Making Sense - Sam Harris - #402 — The Geopolitics of Trump 2.0

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

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00:00:44.980 I am here with Neil Ferguson. Neil, thanks for joining me.

00:00:48.640 It is a pleasure to be back with you, Sam. It's been too long.

00:00:51.980 Yeah, yeah. And it has not been boring, as we were just remarking on. It's an immense pleasure to be

00:00:57.700 able to reach out to you at a moment like this, because there's just so much going on. This is

00:01:01.540 obviously your wheelhouse as a historian and as a commentator on current events. There's just so

00:01:10.520 much to talk about, and I know you have a heart out here because you're going to a talk, so I'm going

00:01:14.120 to be more operational than is normal. How has the first month of Trump's second term struck you thus

00:01:23.400 far? I think it's a bit like being in 1933, but I don't mean in Germany in 1933. I mean in the United

00:01:33.160 States in 1933, because there hasn't been a presidency that has started with this much of a

00:01:40.440 bang since Franklin Roosevelt's first term. The difference is, it's like the New Deal with the

00:01:48.460 sign reversed. You've got this frenetic activity, executive orders coming at us like bullets out

00:01:57.920 of a gun. And that was very much the pattern with the beginning of Roosevelt's presidency.

00:02:04.200 There was also a barrage of legislation, which we're not yet seeing, because Trump does not have

00:02:10.980 the great majorities that Roosevelt had in the Senate and House. But in terms of activity,

00:02:19.120 it's comparable. Roosevelt still holds the record for number of executive orders per year of any

00:02:25.580 president. Trump could beat it at this rate. But the signs reverse, because the goal of the New Deal

00:02:31.840 in 1933 was to expand the federal government substantially as you came out of a depression,

00:02:38.720 the worst economic shock in American history. The goal of Trump 2.0 is to shrink the federal

00:02:44.080 government as you come out of the post-COVID boom. So it's a kind of New Deal, but with the sign

00:02:49.780 reversed. That's how I think about it. And so far, I think that's been a good framework. There are other

00:02:54.400 analogies, but that's the one that strikes me as most relevant to the first month.

00:02:59.440 And how do you think the last month, month and a half has seemed to our allies and our adversaries

00:03:09.680 on the world stage? I mean, you can take it in whatever order you want, but in particular,

00:03:14.880 with respect to adversaries, I'm thinking about Russia and China. I'm wondering how you think they

00:03:19.880 view this barrage of change? I asked a quite large audience in London earlier this week,

00:03:28.440 if anybody could say confidently that they understood the foreign policy of the Trump

00:03:33.900 administration and not a single person raised their hand. It was a quite international group.

00:03:40.180 But I think if I had asked the same question in Berlin, I'd have got a similar response.

00:03:46.140 In Paris, a similar response. People are baffled. They're bewildered. And at times,

00:03:54.840 I have been too. I was certainly pretty baffled last week when President Trump called Volodymyr

00:04:03.600 Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, a dictator, suggested he had a 4% approval rating, suggested

00:04:10.320 that Ukraine had started the war that began three years ago. That was pretty bewildering to me. Up

00:04:17.040 until that point, I thought that there was a rational strategy to end the war. I've felt for 0.90

00:04:25.820 some time that it's not in Ukraine's interests for this war to be prolonged. I felt that in fact in

00:04:31.300 2022. And I thought the rational strategy, which had been articulated by a number of people in the

00:04:37.420 administration, including Vice President Vance, was to apply pressure, economic and potentially

00:04:43.300 military pressure, to Russia to get to a deal. The Ukrainians had more or less acknowledged that

00:04:49.960 they would not get their territory back in the short run, but that they would accept that if there

00:04:55.700 were security guarantees. The outlines of some kind of armistice, at least, were apparent. And I

00:05:02.160 couldn't understand why Trump suddenly rounded on Zelensky and appeared to concede to President Putin

00:05:10.640 of Russia many of the things that the Russians probably hoped they would get at the end of a

00:05:15.760 protracted negotiation, such as no NATO membership for Ukraine. So that was a little bewildering.

