Donald Trump believes that U.S. economic and military might are all he needs to become a benign dictator and achieve unilateral control over America’s allies — what will the effects of this policy be?
Transcript
Chris Hedges
Most European leaders, including NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte along with the heads of U.S. universities, media organizations and the top tech executives, make the fatal mistake of attempting to appease Donald Trump. They grovel before him in shameless sycophancy. This sycophancy is on display at every cabinet meeting.
It sees billionaires, such as Bill Gates, praise the president’s “incredible leadership.” It has rendered the other two branches of government impotent. Congress is moribund. The Supreme Court is a rubber stamp for Trump’s imperial delusions. The Republican Party is a Trump cult.
Trump, as we see with his kidnapping of the president of Venezuela, his self-appointment as the imperial viceroy of Gaza, his calls to seize Greenland, Canada along with Mexico, Cuba, possibly Nicaragua, his unleashing of masked goons in the streets of American cities to terrorize the public, is a one-mad wrecking crew. He is demolishing what is left of our democratic institutions at home and the liberal international order abroad, one put into place at the end of World War II.
This old international order rested on military alliances such as NATO. It championed a respect for the rule of law and human rights, although the U.S. often ran roughshod over these ideals. It collaborated with, and paid deference to, its allies. It permitted free trade. It saw the sovereignty of other nations as sacrosanct. By the time Trump is done, all this will be gone.
“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told his audience, which gave him a standing ovation, at Davos.
Trump divides the world into the weak and the strong. He is reticent to use his tactics of threats and intimidation on Russia and China. He expresses open admiration for these two autocracies. He proposes carving up the globe between his fellow autocrats, with Russia dominating its European periphery, China dominating Asia, and the United States controlling the Middle East, North America, including Greenland and Canada, along with Central and South America.
Trump is dynamiting the NATO transatlantic alliance. He ignores and openly violates international humanitarian law, especially in Gaza. He has ceded the innovations to cope with the climate crisis to China, not only by denying the reality of global warming — he calls the climate crisis “a green scam” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated” — but by actively thwarting the development of alternative energy sources and gutting programs designed to cope with the breakdown of the climate.
Trump’s reliance on an economy based on fossil fuels, like his reliance on U.S. military superiority to exert his will on weaker states, accelerates the decline of the American Empire. It will ultimately make American industries uncompetitive. It will drive countries away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, one of the most potent weapons in Trump’s arsenal. It will turn the U.S. into a pariah state. And it will trigger the kind of military adventurism that backfires on all dying empires.
Joining me to discuss the reconfiguration of the global order under Trump is Professor John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of numerous books, including The Tragedy of Great Power Politics and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
It’s remarkable in the last 12 months, John, what we have seen in terms of imploding the rule of law at home and imploding the rule of law abroad. Although as you are keenly aware, these were often more honored in the breach than the observance. But we are, I think you argue, entering really a new global order, if we want to use that phrase. And I wondered if you can explain what that is.
John Mearsheimer
Well, I think there’s no question, Chris, that given the fact that we have recently transitioned from unipolarity to multipolarity, there were going to be significant changes in the international order. There are going to be significant changes in international institutions.
From roughly 1993 up until about 2017, which is when we were in unipolarity, we did have a liberal international order because the United States was by far the most powerful state in the system.
It was the unipole. It was the only great power. We were able to shape that international order in ways that really privileged us, or at least we thought privileged us.
But once the Russians and the Chinese become great powers, and we move into what most people agree is today a multipolar world, the Russians and especially the Chinese are going to want to change that order in certain ways. So it was inevitable when Trump first became president that there would be changes in the international order.
But he’s gone way beyond that, certainly in his second term. He’s a one-man wrecking crew. The key thing to understand about Trump is that he is a unilateralist. He’s interested in doing things by himself. He wants the United States to act alone. And you want to remember, we usually put the word multilateral in front of institutions. They’re multilateral institutions.
International law, by definition, is international and multilateral, but he has no interest in international institutions or in international law. He’s trying to wreck those things. And he wants to do away with all forms of an international order. He wants to be able to act unilaterally. So what you see going on, I believe, is that he’s trying to wreck institutions like the United Nations.
This new proposal that he has for a Board of Peace. It originally started out as an institution that was designed to deal with the Gaza genocide, to permanently shut down the Gaza genocide, but it’s now morphed into a replacement for the United Nations. And in fact, if you look at the charter, it doesn’t even mention Gaza, this is the charter of the Board of Peace. What’s going on here?
He wants the Board of Peace, which he will run, he will clearly be in charge. It’s a lifetime appointment. It’s a self-appointment. He’s self-appointed himself, or he’s appointed himself the head of the Board of Peace. But what’s going on here? What’s going on is he wants this Board of Peace that he’s gonna run, this is the unilateralist, to replace the multilateral United Nations.
