Making Sense with Sam Harris - #429 — The New World Order

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

Sam Harris speaks with Anne Applebaum about the erosion of democracy at home and abroad. They discuss the Sudanese civil war and the outside forces involved, America’s retreat from global leadership, the impacts of USAID cuts, gerrymandering, the integrity of U.S. elections, the capitulation of Republican representatives to Trump, tariffs, what a post-Trump world could look like, JD Vance as a potential successor to the MAGA movement, Israel’s actions in Gaza, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed. And we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Ann Applebaum.

Anne, thanks for joining me again. Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to see you. Well, so you've just written a cover article in the Atlantic. I titled online at least, I haven't seen the physical magazine, but the title online is the most nihilistic conflict on Earth. This is recounting your two trips to Sudan, which has been plunged into yet another civil war. And I want to use it, as you do in the article, I want to use your experience of Sudan as a lens through which to look at the consequences of American retreat from the world. And it's just this general unraveling of the system of international law and international aid, which has really underpinned what we have come to call the liberal world order for more or less as long as we've been alive a little bit longer.

So let's start with your experience in Sudan. What is happening in Sudan? So Sudan is engulfed by a civil war. The two main warring parties, and actually there are several others as well, but the two main warring parties are formerly components of the Sudanese military. One part is the Sudanese armed forces, the kind of main part of the army. And the another is a group called the Rapid Support Forces, who older readers or older listeners, rather, will remember as the Janjaweed. This was a group that was created a couple of decades ago by a

previous Sudanese dictator, and it was used as a force against, it was, there was an ethnic conflict in Western Sudan between Arab-speaking nomads and non-Arabic farmers. Very old conflict resolved many times through intermarriage and so on, but in the modern era was juiced up by outside weapons, outside interests, and so on. And that's a kind of, that's more or less a broader version of that is what's happening now. But anyway, the other, the other, the other group, they are fighting for concur control of territory. There's some other groups involved as well, but they're the main two groups. And the hard thing about the war and the thing that makes it hard for outsiders to understand is that it's not ideological. It's not a war of ideas. It's not

clearly an ethnic war either. It's really a war between two groups who want power, who want money, who want control of territory, who want gold, they're big and important gold mines in Sudan, who want other kinds of resources, and who are not particularly concerned about Sudanese civilians. And the civilians have really borne the brunt of the war. I mean, it's, of course, always true that civilians bear the brunt of the war, but they're in the middle of the fighting and often the subject of the fighting in a way that's not always true in other places. So they're the focus of ethnic cleansing or of revenge or of, you know, they're, they're, particularly the rapid support, the RSF, as they're called, have quite a lot of mercenaries in their

ranks who've been told that they won't be paid, but they can take whatever they can steal. And so there's an immense amount of theft as well. So it's a very unusually ugly war. And I should say one other thing about it just at the beginning, which is one of the other things that makes it unusually ugly, is the number of outside powers who are contributing to it, who are buying weapons, selling weapons, trying to making deals with one side or the other, increasing the conflict. And they include the Saudis, the Emirates, the Turks, the Egyptians, the Iranians are there, the Russians are there on both sides, you know, and others. And none of them right now have any particular interest in ending the war. Instead, they're all seeing what they can get out of it. And that, you know, in the way that the old conflict, you know, in Darfur was once juiced up by outsiders, this one really is too. And of course, now there are modern weapons, their drones. The level of sophistication of the, you know, the kind of violence that can be done is now just on a much different level than ever before.

Yeah, the list of outsiders from your article I found genuinely surprising. I mean, so you just listed some, but I'll just read you from your article. The Turkish, Egyptian, is Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Russian, Iranian, Ukrainian, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Kenyan, South Sudanese, Chad, Libya, Central African Republic, and the Chinese hovering in the background. I mean, maybe I don't know enough about the history of whatever the 500 civil wars that have been fought in the last 200 years. but that sounds like a pretty novel and awful contribution of outside powers. And there are really novel elements to it. I mean, the Ukrainians, for example, this is one of the big surprises.

