“This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You
can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
Over the past month, there have been two dominant stories in
American foreign policy. One, of course, is the war with Iran. The other is the
much-anticipated summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping of China.
If you look closely at both of these stories, you see that
our foreign policy has entered into a period of absolute incoherence.
Trump said that the point of the war with Iran was to end
the threat of the Iranian regime and to forever end its capability to get
nuclear weapons. If you look at what is being considered, it appears that
neither goal is going to be achieved. So what are we trying to achieve there
now?
If you look at Trump’s entire time in politics, he has been
committed to nothing so much as changing America’s relationship with China —
containing China, making sure that we have power in that relationship or that
we begin to detach from it.
But if you look at our policy now toward China and you look
at that summit, is either of those things happening? Or are we moving in the
opposite direction?
There is much I disagree with in Trump’s foreign policy, but
at the moment, the reality is that it’s not clear what it is. It’s not clear
what he is trying to achieve or what he is simply settling for or reacting to.
So I wanted to do an episode looking at China and Iran and
trying to assess Trump as a geopolitical force and as a force that is remaking
what America means and what its role is in the world.
Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of Eurasia Group
and GZero Media. He’s also the author of, among other books, “Every Nation for
Itself: What Happens When No One Leads the World.”
Ezra Klein: Ian Bremmer, welcome to the show.
Ian Bremmer: Ezra, good to join you.
I was going to do a direct, into-the-news question on Iran,
but I was reading your global risks report from the beginning of the year, and
it made me want to ask a bigger question first: What, to you, is the meaning of
Donald Trump? What does he historically and geopolitically represent?
I would say he’s first and foremost a symptom, not a cause,
of trends that have been coming in the United States for a long time: American
people who believe that for various reasons the political system does not
represent them adequately, that something about it is broken and so needs
someone who is going to shake it up, who isn’t going to be an establishment
figure.
I think that you see that reflected in a whole bunch of
structural policies, like a lack of U.S. support for free trade, and instead
moving toward industrial policy and nearshoring and inshoring. You see it in a
move away from more open borders, both in terms of response against illegal
migration and restrictions on legal migration.
You see it in an unwillingness of the United States to get
as involved in foreign wars and a demand for much greater burden sharing and
other countries paying for their own defense. Those are structural things that
Barack Obama had to deal with and Joe Biden had to deal with and Trump is
benefiting from.
But then you have a separate group of things that have to do
with Trump, the individual, where he puts himself above the country.
I was in Davos in January and wasted three days of my life
that I will never get back on Greenland. That was not a thing for U.S. national
interest or foreign policy. That was purely vaingloriousness on the part of the
U.S. president, to be able to put his name and plant his flag on a territory
that has some of the strongest alliances around it, that the United States
could possibly rely on but don’t matter to Trump because he’s not getting what
he personally wants.
And there are many examples of the latter, which are not as
important for where geopolitics are heading over five, 10, 20 years. But
they’re really important for some of the conflicts that the U.S. happens to be
in and how they’re addressing them right now. And of course, they also play an
inordinate role in driving the headlines and the conversations that you and I
frequently end up having.
I take that point — that Trump is a symptom, not cause — but
then he becomes a cause. One of the ways you have described Trump, which I’ve
not really heard many people say, is as the generator of a political
revolution, a kind of upending of the American state and the way it works and
the expectations one should have of it, on the level of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Talk me through that comparison. Why Roosevelt? And what is Trump’s political
revolution?
Well, Roosevelt was the last time you had a president in the
United States that was truly interested in upending the checks and balances
that existed on the executive and in transforming the nature of U.S. power as
manifested by the government.
And there were some things that he tried to do that he
failed at, like packing the Supreme Court to 15 members or throwing out,
purging a number of the members of his own Democratic Party who had been
democratically elected. But there were a number of things that he succeeded at
— like creating a professionalized administrative state to actually do the
business of the government that was independent, that was technocratic — that
did not exist before.
Like the New Deal — the infrastructure of the country that
was built, that allowed a middle class and a working class to emerge in a
stable way over several generations, coming out of the Gilded Age and the Great
Depression.
Now, a political revolution does not have to succeed, and a
political revolution does not have to be for goals that you or I happen to
agree with. But the structural condition of a people that are demanding a
political revolution — that is something that will persist if it is not
satisfied, if it is not satiated. And what I see right now is Trump driving a
political revolution. He is attempting, every day, to end the checks and
balances on the U.S. executive, and you and I can come up with many examples of
that.
Many of them he is failing at. And it is very clear to me —
I have a lot of confidence that he will not succeed in the political revolution
that he will drive.
But it’s also pretty clear to me that the
American people are going to continue to demand some very significant
revolutionary responses to a system that they believe is not responding
adequately to them.
And where that comes from — is it the left? Is it the right?
Is it a new party? — what it happens to address, and does it have to be a
president who is maximally incompetent, from a policy perspective, or
authoritarian in impulse or personally kleptocratic? Those are three
descriptors of Trump that, I think, apply to a more extreme version with him
than with any other president in American history.
So I’m less concerned about the revolution. It is a natural
response to a system that’s not seen as performing, but there are lots of
reasons to be concerned about what Trump is doing.
One of the reasons I thought the Roosevelt framing was
interesting is that I think it’s right that Roosevelt exerted tremendous power
— sometimes in ways that followed American norms, sometimes in ways that didn’t
— to build professionalized structures.
Yes.
This is what
is always very interesting about Roosevelt. He’s somebody who could have become
a dictator, and what he creates is a highly professionalized administrative
state.
Mm-hmm.
He could
have become — or really asserted America as a global hegemon in the old style
but instead invests in things like the U.N. And that is not to wipe away all
the ways in which he did use power, but out of him comes the state as we know
it and the global order as we know it. And those are the two things that not
just Trump but Trumpism — Project 2025, the foreign policy thinking of the
people around him — have really come to target. The administrative state, to
them, is the “deep state,” a tool of weaponized liberal control.
Mm-hmm.
The global order is a way that America — instead of being
the power that acts on the world — is being restrained from using that power
and taken advantage of. And there’s been an extended, now concerted, effort to
do something to both of those orders. To do something to the state, to do
something to the global order.
How would you describe the aim of Trump’s political
revolution? If Roosevelt wanted to construct, does Trump just want to destruct?
Does he want to own? Does he want to transact? What is he trying to achieve?
Well, that’s why I focused on the narcissism — that he is
above the law, it should not apply to him, it shouldn’t apply to people around
him. He can have his own former personal attorney as the acting attorney
general of the United States, and he will weaponize the legal and the judicial
system in ways that he perceives it was weaponized against him.
But the reality is, what he’s doing is far, far beyond what
we’ve seen before. Just as we’ve had corruption in the country — and it still
persists across the political spectrum — and yet what Trump is personally
driving is unprecedented in American history. I do think a lot of what he’s
trying to do is specific to his personal character.
But I also think that a number of the policies that he has
been driving are policies that are broader, in terms of the more revolutionary
aspect of what the American people want. For example, we’ve come out of Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Trump was
the one who basically cut the deal with the Taliban to get the Americans out of
Afghanistan.
Now, a lot of people will say: Well, that was a bad deal,
and you gave away the store to them. But most Americans would say ending 20
years of a failed war with trillions spent and hundreds of thousands of
American lives disrupted — to say nothing of what happened to the civilians in
Afghanistan — ending that was a positive thing. Trump got that done. Biden,
finally, sort of got the troops out.
Well, they didn’t like it when Biden actually finished that
job.
Well, a lot of people, I think, were very happy to have it
over.
That might be right, but that’s when Biden’s approval rating
dropped under 50 and never recovered. I always found that interesting, because
everybody says people hated the war, but they didn’t like what it looked like
——
They didn’t like the optics.
When America began to withdraw.
The optics of the planes and the people hanging off it and
all of the rest. They wanted it to be cleaner, let’s say. It looked like
America leaving Saigon and the embassy moment. And I understand that, but the
broader point I’m trying to respond to here is that there are an awful lot of
Americans that like the idea that the U.S. should stop with all of these
foreign wars that are thousands of miles away and have very little to do with
American interests.
So if Trump
goes to China and says: Why do I care about giving military support to Taiwan,
which is 9,600 miles away? Most Americans — not the establishment, not the
Republican establishment, not the Democratic establishment but most Americans —
would say: Yeah, why are we doing that?
When Trump kicks Volodymyr Zelensky out of the White House
and says, “You don’t have the cards” Most Americans think we’ve done too much
for those folks. Taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for that when you’re not paying
for me. Where Trump then goes wrong, of course, is he had so much of the
message at the beginning. He said, “Drain the swamp,” and yet it’s much
swampier now than it was before.
