(no audio) (film reel beeping) - From the violence in the Middle East to the dysfunction in Congress, the world feels increasingly untethered.

Today's guest spent his early career analyzing threats to American security, and now is unapologetic in his warnings about the threats to American democracy.

He's Tom Nichols this week on "Story in the Public Square".

(bright music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Virginia University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Tom Nichols, Professor Emeritus of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College.

He's now a staff writer at "The Atlantic" where he writes a daily newsletter.

Tom, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Good to be with you, Jim.

- So we are mindful of the fact that we taped this a couple of weeks before broadcast.

So events may unfold in the coming weeks in ways that we can't anticipate.

But we take a look at the war in Ukraine, we take a look at the crisis in the Middle East, and it just feels like there's a sense of unraveling on a global scale.

What do you think is at work here and are all of these events completely distinct?

- It's interesting to look at them as linked events because I think what you're seeing is a kind of counter offensive of authoritarians and terrorists around the world, that we lived through a period of 30 years of the expansion of democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Now we're in kind of a period of retrenchment where the people who really want the international order turned back.

And to turn back some of those democratic gains in places, especially like Ukraine, where Putin is simply making more on a neighboring democracy out of pure imperialistic nostalgia.

And I think as well in the Middle East, you're seeing an all out terrorist counteroffensive of the kind that really, I mean, we keep comparing it to 50 years ago with the Yom Kippur War.

But that was a military attack from neighboring states.

This is really an all out kind of terrorist offensive meant to make Israel an unlivable place for Israelis.

So while I don't think it's a huge network of connected, it's not specter or something, but on the other hand, there is a kind of drift, a tide in international affairs where I think the authoritarians are making their move.

And we've seen that as well in the democracies, even at the ballot box.

So it's a scary time.

- So you don't put any stock in, I see some speculation with folks I think almost hoping or wishing that somehow or another Moscow or Beijing are somehow controlling Tehran, which is controlling Hamas.

It's not that coordinated is what I hear you saying.

- I don't think it's that coordinated, but I don't think, but I think they've been on the phone to each other.

I think they keep, they all stay in the loop.

China's an interesting exception here.

The Chinese have always wisely found a way to kind of circumnavigate or to sidestep a lot of these problems in the West.

Which they keep an arm's length because that preserves their freedom of movement in the Indo-Pacific region.

But is it a big coordinated, you attack here, I'll attack there?

Anybody watching the war in Ukraine can tell you the Kremlin isn't nearly that organized.

But they are keeping in touch with each other and they're supplying each other, North Korea, Iran, China, Russia, they're making deals.

- Yeah, you described the Hamas attack as a massive terrorist operation, which it certainly was.

I think a lot of people were surprised by the pure barbarity of some of the things that we saw Hamas do to innocent victims.

Do you have any explanation about that evolution in terrorist tactics?

- Well, actually, if you look at the history of terrorism, you'll see that terrorists, excuse me, that terrorists will often do astoundingly ghastly things in an attempt to draw the foul from the targeted nation.

They want their enemies to react as brutally and as harshly as possible because they want to get them to overextend.

They want them to lose credibility among their allies.

They want to bring them down to the level of the terrorists themselves to say, see what we're fighting, the people we're fighting are no better than we are and perhaps worse.

You see this throughout the history of terrorism.

You saw it after 9/11 where Al-Qaeda was hoping that the United States.

What we did was bad enough getting ourselves mired into two different wars.

But what Bin Laden was apparently hoping would happen is the United States would completely go nuts, start bombing every country in the Middle East and Central Asia, bring down the regime in Pakistan, bring down the regime in Saudi Arabia.

So this is actually an old tactic.

Now we're shocked because we see it in more detail in 2023 because of the nature of interconnected media.

But drawing the foul, trying to provoke your opponents into barbarity and overreaction is actually an, it's almost like page one out of the terrorist playbook.

- So Tom, bearing in mind again that we're taping this in early November.

But how do you think the Biden administration overall is doing in managing what is clearly an international crisis?

- I think that the Biden administration has done a remarkable job handling multiple international crises.

The war in Ukraine, I think is a remarkable, I think this was just the right time to have the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the White House.

But I think it's been a remarkable ability to draw NATO together to get the Europeans to contribute to this effort and to take risks.

In fact, some of the Europeans want to take even bigger risks than the United States is willing to take.

