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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Is Donald Trump Creating the Conditions for Another World War?
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Welcome to the Political Scene from the New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined, as ever, by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser. Hi, Jane and Hi, Susan.
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C
Hey.
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A
It's so great to be together, guys.
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C
So glad to see you. Happy New Year.
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B
Today it is barely a week into 2026, and we're facing a changed world. There's no other way to put it. It's a world bound less than it was even one week ago, by law and diplomacy than it is by the sheer force of one man's domination. In Venezuela, the administration of Donald Trump has embarked on an adventure of lethal force with little concern for international law. And on American soil, we've witnessed an extraordinary use of official force when an ICE agent in Minnesota killed a woman in her car, a shooting that was widely documented on video, which drew plainly false defenses from the White House and immediate street protests from the public. The history here looms heavily. Franklin Roosevelt, in the days after Pearl harbor warned, quote, there is no such thing as security for the nation or any individual in a world ruled by the principles of gangsterism. By contrast, this week, Donald Trump told the New York Times that the only limit on his global power is, as he put it, my own morality, my own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me. Asked why he needed new territory such as Greenland, he said, ownership is very important because that's what I feel is psychologically needed for success, unquote. So in this episode, we're going to have a bracing conversation, I think it's fair to say, about the scale and the impact of this moment. What's the spectrum of risks when so much rides on the whims of one man? And where have we seen this before? What is history telling us about where this just may be taking us? Jane Trump has suggested in the days since the assault on Venezuela that the US could use our military to various effects in a whole range of other places, Greenland, of course, but also Cuba, Colombia, even Mexico. There are a lot of questions swirling around, and I'm wondering how you decide what to take seriously. What is signal and what is noise at a moment like that.
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C
This is the Dunro Doctrine, you know, I think at this point, you have to take it all seriously. That is one of the lessons here. I don't think it's just gaslighting us for fun. I think that what you're seeing both abroad and at home, are completely optional conflicts created by the character of the president. The die is cast by who he is, and he sees himself as without any kind of restraints on his power. So I think you have to take this all seriously at this point. We've talked about this before. We've taken Greenland seriously here for a while.
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B
Susan, even before Trump came back to the White House, you were reporting and writing about Greenland, his preoccupation with this Danish territory.
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A
Well, I mean, look, just in the big picture sense, right? If the fear is gangsterism, what does it say that we're talking about? America is the gangster. Right, Right. That was a quote from FDR talking about the dictators of Europe. Now, the threat to the world, on some level, the threat to our allies, Denmark and NATO, is coming from the United States itself. When Harry Truman signed the NATO Founding act, he could never have conceived of, nor could anyone else, a world in which the other NATO allies viewed the United States as. As the gangster. And of course, Trump is the gangster in chief. I do have to say, as a former editor of Foreign Policy who was besieged with pieces constantly about this doctrine and that doctrine, I have a visceral allergy to proclamations of doctrines, especially something with the name the Don Row doctrine. Let's just be clear on that. The thing that I think is remarkable that you're saying, Jane, that I agree with, is Donald Trump is often mistakenly seen to have an ideology or an ism to the extent he has an ideology. Let's be clear, we're talking about a form of almost narcissistic unilateralism.
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B
Right?
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A
The people were wrong. For years, many of his fans cheered Donald Trump when he came to power in 2016 because they said they believed this idea of America first. And essentially they wanted a new era of American withdrawal from the world, American focus on within. And it's not isolationism that we've seen from Donald Trump. And those people who leaned into that. I think their analysis has been consistently surprised at the idea of what is going on with a leader since Donald Trump came back to office and it's not even been a year, which I know is pretty stunning, Right? Like it's not even been a year since last January 20th.
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B
But we've aged.
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A
Trump has gone into and launched military attacks on seven different countries. I'm not aware of other presidents in our lifetime who launched attacks on seven different countries.
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B
Right.
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A
That'll be the trivia question is, can you name all seven countries, including the obscure Christmas Day strikes in Nigeria? Seven countries. So how's that compatible with America first system? To me, it goes back to Jane's point about. It's about one man asserting breathtaking power.
