Glenn Diesen interviews Einar Tangen on China's approach to managing US hegemonic decline
Glenn Diesen speaks with Einar Tangen, senior fellow at the Thai Institute and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), about China's diplomatic strategy.
Summary
Glenn Diesen hosts Einar Tangen for a wide-ranging discussion on China's strategic response to what both describe as the decline of US hegemony. Tangen argues that Donald Trump is not an aberration but a symptom of structural shifts in American political economy dating back to the 1960s, tracing a line from the Powell Memo through the Clean Break doctrine to Elbridge Colby's current strategic framework. He contends that China has concluded the only viable approach is to outlast US dominance, lead by example, and build a coalition of nations around shared principles of sovereignty and development — while managing Trump transactionally. Diesen raises the parallel problem of Western irrationality in the face of declining hegemony, noting that recognising multipolar realities is now treated as treasonous in European political discourse, and describes personal harassment and government pressure he has faced for arguing that NATO expansion contributed to the Ukraine war — including the current defence minister encouraging media not to interview him. Both speakers argue that the refusal to engage with the security concerns of adversaries — whether Russia, China, or Iran — makes conflict resolution impossible and that economic interdependence, not military force, is the only realistic lever remaining. The conversation also covers Tucker Carlson's evolution from Fox News loyalist to critic of US-Israel policy, historical parallels between current Western propaganda dynamics and wartime dehumanisation campaigns, and a survey of past US military interventions as evidence of systemic hypocrisy.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
China's evolving diplomatic posture and the Xi–Trump–Putin meetings
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined again by Einar Tangen, a senior fellow at the Thai Institute and also senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, the CIGI. Thank you very much for coming back on the program. I've been looking forward to speaking with you.
Einar Tangen: Well, thank you for having me. I'll try to do what I can. I find your shows more interesting than my own.
Glenn Diesen: I've been looking forward to some of your thoughts on the recent meetings of Xi Jinping, because for many years Beijing appeared to keep a low profile — especially in the 2000s — essentially attempting not to draw too much attention to itself, to be allowed to grow in peace. But the distribution of power has shifted, and the whole idea of concealing China's might is now gone. We have all these world leaders lining up to go to Beijing and meet with Xi Jinping. The two main ones would be Trump and Putin. What do you make of this shift — Beijing taking a greater stand in international diplomacy? Is it just a reflection of power, is it filling a vacuum, or how are you seeing its new role in the world?
Einar Tangen: Well, first off, I think they've been studying Donald Trump very carefully. They were surprised the first time he was elected. They thought: he's a businessman, he'll just do what's good for business, and since you have an intertwined world logistics system, it just didn't make sense. So they thought it was a campaign issue — be tough on China — and like many other presidents before him, as soon as he got into office he would realise the realities. But that's not what happened. He really wanted to carry it forward, and there's no going back, as they say.
So China has understood that he's transactional, that he is going to be here for the next two and a half years, and that they have to have some way of handling him. They've seen quite clearly that if you try to be nice to Donald Trump, or if you agree, you will get the back of his hand. Literally, he will start mocking you and saying you're losers and all these types of things. He might even take personal affronts — as we've seen with Zelensky and other people. So they decided they had to be somewhat firm.
There are two problems to this. First, they need to deal with Trump. It's very transactional, and if you've been following what's been happening, it's very clear they made promises to Trump: we will do B if you do A; next, if you do C, we will do D. And that's exactly what is happening. I've never seen Donald Trump's messaging being so tight as when he got on the plane and came back to the United States. Generally his people are all over the place — Bessent's over here, Hegseth is over there, Rubio's somewhere else, or they say things which are slightly different. But this time they had very, very strong messaging. So they think they have the formula in terms of transactionalism.
But the second part is: how do you deal with the rest of the world? I appear on a lot of stations internationally, especially in the Global South, and the refrain is always, "What is China going to do?" And I always say, look, China is not the United States. It doesn't have 800 military bases. It has no interest in getting into a toe-to-toe battle with the US which could lead to a nuclear war. Even if it didn't lead to a nuclear war, you would still have war, and this would drain everything away from society. No one in the world would be helped if China and the US go to war, and people should think about that. But they're always saying, "Well, China should do something because they're a big powerful country."
China's response to that has been to stand up and say, "Look, we're going to draw some red lines here. We're going to deal with this guy. We're going to show you that there is a path to dealing with him."
The structural roots of American decline: Powell, Clean Break, and Colby
But Glenn, if I may, I just wanted to add something here. It's a fairly long conversation, but I want to start with: how did we get here? We tend to look at Donald Trump as somebody who just kind of — well, you know, how probable is it that some guy with bankruptcies, sexual misconduct allegations, fraud, lying, criminal charges — it just doesn't seem possible that somebody like that could rise to the top of the system. So then you have to wonder: why is America this way? And is Donald Trump simply a symptom, or is he some sort of instigator who has changed everything? I would argue that he's really a symptom.
