Emma Ashford and Rory MacFarquhar
Subject: Understanding Trump’s Foreign Policy
Bio: Emma: Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center, an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University, and author of First Among Equals: US Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World, Rory: Former Member of Obama’s National Security Council
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s topic is Understanding Trump’s Foreign Policy.
Our first speaker will be Emma Ashford who is a Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center, an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown and the author of a new book entitled First Among Equals: US Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World.
Our second speaker will be a very dear friend of mine Rory MacFarquhar who previously was a member of Obama’s National Security Council.
I want to learn from Emma about Trump’s realist approach to foreign policy and what that will mean in its application.
On December 4, 2025, the Trump administration published its 2025 National Security Strategy, and it was a radical departure from previous documents. I would like Rory to explain what this means for our America’s foreign policy as it relates to Europe, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Venezuela.
The opening discussion with Emma was held at a conference that I hosted in Washington DC, so many of the questions will be asked by my friends including Rory who moderated that session.
Emma can you please open with six minutes of opening remarks.
Emma Ashford:
I’m going to start by quoting Gramsci because when you get a bunch of finance folks in a room, what you want to do is quote an Italian communist from the 1930s. Antonio Gramsci is sitting in a fascist prison in Italy. He says, “the old world is dying. The new world struggles to be born. In the interim, a variety of morbid symptoms can be expected to appear.” This quote sums up where we are right now in U.S. foreign policy. For policymakers, the challenge is going to be to reorient U.S. foreign policy to meet this moment.
The unipolar moment was this period of pronounced U.S. predominance that happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Military and economic predominance. We were top dog for a few years in U.S. foreign policy. The war on terror, democracy promotion, supercharging, globalization, WTO and NATO expansion. We were going to change the world and make it a better place for everybody, but particularly for Americans. Many of those crusades failed.
We are entering an unbalanced multipolar world. I’m not saying that there are five big states out there and they’re all equal playing off one another. We are looking at a situation in coming decades where the U.S. and China are ahead of the pack. There’s a variety of second tier regional powers that are active and that the biggest powers are going to work with to achieve their aims.
South Korea, Turkey, Brazil, Nigeria, Russia. The common assumption is multipolarity would be bad for U.S. foreign policy. I do not think that is true. It means we need to recalibrate. I don’t think the U.S. needs a new foreign policy per se. We need is to return to a more realist foreign policy, a set of principles that served us very well in past decades. Throughout our history Eisenhower, Nixon, George H. W. Bush or way back to Washington. U.S. policymakers turned to realist principles, particularly in times of turmoil and strife.
Realism sees the world as it is not the world as we want it to be. It sees US interests in a narrower sense. It focuses on national interest rather than international or transnational crusades. We must prioritize scarce resources to meet the biggest threats that we face.
We need to rethink alliances to relieve the burden on the United States where we can and look for flexibility in alliances rather than the structures built over decades that have been rigid.
We need cooperative economic statecraft. We have seen the U.S. double down on tariffs, sanctions, export controls. At the same time as we’re retreating from the cooperative versions of that power, we are not offering America’s best incentives to other countries to work with us.
The last 30 years have been this incredibly ambitious, transformative version of U.S. foreign policy, but the risk of overextension is becoming greater. Constraints are growing, and this is the time to figure out how to rebalance U.S. foreign policy without going to overextend ourselves.
Rory MacFarquhar:
Your book calls for the U.S. to do less than it’s currently trying to do around the world. You argue that Europe has the resources to stand up for itself. That U.S. interests in the Middle East are a lot less than they used to be. But in Asia you cast the situation quite differently. How you would respond to the argument that Taiwan is a far off country that there are plenty of countries surrounding China, including India, Japan, and Australia that have plenty of resources to stand up to a rising China. If we’re pulling back from Europe and the Middle East, why would we not also take a much more benign neglect approach to China as well?
Emma Ashford:
Leaning forward in Asia does not mean leaning into a U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan and start a war with China over it. Focusing on Asia does not necessarily involve significantly expanding our military footprint or commitments.
We have a country China whose military capabilities and economic strengths are growing. It is the one place in the world where I do not see regional states able to handle that challenge on their own with some outside assistance.
