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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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B
Good evening. I want to welcome everyone to lsc. Come on in. We've got more coming in in the back there. That's great. For tonight's lecture, my name's Peter Trobowitz. I'm a professor in the International Relations and the director of the Fallon United States center at lse, which is hosting tonight's lecture. Tonight marks the first in a series of public lectures entitled America's Changing Role in the World that we're running this year. It's going to run for the full academic year. It's comprised of seven different events. Its premise on the idea that the United States is having a rethink about its foreign policy purposes and its priorities, the outcome of which is very uncertain. Will this moment prove as transformative for the United States and the world as other eras, such as, let's say, the 1890s or the 1930s, when America's conception of its national interest, how it defined its interest and how to pursue them, fundamentally changed? Or will we look back on this period as one of great division and churn domestically, but more continuity than change internationally? And to help us get perspective on these kinds of questions, what we've done is invited a wide range of foreign policy experts from the United States, but also importantly from outside the United States to join the discussion. And I couldn't be more pleased to have an old and dear friend, Professor Charles Kupchan, here to kick things off this evening. Charlie's a Professor of International affairs in the School of Foreign Service and the Government Department at Georgetown University and also a Senior Fellow on the Council of Foreign Relations. He's written widely on international affairs and US foreign policy. He's the author of 10 books, including most recently a History of America's Effort to Shield Itself from the world. Many in the room here know Charlie for his scholarship. But another thing I think that really distinguishes him and one of the reasons I really wanted him to be part of this conversation this year is his deep engagement with the policy making world through his appointments at the National Security Council under Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, his work on the Council on Foreign Relations over many years, and the many essays that he has written in America's leading foreign policy magazine, Foreign Affairs. So Charlie, it is wonderful to have you in this big room. This is. Good evening. Thank you for joining us. A few words about the game plan for this evening. Charlie's going to share his thoughts for about 35, 40 minutes about Trump's America first. Then I will probably put a couple of questions to him and then at that point we will open it up to to all of you, both those of you in the theater here and those of you online. And maybe I'll just say this now so that I don't need to say it again later. For those of you who are joining online and you want to put a question to Charlie, just go ahead and submit it by using the Q and A function at the bottom of the screen. And please make sure to indicate your name and your affiliation as well. For those of you in the theater, we'll just do it the old fashioned way. Raise your hand and I'll try to identify you. What we'll probably do is I will cluster questions for Charlie. We will try to get in as many people as possible. If you haven't already, please put your phone on silent since this is being recorded. And with that, please, please join me in giving Professor Kupchan a very warm LSE welcome.
- [05:21]
C
Thank you, Peter, for the warm welcome and the invitation to be back here at lsc. And I'm pleased and honored to be the lead off speaker in what I hope is a very important and fruitful lecture series. My country, the formerly United States of America, and the world in which my country operates have more or less become unrecognizable for those of us who have been around long enough to remember america of the 20th century and the early 21st century. When I get up in the morning, I go downstairs and out on my front walk is a newspaper. And since many of you are 20 somethings, you probably don't know this, but there are physical newspapers and they deliver them. And you can go out and I grab my blue bag, it says the New York Times on it, and I take it inside and I open it up. And on pretty much any given day, what's on the front page? Well, Russia launched 800 drones last night. Gaza is now 93% rubble. Trump is dispatching the National Guard to Portland and Chicago after blowing up two speedboats off the coast of Venezuela and who knows what else. And in some ways you really have to say, is this happening? Is this real? Am I actually reading something that happened over the last 24 hours? And sadly, the answer to that question is yes, this is all real. And what I want to dive into tonight is, what the hell is going on here? Why do we wake up in the morning and feel like our world is unrecognizable disorienting and getting worse by the day. And I want to start off by quoting Antonio Gramsci, who was an Italian activist, anti fascist theorist in the early part of the last century, and he was thrown in jail because he was an anti fascist. And two sentences in what we now call his prison notebooks, I think, speak very directly to our moment. And those two sentences are, the old is dying and the new cannot be born. And in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. I think that's where we are today. We are in a Gramscian interregnum in which one historical era is ending, the next historical era has yet to open, and many morbid symptoms are appearing. Donald Trump being one of the more morbid of those symptoms. And I think Gramsci's wording is particularly important here because of his focus on symptom. And I think it's important to start with the observation that Donald Trump is a symptom of this deeper dislocation in the world and in leading democracies. He's not the cause. And we often blame him for the division in America, and we blame him for the return of great power politics and the return of tariffs and all the things that many of us who reside in the academy think are just plain wacko. But he's doing this in many respects because he is presiding over the demise of an old order. And when I use the phrase the promise of Donald Trump, I think the promise is that he is a needed agent of change. He is giving us all a wake up call that says the old system wasn't working. It wasn't working for many Americans, it wasn't working for many Brits, it wasn't working for many Germans, and it wasn't working for many around the world. And as a consequence, we need to begin to say, okay, well, if that old system wasn't delivering and our democratic institutions were beginning to suffer, then we need to move ahead. We need more a plan B. And Trump is in many respects the guy who is hoping to deliver Plan B. That's the promise. The peril is that Trump is a demolition man and not an architect. He will very successfully bring down the old order. But my best guess is that when he leaves office, we will all be standing around in the rubble because he is going to take a wrecking ball to the world that America and its allies made together and not take the next step of saying, okay, where do we go from here? And the peril is that it takes a long time to rebuild when we find ourselves waking up in the rubble. But it's important to, I think, locate our historical moment in that broader inflection point in history and begin to think about the post Trump era. How do we pick up the pieces? How do we begin to think about what the demise of the old order means when it comes to building the next order? So that's the kind of quick and dirty version of what I want to share with you tonight. And I want to do the following in the next 30 minutes or so. One is to say, how do we know that we're in a historical inflection point? What are the morbid symptoms of this Grantian interregnum? Number two, why is this