Making Sense with Sam Harris - #495 — Foreign Policy for Sale

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Sam Harris speaks with Anne Applebaum about corruption, authoritarianism, and America's retreat from the world. They discuss her Atlantic cover story, the revolutionary project behind Trump's second term, US support for Europe's far right, the AfD, European rearmament, the state of the war in Ukraine, Russian propaganda, Witkoff and Kushner's deal-making in Moscow, Venezuela as a union of kleptocracies, JD Vance's nativism, the midterms, the challenge of depoliticizing institutions, 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.  

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please consider subscribing today. I am here with Anne Applebaum. Anne, it's great to see you again. Thanks for having me. I must confess, I bring you. you on because you're one of the great observers of the unraveling of America and our stature on the world stage. But also, I really always have a covert agenda, hoping you will perform psychic surgery and a few primary relationships in my life where I just,

I've got some very close friends who have been unconcerned all the while about what is happening in America. And I have not gotten through to them. And I keep hoping you will. you're really the first person on the A team of who I'm drafting again covertly. I'm making it explicit now, but you're performing the work of important relationships in my life. So keep going.

I'll do my best. Okay. And I'm sure this is true for many people in the audience as well. So I want to use your recent Atlantic cover story as a jumping off point where you discuss how American foreign policy has become an instrument of corruption in a way that we,

really haven't seen. And there's this ideological and even in your terms revolutionary agenda to spread this kind of graft and lawlessness beyond our borders and to make common cause with authoritarian regimes that already operate this way. What do most people do you think not understand about the level of corruption we're seeing in the second Trump term? So first of all, I think, people don't understand the degree to which, as you say, this is a revolutionary project. That means that there is a team of people. It's not Trump himself. Trump has his own agenda, his own narcissistic agenda, his desire to win at all costs and so on. But there's a group of people around him who are very happy to destroy existing institutions and bureaucracies and customs and to replace them with

themselves, essentially. And in the case of foreign policy, what this looks like is clearing away diplomacy, removing experts, removing ways of doing business that Americans have stuck to for the last 70, 80, 90, maybe 100 years, and instead substituting business people, friends of friends of the president, in some cases, ideologues, and letting them be the voice and the face of America. And the reason I compare it to a revolution is that when you have a revolution, there's always an ideological component, right? There's a big idea. And then the people bearing the big idea knocked things down, but then lots of other people come in after them and alongside them. And in the case of this American Revolution, we have different kinds of ideologues. We have people

who believe in their version of what they would call Western civilization or white supremacy. there are Christian nationalists who want to replace the American secular state with a Christian state. There are people who want to destroy what they call the administrative state, which the rest of us call the American government. And then there are people who want to take advantage of the vacuum and make money out of it. And I think the consistency of it and the frequency of the patterns, whether it's in Canada, whether it's in Latin America, whether it's in Europe, whether it's in Asia, is pretty overwhelming. And a lot of it gets reported. You know, there are stories here and there, but it's very rarely put together

and explained as a pattern. So just for example, you know, it's pretty clear that the Trump administration inside the state department elsewhere in the government have people who are interested in building ties between the U.S. government and the far right, especially in Europe,

because they care a lot about what they would call European civilization. And it also happens that a lot of the far-right parties are parties who are so-called enemies of regulation or libertarians, and that means those are political parties who oppose regulation. And so, therefore, you often have cryptocurrency companies supporting them because they don't want to be regulated or tech companies supporting them who don't want to be regulated. And so you have a team, really, of ideologues plus tech plus crypto working together, for example, to support

the AFD in Germany, the far right party or the far right in in France or in Poland or Romania. And this is now, you know, this is American foreign policy. You would have more and better and closer relations between many people in the Trump administration and opposition parties, because these are for the moment opposition parties in Europe, whom they would like to help have come to power rather than with the governments themselves. And that's pretty new. You know, you can say America has done terrible things in its foreign policy over the last many decades, but supporting far-right political movements in Europe in order to overthrow existing governments, in order maybe to take apart the European Union, which is

seen by some American companies as a hassle. This is a new way of operating on the world stage. And so, you know, it's pay attention to the details because it's in the details that you understand the story. Well, I think I can forgive many people for being confused about a lot of this, because So for instance, when you talk about support for the far right or, let's say, the AFD in Germany, I can imagine there are gradations of this kind of ideological capture, which, and some of which I think I'm in touch with personally. I mean, obviously, I have no fondness for the far right anywhere. But I understand the, quote, civilizational concerns when you look at the problem of Islamism and unchecked immigration, you know, the level of anti-Semitism. I mean, it's hard to imagine at the far right in the end is a friend to the Jews.

