September 2024

Welcome to Cato Audio for September 2024. I'm Caleb Brown. In this offering, the University of Miami's Brian Blankenship details how NATO burden sharing fell by the wayside. Former CDC director Robert Redfield and Cato's Ryan Bourne provide context for some of the public sector failures in the COVID pandemic. Cato's Emily Eagans and Scott Linscombe unveil new polling on why Americans don't want to pay much for protectionism. And Gene Healy discusses the new edition of his book, The Cult of the Presidency. First up, this month's Cato Roundtable. This is a big topic, and we're not going to get into the most contemporary aspects of the topic, except to refer to them obliquely.

I think the modern understanding of American Christians is sort of a post hoc ergo proctor hoc problem, which is we had Judaism. Then we had Christianity, an outgrowth of Judaism. And the assumption... probably an incorrect assumption by a lot of American Christians, is out of Christianity, we get Islam. Which is not strictly true, according to the book that we're going to be talking about here today by Mustafa Akial. He's author of The Islamic Moses, How the Prophets Inspired Jews and Muslims to Flourish Together and Change the World. We're also joined by Doug Vandau, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. So, Mustafa, when...

The best I can understand in terms of the association of Jews and Muslims in the United States is that Muslims sometimes shop at kosher markets because everything that's kosher is halal. That is true. And that's just one of the many connections, I would say, between Islam and Judaism, which I try to explore in the book. Well, thank you for this conversation, Caleb. And thanks, Doug, for joining. As you alluded, I mean, there is a hundred-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict, which has escalated to a terrible phase since October 7th. And that's on everybody's minds maybe these days. But that conflict sometimes makes people think that Muslims and Jews who typically find themselves on the two different sides of this conflict.

are irreconcilable enemies who hated each other for centuries. And whereas there is a Judeo-Christian tradition on the one side, and there's Islam as a distant cousin, if sometimes the other, if not the enemy in the minds of some people. And I challenge that in this book. And I bring the angle that you're right to bring, which is a lot of people think, yes, there was Judaism with Christianity, its values expended, and Christianity acquired a lot of the ideas that were in Judaism and universalized and brought them to Gentiles. I'm saying Islam did the same thing. And sometimes even in a way where Islam remained more loyal to Judaism than Christianity.

Islam didn't bring an idea of a divine messiah, which is the big theological gap between the two religions of Judaism and Christianity. And Islam also became a more legalistic religion, again, similar to Judaism. That's why Muslims can eat kosher food today easily. We all, I as a Muslim, avoid pork and my Jewish friends do the same thing. Muslims have similar religious freedom questions in Europe. Muslims and Jews can circumcise our boys. And what about halal or kosher slaughter of animals for halal or kosher meat? These are glimpses of what I call the larger story.

which is the Judeo-Islamic tradition. And my book, beginning with the story of the Islamic Moses, expands into history and theology to tell the story of this much forgotten Judeo-Islamic tradition. So what did you, you read the book, Doug? And so give our listeners a bit of what you learned. Well, what's interesting about it is if you look at, say, the United States today, most Christians, especially politically active Christians, evangelical Christians, will always talk about Judeo-Christian.

that there is a sense of which they see Judaism as being inherent to the Christian faith, and in essence, an adoption of a lot of Jewish scriptures. The Old Testament, as Christians call it, is viewed as scripture for Christians as well. And for the most part, they don't view Islam anywhere close to that. They see Islam essentially as an alien faith, and they see it in conflict with both Judaism and Christianity. I think what Mustafa has done is shown how, in many ways, the Jewish and Muslim faiths are actually closer.

in terms of many of the tenets and how Muhammad pointed to Judaism and Moses very substantially in his religious discussions and making it into the Quran. And what that suggests, I think, is that there should be a much better relationship between Muslims and Jews. And politically, unfortunately, what we see kind of the events of the Middle East, it's been perceived as these are two faiths that are at odds. But we see, in fact, in tenets and practice, there's a lot that draws them together. And that's something that I would hope will be useful in the future, that this is a message that can get out to Christians and Jews in terms of how they look at Islam and recognize the areas of commonality and see that as something that should draw us all together. So in terms of trying to draw out a lot of this history,

You sort of detail some of the uncomfortable history of the relationships between Jews and Christians and how that was not just uncomfortable, but Jews and Christians viewed each other as enemies at certain points in history. That's not broadly where we are now, but it certainly points to a world in which the allegiances, the alliances, the friendships were very different a long time ago. Indeed. And when Islam was born in history, that is early 7th century Arabia, Islam was born in a context where Jews and Christians were really very hostile to each other. The Byzantine Empire was very anti-Semitic. It had anti-Semitic laws, persecutions, religious forced conversions and banning of the Talmud and Jewish practices. And Jews were very concerned about that. And they sided with the Sasanid Empire, which was Zoroastrian in its official religion. Islam was born in a context like this. And that's why, interestingly, when Islam became gradually, quickly, a world empire, just coming out of Arabia and conquering Syria, Palestine, Jerusalem, then Iraq, then ultimately North Africa and Spain.

we have historical evidence showing that many Jewish communities there welcomed Islamic conquests. They even supported them actively, especially in Spain. There are a lot of historical evidence for that, as narrated in Jewish sources. Because Islam appeared to be a more tolerant religion than Christianity. Islam didn't have the idea of Jews being condemned as quote-unquote God killers. Islam saw Jews and Christians as the people of the book, which was not an egalitarian approach. Muslims believe they are supreme and their religion is truth, but they still tolerated Jews and Christians. And for Jews especially, who lived through a lot of periods of persecution.

This was a God sent in many ways. And I tell that story of how Jews actually, for about a thousand years, found most of the time Islamic rule, Muslim lands, more hospitable. than Christian ones. And which shows that while there's a history of coexistence here, there's not an irreconcilable enmity between Jews and Muslims. And there are many episodes of that, and people don't know that. For example, one key example is the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century when the Catholic monarchs reconquered Spain from Muslims. Jews paid a heavy price by being expelled, Sephardic Jews, and they went to different places. But the luckiest turned out to be going to the Ottoman Empire, ended up in the Ottoman Empire, and they created a community there that flourished for centuries. Where have we been in the 20th century? I mean, it seems like at least for...

