WAR UPDATE: Harvard Professor on Iran, Russia, China, and Trump’s Dangerous Moves in the Middle East

**Tucker Carlson** (0:04)
First of all, thanks so much for doing this.

**Stephen Walt** (0:06)
Nice to be here.

**Tucker Carlson** (0:06)
So let's start at the end, the anticipated end. When and if the United States resolves its role in these two wars against Russia and against Iran, what does the world look like, do you think?

**Stephen Walt** (0:18)
I think it looks like a substantially more dangerous world, actually, than we've seen for, say, most of the night.

**Tucker Carlson** (0:25)
After the wars.

**Stephen Walt** (0:26)
Yeah, after the wars. Well, it's gonna leave the world in, I think, a more precarious condition, and for sort of larger, more enduring reasons than just these conflicts. I mean, the relationship with Russia is not gonna improve for a while, even if the war formally comes to an end. There's lots of suspiciousness on both sides now, so that's gonna be a problem.
China is gonna continue to improve its military power, it's gonna continue to grow economically, it's gonna continue to challenge the United States and others for influence around the world, so that's gonna be a source of tension.
We have, I think, in the world today, you're seeing other powers, lesser powers being more active and not always constructively. Think of the role that the UAE has played in the civil war in Sudan. So they're involved in fueling conflicts in a variety of other places. So you're gonna see a tripolar world, Russia, China, the United States as the three main powers with some unresolved tensions among them. Continued, I think, concerns about what's going on in Asia and what China's ambitions might be there. And in a situation where no one really trusts America's judgment anymore. And that's, I think, an artifact of the war, especially the war in Iran. Let me point to one other thing that I think people sometimes forget about, and that's what we've seen, I think, a pretty dramatic erosion in the normative environment surrounding the use of force.
And I'm a good realist, so I don't think norms in international law are everything, but they're not irrelevant. So one of the things we've seen is essentially a collapse of the norm against assassination. For a long time in world history, governments didn't try to assassinate each other. Leaders of other countries didn't try and kill each other in conflicts. This was a common practice 500 years ago, and it gradually fell from favor and a norm emerged against it. You can understand why. It was in everybody's self-interest if you were a king, if you were a prime minister, not to be trying to kill each other. Moreover, great powers liked this norm because it meant that conflicts would be decided on the battlefield where they had all the soldiers and all the wealth and could win. Assassination is a tool of weaker powers.

**Tucker Carlson** (2:58)
Right. It's asymmetrical, of course.

**Stephen Walt** (3:00)
Right.
And beginning at the end of World War II, when the Allies began to hold leaders accountable, Nuremberg trials, the Tokyo war crimes trials, this idea that what you did as a statesman was sort of separate, began to erode. Once that began to erode, then going after a leader, going after Muammar Gaddafi, going after Saddam Hussein, begins to look morally preferable. Why not just take out this troublesome leader as opposed to-

**Tucker Carlson** (3:32)
Spare the population.

**Stephen Walt** (3:33)
Yeah, spare the population. You could make this argument. Of course, this is a very dangerous road to go down, because now it's becoming a much more common practice. Look at what the United States and Israel do at the beginning of the Iran war. They take out all of Iran's senior leaders.
There's at least two problems here. First of all, you don't know who's going to replace them. Of course, we're now having trouble with a more hardline faction in Iran. It also erodes any possibility of trust. I mean, how can you sit down and negotiate a peace agreement with a regime that has killed your senior leaders and might do something again subsequently? Then finally, as that norm begins to erode, others are going to use it too. Others will start using similar tactics, and leaders, including American presidents, are going to have to worry much more about this than they did necessarily in the past. You put all of those things together, continued great power competition, eroding norms against the use of violence in a variety of different ways. I think you end up with a much more dangerous world. I think, unfortunately, the world agrees with that, if you look at the last 20 years or so, in constant dollars, defense expenditures have basically doubled in the world over the last 20 years because— Not just in the US? Not just in the United States. You see this happening in Asia, you see this happening in Europe now, belatedly, but finally happening.