← 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 School at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week. The Mexican government said it killed the nation's most wanted cartel boss on Sunday, setting off a wave of retaliatory fires and violence across the country. Nemesio Aceguarra Cervantes, known as El Mencho, was the longtime leader of the Jalisco New Generation cartel and widely regarded as one of Mexico's most violent criminal figures. He presided over a rapidly expanding enterprise involved in drug production, extortion, and terrorizing communities nationwide. His killing plunged Mexico into a highly tense moment. Past captures of cartel leaders have set off wars between government forces and rival factions jockeying for control. Armed groups blocked roads and set fire to supermarkets, banks and vehicles in one of the most widespread eruptions of turmoil in the nation's recent history. The killing is a major victory in Mexico's new offensive against drug cartels and could help reduce pressure from President Trump, who has been threatening strikes in Mexico. The Mexican government said the United States contributed intelligence that aided the operation, though U.S. officials stress no American troops were involved. Walter, is this episode news or fo news?
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It's news. It's news. I mean, the underlying situation is not news. It's been around. But this does point to things actually happening. One is that for some time, the Mexican government had been trying to take a less confrontational approach to the cartels. Sort of the idea is, well, if you don't poke the bear with a sharp stick, the bear might not come after you. And the Trump administration has been pushing very hard to get the Mexicans to do more about these cartels. And so this would be a sign, I think, if nothing else, that the government feels that the risks of taking on the cartels are less than the risks of alienating the Trump administration. Which probably tells you when you consider that they would rather see firefights all over parts of Mexico and horrors at Costco on fire. They would rather see that than have a fight with President Trump. Does suggest maybe there's been a lot of diplomatic pressure behind the scenes. I noticed, too, that Mexico is not sending oil to Cuba, which in the past has been a practice. In fact, they used to say in Cuba that every time the president was about to do something kind of unpopular that would be perceived as too right wing. They'd like, make a state visit to Cuba just to kind of like offset it to the left. So this is, you know, it tells us something about the power relationship and the degree to which Trump is, is exploiting it. I understand too, that some of the conversations taking place around tariffs and the renewal of the U.S. mexico, Canada, a trade agreement, there's talk of leaving Canada out and just doing it with Mexico, which again suggests that there's some real horse trading going on behind the scenes here. Beyond that, the scale of violence really was unusual. We don't know whether this is going to continue or if it just kind of settles down in a bit. But we need to remember that many of the states of the governments south of our border do not exert full control over their own territory. This is not in the sense that, you know, sort of, you can say, well, in the United States, there's a lot of urban neighborhoods where there's crime and, you know, is that really a, you know, the government is not really in charge. But this is more, you know, it's not just that there are neighborhoods, but there are financial networks, there are business organizations and so on. There's a range of entities and networks that answer to the cartels rather than to the government. And to some degree, these pose a threat to central authority. I think Americans should look in the mirror here a little bit. You know, those Latin Americans, they can't organize anything. What's wrong? The reason that these societies are, one of the big reasons that these cartels are so strong is, is because Americans like cocaine and have been sniffing our way to these sort of short term spikes of joy or whatever it is. The consequences for our neighbors and then coming back onto us are immense. The entrenched corruption, the violence that underlies everything, you know, I'm sure that none of our listeners, Jeremy, would ever be the kind of people to use illegal drugs. So, you know, I'm just preaching to the choir here. But if you have any friends who take drugs, it is actually a moral issue. It is not just, how does this make me feel? Or does the US Government have the right to tell me what I can and can't do with my own body? It is, do you really think a kind of momentary happiness in your part justifies your participation with terrorists, with utterly unscrupulous criminal narco traffickers? I think in the future people will look back at the sheer selfishness of generations of Americans who, who put their own happiness above any concept of responsibility to their neighbors. So it's news. Things are happening. The crow, the, you know, the chickens are coming home to roost.