I go back to 1964. Johnson is running against the Republican side and wins in a landslide. What happens is, on the Republican side, there is a real crisis. The families who controlled businesses in the United States back then — whether it was Getty, Rockefeller, Ford — they all controlled their businesses. And because we're in 1964, they believe that America is on the precipice of communism, that you have a socialist president in Lyndon Johnson, and that it is time to draw the line.
Flash forward to the 1970s, and you have the Powell doctrine. This is Lewis Powell — he goes on to become a Supreme Court justice, but six months before he becomes justice he writes a secret memo. In that memo he outlines that the American public cannot be trusted, that it is time to put democracy aside, and that it is time for businesses to be aggressive: to take control of media, to take control of the courts, to fight against any kind of consumer protection, against labour laws, against universities and intellectuals. This is all outlined, and if people are interested they should just look up the Powell doctrine. Not Colin Powell, the secretary of defence who was waving that little white vial around saying this is why we're going to war — this was Lewis Powell. He went on to the Supreme Court and wrote in the affirmative to make corporations people, and by extension, since people have freedom of speech, corporations can back whoever they want with as much money as they want. This changed politics. Companies can give unlimited amounts of money. They can basically control elections. You need money to run elections. But they can also hobble the parties, because each party is making deals with special interests. If you're business, you are the special interest. Labour was making deals with the Democratic side, but the biggest amount of money was on the Republican side. He outlines his plan to take over America — a very thorough plan. You have to read the document to get a complete idea of it.
Then we fast forward a little to the Clean Break doctrine, which we've talked about before. That was by Richard Perle. In that document — I think it was 1996 — written to Netanyahu, the essence of it is that Israel should forget about any kind of diplomacy in terms of settling its issues. It should not seek to live with other countries. It needs to either dominate or decimate. If a country acquiesces to Israel's greater goals, that's fine. If they don't, you knock them down. This in essence becomes the blueprint for Israel's actions even as we come through to today.
The last one was done by the current Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, Elbridge Colby. He's important. He was also supposed to come to China, and China has delayed his visit. He is completely anti-China, and I don't mean in a small way. In 2021 he wrote a book — The Strategy of Denial — and in it he talks about how to get at China: take control of, and deny it access to, trade routes by controlling choke point areas, whether it's the Panama Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, the Straits of Malacca, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal. Also, as part of that, deny China access to energy — the thinking being that if you don't allow them to have energy, and they have to import a lot, therefore they can't produce a lot, and even what they produce you can intercept and prevent from being distributed worldwide. He just lays it out there. This is a book he wrote. He's not going to deny it. And he is now, as I said, in that position. He's not a very likable fellow — during his confirmation he got out of step with so many people in Congress, even people who wanted to support him. But he was able to get through.
So you have these three documents. And then you have one other thing that people should pay attention to. As I said, in 1964 it was the families that controlled businesses. Those families went away, and what they did was hire help. Who was the hired help? Professionals — people with business degrees, accountants, consultants, investment banking houses. These were the people who started controlling and running the corporations. And what was their goal? They had no affinity towards any local place. Every single factory was just a profit and loss centre. If I move production away from there to somewhere else, whether it's another country or another town, all I care about is the numbers. I look at the spreadsheet, because that's what they're trained to do.
The families, despite all their vagaries, did live in their towns. Ford lived in Michigan, lived in Detroit. He was there. His executives were around him. They were part of the community. When you start bringing in hired help, there is no community. They're there from somewhere else. They're there to maximise shareholder value and in the process maximise their bonuses.
So you have these three papers and then this massive change in control, and in the aims and objectives. The first document structured domestic political control. The second exported the logic into foreign policy — we're going to control everything. The third said it's not only foreign policy, it's foreign policy plus economic policy all pushed together. This is how I explain where we are today. There were shifts and movements, and thoroughly anti-democratic ones.
I mean, you can point to one other area — this dark enlightenment area. These people are just thoroughly out there. There's no secret memo. They publish in books: democracy is dead, we need to bankrupt the government to allow private industry to take over the functions of government, and then we would control the world. It would be beneficial for everybody if they were serfs. This is literally going back to square one — fiefdoms run by tech titans. The only comfort I get from that is that tech titans, just like the oil barons, steel barons, and railway barons back in the 1880s, are so busy fighting with each other over who should be the prima donna that they can't possibly agree as a group, which would be required to do that. You need look no further than OpenAI and Elon Musk and all his lawsuits against everybody and lawsuits against him. This is not a stable class. So it probably won't happen, but it doesn't mean they aren't having an effect.
Palantir is really gobbling up all sorts of resources from governments around the world, telling them that we can isolate, we know where all your enemies are, and if you need to, we can direct your firepower towards them. Now it doesn't always work out — like schools in Iran full of young women who all die because it was mistargeted. But these people say, well, it's all worth it. It's kind of like Madeleine Albright when she said, well, how many children have died, and she said, yeah, it's probably worth it. It's a world where there's no empathy. You can't have empathy if you're going to do these big things, if you're going to justify killing women and children and civilians and prisoners. There are no heroes in any of this. It's just the way it is.
