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The PoliticsGirl Podcast
Is Putin Running the Show? - A conversation with international expert Jon Finer
00:59:43
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- [00:00]
A
You know, we used to go around the world, it was part of my job, part of our job in the previous administration, and say to countries, look, we're not asking you to sever your relations with China. What we're telling you is a partnership with America is a better bet for you. China will try to coerce you. They'll try to tell you to do things and punish you if you don't do them. They will try to extract resources from you and not pay you a fair price for those resources and treat your labor population badly. And all of these things that we know China does around the world. And that argument sometimes worked, sometimes didn't. But it was the best argument we had going for us. Now, the country making that argument about who is the bad partner and who is going to coerce you and treat you badly and who, you know, you might wake up one morning and realize you have a 50% tariff on your trading relationship is the United States. And I don't know how quickly we can recover from that, honestly. They have introduced this uncertainty about the, quote, quality of the United States as a friend and as a partner that countries will always have in the back of their mind, I think, long after Trump is gone.
- [01:12]
B
Hello, and welcome to the Politics Girl podcast. I'm your host, Lee McGowan. Let's get into it. So on Friday, August 15th, America hosted a summit in Alaska between President Putin and President Trump. We still don't know what really went down that day, aside from the fact that America rolled out the red carpet for a war criminal and Putin ended up looking like a dominant world leader at a time where he really should have been looking like a weak, murderous thug. We don't have many, if any, real details about what happened that day. We know the closed door meeting was three hours long. We know the luncheon scheduled for after was canceled. We know that the Trump staff looked shaken and that no questions were taken from the press after formal statements by both leaders. Finally, we know that three days later, every single European leader flew to D.C. to have a meeting with Trump. And in the middle of that meeting, he left for a phone call with the Kremlin. So something is up and I don't want to move forward without getting an expert in here to let us know what they think and to give us some insight on what's really going on here. So today we're going to be joined by John Finer. John is a member of the National Security Action Group, an advocacy group of international experts for former State Department employees and veterans from the Obama administration who understand the world order and how the State Department is supposed to function in a working democracy. John served as the deputy National Security Adviser in the Biden administration, where he was in charge of leading negotiations like the most recent summits we saw. So I thought he would be the right person to tell us how it's supposed to go and where he and his fellow international experts believe America sits right now, internationally. So without further ado, please welcome my guest, former deputy National Security Advisor in the Biden administration and member of the White House Chief of Staff, National Security Council in the Obama administration, John Finer. Welcome, John.
- [02:58]
A
Great to be here.
- [02:59]
B
Well, thank you for coming. I mean, you work with the advocacy group National Security Action, which made an incredibly strong case for President Biden's reelection. And then Kamala Harris's election fundamentally based around foreign policy. The idea being that choosing Trump to run the country, country again, would shift our foreign policy in ways that would not serve us. And rather than making every world crisis better, he was more than likely to make everything worse. And here we are.
- [03:27]
A
Yeah, and I think what you're seeing play out is a lot of what people like, certainly the. The nominee, eventually, Kamala Harris, but also a lot of the advocacy groups said was going to happen, which is on some of the big issues facing the country, issues that kind of go to our. Our core values, let alone kind of grand ideas about geopolitics. It is not clear what side the president is on.
- [03:49]
B
Yeah, exactly. I think that's exactly right. I mean, re electing Trump seemed to really validate this autocratic trend in global politics, that this idea that democracy is dead, that we need a strongman leader. It's what we're seeing from people like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, but also any other far right leader, you know, if that's in Hungary or Belarus or whatever. It really seems like these anti democratic ideals are on the rise. And Donald Trump has only added flame to that fire. What do you think about that?
- [04:22]
A
Yeah, there's this strange phenomenon where he feels or looks viscerally uncomfortable with democratically elected leaders, whether they're in Canada or in Europe or in Australia or in Japan and Korea, you know, our traditional allies all around the world. And clearly more comfortable with people who come from a totally different tradition. People like President Putin, who he literally rolled out the red carpet for in Alaska, but also treated in a almost reverential manner, deep respect sharing, lighter moments and a sense of humor. You see very little of that when he engages with democratically elected leaders. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that. One of them is that it is a model that he is increasingly seeking to emulate here in the United States.
- [05:11]
B
Yeah, without a doubt. But I think it's also that the democratically elected leaders, to me, if I was a therapist, which of course I am not, I would say he feels lesser than in their. In their presence. He knows they are smart. He knows they understand what's going on. He knows they are following the rules in a way he never has. He's a man who is by nature unaccountable. So he likes to surround himself with other people who are unaccountable because it makes him feel more like he's part of the in group, but also that he's not being judged. And I think for Donald Trump, a lot of it is, you know, are people judging me? Do people like me? And when he hangs out with people who don't answer to the rule of law, don't answer to the voters, don't answer to intellect or ideas, don't have to know everything, it makes him feel more like he's not being judged or seen from the outside, which is something I think our president does not like at all.
- [05:59]
A
So, look, I agree with all that. And I would add, and this is gonna sound, maybe in a way, almost like I'm defending him, but I think it's actually the opposite. Democracy is a hard system of government. You're in charge because you don't just get to do exactly what you want, exactly at the moment that you want to do it. There are institutions that can resist your policy preferences even when you're the President of the United States. And that goes for other democracies around the world, too. And so I think part of his resentment of some of these other democratic leaders, compared to dictators who can simply say it will be X and it is X, is that they also have to work through complicated systems. They have politics in their own countries that sometimes resist what they want to do. So he can't get a clear yes, a clear no, a clear decision always immediately out of the US System, which he's increasingly trying to break down and remove those ways of resisting, or out of these other countries. Whereas if he goes to a dictator, the dictator can snap their fingers and do what he'd like. And I think he prefers that. Honestly, I don't think that's a good thing, but I do think that's part of what he prefers.
