The Daily Beast Podcast - Katie Britt Should Have Known the SOTU Response Was a Trap

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

The New Abnormal breaks down Sen. Katie Britt’s disastrous State of the Union reply and why she should have spoken to Bobby Jindal and Blake Masters before agreeing to do it. Plus! CNN’s Chief National Security Analyst Jim Sciutto joins Andy Levy to talk about his new book The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War, which is out on March 12. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here.

Today we have an extra special guest with anchor-in-chief national security analyst at CNN, Jim Skudo. Who will join us to tell us about his new book, The Return of Great Powers, Russia, China, and the Next World War. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to me, read a tweet out loud? It doesn't roll off the tongue in the same way. But sure, tweet out loud. Read a tweet out loud. Yeah, okay, okay.

A little bit of a curbball here. I may have voted for this person. It would have been between her and Barbara Lee if I lived in California, was voting for the center. But Katie Porter put out a pretty disgusting tweet yesterday that says, thank you to everyone who supported our campaign and voted to shake up the status quo in Washington. Because of you, we had the establishment running scared, withstanding three to one in TV spending, and an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this

election. You know, here's the thing. Katie Porter used to be a favorite member of mine. Her white boards, her way to break down people during testimonies before Congress and all of these things. This display is disgusting. It is, it is. not going to help the Democratic Party, and frankly, it is not going to help her brand. Because the responses that I'm seeing to this make her the ultimate fucking Karen, which is what people are calling her right now. The election was not rigged. It was free and fair.

You just did not have the monetary backing in order to get your word out. That is it. So the word rigged and all of the shit that she is using and the statements that she's pulling out, you are a sore fucking loser. You lost. That's it. Plain and simple. You don't see Barbara Lee

or anybody else coming out and saying, oh, woe is me. It's like you pack up and you get behind the person who did win. That's what you do in the Democratic Party.

And if that's not where your values lie anymore, then get the fuck out. Yeah, I'm going to be a little contrarian on this. Okay. Mm-hmm. Go ahead.

I don't like that to use the word rigged. I will say that mainly because people associate, when you talk about a rigged election now, people associate that with Trump's ridiculous shit about the 2020 election. So I don't think she should have used the word rigged. And I don't think she should have referred to it as a rigged election. Where I don't disagree with her, I think she meant it in more of like a Bernie Sanders sense

in that the system is rigged. And I think her point was that maybe I'm being too generous here. But I think her point was that it sucks. Look, I don't like Adam Schiff. I'm not a huge Katie Porter fan either, but I don't like Adam Schiff. And I think he's a little slime. And I think what he did in this election was in his primary system was really slimy, where he basically elevated Steve Garvey because California has this jungle primary where the top two finishers in the primary, regardless of party, move on to the general election. And Adam Schiff did not want to face Katie Porter in the general election. He wanted to face Steve Garvey. And now he got his wish. And boy, I hope it wasn't a monkey's paw situation.

But I think, you know, talking about that, yes, she did get outspent three to one. I don't think that's untrue. And I think her point was just the influence of money in politics means that the system is rigged and that the fact that Schiff was able to outspend her three to one gave him the victory in addition to the little slimy things he did to elevate Steve Garvey. I'm not fully supportive of what she said, and I really don't think she should have used the word rigged because people don't think of it in the Bernie Sanders type sense now. We think of it when it's applied to an election in the Donald Trump, just straight up lying sense. So she sounds like exactly how you described her, Danielle, and how most people are taking this, as you said. She just sounds

like a sore loser who can't accept that she lost a fair election. I'm not as angry at her as a lot of people are. So that's my slight contrarianism. And that's all I'm saying. If you want to talk about money in politics and you want to talk about the little person not being able to, you know, to battle against billionaires, then do that. But to act as if you don't understand the inflammatory language that you're using at this moment is reckless at best and stupid at worse. A hundred percent agree. So that's why I'm only slightly contrarian on this. What she actually said was bad. Maybe it's just more like what she should have said is what I'm getting at, but she didn't. So I'm going to go even a third contrarian way.