China's strategic response: outlasting, leading by example, and building coalitions
So here's the world as I explain it in China to people I run into, and also in essays and things like that. China is looking at this and deciding: what is the logical direction to any of this, and how do you get along with a power that has been shaped in this direction? I think the only thing they can come up with is you kind of outlast it. You lead by example. You keep your talking points to: we want security for all countries that isn't dependent on the insecurity of another country; every country has the right to a development path; every country has the right to be respected and to sovereignty; and lastly, there has to be a mechanism so that when there is inevitably friction, you can sit down and talk rather than throwing tanks at one another.
And it's not something they're just talking about. Over $1.3 trillion has been invested in the Belt and Road Initiative, which really only started putting money in around 2015. So we're talking eleven years later, and when you start looking at the Global South and the growth patterns there, it's undeniable.
I remember back in 2018 there was Professor Chellaney from India — he invented this phrase "debt trap diplomacy." Do you remember that?
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, they still refer to this, by the way.
Einar Tangen: Well, okay, let's talk a little about debt trap diplomacy. Chellaney uses Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka. He says, "They don't need it. They have Colombo. What is this? It's a white elephant. It was politically motivated. This is a perfect example of how China is subverting Sri Lanka into debt trap diplomacy." Well, guess what? Last year Hambantota Port expanded by 175% in terms of cargo handling. They are now having to expand — putting tens of millions of dollars into expansion — because they do not have enough capacity. So those people who said back then — and it was sexy and easy to say it — freight does not come in the day you open the port. It takes quite a while to set up all of the receiving. You have to have people there. There has to be loading and unloading. People have to get used to the idea. But once it starts, it starts rolling.
Hambantota is very, very successful. You still hear these echoes of the debt trap narrative, but I love getting into debates with these people because I say, okay, what were your expectations — that it would be profitable the day after they cut the ribbon? Is that how ports work? If you look historically at ports, rails, everything like that, there's always a breaking-in period. But if it's strategically located — and the reason Hambantota was put there is it's only about ten miles from the regular marine routes, so you don't have to go as far up as Colombo — it works. Now they have two ports specialising in different things. Hambantota is newer; they can do roll-on, roll-off. Colombo is a little older but still fairly well mechanised, doing more different kinds of container loading and unloading. This is a perfect example of how people will always react negatively to anything China is doing.
So China has to look at this and say, "Okay, the United States has a million-watt stereo system with the media, which you know well, Glenn — they're always nice to you." China has like a squeaky toy. They're trying hard. They have CGTN. They're trying earnestly to put the message out, but it's very hard to get coverage. So they've given up on the idea that they can out-of-the-box convince people. What they're doing is convincing people by action — lead by example. And that's not only true externally but also internally. Corruption is not tolerated. If you're corrupt, there is no place to hide. They've been pretty good at finding people.
So China's best way to handle the US was to understand where it was coming from, what this guy wanted, where it was possibly leading — not an endgame, but just: we dominate, we dominate, we dominate, we're king of the hill. Okay, you can be king of the hill, but we can still trade. Just because you're on top of the hill doesn't mean you don't need $4.3 trillion worth of imports, which is what the US imported last year. Without that $4.3 trillion, the economy would literally collapse.
Then you take that to the next level. We start talking about an area like the Strait of Hormuz and Iran. I've said before the solution is for the rest of the world to come together — because the rest of the world is getting hurt — and say to the US, Israel, and Iran: knock it off. Stop. And if you don't stop, we're not going to go to war with you. We're just going to not trade with you, and all three of your economies will literally collapse. That is the ultimate pressure. It's peer pressure. It's not a gun. It's just the realities of an interconnected world. All of these countries need things that they don't have and cannot make themselves.
This is exactly what China is trying to do. They're trying to get other countries to step forward, not just one. China cannot settle this by itself. What is it going to do — go to Iran and dictate their foreign policy? Not going to happen. It certainly can't do it to Israel or the United States. So it takes an overwhelming majority of countries coming together. Maybe this is the beginning of something like a global governance initiative, because right now the truth is the United Nations is useless. As long as you have five countries with veto powers, you can't get anything done. It would be nice if they would give them up, but the chances of that are not great.
So this is where we are today. We have more than 80 conflicts going on around the world. We have a crisis affecting somewhere between 13 and 20% of our energy — energy that is going to impact food. We have maximalist positions because there's no trust. No one's willing to give an inch because they feel the other side will take a mile. And that's why I'm saying the last element is all the rest of the countries coming together, because they have no choice. It's a roll of the dice between a recession and a depression. So hopefully there will be some leadership in the world. China is trying to encourage it, but as I said, it can't do it alone.
