Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative magazine, joins the Trialogue to discuss the evolution of anti-interventionist thought on the American right. In this conversation we cover the origins of American empire, the extent of U.S. global commitments, the future of NATO, competition with China, and the strategic direction of U.S. foreign policy in Trump’s second term. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to stay updated with the latest episodes! *The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative magazine, joins the Trialogue to discuss the evolution of anti-interventionist thought on the American right. In this conversation we cover the origins of American empire, the extent of U.S. global commitments, the future of NATO, competition with China, and the strategic direction of U.S. foreign policy in Trump’s second term.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to stay updated with the latest episodes!
*The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:05] Peter Slezkine: I'm Peter Slezkine, Director of the U.S.-Russia-China Trialogue Project at the Stimson Center. Since the middle of the 20th century, relations among the United States, Russia, and China have had an enormous impact on each country separately and on the world as a whole. The purpose of The Trialogue is to better understand this extraordinarily complex and consequential relationship by directly engaging with experts from all three countries.
In this show, guests from across the political spectrum and from every corner of the globe share their views in their own voice. While the Stimson Center seeks to provide access to a wide variety of perspectives, it does not endorse any particular position. We leave it to the listeners to judge the validity and value of the views expressed by the guests.
My guest today is Curt Mills, Executive Director of The American Conservative Magazine. Since its founding in 2002, The American Conservative has been the preeminent platform for anti-interventionist writing on the political right. In some respects, the magazine's position prefigured Trump's own embrace of America First.
In addition to running the magazine, Curt has become a prolific and influential commentator on international affairs in his own right. In the conversation that follows, we discuss the history of the magazine in the country, the extent of American interest and commitments, and the successes and failures of Trump's second term. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:34] Curt Mills: Thanks for having me, man.
[00:01:37] Peter Slezkine: So, you are the executive director of The American Conservative magazine. Can you tell us a bit about the publication? Who founded the magazine? When? What positions has it taken for or against various issues over time?
[00:01:51] Curt Mills: Sure. Yeah. So, the magazine was founded here in Washington, D.C., in 2002. The basic, you know, quick and dirty is that it was founded by conservatives and friends against the Iraq War. It was anchored around the singular personality at that time of Patrick J. Buchanan, who I think, for viewers that are younger or unfamiliar, roughly equivalent to the Tucker Carlson of his day, which is to say the most important conservative journalist in the country, but someone who was resolutely anti-establishment and kind of a thorn in the old guard of the Republican Party.
So, Buchanan had run for president three times in '92, '96, and, less at least relevantly, I would say, in 2000, but he finished fourth in a third-party run. Buchanan was the, sort of, anchoring figure against this war. The other co-founders, in many ways, if Pat was the heart, Scott was the brain, Scott McConnell, the first editor of the publication, and then the Greek writer, Taki, who people might be familiar with from his High Life columns at The Spectator, and now again at TAC as of 2026. That was the, sort of, ruling troika of the early days.
[00:02:55] Peter Slezkine: What were Pat Buchanan's reasons for being against the war from the very beginning?
[00:02:59] Curt Mills: I mean, I think just the obvious tactical risks of the whole thing. I mean, it was the dawn of the internet age. You know, it was right after 9/11. Conservative anti-war stuff is probably more mainstream now because, I'll start with the president of the United States is one of us, and, you know…
[00:03:12] Peter Slezkine: When all this seems obvious in hindsight, but Buchanan's position was extremely unusual at the time.
[00:03:17] Curt Mills: Yeah, no, I mean, it was basically hated in the broader public, but particularly hated by the elite in Washington. There was a famous article in National Review in the early 2000s by the… Who became the White House speechwriter, David Frum, who called the group of people who founded the magazine “unpatriotic conservatives." To oppose Iraq was not only a political disagreement, it was a moral failing. And I think you see the seeds of…
I mean, it had been going on for a while for anyone paying attention, but you see the real nature of the disagreement between what are known as neoconservatives, people who came to the right and came to dominate Republican administrations in the '70s, '80s, '90s, and 2000s, and what might be called the old right, paleoconservative, nationalist, populist, this kind of thing. And there is this tendency on the neocon right that exists to this day for grand moralization, both in foreign affairs but also in the interpersonal. And so, it's not as if our side of things was immune from lobbing rhetorical bombs, but I think that, in general, you'll see, I like to think, a less preachy perspective from our magazine historically.
[00:04:23] Peter Slezkine: And its principal focus has been foreign policy, and its line has consistently been anti-interventionist regardless of issue.
[00:04:30] Curt Mills: I think that's what we're known for, and I think that's what we do best. But I would say the critique of the Iraq War and the critique of the Bush administration was probably a little more sweeping than that. I would say it was anti-globalization writ large. It might not have used those terms. But if you read, for instance, Buchanan's book, Where the Right Went Wrong, in the early 2000s, you would see, I think, a pretty clear disparagement of the way the country was going on three main vertices, one, foreign policy, but that was merely the tip of the spear, immigration, enormous, and also laissez-faire or free, quote-unquote, "international trade."
I think it was always of a piece, and this was, sort of, potentially, would've been a niche intellectual product, especially because George W. Bush got reelected and a lot of the anti-war and even anti-globalization energy was co-opted by Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in 2008. If it had not been for, A, number one, the magazine's survival, but B, there was this little guy called Donald Trump who ran a lot of these ideas only a decade and a half later.
And, you know, I'm only aware of two instances when Donald Trump has ever apologized to anyone. The first was to Melania Trump after the Access Hollywood disclosures in autumn of '16, but he also called Pat Buchanan to apologize for the comments that he had made about him when they were actually fighting for the Reform Party nomination in 2000.
