The Munk Debates Podcast - Trump's Middle East diplomacy and why Canada should re-evaluate its auto sector subsidies

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

To listen to the full episode consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. Should Donald Trump win the Nobel Peace Prize? Andrew thinks we should wait to see how this ceasefire unfolds before heaping praise on the US President. The current cessation of hostilities has more to do with Netanyahu and Israel's extremely aggressive war policy that has redrawn the map in the Middle East. Does Trump's brand of diplomacy work better in that part of the world? Or did Trump have the benefit of coming after Biden and two years of fighting that exhausted both sides? And finally has the media been fair in their overall coverage of Trump since he started his second term? In the second half of the show Rudyard and Andrew turn to ongoing trade negotiations between the US and Canada, and specifically Trump's hostility towards our auto industry. Is it time to let the sector go instead of pouring millions of dollars of subsidies into propping it up? Do we put tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to protect our industry? And why aren't we supporting industries that are not subsidized and excelling on their own in the new economy? Rudyard and Andrew agree that trade has now become intermingled with climate change and security issues, and we need to take those factors into account as we negotiate new agreements for Canada.     This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue.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.

There's a theoretical case you can make for a subsidy if you're the only one that does it. The minute you realize that other people are making the same bets, people with much deeper pockets than we are, then the only thing we get by subsidizing our industry is the right to go on subsidizing. Rudyard Griffiths here, Chair of the Monk Debates. Welcome to this, the Monk Dialogues with Andrew Coyne. Andrew's been joining us week to week now here in studio, talk about contemporary news and events. Thank you for being here, sir. I understand you've got a bit of travel coming up.

Yeah, I'm going out to West to speak to a couple groups. Book-related, I hope? Well, we'll sell some books at the events. It might not actually be book-related. Okay, the crisis of Canadian democracy. Thank you, my goodness. We will always mention that and stick it in our show notes. Andrew, a lot to talk about since we last chatted last week.

I think the big news is what's happened in the Middle East and in Gaza. So let me jump, as they say, right to the punchline. Should Donald Trump win the Nobel Peace Prize? I think there's a lot to be settled before we make any such judgment. First of all, you know, it's very unclear whether this is going to hold. Hamas has already violated at least two of the provisions of the agreement. They seem to be bent mostly on seeking revenge, on themselves, on rival groups within Gaza. they haven't released all the bodies of the dead hostages.

So there's a lot still to be decided on that front. Second of all, you could make an argument that this has a lot more to do with Benjamin Netanyahu than Donald Trump. That Israel pursued an extremely aggressive policy that has not just in Gaza, but in the Middle East General in the last couple of years, that has in many ways redrawn the map there. You can say, and people will say, well, Donald Trump gave him the kind of support that Joe Biden never would have done.

Maybe that's true. But you could equally argue that a lot of the, you know, when Trump first came out with this package, the response was mostly not, oh, what a brilliant package. It was relief. People said, well, this looks normal. So if we're handing out Nobel's peace prizes for coming out with packages you would expect an American president to come out with, which highly resembles the package that Joe Biden put together,

but which fell apart in early 2025, it is said because Trump basically said to Netanyahu, wait, and let's do this together ourselves. So all that is arguable, but I'm in no rush to give him the Nobel Peace Prize. Let me just play devil's advocate for a moment and observe that, you know, Joe Biden with, you know, Anthony Blinken, a very capable Secretary of State, Jake Sullivan, a sophisticated national security advisor with a willingness on the part of President Biden at various times to, some people would say, correctly hold Netanyahu's feet to the fire and withhold certain weapons based on Israeli behavior. was unable to get to anything close to what was agreed in these 21 or so odd points.

