The Palestinian movement, at its core, is not a nation-building or rather state-building movement; it's a movement of resistance. What it is, is: we are saying no. We are keeping ourselves alive by keeping the fire of resistance alive, and as long as we do that, you know, we're going to live in hell, but the Israeli heaven will be less pleasant because of our resistance.
It's 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday, January 28th, here in New York City. It is 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, January 28th, in Israel, as Israelis continue to observe the implementation of this hostage deal, anticipating the release of additional hostages later this week. And for conversation about the significance, the geopolitical significance for Israel of this particular deal, and also widening the aperture to some degree to have a larger conversation about US foreign policy under the new Trump administration and its implications for the Middle East and other geopolitical hotspots, I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast Walter Russell Mead, Global View columnist for the Wall Street Journal, of the Hudson Institute, one of the leading think tanks in Washington DC, and currently joins us from Gainesville, Florida, the University of Florida, where he is teaching a seminar on global affairs at the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida. In fact, he goes from this conversation right into the classroom. Walter, thank you for being here.
Good to be here, Dan. Good to see you.
Walter, our listeners don't get to take your class, although I have heard about the class you are teaching, and hopefully we'll do like a CliffNotes version of it right now, because I want to start at the pointy end of the spear of global affairs these days, which is the foreign policy of the incoming Trump administration. Now, you have been excellent in this, on these conversations we've had over the last couple of years, and also in your columns for the Journal, in decoding Trump's foreign policy. So to many of our listeners and viewers, this foreign policy may seem a bit confusing. On the one hand, the president has been suggesting that he's open to deals with Iran and the Palestinians, or the Palestinian Authority, and in Beijing. But at the same time, I think what has been unexpected for a lot of observers is that he is being, as they would put it, uncharacteristically tough on Putin. You pointed out his remarks at Davos, the president's remarks he delivered at Davos, where he seemed pretty tough on Russia. So, you know, pushing Israel to end the war in Gaza and de-escalate, when many in Israel and on the right thought he was going to give Israel a complete green light to keep doing whatever it wanted to do, Israel, and support Israel for some kind of strike on Iran, and that he would do everything he could to help Israel end Hamas's rule in Gaza, at the same time floating Palestinian population transfer to Egypt and Jordan. I must say, many Israelis, most Israelis I speak to, including Israelis on the right, have been surprised by the things he said on that front. And then, of course, at the same time, he's been releasing weapons holds for Israel, removing all conditions for sending weapons and munitions to Israel. So this is like a flurry of activity I've just described. I don't expect you to get into every piece of it, but just taking a step back, what's going on here?
There's several things obviously going on. Trump is a complicated man. His approach to domestic and world policy is complicated and different from what we're used to in political leaders. So trying to kind of wrap your head around Trump is always a difficult exercise, even for some of us who've been, you know, working at it for years. But I think the first thing to understand with Trump, as for that matter it is with someone like Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or for that matter Scholz in Germany or whoever, is his first goal is to maintain and solidify his power at home. And Trump is, you know, by profession he's an entertainer. One of Trump's superpowers, and he has a number of them, but one of his superpowers is the ability to use theater as a political weapon. That he creates theaters, you know, sometimes by upsetting expectations, sometimes by over-fulfilling them. He creates dramas that often cause his enemies and opponents to react in ways that enhance him, but also that put him at the center of the drama. And I'd say one way to understand the last couple of weeks is Trump saying, I'm a different kind of American president. Remember Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign once said about Jimmy Carter: I had a dream in which you told me that, you know, I, Reagan, wanted your job, Jimmy Carter's job, and I answered in my dream, no, I don't want your job, I want to be president of the United States. And you know, so Reagan... So Trump is telling us, using all kinds of examples and illustrations, saying, I am not sleepy Joe, I am not King Log, I'm King Stork. I'm going to be powerful. My will is going to transform things. No important question anywhere in the country or in the world can be answered without my having my input. And I have more power than you think I have, and I'm going to use it more effectively and more dynamically than you thought I would. And I think everything he's doing at home and abroad, first and foremost, needs to be understood as scene-setting for the presidency, and doing it in a way... Again, Trump has always... Trump has been the dominant, not just political figure of our time, the dominant figure of our time, almost since he came down the escalators in Trump Tower.
Yeah, it's been a decade. It's been a decade. But by the way, just to put it in my little parochial world, I have a 17-year-old son and a 15-year-old son, and you know, everyone around them, all the adults around them, had just assumed when they were young, when Trump first got elected, that the Trump presidency would be an aberration, that that's not what they would know of as the American presidency in their national, American political life. In reality, they got the last laugh, because for most of their life now, they're like pretty aware of current events and news and politics, partly because of, you know, dinner conversation at our home, but just generally speaking, they're now teenagers, they're following stuff, they have strong views. Everything else is an aberration. Trump is the dominant... like, they have been living with Trump as the dominant figure in American political life for a decade. So one of my sons is going to be 18, he'll be able to vote next year. All he knows is that the most steadying force is Trump's presence.