He said: End the wars, and now the United States is driving
what could be a global recession directly because of him. I was just in the
Dominican Republic, and I had a meeting with all the C.E.O.s, and the president
was there, in front of me.
Trump or the president of the Dominican Republic?
No, President Luis Abinader. He’s the opposite of Trump. He
actually really cares about extending democracy and increasing checks and
balances and limits on leaders across Latin America.
That is what he wants to see happen. And I said to all of
the leaders in the room — basically 98 percent of their economy — I said, “I
know you’re all upset about the inflation that you’re seeing right now.” His
approval ratings are down to about 55 on the back of that. They were at 70. I
said: “Do not blame your government for that. You can blame my government for
that. Don’t blame your government.” Like, Trump is looking for anyone to blame
for this war that is exactly the opposite of how he was elected and yet he has
personally decided what he was going to do and now he can’t extricate himself
from and he can’t blame anybody for.
I do think
that there was a lot of what Trump’s initial agenda was about — some of which
he has stuck with, like actually securing the border with Mexico, much of which
he has completely jettisoned — that reflects the sensibilities of what a
political revolution would be in service of in the United States.
And they all kind of have to do with — not that democracy
doesn’t work as a system but rather that the American democracy has somehow
gotten completely subverted by special interests: It’s coin-operated. It’s
controlled by money. There’s a two-tier system. It doesn’t apply to me. It
applies to other people. I can’t get what I want for my kids.
And by the way, I’m supersensitive to this because my mom
was just like that when I grew up as a kid, and she didn’t finish high school.
She had a feral intelligence that was very supportive of her two kids, but it
wasn’t book smart. She read The Enquirer every weekend. A lot of the way she
felt about her family — I will steal, I will cheat, I will do whatever is
necessary to support them, because I know the system is rigged. I think that
there’s an enormous amount of that that exists across the country today in
2026.
Here’s a question about this — because I largely agree with
that diagnosis and I also agree that American politics is tremendously
corrupted by money, and that sense that the country, the system, is not working
for Americans — are Americans right about that? And here’s how I want to,
maybe, steel-man the other side of this: A couple of years ago, there was this
big cover in The Economist that basically said: If you look at the American
economy, it is crushing the economies of the rest of the world.
Yeah.
You wouldn’t want to be Europe rather than us. You wouldn’t
want to be China, where the median disposable income is at $6,000. There’s no
one you would want to be rather than America. But in this period, the vibe, so
to speak, just gets worse and worse and worse. This has been confusing for
economists.
If you look at most measures, we’re not doing that badly.
Inflation is not that high anymore. The price level didn’t go back down, but
we’re back to pretty normal levels of inflation. You have had income growth in
the bottom half of the country. You have people acting in a way that does not
reveal financial stress. They are spending. They are taking on debt. They are
not defaulting on that debt. G.D.P. growth is fine. We’re the world leaders in
A.I.
And then if you look at consumer sentiment, they will still
tell you the consumer sentiment about the country is worse than at the depths
of the Great Recession. There is something here about how bad everybody thinks
this is. How do you understand this divergence between the ways that people
would have looked at the outputs of a system before? What is the system
supposed to be creating? American prosperity and American power? And we were
getting a lot of both. Also, people hate it, and they feel it is failing them
as never before.
I’m really glad that you framed the question that way,
because I think there’s a lot of truth to what you’re saying. I also think that
there are really good reasons that are legitimate for why Americans feel
increasingly hard done by.
But let’s start with the big picture, the macro. Xi Jinping
recently met with Trump, and he said we’re in a Thucydides trap and want to
avoid that, because that usually leads to war. And the Thucydides trap — so
that everybody listening here knows what it’s all about — it’s that,
historically, when you have a lead power in a system that’s in decline and a
rising power that’s challenging it, frequently, the lead power is trying to
hold on to power or hold on to its system, hold on to its advantages for too long,
and the rising power is deeply unhappy about that and challenging, challenging,
challenging. And most of the time, historically, it leads to war.
That was the Chinese narrative. And my counter to that,
first of all, is that Xi should not want to be perceived in the United States
as the person saying that the U.S. is in decline, because if he comes to
Washington in September and does that, he’s going to get hammered. It’s going
to be very different from the coverage he gets when he says it in Beijing. It’s
going to be a hundred times every focus: This is what he’s saying to Americans,
is that we’re in decline. Screw that guy, right?
No. 1, he shouldn’t want to do that. But also, it is
manifestly untrue that over the past 20, 30 years, the big structural changes
in the world, in terms of power, is China’s rising. The United States is not in
decline, but American allies are declining, and they are declining because
their productivity is down, their growth is down, their demographics are
contracting, they’re not investing in defense, they’re not investing in
technology.
There has
been a stat that’s been bandied around recently that shows that even
Mississippi has higher per capita income than every European country. And that
is true, but you would not necessarily be happier or better taken care of as a
citizen in Mississippi than you would be in lots of European states.
Why? Because
the social contract in Europe actually takes care of a lot more people, and you
see this in terms of health care, and you see this in terms of policing. You
see it in terms of the educational system, maternity leave, paternity leave,
all of these things.
So let’s recognize that the safety net in the United States
has a lot more holes, is a lot more frayed and just does not act as effectively
as it does in a lot of other countries. In Canada, for example, in Japan, in
South Korea, those things are important.
Also, you
have a system in the United States, where Americans rightly perceive that if
you have access to funds and network, your kids are treated completely
differently. They have different opportunities. The American dream is not for
everybody, no matter how hard you work.
I remember Operation Varsity Blues: You had all of these
parents that weren’t wealthy enough to get their names on university buildings,
so they couldn’t buy their way in officially, so they had to buy their way in
unofficially, by giving a bunch of money so that their kids could get to be on
the lacrosse team, to make sure they were in a final place.
But it’s like, of course it works that way. And we see that
in terms of absolute inequality numbers in the economy.
We see it in
terms of the ability of class mobility. Americans are far less class mobile
today than Europeans are, than Canadians are. That’s shocking. Back in the ’70s
and ’80s, the United States had some of the greatest class mobility in the
O.E.C.D., and in just 40 years, that turned completely on its head.
And then you have a couple of other things — which is not
about the economy, but it’s really important — which is the grievance-based
nature of the U.S. political system, where you increasingly are electing
leaders that are saying how much that you are being taken advantage of by X.
And obviously, Trump is the genius, the master at this. But
when I saw Zohran Mamdani go outside Ken Griffin’s apartment — and this isn’t
some Arab billionaire that doesn’t spend any time in New York and doesn’t spend
any money in New York, this is one of the guys that actually has spent the most
in developing jobs and his company in this city — and he stands in front of
this guy’s building and points to the apartment and says: This is the problem.
America, as a country, is supposed to be where everybody
builds up, everyone has an opportunity. When you don’t feel that way, you start
demonizing these people. And another part of the problem is that if I look at
the absolute top billionaires in the country right now — I look at Elon Musk,
at Jeff Bezos, at Mark Zuckerberg, and I see the absolute percentage of money
that they spend on charity, on public-policy-related things. I look at their
interest in acting as stewards for humanity as it is today, as opposed to
making Mars safe for humanity in some undefined future. That lack of
stewardship, that lack of belief in your fellow American, not to mention your
fellow human on the planet, is something that I think is driving a lot more
anxiety and, in some cases, hate. And that’s not to disagree with your initial
question of, “Well, isn’t America doing great?” Sure it is, at the macro level.
I’m straw-manning a view. I have my own views on how America
is doing, and I don’t think we’re doing great. Just to be clear.
I understand that. That’s the way you put that out there.
From a macro perspective, the U.S. is doing great.
The other obvious explanation here is inflation. And let me
put the two versions of this to you, to see what you think. One answer to why
the economic vibes, in particular, are bad is just that we’ve been in a period
of inflation. That’s what turned people on the Biden economy after the
pandemic. And then, particularly with the war in Iran and the tariffs, Trump
has kept, in a very salient way — you see it on the gas station board, in the
news — just driving up prices of basic things.
And maybe all this is just inflation. People hate prices
going up. They hate it. The hard part about this, which an economist will tell
you, is we had much longer periods of much more inflation before, that yes, we
had pandemic inflation, but aside from that two-year period — inflation in the
’70s, in the ’80s, it was just much, much, much higher, and people were much
happier with the economy. How do you see the price story? Does that explain
enough of this or not?