So what does that say? Is that an acknowledgement that, well, we don't like it? The way Trump does diplomacy, and I'll put that in air quotes, works. And it works in that part of the world with those people. There's something about his style and his approach that got something done that the other administration, despite all the same tools and arguably more capable, competent people, were unable to do. Well, you know, these things generally happen when the two sides are exhausted in one frame or another. So Trump has the advantage of coming after some period of time. Certainly, Hamas was on its back heels. It takes a... and enormous punishment, but Israeli public opinion was also growing heartily tired of

pursuing this advance, and not just from the usual suspects, but people in the security established, from people on the center right and the right, some of whom we're saying, this has gone on far enough, where there's hugely diminishing returns, we're conflicting enormous amounts of suffering for very little military gain. So do you need an American president at that point to sort of bang heads together and say, okay, you're both exhausted. You're both really want this to stop at some point. Let's do it now. Yes. Would another

president in that situation have been able to do so? I actually kind of think so. I think Trump had the benefit of coming after Biden. So all this is to say, I would have preferred Biden had been firmer in the support of Israel. I think he was tried to split the difference too much.

Maybe you give Trump some credit for that. But as I say, these things are so contingent on previous events and the path that you've gone down to up to that point, that you really have to be careful about the assessing the context when you're doing that. It's a good point. I guess we had not seen Trump had benefited from the de-fenestration of Hezbollah, the relatively successful.

I think you'd have to argue Israeli attack on Iran. The collapse of the Syrian regime. The whole landscape had changed in the two or three years prior to this. So take one more pass at this. There's something about how Trump interacts, especially with these leaders in the Gulf, who are themselves authoritarian, to put it kindly. They're usually in kind of dynastic monarchies with large security forces and surveillance states around them. Is his willingness, in a sense, to be compromised by them?

the, you know, the $500 million dollar Katari plane, the large crypto investments by the government of Dubai in the Trump family coin. Is there something, an unfortunate byproduct of corruption, is that it creates familiarity amongst crooks. And in this case, it was, maybe there was a sense amongst these, especially the Gulf state, rulers in Qatar in particular, who had considerable sway over Hamas, that this guy is kind of one of us. We can make a deal here because we know what the price is and we know when the price has been paid. And more importantly, he's agreed to the price and he knows what it means to accept the plane, to accept the cryptocurrencies, to agree to have a son get billion dollar golf course deals in our country. And all of that. And all of that,

that bizarrely, as unethical as it is and as corrupt as it is, actually facilitated a peace negotiation? Look, there's something probably to that. Certainly he's not going to get too hung up on their human rights records or their attempts to, well, their successful attempts to corrupt him. So there may be something to that. Again, there's a context, though, which is that several of these Arab regimes have privately kind of made their peace with Israel, probably in in some cases publicly. They're bound to say for public relationship purposes that they'll denounce Israel for this, that,

and the other thing. Meanwhile, they're ready to do deals behind the scenes. So there's been an enormous evolution in at least some Arab leaders' opinions towards Israel. You saw this, for example, there was that extraordinary document. I'm not going to be able to remember the place in the time, but basically 20 Arab states signed on to a document a month or two ago saying Hamas cannot be part of any post-war regime in Gaza. You would not have seen that a long time ago, and that didn't have anything new with Trump.

That was just the way things have evolved in the region. But I'm not going to die. There's probably something in what you're saying. What did you make of the president's remarkable statement in the face of evidence? that Hamas was murdering Ghazans who maybe are associated with some of these clans who had emerged and had acted as a counterforce to Hamas, some of whom probably were in some kind of alliance with the IDF or with the Israelis. But Trump's comment to this was, we've agreed to let them do some kind of policing and they're just basically acting on our instructions.

What are we to make of this? Well, he never met a dictator he didn't like. He doesn't care about the slaughter of civilians, which supposedly is the reason of, he's not alone, of course. Supposedly the deaths of civilians in Gaza was the thing that was motivating people to march in the streets.

