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As Donald Trump’s administration continues down the path of self destruction, it is taking the rest of the American population down with it. The abandonment of international allies, treaties and norms, the political scientist Stephen Walt argues, will slowly ostracize the United States and give rise to a multipolar world order which will leave the country behind.
Walt, the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of multiple books, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle what this decline may look like and how Trump’s policy choices are not unlike past empires in history.
The decline, Walt and Hedges emphasize, is multifaceted. On the one hand, Trump is motivated by personal gain for himself and his family, and on the other, petty grievances towards countries once considered allies. This policy pattern will isolate the U.S. as Walt says, “we’re already starting to see lots of countries who are currently accommodating the United States in the short term also looking to find ways to de-risk, to reduce their vulnerability, to create alternative structures to one in which the United States has the central role. This isn’t going to leave the United States completely isolated. We’re too big for that. But it’s going to mean a long-term diminution in American wealth, power, influence, and security.”
International politicians, such as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, have already begun to understand that rather than groveling to a toxic Trump regime, standing up for your citizens can ultimately pay greater dividends. “You are going to see other leaders realize that kowtowing to Trump doesn’t get you any good, may prompt something of a nationalist backlash in your own country as well. And that in fact, taking a more principled position, defending your own country’s interests, even in the face of American pressure actually will pay political benefits,” Walt explains.
Host
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Thomas Hedges, Milena Soci, Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges
The Trump administration reflects a sharp break with past U.S. administrations, not only in how it wields power at home, but how it wields power abroad. Not only do its domestic policies increasingly resemble those of all authoritarian states or dictatorships, but its foreign policies are also those chrematistic of authoritarian states led by all-powerful demagogues.
These policies are not strategic but mercenary. They seek short term gain over long term stability. They prey on weaker states, even if these states are long-time allies. The political scientist Stephen Walt calls this “predatory hegemony.”
Predatory hegemony demands tribute and obsequious deference, including the sycophantic flattering of Donald Trump, as well as deals that enrich him and his family personally, in order to do business. Because countries are bound by trade agreements and economic dependence to the U.S., this predatory hegemony works in the short term. But in the long term it is disastrous for the U.S. pushing countries into other orbits, most notably China, and leaving the U.S. isolated and reviled.
Even great powers need allies. Trump is shedding them one-by-one, imploding not only the world order set in place after World War II, but the financial stability, domestic tranquility and power of the United States itself.
Joining me to discuss the new world order rising from the ashes of the old is Stephen M. Walt, the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. Professor Walt is the author of Taming American Power, Origins of Alliances, Revolution and War and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which he wrote with the University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer.
You spoke before Trump took office, kind of reflecting on where we were headed. I think you were pretty much correct on most issues. What is it that has surprised you over the last year?
Stephen Walt
Well, there’s several things that surprised me. First, I didn’t expect Trump to do as much in foreign policy as he’s done. I thought he would be focusing on all these domestic items. And certainly there’s been sweeping changes, they’re attempting the most radical transformation of American politics since the Civil War, maybe ever.
But I thought that would be where most of the focus would go and that foreign policy would be left to one side. But instead, you’ve seen an equally ambitious attempt to radically transform America’s foreign relations and done with surprising speed. So that surprised me.
I was also surprised, of course, by the complete absence of any Republican Party pushback on all of this, either at home or abroad, particularly given that a fair number of Republicans had been sort of traditional internationalists who wanted the United States to be engaged to exercise lots of global leadership. And they’ve been willing to go along with Trump’s wrecking ball operation here.
Chris Hedges
Well, there’s a kind of symbiotic relationship, the way he treats people at home — ICE, ignoring the rule of law, 96 court orders in the month of January against the operations in Minneapolis, which they just ignore, Pam Bondi. But it’s also reflected in the way he treats allies overseas, particularly in Europe. There does seem to be a kind of a uniformity into how he views power both abroad and both domestically.
Stephen Walt
Yeah, I think that’s right. And it goes really back to, I think, Trump’s basic worldview, the same worldview he exhibited throughout his business career, a sort of contempt for rules, contempt for laws. You can get away and you can do whatever you can get away with. A view that you’re either weak or strong. You’re either the victim or you’re the winner here.