I think it matters in the sense that there’s recency bias.
You mention the ’70s, and most people don’t remember when they couldn’t afford
a mortgage for their house because the rates were at 10 percent.
Often higher.
So when they were basically nothing, and then suddenly they
hit 5, 6, 7 percent, that feels bad. And the fact that this, the broad
affordability thing, after Americans have been taught that you don’t need to
worry about inflation for decades, I think it’s relevant.
I think it is a point. I think the fact that Trump began his
State of the Union by pointing out that there was a gas station in Iowa that
had gas for under $2 a gallon, and people go and they gas up their S.U.V.s, and
they do it every week, and they know what that costs. It’s a very specific
price point, and then suddenly it’s $4 a gallon.
That feels very, very different to them. So I think it is a
real data point, but the broader point that you’re making, which is that
there’s something much bigger, much more structural going on than purely what
you can tease from these economic data points, is essential.
Let me take the host prerogative, because I’ve been thinking
about this question lately, and I have my own answer to it, because I think
some of these answers don’t work, and here’s why. The vibes have been bad and
getting worse, and when I say the vibes, I mean a measurable set of things
about how people feel about the direction of the country, how they feel about
the economy, how they feel about the future. And a lot of people tend to look
at that and move backward to things that they have every right to be upset
about and maybe have been for a long time.
But the social contract, so to speak — the safety net in the
U.S., prior at least to the giant Medicaid cuts and Affordable Care Act
increases that are coming into play this year — it has been better here than it
has been in the past. We have gotten closer to where Europe is, not further
away. There are more states where you get pre-K, more states where you get
subsidized child care, more places ——
And people like Obamacare. As a consequence. Absolutely.
But the vibes are worse. They were worse in 2014, worse in
2016, worse in 2018. First, you cannot separate this from attentional
platforms. I think that algorithmic media is negatively biased; it is toward
outrage, toward anger. But if you just go on X, which you talked about: Is Musk
a steward? The thing he thinks he did that was important for the country was to
buy Twitter and make it a zone of what he would call free speech, so he could
tell everybody all day about the conspiracies that are obsessing him and about
a declining fertility rate and he could let the neo-Nazis back onto the
platform. And you have one of these central spaces of political information and
sentiment construction that has gone from toxic to unbelievably toxic. And that
was the big social investment of the richest person in the world, to do that to
us. But I think this is true across a bunch of them ——
And you and I, I think, would agree that this was not an
actual social investment for the betterment of the people of the country.
I don’t believe — yes, I am not a huge fan of the way Musk
is trying to shape American and global politics, but I think that he believes
he is, you know, trying to save us from the woke mind virus and collapsing
fertility. But I think that sentiment is a complex system, and what has
happened is that there are enough things that have tipped badly, that we’ve
entered into a negative feedback loop. And it’s very, very hard to get out of a
negative feedback loop because there’s no one thing. If wages go up, it’s
actually not enough. People’s view, for instance, of crime — crime is really
low in America right now.
Compared to where it was in the ’90s, for example. I posted
on that just the other day. And people are surprised. Like, “That’s got to be
fake news.”
People still feel very upset about it. And one reason is
that ——
Murder rates, particularly, yeah.
I think what you have is a situation where there’s no one
thing but basically lots of negative sentiments get slingshotted forward on
algorithmic media. This is A.I.; this is everything else. And there’s just a
generalized sense that things are bad. I mean, Trump is scary to a lot of the
country. But even the people who like him — he’s not doing a great job. He’s
not doing what he said he would do for you. And it’s chaotic, and it’s crazy,
and he is making you afraid of the other side.
Again, it’s grievance-based.
It’s grievance-based. But not just grievance. It’s
conspiratorial. It’s scary. It’s people trying to destroy the country, if you
don’t like them. And in some cases, the stakes are very high. Like, I do think
Trump is destroying significant parts of at least what the country has been.
I think there’s always this effort to create an underlying
material reality to sentiment. And it’s always true that sentiment has some
underlying material reality, and there’s a lot wrong with the material reality
and the way American politics works. But I think sentiment has become a little
bit free-floating now. And one reason it is not responsive to the economy
getting better, one reason it is not responsive to things changing, one reason
it has diverged so much from the macro data, particularly since the pandemic —
my wife, Annie Lowrey, just wrote a great piece on this in The Atlantic — is
that there is something happening in the system of attention. I think, now a
system that has just moved into — its grammar is angry.
There’s an
interplay between the independent and dependent variable here, to get really
wonky. In other words, you have underlying issues that come from free trade,
robotics, innovation that hollows out a whole bunch of the middle class in the
United States and in Europe, to the advantage of emerging middle classes in
China and India and the so-called global south, the former emerging markets.
But I just want to stop you on that. What does it mean to
have hollowed out the middle class if the middle class’s purchasing power,
etc., is higher than in the past? This is where you have something tricky
happening. I could give you my explanation, but I want to hear what you mean
when you say that.
What I mean when I say that is: You have large numbers of
communities that no longer have the same industrial base, the same civic
connection, the same institutions around them, the Robert D. Putnam “Bowling
Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” ——
This, I think, is much more specific, and I wish people
would talk in this language. We didn’t hollow out the middle class. We hollowed
out places.
Yes, places, but places that have community and civic
engagement and citizens.
But this is important.
It’s superimportant.
And we don’t talk about it correctly, in my view.
That’s a
fair point. But those are the precedents, the antecedent conditions that then
lead to a population that is mostly male, that’s doing pretty well
economically, and they’re not all white — some of them are Hispanic. Some of
them are Black. They’re living in poor urban areas and rural areas that, again,
really feel very different and are going down compared to where they were. And
they’re the ones that are voting for Trump not once but twice. And the idea
that this can be driven by something that is vibe based, as opposed to real
antecedent conditions — I reject that.
But once you have that, there is a flywheel. Once you have
that, suddenly those other, the algorithmic conditions really matter. And here
I want to really get into the macrostructural for a second. The first big book
that I wrote, back in 2006, was called “The J Curve: A New Way to Understand
Why Nations Rise and Fall.” And I doubt you even remember it. It’s a long time
ago.
Who doesn’t remember “The J Curve”?
Yeah, exactly. It was a small thing. At the time, it was big
for me, and it was about how countries did and didn’t fall apart. The J is the
relationship between openness and stability and that you have some countries
that are stable because they’re open, some that are stable because they’re
closed.
Stable because they’re open: the United States, Japan, the
Nordics. Stable because they’re closed: China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia.
Countries that are stable because they’re closed want to stay closed, because
if they open up a little bit, the country can suddenly fall apart. Countries
that are stable because they’re open are more stable than countries that are
stable because they’re closed.
And the reason I bring it up is it was not only something
that was really, really kind of promoted at the time as, “Wow, this is a
breakthrough”; it’s also completely wrong today. It no longer applies, because
the world has changed. And the thing about the world that has changed is what
you just got at.
It’s technology. Technology back in 2006 was actually
advantageous to more open societies. It was the communications revolution. It
was bottom-up. It’s what got us the Arab Spring. It’s what got you the color
revolutions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. People that suddenly
were interconnected, that could learn more about their fellow citizens and what
they were doing and organize, learn more about their governments and their
predation and their corruption, even though the government didn’t want them to
necessarily know about that.
It undermined authoritarian systems, and it strengthened
liberal societies, open societies. Then you move from that system to one where
technology is top-down. It’s a surveillance-based system. It’s a data-based
system. It’s algorithmic nudging of people by other people and even by bots.
It’s attention-based, it’s addictive, and it benefits closed societies, and it
undermines open societies.
And it’s creating a level of stress, it’s creating a level
of anger, and it’s a level of outrage, but it also has a political gravity to
it, and it’s weakening the United States.
And it’s much worse in the U.S. than it is in places like
Japan or even than it is in Europe, though it’s coming in Europe, too. But the
Chinese don’t have this problem at all because they’re able to actually control
and nudge what patriotic behavior is.
Let me try something here. I want to build on this in a very
certain way and get at a difference between China and America. But let me take
what you just said in a different direction. I think one of the fundamental
problems in the country is that we’ve broken the relationship between
technology and places. We said a second ago that the problem is not just that
we’ve hollowed out this abstract concept of the middle class — because I can
show you the disposable income of the middle class on a graph and it does not
look hollowed out compared with 1980. They’re richer.
Mm-hmm.
But these communities did get hollowed out. And you
sometimes hear self-satisfied Democrats — this was Hillary Clinton after the
2016 election, saying: Well, the places that voted for me represent two-thirds
or something of the G.D.P. growth in this country.