00:05:23.700 I think my role as an historian is twofold. First of all, it's to try to put this in some kind of

00:05:31.680 broader perspective, using analogies to help us get a better sense of where we are. The other role is

00:05:37.860 to be humble. You can't do history in real time and always be right. And some of the things that are

00:05:45.080 especially difficult about this moment will not prove to be right or wrong for years. But let me try

00:05:53.300 to make sense of what we're seeing. And also to answer the specific question you asked, how do they see

00:06:00.400 this in Moscow? How did they see it in Beijing? I think in Moscow, they're feeling good, but not

00:06:09.280 completely relaxed. Because they have, to some extent, handed the initiative to the President of

00:06:18.580 the United States. And that means that, to some extent, their fate is no longer in their hands.

00:06:25.780 In Beijing, they're doubtless looking on with some amusement at the divisions that have opened up

00:06:36.480 between the United States and Europe. But from the point of view of Beijing, this is not the main event.

00:06:41.800 Ukraine is not the main event, and nor is the Middle East. The main event is Taiwan and, more broadly,

00:06:46.860 the South China Sea. From the point of view of America's European allies, the bewilderment has

00:06:53.880 rapidly turned into resolve. And let me try this thought out on you. Presidents since Richard Nixon,

00:07:01.900 so for 50 years, have been trying to get the Europeans to pay a greater share of the cost of their

00:07:08.380 insecurity without success. Europeans have consistently allowed the United States to bear 0.89

00:07:15.920 the lion's share of the costs of NATO. But Donald Trump appears to have achieved what eluded successive

00:07:24.700 presidents since Nixon. Namely, the Europeans, in the last few days, finally realized that they do, 0.67

00:07:32.600 in fact, have to take responsibility for their own security. And the days of free riding and allowing

00:07:38.680 the United States to provide their security are over. So if you wanted to try to rationalize

00:07:44.620 what just happened, by saying such outrageous things about Ukraine, Trump has succeeded in making the

00:07:53.120 way that the Europeans realize that the post-1945 international order is over, and they will now have

00:08:00.380 to stop talking about strategic autonomy and actually doing it. And the sign of how successful Trump has been

00:08:07.620 was what Friedrich Mertz, the Christian democratic leader in Germany, said just after winning Sunday's election,

00:08:15.340 which was, in effect, I now understand that the US backstop for European security is over, and we are going

00:08:25.240 to have to get serious about increasing our defense spending and taking care of our own security.

00:08:30.820 So that's probably the single most important thing that's happened in the last week. The Europeans have 1.00

00:08:36.460 been talking endlessly about strategic autonomy for years. I've heard so many European leaders give speeches

00:08:42.260 about it. I remember just a few years ago, Bruno Le Maire, French minister, gave a speech I was present at,

00:08:48.220 in which he said, Europe is a superpower, and it will have strategic autonomy. And the audience clapped

00:08:53.200 enthusiastically. He got the biggest round of applause for an entire conference. And it was all completely empty

00:08:59.340 words. None of it happened. The European defense budgets barely moved in the case of the Italian budget

00:09:06.240 didn't move at all. Now, the Europeans have finally got the message. They didn't get it in the 0.67

00:09:12.260 first Trump term. They thought Joe Biden would save them. And now there's no longer any more

00:09:18.380 delusion possible. They have to deliver strategic autonomy and fast if they're to be secure from

00:09:24.940 a fascist regime in Moscow. Well, it seems to me strange if the only way to get the Europeans to

00:09:33.100 not free ride and take their investment in hard power seriously would be the moral collapse of the

00:09:42.140 United States on the world stage. I mean, to rewind to the deranging moment you just referenced with

00:09:48.020 Trump blaming Ukraine for the start of the war and claiming that Zelensky is a dictator,

00:09:53.340 it's not only upside down, it's obscene to characterize what has happened these last three years in that

00:10:02.200 way. I mean, Putin has not only launched a war of aggression against Ukraine and killed who knows

00:10:12.020 how many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people there, stolen tens of thousands of children

00:10:18.400 to Russia and repatriated them. He's all but threatened the U.S. with nuclear annihilation

00:10:26.100 for our support of Ukraine, right? I mean, certainly his proxies have on state television.