You know, a lot of the anti-Semitism that we've seen in the 20th century, a whole lot of that was in the U.S., like a really significant amount of it. But for Jews dealing in Muslim-majority countries, the conflict has been pretty sizable as well. 20th century is the worst century of the Islamic civilization, in my understanding. Muslims felt that they are being attacked. They're colonized. They are taken over by these European powers, the British, the French, the Italians. The caliphate, the Ottoman caliphate was abolished by Republican Turkey. Muslims lost their political direction.

And they realized the West is powerful and more prosperous and much more successful than it used to be. And how do you catch up with that? That led to a lot of different movements and ideologies in the Muslim world. Some of them were pretty bad. There emerged the movement of Arab socialism, for example, which created these corrupt republics in the Arab world, which are still very authoritarian. There emerged zealous nationalism. In Turkey, my home country, the wiping out of an Armenian genocidal way in 1915 was a huge tragedy.

They were there though for centuries with Muslims during the Ottoman times. This was this new nationalism that went after them. And also Muslims, because of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Muslims, especially the Arab world, began to absorb anti-Semitic narratives that they didn't have before. They were actually European narratives. The elders of the protocols of the elders of Zion, that was a Russian hoax, a Russian invention. The blood libel, which was a European invention, again, a European nonsense. And Muslims actually didn't believe in these. The Ottoman Sultan, Abdul-Majid, in the middle of the 19th century, actually issued an edict against the blood libel in Damascus, saying that this is nonsense. Our Jewish people are innocent from these accusations. So Muslims didn't have these, but those ideas began to pour into the Muslim world.

That is why today there is a big literature criticizing anti-Semitic ideas in the Muslim world. Those ideas are there and they're a problem, those narratives, those tropes, and they make it more difficult to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, I'm saying that these are not the products of the Islamic civilization. They're just bad ideas and Muslims don't need these. And in certain parts of the book, I'm showing that these are even going against some of the Islamic tenets, Islamic understandings of the Quran, Islamic understanding of Judaism and Jews as we find in the Islamic tradition. Doug, how central are these religious differences?

and conflicts. I know there are certain physical spaces that are holy to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and the fight over some of those is pretty severe. But aside from that, how front and center are the actual religious differences to the conflicts that we see between Muslims and Jews today? Well, in a lot of places, religion in many ways has become kind of a cultural marker. What's more important is that it symbolizes what side you're on as opposed to the actual beliefs. We saw that in the Balkans, where Serbs are Orthodox, typically Croats were Catholic, and you had Muslim populations. And what I found is, in dealing certainly with Serbs, was that very many of them never actually went to church. So they would talk movingly about Orthodox churches despoiled in Kosovo, but they would never attend them. And you get a sense that these were communities, and the boundaries for the community religion was part of that.

So it became part of the conflict, where how do you know who's on your side? You look at what faith community they're part of, what religious building do they go to? And I think in many ways, that tragically is what has increasingly happened in the Middle East, where you have a relatively small territory. And the question is, can you make this territory all of your people or not? And we're seeing that breakdown on religious lines. I mean, there've always been Christians in the Middle East.

And the irony today is that Christians in, say, the West Bank have a better time with Muslims in the West Bank than they frankly do with many, say, Orthodox Jewish believers in Israel. I don't think fundamentally people are debating religion in these cases. It's much more groups of people in its territory. And unfortunately, what we've seen is in many ways a political dispute has really... transformed the religion and transformed the area and taken religion and turned it into a weapon. And that, I think, is a great tragedy. We see that going on now today, you know, with what's happening in the West Bank, what's happening in Gaza. And this radiates out then from that region. So all of a sudden, you have religious communities across, say, South Asia into Southeast Asia, Muslim communities that are more likely to blame Jews because they perceive this as a Jewish state of Israel, even though, to my mind, this is fundamentally political and not religious, that it's taken as a religious issue. You have chapters on Islamic rationalism and the Islamic enlightenment.

What is the relevance of that to how we ought to understand the relationships between Muslims and Jews today? As I said, Jews and Muslims lived together for centuries. The majority of the world's Jews for several centuries were under Muslim rule and then in Christian Europe or elsewhere. And in those times, there have been lots of engagement. Muslims studied Jewish sources that they called Israiliyat, which means of the Israelites. And Jews studied Islamic theology and they studied philosophy through Islamic sources.

Similar ideas emerged in these religions at the same time. And Jewish historians tell that Jewish theology actually appeared in Islamic lands and with a lot of Islamic influence. Now, in the book, I go through these periods and I try to catch some interesting ideas. One thing that emerged in both religions, one question, was this issue of God's law. Both religions are very legalistic, right? I mean, the divinely inspired, the divinely dictated, revealed law is the core. In Islam, it's called the Sharia. In Judaism, it's called the Halakha.

And they're very similar, actually, in terms of content. Jews have not been implementing the criminal code of the Holocaust for 2,000 years, so that saves them from a lot of trouble, like stoning and lashes and stuff like that. But it's in the book. I mean, it's right there if you implement it. And I think the political trajectories of the two religions explain the big differences there. But also, a question emerged in both religions. Does God reveal these laws just because there are commandments and bare commandments we have to follow without question? Or is there a rationale behind these? What's the intent? What's the divine goal?

And could we rationally understand what's right and wrong, even if we didn't have the religious law? And so there emerged rationalism, as people call it, in theology. In Islam, it was championed by the theological school called the Motezila. And then Islamic philosophers got into the scene with a lot of Greek ideas. And interestingly, Jews interacted with these Jewish theologians like Sadia Gon and later Maimonides actually borrowed some Islamic ideas and advanced them further. So in the book, I get into these interesting episodes and I bring them to the period called the Jewish Enlightenment in the 18th century.

