This episode explores what a second Trump presidency could mean for American domestic policy and politics, and for the rest of the world. Is American democracy at serious risk of being dismantled? And what will be the impact of Trump’s agenda on global efforts to reverse climate change and transatlantic relations with the European Union? Listen to hear what’s in store for America and the world.
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Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to a new episode of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and senior fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
This is the 10th and final episode of season nine of Democracy in Question. It's a real pleasure to welcome back Stephen Walt, who is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. He's been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for almost two decades.
His other affiliations include the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, the Brookings Institution, and he's currently a special guest at the IWM here in Vienna. He's been a contributing editor at Foreign Policy Magazine, co-chair of the editorial board of the journal “International Security”, and he's also co-edited the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs book series.
A prominent representative of the realist school in international relations, Steve has authored several highly acclaimed books, such as “The Origins of Alliances”, “Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy”, “The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy”. He has also co-authored with John Mearsheimer “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”.
Stephen Walt and I are continuing today the conversation we began in the previous episode about the recent resounding victory of Donald Trump on the 5th of November. If the first part of our conversation was more of a postmortem on the Democrats’ historic defeat in the presidential elections, today we're going to focus on what the next four years may bring during Trump's presidency.
What does a second Trump presidency have in store for American domestic policy and politics, but also for the rest of the world? Will the new administration's policy preferences be shaped by the interests and ideologies of a handful of tech billionaires? Is American democracy at serious risk of being dismantled and morphed into a soft authoritarian regime?
I'll also ask Steve to comment on Donald Trump's economic and trade policies and their national as well as their international ramifications. What will be the impact of his agenda on global efforts to reverse climate change? Lastly, we'll also turn to the potentially explosive fallout from Trump's second term regarding foreign policy.
We'll discuss tensions and military conflict with China and Russia, Israel's escalating war in the Middle East, and the uneasy future of transatlantic relations with the European Union. We're certainly not short of controversial topics and even disconcerting questions and possibly more alarming answers.
So, without further ado, let me just say, Steve, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Stephen Walt (SW): It's wonderful to be here.
SR: Let's talk about another question which you touched on briefly when you talked about the tech bros and the billionaires, the shifts and the reconfiguration of elites and oligarchs that determine politics in the United States, what Larry Lessig calls the “economy of influence”.
Since the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in the Citizens United case, corporations and other associations have been allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts on elections, and which has given rise to the proliferation of the super PACs, the political action committees. Now, of course, there's been a debate in the United States on the corrosive effects of fundraising and donor structures on representative democracy, the proverbial revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, D.C., et cetera. And this has also partly fueled resentment that a populist like Trump could easily exploit. What we saw, however, is a different elite, as you said, not the establishment, but nevertheless, a very rich elite rallying behind Trump. You had maverick tech billionaires like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, but what they also brought with them was a very ambitious far right agenda, and what they let fall under the table is the fact that a lot of their enterprises have actually benefited from enormous government subsidies. So how do you think this is going to influence Trump's agenda?
SW: Well, Trump, I think, sees politics, as everyone has said since day one, in a very transactional way and, and not based on any sense of general norms, rules, principles, laws, things like that. It's whatever you can get away with, and whatever deal you can cut to improve your position. And that's a perfect environment in which corruption flourishes. But in exchange for government concessions on one issue or another, you agree to provide support.
It becomes a mutual back scratching arrangement. And I might add, this is why if he does launch a big tariff war, it fuels corruption because you impose a bunch of tariffs and then a bunch of businessmen come and say, I want to be an exception. You have to make a special arrangement for my company. And in exchange for that, I will of course continue to support you financially and in other ways as well. So, it's a perfect way to sort of build a network. This is, I think, the strategy that Viktor Orban and others have followed all along. You basically go to the wealthy business interests in various places, and you either impose your supporters on them, or you turn them into your supporters by giving them favorable arrangements. And if they don't want to play ball with you, you then find ways to punish them, and I think that is likely to go up here.
