The Imperial Geopolitical Order

Peter Beinart interviews Asla Bali

March 4, 2026

Transcript formatted by Claude

1. Introduction

2. Continuity and Rupture: How Trump's Foreign Policy Differs from Its Predecessors

3. The Imperial Order: Coercion vs. Legitimacy

4. How Did America Get Here? The Post-Cold War Unipolar Moment

5. Was American Imperial Overreach Inevitable?

6. The Rise of China and American Relative Decline

7. Where to Look for Resistance: Domestic and International Allies

8. Pat Buchanan, Tucker Carlson, and the Politics of Anti-Empire

9. What Kind of Domestic Coalition Can Push Back?

10. Israel's Role in Driving the War on Iran

11. Historical Analogies: The UK, the 1953 Coup, and Political Entrepreneurs

12. Is Turkey Next? Regional Reordering After Iran

13. Europe, Migration, and the Risk of Global Conflagration

14. Closing Remarks

Introduction

Beinart: I'm really, really pleased to be joined today by someone who I just have, I don't know well personally, but who I have enormous, enormous respect for. There are a few people out there who I find, very few actually in my case, where if I hear them talking about something, I am just consistently kind of astonished by the level of clarity in what they say. And Asla Bali is definitely in that small category. She's the Howard Holtzman Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She works on human rights law, law of the international security order, comparative constitutional law with a focus on the Middle East. And I just couldn't think of anyone in this really bewildering, I mean, situation just in the world, in the United States and the world just gets more and more terrifying and bewildering. And I felt like I didn't want to have a narrow conversation about Iran, because I think this is so much bigger than Iran. I wanted to talk to someone who I thought may be able to put America in its relationship with the world in some context at this moment. So Asla, thank you so much for doing this.

Bali: Yeah, it's my absolute pleasure. I'm always happy to be in conversation with you, Peter. And, you know, the admiration is definitely reciprocal.

Continuity and Rupture: How Trump's Foreign Policy Differs from Its Predecessors

Beinart: So as always, folks know that I'll ask the initial questions. People can put questions in the chat. So I guess the first kind of question I want to ask you is, how do we find a way of talking about what has changed in the way America relates to other countries under Donald Trump without sanitizing some kind of rule-based order in which the United States, before Donald Trump was kind of just like you know, playing by the rules and being a Boy Scout. What formulations have you thought about that can help us understand what's different here and what's not different?

Bali: Yeah, so thanks for inviting this particular reflection, which I think is important to me, because I think this understanding the relationship between continuity and rupture, I think, is very important in this moment for Americans as they think about the role this country plays and has played since the end of the Second World War and how that may be changing. I'll just mention that I wrote a piece with Aziz Rana, my great friend and co-author, frequent co-author in the Boston Review that tried to look at what are the origins of the Trump doctrine and what distinguishes it. But I really liked the title you chose, Peter, for this conversation, the Imperial Geopolitical Order. So I thought like maybe we could begin by just unpacking what that means.

In my mind, it means that there is a US-led global system that is structured around the maintenance of American primacy through military dominance, economic leverage, and political coercion. And today, those features override formal commitments to other countries' sovereignty or practices of multilateralism, rules of international law. So it's a global hierarchy anchored by US dominance in which all the other elements of the system, sovereignty, law, and institutions, all of those operate within limits set by American strategic interests and sustained by coercive capacity.

What's different under Trump is that there is scarcely an ideological framework presented to legitimate or justify this order. America First, or in the context of the Iran war, America and Israel First, is far from being a compelling basis to manufacture consent beyond our borders. So Trump is currently presiding over a system of American primacy that depends on simple coercion rather than ideological justification.

So what I'm trying to say is this represents both continuity and rupture. US primacy has long been the character of the global order, including the liberal, international, rules-based order, however you want to present it. But U.S. primacy was justified in terms of liberalism, that is protection of human rights, promotion of democracy, ensuring global stability, and so forth. Now, even when it had that legitimating frame, it was secured by very similar means — military intervention, sanctions regimes, security dependency, diplomatic pressure through economic leverage, and an instrumental approach to international law and institutions like the United Nations. But now consent is entirely secondary to simply enforced domination.

So I would say the imperial structure itself that you reference in the title for our conversation predates Trump, but where prior administrations presented primacy and geopolitical empire through a liberal framework — and this was, by the way, a bipartisan American self-understanding — that liberal framework offered the possibility of a measure of constraint on the ways that U.S. coercive power would be exercised. Trump's approach makes the imperial character of this order completely explicit, stripping away languages of partnership and limiting the sources of American dominance to raw coercion.

The Imperial Order: Coercion vs. Legitimacy

Beinart: Is the difference only that the United States used to dress up its imperial order in some universalistic language and now it doesn't make the effort? Or do you think there's actually actions that the U.S. is taking that it wasn't because that language was constraining how brutal America was willing to be in its own interests?

Bali: So again, here, I want to be careful because for the reason you said earlier, I don't want to be Pollyannish about what preceded Trump. I think it's definitely a rupture in its explicit rejection of international law. So in a sense, Trump is at war with law both at home and abroad. I also don't want to make this a story just about how the U.S. is exercising power globally because it is also true in the domestic context that Trump is at war with ideas of constitutional constraint or the ordinary practices that were associated with lawful executive branch conduct. And that's exemplified again in the Iran context.