00:10:31.440 There's been widespread torture of Ukrainian POWs. I mean, this is not, he's not a normal actor on the

00:10:38.600 world stage. And yet we have an American president not only failing to criticize him as a dictator,

00:10:45.100 but criticizing his victim as a dictator, putting the moral onus of all of this chaos and destruction

00:10:52.420 on the victim. I mean, it's just, it's so disgraceful just as an American citizen to see

00:10:59.800 what should have been the moral and effective leadership of our country and what would have

00:11:06.260 been, you could imagine under almost any other president, to see that vacated so fully.

00:11:12.000 I get that there's, you know, one possible silver lining to it is that it has so terrified our

00:11:19.280 allies that they now are going to take more responsibility for their own safety and security

00:11:24.180 than they have in the past. But surely there was another path to that outcome.

00:11:29.400 Well, Churchill used to say that the United States would do the right thing when all the

00:11:33.460 alternatives had been exhausted. And I think successive presidents have tried just about everything

00:11:37.920 else to get the Europeans to pay their share. So one begins to ask after 50 years, what else

00:11:44.680 could possibly have worked? But let me suggest another way that we might understand this moment.

00:11:52.700 You've made some moral remarks there and used the word disgraceful. From a realist perspective,

00:11:59.720 which Vice President Vance certainly says he represents, none of that matters. You're just

00:12:07.440 engaged in liberal histrionics. In the world of great power politics, you can't be motivated by

00:12:15.200 those moral considerations because what matters is national interest and power.

00:12:20.160 But don't alliances matter? I mean, isn't much of our power historically the result of being a

00:12:27.580 shining city on a hill to aspiring democracies and being a reliable friend to our allies? And now

00:12:34.320 we're some kind of shining sewer, you know, on X with a-

00:12:39.360 I hate to shatter your illusion, Sam, but not many people outside the United States have believed that

00:12:45.000 stuff about a shining city on a hill for a very long time. I wrote a book called Colossus back in

00:12:50.060 2003, which had as its subtitle in the original hardback edition, The Price of America's Empire.

00:12:58.600 And that was a book that was highly skeptical about the neoconservative enterprise that we

00:13:04.500 embarked on after 9-11 to try to transform politically Afghanistan and Iraq and what was

00:13:10.840 called for a time the greater Middle East. I think one has to look at American foreign policy

00:13:16.220 in its historical context with a little bit more of a hard stare rather than through rose-tinted

00:13:24.080 spectacles. The back and forth between idealism and realism is in some ways a preoccupation of

00:13:32.500 journalists and academics. In reality, administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, have tended to be

00:13:41.540 quite ruthless in their treatment of both allies and adversaries. There's an old Henry Kissinger joke

00:13:50.320 about only one thing being worse than being America's foe, and that's being America's ally.

00:13:57.080 The South Vietnamese can tell you a thing or two about how it goes when the United States

00:14:01.600 backs a country not always well. So I think we need to be a little bit skeptical about

00:14:07.600 the idea that suddenly, suddenly the United States is betraying its legacy as a shining city on a hill.

