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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 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. Finnish lawmakers voted by a 2 to 1 margin this week to lift the country's long standing ban on nuclear weapons, marking a major shift in Helsinki's security posture as it deepens its integration with NATO. The measure clears the way for Finland to receive transport and otherwise facilitate the movement of nuclear weapons on its territory as part of allied defense operations, removing a decades old legal restriction that officials say no longer fits the country's role inside NATO. The country's defense minister, whose name I won't try to pronounce, hailed the move as essential for Finland's security, but insisted the country had no plans to permanently station nuclear arms on its soil. Walter, is this news or FO news?
- [01:01]
B
Minor news, you know, news that it's happened. But once Finland decided to join NATO, sooner or later this was going to happen because nuclear weapons are an essential element of NATO's defense posture and it would be very hard to be a treaty ally in that particular organization where you're explicitly denying permission for nuclear weapons on your soil.
- [01:26]
A
All right, our second story. Two AI medical tools matched or surpassed doctors across a range of diagnostic and treatment decisions in the latest sign that specialist health large language models are moving closer to demonstrating clinical value. Mira, developed by researchers in Germany, outperformed physicians in analyses of diseases including pancreatic cancer and pneumonia, while Google's AMI produced more precise treatments and investigation plans than humans, according to results published in Nature this week. The studies suggest specialist health AI tools can give better medical advice than general consumer AI models and perhaps than human physicians. MIRA notched a diagnostic accuracy of 87% across eight conditions, including appendicitis and lung embolism, according to the Nature paper. That compared with 78% achieved by a panel of six human physicians across specialties. Walter, is this news or phone news?
- [02:19]
B
It's news and it's probably bigger news than a lot of folks would realize on first hearing it. Yes, it's clearly not the big breakthrough, but clearly a sign that we're getting closer. When you think about the advantages of faster, better, cheaper medical care, they're pretty overwhelming. More accurate diagnosis, faster diagnoses, meaning too, that people who live in small towns or remote areas, you know, can actually get medical treatment or knowledge on the, on the same Level of someone going to a major hospital in a major urban center. I mean, it's life saving. It's fantastic. It opens the possibility for a lot more people to live where they want and still be able to get prime primo healthcare. But then you think too about the fact that what is sinking the American ship fiscally is not Social Security, it's Medicare and Medicaid. The costs of these programs are going up almost exponentially as the number of older Americans in particular rises and the cost of medical care generally rises. The federal government is looking at a whomping enormous budget deficit and it goes on forever. At the same time, think about the cost of healthcare to private companies. First of all, healthcare is obviously very expensive health insurance for the average family. But your employer is paying a huge amount of money on top of what you pay for that, which reduces profit, reduces money available for investment, and for that matter, reduces money that could otherwise be paid as salaries to workers. So the roadblock of health care costs in our economy is enormous. And anything that gets us closer to being able to use the transformational power of technology to change the way healthcare works so that it becomes cheaper and better, like computers do and like so many other products do in the modern world, that will mark a radical change in any future outlook for the United States, for the average American family, and for the world at large. So big, big news, and unambiguously good news.
- [04:56]
A
What do you think are going to be the political or societal consequences of AI? Seems like, at least at this stage in particular, is going to be affecting white collar work the most. Whether you think it's going to cause a white collar job apocalypse or is actually just going to make white collar workers that much more productive and effective, at the very least, it seems like it's going to require people in white collar jobs, consultants, physicians, lawyers, whatever, to, you know, kind of radically reorient the way they think they do their jobs, which most people don't like having to do. So what do you think are going to be the implications of that?
