Filmed December 3, 2025
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined today by Bob Kagan, with whom we’ve had previous conversations on American foreign policy and the history of American foreign policy, his most recent book, Rebellion. I would highly recommend and his two volumes on the history of American foreign policy until 1940. Is that right? I think it’s—
BOB KAGAN:
1941, yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
- One or two more volumes to come. We’ll anticipate those. But meanwhile, you’ve been working on the current moment and in a big picture sense, where are we in American foreign policy and in, I guess, the world as shaped by American foreign policy? So let’s talk about that. We’ve discussed this privately and I think there’s a lot of interesting things to be, you have a lot of interesting things to say, so I look forward to your saying them. So, welcome. And where are we? I mean, is this moment different from all previous moments or all recent previous moments, or is it just like a blip or a little bit of corruption ladled on to a traditional American foreign policy or what?
BOB KAGAN:
Yeah, I mean, normally in my historian hat, I’m reluctant to say things have changed radically because things don’t really, I mean, there is change, but there’s also usually tremendous continuity. And that’s particularly been true of American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. And it’s not that there haven’t been huge debates about American foreign policy, but mostly American policy with a new administration, regardless of whatever the rhetoric they’ve run on, usually it’s about a 10% one way or 10% the other way in terms of our foreign policy.
But now I think we really have had a real, we’re at a moment of a real break and a real discontinuity and the beginning of return to, I think the best way to put it is normal international relations. Which unfortunately, people don’t understand that normal international relations are a very dangerous situation. We sort of take for granted the degree of peace that we’ve enjoyed over the past eight plus decades, the degree of prosperity, et cetera. And we sort of think that’s the norm. The norm is actually a lot more like what the world looked like before 1945. Certainly the previous 100 years were one of just constant great power warfare. And I don’t think people are really quite ready for that, the world that we’re now moving into.
BILL KRISTOL:
So that 1945 to 20, I don’t know, ’15 or 2025, I guess, what do you think, for you is really an unusual moment and dominated by what? By American power, by the nature of that power? Characterize that.
BOB KAGAN:
Yeah. The key to it all, what’s the difference between a multipolar world and the world we’ve been living in? And the difference is not, as many people think, just the sheer distribution of power. The United States was more theoretically, certainly economically in reality and also theoretically militarily more powerful in the 1930s relative to other countries than it is today. But that was a multipolar world because the United States was not participating and preventing regional aggressors, et cetera, in Europe and Asia. So that was a truly multipolar world despite American power. And I think that where a lot of international relations theorists and other analysts have gone wrong is as they’ve seen American sort of relative economic dominance decline, and to some extent, American military dominance decline, they’ve assumed that that meant the end of the American order and a return to multipolarity. But the key thing that I think we need to understand is it’s the relationships between the powers and among the powers that determines whether a world is multipolar or not.
And in the unique, and it has been a unique situation since 1945 where the overwhelmingly most powerful nation in the world has had its power basically voluntarily accepted and even legitimized by most of the other great powers in the world, that they’ve basically have agreed to a bargain since 1945, in which formally great powers, formerly superpowers like Great Britain or France who ran much of the world for a long time, Germany, which almost conquered Europe twice, essentially accepted that their security would no longer be under their control. They were not going to determine whether they were secure or not. They were going to basically allow the United States to provide them the security and to be their defenders. And I just think we’re so used to that, that we don’t realize how almost crazy that is. If you think in historical terms, I cannot think of another situation where a major power has essentially allowed another sovereign power to be responsible for basically the lives and wellbeing of its people, as most of the powers of Europe have done, the powers of Asia have done.
These were once dominant powers capable of huge military capability, and they essentially shed all that. And the bargain was that the United States would be a reliable guarantor of their security and in exchange for which they basically ceded this overwhelming power to the United States on the assumption that the United States would not abuse that power to sort of take advantage of them. And so it really was a twofold bargain. One was that the United States could be relied upon, which by the way, historically is also unprecedented, that you could really rely to the point of disarming yourself on another power helping you.
And the other part was in doing so, you left yourself very vulnerable to that power, and therefore you had to trust the power not to abuse it. And that bargain has been exploded. And that’s why we are entering a new era, because if these countries, as is now the case, cannot rely on the American security guarantee, and I think the Trump administration has made it very clear that they can’t, that it’s sort of the intention of the Trump administration to make it clear that they can’t really rely on the United States, on the one hand.
While on the other hand, the United States now is using its superior power to demand, what is in effect, tribute from its allies in the form of these high tariffs. And so the United States is taking advantage of its overwhelming power and abusing it with its own allies. I don’t see how the alliance structure can continue under those circumstances. And now all these countries that have relied on the United States for their security are now going to have to go back to the world that existed before this unusual era in which they can only rely on themselves for security. And that has vast implications for regional geopolitics and global geopolitics that I think, again, Americans have not really begun to contemplate.
BILL KRISTOL:
So I want to get to those implications in a second and also talk about whether these other nations and other parts of the world are contemplating this yet or how much they are and what they’re thinking about it. But just to be clear, yeah, so interesting the way you put it. So there are sort of two components to the bargain which are related though, I guess. One is, what should we call it? We’re not going to do what we did before, which is walk away from the world. Which incidentally, it’s kind of amazing people assume we wouldn’t since we did in 19… We were late getting it, think of it this way, into World War I. We then walked away in 1920, basically, ’21. And then we weren’t exactly up there on the ramparts in 1938 or nine, and there were plenty of instances fresh in people’s minds of countries that one might’ve thought would’ve been on the ramparts, walking away, Munich, et cetera.
So one part of the bargain, I guess, is this faith in our commitment to do what we said we would do and that we wouldn’t just… We’d have troops in Japan, we’d have troops in Europe, and we would commit to allegedly at least, to being willing to sacrifice US cities for European land against the Soviet Union and so forth. So there’s that side of it. And then there’s the… We wouldn’t exploit them, at least not too much. We might take advantage of a few things, but we wouldn’t fundamentally have an exploitative relationship. And I guess those must be related because why would you trust… To trust the… They both depend on a kind of trust, I guess.
BOB KAGAN:
Right. And if you try to examine why did they trust the United States, I think some of it was the sort of demonstrated reticence that Americans had shown about getting involved in the rest of the world. I mean, the Europeans basically had to beg the United States to get involved twice in the first half of the 20th century. So the United States did not… There were two United States. There was the United States that conquered the continent and did so rather brutally at times, and certainly without regard for anybody else’s rights and so the United States could be that power.