But while it's true that this is a break, first of all, with earlier bipartisan orientations — so you had not just liberal rhetoric, but actual consideration given to questions of how does conduct relate to existing international rules, attempts to justify in the terms of those rules, and attempts to persuade others in the international system that the U.S. conduct being rule-based meant that they could rely on the United States and have a certain measure of predictability about how power would be exercised and how they themselves in the sort of hierarchy that is American geopolitical empire were situated relative to power — a lot of that predictability, that understanding of how different powers are situated relative to American coercion, all of that has been dispensed with at the moment.

So the Trump doctrine does represent a rupture in its explicit rejection of multilateral constraints. But it does build on longstanding trends. And so let me just say a little bit more about that before we turn to what is new.

U.S. foreign policy dating back at least to the 1990s — and here, again, I'm talking about bipartisan policy — has included past presidents' willingness to circumvent legal norms, and this includes the Obama administration and the Biden administrations notably, but also the Clinton administration, and to concentrate power in the executive and to engage in policies that stretched the existing international legal order well past the breaking point.

So an example that immediately comes to mind, of course, is Iraq and the aggression that was committed by the United States in that context. It was an unlawful use of force against a state that posed no threat to the United States, was widely understood in those terms at the time. The difference, of course, is that the Bush administration sought to offer justifications, spent months and months arguing at the United Nations, seeking UN Security Council authorization, also making a case to Congress and so forth. But it was ultimately a regime change intervention based on aggression.

Libya was an example of another regime change-based intervention, and it represented a progression from the Bush approach. First, it also entailed turning to the United Nations, and in this case, successfully securing Security Council authorization, but not for what ultimately was undertaken in Libya. And Libya, I think, is a relevant precedent for what's happening in Iran right now because it was a regime change intervention conducted by aerial bombardment, not actually what many members of the Security Council thought they were authorizing, and presented in the language of humanitarianism, describing itself, legitimating itself as a liberation for the Libyan people and so on. But it removed the boots on the ground element that had been present with respect to Iraq and smashed up a country, overthrew its regime, and took no responsibility whatsoever for the day after, which I believe is also the playbook that is now likely to be executed in Iran. And that's, of course, an Obama-era intervention.

And then similarly, Trump's lawless conduct in the Caribbean is preceded by arguments around targeted killings, in which a continuous narrative was presented by both Republican and Democratic administrations of the United States, that they can re-describe basically any number of sites across the global south as part of a global battlefield in an indefinite war on terror with no distinct declared armed conflict, but apply the rules of international humanitarian law — that is the laws of war — to territories at which we were not at war in order to justify the assassination or targeted killing of individuals, which is essentially just the presentation of a legitimating framework for extrajudicial killing. Those are the precedents that pave the way for the Trump strikes in the Caribbean, even though, of course, what Trump has dispensed with altogether is any legal rationale or presentation of a legitimating frame.

And that does matter — we can come back to why that matters, the fact that the Trump administration is dispensing even with the niceties of presenting some kind of a legitimating frame. But ultimately, what we are seeing is sort of the building blocks that have been prepared by earlier administrations, Republican and Democratic, including arguments grounded in international law and arguments presented to international institutions for why the United States should be able to electively overthrow the regimes of other countries, including through acts of aggression, and commit extrajudicial killing beyond its borders at its own sole discretion. So in a way, Iran represents something like shock and awe redux. And that's the part that I think we have to understand to be continuity.

But of course, there's a huge break. There's, first of all, a break with American self-understanding, which believed that all of this was being presented in good faith. And I think most administrations had truly convinced themselves that America exercising this kind of global police power was ultimately in the interest of the international community as a whole, that it was built upon multilateral consensus of a variety of kinds, that there was promotion of democracy and human rights and so on.

Trump's 2025 national security strategy is the first clear statement of official doctrine by the United States that is a complete break with that self-understanding — an expression of a blunt transactional vision for what the United States plans to do as it oversees geopolitical empire. And I think what this means, for what it's worth, is an acceleration of American decline, actually. I think that's what we're seeing happening at the moment.

The reason for that is that it is far more costly to oversee a geopolitical empire through sheer coercion. When you abandon any thought of manufacturing consent, where there's no attempt to persuade, where there's no institutionalization of American interest and presentation of a narrative that American primacy serves the ends of at least some of our allies, then what you engender, of course, is a clear set of incentives for every state in the international system to revisit its own portfolio of relationships and alliances and to diversify. You basically are undermining or unraveling a multilateral order that primarily redounded to the benefit of the United States, while at the same time radically destabilizing the orders in which you are exerting that coercion.

And so at this point, we have, as others have said, no more Powell doctrine, no more idea that if you break it, you own it. Instead, we have a foreign policy of systematically serving as a wrecking ball. But again, there is variation. So our wrecking ball operates very differently in our own hemisphere than it does in other regions and notably in the Middle East. There's no Delcy Rodriguez plan for Iran, in part because you needed a Delcy Rodriguez plan in Venezuela to avoid having millions of new refugees and flows of migration in our hemisphere. And Trump had made a series of promises to his own base that that was not going to be something that he was going to engender.

By contrast, when you smash up a country that was in any case incapable of presenting a meaningful threat to the United States or to Israel, in the Middle East, and leave 90 million people without a clear path forward, you are creating a significant destabilizing event, but in a region far from your own shores.

How Did America Get Here? The Post-Cold War Unipolar Moment

Beinart: Given that, I mean, I thought your analogy about the U.S. as a global empire now which is relying on brute coercion, you know, kind of a little bit like the kind of global version of the Soviet Union in the Eastern Bloc — it seems so irrational from an imperial perspective. Right. What do you think — why do you think when you step back and say, how did the United States get to this place? Right. Where it would do things that virtually all of its elites in both parties would consider to be self-destructive to the United States. Is it just the weird idiosyncrasy of Donald Trump? Or what factors do you think led the United States to do these series of things that are so damaging, even from its own imperial perspective?

