The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: A weakened President needs China's help and a debate over the new Governor General

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

As the Strait of Hormuz grinds to a halt, gas prices soar, and inflation threatens to spike, Trump arrives at his meeting with Xi Jinping looking wounded and weak. He will be looking for help from China's dictator, but help never comes for free. What will he concede to Xi? In the second half of the show, Rudyard and Janice turn to a major new government appointment in Canada: Louise Arbour as our new Governor General. Andrew argues that despite widespread criticism, she is highly qualified for the position, with a long record of achievement and a deep understanding of the country's history. Serious jobs require serious people with real experience. Rudyard, however, is concerned that Ottawa keeps recycling and reappointing Boomers to important government positions, and argues it is high time for a generational transition and the passing of the baton to the next generation.   Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to full episodes of Munk Dialogues with Andrew Coyne. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up.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.

The American president is going to come in there weakened, looking for help. Help, as we've discussed, never comes free. It's the worst possible meeting at the worst possible time. Welcome to the Monk Dialogues with Andrew Coyne, our regular contributor here in the studio with me for today's show. Andrew, great to be in conversation. Good to be with you. We'd like to occasionally check in with you on all things Trump and today, Monday, is a day to reflect on that. We have a ceasefire that looks increasingly shaky, to say the least,

and a president who's threatening to restart Operation Freedom has blockade of the Strait of Hermose. Where are we at, and do you think we're on the verge of this war kicking off again? Well, quite possibly. I mean, it's almost indistinguishable between a ceasefire and a war. I mean, the ceasefires are so regularly violated. The war is so fitful. it's all about what somebody declares to call it. I mean, Trump and his people were trying to pretend, for example, that they didn't have to go back to the Congress for war authorization because now peace had broken out.

All these terms have become kind of meaningless to some extent. What we're in is, I guess, what Robert Kagan is called a checkmate. You know, the United States under Trump has taken on something that they hadn't figured out how they were going to do or even why they were doing it. had not thought through how Iran might respond in the most basic terms, had it built into it a whole lot of assumptions about how easy it would be because the Venezuela operation had been relatively easy.

Notwithstanding that that hasn't really achieved very much either, but it at least achieved the narrow goal of taking up Maduro. So they've walked into something they can't handle, don't know the way out of. It has done enormous damage. to American military prestige, American foreign policy, operational ability. And we're about to see one of the major consequences of that in this upcoming summit between Trump

and President Xi in China, where the American president is going to come in there weakened, looking for help. Help, as we've discussed, never comes free. It's the worst possible meeting at the worst possible time. Trump is endlessly manipulatable to begin with, particularly by dictators. And the advance word coming out has been of the kinds of concessions he's prepared to offer, whether it's on Taiwan or whether it's on Chinese investment in the United States. I noticed some of the MAGA heads are already jumping up and down in great fear and fright

over what Trump might concede in terms of Chinese investment. Right. So the wheels are coming off, frankly. Maybe our Chinese EVs will be less of a problem. Well, that would be a presuming consistency in the part of the American president. It's good for the goose, is good for the gander. But just to go back to the situation, the Straits and Firmus right now, it feels like a trap, Andrew. It feels like the president is trapped.

He's trapped himself. If he restarts the war, oil prices that are already elevated will increase. There's increasing word of jet fuel shortages in not just Asia, but Europe now, diesel prices in the United States, which is what powers transport trucks, which haul people's groceries and all those things that were the cause of the Biden presidency falling off the rails, inflation. I guess what I'm struggling with Andrew is surely the president can't let this status quo. proceed as it is because he loses. He loses politically. He loses because of inflation. So what would the offer on-ramp look like? I guess the on-ramp is a re-escalation of the war. To what end? I don't know. The off-ramp would be what? China leaning on Iran to somehow broker an end to this conflict? That would be a different kind of humiliation for the United States.

That's right. But at this point, that's almost looking like the least bad alternative for them. They don't have the capacity. I think this has been demonstrated. They don't have the capacity to bend Iran to their will. It's not that kind of regime. It's not as fragile as some others. It's got many layers to it. They have spent a lot of time preparing for this, literally burying things underground, for example. so he doesn't have the capacity to just simply declare war again and frighten the Iranians into submission. There's not a whole lot he can offer them, frankly, you know, other than complete capitulation, complete removal of all the sanctions, a complete, you know, surrender effectively on the nuclear question. So unless he's prepared to do that, and who knows what he's.

