← What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
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Foreign. 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. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pitched Donald Trump on ending all US aid to Israel within the next 10 years. Though Trump was, quote, bewildered by proposal and did not immediately support it, Netanyahu revealed the proposal made during his December trip to Mar a Lago in an interview with the Economist published this week. His argument seemed to be that US Aid fosters Israeli dependence, reduces Israel's strategic autonomy, and contributes to an increasingly toxic US Political discourse on the Jewish state. Trump, however, reportedly, quote, could not understand why Netanyahu would want to end the aid relationship and, quote, disagreed with his suggestion and that ending aid would improve Israel's reputation in the United States. WALTER News ORFO News People who follow.
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This stuff have known for quite a while that particularly on the right in Israel, the momentum has been building to end the aid relationship with the U.S. primarily, that argument seems to come from Israeli rather than American interests in that the Israelis do feel that it does create dependencies. I mean, the aid is not sort of pay to the order of Israel by anything that you want. The aid actually means you have to source stuff in the US from the US and that then makes you dependent, perhaps if the US Then decides to embargo your spare parts or something because it doesn't like your policies at a given moment. So I think the Israelis, looking at where things are going on the far right and the far left in the US think that reducing their dependence on a potentially unreliable partner makes sense. Now, if you're going to do this, you might as well try to package it as America, we're doing you a favor. We're not going to ask you for any aid. But to me, it highlights reality that the American aid to Israel benefits the US at least as much as it benefits Israel. It's a kind of a subsidy to our defense industry. It does, in fact, give presidents more leverage over what Israel does and doesn't do. And very often when the Israelis buy American equipment, famous example with the F35, the innovations that they make as they kind of tailor it and tweak it for their own purposes, we get to use and often actually benefit, lead to a more effective weapons system. I mean, obviously if the Israelis don't want the aid, we shouldn't force it on them. But we should take this overall in two ways. One is a sign of actually Israel is a strong country. This idea that so many people seem to have in their heads that if it were, weren't for the United States, Israel would dry up and blow away just has never been true and is not true now. You know, it's Faux News in the sense that if you, if you followed this stuff already, you knew this was, was, was in the mix. I suppose it's news in a way that has gotten up to Netanyahu's level and he's the one who's embracing it. But it tallies with a lot of other things and probably it does tally with the direction in which things are going.
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I did like the part of the Economist article where Trump reportedly told Bibi that he doesn't think eliminating US Aid to Israel would actually appease the anti Israeli people in America. Do you think have a sense like, he's probably right about that?
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I think he is right about that. Basically nothing would appease some of these people. Possibly a mass conversion of Jews either to Christianity or Islam, depending on whether you're talking about the right or the left, and then their decision to either leave the promised land en masse or else, better yet, you know, commit seppuku mass, because really nobody else would want them. So convert to your favorite religion, then kill themselves. That might soften some of the opposition, some of the bitterness, but hard to say. Hard to say.
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All right, our second story. President Trump said that neither the Republican Party nor the MAGA movement has room for people with anti Semitic views. His most direct public statement yet in a debate pulsing through his movement over the inclusion of supporters who spread anti Semitism. I think we don't need them, Trump said Wednesday during an interview with the New York Times when asked whether such people had a place in his coalition. I think we don't like them, he said. As we've discussed on this show, Walter, the Republican Party is mired in a debate about how expansive its coalition should be and whether it should include figures like Nick Fuentes. Trump's comments stand in contrast, the Times noted to Vice President J.D. vance, who said last month that the party did not need, quote, purity tests and that we have far more important work to do than canceling each other. But Trump seemed to draw a much clearer line than Vance in his interview with the Times. Rejecting anti Semitic supporters, Trump said, quote, my daughter happens to be Jewish. I have three beautiful grandchildren who are Jewish. I'm very proud of them. I'm very proud of that. Whole family. I'm the least anti semitic person probably there is anywhere in the world. Walter, is this news or phone news?
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I guess it is news though. It really follows along what we have been talking about before. That pushing that anti semitic button in far right Republican politics is a way for some sort of MAGA aligned figures to try to create a version of MAGA that Trump doesn't control is to rest a piece of that movement from Trump. And Trump doesn't like it. I think that's where we are. We often forget, I think in politics, and this would be true both of the Democrats, center left, left and the Republicans, that one of the jobs of the centrists, more centrist mainstream people is to keep the nut jobs isolated in both parties. You can't just do this by saying, oh, I hate the nut jobs. They're stupid, mean and ugly. Right? You, you have to figure out, okay, where do I draw the line? You know, what, what do I pick as the thing that, okay, you can't do this. You need to capture some of that energy and you need to defang some of that anger that's out there, you know, in order to again, to, to keep part politics nationally on something like an even keel. You've got Trump in many ways with his MAGA coalition is channeling a lot of the anger on the right. But now that he's the incumbent, he can't be just interested in whipping it up into ever new frenzies of rage because he's the guy in charge. So there's a sort of inherent. A lot of people are going to gag at this, but there's a certain moderation inherent in Trump as being the President of the United States. And so he needs to limit, check the wildness in parts of the fringes of that movement. But then again, for somebody like Vice President Vance, who is considered the more right wing of the potential successors, right now we talk about Rubio and Vance as the two rival wannabe heirs in the MAGA movement. And for Rubio, condemning anti Semitism is really easy because there aren't any anti Semites or many anti Semites in Camp Rubio, but Camp Vance. It's a more divisive issue in. So it puts Vance in a tougher position and he's trying to draw the line a little bit to the right of Trump in order to keep the Vance wing together. Nothing is easier than to kind of point fingers of morality at people doing this. And certainly there are limits to what a decent person can and will do. But the basic project of trying to mobilize a pragmatic coalition and marginalizing the true crazies. That's a good thing to do on the whole. Just sometimes doing it can. Trying to do it can get you into. Into some very muddy water.
