Ian Bremmer on the Risks America Poses to the World

I'm Tracy Bennett. I get to pick the word word every day, which is not as easy as it sounds. The fun fact about me is that I am descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem. New York Times games are made by people, like the ones you just heard from. Go to nytimes.com/games to start playing today. Over the past month there are two dominant stories in American form policy.

One of course is the war with Iran. The other is the much anticipated summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping of China.

“And I think if you look closely above these stories, you see that our foreign policies entered into a period of absolute and complete in coherence.”

Donald Trump said that the point of the war with Iran was to end the threat of the Iranian regime and to forever end the capability to get nuclear weapons.

They will never have a nuclear weapon. This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States armed forces.

Now if you look at what is being considered, it appears that neither policy is going to be achieved. So what are we doing there? What are we trying to achieve there now? And if you look at President Trump's entire time in politics, he's been committed to nothing so much as changing America's relationship with China.

“We can't continue to allow China to rape our country and that's what they're doing.”

It's the greatest theft in the history of the world. Continuing China, making sure we have power in that relationship, or we begin to detach from it. But if you look at our policy in our country and you look at that summit with China, or either of those things happening are we in fact moving in the opposite direction. American and Chinese people share much in common. We value hard work. We value courage and achievement. We love our families and we love our countries. Together we have the chance to draw on these values to create a future of greater prosperity cooperation and happiness.

There's much I disagree with in Donald Trump's foreign policy, but at the moment, there's just a reality that it's not clear what it is. It's not clear what he is trying to achieve or what he is simply settling for or reacting to. So I did do an episode looking at China, Iran, but also just trying to assess Donald Trump as a geopolitical force. And as a force that is remaking what America means and what its role is in the world. Ian Bremmer is a president and founder of the Asia Group in GZR Media. He's also the author of among other books, every nation for itself, what happens when no one leads the world.

As always, my email as recline show at mottimes.com.

Ian Bremmer, welcome to the show, as I look at the journey. So I was going to do like a direct into the news question on Iran, but I was reading your global risks report from beginning of the year.

“And it made me want to ask a bigger question first, which is, what key was the meaning of Donald Trump?”

What is he historically and geopolitically represent?

I would say he's first and foremost a symptom, not a cause of trends that have been coming in the United States for a long time.

American people that believe that for various reasons that the political system does not represent them adequately, that something about it is broken and so need someone who's going to shake it up, who isn't going to be an establishment figure. That you see that reflected in a whole bunch of structural policies like a lack of U.S. support for free trade and instead moving towards industrial policy and near shoring and ensuring you see it in a move away from more open borders, both in terms of response against illegal migrants, but also restrictions on legal migration.

I see it in an unwillingness of the United States to get as involved in foreign wars and a demand for much greater burden sharing and other countries paying for their own defense.

But then you have a separate group of things that have to do with Trump the individual where he puts himself above the country.

I mean, I was in Davos in January and wasted three days of my life. I will never get back on Greenland. That was not a thing for U.S. National Interest or foreign policy. That was purely vain gloriousness on the part of the U.S. President to be able to put his name and plant his flag on a territory that has some of the strongest alliances around it. That the United States could possibly rely on, but which don't matter to Trump because he's not getting what he personally wants.

“And there are many examples of the latter, which are not as important for where geopolitics are heading over 5, 10, 20 years.”

But they're really important for some of the conflicts that the U.S. happens to be in and how they're addressing them right now.

And of course, they also play an inordinate role in driving the headlines and the conversations that you and I frequently end up having. So I take that point that Trump is symptom not cause, but then he becomes cause. One of the ways you have described Trump, which I've not really heard many people say is as the generator of a political revolution, a kind of upending of the American state and the way it works and the expectations one should have of it on the level of FDR.

“So talk me through that comparison. Why FDR and what then is Trump's political revolution?”

Well, FDR was the last time you had a president in the United States that was truly interested in upending the checks and balances that existed on the executive and in transforming the nature of U.S. power as manifested by the government. And there were some things that he tried to do that he failed at like packing the Supreme Court to 15 members or like throwing out purging a number of the members of his own democratic party who had been democratically elected. But there were a number of things that he succeeded at like creating a professionalized administrative state to actually do the business of the government that was independent that was technocratic that did not exist before like the new deal.

The infrastructure of the country that was built that allowed a middle class and a working class to emerge in a stable way over several generations coming out of the gilded age and the great depression. Now, a political revolution does not have to succeed and a political revolution does not have to be for for goals that you or I happen to agree with. But the structural condition of a people that are demanding a political revolution that is something that will persist if it is not satisfied if it is not satiated.

And so what I see right now is President Trump driving a political revolution. He is attempting every day to end the checks and balances on the U.S. executive and you and I can come up with many examples of that.

Many of them he is failing at and it is very clear to me. I have a lot of confidence that he will not succeed in the political revolution that he will drive.

But it is also pretty clear to me that the American people are going to continue to demand some very significant revolutionary responses to a system that they believe is not responding adequately to them. And where that comes from is that the left is that the right is a new party, what happens to address and does it have to be a president who is maximally incompetent from a policy perspective or authoritarian in impulse.

“And I think that those are three descriptors of Trump that I think apply to a more extreme version with him than with any president of the American history.”

I'm less concerned about the revolution. It is a natural response to a system that's not seen as performing, but there are lots of reasons to be concerned about what President Trump is doing. The reason I thought the FDR framing was interesting is that what I think it's right is that FDR exerted tremendous power. Sometimes through in ways that followed American norms, sometimes in ways as you know they didn't, to build professionalized structures. This is what is always very interesting, but FDR. He's somebody who could have become a dictator. And what he creates is a highly professionalized administrative state.

He could have become or really asserted America as a global hegemon in the old style, but instead invests in things like the UN. And that is not to wipe away all the ways which we did use power.

The administrative state to them is a deep state, a tool of weaponized liberal control. The global order is a way that America is instead of being the power that acts upon the world is being restrained from using that power and taking advantage of. So there's been an extended answer to do something to both of those orders right to do something to the state to do something to the global order. So how do you describe the aim of Trump's political revolution if if after you're wanted to construct.

“Does Trump just want to destruct as he want to own? Does he want to transact? What is he trying to achieve? Well, that's why I focused on the narcissism that that he is above the law. It should don't apply to him.”

It shouldn't apply to people around him. He can have his own former personal attorney as the attorney general acting attorney general of the United States and he will weaponize the legal and judicial system. In ways that he perceives it was weaponized against him, but the reality is what he's doing is far, far beyond what we've seen before. Just as we've had corruption in the country and we end still persists across the political spectrum.

And yet what Trump is personally driving is unprecedented in American history. So I do think a lot of what he's trying to do is specific to his personal character.

I also think a number of the policies that he has been driving are policies that are broader in terms of the more revolutionary aspect of what the American people want. So for example, we come out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump was the one that basically cut the deal with the Taliban to get the Americans out of Afghanistan. Now, a lot of people will say, well, that was a bad deal and you gave away the store to them. But most Americans would say ending 20 years of a failed war with trillion and spent and hundreds of thousands of American lives disrupted to say nothing of what happened to the civilians in Afghanistan.

“Ending that was a positive thing. Trump got that done. Biden finally sort of got the troops out. They didn't like it when Biden actually finished that job. Well, a lot of people I think were very happy to have it over.”

So again, that's when Biden's approval writing jumped under 50 and ever recovered. I was feeling that interesting because everybody says people hated the war, but they didn't like the, they did not like what it looked like. They didn't like the American began to move the planes and the people hanging off of it and all of the rest, they wanted it to be cleaner. Let's say it looked like an America's leaving Saigon and the embassy moment. And so I understand that, but the broader point I'm trying to respond to here is that there are an awful lot of Americans that like the idea of the U.S. should stop with all of these foreign wars that are thousands of miles away and have very little to American interests.

