← What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
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Foreign.
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Welcome back everybody, to what really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. I'm here as always with Walter Russell Mead of tablet, the Wall Street Journal, Hudson Institute and the Hamilton center at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week, the US flew B1 bombers near Venezuela on Thursday, stepping up pressure on Nicolas Maduro only days after other American warplanes carried out an attack demonstration near the American country. The bomber flights are part of a broad military ramp up which includes eight warships, a submarine, a P8 maritime patrol aircraft, MQ9 Reaper drones, and an F35 fighter squadron now in the region. Trump said on Thursday that he would bypass Congress rather than seek its approval to carry out military strikes against drug cartels that traffic narcotics to the United States, even as he vowed to expand the operation from attacks at sea to targets on land. The remarks came as the President has talked about expanding the military operation in which nine airstrikes at sea have resulted in 37 acknowledged deaths. According to the New York Times, the Senate is expected to vote next week on a bipartisan resolution that would bar the US from engaging in hostilities inside Venezuela without explicit authorization by Congress. Walter, is this news or faux news?
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Well, I think the least newsy part of that is the Senate resolution in that I doubt it's resolution like that would pass the House. And even if it did, I think this is a president who would probably continue with what he thinks is the is the right course of action. So we'll see. Generally speaking, Congress for a long time in history has not done very well when it comes to tussling with the executive over authority to do things internationally. You know, then I think more questionable in a way is, you know, what is the strategy here? Is it regime change in Venezuela? If so, that's a, that's a difficult thing to do. Is it to stop drug trafficking for Venezuela? Again, it seems very, very hard to get the Venezuelan government to do that. You know, submarine and F35 aren't that good at, at regime change and somehow getting involved in an ugly guerrilla war in Venezuela doesn't seem like the kind of thing that President Trump would like to do. So just what, you know, what, what does he cons would he consider a successful outcome of this strategy? I'm a little bit puzzled with that. I do note that intimidation of neighbors has had some success. The Cubans just extradited a wanted criminal to the U.S. generally speaking, I think we can say that they don't do that unless they're worried about something. And having an influential Floridian, Cuban American Secretary of State who seems to be able to deploy military assets in the Caribbean, that's the sort of thing that would get the attention of the Cubans. So I won't say that this policy is without impact. And I think some of the cooperation we've had from Mexico has been less about their wholehearted desire to help us with these problems than their concern about possible US Strikes against drug cartel facilities on Mexican territory. So one can see how a more activist, threatening posture regionally can get certain types of results.
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That.
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The question is, how far does that get you, and what is the trajectory that this is all taking you on that we'll have to wait and see?
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You touched on this. But in terms of the domestic politics of this campaign, if we can call it that so far, do you think this is more, kind of fits squarely in Trump's longstanding focus on the Western Hemisphere, Immigration, drug trafficking, the fentanyl trade, all that kind of stuff? Or do you see this more as kind of, as we've talked about on the podcast before, like Reagan in Grenada, this is kind of like, you know, this footage of, you know, bombing these vessels off the coast of Venezuela and killing these drug traffickers. This is kind of more in the category of, you know, easy social media victories, that kind of thing.
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Yeah, look, I'm not sure why that has to be either or, Jeremy. Certainly, I think there are a lot of Americans who do wonder why we would send military units overseas to promote democracy in Iraq, or democracy in Afghanistan, for that matter, when hundreds of thousands of Americans are killed by fentanyl coming into the US and the federal government seems to just kind of shrug its shoulders, well, nothing we can do. So I think in terms of using American assets for purposes that a lot of ordinary Americans on a common sense basis would say, well, yeah, is probably good strategy from the president. But again, the problem that I see is where does it take him? Can you declare victory and get out of a drug war, or do you sort of, you know, presumably these drug cartels, oh, my gosh, they're. They're attacking our. Our ships at sea. Well, gee, I guess we better not go to sea, then. But, you know, that's. There are other ways of getting. Getting across. But I. I suppose people would rather see a president that at least tries to address what a lot of people would see as a big domestic problem than someone who is just says, oh, the heck with that. I'm going to work on promoting trans Rights in, in the Dominican Republic or something like that.
