← What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
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Foreign.
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Welcome back, everybody, to what really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. I'm here as always with Walt 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. China's top general, second only T jinping in the country's military command has been put under investigation and accused of quote, quote, grave violations of discipline and the law. The most stunning escalation yet in Xi's purge of the People's Liberation Army. The General Zhang Yujia is a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, the Communist Party body that controls China's armed forces. Another member of the commission, General Lu Shenli, who leads the military's Joint Staff department, is also under investigation. Few if any Chinese officials placed publicly under investigation are later declared innocent, according to the New York Times. And General Zhang's downfall is the most drastic step yet in Xi's years long campaign to root out what he has described as corruption and disloyalty in the military senior ranks. It's all the more astonishing because Xiang seemed to be a confidant of Xi, who has known him for decades. Quote, this move is unprecedented in the history of the Chinese military and represents the total annihilation of the high command, said Christopher K. Johnson, a former CIA analyst who follows Chinese elite politics. Walter, is this news or fo news?
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Well, this one's news. There's no doubt about it now. Trouble is, you and I are not going to know what this news means for some time and maybe never. Winston Churchill used to say about fights within the Soviet Communist Party that it's like watching two dogs fighting under a rug. And you know something is happening, but you have no idea what until the bloody bones of the loser are, are thrown outside. So, all right, so we got some bloody bones on our hands and we can at least identify some losers. But this really is a big deal. Xiang was extremely close to Xi. He was Xi's hand picked guy. If you're a regular old Chinese citizen reading the newspapers and trying to figure this out, you got sort of two questions here. One is like, really, this guy was, you know, so horrible. I mean, he's accused of giving nuclear secrets to the Americans, not to mention all kinds of bribery and corruption. Well, the bribery and corruption is probably truest for everyone everyone else, why wouldn't it be true of him? But then you have to ask yourself, Xi Jinping picked an incompetent, thieving traitor to be number two in the Chinese military, the great helmsman steering our country through Xi Jinping thought on, you know, what is it? Socialism with Chinese characteristics in the era of building a modern society? Whatever the heck it is. Right. You know, it's like this dumb. That's really kind of unsettling. Stalin, by the way, used to have this problem, too, because sort of one by one, all the people that Stalin had picked as his associates turned out to be terrible traitors and wreckers, and they all had to be thrown under the bus or one after the other, as Stalin's way of handling any doubts about the wisdom of Comrade Stalin, picking such traitorous, thieving incompetence for high posts over and over and over again, which is to shoot anybody who asked any questions. And this will astonish you, Jeremy, but people stopped asking questions. Will Xi Jinping move in the same direction? What else it tells me is that the quality of information that Xi Jinping gets is about to take yet another nosedive. That is, nobody is walking into his office to tell him things that he doesn't want to hear. No. Your last idea was a great one, sir, and we're really looking forward to implementing it with even more vigor. That's what he's going to be hearing. He's not going to be. Ah, sir, actually, we ran the numbers on your latest proposal, and it just doesn't add up. So this is the kind of inner weakness that tends over time to, you know. Well, it affects, like, even CEOs and businesses. The plague of yes men, but absolute rulers in dictatorial or authoritarian states. The problem is, sooner or later, nobody tells them the truth and they get further and further and further out of touch. So it's news with regard to Taiwan.
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I guess you might think, on the one hand, if Xi's in the middle of a massive purge of his military command, that might make it seem like he's less likely to try to do something about Taiwan in the next year or two or in the short term. On the other hand, as you describe, if he's just surrounding himself with people telling him exactly what he wants to hear, in a certain sense, that might worry us, that it might accelerate the Taiwan timetable. What does it make you think?
