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00:00:22.960i am here with ann applebaum and it's great to see you again thanks for having me
00:00:29.300I must confess, I bring you on because you're one of the great observers of the unraveling of America and our stature on the world stage, but also I really always have a covert agenda, hoping you will perform psychic surgery on a few primary relationships in my life where I've got some very close friends who have been unconcerned all the while about what is happening in America, and I have not gotten through to them, and I keep hoping you will.
00:00:59.300You're really the first person on the A-team who I'm drafting, again, covertly.
00:01:05.300I'm making it explicit now, but you're performing the work of important relationships in my
00:01:13.680And I'm sure this is true for many people in the audience as well.
00:01:16.000So, well, I want to use your recent Atlantic cover story as a jumping off point where you
00:01:21.940discuss how American foreign policy has become an instrument of corruption in a way that
00:01:28.660we really haven't seen. And there's this ideological and even in your terms, revolutionary
00:01:35.120agenda to spread this kind of graft and lawlessness beyond our borders and to make common
00:01:43.040cause with authoritarian regimes that already operate this way. What do most people do you
00:01:49.800think not understand about the level of corruption we're seeing in the second Trump term?
00:01:55.300So first of all, I think people don't understand the degree to which, as you say, this is a revolutionary project. That means that there is a team of people. It's not Trump himself. Trump has his own agenda, his own narcissistic agenda, his desire to win at all costs and so on.
00:02:13.980But there is a group of people around him who are very happy to destroy existing institutions and bureaucracies and customs and to replace them with themselves, essentially.
00:02:29.440And in the case of foreign policy, what this looks like is clearing away diplomacy, removing experts, removing ways of doing business that Americans have stuck to for the last 70, 80, 90, maybe 100 years, and instead substituting business people, friends of friends of the president, in some cases ideologues, and letting them be the voice and the face of America.
00:02:59.440And the reason I compare it to a revolution is that when you have a revolution, there's always an ideological component, right? There's a big idea. And then the people bearing the big idea knock things down. But then lots of other people come in after them and alongside them.
00:03:14.900And in the case of this American Revolution, we have different kinds of ideologues. We have people who believe in their version of what they would call Western civilization or white supremacy. There are Christian nationalists who want to replace the American secular state with a Christian state. There are people who want to destroy what they call the administrative state, which the rest of us call the American government.
00:03:37.660And then there are people who want to take advantage of the vacuum and make money out of it.
00:03:43.180And I think the consistency of it and the frequency of the patterns, whether it's in Canada, whether it's in Latin America, whether it's in Europe, whether it's in Asia, is pretty overwhelming.
00:03:56.760You know, there are stories here and there, but it's very rarely put together and explained as a pattern.
00:04:03.600So just for example, you know, it's pretty clear that the Trump administration inside
00:04:08.420the state department elsewhere in the government have people who are interested in building
00:04:15.520ties between the U.S. government and the far right, especially in Europe, because they
00:04:19.960care a lot about what they would call European civilization.
00:04:23.100And it also happens that a lot of the far right parties are parties who are so-called
00:04:27.560enemies of regulation or libertarians.
00:04:30.080And that means those are political parties who oppose regulation. And so therefore, you often have cryptocurrency companies supporting them because they don't want to be regulated or tech companies supporting them who don't want to be regulated. And so you have a team really of ideologues plus tech plus crypto working together, for example, to support the AFD in Germany, the far right party or the far right in France or in Poland or Romania.
00:04:56.000And this is now, you know, this is American foreign policy. You would have more and better and closer relations between many people in the Trump administration and opposition parties, because these are for the moment opposition parties in Europe, whom they would like to help have come to power rather than with the governments themselves.
00:05:16.580And that's pretty new. You know, you can say America has done terrible things in its foreign policy over the last many decades, but supporting far-right political movements in Europe in order to overthrow existing governments, in order maybe to take apart the European Union, which is seen by some American companies as a hassle, this is a new way of operating on the world stage.
