Departures with Robert Amsterdam

In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States engaged in a relentless anticommunism crusade which included the sponsorship of mass killings, coups, and installations of authoritarian regimes across much of the global South, from Indonesia to Brazil.

In his fascinating new book, "The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World," journalist and author Vincent Bevins explores some fascinating personal testimonials of survivors and their families, and studies how this pattern of conduct by the United States often resulted in structural, systemic defects in many of the countries which to this today continues to impede the consolidation of democracy and stability.

Most Americans, and many in the media and pundit class, continue to overlook the human toll that it took for the United States to win the Cold War, and defer to an attitude of exceptionalism. Bevins argues that we need to overcome this and grapple with how our actions impacted these countries.

"There's a contradiction between empire and democracy - when you are a regular person that has to put food on the table for your family, you have your own things to worry about, but then you are also supposed to pay attention to what your government is doing and understand how to say yes or no to certain actions," Bevins says, and how is one expected to do that when the US has been active in 180 countries all around the world.

"However much you love the United States, you still have a moral responsibility to know your own history and to criticize yourself first," he argues, pointing out that media narratives need to be more realistic about the context of how other countries view the United States based on the history of intervention.

With a focus on the overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia and the installation of the brutal Suharto regime, Bevins raises the interesting question of whether or not it was even necessary to kill 1 million people during those years.

"What if there had never been this violent attempt to crush Indonesian democracy from 1955-1959? What if he were allowed to oversee a multiparty democracy in which the Indonesian Communist Party just existed, winning 30-40% of the votes and influencing policy but not carrying out a revolution. This is what Italy was like during the Cold War, this is what France was like during the Cold War."

But we can never know what the alternative history would be.

In 1942, Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle led an audacious one-way bombing raid to hit targets in Japan which many thought impossible. With nowhere to land their planes, eight American airmen who were captured afterward by Japanese troops in occupied Chinese territory, and later subjected to trials and death sentences.

In his fascinating new book, "Last Mission to Tokyo: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice," Columbia Law Professor Michel Paradis takes the reader deep inside the first postwar war crimes tribunals organized by the Allies in Shanghai, which included trials of lawyers involved in the prosecution of the captured Doolittle airmen.

In speaking with Robert Amsterdam about the book, Paradis remarks that much of the prosecutions that took place following the war were quite flawed examples of "victors' justice," but nevertheless set important precedent.

"When we fall short in upholding justice, and we fall into the trap of victors' justice and revenge and show trials, you end up creating really unpredictable outcomes," Paradis says. "Now, here in 2020, 75 years later, Yamashita's trial is remembered as an outrage. (...) And we don't remember Yamashita as the really horrible fascist war criminal that he was. This is an issue that I try to explore in the book."

Tundu Lissu is not known for backing down from a challenge.

From his humble roots growing up herding cattle in Central Tanzania to his British education and legal practice, he rose to a senior position in the CHADEMA opposition party. As a vocal critic challenging the alleged human rights abuses of President John Magufuli, in 2017 he survived an attempted assassination in which he was shot 16 times.

On this podcast, Tundu is interviewed by his international lawyer Robert Amsterdam, and shares his views on what motivated him to go back home and contest for the presidency.

As the Syrian conflict has raged on for almost a decade, and the United Nations is hamstrung with Russia's veto power over proposed legal instruments to intervene, international law finds itself being innovated at light speed in response.

Michael Scharf, the co-dean of the Law School of Case Western Reserve University and the co-author of "The Syrian Conflict's Impact on International Law," joins the podcast this week to discuss the effect of the Syrian conflict on the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, and whether or not these recent precedents are sustainable in the long term.

Scharf asks if the bombing of Syrian chemical weapons facilities, which was carried out under the ambit of humanitarian intervention by a handful of nations, will be seen as broad precedent that could be invoked over other international crises, or if it will be seen to be much more limited for use only against countries deploying biological warfare.

In this discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Scharf proposes that the conflict has rapidly crystallized new international legal rules and significantly altered previous international approaches in classic "Grotian moments," referring to 17th century legal scholar Hugo Grotius, referring to a "paradigm-shifting development in which new rules and doctrines of customary international law emerge with unusual rapidity and acceptance."

As the trade war heats up between the United States and China, the strategic calculations on behalf of both Donald Trump and Xi Jinping bear increasing levels of risk of the confrontation spinning out of control.

Joining the podcast this episode are two Wall Street Journal reporters, Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, whose new book "Superpower Showdown: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War" examines the history driving the current trade dispute and the behind the scenes thinking that continues to mischaracterize and misunderstand how we find our way back to détente.

"One thing we try to do in this book is illustrate the kinds of calculations that both sides had done that brought the relationship closer and closer to this new cold war," says Lingling Wei.

"Constantly the Chinese side would overestimate their leverage over the American side," she says. "To them, its biggest leverage throughout these negotiations was soybeans. They knew that agricultural purchases were something near and dear to Trump's heart. (...) They played this card over and over again, and it backfired."

As a career foreign service officer, Elizabeth Shackelford was seen as a rising star in the US State Department, a recipient of the Barbara Watson Award for Consular Excellence. But in 2017 she resigned from public service, publishing a stinging indictment of a letter which brought to light the extraordinary mismanagement and strategic drift under then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

In Shackelford's new book, "The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age," she takes the reader inside the collapse of the U.S. diplomatic effort in South Sudan, which had fallen into a pernicious civil war with Washington left backing a murderous dictator.