And that’s certainly how he has treated domestic opponents — belittling them, threatening them in a variety of ways, the way he’s gone after media organizations, universities, anyone really who suggests that maybe he’s wrong about something. But that’s also been the way he’s dealt with the outside world. And what’s different about Trump as opposed to, I think, every previous American president is that he’s engaged in these predatory acts, not just towards adversaries, where you can understand you want to always try and get the better of a genuine rival.
Even when you’re cooperating with a rival, say in arms control, you’d kind of like to get a deal that’s favorable to you. But Trump’s done that with just about everybody, including some of America’s closest allies, where all of these relationships are supposed to be structured and arranged so that the United States is getting the lion’s share of the benefits and extracting as many concessions as possible on a wide range of issues using the leverage that we’ve built up over 75 or 80 years. And that’s quite new. We really haven’t seen that before by an American president.
Chris Hedges
It doesn’t work in… it works in the short term, as I said in the introduction, but that’s also true for his businesses. I mean, he was pretty washed up by the time he became a reality television star. I actually wrote a book called America: The Farewell Tour and it was written out of the Trump Casino in Atlantic City.
And this was before Trump announced that he was running. But by the time I got there, half of the casino was mothballed. There were rodents running around the halls. People were shooting up in the elevators. Eventually went into bankruptcy. And of course, there he didn’t pay his contractors. He took out loans he couldn’t pay back that he had to renegotiate. That bankruptcy kind of dogged him throughout his career, his sham universities, which kind of reminds me of the sham Gaza peace plan.
But in terms of foreign policy, you make the point that because countries are inextricably bound, especially through the world financial system, they’re captive at this moment to US hegemony and US power, but eventually blowback is coming.
Stephen Walt
Right and it’s very similar. I like the comparison to his business career because one of the things that happened, of course over time, was that more and more other businessmen didn’t want to do any business with the guy because he was so unreliable. Not only did a lot of his schemes not work out, the casino business being one, but he was just an unreliable partner.
He would promise you one thing and then never pay you, never deliver, not pay back loans promptly, tie you up in endless amounts of litigation. And therefore, eventually he just got the reputation of being someone you didn’t want to do business with, at which point he had to become a reality TV star and then, of course, get into politics, the one place where you can actually get away with that kind of behavior for a relatively long period of time.
I think you see the same problem arising in the international arena. There are countries that will make concessions. They will try to structure deals. We’ve seen that already. But of course, every time he goes back and tries to renegotiate it, “We agreed to do something six months ago, but now I want to change the terms. I’m going to raise the tariffs again. Maybe I’ll lower them if you’re nice to me, et cetera.”
Eventually, even countries that would like to work with the United States in a constructive fashion will decide it’s just not worth the risk. It’s just not worth it to try and deal with such an unreliable partner. And they will take arrangements that might be suboptimal with others or might be not as desirable as what the United States is offering with others because those other parties are going to actually keep their promises, the deal will actually stick.
And I think, again, we’re already starting to see lots of countries who are currently accommodating the United States in the short term also looking to find ways to de-risk, to reduce their vulnerability, to create alternative structures to one in which the United States has the central role. This isn’t going to leave the United States completely isolated. We’re too big for that. But it’s going to mean a long-term diminution in American wealth, power, influence, and security.
Chris Hedges
This is from the article you wrote, “The Predatory Hegemon,” in Foreign Affairs. And you write about the unipolar era, this is with the collapse of the Soviet Union, you say,
“the United States succumbed to hubris and became a rather careless and willful hegemon. Facing no powerful opponents and convinced that most states were eager to accept American leadership and embrace its liberal values, U.S. officials paid little attention to other states’ concerns; embarked on costly and misguided crusades in Afghanistan, Iraq, and several other countries; adopted confrontational policies that drove China and Russia together; and pushed to open global markets in ways that accelerated China’s rise, increased global financial instability, and eventually provoked a domestic backlash that helped propel Trump to the White House.”
So all the seeds were set before Trump. He may have accelerated it, but explain a little bit about that hubris. And that, of course, saw the expansion of NATO with the confrontation with Russia.
Stephen Walt
Right. So hubris is, I think, the perfect word for it. People have to remember back to the 1990s, the end of the Cold War, the sense that the United States and its Western partners had won this historic victory and that all the forces of history were now lined up in our favor. The wind was at our back. Democracy was the only game in town.
You think about Frank Fukuyama’s famous article about the end of history, suggesting that liberal capitalist democracy was really the only way, the only way to organize a society. We had the answer. Think of Tom Friedman’s book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which basically says American capitalism is the model that everyone else is going to have to converge on.
