← 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 center at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week, the Trump administration is putting the weight of the federal government behind a crackdown on political speech it deems objectionable. It will the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk. On Wednesday afternoon, the head of the FCC suggested the agency could punish ABC over comments made by comedian Jimmy Kimmel related to Kirk's killing. By Wednesday evening, Disney, ABC's parent company, said it was taking Kimmel's late night show off the air indefinitely. Hours later, Trump said he was labeling antifa, a loose affiliation of far left activist groups as a major terrorist organization. Earlier this week, Attorney General Pam Bondi raised the prospect of prosecuting people who engage in hate speech. And behind the scenes, according to the Wall Street Journal, senior administration officials are drawing up plans to take action against left leaning organizations. The president and his team have reportedly discussed investigating George Soros and left leaning foundations like the Ford foundation under the corrupt organizations law known as rico. Trump advisors are also weighing whether to review the tax exempt status of left leaning nonprofit groups. Walter, is all this news or faux news news?
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You know, as usual the news that comes out is a little kind of muddied and muddled, but something is going on here. I think we need to step back a little bit because it's an important fact in considering what Disney did with the Kimmel show. These late night shows have been losing audience pretty significantly. So I think they're down. I don't know the exact numbers for Kimmel, but sort of 70 and 80% in the last 10 years and yet many of them still have a cost structure reflecting a very different era. So I suspect that if the show had been making pots of money and the same thing with the Colbert show, there would have been a bit more corporate resistance to ending the show and probably likely someone would have picked it up. I've noticed that we're not canceling south park or closing south park even though it's probably been recently the most kind of vehemently anti Trump show out there. So that, you know, if south park is the canary, it's still chirping pretty, pretty happily down in the coal mine. So that, you know, so I think that we have to sort of put this is not government forcing a network to take a profitable show off the air. It's Network gauging its various pros and cons in a situation where maybe it's not that attached to the show anyway. Even so, so we, you know, we, we want to circumscribe it there. Even so, on the whole, it's probably, it's, it's, it's a bad thing to have the federal government trying to tell television organizations what to show and what not to show. And it's very hard for me to see this going in a healthy direction. Beyond that, the business of going after certain foundations and their donors. I'm not totally close to the idea that if you had hypothetically, a foundation, whether it's a nonprofit, whether it's left wing or right wing, let's put that aside. But it was giving money to organizations that sponsored protests at which acts of violence repeatedly happen. It seems to me that there ought to be a situation where if you're a store owner and your store just got looted by a mob, you might be able to establish, if you could establish in court, that the foundation that gave the money to this group knew that the group had a bad record of promoting or supporting demonstrations that went violent and did nothing to prevent it. And by nothing, I don't just mean having a little disclosure like please do not engage in any acts, but actually took serious steps, then maybe you should be able to sue the living daylights out of that stupid foundation. That seems to me to be a place where real people who have nothing to do usually with the issues that people are protesting, are suffering. And I think there's been a ton of carelessness on that. And I actually think there may be enormous liabilities for some of these foundations based on their own failure to do real due diligence to protect, to prevent violence. But, you know, I'm not a lawyer, so I think there is a place that one could legitimately go, the RICO statute. It's a very broad thing. It's, you know, one of the things that we've seen with the creep of government power largely by the left, because the left has mostly been in power, but certainly under the Bush administration, and the reaction to 91 1, there's, you know, big uptick is the criminalization of everything. Remember at one point Solzhenitsyn wrote, by the late Soviet, sort of Brezhnev era, you no longer had to prosecute anybody for political crimes because you'd created a situation which no one could get through a week without breaking some law or other. So all you have to do is investigate, and lo and behold, your designated Target is guilty of a crime. So we are already an over criminalized society, over regulated society. And to see this, you know, in a sense being weaponized by a particular administration is just to me a sign that we are advancing further down a dark road that as far as I can tell, leads to no, no good place.
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All right, our second story. Saudi Arabia and nuclear armed Pakistan have signed a mutual defense pact that defines any attack on either nation as an attack on both. The kingdom has long had close economic, religious and security ties to Pakistan, including reportedly providing funding for Islamabad's nuclear weapons program as it developed. Analysts and Pakistani diplomats in at least one case have suggested over the years that Saudi Arabia could be included under Islamabad's nuclear umbrella, particularly as tensions rose over Iran's atomic program. According to the Washington Post, the timing of the pact this week appeared to be a signal to Israel, long suspected to be the Middle East's only nuclear armed state, which has conducted a sprawling military offensive since October 7, 2023, stretching across Iran, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Syria, Yemen and last week the Gulf state of Qatar. Walter, is this mutual defense pact news or FO news?