Now, lots of people would know that the Jewish people are quite successful in the modern world in many ways, in education, in civil society, in economy. That success comes from mainly the Jewish Enlightenment in the 18th century. Before that, Jews were in Europe living in ghettos as close communities. But with this new period, thanks to liberalism, they gained equal rights with Christians. And then they started to enter into modern society, study not just the Talmud and the Torah, but go study philosophy, mathematics, science, and everything. And a big flourishing happened in 18th century Europe. That has a lot of similarities with the discussions in Islam today. I show those parallelisms.

there's a chapter focusing on Moses Mendelsohn, who's being called the John Locke of the Jews, who was this Enlightenment Jewish philosopher who was still a pious Jew, observant Jew, but he embraced a lot of Enlightenment liberal ideas on religious freedom and individual conscience as well. And he reconciled them with Judaism. He reinterpreted certain things in Judaism to make them compatible with these liberal ideas. I show how those ideas are very similar to the discussions in Islam today. I also show that there were Christian suspicions about Judaism in that exact period, in the time of Moses Mendelsohn. Some Christians were saying,

Christianity is a very enlightened religion. It's based on conscience, but Judaism is so legalistic. It's coercive. It was born with a theocracy. It can never be liberal. And Moses Mendelsohn answered those things, which is very similar to the issues that we discuss about Islam today. So if he could magically somehow, inshallah, I would say, solve the Arab-Israeli conflict, Muslims and Jews can look at each other and say, look, we are very similar. We have had similar issues regarding the modern world and liberalism and how to live as minorities, how to make a sense of religious law. And the book also gets into those discussions in those chapters.

All right, so in the modern context. What do you see as the opportunity here? Because, you know, when you look back on, you know, the vast history of the important thinkers within Islam and Judaism, these were very serious people who we should be taking seriously today. As you point out, there were a lot of cross currents in terms of the thinking that people would borrow from the other religion in order to make points and to think more seriously about their own faith. But ultimately, religion, at least to the extent that we take it seriously in our own lives, is meant to direct us.

is meant to direct us to behave in certain ways with respect to our fellow man on this plane. And so in terms of the opportunity that you're trying to highlight in this book, what is it? Those who read this book, I think, either as Jews or Muslims, will get the message that the other guys have not always been our enemies. There is no irreconcilable conflict between our faiths and values. What is going on in Israel-Palestine for 100 years, that's a national conflict. It has happened all across the Ottoman territories, in the Balkans that Doug mentioned rightly. People living together for centuries as neighbors got into this conflict of whose land is it? This nation state, my nation state, your nation state. You resolve these things basically through political processes by...

curbing maximalisms and allowing them to coexist in that part of the world. But it becomes more difficult to solve these problems if people see the other. as this eternal enemy that is always our enemy, that's been always conspiring against us, that's been always oppressing us. So there are these narratives that emerge on both sides, both among Jews and the Muslims, that we can never make peace with these people because they have been always against us. They've been always hateful against us, oppressive against us, or conspired against us. This book shows that is not the case. There's a chapter on the Ottoman Empire which shows in the 19th century, if there was some Jewish political power in Europe, it was more pro-Ottoman than anything else. Ottoman Empire had long wars with Russia. Russia was the main antisemitic power on earth.

And Jews rightly didn't like Russia. And during these Ottoman-Russian conflicts, Jews in England were... By and far, very pro-Ottoman, pro-Turkish, as Bernard Lewis calls it. And there were some British writers at the time who said, there is this Semitic alliance against the Aryan Christian civilization. Semitic means Jews and Muslims. Russia was seen as an Aryan power, like white and Christian as well, although that was not the issue there. So there were these fascinating episodes where Jews and Muslims found themselves together in history, which means we can build on that heritage. And for Israel-Palestine too, we can envision a future where Jews, Christians, and Muslims living in that...

very disturbed part of the world, right? I mean, from river to the sea, that very contested part of the world. They can all exist. They can all be friends again. They can still live together. We can find a political solution, two-state solution, other people. It's up to them. But from a theological, religious perspective, from a civilizational perspective, we can hope to have peace and we cannot give up that hope. And there are enough reasons in the traditions of these people to build that hope for a peaceful future. And I think this really comes into the Christian community as well.

If you look at the United States, among many Christians, very strong identification with the Jews, as you're kind of given the relationship to the Christian faith, very strong support for Israel. So to the extent that one can help diffuse the tensions and hostilities between Jewish and Muslim congregations and groups, you can also have an impact in terms of how Christians look at Islam, that to have Christians step back and realize that, in fact, there's a really historic relationship between Islam and Jews. I mean, number one, that shows those two faiths have something in common, but also should convince Christians that they themselves should look at Islam, because to the extent that Christians are looking at Judaism as the kind of the forebear of their faith, that there are things that are clearly going to be related to Islam's understanding of Judaism as well.

So I would hope this is not political. I hope this is something that you can see people step back at a personal, a faith perspective, a social perspective, and say those are not the other. That in fact, we have to look at them as individuals, as people. And then out of that, one can hope for political changes, it'll help. defuse conflict. But I think this is potentially very important in causing Christians to step back from, for many of them, a very reflexive anti-Islam position to recognize there's something there very fundamental that binds Jews, Christians, and Muslims. And that should help us all get together and get along much better than we do today. I'm going to leave the conversation there, but thank you, gentlemen, very much. The book is entitled The Islamic Moses by Mustafa Akiol, How the Prophet Inspired Jews and Muslims to Flourish Together and Change the World. Thank you, Mustafa. You're a senior fellow here at the Cato Institute. Hope this book does very well, along with...

your previous works that are also helpful in this regard. And Doug Vandau, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. And you can read all of our work at our website, cato.org. NATO is supposed to be an alliance, sharing the burden of providing the security that NATO is supposed to guarantee is supposed to be part of the deal. But it hasn't worked out that way. At a Cato conference in July, NATO at 75, Brian Blankenship of the University of Miami provided some context for how the U.S. became the effective financial and firepower guarantor of NATO's promises.

