US Politics Thread

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THE EZRA KLEIN SHOW

The Dark Heart of Trump’s Foreign Policy​

March 1, 2025, 7:02 a.m. ET


By Ezra Klein

The Dark Heart of Trump’s Foreign Policy​

The journalist Fareed Zakaria discusses the worldview emerging from Trump’s foreign policy decisions regarding Ukraine, Gaza, China and beyond.​

What is the Donald Trump doctrine. What is Donald Trump’s foreign policy. I think the place to begin to try to untangle what we’ve actually seen here is to listen to the way Donald Trump and Vice President Vance speak about our allies. The threat that I worry the most about vis a vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America. I mean, look, let’s be honest, the European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president. I’ve had very good talks with Putin, and I’ve had not such good talks with Ukraine. They don’t have any cards, but they play it tough. Something is new here. This is not even what Donald Trump’s first term was like. There were hints of it, but something is new here. I wanted to have a bigger picture conversation about what this Trump doctrine is, and the way it’s going to reshape the world. So I’m joined today by Fareed Zakaria, the host of GPS on CNN, a Washington Post columnist and the author of the best selling book, age of revolutions. As always, my email at nytimes.com. Fareed Zakaria, welcome back to the show. Always a pleasure, Ezra. So to the extent you feel you can define it, what’s the Trump doctrine. The part of the problem with Trump is he’s so mercurial, he’s so idiosyncratic that just when you think you’ve figured out the Trump doctrine, he goes and says something that kind of sounds like the opposite of the Trump doctrine. But I do think that there’s one coherent worldview that Trump seems to espouse and has espoused for a long time. The first ad he took out when he was a real estate developer, I think it was in 1985, was an ad about how Japan was ripping us off economically, and Europe was ripping us off by freeriding on security. And what that represents, I think, fundamentally, is a kind of rejection of the open international system that the United States and Europe has built over the last eight decades. If you think about it for a minute. It really is a remarkable achievement. You go back to international relations before 1945, and it’s just constant war, mercantilism, protectionism. The two Yale scholars who tabulated in the hundreds years before World War II, there’s about 150 territorial conquests aggression, taking of territory, legitimization of that since 1945, there have been practically none. You have an open international economy. You have free trade. You have rules, you have trade and travel and patents. I mean, there’s a huge area of international cooperation that people don’t think about but that happens all the time, every day. When you fly, when from one place to another. And what Trump, I think has taken from that whole world is the US has been the sucker. The Uc has been the country that’s had to underwrite it. The Uc is the country that’s opened itself up to the world and everyone takes advantage of the US. So I don’t know that he wants to tear it down, but he wants to seriously renegotiate or perhaps even redo that system. Let me try to reflect what his people tell me. Picking up on something you said. There is this, as people call it, rules based international order. And the thing that Joe Biden says and Jake Sullivan says. And Fareed Zakaria says, is that America benefits from that order and benefits from being part of that order. And there’s long been a critique from the left that America, in fact, dominates that order and doesn’t play by its rules. We break international law, we do the things we want to do, and then use those rules on others when we don’t like what they’re doing. But the critique from Trump is that that’s not true, that of every country, America, as the strongest, is harmed the most by these restraints, by these rules, by these laws. Because we have so much leverage we could be using, we could slap tariffs on anybody for any reason and get them to do what we want. We have the strongest military. Of all of the militaries. Everybody wants to be on our side and everybody fears being on our bad side. And that what Trump is doing is systematically automatically searching out the strength America has, the ways we can wield our weight and leverage, and untying our hands from behind our back. Yeah, there is a certain truth to that the United States does have enormous power, by the way. They’re even right about the fact that the United States is more open to for example, the world’s goods and services than they are to ours. The United States has long practiced a kind of asymmetrical free trade. So after World War II, we decided we would open up our markets to Europe and East Asia, to Japan and South Korea. And the reason we did that was we were trying to build an international system where everyone benefited, where there really wasn’t that feeling of beggar thy neighbor. Zero sum game where everyone went into a competitive spiral, which then ends up in nationalism and war. We were trying to build something different and we thought, we can be a little generous here. Let’s let everyone grow and we’ll do fine in the process. And of course, Europe, and Japan and South Korea and places like that grew. But the United States absolutely dominated the world, because it’s a classic positive sum game. We created a much larger global economy, much larger trading system, huge capital flows, and we were at the center of it. The dollar was the reserve currency of the world, which alone gives us incredible advantages. We’re the only country that doesn’t have to worry that much about debt and deficits, because we know that at the end of the day, the dollar is the reserve currency. And my feeling is if you take that system and say, O.K, we’re going to look at each bilateral relationship and see if we can squeeze this country for a slightly better deal, you probably will get a better deal, but two things will happen. The first thing is you will end up fracturing your alliances because the people with whom you have the most leverage are your allies. We have more leverage with Canada than we have with Russia because Canada depends on us for security. Canada trades with us a lot. Its economy is intricately tied to the US economy. So you can bully Canada. You can’t really bully Russia that much because we don’t do much trade with them. You can’t bully China, even China. It’s another vast continental economy that can survive just fine. So the result of Trump inaction, the Trump doctrine inaction has been a war on America’s allies. But the second and more important part is yeah, you’ll gain a little bit here and there by getting slightly better tariff deals. And just so people understand, tariffs in the industrialized world are around 3 percent They’re very, very low. So the idea we’re not getting penalized in any large ways. You can pick a few. You can cherry pick a few examples to the contrary, but mostly among the liberal Democratic states of the world. It’s a free trade world. But what you will do by squeezing each of these individual countries, humiliating them, making them, forcing them to accept renegotiation of terms, you lose the kind of relationships that you had built over 8 decades that created this extraordinary anchor of stability in the world, which was the Western Alliance. And the gains are not that great. Let’s talk about the tariffs for a minute. This is one of the places where the policy and practices just seemed incoherent to me. And I think I need to do a whole episode on this. But you there were different goals that have been articulated for tariffs. One is you impose significant steady tariffs for a long period of time because you’re trying to make manufacturers make different decisions about where to locate factories. You’re trying to onshore supply chains. To do that have to have them, these corporations expecting tariffs for quite a while. And then you hope that they will respond to those tariffs by insourcing into America. Another is that we’re going to use the tariffs to raise a lot of revenue. That too requires the imposition over a long period of time of significant tariffs. Another is we’re just going to bully small nations and just bully kind of anybody. We might feel like bullying right. The tariffs are an all purpose tool to get other countries to do anything we want them to do. We’ve been using them that way, but not for very significant concessions. We’re on the cusp of maybe they’re about to reintroduce them to Canada and Mexico. So we’ll see where we are in a couple of weeks. But what are they doing, man. So there are two things, I think, are going on. One is, as I’ve said, Trump, if he has a worldview, he’s a protectionist. He’s always felt that want to protect American industries. These foreigners come in and they take advantage of us. Et cetera. Et cetera. The second, I think, is that and this I think he discovered as president, the president has incredible power in the area of tariffs. Technically, it’s meant to be Congress that imposes tariffs. But a long ago Congress delegated that power to the president. And I think Trump loves that. It is an extraordinary unilateral exercise of huge American power, the power of the American market to say, I will just block you from being able to participate in the American market. And you saw him do that in the case of the Colombian president. So I think he’s not sure. At one hand, he loves wielding this weapon. On the other hand, he is something of a protectionist. But as you say, he notices that markets don’t seem to it. So where will it all end up. My gut is that what happens is, so tariffs in the industrialized world, as I said, have roughly been about 3 percent If you assume all of Trump’s tariffs are actually put in place. I think it goes up to about 6 percent And if that stays, which is a big if other countries will all retaliate. This is an area where I think, we do live in it’s not even a bipolar world. It’s a tripolar world. The Europeans and the Chinese are very powerful. And the Europeans on this issue speak with one voice. So they will put on reciprocal tariffs. The Chinese will put on reciprocal tariffs. We end up in a world with more tariffs, more protection. Look, I’m an old fashioned free trader. I think the whole thing is a disaster. I think that it is a complete misreading of the last 30 or 40 years of economics. JD Vance, when he was in Germany, in Europe, one of the few backhanded compliments he played to Germany was, he said, at least the Germans didn’t go along with this Washington Consensus nonsense, and they protected their manufacturing, which is partly true. They didn’t protect it through tariffs, by the way. They protected it by just having very strong apprenticeship programs and what we would call community college type stuff. But look at where Germany is. Germany, the third or fourth largest economy in the world, is stuck in the second Industrial Revolution. What do they make. Cars, chemicals, machine tools. They don’t have any industry in the digital economy, the entire digital economy is totally dominated by the US. Why is that. Because we allowed ourselves to transition to where the frontiers of the economy were. This whole idea of trying to hold on to the 19th century or the 1920s, it doesn’t work. It’s incredibly expensive. Nobody has been able to do it. Manufacturing employment today after Donald Trump’s four years, and Joe Biden’s four years is the same as it was roughly 10, 15 years ago. I think that this whole obsession is fundamentally misconceived. What we should do is much more redistribution, so that the people who lose out in these periods of technological change are taken care of. But the idea that we can go back to 1950 is just nuts. This gets to me, one of the real obfuscations of the Trump presidency of MAGA as a movement. There are a lot of conversations right now that have a term in them that is ill-defined. Let’s call it efficiency. What is the Department of Government efficiency about. What is efficiency. Efficiency of what Towards what. Efficiency requires some other defined ends to be a coherent goal. But here too, what is America first. What would it mean for that to be successful. What are we looking like. The trade deficit is going to be the main output of our foreign policy, which, by the way, he’s not consistent on in any way. He was talking the other day about building a renewed Keystone XL pipeline to Canada, which if we start importing a bunch of Canadian oil, that’s going to increase the trade deficit with Canada. Is it manufacturing employment. Is that what we’re supposed to be targeting here is if America first was working, it would be manufacturing and playing. Is it GDP growth. I have never heard them, and I have listened fairly closely. Describe what this new era, this new golden age of American strength is. Is it median wages for men. They don’t, I think they certainly have not articulated a coherent view of American power or success. Like, is America stronger if AFD takes over Germany. Why like, what does AFD get us. I’m curious how you think about this. If maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe you think there’s a better definition of it. But there is a question, all this of what they’re trying to achieve. Do you feel like, I would guess that America First for Trump and for many of his followers and I wouldn’t put some of the ideologists of MAGA in the same category. But I think for Trump. It’s the idea that the United States has been constrained for too long by globalism, by worrying about the international environment, by worrying about all these alliances constrained by these international organizations that, again, we’ve been the sucker, that what America first means is we’re going to break through all that bullshit and we’re just going to do what’s good for America. But what is left undefined, as you’re saying, is, well, what is good for America. Why would it be good for America to break, to break apart the international trading system. Why would it be good for America to break apart this world that’s created. So that part I think is undefined. But you can see the impulse and what the attraction is to a lot of people. A lot of people who have always felt that the United States, by the way, run by this elite cabal of urban liberals, overeducated urban liberals in places like New York and Washington has been selling America out. This was basically, if you think of the 1950s, this was the McCarthy attack in many ways. So I think in some ways, it’s a harkening back to that idea. There’s another piece of that being restrained by norms. I think a pretty significant difference between Trump’s first term and his second is the intensity of his fascination now with territorial expansion, making Canada the 51st state, making Gaza province. Somehow of America. Taking over Greenland. But I think Trump believes in the people around him. Believe that the norms of the world turned against territorial expansion in a way that was bad for America. America in the 19th century expanded. Other countries did, too. And we are powerful. And there are things we should want that Canada should be the 51st state, or at least it should act like a vassal state of America that if we want Greenland, we should have it. I think Trump really wants, fundamentally wants the landmass of America to be larger when he leaves office than when he came in. How have you taken Trump’s renewed interest in gaining territory. Yeah, I think you have it exactly right. And in a way, he has a kind of fascination, not just with America. I think in the 19th century, in the way exactly the way you described, but also in geopolitics of the 19th century to the extent that I think he understands it, which is the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. To quote Thucydides, and that idea that we are powerful, we should be unconstrained is very familiar in a sense. That’s what the Chinese foreign minister said at a meeting of ASEAN nations where he was telling, I think it was the Philippines or the Singaporeans. You’ve got to understand we are big and powerful. You are not. We are going to tell you what to do. Obviously, it is the way Putin views the world. That’s why I think he has a much more benign view of Putin’s desire to have a sphere of influence, a kind of a group of satellite states around him, including Ukraine. He has a much more benign view, I think, of Chinese expansionism. He very rarely criticizes it. I can’t remember him ever doing it. And so then he looks at it and says, well, the United States should similarly have that kind of sense of the Monroe Doctrine, the Western hemisphere. Again to me, it Mrs. the central point about the transformation of the international system after World War II, which is that you realized you don’t need territory to become rich and powerful and incredibly effective in the world. Look at South Korea. South Korea is, I forget, now 15 times the per capita GDP of North Korea. Look at tiny Israel, which is now essentially an advanced industrial country on a tiny spit of land. Think about all the richest and most powerful countries in the world. Land acquisition has almost nothing to do with, who has a lot of land. Russia it feels to me like a kind of bizarre, anachronistic way to look at the world. But I agree with you. That is the way he’s thinking about it. You could get whatever minerals you wanted to get out of Greenland by just signing a couple of deals with them. You don’t actually need to own it. You could redo the Panama Canal treaty and be much easier, by the way, to let the Panamanians run it. And you’ve just kind of renegotiated it in terms you like. But I think for Trump, part of it is this kind of old fashioned view. And part of it is I do think at the end of the day, there’s a strong element of narcissism that infuses everything that Trump does. And I think he loves the idea that he would be able to put his stamp on history by