But clearly beyond the continent with what was essentially, aside from the sort of accidental acquisition of the Philippines, but basically the United States was clearly not interested. It was not interested in taking European territory. It was not interested in taking territory in China at a time when everybody else was, every other great power was. And so I think the United States had… That’s part of it, is that there was that track record of Americans being pretty satisfied with their situation after they conquered the continent. And I think everybody sort of understood that. But the other element of it that I think—
BILL KRISTOL:
And I guess two oceans separating us, which—
BOB KAGAN:
Well, I mean—
BILL KRISTOL:
Which relates to that. We were satisfied to have those oceans. We didn’t think we should be going around taking bits of Europe or something like that.
BOB KAGAN:
And I don’t want to claim, by the way, it was not necessarily virtue on American’s part, it was simply lack of necessity. If the United States had been placed where Germany is placed, we would’ve had a different foreign policy. It isn’t the character of the people. As you say, a lot of it is just the absolutely unique location. And I think it’s worth emphasizing again, because I think people are just… The world they’ve known for 80 years is the world they’ve known, so I understand that. But no power in history has ever had the combination of relative invulnerability to foreign invasion on the one hand, and the capacity to deploy huge numbers of forces thousands of miles away without risking its immediate security. That even Britain, which was the closest approximation of that, had to face the prospect of invasion across the English Channel, both from Napoleon and from Hitler, and that was always a danger.
America never had to face that problem. So that both made the United States less threatening and more capable of providing the security. And so a lot of this is just geographical, but I do also think that we can’t dismiss the liberalism at the heart of the liberal world order. And the fact that there really, when people say this all time, it’s a cliche, but the shared values went beyond just the fact that we were democracies and we believed in individual rights, which was important, I think, because I think most people who live in those societies tend to look at autocracies as inherently aggressive and perhaps with some justification given the history. So there’s a certain amount of trust based on that, but also there was the liberal ideal, which sometimes gets expressed as self-determination, but the idea that you can’t simply pass entire peoples and nations back and forth between different masters, that that is somehow a basic violation of individual rights.
Something that, by the way, was the norm throughout history. The settlement of World War I, which upset a lot of American and European liberals did what all those settlements always did. Some of these people were put under, people were put in Germany, Germans were put under Czechoslovakia. They moved people around and traded imperial holdings, et cetera, et cetera. And the liberal premise is that you can’t do that and that small nations should have as much rights and protection as large nations. And within the liberal world order that the United States supported and European supported and Asian supported, those rules were abided by. And I think that that, by the way, also made it very attractive to nations that were living under the hegemony of the Soviet Union or potentially under Japan or China to look to the United States for support and to look to the liberal order for the basic sort of principle that they deserve to be independent and sovereign, et cetera.
And that’s why that’s what the Warsaw Pact countries were trading a kind of subservience to Moscow to relative equality within NATO and the European Union. And so I think… And one of the aspects of the turning point today is precisely that Trump, I think, is the first post-World War II president who does not share those basic liberal values. He doesn’t share them in terms of American domestic politics. He’s an opponent. His movement is opposed to the Declaration of Independence and the principles there. And in their foreign policy, they’re also hostile to liberalism. Clearly, they support all kinds of anti-liberal movements and governments around the world. And so that essential sort of ideological binding, which I think was kind of an essential glue to the whole system, that is also gone. And so you have both elements of the bargain are gone and the common ideology is gone. And so it just seems to me, if you take away those two things, you have to have a completely different kind of world.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, the sense that we would… It was out of the question that we would, I don’t know, invade a fellow democracy. I mean, we would sometimes care about what kind of governments they had, worry if a communist party was too strong like in France and so forth. We would make alliances, occasionally we would, of course, support or be allied with dictatorships if they were anti-communist or seemed better than the alternative, or we didn’t have much choice. So even there we put pressure on to move towards democracy and there was a kind of, as you’ve written a lot, I mean, sort of an ineluctable almost movement in that direction, even with presidents who didn’t start off thinking that was what they wanted to do.
But no, I think that is, yeah, so the ideological part of it, the liberal part of it is so important. And so do you think with Trump, is it the authoritarian side, which you wrote about in your most recent book? Is it the just willingness to make everything about his own family’s and friends’ profits? The kind of personalizing of the foreign policy and the willingness to not think that, gee, if Ukraine’s been invaded by Russia, we probably should at least start out with the presumption that we should be helping Ukraine or at least be on Ukraine’s side, even if you don’t want to help them very much and not be looking to cut commercial deals that would benefit your cronies with Russia? I mean, which part of the break— or maybe these parts of the break are all connected, I guess? And what about the rhetoric—I’ll just make it one big question, you can talk about it summarily— of America first and isolationism? Is it that or is it… Well, what is it exactly? What are we talking about?
BOB KAGAN:
Well, I mean, this is the problem, of course, in dealing with the Trump administration, which is that it’s a lot of things at once. And there’s the Trump movement, which I do think has a set of ideological principles that are fundamentally what they call post-liberal, but what I would call anti-liberal, that they really do want to redo the founding and turn the United States, as Vance said, into it’s not a creedal nation, it’s not a nation based on idea, it’s a nation based on blood and soil. And that is not, as I go through in detail in Rebellion, that is not a new phenomenon in the United States. This is an old battle that goes back to the founding. It goes back to the immediate period after the revolution when there were a lot of people who didn’t believe in the principles of the declaration and they fought it in the South particularly, but elsewhere. And what we’ve seen in terms of the Trump movement is the return of a true anti-liberal movement that has been locked out of power since the 1920s, basically.
It was overthrown by the Depression and ultimately World War II. And we’ve been living in a pro-liberal world. It hasn’t mattered who the presidents are. Eisenhower was pro-liberal, Nixon was pro-liberal, Reagan was pro-liberal, which is why the critics of the Trump movement always refers to the “uniparty,” which is to say they were right. There was no real difference on the question of liberalism between an Eisenhower and a Jimmy Carter, ultimately. But there is a difference between the Trump movement, so that’s a real break. And that movement, I think, is mostly genuinely committed to an America First isolationist position, but they also can’t seem to avoid wanting to support anti-liberalism around the world so that when J.D. Vance goes to Europe and says, basically, we’re supporting the AfD, that’s not America First. The America First guys in 1940 weren’t about change.