This is China's approach, and you could see it quite clearly laid out during these two visits. With Trump it was transactional. With Putin it was a great visit from this perspective: they didn't agree — they didn't get the Power of Siberia pipeline agreement, and they're still arguing about price — but you didn't see Xi Jinping saying, "If you don't give me the price I want, I'm going to tariff you to death." You saw Xi and Putin very comfortable with each other, talking very clearly. Communication was free and easy. They did have issues that haven't been resolved yet, but it did not change the tone, tenor, or direction of the negotiations. They signed 40 deals, which is about the same amount they sign almost every year. The cooperation is continuing to deepen. As the US thrashes and tries to maintain things, it's actually scoring own goals. The rest of the world is watching how China is leading — not from the front but from the side — trying to get people to understand that if we have a common direction, we are unstoppable. If one person tries to dictate it, it's just going to lead to more wars and friction.
Managing hegemonic decline: irrationality, strategic desperation, and the Western discourse problem
Glenn Diesen: What you've described to a large extent is about China attempting to manage America's decline — not to push for the decline, but to manage it — because you often see a diminished rationality in a declining hegemon, a strategic desperation, if you will. The expectations, the commitments, the psychology still belong to the commitment of dominance, but at the same time the material advantages are going away. This split — wanting to pursue a hegemonic policy even after the hegemony is gone — is a source of irrationality. A declining hegemon will have commitments exceeding its resources. When it faces challenges, it feels existential because every challenge threatens to push it off the hegemonic throne. You will have internal fragmentation, and also an obsession with symbolic dominance. You see this in Trump, but I think it's a mistake to assign it only to Trump. This is something you see wider — not just in the United States but across the political West.
And part of the internal splits is because rationality — which is required to maximise your own security and prosperity — demands that you accept new realities and adjust to them. But what I see across the political West now is that rationality is almost condemned. If you recognise the limits of power, it's seen as surrender, or even cheering on the other side. I was actually criticised in the media recently because I said the world is turning multipolar. They made the point: why would he say this? It's a gift to Putin, because if we say the world is multipolar, that's what the Russians want us to think. If we treat them as a polar power, they get respect. So essentially we all have to walk around pretending to live in an imaginary world where we say, no, they're not a real power, they're just a gas station with nuclear weapons. We have to live in a fantasy world because otherwise we give them respect or legitimacy.
I think this irrationality should have been predictable — it comes with a declining hegemon, which is why it's so difficult to readjust to a new distribution of power. I noticed that Xi Jinping mentioned this during the meeting with Trump: we have this Thucydides trap moment where you have a declining hegemon and a new power rising. This is usually when you expect to see conflicts. We have to manage this carefully. But if you look at the media here, there's nothing of the sort. There's no rationality anymore. It's only: how can we manage or defeat these mullahs in Iran, these commies in Beijing, these imperialists in Russia? There's no discussion about: instead of living in the old world, how about we recognise current realities and carve out as good a position as possible?
Einar Tangen: No, I'd agree. And that goes to this issue that Trump is a symptom. He might be outrageous. He certainly has lots of faults. But he's a symptom of a system that is dedicated to, ironically, anti-democratic democracy. He's running around trying to make sure that no one can vote who won't vote for him. I think he's going to find that backfires. All these two forms of identification — well, guess what? Wealthy people, middle and upper-middle class people, yes, they do have passports, they do have birth certificates, they have multiple forms of ID that would satisfy this. But a lot of the people he works with who work in blue-collar jobs don't have passports. They're not going to have their birth certificate handy when they go to the polls, and they're going to be turned away. This is not a strategy I would advise.
But getting to this rationality — I think your Wikipedia page now accuses you of being connected to neo-Nazis.
Glenn Diesen: No, really?
Einar Tangen: Yes.
Glenn Diesen: Well, it tends to be either far left or far right. I'm either a communist or a fascist. I'm not quite sure what they're going with.
Einar Tangen: I think you represent all ills. I think you're all bad things wrapped in one package. And the fact is you're a historian and you're simply trying to point out to people that we've been down these roads before. As you've said, empires come and go. We should study them. We should understand them. They become irrational towards the end because they're trying to protect something that is unprotectable — it's lost.
Look at Albanese — the lady who's supposed to be looking out after Gaza. She was disappointed by the UN. She had been depersonalised. She couldn't get to her accounts. She couldn't travel. All of these things, because the US decided we're going to attack her. We not only dislike these countries, but we're going to personalise it. We're going to attack anybody whose voice threatens us.
I was having a discussion with my son about it. He was the one who said, "Oh yeah, they're really going after Glenn. They're now accusing him of being a neo-Nazi. I just can't even — I don't even know where you begin with that." And he said, "I'm worried about him being depersonalised." And I said, "The reason he represents a threat is because he's rational. When you go out and start talking about irrational appointments, it's 1984 — you have to do the doublespeak, quack quack, whatever they tell you." And here's the irony: we're the ones running around the world saying that we're against 1984, that we're against fascism and totalitarianism and all of these things, and we are the worst offender. We do everything we tell everyone else not to do. We start wars. We take things from people. We break international treaties and laws. We blow up people because they're on a part of the ocean that we don't own, but we suspect they might be drug carriers. We're now up to close to 200 people who they don't know — they're in a boat — and they blow them up. And they don't only blow them up once. They use this double-tap syndrome. They blow them up and make sure they're all dead so there aren't any witnesses and no one can testify as to what they were doing out there — fishing, going for a sail, whatever. They make sure they're all dead. I think that's pretty much deliberate. Why would you spend two very expensive missiles on a speedboat? One is enough. You've sunk it. They're probably going to drown. But you send in another one just to make sure. Why is that worth a couple hundred thousand dollars? I think it comes down to this fear that we will be caught in this particular lie and won't be able to get out of it.