If the agenda of the so-called tech bros gets fully implemented, I mean, they don't like regulation, they don't want anything that gets in the way of their making money as well. They don't want to pay taxes at all. That's true of the sort of whole financial class in the United States. And I think that the ways that may come back to bite the Trump administration is, if their influence makes it impossible for Trump to keep the budget deficit from continuing to go up, at some point, the bond market does, in fact, rebel. Bond traders are not sentimental about this. At some point, if people begin to realize that the United States really isn't going to be able to repay all this stuff, then you could easily get the kind of reaction that sank Liz Truss in the United Kingdom, where she puts out a budget proposal and the bond market immediately reacts, and she's gone in two weeks or a little bit less. Now, the American financial markets are different than the United Kingdom. It would take a lot more to produce that, but there is that concern out there that there are other financial interests or sectors that have to be taken into account.
And the one final thing is that there is this question of to what extent you can fool enough people long enough, with lots of money and media influence and Twitter algorithms and things like that, if the American economy reverts in a significant way, if you get a stock market crash, as opposed to the little sugar high it's going through right now, if in fact inflation returns, if companies have to adjust to Trump tariffs by doing things that harm their employees, etc. not giving raises because they're busy stockpiling the goods that they think they need to get now while they still can before the price goes up later. All of these things would then start to affect real people's real lives.
And suddenly the folks who thought they liked all of the things Trump was going to promise them and give them and defend them against, they suddenly wake up and say, well, gee, this didn't work out quite the way I expected. And it's worth remembering, that's what happened to him in his first term. There, it was as much as anything, the mishandling of the COVID pandemic, suddenly there were real consequences, he didn’t seem to be in charge of things there are limits, even in Trump's case, to what he can do.
SR: So, I come back to the tariff question, because I think you have some very interesting remarks on that in another article. I come back to that in a moment, but there is one question which I wanted to ask you on something which we were talking about a moment ago, and that is Francis Fukuyama wrote piece recently in which he argued that Trump's election represents, and I quote him here, “a decisive rejection of American liberalism”.
And he says the particular way that the understanding of free society has evolved since the 1980s has been rejected by the American electorate. So do you think that's a fair way of understanding what has happened, and if that is the case, then do you think liberal democratic institutional architecture in the United States is going to take a very large hit, particularly because, thanks to the Supreme Court decision, Trump would enjoy immunity for all official acts and thus have unlimited, unchecked power. So, what do the next four years spell for liberal democracy, not only in the U.S., but worldwide, in practice?
SW: So, liberal democracy's been in trouble for a while now. What The Economist and Freedom House have pointed out for the last 20 years, is that the number of free societies keeps going down every year the United States was downgraded to only “partly democratic” by The Economist, I think back in 2016 before Trump was president, however, this was happening. So liberal institutions have been under siege for quite some time now, and I think there are a variety of reasons for that. I think part of it is the economic consequences of globalization and what they did to discredit elites. Certainly, the financial crisis of 2008, sort of cast doubt on whether or not these masters of the universe really knew how to run things as well.
I think, as we've already spoken about, the perception of unchecked immigration that was swamping different societies or might alter people's way of lives without them being able to control it cast some, some doubt on this as well. And that's why Frank Fukuyama is a good person to write this, because in a sense it's the refutation of the very optimistic forecasts he made back at the end of the Cold War, which had a big influence on people. That liberalism was the wave of the future and kind of the only game in town. And that clearly proved not to be the case. And I say that with some sorrow, I might add, because I like the values of a liberal society. I'm grateful that I've lived my whole life in one that's like that. However, we shouldn't over romanticize the liberalism in the United States.
Yes, it's a deeply liberal society, and some of those values, individual freedom and the government shouldn't be able to tell me what to do, those are, I think, pretty deeply rooted in the American character, but those are also values that we've been willing to compromise or abandon on a number of occasions.
We've locked people up when we thought they were political enemies. We've imposed censorship of a variety of kinds. There has always been an authoritarian streak running through the United States as well. It's usually kept in abeyance, but it's been out there in various ways. As an American, what worries me most about the return of Donald Trump is that there are, important elements of the Trump movement and also the Republican Party that are very comfortable with a unitary executive, a strong central authority.