And so if Trump goes to China and says, yeah, I'm not gonna, why do I care about giving military support to Taiwan, which is 9,600 miles away. Most Americans, not the establishment, not the Republican establishment, not the Democratic establishment, but most Americans would say, yeah, why are we doing that?

“When Trump kicks Zelensky out of the White House and says, you don't have the cards. Turns out he's wrong, but I think most Americans think we've done too much for those folks. Tax payer shouldn't be paying for that when you're not paying for me.”

We're Trump thing goes wrong, of course, is he had so much of the message at the beginning. He said, drain the swamp and yet it's much swampier now than it was before. He said, and the wars and now the United States is driving what could be a global recession directly because of him, I was just in the Dominican Republic yesterday and I had a meeting with all the CEOs and the president was there in front of me. And during the Trump and the president of the United States, he's the opposite of Trump. He actually really cares about extending democracy and increasing checks and balances and limits on leaders across Latin America.

That is what he wants to see happen. And I said to all of those, all of the leaders in the room, I mean basically 98% of their economy.

But I know you're all upset about the inflation that you're seeing right now and his approval ratings are down to about 55 on the back of that. They were at 70. I said, do not blame your government for that. You can blame my governments for that. Don't blame your government like literally Trump is looking for anyone to blame for this war that is exactly the opposite of how he was elected.

And so I do think that there was a lot of what Trump's initial agenda was about some of which he has stuck with, like actually securing the border with Mexico, much of which he has completely jettisoned that that reflects the sensibilities of what a political revolution would be in service of in the United States.

And they all kind of have to do with not that democracy doesn't work as a system, but rather that the American democracy has somehow gotten completely subverted by special interests.

It's coin operated. It's controlled by money. There's a two tier system. It doesn't apply to me and applies to other people. I can't get what I want for my kids. And by the way, I'm super sensitive to this because my mom was just like that when I grew up as a kid and she wasn't she didn't finish high school. She had a federal intelligence that was very supportive of her two kids, but it wasn't book smart. She read the inquire every weekend. And she a lot of the way she felt about her family. I will steal. I will cheat. I will do whatever is necessary to support them because I know the system is ranked.

“I think that there's an enormous amount of that that exists across the country today in 2026.”

So here's the question about this because I largely agree with that diagnosis and I also agree that American politics is tremendously corrupted by money. And that sense that the country, the system is not working for Americans. Our Americans write about that. And here's how I want to maybe steal many of the other side of this. A couple years ago, there is this big covering the economist. The base said, if you look at the American economy, it is crushing the economies of the rest of the world. You wouldn't want to be Europe rather than as you wouldn't want to be China where the medium disposable income is at $6,000. You want to be Russia trapped in this morass of a war with Ukraine. There's no one you would want to be rather than America.

But in this period, the vibe so to speak, they just get worse and worse and worse and worse.

This has been confusing for economists. If you look at most measures, we're not doing that bad inflation is not that high anymore. I mean the price level didn't go back down, but we're back to pretty normal levels of inflation. You have had income growth in the bottom half of the country. You have people acting in a way that does not reveal financial stress. They are spending. They're taking on debt. They are not defaulting on that debt. GDP growth is fine with the world leaders in AI. And then if you look at consumer sentiment, consumer sentiment about the country is worse than at the depths of the Great Recession.

There is something here about how bad everybody thinks this is. So how do you understand this sort of divergence between the ways that people would have looked at. Outputs of the system before, right? What is this supposed to be creating? American prosperity and American power and we're getting a lot of both.

And also people hate it and they feel like it is failing them as never before.

“So I'm really glad as for you, you framed the question that way because I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying.”

I also think that there are really good reasons that are legitimate for why Americans feel increasingly hard done by, but let's start with the big picture of the macro. The macro is that, so Xi Jinping recently met with Trump. And he said, we're in a through-sidgety's trap and want to void that because that usually leads to war. If the city is trapped so that everybody listening here knows what it's all about, it's that historically when you have a lead power and a system that's in decline and a rising power that's challenging it.

Frequently, I mean, the lead power is trying to hold on to power or hold on to its system, hold on to its advantages for too long.

“And the rising power is deeply unhappy about that and challenging challenging and most of the time historically leads to war, right?”

And that was the Chinese narrative. And my counter to that, first of all, is that Xi Jinping should not want to be perceived in the United States as the person that is saying that the US is in decline. Because if he comes to Washington and September and does that, he's going to get hammered. It's going to be very different than the coverage he gets when he says it in Beijing. It's going to be 100 times every focus. This is what he's saying to Americans is that we're in decline. Screw that guy, right?

So number one, he should want to do that, but also it is manifestly untrue that over the past 20, 30 years, the big structural changes in the world in terms of power is China's rising. The United States is not in decline, but American allies are declining. And they are declining because their productivity is down, their growth is down, their demographics are contracting, they're not investing in defense, they're not investing in technology.

And that is true, but you would not necessarily be happier or better taken care of as a citizen in Mississippi than you would be in lots of European states. Why? Because the social contract in Europe actually takes care of a lot more people. When you see this in terms of healthcare and you see this in terms of policing, you see it in terms of the educational system, maternity leave, paternity leave, all of these things. So let's recognize that the safety net in the United States does not has a lot more holes as a lot more freight, just does not act as effectively as it does in a lot of other countries in Canada, for example, in Japan and South Korea, for example, those things are important.

“Also, you have a system in the United States where Americans rightly perceive that if you have access to funds and network, your kids are treated completely differently, they have different opportunities.”

The American Dream is not for everybody, no matter how hard you work. I remember Operation varsity blues, and this was this, I mean, we barely is a blip in todays, it's like OJ Simpson, like oh, I remember when you had all of these parents that weren't wealthy enough to get their names on university buildings, so they couldn't buy their way in officially, so they had to buy their way in unofficially, by like, you know, sort of giving a bunch of money so that the kids could get to be on the lacrosse team to make sure they want to final place.

But it's like, of course it works that way, and we see that in terms of absolute inequality numbers in the economy, we see it in terms of the ability of class mobility, which, I mean, Americans are far less class mobile today than the Europeans are than the Canadians are, that's shocking.

I mean, like back in the 70s and 80s, the United States had some of the greatest class mobility in the OECD, and in just 40 years that turned completely on its head.

And then you have a couple of other things, which is not about the economy, but it's really important, which is the grievance-based nature of the U.S. political system, where you increasingly are electing leaders that are saying how much that they are, that you are being taken advantage of by X. And obviously Trump is the genius, the master at this, but when I saw Zora Mondani go outside Ken Griffin's apartment. And I mean, this isn't some Arab billionaire that doesn't spend any time in New York and doesn't spend any money in New York.

This is one of the guys that actually has spent the most in developing jobs and his company in this city.

And he stands in front of this guy's building and points to the apartment and says, this is the problem. That's not who America is. America as a country is supposed to be everybody builds up. Everyone has an opportunity. When you don't feel that way, you start demonizing these people. And another part of the problem is that if I look at the absolute top billionaires in the country right now, I look at Elon and I look at Jeff Bezos.

And I see, I look at Mark Zuckerberg and I see the absolute percentage of money that they spend on charity on public policy-related things.

I look at their interest in acting as stewards for humanity as it is today as opposed to making, you know, Mars, safe for humanity in some undefined future.

“That that that lack of stewardship that lack of belief in your fellow American, not to mention your fellow human on the planet is something that I think is driving a lot more anxiety and in some cases hate.”

And that's not to disagree with your initial question of, well, isn't America doing great. Shortest at the macro level. I'm strong manning of you. I have my own views on how America is doing. And I have to agree doing great. Just to be clear. But no, but I understand that that the way you put that from a macro perspective the US is doing great. The other obvious explanation here is inflation. And let me put the two versions of this to you to see what you think.

“So one answer to why the economic vibes in particular bad is just we've been in a period of inflation, right? That's what turned people on the Biden economy after the pandemic.”

