Making Sense - Sam Harris - #426 — How Bad Is It？

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

00:00:11.740 hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing

00:00:15.720 the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense

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00:00:26.240 it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're

00:00:30.220 doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with David Frum. David, thanks for joining me.

00:00:40.220 Thank you.

00:00:41.220 It's been a while. I feel like we speak more than we do because I just consume your stuff

00:00:46.120 over at The Atlantic, so I know what you're thinking about, but I think it's been some

00:00:50.280 years since we've done a podcast together.

00:00:52.160 I think that's right. Since then, I've ventured into your domain. I've started a podcast of my

00:00:56.900 own, and I want to salute you. I think I always knew that it was not easy. I didn't know how not

00:01:02.720 easy it was. So, Maestro, you know how it's done, and I take my hat off to you.

00:01:08.660 Oh, nice. Well, congratulations on the show. It's the David Frum Show over at The Atlantic.

00:01:13.460 Thank you.

00:01:14.140 That's fantastic. Well, let's jump into the current moment. We're, what, six or

00:01:22.140 or so months into the second Trump administration. There's a lot we could talk about where the

00:01:28.320 fires of controversy are currently raging on the, about the Epstein case. Trump and his

00:01:35.620 courtiers have been amazingly inept at putting those fires out, and I would love to know the 0.71

00:01:42.180 reasons why you think that is. But we'll start with just the big picture on the domestic front.

00:01:48.680 How has it been these last six months from your point of view, and what has surprised you? What

00:01:54.000 has been worse than you thought? What has been better than you thought?

00:01:57.840 Yeah. Well, here is the thing that has been worse than I thought, and this is one of the two or three

00:02:01.700 biggest stories, which is the corruption has been on a fantastically larger scale than anything I

00:02:07.020 imagined or anything that I was ready for from the first Trump administration.

00:02:11.780 In the first Trump administration, Trump used techniques like making the Secret Service follow

00:02:17.240 him around to his various resorts. He used techniques like making sure that any Republican

00:02:23.300 candidate who wanted his blessing had to use one of his facilities. He pressed foreign governments

00:02:27.960 that needed American favor to use his facilities for their national day events and to stay. He would

00:02:33.180 ask diplomats who visited him, where did you stay last night? But over, that probably moved some

00:02:38.720 single millions of dollars into his pocket, maybe something over $10 million. There are different

00:02:43.400 estimates in the first term. So in the second term, he has left all, we're talking now, much

00:02:48.880 faster sums of money through the meme coins. As you and I speak, that President Trump is about to go to

00:02:54.860 Scotland to open a new golf course of his own. He's got golf courses in Vietnam and other countries

00:03:00.740 that seek America's favor. So all of that is bigger by a factor of 10 or 100 than it was in the first

00:03:05.980 term. So that's one thing that has changed. A second thing that has changed is the trade disputes

00:03:11.060 of the first term were definitely a problem that hurt Americans. Before Trump became president,

00:03:16.220 the United States was the largest exporter of soybeans in the world. And over the first Trump

00:03:19.920 term, it fell into second place behind Brazil because Trump alienated so many soybean buyers.

00:03:24.780 But the trade disruptions we were seeing and the threat to the American economy and the world

00:03:28.540 economy, that's much bigger. The damage to alliances is much bigger. And of course, the shock to America's

00:03:36.900 future standing from this enormous debt that Trump is incurring through his fiscal measures, that's much

00:03:41.900 bigger. Yeah. And also some of those indiscretions are linked, right? So the trade disruptions seem in

00:03:48.780 many cases to be motivated by Trump's personal corruption, right? I mean, you cited Vietnam, right?

00:03:55.980 So the reason to slap a 46% tariff on Vietnam is that their remedy for that is to immediately 1.00

00:04:03.020 greenlight a $1.5 billion Trump family resort deal. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I'm speaking to you

00:04:09.260 right now from Canada, which has been a special target of Trump's animosity. And a lot of people

00:04:13.900 in Canada are sort of baffling. What the hell happened here? What did Canada do? Canada's linked to the

00:04:19.820 United... Canada signed all these trade agreements. It signed a new trade agreement with the United States

00:04:23.560 that was signed by Donald Trump. He's just ignored that. And I think a big part of the Canadian

00:04:27.720 problem is the Trump organization had two hotels in Canada, one in Toronto and one in Vancouver.