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All right, our second story. A Ukrainian counterattack in the country's southeast is chipping away at Russian advances and demonstrating that Kyiv's forces have plenty of fight left as Moscow's invasion stretches into a fifth year. With Trump backed peace negotiations stalled. Russia has sought to portray its victory as inevitable. But losses among the Kremlin's troops now number well over 1 million, and its grinding offensives advance at a few dozen yards a day at best. Ukraine has largely cleared the city of Kupyansk of Russian forces and retaken several villages in the Zaporizhzhia region with long range strikes. Western sanctions and ship seizures are pushing down Russian oil prices, critical for sustaining Moscow's military efforts. Russian casualties total some 1.2 million, of which as many as 325,000 have been killed, more than double Ukraine's figures. Ukraine's top military commander said last week that Russia was unable to replace its battlefield losses in 2025. Walter, you had a tweet to this effect recently. Is this news or foe news?
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It is. It is news. It is not the end of the war, but at least not yet. But it is a new phase in the war. And if we kind of look back on the history of this horrible conflict, you know, there's that early phase where everybody thought, oh, my gosh, the Russians will win in a week. Then they don't win in a week. And then there's like, ah, nana, nana, boo, boo, Putin is not going to win. He's totally blown it. Then it kind of settles into a longer thing where Putin is doing well, Ukraine's gone back. We've gone back and forth many times. But I think for now what we're seeing is that while Russia remains the stronger country with the bigger economy and the bigger population of the bigger technological base, those advantages are not bringing it a quick victory in a really bitter war of attrition. And increasingly, the Russians have stalled out. They've stalled out and they have to lose large. They have to be willing to take huge casualties to make minor and from a strategic point of view, inconsequential gains of territory. That alone is not necessarily going to bring an end to the war. For one thing, even if Putin is reading some bad news from this front, he knows that today, for example, this week, the European leaders travel to Kyiv to show their solidarity with, you know, five years, you know, fifth year starting. Here we are. Great. But they had planned to bring the loan guarantees that would have allowed, you know, funded Ukraine, really for the next Two years, they couldn't do it because at the last minute, Hungary pull the rug out from under them at the meeting back here in Europe. So, you know, Putin has his reasons to be hopeful, too. He's got, you know, some other bad news, though, is happening. The gap between the prices that the price that Russia can get for its oil and the price that other oil gets is widening because the sanctions are still, you know, working better. India is buying less Russian oil. We are seizing tankers, the Europeans, and we are seizing tankers that are carrying illegal Russian oil. A lot of things are happening, and most of them are not really good for Putin. He can hope perhaps, that the war in Iran would at least temporarily drive a, you know, spike up in oil prices. But should the US And Iran compose their differences, either before or after some kind of conflict, Iranian oil is likely to get out onto world markets in greater volumes and without discounts, which, again, will be a problem for Putin. So each side has a mix of strengths and weaknesses. Putin is, you know, Putin has to recruit more troops, both because he's, you know, he's on the offensive. So it, it, it takes more troops to attack than to defend. But also he's got a longer front just because he's attacking in, on Ukraine, which has interior lines of communication. He has to recruit more troops, but he does have a bigger population and he has more ability. There are lots of increasing stories that as many as 30% of new Russian recruits are mercenaries from overseas. And we know about the North Koreans, but a lot of Africans have been showing up on that front pretty much scammed or otherwise, you know, gotten into there through Wagner or through other channels. So Putin has more ways of bolstering his, his legions than Ukraine does. We're not noticing at this point, large number of Americans volunteering to go fight for Ukraine. But on top of all of this, of course, there is the drone warfare and the technological warfare. One of the reasons, apparently, that the Russians have suffered some losses recently is that Elon Musk cut off their access to Starlink, and that made them unable, you know, sort of enable the Ukrainians to push forward. I mean, I have to ask myself what, what were they, what were they doing getting Starlink in the first place? But, okay, it's gone. It's hard to think that Musk would have done that against Trump's will. But we have this technological race going on, as the Russians will probably find a way to replace Starlink for the guidance for drones and missiles that were actually being fairly effective. But will the Ukrainians come up with some new tactic, new device in this increasingly sophisticated drone on drone war environment. Will the Russians, how will all of this play out until one side or the other really is ready to give up? This war is likely to continue to shift shape. There are so many external factors on our side, on the Russian side, that make it difficult to assess which country is actually going to be able to scrape up the resources to keep fighting longer. But it would say if the Europeans finally manage to get that money question settled and Orban faces an election soon, which right now he's favored to lose. And that could change a lot of things. If it looks like essentially that Ukraine is in shape to keep going till 27, 28, 29, then Putin's calculations could begin to change.