OK, there’s
a redistribution of opportunity to these cities. Superstar cities — like New
York and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Boston — they’ve gotten richer and
richer and richer and richer and richer. In the past, what that would have done
is create an engine of opportunity. You move to San Francisco, and you’re a
firefighter, you cut hair, you work in some job, and then your kids are there,
and they get richer and so on. This is what is happening in China.
They’re
moving.
In China the
cities are getting richer.
Absolutely.
And there is
this huge movement into them. In America those cities made it impossible to
build housing. And Silicon Valley — I was just driving around the other day in
the part of Silicon Valley, Santa Clara area, where you have Meta and Nvidia.
It is so crazy to me that you do not have places for people to live.
It’s strip
malls, and it’s single-family homes. We’ve not built huge towers next to them.
You look at what Shenzhen looks like. And here, where we’ve invented A.I. (A.I.
was invented in Canada (K.)), it looks like an office park. And this is a major
part of “Abundance” obviously, but this is the destruction — when we talk about
social mobility, how did social mobility actually work?
What it
actually did was: Places got rich, and people moved to them. But we have
really, really good evidence now that this doesn’t happen. And in fact, what’s
happening is richer people move to richer places and poor people move out of
them. Because — and this is why there’s energy in stepping in front of
Griffin’s God-knows-how-expensive apartment in New York — the thing is, you
can’t afford to live in New York anymore and raise a family. Griffin, sure,
he’s here, and they’ve spent a lot of money here, and I’m not saying New York’s
housing problems are Griffin’s fault. I don’t think they are. But the feeling
that it has not benefited you — it’s actually true.
Like, we know this is true. We know that what used to happen
is that it used to be that people would move from the poorer areas to the
richer areas, and now they move out of the richer areas and into the poorer
areas because they can’t afford it anymore, because they can then afford a
home.
They’re angry about gentrification.
It’s not
just gentrification. It is just that they cannot afford to live there. And I
just want to harp on this for a minute, because I do think it’s really
important and a thing we miss: We hollowed out a huge number of communities in
this country, and then we gated the places where the opportunity had moved to.
So that has
killed mobility. It’s not some nature of the technology. It’s not what they’ve
done in China. The way you used to do this is you built where there was money
and opportunity, and instead they’ve made it very, very hard to build where
there’s money and opportunity.
Let’s not lionize China, for a second, because the only way
you get into a city in China is a hukou system, where the state gives you the
right to move there. They’ve overbuilt in some places, and the real estate
crisis is massive, all of those things. And you remember, that’s not just about
cities. It’s also about experiences. I mean, the Disney piece that was done in
The New York Times a few months ago ——
Do you want to describe this?
They followed this woman who was working class, and she had
saved up an enormous amount to be able to get to Disney with her kids, and she
did. And it followed how expensive it was and how difficult her experience was
and how Disney, which used to be the great equalizer that everyone would go to,
everyone would be a part of it. And her experience, compared to someone that
just flies in and pays for the skip-the-line experience and everything else.
Even a place like Disney, which is the magical vacation that
all Americans get to come and have the same experience, has become completely
stratified. And much of corporate America is stratifying every experience you
have — not just place — every experience, every ballgame you go to, every
airline you fly on, every experience Americans have.
If you can make money out of stratification, you will do
that, and you will do much less to commodify. And of course, the danger and the
concern is that when that happens with A.I., the people that don’t pay for A.I.
are the ones that get the ads and have substandard A.I. that’s the “for you”
feed, and the wealthy people can actually be superempowered and become more
than human because they have A.I. that’s giving them real information that’s
actively curated for them and then can help them to accomplish things that will
improve their lives.
Almost every dystopian, near-dystopian novel and movie in
the United States right now is about some form of that shifting of America into
haves and have-nots, where there is no mobility between the two. And again,
it’s the lack of mobility that comes down to — you can’t have an American dream
if you can’t make it.
I grew up in the projects, and I feel like I was the
American dream, but I know how close I was to not actually making it and how
kids I grew up with who were smarter than me in high school and in grammar
school didn’t make it. And most of the people — and I still am Facebook friends
with a lot of them, and I go back to Chelsea every once in a while — the kids
that I know in those neighborhoods now will not make it to the same degree.
That lack of
ability to achieve mobility in a superstratified society — technologically
enabled, capitalistically enabled — that, I think, is what subverts the
American dream more than anything else that we’ve done.
And this is where, I think, a lot of our measures of
inequality do not capture the modern experience of inequality. You just
mentioned how real-world experience is stratified. Digital experience is
stratified. You turn on TikTok, you turn on Instagram, and it is feeding you
people living better lives than you.
All the time.
You are watching the billionaires, the influencers, all
these people succeed in a way you’re not, or you’re seeing people who are
drafting off the anger that creates. Those are both there. You’re watching
people who are better-looking than you. It is the kind of comparison ——
Speak for yourself on that one.
Well, maybe better looking than me. I’ll take that.
The constancy of comparison and the size of the world you’re
comparing yourself with and also the falsity of it, the way you’re comparing
yourself with fake versions of other people’s lives. Not their real life, with
the diapers they have to change and the fights with their partner, but the
fake, curated life. So there’s that.
I think that’s a contributor to all this, too. But there’s
also just the wealth you see that you are not part of. And I agree with you on
A.I. This is also why people need to think a little bit differently about the
data center moratorium questions, because it sounds like a good idea if you’re
not confident in A.I., if you’re worried about what’s about to happen, to try
to just slow down or shut down the data centers.
But what you’re going to do is make compute much more
expensive. We already do not have enough compute for how much people want it. I
think a lot of people on the left have sort of told themselves a story that
A.I. is not powerful, it’s not a real technology, it’s overhyped, it’s
[expletive], so it doesn’t really matter if people don’t have access to it,
because why would you want access to the hallucination machine?
Yeah.
But actually, at its upper levels, it’s a very powerful
technology now. And if it’s something that the rich can afford and, as you’re
saying, we get a new digital divide — where the rich get these amazing A.I.
agents that are giving them incredible information and doing all this on their
behalf and making sure they get the best deals on everything and they’re out
there sorting the internet for them and then what everybody else can afford is
manipulative, crappy, hallucinating — that’s a real problem.
And you would never even meet those people, right? In other
words, they won’t even be part of your experience, because algorithmically,
they’ll be sorted out. So you would never date one. Again, 50 years ago, 30
years ago, a lot of people would meet people from different classes in their
community, in their schools, in different institutions, and you got
intermingling that way.
That’s already not happening because of the gated community
issue, already not happening because of corporate stratification.
A.I. will end that if it goes in the present direction.
Yeah, A.I. as agents for the rich and erotica and the
simulacrum of companionship and entertainment for the poor is a very, very
dystopian world, and I think people underrate its possibility.
Yeah, I completely agree. And yet the Chinese are doing this
completely differently.
How are they doing it?
They don’t believe that A.I. is going to be such a huge
advantage for the population as a whole. They really don’t like the TikTok
model, which is one of the reasons, when Trump was so interested in having it,
they let him have it without doing other big parts of the negotiations to make
that occur.
And they
also are deeply concerned about what it means to have people in China
hallucinate on the back of A.I. models. Like, if you’re going to hallucinate,
it better be pro-Chinese Communist Party stuff. It can’t be ChatGPT. And yet
the Chinese are all in on using A.I. for defense purposes, all in on using it
for industrial purposes, all in on innovating and inventing, making sure that
all their strategic sectors and their government are as fully integrated with
the most advanced technologies as humanly possible, because that’s how they
project power, that’s how they get growth.
In the
United States, it’s exactly the opposite. The United States says: We’re going
to build these massive large language models, and they’re going to create the
Singularity and artificial general intelligence. We’re going to treat
intelligence as a utility, and human capital will become supplanted by token
capital, and that’s what you’re really going to need.
But who’s
going to have token capital? It’s not going to be most Americans. Again, the J
curve used to be this idea that more open societies became more stable because
they were open, but that is facilitated by technology that makes that system
work well.
Suddenly, when you have A.I. driving more stability for a
closed system, like China, at the very least you would say the J today is a U —
that there are no longer structural advantages to the stability of a country by
being open if you’re technologically empowered. And if this trend continues,
there would be structural advantages to closed systems, as opposed to open
systems.
It’s the opposite of what you want to see.
