← The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
Nation States: The Biggest Foreign Policy Mistakes the Experts Keep Making
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- [00:00]
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- [02:29]
Steve Yates
Welcome to Nation States with Yates. The world comes at you fast. Whether you're in the White House or at your house. We try to help you get past the headlines, past the talking points to serve as your personal National Security Advisor. To make a little sense of what's happening in the wild and crazy world, but also to get a little bit better knowledge of why some of these things are happening and what we can do about it as a country. But also in your community and the conversations that you have in your world today, we're going to take up an interesting challenge. I was trying to think through what some of the biggest mistakes are that conventional analysts have been making when trying to assess what's happening in the world and what I mean by that, when they're looking at how does President Trump negotiate in conflict resolution situations? How does President Trump negotiate on trade agreements? How does President Trump negotiate with big powers? He's trying to change the course with? How does President Trump deal with challenges in our own hemisphere? And in many cases, I think that the hot flash analysis syndrome that you'll get in your talk shows and instant analysis panels misses the boat where you're hearing them say one thing on one day and they're already wrong later that same day. Well, there's a few things that are happening here at the same time. I'm going to try to pull out three or four of those that I think are the big ones that maybe once you see the world through these lenses, all of a sudden those pundits can just be background noise and you'll see more clearly what's really happening in the president's engagement with the world and the world's engagement with him. And you won't need a filter. You'll have your own national security advisor here to help you at nation states with Yates. So after a brief break, we'll come back and get into it on the big mistakes the big experts have been making about understanding the world. In Trump 2.0, you're a pro at
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- [04:59]
Jacob Goldstein
This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells A suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out odoo@o d o o dot com. That's o d o o dot com.
- [05:34]
Steve Yates
Welcome back to Nation States with Yates. Now, today, hopefully, we're going to give you some food for thought to filter the signal from the noise in everything that's coming at you in the news and the things that you read about conflicts in different parts of the world. If you kind of went by what people are talking about all the time, you might be guilty of some doomerism, what they call it these days, where people just believe the worst possible outcomes. And it seems like everything's getting broken in every part of the world and there's nothing we can do about it. And it's lose, lose, lose all the way around. Well, the president's been telling us that we've been winning in some of these areas, and maybe we are, maybe we aren't. You be the judge of how America's doing. I would say that we're doing a lot better than those headlines might lead you to believe. And there's some mistakes that I run into in my conversations with people who are leaders of other countries trying to understand what's happening with America. There are mistakes that are being made by leaders in media that are presenting the story to the world and to America about what's happening and. And let's run down what a few of these are, see whether you agree with me. Maybe you can think of others that should trump some of these, so to speak. But one of the first mistakes that I have repeatedly seen and tried to caution people against in the world of Trump 2.0 is watching too closely, even obsessing over words, but missing what's happening with actions. And so I traveled to Taiwan last week and I was meeting with people there, and many of them had concerns about what may or may not be happening with decisions to provide defensive arms to Taiwan. What may or may not be happening was would the President of the United States call and talk directly to the President of Taiwan? When the president's talking about the economic relationship with Taiwan, sometimes he speaks in less than friendly terms, terms about the semiconductor industry, which he says Taiwan stole from the United States. There's a different story told from the Taiwan point of view. From my own point of view, it's really all about the future. And I hope that we have Taiwan investing In America being the enduring semiconductor superpower of the world, maybe some other allies participate too. But this is just one of the microcosms where this actions versus words can get you lost. When you look at the conflict with Iran, there are words the President has used. Holding out deals, saying, we have a deal, talking about major military accomplishments. The Iranian navy's at the bottom of the ocean. Their ability to project power has been completely degraded, their nuclear capability completely destroyed. But then the conflict endures. And we are working on how do we get the Strait of Hormuz open reliably under reasonable terms. What do we do in terms of the dust or radiated material that's been left behind in Iran that that needs to be secured, probably removed. All of these things are sort of the noise that's in the conversations, but a lot of the coverage is focusing on the words, even the words that come from our enemies. So the remnants of the Iranian revolutionary guardians saying that they're winning and that they can endure anything and that they're rejuvenating and they're going to teach America a lesson. Sometimes that goes out unfiltered and people start to think, well, are we losing? And I would argue, no, we're not. It isn't a walk in the park. There's a lot of outstanding tasks that have to be dealt with. But we have better options now than. Than we did before the conflict broke out. And we have more capable allies who have proven to be more capable now than we did before the conflict broke out. And so there are more balanced ways of dealing with this. But really, in order to get to that