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I think the pact is faux news. The announcement is real news. That is, I doubt frankly that Pakistan is actually going to or could target, say Israel with nuclear weapons. If an Israeli raid like the one on Qatar were planned in Riyadh. There won't be an Israeli raid on Riyadh because Saudi Arabia isn't doing what Qatar was doing. This is theatrics and perception management, I think, and doing it now, yes, it's a signal, but it's kind of the lowest wattage signal of like, oh look, I'm going to pretend to do something. And you can infer from this that I'm annoyed. It's maybe a step above a diplomatic note, but it's well short of substance. But there is something under the surface going on. I think two things. Number one is that Pakistan, after a long period of really almost kind of being flat on its back diplomatically and politically, I mean, it's torn by unbelievable unrest. Its economy is in utter shambles, its ruling class hates itself and the mob hates all the factions of the ruling class. And in any case, the quote, ruling class is sidelined by a military which has its own objectives. You know, it really is a dismal thing trad there a lot of fantastic Pakistanis. You go there and you meet some of the nicest and most intelligent people that you'll ever meet in your life. But the system is really kind of deformed and things had reached an acute crisis with the sort of arresting the latest and most popular of the political figures in the country, the army, really not knowing sort of which politicians now could be convincing puppets to do the little democracy governance dance that, that keeps the, the general sort of safely veiled. Pakistan women are veiled and power is veiled. It's kind of, you know, both things. But now it looks as if the Pakistanis have kind of gotten their act together a little bit. It may be that the latest attack from India, or not really attack from India, but sort of flare from the terror attack in Kashmir leading on into larger hostilities, sounded as a wake up call. And so the Pakistanis are working to renew their ties with the Gulf. But in general, the taboos against nuclear proliferation in the Middle east are rapidly eroding. A wackier, less dependable America. And we were wacky under the Biden years as well as under the Trump years. So I'm not sure this is not a partisan remark, but no sane person in the Middle east right now thinks they can predict where the US will be in five years. And that makes, you know, when you feel that way and you feel existential threat, nuclear weapons start looking like a really good idea. Pakistan's role here is less likely to be the purveyor of, of a nuclear umbrella, but rather an enabler and a facilitator for the right price of nuclear proliferation. That was what they were doing some years ago, I think. I imagine that there's a lot of thought being given now to how can a country like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, whatever, Egypt, other countries, start down this path again. Needless to say, it's been a long American objective to try to stop nuclear proliferation. One of the reasons that we do that, we have been as active as we've been, not often wisely, but very active in the Middle east, is our sense that an American security platform and umbrella could end the need that other states had for this. It's one of the reasons we've been so focused on the Iranian program. But if in fact our kind of current state of disarray and uncertainty and vacillation is going to continually reduce the perceived security of these states, they're going to want nukes. Pakistan, which by the way, used to do this to some degree in cahoots with North Korea, is ready, I think we also need to understand that Pakistan's alliance with the axis of revisionists, the Russia, China, North Korea, Iran's a bit of a problem for them, but that's growing. And as Chinese influence rises in Pakistan. It's not a bad way for China to give Washington a headache, to sort of not object if Pakistan wants to jump into this. And to export the India Pakistan rivalry into the Gulf would also, I think be create headaches for the United States, headaches for Israel, headaches for Europe. But maybe if you're trying to show your Vladimir Putin, your Xi Jinping that you're a force to be reckoned with, and maybe if you're trying to build your footprint in the Middle east, helping Pakistan become a little bit more assertive and destabilizing just might not be that bad of an idea.
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Just one follow up. I also saw that Turkey and Egypt are holding joint military drills in the Eastern Med for the first time in something like 15 years, which comes after Sisi visited Ankara recently to apparently mend strained ties. Is this another kind of PR signaling for domestic audiences, or is the vice kind of tightening around Israel here along multiple dimensions?
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Yeah, interesting. I think the Egyptians are not really that interested in a new war with Israel, but probably the Egyptian government is a little bit concerned. The Egyptian government has not covered itself with glory. In economic terms. The Muslim Brotherhood is still a force inside Egypt. The long war really on Egypt's border with Gaza. So you put all of those things together and showing a little bit of Islamic solidarity ankle by the government might make some sense. Erdogan is eager, no doubt, to increase his profile in various ways. I am not anticipating any kind of joint Turkish Egyptian military operation against Israel anytime soon, but again, this serves the interests, I think, of both governments.
