On this episode, Dan Richards spoke with Watson School Senior Fellow Stephen Kinzer about the history of U.S. foreign intervention and how it can help us to understand today’s conflict in Iran.

Stephen is an award-winning foreign correspondent who spent more than 20 years reporting around the world with the New York Times, and has written multiple books on the history of U.S. intervention abroad, including “All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” which explored the history and unintended consequences of the CIA-backed 1953 coup in Iran.

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DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson School for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. As of this recording, over 1,800 people have died in the conflict between the US and Israel and Iran, including hundreds of civilians, with no end to the violence in sight.

Supporters of the war say the US and Israel are freeing the Iranian people from tyranny and neutralizing a global nuclear threat. Opponents say this is a conflict with no clear goals, no clear strategy, and one that risks destabilizing the entire Middle East. So how should we think about this conflict, its rationale, its timing, and its future ramifications?

In this episode, we're going to take a step back from the headlines and try to put this moment in its historical context. Because as the work of our guest on this episode makes clear, while, of course, every military conflict is unique and their outcome is impossible to predict, in many ways, the US has been here before. And when it comes to understanding how this conflict might evolve, our own history may be our best guide.

Stephen Kinzer is a Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson School, and an award winning foreign correspondent who spent more than 20 years reporting around the world with The New York Times. He has written multiple books on the history of US intervention abroad. Stephen, thank you for coming back onto the show.

STEPHEN KINZER: Great to be with you, especially here at Watson.

DAN RICHARDS: So before we get into the history, I just wanted your quick reaction. As a student of this history, of US military intervention and a former foreign correspondent, what was your initial reaction to the US and Israel's most recent military strikes in Iran?

STEPHEN KINZER: I thought I had been pretty well conditioned to the impulsiveness of our president and the developing idea that military force should be used unilaterally. But even so, I was quite taken aback by this. I still can hardly wrap my mind around the fact that these wonderful cities like Tehran and Shiraz and Isfahan are being essentially carpet bombed.

As it proceeds, I think we get deeper and deeper into a situation that's more difficult to withdraw from. On the other hand, President Trump has shown unpredictability and impulsiveness in launching the operation, so he might show the same thing in ending it.

DAN RICHARDS: We'll get back to President Trump and the current state of affairs. But I want to take a look in this episode at the history that you have written so much about and what it can help us understand about the present.

So let's start a little ways back. You wrote a book that came out in Twenty Seventeen called The True Flag-- Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, which, among other things, recounted this national debate over US intervention abroad that raged in America in Eighteen Ninety-Eight.

You described this as a foundational debate in American history, from which all future American debates about foreign intervention grew out of or that we're continuing to have. So what was this debate, and what were the two sides arguing?

STEPHEN KINZER: So Americans in the 19th century were very caught up in the idea of what was then called manifest destiny. That was the idea that it was the fate, it was the blessing of the United States to ultimately fill up North America. We were going to overrun the whole continent, expel others who are pretenders and make it our own country.

In Eighteen Ninety, the US Census Bureau announced that the frontier was officially closed. No more room to expand inside North America. So then comes the question, what do we do now?

One option would have been to say, well, we've fulfilled our manifest destiny. Let's now transform this country that we've managed to settle into a model for the world and devote our resources to creating a society that others would want to emulate. The other option is, since we've been expanding ever since the pilgrims moved from Plymouth to Boston, we got to continue expanding.

I remember Richard Russell, the famous conservative Senator from Georgia in the second half of the 20th century, who said something like, "if we get to the point where we can go everywhere and do everything, we're probably going to go everywhere and do everything". So here America had this power. And it's rare in world affairs that countries have power to do things, but they decide not to do them, even if doing them is going to be self-defeating and cause backlash to themselves.

DAN RICHARDS: And so what were the types of expansion in the late Eighteen Hundreds that the US was grappling with?

STEPHEN KINZER: The first explosion of American overseas expansion had to do with Cuba. So in Cuba in the Eighteen Nineties, there was a rebellion going on against Spanish colonialism. The Americans, conditioned by wild press reports about brutalities being committed by the Spanish, became very excited about the possibility of sending troops to Cuba to help the Cubans liberate themselves from Spain.

Now, to our surprise, some of the Cuban revolutionaries were not so happy about this idea. They worried about what would happen with a US Army on their soil. In order to calm down those fears, the US Congress passed a law declaring that the moment we helped the Cubans overthrow Spain, we would withdraw our own troops and we would allow Cuba to proceed to have an independent government.