They weren’t pro-fascists. Some of them were a little bit fascist, but that wasn’t their point. They weren’t out to… They really were, “We don’t care what happens out there.” These guys aren’t quite that. But if they are anything, it is more that because I think they understand that this entire American role since World War II is fundamentally a liberal project. It was the consequence of a liberal triumph in the United States and then a liberal triumph globally. And so if you’re opposed to liberalism, you’re opposed to this order. So that’s the movement. No one thinks that Trump has any ideas about anything except Trump, and that’s fine. Now, Trump’s personal needs to satisfy his needs, which are mostly about amassing power and being treated like a powerful person and all that kind of stuff, dovetails nicely with the anti-liberal movement because the liberal aspects of our society are constraints on his ability to get whatever he wants. So they both have a interest in overturning liberal institutions, and I think that means globally. But Trump himself, I think his goal, his desire is to be world emperor. I think these tariffs are not, in my view, primarily about money. They’re primarily about power. They’re primarily about his ability to say to one country, “You do what I say, or I’m going to put 50% tariffs on you,” or, “If you do do what we say, I’ll drop the tariffs,” et cetera. So he kind of wants to be world emperor. But again, it has the same impact because…
And here’s the thing, I don’t know what Trump believes or doesn’t believe, but the thing that I’m confident, he does not share the liberal outlook. And that’s critical because all the presidents that we mentioned since World War II have shared that liberal outlook. So that even when someone like Barack Obama, who I think was not happy with the American grand strategy, “the Blob,” as Ben wrote… The Blob was the American foreign policy establishment basically arguing for the continuation of the post-World War II strategy. I think Obama’s basic view was that that strategy was either wrong or certainly not appropriate to our time, and so he diminished American capabilities significantly in pursuit of that. But he’s, at the end of the day, a liberal and he was unwilling to basically turn against the entire order in the same way.
And that’s what’s different about Trump is that Trump is willing to turn against the order. He really regards it as not in America’s interest. He has no feeling for it, which is why, by the way, when you say people are upset that Ukraine is being invaded, you don’t have to be upset. There have been times throughout history where the countries are invaded and people are not upset. It’s a liberal impulse to say that it’s terrible what’s happened to the Ukraine. Graham Allison is not upset. Graham Allison, the dean of our international relations theory, has been calling for a multipolar world for decades and is perfectly happy to see Ukraine fall under Russian control. And so I mean, we shouldn’t think that that’s not a respectable position historically.
Even the idea that war is bad is a liberal construct. The Germans of 1914 did not think war was bad. They thought war was a central attribute of human progress. So a lot of these things, you have to feel it. And we have to understand that when a guy like Trump looks out at the world, he doesn’t look at Putin and say he’s a villain because he’s a dictator, because he’s an aggressor. He thinks he’s just another guy that I can do business with. And so part of it is not so much what, basically, it’s not so much what he believes as the beliefs that he doesn’t share, which have been pretty basic American beliefs for a long time.
BILL KRISTOL:
I suppose in his first term, I mean, he had these impulses and this lack of belief and that was much litigated and reported on, but he was constrained by his cabinet and by other people and by, to some degree, I suppose, by Republicans in Congress at that point. And the personalism, the personal side of it, he of course indulged in quite a lot. But again, I guess, am I wrong about this, that it’s the combination in a way. I mean, if we really had an authoritarian anti-liberal movement—we do in the US, but it was a pure version of that—I have a feeling it would have trouble being successful politically. It certainly has in the past. It’s dominated particular at moments and particular regions. And the personalism conman side of Trump, it’s all about him by itself. It seems like the two coming together is a bad and unfortunate… Maybe it’s not an accident. Maybe they do dovetail in some ways, but they are somewhat distinct, I guess, is what I’m thinking. Witkoff cutting deals is a little different from J.D. Vance giving a sort of pseudo-intellectual defense of authoritarianism.
BOB KAGAN:
Right, right. But in the case of, I guess when it comes to the subject that I’m talking about, which is what is the effect—
BILL KRISTOL:
Yes. [inaudible 00:23:41].
BOB KAGAN:
… on the rest of the world, they are perfectly, not only complimentary but in a sense additive to each other. Because on the one hand, you have J.D. Vance going to Munich and chewing out the Europeans and saying, “We’re basically on the side of your enemies.” And on the other hand, you have Trump threatening to cut off aid, not doing anything in response to Russian attacks on NATO countries, which are being carried out in a kind of hybrid way right now, but which are nevertheless attacks, and throwing his weight around in kind of an imperial fashion.
These tariffs, everybody’s gotten used to the idea that, well, the Europeans and the British, they cut the deal. The Chinese cut the deal. The Japanese and the Koreans, they all cut the deal. And so fine. But I’m sorry, this is only act one of this stuff. When you tariff another country, it creates anger and bitterness in that country. The best historical example I can think of is in the 1920s when the United States put up the big tariffs. They first of all, they did anti-immigration legislation, which directly affected the Japanese because some of it was just anti-Asian exclusion. So they offended the Japanese with that. Then they put on these tariffs in the early 20s, which devastated the Japanese silk industry, for instance, and led to a real shift.
Japan comes out of World War I, and in 1920 it has a fundamentally Democratic government, which is very pro US. And over the course of the 1920s, and I would say largely because of the tariffs, politics in Japan completely shifts, and then you get the Japan that invades Manchuria in 1931. And so the notion that there isn’t going to be a backlash, especially in these democracies where people get to express themselves, there is going to be a backlash. And so that’s how whatever Trump is doing, together with what J.D. Vance is doing, together with this basic notion that now you have an America that is incredibly powerful, can throw its weight around in a lot of ways, is not committed to the defense of allies, is willing to abuse its allies economically because it has the power to do so. What do these countries do in a world like that? They can’t just keep clinging to a United States that has effectively become an opponent of theirs.
And this is going to be, by the way, even… I don’t know that Trump has given up on Greenland, maybe because a lot of other things, of elements of his policy, are not working that he doesn’t have time to focus on it. But I don’t think we have any reason to assume that he’s done with Greenland. And if he ever does recognize an independent government in Greenland, that’s a direct assault on an American ally. So right now you get the feeling that the allies are trying to jolly Trump along as best they can. But I think you’re beginning to see their understanding that they’re going to have to rely on themselves to defend themselves.
Now, a lot of Americans hear that and they say, “Well, good, let them defend themselves.” But what people don’t realize is that takes us back to the world of pre-1945. Germany having to re-arm to the point where it can actually meet Soviet power means a completely new Germany again. Now, maybe a heavily armed Germany will still be a liberal Germany, that’s possible. But it’s clear that Germany’s neighbors are going to have the same reaction to that level of German power that they’ve always had in the past. If Japan can’t rely on the United States, it’s going to go become a nuclear weapon state. It’s going to build up its capabilities, and tensions between Japan and China are going to increase exponentially. And if there’s one thing Americans have learned over the past century is that when other great powers get into wars, the United States is immediately implicated in that. That’s the great lesson of World War II. And that’s why we created this liberal world order in the first place.