Well, he's, you know, I would compare him in some ways to Napoleon in the sense that he is an individual who has managed to make world history, at least for a time, about him. And that, you know, whether you like Trump or dislike Trump, or for that matter, whether you like or dislike Napoleon, you have to recognize that this is a sign of a certain kind of genius that is very rare. He is an, you know, he is an extraordinary historical phenomenon. And, you know, you can get confused when you try to, you know, apply the standards that you would apply if this were the first week of the Harris administration. What would she be doing? What would she not be doing? That's not what he's... he's not playing that game. He is being the Donald, the grand Trump, the center of American politics and world politics. And I would have to say, regardless of what we think of any single one decision that he has unveiled in the last week or anything that he said, he has succeeded brilliantly in that mission. He has done what he set out to do with the early days of his presidency.
Okay, so many critics and supporters have pointed to this idea that he seemed possibly, you know, I think this criticism has been unfair, but the criticism is, criticism has been that he's been too cozy with President Putin in Russia. But others have just observed that, look, he seems that he wants the Russia-Ukraine war to end, and he was going to end it as soon as he became president. And the implication of him saying he was going to end it was that he was going to stuff, effectively, a bad deal on Ukraine. I've always thought the sort of, you know, Trump as Putin fanboy was just the most idiotic, self-delusional element of all the sort of Trump derangement syndrome that you see. And by the way, you can identify Trump derangement syndrome in other people without being pro-Trump yourself. You know, this is not... I'm not trying to make a statement here that, wow, he's terrific or anything like that. You can have that conversation. But Trump, you know, the man, the man that Vladimir Putin would most want to be president of the United States forever is Barack Obama. You know, what he wants is a president who makes grandiose moral statements about human rights and nuclear nonproliferation and American principles, but then doesn't do anything substantive about them. Retreats when pushed. Lets Syria cross a red line. Responds with essentially ineffective sanctions when Putin attacks Ukraine. And meanwhile is systematically trying to limit US oil and gas production in ways that ensure high prices for Putin's oil as far as the eye can see. You know, that is a pro-Putin presidency, objectively speaking. Oh, and by the way, cutting military spending and thinking that everything is about, you know, soft power and the power of our ideals and example. Putin would like a thousand years of that kind of leadership in the United States. And tragically for him, he didn't get it. Trump's policies were always tough about Russia. People are saying, well, he's going to use the oil weapon against Putin. He used it in his first term, you know, really trying to juice up oil production, oil and gas production as much as possible, and pushing European allies, pushing countries like Poland to import gas from the United States rather than Russia. You might say, well, that's a commercial policy, not a geopolitical policy. It's an anti-Russia policy from the ground's point of view, right? Or confronting Russian private militias in Syria and killing a bunch of those contractors, which he did in his first term, right? And for that matter, killing Soleimani, although Trump's police record was a rather mixed one in other respects. But the point is that... And then people, you know, the reasons people put forward for thinking that Trump is somehow under Putin's thumb in some way, you know, one of them is, oh, Putin has some kind of compromise, some blackmail material on Trump. Honestly, I cannot think of a single human being in the last 200 years who is less vulnerable to blackmail. I mean, Trump, you know, if Putin had on film Trump shooting a pregnant woman in broad daylight, half of Trump's base would say it's a deepfake, the other half would say she deserved it, all right? Trump is unblackmailable, all right? And so this idea that somehow, oh, he has this, or, you know, a financial impropriety, oh, my goodness, he has evidence that Trump did something, fiddled with his tax forms or something like that. And the other thing is somehow that they have this deep ideological bond and Trump identifies with Putin's critique of Western values. And so he's somehow, because Trump is such a sincere, idealistic believer in morality, he's going to make realpolitik concessions to Putin because he's an idealist. Trump, I'm sorry if I disturb anybody's peace here, Trump is not, of all the things that he is, a naive, starstruck fanboy is the last thing Donald Trump is of anyone. So the entire establishment vision of Trump's approach to Russia is a manifestation. It's like, you know, this reveals the astigmatism, an astigmatism in the vision of the beholders. And you've got to try to clear your eyes of this sort of thing to have the first... So every, you know, again, from Trump's point of view, you have this entire anguished press discussion, well, why isn't he being anti-Russia? Is he being secretly pro-Russian in some way? We can't say. All right, it's all about nothing, nothing, right?
Right, okay. I'm going to get to the Middle East in a moment, but these hotspots, since the threats that Israel is facing and what's going on in the Middle East is all connected to these different, you know, this axis of resistance and these broader, you know, Beijing and Moscow. So I do want to ask you about Beijing. Have you been surprised about President Trump's tone about Xi, where it seems that he's more open to some kind of path to negotiation rather than confrontation so early in his administration?