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All right, our second story. New U.S. sanctions, including blacklisting Russia's biggest oil producers, hit at the core of Russia's faltering war economy and drew a swift rebuke from Vladimir Putin, who acknowledged the potential impact on his country. On Thursday, the Russian leader denounced the new sanctions, saying the measures are serious and could have consequences for Russia. President Trump's decision to impose the US Sanctions came after the Kremlin rejected his call for a ceasefire in Ukraine. Along the current front lines, followed by peace talks, the sanctions are hitting the Russian economy at a precarious time. After defying Western sanctions for over three years, the Russian economy has slowed to a crawl in recent months. Under the weight of a labor crunch, high interest rates, and a costly wartime fiscal squeeze, Moscow has resorted to hiking taxes and tapping into its rainy day fund to cover its widening budget deficit. The sanctions are also expected to introduce more friction in logistics and payment, shrink profit margins, and force Russian producers to offer further discounts on the global market.
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Market.
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Walter, are these new sanctions news or FO news?
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I think there's an element of news that's been overhyped. I mean, every time sanctions have been tightened since the invasion of Ukraine, we've had these press resorts, oh, well, this is going to force Putin now. We're going to show Putin, ah, the faltering Russian wartime economy. They're not going to be able to handle this, right. And yet somehow they keep, they keep going. That strikes me as the most likely outcome here. In an odd way, Trump seems to have fallen into what is typically a democratic trap, which is you try to fine tune escalation in a war. You think, well, I don't want to go too far, but I need to do something. And so you look for that middle ground. It's unlikely to be the thing that changes Putin's mind. So then you have to ask, well, why do it at all if it's not going to change his mind? And part of this is you do want to look like you're, you're trying, I suppose, ultimately, I think what, what Trump's goal in a sense ought to be here is to stir up the Europeans to take real responsibility for Ukraine. That is. So that you're saying we'll, we'll be the backstop, but we're not going to, you know, but it really is your responsibility, not ours. Primary responsibility. The Europeans have just failed to sort of get the next, you know, really move forward on this loan using frozen Russian assets. Apparently The Belgian prime minister raised objections, and that was enough to derail a process that all the Europeans were saying just 24 hours ago. Now we've done it. Now we're really going to show them. Now we've got our act together. Well, you just hadn't checked in with the prime minister of Belgium, that mighty state. And so, you know, we're kind of stuck in this situation. But I do think that in general, getting the Europeans to fully understand that this is on them, though we will help is the right way to go. How we get there, hard to say. I don't like at this point a lot of gradualism, just because, as Trump himself knows, the war is killing a lot of people every day the destruction is real, the economic devastation, but also every day it's driving Russia into a deeper, longer term dependence on China. And that I don't think is in the American interest. So sometimes it's better to just pull the band aid off all at once rather than just slowly, slowly and incrementally pull it off bit by bit. So I guess I would favor sort of either a thing of saying, well, we give up, we can't win here, or we are going to put on some sanctions or take some actions that will change your mind. And I may, at the risk of sounding a little bit like a broken record, we're still not doing enough outside of Ukraine to impose a price on Russia for this terrible war. There remain a lot of things that the United States and our allies could do that would make Putin feel that continuing the war is actually bad for him. And that's if he doesn't get to that place, I'm not sure that we're going to get to the ceasefire.
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By the way, just one follow up. Since you spent a lot of time in India over the last month, how often did US Sanctions on Russian oil exports that I think are in which India is kind of primarily implicated? How much did that come up?
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Well, generally, what a lot of people said to me is, you do know that Janet Yellen told us to do this, don't you? That that is basically the Indian position, is that you guys set up deliberately a system that was going to make Russia sell its oil underpriced. And you did it basically because you wanted to look like you're doing something to Russia and you didn't want to hurt Russia, but, but you didn't want gas prices to be going up in the United States. So you came up with this clever Rube Goldberg machinery and you asked us to play a part in it and well, we did and you know, making some money and that's not a bad thing. But now suddenly you're flipping and saying you're the enemy of civilization because you did what we told you to do. So what I basically got was mockery and scorn. And, you know, I, I was not a party to Ms. Yellen's or any other Biden official discussions with the Indians about this. So I'm not going to be able to be the umpire on it. But I, I, I think from the Indian perspective and from a, you know, again, they, they see this sort of half hearted nature and symbolic nature of Western policy on Russia and they're not quite sure why they should pay a large economic cost to allow us to pretend to ourselves that we have a Russia policy when we don't. Now, I think that the time has come and I think with these additional sanctions, we may see both China and India reducing purchases of Russian oil. But also, I would note, driving all of this, I don't think Trump would be doing this if there weren't already oil prices weren't already going down globally. So again, it's just not a nobility, new nobility of purpose and focus. It is opportunistically saying, well, here's a chance to tighten the notch without prices going up at home. I'm going to take it. Well, okay, but don't expect other people to be sort of inspired by your courage here because that's not what's happening. And the other thing, by the way, the Indians would say to me, other than that, well, Janet Yellen told us to do it, was that the Chinese are doing a lot more and where's their 25% tariff surcharge on it? So there was a, I would say a simple rejection of the American position on this map.
