Loading summary
Transcript19 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:06]
B
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 government of Lebanon is barely able to manage the basic requirements of statehood. It can provide electricity for only a few hours a day and people avoid its flattened currency in favor of dol. Its military is only the second most powerful force in the country after Hezbollah or the third, counting Israel, which has been expanding its months long occupation. But it is now being pressed by the U.S. israel and many of its own people toward a confrontation with Hezbollah that risks tilting the country into a new civil war. The growing pressure comes via a new and already strained ceasefire deal to end the war with Israel that has rocked Lebanon since early March when Hezbollah sided with Iran and began firing rockets across the border. The agreement requires Lebanese state to take back control of its territory a little at a time as it disarms and dismantles the militant group. Walter News or Faux News?
- [01:12]
A
I kept waiting in there for something new or surprising. The Lebanese government is really weak. It's so weak that when Israel and the United States tells it to disarm Hezbollah, it has no choice but to say sure, we'll do it. And then it is much too weak to disarm Hezbollah. Jellyfish flounders, a squid emits. There's nothing here that the Lebanese government cannot disarm Hezbollah. In that sense it is a fake state. It doesn't control its own territory. There are places where it does control things, but surprisingly limited. When Assad was still in power in Syria, the Lebanese government was basically so indebted to Assad there was really nothing it could do and this attempt to use it in saying I don't see the strategy. What would be news to me is that if Israel and the United States had an actual strategy to disarm Hezbollah, perhaps involving the Lebanese government in some way. But there's just no way that this government or the Lebanese army can disarm Hezbollah. If they start a war with Hezbollah, they would lose.
- [02:23]
B
All right, our second story. A decisive win for Armenia's pro Western leader Nicole Pashinyan in parliamentary election Sunday is another sign of Russia's shrin global influence since Vladimir Putin's full scale invasion of Ukraine. The vote was Armenia's most important since it gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, according to the Financial Times, and was A plebiscite on the peace process with neighboring Azerbaijan and on Pashinyan's push for closer ties with Europe and the US without breaking altogether with Moscow to tilt the race in favor of the pro Russian opposition and ensure Armenia's fealty, the Kremlin closed off imports of Armenian produce, threatened Ukraine style intervention, and deployed its standard disinformation techniques. It all failed. Walter, is this news or Faux news?
- [03:12]
A
It's news. Russia really did want to keep Armenia in its orbit and it's not going to do it. And that is, I think, particularly striking because what was on the ballot was essentially, do you accept our surrender to Azerbaijan and the destruction of the dream of Nagorno Karabakh as Armenian territory? You put it that way, that sounds kind of like maybe people would want to vote no. On the other hand is, do you accept that reality exists? That's a harder one to deny. But yeah, Russian propaganda would have had a real, you know, if you ever had an easy case to make, it's like, you know, these are, you know, this is Marshal Petan, these are the quislings, et cetera, et cetera. And a lot of the Armenian diaspora, by the way, kind of shares that view that they aren't militant enough and so on and so forth. So this was actually a real victory for common sense among the Armenians. Now, I don't want to over exaggerate how much this is a blow to Putin. It is a blow to Putin. But let's not forget that Georgia, which has actually got a stronger economy and a more strategic location in some ways has been moving pretty hard into the Russian camp. If you made somebody make a swap between Armenia and Georgia, Georgia would be the card you'd probably the most want to have. So Putin is not as completely on the back foot in the Caucasus as some reports would like to stress, but it is a setback and it will make people ask questions in the Kremlin, and that's a good thing.
- [04:52]
B
Are there any other spots in what Russia considers its sphere of influence that are on your radar as potentially being weak points for Russia in the near term, other than Armenia, either also in the Caucasus or in Central Asia or in southeastern Europe?