00:14:15.500 That's not the history of American foreign policy as anybody outside the United States

00:14:19.340 thinks about it. But let me suggest this. One way of thinking about the Trump administration

00:14:23.980 is that it is not only realist in an academic sense, but in a very practical sense, that at least

00:14:31.780 some elements within the administration have a very clear understanding of the limits of American

00:14:36.480 power. You said American power has to do with alliances. No, it doesn't. That's peripheral

00:14:41.820 to American power. American power has to do with the incredible strength of the U.S. economy,

00:14:46.820 which has consistently been the largest economy in the world since World War II. It has to do with

00:14:53.180 American technological leadership, and it has to do with the American ability to project military power,

00:14:58.820 hard power, all around the world. That's what really matters. And that is no longer an uncontested

00:15:07.280 dominance in the way that it used to be. I don't want to bore you with statistics, but let me give you

00:15:13.740 just one. In 2001, which was the year China entered the World Trade Organization, American manufacturing value

00:15:22.220 added was more than twice that of China. Today, China's is more than twice that of the United

00:15:29.200 States. There has been a huge reversal of economic fortune. China's economy on a purchasing power

00:15:35.440 parity basis, adjusting for differences in relative prices, has been larger than the U.S. economy

00:15:41.780 for at least eight years. And so we inhabit a world in which the United States' dominance can no longer

00:15:50.280 be taken for granted. In a sense, Trump has more in common with Richard Nixon than most people

00:15:56.500 realize. I've been joking in recent conversations that Trump is Nixon's revenge, both domestically and

00:16:04.260 in foreign policy terms. And Richard Nixon, when he came into the White House in 1969, had a very keen

00:16:10.060 sense of the weakness of the American position. And his realism was actuated by that sense of

00:16:16.240 American vulnerability. I think the same is true of Trump. Here's the thing that fools people.

00:16:21.520 Trump talks a big game. He talks the monarchical imperial talk. But I think what actuates that,

00:16:30.560 what motivates that very aggressive treatment of minor powers, hey, we want Greenland. Canada, 0.54

00:16:38.580 you're going to be the 51st state. Panama, we want the canal back. What motivates that kind of

00:16:43.640 behavior is a sense that in terms of geopolitics relative to the superpower on the other side of

00:16:50.560 the world, America's position is highly vulnerable. I would go further. The preoccupations with Ukraine 0.94

00:16:58.020 and the Middle East, with Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the efforts to support Ukraine and Israel

00:17:03.760 are in the eyes of a completely unflinchingly ruthless realist, distractions and drains of resources

00:17:12.080 given the stakes in the Far East, in the Indo-Pacific region. To give you a contingency, an example,

00:17:19.880 if the Chinese decided today to start requiring all ships going in and out of Taipei to clear

00:17:28.580 people's republic customs, what would the United States do if they went a step further and imposed

00:17:36.760 a quarantine, which would be kind of blockade light? What would we do? The reality is that the

00:17:42.080 United States has very few good options if Taiwan's autonomy is going to be contested by China, because

00:17:49.080 China has established meaningful military superiority in that theater.

00:17:54.300 So I would suggest that one way of coming at the Trump administration is that unlike back in 2017,

00:18:02.460 when the challenge was to persuade Americans that there really was a Chinese threat, that was,

00:18:07.040 I think, the main significance of the first Trump term, that was done and a bipartisan consensus emerged

00:18:12.860 that China really was a problem and maybe we should even be in a Cold War with China. Now the problem 0.84

00:18:17.680 is adjusting for the fact that China's in a position of real strength and that could put us in a very

00:18:26.240 weak position if Xi Jinping decides to call our bluff. Well, everything you just said suggests to me that

00:18:32.320 the importance of allies has almost never been greater, right? I mean, so when you say that Trump talks a big

00:18:39.280 game and is bellicose in a way that people like myself find agitating, for the most part, all of that

00:18:47.640 bellicosity is directed, again, at our friends or our erstwhile friends, right? So my concern is that

00:18:53.940 the people who should be standing shoulder to shoulder alongside us in any hot conflict or nearly hot conflict

00:19:02.400 with Russia or China are now thinking that we have some kind of maniac in charge who's decided as

