← Which Side of History?
Which Side of History?
Democracy Under Attack: Tom Friedman, Nick Kristof, Laurene Powell Jobs
00:50:07
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- [00:01]
A
We need to stand up to bullies. We need to stand up to a culture of fear and corruption that we see in our country right now in an unprecedented way. We have to talk about the attacks on our core values and institutions and focus on the fact that we respect our Constitution and our constitutional rights and our freedom of speech and fundamentally defend our democracy at a unique. Welcome to which side of History? I'm Jim Steyer, the founder of Common Sense Media and a longtime professor at Stanford University. This is a brand new show, so please make sure that you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and let me know what you think. We really appreciate your support. In this inaugural episode we're going to look at what is this current state of American democracy both at home and abroad and we have a truly all star panel to answer those questions. Joining me today are Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times author and columnist Tom Friedman, businesswoman and philanthropist Lorene Powell Jobs, the owner of the Atlantic, and Nick Kristof, another Pulitzer Prize winning columnist from the New York Times. So let's head now to the campus of Stanford University and get their valuable insights. We have an amazing group of three guests, one of whom, Lorene Paljob sitting over there and two other people you're gonna see on the screen in a minute. It's gonna be great. I'm gonna talk for a couple minutes about the class, but also give you a little about my own perspective on this. I think our nation, our democracy, our kids futures, Stanford University's future and a lot of the things we hold most dear into our lives are at a crossroads right now. I think this is the most unique time in my entire lifetime in terms of politics in this country and the state of America's democracy and well being. These are extraordinary, challenging times. That's going to be the focus of our discussion tonight and quite frankly every night in the class. I'm really psyched to do this with you. It's going to be a great eight weeks because we have a couple of other guests who we haven't announced yet who I think are going to come and the course is designed to educate, inspire, challenge, focus on solutions and positive change that the biggest thing I'd like to say is at a time that is a very complex time in our country, I really hope we'll spend a lot of time this year talking about solutions. We welcome open dialogue, constructive dialogue and disagreements and quite frankly, serious action and solutions for our troubled nation. That is my perspective. I think the implications to this are huge, particularly for young people and and having been a Prof. Here for well over 30 years, I have never thought that the students lives were more on a precipice than I feel that way right now. And I really hope that we can provide them with some leadership and answers in a big way. The number one thing I want to talk about with you and the incredible guests we're going to have over the next eight to 10 weeks is the future of this country and particularly how younger generations are going to be able to have the extraordinary lives that I've had and so many other people, people in this audience have had a little about my background. I've been teaching at Stanford for over 30 years as a Prof. Actually, over 35 years. Just shows you how time flies. And I've been a Prof. For a long time basically because I like to talk to young people about doing social change work and inspiring them to go out and change the world. That's the most rewarding part of teaching. And the lens that I bring to this class and to the discussions we're going to have tonight and for the next eight to 10 weeks is the perspective of the future of your kids and grandkids, if your parents or grandparents. And for students here, I have a day job. I'm the CEO and founder of Common Sense Media. It's the leading child advocacy group in the United States. It's the biggest media and tech nonprofit in the world. We are in the business of educating the public about the impact of everything on children's lives. That's why I care so much that we're a child advocacy group more broadly, but also about the extraordinary impact of technology and media on everybody, including everybody in this audience. It's a non partisan organization. We have about 175 million unique users, 110,000 schools that are part of the organization. Probably reach 50 million kids a year. Students now with our curriculum on digital literacy, citizenship, AI literacy, and we have a very large public, non kid partisan platform. But look, our basic norms and institutions are under assault right now, in my opinion. I believe that our nation and our world are at a very troubled moment, the most troubled moment I've ever seen since I've been teaching here. I believe that some of our key institutions and our basic constitutional structure and order are facing unique challenges, let alone our role in the world. We're going to talk about all, all of that tonight with our extraordinary guests. I believe this is not a time to be silent, period, full stop. I don't think it's a time for universities to be silent. I don't think it's a time for professors to be silent. And I don't think it's a time for you or anyone else to be silent, whatever your viewpoint is. I think that we need to stand up to bullies. We need to stand up to a culture of fear and corruption that we see in our country right now in an unprecedented way, you could say on both sides of the aisle. But I believe that we have to talk about the attacks on our core values and institutions and focus on the fact that we respect our Constitution and our constitutional rights and our freedom of speech and fundamentally defend our democracy at a unique time. And we're going to bring conservative Republicans to this class to talk about that. But there are some people I will not platform and that's my choice. Let me start with my dear friend, Lorene Powell Jobs. I could tell you so many things about her, but she is an extraordinary leader, educator, mom, philanthropist, built this extraordinary organization, Emerson Collective and turned the Atlantic around. And just as a huge figure in American and global society and an incredible person and leader. So welcome Lorene Powell Jobs.