The war was over very quickly, but also quickly the United States began to reconsider its pledge. We began to realize several things we didn't like about the idea of an independent Cuba. So we overruled our promise, which we had made with the force of law. And we passed a new law called the Platt Amendment, under which we would allow Cuba to have its own government, but we would have a veto power over it. And that became the template of the Platt Amendment for our interventions all around the Caribbean.

Now, as we were preparing for the war in Cuba, we decided that we needed to find the Spanish fleet because we were afraid that might attack America in retaliation. Well, the Spanish fleet was not in Spain. It wasn't in Cuba. We finally located it in a place that no American had ever heard of and that was the Philippines.

So the Americans sent a flotilla of Naval ships to destroy the Spanish fleet in Manila harbor, which it did in a couple of hours. And then America was in such an aggressive mood, and America had convinced itself that its occupation of other countries was actually beneficial for the natives, as do all empires. So America went ahead and seized the Philippines. This was a horrifically brutal war.

Now, a huge debate erupted in the United States over whether this was a good idea. There had never in history been an example of a country that was once a colony, now taking other colonies. Our own founders proclaimed the idea that everybody should have the right to self-government.

So how could we square this? Isn't it fundamentally un-American to impose ourselves on other countries? Now, each empire in history convinces itself that unlike all other empires, it's beneficial. It only wants to help and civilize the people. And we certainly convinced ourselves of that.

DAN RICHARDS: So that was part of the rationale that it was a civilizing approach.

STEPHEN KINZER: Absolutely. Part of it was civilizing, and it was a charitable mission. On the other hand, we were also acutely aware of the economic benefits that were out there. During the debate in the Senate, one Senator actually held up a gold nugget that he said he had picked right out of a river in the Philippines.

In addition, the Philippines were seen as a springboard toward the China market, which transfixed American businesses. And in those days, the way to get foreign markets was to capture countries. And we felt that by seizing the Philippines, we would be joining the most important countries in the world, all of which sealed their status as important by grabbing foreign colonies.

So this huge debate that erupted in the US Senate over the question of whether the United States should begin taking foreign territories, in particular the Philippines, consumed the United States. It went on for more than a month. Newspapers all over the country were publishing full texts of what everything that had been debated in the Senate the day before.

And as you mentioned, every theme that we now debate, whether it was Vietnam, Iraq, or now Iran came up first in those arguments on both sides, why it's good for the United States to exercise military power around the world and why it's bad. This is indeed the founding debate, which we keep repeating with various permutations.

DAN RICHARDS: I want to turn to another moment, a few decades later, a different defining era in this history of US foreign intervention. And that is in the middle of the 20th century and around the Cold War.

And to hear more of your thoughts about intervention in that era, I want to talk about the Dulles brothers, who you also wrote. You wrote a joint biography of these brothers called The Brothers-- John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, which came out in Twenty Thirteen. So who they and what was their collective approach to America's position in the world?

STEPHEN KINZER: So for the first half century, after our initial burst of foreign expansion at the very end of the 19th century, intervening was pretty easy for us. We just sent the Marines and then we took over the countries, or we deposed governments at will.

DAN RICHARDS: And we would install a dictator who was friendly to our--

STEPHEN KINZER: Usually under the Platt Amendment. The idea was you rule, but we tell you what to do. It was a different form of colonialism than the European powers had conducted. Then after the Second World War, everything changed because suddenly there was a force in the world, the Soviet Union, that could oppose our Marine landings. We could land troops somewhere, the Red Army could show up on the other side. And the next thing you know we're spiraling into World War III.

So we had to produce a new way to influence other countries, and that became covert action. So the CIA was created in Nineteen Forty-Seven. Allen Dulles joined soon thereafter. When President Eisenhower took office in Nineteen Fifty-Three, he named Allen Dulles as head of the CIA and his older brother John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State. So this was the only time in American history where siblings, two brothers, controlled the overt and the covert sides of American foreign policy.

So who were the Dulles's? They grew up in a very religious household. Father was a preacher and their other ancestors had been missionaries in India and such. So one of the things they absorbed growing up was a Calvinist view of the world that is underlined by two fundamental beliefs.

First of all, the world is divided between the good and the evil. And the other principle that accompanies that in traditional Calvinist doctrine is that good Christians do not have the luxury of sitting at home and just hoping that the world gets better. You have to go out and redeem it and bring the message of Christianity to the people who are so ignorant of it, and thereby risking eternal perdition.