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Well, I do think he's going to be cautious about Taiwan. You don't launch a war the day after you purge the senior ranks of your military. So there's. There's a little breathing space here. The question is going to be, does he think he could get away with it? If he thinks he can get away with it, the risks are small and the, and the gains are high. He looks at the United States and thinks they're, you know, they're distracted or they're weak or they're thinking short term or whatever else it may be, then he might make the grab. And I think the Chinese, the PLA certainly still has some weaknesses and some problems to it. But we've seen in past, over the past couple of years, it's steadily upping its game. It's steadily undertaking more and more ambitious activities around Taiwan. Last week, for the first time in a long time, it actually violated Taiwanese airspace. The noose is tightening and at a certain point he's going to want to really just go ahead and make the move, but we don't know when.
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All right, our second story after Renee Goode, a 37 year old mother in Minneapolis, was fatally shot on January 7th by an ICE agent during one of the many protests erupting in the city. On Saturday, Alex Predd, a 37 year old nurse at the Minneapolis VA Medical center, was shot with 10 rounds and killed by a Border Patrol agent. Those fatalities in a span of little more than two weeks marked a new and alarming phase in a two month confrontation between the residents of an American city and armed officers of the US Government. Broadly, the conflict reflects the nation's split views of immigration policy, an issue that helped carry Trump to the White House a year ago. To many Minneapolis residents, it has become a fight against an occupying army bent on subduing their city inside the White House. According to the Wall Street Journal, the sentiment is mixed with several of Trump's political advisers privately expressing the belief that the operation has gone too far and the administration should be looking for an off ramp. Others say that any retreat from Minneapolis would amount to a capitulation to the left. Walter, is this all news or fo news?
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Is it car crash news? Is one question that, that you have. In other words, the Trump administration is trying something very difficult, very important to its own agenda and kind of self understanding, very complicated, very difficult to do and do well. It's not easy to do it even when the state and local authorities are cooperating with you. In Minnesota, where they're really trying to stop you, it's a different thing. But what they did, given this challenge, they send in really pretty untrained people. You think about, they've only been recruiting this large number of ICE agents a very short time. How well trained are these people? How ready are they for difficult situations? What are they hearing from? Again, sort of the equivalent of NCOs may also be, you know, a little hot headed and not very experienced. What is the direction they're getting from the, the higher command? The sense is that some of the, well, let's use the word goofballs that have found their way into the Trump administration have congregated sort of heavily in the ice area. And it's a, it's a topic that draws radicals. If deporting people who've been living in the United States peacefully for several years is, you know, you may say, well, you know, I don't like it, but it's the law and there has to be respect for the law and borders and worse things will happen if we don't enforce the law. So I'm going to do this, but I'm going to do it carefully. I'm going to do it.
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Well.
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You can say, oh, wow, this is really cool. Finally, finally, these parasites, the replacement people, we're going to be able to do something about them. All right? That spirit combined with poor training and inexperience is going to get you in trouble sooner or later. You're gonna, you're gonna hurt people and you may get hurt yourself. I see an ICE agent lost a finger. And to send people like this into, you know, a very, very difficult situation is, it's, it's not wise. I say this without wanting to say that the governor of Minnesota and some of the authorities there have done the right thing. It is a federal law that you cannot cross into this country without permission. You can't live here illegally. It really is the law and it really is the job of the federal government to enforce a federal law. And you, as an upstanding mayor, Governor, what have you, you actually have the job to work with federal authorities to ensure that the laws be faithfully executed. The President of the United States is not the only one that takes an oath. The Minnesota authorities have been derelict in their duty. On the other hand, much worse in a way, the federal authorities have been grossly incompetent and put themselves and innocent people at risk. With the results that we've seen, there can't not be a political price for this. And there is a political price. It sounds as if Donald Trump is getting ready to throw some of the hotheads under the bus. That would be a very good thing. President Trump has had some interesting experiences in the last couple of weeks. He got his fingers burned on Greenland a little bit. Bit. And I think he's still looking at what's happening to the dollar and financial markets and things like that and really wondering if he's done the right thing here. Looking at the price of gold and these other things now, I think he's looking at the polling on immigration. He's looking at the response, which is not just the sort of typical lefty anything, any stick I can possibly find to beat the devil Trump, but some people who, you know, like my own newspaper, the Wall Street Journal. The editorial there was pretty scorching. So President Trump made some mistakes. He put the wrong people in the wrong jobs, he let them go with the wrong marching orders, and bad things happened. And now he's got to deal with it.
