UKICE Lunch Hour: Confronting foreign policy challenges

I'm not giving up my lunch break for this. And I was like,

Not sure it'd be a good look.

Hello. Hello.

I'd take the centuries even earlier.

It's starting to feel 17th, 13th, you know. Even — I mean, all of us talk about the Roman Empire, you know, gone from republic to empire. I think everybody's on the same page, apart from those who are steadfast supporters at this point in, you know, I think quite very accurately describing this as the court of King Donald. I mean, he does it himself, and even goes one step further in likening himself to a world historic individual, which many of us have been doing, slightly tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely. But now he's all in on that as well. So, anything that we could say about him, he has taken it a step further. Memes of him as Jesus Christ, god-like figure — you know it.

So, one of the points that I've been making recently is that we've kind of hit peak presidency, if there's such a thing one can say about that in the United States. A kind of — well, let's see if it's a sort of overvaluation of the stock of the president. I mean, 250 years on from the Declaration of Independence and this decision ever again to create the conditions for tyranny, we seem to have, at least at the very top and pinnacle of US politics, come full circle.

Yeah, and because he can. Yes, I think that is fair. But the only thing is that it's unclear right now what's going to happen in the midterms exactly. And there's lots of speculation, there's loads of commentary on this, lots of polling, people giving their best guesses. But he's really been making every effort to mess about with the midterm process. So it makes you actually really wonder — with everything from all this gerrymandering going on in individual US states at his behest, to all of his questions about the validity of the election process, because of course in the United States each state gets to set all the ways that they will basically take the votes, from mail-in balloting to early voting and all the rest of it, and then their decisions on the way in which they structure the count, etc. And he's basically throwing all of that into question. And obviously in both the Senate and the Congress the margins for the Republican Party are pretty slim. We've had this really quite devastating news, particularly for those of us who watch foreign policy very closely, of the sudden death of Lindsey Graham, who despite everything was actually a real advocate for the transatlantic relationship — and the horrible irony of him literally just coming back from Ukraine. Questions about Mitch McConnell, the key person in the Senate, and his health, and on and on and on it goes. I mean, there's just this constant sense of drama and chaos.

But in the middle of it all, getting back to the way that you just framed that, Trump will just keep on doing what Trump does. And part of the problem is that even though he hasn't legally changed some of the structures in which he operates, he's been pushed back on many fronts by federal judges, even if not always by the Supreme Court in the way that people would want. People cede power to him. They have very limited means of checking him beyond the courts. And so he just barrels on, doing whatever it is that he wants to do. And that is extraordinarily dangerous for US allies and others overseas, as we see from the case in Iran.

No, there's definitely a strategy. It's one of maximizing his own power, influence and money. And in fact he's profiting from the chaos in the world. I mean, every day you can read in the US press — well, depending on which press you're reading. You probably wouldn't hear about it on Fox News, and you wouldn't necessarily be hearing about it in some of the papers that come under his purview, or what he's putting out on Truth Social or the White House, for example. But you can read all kinds of investigative reports about just how much Trump himself and his family have enriched themselves. And it's outrageous. But I will just say that it hasn't — and that's the strategy. Honestly, it's maximizing his profit. He's turned the presidency into a profit-making machine.

Yeah, he's not getting called out about it because it's not registering with most of the people in the country. And he said quite recently that he's learned that most people don't care about conflicts of interest. That's not exactly true. Most people are not hearing about it. I just spent July 4th up in Wisconsin with my extended family, and it's a part of Wisconsin which is very close to the Illinois border. It's not that far away from Chicago. It's hardly the middle of absolutely nowhere. And people there just, 'What? No, we don't know anything about this.' And all they've factored in, thinking about this, is, 'Well, this is just typical politics as usual, old world politics — old world, rather, rather than old world, but maybe all of those,' you know, kind of link together.

Because this whole idea was, 'Well, hasn't it always been like this?' particularly if you think about Chicago and all the kind of reputation that had for corrupt politics. But that actually isn't the case. It hasn't been like this for decades. Think about all of that big noise that the Republicans were making about the so-called Biden crime family. And now we've got the Trump family on a scale that would have been unfathomable — exactly again outside of the context of some 18th century or 17th century court.