saying, Trump added Greenland or something like that to the United States. The physical expansion of America would be a great Trump legacy. You mentioned Ukraine and Russia. We’re talking in the week when all that is being negotiated. How would you describe what Trump’s policy towards Ukraine now is. It’s almost impossible to have a kind of again, a clear through line because it’s moved so much. He had a tweet in which he said the Russians better. Putin better realize this war has ruined his country. He better settle. And if he doesn’t, we’re going to put additional sanctions and his favorite weapon tariffs on Russia now. But it seemed to suggest that he understood that the principal obstacle to a peace deal was not Zelenskyy but Putin. But then he shifted entirely and enormously in the last few weeks, where he’s called Zelenskyy a dictator. He said he started the war, all that stuff. I mean, the UN resolution where the United States sided with Russia and North Korea and Belarus. So you could argue that, again, in Trump’s case, so much of it is personal. He doesn’t like Zelenskyy. But if you step back from that, I think that Trump in his heart believes that Russia has legitimate claims over Ukraine and so has a much softer line on Russia. I think he thinks that the Russians should keep the territory they’ve acquired. He thinks Ukraine should not be a part of NATO. He thinks that maybe Ukraine should have a kind of neutrality in foreign policy. These are all essentially the Russian demands. There’s no way to read his mind. But my sense from listening to him and watching him is he thinks all those Russian claims are kind of broadly legitimate. Let me push on this. All this much better than I do. I don’t think he thinks anything about Ukraine and Russia whose claims are legitimate. I think he thinks Ukraine is worthless to the Uc, and somebody at some point persuaded him their mineral rights there. And he thinks Russia is not that there is value for the US, for Trump personally, for the US economy and access to Russia, good relations with Russia, and that there is some part of him that genuinely doesn’t. Understand why we give a shit about Ukraine, as opposed to cutting a deal with Putin. And getting something out of that transaction. Yeah if you think about the countries and the leaders he likes, it’s either the country is very strong or the leader is very strong. It’s Putin Xi. Modi, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Orban Erdogan. Those are the people he speaks, talks about with respect. The more muddled, compromised, weaker leaders of coalition governments in Europe, he finds feckless, he finds uninteresting. I think he likes these more old fashioned countries. I’ve thought about this once, and I don’t know if it’s a reasonable point to make, but the countries he seems fascinated by and respects are countries which you could imagine having lots of Trump towers. The countries he doesn’t like Europe. You couldn’t imagine a Trump. But in that way, is he picking up on something real. And I think you see this a bit with JD Vance. JD Vance is going out of his way to alienate the European governments of the moment. America is weighing in on behalf of the AFD in Germany. Their view is that there are regimes that they have affinity with, and that the proper nature of American Alliance is in some unchanging alliance between America and Europe, because we’re all quote unquote, liberal democracies. Trump doesn’t want us to be a liberal democracy. The proper nature is between regimes of affinity. And in that way, Putin sees a world more like Trump does than Keir Starmer in the UK. Erdogan sees a world more like Trump does, and Justin Trudeau does that the nature of the alliances they’re seeking is a nature of regimes that are like them, regimes that could actually support, have a genuine ideological affinity for who Trump is and what he wants and the world that he wants to see. Yeah I think you’re raising something very important. I think that part of what’s going on here, this new dynamic in international relations we’re watching, is that it’s not all about power. It’s about ideology. So if you think about what is it that Putin is reacting to in the rise and hegemony of the West after the collapse of communism, some of it is Western power, the expansion of NATO, for sure. But a lot of what Putin has been obsessed by has been the expansion of Western liberal ideas and ideology. So if you notice, the things that he talks so much about are the rise of multiculturalism in the West. The rise of a kind of libertine gender ideology. The idea of gender fluidity even weighed in on the JK Rowling controversy. These issues are central to the way that Putin thinks about Russian power. The power of his regime. And so he’s viewed the rising tide and the spreading of Western liberal ideas as much a threat as the expansion of NATO. So notice that when he really reacted with force against Georgia in 2008 and then against Ukraine in 2014, in both cases, the issue was not actually that these countries were about to join NATO. They were not. It’s that they were going to join the European Union, or at least wanted to have better relations with the European Union. What is the European Union represent It represents some kind of idea of a Western style capitalist liberal democracy. And so the way he looks at it is he doesn’t want to be surrounded by those kind of countries. He wants to be surrounded by countries like Belarus and Kazakhstan, quasi authoritarian, somewhat kleptocratic regimes that he can control and manipulate. And I think she also, if you listen to Xi Jinping, a lot of the things he’s talked about is the dangers of too much westernization, too much liberalism. The Chinese have not just cracked down on the private sector, they’ve cracked down on what they called the effeminacy of men. He’s talked about the virtues of motherhood and women going back to raising families. So again, he views this rising tide of Western liberalism as much a threat, I think as Western hard power. And here the irony is Trump and Vance agree with them. And so for the first time now, you have in America a party or an ideology that says, Yes, that’s right. And in a strange sense, as Steve Bannon would explicitly say this. Our real allies should be Russia, and that becomes the new alliance system. Now that takes it further than we are right now. But it’s those inclinations. But that’s I think, where this is really going. And I think the way you see it is in Vance and Musk in Trump’s first term. Trump is surrounded, particularly on the National security and foreign policy side, by members of the traditional Republican establishment. Your HR McMaster’s, your Rex tillerson’s Mike Pence as his vice president. And none of them want this move, right. This is not why John Kelly got into politics. And so it doesn’t really happen. What there is instead are these weird moments in interviews and elsewhere where Trump seems to talk about Putin with real affection in a way that he never talks about anybody in Europe that way. Fast forward. You have Trump’s second term, in which he is surrounded by people who have been spending the intervening years building the ideology for what Trump intuitively was moving towards. And it’s not a complete purge in the Republican Party. But what’s left is too weak, even if the Senate Republicans don’t love it in every instance. And so now you see this the war between autocracy as an ideological phenomenon and liberal democracy as an ideological phenomenon isn’t now between America and Europe. And these other countries. It’s inside America, too. And now you really see it, right. These people who are more framework oriented, going there and actively weighing in, as Elon Musk did on behalf of the AFD in Germany. JD Vance going to the Munich Conference and really telling the Europeans that the great security threat is the way they run their governments, not Russia, not climate change. It is the temperament and the policy of European liberalism. Yeah, many years ago, I wrote an article called The Rise of illiberal democracy in Foreign Affairs, and I was trying to describe this phenomenon of countries where with majorities, with pluralities, we had elected leaders who then systematically degraded the rule of law and individual rights and individual liberties. And of course, I meant it as a term of condemnation. Viktor Orbán gave a speech a few years after he came to power. He didn’t he didn’t quote me, but he cited the phrase illiberal democracy. And he said, people have talked about illiberal democracy. That is what we want to achieve. That is our goal. We want to be an illiberal democracy because we don’t believe in the tenets of Western liberalism. And I think that is where some impulses of the Trump administration go. Now, I do want to say there are two possibilities. And you have outlined them yourself because when you first started the conversation, you said, the Trump people tell me, look, we just want to use unused American power and get a better deal within this framework that we’ve built up. Like, we’re O.K with the liberal international system. We just think we got screwed. So that’s one theory of where Trump is going. And I actually had a conversation with a very senior Republican this week who was hoping, and I would say was arguing that that’s where Trump is going. Yeah, there’s a lot of noise. It’s very messy. He does things. He negotiates out in the open in ways that you never would by demeaning Zelenskyy. But what he’s trying to do is to get a better deal. But then there’s the second view, which is the one we’ve just been talking about, which is no, no, no, he’s not trying to get a better deal. He is trying to systematically remake the international system, and it it reminds me there was a period in the 1870s and 80s when the three great conservative monarchs of Europe, the Russians, the austro-hungarians and the Germans got together and created a 3 emperors league. It was called the dry Kaiser Bund. And they got together because they feared the rise of liberalism in Europe after the revolutions of 1848. And it was meant to be these three conservative monarchs holding back the tide of liberalism. And to a certain extent wonder whether for some of The people involved here, that is the way they are thinking about it. And Putin and maybe even Viktor Orban and people like Erdogan and Xi. We need to hold back all this kind of godless, reckless, libertine liberalism that is engulfing the world. I do think there’s a why not both to this, as you were saying at the top of the show, it is very hard to say anything definitive about Donald Trump, because he actually is flexible and he starts in one place and it ends in another, and he says, we’re going to annex Gaza and use it to build hotels. And I do want to talk about this in more detail. But he also seems perfectly happy with the situation where the Arab League steps up. He says he wants to slap huge tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but he also seems kind of happy if they just give him some concessions. And I think two things are happening at once. He takes deals. He doesn’t want a lot of friction. He doesn’t want markets to freak out. He doesn’t want to be committing US troops in places where they’re not wanted. He Trump has a real sense that the tolerance of the American people for pain and bad headlines is low. And on the other hand, there is an erosion to what he is doing. He is pushing and pushing and pushing and the rock slowly give way. And so even as he’s taking these deals, he’s also alienating the Europeans. Even as he’s taking these deals, he’s changing the way people think about America, even as he’s taking these deals. Maybe he cuts the deal on minerals with Ukraine. He’s also signaled to Moscow that he’s open for a transaction. And so even if he doesn’t go all the way in the first deal, I mean, we’re a month into his second term. He’s sending signals to every other player on the field to reimagine their strategies. And for some that’s going to mean reimagining their strategy to create countermeasures to the US. I think you’re seeing that among the Europeans. For some that is going to mean reimagining their strategies, their offerings, their positioning to come closer to the US, to give Trump a deal that he can sell here. I think that’s for Putin, right. I think that’s for potentially China, somewhat to my surprise, given Trump’s historic feeling that China is going to destroy the American economy. And this game will be repeated again and again and again, and by the end of it, by the end of turn after turn after turn of this, the entire system is in a very different place, not a place you could have gotten it into in one month, but a place you could definitely get into in four years. Yeah, and I think NATO has essentially been eroded already because what is NATO. NATO is not the buildings. The treaty. NATO is something very simple. It is the question, will the United States of America come to the defense of a small European country if attacked by Russia. And I think the events of the last few weeks have left. I can tell you, having talked to many Europeans, have left the Europeans in no doubt that if Lithuania were attacked tomorrow by Russia, there is almost no chance that Donald Trump would do everything it took to defend Lithuania. So that means they start asking themselves, what. What is this new world we’re living in. So you’re seeing I mean, this is really historic that the guy who’s going to become the chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Mertz, has said the most urgent task for Europe now is to begin a step by step independence from the United States, because the United States, or at least Donald Trump, have shown themselves to be indifferent to the fate of Europe, that is seismic for what was really America’s most important ally in Europe. To say that our principal strategic task now is to find a strategy of independence away from the United States, and you’re going to see other countries do variations of that. And in some cases, those countries will be probably doing private kind of hedging in a way that they can’t publicly admit to. The one part I don’t agree with you is I think there are countries that are going to do deals with America. Everyone is going to be wary of a long term relationship because they realize that certainly in this new world, those don’t mean that much. I was in Australia last December. And I met with a senior official there who said to me, we’re very happy to be in this closer relationship with the United States. We’re delighted that you’re sharing your nuclear technology with us. Those nuclear subs deal that we made with them. But the big question we wonder about is we have now put ourselves in a structurally confrontational role vis a vis our principal trading partner, China. We didn’t have to do that. China is a long way away. We were happily trading with them. We hope to continue to do that, but it has completely changed the relationship we have with China. That’s O.K if you have our back, but if in a few years you decide to cut a deal with China, we will have made a generational strategic error, and I think that is what’s going to be in every country’s mind, about getting close to the United States in a long term. That’s why I say these alliances took eight decades to build. Let me take the other side of this. What are the chances that Trump is exactly what Europe needs right now. That Europe is a mess, that it has not invested nearly enough in its defense for decades. That it has been watching its productivity numbers functionally collapse, that in something JD Vance was saying, it is overregulated. And that is one reason it has almost no strong technology companies right now. That Europe was not getting stronger under Joe Biden’s protective umbrella that we’ve been watching, actually, Europe weaken. We have been encouraging a kind of dependence from it. And that here, I guess I’m sounding like the senior Republican you were talking to. But I’ve heard this, and I don’t think it’s crazy that you may not ideologically like why Donald Trump is doing this. But if the end result of it is a more independent Europe that spends more on defense and takes its own economic revitalization more seriously, that would be good for all parties, and that it is frankly unlikely that Putin, when he’s trying to build better relations with America, is going to invade a bunch of other countries and embarrass Donald Trump. So the Moscow problem is not that big of a problem in the near term. And a stronger Europe would be good for deterring that in the long run. And was not going to happen under Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. I broadly agree with what you’re saying, that Europe needed a kind of a kick in the pants. And interestingly, the threat from Russia has turned out not to be big enough to get Europe kind of energized because of us. Well, it couldn’t it could only not be big enough because of us. And the threat of the abandonment of the United States is actually more significant than the threat of Russian aggression. And so they will probably spend more. They will coordinate more on defense. Maybe they’ll even do more. I think that the fundamental issue with productivity in Europe is much larger than the US or Russia seeing where the total factor productivity rises in Europe over the next five years may be unrelated, but I do think they will coordinate more in defense. They’ll coordinate more in foreign policy. They’ll get they’ll get more. They’ll spend more. What you will lose is they will be less deferential to the United States. I think it might be bad for us. I was about to say we had a system where we kind of ran the world. We ran the world because the European Union essentially did exactly what we wanted them to and was a satellite of the United States. So we would be experimenting with a different system. Yet the Europeans will spend more. It is worth pointing out it’s there was a reason we wanted to denationalize the foreign and defense policies of countries like Germany and Germany in