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All right, final story of the week. The opposition affiliated Iranian news site Iran International reported Sunday that over 36,000 people were killed by the regime at the height of protests earlier this month, numbers similar to those also reported by Time magazine. The Iranian opposition outlet said its estimate for the death toll in the brutal repression of January 8th and 9th is based on extensive data it compiled from classified documents, field reports and accounts from medical staff, witnesses and victims families. It said the numbers make the killings the, quote, bloodiest massacre of civilians during street protests over a two day period in history. Most of the killings were done by the IRGC and its allied Basaj militia, though proxies were brought in from Iraq and Syria were also used. According to the report, sources in the country's Interior Ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the outlet that figures from provincial security councils submitted January 20th put the toll at over 30. Walter, I won't ask if this is news or faux news, but the scale of these atrocities. Do you think this is going to end up changing things with regard to U.S. policy towards Iran or not?
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Well, what was U.S. policy toward Iran before we got this news? Kind of hard to say. What is US Policy now that we have this news? Kind of hard to say. There's an aircraft carrier group that now has, at the time you and I are recording this conversation, it's now entered the Middle East. I don't think it's quite close enough yet to really be a military factor, but it's moving in that direction. Is it going there because Donald Trump is just morally appalled at the slaughter? I don't actually and is going to do something about it because, gosh darn it, it's the right thing to do. I don't actually think so necessarily. I think President Trump, perhaps like a lot of Americans, has a pretty high tolerance for large death tolls in faraway lands. If people dying in conflict was the thing that launched American intervention, we would be all over Sudan right now. And I just don't see, you know, I don't see any American bases in the Great Lakes in the eastern DRC trying to separate combatants around the city of Goma. But that's not the moving force, and I don't think it is here. The question is, what does Trump want to do with the current regime in Iran? There's very little doubt that if foreign intervention were to overthrow that government, there would be a lot of joy in Iran over the downfall. And I think you wouldn't have to if you were being prosecuted in the International Criminal Court for launching an attack on the Iranian government. Right now, I don't think you'd have to hire the world's best lawyers to get you an acquittal, especially if you get a jury trial of Iranians. But what does Trump want to do? He's very aware, and he's not wrong to be so that in Iraq and Libya, when the US Took actions that knocked over governments that we didn't like, the aftermath was a real problem. If the ayatollahs go in Iran, does that just mean the nastiest guy in the IGRC ends up irgc, ends up, like, running the show even worse than before? Does Iran collapse into ethnic enclaves fighting each other? Do you have a very weak government that's unable to do something about, you know, all kinds of smuggling and terrorism and things like that going on? You don't know. It's a black box. So Trump is saying what he wants is he wants to get a real deal with a government in Iran is what it sounds like. At least he's saying he wants a deal. Imagine something like the Venezuelan deal, where he uses control over oil and the threat of military intervention as a last resort to extort compliance with a regime. You know, how successful he'll be with this and what your goals are. Big questions over all of that. But I do think that the fact that the current government in Iran has reached a true dead end. Its foreign policies have comprehensively failed. Its domestic policies have comprehensively failed. It can only stay in office through enforcing starvation by terror. It's not really a great place to be now. You can be there a very long time. Think of the words North Korea. You know, a government that has absolutely no scruples, no pity, no heart, whatever, can do a lot of things in this world. And there clearly are people in Iran who perhaps, let's give them some credit, it's religious fanaticism and not sheer hatred of the human race that gets them to this place in their own dark, perverted way, they could be chasing some kind of twisted ideal, okay. But the consequences for the people around them are as dire.
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All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. So we've been talking on this show for a while, Walter, about the Tech MAGA alliance that helped put Trump back in office this time a year ago. It's been a year with quite a lot of ups and downs for that coalition. But you've sort of updated and collated your thoughts on this into a theory of what you call the Tech Hamiltonians, which you say might be a political coalition between tech elites on the one hand and sort of MAGA populism on the other that could outlive or outlast the figure of Donald Trump himself. So tell us more about that thesis.
