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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 School at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week. President Trump announced he was extending a ceasefire with Iran indefinitely a day before it was set to expire. Even his plans for a fresh of talks between the two countries fell apart. Trump said Tuesday he would maintain a blockade over ships coming to and from Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. He said Pakistan, which had mediated between the two sides, asked for the US to hold off on fresh strikes and that he was extending the ceasefire until Iran submits a new proposal, quote, and discussions are concluded one way or the other. In the meantime, a third aircraft carrier and thousands of elite US Troops are approaching the region while the US Military presses on with deployments to the Middle EAS that significantly expand its capabilities. Walter, news or FO News?
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Not really news in that nobody, I think, really expected a resumption of American attacks on Iran today. And substituting the blockade of the straits for active military action is actually, I think, kind of a sensible move. It puts more pressure on Iran economically than on the US it puts a lot of pressure on a lot of other countries to go to Iran and say, we want that straight open, do something. So it's using American leverage where it's strong in a way that is kind of hard for Iran to counter. So I can't really, in a sense, I can't make a good case for Trump to change from that position. So, and again, you know, a month into this war, the stock market is near record highs. You know, inflation is back and people are angry, but they're not that angry and inflation is not that high. So it looks as if Trump is just sort of continuing the pressure campaign in hopes something will turn up. You and I don't know what information he's getting. Much less do we know what the reality is on the ground of Iran in terms of is that pressure impacting the regime in ways that might lead to regime change or to a serious change of behavior. We have seen, I think, that the crack between the civil and the military side of the establishment, I'll say the clerical and the military side seems to be widening. The Iranian leadership doesn't seem that united, although there's clearly a hardline core in there that is pretty solidly in control. But it's not really clear how stable that configuration is going to be, especially if you figure Iranian public opinion into the mix. And this, this business of not bombing them, but tightening the economic blockade, you know, is actually a kind of an accentuation of the pressure tactics that led to the mass protests earlier in the year. So now what you have is, I think a, a, a unified military hardline command, probably divided by factions, personal factions that are invisible to you and me, but very visible to the people involved in it, amounting isolation of the regime domestically. And the clock is ticking. So whether Trump obviously faces time constraints as well, his polls continue to sink. The midterms are coming closer. He may not care as much about those as some people think, but still they're a reality. So who's going to crack first? In that sense, it's turning into a war of attrition.
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Just one question on that point about the stock market. I've seen a lot in the last few weeks, a lot of columnists and pundits who I think specialize more in foreign policy and foreign affairs and geopolitics kind of arguing that the stock market and investors are complacent or delusional or don't understand the more long term implications of what's happened in the Strait of Hormuz and the energy shocks that are continuing to unfold. I mean, what do you think of this, I guess, species of commentary that the stock market is just really not grasping how serious these economic shocks are going to be?
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Well, you know, again, if I had answers to that, I wouldn't question like that. I wouldn't be wasting time on a stupid podcast. And may I say, especially not with you, Jeremy. Oh, thank you. You know, people always want you to tell them what you don't know. But I, So who knows, we may all look around in a week or two and say, boy, those gloomsters were right. On the other hand, stocks may be up another 5%. So I do think that the world economy is more flexible than it was in the 70s. There are alternative sources of energy. A lot of the economy is a lot more energy, resilient than it used to be. And then from the standpoint of the Americans, the problem is less direct. For us in the 70s, we needed that oil. We had our. We, you know, there was a pipeline from the Middle east directly to our veins, not so much now. So from a, again, a Trump administration point of view, the economic pressure is much more in Asia, Southeast Asia, than it is here. The Trump people are probably not that unhappy that Xi Jinping and a bunch of other people are on the phone to Tehran saying fix this, fix this. But what does all that mean for the stock market? Somebody smarter than me might have that answer.
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All right, our second story. Japan has abolished rules limiting the export of Finnish defense products to other countries, opening the door for the country to become a bigger player in the global arms industry. Previously, Japanese law had limited exports to the so called five categories of defensive equipment, including search and rescue capabilities and mine countermeasures. The amended law will allow the country to sell offensive weapons to allies around the world, which Tokyo hopes will help booster bolster the country's defense industrial base as it pursues its own military buildup. In particular, the move is expected to allow Japan to deepen its own defense industries integration into European defense industrial supply chains. Japan is already developing a next generation fighter jet in coordination with the United Kingdom and Italy. And the country is reportedly considering joining NATO's Pearl program which allows nations to purchase equipment from the United States and donate it to Ukraine. Walter, is this news or faux news?
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It's not big. It's real, but it's not big in the sense this has been happening for a while. Every, every single sign is pointed in this direction. The things the Japanese people are saying, the polling, the, a whole series of announcements from the government. So yeah, we've passed from discussion to reality, but I don't think anybody was surprised. I think it's a very good move. Again, as I've said in the past, we do have to. The big picture is the world is moving closer to a war, to major war, and that's horrifying. But the Japanese are behaving rationally in the face of that darkening global picture. And from an American point of view, it's a good thing that they are.