We did so many of these things — Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan. The litany goes on. The things we did in South America, toppling democratic governments — why? Because they were against the business interests of our companies. "Banana republic" was a phrase developed around Honduras because Dole had huge plantations down there, and every time a government was elected and said, "Well, we need to have fair wages," Dole would scream to Washington, "They're communists," and we'd send down troops or kill a bunch of people and the government would change. In theory, this is what we're trying to protect the rest of the world from. In reality, it's exactly what we do.
America is not evil. I was in a symposium and somebody said, "America is evil," and I said, "No, it isn't. Don't fall into the trap of demonising whole groups of people. America is full of very concerned people, ordinary people who would, if they saw you in need of help, stop and help you. Not bad people." You do have interests that have absolutely no empathy, who live by profit motive alone, who are amassing wealth at an even faster pace under Donald Trump than before. And they're happy.
I always ask people I know: aren't you worried that you're going to basically undercut the markets that support your fortunes? Because if people can't buy what you sell, eventually you'll have a lot of money but you won't have a business, or it'll be severely compacted. Today in America, 10% of the people represent 50% of all the sales. That should be frightening to people, because that means 90% of the people are only taking 50% of the sales, and by definition it's mostly about necessities. America is overwhelmingly a tertiary economy relying on services, but you can't afford services if you don't have wages.
My great-grandfather, who was an industrialist, always said, "Never pay your people less than is necessary for them to buy your products." He built ships and things like that, so it wasn't like he was selling ships on the street corner. But he was clear. He said, "You have to keep an eye on the economy. Our growth is dependent on a large middle class which is able to have needs and desires that are expanding, and that creates more business and more business opportunities." He understood that. He wasn't an economist — he was an engineer — but he understood it. Today you go into a boardroom and no one talks like that. The only talk is: how do we maximise shareholder value? It's almost a legal requirement. If you're not going to do that, you have to say, look, we can maximise next term or next year, but the cost will be that the company will suffer. They always do things short term, and it looks great. But where are you going to increase your business next year? There has to be some trade-off between instant gratification and delayed gratification, and unfortunately that seems to be getting very, very thin.
I worry that voices like yours are going to be intimidated — that they'll come after you and try to say you're pro-totalitarian or you're a fascist or a communist or a neo-Nazi — when you're simply trying to get people to think about these things. If you look at the people you have on your show, it's very broad-based. We were discussing before you started recording about how people who dedicated themselves to helping their countries, who believed in principles, are now turning against the system — particularly in the United States, but also in Europe.
You have Tucker Carlson. He was true blue — or red, I should say. Remember, even when they showed that he was saying there was something fishy about the elections that Donald Trump won, his private emails showed quite clearly he didn't believe any of it — that these guys were fools and morons and this wasn't true. It was all out there in a lawsuit brought by the company they defamed, which said their election machines had been hacked and had swung the election in favour of Donald Trump. Never proven. The only thing that was proven is that they were defamed, and Tucker Carlson's emails were the basis of that. Now he left Fox shortly after that. He's been very successful. He's now coming out very strongly against Israel because he believes they are manipulating — they're the tail wagging the American dog. But this is not something new. And this is where I have a problem. He's saying, "Oh, look what they're doing." And I say, well, when weren't they doing this? You go back to 1996, Clean Break, defence of the realm — it's right there. Everybody sees the report and they say what they're going to do and they want our backing, and we were giving them back then around four to five billion. Now it's about 3.5 billion in regular aid, plus additional ones from war and things like this. But it didn't start when Tucker Carlson left Fox News. It was happening all along. He just discovered it at that point.
So this is my point. I do think Tucker has some feeling about America. He thinks it's probably going in the wrong direction. Wars are not good, all this stuff. But he's also a media personality, and I sometimes wonder if there's some compromise that people make to do that. I have never had any sense watching your shows — and I watch them religiously, although there are a lot of them and I have to listen at 2x speed to get through them all — that you're like, "Oh, let me pander to somebody here." It's strictly: let's look at the facts, let's look at the history, let's try to learn from them, let's bring people on who can provide perspectives. I really appreciate it. But this idea of people trying to shut you down, depersonalise you — that's real totalitarianism. That's 1984. Everything we've heard.
The suppression of rational dissent and the criminalisation of diplomacy in Europe
Glenn Diesen: Well, we should worry when we see governments and media attempting to teach us to hate entire nations — even if it's the United States with 330 million people, red flags should go up. But I also think it's interesting if you listen to a lot of Americans who held top military positions in government and hear them speak now about how they feel all their ideals were essentially betrayed and weaponised for very different goals. For them, after decades of serving their country, it's painful, and they express this as well.