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All right, final story of the week. China is quickly becoming the global leader in nuclear power, with nearly as many reactors under construction as the rest of the world combined. While its dominance of solar panels and electric vehicles is well known, China is also building nuclear plants at an extraordinary pace. By 2030, according to the New York Times, China's nuclear capacity is set to surpass that of the United States. As the US And China compete for global supremacy, energy has become a geopolitical battleground. The U.S. particularly under President Trump, has positioned itself as the leading supplier of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. China, by contrast, dominates the manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. Yet in the race for atomic energy, China has one clear advantage. It has figured out how to produce Reactors relatively quickly and cheaply. The country now assembles reactors in just five to six years, twice as fast as Western nations and does so at a cost of well under $2per watt compared with $15per watt in the U.S. walter, is this news or FO news?
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So much energy news is basically people trying to take developments that are happening and sort of twist it to fit their own agenda. A lot of this just simply looks like what China, because the Chinese government can basically make anybody do anything it wants in China. You just say, fine, we're changing all the safety regulations, we're changing this, we're changing that, and lo and behold, we can make this stuff really cheap really fast. True, and certainly true that we have some self defeating and excessive regulations here caused basically by a lot of silly green hysteria, frankly. But okay. But I think again the missing part there is the degree to which China is moving really fast toward trying to achieve energy autarky as part of a program of making its economy less and less dependent on the outside, reducing its vulnerability to American countermeasures in the event of a war. This strikes me as much more fundamental here. So that China nuclear, they're building nuclear plants which they can will then not depend on large imports. And they can get stuff from Russia, solar and wind that again don't have to be shipped through the Straits of Malacca. And then meanwhile they're also going pretty hard tilt on coal, which is, you know, also something they've got a lot of at home. That is the story here. And we, that's what we need to be paying attention to. Yes, America needs to do much a much better job of increasing energy. I'm one of these people who believes in the all of the above approach. I don't think that solar power is icky or that wind power is icky or that nuclear power is icky. We need to do what we can that will involve reducing a lot of the regulatory overreach and overhang that makes building anything in this country so difficult. And you know, that has to go through the political process. Fine, let it. But the real issue here is that China is what I say. China has built an engineering state and America has built a lawyer state. And we probably, they could use a few more lawyers in China and they could use some law, they could use some actual courts that ruled not in the party's interest but on a really objective basis on rule of law. But we also need to prune back some of our like exceptionally busy Byzantine regulations that just get in the way.
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All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. So, Jim, Japan has a new and very different kind of leader. WALTER Prime Minister Takaichi, 64 years old, is a former heavy metal drummer. She's an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and the first woman to lead the country. She's a hawkish nationalist politician who has made several visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine and invokes the ideas and priorities of the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who, as far as these things go, was very close to President Trump in his first term. And in a word, Takaichi wants to make Japan great again. You noted that the best course of action for Takechi may be to embrace what you called a sort of modified 21st century version of what American leftists used to call military Keynesianism. I'm curious for your description of, well, I guess first of all, what you mean by that term, but also what Japan's domestic and geopolitical circumstances are right now that would lead it down that kind of a path.