At the start of the Cold War back in the 1940s and 50s, the U.S. got involved and stayed in Europe predominantly because European states in Western Europe were not capable of resisting the Soviets. We had an interest in doing that. Today, I don’t see that threat in Europe the same way.
Alex Graham:
Three geographies spend a trillion dollars a year on military hardware and resources. The world needs it more effectively deployed. If the United States had punched Russia in the nose when it invaded Ukraine, as opposed to do what Biden did, which was to say, we will give non-lethal aid. But if it actually unleashed the United States’ tremendous power in stopping that. It would’ve sent a valuable lesson to the Chinese about Taiwan and brought the Ukraine war to a halt.
Emma Ashford:
I completely agree with you that European states are chasing spending over actual results. That’s a huge problem. I do not agree with you on Ukraine. It’s easy to say, if Biden had come out of the gate stronger and he had sent all our advanced weapons to Ukraine on day one, then this would have stopped the Russians. I am less persuaded about that. For the first three months of the war, it was widely assumed that Ukraine was going to lose badly.
This was not necessarily something we thought might save Ukraine. It was something that we thought might expand the war into NATO. The second point is exactly that there have been some border violations with drones in recent months. But this war has not expanded into NATO Article 5 held territory. We’re not looking at a Europe wide war in which US forces are fighting. Instead, we’re looking at a proxy conflict where for a moderate cost, we’ve managed to stop the Russians in their tracks. That to me is a good outcome. If you are concerned at all about the escalation side of the ledger, and it is always easy looking back to say, it didn’t escalate so it could not have escalated.
But I suspect what we will learn when scholars get into the Russian archives in five decades, that the Biden administration pursuit of dripping out resources over time may have prevented this conflict from escalating. Maybe a forceful response could have pushed the Russians back. There is also a good chance that it could have escalated this into a much broader European war involving the US. I am comfortable with the outcome that we have achieved as a result.
Alex Graham:
Where has China demonstrated that it is a threat to its neighbors to the independence or sovereignty of Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Korea? These are pretty formidable countries. Why would America abandon its traditional role in Europe as the convener and cheerleader of NATO to rush to an Asia that does not need protection because China has not demonstrated an expansionist threat?
Emma Ashford:
I want the US to focus on Asia because it matters for our interests. I don’t think that China is territorially revisionist with the big exception of Taiwan. I don’t think China has an intention to invade Japan or the Philippines. It’s about small islands in the South China Sea and Taiwan.
There is a real possibility that if the US is absent from the region, China will coerce its neighbors to exclude the US from the region. This may involve an inability to use shipping lanes and access markets in those other countries in Asia. I do not think the threat is predominantly military. There is always going to be some saber rattling, but Asia is predominantly maritime means that this is a different situation from the Cold War in Europe.
Brande Stellings:
What do you think about the use of aid as soft diplomacy?
Emma Ashford:
There is a grain of truth that USAID was bloated and relatively ineffective. It’s also the case that many of USAID’s democracy promotion programs were making relations worse with some states rather than better. You could say the same thing about state department reform. That state department was structured poorly and they were focused on human rights. This administration swung an ax and killed everything. Reform is good, but leaving us only with the military that is going to make our foreign policy more militarized and less effective.
Larry Bernstein:
What is the trend in European defense spending?
Emma Ashford:
European states have been slowly increasing spending since the 2014 Russian seizure of Crimea. It particularly escalated since 2022. You’ll hear Europe needs to spend more. The problem is that the money’s being spent in very poor ways. It goes to prestige weapons systems often purchased from the U.S. Germany investing in F-35s rather than purchasing Swedish Gripenx, which would be European procurement, interoperable and cheaper.
There are also significant problems with the way European militaries manage military overhead. Veterans’ benefits and healthcare are extremely high. For years now, these have been folded into the statistics to make it look like European states are spending more than they are on defense.
On the U.S. side a budget of a trillion and a Chinese budget of about a third of that. Because of lower labor and materials costs, the Chinese and the Russians are getting a lot more for their spending than we are. China has been able to leverage its new ship building capacity. We cannot build ships almost at all. The Chinese are pumping out tens of ships every year. We spend more does not mean that we are getting more for that money, and that is a huge problem.
Larry Bernstein:
You said we are heading for a multipolar world. Who are these other important state powers?