I want to talk about the China-U.S. relationship here,
because one of the things — as Trump rose in 2016 and then in 2024 — that he
was the most insistent on, was that the threat to America was China. And the
way in which American policy had to change was we had to contain China. We had
to stop faffing around in the Middle East, and we had to be focused on getting
over free trade and recognizing that all of this system had been used for China
to rise and to allow America to begin to fall, and he was going to change that.
We just saw the Trump-Xi summit. What did we see at that
summit? And how does where we are now reflect this argument he’s been making
for years?
Well, no faffing around the Middle East. There’s now lots of
faffing. And “China’s the big threat” to now “China’s the leader” that he
treats with the greatest respect. He talks about a G2 with China. It was a
strongly positive summit, from China’s perspective.
They consider it historic. They consider it a big win. It
helps to solidify their prestige on the global stage, acting as equals with the
United States, which is much bigger, much more powerful. Trump failed on April
2, “Liberation Day.” The intention of the second term was very much a
continuation of the first — that the Chinese were the big threat and he was
going to put heavy tariffs on the Chinese, whose economy was not performing
particularly well, and that was going to force them to capitulate, force them
to bend the knee.
He was wrong. He failed. And when they hit back, they hit
back hard — not just on reciprocal tariffs but also then took critical minerals
and rare earths, put a gun on the table and said: We will shut down your
industrial production.
Describe what that was and why they were able to do that.
For some 30 years, the Chinese have been investing in
exploitation of critical minerals and rare earths around the world that are
essential for a lot of military and industrial purposes, energy purposes and
other infrastructure that we all rely on. And the Americans were not investing
in it, thinking: Well, it’s cheaper coming from these Chinese sources, so,
great, we’ll just buy it from them.
Kind of like the way the Europeans decided to get a lot of
their cheaper energy from Russia, kind of the way all of us decided to get our
semiconductors from a hundred miles off the Chinese coast. All of which is true
if politics don’t matter. If politics matter and you don’t trust those
countries and maybe they might act to make your just-in-time supply chain
vulnerable, suddenly you have a problem.
And the lock that China had globally from 30 years of these
investments, including in the processing of these critical minerals inside
China, suddenly they said, if you want to get them, you need a license. You
need to apply for a license to China. If you’re not considered on the right
side of the law with us, we’re not going to provide you with those critical
minerals. And you suddenly had C.E.O.s of big companies going to Mar-a-Lago,
telling Trump: You’d better cut a deal with these Chinese, because otherwise,
our factory floor is going to shut down.
So the Americans had to buckle, had to suddenly say: OK,
we’ve got to do a deal with these guys. We can’t afford a trade boycott. We’ve
got to sit down and figure out, like, they give us some on fentanyl, and we
give them some on tariffs, and let’s talk about Taiwan and the rest.
And that was a complete climbdown, a turnaround of the sort
that we’ve more recently seen with Trump’s war goals in Iran once the Iranians
broke glass, pulled the emergency lever and shut down the Strait of Hormuz,
which he thought they wouldn’t do.
In both cases, Trump’s eyes were bigger than his stomach. He
has a big punch but also a glass jaw; he can’t take one hard from the other
side. And the Chinese are now in a position of much greater leverage. So the
summit that you just had was two leaders sitting together and saying: We must
find a way to work together constructively. You may not like us, and you may
not trust us — it’s vice versa — but we will ensure that we work together
constructively so we don’t get into a fight that does a lot of damage that you
don’t want to see done. And that was what happened.
How would you rate this as a substantive outcome? Because
you could say either Trump was right about the danger posed by China, and so
this is a problem as he’s moving into this more conciliatory climbdown posture.
Or you could say, as many of Trump’s critics have on this, you’re being too
belligerent; these countries need to work together. And maybe he fumbled
himself into a reasonable outcome, which is constructive dialogue, a
relationship between the two leaders and the recognition that in a world of global
challenges like A.I. and climate change and pandemics, it actually is important
that we have good relationships. You wouldn’t count this as a win, from Trump’s
rhetoric, but should we be happy with where this has ended up?
Well, we should be happy that, it turns out, Trump does not
have the ability to commit suicide on the global stage.
If he had persisted with his intended policy — which was: We
will force these Chinese to capitulate to us — the Americans would have been in
a massive recession, and so would the world. He backed down. So is that a win?
Of course it’s not a win. There are big wins under Trump. There are foreign
policy wins. For example, in his first term, U.S.M.C.A. — which, at the time,
he said was the best deal ever, and now he says it’s a horrible deal, but I
don’t care what he says — the reality was, U.S.M.C.A. was a significant
improvement over NAFTA. The reality is, the Abraham Accords were a big win in
creating more stability in the Middle East and the gulf ——
Boy, does that look like a stable region of the world to me
now.
It does not. But at the time, it was something that no one
thought could be doable, and it was a stable — it was a much more stable region
until Trump decided to go in and blow up the Iranians with Israel. Again, I can
point to plenty of places.
Venezuela, on balance, a win and perceived as a win by most
populations across Latin America, because Venezuela had been exporting a lot of
instability, and now it looks a lot more stable, with a government that is a
lot more tractable and focusing on long-term economic development. Those are
all wins.
China is not a win. China’s a loss. China’s a loss because
Trump’s intended policy — which is: We need to beat these guys, and here’s how
we’re going to do it — completely failed. And at the same time, he was pursuing
policies to support himself individually. Again, TikTok. He got TikTok. That
doesn’t help the country. That helps him. It’s advantageous in the same way
that Musk owning X is politically advantageous for Trump. It doesn’t help the
country. You and I agree on that. So what you have is a more stable environment
with a China that rightly feels they have more leverage over this guy and this
government.
One of the dimensions of competition here — and one that you
all emphasized in that early 2026 paper on risks — is energy.
Yeah, definitely.
And the way you put it is that America’s become the largest
petrostate, in a way a lot of Americans have not tracked. It’s really quite a
remarkable story, from fracking to where we’ve ended up, as a huge exporter of
energy.
We produce so much more oil than any other country in the
world.
Yeah, we produce more than Saudi Arabia. We used to talk
about energy independence. We got it.
Yeah.
But we got
independence on the old structure of energy. And China is becoming the largest
electrostate. You have a tremendous chart — I say tremendous in the sense that
I found it really shocking to see that China’s exports of green energy
technology are much larger now than our exports of oil and gas.
Mm-hmm.
That they’re
sort of exporting the infrastructure of the 21st century, while we’re exporting
the energy of the 20th century.
And theirs is becoming so much cheaper at scale.
Tell me about that competition, because the energetic
foundations of countries are important. Trump has really doubled down on
America as a petrostate. Tell me about that competition.
I have no problem with Trump doubling down on America as a
petrostate. I think that the United States has the ability to be more effective
on efficient regulations, on expanding production to have cheap energy for
Americans and to export around the world.
The resources are in the United States. It makes sense. Mark
Carney in Canada leaves Justin Trudeau in the dust, and he’s running the
Liberal Party, and he’s actively trying to ensure that Canada can be more
effective as an oil producer and a transiting and exporting nation. Smart for
them, right?
But what Trump is also doing is saying: I don’t want the new
energy. I don’t actually want wind. I’ll shut it down. I don’t want solar —
which is insane. I don’t want electric vehicles — which is crazy. I mean, go to
Iran for a second, because it’s important. One of the biggest long-term
implications of the war in Iran is that OPEC is over.
The U.A.E. left OPEC in the middle of the Iran war, when
they aren’t actually able to produce or export much of anything, only a little
bit. Why did they do that? Because they understand that they’re going to have
stranded resources long term, because there’s not going to be as much of a
market for their oil. So they want to get as much oil out as humanly possible
as soon as the war is over, as soon as the blockade is done and the strait is
open, so that they can then get on with being a modern, technologically
empowered city-state.
They’re doing it at a small level, and we should be very
happy that basically OPEC is gone, because it is a cartel monopoly over oil.
That’s not good for the United States. It’s not good for anyone, globally, to
have a cartel, except the people that control the cartel. They’re doing at a
small level what the Chinese are doing at scale, which is they want to be
dominating the investments in energy that will power compute, that will power
A.I. at scale and cheap, and they want to do it for their own country, and they
want to export it.
Texas understands this. Red state Texas — at least for now.
We’ll see where James Talarico goes, right? Ken Paxton, whatever. Point is,
they are driving more renewable energy production than any other state in the
United States. They’re also driving more petrol production than any other state
in the United States. That is the appropriate response for the world’s most
powerful country. We should be able to do both of those things.
But I want to clarify one thing here, because we’re talking
about the production of energy. China’s control, the thing they’re exporting is
not sunshine.
Right.