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Thank you.
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A
Okay, up there, Tom Friedman. I don't want to tell you how many Pulitzer prizes he has bestsellers, because there's a lot. By the way, the US Would have won the Ryder cup this week in golf if Tom had played for the US Rider cup team. He's a fine golfer. He's a quiet advisor or not so quiet advisor to presidents and he's most of all Minnesota's finest. So welcome Tom Friedman. Thank you. And his great colleague at the New York Times, Nick Kristof, also the winner of multiple Pulitzer Prizes, multiple best selling books. His most recent one, chasing Hope, which is his memoir about growing up in rural Oregon. It just came out in paperback. You should get it. He's an Oregon boy. He's very happy to see that the military is moving into Portland. Oh my God. Unbelievable. And also has been referred to as the Indiana Jones of journalists. So you can figure that one out. Anyway, tonight we're going to do the state of American democracy and national well being. Democracy versus autocracy, the rule of law, universities, the failure of leadership in the country on all sides of the aisle, the role of young people. And then we're going to go into America abroad and talk about our role and reputation. Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, the brilliance of Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, the D team running American foreign policy, abandoning our global role in the world. This is a big deal to me. You don't have to agree with me, but we're going to talk about it. I'm going to open with a question to Tom and Nick, but then for Lorene to comment on, which is the following. It blends the two, but we're going to do mostly domestic to start, and then we're going to switch to foreign policy. Tom, maybe you first and then Nick. How has your experience, Remember, Tom was in Lebanon. He read a fantastic book, Beirut to Jerusalem. Nick has posted all over the world, covered Tiananmen Square, a number of other countries, and still both of them still do. And so the question is, how has your experience covering autocracies abroad shaped your understanding of what's currently happening in America? Tom Friedman, you go first, then Nick, then Lorene.
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B
Okay, thanks, Jim. And it's great to be with your class and with my friends, Lorene and Nick. I was only I was a foreign correspondent in Beirut for five years and then Jerusalem for five years. So 1979-84 in Beirut and then 84 to 88 in Jerusalem. And my experience in Lebanon really taught me two things. I was there during a civil war. And two things that are relevant, I think, for your class, Jim, and one is as a country can get through a lot of stresses as long as its institutions and their integrity hold. But if you lose your institutions, the independence of your judiciary, the integrity of your central bank, the integrity of elections, the restraints on the executive, when you lose your institutions, then recovering from a bad leader becomes hugely difficult. And if there's an analogy to that with what's going on in America today, that we are seeing a systematic attack on institutions, on what we're seeing the politicization of the Justice Department. We've seen people fired for producing data that the president didn't like. We saw the head of the National Security Agency dismissed because a witch doctor, Laura Loomer, said he was too close to the previous chairman. So these are all assaults on our institutions, and if those break, we really are in an irreparable place. They haven't yet, but I think that's what's at stake. What I also learned from Lebanon is that politicians can hack away and hack away at a democracy and think, I'll be responsible, I'll behave more responsibly when I'm in power. But right now I'm just going to hack away at the system. And then you hack away and you hack away. And then one day, you never know which hammer blow does it, but the whole thing breaks. The whole thing just breaks. And once it breaks you can't get it back. And Lebanon to this day is struggling to get back the sort of basic democracy and institutions that it had before the 1975 civil war. That would be my biggest message, that you can break it. I have a friend from Zimbabwe, Leslie Goldwasser, I've written about her before who used to say to me and I've quoted it several times, that you Americans kick around your country like it's a football. It's actually not a football, it's a Faberge egg. And if you drop it, you can actually break will break. I was talking to a colleague who covers the State Department, and he was saying to me this afternoon, there's no diplomacy going on around the world these days. And the reason there's no diplomacy and I do not say this as a jingoistic statement, it's a matter of fact, America is the straw that stirs the drink. And when we're out of the diplomacy business, there really is no diplomacy. And what's happening now, I couldn't agree with you more. Jim and I know Lorene and Nick agree this is this is a 10 alarm fire. And what I tell everyone is that this is the fight of my life. This is why I became a journalist and I'm not tired.