China, if it wants to develop, is going to have to become a democracy as well as its middle class rises, etc. Other countries can’t wait to be closely allied with the United States, can’t wait to become democratic. And the only problem we have here is a few dictators in a few places who haven’t gotten the memo.
And we might have to deal with them in Iraq or Libya or elsewhere. But basically creating a truly global liberal order is going to be relatively easy because everybody kind of understands that’s where history is going. And that was the mindset of the 1990s and the aughts.
And I think it led us, first of all, to NATO enlargement without realizing that that was eventually going to provoke a direct confrontation with Russia. It certainly led us to promote democracy in lots of different places, including with the use of military force, such as in Iraq. And it also led us to promote globalization.
I’m a big believer in international trade, but of course we did it in a completely unthinking way, what my colleague Dani Rodrik likes to call hyper-globalization, and ignored the effects this was going to have on certain sectors of the labor market here in the United States, particularly manufacturing. And was also going to create a financial system that was more delicate and fragile, which eventually then crashed in 2008.
You put all of that together, a situation where a substantial number of Americans are not benefiting from globalization. People like me are benefiting. Wall Street bankers are really benefiting, but a lot of Americans aren’t. And you couple that then with a series of foreign policy failures, the costs of which are borne mostly by soldiers, but not by the elites.
And finally, an elite, Republican and Democrat, that doesn’t hold anybody accountable, either for the financial crisis or for these foreign policy debacles. And that created, I think, the conditions where an outsider with no prior political experience could come in, issue a critique against all of that, and suddenly be taken seriously. Add to that that this is a guy, Trump, who had spent 40 or 50 years learning how to market himself in very compelling ways, and you had the recipe for the 2016 election.
Chris Hedges
And it’s a point that I know you have made, but it’s an important one, is that although Trump comes out of that oligarchic class, he was never really accepted into the club, that inner sanctum. He was considered gauche, which he is, of course, crude, as you mentioned before, untrustworthy, so that his anger towards the elites is probably as one, authentic emotion, but that’s what connected. He’d never articulated, like Bernie Sanders, a particularly astute critique of power of the ruling class, both Republican and Democrat, but he hated it and much of the American public hates it too.
Stephen Walt
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I mean there’s several aspects of it. First of all, it’s the associating himself with the masses, with the people who are angry, which he does very effectively. Second, unlike Bernie, there are no really firm principles here. He has some prejudices, some beliefs, but he’s tactically very flexible, willing to move wherever he thinks voters want to go.
Famously this whole line in the 2016 campaign about how he was going to build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it. That was not something he’d been thinking about. He hadn’t been studying immigration. He just gave a speech at a rally one day and he noticed that that was the big applause line when he talked about building a wall. Everybody cheered and that became part of his speech ever after as well.
The final thing is that Trump is a very gifted rhetorician, not in a sort of elite fashion, but he never sounds smarter than his audience. He sounds like a guy you might meet in a bar and who’s got opinions and is entertaining and all of that. And I think that’s part of what has created this very powerful bond with the MAGA base.
He doesn’t sound like, you know, a guy who went to Harvard Law School, speaks in full paragraphs, etc. He speaks like an ordinary person, even though of course he’s anything but, if you know his background.
Chris Hedges
So let’s talk about the consequences. NATO kind of went rogue after the unification of Germany. I mean, it was designed as a defensive organization. Next thing you know, it shows up in Afghanistan and Iraq. But what are the shattering of these alliances going to do? I mean, that’s what he’s doing at the moment. You’re watching in shock as these European nations scramble to restructure their relationship with the United States. How is that going to play out?
Stephen Walt
Well, I think you’re going to see European countries starting to chart a much more independent course. They didn’t pick this fight. They would prefer to have a constructive relationship with the United States, but they’re being forced to now chart an independent course.
And I don’t think you can rule out, actually, this combination of concerns about Russia to the east and concerns about the United States on the other side of the Atlantic, driving European countries, at least many of them, closer together than ever before, overcoming some of the lingering nationalist divisions between Europe because they essentially have no options.
Second, over time, they’re going to be less dependent on the American economy and therefore less receptive to American requests. I always like to use the example that the Biden administration went to the Dutch lithograph firm [ASML], which makes these lithograph machines that are essential for making the world’s best semiconductor chips.