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Well, the Tech Hamiltonians aren't the coalition, but they're a group of corporate types and tech leaders and intellectuals and think tanks associated with them who think that they can and should make an alliance with MAGA populism and that that alliance is maybe the only way forward for the United States to deal with the problems that we face. Well, you know, you might ask, well, how the heck do you get there? Because when most people think of maga, they think of anti corporate, you know, certainly not sophisticated statecraft or anything like that. But, and then when you think of Tech Hamiltonians, you think of Silicon Valley billionaires who. And trillionaires soon, I suppose, whose private lives don't necessarily reflect those all American values that a lot of folks in MAGA think kind of matter and who don't seem that unhappy about rising inequality in the country, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So how are you going to get these two groups into a coalition? And why is even is that necessary? And I think if we start from, let's just, you know, Jeremy, try to, to sort of think yourself into the shoes of a tech bro. Not that hard for you. You've, you've interviewed a lot of these folks. You, you know, Palmer Luckey, you've interviewed Alex Karp, you know, a lot of the folks in that, in that universe. And let's suppose you really think this tech that you're bringing online is actually going to change everything that not just AI, but a kind of suite of technological innovations, some dependent on AI or adjacent to AI, others independent of it, but moving generically in the same direction. This is a revolution that's going to change everything. It change the way the economy works. But it's also going to change the pecking order in international politics if America gets there first. And by there, I mean, you know, out at the frontier of technological innovation. Where. Where is this? We can, like, I don't know, just a random example, our quantum computers can, you know, decode, decrypt everything the Chinese have. So we like, you know, we know what size underwear Xi Jinping has in his drawer, okay? And that there's, you know, we can. We can look through everything they've got and we have. We also then would have the economic ability, with all the productivity this unleashes, to just generate enough wealth so we can build the ships, build the drones, build whatever it is and just put this competition with China think to rest. Or alternatively, if they get there first, they can do exactly that to us. If you believe this, and I think a pretty high percentage of the tech people do, then it's clearly in the vital interests of the United States to develop a political coalition that can unleash and deploy the power of these technological advances asap. Xi Jinping can just do it in China. Well, he can't really, but, you know, there he can. He can order people and get a lot more action, or at least the appearance of action sometimes than we do. So an authoritarian system like China has some advantages. It can direct resources pretty effectively toward whatever it thinks are the key targets. And it can impose, you know, look at the way the Chinese sort of took over the solar market or the EV market by just basically decreeing a set of conditions and so on. All right, in America, in our messy process, we got to figure out how to do this our way. All right, well, who are you going to do this with? That's the next question. You know, tech lords may have a lot of money, but there's not that many of them when you get down to the voting. All right, you know, Lucky Palmer votes. Alex Karp votes, you know, Peter Thiel votes, Elon Musk votes. Okay, that's like five votes. That's not even one seat in the House of Representatives. What are you going to do? All right, you got to find people who are willing to walk this walk with you. Now, traditionally, I mean, this is actually a very old problem in American politics. How do you get popular consent for the policies that are likely to unleash the technologies that can make America ultimately richer and make Americanza richer, but also keep the country kind of at the cutting edge of an international technological march into the future and therefore keep us independent, respected Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so we've been thinking about that since Alexander Hamilton was in the Washington administration, Tech Hamiltonians, because he kind of first thought a lot of these things through. A good example to me of how this has been done in the past is the Homestead act and basically the opening of the west where, okay, you want railroads that are going to go across the country so that we'll have a national market, not going to lose California, but we're going to build big steel mills to make the steel that'll make the rail, you know, blah, blah, you know, all of the things that are going to go with that so called second industrial revolution when you go from just like textile looms to really big industry. All right, how are you going to do that? You got to get people to vote, but you give away all that money, all that land or whatever to the railroad companies. Oh, I know what we'll do. We'll give free public land to Americans who just like go live on it. The Homestead