And if you look at what’s happening with regard to Greenland and other issues as well, what’s going on there is he’s bent on wrecking NATO. He does not like NATO at all. It’s a multilateral institution. He doesn’t like that. So my basic point to you, Chris, is that it was inevitable that we were going to have a change in the international order because we went from unipolarity to multipolarity.
But President Trump, factored into the equation, makes that move from unipolarity to multipolarity fundamentally different. And his basic goal here is to do everything he can to destroy international institutions and to destroy international law.
Chris Hedges
So we had a multipolar world during the Cold War. The Soviet Union was a far greater power, a global power, than Russia. And of course we had China. And the mantra during the Cold War was to make sure that there was never an alliance between Russia and China. That was certainly the bedrock of the odious Henry Kissinger’s policy. And I’m just wondering if you can draw from how the United States handled a multipolar world during the Cold War as opposed to what’s happening now.
John Mearsheimer
Well, during the Cold War, it was commonly said, and I think correctly, that it wasn’t a multipolar world, that it was a bipolar world. You had two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. But nevertheless, China was a major power. And the question during the Cold War was whether or not China would be allied with the United States or China would be allied with the Soviet Union.
And, as you well remember and as I remember, during the first half of the Cold War, China and the Soviet Union were close, let me put it differently, they were reasonably close allies, arrayed against the United States. And most people don’t realize this, but during the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, the United States fought not against North Korean troops, they fought mainly against Chinese troops.
China was a bitter adversary of the United States for the first half of the Cold War. But then what happens when Kissinger and Nixon go to Beijing is that we inevitably or invariably flip the Chinese from the Soviet side to the American side. So for the second half of the Cold War, the Chinese and the Americans are allies. It’s a quite fascinating situation. We get the Chinese to flip from the Soviet side to our side.
Then the Cold War ends and the United States emerges as the unipol, the most powerful state on the planet. So the question is, what do we do with regard to China? Now China is our ally as the Cold War ends. And you want to remember, Chris, that during the Cold War, the second half of the Cold War, when China was our ally, we had a vested interest in helping China to become richer because the richer or the more prosperous China was, the more powerful it would become militarily.
And for purposes of containing the Soviet Union, that was a good thing. But anyway, the Cold War ends and the question is, what happens to the U.S.-China relationship? And I think, starting with the Bush administration, but really with the Clinton administration, is we develop a policy of engagement, which is where we try to help China grow economically.
We want China to become remarkably prosperous. And as you remember, in 2001, we invite China into the World Trade Organization, which really propels Chinese growth forward. So up until about 2017, the United States is doing almost everything it can to help China grow more prosperous.
But by about 2017, China has grown so prosperous, it has so much economic might, and it’s beginning to develop military might of the first order, that at that point, the United States recognized China has become a great power. And that’s when the United States takes engagement and flushes it down the toilet bowl and begins to pursue a policy of containment.
So what’s really happened here is China has just turned into a great power and the United States has played a key role in helping turn China into a great power. And once the United States recognizes it’s a great power and the Chinese begin to throw their weight around in East Asia, you have a security competition that sets in.
So in a very important way, China becomes an adversary of the United States, or the United States becomes an adversary of China. And this is where we are today. So if you sort of look at this relationship over time, in the first half of the Cold War, the United States and China were adversaries. Then in the second half, they were close allies.
And I think in the first half of the 21st century, China and the United States, let me say for the first 17 years of the 21st century, certainly during the unipolar moment, the United States and China were close allies. They were very friendly with each other. And then that all changed in about 2017 when China became a great power, and that’s where we are today.
Chris Hedges
Trump, I mean, empires need allies. I mean, history has just shown that time and time again, and yet Trump is dynamiting our traditional allies, whether that’s the European countries of NATO, Canada. I mean, he is isolating the United States. Just historically, what are the consequences of that?
John Mearsheimer
Well, there’s no question that great powers like the United States need allies. I’d go further and say great powers need international institutions and they need international law. You want to remember that the reason that the United States has historically privileged international institutions and international law is because we write the rules.
We write the laws and we write those rules and laws so that they benefit us. And every one of President Trump’s predecessors has therefore appreciated the fact that international law and international institutions work to our advantage.
They also fully understand that allies matter greatly. And if you’re interested in containing the Soviet Union during the Cold War or you’re interested in containing China today, you need good allies and you have to work overtime to make sure that you have good relations with those allies and that you can work together with them in effective and cooperative ways.
But the key point about Trump is that he is fundamentally different than virtually all his predecessors. He has contempt, as we were saying before, for international law and for international institutions. And I think he can make an argument that he treats allies worse than he treats adversaries. The man has unmitigated contempt for our allies.
And if you’re a great power, it’s very important that you understand that there are limits to your power. This is why you, in the final analysis, cannot act in a purely unilateral fashion the way that he would like to act. You just can’t do it. There are just real limits to your power.
But the problem is that Trump and many people in the American foreign policy establishment don’t have a full grasp of the limits of American power. They tend to think that this military that we have is a magical weapon that we can use to accomplish all sorts of tasks. We can invade Iraq and turn it into a liberal democracy and then we can spread democracy all over the Middle East because we have this very formidable military.