Debates over burden sharing are as old as NATO, and they have risen to the top of the NATO agenda in recent years due to a variety of circumstances, some external to the alliance, some internal. But importantly, burden sharing is at the heart of the alliance, and it's been at the heart of U.S. concerns about the alliance. And perhaps just as importantly, just as burden sharing has been part of the alliance since its founding, so have occasionally coercive efforts by the United States to try and achieve burden sharing. Dating back to the Eisenhower administration, you had...

Secretary of State making the case that the United States would have to make an agonizing reappraisal of its commitment to the alliance without European and particularly West German burden sharing. You had Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon routinely using threats of troop withdrawals to encourage European defense spending. And of course, this continues to the present, particularly while associated with Trump, these coercive efforts are old. In many ways, Trump's approach is different only in how publicly he has aired these debates, but not so much in the content of much of his approach. But there's a lot of variation in the frequency and perhaps most importantly, the effectiveness of this kind of coercive pressure.

During the Cold War, you had contrasting cases like France versus Germany. Germany was, in contrast to today, a big spender on defense, really supplied the bulk of the military power that would have met the Soviets in the event of an invasion through the fault of Gap. Conversely, you had France exiting NATO military command in the 1960s. And likewise today, you have some allies, Poland and the Baltics, really punching above their weight. Others, perhaps most notably Germany, dragging its feet until very recently.

Now, when it comes to U.S. efforts to encourage burden sharing, there's two basic problems. One is allies not being willing and the other is the U.S. not being willing. Generally speaking, for allies to be willing, you need two ingredients. You need some perception of threat and you need some degree of concern about U.S. abandonment. And those two things often work in opposite directions. Oftentimes when the threat environment is more severe, that leads the U.S. to double down, which in turn kind of takes the heat off of allies. And of the two, threat perception tends to be the more important one.

Even if allies are really concerned about abandonment, if they don't perceive an external threat, they're probably not going to really pick up the slack. What that tends to mean for NATO is that the geography of the alliance matters a lot. Generally speaking, allies closer to the front, whether it was Germany during the Cold War, the Baltics and Poland today, tend to really feel the heat and allies that are behind the front line are able to let them pick up the slack. Now, the second challenge, U.S. reluctance, U.S. willingness, often stems from the basic principle that burden sharing means control sharing and it also means influence sharing. The less dependent allies are on U.S. protection, the less easily the U.S. can persuade them to do things that they'd rather not do, whether that is host American military bases, participate in U.S. sanctions regimes, importantly refrain from pursuing nuclear weapons.

And the United States has often been unwilling to let allies take the reins. And this is particularly true among larger allies who could become more capable, who could feasibly look after themselves, whether that is Japan in the Pacific, Germany in NATO, or more recently, unified European efforts for defense, which is something that I know Linda will be speaking more about. Now, all of this, in turn, sheds light on how NATO burden sharing and how the U.S. approach to NATO burden sharing has changed over time. During the Cold War, when the alliance faced a compelling external threat, you had really, really intense U.S. interest in burden sharing and it was particularly focused on Germany. And Germany has perpetually been kind of the fulcrum of the European component of the alliance.

And for one reason or another, it's often been the point of some concern during the Cold War and after. There's a lot of concern about whether NATO even wanted a capable Germany. But because of a compelling external threat, the U.S. put a lot of pressure on Europe and particularly on Germany to rearm. And it was often quite successful. As I alluded to earlier, Germany was one of the success cases during the Cold War when it came to burden sharing.

Now, after the Cold War in the 1990s and the 2000s, because the alliance no longer faced a really compelling external threat, conventional defense, conventional burden sharing kind of fell off the menu. It was replaced by an effort toward adapting NATO to so-called out-of-area operations. And as a result, the alliances, particularly the European component of the alliances, conventional defense atrophied. And that was partly just due to the lack of a compelling external threat, but also partly by design. After the Cold War, the United States really pursued a strategy of primacy and in many cases actively sought to suppress what could be the emergence of rival powers and included allies like Japan and Germany.

which brings us to the present, which in many respects resembles the environment of the Cold War. There is a more compelling external threat than there was during the 90s and 2000s. But there are a few differences. The most notable one is that the threat posed by Russia is not as compelling an external threat as the Soviet Union was. The second is that Europe is no longer the primary theater, the primary theater of U.S. interest. And the third is that the alliance's geography has shifted.

The alliance moved eastward. And all of this has created a set of dilemmas for the alliance and for the United States. And the main dilemma is that the United States is increasingly, since at least the Obama administration, trying to let Europe assume more responsibility for its own defense, focus more on Asia, but keeps getting pulled back by events and also by a fear that Europe might be unwilling or unable to do it alone. And part of that, again, stems from geography. Because NATO moved eastward, the allies that are now on the front lines are, with the partial exception of Poland, some of the alliance's smallest members. And the larger members, though, France, Germany, the UK, in Western Europe, don't feel the heat nearly as much, which creates a challenge, which is if the United States does really want to prioritize areas outside of Europe, wants to do less in Europe, raises questions about...

Western Europe's willingness to assume that role as Eastern Europe's security guarantor, which in turn raises bigger questions about the credibility of NATO's Article 5. Brian Blankenship is an assistant professor at the University of Miami. The COVID-19 pandemic was the most severe global public health emergency in over 100 years, deadlier than the influenza virus COVID-19 claimed more than a million lives in the U.S. by 2023. At a screening for the film COVID Collateral, Robert Redfield, former director of the CDC, and Cato's Ryan Bourne discussed some of the key errors in the early days of the pandemic.

Many of you may or may not know, the original mortality rate of the cases they identified was over 8%. Now, it's not because COVID had an 8% mortality, it's because they overwhelmed their health system. In New York City, when they started their epidemic in March, April, we had 7% mortality of the cases they presented. Again, not that they were dying because of COVID, they were dying because the health system could no longer function effectively. And so I think there was an overestimentation. Some of that was one of the big mistakes that was made from the beginning when it was decided that this was a SARS-like.