- [07:02]
B
No, obviously. I mean, I think most of us would prefer that by general nature, I'm sure most people can say, well, I understand the idea that, like, if what I want, I get what I want when I want it. Sure, that makes it easier for all of us, you know, but democracy is messy. I think.
- [07:15]
A
Yeah, there are good reasons why, why we have not chosen a system like that.
- [07:18]
B
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I remember Churchill used to say, you know, democracy is the worst form of all governments, except for all the other ones we've tried. Right. Like, no one has said democracy is easy. I think there's an old quote as well that says something about democracy is great until you meet the average voter. Right. Like, it is tough. It's tough to get elected, it's tough to stay elected. It is tough to get things done. There can be people who are in your way all the. And it feels like nothing ever moves along. And this idea that no one can stand in your way and you get to act like, say Putin or Kim Jong Un and just do what you want when you want it. Yes, of course, things can get done a lot quicker. And there's a lot of people who are looking around our country right now and saying, look, he's changing homelessness. He's getting rid of homelessness. You're like, no, he's using the military to clear out encampments. That doesn't mean homelessness is gone. It just means you're not looking at it. Right. That's a different way of dealing with actual problems. In many ways, it's not actually dealing with the problems, it's erasing the problems from view. But that does not necessarily mean you are changing things. It's the same thing with the border. Right. Like you round a bunch of people up and put them in a for profit prison. You didn't actually change immigration policy. You just got people out of the eye line of the people who think they need immigration policy changed.
- [08:31]
A
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And another way to think about it is, look, he comes from a business background. In business, his mindset was what is good for my company, what is good for me. And that doesn't mean, by the way, that people that come from a business background can't make the shift to politics and to government, where you have to actually think about more broadly what is good for a large number of people, not just your own friends and associates. But he's never made that shift, never even close. And he still brings this mindset of how do I bring the greatest benefit to myself and maybe to the few people around me who I also want to help either financially or with political favors, and has never demonstrably thought about the good of the country. And I think we're seeing that to devastating effect right now.
- [09:13]
B
Devastating effect. But also, if we're talking about business, this is a man that's never had a shareholder, never had a boss. He's always been his own boss who hired his family members and his yes men to surround him. So he's never actually run a business the way, say, another business would be run, where you are answerable to somebody. He's never been answerable to anybody. So he's now running the country the way he ran his own businesses, which were unaccountable, you know, and he ran six of them into the ground.
- [09:39]
A
Couldn't say it better myself.
- [09:41]
B
So let's talk about this summit that happened in Alaska on Friday, August 15, and the actions that followed, particularly with the European leaders just dropping everything to fly to D.C. for Monday, August 18th to meet with Trump. So walk me through what those of you who actually understand foreign policy and foreign relations saw in both that Alaskan summit and what you think the European leaders felt when they just felt the need to come here as a united front a few days later.
- [10:10]
A
Sure. So I think when you're talking about a summit between two world leaders, by the way, two world leaders who have very important, high stakes topics to discuss, as President Putin and President Trump do, I don't necessarily object to the idea of them meeting. In fact, I think it is a good thing, fundamentally that President Trump says he has a goal of trying to end this war. It's been a terrible war. Terrible for the Ukrainians, terrible for Europe, for broader stability, terrible for Russians as well. And so wanting to end the war is not a bad instinct, but. But it really matters how you want to end the war. And so the two ways of looking at the summit are, one, how does it look? How does it feel? What is the impression and the message that is sent? And then two, and more importantly, what do you actually get done at the summit? So on the first score, we talked about this a little bit, but I think it bears repeating. President Trump could have engaged President Putin in a sober, measured way. You know, looking him eye to eye, staring him down and standing up for what's right, what's decent, what's in America's interest. Instead, he treated him really the way you would treat almost like your best friend in the world if you were getting together with them at a summit. Lots of back slapping and smiling and whispering in each other's ears and inviting President Putin to ride with him in the presidential limousine. Now, look, on some level, all of this is just imagery and symbolism, but on another level, most of the world is watching this, and the conclusions they draw, since they're not actually in the meetings, are going to be based on these images and these impressions. They're very carefully chosen by the White House and in this case, by the President himself, who is deeply image conscious. And he chose to send a certain message with the way the choreography and the pageantry of the summit went, which is, this guy is my friend and somebody who I care about and who I respect, not somebody I'm going to push to make hard decisions. That's on the imagery side. On the substance side, it was very hard to know what happened because in the aftermath, they both came out, both President Putin and President Trump, and said, oh, great meeting, really great, great future. You know, we're going to work together. But they didn't give a lot of details. And what has emerged since the summit, through leaks and through background briefings to reporters, is what I think many of us were most worried about, which is that President Putin would show up in Alaska, benefit, because he's basically been ostracized from a lot of the world, benefit from being embraced by President Trump, being shown to almost be back in the good graces by somebody who is, you know, entitled, at least traditionally considered the leader of the free world. Whether or not that's still the case, we can debate, take those benefits, but offer nothing in terms of concessions on Russia's position that could actually bring about the end of the war. And there's like, three key issues that Russia did not move on. It did not move on whether Ukraine can benefit from either membership in NATO or some other security guarantees, guarantees about its future security from the United States or from the West. No give on that position. It did not bend on territory. And in fact, what President Putin seems to have put on the table is if Ukraine wants to end the war, it would have to give up a bunch more of its territory in order for Russia to agree to a ceasefire. And then it did not give on other basic issues in the conflict, including things like, could US Or European troops be present in Ukraine someday to help secure Ukraine's future again in a situation when there's a ceasefire, so that Russia can't someday just decide, well, I'm done with the ceasefire, I want to go back in and reinvade Ukraine. It gave on none of those things. And so the reason, just to finish the answer to your question, that the Europeans showed up on Monday, I think was largely to confirm what I just said, that actually Russia didn't put anything meaningful on the table, and then to try to claw back what they could in terms of Trump's own position to do damage control, basically, given the pretty severe damage to the united front in favor of Ukraine that the Europeans always want to present with the United States. So I credit them for showing up en masse and making the case to President Trump a few days later.