he's capable of, then it's all, you know, there's no, there's very little upside and mostly it's how bad is this going to be for him? How much is he going to have to give up? He's already created a crisis that didn't exist before the war. I mean, Marco Ruby was out there the other day giving a press conference saying, we want to, our goal now is to get back to the way things were before the war started, i.e. to undo the damage we ourselves have done by by essentially enabling Iran to take the strait of hormones. And what I mean, mean by that is prior to the war, Iran would never have dared to do it because they would not have wished to have the military blowback that would result. The military blowback happened before

they went to the strait. It had already happened. At that point, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking control of it. And as we've discussed, they don't absolutely have to control every square meter of the strait. They just have to make it dangerous enough that nobody wants to risk it. And as long as that's all that's required, it's very difficult to have any kind of military solution for that. You can send ships in from whatever country wants to go in there to try, I mean, military ships, but unless they can guarantee absolute, you know, security and safety, people are still going to be nervous about going in there.

So everything's on the side of the Iranians. As long as they can make trouble, they effectively achieve their aims. But inflation lurks out there. The longer this goes on, there are upwards now of tens of millions of barrels of oil that are trapped behind the choke point of the straight. And at some point, I don't... There's math there on the side of Iran. That's right. I don't understand the exact mechanics, but in a couple of weeks, so the people who are experts in the say, at some point, you know, it goes from being...

It goes from gradual to sudden. To exponential. There's a point at which the supplies in the pipeline just simply run out, and your prices go, as you say, exponential. And I think markets have been calculating up until now, I mean financial markets, that, well, you know, some way will be found to avoid that because it's just too horrible to contemplate.

I hope the markets are right. I'm not sure what, as we've been discussed it, I'm not sure exactly what is the thing that's going to save us all from that, because if they don't come up to it, then you are looking at a pretty catastrophic economic event with all of that means for investments. So you would hope that the White House knows this. So they know that there's a clock running. There's analysis by their own intelligence agencies that it seems like Iran potentially could wait out two to three months before its economy would be in collapse. but that date probably falls after this acute oil shock, which would then ripple through the United States, would ripple through gas prices, transportation prices into food prices. So there's multiple clocks here running, Andrew, but that short, sharp shock that may be lying out there two, three weeks out, they must know this. So, I mean, Einstein's definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

So if you're getting up every morning and declaring Operation Freedom and then canceling it when you go to sleep and then putting it back on and off again and on and off again, I mean, this is giving Einstein a run for his money. Oh, yeah. And remember, we're not just talking about oil prices, as we've discussed before. We're also talking about food with the fertilizer thing.

If you start getting skyrocketing food prices in particular parts of the world, then you're not just talking about economic crises. You're talking about severe political crises. So, yeah, we've discussed many times. You cannot look at this crisis purely as a matter of, oh, there were debatable policies here, and this has pluses and minuses and it's questions of degree. You have a president of the United States who doesn't know what he's doing.

Right. who has no conception of adequately and properly weighing risks and returns and costs and benefits, he reacts on impulse. He was told or told himself that this would be a massive triumph that everyone would be very excited about and would write about him in the history books. It hasn't worked out of that way for reasons

that any fool could have told him and did at the time. And so the consequences are incalcable. And yeah, is it insanity or is it just childlike incompetence? Yeah. The comedian, I think you call him a comedian, Tim Dillon recently described Trump as what many Americans first came to know him for, which is a reality TV star playing a politician.

And that in his view, in a much more amusing way than I could relate, he's now a reality TV star fighting a war. And the show isn't going the way he wanted to do. There is no scriptwriter that comes in at the end of the day and says, okay, we're going to fire that contestant, have this contestant come in. We'll flip the script and sure, we can do what you want. This is a war. The Iranians have a say.

And this has thrown the president. It's deeply destabilizing for this administration because it really is, Andrew, maybe the first time that an unstoppable object, the president, has run into an immovable object, which is the Iranian regime. And the war, and you can't just bullshit your way out of it, pardon my language. You cannot just, his whole life has been about, you know, stiffing his creditors, lying his way out of things, bluffing his way through things. This is one of those situations that just has that awful finality to it, like death, where you just can't reason with it.

You can't bargain with it. you just have to kind of deal with it and accept it. And he's not psychologically disposed to dealing with reality. His whole life has been a conduct of lies and fictions and foolishness. And I do believe he's not wholly connected to reality himself. And it's the same with members of his cabinet. If you look at these people, they're all basically reality shows. They're all Fox News hosts, but a lot of them are also basically reality shows.