For me, I have a special interest in Ukraine, and I told a Ukrainian friend of mine I was going there, and he sort of turned pale, and he said, oh, be really careful. You know, I know some people there, and I mean, and Ukrainians are there, too, and they're there to kill Russians. So in a way, they're not there. They're not fighting on one side or the other. they're there attracted by the anarchy itself, you know, that this is a place where they can harm members. Basically, it's members of the Wagner group, that Russian mercenary group has had a long involvement in Sudan, and the Ukrainians attack them there. And so the fact that they're there, you know, is from pretty far away, tells you how much of a vacuum has been created by the war and by really, you know, and I'm sure this is the next. question by the absence of any outside power or organization or institutions who are able to help

end it. Yeah. You just used the word anarchy. And as I was reading your article, it put me in mind of Robert Kaplan's very famous article from over 30 years ago, The Coming Anarchy, which was also in the Atlantic, I think probably the most read article for at least a decade in the magazine. And his prediction there, I think in the final analysis of did not come true. He was imagining the unraveling of international order and kind of all of us being pitched into a kind of crime planet as a result. But in reading your article and in, you know, now posing the question I have to pose for you, I began to worry that you are, this is sort of the, an echo of his prediction there and it's now we're we're on the cusp of something that is uh you know that of bearing out

that prediction that because i mean we really are witnessing a um just the consequences of a vacuum of leadership and i mean there was there's one quote from your article that really uh struck me as quite poignant and fairly arresting i'll just read it to you because it it um you say a middle eastern ambassador in port sudan thought i was joking when i suggested that the u.s might no longer care that much about Africa. That was beyond his imagination and beyond the imagination of many other people who still believe that someday, somehow, American diplomats are going to come back and make a difference. And I mean, to me, that really speaks to the brand damage that our country has suffered. I mean, it seems to me we've, Trump and Trumpism and this American, America first,

no-nothingism has really, at least on the international stage, ruined the very idea of America. and so I just wanted you to just reflect on that and tell me what you noticed and what you continue to notice you may live overseas most of the time so you have a very global view of our current moment in the States. Yep, I'm in Poland right now, in fact.

I'll start with saying Robert Kaplan, you know, I agree the meltdown that he described didn't happen, but you can find on the planet now a number of places where, you know, used to be order and there isn't now. Sudan is one. Libya, Yemen, Syria's on the cusp could go one way the other. And all these places are also places where this role of these so-called middle powers is very important, where there's no, you know, there's no U.S., there's no U.N., there's nobody else.

And so you get these competition between other countries. And I would say that the, you know, some of what people say about the U.S. is maybe even nostalgia for something that never was. I mean, It's more of an idea of America that there was such a thing as, I don't know, it's, you know, Camp David or either the Dayton Agreement, you know, that there could be in America that would come in and bring all the warring parties and make them sit down at the table and have a conversation. I mean, maybe that didn't happen as much as people like to think. And maybe when it did happen, it didn't work as well as people remember. But there is a, it's almost a, you know, it's kind of reflex. Like, when are they coming back and why have they gone? Of course, you do all. also increasingly have people who are angry or don't care or have tossed America into the group of, you know, irrelevant, sort of countries that are just as nihilistic and just as transactional as everybody else. And so, again, I don't know whether, how much of the longing for a different America is some based on something real and based on an ideal, I don't know. But it is going to be gradually replaced by an idea that, oh, America is just another, you know, what's the difference between America and Saudi Arabia. and Russia and Iran. I mean, they're all just a bunch of greedy transactional countries whose leaders are looking for personal wealth and, you know, who aren't really bothered about anybody's well-being. And, you know, I should say the United States, I mean, it's complicated because the United States has behaved badly in so many places over so many

years. But it was always that the bad behavior was often balanced out by other things, by USAID, especially maybe by American health. you know, the contribution that America's made to ending AIDS, to ending pandemics, working on Ebola, working on child health care all around the world. I mean, people knew all of that as America, too, whatever they thought of American foreign policy in any given moment. So there was an idea of American benevolence, you know, that is, I think, really gone or is disappearing fast. When I think about the damage to our reputation and just now the failure of leadership, I'm thinking much more in terms of those ideals against which we measured ourselves, even in our failure.

