Filmed August 27, 2025
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, I’m Bill Kristol. Welcome to Conversations. Very pleased to be joined again by my friend and someone who I have highest regard for an analyst of all things, what, Russian, European, Soviet back in the old days, and American, and unfortunately authoritarianism, which has become more and more of an important thing to be a student and analyst of.
Anne Applebaum, this is I think our fifth conversation, our most recent one was six months ago. I just looked back at the transcript. It really stands up very well, I would say. But throughout, you’ve been more hopeful that Ukraine could hold its own against Russia than I think conventional wisdom had it. And I think that’s been correct. You’ve been more convinced that Europe might really step up a little more than most people here thought, at least in the US. And I think that was right. And you’ve also been very worried about authoritarianism here in the US, and that’s certainly unfortunately becoming very much a concern that was well founded. So anyway, thank you for joining us today. We’ll talk about all those topics and update people, even if we can’t entirely cheer them up.
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
Well, thanks for having me. Always pleasure to talk to you, whether in real life or via Zoom.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, both are good. Okay. So you’ve been to Ukraine several times, obviously you know it very, very well. Been to it before obviously the war, then since the war, you’re right there. You’re spending a fair amount of time in Poland right across the border. So what’s your sense of the actual situation on the ground in the war in Ukraine?
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
So first of all, yeah, I’m in Poland now. I’m in Western Poland though, so not exactly near the front line, but still. I was last in Lviv a few months ago. I was there in the spring, and I’m actually supposed to go to Kyiv in September.
I mean, I think one of the remarkable stories, and this is not very well told in the US, is that not that much has changed. Despite this kind of constant drumbeat of crisis and danger, and the Russians are going to take Pokrovsk, which is a big fortress town in Donbas, the Russians move forward very, very slowly. They are moving, but I was told at the current rate, they will take all of Donbas in something like four and a half years. Donbas is a tiny part of, well, it’s a large part, but it’s still pretty far Eastern Ukraine.
So the Ukrainians continue to hold the line. They continue to innovate. They’re building new drones. I’ve just seen some photographs actually of a new type of drone they’ve built that seems to be modeled on an Israeli model. They’re now building their own missiles.
I think another piece of the story that’s really not understood is the Ukrainian campaign inside Russia against Russian refineries. And just in the last few days, they’ve hit several very large ones. And these are refineries that affect the internal Russian market. And one of the effects has already been long lines at gas stations all across, particularly, the eastern and southern parts of Russia.
So the story that we’re usually told, which is Ukraine is about to be crushed by Russia, and that actually President Trump seems to believe, is not true and hasn’t been true for, it’s not quite three and a half years, but three and a quarter years so far. So in that sense, again, I mean the Ukrainians are as depressed as you would imagine by the failure of the talks so far and dispirited by that. And I can’t account for how that morale will eventually affect them. But the war continues not very much changed. And the Russians are not making a breakthrough and they’ve not achieved a victory. And so I think that’s the first thing to say.
I mean, I think the second thing to say is that, looked at from the point of view of the Ukrainians and indeed from the Poles and from Europe, all the events of the last couple of weeks that seemed so dramatic, the meeting of Trump and Putin in Alaska, the Europeans flying to Washington to meet Trump together with President Zelensky of Ukraine, all of it has had very little impact on the ground. And probably what it’s doing is prolonging the war.
So again, I have to be very careful how I say this because I too want these talks to succeed and I also want there to be a breakthrough. And I hope there are secret negotiations that I don’t know about where something better is happening. But what we see from the outside, and indeed what the Europeans and the Ukrainians see, is simply President Putin stringing along Donald Trump. There clearly have been some business deals discussed, offering him the impression of change and movement, but without making any real offer towards peace.
So the Russians have never said they want to end the war. They have never recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, a few days ago said it’s not even clear that they recognize President Zelensky as the president of Ukraine. They have never stopped fighting, they have never stopped hitting civilian targets. So all I can say is they haven’t made any shift. And at the same time, we are watching the US take apart its own strategy towards Russia that’s been built up actually over a couple of decades.
So the US is undermining or seeking to defund Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, this is the Russian language and other language broadcasters that broadcast in that part of the world. We’ve removed funding from other independent Russian media. These are organizations that can bring the truth about the war to Russia, which also has an impact on how people feel and how the war is perceived there. We are slowly dismantling sanctions simply by not updating them. So a sanctions regime requires constant shifts and changes as the Russians find ways around old restrictions. We aren’t updating those anymore. That’s been reported both in the media, but it’s also been, there was a big Senate report about it a few days ago as well.
So at the same time, we don’t see the administration talking about new aid, either new military aid or any other kind for Ukraine at all. So we see the US slowly backpedaling, slowly removing restrictions. We see a prolonged negotiation that has no result so far and simply allows the Russians to spin out this game, whatever game it is that they’re playing with Trump. That’s what I see.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s very helpful and comprehensive. I mean, one question, well two questions I guess, one is just how much do you think, and there’s one more Ukraine-specific and the war-specific, the drying up of USAID, it doesn’t seem to have quite as bad an effect of some of us feared. I mean, the Europeans seem to be doing more. I’m just curious how worrisome though is that going forward, three, six, 9, 12 months, obviously if it stays basically dried up?
