← What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back, everybody, to what really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. I'm here as always with Walter Essel 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. Donald Trump faces an unexpected rift in the MAGA movement. As Republican officials from state houses to Capitol Hill warn his full throated embrace of the tech industry's artificial intelligence boom risks undermining Americans economic security and exposing their children to new harms. Trump has appointed influential tech investors and entrepreneurs to key positions in his administration and back the sector's ambitions for AI, scrapping regulations introduced by President Biden and facilitating huge investments from foreign companies and governments into American AI firms. But a growing cohort of Republicans, including Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, and prominent members of Congress such as Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, argue AI's breakneck growth could undermine the party's populist appeal. Some have called for regulation to protect Americans against job losses driven by automation, shield teenagers from harms caused by chatbots, and curb spikes in utility bills linked to the energy guzzling data centers that power AI technology. Walter, is this rift or supposed rift news or FO news?
- [01:27]
B
It's real. It shouldn't be news in the sense that people should have seen this one coming. You know, last spring you had basically Steve Bannon talking about how he would, like he wanted to drive all the tech people out of the temple, out of the MAGA temple and this fissure between, on the one hand, populace who include people who think that Biden's antitrust commissioner is somebody that was doing a terrific job on the, you know, and people with great fears of tech or concerns about tech. You know, that's, that's one side, but then the other side really is big tech. And Trump could not have been elected without the combination of MAGA populist votes and tech money. So keeping this coalition together is critical to the future of the Trump movement, whatever we may think of that. And it's not an easy thing to deal with. On the one hand, you have the reality that we've got to get on the tech train. If we don't, China will, we will sort of progressively become kind of, you know, we'll be, we'll be the next Europe in a sense, behind the cutting edge on, on, on the, sidelined by history, which would not be great when China would be driving the train. So you have that problem. But then on the other, on the other hand, this is a very disruptive technology, and it really does affect the way a lot of people live. So managing that, the necessity to move quickly enough with this technology to get the benefits and to keep America strong, et cetera, et cetera, and prosperous, on the one hand, and then to deal with the benefits, that's not a task of governance. In some ways, that's the task that Americans face. And this eruption in the middle of the Trump movement is just one of the ways that this fissure is going to be manifesting in American politics.
- [03:34]
A
Do you think there is a role for regulation and I guess, policy more generally to try to contain some of the political and economic consequences of AI and automation in the job market and elsewhere? Or is this one of those scenarios where various politicians can position themselves to reap the benefits of, you know, appearing to defend their voters against the consequences of automation, but ultimately it's just going to sweep everything, regardless of what we do.
- [04:02]
B
Well, you know, I'm not sure that that's either or this tech is going to have a progressive impact. And I should say here I'm. When I say this tech, I don't just mean chatbots and so on, but there's a sort of new level of information processing that LLMs are part of, but it is bigger than them. And this will, you know, the information processing capabilities that people are developing to build and train. LLMs have other uses, too. And so we are, we really are looking at something very, very big. And it will be disruptive. The. But, you know, I, I look at, say it, you know, in some ways it'll be like the car, which is the massive disruptor that we still haven't fully come to terms with in the way that, you know, before the car, most people's neighborhoods, your, Your life was a life of givens. Your, your neighbors were people you could walk to see or ride a horse to see, unless you lived in a very large city with transit. And so your churches, your schools, the people who you knew to get married to, there was a kind of necessary communitarian focus to that. The car has blown that whole thing wide open. It's blown, it's destroyed the downtowns of most American cities, et cetera. It has killed at its peak, I think like 40,000 people a year dying in car accidents. I mean, it's, it's insane. But the, but the technology was so irresistible that we just adjusted. There will be an element of that, but this will also be, you know, a job Eater. And in general, the jobs get eaten before the new jobs get created. So we're going to see everybody from coders to truck drivers facing loss of jobs. And that's going to be big. We're going to see bureaucracies. I think we'll see 60 to 90% cuts in middle management. And in both government bureaucracies and corporate bureaucracies. The effects are going to ripple through. And a lot of history of the next 30 to 50 years is going to be about society struggling to process this thing, this stuff. So is regulation needed? Yes, absolutely. Again, you think about the car, the amount of regulation that had to come with having cars. I mean, the whole notion, you know, the car insurance, highway standards, standards for safety in cars, et cetera, et cetera, just doesn't stop. And in the same way, this new information age is going to require all kinds of regulations. We can be 100% sure that we're not going to get it right the first time. You're going to have a mix of klutzy, kludgy regulations that actually don't accomplish the goals that you want but inflict very large costs in the economy. You're going to have absences of regulations that don't allow for innovative tech. Progress would just lead to all kinds of car crashes and so on. We're going to have all of the above. Hopefully we will also have a sort of growing group of regulations and ideas about how to manage this thing that work. Now, I think part of the trade off people are going to have to be thinking about is the trade off somehow. And this is where I think people like Steve Bannon actually make real points. Somehow you have to find a way for the average person to benefit from this information economy. And one of them is that your information is valuable. And right now tech companies really don't pay you anything other than the service of using a search engine to harvest your data big time. That maybe is something that you could find ways of managing that that don't destroy the business models of tech, but that provide some kind of of relief or income stream to the average person. I think once you get into medical tech, which we're going to need, we're actually going to need to be able to use the information based on the whole population. All right? You know, if there's a drug and my medical record was some small part of that, maybe I get a small chunk of the profit figuring that stuff out in a way that it enables progress and ultimately accelerates progress rather than arbitrarily and Foolishly retarding it. That's the kind of thing that the next generation of policy intellectuals needs to learn to wrap its head around.