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What's your sense in this point of the war, of China's support for Russia?
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The war?
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I mean, we've, you know, kind of hearing a lot about for the last few years that, you know, the Putin's war effort would be impossible at this point without Chinese backing. But if things tend to, you know, if things continue to trend against Russia, would you expect China to up its support for its war effort in Ukraine? Or has this become kind of more of a debacle than China cares to try to rescue?
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No, I think actually Putin in trouble is good for China. It makes Russia more and more dependent on China in various ways. Putin is, you know, without Chinese economic, with resources, weapons, other things, I don't think, you know, Putin would have a much harder time carrying out the war. And while that's the case, China can continue to sort of expand its influence in Central Asia and elsewhere, much less heavily contested by Russia than it otherwise would be. And if anything would change Putin's mind about the war, I think it is again, the fact that while, you know, that Central Asia might be slipping out of his grasp, he's seeing both China, which is making deals every day, all up and down the stands, former Central, the Central Asian republics that used to be part of the Soviet Union. He's also seeing now the United States sticking our nose into it with Vice President Vance's recent visit to Armenia and Azerbaijan with recruiting Central Asian countries to be on President Trump's board of peace for Gaza, whatever. If you're trying to reconstitute the Soviet empire, trying to regain Soviet lands, sitting there watching while the United States is poking in and China is poking in and frankly also Turkey is messing around in there. This is not the view from the Kremlin that you want. Putin will stop the War only if the sort of consequences of continuing it are catastrophic enough to make him accept the price of a strategic defeat in the West. And Central Asia is possibly where some of that could happen. But for China, just grab what you can while the grabbing is there. Why wouldn't you?
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All right, final story of the week. Donald Trump has told advisors that if diplomacy or an initial targeted US Attack does not lead Iran to abandon its nuclear program, he will consider a much larger assault intended to drive the country's leaders from power. Negotiators from both countries are scheduled to meet in Geneva this week for what appears to be last ditch talks to avoid a military conflict. Trump has reportedly been leaning toward an initial strike in coming days to demonstrate to Iran's leaders that they must agree to give up the ability to make a nuclear weapon. Targets under consideration reportedly range from the headquarters of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to nuclear sites to the ballistic missile program. Should those steps fail. Trump has told advisors he is open to the possibility of a military assault later this year intended to help topple Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Walter News or foe? News.
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You know what? Honestly, I don't think it's news. There's a lot of, you know, a lot of smoke and mirrors in there. But, I mean, if there's anybody on planet earth that already did not understand that Donald Trump is conducting the largest military buildup of American forces in the Middle east since 2003, that he's not trying to get the Ayatollah to do something. I don't know what's going on since the. And also the idea that if his first strike fails, he would just give up and go home. That also, I mean, what's the point under, under that. So what he's saying, you know, this is, this is simply a restatement of the status quo that we all know is there. Reporters love to go in and get, you know, I've got all these sources and they're giving me the latest thing, but you just stand back and you look at it and what you're hearing, you know, what we can all sort of get from this is, okay, the generals want reporters to know that they're warning Donald Trump that this could be a really dangerous thing if it goes wrong. In other words, the generals do not want to be publicly blamed if one of a million things that could go wrong goes wrong. Shocking, isn't that? I mean, you know, what would we do without this kind of revelatory reporting, right? At the same time, they're reporting that Donald Trump really, really wants to hit Iran, but is not entirely sure exactly how to do it and get what he wants. I don't think you need to spend a lot of time following the news to know these things. You need a kind of some common sense, a grasp of human nature, and then, you know, sort of a reasonable familiarity with what the news has to tell you.
