What’s America’s Role on the World Stage?

KORI SCHAKE, FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL AND STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: You know, I think that’s disgraceful. I actually think it’s disgraceful for the president of the United States, after 20 years of American involvement in Afghanistan, to say we bear no responsibility for what happens now, that we’re writing it off, and to suggest that an Afghan military and police force that suffered 68,000 dead in order to try and fight for what we were trying to create with them, that somehow this is their failure, and we deserve to be exalted for being smart enough to write off their future. I just think that’s disrespectful to the people who are bearing the consequences of this policy choice on our part.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: OK, so how much responsibility, do you think, I mean, not you precisely, but the American Enterprise Institute, the neocons in the W. Bush administration, who decided to move from the legitimate goals in Afghanistan, to respond to an attack on the headline — on the homeland, and then went off on some half-cocked idea that Iraq was a great place to end up? Let me just play what you might call a neocon, Tony Blair, said — at the time prime minister — said in the right aftermath to me of 9/11, that, yes, we have to number one, respond, and we will help America defend itself against 9/11, but then — and then listen to what he said.

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TONY BLAIR, FORMER BRITISH PRIME MINISTER: There has then to be an agenda that we construct at an international level that involves the whole of the international community in dismantling the machinery of international terrorism, how it’s financed, how these people move about the world, the countries that then harbor them and give them help. At every single level, we have to pursue and dismantle this machinery of terror.

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AMANPOUR: So, barely three or four days after 9/11, he envisioned what eventually became Western policy, I mean, just go after terrorism in every single way, including misbegotten war in Iraq based on false premise. We know that’s the case. My question to you is, was that wrong? You’re still at the American Enterprise Institute, or you’re there now. What is the conservative playbook for what you would like to see, America defending and raising the kind of ideals that it has done and protecting the institutions that it created in the aftermath of the Second World War?

SCHAKE: So, a couple of things. First, I went to work in the Bush White House not long after September 11. And my strongest impression was how frightened people were, how fearful they were that they didn’t understand the dimensions of the terrorist threat. And I think we made up a lot of bad policy choices out of fear and out of ignorance about the nature and magnitude of the threat.