Fareed Zakaria
Appearances
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 kind of geopolitics of the 19th century to the extent that I think he understands it, which is, you know, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, to quote Thucydides. And that idea that
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
We are powerful. We should be unconstrained. It's 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 know, you've got to understand we are big and powerful. You are not dangerous. We're going to tell you what to do. Obviously, it is the way Putin views the world.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 misses the sort of 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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, you know, who has a lot of land? Russia.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And you've just, you know, 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, you know, Trump added...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
whatever it was, Greenland or something like that to the United States. The physical expansion of America would be a great Trump legacy.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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, you know, the Russians better realize, Putin better realize this war has ruined his country. He better settle. And if he doesn't, you know, we're going to put additional sanctions and his favorite weapon tariffs on Russia.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
But it seemed to suggest that he understood that the principle of, obstacle to a peace deal was not Zelensky, but Putin. But then he's shifted entirely and enormously in the last few weeks where he's called Zelensky 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
So, you know, 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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. And I think there's no way to read his mind, but my sense, fundamentally, from listening to him and watching him, is he thinks all those Russian claims are kind of broadly legitimate.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Yeah. And 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, right? It's Putin, Xi, Modi, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Orban, Erdogan. You know, those are the people he speaks about with respect. The more muddled, compromised, weaker leaders of coalition governments in Europe, he finds feckless.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
He finds uninteresting. You know, so it's a very interesting. It's also, you know, that I think he likes these more old fashioned ideas. 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 Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
The countries he doesn't like, you know, Europe, you couldn't imagine a Trump tower.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 ideology. gender ideology, the idea of gender fluidity, even weighed in on the J.K.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 as much a threat as the expansion of NATO. So notice that
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And I think Xi 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
So again, he views this rising tide of Western liberalism as as much a threat, I think, as Western hard power. And here the irony is Trump and Vance agree with them. And so, you know, 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 allies should be Russia.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And that becomes the new alliance system. Now that takes it further than, you know, than we are right now. But it's those inclinations.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
You know, the part of the problem with Trump is he's 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 Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Yeah, you know, many years ago, I wrote an article called The Rise of Illiberal Democracy in Foreign Affairs. And, you know, I was trying to describe this phenomenon of countries that were 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And I think that that is, you know, 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, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
We're okay 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
He does things, 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
You know, and 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 three emperors league. It was called the Dreikaiserbund. And they got together because they feared the rise of liberalism in Europe after the revolutions of 1848.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
We need to, we and Putin and maybe even, you know, Viktor Orban and people like Erdogan and Xi, we need to hold back all this kind of godless, reckless liberty and liberalism that is engulfing the world.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 free riding 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 that...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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, you know, what is this new world we're living in?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
So you're seeing, I mean, this is really historic, that the guy who's going to become the chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
That is, you know, 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 Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
You know, 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 100 years before World War II, there's about 150 territorial conquests, you know, aggression, taking of territory, legitimization of that.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I was in Australia last December, and I met with a senior official there who said to me, you know, 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, you know, the nuclear subs deal that we made with them.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 okay if you have our back.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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, you know, about getting close to the United States in a long term. That's why I say these alliances took eight decades to build.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 U.S. or Russia.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Seeing where the total factor productivity rises in Europe over the next five years is maybe 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Right. 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. Yeah, the Europeans will spend more. You know, it is worth pointing out it's
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Since 1945, there have been practically none. You have an open international economy. You have free trade. You have rules. You have travel and patents. I mean, there's a huge area of kind of international cooperation that people don't think about, but that happens all the time, every day, you know, when you fly, when goods go from one place to another.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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, guys, don't worry so much about your security. We'll take care of it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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. You know, that's the way even Trump conceives of America's role. So there's going to be no defense savings. So at the end of the day, yeah, it's possible that we get a more independent Europe that spends more on defense.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I think I would prefer a kind of tough love approach where there was actually some love.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Again, you know, 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 that. But I think that...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
With China, you have always had this conflicting pressure. And you saw it in Trump 1, in 1.0. He was hostile to 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...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
dazzled by that and his grandchildren sing Chinese songs to Xi Jinping and he talks about this beautiful chocolate cake he serves him he likes the idea that he is you know sitting with the second most powerful person in the world and they you know 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
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And what Trump, I think, has taken from that whole world is the US has been the sucker. The US has been the country that's had to underwrite it. The US 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And somebody did a calculation that something like 95% 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 one of the things I worry about in the new world we're going into, China is embarking on a massive military buildup.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
China is probably going to quadruple the number of nuclear weapons it has in the next 10 years. And, you know, 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
That period when the Soviets expanded their nuclear arsenal in the late 50s and 60s and the United States and the Soviets were going macho, mano a mano, it 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And if for whatever reason Trump gets there, I'd be the first to applaud it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
As a result of that, by the way, he was able to get a ceasefire 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 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
If you notice in that UN resolution in which the United States absolutely bizarrely sided with Russia on 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 U.S., Russia, North Korea, Belarus. It was Hungary and Israel.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 there's, I think, a kind of personal and ideological connection that Trump has with Bibi's Israel.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And you can see it when you watch them together.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
You know, I've tried to understand it, and most people, 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—
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
This would be a great place for us to, you know, 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's it maybe came out of that. What it has done is it has in some ways given comfort to both sides. The extremists on both sides.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
So right-wing Israelis now say, and I mean people to the right of Bibi Najinyahu, 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
But on the other hand, it does seem to have also reinforced among the hardline Palestinians the idea that, look, the Americans only mean bad things for us. 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
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Look, I think that there's no question the United States had enormous power. It sort of 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 Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