The thing they’re exporting, which we are way behind on, and
that’s true for Texas, too ——
Solar cells.
Is what you use, the physical machinery that turns sunshine
into energy. So that thing, which the Biden administration was very concerned
about, this was a big part of their plan to try to reshore some of the supply
chain. But what China has is the infrastructure of how any country becomes an
electrostate. You buy that infrastructure from them.
What is the power of that? Not just of the energy that the
two states are producing or the kinds of it — we are driving in on energy
production, but they’re driving in on energy electrostate infrastructure.
In the same way that the critical minerals give you that
influence, because if you don’t have them, you can’t allow your economy to
grow, and if you don’t have the infrastructure that allows your energy to be
built at scale and cheaply from China, then your economy won’t grow.
And you can’t have A.I. if you don’t have the ability to
drive energy for compute at scale. China wants to be at the commanding heights
of where the global economy is going. I mentioned before: We are very short
term in the way we’ve thought about these investments. That’s why the Europeans
got into trouble on gas. That’s why we’re all in trouble on semiconductors in
Taiwan.
You can fix these things. We’re doing it with critical
minerals right now. Late, but the Americans are now saying: OK, well, now we
need to start investing. The Pentagon needs to invest in these companies. We’ll
do it in the U.S., we’ll do it in Chile, in Brazil. Anywhere around the world
that we can find the critical minerals, we’re going to go in.
And by the
way, the fact that the Chinese have put that loaded gun on the table — once you
do that, you can’t do it twice. Now we’ve seen, “Oh, they’ve got this leverage.
That’s dangerous. We’ll invest.” And within five to 10 years, they will no
longer have that key chokehold over the United States in all of these minerals
that we need for, by the way, our defense capabilities.
The Chinese,
if they were ever to get into a fight with us, the first thing they would do is
shut that down, because it would strangle our ability to continue to build the
military-industrial complex. You’re not going to fight a war effectively.
People worry about Taiwan. If there was a fight like that, you’d be very
vulnerable, given all of that.
The same
thing will happen on energy, but the longer we wait for it to happen, the
greater the Chinese lead. And right now we’re digging a hole for ourselves by
investing as much as we can in the energy technologies that are not getting
cheaper at scale and politically saying that we oppose the technologies of the
future that will be essential for growth of our populations and essential, most
importantly, for A.I. compute.
America’s lead in A.I. — it’s not a huge lead, but a lead of
let’s call it six months, something like that. We have the best chips. The
Biden administration put export controls down on that. Trump has sort of
unwound those and ——
And Trump personally has done that. Because his
administration mostly opposed it.
Well, let me ask you what you think of that decision,
because I have found myself a little bit more conflicted on this than many
people in the public discourse. The argument for keeping them back is that if
China does not have the best chips, we will maintain a lead in A.I.
The
counterargument is that if we deprive them of the chips, they will accelerate
and be able to accelerate their chips industry. And we have all these
dependencies on China, and China being dependent on Nvidia chips would create a
dependency on us. You’re not going to stop their A.I., because they have so
much energy. They have infrastructure we don’t have. There’s a lot they can do
to supercharge. But this lead we imagine ourselves of having, a couple months,
is that really so worth making Huawei chips eventually as good as Nvidia’s?
Well, that argument, the second argument you just made, was
a reasonable argument before the Biden administration started putting all the
export controls on. Once you’ve done that and you’ve shown the Chinese, “You’ve
got to invest in your own semiconductors because we will crush you,” then they
do it. It’s just like when the Chinese say, “We’re going to force you to have
licenses for rare earths.” At that point, the Americans say, “OK, that’s
unacceptable. Now we’re going to invest.”
The idea that holding back H200 chips from Nvidia is going
to make the Chinese unsee what we have already done to them — that’s a spurious
argument. Once you’re involved, once you’ve declared a cold war on
semiconductors, then you should be consistent with that policy. Then all you’re
doing with the H200s is letting them catch up when they’re spending — they are
moving as fast as humanly possible, in the constraints of their economy, to
catch up with the Americans on semiconductors.
It also
matters a little bit less, in the sense that if they have really cheap energy,
you can run the same A.I. with more semiconductors. It just takes more energy
to actually make it work.
So it’s not
like you get better A.I. with better semiconductors; it’s just less efficient.
Same A.I. So that is the point.
I do think it’s both, as best I can tell. I know people who
were just on this big trip and talked to a bunch of Chinese A.I. firms, and
every single one of them said what is binding them is compute, that if they had
better compute. ---
It is true that you can just run more energy through more
lower-quality chips and, in some way, get to the limit. But the people I know
who do A.I. don’t think that’s quite true, that having access to the best chips
and those chips getting better does seem to keep you or help keep you a little
bit ahead.
Everyone I know in Silicon Valley was surprised by how
advanced DeepSeek was when they released it. So you’re right that the gap
between the United States and China is less great than a lot of the American
A.I. leaders were talking about three years ago, five years ago.
My core point here is that Nvidia is pressing an issue that
is of sole interest to Nvidia. It is of no interest whatsoever to the country.
It is not aligned with U.S. policy toward China. It is not
aligned with a China that is working as hard as possible to build that
semiconductor capacity, and they will get there. They will get there.
What has happened since Trump lifted the export controls?
The Chinese are still trying to promote as much nativization
of Chinese chips as humanly possible. They clearly have a whole bunch of
companies that would much rather have access to the H200s, but unless it is a
big breakthrough for them, it is not necessarily worth accepting a quid pro quo
that would clearly be necessary to the United States in saying: Oh, yes, that’s
a big give that you just made to us.
Right now,
the big argument here is about how fast the Chinese are capable of catching up,
when that is their overwhelming desire and that’s the only place where they’re
behind. In terms of the capability of their talent, they’re producing an awful
lot. In terms of the coding that they have, they’re world class. And in terms
of the energy and the ability to build and direct, they’re there.
One of the arguments of Trump and the people around him is
that we need to focus on China. We need to focus on this competition. Instead,
what the U.S. government is focusing on is Iran. As somebody who’s covered this
and talks to people here, I am confused about what is happening. It’s like
Schrödinger’s war at this point. Is the war alive? Is the war dead? How would
you describe the state of America’s war with Iran?
I actually posted — I think it was last week — a graphic
that I put together, showing Schrödinger’s Iran agreement. Like, is it a
cease-fire? Is it a peace deal? Is it not?
Great minds cliché alike.
I know, exactly. Because he says different things inside the
same post. The reason we don’t know if it’s dead or not is that Trump is
desperately looking for an offramp. But he also wants someone to blame, and he
wants the offramp to look credible, and it doesn’t. He understands that right
now it looks bad for him, that the outcome, if he accepts what is on the table
today — he’ll reopen the strait, but Iran will arguably be in a stronger
geopolitical position in the Middle East than they were before the war.
What is on the table?
On the table is that the Qataris would unfreeze Iranian
assets that would be given to Iran in a lump sum, in return for the Iranians
ending the tolling of the strait and the Americans ending the blockade. And
then the two sides would negotiate the nuclear issue.
Probably worth noting here that Trump has repeatedly and
very loudly denounced Biden and Obama for allowing Iran to have access to money
that was frozen.
The pallets of cash that they’ve spoken about many, many
times. In other words, at least, at this stage of the deal, you would clearly
say that the only thing better about the Trump engagement with Iran over Obama
is that it was Trump that did it. That’s the only thing that Trump supporters
would have to point to: Well, that’s my guy.
Because you’re in a much worse position. The strait had been
open before the war. They didn’t have that leverage. They wouldn’t have gotten
that money, and their nuclear capacity is still sitting there. Are they still
going to have the nuclear dust, as they call it? Well, that is to be
negotiated. Do you trust them? Do you think in some future period, in 60 days,
that they’re going to engage proactively with you and the inspectors when the
ships are coming through and they’re exporting and you’re exporting and you
need it and you know that it can be shut down again? It’s an incredible own
goal that is, by far, the biggest foreign policy mistake of the Trump
administration and, frankly, of any administration since the Iraq war. I think
you could say that.
Why have they failed so badly? And the thing I hear Trump
being confused by, when I hear him speak, is — look, they pounded Iran with
bombs. They killed many of the senior people. I think he would have thought, by
now, either the regime would have toppled — that was clearly what he wanted at
the beginning — or it would be so desperate that it would be suing for peace,
willing to give up things it would never have given to Obama.
Just like China after April 2. He thought they were going to
sue for peace, because their economy was so much weaker than America’s.
What did he get wrong about Iran? Why is Iran not desperate
for an offramp but Trump is?