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All right, final story of the week. Record growth in solar, especially in China and India, was a driving factor for clean energy sources, surpassing the world's strong demand for electricity in 2025, according to a new global power analysis. Glean. Clean power generation grew 887 terawatt hours last year, exceeding overall global electricity demand growth. The report analyzed electricity data from 215 countries and studied 2025 data for 91 countries, which it says represents 93% of global demand. Overall, the share of renewables, including solar, wind, hydropower and other clean energies hit more than one third of the world's electricity mix for the first time in modern history, last year, growing 34%. In another historical first, coal power saw its share fall below one third of global generation. Walter, is this news orfo news?
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I would have to say news. No, I'm going to give it a faux news because I think that while it is true that renewables are growing in scale and I think solar more than wind, I would be interested to look a little deeper into that. But, you know, solar has actually reached a point where it just makes sense in a lot of applications. Wind has its advantages, but it's more capital intensive, which means things like rising interest rates can make wind tougher. But they, you know, we still have the problem of both solar and wind. You need to have conventional, whether it's nuclear or fossil fuel capability for the times when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. So they're not to try to sort of turn this into hooray, the greens are winning the energy race is to make a mistake. I think if anything, the big news of the last of 2026 is all of those people who thought that the dominance of fossil fuels and global economics and politics was diminishing are totally wrong. The Strait of Hormuz closes and you have massive shockwaves rippling around the world. And politically, the entire attention of the world gets fixed onto this crisis. And what we've discovered too is that the Gulf oil producers haven't just been sitting around passively waiting for solar to destroy their industry. They understand very shrewdly that the low cost, that their access to this large amount of fossil fuels makes them important producers of things like sulfur and hydrogen and feedstocks for drugs and so on. So that people are sitting around shocked to discover, wait a minute, it's not just oil that's going out of the Straits of Hormuz. So I think the fossil fuel business shows absolutely zero sign of losing ground on a global basis. What's happening is that global demand for energy is rising so quickly, data centers being kind of the latest flavor of the month in terms of rising demand, that more and more of all kinds of power is needed. I do think solar and wind, not hydro, because the number of rivers is limited. I also find it a little sort of bizarre and typical of the self deceit you see in the climate change movement that they're calling hydropower a clean source. They do that when it's convenient. But listen to a group of environmentalists talking about, you know, the impact of the Three Gorges Dam or some of these dams on the Mekong and so on, you know, clean. If you're calling that clean, then clean means nothing to you. It's just a label of convenience. So there's, there's a little bit of chicanery and self dealing kind of in, in those number numbers too. Nevertheless, we got a global bull market for energy. There are a lot of streams of production online. Hopefully more will come online. We need all we can get and I wish them all well.
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All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. Walter, you wrote a column this week I loved about the feud between Donald Trump and the Pope. Tell us about why you, you think this feud, which has undergone a very mild and brittle ceasefire for now is, is likely to last through the end of Trump's final term.
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Of course. Of course, Jeremy. We're assuming that his final term ends in 2028. Maybe not trying to horrify the Pope
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any more than is necessary.
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I think almost any Pope would have trouble with Donald Trump. Let's, let's put that this is not some kind of weird eccentricity of Pope Leo, that Donald Trump is not close to the Catholic Church's historic idea of what a good ruler looks like. There we are, I've said it. And fortunately he's not Pope Leo isn't. So isn't putting the US under the interdict until the midterms or something like that. But a lot about Donald Trump's formation and Pope Leo's formation just put them on a collision course. Maga America and a kind of Latin America based and coded Catholic Church are not going to work, are not going to play nicely together. This is, I think, particularly a problem for people like J.D. vance, who, you know, has published with, I understand, a Methodist church on the COVID a memoir of his conversion to Catholicism, you know, I guess, well, we've all got editors. The kind of Catholicism that is popular among these kind of young conservative, or as they would call themselves post liberal American right wingers is, is historically kind of the exact opposite of the kind of Catholicism that Pope Leo is grounded in. And what do I mean by that? Well, Latin American Catholicism used to be the most dominant religion anywhere in the sense that 90% of the population in Latin America in the 1960s would identify themselves as Catholic. Today, it's closer to 60% in Brazil. Some polls will show you that it's less than a majority of people now identify as Catholic. And in any case, a lot of the Catholicism in Latin America was always something kind of brittle. That is, there weren't many priests in some of the rural areas. Catholicism tended to be strongest in the higher income, higher educated and frankly more European ethnically communities in the country. So descendants of the Conquistadors were more Catholic often than the indigenous peoples who their ancestors had crushed. And to some extent in much of Latin America are still kind of economically marginalized, socially on the outskirts. This is the base of a lot of that Tridentine, very conservative, doctrinally conservative, liturgically conservative, Latin Mass Catholicism. I'm not saying, by the way, that that's the only thing going on here, but when somebody like Pope Leo looks at this, he sort of sees the handful of upper class royalist Catholics nostalgically prancing around talking