Making Sense - Sam Harris - #69 — The Russia Connection

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.

00:00:10.880 Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber

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00:00:46.720 Today I'm speaking with Anne Appelbaum.

00:00:50.240 Anne is a columnist for the Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian.

00:00:55.060 She's also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.

00:00:58.360 where she runs ARENA, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda, resisting those

00:01:05.000 things rather than producing them.

00:01:07.020 She's formerly a member of the Washington Post editorial board, and she's also worked at

00:01:10.880 The Spectator, The Evening Standard, The Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, The Economist, The Independent.

00:01:18.420 Her writing has appeared everywhere, including the New York Review of Books and the Wall Street

00:01:22.680 Journal and the New York Times, and she's the author of two very well-regarded books.

00:01:28.100 The first is Iron Curtain, which describes the imposition of Soviet totalitarianism in Central

00:01:34.900 Europe after the Second World War.

00:01:37.300 And her previous book, Gulag, A History, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2004.

00:01:43.900 Now, as you'll hear, I've primarily been reading Anne in the Washington Post and following her

00:01:49.580 on Twitter, where she's just been an assassin. 0.98

00:01:53.460 Her commentary on Trump has been on point from the very beginning, practically from the

00:01:58.100 moment he announced his candidacy.

00:02:00.080 So I recommend that you follow her on Twitter.

00:02:02.400 She's at Anne Appelbaum.

00:02:04.340 All one word.

00:02:06.040 Needless to say, her expertise on Russia and propaganda is coming in especially handy these

00:02:12.660 days.

00:02:13.660 You'll hear that we recorded an addendum to this podcast, because a few days after we recorded

00:02:18.960 the initial conversation, events got quite colorful in the ongoing investigation into collusion

00:02:26.480 between the president's team and the Russians.

00:02:30.280 So we added about 10 minutes at the end to bring things as up to the minute as one can in

00:02:36.840 a podcast like this.

00:02:38.040 No doubt the story will have changed since, but I suspect the moral core of the story is

00:02:44.740 the same, and that's what we talk about.

00:02:48.260 Now, of course, you all know what I think about Trump, and I know that many of you are getting

00:02:53.160 bored with my howls of pain, and so I haven't been saying much on my own.

00:02:58.780 Instead, I've been bringing guests on who have a lot more to say than I do, people who are

00:03:03.100 far more knowledgeable about politics and the inner workings of governments and the relevant

00:03:08.740 history.

00:03:10.100 So in this vein, I spoke with Gary Kasparov and David Frum, and now I'm bringing you Anne

00:03:17.420 Appelbaum.

00:03:19.020 Enjoy.

00:03:19.460 I am here with Anne Appelbaum.

00:03:27.920 Anne, thanks for coming on the podcast.

00:03:29.840 Thank you for inviting me.

00:03:31.260 Well, listen, I've been following you on Twitter.

00:03:33.940 Avidly is not too strong a term.

00:03:36.600 You are among the few people who have just been devastating against our current president,

00:03:42.380 and I would put you up there with David Frum in terms of the quality of the stuff you've

00:03:48.460 been circulating on social media about him and in response to his antics.

00:03:53.760 So first, let me praise you for that.

00:03:55.240 It may seem like a trivial thing, but I think it's of immense social importance.

00:03:59.740 Well, thank you.

00:04:01.000 I'm not sure, is it flattering or not flattering to be known for your Twitter feed?

00:04:05.280 But I'll take it as a compliment.

00:04:07.680 I think we fight in the trench we are given.

00:04:10.440 And it seems to be an important one to occupy at the moment.

00:04:14.460 Before we jump into the matter at hand, can you just say a little bit about your background

00:04:19.420 as a journalist?

00:04:20.920 How is it that you have come to do the work you're doing now?

00:04:24.280 I actually, I entered journalism in 1989.

00:04:28.520 I began as a stringer living in Warsaw.

00:04:33.160 Actually, late 1988 is when I first moved there.

00:04:36.160 And I was a stringer.

00:04:37.220 I was in my mid-20s, writing for British newspapers, writing for The Economist magazine, actually,

00:04:42.940 and the independent newspaper and others.

00:04:46.660 And partly because I sensed that it was an interesting time to be there, and partly because

00:04:51.960 I was just very lucky.

00:04:52.820 I wound up covering the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, not only in

00:04:58.580 Poland, but in the whole region.

00:04:59.820 And I think that experience of seeing a tyranny collapse and seeing democracy replace it,

00:05:07.420 I then had an occasion to watch those countries change over the subsequent 20 years, was probably

00:05:14.120 the formative political experience of my life.