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All right, final story of the week. Since 2019, cocaine consumption in the United States has increased by 154% in the Western U.S. and by 19% in the Eastern U.S. where maybe it never really went out of style. Fentanyl consumption, by contrast, has been on a steady decline since 2023. These changes in drug consumption, according to the Wall Street Journal, have been reflected in the changing fortunes of Mexico's drug kingpin. The Sinaloa cartel, formerly led by Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, became one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world during the 2010s by specializing in fentanyl trafficking. But it has declined over the past decade as the US has exerted ever more pressure on the fentanyl trade. Now the Sinaloans have been displaced by the cocaine specialist Nemesio Mencho Asaguera, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation cartel. US Forces in the Caribbean recently blew up two speedboats, including one this week that President Trump Alleged were ferrying cocaine and fentanyl from VENEZUELA to the U.S. the president has also threatened military action against drug cartels in Mexico. Walter, is there news or phone news in here?
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There's certainly some phone news in there. You know, when you tell me that cocaine use is up 154% here and 19% there, excuse me for sniffing a little bit at those statistics. I mean, how do they know? I do remember after 91 1, somebody, I was. I think it was a CFR meeting maybe, I don't remember, but somebody asked the question, you know, what are the. What are the chances that Al Qaeda could smuggle a dirty bomb into the United States? And somebody, I think maybe from the Coast Guard might have said, well, you know, if they really wanted to do that, what they could do is just put it in a boat shipping cocaine because our interdiction rate of cocaine is so low, they have a 90% chance of getting that through. So this is, you know, the problem of illegal smuggling of drugs is one this country has never really solved. You know, you go back to Prohibition, our track record on modifying the recreational habits of American citizens by imposing border controls on certain substances just doesn't, you know, just a very tough problem. But that said, all right, it really matters that criminal American drug consumption is feeding the growth of narco terrorist organizations, destroying legitimate governments, reducing development prospects, and in every possible way turning America's neighborhood in the Caribbean and Central America into. Instead of being, you know, logically, these countries that are so close to the world's richest economy should be basking and growing just the virtue of geographical proximity. You know, we should. We should have this flourishing backyard, so to speak. And the fact that it isn't, is not a great advertisement for the values of a close relationship with the United States. It's also not a great commentary on American economic policy or strategic thinking. It's maybe not also a great commentary on the quality of the political elites in some of those countries, but that's another. Or political culture. That's another issue. So switch from, you know, on the whole, is a switch from fentanyl to cocaine good? Well, I suppose. I mean, it's, you know, fentanyl kills you faster than cocaine, but it is a little bit like, do you want, you know, lung cancer or skin cancer or something like that? But the reality that America's drug problem is serious, affects millions of families around the country, has the most corrosive, horrible impacts here and abroad, and that we don't really have much in the way of policy for dealing with it. That's news, not new news. A continuing event of continuing significance.
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All right, that does it for this week's news. Let's have the big conversation. Walter, you wrote about the week that shook the old order. Just to first recap the week in question to set the table for our listeners. So in the span of a week, Israel struck Hamas leaders in Qatar and moved toward a full scale invasion and occupation of Gaza City. A large group of Russian drones invaded the airspace of Poland. Trump demanded that NATO allies slap massive secondary sanctions on India and China to force Russia to end its war on Ukraine. The French government fell after losing a confidence vote in the National Assembly. The prime minister of Japan announced he was stepping down after a disastrous tenure during which the LDP lost its majorities in both houses of Parliament. Nigel Farage's Reform UK Marine Le Pen's National Rally and the AfD in Germany all led national polls. Some 300 Korean Hyundai workers were deported from Atlanta to Seoul. Brazil's former president was sentenced to 27 years in prison after being convicted of plight plotting a coup. Britain's ambassador to the US Was dismissed after the revelation of connections to Jeffrey Epstein. And all that happened before the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which is currently tearing us apart domestically. Now, when you lay it out like that, I think I, at least, and probably many of our listeners, if nothing else, feel reassured that we're not simply just too online or emotionally hysterical or Chicken Little. We, we really are going through a genuinely tumultuous time. Can you lay out for us like you did in the column, maybe some of the sources of all this disorder and where it's taking us?