But the anti-Semitism on the left and the so-called red-green alliance, the leftist and Islamist alliance that we've seen, perhaps we'll come back to that at the end of this conversation. I can see how there are people who don't see the risk of a group like the AFD, just deciding that there's nobody else to do the job of defending the Western civilization and open societies, you know, liberal values, free speech, et cetera, from their genuine enemies. And so, you know, there might be some aspects of this that we don't want to support, but if we can cut a few regulations as well, that's all to the good, you know, I'm not a Nazi. These guys aren't Nazis.

What's the problem here? We're just recognizing that there are very few voices left of center who are willing to do this particular job. So that's, first of all, not exactly true. And I don't know, you probably don't want to break it down country by country, but I live in Poland part of the time. And the Polish government, which is a centrist, center-right government. Actually, at the moment, it's a coalition between the, I would say, central left and central right, has been stricter on immigration than the previous government, which was a far-right government or a nationalist government as it would have defined itself. You know, in most European countries right now, there are one or two exceptions. You have a, you know, very clear, you know, change of emphasis and policy. So it's not true that borders are open. It's not true that people are flooding in. It's not true that civilization is in danger in the way that the ideologues would have you believe. On the contrary, the problem with the far-right parties, I mean, again, they're different in each country and they have different roles

and so on. But if you just stick to the AFD, the AFD is a pro-Russian party. It's openly and aggressively pro-Russian. It does have neo-Nazis in its team of members of parliament. It does seek to change the nature of the modern German state. It would pull Germany out of the European Union, as it says it would. This would be caused profound economic chaos and disorder. You know, it looks to me from the, I've been following it for a long time, it's a party that's really interested in undermining Europe in removing the judicial and the legal boundaries that have made Germany such an important stabilizing influence in Europe over the last many decades. So it's also a strange position for the U.S. government, which is on the one hand calling on Europeans to defend themselves,

calling for the rearmament of Germany, which has begun. And so there's a strange question. So you're going to rearm Germany, okay, and then you're going to hand Germany over to a political party that talks about Western Poland as German territory, and you're going to hand it over to a party that doesn't want to use the weapons to fight Russia, so who else is it going to use to fight them? It's a peculiar group of people. It's not, you know, their central issue is not saving anything that you would recognize as Western civilization. So it's a, you know, when you delve into the, when you get away from the stereotypes and you delve into who the people are, what exactly we're doing, why exactly we're supporting them, it all looks a lot uglier. But of course,

it's not the only, that was not the only argument of my article. The other part of the argument was that the use of many of this, you know, there's a kind of ideological hardline, but there are also ways in which U.S. companies and especially companies close to Trump are using American foreign policy to do business. And I think that's part of the story in Europe as well. Well, in your response there, you turned up yet more evidence of how hard this is to parse. I mean, to take the rearmament of Germany, one of the only silver linings anyone has conceded to the chaos that Trump has introduced on the world stage

and the unraveling of the world order as a result has been that Europe has acknowledged that it should take responsibility for its own defense, right? That relying entirely on the U.S. was untenable. we had a massive free rider problem, and it's all to the good that Europe is rearming, and yet now you've shown a possible negative implication of that. How do you, how would you assess just that piece on its own? So the reason Europe is rearming is not because of Donald Trump. Europe is rearming because Europe has now a very clear threat on its eastern border that Europe

has finally understood, and it took a long time. You wouldn't credit Trump's lack of consistency as an ally. Certainly Trump's lack of consistency in an ally has helped. But if it weren't for the threat of Russia, there would be no need to rearm. There would be no, you know, there would be a terrorist threat from the South or from, you know, from elsewhere. But that wouldn't require rethinking mobilization, rethinking, you know, how you, how you large armies, rethinking the drone industry, doing deals with Ukrainian drone industry, which is a big part of this.

