Chas Freeman is one of the most insightful voices in U.S. foreign policy, with a distinguished career as a diplomat and a deep expertise in U.S.-China relations. In this conversation with Nathan J. Robinson, Freeman offers a searing critique of America's current approach to diplomacy, the global balance of power, and its role in key international conflicts.

Freeman challenges the pervasive "China threat" narrative, arguing that the U.S. has misunderstood China's rise and wrongly positioned it as an existential threat. He compares the foreign policy approaches of Presidents Biden and Trump, highlighting the surprising continuities in their handling of China. Freeman also deconstructs the oversimplified and inflammatory discourse surrounding Taiwan, calling for a more nuanced understanding. Shifting to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Freeman explains how U.S. diplomatic failures helped fuel the war and why America’s actions have deepened the crisis. Finally, Freeman offers a sharp critique of U.S. policy towards Israel, urging the U.S. to stop enabling Israel’s expansionist policies and to push for a real peace agreement with the Palestinians.

Nathan J. Robinson 

I want to start with a quote from you. You have said of the United States, "We don't do diplomacy anymore." 

You spent your career as a diplomat, and one of the criticisms you've made of United States foreign policy, consistently, is of the resort to force and the threat of force over diplomacy. Can you expand upon what you mean? I think most Americans probably haven't thought about this much. Most do know about their country's disastrous failed wars abroad. But the idea of diplomacy, what it is and the fact that we don't do it anymore, is probably something they haven't heard much about. 

Chas Freeman

Well, the word "diplomacy" has multiple meanings. In one sense, it means a strategy of foreign affairs, of foreign relations. In another sense, it's the practice of negotiating with foreign countries to persuade them to do things your way, the way you want them done—to persuade them that your view of their interests should also be adopted by them. And finally, of course, it's where the rubber meets the road. Diplomats are forward stationed in foreign capitals to manage relations, to reduce risks, to advance the interests of their country.

Basically, the United States has dismantled much of the capability it had to engage in strategic reasoning. I think that's probably the result of the Cold War. After all, George Kennan, a career diplomat, gave us a strategy of containment, which he saw as mainly diplomatic. He was very distressed when it became mainly military, but he was basically correct. He said that if we contained the Soviet Union, it would eventually collapse of its own defects, which is what happened. We had 43 years of containment policy, and we didn't have to reason strategically. Everything in the world that happened was related to that strategy.

So that's the first thing: we have a strategy deficit in our foreign policy.

The second: the Foreign Service of the United States, of which I was a proud member, basically learned during the Cold War to be imperial administrators of a bloc of countries with everything defined in terms of a bipolar world order. There was not much real diplomacy done. It was a bit like trench warfare: there was no real movement. Once in a while, an expedition would be sent out to do some reconnaissance, but it would very rapidly retreat. Almost the only exception to this, I think, was something I was involved with, which was the successful removal of Cuban troops from Angola in return for South Africa giving independence to Namibia. That was the end of colonialism in Africa.

So we have a strategy deficit. We've not been trained to do the right things. Americans do not study geography anymore in school. We learn it by going to war with places, and we discover where they are. And of course, geography, in the end, is a defining characteristic for us. Unlike European countries that have neighbors who will fire back or send their troops over the border if they pick a fight with them, as Bismarck remarked, the United States is extraordinarily fortunate. To our north, we have the meek, mild-mannered, extremely polite Canadians.

Robinson 

Well, not so mild-mannered anymore.

Freeman

Well, I'm glad to hear that, but I wish we hadn't done to them what we are doing. And second, and to our south, we have the Mexicans, who are people I like very much—I went to the National University there—and who know their place and don't invade us. And to the east and west, our neighbors are fish. So this is a pretty fortunate geopolitical situation, which anybody in their right mind would trade places with in a minute. So Canada, of course, has many of the same characteristics, and has lived very well with the huge elephant to the south, until very recently, when the elephant is twitching and causing all sorts of problems.

