Making Sense with Sam Harris - #69 — The Russia Connection

Episode Date: March 24, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Anne Applebaum about Russia's meddling in the U.S. Presidential election and Trump's troubling affinity for Vladimir Putin. 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.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. 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. Today I'm speaking with Anne Applebaum. Anne is a columnist for the Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. She's also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, where she runs ARENA, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda, resisting those things rather than

producing them. She's formerly a member of the Washington Post editorial board, and she's also worked at the Spectator, the Evening Standard, the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, The Economist, The Independent. Her writing has appeared everywhere, including the New York Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. And she's the author of two very well-regarded books. The first is Iron Curtain, which describes the imposition of Soviet totalitarianism in Central Europe after the Second World War. And her previous book, Gulag, A History, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2004. history won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2004. Now, as you'll hear, I've primarily been reading Anne in the Washington Post and following her on Twitter, where she's just been an assassin. Her commentary on Trump has been on point from the very beginning, practically from the moment

he announced his candidacy. So I recommend that you follow her on Twitter. She's at Anne Applebaum, So I recommend that you follow her on Twitter. She's at Ann Applebaum, all one word. Needless to say, her expertise on Russia and propaganda is coming in especially handy these days. You'll hear that we recorded an addendum to this podcast because a few days after we recorded the initial conversation, events got quite colorful in the ongoing investigation into collusion between the president's team and the Russians. So we added about 10 minutes at the end to bring things as up to the minute as one can in a podcast like this. No doubt the story will have changed since, but I suspect the moral core of the story is the same, and that's what we talk about. Now, of course, you all know what I think about Trump, and I know that many of you are getting

bored with my howls of pain, and so I haven't been saying much on my own. Instead, I've been bringing guests on who have a lot more to say than I do, people who are far more knowledgeable about on who have a lot more to say than I do, people who are far more knowledgeable about politics and the inner workings of governments and the relevant history. So in this vein, I spoke with Gary Kasparov and David Frum, and now I'm bringing you Anne Applebaum. Enjoy. I'm here with Anne Applebaum. Anne, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. Well, listen, I've been following you on Twitter avidly is not too strong a term. You are among the few people who have just been devastating against our current president. And I would put you up there with David Frum in terms of the

quality of the stuff you've been circulating on social media about him and in response to his antics. So first, let me praise you for that. It may seem like a trivial thing, but I think it's of immense social importance. Well, thank you. I'm not sure is it flattering or not flattering to be known for your Twitter feed, but I'll take it as a compliment. I think we fight in the trench we are given, and it seems to be an important one to occupy at the moment. Before we jump into the matter at hand, can you just say a little bit about your background as a journalist? How is it that you have come to do the work you're doing now? I actually, I entered journalism in 1989. I began as a stringer living in Warsaw.

Actually, late 1988 is when I first moved there. And I was a stringer. I was in my mid-20s writing for British newspapers, writing for The Economist magazine, actually, and the independent newspaper and others. And partly because I sensed that it was an interesting time to be there, and partly because I was just very lucky, I wound up covering the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, not only in Poland, but in the whole region. You know, and I think that experience of seeing a tyranny collapse and seeing democracy replace it, I then had an occasion to watch those countries change over the subsequent 20 years, was probably the formative political experience of my life. So that might make me a little different from other American journalists. That was the thing that interested me the most and that I wrote about the most over a couple of decades.

I took that in several different directions. I wrote a couple of history books. I was fascinated by the history of the region. I wrote a history of the Gulag system, which was the Soviet camp system. And then I also wrote a history of the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after the war. So in a way, the opposite of the process that I observed. You know, what did totalitarianization look like? I'd witnessed democratization. This was the opposite process I wrote as a history book. But I've also worked as a journalist in Britain. I worked on the editorial board of the Washington Post, where I wrote about healthcare and all kinds

of all kinds of ordinary things. But I suppose that experience of being constantly trying to understand what was dictatorship, what was democracy, what were the constituent parts of both, you know, what made people adhere to one system or the other has something that's been I've been interested in my whole professional life. And I didn't think that those would be important things to know and understand in following and interpreting an American election and American presidency, but it turned out that they were. And, you know, if I had any insight into Donald Trump in his early days, and, you know, from last summer and last spring, it was because I saw, you know, immediately saw that much of what he was doing was, you know, these were tactics that came from Ukraine.