And then particularly with the war and Iran and the tariffs, Trump is kept in a very salient, you see it on the gas station board, you see it in the news way, just driving up prices of basic things. And so maybe all this is just inflation, people hate prices going up, they hate it.

I mean, inflation the 70s and the 80s, it was just much, much, much higher, and people are much happier with the economy.

“So how do you see the prices story? Does that explain enough of this or not?”

The matters, in the sense that there's resencibious, like you mentioned the 70s, and most people don't remember when they couldn't afford a mortgage for their house, because, you know, the rates were like, you know, a 10%.

And so now when they all did higher, so when they were basically nothing, right, and then suddenly they hit 567, that feels bad.

And the fact that this is the broad affordability thing after Americans have been taught that you don't need to worry about inflation for decades, I think it's relevant. I think it is a point. I think the fact that Trump began his state of the union by pointing out that there was a gas station in Iowa that had gas for under $2 a gallon, and people go, and they gas up their SUVs, and they do it every week, and they know what that costs. It's a very specific price point, and then suddenly it's $4 a gallon. That feels very, very different to them.

“So, I think it is a real data point, but the broader point that you're making, which is there's something much bigger, much more structural going on than purely what you can tease from these economic data points, is essential.”

Let me take host part of it. I'm going to give, because I've been thinking about this question lately, and I've my own answer to it, because I think some of these answers don't work, and here's why. So, the vibes have been bad in getting worse, and when I say the vibes here, I mean, a measurable set of things about how people feel about the direction of the country, how they feel about the economy, how they feel about the future. And a lot of, we can, people tend to look at that and move backwards to things that they're very right to be upset about, and maybe have been for a long time.

But the social contract, so to speak, is safety net in the U.S. prior, at least, to the giant Medicaid cuts, and affordable character increases that are coming in play this year. It has been better here than it has been in the past, so we have got a closer to where Europe is, not further away. There are more states where you get, you know, pre-K, more states where you get subsidized child care. And people like Obamacare. People like Obamacare. Absolutely. But the vibes are worse. They were worse in 2014, worse in 2016, worse in 2018.

I think that, first, you cannot separate this from intentional platforms. I think that algorithmic media is negatively biased. It is towards the outrage, towards anger.

“But if you just go on X, which you talked about, is Elon Musk is steward. I think the thing he thinks he did, that was important for the country, was to buy Twitter and make it a zone of what he would call free speech.”

But I think this is true across a bunch of them. I think, you know, when I think about what he would call free speech, he would call free speech. And you and I think with both agree that this was not an actual social investment for the betterment of the people I believe. So I'm not a huge fan of the way Elon Musk is trying to shape American and global politics. But I think that he believes he is trying to save us from the work-mind virus and collapsing fertility. But I think that sentiment is a complex system and what has happened is that there are enough things that have tipped badly that we've entered into a negative feedback loop. And it's very, very hard to get out of a negative feedback loop because there's no one thing.

If wages go up, it's actually not enough. People's view for instance of crime. Crime is really low in America right now compared to where it was in the 90s, for example. I posted on that just the other day and people are surprised. But that's got to be fake news people still feel very upset about it.

And so I think what you have is a situation where there's no one thing, but basically lots of negative sentiment get like slingshoted forward on algorithmic media. This is AI, this is everything else.

And there's just a general sense that things are bad. Donald Trump is scary to a lot of the country, but even the people who like him, he's not doing a good job. He's not doing what he said he would do for you, right? And it's chaotic and it's crazy and he is making you afraid of the other side. But that's just grievance, right? It's conspiratorial. It's scary. It's people trying to destroy the country if you don't like them. And in some cases, right? The stakes are very high. I do think Donald Trump is destroying significant parts of, at least what the country has been.

I think sentiment has become a little bit free-floating now. And one reason it is not responsive to the economy getting better. One reason it is not responsive to things changing one reason it has diverged so much from the macro data, particularly since the pandemic.

“There is something happening in the system of attention. I think now a system that has just moved into its grammar is angry. I think that we do need. There's an interplay between the independent and the variable.”

Right? In other words, you have underlying issues that come from free trade, robotics, innovation that hollows out a whole bunch of the middle class in the United States and in Europe.

In other words, there's a lot of pressure to the advantage of emerging middle classes in China and India and the so-called global south, the former emerging markets. What does it mean to have hollowed out the middle class if the middle class is purchasing power, such as higher than it's been in the past. This is where you have something tricky happening. I want to hear yours, what you mean when you say that. What I mean when I say that is you have large numbers of communities that no longer have the same industrial base, the same civic connection, the same institutions around them.

So this I think is much more specific and I wish people would talk in this language. We didn't hollow out the middle class. We hollowed out places, places, places that have community and civic engagement and citizens. But this is important. It's super important. But those are the, that's a fair point. But those are the precedents, those are the antecedent conditions that then lead to a population that is mostly male, that's doing pretty well economically. And they're not all white. Some of them are spanics. Some of them are black. They're living in poor urban areas and rural areas that are doing, you know, again, really feel very differently and are going down compared to where they were.

And they're the ones that are voting for Trump not once, but twice. And the idea that this can be driven by something that is vibe based as opposed to real antecedent conditions. I reject that. But once you have that, there is a flywheel. Once you have that suddenly those other the algorithmic conditions really matter and here I want to really get into the macro structural for second, which is that I had this the first big book that I wrote back in 2006 was called the J curve.

“And I doubt you even remember it right as a long time ago. Who does remember the J curve?”

Exactly. It was a small thing. And for time was big for me. And it was about how countries did and didn't fall apart.

The J is that relationship between openness and stability and that you have some countries that are stable because they're open, some that are stable because they're closed. Because they're open, the United States, Japan, the Nordics, stable because they're closed China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia. Countries that are stable because they're close want to stay closed because if they open up a little bit, the country can suddenly fall apart. Countries that are stable because they're open are more stable than countries that are stable because they're closed.

“And the reason I bring it up is because it was not only something that was really really like kind of promoted at the time as well. This is a breakthrough.”

It's also completely wrong today. It no longer applies because the world has changed.

And the thing about the world that has changed is what you just got at. It's technology. Technology back in 2006 was actually advantageous to more open societies. It was the communications revolution. It was bottom up. It's what got us the Arab Spring. It's what got you the colored revolutions in the Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. People that suddenly were interconnected that could learn more about their fellow citizens and what they were doing and organize.

Learn more about their governments and their predation and their corruption. Even though the government didn't want them to necessarily know about that, it undermined authoritarian systems. And it's strengthened liberal societies, open societies. Then you move from that system to one where technology is taught down. It's a surveillance based system. It's a data based system. It's algorithmic and nudging of people by other people and even by bots.

It's attention based. It's addictive and it benefits close societies and it undermines open societies. And it's creating a level of stress. It's creating a level of anger and it's at level of outrage. But it also has a political gravity to it and it's weakening the United States. And it's much worse in the US than it is in place like Japan or even than it is in Europe, though it's coming in Europe or too.

Let me try something here because I think this is, I want to build on this in a very certain way and get it a difference between China and America.

But let me take what you just said in a different direction.

“I think one of the fundamental problems in the country is that we have broken the relationship between technology and places.”

And so we just said a second ago that the problem is not just that we've holed out this abstract concept of the middle class because I can show you like the disposable income of the middle class on a graph. And it does not look hollowed out like they're richer. But these communities they get hollowed out. And you sometimes hear, you know, self satisfied Democrats, right?

This was Hillary Clinton after the 2016 election say, well, the places that voted for me represent whatever was in two thirds or something of the GDP growth in this country.

All right. So, okay. So, so there is a redistribution of opportunity to these cities, superstarsities like New York and a staff, film Los Angeles and Boston. They've got in richer and richer and richer and richer and richer and richer. In the past, what that would have done is create a new engine of opportunity. You move to San Francisco and you're a firefighter. You cut hair. You do, you know, you work in some job and then your kids are there and they get richer and so on. Right. This is what is happening in China.