Robinson 

I'd like to talk about China a little bit, because you've talked there about the kind of formidable position that the United States is in geographically, in terms of not having any real threats to the homeland. We haven't been invaded. We have, as you say, a giant fish-filled watery barrier between us and the places where a lot of the conflicts in the world happen. And yet, you hear very much in the rhetoric of United States politicians, both Democratic and Republican, about the "China threat" that we face in our time—the massive existential threat to our way of life and the future of our country.

Donald Trump—he vacillates a lot, there's a lot of inconsistency—previously declared that "China is our enemy." He used the term "enemy" to describe China. And the rhetoric from many Democrats has not been much better when they talk about China.

You are an expert on China. One of the things that you've argued a lot is that there's a lot of misperception about the nature of the Chinese government and of the supposed threat. Where do you start to unpick and unravel the misperceptions about the supposed looming Chinese threat to the United States?

Freeman 

China does pose a threat in the sense of that it threatens American primacy, both in Pacific Asia and ultimately on the global level, primarily because it is recovering its wealth and power. After a bad couple of centuries, it's back.

For most of human history, China was about one-third to two-fifths of the global economy. It's reattaining that position. It was also an extraordinarily innovative country. It gave us some things you may regret, like paper, bureaucracy, gunpowder, and other things, historically. And it is again the most innovative society now on the planet. In 2030, according to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) 37 percent of the world's scientists, technicians, engineers, and mathematicians—or STEM workers—will be Chinese.

So, certainly in economic and technological terms, China is a threat to the position the United States has had at the head of the world since about 1870. It is, in fact, going back to where it was when we became independent. As late as 1820, China was over a third of the world economy, and certainly a very powerful country. But because our foreign policy is now not focused on diplomacy, but on military matters, we posit a military threat.

But let's examine that. First, China's geopolitical position is not anything like ours. It is surrounded by 14 neighbors, many of which have previously invaded it for the previous thousand years, and for 600 of those years, China was actually ruled by foreigners. The United States, Britain, France, and others, especially the Russians, participated in dismembering China in the 19th century. The Japanese joined that in the 20th century. [Tens of millions of ] Chinese died at the hands of the Japanese between 1931 and 1945 when they rampaged through China.

China has always been on the defensive. There are very few instances in history of China invading a neighbor. Vietnam would dispute that, of course, and so would Korea, but those countries have retained their independence for millennia.

So, look at the current situation. There are no Chinese fleets off the American shores. There are no Chinese aircraft patrolling our coasts or anywhere else. We have a naval and Air Force presence that conducts three to four hostile surveillance missions along the Chinese coast every single day—three to four every day. So we're in their face. They're not in our face.

This is all about two things. First, the psychological problem of no longer being number one. It is difficult to adjust to a status that is less than number one, if you've had it for 120-150 something years. And in that regard, I would say that on the economic level, the correct comparison between economies is not to use the nominal currency exchange value, but rather purchasing power parity. And on that measure, the Chinese economy is already one-third larger than the United States economy. China produces one-third of the world's manufacturers, and we produce 15 percent. In 2030, we will have 4.2 percent of the world's STEM workers, while China has 37 percent. So it's pretty formidable, but it's not military. And we run the risk that in going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, they will follow us home. We are poking the Chinese militarily in such a way that they may very well turn up in our hemisphere, on our borders, which they have not done so far.

Robinson 

At which point we will conclude that we were right to see them as a threat.

Freeman  

Of course, that is, we seldom make mistakes. That is something that we in the Chinese have in common, by the way. Neither of us ever admit that we were wrong about anything at all.

Robinson 

But there's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in some of these things, where the United States takes actions that create a backlash and then uses the backlash as proof of the existence of the monster that we said was threatening us.

Freeman

Self-fulfilling paranoia. Yes.

Robinson 

You gave a talk recently at Brown University, and you had a few points. You listed some of the distorted perceptions and unsubstantiated statements that are made commonly in US political discourse about China. I just want to mention a couple of them you touched on there:

"Opposing China's desire to emulate the USSR and impose its rule on its neighbors, or oppose its ideology on the world.”

“Charges that it's China, rather than the United States, that rejects international institutions and rules, or it's China that takes a scoff law position on international law and genocide.”