So, the idea that, like, you know, it's just a cult, Trump is an egomaniac narcissist, you know, not to say that there's 0% truth to any of these things, but the idea that there's no ideas to any of this, that Trump could have just run on literally anything and won, I don't think Donald Trump believes that. I mean, if you look at the kind of rhetoric he used, especially when he was really down and out, so running again for president in late '22, early '23, it really leaned into this non-intervention, nationalist, populist, red-meat, anti-immigration, anti-globalization kind of thing.
And if there was any intellectual hum at all in the world for this from an American perspective, it was The American Conservative, also known as TAC.
[00:06:27] Peter Slezkine: So, TAC got to “America First" first.
[00:06:30] Curt Mills: Our haters would say that Charles Lindbergh got to it before anybody. But yeah, I think in the 21st century, we were clearly the fulcrum of this.
[00:06:38] Peter Slezkine: Why would it be the haters who invoke Lindbergh? That's just a proxy for calling you guys Nazis.
[00:06:43] Curt Mills: You know, I mean, I think Lindbergh has a troubled profile in the American imagination at this point. He's, kind of, like a… I think Trump has commented on Lindbergh. He's, in theory, like the kind of guy Trump would really like, central casting, right?
[00:06:53] Peter Slezkine: A fantastic flyer.
[00:06:55] Curt Mills: Yeah. Did an act of physical daring. Trump likes athletes and has interesting political opinions, and Trump is not immune to that. I think Lindbergh's advocacy against World War II has marked him out as a bigot or a troubled man in the American postwar imagination. But Lindbergh was the apex celebrity, in some ways the first celebrity, right? I mean, when his child was kidnapped and murdered in the early '30s, it was the O.J. trial or Scott Peterson trial of its day. It was enormous, sort of Savannah Guthrie kind of thing, and it had happened to somebody who was a cross between LeBron James and a movie star.
And when this person became the anchoring figure for sort of conservative, right-wing foreign policy restraint, that was a big deal. And I think there's actually been a historic effort to really demonize his perspective because he's actually such a powerful symbol. And I don't think, actually, he's said anything that, broadly speaking, I think is beyond the pale. I think the main optical tactical error he obviously made was going to the Third Reich and being awarded some sort of medal by Hitler in the mid-'30s.
But of course, the previous conception of Nazi Germany was very different before, certainly, Kristallnacht or the war. And there were leading figures throughout the American intelligentsia that admired Hitler, and admired Mussolini, and admired Stalin. So, it was not known the extent of the crimes in the '30s by these guys. And, of course, especially in the case of Hitler, most of them had not really been committed. It obviously was running an autocracy, but from the surface perspective, it might not have been so different than the Kaiserreich, which, of course, had a number of admirers in America as well.
[00:08:34] Peter Slezkine: Well, since we're on the subject, let's tackle his arguments from 1939. You mentioned the postwar imaginary, which makes it almost incomprehensible that one would be against intervention against the greatest evil of our age. But what do you make of the arguments in their own context, and do they resonate for an anti-interventionist position today?
[00:08:57] Curt Mills: Yeah. I mean, I'm, sort of, leery of making polemical arguments about issues that I didn't live through, but the idea...
[00:09:04] Peter Slezkine: I'm a historian, so I do only that.
[00:09:07] Curt Mills: Yes, unlike you, I'm not a trained historian, but I would say the idea that opposition to both World Wars, American intervention, the idea that this was fringe stuff, is historically inaccurate. They were extremely unpopular, and it was a very close-run thing, basically, both. And I would note this is both Democratic presidents who wanted to expand the size of the state, Woodrow Wilson and, much more so, FDR, basically, in part, lied the Americans into the war. Now, you can argue that was just that the specter of Hitlerism or German domination of Europe was just so great that a noble lie was necessary, but the…
[00:09:47] Peter Slezkine: What was the noble lie? Just be specific.
[00:09:49] Curt Mills: Just that this was clearly in the national interest, was absolutely necessary for American national interests. I think the argument for that is pretty thin, right?
[00:09:59] Peter Slezkine: You mean that there was actually a threat to the U.S. homeland? Because that was part of the argument.
[00:10:03] Curt Mills: I mean, people disagree on this. I don't think there's a major threat to Iran of the U.S. homeland in 2026. And people disagree very, very passionately about that today, so I don't want to imply that anyone who disagrees with me is a liar. But I think it's quite a stretch. I think it relies on this conception of the American empire and American responsibility in every corner of the world.
Additionally, I think it underrates how porous our system actually is politically to interest groups in the modern age. So, I think something that was quite different about immigration in the 19th century, before mass communication, is if you came over here, you were gone. Like the level of connections to Europe was a lot harder in 1870 or 1880 than it was in 1920 or 1930 or 1940.
And I think you see, especially as the U.S. becomes an empire in the Spanish-American War, and especially as the U.S. brokers détente with the Brits in the late 19th century, you see us importing a lot of British imperial sicknesses, in my opinion. I mean, the idea that this empire was necessary for our current power, I think, is just historically inaccurate. We were the largest economy in the world. The comparison has been made to modern China today. Before getting involved in all these foreign policy adventures, we were essentially a hemispheric power, as some people in the administration apparently want to return us to now.
And we still have the world's largest GDP, and I would submit that we would probably have the world's largest GDP, or second largest, depending when you think of China, without running this massive imperial machine.
[00:11:34] Peter Slezkine: When did the imperial machine start running? Is it 1898 and the acquisition of a few Spanish colonies, or is it truly World War II and the creation of the national security state?