So it's a short step from those religious beliefs to a political belief that the world is composed of good countries and evil countries, and that the good countries, particularly the United States, have the obligation to go out and redeem the rest of the world.

So that was a part of the Dulles brothers approach, but it went beyond that. During most of their early lives, that is to say, when they were in their 30s, 40s, 50s, both were working for this famous New York law firm called Sullivan and Cromwell. That was not a normal law firm like any other. They had a single focus, and that was bending foreign countries to the will of American corporations.

So through their decades of representing the biggest American multinational corporations, the Dulles brothers developed a view of the world that was very much from the perch of Wall Street. They completely identified the interests of the United States with the interests of American multinational corporations.

So put those things together and you get the approach to the world that the Dulles brothers carried out. And covert action was a very important part of it. Both of them were fervent believers in this, but what I think was not understood at the time was that President Eisenhower was also a huge fan of covert action.

Eisenhower had been commander of American troops in Europe during the Second World War. He had had to send kids off to die by the thousands during World War II. This weighed very heavily on him, and you can see it in some of the interviews, including one where he essentially starts to weep when thinking about the kids that were lost on D-Day. And he saw covert action as a way to avoid wars. So actually, it was a kind of a peace project, and I don't think any of these people ever thought through what the long-term implications of covert action would be.

DAN RICHARDS: Did it begin to just also lower the threshold for intervention? If an intervention requires D-Day, those costs are so high may really question whether it's a value. But if there's this idea that you can secretly go in with a few dozen people, you might jump around the world.

STEPHEN KINZER: Absolutely. And I would add another factor to that. By intervening in other countries, overthrowing governments or preventing free elections, the United States was violating its stated principles. We couldn't do that openly. It had to be done covertly. Otherwise, the hypocrisy of the project would be completely clear. So for a lot of reasons, covert action just seemed like the solution to all of our problems. When we look back on it, we could see it as maybe the opposite the beginning of all of our problems.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, let's look at one of these instances that I think will also bring us a little bit more into the present, or at least set the stage for that conversation, which is that Allen Dulles, as director of the CIA, oversaw the coup in Iran in Nineteen Fifty-Three. What was the rationale for that covert action?

STEPHEN KINZER: It's a very interesting story. And the Nineteen Fifty-Three coup is a formative episode in the history of US-Iran relations. In fact, I would say that Iranians understanding of US-Iran relations is completely different from America's understanding of US-Iran relations.

America's understanding of US-Iran relations is that they begin and end with the hostage crisis of Nineteen Seventy-Nine - Nineteen Eighty. The Iranians think something different. They think that was kind of a little blip. But what was really important was what happened in Nineteen Fifty-Three. So what did happen?

Allen Dulles was pretty bored at Sullivan and Cromwell, unlike his older brother. But in the late 40s, he got a case that really grabbed him, that he loved. A conglomerate of the major American engineering companies had come together in something called OCI, Overseas Consultants Inc., and their idea was to launch massive projects in foreign countries that would completely transform them. And Iran was the first country they focused on.

So Allen Dulles was given the job of going to Tehran and getting the Shah to sign off on this project. He went to Tehran. He did get the Shah to sign on. While he was there, he saw that the Shah, who was eager to cooperate with the United States in every way, was facing domestic political opposition. And who was the head of that group but Mohammad Mosaddegh, this very well respected nationalist leader?

So Allen Dulles developed not only an affection for the Shah, but a realization that Mosaddegh, who was immensely popular, was the great threat to America's interests in Iran. He and Foster Dulles were particularly horrified when Mosaddegh became prime minister and in Nineteen Fifty-One nationalized Iranian oil. So that electrified the Dulles brothers. And they came into office in Nineteen Fifty-Three with a real grudge against Mosaddegh.

Now, Eisenhower didn't. So the Dulles brothers had to persuade Eisenhower to take the opposite approach. One of the things they did was to play down the oil motive and to say, the real problem is that Mosaddegh could be leading Iran toward communism. And of course, in the Cold War atmosphere of that era, this was a very powerful argument.

Now, Mosaddegh was an elderly feudal landlord who despised all Marxist and socialist ideas. And actually, Eisenhower had a sense of this, and he-- I'll paraphrase now, said something at one of these National Security Council meetings like, "I'm glad we're getting rid of that Communist Mosaddegh. But I hadn't understood that he was a Communist".