In China, there moves cities again, richer. Absolutely. And there is this huge movement into them in America. Those cities made it impossible to build housing. And Silicon Valley, I was just driving around the other day where the part of Silicon Valley sent a clear area where you have meta and in video. And it is so crazy to me that you do not have places for people to live. It's just, it's strip malls and it's single family helps. We've not built huge towers and active them. Right. Like, you look at what Shenzhen looks like.

And here where we've invented AI, it looks like an office park.

“And this, I mean, this is a major part of a bundles, obviously, but this is the destruction, the literal destruction of when we talk about social mobility, how did social mobility actually work?”

What it actually did was places got rich and people moved to them. But we have really, really good evidence now that that doesn't happen. And in fact, what's happening is richer people moved to richer places and poor people move out of them. Because, and this is why there's energy in stepping in front of, you know, Ken Griffin's god does how expensive apartment in New York is that the thing is you can't afford to live in New York anymore and raise a family. And so Ken Griffin, sure, he's here and they spend a lot of money here. And I'm not saying New York's housing problems are Ken Griffin's fault. I don't think they are.

But the feeling that it has not benefited you, it's actually true. Like, we know this is true. We know that what used to happen is that it used to be that people would move from the prayers to the richer areas. And now they move out of the richer areas and into the because they can then they're angry about gentrification and it's not just gentrification, it is just they cannot afford to live there. And I just want to harp on this for a minute because I do think it's really important and the thing we miss, we hollowed out huge number communities in this country.

And then we gated, we gated the places where the opportunity to move to. And so that has killed mobility. It's not some nature of the technology. It's not what they've done in China. And we've done it because like the way you do this is you built where there were there's money and opportunity. And instead they've made it very, very, very hard to build where there's.

Well, that's not a nice China for second because you know, the only way you get into a city in China as a who-cou system where the state actually gives you the right to actually move there.

They have over built in some places in the real estate crisis center.

“All of those things and you remember that's not just about cities, it's also about experiences. Again, I'm in the Disney piece that was done in the New York Times a few months ago.”

You want to describe this where they followed this woman who was working class and she had saved up an enormous amount to be able to get to Disney with her kids. And she did and it followed how expensive it was and how difficult her experience was and how Disney which used to be the great equalized that everyone would go. Everyone would be a part of it. And her experience compared to someone that just flies in and pays for the skip the line experience and everything everything else. And so even a place like Disney, which is the magical vacation that all Americans get to come and have the same experience has become completely stratified.

And so much of corporate America is stratifying every experience you have, not just place, literally every experience. Every ball game you go to, every airline you fly on, every experience Americans have, if you can make money out of stratification, you will do that. And you will do much less to commodify and of course the danger in the concern is that when that happens with AI.

And the wealthy people can actually be super empowered and become more than human because they have AI that's giving them real information that's actively curated for them.

And then can help them to accomplish things that will improve their lives. Almost every dystopian near dystopian novel in movie in the United States right now is about some form of that shifting of America into haves and have knots where there is no mobility between the two. And again, it's the lack of mobility that comes down, you can't have an American dream if you can't make it. I grew up in the projects and I feel like I was the American dream, but I know how close I was to not actually making it.

And how kids I grew up with that were smarter than me in high school and in grammar school didn't make it. And most of the people and I still face book friends with a lot of them and I go back to Chelsea every once in a while. The kids that I know in those neighborhoods now will not make it to the same degree that lack of ability to achieve mobility and a super stratified society.

“And the logically enabled capitalistically enabled that I think is what subverts the American dream more than anything else that we've done.”

And this is where I think a lot of our measures of inequality do not capture the modern experience of inequality. You just mentioned how real world experience is stratified digital experience is stratified you turn on TikTok you turn on Instagram and it is feeding you people living better lives in you all the time. Watching the billionaires you are watching the influence was you are watching all these people succeeding in what you're not or you're seeing people who are like drafting off of the anger that creates right those are both there.

You're watching people who are better looking than you I mean it is the the kind of comparison it has not been. You're on that one as well. Maybe better looking than me. I take that. The the constant see of comparison yeah and the size of the world you're comparing yourself to and also the falsity of it.

“The way you're comparing yourself to fake versions of other people's lives so not their real life with the diapers after change and the fights with our partner but like the fake curative life so there's a that right I think that's a a contributor to.”

This is just like the wealth you see that you are not part of. And then I agree with you on AI this is also why I think that people need to think a little bit differently about the data center more TORAM questions. Because it sounds like a good idea if you're not confident in AI if you're worried about what's about to happen to try to just slow down or shut down the data centers. But what you're going to do is make compute much more expensive there's we're already we already do not have enough compute for how much people want it.

I think a lot of people on the left who have sort of told themselves a story that AI is not powerful it's not a real technology it's overhyped it's bullshit.

So then it doesn't really matter if people in the back system because why would you want access to the hallucination machine. Yeah, but actually at its upper levels it's a very powerful technology now. And if it's something that the rich can afford and is your saying we get a new digital divide where you know the rich get these amazing AI agents that are giving them incredible information and doing all this on their behalf. And making sure they get the best deals on everything and they're out there you know sorting the internet for them and and then everybody else can afford is manipulative crappy hallucinating.

And you never even meet those people right I mean like in other words they won't even be part of your experience because algorithmically they'll be sorted out.

So you would never date one right I mean again 50 years ago 30 years ago a lot of people would meet people from different classes in their community in their schools and different institutions. And you got into mingling that way that's already not happening because of the gated community issue not already not happening because of corporate stratification. AI will end that if it goes in the present direction yeah I as agents for the rich.

“And erotica and the simulacrum of companionship and entertainment for the poor is a very very dystopian world and I think people under rate it's possibility.”

And yet the China again the Chinese are doing this completely differently are they doing that they don't believe that AI is going to be such a huge advantage for the population as a whole. They really don't like the tech talk model which is one of the reasons why when Trump was so interested in having it they let him have it without doing other big parts of the negotiations to make that occur. They're focused and they also are deeply concerned about what it means to have people in China hallucinate on the back of AI models like if you're going to hallucinate a better be pro CC piece of the can't be GPT right.

And and and yet the Chinese are all in on using AI for defense purposes all in on using it for industrial purposes all in innovating and inventing.

So and the United States it's exactly the opposite United States is we're going to build these massive LLMs and they're going to create the singularity and artificial general intelligence we're going to treat intelligence as a utility. Human capital will become supplanted by token capital. That's what you're really going to need, but who's going to have token capital. It's not going to be most Americans. And so again the J curve used to be this idea that more open societies became more stable because they were open.

This facilitated by technology that makes that system work well suddenly when you have AI driving more stability for a closed system like China at the very least you would say the J today is a you that there are no longer structural advantages to the stability of a country by being open if you're technologically empowered.

“If this trend continues, there would be structural advantages to closed systems as opposed to open systems is the opposite of what you want to see.”

I gave my brother near kind subscription. She sent you your long subscription, so I've actually saw all the games we'll do world old many spelling bee.

It has given us a personal connection, we change articles and so having read the same article we can discuss it. The coverage, the options, not just news that should diversified yes, I was really excited to give him a near times cooking subscription so that we could share recipes and we even just shared a recipe the other day. The New York Times contributes to our quality time together. You have all of that information at your fingertips. It enriches our relationship, broadening our horizons.

It was such a cool thoughtful gift.

“We're reading the same stuff, we're making the same food, we're on the same page.”

Connect even more with someone you care about. Learn more about giving a New York Times subscription as a gift at nytimes.com/gift. I want to talk about the China U.S. relationship here because one of the things that as Donald Trump rose in 2016 and then in 2024 that he was the most insistent on was the threat to America was China. And the way in which American policy had to change was we had to contain China. We had to stop fathom around in the Middle East and we had to be focused on getting over free trade and recognizing that all of this system had been used for China to rise.

