Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov - Trump Just Turned Canada Into an Enemy — Carney Is Fighting Back (ft. Anne Applebaum)

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Starting point is 00:01:54 Scott's off, but I have one of his great friends who he has spoken to. And now we get to have Ann Appelbaum here on Raging Moderates. She's a staff writer for the Atlantic, senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins and the School of Advanced International Studies, and a Pulitzer Prize. winning historian. And it's great to have you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. No, it's a pleasure. Kind of one of those dreamy things for me. So I want to start with our closest neighbors, a trade war that is getting more and more heated by the day. Trade talks between the U.S. and Canada collapse late Friday night, just minutes before deadline, triggering 50% U.S.

Starting point is 00:02:32 tariffs on roughly 20 billion worth of Canadian goods, including hockey sticks, building materials, liquor, and clothing. This morning, President Trump fired up Truth Social, said that even more tariffs were planned for January 1st, 2027. So he's making advance plans now. 50% on cars, trucks, automotive parts, and steel. He says Canada will be treated like a state no longer. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, meanwhile, said the U.S. is at war with Canada over these tariffs. He's announced dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs on U.S. steel, dairy appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, electronics, and that it will be effective September 8th, which is soon. That is the day after Labor Day.

Starting point is 00:03:15 Let's listen to a little bit of his speech from Saturday. Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so they can own us. And I promise that that will never, ever happen. We are keeping that promise. Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away. Why does it feel like today Mark Carney is going to war? Because we're attacked.

Starting point is 00:03:44 You're at war when you get attacked. We got attacked. The U.S. put 50%. We waited until the United States decided to actually implement the so-called 338 tariffs. That's fine. We've got the reserves. We've got the resilience. We've got the plan.

Starting point is 00:04:00 We've got the focus. We'll respond. We're going to focus on what we can control. We're going to build. It was quite a speech. There were some other sections of it that really took out to me also where he talks about trade being something that's about mutual strength, something that Donald Trump is never really satisfied for anyone else having anything good out of an arrangement. But what were your big takeaways from Carney's speech and kind of the state of this trade war? So I think if you zoom out, you know, what you're seeing now is the end of.

Starting point is 00:04:33 era. And Mark Carney has, in more than once, actually, has defined it. You know, we lived for a long time in a world where people believed in negotiating for mutual benefit, that America and its closest allies would do trade deals and security deals that helped everybody. And the idea was that the more cooperation we had, the more progress we would have. And we did actually succeed the United States in creating a kind of zone of prosperity. In Europe, in parts of Asia, with our closest allies, we had these seamless arrangements that worked very well. Donald Trump doesn't believe in that world. And what he believes in is a world of zero-sum games. So there can only be one winner and one loser. So the United States doesn't do deals with Canada that are good for the

Starting point is 00:05:28 United States and Canada, the United States is interested in destroying Canada. And what I think most Americans might not realize that there's actually now a backstory. I mean, there's been a year and a half of this that we don't pay a lot of attention to, but Canadians do, which is that, you're really actually from before the inauguration, Trump has been issuing, you know, tweets and posts and making statements about Canada as the 51st state. There have been parts of the U.S. government that have been promoting the Alberta separatist movement, maybe with an idea of breaking up Canada. There have been statements by different members of the administration that also imply that we wouldn't mind if Canada ceased to exist as a country. And so the Canadians have been listening to

Starting point is 00:06:14 this. They've been watching this, as I said, zero-sum trade negotiation where only the United States is allowed to win and nobody else is allowed to succeed. And I think we've now finally hit a kind of breaking point where they're saying, we won't accept this anymore. I mean, as far as I know, there were a lot of issues at stake here, but the two really big ones that struck me, one was apparently the United States was telling Canada they can't do trade deals with anyone else. In other words, they were trying to restrict Canadian sovereignty. And the other was, there was pressure on Canada to give up some of its rules about using the French language. You know, products being sent to Canada have to be labeled in French and their rules around intellectuals.