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All right, that does it for the news with this week. Let's have the big conversation. You wrote this week, Walter, about the Supreme Court ruling against Trump's tariff regime and what its domestic and foreign implications might be for the remainder of his second term. So tell us more about what you foresee as the potential impact here of the Supreme Court ruling.
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You know, let me, let me just first say that, that, you know, while I do, I have no claim to either be a constitutional lawyer or a tariff lawyer, it does look to this layman's eye that, in fact, that was. Trump was building a very, very large building on a very small footprint of legality there. I am not surprised that the court ruled that that statute does not permit this negotiating stance. So where do we go from here is the question. And Trump has already answered that to some degree that, you know, the next morning he announced, or that day, I think the day the ruling comes in, it's fine. He says, I got 10% tariffs over on this. Await. The next morning comes over, no, it's 15% tariffs. Okay? TRUMP likes tariffs. This statute is not the only one that gives him, you know, grounds to, to levy tariffs. And he's going to, he's going to tariff, tariff, tariff while he can. Okay, none of these other authorizations are quite as convenient as the one that he'd hoped he'd found with the ieepa, you know, under the, under what he's had since, what he's claimed since he got in. He can basically say to any country, I'm, your tariffs are anywhere from 0% to 5,000%. He can do that in five minutes. He doesn't need to, like, have some commission of inquiry issue of finding. He's like, no, no, no, this is it. And furthermore, he can do it either on all of the country's imports, exports, some of them, or none of them. So I can put 50% tariffs on your tire industry, your exports to the US while letting your parmesan come in tariff free, whatever. All right. Which means when we think of the power that gives him, it's not just power over exporting countries, which is, okay, I can, I can make your reelection A very difficult thing, or I can. I can make a lot of very powerful people in your country really mad at you. All right, that's always nice. But what he can also say to any American company whose business model involves lots of imports, he can say, basically, your profit is this year, this quarter is going to be what I think it should be. American CEOs are sturdy folk and American principled people. And I, you know, I can't imagine that any of them would ever sell out the national interest for mere fiduciary personal gain. But still, when you're talking to a president who, by, you know, just the flick of a finger can put your business either in great shape or terrible shape, you're just kind of careful. You don't want to make him unnecessarily unhappy with you. And so that. That is an awesome amount of power to get out of a very, very thin mesh of wordage in a. In a statute. And, you know, Trump enormously enjoyed his ability to concentrate all of this power and have it be available at discretion in almost every encounter with every foreign leader and every domestic business person. So losing that matters to Trump. When he's faced with a setback, Trump's normal method isn't like, oh, well, I guess, you know, I can't do it. All right, you were right. Fine. You know, he doubles down, he comes back at you. And so he's lost. He has lost this tool of power. He does not intend to lose power to shed power in any kind of way or concede it. So he is already imposing tariffs. You know, the lawyers will be combing statutes now, looking for any kind of way to give him as flexible and broad authorities as they can possibly find for him, and then he'll be stretching those interpretations as far as he can, you know, from his point of view, if he does something tomorrow, that in another 18 months gets declared unconstitutional. But, well, that was 18 good months. So we should not expect him to sort of step back on this front. Trump is, you know, what academics call an interdisciplinary phenomenon. That is, when he thinks about power, he thinks about it in an integrated way. So his tariff program gave him power over multiple dimensions in, you know, it wasn't just like trying to get other countries to lower their tariffs. It was trying to get other countries to do a whole bunch of things. Even tried to get Greenland that way by threatening tariffs. Didn't work, but he tried. So what he'll do, too, is he'll start looking actively for other ways to build his power internationally and nationally. That don't involve tariffs. If that door, you know, if he's having a hard time getting through that door, he'll check around and see what's going on with the back window. So I would expect to see. You know, he loves the, the Iran situation, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Only problem for him with the Iran crisis is it has to come to an end sometime. You know, he's got everybody in the world fixed on will Trump decide to have a war with Iran or not, and nobody else can say anything, and everybody's interests are bound up in it. Well, maybe there are other situations where you can create that or generate leverage. I, I noted in my column that there is a, a ship that is taking something like almost 200,000 gallons of Russian fuel to Cuba. This is, hey, in the 1960s, it was Soviet ships taking missiles to Cuba. What is Trump, you know, Trump can either try to stop that ship, let it go through. He has a lot of options there. He may be in a mood. The tariff setback may make him more inclined to have a nice Cuba, you know, return to the Cuba missile crisis or what have you. There are lots of, lots of ways that Trump can, can put himself at the center of world events. And so he will try to compensate for his loss of the tariff power through a variety of measures in the zone of tariffs, but also in others as a way to just keep that concentration of authority in one hand.