Well, one, he and the Israelis assassinated the leadership.
The reason that they had never tried to close the strait before, which they
clearly had the capacity to do — the military capacity, the drones, the rest —
is they feared that if they did, that would be the end of their regime. People
would come after their leaders. The people making the orders would get killed.
Well, then you went ahead and killed their leaders, so they broke glass. They
pulled the lever. That is what happened. Trump thinking that they were going to
sue for peace like Venezuela, when in reality they said: No, no, no, you just
broke the whole thing. We don’t trust you.
He also killed the equivalent of the people he handed power
to in Venezuela.
Exactly. Even if they hadn’t, I would’ve been very surprised
if this strategy worked out. This was incredible overconfidence born of the
Venezuela success and also born of Trump’s history with Iran, where they talked
big against the United States during the 12-day war in his first term, when he
killed Qassim Suleimani, ordered the assassination, then they didn’t do
anything.
Well, this time you actually went and blew up their regime.
It’s essentially a suicidal response, but anything you can do to try to regain
deterrence, because you know you can’t trust them in diplomacy.
So there’s no credibility with the Americans saying: OK,
we’re going to be Mr. Tough Guy if you don’t do X, Y and Z — Trump has posted
that in the last couple months: I’m going to really be a tough guy, “No more
Mr. Nice Guy!” Once you’ve assassinated their leadership ——
“A whole civilization will die tonight.”
Once you’ve assassinated the leadership, I don’t think you
can say, “No more Mr. Nice Guy.” I think that analogy should be off the table
for you. So he’s gotten himself in an enormous jam, and the only way he can
resolve it is by undoing all of his war goals. All of them. There’s no more
rescuing the Iranian people. There’s no more ending the ballistic missile
capability. That’s for the region to deal with. There’s no more ending support
for proxies.
The military
capabilities — the missiles, they still have. The drones, they still have.
They’ve
blown up a lot of the navy, but almost everything they have tried to
accomplish, they have failed. Meanwhile, the United States has driven an
incredible economic consequence for the entire world, and he is to blame. So
allies and adversaries of the United States, they’re looking at oil prices and
fertilizer and food.
Can you describe this for a minute in detail? Because I
think that people don’t quite realize. We have suffered some economic pain from
this war here at home. The fact that it is much worse elsewhere has not fully
penetrated. Paint that picture a bit.
I mentioned before: I was just in the Dominican Republic,
and this had a huge effect on approval for the leader, on their oil importers,
and the subsidies are much harder to do. Inflation is way up. The United
States, as a major oil producer and exporter, is much less affected in the near
term by this conflict. You have Asian economies that have to ration the energy
that’s available for industrial uses, because they can’t get what they need
through the strait.
You’ve got the global plastics industry, petrochemicals.
What’s it come from? Oil. Where does it come through? The strait. Most of that
is Asia. That production is getting squeezed. Those prices are way up. Those
industries are under severe distress. You’ve got countries, like the
Philippines, that are under a condition of national emergency right now.
You have sub-Saharan African countries that may enter
financial crises because they don’t have the fiscal space to provide the
continued support for their populations, given where prices are going. And
that’s before the food crunch, because the fertilizer has missed the growing
season, but you haven’t passed that through to food until the growing season
leads to vegetables and fruits and grains that then are exported.
The Americans and the Europeans and the Japanese, they’ll
get the food. It’ll just be a higher price. Countries in the global south, a
lot of those will not even have access to that food. People will starve on the
back of this.
Is there an estimate of how big this will be?
I’ve heard from members of the United Nations that are
involved in global food distribution that the impact on the global G.D.P. next
year could be as much as 1½ percent. Again, the United States’ will be much
lower than that, but some of these other economies’ will be much higher.
Every country you talk to, every leader you talk to, sees
Trump individually as uniquely responsible for this economic downturn, and
every day that the strait remains closed is a day that the Americans are
responsible further for that.
And the impact of that on the trust and the reliability of
the United States — as the Americans tell the Saudis: Well, if you don’t do an
Abraham Accords deal, maybe we’re not going to support reopening the strait.
The impact on the Saudis is: Why are we working with these guys the way we used
to? Why don’t we engage more with the Chinese?
There’s been a bunch of reporting — I’m curious what you
think of it — that the Saudis were, along with the Israelis, pushing us into
this war.
I would say that the U.A.E., along with the Israelis, have
been much more interested in the war continuing, to ensure that Iran no longer
has that capacity. That’s very different from the Saudi view, which is aligned
with Pakistan and Egypt and Turkey, much more of an Islamic bloc, that will
find a way to engage in a peace settlement with the Iranians after the war is
over. The Saudis are not hurt as much economically, because they’re moving
seven million barrels a day across their east-west pipeline through the Red
Sea, which doesn’t need the Strait of Hormuz.
You’ve got other countries, like Kuwait, Qatar, that can’t
get anything out unless the strait is open. So, very different perspectives
inside the gulf itself as to how this war should be responded to. But with the
exception of Israel and the U.A.E. — and the U.A.E., by the way, did not like
this war when it started.
But now that they’ve taken these existential threats — if
you’re going try to hit the Burj Al Arab, if you’re going to hit their airport,
suddenly your entire model is at threat, because they’ve got 10 million people.
One million Emiratis. And they’re not a regional player; they’re a global
player.
They’re like a city-state. They’re like Singapore, but
they’re only like Singapore if the Middle East can be like Europe. If the
Middle East is like the Middle East, suddenly the Singapore analogy doesn’t
work very well. So they’ve got real problems, and they don’t want to leave the
Iranians with this level of strength. Literally every other country in the
world is saying this is an unmitigated disaster and it needs to end. There was
no reason for it, it was a war of choice, it’s gone badly, and we want this
over now.
Trump is saying, and his administration is saying, there
will be no end without a resolution of the nuclear file. The nuclear file is, I
guess, the new term of art on this.
Yeah.
Will there be a resolution of the nuclear file?
Well, what they are presently negotiating is not that. They
are presently negotiating reopening the strait, which will then lead to
discussions on the nuclear file. Trump has publicly softened his approach on
the nuclear file. He was saying that all of that enriched uranium had to be
removed and had to be sent to a third country — preferably the United States.
Now he’s saying it doesn’t matter where it goes, can be any other third
country.
He’s made it much easier for the Iranians to eventually get
to “yes.” I could make an argument that long term, functionally the end of OPEC
and the shift of the global economy, to a much faster degree, toward postcarbon
energy as a consequence of this war is a really positive thing. It’s a huge
amount of short-term economic hardship, but absent that, it was moving more
slowly. We’re going to move to electric vehicles faster. We’re going to move to
solar and wind and nuclear faster.
Donald Trump, a climate president.
Trump turns out to be the guy that has done more to ramp up
that shift than any other move, except for the Chinese leadership. No question.
That wasn’t his intention, but that is the long-term outcome. That is a good
thing. The planet has a better shot as a consequence of that.
Is that really true, or do you just have everybody building
more pipelines to make sure they don’t need the Strait of Hormuz as much?
No, no, it’s really true. I mean, both will happen. Don’t
question it. The fact that oil and gas in the Middle East is this vulnerable,
so much comes from this part of the world.
Yes, you can
move pipelines — that’ll have more go through the Red Sea. The Houthis can
disrupt the Red Sea. They haven’t. They’ve been bought off by the Saudis. But
in a world where drones are becoming so much more cheap, do you really want to
have choke points that can be hit that easily?
Today’s problem in the Strait of Hormuz could be tomorrow’s
problem in Malacca. Given that, do you really want these global choke points on
oil or gas, or do you want to invest in 21st-century technologies?
If this were to get the Americans’ [expletive] in gear on
renewables, that would be an amazing thing. Instead, the Americans will fall
further behind, for now — the way the U.S. is now starting to catch up on
critical minerals and rare earths. But leaving that aside, in terms of the
short-term impact for this administration, one thing we haven’t even talked
about yet, and we have to at least mention it, is the Iranian people are
completely screwed here. Remember, this was the whole argument at the beginning,
back in January: the believed to be tens of thousands Iranians that were
brutally murdered by their own regime.
And Trump said: I’m coming to rescue you. Well, he doesn’t
talk about that anymore. This regime is in place. This regime is so confident
in being in place that over the last week, they even had military leaders — for
the first time since the war started, they all showed up publicly for a
memorial service. They wouldn’t have done that two weeks ago or a month ago.