I mean, I recognized, you know, Ukrainian politics, which I also write about. I recognized the use of tactics, the way he was using social media, the way he ran his electoral events. And they looked to me like things I'd seen in Eastern Europe. And I think that somewhat weird insight might have turned out to matter because it looks like he was influenced by, well, certainly he's a campaign manager who had long Ukrainian experience. And I think that explains some of his electoral tactics anyway. Obviously, that's much of the reason why we're speaking now, because you were so early and so clear on these parallels. And we're in the process of discovering how relevant your expertise is at the moment. We'll get into talking about the investigation and what evidence is there or seems likely to be there of a connection between the Trump campaign and Russia.

But just briefly, how would you describe yourself politically? How do you come to this? What are your political biases and commitments? You know, I always thought of myself as being center-right. You know, I thought I kind of, I was very happy in the Tory party in the 1990s when I was living in Britain and I was a British journalist. I have voted Republican in the past. But I have this feeling that although my views haven't changed, I feel that the right, actually in the three countries that I remain connected to, which is Poland, the United States and Britain, the right has changed so much that it's left me somewhere else. I mean, somewhere, you know, in the center.

You know, I don't, I feel very out of touch with the current Republican Party. Certainly since the Brexit vote, I feel out of touch with the Tory Party. And the Polish right has gone mad as well. It's a whole other story. But, you know, I don't think I've changed. I mean, my views are the same as they were, you know, the same as they were 20 years ago. You know, I was sort started out as an anti-communist. I was interested in, you know, small but efficient government. I understand there has to be some public funding for some things. And, you know, of course, that will vary from country to country,

depending on what people want. But those views were, in the 1990s, kind of center-right views. And I'm not sure where they leave me now. Right. But you're not coming at this from the far left. You're not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Michael Moore. No, I'm not Bernie Sanders. I'm not Elizabeth Warren. I'm not Bernie Sanders.

I'm not Michael Moore. And, I mean, I was—the Bernie Sanders candidacy is, of course, another interesting phenomenon of the last year. I didn't have any initial sympathy with it at all. I mean, as time went on, you know, I began to see, I began, I understand more why people were voting for them and why people were excited by them at this particular moment. But no, I mean, I come from, I mean, actually, you mentioned David Frum, who I think he's also been on your program. I mean, I, for much of my life, I would have had trouble distinguishing myself from him and as a, in, in terms of political views. I mean, we've differed about some things, but

you know, sure. I, I used to write for the weekly standard. I used to write for the national review. Um, I was, you know, I didn't know how people considered me because I don't, I'm not, you know, probably culturally different from some of the American right. But, um, I was very happy in that position 10 years ago. And now, you know, I just don't know. Yeah, well, that strikes me as the most useful background to have at the moment, because what one can't allege about you and Frum and David Brooks and all the people who are center right and who have been traditionally Republican, or certainly more Republican than Democrat, you can't allege rank partisanship in your criticism of Trump, which could be alleged

of anyone on the left. I don't think honestly at this point, but certainly that's what would strike the mind of any Trump defender. This is really the challenge before us, because I want to talk about Trump and Russia and fake news and all of these intersecting concerns. But the challenge is to say something that could be conceivably persuasive to someone who doesn't already agree with us. And this is the challenge I put to David in my podcast with him. It's a very high bar given the style of thinking on the other side. This just strikes me as almost an insuperable problem, given how the defenders of Trump don't acknowledge seemingly facts that you have to acknowledge to be sane with respect to his behavior and his obvious lying. I mean, the most alarming thing about Trump, from my point of view, is, and this is among many alarming things, but it's the degree to which he lies. And the most alarming thing about his defenders is their reluctance to admit this. They'll say things like, all politicians lie, as though Trump's lying was of the ordinary sort. So even in the most extreme case,

you have something like the wiretapping allegation against President Obama. The most Republicans in Congress will say at this point is that the president is wrong. But that entirely misses the moral and political core of what happened here. I mean, the president wasn't wrong in the sense that he was mistaken. It's not like he has some information that he misinterpreted in good faith as anyone might have. He made up this allegation to cause chaos, obviously to distract people from some other chaos he caused in a previous news cycle. And it's kind of the political equivalent of a suicide bombing. It's one of these utterly malicious, slanderous, insane lies that you actually you stand no chance of being able to get away with. And he tells these sorts of lies all the time. Lies of a sort that really cannot be believed.