And we went and said, look, we’d rather you didn’t sell these to China. Now, [ASML] could make a lot of money selling those machines to China, but the Dutch went along with this because we were allies. They understood that we were concerned about it and they had some reservations about doing business with China themselves.
As Europe distances itself from the United States, if a subsequent American administration goes to a European country or a European firm and says, we think you should do this, we’d like you to do this because we’re allies, you’re not going to get the same kind of positive response. They’re going to have to make other arrangements. And we’re going to see the same thing happening in economic terms. In fact, I think that we’re already seeing beginning to develop.
Now what that means over the longer term, do you get a rapprochement between Europe and China? I don’t think so, but you’re going to see a warmer relationship than you might have seen otherwise. And you’re going to see other countries trying to find as many ways as possible to have options. That means American businesses won’t sell as many things to China, European, sorry, won’t sell as many things to China or to Europe.
Investors will be less willing to invest in the United States over time. Again, we won’t disappear off the planet by any means, but the American position is going to be less favorable than it’s been for most of our lifetime.
Chris Hedges
At the moment we have a stranglehold through control of the world financial system, don’t we?
Stephen Walt
Yeah, stranglehold might be a little bit too hard, a very, very pronounced influence, not just because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency and because the American economy is still enormous and people do want to do business, but also because most of the key nodes by which money is transferred from country to country are in fact controlled by the United States because at some point they have to go through an American financial institution, again, because dollars are the reserve currency, and that allows the United States to block those transfers or cut people out of this financial network.
This is a tactic we’ve used very effectively, say, with countries like Iran, essentially telling the rest of the world, if you do business with Iran, you’re not going to be able to do business at all with the United States. And most countries then make the calculation that their business in the US matters more than their business in Iran and they go along with it. So this is a powerful tool and it’s one of the things that other countries are now trying to create alternatives precisely because they don’t want the United States to have this kind of coercive leverage.
Chris Hedges
Well, they’ve weaponized it to shut two ICC judges who ruled or issued arrest warrants for the Former Defense Minister of Israel Yoav Gallant and Benjamin Netanyahu. They’ve used it against the UN Special Rapporteur of Palestine, Francesca Albanese, cutting them individually out of the financial system.
Stephen Walt
Right, right. And by the way, that’s exactly the kind of behavior you would expect to see out of a predatory hegemon. Whenever you’re in a position to make an example of someone, you do it because you want to discourage anybody else from taking a step that might be seen as opposition, taking a step that might slow you down a little bit.
Part of the strategy here is to discourage others from organizing against the United States, discourage them from rejecting American demands. So when someone is a thorn in the side, if you want to put it that way, you have to find a way to make an example of them.
Chris Hedges
One of the things that’s fascinated me about the Trump administration, and I think is indicative of the fact that they don’t understand how power — especially power outside the borders of the United States — works is how they have imploded the mechanisms of what I think Joseph Nye called soft power, USAID [United States Agency for International Development].
USAID, which does provide all sorts of humanitarian aid, is also weaponized as a form of control. You look at [Evo] Morales in Bolivia. They’re kind of democracy institutes, which USAID funds to go after leftist governments in Haiti, they wanted a new airport, and they said, well, you have to keep Cuba out of the Organization of American States. The closing of the Voice of America. I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe. If you wanted to hear Václav Havel, who was no cheerleader for US imperialism, you had to turn on the Voice of America.
But talk about how, I mean that’s fascinating because they don’t understand how power works, they’ve actually accelerated this process of decoupling themselves or diminishing our influence. They wield military power.
Stephen Walt
Yeah, I agree. Right, right. And they think very much in hard power terms. And I must admit, I find this especially surprising, particularly somebody like Secretary of State Marco Rubio ought to know better.
Some of the people in the Trump administration, I don’t think they know better, but Rubio does. And I think it’s just an indication of the degree to which he has sort of sold his soul for a position of influence. No one doubts that the United States has a mailed fist, right? That’s well understood around the world. But of course, people will tolerate that mailed fist if it’s got the velvet glove on it.
And if the United States is, for all its mistakes, seen as primarily a benevolent force, not just out for gaining every single advantage. And that’s a lot of what soft power, as my late colleague Joe Nye put it, was talking about, people who are willing to go along with you, willing to work with you, willing to partner with you in detail, because in some ways they admire what the United States stands for, they think its intentions are basically good, even if it sometimes makes mistakes.
