of public distrust, the fact that he would talk about 15 years of lies, of useless wars, of incompetence?

Yeah.I mean, it's interesting, in a way.Donald Trump upended every supposition we have about Republicans and conservatives, right, in part because he's not really a Republican and not really a conservative.But what he did was use mistrust that developed over the WMD question, over Abu Ghraib, over losing—again, Americans don't like losing wars, and they don't like spending money on losing wars.

Donald Trump used America's failure to quickly win wars in Iraq and Afghanistan against the Democratic Party in a very clever, populist way.One thing I learned in the total collapse of Jeb Bush's campaign is that the base of the Republican Party had long since abandoned neoconservative ideas of America as a shining city on a hill, and the export of democracy, and so on and so forth—long, long, long dissuaded from those kind of ideas.

We didn't know it until Donald Trump came along and proved that, in this case, the emperor had no clothes; that Bush-style internationalism, muscular internationalism or however you want to call it, that was not where the people were at.Donald Trump had a much better sense of where the Republican base was, in part because he had felt the same populist urges that so many other people were having, that "Why are we spending money overseas?Who are these people, anyway?We're not going to make Muslims to be like us.We're not going to win these wars, so why are we bothering trying?Why do we spend all this money on these countries that don't deserve our money?"That's where people were.

And a lot of people in the Republican Party elite, a lot of people in the media, a lot of people in academia thought that the Republican Party hadn't changed that much since George W. Bush.But it really had changed.

Trump then turns his attention to the enemy within.He starts talking about tapping into the fear about Muslims in America, that you need to lock them out, that his opposition is in league with the enemy.Talk a little bit about that, and the consequences.

One of the first things Trump does when he gets into power is the so-called Muslim ban.Combine that with building the wall, it's very clear that his appeal to his base is built on fear of brown people and their overarching impact on what he sees is America's culturally dominant groove.You could argue that that's a long-term consequence of 9/11.Mainly that's a reaction to a presidency that many Americans saw as fundamentally foreign in some kind of way. …

This is where the desire for coherence will defeat us, because on the one hand, Donald Trump uses the tools handed him by the Bush and Obama presidencies to go kill terrorists, and unlike Barack Obama, Donald Trump does not express ambivalence about the terrorist-hunting part of his presidency.So he has those tools, and he uses them, and he brags about them.On the other hand, he tries to scare his domestic followers about the power of government by pointing to the government and saying, “Look at the deep state.Look at all these tools that the government is given.I use the tools well.

I, Donald Trump, use the tools to defeat Muslims overseas, but the deep state wants to use the same tools to defeat you.”Everything, in a way, leads to Jan. 6.Everything, everything leads up to that.And by the way, not that Jan. 6 is a particularly coherent event, easily understood, but the fomenting of that paranoia, the fomenting of that paranoia definitely leads us to the moment of Jan. 6.

The 2020 Election

So Trump, as the 2020 election is coming up, he rebrands the war on terror and focuses on the war at home.And his enemies now are antifa and radical socialists.And it's an existential threat.And he uses anti-terrorism weapons against them.He uses the military.He uses the DHS at demonstrations to arrest people.And he urges his followers to defend their country.Then he gets to a point where he claims, when he loses the election, that the election was stolen.And this all works because of his distrust that he has fomented, and also the mistakes of the 20 years before, the 15 years before.So tell us … what's he doing there and how it leads to Jan. 6.

It's always dangerous to assume that Donald Trump had a plan for anything.I mean, let's be honest, Donald Trump was never playing chess.Very frequently, he was playing checkers against himself and getting mad when he lost.I mean, there's no rhyme or reason to many of the decisions.These are not thoughtful decisions.These are glandular impulses, right?

But what he was very good at was identifying a feeling on the part of his base—a fear of the deep state, fear of Muslims, fear of immigrants, fear of elites, fear of the media.And you know, he was kind of a great big goulash-maker in one sense.He would throw all these things into a cauldron, and sometimes they would bubble out in very, very strange and destructive ways.

And a lot of what Jan. 6 was was a reaction by people who believed, among other things, that Mexicans were an existential threat; that Muslim terrorists were an existential threat; that the deep state that was built to fight Muslim terrorism was an existential threat; that the media, which had covered these existential threats, was an existential threat.It all gets thrown into the cauldron, and it comes out in kind of very, very strange ways.

I mean, ultimately, Donald Trump is about Donald Trump, and Donald Trump would use whatever enemy he could find, real or imagined enemy he could find, to stimulate fear on the part of his followers.So one day it's the deep state.The next day it's Muslim terrorists who are being defeated by the deep state.It doesn't have to make sense, because it's Donald Trump.That's the problem of trying to analyze decision-making in a chaotic administration is that there is no decision-making.There's reading the moment, and reading the feelings and fears of the people who made you president, and in your belief, leading up to Jan. 6, would keep you in the presidency.

I mean, the interesting thing is, like people think of Donald Trump and Barack Obama as opposites.It's Donald Trump and George W. Bush who are actually even more unlike each other.I mean, George W. Bush really believes that America is a shining city on a hill.George W. Bush really believes that democracy is the superior form of government.George W. Bush believes in traditional notions of service.George W. Bush might have gotten X, Y and Z wrong, but he believes all these things.Donald Trump had none of those beliefs.That's what's so interesting.