particular, trapped in the center of Europe, has always had a difficult time having a kind of sensible, moderate foreign policy. So there were great virtues to saying to the Germans what, guys, don’t worry so much about your security. We’ll take care of it for the last 100 years when you’ve worried about it, things haven’t turned out so well. And I think Germany is a completely different country now, but it is taking us into a different world. By the way, there will be no defense savings out of all this. The idea that the United States will be able to spend less because the Europeans are spending more misunderstands what our defense budget is about. We are the only global superpower. We are trying to be engaged in every part of the world. I mean, this is a president who says we should be in Gaza. We have to deter the Japanese. We need Greenland because we want to be able to be sure that we control the Arctic. And by the way, we need to be controlling the Panama Canal. That’s the way even Trump conceives of America’s role. So there’s going to be no defense saving. So at the end of the day yeah, it’s possible that we get a more independent Europe that spends more on defense. I think that I would prefer a kind of tough love approach where there was actually some love among the places where I am surprised by what policy is looking like and what the rhetoric coming out of the administration is like. Is China where what were we told he was going to do and going to think that he was going to come in and put a 65 percent tariff on all goods from China. Nothing like that is happening. He’s been much more aggressive in some ways with threats of tariffs towards Europe and Canada and Mexico. He’s now begun talking about some kind of big deal with China, where they would just buy more of our stuff, which is like a deal he struck in the first term, even though they didn’t end up buying the stuff. But I would have told you that he actively wants a hostile relationship with China. And now he doesn’t seem to actively want a hostile relationship with China. It was him who initially came up with, or at least people in his administration with, forcing the sell off of TikTok. Now he’s the Savior of TikTok. How do you describe where the Trump administration seems to be or seems to be moving on China again. You with Trump, so much of it is personal. So the reason he seems to have moved on TikTok is because he realized that there was a large group of people supporting him on TikTok. TikTok was good for him. It was a good platform for him to get his message out. And it’s possible. Sometimes with Trump that it’s as simple as he realized TikTok is good for me, so I’m for it. But I think that with China, you have always had this conflicting pressure and you saw it in Trump in one 0.0. He was hostile toward China in the campaign. He talked about massive tariffs against China. And he comes in and he invites Xi Jinping to mar-a-lago. And he’s dazzled by that. And his grandchildren sing Chinese songs to Xi Jinping. And he talks about this beautiful chocolate cake. He serves him. And he likes the idea that he is sitting with the second most powerful person in the world. And they have a relationship and they get on. I mean, the whole Trump 1.0 on China was kind of a nothing because they put tariffs on. And somebody did a calculation that something like 95 percent of the value of the revenues collected for the tariffs went to subsidies to American farmers to compensate them for the loss. So we didn’t even make any money off of it, which Trump often talks about with tariffs. This time around, I think he seems to be much less even rhetorically hostile toward China. My inclination is to go where you’re going. He wants to deal with China. He wants to have some kind of a better working relationship with China. I think to a large extent that could be a good thing. And I think that if one of the things I worry about in The New world we’re going into China is embarking on a massive military buildup. China is probably going to quadruple the number of nuclear weapons. It has in the next 10 years, that’s all. And to a certain extent, I understand China’s point of view, which is they are the second richest country in the world. Why should they not have an arsenal that’s as big as Russia is, but it can be very destabilizing that period. When the Soviets expanded their nuclear arsenal in the late 50s and 60s and the United States and the Soviets were going mano a mano is a very unstable period. Think of the Berlin crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis. So to have a better working relationship with China during that in this period, I think is a very, very good thing. And if for whatever reason Trump gets there, I’d be the first to applaud it. How have you taken Trump’s attitude towards Israel and Gaza, his proposals, his appointments. How would you describe it. I think what Trump represented for the Israelis was the most unqualified support that any American president was ever going to give to an Israeli Prime Minister. And the relationship is obviously very personal between Trump and Bibi as a result of that. By the way, he was able to get a ceasefire fire because in effect what. It seems that his envoy told Beebe, you’re not going to get a better deal from Trump. So you better take this one. This is in the waning days of the Biden administration. But I think that it’s also a kind of ideological affinity to Bibi ISM, if you will. If you notice in that UN resolution in which the United States absolutely, bizarrely sided with Russia, against Ukraine, against almost every Democratic country in the world, in basically not condemning the Russian aggression in Ukraine. There were two unusual countries that went along with the US, Russia, North Korea, Belarus. It was Hungary and Israel. And I think what that tells you is that there is this ideological affinity that Trump feels with Bibi, both wrongly persecuted by the liberal elites of their country, both representing the kind of silent majority in their minds, both believing in huge amounts of disruption, both tough guys. So I think, a kind of personal and ideological connection that Trump has with Bibi’s Israel. And you can see it when you watch them, watch them together. The fear that the people I know who work on Middle East policy had about Donald Trump was that if he was elected, you would have an American president functionally supportive of Israeli annexation of the West Bank and possibly of Gaza. What they didn’t expect was any desire on that same American president’s behalf to personally annex Gaza. Nobody saw. Well, actually, no, Israel shouldn’t take Gaza. America should take Gaza. What do you think that proposal is. Do you understand where it came from. Do you have a sense of how much he would actually risk to make it happen. Like, how have you read it. We have tried to understand it. And most people I was with a lot of what Trump says, it does appear to have come out, almost spontaneously. And so my guess is what happened is Bibi Netanyahu essentially expressed what has long been a kind of right wing fantasy in Israel, which is if only we could clear these Palestinians out of Gaza, this would be a great place for us to it was a big mistake for us to leave. And it’s an amazing piece of land. We could think of the wonders we could do with Gaza. So it may be came out of that. What it has done is it has in some ways given comfort to both the extremists on both sides. So right wing Israelis now say, and I mean people to the right of Bibi Netanyahu say, you see, this was not a fantasy. This was something real. The president of the United States is now advocating getting the Palestinians out of Gaza. So all those people have dug in and believe that this is really viable. And by the way, it’s spreading to their views on the West Bank as well, because the right wing fantasy in Israel has always been make life so difficult for the Palestinians that effectively, they will slowly but surely start moving away. They’ll go to Jordan, they’ll go to Egypt. The Egyptians and Jordanians will be forced to take them. But on the other hand, it does seem to have also reinforced among the hard line Palestinians. The idea that, look, the Americans only mean bad things for us. Don’t be very wary of any of This American involvement, because what the Americans really want to do is ethnically cleanse all of us out of Gaza. So they’re digging in. They’re trying to figure out how do we maintain our presence, how do we make sure that if there is some kind of an American or Israeli suzerainty here, we would launch an insurgency? So I don’t see it as having produced anything particularly good. And it has really reinforced this very, this very strong element within the Israeli right that believes there is a solution to the Palestinian problem, and it is largely ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. In Joe Biden, you had the apex of the liberal international order believers. Joe Biden’s whole career in the Senate it was devoted to this quite significantly. He was known for his commitment to these alliances, known for his belief in a muscular liberal internationalism. It was always notable the way, when he was deciding whether or not to stay in the race, the thing that seemed to animate him in that period was NATO. And if not for me, who’s going to protect NATO and the alliances. And they had this vision of American strength through the alliance system, and it led to a world or it coexisted with a world that by the end of his term felt to many people like it had fallen into disorder. You had Russia invading Ukraine. You had the war in Gaza. And you had a sense of American weakness. I mean, some of that was Joe Biden’s inability to personally project strength, whatever you thought of the actual policies. Now, you’ve had Trump come in for a month and the whole world is reshuffling in response to what he says. You have negotiations happening with Moscow. You have mineral deals being signed with Ukraine. You have in Gaza, all of a sudden, for the insanity, in my view of Trump’s actual proposal, I am hearing more serious proposals from the Arab countries than I was before. Yet Yair Lapid, one of the opposition leaders in Israel, had a reasonable I thought, proposal of wiping out Egyptian foreign debt in return for Egypt taking over rebuilding and governance of Gaza for a period of time. The sense that the world is responding to American strength. Did Democrats fumble this in their belief that a restrained America was a strong America, that more did not need to be projected? Did they leave the opening for someone like Trump, who said, there’s all this surplus power and the American public is going to respond to seeing someone come pick it up, that the sense of the world should respond to America, that we should be feared by our friends and our enemies alike, had been dismissed. I’ve heard this from people involved in the Middle East conflict. Nobody feared Joe Biden. Look, I think that there’s no question the United States had enormous power. Again, I say it contradicts the central premise of the Trump Vance domestic argument, which is that America has been hollowed out and ravaged over the last 30 years by the forces of globalization and liberalism. In fact, the real story of the last 30 years is the United States has emerged dominant among the rich countries in the world. And they seem to envy the political systems of countries that are in terrible shape. right. Hungry Russia, China, which is seeing its growth rates fall. They have a lot of envy of systems that you would not want to emulate. China doesn’t have a trade deficit. And look at China. Like that’s not a country you would want to emulate the economy of. So there is a kind of weird contradiction. But I agree with you. The United States has enormous power, and I don’t think that it is a sign of strength to go around bullying smaller countries and forcing them to say, things that are often kind of rhetorical concessions get everyone to call it the Gulf of America get the Panamanians are a good example. The guy who was running Panama now is a very pro-American conservative, and he’s now been humiliated and made to mouth some kind of nonsense that allows Trump to claim he got a victory. Same thing happened with Canada and Mexico. I’m going to do it because I want to push you to the strong examples here, the strong counterexamples, which is to say that I Jake Sullivan, on this show and we were talking about Ukraine and we were talking about Israel, and I would say the view that emerged from him is that it would be immoral to use American leverage to push our allies into negotiations in Ukraine, to force Israel to have done really anything differently in Gaza, and that as soon as Trump came on the scene, it turned out people would listen. Like the hostage deal got signed and Yahoo dropped some objections they move forward on to some kind of ceasefire. You had negotiations. Not in the way I would like to see them had preconceiving. Functionally, everything to Moscow is, in my view, fundamentally immoral. But the level at which the Biden administration would not push its own allies and did not act like it had leverage over someone like Zelenskyy, was strange. By the end, you could tactically say there are some cases where they didn’t handle it well. I for many, many months was criticizing the Biden administration. On the russia-ukraine front. I thought that it was important to get more realistic on Israel. It’s a particular dynamic that you well, which is that for a Democratic president, it is very hard to push the Israelis to do anything, because they know they can outflank a Democrat by going directly to Congress, by going directly to essentially to Republicans. Bibi Netanyahu did that to Barack Obama, who was a much more skilled politician and negotiator than Joe Biden was. And when Obama tried to push him on the Iran nuclear thing, Bibi just did an end run around Obama, went to Washington, got the Republicans to invite him to give a joint speech to the joint session of Congress and completely kind of tied Obama in knots on that one. So that is a particular problem. But I agree with you that tactically, there are some places where you could push harder, if you ask me, which philosophy is the right one for the United States to have. I think it’s the one that has built these alliance structures in this system for 80 years by not viewing this as a series of transactions, but as a relationship. Trump is a transaction guy. Think about every real estate deal he’s ever done. At the end of the day, the person. He does the deal with never wants to deal with him again. I mean, that is basically one of the leitmotifs of Trump’s business career. He screws you in the deal and then moves on and the next time around screws somebody else. But that’s not what American foreign policy has been built on. It’s been built on these alliances and these relationships that have endured now for almost a century. And by the way, very few countries have managed that. So Trump, by strong arming of a few people, a few of these countries will get, in the short term, a better deal. Again, we’re very powerful. We’re very rich. But is that going to build real trust for the next 40, 50 years. I don’t think so. It’s going to give Trump a few good headlines. And by the way, on the Gaza thing, I think it’s important to remember, because I’ve spent time in a lot of time in the Middle East over the last nine months or so. I’ve been to Saudi Arabia 3 times 4 times. They were always willing to pay for the reconstruction. The idea that the Trump’s bizarre Gaza proposal has gotten the Saudis and the Egyptians to be ready to be involved is not true. The issue has always been who will govern Gaza. And that was the Israelis say it can’t be any Hamas involvement. The Arabs say, look, if it’s going to be no Hamas involvement, then you have to allow the Palestinian Authority to do it. And the Israelis say no. And the Israeli response is, why can’t the Arabs do it. Well, the Arabs don’t want to be in the position of ruling over the Palestinians. They don’t want to be in a position where Hamas launches an insurgency against them. That has been the sticking point, not the money. They’ve always been willing to pay the money. And by the way, that will continue to be the sticking point. That is the hard part of the Gaza business, not getting the Saudis and the UAE to pony up the cash. The thing that I think I’m pushing towards here is not, is Trumpism the right long term strategy for the US, but assuming the system survives the next couple of years, which in the range of possibilities. I don’t think is 100 percent I don’t think it’s 100 percent domestically, and I don’t think it’s 100 percent internationally. I think there’s a question of there being thesis, antithesis, synthesis, dynamics to where things probably need to go. I think that with Doge, where Democrats were accepting, I mean, I have a whole book on this coming out, but Democrats are accepting of huge levels of government proceduralism obstruction, the inability of government to deliver or be responsive. They became defenders of government. Now you have a group heedlessly taking chainsaws, trying to actually wreck the thing in a way I consider immoral and genuinely dangerous. But I think for to find some stable equilibrium, Democrats are going to have to take some lessons from this. Not just say we were right before you guys should have listened to us. And the way I think we now understand that center left parties, kind of in Europe and in America, had adopted positions on immigration that were politically unstable. And they don’t need to go all the way to where the far right is, but they can’t be where they were if they’re going to win power. Is there some ways in which lessons need to be learned here, for there to be an effective center left answer, or even a left answer or liberal answer to what this set of challenges represents. Is there some dissatisfaction with how the system is working, either from the American perspective or the International perspective that needs to be