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Final question after this decision. What do you expect for tariffs as a kind of policy instrument in the future beyond Trump? So I think a lot of people were hoping after the first term that tariffs would fall away, but it turned out that Biden actually didn't repeal as many of them as people might have expected. They came roaring back in the second term. They've been struck down in the court, at least in this capacity. Do you think this is going to remain a kind of enduring revival of tariffs in American economic and trade policy, or do you think this is a kind of nail in the coffin, at least for now?
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Oh, no, it's no nail in the coffin. I think, you know, let's assume the Democrats come back in 2028. They're going to need money. They're going to need money. The deficits are big. We don't seem to be doing anything to fix either Social Security or Medicare. So, you know, those deadlines that we've been worrying about for decades will be significantly closer. There will be lots more calls on the pocketbook of the federal government. And the Democrats representing these indebted Blue cities like Chicago that need money. And how is Mamdani going to build paradise on Earth without money? And that means since you've taxed New Yorkers about all you can possibly tax them, you got to get the money from other people. So the hunger for revenue is going to be immense. And tariffs are revenue. And while tariffs. There are downsides of tariffs for all kinds of reasons. Yeah. There are downsides to all taxes and tariffs, even if Americans sort of think, okay, well, actually, Trump is wrong. And it's not that the foreigners pay the tariffs, we're paying the tariffs. There's still a sense that a tariff on imports is a tax on consumption, of imports is sort of better than a sales tax that just, you know, taxes everything. So if we think of tariffs as more the back end of a national sales tax rather than as the front end of trade policy. Right. There's a very strong big government democratic argument for raising revenue. And while people don't like tariffs, and Trump's tariffs aren't popular, people don't like. There's no kind of tariff. People like tax people like. Right. The only tax people like is the tax that other people have to pay. So this is a less unpopular form of taxation than a number of the alternatives. So that makes me think it is unlikely to disappear.
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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 in London this week, where you spent part of your childhood. What is London to you these days? Is it still the great British city? Is it now more of a global and cosmopolitan city than a British one? Do you find it better or worse than it used to be? What do you make of it?
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Well, I will say that to a kid from the backwoods of the Carolinas, London looked pretty global and Cosmopolitan back in 1963. These people speak a strange form of the language. They eat the weirdest food. They got the strangest customs, their money, pound, shillings, pence. What the heck is this stuff? Right? I was overwhelmed with the exoticism of London in the 60s. And I would say that I guess for me now, first of all, it's a lovely thing to have been visiting London on and off now for more than 60 years. I have these great layered memories. You know, the Uber, taking me to my black cab, taking me from my airport to the hotel for the first time. We pass, you know, oh, I remember when I was there with my nieces. Remember when, you know, sort of these many, many visits over the years. So it's almost like a kind of a, you know, sort of resume of your life and then at this point, you know a lot of I have a lot of good friends in London so you know, having stopping to see an old friend who you haven't seen in a couple of years or maybe just ran past in the halls of Davos but didn't really have time to sit and chat. It was fantastic. Having a city that is, that is foreign, not in your country but where over time you've built memories and built friends and having it as kind of a point in your life that you can go back and revisit. I just love it. I just love it.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producer Josh Cross, thanks to Alex Vatana but Hudson and my co host Walter Russell Mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week and until then please go rate and review us. This helps other people find the show.