[00:11:44] Curt Mills: I think it really starts in the Spanish-American War. I mean, a left-wing person would argue that the U.S. was a settler-colonialist imperial project from the beginning. But I would argue, and this is not to just downplay or not acknowledge the obvious brutality in which Native American nations were dealt with, and I think it is appropriate to think of some of these federations as effectively nations. But the model of American expansion, basically from the Jefferson administration on, is annexation, absorption with full rights.
And then, you know, obviously, that didn't happen for women, that didn't happen for Blacks, that didn't happen for a lot of Native American groups, and we fought a Civil War over some of these issues. But the model was small-r republican, small-d democracy, creating a large country where people who were absorbed, broadly speaking, were given rights. That is fundamentally distinct. And it also, importantly, the land was basically contiguous, right? That is fundamentally different than a naval war of colonial extraction, right?
I mean, the Philippines was never a state. There wasn't really any serious momentum. I don't believe… I'm not a super expert on the Cuban thing, but Cuba was never a state. And even something like Puerto Rico, I think everybody thinks is, kind of, a benighted example of American statecraft, right? I mean, the Puerto Ricans… I mean, as you know, what is it? It's half American, it's half not, as we just saw in the Bad Bunny halftime show, right? The number of American conservatives who sadly don't even know that, or not just conservatives, Americans, don't even know that Puerto Rico is in the United States.
Well, because in some ways it's not. It doesn't have full rights, right? It's sort of this silly thing that we gathered, and it is way more British in mode. And so, I think that really sets it off. And then, at the same time, you see the, sort of, moralizing, centralizing drives of the Progressive Era, of which politicians like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and then later FDR are all part of it. And there is the beginning of what I think is the warfare-welfare state.
This stuff can feel like, "Wow, we should just go back to the '20s or whatever," like there's no social safety net, et cetera, et cetera. And I understand this stuff needs to be modulated and finessed for the modern world. But I think there was a lot right about actually how the country, not to say that there weren't opportunities for progress and the country wouldn't continue progressing, but the idea that we needed this state, actually, I think is not very persuasive at all. And the idea that we needed to get involved in these wars is not very persuasive at all.
[00:14:10] Peter Slezkine: So, you are not much older than your magazine.
[00:14:14] Curt Mills: I'm 12 years older than the magazine, but yeah.
[00:14:17] Peter Slezkine: Well, so you came to some degree of self-conscious awareness of the world and the United States about the moment that your magazine was founded. So, how did you develop alongside it? When did you come to share the views that your magazine has long trumpeted?
[00:14:37] Curt Mills: Well, very conveniently for my career, pretty much through the magazine and at the time of the magazine's inception. I've read it since at least the 2004 election, but honestly, before, so whenever the 2004 election kicked off, '03 or whatever.
And so, all these interesting because like very, very smart people who have all kinds of wealth of information can just disagree on basic fundamental things, right? I saw this making the rounds again, the sort of Robert Kagan, neocon historian, extraordinary person, has been on Amanpour all week, the CNN show. And obviously, Robert Kagan knew more about foreign policy and history than a 13-year-old me, but I would submit that a 13-year-old me got the Iraq War right, and he got it very, very, very wrong, right?
And so, there was something about the first-blush arguments that seemed just so fundamentally wrong to effectively an adolescent teenager that it has really stuck with me. Not to imply that I haven't changed views on certain things. I think at different times, different things become more salient, maybe different economic approaches or different focuses, different parts of the world. But the fundamental view that the U.S. immigration regime has gone into overdrive and is counterproductive, the fundamental view that free trade is kind of a lie, and the fundamental view that these wars, we're not winning them and they're kind of pointless for the U.S. national interest, I've had for two decades.
[00:15:54] Peter Slezkine: So, what makes you and the magazine, by extension, conservative? So, of those three pillars, I suppose opposition to immigration is the only one that is coded conservative. Your assessment of American empire, critique of free trade, is classic left-wing principles as well.
[00:16:14] Curt Mills: Yeah. I mean, maybe. I would say I am very comfortable. I'm not sure everybody that we've published and has been in the leadership of the magazine over the years, since this is more of a me view than a house view, though, you know, obviously, increasingly my view quite matters for house view is that, I think, we have very little in common with what people think of as the modern conservative movement or establishment conservative, or Conservative Inc. that is William F. Buckley's concoction. It is a fundamentally postwar invention. I think it's not real. I think it's not actually that conservative.
When I hear the word “conservative,” I don't really… To an extent, labels are only so important, but I fundamentally think that the country is good. The country's founding institutions are good. I'm pro the Constitution. I'm pro the Declaration of Independence. And I'm pro the country's history, heritage, and inheritance. And, you know, as you could tell by what I said in the previous segment, I think the country's gone off the rails for about a century, but certainly since the end of the Cold War.
And so, you know, I'm comfortable with that. But yeah, do I have much in common with Mike Pence? No, I do not, proudly.
[00:17:20] Peter Slezkine: Is there a sense that the right side of the political spectrum has, in some respect, taken up the anti-imperialist, I don't know, taken the reins from the left? That there are obviously distinctions, but where the new left was leading for decades, now it's the new right, or whatever else you want to call it, that is leading the charge?
[00:17:41] Curt Mills: There are good left-restraint people, and we know a lot of them, and it remains to be seen if they will remake the Democratic Party in the future. I think what essentially has happened is ideology and party weren't so neatly aligned in the early 20th century, right? You've got people like H.L. Mencken, who, by I think any metric, is a right-wing libertarian who opposed World War I. And then you have uber-progressive politicians like Hiram Johnson or Robert La Follette, who I believe are both Republicans but, like, probably would be Democrat, left-wing, Bernie types of the day is counterfactual, and they both opposed the war.