integrated. Even if you find, as many of us do where Trump is going. Immoral Yeah. Look, the left is collapsed everywhere. I mean, if you look at Europe, the real story of the European elections over the last, 10 years is the collapse of the left. The French left has collapsed. The German left has collapsed. If you look, Holland, wherever you look, Sweden was run by the Swedish social Democrats for 75 years, and they were in trouble. And I think it’s principally over the issue of immigration. As I’ve been hard line on immigration. I think the whole system is. The asylum system needs to be scrapped. And the fact that the left was not willing to frontally acknowledge that you had millions of people coming in who were obviously gaming the system, claiming to be asylum seekers when they were really economic migrants. I think the left is paying a huge price for that everywhere, and they will continue to pay a price for that because even now it will feel like catch up. When they do it on the international side, I don’t think there was any such deep dissatisfaction with the international system as it exists. I think to a large extent, Trump’s grievances around it that have exploited it. But he taps into a certain kind of American jacksonianism that says, why are we entangled with these people. Why the United States has always had two fundamental attitudes. One, we are too good to participate in the world, or we are so good that we should completely transform the world. But to actually engage in the world as it exists has always been difficult for the United States because it’s an ideological nation. It believes it is exceptional and all that. And I think you see some of that in the Trump attitude. I think the point you made about Europe is the principal place where I would say there was a lesson to learn, that we had gotten too complacent about the Western Alliance, and we had gotten too complacent about Europe’s foreign policy dysfunctions. And I think in some ways, Trump’s willingness to say the I think the unthinkable and say the unsayable like he’s said, for example, maybe we should make a deal with Iran. He went in his first term and tried to make a deal with Kim Jong Un. I those things I actually do find refreshing because why not try to see if there’s a way you could make a deal with Kim Jong Un. Why not see if there’s a way. I think all these things are low probabilities of success, but there is something to be said for of thinking out of the box or in some way or the other. I feel like with Trump, the danger is not the thinking out of the box part. The danger is he doesn’t value that the box we created is a pretty special box, and it’s been very hard in human history to find an era of peace and prosperity and great power, stability of the kind we have been able to create. So before we have this kind of Maoist nihilism and say, let’s burn the whole thing down and see where it goes. Let’s appreciate the box. How does the destruction of USAID fit into this in one way or another. I think it’s been because that got filed under Doge, I think has been treated as less of a foreign policy move than it actually is. They seem to have successfully continued to keep the money pretty cut off in a lot of cases, even in places where say, Marco Rubio seemed to want PEPFAR funding, which is funding for HIV/AIDS medication, particularly in Africa, turned on. And it seems to have not really turned back on. Is this foreign policy. Is this just a kind of internal jihadism against what they see as the liberal nonprofit industrial complex. What do you. What is the import of what they’ve done to USAID and what is to the best you believe they have it or the rationale for it. So I’ve thought about this a lot, because why would you choose usaid? It’s 1 percent of the federal budget. If you were able to change some of the uploading mechanisms in Medicare Advantage, you’d probably save more money than in reforming USAID. Medicare is $1 trillion, Social Security is a trillion and a half dollars. USAID is about $40 billion. And they don’t seem to be reforming it. They’re annihilating it. So I think what happened is if there’s thought behind it, there must have been Musk. And companies said, what is the least popular form of spending that the US does. And Marco Rubio alluded to this. It’s obviously foreign aid. You’re sending money to foreigners. People feel like, why shouldn’t we be spending it at home. It’s easy. So I think that was the idea. Let’s go for an easy win. Let’s go for something where particularly our base, the megabase. And most Americans in general think this is a waste of government spending. And they went at it with a brutality. I think to send a signal to other government agencies don’t block us. This is how this is what will happen to you if you try to in some way or the other, do an end run around what we’re doing. The look, the effect to my mind is tragic because there’s this geopolitical argument that this is the soft power of the United States. We go into these countries and people think, well of America. Now the Chinese are going to go in and the Russians are going to go in. I believe all that. But I think it’s I wouldn’t it’s put it in those competitive terms to sell it and I get it. But, it’s been one of the wonderful things that the United States has done in the world. Foreign aid barely existed before 1945. It’s again one of these revolutions of foreign policy that America in large part initiated. And I think it is largely the impulse comes from the idea we’re the richest country in the history of the world. It would it’s also be a great thing for us to be the most generous country in the history of the world 4 out of every 10 humanitarian dollars spent in the world are spent by the United States, and most of USAID’s budget is food and medicine. You’re literally feeding the hungry. You’re clothing sick people. I’ve seen this on the ground. The people who do work at USAID, these are people who move to Mozambique or Ghana to learn how to get water filtration systems in there. They’re getting paid 60, $70,000 a year. They’re not doing it for the money. They’re not doing it for the glory. They’re doing it because they believe that the United States can have a kind of positive impact on the world. And to see the agency gutted, the funding pulled. And these people demeaned and demonized, called a criminal enterprise. It’s so sad. I grew up in India, and I saw so much of the USAID funding, which was exactly the kind of stuff that Doge demonizes, which was to say, I mean, there was a program where they would show old American movies at the US. Consulate, and a whole bunch of us would go there. And I remember, I mean, I went to I saw it’s a wonderful life and movies like that. And you know what it did have it made me fall in love with America. It made I think that’s always been America’s great strength, which is that it’s the Chinese who do these deals with an African country and with the dictator and say, we’ll build you a dam. And in return for that, here’s what we want. And by the way, you can take 10 percent what American soft power has been. We let the world know who we are. We let the world know that we’re a big, open, generous country. And some of that is funding plays and movies, and some of it is, and most of it is food and medicine. And I was always a matter of great pride to me that the United States did that. And it’s very sad that, for now at least, gone away. I think it also gets to what is America first. And one of the things that I actually think it is a total devaluing of non-American lives. We were talking you were saying a minute ago how USAID is being Musk calls it. What was it, a ball of worms. It’s like no worms in the Apple, just a ball of worms. So that’s a horrible thing to say about I know people who work in aid like you do. Musk is a billionaire who Jets around the world fathering children with Lord knows how many women and tweeting sending missives on X 300 times a day. And these people who went to amazing schools go work on, marginally improving economic growth by making the textile sector more efficient in Ghana. So it just it appalls me. But at least the Americans who are working for USAID exist in the calculus the administration hates them and wants to demonize them and wants them to go to the private sector where they’ll be more productive. But the kids who the children who needed PEPFAR funding the antiretrovirals from PEPFAR. They don’t exist in the conversation here at all. And it’s always, I think, a difficult thing from the perspective of a nation, right, which does have a preference for its own citizens. Like, how should you think about an economic migrant who’s any individual economic migrants. Life would be much better off if they could come to the US. And for reasons of stability and the economy, you can’t let everybody who would like to come to the US and how do you value that. It’s a really hard question. And we don’t have I think, very good answers. And we tack forward and backward. How do you value like people we say, from dying of malnutrition. The answers have been complex, not always really debated, but somewhat. We value those lives somewhat. It’s not how we think about Americans, but it’s not nothing. And I kind think one of the messages here is it’s nothing like the value of foreign lives is nothing. The value of people in the West Bank whose land is going to be annexed is nothing our care about. The Ukrainians is nothing, right. And I think that’s some of the message of it, too, particularly domestically, that USAID was about spending American money to not really serve our interests. First and foremost, I think you’re right to say that when we say it’s really about our soft power, not truly telling the truth anymore. It’s about expressing our values, which is that other Lives Matter. And practically, if those cost effective ways we can help them, we should. And the message here is they don’t and we shouldn’t. I think that one of the ironies here is that I do believe, as you do, that it was American aid was never entirely about geopolitics and geostrategy. Part of it, I think, came out of a kind of deep, high Protestant impulse of saving the world. And I think it is one of the central messages of Christianity that all human beings are equal in the eyes of God and it is incumbent on the rich to look after the poor. I mean, I’ve always been struck by the if you read the Sermon on the Mount, if you read Paul’s letter to the Galatians, it is that’s what Christianity is about. It’s not if you hear JD Vance’s version of it. Which is to me is bizarre. And yet here you have this Christian administration neglecting what strikes me as the central tenets of Christianity, which are be nice to poor people, help people who are in need the good Samaritan, all that stuff. And this was our expression of it for every $100 the federal government spent, we were saying, we’re going to give a to clothe the naked and feed the hungry. And I would have been, look, I am somebody who believes you could have targeted a bunch of those dollars better. I would have moved lot to public health, to cash transfers. If you want to say we shouldn’t be doing plays, fine. We can have that debate. Actually, auditing USAID would have been fine with me. That’s why I think the message was that they didn’t do that. I’ve heard people. And just to push back, USAID was audited 60 times in the last year. It is you could have audited from their perspective. You could have. And as by the way, that play was not a USAID spend. It was an American ambassador who decided to help to fund a cultural festival in Ireland. So much of this is Yes, there’s been a lot of bullshit here, but it is I know a lot of people who work in foreign aid, and a lot of people who work in making foreign aid more effective. And there is a big bureaucracy and there is waste, no question about it. And not only and I don’t even mean waste, I actually mean that from their perspective, I think it would be reasonable for a Republican administration to come in and say, too much of this is cultural, too much. I want this money spent differently. Fine I’ve heard people say, well, what Dodge is really doing is zero based budgeting. We’re just making everything rejustify itself. Well, then you would have it rejustify itself based on some set of measures. Does it achieve this. You dollars per life saved, right. I know people who spend all their days trying to figure out how many dollars does it take to save a life here, and they’re not doing any of that. That to me was actually the message. They didn’t want USAID audited because actually a lot of things sound great. If you audited USAID, even from any kind of humanitarian perspective, they could come up with, PEPFAR is an amazing program. It was that the expression of values was the point there, and the expression of values of Trump and America first is that we are the only ones who count. It’s why JD Vance’s riff that Christianity has this understanding of this intense partiality of favor. It’s our family and our neighbors and our community and out and out and out and out till you have basically no responsibility to the world. And as an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean hate people from outside of your own borders. But there’s this old school, and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way, that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. It’s fine for that to be your politics, but to pretend that’s your religion. Well, and he was corrected by Pope. Yes And then. Yes When the Pope has to come in personally, in his frail health before he ended up in the hospital for double pneumonia to say, no, wait, you just converted to Catholicism. And as the head Catholic, let me tell you, that’s not how we think about it a more humble person might have rethought some things. You’ve talked a lot about what it took to build the International system that we can now take for granted, or that we got to the point where we felt we could take it for granted. And I think about when I read a lot of history, what it took to get to the point that we actually thought lives of individual people around the world had some value. They weren’t just pawns that their destruction was meaningful, because I look at a lot of history, and I don’t think people put a very heavy value on life, right. If you had to wipe a bunch of people out to get what you wanted, you did. The poor suffered what they must. And with Trump, I see a return to that moral framework, among other things. And you can make a lot of criticisms of Democrats or Republicans, of George W Bush, of Joe Biden. Look at the destruction visited upon the Gazans in the past year. But there was at least some framework that existed that you could yell, hypocrite. How dare you look at what you said before and what you’re allowing now. And I think part of their foreign policy is the destruction of that framework entirely, where there’s nothing you could say hypocrite of. They’ve been perfectly clear. They don’t care. I mean, that way it’s very unchristian. It’s very, very great powers of the 19th century. And if you’re not somebody who’s big enough to be written about in the history books, there’s just not value to what you represent. Can just be used as a pawn or taken off the board if you just happen to be in the way. Yeah, if you think about the mood now, is this kind of macho realism where Trump is about doing deals. We don’t worry about all these values. We’re just going to do what’s best for America. We’re going to use our surplus power. All of that evokes this kind of 19th century realpolitik. And what people forget about that world it was a world of constant war, massive human rights abuses. The way that the rich countries thought about poor countries then was let’s colonize them, let’s exploit them, let’s enslave their people. There’s something weird about forgetting what that world entailed and forgetting how important it was that we had this revolution in international affairs over the last century where we’ve moved to a completely different place. And to my mind, one of the sad ironies about all this is that the country that did more than any other country to effect that revolution, beginning with Woodrow Wilson, is the one now undermining it. If you had told me, who’s going to undermine the open international system, the liberal international order, in 10 or 15 years ago, I would have said, oh, it’s going to be the rise of China, or it’s going to be the rogue actions of Russia, or it’s going to be the Iranians. No, it turns out to be the United States of America that turns its back on its own creation. I think that’s the place to end. So as our final question, then, what are three books you would recommend to the audience. So I was thinking about it, and one of them, I think, would be Robert Kagan’s book “The Jungle Grows Back,” which is a short book that tries to explain the nature of this world that America built and how its erosion. And decay will result in the jungle growing back. The jungle of realpolitik, war, poverty, all the things that existed before. The second would be, if you want to get a feel for 19, 18th century diplomacy and its ups and Downs, Henry Kissinger wrote a wonderful kind of history called “Diplomacy.” And it begins in the 17th century, and it goes all the way to the 1970s, 80s, as I recall. The third would be, again, thinking about this world America built. If you want a kind of a wonderful biographical lens into it, Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas wrote a book called “The Wise Men.” And it was a story of six people who were instrumental in building the post-world War Ii American order. So for all those of you who are fans of Walter Isaacson, this was actually his very first biography. He wrote it with one of his closest friends, Evan Thomas. They were both editors at time. It’s a wonderful read. It’s my review of that book for an obscure publication called the American scholar is my first published piece in the world, so I have a particular affection for it. Fareed Zakaria, Thank you very much. Good to be here. Ezra