In fact, the real story of the last 30 years is the United States has emerged dominant among the rich countries in the world. You know, we are the Eurozone.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
China doesn't have a trade deficit. And look at China, right? That's not a country you'd 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 you can use it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Look, 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, you know, get everyone to call it the Gulf of America. The Panamanians are a good example.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
The guy who's running Panama now is a very pro-American conservative, and he's now been humiliated and made to, you know, mouth some kind of nonsense that allows Trump to claim he got a victory. Same thing happened with Canada and Mexico.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
So 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 mean, I thought that it was important to get more realistic. On Israel, it's a particular dynamic that you well know.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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's a much more skilled Democrat. politician and negotiator than Joe Biden was.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
But I think 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 relationship. Trump is a transaction guy. Think about every real estate deal he's ever done.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 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 power? real trust for the next 40, 50 years? I don't think so.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 a lot of time in the Middle East over the last nine months or so. I've been to Saudi Arabia four times. They were always willing to pay for the reconstruction.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
The idea that 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, you know, 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
That is the hard part of the Gaza business, not getting the Saudis and the UAE to pony up the cash.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Yeah, look, the left has 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. You know, Holland, wherever you look, Sweden was run by the Swedish Social Democrats for 75 years, and they're in trouble.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And I think it's principally over the issue of immigration. As you know, I've been hardline 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 –
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
The left is paying a huge price for that everywhere, and they will continue to pay a price for that because even now it'll 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 it's, to a large extent, Trump's grievances around it that have exploited it. But he taps into it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
a certain kind of American Jacksonianism that says, 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
It 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And I think, you know, in some ways, Trump's willingness to to sort of think the unthinkable and say the unsayable. Like he said, for example, maybe we should make a deal with Iran. You know, 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?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Yeah, there is a certain truth to that, 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 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 globally.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 Iran thinking out of the box 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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. That's appreciated the box.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
So I've thought about this a lot because why would you choose USAID? It's 1% 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 a trillion dollars. Social Security is a trillion and a half dollars. USAID is about $40 billion. Right. And they don't seem to be reforming it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
They're annihilating it. 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? 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, right? So I think that that was the idea.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 the other, do an end run around what we're doing.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Look, the effect to my mind is tragic because there's the sort of 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. The Russians are going to go in. I believe all that. But I think it's you put it in those competitive terms to sell it. And I get it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
But, you know, 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, you know, I think it is largely the impulse comes from the idea we're the richest country in the history of the world.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
It's 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 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 are
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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, $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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And to see the agency gutted, the funding pulled, and these people demeaned and demonized, called a criminal enterprise. It's so sad. You know, 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'd show old American movies in the U.S.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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, you know,
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 made me fall in love with America.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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, you know, we'll build you a dam and in return for that, here's what we want. And by the way, you can take 10%. What American soft power has been, we let the world know who we are.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
You know, I think that 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 kind of deep, high Protestant impulse of... Saving the world. And I think it is one of the central messages of Christianity that, you know, all human beings are equal in the eyes of God.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And, you know, 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 like, you know—
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Vance's version of it. 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, you know, 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
For every $100 the federal government spent, we were saying we're going to give $1 To clothe the naked and feed the hungry.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I've heard people— And just to push back, USAID was audited 60 times in the last year.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And 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 misinformation.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And there is a big bureaucracy and there is waste. No question about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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. You know, 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Well, and he was corrected by the Pope.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Yeah. You know, if you think about the mood now is this macho realism. You know, Trump is about doing deals. We don't worry about all these values. You know, 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And what people forget about that world was 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
If you had told me, you know, who's going to undermine the open international system, the liberal international order 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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, and all the things that existed before.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
The second would be if you want to get a feel for 19th, 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. And it's just called Diplomacy. And the third would be...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
He wrote it with one of his closest friends, Evan Thomas. They were both editors at Time. It's a wonderful read. 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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. 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
So the result of Trump inaction, the Trump doctrine inaction, has been a war on America's allies. But the second 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%. They're very, very low. So the idea, you know, we're not getting penalized in any large ways.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 war. But what you will do by squeezing each of these individual countries, humiliating them, making them, forcing them to accept renegotiation of terms,
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
You lose the kind of relationships that you had built over eight decades that created this extraordinary anchor of stability in the world, which was the Western alliance. And, you know, the gains are not that great.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
So there are two things I think are going on. One is, as I said, Trump, if he has a worldview, he's a protectionist. He's always felt that, you know, you want to protect American industries. The foreigners come in and they take advantage of us, et cetera, et cetera. The second, I think, and this I think he discovered as president – The president has incredible power in the area of tariffs.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 like it. So where will it all end up? My gut is that what happens is tariffs in the industrialized world, as I said, have roughly been about 3%.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
If you assume all of Trump's tariffs are actually put in place, I think it goes up to about 6%. 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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. J.E.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
by just having very strong apprenticeship programs and what we would call, you know, community college type stuff. But look at where Germany is. Germany, the third, 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 Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
The entire digital economy is totally 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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. So 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I would guess that America first for Trump and for many of his followers. And again, 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
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 it'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.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
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 hearkening back to that idea.