Bali: So let me just start by saying, you know, I thank you for underscoring that piece of what I just said a moment ago, because ultimately it is the self-inflicted wounds that the United States is currently incurring against itself that will do far more damage to the U.S. and its capacity to continue being at the center of a geopolitical imperial ordering than anything any adversary could conceivably do. And I mean, I would like to unpack that a little bit more, but you're asking a question of how did we get here?

The first thing I would say is that at the end of the Cold War, decisions were taken that were unbelievably reckless by the first Bush administration — Bush father — and also by the Clinton administration, to use what they understood to be a unipolar moment as a means of forever entrenching primacy. The idea was that American primacy was going to be the principal character of that order, that there wasn't going to be a peace dividend, but instead a further investment in institutionalizing American dominance now globally. And that required a series of moves that in the 1990s were presented through arguments about humanitarian intervention, et cetera, but that basically began eroding the prohibition on the use of force, which had been the characteristic new institutional order of the post-World War II period.

So it is worth noting a couple of things. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the international legal order that was created is of American authorship. It reflected a constitutional imagination of the United States to create an order that legitimated hegemony. And for the vast majority of the world, which was outside of the Soviet dominion, this was a world of American unipolarity already — even within the so-called bipolar system that was created after World War II. But the United Nations reflected an institutional ordering of asymmetric power that advantaged the United States overwhelmingly and allowed the United States to preside over the creation of a system that had widespread consent.

And that widespread consent was secured in part as a consequence of the clear understanding of the generation that lived through two world wars, that a third world war was the most catastrophic possible outcome, that peace of whatever kind — global stability, in short through asymmetry — was better than the risk of a third world war, particularly following Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that was also in the minds of American policymakers at the time. So the authors of that institutional order created an order that helped entrench and project American hegemony, but also involved a measure of enlightened self-constraint.

And that was a consequence of the really important cautionary lessons learned, particularly through the interwar period, between the First and the Second World War, where policymakers understood that the punishing experience of a global conflagration was not enough to deter a second global conflagration within a matter of a short few decades. And it was necessary to come up with a new institutional ordering that would keep great powers at the table, that would reflect asymmetries in the international system and would channel great power rivalry. Make no mistake, the Cold War was, of course, a time of enormous violence, particularly through proxy wars fought by especially the U.S. and the Soviet Union in their competition and rivalry with one another, but it contained the possibility of real great power conflagration.

The end of the Cold War and the unipolar moment was just a moment of hubris. All of that idea of enlightened self-constraint, of why institutions matter, sort of fell away. And the idea became that the United Nations was just another tool in the arsenal of U.S. hegemonic interests alone, and that the U.S. could systematically exempt itself from the rules at will, as it did in the Kosovo intervention, that it could disregard the sort of constraining force of other great power interests. And we have been driven in that way ever since.

We also were in pursuit of new adversaries in order to justify the idea that American global police power was necessary to global stability and to keep allies on board, to continue entrenching U.S. military power at a time when there was no longer a great military rivalry. And the war on terror ended up producing the perfect vehicle for this. And that in turn had the characteristics I described of reducing the whole world, at least the global south, into a potential battlefield where we could use power at will, define enemies in some inchoate way as part of a nebulous network of terrorist threats.

And it's only the culmination of that logic that allows Donald Trump — now an actor who domestically and in his own personal biography has always understood power in terms of raw coercion and transactionalism — to inherit the entire edifice of that way of understanding the world and make it the most naked possible expression of those logics. It's a rupture because he doesn't share the core self-understanding that was a bipartisan sort of foreign policy project of the United States as a city on a hill, the United States as ensuring that the tide raises all boats, at least within its own sort of sphere of influence, but rather understands an America First model in which all of that power should be wielded exclusively in a transactional manner to advance the vision of the great leader.

And I mean, the other story, the parallel story to what I told, is a domestic story of ongoing, again bipartisan, underwriting of the concentration of power in the executive branch in ways that has enabled a single person or a small coterie of people to hijack the machinery of the state of the United States in order to enact their vision of what America First is supposed to mean.

But again, it's impossible to understand the story either as pure rupture or to not understand the ways in which it's actually embedded in how the United States oriented itself towards international law, multilateral consensus, instrumentalized the languages of liberalism and rules-based order prior to Trump in order to advance what it understood to be its interest — with, you know, increasingly a set of entanglements that dragged many others, including the European Union and other close strategic allies of the United States, together with it into intervention after intervention.

Was American Imperial Overreach Inevitable?