Starting point is 00:06:55 property and so on. And this for Canada is a kind of, you know, that's a red line that can't be crossed. I mean, they're a two-language country. You know, Quebec is a part of Canada, too. They speak French, and the U.S. was trying to, so what you have is the U.S. ending an era, putting huge pressure on Canada, maybe decide to end it as a state, and putting these unacceptable conditions on Canada. And you've now had a really strong reaction. And again, I don't think Americans are understanding it from the Canadian point of view, but this looks to Canadians like a war on Canada. And that's what Carney said. Well, I think that they're going to feel it a lot more deeply when the implications of this come to fruition. I mean, if you were in a state that did a lot of trade, like in Kentucky, for instance,

Starting point is 00:07:44 they know what's gone on with the bourbon industry as a result of this, but that has felt small with these large tariffs, especially on the automotive industry, for instance, people in Michigan are going to feel that construction supplies, Ohio, Maine. And it's interesting from the political perspective on the domestic front, a lot of the states that will be most affected are battleground states for the midterm. So I don't know if Leader Thune is currently running to the Oval Office to say something to Donald Trump about the larger. implications for us here besides the money of it all. But it's going to have a big effect in November. You know, commentators have batted around this idea that Mark Carney is the quote-unquote

Starting point is 00:08:31 leader of Europe, that he is setting the tone for how European nations should think about how they deal with Donald Trump. What do you think taking such a strong stance against him? And he And he has pushed back strongly in the past and given these big speeches, but the size of the tariffs are larger than what we've dealt with before. So what do you think the reaction in Europe is right now to what Mark Carney did on Saturday? So Europeans have been in a slightly different position from Canada because Europeans are right now directly threatened by Russia, militarily threatened by Russia. I'm actually, I'm in Poland right now as I'm talking to you. So it's something. that is talked about here all the time. There was only days ago, there was a Russian drone was discovered at a German airport. There are sabotage attacks. There are Russian drones that come over the border, their explosions and so on, and it feels like the war is getting close. And Europeans have wanted the U.S. to continue playing a deterrent role. You know, the presence of the U.S. and Europe

Starting point is 00:09:38 was seen as part of what has prevented the Russians from going farther. And I think that's, you know, I think that's true. And so they've been more reluctant to use the kind of language that Mark Carney uses, even though I think we're also at a beginning to come to a turning point in Europe where most European leaders, you know, with maybe some exceptions, but most of them now also understand that we're reaching a moment when it's better to be clear about living in a world where you don't count on the United States as much as you used to. you begin to make new security arrangements, you begin to look for different trading partners, people are moving much faster in that direction than before. I mean, I don't think you'll hear, except maybe from Spain, maybe from countries in Southern Europe, you would hear louder language. You won't hear Europeans talking the way Carney talks, but you will see them behind the scenes beginning to make really big changes. You know, so there's a kind of security alliance

Starting point is 00:10:36 emerging with Scandinavia and the Baltic states and Northern Europe, you know, Poland, Germany, to the UK. There are some, you know, dozens of European leaders have made the, you know, treks either to India or to China or to Latin America in the last, you know, a couple of years doing new kinds of trade deals and even security deals. So you're beginning to see sort of one level under the surface. You're beginning to see new arrangements coming into being. And I think that's going to continue. And Carney gives voice to it in a more articulate way. He's a more articulate leader, but he's also, he can speak more openly. It's easier for him. But you'll see, we're already seeing Europeans doing much the same. Yeah, I think it also helps a lot that he's a

Starting point is 00:11:23 former central banker. So the way that he talks just feels a little bit different than someone who maybe got elected for the soaring rhetoric. You know, Mark Carney has that as well, but you can feel the seriousness of what he's saying, which certainly is rooted in his resume. And this kind of takes us in the direction that I wanted to go anyway about the future of the global alliance. I understand, you know, why some European nations, whether it's being under threat from Russia or being really concerned about what's going on in Iran and that they have an energy supply crisis as a result of that war. But do you—so Trump is going to leave office, hopefully peacefully, peacefully, after the Trump. 28 election. So always caveat. But do you feel that when these countries or these leaders, I should say, are going around the world, they're going to India, they're standing side by side with Xi Jinping,

Starting point is 00:12:22 are they making a long-term plan or are they making a two-and-a-half-year plan to get through the end of the Trump administration? Because I know that this is not something that you can just kind of boomerang back, right? And we'll go back to normal. And most people, the world over, are not interested in, business as usual and just reverting to a system that maybe wasn't particularly fair in all facets. We had that in, you know, Trump's first administration with NATO countries having to pay more for the common defense. So what is your sense of what Europe thinks about a post-Trump era looks like whether it's a Democrat or a Republican that comes into office? So remember that the kind of revolutionary movement that Trump represents isn't just him. It's also congressmen and senators, and they have right-wing media, they have bureaucrats in the administration who now have relationships with the European far-right or with other groups around the world. You have U.S. tech companies who have a similarly kind of predatory attitude towards U.S. allies and, you know, you.