One, it came out that she is horrible to her staff. She has one of the highest turn. Yeah, that's what I heard. In Congress, dear white staffers has pretty much gone in on her being one of the worst ones to work for, which I personally don't take kindly for obvious reasons. Secondly, though, too, she chose to run on a platform that when you looked at the polling and I know we don't totally believe polls isn't quite where California is at right now. And honestly, being 20% down with 53% the voted because Cal 40K count votes, which is another thing we should really fix, is pretty bad. I think that she should really be pointing the finger inward rather than that word personally.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. By the way, I don't mean to imply that if she and Schiff had spent the exact same amount of money that she would have won. I suspect you're right there, Jesse. And that, you know, her positions were not in line with what the voters wanted as much as Schiffs were. But, yeah, that when I said I don't really like her earlier is.

or that I'm not a big fan of hers. I mean, that staffer shit. That's disqualifying for me. Like, I will never vote for someone who treats people like that, whether it's their staff, or just people in general. Like, to me, that is disqualifying you from holding elected office, in my opinion. Like, I don't want you there. If that's how you treat people, then you should not have any power.

Gross. Strong agree. Okay. Back to our regularly scheduled clips. Clips. So, of course, this week was the state of the union. and we got to get to know a new character in the GOP roster as you do with these rebuttal speeches. And as we know, they don't usually go well, but boy, let's do this.

Mr. President, enough is enough. Innocent Americans are dying and you only have yourself to blame. Fulfill your oath of office. Reverse your policies. End this crisis and stop. The suffering. Which suffering was she referring to? This, like, the suffering on her diamond cross, the suffering in her, like, perfect

manicured HDTV kitchen. It looks like things are going great in Alabama, according to Katie Brits' performance. Like, they couldn't have scripted better for SNL if they tried. Yeah, it really was a sketch. Yeah. I think, you know, this is why there shouldn't be conservative theater kids. I thought she was auditioning for Ben Shapiro's movie studio. I mean, this was some of the worst acting I think I've ever seen.

I don't even care what she said, because all of it was stupid. But her delivery, it was just flat out insane. And it was incredible to watch. Because I don't know, she must have been coached to talk like that. And I don't think she talks like that in real life. There was a clip going around of her like saying hi to people before the speech. And she seemed like a totally, like if you saw that, think, oh, this is a totally normal Alabama conservative.

Then all of a sudden, she turned into this. And it was, it was insane, but it was also kind of, I need to keep watching this because I cannot believe that I'm really seeing it. I will say this, that I wanted to try it out on the new abnormal. I thought that maybe, Andy, we needed to talk in this way to convince people to vote. Like, it was just so bad. It was so bad. So I have a theory to piggyback on this.

You know how when like, for example, we all know Beck and McCain a horrible person, everybody would be like her hairdresser hates her. I got to say as a producer, I think her producers hated her. Yeah. And they guided her down this road because let's be honest, somebody was in that room going, great take. Yes, we should do it like that. Keep it just the way you have it, Katie.

It looks great. Doing good, honey. Give me a little more. Give me a little more. So you guys saw that first she only put up one clip from it. Now there's no clips on her Twitter. Oh, no, I didn't know that. Oh, that's hilarious.

Yeah. You know, part of this is I think it's the curse of the state of the union response because it's a truly no-win situation and they always try to elevate these young politicians and it's just a, it's a complete and utter trap. And if you have half a brain at this point, your response should be a gracious, you know, decline of the invitation. But the Republicans in particular, I mean, you've had Blake Masters gave one. Bobby Jindal gave one. And it's widely considered that that ruined whatever presidential aspirations he had. It's just such a no-win situation. She was bizarre and horrible. Don't get me

wrong. But like the only way to win this is to be completely bland and not fuck it up. And and she clearly couldn't do that. Or not drink water incessantly throughout it. Did we forget that one because that was great. You know, we've all talked about how Bobby Jindal disappeared from the political stage. And I wonder if he down just has a part-time job where he haunts you like the ghost of the Union's rebuttals past. And, you know, he comes to you in the middle of the night and says, don't do it, Katie. And then she's like, I got this though, Bobby. I got this.