You remember this was the Bush Doctrine and we can get Iran to do this or do that and so forth and so on because we’re the United States of America. We’re Godzilla. International politics just doesn’t work that way. There’s no question the United States is powerful, this is one of the principal reasons that Trump is allowed to whipsaw so many countries around the world, because we are so powerful, both militarily and economically. There’s no question about that.
But there are real limits as to what you can do. And you need institutions. Are you going to tell me that if we are fighting the Cold War all over again, that we wouldn’t do it with NATO? This is a ridiculous argument. And NATO is an international institution. And the United Nations, which is hardly a perfect institution, it has real limits because of the Security Council and the vetoes that the great powers have in the Security Council.
But nevertheless, the United Nations serves useful purposes. That’s why all presidents have said positive things about the United Nations in the past. And when it was in the American national interest, they worked through the United Nations. And I can go on and on about this, but the fact is that Trump, he has just sort of a very different view of how to conduct international politics and he’s going to get himself in a whole heck of a lot of trouble.
Chris Hedges
Well, but John, I think he just doesn’t understand it. I mean, watching him dismantle centers of what Joseph Nye called soft power — USAID, Voice of America, the Institute of Peace — I think for me was a signal that he doesn’t understand how power works, certainly on an international level.
John Mearsheimer
Yeah, I mean, I think that he understands that the United States has a great deal of economic power. You know, if you think about it, Chris, what happened, especially during the unipolar moment when we created this liberal international order, is that the liberal foreign policy elites in the United States thought that they could create an international economy that fostered a great deal of economic interdependence among all the states in the world.
We get real economic integration. And the belief was that this would produce not only prosperity for everybody, but because it produced prosperity, it would produce peace. Because if everybody’s getting rich, who would kill the goose that lays the golden egg?
This is basically economic interdependence theory, which says that if states are economically interdependent, you’re not going to get war. Because, again, if prosperity is apparent to everybody or everybody’s getting prosperous, then there’s no incentive to go to war.
But what I think people didn’t understand is that when you created this highly integrated world economy, and the United States sat at the middle of the economy, this international economy, it gave it tremendous economic leverage over almost every country in the international system. And it’s this leverage that allows us to wreck the economy in Iran, to wreck the economy in Venezuela.
You want to understand that we wrecked the economy in Venezuela. We wrecked the economy in Iran. And you want to remember one of the reasons we were so enthusiastic about going to war against Russia in 2022, and we effectively went to war against Russia. We didn’t do fighting on the battlefield, but we joined forces with the Ukrainians. And if you look at the run-up to that war, we were enthusiastic about fighting that war against the Russians.
And you remember right after the war started, there were negotiations to end the war in Istanbul. And it looked like they were making real progress.
Chris Hedges
Which we destroyed.
John Mearsheimer
And we destroyed it. And the question is, Chris, why did we destroy it? We destroyed it because we thought we could beat the Russians with economic sanctions.
Chris Hedges
But it didn’t work.
John Mearsheimer
No, it didn’t work. That’s exactly right. But the point is that the Russians had been integrated in good part into this global economic system that had been created during the unipolar moment, as had the Chinese. And we thought that we had tremendous economic leverage over the Russians before the 2022 war, but as you said it didn’t work.
But you want to remember, Trump also thought we had tremendous economic leverage over the Chinese when he came into office last January. Remember, one of the first things he did was to put these wickedly high tariffs on the Chinese.
He thought that he had leverage over the Chinese from an economic point of view, but he did not because they had leverage over us because they controlled these rare earth minerals. But anyway, the point that I’m making to you is that the United States has tremendous economic power with some caveats, right? And it has this very powerful military.
And Trump thinks that he can use those two instruments in a unilateral fashion to get his way in almost all cases. And that’s what he is doing. And things like soft power, things like international institutions, international law, allies, they’re just not important to him. He thinks that U.S. economic might and U.S. military might are all he needs to basically be a benign dictator and act unilaterally and get what he wants around the world.
Chris Hedges
I want to talk about economic power, specifically how it works, the SWIFT [Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication] system, the dollar being the world’s reserve currency, which both China and Russia are trying to dismantle, of course, along with countries like Iran. And also this failure on the part of European leaders to stand up to Trump, which I am supposing is because they fear, primarily, economic retaliation.
John Mearsheimer
I think that’s right. I think in the case of the Europeans, they definitely feel fear, economic retaliation. But I think what they fear even more is that the Americans will withdraw from Europe. The principal reason that you have not had any conflict in Europe among the Europeans, the major states in Europe, and we’re leaving the Russians aside here, is because of the American military presence.
The United States serves as a pacifier in Europe, and the Europeans understand this. There has never been any interest among the European foreign policy elites to ask the United States to leave Europe. They don’t want the United States to leave Europe. They want the United States to stay in Europe because they understand we’re the pacifier.