Starting point is 00:13:33 you know, and friends of all kinds. And people can see that even if Trump were gone, those people who have, as I say, this predatory zero-sum attitude to the world are still going to be around. And even if there's some kind of imaginary, nice, pro-alliance American president next time, they'll still be in Congress.

Starting point is 00:13:55 Some of them will still be in the government. They'll still be in the media. They'll still have influence. And counting on the United States, changing back again somehow isn't really something you can do. I think it was a, the French foreign minister said this, and maybe the French presidents has said it as well. He said something very recently, again, you know, the future of Europe and the security of France can't depend on 40,000 voters in Wisconsin every 40 years. You know, so, you know, we need something different.

Starting point is 00:14:23 And this is why, as I said, you're beginning to see this restructuring underneath the surface. You see France actually is a country that's trying to move all of its government software away from U.S. software. They're putting a lot of money into developing their own, a kind of separate, you know, big AI company and separate tech industries. And you're beginning to see some of that happen as well. So I don't think the situation that we had for, you know, decades after World War II, where the United States was just automatically accepted as the leader and was given advantages and actually given trade advantages and security advantages because it was later. I don't think we're going back to that. I mean, NATO is an interesting, even what you just said, you know, NATO paying more and so on.

Starting point is 00:15:07 Remember, the NATO bases in Europe, especially, you know, there's one in Spain, they're elsewhere, have mostly historically not been used directly for European defense. They'd been used for America projecting itself into the Middle East. They're part of a U.S. global picture. You know, the U.S. also has advantages from NATO, and it's also had the open economies where it could trade in in Europe and in Asia. thanks to all these alliances and relationships and arrangements. And I think the automatic deference to the United States, giving the U.S. these advantages and bases and so on, might come to an end,

Starting point is 00:15:46 or it will begin to become now, or it will begin to be less. Again, I don't think anybody wants, like, a dramatic break, but I don't think we're going back to the time when the United States was automatically received with this kind of deference because it was the leader of the democratic world. Yeah, it's like one of those breakups that just fizzles out, like breadcrumbing a little bit, where you're just sending a text every once in a while, but you're clearly not together anymore. Just to contextualize it for everyone else, like, we talk a lot less. And I wanted to before we get to Iran, because what you were saying about the bases connects directly to what the Pentagon seems to be planning, which is to pull us back from having a Mideast presence at all.

Starting point is 00:16:30 and whatever that portends for the future of the policy of foreign policy. But I'm curious, you know, you mentioned far right influences. Is there also concern about the far left? Because this, you know, the horseshoe unites in our politics when it comes to foreign policy a lot, right? And talking about America first and we should be focusing on domestic issues. We shouldn't be mostly they focus on Israel and saying our money shouldn't be going abroad. to fund anything from Iron Dome to offensive weapons for sure. So is there a concern that no matter who comes into office,

Starting point is 00:17:12 certainly if it's a lefty Democrat, that we could still be in the same position as a global order? Yeah, I mean, the Trump administration has a specific policy, which is, you know, it's in its national security strategy, and it's being carried out by people at the State Department to promote the interests of the European far-right in particular, some also in Latin America, but in Europe it's very specific. I mean, to promote the German far-right, the French far-right,

Starting point is 00:17:42 and to help them win elections, to intervene in their politics, even to intervene directly in elections, either it's the administration doing it or it's, you know, Elon Musk doing it or somebody else. And that's seen as a particularly egregious abuse of American influence, especially American tech influence, that I don't think a Democratic president wouldn't, you know, wouldn't behave like that, presumably. But, yeah, I mean, I think everybody understands that the U.S. is going through a transformation and that the U.S. dedication to playing and, you know, a role in international security is receding

Starting point is 00:18:17 and that even a Democratic president might be the same. I mean, I tend to think maybe I'm wrong, but the far left is a smaller percentage of the Democratic Party. than the far right is of the Republican Party. And so the idea that they will somehow dominate the next, you know, if there were to be a Democratic administration, they would dominate it. It seems more unlikely to me. I mean, I could well turn out to be wrong.

Starting point is 00:18:43 But the real fear isn't that. It's just more the, it's more of U.S. withdrawal, U.S. confusion. I mean, remember that a lot of this U.S. behavior, including this trade war with Canada, is also suicidal. I mean, this is really bad for the U.S. industry. Yeah. It's really bad for the U.S. currency. You know, these uneven tariffs have damaged the U.S. economy.