None of that would be necessary. But what you do have now is an emboldened and escalating Russia, which is carrying out frequent now, sabotage attacks, assassination attempts, cyber attacks all over Europe. There was an armed drone founded a German airport a few weeks ago. There was an attack on a, which fortunately failed on a Polish passenger train. there have been bombs and missiles that have fallen right next to the Polish border. You know, these are the things that have changed the atmosphere in Europe and change the conversation. And in that, you know, looking at it from the European point of view,

they see a threat, a genuine threat from Russia, not just some kind of online or hybrid threat that a real threat. They see the war in Ukraine escalating. And they see Trump playing a kind of neutral role. So the United States is not in solidarity necessarily with European allies. The United States is ambivalent about Ukraine. And the United States is often, I won't say aligning with Russia, because that hasn't happened yet, but certainly not criticizing Russia. And so the reorientation that's happening in Europe is, I mean, I wouldn't say it's because Trump was so clever and he persuaded them to rearm. It's more the sense of right. We see the world differently now. the United States is not necessarily on our side. We have a genuine threat. We need to think about

rearmament. And you see that, especially in Scandinavia, you see it in the UK, you see it in Germany, you see it in Poland, Baltic states, Netherlands, and a few other places. Southern Europe feels it less and they're rearming less. And I think that's, I don't have a, it's hard for me to argue with that. But as a whole, the continent now looks out into the world and see something completely different from what it saw a decade ago. And that's, it's to do with Trump. It's to do with Putin. It's to do with she. It's to do with an understanding that the United States is not the guarantor of stability or even, it's not even about military security. The United States is not a reliable partner. And therefore, Europeans need to rely on themselves. Well, on the point of military

security, does anyone believe that we would honor our Article 5 obligations to NATO at this point? I mean, it depends who you ask. I mean, there are a lot, very few European leaders would say in public, we don't believe it. But privately, many don't believe it. I think a lot would depend on what happens. I mean, one of the fears now is that there will be an attack that doesn't clearly look like an attack. So a missile falls on a German city and kills a lot of people. And the Russians say, oh, we're sorry, that was an accident.

What does NATO do? Yeah. Or a band of border guards. crosses the border into Estonia and does carries out some kind of raid. What does NATO do? Those are the kinds of things that Europe is anticipating. And would the U.S. intervene in those circumstances, pretty hard to say. So let's talk about Ukraine.

What is the actual state of the war at this point? The state of the war is that on the front line, the actual war where the, you know, the two armies fight against each other, the front line is either not moving or the Ukrainians are winning and taking back territory. I think most people aren't aware the degree to which this is a new kind of war. So there is now what the front line looks like is it's a kind of 20 or 30 or maybe it's a little wider now, kilometer strip. Inside that territory, everything is totally visible. Ukrainians can see everything. Russians can see everything. And so whenever anybody goes into the strip, into the front line, into the no man's land, whether it's a person or a tank or some guy on a

motorcycle, whoever it is, the drones can see them and take them out. And so this means effectively the Russians can't move forward. Ukrainians have been able to maneuver a little bit and move forward in the last few weeks. Russians are not able to move forward. And instead, what they've been doing is sending waves of men into the strip anyway. And this is why you have these huge Russian casualty figures, you know, thousands of people every month killed and wounded. And that's what the war looks like. The war also has two other faces, though. One is the escalation. in Russian bombardment and destruction of Ukrainian civilians in cities. So, I mean, literally in the last few days, kindergartens, hospitals, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences

in Kiev, you know, factories, not necessarily military factories, civilian factories of all kinds. It looks like what the Russians are doing is the policy they carried out in Chechnya and Syria, which is just destroy everything, just try and wreck as much of the society, as much of the economy as they possibly can. And they're targeting Kiev in a way that they didn't earlier in the war. Kiev was pretty safe, actually, through a lot of the war. And that's changed. And that's changed the atmosphere inside Ukraine quite a bit. I mean, the things that felt safe until very recently don't feel safe now. And the Russians, this is, there are technological changes. The Russians now have these jet-powered drones. Ukrainians are working on how to counter them. Maybe that will happen.

We'll see. The other thing that's really new and different, and this is true over the last few months, is that Ukraine is now able to hit very long-range targets. So they can hit Russian refineries. And they're hitting very regularly. I mean, there are daily rates, some more successful, some less. They can hit refineries in Moscow. They can hit them 1,000 miles from the border. And they've taken out, as I understand it,

something like 30 to 40 percent of the Russian refining capability, which is huge. Does anyone think that Ukraine is capable of actually winning this war? Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharis.org. Subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player. There's lots of evidence that the legitimate leader of the Venezuelan opposition, who was the figure behind an electoral victory in 2024, this is Maria Karina Machado, as we speak, is being prevented from going back to the country. She's made multiple attempts.

Her planes get turned around in the air, and the U.S. seems to have played a role in that, too. The United States is not fixing the criminality or bringing the rule of law, what the U.S. is doing instead, is partnering with the criminals and seeking to benefit from it.