- [14:07]
B
Yeah, it was pretty crazy. I don't think I've ever seen that in my time watching politics. To see that many leaders not come together for something like the G7 or something like that. They all, like, flew to D.C. to have this conversation with our president, which was basically, it looked like, to talk him down. I mean, like you said, what we witnessed on that tarmac, that red carpet rolling right up to the base of Putin's plane, I mean, that was. The optics of that were so shocking as an American to see that. And then all the, as you said, back slapping and this kind of thing. But, I mean, our president was genuinely clapping as Putin came along. And I don't think there's any other way to look at Putin other than a war criminal who has systematically invaded a country that is our ally, that has killed millions of people, including his own people, who has stolen Ukrainian children and tried to make them Russian and put them out into Russian families. The war that is happening between those two countries right now is astoundingly terrible. And to have the American president be so buddy, buddy with someone who's doing that was really very, very hard to see. But then on, on top of that, like you said, we didn't get any of the concessions that we were talking about. There's no ceasefire, there's no agreement. And if anything, Putin kind of got the photo op he wanted. He got to be legitimized on the world stage. And then on top of that, he basically was just stalling because as far as I understand, there was a time limit. He was supposed to have made agreements and he had passed that time limit, not done what he was supposed to do. But then you can't really act on sanctions or anything like that if you're in the middle of, quote, unquote, peace talks, right? So here he is in Alaska and he wants the land he wanted from the beginning, right? He's like, I still want the same things I wanted before. I still think that Donbass belongs to me. I still want to keep Crimea. I still want, you know what I Mean, like, he had no intention of wavering on any of his plans.
- [15:56]
A
Yeah. This is the maddening political magic of President Trump in some ways, because he said going into the summit quite clearly, if there is no ceasefire, if Russia doesn't come in and agree to my terms, then there will be, quote, unquote, severe consequences that I will place on Russia. They did not do that. He did not impose severe consequences. And at the end of the day, politically, it's just hard to tell whether that hurts him, whether the press really holds him accountable in the way that they might another leader, because they kind of have priced in almost the expectation that he's not going to live up to what he says. So he's held to a lower standard. And to your point about Putin and really about the European leaders, in some ways, it's not that. What the Trump people would say is, look, if we want to make peace, you got to talk to bad people. You don't make peace with good people because you're not fighting good people. Perfectly reasonable position. But there was a way to do this meeting that was not walking up to Vladimir Putin and giving him the middle finger. You're not going to make peace that way either. But that also was not walking up to Vladimir Putin and putting an arm on him, patting him on the back and saying, you're my guy. And somewhere in between was the right way to handle that meeting, but he chose the latter. And by the way, the contrast between how he treated Putin and how he treated the European leaders, which, by the way, is better than he often treats them. You know, sometimes he is disparaging and condescending to them and talks over them. And, you know, we saw what he did with President Zelensky the first time Zelenskyy came to the Oval Office, which was one of the more appalling displays of presidential behavior that I've ever seen. Berating him, basically telling him, you caused the war and you're going to lose, and you're going to lose because I don't like you more or less. That was basically the message that he gave President Zelensky. He didn't do any of that this time. But by comparison with how he treated Putin, it was so much more cold and clinical and business like that. If you just saw the images, you would judge probably that President Trump was on President Putin's side of the war, as opposed to being on Ukraine's side of the war, where we should be, or even a neutral party between the two.
- [17:58]
B
Yeah, because the Russia, Russia, Russia thing was never particularly a hoax in my opinion. I mean, look, it's hard not to see what Trump is doing right now as in my opinion, massive foreign policy failures. When you see the American military deployed on American streets and the rigging of elections to keep the House in Trump's hands, Obviously we are failing domestically as well. But since you're a foreign expert, I want to talk about the mistakes you and your colleagues believe Trump is making beyond just this summit. If we want to keep the current Western democracy led world order, it seems like he's making a lot of mistakes. But more realistically, if the series of decisions Trump is making are actually more in line with the fact that he wants to change the world order, then it seems like he's doing exactly the right thing. So where do you guys sit on that? 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- [24:13]
A
That to take just a step halfway back to kind of how he sees the world, which I think is important to note, just because it's very different from how any previous president has seen the world, Democrat or Republican. By the way, this isn't actually a partisan comment. Both Republicans and Democrats historically have believed that the world is a inherently chaotic place and it is better for America, principally for America. We sometimes talk about it being better for everybody, and it is better for everybody, but principally better for America if the world is organized, if we are the ones doing the organizing, and frankly, if we have more friends on our side who see the world the way we do than we do adversaries on the other side who try to change things. It's a pretty simplistic way to put it, but I think that is basically the worldview that every president has had up till the current day. President Trump has a different view, which is one the world is inherently chaotic. He agrees with us on that, but basically he accepts and embraces the chaos. He does not want to try to organize it. And he does not believe that having friends on our side is helpful. His view of alliances and partnerships and friendships, you know, NATO, our Asian allies, sometimes allies in our, in our own hemisphere, is that they extract more from us. We give them more than we get out of those relationships. This is a bad deal for America. Big international institutions where we all get together to talk about problems are a bad deal for America because America puts more into them than it gets out of them. And big international agreements on trade, on nuclear issues have all been negotiated to our disadvantage by idiots. You know, he's often talks about how these are terrible deals. He only makes good deals. And so he wants to undo all of that and basically accept a system in which it's every country for yourself. America is a bigger country, stronger country. So maybe we do okay in that system. But it is inherently much less stable, much less prosperous, much more prone to conflict. And part of the reason why, Since World War II, you know, 75 plus years, we have not had these big global conflicts is because there are mechanisms in place to try to address them. They're highly imperfect. The US actually candidly has not always behaved well as the sort of steward of this system. We've made a lot of mistakes. But it is better than a system that is purely chaos. And the system that he is trying to embrace is a system of pure chaos.