00:05:40.000And so, you know, pay attention to the details because it's in the details that you understand the story.
00:05:46.580Well, I think I can forgive many people for being confused about a lot of this because, I mean, so for instance, when you talk about support for the far right or let's say the AFD in Germany, I can imagine there are gradations of this kind of ideological capture, which, and some of which I think I'm in touch with personally.
00:06:07.320Obviously, I have no fondness for the far right anywhere, but I understand the, quote,0.52
00:06:12.940civilizational concerns when you look at the problem of Islamism and unchecked immigration,
00:06:20.640It's hard to imagine that the far right in the end is a friend to the Jews, but the anti-Semitism
00:06:25.200on the left and the kind of so-called red-green alliance, the leftist Islamist alliance that
00:06:32.080we've seen, perhaps we'll come back to that at the end of this conversation.
00:06:35.140I can see how there are people who don't see the risk of a group like the AFD just deciding that, well, there's nobody else to do the job of defending Western civilization and open societies, you know, liberal values, free speech, et cetera, from their genuine enemies.
00:06:56.640And so, you know, there might be some aspects of this that we don't want to support.
00:07:01.960But if we can cut a few regulations as well, that's all to the good.
00:07:10.440We're just recognizing that there are very few voices left of center who are willing to do this particular job.
00:07:16.940So that's, first of all, not exactly true.
00:07:19.000And I don't know, you probably don't want to break it down country by country.
00:07:22.120But I live in Poland part of the time, and the Polish government, which is a centrist, center-right government—actually, at the moment, it's a coalition between the, I would say, center-left and center-right—has been stricter on immigration than the previous government, which was a far-right government or a nationalist government, as it would have defined itself.
00:07:42.180You know, in most European countries right now, there are one or two exceptions, you have a very clear change of emphasis in policy. So it's not true that borders are open. It's not true that people are flooding in. It's not true that civilization is in danger in the way that the ideologues would have you believe.
00:08:03.680On the contrary, the problem with the far right parties, I mean, again, they're different in each country and they have different roles and so on. But if you just stick to the AFD, the AFD is a pro-Russian party. It's openly and aggressively pro-Russian. It does have neo-Nazis in its team of members of parliament. It does seek to change the nature of the modern German state.0.67
00:08:26.820It would pull Germany out of the European Union, as it says it would. This would cause profound economic chaos and disorder. It looks to me from the—I've been following it for a long time—it's a party that's really interested in undermining Europe, in removing the judicial and the legal boundaries that have made Germany such an important, stabilizing influence in Europe over the last many decades.
00:08:54.260So, you know, it's also a strange position for the U.S. government, which is on the one hand calling on Europeans to defend themselves, calling for the rearmament of Germany, which has begun. And so there's a strange question. So you're going to rearm Germany, okay, and then you're going to hand Germany over to a political party that talks about Western Poland as German territory, and you're going to hand it over to a party that doesn't want to use the weapons to fight Russia, so who else is it going to use to fight them?
00:09:48.320that was not the only argument of my article.
00:09:50.920The other part of the argument was that
00:09:53.120The use of many of this, you know, there's a kind of ideological hard line, but there are also ways in which U.S. companies, and especially companies close to Trump, are using American foreign policy to do business.
00:10:06.220And I think that's part of the story in Europe as well.
00:10:08.400Well, in your response there, you turned up yet more evidence of how hard this is to parse. I mean, take the rearmament of Germany. One of the only silver linings anyone has conceded to the chaos that Trump has introduced on the world stage and the unraveling of the world order as a result has been that Europe has acknowledged that it should take responsibility for its own defense, right?