00:05:16.500 So that might make me a little different from other American journalists.

00:05:19.580 That was the thing that interested me the most and that I wrote about the most over a couple

00:05:26.180 of decades.

00:05:26.860 I took that in several different directions.

00:05:30.080 I wrote a couple of history books.

00:05:31.900 I was fascinated by the history of the region.

00:05:33.640 I wrote a history of the gulag system, which was the Soviet camp system.

00:05:37.460 And then I also wrote a history of the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after the war.

00:05:41.640 So in a way, the opposite of the process that I observed.

00:05:44.700 I, you know, what did totalitarianization look like?

00:05:48.840 I'd witnessed democratization.

00:05:50.360 This was the opposite process I wrote as a history book.

00:05:53.100 But I've also worked as a journalist in Britain.

00:05:56.480 I worked on the editorial board of the Washington Post where I wrote about health care and all

00:06:01.100 kinds of all kinds of ordinary things.

00:06:03.120 But I suppose that experience of being constantly trying to understand what was dictatorship, what

00:06:10.220 was democracy?

00:06:10.920 What were the constituent parts of both?

00:06:13.540 You know, what made people adhere to one system or the other has something that's been I've

00:06:19.260 been interested in my whole professional life.

00:06:21.700 And I didn't think that those would be important things to know and understand in following and

00:06:27.800 interpreting an American election and American presidency.

00:06:30.180 But it turned out that they were.

00:06:32.520 Yeah.

00:06:32.760 And, you know, if I had any insight into Donald Trump in his early days and, you know, from

00:06:38.780 last summer and last spring, it was because I saw, you know, immediately saw that much of

00:06:43.980 what he was doing was, you know, these were tactics that came from Ukraine.

00:06:48.040 I mean, I recognized, you know, Ukrainian politics, which I also write about.

00:06:51.880 I recognized the use of tactics, the way he was using social media, the way he ran his electoral

00:06:58.560 events, and they looked to me like things I'd seen in Eastern Europe.

00:07:02.340 And I think that somewhat weird insight might have turned out to matter because it looks

00:07:08.120 like he was influenced by, well, certainly he's a kid, a campaign manager who had long

00:07:13.720 Ukrainian experience.

00:07:14.640 And I think that explains some of his electoral tactics anyway.

00:07:19.180 Obviously, that's much of the reason why we're speaking now, because you were so early

00:07:23.920 and so clear on these parallels.

00:07:27.520 And we're in the process of discovering how relevant your expertise is at the moment.

00:07:33.620 We'll get into talking about the investigation and what evidence is there or seems likely

00:07:39.060 to be there of a connection between the Trump campaign and Russia.

00:07:44.340 But just briefly, how would you describe yourself politically?

00:07:47.860 How do you come to this?

00:07:48.900 What are your political biases and commitments?

00:07:51.240 You know, I always thought of myself as being center right.

00:07:55.860 You know, I thought I kind of I was very happy in the Tory party in the 1990s when I was living

00:08:00.280 in Britain and I was a British journalist.

00:08:03.500 I have voted Republican in the past.

00:08:06.300 But I have this feeling that although my views haven't changed, I feel that the right actually

00:08:13.420 in the three countries that I remain connected to, which is Poland, the United States and Britain,

00:08:17.740 the right has changed so much that it's left me somewhere else.

00:08:21.500 I mean, somewhere, you know, in the center.

00:08:24.400 You know, it's hard.

00:08:25.420 You know, I don't I feel very out of touch with the current Republican Party.

00:08:29.660 Certainly since the Brexit vote, I feel out of touch with the Tory party.

00:08:33.300 And the Polish right has gone mad as well. 0.76

00:08:35.360 It's a whole nother stories.

00:08:36.380 But, you know, I don't think I've changed.

00:08:38.540 I mean, my views are the same as they were the same as they were 20 years ago.

00:08:43.720 You know, I sort of started as an anti-communist.

00:08:45.840 I was interested in, you know, a small but efficient government.

00:08:49.780 I understand there has to be some public funding for some things.

00:08:52.940 And, you know, of course, that will vary from country to country depending on what people want.

00:08:56.760 But I met those views were in the 1990s, a kind of center right views.

00:09:01.220 And I'm not sure where they leave me now.

00:09:03.960 Right.

00:09:04.040 But you're not coming at this from the far left.

00:09:06.660 You're not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Michael Moore.

00:09:10.680 I'm not Elizabeth Warren.

