In 2011, top liberal thinkers said nothing like ISIS could ever happen and Russia was no threat

I stumbled across the video in which Melissa Harris-Perry, Chris Hayes, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and Eric Foner debated perceived U.S. security policy failures. What struck me most was their absolute self-righteousness. After that, it’s the fact that they were so wrong about most everything.

Chris Hayes argued that the post-9/11 international order would, post-2011, be defined by small proxy wars and not great power struggles. To that end, Hayes lamented how many “tanks” and “nuclear warheads” the U.S. military possesses and asked why we had not sold them on “Craigslist.”

Of course, now in 2017 that Hayes and his followers want a tougher stance against Russia, they should be grateful that we didn’t put all those tanks and nukes up for sale. After all, countering Chinese and Russian threats requires military capabilities that can maneuver against massed enemy formations and deter nuclear escalation with assured overmatch. Xi and Putin must know that any invasion against vital U.S. interests would result in their almost certain defeat. That deterrence requires meat on the bones of national power, not just nice words at a Nation magazine event.

Speaking of the Nation, its editor, vanden Heuvel argued that 2011 offered a unique “moment of promise and possibility” to move towards relative pacifism. According to 2011 vanden Heuvel, the priority was to “cut the defense budget,” and address terrorist related threats through an intelligence and law enforcement prism. It sounded good to the crowd of lefties, but if carried forth, vanden Heuvel’s waffling utopianism would have meant disaster in face of rising challenges such as Russia and ISIS.

Then came Eric Foner’s take on the world. Referring to the late (then dying of cancer) Christopher Hitchens as Voldemort, Eric Foner elicited gleeful chatter from the crowd and panel as he ridiculed Hitchens’ warnings about an ISIS-like terrorist caliphate. At the time, there was no ISIS, Osama bin Laden was newly dead and the terrorist threat was permanently gone. International terrorism is that simple, see.

Or perhaps not, as subsequent events demonstrated. To borrow from Shakespeare, ISIS has ensured that Foner’s jest savors but of shallow wit, as thousands more weep at his words than did once laugh at them.

Perhaps surprising to some, Melissa Harris-Perry came across as the most realistic in the group. Noting that she wasn’t a pacifist, she spoke eloquently of the challenges in post-9/11 related social attitudes.

Still, Harris-Perry did join in the Kool-Aid adventurism when it came to countering al Qaeda. She described having supported the military response against al Qaeda until a fall 2001 sermon from Jeremiah Wright of “God Damn America” fame. Wright apparently told his congregants that we shouldn’t bomb the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan because doing so would kill babies.

And while many Americans might not regard such words as terribly analytical or morally precise assessment of looming war, Harris-Perry apparently did. And so, she opposed the war.

Don’t get me wrong here, I respect the right to oppose a war. Nevertheless, I do think the simplistic nature of Harris-Perry’s judgment about morality in war speaks to why so many Democrats were resistant to more aggressive action against ISIS even when it became clear that the group posed a clear and present threat to U.S. security interests. It was easy to close their eyes to the truth and instead embrace Code Pink-style platitudes.

Ultimately, this discussion is interesting for what it records of the national security delusions of top liberal thinkers just seven years ago. Put simply, they didn’t just not see the threats of today coming, they laughed at the very notion of such threats, sometimes making themselves completely wrong with alarming specificity. I’m inclined to think former President Barack Obama was weak on national security, but this debate shows how much worse things could have been.