← What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
Socialists, Chinese AI, Air Conditioning, and Putin
00:39:29
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- [00:01]
Narrator
Israel's next war is already being fought. It's not over borders. It is not against foreign enemies. This time the battle is within and it's over the soul of the Jewish state. So what is Israel all about? The country is divided by two competing visions of Israel. One side fears where the country is headed. This is madness. The other believes the system was broken all along.
- [00:28]
Walter Russell Mead
Judicial reform is about making Israel democratic again.
- [00:33]
Narrator
A nation at war with itself over one difficult question.
- [00:38]
Walter Russell Mead
You know we are on a crossroad.
- [00:39]
Narrator
What kind of country will Israel be?
- [00:42]
Walter Russell Mead
Let the most fit one win in the end.
- [00:47]
Narrator
The battle for Israel's soul. Find it wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe now.
- [01:00]
Jeremy Stern
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 School at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week. Democratic dissatisfaction with the status quo percolated through Colorado's primaries this week as a socialist defeated a longtime congresswoman and Senator Michael Bennett lost his gubernatorial bid to the state's combative attorney general. The victory of Milot Kiros, a 29 year old Democratic socialist, was the latest advance for a socialist groundswell that is forcing a reckoning for Democrats. A slate of left wing candidates toppled Democratic House incumbents and won crowded races in New York last week, writing endorsements from New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani. In Maine, Graham Platner won the Democratic primary in June, putting a progressive with a complicated past on the ballot for Democrats in one of the most competitive Senate seats in the November midterm elections. The victories in New York set off alarm bells for centrists, while the elections in Colorado served as a barometer for whether socialist candidates also appeal to voters outside coastal metropolitan areas. Walter, is this news or faux news?
- [02:17]
Walter Russell Mead
It's news. Things are moving. I think we need to kind of take it in a bit of perspective. Historically, we've seen things like this in the past. We've had socialist mayors in American cities in the past. With Upton Sinclair in California, we had a very serious race for the governorship of an important state by a socialist. And it has not just been in the past restricted to coastal cities. Minnesota was a long time kind of left wing center. So it's formally in terms of US History, this is not so surprising. And interestingly, the combination of an era of high immigration where you've got a fairly large population that has brought with it Ideas about economics, history, culture that are different from what's around them is a piece of that. So you have that trend, but you've also got something that's happening across the west and that is the continual transformation of the old left into a new left is the old left was centered around the industrial working class, what tended to be pretty pragmatic and economically focused, you know, give me a higher minimum wage and so on. But it was also rooted in a private sector centric labor movement. So there were more steel workers, auto workers and so on making up the backbone of the labor market than teachers, government employees in unions. What we're seeing now is with the weakening of that old left, you're getting a split in the left between a kind of old style pragmatic economic left which tends to be stronger in actual working class, industrial working class communities, and then this new left which is college educated, which works in the government and NGO sectors. So in the UK this is driving labor crazy with the rise of the Green Party, which is pretty socialist and also very, very anti Israel, which is a kind of a common denominator of a lot of these movements. And it threatens to TO d to push the Labor Party out of contention. But before Republicans get too smug, let's also look at their centripetal forces on the right as well. And in Britain, both the Conservatives and Labor, at least for now, lost their traditional monopoly on electoral politics. In Germany, the AfD is ahead of the CDU even as the SDP is facing big challenges on its left. So this splitting up of the all party structure with radical elements coming to the forest on both the right and the left, America is going drifting in the same direction as other countries are, I think.
- [05:36]
Jeremy Stern
Can you say a bit more about the opposition to Israel being kind of the main criteria for a lot of these candidates? I mean, in some of these seats, the incumbents who have now lost the primary were in many cases totally aligned in a policy or platform sense with the DSA primary candidate, except on one issue, Israel. And it's not like they were pro Israel. It just maybe wasn't enough of an issue for them. But this seems to be where the DSA sees a weak point for a lot of these incumbents as people who are kind of not running enough on Palestine.