- [26:38]
B
Yeah. Anne Appelbaum wrote a great article in the Atlantic years ago and then she made it into a book. And it was called autocracy Inc. And it was basically, basically the concept that there are two major warring companies. If you look at it in a capitalistic way, Autocracy Inc. And democracy Inc. And they both have C suites with like people who are in charge and then all the workers below. But that autocracy Inc. Was growing, improving, making, because they didn't have to ask as many people when they wanted to do things. And that the allies that the autocrats have, they don't necessarily have to agree in a world order or on a world sense, or even what their, their main long term goals are. Because ultimately their main long term goals are staying power, money, and domination of the leaders. What happens to the people is almost secondary. And I think that America has sadly joined that company under Donald Trump. He's moved over to the world where it's transactional, where you don't have to think about your people. Like you said, American foreign policy is far from perfect. We have made a lot of mistakes. But you can see when Donald Trump came in and he took out US Aid right away. And that's soft power that we've put around the world. And we leave a vacuum for countries like China to fill if we don't fill them. And it's a way of, you know, when if you're starving people in a certain country and food shows up that says US Aid on it, you have positive feelings towards the United States. If that no longer comes and it comes from China, then you have positive feelings towards China. I don't think people mostly understand that kind of foreign policy, because why would we? We're all trying to kind of function in our daily lives. But what I'm seeing when I read foreign news or I listen to people like our former Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is that foreign leaders are kind of deciding at this point that they can no longer rely on the United States, that they have to move away from the US or work around us. That this idea of America, first of me, first of how do we win? It's only for us, is ultimately going to be America alone and the American people will suffer for that, both safety wise, but also financially. What do you think about that?
- [28:40]
A
Yeah, look, I mean, I think, to be honest, those of us who believe in a more traditional foreign policy made one big mistake, maybe a bunch of big mistakes, but one big mistake that Trump has taken advantage of, which is we talked about things like foreign assistance. You just mentioned usaid, which does this incredible work all around the world, eradicating diseases and all kinds of other things, as if this were something that the United States did, in a purely altruistic way, help the people of whatever country many Americans have never heard of. And the reason we talk about it that way is because it sounds better to a global audience. It often, I think, does not sound good to an American audience because people adopt the mindset that Trump now has really pounded, which is, why are we benefiting all these people over there when we should be spending money? Which, by the way, he does not want to do, but at least he.
- [29:29]
B
Says he does not want to do.
- [29:31]
A
Here in the United States. So it's a disingenuous argument, but it really resonates, I think, with Americans. And instead of the way we have traditionally talked about assistance, what we should have been saying, which is the truth, is that this is fundamentally good for us. Not having an outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, yes, is good because the people in West Africa are not going to die of Ebola, but it also means that disease is not going to end up in an American city for the first time, which would be a devastating development. We do this both because it benefits broadly the world and principally because it is good for us. And the fact that we have eradicated all of these early warning systems for diseases, all of these programs to fight extremism in countries around the world, you know, we've seen in a devastating way how extremism that starts somewhere else can end up in the United States. And I think we made a mistake by not talking enough about the direct impact that this has here. Because at the end of the day, people are a little bit selfish. Like, let's be honest, they want to know how this will benefit us, not just how this will benefit a person far away who they will never meet. And I think we too often neglected making the arguments about how this is good for us.
- [30:39]
B
Yeah. So we did this like we're gonna help save the world and feed the children. And people are like, our children are starving, you know.
- [30:44]
A
Correct.
- [30:45]
B
And there's a way to say, well, actually we're feeding the world and helping the starving because it ultimately won't end up with foreign wars on our soil or, you know, we won't end up with terrible diseases over here, cause we cured them over there, that kind of thing. We never said that. And it allowed again, a vacuum for someone to walk in and say, I'm taking it all back for us, that I'm going to spend, you know, it on alligator, Alcatraz and you know, military in your streets. And you know, it's not like they're helping our homeless or building shelters.
- [31:13]
A
And what puts the lie to it is it's not like he's taking that money and saying, we're going to spend this to increase the social safety net in the United States, help our veterans, underprivileged people, or any of that stuff. He wants to do it primarily, it seems like, so he can pay for tax cuts for his friends and his demographics. So that's where his lie breaks down. But, but the first part of that story, unfortunately is quite compelling. And he has sort of beaten us to the punch on that.
- [31:37]
B
Yeah. Honestly, the Republican Party by general nature are better long term thinkers. They are better at selling their narrative. And even if their narrative hurts more people, it's a better narrative. It's solid PR advertising. They have done it better than us for 40 years.
- [31:51]
A
We have a lot of work to do.
- [31:52]
B
We certainly do. Now listen, for me, abandoning our allies around the world, it all comes back to stuff like that signal gate crisis. This because, like, why would Our allies share intelligence with us. When our national security advisor and Secretary of Defense are treating sensitive information, often information that isn't even ours, so callously. Right. Like this incompetence that we see in the leadership here, it has far reaching effects to our allies overseas. Coming back to how it serves us, which is the story you and I are talking about. If we don't have that information from foreign allies because they don't share it with us anymore because we are not a safe place to share, because we like tell our secrets on signal, we are less safe. Safe. We are less safe as a people. We don't have a full picture of what's going on. We don't know what's happening with terrorism. And it puts our people and our national security at risk. I feel like the bottom line is there's so much fallout from us abandoning our allies like this.
