B (10:59)

Up there before we move on. You've seen a lot of people, including maybe especially Trump's critics, saying that there's kind of something about the Middle east that Trump gets in a way that his predecessors did not, or that there's something about Trump that just has a feel for the Middle East. Is there something, something to that that you see, or is this kind of a backhanded compliment and just a way of saying, well, he'll, you know, kind of still screw up every other part of the world?

A (11:26)

Look, I think that is that that has the sound of people clutching at straws as, as the ship goes down. Yet Trump does have some. Hey, I think he has two qualities that many of his domestic opponents and international colleagues and peers lack. The first is, and this was very important in the Middle east, an instinct for power. Trump. And now I'll really make a lot of people grow pale. Trump and Reagan are similar in this way. They both operated on Instinct more than on kind of learned calculation and deep study. Reagan did not sort of go overtime with his briefing books. And Trump doesn't even bother to open them some days. But they both had, in some way, they intuitively understood some big things about how the world works and how American politics works. That gave them, it enabled them first of all to enjoy the benefits of their insights. But it also foxed and confounded their opponents. Who would keep thinking, this guy has never read a book on the Middle east in his life. Jared Kushner's read 25 Trump. Has he read any. And so you go in assuming he's a stupid idiot and suddenly like he's gutted you with a fish knife and you're flopping helplessly on the deck because you underestimated him. Now, Trump definitely has that going for him, but there's, I think, something bigger. Trump is a simple person in the sense that he sees something and he goes for it in the best way he knows how. Think about, you know, think about how Barack and Obama and Joe Biden sort of torture themselves over everything. It's, it's, you know, well, I want to, like, I don't want to lose the Afghan war, Obama would say, but I don't really want to do what it might take to win it. And so I'm going to do like, you know, I'm going to go halfway, I'm going to go part way. This was Biden, you know, I can't let Israel lose the war in Gaza, but politically it's just a bad look for me to, to, you know, give to back Israel 100%. So, so Biden ended up in that obami and sour spot where he did enough for Israel so that everybody who hated Israel and loved Hamas and all that kind of progressive wing of the Democratic Party hated what Biden was doing and called him Genocide Joe. So he did enough for Israel. So he doesn't get, so he loses the left and loses the sort of cool kids in the international community. But then he doesn't, doesn't go forward enough to get the benefits of what he's doing. He's trying to reel BBN in a sense that the combination of tapping the brake pedal one moment, the accelerator, the next, brake, accelerator, brake, accelerate, means you don't go very far. You, you don't get anywhere, but you suffer the consequences. The pro Israel people. While acknowledging that Biden actually did deliver a lot of aid to Israel, he never won them over because it was really, really clear that his policy was to kind of keep the thing in suspense, I think that's how he handled Ukraine as well. So you end up getting the worst of both worlds because you're so clever, calculating, wise, prudent, that you wreck yourself and everyone connected to you. That is maybe the overriding sort of wrong idea in the heads of the American foreign policy establishment that half measures are the best measures. I think there's a Shakespeare phrase, you know, the, like the cat in the adage, letting I dare not wait upon, I would. Trump doesn't suffer from that mental incapacity. So if he's going to support Bibi, he's going to support Bibi. But then if he's going to reign Bibi in, he'll do it publicly and in front of everybody. But he has the Israeli trust. He's the most pro Israel president they'd ever say. That actually increases his leverage over them because of this guy who's given you more backing, more verbal backing. He's not ashamed. He's not doing it out of the daylight. He's out there. He's being beating his chest about it. Now he's turned on you. Okay, okay, fine. I'd better like do something. I could list what I think is wrong with Trump's approach to politics and other things. Even Trump says he doesn't think he's going to get into heaven. But I think it's important that we all understand that there are elements of the way Trump works that are actually better than the way that all the wise sage, you know, moderate counsel on foreign relations, you know, chin stroking intellectuals and foreign policy experts are Trump. Trump knows things they don't. And the things that he knows are important.