- [05:33]
B
First of all, let's remember that we're not all of us just sitting still already. When I started working for a living, the typewriter was still the basic instrument of office work. And there was no such thing as a spreadsheet. You know, forget mobile phones or any of that kind of stuff. You know, you didn't even have a printer. You, you went to a printer who had a printing press or you put stencils on, you know, you mimeograph stencils. So I've Been adapting constantly all my life to changes in the technology with which I work, the industry that I'm in, of journalism and industries, I suppose, of journalism, publishing, think tankery and universities all in constant upheaval. And so the norm of my personal existence is constant change. And it's never been enough to simply okay, this coming year, new year, we're going to try to do exactly what we did last year. If you do that, you go down. You know, I don't think my career is that exceptional in that way. If you're a medical technologist, the chances are the technology that you're working on today didn't exist 30 years ago and has changed five times since you got out of school and started working with it. That's true everywhere you go. So when people talk about, oh my goodness, you know, AI is going to change and I'm just so tired of change. We are all kind of tired of change. But also this is a skill of adaptation that all of our lives have been preparing us for. I also have been thinking a bit lately that some of the talk about entry level jobs and you're even starting to see some, some newspaper stories about this is overdone, that it may be that the AI is going to be cheaper than the 23 year old just out of college person who you've hired to do like some basic work in an investment bank or something like that. But you're going to need people 10 years from now who've been through the learning that you get from doing that. And so even if it is maybe in the short term a little bit inefficient to have a college kid rather than an AI do it in the long run, it's pretty crippling. And if you think back in history, having midshipmen in the British Navy was not the most efficient way to, to run a ship. You know, having 15 year old kids kind of running around your, your complex sailing ship with all of the dynamics and having orders relayed to like seamen who knew exactly what to do. And now there's this little twerpy kid belt, you know, yelling out orders or whatever. It's not efficient in the short term, but if you're going to have captains, you have to have people who know the ship and know it from the, you know, hull up. So I think there will be a need, a greater need for humans at all levels than people sometimes think. It's just that we're likely to all be a great deal more productive. Doesn't mean no change is coming. But I Suspect a lot more of it is going to be survival change than extension level change.
- [09:15]
A
All right, final story of the week. Nearly two years after it suffered its worst ever assault at the hands of its longtime enemy Israel, Hezbollah has emerged from this latest war markedly more self assured. It has been buoyed by its battlefield performance and Iran's own renewed confidence. According to the Financial Times, that is much to do with the primacy Tehran has placed on the war in Lebanon. The conflict there has tested the fragile U. S. Iran ceasefire and has become the pressure point around which diplomacy over the wider conflict has turned. Iran's intervention has reinvigorated the Shia militant group, particularly when it fired ballistic missiles at Israel this month in response to an Israeli attack on Beirut, the first ever time it has stepped in on Hezbollah's behalf. Members of its base who had come to view Iran as a neglectful patriarch applauded the move. Walter, in the big conversation, we'll talk more about Iran in the MoU, but for this Hezbollah issue in particular. Is this news or FO news? News.
- [10:13]
B
That Hezbollah isn't dead. But that's not news. And so we knew this. And for that matter, in case there any there's anybody listening to our broadcast who doesn't know it, guess what? Hamas isn't dead either. Right. That article actually struck me as a. As something, an example of a possibly credulous reporter. You're not going to run around in Hezbollah territory as a Western journalist without being cleared by Hezbollah. And it means that the people that you're talking to are going to tell you what Hezbollah would like you to hear. Are you feeling discouraged? No, I'm feeling great. Are you disappointed in Iran's lack of support? No. Iran is really helping us. It is so great. I love Iran. Right. So honestly, you know, a New York Times columnist with a taxi driver is actually more likely to be getting straight information than a journalist wandering around under Hezbollah auspices. It's like all of those, you know, Gaza journalists who are Hamas operatives and the capacity of, you know, ostensibly intelligent people to be hypnotized into believing something because it's presented as a news article in a respectable outlet never ceases to astonish me. But that's not news either.
- [11:47]
A
All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. All right, Walter, the moment our listeners have been waiting for all. All week. Please give us your understanding and best assessment of Trump's MoU with Iran. What it does and doesn't mean and what you think at this stage, it does mean for Trump and more importantly, for US Foreign policy?
