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During this period of peak Iranian threat, the US and Israel's interests were very closely aligned. We both wanted to stop Iran. Then Israel did everybody the favor of knocking Iran down several pegs. And that has had the paradoxical effect of making everyone else less aligned with Israel. And the US may feel just less worried about the Middle East. And it reverts to just don't cause trouble.
I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast a fan favorite of the Call Me Back community, Walter Russell Mead. Walter, thanks for being here.
So, I want to start by taking a step back. President Trump just released his 33-page national security strategy document last week to lay out his foreign policy priorities. It's a roadmap, in his words, in the introduction. In your Wall Street Journal column, you described it differently, and I'm quoting you here. You wrote, "It is more manifesto than strategy document, expressing what its authors hope are the ideas that will guide American foreign policy for the next generation and giving us their interpretation of Mr. Trump's underlying worldview." That's you. So, you read the document, you read it closely. What does this document tell us about, you know, how we should think about, let's just call it, the next year ahead?
Well, they really intend to launch a sea change in American foreign policy. And it starts right when they say, okay, number one most important region in the world is the Western Hemisphere. That's a real shift also. Then when they segue into Europe, they really attack Europe. European policy, say you guys are destroying yourselves and that matters to us. And if you keep this up in 15, 20 years, you face civilizational eclipse. You are canceling yourselves out. And not only do we not like that, but it's not in America's interest to let it happen. And so we're going to support movements in Europe that take, in our view, a healthy view of the world situation, which sounds, I think, as if they're planning to work with parties like the National Front in France or others, Reform in the UK, who Europeans would say are far-right parties who are trying to upset the apple cart.
Yeah. The document reads, should present trends continue, I'm quoting from it, the European continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. So, is it basically in that sense saying America, at least as it relates to the European continent, is on its own?
It's not saying that we're there yet. It's saying that's the trend, but it is clearly saying that Europe is not what it was to the United States. And also that unless the Europeans change their approach, the normal kind of transatlantic cooperation that we've seen between America and Europe under so many administrations is actually enabling Europe's decline. And so we need to stop doing that.
Yeah. I was struck by the press reaction to the document because it was fixated on Europe. The New York Times described the document, I'm quoting here, a new White House policy document formalizes President Trump's long-held contempt for Europe's leaders. So, do you think the press is focusing on the wrong priority of this document or at least misinterpreting it?
Well, you know, the press is focusing on what's important to the press. For a lot of people in the kind of mainstream, oh, let's just call them elite, the transatlantic relationship is the cornerstone of world order. And the European Union and the United States and NATO are the pillars on which we are now building a global zone of law, peace, human rights, prosperity, all of those good things. And so for Trump to challenge the foundations of that, it is an assault on everything that is good, holy, important, and can keep us from having World War III. That, I think, is the conventional view of the importance of that relationship.
So let's talk about where the non-elites focused, which was on the Western Hemisphere. Can you tell us how we should be thinking about what the implications of the document's dwelling on the Western Hemisphere, to say the least?
Well, it is, I mean, it really is fascinating because they go back in history and they anchor their new Western Hemisphere policy in not only the Monroe Doctrine but in what they're calling the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine says, "We want no outside powers messing around in the Western Hemisphere. It's ours." That wasn't Monroe's original formulation, but that's how it evolved.
Monroe Doctrine declared by President Monroe in 1823. Right. Right. And it was a warning largely to European powers. Right. At that time, the French and the Spanish monarchies were looking to restore the rule of the House of Bourbon, maybe in Latin America. And the Americans hated it because we were afraid that this would reintroduce monarchy and great powers into the region. But the reality was the British would do it for their own reasons. The British didn't want the French and the Spanish in the New World. So, they would prevent it. So the Americans just were riding on the British power.
But that evolved over time as the US got stronger and had more to say about what went on. That evolved into this idea that the United States does not want to see other great powers installing themselves in what we began to consider as our hemisphere. Now let's fast forward to 1904. And at this time the problem was that very, very often South American governments who weren't always that good with their finances and, you know, had revolutions and so on and so forth would borrow a lot of money from European lenders and then not be able to pay. And these days we have the IMF for problems like that. But in those days, what you would traditionally do is send in the gunboats where you would occupy a major port and that would mean you would have the power to collect all the customs duties. It was just a way of forcing them to pay. And the United States didn't want, for example, German gunboats coming to Venezuela because Venezuela was reneging on its debts to German banks. So Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed in 1904, as I recall, that if a South American, a Latin American country by its own misbehavior is inviting foreign intervention, then the US will send the gunboats to Venezuela and we'll decide how much of Venezuela's customs revenue goes to German or English or French banks. We're in charge here.