B (16:42)

All right, let's hit the next story. This is Afghanistan and Pakistan where you've been somewhat close over the last week or two. So over the weekend, at least 23 Pakistani soldiers were killed and 29 others were injured, according to the Pakistani military. And the Taliban government said nine Afghan soldiers were killed and at least 16 others had been injured. These are not negligible numbers, Walter, insofar as our listeners are kind of aware of this at all. Can you enlightened us a bit? You know, what is this conflict about and how serious do you expect it to be?

A (17:20)

It's certainly for Pakistan. This is a nightmare. Pakistan has been hoping, has been trying really since the. So actually since its independence, but with much more focus since the Soviet invasion of Pakistan back in the Carter administration. Pakistan has always kind of seen a friendly Afghanistan as essential to its security. It gives it what Pakistanis say is strategic depth facing India. And Pakistan, you look at it on the map, is not really that big of a country. It's not that fat of a country. North, south, it's kind of narrow. And India, much larger, larger conventional forces, et cetera, is sitting right there. So if the Pakistanis, you know, in, in a worst case, had to worry about a hostile Afghanistan, and in a best case or a mild case, just an Afghanistan that, that was, you know, irre, you know, neutral, would be in trouble or see that they would be in trouble. They wanted a friendly Afghanistan. That is frankly why they were hiding Osama bin Laden. They wanted ties to the Taliban. They wanted to make sure they were. I think they understood Americans better than Americans understood themselves. They knew we'd ultimately walk away from Afghanistan, that, that we weren't actually going to establish girls high schools in the rural areas of Afghanistan. We weren't going to turn the farmers from opium poppy cultivators to heritage kale farming with organic methods only. You know, they knew that all of this was just Americans deceiving themselves and living in their happy bubble of narcissism and derangement so that ultimately Afghanistan would come back in something like its familiar ways. And so they hoped that the Taliban would return as a friendly power to Pakistan. And much to their horror, they have discovered that's not what happened and that the Taliban is aligned with forces, with guerrilla movements inside Pakistan. They'd sort of forgotten that the Afghan nationalists, although that's a strange word to use in that context, but perhaps Pakistan supremacists might be another. Another way of thinking about it. They don't like the Duran Line, the boundary between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which was drawn by the British. They don't really think of Pakistan as a very Islamic state, in spite of all the things that Pakistan has tried to do to win that mantle. And they see themselves as ideological and political rivals to Pakistan. And like a lot of Central Asian warlords going back a thousand years, they tend to think about how much fun it would be to expand south into all that rich land beyond the mountains. So Pakistan is waking up to discover, A, that it has potentially a very, very serious enemy immediately to its north, and B, because the foreign minister of Afghanistan was actually in New Delhi holding consultations with his Indian counterparts as the fighting was flaring, that India has kind of recognized that the enemy of my enemy is, if not my friend, at least somebody I can talk with. And so Pakistan is now seeing a sort of nightmare coalition. I think in some ways we have to think of this as India's payback for what Pakistan has been up to in the last six months. We'll now see whether Pakistan's response is to double down and. And try to think of something equally evil and devious to do back in its turn. But the antipathy between these two important countries, which had never gone away, is clearly reactivated and is moving events. Now, that's a new and from my point of view, not very welcome development in world affairs.

B (21:40)

All right, well, speaking of India, let's make sure to hit before we wrap up your time in India. It comes after several testy months in the US India relationship and as India's neighborhood seems to be getting more unstable by the day. So just enlighten us to what you've seen and heard and learned in the last week or so.