And secondly, one thing you didn’t mention that I think fits very much in with what you were saying is having Putin in the United States, I think people here didn’t appreciate what that meant. I mean, he’s been a pariah, justifiably so in my opinion, since the invasion, but maybe he should have been a pariah after the first invasion. That’s a whole ‘nother, but anyway, certainly since February 24th, 2022, and he hasn’t been to any respectable European country, and maybe even unrespectable one. I don’t know if he’s been anywhere in Europe beyond Belarus or something. And having him be greeted with a red carpet by the president of the United States in the US while the war’s going on, no ceasefire, no cessation for one day of bombing of civilians. I feel like that’s a horrible, horrible thing for the US. It’s just kind of a stain on our honor, but also a terrible signal to send to the Ukrainians and to the Europeans, and to the Russians for that matter.
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
To be clear, if Putin were to go to any country that’s a member of the International Criminal Court, which the United States is not, that country would be obligated to arrest him. And that includes every European country. So he can’t visit Europe at all because he would be arrested upon landing.
And the fact, as you say, that he appeared in the US, that American soldiers physically rolled out a red carpet for him, which I haven’t seen them doing for Zelensky indeed, or President Macron, or anybody else. The fact that he was received with this expectation of an elaborate lunch and so on, which by the way, he didn’t stick around for. The fact that he was apparently rude to the American president, for which he seems to have paid no price either. I mean, all that is, from the European point of view and really actually the international point of view, pretty extraordinary.
And it has started once again all the questions and conversations about what does he have over Trump? Why is Trump a supplicant towards Putin? Why is the United States, which is a much larger, much more important, much wealthier, much more powerful country, why do we appear to be sucking up to Russia? And we have analyzed this many times back and forth, and we’ve heard all the possible explanations, and none of them has ever really made any sense. I mean, none of it really adds up.
As for Europeans, the first part of your question… So yes, Europe now—actually this has been true for a while, this has been true for more than a year—Europe in total gives more money to Ukraine than the United States does. And that’s both money… Ukrainians now have their own industries. And so Europe funds a lot of the drone production, for example, inside Ukraine, or some of it takes place outside of Ukraine in neighboring countries. So, the European money, both producing weapons and giving them weapons, is now much larger than the US. Plus there’s other kinds of economic support and so on.
I think European, there was a kind of Czech-led project to collect ammunition from around the world, that’s had an impact. And so there’s no question that Europe is now the more important source of aid, military aid and economic aid for Ukraine than the United States. I mean, the United States still has a couple of key capabilities, and one of them is the US satellites and intelligence that make a big difference for Ukrainian drones and targeting and so on. And there are a few handful of US weapons that would still make a big difference in this war, mostly long-range artillery of different kinds. I mean, actually a lot of the stuff that we all thought would be very important earlier on in the war like tanks, turns out not to be that important.
I mean, I don’t know that Americans have really understood this either. This is a really new kind of war. It’s being fought in a different way from any other war in recent history. It’s a drone war. Within 10 kilometers of the front line, nobody can move without being seen. So a tank or a truck or anything that crosses into that zone is immediately spotted and can be hit. And it’s very difficult to move one direction or another. And some traditional weaponry that you thought would’ve made a difference, like as I said, tanks, armored cars, and so on, they’re not useless, but they’re not as important as they are. So the things that really matter Ukraine does have, and in many cases is now beginning to develop and produce itself. By the way, when the war is over, the world’s greatest producer of drones and the most important possessor of the most cutting edge drone technology is going to be Ukraine.
BILL KRISTOL:
I mean, the resourcefulness and inventiveness of the Ukrainians under unbelievable pressure, obviously, and with difficulties, is really kind of, I do think that’s a little, this is sort of appreciated now, I think maybe, now in a way that the USAID is dried up to some degree, a considerable degree. And also, as you say, some of the early things that everyone was focused on, the tanks and all, some of them got delivered, some didn’t. In any case, they don’t seem nearly as important. And it is kind of an amazing story. I guess there are other comparable stories, and obviously there are in world history, but I don’t know, this is pretty striking, isn’t it? I mean—
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
It’s essentially the reinvention of the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian military industry during a war. I mean, I suppose that does happen during wars. The United States invented nuclear weapons during the war for the purposes of the war. And the Germans actually during World War II invented long-range rockets in the same way. So it’s not unheard of.
But as I said, I don’t know that the scale of it is understood. I mean, there is a, I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish, I mean, the Russians also innovate. They copy the Ukrainians. They still have much greater scale. They have a wider and deeper production, and so and so. They still have huge advantages. But the fact remains that we are more than three years into the war, and the front line is barely moving. I mean, by the standards of wars. It moves a little bit, but the collapse of the front line that people were predicting six months ago never happened, and we’re now at the end of the summer. So fighting will slow down as the weather gets worse.