They want to emulate it in certain ways. They see it as admirable, whether it’s doing impressive things like putting somebody on the moon or developing new technologies, or it’s being generous. It’s providing health aid in countries that need it. And these things don’t cost very much, right? USAID was remarkably inexpensive. American foreign aid is less than 1% of GDP. So we weren’t putting a lot of money into this and to sort of blithely cut all these things to withdraw from, I think, 60 plus international organizations.
These are all ways of symbolizing that we kind of don’t care about the rest of the world anymore. And we’re certainly not trying to do anything good for others unless they are closely politically aligned with us. All so we might help Viktor Orbán in Hungary get reelected.
We’ll certainly give a bailout or a credit line to Javier Milei in Argentina, because he’s one of us. But doing good things for the rest of the world, that’s not our business anymore. And this can’t help but undermine American influence. The last thing, of course, is what’s happening here at home. I mean, just imagine what it’s like to sit in Canada, sit in Europe, in other parts of the world and see what’s happening in Minnesota, see the sort of abject cruelty of some of what’s going on, seeing these ICE essentially goon squads, in some cases gunning down innocent Americans who are monitoring what they’re doing.
This does not make the United States look like a country you want to be more like. It doesn’t make the United States look like a country you might want to visit, et cetera. Tourism is down pretty dramatically here in the United States.
And finally, it, I think, weakens us geopolitically because we do have rivals in various parts of the world, and we no longer look like the sort of morally preferable alternative, which is saying something when you consider the character of some of our adversaries and rivals. In the article I mentioned a survey conducted by the Pew organization of looking at a bunch of countries and asking, do you feel more positively towards the United States, or do you feel more positively towards China?
The United States is still slightly ahead, but it’s almost even. And the report notes very clearly the trend is in China’s favor. And of course, it’s not surprising when you consider what the United States is doing to countries around the world, and also the image we’re projecting by what’s going on here at home.
Chris Hedges
So our two largest trading partners, it’s not China, it’s Mexico and Canada. And yet you’re watching the Trump administration also dynamite those relationships. I’m mystified as to why. Maybe you have an idea.
Stephen Walt
Well, no, I think it’s consistent with his worldview that first of all, trade deals are basically bad unless we get such a one-sided share of the benefits, it’s obvious it’s in our favor. I actually think Trump prefers a deal where we get more than others do, even if we could get more in absolute terms by being more generous with them.
And with respect to the United States, Canada and Mexico, remember Trump negotiated the current arrangements with them during his first term. And he declared at that time this was the greatest trade deal ever. It was a beautiful trade deal. All the usual hyperbole you get from him. He comes back in four years later, the deal hasn’t changed, but now, of course, it’s completely unacceptable. Now it’s a deal in which Mexico and Canada are ripping us off.
And again, he just wants to renegotiate this to try and get better terms. So what happens? Well, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who, by the way, owes his election to Trump’s policies towards Canada as well, has been very energetic in negotiating new trade arrangements for Canada to diversify away from the United States. A new trade deal with Indonesia. He’s gone to China to mend fences with Beijing.
He’s, I think, probably the leading voice advocating essentially a link up between the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12 nation Asian trade deal, linking that up with the European Union and with Canada. So over time, you’re going to see all of these countries, most of the medium powers, beginning to forge relationships that bypass the United States to the extent possible.
It’s not probably what they would prefer to do but if your alternative is dealing with an unreliable and predatory Trump administration or dealing with some other countries who share, in most cases, some similar values and are simply more reliable partners, you’ll go with the latter if you have the chance.
Chris Hedges
So Trump will throw out these, his “peace plan,” which is a joke, of course, although it was embraced, it mystified me, frankly, by the Security Council. He’s attempting on the one hand to destroy international bodies such as the United Nations. And rhetorically through his Board of Peace, he appears to be presenting an alternative, but it’s not a serious alternative.
Stephen Walt
I think that’s basically right. You should view most of these things roughly the same way one would view Trump University, that it’s a Potemkin arrangement. It’s clear that Trump doesn’t like international institutions. He sees all of these institutions as essentially rules that might constrain the United States.
And again, throughout his career, this is a guy who doesn’t like rules, doesn’t like anything that gets in the way of what he wants to do. So instead, he wants to create his own independent version of the Security Council, which has, of course, when you call it a Board of Peace and you include some of the other people who are on it, when you invite Vladimir Putin to join, when you invite Benjamin Netanyahu to join.