00:09:13.360 I'm not Bernie Sanders.

00:09:14.240 I'm not Michael Moore.

00:09:15.480 And, I mean, you know, the Bernie Sanders candidacy is, of course, another interesting phenomenon of the last year.

00:09:22.700 I didn't have any initial sympathy with it at all.

00:09:25.800 I mean, as time went on, you know, I began to see – I began – I understand more why people were voting for them

00:09:30.740 and why people were excited by them at this particular moment.

00:09:33.840 But, no, I mean, I come from – I mean, actually, you mentioned David Frum, who I think he's also been on your program.

00:09:40.520 I mean, I – for much of my life, I would have had trouble distinguishing myself from him in terms of political views.

00:09:47.800 I mean, we've differed about some things.

00:09:49.220 But, you know, sure, I used to write for the Weekly Standard.

00:09:51.980 I used to write for the National Review.

00:09:53.240 I was – you know, I didn't know how people considered me because I don't – I'm not, you know, probably culturally different from some of the American right.

00:10:02.220 But I was very happy in that position 10 years ago.

00:10:06.040 And now, you know, I just don't know.

00:10:07.400 Yeah, well, that strikes me as the most useful background to have at the moment because what one can't allege about you and Frum and David Brooks and all the people who are center-right

00:10:21.020 and, you know, who have been traditionally Republican or certainly more Republican than Democrat,

00:10:27.140 you can't allege rank partisanship in your criticism of Trump, which could be alleged of, you know, anyone on the left.

00:10:35.260 I don't think honestly at this point, but certainly that's what would strike the mind of any Trump defender.

00:10:40.440 This is really the challenge before us because I want to talk about Trump and Russia and fake news and all of these intersecting concerns.

00:10:47.920 But the challenge is to say something that could be conceivably persuasive to someone who doesn't already agree with us.

00:10:54.820 And this is the challenge I put to David in my podcast with him.

00:10:59.260 It's a very high bar given the style of thinking on the other side.

00:11:05.260 This just strikes me as almost an insuperable problem given how the defenders of Trump don't acknowledge seemingly facts that you have to acknowledge to be sane with respect to his behavior and his obvious lying.

00:11:21.160 I mean, the most alarming thing about Trump, from my point of view, is, and this is among many alarming things, but it's the degree to which he lies.

00:11:28.860 And the most alarming thing about his defenders is their reluctance to admit this.

00:11:34.220 They'll say things like, all politicians lie, as though Trump's lying was of the ordinary sort.

00:11:40.320 So even in the most extreme case, you have something like the wiretapping allegation against President Obama.

00:11:45.740 The most Republicans in Congress will say at this point is that the president is wrong.

00:11:51.560 But that entirely misses the moral and political core of what happened here.

00:11:57.040 I mean, the president wasn't wrong in the sense that he was mistaken.

00:12:01.240 It's not like he has some information that he misinterpreted in good faith, as anyone might have.

00:12:07.160 He made up this allegation to cause chaos, obviously to distract people from some other chaos he caused in a previous news cycle.

00:12:16.780 And it's kind of the political equivalent of a suicide bombing.

00:12:21.160 It's one of these utterly malicious, slanderous, insane lies that you actually stand no chance of being able to get away with. 0.89

00:12:29.140 And he tells these sorts of lies all the time, lies of a sort that really cannot be believed.

00:12:35.460 Where his line is so obvious that the language game he's playing at that point isn't the ordinary attempt at deception.

00:12:43.080 He's just trying to bowl you over with his disregard of the norms of political discourse.

00:12:48.840 So, you know, as someone who's a student of this style of communication, where you're kind of the strong man or the autocrat or the highly atypical political figure begins to communicate in this way.

00:13:02.360 How does this strike you?

00:13:04.480 What are the consequences of having a president who not only can we not trust, but it's worse than that.

00:13:11.260 We can trust him to lie always when he thinks it serves his purpose, even when it doesn't serve his purpose.

00:13:19.780 How do you think about that?

00:13:22.060 Well, first of all, I do want to come back to the question of, you know, who is supporting him and why and how to reach them.

00:13:28.400 Because that's actually something I'm working on now myself.

00:13:31.340 But this question of why he's behaving the way he does.

00:13:36.260 I mean, first of all, you said this is so atypical.

00:13:38.500 It's actually not atypical.

00:13:40.420 You can look around the world and you can find similar leaders.

00:13:44.740 I mean, the period that I worked on, you know, as a historian is a little different in that, you know, I was writing about the communist parties in the 40s and 50s.