vision about whether dealing with Venezuela, after having brought Maduro to justice by way of some special operations that were genuinely special, it's a better set of circumstances in this hemisphere. Hitting major cartels in this hemisphere, especially taking out the top leadership of one of the major cartels that was definitely related to the fentanyl crisis coming across our border, but also a lot of crime beyond the fentanyl travesty, that we're better off. We have better options after having taken that decisive action. And it isn't because the United States or this president want conflict or a quagmire or nation building. We're avoiding all of those things. But that doesn't mean that America's not going to use the power that it has to make the world a better, safer, more stable, and hopefully even ultimately more prosperous place for ourselves, for our next generation, and on into our future. That's the big vision. So the President talks about that but somehow our coverage doesn't focus on those words. We tend to get focused on the words of his critics, the instant analysis in the media, and sometimes our enemies. But if you put the filter of what are words versus actions and try to push through that and assess where the actions are, you might be more heartened that we're doing better in our dealings with Europe than we were at the beginning of sort of the hot verbal contest back and forth. We're doing better in the broader Middle east with this getting reordered with better, more capable allies than we were at the beginning of this. And we're doing better in East Asia than the sort of nattering nabobs of negativism might lead you to believe, with revitalized allies who are willing to act on their own, but but also still remain loyal, effective contributing partners with the United States. So words versus actions. The next one that I think is a big mistake often made by the experts in air quotes is drawing long term conclusions from short term developments. Happens almost every day, sometimes multiple times a day. So we have an announced ceasefire, people draw long term conclusions. Oh well, we're no better off today than we were before. And if the ceasefire is where we end up, that this is worse than what the Obama Biden policies were towards Iran, or if we are talking to Vladimir Putin trying to work towards some kind of a ceasefire with Ukraine, that somehow, if that's where everything ends, that this is the end of the world, this is terrible. We have engaged in appeasement with an aggressor and we have undermined our allies. Or if we sort of hit pause on European complaints about the way that American leaders talk to them about needing to save their civilization from the perils of unfettered immigration, that changes the nature of their cultures, changes their ability to defend their own homelands, but definitely has weakened their ability to project power, well, that has consequences. But if we think that that's the end of the story, that the short term development is where it all stops, that just leads you to that doomerism. But if you just go down issue after issue, there's the hot take, the news cycle. But if there's anything that we've learned from Donald Trump in this second administration is he's going at a speed greater than he did in his first term and it's on purpose. Because if he slows down to go through things in the conventional way, that gives time for his opponents, foreign and domestic, to organize against him in his first term, he really got bogged down by those domestic opponents, whether it was the perpetual impeachments based on hoaxes or whether it was the Chinese slow rolling on a phase one trade agreement. And there are some other areas as well. So we're going at a different speed. There's also multiple news cycles per day because the president directly engages with the press multiple times a day and shifts the narrative multiple times. And so if you're stuck, if you find yourself trying to say what does this all mean, and you're drawing some grand conclusion of America is winning or America is losing we or this war is lost or this negotiation has failed, just understand these are just acts in a longer play. And the President has multiple rounds of action, influence and negotiation still to be playing out. And you don't have to take my word for it. You can see it with your own eyes, whether it's trade negotiations, fixing the border and dealing with the cartels, dealing with broader negotiations in the Middle East. On balance, we've made a lot of first downs, maybe even a few touchdowns, but we're still in the game, working toward a better, ultimate outcome. That's the way I would see it, to use maybe a strange sports analogy, but we have words versus actions. We have drawing long term conclusions from short term headlines. As another major mistake, another frame that I think has been incorrect, is that a lot of people's conversations in news and even in government around the world begins with talking about President Trump being the disruptor. And in some senses it's true, he is disruptive for a purpose. But what it misses by taking, I think, this mistaken frame and just sort of suggesting that President Trump is going around and breaking things just for the sake of breaking them, is that global systems were breaking or broken already, and that what President Trump is doing is engaging in a policy of disrupting the old policies that led to those outcomes and trying to build new policies, new forms of cooperation to replace those failed or broken ways. What do I mean by that? Well, a lot of you have heard of the United Nations. When the first Gulf War came around in the early 1990s, the United States government felt compelled to go to the United Nations Security Council to get a resolution that sort of authorized the use of force to enforce UN Resolutions that were aimed at the country of Iraq. When the second Gulf War came around, the Bush administration, especially driven by our United Kingdom ally, felt compelled to go to the United Nations Security Council and get some kind of legitimization for taking military force against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Well, it wasn't America going this route that broke The United nations, arguably, it's been somewhat of a fragile and corrupted institution along the way anyway. But it's China that has broken a lot of these