"The role of diplomacy in our national security toolbox has really been downgraded and diminished in recent years, really over the past 20 years as the military's role has become the primary tool we are using," says Shackelford. "We aren't just ineffective. We're counterproductive."

Shackelford says that the picture of the coronavirus pandemic would be entirely different if we were leading with diplomacy.

"It is costing Americans dearly that we are not integrated with the global response," she says. "We would be well-coordinated with our European and Asian allies in terms of the supplies we need and how we manage things like our totally intertwined economies and trade. But instead, we've really cut off all those opportunities."

With assassinations taking place on foreign soil, widespread hacking and disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining democratic elections, and provocations of armed conflict across multiple theaters, Russia's role in the post-Cold War international system under President Vladimir Putin has been that of a disrupter. But they've likely never had a more powerful weapon at their disposal than the current president of the United States, Donald Trump.

Luke Harding, an author and journalist who served for years as the Guardian's correspondent in Moscow, has recently published a fascinating new book examining the crucial developments that led us to our current problems with Russia, entitled "Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia's Remaking of the West."

In this interview with Robert Amsterdam, Harding discusses some of the book's heroes and anti-heroes, with a special focus on the deeply peculiar relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin dating back to the infamous summit in Helsinki.

"It was that notorious meeting where Trump stood next to Putin and said, 'I don't believe that Vladimir interfered; he's given me his word,'" Harding says. "And I think that this was possibly the worst moment of his presidency, where even people who had previously been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, realized that he is profoundly compromised, and for whatever reason, he's doing Moscow's bidding."

As an attorney, distinguished diplomat, academic and author, there are few public officials with careers as varied and impressive as Philip Zelikow. He served as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, was the author of the "Zelikow memo" disputing the legal grounds of torture of terrorism detainees, and co-authored books with former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and recently published on "strategy corruption" in Foreign Affairs.

In this wide-ranging discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Zelikow talks about his work deconstructing the Suez crisis of 1956, how to consider history and decisionmaking without 20/20 hindsight, and what mistakes the Trump administration is making by concentrating solely on the culture war as opposed to focusing on what outputs and results they want from global diplomatic engagement.

Zelikow explains in detail his most recent work on "strategic corruption," in which other nations exploit openings for lawlessness in the United States.

"I do think that this administration has opened itself up to corruption in a way that no American administration has ever done in the history of the United States," says Zelikow. "I think this is actually a more corruption administration than the Harding administration or the Grant administration, and that foreigners have taken advantage of this."

He argues: "This concern crosses party lines. There is not a party that says corruption is good. But there is an administration which has left itself enormously vulnerable to it, and actually, quite deliberately plotted by foreigners who are using our vulnerability to get policy objectives they want in Europe and Asia."

The United States has enjoyed a position of relative primacy in the international system since the end of World War II, but are those days numbered as China and other powers continue to rise? Or does Washington still have a few more decades left in the tank?

Matthew Kroenig, a political scientist and the Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, has a decidedly more optimistic view of the capacity of American democracy to help the country prevail in the new rivalries with China and Russia.

On the podcast, Kroenig discusses these questions by taking a critical look at the strengths of weaknesses of democracies vs. autocracies by highlighting seven different confrontations between rivals, from from ancient Greece to the Cold War.

In his new book, "The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and China," he argues that although democracies do not always win wars, they do have outsized strategic advantages in comparison to autocracies, from culture to innovation to the financial strength of a world reserve currency.

When you are "the capital of capital," Kroenig argues, you have a major advantage in your ability to deficit spend and build up your capabilities, and we've always seen international finance exist in more open societies, from Venice to Amsterdam to London to Wall Street.

"Autocracies historically don't do well when it comes to international finance," Kroenig says. "People don't trust investing in autocratic countries, and it's also because to have a financial system you have to allow the free flow of currency, money, in and out of your borders, and autocracies don't like allowing things flowing in and out of their borders."

In this regard, he points out, China is not even particularly trying hard to make the RMB a reserve currency, while President Xi appears to be prioritizing political control over economic growth by increasing the Communist Party's control over the economy.

Numerous others we've had on the podcast take the opposite view, that we are witnessing the final days of American hegemony. Time will tell us who is right, it seems.

For fans of legal fiction, there are few characters more memorable than Scott Turow's protagonist, Alejandro "Sandy" Stern, whose crusading work as a defense counsel first appeared in his 1987 book, "Presumed Innocent."

Now, with Turow's latest novel, "The Last Trial," it appears we are witnessing the end of a long arc of a beloved character.

In this discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Scott Turow talks about what went into the creation of Sandy Stern, and the process by which he plots his many bestselling legal thrillers. Amsterdam and Turow share their contrasting experiences of large firm and small firm defense counsel, and how lawyers must manage the role fully investing themselves, personally and emotionally, into the cause of their clients, sometimes with the consequences that may bear.

"I think that the transmission of motif and milieu and information from my practice to my novels is pretty obvious," says Turow. "It keeps me current on the law, gives me a sense of what's going on now. On the other hand, occasionally it's useful to be the novelist in the courtroom."