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B
That's the point I wanna return to. Just linger for a second here, Susan, on this. The psychological effect on something as fragile as the NATO mindset. The idea. Let's remind ourselves this is right at a moment when European allies have been trying to get the United States to put pressure on Russia to try to bring about a peace agreement. And instead what you have is now European allies condemning the US President because of this assault on Venezuela. And now the almost unthinkable prospect of. Of the United States taking territory from a NATO member. Let's remind ourselves Denmark, after all, came to the US defense after 9, 11, sent troops to Afghanistan, lost lives in defense of American strategic interests. What does it mean? Set aside the idea that we would even go into Greenland. What does it mean to be talking about taking territory from a NATO.
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A
No, I. Thank you. And I'm sorry I didn't answer that question before because it really does get at the heart of why this is dangerous. People have underestimated Trump again and again, including, by the way, our European allies who didn't take this seriously until you could argue, far too late, NATO. The entire premise of NATO is undergirded by this idea of mutual defense. A sort of all for one, one for all principle. Article 5. And essentially that relies upon the credibility of that. Yeah, exactly. It's not just a piece of paper. Is there anyone in the world after this week, with Trump having done and said what he's done and said, who believes in the credibility of the United States commitment, which, by the way, is a treaty commitment that means it's passed by Congress, signed into law for decades, that the United States would come to the defense of our NATO allies say, forget about this threat to Denmark. Our NATO allies just literally across a little river border from Russia in the Baltics, So just on Greenland. The thing is, is that Trump has not just said, oh, I'd like to buy Greenland, which was a source of ridicule, shock, Horror, amazement in 2019. Now he has escalated, and that's the story of the second term. And said, if you don't hand it over, I may attack you.
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B
Military. Nice country you got here.
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A
Militarily.
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C
Well, I just think that getting back to Trump's id, basically you've got somebody who doesn't know history, has never served in the military, doesn't understand the risks here. I mean, I think you could call this, remember, he got five deferrals from the Vietnam War, which was the war of his time. He sees this as simply cost free ways that he can impose his power on the world without understanding any of the risks that it puts the rest of the world in, as far as I can tell. I mean, we could call it, we can give it our own doctrine and we can call it the bone spur, foreign policy for the bone spur that got him out of the Vietnam War. And I think it's interesting also if you look at the New York Times interview with him, despite this or maybe because of this, what he's projecting is a sense of insecurity and anger and resentment that he's not getting his due. Beneath the surface, this is someone who's constantly trying to impose himself as a winner on the world. His father always told him, you need to be a winner. And yet he feels like people are treating him like a loser. That's underlying a lot of this, I think.
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B
Yeah. And look, we know that the psychological dynamics of leadership matters in geostrategy. You can't talk about a place like China, for instance, without saying how much does it see its own history and its future through the lens of the fact that it hasn't fought a war since 1979. The last war was against Vietnam, a war that it lost. I think a lot of people this week in my world of China watchers were saying, oh, how is China responding to the vision of the United States just going into another piece of territory, deposing its leadership, running the country? Does this mean that they're now gonna see that this is open season for Taiwan, for instance?
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C
Well, do you think it does?
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B
I actually think it doesn't affect their internal calculations because in the end, China's decision making around Taiwan comes down to how it perceives things like its own military readiness. Whether or not it has civilian control of the pla. As long as they are still bouncing out senior generals, which they're doing fairly frequently, that's a sign that they don't feel like they have control. The bigger issue, though, it's not just about Taiwan. The bigger issue is that they now see from the United States actions that almost perfectly enact the Chinese worldview of how the globe should be organized. Everybody in my world this week was remembering a comment, this incredibly indiscreet moment in 2010 when the Chinese foreign minister at a conference said the quiet part out loud. He said, China is a big country and there are small countries. That's a fact act. That's the Donald Trump worldview. And now China is looking out and saying, oh, okay, I guess we're dividing up the world. By that logic, it sounds a lot.
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C
Like Stephen Miller, right?
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B
It does.
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C
The way of the world.