happening? How did we get here? How do we understand the arrival of this historical interregnum? Then I want to talk a little bit about Trump's strengths and Trump's weaknesses and end up with, what do we do now? How do we prepare ourselves for the rubble that lies ahead? How do we know that we're in and interreg them? Well, I think there are multiple signs that we are witnessing a kind of degradation of the old order. Number one, the arc of history that, beginning with the American French Revolutions, began to bend more and more toward more freedom, more liberty, more justice, is now bending in the opposite direction. For the last 20, 25 years, the world has been becoming more and more unfree. And it's particularly concerning that those countries that are becoming unfree are those countries that were the leaders of pushing the arc of history in a progressive direction. I can say quite honestly that I never thought I would be living through a moment like this in the United States of America. Never. Right. I now live with existential fear. My kids are 8, 10, and 13. I worry about what kind of country they're going to grow up in. Right? I grew up in Wisconsin. Right. When I grew up in Wisconsin, it was the land of milk and honey. And what did we talk about? Cows, cheese, Green Bay Packers. And that was it. Right? Wisconsin. And James knows about this because he has roots there, too. Wisconsin is now deeply divided between blue and red. And my sense of where do you. My family all fled Ukraine in the 1920s because the Cossacks were riding around trying to cut their heads off. And there I was, growing up in Wisconsin. I think, boy, I got lucky. I dodged the bullet. I'm not so sure anymore, I'm not so sure that we are in a point at which we live in societies that are inoculated against the darker human instincts. In fact, One of the things that most scares me about the Trumps of the World and the Orbans of the World is that playing to the dark instincts of human beings actually works pretty well. But that's all by way of saying this shift of the historical arc in the direction of unfolding freedom, autocracies growing more autocratic and democracies growing less democratic, is a sign of a historical shift. It's one of the morbid symptoms of this interregnum. Two geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry, great power entanglement heating up with a vengeance. We, we now live in a redivided Europe. We now live in a period in which a historic power transition is occurring between the United States and China. The global balance of power is shifting in a way that we have not seen in several hundred years, really since going back to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. And as the world becomes decentered and power shifts from west to east and from north to south, it is going to make the globe much more difficult to govern. This increasing fracture and increasing political dysfunction is occurring at a time when we need collective initiative. Some people think, well, maybe we're going back to Cold War times. Maybe the split that we see between democracies on one side and Russia and China on the other side is going to put us back into Cold War 2.0. But the problem is that the 21st century world is much more integrated, interdependent than that of the 20th century. And if we go back to a geopolitical range rupture and a fracture, climate change, nuclear proliferation, global health, you name it, our global governance agenda is going to crash and burn. But that is exactly what is happening today. Day by day, the demand for global governance is going up. The supply of global governance is going down. Now, why is this happening? Why have we entered this interregnum? One factor I've already spoken about, and I think we could have seen this coming, and that is simply the redistribution of power. But As I mentioned, 1815, important turning point. You go back to 1700, the two dominant economic powers in the world were India and China. Together, India and China represented more than 50% of global wealth. You then move into the era of commercial capitalism and industrialization, and the global balance of power very rapidly shifts to the north and to the west, first to Northern Europe and then across the Atlantic to the United States and Canada and. And those political formations have been at the vanguard of both ideological and material power throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Those days are ending. You just simply look at where we will be in 2050. Only one Western democratic power is going to make it into the top ranks gdp, and that's the United States. All the other major economic powers in 2050 will be in Asia. They will be China, India and Indonesia. And as the world becomes decentered, as it becomes no one's world, not a Chinese century, not an American century, not an Asian century, just decentered, no captain at the helm. It's going to be a rough ride. And we are beginning to see the outlines of that rough ride. Because the turn has begun, because power is being redistributed, because there is a peer competitor to the United States. For the first time in American history since America emerged as a great power, the Soviet Union topped out at roughly 50 to 55% of US GDP. China will probably catch up with American GDP next decade. We don't know. But if you look at their ability to turn the corner from an industrial power to a digital power, they're doing a pretty good job. Drones, solar panels, digital payment systems, quantum computing. They're about as good as Silicon Valley is when it comes to high tech. This is not a country that is going to go the way of the Soviet Union. The second big change that I think helps us understand why our world feels so topsy turvy and off kilter is that we're moving from the industrial age to the digital age. And we know from history that when you get a combination of changes in the global distribution of power and changes in the underlying mode of production, look out right? The last time this happened was the late 19th century when Pax Britannica ended and a multipolar world emerged and countries rapidly industrialized. And that industrialization caused a huge amount of socioeconomic dislocation and contributed to the onset of two world wars. Why are there so many pissed off Americans? They may say it's because of immigration. They may say it's because jobs were taken to China. But the main reason that they're not having a good time is because of ones and zeros. It's because of automation. Most of the deindustrialization of the United States, economists say somewhere around 90% is driven by automation. And so you look at the working class of Wisconsin or the working class of Ohio, white. What has happened to them? Why is my state now so screwed up? Well, I can tell you why. Because when I lived there when I was growing up and I went to all the small towns, Racine and Oshkosh and Beloit and James. What other small towns can you where? Marinette. Marinette they had factories, they were prosperous. They're dead now, right? And they're mainly dead because of the impact of the introduction of digital technology and the erosion of the social contract of the industrial era. It's kaput. If you worked at the largest employer in the United States during the industrial era, you made roughly $35 an hour. GM. Today, the largest employer in the United States is Walmart. Before the pandemic, if you worked at Walmart, you made around $8.50 an hour. I think now it's up to 13, maybe $14 an hour. You can't live on $13 an hour if you're feeding a family. And all of the time you're going off to shop and the price of food keeps going up and up and up. That, in my mind, is the main reason that Donald Trump is president, because many working Americans are having a very hard time making ends meet. And Trump, I think, in many respects as an imposter, has communicated to those that feel left behind by globalization and by the political establishment that he's their guy and that he has their back. One of the most interesting pieces that I saw studying