And by the way, when the Cold War ended, the Soviets did not want NATO to disband, right? They were disbanding the Warsaw Pact, but they didn’t say to us, we’re disbanding the Warsaw Pact, you should disband NATO. They were perfectly content. This is the Russians. The Soviets…
Chris Hedges
Well Gorbachev actually proposed joining NATO, didn’t he?
John Mearsheimer
Yes, yes, as did [Vladimir] Putin, right? But what the Soviets and then later the Russians understood was that keeping the Americans in Europe maintained the peace in Europe. With the Russians — excuse me, with the Soviets, then the Russians, did not want was NATO expansion.
Chris Hedges
Right. Well, and this is an important point because always expansion beyond the borders of a unified Germany was seen by every single Russian leader, not just Putin, but [Boris] Yeltsin and [Mikhail] Gorbachev as a way to provoke a kind of… and there were constant Russian protestations over the expansion up to their borders, putting missile systems into Poland and everywhere else. So all of this is true as long as NATO didn’t expand.
John Mearsheimer
That’s right. And the real issue here was Germany, because you want to remember that during the Cold War, Germany was cut in half. The Soviets basically controlled one side, we controlled the other side. The Cold War ends, the Warsaw Pact goes away, and you get German reunification. And this makes everybody nervous at the time.
The French, the British, they were all extremely nervous because they remembered World War I and World War II, where basically all of Europe took on Germany, first Imperial Germany, then Nazi Germany. And everybody was saying, my God, you what’s going to happen now?
But if NATO remains in place or intact and the American pacifier remains in Europe, then you really don’t have to worry about the Germans. And you don’t have to worry about security competition between Germany and France and between Germany and Poland and so forth and so on.
So everybody was happy to keep the Americans in Europe. But what’s happening now is that Trump is threatening to either demolish NATO or at least greatly reduce the American military footprint and tell the Europeans that they’re on their own. They effectively have to provide for their own security.
And if you look at the National Security Strategy that came out of the White House, this famous document in November of last year, and you read the section on Europe, it’s quite clear that the White House or the Trump administration does not see the United States providing security for Europe. It sees the Europeans providing security for themselves. And this means you take away the American pacifier.
And I believe, Chris, this scares the Europeans greatly. This is of enormous importance for them to keep us involved for security reasons. And then your point is they want to have good relations with us for economic reasons, which is certainly true as well. And furthermore, just going back to soft power, I would argue ideological reasons, the whole idea that we’re all part of the West, that we share values and so forth and so on also matters to the Europeans.
I think the Europeans are quite shocked that a sort of a fellow liberal democracy has turned on them. This is not supposed to be the way it works. We’re all birds of a feather. We’re supposed to get along ideologically. So I think from a soft power point of view, an economic point of view, and a security point of view, the Europeans are deeply committed to maintaining very close relations with the United States, but the problem is they’re up against Donald Trump.
Chris Hedges
We’re also up against a resurgent German militarism. When you talk about Europe being nervous, they’re nervous about Germany.
John Mearsheimer
I think there’s some truth in that. I think the Europeans have convinced themselves, I think foolishly, that Russia’s a great threat. I mean, they make the argument that Russia’s gonna conquer all of Ukraine, then it’s gonna move into Eastern Europe.
Chris Hedges
But do you buy that? I don’t buy it.
John Mearsheimer
No, it’s utter nonsense. First of all, the Ukraine war has now gone on longer than the Soviet war against Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945. This war has been going on for many years, okay? And as anybody with the triple digit IQ can recognize the Russians have had a devil of a time conquering.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, it kind of exposed the lie that Russia was any kind of a military threat to anyone.
John Mearsheimer
Yeah, exactly. And Putin, let’s put capabilities aside, in terms of intentions, Putin has made it clear that he has no intention of conquering all of Ukraine. And the reason is that he fully understands that if he tried to conquer the western half of Ukraine, it would be, as I like to say, like trying to swallow a porcupine.
Western Ukraine is filled with ethnic Ukrainians who now really hate the Russians. And the idea that you’re going to occupy that territory and then annex it and make it part of a greater Russia, I mean, that would be a total disaster. And Putin is a very smart man. You don’t have to like what he does, but he is smart. And he’s made it clear that he’s not going to try to conquer Western Ukraine or all of Ukraine.
And again, he doesn’t have the military capability to do that. And so the idea that he’s going to conquer Eastern Europe and threaten Western Europe the way the Soviet Union did during the Cold War, this is poppycock, to put it bluntly. But anyway…
Chris Hedges
But you need, was it Colin Powell or somebody said at the end of the Cold War, all I have are like what Cubans and jihadists or something, I need an enemy. I mean, didn’t that, in order for these military juggernauts to continue and to expand, if they don’t have an enemy, they’ll create one.