Yeah, I mean, there is a strategy here. It's quite obvious. It's obvious to any sentient being who's paying attention, but it's not what's registering at that level, and it's hidden by the chaos of the politics, the drama, the showmanship of Trump, and also because he is, as you say, focusing in on foreign policy where he gets a big bang while he's stealing the books.

I think there's a — well, there's another point on this, because in a number of respects — I mean, I've done a lot of comparisons — and notwithstanding all the structural and other historical and cultural differences between the US and Russia, in the creation of this sort of pinnacle of power, a vertical of power going down from Putin all the way through. The fact that Putin isn't a member of a political party — obviously the political parties become somewhat meaningless in Russia, and obviously not a great deal of depth of history of political parties there in any case. But the similar phenomenon happening in the United States with this kind of peak presidency, the unified executive theory as people would have it. And the fact that, my God, MAGA is a movement and the Republican Party has been completely, utterly emasculated, if not eradicated, in many respects from the political scene. But the other thing is that Russia and the United States are enormous. These are continental powers.

Yeah, I mean, they're larger than Europe. They've got huge populations and obviously larger in geographic extent. And you have that advantage that, if you're in Vladivostok, in the Russian case, you don't really care all that much about what is happening in Washington DC, or in Moscow for that matter. And the same in the United States: if you get really far out — Wyoming, the Dakotas, Idaho — you're in these kind of rural areas, you're really not paying a lot of attention to what's happening in DC at all, apart from the surface noise of the politics. That's not the case in the UK. The UK geographically is about the size of one of the US states. Oregon, I think, is kind of the closest. All right, it's got a large population, but it's dense and compactly settled. You've still got a lot of common sources of information, even if people are not sitting around watching the 9:00 news on the BBC or ITV as they used to do, when you and I were younger.

You know — we're kind of in an old thing. I think I was watching something about 1966 the other day, about how the entire country was watching the World Cup in 1966 on the same TV screen, on the same channel. And of course that's not happening, but there's still that kind of sense in the UK of people generally being in the same space. And that's not the case in the United States at all.

That really isn't. And I think that's what Trump, as well as Putin in Russia, take advantage of. And you're also seeing much more the repressive apparatus kicking in here. But the structures of the court, the fact that people don't have a lot of recourse, the communal violence which is always very close to the surface — not to say that that isn't the case in the UK as well, as we've seen from so many recent incidents. But the fact that there is a kind of — it's not a tacit acceptance, but at least an acknowledgement that the government in the United States, given its long history, will actually come down quite hard on you. It has the monopoly of violence, even if there are all these militias and all these guns circulating around in private hands. We know from American history that they're quite happy to send out the troops in terms of social unrest. And so we've got the National Guard patrolling. I just don't think many people in the UK would put up with that.

Well, yes and no. And also, look — the very fact that we're speculating about J.D. Vance taking over tells us how deep in trouble we are. I mean, look, it's odd enough in the UK where you're just anointing the next prime minister without due process in the electoral sense. But in the United States, theoretically, there's supposed to be a presidential competition here, and traditionally vice presidents don't automatically get into power. We've seen that happening on many occasions, notwithstanding Biden or H.W. Bush, for example. But it would be a real question about how much J.D. Vance would be able to chart his own course. I mean, we know that he's a non-interventionist. He doesn't want to support Ukraine. He certainly doesn't like Europe, and would like to continue those trends.

But I would actually say that even without the Republican Party, the United States was always fading to grey in terms of its views of its role in the transatlantic alliance. You can hear these very similar things being said about Europe and Europeans by people who were in the Biden administration, who would have been in a Harris administration. I mean, you know this, Anand, because you're frequently over there. And I think many of the people who are listening to this have probably recently been in meetings with the so-called opposition, or the Democratic establishment, and heard all kinds of other more pejorative commentary about Europe and what Europe needs to be doing. We had Barack Obama talking about leading from behind, and that was maybe with regard to Europe. So the foreign policy — I think there is some common frame there that, irrespective of who is there, shows that the United States is not willing to pick up the mantle of European security for sure, but also global security in the way that it was before. And so I think that idea of the United States as being the dominant player shaping a world order — I mean, certainly there would be more internationalists.

