The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Trump's latest threats carry no weight and AI leaders sound the alarm

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Trump says he is weighing whether to "annihilate" Iran next week. Is this another empty threat? We have reached a point where it is increasingly difficult to know how much weight to put behind his threats. The bond markets are beginning to speak, inflation is rising, and U.S. military capabilities are under strain. Trump pays attention to all three. The constraints on both sides are far tighter than they were nine months ago. So why continue with maximalist rhetoric that risks eroding American credibility and deterrence?This week also saw Mark Carney and Ursula von der Leyen signal a much closer relationship between Canada and Europe, including the possibility of Canada becoming the EU’s first associate member. What does that actually mean? And why pursue this partnership when the world’s growth and dynamism are increasingly shifting toward Asia and the Indo-Pacific?In the second half of the show, Rudyard and Janice turn to AI and a growing chorus of warnings from the industry’s own leaders, who are calling for stronger safeguards to limit the potential damage if AI systems break out and cause serious disruption to the systems that underpin our everyday life. How much weight should we put behind the argument that regulation and inspection could handicap American AI development and allow China to pull ahead?Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

None of his comments make any sense at this point. It almost seems as if as he gets closer and closer to these midterms, which are not looking good for him at all, he gets more and more extreme erratic. I give no weight to what he says. Amazing comment about a press in the United States, but I just don't. Rudyard Griffiths here, Chair of the Monk Debates. We've got your Friday focus on tap.

It's the 18th of September, and I'm joined by my co-host, Janice Gros Stein. Hey, Janice. Good morning to you, Roger. Did you smell a little fall in the air this morning when he got out of bed? Yeah, nice and cool in the city. I'm trying to train for the Toronto Marathon in October. So this colder weather is truly a blessing for long morning runs. But enough about me.

How about your beloved J's, Janet? Or what, how are they looking this season? Are you down there at the dome? You know, these games as they go for this wild card spot? You know, Roger, I am a really true blue loyal fan. As you know about me, I watch every game I can. I was so mad this week when in the middle of a second game that they lost, that I slammed the TV and turned it off. Wow.

Okay. But we're still in it. You can't give up hope. You cannot give up until the last inning of the last game here until we're out. Well, we've got the Maple Leaf's home opener, I believe, next week. So talking about hopeless causes, there's another one, you know, Torontoians and Canadians can can happily jump on. I want to jump around a bit with you this week because one of those weeks where it feels like, you know, a month is compressed. Yes.

A few days or a few months into a day or two. And just to start with the latest news, the last 24 hours, comments out by the president that he has to make a consequential decision soon as to whether to annihilate Iran and that he will do this. It seems like in the context of discussions around Unga, I love saying that acronym, the United Nations General Assembly meeting, next week in New York where heads of the variety of the Gulf states will be in attendance and the president will take a bilateral meeting with them.

What do you make of this jazz? Is it just the latest string of a series of kind of a puffery from this president where he loves to threaten? I guess it excites him. He gets a certain frisson of, you know, being the big guy. but it seems like he's almost setting himself up with these talks on Tuesday to say, oh, they held me back. You know, I'm not going to annihilate Iran by this time next week.

It's all very confusing. Yeah, Richard, just like we talk about the Jays, there's a, you know, there's a discount factor finally with Trump. If you look at his week, he made the comments about annihilating Iran, which are frankly preposterous. They're just preposterous. And went on when he got upset that our prime minister was in the European Union Parliament

to say, this was a hostile act, and he was going to cut all trade with Europe, right? None of his comments make any sense at this point. It almost seems as he gets closer and closer to these midterms, which are not looking good for him, at all, he gets more and more extreme erratic. I give no weight to what he says.

Not amazing comment about a president of the United States, but I just don't. Yeah. Is there though, Janice, a tail risk that, you know, this president has in the past, a certain moments acted, to put it charitably, irrationally. He has done things that are seemingly every year, day, contrary to his political interests or, or in a sense, the national interest of the United

States. I don't know. How do you, from a scenario analysis perspective, how do you, what kind of waiting, do you give the possibility that the president is most likely in receipt of imprecise information, again, to be charitable? He may be, in fact, being manipulated by his staff or by other governments. Lots of reports. about how isolated the president is at this moment. To what extent, you know, in political systems, when you have the dear leader in an environment like this, isn't this exactly the type of context that Vladimir Putin

made the horrific and tragic error for Russia and for the people of Ukraine to launch his ill-fated invasion? Just a similar set of psychodynamics and and on the ground circumstances around maybe Trump now as Putin then. You're absolutely right about this, Roger. And we have a label for this. We call these personalist regimes where the dear leader is at the center and the leaders, the personal attributes are everything.