So Trump has completely failed in the ostensible
humanitarian purpose of the war. And on the nuclear file, after having blown up
— obliterated, as the administration said — their nuclear capabilities, which
have been set back, that’s certainly true. But now getting the Iranians to a
place of: We will actually allow for the end of enrichment beyond civilian
purposes, with inspections — we’re very far from that.
I would argue that not only are all of the macro concerns
made much worse by, near term, Trump’s war, but even the narrowest vision of:
We’re going to do a much better deal than that horrible deal that Obama did
with J.C.P.O.A. — at this point, that looks unlikely.
Does all this anger from our allies, from other countries
actually matter for us? And the reason I ask is that I remember, in the George
W. Bush era, being told America’s standing in the world would never recover.
Then Obama was elected president, and it seemed to recover. Then Trump won, and
they’d never trust us again. Then Biden took office, and bygones seem to be
bygones. This has been a lot worse. But does it matter?
It does matter. But we need to be modest in the expectations
of what that means. The Europeans today really mistrust the United States. That
is not making them trust the Chinese more. The one part of China’s economy that
is really going gangbusters is not the domestic economy; it is their export of
manufactured goods around the world, which is a dumping strategy that is here
truly hollowing out industries in other countries, like in Europe.
It’s not like the Europeans are suddenly saying, “We’re
going to work with the Chinese, and that’s going to be our principal alliance,
and it’s no more NATO.” And that’s not going to give them influence with the
U.S. So in those big-picture ways, I don’t suddenly see this being a cold war —
two blocs and the Chinese picking off a bunch of countries.
I think it’s much more complicated than that. The Japanese
don’t suddenly trust the Chinese. In fact, they’re in a big fight with the
Chinese right now over Taiwan. And the Chinese are cutting off their tourism
and not buying seafood anymore. It’s gotten much worse. So the Japanese are
closer to the United States, despite feeling that the Americans are acting in
an extortionate way. And their top leaders have told me that directly —
extortionate in how badly the Americans have mistreated their best friend, the
Japanese.
Having said all of that: We are seeing things that are going
to matter long term. I’ll give you an obvious example. The Europeans are now
spending real money on defense. The Poles, the Germans, other countries,
especially the frontline countries. The Canadians are spending a lot more on
defense, but they’re not spending on the American military-industrial complex;
they’re spending it on themselves. They’re building it out. And that is money
that used to go directly into the U.S. and U.S. jobs, and going forward, it
will not. India is building out their military to a much greater degree.
They’re moving away from Russia. First Trump term, the Quad moving more to the
United States, now much more with the Europeans. That is a long-term move.
These are legacy systems that will have parts and service and training that
will last for decades. That is money that is not coming to the United States.
The E.U.-Mercosur trade agreement.
And Trump deserves credit for E.U.-Mercosur, which, from a
global ——
Can you just say what E.U.-Mercosur is?
Mercosur is the big trading group in Latin America, the free
trade association in Latin America, and the E.U. is the European Union. Now
there is an agreement between the E.U. and Mercosur. It’s bringing those
tariffs down that will facilitate greater trade flows between the Latin
American countries and the European countries, which will mean less trade flows
with the United States. Trump deserves credit for that. It would not have
happened without him, without the tariffs that he put on unilaterally toward
all the American allies.
And I can give you so many other examples of those things
happening, all of which individually are small but collectively make the United
States a smaller piece of indispensability with other countries, and that means
less money to the U.S., less money through the U.S., less jobs in the United
States. Those are own goals that are near-term irrelevant — and Trump cares
about the near term — but long term will have real costs for a United States
that is the biggest engine of global growth still in the world.
Earlier in this conversation, we talked about the Thucydides
trap. You’ve made an argument that it’s the wrong trap to think about. What’s
the trap that’s been on your mind?
The trap
that’s been on my mind is the Gracchi trap, which was when the Gracchi
brothers, who had policies of grievance, that believed that there was no more
mobility and that the poor Roman citizens were never going to have their due,
started breaking — they had their own political revolution — the norms and the
laws of how Rome was run, and the allies of Rome no longer saw Rome as
dependable.
The enemy
was inside the house. It was the political dysfunction of Rome that was
defeated the first time, defeated the second time but ultimately led to the
collapse of the Roman Republic. Again, internal political revolutions that
failed but that weakened the system and that also allowed people to get used to
those norms getting violated so that when they were violated a second time and
a third time by different leaders, they weren’t so surprising.
And that is what I see happening in the United States right
now — that the U.S. is unilaterally withdrawing from its alliances. It’s
saying: We don’t want to be dependable. We don’t want to be there for the
Ukrainians or for the Europeans in helping Ukraine. We don’t want to be there
for Taiwan. We’ll make that a negotiation with the Chinese. We don’t want to be
there for the Japanese or the South Koreans. You guys should be doing that
stuff yourselves. We’re not going to be the architects of free trade. Everybody
else should have to come and invest in the United States, because we’re the big
power and you guys have been taking advantage of us, and we don’t even want to
have the best talent from all over the world because we already have the
Americans and that’s what really matters. So you guys just do whatever you
want.
Those things are what is driving the geopolitical risk in
the world today. The United States is the principal driver of geopolitical
uncertainty in the world today. Trump and the Americans are driving it. They’re
driving it with tariffs and industrial policy. They’re driving it with the war
in Iran. They’re driving it with the lack of predictability with the Europeans.
They’re driving it with the change to the structures and the rules and the
norms inside the world’s largest market. It’s not China. China has huge
problems. They’re not the ones that are driving the change.
When Trump put together the Board of Peace, which we don’t
even talk about anymore because there’s no money for it, right? No one really
cares. And Davos, he was there onstage, and he had all these big countries like
Paraguay and Azerbaijan show up with him. The Chinese didn’t show. He invited
them. The Chinese didn’t show. They said no. Why would they say no? Well,
because the Chinese were like: If you guys are going to pull out of the U.N.,
we’ll just be the most powerful country influencing the United Nations. If you
guys are pulling out of the World Health Organization, we’ll increase the
amount we donate every year to the W.H.O. We’ll be the people making those
decisions.
They’re not creating alternative architecture. They’re
becoming the most important country influencing our architecture that we don’t
care about anymore. That’s not a Thucydides trap; that’s the Americans
withdrawing. That’s the U.S. acting in a unilateral way and other countries
trying to find ways to continue to ensure that we have governance.
I think that is a good place to end. Always, our final
question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Three books. Well, first, I’ve got to start with “The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” because when I was in high school and
college, there were basically three kinds of kids: There were the J.R.R.
Tolkien kids that were way too dorky. Then there were the Ayn Rand kids, who
you don’t trust to run anything. And then there were the Douglas Adams kids,
and those were kind people. They were curious, they were interested, and that
was a universe that really appealed to me.
I love this typology. There’s no book I’ve reread more than
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
Is that true?
Yes, no book.
Have you said that publicly?
Probably not. You’ve got something new out of me.
Interesting.
My favorite book growing up.
My favorite book growing up. Absolutely, my favorite.
Actually, maybe “The Dragonriders of Pern,” which I reread
obsessively when I was, like, 10. But after that, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy,” and I continue to reread it.
And it was the kind of thing that if you meet people when
you’re younger that really love “Hitchhiker’s” and the series, you’d like those
people. Like, those are your people. That’s your tribe. And I would say more
people like that, on the global stage, certainly on the American stage in
Washington, would probably help us, right?
Second, I was going to say “A World Appears” by Michael
Pollan. I don’t know if you’ve read it yet.
He’s been on the show. We had a great conversation.
Oh, cool. I’ve liked him for a long time, because he talks
about issues that are not superfashionable but that are really important to
human beings. I really appreciate him doing the work and making us think about
what identity is in this, because it’s changing so quickly now. Like, the
nature of where humanity begins and ends is, seems to me, very fluid in ways
that people aren’t thinking about.
And then finally, I was going to say “The Chronoliths” by
Robert Charles Wilson, which was written back in 2001 but which I went back to
and read recently, and I wanted to see if the book still held.
And it was, again, a kind of ne’er-do-well intelligent folks
but who aren’t really succeeding in society, who by virtue of being in the
right place at the wrong time, witness something from the future coming back
that has the potential to rip apart the society or that they can fix it. The
book is all about this, and this is before A.I. becomes, like, a real thing,
and yet it’s the same exact thing.
Ian Bremmer, thank you very much.
Thanks, Ezra.” [1]
1. Ian Bremmer on the Risks America Poses to the World: The
Ezra Klein Show. Klein, Ezra; Hu, Rollin; Galvin, Annie. New York Times
(Online) New York Times Company. Jun 2, 2026.