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A
Ms. Okay. Thank you, Tom.
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C
Professor Kristof, thank you, Professor Steyer, and I'm delighted to be with Professor Tom and Professor Lorene as well. Tom preceded me as a foreign correspondent and then preceded me as a columnist, has been a wonderful colleague for decades. And Lorene, what Lorene has done with the Atlantic is something that I hugely admire, and I think all my colleagues around journalism just salute her for the extraordinary job she has done there. And when I was in a reporter in China or covering other authoritarian regimes, I never thought that would be good preparation for coming to the US but sadly it has been. And I think that what is that authoritarian regimes, as they're creeping along, they do three distinct things. And first of all, that leader corrodes the other checks and balances within the government and so goes after the judiciary, goes after other checks and balances, other institutions, the legislative branch and so on. And of course, that's what we're seeing right now with President Trump usurping Congress's authority, albeit unfortunately, with often the ascent of Congress and making it very unclear that he will obey the judicial branch as well, often evading the rulings of district judges. And then so far, the Supreme Court has largely come out and bailed him out. And then secondly, the authoritarians whittle away at the independent referees, the arbitrators of society, the institutions. And those are particularly journalists, lawyers, things like that. And we've seen a real campaign against independent journalism in the United States, especially those institutions that have other interests, business interests at stake. I think that I'd speak for many of the other journalists around the country when I say that we feel a real sense of mission. This, as Tom said, this is why we went into journalism. This is history unfolding. But a lot of corporations that happen to own a news organization don't necessarily feel that way. And the White House has shown that it can punish those organizations and hurt their profitability. And so they have tended to buckle. And the final measure, I think, of authoritarianism, which we have not fully seen in this country, but I worry about is the use of shadowy individuals and organizations for violence to intimidate people. And one of the things that one of the reasons I really worried about the pardons of the January 6th protesters was that does create impunity for violent acts. I think the use of masked federal agents who don't offer identification is also a really worrisome step in that direction. What you also learn in authoritarian regimes is what works to challenge them. And so I'd also say that there are a few good lessons there. And one is that storytelling really works. And it's often about it's not about talking about authoritarianism, about the erosion of democracy, or even about how many people are affected. It's often about the power of one. So when South Africa was South Africans were opposing apartheid and their initial slogan was Free South African political prisoners. And that kind of got nowhere. And then they switched to free Nelson Mandela. And boy, that took off. You know, the power of one. I think, likewise, going after corruption is often a lot more effective than going after these kind of, these larger questions of institutions. And what Navalny did, for example, going after Putin and talking about Putin's billion dollar pleasure palace, I mean, that clearly needled Putin and got Putin's attention. I think it got the public's attention. And I think there are so many avenues to aggressively cover the extraordinary ways in which the Trump family has monetized his position in the White House. I think that's, that's pushing on an open door. And I guess the final thing that has often worked very well has been humor and sarcasm, mockery, the power of mockery. And in China, I suspect there are some Chinese students in the audience who will remember the way in which a lot of Chinese on the web talked about grass, mud, horses, I'm translating for the Chinese Tsao Nima, which. And it was all, it was a character for grass, the character for mud, the character for horse. But it sounds very much a particularly, particularly. Well, it sounds very much fuck your mother. And, and so there were all these, there were all these articles about the habits of the, the grass mud horses, the battle between the grass mud horses and the river crabs, when river crabs sounds like censorship. And it was a way for Chinese to poke fun of the authorities in ways that made it hard for them to respond. And I think likewise that today there is great opportunity for the power of mockery. And that may get farther than a lot of earnest discussion about authoritarianism, although obviously we need that too. And this is a. And I guess the final thing I should say also is that in addition to being honored by my guests here, I'm honored by the class. And I remember last year I was hiking around Three Sisters Mountains and another backpacker was coming from the other direction and looked at me and was trying to place me and said, oh, you're that guest speaker at Jim Steyer's. So I finally found my way. I can identify myself.
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A
There you go. So, Lorene, humor. This is obviously you have, I don't believe you've been a foreign correspondent. I certainly have not.
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D
I have not.
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A
So talk about your overview sense of the state of the country right now. And then any response to Tom and Nick's extraordinary experience?