Starting point is 00:19:06 You know, as you referred to the automobile industry, you're absolutely right. I mean, automobile parts go back and forth across the U.S. Canadian border sometimes several times before a car is built. You know, if you put tariffs in that would destroy that, you're going to do real damage to the American car industry, which is already in pretty big trouble. You know, and so people see this kind of self-harm. U.S. is undermining its alliances, its interests, its power, its economy. You know, the war in Iran has raised gas prices, which harm Americans and harm everybody else. So it's not just that people are afraid of the left or the right. They're afraid that the U.S. is becoming less powerful and will have fewer tools to offer, to create zones of security that it was able to do in the past. You know, so it's not even just a political, problem. It's not about whether the left or right wins. It's about whether the United States is going to be capable of acting in the world the way we got used to it being able to do over many decades. Support for the show comes from Mars Men. Gaining weight as you age is pretty common for men. Of course, diet and lifestyle are big factors. But another factor might be that your testosterone levels start

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Starting point is 00:23:57 threatening to isolate countries that continue doing business with Iran. And Iran, in turn, is warned that countries aligning what the U.S. could be considered to be committing a, quote, act of war. We are six months in. It feels very no end in sight. What's your sense of where things stand? And do you believe that there are more conversations going on behind the scenes than President Trump's truth social account would indicate? If I believed what President Trump's truth social account portrayed as reality, then I wouldn't really understand anything. So no, I don't, I don't take much that he's, it's very hard to take anything he says as, as factual. I mean, I assume someone's talking to somebody because someone always is. I mean, just like the Ukrainians talk to the Russians

Starting point is 00:24:47 behind the scenes and everybody talks to everybody. But there are a few, there are a few things that are emerging from the conflict. There's a, you know, essentially what the U.S. did when it destroyed the Iranian leadership in that very first strike at the beginning of the war was it eliminated a kind of old and tired religious leaders and they've now been replaced by a younger, essentially, military junta, which doesn't seem inclined to give up and seems able to endure quite a lot of hardship. You know, again, I hope to be wrong about that. I would like the Iranian regime to change. I've had friends in the Iranian opposition for years, and I want the best for them and for their country. But at the moment, they've discovered that they have advantages that weren't even

Starting point is 00:25:37 clear before. I mean, for example, it's turned out that the Gulf states, the U.S. allies in the region, are much more vulnerable than anybody thought. It turns out that it's pretty easy for them to hit targets in Saudi Arabia or in UAE making those countries much more malleable and much more willing to deal with Iran than they were in the past. You know, the whole tenor of the region has changed now because of the war and everybody understands that Iran has cards, as President Trump would put it, that we didn't, you know, we didn't, we seem to not have known were there, or rather military planners knew that they were there, but Trump doesn't know, you know, wasn't listening to them when he, when he began the war. And so we're in a situation where,

Starting point is 00:26:18 you know, Iran is emerging as the most important regional power could do. Bob Kagan has a good piece in the Atlantic, actually, that was published in the last day or two, saying exactly that. And the U.S. is in a position that looks much weaker than anybody could have imagined. The U.S. also, again, in the region, has an alliance problem. Had the U.S. begun this conflict by first talking to European allies and to regional allies, some of whom are also surprised by it, and said, here's what we're going to do, we need your support, you know, everybody's got a role. will you help us, you know, in whatever we, in carrying this out, maybe not everybody would have been enthusiastic, but they would have had some, they would have had a broader base of allied support and

Starting point is 00:27:05 friendship and, you know, a military might and economic might from the very beginning. But they didn't do that because they don't think like that. Again, they think zero sum. They think we're the best. U.S. can do whatever we want. Our power means that we get to dictate the outcomes. And they've really alienated everybody. they've alienated Europeans, they alienated Abu Dhabi, they alienated everybody in the region.

Starting point is 00:27:27 And now it's really the United States seeking, you know, trying to figure out how to end a war that it doesn't even have clear goals for anymore. So, you know, you could very well have within the next year or two a really completely different Middle East, you know, one in which the U.S. plays much less of a role than it ever does and with, and therefore accruing less advantages and having less influence. What do you think Israel's stances right now or what actions they're willing to take? Because I feel like that has been completely undercovered, at least in U.S. media. At the heights of conflict, I guess we're at a bit of a stalemate right now in the war we were talking about Israel and their role not only as a partner to the U.S. and what we're doing with Iran, but also focused on Lebanon. And I'm curious what you think they're thinking behind the scenes. Obviously, they're going to have elections, very big deal.