 

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The journalist Fareed Zakaria discusses the worldview emerging from Trump’s foreign policy decisions regarding Ukraine, Gaza, China and beyond.CreditCredit...The New York Times

The Dark Heart of Trump’s Foreign Policy​

The journalist Fareed Zakaria discusses the worldview emerging from Trump’s foreign policy decisions regarding Ukraine, Gaza, China and beyond.


This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
What is the Donald Trump doctrine? What is Donald Trump’s foreign policy?
I think the place to begin to try to untangle what we’ve actually seen is to listen to the way Trump and Vice President JD Vance speak about our allies.

Archived clip of Donald Trump: I’ve had very good talks with Putin, and I’ve had not such good talks with Ukraine. They don’t have any cards, but they play it tough.

Archived clip of JD Vance: The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America.

Archived clip of Donald Trump: I mean, look, let’s be honest: The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it, but now I’m president.

Something is new here. The Trump doctrine that we’ve seen in the first month of this presidency is going to reshape the world much more fundamentally than Trump did in the four years of his first term. That’s in part because of who is around him now — JD Vance and Elon Musk, instead of the foreign policy establishment.
So I wanted to have a bigger picture conversation about what this Trump doctrine is. I’m joined today by Fareed Zakaria, the host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN, a Washington Post columnist and the author of the best-selling book, “Age of Revolutions.”
This episode contains strong language.
Ezra Klein: Fareed Zakaria, welcome back to the show.
Fareed Zakaria: Always a pleasure, Ezra.



To the extent you feel you can define it, what’s the Trump doctrine?
Part of the problem with Trump is that he is so mercurial. He’s so idiosyncratic that, just when you think you figured out the Trump doctrine, he goes and says something that kind of sounds like the opposite of the Trump doctrine.
But I do think that there is one coherent worldview that Trump seems to espouse and has espoused for a long time. The first ad he took out when he was a real estate developer was in 1987. It was an ad about how Japan was ripping us off economically and Europe was ripping us off by free-riding on security. And what that represents, fundamentally, is a rejection of the open international system that the United States and Europe have built over the last eight decades.
If you think about it for a minute, the open international system really is a remarkable achievement. You go back to international relations before 1945, and it’s just constant war, mercantilism, protectionism. There are two Yale scholars who tabulated that in the hundred years before World War II, there were about 150 territorial conquests — aggression, taking of territory, legitimization of that territory. Since 1945, there have been practically none.
You have an open international economy. You have free trade. You have rules on all kinds of things like trade, travel and patents. There’s a huge area of international cooperation that people don’t think about but that happens all the time, every day — when you fly, when goods go from one place to another.
And what Trump has taken away from that whole world is: The U.S. has been the sucker. The U.S. has been the country that has had to underwrite it. The U.S. is the country that has opened itself up to the world, and everyone takes advantage of the U.S.

​

I don’t know if he wants to tear the international order down, but he wants to seriously renegotiate or perhaps even redo that system.
Let me try to reflect what Trump’s people tell me. There is this, as people call it, rules-based international order. And the thing that people like Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan and Fareed Zakaria say is that America benefits from that order — and benefits from being part of that order.
There has long been a critique from the left that America, in fact, dominates that order and doesn’t play by its rules. We break international law. We do the things we want to do and then use those rules on others when we don’t like what they’re doing.
But the critique from Trump is that’s not true: Of every country, America, as the strongest, is harmed the most by these restraints, rules and laws. Because we have so much leverage we could be using. We could slap tariffs on anybody for any reason and get them to do what we want. We have the strongest military of all the militaries. Everybody wants to be on our side, and everybody fears being on our bad side.
And what Trump is doing is systematically searching out the strength America has — the ways we can wield our weight and leverage. He’s untying our hands from behind our back.



There is a certain truth to that. The United States does have enormous power. And by the way, they’re even right about the fact that the United States is more open to, for example, the world’s goods and services than the world is to ours. The United States has long practiced a kind of asymmetrical free trade.
After World War II, we decided we would open up our markets to Europe and East Asia, to Japan and South Korea. And the reason we did that was we were trying to build an international system where everyone benefited, where there really wasn’t that feeling of a beggar-thy-neighbor, zero-sum game, where everyone went into a competitive spiral, which then ended up in nationalism and war.
We were trying to build something different. And we thought: We can be a little generous here. Let’s let everyone grow, and we’ll do fine in the process.
And of course, the data is overwhelming. Yes, Europe, Japan, South Korea and places like that grew. But the United States absolutely dominated the world. Because it’s a classic positive-sum game. We created a much larger global economy — much larger trading system, huge capital flows — and we were at the center of it.
The dollar was the reserve currency of the world, which alone gives us incredible advantages. We’re the only country that doesn’t have to worry that much about debt and deficits, because we know that, at the end of the day, the dollar is the reserve currency.
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And my feeling is, if you take that system and say: OK, we’re going to look at each bilateral relationship and see if we can squeeze this country for a slightly better deal, you probably will get a better deal. But two things will happen: The first thing is you will end up fracturing your alliances. Because the people with whom you have the most leverage are your allies.
We have more leverage with Canada than we have with Russia because Canada depends on us for security. Canada trades with us a lot. Its economy is intricately tied to the U.S. economy.
So you can bully Canada. But you can’t really bully Russia that much because we don’t do much trade with them. You can’t bully China. It’s another vast continental economy that can survive just fine.
So the result of the Trump doctrine in action has been a war on America’s allies. But the second more important part is: Yes, you’ll gain a little bit here and there by getting slightly better tariff deals. And just so people understand, tariffs in the industrialized world are around 3 percent. They’re very low. So we’re not getting penalized in any large way. You can cherry-pick a few examples to the contrary. But mostly, among liberal, democratic states, it’s a free-trade world.
And what you will do, by squeezing each of these individual countries, humiliating them, forcing them to accept renegotiation of terms, is that you lose the relationships that you had built over eight decades, that created this extraordinary anchor of stability in the world, which was the Western alliance. And the gains are not that great.



Let’s talk about the tariffs for a minute. This is one of the places where the policy and practice has just seemed incoherent to me.
There were different goals that have been articulated for tariffs. One is you impose significant steady tariffs for a long period of time because you’re trying to make manufacturers make different decisions about where to locate factories. You’re trying to onshore supply chains. To do that, you have to have these companies and corporations expecting tariffs for quite a while, and then you hope that they will respond to those tariffs by insourcing into America.
Another is that we’re going to use the tariffs to raise a lot of revenue. That, too, requires the imposition, over a long period of time, of significant tariffs. Another is we’re just going to bully small nations — and just bully anybody we might feel like bullying — that the tariffs are an all-purpose tool to get other countries to do anything we want them to do. We’ve sort of been using the tariffs that way, but not for very significant concessions.
They may be about to reintroduce tariffs to Canada and Mexico, so we’ll see where we are in a couple of weeks — but what are they doing, man?
So there are two things that I think are going on. One is that Trump, if he has a worldview, it’s that he’s a protectionist. He’s always felt that you want to protect American industries — the foreigners come in and they take advantage of us, etc.



The second is that — and this I think he discovered as president — the president has incredible power in the area of tariffs. Technically, it’s meant to be Congress that imposes tariffs. But long ago, Congress delegated that power to the president.
And I think Trump loves that. It is an extraordinary unilateral exercise of huge American power. The power to say: I will just block you from being able to participate in the American market. And you saw him do that in the case of the Colombian president.
So I think he’s not sure. On the one hand, he loves wielding this weapon. On the other hand, he is something of a protectionist. But as you say, he notices that markets don’t seem to like it.
So where will it all end up? My gut is that what happens is: As I said, tariffs in the industrialized world have been about 3 percent. If you assume all of Trump’s tariffs are actually put in place, I think it goes up to about 6 percent. And if that stays — which is a big if — other countries will all retaliate.
This is an area where I think we do live in a — it’s not even a bipolar world, it’s a tripolar world. The Europeans and the Chinese are very powerful. And the Europeans on this issue speak with one voice. So they will put on reciprocal tariffs. The Chinese will put on reciprocal tariffs. And we end up in a world with more tariffs, more protection.



Look, I’m an old-fashioned free trader. I think the whole thing is a disaster. I think that it is a complete misreading of the last 30 or 40 years of economics. JD Vance, when he was in Germany, in Europe, one of the few backhanded compliments he paid to Germany was: At least the Germans didn’t go along with this Washington consensus nonsense, and they protected their manufacturing.
Which is partly true. They didn’t protect it through tariffs, by the way. They protected it by just having very strong apprenticeship programs and what we would call community-college-type stuff. But look at where Germany is. Germany, the third- or fourth-largest economy in the world, is stuck in the second industrial revolution. What do they make? Cars, chemicals, machine tools. They don’t have any industry in the digital economy.
The entire digital economy is dominated by the U.S. Why is that? Because we allowed ourselves to transition to where the frontiers of the economy were. This whole idea of trying to hold on to the 19th century or the 1920s — it doesn’t work. It’s incredibly expensive. Nobody has been able to do it. Manufacturing employment today, after Donald Trump’s four years and Joe Biden’s four years, is the same as it was roughly 10 or 15 years ago.
So I think that this whole obsession is fundamentally misconceived. What we should do is much more redistribution so the people who lose out in these periods of technological change are taken care of. But the idea that we can go back to 1950 is just nuts.
To me, this gets to one of the real obfuscations of the Trump presidency, of MAGA as a movement. There are a lot of conversations right now that have a term in them that is ill-defined. Let’s call it “efficiency.”



What is the Department of Government Efficiency about? Efficiency of what? Toward what? Efficiency requires some other defined ends to be a coherent goal.
But here, too: What is “America First”? What would it mean for that to be successful? What are we looking like?
The trade deficit is going to be the main output of our foreign policy — which, by the way, he’s not consistent on in any way. He was talking the other day about building a renewed Keystone XL pipeline to Canada. But if we start importing a bunch of Canadian oil, that’s going to increase the trade deficit with Canada.
Is it manufacturing employment that we’re supposed to be targeting here? If “America First” was working, it would be manufacturing. Is it G.D.P. growth?
I haven’t heard them describe what this new golden age of American strength is. Is it median wages for men? They certainly have not articulated a coherent view of American power or success.



Is America stronger if AfD takes over Germany? Why?
I’m curious how you think about this. Do you feel like you know what they’re trying to achieve?
I would guess that “America First” for Trump and for many of his followers — and I wouldn’t put some of the ideologists of MAGA in the same category — but I think for Trump, it’s the idea that the United States has been constrained for too long by globalism, by worrying about the international environment, by worrying about all these alliances. The U.S. is constrained by these international organizations. And again, we’ve been the sucker. And what “America First” means is we’re going to break through all that [expletive] and we’re just going to do what’s good for America.
But what is left undefined, as you’re saying, is: Well, what is good for America? Why would it be good for America to break apart the international trading system? Why would it be good for America to break apart this world?
So that part, I think, is undefined. But you can see the impulse and what the attraction is to a lot of people who have always felt that the United States is run by this elite cabal of overeducated urban liberals in places like New York and Washington who have been selling America out.
If you think of the 1950s, this was basically the McCarthy attack in many ways. So in some ways, it’s a hearkening back to that idea.

 

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A pretty significant difference between Trump’s first term and his second is the intensity of his fascination with territorial expansion now.


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I think Trump and the people around him believe the norms of the world turned against territorial expansion in a way that was bad for America. In the 19th century, America expanded; other countries did, too. We are still powerful, and there are things we should want: Canada should be the 51st state — or at least it should act like a vassal state of America. If we want Greenland, we should have it.


Trump fundamentally wants the landmass of America to be larger when he leaves office than when he came in. How have you taken Trump’s renewed interest in gaining territory?


Yes. I think you have it exactly right. And he has a kind of fascination, I think, not just with America in the 19th century but also in the geopolitics of the 19th century, to the extent that I think he understands it, which is: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must” — to quote Thucydides.


The idea that we are powerful and we should be unconstrained — it’s very familiar in a sense. That’s what the Chinese foreign minister said at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. He was telling I think the Philippines or Singapore: You’ve got to understand, we are big and powerful, and you are not. We are going to tell you what to do.





Obviously it is the way Putin views the world. That’s why I think Trump has a much more benign view of Putin’s desire to have a sphere of influence, a kind of a group of satellite states around him, including Ukraine.


He has a much more benign view, I think, of Chinese expansionism. He very rarely criticizes it. I can’t remember him ever doing it. So then he looks at it and says: Well, the United States should similarly have that kind of sense of the Monroe Doctrine, the Western Hemisphere.


Again, to me, it misses the central point about the transformation of the international system after World War II, which is that you don’t need territory to become rich, powerful and incredibly effective in the world. Look at South Korea. South Korea has — I forget now — 15 times the per capita gross domestic product of North Korea. Look at tiny Israel, which is now essentially an advanced industrial country on a tiny spit of land.


Think about all the richest and most powerful countries in the world. Land acquisition has almost nothing to do with it. You know who has a lot of land? Russia.


It feels to me like a kind of bizarre, anachronistic way to look at the world. But I agree with you, that is the way Trump is thinking about it. You could get whatever minerals you wanted to get out of Greenland by just signing a couple of deals with them. You don’t actually need to own it. You could redo the Panama Canal treaty. And it would be much easier, by the way, to let the Panamanians run it — and just renegotiate with terms you like.





Part of it is this old-fashioned view. But I do think, at the end of the day, there’s a strong element of narcissism that infuses everything that Trump does. He loves the idea that he would be able to put his stamp on history by saying: Trump added Greenland or something like that to the United States. The physical expansion of America would be a great legacy to Trump.


You mentioned Ukraine and Russia. We’re speaking during the week when all that is being negotiated. Today is Wednesday. How would you describe what Trump’s policy toward Ukraine is now?


Again, it’s almost impossible to have a clear through line, because his stance has moved so much. He had a post in which he said: Putin better realize this war has ruined his country. He better settle. And if he doesn’t, we’re going to put additional sanctions and his favorite weapon tariffs on Russia.


His post seemed to suggest that he understood that the principal obstacle to a peace deal was not Zelensky but Putin.


But Trump has shifted entirely and enormously in the last few weeks. He has called Zelensky a dictator. He said Zelensky started the war. All that stuff — including the United Nations resolution where the United States sided with Russia, North Korea and Belarus.





You could argue that, again, in Trump’s case, so much of it is personal. He doesn’t like Zelensky.


But if you step back from that, I think that Trump in his heart believes that Russia has legitimate claims over Ukraine and so has a much softer line on Russia. I think he thinks that the Russians should keep the territory they’ve acquired. He thinks Ukraine should not be a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He thinks that maybe Ukraine should have a kind of neutrality in foreign policy. These are all essentially the Russian demands.