Well, this virus is nothing like SARS. SARS, you know, had a 7% to 10% mortality. It really didn't go very well human to human. This was not a SARS-like virus at all. But when they went into that model SARS-like, and they saw Wuhan with an 8% to 10% mortality, they're thinking this was SARS-like. And it was really nothing to do with SARS. This is a wholly different virus. It's, as Jay pointed out, probably had an overall, I don't know, 0.2 to 0.6 mortality, depending on what age group you're looking at. In young children, it had much less than that. It was just totally misclassified.

And that led to a lot of mistakes. Not the least was the public health mistake. And I wanted to say this one thing, because many of you may not know this. When I first heard that there was 27 new cases of unspecified pneumonia in China on New Year's Eve in 2019, I called my counterpart, George Gao, who's the head of CDC in China. And we had a very good relationship. And he was a very good coronavirologist, actually. And I asked George what's going on. He says, I have 27 cases of an unspecified pneumonia that's not SARS.

and not flu, and they all came from the wet market. And I said, well, George, help me out. What's your case definition? And he said, well, it's unspecified pneumonia. There's not SARS and not flu from people who came from the wet market. I said, well, George, in my definition, everybody came from the wet market. You need to get away from the wet market. That was part of the SARS mentality. Go away from the wet market and see what you see of unspecified pneumonia. And two days later, three days later, he called me back. And he said, Bob, we have hundreds of cases. It had nothing to do with the wet market. That's what's particularly bothersome about the proximal origin paper, because we now know that the transmission of this virus started in Wuhan somewhere between August and October.

Right. We know that this epidemic started long before the wet market. We know it had nothing to do with the wet market. The CDC director of China says it had nothing to do with the wet market. And yet we have these scientists are trying to say that somehow epidemic started at the wet market. Or we have, you know, the Atlantic magazine in The New York Times that came from raccoon dogs. No, this virus really did emerge not from the wet market and really started much earlier. And the other thing he said, and it was a mistake, there was no human to human transmission because they saw no nosocomial infections among doctors and nurses and health care people taking care of the patients.

However, they didn't think that there was a possibility there was asymptomatic infection. And the young people were the doctors and nurses and health care professionals. And had they tested them, the last thing I'll say on this just for some history, I diagnosed the first case in the United States in Seattle. I think it was January 20th or 2021. And over the course of the next four weeks, we diagnosed not imported cases from repatriation of our citizens in China, but the individual citizens that were coming back. We diagnosed 14 cases all the way through the second week in February.

I had CDC and the Public Health System of America evaluate the contacts. We evaluated over 800 contacts. Only two of those contacts were shown to be infected with COVID-19. So based on what China told us, the CDC, and based on that data, we said, it doesn't look like this is very infectious. But how did we diagnose those contacts? We diagnosed them by bringing them in and taking a history. If they weren't sick, we let them go. If they were sick, we tested them.

If we had tested all 800 people, we would have figured out early February that this is a very highly human transmissible virus. It wasn't until the Diamond Princess that Debbie Birx and I said, wait a minute, we got this all wrong. This is largely an asymptomatic transmitted virus. We need to shift the focus to basically expand the diagnosis, basically from public health policy, find out where's the silent epidemic. We've got to move away from the symptomatic disease. But unfortunately, we didn't have any support from the private sector. As you may or may not know, when SARS came, the private sector developed a test for SARS. And what happened? SARS went away.

When MERS came, the private sector developed a test for MERS. What happened? MERS went away. So when COVID came, the private sector did not help us with diagnostics. The CDC test was never flawed, contrary to what the news says and everybody. It was never flawed. It worked great when we developed it seven days after the sequence was available. It worked great today. But the only mistake CDC made was when the states were complaining that they wanted to do the test themselves, they decided to produce all the prime repairs. And since they were sending it away from CDC, they decided to add a third prime repair just to make sure they didn't have any false positives. Well, they didn't vet that third prime repair right.

And that third prime repair was defective. And when we tried to validate it, it didn't validate. Nobody ever used that test. But it took us another couple weeks with the FDA. But we never thought CDC was going to provide testing for the whole medical community. We were providing it for the 100 public health labs around the country. And the medical community didn't provide the testing. Private sector didn't do it. We published the prime repairs. We didn't patent it. But what did the FDA do at that time? They said that they were going to enforce.

pretty aggressively against laboratories doing laboratory-developed tests. So all the molecular labs stayed on the sideline. Korea did it differently. When Korea had an imported case of MERS around 2016-17, they formed a private-public partnership with the private sector diagnostic companies to develop the MERS diagnostics. So when COVID came, they just pulled the lever, and that private sector company and the government made all the tests they needed. And that's why Korea had all the tests. That's why Governor Hogan, whose wife's Korean, went over to Korea to get tests for the state of Maryland.

A lot of interesting stories as you try to put this all together. Ryan, I see there's a lot you'd like to say. I'd like to offer a bit of a criticism again of my economist friends because a lot of economists actually denied the tradeoff. I actually think it's related to the Korea aspect that you're talking about because a lot of people looked at Korea, which had this completely different regime where they were able to test pretty quickly and trace contacts and things, and thought because they had both good economic outcomes and low prevalence of the virus, that inherently there was no tradeoff between shutting down parts of the economy to suppress the virus and economic outcomes. Of course, they had a different...

technological framework that allowed them to do that. So that just wasn't available in the US given the degree of community prevalence that we saw. But economists did blithely keep repeating this phrase that there's no trade-off between mitigating the virus and the economy. One very famous economist said on April 3rd, 2020, I won't say who he is because I've got a great deal of respect for him, that the recession and recovery would have the character of a rebound that hits Cape Cod economy every winter or recovery in American GDP that takes place every Monday morning. And what he meant by that was essentially it'd be very easy to switch the economy off and switch the economy back on again. But of course, banning...

voluntary trades, banning the operation of supply chains, banning individuals meeting to discuss new projects. That tears at the fabric of economic relationships and clearly has a big short-term cost. I mean, at one stage, about a third of output in this country wasn't being produced, output that we would have expected wasn't being produced as a result of shutdowns. But it also had long-term macroeconomic consequences as well, because as a result of the lockdowns and the politicians felt they needed to make everybody whole, we printed lots of money, we borrowed lots of money, and that... combined with the fact that coming out of the lockdowns we had, supply chain issues, contributed to the highest inflation we've seen since the early 1980s. And that has all sorts of societal consequences, not least one presidential candidate at the moment talking through the media, floating the idea of removing Fed independence or at least compromising Fed independence. So potentially a huge economic consequence of this. Now, in my book, I kind of made the point that a new virus like this was always going to be costly. We shouldn't pretend that this wasn't a big deal.