“Extrapolating from the Taiwan situation a threat to other countries sovereignty and territory," which you think is not the correct conclusion to draw.

And "dismissing China's claims in the South China Sea while championing those of other countries with equally dubious claims."

So it seems like in all of those there's an exaggerated threat, a kind of hypocrisy of not seeing that we're complicit in a lot of the things that we accuse China of doing, and just a lack of understanding of how China sees the world.

Freeman  

Well said, if I do say so myself. A lot of this comes from the fact that we engage in a priori reasoning, that is, evidence-free reasoning. For example, the average American political figure seems to imagine that if you've seen one communist, you've seen them all. But in fact, the average American political figure has never met a communist, except perhaps a Vietnamese Communist, and since they're anti-Chinese, they're not really communists, I guess. Anyway, there's a huge amount of hypocrisy, self-deception; a mixture of hubris, self-doubt, self-assurance, braggadocio. It's a rather strange combination. China is, of course, the perfect [opponent] for the United States, because it's beating us at our own game of capitalism. So what could be worse than that?

Robinson 

The kind of terms that we've been using have been, "the United States does this," "the United States does that." But of course, there's been a transition between presidential administrations recently. We had Trump's first term. We had a Biden term. Now Trump is back. To what extent do you see differences versus continuity in the approach to China between Biden and Trump? 

Freeman  

Well, there's quite a bit of continuity because essentially, there is, as you indicated earlier, something approaching a consensus in our “Tweedledee, Tweedledum” party system on this issue. So there wouldn't necessarily be much difference. What is different going now to current events is that Mr. Trump, who has shown he's capable of colossal errors of judgment, also seems to be capable of colossal reversals of those errors.

So what we have at the moment is a détente, if you will, a rollback of confrontation and tensions between the United States and China. The United States declared economic war on China. China didn't do that to the United States. China reciprocated. The United States has now rolled back some of the economic warfare. Not all. The Chinese have responded by rolling back their response. This isn't a truce, because it has a 90-day duration attached to it. It's not a ceasefire because we're going to keep shooting at each other, rhetorically, at least, and with tariffs.

If it's simply a pause that refreshes in a long-term confrontation that the United States has chosen, why did we choose this? I think part of it is explained by enemy deprivation syndrome. When the Soviet Union irresponsibly collapsed, as Kennan had predicted, we were left without an enemy to fight. We turned to China immediately, almost. That became the "pacing threat", to use the Pentagon's term at the time, and the Chinese were saved only by the emergence of al-Qaeda as a more preferable enemy.

But now, the United States is waging counterterrorist wars in 42 countries at present, and al-Qaeda is not the fearsome thing in our minds that we once thought it was. I think that's probably mistaken, by the way. We've made an awful lot of people in the Middle East sufficiently resentful and vengeful, to imagine that they will do again what al-Qaeda did. If you bomb someone, and they don't have an Air Force, they figure out another way to bomb you, and that's what al-Qaeda did.

Robinson  

Yes, our support for the destruction of Gaza might give us a new enemy soon enough. One final thing on China is a lot of people might point to, and I think do point to, Taiwan as the kind of example of the threat that China poses. And the narrative around Taiwan is very similar, actually, to the narrative around Ukraine, where the United States's job is to defend the rules-based order against aggression—to defend democracy against autocracy—and there is a threat coming from a larger, stronger neighbor that wishes to impose itself. Now, you have argued before that this is a wild misunderstanding and oversimplification of the Taiwan situation, that it's important to get clear if we are to avoid this spiraling into some kind of armed conflict.

Freeman  

Well, we have tried to impose a sort of Taiwan analogous narrative on Ukraine, but I'll leave that for later. Anyway, in the case of Taiwan, the Taiwan issue arose because the losing side in the Chinese Civil War was escorted by the United States to the island of Taiwan and protected there. This is a civil war which has not ended because the United States intervened in it. We intervened, actually, right after the Korean War broke out, to confine the war to Korea by preventing Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalists who had ensconced themselves on the island of Taiwan—the Taiwan province of China—from counter attacking the mainland, or the mainland from attacking them.