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Well, you know, first of all, Jeremy, it doesn't have to be either or. It can be both. And people can be terminally online, hysterical and obsessive whether the news is good or bad. It's, you know, you have to maintain some kind of sanity no matter what is going on in the world. It's, it will not help the rest of the world in any way, shape or form if everyone's head explodes. What we have here is, I think, a confluence of a couple of trends. The first trend that we have is this, you know, the tech revolution of which AI right now is the most visible but far from the only thing driving it is upending life for people all over the world. World. It's on the one hand creates lovely opportunities. On the other hand, it's creating all kinds of dangers and changes that are very difficult to assess. You know, if you're a truck driver or A taxi driver, and there's a lot of those. Suddenly you're, you wonder if you're going to be employed in five years when we keep reading Waymo and so on, are coming out on rolling out in more cities, blah, blah, blah. You know, if you're a kid coming out of college, you're looking at these unemployment rates for young college grads, et cetera. So all of this is preying on the social stability, the psychological balance of a lot of different countries. At the same time, what you're seeing is the relative decline of the kind of old industrial giants, the classic multinational corporations with this new wealth for these sort of mega wealthy, which is a dog of Elon Musk, would get almost a trillion dollar bonus if certain targets are met at Tesla and so on and so forth. So a scale of wealth creation that is dwarfing anything we've ever seen, again, in and of itself is probably a good thing. Ultimately these people or their kids will spend the money and we'll all get it. Ultimately, maybe, but still, what it means too is that old institutions like the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce and so on that used to have a kind of economic dominance are losing out as these upstarts and insurgent forces come in, whether it's a Palantir or a Tesla or what have you. So we have that as kind of one driving force, upending society and upending the kind of power structure in society. And it's problematic. But then on top of that, we have other things going on. And I think the biggest one is that ever since the end of the Cold War, by and large, our cultural and policy elites have underestimated the cost of maintaining the world order and also sort of progressively enhanced their vision of how good a world order needs to be in order to be legitimate. So for, you know, you could see in the 90s, and then with the hiccup of the war on terror over, you know, that we get back to it. Let's slash defense budgets left and right. Yes, China is building up. Who cares? They'll be democratic or whatever. Let's just go ahead and do this. Let's spend our time, let's declare climate change and national security threat, you know, and see if we can't get some aircraft carriers to run on ethanol, I don't know, whatever. But, you know, sort of a lot a mix of failing to do the stuff that really matters for conserving power and stability, and then a kind of a, I would say casual and careless and fundamentally unserious attitude toward what Building a world order looks like. So the one global institution, most important global institution since the end of the Cold War, without any doubt, is the World Trade Organization. And it's now basically a shell shock, ruin. And it was poorly constructed. The people didn't really think through what they were dealing with. And so we're now reaping the rewards of malpractice and incompetence and fuzzy thinking. At the same time, what we see is countries like China and Russia starting to think in a very focused way. Good heavens, these people are idiots. The foundations of their power have eroded, continue to erode, and they show almost no sign of getting more serious or more competent. Okay, it is raining soup, guys. We can't be standing out here with a fork. And so they are starting to do what happens when you have a power vacuum. They're looking for ways to fill it. So the curve, their rising ambition and then the curve of our kind of continued sort of failures is added to this global trend of uncertainty and distress is getting us to a very strange place. And when you're in a space like that, odd things start to happen. And we are seeing, I think, more and more odd things happening. Signs that the old taboos are losing force. New institutions are not really. You know, the BRICs have certainly not replaced NATO or the UN or anything else as a kind of serious force in world affairs. And yet there's an ambition there, at least in some capitals, to do something. So we are seeing an old system gradually falling apart or tending toward falling apart without any sense of what a new system could really work like. I know Xi Jinping is starting to make some statements about what it's centric world and might look like. You won't call it a Sinocentric world, but it. I think we're very far from coherent. A duel between coherent visions. At the moment, we have a duel between two incoherences. And that, again, is, like, more likely to produce kind of drama, incidents and chaos than some coherent driving force.
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One final question, and it's one that's come up periodically in the course of us doing the podcast. But what do you think it would take to do some. To make some kind of course correction during relative peacetime? So we're not waiting for some massive external shock like a war or something like that to kind of force Americans into getting more serious about a lot of these issues? Is it even possible for us to pull it together like that in relative peacetime?