Who might kind of re-emerge in a different setting if it's not a J.D. Vance or others. There are still — and that was what Lindsey Graham was representing in the Republican Party — people who would be in a different form of non-MAGA Republican Party who might have different sets of views. You see that with the Munich Security Conference. You see that every time people go to major summits. But I think all of these are up for debate in the United States. My colleague Tom Wright at Brookings wrote an interesting piece recently in the Atlantic talking about the debates in the Democratic Party about this.

I think America is having — not that dissimilar from Britain — a bit of an existential crisis about who it is and what it wants to be now that it's grown up. You know, 250 years on, it's really not clear what the next phase in US history is going to look like.

No, I think that's totally gone. And look, you just have to look at the demography of the United States to see how much the place has changed. In all the different age cohorts, the kind of shift in the composition of the population, which is another reason why there's such a backlash — because the United States is at one of those demographic tipping points. I mean, in fact, again, colleagues at the Brookings Institution — I would recommend people reading some of the recent articles by one of our demographers, William Frey, F-R-E-Y, which kind of show that the United States is rapidly approaching a demographic winter, pretty much as we've been talking about in Europe, because of course the population was really being driven by immigration and higher birth rates among immigrants, where

the so-called generalized white populations' birth rates have been declining for a very long time. You've got these tensions between urban and rural areas that many of us are also looking at at Brookings. And there's just a completely different feel to America at that moment, which leads to some of these tensions that we're already going to see in its overseas links. Most people have got more diverse backgrounds, which is kind of inevitable over time. It's not just did they end up on, or was one of their family members on the beaches of Normandy, but those longer-term ties, even going back multiple generations, to thinking about Europe or European heritage, have shifted as well. You've seen J.D. Vance shifting to this blood and soil idea — the German 'Volk' idea of people who are born and raised in Appalachia for multiple generations, which is somewhat absurd as well.

I mean, we're thinking again 250 years of American independence — the original 13 colonies are not the core of the country. The country's enormous. It's expanded, the demographic changes all have to be factored in. So I think that's absolutely right. We shouldn't think that America is coming back. And I think individual American states are finding themselves in the same place that European allies individually of the United States are. Texas might seem more in the vibe of currently the politics of the United States, but also not. Texas is a vast place, was once an independent country before being absorbed into the United States. There's all kinds of different views. Most states are actually pretty purplish, not red or blue in these kinds of extremes, but the Electoral College and the voting system tends to exaggerate a lot of the differences. And states themselves are working out what do they do and what's their relationship vis-à-vis the federal government now?

Because Trump has been very divisive. I called him in another conversation I was in recently America's Gorbachev. He doesn't even realize that in many respects he's undercutting the country. He's pulling apart the glue that keeps it together. And that is really a rather remarkable thing, because there's no real base beyond his support spread around the country for the US president. Washington DC is really a capital city — it's not a London, it's not a Paris, it's not a Moscow. And 90% of people in DC don't like him. That's just a fact.

You know, what is he doing here? He's dismantling everything, putting up monuments to himself, and he's not focusing on how he would knit the country back together again. And in the meantime, you're seeing Texas, California, Massachusetts, all kinds of states — Minnesota, given what's been happening with ICE, Maine — are they pushing back or talking about doing things on their own in terms of trade and all kinds of other thinking about what happens when the federal government disappears on you. So it's not just Canada thinking, 'Hey, what do we do here? We don't want to be the 51st state.' It's the 50 states thinking, 'Canada, for God's sake, is this what we signed up for?' Not everyone is actually on board with all of this.

Well, they can, with some effort. I think it might have to be from the grassroots up. And there's a lot of discussion about this, too. There's some really interesting research going on, very similar to some of the work that's going on at King's on social cohesion that people like Bobby Duffy and others are doing. I met with Bobby recently looking at what he's doing, because there's a lot of correlates to it in the United States. There are institutes across the country that are thinking, 'We've got a problem here.' There's a lot of common sense — or at least it doesn't appear to be at the top, certainly not on the part of Trump — about what is America beyond these kind of definitions that migrants are putting out. What do Americans think? And it still seems to be, from polling across the country, that people believe in those fundamental ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

So if someone from the top started to be more inspirational, and was kind of thinking about how would we extol those virtues again, sort of recommit to those principles of the American Declaration of Independence, you might be able to jolly people along somewhat, get people to pull behind a different approach. But obviously that's not what Trump is doing, and it makes it a really high bar for someone who wants to come in and pull the country together in the future.