They do not want checks and balances to be very powerful. They want whoever's president to be able to do pretty much what they want. And they think that's necessary to do the right thing. Now whether they think the right thing is just for them or more broadly, I think that's a more complicated question.
But I think that strand has been there for a while. It was certainly true of Dick Cheney. That he really thought that the executive had to be much stronger, and that Congress shouldn't be allowed to get in the way too much. And certainly, not the courts, and you can see those stars lining up now in the United States where you have a president with some autocratic tendencies who certainly doesn't believe in the rule of law, certainly doesn't believe in anyone getting in his way, you have control of both Houses of Congress, most likely you have a Supreme Court that, may not go all the way in this direction, but it's not going to do much to stop it unless there's a real personality change there. How much they can accomplish, particularly if things start to go badly for them in various ways, I don't know. Two things that might be a problem. One is Trump is old. He's less energetic. He's less coherent. And he wasn't hugely energetic as president. He played a lot of golf, started his work day pretty late in the day, that sort of thing. And if he starts visibly failing, it's not clear that there's anybody who can carry that agenda forward quite the same way he might be able to, at least even just as the salesman for it.
So, the age issue is there. And the second thing is that, yes, he has subdued the Republican Party to some extent. Lots of people who didn't like him have nonetheless gone along with him. But American politicians, regardless of party, care first and foremost about their own careers. And people in the House and people in the Senate are going to part company as soon as they think that supporting the president on issue x or issue y is going to cost them their seats. And so again, if the Trump agenda starts to have negative consequences, people in congressional seats who begin to worry that, yeah, the president might get reelected, but I am in trouble may start to distance themselves in various ways. Again, it assumes that they do enough dumb things, that things go badly.
If they're really smart and they do some of their agenda, but not all of it, they may be able to go a long way, but that's in some respects, harder to do after a decisive win. If you win by a narrow amount, that's a reminder that your support is very thin. If you win decisively and you think you now have the country completely behind you, it's very hard to tell the most extreme members of your coalition not to pursue their craziest ideas.
“We won this big election. Let's try it all. Let's do it”. So, there's some tendency to overreach, when you have a big, or you think you have a big lead. And again, to go back to what I said earlier, it was a decisive win in terms of the outcome. It was not a decisive win in terms of the signal that the whole country wants to move in that direction.
SR: So, I come back exactly to that point on the tariffs issue, because what I do want to ask you about this, what do you think a new Trumpist regime in international political economy will look like? And you wrote in an article just a month ago, and I quote you here, “Trump is now promising to double or triple down on those tariffs from 2016, 2020. Even today, he doesn't understand that tariffs on foreign goods are a tax on American consumers, not a penalty that foreign exporters paid to us. The tariffs he's proposing would rekindle inflation, reduce the dollar's appeal as a reserve currency, and harm American exporters”. They'll also hit, I think, low-income families, they will stunt economic growth, and they will cause probably a recession, and they could hardly cover the fiscal deficit, which would be caused by the tax cuts which he has promised.
So, in a sense, would imposing these very high tariffs on trade, of course it would ignite a terrible trade war with China, the EU will also be in trouble, but nevertheless, would imposing high tariffs be one of these dumb mistakes that could cost a lot?
SW: If he actually delivered on some of the things he said on the campaign, it would be very painful, damaging to the United States and other countries, but as a result, it would also be personally damaging to him. So, a worrisome sign, because he said he's going to reappoint Robert Lighthizer as his trade representative. Lighthizer is, in fact, very knowledgeable, very savvy, knows how Washington works, good at getting his way, etc. And is a big fan of tariffs. He was one of the architects of the first term tariff policies, which for the most part failed. They didn't bring down the trade deficit. They didn't certainly put a lot of Americans back to work in manufacturing or anything like that. They cost American farmers a lot. They had to be compensated with subsidies of various kinds as well. And so that's what I mean.
Doubling or tripling down on that would have all the consequences that you read there. Now. He has had some economic advisors in the campaign who said, Trump is smarter than that, he's just bluffing, he's going to threaten all these things, but ultimately, he'll do something modest, there'll be some tariffs, but they won't be too punitive as well.