00:04:33.040 And they both went bust. The Toronto hotel, Trump just licensed his name and it went bust for sort of

00:04:38.440 semi-objective economic reasons during the Great Recession or soon after. But the Vancouver hotel went

00:04:43.680 bust. Trump owned it and operated it. It went bust because Vancouverites wouldn't set foot in his

00:04:48.360 building during his first round. And he seems to be really mad about that and is blowing up

00:04:52.300 the North American common market or the North American trading zone to punish Vancouver for

00:04:57.420 not liking his hotel more. So why is it in your view that half of America appears not to care about

00:05:05.580 this? Is the problem that people don't know any of the facts you just elucidated or they've heard

00:05:14.780 about them but they think it's fake news or they understand exactly the shape and scope of this

00:05:20.960 corruption. They understand that the meme coin is a device for the pain of bribes directly to the

00:05:28.960 first family. They know that really there is no precedent in American history for a president

00:05:35.540 to use U.S. trade policy and foreign policy as a mechanism by which to extract tribute from foreign

00:05:43.940 governments. And essentially he's running a protection racket. And it's both internationally

00:05:48.160 where he's putting the global economy at risk for his personal gain and it's domestically where he's

00:05:55.120 shaking down some of our largest corporations. I mean we have news organizations settling spurious

00:06:02.000 lawsuits that they were almost certain to win but this is a way of just funneling money in Trump's

00:06:07.100 direction and hopefully getting his favor on future deals. Is it that people know all of this and

00:06:14.220 simply do not care? What's your interpretation of half of the half of America that still supports

00:06:19.280 Trump? Well I don't think we should be so surprised that this would happen. But American politics has

00:06:25.220 always been deeply tribal. This has been a two-party system more or less for almost all of its political

00:06:30.680 existence. Now who's in the tribes changes from time to time and the tribes are always remaking

00:06:35.940 themselves but they're two big tribes. And I think the way to think about how strong these tribal

00:06:40.880 loyalties are. So 1932 is probably one of the worst years in American history. Bottom of the Great

00:06:45.960 Depression. People are literally, Americans are literally going hungry. Incumbent President Herbert

00:06:51.600 Hoover who presided over the disaster ran for re-election in 1932 and got 38 percent of the vote.

00:06:58.140 So there's a core 35 percent that's just unmovable. Yeah. It's called the base for a reason. It doesn't

00:07:05.920 move. And if you ask people in 1932, look, things are terrible. Why are you voting for President

00:07:11.660 Herbert Hoover? They would have deep reasons of identity. Well my grandfather was at Antietam

00:07:17.360 under Grant and we vowed we will always vote Republican no matter what. Or the Democrats of

00:07:22.820 the party of the Catholic Church. Or the Democrats of the party of liquor. So we don't care about these

00:07:27.380 economic facts. We are voting for the union against the Catholic Church, against liquor. And that's why

00:07:32.300 this household votes Republican in 1932. And there you could tell the same story about Democrats. So

00:07:37.680 elections are always decided at the margins. And I think that's one of the reasons that Donald Trump

00:07:42.280 is so freaked out about the Epstein story. Because that is one of those rare events that can shake up

00:07:47.360 the tribal structure and move people from column A to column B. Because Trump has already told them,

00:07:53.860 Trump talkers and validators have told them, this is the biggest scandal in the world. It's the most

00:07:58.580 important scandal in the world. And only Donald Trump can get to the bottom of it. And it's as

00:08:04.120 if, I'm going to borrow an analogy from my son, it's as if they built a giant device of paranoia and

00:08:10.660 fear and rage and hatred and never thought to ask, in whose basement are we building this device?

00:08:17.580 Oh, it's the basement of the guy we think we're supposed to be following. It's in his basement.

00:08:22.120 And when it blows, it blows him up, not the people we want it to blow up.