Emma Ashford:
Mark Leonard at the European Council in Foreign Relations points out that during the Cold War, if you look at the distribution of military power 85% was tied up by the US, USSR, NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Less than 15% is everyone else. That same calculation today, the US and China barely cracked 60% and everybody else, even if you start to add US allies to that, you’re only edging up towards 70%. These states have has grown substantially. We’re talking about players in the Indo-Pacific that are much more powerful than they were during the Cold War. They have this massive demographic growing economy. And that’s why the US has tried to court India so assiduously in recent years. Our traditional Asian allies, Japanese, South Koreans, Philippines and Indonesia. In Europe, the big three, Germany, France, the UK. But two other states, Poland and Turkey, both very useful to the U.S. in the conflict in Ukraine keeping Russian ships bottled up in the Black Sea because it’s got legal rights over the straits there. But they’re also heavily involved in arming both sites with drones and other technology. The Turks are a really interesting player that straddle that line between Europe, Russia and the Middle East. In Africa, the continent does not seem to have the potential or the necessary interests for the US to be heavily engaged.
Rory MacFarquhar:
In the recent conflict between Israel and Iran, the United States was shooting down missiles and bombing nuclear sites, would you regard that as examples of imperial overstretch that you would discourage the United States from pursuing in this multipolar future?
Emma Ashford:
I have no objections to selling the Gulf States whatever weapons systems they want and that’s predominantly what we do. I don’t think we should have U.S. service members there on the ground acting as targets for Iranian missiles. The U.S. has a limited set of interests in the Middle East, mostly related to the free flow of oil. We can achieve that with a small naval presence. This is very comparable to the mid-to-late Cold War where we had a small naval and air presence in the Middle East and achieved our aims through economic and diplomatic means instead. I would much rather have that posture than the current 40,000 U.S. service members on the ground.
David Wecker:
We’ve seen the U.S. military engaged over the last 20 years. There seems to be constant fighting and training. What is your assessment of China’s ability to fight a war, to execute at the level of command and control and soldiers to be effective in battle?
Emma Ashford:
This is difficult to assess. The Chinese have not fought any large-scale engagement in at least three decades. We do not know on the naval or the air side.
The Chinese have spotted this deficiency and have engaged in working exercises, studying what has happened in other conflicts, trying to rework parts of the force so that it’s more efficient. We know that they are studying what’s happening in Ukraine. We have to assume that they would be moderately effective in conflict because to assume anything else is to leave ourselves vulnerable.
Jay Greene:
Isn’t non-proliferation enough of a goal to have justified the limited US involvement with the Israel-Iran war? It sounds like the policy that was enacted is consistent with the principles that you were laying out.
Emma Ashford:
When US strikes on Fordow started, I was astounded the next day that the Trump administration managed to limit objectives, and stopped and pulled back. That is not something we’ve seen policymakers do for a long time. I can also make the case that there were better ways to handle this. We had a working non-proliferation agreement that the Trump administration first time in office pulled out of, even if all we were going to modify that arrangement, there were ways that that could have been done.
We did not have to give Israel the green light and the security assistance to start that 12-day bombing campaign that eventually ended up pulling us in. What have we achieved? There’s a big pile of enriched uranium that’s running around somewhere. I hope the CIA knows. We’ve maybe set the program back by best case two years. I can make you the case why on that day the strikes were the least worst option, but I can’t make the case that this was a good policy over time.
Rory MacFarquhar:
9/11 was an attack on the United States. How does the U.S. resist when something is perpetrated against the United States? How do we not get pulled into playing a global role?
Emma Ashford:
There are going to be cases like the aftermath of 9/11 attacks where we’re not going to and shouldn’t resist. Where Afghanistan went wrong was not 2001. It was 2002, 2003. When we turned from this mission to overthrow the Taliban and end the terrorist threat towards 20 years of nation building. I am less worried about policymakers’ reaction to go after bad people, and I am much more worried about their ability to stop. This is why I wasn’t a huge fan of Trump’s strikes on Iran. The fact that he was able to stop and say we have achieved what we came to do and now we’re pulling back and trying something different. To me that’s something we haven’t seen from policymakers for 30 years. I found it refreshing.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks Emma. I am now going to our second speaker Rory MacFarquhar. Rory can you please open with six minutes of opening remarks.
Rory MacFarquhar:
Larry, you invited me here to discuss the Trump Administration’s new national security strategy, and the discrepancy between the strategy and the actual policies pursued by the administration..