John Mearsheimer
Yeah. Let me just make a point about that, because I think that’s a very interesting point. The problem that the Europeans face, different European countries, is that as long as the Americans are there and the Americans act as the pacifier, what the Americans do is they solve all the collective action problems that the Europeans would otherwise face.
So if you take away the United States, right, you take away the pacifier that sits above these European countries, all these collective action problems begin to come racing to the fore. And differences among European countries that they can’t settle themselves, right, and the United States is no longer there to settle for them, come racing to the fore.
And the great danger is, in the absence of the United States, these centrifugal forces that are naturally at play any time you have a handful of different countries, these collective action problems, make it impossible for Europe to act as a single entity in any meaningful way. You know, we refer to Europe today all the time, and we talk about Europe like it’s a single entity.
And the reason you can do that is because you have the EU and you have NATO. And what underpins all of it is the American military presence. You take away the American military presence and those centrifugal forces that were there before the United States became the pacifier, they come racing to the fore.
Chris Hedges
And you know, John, the perfect example of that, I covered the war, is Bosnia, because at the inception of the war in Bosnia, the Europeans tried to handle it, and it was another disaster.
John Mearsheimer
Exactly, and in came the United States and NATO. But Chris, the point I want to make to you that builds on what you were saying earlier is that one way to deal with those centrifugal forces is to create an external threat. In other words, if you have an external threat, that forces everybody to come together. This is the way Sam Huntington used to think about the world. Sam Huntington understood full well, I’ve talked to him about this back in the day.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, I knew him too. I never bought his thesis, but yes.
John Mearsheimer
Well, I disagreed with Sam on all sorts of issues, especially regarding the clash of civilization, but he was a good friend of mine. And even though I think he was wrong on a lot of issues, he was a brilliant man. But anyway, putting all that aside, Sam believed that the United States was a society that relied very heavily on immigration.
And when you have a society that relies on immigration, you have to work overtime to assimilate everybody, to integrate them into a unified whole. And he was not against immigration. He just thought it was a difficult problem. And there were powerful centrifugal forces in the United States that worried him. And he believed that the United States needed an external threat.
And if you go back and look at his writings, when the Cold War ended, Sam was portraying Japan as the next great threat to the United States. And you want to remember, in 1987, when Paul Kennedy wrote his famous book, that was sort of the high watermark for the Japanese economy. That’s when I think the Japanese economy was like two thirds the size of the American economy, if my memory’s correct.
But Japan looked like it was our serious competitor moving forward and Sam went to great lengths to hype up the Japanese threat because he thought we needed an external threat to hold us together and then that didn’t work out. It was quite clear by the early 90s that Japan was not going to fit the bill and that’s when he wrote…
Chris Hedges
Well, their economy tanks.
John Mearsheimer
Yes, so what did he do? He wrote Clash of Civilizations. And what’s the main message in Clash of Civilizations? That we have two threats out there, Islam and China, right? Because he believed we needed an external threat. And what I’m saying to you is that same basic logic, I believe, is at play to some extent in Europe today.
I think the elites understand that the more you hype the Russian threat, the more your publics are willing to ante up and pay for a defense bill but furthermore, the greater the incentives for the various countries of Europe to work together. And most importantly, maybe if you hype the threat enough, you can convince the Americans to stay in Europe and remain as an American pacifier. So there’s a great, go ahead.
Chris Hedges
How much does this historical period replicate the years before World War I?
John Mearsheimer
The problem with the period before World War I, or the problems there, mainly centered around Germany and its great power, or the immense power it controlled in Europe at the time. And World War I was really all about, initially, Britain, France and Russia fighting against Imperial Germany. And they had formed a balancing coalition.
This was the triple entente before the war. And the Germans saw that balancing coalition as a threat to them. And they launched World War I in August of 1914 as a preventive war against that balancing coalition. That’s how I read it.
Chris Hedges
But let me just ask, as you know more than I do, but World War I was triggered by the folly of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when they went down and got shellacked in Belgrade by the Serbs, and they had an alliance with Germany.
But my understanding is that the Germans were very wary of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and did not want to be drawn into a conflict, but because of that alliance, and this is Barbara Tuchman’s whole thesis, the machinery started rolling and they couldn’t stop it.
John Mearsheimer
Yeah, just to elaborate on what you said, there’s the triple entente, that’s France, Britain, and Russia. And then there’s Germany. And Germany has two allies. This is the triple alliance. Italy is one ally, and Austria-Hungary is the other ally. And the Germans feel like they’re badly outnumbered. They’re in a really wicked situation. They’ve got a two-front war problem.
They have not much in terms of allies. And the Italians, by the way, don’t come into the war until 1915. And when the Italians do come into the war, they switch sides. They don’t fight with the Germans, they fight against the Germans. But anyway, all this is to say the Austro-Hungarians matter greatly.
So what’s happening in the Balkans to the Austro-Hungarians who are in trouble in the Balkans matters greatly to the Germans because the Germans are fearful that they’re going to lose their one ally. Not a great ally by any means, but an ally. An ally in a world where you’re arrayed against three great powers.