Or his line is so obvious that the language game he's playing at that point isn't the ordinary attempt at deception. He's just trying to bowl you over with his disregard of the norms of political discourse. So, you know, as someone who's a student of this style of communication, where you're kind of the strongman or the autocrat or the highly atypical political figure begins to communicate in this way, How does this strike you? What are the consequences of having a president who not only can we not trust, but it's worse than that. We can trust him to lie always when he thinks it serves his purpose, even when it doesn't serve his purpose. How do you think about that? Well, first of all, I do want to come back to the question of who is supporting him and why and how to reach them, because that's actually something I'm working on now myself.

But this question of why he's behaving the way he does, I mean, first of all, you said this is so atypical. It's actually not atypical. You can look around the world and you can find similar leaders. you can look around the world and you can find similar leaders. I mean, the period that I worked on as a historian is a little different in that I was writing about the communist parties in the 40s and 50s. And they combined lying with violence. So, in other words, they lied about what they were doing. They lied about the purpose of it.

They lied about their achievements. And then they suppressed people who disagreed with them. And I don't think we're dealing with anything like that in the United States. And I think it's important to be clear about that. This isn't, nobody's being forced to believe him, as they have been in other countries and other times and places. Lying has been very, very central, actually, to a lot of 20th century governments. But the correct comparison to him, though, is you if you look at Putin and how he uses lies, and if you look at Chavez and how he used lies, you do see that there are leaders who have used them effectively. So Putin uses them in a very specific way. He lies. Well, he and his and the media that he controls, and he, again,

is in a different position because he controls all the media, which is, again, not the case with Trump. He's acting in a different climate. But he creates lies deliberately, partly to devalue the entire concept of truth. I mean, it's very interesting. Look at what happened after that Malaysian plane crashed in Ukraine a couple of years ago. It was shot down by, we now know it was shot down by Russian anti-aircraft weapons, and it crashed in Ukraine, and many people died, including many Dutch people. What did the Russian media do after that? It didn't say, we didn't do it. No. Instead, it released literally dozens of different explanations. You know, there was one explanation. It was the Ukrainians shot them down because they were aiming at Putin's plane. There was another explanation that said there were lots of dead

people put on the plane on purpose and it was crashed on purpose, you know, to discredit Russia. people put on the plane on purpose and it was crashed on purpose, you know, to discredit Russia. There was another, you know, very many of them were absurd, the explanations. But the proliferation of them was such that it created this massive confusion around that event. And Radio Free Europe did a very good series of interviews in Moscow at that time, right afterwards. And they asked people on the street, you know, why did that plane crash? And overwhelmingly, people said things like, oh, we have no idea, and we'll never know. It's impossible to find out. The truth cannot be known. And the effect of Putin and Putin's press, the sort of multiplication of explanations was that it obfuscated the idea of truth. You know, people don't believe you can find out the truth. And that's very useful to a dictator. You know,

Putin doesn't want people, people, he doesn't want people to believe anything because, you know, maybe somebody will eventually print, for example, how much money he really has or, and they actually, you know, many things about his, you know, his colleagues and associates have been printed. There has been information about money stolen. There's a big piece actually in the last few days reported by several newspapers about much of the extent of Russian money laundering in Europe and how much, you know, billions of dollars stolen from the Russian budget and so on. So what Putin wants is for all those stories to be undermined.

You know, so if you tell lots and lots of lies, then people don't really know what to believe. And I don't want to make a direct analogy to what Trump is doing, but Trump clearly is trying to undermine the so-called mainstream media or even just the media. He wants people to doubt what they read. He wants his followers not to believe, I don't know, the New York Times or the Washington Post. And so, you know, by lying, he obfuscates the whole space in

a way. You know, the whole media space and the media conversation is thrown into chaos. I mean, I think it's really interesting how difficult it is for sort of mainstream reporters, I mean, really, whether they have kind of center-right or center-left views, even to describe what he's doing. I mean, for example, you know, as soon as he made that wiretapping claim, Obama denied it almost immediately. It was pretty clear to me right away that it wasn't true, you know, that he'd made it up, as you say, to distract from something else. But it's very difficult for, you know, in our media environment, it was very hard for people to cope with that. And, you know, people kept reporting on it and they kept asking him questions about it. And it was very difficult for us to come to terms with it.

And I think what it helped to do was undermine the whole idea that the press can report on things that are true and find truth and falsehood and that there's anything that can be true or false at all. You know, he prefers to exist in a kind of fantasy world where he can make up reality. So he can say, I don't know, you know, I won the popular vote in the election where there were millions of people at my inauguration. And he wants people to believe that because he wants to create reality and not be, you know, be beholden to reality. And lying is one of the ways in which political leaders do that. They do it in Russia, they do it in Venezuela, they do it in Turkey. I mean, it can be done. You know, you can, it turns out that you don't need even a police state to do that. You can sort of pollute the information space just by lying.