I mean, this is, normally the United States is charging in and saying, come with us.

We've gotta do this thing.

And the Europeans are now the one, at least some of the Europeans are the ones who are saying, let's really get into this scrum and help the Europeans.

And the United States is holding together a fractious coalition.

NATO is twice the size, almost twice the size it was at the end of the Cold War.

And then to balance that with a Middle Eastern crisis in which one of our allies wants to unleash hell, understandably, much as we did after 9/11, and trying to encourage restraint there.

I mean, I think it's just been a remarkable foreign policy performance in every way on these crises.

- Yeah, Tom, I think we all on some level recognize the Israeli and respect the Israeli impulse to seek justice in the aftermath of what happened on October 7th.

There is a growing sentiment in a lot of places around the world, though, to your point that the Israeli response has become the source of outrage rather than the initial terrorist attack.

How has Israel's response risen to the moment?

Has it risen to the moment?

And what do you think the, how do you think this all plays out in the weeks and months to come?

- I think a country, again, as an American who lived through 9/11, I'm deeply sympathetic.

And turning the story into a story about Israel's reaction, as I'll say again, is kind of page one out of the terrorist playbook.

To get the attention off of what the terrorists have done and to shift it over onto the reaction from the targeted regime.

We went through this after 9/11.

What kind of operations are we conducting in Afghanistan?

Are we bombing too much?

Are we doing too little?

Are we violating laws of war by having guys on horseback, dressed in local garb and so on?

I don't have enough vision inside the Israeli, I don't know what the Israelis know.

I think one thing that is difficult for Western audiences or for non-Israeli audiences to comprehend outside of this situation is that one thing terrorists do is to bait their opponents into attacking civilian targets by using those civilian institutions, hospitals, ambulances, and so on, as basis for their actions.

Now, it doesn't really help much to say that under international law, the onus for that rests with the terrorists.

It rests, Jim, you know, you've taught international affairs for years.

You know that when one of the parties removes the innocence of a civilian target by militarizing it, that burden rests with them.

That doesn't help much when there's footage of a burning ambulance.

So I think one of the things that's really struck me is not so much about Israel's reaction, which so far seems to be what I would've expected it to be and probably what most countries would do under these circumstances.

But rather how cleverly Hamas has turned this, used video and the internet to turn this into a story about Israel rather than about a terrorist attack on Israel.

- So Tom, meanwhile, we have another war continuing.

It will be early next year, two years since Russia invaded Ukraine.

What is your assessment of that war now?

And then we can get into Vladimir Putin's role in it and Putin himself.

And we know of course, that Putin is an area of expertise of yours.

- I was one of the people two years ago who said, if the Russians execute this competently, this could be over in a week.

And I was surprised by many things, including the, I think, I underestimated the Ukrainian will to resist for sure.

I think a lot of us did.

But I think the thing few of us could have counted on was how astoundingly incompetent the Russian military is.

And that's been the story of the past two years that this country, three times the size of Ukraine, attacking on three axes, multiple fronts, and is simply just throwing away the lives of tens of thousands of its own young men for some idea, some scheme that was probably cooked up in a bunker during COVID.

So at this point, I know people are tempted to call the war a stalemate.

It's a failure.

It's a Russian loss.

I mean, remember the Russian goal was the lightning capture of Kyiv and subjugation of the whole country within a few weeks.

That ship has sailed.

That's just not going to happen.

And the Ukrainians are regaining territory slowly.

So this isn't quite 1914 with guys in trenches just stuck on a very static line.

Ukrainians have carried out some very nimble operations recaptured territory, and the Russians just keep having to plow men and material and money into a war that I, as an expert, former expert on Russia, I find myself asking what they think is going to happen.

How they think this ends because they're not interested in peace.

I think the people, another thing that we should think about two years into this war is how many people keep talking about how Ukraine should accept a peace deal.

There is no peace deal.

The Russians aren't interested in this.

The Russian peace deal is surrender completely and let us march through your streets.

So I don't know where the Russians are going with this other than that they've kind of picked up this porcupine and they don't know what to do with it now.

And they're just gonna, I think Putin at this point just thinks that every few months he's gotta get a bigger hammer and consign more of his own young men to death.

- So what does this portend for the future of Putin as the dictator of Russia?

- I thought Putin was shaken during the coup or the putsch, or the I don't even know what to call it when Prigozhin, Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner guys started to march toward Moscow.