And I can easily imagine the tech guys we were talking about and other business interests saying, don't do this. If you're Elon Musk and you're getting your batteries from China, the last thing you want is a trade war with China, that suddenly increases the cost all of that. And Wall Street would be in the same way.
There was an anecdote, in the New York Times, about a company deep in the heart of Trumpland that had just announced last week after the election that there would be no Christmas bonuses for their employees. And the reason given by management was that they had to take the money and stockpile the imports, the components that they buy from overseas, particularly from China, that were part of their manufacturing process. Just to get ready, because these tariffs are coming, we want to make sure that it doesn't affect us. And of course, that's one anecdote, shouldn't pay too much attention to it, but it describes the logic of what would happen here. And so, if he does go down that road and insists that he has to fulfill this promise, or it's just reflecting his view of how the world economy works, it will backfire, very badly on him. Unfortunately, there will be a lot of people who suffer as a result.
SR: So, the other worry that a lot of people have about the Trump presidency is his climate skepticism. The U.S. is responsible, as you know, for more than 10 percent of global emissions, and it's on the way to more emissions, more pollution, more fracking. Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord during his first term. So, what do you think are the prospects for any internationally coordinated attempts to find viable solutions to the environmental crises, especially because Trump relied on a strong support from the fossil fuel lobby.
SW: If we step back from all of this stuff, this may actually be the single most significant part of this election because climate change is arguably the existential, the one existential or one of the main existential threats that humanity faces where even if it doesn't wipe out the human species to allow continued increases in average temperature, it's going to have vast, enormous, and mostly negative effects on many countries and societies.
It already is in terms of damage in a variety of places, and it's only going to get worse, and that will make the migration problem even bigger. In some respects, it's going to have economic consequences, adapting to climate change, just dealing with it, doing all the things we're going to need to do, even in wealthy societies to prepare for the consequences and adjust to them, it's going to cost trillions of dollars, which is trillions of dollars that then cannot be spent on other things. So this is a massive, massive problem, which Trump doesn't care about because he will be safely dead by the time most of these things come to pass. So, policy, as he put it in the campaign, of “drill, drill, drill”, is exactly the wrong way to go.
And the real problem is not just that American emissions are going to go back up, or not decrease as rapidly as they should, but also, this will make it almost impossible to have any kind of meaningful global agreement. Why should any other country adjust its behavior, incur some economic costs in making a green transition if one of the world's biggest polluters, not the biggest anymore, but one of the world's biggest polluters is still doing everything it does. Why, if you're a medium sized country, why pay the price? And that's compounded by the fact that Trump and most of the Republican party now is fundamentally ideologically opposed to global institutions more generally. So, the last thing they like is a global institution that actually might have some economic consequences for the United States, might force us to make some adjustments.
All right, so you put all this together, and not only are we going to behave badly, but we are now going to make it much more likely that everybody else behaves badly, more fossil fuels, and again, if I were ranting in front of the audience here, I would be saying what people have to also understand here is that once the carbon is burned, it stays in the atmosphere for a long time.
If we suddenly reversed our policies and adopted the most stringent restrictions you could possibly imagine, the world's going to get a little bit warmer for a while because of what's already been burned. And so doing more of that is simply making the lives of our children and grandchildren and in many other parts of the world much more fraught, much more perilous. And unfortunately, that's what Americans voted for.
SR: Another Trump presidency won't much change U.S. foreign policy. And you argued there that for all his erratically confrontational style, Trump's foreign policy wouldn't differ much from Biden's in his second term. Now, the question for me here is what we saw in Trump's first term is, in a sense, empty theatrics of him cozying up to Putin or Kim Jong Un. Now that he'll be back in the White House soon, any hope of course correction would be lost. In your words, and I quote you here: “You're as likely to get sensible foreign policy from Trump as you were to get an education from Trump University”.