Beinart: To what degree do you think that something like this trajectory was inevitable, that once the United States lost its superpower foe, it would have been unrealistic to expect that American elites would be able to restrain themselves — basically just continuing, with slight variations, to push as far as they could go, given that they didn't meet resistance. When I think back to those debates in the 1990s, in which I myself made some arguments that were pretty disastrous in retrospect, I'm struck by how weak the arguments for restraint were. I mean, you really had people on the right and on the left, but they were really on the margins in Washington, who were basically saying, great, the Soviet Union's over, America really can now adopt a more modest position in the world. That wasn't the mainstream in either party. So again, is the lesson of this that basically, unless there is another powerful actor or actors restraining the United States, this is what human beings are simply going to do. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The Rise of China and American Relative Decline

Bali: I think there's one other element that one could add to your story of inevitability, which is that there is also an inevitability to incremental, gradual redistribution of power geopolitically. The thing that we haven't talked about is the rise of China in all of this and the degree to which the US commitment to primacy then commits it to greater and greater assertions of coercion in the face of the rise of not a rival militarily, but in the reality of its own relative decline. Relative decline, by which I mean only as a relative matter, because China's economic power is growing. And that too was a consequence of the kind of institutional framework secured by the United States — of globalization, global financialization. The characteristics of the US commitment to a neoliberal international global order created an international economic framework that enriched many. So there was a measure of truth, if you want, to the idea that the tide was going to raise many boats — in ways that were profoundly unequal and produced enormous forms of global inequality, but also produced opportunities for enormous wealth and wealth concentration.

And if you have other countries emerge with significant economic power that are not willing or not persuaded by the kind of ideological project of ongoing American primacy, that's always going to represent a real challenge. And so if in the 1990s, the goal was to create the thousand-year Reich — that forever we were going to have to be the most dominant power across all domains, economic, military, et cetera — if that was the only available vision for international ordering, then yes, there's a way in which the rest of it becomes almost inevitable. Not necessarily the global battlefield, or the specific forms of defection that countless US administrations have engaged in, but the idea that you are going to entrench a vision that in order to preserve American dominance requires America to commit to untold and ever increasing degrees of coercion. I think that is right.

But of course, I don't think that was the only possible vision available. I think there are many other models that one might have imagined that involved committing to more genuine forms of multilateralism and partnership, seeking to diversify and decentralize the ways in which ideas of stability were actualized in different regions.

What I do worry about today, though, is that it is very difficult to imagine the replacement of our existing international legal order with another one of global scope in the absence of a power like the United States in the 1990s that is, in fact, able and willing to be present globally in a way that requires it to think of the world collectively and not just in terms of regional orderings. I think the only thing that today is likely to replace a multilateral order, should it not survive the current direct assault by the United States against its principal institutions and rules, is a kind of siloed world of regional orders that is much, much more unstable.

And returning to the ways in which the centrality of coercion as essentially the sole tool of American empire means that we are overseeing an inherently unstable order — that inherent instability means that it's very harmful for the US in terms of its capacity to preserve primacy, but it's also a really dangerous development globally. I mean, the United States now represents perhaps the most significant disruptor of the existing international system that, for all its many flaws, has in fact avoided a third world war. And instead the United States is on the precipice. I think we're at a cliff in which we are ourselves accelerating dynamics that very much look like a drive towards new global conflagration.

So then returning to your point about the inevitability — if it is the case that it requires either a very significant military rival to concentrate the mind or a cataclysmic episode like the two world wars of the first half of the 20th century, the United States may well be accelerating us in the direction of that kind of a clarifying event.

Where to Look for Resistance: Domestic and International Allies

Beinart: I wonder where it is that people like you who want to have as much law and as much order in the world as possible, who want to move us into a world where there are real constraints on what the United States can do in terms of international constraints of law, but also domestic constraints, where you look to allies. And I guess I want to ask it in two parts, first domestically and internationally, because it seems to me it's a tricky question in both regards. When I think about prominent politicians who had a reasonable chance of winning a presidential election in the post-Cold War era who are offering a vision that was not of American primacy — to be honest, I can't think of anyone who had a better chance than Pat Buchanan. You know, he was the leading Republican candidate for a period of time in the 1996 presidential race. And if the Republican establishment hadn't rallied against him, he might have won. And I can't think of any Democrat. We now have Sanders. But in the post-Cold War era I can't think of any Democrat who was offering as clear a vision. And, you know, when I look at Tucker Carlson, it's very clear that Tucker Carlson is essentially taking that Buchananite vision — that's what he wants America First to be. Right. So he, you could argue, is the most important American media figure fighting American primacy, fighting this empire now. So how do people like you and me deal with that wing, that part of MAGA in terms of thinking about political coalitions, given I don't even need to spell out the deeply problematic parts of Tucker Carlson's view of all kinds of things. How do you think about that?

Bali: Well, the first thing I should say is that I think the hope at the international level for a shoring up of our existing international legal order — because as I say, I don't believe that if we dispense with this one, we're going to get another one of remotely similar scope — lies outside of the U.S. So I don't think there's any hope of any American political leader leading such a movement. But I do think the US is, in fact, in the midst of a series of self-inflicted wounds that are accelerating its own decline, causing de-dollarization, producing a much more rapid redistribution of power globally than any adversary of the US could ever have achieved, and certainly than China was even seeking to achieve.

There are just any number of indications that the US has lost its capacity to command consent. It certainly has not lost its coercive power or its capacity to bully. There's an old quip from Henry Kissinger that has never been truer: it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is absolutely fatal. And this lesson was learned, of course, by our Afghan allies when we withdrew in 2021. It's being learned by Gulf countries at the moment that have invited protective forces to be stationed on their territory that is now exposing them for the first time to very significant military incursions. But it's also been learned by the EU in the midst of Greenland and so forth.

And we see France reacting to all of this by introducing a new nuclear doctrine, which is to say that we are incentivizing our allies at present to reorder their military doctrine. And if an attack on Iran is producing almost immediately new nuclear policy in Europe, you can well imagine that it is also incentivizing proliferation in basically every possible region of the world where you have adversaries of the United States. So we're in a moment where the consequences of the wrecking ball approach will have a series of just completely unpredictable consequences. We can't know where this is going, but I do think we can be certain that we're in the midst of an accelerant of American decline.