And again, that’s another thing that I think Americans just are not conscious of. A lot of Americans think we created this liberal order to fight the Soviet Union, which was not true. It was created without regard, even without anticipation that the Soviets were going to be the big problem. It was to prevent a return to effectively a multipolar world.
BILL KRISTOL:
Two questions, I guess, and I don’t want to keep going on this theme, but these are related, I think. How much is this related to what Trump’s doing at home? That is, how much are we looking at—obviously, must be somehow related—the anti-liberalism at home and the anti-liberalism abroad. And secondly, what about the Western hemisphere? They seem to be sort of groping towards some doctrine, I don’t know how seriously to take it that, well, there’s a way to reconcile America first and being a big, tough nation is we beat up people, but only in this hemisphere, apparently, and blow up these fishing boats and so forth. I mean, and that vaguely fits in with homeland defense, which vaguely fits in with nativism and protectionism. I don’t think it actually stands up if you looked at it in a very serious way as a construct of a strategy, but it has vague overlaps and feels like it goes in one direction together.
So how seriously do you take the Western Hemisphere stuff and how seriously do you take the relationship to anti-liberalism at home? Because I guess for one thing, that makes it deeper than just a judgment about the world, right?…About the rest of the world.
BOB KAGAN:
Yeah. I mean, there’s clearly a connection because… And again, go back to the interwar period. So in the 1930s, America was divided about how it viewed fascist aggression. Conservative Republicans, like Robert Taft, believed that this was not a problem. And if anything, communism was the bigger threat. And he said that very late in the day. Like 1938, ’39, he said, “Communism is a bigger threat than fascism,” because domestically that’s where Conservative Republicans were, that their fear at home was that—at least they claimed their fear was, and I’m not sure I think they were being disingenuous—they claimed that communism was the threat at home and FDR was surrounded by communists or was himself a communist. And so their greatest fear was communism, and that extended to the world. And so their greatest fear in the world was communism. And in that regard, Hitler was kind of a bulwark against communism. There were certainly British conservatives who saw Hitler as a bulwark against communism. So that was a way of thinking.
Now, if you were a liberal in the 1930s, you had the opposite view. Your domestic fear was fascism. They meant corporate fascism, which was in vogue at the time. I mean, that’s what Sinclair Lewis is talking about, those corporations are going to become fascists in some way. But nevertheless, it was fascism. And so as they looked out on the world, they had the opposite view. The fascists were the dangerous ones. And the communists, if anything, are a check on fascism. So liberals were soft on the Soviets, conservatives were soft on the Nazis and Mussolini, and that’s just the way it was.
And so our entry into World War II is very much a victory of one view over the other. It was not that all Americans just said, “Hey, geez, we really got to do something about this.” The opponents of intervention were opponents right to the bitter end and after Pearl Harbor, they just couldn’t say it anymore. So here today, we’re in a similar situation. How you view the world depends on what you think primarily the domestic issues are. And so we have, at the very least, a Republican Party that has suppressed what had been its Reaganite impulses in the interest of this anti-liberal solidarity. And people who had been initially unhappy about the Russian invasion of Ukraine were compelled or persuaded to change their mind because that’s not where MAGA was going, et cetera. So I think there’s clearly a deep connection.
And when it comes to Venezuela and the hemisphere, I do think that is driven mostly by domestic politics. I think it’s driven largely by Stephen Miller’s desire to have some kind of national security justification for locking up the people that he wants to lock up. And to have a general sense that we’re in a state of war, although not one that we need to ask Congress for permission for, but we’re in a state of quasi-war which has all kinds of security implications, which unfortunately the courts are very deferent to whenever an administration claims national security justification. So I really feel like a lot of it is that. Now, maybe tomorrow we’ll invade Venezuela because Marco Rubio wants to overthrow Maduro. I don’t know. But I think that the driving force behind it is domestic.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that seems right. I mean, it fits. And this is where the immigrants who are doing—some of them at least—who are doing so much damage and all the drug dealers are coming from, et cetera. I mean, there’s some casual racism about Africans too who are less proximate. But there, Trump just wants to maybe … I don’t know what he wants to do, nothing much, I guess.
BOB KAGAN:
As you’ve said, we’re kind of dancing around this, the Trump movement is primarily a white supremacist movement. It’s a white Christian nationalist movement, but that’s almost redundant in some cases. And therefore everything is about brown people and black people and foreigners and Jews and Asians, so that can’t help but influence. And Trump is clearly responding to that. And the idea that European liberals are out to get us and there’s a great liberal global cabal, the whole globalist phenomenon, these are clearly animating… Whatever Trump personally believes, he is clearly influenced or at least paying off these sentiments that are such a key part of his movement.
BILL KRISTOL:
It seemed to be increased, maybe ascended, more than they used to be in the movement. That is, the younger people seem more inclined that direction and so forth, which it’s hard to… I find… That is I’m maybe just conditioned too much by obviously having grown up in the era that we’ve grown up in, but it’s so astonishing when people come back… But I take it they’re telling the truth when they report that more than, how much higher percentage of those hill staffers than you realize. “You don’t like the Republican Senators,” someone said to me last week. “Their staffs are worse from your point of view. Their staffs are more fascist adjacent. The Senators are just weak, but they still vaguely believe probably somehow in liberal democracy.” But that’s less the case with the younger generations. I mean, I don’t know if that’s true.
BOB KAGAN:
I mean, this is the thing. I put myself in this category. We had a kind of enlightenment liberal view that, as time goes on, people discard atavistic racism, et cetera, et cetera. But the history of our country suggests that it never entirely goes away. A hundred years after the Civil War, the South was ready to secede again over segregation. I mean, that’s just the truth. And so what do we think has happened to those people in the last 60 years? They didn’t go away for a hundred years. The people who regard America as a Christian nation is a very high percentage of the voting populists. They haven’t gone away.
And by the way, this is a larger issue, which I haven’t gotten into, but which is clearly out there, which, is liberalism itself a spent force in the world? I mean, obviously it’s not just the United States facing this kind of internal challenge, but which does mean that having a United States that is led by an anti-liberal movement, just as having a liberally America led to the spread of liberalism around the world, that’s unquestionable, so what does it mean to have an anti-liberal country that is as powerful as the United States is? We can see Trump is already affecting elections. I don’t know what’s going to happen in Honduras. By the way, it’s not like America never had any influence in the Honduran elections in the past. But in this case, it’s clearly in favor of an anti-liberal candidate, his support for Bolsonaro. And that’s another thing that I would say those countries that believe in liberalism, that’s another reason to regard the United States as an adversary, not as a reliable partner.