And to allow American to fall and he was going to change that. We just saw the Trump Xi Jinping summit. What did we see at that summit?

“And how does where we are now reflect this sort of argument he's been making for years?”

Well, no fathom around the Middle East. There's now lots of fathom. And a China's the big threat to now China's the leader that he treats with the greatest respect. He talks about a G2 with China. It was a strongly positive summit from China's perspective. They considered historic. They considered a big win.

It helps to solidify their prestige on the global stage acting as equals with the United States, which is much bigger, much more powerful.

Trump failed on on a pro-second liberation day. He was the intention of the second term was very much a continuation of the first that the Chinese were the big threat. And he was going to put heavy tariffs on the Chinese whose economy was not performing particularly well. And that was going to force them to capitulate, force them to bend the knee. He was wrong. He failed. And when they hit back, they hit back hard, not just on reciprocal tariffs.

But also then to a critical mineral's rare, it's put a gun on the table and said, we will literally shut down your industrial production.

Describe what that was and why were they were able to do that. So for some 30 years now the Chinese have been investing in exploitation of critical minerals and rare earths around the world that are essential for a lot of military and industrial purposes, energy purposes, other infrastructure that we all rely on. And the Americans were not investing in it, thinking, well, it's cheaper coming from these Chinese sources. So great. We'll just buy it from them. Kind of like the way the Europeans decided to get a lot of their cheaper energy from Russia.

Kind of the way all of us decided to get our semiconductors from 100 miles off of the Chinese coast, all of which is true if politics don't matter.

And the lock that China had globally from 30 years of these investments, including in the processing of these critical minerals inside China themselves.

“Suddenly they said, if you want to get them, you need a license. You need to apply for a license to China. If you're not considered on the right side of the law with us, we're not going to provide you with those critical minerals.”

You had suddenly CEOs of big companies going to Mara Lago telling Trump, you better cut a deal with these Chinese because otherwise like literally our factory floor is going to shut down. And so the Americans had the buckle had to suddenly say, okay, we got to do deal with these guys. We can't afford a trade boycott. We got to sit down and figure out like, you know, they give us someone fentanyl and we give them someone tariffs and let's talk about Taiwan and the rest. And that was a complete climb down turn around.

Of the sort that we've more recently seen with Trump's war goals and Iran. Once the Iranians broke glass, polar emergency lever and shut down the straightaway moves, which he thought they wouldn't do.

In both cases, Trump's eyes were bigger than a stomach. He has a big punch, but also a glass jaw can't take one hard from the other from another side. And the Chinese are now in a position of much greater leverage. So the summit that you just had was two leaders sitting together and saying, we must find a way to work together constructively. You may not trust us. It's vice versa, but we will ensure that we work together constructively. So we don't get into a fight that does a lot of damage. You don't want to see that. And that was what happened. So how would you rate this as a substantive outcome? Because you could say either Donald Trump was right about the danger posed by China.

And so this is a problem as he's moving into this more conciliatory climb down posture, or you could say, you know, many of Trump's critics on this, you're being too belligerent.

These countries need to work together. And maybe he fumbled himself into a reasonable outcome, which is constructive dialogue, a relationship between the two leaders.

“And the recognition, then a world of global challenges like AI and climate change and pandemic. It actually is important that we have good relationships. And so, you know, you wouldn't count this as a win from Trump's rhetoric.”

But should we be happy with where this is ended up? Well, we should be happy that it turns out that Trump does not have the ability to commit suicide on the global stage. If he had persisted with his intended policy, which was, we will force these Chinese to capitulate to us. The Americans would have been in a massive recession. And so would the world. He backed out. So is that a win? Of course it's not a win. There are big wins under Trump. There are foreign policy wins. I mean, for example, in his first term, USMCA, which at the time he said was the best deal ever. Now he says is a horrible deal. But the reality, I don't care what he says. The reality was USMCA was a significant improvement over and after.

“The reality is the Abraham Accords were a big win in creating more stability in the Middle East and the Gulf.”

But does that look like a stable region of the world to me now? It does not. But at the time, it was something that no one thought could be doable. And it was a stable. It was a much more stable region until Trump decided to go in and actually blow up the Iranians with Israel. So again, I could point to plenty of places Venezuela on balance, a win and perceived as a win by most populations across Latin America, because Venezuela had been exporting a lot of instability. And now it looks a lot more stable with the government. There's a lot more trackable and focusing on long-term economic development. Those are all wins.

China is not a win. China is a loss. China is a loss because Trump's intended policy, which is, we need to beat these guys. And here's how we're going to do it completely failed. And at the same time, he was pursuing policies to support himself individually. Again, TikTok. He got TikTok. That doesn't help the country. That helps him. It's advantageous in the same way that Elon owning X is it politically advantageous for Trump doesn't help the country. You and I agree on that. So what you have is a more stable environment with a China that rightly feels like they have more leverage over this guy and this government.

So one of the dimensions of competition here and one that you all emphasized in that 20 early 2026 paper on risks is energy. And the way you put it is that America has become largest petrostate in a way. I think a lot of Americans have not tracked. It's really a quite remarkable story from fracking to where we've ended up as a huge exporter of energy.

You have a tremendous chart as a tremendous sense that I found it really shocking to see that China's exports of green energy technology are much larger now than our exports of oil and gas. There's sort of exporting the infrastructure of the 20th century, we're exporting the energy of the 20th century and there's just becoming so much cheaper at scale. So tell me about that competition because the energetic foundations of countries are important. Like Trump is really double down on America's petrostate. Tell me about that competition. I have no problem with Trump doubling down on America's petrostate.

“I think that the United States has the ability to be more effective on efficient regulations, on expanding production to have cheap energy for Americans and to export around the world. The resources are in the United States. It makes sense.”

And it makes sense. It makes sense. It makes sense. It makes sense. It makes sense. It makes sense. It makes sense. The oil producer and transiting and exporting nations smart for them. But what Trump is also doing is saying, I don't want the new energy. I don't actually want wind. I'll shut it down. I don't want solar, which is insane. I don't want electric vehicles, which is crazy. I mean, so you don't go to Iran for a second because it's important. One of the biggest long-term implications of Iran, the war in Iran, is that OPEC is over.

“The UAE left OPEC in the middle of the Iran war. When they aren't actually able to produce or export much of anything, a little bit, why did they do that?”

Because they understand that they're going to have stranded resources long-term because there's not going to be as much of a market for their oil. So they want to get as much oil out as humanly possible as soon as the war is over. As soon as the blockade is done and the straight is open, so that they can then get on with being a modern, technologically empowered city state. They're doing at a small level, and we should be very happy that OPEC has gone because it is a cartel monopoly over oil. That's not good for the United States. It's not good for anyone globally to have a cartel except the people that control the cartel. They're doing at a small level what the Chinese are doing at scale, which is they want to be dominating the investments in energy that will power compute, that will power AI at scale and cheap, and they want to do it for their own country, and they want to export it. Now, Texas understands this. Red state Texas, at least for now.

We'll see where Tallerico goes, or it packs and whatever. Point is they are driving more renewable energy production than any other state in the United States. They're also driving more petrol production than any other state in the United States.

That is the appropriate response for the world's most powerful country, as we should be able to do both of those things.

But I want to clarify one thing here because we're talking here about the production of energy. China's control, the thing they're exporting, is not sunshine. The thing they're exporting, which we are way behind on, and that's true for Texas too, is what you use, the physical machinery that turns sunshine into energy. And so, that thing, right, which the Biden situation is very concerned about. This was a big part of their plan to try to restore some of the supply chain. But what China has is the infrastructure of how any country becomes electricity.

You buy that infrastructure from them. And so what is the power of that? Not just of the energy that two states are producing, but the kinds of it. But we are driving in on energy production, but they're driving in an energy-electro state infrastructure.