And the question here is for me, will the U.S. lose whatever is left of its global appeal, in terms of soft power? How do you think he'll deal with some of the strategic challenges of China's rise, especially the whole Taiwan question? And then I'd like to hear from you on two of the crises which are facing us, the war in Gaza, and not the least, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, on both of which he has taken very strong positions. But on the other hand, if you recall, he said he would solve the Ukraine war in 24 hours. But if that's not going to happen, he's going to be loath to put money into fighting other people's wars, as he's also put it. So, what do you think is the likely foreign policy consequence on all of these questions, which will not only need diplomatic finesse, but may need American investment?
SW: Well, diplomatic finesse has never been his long suit. So, the title of that article you quoted is not the title I would have picked. It's something authors always complain about when they write for journals, but let me clarify exactly what I said in that piece, because I didn't say there would be no differences at all that there would actually be on some issues quite substantial issues climate being, maybe the most obvious as we've already talked about what I did say was that the differences between what Biden has done and what Trump is likely to do on three issues were not as great as people were thinking. So, first China, Trump sees China as an economic rival. They are not going to be pals. We're not going to see the two most powerful countries in the world suddenly become partners in a big way in the Trump administration.
And there are plenty of people in his circle who are real hawks on China and it will push him to be confrontational, not just on economic issues, but also on security issues. And of course, that's where Biden has been. Remember, Biden continued and refined the Trump economic war against China.
Trump was the first one to go after Huawei, for example. And what the Biden people did is they came in and said, well, this was the right idea. It just wasn't done very well. So, we'll refine it, but we'll make it more effective. But it was in the same direction. And Trump will continue that. You're not going to see him suddenly go and say, oh, we don't mind sending sophisticated chips to China. We don't mind helping their tech industries advance. That's not going to happen. So, in that sense, no great difference. On Ukraine, my view there was that Harris, oh, if she had been elected, would have moved rather quickly to try and end the war in Ukraine as well.
I think she would have done it more responsibly, more sort of deliberately, carefully. She would have tried to give the Ukrainians sufficient support to get a somewhat better deal than they are going to get otherwise, but it was going to be a bad deal because almost everybody in Washington understands now that Ukraine's war aims are completely unrealistic. They're not going to get back the Donbass. They're not going to get back Crimea. The best they can hope for is a deal that they lose about 20 percent of their country. And then Putin leaves the rest of the country alone. Now, how one fashions that deal is a subject for another podcast.
But I think that's where Harris would have gone. She couldn't say that in the campaign because to say that in the campaign would, of course, repudiate all of Biden's policies. And as I said before, she wasn't going to do that. But I think If she'd been elected, that's the direction she would have gone, and Trump will go in the same direction. He may go there faster, he may go there in a less responsible way, but it's in the same direction, and likely to produce the same outcome. I believe he and others are betting that Putin, in fact, does not want to conquer all of Ukraine.
He doesn't want to try and govern the population, most of which hates him and will continue to resist in various ways, it will be very expensive. He doesn't want to have to rebuild anything in the rest of Ukraine. He doesn't want it in NATO. He would like to keep it as weak as possible. He was going to keep the Donbass. Which again, he thinks of as, culturally Russian and all of that stuff. But I think a case can be made that he'd be happy with a deal that left Ukraine out of NATO, relatively weak, in real trouble, and not him occupying it. At which point Trump will say, that's fine by me, I did this, it's because of, me that we now have peace in Ukraine. And here's the great irony, it's also possible that that position actually gives Zelensky an out. Zelensky can't cut a deal with the Russians now, because he'd be removed by the Ukrainians. But if Zelensky says, I have to accept this deal. I don't like it, but I'm being told by the Americans that I have to do it. The Europeans, they're not happy about it, but they're not willing to do enough to help us. So, I have no choice, right, but to accept this, drink this poison chalice, etc., whatever language he wants to use. So, on Ukraine, I don't think, there's differences, but I don't think it's a 180-degree difference.