This document is vastly different from its predecessors. It’s shorter, more focused, combines sound ideas and some truly weird ones.
The strategy calls for prioritization. This makes a lot of sense. The United States does not tower over the world like it did after World War 2 or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Resources are constrained. The American people are disillusioned by forever wars and futile efforts to promote democracy in places where it’s unlikely to take root. The strategy also calls for shifting the economic burden of defending Europe and Asia towards our wealthy allies. Makes a lot of sense and the Trump administration deserve credit for making more progress on that issue than other US administrations.
The strategy underscores the importance of securing critical mineral supply chains and rebuilding the US defense industrial base. Very sensible priorities that were neglected for many years although not by the Biden administration. The strategy puts most emphasis on the Western Hemisphere. Drug cartels typically armed with US made weapons are a cancer in many of the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean causing human suffering.
The strategy also calls for a pullback in the Middle East, arguing that the region is not as important to us strategically because we’re no longer importing large amounts of Middle Eastern oil.
Then there’s the weird stuff. For a president who deservedly takes credit for breaking with decades of one-sided and futile engagement with China during his first term, it’s striking that this document barely mentions China directly at all. The Asia section shies away from any language about great power competition, and that is revealing about what has happened so far this year. The Trump administration believed that it had all the cards when it launched the trade war only to discover that China’s control over the rare earths gave it far more leverage over us than we had over them.
All the Chinese policymakers I have spoken to take it as a given that China is winning the trade war and the national security strategies Asia section seems to be a tacit admission that they’re right. The discussion of Europe where the strategy expresses concern about the risk of civilizational erasure warns that Europe may become majority non-European in a few decades, which is a bizarre turn of phrase and says that the rise of patriotic parties across Europe is grounds for optimism. This is genuinely weird, and at odds with the spirit of restraint of a predisposition to non-intervention. It is what psychologists refer to as projection. Everything they warn about in Europe would appear to reference issues they are trying to fight in the United States from migration to wokeness.
Finally, the discrepancy between what they are doing and what they say in the strategy. They say that the US has unrivaled soft power and yet this is the administration that is dismantled The Voice of America, Radio-Free Europe, and USAID. The non-military means to win over the hearts and minds of people around the world.
They talk about rebuilding alliances even as they trash them. They talk about the US lead in science even as they defund science. There is a gap between the aspirations and the practice of this administration. I’m not convinced that President Trump has read, let alone endorsed any part of this strategy, and he didn’t launch it with a big rollout. There was no speech, no press campaign. This is one of those documents that will be soon forgotten and represents the views of one faction within this administration but not a statement of the overall policy of the United States.
Larry Bernstein:
What is the importance of this security strategy report? What is this?
Rory MacFarquhar:
This is meant to be the encapsulation of the views of an incoming administration for the benefit of foreign governments and the US bureaucracy. In practice, these are messaging documents.
Larry Bernstein:
As a member of the Obama National Security Council, who generally gets involved in writing it? Do you fight over sentences and ideas?
Rory MacFarquhar:
This is supposed to be a statement of the administration’s policy and not one person’s view. There will be a whole policy process surrounding this document where the relevant staff members get to weigh in and dissent. These documents end up being written by committee and reflect compromises. That does not seem to be what happened. This document feels much more like someone got to write it, maybe a few other people reviewed it, but it certainly does not feel like the product of a lengthy government review process that generated a compromised document.
Larry Bernstein:
And does that mean that it is more readable, more ideological, and less practical?
Rory MacFarquhar:
It is more readable. It is certainly more ideological, and it may not represent what the administration believes.
Larry Bernstein:
Let’s jump into the China policy. I’ll quote part of it, “President Trump single-handedly reversed more than three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China. Namely that by opening our markets to China, encouraging American business to invest in China and outsourcing our manufacturing to China, we would facilitate China’s entry into the so-called rules-based international order. This did not happen. China got rich and powerful and used its wealth and power to get its considerable advantage. American elites over four successive administrations of both political parties were either willing enablers of China’s strategy or in denial.” What do you make of that idea that we help facilitate a great power rivalry by encouraging American business to manufacture in China?