So we've perpetuated a division of China with force. And we have actually worked out, between 1971 and 1979, a way of kicking this issue down the road and depriving Beijing of any incentive to regard it with urgency or to act prematurely to continue the civil war with force.

We made three assurances to Beijing. One was we will have no official relationship with Taipei, but we now have a $230 million building in Taipei that flies the American flag and has Marine guards in it, and it's very hard not to consider that an embassy. Our officials go to Taipei and talk officially with Taiwan officials. Taiwan officials come to Washington. We have basically invalidated that.

Second, we said we would have no troops on the island, but now we do. Again, supposedly for training purposes, but they're also, in effect, a trip wire for a war with China. And third, we said we would not have a defense commitment to Taiwan, but former President Joe Biden, on at least four occasions, asserted a defense commitment which is at odds with both the Constitution, which reserves that right to the Congress—Congress is in default—but there's also a law called the Taiwan Relations Act that basically restricts our relationship to Taiwan in the military area, with two arms sales. We have an agreement with the Chinese on that too, which was to reduce those arms sales. We've instead increased them.

So we are in violation of the modus vivendi we worked out. And I think it's remarkable under the circumstances that the Chinese have shown the restraint and patience that they have. They are intent on requiring the ability to take Taiwan by force over American opposition. They have apparently set a deadline of 2027 for that, and that is because that is an anniversary of the establishment of the People's Liberation Army. And they have also set a deadline now, 2029, to achieve essential independence from supply chains that connect them to the United States.

So in the meantime, President Trump basically fired our wad at China. The one convincing deterrent that we really had with the Chinese, the sort of use of force, was sanctions, tariffs, and the like. We just did that, and the Chinese faced us down and show they could survive. And not only survive, but they could take advantage of this to achieve the objective they've set for 2029, that is an end to overdependence on the American market and American supply chains, whether for grain or high technology.

Robinson

You talked there about certain facts about American policy and American actions that are left out of American political discourse when we talk about our relations with other countries. We see what they do, but we don't see the agreements or understandings that we ourselves made and then violated.

I want to turn now to Russia and Ukraine. They are about to be potential peace negotiations. That is an area where, also, you have very prominently argued that the story that was told at the beginning of the war to Americans by the Biden administration was essentially false. It was a moralistic story. It was that same kind of story of an aggressor invading its neighbor and the United States rushing to its defense because we have a principled opposition to aggression, and a principled defense of democracy.

You argued that this was not what was going on. First, it ignored all the build up and all the ways in which United States policy had contributed to Russia's decision to invade. And that also the United States support for Ukraine, far from being principled, was deeply and disturbingly cynical. In an interview with Aaron Maté, you said that the United States was basically interested in "fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian", by which you meant essentially seeing it as a bargain where the Ukrainians could fight and erode the capabilities of our geopolitical adversary, and our arms industry does very well. It's a great benefit to the United States.

So now that we're probably two years past that interview where you explained it, looking back, what do you think Americans still don't understand about the Ukraine-Russia war?

Freeman

This war began because of our repudiation of diplomacy, beginning in 1994 with Boris Yeltsin, and then in 2007, but continuously over the years. Vladimir Putin at Munich, at the Security Conference, warned us very consistently that the expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia, in Ukraine or in Georgia, would draw a military response. It culminated in 2014 when the United States sponsored a coup d'état in Ukraine, which installed an anti-Russian government dominated by Western Ukrainians, who were ultranationalists. The first thing they did was to ban the use of Russian for education in the schools or communication with local government, despite the fact that 29 percent of Ukrainians are native Russian speakers, and that Eastern Ukraine, the Donbas region—basically Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson in particular, as well as Crimea—are predominantly Russian speaking. So that action by Kyiv set off the civil war in Ukraine, in which drew in the Russians, of course, to protect the fellow Russian speakers.

From 2014, when the coup occurred, to 2022, when the war began, we retrained and restructured the Ukrainian army. On the eve of the Russian invasion, it was 780,000 men. The only army in Europe larger than it was Turkey’s. It was slightly smaller than the Russian army, and it was poised to mount an invasion of eastern Ukraine and reclaim the Russian speaking secessionist areas there.