00:13:54.360 And they combined lying with violence.

00:13:58.080 So, in other words, they lied about what they were doing.

00:14:01.420 They lied about the purpose of it.

00:14:02.700 They lied about their achievements.

00:14:04.320 And then they suppressed people who disagreed with them.

00:14:07.180 And I don't think we're dealing with anything like that in the United States.

00:14:11.580 And I think it's important to be clear about that.

00:14:13.800 This isn't nobody's being forced to believe him as they have been in other countries and other times and places.

00:14:20.320 Lying has been very central, actually, to a lot of 20th century governments. 0.89

00:14:24.660 But the correct comparison to him, though, is if you look at Putin and how he uses lies, and if you look at Chavez and how he used lies, you do see that there are leaders who have used them effectively.

00:14:39.100 So, Putin uses them in a very specific way.

00:14:41.340 He lies, well, he and the media that he controls.

00:14:46.120 And he, again, is in a different position because he controls all the media, which is, again, not the case with Trump.

00:14:50.080 He's acting in a different climate.

00:14:52.100 But he creates lies deliberately, partly to devalue the entire concept of truth.

00:15:02.580 I mean, it's very interesting.

00:15:04.200 Look at what happened after that Malaysian plane crashed in Ukraine a couple of years ago.

00:15:11.100 It was shot down by—we now know it was shot down by Russian anti-aircraft weapons, and it crashed in Ukraine, and many people died, including many Dutch people.

00:15:22.840 What did the Russian media do after that?

00:15:25.200 It didn't say, we didn't do it.

00:15:27.540 No.

00:15:28.040 Instead, it released literally dozens of different explanations.

00:15:32.480 You know, there was one explanation.

00:15:33.780 It was the Ukrainians shot them down because they were aiming at Putin's plane. 0.80

00:15:37.260 There was another explanation that said there were lots of dead people put on the plane on purpose, and it was crashed on purpose, you know, to discredit Russia.

00:15:44.940 There was another—you know, many of them were absurd, the explanations.

00:15:49.620 But the proliferation of them was such that it created this massive confusion around that event.

00:15:55.260 And Radio Free Europe did a very good series of interviews in Moscow at that time right afterwards, and they asked people on the street, you know, who—why did that plane crash?

00:16:06.080 And overwhelmingly, people said things like, oh, we have no idea and we'll never know.

00:16:10.700 It's impossible to find out.

00:16:12.620 The truth cannot be known.

00:16:14.100 And the effect of Putin and Putin's press, the sort of multiplication of explanations, was that it obfuscated the idea of truth.

00:16:23.820 You know, people don't believe you can find out the truth.

00:16:27.040 And that's very useful to a dictator.

00:16:29.460 You know, Putin doesn't want people—he doesn't want people to believe anything because, you know, maybe somebody will eventually print, for example, how much money he really has.

00:16:38.640 Or—and actually, you know, many things about his, you know, his colleagues and associates have been printed.

00:16:44.980 There has been information about money stolen.

00:16:47.240 There's a big piece, actually, in the last few days reported by several newspapers about much of the extent of Russian money laundering in Europe and how much, you know, billions of dollars stolen from the Russian budget and so on.

00:16:58.680 So what Putin wants is for all those stories to be undermined.

00:17:02.340 You know, so if you tell lots and lots of lies, then people don't really know what to believe and they don't—and I don't want to make a direct analogy to what Trump is doing, but Trump clearly is trying to undermine the, you know, the so-called mainstream media or even, you know, just the media.

00:17:19.640 He wants people to doubt what they read.

00:17:21.740 He wants his followers not to believe, I don't know, the New York Times or the Washington Post.

00:17:27.660 And so, you know, by lying, he obfuscates the whole space in a way.

00:17:32.640 You know, the whole media space and the media conversation is thrown into chaos.

00:17:37.140 I mean, I think it's really interesting how difficult it is for sort of mainstream reporters—I mean, really, whether they have kind of center-right or center-left views—even to describe what he's doing.

00:17:50.420 I mean, for example, you know, as soon as he made that wiretapping claim, Obama denied it almost immediately.

00:17:56.460 It was pretty clear to me right away that it wasn't true, you know, that he'd made it up, as you say, to distract from something else.

00:18:03.280 But it's very difficult for, you know, in our media environment, it was very hard for people to cope with that.

00:18:09.260 And, you know, people kept reporting on it, and they kept asking him questions about it.

00:18:13.640 And it was very difficult for us to come to terms with it.