And it suddenly dried up pretty quickly when it was Hamas doing the killing rather than Israel. But it shows how transactional he is, how immoral he is. maybe as you say in that part of the world that gives you some leverage that gives you some sympatico but at what price and certainly certainly what everyone it seems to me on all sides ought to be able to agree is Hamas cannot emerge out of this as the power in that area and if if that's what results then what the hell are we celebrating

Yeah. Do you think, Andrew, that it might have been something that the president does quite a lot, which is when the reality diverges from what one is expecting reality to be, which was Hamas, if not disarmed. That's a later discussion debate, but at least not start mowing people down on the streets in organized snuff films. that the president's trick is to say that, no, this is actually reality. I somehow have anticipated this, or in this case, I've agreed to it. And in other words, there may be no permission that had been extended in any shape, or way or form by anyone in the U.S. government, including the president, to anyone associated with Hamas to begin killing their opponents publicly in the strip. But because it's happening, because it's running counter to the president's own, you know, achievement, he then reworks reality to paper these cracks over. And I wonder you think about this as a kind of a device that he has because it's also happening now in Chicago around, you know, the sending of troops and the supposed, you know, cities on fire and rampant crime.

It's this willingness, in some ways, our acceptance at times to allow him to rewrite reality, even in the face when the reality is actually in opposition to him, in opposition to what he's done. To this day, if there's anything bad in the economy, he says that's the democratic economy. Like this is literally what he says is anything that is bad going on. And at one time or another, he's almost literally said, I'm going to describe anything bad as being the democratic economy. And like he sometimes gives you a play by play, you know, on his own, what for one of a better word, all called strategic thinking. So, yes, he either since, I was going to say either sincerely or for public relations purposes, I have more and more ceased to believe there's a distinction in his own mind.

It is really remarkable how often. So what distinction we're talking about, reality and unreality? Distinction between what he says for PR purposes and what he actually thinks. both of which in both of which case diverge sharply from reality but the question is does he mean it or is he just saying it you know there's a lie and as I say I've kind of really started to think that there's no distinction in his own mind you keep getting evidence from private conversations he's having so exhibit A would be that that errant DM he sent to Pam Bondi the Attorney General which, it turns out, was indeed an errant DM,

but sounded exactly like one of his tweets. Like, it's very hard to distinguish it. This is Arrest my enemies. Arrest my enemies. And he said all the things in this private discourse, but basically he would say in public. So it's very hard to distinguish there. Another exhibit B would be that conversation he somehow was reported on

between him and Nahandra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, where he was begging him to put him forward for the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, you know, oftentimes you just assume, well, that whole Peace Prize thing is just something he likes to say because he's a showman and it's good for the grassroots, whatever. No, genuinely, that's what he wants. So, yeah, you know, so his reconstruction of reality, whether it's the domestic economy or foreign affairs or the situation in Middle East, it's entirely possible that he simply does not distinguish between truth and falsehood. just finally we'll move on to our next topic the second half that's shown it in a moment but does the media have as the media failed here in some way because this quote in Gaza was so bizarre but it is reported again as fact so it takes something that could be fiction or definitely is

unreality and then repeats it over and over again through the Associated Press through Reuters through whoever as well the president has said this this is why this is happening. And I worry, I don't know, I worry that there's something happening here in the transmission mechanism between, as you say, his, his either conscious or unconscious spinning that he does all the time versus our ingestion of this through the media. So what's going on here? Why aren't journalists saying, whoa, wait a second. The president just said that he's authorized Hamas to kill, presumably unarmed civilians in Gaza? Because he's debased all of our standards.

He is marked against a constantly declining curve. So it's not even being great on a curve. It's greater on a curve that's constantly sliding lower and lower because his behavior just keeps getting worse and worse. His statements keep getting crazier and crazier. People get hung up on just the conversation I just had with you is, you know, is he crazy or is he a liar? rather than is it true.