There were better ways of managing those trade-offs, and we've kind of discussed some of them, so I won't labor the point again. We should have been trying to find mechanisms, solutions, therapies, ultimately vaccines, to try and reduce this sharp trade-off between short-term economic activity and people's health. Robert Redfield is former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ryan Bourne is author of, most recently, The War on Crisis at the Cato Institute. So-called Buy American policies and tariffs are often popular, but they're not free to average Americans. Candidates for high office like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump may try to convince Americans otherwise, but their claims don't hold much water. The Cato Institute has conducted polling that details some of what Americans are and are not willing to pay with respect to trade restrictions, and the results are illuminating. On the Cato Daily Podcast, I spoke with Emily Eakins and Scott Lincecum about why Americans are fine with protectionism as long as it's costless.

Free trade is all costs and no benefits, and protectionism is all benefits and no costs. And that narrative has been around for a few years now, for sure, and was one of the motivations of why we launched our Defending Globalization Project, to get at the facts and analysis. But we wanted to also get at what Americans really think about these issues. And unfortunately, a lot of the public polling that's out there doesn't do a very good job. of probing not just the top line views on international trade and those types of things, but then asking more about trade-offs and confronting people with facts or testing their knowledge about some of the basic facts. The perception out there that America has turned protectionist, that Americans are really embracing this, that it's necessary for politicians to become protectionists. Is that really what Americans think? And how do they think?

The idea was we need to do our own polling written by people who actually understand these issues, who see some of the flaws in some of that polling, whether they're poorly worded or present the wrong tradeoffs. And then also to push other little buttons like checking partisan biases and the rest. So that's why we really wanted to do our own survey to get at those things. Emily, I've said it before and I'll say it again. The value that you bring to polling broadly is asking people to confront at least for a moment those tradeoffs across a wide variety of areas where Americans opinions are relevant.

Blue jeans are, well, you just can't think, I can't think of anything more American than blue jeans. And confronting voters, Americans broadly, with the trade-offs regarding trade and prices, what did you learn? Well, I like how you teed that up. I think that Americans have a complex set of views when it comes to these issues. And one of the things, I like that you brought this up, that we at the Cato Institute do differently with our polls is we ask the same types of questions that other people do, but then we also follow up with trade-offs. It's surprising. It's honestly very surprising that more pollsters don't incorporate this into their research. I think a great example is what we found in this survey, that Americans, they want to buy American. They want to support American business, their fellow Americans. I think that's a very normal and natural psychological response. But if it costs them more money.

if it penalizes their pocketbooks, they're not willing to go along with that. And so to kind of put this in perspective, you know, we asked a lot of different questions about how people, you know, do they prefer to buy American? Do they trust American products more than other products made in other countries and imported into the country? And yes, people do. But then we asked, would you be willing to pay, say, $10 more?

for a pair of blue jeans or $25 more or $50 more in order to, say, impose a tariff on imported blue jeans or to buy American. And Americans aren't willing to pay even $10 more for a pair of blue jeans. We asked about frying pans, like literally everything we asked about. It seems like $10 is that tipping point where people aren't willing to pay that much. And so I think the question is to ask policymakers and policy analysts, well, what's the data say? I think Americans would certainly be willing to pay, say, another, you know, a buck extra for something like a frying pan or pair of jeans for that.

feeling of, you know, feeling they're supporting an American, you know, American run business or something like that. But when it comes to what it really costs, you know, what is it, Scott? I mean, you have the data. I'm the pollster. So Scott related to that when J.D. Vance gives a speech in public and presents, again, a fanciful tradeoff.

between what he characterized as a million knockoff $10 toasters and one American manufacturing job, that seems like a pretty far cry from what Emily described as $10 greater expense on a wide variety of items being just too much for the average American. You know, if you look at the survey results, you see in... them that, look, Americans don't have very rigorous economic views about how tariffs and trade agreements and other things work. They do, however, have a desire for certain outcomes, whether it's supporting American jobs or supporting their communities, bolstering national security, you name it. And so an issue like tariffs is a perfect example. It seems, and there's actually, we asked about this, you know, about half of the...

2,000 people we surveyed don't know that consumers pay tariffs. I mean, about half do, but look, that's about half the country here who doesn't really understand that basic economic fact. And we know from the Trump tariffs and from centuries of economic research that a tariff is going to increase the price of stuff in the United States, not just for imports, but from domestic goods as well. And so our job as wonks, and I think policymakers and politicians as well, is to kind of focus less on tariffs and focus more on the desired outcomes, right? What is actually the best for jobs? What's best to keep prices down and the rest? Because at that kind of base voter level, it's just that's not that's not where people are really focused. They just want a good economy. They want those good, good outcomes. So it's the it's the scholar's job and the politicians and policymakers to to implement good policy to achieve those objectives, not just pursue blind things like toaster tariffs or whatever, because it sounds good. In our polling, we found that we asked Americans to rate what are their top issues? You know, they could select up to three, not just one. What are your top three issues? Only one percent of Americans listed trade.

in their top three issues. And what's going on there? It's because whenever people start talking about tariffs and subsidies, imports and exports, the trade deficit, a lot of people don't know what they're talking about because that's not what's really relevant to their everyday lives. And to Scott's very good point, it's about outcomes. What are the outcomes? Now, what we do know based on a lot of literature from the political science field is that pocketbook voting does impact vote choice. What the latest policy is on trade or what a lawmaker or politician says they want to do on trade may not matter that much besides signaling their support for America or some other cause.