Oh, God. Apparently, Maga Mike Johnson warned his followers to not hoot and holler like Bobert and Marjorie did, but Marjorie was going to be defiant. This is what she said before the speech. He talks tonight. And, well, if he's a liar, he should be called out. That's important to do. And people really care about that.

So you might call him out tonight from the Florida House. I have no idea what he's going to say. And I would argue that Joe Biden has no idea what he's saying to. So they're probably working up a good drug cocktail mix over the there at the White House. So we'll see how he, how he talks tonight. And then I'll decide then. I really was hoping that she would have had decided about her outfit because she

looked a hot fucking mess. And the best reaction going around on social media is Joe Biden's reaction to seeing what the fuck she was wearing. And he, like, his eyes got big. He's like, whoa, okay. That's, that's what we do. You picked out your own clothes today. It was like that was the reaction.

And I'm sure she's missing out on the drug cocktail because as we know from reporting, the Trump administration, boy, they had it flowing. Yeah, she is like, like I think Bravo producers look at her and go, oh, no, that's too much for us. I don't want to talk about her too much because she did what she did and she does what she does because she wanted the attention and she wore the stupid hat and the stupid clothing and she yelled her stupid yells and it was all in service of getting attention and she looked like a fool I don't even know if she was a hot mess I feel like she was a cold mess and I don't even know what that is personally I think she was cosplaying as the greeter at KKK Friday's someone said on Twitter

yeah an embarrassment but it was nice to see that Lauren Bobert kept her hands to herself when sitting next to Matt Gates you know as far as we know the cameras were not on them and it seemed that there wasn't clouds of smoke over her. So maybe they confiscated her vape pen on the way in. It was also nice to see a little pop-up appearance by everyone's favorite psychopath, George Santos, who why the fuck does that man still have floor clearance? No one knows. But yeah, it was a night.

It was a night. To be fair, I mean, Bobert is what, twice the age of Matt Gates' preferred companions. It's true. I think she was pretty safe. It's true. He might not have been, though. Yeah. Moms for Liberty was on 60 minutes on Sunday.

And much like when Bethany Mandel was asked about what woke means or lives of TikTok's Chia Ratchik was interviewed by Taylor Lorenz, we learned that these people are absolute morons with absolutely no clue what they are activists about. Let's listen. I love teachers. My children have had the best teachers. I've had the greatest teachers that have influenced and impact me. But there are rogue teachers in America's classrooms right now. Rogue teachers. Rogue teachers.

Parents send their children to school to be educated, not indoctrinated into ideology. What ideology are they being indoctrinated into? Let's just say. Children in America cannot read. They often dodged questions with talking points. You're being evasive. What ideology are reading on a great level? What ideology are the children being indoctrinated into?

What is your fear? I think parents' fears are realized. They're looking at these books where sexes. Sexual discussions are happening with their children at younger and younger ages. Tiffany Justice read from sexually explicit books written for older teens, but found in a few lower schools. Most people wouldn't want them in a lower school. But in a tactic of outrage politics, moms for liberty takes a kernel of truth and concludes these examples are not rare mistakes, but a plot to sexualize children. Your critics say that you have an anti-gay ideology.

That is false. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have gay members. I think it's an effort to really try to marginalize us as an organization because parents are coming together across racial lines, across religious lines, across all these different ways that we see Americans being divided so often. But voters have not come together for moms for liberty.