00:18:16.120 And I think what it helped to do was undermine the whole idea that the press can report on things that are true and find truth and falsehood and that there's anything that can be true or false at all.

00:18:26.820 And, you know, he prefers to exist in a kind of fantasy world where he can make up reality so he can say, I don't know, you know, I won the popular vote in the election where there were millions of people at my inauguration.

00:18:41.200 And he wants people to believe that because he wants to create reality and not be, you know, be beholden to reality.

00:18:48.220 And lying is one of the ways in which political leaders do that.

00:18:52.960 They do it in Russia.

00:18:53.800 They do it in Venezuela.

00:18:55.000 They do it in Turkey.

00:18:57.040 I mean, it can be done.

00:18:59.380 You know, it turns out that you don't need even a police state to do that.

00:19:04.340 You can sort of pollute the information space just by lying.

00:19:08.880 And I think he has done that.

00:19:10.500 And what's, you know, the interesting thing will be to watch what happens both to the American press and to the American political debate over the next several years.

00:19:18.780 And I actually don't I don't have a prediction exactly as I can tell you what happened in, you know, in totalitarian countries where people were forced to believe in lies or were forbidden from contradicting them.

00:19:29.160 But how it will work in in in in the United States, I don't know yet.

00:19:34.220 You know, in other countries, you get a phenomenon where people separate public life from private life.

00:19:41.220 In other words, there's one set of values that apply in the public sphere.

00:19:45.400 You know, in the public sphere, you lie.

00:19:47.060 And then in the private sphere, you behave differently around your family and your children and so on.

00:19:51.200 And maybe something like that will happen in America where people begin to say, right, the public sphere is different.

00:19:57.180 And, you know, we behave differently there and we did and we behave differently at home.

00:20:01.340 Maybe you will begin to get people cutting themselves off from public life.

00:20:05.400 And I've seen this a little bit among people I know.

00:20:07.240 You know, it's also awful.

00:20:08.380 I can't bear to read about it anymore.

00:20:10.480 Get me away from it.

00:20:11.740 And that's that's another reaction that you get in, you know, again, in Venezuela and in Russia.

00:20:17.800 You know, OK, I'm just going to I'm not going to pay any attention to the political sphere because it's so confusing and awful.

00:20:23.060 I want to flag that point because the truth is I feel that myself.

00:20:26.660 And I noticed that among people and I just see that happening around me.

00:20:31.600 But I feel it really acutely myself.

00:20:34.540 And I'm someone who has made a lot of noise about Trump and dealt with the pushback that one gets there.

00:20:41.520 And there's a kind of reality testing fatigue that sets in.

00:20:46.640 And it's just it's so onerous to have to respond to this stuff.

00:20:53.420 And he lies with such velocity and so grotesquely.

00:21:00.000 And as do his defenders, the Sean Spicers of the world and Kellyanne Conway.

00:21:04.380 And it's just it's unbelievable what comes out of their mouths.

00:21:08.120 And I've said this before.

00:21:09.600 I'm sure I'm not the only person who has said this.

00:21:11.520 But if Trump were one tenth as bad, he would seem worse.

00:21:16.760 Like you can't even keep up with the crazy thing he said a few hours ago because he's he's saying another crazy thing right now.

00:21:24.940 And you see, the media just can't even focus on his various crimes and misdemeanors against basic human sanity to say nothing of civility because they come at just so rapidly and they're so enormous.

00:21:40.800 But this is we know this in other countries.

00:21:42.780 It's not unique to the United States.

00:21:44.460 I mean, it's it's a it's a and as I said, people people develop coping mechanisms.

00:21:49.700 They cut themselves off or they create, you know, they make a distinction between public and private morality or they, you know, or in some cases they they realize that to get ahead in their job or in their community, they need to pretend to believe it.

00:22:04.740 And so they do.

00:22:05.340 I mean, that's another phenomenon it's worth paying attention to is that, you know, and I think that a lot of the Republicans who defend him or who aren't anyway, don't criticize him or doing it for this reason, you know, so he's set the tone of public life.

00:22:17.860 And in order to succeed in his world, whether it's in his cabinet or in his White House or in his or in the Congress that he's president of, people will need to pretend what he's saying is true.

00:22:28.800 And that will create another weird level of alternate reality.

00:22:32.180 Yeah.

00:22:32.720 Where, you know, as you say, people can't contradict him because in order to sort of, you know, in the way that, you know, the Communist Party used to say, you know, we've had this tremendous economic success and people would say, yes, we've had tremendous economic success.

00:22:45.360 It wasn't because they believed it.