- [05:08]
A
I recently visited Moldova and met with the President and a bunch of other folks there. And my sense of that was that actually Transnistria, which is that kind of Russian occupied enclave in the eastern part of Moldova, that had been a thing that the Russians were really trying to use as a pressure point, the Russians have certainly tried to push their way into greater influence and power in Moldova. But it looks like the Moldovans seem to be stabilizing the situation in Transnistria and that over time, we're seeing Russian power ebbing a bit there and their kind of ability to use that as some kind of leverage either against Ukraine or Moldova. Ukraine and Moldova, in the sort of weird European bureaucratic sense, are kind of seen as linked in terms of their bids into the eu. So the news that the EU is opening chapters of negotiation with Ukraine is also extremely good news for Moldova. And Moldova was one of the Soviet republics in the ussr so that's a setback. Obviously, that's to some degree offset by Belarus just falling ever more steadily into Putin's grip. Central Asia, I think there the problem is more rising Chinese influence. The Turks would like to say that there's this organization of Turkish states that's somehow going to drive the train in Central Asia. I think it's still basically a contest between China and Russia. There's a sense in which the stronger China gets, the more some of those states would like to balance with Russia. You always want the weaker of the outside powers to work with you when you're worried about a really strong and rising presence. Central Asia has got to be for Putin, especially Kazakhstan, which has a lot of symbolic, economic, and historical significance for the Russians, is really something to watch.
- [07:20]
B
All right, final story of the week. North Korea is the world's most unlikely growth story. Its economy is flourishing in ways not seen in years, aided by arms sales and troop deployments to Russia, supplies and financing from China, and the ability to flout international sanctions to import more energy components and materials. The Kim regime slammed its borders shut during the COVID 19 pandemic and has since reopened to only a select few outsiders, including Russian and Western travelers and diplomats. Those visitors describe a North Korea unrecognizable from the past, especially its capital, Pyongyang, where Kim and the country's elites live. Walter, is this news or faux news?
- [08:02]
A
Well, it makes me want to go back to North Korea and see how it's changed since I was there in the 1990s. It's not a surprise. People really underestimate both the strength and the focus on survival of the Kim dynasty. In North Korea, they got this idea that if we build nuclear weapons, nobody can really push us too far or too hard. And that obviously means South Korea, means the United States, but it also kind of means China, too. Not even China can really push North Korea around. And that's their goal, is that no one but the Kims can push North Korea around, and they can push it anywhere and anyhow they want, and they've achieved it. And that's actually remarkable. A very poor country with what, 22 million people or something of that order of magnitude, with a GDP that is smaller than a lot of unicorns. Stock market capitalization has managed to defy the whole world and over time has outlasted all the international efforts to take down the nuclear program and so on. In many ways, the turning point or the definitive moment of Kim's victory over the rest of the world was during COVID when they did close their borders. And it was a terrible experience for the North Korean people. Imports, exports across the Chinese frontier came to a stop as they put the world's most severe lockdown policy in place. What that does, though, diplomatically, it showed the United States that we have no North Korea Strategy. Since the 1990s, we've been talking about, oh, we're going to denuclearize North Korea by international sanctions and UN Sanctions. And every time people say, well, you know, they keep building nuclear, but we can tighten the sanctions regime, what North Korea did was it put more effective sanctions on itself than the international community could do in literally 1 million years. I mean, it was just, you know, you could never get the world to do what the North Koreans did for themselves. And the regime survived it and came out on the other side stronger. We do not have a policy, an effective policy around North Korea. And North Korea's nuclear arsenal is growing. North Korea's ambitions are growing. And now it's in the most glorious sweet spot it's been in for many years, where Russia needs. North Korea needs North Korean missile production. It needs North Korean bodies to feed the battlefront in Korea. Anything North Korea wants to sell, Russia needs to buy. And what that does is it helps offset any dependency on China. And now, you see, Xi Jinping is visiting North Korea. People are now courting North Korea. That's what they've done. And it's an unbelievably brutal regime, unbelievably repressive. All of this talk about wealth in North Korea is not trickling down very far out of the reach of the elites. And in a way, it's kind of a proof that for a very long period of time, none of the sort of happy, clappy cliches that we like to tell ourselves about the arc of history, dictators don't prosper, and all of this, it ain't necessarily so. The Kims have built a power machine that grows progressively Stronger, even as it defies everything that kind of Anglo American statecraft would like to think is true.