Last year, Moms endorsed 166 school board candidates. Two-thirds were defeated, according to the nonpartisan Brookings Institution. Moms also faces questions about its third co-founder, conservative education activist Bridget Ziegler. She left Moms for Liberty, and now she's being asked to resign from the Sarasota School Board. Last year, she told police she had. three-way sex with her husband and a woman. Her husband, Christian Ziegler, had been accused of rape in another incident. Investigators concluded that alleged attack was, quote, likely consensual.

But Christian Ziegler was forced out as chair of the Florida Republican Party. Can't make this shit up. You know, and the sad thing is, is that when I hear them say, we want to bring parents together, And I just wanted it to be spliced with the threesome. What kind of bringing together you're trying to do, miss? The more people you can bring together, the better. So three is better than two. For them, absolutely.

You know, when I first started playing this segment, I thought this was all going to be to show that, you know, there's an emptiness beyond their beliefs, but I didn't realize this is all a dating mechanism for swimmers. I just, I love that they talk about, oh, these efforts to marginalize us. Like your entire platform is trying to marginalize LGBTQ people, et cetera, and you're going to play the marginalized card. Cue up the Spider-Man pointing at each other.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, come on. I would like for them to point to the one gay that they have. You know, like they're always like, oh, we have gay members. And I'm like, are you talking about the three son? Like, like who, like, what are, you know, what are you actually referring to? And I love whenever anyone says in response. to anything. That couldn't be further from the truth. That is absolutely the truth.

Fuck those guys. Jim Shudo is a former diplomat who is currently an anchor and chief national security analyst at CNN. And he's written a new book called The Return of Great Powers, Russia, China, and the next world war. It's out on March 12th, and he joins me now to talk about it. Jim, thanks so much for being here. Hey, thank you for having me. Absolutely. So very early in the book, you say that for the U.S. and its allies, this is a 1939 moment. That's a pretty chilling statement. Tell us what you mean by that and why you believe it. I do truly believe it. And I'll tell you how I came to that. The thought occurred to me while I was in Ukraine at the start of the Russian invasion in February 22. And I'd been covering Russia's growing aggressiveness in Europe and around the world and its deteriorating relationship with the U.S. for some time. I wrote a book in 2019 called The Shadow War about how Russia and China were fighting this sort of below the surface war against the U.S. and the West, in cyber and outer space, with sort of subtle land grabs here and there. But once I saw those tanks rolling across the border into the largest country in Europe

and the missiles starting to fall on Ukrainian cities in a massive invasion, the biggest we've seen since World War II, it struck me, this is a sea change. And this is a clean break. We'd had subtle breaks, deterioration, rot, if you want to call it that, with the system we'd enjoyed for the past 30-some-odd years post-fall of the Berlin Wall, post-collapse of the Soviet Union. It was deteriorating, but it was over at that moment when Putin decided he could invade a country in Europe in the 21st century. And on the flip side of that is the idea that this is a leader the U.S. and the West cannot accommodate. And that's why it is to me a 1939 moment. It's not only the bloodshed, the brazenness of an invasion like Hitler invading

Poland, but also that here is a leader who cannot be satisfied with one piece. And we've had a lot of proof of that in recent years, even going back before the Ukraine invasion, take a little piece of Georgia by force, carry out the largest cyber attack on Estonia. a nation-on-nation cyber attack that we've seen to undermine them. Take a little piece, well, not an insignificant piece of Ukraine in 2014 in Crimea and the East. He takes what he can get, and if he's not challenged, he'll take the next thing. And that's why I believe it truly is it's a test now. I've spent a lot of time with the Estonian Prime Minister Kaya Kales in the book,

and Estonia very much on the front lines of this. And she likes to quote Churchill, and I'm paraphrasing on the crocodile, that, you know, an appeaser is someone who feeds the crocodile and hopes that he or she is the crocodile's last meal. Hitler was the crocodile to Churchill. Putin is our crocodile right now. He can't be satisfied with one piece. He'll go after his next meal. And that could be your friend or it could be you. Yeah, you were actually in Ukraine when the invasion started. And one of the things you wrote that I thought was really interesting was you say, the war in Ukraine has proved to be a bloody laboratory of modern warfare. What are the lessons that have been learned on all sides, because I assume we've learned lessons, NATO has learned lessons, and also you would think

the Russians maybe have learned lessons. They have. And early on, the story was the Russians were not learning, right? And they were repeatedly losing. But they've adapted as well. And they were, for sure, and are still suffering enormous losses. But they've been adapting as well. All sides have been adapting.