And then finally Gaza. Even before the Gaza war broke out, the Biden policy on the Middle East was essentially identical to Trump's. They had completely ignored the Palestinian issue. They were doing nothing. They didn't reopen the consulate that dealt with Palestinian affairs in Jerusalem, which is something Biden had promised to do. They didn't go back into the nuclear deal with Iran, which is something Biden had promised to do. And they spent most of their time trying to get Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. It was a completely pro-Israel agenda, and it was completely consistent with everything that Trump had done. Hardly any daylight, really, between the Trump policy and Biden's policy. Then the war in Gaza breaks out, and Biden's policy to a first approximation has been to let Netanyahu do anything he wanted and occasionally say that we were unhappy about it.
So the United States of America has ended up not just sitting passively by when a genocide takes place, right? But actively supporting it with billions of dollars of military assistance, even though we constantly complain about some of the ways that assistance is being used. And Trump would have been no different. He would not have twisted Bibi's arm in any substantial way at all. I think it's conceivable that Harris would have moved somewhat in a slightly more less supportive, more critical direction had she been elected. And particularly, the perfect outcome from this perspective would have been for Harris to win, but to lose Michigan. And if she'd lost the state of Michigan because Arab Americans there were unhappy, that would have been a warning shot to her that we needed to adjust our policies. Of course, that didn't happen, so we're not going to test it.
And finally, you raised this question of sort of Trump and his approach to diplomacy. He, in the first term at least, he was extremely erratic. And I don't mean unpredictable, I mean erratic and showed no interest in the actual details of diplomacy. He tended to be impulsive, he would do things or ask his staff to do things based on something he'd seen on TV that morning.
He didn't read, he didn't prepare. So, just to give one illustration of this, he gave North Korean leader Kim Jong Un an extraordinary gift, which is the privilege of a one-on-one summit meeting with the American president. This is conferring great status on a leader to say, you are so important that I'm going to take time out of my busy schedule and meet you one on one. Something no American president has ever done with a North Korean leader. Now, normally you would do that if you had a deal lined up. Ready to go, that was in everybody's interest, and this becomes the way you sign it. What Trump did is, let's have the meeting first, because he thought he could charm him, cajole him, it's something to get him into making major concessions, like giving up his nuclear weapons.
Of course, at the end of the day, Kim Jong Un pockets this newfound status and gives us nothing. Trump, in other words, despite what he has tried to convince the world, is a terrible negotiator and is more, interested in being the center of attention and publicity that conducting a reality show summit in which he gets nothing substantive, but he gets lots of attention, has been his approach to diplomacy all along. Maybe that'll be different. Maybe he will appoint people, because he's old, he'll have to delegate lots of attention, he'll let his subordinates run things and just bless the things they come up with. But that's not the way he acted in the first term. So, I'm not confident that you're going to see a much more adroit, subtle U.S. diplomacy. I hope I'm wrong.
SR: Last and final question, Stephen, that is of course the relationship to Europe and to the EU. It's always been termed the Special Transatlantic Partnership, and here one of the biggest problems that Trump presents for Europe is that he could prove to be a very strong ally for far-right populist parties and leaders across the continent who are interested in pursuing very similar illiberal agendas. And they've formed a network over the years in which there's been a lot of sharing of ideas, resources, people moving back and forth. So how do you envision the future of transatlantic relations between Europe and United States under Trump presidency?
SW: Not good. And so, this is probably the place where I think you'll see the most dramatic developments. First of all, Trump has never liked the European Union. I think he called it an enemy or a rival during his first term. And he sees it that way because he sees the European Union as an agency or an institution that on economic issues can speak with one voice with a lot of economic power behind it.
And so, he favored Brexit. He thought that was a good thing because of course that weakens Europe and he likes populists who also are skeptical about the European project. He doesn't want to deal with Brussels at all. He wants to deal with Paris and Berlin. And Rome and Vienna and anybody else one-on-one bilaterally, because, of course, in that case, the United States is the 800-pound gorilla dealing with a much smaller and weaker opponent. So, he'll be able to get a better deal. And I think that's going to be his approach to the EU. NATO's trickier. He doesn't like NATO all that much. He doesn't feel any emotional attachment to it of the sort that Biden did. And he's always thought of NATO is a bunch of free riding countries that depend on American production and don't spend enough.