00:19:10.960 almost his first act of his new presidency to effectively attack Canada and Denmark and Mexico,

00:19:19.040 right? I mean, like, and he, again, he says nothing. I mean, he doesn't talk a big game against our

00:19:25.240 actual adversaries. I mean, he says, he doesn't say a bad word about Qatar that, you know, that funds

00:19:31.040 terrorism and harbors Hamas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and has given tens of billions of dollars to 0.62

00:19:35.980 American universities to spread their delusional anti-Western propaganda. I mean, this is all, like, if you

00:19:42.740 wanted to dig into a defense of the West and a defense of the liberal democratic order and, you know,

00:19:50.020 what actual realism could look like in a sustained conflict with the enemies of that order, it seems to me

00:19:57.920 we need to get, I mean, again, coming back to what you briefly mentioned, you know, J.D. Vance's remarks

00:20:04.460 at Munich, right? I mean, you know, a wake-up call to the West, right, is perhaps is needed, but it seems to me

00:20:12.440 that Trump and Vance are doing their best to fracture any kind of Western alliance against its adversaries.

00:20:21.560 Let me take you back four years. Time travel is what historians do, but this is a short journey.

00:20:27.080 And let's remind ourselves of the things that were said in the first hundred days of Joe Biden's

00:20:34.940 administration. The adults were in the room. Alliances mattered again. Some were so adult that

00:20:41.220 they were clearly no longer accomplishmentous. A little over-adult. And that was the line that

00:20:48.460 the Europeans took and many commentators in the United States took. It was also going to be a

00:20:54.220 transformative presidency. You may remember this from people like Michael Beschloss that was going

00:20:58.520 to be up there with Roosevelt and Johnson. And all of this struck me at the time as completely

00:21:06.440 absurd. And sure enough, my prediction four years ago that the Biden administration would be like

00:21:13.980 the Carter administration, but with dementia, turned out to be about right. Because what happened was

00:21:20.460 they made a big inflation mistake by throwing a ton of money at the economy, which she didn't really

00:21:24.360 need to do because the pandemic was basically over. And they then did a series of things that

00:21:30.540 completely antagonized the allies that were so happy to see them. They pulled the plug on the US

00:21:37.220 and allied presence in Afghanistan without really telling any of the NATO partners what they were doing.

00:21:42.900 They did it in the most chaotic way possible. That sent a signal that was picked up loud and clear

00:21:47.760 in Moscow and Beijing. In 2021, they wholly failed to deter Putin from preparing an invasion,

00:21:55.020 even when Putin signaled what he was going to do in July of that year, publishing an article on the

00:21:59.820 historic unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, which was a declaration of intent to do Anschluss.

00:22:05.700 And they proceeded to do exactly the same in the following two years with respect to the Middle East,

00:22:12.300 which they thought they'd somehow pacified on the very eve of the October 7th, 2023 massacre.

00:22:20.700 So the Biden administration, which I think broadly agreed with your terms of reference,

00:22:26.780 allies matter, all that kind of stuff, were a disaster. It was a succession of failures of

00:22:32.300 deterrence that produced two major wars that the United States seemed incapable of doing anything to

00:22:40.780 stop. That's an important setting for Trump 2.0. The real failure of whatever was left of liberal

00:22:50.220 internationalism, the Obama foreign policy in its Biden-Harris incarnation, did create an opportunity

00:22:57.900 for the new sheriff to say, you know what? The allies are weak and suck, and the bad guys are strong. 0.99

00:23:07.300 We need to be careful. We certainly, I think this is, here I'm going to paraphrase what I think 0.99

00:23:11.920 the Trump inner circle thinks. We do not want to be simultaneously in a fight with Russia, Iran,

00:23:20.500 China, and North Korea. And I think that's interesting because there are some people inside

00:23:25.700 the administration who think we should be. Here is the central rift that I see within this

00:23:31.980 nascent administration. Many of the people who've been appointed to key jobs, including Marco Rubio,

