School of War - Ep 269: Walter Russell Mead on Donald and Davos and Greenland, Oh My!

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

Walter Russell Mead, Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft at the University of Florida's Hamilton Center and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, joins the show to discuss foreign policy in the Age of Trump. ▪️ Times 03:15 An extraordinary week 05:06 The Transatlantic relationship 09:02 Turning to China  16:10 Greenland 27:03 Post-presidency Trump 32:25 Harder now 43:08 Zelenskyy Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

A word of explanation, our bread and butter here at School of War is, of course, military history and also contemporary debates about strategy. So why a whole episode on Davos, that over-the-top fancy convening in the mountains of Switzerland where CEOs and politicians rehearsed the conventional wisdom of the day? Well, in part because this year, what happened at Davos was both significant and revealing about America's role in the world, the future of Europe, and the questions of Greenland and Ukraine, and also because we're lucky enough to have Walter Russell Mead, one of my favorite commentators on global affairs, join us. He was there for the conference

and in the room for Trump speech, Zelensky's speech, and more. Let's get into it. It is for a war this Iraqi invasion of November 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinity. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face a great situation in the ground. We'll fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in those streets. We shall never have no rest.

Hi, I'm Erin McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, the great Walter Russell Mead. Walter is, of course, the Global View columnist at the Wall Street Journal. He is a professor at the University of Florida's Hamilton School. He has the Ravenel Curry Chair at the Highlands. Hudson Institute, I'm sure many other impressive affiliations and titles beyond Walter. Thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Hey, it's great to be here, Aaron. Great to see you again. Now, it's always great to talk to you, but I actually think now is a kind of perfect time to talk to you because you just spent the week at Davos, where the great and maybe not necessarily the good hob, knob and have canopays and, you know, Sip Sincere with, I don't know, did you see Katie Perry and Justin Trudeau? Did you cross paths with, with, with, with, sadly. Sadly, no. It's a celebrity spotter. I'm just really not that good. Occasionally you see Christine Lagarde

flashing by at great speed. But it was, you know, for me, it's mostly just the kind of boring policy wants. The Hollywood celebrities don't come my way. Let me read, look how old-fashioned I am. I actually have, you wrote a series of really interesting columns about this with Wall Street Journal. Here I have the paper Wall Street Journal with your column,

which dates me a little bit. And I want to read what up from your most recent column, what I take to be kind of a thesis statement about what all this meant and where it's going. And I'll just ask you to expand on it a bit. You wrote, this isn't the year when Donald Trump breaks the world order. It is the year when Europeans finally begin to see how badly they have misplayed their hand. Can you tell us about the things that you heard and saw Davos that lead you to believe this and give us a little bit more texture on what it means? It was certainly an extraordinary week at Davos this year. I first started going to Davos. I should probably, now a lot of your listeners are going to type me as a global man and great conspirator and is trying to force bugs down the throat of the rest of the world. But I started going to Davos back in the 90s. I certainly haven't been every year, but over the years, I've seen Davos's come and go. and this year was far and away both the most exciting and I think maybe the most consequential.

Just one metric, which makes a lot of sense to me, but maybe not to others. Ever since I've started doing the Global View column, if it's a really big news week and a lot of different things are happening, I might write two columns. This was my first three-column week. and when I should have probably been hanging out with Katie Perry in some glamorous spa, you know, there's an ink-stain drudge. I'm out there typing some stupid column, but things kept happening and I had to keep writing about him. This was always to me the most impressive thing about Christopher Hitchens

is that somehow he managed to make it to all of the parties, and yet at some period of time, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, he managed to crank out those columns. I think his liver paid the price. Okay. I take it that a lot of people who attended this conference actually do think it's the year that President Donald Trump broke the post-1945 world order. But here you say that if it's going to happen, it hasn't happened yet, and it didn't actually happen this week. Why not?