So that's the background. And in December 2021, the Russian government put forward an ultimatum. They demanded negotiations on three things. One, to reinstate an agreement Ukraine had repudiated, which would have given the sort of Quebecois-type linguistic and cultural autonomy to the Donbas—the Minsk accords, sponsored by the French and the Germans, and in the end, revealed by them to be a ploy, rather than a serious effort at protecting those people in eastern Ukraine. Second, that Ukraine returned to the neutrality which was proclaimed when it became independent, and on the basis of which Moscow recognized [Ukraine] as a separate country. And finally, that there be a discussion in Europe of a new security architecture that would relieve the Russians of their fear of invasion from the west and relieve the west of their fear of assault part of the Russians.

We stiff armed that. We refused to talk about any of that. And therefore the Russians called our bluff, and they then, on February 24, 2022, actually did invade. A week later, Ukraine and Russia came to a basic agreement. They began to negotiate and in late March, they actually reached an agreement by which Ukraine would return to neutrality, not join NATO, the Minsk accords would be reinstated and so forth.

We intervened. We went to Kyiv in the person of Boris Johnson, the then Prime Minister of the UK, and said to the Ukrainians, well, you may be interested in peace, but we want to weaken and isolate Russia—we think you should fight on. And they did. The result is that they're probably a million dead Ukrainians. A population which was probably 32 million at the outset of the war is now something like 20 million, given the huge exodus of Ukrainians for safe haven, both in Russia—2.5 to 3 million went to Russia—and the remainder in Western Europe, and some in Canada and the United States.

So this is not a story of anything but militarism and a lack of diplomatic flexibility and imagination on our part, and we now have the fortunate thing: Mr. Trump has basically forced Ukrainians and Russians to hold a renewed talk in Istanbul, basically on the basis of what they did agree in March or April 2022. This is now three years later. There are a huge number of dead for nothing. Because the Russians have basically won the war on the ground, and that will establish the parameters of whatever agreement they can ultimately reach.

So I can say with the Taiwan issue, the thing that we have in common here is that our most charming characteristic is amnesia. We forget what we agreed to or how things started, and we inhale our own propaganda, and don't even cough when we do it.

Robinson  

The story that you've told there, I think, would be characterized by critics as pro-Russian in some ways. Being an "apologist" for Putin is a common term. But what you're saying there is that actually that we betrayed Ukraine. It is Ukraine's interests and Ukraine's people that were ultimately deeply hurt by the U.S. turn away from diplomacy.

Freeman 

Yes, that is exactly right. And the Ukrainians have basically run out of Ukrainians to continue to support our policy. They are collapsing all along the battlefront at the moment. A ceasefire is not going to work, because the Ukrainians have their war aims, which are to recover the lost territories, beginning with Crimea and continuing through the Donbas—the Russians have their war aims, which I just described. And there's been a lot of blood and treasure spilled on both sides. The Ukrainians have had the worst of it, but if Ukraine doesn't agree to some sort of peace, it risks being reduced to a landlocked country with no Black Sea coast, as the city of Odessa, which was historically Russian, is regained by Russia. So there's a lot at stake here, and I think Mr. Trump has the right idea: if we want to save Ukraine, we've got to have a peace.

Robinson  

There is a report in the Financial Times today saying that members of the Trump administration have begun to feel that Vladimir Putin is not seriously interested in peace. Some of Trump's promises were to be more openly interested in diplomacy than the Biden administration was, and he talked constantly about how there was a need to try and work out the war and solve it. But now that they have pushed Russia towards negotiations, they are—I think the Financial Times' perspective is at least—finding out that Putin actually isn't serious about engaging in discussions to end the war. What's your take on that? 

Freeman 

Well, I think the Biden administration rejected diplomacy completely with the Russians and others. In the four years he was in office, Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, never once visited Russia. It's been five years since Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, has been in Washington. So the Trump administration had inherited a diplomatic vacuum, but it also inherited something else. That is, that in the absence of diplomatic contact and dialogue, the United States and the West, generally—NATO—attributed objectives to the Russians that they never voiced and never had. And so if you enter a negotiation with a complete misunderstanding of what the other side's priorities are, if you imagine, as General Kellogg appeared to imagine—the other envoy of the Trump administration—that the Russians were on the ropes economically, militarily, and otherwise, when the reality was quite the opposite, of course, you discover that things aren't the way you thought they were.

