Corruption and Regime Change with Anne Applebaum and Tim Snyder

That is a fair first take. And of course, there's a version of this article you could write about the United States. It would have to be longer, more comprehensive. But yes, I do believe that what's happened with the second Trump administration is that the different people with different agendas have all coalesced around Donald Trump. I think many of them made the decision after January the 6th because they all have a vision of changing the nature of American government. They call it different things. Some of them talk about destroying the administrative state, which means, I think, as you've said and others have said, destroying the American government. The administrative state is the American government. It's the thing that monitors our pollution and food safety and builds our highways. Some of them have a Christian nationalist agenda. They want to replace the secular state with a religious state. Some of them have a white supremacist agenda. They believe that there is a part of the American polity that is more deserving of power than other parts, and they would like to keep that part in power and have its interests reflected in foreign policy and elsewhere. And then, of course, there are tech oligarchs who have their own set of interests, and they don't want to be regulated. They want to make use of the US government's resources for their own needs. And so all of these are the kinds of people who in the past were never able to control American national federal politics. Sometimes versions have had control at state levels. You can look past in American history and see some of the same ideas, especially in the Jim Crow South, but they've never had control of the federal government. And so what you're watching is those people with some different goals seeking to carry out what is genuinely a revolution, to replace the existing political system with something very different. And I decided to write about what this looks like in foreign policy, where the old idea of what American foreign policy is for — certainly the idea that we had through most of the 20th century, definitely since the Second World War — was that American foreign policy was to create safety and security for the United States and its allies, to build zones of peace and prosperity where American companies could function, to promote democracy because Americans believe that the world is safer when there are more democracies in the world and when the United States can deal freely with legitimate governments freely chosen by citizens. And all of those things have now been set aside, and instead what we have is, as I said, the different revolutionary clans seeking to use the old foreign policy apparatus, including the tools that were once used to promote democracy, in order to fulfill their own goals.

Yeah, I think that's correct. And I think, as you say, there are different clans, but the word extraction is a very useful one. And it applies in particular to some of the companies close to the Trump administration. So we talk a lot about the tech companies, but there are others — the cryptocurrency companies, oil and gas to some extent, mining companies. These are all companies that now look at the federal government as a source of funding. A lot of Musk's companies have federal government funding, Pentagon funding, or as a way — as an institution that will help them break the previous existing rules, lifting pollution laws, carbon restrictions. And they're using this new form of the American state to pursue their own goals. And you're right, they're doing it inside the United States and they're also doing it increasingly around the world. And they're frustrated when they see obstacles. And so to them, other states are obstacles. The European Union is a big obstacle because it's powerful and it can regulate them. But also Brazil is an obstacle because the Brazilian government might not want to have its politics dictated by Twitter. And so maybe it will restrict Twitter, which it has a right to do if it's a democratically elected legitimate government. And these companies now say, why should we? We have no restrictions inside the United States. Why should we be restricted anywhere? And so they now have allies inside the US government who will help them do that. Although there's another element too, which is that not all of American foreign policy now is being done by people who you would call diplomats or who are civil servants or people who are bound by ethics laws, you know, or ethics rules of the State Department or the CIA even. These are independent businessmen. They are people who've been appointed who have mixed — you know, sometimes they're technically ambassadors, but they're people with business interests in the countries where they've been appointed and so on. So this is also part of the new model, is that the state itself, the old institutions of American foreign policy are not being deployed, and instead they're replaced by private people with some personal links to Trump or to people around Trump.

Yes, I think they're both. I mean, your first point about climate change is correct. I mean, you're right. There's something very old and familiar about the US oil companies and gas companies and natural resources companies being close to politics and using politics for their aims. I mean, that's been around since probably the beginning of the country. But in the context where we know that these kinds of fuels damage us in other ways and where we have — I think we're now maybe the only government in the world. I think the US may be the only country in the world that formally does not recognize climate change. You know, where the US refuses to be part of any international discussions of it, where the president says it's a hoax, where there have even been some instances of academics who work on climate change projects have lost government funding because climate change is a hoax. So you know, the idea that it's a hoax and not real is now part of the infrastructure of American politics and science in a way that I think is unique. I don't think there's anywhere else. I mean, maybe somebody will write in and correct me if I'm wrong, and you can find a few other politicians here and there who would say that in Europe and elsewhere, but I don't think it's as formal government policy. I think the United States really stands out in this sense. And so you're right, that makes that different. And the control over AI and social media — and social media already being a form of, you know, we're already being affected by algorithms that are essentially artificial and are designed to manipulate the way we think even before AI kicked in. You're right that the big difference between the sort of titans of industry now and their predecessors in, say, the 1890s in the Gilded Age is that in that era there was Standard Oil and there were the railroads and so on. But you didn't have such a small group of people able to command not just news and information but also attention, and the degree to which they have commanded and captured attention to the detriment of real thought. You have now a collapse of journalism — and I mean all journalism, like good journalism, bad journalism, right-wing journalism, left-wing journalism. You know, Fox's numbers are down, everybody's numbers are down as journalism is replaced by opinion, social media, whatever random things AI puts together and makes into the answer to your question. And that means that the quality of new information coming into the internet or being made available is also bound to die and eventually grow weaker. And that means that the base of our ways of understanding the world are being altered pretty fundamentally, and I don't think there's a precedent for that either. Nor is there a precedent for that same small group of companies seeking to do the same thing essentially in all of our allies or everywhere else in the world except for those countries where the Chinese version of the internet or the Russian version of the internet is dominant.