But I would submit that the previous anti-war movements, because it was Democratic administrations, were functionally, kind of, more concentrated on the right. And indeed, the leading politicians that opposed the wars, Warren Harding, famously withdrawing us from the League of Nations, Herbert Hoover in the '30s. I think it coded right. That, sort of, flipped, for a variety of complex reasons, in the '60s, when the anti-war movement obviously became so closely aligned at the left. And then the Bush family sending us into so many wars in the Middle East in the early '90s and early 2000s made a lot of the anti-war movement very left.
And then by then, you know, you had the Vietnam energy. You had the anti-Iraq energy over two generations. Barack Obama very much was a beneficiary of that and rolled into power on that in 2008. But I think what's really effectively happened to the Democrats, and this is not my critique, this is actually a left-wing critique within their own ranks. The Democrats have become the party of power and the power party of the establishment. I think it's not as clear as it was three years ago because the Democrats aren't in charge now. But broadly speaking, if a Democrat becomes president in 2028 or 2029, I mean, we're recording as AOC is giving her foreign policy address in Munich, but I do think there are all these lines of convergence of establishment interests.
Like, for instance, on Russia politics, for instance, the Democrats are going to run against oligarchy, right? And I'm not saying there's nothing there. They're running against corruption. I'm not saying there's nothing there. But they're going to link that to foreign policy, is my suspicion. I think you've seen Bernie Sanders do this already, Elizabeth Warren more explicitly. And if you're running against oligarchy, then, like, the obvious bogeyman example of that are the Russians, right? So, accordingly, if we're going to take it to the oligarchs here at home in this conception, then, you know, our animating foreign policy goal has to be taking it to Moscow again.
And it's different motivation, it's different language, it's different seasoning, but, like, how is it functionally different from Biden's Atlantic system? I'm not sure it is.
[00:20:17] Peter Slezkine: Right. Well, Matt Duss and a co-author had an essay in Foreign Affairs not too long ago where they proposed this global crusade against kleptocracy, which does not sound fundamentally different from the global crusade against autocracy.
[00:20:30] Curt Mills: I would be hesitant to see it. I think, and additionally, I mean, it's nothing I wouldn't say to his face and doesn't know, like, I do think, you know, when he was advising Sanders in the late 2010s, Sanders' tack on Russiagate, I think, was not great. Like, I think Russiagate is extremely unfounded and dangerous and put the seeds for a lot of our modern political maladies. So, I am hesitant.
[00:20:50] Peter Slezkine: Can you spell that out a bit?
[00:20:51] Curt Mills: Well, I mean, it was an actual witch hunt. Like, there was just very little evidence. And then it was clearly a weaponized crusade against a duly elected president of the United States that just happened to align with a lot of like IC and liberal landies' goals on foreign policy. I mean, by all means, if Trump is actually a Manchurian candidate and there was evidence—but I mean, the kind of stuff that was printed, you know, there are a lot of flaws in conservative media. I mean, we declined the invitation to report on the Pentagon. I think Hegseth's rules are counterproductive and clownish.
But, like, it's not as if, and you see this with The Washington Post brouhaha right now, it's not as if center-left journalism in the late 2010s, which was considered this great model in retrospect, was blameless. I mean, the kind of stuff printed in stuff like New York Magazine by Jonathan Chait is basically, it was the liberal equivalent of Glenn Beck's terrifying chalkboard in 2010 on Fox News. It was just crazy stuff. It's not rigorous. There's still, like, a hesitancy to apologize for that. And I think it also played a little bit into how insane the Democrats went on COVID and BLM.
Like, there's this assumption that the Democrats are actually always more rigorous than the Republicans, or the left is always more rigorous than the right, and the right is for idiots and error. These days, for something like this, I just don't think that it's borne out. A lot of the larger mistakes of management of the United States over the last 10 years have been pretty attributable to the left.
[00:22:19] Peter Slezkine: And you think that is more about the left as an ideology than the state as a bureaucracy? Because you just said a moment ago that the left has in some sense melded with the establishment, so it's hard to tell if it's the left doing something or just the bureaucracy.
[00:22:37] Curt Mills: Yeah. I mean, look, it is very difficult. And maybe it's just, like, the thing that I feel more personally oppressed by, and I think one should be cognizant of that. But I would say when the left is just making stuff up, it feels really oppressive because the left is still broadly more in control of the American establishment. The right and the Trump administration make up crap all the time, but it doesn't feel like it has this oppressive, totalitarian energy in the same way.
I think Trump does have authoritarian impulses in some sense, but he doesn't have totalitarian impulses. So, I know that's like a relative defense. There definitely, obviously, are political prosecutions going on, but, like, people really slept on the early Biden-era stuff.
They really declared white domestic terrorism the number one national security threat to the United States. It's just something that's totally made up. Of course, the number of white extremists in the country is above zero in a country of 330 million people. But, like, these far-right groups are half federal agents, and the Ku Klux Klan has, I think, seen better days. The idea that these things were the top threat, I mean, it's a long conversation, but like, you know, so much of the left-wing conception of the world assumes that we actually still do live in the Harding administration or something like this. It's just the country is not like that. You, kind of, see it in the Epstein list. And there are obviously, like, runs the gamut, but, like, what is the Epstein list, like, really? It's kind of a list of Democrats. There are exceptions, obviously, but it's broadly speaking a list of very wealthy, very Ivy League-connected Democrats. And the most implicated are the Clintons, who are, like, obviously the center of this.