00:08:25.640 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to get to Epstein because it's the one thing, the one controversy

00:08:32.080 that seems to be doing him some damage with the base or with certainly parts of the base.

00:08:37.940 But before we get there, let's linger on this litany of abuses you have put forward. I mean,

00:08:44.540 there's the additional problem of how needlessly provocative and cruel the immigration crackdown

00:08:51.620 has been. Again, I feel like there are many people who voted for Trump who in the abstract

00:08:57.420 supported some of these policies and would have been even insouciant about his corruption because

00:09:03.920 they just think, oh, well, it's more or less the same thing all politicians do. You know, Nancy Pelosi

00:09:08.600 made some stock trades that are hard to explain, et cetera. So they just put it all in the same bin.

00:09:15.220 I mean, they're insensitive to the scale of the problem, right? A million dollars is the same as a

00:09:19.260 billion dollars, really, if you're going to look at it that lazily. But I think many people are

00:09:25.880 genuinely surprised by the optics of the immigration crackdown. How has the implementation of this

00:09:32.540 policy struck you? And why does it seem, I mean, frankly, it seems reckless. I'm surprised by how

00:09:40.540 ruthless and chaotic they seem to want to be in the implementation of this policy.

00:09:47.160 Yes. No, that's a very important question. I should have mentioned it at the opening. And it's

00:09:51.660 one that hits me especially hard because I have been arguing for a long time that America needs

00:09:57.060 a stronger border policy. And this is before the surge of 2020. This is before even the surge of 2014.

00:10:03.900 I've been writing this since the 1990s. Because my view has always been immigration, if done right, 0.99

00:10:09.060 is a great benefit to a country. So it's very important to do it right. Because if you do it

00:10:15.560 wrong, you will get a backlash. And the backlash will be even worse than a failed immigration policy.

00:10:21.400 So do it right.

00:10:21.520 I'll remind you of your own famous line. I mean, many of us have made this point,

00:10:24.720 but you made it most sententiously. You said, I believe, if liberals won't police borders,

00:10:30.360 there's fascists will.

00:10:32.460 Right. All right. And you get Brexit and you get other forms of self-harm.

00:10:36.520 So it's been, and so I was, my first article about the Biden administration, when it took

00:10:40.860 over in January of 2021, was they began undoing many of the Trump restrictions on the border that

00:10:46.740 had kept people from flowing across. I said, this is the first and biggest mistake they make. If they

00:10:51.180 get, if they undo this, they are courting a lot of damage because the whole world wants to come to

00:10:56.580 the United States. And if you don't police the border, you'll have the problem.

00:10:59.400 The answer people like me insisted was the way you enforce the border is not at the border. It's

00:11:05.760 at the workplace. And what you should have a system where, when an employer is looking to hire

00:11:10.460 people, there's a requirement the employer check that they're legal in the country. The same way

00:11:15.080 that the employer should check that they're not a minor. In the same way that the employer should

00:11:18.180 check that they actually work the number of hours that are legally allowed to be worked. And that

00:11:22.780 there should be consequences for the employer. If you should treat immigration as another aspect 0.92

00:11:27.500 of labor law. And if employers get the message that the government is checking whether the employees

00:11:32.120 are legal, there will be less incentive for people to enter the country in the first place.

00:11:36.020 And the reason I was so emphatic about this over many, many articles was if you start, because the

00:11:41.840 alternative is our walls and roundups and the country won't stand for it. We are seeing scenes

00:11:47.380 that shock the conscience. We've got this network now of camps that are being built in which people

00:11:53.040 have not been convicted of any crime or just here illegally in the country, which is not a crime.

00:11:56.820 It's a violation of status, but it's not a crime to be in the country illegally. It's against the 0.61

00:12:01.080 law, but a lot, you know, so is driving recklessly, not necessarily a crime. They're rounding up people.

00:12:06.840 They're removing status from categories of people like Venezuelans and others who were granted 0.98

00:12:11.960 temporary protected status, who thought they did the right thing, and who now find themselves

00:12:15.680 without status and subject to being dragged to a camp. The country won't wear this. And Trump is

00:12:21.440 going to create a situation where, in addition to all of the terrible suffering that people have done

00:12:25.900 nothing really wrong, other than break a labor law to make a better life, they're in camps. He's also

00:12:31.360 going to change the political structure about immigration in this country in a way that is going

00:12:35.160 to be to his own harm and those of the people who follow him.

