← What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
The Return of the Hostages, an AfPak War, and India
00:30:30
Loading summary
Transcript16 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:07]
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 center at the University of Florida. Walter, where in the world are you right now? Last time I checked, it was Sri Lanka, but I'm sure it's changed.
- [00:24]
A
All right, this morning I'm in Gujarat in India, and we are just coming to the closing couple of days of a 10 day visit to India and Sri Lanka. From here I'm headed on to Singapore and Taiwan. So quite a month.
- [00:39]
B
All right, well, I'll ask you about India in just a moment. The last episode we recorded the title of that was the Week When Decades Happened, which now seems a little preemptive. There's so much clear news to discuss since we last spoke that I thought we'd skip our YouTube usual format and save any potential Faux news for next week. So we're recording late at night on Monday in LA. It's a little after 8am in India, so all the usual caveats apply about how quickly things can change in the time it takes to publish the episode. But let's make sure to discuss the Gaza hostage release and ceasefire deal on the one hand, the war that's broken out between Afghanistan and Pakistan on the other. And then finally, I'm going to ask you about what you've been seeing and hearing and learning in India and from Prime Minister Modi, who I'm guessing that's not a state secret since he was tweeting out pictures of the two of you together.
- [01:32]
A
Yeah, that did kind of take the discretion out of the meeting to some degree.
- [01:36]
B
All right, so first, the pretty incredible events in Israel and Gaza today, yesterday for you, including President Trump's speech to the Knesset and summit in Egypt. You said it's much too soon to know what it all means, but that there are a few things we do know about what just happened. Can you tell us a bit about what you're thinking of?
- [01:56]
A
The first thing that we know happened is that the hostages came home. And that sounds maybe at this point a little bit trite, but that was a big deal, not just for the hostages and their families. And there it's of transcendent importance, but just in terms of the sort of situation of Israel, the psychology of this situation from the October 7 attacks, Israel had been living in this sort of psychological dark room. You know, the fate of the hostages was hanging over the whole country was affecting everything about Israeli politics was driving storms of emotion Defining the actions of political characters, that's over. What it means for the future of Israel and Israeli politics, we can't say. But the sort of national state of emergency, psychological emergency, is over. Now, I wouldn't want to talk about this without referring to the grief of those who, you know, for whom the news came that their friends and loved ones were not among the ones the people released yesterday, that there are, you know, and we should never forget those who died in captivity. But from this point on, Israel can take a much more forward looking approach to the events in its neighborhood. That really is a big deal. And it has happened. It's not speculative. It's not sort of, well, maybe if everything goes right, that has happened. The second thing that struck me is that really nobody but Mr. Trump could have done this thing. There are lots of things to like about President Trump, there are lots of things to dislike about President Trump. And oddly, his good qualities can be better than most people's good qualities. And his bad qualities are also larger than life. It's all out there. And somehow what Trump did was he brought this. I don't even know how to describe it. This, a scale of political action and effect. It's not necessarily strategic calculation. I don't know that a week ago he had a chess move going, but this instinct for seizing the advantage, wringing advantage out of every circumstance. So it says he was able to take the Israeli strike on Qatar and turn that into an element, actually of incorporating Qatar and others into a coalition which did have the impact of weakening Hamas's resolve to hold onto those prisoners at all costs. He used it also to, you know, sort of by forcing Bibi to, you know, not stopping Bibi from doing it, but. But forcing him to apologize after it was done. A limited apology, but enough so that other Arab leaders could sort of move forward. Even though the idea that Israel might attack a Gulf state with the backing of the implicit backing of the United States is a pretty powerful flex. He got away with all of that and was able to, you know, an action which, oh, all the commentators said, oh, this is going to make peace hopeless. Oh, my God. You know, the. Oh, oh. It was like the storm over the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem. You know, this will wreck the Middle east for a thousand years. They were as kind of hyperbolic in attacking Trump as Trump is in praising himself. All right? And yet he's able to make these things serve his purpose. So it was an extraordinary demonstration of the way that Trump really, he bestrides the world today like no Other leader there is simply Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. They have their power, they have their goals. In the long run, they may win and America may lose, who knows? But at this moment, you have to say that, that Donald Trump has elevated himself in the sort of global pecking order to the kind of place where he would always like to be. I think we also have to look at what happened yesterday and say Bibi deserves a real tip of the hat here. Israel was sick of Bibi before the October 7 attacks. They were even sicker of him after the October 7 attack and said, not unreasonably, you know, the guy that's been running this country for the last 10 years or whatever maybe has a little bit of responsibility for the fact that we were totally unprepared for the worst attack in decades. So, you know, this sort of pit of public anger, the political firestorm, and that's inside Israel with a coalition that to some degree, is bound together only by mutual loathing. From that position, he was able to develop a plan and stick with it through thick and thin, the entire world screaming at him, all the great and the good and every condemning and, you know, within Israel, hundreds of thousands of people marching against his leadership. The military leadership in open revolt, the judicial system wanting to nail his hide to the barn door. The intelligence leadership, you know, could hardly contain their loathing and contempt for him when they spoke against all of that. Bibi did it his way, you can argue. Was there another way? Was there a better way? But Bibi saw this thing through on his terms. It is, again, just forget everything else as a, as a sort of textbook example of leadership. This is one of the most powerful performances I've seen in my life. And now the hostages are back. Paradoxically, that may make it easier for Bibi's government to fall. The post hostage era could end up being unfavorable politically to Bibi, we don't know. But Israeli politics are now in a new space. Of all people, Bibi Netanyahu is the one who's going to sort of struggle the hardest to manage those consequences. So these are, you know, these, these are big things. I don't think the deal in Gaza has, you know, ended 3,000 years of conflict in the Middle East. I doubt it's even ended the problem of, of Hamas in Gaza. We see they're already running around doing their usual loathsome murders and executions. You know, one hopes that some of the people who had been so eager for a ceasefire will now begin to realize the true character of Hamas. And kind of awaken from this gauzy, sentimental dream in which sort of Palestinians are good and all Israelis are bad and, you know, this kind of simple dichotomy and everything that Hamas does is good because resistance, after all, you know, that's the name of the game. And we're fighting, you know, capitalist oppression, whatever. Maybe Hamas is not really a very good representative of the Palestinian people or of anything else other than the spirit of hatred, despair and nihilism. There's that. And then we go from that to. So the Middle east situation has not. Trump has not solved the Middle East. Bibi has not solved the Middle East. You don't solve the Middle east, you live in it. And finally, what I would say is, while this is a great moment, perhaps the greatest moment in Trump's one and a quarter terms, roughly, it is not his sternest test. This is not the big event in the Trump presidency. This is not the. Who knows, it could be his high watermark. But he has not resolved the greatest and most difficult challenges to the United States and for that matter, frankly, to him. Those are posed by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. They're not posed by Hamas. They're not even posed by Iran. Those are much bigger problems. They are almost infinitely more powerful and resourceful than Hamas. The threats are far more sort of both formidable and far reaching. So for Trump, in a sense, if Trump is going to achieve what more and more appears to be his goal of going down in history as a great statesman, he's only at the start of the big adventure. This is episode one, just one follow.
- [11:00]
B
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?
- [11:27]
A
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.
- [16:43]
B
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?
- [17:20]
A
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.
- [21:40]
B
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.
- [22:00]
A
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.
- [26:26]
B
That does it for our news items this week. Lastly, before we close, Walter, you got to give us your Colombo travel tips.
- [26:34]
A
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.
- [28:27]
B
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.