We simply don't mark him on that standard anymore because he doesn't care whether he's marked him not standard. All of our coding of how we write stories about things depends on the idea that somebody's keeping something from us. So if somebody has a reputation as a good guy and then is revealed to be actually secretly a bad guy, it's enormous because he's ashamed, whoever that person is.

we've caught him out. You've provided an accountability function. And he plays his part by looking shame-faced, or at the very least by trying to conceal it. And so we get to say, aha, gotcha, you were trying to conceal us, and we got this out. What do you do with a guy who has no shame, makes no attempt to hide it,

never acknowledges any debt to reality, any debt to the truth? You know, that old line about hypocrisy as the tribute vice plays to virtue. Well, you can't call it. Trump a hypocrite because he never even attempts to portray himself as virtuous. His whole mission, if you will, is to undermine and destroy any such standard. So we are not well equipped to deal with it.

I mean, we had a small preview of that in this country. Maybe we've had more than a few, but it certainly comes in mind with Jean Crecheon used to play the same game. You know, you'd catch him out in something. I remember the, I don't know if we talked about this before, but But during the showinigate thing, where he was found... You covered that extensively. When he was found of been pressuring the Business Development Bank of Canada

to make a loan to his friend, constituent, political supporter, and serial arson victim who had a hotel that butted a golf course that Trump had a financial interest in. I mean, it was layer upon layer of scandal. And when people rounded on him and said, you were pressuring the president of the business development bank to make a loan to this fellow. Cretchen's reaction was, and I quote,

you call who you know. Like almost literally he was performing that old joke about the bank robber was asked, you know, why do you rob banks? He said, because that's where the money is. That was basically Crudgeon's logic. So, and it flummoxed us then

in obviously much less severe form, but Trump is taking that to the endth degree and mostly the media has failed at it. I cut us some slack for it because we've never confronted this before. We've had to learn some things on the fly. So we've tentatively and, you know, with some misgivings,

we've gotten over our hang-up about saying so-and-so was lying. Now, I absolutely sympathize with and agree with the idea that you should be really hesitant to say somebody's lying unless you know the state of his mind. But if you've got sufficient evidence, you got to call a spay to spay. And with Trump, it's just, you know, extraordinary amount of evidence that he just lost through his teeth.

I think you're right. I think it seems like some of the media is still caught up in this idea of objectivity, which is, again, a great sentiment if you, in fact, are living in an objective universe. But if you're living in a country with a president and the rest of us in a world with a president who doesn't have any objective reality,

who is spinning or lying, ad nauseum, I don't know. Is the press really serving us by always being so studiously objective about it? I mean, you should try to be objective or fair. Maybe there's some distinction between those two terms. Recognizing you will always fall short of that, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't make the attempt. So that, I don't think, changes. What I think we've had to learn is, maybe we should have learned this a long time ago, is objectivity or fairness doesn't simply consist in quoting both sides or quoting five sides, you know, that you do have to exercise some judgment as to who is credit worthy. And that's tenuous grounds. It's not as easy a rule

as just quote both sides. And this is something I've come to believe more and more in is, while I'm a believer in rules, sometimes we don't have bright line rules. This crosses a lot of issues. Sometimes we have to actually exercise judgment, which is really hard, has all kinds of potential pitfalls in. Because you get some people saying we should dispense with even the pretense or even the attempt at objectivity. We should just be nakedly opinionated. And I don't agree with that, depending on exactly what you mean.

I mean, even an opinion writer should try to be fair. If they want to be persuasive, you should try to show that you've understood and embraced the opposing arguments, and you're not just unaware of them or trying to sneak past. But what if the opposing argument is just kind of lunacy. That's what I'm saying. Dross is just this fantasy of one kind of unward mind. That's right. So, you know, you want to do honor to your honorable opponents.

to good faith, credible arguments. Again, it's in your own interest as an opinionator to show that you've understood and can withstand their arguments. But you do a disservice to your honorable opponents by treating them the same as your dishonorable opponents. That not every argument is the same and shouldn't be treated as such.