BILL KRISTOL:
In Ukraine’s case, the innovation is as they have been invaded and have territory conquered, and they’re fighting right there, whereas I don’t mean to minimize our achievements in World War II or other countries, Britain, Germany, et cetera, but we weren’t partly occupied and weren’t being, I believe Britain was, but we weren’t being bombed every night and so forth. So I mean it is—
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
No, I mean, actually one of the things that bothers me the most about the way Trump talks about Ukraine is he keeps talking about Ukraine has no cards. There was something he said a couple of days ago about how Ukraine is a small country, it shouldn’t have gone to war with a big country. I mean, first of all, who invaded who? But there’s this constant refusal to recognize this achievement, the holding the line. It is a smaller country, it is fighting a bigger country. And it had a lot of disadvantages. I mean, it still was a partially Soviet army. It has fewer people, all those things. And yet it’s true, the collapse that people kept predicting never happened.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Say a word about, I mean, let’s get to maybe to Europe more broadly. And obviously Europe has many different countries, as you know very, very well. Better than I, and different governments, and so we can break it up a bit if we want, but I just was struck… Again, I think people hear, it all happened so fast. That Friday Summit in Alaska, Monday meeting with Zelensky, Europeans get together with Zelensky over the weekend, and suddenly the most important European leaders are showing up here. I mean, it’s pretty amazing, actually. I don’t recall even quite seeing anything like that in my years of being in and watching and being around government.
And I just wondered, A, were you surprised by the degree of coordination among the Europeans and also willingness to lean forward? I mean to really do something, taking on some considerable risks to themselves politically in that way. And I don’t know, it just strikes me that you said I think when we had a conversation, it was the one before last, you were more bullish on Europe, I think, than the conventional wisdom. Does that fit in with that?
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
Yeah. No, I mean, at least with its current leadership, this is a Europe that understands … It’s not just that they back Ukraine because the Ukrainians are nice, they understand the stakes. The stakes for them, the stakes for their own security. But I think they also have, as a group, understand the depth and danger of the change inside the United States. And this, again, I don’t know how to translate this for Americans, but you are right. I mean, the idea that, what was it? Six or seven leaders of large European countries on the spur of the moment in the middle of August, which is like, everybody goes on vacation in Europe in August. That’s part of the deal. All were so alarmed by what they saw in Alaska and by what they feared might have been happening in Alaska behind closed doors that they all got on their various planes and came to Washington to make sure that President Zelensky wasn’t bullied by Trump and Vance again like he was back in February. I mean, it was a piece of diplomatic coordination on a really unusual scale.
And as I said, it shows not just their understanding of the stakes of the war, but also their understanding of the profound change in Washington. And none of them will say this publicly, and I understand why, and I don’t wish them to do anything else. I mean, they’re all still talking about how wonderful President Trump is, and they are full of compliments when they see him, and so on, and I understand why that’s happening. But believe me, people are horrified, and they’re horrified both by the Trump-Alaska meeting but also by the domestic politics inside the United States, which look like nothing anybody in Europe has ever seen before. They’re horrified by the language that comes out of the administration, whether it’s from Vance or from the people talking about tariffs.
I mean, the tariffs are a background to this story too. And they’re aware that this shift is of such scale and of such importance that they need to coordinate in a way that they hadn’t ever felt they needed to do before. I mean, nobody ever before thought of the United States as an antagonist. I mean, people didn’t like, plenty of people were anti-American or they didn’t like the Americans, or they were annoyed by them or they disagreed with their policies. But the idea that the United States might be an antagonist, a country that is seeking to undermine Europe, or break up the European Union, or damage NATO, or damage the security of European states, this is brand new and everyone is still getting used to it.
BILL KRISTOL:
I mean, some friends of mine get annoyed when the Europeans are so nice to Trump. It does have a slightly deleterious effect, frankly, on those of us in the US trying to warn people about how bad and alarming Trump is because of course it cuts the other way. I always say what you said, and I think it is right: they have actual responsibilities running a country, and they have to do what they think is right in terms of not only their own country, and that’s obviously important, but also in terms of helping it, really helping Ukraine. And Trump’s going to be president for the next three and a half years so people like me can say, this is horrible, but they have to say, “Oh, we can make it work, I guess.”
Now, but you’re saying, I’m just curious, I mean, you’re saying they understand, A, And B, I’m curious if that goes beyond this particular rung of leaders to sort of a European elites more generally? And C and relatedly, how good do you feel about the general political situation in Europe? They’ve been these spurts of alarm maybe justified about the far right and AFD at one point, and that other countries have their own. Feels to me like that’s subsided a little bit, but maybe that’s just because there’s an election in the next month or two. I don’t know. So generally, give me your sense of that in Europe.