BILL KRISTOL:
So what about the big European and Asian countries, I think in Japan in particular, but I guess others too? Do they agree with what you’re saying, but are just they need to buy time so they’re pretending it’s not quite happening? Or do they think, “We can prop this up. We did it in the first term. Maybe this fades away some and we still have some version of this prior structure we had”? I mean, what do you make of what they’re doing and where are they really, do you think?
BOB KAGAN:
I would say that for several months there was this idea that they figured out how to play Trump, that if you just flattered his ego enough, you could get him to get off your back and stuff like that. But I think that in recent months, it’s pretty clear. If you read, there’s a good article in The Atlantic right now about the debate in Germany about returning to German power. There’s clearly the former Defense Minister Pistorius, I think he’s the former Defense Minister. Maybe he’s the current Defense Minister?
BILL KRISTOL:
Current, I think. He’s still [inaudible].
BOB KAGAN:
Yeah. Is very clear that he believes Germany is going to have to take on a huge burden. You saw this, I guess he was a general in France, talking about how the French need to understand that they’re going to have to lose lives in fighting what presumably would be Russia.
So, I think that there is realism. And so, I think it is more like what you said right now, which is, they’re not going to turn around and become great powers overnight. They need time. And so, they need to buy time with Trump and have him do as little damage as, try to keep the damage that he’s doing to a minimum while they…
Now, there are people who have real doubts as to whether even under the best of circumstances, the Europeans are ever actually going to re-arm. And it wouldn’t be the first time in history that a group of nations was a little too late deciding that they needed to make a move like that. In which case, I think Europe is in danger of basically being flanked by two hostile powers, one, Russia, and one, the United States, which leaves them open to being plundered and divided against each other.
The other interesting thing is, insofar as Trump is encouraging these right-wing nationalist parties? Nationalism can cut a lot of different directions and it isn’t necessarily the case that even if they win, they’re going to be pro-American, because they’re pro-Trump. They could just be nationalist. A nationalist Poland that doesn’t feel like the United States has its back is a different nationalist Poland than one that does.
And God forbid if you actually have a nationalist Germany run by the AfD, that is increasing its military power. So, I think one of the things, the risks that we’re seeing potential right now, is the re-nationalization of the world. You could certainly see how that could happen in Europe.
But it’s also, it’s happening right before our eyes in Japan. I mean, Japan already before this, had a pretty serious right-wing movement that Japanese prime ministers had to pay respect to, by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, and not always apologizing as much as the rest of the countries do. I mean, this is where the little details of Trump day-to-day nonsense foreign policies become relevant.
There’s this whole brouhaha over the phone call between Xi and Trump after the new Japanese Prime Minister said that Japan would come to the defense of Taiwan if it were attacked, and Xi threw a fit, called up Trump, yelled at Trump, told him. And Trump apparently sent the message to the Japanese Prime Minister, that she should tone it down. And the Japanese are like, “Oh, my God.” You know what I mean?
So it’s not like this couldn’t have happened before, but in the present context when there’s already doubt. This is the other thing. Trump has made it very clear. He said over and over again at various different times, that he thinks countries that America is defending should pay for their defense. He’s proven that he is willing to withdraw security support as he did in Ukraine, if he’s unhappy with them.
So Japan now, as it negotiates trade agreements, also has to question whether if it doesn’t please Trump, does that mean Trump will withdraw security support for Japan? Anyway, the long and the short of it is, I don’t see what choice Japan has, but to start taking on its own security responsibilities.
And again, Americans may think, “Well, good. Let it do that.” But the difficulties and potential crises and conflicts that a re-armed Japan means for East Asia, not just vis-a-vis China, but vis-a-vis Korea, vis-a-vis other countries, there’s a history there that these countries have not forgotten, only we seem to have forgotten.
But I think that the net result of Trump’s policies is to drive all of these countries in a more nationalist and more militarized direction.
BILL KRISTOL:
And also unpredictable, in terms of how that all plays out. Because, as you say, it wasn’t obvious in 1920 that the world we had in 1931 or ’35, certainly ’38 was going to develop, those countries were going to go in the direction they went in. India, I mean, there are a lot of countries that are inclined to go nationalist that Trump might be temporarily friendly with, but that he gets annoyed at them or not.
And then who knows what happens domestically? I mean, even I have trouble… One still sort of defaults, in a way, to the, well, okay, there’ll be more nationalists, but it’ll still be the kind of nationalism we’re sort of familiar with in the context of the last 80 years. They’ll be more Gaullist, or they’ll be more annoying the way India was under Nehru, or something like that.
But I think what you’re saying is that we’re not… Once you have the structure within which those mini, minor league, let’s call them nationalisms developed, once that structure collapses, you’re off to the races, potentially.
BOB KAGAN:
Right. I mean, the difference between America providing security guarantees and America not providing security guarantees, is the difference between a world order and world chaos. Even if we ultimately settle into some kind of condominium…
By the way, that’s the other sort of myth that a certain number of, I don’t know, vaguely Trump-y defenders are selling this idea that there’ll be a great power condominium, and we’ll divide the world up between China, Russia, and the United States. It’s like, does anybody really understand what that looks like? And this gets into questions of something which I’m trying to talk a lot about in this piece that I’m working on now, which is the whole sphere of interest question.
The world order of the United States was basically contrary to spheres of influence. And even though we permitted the Soviets at Yalta to get all that territory and control those countries, we never actually thought it was legitimate. The entire Cold War story is about the Soviets gradually losing that, because of the attraction, at least partly because of the attraction of the West.
But a sphere of interest world is a world in which not just Ukraine, but the Balts, traditionally Poland, if you go look at the history of Poland and Russia going back two, maybe three centuries, much of that time, Poland was either divided among different countries and non-existent, or it was basically a vassal of Moscow. The periods in which Poland has been an independent country are few and far between, and that is part of Putin’s ultimate design, because that is traditional Russian sphere of influence. And so, people who are saying, “Let’s go back to a sphere of influence world where we all…” Where are you dividing Europe exactly? And if you think about Asia, you go back to Sam Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, in which he basically recommended dividing up the world into various cultural spheres, et cetera? Well, in his division of the world, Japan is in the Sinic sphere.
I’m quite confident that Japanese have no interest in being part of the Chinese sphere of influence, and will fight to prevent that from happening. That may be true of other countries as well. I remember Peter Beinart used to write about this years ago. “Well, why can’t these countries have their sphere of influence?” And it’s like, first of all, their sphere of influence comes at the expense of currently independent countries, and in a sphere of influence, you can do whatever you want to those countries.