Well, first, you know what? Was Samuel Johnson once said, somebody said, oh, sir, this will be the ruin of the nation. He said, sir, he said, there is a deal of ruin in a nation. and it, you know, Rome was not burned in a day, as one Visigoth said to the other. So I think we're going to see, you know, we are definitely in a period of crisis. We are definitely in a period of transition. But there are, you know, the transatlantic relationship, in spite of all of the problems and burdens that it's under, remains a kind of a very important access for world trade, for world politics. for intellectually for what's going on in the world. So, you know, so I think we're going to, there's a lot of persistence going on. But it is a year in which Europeans have realized, as they have not really in the past, that they have lost the power to shape events increasingly not only outside Europe,

but at times even inside Europe. And what had happened, I think, in the past was that liberal American presidents or more conventional American presidents had tended to act in ways that were similar enough to what Europeans would have done if they had had the power. That they could sort of feel that even though, you know, they were no longer in charge, they were, they had enough influence. What was it? Harold McMillan said, you know, we'll be the Greeks to the American Romans. We will. They'll rule the world. We'll whisper in the ear because we're smarter and we have the ideas without which those

pathetic idiots really would fall down, brutal though they are and tough though they are. And this was the year, I think the Europeans experienced, A, that they've got an American present who simply does not care very much what they're. think, and B, they have no plan B to get the American president to behave more in in accordance with their wishes. And given that, Europe as a whole does not have a lot of ability to shape world events, even on issues that are extremely important for the Europeans themselves. Well, let's keep pulling on that thread, though at some point we should talk about what

I take to be the main issue that provoked most of the crisis this past week, which was Greenland, and to make a general reference to the Sopranos, you know, Greenland, whatever happened there, you know, we'll figure out what Trump was thinking and what the objectives were. But just to keep going in this direction of what the European alternatives are, if we consider Canada as a part of spiritual Europe, even if it is, you know, perhaps unfortunately from their point of view, now parked immediately north of Donald Trump's United States, you know, the Cardi stands up and gives this speech that gets a lot of attention. It includes calls for the middle powers of the world to unite, to defend the sort of idealism threatened by Donald Trump. Of course, at the same time,

to this point you make about where are they going to turn, Carney is also engaged in all sorts of dialogue with China about a closer economic relationship between Canada and China. So it turns out one place that Europe or European like middle or small powers might turn is China. How do you evaluate that as a strategic option for them? Do you think it's a bit hypocritical to, on the one hand, speak about the United States' assault on liberal idealism and on the other hand turn to China to balance it? How do you reconcile all these things? Yeah, well, there are obviously several things going on there. I think none of them are particularly good news for the Europeans, though we'll have to see whether the Chinese play their hand well.

Definitely, you're right at the kind of ideological level. it's pretty hypocritical to say, oh, the United States is so impure that I cannot bear to be associated with it and then immediately plunge into a passionate romance with China. It defies belief. But let's take it a step further. What that really means is that Europe no longer has the ability to pursue the kind of liberal internationalist vision that is in to the modern European political project. It's to say, from the standpoint of the Europeans, you either have to choose the illiberal monster Trump or the totalitarian monster Xi Jinping

because no one is choosing you. And no one is choosing to build work with you to build a kind of world that you want so that Europe must now fall from the realm of post-historical, beautiful order building back into classic geopolitics, how do I achieve my interests in a difficult world? And that's a real change. Now, to some degree, they've always been quite realist in that they, you know, you can usually find that their economic interests lead the way, and then the other stuff is sort of a

beautiful flourish. So, for example, on the whole climate change issue, a lot of the energy, not on the European level of the street and the popular anti-climate change movement, but why it had so much impact in the European deep states, so to speak, was that Europe, to begin with, has in general higher energy needs and prices than, other parts of the world with fewer resources that given Europe's kind of thick population density and so on, it's a lot harder actually for them to drill baby drill than it is for other people. You know, we can go frack out in Wyoming where practically nobody even sees the, you know, the oil while the whole extractive process.