I mean, we do have a lot to apologize for in how we've behaved historically, but our failures have always been measured by the ideals that we really did stand for on our best days. I mean, like, we, you know, for as long as we've been alive, America could credibly be thought to care about whether other nations cared about human rights or. or, you know, through their journalists in prison or, you know, treated women like chattel. I mean, like, those are, you know, we stood for something. But as you say, now we seem to stand, I mean, we seem to have announced to the world that none of that really matters. And we just want our president and his rapacious family to get a hotel deal in your capital city. I mean, so it really, it is just a, just, the corruption is not even hidden. And it's just been shamelessly advertised. And it really just, it makes me very sad to think that

the ideals themselves now are understood, I think, erroneously, but, you know, all too plausibly, they are understood to have been bogus this whole time. I mean, we are just like Saudi Arabia in some basic sense. So one other thing that's happening, this is, this wasn't the subject of this story, although it's something I am going to write about in the near future. the U.S. is also dismantling a lot of small institutions. This is much smaller than U.S. aid or trying to dismantle, I should say, because they're all fighting back. But the administration is trying to dismantle. For example, we have foreign broadcasters who broadcast in a lot of languages. You know, Russian, you know, many Central Asian languages, Chinese, the Uyghur language, actually, which almost nobody else broadcasts in Arabic, obviously, Persian and so on. And we have broadcasters, and a lot of them have real important followings, and they have listeners in around the world. And the Trump administration has been trying to cut them or trying to end them and their work for a long time. And, you know, for a lot of the world, that's how they

know us. I mean, they listen to Radio Free Europe or Radio Liberty or Radio Farta or Radio Free Asia. And that's how they knew about America. And that's how they learned about us. And also, that's how they learned alternative stories to the ones told them by their own propagandists, you know, by their own regimes. And they would listen to, you know, U.S. radio. And often it was, as I said, it was U.S. backed radio, but the radios was done by nationals of those countries and those places. So it felt to them like had a local element as well. And a lot of it has already gone off the air or there's already, because they've had cuts to their funding that's been disappearing. And when And that disappears, you know, it's not as if, you know, the U.S. stops doing that and nothing happens, you know, the U.S. will stop those broadcasts if that happens, which I hope it doesn't. And Chinese and Russian, you know, and Cuban and Iranian information will come and take their place. There isn't, you know, there isn't ever a vacuum, you know, in the world. I mean, the vacuum is always filled by somebody. Right. And there are already examples, for example, of Voice of America had a number of Chinese language programs.

that have disappeared to be replaced by Chinese state media. There was a specific example. The Wall Street Journal found of there was a Thai program that used material from Voice of America. Voice of America has now disappeared. That's been replaced by its Chinese equivalent. Over and over and over again, every time we disappear,

the stories that we used to tell, the ideals that we used to have, we used to talk about, you know, the information that we were able to provide is simply gone. And so it's very ironic, given how many people who back this administration or claim to back it who talk about fighting censorship and that they believe in free speech. And it may turn out, I mean, very

soon that one of the biggest impacts of this administration is to undermine and degrade people's ability to speak and to hear real information all around the world. So it's not just aid. It's also the end of those kinds of programs, the small support that we're we often gave to democratic leaders and movements, but also to independent press, independent lawyers, all those things that were, again, really tiny amounts of money by compared to what we spend on the military or what we're about to spend on ice. And cutting those means that people won't even hear about this democratic ideal or the free speech ideal anymore because it simply won't be available to them. And the short-sightedness of that, you know,