00:12:38.060 Do you actually think that the country won't put up with it? I mean, haven't we shown an inclination

00:12:43.780 to put up with it thus far? I mean, obviously, there are people, you know, a handful of people

00:12:48.780 in the streets of Los Angeles who, at least for a time, showed some signs of not putting up with it.

00:12:54.640 But in terms of the way the rest of the country views the so-called sanctuary cities where these

00:13:01.180 raids are happening, I feel like there's, it's not even an acquiescence. There's basically,

00:13:06.200 at least perceived, full acceptance of it as this is what you liberals get. I mean, you wanted your

00:13:12.420 nannies and your housekeepers and your gardeners to be as cheap as possible. We don't have the same 0.96

00:13:16.620 black market economy and that kind of labor over here in Ohio or Pennsylvania. You're getting what 0.98

00:13:21.860 you deserve and we wanted these people out of the country.

00:13:24.240 Well, as I said, the base doesn't change. But here are two things to keep in mind.

00:13:27.980 One is, there is a lot of polling about how attitudes toward immigration, which hardened during

00:13:33.000 the Biden administration, are softening under Trump, quite dramatically so. And the second thing to

00:13:37.640 keep in mind is, one of the reasons that Donald Trump won the presidency with an actual plurality

00:13:41.980 of the vote in 2024, unlike 2016, was that quite a number of Hispanics, especially Hispanic men,

00:13:47.480 moved in his direction. Now, I'm going to forget the statistic off the top of my head,

00:13:51.340 and I probably shouldn't quote statistics off the top of my head anyway, but what percentage

00:13:54.400 of Hispanic voters have a relative who is in the country without status, but it's high?

00:13:59.840 And Hispanics are not immigration single-issue voters. That was a big mistake that Jeb Bush made

00:14:05.400 back in 2011 and 12 to believe, or sorry, 15, 16, to believe that there would be single-issue

00:14:10.940 voters on immigration. That's not true. And many Hispanics welcome more enforcement. But if you're 1.00

00:14:16.700 rounding up their mother-in-law and putting her in a camp, that's going to be a problem, 1.00

00:14:20.880 and it's going to be a problem with people, with voters that were trending Trump and that Trump

00:14:23.800 needed to keep. Do you think we're just getting started in the unveiling of this ugliness,

00:14:29.620 or is this, have we seen the sort of the peak of what is morally outrageous?

00:14:35.980 And in the immigration side, we've built a new bureaucracy. ICE is soon to be bigger than the

00:14:39.820 Marine Corps, if I read the numbers right. And you can't build up a law enforcement agency that fast

00:14:44.760 without terrible risks. So the bureaucratic machinery that is built is going to keep chomp,

00:14:49.160 chomp, chomping, and there'll be more and more terrible stories. And first people will read about

00:14:53.220 them, and then they will hear about them, and then they may feel them. And then you'll have cases where

00:14:58.840 a family, some of whose members are in the country legally, has other members who are in the camps.

00:15:03.420 And so it's not just going to be the Fox News audience. It's not just going to be,

00:15:06.540 you know, the diehard voter for one side or another. It's going to be people who

00:15:10.040 were potential Republicans who are going to say, well, I would have been, but now my mother-in-law

00:15:14.560 is in a camp. I'm not voting for that.

00:15:17.260 So what else strikes you as surprising from the first six months? I'll remind you, we have three and a

00:15:25.920 half years left, right? So many things, I have to remind myself of this because I keep noticing

00:15:33.400 that I'm living with a kind of political illusion that the shape of the thing is already fully

00:15:41.100 manifest, whereas it's obviously evolving hour by hour, and who knows what we're going to be

00:15:46.340 talking about a year from now.