At the end of the day, they vote with their pocketbooks. And if lawmakers pursue policies that drive up prices at the store, Americans are going to notice that. And we actually saw that in our data. An overwhelming majority of Americans are worried about rising prices and tariffs and trade restrictions increasing those prices of products they buy at the store. To both of you, it seems like a pretty powerful disconnect that we've just gone through a spate of inflation.

And Americans have been largely up in arms, very concerned and very troubled by the inflation we've seen. And yet, Scott, as you point out, lots of research shows that the incidence of a tariff often falls on the consumer of the good. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, and the other, I think, disconnect, and it's shown again in our survey results, is there's this very popular idea in D.C. these days that.

America has gone protectionist, that Americans are really out there demanding tariffs and other protections. And it's again, it's just not in the data we now have, that Americans are generally pro-trade. I was actually really surprised that a huge chunks, more than 60 percent of people favor increasing trade with other nations. Only 10 percent of the respondents opposed that. They also, though, kind of think they like tariffs and they think that trade agreements can depress wages and all these other things. But, you know, really, there's no evident vigorous, passionate demand for any of this stuff. So protectionism.

continues to be mainly stuff coming from elite policymakers and pundits. And voters can embrace it for partisan reasons. I like some of the partisan testing we did. We asked them about a Trump tariff and a Biden tariff. And what a shock. The Democrats like the Biden tariff and the Republicans like the Trump tariff and they don't like the vice versa. So that's really instructive because it pushes back on this idea that for political reasons, policymakers have to be protectionists if they want to win elections. It's just not there. If they can talk about cost of living issues, they can talk about...

jobs in import-consuming industries that they can talk about, foreign relations, helping the global poor. There's some other really great results on that. There are plenty of good things to talk about. And so to have a good political message that also is great policy, right? It's actually what the economics literature says. And that's like, you know, a double whammy of good that we hope policymakers pursue. Scott Linscombe is vice president for general economics at the Cato Institute. Emily Egan's direct polling at Cato.

A lot has changed in presidential politics since Gene Healy's book, The Cult of the Presidency, was first published. We discussed the book's ongoing relevance on the occasion of a new edition this year for this Cato Audio exclusive. Before we started recording, we were talking about what... people think this book was about at various moments in time. The Cult of the Presidency was first published in 2008, in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration. What were the general reactions to it then? When it first came out, everyone thought it was about George W. Bush, which to be fair, it has three chapters or so on the Bush presidency, because that's when I started writing the book. I believe I finished, I sent it off, the final draft.

right after the Iowa caucuses, which Barack Obama lost. And at that time, I would bet anything that Hillary Clinton was going to be the nominee in 2008. But I threw in a few lines, some quotes from some hope-charged Obama speeches because they seemed to fit. And then everybody for a few years after that thought it was about Barack Obama if they didn't read it. And I used to joke I could just...

update it, slap a new preface on it, taking account of whatever fresh hell the next president has delivered to us. And finally, 15 years later, we did have a new preface that takes a look back at the three presidencies we've endured in that 15 years and what's changed and what hasn't in America's pathological relationship with the presidency. Now, I remember a prediction that you made shortly after Barack Obama was elected president because he was entering with approval ratings that were just incredibly high. Hopes were very high for him. He had his own sort of weird devotees in 2008. But the prediction that you made was that he was essentially going to have this incredible tumble in terms of public approval. And then he did. It was almost immediate. Yeah, I mean, that's the pattern of most presidencies, or at least was the pattern for much of the 20th and early 21st centuries is a honeymoon period when people get real excited. And then there's a period of grim mourning when they...

wake up hungover and start wondering, well, my God, what have I done? Obama sort of heightened both phases of that cycle. There was very few presidents in the modern era have come in with such an aura of great expectations. Great expectations lead to crashing disappointments. One of the things the book talks about is the arc of the presidency bends toward failure because our political culture has invested such preposterously.

broad responsibilities and what was supposed to be a limited constitutional office that whoever is president really can't fail to disappoint. So when we think about the... And I think it's fair to call them cults around Obama during his election. The weird devotees is a more charitable way of putting it. And surrounding Donald Trump in 2016, in 2020, in early 2021, and now again in 2024. Is there anything historically that parallels them? These cults of personality? Yes. It's been a recurrent feature of the presidency. And I argue in the book it's something we'd want to get away from. One thing a parliamentary system does better.

is they separate head of state and head of government. You invest the whole representation of the nation in a royal family or something. And the prime minister is viewed more as somebody who's there to do a job and he or she has to endure questions time and get abuse hurled directly at them. And the parliamentary systems don't seem to inculcate the sort of leader worship that presidential systems do. So at one point I joked that maybe we should just...

tap a royal family, the Kardashians or something, and hand over the head of state representing the nation function so we can look at the president as somebody who is there to do an important but limited job. We don't view presidents as the same way we view, or for example, Great Britain might view prime ministers. And is part of that a prime minister's spot is just... precarious. The removal function for a prime minister is quite a bit simpler than it is for president. And as we've seen in recent history, efforts to hold presidents accountable for whatever they may have done is exceedingly difficult. Yeah, that's a major flaw of our system. And yeah, we did see it very recently. Before that, if you think back to the Clinton impeachment, Al Gore would have had a government over a weekend when that happened in a parliamentary system. Instead, we had...

a year and a half long conniption about where Clinton's hands were at any given time and what the meaning of the word is. And we saw more recently with the aftermath of the disastrous debate, the presidential debate between Trump and Joe Biden when the extent of Biden's decline became undeniable. But there was a period of at least three weeks where... He has to go voluntarily in our system. The 25th Amendment is not a viable option. It's too hard to ratify the switch. Impeachment, as we learned twice during the Trump presidency, it's almost impossible to remove a president from office using the constitutional impeachment process. So if Joe Biden wanted to age in place in the White House and was just determined to do it, there wasn't much that anybody could do about it. And that is crazy.