While in Europe, anywhere you did this, there are a lot of people who live there and they vote and they don't like it. So you have that problem. So what they tried to do was to export high energy prices to the rest of the world by saying, let's all go green. And it was that realpolitik element, I think, of the climate vision that drove a lot of the European energy on the topic. So the Europeans have never been as moral as they would like to think that they are, but it's very important to them to be able to think convincingly to themselves that they are moral. And this is where they're kind of losing their edge. Again, you can look at European politics where the idea that we are building a post-national Europe,

this, you know, a transcendental new kind of cosmopolitan entity. Well, it's very nice, but actually, again, the modern European project comes from realization in both France and Germany that both of them are too small to act alone as great powers in the world. And so they were going to try to form a new great power that would, that was actually the best nationalist choice for both Germany. and France. But the only way to achieve this is to tell yourself, well, we're not being nationalist anymore because the minute they start getting nationalists, both Germans and French,

tend to drive each other crazy. And the secret sauce that makes that whole thing work is that both know that the strong American presence in Europe is the thing that guarantees each of them against excessive nationalism on the part of the other. So it's kind of a twisted convoluted project that makes an awful lot of sense in European terms, but is sort of dependent on a kind of an international environment that doesn't seem to be there anymore, at least right now in Donald Trump's second term. We've been pretty hard on the Europeans here for the last 10 minutes, but you're not without your criticism of President Trump. And the issue of the week, though in terms of the threat of military action resolved almost as soon as the president started speaking,

was this question of Greenland. And I'll confess, I mean, as somebody who has been part of various conversations about, gee, wouldn't it be great to buy Greenland over the course of the last decade, even I was getting a little alarmed early last week as the rhetoric was heating up. I was a little concerned that the administration, maybe just the president personally, seemed to be operating as though they had some kind of escalation dominance over Denmark on this question of Greenland, and Greenland was just going to be theirs no matter what. And it occurred to me that that might be true in some theoretical sense that the United States kind of has the edge over Denmark and the balance of power. But then in the real world where we actually live, it was total nonsense. And that the economic cost of a serious trade war with the Europeans alone was probably going to upend this project, as indeed we saw the market start to complain about.

last week. But then the question of military action, God forbid we ever got to that point, it was just absurd. I mean, the notion that Americans were going to tolerate casualties to fight Denmark over Greenland was just seemed preposterous to me. So I couldn't quite bring myself to take it seriously, except to be alarmed by the extent that the president seemed to be taking it seriously. And then in very Trumpy fashion, of course, there's a kind of, you know, deal of sorts emerging at the end. Why do you think the president fixated so strongly and so suddenly on Greenland? And how do you evaluate the consequences of how he handled the issue? Well, you know, I hate to admit this, especially in public here, but I'm actually not a very good

telepath. And so my ability to read Donald Trump's mind is limited. And I want to make that clear. Looking at this and kind of looking at the long trajectory of his career, I think in some ways we have to go right back to the art of the deal where Trump talks about, or perhaps Trump's ghostwriter, but with his approval, talks about one of the ways that you make deals that you have success is you have a bunch of different negotiations going on at any given time. and if you're making some progress on something, you pursue it.

And if it turns out that that one isn't working, well, you go off and you work on something else. Well, you definitely see this pattern that Trump was doing a lot. He wasn't just doing one thing at Davos or anywhere else. It's not like, okay, I've taken a strategic decision to make the conquest of Greenland the theme. of my foreign policy in the second term. And I'm going to orchestrate the action of the entire American state around this objective. And I'm going to lay a political foundation for it at home. And I'm going to be sort of working to divide and conquer among the Europeans to undermine the possibility of resistance. Nothing of that kind was happening. It was more at the level I'm making a

speech, one of my aides trying to please me has given me a position paper that, you know, that I'm now going to talk about. And then when, and in the beginning, he seemed to, you know, wow, this is kind of working. It's getting a lot of attention. It's, you know, it's dividing everybody. It seems it's bringing a lot of attention to me. It's putting me at the center of the stage. I'll return to that thought in a moment. But then you get to the point where for Trump, it begins to look like, oh, the cost of this is really higher than the benefits. And I've reached a kind of resistance point here. Stock market is falling.

Interest rates are rising. This is not the way I want things to go. Okay, next. So that's very, very typical of the Trump approach to everything, not just to foreign policy or to Europe. But I want to return to this point about putting. him at the center of things, we often forget with Trump that being at the core of what makes him the most, you know, the figure in human history who's commanded a bigger percentage of the

mind share of the human race than any other physically present living human being is Donald J. Trump. Right. And what he has found is that he can turn that sort of media dominance, mind-shared dominance into real political power. Everybody is always thinking, how do I deal with Trump? How do I respond to Trump? What kind of trouble can Trump make for me in my own country with a speech or in my own state with a primary endorsement, et cetera? and so that the sheer magnitude of Trump's media presence and general presence is power.