And so, what Ukraine is experiencing now will not be the last time that that happens. But the second question is always, why would only Russia and China get spheres of influence? Why doesn’t Germany get a sphere of influence? It once had one. Why doesn’t Britain have a sphere of influence? Why doesn’t France have a sphere of influence? And by the time you finish getting everybody’s sphere of influence, you’re back to the early 20th century again.
BILL KRISTOL:
I think even in parts of the world where we don’t think of it that much, Latin America, Africa, there can be, let’s call them, lesser spheres of influence, but still, they have bigger and smaller countries, and they have rivalries, and they have issues of boundaries.
BOB KAGAN:
Right. Right.
BILL KRISTOL:
A lot of that stuff has been held together because, and people used to make fun of it almost, arbitrary lines that were drawn and wherever they were drawn, ended up just once the United Nations gets set up, once you’re in the post-1945 order, you can’t change any of those arbitrary lines. It seemed ridiculous and it seemed arbitrary, as I say. But yeah, it seems arbitrary and ridiculous until you have a world where none of those lines means anything.
BOB KAGAN:
Until you actually don’t have that, right?
BILL KRISTOL:
Right. And then that is pre-1914, too, where you have little fights, which then can drag in bigger countries, right?
BOB KAGAN:
Absolutely. That is the source of all the wars, is overlapping spheres of influence. Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
I mean, I do think China’s been an interesting test case for this, because there were people who were Trump adjacent, maybe, well, actually in the administration, so they’re more than adjacent, very hawkish, at least they claimed, on China. And that they had to give up some of the European stuff so you could really mobilize in Asia. “That’s the key fight of the 21st century, US versus China.”
I mean, can one look at the first year of the Trump administration and say that there’s this coherent anti-China policy? I mean, whatever the merits of that would’ve been, incidentally, and however risky and unthought-through that was, I do think that’s a very big tell, don’t you think? I mean, the call from Xi that you mentioned earlier and that.
BOB KAGAN:
Yeah. No, I think that first of all, nobody doesn’t… There are very few people who don’t think that if Trump could get a trade deal with China that he liked, that he would not be willing to sell out a lot of things, including potentially Taiwan. I never understood how you could argue that the United States had a vital interest in Taiwan, but not a vital interest in Eastern Europe.
The logic of it was that we didn’t really have a vital interest in Taiwan. If you want to talk about basic America… America First wouldn’t have had any question about whether they had an interest in Taiwan. They wouldn’t have had any question about what… They would’ve thought we were crazy to be in Gaza. They would’ve thought we were crazy to be bombing Iran.
This is the thing. It is one thing to be genuinely America First, in which case, you really only care about what’s happening, not even in the whole hemisphere. America First did not care about… They were mostly for withdrawing from the hemisphere. It was what was happening in the continental United States, and everything else was not relevant to us.
If you believe that there is a foreign policy for that, and it is one of pulling back in. But, first of all, the American people have demonstrated that they can’t actually tolerate what happens in the world when that happens. I mean, they couldn’t tolerate it before World War I, ultimately, and they couldn’t tolerate it… Partly because they get sucked into it just by virtue of the fact that they’re everybody’s market. So you have questions of trade or embargoes, et cetera, if there’s conflicts, and that’s how we get drawn in. Yeah. So. I don’t…
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s an important point. I mean, the America First, which is the sort of most coherent view of a policy in that world, probably isn’t sustainable, which is why that world does lead to World War I and World War II, not to simply us watching other countries fight each other. We watched them for a while.
But as you say, we have trade… Unless you literally go to a, I suppose, real protectionism, real autarchy, but that doesn’t seem very likely or possible, in the 21st century.
BOB KAGAN:
No. And this gets back to what Trump is in fact doing, which is even though we have a kind of America First strategy, and if they ever released the national security strategy, I think it’s going to focus on the homeland and the Western hemisphere and everything.
Except Trump is building an American base in Gaza. Trump is bombing Iran. Trump is influencing the elections in Brazil and Honduras, and in Europe and elsewhere. So, in other words, you’re going to destroy our alliance system. You’re going to pursue an America First defense strategy, but you still want to act like a global superpower.
That gap is going to be increasingly large. And it’s amazing to me that people… It’s funny how the realists who spend all their time talking about the gap between means and ends, this is a massive gap, a growing gap, between means and ends, and I don’t hear the realists really talking about it at all.
BILL KRISTOL:
And also the deals with MbS and Saudi Arabia, and the UAE and stuff, it just feels like whatever the case for and against some of the practical decisions that are being made on trade and weapons and AI and all that, it seems like you’re betting an awful lot on them remaining friendly, and remaining, if they are really friendly, but are remaining workable with us, and having common interests.
BOB KAGAN:
Oh, I know.
BILL KRISTOL:
But I don’t know, it seems like that’s an awfully… Is that a world we want to be in where all these countries have their own ability to … I don’t know. I guess that’s… I’m just reiterating what you’ve been saying.
BOB KAGAN:
No, I mean, you’re 100% right. I mean, first of all, it’s funny that this pro-Israel administration is arming the Saudis to the teeth. We always used to worry about giving the weapons like that to the Saudis, partly because of what you say. Yeah, MbS is in charge now, and he’s friendly to us now. How do we know it’s going to stay that way? And also, how do we know there’s not going to be a revolution at some point in Egypt, and in Saudi Arabia? And so, how well do you actually want to arm these people?
But also on the AI front. We’re going to give them all these capabilities, how do we know they’re not going to share it? Why shouldn’t they share them with the Chinese? But this is where obviously it’s all about money, and not just about money personally for the Trump family and friends.
The degree to which America is clearly a country that is open for sale is also really remarkable. But countries that are buying your goodwill by bringing cash to the president, that is a different form of leadership than the kind where we’re guaranteeing their security and trying to have a decent world order for all of us.
BILL KRISTOL:
It’s different even from something that you and I wouldn’t like, but that would be sort of intelligible, I guess, which would be a world order in which we’re not sharing values, and we’re not even guaranteeing other people’s security, but we’re making hardheaded adjustments and arrangements with other powers, to make sure there’s a sort of balance, a sort of… I don’t know what that would be exactly, sort of pseudo Congress of Vienna.
A kind of hardheaded realism that is based on actually what these nations are like, and what their interests are, and likely to be in the near future. The moment you really are in a kind of being bought off for cash situation, it’s inherently totally unstable, right? I mean, it’s much less… It’s a very bad form of even a non-liberal world order.
It seems like we become, in fact, a very source of instability in whatever post-liberal order could be created, because we’re so commercial and available, so to speak, for manipulation.