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D
Yeah, thanks, Jim. And I'm very happy to be here for opening night. Thanks for inviting me. As Nick was speaking, I was thinking about a meeting that I had last week with David Pressman, who was the US Ambassador to Hungary over the last two years. And frankly, I didn't know very much about David Pressman. He's a human rights lawyer, he's a really strong advocate. But surprisingly, he was the second most famous person in Hungary for those two years behind Viktor Orban. Because through the state owned media, he was on every media channel, every single day, demonized and pilloried. And because he had the protection of the United States behind him, he decided that he would stand up to this unfair, unrelenting, often dangerous rhetoric against him. And he invited to the ambassador's house all the free speech advocates who were also being equally threatened by Orban's government to give them protection, give them a little bit of elevation. He said to me, we in the United States are missing the moment. Because so much of what he found when he returned to the US over the last couple years of couple months is reminiscent of Orban's Hungary. And he said what we're missing is we have to meet bluster with bluster. We have to puncture that balloon of invincibility which really is just a bunch of hot air. And he said what he learned in Hungary is that there's no longer a need for gulags if you control every form of communication to people. And we're seeing that in the United States this very deliberate undermining of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. And some of it, as Tom and Nick said, is happening because there are corporations that own a lot of media properties and they have a multiplicity of other corporate interests that are very much at risk if they don't acquiesce to this administration's demands. And also because frankly, it's a little frightening. And I think the two of you are heroic and your colleagues are heroic because you're standing up and telling the truth and you don't have personal security. And I know many journalists at the Atlantic and other places who are receiving death threats every single day. And it's very frightening for them and for their families. So there's a real chilling effect that's taking place in the United States and we don't have to go very far to actually learn from what has happened in other countries and as Nick suggests, what we can actually do about it. I think political satire is enormously effective, which is why we saw the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel and others, obviously Stephen Colbert as well, because I think autocrats are notoriously thin skinned and have a complete inability to laugh at themselves and hate it when others are laughing at them. Love it when others are fawning over them.
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A
The next question I want to ask you, all three of you, maybe Lorene, you go. Tom, Nick. It's about the state of the two parties in America. A short sort of assessment of both the Republican. Not it, but a quick here's what I think is going on with Republicans, here's what I think is going on with Democrats, because neither of them are pillars of leadership, in my opinion at this point. How do you see that playing out? And also I would throw in there the capitulation of some of the business leaders. We could do a whole class on that. But if some of the leaders are some of the most important institutions. But I'm interested to know how you see the leadership of both the Republican and Democratic parties right now in the context of these questions. Read first.
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D
I'll happily start and then jump back in. We can have it more of a conversation if you'd like.
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C
Yep.
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D
I think you have to look at it at different levels, at the municipal level, at the state level, and then at the federal level, federal level for the Democratic Party, they're not in control of any of the houses, the legislative or executive, and so their voice is limited. They're not setting the agenda and they actually are finding it very difficult to control the message in a very noisy environment. At the state level, however, there are a number of governors who I think are doing extraordinary work. Of course, I'm a big fan of our California governor and he's using, obviously he's using mockery to an extreme hailing. But yeah, it's actually having an effect. But in addition to that, he's passing once in a generation climate legislation and giving to our state the mantle of climate leadership. That is really exciting. He's running the fourth largest economy in the world and I think doing it very ably. If you've been following, I think the reforms of CEQA will allow for building to happen. That has been under examined in our state for some time. I also like Josh Shapiro. He's doing enormous work around workforce transition, getting prepared for what's coming with AI displacement of his workforce. He's focused on adult literacy. We're doing a literacy program with him for childhood literacy. He's a real pillar of strength and he has enormous popularity in Pennsylvania.
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A
How about on the Republican side? Who do you see?
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D
Spencer Cox, for certain, he's a moral leader. I think you can see what happens when someone has core values and a strength of faith and mission and how that's expressed in leadership. So I find that really compelling. I think I'm not going to say anything original. What gets amplified in social media is the most vitriolic, most extreme views of both the left and the right. And the vast majority of Americans, about 70% live in between those two extremes. So as a result, our political rhetoric and our social media is not reflective at all of the needs and desires of the American citizens.
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A
We're going to actually do week three, we're going to do a whole thing about that. Interestingly, Nick and Tom comments on the leadership on both sides of the aisle and what you'd like to see from them. And I think I am going to play that. After you both comment. I'm going to show this.
