The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - May 19, 2026


PREVIEW LIVE： Realpolitik #47 ｜ Trump's Geopolitical Trainwreck

Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Trump Ivan Cepeda Castro Claudia Scheinbaum Flavio Bolsonaro Max Blumenthal Jair Bolsonaro Firas Maudad Barack Obama Mark Carney Evo Morales Eric Prince Prubau Lula
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1420 The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1422

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

137.34

Word count

2,740

Sentence count

141

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

18

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of RealPolitik, Firas Maudad takes a look at how the Trump administration has managed to achieve its foreign policy goals so far. In particular, how has Trump been able to achieve the objectives of the National Security Strategy of 2025? Is he on track to achieve them?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.160 Hello, and welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Maudad, and today, since this is the 47th episode of RealPolitik, I thought we would do a bit of an overview on how the 47th President of the United States has been performing geopolitically.
00:00:21.380 And I thought that we would discuss some of the objectives that were set out by the Trump
00:00:26.720 administration in the National Security Strategy of 2025. If you remember, we did a bit of a long
00:00:34.860 episode about that a couple of months ago, I think, when it first came out, and try to see,
00:00:41.700 well, where are we now? And the key points of the National Security Strategy were to have the United
00:00:48.640 States consolidate over the Western Hemisphere to reduce the American presence in Europe and to
00:00:56.660 reduce the role of the U.S. in Europe and transfer responsibility for the Ukraine war to the
00:01:03.240 Europeans, but also to find a way towards peace in Europe by ending the Ukraine war completely.
00:01:11.500 So these were the objectives for Europe. There was obviously, again, continuing from Barack Obama,
00:01:17.740 a kind of pivot to Asia and focusing on the confrontation with China and how to manage that.
00:01:24.640 And there was the idea that the U.S. would reduce its presence in the Middle East and basically
00:01:30.500 no longer be dragged into endless wars in the Middle East. And so I thought we would discuss
00:01:39.600 each of these objectives and also mention things like the plan to take Greenland and the idea of
00:01:46.580 pushing the left out of power in Europe and so on and so forth. And to see, really, has Trump in any
00:01:56.900 way gotten closer to achieving these objectives and to fulfilling the aims that he had? And I
00:02:06.420 thought we would start first with Latin America and discuss a couple of countries there. I'm not
00:02:11.520 a Latin America expert, so please, you know, be tolerant, be patient with me. And then we'll do a
00:02:17.460 bit of a round-robin around the world, talk a little bit about Asia, talk a little bit about
00:02:22.440 Europe, and talk about Canada and Greenland, and talk about the Middle East, and see what has been
00:02:29.340 achieved, really. Now, when it comes to Latin America, obviously the most important country
00:02:35.640 for the United States is going to be Mexico. Or when it comes to the Western Hemisphere in general,
00:02:41.520 the most important countries are Canada and Mexico.
00:02:45.620 And with Canada, Trump's plans to annex that country backfired spectacularly,
00:02:52.480 and he didn't do it in any way that would have achieved results.
00:02:58.380 So if you're thinking about annexing Canada, there are a couple of things that you can do. 0.74
00:03:02.600 You could just invade the Great White North and send your troops in
00:03:08.720 and remember that, you know, 80% of the Canadian population lives in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver,
00:03:19.360 and that very tiny strip along the American border. This isn't going to happen. The American
00:03:27.700 military doesn't have the stomach for this kind of stuff anymore. It looks bad. It's not happening.
00:03:33.420 so you could try to convince them and be nice to them and say these are the goodies that you're
00:03:40.280 going to get if you join the united states this also didn't really happen because the main thing
00:03:46.860 you could promise canadians is i'm going to absolutely decimate the left and i'm going to
00:03:52.160 deport a lot of people neither of these things are things where trump has shown a lot of credibility