He has found the way to convert fame to power, something that if Mc Jagger had done, maybe he could have ruled the world. You don't know. So, and certainly I think a lot of the reason Hollywood hates him so much is he's so much better at the core thing that they're trying to do, turn entertainment. ability into power. So the very awfulness of the whole Greenland concept and the strong reactions that it creates and the way it instantly made everything at Davos about, is Donald Trump going to blow up NATO over Greenland? Okay. That actually worked for him in his, in this kind of central,

the engine of what makes Donald Trump the dominant figure of the 21st century. So we shouldn't take away that aspect of what he's doing. And then I think we should also think about coalition management. We don't think often about Trump having to manage his coalition because he seems so dominant in the Republican Party. You know, there's kind of the resistance fighters up in the hills that are still firing at the occasional patrol, but it's guerrilla war with no option, apparently, of rising into a full-scale rebellion. But otherwise, he seems to rule the roost. But Trump actually, I think, is more worried about the kind of Tucker Carlson wing, the kind of ultra-maga wing, where their goal is to create. a MAGA identity personality program that isn't entirely an emanation of Donald J. Trump.

And that's partly a factor in succession politics, who will be the successor to Trump, but it's also his control over the MAGA movement. And I think some of these folks have actually moved much closer to aiming at a kind of a rebellion inside Maga, to split Maga. And we can expect more of this to happen as Trump ages and as the end of the second term begins to come into focus. I would think after the midterms, some of this would would rise. Well, Trump's internationalism, Trump, on the one hand, Trump, as I quoted in one of my journal columns, the line from Teddy Roosevelt's, daughter about her father. He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the child at every christening,

and the corpse at every funeral. Trump needs to do that to keep this media dominance, which is so central to his whole personal and political project going. But you do that, you make a lot of isolationists kind of unhappy. Why, you know, why is an America first president out there trying to arbitrate a piece between Cambodia and Thailand for crying out loud. Why is he even in Davos? What's all this like, you know, new architecture? What is he going to build like a huge housing development in Gaza? Well, what about like me in my town? I'm still living in a trailer park, right? And he's building high rises in Gaza? What is this? Is this America first? Well, that actually is a problem for Donald Trump because global media dominance and biggest guy in town is critical

to his international positioning and to his media dominance. But at the same time, without America first, who is Trump? And you abandon either of those bases and you kind of undercut the Trump project. Well, going to Davos and talking about Greenland, driving the NATO allies into sputtering fits of hysterical rage and fear and kind of defecating on everything that every liberal internationalist and globalist has ever, you know, had even a moment sentimental thinking about, right, is a great way to say to all of these doubters in Maga world, I'm the guy, I'm your daddy. There is nobody who understands. what you care about better than I do, and who can do something about it.

And it's actually quite secondary whether or not he gets Greenland. It's that he's willing to do something that makes every thoughtful, sensible, educated, internationally experienced observer in the country and beyond go in blind, shrieking fits of hysterical, apocalyptic rage and fear says, I care about the little people back home who vote for me more than for all of these turkeys in their finery at Davos. So I think this, if you think about the whole Trump project and the whole Trump political positioning, it seems to me this makes a good deal more sense than, some people have understood.

That is really, really interesting. You know, if I were a political strategist advising MAGA or the new right or, you know, America First or however we want to describe it and trying to figure out what the strategy for its post-Trump future is going to be, I think I would have some pretty significant concerns of how I'm going to elevate a leader of an intellectually more pure movement. That is to say, a movement with less maneuverability and complexity than Trump himself. has perhaps and without this celebrity driven dominance that Trump brings as a political tool, how does one sustain a movement that is pure and less dominant in the American mind? Because

so far it's been sustained with the addition of that flexibility and that unique tool. You take those away, I guess it's not a given that you take the flexibility away, but you are going to take a degree of the celebrity away. There's just no way around it. he is a truly unique figure in that regard, if not others. And I don't know. I don't know how I would think about solving the problem. Right. Well, you know, I think Trump does not plan to disappear from the stage with the end of his presidency. You and I both know that even after Andrew Jackson had left the presidency and even after the terrible recession in Martin Van Buren's year gave the wigs another chance back at the presidency, Andrew Jackson was still able to throw the Democratic nomination

