This is one of deep state radios, briefs and debriefs.

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of National Security magazine. I'm your host David Rothkopf and we are joined today by an old friend of deep state radio Colin call who is co director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and is the inaugural Stephen C. Hase senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute of for International Studies there.

And you may recall that con was the deputy assistant to the president and national security advisor to vice president Biden and prior to that he was deputy assistant secretary of defense from Middle East at the Pentagon. So welcome glad you could join us.

Great to be with you David. As we follow the news closely I've noticed you've moved further and further away from Washington and I want to know what it is that you knew that we didn't know that you know I mean is seems very clever but are you planning to cross the Pacific at any time.

I mean you know I'm asking again in 2021 a particular view on that. No I think a lot like a lot of veterans of the Obama administration 2017 to say the least was a psychologically difficult year.

It was I think a psychologically difficult year for for many Americans who were in happy with the way that the election turned out but for those of us who worked on national security issues up until the end it was.

I think quite difficult and being in DC was not was not the it was not the easiest place to be so when I had an opportunity to come back to the Bay Area where I grew up and to be at such a great university like Stanford I jumped at it.

No it's definitely it's definitely a good job and I know that you committed from a really kind of enlightened perspective I think as I saw in your bio I didn't really notice this before although we've known each other for some time that you went to both the University of Michigan where my wife went and to Columbia where I went and both of my wife and I would have chosen to go to Stanford had we been smarter back in the day.

Yeah I didn't get in I didn't get in at Stanford either as an undergraduate graduate student so I was just holding out for them to pay me.

Smart very very very smart so so the other night the president gave his state of the Union address and most of it was what you would expect was kind of bloviation and bad teleprompter reading but there was some considerable amount of foreign policy talk within.

Whether it was you know patting himself on the back for pulling out of the INF Treaty or setting the stage for further pull outs from the Middle East or perhaps some of us reading between the lines guessing that there may be more to come in this department with regard to say US troops in South Korea.

It was all you know unnerving to those of us who follow foreign policy I think and I'm just wondering what your reaction was to the speech first of all.

Yeah well I'm just curious is the speech still going I mean it was really long but no about an hour into a power in 20 minutes plus speech he talks about foreign policy I think.

You know he tried to put the best gloss on on its foreign policy record I think the polls suggest that the overwhelming you know a pretty strong majority of the American people are not very happy with Trump's foreign policy.

I think that if you look at kind of the ratings of the United States across the world and look foreign policy international relations not popularity contest but it does actually matter how we're viewed around the world and.

You know you have gallop polling from the past year that shows that respect in American leadership is now significantly declined across the world and the United States is now tied with China in terms of seeing of being seen as a world leader when you look at the few global research data especially as it reflects opinions and in other liberal democratic states and in Western Europe and in East Asia.

The views of the United States today compared to say the last year of the Obama administration you have double digit difference of some in some countries as much as you know 3035% reductions in house able to the United States is viewed.

I think it reflects the fact that the time from came into office hoping to kind of overturn the existing international order of America's role in that order and to some degree he's been successful at least in making a lot of America's traditional allies quite quite anxious.

I mean he bragged in the in the speech the other night that NATO countries had had significantly increased their defense spending.

I think some of that is a trend that that you know reflects things that were they were happening already but that's come at the expense of essentially calling into question whether or NATO allies can actually count on the United States to defend them in the event of an emergency.

So I think almost any fair analyst of the NATO alliance recognizes that it's weaker today than before largely because an alliance is only as strong as as allies believe in one another and I think you know countries in Europe and elsewhere increasingly come to doubt whether the United States is willing to play a

positive role in the world as opposed to kind of a narrowly nationalistic one.

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