And so, yes, we should not be giving a platform to people who are obvious lunatics or Nazis or what have you and treating them as if they have arguments of similar weight to people who we disagree with, but who are clearly arguing from facts, making good faith attempts to understand the world around them, et cetera. And in a sense, the people who are honorable opponents of each other are in the same team versus the lunatics. Yeah. That they've got to, and we've got to be very conscious of that of trying to create a space for reasonable people to differ. Is this partly why, Andrew,

in your columns, you've been so particularly hard on the president? Because in some ways, I think the way you write about the president is uncharacteristic to a lot of your other writing, which is very measured, which does acknowledge the other side. I think we all appreciate the extent to which you and your columns really do go through your opponent's arguments and approach them with a sense of fair play. When you write about the president often, though, you seem to be angry. You seem to evidence maybe a greater feeling that those rules of fair play just don't. apply because of what? Because of... Well, I'm not trying to be angry. I'm trying to call a spade of spade.

Okay. I think the thing with Trump is, and I think we've talked about this before, but is the trap you fall, the trap you have to avoid in writing about other people you disagree with is precisely what we've just been talking about is not attributing to them false motives, not saying that they're evil or whatever. You treat them at face value. Say this is their argument I'm going to take that. That's the, so whenever one is tempted to dismiss an honorable opponent in that way, you've got to rein yourself in because you're doing a disservice to the, to their arguments, you're doing a disservice to the public and you're ultimately doing a disservice to your own arguments. With Trump, the danger is the opposite. With Trump, the danger

is of normalizing him. With Trump, the danger is of treating his arguments as if they were ordinary arguments, as if they were rooted in at least an attempt at the fact. And that's, just injured, Jeffrey, that's what I hate about the American Sunday talk shows. during the second presidency. They have all these people on from his administration, including J.D. Vance, and they treat them as if it's any cabinet minister. Is it any Mr. Vice President, what do you have to say about X? That's right.

So the thing I've been grappling with Trump is my own tendency, is I constantly feel myself falling into the trap of normalizing them. Even I, who I'm pretty critical of them, that your brain wants reassurance. Your brain wants things to fit into the normalizing. models of political debate and when you see somebody who is so clearly attempting to destroy all that then it requires a conscious effort of will to keep yourself focused on it to keep your eyes from a verging it's almost like

staring into a bright light you have to force yourself to look at this and to see what's there and that's what I'm trying to do in the Collins is to convey that exercise to the public that don't lull yourself to sleep, don't pretend to yourself that he's just rough around the edges or he posts mean tweets or these kinds of rationalizations people put out about it. Well, who am I to give you advice? But I think you should write this up as a column. I think to get, it's interesting as a reader to kind of get into your thought process about

two different types of interloculars and how you treat the majority of people and subjects that you deal with versus how you treat the president. I think that'd be, it's been a fascinating discussion right now, but I think it would be interesting for the rest of your readership to similarly see those distinctions. That's good advice. We're going to have a quick pause right now and just say goodbye to our complimentary listeners and viewers. I'm going to urge you, though, to head over to the Monk Debates website if you're not already

a member and become one for as little as $25 a year. If you're Canadian, it is a tax deductible donation. What a deal. And Andrew's going to stick around. We're going to have a little bonus discussion about Salantis. Some big job losses coming up here in the auto sector in Ontario, just announced this week. what's happening with their trade negotiations, what's happening with the auto sector, all of this. We're going to discuss in this bonus installment of today's episode of Hub Dialog.

So back in a moment with Andrew for the bonus portion of our program. Thank you for listening to the first half of this monk dialogue with Andrew Coin. To access the full episode, consider becoming a monk donor. For just $25 a year, you get exclusive access to all of our full-length podcast. in video and audio, and all kinds of special offers, perks, and updates, including for upcoming live in-person monk debate events. Simply go to our website, triplew.munkdebates.com. Click on the join button on the top right-hand corner of the website. Again, that website is www.munkdivates.com.

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