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I do think leadership can play a role. I do think if you had a political leader who was widely. Doesn't have to be universally trusted, who was able to lay out the world situation in a serious, factually grounded way, show trends on maps and things like that, and persisted in it and was assisted by bipartisan forces. So that president makes a speech and there are three prominent senators from each party sitting at the desk or whatever as he makes the speech. I mean, there are things one could do. Doesn't look like we're going to do them, but they are still there. As things move toward a more chaotic direction, it's likely to be harder and harder to figure out what the steps would be. You know, I mean, there again, there are some promising signs out there. I don't want to just be all gloom and doom. Number one, the old world order, while it probably is dying in part of old age, things change. And something like the UN has needed to be reformed for 50 years and hasn't been. And amazingly, that has consequences. You can see, I think, the fact that, that Trump is shaking things up. Well, I don't think everything he's doing to shake things up is going to have the kind of results he would like to see. But this sense that the increasing willingness of populations to turn to politicians who aren't going to try, you know, who aren't just going to keep lying to them about how the old order is perfect and if you'll just give me more money and more time and more power and help me lock up all the bad people, then I can give you stability. I think people in a lot of countries no longer believe that, and that doesn't necessarily mean they're choosing great alternatives. But maybe just realizing that you have to have an alternative is an important first step. I think we have that. I do think we're seeing on campuses and generally young men are sort of saying, wait a minute, we exist. You know, I'm not all bad. I exist for a purpose. Even the phrase toxic masculinity suggests that there's a non toxic, maybe even vitally necessary masculinity as a part of life. And so, you know, some of the most dynamic people in our country are starting to think, okay, how do you. The world is in a bad spot, the country's in a bad spot. How do I make my contribution? What is that? What is the gap in the defenses that I'm supposed to fill? I think as citizens of a free country, reflect on that. Yeah, we'll get some craziness and some hotheads and some false starts, but I think we may see a generation growing up we may be watching a generation growing up that has fully internalized the idea that, hey, our job is not simply to maintain the order that our grandparents or great grandparents constructed a hundred years ago, but maybe we have to take a fresh look at things and see, okay, what has to happen now.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Another listener request this week, Walter, this one from Benson in Summerlin, Nevada, who wrote in with a real softball. He asks, quote, what's your best explanation for why Israel and Jew hatred has become the number one obsession among right wing podcasters and influencers?
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Softball? Is that what you call that one? I mean, there are a lot of things going on, but one thing I would, I would really look at is we're seeing a split in the Magaverse. That is, there's kind of what you could call the respectable or Trumpian Magaverse, which sees it sort of accepts Donald Trump as the, as, as the great Maga Lord. And as Trump said at an earlier time, what I say is Maga is Maga. And then you have people who say, wait a minute, I got a following, I've got a base. I am not a 78 year old real estate developer slash reality television star from queens. I am 35, I have a future. And Trump is term limited. At least in theory, he's term limited. So we're talking about a fight for the succession of Trump and how do we gather up? Where do I look for followers? Where do I look for the division points between my side of the, of Maga and the establishment side of maga. And in that, I think attitudes about Israel and the Jews are an important sort of point. In general, they're exception to everything. But in general, if somebody is more or less pro Israel, it's not the same thing as being pro Bibi or even pro Gaza war. But you know, like, okay, it's a good thing that there's an Israel. The Jews need a state. They've had kind of a rough deal and you know, they've surrounded by some tough countries and so every now and then they have to do some tough things and sometimes they're too tough. But even so, you know, it's like on balance, it's a good thing that they're there. If you think that you are probably rather moderate in a lot of your other opinions, you know, you kind of think, well, capitalism is basically good, America's basically good. Yes, yes, there are problems, there are issues, blah, blah, blah, reforms are needed. But you're kind of, you're steering in the center lane. If you and as you begin to drift out toward the extremes, one of the points of division, and this is obviously in our time as true on the left as it is on the, on the right. One of the ways you mark yourself and say I'm not a centrist, I am not one of these compromising moderate fools sheeple, you know, I'm actually an edgelord. I'm serious, I'm out there is to say it's the Jews, it's the Jews. And this I think is part of what we're seeing. There is this kind of ugly scene in Western civilization of anti Semitism. And I think we have to say not only in Western civilization these days has a long and a deep history and it's always there, you know, sort of as a, as potential as, you know, it's like an earthquake fault that might not snap for years or produce any disturbance, but is there and can. And so in a time when you're seeing a lot of tectonic stress in our society and all, okay, there's the place. And I do think folks, you know, there are a lot of folks who think, and so far, sadly, with some accuracy, that sort of doing the anti Israel, anti Semitic rant is actually a good way to garner up a share of populist support and to differentiate you again from those accommodating weasels form like establishment maga. And it's quite likely that as Trump moves toward the end of the second term, the wars of succession in the Magaverse are going to become sharper, the stakes are going to rise and who will the true heir to Trump be? And you can see someone like J.D. vance, Vice President Vance, who hopes to be the inheritor, is trying to keep, keep the coalition together. But if you want to push a more radical agenda, the anti Israel line, anti Semitic line is a good opening.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers Josh Cross and Quinn Waller. Thanks to 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.
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Sam.