00:15:47.860 Yeah. Well, let's start with some things that are not as bad as they could be,

00:15:52.060 so we don't sink too deep into the gloom. Ukraine is still fighting. Trump is obviously not sympathetic

00:15:57.720 to Ukraine. Vice President Vance, even more hostile to Ukraine, but he's not stopped the

00:16:02.060 Ukrainian forces from fighting. And weapons and support do continue to trickle to Ukraine.

00:16:07.460 They're interruptions, but they're getting something. And it looks like they may get some

00:16:11.220 more stuff. Again, not enough, not as much as they should have, not maybe enough to win,

00:16:15.080 but enough not to lose. I have to say, as a supporter of the state of Israel, I have been impressed and

00:16:19.700 grateful that the Trump administration has improved the already generous support for Israel that the

00:16:25.560 Biden administration gave. And that has led to some decisive results. I think also the kind of,

00:16:32.440 I had thought the uncertainty that Trump was creating about trade would move us faster to

00:16:36.760 recession, but the opposite seems to be happening. It's because Trump, he does something dumb and then 0.99

00:16:41.600 he retracts it. He does something else dumb and then he retracts it. And I thought the market would 1.00

00:16:45.540 say, well, in that case, we have to stop investing altogether because who knows what the future

00:16:49.600 is. But the market keeps hoping for the best and paying more attention to the retractions of the

00:16:53.960 dumb policy than the dumb policy. So we're not in a recession. It looks like right now in the summer 0.88

00:16:58.340 of 2025. It doesn't seem so. And we hope that maybe we can get through the rest of this year

00:17:03.160 without too much of a recession. So that would be a good thing if we could avoid that.

00:17:07.060 Although it does seem on its face, completely irrational. The market seems to have drawn the

00:17:12.320 lesson that there's actually less uncertainty now than there was before so-called Liberation Day.

00:17:18.880 Right. I mean, all of this lurching back and forth, it seems to have convinced the market that this is

00:17:23.060 better than it was four months ago. Yeah. Well, the Trump trade policy has failed

00:17:28.580 and has predicted to do what it pretended to want to do. What it's pretended to want to do

00:17:33.580 is to bring back manufacturing to the United States. And that is doomed to fail for two reasons.

00:17:38.680 One is if you're producing something where your costs are higher than a Chinese or Vietnamese 1.00

00:17:43.540 competitor. And the government says, okay, we'll protect you from the competition. You're safe.

00:17:48.720 It doesn't matter that your costs are 20% or 30% or 40% higher than the Chinese or Vietnamese. We're

00:17:54.500 going to put up a wall to protect you. To which the investor will say, okay, but the investment I'm

00:17:59.080 contemplating is a very big one. And it's going to take quite a lot of years to pay itself off.

00:18:03.560 Can you assure me that this protection is going to be in place for the next 15 years? Because I'm not

00:18:08.160 making this investment unless I'm guaranteed 15 years of protection. And obviously Trump

00:18:12.800 can't protect that. And so we have seen business investment not responding. The second thing,

00:18:17.040 and this is a point that the Trump people cannot, will not understand, and that you can't get

00:18:21.080 protections to understand. Every product is also an input. So when you raise the price of a product,

00:18:28.080 you are making, of one step in the industrial process, you're raising every price. So fine,

00:18:33.820 when you protect steel and protect it from foreign competition, and you then say, we also want to

00:18:39.120 bring back shipping to the United States. What do you think ships are made of? You've raised the

00:18:44.700 cost of the ship. So you pretty soon, it's like the house that Jack built. And when America was

00:18:48.900 more protectionist back in the 19th century, this was all that politics was about. The wool people 0.99

00:18:53.700 would want protection. So the coats would need protection. The coat people would get protection.