And I do want to say one other thing before turning to Tucker Carlson and the domestic question that you asked. We have presided over an order in the Middle East that has long enabled Israel to exercise unrivaled military supremacy in the region. And some of the things that are the most toxic in the Tucker Carlson universe are the kinds of anti-Semitic elements of him and those who follow him, who regard Israel as responsible for American foreign policy errors and also have an entire account of the role of the Jewish community within the United States. And all of that is incredibly dangerous. You've spoken to that eloquently yourself.

But I do think that in accelerating American decline, we are in the midst of having created a circumstance in which the Middle East is being reordered violently and unpredictably in ways that will also be unpredictable for the capacity of Israel to continue to exercise that kind of unrivaled military supremacy. What I'm describing here, of course, are medium-term consequences of what's happened. In the immediate term, obviously, the Iranian people will pay the heaviest price and Iran will absorb enormous military costs first and foremost. But I think we've set in motion a kind of dynamic, a Pandora's box with very, very uncertain outcomes.

But I do think ultimately at the international level today, as opposed to in the 1990s, anybody that wants to shore up the existing multilateral order — that kind of initiative will have to come from outside of the United States, not within it.

Pat Buchanan, Tucker Carlson, and the Politics of Anti-Empire

Bali: But I agree with your account. I think that Pat Buchanan is indeed the OG of America First and had a vision of it that was ideologically coherent in a way that Trump simply isn't. I mean, Trump's understanding of America First is a domestic posture of emphasizing ethno-racial identity and imagining an America First that is like a white Christian nation, and then globally a commitment to uninterrupted US dominance everywhere — apparently at the moment treating American and Israeli interests as coterminous, but that's unlikely to be a view also shared by his base.

And because he relies exclusively on coercion, it's a losing proposition in my mind. Nobody, no power, not even the United States, has enough of a monopoly on coercion globally to sustain empire indefinitely on these terms.

What Kind of Domestic Coalition Can Push Back?

Bali: So then what about the kinds of political actors domestically who might resist this kind of a vision of the US? I mean, it's not just someone like Pat Buchanan. There were at an earlier time, not in the 1990s, but in the 1960s and 70s, a plurality of voices on the left — let's not say in the Democratic Party — that had a variety of visions of the kind of actor the United States could be at a time when it exerted as much power as it does in the international system. And that could happen again.

I mean, at the moment, the United States is a danger to the world and its capacity to realize the aspirations of its own founding have been totally squandered, whether that's an emancipatory vision at home or abroad in terms of commitments to self-determination, to democracy, to human rights and so forth. But the United States is also distinctive in having those strains present in its constitutional order and in its self-understanding, Trump notwithstanding.

And so in that universe, I think it's possible to pick up on strains of a vision of the United States and its own constitutional system that are resonant with the possibilities of returning to a kind of enlightened self-constraint. Sanders is one iteration of that, but there are many more available to us if we are willing to go back and think about the kinds of constitutional visions that came out of the labor movement, out of the feminist movement, out of even forms of third world nationalism that existed in the United States in the 1960s and combined with ideas of racial emancipation domestically. There are strains in the American constitutional experiment that express aspirations that are consistent with the world that you describe me as wanting, quite rightly, and that I think also are expressed in the vision that was created at the end of the Second World War. The Nuremberg Tribunal, again, was an expression of the American constitutional imagination — an expression of an American idea of world ordering at a moment when the United States had emerged with total primacy. And yet that vision, which is an American vision also, has not been represented in any way in the bipartisan coalitions that have governed American foreign policy for decades.

And so I agree with you. I can't give you an alternative Democrat politician at the moment that I would invest my confidence in, and I don't think the domestic American political system is going to produce anything like international restraint. It may yet return to some version of constitutional restraint because we're also driving very quickly towards a kind of unraveling of our own domestic political experiment. And I think that more than our international adventurism has been clarifying for many people in the United States — what it means to have the MAGA fracture that you have now, and whether there will be a faction in the Republican Party that comes to understand the magnitude of the destruction being wrought at this moment at our domestic institutions. I can't predict — no crystal balls. And I'm far from having a clear reading of the Republican internal sort of ideological fractures.

But I think that for the United States at present, the damage that Trump is doing domestically is the only thing that current political leaders in either of the parties are likely to be willing to confront or address. The United States has never taken the global cost of its conduct seriously as a matter of its own domestic political competition.

Beinart: Yeah, I mean, I guess my fear is that even if you can create a trans-ideological coalition against these kind of imperial actions with the Tucker Carlsons of the world, that's not a coalition that you can use to try to protect democracy in the United States, because those people are on board with the idea that we can't allow America to become a democracy if there are going to be too many black and brown people and women and et cetera who have power.

Bali: The domestic face of America First, they remain quite committed to. And just to be clear, what I'm saying is I don't think there's ever going to be a meaningful political coalition that reshapes our governing practices in the United States or takes power on the basis of a position relating to foreign policy. So what I'm saying is the only kind of broad coalition that can disrupt the dynamics we're discussing right now is a broad coalition that is committed to realizing the domestic aspirations of the constitutional order.

I just don't think Americans are motivated enough by the global consequences. Ideas about imperial blowback or imperial boomerang have always rung hollow to me. The costs of America's conduct abroad are absorbed overwhelmingly by America's victims, or the victims of this kind of imperial ambition, and there aren't meaningful costs domestically. And there are unlikely to be — again, there will be, as I say, medium and long-term costs, very substantial costs, to America's ongoing commitments to primacy. But that's very different than costs that motivate American voters at the ballot box.