And I think he has done that. And the interesting thing will be to watch what happens both to the American press and to the American political debate over the next several years. And I actually don't have a prediction exactly, as I I can tell you what happened in, you know, in totalitarian countries where people were forced to believe in lies or were forbidden from contradicting them, but how it will work in, in, in, in the United States, I don't know yet. You know, in other countries, you get a phenomenon where people separate public life from private life. In other words, there's one set of values that apply in the public sphere,

you know, in the public sphere, you lie. And then in the private sphere, you behave differently around your family and your children and so on. And maybe something like that will happen in America, where people begin to say, right, the public sphere is different. And, you know, we behave differently there. And we do. And we behave differently at home. Maybe you will begin to get people cutting themselves off from public life. And I've seen this a little bit among people I know, you know, it's all so awful, I can't bear to read about it anymore. Get me away from it. And that's another reaction that you get in, you know, again, in Venezuela and in Russia, you know, okay, I'm just gonna,

I'm not going to pay any attention to the political sphere because it's so confusing and awful. I want to flag that point because the truth is I feel that myself. And I noticed that among people and I just see that happening around me. But I feel it really acutely myself. And I'm someone who has made a lot of noise about Trump and dealt with the pushback that one gets there. And there's a kind of reality testing fatigue that sets in. And it's just, it's so onerous to have to respond to this stuff. And he lies with such velocity and so grotesquely, and as do his defenders, the Sean Spicers of the world and Kellyanne Conway. And it's just, it's unbelievable what comes out of their mouths. And I've said this before, I'm sure I'm not the

only person who has said this, but if Trump were one-tenth as bad, he would seem worse. Like you can't even keep up with the crazy thing he said a few hours ago because he's saying another crazy thing right now. And you see, the media just can't even focus on his various crimes and misdemeanors against basic human sanity to say nothing of civility because they come just so rapidly and they're so enormous. But this is, we know this in other countries. It's not unique to the United States. I mean, enormous. But this is, we know this in other countries. It's not unique to the United States. I mean, it's a, and as I said, people develop coping mechanisms. They cut themselves off, or they create, you know, they make a distinction between public and private morality, or they,

you know, or in some cases, they realize that to get ahead in their job or in their community, they need to pretend to believe it. And so they do. I mean, that's another phenomenon it's worth paying attention to is that, you know, and I think that a lot of the Republicans who defend him or who aren't anyway, don't criticize him are doing it for this reason, you know, so he's set the tone of public life. And in order to succeed in his world, whether it's in his cabinet or in his White House or in his or the Congress that he's president of, people will need to pretend what he's saying is true. And that will create another weird level of alternate reality.

Yeah. Where, you know, as you say, people can't contradict him because in order to sort of, you know, in the way that, you know, the Communist Party used to say, you know, we've had this tremendous economic success. And people would say, yes, we've had tremendous economic success. It wasn't because they believed it. It's just that that was what it was necessary to say in order to get ahead. And we will now see that phenomenon in American life as well. Yes. Let's step back for a second. And I don't want to ignore this challenge I put to us at the beginning. What is the smartest defense of Trump you've heard? And so what could someone say? I don't know who this person would be. If you have a smart defender of Trump in mind, please name

this person because I would love to know such a person exists. But what could someone say to argue that none of what we just said matters at all? So I do know some people who've defended Trump. I won't mention their names because they might not like it. But the main defense that I have heard from intelligent Republicans who, you know, care about their country just as much as you and I do, is that there are things that we need to get done, that the Republican Congress, you know, which is now united and dominated by the Republicans, and we were about to have a Republican dominant or anyway, four to five, if I mean, never quite works out like that, but a Supreme Court that will have a conservative

majority or might have a conservative majority, because you never know how people really vote. But, you know, there are now important changes that we can make. And we just need to somehow live with Trump and his madness and get around him. And the Republican Congress is going to do so many great and important things that we can ignore this. And I'm not defending that defense. I'm just saying I've heard it. How deep does that go? Does it go so far as to say that not only is Trump the lesser evil here, it's just not that Clinton was going to be so terrible and make our, you know, our being the rights policy concerns unattainable, but that there's something actually more optimal about Trump than that,

that what the system needs is this level of chaos or something like it. We need a wrecking ball. Well, there's the Steve Bannon anarchy argument or the Peter Thiel anarchy argument, you know, that we need total chaos and revolution and we need to burn everything down. And then in the ashes of our country, we will rebuild something better. I mean, that's, by the way, a Bolshevik argument. That was the, you know, that was the motivating idea of the Russian Revolution, which ended in total disaster. I mean, there's no evidence that revolutionary destruction creates anything good ever. I mean, there's no historical example you can point to. But there are people who believe that. I mean, there are people who believe that. Stated that way, it sounds quite crazy to me.

