Single Best Idea with Tom Keene: Richard Haass & Robert D. Kaplan

Tom Keene breaks down the Single Best Idea from the latest edition of Bloomberg Surveillance Radio.

In this episode, we feature conversations with Richard Haass & Robert D. Kaplan.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Single best idea and a single best idea. It has
been a team effort for the last seventy two hours
into this military action by the United States of America.
Our special show yesterday, and of course we advanced forward today.
We started with a gentleman who pulled the consul and

(00:34):
foreign relations into the modern age now with Centerview Partners,
here is Richard Haass.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
And the President had the authority like all of his predecessors.
If you look at the history of a modern American
foreign policy initiative, and foreign policy has decidedly passed to
the executive. I mean, Tom, what was it sixty years ago?
Author Schlesinger Junior wrote his essay book about the impurial presidency.
This is not new. Congress virtually, never ever fulfills its

(01:04):
constitutional obligation to declare war, and we have used military
force hundreds of times in the absence of anything so formal.
So I just flat out disagree with that kind of
a narrow legalist interpretation. That said, if I had been
advising President Trump, I would have said, take a page
out of the book of President Bush, the father Bush

(01:26):
forty one, do things with the internationally, with building on
the International Atomic Energy Agency Skating report of Iran, do
things with the Congress, do things with the American public.
If you're going to use military force, people should come
to conclude that you tried to do diplomacy and at
the end of the day you reluctantly had to use it.

(01:47):
And also, by the way, would have helped this president
with his magabase. So I think he should have gone
about this differently. But did he under American political tradition?
Did he possess the authority to do what he did? Absolutely?

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Richard Hass can't say enough about the works he's put out.
One of my books of the summer years ago, The
World with Richard Haws and of course Bill of Obligation
out there now on citizenship in America. Robert Kaplan came
by with a new book, Wasteland, my book of the
year I think two years ago, The Loom of Time,

(02:21):
the reach of the Arab world from Morocco over to Persia.
Robert Kaplan on this moment for America and Persia.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
People who were saying that this could this could lead
to another you know, forever forever war, Middle East quagmire.
They're making a mistake of category. Iraq is was in
a different category than Iran. Iraq was in the category

(02:52):
of Vietnam and Afghanistan in Korea in the sense that
it involved tens of thousands of ground troops which got
stuck literally in a quagmire. Here, we're dealing with just
air and naval assets. The war could go in a
number of ways. There could be blowback, but as long

(03:15):
as we stick with air and naval assets, there's not
going to be a quagmire. There's going to be something different.
It may be something bad, but it will simply exist
in a category different from those four forever wars Korea, Vietnam, Iraq,
and Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Robert D. Kaplan, The new book is The Wasteland. Thank
you so much again to our team for a concerted
effort on our fractured geo politics, huge sets of economic data.
This week we'll be covering all that into the domestic
legislative debate in Washington as well. On your commute across

(03:55):
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Channel one twenty one on YouTube. We're out at Bloomberg Podcasts.
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single best idea