00:18:57.900 So every industry that used coats would need protection and so on forever. And one of the reasons

00:19:02.940 that the United States changed and abandoned the protections policy was to say, you can't protect

00:19:07.600 everything, but you must protect everything if this is going to work. And the whole thing is crazy

00:19:12.240 and dysfunctional and expensive. So don't do it. Well, as you said, there are a few, if not silver

00:19:19.260 linings, there are things that are not as bad as one would have feared. I mean, the change of posture

00:19:25.920 with respect to Ukraine, since that awful Oval Office meeting with Zelensky has been good. Although it's, 0.99

00:19:32.520 it hasn't been principled. I mean, there's been this deterioration in his love affair with Putin

00:19:38.080 simply because Putin keeps humiliating him. And so we're seeing, again, U.S. foreign policy get bent

00:19:45.180 by the brain chemistry of the lone maniac in the Oval Office who perceives everything through the

00:19:52.940 politics of personal slights and flattery and the payments of tribute, et cetera. So, you know,

00:19:59.220 who knows what policy will change as a result of the next insult or the next piece of flattery.

00:20:07.240 And I think, you know, one hopes that there's a more principled stance underwriting his support for

00:20:17.000 Israel. I mean, he has, you know, on balance always been quite supportive of Israel and that would

00:20:22.940 explain his popularity there, except he has shown signs of, again, just being pushed around by any

00:20:31.660 perceived slight. I mean, I remember in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, I really think, I think

00:20:36.660 the first thing he's had to say about that atrocity was something petty about, you know, Netanyahu

00:20:44.520 not, you know, treating him well. I mean, we can only imagine had the mullahs in Iran offered him a

00:20:51.560 sufficiently large golf course deal, we might have a different policy with respect to the Middle East

00:20:56.720 right now. I think we have another big problem with coming with Iran, which is, look, we all hope, 1.00

00:21:02.420 I think we all hope that the Trump actions against Iran were decisive and that the, and we've reached 0.98

00:21:07.360 the end of the story, that he's done significant damage to their nuclear program and we can close the

00:21:12.160 books on this for a long time. But what if that's not true? What if either the damage was not as total

00:21:18.300 as Trump said, or the mullahs have other tricks to play, whether that's regional, whether that's

00:21:24.080 global terrorism, whether it's something. What if this is a problem that requires more work than just

00:21:29.660 press a button, collect the accolades, forget about it? The whole Trump foreign policy idea is you do

00:21:36.340 something once and then it's over and you're a winner and you give yourself a parade. But foreign policy

00:21:41.540 doesn't work that way. And one of the things that, one of the ways I think we should consider,

00:21:46.560 when we're trying to think how serious are the threats to the United States from what's happening

00:21:50.360 today, one of the questions asked is how difficult will it be to undo? So the good news about the

00:21:56.180 Trump corruption is actually you can, as happened in the 1970s, you can have a period of cleanup.

00:22:01.840 So you could have a four or five years where both Congress and state legislators say, okay,

00:22:06.060 we have the corruption got out of hand and we're going to pass rules to make sure that nothing like

00:22:10.400 this ever happens again. You can, you can dial it back. Let's do that. You can fix it up. American 1.00

00:22:15.200 politics is sometimes more clean, sometimes less clean. We're in a dirty period. You can have a

00:22:18.880 clean period. The damage to world trade is not so easily fixed. If Ukraine goes under, that's not

00:22:24.420 fixed. If you get a long-term conflict with Iran, that's bigger than the one we've had. And above all, 0.77

00:22:30.680 and this is the most important thing, if American leadership is questioned by the allies who benefit

00:22:35.840 from it by the adversaries who used to fear it, I don't know how quickly you get that back. That's

00:22:40.120 a hard thing to reassert. Yeah. I don't know how you get it back given that whatever we do to get

00:22:46.160 it back, I mean, just imagine the next president who's presumably, if he did this or she did this

00:22:51.400 would not be J.D. Vance, just offers this omnibus mea culpa on behalf of the nation saying, we're

00:22:57.940 terribly sorry we did this to you. Trump was a monstrosity. He was a gift to our enemies and an enemy 0.99

00:23:03.940 to our friends. We want a hard reset of all of our relationships and we're going to resume something

00:23:10.860 like a normal role of leadership and collegiality with all other liberal democracies. The problem

00:23:18.440 is that there's one bell that cannot be unrung here, which is that we have announced to the world

00:23:24.300 that within any four-year political cycle, we are capable of reneging on everything. We're capable of

00:23:32.840 producing a tsunami of corruption and stupidity, the likes of which no one could have expected. 1.00

00:23:40.960 And I mean, it's impossible to exaggerate. We can befriend dictators. We can claim that the victims 1.00

00:23:47.780 of a war of aggressions actually started the war. I mean, there's just up is down and down is up.