- [12:14]
B
Well, I think it is, as I say, too soon to tell in a lot of ways that, you know, if you were asked me to list the people on this planet who are least likely to abide by their. Their given word, either in writing or orally, I would put both Donald Trump and the Iranian government in my top five. You know, how many other memorandums has the US Signed? The. The Beautiful Gaza peace deal? I believe we were going to have a Riviera in the Mediterranean. I think both the Iranians and the Americans are entering this with negative levels of trust, not even zero trust. And each will be able to adjust their behavior in light of the changing situation. Both of them still see each other as enemies. You know, Clausewitz's comment that war is politics by other means? Well, you know what? Politics is war by other means sometimes, too. You know, what we're seeing is an agreement on Trump's part to stop his blockade against the Iranians. In exchange for that, the Iranians are going to drop their blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, which will make a lot of people happy around the world if they do it. And then there are massive promises that get sort of larger and vaguer as you go out in time. The line about the $300 billion in aid for Iran reminds me. Keynes was once asked what he thought of the common rumors that Winston Churchill's mother, Lady Randolph, had had some 200 lovers. And his response to that was that he was skeptical. He found that number suspiciously large and suspiciously round. And this would be my feeling about that $300 billion at this point. The memorandum is, I think, mostly about talking points for each side. You know, what. What appears to happen is that Trump has decided or realized that the Iranian government is not going to collapse before the world economy is so badly hit by the. By the closure of the strait that it just creates massively more problems than he's willing to take on or deal with. And so he is stepping away in the customary cloud of smoke. And where this goes, I don't really know. I mean, as I said in my column in the Journal, the underlying question, which is that Iran wants to control the Gulf and be able to control the flow of oil from the Middle east to the rest of the world because it believes that would make it a great power. And the United States, since World War II, has been determined not to allow any other country to do that. That sort of clash of interests kind of remains. The Iranians are certainly not giving up their ambitions I don't see Trump completely giving up on that ambition. I do see him saying, okay, the war I launched has not achieved the goals I set for it, and so I need to do something else. That in sort of the technical term for this would be defeat. Another term for it would be failure. And so now Trump is going to have to try to spin his way through this. Our listeners may remember that earlier I was saying that in launching this gamble, Trump seems to have thought there were three things going for him. One, that Iran really had, you know, he really could hammer Iran and the regime might collapse. Two, that in a chaotic situation, his ability to sort of come up, you know, pull rabbits out of hats and to function well in chaos was better than most people. So that if the situation was kinetic and uncertain, he could maybe find a path through. But his third fallback position is that no matter what happens, he can spin it well enough to keep a hold of his political base at home. And so it looks to me like, you know, plan one failed, plan two failed, and now he's onto plan three. That he's going to try to manage this in such a way that it reassures or that he's able to connect up with his base. I mean, he's started by, oh, that awful baby who got me into this Israel, you know, trouble, trouble, trouble. And so we see, you know, people like Tucker Carlson and so on who were just weeping tears of grief a week ago and abandonment and bitterness of are now, oh, he loves us still. He really is ours, you know, so he's shoring up his coalition in, in that way. And, of course, the people are really happy with him at the start of the war, now angry. But you know what? Trump moves steps twice to the left, twice to the right. That's his dance. And he'll figure out how to do it, is how he thinks. I think wars are harder to manage than other situations. I will say Trump was probably correct in that if this thing was going to turn into a longer war, he does not have the public support in the United States to do that. Now, some people would say, well, if he knew that, he shouldn't have launched the war to begin with, that's coulda, woulda, shoulda in the past, in the present, as Trump looks at his options, do I have the ability to take more steps in Iran? Will Iran give up? You know, is there. Is there a path here to taking over Iran or doing in Iran what I did in Venezuela? And here, I think the ideology of resistance that we've talked about before is an important thing. These folks don't like to give up and make rational calculations. Oh, Well, I gained 52% if I do this, and I gain only 48% if I do that. So I'll do the more rational thing. And that's not how Hamas has survived the war. It's not how Hezbollah has survived its defeats and disasters. You take Carg island, they don't fold in the cards. And, you know, a faction, a pro American faction appears, maybe even you send ground troops to Tehran. Well, the hardcore basiji are still fighting you up in the hills, blah, blah, blah. And I think Trump looked into all of that and said, I don't really see a path here that I've got support for. And it's impossible really to know whether he's right about that. Is there in Iran a strong enough domestic opposition to the regime and a capable enough opposition so that, in fact, you could have an Iranian revolution as opposed to an American occupation? We've had American presidents at this place before. You know, do I go in deeper or do I cut my losses? Lyndon Johnson went in deeper in Vietnam. The US Went in deeper in Iraq. You know, we went in deeper in Afghanistan. So there is a sense in which Trump's calculation here may not be unrealistic. But again, you have the problem that he promised the American people a bunch of things. He made a decision about the war based on arguments that he made, calculations that he made, or conclusions that he jumped to who? Whatever, he was wrong. It did not work out the way he wanted. How does he account for that? Meanwhile, what he's going to have is on the left, all the Democrats, for them, this is like, oh, the wisdom of Obama. This is going to be worse than the jcpoa. So they're going to be hammering how terrible his deal is. It's a little bit like what they've learned to do with Epstein. You run the Trump playbook against Trump. So if he's appealing to pedophile conspiracy theories, you whomp up the pedophile conspiracy theories, all right? And if he's, like, attacking, you know, deal with Iran is weak and so on, you just pull it right out and whack him over the head. And it works. I mean, of all the things that they've kind of tried with Trump of denting his popularity some, it does turn out that Trumpy tricks are more or less the way that you can at least somewhat level the playing field in your political contest with Trump. So Trump's going to be dealing with a smarter and of course, extremely vindictive opposition over the war in Iran. And he's going to have to start saying things like, well, you know, it's actually really good. I've gotten them to do X. At which point the counter is, well, Obama got him to do Y, you idiot. So it'll be simultaneously making him look more like Obama, which is death in the, in the Magaverse. But also, maybe he has no option except to defend this pacific delaying negotiating course. It's kind of an ugly mess.