to Polk over the Texas issue. So if we think of Trump's still around at Mar-a-Lago, I think that would be the idea and that certainly would be Trump's idea, that his sort of lasting presence, even if it fades a bit would be enough to provide the magic that kept Maga going and that he wants to have a movement that is centered around him personally rather than as a set of ideas. And then what you would see likely is an effort by the next generation in the Trump family or others who could make some plausible claim to being the personal heir. You know, that has, I mean, the most successful families in America in the past that have done that, I suppose, where the, you know, the Roosevelt's kind of fail, the Franklin Roosevelt family that they're just, Eleanor was venerated. And possibly in today's climate, Eleanor could have been not the Hillary Clinton of, but, you know, she could have actually been elected.

But the sons didn't have it. you know, do the, the, the, the Kennedys with the real talent of the first RFK, I don't see the second RFK becoming president, but what do I know? And then a kind of decline of Kennedy political talent since then. The Bushes have kept it going pretty well, but Trump really kind of broke the, for now, the Bush family as a political force. So, you know, will we see, you know, a fight between Donald and Eric, you may have, I don't know if you've noticed, but there were some, some internet comment calling Baron Trump Octavian. You know, he does, if you, there's that HBO show, which I think John Milius was involved

in the original production of Rome. And the actor who plays, I have to suddenly, I've never thought about this into this moment, but the actor who plays the young Octavian, there is a more than passing resemblance between that actor and Baron Trump. I just want to throw that out there. True story. Augustus. Okay, here we go. Right. So, you know, so, but I think that there's ultimately something very personal about the Trump brand in politics. The forces that he's managed to pull together are not purely personal. And there's a lot that goes beyond sort of a personal admiration of Trump or trust in Trump or any of those things. There's discontent. There's economic change. As I, written about in a piece that's just been published by the Atlantic this week, there's the

really interesting fact that the tech, the Silicon Valley tech lords have rallied to the second Trump administration in a way they never did to the first, with a couple of exceptions. And that's, that's really striking. And I think there's something important there. But that might be a topic for another show. Your reference to Polk puts me in mind of American expansionism, Of course, it's Polk, who in a fit of expansionism, gets Mexico done. So maybe we won't see Greenland fade away as an issue, despite the fact that we're apparently negotiating this more limited deal with limited amounts of sovereignty, potentially where we're going to put bases,

bases that we don't have right now. So this is, I want to get your thoughts on the merits of the Greenland question. I've already confessed that over the years, I've been sympathetic to the merits of the case of buying Greenland, you know, ideally in some way that does not detonate. the U.S. relationship with Denmark or Europe, which seems less of a concern for the president. My understanding of the arrangement we have today is essentially in terms of military deployments and the military use of Greenland, we have something approaching a free hand. We have to consult with the Danes, but we could do much more than we are. It's interesting that we're actually

not doing much militarily right now, despite that agreement. And then on the economic front, it's more limited. If there's more, if there's room for negotiation, it's probably in terms of economic rights for American firms in Greenland. But what are the merits of the case for greater American, you know, influence on one under the spectrum to sovereignty on the other over Greenland, setting aside the president's individual approach and his sort of spectacular and at times chaos-inducing handling of the issue? Well, I think we should be clear that he's made everything harder, not easier, that if you were a person who's who deeply believed that America national defense required American sovereignty over

Greenland, this would be the worst week of your life because it's now become this kind of emotional issue not just in Greenland, but in the UK, in France, in Germany, in Norway, that if that were our goal taking over Greenland, the cost has risen dramatic. And also, I think the domestic U.S. opposition to doing something about it is much higher. So, you know, this would also suggest that, again, that Trump's interest in Greenland did not necessarily arise out of a deeply considered view of the national interest, but was something that just sort of, you know, flared up in his mind in a more casual way. you know, it's absolutely clear that any kind that if we think about it, by the way, if, you know, smarter Europeans might have been able to work with this a little better, that they sort of thought, understood that this is kind of Trump's backdoor acknowledgement,