Starting point is 00:28:24 And the future of Israel as a close partner in the U.S., I think, is up for grabs or up for debate a bit more than it ever has been before. So Israel's, Israel seems to be deliberately trying to lose friends, you know, deliberately making enemies, deliberately creating one conflict after the next. You know, it's not just the far left of the Democratic Party that's, you know, that's angry at Israel. It's also the center. You know, the Rom Emanuel was in Israel and made it who's a moderate by any standard, you know, and made a speech warning Israeli leaders that they were losing a whole generation of Americans. Not just because of, you know, because of this mistaken war, but because of the behavior of settlers in the West Bank, because of their aggression in Lebanon and in Syria. You know, you have in Netanyahu. a leader who, like Trump, is also, you know, is also somebody who has become, you know, through many, too many years in power has become, you know, arrogant in his belief that Israel gets to dictate all the outcomes and never has to negotiate. And you're seeing the, you know, you're seeing, you know, you will see a continued backlash to Israel as well. I mean, the best thing that could happen to Israel in the next, in the next, in the coming months is that Netanyahu would

Starting point is 00:29:41 lose the elections and then we'd have a different kind of leadership. But it would take a long time if it's even possible in this, you know, in this generation to, to rebuild the kind of respect that Israel once had in the United States. What did you make of in that speech that Rom gave his idea of a 23-state solution and kind of moving away from this idea that we should just be focused on the two-state solution? I think he was trying to help out the left, but also to some degree help out the right, which is struggling with this too, more on the fringe or kind of like the math. a red meat base of it versus, you know, centralized leadership or the whatever of the neocons that hang on or are still in office. But I thought that it was very smart of him to make the problem or regional, problem or regional discussion to give also Israel some cover that we would talk about them as embedded as part of a system versus just on their own. Yeah, I'm not sure how

Starting point is 00:30:42 grippingly original that was. I mean, you know, people have, you know, there have been attempts to get other Arab states involved in the conversation for a long time in different ways. But I think it's true that beginning to radically rethink how we talk about it, how we deal with it, what kinds of solutions are possible. There is, I don't have the solution myself, but it's pretty clear that thinking along the lines that we've been thinking for two decades isn't working. and finding a new way of negotiation, you know, would, you know, it could help solve the problem. I mean, again, I think one of the most important obstacles to any solution remains the leadership of Israel. I mean, you have to have Israeli leaders who want peace and who want to create regional stability and who want, you know, regional ties in which they will fit and their Palestinian neighbors or some form of Palestinian state will fit, you know, in order to have a negotiation at all. And I don't sense from this Israeli government any desire to do that.

Starting point is 00:31:45 I don't know how closely you've been paying attention to what's going on at the Stars and Stripes, the independent military paper. But Pete Hagsas has fired a couple top editors and a reporter. It seems linked to their reporting on 1,300 military families who were evacuated from Bahrain, still can't return home six months later, tens of thousands of dollars in expenses kind of left. hung out to dry. I'm curious as to what you think this portends, obviously this administration is extremely hostile to a free press. What can we do about it? I know that's kind of like a broad question, but obviously, you know, you've studied reported on, you know, Victor Orban and that there was an election and was able to push him out, even though a huge amount of influence and a lot

Starting point is 00:32:35 of help from us, including, you know, J.D. Vance popping over and things like that. How are you feeling, I guess, about the state of the press and whether that could boomerang back under a new presidency? So the Stars and Stripe story is frightening for a number of reasons. One, it's a, you know, it's an old organization and with a long and great tradition, and it's really sad to see it destroyed. It also, when I saw that story, I wondered how much about the war in Iran we just don't know. I mean, it's not just not just. just stars and stripes. It's also, you know, the journalists have been banned or have had to resign from being based at the Pentagon. There are no journalists embedded in this war. You know, we've always in the past, or in recent years anyway, in recent decades, the U.S. Army, U.S. military, has always wanted journalists to be at the conflict, has worked with journalists, and we're not

Starting point is 00:33:29 seeing very much of that at the moment. And I wonder how much of it we just, you know, we just don't know. I mean, the story about thousands of Americans being essentially expelled from Bahrain and unable to live there is not one I'd see. You know, and I was, I was impressed that Stars and Stripes had it and distressed to see that it was being controlled. So you do see this administration seeking to, you know, it's not through direct censorship. It's not, there isn't like a Bureau of Censorship or a Ministry of Information who decide what's published and what's not, but through all kinds of methods, you know, through pressure on newspapers.