And I think that's what Vice President JD Vance's discovery represents. We are encountering reality. There is an adage in military affairs that you should never lose contact with the enemy, because if you do, the enemy is bound to surprise you. This also applies to diplomacy. If you don't conduct dialogue, if you don't reach out and see the real reality—if you imagine the reality, if you engage in fantasy foreign policy—then you cannot successfully deal with the realities that are out there.

Robinson 

I want to turn finally to the Middle East, where Trump actually is right now at the time of this recording. A theme of our conversation has been missed opportunities, ways in which the engagement and diplomacy might have—nothing is for certain, but might have—achieved things that military force and the threat of force did not achieve. Obviously, on October 7, 2023—which I believe Jake Sullivan had just said the week before in Foreign Affairs that the Middle East is more peaceful than ever before—completely exploded what was left of the peace process, or the two-state solution disappeared.

Now that we see Gaza being essentially erased, every last building being flattened, and Trump and Israel planning the complete expulsion of Palestinians if they can achieve it. But is that also an area where there were squandered or missed opportunities for the United States to achieve some kind of lasting peace?

Freeman

Of course. The last serious effort at making peace was led by Jimmy Carter and introduced the Camp David Accords, which are now in jeopardy because Israel is violating a key provision of those accords by what it's doing in Gaza. But of course, there were diplomatic opportunities. The United States has simply backed whatever the Netanyahu government wants to do, not being willing to admit publicly that the Netanyahu government and Zionists and Zionism generally are dedicated to the removal of the native population from Palestine and its replacement with immigrants from Europe and elsewhere in the Arab world. There's quite a divide, of course, between the Mizrahi, the Sephardic, Arabic-speaking Jews who were driven out after Israel's establishment in reaction to the establishment of this colonial settler enterprise, and the Ashkenazi European Jews who were the spearhead of Zionism.

But anyway, we have a situation in which the Trump administration seems, in many respects, to be moving away from Israel. There's a battle within the administration between America Firsters and Israel Firsters. Now, of course, the America Firsters are also ardent Zionists, but they don't think that the cause of preserving Israel as a viable state is served by the sort of inhumanity, gross violations of international law that attract a universal program wherever they are accurately reported, and therefore the America Firsters are prepared, apparently, just to have a distance between themselves and Israel.

This is illustrated in multiple recent developments. For example, after coming to the aid of Israel by an attacking Yemen and the Ansar Allah, or Houthi, government in Yemen, the Trump administration reversed course, and they agreed on a ceasefire with the Yemenis, but they did not insist that Yemen stop firing missiles at Israel, or stop conducting a sea blockade from the land in the Red Sea against Israel.

We've also seen the President, against Netanyahu's demands, embrace Syria, ending the sanctions against Syria, and actually shaking hands with Ahmed al-Sharaa, the new president of Syria, a terrorist with a bounty on his head. This is a direct frustration of the Israeli desire to fragment Syria into multiple little enclaves.

We have also got an arms deal with Saudi Arabia, which the Israelis oppose, including, apparently, a nuclear agreement to provide reactors to Saudi Arabia, without demanding that Saudi Arabia normalize relations with Israel, which is utterly impossible under current circumstances, given Arab abhorrence of what the Israelis have been doing in Gaza. Some parts of the administration are working to resettle Palestinians in improbable places like Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Rwanda. These are not locales that are very congenial to Palestinians.

So some of that is going on, but at the same time, the Trump administration just said to Israel, look, we're taking over management of Gaza. We will manage the humanitarian relief that you have denied people in Gaza. Of course, they plan to do it in a weird way with private contractors, but there will be no Israeli soldiers handing out food and so forth to Gazans if this goes through. So these are all evidences of a distancing of the United States from foreign policies that have been basically dictated by Israel. This is a declaration of American independence. It's America first, not Israel first, in West Asia.