And Foster Dulles had a great answer. He essentially said, you're right, Mosaddegh is not a Communist. However, Mosaddegh is old. Mosaddegh is sick. He could die. He could be overthrown. Meanwhile, Iran has all this oil. It's right on the border with the Soviet Union. It's too big a risk for us to take.

And I think Eisenhower, without thinking about long-term consequences, decided that that was a risk worth taking. And he authorized that Nineteen Fifty-Three coup. And the result of the coup was not just the fall of Mosaddegh, the fall of one political leader. It was the end of democracy in Iran. And that's why Iranians see this as the key moment.

And this was all crystallized for me in a discussion I had some years ago with Bruce Laingen, who was the chief of the American diplomatic mission in Iran when it was taken over. So he was the senior figure among the hostages. And I asked him, what was it like being held more than a year?

And he said, well, as a diplomat, by career, by experience, by disposition, I was able to put up with a lot. But at one point, after I'd been in for more than a year, my captor came into my little cell or room and I exploded at him. I just lost it, and I started screaming at him and telling him have no right to do this. You cannot take hostages. Iran is supposed to be a hospitable country. Taking hostages is against every idea, every law, every principle of religion.

He said, I went on and on for several minutes, and the guy just waited patiently until I finally ran out of breath and stopped. And then he looked right at me and said you have no right to complain because you took our whole country hostage in Nineteen Fifty-Three. And that shows you how vivid that episode is in the Iranian collective memory.

DAN RICHARDS: And it points to something you wrote in the preface to your book, All the Shah's Men, a preface I think you wrote in Two Thousand and Eight that this episode of the Nineteen Fifty-Three coup epitomizes more perfectly than maybe any in recent history, the concept of blowback.

I wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit. And this idea that a recurring theme in American intervention is the kind of unpredictable reactions that sometimes can even go in the opposite direction of what the designers had hoped for.

STEPHEN KINZER: The Americans placed the Shah back on his peacock throne after the Nineteen Fifty-Three coup. He then ruled for 25 years with increasing repression. During that period, he was never able to establish his legitimacy as a leader. The reason was everyone understood he had been placed in power by foreign nations. And that's a particularly sensitive point for Iranians who have had a long history of foreign intervention.

So spin forward, what were the results of that? The Shah's 25 year rule finally ended with the national uprising, which we now call the Islamic Revolution. And that revolution brought to power a group of fanatically anti-American mullahs who have spent nearly the last half century working intently, and sometimes very violently, to undermine American interests all over the world.

None of that would have happened if the United States had allowed democracy to flower in Nineteen Fifty-Three. If we had not staged that coup, we might have had a thriving democracy in the heart of the Muslim Middle East all this last practically 3/4 of a century. And it's very difficult to even wrap your mind around how different the Middle East might be.

This coup sent a message to the rising generations all around the Middle East, the rising generations of leaders. And the message they got was very clear. The United States has now replaced Britain as the dominant power in the Middle East. And what does the United States want? Just look at Iran.

DAN RICHARDS: It reminds me of something you wrote from the perspective of those few weeks in Nineteen Fifty-Three and the people who led that coup. Any story can be a happy ending, depending on when you end the story.

STEPHEN KINZER: Absolutely. So from the White House perspective, this was a spectacular success. So we got rid of a guy we didn't like, Mosaddegh. And we replaced him with a guy, the Shah, who would do whatever we wanted. So it seemed like the perfect ending as long as history doesn't keep happening.

DAN RICHARDS: I want to talk a little bit more about the present now in light of everything we've been discussing. As you've kind of illustrated, there have been multiple different eras of US approaches to foreign intervention, different templates from full on annexation to covert regime change to military intervention, military-led regime change.

I wonder when you look at our current administration and their approach to foreign intervention, most notably in Iran, but also what we saw take place in Venezuela earlier this winter, how do you kind of fit the Trump administration's approach to foreign intervention in this history?

STEPHEN KINZER: In the first place, it's completely unilateral. There's no pretense of trying to get permission from the United Nations or trying to build a coalition, as previous presidents would have done. Secondly, we've dropped the pretense that we're doing this to help other people. You very rarely hear people in Washington talk about how there's going to be liberation, there's going to be human rights, there's going to be democracy. We never really meant that, but we pretended. Now we don't pretend anymore.

