So we talked to Matt Rosenberg while back on the Armstrong and get a radio show and we thought he was really really damned interesting thought we needed a longer conversation with it.

Yeah, Pulitzer prize winning journalist covers national security currently for the New York Times spent 15 years this foreign correspondent in Asia Africa the Middle East.

He was actually booted out of Afghanistan on the orders of President Hamid Karzai.

As I had a lot of really interesting experiences around the world and it's a pleasure to talk to Matt Rosenberg.

So I got a really broad question right off the bat and then we can just you know follow different lines based on the answer.

We the United States have tried all these different things in a lot of countries that you've reported on over the years we've we've tried killing a dictator and then leaving it to the people we've tried overthrow in a country and trying to build a democracy.

We've tried leave it alone and let them have elections we've tried all these different things none of which seem to have worked out that well for us. What do you think we ought to do?

Yeah, that's a tough one.

Yeah, you know, I mean we have 25 different countries that we follow up with exactly specifically.

So there are PhD thesis being written about this right now. I mean I'm going to just I'm going to stay away from from from projections what we should do and just tell a little story about when I was in Afghanistan right before I got tossed in the place.

You know they had an election in 2014 it was going to be the first election in which Hamid Karzai had been the president since you know since the US it's kind of over on the Taliban in which he was not going to be running.

And so who is going to be the new leader and I said to them I said guys look around you know y'all hate cars I at this point y'all hate the people who were kind of brought into power by the US.

Like why in the world when you want us picking more people we seem to not be very good at this and we seem to be you know we're not naked colonelists like the British and French were in the 19th century.

So we're not just appointing finding leaders who will do whatever we want and kind of rob their country's blind on behalf of us.

We don't but we don't really know these countries very well I mean I think you know take Afghanistan for example probably a a housewife who speak to me English and in Afghanistan probably doesn't read this literacy rate among women is so low she probably knows more about Afghans than we ever will most of us ever will.

And so we end up selecting leaders that tend to serve their own personal self interest very well not much else they don't serve their people that well they don't serve us very well.

I don't know how we kind of get around that I just know that you know between South Asia and Africa and elsewhere in the world the countries that seem to thrive are the ones that build themselves and then have a sense of themselves.

If you look at India India is a great example that India 1947 India becomes a dependent and it says it's not going to be a client state of the West it's not going to be a client state of the Soviet Union.

And you know India today is a thriving country Pakistan on the other end you know right next door they were the same independent state became a client state of the West Pakistan is not a thriving country I mean there are a lot of variables in there but there is some truth to that too that the Indians decided we are going to be our own country we're going to be nobody's kind of.

A client I guess nobody can tell us what to do we're not going to have a master here and it's worked out very well for them well I think I get what you're saying that with very very few exceptions countries have to go through the very difficult decades of finding themselves sorting out who they are and how they're going to.

I had a power and there's just no no imposing it from above and I don't know how we kind of like you know how we do that in large parts of the world I mean Africa never got that chance because of European colonialism let's be honest about this the the the West Europe mostly true the borders of Africa there's never any kind of sorting out of countries the way you had in Europe in Asia Europe spent a thousand years two thousand years killing each other to get to where they are today.

So you know not optimistic for countries that are struggling it's it's a really long bloody road well should our bet just be whatever is best to try to counter Iran as Iran wants to take over you know the whole Middle East and there they have been an enemy the United States I mean we are counting on MBS to be on our side with that things going a little sideways there but maybe he's still the horse to stick with I don't know.

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