[00:24:08] Peter Slezkine: Well, I can't pretend to have read the however many million pages. So, who's most implicated by what innuendo specifically? I have no idea. But certainly, the Clinton is much discussed.
[00:24:20] Curt Mills: Basically, the most high-profile, most compromised by these disclosures, I think, is fair to say. And that's why they'll be testifying at Congress shortly.
[00:24:29] Peter Slezkine: How much of the anti-war energy on the right is attributable to the disproportionate cost they had to pay in actually fighting in the Middle East?
[00:24:39] Curt Mills: I think it's significant. The military's had recruiting problems for a long time. The military, since the end of the draft, has become way more of a socioeconomically lopsided thing. And so, frankly, just a lot of people who are in the military today are from white, working-class, Southern, rural, just not terribly wealthy people. There are a ton of people who are of Latino background and Black background and, I think, broadly speaking, have a separate story and separate voting patterns, although the Latino thing, I think, is more ambiguous.
But I think it's huge. And people have become, however unevenly, sort of avatars of this perspective, of this skepticism. Of course, the most famous is the vice president.
[00:25:24] Peter Slezkine: Okay, so it's clear that you believe that the U.S. is overextended in all sorts of ways and has gone off the rails, or did go off the rails over a century ago. And we'll get to a discussion of which regions to retrench from and in what order in a moment. But to begin with, first principles, how would you define U.S. interests, and how far do they extend?
[00:25:50] Curt Mills: You mean like on a map? So hard to do it in this direction, because I can just do it in the reverse direction. Like, you know, we shouldn't have bases in Syria. I'm pretty comfortable
[00:25:59] Peter Slezkine: Well, I know, but that's why I didn't ask it that way, because we can take the low-hanging fruit in a moment.
[00:26:03] Curt Mills: Well, but there's not, they're not that low-hanging fruit. I mean, as somebody who's been kind of in these policy battles, I'm both reporting and as an activist for 10 years, like it is just, it's pulling teeth to get out of Syria. It's pulling teeth.
[00:26:15] Peter Slezkine: No, no, I agree. But since you have been engaged in those battles for so long, I think it's sometimes important to take a step back. All these restrainers agree that we should get out of Syria, but would probably, if pressed, define American interest differently. So, if we were not settled with all this baggage and could start over employing our means to achieve certain ends, what would those be?
[00:26:42] Curt Mills: Yeah. So, I think if you've had to define my own policy preferences, I would say like, there's the realism restraint sort of coalition, right? And then in Foreign Policy Muscat terms that I feel like this is like prioritizers versus restrainers. Like, I have become more and more and more on the restraint end of that equation.
But I would say that I am not a total restrainer. I think the administration's hemispheric defense is a good idea. I think the idea that the U.S. should throw its right around and the region is fine. But I am leery of doing that in a way that I think are the imported sicknesses of the war on terror and our colonial failures around the world.
So, like, I opposed the Venezuela abduction, we could gotten everything we wanted by just working with the existing regime, evidences that we're getting everything we want by working with the existing regime. So, this was a wholly unnecessary risk for the White House to take. And you know, my view is that the U.S. really only has one peer competitor in the world, and that's China. And so, I think that if I'm hawkish on anything, it is China. I think the Russia, Middle East stuff is completely not our business.
[00:27:50] Peter Slezkine: What would you do about NATO?
[00:27:52] Curt Mills: I think we should be moving towards leaving it. It doesn't really serve any purpose. I think it actually is more provocative than protective, and I don't know if President Trump should leave today or tomorrow, but I think we should be sunsetting our involvement in it, and how I don't have firm opinions on how quickly or deliberatively. I think we've set it up. We've been involved in it for nearly 80 years. But I think we should be moving towards leaving, yeah, or at least severely limiting its relevance.
[00:28:20] Peter Slezkine: Did NATO ever serve a purpose as far as you're concerned?
[00:28:24] Curt Mills: I'm less convinced of the necessity of the Cold War, as I think maybe is not a surprise when you've heard my comments on the previous World Wars. So, not particularly, but if you needed to fight a Cold War, absolutely it did.
[00:28:35] Peter Slezkine: Which means that you are not in favor of future Cold Wars or proxy wars with Russia, and leaving NATO over time or abruptly would lessen the chances that we would be involved in conflict with Russia?
[00:28:49] Curt Mills: Yeah, I mean, it is just very... You asked me hypothetically, because of course you know more than me, like, how tight the Russians and Chinese are today. Like, all the problems of like, trying to pull off something like a reverse Kissinger, which is, people think is fantasy basically, but like in theory...
[00:29:02] Peter Slezkine: I don't think it's fantasy at all. Russia is very uncomfortable in its current position, so it's not going to become an adversary of China the way that China had already become an enemy of the Soviet Union before Kissinger arrived, but Russia would be very eager to move away.
[00:29:19] Curt Mills: [crosstalk 00:29:19] dressing up my views, which is because if you say reverse Kissinger, I feel like you're on a foreign policy podcast, people think you're an imbecile, so in 2026, but yeah, I agree. I don't think it's impossible either, but that's not the felt sense with the consensus. And so, I guess I was disguising my actual view, but I don't broadly... I don't get the Russia hawky crusade basically at all.
I don't get the Iran hawk crusade basically at all. That's not to say that like I fully trust these societies. I don't, but I don't fully trust the British. So, like, I really don't trust them, you know. I certainly don't trust our great friends in Israel. So, like, I mean like the trust itself is an international relations, it can not be the only currency, or else we're not going to engage with anybody.
[00:30:00] Peter Slezkine: Who is more dangerous to the United States, the Russians, the British, or the Israelis?