- [06:11]
Walter Russell Mead
Well, I think we should also note that the DSA itself is changing. I believe they've dropped their long standing thing that you can't believe in, quote, democratic centralism, that is Leninism, and be part of the dsa. That was like the Core reason why there's a DSA and not a communist party. So there's sort of two levels of entryism happening. The sort of genuinely communist left trying to take over the DSA and then the DSA itself moving into Democratic primaries. Yeah, look, I do think the, you know, anti Israel fading pretty easily into antisemitism is something that is not again not just in America but in a lot of these parties and has a couple of horses things going for it, so to speak. One is just has very long time been true. That kind of antisemitism is often a marker for anti capitalism generally. I forget who it was that said that antisemitism is the socialism of fools. But this belief that kind of an evil, greedy, money grubbing minority is driving the human race toward extinction and something must be done that is a kind of a psychological area where anti Semites and anti capitalists are singing from the same songbook. Then if you add to that that in the sort of ethnic politics of today that can you, you know, you can unite yourself with Islamic or many immigrants from Islamic countries where there's a kind of, you know, nouveau anti Zionism, anti Semitic fusion related to the politics of the Middle East. You throw that together with, you know, the sort of cult of indigeneity. So settlers and colonists are always uniquely horrible. Somehow though, you know, one, one forgets here that, that the Jews are as indigenous as anybody's going to be in Israel. But there you have it in a way it's, it's kind of a trifecta and it then it also serves as anti Israel politics served on the left in Europe after 68, 68 riots and the sort of arrival of the new left in Europe. The old left was pro Israel, pro Zionist and seen by the new left as compromised and colonialist in its thinking. So it can be a generational marker as well, all of these things going. I think it's a pretty potent cocktail as we can see. But we are so far still really talking about small numbers of primary voters in certain areas. You know, if you have 10% of the general population that is very strongly motivated to vote in a primary, you can win a primary election. You know what happens in a general election, we'll see. In some cases it'll, it may depend on whether the Republicans, you know, can pull themselves together enough so that they deliver a candidate who is not equally toxic in some other way.
- [09:40]
Jeremy Stern
All right, our second story. In a document called Implementation Opinions on Accelerating the Development of AI plus Consumption, China is launching a full Scale push to roll out artificial intelligence across its economy and make the sector the foundation of its economic Strategy. The text 17 points outline a plan to accelerate the rise of AI and reinvigorate the Chinese economy by reorienting it around the new technolog. The document identifies key sectors where they will focus, including AI enabled humanoid robots that will transform industries like elder care, a people vehicle home ecosystem that links smart cars, smart roads and smart homes, brain computer interfaces, AI enabled smart glasses, wearables and other consumer products and a solid security line of defense which will protect China's burgeoning ecosystem from malicious and foreign penetration. Walter, I know you have opinions here. Is this news or fo news?
- [10:42]
Walter Russell Mead
Well, since I based a column on that report, readers can assume that actually yes, I think this is news. Why is it news? It's news because like AI boy two levers that we're all kicking around these days. AI AI AI E I E I O is about as much as a lot of people know about is a technology that isn't just going to be driven, you know, say like nuclear technology or rocket science in the Cold War by the focused economic planners of a few people in a lab so that like Stalin can have some people in the first circle of the Gulag working on his nuclear program. Okay. It really is a whole of society thing where the widespread adoption of AI on a commercial basis throughout an economy generates the investment and the revenues and the competition that leads to breakthroughs in the technology of various kinds of breakthroughs making it more able, more efficient, whatever. And this is actually what China has been very good at since the 1980s. It identifies a sector which it thinks is crucial. So you know, great example here is green technology. The, you know, early in the, in the 2010s, the Chinese get the, you know, they look at the, the green mania sweeping the west at that time. Ambitious programs for energy transformation. They also look at their own pollution problems, but also their own desire to free themselves from dependence on in imported energy in case there's a war with the U.S. and so they, it, it's a no brainer for them. Okay, like there's going to be huge demand for solar panels, there's going to be huge demand for electric cars. So we're going to set up a regulatory environment. We're and we're going to tell all the banks and other state enterprises go for it. We'll send the signals to capitalists and entrepreneurs. Listen guys, we're not going to be cracking down. If you want to make your fortune and not have Any problems with the government here is a great place to do it. So out of this, plus of course we're not going to be prosecuting any IP intellectual property theft cases in