It looks like it was some kind of inside military deal to shake up Putin and to push the defense minister and the chief of the general staff outta the way.

That's all, that's gone.

The guys involved are relaxing, they're taking a break, they're spending more time with their families is what I say in America.

But I think Putin's blowing Prigozhin out of the sky and executing him very publicly was a message from Putin to the rest of the Russian league that I'm still in charge.

On the other hand, his power is not unlimited.

His attempts to keep just drafting and drafting and drafting keep getting scaled down and pushed back.

So, I thought about a year ago on Victory Day, he might declare some kind of general mobilization, but clearly he's trying to observe some kind of deal with the Russian elites and with Russian society that I promised you this war wasn't gonna really touch you.

I promised you a quick victory.

So it shows you the limits on his power that he's trying to balance these two things of I'm not giving up, we haven't lost, victory, all that propaganda that you're seeing on Russian TV.

But on the other hand, no, I can't just declare a martial law and put a million men into the army or do something even worse, including something like nuclear weapons.

He's stuck.

So he's in power, but he's now stuck with this war that he doesn't, I think he doesn't really know how to get out of at this point.

- Yeah, Tom, you spent time working on Capitol Hill.

The debate about whether or not to continue funding Ukraine's war efforts seems to be mired in some form of political squabble, particularly in the House of Representatives.

What does that kind of debate at this particular moment in the course of this war, do to American leadership in a place like Ukraine, but globally more generally?

- It's such a important question, Jim.

What it really shows is that the Republican party has become just an utterly unserious and performative party.

That there's no real principle involved here, that it's almost the kind of oppositional defiance disorder.

Well, if Joe Biden wants this and a lot of other folks agree with it, then we have to put a wedge between Joe Biden and the public and be against it.

It's that old Marx Brothers song, right?

Whatever it is, I'm against it.

And there's no real solution here, and there's no real sense that any of these Republicans, the Republicans who are opposing this, understand this issue, care about it, really understand it beyond its influence on domestic politics.

And I think that sends a horrific message to the rest of the world because it says, it tells these authoritarian regimes, you can play the game of dividing Americans.

You can push that button and divide Americans over something that normally they would be pretty much on the same page about.

- Well, and to that end, you mentioned it, you're a recovering Sovietologist.

You understand the history of Russia's use of political warfare and disinformation to sow divisions inside American and Western publics.

We know what happened in 2016.

Do you believe Russia will try to take a hand in the 2024 campaign?

- I don't think they have to.

I think we're doing it to ourselves.

Why does Russia need to get involved in more active measures when Fox and Newsmax exist?

We're practically running a psychological operation on ourselves at this point, again, based not in any kind of theory of government or deeply rooted policy differences, but again, in this kind of childish, sort of whatever the other team wants, I have to be against.

Now, with that said, of course the Russians will do everything they can to help that process along.

But one of the interesting things here is that since Elon Musk more or less destroyed Twitter, and Facebook has created this kind of gigantic thing called threads, that actually complicates the problems for Russians seeking to influence social media.

Because now there's multiple social medias and the Russians, back in the old days, it was easy.

You went on Twitter, you put 1,000 bots out there, and you push your message that way.

So I think they'll be interested in it, but I actually think that in some ways, the social media landscape in 2024 is actually harder for the bad guys to navigate.

- So Tom, you we're talking about the 2024 election, and as of now, it looks like it will be a rematch between Joe Biden and the former President Donald Trump.

Can you give us sort of an overview of what you expect to happen during the election?

There's so many things that could happen with Donald Trump facing so many charges.

Anyway, give us your sort of overview where we stand right now.

- First thing I think is Donald Trump's gonna be the nominee.

The Republicans want him.

We keep talking about the Nikki Haley surge.

Yes, she's surging to a 15 point tie with Ron DeSantis.

And together DeSantis and Haley are 60 point, running 30 points back from Trump.

The Republican party has become a cult of personality.

And so they don't care if he's, I think it's true that when he is indicted, his supporters think that's awesome.

That's a sign that he is aggravating the right people.

So on the Republican side, and even if he, now there is a possibility is if he's convicted or he has some remarkable flame out in public, I don't know.

I mean, he's so unpredictable and he's such a emotionally disordered person that it's hard to know.

But I think even the Republicans are not gonna abandon him.

If he's convicted, that would affect how Independents and swing voters view him.