00:10:38.300that relying entirely on the U.S. was untenable, we had a massive free rider problem, and it's all
00:10:44.780to the good that Europe is rearming, and yet now you've shown a possible negative implication of
00:10:52.520that. How would you assess just that piece on its own? So the reason Europe is rearming is not
00:11:00.200because of Donald Trump. Europe is rearming because Europe has now a very clear threat on
00:11:07.380its eastern border that europe has finally understood and it took a long time you wouldn't
00:11:12.540credit trump's lack of um consistency as an ally as part of that certainly trump's lack of
00:11:18.920consistency and ally has helped but if it weren't for the threat of russia there would be no need
00:11:25.540to rearm there would be no you know there would be a terrorist threat from the south or from
00:11:30.920you know from elsewhere but that that wouldn't require rethinking mobilization rethinking you
00:11:38.080know how you how you create large armies rethinking the drone industry doing deals with
00:11:42.840ukrainian drone industry which is a big part of this none of that would be necessary but what you
00:11:47.760do have now is an emboldened and escalating russia which is carrying out frequent now0.74
00:11:54.560sabotage attacks, assassination attempts, cyber attacks all over Europe. There was an armed drone0.54
00:12:01.300founded a German airport a few weeks ago. There was an attack on a, which fortunately failed on
00:12:05.740a Polish passenger train. There have been bombs and missiles that have fallen right next to the
00:12:09.980Polish border. You know, these are the things that have changed the atmosphere in Europe and
00:12:15.700changed the conversation. And in that, you know, looking at it from the European point of view,
00:12:20.940They see a threat, a genuine threat from Russia, not just some kind of online or hybrid threat, but a real threat.
00:12:28.940They see the war in Ukraine escalating, and they see Trump playing a kind of neutral role.
00:12:35.260So the United States is not in solidarity necessarily with European allies.
00:12:40.900The United States is ambivalent about Ukraine, and the United States is often, I won't say aligning with Russia because that hasn't happened yet, but certainly not criticizing Russia.
00:12:50.940And so the reorientation that's happening in Europe is, I mean, I wouldn't say it's because Trump was so clever and he persuaded them to rearm.
00:13:00.100It's more the sense of, right, we see the world differently now.
00:13:04.540The United States is not necessarily on our side.
00:15:55.660The war also has two other faces, though.
00:15:57.480One is the escalation in Russian bombardment and destruction of Ukrainian civilians in cities.
00:16:05.540So, I mean, literally in the last few days, kindergartens, hospitals, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev, you know, factories, not necessarily military factories, civilian factories of all kinds.0.83
00:16:17.220It looks like what the Russians are doing is the policy they carried out in Chechnya and Syria, which is just destroy everything, just try and wreck as much of the society, as much of the economy as they possibly can.0.85
00:16:29.140And they're targeting Kiev in a way that they didn't earlier in the war. Kiev was pretty safe, actually, through a lot of the war. And that's changed. And that's changed the atmosphere inside Ukraine quite a bit.0.98
00:16:40.380I mean, the things that felt safe until very recently don't feel safe now.0.74
00:16:45.240And the Russians, this is their technological changes.
00:16:47.160The Russians now have these jet-powered drones.0.92
00:16:49.060Ukrainians are working on how to counter them.1.00
00:17:05.080I mean, there are daily rates, some more successful, some less.
00:17:08.480They can hit refineries in Moscow. They can hit them a thousand miles from the border.
00:17:13.240And they've taken out, as I understand it, something like 30 to 40 percent of the Russian refining capability, which is huge.
00:17:19.860Does anyone think that Ukraine is capable of actually winning this war?
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00:17:33.440There's lots of evidence that the legitimate leader of the Venezuelan opposition, who was the figure behind an electoral victory in 2024, this is Maria Carina Machado, as we speak, is being prevented from going back to the country.
00:17:47.640She's made multiple attempts. Her planes get turned around in the air, and the U.S. seems to have played a role in that, too.
00:17:53.460The United States is not fixing the criminality or bringing the rule of law.
00:17:58.180What the U.S. is doing instead is partnering with the criminals and seeking to benefit from it.