the outcome of the 2024 election was in the New York Times maybe six months ago. You probably saw this, Peter, and it broke down by county, how people voted, what was the best predictor of how people voted? Level of education, College education. And above. Kamala Harris. No, college education. Donald Trump. And that's because if you don't have a college education, it's very difficult to get a reasonably well paid job in the United States. We're not alone. Right. The same thing is happening here. I would have said, and maybe I did say this when we were in LSE a few years ago, that the US and the UK were in a competition to see which country is more screwed up. Right. Thank God for the continental Europeans. Their center is holding. Not anymore. If there were elections today in Britain, France and and in Germany, polls show that the three parties that would come out on top are Reform, UK National Rally and AfD. They're MAGA parties. If you just think back to late 2024, what happened? Trump was reelected. The French government fell, the German government fell. The Romanians elected somebody so far to the right in the first round of the president presidential election that the courts disallowed the election. Then the South Korean president declared martial law and was impeached. Then the Prime Minister of Canada resigns. That was all in the space of a few months. The average French government today lasts between six and seven hours. I think there was a new cabinet announced today after the one that was announced last week. And that's because in none of our societies is the center holding. And the center is not holding because the social contract of the industrial era is dead. One final comment on why is this happening and how did we get here? Those two shifts that I talked about, the redistribution of power and the advance of the digital age, are unstoppable. They have nothing to do with policy. Right. You can't call a company and say, please destroy your robots and hire 5,000 laborers. It's not going to happen. And so nobody really talks about that. What they talk about is the things that you can get at with policy, like immigration and free trade. And they'll matter at the margins, but they're not going to solve the problem. But we have had policies, public policies in the United States in particular, but also in Europe, that have made this problem worse. And in particular, the neoliberal orthodoxy of the 1990s. And Peter and John Eikenberry have a book coming out on this. But I think there were public policy decisions that could have been made at the end of the Cold War to cushion what was happening socioeconomically, but we did the opposite. We said, let the market rule, deregulate, defund welfare programs, bring China into the wto, and boom. We ended up with a double whammy. And I would say the same thing about immigration. Trump is right. Our immigration system in the United States is broken. And until that problem gets fixed, you're going to see a lot of discontent that combines with the socioeconomic dislocations that are caused by automation. And it is very, very difficult in American politics today to untangle identity politics and economic discontent, because the two are very interwoven. And Trump is very good at manipulating both of them. Let me now talk a little bit about what I like about Trump, what I don't like about Trump, and then end with a few thoughts on what do we do now? As I said at the beginning, I think Trump is in some ways the alarm bell that we need to understand that many voters in Democratic societies are dissatisfied with the political establishment. And by political establishment, I don't mean the Democrats or the center left. I mean the entire elite structure, because they feel that they have been left behind by that elite structure. And in many ways they have. And this phenomenon of maga, which is now spreading to Europe, is, I think, very much about anti establishment politics. It's about populism. It's about going after the folks that landed us in this position. And I think that, you know, the Biden administration was in some ways a restoration presidency. They were going back to the old ways. They were going back to liberal internationalism. And even though Biden talked about a foreign policy for the middle class, his administration really was. Was attempting to sustain and rebuild and grab onto the old order. And Trump, in some ways, is the first person to just come out and say, it's not working anymore. It's time to move on. And he's right. Second thing I like is I think he's not a very ideological person. He's a pragmatist. Many American politicians are too ideological. Right. It was nuts to try to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into Ohio. And many Americans looked at this, and it cost $6 trillion, and the Taliban has taken over Afghanistan and Iraq is under the thumb of Iran. And they're saying, what the hell are we doing? And Trump is. He's right. He says, this is nuts. We're out of here. And that kind of pragmatism, I think, is what we need. He's right to talk to Putin. He's right to talk to Xi Jinping. We need to talk to bad guys. That's what diplomacy is all about. And in the end of the day, in some ways, Trump's transactionalism may be one of his strongest attributes. He is not an ideologue. I don't think he believes in anything. I mean, maybe tariffs, maybe. Right. But he's not a MAGA guy. He listens to the movement because it's his political oxygen. And he's surrounded by ideologues. JD Vance, Russell Vogt, Stephen Miller. Right. But he doesn't really give a shit about all that stuff. He'll make whatever deal he thinks is good for him. And that actually may be good if he can make a trade deal with Xi Jinping and lower the temperature and ratchet down and de. Escalate US China competition, more power to him. We need that. In the city that I live in, Washington, D.C. you utter the word China and Democrats and Republicans alike, they start frothing at the mouth and steam starts coming out of their ears. It's good to have someone who invited the Chinese leader to his inauguration and who wants to try to forge a relationship. Bring it on. One other or two other things. I want to say that I think Trump is sort of getting right but going too far, that is, on immigration. All of our countries need functional immigration policies. If we do not have functional immigration policies, all of our countries will be run by white supremacists to be blunt. And Trump is doing things that are indecent and they are inhumane in terms of deportation. But we need a functioning immigration policy. So does Britain, so does Germany, so do all liberal democracies. He's going about it in the wrong way, but he's right that this is a big problem. And I also think he is tapping into the American political mainstream by going after what I would call woke excesses. And I think in general, Democrats in the center left have the right policies on issues of diversity and inclusion, but they end up putting themselves out of step with the American Main street by putting them front and center. There was one ad that ran in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign. And when I saw that ad, I said to myself, this election is over, and Trump's going to win. And that ad was, kamala is for they them. President Trump is for you. Simple ad, extremely powerful. And so I think that Trump is going way too far in terrorizing DEI and going after all kinds of things that have to do with diversity. But politically speaking, he's tapping into a powerful current in the American political mainstream. Now, what does Trump get wrong? This part of my lecture will run about three hours, so I hope we have the room till midnight. I'm just gonna. I'm gonna be brief because there really is a lot that one could say that he gets wrong. But three things I think in particular. One, I think Trump is, in many respects, a 19th century American president. Many of you have grown up with an America that has been guided by liberal internationalism. But liberal internationalism is quite new, and