And before I get to the Democrats, I'll just say, I find it astonishing that there are still swing voters in a country where Donald Trump has told us exactly what he intends to do in 2024.

Violate the Constitution, use the army against American citizens, prosecute his enemies, politicize the Justice Department.

But unfortunately, that's the time we live in.

On the Democratic side, I find it again, kind of remarkable that Joe Biden can't catch a break no matter what he does.

I mean, the economy is booming.

We talked about his foreign policy, and yet there's all this hemming and hawing.

And so what I expect is that voters will come home in a year, and that you will get large turnouts in all the places where in blue states and red states where the loyalists will come home to their parties.

I think in the swing states, I'm still optimistic, because especially now we're doing this in early November, we've seen the results.

The Virginia House was flipped by Democrats.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court added a Democrat to its majority there, which actually matters because they would be the ones to hear challenges in 2024.

Ohio has guaranteed abortion rights in its Constitution, which adds to red states like Kansas and Montana.

So I think all of the indicators are the right way.

I think the problem is that the voters still think Joe Biden just sounds old.

When he talks, he just sounds like an old guy.

But again, if his opponent is a guy who, when he talks, sounds completely unhinged, I think voters will kind of sort this out when it comes closer to November of '24.

- Tom, am I just becoming an old curmudgeon?

You and I.

- Welcome to the club, Jim.

- Well, I'm glad to be in the club with you.

- It is a good club though.

- I think back just in the last 15 years to campaigns between Obama and McCain, between Kerry and Bush, between Gore and Bush, where there was serious substantive policy discrepancies that sort of characterized the two parties.

But there was a seriousness about governing that both parties offered the American public.

I might be sounding very partisan in saying this, but I don't see that same seriousness about governing from the expected standard bearer of the party.

You've written about some of the dangers that Trump might pose in a second administration, and you made reference to it here.

But specifically, what are you worried about?

- Well, let me back up for a moment and say that this problem of seriousness is really heartbreaking, and it doesn't make you a curmudgeon to notice it.

We live in a post policy world.

That's part of the problem is that we live in a celebrity driven, and I'm gonna both sides this just a little bit.

I know that some folks itch a bit, but when I see and talk to, not just in the social media, I mean, I taught, I stepped down after 18 years teaching summers and nights at Harvard, and I taught for 10 years at Dartmouth and Georgetown.

When I hear young people saying things like, well, I don't know what I'm gonna do in November if Biden doesn't forgive student loans.

Or I don't like Biden's position on Israel so I may sit out the election.

There's a fundamental unseriousness about that throughout the electorate, because we, as Americans have come to expect a kind of transactionalism.

We vote and we get things that we want, and we don't cooperate, we don't compromise.

And the Republicans have gone a million light years beyond this and basically say now, we don't even care about, we're fiscal hawks.

While Trump spends a million, bazillion dollars out and raises the deficit.

Okay, we don't care about fiscal discipline anymore.

It's really about social resentment and tribalism.

So I think that is the bigger problem that we just can't seem to get our arms around this notion that we actually have to govern.

And I miss those elections too, Jim.

I often say to my friends further to the left, I can't wait to get back to having arguments about marginal tax rates.

I want to have really boring arguments about marginal tax rates.

But unfortunately, that's just not the world we're living in.

- Hey, Tom, we've only got about 40 seconds left here.

I'm curious, you are still one of the great social media follows and your audience on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, would certainly agree.

I'm curious though, have you considered switching platforms with the recent changes to X?

And if not, what keeps you where you are?

- I use multiple platforms now.

I'm Radio Free Tom, on Blue Sky, on Threads, on Spoutible.

I mostly use Blue Sky, Threads and Twitter.

And Twitter I think is sort of petering out.

And I did want to, I didn't want to duck your last question, Jim, and I'll do it in 10 seconds.

What I worry about if Trump is reelected.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- Is that he will turn the United States into an authoritarian government.

Trash the Constitution, turn the Justice Department into a police force that he uses against his enemies and turn the US military into a Praetorian guard.

I mean, I think we will be, we will lose our democracy if Donald Trump gains the White House again.

So that's the simplest answer about what I'm worried about.

- Tom Nichols, that is a sobering point to leave it on.

Yeah, people can find you, as you mentioned on those social media platforms, but also in "The Atlantic".

Thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square", you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where we can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square".

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