- [12:03]
B
Before we move on, will you quickly tell the story of. Didn't you end up on North Korean television when you were there visiting a statue or something?
- [12:13]
A
Well, I don't know. I didn't actually watch the TV, but yeah. At least in the 90s, when you visited North Korea, they were all in mourning because Kim Il Sung had recently died. Kim the first and so. Or was it Kim the Second? I can't remember. Too many Kims here.
- [12:31]
B
The first, I think. Yeah.
- [12:34]
A
Your car would take you in from the airport to your hotel, and you're expected to stop at this memorial and lay a wreath at the feet of the statue of Kim. And they kind of wanted you to bow at the waist. They explained to you what you're supposed to do. So I actually had to buy some flowers in Beijing. You fly in from Beijing to Pyongyang, and they sat in the overhead luggage compartment of the planes. This bouquet of flowers with. We were stuck on the tarmac for, like, three hours. So this was not a very sort of flourishing bouquet of flowers. These are drooping daisies kind of coming. Coming in. They told me I needed to bow at the waist. And I said, well, we don't really do that in the United States. I said, I tell you what, when my grandmother's coffin passed in the church, I bent my head like this, you know, as the coffin went by. I'll do that here. How's that? Anyway, you walk forward with your droopy flowers, and all of a sudden, this recording of the North Korean national anthem burst out, which you had no idea what was going to happen. And apparently, I don't know if they use mine because I didn't bow deeply enough, but this is a regular feature on North Korean television. Broadcasts was then just showing the procession of foreigners coming, bowing low to the statue of the great leader of North Korea. Yeah. It's great entertainment, huh?
- [14:12]
B
Amazing. All right, that is it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. Walter, you wrote this week about how many Trump supporters, MAGA supporters, have come to believe that the Cuban regime maybe can and will collapse and, you know, thereby shore up diminishing confidence in President Trump's conduct of foreign policy and boost flagging support for the Republican Party. But that life may not be this simple. The Cuban government is much more resilient than many of its opponents understand, and its fall could complicate rather than simplify the lives of the Trump administration. And everyone else in Washington. So tell us more about this.
- [15:00]
A
Sure. Well, you know, I spent quite a bit of time in Cuba in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. And then at the time, the conventional wisdom almost everywhere was that obviously communism is collapsing everywhere. It is, in fact, the end of history. It's only a matter of time. And of all the countries, Cuba seemed to be top of the list, poor, close to the United States, and absolutely devastated as a result of the loss of Soviet subsidies and support. And here we are 30 years later, and they're still there. I remember talking at that point to an American diplomat, and I said, what have we achieved with 40 years of the economic embargo against Cuba, or the economic. Whatever you want to call it? And he looked at me without missing a beat and said, we are 40 years closer to the end of the Castro era. And so now we are 80 years closer to the end of the Castro era. So I think people don't really understand the resilience of communist regimes after the fall of the Soviet Union. And one key is communism flourished better in countries where there was an indigenous element in the communist takeover. There were domestic communists in Eastern Europe, it was the Red army, and only the Red army that brought communism to those places. Not a single one of them would have wanted to be communist if they'd had a choice. You know, Yugoslavia was a slightly different situation. You go to China, they had their own revolution, and their own dynamics really drove what happened same in Vietnam and in Cuba. So if you look at how and why did these different communist regimes survive? And in the cases, certainly, of China and Vietnam, they thrived. They're stronger, more resilient now than they ever were. In spite of all the laws of history, in spite of the end of history, there they are. And Cuba, without the resources, dependent in some way with a horrible relationship with the United States, is still there. We've talked about how the Kims did it in Korea with the nuclear arsenal and so on. The Cubans realized that they couldn't do it the way China did it. I mean, both North Korea and Cuba were frequently. The Chinese used to make this point to them a lot. They'd even tell us that they were making this point, you should have the same kind of market reforms we did, because if you do, you'll have the economic growth and you'll be able to