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He has a bright future in Chinese politics. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll untangle the domestic threads here. The political SCENE will be back in just a moment. If you've been enjoying the show, please leave us. A rating and a review on the podcast platform of your choice. And while you're there, don't forget to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode.
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C
Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlemagne, tha God, and so many more. That's all on the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts.
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B
Stephen Miller, who's, of course, the White House deputy chief of staff who has had a heavy hand on domestic policy, particularly on immigration, is now being heard on foreign affairs. There is an absolutely immortal quote that he gave this week on CNN's Jake Tapper Show. Let's listen to it. We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world. But are you saying since the beginning.
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A
Of time, the jungle, man, you know, it's the jungle. And I think people have been correct to seize on this as sort of, you know, the most sort of snarling but revealing explanation of the worldview that is now governing the United States. And we're right to seize on this because it's a world of might makes right. It goes back certainly to the psychological explanation of Trump and Jane, I agree with you about Trump's feeling of weakness and need to compensate. Stephen Miller, in this appearance, is specifically been asked about Trump's desire to take over Greenland. And this quote is specifically in response to questions about why. Why would the United States do such a thing? It has these treaty obligations. And so it's not just some generally unsettling statement. It's a specifically terrifying statement, I think, because it says, the United States, the leader of the United States, rejects all the commitments that the United States actually currently has to its partners, to its allies, and to a vision of the world that is governed by laws and not by men wielding clubs. I remember we were exchanging messages, the three of us, when the Venezuela operation came out. We were texting each other and Jane's like, we're pirates now. We're pirates now. Basically, we're seizing the oil, we're selling the oil. Donald Trump says he's personally taking charge of the oil. And on Greenland, right? This fixation on Greenland, I know people will say, well, it's because of resources. There's all these minerals locked under the surface. Or it's because of national security. We don't want China and Russia engaged in the Arctic right now with global warming, which of course the administration doesn't acknowledge exists. But putting that aside, you know, this is a more important place. Those are all factors when you talk to why somebody like John Bolton was interested in pursuing this. But Donald Trump is very interesting. When we were doing our book and doing reporting on why this fixation on Greenland, he said something to us. This was back In November of 2021, in his exile that I think kind of sums up this worldview Stephen Miller's talking about. We said, why Greenland? And Trump says, well, it was my idea. Which, by the way, our reporting showed wasn't necessarily the case, but it's actually one of his businessmen friends, Ron Lauder. Why don't we have that you take a look at a map? So I'm a real estate developer. I look at a corner, I say, I gotta get that store for the building that I'm building, et cetera. You know, it's not that different. I love maps. And I always said, look at the size of this. It's massive. And that should be part of the United States. He added, it's not different from a real estate deal. It's just a little bit larger, to put it mildly. Donald Trump wants to write his name into history on the map of the world, obviously, in big gold letters. He wants to be the William Seward of this era acquiring Alaska. He wants every single person in the world to have to exchange their map for one of the United States that looks different, that looks bigger, and that everybody for all eternity will say, donald Trump did this. And that's, by the way, what Vladimir Putin has done. He's chosen what he sees as historical glory to be the restorer to the in gatherer of the Russian lands, to go for restoring Ukraine. And you asked me that question before. I think it's right on. It's China, but it's also Russians who've been cheering statements like Stephen Miller's saying.
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C
Well, this is exactly the right tweeting them, correct? I think absolutely.
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Kirill Dmitry, who's in the middle of the talks, who's been Putin's envoy to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Kirill Dmitriev is cheering this on. Because how is that statement from Miller, how was the White House official statement.
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B
This week saying any different than what you would see out of a Russian, out of a Russian apologist?
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C
It strikes me as the most un American possible thing to say, because every other. We've had plenty of foreign interventions and many that you can argue were foolish, but they were under color of ideology and idealism of some sort or another, usually trying to make the world safe for democracy. And there's no pretense here of this being about anything beyond, particularly with Venezuela, the oil. We kept the regime in place. It's not regime change, it's regime extension with our getting their oil. And I don't know, I mean, I still. Susan and I have been sort of sparring back and forth about how important it is that the businessmen, whether it was Ron Lauder in the beginning or Trump's friends, Slater, and there are plenty of businessmen who are right at his elbow, who, who are really looking forward to developing because of rare earth minerals.