So the Balkans and what the Austro-Hungarians are doing in the Balkans matters greatly to the Germans. And the fact that the Germans feel they’re being surrounded by the Triple Entente and their one ally is in trouble in the Balkans, those two things, I think, worked together in 1914 to cause the Germans to launch a preventive war.
But anyway, your question was, how does this compare with the situation today? First of all, the situation today focuses on East Asia. It doesn’t focus on Central Europe. If you talk about what Europe looks like today, Europe does not look like the period before World War I, it does not look like the period before World War II, and it does not look like the Cold War.
And by the way, Chris, I would point out to you that from 1783, when we get our independence, 1783, up until roughly 1917, excuse me, 2017, the end of the unipolar moment, the center of the world for the United States, the most important area of the world for the United States strategically and economically was Europe.
Even though the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, we had a Europe first policy. Europe was the most important area of the world for us. That changed in 2017. Europe is no longer very important to the United States. This is why Trump can talk about destroying NATO. Europe just doesn’t matter that much to us. Why? Because there’s no Soviet Union, there’s no Nazi Germany, there’s no Imperial Germany. There’s no threat there. The threat from our perspective is in East Asia.
So for the first time in our history, we face a serious problem in East Asia. Imperial Japan was not that big a problem. We could go into that. China is a completely different story. This is a formidable power. Really, we’ve never seen anything like this when you look at the key building blocks of military power, the size of the population, the wealth, the ability to develop sophisticated technologies may be better than we do.
So the competition today is between the United States and China, and it’s in East Asia. So that’s the big difference. The similarity is that the competition in East Asia is remarkably dangerous. It’s just very important to understand that Chinese are not a status quo power.
The Chinese want Taiwan back. You can argue that’s good or bad, that they have a right to take it back or they don’t, whatever, doesn’t matter. They want it back and we don’t want to give it to them. Furthermore, the Chinese believe the South China Sea is theirs. There’s this 10 dot line or nine dot line that marks off what part of the South China Sea belongs to them. And we don’t buy that.
We think these are international waters. Furthermore, there’s the East China Sea and there are these rocks, tiny islands, if you want to call them that, in the East China Sea that the Japanese now basically control that the Chinese say does not belong, that those rocks do not belong to Japan, they belong to us. And furthermore, we want to control the East China Sea as well as the South China Sea. And the United States and the Japanese say you can’t do that.
Regardless of who’s right or wrong on all these issues, the fact is that you have significant flashpoints in East Asia, a very dangerous place. And we lose sight of that today because our focus is on Ukraine and Europe and on the Middle East. And of course, the focus on the Middle East is because the United States is joined at the hip with Israel.
But I say that the Middle East and Europe, as dangerous as those places are, are nowhere near as dangerous as East Asia. So what you have, Chris, in East Asia today is a situation that’s not altogether that different than the situation you had in Europe before World War I.
Chris Hedges
I wanted to ask, because one of the things that struck me in leading, I think, up to both World War I and World War II is the breakdown of, or the lack of any kind of international agreements, the lack of any kind of international law, which of course Trump, especially with Gaza, has just shredded. That was kind of what I wanted to ask about is that is there a similarity there that there’s a kind of Hobbesian lawlessness on the international level?
John Mearsheimer
The truth is, before World War I in Europe, you had a huge amount of economic interdependence. If you sort of look at Europe before World War I, right, you have this intense security competition, which I described before, with the Triple Entente on one side and the Triple Alliance on the other side.
And side by side with that security competition is a great deal of economic interdependence. These potential, these rivals, these countries that could end up in a war with each other are trading with each other. And by the way, they continue to trade with each other when the war breaks out. Furthermore, you have the beginnings of international law, significant amounts of international law and the growth of institutions before World War I.
But the fact is that the security logics, the power competition overwhelms the economic cooperation. And I’m choosing my words carefully here. When you have all this economic interdependence, what you’re saying in effect is you have a great deal of economic cooperation. And furthermore, you do have rules and laws.
Back then, not as many as you do now or as even you had during the Cold War, but you had rules, you had institutions, you had economic intercourse, which involved cooperation. But side by side with that, you had this wicked security competition that led to World War I. That’s the problem.
If we took Donald Trump out of the equation and you put Barack Obama or Bill Clinton or Dwight Eisenhower in the White House, and they paid attention to allies, they paid attention to international law the way you and I would expect them to do, you would still be faced with the fact that you have this security competition. It would still be there.
The question that you have to ask yourself is if that security competition really heats up and it looks like you might have a war between China on one side and the United States, Japan, Australia, whatever, on the other side, are economic considerations, is all that economic interdependence that still exists and is international law or international institutions and international law gonna work to prevent that power competition from spiraling into a war.
And I think that they may help on the margins, but not that much. And the best you can hope for in these situations is that cooler heads prevail. And of course, this is what scares everybody about Donald Trump, by the way. You know, people often ask me, what do you think the Russians or the Chinese think about Donald Trump?
