Arguments for restraint while Europe is in the middle of a war are xenophobic and funded by the Kochs.

Kagan: And so it, it's an old trope to say, we are interested in the American, in defending America, not in defending some global liberal order, which they portray as being a kind of conspiracy of the elite to keep down, to keep down the average American. And again, that the idea that there are these vast conspiracies of plutocrats, uh, and communists and Jews, uh, et cetera, was a, was a constant refrain in the 1930s, uh, in conservative circles. It was a major element of Father Kauflin, the, the, the, the famous radio priest of the 1930s. Those links were the ones that he made communism, war mongering, Jews, et cetera. Charles Lindbergh got into trouble for saying that Jews were trying to force the United States into war, uh, for reasons that were quote unquote not American. And of course, we, we hear those kinds of, those same tropes today, people are a little bit more careful about the words they use. They generally talk about globalists and liberal globalists and neo-conservatives, et cetera. But it's all the same. It's all that same picture. A lot of mileage has been gotten by conservatives over the past century and more playing precisely to Americans’ xenophobia, which, uh, which crops up now and then their fear of the other, their fear of people who don't look like them, et cetera. These are normal human qualities, of course, and Americans are not immune to them. But it's been one of the, it's been one of the goals of, of these conservative attacks to sort of stir up those kinds of fears in the United States. And that is very much part of Republican foreign policy today. And, and, but getting back to your point where we can see all this come together is in what now is clearly becoming the dominant view in the Republican party, which is that we should completely cut off our aid to Ukraine. Um, it was interesting to see Ron DeSantis, who has been pretty quiet on the subject of foreign policy lately, finally come down and make it clear that he doesn't think the United States really should be engaged in this conflict even indirectly with Ukraine. And Josh Hawley gave a speech just recently in which he called for the, not only for the immediate cutoff of aid to Ukraine, but the withdrawal, the beginning of the, to withdraw American forces from Europe entirely. And he says explicitly that he wants the Europeans to know that the United States is no longer able to protect them. Now that you would do this in the middle of a war is rather extraordinary. But there you have the, the sort of the throwback to the Real America first approach and of course Hawley's argument. And in general, the Republican argument against helping Ukraine is filled with this notion of a conspiracy to impose some kind of liberal plutocratic, communist empire on the world, which is the great global elite conspiracy that they're pointing to. Republicans have taken to calling their opponents, for instance, uh, not only Chinese Communist party sympathizers, which is another old throwback to an earlier day, but also this constant refrain of that they are globalists, that they're liberal globalists, they're left globalists, et cetera. It's an old game and it has been resurrected in force.

Rothkopf: It really is, and it's really resonated throughout this era. Frankly, I could go on talking about this a lot. Uh, yesterday I was in a conversation with somebody who was dealing with a different dimension of it. There is also a group of so-called realists today who are not associated typically with the right or conservatives, but are associated typically with the left. And they have also embraced this idea that, you know, the west started the war in Ukraine and the West, uh, uh, is responsible and the US shouldn't be involved. And there's an interesting subtext, which this guy pointed out to me yesterday, which is a bunch of these people are beneficiaries of, of programs that are underwritten by the Koch brothers, who are also sort of vaguely sympathetic. There is a kind of, not just conservative sympathy to the Russians, but there is a, a libertarian progressive sympathy to the, to the Russians. And I find it all kind of hard to get my brain around given the world I grew up in. But I'm just wondering what your thought is of that other side of the equation.

Kagan: Like you, I've watched this and I, and I try to piece it together. There's no question. And there is a place where the, where the, where the left and the right meet on this, um, from the left point of view, it's the evils of American capitalism. The left theory of the case is that the United States is a capitalist country and therefore an imperialist country, and therefore is, has got, is fundamentally evil at its core. They can blame specific people for it. But I mean, ultimately the great left w leftist historian William Appleman Williams, you know, he said, look, this is in the DNA of America. It's in the DNA n a of a capitalist power like the United States. The right comes at it from a different direction, but because what their, the rights argument is that America is, was born good, but it has been corrupted and destroyed by malign non-American influences, whether it's immigrants or Jews or what have you, and that that is, but, and that those are the ones who've been leading the United States into these conflicts. As I say, you know, there was a lot of blaming of the Jews for American intervention in World War II and blaming of the Jews for American intervention in World War I, which is even more bizarre since Jews generally opposed intervention cause they were, they, they were anti-Russian because the Russian czars were the most anti-Semitic power in the world at the time. But that, but this is, you know, it's, it's, it's a common refrain to suggest that our basic true Americanism has been poisoned by these outside influences now. And yes, right now, people like Hawley and, and Trump and others, by the way, all of whom supported the Iraq war thoroughly at the time now want to go back and say, you see, those neoconservatives got us into the war. And that's also a left wing trope that they are borrowing, even though factually that's not the case. Is, uh, I, if you haven't done it already, you should get the great professor and historian Melvin Loeffler on. He just has a new book on the Iraq War, which is, uh, uh, far and away the most serious balanced historical account, uh, of what happened and, and actually addresses a lot of the myths that both the right and the left have made common currency.