Rory MacFarquhar:
There is a lot to it. There was a period where American business moved to China. American manufacturers left and went to China was the period from after the China accession to the WTO in 2001 for the next eight years. The period of mass outsourcing. That was a mistake. I don’t think that anyone anticipated that China would be as successful as it turned out to be.
Larry Bernstein:
There was a sense that we would not have such a massive trade deficit with China as a result. Hope that it would be fair trade, that intellectual property rights would be respected, that they would play ball, and that did not happen either.
Rory MacFarquhar:
China’s domestic consumption is weak. Its entire economic strategy is based on exporting to the rest of the world. China’s huge economy is relying on foreign demand. It is bulldozering manufacturing in Europe and the developing world. China is running a massive global trade imbalance.
Larry Bernstein:
Chinese exports are like an ever-expanding balloon. If the United States squeezes on part of the balloon to prevent Chinese imports, those goods must go someplace else. The most logical next place is the European Union because it is a large economy and relatively open. Choice two would be Japan, and then other places in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But the US economy is so big and has been such a great place for Chinese exports in the past, and if the country continues to grow between 4-8% a year, these goods must find a home.
Rory MacFarquhar:
What is going to happen is more countries are going to put up trade barriers against Chinese goods because otherwise they are staring down the barrel of losing their entire auto or machine tools industry. Countries like Germany flourished for the last several decades are now under threat from Chinese exports. You have seen some restrict Chinese auto imports into Europe. Other countries like Indonesia, Brazil, and Turkey do not want to buy everything from China. China is pursuing a mercantilist strategy where they believe that they should be importing only raw materials and exporting manufacturing.
Larry Bernstein:
What I expected when Trump took office in January was that he would use his tariff muscle to challenge China and that he would act in concert with other nations to force China to change its trade policy. What was bizarre was that he did not go after China first. He went after the other countries that I expected to act in concert with. But to your point, maybe he does not have to act in concert because everyone individually would pursue the same policy. They would get there on their own with or without us.
Rory MacFarquhar
That was essentially the policy that the Trump administration pursued with steel in the first administration where Wilber Ross explicitly said that the goal of the US was putting tariffs on steel imports with the expectation that every other country would also put trade barriers on China so that China would be forced to change its policies. That was not successful. The problem with the approach that you’re expecting other countries to go along is they will not move quickly. Even the Europeans who are under the most threat and are sophisticated with trade tools are committed to the WTO and playing by the rules, and that’s going to mean that they act slowly.
European companies, especially German automakers, believed that they had more to lose from being cut out of the Chinese market than they had to gain by putting up trade barriers in Europe. That has slowed things down as well. A lot of countries do not have the tools, the experience, the policy expertise, or are heavily influenced by China who will put pressure on countries not to do this.
Larry Bernstein:
The Germans have invested in manufacturing capabilities in China. We are going to be seeing these German manufactured goods out of China instead, and it probably will gut the German manufacturing base. Why did German firms do this? Is this a distinction between national and firm competitiveness?
Rory MacFarquhar:
I don’t think the Germans intended to move manufacturing facilities to China and then export back to Europe. The idea was that you would create production facilities in China for the Chinese market then secondarily export to Southeast Asia or to other markets. The daunting realization that China was going to start exporting to Europe was recent and a huge shock.
We will probably see much more substantial trade barriers and more concerted pressure on China to redress its enormous trade imbalance. They just hit the trillion-dollar mark in their trade surplus, which is astounding.
Larry Bernstein:
Japan’s, new prime minister used language which angered the Chinese. They too have made substantial investments in China exporting to the rest of Asia. The big difference between the Europeans and the Japanese is that from a defense and military perspective, it’s close by and they fear them.
Rory MacFarquhar:
The Japanese are counting on making common cause with the United States. The Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi suggested that it would be important for Japan to come to the defense of Taiwan in the event of an invasion, she might naturally have assumed that that would have been music to the ears of American policymakers and that they would back her up. We did almost the opposite. Trump basically told her to not say such things. The Japanese are right across the East China Sea from China start contemplating that they may be on their own.
Larry Bernstein:
It says in Trump’s National Strategy Report that the security challenge of the Chinese to control the South China Sea and to maintain openings of the vital sea lanes. It says that it expects strong cooperation from both India and Japan working together with maritime security issues along that first island chain to deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or make it impossible to defend that island. I read it to be step up your defense to work together on this.