Even our media account of the consequences of our current action makes that transparent. It's overwhelmingly framed in terms of market responses and the costs at the gas pump and so forth. Those are the kinds of considerations and the kinds of coalitions that ultimately influence the outcome of American elections.

And I think, sadly, that's one reason why American foreign policy is so deeply reckless — because there are no consequences for imposing punishing comprehensive sanctions on other countries or for engaging in these kinds of unbelievably reckless actions, aerial bombardment based regime change. It's so incoherent. You can't even articulate — and nor of course can the administration — a single rational logic that's being pursued here that isn't simply "let's smash up enemies." It's like the logic of the bully on the playground.

And people are mistaken when they say that no strategic end game has been articulated. It has been articulated, maybe more explicitly by Israeli leadership at the moment than US leadership, but it is simply to destroy the state. That is the end goal. There's no thinking of a day after that. And of course, that's really fatal for the reasons I mentioned earlier for a country that is actually part of the region in which that state is being collapsed. But it's also a remarkable level of insouciance for any actor that is engaging in that military conduct.

The lesson learned from Libya is that one can do that. And in fact, what has Libya done? I mean, of course, if you live in the Sahel region, what it's done is produced an endless number of additional conflicts, not just the Libyan civil war itself, destabilizing every country in that region and essentially making it impossible for Tunisia to actually pursue a meaningful democratic transition. But the consequences for Chad, for Mali, for Equatorial Guinea — it just goes on and on. But these are countries whose names never appear in American headlines. Americans would have no understanding if you tried to lay out for them the chain of events that make them responsible in any way for outcomes in Equatorial Guinea. And meanwhile, all of the Sahel is awash in small arms as a consequence of that war, and we've absorbed no meaningful cost.

So the reality is, putting a fine point on your question: it's important to think about this and what kind of responsible political leadership we can hope for. But honestly, I think there is no sense in which the consequences of our imperial conduct drive domestic political calculations in the United States. And so instead, we need to look to what kind of coalition can we build around the assault on domestic institutions pragmatically. As a normative matter, I think the most important consequences are the ones that we're exacting on the world. And as I say, the only hope is that there are some aspirations present in our political and constitutional traditions that might be resonant with a campaign that could capture American imagination at the polls — that are also consistent with desisting from this level of damage globally.

Israel's Role in Driving the War on Iran

Beinart: Yeah. I wanted to ask a question about Israel and Israel's role in all this. And I really noticed, even in the last few days since this war, that the turn towards describing the Israel-U.S. relationship as essentially Israel, you know, kind of in the driver's seat, Israel making the decisions — it seems to have been really, really accelerated, even in ways that make me somewhat uncomfortable in some of this discourse, even though I think it's obvious that Israel was pushing for this war and played a role in this war. Is there any historical analogy to the role that Israel is playing vis-a-vis the American empire right now? It's hard for me to think of one. And it's also hard for me to think about a way of characterizing this relationship now that acknowledges the enormity of Israel's influence and the way in which Israel is accelerating America's decline without whitewashing America, because I think that's what the MAGA discourse does. It's like, oh, America is just this dumb, but basically good-hearted beast that's being led around by the really, really crafty Jews, you know? And so I'm just curious if you can think of analogies and what's the right way to talk about Israel and the relationship with the U.S., right?

Bali: Okay, so let me start with how to rightly understand the role that Israel has played right now. I think the reason we're seeing the kind of crystallization of a narrative of the U.S. being led by Israel is the kinds of comments that Marco Rubio and others in the administration made. Like, they're explicitly saying this, right — that the Israelis forced our hand, et cetera — and then Trump is trying to walk that back. But because the justifications are constantly shifting and only the Israelis have presented a concrete strategic vision for what actual goals they're pursuing, it becomes very difficult to rebut that account.

Also, Israeli interests are pretty clear. The idea from the Israeli side, because they say it explicitly and consistently, is that Iran has been weakened and damaged to a degree that has just never been the case previously since 1979. The harm to Hezbollah and the weakening of that actor by Israeli strikes and the destruction of the leadership of that organization, and the fall of Assad in Syria, have been fatal blows to the regional strategy of Iran.

And then there's another thing. People talk about Netanyahu's own electoral calculation, but actually I think the more consequential of his electoral calculations has to do with the midterms in this country. I think the Israeli government has understood that its conduct over the last three years means that it has lost large swaths of the American public, that American public opinion has turned against Israel in a variety of ways. That means that whatever the outcome after the midterms, they can no longer have certainty that there will be as pro-Israel a configuration in Washington as there is today — in terms of the commitments of the executive branch and the Trump administration, but also Congress. At best, maybe they will get an equally supportive Congress, but there's a real risk that they will get a much less supportive Congress out of this.

And so I think understanding the conjuncture of the meaning of US elections and the weakening of the Iranian regime meant that this was a genuine window of opportunity. And so I do think it's probably right to say Israel was going to proceed sometime this spring with or without the United States and require the United States then to make good on its commitments to being a partner.

And this is, by the way, another way of thinking about the Kissinger quip, because the ways in which the United States has enabled an Israeli government to engage in conduct that is, in fact, ultimately self-destructive for Israel proper — in the sense of hubris and swagger and engaging in more and more extensive military engagements to reorder the region, but in ways that truly are going to have unpredictable consequences that they simply aren't in control of, nobody can be in control of — has meant that there's a recklessness to Israeli military doctrine that itself is a product of the relationship. But it's symbiotic. So I definitely agree with you that this is not just a story of Israel in the driver's seat.

