The conflict in Syria rages on, the United States' relationship with Iran remains strained, and China is taking hold as an emerging superpower. As part of TOTN's "Looking Ahead" series, NPR commentator Ted Koppel looks to the future of international relations.
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan, in Washington. As some of you may know, this program began in the crisis that led up to what we now call the first Gulf War, in 1991, as Daniel Schorr and I anchored live coverage of briefings from the White House and the Pentagon and congressional hearings.
I got called away to other duties, so Dan took over, and when events failed to start on time, he took phone calls. As this program wraps up today, our guest is another great broadcaster, best known for a program born in another crisis: the Iranian hostage crisis back in 1979. On "Nightline," Ted Koppel provided indelible and indispensible coverage of that and a thousand other stories.
It's been our privilege to include him as a commentator on this program over the past several years, and on our last day, we couldn't think of a better way to conclude the series of conversations we've called Looking Ahead than to call on Ted Koppel. And, of course, we want to hear from you, too.
What makes you believe the future will be better? What keeps you up at night? Our phone number: 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. And Ted Koppel joins us today from member station WBEZ in Chicago. Ted, it's always a pleasure to have you on the program.
TED KOPPEL, BYLINE: Hello, Neal. I was just thinking, you know, maybe we need to explain the logic of having me on for this last program to all your many mourning fans out there. I think it's simply so that we can spend a few minutes taking a look around the world, so that by the end of the program, people will say it's terrible that Neal is going. It's terrible that TALK OF THE NATION is going, but there are even worse things going on out there in the rest of the world.
KOPPEL: I suspect we'll touch on a few of those.
CONAN: Well, I wanted to ask you, yes, to a lot of us, it looks like an incredibly dangerous world. The United States is economically weak. It's being challenged by China in one part of the world, and that, to some people, seems rather dangerous, as a new nationalistic power begins to flex its muscles in areas, well, where there aren't any rules. We look at the Middle East, and it seems like the cauldron in Syria is spilling over into other countries and could ignite a much broader war, that the conflict that a lot of people feared might happen with Iran over its nuclear program could erupt in, well, any of a half a dozen other ways.
And now we look at a situation where – I wanted to ask you: There was an extraordinary piece written in the New York Times a couple, three days ago, by Richard Haass at the Council on Foreign Relations, who we both know. And he said, in fact, what we – where we are is at a moment where the United States can breathe a little bit easier than it could in the past, that there are no existential threats, and we need to get our economic house in order and, well, just stay out of trouble in the rest of the world.
KOPPEL: Yeah, I think Richard's main point – and you're right. He is an old friend to both of us. But I think his main point was that perhaps this would be an opportune time for the United States to focus more on the internal problems that we have and the domestic issues that need to be resolved. I certainly agree with him on that. I'm not sure that I agree with the other point that you made that he puts forth in his op-ed piece, namely that the dangers out there are not as great as they were before.
I think, quite frankly, we are living in the most dangerous times that I have known in my adult lifetime.
CONAN: And Ted is not a young man anymore, so we're including the Cold War.
KOPPEL: No, you're exactly right. I mean, I was born in 1940. So that – yes, I wasn't terribly conscious of World War II, but by the time the Korean War came along, I was paying attention. And by the time Vietnam came along, I was there. So I am including those times.
I think we live – and I'm including the times of the Cold War. The Cold War was potentially, hugely dangerous. Obviously, the possibility of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States dwarfs anything that we are confronting today, and mercifully, that threat seems to have eased somewhat.
But the fact of the matter was that the Soviet Union and the United States managed to maintain an uneasy sort of stability throughout the world, which even had an acronym, this notion of mutual assured destruction: We won't do it to you, because we know what you're going to be able to do to us after we've done it to you.