Rory MacFarquhar:
It’s pretty clear that if the United States is not defending Taiwan, no one is defending Taiwan.
Larry Bernstein:
For sure, without that, it does not work.
Rory MacFarquhar:
I would characterize this national security strategy as backward leaning on Taiwan.
Larry Bernstein:
I did not see that because the sentence says the defense of the first island chain while reinforcing US allies’ capacity to deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or even achieve a balance of forces so unfavorable to us as to make defending that island impossible. That the defending Taiwan is still of critical importance, but this must be a group project and not an American project.
Part of it goes back to being explicit about defending Taiwan. Every administration in the last 30 years has tried to be as ambiguous as possible.
Rory MacFarquhar:
Except for Joe Biden, who four times said that he would militarily defend Taiwan.
Larry Bernstein:
Four times the State Department released a statement the next day saying that must be a misunderstanding of what he said.
Rory MacFarquhar:
That was the game. But four times he said it.
Larry Bernstein:
And four times the State Department said that he was being misquoted and misunderstood. This document is partly ambiguous, it fits under that same rubric, which is it doesn’t explicitly say were pivoting towards containing Chinese power. But it’s antagonistic in all the usual ways.
Rory MacFarquhar:
We will also maintain our longstanding declaratory policy on Taiwan, meaning that the United States does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.
Larry Bernstein:
What does that mean?
Rory MacFarquhar:
That it does not say we oppose any unilateral change. It says we do not support any unilateral change.
Larry Bernstein:
It is a well lawyered document as it relates to that point.
Rory MacFarquhar:
Only that part is well lawyered. Yes, I agree.
Larry Bernstein:
How should we think about burden sharing in Asia?
Rory MacFarquhar:
Everyone got the message to be spending more on their own defense, and chalk that up as a success for this administration.
Larry Bernstein:
One way to do that is to say, we are stepping aside. Good luck to you. That’s the way to light a fire under these countries. For the first time in my lifetime other countries are saying, we got to defend ourselves because the American security umbrella seems in doubt that was the only way to do it.
Rory MacFarquhar:
I do not know about the only way to do it, but that was the way these guys did it and it has been effective. There’s a cost to doing it that way, but people are spending more on their own defense and that will have consequences, positive and negative.
Larry Bernstein:
What is negative?
Rory MacFarquhar:
Negative is that these countries have been closely aligned with US foreign policy for decades and as they are more capable of defending themselves, they will pursue an independent foreign policy, which will not be as aligned with the US as they have been.
Larry Bernstein:
Just to push back. When Reagan wanted to bomb Libya, he had to go around Southern European countries to do so. When President Bush wanted to invade Iraq through Turkey, they were denied access.
Rory MacFarquhar:
You have literally picked out two incidents over 70 years to argue that our allies have not always been in lockstep with us when we have decided to do things that are completely outrageous.
Larry Bernstein:
Can you give me an example of something you think we won’t get in the future that we had gotten in the past?
Rory MacFarquhar:
There is a huge number of things. We don’t know how the world is going to look, but in many cases what we will see is balancing behavior where countries in East Asia, will decide that they need to be somewhere in between China and the US because China is on their doorstep and they need to defend themselves, ultimately, they need to come up with an accommodation with China because we don’t have their back.
Larry Bernstein:
I thought that the most interesting part of Trump’s national security strategy related to Europe.
“Promoting European greatness: American officials have become used to thinking about European problems in terms of insufficient military spending and economic stagnation. There’s truth to this, but Europe’s real problems are even deeper. Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP down from 25% in 1990 to 14% today, partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness. But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transactional bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty. Migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression, … cratering birth rates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.
Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and military strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”
What do you make of that?
Rory MacFarquhar:
This does not look like anything that one would normally encounter in a foreign policy document. It is highly prescriptive and interventionist. It imagines that Europeans should care what we think about their domestic politics. It suggests that we should be influencing their domestic politics. Whoever is responsible for this piece of the document sees Europe as resembling the United States and therefore wants to perpetrate on Europe the same transformations that they want to perpetrate on the United States.
Larry Bernstein:
I don’t see that this is referencing the United States.
Rory MacFarquhar:
It’s all about migration, wokeness, free speech, all of these tropes of right-wing chat rooms.