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D
I'm going to say one last thing if I can, because it's a little counterintuitive. So when you think about what has changed, in addition to everything that we're going to talk about, in this administration versus the Biden administration. The previous administration. The previous administration, I'd say, was anti business. Across the board, they did not find any common ground. There was a lot of vitriol. About a year ago, our team did a word cloud from president. Actually a year and a half ago from President Biden. He never said the word corporate without the word greed attached to it. And it was so unhelpful and so unfair. And it's a huge criticism that I have of the Biden administration because they left wide open the opportunity for the next administration to actually embrace corporate leadership. Listen, you can't be only for labor because labor works for businesses. They were very divisive in their language, and I found it enormously unhelpful.
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A
I remember having meetings with you where you made that quite clear and say, you call them, Jim, you call Bruce, you call.
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D
You wrote multiple memos about this because it was deeply frustrating and I thought not healthy for our country to be demonizing corporate leaders. Listen, if they do something wrong, of course you hold them accountable. But you do not paint everyone with a big, broad brush of corruption.
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A
Tom, Nick, your thoughts about the party leadership on either or both sides of the aisle?
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B
Who do you want to go first?
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A
You go first, Tom.
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B
Pick up where Loreen left off. If you ask me what my own political identity is, I'm a pro globalization, pro trade Democrat, and there's about three of me left in the zoo, and Loreen and Mike Bloomberg are maybe two of them. I'm not a particularly political like person. I'm a. It goes back to my maybe growing up in Minnesota at a time and place where politics worked. And so I am actually a both and person, not an either or person. I thought we needed a very high wall on the border with a very big gate. I think we need to grow the pie and redivide the pie. I think we need more police and better police. I think we need green. But I think right now we also need all of the above to get the energy we need. I'm a both and person, not an either or person, not because I can't make up my mind, but because I have made up my mind. But I think the energy is in the synthesis between the two. But the whole structure of sort of media today with social networks and the like really works against someone like me. I'm blessed. I have a platform in the New York Times. But if you don't now, Jim, because I've done your class twice now, that I have never looked at Facebook, I have never looked at Twitter, I've never looked at TikTok, I've never looked at Instagram, I've never smoked a cigarette. And my plan is to die saying all five, okay? And because I consume no social media whatsoever in my world, everybody likes me. What I mean by that is that I never come to the office and say, nick, did you see that tweet about me? That was so unfair. You know, I mean, I leak no energy. Now, if Nick comes to me or Lorena says, because I have, I do tweet my column out, my system does it. I don't know the password. So I have 900,000 some Twitter followers. If you come to me and say, would you tweet about my book? I will happily do it. But it's actually Gwen Gorman, my assistant, who does it, because I don't have a clue how to do it. So I don't leak any energy on social media. And if I find out about the fire or the earthquake or the shooting, God forbid, 30 minutes later, I'm good with that. I'm not going to write my column in those 30 minutes. I want to go back, though, to something Laureen said because I just so resonates with me something. First of all, my teacher Dov Seidman always says, we aren't divided as a country. We are being divided. We are being divided for profit, okay? And for political energy. And my sense is that when I go out is that there is that 70% that Lorene talks about. And if we had a different system of open primaries and ranked choice voting, I think that 70% would actually be manifested in our politics. I just leave you with one story. I get to speak at uninv, invited to speak at universities, and my lecturer agent came to me, this was a while ago, maybe nine months ago, and said, you have an offer to speak at Pittsburgh State about what you're working on with your book. And I said, great, sign them up. And really didn't think about it for the six months. And then I went on a long overseas trip and came back the night before. But I thought, it's Pittsburgh State, so no problem. And my agent called me that day and said, no, no, it's Pittsburgh without an H. Well, I said, where is Pittsburgh without an H? He said, it's in southern Kansas. I said, you've got to be kidding. How do I get to Pittsburgh without an H? He says, you fly from Washington to Chicago, then Chicago to Springfield, Missouri, and then you take a three hour car drive to get to Pittsburgh without an H. You have to be kidding me. Okay, I just, I'm jet lagged out of my mind. But I made a commitment. So I make this trek to Pittsburgh without an H. It's in the heart of Trump country. It's a wonderful little school that was president was the brother of the former chairman of Walmart, the CEO of Walmart, and he had actually endowed the lecture, but it was a primarily red audience. And I gave my talk and they were very open to what I was talking about. They came to Q and A time and I don't remember what triggered it, but the President asked me a question. My response was, Donald Trump's favorite word is tariffs. My favorite word is actually public. Public parks, public health, public schools, public libraries, public places, public transport. And I got the loudest ovation I got all night. And I absolutely am a huge believer that's where the country is. And whenever politicians, I believe that's why Joe Biden got elected. I entirely agree with Lorene about the anti business bias of that administration. It was crazy. And so I just think that's where you have to be as a country. I think it's where we can be as a country. And I just say one last thing. Watching that Jimmy Kimmel poll episode, what actually turned it around, it was when a Republican stepped up, when Ted Cruz said and Joe Rogan said, hey, that's actually censoring free speech. That's what we cruise to the left of. And when that happened, the air went out of the whole thing and suddenly Disney fought back and then Sinclair backed off their thing, which says to you, at a time when Democrats control no levers of power, not the Supreme Court, not the House, not the Senate, not the White House, right now, in this interregnum, we have to rely on, on courageous Republicans as much as anything. If there were just five courageous Republicans in the House and the Senate, who would say to Donald Trump right now, these prosecutorial escapades you're on, that's exactly what you decried the Democrats for now, you're we're just going from left wing woke to right wing woke and never stopping for common sense.