- [09:13]
A
All right, our second story. In an unusual diplomatic move, Xi Jinping initiated a phone call with President Trump this week to discuss Taiwan, a flashpoint point that has surged to the forefront in recent days as Japan takes a more assertive stance on the island's autonomy. While Taiwan was Xi's focus, Trump steered the conversation to Ukraine. According to the Wall Street Journal, as Washington, Kyiv peace talks appeared to make progress and Trump tries to end Russia's war there. The two issues, Taiwan and Ukraine, are sensitive for U. S. China relations, but they are rarely linked in discussions between the two leaders. Xi made the outreach, people close to Beijing said, turning the high level communication into a rare diplomatic overture from China. Walter, was this phone call news or phone news?
- [09:57]
B
Well, it's not clear, actually. As you look at all the reports, there's some serious disputes as to whether in fact it was Xi or Trump that initiated the call. So I think that part of it, at least for now, is in the gray zone. We don't actually know. So I wouldn't, you know, hyperventilate over Xi has initiated something. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. Hopefully we'll figure that one out. Nor is it really news that the US And China disagree about a number of issues that Trump wants to talk about trade and Russia while Xi wants to talk about Taiwan. It's not really news trying to figure out what went on here. It is just possible that for Xi, having it known publicly that he's having a conversation with Trump about Taiwan and Trump rather conspicuously not saying, you know, not saying we're going to defend Taiwan, you keep your hands off, you evil monster. That that gives Xi something to show. The Japanese statement that that they really might get involved in some kind of a conflict over Taiwan, depending on what China does, came as, you know, kind of an ugly shock to a lot of Chinese opinion. And so Xi is looking busy here possibly. Again, my sense of the reality is since he's been so busy purging the top levels of his military, Xi isn't in a position right now to invade Taiwan or doesn't think he is. And given that it would be kind of an empty conversation with Trump about how would he hypothetically respond to, to a not going to happen Chinese invasion in the next six months. So all of this looks very unclear to me, and it does. So I'm at this point unable to say that it's news.
- [12:00]
A
All right, final story of the week. As recently as 15 years ago, Self described conservative and liberal women in America between the ages of 18 and 35 were having children at around the same rate, according to an analysis from a large national study called the General Social Circle Survey by Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma. But in recent years, the gap has widened. His analysis shows as of 2024, roughly 75% of liberal women in this age range were childless, compared with around 40% of conservative women. In 2010, the difference was only 5 percentage points, according to Perry. Quote, liberals are leaning hard into being dinks. This is an acronym for dual income, no kids, being childless or having fewer kids, and it being very much a choice. Whereas for conservative women in America, having kids is still very much a part of what they believe it means to be a whole person. Close quote. Walter, is this news or faux news?