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
So yes, it’s widespread. It includes the UK, it includes, I don’t know, people like the Poles and the Czechs and the Romanians. Everybody, however they feel about it, whatever kind of government they are, including the far-right governments, they understand that there’s been a seismic shift and everybody’s seeking to adjust to that shift and to figure out how to cope with it. So there’s no one who thinks differently. Maybe some like it. I mean, Viktor Orbán in Hungary presumably likes the change in the United States, and he’s hoping to profit from it. But he too understands the scale of it. So nobody really doubts that.
As for the stability, I don’t want to make a general statement because these go election to election and each election is different. There is no question that there is in every European country, maybe one or two exceptions but almost none, here is a far right which is pro-Russian and which in some cases has been funded by Russia, or amplified by Russia on social media, or has had some special relationship with Russia, or with Russian propaganda, just like in the United States. Some of those parties are flirting with or experimenting with MAGA techniques. So they’re watching what works in America and they’re seeking to bring those tactics to Europe. So you see some of that too sometimes successfully and sometimes not.
I mean, I think the Nigel Farage’s party in the UK is trying that. In Poland, we have a party that, a kind of far-right party, which is also seeking to do the same. You can see some, in some cases, direct imitation. And of course, the degree to which those parties have influence and power, they are dangerous, both for European solidarity around Ukraine. They’re also dangerous for the persistence of and power of European institutions. I mean, Europe functions when its leaders are most in agreement. And I think we may well get, later in the next year or two, we may well get new kinds of … I mean, they’re already talking about a coalition of the willing, so the group of European leaders who came to Washington speak of themselves as a “coalition of the willing.” So they’re not NATO, they’re not the EU, they’re a new thing.
And I expect that to last and to become a way of doing business. I mean, okay, Viktor Orbán doesn’t want to join us or, I don’t know, some newly elected leader somewhere else gets cold feet. Well, then the coalition of the willing is going to move forward anyway, and you’re going to see a lot more of that action. They do understand, I think, the need to work together. I mean, everybody now has the feeling in Europe that we somehow missed a moment. So we now have the US as a quasi-authoritarian power. We have China as an authoritarian power. We have Russia as an authoritarian power. And Europe, unless it acts jointly, and unless it finds a way to channel its economic strength, I think the European Union as a single thing is the largest economy in the world, largest or second largest. Unless they find a way of channeling that and using their economic strength and translating that into some kind of geopolitical strategy, then they’re just going to be chopped up and eaten up by the others.
I mean, I think that there’s an understanding of that. But as I said, in every country you have the counterforce, sometimes directly supported by Russia, sometimes with direct links to the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. There are different configurations.
And the big question in Europe over the next couple of years, four years is: will the advocates of European liberal democracy writ large, will they win the argument? Will they find a way to pool their resources and also become, I don’t know, an AI power and a tech power as well? Or will they wind up being carved up by Americans and Russians and Chinese? And will these far-right parties play a role in that destruction? And as I said, I’m being very general because the tactics and the nuances are different in every country, but that’s the big, that’s actually now the central argument in European politics.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s very interesting and very helpful, actually, to put it in a way not in the weeds but in a bigger sense. But in a true bigger sense in the sense that they are, I think they themselves are thinking beyond the weeds, if I can fix metaphors here or say it awkwardly, you know what I mean? They’ve managed to pull themselves out. That sort of thing that’s impressive about that meeting, pull themselves out of their own national and parochial, and issues with this and that, and suddenly they seem to be, more than I would have expected, honestly, presenting a kind of united front. I mean, you’ve got to think it some point, if we remain rogue or semi-rogue, let’s just say, even if only semi on the side of the authoritarians, at least on the side of Putin, if not maybe China as well for that matter, there’s so much pressure on them.
I would think internally, I’m surprised … Let me put this way, I’m surprised more politicians have risen up internally to say, “Look, we can’t do this. I mean, we cannot be fighting Russia, in effect, opposing Russia and China and the US is not really with us. I mean, we’re not that big and we are fractured and they’re powerful and they’re ruthless, and why can’t we just go back to a certain amount of business-as-usual energy policy?” It wouldn’t be crazy to have, I mean, it wouldn’t be an honorable way to go, would ultimately be self-defeating. But I mean, it wouldn’t be—
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
The threat is that they don’t keep their sovereignty, they won’t be independent countries anymore.
BILL KRISTOL:
So Putin really is a funny way, if it were, helping is not the right … You know what I mean? They see the threat of Putin as very real, if I can put it that way?
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
Not just Putin.
BILL KRISTOL:
Not simply as an abstract matter of international relations theory or something.