There’s no way to read his mind, but my sense from listening to him and watching him is Trump thinks all those Russian claims are broadly legitimate.


Let me push on this. You know all this much better than I do. But I don’t think he thinks anything about Ukraine and Russia — or whose claims are legitimate.


I think he thinks Ukraine is worthless to the U.S. And somebody at some point persuaded him there are mineral rights there. And he thinks there is value for the U.S. economy and for Trump personally to have access and good relations to Russia. And there is some part of him that genuinely doesn’t understand why we give an [expletive] about Ukraine — as opposed to cutting a deal with Putin and getting something out of that transaction.


Yes. If you think about the countries and the leaders he likes, it’s either the country is very strong or the leader is very strong: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Viktor Orban, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.





Those are the people he talks about with respect. The more muddled, compromised weaker leaders of coalition governments in Europe he finds feckless and uninteresting.


I think he likes these more old-fashioned countries. I’ve thought about this once, and I don’t know if it’s a reasonable point to make. But the countries he seems fascinated by and respects are countries that you could imagine having lots of Trump Towers.


The countries he doesn’t like — you couldn’t imagine a Trump Tower in Europe, for example.


But in that way, is he picking up on something real? You see this a bit with JD Vance, who is going out of his way to alienate the European governments at the moment. America is weighing in on behalf of the Alternative for Germany party in Germany.


The Trump administration’s view is that there are regimes that they have an affinity with, and the proper nature of American alliance isn’t some unchanging alliance between America and Europe because we’re all “liberal democracies.” Trump doesn’t want us to be a liberal democracy.


The proper nature is between regimes of affinity. And in that way, Putin sees the world more like Trump than Keir Starmer in the United Kingdom. Erdogan sees the world more like Trump does than Justin Trudeau does.





The nature of the alliances they are seeking is the nature of regimes that are like them. Regimes could actually have a genuine ideological affinity for who Trump is, what he wants and the world that he wants to see.


I think you’re raising something very important. Part of what’s going on here, this new dynamic in international relations we’re watching, is that it’s not all about power. It’s about ideology.


If you think about what Putin is reacting to in the rise and hegemony of the West after the collapse of Communism, some of it is Western power and the expansion of NATO. But a lot of what Putin has been obsessed with has been the expansion of Western liberal ideas and ideology.


The things that he talks so much about are the rise of multiculturalism in the West, the rise of a kind of libertine gender ideology, the idea of gender fluidity — he even weighed in on the J.K. Rowling controversy. These issues are central to the way that Putin thinks about Russian power and the power of his regime. So he’s viewed the rising tide and the spreading of Western liberal ideas as much of a threat as the expansion of NATO.


Notice that when he really reacted with force against Georgia in 2008 and then against Ukraine in 2014, in both cases, the issue was not actually that these countries were about to join NATO. They were not. It’s that they were going to join the European Union — or at least wanted to have better relations with the European Union.





What does the European Union represent? It represents a Western-style, capitalist, liberal democracy. He doesn’t want to be surrounded by those kinds of countries. He wants to be surrounded by countries like Belarus and Kazakhstan, quasi-democratic, quasi-authoritarian, somewhat kleptocratic regimes that he can control and manipulate.


If you listen to Xi Jinping, a lot of the things he’s talked about are the dangers of too much Westernization, too much liberalism. The Chinese have not just cracked down on the private sector, they’ve cracked down on what they called the effeminacy of men. Xi has talked about the virtues of motherhood, and women going back to raising families. So again, he views this rising tide of Western liberalism as much a threat as Western hard power.


And the irony is Trump and Vance agree with Xi and Putin. So for the first time now, you have in America a party or an ideology that says: Yes, that’s right.


And in a strange sense — and Steve Bannon would explicitly say this — our real ally should be Russia. And that becomes the new alliance system. Now that takes it further than where we are right now. But it’s those inclinations —


But that’s, I think, where this is really going. And the way you see it is in Vance and Musk.


In Trump’s first term, Trump is surrounded, particularly on the national security and foreign policy side, by members of the traditional Republican establishment — H.R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pence. And none of them want this move. This is not why John Kelly got into politics. So it doesn’t really happen. What there is instead are these weird moments in interviews and elsewhere where Trump seems to talk about Putin with real affection in a way that he never talks about anybody else in Europe.





Fast-forward, you have Trump’s second term, in which he is surrounded by people who have been spending the intervening years building the ideology for what Trump intuitively was moving toward. It’s not a complete purge in the Republican Party, but what is left is too weak — even if the Senate Republicans don’t love it in every instance.


So now you see that the war between autocracy as an ideological phenomenon and liberal democracy as an ideological phenomenon isn’t now between America and Europe and these other countries. It’s inside America, too.


And now, these people who are more framework oriented are actively weighing in, as Elon Musk did on behalf of the AfD in Germany. JD Vance going to the Munich Security Conference and telling the Europeans that the great security threat is the way they run their governments — not Russia, not climate change, but the temperament and the policy of European liberalism.


Many years ago, I wrote an article called “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy” in Foreign Affairs. I was trying to describe this phenomenon of countries that, with pluralities, had elected leaders who then systematically degraded the rule of law and individual rights and individual liberties.


And of course, I meant it as a term of condemnation. Viktor Orban gave a speech a few years after he came to power. He didn’t quote me, but he cited the phrase “illiberal democracy” and said: People have talked about illiberal democracy. That is what we want to achieve. That is our goal. We want to be an illiberal democracy because we don’t believe in the tenets of Western liberalism.





And I think that is where some impulses of the Trump administration go. Now I do want to say there are two possibilities, and you have outlined them yourself.


When you first started the conversation, you said the Trump people told you: Look, we just want to use unused American power and get a better deal within this framework that we’ve built up. We’re OK with the liberal international system. We just think we got screwed.


So that’s one theory of where Trump is going. And I actually had a conversation with a very senior Republican this week who was hoping — and, I would say, was arguing — that that’s where Trump is going: Yes, there’s a lot of noise. It’s very messy. He negotiates out in the open in ways that you never would by demeaning Zelensky. But what he’s trying to do is to get a better deal.


But then there’s the second view, which is the one we’ve just been talking about, which is: No, no, no, he’s not trying to get a better deal. He is trying to systematically remake the international system.


There was a period in the 1870s and 1880s when the three great conservative monarchs of Europe — the Russians, the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans — got together and created a Three Emperors’ League. It was called the Dreikaiserbund.





They got together because they feared the rise of liberalism in Europe after the revolutions of 1848. It was meant to be these three conservative monarchs holding back the tide of liberalism.


And to a certain extent you wonder whether, for some of the people involved here, that is the way they’re thinking about it: We and Putin — and maybe even Orban and Erdogan and Xi — we need to hold back all this godless, reckless liberty and liberalism that is engulfing the world.


I do think there’s a “Why not both?” to this. Which is that, as you were saying at the top of the show, it is very hard to say anything definitive about Donald Trump. Because he is actually flexible. He starts in one place and ends in another.


He says we’re going to annex Gaza and use it to build hotels, but he also seems perfectly happy with the situation where the Arab League steps up. He says he wants to slap huge tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but he also seems happy if they just give him some concessions.


Two things are happening at once: He takes deals. He doesn’t want a lot of friction. He doesn’t want markets to freak out. He doesn’t want to be committing U.S. troops in places where they’re not wanted. Trump has a real sense that the tolerance of the American people for pain and bad headlines is low.





And on the other hand, there is an erosion to what he is doing. He is pushing and pushing and pushing, and the rocks slowly give way. So even as he’s taking these deals, he’s also alienating the Europeans and changing the way people think about America. Maybe he cuts the deal on minerals with Ukraine. But he has also signaled to Moscow that he’s open for a transaction.


So even if he doesn’t go all the way in the first deal, we’re a month into a second term, and he’s sending signals to every other player on the field to reimagine their strategies.


For some, that’s going to mean reimagining their strategy to create countermeasures to the U.S. I think you’re seeing that among the Europeans.


For some, that is going to mean reimagining their strategies, offerings and positioning to come closer to the U.S., to give Trump a deal that he can sell here. I think that’s the case for Putin. And that’s the case, potentially, for China — somewhat to my surprise, given Trump’s historic feeling that China is going to destroy the American economy.


This game will be repeated again and again. And by the end of it, the entire system is in a very different place. Not a place you could have gotten it into in one month, but a place you could definitely get into in four years.





I think NATO has essentially been eroded already. Because what is NATO? NATO is not the buildings or the treaty. NATO is something very simple. It is the question: Will the United States of America come to the defense of a small European country if attacked by Russia?


And I think the events of the last few weeks — I can tell you, having talked to many Europeans — have left the Europeans in no doubt that if Lithuania were attacked tomorrow by Russia, there is almost no chance that Donald Trump would defend Lithuania. So that means they start asking themselves: What is this new world we’re living in?


This is really historic — the guy who is going to become the chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, has said that the most urgent task for Europe now is to begin a step-by-step independence from the United States, because the United States, or at least Donald Trump, has shown themselves to be indifferent to the fate of Europe. That is seismic — for America’s most important ally in Europe to say that their principal strategic task now is to find a strategy of independence away from the United States. You’re going to see other countries do variations of that. And in some cases, those countries will probably be privately hedging in a way that they can’t publicly admit.


The one part I don’t agree on with you is: I think there are countries that are going to do deals with America. Everyone is going to be wary of a long-term relationship because they realize that, certainly in this new world, those don’t mean that much.


I was in Australia last December, and I met with a senior official there who said to me: We’re very happy to be in this closer relationship with the United States. We’re delighted that you’re sharing your nuclear technology with us — the nuclear submarine deal. But the big question we wonder about is: We have now put ourselves in a structurally confrontational role vis-à-vis our principal trading partner, China. We didn’t have to do that. China is a long way away. We were happily trading with them. We hope to continue to do that. But it has completely changed the relationship we have with China. That’s OK if America has our back. But if in a few years you decide to cut a deal with China, we will have made a generational strategic error.





And I think that is what’s going to be on every country’s mind — about getting close to the United States in the long term. And that’s why I say these alliances took eight decades to build.


Let me take the other side of this. What are the chances that Trump is exactly what Europe needs right now? That Europe is a mess. That it has not invested nearly enough in its defense for decades. It has been watching its productivity numbers functionally collapse. It is overregulated, as JD Vance was saying, and that is one reason it has almost no strong technology companies right now. That Europe was not getting stronger under Joe Biden’s protective umbrella. We’ve been watching Europe weaken. We have been encouraging a kind of dependence from it.


And I guess I’m sounding like the senior Republican you were talking to, but I’ve heard this, and I don’t think it’s crazy: You may not ideologically like why Donald Trump is doing this, but if the end result of it is a more independent Europe that spends more on defense and takes its own economic revitalization more seriously, that would be good for all parties.


And it is frankly unlikely that Putin, when he’s trying to build better relations with America, is going to invade a bunch of other countries and embarrass Donald Trump. So the Moscow problem is not that big of a problem in the near term. And a stronger Europe would be good for deterring Russia in the long run — and was not going to happen under Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.


I broadly agree with what you’re saying — that Europe needed a kick in the pants. And interestingly, the threat from Russia has turned out not to be big enough to get Europe energized —





Because of us. It could only not be big enough because of us.


And the threat of the abandonment of the United States is actually more significant than the threat of Russian aggression. So they will probably spend more. They will coordinate more on defense. Maybe they’ll even do more.


I think that the fundamental issue with productivity in Europe is much larger than the U.S. or Russia. Seeing where the total factor productivity rises in Europe over the next five years may be unrelated, but I do think they will coordinate more in defense. They’ll coordinate more in foreign policy. They’ll spend more.


What you will lose is they will be less deferential to the United States —


I think it might be bad for us.


Right. I was about to say we had a system where we ran the world because the European Union essentially did exactly what we wanted them to and was a satellite of the United States. So we would be experimenting with a different system.


Yes, the Europeans will spend more. It is worth pointing out that there was a reason we wanted to denationalize the foreign and defense policies of countries like Germany. And Germany, in particular, trapped in the center of Europe, has always had a difficult time having a kind of sensible, moderate foreign policy. So there were great virtues to saying to the Germans: You know what, don’t worry so much about your security. We’ll take care of it. For the last hundred years, when you’ve worried about it, things haven’t turned out so well. And I think Germany is a completely different country now. But it is taking us into a different world.





By the way, there will be no defense savings out of all this. The idea that the United States will be able to spend less because the Europeans are spending more misunderstands what our defense budget is about. We are the only global superpower trying to be engaged in every part of the world. This is a president who says: We should be in Gaza. We have to deter the Japanese. We need Greenland because we want to control the Arctic. And by the way, we need to be controlling the Panama Canal. That’s the way Trump conceives of America’s role. So there’s going to be no defense savings.


So at the end of the day, yes, it’s possible that we get a more independent Europe that spends more on defense. I think that I would prefer a kind of tough-love approach where there was actually some love.


Among the places where I am surprised by what policy is looking like and what the rhetoric coming out of the administration is like is China. What were we told he was going to do and going to think? That he’s going to come in and put a 65 percent tariff on all goods from China.


But nothing like that is happening. He’s been much more aggressive in some ways with threats of tariffs toward Europe, Canada and Mexico. He’s now begun talking about some kind of big deal with China where they would just buy more of our stuff, which is sort of like a deal he struck in the first term, even though they didn’t end up buying the stuff.


I would have told you that he actively wants a hostile relationship with China. And now he doesn’t seem to actively want a hostile relationship with China. It was Trump — or at least people in his administration — who initially came up with forcing the sell-off of TikTok. Now he’s the savior of TikTok.





How do you describe where the Trump administration seems to be or seems to be moving on China?


Again, with Trump, so much of it is personal. The reason he seems to have moved on TikTok is because he realized that there was a large group of people supporting him on TikTok. TikTok was a good platform for him to get his message out. And it’s possible sometimes with Trump that it’s as simple as that. He realized: TikTok is good for me, so I’m for it.