this sector. From all of this comes a kind of hurricane of innovation, investment and development. And so now all of those people who used to talk tell us, oh well, you know, we should all go green because think of all the jobs in the solar panels. Well, all those jobs are in China. So this is the way they would like to take AI. And, and they are now, I think, setting the, the framework to make that happen. And, and this is not just a sort of economic issue, it's a strategic issue in the sense that out of that environment you're just going to be developing a lot of really cutting edge capabilities in what this can do and a lot of experience managing, dealing with it and so on and so forth. There will be an eminently saleable product. So there'll be a lot of other countries that will want to buy into the Chinese IT ecosphere, which again is going to be, you know, give them all kinds of windows into what those countries are doing as a source of all kinds of, of stuff. It's a way of competing with US based and other Western based firms on this, who will have trouble finding, you know, competing on an equal basis with heavily state supported Chinese enterprises, but also obviously will accelerate and enhance their ability to get to the kinds of critical cutting edge capabilities for things like decryption, you know, and development of weapons systems and goodness knows what, if you're trying to, you know, develop a, a system that can handle, you know, millions of combat drones, having developed a system that does, you know, does your own air traffic control, that does, and, and your domestic drone AI enabled industries that is doing smart cars and you're coordinating traffic flows on highways across your country, these are transferable. It marks a very intelligent step into a new kind of economic competition and one that obviously tests us because here our backlash against AI is accelerating even as objectively speaking, the necessity of moving forward with AI and is also increasing. And that's going to be a big test for the American political system. This news out of China is they are pedal to the metal and we've got, we've got to figure out how do we respond.
- [15:48]
Jeremy Stern
All right, final story of the week. Europeans have long shunned air conditioning, viewing it as noisy, a blight on architecture, and also unnecessary. Above all, they feared widespread adoption of the technology would undermine their ambition to lead the fight against climate change. That resistance, however, is Colliding with the realities of a continent where temperatures are rising faster than any other region on the planet. Thousands of schools across Western Europe, which are rarely air conditioned, shut down during the last latest heat wave, forcing many parents to stay home. Businesses closed, factories cut back production and rail lines were suspended. The fight over the future of air conditioning is now shaping political debates across the continent, pitting politicians on the right who want a massive plan to install air conditioning against those on the left who fear the environmental impact. After over a thousand people in France died of heat related deaths during the latest heat wave, the deputy Prime Minister of Paris said that the United States, quote, bears a significant amount of responsibility for global warming and the consequences that we in France are experiencing. Walter, is this news or fo news?
- [16:58]
Walter Russell Mead
Well, the air conditioning and heat crisis in Europe is real news. The sentiments of the deputy mayor of Paris are, I think, about as faux as news can get. It simply doesn't matter what that guy thinks. This idea somehow that it's only climate change is creating the need for air conditioning. That may be true in Denmark and the uk which have not historically been known for hot summers. You know, Spain and Italy have been pretty hot for a really long time and they don't have air conditioning, as many Americans have discovered. I mean, great tourist hotels, yes, but you would just be surprised how often you find yourself in a really hot Roman summer. Like they've been having hot Roman summer since before Julius Caesar went to Gaul. It's unbearable. And yet, you know, there they are. I grew up without air conditioning in South Carolina. When I was a kid, you just basically spent a couple of months of the year lying on the floor like a dog with your tongue hanging out. You know, movie theaters got air conditioning and oh boy, did we go. You know, you see the worst movie in the world, but there was air conditioning. Here's a pre air conditioning story for our gentle listeners who may not be aware of just how tough and, and rugged life was in the old days. They didn't have car air conditioning in the old days and try to, you know, you all know how hot a car gets if it's been sitting out in the sun. Well, all right. You get into one of these hot cars and there's no air conditioning in it and you are sweating and it's horrible. And the only thing that's keeping you alive is you can roll down the windows and again, like a dog, stick your head out into the, into the flow of the air. Well, my mother, like a lot of women in those days, would get her hair permed. And there's nothing more destructive for. For a nice hairdo than 70 mile an hour wind rushing in through the windows. So we would have death struggles in the car over, like, can we roll it down just a crack, an inch, two inches, how far? And you're constantly, like, pushing her tolerance. So these are the kinds of tragic trade offs that the lack of air conditioning imposes on