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Okay. Well, Japan is in a, in a tough, tough situation. It's very close to China, it's very close to North Korea, and it's very close to Russia. And those three countries are now cooperating, not just in Ukraine, but actually also in the waters around Japan in a way that we haven't seen in the past. Those are, you know, you've got three hostile nuclear powers right off your, your coast. That's kind of worrisome. Also, Japan, as we all know, has a declining population and its economy has been essentially stagnant for decades. Its companies used to astound the world. In the, in the 1980s, people thought about Japan way they now think about China, you know, the, the country whose unstoppable rise based on superior tech, bullet trains, you name it, you know, whatever we weren't doing, the Japanese were doing much better. And, oh, if we could only be more like Japan. And now, you know, then it kind of flattened out. So Japan has got to overcome domestic economic problems and it has to face a major, secure, major continuing security worries. It's not unlike the problem that the Israelis faced years ago when they sort of realized that with, you know, all of the kind of cyber espionage and hacking that was going on, Israel would be a natural target for this kind of thing. And so you could either, this could either be just a continuing drain as you pay for various kinds of, how do you protect yourself? And you buy different systems, or you use that to stimulate the growth of a domestic cybersecurity industry and you organize yourself in order to build that up so that ultimately other people need to buy this stuff from you and you've turned a disadvantage into a source of strength. I think Japan needs to think that way about its security situation. When you think about the future of Japanese security, you don't think about mobilizing ever greater masses of 18 year olds and handing them rifles and shipping them overseas. That's, you know, just not neither technologically nor demographically does that make sense. So it's going to be about the using technical capabilities to up your own defenses and give yourself enough of a counter punching strength that other countries have to take you seriously. And so you have to do this. Well, you can either do it again, you can just sort of continue buying weapons from the US and that's fine, but. But as an economic drain when you've already got problems, or you can say, look, fortunately in this day and age, most military tech is dual use. That is the stuff that gives you drones and other military systems capabilities is also incredibly useful if you're building refrigerators or you name it. And if they think that way, I think what they can do is actually start to rebuild the competitive edge of Japanese business and enable their corporations again to develop the kind of skill and innovation that once made the Japanese kind of the wonders of the world. They've done this not once but twice in their history really. The Meiji Restoration and again the post war boom where the Japanese take what looks like a disadvantageous and difficult situation and mobilize themselves to make lemonade out of lemons. So this is an approach. The Prime Minister, she's got kind of a, she knows she needs to get the economy going. She knows she can't do it by increasing immigration. A lot of the vote in the last election went to anti immigration parties. The Japanese are not sort of historically famously fond of immigration. And she also has to deal with the security stuff, but the country has a large deficit. So unless you link your security spending to a serious program of economic and technological revival, you are just not going to get the energy that you need for a sustained, successful line of policy. So this is where I think she needs to go. I think working with Israel, working with India, with Taiwan, with the United States, that's a pretty good group of countries to be working with on developing a technological edge. I think that if I were, if she were to call me up and ask for advice, that's the advice I would give her.
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Just one final question on that last point. You know you spent a Lot of time recently in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore. I know you've also been to Taiwan and Korea and Australia in the last year or two. What's your sense of what. Not remilitarization in the big mobilizing millions of soldiers sense, but in the sense that you're talking about, how would that be received in the region or I guess, how is Japan regarded in the region? Is it seen as kind of a sleeping giant? Is it seen as dependent like anyone else on the United States? What's your impression?
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I think that the sort of the post World War II fear of the great conquering Japan is pretty much over in the region. It's 80 years since World War II and China is so clearly the great. You know, if you. If you worry about a rising hegemon in. In Asia, you don't worry at all about Japan, you worry a lot about China. And a stronger Japan will help forestall the. The dangers from China. So I think that is really, you know, a much lesser factor. In Korea, it's a little bit more of a factor. There's some very special bilateral kinds of problems there. But generally speaking, Asia is more. The Indo Pacific is more receptive to Japan, certainly, than it's been at any previous time in my lifetime.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Walter, you were recently in Narendra Modi's birthplace in Vodnagar in Gujarat. So tell us what you made of Vodagar in your Gujarat travel tips.
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Well, actually, I was quite surprised. I mean, I wanted to go to Vodagar because, you know, Modi is a historic figure and, you know, unlike a lot of Indian rulers in the past, he came from very humble circumstances. So to get a sense of, you know, what kind of surroundings he grew up and was great. You know, we. We ended up going to his. To the primary school that he went to. Now they no longer use it as a primary school. It's, you know, kind of a bit more of a shrine used for kind of national training and stuff. But the building, the architecture was very evocative and you sort of picture the sort of, you know, kid from not very prosperous family coming to the school and taking his first lessons. Interesting thing to see what actually was, was, in a way more striking and something I didn't know much about is there's a big archeology museum there. It turns out that Vanagar has thousands of years of continuous habitation and had sort of really big fortifications and stuff that go back quite a ways. And so they've done a terrific job. There's this sort of museum that combines indoors and air conditioned. You can see a lot of the artifacts and so on that people have found. But then they built a kind of, you know, there's a outdoor area that, that's roofed in, but you can sort of see, you know, the, the, the excavated a few cases, restored walls of the ancient fortifications, the different levels that people have lived at. And you know, the point they're trying to make here is that India has this deep, continuous history of civilization and that, that really is, you know, it's a. That sense of trying to go back to deep Indian tradition as a way to unify the country for the sort of various centripetal forces of the 21st century and finding some kind of authenticity in your past that can help you build for the future. That's not a bad sort of reflection of the sort of Modi project overall. So it's interesting to see that his hometown does have this deep sense of Indian history. So I actually, I'm glad I went to the museum. I had absolutely no idea, really, just my ignorance that there was a major historical site there. But well worth the visit.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producer, Josh Cross, thanks to Alex Patanov at Hudson, and my co host, Walter Russell Mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week. And until then, please, please go rate and review us. This helps other people find the show.