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B
And things like that. But I want to talk about the domestic side of this for a second, because one of the big surprises here, frankly, is that the story that was told about Trump coming back to office was partly that you had people like JD Vance, the important figures within the MAGA firmament, who said, we're done with these wars of adventure and misadventure. We're gonna focus on America first. We're gonna invest that money at home. And here we have him going off. How is it possible that the MAGA movement accommodates itself so swiftly? And I know there's an easy answer, which is they'll do whatever Trump says, but are they actually imagining that they want to be a part of this materialist project.
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C
Well, I'm a little lit is what we've seen. I mean, and so there's beginning to be some pushback from the right about this. I mean, it's Marjorie Taylor Greene, of course, liberal icon.
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B
I always need to.
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C
A liberal icon. Yeah. Saying is this America first? This is exactly what we did in America. Want useless foreign wars. And so there is beginning to be some split over this subject. There's also, I would say, if you want to talk about domestic politics, I think importantly, some split quietly within the Democrats who are as usual, unable to figure out where they want to be on this particular subject in any unified way. So you've got the condemnations of the violations of the Constitution and you condemnations of international law coming out of the liberal mind. Members of the Democratic Party. And then you've got others who kind of focusing on, well, Maduro's a bad guy, you know, and they're just not quite able to speak with one voice and have a powerful opposition.
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B
I want to stay with you, Jen, for a second. On the domestic side, I mentioned just briefly at the top, this shooting in Minnesota, which in a strange way feels like it's very much an extension of the same thing we've been talking about, about this kind of vision of power, of unchecked, unbound power limited only by psychology.
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C
You're so right, Evan. I think I was thinking about it that these kinds of conflicts allow Trump and his administration to declare emergency law and do things like invoke the Alien Enemies act and take extra powers that are afforded the executive during times of war, put troops in the street, as we're seeing. So I mean, there is some method to the madness here.
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B
I mean, what you're describing is this, and this ties into something, Susan, you were saying before, you know, we've gone from this period when for the years Since World War II, essentially there was an understanding that the world would be governed by ideas, by trust, by compacts, by the mutual knowledge that we would be at greater peril if we allowed ourselves to succumb to a world of iron and bone and blood and soil than we would by ideas. And both on the domestic side here and on the foreign side, we've seen that essentially unraveling over the course of the last week.
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A
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. We can get big picture here and talk about, I think it's really the protracted crisis over what is the world order after the end of the Cold War. I mean, I take Your point about the end of World War II. But look, there were a lot of grubby, dirty, self interested, awful wars fought after World War II, but there was a framing reference for the world. There was a sense of existential threat that came from having these two nuclear superpowers essentially pitted against each other. And I think that the world has been in a couple decades of crisis over the identity. What's an international system that works in the post Cold War era? And we kept talking about, well, is this Cold War 2.0, remember, with Russia? I think we've now gotten rid of that framework and we're moving towards something more like this revamped 19th century vision of a kind of tripartite great powers, right? The United States, Russia, China, spheres of influence. That's where Donald Trump is leaning in. That's, I think, the framework that we're looking at here that people are very uncomfortable with because it gets rid of a lot of the institutions and ideas that were created to prevent another world war. It basically jettisons all that. And in fact, to that point, it didn't get as much attention this week because we're so focused, understandably on the United States just kidnapped a world leader and, you know, brought him to trial and, you know, a lot of very specific news events. The United States this week withdrew from more than 60 international organizations and institutions of exactly the kind of huge moment. The fabric, it's unraveling, the fabric of international cooperation is unraveling. That was established in part as a bulwark against future world wars and in part in the context of this Cold War competition. After World War II, the people were desperate not to become a hot war between the great powers. Now Trump is just saying, let's just get rid of that framework. We're building a new framework. I do want to talk about what does that mean politically here at home just for one second because I think Gene is really onto something. There's discord and division within both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, a kind of a lack of leadership. Obviously, Donald Trump is not going to be the kind of leader who coherently describes and therefore brings into being this new world order. Right. It's just something he's doing while watching TV and sending out true social.