stabilize your political system. And it frustrated the Chinese. For the North Koreans, they're a tiny little country. They start opening up to foreign investment. And so the Kims lose control. And so they're much better off building nuclear weapons, even if that leads to economic boycotts and sanctions. They would rather control 100% of a $10 billion GDP than 10% of $100 billion GDP. That's their calculus and they're sticking to it. In the Cuban case, also, if you opened up the Cuban economy to normal investment and so on, basically the Cuban Americans would just come back in and buy the place back. And now they would all have American citizenship. So you would. Basically Cuba would be even more tightly integrated into the United States after the Castro revolution than before. This is an unimaginable nightmare for a lot of the folks connected to the current Cuban government. They couldn't go the market opening route. And the Cubans also realized they couldn't really go the full Kim Il Sung route of nuclear development, because as I say in my column, not even the most supine American administration would allow Cuba to build nuclear weapons 90 miles from our shores. This is just not on. Remember that Cuba missile crisis? So they couldn't do the Chinese and Vietnamese method, they couldn't do the Korean method, but they figured out their own path. And what were some elements in that. Number one, they let in very carefully vetted and closely monitored limited foreign investment. They see a Canadian mining company did a lot of it, and a couple of foreign hotel chains were basically it. And a lot of these companies were disappointed because they thought, okay, we'll go in there, we'll invest, we'll build relations of trust, and then as the island begins to open up, we'll be the privileged partners. This is really going to work for us. And. And it turned out, no, in fact the opposite, that once you had made investments there, they were even more aggressive and limiting you because they didn't want you to get too strong, really didn't want that to happen. So you let in enough of that for survival. Then when things are really terrible, you open up your domestic economy a little bit. Small businesses, you have shoe repair, bicycle repair, you know, stuff like that. Restaurants, strict rules like you can only employ family members. I mean, the rules are really tough. And you use that to get through the worst times. But as soon as things get a little bit better, you immediately start chopping back on the opening the private business. And then the third element was figuring out how to use your citizens to get foreign hard currency. And they came up with basically two ways. One of them, people know, I think, about how Cuban doctors go around the world and do these things. What they don't know is that the host country pays the Cuban government for the doctors. And the doctors do not see very much of the salary that is being paid. The Cuban government pockets that hard currency and the doctors don't live very well. But that's one of the ways that you make money from essentially, let's face it, renting out your slaves. The other thing that they did, brilliant actually, they figured out that when you have a bunch of unhappy dissidents at home, that's like a problem. You have to either throw them in jail or you have to beat them up. And that's like bad for your international image. But on the other hand, if they go overseas and start working, they'll want to send money back to their families stuck in Cuba. You can actually, I think they get like three, four billion dollars a year hard currency from actually often from people who hate the Castro government and would rather be like, you know, landing there in boats with guns to overthrow it. But you know what? Grandma needs the money, grandma needs the medicine. And so you pay and you pay and you pay. They've said in the piece that the East Germans built a wall, the Cubans built a toll booth. And so they've turned their internal opposition into an external source of finance. And the worst things get on the island, the more people flee, which means the more remittance financing comes back to you. So all of that stuff sort of helped them get through until the Venezuelans began to pay. The sort of crazy, misguided Venezuelans started to support the Castro regime. I can't think that was ever a very popular policy in Venezuela. I should tell you. During the Soviet Union I drove around in the late Soviet days and met a lot of ordinary Russians and stuff. And I was at a hotel where there was a group of Cuban entertainers as part of socialist solidarity were like singing and stuff. So I was talking to some Russians standing outside, they're all smoking and, and they're furious about the Cubans. We are so, you know, we got nothing over here. We are bailing those rats out. This is the like most horrible policy. We