BOB KAGAN:
By anybody.
BILL KRISTOL:
That could be like Bismarck.
BOB KAGAN:
Friend and foe, right?
BILL KRISTOL:
Right.
BOB KAGAN:
I mean, we’re just as attracted to Russian money as we are to European money. And so, we can be pulled… I mean, look. Trump has put us back in the position that we were in the 20s and 30s, which is to say, we could help a country if we decide to help them. We don’t have to help them if we don’t decide to help them. This year we’re aligned with these guys. This year we’re aligned with that guy. That’s traditional diplomacy. That’s Palmerstonian diplomacy.
But it’s been demonstrated how ultimately ineffective that is from our own point of view. It is the permanence and reliability of the system that has been such a great force for peace. And for instance, the fact that the British could not necessarily be relied upon to come to France’s defense in 1914, had a huge impact on German calculations.
If the Kaiser had known for sure that the British were going to come in on the side of the French, he would not have gone to war. This is why, again, I’m sorry to be picking on Graham Allison today, but this whole notion that we are trapped into wars by the commitments we make to our allies. I think the opposite of that is true. We have not had to fight for any treaty ally.
The only wars we’ve gotten into have been wars for countries that we decided were important, even though we didn’t have a treaty with them. And so, it is the reliability of the commitment that is the source of stability. And right now, we are absolutely anything but reliable.
Getting back to our earlier question, what do the Europeans do? They could say, okay, maybe Americans will get over this and they’ll go back to normal and stuff like that. I would say, on their part, that’s a very bad bet. Because even if Trump loses in ’28, A, his movement is not going away, so you’ll always have a potential return to Trumpian-type foreign policy in the wings, which was not true during the Cold War. You had various different versions of hawkishness during the Cold War and not we’re in or we’re out. So that’s one, on the one hand. On the other hand, who’s to say the Democrats are going to reverse all of this? And this is the part that we shouldn’t pretend that Trump invented this view. The attacks on America, the idea that America’s getting ripped off by the liberal order precedes Trump by decades, and was basically the argument of Obama, basically the argument of Biden. When Biden came out with foreign policy for the middle class, that was essentially an endorsement of the idea that American strategy wasn’t working for the average American. And so we were already on a long trajectory, basically since the end of the Cold War, of Americans in both parties saying, “Why do we have to do this?”
And Trump didn’t invent the notion that the allies have been ripping us off and we don’t really have to defend them and the order is too costly. Why would anybody assume that we’re all going to discover our inner Dean Acheson in 2028? I think if I were a foreign power, I would be dubious about counting, resting my basic security, fundamental security on the idea that the Americans are coming back.
BILL KRISTOL:
I suppose if you’re a hostile foreign power or potentially hostile foreign power, I mean, I guess which way does that cut you? Maybe you want to get things done in the next three years when Trump is there and it’s more transactional. There’s some risk of something like a more traditional Democratic Party reemerging in power. Or do you think, I mean, are we in a particularly unstable moment for that reason now?
BOB KAGAN:
I think so. And again, it’s hard to really get in the heads of both Putin and Xi Jinping, but I would say without being in their heads, it would be logical for them to believe that they can’t count on the United States being Trumpy forever. That certainly the history of the United States is one where eventually we come back and then we go to war and we defeat you, and so you need to be careful about that. But in which case, I would say the urgency of getting done what you need to get done if you’re Putin is more than people think. I think there’s a lot of assumptions that if and when he takes Ukraine or whatever happens in Ukraine, he’s going to need years to swallow it, deal with it. By the way, exactly the same arguments that were made about Japan in the 1930s, that it’ll take a while, we’ll have years to be ready for the next thing. I wouldn’t worry about that. It is clear that he’s building up a military that is not only about Ukraine, but also about Europe. And what some people are calling phase zero operations in Europe, which are really extensive, need to be understood as probes of European defense capabilities. And so if we have three years of Trump, I wonder whether Putin, in particular, but maybe also Xi, thinks this is the time to make the move before the Americans have recovered their understanding of what needs to be done.
BILL KRISTOL:
I suppose they have ways of directly and indirectly providing inducements to stay on this path because we impose these tariffs, but we also depend on them to some degree, obviously, not to be hostile to us in their economic and other behavior. So it’s not as if they have no leverage over our decisions in that respect, right?
BOB KAGAN:
Yeah. I mean, what’s hard to read in my… For me, the question is, because historically the American people have ultimately not been willing to tolerate significant gains by autocratic dictators committing aggression overseas, and that despite our best efforts to stay out, we seem not to be able to stay out. And it’s interesting to watch even today that Trump, who has the ability to cut off Ukraine completely if he wanted to, he has the ability to say, “We’re not interested in this anymore.”
And by the way, any day he may still say that, but even now he looks like a guy who doesn’t want to look like he’s just losing. And it was interesting to me that they came up with this terrible plan, and it looked like they were going to ram it down the Ukrainian’s throats. And then I don’t know whether it was Marco Rubio saved the day or whether the Europeans saved the day or whatever, he’s clearly reluctant.
So the question is, even if you have a authoritarian dictatorial Trump, even dictators have to respond to public opinion to some extent. Can we really allow the world to disintegrate in this way without a huge American reaction? And the interesting thing is I think if Trump had not been elected, I think the country was already moving in that direction of, if you look at American foreign policy since the end of the 19th century, it’s a constant oscillation between periods of high intervention followed by periods of disillusionment and retrenchment followed by a period… And there’s a logic to that because as we pull back, others move in. We don’t like the moving in, so we get back out. I think we were probably in the post-Iraq trough we’d been in for quite some time, but I think we were starting to move out of it.
The panic about China, which I think is probably overstated, but nevertheless, that’s the way Americans are. We’re either indifferent or panicked. And the obvious normal concern about Russia, which if you didn’t have a Trump, I think the Republican Party would’ve been absolutely anti-Russian on the Ukraine question so we could have been moving back in that direction. And the question is, does the advent of Trump prevent us from moving back in that direction, which is similar to asking the question, what if there’d been no Great Depression and what if Herbert Hoover or his ilk was president throughout the 1930s? I mean, we know that Roosevelt pushed the American people along. What if you had an American president who was holding them back? Who knows what would happen? There would’ve been no Pearl Harbor in that case. The wildcard for me is can Trump and the Trump movement hold back what ought to be a natural, at least historically natural American reaction to what’s happening in the world?