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B
I will point out in the New York Times interview, he didn't exactly empower the younger generation. He called Marco Rubio and J.D. do you see one of the kids standing up and taking up the man?
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A
But to the point, absolutely.
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C
That is a sign that we're living in a Gerontocracy, when the people in their 40s and 50s are called the kids.
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A
Yeah, exactly. But, you know, look, the divisions are important because I think there are still these sort of tribes in Washington that haven't caught up to where the power is, and that's a scary thing. But, you know, for Republicans, you have definitely the America Firsters, Marjorie Taylor Greene. We don't know where J.D. vance is. They literally left the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, out of the planning, according to newspaper reports this week, for the Venezuela operation, because she's been a public critic of intervention.
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C
Can we just interject with what the DNI now stands for?
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A
Apparently, Do Not Invite.
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B
Exactly.
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A
I saw that. But, you know, there's another camp as well that has still some refracted energy here in Washington, what's left of the Republican establishment. And those are the senators who have spoken out this week, both with qualms about Venezuela and also really serious concerns about what's happening with Trump and Greenland. People like the Republican Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mitch McConnell. So you have, you know, you have on the far right, the kind of Steve Bannon types who are worried about this, JD Vance types. Then you also have the old Republican Guard that's worried about this. And there were nine Republican senators so far who have spoken out and said, basically, please, you know, pump the brakes on Greenland. This is crazy. This is not who we are. We're supporting NATO. Nine Republican senators. Then you had five Republican senators joining forces with Democrats on a measure that actually passed the Senate, saying, in the future, any additional Venezuelan military action needs to be consulted with Congress as per the War Powers Act. Now, that measure, it can pass the Senate and will pass, it looks like, next week, on a simple majority vote. I doubt. I don't know what the House is going to do. And obviously, Donald Trump considers this.
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B
Yeah, I was going to say Donald Trump's view is that nine Republican senators plus five Republican senators equals zero. It equals zero impacts. Absolutely.
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A
I'm bringing this up in part because it goes back to Jane's point about the Democrats, the critics of Donald Trump, wherever they are in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, they're still one year into this extraordinary, almost revolution in our governance. They're still completely at a loss on how to meaningfully stand against it. And I see nine senators. You should see the hyperventilating of the kind of inside the Beltway press corps. Oh, my gosh. You know, Trump's power is finally breaking. I look at that and I Say, you know, there should be 53 Republican senators saying it is unacceptable to threaten our military ally with military action. That is unacceptable. That is crazy. That is literally crazy. And the fact that it's nine senators and not 53 Republican senators is frankly why we have this.
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C
I mean, you started with talking about FDR and gangster diplomacy and foreign policy, and when you listen to that particular fireside chat, what you hear is such a powerful message. That's the Democratic Party that knew what it wanted to do, basically. And we're waiting to hear somebody articulate it with that kind of force. And it's a harder argument to make. It's one that appeals to people's enlightenment instead of to their, you know, pre Bronze Age brute force.
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B
We are now in the midst of a war not for conquest, not for vengeance, but for a world in which this nation and all that this nation represents will be safe for our children. We expect to eliminate the danger from Japan, but it would serve us ill if we accomplished that and found that the rest of the world was dominated by Hitler and Mussolini. So we are going to win the war and we are going to win the peace that follows.
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A
By the way, this is FDR in kind of evangelical mode to a certain extent. Remember, it's in the days after Pearl harbor, after years of the America first movement, and he couldn't get Americans to come to the aid the way that he wanted of Europe after the invasion of Poland and the beginning of full scale World War II on September 1, 1939. This is two years later because FDR is still proselytizing, is still trying to get Americans to believe that the consequences are enough to make them embark on another horrible world war, even though they don't want to. They want to pull up the stakes in Fortress America.