about, oh, the good old days of, you know, King Louis XVI or whatever it is. And to him, that's a poison pill that would kill the future of the Church. The Church has to completely get away from all of that stuff and be the church of the marginalized, the church of the non Spanish speaking Indian indigenous peoples in the region, et cetera, et cetera. More than that, I think, you know, again, Pope Leo, while he was born in Chicago, has spent his professional career largely in South America. And if you look at, you know, how does capitalism, how has it historically worked in, in a lot of South America, it has not looked a lot like anything Adam Smith ever talked about. What you have is, again, powerful local families, oligarchical local families making sweetheart deals with foreign investors has been away a lot of it. So that, so that capitalism has reinforced social privilege and hierarchies. Now, even under these bad conditions, it has, by the way, also raised living standards for a lot of people. Let's not go hyperventilate into some kind of a, you know, neo Marxian analysis. But it's a fact that any kind of intuitive linkage of capitalism with freedom and opportunity that people in a lot of North America might respond to just doesn't ring as true for a lot of folks in South America. And so if you put together, we need to be a Church of the marginal, we need to be a church of the poor with capitalism like Trident, like this sort of super traditional Catholicism is an instrument of the rich. All right, you can see probably how a meeting between Vice President Vance and Pope Leo would have its challenging moments. Then you have Donald Trump. You know, I'm going to make America great. I'm going to make us dominant in the Western Hemisphere. All right? This offends almost everybody of every political persuasion in south and Central America. At the most, you might be willing to concede it as an inevitable fact of life, but you don't rejoice in it. And you would certainly prefer that the United States talk less about it. Even if it's going to be, the less we say about this, the better. So you have that problem, and then you have the problem of who are Donald Trump's most fervent supporters in the US A lot of them are not just evangelical Christians, but there's a prosperity gospel, Pentecostal Christians. Okay? These are public enemy number one for the Catholic Church in Latin America, because these are the guys who are converting masses of formerly Catholic, at least nominally Catholic people to Protestantism and are largely responsible for the demographic shrinkage that has taken Catholicism from a hegemonic religion to, in some places, a minority religion and done that in the lifetime of people living. So everything, everything about the sort of MAGA approach creates problems for a Catholicism that's informed primarily by the historical and cultural experiences of Catholicism in South and Central America.
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One final question. Does Trump's feuding with the Pope or with this Pope, do you see it as, you know, he kind of. He can't help himself, and feuding with the Pope is what great historical figures do, or do you see, like, a more specific reason of coalition management? Is it that, you know, his feuding with the Pope really does bolster evangelical support at a time, you know, when people are concerned about Iran or Israel or anything like that?
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I don't think you've. I mean, you know, America's a big country, and we have a lot of diversity here, but I don't think there are that many Protestants who are sort of, oh, yeah, let's go after the Pope. Okay. You know, I mean, you don't see that many Popes getting burned on Guy Fawkes Day in America. My very Protestant grandmother in South Carolina used to talk about the piece of a chicken that hangs down over the chicken's rear end. They call that the Pope's nose in the Carolinas in the old days, I think a lot of them reflecting a Jacksonian, Scots, Irish folk approach there. It's just not a big issue. It's not a big issue. Possibly if Donald Trump wanted to torture J.D. vance, picking a fight, you know, making Vance go out and defend the war in Iran and the fight with the Pope. If you wanted to demonstrate to everybody who holds the leash in this relationship and who wears the collar, okay, I think Trump has done that. You know, that's interesting. And from a standpoint of coalition management, it could be problematic for Trump. I think, on the whole, Trump has lost more than he's gained from the fight with the Pope. But I would say, on the whole, it doesn't look like a lasting problem for him. This is just more of the drama and the churn that we see associated with the Trump phenomenon. You know, the war in Iran, obviously, I think is much more consequential for what happens to this president and how he's viewed.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Bernard from Bath writes in to ask, quote, does Walter have a favorite church he's seen in England?
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I'm assuming that question is coming from Bath, England, and not Bath, Arkansas or something.
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No, I think it's in England.
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Well, Bath and Wells is nice cathedral, but I may be disappointing aficionados of grand church architecture here, but there obviously are a lot of great English cathedrals and churches. But one that has always been kind of special for me is St. George's Church in Easter. This was not in use even when my dad was the temporary rector of easter back in 1963. But it was the, you know, it was a traditional parish, historic parish church back when it was Cardinal Wolsey's parish. And Queen Victoria actually spent a lot of time there. She had a little, a special little pew cut for herself, little alcove where she could see the rector, but the congregation could not see her when she came to church. And it was just, you know, when I was a kid, it was an abandoned place. Then there was a bright, shiny new Christ Church is the main parish church there. But as the rector's kids, it was kind of a playground for us. And I really enjoyed that place. It had some trees that were excellent sources of conquers for people that want to play that old English game. So that's probably my favorite church in England for neither architectural, historical nor spiritual reasons, just personal associations. I had a lot of fun there.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers Josh Cross and Quinn Waller. Thanks to Alex Vitana, But 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.