Yeah. So, in the same way that the critical minerals gives you that influence, because if you don't have them, you can't allow your economy to grow.

And if you don't have the infrastructure that allows your energy to be built at scale and cheaply from China, then your economy won't grow. And you can't have AI if you don't have the ability to drive energy for compute at scale. So, China wants to be at the commanding heights of where the global economy is going.

“Now, I mentioned before, we are very short-term in the way we've thought about these investments. That's why the Europeans got into trouble on gas.”

That's why we're all in trouble on semiconductors in Taiwan. You can fix these things. We're doing it with critical minerals right now. Late, but the Americans are now saying,

By the way, the fact that the Chinese have put that load of gun on the table, once you do that, you can't do it twice. So now we've seen, "Oh, they've got this leverage. That's dangerous. We'll invest."

“And within five to ten years, they will no longer have that key chokehold over the United States in all of these minerals that we need.”

And we need, for by the way, for our defense capabilities. So the Chinese said they were ever to get into a fight with us. The first thing they would do is shut that down, because it would strangle our ability to continue to build the military industrial complex. You're not going to fight a war effectively. People worry about Taiwan. If they were a fight like that, you'd be very vulnerable, given all of that. The same thing will happen on energy, but the longer we wait for it to happen, the greater the Chinese lead. And right now we're digging a hole for ourselves by investing as much as we can in the energy technologies that are not getting cheaper at scale.

And politically saying that we oppose the technologies of the future that will be essential for growth of our populations. And essential most importantly for AI compute.

America is a lead in AI. It's not a huge lead, but a lead of, you know, it's called six months, something like that. We have the best chips.

“The Biden administration put export controls down on that, Trump has sort of unwound those, and then Trump personally has done that, because his administration mostly posted it.”

Well, let me ask you what you think of that decision, because I found myself a little bit more conflicted on this than many people in the public discourse. The argument for keeping it back is that if China does not have the best chips, we will maintain a lead in AI. The counter argument is that if we deprive them of the chips, they will accelerate and be able to accelerate their chips industry. And we have all these dependencies on China and trying to being dependent on Nvidia chips would create a dependency on us.

And so the idea that you're going to, you're not going to stop their AI because they have so much energy, they have the infrastructure we don't have, right, there's a lot they can do to sort of supercharge. But this lead we imagine ourselves of how many a couple months is that really so worth making Huawei chips eventually is good as Nvidia.

Well, that argument, the second argument you just made was a reasonable argument before the Biden administration starts putting all the export controls on.

“Once you've done that and you've shown the Chinese, you've got to invest in your own semiconductor, because we will crush you, then they do it. It's just like when the Chinese say we're going to force you to have licenses for rare earths.”

At that point, the Americans say, okay, that's that's unacceptable now we're going to invest. So the idea that holding back H200 chips from Nvidia is going to make the Chinese unsee what we have already done to them. That's a that's a spurious argument, right. So once you're involved, once you've declared a cold war on semiconductors, then you should be consistent with that policy, then all you're doing with the H200s is letting them catch up when they're spending. So we're moving as fast as humanly possible in the constraints of their economy to catch up with the Americans on semiconductors.

It also matters a little bit less in the sense that if they have really cheap energy, you can run the same AI with more semiconductors, just is more energy to actually make it work.

So it's not like you get better AI with better semiconductors, it's just less efficient. Same AI. Same AI. So that is the point. I do think it's both as best I can tell. So I mean, I know people who are just on this big trip and talked a bunch of Chinese AI firms and every single one of them said, what is binding them is compute. They had better compute. It is true that you can just run more energy through more lower quality chips and in some way like get to the to the limit. But the people I know who actually do AI don't think that's quite true that having access to the best chips and those chips getting better does seem to keep you or help keep you a little bit ahead.

Everyone I know in Silicon Valley were surprised by how advanced deep seek was when they released it. So you're right that the gap between the United States and China is less great than a lot of the American AI. You know, sort of leaders were talking about three years ago, five years ago. My core point here is that Nvidia is pressing an issue that is of sole interest to Nvidia. It is of no interest whatsoever to the country. It is not aligned with US policy towards China.

It is not aligned with the China that is working as hard as possible to build that semiconductor capacity and they will get there. So what has happened since Trump lifted the export controls. The Chinese are still are they're trying to promote as much nativeization of Chinese chips as humanly possible. They clearly have a whole bunch of companies that would much rather have access to the H200s.

It is not necessarily worth accepting a quid pro quo that would clearly be necessary to the United States in saying, oh yes, that's a big give that you just made to us. So right now, the big argument here is about how fast the Chinese are capable of catching up when that is their overwhelming desire.

“And that's the only place where they're behind, right?”

In terms of like the capability of their talents, they're producing an awful lot in terms of the the coding that they have their world class and in terms of the energy and the ability to build and direct to there. [Music] One of the arguments of Trump and the people around them is we need to focus on China. We need to focus on this competition. Instead with the US government is focusing on is Iran. I and myself, as somebody has covered this and talks about here, confused about what is happening.

It's like this Schrodinger's war at this point. Is the war alive? Is the war dead? How do you describe the state of America's war with Iran? I actually posted, I think it was last week, a graphic that I put together that showed Schrodinger's Iran agreement. Is it a ceasefire? Is it a peace deal? Great minds, cliche.

“I know, exactly. Because he says different things inside the same post, right?”

Look, the reason we don't know if it's dead or not is because Trump is desperately looking for an off ramp. But he also wants someone to blame. And he wants the off ramp to look credible and it doesn't. He understands that right now it looks bad for him. That the outcome, if he accepts what is on the table today, he'll reopen the straight. But Iran will arguably be in stronger geopolitical position in the Middle East. What is on the table today? On the table today is the cutaries would unfreeze Iranian assets that would be given to Iran in a lump sum.

In return for the Iranians ending the tolling of the straight and the Americans ending the blockade. And then the two sides would negotiate the nuclear issue. I worth noting here that Trump has repeatedly and very loudly denounced Biden and Obama for allowing Iran to have access to money.

There was first. This is going to be a big challenge of cash.

Trump has spoken about many, many times. So in other words, at least at this stage of the deal, you would clearly say that the only thing better about the Trump engagement with Iran over Obama is that it was Trump that did it. That's the only thing that Trump supporters would have to point to. That's my guy. Because you're in much worse position. The straight had been open before the war. They didn't have that leverage. They wouldn't have gotten that money. And their nuclear capacity is still sitting there.

So I mean, are they still going to have the nuclear dust as they call it? Well, that is to be negotiated. Do you trust him? Do you think in some future period in 60 days that they're going to engage proactively with you and the inspectors when the ships are coming through? And they're exporting and you're exporting and you need it. You know that it can be shut down again.

It's incredible on goal. It is by far the biggest foreign policy mistake of the Trump administration.

“Frankly, of any administration since the Iraq war, I think you could say that. Why is it? Why have they failed so badly?”

And the thing I hear Trump being confused by when I hear him speak is, look, they pounded Iran with bombs. They killed many of the senior people. I think he would have thought by now either the regime would have toppled. That was clearly what he wanted at the beginning. Or it would be so desperate that it would be suing for peace.

Willing to give up things it would never have given to Barack Obama.

Just like China after April 2nd, he thought they were going to sue for peace because their economy was so much weaker than America's. So what did he get wrong about Iran? Why is Iran not desperate for an offer? Well, one, he and the Israelis actually assassinated the leadership. So the reason that they had never tried to close the straight before, which they clearly had the capacity to do. The military capacity, the drones, the rest, is because they feared that if they did, that would be the end of their regime.

People would come after their leaders. The people making the orders would get killed.

So they broke glass. They pull over. Right? That is what actually happened. So Trump thinking that they were going to sue for peace like Venezuela when in reality they said, no, no, no, no, no. You just broke the whole thing. We don't trust you. So killed the equivalent of the people he handed power to in Venezuela.