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B
I think there is something essentially important about the moment when FDR was saying that he was talking about it in the ashes of Pearl harbor, when Americans had this very acute understanding. You couldn't get more vivid image of what war meant and the consequences. This brings us back to something, Jane, you said earlier, which is about this idea that for Donald Trump, war has always been a remote idea. He has never had a kind of intimate understanding of the consequences of statecraft. This has been on my mind all week. There's a book called the Lessons of Tragedy by two scholars, Hal Brands and Charlie Edel, who talk about the idea that the United States lost in the quarter century after the end of the Cold War, lost what they call the tragic sensibility. The idea that so many of the people in power didn't have, not serve. They were not scarred psychologically and physically by Vietnam or by World War II. And so they became quite casual in the application of American force. It became one of these psychological instruments for fragile minds. And I'm reminded this week, Alex d', Elia, our terrific researcher, pointed us to words by Mark Shields, the great Mark Shields, the late columnist who right around the time of the invasion of Iraq, Mark Shields went around and asked and did a survey in Congress of how many people had children serving in the armed forces. And he was astonished to find how few people had actually personal contact with the consequences of American military power. And he came up with this line that I think rings with haunting power today. He said, those in power are totally divorced from those at peril.
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C
Isn't that incredible?
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A
Yeah.
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C
I mean, and Mark Shields, of course, was a U.S. marine.
- [31:20]
B
He was.
- [31:20]
A
He enlisted remarkably, this is what fueled the America first movement to a certain extent in the first place was those, you know, sort of forgotten America, Middle America veterans coming out of two decades of the endless war in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Recall that both J.D. vance, both the Vice president, and Pete Hegseth, the Defense secretary, are people who served in the aftermath of 911 in the sort of global war on terror broadly framed. And their rhetoric has been powered and shaped by the idea that our leaders, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, that they were disconnected from the horrors unleashed in America's name.
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B
Exactly. How did they then?
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A
Well, they went with the cult instead. I mean, what are we talking about? We're talking about a foreign policy that's not driven by what Donald Trump promised his electorate. It's not driven by where a new generation of Republicans might see themselves in the country, but is driven by the grandiosity and aspirations of one man. It's narcissistic unilateralism. It's a personalist cult, in the words of the political scientists. What we're dealing with here is a personalist regime in the United States, right, where there's one man essentially making these decisions. Now, there are various constituencies that he's balancing. There are politics in even the most hardcore dictatorship. Right? So it's not that there aren't politics inside MAGA world, inside Donald Trump's White House, but Donald Trump as the decider forces people like J.D. vance and people like Pete Hegseth to make a choice constantly between what they said was their policy and what he wants it to be. And Republicans have chosen him again and again. That's the story of our own dismantling.
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B
Over the last few years. The time of choosing, in the end, was to choose Trump.
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C
To choose Trump. Well, I was just gonna say one other insight on Trump and why he is making these choices actually came from really a wonderful profile of Trump in our own magazine by Mark Singer.
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A
Yeah, that's a great one.
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C
And if you remember, there's the Old.
- [33:41]
B
Testament profile of Trump.
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A
This is in 1990 something.
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C
Yeah, it totally got Trump, though. And he, at one point, Mark Singer is on Trump's plane and they're watching, you know, some fight movie. I think it's like Claude Van Damme or something like that. And Trump is impatient, and he demands that whoever is projecting the movie forward from one fight scene to the next fight scene. He's bored with the stuff in between. And I would say when you look at Venezuela, he's bored with the governing. He's not interested in the rest of the plot. He loves the pyrotechnics.
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A
Here's another quote. Let me see. Okay, let me pull it up here from Donald Trump himself. He calls in to Fox News on Saturday morning to brag about the success of this remarkable Delta Force operation, literally capturing the president of Venezuela in his bedroom along with his wife. And what does he say? He says, I mean, I watched it literally, like I was watching a television show, he marveled in an interview with Fox. And if you would have seen the speed, the violence, the violence, I just believe that that quote, along with the Miller quote, tells you just about everything that you need to know.