- [32:46]
A
Yeah, look, you asked a very important question earlier that this also comes back to, which is how is the rest of the world viewing what is happening here? And I think what's happening unfortunately, is, you know, Trump was elected once, he served for four years, he got voted out. I think there was still an open question at that point as to whether the Trump phenomenon in American politics is a phenomenon. He has now kind of dominated the American political discussion for a decade and will for the next few years, at least until his term is done. And so whether that was an aberration or whether that was actually an inflection point in a new kind of direction for the United States, I think people like, I won't speak for you, but certainly people like me, I wanted that to be seen as an aberration, that we would revert back to a more normal way of doing business. And there was nobody more kind of normal way of doing business than Joe Biden. But Joe Biden only lasted one term and then Kamala Harris lost and then American voters brought Trump back. So if you're the rest of the world, leaving aside that, I think many of us believe that we will be able to take the White House back sooner rather than later. Have to hope, hope for that. They look at this shift back and forth and the return of Trump as kind of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. And they are not going to get fooled again. And so they are going to treat the United States in kind of four year increments. Whoever we're dealing with over four years will deal with them in the way that we have to. But we're not going to make these 20 year, 30 year, 50 year bets that America is our most important relationship the way we used to, because we cannot not depend and rely on you. And that is a fundamentally different way of those countries looking at the world. And where it's going to come back to haunt us, I fear, is, yes, the Ukraine conflict, which is critically important to our interests. But we're also in this competition with China, which we haven't talked about in, in this conversation. And China is a much stronger country than Russia now, stronger than Russia militarily, which is relatively new, much stronger than Russia economically, which has been for some time. And if the United States is going to effectively compete with China over how the world works and whose vision for society prevails, we're going to need our friends in that competition. And in fact, we are much better off having our friends. But if our friends are looking at the world as us, not very reliable China, big economic opportunity doesn't really ask a lot of us, just doesn't want us to kind of get in their way or say bad things about us. It becomes a much harder decision for them about whether to be on one side or the other or whether to just say, we'll let you guys fight that out.
- [35:20]
B
Yeah. I mean, ultimately it makes perfect sense. I heard somebody saying that European leaders are like, we can't keep relying on America because we can't say, well, what are our trade policies going to be every four years based on how some swing voters voted in Wisconsin. Right. Like, they're like, we can't make our decisions based on that. Like, you're, you're, our country is too unstable. You know, we've been downgraded on the Democratic index. Like, we just are not between the electoral College and now the gerrymandering. It's like, if I was a European leader, I would be like, I can't count on the United States either. Not if they're going to keep making these decisions and not if the trade policies are going to be, you know, willy nilly based on the leader's will. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, China does appear to be far more stable, even if you don't agree with how they handle their people.
- [36:05]
A
Well, and that's the European countries who are our closest friends. Imagine how these conversations go with countries that are really kind of swing voters in the, in the big debate.
- [36:14]
B
Yeah. In the big picture. Yeah.
- [36:15]
A
And China, you know, we used to go around the world. It was part of my job, part of our job in the previous administration and say to countries, look we're not asking you to sever your relations with China. What we're telling you is a partnership with America is a better bet for you. China will try to coerce you. They'll try to tell you to do things and punish you if you don't do them. They will try to extract resources from you and not pay you a fair price for those resources and treat your labor population badly. And all of these things that we know China does around the world. And that argument sometimes worked, sometimes didn't, but it was the best argument we had going for us. Now, the country making that argument about who is the bad partner and who is going to coerce you and treat you badly, and who, you know, you might wake up one morning and realize you have a 50% tariff on your trading relationship is the United States. And I don't know how quickly we can recover from that, honestly. They have introduced this uncertainty about the quality of the United States as a friend and as a partner that countries will always have in the back of their mind, I think, long after Trump is gone.
- [37:19]
B
Yeah, I agree with that, sadly. And I also think that it's one of the reasons that should we be able to pull it together and turn it around and take our house back and then maybe take our presidency back, we would have to have such massive repercussions for the people who did this. Not just for our own country to know that this should never happen again, could never happen again, but also to show the world that we are not this unreliable dictator type led country, that we have rules, that we have a rule of law, that we have guardrails that we are going to put in place and hold in place. I think in many ways we have to prove to the world, you know, it's what you say when you're in a relationship. You know, it's like, like whether it's a you and I are dating kind of thing. It's like, prove it to me. Don't say the words to me. You have to show me. And I think that the United States would have to show the world with its actions that it was never going to allow this to happen again. Otherwise why would anyone believe us?
- [38:14]
A
Yeah. And look, it sometimes feels like we play in the United States by two totally different sets of rules, depending on who is in charge. Democrats take power and they say things like, well, you know, we have to stand up for, for principles and everybody has the right to their opinions. And, you know, people who served in office during their time and need to be respected for, you know the positions they held and what they did. And then the Trump administration comes in and sort of lays waste to all of that in a really vindictive way. Goes after people who either serve with them, who disagreed with some of what they were doing, or served in a different administration. And so you see them doing things like turning the justice system against people, law enforcement against people, people, you know, John Bolton's house.
- [38:56]
B
John Bolton. This is what I. We are recording this, everybody. The FBI has gone into John Bolton's house, who worked for the Trump administration, who is a hardcore conservative, war hawk.
- [39:08]
A
National guy, advisor to the president, longest serving.
- [39:10]
B
Yes. I mean, this is not some Democrat you know, that he's coming after. This is his own people, like you stand up against him and he is coming for you. This is the same thing that everyone said was unbelievable when the FBI came to Mar a Lago, but they had a warrant, they had gone through a judge, they had done everything by the book. And Trump did have a whole bunch of secret things that he wasn't supposed to have. Now they've done the same thing to John Bolton with absolutely no repercussions, it seems it's basically a threat. It's an intimidation tactic. Do not stand against me. Do not speak against me. And it's, you know, I mean, I'm sure you've seen dictators rise around the world. Does it not seem indicative of that? That.