the lack of thought about what that means for the future kind of flabbergasts me. Particularly given there's still China Hawks kicking around and there's still people in and around the White House and certainly in Congress who understand that the United States is in competition with other countries, not only economic competition and military competition, but also kind of war of ideas competition, and that the United States would just give that up is extraordinary. And I'm amazed there isn't louder reaction. I know that there's some in Congress are trying to help and trying to save

some of these programs, but the administration seems to be not interested at all. Well, you mentioned USAID. Can you tell me what has been the effect of Elon Musk's compassionate and judicious and technically agile editing of that program? So what you need to understand about USAID is that it was,

it represented, aside from everything else, whatever else it did, it was about 40% of international humanitarian aid. That means food and medicine, basically. It's nothing else. No other programs, nothing. But it was also a huge part of the logistics. So, you know, trucking contracts to bring grain around the world or shipping contracts or statistics or payment systems. And as it turned out there were a lot of international organizations that were somehow dependent on them and those systems that didn't necessarily even know it. And so one of the things, even when I was in Sudan in the spring, which was a little bit after the destruction of USAID, is people were literally just discovering that they had a budget cut or some institution they were used to relying

on was going offline. And you had this sense of this complete disruption. And remember that when USAID ended. It didn't end in a way that, you know, we passed on responsibilities to someone else or, you know, wasteful programs were cut, but in a bit in a careful way so that programs that were useful were kept. No, it was shuttered. It was shut down. I spoke to a woman, she's quoted in the article, who didn't want her name used because she's still technically there. She's still part of the humanitarian aid programs in the United States. And who said to me, I talked to her in February, and she had been cut off from her email. She had been kicked out of her office. She had been cut off from payment systems. And she was personally responsible for a group of refugees. I won't say in which country. You know, and that was like her responsibility was to get food to them or get payments to them. And she was unable to do it. She didn't know what had happened. She didn't know where the money or the food was going. She had no ability to track it. And it just disappeared overnight. And the consequences of that, you know, the chaos, the canceled contracts, the expense, a colleague of

my at the Atlantic reported a few recently in the last couple of weeks reported a story about a huge amount of sort of nutritional food aid. They're these special products that are high, high calorie products that are made for people who are malnourished that was in a warehouse and because it hadn't been distributed, it was going to have to be destroyed. But of course, to destroy a warehouse full of food is also very expensive. the cost of destroying it, the cost of this destruction is going to be with us for a long time. And there were other very specific moments. I mean, I met a doctor who was using exactly some of this kind of nutritional aid food for the malnourished children in the hospital where he worked.

And these were, I saw the children. I mean, they were tiny babies mostly. They were very weak. They were lying down. Their mothers were also famished and lying down. And they were in a hospital word. And he was almost, you know, he was saying to me, don't worry, you know, we don't waste it. I mean, he'd heard that Elon Musk or somebody in America is worried that they're wasting this food. And he said, no, no, of course we don't waste it. We use it. And I had this feeling of shame, you know, that this man who's really on the front line of saving people's lives is justifying his use of, you know, of this product that Americans, you know, don't even care enough about to continue sending and would rather burn in a warehouse.

I mean, it's a very dramatic moment, and people don't understand it either. They ask, you know, why, what's the reason? And it's very hard to explain, you know, why didn't you hand it off? Why didn't you, you know, if you wanted to end it, why didn't you do it slowly? Why didn't you make sure nobody was going to starve or die because of what you're doing? And there's no explanation. Yeah, I mean, I'm hard pressed to come up with any charitable framing of what happened. I mean, I think the obvious callousness and ruthlessness and even cruelty and, you know,