So what's to me, the defining factor of the way the United States is acting now is that it seems to have absolutely no restraints. And in a way, this is terribly self-defeating. The United States managed to maintain what amounted to a global empire, of which it was the unquestioned hegemon for the better part of a century.

And we did this partly through coercion, but often we did it with the approval and cooperation of many other countries. And that was because coercion wasn't our only tool. We had a whole variety of tools. We had carrots as well as sticks. We tried to shape international institutions in ways that would at least give other countries the sense that they had a role, they had a voice. And I think that was a very successful way of maintaining America's global primacy.

But now we are essentially seen as nothing but a wrecking crew. We're not replacing anything bad with anything good. And Iran is a perfect example of this. We have essentially a diplomacy-free foreign policy. And this is a great mistake.

And that's why I think even if you're looking at America's posture in the world from the perspective of Washington, the perspective of wanting to maintain American influence around the world, you see these interventions as self-defeating. They don't help the United States' position in the world.

And the country that I think is laughing all the way to the bank has to be China. The Chinese have spent years trying to persuade countries around the world that if they want a stable, predictable international partner, it could be China. And nothing has made that clearer than the way the United States has behaved, including towards some countries that thought they were friends of ours.

DAN RICHARDS: You mentioned that the pretense of helping people in these countries we're intervening in is no longer there. Although I would say, there are at least overtures made in that direction by the Trump administration. They make claims that they are going to create a better life for people in Venezuela and Iran, ultimately. And whether that is a sincerely held belief or not.

I think another point that the supporters of this administration are making is that they are figuring out a way to intervene in these countries in a way that is quicker and more directed somehow, and less costly to the US than, say, the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan. That there's this kind of entering into a country, decapitating the leadership, and we won't get bogged down in some quagmire. What do you think of that defense of what's happening right now?

STEPHEN KINZER: Well, first of all, the Iran situation is very different from Venezuela. Venezuela has been a country for 200 years more or less, like the United States, 250 years. Iran is a country that's been around for 25 centuries. It has a very deep culture, and Iranians have a very strong sense of themselves.

So my reaction to that is that the United States has never produced a strategy that would really lead to an alternative in Iran. We don't know what the goal is. That's one of the craziest things about this project. What are we hoping to achieve? The idea that you can destroy the Islamic Republic by killing its leaders is a great misreading of the way Iran is structured.

The only way to produce change in Iran or any country in that situation over the long run, a sustainable change is to adopt policies that create a strong middle class. Once there's a class that has some economic success, it wants political opening as well. So this is a long-term project. And when you use that phrase "long-term," you've essentially lost people's attention in Washington. They want to see quick results, but there's not going to be a substantial change of government in Iran, no matter how much bombing goes on.

The Iranians learned from Vietnam and from their own war with Iraq how to escalate in ways that the United States can't match. They are great masters of asymmetrical warfare. They call it horizontal escalation. So that means you want to spread out the size of the battlefield. And you also want to lengthen the length of the conflict.

So the idea of producing or encouraging change in Iran is something that I think is very praiseworthy. But it should be done in a way that's actually going to achieve that result. Inside Iran there really is a core of spectacularly impressive opposition figures. They have been brutally repressed. Many of them spent years in jail. But there's the core of an entire new government there. Encouraging the government to take those people more seriously is not possible when our approach to Iran is, we want to destroy you.

I repeat, this is, to me, the most amazing part of the Iran project. There's no goal when you want to launch a war, that should be something that's clear in your mind. And then the next thing you want to ask is, how do we get from where we are to that goal? And I don't think either of those questions is being seriously discussed in Washington.

DAN RICHARDS: If you had to guess, what do you think is the most genuine reason for this conflict right now?

STEPHEN KINZER: I have to say I'm going to go along with the general consensus - usually I like to have my own ideas - and say that without Israel, this war would never have happened. Israel has spent decades trying to portray Iran as this death cult that's demonically devoted to taking over the whole region.

And the influence of Israel in American politics is quite evident, particularly through financial contributions. So I think the encouragement that Israel gave to Trump in various ways has to have been the decisive factor. I don't think Trump would have acted so violently, so decisively, had he not been egged on by another regional actor that had its own interests.

Now, I'm not here to criticize Israel's interests. Israel is what Israel is and Israel is going to do what Israel does. But we're the United States. We have other interests. Ours are not identical to Israel's. So I don't mind Israel pursuing what it sees as its own interests. That's their business. But as Americans, we should be focused on what our own country is doing. And I can't see what benefit the United States is going to get from this conflict.