- [22:37]
A
One final question. You already touched on it a bit, but can you tell us a bit more about your idea from earlier this week on? You know, Trump's like, cynicism or his disregard for ideas and ideals and the people who, who take them seriously, it's at various points maybe been an advantage of his, but maybe in this particular instance may be proving to be a disadvantage.
- [22:59]
B
You know, Trump's genius as a politician and to some degree even as an international negotiator, he can do anything. He can break a promise that he made yesterday and he sort of believes that all of the, like, European station, well, now these are the rules in human rights. He thinks these are actually weak, stupid hypocrites. He is often right. Okay, let's just, let's be clear. The kind of establishment politicians were so full of admiring their own virtue while neglecting the fundamentals of self defense, economic competence, public support, all of these things that in the end, when, when challenged, they fold like a cheap suit more often than not. And so in that atmosphere, Trump, and here, he's very much like Putin. Trump was able to run the table and exert the considerable power of the United States and the American economy in ways that just, you know, it's almost like blitzkrieg. He's just sending the Panzers over these flat, this flat terrain and you know, the hapless French are surrendering again. You know, that was, that's the way a lot of it is. But there are people out there who actually do mean what they say. You know, Zielinski doesn't take the plane out of Kiev, but fights on, you know, and the Iranians, you know, give them the credit. You, you knock off the top level of their leadership and they don't say, oh, well, I guess resistance is futile. You know, let's go to Jerusalem and tell them how sorry we are. They double down on what they believe in. I think it's poisonous and horrible, but they, but they believe it. And Trump is used to having people fold when faced with long odds or difficulties and when he has to deal with people who are true believers, he is at a disadvantage. And I think we've seen that here in the Ukraine war. He thought that he could make a deal in a day. I mean, he repeatedly said that he actually thought there was this fabulous deal that he would be able to pull off because he assumed that Putin, you know, well, his. His initial strategy didn't work, and so now he's in trouble. So he'll want a way out. And the Ukrainians who, you know, who are weaker and smaller and have been hit pretty hard, are going to be looking for almost any way out. So my, My job as a mediator is to just kind of, you know, draw the line and, and get them both on side. They'll both want to do it. Neither one wants to do it. Putin believes in Russia. The Ukrainians believe in Ukraine. And so they really don't want to go where Trump would like them to go. And when that happens, his method of pushing people, his tools are weak. So I think we're seeing that in the Middle east, where, you know, the Israelis are, you know, have real convictions here. They're not always right. But, you know, the survival of the Jewish state is not something that any Israeli leader is going to take lightly or casually. Iranian ideology, Hezbollah, Hamas, they're not for sale in the way Trump thinks. Everybody is for sale. And it's frustrating for him, but there he is.
- [27:01]
A
All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. All right, Walter, for this week, give us your pick for the great American novel. It's a debate that's raged for a long time. You get one. One nomination.
- [27:23]
B
Well, you don't get to set the rules here. You get to ask the questions, but you don't get to set the rules. Jeremy, I think that debate is going to rage forever because there is no answer to it. America is 350 million people. It's 250 years of independent history. It's, you know, there's the great New England novel, there's the great maritime American novel. You know, the great New England novel is probably nyo, Scarlet Letter. Great maritime novel is probably Moby Dick. But, you know, the great Southern novel is very different. The great Western novel very different. And. And there's no one yet, and I think probably ever that just gets it all. It would be so. It would make Moby Dick look like a tweet. It would have to be so long and inclusive and so sprawling. So even if that one were written, nobody would read it.
- [28:32]
A
All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producer, Josh Cross. Thanks to Alex Vatanov 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.