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A
So, Nick, let me ask you a question. You're from rural Oregon, you're from Trump land, right? So when you go home, you're surrounded by Trump voters. So pick up on what Tom said. How do you think about the way that your neighbors view this and how do you view the solution for both moving them forward in the polarized environment we are now? Because it's exactly what Tom's talking about. In Pittsburgh without an H. Yep.
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C
And I would make the point that while people in my liberal world overwhelmingly focus on how Republicans brought us into this catastrophe, I mean, we Democrats also to some degree did this to ourselves. And I firmly believe that if, say, Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer had been the Democratic nominees last time around, we might well have avoided this mess. We might well not be having this conversation. And indeed, I see this very much through the frame of my little hometown, Yamhill, Oregon, population 1,000 on a good day. And this is an area, it's a farming area. The biggest employers were agriculture, timber, and light manufacturing. And those jobs all went away and meth came in. There had not been a lot of emphasis on education, partly because you always could get jobs in the mill. And so once those factory jobs went and meth arrived, our strong rural values that we'd been very proud of, that all unraveled very quickly. And so at this point, more than a third of the kids on my old school bus are gone from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. And many of them, they suffered greatly, but they also inflicted great suffering on others. As somebody who's written a lot about sexual violence, one of the things that I found really hard to understand was that two of the boys on my old school bus had been convicted and sentenced to prison for raping very young girls. Trying to understand how that happens on one small school bus, that's hard. But what I came to see is this wasn't the story of one school bus, one town. This is a story of working class America in white rural communities and black urban communities around the country. And one reason working class communities have turned against Democrats, including communities of color, is a feeling that elites just don't care and that they betrayed these communities. And there is something to that. We've lost more than a million people to overdoses since the year 2000, more than a million. And the response from, whether from politicians, from journalists, from civil society, has not been remotely equivalent to that harm all across the country, disproportionately in working class communities, only 10% of people with addiction get access are in treatment. And so there is this sense of betrayal. There is a sense that educated folks who are now disproportionately in the Democratic Party condescend to them, look down on them. Michael Sandel, the Harvard philosopher, says that the last acceptable prejudice in America is, is the prejudice against less educated people. And there is something to that. There is something to that. I think that it's been magnified by President Trump's success with working class Americans and the tendency of liberals to then denounce every Trump voter as a racist and a bigot. We should be very wary of broad stereotypes and it certainly makes it harder to get votes from people ones accusing of being racist and a bigot. And I think that the Democratic Party is going to have to understand that it can't win elections if it is relying on the university educated in a country where only 40% of people have college degrees. And we have to figure out how to communicate more effectively with working class Americans. We have to figure out how to champion those issues of quality of life that matter a lot to those communities. And I must say that in the long run, I think the kind of inoculation that will make those communities healthier has a lot to do with what Jim is doing in terms of working with young people with kids. For a lot of my old classmates, frankly, it's too late. They've been, they've been wrestling with these issues for too many decades. But the time to intervene is early and we still are not doing that as a country. We are still failing these communities.