BILL KRISTOL:
Or has, as you said, whether Trump though, previous president’s nation building begins at home, middle class is being hurt by all this, the world’s very complicated and difficult. And could you get a more of a sense among Americans that less of a reaction than maybe we got back in the case of World War I, World War II, where it took a long time. I mean, I’m always struck when I speak sometimes to college students on Iraq. I know, especially when I used to give more really foreign policy speeches, this was probably 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago with Iraq and all that. But it was amazing how many people didn’t actually understand that the World War I was going on for a long time before we got involved and the bloodiest and most horrible war in obviously the century at least… And that World War II was going on.
I mean, they really don’t quite understand how late we got into World War II. I used to say the British are right to be a little bit offended that, well, exactly. Who was there alone for two and a half years? Or two plus years. So I don’t know, I feel like, so I don’t know which way that cuts, honestly. But again, I think your point is, I mean, yeah, to go through that would be, to wait for that to happen before we reacted.
BOB KAGAN:
Then it’s already catastrophe, right.
BILL KRISTOL:
And there are nuclear weapons, and there are other things that happen that are about a hundred years later, right?
BOB KAGAN:
Right.
BILL KRISTOL:
I mean, that is not an experiment. I guess what is the closest we’ve come to running that experiment since ’45? Maybe that would be, I’ll close with that question since you’re an actual historian who could be writing your third and fourth volume up about this. But I mean, do you think it was really, we just basically ruled it out or, well, I guess, I mean, even the little things, Korea. Acheson famously allegedly what rules it out of our sphere of inference, which maybe induces the North Koreans and the Chinese to think this is a good time with, I guess Soviet backing to think this is a good time to go snatch South Korea. That was small.
I mean, it was small. We’ve lost tens of thousands of people and it was a pretty big war and stuff. But I guess you could have, I mean, in a way, is that not a model though? Think of the Korean War on a mass happening in eight places on a much bigger scale. That’s what happens when the US signals that we’re not ready to be to step up, right? Or is that not a good analogy?
BOB KAGAN:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, the thing about the Cold War is that I think because of the anti-communism, there was a level below which we never went. So that even after Vietnam, whatever you thought about what Nixon and Kissinger were doing, they were trying to stabilize the American position. Now, I think they were doing it in a way that didn’t actually work. And then almost immediately you’re electing Ronald Reagan. I mean, Vietnam, which was infinitely more costly than Iraq, infinitely more divisive in the country than Iraq, and yet within—
BILL KRISTOL:
And had a much worse outcome in the sense of a real—
BOB KAGAN:
And a much worse outcome, right.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yes, the outcome both in Vietnam and in Cambodia and stuff like that.
BOB KAGAN:
Right. The Iraq outcome is mixed compared to the Vietnam outcome, and yet we are the last troop leave in ’73, and by 1980, you’re electing Ronald Reagan. I mean, the post-Iraq trough has been much longer than that. And so look, I mean, if you want to say… The answer to your question is we’ve already done it, because the post-Iraq American foreign policy has been inadequate to sustaining the liberal world order. And now I believe that because of the unique quality of liberal order, it still lasts even though and it leaves room for us to return, et cetera et cetera. But we have already put ourselves in a position where we now have to contemplate war.
I mean, this is the thing about Ukraine. Our Ukraine policy is classic American policy. We don’t want to go to a war with Russia. We don’t want Ukraine to lose. And so we’re trying to solve a problem that may not have been possible to solve in the way that we wanted to, you know what I mean? Just like we wanted our economic embargo of Japan to be enough to prevent them from invading Southeast Asia, but it wasn’t enough. And so we want our aid to Ukraine to solve our problem, but it doesn’t solve our problem. And so we will be back to where we thought, I think most Americans thought we never would have to be back again, which is actually contemplating great power conflict.
And if you’re unwilling to contemplate great power conflict, then you are where Europe was in the 1930s, and that does leave you vulnerable to all kinds, if you make it clear that you’re not there. And we have been heading in that direction. Now, Trump is a decisive break, and I don’t want to claim that it’s just straight from Obama to Trump because Trump is different in the way that we’ve said, but we have played with this world order and acted as if we were too tired to continue doing it for quite some time and have invited the Russian aggression.
I mean, let’s face it, we were weak in response to the invasion of Georgia in 2008. We were weak in response to the seizure of Crimea, and then our response to… Think about looking at the world from Putin’s point of view, we got the plans in detail for his invasion of Ukraine months before the invasion, and then we publicized the shit out of them and told the whole world about them. Did we take one step to deter him from doing it? No. Did we move any forces forward as a signal? Did we move our fleet into the Black Sea as a signal?
And when Putin’s forces were bogged down, he must have thought he was out of business at that point. We could have said to him at that moment when his troops were trapped in Ukraine, “You need to withdraw right now or we are going to get involved.”
Anyway, we never even came close to that. So we have sent the signal to everybody who wants to hear that we really don’t want to get involved in this stuff, and so they’re going to keep pressing until we make it clear that we are willing to get involved.
BILL KRISTOL:
But yeah, Trump has converted what was, from at least by your account, too much weakness of response, but directionally still some response that bipartisan response pro-Ukraine to a genuine—
BOB KAGAN:
We don’t care.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, we don’t care. And indeed, we want to cut deals with all you guys. So in that respect, it is a decisive moment, I suppose.
BOB KAGAN:
Yeah, yep.
BILL KRISTOL:
Hey, hate to end on a depressing note, but.
BOB KAGAN:
Yeah, sorry.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, no, but very important for people to think clearly about it and look forward to whatever article or set of articles that this gets explained in. And particularly, yeah, really getting people to think through what this world we’re unfortunately, I think inviting will look like. I mean, isn’t that the people just, it’s very hard. It’s hard after 80 years. I mean, I feel personally, right?
BOB KAGAN:
Yeah. It’s hard to realize that the way every single nation in the world behaves right now is conditioned by a certain distribution of power and a certain expectation of what the United States will and won’t do. Nobody is making any decisions without thinking about that. And Americans are generally unconscious of that, we just think we’re here mining our own business, worrying about our own stuff. What we don’t realize is every other power in the world is watching us on a daily basis to see what we do and taking their signals from that.
BILL KRISTOL:
And taking the signals in the opposite direction from the ones the way they did for decades, really.
BOB KAGAN:
Right. If the answer is the Americans are not there anymore, or they’re only there when there’s money in it for the president or whatever it is, then everybody, you have to take seriously that nation’s number one responsibility is to provide for the security of their people. And if we are not providing it, they have to provide it, and that means a whole different world.
BILL KRISTOL:
Bob Kagan, thank you for taking the time today. Very important, I think, and I think enlightening and stimulating conversations, so thanks, Bob.
BOB KAGAN:
I enjoyed it, thank you.
BILL KRISTOL:
And thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
