Interview with Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer Prize Winner
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Kate Nagle, GoLocal News Editor
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Hedrick Smith, addressing the audience at the Hope Club in Providence Tuesday night.
GoLocalProv sat down with Pulitzer Prize winner Hedrick Smith to talk about domestic politics -- and international relations -- on Tuesday, before he addressed the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations at its monthly lecture series.
In 1971 as the New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent, Smith was a member of the team which produced the Pulitzer-winning Pentagon Papers series. In 1974, he was awarded a Pulitzer for International Reporting for his coverage of the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe.
Hedrick, who wrote national best-sellers The Russians and Who Stole the American Dream? in 2012, talked about the future of the U.S -- and where things stand with Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the 2016 Presidential field.
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Q&A with Hedrick Smith
Who Stole the American Dream? came out in 2012. Where are we now in 2016?
The situation in America is worse now than when I wrote [the book], because that was about inequality of income, and inequality of power in America. We've had six years of recovery, 14 million new jobs, and the average American family is worse off today than it was in 1999, while Wall Street is near record heights and the percentage of the national income going to the top 1% is greater than it's ever been, with the exception of the end of the 1920s.
So what's the outlook moving forward in the U.S. in an election year?
The outlook is not good unless we start fixing fundamental structures, and what's interesting about the Presidential race is that both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are riding high and strong because of the enormous widespread unhappiness and disenchantment both with the political system and the economic system.
What's going on is the unhappiness of a lot of middle class, working class Americans -- and young people -- and it's translating from figures and polls into voting at the booths. Politicians have to start paying attention to that. Hillary Clinton is in trouble because she appears to be the voice of Wall Street within the Democratic party and there's a huge faction of the Democratic party that's not buying that.
Donald Trump has routed the establishment candidates of the Republican party because they continue to insist on trickle down economics. And Trump, for all the terrible things he's said and done in his campaign -- which I'm certainly not approving -- has tapped into the frustration of white middle class workers, mostly men, who have been left behind by trade deals and the trickle down economics of the Republican party. So the answer is rebellion is afoot and it's either going to bring change as a result of this election, or if not this one, then next election.
Turning to Russia, can you encapsulate the state of Russian-American relations right now?
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Smith, who wrote the bestseller The Russians, talks Putin - and Presidential candidates.
Terrible. They're just terrible. Largely because Putin wants to make trouble because Russia and Putin have not been brought into the world in a way that makes Russians feels respected as a world power. There are five or six major countries in the world -- they're one of them -- and our attitude was, we won the Cold War, so we'll push the borders of NATO right up against Russia. Putin and Russians want to be on the world stage. If he can get what he wants, he might not be trouble. But my hunch is Ukraine is so unstable -- the government and the economy -- and there's affinity of Eastern Ukraine people who are ethnically close to Russians, that Russians will continue to play in that arena.
Syria is another question. It's difficult to understand. The Russians and Putin want to be a factor in the Mediterranean and Arab world. Do they want to be tied to Bashar al-Assad from now on, that's not so certain. But they don't want to shift to somebody else without making it look like they made a good deal. And they'll continue to be active there.
And he'll continue to try to divide Western Europe from America. [Western Europe] wants a civil war ended in Syria and they'll buy a cease fire and peace deal on any terms, to stop the refugee problem. We won't buy a peace deal to the same degree. Putin's going to work us. Because he's like Clinton, he's a power player, he likes the power game. This isn't going away, but it doesn't need to escalate. The real question is will he try to push into Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, one of the NATO countries we're technically bound to defend. I think he probably won't, I don't think he wants that kind of showdown, but he's a gambler and his gambles have paid off.
But he's playing from a hand of weakness. People in America think he's playing from a hand of strength because he's bold. But what he does understand is when we have a divided government, and Western Europe and America are divided, it's a great time for Russia to push for an opening. We have to get our home act in order.
What about the candidates?
I would say that Putin's a cocky guy, and he can easily read that Trump doesn't know what he's talking about, but that Trump thinks he's a deal maker. So Putin will be comfortable with a guy like Trump, he'll think he can take him easily. Cruz, he might be concerned he'd use force in ways that are unpredictable.
I think he figures Clinton will be tougher to deal with than Sanders. He's met her, he knows her, he knows her toughness. But leaders like predictability. If you can get a known quantity even if it's a tough adversary, it's better than someone who's unpredictable.
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