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
Not just Putin. I mean, there is now, I mean, people don’t want to say it quite like this, but there is now also a threat from the United States. There’s a threat that US tech companies dominate and control European political conversations, that they prevent the development of European competitors. I mean, there are other kinds of threats directly from the United States as well that people are also just beginning to grapple with.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s so interesting. I mean, I do think here also, again, people didn’t … Trump and Vance had been sworn in and everyone was focusing on a million things, and Vance supports the AFD and it was just a little weird and Elon Musk and people weren’t happy about it, I don’t think, but there was not much … People didn’t understand how that would look actually in Germany or in Europe, right? That I mean—
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
Oh, in Germany, Germany, it looks like the United States is our enemy and they want to topple German democracy. And that’s what people think. I mean, again, I don’t think Chancellor Merz is going to say that, but you can meet plenty of Germans who believe that now.
BILL KRISTOL:
And not without some, I mean, it is extraordinary. It’s one thing to be, and this is a point you’ve made, others have made too. It’s one thing, America First had its own God knows problems and deficiencies, but you can imagine a policy of, let’s call it “restraint” or America First where you don’t get involved. Forget about all that liberal internationalism that you and I have been mostly in favor of and supporting other liberal democracies. We just stay out of these things. They go dictatorship, they go dictatorship, but we’ll survive. We have two oceans, blah, blah, blah. So it kind of more let’s say principled or consistent isolationism really. But that’s not where Trump and Vance turned out to be, or at least not Vance, I mean, Trump’s a little more confusing and stuff, but certainly Vance and the new right in America is not there. The new right is for authoritarian governments everywhere, they’re as internationalist as we are in their own way, right?
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
Well, we also have… I mean, I would draw your attention to a news story that came out of Denmark in the last 24 hours. The Danes have said that they have discovered, I haven’t seen a lot of detail yet, but that they’ve found Americans conducting an influence campaign in Greenland designed to break Greenland off from the mainland. And they’re summoning US Embassy. I’m not sure there’s an ambassador there yet or not, and they’re demanding explanation. So this is a concrete example of some kind of US covert campaign that’s designed to undermine Danish democracy and the Danish government and Danish sovereignty in order to achieve something, I’m not sure what, with Greenland. I am still not 100% sure what the goal is there, but this is the kind of story that will change forever the way the United States is perceived. I mean, I was in Denmark a few months ago, and it’s already happened there.
The idea of the United States as like our benign friend, I mean, I think the US was the biggest Danish market, and Denmark had this special relationship with the US partly about Greenland. There was a long history of sharing military exercise up there, and actually the US kept nuclear weapons in Greenland in the 1950s. And so there’s a very long, complicated, benign, friendly relationship between Denmark and the United States, and it is shattered. People are shattered by it and shocked by it. And they now look at the United States as a country that may seek to undermine Denmark. And in a way, Denmark is the most dramatic example. But as you say, there’s a version of that in Germany. There’s a version of it in Poland. There’s a version of it everywhere.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, the Danes, in my experience, I mean limited, but conferences and some stuff even in government were maybe the most unproblematically pro-American country in Europe. Certainly in Western Europe. They didn’t have issues like France did. They weren’t… Germany was complicated, unification and some trade economic rivalry. The Danes were happy. They were sort of unambiguously pro-American was my general feeling. Partly they probably wanted a little bit of barrier, bulwark against Germany. But anyway, yes, to lose that over. Yeah. But as you say, that’s only the tip of the iceberg, I guess, in Denmark. Well, let’s talk about the US since we’ve sort of talked about it indirectly through the European lens, which is a real lens though, and a very concerned and perceptive lens, I would say. But I mean, you’ve written so much about autocracy so well, you saw it coming.
You were right, I think in seeing so many that it would be more serious than a lot of people thought. Is even you… Are even you—what’s the right way to say that grammatically? —surprised though, by the pace of it and the speed of the authoritarianism and the fact that it seems to be, to me at least, to be accelerating? There’s certain wishful thinking here after three months, four months, Elon Musk goes away, DOGE, okay, we’ve seen the worst of it. It’s going to slow down sort of reversion to the mean. It wasn’t crazy to hope that, I suppose, but it feels to me like it’s more like the opposite. Anyway, how does it look to you?
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
I am not surprised that they are trying it or that they are accelerating. Everything they are doing is stuff they said they would do. I mean, DOGE had some little twists I didn’t expect. I didn’t know you could send a guy into a US government department and switch off the computers. I mean, I hadn’t thought of that, but that’s a kind of high-tech version of it. But I expected most of this to happen. I think for me, the surprise has been the number of people, the Republicans in the Senate and the House, but also law firms, business, even ordinary people. The surprise for me has been how many people gave up before fighting and they just kind of acquiesced. And I think, by the way, that’s a surprise for Europeans too. I mean, everybody has this image of Americans. We believe in freedom and we’re cowboys and we fight for what we believe and so on.
And to see just one by one by one serious people with a lot of power, billionaires and US senators, kind of caving and letting stuff happen that they know is wrong, they must know it’s wrong, is amazing. And I think I didn’t appreciate how few barriers this Trump assault would take. I knew the assault was coming, but I assumed there would be more resistance. By resistance, I know that there are people protesting. I know that there are a number of Democrats in the house and in the Senate who have been brave and open, and of course all the great Democratic governors and so on. I’m not saying that there’s… What surprises me is the rich people.