Larry Bernstein:
Let’s break it down. The first thing says that they’re not spending sufficiently on military spending. That’s said by every administration.
Rory MacFarquhar:
Exactly. And that is what they’re going beyond. They say there’s truth to this, but Europe’s real problems are even deeper.
Larry Bernstein:
Then it says that their global GDP is declining from 25% to 14% in the past 35 years.
Rory MacFarquhar:
And their population has also declined as a share of global population substantially over that period as well.
Larry Bernstein:
The cratering birth rates is legitimate.
Rory MacFarquhar:
Why is it any of our business what their birth rate is?
Larry Bernstein:
Well, it matters to the extent that if their population is imploding, it will no longer have the economies and military strong enough to defend themselves.
Rory MacFarquhar:
They are too small? Russia’s population is also declining.
Larry Bernstein:
It doesn’t say necessarily that Russia is the primary boogeyman. It’s the next sentence that says quote, “This lack of self-confidence is most evident in Europe’s relationship with Russia. European allies enjoy a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure save nuclear weapons.”
Rory MacFarquhar:
That is patently untrue. The Europeans are unable to mobilize a large fighting force. This is exactly the problem. This is why we’re asking them to invest in their own self-defense. It is just flagrantly untrue, and the Europeans understand that, and that is why this has been such a revelatory moment for them in a negative sense that they’ve realized that the United States may not have their back. And so they really do need to get serious about rearming in a way that they haven’t been serious since the end of the Cold War.
Larry Bernstein:
That was the purpose of the American policy.
Rory MacFarquhar:
That is not what it says here. What it says here is European allies enjoy, in the present tense, a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure. That is flagrantly untrue.
Larry Bernstein:
We saw Russia invade Ukraine and go nowhere.
Rory MacFarquhar:
That is not true. They have gone somewhere. They are eating away bits of Ukraine on a day-to-day basis.
Larry Bernstein:
But Europe is much bigger much stronger than Ukraine.
They are suggesting that Russia’s population, Russia’s GDP, Russia’s military power, save the nuclear weapons is smaller.
Rory MacFarquhar:
Many Europeans regard Russia as an existential threat.
Larry Bernstein:
That’s the next sentence. Let’s go to that.
“As a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, European relations with Russia are now deeply attenuated, and many Europeans regard Russia as an existential threat. Managing European relations with Russia will require significant US diplomatic engagement, both to reestablish conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian land mass and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and the European states. It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious succession of hostilities in Ukraine, to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation, expansion of the war, and reestablish strategic stability with Russia, as well as to enable the post-hostilities, reconstruction of Ukraine to enable its survival as a viable state.”
It says is that the Europeans seemed misplaced that Russia is an existential threat.
Rory MacFarquhar:
Yeah, that is exactly what it says. Why would the Europeans who are witnessing Russia that invaded Georgia in 2008, seized Crimea in 2014, reinvaded all of Ukraine in 2022, has irredentist claims all over the place. There are large Russian minorities in the Baltic states. Why on earth would the Europeans be at all afraid of Russia. The Europeans are rearming in a way that we have urged them to is precisely because they are afraid of Russia, and they have every reason to be afraid of Russia. Russia is a malevolent force in global politics now. I would hazard to guess that most Republican elected officials would agree that Russia is a threat.
Larry Bernstein:
This document reflects concern for the Europeans in multidimensions. First, they’re highlighting the overly aggressive regulatory state that has reduced GDP growth. Draghi wrote an extended white paper on the European regulatory problems, which I think the Europeans would agree with.
Rory MacFarquhar:
That’s uncontroversial. But this document is making some very controversial statements.
It is controversial to say that it is more than plausible that within a few decades certain NATO members will become majority non-European. Obviously, the country that is going to become majority non-white in coming decades is the United States, and that’s what this is really about.
Larry Bernstein:
The document migration policies are about Europe, namely that it has an ever-increasing Islamic population movement and migration from Africa, North Africa and Syria is causing turmoil.
Rory MacFarquhar:
Whose business is it what the migration policies of European countries are? Is this a question that should be determined by the voters in the UK?
Larry Bernstein:
What it is saying is that if Europe continues down this path our mutual interests will change.
Rory MacFarquhar:
If you consider non-white people to be non-European, which is a revealed peculiar expression. And the key issue here is that the anxiety that this is reflecting is an anxiety about the United States becoming majority non-white.