Do you think Bannon and Thiel and people who subscribe to the wrecking ball theory are imagining that level of real world chaos? Or are they just imagining that it can be contained to the bureaucracy of government and that it will kind of clean out that mess of bad incentives and career bureaucrats who staff the administrative state, but that nothing that we really care about will be destroyed. So I only know, you know, I'm now repeating what people have said about Bannon or heard him say, or, you know, interpreted that, you know, but I'm told that he does believe in something quite a lot more than that. For example, he would like to have a war with China, you know, interpreted that, you know, but I'm told that he does believe in something quite a lot more than that. For example, he would like to have a war with China, you know, because he feels that, you know, we need to bring this crisis to, you know, this competition between our two

countries to, you know, to a head and we need to resolve it. And so we need, you know, we need a war. And just, you know, desiring a war like that, that's another, that's also very Bolshevik. I can't, you know, I don't know whether that's true or not. But if it is, then it is a case that they do believe in something quite a bit more than just less bureaucracy. Give me the view from across the pond. What is Trump doing to our standing in the world? How do the various European countries view us at the moment? standing in the world? How did the various European countries view us at the moment? This is, of course, my main concern. I mean, so I live in London. Most of the time I live in Warsaw. Part of the time I have a kind of foot in different parts of the transatlantic alliance.

I married to a Pole who was in a previous Polish government. I, you know, was I watched, you know, Central Europe join NATO, which was very moving at the time. And I watched the creation of the expanded transatlantic alliance as it is and the spread of democracy and prosperity across Europe. And, you know, the, I mean, first of all, it was clear to me during the campaign that Trump, even by his rhetoric and his behavior was doing enormous damage to America's reputation. But of course, since he's been in office, it's become much worse. You know, he, he, he, you know, the same things that we see at home, of course, are seen abroad. I mean, there's no difference anymore. And, but, you know, he, the same tweets that he's tweeting in the United States are read all over

the world. I mean, I was told there was a department now in the South Korean government that's now devoted to reading Trump's tweets because they need to be up on them in case, I don't know, in case he accidentally insults South Korea. They might need to know about it. Sign of the times. Yeah, exactly. But I mean, he, I mean, first of all, the lying, which is perceived as lying abroad just as it is at home. But second of all, the open and obvious disregard for America's allies and alliances and traditional friendships, which are not minor and unimportant things and which are not, you know, in which which have been extremely valuable and important to the United

States. I mean, one of the bizarre things about Trump, who styles himself as a dealmaker, is that he doesn't seem to understand even, you know, what our alliances are and what they give to us. I mean, why does the United States have an outsized footprint all around the world? Why does the world speak English? Why, you know, why is the world open to American companies? And one of the reasons is, and also why are we, why was our strength generally accepted and not fought back against in Europe and other places? And part of it is that we are an unusual superpower in that we have created this structure of friends

and alliances and like-minded countries who want to cooperate with us in creating international trade agreements and international financial arrangements countries who want to cooperate with us in creating international trade agreements and international financial arrangements and ensuring that, you know, the business is possible for our companies. And, you know, the world is open to our diplomats and our tourists and our travelers. I mean, there are all kinds of benefits that we have as a nation, both economic and psychological and political, from this enormous

web of alliances with other democracies. And Trump, by denigrating it, I mean, constantly, actually, all the way through the campaign and right up until really a few days ago, when he once again attacked Germany and Sweden in a strange speech that he gave, you know, at a rally in Florida, he has continually attacked them, you know, over and over again, you know, while appearing to praise dictatorships and particularly Russia. And that has alarmed people because, you know, what does it mean? Is America not interested in democracy anymore? Are we not going to defend our friends anymore? Are we not interested in the world that we created? I mean, the globalized world,

you know, we call it globalization. Actually, you know, in a lot of ways, it's been Americanization. I mean, it's been people accepting our norms and our ways of behavior and our, you know, our understanding about economics. You know, free trade is an American, really, it's an Anglo-American idea. The British championed it in the 19th century, but we championed it now. This is the world that we wanted and that we've stood behind and we wrote the rules. So are we now going to unwrite all that? Are we going to destroy it? Are we going to go backwards? And it's very confusing for our allies. our allies. And for people who don't like the United States, it's been, I mean, it's a combination of them feeling quite nervous about it, about us and not being sure what we'll do anymore. But it's also, you know, a green light. Okay, America doesn't care anymore about democracy. You know, that makes it easier for us to beat up on our dissidents. So I think there's been a, you know, I think that his, his, just the two months of his presidency have had a profound negative and maybe irreversible effect on America's impact in the world and America's presence in the world.