And I always say that I think they’re perplexed by him the way almost all of us are. It’s just hard to believe that an American president acts the way Donald Trump does. But I said that secondly, I think they’re worried that his erratic behavior will lead to a war that they get dragged into. And this gets back to talking about East Asia.
If you think about Taiwan, you think about South China Sea, East China Sea, these are dangerous flashpoints. And if a crisis breaks out over one of those flashpoints, and you have Trump in the White House, it makes you very nervous because he does things that don’t seem to make sense sometimes.
And he’s not exactly the person you would want in the White House when a major crisis breaks out in East Asia. I mean, just think about the Cuban Missile Crisis. You know, the more time has gone by and the more I’ve read about the Cuban Missile Crisis, I just say to myself, thank goodness we had John F. Kennedy in the White House at that point in time.
I mean, Kennedy was a cool head. He understood full well that he had to figure out how to get out of this mess without blowing the world up. And he had a number of advisors who were willing to pursue policies. Curtis LeMay, there’s a name from the past.
Chris Hedges
Curtis LeMay. Well, I mean, he was insane. I mean, he wanted to start bombing, nuclear bombing.
John Mearsheimer
I think that most of Kennedy’s advisors were remarkably hawkish during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But Kennedy, much to his credit, figured out a way to walk away without precipitating a war. And the question is, if a crisis breaks out in East Asia, do you want Donald Trump in the White House? That’s the question. And this is, think, the question the Russians and the Chinese ask themselves.
Chris Hedges
I want to ask about Davos because he had that great speech by Carney, which people should all read or listen to. But Trump backed down. I mean, he said he wouldn’t take Greenland by force. His speech was, as usual, very meandering and filled with all sorts of factual inaccuracies and non sequiturs and trumpeting about his racial heritage and God knows what else. But both on the tariffs and on Greenland he seemed to retreat.
John Mearsheimer
I think he clearly retreated. I mean, first of all, he said at the start of the Davos meeting that — or his talk at Davos — that he was not going to use force to take Greenland. He was not going to do that. So that was backing down. And then he subsequently said that he did not feel that he had to buy or acquire Greenland through peaceful methods or peaceful means.
So he backed off on that dimension too. And now he’s talking about working out some sort of arrangement with the Danes, with the Europeans, and with the Greenlanders, that gives him a bit more room to maneuver in Greenland, to act unilaterally in Greenland, to put it bluntly.
But the fact is, if you look at the 1951 treaty, he had a great deal of maneuver room to act unilaterally in Greenland anyway. And if there was any serious threat to Greenland in the future from Russia or China, and there is not now, but if there was a threat from China or Russia in the future, the Danes and the Europeans and the Greenlanders would work with us.
It wouldn’t be a problem. So I think if you look at where we are, basically gone back to the 1951 treaty, maybe with a few bells and whistles added. But he’s completely backed down. And I believe, by the way, the reason he backed down is that there was real opposition to doing this in the United States as well as in Europe.
He can read the public opinion polls. And many people in the foreign policy establishment, not just people on the Democratic side, but on the Republican side as well, were saying that this is a cockamamie idea. I mean, we’re going to go to war against Denmark. This is probably our closest ally in NATO, profoundly loyal to the United States.
And we’re to go to war against them to conquer Greenland? And then there were all these discussions in the media about the military disobeying unlawful orders, which really revolved around Greenland. And I think all these factors just added up to say that this is not a good idea, and Trump backed off. And as you know, as well as I do, Chris, Trump is a bully, right?
If you show any weakness, he’ll walk all over you. And in this case, I think collectively lots of people in the foreign policy establishments in both the United States and in Europe made it clear to him that this was a bad idea to put it mildly.
Chris Hedges
Let’s just end with, you know, where these policies that the Trump administration is embracing, where they could lead us. I mean, we’re seeing a domestic evisceration of the rule of law and having lived in, covered countries like Pinochet’s Chile and these ICE, masked ICE goons are unfortunately intimately familiar to me. Where are we headed if there aren’t any impediments to this Trumpian vision?
John Mearsheimer
Well, when you take into account that he’s just reached the one year point of his presidency, today is January 23rd, and he came into power January 20th of last year. That means he has three more years left. And when you think of all the damage he’s done in the first year, it’s positively frightening to think about where we will be here in the United States in three more years. He can do a great deal more damage.
You know, I was saying when we were talking about his foreign policy views that he doesn’t like institutions, he doesn’t like international law, he likes to act unilaterally, he views himself as a benign dictator. I think those basic attitudes apply at the domestic level as well. He does not believe that laws and rules apply to him.
He’s above laws and rules. In terms of institutions, he has hardly any respect for the judiciary. He has hardly any respect for Congress, certainly for the media. He’s constantly talking about threatening the mainstream media by suing them, doing everything he can to undermine them.