00:23:38.880 Mike Waltz, a bunch of people who are going to DOD, a bunch of people on the National Security Council,

00:23:45.360 think that there is an axis of authoritarians. China leads it, Russia's number two, Iran is number 0.65

00:23:51.100 three, and Little Rocket Man is number four. And we have to deal with this axis because if we don't

00:23:56.160 deal with it effectively, we end up rerunning the 1930s. I think there are plenty of people in the

00:24:01.880 administration, as well as in Congress, who would agree with what I just said. But what's interesting

00:24:08.280 is that the president's inner circle, which includes people who don't have formal jobs, like Tucker

00:24:13.780 Carlson, take a completely different view, namely that the axis is too powerful, it would be much

00:24:21.200 better to at least conciliate the key members. And Trump himself, even before he was inaugurated,

00:24:30.600 was sending signals, particularly to China, that he intended to pursue détente. He invited Xi Jinping

00:24:37.840 to come to the inauguration. He says he wants to go to Beijing himself and do a deal of some kind,

00:24:43.660 we don't know what. So Trump, although he has quite a hawkish national security team, himself,

00:24:50.480 I think, inclines towards détente, to use a word that has not been used for a while. Détente,

00:24:56.440 particularly with China, but also with Russia. And he certainly wants to end these wars. And I think

00:25:03.420 the motivation is not to shock and appall liberal Americans. The basic objective is to reduce American 0.56

00:25:10.860 military commitments because they seem too great. Can we talk about Ferguson's law, Sam?

00:25:15.320 Yeah. Yeah. Ferguson's law, named not after me, but after Adam Ferguson, the great Enlightenment

00:25:22.080 Scott, one of the great thinkers, not as famous as the other Adam, Adam Smith, but should be,

00:25:28.220 argued back in the 1760s that public debt, though a very attractive device, was ultimately

00:25:36.000 a source of weakness if it got too large.

00:25:39.920 And I tried to formulate this more tightly in a piece that just appeared last weekend. And the

00:25:45.760 argument, it was in the Wall Street Journal, the argument was, if a great power is spending more

00:25:51.220 on interest payments on its debt than on defense, it won't be a great power for much longer. And I

00:25:57.420 tried to show that this has been true all the way back to 16th century Habsburg, Spain, one of the

00:26:04.200 first great European empires. It was true also of the Dutch Republic of 18th century France. It was

00:26:12.480 true of 19th century Turkey, the Ottoman Empire. It was true of Austria-Hungary. And it was true of 0.83

00:26:17.420 Britain in the 20th century. And now it's true of the United States. 2024 last year was the first year

00:26:23.860 since 1934 that the United States has spent more money on interest payments on the federal debt than

00:26:30.840 non-defense. And I think that constraint looms very large in the minds of at least some people in the

00:26:39.380 administration. Which is why, for example, last week we had reports of Defense Secretary Hegseth

00:26:47.120 talking about cutting at least part of the defense budget, or shrinking at least part of it. Trump

00:26:52.680 himself talking about reducing defense spending mutually, the United States, Russia, and China,

00:26:59.040 a language quite different from the language of the first Trump administration, which

00:27:03.120 criticized the Democrats for not spending enough on defense. We've really got a different set of

00:27:09.320 priorities here because the world has changed. And at least some people in this administration think

00:27:15.180 it has changed in ways that put the United States in a much weaker position than most people realize

00:27:21.020 it's in. So that, I think, is how to frame this. The behavior that seems so outrageous to you,

00:27:29.300 obscene, I think you called it, is part of a realpolitik motivated by a sense of the limits of

00:27:36.180 American power and the need to avoid a showdown in three places at once. Because the US military

00:27:42.480 cannot simultaneously contend with conflicts in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, and in the Far East.

00:27:51.020 That's clear.