Chris Hedges
And [Abdel Fattah El-]Sisi in Egypt.
Stephen Walt
Yeah, exactly. This doesn’t exactly look like the usual set of diplomats and peace advocates you might expect to see. But I do think it is in part an effort to undercut the existing set of arrangements, which Lord knows have their limitations, have their problems, and are badly in need of reform. But this is not a serious solution.
Of course, it has this other element to it, which we haven’t talked about yet and that’s the fact that part of predatory hegemony is, of course, extracting benefits for Trump and his family themselves. I think it was the New York Times that reported that he’s made over a billion dollars just in his second term, just in the time he’s been back. Other countries have, you know, Qatar has gifted him a plane. The UAE bought into his crypto company as well.
To be a part of the Board of Peace, you have to pony up millions of dollars as well. All of this, I think, is eventually designed to also line his pockets in ways, again, we’ve never seen in all of American history.
Chris Hedges
You talk in the article about the adulation that he demands, this kind of fawning sycophancy. The secretary general of NATO kind of wins the prize for that. And although he has a kind of gargantuan ego, you also argue that it is itself a kind of consolidation of power.
Stephen Walt
Yeah, and it’s very much the kind of cult of personality you see in authoritarian regimes where you want to present the leader as this almost divine or magical figure, far superior to all other people, and therefore it makes perfect sense that they get to lead and do whatever they want because they’re wiser, smarter, more far-seeing, et cetera.
And the more you can get people to talk that way about you, the more it discourages anyone from pointing out all the flaws. It becomes the chorus. I think first of all, it does satisfy some deep psychological need, a very narcissistic demand for praise. And then you see that in these cabinet meetings where instead of going around and talking about the issues, you go around all these cabinet officials and they just talk about what a genius Trump is.
But the other part of this, of course, is foreign leaders thinking that if I come in, if I flatter him, if I’m really nice, if I sit in front of the cameras and say nice things about him, I’ll get a better deal. I mentioned in the article sort of the extreme version of this was when the head of FIFA [Gianni Infantino], the world soccer agency, gave Trump a Peace Prize, invented a Peace Prize and awarded it to him as well to, of course, win favor, to reinforce this idea that Trump is sort of a magical figure that can’t be criticized because he’s so great.
There is a downside to note about this. First of all, it doesn’t seem to work, right? As you said, Secretary General Mark Rutte of NATO has been notoriously obsequious in dealing with Trump and it doesn’t seem to be doing much good. So accommodating him doesn’t seem to win you a much long term favor.
But also a number of leaders around the world are discovering that standing up to him actually is politically beneficial. I mentioned Mark Carney got elected because he was the anti-Trump candidate in Canada and he gets a standing ovation in Davos for pointing out the obvious, that other countries have to start countering what the United States is doing. He’s very popular in Canada for this position as well.
Lula in Brazil saw his popularity go up when he got into a spat with Trump as well. So I think you are going to see other leaders realize that kowtowing to Trump doesn’t get you any good, may prompt something of a nationalist backlash in your own country as well. And that in fact, taking a more principled position, defending your own country’s interests, even in the face of American pressure actually will pay political benefits.
Chris Hedges
You draw a historical parallel, you say predatory hegemony is not a new phenomena. It was the basis for Athens relations with weaker city states in its empire, a dominion that Pericles himself, the preeminent Athenian leader of his time, described as tyranny. Athens, of course, destroyed its democracy as Thucydides points out with the consolidation and creation of empire. What are the historical parallels that you see?
Stephen Walt
Well, there are differences. I mentioned, obviously, Athens, and that’s a particularly instructive one, given that many Americans sort of look to Athens as this model that the United States is patterned on. The Chinese tributary empire of five to eight hundred years ago had elements of this, certainly the idea of paying a formal tribute, formally acknowledging the superiority of Chinese culture, things like that.
There’s disagreements among historians as to just how exploitative that empire was, but it had similar qualities. Many European colonial empires were explicitly designed to be exploitative. There was a certain amount of propaganda about how this was supposed to be beneficial for the colonies as well, but the reason you wanted those colonies was to extract wealth from them and not necessarily have to pay for it.
So that was clearly a part of it as well. There have been other examples you might point to, the Soviet control of Eastern Europe as an essentially predatory relationship as well. All of this was to say that it’s not a new phenomenon. It is, I think, a new phenomenon in American foreign policy that certainly the United States has engaged in predatory acts in the past, many in the developing world in the Western Hemisphere, but generally not towards our friends, not towards the countries that we regarded as our closest allies.