By the way, that is not unique to Trump. That has been true of every American president since Eisenhower. So there's nothing new in this regard, but he takes it much further and I think was more willing to seriously contemplate getting out of the alliance. I think, looking at my crystal ball that he will not leave NATO. NATO is still popular with the American people. He would get a lot of pushback from the Pentagon for a variety of reasons on that. There are some Republican senators who are big NATO fans too. I think he'd rather stay in NATO and constantly berate its members to do more. And his message will be, you want to keep us in, you have to spend more on defense, and a lot of that money should be going to Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Raytheon and American weapons companies. I don't want you building up your own defense industries. I don't want you becoming autonomous. I want you to continue to depend on us and mostly just by buying our weapons. That's where I see him going with respect to NATO. And then finally, your other point is exactly right. This is a huge boon to European populace, across the board, give them a sense of momentum that they are, in fact the wave of the future. And so, if you think populism is the right way to govern European countries, and it's going to leave them better off, you're happy, if you think most of these populists are actually in terms of improving the lives of their citizens not very effective. You ought to be worried about that.
SR: So, thank you so much for this really insightful, also very wide-ranging conversation. It's been a great pleasure having you with me and having you share not only just the commentary on the U.S. elections, but also a whole set of larger issues with insights going back into American politics over several decades, which will then inform the way we look at the next four years to come.
SW: Thanks very much for the opportunity. Really enjoyed talking with you.
SR: Many of my previous guests on the podcast have also insisted that liberal democracies have been under attack, often from within, for much of the 21st century. Steve is still cautiously optimistic about the extent of the damage that President Trump and his supporters could do to the American political system by undermining it and radically transforming all democratic institutions, as many fear. Despite Trump's control of both houses of the legislature and a supermajority in the Supreme Court, the future of his administration could easily be threatened by internal contradictions. For instance, it's unclear how the tensions between the oligarchic corruption it relies on for support and the potential economic and financial fallouts that may result from these narrow interests are likely to play out. It's way too early to foretell what the consequences of Elon Musk's much heralded plan to radically downsize government bureaucracy will be, and thus one cannot fully anticipate the ways in which it could also backfire. For example, the high tariffs on imports could not only spark trade wars, but also adversely affect important sectors of American industry, including those led by well-known Trump allies by short circuiting global supply chains.
Nevertheless, one should not take satisfaction in the possibility of Trump's misguided policies backfiring since it's ordinary American people who will bear the brunt of these and suffer socioeconomic consequences. The clearest example of this above all else is obviously in the area of climate change. The new Trump administration, which is skeptical both about the urgency of the climate crisis and global institutional cooperation to combat it, could have catastrophic consequences, not only for the United States, but also worldwide. Nor will the cause of international cooperation be advanced by Trump's well-known belligerence towards China.
The most surprising aspect of Steve's analysis, however, is his conviction that the Democrats would not have pursued a very different foreign policy agenda, either regarding Israel's wars in the Middle East or in effecting a compromise with Putin to end the war against Ukraine. Steve argued that this does not mean that U.S. diplomacy will not continue to fumble and fall, as it often did during the first Trump presidency. Transatlantic relations between the United States and Europe are poised to deteriorate insofar as Trump regards the European Union as a rival, if not quite as an outright enemy. This is why he has long supported populist Eurosceptics within the EU and he's been in favor of bilateral deals with individual European member states instead of with the European Union. He has little interest in continued American support for the NATO either. One can only hope that soft authoritarian, right wing populist leaders in Europe will not be able to exploit Trump's second presidency to the fullest to weaken the European Union. They may discover that many of Trump's policies on trade and tariffs would go against their own national interests. So, their honeymoon with Trump may in the end turn out to be somewhat short lived.
This was the tenth and final episode of season nine. Thank you very much for listening. I wish everyone happy holidays and a better new year. Join me again early next year when we resume with the opening episode of season ten in February. My guest will be Katha Pollitt, the well-known American feminist and journalist. I'll discuss with her the implications of Trump's misogynist campaign that tapped into latent sexism, and what his victory may mean for women's rights in the United States.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed. And of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.