00:04:00.340 in the last year. So there isn't much to look for. And the third way you could do it is you could try
00:04:08.000 to work with the very resource-rich provinces, specifically Alberta and Saskatchewan, where in
00:04:15.320 Alberta you have a massive amount of oil and Saskatchewan you have a lot of minerals, and say,
00:04:21.240 I'll let you join as two conservative states. You won't have to subsidize the rest of Canada
00:04:29.980 and its immigrants. I'll offer you a referendum and I'll make the Canadian government accept the
00:04:36.120 results of that referendum. And you can join the United States as a single state or as two separate
00:04:42.100 states. And you're not seeing any movement on that. Instead, what you're seeing is that the
00:04:48.640 Canadian conservatives are tanking in the polls. They're not doing very well. And Mark Carney is
00:04:53.840 doing quite well. And not only that, Carney is reaching out to China and he's reaching out to
00:04:59.000 Britain and to Europe. And basically, he called Trump's bluff and stopped him in his tracks.
00:05:06.780 So nothing happened with Canada. It just seems to have badly backfired and left a sour taste
00:05:14.840 in everybody's mouth and really poisoned American relations with Canada. Does Trump still have a
00:05:22.860 chance of working with these two states and trying to cleave them off? There are some of Canada's
00:05:28.880 most important taxpayers. So separating them kind of breaks the entire Canadian social model and it
00:05:34.980 breaks the welfare system in Canada. So in theory, he could still pursue this strategy. We haven't
00:05:42.360 seen any of that. We really haven't seen any of that. And so that's an F. There's been no movement
00:05:50.160 in that direction. The second top priority country in the Americas is Mexico.
00:05:57.140 And there's really no evidence that Trump can sort of, I don't know, push Scheinbaum out of office. 0.92
00:06:05.740 Claudia Scheinbaum, she is a creature of the cartels, essentially. When she was mayor of 0.98
00:06:14.640 Mexico City, which is her position before she became president, the cartels decided to disappear 1.00
00:06:22.520 bodies rather than leave them out in order to help her drop the murder rate. So she's a genuinely
00:06:30.220 cynical character. And Trump made all kinds of threats about the kind of pressure that he would
00:06:36.040 apply to Mexico and so on and so forth. But really not much is coming out of it. The Mexicans are
00:06:42.620 saying that they've reduced flows of fentanyl and they've dismantled drug laboratories and things
00:06:50.140 like that. And to be fair, a couple of very high profile cartel bosses were captured or killed,
00:06:58.020 mainly from the Jalisco cartel, from Jalisco Nuevo Generación group. So they did achieve
00:07:05.900 some things, but these guys, when you kill them, it doesn't change things. The only thing that 0.98
00:07:13.440 really reverses the stranglehold of organized crime over a country like Mexico is going to be
00:07:22.400 things like Bukele, locking up thousands and tens of thousands of members of these gangs and just
00:07:33.420 absolutely crushing them and dismantling their financial empires. These are the only things
00:07:39.960 that actually have a long-term effect in fighting crime. Either lock up all of the criminals and or
00:07:47.060 take away their money. And Scheinbaum has done none of that. Instead, what we're seeing are a
00:07:54.800 couple of very high-profile operations that make for very good headlines and some reporting about
00:08:01.120 them dismantling labs, but a lab could mean anything. A lab could mean a guy with a couple
00:08:06.260 of flasks. It doesn't mean very much. But in terms of concrete progress, nothing. And in terms of
00:08:14.620 being able to push out the left from Mexico, improve the relationship between the United
00:08:22.660 States and Mexico, make the Mexican state more compliant, they're throwing them a bone,
00:08:28.720 But officially, and clearly there is something going on under the table because we saw this incident where basically a couple of American officials got killed in a car crash while they were fighting against the drug lords.
00:08:46.980 that's impressive and it means that the americans are being given some access
00:08:53.380 but we've been down this route a bunch of times before with in in the war on drugs
00:09:00.440 and we've seen a bunch of times how these latin american countries can play the united states for
00:09:07.600 an extended period of time say that yes we're going to let you get involved yes we're going
00:09:11.920 to receive help from you, but it doesn't actually change things because there's no political will