And what Trump is doing is he's kind of expanding that. He's asserting the same kind of police power that Roosevelt asserted over the whole hemisphere and saying, "Look, if they are misgoverning in ways that create huge floods of immigrants, or if the government is so aligned with narco-trafficking cartels that it is really an enabler of drug smuggling rather than a government policing it, in those cases of misgovernment, we are asserting a police power to go in and clean up the mess." And because Venezuela is exhibit A, a quarter of its population have fled as refugees because of the absolutely horrible economic policies. Absolutely. That government is totally in bed with narco-traffickers and also absolutely anybody from Russia, China, Hamas, Iran, you name it, can play very happily in the Venezuelan playground. So Venezuela is right in the crosshairs of the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. That's what this statement says. And it's a pretty powerful statement. It would be very hard for them to back down from this without a real diminishment of prestige. It would be a very, very kind of public egg-on-your-face failure. So that's why I thought it was as powerful as it is.
And what, I mean, you mentioned the role of China around the world and especially in the Western Hemisphere, but what does the document tell us about great power rivalries?
If you read between the lines, you see a very conventional approach in the sense of, well, America has an interest in preventing any single power from dominating a region. You know, this is something that a lot of American presidents would have agreed with. And that means that if China is trying to dominate Asia, then the United States will form alliances with other countries in order to resist that Chinese drive for domination. And it reasserts a sort of historic policy on Taiwan, but it doesn't have a section on geopolitical great power rivalry or US-China. A lot of people have read that as saying that the administration is no longer interested in these issues. I think that's a very deep misreading of their views. But they are definitely using, let's say, diplomatic language about China in a way they're not using it about Europe. And that's yet another reason the Europeans are so angry. It's like, you were polite to China, you were polite to Russia, and then you kick us in the teeth, and yet who's your allies? Who are your friends? That has fueled a lot of the wrath about the statement and a lot of the incomprehension. Why would you do this?
What role does the Middle East have in this doctrine or in this document?
The Middle East is not on the front burner. They run a little victory lap about Iran in the statement. But if you're thinking of the world in terms of these rivalries right now, the United States has gone from being really worried about Iran's plans to dominate the region to thinking, well, Iran isn't doing it and nobody else is really right now in the kind of position of strength Iran was three years ago. So, you know, what do you want?
All right, I want to drill down here a little bit more. On most issues, President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu seem to be on the same page, at least publicly, Iran, Gaza, even Lebanon for the most part. But it's not clear on Syria. So, if you're sitting there in Jerusalem and you're Israel and you're reading this document, what should Israel be thinking? What should they be worried about? Are there areas like Syria or others that are catching your eye where US and Israeli interests may diverge?
Yeah. Look, I think in general during this period of peak Iranian threat, US and Israel's interests were very closely aligned. We both wanted to stop Iran. And not only that, most of the Gulf Arabs were on the same page that Iranian power was the threat that everybody was worrying about. Then Israel did everybody the favor of knocking Iran down several pegs and that has had the paradoxical effect of making everyone else less aligned with Israel. So Saudi Arabia is not saying, well, we don't necessarily care for everything the Israelis are doing, but we're not going to worry about that while Iran is at our throat. And the US is also not going to nitpick when there is this big Iran thing. But now, you know, the US, I think Trump administration may feel just less worried about the Middle East and it reverts to just don't cause trouble, don't cause trouble in Syria. Though, you know, Trump is still, I think, with Israel basically on Gaza, but he sees a diplomatic advantage in occasionally distancing himself some from the Israeli position.
And I think many people think that maybe Netanyahu doesn't mind that sometimes Trump plays the bad guy and says, "Don't do this." Because it allows Bibi to say to some of his supporters, "Well, you know, I'd love to do it. I want to do it so bad, but Trump won't let me. And he's the most pro-Israel president we've ever had, and I can't possibly offend him. So, you have to understand. I can't help you, but it's not my fault." But I think on something like Syria, the Trump administration clearly has come down on wanting the kind of stabilization of Syria and it doesn't seem to be that worried about some Israeli concerns about what that might mean, maybe especially in terms of Turkish power in Syria.
Well, I was going to ask you about Turkey. So, how worried should Israel be about Turkey and Turkey's role in the Middle East?
I think it's an interesting question. Again, with Iran temporarily knocked back a bit, Turkey is the obvious major geopolitical actor other than Israel in the Middle East. And Erdogan has, you know, for a long time wanted to reverse Ataturk's approach of saying that Turkey was really only interested in Europe, was not a Middle Eastern country. That was sort of a hundred years, almost 100 years of Turkish policy and Erdogan is reversing that. And the collapse of the Assad regime opens a huge opportunity in a sense. There's a hope, I think, in Ankara that Syria will be the Turkish Iraq. And what do I mean by that? When Saddam Hussein's secular, nominally secular regime but actually controlled by the Sunni minority over a Shia majority, when that fell, the Iranians were able to kind of pull a lot of Iraq into the Shia camp under the Iranian banner. Turkey would like to do that in Syria. In a perhaps weakly governed state, Turkey would be the dominant outside power. And by the way, that would give you a lot of influence in Lebanon because whoever is running Syria has a lot of sway in Lebanon.