Robinson   

Trump just gave this speech in Saudi Arabia, where some of the language he used is deeply unfamiliar in American politics: condemning neoconservatives, condemning war, speaking of the catastrophe of US intervention in the Middle East. It's very hard for me to get a grip on Trump's Middle East policies. In one moment, he seems to be wanting to go to war with Iran, and the next moment, he's talking about making a grand deal. In one moment, he's talking about how all the Gazans need to leave, and the next moment he's telling Israel you've got to be good to the people of Gaza. You've talked about the kind of internal contradictions within the administration. Can we take this speech seriously at all? Does it mean anything?

Freeman 

This is the prince of uncertainty. And the name of the age should be "the age of uncertainty" because Mr. Trump, aside from making some really deplorable personnel choices in staffing his administration, two-thirds of which are neoconservative—and he condemns the neoconservatives—he is unpredictable, and he revels in that.

And as I indicated, there are positive things to that. He can change his mind in a fantastically amazing way, as he did on Yemen. So this is a man who has his own ideas. He has counselors who I think gave him bad advice on many issues, but he seems to be capable of making his own decisions, sometimes on the basis of absurd theories. For example, he's gone to war with Adam Smith and David Ricardo on the economic theoretical level, but he seems to have learned that lesson too. In some respects, at least, he's distanced himself from the advisors who advocate preventing death by China in the economic area. He's learning, and he looks a bit frazzled. He's obviously got quite a bit of tension under him. And so this is an administration that embraces contradictions and sometimes rises above them. So I would say it's not all bad.

Robinson   

With the horror in Gaza that's unfolded since October 7, you suggested there, when I asked you if you believe that there were squandered opportunities, that the peace process could have gone differently if the United States had been more seriously committed to doing something other than just standing in lockstep with Israel. Going forward, if you were an advisor to the United States president, someone who has an interest in a just resolution to the conflict that actually helps Palestinians achieve some level of self-determination or equal participation in the country they are occupied by, what do you think US policy ought to be in Israel-Palestine going forward? How do we help come back from the horrendous catastrophe that we're seeing unfold?

Freeman 

Well, in the almost 80 years of its existence, Israel has never put forward a single peace proposal for peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians. Its objective has always been their expulsion or murder. I think we should cut off arms sales and demand that Israel make a peace proposal for coexistence with the other people who inhabit Palestine. The great irony here, of course, is that David Ben-Gurion, who was the first leader of Israel, freely admitted that Palestinians were the genetic descendants of the original Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, who had converted first to Christianity under the Byzantines and then to Islam. So basically, we have a group of people with a dubious claim to territory. After all, if you apply the principles we apply to Palestine to, let's say, Manhattan, then the Lenni Lenape Indians would be entitled to recover it, probably with reparations from the Dutch, who screwed it out of them with a few beads. (I say that because my kids are part Lenni Lenape, so I'm hopeful.) But the only time Israel's ever been able to advance any kind of peaceful relationship with its neighbors, or the Palestinians, is when it has received tough love from the United States and the international community. And that's just a fact.

Robinson 

And you said at the end of your book America's Continuing Misadventures In The Middle East, which was published well before the October 7th attacks and the present war, "we must find a way to divert Israel from a largely self-engineered isolation into which it is driving itself while repairing our own increasing international ostracism on issues related to Israel." That's obviously been magnified a hundredfold since then.

Freeman 

Yes, I had some vision of where Israel was driving itself, and I was appalled because I believe it ends in going off a cliff. And for seeing what is actually happening now, I was, of course, branded a vicious antisemite and so forth. Far from that, I would like to see Israel survive and prosper. It cannot do it in this manner.

Robinson

Yes. Noam Chomsky, who we've had on this program, said that Israel was driving itself towards national suicide, and it would be the end of Israel. And he said the people who say they care about Israel don't actually care about Israel because they're driving it towards its own destruction. Well, your analysis is always so clear and sharp and so different from what we hear in the mainstream American press. Ambassador Freeman, thank you so much for coming on the program today.

Freeman 

It's my pleasure. Thanks for good questions.

 

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.