Historical Analogies: The UK, the 1953 Coup, and Political Entrepreneurs

Bali: Can I think of an earlier historical example? The one that comes to my mind is actually the UK after the Second World War, where empire is declining or has declined, the sun is setting. And again, let's return to Iran. What is the direction by which 1953 happens?

I mean, Truman is basically saying to the UK: if Iran is going to renegotiate the terms of your oil concession, and you're going to have to have a revisiting of the Anglo-Iranian oil company's fate, then you just need to renegotiate it. We've had to renegotiate the terms of our own stake in the Mexican oil industry, et cetera. This is the reality. Then Eisenhower wins an election. And the UK persuades the Eisenhower administration that in a cold war where they need to score victories, they can present the most democratically elected government of Iran as a communist threat — which it is not. And which I think the UK pretty much understands it is not, right? This is just a liberal democrat that's looking to renegotiate an extremely colonial contract in a way that better serves the development interests of his country — a leader very similar to Nkrumah or Gandhi or Nehru or Atatürk in Turkey. That's the ilk of the guy.

But the UK decides, let's turn this into a way to win a low-hanging-fruit battle that serves our interests — not particularly the US interests, but UK interests — and let's get the US foreign policy establishment on board and get them to do this for us, which they successfully did. And it actually is the source of the dynamic that we're in now, because that initially botched coup attempt and then successful coup attempt, and the return of the Shah, and the denial of the self-determining goals of the Iranian people, created the dynamics that brought the Iranian revolution.

So I do think there's a way in which the possibility of political entrepreneurs working their special relationships with the United States — and the ordinary operation of the foreign policy machine in the US — is something that's actually invited by various elements of the structure of foreign policymaking in the United States. And again, the UK took great advantage of the Cold War in that context.

Another good example is the way the Iraqi diaspora insinuated itself and its own imagination of a day after in Iraq into the Bush administration. Now, were they the drivers? No. I think the Bush administration had its own reasons for deciding that they wanted to pursue a war of choice in Iraq. But their understanding of what that war of choice would look like and its course was shaped by individuals that should have had absolutely no role in American foreign policymaking and yet helped define the terms of an intervention that the United States undertook, which they themselves were seeking for completely separate reasons.

And so one question now is: just as with the U.S. and the U.K., as the U.S. interest begins to diverge from Israel — as the idea that these two countries' interests are coterminous in America First gives way, as fractures occur within the U.S. — first of all, obviously, they're going to have terrible consequences potentially for our own domestic politics and the sort of MAGA anti-Semitism that you've, again, eloquently spoken to. But also separately, what are the consequences going to be for our foreign policy? And I do think this is kind of an open question at the moment.

One of the things about the pure coercion strategy that Trump has undertaken is, for the most part, he punches down, right? He wants quick, brutal wins. And in Iran he is still punching down, no doubt about it. The reason that they've undertaken this is because the country posed no threat. If it had posed any meaningful threat to two countries with nuclear arsenals, they would not have undertaken this. Iran never posed a meaningful threat, didn't have a nuclear program that was capable of producing a weapon, didn't have intercontinental ballistic missiles, etc. So they are punching down for sure, but this is a very different kind of target and one that the U.S. seems to be staggeringly ignorant about, at least the people articulating these policies.

Anybody who thought that assassinating the supreme leader was going to result in regime collapse drastically misunderstood the nature of the institutionalized and decentralized character of the Iranian regime. And so given that apparent miscalculation — and I can't say, I have no finger on the pulse of American policymaking under the Trump administration — but presuming that their plan A involved a quick collapse, and then telling the Iranian people: there you go, we engaged in a decapitation, now you take up the reins. And given that that's not what's happening, and that they're now no longer in control of a dynamic that may alter the geographic and temporal scope of this war, might interest diverge sufficiently that Trump decides to take the win and say: hey, I killed Soleimani, now I've killed Khamenei, I did this with blinding force, the American military, we're the biggest bad guys in the world and we've destroyed this evil empire — and then reign in Pete Hegseth and call it to an end. I think it's possible.

But any scenario from here is one that I think basically only underscores the analysis we've been discussing, which is: this is absolutely terrible for the region, terrible for the world, but also incredibly dangerous for the two architects of this war.

Is Turkey Next? Regional Reordering After Iran

Beinart: I wonder — I've heard some people kind of suggesting that if Iran does really emerge from this much weaker, maybe even as some kind of semi-failed state, that the new enemy that Israel focuses attention on will be Turkey, a country you obviously know extremely well. And I do think that the nature of Israel's dynamic with the Palestinians is that because Israel refuses to face what it's doing to the Palestinians, it needs to always look for some external enemy. It was Iran before. It was Iraq in the 1980s. That's why Israel supported Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. And it just seems to me Turkey would be a natural place for Israeli antagonism to go. I wonder if that's plausible to you and what you think that might end up looking like.

Bali: I mean, this is what I mean by the hubris that has been enabled by the U.S.-Israel strategic partnership. And it's very hard to say what might actually happen. First of all, it's not enough to say that Iran might be a semi-failed state, because that has significant consequences for all of the neighbors of Iran, including Turkey.