- [39:48]
A
Yeah, there's a whole range of this stuff that's happening. Going to the Smithsonian museums and telling them they need to change some of the content that reflects, you know, the history of the country, including, by the way, the history of the period in which President Trump served during his first term, and altering that content. Firing the person who's in charge of telling the US Government about job creation or loss in the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's part of, I think, why. Also, he attacks the press and the intelligence community. And I think the reason for this is he wants to be the person to tell you what the facts are. And so anyone who offers kind of an alternative factual framework, whether it's journalists, whether it's people who served inside his own administration, whether it's universities or business leaders, whether it's his own intelligence community which publishes set of facts that he gets on his desk every single morning, if they do not comport with the worldview that he has in his mind, they are now at risk of not just being not listened to, which we've had a problem with in the past, but actually being actively punished and that is a new phenomenon and a very dangerous one.
- [40:56]
B
Well, it also seems kind of like something that should be studied. Like we have to live in Donald Trump's reality or be punished for it. You know what I mean? Like what you were talking about with the Smithsonians. Donald Trump had himself removed from presidents that had been impeached, and then there was so much backlash that they had to put it back in the Smithsonian. They are now taking a look at how we represent things like slavery and saying maybe this should be described differently because we don't like how it makes the country look. That's not how things should be done. It's certainly not historically accurate, but it's terrifying because I remember Steve Bannon before the 2024 election saying, like, you just wait, because history is written by the winners. And what it seems like right now is that they were the winners and they are going to rewrite history so it serves them. He won the 2020 election. Slavery wasn't bad. You know, like, this is a Christian nation. Anything that they want, and if you speak up against it, you will be punished. And that is not how a nation of freedom based on a constitution and a democracy should ever behave.
- [42:01]
A
And look, part of the problem here, and it's reflected in some ways in this conversation, by the way, also part of. Of the strategy, is that there is so much of this across such a broad range of topics that it is dizzying, frankly. It's dizzying for me, and I kind of live and breathe this stuff. I can only imagine what it's like for people who, frankly, do not want their life to be dominated by politics, which I also completely understand. They want to kind of dip in and dip out of it.
- [42:28]
B
I understand it. And my name is Politics Girl. I'm like, God damn, just make it stop. You know?
- [42:32]
A
So even just deciding what to focus our limited kind of mental, emotional bandwidth on is challenging. And that is a tactic, it's a strategy for these guys, because you can't focus on all of this at once. And so you can't concentrate opposition on kind of priorities. If you can't concentrate opposition on priorities, there will never be enough opposition to any of this to actually change the course. And it's been quite. I hate to say it, but quite effective, actually, as a. As a strategy for this.
- [43:02]
B
Yeah, in many ways, I'm curious to know, because we talk a lot about this feeling like 1930s Germany, you know, when we start building Alligator Alcatraz and pulling people off the street and asking for papers and dictatorship on the rise and far right nationalism and this kind of thing. But in many ways, I feel like it's more like how Putin took over Russia, you know, with getting the moneyed interest involved and taking over the press. It's what Orban copied in Hungary. It's this sort of playbook. And on a complete side note, because I'm actually deeply curious about what you think is Putin running the show here? Like, it's hard not to think when you see the president leaving the meeting, say, with the European leaders and the NATO leaders to call the president of Russia and have a full conversation. I think there's a lot of us who believe that Putin is showing Trump a playbook that Trump is then following, that Donald Trump is at best a useful idiot for the Kremlin and at worst an actual Russian asset. Now, people like me are mocked mercilessly for saying things like that. But I'm curious, curious as to what the national security world is saying regarding this connection between Trump and Putin or Trump and Russia. Because if you look back to Helsinki in 2017, he said he publicly believed Putin over all of our own intelligence agencies. We saw how he behaved when Putin showed up in Alaska, which you were speaking of. Like, if you're looking at just the optics, it really seems like this is his guy, you know, leaving the room to have this conversation with Putin. When people asked him, like, why he did that, and he said, well, if I didn't leave the room, it would have been rude. And they were like, rude to who? And he said, said to Putin. Right. And you're like, you left every world leader and NATO leader in a room.
- [44:40]
A
Yeah. Also, rude is not exactly something he's, you know, demonstrated in a version.
- [44:44]
B
He's like Mr. Polite over here. Yeah. I mean, but it does seem very weird. So at the very least, it seems like Trump wants America to be more like Russia. This kind of top down, moneyed interest oligarchy where Trump gets sort of dictator treatment, where everyone functions in deference to him and he and his family make a ton of money and everyone who kisses the ring gets special treatment and the rest of the country suffers. What is the thinking in your community, the national security community, on that? Or are you even allowed to say it? Are you supposed to be like, we don't know? What is the thought on that? For us regular folks, I would say.
- [45:18]
A
There'S a wide range of views on the big question of why he is the way he is when it comes to Russia and when it comes to Putin. And I don't have A definitive answer to this. I am probably more of the school of thought that there's not some grand conspiracy. But would I be shocked if one were revealed? No, I would not be shocked. Shocked. I've just never seen the evidence of it. But it almost. You don't have to reach that question because this is so deeply felt and so long standing, as you said, goes back to a much earlier period that whether Putin is calling the shots or Trump is calling the shots is almost immaterial because they are like minded on everything here. It does not seem to me, for example, that Trump is kind of grudgingly under duress, going along with some Russian pressure campaign against him. Doesn't seem that way at all. If Russia is pushing, they are pushing on a wide open door when it comes to President Trump because he is predisposed to see the world the way they do. And by the way, yes, there is some manipulation here. And the best example of it, again from Alaska, is President Putin is not stupid. What is one of the first things he says to Trump? Mail in voting. That's a really corrupt form of, of conducting a democratic process and conducting an election. Obviously, he knows that Trump has been railing against mail in voting for many, many years now, that it is like a boogeyman that he has in his head about maybe. Why? Because he believes it's fraudulent. He lost a previous election. So does Putin care about mail in voting in a democracy? Let's put it this way, mail in voting is not going to determine whether Vladimir Putin stays in power.