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A
The three things I'd like to cover because it's tough, we could go on, we'd have an hour and 2,5 hours on this one is the overall role of the US in the world and the apparent American at first idea of abandoning global leadership. That to me was reflected in those comments. Second is and Tom, with you here we have to is Trump met with Netanyahu today and we've had several classes with you which are the best ever about Middle East. So what's going on in the Middle East? And then third, Russia, Ukraine and Europe. Hopefully we'll get to more but global leadership. And then Tom, for sure the Middle east, particularly Israel and Netanyahu and Trump and our relations to that and Gaza and then Soviet Russia, Ukraine, Europe, maybe we'll get to China. But I'd love to cover if we could in the next 30 minutes that Nick, you want to give it a start?
- [39:03]
C
After 1945, the US remarkably magnanimously created an international order on the ashes of World War II that involved international institutions. It involved low trade. It came over time to involve more not initially, but later immigration, bringing in some of the best and the brightest to America to improve our economy. It involves security institutions and promises of the US to NATO, for example, to support Europe and that overall structure and order which won Cordell held the Nobel Peace Prize after World War II. President Trump has taken an ax to that. And it's not clear that NATO, the pillar of NATO, Article 5, the commitment to collective security, if that really means anything. If, if Russia were to move into Estonia tomorrow, I'm skeptical that NATO would actually respond. Trade. He is completely take a battering ram to international trade order and this sense of importance, of soft power, that legitimacy matters, that we win people over. He's obviously, I think, very much destroyed that as well. And his perception is that this international structure weaken America, and we didn't get as much out of other countries as we could have. And it's true that when you coerce other countries, you do temporarily get more, and I think he's shown that. But this international order has so much benefited the US That I think it's a tragedy that it is now being unraveled. And I particularly worry about NATO and acquiescence in what Russia did to Ukraine. And also the message that sends to Xi Jinping about what he might get away with if he wanted to take a nibble out of Taiwan.
- [41:08]
A
Tom, you just posted before class your latest column about Netanyahu's meeting with Trump today. So I'd be interested to have you speak about that, but also in the context of the role of the US as the global leader, peacemaker since 1945 that Nick was talking about. And then, Loreen, please respond to Tom. But, Tom, you just wrote about the meeting they had today and what it meant means.
- [41:34]
B
I gave my support to this plan simply because we have to stop this war. It's just a terrible war. It's the worst war ever between Israelis and Palestinians, one of the worst wars ever in the 21st century. And so I'm all for giving it a try. And the headline of my column is, Trump's Peace Plan. Perhaps impossible, but never more necessary. Sometimes the necessary is impossible. This may be a case. I've covered this. I'm 72. I started going to the Middle east when I was 15. I've covered conflict a long time, and it's never been more broken. I've never seen it just more broken into smaller and smaller shards. And it's going to take a Herculean effort, which I don't think the president fully grasped, to aggregate enough strength to coherence to bring the two parties to the table. I'm deeply dubious of Netanyahu. I have a rule of Middle east reporting. My first rule of Middle east reporting is what people tell you in private is irrelevant. All that matters is what they'll say in public, in their own language, to their own people. The Middle east is funny. It's the opposite of Washington. In the Middle east, people lie to you in private and tell the truth in public. In Washington, people lie to you in public and tell the truth in private. And so I'm waiting to see what Netanyahu says in Hebrew to his own people when he gets back home, because I think that's the decisive thing. But I'm just. Right now, anyone, I'm for trying anything. I think the odds are long that this will work. But tell me what the alternative is. I'll tell you what the alternative is. I'll do a dramatic reading of the last three paragraphs of my column for you. Since it just did go up, I said my bottom line, if you're a betting person, bet that the necessary will be impossible. You have a lot of history on your side that says the closer we get to peace, the more the haters will derail it. If you're a hoping person, hope that this time will be different. If you're a praying person, pray that everything you know about this region, its current leaders, and the poisonous legacy of the Gaza war will be overcome. Because somehow the key players all realize that this really is the last train to somewhere decent and the next one and all those ever after will be nonstop to the gates of hell. So I'm going to support it, give everyone involved in an effort for trying to. It'll be up and down these kind of things, but these kinds of global efforts, they create their own weather. You just never know what they set in motion. And I'm going to be using my pen to urge everyone to take it up and to get the process back on some kind of track toward the only solution, which is two states for two people. It's the only just solution. It's the only sustainable solution. The only alternative to that is a forever war in an age of drones and smaller, more powerful and powerful weapons. And that is what is on just the other side of the gates of hell.
- [44:28]
A
Loreen, I'm going to. Paul, go ahead. I was going to go to you.