A, that climate change is real. The Arctic is melting. You know, if it weren't for the fact that it is now, you know, poised to become a significant avenue for commerce, Greenland would remain a lot less important. It is also a real confession by a quote isolationist president, or at least the political leader of the isolationists in the United States, that the United States does in fact have very, that has vital national security interests that extend well beyond our frontier and are intimately wrapped up with Europe because you can't think about security in Greenland or the

future of Greenland without thinking about the Arctic Ocean, the North Sea, Norway, and so on. So there are ways of trying to resolve this whole complex of issues that link the United States more directly and deeply with European security and a really smart counterproposal which it may have been at the back of Ruttus minds, the NATO Secretary of General, there is actually a path forward that is kind of win-win. You know, again, for now and possibly forever, the notion of simple American sovereignty over Greenland is off the table, but a way of enormously enhancing America's ability to do things that it needs to do in Greenland.

in ways that deepen rather than weaken the security relationship with Europe. You know, that path exists. So this would be an interesting thing to explore. If I were talking about trying to pull together some kind of bipartisan CODEL to talk to Europeans about U.S.-Europe relations after this week, that might be one of the topics that I would encourage members. to think about. Again, it has to be bipartisan. So, you know, it's if we're thinking about some kind of enhanced missile defense, Golden Dome or whatever, and I think Greenland also becomes

more important for our security, just thinking about the geography, the Kola Peninsula, where so much of Russia's stuff is, the shortest roots from bases in China, et cetera, Greenland really does matter a good deal. And I am all for us thinking more seriously about all of these issues. And that would definitely include thinking seriously about what are we doing in Greenland and how do we do it and who do we do it with all of those things. So, you know, there's a lot there. But this is, you know, we've, it's just harder now. It's going to be harder now because the issue has become radioactive.

Yeah. My way of summing up quickly when, especially during the first Trump term, this issue also bubbled up then less dramatically, but still it was capable of arousing emotions. And I had a number of conversations. One of particular sticks in my mind. It was on the sidelines of a wedding with sort of center-left foreign policy analyst commentator type of some standing. You're the most terrible wedding guest I can think of. You went in celebrating a young couple starting a new life together, and you want to talk about missile bases in Greenland. To be clear, Walter, to be clear, I did not raise the issue. This other person knew that I was associated with this conversation in some way.

He raised the issue. And what I'll never forget about it was that this person was like borderline. I mean, he was a little emotional and like borderline physically angry. And this is before, I mean, this is not. the week we've just had where we're sort of threatening military action and this kind of way over the in my view way over the top absurd harmful kind of stuff it was really more just we we really were sort of talking about buying it at the time and this notion that the united states would engage in you know as it were consensual territorial expansionism if it could if consent could be achieved was very

very upsetting to this person i'll sort of never forget this and i defended myself saying like are we are we upset that we have alaska is that a bad thing for American security? And to me, the answer is obviously no. And once you concede that point and remember how Alaska came to be American, well, that just sort of sets you up to think about this issue more clearly and more rationally. But as you point out, Walter, sort of irrefutably, calmness and rationality are not the order of the day on this issue right now. Well, and it also says you were probably really bad at land acknowledgments ceremony. I always want to know who, Well, you know, when we say this place belongs to the, you know, whatever tribe, I always want to know who they took it from.

Like, do they have to get up and do their own land acknowledgement now? Well, my view on this is that if you, you know, if you make a land acknowledgement and you're not planning to give it back, you're just gloating. Bad manners. You know, I don't, perhaps it speaks to my closed social circles. I actually don't find myself in a lot of rooms where land acknowledgments are being offered unironically. I've been in a pair of view ironic ones. This doesn't surprise people that much. I'll never forget.

If that's how you behave at a wedding, I get a maddenial land acknowledgments. Get the end of fights at the punch bowl over drinking. The first one I remember, you know, speaking of our Canadian friends, was in Canada. And I was at the big, you know, you have the Halifax Security Forces. them up there. And at that time, new defense minister stood up to give her speech. And she opened with the land acknowledgement. And I remember being kind of shy. I was like, oh, this is really happening. Like, I've heard about these things. But I graduated from college a long time ago. You know, like this sort of, I just am not in these rooms anymore. But here I am. And it's really happening.