Cash Patel is a reality show. Sean Duffy, his transportation secretary, has spent the last seven months, unbeknownst to anybody, driving across America with his family of nine in tow, filming a reality show about him driving across America with occasional stops to do some work. And nobody even noticed. So that's the level, you know, Pete hates it. At least he wasn't passing out Cash Patel's name engraved bourbon bottles at the window of his family station wagon. None of these people are wholly in contact with reality.

Yes. It's a strange moment. They're all performing not literally in a reality show, in some cases, but in kind of the movie of their own lives where they're the stars. And we all know people like that. Hero of their own story. We can all be like that in moments where you just get too caught up in yourself. But it's extraordinary to see a whole government organized around that principle. And every day, every hour of every day, we see the consequences of us.

So just finally, because I think this is one of the things a lot of us maybe have worried about Trump, is that there would become a moment where he would drag us and everything down with him. And I guess the question is, Andrew, is has a certain paralysis set in where even though he's aware, either directly or indirectly, about this looming deadline of large-scale energy shortages across the world, that date is coming. It's moving up with each passing day, but we seem trapped in this braggadocio of I'm about to escalate the war. He was even doing it today.

But, oh, no, the negotiations are going really well. Some of these moderates are fantastic. The rest are lunatics. There's lunatics here in my country, too. I don't know what exactly he's talking about or who he's referring to, but it all seems rather incoherent and it's hard to make sense of. But the consequences, the same is that we're going from one day to the next without a state change in this conflict. We are frozen into this dynamic of a shuttered energy artery for the world, which the international energy agency has already said a few weeks ago, Andrew, would be the single biggest energy shock in modern history.

Yeah. And I'm not sure anybody's really psychologically adapted themselves to this possibility, probability, reality. Yeah. That that's, that we're heading for this cliff in a couple of weeks, they say. But I guess what I'm wondering is it's going down with the ship. It is something we don't want to contemplate. But sometimes that happens. And I guess I'm wondering if we're in a kind of down with a ship moment here with this president, this presidency, his inability seemingly to make either a decisive capitulation, which would be one

off-ramp, or, I don't know, escalate to de-escalate. At least it would be a way out of this this kind of false state, this false dichotomy that there are meaningful choices ahead. Everything he's done in power has been essentially self-destructive, self-destructive of his own administration, but self-destructive of the country. I don't literally think that he is an agent sent from abroad to try to destroy America. I do think he is a kind of revolutionary nihilist, as we've discussed before, not out of any sort of broad political ideology, but just out of a psychological need. But certainly there's people around him who would like to rebuild from the rubble.

And so the normal, you'd think that any normal president would be trying to change tasks, get out of a mess that he'd made, cut his losses. If not for his country's sake, then for his party's sake, because, of course, we're coming up to the midterms, which were already shaping up to be a Republican disaster before this war, before the economic impacts of this war have fully been felt. The bloodbath that could emerge if, you know,

we continue down this track, is extraordinary to contemplate in terms of what it could mean for Republicans up and down the ticket. But he doesn't see. seem either able or willing or interested in changing. Of course, there was that extraordinary story in the Atlantic a couple of days ago would say he was bored with the war, which completely fits. If it's just another thing on TV, I mean, we have- It's a bad TV show, so we're not interested in. And we had reports in the first weeks of the war that his briefing every day on the war consisted of sort of greatest hits packages of American military blowing stuff up, which apparently, you know,

seemed to greatly excite him. When you're dealing with that kind of damaged psyche and that kind of limited ability to comprehend things that he can only see it through the lens of America once again winning in the third act of the film, they used to say this about Reagan, which was ridiculous, but it really is true with Trump.

Then even if he had the ingenuity to get out of this, I don't think he has the will and I don't think he has the ingenuity. So to come back to our first point, I think his only kind of Hail Mary pass is somehow he gets the Chinese to bail him out and that is not a good outcome. Or uncertain.

It's not clear whether the Iranians necessarily feel that the Chinese will determine their range of action and their scope of options. I think that's a question to be determined. But we will continue to determine it with you. We'll say goodbye to our complimentary list and viewers, Andrew. Welcome our monk donors for a quick back half of the show, a bonus segment

with Andrew. We're going to talk about the new Governor General, Andrew's thoughts on Louisa Arbor. What's the role of Gigi? Is it still relevant in the current context? And what does this incumbent bring to the job? That conversation exclusively for monk donors after this short break. Thank you for listening to the first half of our monk dialogue with Andrew Coyne. To get access to the full episode right now, consider becoming a monk donor for just $50 a year, less than a dollar a week, you will get 72-hour advanced access to all of our premium podcasts, including Friday Focus with Janice Gross Stein. You also get our live streams of mainstage debates and all kinds of other great perks and

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