And a Republican senator is a serious figure. You have 200 employees and a job for six years and an enormous amount of status. And why would someone like that cave to someone like Donald Trump whom they know is breaking the law and they know is taking power away from Congress. I mean, this to me is really mysterious. We saw some of it in his first term and actually should say, I even wrote about it. I wrote a piece about collusion and why people collaborate back during Trump’s first term. And so it’s not like I’ve never thought about this before, but that seems to me the thing that has really accelerated. There’s just much more of that than I expected.
BILL KRISTOL:
I really think that’s true. And I think it’s true throughout society and civil society and business, private sector as well as the Republican senators are the most mind-bogglingly obvious example. Only four of them were needed to stop some of these cabinet secretaries, which would itself have sent a signal about the sub-cabinet appointments and about policy to say nothing of stopping all kinds of actual policies ranging from tariffs to foreign policy. It’s not like Senate has no role. But there’s been absolutely nothing there. But the business, and I guess it has been for me, just seeing it time and time again, and people would say, “Well, Bill, when he really goes after the stuff that effects business directly, that’s when they’ll step up. You can’t expect them to be quite as concerned as you are about abstract issues of, I don’t know, academic freedom or other kinds of assaults on civil liberties or the fact that he’s going after his enemies.
That was some particular cases, people who went after him in his first term or after. But come on, when it gets serious.” Tariffs, they all just decided basically, we’re going to go cut deals instead of taking any kind of stand on principle. And now of course, we’re taking over parts of companies and then becoming supplicants to him, the corruption, the crypto stuff is really beyond belief. And now we just… We’re speaking, what is it, August 27. So Wednesday at the end of August, he’s going after the Fed. And that was supposed to be the red line that they couldn’t tolerate. I don’t see a lot of… I mean, you can understand because running actually Citibank right now, maybe you can’t think, you can’t afford to take on Trump. That’s itself a statement about capitalism and its limitations and supporting freedom, I would say. But what about former secretaries of the Treasury, former Federal Reserve governors, big shots of all kinds?
I am kind of a… We [inaudible] honestly here in the US, I don’t know what you’ve been this summer, it’s sort of just taken for granted that they’re not going to speak up. I said this on a call this morning with a bunch of people who are anti-Trump. “Where are you? Where is everyone?” I mean, they could say maybe they wouldn’t have that much effect, but it wouldn’t be nothing if three former secretaries of the Treasury said, “This is totally unacceptable,” if 10 former Federal Reserve governors appointed by both Republicans and Democrats said it. I mean, crickets, really.
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that’s partly a phenomenon of people being afraid of being attacked and being doxed, or the fact that MAGA controls a part of the social media, whatever we’re calling it, the social media world is part of it. And maybe people are physically scared too. I mean, I know a lot of politicians are, that’s part of the explanation for their weakness. But you’re right, people who know better aren’t saying anything, and it’s a mystery. And that’s also the mystery to the outside world. I mean, that’s why people keep saying to me, “Where is everybody? Where are all the Americans? Why aren’t you doing anything?” And then I say, “Well, people are doing things, and it depends who you’re following,” but I think it’s this, it’s Intel’s allowing some chunk of its company to be taken over by the state. I mean, you and I used to call that communism, that’s called nationalization of the means of production.
I mean, we’re having kind of de facto kind of crawling nationalization. And it’s also not just the tariffs, tariffs being bad policy, it’s the way tariffs are being used. The tariffs are being used as a bargaining chip in some cases for Trump’s private interests. The Vietnamese have offered some land for a Trump golf course, maybe in exchange for having a better tariff deal. I mean, what’s that about? So US economic policy, government policy is being used to personally and financially benefit the president and his family in a way that… I can’t think of any precedent in American history for that. I mean, there’ve been corrupt presidents before. I don’t know. Supposedly Ulysses S. Grant allowed his brother-in-law to get some contracts. This is on a different scale. This is US foreign policy being twisted for the benefit of the president and US economic policy being twisted for the benefit of the President, for the financial benefit of the president, as well as the political benefit. And I can’t think of a precedent. Maybe your American history is better than me.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, no. I think it’s very different from the normal corruption, which is a sort of particularized case of someone getting paid off so that someone gets a good deal on something. We’ve seen that obviously, or try to bribe people to get good regulations for your company. But that is, I think, qualitatively different really from this level of… And of course, turning the whole US government in a sense, into a place where the people can bid for access and for favors. And then I do think there too, combined with the politicization and weaponization of the Justice Department, of the intelligence agencies, of the FBI, parts of DOD, certainly DHS, that’s again, something we’ve never seen, I think in this way. That is, I don’t know, you studied Putin a lot, I mean, isn’t it, not to… We’re not going to, forbid, become like Russia or something in the next few years, but that really is Putin-esque, isn’t it?