I mean, amongst other things, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Trump administration is interested in potentially arming militias inside of Iran, and they're talking about arming Kurds. Again, beware of friendship with the United States. The Kurds have just learned that lesson in Syria, and they're being set up again as a way of engaging in ethnic fragmentation of another state. And across the region, by the way, this is understood as a kind of Israeli plan for the region — to create statelets, to fragment all of the countries into smaller maps of states that are somehow more like Israel itself, like internally claimed to be ethno-sectarian states that are somehow demographically homogenous, that heterogeneity is a weakness for the region and so on. It's all incredibly sinister and cruel.

And we can't say what the collapse of Iran — if it were ever to become essentially a failed state — would mean. The destabilizing consequences for the region would be so great, including likely for Israel, that it would probably generate its own sort of psychology that would redirect what the Israelis are saying today.

But the Israelis have been saying that Turkey is next for at least a year and a half now. You're completely right. I'm not sure if this is a natural progression, but this is the progression they've chosen. They've already articulated this. They accused Erdogan of neo-Ottomanism. There's a long history there, going all the way back to the international conference where Erdogan had a conflict with Shimon Peres in the wake of the very first of the series of wars on Gaza in 2009. So this adversarial relationship between Israel and Turkey has been a long time coming. And it is something that Turkey is very concerned about and talks about all the time. Within the domestic politics of Turkey, Israel is understood as a country that has designs to militarily attack the country. And of course, Turkey is a NATO country.

So this has already reconfigured Turkish politics, including Turkish foreign policy. It has meant that Turkey has become much more engaged with trying to partner with the United States in a variety of ways. It's also altered Turkey's relationship to the Gulf Cooperation Council. And the Gulf states are actually another interesting dimension of how will the region be reordered after this war. On the one hand, obviously, they're extremely upset that they're being struck by Iran. On the other hand, I think they have no choice but to rethink their relationships with the United States and Israel and the Abraham Accords, et cetera — where again, these are the architects of a war that has brought them greater instability and exposed their vulnerabilities in a way that they haven't had to confront since at least the Iran-Iraq war.

Whether or not an Israeli project of fragmenting Iran and then fragmenting Turkey is welcomed and seen as a way of helping Sunni Arab powers become the regional hegemons, or whether they understand that after Turkey, who's going to be next — that is another open question.

So I think lots of relationships are being reconfigured. Turkey has already begun trying to circle the wagons and put itself in a position that makes it much more difficult to take that kind of action against it. Turkey has a really interesting geopolitical position. It's on the Black Sea, meaning it's a frontline state in the Ukraine conflict. It obviously shares a border with Iraq, Syria, and Iran. It is also a bordering neighbor of Greece and the EU directly. So if you conduct a war that destabilizes the Turkish state and produce flows of refugees — or even destabilizes Iran — the places that those refugees have to go via land are all in Europe. And so this is part of the reason that you have the AfD in Germany, which is typically a MAGA ally, totally apoplectic about this war, because they already understand a war on Iran, let alone on Turkey, as a formula for yet more migration to Europe.

Europe, Migration, and the Risk of Global Conflagration

Bali: So there are so many dimensions to what all of this is, right? There's a white nationalist global project of alliances, whether it's like white South Africans as the world's only legitimate refugees, or the MAGA project for European elections, or the ethno-racial project domestically at home. And it intersects with these reorderings in ways that are basically unpredictable because, you know, a continent like Europe that treats the arrival of a million Syrians as a huge crisis that can cause them to unravel their internal cohesion and borders is also a racist universe capable of being mobilized around political entrepreneurs that weaponize migration, race and religion in ways that are reminiscent of the Second World War.

I should say I said earlier that the thing that is clarifying and that can produce a new version of some commitment to multilateralism is the prospect, the real threat, the sharpening threat of cataclysm. And we have two different ways in which we're hurtling in that direction. One is just climate catastrophe. And again, the Trump administration is doing absolutely everything it can to accelerate that. And no one else in the international system is on board. So it's completely isolated in that project. The rest of the world is moving on, trying to actually mitigate, take measures, et cetera.

And then there's this, which is a war that looks a lot like World War I in the way in which alliances are producing entanglements that are expanding rapidly the geographic scope of the war and reminding everyone that being embedded in entanglements with the United States is not any longer serving the purposes that that geopolitical imperial project was supposed to serve — global stability — but instead producing massive instability.

So what are the consequences of that going to be? We could see basically unfolding right now dynamics along the lines that you just described in which Iran is collapsed. I don't see that happening in the short term, but let's say it happens. Turkey is next. And then we really are talking about a context in which we are confronting a global war. And if that is what direction looks to be, then other actors in the international system have reasons to come together in a coalition to constrain the United States — and that is the only place that I see multilateral order being shored up from.

And the way you see that today is just small middle powers trying to put together the Hay Group or other ways to counter various Trump initiatives. But we've seen the insincerity — in fact the white nationalism — at the heart of the European, Canadian, Australian etc. project, right. Mark Carney says we're going to take the sign down from the shop window. I'm done. I hear Havel's call. And then the minute that the sovereignty that's being breached and the aggression that's being committed is again against a Muslim majority country in the global south, the shop window proudly displays the sign once more. We're with you 100%, blah, blah. The only aggression that counts is tariffs against Canada. I mean, so if that's the thinking, we're going to go nowhere, right?

But if indeed you end up with France developing a new nuclear doctrine together jointly with Germany, because they understand that they're under threat as a consequence of the actions that the United States is currently taking, that suggests a different path. So hard to tell.

Closing Remarks

Beinart: Well, Asla, that was really a tour de force. I'm so grateful to you for doing it. Thank you.

Bali: It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Peter.

Beinart: Thank you. Thank you to everyone.

Bali: You're welcome.