globalist institutions. It was China's conduct under Covid that broke the World Health Organization. It's China's conduct in proliferation that in many ways enabled the breakout of nuclear capabilities to Pakistan, to North Korea, and through an illicit network that we had to combat after 9 11. In a significant way, China really was at the nexus of this. And China has played a role in breaking the counter proliferation institutions by helping a country like Iran, the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, get past sanctions that were opposed by the United States and others to try to compel better outcomes there. And China was on the wrong side of doing that. And so if you look at trade and China breaking the World Trade Organization and you go down the list, in many ways, what's missing from the narrative is that globalization was being broken, and not by the United States. But what. And these allies, like NATO, for instance, were kind of sleepwalking, underfunding, very poorly defined sense of when and how they would use power and what power they were bringing to the table. Or were they just fine and dandy, becoming increasingly economic dependent on the very powers they wanted us to spend much more than them to defend them against if it came to a military threat. And that's clearly not fair, but it's also not sensible. And so President Trump may have disrupted that apple cart, but it was in order to get that institution to wake up, reform and revitalize, to meet the needs of today. And going forward, you can't go on the alleged accomplishments of the past forever. You have to be in fit form to deal with things now and into the future. And so that's the other frame that I think has been missed. Trump isn't the disruptor of the order. He's the disruptor of the failed old ways. And in many ways, his disruption now is the fixer of a lot of these systems. But it takes time to see them come into place and have it be more clearly in line of sight. So that's another frame that I think was a mistake a lot of mainstream analysts were making try to assess the world in Trump 2.0. Another frame that I think has been a mistake is just this assertion that somehow, maybe because of tough rhetoric or provocative rhetoric or playful rhetoric in some senses, that the United States has been harming alliances, has been walking away from alliances or degrading alliances. Sometimes it's alleged, but if you go around the world, almost Every alliance in 2026 is a little bit more capable than it was in 2025. And 2025 is the year that President Trump was re inaugurated for his second term. There's been net movement forward in a lot of these areas. If you just look at actions versus weight words back to that other mistake. But there's underneath all of this is that a sense that allies, because they feel alone or forsaken by the United States, they are forced to do things independently or do take things on for themselves. Well, what I think a lot of these air quotes experts miss is that stronger, independently capable allies is actually good for alliances and good for the United States. And so this is a necessary growing pain that we need to go through from time to time as facts in the world change. China's capabilities economically, technologically and militarily are fundamentally different than they were five or 10, much less 10 years ago. And our way of organizing and dealing with it has to adjust to those new realities. And our allies themselves have been mugged by reality. And dealing with China economically, a lot of them have been pushed to turn over technology. Some of them have faced very aggressive moves inside China to take over some of their brands. And so many ways are alliances of are looking to have more independent capabilities, maybe even taking a more independent approach to their own region. But the key question for you in common sense America, is is that good? Is that better for us? Is that even better for that ally? And I think that it's a much firmer foundation on which to have an alliance that goes into the future in a durable and resilient way. Ultimately, that's what the President's stated objective is, is to have alliances that are fair and balanced, so to speak, where we are helping those who help themselves to try to draw from notions of the good book and also the golden rule. And these are fundamentally positive things, but you just wouldn't know it. It's if you are a Main street media and diplomatic analyst where you just say, well, that was a disruptive meeting or that's just not the way things have been done. And that's just not very respectful to what we have done for many, many years. And to an extent, you do have to break some crockery in order to make things refreshed, reformed and built for the future. So that's another, I think, common mistake that experts have been making in the world of Trump 2.0 is not seeing that allies doing more on their own isn't leaving America behind. It's actually putting America's interests in a better place. The next and final one for today's conversation, I'm surely there are more and I'd really be interested in what other people think about other mistakes that are commonly made that gives get what's happening in the world incorrectly because of these blind spots is that President Trump came onto the scene. And I would argue if it wasn't President Trump, it was going to be Any other president in this era is going to be pressed not to repeat the perceived mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan or Vietnam. If you want to go back further that Americans are not hungry for, for occupations that go on for years at a time costing trillions of dollars and some cases tens of thousands of fatalities, much less those that are injured in a multitude of ways from that conflict. But America is still going to exercise power and influence. There's still going to be conflicts that we're going to engage in. We still want and need to have the most lethal, most feared, most effective and most powerful military ever known to mankind. Not because we're ruling the world as some imperial force, but because we're the only experiment in human history that's actually used that power that could be used for empire, but actually for the liberation and prosperity of a multitude of other countries. Arguably even our enemies are better off with a strong and powerful America