00:22:46.400 It's just that that was what it was necessary to say in order to get ahead.

00:22:50.380 And we will now see that phenomenon in American life as well.

00:22:53.940 Yes.

00:22:54.300 Let's step back for a second and because I don't want to ignore this, this challenge I put to us at the beginning.

00:23:00.920 What is the smartest defense of Trump you've heard?

00:23:04.820 And so what could someone say?

00:23:06.600 I don't know who this person would be.

00:23:08.120 If you have a smart defender of Trump in mind, please name this person because I would love to know such a person exists.

00:23:15.980 But what could someone say to argue that none of what we just said matters at all?

00:23:23.220 So I do know some people who've defended Trump.

00:23:26.380 I won't mention their names because they might not like it.

00:23:28.560 But the main defense that I have heard from intelligent Republicans who, you know, care about their country just as much as you and I do, is that there are things that we need to get done.

00:23:41.020 That the Republican Congress, you know, which is now united and dominated by the Republicans and we are about to have a Republican dominant or anyway, four to five, if I mean, never quite works out like that.

00:23:52.180 But a Supreme Court that will have a conservative majority or might have a conservative majority because you never know how people really vote.

00:23:58.080 But, you know, there are now important changes that we can make and we just need to somehow live with Trump and his madness and get around him.

00:24:08.740 And the Republican Congress is going to do so many great and important things that we can ignore this.

00:24:14.240 And I'm not defending that defense.

00:24:16.540 I'm just saying I've heard it.

00:24:17.500 How deep does that go?

00:24:19.300 Does it go so far as to say that not only is Trump the lesser evil here, it's just not that Clinton was going to be so terrible and make our, you know, our being the rights policy concerns unattainable, but that there's something actually more optimal about Trump than that.

00:24:39.360 That what the system needs is this level of chaos or something like it.

00:24:43.180 We need a wrecking ball.

00:24:43.840 There's that's there's the Steve Bannon anarchy argument or the Peter Thiel anarchy argument, you know, that we need total chaos and revolution and we need to burn everything down.

00:24:53.540 And then in the ashes of our country, we will rebuild something better.

00:24:57.200 I mean, that but that's, by the way, Bolshevik argument.

00:24:59.660 That was the you know, that was the motivating idea of the Russian Revolution, which ended in total disaster. 0.95

00:25:05.100 I mean, there's no there's no evidence that revolutionary destruction creates anything good ever.

00:25:11.020 I mean, there's no historical example you can point to.

00:25:13.360 But there are people who believe I mean, there are people who believe that stated that way.

00:25:18.560 It sounds quite crazy to me.

00:25:20.200 Did you think Bannon and Thiel and people who subscribe to the wrecking ball theory are imagining that level of real world chaos?

00:25:31.260 Or are they just imagining that it can be contained to the bureaucracy of government and that it will kind of clean out that mess of bad incentives and career bureaucrats who staff the administrative state, but that nothing that we really care about will be destroyed?

00:25:52.160 So I only know, you know, I'm now repeating what people have said about Bannon or heard him say or, you know, interpreted that, you know, but I'm told that he does believe in a in something quite a lot more than that.

00:26:06.500 For example, he would like to have a war with China, you know, because he feels that, you know, we need to bring this crisis to, you know, this competition between our two countries to, you know, to to a head and we need to resolve it.

00:26:18.820 And so we need, you know, we need a war and just, you know, desiring a war like that.

00:26:23.700 That's another, that's also very Bolshevik. 0.73

00:26:25.780 I can't, you know, I don't know whether that's true or not, but if it is, then it is a case that they do believe in something quite a bit more than just less bureaucracy.

00:26:35.260 Give me the view from across the pond.

00:26:37.420 How, what is Trump doing to our standing in the world?

00:26:41.500 How did the various European countries view us at the moment?

00:26:44.980 This is, of course, my main concern.

00:26:46.640 I mean, so I live in London, most of the time I live in Warsaw, part of the time I have a kind of foot in different parts of the transatlantic alliance.

00:26:56.580 I married to a Pole, you know, who was a, who was in a previous Polish government and who's, you know, was, I watched, you know, Central Europe join NATO, which was very moving at the time.

00:27:08.160 And I watched the creation of the expanded transatlantic alliance as it is and the spread of democracy and prosperity across Europe.

00:27:15.220 And, you know, the, I mean, first of all, it was clear to me during the campaign that Trump, even by his rhetoric and his behavior, was doing enormous damage to America's reputation.

00:27:25.340 But, of course, since he's been in office, it's become much worse.