people. So, look, climate change, or whatever we want to call it, is definitely making Europe hotter and making Europe hotter faster than other places. But the idea that Europe getting air conditioning would stop, you know, would, you know, if Europe abstains from air conditioning, then the oceans will recede, the planet will cool. I'll be fine. That is just a sick fantasy. You know, the reality is that Europe has almost no control over the future of the world or even over the future of Europe, which is something that Europeans really don't want to think about very much right now. And so this is almost a way of saying, no, no, no, we matter. We matter. Our sweltering in this hideous heat is saving the planet. Rationally you think about it, you realize it's also getting warmer in the winter. And so your winter emissions, which, by the way, you know, when it's zero degrees Fahrenheit outside and you're trying to keep it at 70 degrees Fahrenheit inside, even 68, that's a lot more destructive for the climate than trying to go from 90 to 70. I mean, it's really, you know, there's simply no doubt about whether people who live in cold climates are placing a greater burden on the ecosystem than people who live in warm ones. You know, the extra emissions in the summer are likely to be pretty nicely balanced by the lower emissions in a warmer winter. This is all sort of delusional thinking. It's what happens when people have actually sacralized their politics, turned it into a religion, and brought all the sort of psychological traits that we associate with superstition into the political environment. And it can lead to a big, ugly mess. Right now, it's just making the Europeans hot and miserable and mad at each other.
- [21:23]
Jeremy Stern
All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. Walter, you wrote about Russia's reckoning this week, mainly about how while the military news from Ukraine is nightmarish enough for Vladimir Putin, the global geopolitical or strategic picture for Russia beyond Ukraine is possibly looking even worse for him. So tell us more about what you see there.
- [21:56]
Walter Russell Mead
The problem for Putin is that the countries that we think of as great powers today. I mean, in some ways it's almost down to the big two and a half. China, the United States and Russia. A little bit like the UK. As World War II dragged on, the UK slipped down out of the big league into a secondary status. Russia is really in trouble here. Even before the war, Russia had, had failed since, you know, 1989 to have the kind of economic and technological development that could keep up. We often talk about how the EU has fallen relatively behind the US since, you know, 2000. And the Russians have, you know, have had, you know, fallen behind the EU in terms of technology and other things, living standard gaps and things of that kind. Their economy was less technologically advanced. They were in a worse position to think about tasks like nuclear modernization, other things that you need to do. Their armed forces were both corrupt and kind of addicted to very old style weapons systems and tactics and thinking of that kind. So they enter this war and it's becoming incredibly costly for them. You know, they are, they are throwing everything they've got at the war in Ukraine. And this is, you know, this has limited their ability to do other things. I think it's, it's really notable just how much ground they seem to be losing in Central Asia. You know, these are former, also former Soviet republics. And Putin's goal is to unite the whole ex Soviet Union back under Moscow and then to, from that basis to go forward on the, on the great eternal Russian expansion. That's what, that's what he wants to do. And what he's finding is that putting everything he's got into gaining Ukraine has cost him kind of Azerbaijan and Armenia. We've been reading about this scandal where companies linked to the President's family have been making a lot of money as a result of deals in Kazakhstan, in the Kremlin. They're not thinking about who's getting the money. They're thinking Kazakhstan. Multibillion dollar American investments in Kazakhstan and in China. They're also kind of thinking, wait a minute, that tungsten was supposed to be part of our system. So Putin is getting raided in his Central Asian backyard. And where he's not losing ground to the Americans, he's losing it to the Chinese. So Putin's chances of regaining control of the old Soviet Union are actually being decreased, not increased by the war. And in the same way it's easy to sort of talk about the inefficiency of European policy making and blah, blah, blah. But actually what's happened is that the west has figured out how to counter Russia in this moment. The European use of frozen Russian funds as the basis for loans to Ukraine will keep Ukraine in the war another couple of years and then they can figure something else out after that. Buying American weapons with Russia's money to use against Russia in Ukraine is what we're doing. And that is a big problem for Putin. He cannot continue with these losses of men on the combat front. I'm a little bit skeptical of all of these combat death tolls that you keep saying just because as I've said on the program before, I think I'm old enough to remember how body counts in the Vietnam War were always going to be like the great sign of our impending victory. So like a little grain of salt you still need for those. Nevertheless, they're losing a lot of people and then these. The oil situation for Putin is also looking bad. You know, if the situation in the Middle