Asked in 2019 whether the Democrats were any better than the Republicans on foreign policy, John Kiriakou said the opposite of better: there is no real difference between them at all.
What both parties believe
There are some minor tweaks around the edges, he said, but they’re both neocons and neoliberals, and they all believe in exactly the same thing. And that is that the United States really does need to have a military presence in a hundred and ten countries around the world; that it needs military bases in eighty-six countries; and that it needs the newest nuclear weapons, the biggest ships, the best airplanes and the biggest bombs. They all believe this stuff. [1]
The correction
The exchange contains a small self-correction Kiriakou made in real time. When his interviewer noted that there are 144 countries in the world and that the United States is present in 110 of them, Kiriakou answered that he did not know why he had had the number 700 stuck in his head. Told that this was, at least, a relief, he laughed and moved on. [2]
The mechanism he blames
The basing consensus is one half of an argument Kiriakou makes about how administrations get captured by it. The other half is the briefing: senior intelligence officials, diplomats and Pentagon generals, he says, can all be very convincing — a briefing on Afghanistan or Syria or Libya can be made to sound as though the thing is nearly finished, and that pulling out now would cost international prestige and lives, so give us six more months, give us twelve more months. Six or twelve months later they repeat it, year after year, and the next thing you know you are bogged down in a foreign entanglement. [3] [4]