it's the exception in American history. If you were to say to me, describe American strategy from the founding era until 1941, it would be isolationist, unilateralist, protectionist, and anti immigrant, or anti immigrant if you were not white and Christian. That's Donald Trump. And so he's, in many respects, tapping into an earlier version of American strategy and of the American experience. And I think if he could have his way, he would pull out of Europe and pull out of Japan and pull out of South Korea and pull out of the Middle east and focus on Greenland and Canada and the Panama Canal, which is exactly what American presidents did in the 19th century. It was all about Western hemispheric hegemony. And so there is a kernel of. Of logic to what Trump is doing. But the problem is that we are not in the 19th century, and the world won't let go. And in many respects, I think you see this guy who really wants to bring his toys home and really wants to annex Canada. But he's got all of these things. He's got the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza and the Chinese. They're not being helpful. And he's stuck and he doesn't know what to do. The problem is that you can't be a 19th century president in the 21st century. It's not going to work. And as a consequence, I think to the degree he has a vision, a template, a blueprint that he's aiming for, it ain't the right blueprint. Second, the tariffs, it's not going to work. He thinks, and Biden was just as guilty, that we're going to put tariffs here and use industrial policy there, and Americans are going to get their jobs back on the industrial production line. It's not going to work. We are now in the digital age. We, we need to train our workers for the jobs of the future. And this, in some ways, if you're not a Trump fan, you sort of want to say, yeah, more tariffs, higher tariffs. Why? Because it will be his undoing. Because his voter base is going to get more and more pissed off because they're not going to get their jobs back, but they're going to go to Walmart and the price of their daily goods is going to go up 10% and then another 10% and then another 20%. And that will be his undoing. That's my prediction. But the idea that somehow we are going back to the industrial era. Right. I think Trump wants to drive down the interstate highway and see factories belching out smoke. That's the America that he aspires for. It's not happening. The final thing I'm going to say that is critical of him, and in some ways it's the thing that most worries me is just the hash that he's making of American democracy, the degree to which he is overstepping presidential authority, and he's doing things that are just completely nonsensical. You want to make America great again? Why would you shut some of the most innovative centers, learning centers, universities, the cdc, the nih, National Institutes of Health? It's nuts, right? And the damage that he is doing to American society, to American democracy, to the norms and practices of what we call the compound republic, is, in my mind, the most damaging, perhaps damaging legacy that Trump will leave behind. Let me conclude with just a few thoughts on what do we do now. Number one, I think Europe, Europeans in general, are doing the right thing. It isn't pretty, but play the long game. Flatter the guy. Go over to Washington, tell him he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. He is not complicated. He really is not complicated. He's just a regular old real estate developer who wants to be liked, full stop. Go over there and tell him that you like them, and you'll probably end up in a reasonably good place. You tell them you don't like them, you're in deep trouble. Who are the two leaders who have stood up to Trump? Lula and Modi? Both Brazil and India are now facing 50% tariffs. Right? They are in the doggy house. It's not complicated. Be nice to the guy. And Europe is, I think, doing it quite effectively. The transatlantic relationship right now is in much better place than I would have predicted when Trump first came to power. That's partly because Putin is being dumb, right? If Putin were really smart, what he would do is make a deal and then give Trump the ability to say, oh, this is great, I'm done, we're going home. But by continuing to bomb Ukraine, Trump has actually said some nice things about NATO, believe it or not. And he has a good relationship with Starmer and Stubb and Macron and Merz and Maloney. And, you know, it's about as good as it's going to get. So keep that up. A second way forward, I think, is work with Trump on, on the trade agenda, because the days of hyper globalization are over, but we need to avoid a trade war and the fragmentation of the global economy. In some ways, less is more. Work with Trump to ease off the gas on free trade, and we may end up with a slightly reduced form of globalization, but without risking the nightmare scenario, which is the fragmentation of the world economy into competitive regional blocks. The final comment I want to make is that, and I think I may have actually said this last time I was here at lse, Peter, I think we all need to keep in mind that the greatest threat that we face today is not Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, it's us. Right? It is the erosion of our political centers. It is the internal threat to liberal democracy. And so if I were to say, you know, what are the top three, four, five priorities for the United States when it comes to getting ready for this next order? They're all about domestic politics. They're about rebuilding the American middle class, because the middle class and its revitalization is the pathway to rebuilding the political center. And so let's have a conversation. How do we train Americans for the jobs of the future in the digital age? This is going to get a lot worse. Before it gets better. Ten years from now, after AI has. Has kicked in and become better, there are not going to be any Uber drivers. There will be no human beings in an Amazon fulfillment center, and there will probably be no human beings at McDonald's. What are people going to do? That's the $6 million question. We got to fix our school systems and our education systems and have conversations between the private and the public sector to answer that fundamental question. What are our workers going to do in the digital age? What is the social contract of the digital age? What's it going to look like? We don't know yet. Second thing, I would say get the fiscal house in order, right? The big beautiful bill is big and not beautiful. It's going to push the national debt of the United states to around 200% of GDP. Economists tell us that when you get to 100%, you're in trouble. We're in trouble, and it's irresponsible to keep spending money and asking our kids to pay for it. Third, as I said, immigration. We need functional immigration policies. And then finally, and I don't really know how to go about doing this, but restoring civility to our public life. I don't know what it's like here, but in the United States, it is ugly and uncivil and tribal. There's very little discourse across political lines. There's very little discourse across socioeconomic lines. And I have some thoughts about how to begin to repair that through the school system. One factoid I came across the other day. The United states government spends $54 per student per year on STEM education. The United States government spends 5 cents per year on history and civics education. 5 cents. That's the place to start. But the final point I'll make, and the central message that I want to leave with you, is that right now, our most pressing threats are right here at home. And I think rebuilding our middle classes, rebuilding our political centers, has to be our top priority. We get that right, we will figure out what the the next order looks like. We will figure out how to deal with a rising China. We get that wrong, and we continue to suffer political institutions that are dysfunctional and paralyzed. We're going to get it way wrong. Thank you.