And even if you believed that, say, it was time to adjust America’s overseas commitments, it was time for Europe to do more on defense, et cetera, it was time maybe to step back a little bit from hyper-globalization, the right way to do that would have been in a cooperative fashion, to sit down and work out a new division of labor with our partners, new trade arrangements that were a little bit more stable, didn’t have quite the same consequences as what we’ve been doing for the previous 30 years, without essentially saying, no, we’re going to tear the whole thing up, and from now on, everything is about our getting the lion’s share of every deal, and if you don’t give us what we want, we’re going to punish you. That, I think, is proving to be quite self-defeating.
Chris Hedges
Can you talk about the assault on diplomacy? They’ve gutted the State Department. You have these… [United States Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve] Witkoff, this businessman and Trump’s son-in-law [Jared Kushner] negotiating. These people have no experience in the Middle East, culturally, historically, linguistically, illiterate in terms of the people they’re dealing with. It reminds me of [Joachim von] Ribbentrop or something, the former… Well, he wasn’t even selling champagne, he was selling fake champagne in Britain, becoming the Nazi foreign minister. But when your policy is just the mailed fist, what does it matter? But that’s another example of an assault by the Trump administration that has radically changed our relationship with the rest of the world.
Stephen Walt
Yeah, I think there’s no question. I mean, it’s a little bit tricky because in a sense, you could argue that diplomacy as a tool of American foreign policy has been in decline for a long time as the Pentagon has become more important, more influential in shaping policy where presidents have become more accustomed to relying upon military power as opposed to diplomatic solutions.
We weren’t thinking as much of the kinds of things like the Marshall Plan, which was a diplomatic arrangement of enormous benefit, or the Camp David Accords that Jimmy Carter negotiated, et cetera. We’re just going to solve the problem with drones or with the 82nd Airborne or with other tools of military power. And so even before Trump, we’re seeing a declining influence of the State Department.
And I might add more foreign policy authority being consolidated inside the White House as opposed to over in the State Department. Trump has accelerated that. In his first term, you had a sort of brief attempt to swing the pendulum back somewhat under Biden, but not very far, and a rather weak secretary of state, in my view, in [Antony] Blinken.
But then under the second Trump administration, like everything else, they’re going much faster, much farther. So, lots of people leaving the State Department, many ambassadorships left empty, withdrawing from 60-plus international organizations that are all involved in helping sort of set the rules and regulations by which global interactions occur.
And as we leave those, right, other countries aren’t, right? China is not leaving those organizations. If anything, they’re more active than ever, which of course further enhances their influence. And I think this betrays Trump’s sense that he just hates the elite that he thinks has been running the country forever. He doesn’t trust them. He always likes to blame the deep state for all of the problems he’s had.
They wouldn’t do what he wanted in his first term. They’re the ones who got him impeached. So he doesn’t want to have anything to do with them, which is why he appointed a secretary of state who will do what he’s told and not stand up to Trump in any significant manner. And that’s why, of course, he’s relying on a series of amateurs who are closely linked to Trump who will also do what they’re told in various ways.
So you’re dealing with extraordinarily difficult conflicts like Ukraine and Gaza and some others, what to do about Iran, and it’s basically being done by people with very little expertise and where the people who do know a lot about these regions and have some idea what might be required to actually advance a genuine political or diplomatic solution are marginalized or ignored, which is, I think, why you’re not seeing anything that actually looks like a genuine political solution. You have the usual kind of Potemkin stuff that Trump will talk about for a week or two and claim is the greatest peace deal ever. And then we’ll move on to something else and the conflict will go on.
Chris Hedges
Before I ask you the consequences, you talk about, which I thought was a really interesting point, that Trump often bluffs and that when his bluff is called, it loses its power to coerce. You say if the United States does withdraw its military commitments, however, the leverage it once had over its former allies would evaporate. Either way, using the promise of American protection to extract a never-ending series of concessions is not a sustainable strategy.
Stephen Walt
Yeah, yeah, this idea really hadn’t occurred to me until I was in the middle of writing the piece. But I began to realize that, again, the United States is taking advantage of relations that we’ve built up over many years and where other countries, particularly our allies in Europe and Asia, have become accustomed to American protection, to the sense that the United States was going to be the first responder if something happened, if they got into serious trouble.