- [12:55]
B
I think it's probably news. What I particularly thought was interesting was that many of the young women who are deciding to have children are deciding to do it younger. And I actually think in a lot of ways that's healthy. I think that our thinking about, and before everybody jumps on me, what about careers and so on and so forth, I think we haven't yet processed fully what it means that your active life now is likely to run 10, 15, even 20 years longer than it did a generation ago. Not for everybody. And things happen. But it is much more likely that at age 75, you will still be not only healthy enough, but if you like your work and have value in it, interested enough to keep working. This has a lot of implications for personal finance, for zoomers and millennials who are terrified by the future and are saying, why does this I'm so old when I'm buying my first house? Well, you're, you may actually, even if you buy your house at 40, you may have as many working years to pay off that mortgage as you would have, you know, if you had bought your house a generation ago at the age of 30, but you were smoking, so you were going to die or be, you know, at, at 60, whatever. So there's actually a lot more space in the average lifespan than, than we've internalized. And so it actually could well make a lot of sense to have your kids in the first half of your twenties even. Right? I mean, I don't want to sound all kind of, you know, old fashioned here or anything like that. My goodness. But anybody who's ever spent a lot of time around small children knows that nature intended us to have our children very young because what a 23 year old can just barely cope with can leave a 35 year old like flat on the couch. Jerry. Jeremy, you are snickering as if you knew exactly what I'm talking about here.
- [15:10]
A
My wife and I, who are in our mid-30s, every time we meet a couple in their mid-20s with kids, our kids age, we always look at each other and realize we made some sort of mistake.
- [15:21]
B
Right. And by the way, you know, my parents were in their very early twenties when I was born. And among the other advantages of this is you just have a much longer period of time when you're both adults, you know, both kind of cruising along and able to share all kinds of experiences. It's really, it's actually kind of terrific. And the downside, you didn't have much money when your parents were young and struggling. But you know, sometimes that's actually good for you rather than bad. Because one of the things that young parents will often teach their kids is how to budget, because that's a very important skill if you're like 23 and you have two kids. But look, so I do think that actually there is a way that more young women can have it all, is to have those children early and then kind of plan their move into the workforce when they're late 20s, early 30s. That's still plenty of time for a career. And women live longer than men on the average. So, you know, you're still talking about a 40 year career horizon. That's enough time to get a lot of things done. Right. So. And I think our society is much more flexible than it used to be about people entering the workforce at a later age. If you know what you're doing and you're qualified, you know, there's more room. So I actually think people are discovering a new way of managing modern life. And while maybe conservative women, because this kind of tallies with some values about family and having children, may have stumbled on this great truth earlier, I wouldn't be surprised if some liberal women start also figuring things out and say, wait a minute, you know, I can still make partner in a law firm. It's just a slightly different trajectory. By the way, I know some conservative women who are partners in law firms. And you know, it's, it's not, no one can have it all, but you can have a lot more than, than you think if you think carefully about what you're doing.
- [17:39]
A
All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation foreign. So the big Story this week, Walter, was The Trump administration's 28 point peace plan for Ukraine. It seemed to arrive initially as an ultimatum crafted and issued by Steve Witkoff, J.D. vance and Jared Kushner. Then, fairly quickly, it turned out it transitioned from an ultimatum into merely a guideline, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. And now it's kind of hard to tell, at least from the outside, exactly what it is or where we are, as we're getting some 2017 style accusations again, that Trump's plan was in fact written for him by the Kremlin itself. And there doesn't seem to be a coherent European response to all this, as far as anyone can tell. And meanwhile, the actual military situation doesn't seem to have changed in the sense that it's not improving for Ukraine. So tell us what you make of this peace plan and all this and what it does or doesn't tell you about what's going on.