And I think that liberal democracy is under threat all over the world today. And I think if you look at the situation in the United States, there’s no question that liberal democracy is under threat. He’s, I think, a very dangerous individual.
It’s just hard to say where this will all end up. By the way, it’s also hard to say where this will all end up internationally. I mean, where’s NATO going to be three years from now? It’s hard to imagine it’ll still be there. But at the same time, maybe something will happen.
International politics is a very complicated business. And even at the domestic level, it could be the case, Chris, that the economy tanks in a really serious way. There’s a major economic crisis within the next year. And that forces Trump to change his behavior in all sorts of ways. He’s just defanged in lots of important ways. The threat that he now represents to liberal democracy goes away.
Chris Hedges
And yet, John, I covered the hyperinflation that precipitated the war in Yugoslavia. Hyperinflation precipitated the rise of fascism in Germany and Weimar. An economic crisis doesn’t necessarily weaken the regime, but it can solidify fascist movements.
John Mearsheimer
Absolutely. I wouldn’t disagree with that for one second. By the way, if you sort of think about why Trump has such a wide base of support in the United States, despite the fact that he pursues policies that people like you and I find antithetical to basic American values, it’s in large part because there is a huge slice of the American population that feels that it was left behind economically and even socially, in terms of social values, and that the elites just didn’t care about them.
And Trump, you know, capitalized on this powerful sense of resentment. And the end result is, you could move in a rightward direction. I’d also point out Tucker Carlson talked to Charlie Kirk before Kirk died, not long before Kirk died. And Kirk said to Tucker Carlson that he should understand, he, Tucker, should understand that Mamdami’s base of support in New York City is not that different at all from Trump’s base of support.
And what Kirk was saying to Tucker Carlson was, there are a huge number of people who are profoundly dissatisfied from an economic point of view, but even from a social point of view, the direction that the United States is heading in. If you live in a city like New York, or you live in a city like Chicago, making ends meet, putting a roof over your head, putting food on the table for lots of people is almost impossible. And these are people who support Trump, and they also support Mamdami.
And what I’m saying to you is, if you support Mamdami, who’s a self-declared socialist, you’re moving in a leftward direction. But if you support Trump, you’re moving in a rightward direction. So again, it’s just very hard to tell where this all ends up. If we did have a really serious economic problem down the road, are right-wing forces gonna prevail or left-wing forces?
Chris Hedges
Well that was the 1930s and we were saved. I mean Europe and in many cases Spain, Italy, Germany of course, you know Hungary, these all went to the right and we, because of powerful union movements, were saved from fascism.
John Mearsheimer
I’d put a slightly different twist on it too. If you look at what happens in Europe, the real divide when liberalism begins to fail, the real divide is between fascism and communism. Communism is the left, fascism is the right. And by the way, we had a significant communist movement in the United States. And we also had powerful, not so powerful, but we had emerging fascist forces in the United States, right?
But in much of the world, liberal democracy was discredited. Look at Germany, Weimar, right? The Weimar Republic, liberal democracy, discredited, and they went to the right. But there was a significant communist movement inside of Germany. Could have gone right or left. The Soviets, of course, went left. Excuse me, liberal democracy was under threat back then and you had a left wing and a right wing alternative and I think in very important ways that’s the direction we’re moving in. And by the way…
Chris Hedges
Well, it was a bankrupt liberalism. I mean, it was a liberalism that created a kind of paralysis that, I mean, after the 1929 crash, the Weimar government revoked unemployment insurance to pay back the loans. In many ways, the population was abandoned. There were certainly, the working class in the same way the working class has been abandoned here. And there’s that, I can’t remember who wrote it, somebody wrote that, you know, fascism is always a product of bankrupt liberalism.
John Mearsheimer
I had not heard that. Also, but you know, the 1929 shock, economic shock, which of course led to the Depression played a key role. The problem with Weimar, not to get too deep into history here, but the problem with the Weimar Republic is that it was created after World War I when Germany was under siege.
Chris Hedges
Maybe it was you, I don’t know. I think it was Fred Stern.
John Mearsheimer
And to put it in simplistic terms, it got off to a terrible start. And it was beginning to get its sea legs by the late 1920s. And then the Depression hit in 1929. And of course, Hitler comes to power on January 30, 1933. So you can see the Depression in ‘29, Hitler comes to power in ‘33.
Chris Hedges
Well yeah, that’s right. Well, the Nazis were polling in the single digits in 1928, Nazi party.
John Mearsheimer
Exactly, exactly. But all this raises the question that if you have some sort of major league economic shock in the United States, where do we go? You see this, by the way, if you look at the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party is split between progressives who want to move to the left and the mainstream, which wants basically to maintain the status quo.
And then if you look at the Republican Party, inside the Republican Party, you have all sorts of forces that want to move further to the right, and then you have a big chunk of people who want to maintain the status quo. So you could see that the forces are present in the American political system, should a shock occur, to push either leftward or rightward.
Chris Hedges
Great. Thanks, John.
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