They are the hinge in all the big decisions that get made. And when you look at Donald Trump's cabinet, I think that's very, very much the fact. But there is one restraining factor now, a couple actually, that make this period of his presidency different from the earlier periods. One, the bond markets have spoken or are beginning to speak. The bond vigilantes are beginning to get loose. and that is, it restrains everybody sooner or later. And I think it will be an increasingly big factor for Donald Trump now that interest rates are going up. In the United States, inflation is going up.

There's nothing that Donald Trump pays more attention to than that. That gets through the screen. On the other side of the equation, the United States is depleted. a lot of its military capabilities. It's defensive military capabilities. It doesn't matter how much he denies it. It's a fact, and his commanders for sure know it, and they are telling him that.

So if you look at that set of constraints, both sides of the box are much narrower now than they were even eight or nine months ago. Well, just to put a pin in this portion of our discussion, And why does he do this, Janice? Why the maximal language, it erodes credibility and therefore erodes deterrence, not just in the case of Iran, but a potential future conflict with China, whatever bargaining leverage he has with Russia. Do you think it's just an expression of frustration? Like this is, you know, Occam's razor is the simplest answer here.

It's a poll of one, and that one is POTUS. And that explains, again, why we have these types of statements that from a U.S. president in the past would cause an incredible amount of consternation, debate. What does annihilate mean? Does that mean the use of nuclear weapons? I don't know. It's descriptive language that suggests something exclatory beyond the current parameters of the conflict. You know, it does erode his credibility.

It erodes the credibility of any U.S. commitment. And that's probably the lasting legacy internationally of Donald Trump's presidency. Nobody believes that the United States, means what it says because what it says under this president is so erratic. What does he do it? Who knows? You know, you can't really get inside his head. I certainly can't.

But what you see is frustration. He's so frustrated. He doesn't understand why he's not able to prevail. He was able to do it in Venezuela, but he can't do it in Iran. And he can't force Canada to its knees. And the United States 10 times bigger than we all want. Can't he force us to our knees? He's so frustrated in the anger.

And I think that's what explains the language that we've heard from him this last week. I think this was one of the worst weeks of his presidency, frankly. He was most out of control. You could visibly see it. And in his office from what everybody is saying, and we're hearing a lot because our people spent

a fair amount of time there until the talks fell apart. In his office he's busy with the plans for the big beautiful arch and the big beautiful ballroom. That's what he talks about. Yeah, pictures this week by an intrepid photographer of Air Force One

with a poster board in front of the president as he's seated in Air Force One, I guess, on his return to Washington after a political rally in the Carolinas that featured a Bristol board with pictures of the Kennedy Center and the word demolition or destruction I get on top. So literally, this is this is Nero-esque jazz.

Oh, yeah, it really is. I mean. To Roman history, this is kind of Nero with his violin on the top of the- You know, I don't want to prolong this, but it's absolutely funny. Look where we are. he can't have his name on the Kennedy Center. The courts took that away. So he's going to demolish it, right?

It's absolutely, we are in unprecedented territory. Let me tell you this and, and again, there are no grounds for diagnosing anybody from afar, right? All the professional association, psychiatrist, psychologist, will tell you that if you're not in the room the person you're not spending time you cannot make a diagnosis so let me not do that just let me say that more and more this president looks like he's out of control yeah uh second topic i want to take up with you which was uh mark carney's uh visit to to europe and uh a series of uh of speeches uh by ursla van der laine

the kind of political head of the union, and then Mark Carney, the subsequent day, dancing around, but nonetheless affirming a much deeper relationship in the future between Canada, Europe, Europe describing this in the context of an associate membership, a kind of TBD status vis-à-vis the union, the prime minister and staff, being a little more cautious about that type of language.

I guess what I'm struggling with a bit at the end of the week, Janice is just to calibrate this in the context of what is its significance? Because if you, if you listen to the prime minister by the end of the week, it sounds like some worthwhile things like Canadian students being part of the Erasmus program, which is a great, basically that's great, almost like the beginnings of a kind of civil service, not as in bureaucracy, but as in a transition year where you live and work in a different place and understand a different culture, maybe some sharing on data storage and data transmission. Again, find things, but a bit L-I-T-E, if you ask me, in the context of the theater and the rhetoric around the visit,

especially from the European side. Yeah. There are some tangible things that you just said, right? Shared cloud, shared financial services, payments set, although how realistic is that one that don't run on American pipes? In other words, no American visa master card. That's a big one. That's a big hill actually to climb.