- [46:54]
B
Well, let's be honest. They have mail in voting in Russia, But Putin wins 80% of the vote every single time. So it's like totally irrelevant. It's irrelevant. If you're gonna steal the vote, you're stealing the vote.
- [47:05]
A
But it's not irrelevant to cozying up to President Trump and to planting the seed that like, hey, I'm with you, I'm on your side. And I think a normal person would see that coming, would say, oh, this person is trying to kind of ingratiate themselves with me. But Trump seemed to just eat it up and then echo it, and then now issue this executive order that seems almost as if he's basically saying, I was advised to do this by the great democrat, small D D Democrat, Vladimir Putin. Bizarre.
- [47:32]
B
Totally bizarre. But it's also, he hears what he wants to hear, he likes what he wants to. Like, he'll say, you know, like someone asked him recently if he was gonna pardon Puffy and he was like, well, he was always nice to me. But then when I ran, he wasn't so nice to me. So, like, I'll have to think about it, because, you know, like, and you're like, it's all about who was nice to me, who was friendly to me.
- [47:51]
A
That is a very honest, I think, accounting of how he makes decisions, which is, is it good for me? Is this person one of my people? Or maybe not one of my people? Not? Like, is it deserved? What are the merits of the argument? Is it right or wrong doesn't even enter into the equation.
- [48:06]
B
No. And that's problematic for a leader, does it? Is it right or wrong? Doesn't enter into the equation. Is deeply problematic for a leader with the biggest military in the world.
- [48:17]
A
And that extends to foreign policy, too. A big part of his problem with Zelenskyy is he did not. Not believe that Zelenskyy treated him with the appropriate degree of. Of respect and deference. And, you know, look, I will say, having dealt a bit with President Zelensky when I worked for President Biden, that he's not always the easiest character, by the way. He's a leader of a country that is in an existential war. So not exactly a situation in which you are going to be easy to deal with because you have real needs and. And demands. But to Zelensky's credit, it. He sort of figured Trump out a little bit. Rather than argue with him in public the way he did for a while, he just started saying yes to things that Trump asked for. And he did it not because, I think he liked what Trump was asking him for. He agreed to a ceasefire. He doesn't really want a ceasefire because his territory is. Russia is sitting on 20% of his territory. So he doesn't really want to just abandon that, even temporarily while they negotiate. But he said yes to those things because he knew that Putin would send. And that was, for him, for Ukraine, a very smart strategy because it's the one thing that has complicated Trump's whole project on Ukraine. Trump came to office believing that Ukraine was the problem, the barrier to peace. And so if I put enough pressure on Ukraine to get them to agree to a ceasefire, then, of course, my friend Vladimir will agree to a ceasefire and the war will be over. And so he tried that play, and he put a ton of pressure on Zelensky in a very, I think, dishonorable way. But Zelenskyy ultimately said, okay, I call your bluff. Russia, I'm open for a ceasefire. Are you open for a ceasefire? And Russia said, no. And so that is the Only thing that has made Trump start now to talk about Russia doing bad things. Russia maybe needing more pressure and more sanctions. He hasn't followed through on a lot of it, but he has started to provide Ukraine with weapons again, which he withheld for the first five or six months that he was in office. And basically Zelenskyy, I think, backed him into that corner by just yesing him.
- [50:08]
B
Him to death and showing up in a suit.
- [50:11]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Suitish suit.
- [50:15]
B
Ish. It was very military. It was kind of. It was sort of slick, actually. And, and he got a good dig into the reporter who had gotten mad at him the first time for not wearing his. I thought that was quite good. We should remind people that Trump said he could end this war in 24 hours, that if he was elected, he would end the war on day one, if not earlier. Now he's talking about how he might host a trilateral meeting with the two leaders, but only after they've been met first. He's taking a wait and see approach at this point. This is what we've heard. What do you think this is going to end up with? Because I know they're talking About NATO Article 5, Collective Self Defense mandate. Like you said, they're going to start selling weapons again. I think the Ukraine is scheduled to buy $90 billion in American weapons. What do you think is going to happen with this conflict right now moving forward? Because America is kind of like standing back now. They're doing.
- [51:03]
A
Predictions in the Trump era are about the dumbest thing you can engage in. But I'm going to do it anyway because you. Good point.
- [51:08]
B
I asked you, I say. Yep.
- [51:10]
A
So, yeah, direct question deserves a direct answer, I guess. I don't think the war is going to end anytime soon. And the reason I don't think the war is going to end anytime soon is Ukraine is not going to give away through negotiations anything that it thinks that it might still be able to hold on to by fighting. Fighting countries just don't tend to do that. And so unless Russia's negotiating position changes, and the only way that's going to happen is if the United States puts with its European allies severe pressure on Russia, more sanctions pressure, more weapons to Ukraine, unless the United States does that. And it'll be uncomfortable for President Trump to do that given everything we just talked about in terms of how he sees President Putin and Russia, then I think Russia's position continues to be what it's been the entire time has not changed at all.
- [51:57]
B
Despite this country belongs to me. I Want it back?
- [52:00]
A
Give it, or at least give me more of it. And make sure Ukraine is neutral and has no allies and not a very strong military going forward, because that's the other condition Russia's insistent on. Ukraine cannot continue to build up its military in a situation in which there's a ceasefire. So if Russia insists on those conditions, Ukraine can never agree to that. And until and unless the United States, it's actually diagnosis properly what is happening here, which is Russia waging a war of aggression that it will not stop unless it is stopped, we're going to keep going. And you know, that's a tragedy because it's devastating the people of Ukraine. It's a tragedy for kind of overall stability in the world and for the message that is sent when a bigger country thinks it can just swallow a piece of a weaker, smaller country. This might makes right idea that I think Trump kind of likes on some level, part of why he is sympathetic to Russia. But that unfortunately feels like where we're going to be for the narrative term.