- [45:17]
A
Hi. I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE iq. Ask social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSEIQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.
- [45:46]
B
Charlie, terrific as always. I see where we are on the clock. Maybe. I know there's going to be a ton of questions out here. I maybe want to push you a little bit on the priorities. You're preaching to the already converted that the US Needs to invest much more attention domestically. But given the kind of land landscape that you've sketched out internationally, what's happening, the redistribution of international power and yet the continuing interdependence that exists, what should we be doing internationally? I mean, Trump, as you suggest, is trying to pull back, in a sense, to reset international priorities. In fact, I think it's fair to say that Trump is the first president since FDR to consider pulling back off the Eurasian landmass. You know, to remove, to pull back from a forward deployment, forward defense position. And I mean, given what you've described, is that, is that a, that's a morbid symptom? Is that the direction that the US should be moving to try to get its house in order domestically? I mean, sketch out a little bit like kind of what should. I mean, the implications there is that America's alliances are really not as important and that it can somehow afford, in terms of its own security and its own prosperity to kind of, to maybe have a hemispheric, a 19th century foreign policy that given technology the way it is today and way things are developing, the US can reach out and touch people from the hemisphere. So say a few words about that. Maybe what it should be, what it should look like, if you would.
- [48:12]
C
I think that the alliances that exist are one of America's strongest suits. And in some ways, if you were to compare the US Position in the world with China's position in the world, the starkest difference is on this issue, we have or at least had a lot of friends. I think we still have them and I would urge us to continue to have them because it's a force multiplier. I think Trump thinks of alliances as encumbrances. Right. We need this like a hole in the head. I don't think he understands the added value. That having been said, I do think that our allies need to shoulder more of the burden. I do think that we need to be more selective. We've had bad shot selection, to use a, is it a basketball term? You know, we have picked a lot of fights that we didn't need to pick and they haven't gone well. And in some ways, I think that that is partly why Trump got elected because he tapped into this sense of, well, listen, my school in Arkansas is collapsing, the roof leaks, you're spending X billion in Afghanistan. This doesn't make any sense to me. And there's a logic to that that you cannot escape. So I do think that getting allies to shoulder more of the burden makes a lot of sense. And I guess if I were to kind of put a. What would be the top priority for me, it's us, China. That is in some ways such a seminal relationship to where we go in the next several decades geopolitically that I would be investing a lot of effort in trying to. You're not going to get rapprochement, you're not going to get friendship. This is a hard, hardwired competition that comes with hegemonic transitions. But I do think that we can do a better job of trying to find a way to incorporate elements of collaboration with the competition. And that to me will set the tone for so much more. And frankly, you know, I don't think we're in a great spot. Belt and Road has changed the world. Two thirds of the countries in the world now trade more with China than they do with us. And so I do think that we have to kind of look rather soberly at this change and both opportunities and constraints on American power. One final comment. I do think that we. That Trump is right to ease off on the ideological component of American grand strategy. Right. One American administration after another have sort of been drinking the Kool Aid of American exceptionalism. We need to go out there and we need to universalize the liberal order. It ain't happening. And the next order is going to be politically and ideologically diverse. And we have to learn how to work across ideological dividing lines. That is not going to be easy for Americans to get their head around.
- [52:15]
B
What about just on that? Maybe, maybe to just flesh it out a little bit more institutions. So Trump, it seems to me, has been responding, and I would say kind of the American first coalition in general, to the sovereignty costs that they think international institutions impose, whether it's the WTO or the WHO or, you know, pick your acronym. I mean, where do you. Where do you come down? Is that when you're kind of looking forward? Should. I think what I'm trying to do is figure out where you are. It's not liberal internationalism, is it liberal internationalism? Light your. Yes, there should be. We should maintain the alliances. To me, what that means is the US should be forward deployed. It should steer clear of democracy promotion. It just gets itself into a heap of trouble. And I guess maybe the last issue here maybe, is where is it? Where should it be? On institutions.
- [53:24]
C
Yeah. I guess, you know, if I were to kind of metaphorically try to communicate, where I would land, it would be take liberal international, take America first, Smush them together and meet in the middle.
- [53:40]
B
Get Bernie Sanders.
- [53:43]
C
Because I think the liberal internationalist cause, with all apologies to John Eikenberry, is kaput. And we just ought to recognize that. But I also, I'm a believer in international institutions, but. But in institutions. Light. And so what I would do is I would go form what I think Miles called in one of his old articles plurilateral. Did you use the word plurilateral? Minilateral, yeah. Small groupings that come together to solve particular problems. Because, you know, the UN is great. The un, but it's the un. Right. And so we need various kinds of ad hoc coalitions of the willing, where you put at the table the groupings that need to be there to solve the problem. That, in my mind, is where diplomacy is going to be in the coming years. Because of the sovereignty costs, because of the redistribution of power, the big formal institutions are going to be paralyzed.
- [54:57]
B
So more informal coalitions of the willing.
- [54:59]
C
Yes, sort of. Exactly what happens today in Sharm El Sheikh. Right. Where the Israelis and Hamas and the Egyptians and, you know, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner show up, and then you call in the spy head from Turkey. That's about as good as it's going to get.
- [55:22]
B
Okay, we're going to open it up here for questions. Just raise your hand and I'll start to pick out people. I'm going to take this woman right here in the second room. We'll start here. Hi.
- [55:37]
C
Oh, is it working? Yeah, yeah.
- [55:39]
A
Amazing.
- [55:40]
B
Mention your name and your department or whatever you connect to.
- [55:43]
A
Oh, I'm still a student. I'm only 17. I go to sixth form. My name is Greta. And I was just wondering, how do you think the US could find a balance between its social contract with the people and the growth of big tech companies, which are increasingly acting like with the agency of government sub branches.
- [56:01]
B
Okay, social contract, big tech. How about that gentleman back there and up next to the wall? Right?