I'm not in the slightest surprised by that. Trump is all about deals, all about negotiations. And we've seen over and over and over again what Trump likes to do in a negotiation is a combination. First, he, you know, gives you a picture of the absolute worst that could happen if you don't go along with, don't make the deal, then how fantastic the deal would be. And then he floods the zone with chaos and confusion. That's his standard MO, all right? He's now doing it with China. I mean, why, again, surprise? It just reveals, in a sense, that even though this guy's been dominating global attention spans for a decade, a lot of us are still just so caught up in, you know, he is so different from conventional politicians that we have not yet kind of adjusted our methods of analysis to grasp this. But this is simply Trump being Trump. And by the way, you can't infer anything from this about what he will actually do, say, vis-a-vis tariffs with Beijing. I do think that if China were to kind of, if China and Trump had a common vision on how the Ukraine war should end, and then China used visible pressure on Russia to get Putin to sign up for that, I have no doubt that Trump would be willing to pay them in some coin or other for that service. But don't you know, that's a very far, you know, long path from where we are. But it is a possible outcome. But that's Trump. He has ten thousand possible outcomes swirling in this huge cloud that makes it, you know, hard for other people to focus and act.
Okay, one of the other things he does is he seems to float very provocative questions, topics that are verboten, like you just can't, they're untouchable, you're not supposed to talk about them. The foreign policy establishment, it's just, it's settled, it's settled, you can't talk about it, you can't even have a serious conversation about it. And he just raises these questions and you never really know what he's serious about and what he's not, to your earlier point. So, you know, he talks about, even before he was sworn in this time, he talked about the US taking over Greenland and Canada becoming the 51st state. Now, those involved with his administration basically say, yeah, he's mischief-making on Canada becoming the 51st state. He's not really mischief-making on Greenland. Like, he's up to something on Greenland. And now, suddenly, we'll see where it goes. There's a real conversation about Greenland. And, like, you know, there are real foreign policy and the kind of intelligentsia discussions now about Greenland in a way that there wasn't before. So first of all, do you think, do you agree with that, that he seems to have actually sparked a more... I mean, who knows what will ultimately land with Greenland, but the point is he sparked a conversation about Greenland that is getting a little more altitude than I would have expected?
Well, I would say this is an example of Trump having a basic insight that is true, that is against the consensus, the very tired and stale consensus of the establishment, and then finding a variety of sort of opinion, of attention-grabbing ways of exploiting that gap and illustrating that gap. Now, the establishment, the foreign policy establishment and the kind of Atlanticist elite cannot get itself away from the idea that Europe is a dynamic force in international politics. All right, actually, in some ways, what we're looking at now is the wars of the European succession, where Russia has grabbed the French Empire in Africa, Turkey appears to be grabbing the remains of what France once had in the Levant, and is quite possibly going to be looking at the Balkans in the future. Russia is obviously, you know, grabbing for Ukraine and moving toward Belarus. The sort of the institutional failures, economic drift, and political incoherence of the European Union has, you know, has created an empty space from a geopolitical point of view, and nature abhors a vacuum. All right, now the Atlanticist establishment, for the Biden administration, Germany was our key ally, followed only by Japan, right? And if you align with Germany, get things right with Germany, NATO will go well, the transatlantic relationship will go well, the sort of island of democratic peace that we're trying to consolidate will get deeper and expand. All right, Biden will, I hope, will be the last president who thinks that, you know, that it's a kind of, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's something that might have been true a generation ago, but it's been getting less true ever since. So Trump sees that, and that leads him to all kinds of things. One of them is European weakness is creating massive vulnerabilities around the Arctic that are of serious national security concern to the United States. All right, if we're counting on Denmark to protect us from Russia and China in Greenland, by the way, you know, as the climate is changing, as the Arctic is warming and becoming a more significant avenue for navigation, and also the rare earth materials in Greenland, and blah, blah, blah, you know, there's a there there. The scarecrow of the power of the European Union and a sort of undifferentiated Atlanticist West has lost its power to scare the birds of prey away. Meanwhile, there is this independence movement in Greenland, and you think it doesn't have a big population. China and Russia have a lot of money to spend. Are we really prepared as a country to let sort of election skullduggery, bribery, who knows what sort of, as Greenland takes kind of an erratic future course, is that actually something that we want? Now, the establishment can't see that there's a question until Trump asks it, because it is so hooked into a dead world, a vision of a dead world. Trump gets it, and again, remember, he wants theater, and theater that works for him. So you could write a, you could, you could make a speech about European weakness is creating a range of security problems, blah, blah, no one cares, no one listens. But then when you see the Trump, the Trump plane landing in Greenland, yes, so all right, so that's political genius, and that's something that Kamala Harris in ten thousand years could not manage. Now, okay, is it good policy? That's another question. But again, I would say right now at this stage in his, in his presidency, Trump is much less concerned with sound policy than he is with establishing a solid picture of Trump as the commanding figure in global and national politics.