[00:30:06] Curt Mills: I think... Okay. The Russians don't ask for anything. They are obviously doing a war of conquest in Ukraine. They're trying to take territory, granted territory that was theirs when the year I was born. So, I think it's a little complex. It's not just like this random war. But you know, the Russians at least don't ask the U.S. to pay for it. The British and the Israelis particularly do, so that's my answer, which is answer via non-answer.
[00:30:29] Peter Slezkine: And when you say that you don't get Iran hawks and Russia hawks, what you mean by that is that neither country seems to pose a substantial threat to the United States, to our physical security as far as you can tell?
[00:30:43] Curt Mills: No, even the sort of extreme examples, like the Russians, as far as don't really don't assassinate people inside the United States. The Iranians don't either, even though there's like, you know, very fringe allegations of attempts from maybe people, sectors of their society, and that's obviously downstream of our very adversarial foreign policy towards them.
So, if that's the amount of blowback we're getting, it's just even with our current posture, I just think, just structurally, they don't threaten it. I think a lot of it is, the fact that we still live in gerontocracy, and so much of the anti-Russia, anti-Ukraine thing is just very baby boomer, right?
It's just 1979. It's just people who don't understand that Soviet Union doesn't even exist anymore, frankly. Sometimes you get the sense for like these, some baby boomer, Democratic congressman, like they really think like Putin is just there's no distinction between him and Brezhnev.
[00:31:32] Peter Slezkine: Well, I think the Hitler and Stalin are the most frequently invoked comparisons.
[00:31:40] Curt Mills: He's most solid and Hitler or [inaudible 00:31:41].
[00:31:41] Peter Slezkine: Brezhnev would not provoke such an indignant reaction.
[00:31:45] Curt Mills: Well, we were hawkish towards Brezhnev, and I've been doing a lot of very bizarre like Ford and Carter era reading right now. And it's... I actually think the '70s is an underrated time of when we really started messing up. So, the early neocons broke the Kissinger, Gerry, and Nixon détente in the Ford administration and our original posture towards Iran was like basically a kind of traditional WASP establishment versus Brzezinski thing, right?
So, like Cy Vance resigns over the Special Force raid that fails. Operation Eagle Claw, great name, bad operation.
[00:32:19] Peter Slezkine: Also, a bit of a zoological misnomer. Eagles, I imagine have talons, not claws.
[00:32:24] Curt Mills: Right. Well, I mean, you're not hiring Delta Force for the names, presumably, but it's about the best thing that happened in that operation. But it is very interesting, like, I mean, like, you're seeing it kind of now. I see the Shah, led Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, is in Munich saying he wants to be a transitional figure, et cetera. Khomeini said the same thing, the consolidation of power with that kind of edge to it was not fait accompli. The ambassador to Iran urged Carter to make a deal with Khomeini. Not that it would be Kumbaya, the Shah, et cetera, et cetera but it would at least like potentially secure neutrality in the region. And it's probably inaccurate to call Brzezinski and neocon, this is Carter's national security official because he opposed the Iraq War, and I think is more complex, but he was kind of a neocon, and Brzezinski led the hawks in the administration to do the special forces raid that failed, to not do a deal with the Iranian revolutionaries.
And I think we're still living with the consequences now, and we see the echoes of it, which is like the idea that we cannot do business with the current ruling government in Iran. And I think that's just obviously true.
[00:33:28] Peter Slezkine: What is obviously true?
[00:33:30] Curt Mills: Obviously, not true that we keep the business, I mean, we had a deal with them with Obama, but even if you don't like that deal, there's a better deal on offer now. And so, like, the whole debate is fake. The hawks won a debate between war and/or complete capitulation, i.e., surrender deal. And so, I just don't think imposing regime change in that part of the world is really in our interest.
And then additionally, if we actually care about bringing the society more online, making it more Western or more like us, I'm not sure we should, but if we did, then I think sanctions relief and trade is far more likely to do that peacefully than the force of the gun.
[00:34:08] Peter Slezkine: What do you make of Western civilization? It's a national security strategy. It is a popular concept in certain portions of the young right-wing commentary. Is it a meaningful category as far as you're concerned?
[00:34:24] Curt Mills: I don't think it's a thing. Basically, I think Western civilization is a concoction, more or less similar enough to the Buckley-ite conception of modern conservatism. It's newer than people understand, and it's ironclad precepts are more artificial than I think generally conceded. And so, I don't think that there is, as sometimes is now voguish on the right, I don't think there's like one unified civilization from San Francisco to Jerusalem.
I don't think that from most of history, anyone who lives in any of these places would've conceived of themselves like this as part of one fight or one shared culture, anything like that. And I don't think that there's this massive panacea of democracy and liberty, inside the castle walls and outside the castle walls is that we're perceived by Al-Qaeda who hate us for our freedom. I think this is a mixture of Fukuyamaism and Huntingtonism, and I reject both views of the universe.
I know that they're gigantic intellectuals, and I know that people like to cite them. I think they... I think we would've been better off with neither of them on the scene, quite frankly.
[00:35:26] Peter Slezkine: Well, forget Fukuyama in Huntington for a second, and consider Plato and Molière. What if we like them and, I don't know, the Gothic cathedrals spread around Europe. Is that a meaningful imperative in foreign policy?
[00:35:42] Curt Mills: I mean, I like Notre-Dame, and I like Samarkand. I mean, like what's the, I mean, the human beauty is... I don't mean to like come off like Kumbaya here. I'm American, I'm, you know, I have more in common with France than Uzbekistan. But like the idea that I have, something that's fundamental, like I have to endlessly care about defending this sort of like, goofy welfare state in Europe, or the ethnonationalist Jewish Pakistan and Israel. I think this is a concocted argument that is actually just sucking this country dry.