- [56:08]
D
Yeah.
- [56:08]
B
You got glasses on your forehead. There we go.
- [56:15]
C
Great.
- [56:15]
E
You were talking about the digital age. What's curious? And I have an obsession with the Luddite movement. Surely we need a neo Luddite movement, because in the 19th century, before the Industrial Revolution, you had a population that the technological means to their own production. We have the technology now to rebuild that, the technologically savvy production, why not just advocate for that instead of educating for an economic system that is fundamentally past its sell by date?
- [56:57]
B
Chris, we're going to go online right here.
- [56:59]
F
Thank you. Just to say There are about 190 people watching online from countries including the U.S. uK, France, Brazil, Czech Republic, Ukraine, India, Turkey, Germany and Spain. This question comes from Ellen Warren, who is a master's degree student in political science. They ask how can countries navigate diplomacy and national interests and not least, dignified relations with the US Under Trump? How can world leaders flatter Trump's ego while at the same time not agreeing to his terms and conditions? Is Trump capable of separating those.
- [57:29]
B
You got that, Charlie. That's like social contract, big tech flattering Trump, the digital age.
- [57:39]
C
Yeah, the. I didn't get into the sort of high tech, big tech. But I think there are two different issues that are part of the mix. One is that the lack of willingness, at least in the United States, just a little bit better in Europe to countenance regulation of high tech, I think ultimately is very damaging. And if I were to locate why American politics has become so angry and so tribal and so polarized, it is because of the amplification effects of social media. And, you know, no American government has even begun to think about any serious regulation of that space. And the idea that, and Biden, you know, he had this, what he called voluntary compliance. I mean, come on, you think that OpenAI and Nvidia and Google are going to monitor themselves and hurt their bottom line? No, if this is going to work, it has to come through government regulation and preferably international government regulation. Regulation, because, you know, these are issues that are not country specific. And yeah, I mean, I thought Biden was right in his closing farewell address when he used the word oligarchy because you now have people like Elon Musk and the heads of other major technology corporations that are at least, least as powerful as many heads of state around the world. What do we do about that? I think Peter is going to answer that question, right? I don't know. I don't know. But it, you know, I guess if you were to say, you know, give me the one thing that I think would really make a difference, serious campaign finding reform, our campaign finance reform system. I mean, it just, it doesn't, we don't have any real restrictions. And if Elon Musk can spend. What did he spend?
- [60:13]
B
300 million.
- [60:14]
C
$300 million.
- [60:16]
B
Not all on Wisconsin in the last election.
- [60:18]
C
No, but I mean Is that democracy? It's not democracy if somebody can come and spend 300 million on a candidate or a cause. So there are fixes like that that would dramatically reduce the power of corporations. Unfortunately, we don't yet have a situation where there's a political will to tackle those issues. You know, I'm the flag question. It's a tough call, you know, because on the one hand, what's the right thing to do? The right thing to do is to stand up to a bully. Right. We know that from our kindergarten experiences. Is it the smart thing to do? I don't. I don't know. I would say no, it's not. And that's simply because I don't think Trump will last forever. And therefore, it is in the interest of other countries to play the long game. Limit the damage that occurs while he's in the Oval Office and begin to think about what you do when he's gone.
- [61:35]
B
But doesn't that somewhat depend upon the size of the stick that you're carrying? Xi Jinping doesn't seem to be sucking up. And he's probably going to get an agreement at the meeting in South Korea at apec. It's probably fairly favorable for China, you know, so. Whereas, you know, I mean, the problem with flattery is the bar can just be moved after you get an agreement. Just ask Canada and Mexico. Right, Right.
- [62:03]
C
No, and the bar, not can be moved, will be moved. We know that because it keeps happening. But again, you know, I would say adopt a strategy of risk aversion and play out what? Play out the counterfactual. Right. Let's say that Ursula von der Leyen didn't bite her tongue and say 15%. Oh, that's great. Let's have a deal. And she said, screw you. I don't think we'd be in a good place right now. And so, even though, as I said, I think the right thing to do is to push back, I'm not sure that's the best strategy from the perspective of foreign policy and national interest. I do think it's the right strategy at home. And I am dismayed by the number companies, law firms, universities, media corporations that are taking a knee and kissing the ring. Right. That's poison when it comes to the future of American democracy.
- [63:13]
B
Let's take some more questions. How about that woman in the middle with a black top right there?
- [63:19]
C
Yeah.
- [63:21]
B
And maybe the gentleman right behind her, too, afterwards.
- [63:25]
G
Thank you so much for this talk. My name is Katerina Guderzo, and I'm a master's student here in the Department of International Relations. You mentioned that we are in a moment where collective action is needed. And I'm thinking about the role that Europe could play in this. And a few weeks ago in London, Natalie Tocci, that I think will also speak in this series, mentioned how we need a much stronger and almost federalized Europe. Do you think that this could have counter effects with, with Trump? Could he get scared or is it a good way forward in relation to the U.S. thank you.
- [63:56]
B
And if you can hand the mic right behind you there in the white jersey. Yeah.
- [64:01]
H
Hi. Thank you for the talk. Truly amazing and it really, really thought provoking. I wish I could show the mountain, but I had the question of when you were talking about how Trump is only a symptom of this hot mess rather than the cost. And then this is a little counterintuitive to me because I thought that Trump was the culprit for the global turning right politically movement. So if, if Trump is not the cause, if Trump is only a symptom, what would be the cause then?
- [64:35]
B
And, and we'll take one more question from online. I'll come back out again in a minute.
- [64:40]
F
So, so this question comes from Kathy Katerina Reitzler, who asks, you mentioned early on the way in which societies like the US Are becoming less free. Can you be more specific about the kinds of unfreedoms that you see increasing? Thank you.
- [64:54]
B
Collective action symptom or cause? The last one.