00:23:53.760 And we are capable as a nation of, given all the protections against this that one would have

00:23:59.400 thought existed against this, we are capable of doing this on a dime in response to a 51% vote.

00:24:05.880 And who knows when we're going to do this to you again.

00:24:08.320 And it's happened twice.

00:24:09.700 Right.

00:24:10.500 So let me give you some concrete examples of things that I think are going to be with us for a long

00:24:14.920 time. With the European allies whom Trump is so hostile to, there are deep commonalities of history,

00:24:21.200 of culture, legal systems. You know, the British, the Germans, they'll probably forgive the United

00:24:27.120 States sooner or later. But the great challenge to American power in this coming century, in this

00:24:33.380 present century will be China. And of course, China's neighborhood is very different. The 0.81

00:24:37.420 allies you need to balance China are countries that don't have that kind of affinity. Vietnam has no

00:24:42.680 sentimentality about America's role in Vietnamese history. The Indonesians don't have much. The 1.00

00:24:48.240 Indians have zero. The Filipinos may have like a little, but not much. So what all of these people 1.00

00:24:53.340 are wondering about is, can we, the Chinese are close, you're far. The Chinese and you are about

00:24:58.640 equally strong. You say you will protect us if things get tough. Can we trust you? And the

00:25:05.480 American answer is about 50% of the time. Yes. Yeah. We're good for 50% of the time. And you never

00:25:10.320 know in advance which 50% it's going to be. So the Vietnamese are going to think, and not just the 0.87

00:25:15.080 Vietnamese, but even more congenial countries like Australia are going to think, we need to hedge our

00:25:19.760 bets here. We can't be so close to the United States because they're not so reliable. Or here's

00:25:24.060 another concrete problem. Trump has used American weapon sales as a tool of not only national

00:25:30.720 strategy, but personal irritation. So one of the big questions that the Europeans have is the European

00:25:35.740 Union economy is at least equally big to the United States. Europe does not have an arms industry

00:25:40.660 competitive with the United States. And the French government has always said,

00:25:43.980 Europeans should buy European, even if the European weapons aren't at the moment quite as good as the

00:25:48.040 American weapons, because then they won't have to worry about being cut off. So when Trump is saying,

00:25:53.160 you know, we've got a kill switch in every weapon, whether that's true or not. He's the best

00:25:58.560 salesperson the French arms industry ever had. If you're a German, if you're a Pole, and you think,

00:26:03.560 should we buy the French system? I was in a, I won't use the specifics here. I was in a NATO country

00:26:08.360 at the earlier part of this year and had dinner with the defense minister who was contemplating a major

00:26:13.720 weapons purchase, at least major by the standards of that country. They had a series of bids, one

00:26:18.620 from American, the United States, one from France, one from some other country. The American system

00:26:23.720 was clearly the best, most capable, but it was also the most expensive. And they also had lost

00:26:29.040 confidence that they could trust it. They had bought, they had heard about this kill switch

00:26:32.700 rumor. Trump hadn't said it yet, but they had heard about it. They were worried about it. And they

00:26:36.320 were going to lean instead to a French or South Korean system because at least they could trust that 1.00

00:26:40.640 system. And after all, while it wasn't as good as the American system, it was still better than the

00:26:44.620 Russian system. Yeah. Yeah. So are you anticipating a new wave of nuclear proliferation as a result of

00:26:52.780 what's happened of late, especially our, our on-again, off-again support of Ukraine? I mean,

00:26:57.640 it seems to me that the only rational lesson to draw from Ukraine's experience on the one hand,

00:27:03.960 that maybe you could hold North Korea on a reason. If you'd like to continue listening to this

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00:27:15.020 all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free

00:27:19.980 and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.

00:27:33.960 Thank you.

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00:27:53.080 Thank you.

00:27:54.000 Thank you.

00:27:57.020 Thank you.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 23, 2025

#426 — How Bad Is It？

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