hate it. So the Venezuelans were doing this too, but now that stopped. And so the, the island is now back to, you know, the worst days after the fall of the Soviet Union. We've seen the press that the emigration pedal to the metal. Cuban population may have dropped from like 11 million to 8.5 or something like that. As just this huge exodus of people out driven by absolute desperation. They've still got iron fisted control over the street neighborhood watches, you know, the like local snoop that reports on everything to the police. Relentless suppression of dissent, even when there's no power. Police are beating people up who protest the fact that I'm living in a tropical country with no air conditioning. I have nothing to cook on, nothing to cook with, and nothing to cook. Even back in the 90s, there was a joke in Cuba. Why is Castro like an onion? They both make you cry in the kitchen. So that still rings true today. But through all of this, they've held power. And we note that while the Trump administration brilliantly was able to find someone in the Venezuelan government that was willing and able to build a different kind of relationship with the United States, that person has not shown up in Cuba yet. They've obviously been probing, but it isn't happening. The Cuban Communist Party, the Cuban security forces are much better organized than the Venezuelans ever were. They're a tougher nut to crack. Who knows, right? The pressure is mounting in Cuba. It is really tough. And a lot of people are suffering very badly. I mean, ordinary people who had no say in anything the Cuban government has ever done are paying the price for this campaign. It's a steep price, you know, like no medicine for your sick kid and no food. That kind of price. So there's one question. Will, in fact the Cuban government fall or change direction? And again, for the Trump people, this would be a historic victory. Eisenhower tried to get rid of Trump of Castro and failed. Kennedy tried and famously failed. Johnson couldn't do anything. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush. Nobody's been able to shake it. Obama recognized it, but it didn't really help any. So here we are. And Cuba continues to deepen its ties with Russia and China, though both neither Russia or China is that interested in giving them more money. They kind of see where that goes, but they're a bad actor. They continue to make trouble. Their immigration policy contributes to our immigration stuff, but they're still there. If they fall, that would be a kind of win. And you can imagine how that might affect midterm elections in South Florida if the Reagan administration is successful. I think for Marco Rubio, this would definitely be a good thing. But what happens on the day after in Venezuela? It's a huge problem to get. The Venezuelan economy still a mess, and they've got the world's largest proven oil reserves. Cuba has, what, abandoned sugarcane fields, the world's greatest supply of 1955 Chevy cars. There might be some money in that, but it's not enough to turn the thing around. And if that dictatorial government Falls. You know, how many Cubans just decided, I'm getting in a boat, I've really had enough, Particularly if things don't get better right away. Or alternatively, drug cartels. The Cuban government, by and large, not 100%, but by and large, has not kind of gotten in bed with the narco traffickers the way the Venezuelans did and the way some others in the region have done. If there's any kind of a vacuum there or a very weak government with economic constraints and losing whatever discipline, what happens there? What happens if you start getting some kind of civil violence down there, Unrest? You have a lot of people in Miami and other places in America who have relatives caught up in that. The speedboats start bringing arms from the United States down into. All kinds of things could happen. Maybe none of them will, and it'll be fantastic. But what I wonder about is, and I don't have the answer, how thoroughly has the Trump administration thought through the economic dimension of a political transition in Cuba? How much thinking have they done about how poorly a bad outcome would affect American interests and American politics? So we may be coming to an end game. In some ways, this is probably more dangerous for the regime than the post 1990 crisis was. And they don't have Fidel's charisma. He was very good at what he did. I spent enough time with him to understand that the guy actually was a gifted politician, particularly in the Cuban context. Raul is in his 90s and doesn't really have it. The current president, I think, doesn't have the same kind of appeal. So the resources are a bit less. Any ideological conviction is long gone in the sense that, yes, we can make socialism work in Cuba. After 70 years plus, that begins to look less likely. So where do they go?