- [64:59]
C
One of the reasons that my advice to Europeans is be nice to Donald is, is I don't think Europe is ready for what might come if you're not nice to Donald. There's a lot of talk about strategic autonomy and, you know, Europe anchoring the liberal order. And I wish it were so, but I don't see it yet. Yeah, there are changes. The invasion of Ukraine has created existence, existential fear. Germans are now spending more on defense in a way that matters. But it takes a long time, like a generation or two to really make a difference. And I also worry about the political trends that I see gaining steam here. You know, if the next president, president of France is Marine Le Pen, if the courts allow her to run, that's going to be a big deal. Right. If AfD starts winning elections and I was in Germany about 10 days ago, sour political mood. And a lot of people said to me, this is the last chance. If this German government, this current coalition under merits doesn't reform the economy and get the country back up and running, it's the end of Germany's Political center. Right. And so I hope that none of this transpires, but if it does transpire, you're going to see a kind of re. Nationalization of European politics, not the lifting up to the supranational level of politics that Natalie, I think, was talking about. And so I think one just has to be realistic about these deeper trends. And that brings me to the question about Trump's symptom or cause. Part of the rationale for interpreting Trump is the symptom is because it's happening everywhere. Right. We know that this is a systemic problem and not just contagion from the United States. I think the United States is kind of the leading edge. Our political center is gone. Right. The political center in Germany is shrinking, but it has a heartbeat. And so this is what gives me confidence that we really are looking at a systemic phenomenon here where fundamental changes in the socioeconomic order are bringing down the ideological centrism and bipartisan moderation that we saw during the long years of the, of the industrial era. And I didn't quite understand the question about Neo Luddites, but I'll try to circle back to this. We'll figure this out. Right. In the second half of the 1800s, we didn't really know what the industrial era would bring. Certainly didn't know in 1800, but, but we innovated and figured it out and built public schools and educated people to work on production lines. And lo and behold, we had prosperous middle class societies and stable liberal democracies. So I think we'll figure out what the social contract of the digital era is going to look like. But in my mind, it's the, the $6 million question. And until we begin to answer that question, we're going to be living through this period of profound electoral discontent and socioeconomic disruption. Unfreedom in the U.S. it's kind of everywhere. People are now censoring. I have colleagues who just won't speak up. I have colleagues who say to me, be careful what you say. It's very. Because I read about this in Hungary and I read about this in Turkey and now I'm living through it. And it's scary. And you know, sometimes when I, I take a trip abroad and I go back, are they going to let me in?
- [69:58]
B
Let's take a few more questions. So how about that gentleman right over there in the plaid shirt?
- [70:05]
C
Yeah.
- [70:07]
D
So someone once said, it's the economy, stupid. And this may be a little bit of argumentative, but it seems to me you kind of are admiring the problem. But you say there is no, there are not enough good jobs, that the wage has fallen from $35 down to $13. My question is, is there any country in the world who knows how or what to train its workers to do? Because if we can't figure out how to train them, how would they get better jobs?
- [70:37]
B
How about the woman up there in the white collar?
- [70:41]
C
Yeah.
- [70:43]
I
Hi, my name is Rhea Mishra and I'm a year 12 student at Southend. I wanted to ask, you mentioned that India and Brazil and all of these different countries, they are suffering the consequences in terms of, in the form of tariffs by upsetting Trump. What does this actually mean for their economic growth for these countries personally? And how does that really sort of eliminate them as a possible threat to whatever Trump's doing right now?
- [71:08]
C
I'm sorry, a threat to what threat?
- [71:10]
I
Not a threat. Almost as like, does it suppress them? Does it accomplish the purpose that Trump's trying, what Trump is actually trying to do?
- [71:17]
B
And how about the gentleman over there in the black T shirt?
- [71:23]
C
Hi, my name's Peter, I'm a first year student here at the lsc. And my question to you is, do you think that Trump is playing the long game with Putin? You said that he's right in meeting with. But do you think that he really knows that Putin is not going to bend his terms and that in reality, over the long term he's going to continue to support Ukraine and potentially help them win in this conflict? I don't think any, any country has the answer yet. I think that, you know, some may mixture of vocational training, worker retraining, free community college. There are ways that one can begin to think about how to make sure that our citizens have the skills that they're going to need to operate. I'm not even sure we know what the big sectors are going to be. I mean, I think we know data will be big. Health care is going to be a huge and growth sector, hospitality and leisure. So I think we sort of know where the jobs are going to be, but exactly how to train them, what skills they're going to need, I don't know. So I don't have a good answer to the question. And that's part of my worry. We're not having this conversation. Right. The answer to the question is tariffs and it's complete bullshit. It's just not going to work. And so, you know, when Gramsci says the new cannot be born, he's right if we're not even talking about it. And I think you're starting to have pockets of the conversation. But we are behind the eight ball, especially when you look at the speed of technological innovation and how quickly AI is improving and is likely to be deployed throughout lots of different sectors in the economy. And that brings me to the second question about tariffs. Is Trump getting what he wants? It's very hard to say because we don't know what he wants. Right. One day he says, I'm punishing countries because they send immigrants in fentanyl. The next day he says, I'm creating the External Revenue Service to bring income into the United States. Then he says, well, I'm punishing, punishing Lula because Lula has thrown my buddy Bolsonaro into jail. I think with Modi, he just got pissed off because he said, I ended the war between India and Pakistan. And Modi said, no, you didn't. You had nothing to do with it. And Trump said, well, then I'm going to hit you with 25% tariffs. And because I'm really pissed off, another 25% tariffs because you buy Russian oil. And so there isn't a real method to the madness. And I think it's very important to understand for those of you who aren't sort of in Washington and hearing what's going on in the street, there's no policy process. There really isn't a functioning US Government, especially when it's closed. I'm not sure if it were open, it would be any different. There's basically Donald Trump and he sits there and he talks to a very small number of people without disclosing any, you know, confidential conversations. I've met with, with high ranking people in the White House who should be in very significant positions of responsibility. They've never met the President. They have no insight whatsoever into the policy areas that they cover. So literally, it's like this table and he's Donald Trump and I'm Steve Wilson Witkoff. And Trump says, well, what's that? And Witkoff says, that's Greenland. And Trump says, I want that. And I mean, there really is no, there's no control. There's the first term there were all of these establishment Republicans and they hemmed him in and they moderated him and they controlled him. And because that's what happened, he said, I'm not having any establishment Republicans in term two. And so what we're seeing is Donald Trump and he's mercurial and he changes his mind all the time and we get what we see.