And yeah, if anyone reads my Wikipedia page — it's a very strange reading. But it's the same group of people who write this kind of stuff. My position, I thought, should have been fairly uncontroversial. I mainly argued that towards the end of the Cold War we had key goals: we were going to overcome bloc politics, we were going to pursue a new European security architecture which pursued security with each other instead of against each other. This was the objective. This is why we had the Helsinki Accords. This is why we signed the Charter of Paris for a New Europe in 1990. This is why we set up an inclusive security institution, the OSCE, in 1994. This was the goal. But it didn't happen.
So I just argue: well, what happened? You hear top officials from the Clinton administration tell us exactly what happened. William Perry, the defence secretary under Clinton, said that instead of including Russia in a security arrangement, we decided to go for a hegemonic peace. We saw that Russia was weak, so we didn't really have to include them. This coincided with the Wolfowitz doctrine — let's pursue security based on hegemony; we'll be so powerful no one can challenge us. And essentially what this meant for Europe was that instead of having a new common European home, which Gorbachev had spoken about, we replaced it with NATO expansion. Instead of indivisible security, NATO would expand and push Russia out of Europe, essentially reviving the logic of the Cold War.
Many people had good intentions behind this, at least as it was sold, because they said: if we have a hegemonic peace, a dominant West developed through NATO expansion, there won't be any more security competition in the international system, because there is only one central power and that central power prioritises liberal democratic values, so we can develop a more benign world. The problem is —
Einar Tangen: Of course it doesn't work out, because it would be temporary. You would have to hold down the rising power. But this is how you impose peace? I don't even understand this concept. I know you don't want it, but I'm going to impose it on you and you're going to like it. These are nations supposed to be sovereign. I never understood the premise that we were going to — you know, the Francis Fukuyama thing, the end of history. I mean, he's been walking it back. I think you've had him on your show?
Glenn Diesen: I should try to get him. Yeah.
Einar Tangen: You should, because he's been walking it back ever since. Unfortunately, the people who seized on it — the neocons and all the rest of them — said, "Okay, this is our mantra. We're doing peace. We're going to kill you, but in the end it'll all be very, very good for everybody — the greater good."
Glenn Diesen: But they made an ideology out of it almost. The entire political class we have in Europe now — they were raised on Fukuyama and they're essentially trying to organise Europe around these ideas. But in practice, this means that Europe remains divided, which means we can't have proper economic prosperity, we can't have proper security. And now that the distribution of power is shifting, the US will deprioritise Europe. So Europe sits there, increasingly becoming more and more of a vassal — it will become the exclusive economic sphere of the US, completely divided, full of conflict, as our security is premised on the perpetual march towards Russian borders.
My argument essentially is: we have to adjust to this new distribution of power. The hegemonic moment is over. Why wouldn't we adjust to current realities? Whatever great dreams they had in the 1990s, it's not going to work anymore. The Russians have put their foot down — no more expanding NATO to their borders. The Americans have realised they have to prioritise some regions over others, and Europe is no longer a priority. But you can't say this. If you say it, you're essentially betraying the Fukuyama ideology, as you suggest.
I thought this was an uncontroversial argument: you adjust to current realities because that's good for us, it maximises your own security and prosperity. But in this country we have government-financed non-governmental organisations that will write articles about you and run social media campaigns. I can't even speak anywhere because they call and demand that invitations be cancelled. They send letters to universities. One of these NGOs even posted a picture of my house on social media. It's quite insane. And the former foreign minister said that Putin wants to destroy Ukraine and put Europe under perpetual threat, and that's what I'm working for. The defence minister — since I said that NATO had helped to provoke the war in Ukraine, which is a necessity to recognise if we're going to solve it — essentially encouraged media not to talk to me because he said I was spreading Russian propaganda. That's the current defence minister telling media which academics they can speak to. It's very wild here.
Einar Tangen: Yeah, but it sounds to me like — I don't know what the laws are in terms of slander in Norway, but I imagine they follow international standards. And if she wants to say that, she's going to have to prove it. This is the only way sometimes to get these people to realise, because they're bullies. They say to themselves, "Oh, what is he going to do about me? I'm a former defence minister and I have the weight of all these people behind me." But sometimes the courts are the only last refuge of rights. I don't know what the laws are there, but if she's saying this, that sounds very slanderous to me unless she has some sort of proof. That would be an interesting case. I wonder if there would be somebody in Norway who would say, "Look, I'd like to take that case." Because it's not just you, Glenn. They have a list of people they don't want to speak. You're dangerous because you're not some raving loony guy shouting and screaming. You're very — look at you. You don't look like a radical. You don't have long hair. You're clean-shaven. You always use rational arguments. You cite historical facts. You talk about: well, there are points when things change and you have to adjust. How is this communist, fascist, totalitarianism? But it's really becoming more and more personalised. Having a debate with anybody now is almost impossible. If you go abroad, it's either you're with us or you're against us.