Jan Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary General, put it best in the book. The war is, it's a laboratory of new and old. On the new side, we are seeing the dawn of the drone era of warfare. Drones are everywhere in this conflict. And both sides, using them and using them more over time, and both aerial drones, but also sea drones. And we're even seeing some ground drones experimented with in the east. So first, from the air surveillance, we get a picture of this war you've never had before. We're seeing it play out before our eyes from drones.

And not just from a surveillance aspect, but dropping bombs, right? Big ones, including these Iranian-supplied ones, just leveling Ukrainian cities. Big reason civilian casualties have been so high here, but also smaller ones, flying over single Russian soldiers in some circumstances and dropping a little grenade on top of them. And you can see via live feed that soldier dying. So you're seeing that happen. You're seeing it at sea. One reason Ukraine has had such success neutralizing Russia.

Black Sea Fleet is via seaborne drones, and we're beginning to see them on the ground as well. In addition to electronic warfare, we're seeing that play out. Russia has had a lot of success defending itself against Ukrainian attacks by using electronic warfare. That's on the new side of the ledger. That's the kind of 21st century Terminator 2 kind of world. But you also have this World War II or even World War I world because we have the return of trench warfare. We have a Soviet style artillery campaign playing out in the East and both sides really playing by the that those rules just launching hundreds upon hundreds of shells per day at each other from fixed positions and it becomes a volume game there right who's got more shells and that's one reason Ukraine has

been at a disadvantage with the lack of U.S. military systems because they're running out of shells you have that combination super advanced from land, sea and air and drones, electronic war and then super old school, trench warfare, artillery fights. And by the way, the sad fact of the return of tactics we haven't seen since World War II, concentration camps, children being taken across the border into Russia, just rape and pillaging of civilians by Russian soldiers, new and old and in an appalling way, because civilians have suffered some of the worst losses from this. There was a big fear, and it's something you touched on earlier in the interview,

and you touch out a lot in the book. There was a big fear early on that Putin's invasion of Ukraine would just be the first of his sort of grand expansionist plans. Is that fear still extant, or has it diminished at all because of the losses the Russians have suffered and sort of how long they've actually been bogged down there? It depends on who you talk to. I interviewed Secretary Blinken for the book. And his view, which is not uncommon in the West, is that Putin will not take a shot at NATO, that the losses have been so severe for Russia. And listen, Russia can tolerate those losses to some extent, because as we've seen, they really don't care about sending young Russian men, including convicts, right, ex-cons, to die on the battlefield. But there's still significant losses,

both in personnel and aircraft and ships and so on. The blinking point of view is that he's going to stop at that NATO red line there. When you go to Eastern Europe, and by the way, you want to listen to the Eastern Europeans, right? Because they have very real and not long ago experience of Russia and the Soviet Union, right? I mean, you go to Estonia. I spent a whole chapter in Estonia. They were part of Russia, the USSR, until 1991, right? I mean, it's in our lifetimes that, and they were absorbed into the Soviet Union, not by their choice. And they say, listen, he's not going to stop. And what do they base that on? Well, look at Ukraine. He took a couple slices of Ukraine in 2014, seemed to be able to bear the consequences, calculated he could carry out a

full-scale invasion. He successfully took a piece of Georgia. He is right now, listen to Lavrov and others, right now about Transnistria, this section of Moldova, which, by the way, is another sovereign country, which Russia is talking about much the same way they talked about Ukraine before the invasion. Oh, the ethnic Russians there, they're asking for our help, we may need to go in. Listen to what they say. I say this repeatedly in the book because they often say it before they do it. And the eastern European view, and by the way, it's not confined there because there are Americans who feel this way and Brits and others, is that he is not appeasable and that, yes, the costs have been enormous, but he kind of feels like he could survive those costs, right? The economy still staying up. China and India, still buying