Act. And in fact, once you have those people out there on the farms, they'll want railroads because like a farm, a farm that you know that is like a thousand miles from any ocean is not going to be able to export any of its products unless there's a railroad. And, and a railroad too will need farms along there. So there's a kind of a potential symbiosis. Now it was a pretty corrupt era in American politics, the Gilded Age, credit mobilier, I mean, scandal after scandal, not completely unlike some of the things that we see in Washington in our own day. But at the end, the United States had the largest industrial economy in the world. And while the farmers then like spent the next 30 years cursing the railroads and trying to fight them, we had the farms and the railroads that we needed to become the kind of country that we needed to be for the 20th century. All right, so question is going to be, I think long term question, what's the Homestead act for the age of tech? And by the way, we did a second version of this kind of after the New Deal and so on with the 30 year self amortizing home loan, where again, you know, American industry did very well after World War II, but so did the American middle class. All right, so what's going to be that next piece? Now we don't necessarily know yet. And the tech is still evolving. But there are a few things that the tech lords, the Tech Hamiltonians I think see in MAGA that make it attractive. And part of it is the things that traditional American business doesn't like about maga, actually don't bother the tech lords that much. Why is that? Well, think about free trade, sending American jobs overseas for low wage foreigners in slave labor conditions to toil on assembly lines to send us cheap stuff for Walmart. Okay? Now that has been very. The idea of a seamless global economy, frictionless global economy where a multinational company can make stuff wherever it's cheaper, move money to wherever money gets the best result, and then sell stuff wherever you can get the best prices for it in the best market. Creating that was kind of the core of American foreign policy after 1990. And it was. When you look at how a lot of big American companies work, this is almost the essence of their business model. If you're a multinational manufacturer or even if you're a retailer like an Amazon or a Walmart, this kind of economy is the core. Now it'll be no surprise to you, Jeremy, because you follow these things in the news, but Donald Trump got elected in part on a wave of opposition to exactly that kind of policy. Bring the jobs back home, bring the factories back home. Big beautiful tariffs. We could go on and on to traditional, let's call them legacy multinationals, the big industrial and retailing companies that are thoroughly grounded in this global economy. Trump's attack on that is like a death sentence. This is the essence of their business model that he. They've spent trillions of dollars over decades investing for this kind of world and now he wants to rip up that playbook. Okay, and a lot of folks in mag, I think it's one reason a lot of Democrats voted for Trump. Right. Well, this doesn't actually bother you if you are making ChatGPT or if you own X or whatever, you're not. The tech lords are not really in the business of global buying and selling and manufacturing of commodities the way the old legacy multinationals are. So, you know, they can sort of say to maga, fine, fine. He said, look, in theory, we've actually read economics textbooks and they do tell you that there are a lot of problems with protection. And the problem, the more protection you have, the more the problems are going to multiply. But you know, we can actually live with that if it makes you happy. And immigration, there are a lot of American companies whose business models are tied to major waves of low income, low skill immigrants coming into the country ready to work for lower wages and work really hard. And it's great stuff. And some of them are actually fantastic people. However, so. So if you're running a hotel business Or a construction company, a farm. There are a lot of things where, you know, high sustained levels of migration are important to you, but if you are running, oh, let's say Google, all right, and suddenly not only is there no new low wage immigration or just very little, you're deporting a lot of people who are already here working for Google. This is terrible. Why? It means the landscaping bill is going to be up 30%, the janitorial services bill is up 30%. This is just horrible. Right? But you can live with it because those numbers are rounding errors in your business. Construction company, hotel company is actually a different kind of a different order of magnitude of a problem. So again, the tech Hamiltonians don't see MAGA opposition to low skill mass immigration as anything to fight about. You say the same about unions. What is going to bring, you know, X to its knees is not going to be a labor union. You know, that's not going to determine whether Meta is going to develop the kind of AI that it needs to stay competitive on the cutting edge. Right? That's not the labor unions. And so they can just kind of. There are a lot of things that, that really get people's blood boiling in maga that traditional business Republicans really feel a need to fight, that