Glenn Diesen: It's a shame. I think Europe's become one big circus of ad hominem attacks. There's no discussion. I was reading the German media yesterday — a German brigadier general, a former adviser to Angela Merkel, was making the point that we've reached a point in the war in Ukraine where to escalate is very dangerous for Germany, that we're essentially throwing away our own national security and should do a rethink. He outlined this argument, and then below it the article said he'd been accused of being an apologist for Putin.
Einar Tangen: Yeah.
Glenn Diesen: They put that in the article. What does that mean? Anyone can say anything, and suddenly this is something obligatory to include.
Einar Tangen: The question to ask is: who's making these decisions? I don't think the editorial boards of German magazines and newspapers are independently saying, "Oh, well, he's an apologist." There is pressure being put, mostly by the government, and they fan out. They do their talking points and they tell people, well, this is very sensitive, you have to be with us or against us. You know, you have your licences. This is what Donald Trump is doing openly in the United States — he's trying to get late-night comedians fired because they make fun of him. Why do they make fun of him? Because he's a clown. He invites satire. In the morning it's "I'm going to bomb them to oblivion," and in the afternoon "negotiations are going great."
Glenn Diesen: And it didn't just happen once.
Einar Tangen: Didn't happen just once. Yeah. So he invites this stuff, and then he wants to use all the powers at his disposal — like this 1.67 billion dollar slush fund that he's given himself. I'd love to be the president, sue myself, and give myself a lot of money because I'm going to settle with myself. That's very fair. Even his Republicans, who are cowed by him after he's beaten people who opposed him in the primaries, can't even stomach this 1.7 billion in tax dollars going to people who were beating police — a group that says they stand behind the police. The only way they're standing behind these police is with a billy club, beating them. All the people who were hurt on the police side have protested. The idea that these criminals were pardoned — 1,600 of them — a fair percentage have now gone back into the criminal justice system for everything from murder to rape, and quite a few of them for paedophilia, including some of his closest advisors. His religious advisor spent six months for interfering with a 12-year-old. What can you say? These are the people who were screaming that the Democrats were paedophiles who killed children and drank their blood and all this kind of nonsense.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah.
Einar Tangen: And it's all towards demonising, but it doesn't go anywhere. At some point things have to fall off. This is what I've been hoping for with Donald Trump. Hopefully he will hit the bottom, because in America we always do the right thing when we have no other choice.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah. The problem is, if he would simply be replaced — by whom? This is often my point. In 2016, when Trump was saying we have to get out of the JCPOA with the Iranians, we have to sanction the Chinese, all this — there was a lot of opposition to it. But it didn't matter that Biden took power; they just continued the policy. So I don't think it matters that much who's on the throne. That being said, I do agree that Trump is much less stable than anyone before him.
I think the source of a lot of the censorship, harassment, intimidation, cancellations, and even sanctions in Europe against its own citizens is the fact that there is no — the reason you can't counter government narratives is because in international security the point of departure is always security competition. Every state is seeking security. If America develops missiles, it's insecurity for China. So usually when you want to have peace, the first step is always to put yourself in the shoes of the other guy, recognise their security concerns. However, we've stopped doing it. And if you try to recognise what the Russians are worried about, you're an apologist, you're pro-Russian, you're spreading Kremlin talking points — because that's what Russia says. Yes, Russia is expressing their security concerns. Usually we would listen to this and then try to mitigate the mutual security threats. But this is not just a Russian thing. It's China. It's Iran. If you try to explain that these are big nations with real interests, that their policies don't come out of a vacuum due to their evil nature, that they're actually responding to their own security and economic concerns — then you're a panda hugger, a mullah apologist, a Putinist. This is the level of sophistication in the discourse. And it's not oversimplification — I don't see any politicians, any journalists, anyone ever discussing the security concerns of your opponent, because they would be out of a job. But if you don't do that, you're never going to solve the situation. If it's just "I win and I'm going to destroy you" — historically, that hasn't worked.
Einar Tangen: Well, that's what I said. There's no endgame. I'm not going to talk to you. Why? Because you're evil. All your people are evil, and I get to kill you without remorse because you're evil. But you know what — the reason I mentioned Clean Break rather than the Wolfowitz doctrine is that to me they're in parallel. Earlier when I was talking about these changes, it's just this idea that total dominance is the only way to go. We're going to get rid of democracy. We're going to get rid of all competing countries, whether it's Japan, Germany, Russia and Germany together, China — whatever it takes. We brook no rivals. And then: okay, we're taking this beyond the military, we're going to ramp this into economic. But the United States isn't even in a position to do that. Not if we're at $4.3 trillion a year in imports. You need other countries. And this is what I don't understand rationally. Where are those things going to come from? They don't even know what they are half the time. These are a lot of essential goods to your standard of life. If you want to go without them, you'd find yourself quickly going down about two or three levels in terms of your lifestyle.