But I think that with China, you have always had this conflicting pressure. You saw it in Trump 1.0. He was hostile toward China in the campaign. He talked about massive tariffs against China. He comes in, and he invites Xi Jinping to Mar-a-Lago, and he’s dazzled by that. His grandchildren sing Chinese songs to Xi Jinping. And he talks about this beautiful chocolate cake he serves Xi. He likes the idea that he is sitting with the second most powerful person in the world and they have a relationship and they get on.


The whole Trump 1.0 on China was kind of a nothing because they put tariffs on, and somebody did a calculation that something like 95 percent of the revenues collected for the tariffs went to subsidies to American farmers to compensate them for the loss. So we didn’t even make any money off it, which Trump often talks about with tariffs.


This time around, I think he seems to be much less even rhetorically hostile toward China. My inclination is to go where you’re going. He wants a deal with China. He wants to have a better working relationship with China. I think to a large extent that could be a good thing. One of the things I worry about in the new world we’re going into is that China is embarking on a massive military buildup. China is probably going to quadruple the number of nuclear weapons it has in the next 10 years.


And to a certain extent, I understand China’s point of view, which is they’re the second richest country in the world. Why should they not have an arsenal that’s as big as Russia’s?














But it can be very destabilizing. That period when the Soviets expanded their nuclear arsenal in the late ’50s and ’60s, and the United States and the Soviets were going mano a mano, was a very unstable period. Think of the Berlin crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis. So to have a better working relationship with China in this period, I think, is a very good thing. And if, for whatever reason, Trump gets there, I’d be the first to applaud it.


How have you taken Trump’s attitude toward Israel and Gaza — his proposals, his appointments? How would you describe it?


I think what Trump represented for the Israelis was the most unqualified support that any American president was ever going to give to an Israeli prime minister. And the relationship is, obviously, very personal between Trump and Bibi.


As a result of that, he was able to get a cease-fire. Because in effect, it seems that his envoy told Bibi: You’re not going to get a better deal from Trump, so you better take this one. This was in the waning days of the Biden administration.


But I think that it’s also a kind of ideological affinity to Bibi-ism, if you will. If you notice in that U.N. resolution in which the United States absolutely bizarrely sided with Russia — against Ukraine, against almost every democratic country in the world — by basically not condemning the Russian aggression in Ukraine: The two unusual countries that went along with the U.S., Russia, North Korea and Belarus were Hungary and Israel.





What that tells you is that there is this ideological affinity that Trump feels with Bibi. They’re both wrongly persecuted by the liberal elites of their country, both representing the kind of silent majority in their minds, both believing in huge amounts of disruption, both tough guys. So, there’s a kind of personal and ideological connection that Trump has with Bibi’s Israel. And you can see it when you watchf them together.


The fear that the people I know who work on Middle East policy had about Donald Trump was that if he was elected, you would have an American president functionally supportive of Israeli annexation of the West Bank and possibly of Gaza. What they didn’t expect was for the American president to want to personally annex Gaza.


What do you think that proposal is? Do you understand where it came from? Do you have a sense of how much he would actually risk to make it happen? How have you read it?


We have tried to understand it. As with a lot of what Trump says, it does appear to have come, almost spontaneously.


My guess of what happened is that Bibi Netanyahu essentially expressed what has long been a right-wing fantasy in Israel, which is: If only we could clear these Palestinians out of Gaza, this would be a great place for us. It was a big mistake for us to leave. It’s an amazing piece of land. The wonders we could do with Gaza.





So it maybe came out of that. What it has done is it has, in some ways, given comfort to the extremists on both sides. Right-wing Israelis — and I mean people to the right of Netanyahu — say: You see, this was not a fantasy. This was something real. The president of the United States is now advocating getting the Palestinians out of Gaza. So all those people have dug in and believe that this is really viable.


And it’s spreading to their views on the West Bank, as well. Because the right-wing fantasy in Israel has always been to make life so difficult for the Palestinians that effectively they will slowly but surely start moving away. They’ll go to Jordan. They’ll go to Egypt. The Egyptians and Jordanians will be forced to take them.


But on the other hand, it does seem to have also reinforced among the hard-line Palestinians the idea: Look, the Americans only mean bad things for us. Be very wary of any American involvement because what the Americans really want to do is ethnically cleanse all of us out of Gaza.


So they’re digging in. They’re trying to figure out: How do we maintain our presence? How do we make sure that if there is some kind of an American or Israeli suzerainty here, we would launch an insurgency?


So I don’t see it as having produced anything particularly good. And it has really reinforced this very strong element within the Israeli right that believes there is a solution to the Palestinian problem, and it is largely ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank.





In Joe Biden, you had the apex of the liberal international order. Joe Biden’s whole career in the Senate was devoted to this quite significantly. He was known for his commitment to these alliances, known for his belief in a muscular liberal internationalism. It was always notable that, when he was deciding whether or not to stay in the race, the thing that seemed to animate him in that period was NATO: If not for me, who’s going to protect NATO and the alliances?


The Biden administration had this vision of American strength through the alliance system. And that led to a world — or it coexisted with a world — that, by the end of his term, felt to many people like it had fallen into disorder. You had Russia invading Ukraine. You had the war in Gaza. And you had a sense of American weakness.


Some of that was Joe Biden’s inability to personally project strength, whatever you thought of the actual policies. Now you’ve had Trump come in for a month, and the whole world is reshuffling in response to what he says. You have negotiations happening with Moscow. You have mineral deals being signed with Ukraine.


In Gaza, all of a sudden, despite the insanity, in my view, of Trump’s actual proposal, I am hearing more serious proposals from the Arab countries than I was before. Yair Lapid, one of the opposition leaders in Israel, had a reasonable, I thought, proposal of wiping out Egyptian foreign debt in return for Egypt taking over rebuilding and governance of Gaza for a period of time. There’s a sense that the world is responding to American strength.


Did Democrats fumble this in their belief that a restrained America was a strong America and that more did not need to be projected? Did they leave the opening for someone like Trump, who said: There’s all this surplus power, and the American public is going to respond to seeing someone come pick it up? That the sense that the world should respond to America, that we should be feared by our friends and our enemies alike, had been dismissed? I’ve heard this from people involved in the Middle East conflict: Nobody feared Joe Biden.





Look, I think that there’s no question the United States had enormous power. It contradicts the central premise of the Trump-Vance domestic argument, which is that America has been hollowed out and ravaged over the last 30 years by the forces of globalization and liberalism.


The real story of the last 30 years is the United States has emerged dominant among the rich countries in the world —


And the Trump administration seems to envy the political systems of countries that are in terrible shape: Hungary, Russia, China, which is seeing its growth rates fall, have a lot of envy of systems that you would not want to emulate.


Right. China doesn’t have a trade deficit. And look at China. That’s not a country you would want to emulate the economy of. So there is a weird contradiction.


But I agree with you: The United States has enormous power. But I don’t think that it is a sign of strength to go around bullying smaller countries and forcing them to say things that are often rhetorical concessions — get everyone to call it the Gulf of America.





Or the Panamanians are a good example: José Raúl Mulino, who is running Panama now, is a very pro-American conservative, and he’s now been humiliated and made to mouth some kind of nonsense that allows Trump to claim he got a victory. And the same thing happened with Canada and Mexico.


I want to push you to the strong counterexamples. I had Jake Sullivan on the show. We were talking about Ukraine and Israel. And I would say the view that emerged from him is that it would be immoral to use American leverage to push our allies into negotiations in Ukraine, to force Israel to have done really anything differently in Gaza.


And as soon as Trump came on the scene, it turned out people would listen. The hostage deal got signed, and Netanyahu dropped some objections, but they moved forward on some kind of cease-fire. You had negotiations — not in the way I would like to see them: Preconceiving functionally everything to Moscow is, in my view, fundamentally immoral. But the level at which the Biden administration would not push its own allies and did not act like it had leverage over someone like Zelensky was strange.


You could tactically say there are some cases where they didn’t handle it well.


For many months, I was criticizing the Biden administration on the Russia-Ukraine front. I thought that it was important to get more realistic. On Israel, it’s a particular dynamic that you well know, which is that for a Democratic president, it is very hard to push the Israelis to do anything because they know they can outflank a Democrat by going directly to Congress, by going directly, essentially, to Republicans.


Bibi Netanyahu did that to Barack Obama, who was a much more skilled politician and negotiator than Joe Biden was. And when Obama tried to push Netanyahu on the Iran nuclear thing, Bibi just did an end run around Obama, went to Washington, got the Republicans to invite him to give a speech to the joint session of Congress and completely tied Obama into knots on that one. So that is a particular problem.





I agree with you that, tactically, there are some places where you could push harder. But if you ask me which philosophy is the right one for the United States to have, I think it’s the one that has built these alliance structures in the system for 80 years by not viewing this as a series of transactions but as a set of relationships.


Trump is a transaction guy. Think about every real estate deal he’s ever done. At the end of the day, the person he does the deal with never wants to deal with him again. That is basically one of the leitmotifs of Trump’s business career. He screws you in the deal and then moves on. And the next time around he screws somebody else.


But that’s not what American foreign policy has been built on. It’s been built on these alliances and these relationships that have endured now for almost a century. And by the way, very few countries have managed that. So Trump, by strong-arming a few of these countries, will get — in the short term — a better deal.


But is that going to build real trust for the next 40 or 50 years? I don’t think so. It’s going to give Trump a few good headlines.


And by the way, on Gaza: I’ve spent a lot of time in the Middle East over the last nine months. I’ve been to Saudi Arabia three or four times. The idea that Trump’s bizarre Gaza proposal has gotten the Saudis and the Egyptians to be involved is not true. They were always willing to pay for the reconstruction.





The issue has always been who will govern Gaza. The Israelis say there can’t be any Hamas involvement. And the Arabs say: Look, if there’s going to be no Hamas involvement, then you have to allow the Palestinian Authority to do it. And the Israelis say: No. Why can’t the Arabs do it?


Well, the Arabs don’t want to be in the position of ruling over the Palestinians. They don’t want to be in a position where Hamas launches an insurgency against them.


That has been the sticking point. Not the money. They’ve always been willing to pay the money. And that will continue to be the sticking point. That is the hard part of the Gaza business — not getting the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates to pony up the cash.


The thing that I’m pushing toward here is not whether Trumpism is the right long-term strategy for the U. S. — assuming the system survives the next couple of years. Which, in the range of possibilities, I don’t think is 100 percent either domestically or internationally.


There’s a thesis-antithesis-synthesis dynamic to where things probably need to go. I think that with the Department of Government Efficiency: The Democrats were accepting — I have a whole book on this coming out — huge levels of government proceduralism, obstruction and the inability of government to deliver or be responsive. Democrats became defenders of government.





And now the Trump administration is heedlessly taking chain saws, trying to actually wreck the thing, in a way I consider immoral and genuinely dangerous. So to find some stable equilibrium, Democrats are going to have to take some lessons from this and not just say: We were right before — you guys should listen to us.


I think we now understand that center-left parties in Europe and in America had adopted positions on immigration that were politically unstable. They don’t need to go all the way to where the far right is, but they can’t be where they were if they’re going to win power.


Are there some ways in which lessons need to be learned here? For there to be an effective center-left answer — or even a left answer or a liberal answer — to what this set of challenges represents? Is there some dissatisfaction with how the system is working — either from the American perspective or the international perspective — that needs to be integrated? Even if you find, as many of us do, where Trump is going, immoral?


Look, the left has collapsed everywhere.


The real story of the European elections over the last 10 years or so is the collapse of the left. The French left has collapsed. The German left has collapsed. Wherever you look: Holland. Sweden was run by the Swedish Social Democrats for 75 years, and they’re in trouble. And I think it’s principally over the issue of immigration.


As you know, I’ve been hard-line on immigration. I think the asylum system needs to be scrapped. The left was not willing to frontally acknowledge that you had millions of people coming in who were obviously gaming the system, claiming to be asylum seekers when they were really economic migrants — and I think the left is paying a huge price for that everywhere. And they will continue to pay a price for that. Because even now it will feel like catch-up when they do it.





I don’t think there was any such deep dissatisfaction with the international system as it exists. To a large extent, Trump’s grievances around it have exploited it. But he taps into a certain kind of American Jacksonianism that asks: Why are we entangled with these people?


The United States has always had two fundamental attitudes. One, we are too good to participate in the world. Or we are so good that we should completely transform the world. But to actually engage in the world as it exists has always been difficult for the United States because it’s an ideological nation. It believes it is exceptional and all that. And I think you see some of that in the Trump attitude.


The point you made about how Europe is the principal place where there was a lesson to learn — that we had gotten too complacent about the Western alliance and we had gotten too complacent about Europe’s foreign policy dysfunctions: In some ways Trump’s willingness to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable — he said, for example: Maybe we should make a deal with Iran; he went in his first term and tried to make a deal with Kim Jong-un. Those things I actually do find refreshing. Because why not try to see if there’s a way you could make a deal with Kim Jong-un?


All these things are low probabilities of success. But there is something to be said for thinking out of the box in some way or the other.


I feel with Trump, the danger is not the thinking out of the box part. The danger is he doesn’t value that the box we created is a pretty special box.





And it has been very hard, in human history, to find an era of peace and prosperity and great power stability of the kind we have been able to create. So before we have this kind of Maoist nihilism and say: Let’s burn the whole thing down and see where it goes — let’s appreciate the box.


How does the destruction of the United States Agency for International Development fit into this? Because that got filed under the Department of Justice. I think it has been treated as less of a foreign policy move than it actually is.


They seem to have successfully kept the money cut off in a lot of cases. Marco Rubio seemed to want to keep the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief funding, which is funding for H.I.V./AIDS medication, particularly in Africa, turned on. And it seems to have not really turned back on.