Yeah, and that's really what I would urge people to think about. I mean, I'm kind of approaching the US in a weird way now, as if it's a foreign country. I mean, I go to Russia in a way that I did before, so I'm kind of transferring back the lens that I might have looked at Russia with onto the US at the moment, because it is quite fascinating and troubling. And if it wasn't that this was a country that seemed so familiar to people — often, in my case, where I've lived since 1989 — if you were just kind of going along as you would normally, instead of being back in it and looking at it, you probably wouldn't realize what's happening here, but it's quite profound. I mean, this really is, as I said, an existential crisis for the United States. And just as Europe and European countries, and certainly the United Kingdom, feel that they're having the same sets of problems — at least some countries more than others — that's what's happening here. And I think that anybody who's looking at the United States, wondering about the future of the transatlantic relationship, thinking about larger foreign policy, has to really inspect what's happening inside the United States itself.

I do. I mean, look, many people are talking about the fact now that we're at a stage where it's obvious that neither Russia is winning nor Ukraine, or that Ukraine could be said to be fending the Russians off for now, or prevailing. We've had Zaluzhny recently making a commentary in the press, trying to caution people against saying Ukraine seems to be winning, which has been the vibe that has been coming out around the NATO conference, the NATO summit recently. But that kind of idea — certainly, given that we've reached a kind of, not really a checkmate or a stalemate, but certainly a kind of impasse here — that gives us an opportunity to try to push for some durable ceasefire at this point. But again, Putin is the one that has to be persuaded, because for him peace is dangerous.

He's become so much of a wartime president that it makes you really wonder how he would prevail in a situation in which the war is not the frame. I mean, I remember years ago when I used to work really closely on Chechnya, and of course he became the main protagonist in sort of driving the end of the Chechen war. I did some interviews with people around the Kremlin when one still could do that. And a very senior Russian official said to me, 'Look, if Chechnya didn't exist, it would have to be invented, because it's now the frame in which we all operate.' And that is exactly what's happened here now.

I mean, for Ukraine as well, there's all kinds of dangers. We all know from the UK's history and from other countries that the transition from war to peace — or in this case it would be a kind of no war, no peace — but still that transition is very rocky. And the old raison d'être, the frame, the excuses that you can draw upon, all go. And for Putin, we've seen the recent pieces from Melnichenko in the Economist. Arkady Ostrovsky's done all these interviews with one of these leading oligarchs, EuroChem and others. I mean, you can see that — and here actually there's an interview with him as well — there's frustration there. And Melnichenko's not making an appeal to us. He's making an appeal to Putin. People basically saying, 'Come on, come on, buddy. Isn't this surely the end — at least the end of this phase of the war?' But Putin — it's going to be very hard to persuade him, because he'll want guarantees. He'll want guarantees that he can declare victory out of this. And although Trump can declare victory every 5 seconds, it's a much higher bar for Putin to be able to do that. There's a lot of dangers that Putin faces internally that Trump doesn't necessarily in the United States.

Of course there is. He just doesn't want it to be his problem. And wherever there is an issue, he wants to get credit for anything that's solved, and he wants some money to be made out of it. I mean, look what he's doing now with the Strait of Hormuz. It's freedom of navigation — one of my colleagues at Brookings said this the other day: 'Is that the end of freedom of navigation?' I mean, the United States never did sign on to the law of the sea. Is Trump looking for every kind of possible way to just monetize everything now? So that's the minerals deal in Ukraine, which was pretty bogus, but looked like it was kind of the source of investment. The way that he talks about Greenland is all about money and making money out of it.