Larry Bernstein:
The migration into the United States, the recent waves has been predominantly Hispanic and mostly Catholic and part of the Judeo-Christian civilization. What this document is referencing is that Europe may not be a Judeo-Christian civilization. It’s not the color of their skin. The fact that the United States is turning brown is irrelevant.
Rory MacFarquhar:
This administration thinks it is highly relevant that the United States is turning brown. And this is just an infusion of that view into a foreign policy document, which is so weird.
Larry Bernstein:
This is a quote from the report.
“The era of mass migration is over. Who a country admits into its borders, at what numbers, and from where, will inevitably define the future of that nation?” Any country that considers itself to be a sovereign has the right and duty to define its future.
That is what is driving the discussion about the Western Hemisphere. Large numbers of migrants from places like Venezuela to the United States, Trump views that as problematic and is one of the reasons to justify his sable rattling versus the Venezuelans. What is going on?
Rory MacFarquhar:
There have been very confusing mixed messages from the administration about Venezuela. Let me go through four explanations.
Explanation number one is that this is about drugs. I do not discount the idea that the Venezuelan regime is tied up with some amount of drug trafficking. It is not the case that they are responsible for trafficking fentanyl, which is what’s actually killing Americans. The president has just pardoned the former President of Honduras who was an avowed drug trafficker and had been convicted in a US court of doing so. So, this is clearly not about drugs.
Number two is it is not about migration because everything that is happening now is far more likely to provoke greater migration than the reverse. So, while this administration is concerned about migration, this is not part of that policy.
There are two other potential explanations. One is that Venezuela and has long been vital to the survival of Cuba. People in South Florida see regime change in Venezuela as a step towards regime change in Cuba. That would part of this administration’s motivation.
The final piece of it is a broader strategy of promoting like-minded right-wing regimes across Latin America electorally where possible, but more forcibly were not.
That while this administration is not interested in democracy promotion like the Neocons of the Bush administration, it is interested in promoting like-minded right-wing governments around the world, especially in Latin America, but also patriotic parties in Europe, as we were just discussing.
Larry Bernstein:
Machado recently won indirectly the election in Venezuela. She was awarded the Nobel Prize. She has consistently reached out to Trump to thank him for all his good work in Venezuela, but I don’t perceive her to create a right-wing government. Am I missing something?
Rory MacFarquhar:
I agree with your premise that her side won a democratic election in that country. Maduro is a terrible dictator. Venezuela would be better off without him.
Larry Bernstein:
Would you recommend an overthrow of Maduro?
Rory MacFarquhar:
No. This is a country that one obviously is not going to become friends with. Putting pressure on them makes sense. I don’t think that we should be trading with them. I don’t think that they should be able to use the US financial system. Potentially squeezing them economically through capturing sanctioned vessels is less legitimate. I do not find it appealing that we’re blowing up random boats.
Ultimately, the question is, is Trump going to launch a real war in Venezuela with unpredictable consequences? My guess is he will not. I do not think that the US has a great track record of regime change. We saw with various interventions over the last several decades that they often leave the countries worse off than before we arrived. So, I think that using the full force of the US military to attempt to overthrow a government in Venezuela would have unpredictable and potentially tragic consequences.
Donald Trump was unique among post-war Republican presidents with a potential exception of Gerald Ford in that he had not, through his first term, invaded a single country. Maybe he will return to typical practice and invade Venezuela. He was voted in by people who were disillusioned with neoconservative forever wars.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about as it relates to Trump’s national strategy for foreign policy?
Rory MacFarquhar:
There is a lot of sensible stuff in this national security strategy, including phrases like a predisposition to non-intervention. This is a call for a more restrained foreign policy. Hope that that does not entail the full-scale abandonment of treaty allies.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Emma and Rory for joining us. If you missed the previous one, the topic was You Sank My U-Boat.
Our speaker was Roger Moorhouse who is the author of a new book entitled Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War. Roger explained the importance of convoys, radar, and breaking the Nazis codes to the allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Our second speaker was the What Happens Next Culture Critic Darren Schwartz. We discussed World War 2 U-Boat movies including Das Boot and the recent Tom Hanks film Greyhound.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, You Sank My U-Boat, here.