- [29:23]
B
All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Walter, while we've been going with you to revisit your 1990s trips to communist countries, give us your. Do you have a favorite Castro story?
- [29:43]
A
Oh, Castro story. Well, I mean. Huh? Castro story. You want to hear my Castro stories, do you? Yeah. Favorite Castro story. That's a tough one. I'll tell you one good story about Castro and one not so good. It was a dinner in the hall of the Cuban Revolution, and I had brought my godson, the son of some friends from college. He was an undergrad at the time, and he was in his college's acapella singing group. But, you know, there was one of these state banquets, and I was sitting at a Table with the Vice President of Cuba. Fidel was at a table with people like Arthur Schlesinger and Gene Kennedy Smith. I mean, you know, sort of a real high flying audience. And between each course, these Cuban youth groups would come out and sing, dance, whatever. They found out that Tim was a, was a singer. And they asked me if Tim would, would be interested in singing between one of the choruses. So he thought about, he went and he decided, yes. He warmed up his singing a little bit and came back and just sang a beautiful performance of Shenandoah, a lovely folk song, intelligently chosen, no politics in it at all, but expressing kind of a love of the country and a lot of applause. And I asked Carlos Lage, the vice president at the time, is it okay if I introduce Tim to the president? He said, absolutely. I take Tim over. Mr. President, I'd like you to meet my godson, Tim O'. Brien. And Fidel stood up and talked to Tim for 10 minutes like he was the only person in the room you can imagine. You're a teenage kid. This is amazing. And then Castro says to him, as he's about to leave, he says, you were the first North American citizen. They don't say American citizen. First North American citizen ever to be invited to perform in the hall of the Cuban Revolution. All right, just an amazing, you know, just really good at what he does. But another time, it was one of the conferences where you have a bunch of historians on both sides declassifying different archival documents and looking at, okay, what our side thought, what their side thought, what was actually going on, and where the principals are still living. They like say, really, you thought we were going to do that, etc. These things can be very interesting. But in this one, Fidel kind of hijacked it. It was about the Bay of Pigs. You know, we're supposed to, this conference, supposed to end the afternoon. We're supposed to go to a dinner and then do a. Go to a performance at the Cuban National Ballet. Very nice. Well, Fidel started talking and he started telling war stories really, really long and involved war stories. And they weren't like, oh, now I understand how the Cubans maneuvered and were able to hold that ground kind of war stories. It was like, okay, remember Jose, you and me were behind the bush and then Jorge came by in the truck and you were saying, you know, it's like that. It's like the most boring professor that you ever had telling the longest anecdotes you've ever heard going on and on and, and time is going by like as soon clear that we're not going to be able to make the ballet on time, they have to go out there calling the National Ballet and telling them to delay the performance, which of course means that all these, like, people who've like, got babysitters for the evening and have made the audience of thousands of people is going to have to sit there, not to mention the dancers who have gotten all ready for the performance and are now like going stale. And, oh, you can just imagine, right? And he keeps talking and then maybe he started to think, have I gotten, you know, am I getting a little carried away here? So he looks around the room, he says, am I talking too much? No, no. Yes. All the Cubans. All the Cubans in the room. No, Fidel, tell us more. We love it when you tell us these stories. And so he, you know, he bowed to the popular demand, continued talking. So, I mean, in that, you know, this is one reason why dictatorships often degrade their performance degrades over time. So, you know, I've seen Fidel be kind of go above the normal standard of human behavior into somebody who's really generous and kind, had a political, you know, he was achieving a political goal, but still really well done. And then on the other hand, just like, oh, no, really? And let me tell you, that's not the worst story, but it's good enough. I think it's illustrated.
- [35:16]
B
All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers, Josh Cross and Quinn Waller, thanks to Alex Vatanov at 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.
- [35:34]
A
Race.