DAN RICHARDS: You have written a lot about a number of different types of these episodes in American history, and often very critically. Are there any instances of US military intervention that you essentially agreed with? Are there instances that you think are examples of a good use of US military force abroad?

STEPHEN KINZER: Well, obviously, ones that involved large coalitions, for example, World War II, or even the first Gulf War, in which Bush senior put together quite a coalition of countries. But in terms of actions that the United States took by itself, yeah, I think in recent times it's very hard to find one of those interventions that came out well.

America's self-interest lies in building up coalitions that support our approach to the world, and we're destroying those coalitions with this war in Iran. I think outside of Europe, you don't find much support at all for this war.

What I'm also struck by is that in Washington, nobody cares about this. They feel like we don't need anybody else's support. We're king of the hill. But actually, in international relations, there's always a counterbalance. It's like physics. Every force produces a counter force. And in the long-run, this is going to make many countries in the world feel much less confident in dealing with the United States and making agreements with the United States.

We're in a moment now of great power shifts in the world. And there should be competition at least, I would like to think, between the United States and China for the goodwill of people all over the world, particularly those south of the equator. And if there is such a competition, we're definitely losing.

DAN RICHARDS: As of this recording, President Trump has refused to rule out sending American troops into Iran. And I know, as they say, prediction is a low form of journalism. But as someone who has studied so many similar kind of moments in our history or similar themes, I wonder what's your most optimistic view of how this intervention could unfold, and what's a more pessimistic view?

STEPHEN KINZER: If Trump wants an off ramp, there are plenty of them. All he has to do is declare victory and say we accomplish what we wanted. We degraded Iran and move on to the next project. So I think that is a possible outcome. And I think probably his political advisors are pushing him in that direction, because this war is not going to be politically beneficial to Trump for long, even if it is now.

DAN RICHARDS: And do you see that any good could potentially come, or is it really just no?

STEPHEN KINZER: I can't see anything positive because the new regime that is likely to take power, likely to be more radical than the one that we've just overthrown. Iranians have learned something very painful from their revolution of the late Nineteen Seventies.

They all came together from wildly different political perspectives to overthrow the Shah, because they all agreed on one point. And that was we don't know what's coming next, but it's definitely going to be better than what we have. And what happened? It was worse. So what have Iranians learned from this? No matter how bad things are, they can always get worse.

Another principle is that you can live under a bad government, but living under no government is really impossible. And I think that is a potential fantasy that some people in Washington or even in Israel have, that Iran could degenerate into ethnic warfare and you could have a kind of a Syria or Iraq or Libya scenario there. And I think there are people that want to promote that by sending weapons to separatist groups. So that, to me, is an ultimate nightmare scenario. It would essentially mean the destruction of Iran as a nation.

And the only thing I can think of that's worse than that is Israel finally deciding that because Trump is pulling out of the war, we need to send nuclear weapons into Iran. So there are all kinds of horrific scenarios out there that could even make what's happening now look gentle.

There are off ramps, though, and I think the greatest hope is that for political reasons, the administration in Washington will decide to wash its hands of this and make some kind of a vague case that we got something done and we're going home now.

It may also have an effect on the American body politic. It may be that Americans seeing this will realize that this extreme form of military intervention is not good for anybody. Public opinion polls already show that many people are against this war. So if you wanted to think that something positive might come out of this, maybe it is that we could be entering into a period of less enthusiasm for these foreign wars.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, whatever unfolds in this conflict, I think seeing it in its longer context and seeing this as part of a chain of US activity in the region I think is a helpful reminder.

STEPHEN KINZER: Learning from history is not one of America's strong points. Gore Vidal used to say that we should change the name of our country and call it the United States of Amnesia.

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So if we can transcend that and maybe not go all the way back to learning about what happened in Nineteen Fifty-Three, but learning about what's happening in Twenty Twenty-Six and trying to take lessons from it, maybe that will be a cautionary tale for people in this administration and future administrations.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, Stephen Kinzer, we so appreciate you bringing of historical context and understanding what we're seeing today. So thank you once again for coming on to Trending Globally.

STEPHEN KINZER: That's what we do at Watson. Great to be with you.

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DAN RICHARDS: This episode of Trending Globally was produced by me, Dan Richards, with production assistance from Juliana Merullo and Eric Emma. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield, additional music from the Blue Dot Sessions.

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