Yeah. In the United States there have been all these changes to all of the national monuments and national parks, to open it up for all kinds of potential mining. And even if none of this happens, somebody will be making investment and giving somebody money somewhere. And oh, what a coincidence — Donald Trump's children, his sons, are all over every company that seems to be involved in everything from Albania to Arizona or something. This is really, again, a remarkable moment. And so I think that's part of the problem as well for Ukraine. He's just not serious about the actual issue of Ukraine itself. And yet this is serious stuff: a war that's gone on longer than World War I, the largest land war in Europe since World War II already, longer in terms of Russian commitment to the war than the Soviet Union fighting the Nazis in World War II. I mean, we go on and on and on. We keep hitting all these hyperbolic

Yeah, new — you know, massive records and things here, and we can obviously just keep going on here. And Trump is not serious about wanting to tackle this, despite what the White House would say at every moment. I mean, we could call them up now and they'll say, 'Of course, Donald Trump is deadly serious about bringing peace to the world and the new golden age in diplomacy, etc., etc.' But he's just more interested in what gold he can make out of it. Sorry — I know I'm sounding utterly cynical, but I'm afraid that this is exactly what's happening here.

Well, it really depends on what pressure comes from other sides. I myself am constantly wondering about the case of Iran and China, and what China's role is in all of this. I'm always cautioned by my colleagues at Brookings and elsewhere who are real genuine experts on China, which I can't attest to be at any rate. I just read their stuff and kind of try to watch it very closely. But there is that kind of sense that — do they eventually lose patience with all of this? Because that kind of uncertainty isn't great for business for China, either. There's only so much unpredictability and chaos that any country can really deal with, even if you're as large as China is. They've got all kinds of interests tied up certainly in the Gulf and in the Middle East, where Ukraine maybe is less so a major interest. But the more that this kind of goes on with a world at war, it is making planning very difficult and raising lots of questions.

Do they start to encourage — I mean, is Pakistan a kind of a stalking horse diplomatically for China, for example? How much are all of these other countries being encouraged by China to step in here? And eventually, if the United States isn't playing the role that it used to, it actually even complicates the Chinese and Russian and other groupings of countries that have always been doing things in opposition to the United States. They were always doing this when the United States seemed like the establishment, so it was kind of like anti-establishmentarianism in international affairs.

The United States, you could rail against it. When the United States just becomes a kind of bonkers basket case where you never really know what it's going to do next, and it's certainly not basically holding up all these ideological or other foreign policy issues you want to rail against — what do you do? Who is your enemy? Who is the organizing principle for opposition? And because Trump is constantly saying, 'I'm with you. I don't want proxy wars. I don't want this. I don't want that. I also don't care about Ukraine. I don't care about Taiwan. I don't actually really care about the Middle East, either' — it's all of these issues that confound regular foreign policy making for even countries that are traditionally seen as the antagonist, which I think opens up all kinds of possibilities as well as a lot of conundrums for Europe and individual countries trying to figure their way through all of this.

Yeah, I do think they're starting to get their act together. It's reasonable, you know, at this particular point. Some things are quite good. I think we have to think about groupings of countries. I often talk about the Joint Expeditionary Force, the JEF, because it's a platform that exists and it's got serious countries there that tend to be like-minded, you know, other bilateral arrangements. Some countries like Spain, others have taken a different tack, they're assessing things differently. So you can't really expect every country in Europe to be on the same page. But you can make a go of some serious groupings of countries, particularly those that see themselves as most vulnerable vis-à-vis what might happen next in Russia and trying to push back in that regard. I also do think that Canada is a very important player here. There was a two-part series recently in The Wall Street Journal looking at the role of Canada and Mark Carney. And we do see Canada in that North Atlantic context as part of NATO, playing a very important role, particularly when Trump is obviously never going to let Greenland drop. Canada becomes a very important player there. And as it was during World War II and during the Cold War and that whole northern Atlantic Arctic context. So look, there's a lot of good bones there. There's good structures that one can work with. It's just is there a sense of urgency to the extent that it should be, and that's where I have questions.

That's been the problem in the UK. I'll be quite frank. From my perspective, the whole situation in the year after the publication of the Strategic Defence Review has been a bit of a debacle. Not that the Ministry of Defence haven't been taking things seriously, because they have. There's all kinds of things that have been going on behind the scenes.