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All right, final story of the week. Donald Trump looked like he had possibly been leaning toward authorizing strikes on Iran to support anti regime protests amid new reports of Iranian security forces massacring protesters. In a truth Social post earlier this week, Trump had written that help is on the way for the protesters, a message he repeated later in the day at a rally in Dearborn, Mich. And the president's statement did come among the emergence of grisly reports from Iran. The exact number of deaths is really hard to pin down, of course, but two Iranian government officials admitted to the New York Times that at least 3,000 people had been killed. Israeli intelligence had reportedly put the number to the US at 5,000, and the Iranian opposition put the deaths at roughly quadruple the figure acknowledged by the Iranian government. And a source close to Secretary of State Marco Rubio had told the Washington Post that Trump believed it is, quote, in the national interest to make sure there's not wholesale slaughter of civilians in Iran. However, just before recording time, Walter Trump was giving a press conference in the Oval Office in which he said he claimed that the killing of protesters in Iran had stopped and that there were no further plans for executions. He emphasized receiving this information on good authority. So Trump in Iran. Is this news or phone news?
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Well, so far it seems more like no news than BO news or news. Trump doesn't invade Iran is not the most dramatic headline story I've seen in my life. Trump sees himself as a deal maker and so trying to pressure the Iranians into limiting their crackdown and so on by a threat of invasion which he never intended to follow through on, would be a very Trumpian thing to do. And at the same time, if you're doing that, then you look for any excuse not to attack. And having cast this as the killing must stop, as the thing that decides whether or not you're going to attack Iran, well, you're the one that gets to decide whether the killing has stopped. And so it's a way to keep control of. Trump never wants to be controlled by events. He always wants to stay in control. And so this way of framing the position allows him to say today, okay, well, I guess the killing has stopped, so I don't have to do anything. Did the killing stop because they killed so many people in the last demonstration that the Iranians are afraid to go out again on the street. Is that so much a kind of vindication of his ultimatum or just the demonstration of the, of the sort of falseness, falsity of his whole policy? Well, people can argue about that, but from Trump's point of view, he can, he can say, I've won a victory no matter what happens. You know, we've all been familiar with folks in the climate change universe who, if it's a really cold, they say, oh, you see, the climate is changing and that's. And if it's warm, it's evidence of climate change. If it's hot, it's evidence of climate change. If nothing is happening, well, that also is evidence of climate change. And in the same way, for Trump, killing, no killing, war, no war. Whatever happens, he has a way forward now that can get you. Ultimately, what that can do is it can reduce the, you know, people's faith or belief that anything that you say means anything at all. And Trump may be feeling that. Well, just having, having just gotten rid of Maduro, now I've established enough credibility so I don't have to, I can, you know, kind of weasel my way through different, different obstacles or different, different diplomatic conundrums. You know, I think for him, the difficult thing would be, suppose there's a bunch more riots and then the killing goes way up again. Is he going to be trapped? Is he not going to be trapped? And let's not forget there's one other possibility, which is this whole thing is a faint. The last time he bombed Iran, we went through all kinds of, is he going to do it? Is he not going to do it? There were sort of elaborate, deceptive tactics one way or the other. So if Trump's goal is to create a fog that obscures his motivations and his actions while preserving his freedom of choice, I would say he's succeeding.
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And then one follow up before we move on to the big conversation. Having lived through a lot of revolutions, counter revolutions, attempted revolutions, I assume most of which have probably not succeeded. What has been your impression so far of what's going on in Iran? Does this time feel different, or does it so far not taking Trump out of it?
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Right. It's bigger than before. You know, it is bigger. And they've had the son of the former Shah sort of try to assume control of the movement. But at the same time, what you kept hearing, even during the peaks of the demonstrations, was that it won't work without outside intervention, which is to say, well, maybe Iran isn't in a revolutionary situation. A revolutionary situation is when the military itself stops fighting, when people just give up or switch sides. I think the issue in Iran has always been that you have this hardcore core around the regime who aren't going to switch sides. Now, on the other hand, Assad had that too, until he didn't. And there are certainly Alawites in Syria now who must look nostalgically back on the time when they had state power and control things. But the collapse was so complete that even Assad's most stalwart defenders just gave up. So you can have a regime which has a base, and that base can still at least briefly melt away. That could happen in Iran. But the fact that even people very close to the protest movement thought that it would need outside intervention to prevail should tell us that there still is some strength in this regime. It's very dynamic. It could collapse. You know, it could melt away overnight. But at the moment, they seem so far to have gotten through this latest series of clashes.