jubilation with which it was, this vandalism was accomplished, you know, going on to X and saying, I spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper when I could have been going to great parties. I mean, just the gloating and calling all the people in the field who have given their life to this kind of work, criminals. I mean, it's just a completely psychopathic exercise in the destruction. of American soft power, but if we were going to come up with some charitable version of skepticism about aid to Africa or to anywhere in the developing world, what would you say to someone who would say, listen, Africa has been, you know, many of these countries certainly have been basket cases for as long as I've been alive. We've been giving aid there at whatever level

continuously. Maybe there's some set of incentives here that need to be re-examined. Maybe this is, maybe aid is not really as helpful as we imagine. Maybe what these countries need is a dealmaker like Donald Trump to come in and, you know, privilege economic interests over handouts and figure out how to bring these countries into the 21st century under their own power in some sense. I mean, is there any, again, I'm, you know, I'm casting a straws here. But is there some version of skepticism that would kind of demand a reset of the status quo in this area that would be anything less than morally insane? So you can meet people and I know some of them who worked at USAID and who worked in the aid world and who would argue very strenuously for a different way of thinking about it, a different way of doing it. I mean, just for example, so in Sudan, one of the few really amazing.

amazing positive stories is a movement called the emergency response rooms, somewhat awkward name, but what it is is a kind of Sudanese mutual aid organizations. And in a lot of cities, they've sprung up, they created, they raised outside money or they found access to food or medicine, and they created their own networks. This is after the war broke out, their own networks to help people and so on. And sometimes they had a little bit of money from the outside world, and some they raised themselves and so on. And there are, for example, ex-US aid people who think that that's the kind of, you know, organization we should help. So rather than helping, you know, large organizations or large charities or large, you know, these

sometimes even for-profit companies who helped to move aid and food around the world, you know, it should have all been much more grassroots and local. So there's a, there's a version that would make that argument. But that wasn't what Elon Musk did. You know, what Elon Musk did was just blow up the whole thing, as I said, in ways that were disorienting and costly. You know, it's also, you know, it's not true that there's no progress. Actually, there's a lot of Africa that's better off than it was and a lot of much of the rest of the world is more prosperous than it was in lots of countries that were formerly consumers of aid, like India, aren't anymore. You know, so it's, you know, it's not true that it doesn't work or it doesn't help or it never changes or nothing ever

nothing ever alters. I mean, countries go up and down for different reasons. Sudan is a kind of, maybe is a special case because of the war. But also Sudan, you know, and one of the things I regret about the article in some ways the story and the photographs and so on is that, you know, you can see in Sudan, you can see in Khartoum that there was a middle class life there. I mean, there were apartment buildings and blocks and infrastructure and schools and universities. And I met a lot of people who had young people who had been in university and studying something at the time the war broke out and then had to go home. I mean, it's not as if there was nothing. It's not, you know, or it's some primitive, empty place. I mean, it's very rich in terms of culture and in terms of

people are well educated. They speak excellent English. They have, they know very, they know a lot about the outside world. You know, they're not as far away from us as we would like to imagine. And As I say, it's not clear that everything that we did there was a disaster and a catastrophe, but there were moments when the U.S. did help, and there was a big north-south civil war in the past. That was the old civil war, which did have a more, it has more of a religious component because the north was Muslim and the south was Christian. And we did help to end that. And we did, we were part of the South Sudan, which had been part of the same country. We were part of them breaking off and establishing themselves as an independent state.

That's a longer story. But there is progress. and things do improve. And, you know, it's just not true that, I mean, the kind of aid that I'm talking about is the aid that keeps people alive. So nutritional supplements, medicine, things like that. And I don't see any good argument for ending that. I can see good arguments for finding ways to get it to people in better ways. I can see, I can imagine, you know, changing the way it was distributed. But to cut it off from one day to the next seems like it was and possibly cruel and pointless. Yeah, yeah.

I don't think we have good intuitions for how societies unravel. A lot of your work is focusing on how precarious democracy is and what happens when democracy is churned, illiberal. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at samharris.org.