- [76:37]
B
We've got time for a couple more questions. I'll go way to the Back, back. Person with a. I think it's a white T shirt, second row to the end there. Yeah, a white shirt.
- [76:53]
J
Just on that theme, Trump's been very successful, some would argue, deliberately, at using ideologues to further his power or achieve a particular agenda. It'd be interesting to hear what you think, particularly when you talk about sort of waiting out Trump, Trump and, you know, only be another few years. What do you think the risk is of real ideological capture? And Trump's disassembled a lot of ideological institutions within the White House, within the government. There's definitely people next to him and on that very small table trying to build alternate ones. It was quite interesting to hear you sort of dismiss him as a white nationalist earlier, for example, say that this leads to white supremacism.
- [77:32]
C
Right.
- [77:32]
J
Rather than is caused by it. What do you think the risks are there? And will it really be three more years?
- [77:37]
B
And let's see, how about right down here in the purple shirt? I guess. Yeah. Hello.
- [77:53]
J
Provided there are free and fair elections in 26, in the midterms in 2028, how does the Democratic Party position itself to recapture the voter base that it lost to Trump? The manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt effectively rebuild the middle class? Does it lean to a more Mamdani AOC direction? Does it become more moderate?
- [78:16]
C
What are your thoughts?
- [78:18]
B
Maybe I'll ask you the last question. On the foreign policy side with Trump, what do you think will endure even if there's a change of party power? Let's say 26, the Democrats come back, they are in a position to block, and then in 28, that there's. There's an election and the Democrats win. What endures? Or is this all this it disappear on the foreign policy side and that. Charlie, you have to do all that in five minutes.
- [78:57]
C
All right. On the ideological capture, Trump's base is highly ideological. And it's generally whites without a college education, more men than women, but that's the demographic. And they're somewhere around 40 to 41% of the American electorate. And they're MAGA and they're going to stick with the MAGA movement come hell or high water. As I said earlier, I don't think Trump is a MAGA guy, but there his base and he listens to them as needed to sustain that base. But he also breaks with them. Right. They didn't want, they didn't like the bombing of Iran. There are other things that Trump does that they don't like. And I don't think he really cares because he, as I said, I think is fundamentally about making deals and transactions. My prediction is that the pendulum is going to swing away from that kind of hard right ideological movement. I saw the outcome of the 2024 election not as a sign that Americans had gotten behind Trump in a America First. The outcome of that election, like many elections in democracies today, was against the incumbent. Right. When you have unhappy electorates, they just vote for the other party, not because they like the other party, but because they want to throw the bums out. And I'm guessing that what will happen is that the electorate will remain unhappy, and so they will want to throw the bums out in the midterms and in the next presidential election. Although I might add, coming back to this question of unfreedom, when I've said that very serious people in Washington, people whose names you would know, scholars, have said to me with full seriousness, what midterms? So I think there will be midterms. I think that they will be free and fair. But the mere fact that we are sitting here saying, will there be midterms? In some ways says it all. And that brings me to the Democratic Party. I wouldn't, you know, I think that the future of the kind of Democratic Party right now should be very much just about its pocketbook issues. You know, I was recently in Louisville, Kentucky. Never been to Kentucky before. But Kentucky is interesting because it's a very red state and it has a Democratic governor and a Democratic mayor of Louisville with whom I met. And I think somebody like Andy Beshear is probably the best candidate. Not necessarily Andy Beshear, but somebody who is a centrist, who is able to appeal to the working class and who focuses very much on day to day pocketbook issues. I think if they go too far to the left, they're, you know, the Mamdani phenomenon you will find in, you know, Queens and Brooklyn and maybe in San Francisco. And they are completely out of step with the rest of the United States. And so as a consequence, I think the Democrats ought to end up trying to occupy the working class center, which they've tried to do without a whole lot of success, in part because of the culture wars, which is why I would tell the Democrats, stay away from the culture wars. Peter, what will be left? I think there is a secular inward turn that will be with us for quite some time. Exactly how that manifests itself is difficult to say. But I do think that the country will be gravitating to do less abroad. Hopefully we'll do enough. It will be gravitating to more hemispheric focus, in part because I think the world is going to be moving toward greater regionalization as it moves toward multipolarity. The natural force that will accompany the diffusion of power from court to the periphery is the diffusion of autonomy and agency from the core to the periphery. And we're already seeing it. I mean, the fact that most of the global south has stayed on the side sidelines in the Ukraine war. I mean, for me, the kind of the poster boy of what we will be looking at in the next settlement is Modi. Right. State dinner in Washington, roll out the red carpet. Two weeks later, he's hugging Putin. Then he flies to Beijing and rubs shoulders with the axis of autocrats. They're going to play the field. And Turkey is, and Brazil is. And the uae, and everybody's going to play the field because they can. And I do think that kind of diffusion of power will favor a kind of regionalization of global politics. The final, final comment. And I guess this will be a question because I don't know the answer. Will the kind of connective tissue norm, spirit of liberal democracy survive, or are we passing an inflection point? Because we've seen, you know, in Hungary, in Turkey, you get to a point, you go over that point and it's very hard to pull it back. I don't think we're past the point of no return. But my biggest worry would be are we looking at a presidency that could do kind of irreparable damage to one of the world's leading democracies?
- [86:08]
B
So I'm afraid we're going to have to leave it.
- [86:10]
J
On that note, you can subscribe to.
- [86:12]
A
The LSE Events podcast on your favorite podcast and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lseac.ukevents to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.