Exactly. Exactly. Even if they hadn't, I would have been very surprised if this strategy would have worked out.

This was incredible overconfidence, born of the Venezuela success.

And also, born of Trump's previous history with Iran, where they talked big against the United States during the 12 day war. In his first term, when he killed Custom Soleimani or to the assassination, then they didn't do anything. Well, this time, you actually went and blew up their regime. And so, yeah, they're going to, it's essentially suicidal response. But anything you can do to try to regain deterrence to try because you know you can't trust them for diplomacy.

So there's no credibility with the American saying, okay, we're going to be Mr. Tough guy. If you don't do XYZ, if you have seen Trump has posted that in the last couple months, I'm going to really be Tough guy. No more Mr. Nice guy. I don't, once you've assassinated the leadership, I don't think you can say no more Mr. Nice guy. I think that analogy should be off the table for you.

So he's gotten himself in an enormous jam.

“And the only way he can resolve it is by undoing all of his work goals.”

All of them, all of them. There's no more rescuing the Iranian people. There's no more ending the ballistic missile capability. That's for the region to deal with. There's no more ending support for proxies.

The military capabilities, the missiles they still have, the drones, they still have. They've blown up a lot of the Navy. I mean, almost everything they have tried to accomplish, they have failed.

And meanwhile, the United States has driven an incredible economic consequence for the entire world.

And he is to blame. So allies and adversaries of the United States, they're looking at oil prices and fertilizer, he's described this for men in indietal because I think that people don't quite realize. We have suffered some economic pain from this war here at home.

“The fact that it is much worse elsewhere, I think it's not fully penetrated.”

So paint that picture a bit. Yeah, well, I mean, so I mentioned before, I was just in the DR, Dominican Republic, right? And I mean, this had a huge effect on approval for the leader, their oil importers, and the subsidies are much harder to do, inflation is way up, right?

The United States as a major oil producer and exporter is much less affected in the near term by this conflict.

You have Asian economies who have to ration and the energy that's available for industrial uses,

because they can't yet what they need through the straight. You've got the global plastics industry, petrochemicals. What's it come from? Oil. Where's it come through?

The straight. Most of that is Asia. That production is getting squeezed. Those prices are way up. Those industries are under severe distress.

You've got countries like the Philippines that are under a condition of national emergency right now. You have sub-Saharan African countries that may enter financial crises, because they can't provide, they don't have the fiscal space to provide the continued support for their populations, given where prices are going. And that's before the food crunch.

Because the fertilizer has missed the growing season now, but you haven't passed that through to food until the growing season leads to vegetables and fruits and grains that then are exported. The Americans and the Europeans and the Japanese, they'll get the food, it'll just be a higher price. The countries in the global south. A lot of those will not even have access to that food.

People will starve on the back of this. Is there an estimate of how big this will be? I've heard from members of the United Nations that are involved in global food distribution that the impact on the global GDP next year could be as much as one and a half percent. Again, the United States will be much lower than that. But some of these other economies will be much higher.

And look, the danger every country you talk to, every leader you talk to, sees President Trump individually as uniquely responsible for this economic downturn. And every day that the straight remains closed is a day that the Americans are responsible further for that.

“And I think that the impact of that on the trust and the reliability of the United States,”

as the Americans tell the Saudis, well, if you don't do an Abraham Accord steal,

The impact on the Saudis are why are we working with these guys the way we used to?

“Why don't we engage more with the Chinese?”

Isn't the Saudis? There's been a bunch of reporting. I'm curious what you think of it that the Saudis were along with the Israelis, pushing us into the swore. I would say that the UAE, along with these rallies, have been much more interested in the war continuing to ensure that Iran no longer has that condition.

That's very different from the Saudi view, which is aligned with Pakistan and Egypt and Turkey, much more than Islamic blog that will find a way to engage in a peace settlement with the Iranians after the war is over.

Now, I mean, the Saudis are not hurt as much economically because they're moving 7 million barrels a day across their east-west pipeline through the Red Sea,

which doesn't need the straighter for a mose. You've got other countries like Kuwait, for example, cutter that can't get anything out unless the straight is open. So very different perspectives inside the Gulf itself to how this war should be responded to. But with the exception of Israel and the UAE, and the UAE, by the way, did not like this war when it started.

But now that they've taken these existential threats, I mean, if you're going to hit the -- or try to hit the Burj al-Arab, you know, if you're going to try to hit their airport, suddenly your entire model is at threat. Because they've got 10 million people, 1 million Emirates, and they're not a regional player. They're global player. They're like a city-state. They're like Singapore.

But they're only like Singapore if the Middle East can be like Europe.

“If the Middle East is like the Middle East, suddenly the Singapore analogy doesn't work very well, right?”

So they've got real problems, and they don't want to leave the Iranians with this level of strength. Literally, every other country in the world is saying this is an unmedicated disaster. And it needs to end. There was no reason for it. It was a war of choice. It's gone badly, and we want this over now. So Trump is saying, and his administration is saying, there will be no end

without a resolution of the nuclear file. The nuclear file is, I guess, the new term for art on this. Will there be a resolution of the nuclear file? Well, what they are presently negotiating is not that. They're presently negotiating reopening the straight

that will then lead to discussions on the nuclear file. Trump has publicly softened his approach on the nuclear file. He was saying that that all of that enriched uranium had to be removed

and had to be sent to a third country preferably the United States.

Now he's saying, doesn't matter where it goes, can be any other third country. He's made it much easier for the Iranians to eventually get to yes. I could make an argument that long term the end of OPEC. And the shift of the global economy to a much faster degree towards post-carbon energy as a consequence of this war is a really positive thing.

I mean, it's a huge amount of short term economic hardship. But absent that, it was moving more slowly. We're going to move to electric vehicles faster. We're going to move to solar and wind and nuclear faster. Donald Trump, a climate president, Donald Trump turns out to be the guy that has done more

to ramp up that shift than any other move except for the Chinese leadership. No question. That wasn't his intention, but that is the long term outcome. That is a good thing. The planet has a better shot as a consequence of that.

Is that really true or true? It's really true. Everybody building more pipelines to make sure they don't need the state of our movement. No, it's really true. I mean, both will happen.

Don't question it. But there's no the fact that oil and gas in the Middle East is this vulnerable. So much comes from this part of the world. Yes, you can move pipelines that will have more go through the Red Sea. The Houthis can disrupt the Red Sea.

They haven't. They've been brought off by the Saudis. But in a world where drones are becoming so much more cheap, do you really want to have choke points that can be hit that easily? I mean, that today's problem in the state of our moves could be tomorrow's problem in

Morocco.

“Given that, do you really want these global choke points on oil and gas?”

Or do you want to invest in 21st century technologies? If this were to get the Americans as in gear on renewables, that would be an amazing thing. Instead, the Americans will fall for the behind for now the way the US is now starting to catch up

on critical minerals and rewards.

But leaving that aside, in terms of the short term impact for this administration. One thing we haven't even talked about yet, and we have to at least mention it, is the Iranian people are completely screwed here. Remember, this was like the whole argument at the beginning, is back in January, the belief to be tens of thousands Iranians that were brutally murdered by their own regime.

He doesn't talk about that anymore.

This regime is in place. This regime is so confident being in place that over the last week they even had military leaders for the first time since the war started. All showed up publicly for a memorial service. They wouldn't have done that two weeks ago or a month ago. So, Trump has completely failed in the humanitarian ostensible purpose of the war. And on the nuclear file, after having blown up obliterated as the administration said their nuclear capabilities,

which have been set back, that's certainly true, but now getting the Iranians to a place of we will actually allow for the end of enrichment beyond civilian purposes with inspections. We're very far from that. So, I would argue that not only are all of the macro concerns made much worse by a near-term, by Trump's war, but even the narrowest vision of we're going to do a much better deal than that horrible deal than Obama, D.B.J. CPA, at this point, that looks unlikely.