- [52:50]
B
Yeah, no, it's the same mentality that says that Canada should be the 51st state. Right. Like, we're more powerful. You guys should just be part of us. This is what we think. This sort of mentality that might makes right, I think is problematic for the world. And it goes back to what we were talking about with Autocracy and Democracy, Inc. And how they have completely different mindsets about how the world should work. So I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us today. John, before you go. So I think people in America don't have the same insight on national security issues that you do. Obviously, we're not privy to the ins and outs of the State Department or the military, and we're definitely not up to date on every foreign issue. We can barely keep up with what's going on in America right now, quite frankly. If you were to tell Americans right now what foreign issues you think they should be following or what our biggest concerns ought to be when it comes to international order, what would you say that they should keep their ears out for? So that when they hear it or they're talking about it, they say, oh, this is something I need to kind of of pay attention to.
- [53:46]
A
Yeah, it's a really good question. For the reason that we talked about earlier, which is just so much going on in the world, I have to say that the thing that I am increasingly focused on and increasingly worried about, but that doesn't get enough attention. And we didn't Talk about it in this conversation, which was focused on other things, is how artificial intelligence, which is going to be obviously something that reorders our entire society domestically, is also going to play out out geopolitically in the wider world because like many technologies, just take nuclear energy. There are both beneficial civilian dimensions to these technologies often, and then somewhat scarier, significant military dimensions to these technologies. And AI is no different. And the difference with AI, though, is that unlike nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, it is not going to be a technology that's just held by a few countries, mercifully, still not that many countries that have this technology with a system of severe regulation and international agreements that govern its use around it. And because of all that, we have not had the use of a nuclear weapon since the United States used them in at the end of World War II. AI is going to be held basically by everybody. And yes, there may be differences in the quality of the models, and the United States may retain a slight advantage at the high end of the most advanced leading edge edge algorithms and models, but everybody's going to have access to this stuff and the national security implications of that, whether it's terrorist groups or adversary countries having access to this technology with significant military applications for things like developing newer, deadlier weapons, including biological weapons and all kinds of other things, I could spend 20 minutes going through. But the fact that that is going to be broadly held, broadly accessed by everybody, including people that wish to do us harm in a relatively near term period, and that there are not the same level of rules and agreements and conversations going on among the people who hold this technology is a pretty dangerous thing. And so I think that's one I'd pay attention to if I were anybody.
- [55:48]
B
Well, you know what? I hear this daily because my husband's in tech and he loses his flipping mind every day about this. He's like, they need a NATO for AI. The fact that we are doing a sort of space race, nuclear race thing between countries about who can get AI faster, better, it means we're not putting any guardrails, any lessons. The whole world should be getting together to make rules around AI because it's going to be in the whole world. Like you said, if I created a nuclear weapon and it stays in a silo in the middle of South Dakota that is contained. The Internet will not be contained. AI will not be contained.
- [56:26]
A
But it goes to an important point, I think, just as we wrap up here, I guess, that we talked about earlier, which is unless there is a system in place for countries to talk to each other, to work together, to collaborate, where there's like a modicum of trust and good faith. What you describe, some sort of big treaty to determine how we all kind of use this technology and what we don't do, where we don't use it and what limits we place on it is like mission impossible. And in a world in which, which, you know, unfortunately all of that, or a lot of that has been detonated by the current administration where countries don't frankly want to have anything to do with us in terms of these big negotiations if they don't have to. Because if we act in such bad faith, it's going to be much harder to do all that. And I think it'll be to our detriment. And by the way, this is a technology your husband probably knows far better than I do that has incredible potential for like positive effect on populations and humanity. But we also need to get our arms around the dangerous sides of it. And the idea that we can do that collectively in a world of every country for themselves and every person for themselves feels much harder than it would otherwise be.
- [57:26]
B
Yeah, this is absolutely the time for collaboration and trust and we have eroded that. Thanks for pointing that out because I really do think AI is the thing that we need to be watching out for and I'm really glad you've, you've noted that. I really appreciate you coming today. If there's anything you want people to be following or any websites that you're doing or any work that you're doing, please tell us so we can follow your work moving forward.
- [57:47]
A
Will do. Appreciate that and enjoy the conversation. As difficult as the topics are, it's important, it's important.
- [57:54]
B
It's best that we know we can't just ostrich our way through life because we're going to end up pretty surprised in a couple of years where we end up if we don't pay attention now.
- [58:02]
A
Amen.
- [58:05]
B
So that was John Finer reminding us how important good international relationships are in a changing world. That America is doing itself a major disposition service by eroding our allies trust in us at the very time, if you look at even the rise of AI alone, we need to be working together. That our president sees the world as a zero sum game and how it serves him. And that kind of selfishness might work in the business world if your only goal is financial gain, but it doesn't work in geopolitics if you want a safer, more secure planet. I want to thank John for joining us today and you for caring enough about democracy to be here. So until next week, pgm. Before you go, are you interested in getting this podcast ad free delivered directly to your inbox along with my kitchen rants? Then please consider becoming a member of Politics Girl Premium by going to politicsgirl.com and signing up. If you are already a premium member of this podcast, thank you so much for your support. And if you're not a member, please consider becoming a patron of my website work. Mainstream news is only giving you a version of billionaire backed propaganda at this point, so if you want real knowledge like this, it's essential to support those of us out here still bringing it to you. There is a link to sign up in the bio of this episode but also on politicsgirl.com and as always, please like and share these podcasts so we can grow our audience. Because the more people who have access to this kind of information, the better. As always, thank you for your time and support. The Politics Girl Podcast is written and performed by me, Lee McGowan and produced and edited by Happy Warrior Entertainment. All rights reserved.