Russian oil, keeping the coffers full. Maybe he will take a shot at a NATO country and just keep coming. That's certainly a view. And I tend to take that view seriously because they have very real world and recent experience of how Putin and Russia operate. Yeah, for sure. In a second, I want to turn to the other great power that you mentioned China. But before I do, let's talk nukes. In the latter half of the book, you write about the signs that were being picked up by U.S. intelligence in the summer of 2022 that Russia might be preparing to use tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons in Ukraine. This was intel the Biden administration took very seriously, right? One official even tells you that, quote, the risk level seemed to be going up beyond where it had been at any other point in time. Yeah. They were taking it seriously. Another official told me they were preparing rigorously for that possibility. They didn't know that Russia was going to do it, but they had picked up intelligence, including communications, that they were discussing doing it.

And it wasn't just that intel that led them to that conclusion or that assessment. It was other things. Russia at that point, if you remember, was on its back. foot in southern Ukraine. They were getting pushed back from Hursan. They had a huge number of Russian forces in danger of being cut off by advancing Ukrainian forces. And looking at Russian military doctrine, nuclear doctrine, a big loss on the ground is a factor from the U.S. assessment of Russian nuclear doctrine where they might calculate, we need to use a battlefield nuke to save those troops from being cut off, killed, captured. And there was another factor.

that was concerning, and that was that because tactical nukes are small compared to an ICBM, right, warhead, because they're smaller and because they can be fired from conventional systems that were already deployed, including missile systems, rocket systems, the U.S. wasn't certain they would know, that the U.S. would know, and its intelligence partners, would know that Russia had moved them into position. So they were nervous. And it was, you know, over the course of weeks. And then they then launched this international sort of influence campaign to keep Russia from doing just that. And unusually, they enlisted India and China to apply pressure to Russia, to not take that step, calculating that, okay, they may not listen to us, but we hope they'll listen to them. And China and India helped

deliver those messages because the read from the U.S. was they were equally concerned. That's unbelievable. All right. So let's talk about China. One of the things you write in the book is that NATO identified China's overall goal as overturning the world order on every front, saying that it strives to subvert the rules-based international order, including in the space, cyber, and maritime domains. Talk about maybe Xi Jinping's view of the world and China's role in it and how it compares to Putin. Both of them view the rules-based international order, right, as a U.S. construct, right? and something that the U.S. leads and the U.S. leads to its advantage. It serves American interests and the interests of American allies, not so much Russian or Chinese interests.

So their view is, we've got to change this to serve our own strategic needs and priorities. The difference that I tend to hear, and not just from the U.S., but from Europe and even in Asia, is that Russia just wants to tear the whole thing down. They benefit or calculate that they benefit from chaos. China wants to seize benefit of an international system, but wants to some degree to replace the U.S. at the top of it. So make a system that better suits their needs. And by the way, not quite rules-based, right? Because China has shown its tendency to break a lot of those rules, and whether it's the threats it's currently directing towards Taiwan, but also stealing

business secrets left and right, you know, not just from states, but from companies, and certainly the way it treats its people at home. So that tends to be the difference in terms of how the U.S. and Russia, how Russia and China see it from the U.S. standpoint. And the trouble is, and this is where it relates to how this plays out in American politics, is the America first approach to the world, which is to say, Ukraine's not our fight. And while some in the America first crowd will make a distinction between Russia and China say, you know, forget about Russia. China's our real challenger. Others will just say, listen, neither of those are our fight. If Russia wants Ukraine, that's fine. If China wants Taiwan, that's fine. It's not really our battle. The issue they have to realize is that, you know, our interests don't stop at our shores because the U.S. has profited from a peaceful Europe, from open shipping lanes in Asia, et cetera. And Russia and China are looking to disturb that so that it will eventually come to our shores or at least to U.S. interests. So you can't keep it. at a distance because you lose that system and a whole host of things that we count on and take for granted