east ends with Iran being able to pump a lot more oil into world markets, that's actually really bad for Russia. It means the price of oil would spike during the crisis and is now back to pre war levels. Price of oil might go down significantly for a pretty long time. At the same time that Ukraine has, has managed to build missiles that and drones that can strike deep into Russia and cripple Russia's own extraction and refining capabilities. We're seeing gas lines in Russia. We're seeing Russia negotiating, trying to buy diesel and other grades of fuel from abroad. Does remind me of that old joke about the Soviet Union. What would happen if the Soviet Union conquered the Sahara Desert? The answer was nothing for 50 years. And then a shortage of sand, you know, so that Vladimir Putin has managed to create fuel shortages in Russia. I say I was, I spent some time traveling around in Russia in 1990 and you could see, you know, there were huge fuel lines then and they gas lines. And here, you know, one of the world's great oil producing countries can't get gas to its citizens. There was a lot of public anger as people were standing in line for two and three days to get, to get gas. Had a big, it was, was not irrelevant in the fall of the Soviet Union. So the war is costing Putin and costing Putin and costing Putin. He doesn't seem to have a, a way out yet. I wouldn't count him out. The guy is very clever. The Biden people were always convinced that Putin had escalation dominance. Whatever we did, he would go a step beyond and ultimately that escalation dominance could lead him to nukes. And so, you know, why even fight him because in the end, we're not going to like, all die in a nuclear war over Ukraine. But he does not seem to be able to do very much right now about translating those nukes or anything else he's got into an effective counter to the current unfavorable situation on the battlefield.
- [28:45]
Jeremy Stern
Final question. Tell us more about some of those consequences or future scenarios that you have in mind.
- [28:52]
Walter Russell Mead
One of them would be this. Suppose from a Russian point of view, the worst happens and the stress of fighting this war actually brings Russia back to the kind of, you know, chaos and weakness that, that it faced before Putin back in the 1990s. That was a time when people were worried that Russia itself might fall apart. In fact, I used to hear a joke in Russia at the time, you know, that don't worry, in, in 20 years it'll, there'll be complete peace on the Japanese Finnish frontier and that Russia might disappear. I, hopefully we won't go there, but I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if Russia really does come out of this conflict dramatically weaker. What happens to the case for the remilitarization of Europe? You know, why would you spend 5% of your GDP on defense if first of all you got a pretty strong Ukraine that just managed to hold Russia, and then Russia itself is so weak that it's going to be a long time before you really have to worry about the bear again? In that case, maybe a Poland and a Lithuanian and a Finland might want to keep up their guard. I'm not sure about a France or an Italy or maybe even a Germany. It would also make the kind of bet and strategy that Germany was working on in the miracle years more viable. I mean, if Russia is not a threat, there's actually not nothing wrong with buying a lot of oil and gas from it. And if you have, in addition, a strong Ukraine, the idea that Germany could kind of rebalance its economy by investing in Ukraine and rely and a military partnership with Ukraine, plus using Russia as the gas station that actually, you know, is, is perhaps viable. Meanwhile, for China, I think it's, it's inevitable that further Russian weakness makes them wonder if, boy, you know, those treaties that gave Russia Vladivostok, those are just as invalid and illegitimate as the treaty that gave Hong Kong to Britain. Maybe we need to kind of look north for a while. That again, that would be rather stressful for Japan. It would, I think, strengthen our focus on the Pacific as a, as a, as a primary area to worry about. But it might also lead to some kind of realignment where A very weak Russia is more in alignment with Japan and the US which are the two countries that really don't want to see China taking Siberia. So, you know, lots of consequences, I think, for a weak Russia would be, would be a game changer in some ways. Turkey, Turkey basically joined NATO because it was worried about the Soviet Union and the fear of Russian. Turkey does not want to see, for example, Russia take Odessa and again, be the dominant force in the Black Sea. So you could well see a Turkey that had lost its fear of Russia, perhaps becoming more active in the Middle east and maybe the Balkans as well. So a lot of things would happen. You might see something like a new and stronger Ukraine. We go back to 16th century politics or before Peter the Great of a strong, you know, Polish, Lithuanian or Polish Ukrainian Commonwealth or things of that kind. The map will change, reality will change. We're not there yet. And Putin may find either a way to change the military balance or to escape from the war before he's lost everything. And I would not underestimate Putin's abilities. He is in the past pulled some rabbits out of some very unpromising hats. But the war in Ukraine is costing Russia more every day. And right now, Russia is not doing well. Those are both important truths. And sooner or later, the laws of political gravity, of historical gravity do make themselves felt.