And it's the Minister of Defense of Canada doing it, acknowledging the previous owners of, you know, Halifax. And then she went on to give a speech, you know, sort of inaugurating her concept of what it meant to be Minister of Defense for Canada. This would have been 2021 maybe. No, that can't be right. That can't be right. It's earlier than that because by then we would have been talking about other things. But somewhere around there. And she gave a speech about the national security threats Canada face. Walter, what do you think? What do you think in her speech? You may actually be able to guess this. Nobody's successfully able to I don't just guess it. I was there. Oh, you were there. Was it 2021? Who knows? We've had so many years,

but it was, it's the high level of sexual violence in the Canadian armed forces. That's right. That's right. Right. Now, in a certain way, that's not entirely false in the sense that if a perception, reality of that, you know, if in fact Canadian public opinion thinks that half its armed forces are busy raping or harassing the other half, probably a liberal government isn't going to pass any significant defense budgets for such an institution. So making some of her constituents at least think that she's trying to deal with this might in fact. That's the only tortured logic that I can get to. And my suspicion is that's not all that far from the thinking of a number of people in the American Armed Forces as well as a Canadian. That's extraordinarily generous as an analysis.

And I stand. Well, I like to be, I like to be generous, especially with other people's money or with empty phrases. But yes. With the time we have left, let's talk about another speech from someone I think is a very serious person, Zelensky, who came out to Davos. Did you, did you manage, were you in the room for Zelensky's speech? Yes, I was. Amazing. You know, the frame of your last column out of Davos is that Trump and Zelensky sort of together.

demonstrated to Europe that its own continental unsuriness. What was the upshot of what Zelensky said? And, you know, I'm curious, I don't think I've ever actually asked you your thoughts on Zelensky generally. I just talk a bit about his performance in this speech, but more broadly. What does the Walter Russell-Mead take on Vladimir Zelensky? Let me just start with the Zelensky-Trump thing. You know, this is the point I've tried to make here is that this really was another example

of the horseshoe, of the opposites coming to share a similar view that Trump, who doesn't much care about liberal internationalist cooperation with the European Union, unless it doesn't much care, doesn't care at all, hates it, who doesn't want it to exist, has a view of Europe as in many ways irrelevant to larger world politics. Zelensky, who passionately wants desperately needs Europe to show some liberal internationalist spine and help save his country from the invading Russian hordes also sees Europe as kind of useless from this perspective. And that, to me, what a lot of people in Davos and I think across Europe were doing was focusing on how much they hate Donald Trump and all of the things that there's really very easy to come up with a long

list of things that are unconvincing, wrong, horrifying, corrupt about the kinds of things that are coming out of the Trump administration. But with, you know, so like talk about that and forget about the fact that Zelensky is actually making many of the exact same criticisms that Europe is all hat and no cattle when it comes to defending the principles that it claims to value and claims to want to center in its approach to international affairs. I think that's actually really important and something that people should reflect on more deeply than they have. You know, Zelensky is an amazing figure in many ways. You know, there are a lot of problems with Ukraine.

I first drove across Ukraine when it was still part of the Soviet Union and talked to a lot of people. there when their kind of ambitions for independence were somewhat incoate, at least among the people I met. I've been back many times twice since the war began, so I've got some idea of, you know, what's going on there. And Zelensky, in the moment, in this moment at Davos, I felt that he was kind of in my estimation where he was at the beginning of the war, when he literally saved the country in Kiev, his, his courage, his determination, his, you know, the Americans are begging him, say, we'll give you a plane, flee, flee, flee. And Zelensky said, that's disgusting.

I will not do it. Put on the uniform and stayed and rallied people to, you know, whatever is the ultimate outcome of it, has to be considered an inspiring, just in terms of the human spirit is an incredible moment. It is, you can take the line that it's futile and disastrous and they should have been wise enough, et cetera, et cetera, that that's the way you want to look at the world. But even you have to say it's inspiring greatness descended on him at that time. and he helped inspire greatness in besieged people. I kind of felt a bit the same way this time.

