Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Single best idea and a single best idea. It has
Speaker 2: been a team effort for the last seventy two hours
Speaker 2: into this military action by the United States of America.
Speaker 2: Our special show yesterday, and of course we advanced forward today.
Speaker 2: We started with a gentleman who pulled the consul and
Speaker 2: foreign relations into the modern age now with Centerview Partners,
Speaker 2: here is Richard Haass.
Speaker 1: And the President had the authority like all of his predecessors.
Speaker 1: If you look at the history of a modern American
Speaker 1: foreign policy initiative, and foreign policy has decidedly passed to
Speaker 1: the executive. I mean, Tom, what was it sixty years ago?
Speaker 1: Author Schlesinger Junior wrote his essay book about the impurial presidency.
Speaker 1: This is not new. Congress virtually, never ever fulfills its
Speaker 1: constitutional obligation to declare war, and we have used military
Speaker 1: force hundreds of times in the absence of anything so formal.
Speaker 1: So I just flat out disagree with that kind of
Speaker 1: a narrow legalist interpretation. That said, if I had been
Speaker 1: advising President Trump, I would have said, take a page
Speaker 1: out of the book of President Bush, the father Bush
Speaker 1: forty one, do things with the internationally, with building on
Speaker 1: the International Atomic Energy Agency Skating report of Iran, do
Speaker 1: things with the Congress, do things with the American public.
Speaker 1: If you're going to use military force, people should come
Speaker 1: to conclude that you tried to do diplomacy and at
Speaker 1: the end of the day you reluctantly had to use it.
Speaker 1: And also, by the way, would have helped this president
Speaker 1: with his magabase. So I think he should have gone
Speaker 1: about this differently. But did he under American political tradition?
Speaker 1: Did he possess the authority to do what he did? Absolutely?
Speaker 2: Richard Hass can't say enough about the works he's put out.
Speaker 2: One of my books of the summer years ago, The
Speaker 2: World with Richard Haws and of course Bill of Obligation
Speaker 2: out there now on citizenship in America. Robert Kaplan came
Speaker 2: by with a new book, Wasteland, my book of the
Speaker 2: year I think two years ago, The Loom of Time,
Speaker 2: the reach of the Arab world from Morocco over to Persia.
Speaker 2: Robert Kaplan on this moment for America and Persia.
Speaker 3: People who were saying that this could this could lead
Speaker 3: to another you know, forever forever war, Middle East quagmire.
Speaker 3: They're making a mistake of category. Iraq is was in
Speaker 3: a different category than Iran. Iraq was in the category
Speaker 3: of Vietnam and Afghanistan in Korea in the sense that
Speaker 3: it involved tens of thousands of ground troops which got
Speaker 3: stuck literally in a quagmire. Here, we're dealing with just
Speaker 3: air and naval assets. The war could go in a
Speaker 3: number of ways. There could be blowback, but as long
Speaker 3: as we stick with air and naval assets, there's not
Speaker 3: going to be a quagmire. There's going to be something different.
Speaker 3: It may be something bad, but it will simply exist
Speaker 3: in a category different from those four forever wars Korea, Vietnam, Iraq,
Speaker 3: and Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: Robert D. Kaplan, The new book is The Wasteland. Thank
Speaker 2: you so much again to our team for a concerted
Speaker 2: effort on our fractured geo politics, huge sets of economic data.
Speaker 2: This week we'll be covering all that into the domestic
Speaker 2: legislative debate in Washington as well. On your commute across
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