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
It really is. I mean, it’s happened in many different places. You could look at Turkey, you could look at Venezuela, you could look… It’s not necessarily a right-wing thing, by the way. But I mean the taking over of the institutions of the state, making civil servants personally loyal to the President and not to the state or to the country, firing intelligence officers who produce material that the President doesn’t like. And this happened a few days ago. Using the FBI or its equivalents to conduct investigations into the president’s personal enemies. People who have not broken any normal law or we don’t know what kind of law they’ve broken. I mean, the breaking into John Bolton’s house and ripping up his filing cabinet or whatever they did, I mean, why? And the idea that this is some kind of revenge for the FBI asking Trump to hand over files.
I mean, that was an open process that was conducted over many days. And Trump was repeatedly asked to give back classified documents. And when he refused to give back the classified documents, which he was storing in Mar-a-Lago in his hotel, eventually somebody went in and said, “We own these documents.” None of that happened with Bolton. We don’t know why he was being investigated. And we do know that the head of the FBI tweeted about this investigation. So the politicization of these. This is a textbook case of how democracies go wrong and how countries become authoritarian or how people lose their rights is when you politicize agencies that are supposed to be neutral when there is no rule of law. And instead, there’s rule by law. Rule by law means that the law is what the President decides it is.
So instead of having courts that make decisions based on the constitution, instead of having an FBI that investigates people based on whether they think they broke the law, instead you have this personalized and politicized organs of the state. And that is completely un-American, it’s completely undemocratic. And again, I imagine in this case, I’m sure there are precedents in American history, for example, in the South, in the 1920s or in the late 19th century. I’m sure we could find at the state level this kind of politicization, Huey Long’s Louisiana, for example. But at the federal level we have never seen anything like this, and it is a dramatic shift. And this is, of course, one that, unlike the business stuff, which people are going to feel pretty quickly, it’s one that people won’t feel immediately, but which has long-term impact on justice, on accountability, on transparency, and on how the government works.
And I also have to say, having lived through a version of this in Poland, we had a far-right government for several years, it is going to be very hard to fix. It’s very hard to fix. Once you fire all the people who worked for the Department of Justice because they believed in justice and you replace them with people who want to be there because they want to make money or because they’re loyal to Donald Trump, it’s going to be very hard to bring you back to where you were because who’s going to want to work for the Department of Justice anymore once it’s a body of politicized—I don’t know—time-wasters?
So, you’re cutting out a whole class of people, a generation of people who worked for the government out of civic-mindedness, and you’re replacing them with people who are working out of venality, and it is going to be very hard to bring the civic-minded people back. This, I’ve seen happen, here and elsewhere. All that is to me, deeply disturbing.
I think you might also want to spend a minute thinking about the difference between how ICE is being created, the new ICE, as opposed to how the FBI was originally created back in beginning of the last century. The FBI, which has been a very flawed institution, this is not an advertisement for FBI, but from the beginning it was meant to be the people who were recruited for it were told they were civil servants. There was this idea originally, they were this straight-cut square-jawed G men, and they wore suits and they were trained in a specific way. Again, they violated that and mistakes were made. I don’t know. But the DNA of the FBI and the reason why, even in some of its worst years, it continued to attract, again, civic-minded people was because that was the culture of the institution.
Look at the way ICE is being created. ICE is the opposite of that. So, people are allowed to wear masks. They don’t wear badges, like normal police. They’re being recruited in a political way. These ads are being put up saying, essentially, I mean I’m paraphrasing, “Join ICE if you want to be tough and beat people up.” And you’re creating almost like a paramilitary organization, which doesn’t have a culture of rule of law and isn’t loyal to anybody, again, except for the president.
And, again, I’m sure there were police force in Alabama in 1920 might’ve looked something like that, or even more recently. But at the federal level, we have never had this. We never had a national interior ministry police, which is what this is. That’s something you associate with communist countries, with fascist countries or with countries that have very, very different political traditions.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, it is really startling. And of course, one problem, just picking up what you said about, not only have you lost all these people from government and lost the culture and the traditions, you now have these people embedded. And so, let’s assume the most wonderful person, whoever it would be, is elected president. There is a free and fair election, fair enough, and Trump loseS it and someone succeeds Trump. Could be a anti-Trump Republican, it could be a pro-liberal democracy Republican, it could be a pro-liberal democracy Democrat, it could be a coalition ticket, whatever. What do they do?
I mean, people do not appreciate this. One friend of mine, acquaintance, was chortling a little, “Well, the Justice Department’s just being stripped of all these people. How are they going to function?” You know what? They’re filling those jobs, but they’re filling those jobs with loyalists and maybe they’re not quite as competent and they’re not quite as good lawyers and the work product declines some and they’re going to be there now, I suppose. The is a classic, isn’t it, Central and East European problem. I mean, do you come in and do you clean everyone out? But then what, do you have millions of discontented peoples, many of them ICE types who are armed and have it? Do you try to work with them? I mean the degree of, as you say, going forward, and this is what I wanted ask you, in a way, was… I want to ask you both, how far along are we on this road towards authoritarianism, I guess, I’ll just call it? Towards autocracy?
