Fred Kaplan Interview

An interview with Fred Kaplan author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. America's power is in decline, its foreign policy adrift, its allies alienated, its soldiers trapped in a war that even generals regard as unwinnable. What has happened these past eight years is well-known. Why it happened continues to puzzle. Slate columnist Fred Kaplan combines in-depth reporting and analysis to explain just how George W. Bush and his aides got so far off track — and why much of the nation followed. For eight years, Kaplan reminds us, the White House — and many of the nation's podiums and opinion pages — rang out with appealing but deluded claims: that we live in a time like no other and that, therefore, the lessons of history no longer apply; that new technology has transformed warfare; that the world's peoples will be set free, if only America topples their dictators; and that those who dispute such promises do so for partisan reasons. They thought they were visionaries, but they only had visions. And they believed in their daydreams. Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column in Slate. The author of the classic book The Wizards of Armageddon, he has also written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, and other publications. He worked as a foreign policy aide on Capitol Hill, and spent decades as a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter in Washington and Moscow. Recorded March 18, 2008