00:27:53.180 Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's so many sides to this object that I'd like to touch. Well,

00:28:02.020 we'll take the people who are in Trump's inner circle, right? I mean, who seem to have his view

00:28:07.640 of the situation as opposed to the traditional neocon or what is left of the vapors of neoconservatism,

00:28:14.380 perhaps in the head only of Marco Rubio. I mean, it seems to me that he has appointed,

00:28:19.400 I don't even know if this is debatable, he's appointed loyalists above all, right? And people

00:28:26.360 whose CVs don't really shriek their qualifications for the various posts to which they've been assigned.

00:28:33.360 So you have people like Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel. And this is a kind of a

00:28:40.580 rogues gallery of the unqualified, the compromised, the flagrantly conflicted. I mean, I don't, you know,

00:28:47.560 I don't know if you, we could drill down on any one of these. I think concerns about Tulsi Gabbard as

00:28:52.400 some kind of, you know, counterintelligence threat don't seem completely paranoid to me if, you know,

00:28:58.200 based on incompetence alone. But I mean, this is like the RFK junior-ification of our entire

00:29:06.840 government on some level, which is to say you point some ideologue who seems to have nothing

00:29:12.580 but contempt for the part of government he is now, he or she is now overseeing in the role of

00:29:18.740 authority there and to see what happens. Granted, you know, not, uh, the, the story up to the moment

00:29:24.860 has been, uh, of the, um, the rampages of Elon Musk and Doge and the gaggle of teenagers and, and

00:29:32.660 young, uh, software engineers he has helping him in that task. But all of this just strikes me as so

00:29:38.700 chaotic, so unvetted. It seems to present, uh, you know, the, the greatest, uh, espionage opportunity

00:29:46.800 for our enemies to be seen in perhaps several generations. There's something so reckless

00:29:52.300 about all of this. And, uh, again, the messaging about it publicly is in many cases, just patently

00:29:59.540 insane. It's just, it's a tissue of lies and, and active trolling. And it's just, it's so

00:30:05.880 unprofessional. And so, I mean, again, you can hear my, my level of allergy to all of this. Again,

00:30:11.480 these are my liberal, um, uh, norms being traduced on a, an hourly basis, but I find it hard to believe

00:30:19.580 that it's just mere idealism on my part that is causing me to whinge to this degree. I, I think

00:30:26.820 that being this cynical and transactional and so in the, in the grip of people who obviously are just

00:30:35.660 not, you know, are, are more, I mean, again, you know, our president's main qualification for the

00:30:41.560 job is apart from his prior presidency is that he was a game show host who convinced everyone that

00:30:46.440 he was really a billionaire. And now he's managed to become a billionaire on the basis of that

00:30:50.200 in some strange way. I just think we, we pay a price for this on the world stage and everything

00:30:55.860 you've said suggests to me that we can't go it alone, but we wouldn't have to go it alone if we

00:31:02.060 recognize that Europe, you know, our EU partners, our EU, our EU allies, I think have what, tenfold

00:31:08.920 the resources that, that Russia has. I mean, they're, they're, the EU is a colossus compared to

00:31:13.200 Russia in, in real terms. Uh, Russia has just proven that it can't quite defeat Ukraine as a 0.81

00:31:20.600 conventional army, uh, to everyone's astonishment, a war that everyone thought was going to be won in

00:31:24.860 days or weeks, uh, has dragged on for years because of Russia's incompetence. 0.94

00:31:29.520 Well, let, let, let me, let me stop you because we've now reached the point where I've got about

00:31:33.600 three or four different things to address. I think when one's assessing an administration,

00:31:39.780 one has to look at the whole thing. And while I personally wouldn't have appointed Tulsi Gabbard

00:31:46.900 to that position, if one looks at the treasury secretary, Scott Besson, commerce secretary,

00:31:53.500 hard luck, Nick, you're dealing with some extremely smart and experienced men whose knowledge of

00:32:00.520 markets is... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 28, 2025

#402 — The Geopolitics of Trump 2.0

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