Yeah. No, no. I mean, extracting value and resources and thought and ideas and agency and leaving kind of empty shells, you know, empty hollow institutions.

So America's policy towards Canada is to weaken the Canadian economy, to break up Canada if possible, and to absorb parts of Canada into the United States. That may come as a surprise to many Americans, but the Canadians who have been watching American policy carefully now understand that — they can see those patterns. They can see those patterns clearly. This is a policy that's being carried out by different people in different ways. So on the one hand, you have Trump, Vance, and others constantly demeaning and undermining Canadian sovereignty. Sometimes it seems like a joke. Canada is the 51st state. Sometimes it's just rudeness. You know, the Canadian prime minister is the governor — call him a governor. In addition to that, you have a whole world of MAGA influencers. They're not technically part of the government, but they take clues and cues from the president and the vice president. They also have a business model that seeks to get as many outraged people onto their platforms and clicking on their links and paying for their posts as much as they can. And in recent years — and this I had confirmed for me by a Canadian academic who studies and has been tracking mentions and discussions of Canada on American podcasts for a long time — there has been a huge uptick in coverage of Canada, discussion of Canada, attacks on Canada. Whereas Canada used to come up once in a while in the MAGA world podcast sphere, now it's a permanent theme. And again, this isn't something that's necessarily directed by the Trump administration, but it's compatible with it, and it's a kind of economic and political project that runs alongside it the way many of these things do. In addition to that, you've had some pretty unusual for American policy, open encouragement of Alberta separatism. And for Americans who don't know, Alberta is the kind of Texas of Canada. It's where a lot of the oil and gas are. Like all Canadian provinces have slightly different histories, the way American states have slightly different histories. Alberta does have a long history of being tied to the United States. And as I said, this kind of very long involvement of the oil and gas industry — there's always been some resentment in Alberta of the politics of Ottawa because Alberta was producing the gas, Ottawa was producing the green energy policies. There was a long-standing conflict. This has grown in recent years to an actual separatist movement. They have a referendum coming up very soon. It's a kind of referendum on whether there should be further discussions. Probably it looks — it's very likely that the separatist movement will lose. But the unusual piece of the story is US encouragement for the separatists. So separatists have met White House officials, which is pretty — you know, this is pretty far out of line with anything American public officials would have done before. So encouraging a separatist movement in a close democratic ally. You know, you have an American ambassador to Ottawa who has also ostentatiously invited a particularly radical Canadian separatist to an American Fourth of July party. It's creating a kind of addition to — yeah, recalled. So you have the comments, you know, and then on top of all of that you have this extraordinary tariff policy. And the tariff policy is just punitive tariffs for Canada, and it's very, very hard to see how this tariff policy is good for anybody in the United States. You know, what's good for Americans, especially Americans who live near Canada, is as smooth and as open trading policy with Canada as possible. Canada is our near neighbor. It's very compatible with us. Its products are compatible with American products. They buy our stuff, we buy their stuff. You know, this is a part of the world where you can't say there's some nobody — you know, it's not a place where salaries are 5% of American salaries or where there's huge pollution issues that we don't have or big regulatory differences. You know, this is an actually ideal trading partner for the United States. So why are there huge punitive tariffs on Canada? And the only explanation is that it goes along with these other policies, that the policy is to weaken Canada so that these separatist movements and other kinds of dissatisfied Canadians do well. And let me — I'll just finish by saying that it would be a long process for Alberta to actually break away from Canada. The fact of it happening, the possibility that a state which is really in the middle of the country and whose absence would disrupt east-west travel — and I mean, it's kind of unthinkable to have a unified Canada without Alberta — is somehow encouraged by America is very radical. And if we can go back to using the Bolshevik terminology, you know, I was thinking a lot about Bolshevik foreign policy when I was writing this article, which was very much — you know, the Bolsheviks would conduct normal negotiations some of the time, and then behind the back of the people they were negotiating with, they would also encourage, in that era, far-left or Marxist revolutionary movements wherever — in Germany and in Britain and so on. And this is the same. The United States has a normalish relationship with Canada. At the same time, we are encouraging, helping along movements that would undermine Canadian sovereignty. And that's now a kind of radical Bolshevik foreign policy.