00:09:17.940 to change things. And so long as Scheinbaum is in power, this is going to continue. There was a big
00:09:24.800 success for the United States in Venezuela. That shouldn't be dismissed. That is actually pretty
00:09:30.160 impressive. And it looks like there is going to be a success in Cuba. And that really matters
00:09:37.760 because of the Venezuelan oil and the ability to get that oil to American refineries.
00:09:46.820 And because Cuba, if it has access to Russian or Chinese weapons,
00:09:51.760 becomes a threat to American shipping in the Caribbean.
00:09:56.880 And so securing Cuba does matter. 0.59
00:10:01.420 So we've seen these things improve.
00:10:04.420 they're not Mexico, not as important as Mexico. They're not Canada. They're not as big of a deal, 0.80
00:10:11.540 but they are very important. And Venezuela has been a success, and Cuba looks like it's going
00:10:21.040 to be a success. Colombia, you know, we'll talk about that in a second, but the rest of Latin
00:10:28.860 America, we're seeing the right-wing administration as Bolivia getting slowly kicked out due to a
00:10:36.080 massive wave of protests, with the Americans supposedly having some kind of plan to get rid
00:10:44.680 of the previous president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, who is supposedly involved with the cartels and
00:10:52.880 is supposedly involved with all kinds of criminality. You never know the truth with
00:10:57.600 these things. You never really know the truth. It's safe to assume that every Latin American
00:11:01.180 politician is just deeply, deeply rotten. But it seems that the U.S. had some kind of plan 1.00
00:11:09.460 to get rid of him, and their reaction was to lead to a massive wave of protests.
00:11:15.720 But Bolivia is not a very important country. We'll see how that plays out.
00:11:20.780 It's interesting here that Max Blumenthal notes that it seems that the Americans and the Israelis
00:11:25.460 are reading from the same playbook with regards to Bolivia.
00:11:29.020 And it's really interesting that Eric Prince is saying
00:11:35.460 that there should be some kind of intervention.
00:11:39.440 And presumably he's suggesting himself
00:11:42.680 as the lead of some kind of paramilitary group 0.66
00:11:47.740 that goes in and cleans up Bolivia.
00:11:52.340 I really doubt that this is realistic. 0.99
00:11:55.460 I really doubt that this is something that he can achieve, but we will see.
00:12:00.680 We will see.
00:12:02.820 Colombia matters, and in Colombia, they're going to have an election later this year.
00:12:09.300 And it seems that what's going to happen there is that this gentleman here, Ivan Cepeda Castro,
00:12:17.160 literally the son of communists, and his father was first forced into exile and then assassinated.
00:12:25.460 by right-wing groups and he's backed by a bunch of lefties and communists and it looks like he's
00:12:31.580 going to win the election there. So Colombia is going to the left. Bolivia looks like it's going
00:12:36.960 to the left. Argentina's melee is at a record low in terms of his support and his whole economic
00:12:47.260 plan seems to not be working. And with Brazil, the Americans really would rather have Flavio
00:12:56.360 Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, become president again. But it doesn't
00:13:03.420 look like he's beating the communist socialist Lula. So all over Latin America, the idea of the
00:13:10.480 U.S. consolidating there and of the U.S. really becoming much more powerful in its own hemisphere
00:13:16.820 there's really no evidence that this is happening there's zero evidence that this is happening or
00:13:24.240 that this is likely um it's not going well in general and i don't know what the americans can
00:13:32.480 do about it you can only maduro somebody like maduro where the geography is permissive and
00:13:40.740 things like that Venezuela and Cuba are going to be probably Cuba I'm saying probably Cuba
00:13:46.800 these are these do look like successes for now it doesn't mean that they will be successes 0.56
00:13:52.820 permanently because if you end up with a bunch of communists in Brazil and a bunch of communists
00:13:57.860 in Colombia and in Bolivia what are they going to do they're going to funnel money to some kind
00:14:02.680 of insurgency against the Venezuelan government aligned with the United States that's what they're
00:14:08.800 going to do eventually. So, so far, Venezuela looks like a success. Will it be one? Who knows?
00:14:16.320 Cuba looks like it's going to follow. But the rest of it, in terms of consolidation,
00:14:22.700 nothing of the sort is happening. Nothing of the sort is happening.