“So, does all this anger from our allies, from other countries actually matter for us?”

And the reason I ask is that I remember in the Bush era being told America's standing in the world will never recover.

Then Barack Obama was elected president and didn't seem to recover. Then his Trump won and they'll never trust us again. Then Joe Biden took office and you know, Biden seemed to be by guns. This has been a lot worse, but does it matter? It does matter, but we need to be modest in the expectations of what that means.

So, the Europeans today really mistrust the United States. That is not making them trust the Chinese more. China has the one part of China's economy that is really going gangbusters is not the domestic economy. It is their export of manufactured goods around the world, which is a dumping strategy that is here truly hollowing out industries in other countries like in Europe. And so, it's not like the Europeans are suddenly saying we're going to work with the Chinese.

And that's going to be our principal alliance and it's no more NATO, and that's not going to give them influence with the US. But in those big picture ways, I don't suddenly see this being a Cold War two blocks. And the Chinese are picking off a bunch of countries.

“I think it's much more complicated than that.”

The Japanese don't suddenly trust the Chinese. In fact, they're in a big fight with the Chinese right now, over Taiwan. And the Chinese are cutting off their tourism and not buying the seafood anymore. It's gotten much worse. So the Japanese are closer to the United States despite feeling that the Americans are acting in an extortionate way.

And their top leaders are told me that directly extortionate in how badly the Americans have mistreated their best friend, the Japanese. Now, having said all of that, we are seeing things that are going to matter a long term. I'll give you an obvious example. The Europeans are now spending real money on defense, the polls, the Germans, other countries, all, especially the frontline countries. The Canadians are spending a lot more defense, but they're not spending on American military industrial complex.

“They're spending it on themselves. They're building it out.”

And that is money that used to go directly into the US and US jobs. And going forward, it will not India is building out their military to much greater degree. They're moving away from Russia.

First Trump term, the quad moving more to the United States now, much more with the Europeans.

That is a long term move. These are legacy systems that will have parts in service and training that will last for decades. That is money that is not coming to the United States. The EU-Mercosore Trade Agreement. And Trump deserves credit for EU-Mercosore, which, I mean, from, I'll give you to say what EU-Mercosore is. EU-Mercosore is, "Mercosore is like the big trading group in Latin America."

So the free trade association in Latin America and the EU is the EU. And so now there is an agreement for the EU-Mercosore. It's bringing those tariffs down that will facilitate greater trade flows between the Latin American countries and the European countries, which will mean less trade flows with the United States. Trump deserves credit for that.

It would not have happened without him, without the tariffs that he put on unilaterally towards all the American allies. And I can give you so many other examples of those things happening. All of which individually are small. Collectively make the United States a smaller piece of indispensable with other countries.

Those are on goals that are near-term irrelevant.

“But longed and Trump cares about the near-term.”

But long-term will have real costs for our United States that is the biggest engine of global growth still in the world. Earlier in this conversation we talked about the Thucity Strap. You've made an argument that's the wrong trap to think about. So what's the trap that's been on your mind? The trap is from all my mind is the Gratchy trap, which was when the Gratchy brothers,

who had policies of grievance that believed that there was no more mobility

and that the poor Roman citizens were never going to have their due,

started breaking their own political revolution and started breaking the norms and the laws of how Rome was run. And the allies of Rome no longer saw Rome as dependable. The enemy was inside the house. It was the political dysfunction of Rome that was defeated the first time, defeated the second time. But ultimately led to the collapse of the Roman Republic.

Again, internal political revolutions that failed, but that weakened the system. And that also allowed people to get used to those norms getting violated, so that when they were violated a second time and a third time by different leaders, they weren't so surprised. And that is what I see happening in the United States right now. The US is unilaterally withdrawing from its alliances.

It's saying we don't want to be dependable. We don't want to be there for the Ukrainians or for the European Union. And helping Ukraine. We don't want to be there for Taiwan. We'll make that a negotiation with the Chinese.

We don't want to be there for the Japanese or the South Koreans. You guys should be doing that stuff yourself. We're not going to be the architects of free trade. Everybody else should have to come and invest in the United States because we're the big power. And you guys have been taking advantage of us.

And we don't even want to have the best talent from all over the world because we already have the Americans. That's what really matters. And so you guys just do whatever you want. Those things are what is driving the geopolitical risk in the world today. The United States is the principle driver of geopolitical uncertainty in the world today.

President Trump and the Americans are driving it. They're driving it with tariffs and industrial policy. They're driving it with the war in Iran. They're driving it with the lack of predictability with the Europeans. They're driving it with the change to the structures and the rules and the norms inside the world's largest market.

It's not China. China has huge problems. They're not the ones that are driving the change when Trump put together the board of peace.

“Which we don't even talk about anymore because there's no money for it, right?”

No one really cares. And again, Davos, he was there on stage. And he had all these big countries like Paraguay and Azerbaijan show up with them, right? The Chinese didn't show. He invited him.

Chinese didn't show. They said no. Why would they say no? Well, because the Chinese were like, well, if you guys are going to pull out of the UN, we'll just be the most powerful country influencing the United Nations.

You guys are pulling out the World Health Organization. We'll increase the amount we donate every year to WHO. We'll be the people making those decisions. They're not creating alternative architecture.

They're becoming the most important country influencing our architecture.

That we don't care about anymore. That's not the city's trap. That's the Americans withdraw. That's the US acting in a unilateral way. And other countries trying to find ways to continue to ensure that we have governance.

I think that is a good place to end. I'll also find a question.

“What if three books you'd recommend to the audience?”

I three books. Well, first, I've got to start with the hitchhikers guy. Because when I was in high school in college, there were basically three kinds of kids. They were the Tolkien kids, they were way too darky. They were the Anne-Ran kids who you don't trust to run anything.

And then they were the Douglas Adams kids. And those were kind people. They were curious. They were interested. And that was a universe that really appealed to me.

I love this typology. Do you really? There's no book I've read more than the hitchhikers guy. Is that true?

Yes, never said that publicly.

Probably not. You've got something new out of me. Interesting. My favorite book growing up. My favorite book growing up.

Absolutely my favorite. Maybe the dragon rod is a perne, which I'd be read up certain times when I was like 10. But after that, the hitchhikers guy. And I just, and I continue to reread it. And it was a kind of thing that if you meet people when you're younger that really love hitchhikers in the series, you knew you'd like those people.

Like those are your people. That's your tribe. Right? And I would say more people like that that like actually like on the global stage certainly on the American stage in Washington would probably help us. Right?

Secondly, I was going to say a world of peers by Michael Pollan. I don't know if you've read it yet. I've been on the show. We had a great conversation. Oh, cool.

I mean, I've liked him for a long time because he talks about issues that are not super fashionable.

“But that are really important to human beings.”

I really appreciate him doing the work and making us think about like what identity is in this and because it's changing so quickly now. Like the nature of where the humanity begins and ends is seems to me very fluid. And in ways that people aren't thinking about.

And finally, I was going to say the chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson, which was written back in 2001, but which I went back and I read recently.

“And I want to see if the books still held.”

And it was by again a kind of near do well in intelligent folks, but who aren't really succeeding in society who by virtue of being in the right place at the wrong time witness something from the future coming back that has the potential to rip apart the society. Or that they can fix it.

And the book is all about this strategy.

It's before AI. It becomes like a real thing. And it's the same exact thing. Ian, remember? Thank you very much.

That's it.

“This episode of the Asuklanches produced by Annie Galvan and Roland Who.”

Back checking by Michelle Harris with Julie Beer. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld. With additional mixing by Asuk Jones and Johnny Simon, our according engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassion, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck.

Jack McCordic, Marina King, and Yon Coble. Original music by Carol Sabro and Pat McCusker. Audience tragedy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser. [MUSIC]