I think there is a desire — I mean, you go back to the Japanese when they were preparing for war. They would bring people in and dehumanise them for a year: long hours, horrible humiliation, combined with beatings. They caused a psychic break. And by the time they came back for the second year, they were just intent on doing what had been done to them to the first-years, and it continued. What you do is you create a group of people who thought anyone who wasn't Japanese was less than human — okay to kill. That resulted in what, 35 million deaths between famine and murders. They would also — there's no actual proof, but they would drop poison grain and also germs on cities, and immediately thereafter there would be epidemics, and many hundreds of thousands of people died. This was a mass atrocity which they never came to terms with. But my point is: there could be no debate in Japan, because if you debated you were against our boys. You're not a patriot. You're a traitor. Same thing in Germany and England. As soon as they're ramping up for war, the propaganda goes into full tilt and everyone else is evil.
That's why I always object when somebody says America's evil. I say, you don't know what you're talking about. America isn't evil. We have evil people. You have evil people. They do evil things. But people are just people, just trying to get by. The question is: who's trying to manipulate them? And with social media these days, the opportunities are great. People don't know what to believe. Somebody actually said to me, "Well, you think you're so smart. You went to school and everything, but you don't have any common sense." I said, "Excuse me?" He said, "Well, I graduated high school and I have common sense." As if common sense is something you get by not going to school. Completely anti-intellectual. And I'm not saying intellectuals have all the answers — they get it wrong just as much as anyone else does. But to actually say, "I'm ignorant and incapable of thinking and therefore I'm superior or equal to you" — that just goes to show how far we've gone. And it's an attitude which is hurting countries that adopt it, because they basically say education's useless. I don't need education. I'll just read the Bible or the Quran or whatever. I'll take it all from there.
The consequences of refusing to engage with adversaries' security concerns
Glenn Diesen: But one wouldn't care about China or Iran or Russia or anything — it's not a charity to recognise the concerns of opponents. It's a necessity to improve your own security. And this should be obvious, even with Iran. I noticed when the Americans started bombing Iran it was compulsory to just explain that they're crazy mullahs who kill their own people, an evil regime, and everyone will take to the streets and celebrate once this regime falls apart. This is the only thing you can say. But the problem is, if you don't recognise the reality — first of all, you will end up in a situation where the US gets defeated and didn't understand it, taken by surprise at what Iran actually did on the battlefield, how resilient they were, their ability to rebuild, the support they got in the international system. And also: where are the Iranians willing to make compromise, and where aren't they? None of these things can be achieved if you live in a fantasy world where they are just evil savages who want to destroy civilisation. The self-delusion is so harmful, and people think it's patriotism. We do the same with Russia. We do the same increasingly with China.
Einar Tangen: It's not out of memory that we've done it before. We did this in Vietnam — oh, they're just waiting for the communists to fall. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya — it was always: the boys will show up, people will be throwing roses at them as they stride into the capital, and freedom will break out everywhere and prosperity will soon follow. Well, look where we've been. It's been a trail of tears. Death without development. More problems, not less. Economics nothing.
I keep — I have friends who have very different views from me, and I always say: is it possible to consider that there's a middle ground, that things have changed? Life is dynamic, after all. We want it not to change, but it's like telling the tide not to come in. It's just not possible. This is my real problem. There's no endgame to any of this stuff. They're hyping up people to hate each other. And at the end of the day, this is what really leads to war. This is how you do it. Once the other side is evil, I'm not going to talk to you because you're evil, and they think I'm evil so they won't talk to me. Exactly what you're describing. So how do you unwind from that?
I'm just hoping that economics might be the answer, because I don't think politically we have the maturity of leaders — except for a few — who could handle that situation. So it has to be by some force, and the force cannot be kinetic because it doesn't work. We've seen that. So I'm hoping that people will realise that trade is necessary to all, and it's time we use that. Look at the Treaty of Westphalia — we've discussed it many times, you're an expert in that. You get to a point where you're tired of killing and you're bankrupt, and all of a sudden you have to realise: okay, what you do is your business, what I do is my business, but we can trade. We'll respect each other's sovereignty. The problem is that the Peace of Westphalia came after 30 years of war, from 1618 to 1648, which decimated the entire European population. Now, if you add industrial military capacity and nuclear weapons, we can't afford to do it anymore.
But kind of my key proof of the lack of rationality now is: look at the European leaders. After more than four years of boycotting diplomacy, not talking to the other side, fighting a proxy war against the world's largest nuclear power, criminalising diplomacy — the huge challenge now is it's too difficult and controversial to restart diplomacy, to talk to Russia. If this is where we are, we should really take a step back and say: how do you end up in a situation where you can't talk to the other side, where political leaders walk around pretending it's a moral virtue to sit on the sideline watching hundreds of thousands die, saying that diplomacy is appeasement and weapons are the path to peace? Certainly something has gone wrong here. But we can't address it, because that's only what Putin apologists say. It's insane.
Glenn Diesen: I know.
Einar Tangen: All right, we should leave it there.
Glenn Diesen: Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's always very insightful to talk to you, and I hope your voice continues — a voice of rationality, questioning where are we going?
Einar Tangen: Well, thank you, and yeah, hope to see you again soon.
Glenn Diesen: All right, my pleasure. All the best. Bye-bye.