00:14:27.400 When it comes to Asia, it's interesting what's going on there. There were some claims that there
00:14:35.160 were attempts at a color revolution in Indonesia. There had been a wave of protests in 2025,
00:14:42.220 in summer, because Prubau, the president of Indonesia, and everybody governing Indonesia
00:14:50.860 were ridiculously corrupt, to the extent that MPs were demanding another $3,000 a month to
00:14:59.000 pay for their housing in a country with a GDP per capita of maybe $12,000 a year, something like that. 0.90
00:15:08.280 So they were just demanding insane amounts of money. And then there was a big wave of rioting.
00:15:14.700 But what ended up happening afterwards was that suddenly the Indonesians saw the light and they
00:15:25.780 signed an agreement with the United States that gave access to military planes overflying Indonesia
00:15:34.140 that leads to some joint production between Indonesia and the United States that kind of
00:15:40.100 makes Indonesia into a client state of America. And if you look at a map, this is a really big
00:15:46.840 deal, because Indonesia controls access to the South China Sea, and therefore to Chinese ports.
00:15:56.520 So anything that has to go from China towards the rest of the world, towards the West,
00:16:02.620 has to go in some strait controlled by Indonesia, be it the Malacca Strait here, or any of a dozen
00:16:10.780 or so other gaps here. And so the Americans gaining influence in that region really does
00:16:19.720 matter. And that is a big deal. This is important. And this is clearly a success. But then the list
00:16:28.860 of failures is bigger, really. First, there's India, where aligning with India is a bad idea 1.00
00:16:39.720 and letting India drift is a bad idea. Here, we aren't seeing anything that suggests that the
00:16:48.420 Indians will ever be in a position to help confront China or that they're interested.
00:16:54.420 Rather, a huge amount of political capital was wasted by the United States trying to get the 0.55
00:17:00.560 Indians to stop buying Russian oil only for the Iran war to force a reversal on this and to
00:17:07.560 confirm the Indian position that they are best off being autonomous, not siding with China and
00:17:13.720 not siding with the United States. There is a partial success with India with regards to the
00:17:23.380 idea that there is this India-UAE-Israel axis that is being built that is intended to control
00:17:34.280 the other Sunni powers, like Pakistan, like Saudi, like Turkey. But this is a success for Israel. 0.99
00:17:43.460 This is not a success for the United States. Because for the United States, containing 0.79
00:17:49.920 the Muslim world matters to an extent. It's just that this isn't the way to do it. 1.00
00:17:56.280 because these are countries that will require the United States
00:18:03.640 to be a lot more involved, 0.98
00:18:06.000 whereas to contain the Muslim world, 0.94
00:18:09.100 what you want to try to get to is Iran working with the West 0.99
00:18:14.920 and separating these Muslim powers from each other.
00:18:19.900 So, bit of a mixed record there. 0.78
00:18:23.440 But let's not get dragged into the Middle East yet. 1.00
00:18:26.280 With the rest of Asia, really, it's been terrible.
00:18:33.580 Because in Korea, you're seeing the left winning, winning elections essentially,
00:18:39.800 and having more progressivism that is just destroying South Korea as a nation.
00:18:46.040 And these guys also don't want a confrontational approach with North Korea.
00:18:50.640 They want to work with North Korea.
00:18:52.300 and then you saw the United States
00:18:55.220 when they got into a war with Iran
00:18:56.940 withdrawing the THAAD missiles from South Korea
00:19:00.680 and here the Americans are clarifying
00:19:03.460 that actually we didn't pull the THAAD systems
00:19:07.280 out of South Korea
00:19:08.240 we just pulled their ammunition
00:19:10.480 okay so you didn't take away the launcher
00:19:14.640 but you left them with inadequate ammunition
00:19:16.580 against China and North Korea
00:19:18.600 how is that a win?
00:19:22.300 So if you're South Korea, what do you end up believing? You end up believing exactly what the current president of Korea believes, which is that they need to coordinate with Beijing, and they need a good relationship with China, and they need to avoid a direct confrontation with either China or North Korea, etc., etc.
00:19:45.360 All of these things mean that they need to put distance between themselves and the United States
00:19:52.520 and draw closer to the Chinese to avoid a direct confrontation. 0.95