- [33:46]
Jeremy Stern
All right, that is it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Gordon Wood, the great historian of the American Revolution, died a few weeks ago. He was struck by a car in a supermarket parking lot in providence. He was 92 and had taught at Brown since 1960 and wrote many great books on the American Revolution and the Revolutionary era. So for this week, Walter, tell us if you have a favorite among his books or maybe just a general impression of his scholarship and contributions to our understandings of the beginning of the country whose 250th birthday is this weekend.
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Walter Russell Mead
Well, I am a fan of Gordon Woods. I'm planning to reread some of his books this summer. Combination of the 250th anniversary, his own death, make that a interesting thing. Just one note, it's actually a good thing when 92 year olds are struck down in parking lots. You know, I mean, obviously one would have liked him to be around for many more years. It's just worth noting that more and more folks in their 90s are up and about and doing things. That's a change, and it's a good change. That said, we should all be careful in parking lots. But look, I'M a, I, I'm a fan of Empire of Liberty, which is the book he wrote that covers of 1789 to 1815. I think it's part of the Oxford history of the United States. What Hath God Wrought is is another one, I believe in that same series and I not by him. And it's a really good synthesis of a lot of political developments. And the thing in it that I find so interesting among many others is the decree to which from the very start of American political history things kept going in ways that none of the actors really wanted or desired. The revolution itself was basically made by a group, you know, I mean obviously a lot of ordinary people fought in it, but there's some very privileged, very well connected people at the top of the American social and you know, intellectual economic hierarchies who thought that what they would do is they would like get rid of the king and those really obnoxious Brits and then there would simply be a pyramid in which they were the top rather than being a few steps down from the king. But what almost immediately starts to happen is that ordered hierarchy, you know, starts dissolving because the average American no more wants to have their life run by a well educated member of the planter or the commercial elite than by George iii. All right, so the Federalists get kind of, you know, are horn swaggled first that the, the society they wanted, they're not getting. And so who wins from that? It's the Jeffersonians who, you know, the Jefferson Republicans who like ah, down with the Federalists. You know, we don't need their centralized hierarchical thing. We want a more decentralized but also you know, the educated and the talented people in Virginia and so on running things. And already by 1815 they're losing out to Andrew Jackson and the Westerners who don't want any, any of those Easterners and see like snooty Thomas Jefferson and Monticello as like as elite and irrelevant as George Washington and as you know, and as George iii. So this kind of tidal wave of American small D democracy keeps rolling in ways that just absolutely baffle and frequently horrify the authors of a lot of our political system. Wood is just, is a really great chronicler of this process. So I'm kind of looking forward to spending some more time with him over the next few months.
- [38:07]
Jeremy Stern
Right, there you have it. Thanks to our producer Josh Cross, thanks to Alex Fatanov at Hudson and my co host Walter Russell mead, and happy 4th of July to all of our listeners. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week. And until then, please go, rate and review. Review us. This helps other people find the show.