I mean, don't forget, while Zelensky was speaking in Davos, the power was out in Russia, sorry, in Kiev, that the missile attacks, which have been continually intensifying, this year have achieved what they have not achieved in past years, which is substantially degrade the electricity and heat generation for people in the middle of a Ukrainian winter. Now, we're recording this podcast while everybody in America is having hysterics about, you know, the greatest in Snowmageddon, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, power may be out in South Carolina for days, parts of South Carolina. Well, what about, you know, power out in Ukraine for days?

Something like 6 to 800,000 people are said to have fled Keeve in the middle of the winter. And these are people who'd been holding out for years of war. The hardship is really hard for us to understand. And Zelensky is coming from there to Davos, where Europe and America have never been so divided in modern history with the Greenland thing flaring at its high. by Trump pushing him to negotiate with Putin for all kinds of reasons in a negotiation that cannot, could not end well for the Ukrainians.

And the Europeans, while giving them the credit, they've stumped up enough money to keep Ukraine financially going maybe for a couple of years, which is important. It's not zero. It's actually important. nevertheless are really unable and unwilling to provide Ukraine the kind of assistance that could change the outcome on the battlefield. Into this situation, this man came and spoke, and he spoke truth. He had several jobs to do.

He had to try to, you know, sort of renew the European support for his cause and try to kind of pitch, you know, they may not be able to do much, but I want them to do all the can do, but he has to do this in a way that doesn't offend Trump because he really needs to keep that. As he said repeatedly in his speeches, America will have much more to do with what happens here than Europe. And at the same time, speak to his people back home who are in cold, hungry, and afraid. Because let's not forget that with every day, that goes by, Putin makes it clear that life in Ukraine will be a horrible nightmare if he wins the war. There will be repression. There will be corruption. There will be social political failure.

Some of the darkest days of tyranny will descend on Ukraine. And Putin and the people around him make no secret about this. So think of the human condition, the emotional condition of people in Ukraine who have, memories from their grandparents talking about what it was like in World War II and family histories woven around these cycles of absolutely horrifying, stupefying violence and chaos and upheaval. And I think Zelensky succeeded. I think his speech was one that was well received at home, that was well received in Europe, and that in fact did not cause a firestorm in U.S.-Ukrainian relations. So this was, you can say all kinds of things, and in a long war, people make mistakes. I mean, think about Lincoln, worst selector of military talent in the

history of the world for, you know, at a horrifying cost to the United States of America. And yet, you know, in the end got it right and is a great man. Zalimski has also gotten some really big things right. I'm embarrassed to say I've not been to Ukraine since the war began. I'm actually meant to go in a few weeks and hopefully we'll record a bunch for school of war while I'm there. But I wanted to tell you the story of the time I did go to Ukraine, which I think, Walter, you're perhaps uniquely positioned to appreciate. I'm a teenager. It's the 1990s. And my parents were big cruisers. And on the Princess Cruise line, they booked us on a cruise which went up to the Black Sea, and this is very soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union

only fall in a couple years earlier. And we went to Crimea and Odessa. We stopped in, you know, we went to Yalta, all these places. And in Sebastopol, you know, this is a nice middle class group of Americans. We all get on our buses with our cameras and our fanny packs. And we go for lunch at this big hotel, it's big sort of Soviet-style hotel. And at lunch, we are serenaded by a choir, which is singing sort of lounge standards, you know, like let it be. Yeah, yeah, I am. Like that. That choir was the Russian naval Black Sea Fleet Choir.

And even that I'm probably, I don't know if I'm 13 or 14 or what I am in this story, but even at that age sitting there watching this group of men in uniform sing American lounge standards for us at this drab hotel in this drab post-Soviet city, I remember thinking to myself, man, this is what. what defeat looks like. This is it. This is geopolitical failure in the flesh. And, you know, if there was a moment where I just sort of tasted the end of history, it was, it was that moment. Well, the problem, of course, is the bitterness from that moment. Right. This is what is driving Russia today, the bitter aftermath of that moment. At least they weren't singing rum and Coca-Cola. That would have been an absolutely unendurable moments.

Walter Russell Mead of the Wall Street Journal, University of Florida, the Hudson Institute. It is always a pleasure to talk to you. I always learn something. And thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see. Great to be here.