00:27:29.660 You know, he, he, he, you know, the same things that we see at home, of course, are seen abroad.

00:27:35.180 I mean, there's no difference anymore.

00:27:36.680 And, you know, he, the same tweets that he's tweeting in the United States are read all over the world.

00:27:40.900 I mean, I was told there was a department now in the South Korean government that's now devoted to reading Trump's tweets because they need to be, you know, up on them in case, I don't know, in case he accidentally insults South Korea.

00:27:51.820 They might need to know about it.

00:27:53.520 Sign of the times.

00:27:54.760 Yeah, exactly.

00:27:55.240 But, I mean, he, he, I mean, first, first of all, the lying, which is perceived as lying abroad just as it is at home.

00:28:01.540 But second of all, the open and obvious disregard for America's allies and alliances and traditional friendships, which are not minor and unimportant things and which are not, you know, in which, which have been extremely valuable and important to the United States.

00:28:20.500 I mean, one of the bizarre things about Trump, who styles himself as a dealmaker, is that he doesn't seem to understand even, you know, what our alliances are and what they give to us.

00:28:32.080 I mean, why does the United States have an outsized footprint all around the world?

00:28:36.780 Why does the world speak English?

00:28:38.840 Why, you know, why is the world open to American companies?

00:28:42.380 And one of the reasons it and also why are we, why was our strength generally accepted and not fought back against in Europe and other places?

00:28:51.760 And part of it is that we are an unusual superpower and that we have created this structure of friends and alliances and like-minded countries who want to cooperate with us in creating international trade agreements and international financial arrangements and ensuring that, you know, the business is, the business is possible for our companies.

00:29:13.800 And, you know, the world is open to our diplomats and, you know, the world is open to our diplomats and our tourists and our travelers.

00:29:18.240 I mean, there are all kinds of benefits that we have as a nation, both economic and psychological and political, from this enormous web of alliances with other democracies.

00:29:28.960 And Trump, by denigrating it, I mean, constantly, actually, all the way through the campaign and right up until really a few days ago, when he once again attacked Germany and Sweden in a strange speech that he gave, you know, at a rally in Florida, he has continually attacked them, you know, over and over again, you know, while appearing to praise dictatorships and particularly Russia.

00:29:52.840 And that has alarmed people because, you know, what does it mean?

00:29:56.280 Is America not interested in democracy anymore?

00:29:58.460 Are we not going to defend our friends anymore?

00:30:00.400 Are we not interested in the world that we created?

00:30:04.580 I mean, the globalized world, you know, we call it globalization.

00:30:08.900 Actually, you know, in a lot of ways, it's been Americanization.

00:30:12.020 I mean, it's been people accepting our norms and our ways of behavior and our, you know, our understanding about economics.

00:30:18.360 You know, the free trade is an American, really, it's an Anglo-American idea.

00:30:23.000 The British championed it in the 19th century, but we championed it now.

00:30:25.920 This is our, the world that we wanted and that we've stood behind and we're the, you know, we wrote the rules.

00:30:32.700 So are we now going to unwrite all that?

00:30:35.500 Are we going to destroy it?

00:30:36.560 Are we going to, you know, go backwards?

00:30:38.420 And it's been, it's very confusing for our allies.

00:30:40.580 And for people who don't like the United States, it's been, I mean, it's a combination of them feeling quite nervous about it, about us and not being sure what we'll do anymore.

00:30:50.260 But it's also, you know, a green light.

00:30:52.900 Okay, America doesn't care anymore about democracy. 0.88

00:30:55.740 You know, that makes it easier for us to beat up on our dissidents.

00:30:58.520 So I think there's been a, you know, I think that his, his, this, the two months of his presidency have had a profound negative and, you know, maybe irreversible effect on America's impact in the world and America's presence in the world.

00:31:13.240 I mean, it's, it's, I mean, this is something I did try to talk about before the election, you know, quite a lot.

00:31:17.540 And I don't know that, you know, and one of the things I'm worried about is that I don't know that Americans understand this anymore.

00:31:22.680 I don't know how, how, how, if Americans are aware of the degree to which this is their world, you know, that they created with their rules and that we had been the main beneficiaries of it.

00:31:34.900 Yeah. So could you just reflect on the, on the, the concept of soft power?

00:31:39.200 It seems like that's what you've been describing, but it's not a concept that most people I think are familiar with.

00:31:44.340 So soft power is the, is the power that we exert through, through being, for example, the world leader in education, you know, that, that people want to come and study in our country.