- [34:59]
B
All right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to look at how this week's events fit into the larger frame of history. The political scene will be back in just a moment. The 2024 election was a lot, and now that we're past it, you might be avoiding political news altogether, or you might want to understand the other side of the aisle, but without poisoning your algorithm or treading into online territory that feels like an alien planet, you need Left, Right and Center. It's your weekly political news check in with representatives from both parties so you can hear from the other guys in a way that helps you actually make sense of it. I'm David Green. Join me on Left, Right and Center from kcrw. New episodes drop every Friday wherever you listen to podcasts. We've talked about the domestic political scene. We've talked about the effect on foreign alliances, on the temperature around the world in places like Beijing. We've talked a bit about the psychology. I think we need to frame this in where this may be going. Ultimately, there is a haunting bit of history here. I was mindful of what President Emmanuel Macron said. He had his annual foreign policy address this week, and his words are worth hearing. He said the U.S. is, quote, turning away from some of its allies and breaking free from the international rules that it used to promote. That's the key point. We are evolving in a world of great powers where there's a real temptation to carve up the world. Any European who hears that also hears the echoes of 100 years ago, of World War I. And look, there are some people are gonna say, okay, that's hyperbolic. I don't think it's hyperbolic. You have to be going back and looking at what the lessons of history here. Take, for example, I'm curious, Jane, when we started talking about it this week, you said something that lingered with all three of us. You said, this is how world wars start.
- [37:06]
C
It is how world wars start. And I think when you take a look at NATO and you take a look at the organizations that Susan was mentioning, and you were mentioning all the international organizations, they've all been the work of generations of people who have tried to stop us from getting into another world war. That's why they exist. And when you scrap them, you're making it far easier to start an international fight that could become a world war. And that's exactly, unfortunately, I think, where we are.
- [37:39]
B
The great title of a book on this topic was the Sleepwalkers, the Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark, by which he meant that 1914, World War I, happened not because of some grand decision, some design. It was, in fact, a cascade of inertia, a cascade of minor moments of psychological weakness and frailty, of hubris, of ambition. And then events. Events, dear boy, as they say, that's what causes history. Susan, how do you see this in the context of the larger patterns of history?
- [38:13]
A
Yeah, I'm thinking about the very beginning of this conversation where we talked about just even in our own recent past, the awareness of a terrifying scenario was not only not enough to prevent it, but often didn't even help us to recognize it when it actually happened. Whether that was bin Laden as this threat determined to strike the United States, whether it was Vladimir Putin riding bare chested, as it turned out, on horseback, Russia into another dictatorship and tyranny that would be a threat to its neighbors and a threat to the United States. We recognized those threats, and yet we couldn't really see them. And I think that's where the world War scenario comes in when we were interviewing, and I spent dozens of hours, if not hundreds, with many of the most senior people who worked in national security with Trump in the first term. Right. I mean, I really talk to players at every level in our government, nonpartisans, Republicans, who had accepted positions with Trump. And I will tell you, this is the fear that haunted these people. So I can't say what exactly would happen. I do believe that Trump has a horror of nuclear war, a great fear of it. He's very afraid of boots on the ground and things like that. So that's. Let's just say that might be the one constraint that really does exist. I believe that's real. But all I can tell you, and this is why I've been so worried, and you guys know I've been expressing concerns about this for a number of years, their fear. And really, at every level, Trump's national security people, in this first term, what they said was they were terrified that Donald Trump's combination of narcissism, of ignorance, of his big mouth, his tendency in fights to escalate, his tendency to pick fights, his never backing down, that all of those things made them really terrified that he would blunder into a war, into a conflict. I remember talking with one very senior former official who expressed great relief. We were talking about Donald Trump's, to me, embarrassing, cringy love affair, remember, with Kim Jong Un, the dictator of North Korea. And I was saying, look at all the BS of Trump claiming that he made this great nuclear deal that never existed with Kim Jong Un. And this official stopped me in the conversation, said, you know, it was a great relief to us. He didn't care about the political embarrassment to the United States or the stupidity of Trump, you know, claiming a love affair with this horrible dictator. He was relieved that they had found a way to redirect the fire and fury rhetoric, which they felt could really lead somewhere terrifying into get Donald Trump focused on, even if it's a bullshit peace process, something to get him away from this. And so, again, I don't know, somebody.