Trump Republicans that Hamilton techies are happy to let go. Then there's patriotism for the global multinational. McKinsey for example, I don't hate McKinsey. I got friends and family that work there. They, you know, they do some good things. But the sort of attitude that you want, if McKinsey is your model of the world, you want a kind of seamless world where you can have a Bangladeshi working next to an Iranian working next to a Greenlander working next to a Brazilian and everybody's in this kind of common cosmopolitan global culture. You don't actually want a bunch of flag waving people who, you know, want to like say the pledge of Allegiance before every corporate events. You know, you don't want your, you don't want an educational system that is consciously trying to instill a sense of American patriotism into elite students. You actually kind of don't really hate woke universities. You kind of wish they made the little weasels work harder so that the grade inflation wasn't so bad and maybe like give them a little bit more of a work ethic. But fundamentally you're fine with a kind of post national, post historical elite culture, elite university culture. But you know what, if IP is the core of your business, if you're a tech company, if you're an AI company or whatever, and China is the greatest business competitor and threat to you. You don't want your employees to think it's an economic decision whether or not they should sell your IP to China or go work for a Chinese company with all the skills that they have. You want them to think this is wicked and despicable. So you may actually need a university system and an educational system that encourages a sense of patriotism among young Americans. You look at all of this and you can see why, if you're an intelligent tech lord, you just might think that there's a way to work with maga. And it looks to me like some of that might be driving some of the events that we see in national politics.
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All right, I'm sure we'll return to this topic soon, but that does it for the big conversation today. Let's end on the tip of the week. Walter Alex from Virginia writes in to ask what your favorite novel is that you've read recently.
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That is a tough one because I've not been reading much fiction lately because I've just been, I've been getting my house together in Florida, teaching a class, going to Davos. So my reading has been a lot of non fiction, although, you know, I occasionally read some of my trashy science fiction for fun. It's getting harder though, you know, to re, you know, to find good science fiction because a lot of it is just kind of, you know, let's, you know, you gotta find the wokiest little way to tweak something. I mean, come on. But all right, fine. If people want it, that's okay. I guess this is the kind of, the kind of kids like me, little nerdy kids in high school that maybe aren't all that popular all the time or zone. And reading escapist fiction, maybe this is, maybe this is the stuff that gets their juices going. I don't know. So probably in sort of the last book of fiction that I actually read that was kind of serious fiction in its way was Cavalier Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, which I read in preparation for an opera. It's been made into an opera. And I wanted to, you know, wanted to kind of get the whole experience, get the flavor of the thing. And you know, what I kind of liked gets at, and so does the opera in its way, gets at this weird creation often by kind of young Jewish kids, first and second generation immigrants in New York in the, you know, middle of the 20s, early middle 20th century, 30s and 40s, 40s of a kind of a Synthetic mythos, you know, sort of this Batman and Superman, they're not like Tolkien, sort of deeply rooted in western this and that. They kind of appear almost out of nowhere. And as an expression, both the kind of drawings, the cartoon drawings that you see, which are, you know, very simple and very clear, but develop an incredibly expressive language in their own. And this mythos, these mythoses, mytho. I don't know, what do you, how do you say, mythes, whatever they are. Yeah, I'm not sure how much Greek they were speaking in Brooklyn in, in 1942. But anyway, these mythi, you know, really did help create a kind of a popular culture that reached across America and in that kind of mid century to late 20th century, gave a sense of unity to younger generations. We don't quite have that anymore. A lot of that is splintered. These myths tend to live on in sort of horrible sequences of movie franchises. Each one, you know, more sort of ghastly than the one before. Batman 18, Superman 94. Oh, but all right, again, you know, people go, they like them, I guess. But this, this what I liked about the novel is it really looks at that phenomenon in terms of the life experiences and the sort of, you know, the, the emotional problems of integrating, assimilating and the very cutthroat corporate world in which a lot of this took place. So it's a good novel. I enjoyed it.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producer Josh Cross, thanks to Alex Fatanov at Hudson and my co host Walter Russell. Need, 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.