- [18:43]
B
Okay. Well, I think here is the reality, as far as I can see through all the fog of propaganda and war. On the one hand, there is not yet a settlement that both the Russians and the Ukrainians are prepared to accept. What looks like what happened is the Trump people tried to come up with a plan that was tilted enough toward Russia that Russia might bite and buy into it, even though there were a couple of very problematic elements in it from the Russian point of view. But that caused so much kind of outrage in Ukraine, in Europe, and among even some Republicans in the US who are sympathetic to Ukraine, that the plan was sort of quickly forced to be modified in a, quote, more pro Ukraine, Ukrainian direction, which then made it dead certain that the Russians won't buy it. That's what happened. Okay. And the rest of it is just kind of smoke and noise. And again, we're not yet at the peace place. Trump was ready to put some pressure on the Ukrainians to try to get them to sign to something like his original plan, but he backed off in crime incredibly quickly. Now we can all, everybody can get very excited. Oh, this faction said this, this faction said that. Let's try to. And reporters love to jump on that. What did Rubio say? How did he get in there? What does this tell us about the Rubio, Vance? You know, this is the kind of thing that just gets everybody's juices flowing. None of it is news really, because what's happening is that Trump sent out a feeler, maybe a little bit like Noah on Noah's Ark, sent out a bird to see if there was any land. The bird Came back to the ark with nothing. So it was clear that, like, it wasn't, you know, the waters hadn't subsided. Peace is not at hand. Doing it in this way made Trump, you know, put Trump at the center of the news, which was very nice, especially since the center of last week's news was Epstein. Epstein files so very good that way for him, reasserted his centrality in the whole process, even as he's not getting the deal that he. Any deal. He looks like the man who is in charge of deals. Again, very, very good for Trump. And he doesn't care if his right hand Rubio and his left hand Vance, or maybe right hand Vance, left hand Rubio. Who knows? Who cares that they're like, you know, in some ways, like in, you know, dancing around, trying to capture his attention, trying to. He's fine with that. Right. So this is, you know, this looks to me like if you're in the White House, you're not unhappy with all of this. I mean, you would love it if miraculously everybody agreed. But another thing about this, though, and this I think we really do have to understand is driving a lot of what's happening, is that what Trump does not want is to be blackmailed by the Europeans into having to become the main supporter of Ukraine. You can make the comparison to the early 1990s in the Yugoslav war. At the end of the Cold War, we heard, oh, I can't tell you how many Europeans were thumping their chests and talk about, this is Europe's hour now the European Union is going to emerge and so on. And, oh, my goodness, you know, this is just so great. Then the, then the Yugoslav war happened, and Europe was completely helpless, unable to deal with it at all. And the humanitarian costs kept rising, the war kept getting worse. Nasty, nasty things were happening. And ultimately the Clinton administration, which had been doing everything it could to stay out of this thing, could, you know, felt just compelled public opinion, all kinds of things, just, all right, fine, we're going to have to go stop the genocide, I guess, and get in there, because Europeans couldn't and wouldn't do it. In retrospect, that may have been a historic mistake because cemented the Europeans in the conviction that the Americans would ultimately bail them out. And I think Trump wants to break that cycle, and the Europeans don't want him to. So one of the things that's been going on is that there are all these frozen assets, Russian assets in Europe, that a lot of them are with some Belgian banks. And the Europeans have come up with this very clever idea of how you could use that money as a way to funnel almost a couple hundred billion dollars to Ukraine, which would be enough to keep it fighting so long that maybe the Russians would then be more willing to accept a compromise or something like that. Maybe, who knows? Chance. But it's not happening because mighty Belgium has stood up and said, no, thou shalt not pass. And the Europeans are now sort of going through their beautiful, intricate, endless processes and passing memos back and forth, and on the one hand, talking about our love of freedom, unlike that evil Donald Trump monster who doesn't care about anything. And we are noble and dedicated to ideals, we're not going to really do very much about those ideals because our hands are dyed by our intricate procedures. But, oh, oh, oh, are we more moral?
- [24:51]
A
Right.
- [24:52]
B
This is an empty position. It's vanity pretending to be courage, which is a fairly common disease in the west these days. The reality is the real target of Trump's policy is Europe, not neither Russia nor Ukraine at this point. To the Europeans, the message is, if you want to keep this war and keep Ukraine in the war long enough to force a change on Putin, have at it. If you don't, there's going to be a very pro Russian peace, and the longer you dither, the worse it's likely to be. That seems to be the sort of explanatory paradigm to me that best explains Trump's Ukraine policy, or rather this series of confusing maneuvers and initiatives that keep coming out of the White House in response to different events.
- [25:54]
A
Just one final question. It's not clear what it would take for the Europeans to learn that kind of lesson. And so I'm not sure what's happening accomplish by repeatedly trying to force that lesson on them. It does seem like they'd really be prepared to sacrifice enormous European interests in order not to have to do anything and to wait for the United States to feel like it's in enough of a jam to have to come in and protect them. I mean, what is the future for Europe here geopolitically? I know it's a big question, but I can't remember any other point in my lifetime where, you know, left and right and kind of everywhere in America, everyone seems to agree that the Europeans are just really hapless.