[00:36:09] Peter Slezkine: What I was curious is actually that in the U.S., Western civilization was first formulated as a pillar of national identity and a mandatory course in elite universities in the so-called isolationist period in 1920s and '30s. So, there was a combination of an ideological assimilation of the United States into something that was more or less invented, as you say, as Western civilization, at the same time as the U.S. was avoiding geopolitical entanglement with Europe, very decisively.
So, that doesn't seem to be the bent taken by those who invoke Western civilization now. They seem to assume that it involves some kind of active defense on some front, I suppose, more political.
[00:36:57] Curt Mills: More than defense, like a messianic zeal that, like, there's some, like grand showdown, between... I mean, it's weird, right? Because I mean, like Trump represents this sort of obliteration and humiliation and neocons in all these ways, but there's all these different elements of Trump that seem right for co-option in a sort of new neocon way.
And it's a fine line, right? Like, because if you believe the world is moving back into great powers then as I think, I broadly do, there's a major distinction, though, by saying because, okay, if you in the world is moving towards great power competition, à la Mark Carney's speech in Davos, but there's like two different roads you could take, which is, road number one, that there should be, these civilizations conflicts should be managed, the diplomacy concept of Europe kind of stuff, et cetera, et cetera, versus, two, a showdown.
And like that's some of the language I think you still see by past administrations, past as the first term, the first national security strategy was just an all great power competition document. I reject the inevitability of it. I don't think it was inevitable. As we discussed at the top of the program, 115 years ago, and I don't think it's inevitable now, and I think it's just as dangerous as ever. And I do think the Cold War logic of nuclear annihilation still holds.
[00:38:08] Peter Slezkine: So, what do you make of China then? Because you said that you are not a Russia hawk, not in a Iran hawk. If you're a hawk in any regard or in any region, it's the East Asia, and with respect to China. So, is a showdown inevitable? Avoidable? And on what plane will we compete?
[00:38:25] Curt Mills: I think it is avoidable, but I think it is tricky, and I think that any serious appraisal of how the U.S. should use its power, where it will use its power, is like, it's not going to just leave East Asia, I don't think. I think it's not worth the risk, but I think the relationship should be actively managed.
In some ways, Trump is right to pursue this kind of personalistic diplomacy. I think it's been more successful than the Biden administration approach, which was more procedural managerial, and I think it got us closer to great power conflicts. And then I think China, so as far as anyone understands, there's really one decision maker.
So, the personal element is a big deal. And I think if you had to super macro credit the administration, current administration for anything, is that, as I think, our friend Jen Kavanagh has observed ad nauseam, we are in era of actual great power conflict recession, it would all look silly if Xi invades Taiwan, tomorrow we go to war.
But like, by all appearances, tensions appear to be cooler than they were in 2022, when the chances of the Russians using nuclear weapon were assessed by the United States at 50%. And Biden, the president, inadvertently blurted out, regime change desires in Moscow and said, and committed to the use of troops in the defense of Taiwan, Formosa, et cetera. Trump hasn't done anything like that, and I think we've been better for it.
[00:39:46] Peter Slezkine: But you don't see the prospect of any kind of deal. Détente is the best-case scenario because Trump clearly is hankering after a deal, I imagine, and might have some kind of expectations for the meeting in April. But you think structurally there's no ribbon that can be tied on this.
[00:40:05] Curt Mills: I think I have attacked a lot of 20th-century policy, but I think strategic ambiguity and Taiwan's pretty much worked, you know, it hasn't been absorbed by the PRC, we haven't recognized it. It's been an economically, uber productive part of the world that hasn't been a war.
Maybe there's ways it could have been better, but that's pretty good, it seems like. And so, my default would be towards just preserving that. It's interesting because, like, the argument, little less bogus right now, but there's an argument about on the Iran file four or five, six months ago, that argued that negotiations themselves were provocative, right?
So, on the one hand, the negotiations were good. I'm in favor of a new Iran deal. I'm in favor of solidifying the relationship and formerly cooling tensions. But what caused the initial war? Well, the negotiations, it got the Israelis, super animated. They hilariously, not hilarious, darkly, comically, intervene to enforce deadline to a negotiation they weren't party to.
So, there were some view that, like, negotiations are just too dangerous. Like we were actually avoided a war if we have this sort of mediocre status quo. Maybe there's something to that logic with U.S.-China that actually just a lack of explicit framework, is actually fairly durable in this weird way. With Iran, it's just there's no reason the U.S. shouldn't make a deal. The only reason is Israel versus China, there's no, like, it's just the actual raw reality.
[00:41:22] Peter Slezkine: What's the raw reality?
[00:41:23] Curt Mills: Well, always just that like they're actually a pure competitor, there isn't some other country like the Taiwanese...
[00:41:28] Peter Slezkine: But what does a peer competitor mean? Because this is just taken for granted. And I understand that China is massive and is threatening-
[00:41:34] Curt Mills: Yeah, the economy...
[00:41:35] Peter Slezkine: ... the United States in various ways, but like competition isn't across the board. We are engaged in mutually beneficial exchange to such an extent that it is almost impossible to disentangle in some areas.
So, I'm sure we're competing in some areas and even in open conflict in others but just describe the nature of the competition a bit more detail.
[00:41:55] Curt Mills: Sure. And I appreciate your challenging that. I just think that the reality of the China thing is that I think it is competitive with the United States on a number of fronts. So, obviously, the economy by different metrics is about as large, its population is four times larger, its military is larger.