A (22:00)

I'm still kind of ruminating and fulminating because I've got a little bit of time left here in India to think things through. I've been here for about 10 days with a Hudson Institute delegation, and we've been fortunate enough to have met with Prime Minister Modi, with External Affairs Minister Jai Shankar, and a number of other very senior people in India. We've also engaged with some of the top opposition leaders, including chief ministers and party officials in New Delhi. So we're doing our best to get a good look at what's going on in India today. And I think I won't be giving away any secrets if I say that what we're finding is that some of the decisions that have come out of Washington in the last few months, ranging from visits by top Pakistani leaders to the White House, talk about the US Buying ports in Pakistan, Pakistan dangling offers of minerals and other things that didn't go over well in India, 25% tariffs with a 25% penalty tariff on Russia, oil didn't go over very well in India. And the sort of threat to abolish H1B visas and then put pricing them at $100,000 each, none of this has gone over particularly well in India. And you have people here who are quite seriously rethinking the US India relationship. That doesn't mean that they've reached conclusions. I don't actually think they've reached all that many conclusions. But while we were here, the new American ambassador was approved, the former director of personnel in the White House was confirmed by the Senate. And it's clear that right from the beginning, the Indians are going to be focusing on this. There was some talk here that, that this is a good thing for India because for the first time since John Kenneth Galbraith was JFK's ambassador back in the 1960s. India has an ambassador in New Delhi who can pick up the phone and call the President. That's why, by the way, a lot of countries would rather have a political appointed ambassador who has good White House connections, rather than a professional ambassador in the career Foreign Service who has great connections with the State Department. You know, who do you want on the case, the president or the Secretary of State? Most foreign countries would say the President. So there's some interest in that. Also, the idea that the ambassadorship to India is a plum that you give to a friend, that's a compliment. As opposed to the only people who go here are the hired hands who have to go where they're sent. It's like the ambassadorship to France, like the ambassadorship to England. Hey, you know, India. So I think there is the potential for turning this corner and possibly now that we see, you know, the White House is going to be able to pull back a little bit from a Middle east focus and that the China relationship is flaring again. You know, we have, we've had the, the Chinese rare earths ban, we've had punitive tariffs. On the US Side, we're seeing this usual back and forth of a mix of compliments and threats as Trump and Xi Jinping kind of, you know, go into their, you know, pre negotiation haka rituals. So in that context, India naturally looks bigger to the United States. Whenever Americans are thinking about China, we pay India more attention and are more interested in making sure that the relationship is working. So what we may be seeing is the creation of conditions in the White House that are going to elevate India as a priority in Trump's thinking. And when and if that happens, my guess is on the American side, there would be some moves to assess the situation, repair any damage, and try to move on.

B (26:26)

That does it for our news items this week. Lastly, before we close, Walter, you got to give us your Colombo travel tips.

A (26:33)

First one is definitely go. Sri Lanka is, you know, it's beautiful. You talk to environmentalists, there's nothing they hate more. Very few things they hate more than palm oil, palm plantation. And I think ecologically, they're a terrible thing. They, you know, Sri Lanka doesn't have any orangutans, but in Southeast Asia, a lot of orangutan habitat has been lost. Rhinoceros, elephants, blah, blah, blah. Okay, fine, that's all true and very concerning, but honestly, you know, those kind of oil pumps are really pretty to look at. So I would much rather drive past a palm plantation than a soybean field. So you, you know, the, the countryside is hilly. It's lots of views, beautiful lush vegetation. It's just, it's just pretty and relaxing. The food is delicious. The people are extremely welcoming. So I would say, you know, you, you, you're trying to figure out where to go. We didn't have a chance to do some of this, but the scuba diving is supposed to be great. The beaches are fantastic. We went out to G A L L E. I think I'm pronouncing that right. And it, it's, it's an old, it was originally a Portuguese fort taken over by the Dutch, taken over by the British. And it's just a very picturesque place across from where I guess Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, lived for many years. It's just, it's just, well, kind of nice. So I would say go, go. It's a long way away. It's a long way away. But worth the trip.

B (28:27)

All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers, Josh. Josh Cross and Quinn Waller. Thanks to Alex Fitanov 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.