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All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. So we talked last week, Walter, about the kind of dizzying number of geopolitical events Trump is touching off or putting himself at the center of, from Venezuela to Iran to Greenland to potentially Cuba. I thought this week we could talk about sort of what you think the impact these events might be having on Russia and China, on Putin and Xi and the kind of world or at least the anti US alliance they've been building or that they thought they were building. As we've discussed on the show in the past, what Israel did to Hezbollah and the fall of Assad in Syria kind of revealed how much an alliance with Iran was worth. And what Israel and the US Together did to Iran maybe revealed how much an alliance with Russia is worth. And what Trump has done in Venezuela maybe revealed how much an alliance with Russia and China is worth. That would all, I guess, kind of be the optimistic take on where all this could go. But tell us how you see all this maybe from the standpoint of Moscow and Beijing as of right now.
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All right. Well, I think they're a little bit like the rest of us still in Camp Schrodinger. Suppose again, six months from now, Venezuela is chaotic, factionalism is raging. Nothing like a new stable government has really emerged and American prestige there has kind of gone down like you got Maduro, but you haven't done a lot since the Iranian government, let's assume for the moment holds on, is able to gradually restore order across the country. Oh, and then let's also throw in. And the push for Greenland deeply alienates Europe from the United States. Russia and China might at that point say, wow, 2026, you know, it's kind of been not a bad year. And start looking for other options for, okay, what do we do now? Alternatively, Venezuela. The oil production begins. The US Is in control of the marketing that's working. The Iranian government either falls or becomes so, so weak and dependent that the United States is, is able to impose more or less its will on, on the region that oil is abundant. Sanctions are, you know, lifted because concessions have been made. Putin is looking at a very low price for Russian oil long term. Russia's a high, high cost producer. China, on the other hand, just at the moment when his economy is weak, is benefiting from low oil prices. So you might, in that case see China kind of happy about things, Russia a little bit worried, especially if Ukraine is still holding out. What Trump does is he stirs the pot and makes it harder for anybody to foresee the future or interpret the president. He's very good at that. And so that creates issues for anybody who has something they're trying to plan. The question of Trump's second term, which will become much clearer in the next six months, is, does Trump have a plan? Is what we're seeing now just the kind of chaotic workings of an undisciplined imagination let loose on the world? Or is there some guiding precept or vision in there, even something Trump himself may not be conscious of as a Trump doctrine, but a Trump pattern that leads in a consistent place? It's really hard to say that's the nature of what, of what Trump does. I think many of Trump's strongest critics believe that the essence of American power in the world in a way boils down to the ability we've had to create a sense of normality and permanence and stability. And that in that environment, international relations, like the transatlantic community and economic relations through globalization and so on, were over time able to kind of entrench themselves and create a very formidable American power structure. And the oscillation, the uncertainty and so on that Trump has introduced to that has fundamentally compromised the foundations of power. That was certainly Joe Biden's vision and his team's vision. On the other hand, certainly some of the people around Trump would say that those institutions and patterns, however, perhaps well adapted to earlier decades, no longer fit. And there had to be some shaking up and some change. And so Trump is still trying Still, Trump's shaking up the old foundations was to prepare a new era for American strength in the world. And the rules have changed, and what we do has to change with them. So is Trump simply a wrecking ball, tearing down the old order, leaving nothing but rubble and chaos behind, or is this step one of a renovation project? We shall see.
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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 Greg in Philly. Who wants to know your favorite winter vacation destination in America?
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Well, I hope this isn't too shocking or disappointing to Greg, but it isn't. Philadelphia. That's my favorite winter, winter design. Philadelphia is very beautiful in the spring. I, I wouldn't give it a lot of points in the, in the winter, you know, it's, it's kind of hard to beat Hawaii as a place to be in the winter. It sounds kind of trivial, right? But, you know, and kind of predictable. But beautiful weather, beautiful scenery, islands, snorkeling. You know, even down here in Florida, we're expecting, where I am, we're expecting a freeze on Friday. And even you go further south in the state, you know, it's not going to be a beach day in Miami necessarily. So, but, but Hawaii is a, I know we've all seen these pictures of snow falling, you know, high in the mountains in Hawaii, but you know what? The, the, the tourism places are not above snow level in Hawaii. You know, I think any, any one of us would do well to find ourselves on a little boat going quietly from one island to the next while the spinner dolphins are, are jumping up and down in our wake. I think that that could work out really well.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers Josh Cross and Quinn Waller, thanks to Alex Patanov 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. Sam.