It has all these advantages that we don't through their system. We have advantages through our system, but some of their advantages are quick decision making, non-focused on human rights international development. And I think all of these things are relevant when you have the scale of something like the modern Chinese state.
And I think that when you have two sides, it's to an extent just the nature of things when there are two people that are, or two entities, whatever you want to call it, that are pretty different than each other. I think, and this is where like the West thing is fair.
I mean, China is the East. It is very different history. We don't know much about it, post Americans don't. I think there's naturally going to be some tensions. I think those tensions are manageable. But I think it's a lot different than Iran or Russia, where there's a power imbalance. And the nature of the confrontation to me strikes me as laden with moralism.
I love the conversation with the morals, sort of morally castigating, moralism. It just seems like the argument is all about moralism, versus the argument on the China stuff is more about power. You could argue that argument is dumb. You could say, like, "We could actually just benefit from trading and exchange, et cetera, et cetera." But I think the power reality is there.
And then, additionally, I think there's some nasty history, right? A lot of people, and I think this is the American leadership is more to blame than Deng Xiaoping, but a lot of people believe that China destroyed the American industrial base and that China destroyed the American working from class.
And a lot of people, not unfairly, you know, I think China shut down the world with COVID. And so, there's bad blood, and like even if you think tabula rasa, clean slate, et cetera, et cetera, and I think there's potentially an argument for that. Like, we're not going to bring all those jobs back. We're not going to reverse 2020, et cetera, et cetera. I think a lot of people in the population are naturally disinclined towards China, and that has to be managed.
[00:43:56] Peter Slezkine: I agree that there will inevitably be tensions between two entities of this size.
The question is what kind and what to do about them, and how those tensions compare to real potential or existing threats and available opportunities. And if it's a range, then that's a very different proposition than what we normally hear, which is taken for granted that there is some kind of extraordinary and perhaps existential conflict already underway or in the offing.
And it sounds more convincing frequently because of the absence of moralizing language, at least among the more rational realist types. Although there are a lot who say Communist Party of China with a special tone of voice, and that does a lot of work for them.
But you say again, like, the Chinese economy is as big as the American economy, or perhaps larger, but it's also inseparable from it. So, they can weaponize rare earths as we can weaponize our own advantages. But it seems both countries have realized that they need to pull back from the brink. There was an attempt at a trade war, there was a Chinese retaliation, and now both sides realize that they don't want to pursue this self-mutilation any further in hopes of defeating the other.
[00:45:16] Curt Mills: No disagreement.
[00:45:18] Peter Slezkine: You already gave kudos to Trump in a couple respects, but you are one of his most vocal critics on issues such as Iran and Venezuela and others. So, we've had a year in a little bit of this administration, give us a grade in different categories, or I guess a number of grades.
[00:45:40] Curt Mills: What are the categories?
[00:45:41] Peter Slezkine: Basically, what you mentioned is the pillars of your magazine.
[00:45:43] Curt Mills: Sure.
[00:45:43] Peter Slezkine: Immigration, protectionist economy and military intervention. How has he done on those three issues?
[00:45:50] Curt Mills: I'm not trying to, like, shy from saying like I'm a critic of Trump, but the problem is like, Trump himself changes his opinions on, or changes his emphasis on so many different things. And he is both promise and pitfall. I've never been actually that interested in like criticizing Trump himself.
I can talk about like the psychology where my own frustrations, the whole thing. Trump promised a bunch of stuff in 2016. He clearly was an unusual manager and governor and leader by the early part of the chaos of the first term.
And like, there are all these different ways in which Trump has changed and maybe improved operationally, but like, it is still fundamentally like a pretty zany guy running the country and running the party and running the movement, that has its advantages and disadvantages.
It's not 100% my style. It's not my style, though. There are just limitations and benefits to that. As to the top lines, I think this is better than the Biden administration. I don't regret voting for him personally. You know, the magazine doesn't make endorsements. That should be clear. But I'm happy to speak individually as a writer. And on the big ones, I'm very inclined to like kind of give like B minuses across the board, right?
So, like, yeah, no new wars, but like, man, we're really floating with it. We really like, too close to it. The trade stuff, I think, with a lot of it was great and then, but it's been kind of unevenly executed and overly personalized, I would say. That all being said, like, "Wow, they did a lot of tariff policy, and like the economy's actually not that bad."
I mean, just again, like inflation even lower as we record this today, the smart set really didn't say that would happen. And then, yeah, finally, immigration look, they shut the border down, which was an actual porous disgrace under Biden. But like, they're retreating from Minnesota right now, and the two people got killed in highly controversial circumstances.
And I'm not even sure they really deported that many people in Minnesota. Again, the advantages and disadvantages. So, like, B minus, I would really prefer if it was an A minus. But I really don't want it to be like a D, you know. If I had to grade like a lot of the Biden stuff on those metrics, I would say like immigration was like a D minus, no new wars.
I mean, Afghanistan, I think, was heroic by him. But everything else, Russia, Ukraine, I mean, disastrous. I'll give him a D plus on wars. And then, know, on trade, I think he was actually kept a lot of Trump stuff. So, I'll give him a B, but I think that averages out worse than Trump.
[00:48:04] Peter Slezkine: Well, with that, Mr. Mills, having given grades to both administrations, we can end. Just don't give a grade to this interview.
[00:48:12] Curt Mills: A minus.
[00:48:13] Peter Slezkine: All right, see you.
[00:48:15] Curt Mills: Thanks, Peter.
[00:48:19] Peter Slezkine: Thanks for listening to The Trialogue Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the show so you don't miss out on any episodes. The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.