Investment in critical minerals, which the Europeans really want because they don't have access to any. And the other big one registered, which is in all life, which is real, energy deals because it is the highest priority in Europe right now to reduce their dependence on Russian gas. So if we could do these as a series of bilateral deals, they would probably move faster. The unspoken elephant in the room here is the regulatory structure of the European Union. And my shoulders sink. You know, we are struggling in Canada to reduce. the regulation and red tape, which almost everybody recognizes,

has gotten in the way of us being able to build infrastructure within a reasonable time, much less move at scale and at speed. To deal with the European regulatory infrastructure, the European Union regulatory structure is a mountain to climb here. The pace is a caterpillar. If we're talking about a marathon, Reddard, that Caterpillar would win that marathon if we're racing against the European Union regulatory structure.

So I think we have to calibrate our expectations here. This was really an opportunity for the Prime Minister and the Europeans to reassert the values of openness of the rule of law of democracy, not a bad thing at all in the world in which we live in, but basically the growth in the dynamism is no longer in Europe. It's in the Indo-Pacific and in Asia, and I think we will eventually turn our attention there. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's lots of things to like about Europe.

It's culture. Yes. It's diversity expressed. through these, you know, not simply national identity, but in the case of France, you could say, you know, a civilization that stretches back, you know, a millennium or more. But as you say, it's for the last few decades, it's been a low growth.

Oh, yeah. Politically, also politically fractious environment where the combination of whatever, you know, because I agree, some of these things are historical antecedents that have caught up to Europe. But they also reflect choices around supranationalism and uploading sovereignty to Brussels and into these pan-European bodies. This has been fertile ground for right-wing and in some cases extreme right political parties who just most recently in Germany have shown remarkable political resilience and potential. So it's a strange block, I find, to be thinking about tying our future to, as you say, in anything more than kind of opportunistic ways.

And I guess what concerns me is that there's always a quid quo pro. I mean, it's great to think, well, let's build data centers and data pipes with Europe to make sure that we're not dependent on Google and meta and, you know, all the big U.S. tech giants. But those data centers and data pipes will necessarily need to apply some European standards, I assume. Some of those standards may be good. Some of them may be good. Some of them may be sovereignty enhancing. But the notion of any, I mean, it underpins every trade agreement or kind of strategic alliance. You are trading aspects of your sovereignty for things that you want in return.

And the other side is doing exactly the same. and hopefully you reach an agreement that is, you know, net net positive. So the idea that we can have one foot in Europe, you know, one foot in Asia, and I hope continue to keep a door open to the United States, because I'm not convinced with the rupture thesis that America is forever lost to the populist forces of MAGA, and given that, you know, something in the order of 30% of all of our trade, globally a little bit more in fact is to the United States to an American market that we understand well that we have shared language and a lot of deep relationships and

infrastructure built up over decades and in fact generations yeah I just hope we don't lose sight of of the opportunity costs and what could be an incredibly hard road to hoe, which is it sounds great to sell more to Germany or France or Italy, but the fact is that there are great companies in Germany, France, and Italy, including lots of companies from China that are selling all kinds of great

things there to happy customers. And you need to displace those companies and you need to make those customers happier in order for them to buy your goods. And that's no small feat for any Canadian business. Yeah, you know, I can't agree more. And this is going to be so slow, Rudyard, that Donald Trump's presidency will be long over, and we will still, in some senses, be talking. There is a summit in Montreal coming up at the end of October. And there are teams from Canada and the European Union working really hard

to get some deliverables. So there will be something, and that's all to the good. But, you know, Well, let's just, as you did briefly, take a look beneath the hood of Europe right now. There's going to, you know, in Europe, Farage is leading the most popular party in public opinion polls in England. That is a far right party. Macron, the prime minister, is going to meet with. There is a presidential election coming up this April coming in 2027, Marine Le Pen, 40% of the vote. by far the most popular, you know, the descendant of a party that used fascist language.

Germany, the AFD, won the largest plurality in a state election for the first time in modern German history. So when you go under the hood, very slow growth, very high regulation, really, really a regulatory architecture that in some cases suffocated European growth and strong, um, ultra white political movements in almost all of the big powers within the European Union. The UK is not in the union, but nevertheless, this is not a picture that is not fraught with difficulty. Well, so, Janice, let's, um, say goodbye to our complimentary listeners who are enjoying this first portion of Friday focus on our various podcast feeds and invite them to become,

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