Is this foreign policy? Is this just a kind of internal jihadism against what they see as the liberal nonprofit industrial complex? What is the import of what they’ve done to U.S.A.I.D.? And what is the rationale for it?


I’ve thought about this a lot, because why would you choose U.S.A.I.D.? It’s 1 percent of the federal budget. If you were able to change some of the uploading mechanisms in Medicare Advantage, you’d probably save more money than in reforming U.S.A.I.D. Medicare is $1 trillion. Social Security is $1.5 trillion. U.S.A.I.D. is about $40 billion.





And they don’t seem to be reforming it. They’re annihilating it.


Right. So I think what happened is, if there’s thought behind it — there must have been — Musk and company said: What is the least popular form of spending that the U.S. does? Marco Rubio alluded to this — it’s obviously foreign aid, sending money to foreigners.


People feel like: Why shouldn’t we be spending it at home? It’s easy. So I think that was the idea: Let’s go for an easy win. Let’s go for something where, particularly our base, the MAGA base, and most Americans in general, think: This is a waste of government spending.


And they went at it with a brutality, I think, to send a signal to other government agencies: Don’t block us. This is what will happen to you if you try to, in some way or another, do an end run around what we’re doing.


The effect is tragic. Because there’s the geopolitical argument that this is the soft power of the United States. We go into these countries, and people think well of America. And now the Chinese are going to go in, the Russians are going to go in.


U.S.A.I.D. has been one of the wonderful things that the United States has done in the world. Foreign aid barely existed before 1945. It’s one of these revolutions of a foreign policy that America in large part initiated. And largely the impulse comes from the idea that we’re the richest country in the history of the world. It would also be a great thing for us to be the most generous country in the history of the world.





Four out of every 10 humanitarian dollars spent in the world are spent by the United States. And most of U.S.A.I.D.’s budget is food and medicine. You’re literally feeding the hungry. You’re clothing sick people.


I’ve seen this on the ground. The people who do work at U.S.A.I.D., these are people who moved to Mozambique or Ghana to learn how to get water filtration systems in there. They’re getting paid $60,000 or $70,000 a year. They’re not doing it for the money. They’re not doing it for the glory. They’re doing it because they believe that the United States can have a positive impact on the world. And to see the agency gutted, the funding pulled and these people demeaned and demonized — called a criminal enterprise — it’s so sad.


I grew up in India, and I saw so much of the U.S.A.I.D. funding, which was exactly the kind of stuff DOGE demonizes. There was a program where they would show old American movies in the U.S. Consulate, and a whole bunch of us would go there. I saw “It’s a Wonderful Life” and movies like that. And you know what? It made me fall in love with America.


That has always been America’s great strength. It’s the Chinese who do these deals with an African country and with the dictator and say: We’ll build you a dam, and in return for that, here’s what we want. And you can take 10 percent.


But American soft power has let the world know that we’re a big, open, generous country. Some of that is funding plays and movies. And most of it is food and medicine.





It was always a matter of great pride to me that the United States did that. And it’s very sad that it’s — for now, at least — gone away.


I think it also gets to the question of: What is “America First”?


One of the things that I actually think it is is a total devaluing of non-American lives. You were talking about how Musk calls U.S.A.I.D. “a ball of worms” — not worms in the apple, just “a ball of worms.” That’s a horrible thing to say.


I know people who work in aid, like you do. Musk is a billionaire who jets around the world fathering children with Lord knows how many women. And sending missives on X 300 times a day. And these people who went to amazing schools, go work on marginally improving economic growth by making the textile sector more efficient in Ghana. So it just appalls me.


But at least the Americans who are working for U.S.A.I.D. exist in the calculus. The administration hates them and wants to demonize them and wants them to go to the private sector where they’ll be more productive.


But the children who needed the antiretrovirals from PEPFAR don’t exist in the conversation here at all. And it’s always a difficult thing from the perspective of a nation, which does have a preference for its own citizens. Any individual economic migrant’s life would be much better off if they could come to the U.S. And for reasons of stability in the economy we can’t let everybody who would like to come to the U.S. in. How do you value that?





It’s a really hard question, and we don’t have very good answers. And we tack forward and backward. How do you value people we save from dying of malnutrition?


The answers have been complex, not really debated: that we value those lives somewhat. It’s not how we think about Americans, but it’s not nothing.


And I kind of think one of the messages now is: The value of foreign lives is nothing. The value of people in the West Bank whose land is going to be annexed is nothing. Our care about the Ukrainians is nothing.


That’s some of the message of it, too, particularly domestically — that U.S.A.I.D. was about spending American money to not really serve our interests, first and foremost. It’s about expressing our values, which is that other lives matter. And particularly, if there are cost-effective ways we can help them, we should.


And the message now is: They don’t, and we shouldn’t.


One of the ironies here is that I do believe, as you do, that American aid was never entirely about geopolitics and geostrategy. Part of it, I think, came out of a deep, high Protestant impulse of saving the world. And I think it is one of the central messages of Christianity that all human beings are equal in the eyes of God, and it is incumbent upon the rich to look after the poor.





If you read the Sermon on the Mount, if you read Paul’s letter to the Galatians, that’s what Christianity is about —


Not if you hear JD Vance’s version of it.


[Laughs.] Right, which, to me, is bizarre. And yet here you have this Christian administration neglecting what strikes me as the central tenets of Christianity, which are: Be nice to poor people, help people who are in need, the good Samaritan, all that stuff.


And this was our one expression of it. For every $100 the federal government spent, we were saying we’re going to give one dollar to clothe the naked and feed the hungry.


Look, I am somebody who believes you could have targeted a bunch of those dollars better. I would have moved a lot to public health, to cash transfers. If you want to say we shouldn’t be doing plays, fine. We can have that debate. Actually auditing U.S.A.I.D. would have been fine with me. That’s why I think the message was that they didn’t do that. I’ve heard people —


And just to push back, U.S.A.I.D. was audited 60 times in the last year.


Thank you. Yes. You could have audited from their perspective, is what I mean.





And by the way, that play was not a U.S.A.I.D. spend. It was an American ambassador who decided to fund a cultural festival in Ireland. So much of this is —


Yes, there’s been a lot of [expletive] here. But I know a lot of people who work in foreign aid and a lot of people who work in making foreign aid more effective —


And there is a big bureaucracy, and there is waste. No question about it.


I don’t even mean waste. I actually mean that from their perspective, I think it would be reasonable for a Republican administration to come in and say: Too much of this is cultural. I want this money spent differently. Fine.


I’ve heard people say: What DOGE is really doing is zero-based budgeting. We’re just making everything rejustify itself.


Well, then you would have it rejustify itself based on some set of measures: Does it achieve this many dollars per life saved? I know people who spend all their days trying to figure out how many dollars it takes to save a life.











And this administration is not doing any of that. They didn’t want U.S.A.I.D. audited. Because a lot of things sound great if you audit U.S.A.I.D., even from any kind of humanitarian perspective they could come up with. PEPFAR is an amazing program.


The expression of values was the point there. And the expression of values of Trump and “America First” is that we are the only ones who count. It’s why JD Vance’s riff that Christianity has this understanding of this intense partiality of favor. It’s our family and our neighbors and our community — and out and out and out, until you have basically no responsibility to the world.


Archived clip of JD Vance: And as an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. But there’s this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family and then you love your neighbor. And then you love your community. And then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.


It’s fine for that to be your politics. But to pretend that’s your religion?


And he was corrected by the pope. [Laughs.]


Yes. When the pope has to come in personally — in his frail health, before he ended up in the hospital for double pneumonia — to say: No, wait. You just converted to Catholicism, and as the head Catholic, let me tell you, that’s not how we think about it.


A more humble person might have rethought some things.


You’ve talked a lot about what it took to build the international system that we can now take for granted. And when I read a lot of history, I think about what it took to get to the point that we actually thought lives of individual people around the world had some value — that they weren’t just pawns, that their destruction was meaningful.


Because I look at a lot of history, and I don’t think people put a very heavy value on life. If you had to wipe a bunch of people out to get what you wanted, you did. The poor suffered what they must.





And with Trump, I see a return to that moral framework, among other things. You can make a lot of criticisms of Democrats, of Republicans, of George W. Bush, of Joe Biden. Look at the destruction visited upon the Gazans in the past year. But there was at least some framework that existed that you could yell: Hypocrite! How dare you look at what you said before and what you’re allowing now.


And I think part of the Trump administration’s foreign policy is the destruction of that framework entirely. There’s nothing you could say “hypocrite” of. They’ve been perfectly clear that they don’t care. In that way, it’s very un-Christian, it’s very great powers of the 19th century.


And if you’re not somebody who’s big enough to be written about in the history books, there’s just no value to what you represent. You can just be used as a pawn or taken off the board if you happen to be in the way.


If you think about the mood now, it’s this kind of macho realism. Trump is about doing deals. We don’t worry about all of these values. We’re just going to do what’s best for America. We’re going to use our surplus power. All of that evokes this kind of 19th-century realpolitik.


And what people forget about that world was it was a world of constant war, massive human rights abuses. The way that rich countries thought about poor countries then was: Let’s colonize them. Let’s exploit them. Let’s enslave their people.











There’s something weird about forgetting what that world entailed, and forgetting how important it was that we had this revolution in international affairs over the last century, where we’ve moved to a completely different place. It’s one of the sad ironies about all this: The country that did more than any other country to effect that revolution — beginning with Woodrow Wilson — is the one now undermining it.


If you had asked me 10 or 15 years ago who would undermine the open international system, the liberal international order, I would have said: Oh, it’s going to be the rise of China or it’s going to be the rogue actions of Russia or it’s going to be the Iranians.


No. It turns out to be the United States of America that turns its back on its own creation.


I think that’s the place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?


One of them would be Robert Kagan’s “The Jungle Grows Back,” which is a short book that tries to explain the nature of this world that America built and how its erosion and decay will result in the jungle growing back — the jungle of realpolitik, war, poverty and all the things that existed before.


The second would be, if you want to get a feel for 19th- and 18th-century diplomacy and its ups and downs, Henry Kissinger wrote a wonderful history called “Diplomacy.” It begins in the 17th century, and it goes all the way to the 1970s and ’80s, as I recall.





The third would be — again, thinking about this world America built, if you want kind of a wonderful biographical lens into it — Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas wrote a book called “The Wise Men.” And it is a story of six people who were instrumental in building the post-World War II American order.


For those of you who are fans of Walter Isaacson, this was actually his very first biography. He wrote it with one of his closest friends, Evan Thomas. They were both editors at the time. It’s a wonderful read. My review of that book for an obscure publication called The American Scholar was my first published piece in the world. So I have a particular affection for it.


Fareed Zakaria, thank you very much.


Good to be here, Ezra.

 

[the AntiPusher]

Nope, Mitt Romney had told Obama that (from CNN):

It’s time to admit it: Mitt Romney was right about Russia​

Who was the American president who let Putin take Crimea in 2014? He was lousy on the international stage, and made Putin brazen. Trump is getting Putin similarly wrong…

Huh, that's exactly what I posted. President. Trump had 4 years to kick Putin out of Crimea but all he did was bend the knee both was for his beloved Vladimir. When has Trump ever gotten Putin "right" or when has he been right about Putin. The Right was to take responsibility for Trump just as the Left has too for President Clinton, Obama and Biden. The one thing I can say about the Bush/Cheney years it felt like an adult was in the WH and was totally against Russia-Putin. Let's see how this plays out for the rest of the year. I am quite sure all from abroad that supported Trump will have buyer's remorse when the chaos hits close to their homeland.

 

[Kieran]

Huh, that's exactly what I posted. President. Trump had 4 years to kick Putin out of Crimea but all he did was bend the knee both was for his beloved Vladimir. When has Trump ever gotten Putin "right" or when has he been right about Putin. The Right was to take responsibility for Trump just as the Left has too for President Clinton, Obama and Biden. The one thing I can say about the Bush/Cheney years it felt like an adult was in the WH and was totally against Russia-Putin. Let's see how this plays out for the rest of the year. I am quite sure all from abroad that supported Trump will have buyer's remorse when the chaos hits close to their homeland.

The point I was making was that America hasn’t covered itself in glory since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Obama’s empty suit swaggering led to Crimea being stolen, which was only the prologue to what we saw in 2022. There is a theory that Trump is serious about wanting peace and the quickest route is to placate Putin.

Now Neville Chamberlain is asking for his foreign policy back…

 

[the AntiPusher]

The point I was making was that America hasn’t covered itself in glory since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Obama’s empty suit swaggering led to Crimea being stolen, which was only the prologue to what we saw in 2022. There is a theory that Trump is serious about wanting peace and the quickest route is to placate Putin.

Now Neville Chamberlain is asking for his foreign policy back…

Yet, Obama took out Bin Linden and always been anti Putin. Putin put his plan in place for the Ukraine when Trump was in office. After all you have seen since 2016 and yesterday, you take anything that comes from Trump serious and how many times does Vladimir needs to renege on his so called agreements. However, Trump is doing the bidding of his new Master Elon. Musk is just as evil and I doubt that Putin wants him around. There can only be a Master and an Apprentice.

Chamberlain's policy would not be acknowledge by Putin. I bet Trump would not know Neville from Richard Chamberlain ..jajaja

 

[Kieran]

Yet, Obama took out Bin Linden and always been anti Putin. Putin put his plan in place for the Ukraine when Trump was in office.

No.

Watch again the video I posted of the 2012 debate. Obama is clearly stupid there. I remember watching it at the time, in shock. He thought that Mitt Romney’s suggestion that Russia was their greatest geo-political threat was outdated by decades. It was Obama who emboldened Putin by taking his eye off the ball. It was under Obama that Crimea was handed to Putin without resistance, in 2014. The EU share some blame for this too.

Putin came back for the rest of Ukraine under the next Democrat president. In fairness to Biden, he helped arm Ukraine. Trump is making a big mistake, but we can’t exonerate Obama for his inability to stand up to Putin…