I mean, it's it's I mean, this is something I did try to talk about before the election, you know, quite a lot. And I don't know that, you know, one of the things I'm worried about is that I don't know that Americans understand this anymore. worried about is that I don't know that Americans understand this anymore. I don't know how, if Americans are aware of the degree to which this is their world, you know, that they created with their rules and that we had been the main beneficiaries of it. Yeah. So could you just reflect on the concept of soft power? It seems like that's what you've been describing, but it's not a concept that most people I think are familiar with. what you've been describing, but it's not a concept that most people, I think, are familiar with. So soft power is the power that we exert through being, for example, the world leader in education, you know, that people want to come and study in our country. They admire American degrees.

It's the power we exert through the power of American culture. You know, people want to watch American movies. It's power through diplomacy. It's power through media. It's power through that we set by example. I mean, for example, you know, it's a side issue, but an important one. The fact that Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, has stated that he doesn't want to bring reporters with him anymore when he travels. Well, you know, one of the things that when the Secretary of State brings reporters to, for example, China, and has an open dialogue with them, one of the things that does is it shows, look, this is the American system. Our officials are transparent. They speak to reporters. And that sets a kind of example for China. It's a kind of challenge. It shows, you know, this is how we do things and we think it's better. And by refusing to do that, he loses something. So he loses a measure of

influence. Oh, I see. He's a secretive leader, just like one of ours. You know, he becomes less, you know, less interesting to people who want China to evolve. So, you know, the soft power is the things that we do that aren't military, that nevertheless create American influence. And this is one of the things that Americans have excelled at and that we've been particularly good at over the last several decades is exporting our model, you know, things that values that we believe in all over the world, not through military force, but through, as I say, the power of example, through media, through education and other things. And that even leaves aside economic power, which is another source of power. The idea that military power is our only, is the only thing we have is absurd. I mean, of course it helps and it's very important, um, particularly in particular circumstances, but, but American power and strength comes from people admiring us and wanting to be like us as much as it comes from anything else. I want to get into Russia and that tightly wound knot in a moment.

But just to stay on this point of foreign perception of our travails at the moment, how does our response to Trump, such as it is, appear to our allies abroad? I mean, how does it look like this investigation into Russia ties that's, to whatever degree, being midwifed by the Republicans in Congress? How does our response look to the rest of the world. Our system is not collapsing, obviously, but the fact that we successfully promoted someone like Trump and are now so tongue-tied in addressing what, to me, is his obvious unfitness for the role of the presidency, it looks like American democracy is precarious in a way that I don't think anyone previously could have imagined. Yes, I've had a lot of sort of hysterical Germans wanting to know, you know, is this the Fourth Reich, you know, is totalitarianism rising in America? And I think actually I've mostly suggested that that's not the case. I mean, a lot depends. I think it's a little early, actually, because a lot depends on how our democracy does react to him. You know, how do we deal with him? You know, what does happen in these hearings? You know, are we,

you know, is our system able to cope with a liar? You know, is it able to cope with somebody with these authoritarian tendencies? You know, And if it turns out that it can, which I think it's too early to say that it can't, I think it may very well might be able to, then I think American proxy will look stronger to people. American democracy will look stronger to people. So I think, you know, certainly it's true that the outside world is gripped by the Russian story, partly because particularly in Europe, I can say, you know, there's really no country in Europe that doesn't have a similar story. I mean, there is, you know, enormous amount of attempted Russian influence in really every country in Europe. And in some cases, it's already shaped elections and it's already shaped political narratives and people are very aware of the problem. So watching how that comes out, I think will have an enormous impact on other countries, particularly European countries. Well, that's a great background point to make because obviously Trump's defenders will say

that the Russian story is just a conspiracy theory, right? As though Russia, there's no evidence that Russia ever does anything like this. No, no, no. I mean, so the Russian story, so I saw it last summer when it started. I knew exactly what it was. As soon as the first, what he makes just before the Democratic convention. 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, along with other subscriber-only content, Thank you. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.