00:31:56.160 They admire American degrees.

00:31:58.620 It's the power we exert through the power of American culture.

00:32:02.140 You know, people want to watch American movies.

00:32:04.680 It's power through diplomacy.

00:32:07.940 It's power through media.

00:32:09.580 It's power through that we set by example.

00:32:11.840 I mean, for example, you know, it's, it's a, it's a side issue, but, but an important one.

00:32:16.780 The fact that Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state has stated that he doesn't want to bring reporters with him anymore when he travels.

00:32:23.960 Well, you know, one of the things that when the secretary of state brings reporters to, for example, China and has an open dialogue with them, one of the things that does is it shows, look, this is the American system.

00:32:35.600 Our officials are transparent.

00:32:37.180 They speak to reporters.

00:32:38.180 And that sets a kind of example for China.

00:32:41.580 It's a, it's a kind of challenge.

00:32:42.840 It shows, you know, this is how we do things and we think it's better.

00:32:46.480 And by refusing to do that, he, he loses something.

00:32:50.300 So he loses a measure of influence.

00:32:52.100 Oh, I see.

00:32:52.660 He's a, he's a secretive leader, just like one of ours.

00:32:55.120 You know, he becomes less, you know, less interesting to, to people who want to want China to evolve.

00:32:59.640 So, you know, the soft powers, the things that we do that, that aren't military, that nevertheless create American influence.

00:33:07.760 And this is one of the things that Americans have excelled at and that we've been particularly good at over the last several decades is exporting our model.

00:33:16.620 You know, things that values that we believe in all over the world, not through military force, but through, as I say, the power of example, through media, through education and other things.

00:33:26.720 And that even leaves aside economic power, which is another source of power.

00:33:30.020 Yeah.

00:33:30.180 The idea that military power is our only, is the only thing we have is absurd.

00:33:35.140 I mean, of course it helps and it's very important, particularly in particular circumstances, but, but American power and strength comes from people admiring us and wanting to be like us as much as it comes from anything else.

00:33:49.020 I want to get into Russia and that tightly wound, not in a moment, but just to stay on this point of foreign perception of our travails at the moment.

00:34:00.180 How does our response to Trump, such as it is, appear to our allies abroad?

00:34:09.700 I mean, how does it look like this investigation into Russia ties that's to whatever degree being midwifed by the Republicans in Congress?

00:34:18.360 How does our response look to the rest of the world?

00:34:21.560 Our system is not collapsing, obviously, but, you know, the fact that we were successfully promoted someone like Trump and are now so tongue tied in addressing, you know, what to me is his obvious unfitness for the role of the presidency.

00:34:39.580 It looks like American democracy is precarious in a way that I don't think anyone previously could have imagined.

00:34:49.220 Yes, I've had a lot of sort of hysterical Germans wanting to know, you know, is this the Fourth Reich, you know, is, is, is, is totalitarianism rising in America?

00:34:59.460 And I think actually I've mostly suggested that that's not the case.

00:35:03.100 I mean, a lot depends, I think it's a little early, actually, because a lot depends on how our democracy does react to him.

00:35:10.980 You know, how, how do we deal with him?

00:35:13.440 You know, what does happen in these hearings?

00:35:15.320 You know, are we, you know, is our system able to cope with a liar?

00:35:19.440 You know, is it able to cope with somebody with these authoritarian tendencies, you know, and if it, if it, if it turns out that it can, which I think it's too early to say that it can't, I think, I think it may very well might be able to, then I think American proxy will look stronger to people, American democracy will look stronger to people.

00:35:39.740 So I think, you know, certainly it's true that the outside world is gripped by the Russian story, partly because particularly in Europe, I can say, you know, there's really no country in Europe that doesn't have a similar story.

00:35:53.860 I mean, there is, you know, enormous amount of, you know, attempted Russian influence in really every country in Europe.

00:36:00.900 And in some cases I've, it's already shaped elections and it's already shaped political narratives and people are very aware of the problem.

00:36:07.980 So watching how that comes out, I think will have an enormous impact on other countries, particularly European countries.

00:36:14.480 Well, that's a great background point to make because obviously Trump's defenders will say that the Russian story is just a conspiracy theory, right?

00:36:23.780 As though Russia, there's no evidence that Russia ever does anything like this.

00:36:27.680 No, no, no. I mean, so the Russian story is, so I saw it last summer when it started.

00:36:31.980 I knew exactly what it was as soon as the first week makes just before the Democratic Convention.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - March 24, 2017

#69 — The Russia Connection

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