Starting point is 00:34:03 In this case, this is a military newspaper, so they have direct control. But through pressure on ownership, you know, I'm sure. you've talked about this millions of times on many podcasts and television shows, you know, through multiple ways, they do seek to control information. I mean, I tend to think that it won't work because, I mean, like the Bahrain story, I mean, sooner or later, people do find out. I mean, Orban's attempt to control the Hungarian press ultimately didn't work because although he controlled 90% of it, all the TV, all the major newspapers, you know, a few tiny websites that still had people's trust were able to break a few stories and change the national conversation,

Starting point is 00:34:46 even though it was just really a few journalists and a few websites. And I tend to think that as people, you know, once people understand that Stars and Stripes is not independent, they'll stop believing it. And then they'll start looking for information about the military somewhere else. And so I tend to think it will backfire. I mean, I suppose there's a risk, and I'm amazed that Republicans aren't worried about it, that you could have in the future, you know, a Democratic president who also tried to use these same tools, you know, now that Trump has successfully shown that you can use the, you know, federal regulators to influence television stations. Once he's shown that that's possible, you can see others doing it. But I also think that

Starting point is 00:35:26 one of the longer-term effects is that people, once they understand that these are not credible sources of news, you'll find people looking in other places. And so it will just accelerate the decline of, you know, if the FCC is going to try to destroy or manipulate television, it will just accelerate the decline of television and people will begin to look for something else. It's certainly not good for American democracy or the American national conversation, but I also don't think it can succeed indefinitely. Well, that's nice. That bit of optimism. The FCC example is a good one because that did actually bring Republicans out in very strong terms, pushing back against Brendan Carr and what the administration was trying to do.

Starting point is 00:36:15 And Ted Cruz was saying, like, do you guys think there'll never be a Democrat again in office? I mean, I happen to think we couldn't come up with one as maniacal or who thinks they should control every facet of American society in this way. So, I mean, objectively speaking, there isn't anyone. else in U.S. politics who is quite as maniacal. So, yeah, I mean, on either side. No, there isn't. I always got that question, you know, well, what would you do if there was a Trump on the left? And I was like, I don't know, like Bernie Sanders annoys me sometimes, but he kind of just wants free health care for everybody and a higher minimum wage. It's not quite as scary as what's going on with the right. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds,

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Starting point is 00:38:41 Up front payment of $45 for three months, $90 for $1 for $1,000, $12-month plan required $15 per month equivalent to taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. I want to talk about what's going on in Kyiv. There's growing pressure, obviously, on the battlefield and at home. These anti-corruption investigators have released tapes, alleging senior officials treated corruption as routine. And the former defense minister Federer is openly challenging Zelensky and calling for elections.

Starting point is 00:39:08 It seems, as of now, though, that the people are largely standing behind Zelensky, happy with how he has prosecuted this war or their defense. Russia's escalating their attacks. Ukraine facing a $27 billion defense shortfall. What do you think the current state of play is there? You know, I mentioned last week, I was talking with Susan Glasser about the vacuum that may be left by Lindsey Graham's passing. We don't know who will, you know, fill that seat. But Mitch McConnell going out, he's already a little bit out, but, you know, we'll definitely not be the senator from Kentucky come next term. And Lindsey Graham, and those are two, you know, stalwart supporters of Ukraine. And you look at that deficit and think, you know, if we have a government that is hostile to giving Zelensky the weapons

Starting point is 00:39:59 that he says that he needs to be able to win this war, where does that leave them and leave us? So there are two or three things in that question. I mean, one is the corruption story is a, is an interesting one because the corruption investigations in Ukraine are coming from inside the Ukrainian government. In other words, these are Ukrainian, you know, inside the government organizations, which are dedicated to looking for corruption, which are fighting me. Try to imagine that right now in the United States, and you can't do it. You know, it's as if the FBI were investigating, you know, the Trump family companies, which it's unimaginable, right? That's very funny. And so the, and so So actually, what you had this exposure of corruption is evidence of democratic institutions

Starting point is 00:40:47 working in Ukraine. The fact that there is that much known, that it's openly discussed, that people debate about it and they talk about, you know, what should be done, makes Ukraine right now a more open and more effective democracy than the United States. So it's a, you know, so always keep that in mind when you talk about corruption. Zelensky is something. so much Zelensky is popular right now. It's that people don't want elections there because they're afraid that elections would be divisive. How would soldiers vote? What if the Russians started a bombing campaign on election day that meant people could, you know, the possibilities of disrupting the election are so many. It's just hard for people to imagine how it could be done. So even people who

Starting point is 00:41:33 don't like Zelensky and there are such people will tell you they don't want elections. And this Fyodorov's calling for elections was actually quite unpopular. I mean, he's very popular, but that wasn't a popular thing to do. So the politics are, you know, remain weirdly stable. I mean, Lindsay Graham, honestly, I mean, I, you know, I think Ukrainians were grateful to Lindsey Graham that he spoke out in their favor, but I'm not sure he had any influence over Trump's policy towards Ukraine. I mean, Trump has repeatedly refused to help Ukraine for two years.