ANNE APPLEBAUM
We’re far. I mean there isn’t like, a moment—
BILL KRISTOL:
And also, where does this go in the next months and years?
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
So, there isn’t a moment when we say, “We’ve crossed a line and there’s no return,” and nor do I want to give people the idea that it’s all hopeless and there’s nothing you can do about it. I mean, we still have the Bill of Rights and we still have plenty of good people. And at the state level there are even some fantastic people and I suspect even deep in the federal government, there are good people too. And in theory, we still have Congress and we have the other branches of government. So, it’s not as if it’s hopeless. But I think Americans need to understand that this trajectory is not unfamiliar. We’ve seen it in other places before. We like to think of ourselves as exceptional and so on, but actually, the way we’re going is following a known path. And that known path leads also to other known places. It leads to falsified or rigged elections. It leads to imbalances in the system whereby… I don’t know. Here, I’m inventing possibilities, but whereby the federal government could put pressure on donors to the Democratic Party, could make it hard for Democrats to run election, could seek to create an unfair playing field. Could, well, we’ve seen this already, begin to put pressure on media to report things or write in a different way. Once the federal government has those kinds of powers or the authoritarian government, then it becomes much harder for the other side to compete. So, the earlier we attempt to stop it and the earlier people recognize and name what this is and develop a strategy to fight again, the easier it’s going to be because the farther you go down the road, the harder it becomes to turn back.
BILL KRISTOL:
And also, people are starting to notice this recently I’ve seen, it also leads to much greater possibility of civic unrest. I mean, it’s not simply that they take over everything. It’s that there’s resistance, but then countries start to split up. I mean you can’t even imagine it in the US these days, the Civil War was a long time ago, but it does look a lot like the 1850s period. I once read a little bit about, and it comes back to mind now, at some point Illinois and California may have irreconcilable differences with Texas and Florida in terms of how the country should be run. And again, which side the federal government is on then becomes extremely important.
But you really do get a question of are laws enforced across the country in an equal way? And who controls which police forces? And we have a complicated federal system, but a pretty good tradition of not having one force fighting another force, but that does happen in countries. It’s not like that’s never been heard of in human history, right? People don’t have enough imagination, I would say, sometimes, in thinking about where this could go, sadly.
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
No, I mean, look, we are really lucky. We’re a lucky country. You and I belong to a lucky generation.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yes, I agree.
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
We lived in an era when it felt like democracy was flourishing and spreading. We got used to that idea. Our country became more democratic in our lifetimes. It became more fair, certainly since I was born in the 1960s. I mean since then, the country, in many ways, has transformed. And so, we got used to the idea that it would always be like that. And it’s really important that people understand that we’ve hit a big turning point. I mean that Americans come to the realization that the Europeans have, which is that this is very different, it’s very new and it requires new ways of thinking.
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, that’s a good, I think, important note to end on and a good challenge to us to think. I view it very much as that cliche that wonderful line of Lincoln’s in his first message to Congress, I think, at the end of 1861, “We have to think anew because conditions are anew,” whatever. It’s much more eloquent than I just said it. And he meant it, I think. And he did a lot of things that really… We think of him as preserving the Union and the constitution, which is true, but also huge amount, of course, leaving aside the Emancipation Proclamation and winning the war. But I mean, many, many things he did were not… It was a kind of refounding of the republic, and I don’t want to get too rhetorical or whatever, but one almost thinks that there has to be a little more thinking, I guess the way I would put it.
It’s a tricky thing. Jonathan Last made this point, I’ll close by asking you this, the other day, which is it’s tricky at one at the same time, defend the institutions that has to be defended, even though they’re flawed, even though they’ve messed up in some ways because the alternative is so much worse. So, you have to defend… Justice Department wasn’t perfect. The FBI wasn’t perfect. The health services weren’t perfect, but I mean, compared to what’s on offer here, they need to be defended. But you also do have to have a path forward. They can’t just be going back to the—
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
No, we can’t go back. No, they need to be defended and reimagined. After Trump, assuming there is an after Trump, there is a different kind of leader next time, we will have to have a different kind of Justice Department. We’ll have to rethink what it does. What does the FBI do? By what rules does it operate? All those things are going to require an enormous amount of creativity and imagination.
BILL KRISTOL:
Let’s hope we can… Well, you certainly can help and I hope we can all help some people use that creativity and imagination some. Anne, thank you so much for taking the time today. And it’s really important, I think, and stimulating conversation.
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
Thanks, always a pleasure.
BILL KRISTOL:
Be well. I’ll see you soon in-person, I trust, here in DC or elsewhere.
ANNE APPLEBAUM:
Yep.
BILL KRISTOL:
And thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