- [26:33]
B
Yeah, well, they are hapless. I mean, this is. You look at Britain, where Nigel Farage is likely to be the next. Would be the next prime minister. They had an election. Right now, it looks like the Le Pens, one way or another, they or their allies are well positioned to win the next French presidency. The AfD is not in position to form a government in Germany and unlikely to be one soon. But it's more and more in that blocking role where then, in order to keep the AfD out of government, you have to have a grand coalition composed of parties who agree on so little that they can't do much. And so the situation just continues to kind of drift downhill, that with the three most significant European countries in that kind of a state, it is very, very hard to see how the Europeans amount to anything in this and that the challenges are growing. Again, Putin sees this, and this is one reason he continues to press forward, even at enormous costs on this war. As far as he can see, the war keeps exposing European weakness and deepening the rift between the United States and Europe, or rather more profoundly, impressing on Americans that the transatlantic alliance isn't giving them the things that they hoped it would. And that is, again, and for Xi Jinping, it keeps the west occupied. Everybody's talking about Ukraine. Very few people are talking about Taiwan or any of the other things that China might be up to. All good. But we should note, too, that 20 years ago, I think the Chinese would have made more of an effort than they're making now to take advantage of America's troubles with its allies to split the Europeans off. They don't even seem to be bothering significantly with that now. They're not. You know, they're dumping more goods into Europe in, partly in reaction to Trump's tariffs in the US and making it clearer and more explicit that their economic development is aimed right now at the destruction of most European industry. That's, you know, again, if you thought they were worth something, you would try to prevent that from happening the same way. I've noticed, you know, India and the US have been certainly going through a rough patch the last few months. China has just reasserted its view that a very significant state in northeastern India, Arunachal Pradesh, is part of China. And it just very sort of publicly refused to accept the validity of an Indian passport for someone who lives in that state and is a citizen of India. Whether we like it or not, other China, as well as the United States, doesn't seem to be willing to pay as much attention to these secondary powers as they would like. I think India has significantly better chance of escaping from that in the near future than Europe does. But we'll see. It is possible that the shock of their increased irrelevance on matters of great importance to them will trigger some kind of A revival of European political and strategic culture. So far it hasn't, but you can, if you're an optimist. You can see green shoots of people beginning to try to do some kind of a rethink.
- [30:31]
A
All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Foreign. Walter, give us your best tip for having a happy Thanksgiving.
- [30:46]
B
Funny year for, for me to have that question, because this year I'm actually spending Thanksgiving quietly by myself.
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A
Maybe that's the answer.
- [30:57]
B
I don't know. You know, this is. I've just been on the road a lot, and we're going to have an extremely busy Christmas season in my family with a wedding, an engagement party, and a lot of stuff. So I'm kind of checking out for Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving, family, by the way. And we are having our family zoom that morning. Well, I'll give you a tip on how to avoid an unhappy Thanksgiving, and that's to clarify family communication. There was a time and most of my family comes from the south and is Southern. We have some Yankee cousins in the family. And years and years ago, my mom had invited our northern cousins as well as Southern family for Thanksgiving dinner. In the language of the south, dinner means midday meal. In the language of the north, it apparently meant evening meal. So it's time for Thanksgiving dinner. One o' clock in the afternoon, the family is gathered, the turkey is laid on everything. And wait, wait, wait about, you know, and they're not showing up, they're not showing up. So finally we just dig in, have a lovely dinner. Then it's like, wash the dishes, get everything ready. And as everyone settled down. And then the doorbell rings like seven o' clock on Thanksgiving night and it's the Yankee cousins. There's nothing for them. So my mom sent my father out to get, you know, like, find something to eat. But it's Thanksgiving evening. There's not a lot of places that are open. And meanwhile she's like frantically setting the table to make it look like we're having Thanksgiving dinner. And he comes in maybe 30 minutes later with like a bucket of Kentucky fries. And so they serve this. We're all sitting there like, it is Thanksgiving. Everybody's very polite. Those cousins never came back to another Thanksgiving dinner. So I think trying to, like, just, you know, making sure that everybody has a clear understanding of basic holiday vocabulary might be a good way for families start. Other thing I would say is really don't think the Thanksgiving table is the place to have political arguments. We all have political views we all think they're very important. We all think they're right. Thanksgiving is a time to be thankful to God Almighty for life, for having food on the table, for having family at all, even Aunt Esther, all of them. And enjoy what you can with people. And if one of your other relatives starts popping up with comments about Trump or whatever, just remember this, too. You do not have to take the bait. You are not a fish that has to, like, strike that hook and, you know, have a bit. You can leave it on the table. You can talk about other things. Enjoy your family, enjoy your life. Let politics go where politics belong. And afterwards, you can all sit around and talk about, oh, did you hear what he was saying?
- [34:39]
A
Afterwards.
- [34:41]
B
But enjoy the day. Enjoy the day.
- [34:46]
A
All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producer, Josh Cross, thanks to Alex Fatanov 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.