Starting point is 00:42:10 We still give them some intelligence help. We don't give them any weapons, and we don't give them any money, are very, very minimal. And I don't see that Lindsay Graham really affected that. So I'm not sure that his passing makes really that big a difference. You know, Ukraine now is almost entirely funded by Europe. So Europeans, this is, you know, back to the question we started with, you know, what's happened to NATO and what's happened to Europe. So the Europeans, European money funds the Ukrainian drug. industry, Ukrainian drone industry is now beginning to work together with European companies. Some of the, some Ukrainian weapons are now made in in European countries. You know, you have some of its private, some of its state. There are mutual investments. You know, you're beginning to see the emergence of a completely different kind of military industrial complex, for lack of a better word, in Ukraine and Europe that wasn't there before. And that's a big change. And that's really how Ukraine has, has, has, has, has,

Starting point is 00:43:10 survived. The one thing the United States could give Ukraine, it now can't really give Ukraine. And these are these anti-missile interceptors. So, you know, Ukraine has plenty enough. Well, it has, I don't know, but enough, but it has offensive weapons. It's able to hit targets deep inside Russia. It's able to stabilize the front line. The front line has barely moved in the last few months. And so there's no danger of the Russians, you know, of Kiev falling right now. The only thing that the Russians are able to do is to hit Ukraine from afar to hit the cities with ballistic missiles and cruise missiles that Ukraine doesn't have any defense against. And unfortunately, most of the world's anti-missile defense has just been used up in the Middle East. So it was used by the U.S. in this war of choice in Iran.

Starting point is 00:44:00 And it's something that's very difficult to produce quickly, and it doesn't seem that it can be done fast. The Ukrainian strategy now is to try and hit the factories. where missiles are made and the launchers that launch them as a way of stopping this. But they don't have, you know, there aren't any missile interceptors. And, you know, the U.S. is kind of losing even its influence over that conflict because the one piece of weaponry that, you know, would be very welcome. A, Trump wouldn't give it anyway, probably, because he's not that interested in helping Ukraine. And B, we just don't have much of it anymore. nobody has much of it anymore. So I think J.D. Vance said in the last few months how happy he was

Starting point is 00:44:44 that the U.S. was no longer helping Ukraine, but also by no longer helping Ukraine, the U.S. has removed itself as an important factor in the conflict and as a decider in Europe. And you will begin to see, as I say, new kinds of connections and develop. It's happened. I mean, I also don't think, you know, part of the U.S. military and certainly the U.S. public, I don't think really understands how different this war is than almost any other war we've ever seen fought. So this is now a drone war. You know, it's really, you know, the front line is this kind of 30-mile strip where everything is visible. And tanks are useless because you send a tank in and it's immediately identified and blown up.

Starting point is 00:45:28 You know, troops are useless in that sense. I mean, you can keep sending them in and most of them die. And the Russians do that because they want to use up Ukrainian ammunition and drones and so on. But they aren't winning that way. And so it's really changed the way this war has been fought, this drone technology, and it will change the way all wars are fought in the future. I don't know whether the U.S. military has really thought this through. I saw recently they were they had canceled some meetings with Ukrainians to discuss their industry.

Starting point is 00:46:02 You know, Ukrainians are working now with Europeans. They're working with some countries in the Gulf. You know, the U.S. is, again, becoming kind of extraneous to these conversations. Yeah, I was going to say, they definitely canceled the meetings, and then there was the huge presentation that the Ukrainians came to Washington to give last summer a whole year ago, which certainly would have helped us out with the war in Iran, about their adaptability and how we could, if we got into this kind of precarious, be able to fight back and spending less money because we were spending something like $4 million

Starting point is 00:46:38 for every $30,000 drone, which obviously is unsustainable from a dollar's perspective. But I don't know if you saw this. The Wall Street Journal was reporting that there was a 600-person army unit that was created that was essentially like a drone battalion. And Pete Higsev has apparently canceled that because of this push to get back to basics. What possesses someone? Yeah, I can't even make up an intelligent conversation or question to ask about it because like, why in God's name would someone do that, like to win a pushup contest or what, you know, what could he be thinking? And is there some nefarious, you know, pinky and the brain scenario in the background that does want us to be completely defenseless moving forward?