Here's the most important job in the world. We always call it the most important job in the world, the most powerful office in the world. And it's pretty much the one that you've got a fixed lease on and you can't be fired for in between terms. That, it seems to me, is a major defect of our system. We recently had a Supreme Court case, Trump v. U.S., in which the presidency, in some ways, got even stronger. Yeah, it's an awful decision on the legal merits, I think.

The idea that the self-professed textualists and originalists in the majority for that case, the presidential immunity case... consider themselves textualist and originalist is pretty laughable because the idea of broad presidential immunities is something that they made up with penumbras and emanations from Article 2 and their own vision of what the presidency is for. When Congress, rather when the framers wanted to include broad privileges, they knew how to write them in. Congress has the speech and debate clause. The only privilege the president gets in the Constitution is he gets a salary.

Other than that, there's no evidence that the president was considered to be immune from criminal process even while in office. So I think it was an awful decision. It was a reckless decision. I can't say for certain what effects it will have because I'm not at all sure how much the until recently remote threat of criminal prosecution was restraining presidential bad behavior. Whatever effect it has will not be...

remove a disincentive for even worse behavior. So is part of that, the fact that we got this weird decision with no constitutional basis whatsoever regarding in Trump the United States, do you suspect part of that is just we have had such a cultural shift in a view over 200 plus years of what a president is supposed to do and what the president's role is and how culturally Americans regard the president? Yeah, I think that's fair to say. One of the things I... tried to do in the book was to take a step back and sort of bring home how bizarre it is, the way in which we view the president. The phrases you hear from journalists sometimes, consoler in chief, even theologian in chief.

The tendency to call the president our commander in chief or the commander in chief full stop as if we're all in the army and he's our commander is another one. Just the fact that the president is ubiquitous over every treadmill on the gym, that there's a presidential alert that can go off on your phone and that the president is at the center of any national debate, whether it has anything to do with the job responsibilities of the president. When you look at how different not just... constitutionally and legally, that is, from the original design of the presidency. But culturally, it's pretty striking. The early president was not supposed to. The framers didn't believe in what Teddy Roosevelt later called the bully pulpit. They were horrified at the idea that a president would go over the heads of Congress and pound the table, rally the masses behind an agenda. The president wasn't supposed to make speeches in public except on very special occasions. And those speeches were not supposed to be.

laying out the president's agenda. There's a letter from Washington who called the office. He held the chief magistracy, which is more humble than commander in chief. There's a letter from him after one of his first annual messages, State of the Unions, saying that motives of delicacy had stopped me from introducing any specific policy measures because that that would be inappropriate. It's very different than the Soviet-style State of the Union we get today.

That is something that I appreciate a lot about the book is just understanding what the American conception of what a president should be over this very long time frame. It seems that since, I don't know, you tell me, since Woodrow Wilson, since FDR, that we had what felt like, at least to me, a lull in presidents grabbing, seizing broad powers with very little support. Is that wrong? In what period after FDR? Yeah, but up through, say, oh, I don't know, 2001.

Well, I mean, in the post-war era, you have some significant growth in presidential power. It's definitely true that Woodrow Wilson and FDR were pioneers here, but I think Truman gets overlooked. He crossed the constitutional Rubicon by launching a major war on the Korean Peninsula without a declaration of war. The president during the Cold War has broad powers, another high point or low point, but high point in the expansion of presidential power. It was Nixon's wage and executive order instituting wage and price controls, which actually had a statute behind it. The idea that a president could say, here's how much you can charge for a hamburger is a real great leap forward in presidential, essentially legislative and dictatorial powers. But I think it's probably the case, or at least it certainly feels like...

From the post-Watergate era, you know, after Nixon quit the office, you had a period in the 70s when a lot came out about what presidents had been doing in the name of the Cold War covertly, you know, with intelligence agencies, with the CIA assassination attempts, the church committee hearings. And this is why you get a lot of... great paranoid political thrillers in the 70s, the parallax view in movies like that, because it was sort of in the air. Nixon's downfall kind of ripped the mask off of the presidency, even something as kind of trivial as the tapes showing that the president was kind of a foul-mouthed, petty crook. That damaged the mystique of the presidency. And you got in that period some...

fairly significant reforms out of Congress limiting presidential power. So I think it's fair to say that while the imperial presidency was very much with us in the post-Watergate period going up to 9-11, it was sort of at a stable, not ideal level. 9-11 was... The history of the presidency, at least in the 20th century onward, is a history of crisis, war and crisis of the health of the presidency. 9-11, the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, that saw a major expansion of presidential power. And that's continued. When that was going on, the book was written six or seven years after 9-11. So we're still very much in the war on terror. But there's what Robert Higgs calls a ratchet effect. It didn't ratchet down under Barack Obama.

Donald Trump or Joe Biden. In many ways, Barack Obama was as important as George W. Bush for cementing the expansions that had been carried out during the Bush-Cheney years. One thing that was very different after 9-11 is it used to be that presidential wars. After Korea, they were short, sharp, intermittent. The default setting of America going up to 9-11 was still peace.

drive-by bombing of Libya, a little incursion into Grenada or Panama. But war wasn't a permanent feature of American governance. Barack Obama was the first two-term president in American history to have left office having been at war every single day of his presidency. And he made some significant expansions even beyond Bush and presidential war powers. And increasingly, we're seeing very fundamental issues of governance being settled by executive and administrative order.

At the same time that American politics has gone more tribal and feral, and I think that's a really dangerous mix. Gene Healy is a vice president of the Cato Institute and author of The Cult of the Presidency. A new edition of the book is now available. In 1998, the Cato Institute first published a pocket-sized edition of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States to encourage people everywhere to better understand and appreciate the principles of government that are set forth in America's founding documents. With more than 8 million copies in print, it has been held up by senators at press conferences and by representatives during floor debates, found in federal judicial chambers across the country, distributed to students of all ages. It also makes a great gift for friends and family alike. Buy yours today at cato.org slash store. That will do it for this edition of Cato Audio. I'm Caleb Brown. Talk to you again next month.