- [44:31]
D
Do you mind? For the benefit of the class, walking through the components of the plan.
- [44:36]
B
Yeah. The basic outline is that ceasefire, immediately return of all hostages, immediately return release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jail, some of them in for life sentences for killing Israelis. And a phased pullback by Israel to the border as a international body created in Gaza, apparently overseen by Tony Blair, builds up a Palestinian governance based on Palestinian technocrats with military forces provided by outside powers, possibly Indonesia, possibly Italy and others. So the basic idea, Lorraine, is again I'm still a huge advocate of the two state solution. And whenever people tell me I'm delusional, my reaction is, oh, you mean it's hard? Oh, I had no clue, thank you very much. But I'll tell you something what the alternative is. The alternative is a forever war. That's the only alternative. The alternative is 7 million Jews trying to control 7 million Arabs in a world of TikTok where every single abuse will be broadcast around the world. Okay, so that's the alternative. So I'm going to keep working for it. But we can't get, unfortunately right now we can't get from here to there that the breakdown between Israelis and Palestinians, the emotional traumatic breakdown is so severe, given what Hamas did on October 7 and what Israel did every day after, basically, is that we're going to have to create a situation where Palestinians are given the opportunity and the help and the challenge of building a non corrupt authority that demonstrates it actually can govern effectively. But for them to do that, Israelis also have to give them the space to do that. And that means no more settlements, just a complete freeze and certainly not doing what this government's trying to do, which is bifurcate the west bank so there can be no peace agreement whatsoever. And so we're going to have to kind of rebuild a minimum level of trust and decency to get back to that discussion. Now, I would say two things. I've been covering this my whole life. After every war you hear from Israelis, that's it, finished, done, never over, done, finished. Oh, and then the sun comes up, the fruit stand opens and people realize they don't want to live this way. You know what I mean? And so there is hope for a peace process. I think the danger though, what Trump doesn't understand and criticizing Trump is truly shooting fish in a barrel today. But if you watch his press conference today, it was just an embarrassment. I mean, where he just went on and on about himself, about Joe Biden. It was an embarrassment. And it was an embarrassment because to do this job of Middle east peacemaking is going to take a Herculean effort that will occupy the full energy of any leader. Go back to Kissinger, go back to Jimmy Carter. You have to break bones, diplomatically speaking. You gotta take Bibi and really twist arms. And the same with Hamas and the same with the Arabs. Nobody is going to come to this easily. Is Trump really up for that? And if Trump isn't, who is his Secretary of State? Who is Secretary of State for Panama, basically? I just don't know who's going to pull this off? But I can go on and on about that. I just say one more thing because it's very much on my mind and it's central to this dilemma we have right now, which is over and above the Middle East. So when I give talks today about foreign policy, I always begin by I want to. I want to speak to all the parents in the class, in the room, mom, dad, if your son or daughter come home from college and say, mommy, Daddy, I would like to be Secretary of State one day. Tell them, honey, anything but that you can be Secretary of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Congress, Education, but promise Mommy and Daddy you won't be Secretary of State. Worst job in the world now. Okay, so why is that? Compare two Middle east wars, October 1973, October 2023, two secretaries of state. Henry Kissinger needed three dimes. I'm dating myself here. Three dimes, an airplane and three months to produce the disengagement agreements between Israel and Syria. He needed Israel, Syria and Egypt. He needed a dime to call Golda Meir, a dime to call Hafez al Assad, a dime to call Anwar Sadat. 3 months. The airplane christened your magic, and he produced the diplomatic equivalent of tic tac toe. Three across Egypt, Syria, Israel. Fast forward to Tony Blinken. Tony Blinken saw double everywhere he went. He had inside Hamas and outside Hamas, military Hamas and political Hamas. In Lebanon, he had Iran, Hezbollah and the Lebanese government. In Syria, he had Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and the Syrian government. In Iraq, he had the government and the Iranian milit. In Yemen, he had 18 tribes, and in Israel, he had 18 parties. Tony Blinken was not playing tic tac toe. He had a Rubik's cube and he was trying to get all the colors aligned on a Rubik's cube on one side. And if you've ever tried that, it's really hard.
- [49:44]
A
Thank you very much. Tom Friedman, Nick Kristof, Lorene Paljab. See you next week. Thank you so much. Thank you, guys. I hope you enjoyed this special episode of which side of History. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel like this video and leave a comment. I'm Jim Steyer, and this has been which side of History?