And because they rely upon this, in the short term, you can threaten to say, if you don’t do what I want, we’re not going to honor Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. Maybe we’ll leave the organization entirely. You can do that once or twice, but of course, if being in that relationship is good for the United States too, if we get benefits from being in NATO, which we do, you can’t deliver on the threat.
And once you’ve threatened that half a dozen times and never done it, it starts to lose its power. It’s a little bit like a parent who keeps threatening to punish a child but never delivers. Eventually, the child understands the threat is meaningless. But by the same token, if you do evoke the threat, all right, fine, we’re leaving NATO, then of course you’ve lost the leverage entirely.
If these relationships are still in America’s interest, and I think they are, then in a sense the power to extract an endless series of concessions by constantly invoking the protection the United States has helped provide is not going to work. It’ll be a failing asset.
Chris Hedges
So where are we headed? We’re definitely not headed in the direction that Thomas Friedman and Fukuyama predicted. And I don’t see many impediments internally, certainly not within the Congress on Trump. What are the potential consequences?
Stephen Walt
Well, I think we are heading for a significantly more dangerous world. I think we’re heading for a world in which you’re going to have a series of competing power centers navigating around one another, not just a purely U.S.-China bipolar world, and where other countries are going to have to make their own calculations largely independent of American influence. And I think that will have, ultimately, some destabilizing effects.
We’re heading for a world that’s going to be somewhat poorer than it would be otherwise. Not saying it’s going to get poorer, that’s a possibility, but cooperative economic relations that might have been reached are going to be harder to reach. So we’re all going to live a little bit worse as a result. We’re going to be in a world that’s warmer and therefore more conflictive because, of course, they’re also retreating on the climate front. They’re not willing to work with anyone.
They’re actively destroying efforts to advance climate friendly policies here in the United States. And that will have then knock on effects on migration and poverty and other things in other parts of the world. We’re heading into a world that’s gonna be less healthy because we’ve withdrawn most of our public health programs around the world, which means others will be sicker in other parts of the world.
And some of those sicknesses will be more likely to get to the United States where we won’t be prepared because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been gutting public health here in the United States. So there’s nothing really positive I see as you look out ahead on all of this. And it’s why I end the article by saying, the sooner we abandon predatory hegemony, the better. But I can’t claim to be optimistic that this administration will read that and reverse course.
Chris Hedges
It also consolidates authoritarianism itself.
Stephen Walt
Yeah, there’s no question that Trump likes to work with strongmen. That’s his image of what proper leadership is. He’s not happy with democracy. Democracy is the kind of thing where voters can vote you out of office. That’s terrible. I don’t want anything like that.
He’s very comfortable with people like [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan in Turkey and [Vladimir] Putin in Russia. And he claims he’s a great friend of Xi [Jinping], claims he got on very well with Kim Jong-un, and of course, they’ve already made it clear that the leaders in Europe that they most like are the ones who share a similar view like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, like the AfD [Alternative for Germany] in Germany.
So you suddenly have the United States, which for all of our hypocrisy and for all of our inconsistencies has at least rhetorically and sometimes genuinely promoted a general sense of liberty is a good thing, democracy is a good thing, people should be served by their governments, not the other way around, et cetera. We suddenly have that country, still very powerful, still very wealthy, still very influential, in a sense playing for the other team, right?
And my great hope, of course, is that reactions here in the United States will be sufficiently powerful to bring this particular experiment with illiberal democracy, with creeping authoritarianism to a close as quickly as possible and begin to shift things back towards a much more egalitarian society here where political power is not limited to the wealthiest, an increasingly wealthy set of tech bros and where the political institutions that need reform are reformed in a way that empowers people rather than elites.
Chris Hedges
Well, and as we speak, Trump and his allies are working overtime to subvert the midterm elections to prevent precisely that.
Stephen Walt
That’s right. Well, they’ve looked at the approval. They know what their approval ratings are and they’ve seen what has happened in a series of elections ever since he was inaugurated. It’s quite clear the American people do not like the direction they are taking the country. And therefore, you can’t let that view be expressed in a free and fair way in the midterms because that could have a constraining effect on what they’re able to do subsequently.
Chris Hedges
Great. Thank you very much. I want to thank Thomas [Hedges], Diego [Ramos], Max [Jones], and Sofia [Menemenlis], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
Photos
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Donald Trump
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