and profit from would disappear if you allow them to take it all down to some degree. You mentioned Taiwan. If I recall correctly, there was fear among U.S. and I guess NATO officials that China might take advantage of Russia's Ukraine invasion to launch its own assault against Taiwan. This obviously didn't happen, but it was a very real concern, wasn't it? No question. I heard it from so many quarters in those. early days just before the invasion and just after, on the hill from Intel sources and from sources and contacts in Europe as well, the concern was as Putin rolled those tanks across the border, that Europe, the U.S. would be so engrossed in that new war that China would calculate

this is our time to strike. We may not be quite ready. She instructed his commanders to be ready by 2027, which I get into in the book, but, hey, we're not going to see an opportunity like this again. And one reason I knew that that was not an isolated concern was I had several contacts reach out to me from different areas voicing that exact same concern. So there was clearly an intel assessment saying, we got to watch out for this. They didn't know for certain, but they were concerned that the circumstances gave China an opportunity and that they might act. Now, they didn't act in that moment, But as I get to later in the book, when I spend time in Taiwan, there is no thinking that she has abandoned his ambition to take back Taiwan in his view. It, in the view of many, is just a matter of time.

So you mentioned America first a little bit earlier. And I guess my exit question for you is with regard to everything that we've talked about and everything in the book, what in your mind would be the effects of Donald Trump being elected in November? Dramatic change. really a 180 shift in how the U.S. deals with the world. Let's start at the granular level. And in the book, I speak to folks who serve Trump at the highest levels in his first administration. John Kelly, his chief of staff, John Bolton, his national security advisor, Matthew Pottinger, his deputy national security advisor. And they say he very nearly took the U.S. out of NATO in his first term. In his second term, there's a very strong possibility he takes that step.

And by the way, even if he doesn't formally take the U.S. out of NATO, and I know that there's been some legislation passed so that Congress would have to approve, you could effectively take the U.S. out of NATO. He'd be the commander in chief by saying, I'm just not going to defend NATO allies if Russia were to invade. And that's why his words in recent weeks where he says, do whatever the hell you want, Russia, they mean something. Because deterrence is, it's all about credibility. And if allies and adversaries do not believe the U.S. will come to their defense, will not abide by article. 5, then Article 5 means nothing. That's just on the NATO piece. But I tell a story in there about Taiwan. John Bolton tells me the story that during his first administration, Trump would say this. He would sit in the oval. He would hold a Sharpie and say, see this Sharpie and point to the tip of the pen and say, that's Taiwan. See this resolute desk? That's China. To make the point that Taiwan has no chance against China, and therefore, we have no business attempting to defend them. It's just not, it's not a battle we could win. And he has a similar view, just not a lot of interest in the U.S. Defense commitment to South Korea, the troop presence there. You remember he talked about removing

that in his first administration. I think he might do the same. U.S. defense commitment to Japan. So that would be an American president who withdraws from alliances, decades old, and seeks accommodation, not just with Putin, but she, and basically says, those are your corners of the world. That's fine. We could come to an agreement. I won't bother you. You won't bother me back here. But Eastern Europe, I'm just not going to get involved. Taiwan, I'm not going to involve. Let South Korea and Japan fend for themselves. That is a 180-degree turn in how the U.S. Republicans and Democrats have dealt with the world, going back to World War II. It's not nuance, right? It would be a major, major change.

The book is The Return of Great Powers, Russia, China, and the next World War. It is out on March 12th. And Jim Shuto, thank you so much for joining us. And the book is excellent if, as I said, before we started recording, a bit scary, but I highly recommend it. Jim, thanks again. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the dailybeast.com

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