Starting point is 00:47:31 I get it. You don't want to give money to Ukraine. You think Zelensky is corrupt. You're mad about the perfect phone call. Like, whatever it is. But what is the idea for the future of warfare if you are talking about fat stores and testosterone injections and pushups and canceling the drone guys? It's nuts. I mean, also, you know, we should be, it's not just a drone battalion. I mean, we should be looking at how to integrate drones into every single aspect of warfare. Because there was, you know, there's no maneuver warfare, there's no reconnaissance, there's no nothing without drones now. Drones have really changed the way everything is done. It's changed the way navies are going to work. You know, Ukraine has no navy at all. I mean, there are no ships really to speak of. And yet Ukrainian sea drones and underwater drones as well as these kind of unmanned boat drones have pushed the Russian Navy out of the western part of the Black Sea. You know, so you now have the way the Air Force works, the way the Navy works, everything is going to work differently because of drones. I mean, helicopters aren't going to work the way they used to.

Starting point is 00:48:39 Tanks aren't going to work the way they used to. All kinds of equipment that we're used to relying on that the U.S. produces in large numbers and is very proud of, you know, might have to be completely rethought in the face of the drone war. And if, you know, I, you know, I assume there are people at the Pentagon who are doing this because, you know, that's what we pay them to do. but hexeth refusing to be the face of that or refusing to say we're going to upgrade our systems, we're going to adapt to this new way of doing it, and instead talking about, you know, push-ups and facial hair is really insane. I mean, as you say, it's almost as if, you know, if someone were paying them to undermine the United States, you would get the same result. I mean, I'm not saying that's happening, but it's a kind of, you know, if they were enemies, secret enemies,

Starting point is 00:49:27 then this is how they would be behaving. It's a, again, I use this for already. I mean, suicidal. You know, why are they trying to undermine, you know, undermine the U.S. military? It's hard to understand. Last thing, and you mentioned this, you know, you're in Poland, spent a lot of time there. Do they sit around scratching their heads like the same way that we just did in detail? Like, what does that look like amongst high-end Polish conversational?

Starting point is 00:49:57 right, where they're, you know, consuming press from all over the world and they see actions like this. So here in Poland, as almost everywhere else I've ever been, you know, you have local news, you have national news, and then you have the U.S. news. So if you read the papers in the UK, you see British news and American news. You don't see, you know, French politics is kind of tertiary, you know, it's there, but it's not as important. You know, in Poland, you know, the Czechs or their neighbors, they don't talk about Czech politics. Like, everyone talks about American politics all the time. And the transformation of the United States, as I say, from a power that was, you know, sometimes distrusted, sometimes it made mistakes. Sometimes people disagreed with it.

Starting point is 00:50:44 Some people were anti-American, but was generally seen as, you know, as the linchpin of a system. And watching it turn in on itself and wreck it. its alliances and therefore undermine its power is the main conversation everywhere, not just Poland. I've just been to Iceland, and half my conversations in Iceland were about that. Iceland had a big U.S. base in the past, and, you know, they, Trump confused them with Greenland, and the speech he gave it Davos in January. And, you know, even they've noticed that it's a, you know, it's a very different country, and that affects the way they talk about politics, too. I mean, this is universal. I mean, you have this conversation everywhere on the planet. People are asking, what does it mean now that the United States is not the kind of country that it was before? How does that affect our economics? How does it affect our politics? I mean, it's a, it's very hard to describe to Americans how central it is to other countries, you know, stuff, you know, U.S. politics of U.S. states, you know, the Michigan primary. You can have a conversation with that about that with people in Poland, you know, where it's, you know, how.

Starting point is 00:51:54 How many Americans can talk about primary elections in Poland? I would say six, you know, maybe, maybe seven. But it's really central to everybody's sense of who they are. And everyone understands that this is a really a revolutionary moment and everything's changing. Yeah, you're right. I mean, Poland, even a more extreme example, but I did all my graduate school work in London. And, I mean, this feels like forever ago because it was the Obama era. It was the end of Bush through, you know, the beginning of Obama.

Starting point is 00:52:24 and I was shocked then how much they were into it, let alone now watching the effects of our politics rollout. Ann Applebaum, this was fabulous. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. Support for this show comes from Harvey A.I. The future of law is agentic, not just tools that assist,

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Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov - Trump Just Turned Canada Into an Enemy — Carney Is Fighting Back (ft. Anne Applebaum)

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