using its capability to preserve freedom of navigation on the high seas, to end conflicts that require intervention, to change course because of a growing threat that would hurt far more civilians in far more places on the planet if we don't take action early or in a process. But this notion that we are avoiding the appeasement of the pass and just engaging in endless dialogue or worse, paying off threats the way the old Iran deal of 10 years ago really kind of fits the definition of. And we're avoiding the nation building exercise of Iraq and Afghanistan that we're moving through this middle that's actually far more common sense and reasonable risk management than those other conflicts were. And despite the President's critics hating his guts and thinking everything he does and touches is bad, he's actually leading in a way that I think future presidents are going to need to and leaders of other countries are going to need to because it seems like in this new age we're not looking at these protracted land conflicts going on forever with outside intervention. We're hoping even with Russia's invasion of Ukraine that the energy is coming out of that engine at some point and maybe Ukraine is coming up with better technology to extend its self defense capabilities and who knows, maybe they will just maybe come out better in the end of this. Getting the better of Russia in it, who knows? But with regard to other parts of the world, this effort at building up this capacity that is splitting the difference between invasion and occupation and appeasing like agreements, use of these powerful tools can help shape events that keep the bad actors of the world more at bay, their malign influences more contained, that our ability to do that is increasing at lower risk, and, and that that risk is shared in a fair way with our allies and partners around the world so that it's not all coming to America at great expense and that we're the only country that's the world's 911. So I think that the fact that a lot of our mainstream experts can't bring themselves to see that President Trump has delivered a more meaningful middle way for the use of overwhelming power than most of his predecessors have is one of the mistakes that gets made in conventional analysis. So there's your core mistakes from Nation states with Yates for those that are out there hitting your news feeds, making some errors in assessment and judgment, overemphasizing words over actions that actually change the world, drawing long term conclusions from short term headlines. Sort of missing the forest for the trees. Seeing President Trump as the cause for disruption and making of problems. When really the problems were made, things were broken. He's the fixer. But we have to sort of disrupt some of the old ways of doing things in order to get the fix to take place. Another big mistake. Independently capable allies are good for America, good for the alliances and good for the world. And this middle way of avoiding appeasement and avoiding nation building is actually better for America and better for the world. So there you have it. Those are my top of the list. Wonder what you think about those kinds of things. We're going to take a brief break and when we come back, we'll have some parting thoughts right after this with Nation States with Yates.
- [28:27]
Jacob Goldstein
This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O D O o dot com. That's O D O O dot com.
- [29:00]
Just Food for Dogs Narrator
Most dog food brands don't really want you seeing how their food is made. Just food for dogs is the opposite. They actually invite you in. You can walk into any of their kitchens and see real human grade ingredients like chicken, beef, carrots and peas being prepared right in front of you. It's real food made in real kitchens. Nothing is hidden behind labels and that kind of transparency says a lot. Nothing to hide, everything to love. Go to justfoodfordogs.com and get 50% off your first order.
- [29:33]
Steve Yates
Welcome back to Nation States with Yates. I hope you've enjoyed today's conversation. Took a little bit of a different track. In previous episodes we were looking at sort of key countries, kind of key challenges. Today we're taking a different approach, looking at what are some of the big mistakes that the experts that you see on tv, here on radio, read in print, see in your social media feed are making in misinforming you about some of the things that are happening in the world. And maybe through these corrective lenses that we have in our conversations, you can sort of judge for yourself a bit better. Maybe America's doing better than you thought, certainly better than you were told through these other conventional ways. And hopefully in seeing that more clearly, you can empower the leaders in your community through your congressional representatives and in all of your contacts. A greater sense of confidence about the role that America is playing in this Trump 2.0 era. Not necessarily for President Trump, which is good perhaps in its own way, but because the world needed adjustment. And I think that our way of thinking about America's role in the world also needed adjustment. And how we filter through and judge net progress or key problems also needed to change. And that's where today's discourse about some of these mistakes might come in handy as you have your personal national security advisor in your pocket here at Nation States with Yates and trying to make sense of what's happening beyond the headlines now. I look forward to joining you again soon. In our next episode, we'll try to take a look at where things stand with the Iran situation and maybe take an unconventional look at what can be done in our next steps. Hopefully for bringing things back to a sensible landing place in time for our midterm elections. So welcome you to come back to Nation States with Yates on our next episode. Until then, I'm your host Steve Yates.
- [31:40]
Jacob Goldstein
This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way you can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out odoo d o o.com that's o d o o.com think about it
- [32:13]
Just Food for Dogs Narrator
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- [33:13]
Firestone Narrator
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- [33:42]
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