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What a pleasure to be joined for the first time on bad faith podcast by Dr. Trita Parcy, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Those of you who tune into rising regularly know that he is a regular guest to talk about foreign policy.

One of my favorites to have on rising and it's a real joy to be able to talk to him and a longer format here on bad faith today. Welcome Dr. Parcy.

Thank you so much for having me. It's a great pleasure to be with you.

The pleasure is all my like I said. So part of what I wanted to have you on is because the last time we spoke on rising.

We were talking about an article that you would recently written in the New York Times called the US is not a indispensable peacemaker and it was written around the meeting between president she and Putin around the

negotiations for peace in Ukraine. Negotiations that US officials cast a pretty skeptical eye upon and I wonder now that that is in the rearview mirror what you make of two things one the US response to an effort at peace negotiated by someone other than the United States into what actually came out of that meeting.

So what I'm right about in the New York Times pieces that you know there was a moment there was a time in era in which almost all major peace efforts have to go through Washington one way or another.

And that United States and Washington DC was the central address for a lot of peace efforts.

That is no longer the case clearly and I think as many different reasons one is that our foreign policy is just kind of more and more militarized and as a result we have kind of played out our ability to be able to be a peacemaker.

Because we're a co-belligerent and so many different conflict but also it's because it's a choice we've made which has gone in this direction in which we want to take side we have more neutrality and we believe that all of these different things are a struggle in which you know history is going to be on the right side and we want to make sure that we picked that right side rather than recognizing that you know moralizing these issues beyond what is reasonable only make it more difficult to get them resolved.

And if you're going for total victory which seems to be the case almost all the time then resolutions will not come about and this is now very much playing itself out in the way that she visited Moscow and the success of the Chinese had a negotiating or mediating a normalization between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

I think to the Sunnets since the United States has been taken by surprise because up until recently the Chinese showed no interest ambition or capacity to be able to do these things but now when they are it is going to be problematic if you have countries in the global South such as Brazil pushing for a peace agreement you got the Chinese pushing for a peace agreement and the United States is firm and saying no to all of those different efforts and then kind of hiding behind what we are going to do.

So if you are hiding behind well you know the Ukrainians should decide you know Ukrainian agency should be at the center.

What reality is that when the Chinese first but forwarder proposed all the 12 point plan the Ukrainians it showed some careful interest in it which makes a lot of sense if you are Ukraine the last thing you want to do is to dismiss the Chinese and then push them deeper into the corner of of Russia.

That goes for the United States as well if the US is dismissing any effort by the Chinese to mediate or negotiate almost out of hand well then that can also push the Chinese deeper into closer to Russia and that is not good for Ukraine.

So I don't really quite understand why Ukrainian agency matters when we are pushing for war but if the Ukrainian starts to show some openness towards diplomacy then we dismiss it without even thinking about it.

So help me understand what is in the 12 point plan what is what is China proposing with respect to these negotiations here because I do think that there is a presumption from some sectors of the US media foreign policy apparatus that whatever China would be proposing is in fact in bad faith there is skepticism that hangs over any actions by various nations that we have characterized as bad faith the authoritarianism.

So what is actually being proposed and are there kind of substantive pushbacks being offered from the West or is are they kind of relying on the idea that whatever China might bring to the equation is in fact in bad faith.

Look so there is quite a lot that goes into the US's position and reaction to what the Chinese are doing and much of it may have nothing to do with what's in those 12 points and admittedly there wasn't anything particularly substantive there.

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