The Raging Debate Over the Strength of ISIS
HARLOW: The White House announcing President Obama will visit the Pentagon tomorrow. He will meet with his national security team. Of course the focus will be the continuing war in the battle against ISIS. It's what a spokesman calls an update. No major policy shift is expected to come out of this meeting tomorrow but it is his first visit to the Pentagon since the terror linked attacks in Southern California and, of course, the terrorist attacks in Paris. Peter Beinart is with me, CNN political commentator and contributor to "The Atlantic." You have a fascinating new piece in "The Atlantic" talking about not just strategy. We know that the military strategy from Republicans and Democrats is so different, but the philosophical divide between the two when it comes to the terror threat we face right now. Let's read part of this talking about the president's address in the oval office on Sunday night. "He gave the address to convince an increasingly fearful nation that he takes the terrorist threat seriously. But he doesn't, at least not in the way his political opponents do." What is the biggest philosophical divide here?</s>PETER BEINART, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: You know, George W. Bush compared violent jihadism to Nazism and communism, as this kind of epic threat that had mass appeal around the world. Marco Rubio talks about the same thing. He says we're at war with an entire -- with a civilization.</s>HARLOW: Right.</s>BEINART: I don't think Barack Obama believes that.</s>HARLOW: He won't use those words. He won't use radical Islam.</s>BEINART: Right. But I also think that he believes that actually violent jihadism is a weak ideology, not an ideology that has a lot of inherent appeal. After all communism and fascism at their height in the '30s, a lot of people actually believe they could bring more economic prosperity than capitalism during the great depression. Nobody believes that ISIS has a vision for prosperity for anyone. I think Obama believes that the only hope that ISIS has really is to feed off the hostility that people in the Muslim world have towards the West because of their interventions and because of things like what Donald Trump is doing, and that if we avoid that, then we allow ISIS' weakness to expose itself.</s>HARLOW: What do you think, Peter, if you can answer this.</s>BEINART: Yes.</s>HARLOW: Informs his thinking in that fashion that is so different from his Republican opponents. Even Hillary Clinton is more hawkish than he is in terms of strategy. But what is it about Barack Obama's sort of history.</s>BEINART: Right.</s>HARLOW: That has caused him to think --</s>BEINART: You also see this in the way he discusses the conflict with Putin.</s>HARLOW: OK.</s>BEINART: I think Obama has a great deal of faith in the inherent strength of liberal democracies as a far more attractive project and generally believes that if liberal democracies don't screw things up by doing things like the Iraq war, self-inflicted wounds, our natural strength over our -- totalitarian competitors shows itself through. The Republicans are a little bit more -- you saw this during the Cold War, too. Conservatives tend to be much more afraid that the West was fundamentally weak and that ideologically our competitors might be stronger. They had a more apocalyptic vision of the Soviet threat and they do now vis-a-vis ISIS as well.</s>HARLOW: So talking about Hillary Clinton, given the fact that now 44 percent of Americans think that the biggest threat is terror and that there could be relatively -- an attack very likely, are the words they use in the United States, in the next few months, how does Hillary Clinton, if she makes it to a general election, differentiate herself enough on that front from this president?</s>BEINART: Well, I think her instincts are actually quite different. I think Hillary Clinton is much more naturally hawkish than Barack Obama. I think he was very influenced by the experience of the Iraq war. She was much more influenced by the experiences of the 1990s, the successful Gulf War, the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo. She has a higher comfort level with military force. I think the thing that she, and we all have to be concerned about, is even if going after ISIS is a good idea --</s>HARLOW: But why would she have more of a comfort level having voted the way she did and looking at Iraq?</s>BEINART: Because I think that by the time the Iraq experience happened, she was later on in her political career. People tend to be most influenced by things that happen earlier, in the formative stages. I think for her the formative foreign policy experience was our successful military interventions in the '90s. She was very close to Madeleine Albright, the architect of the Kosovo war.</s>HARLOW: Sure.</s>BEINART: Obama wasn't influenced by that. Iraq was his seminal experience and that, I think, helps to explain the difference between them.</s>HARLOW: So as he watch, as we all will be, the debate, the GOP debate on Tuesday night, it is all about national security. What are you looking for, for some of these other candidates aside from Trump, to break out and break through on that front?</s>BEINART: What I'm looking forward is for people to talk about the day after. It's one thing to say you can bomb ISIS into oblivion. You actually can't. Even if you had a ground force that was strong enough to defeat them, we have to talk about the day after ISIS. Remember, what got us in trouble in Iraq was not overthrowing Saddam. It was we had no plan for the day after. If we don't have some plan --</s>HARLOW: And look at Libya and look at what we're going to do with Syria.</s>BEINART: Right. We can drop a lot of bombs and we can even arm a lot of people. They might even defeat ISIS. But unless we are thinking now about what Syria and Iraq look like afterwards, we could find ourselves back in a very dangerous situation.</s>HARLOW: Do you think that voters want that answer, too? Or do they want the now, now, now, I'm strong, we'll bomb them?</s>BEINART: You know, I think good leaders have a responsibility for the good of the country to talk about that now because ultimately we will -- we've suffered a lot from not doing that kind of long-term thinking.</s>HARLOW: Peter Beinart, fascinating piece in "The Atlantic."</s>BEINART: Thank you.</s>HARLOW: Thank you. Good to see you.</s>BEINART: Thank you.</s>HARLOW: Coming up next, politics aside, are the biggest leaders in business here in America? Well, how are they going to pay their workers going forward? It is a massive debate in this country, the fight over minimum wage. I had a chance this week to talk to the CEO of Target, one of the biggest retailers in this country. He will join me next.</s>BRIAN C. CORNELL, CEO, TARGET CORPORATION: In each and every market we're paying competitive wage that attracts great talent. So I think it's critically important and it's something we think about all the time.