- [41:12]
B
Who knew Donald Trump, had worked with him, worked for him.
- [41:15]
A
This was true on Iran, it was true on Venezuela. And a lot of these issues that came up in the first term, his national security people, unlike the ones right now, were really about constraining him. And they. I can just say that if for them, Trump was the fear that he would blunder us into war.
- [41:32]
C
And as you were saying, I was just gonna say that those people, those constraining people around him are not there right now. And I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. Didn't Trump at some point complain that he wanted generals that were more like Hitler's generals? Wasn't.
- [41:48]
A
Well, that was the reporting in our book. He once had a meeting with John Kelly, who was his. His longest chief of staff in his first term, the former Marine general. And he was lamenting that the Pentagon and the generals weren't doing what he wanted to do. And he said to John Kelly, well, why can't you guys be more like Hitler's generals?
- [42:10]
B
Well, you could go back further. I mean, Wilhelm II, around the time of World War I, this was a guy who was racked by psychological inferiority. He was Queen Victoria's eldest grandchild. He wanted to be accepted as a great leader by the Brits. He was starting to call his arm my army. And, you know, he had been accused. There were people sort of whispering that he was. They said, Wilhelm the timid. And he was determined to prove them wrong. He started saying to people, I am not backing down this time. And look, anybody who has watched the Guns of August. Yes, exactly.
- [42:46]
C
Barbara Tuchman's fabulous book about that scene in the beginning where they're all there and, you know, everybody was nervous about him. They felt he was off, there was something wrong.
- [42:57]
B
Totally right.
- [42:58]
C
And psychology is. Wilhelm always tells me, psychology is destiny.
- [43:02]
A
Which is why we're ending where we started with this remarkable quote from Donald Trump. You know, the man tells us who he is. We need to listen. We need to listen. The dude says, no one can stop me except myself. I need to own someone else's territory because I looked at it on a map, and psychologically, I have to own it.
- [43:24]
B
Well, I can tell you one thing, which is that as we're trying to understand that mind, I am very glad that we can do it together in one place. Great to see you guys again, to be back together. And we will be back again, of course, next week.
- [43:37]
C
You too. Great to be here.
- [43:39]
A
Stay safe out there. I keep thinking it's haunting me all week long, this idea that any one of us could just. Just drive into, you know, some ice raid gone to hell, you know, And I really. I have to say, I literally couldn't sleep last night because I thought, would I handle that situation differently? Like. Like, if some guy's screaming at me, get the fuck out of there. You know, can you honestly say with conviction that you would have but handled that the message.
- [44:13]
C
Isn't that the message? Yeah, they want me to be afraid.
- [44:15]
A
They want you. They want you up all night saying, you know, we're the power. We're the power.
- [44:21]
C
Well, okay, let me just. One more thing out of the Just on. If you want to end on a happier note from the fdr, it'd be.
- [44:27]
B
Hard to end on a lesson.
- [44:28]
C
Okay. A less happy note. Okay. Again, from FDR's fireside chat, that great one. He says, okay, what is the answer to gangsterism? He says, the answer's the people just letting you know.
- [44:42]
B
I'll take that, Jay.
- [44:43]
C
People gotta stand up.
- [44:44]
B
I'll take it.
- [44:44]
C
That's the answer. And he says it then, no, you're right.
- [44:47]
B
And I'm glad to be reminded of that. We started this conversation in the mind of one man and we end up actually with the reminder that it is actually on the shoulders of the people. This is a larger matter. This has been the political scene. From the New Yorker. I'm Evan Osnos. We had research assistance today from Alex d'. Elia. Our producer is Nora Richie, mixing by Mike Kutchman. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week and see you soon.
- [45:30]
A
When I listen to the news, here's what I want to know. Why this story matters, who's at the center of it, and how the reporters uncovered it. And as a journalist, I want to make sure that's what you get, too. Welcome to I'm Elahe Izadi, co host of the podcast Post Reports. Every weekday, my colleagues and I at the Washington Post give you the context you need on the biggest stories. Healthcare tariffs, artificial intelligence. We've got you covered. Look for Post Reports wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [46:02]
C
From prx.