Barack Obama and Donald Trump shared a belief in America's limited ability to change the world.That is true.Barack Obama and his supporters don't want to hear that necessarily, but that is truth.Both believed in the limited power of America to shape world events.Barack Obama took that belief and tried to use it in a responsible way.Donald Trump did with it whatever he did with it.Very different outcomes.But, you know, you're talking about three men who are so unlike each other, it's hard to believe that they all were produced by the same country and the same culture.

Let me ask you one last thing about Jan. 6, and a couple questions about Biden, and we'll be done.You were there.You were on the streets.You were talking to people.

Yeah, I went down to the Capitol, yeah.

Who were those people?They saw themselves as patriots.They saw themselves, in some ways, like the 9/11 patriots on Flight 93 that brought down that plane, because they were trying to save something in Washington, possibly the Capitol building.Just talk a little bit about who those people are, and the motivations, and why they believed Trump.

They saw themselves as the Sons of Liberty.They saw themselves as the Green Mountain Boys.They saw themselves carrying “Don't Tread on Me” flags.They saw themselves as more American than Americans.They saw themselves as the defenders of the true faith who would protect America from all enemies, foreign and domestic.These were not people who had any soft feelings for Muslim extremist groups whatsoever, right?They saw America had enemies outside, but they also believed that America had real enemies inside, and those enemies included the Democratic Party, the media and so on.

They were a group of paranoids who had been manipulated by their leader, the 45th president of the United States, to do something profoundly unpatriotic that they understood to be profoundly patriotic.Best way I can explain it.

… By the way, by the way, one of the interesting things is, one of the larger ironies here, is that over the past 20 years, while America has been trying to make the Middle East in fits and starts more like America, the Middle East has been making America more like the Middle East.In other words, traditionally, Middle Eastern countries have been more susceptible to widespread conspiracy theories than the American population.But America now—and I say this having spent a lot of time in the Middle East, trying to unravel fantastical beliefs about the way the world is organized on the part of different terrorist groups, extremist groups and so on—I think we've become more like the Middle East.

We're more tribal.We're more prone to conspiracy theorizing.We're more balkanized.We're more mistrustful of state authority.I don't know if you'd call this an irony.I don't know if you'd call this an unintended consequence of the 9/11 attacks.But while our government, at different times, was trying to make Middle Eastern countries more like America, we were becoming more like the Middle East.

What Biden Inherits

So feeding off of that, describe the country that President Biden inherits.Are we a weaker country today than before 9/11?

Are we a weaker country today than we were before 9/11?

Meaning, more divided, more tribal, more democratic institutions damaged, moral authority lost?

Here's the thing.Here's the thing about America 20 years after 9/11.We're still the largest economy.We still have the most powerful military.We still have the most innovative companies.We still have the best universities.We're also more balkanized.We're more divided.We're more mistrustful of ourselves and our government than we've been in modern history.So we are living this contradiction, and it's a lot to put on one president.But really, the Biden term, we're going to find out whether some of the things we've gone through over the past 20 years were strange fever dreams, midlife crises, nervous breakdowns, or whether we're fundamentally different and in some kind of decline that's more than just temporary setbacks.And we're going to find out whether we're in some kind of terminal decline or whether these were just big bumps along the road.I don't know the answer.But that's what I think.

Pulling out of troops from Afghanistan.So Biden, what's he trying to do?

It's not clear that Joe Biden ever believed in the state-building impulse that idealistic Americans had in the Middle East, in the greater Middle East, including Afghanistan.I don't use the term "idealistic" advisedly, because that kind of idealism can sometimes get us into trouble.

Joe Biden, during the Obama terms, was very skeptical of the generals who said, “Just another year, just another 10,000 troops, and we'll fundamentally alter the course of Afghanistan and its history.” So it's not at all surprising that Joe Biden wanted to get out of Afghanistan in what he sees as a very clean way, and we're going to find out whether it was the right decision or the wrong decision.After 20 years of this, I don't think that the average American is going to care if the Taliban comes back into power in Afghanistan.The average American will care if the Taliban allows Al Qaeda and ISIS to come back into Afghanistan and plot its nefarious plots from Afghanistan.If that happens, well, then we're back to Afghanistan in some manner or form.No ground invasion, but we're then stuck in a place that we just don't want to be stuck in.

Is there also a reality here that we're walking away from the initial things that Bush wanted to do, the values, spread the values of democracy and human rights in Afghanistan?

Well, there's a lesson here.There's a very sad lesson here, which is that when Americans come to you promising to help, maybe it's best to run for the hills, because America will help.The impulse is real.We want to liberate the women of Afghanistan.We want to build schools for girls.We want to do all the sorts of things that we want to do.

But if the going gets tough, we are going to go first revert back to, “Well, let's just make Afghanistan stable,” and then we're going to go back to, “What are we doing there in the first place?” I don't want to sound too harsh here, but beware of Americans promising the gift of democracy, not because the Americans don't mean it, and not because American democracy is a great form of government, but Americans don't like long-term entanglements.They certainly don't like seeing American troops die so that Afghans can go to school.They want Afghans to go to school.They want women to be liberated in Afghanistan.But I think the average American voter doesn't want to spend American treasure and, most importantly, American lives, so that people 10,000 miles away have better access to schools and clean water.It's just the way the world is.

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