The Paikin Podcast - Walter Russell Mead: America at 250, The Trump Doctrine, and the “Drama Queen” President

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

Walter Russell Mead joins Steve to discuss America’s 250th anniversary, how “we’re in an uncharted world with a man who doesn’t believe in charts,” Trump’s political genius, how he sees drama as the core of power, not achievement, and a possible successor to Trump. They also discuss Trump’s foreign policy, whether there is a Trump doctrine, the unpredictability and chaos in which he operates, the rise of asymmetrical warfare, the Iran war, Trump’s relationship with Putin, and how Mead compares them to two mafia guys. Article from the podcast:Foreign Affairs: Losing the War of the Future by Paul Scharre     Support us: patreon.com/thepaikinpodcast Follow The Paikin Podcast: YOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/@ThePaikinPodcastSPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/1OhwznCIUEA11lZGcNIM4h?si=b5d73bc7c3a041b7X: x.com/ThePaikinPodINSTAGRAM: instagram.com/thepaikinpodcastBLUESKY: bsky.app/profile/thepaikinpodcast.bsky.social Email us at: [e-mail] 

Hi, everybody, Steve Paken here. It is hardly a secret that most Canadians think Donald Trump is a menace to both our country and the rest of the world. But for foreign policy experts, they try to go beyond Trump's bloviating to see whether there are actually any doctrines underpinning his international adventures. So let's do that today. We've got one of the leading foreign policy voices on the show today who has spent a lot of time trying to understand what drives Trump's agenda. Walter Russell Mead, one-on-one, coming up next on the Paken podcast. I am delighted to welcome for the first time to the Paken podcast, but not the first time to be interviewed by this guy,

because we talked on TVO numerous times over the years. There's Walter Russell Mead, who is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft at the University of Florida's Hamilton Center. He's a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He's a scholar for the Hudson Institute. He's a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs published by the Council on Foreign. foreign relations. And Walter, I gather in your spare time, you're also advising the new general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Is that right? They need all the help they can get.

Don't I know it? Don't I know it? Well, I want to, first of all, great to see you again and thanks so much for doing this. I want to start with a very neutral, lean, open-ended question and take it where you will. Do you like where America is at in its 250th year of existence? That's a tough question. I think I'm going to say yes and no. And let me, you know, the, no, there are a lot of obvious things that make me dissatisfied. You know, the polarization in the country, the fact that I think both on the right and the left, you've got some people who've gotten so far over in the extremes that they've lost sight of the, of the key things that really make, you know, the special sauce that is enabled America to do what it's done.

And, you know, I look at some of the corruption that I see in Washington and I look at some of the mean-spirited things that are happening. None of this makes me happy. And when I look at the degree to which people on the left are allowing themselves, you know, as we saw in this recent situation in Maine, sort of to overlook a lot of warning signs. and then in a sense discredit the opposition. It all kind of makes me sad. But on the other hand, a lot of things are, you know, America is a big country. I think it was Samuel Johnson who once said,

sir, there is a deal of ruin in a nation. That is that, you know, a nation doesn't fall apart in one day. And a country like America is always, A mix of, you know, creative destruction, of the, of old stuff falling into decay, new stuff springing up, weird stuff springing up. And so a lot of this looks to me like, this is kind of how America has, is, and has been, is crazy, chaotic, in many ways deplorable, in many ways, surprisingly outstanding. that's kind of how we roll down here.

Yeah, I should remind you, the last person who used the word deplorable got in a lot of trouble for doing so. That might have been Hillary Clinton 10 years ago. Want to be careful with that word, right? I'm not talking. I didn't say basket. No, you did not. Pointing my finger at any particular large group of voters. Very good point.

Good clarification. How should, you know, of course, that so much of the past, well, 10 years, in fact, have been spent by countries around the world trying to figure out how to deal with the, and again, I'll just put it very neutrally, with the unique situation that Donald Trump presents. As you look at it, how do you think the rest of the world should be, what's the word, coping with a president like Trump? Yeah. You know, he is really a difficult phenomenon to grasp or to deal with. You know, there'll be times when he does things that make you think, you know, he's such an idiot that this can't go on, you know, and then he'll surprise you by sort of pulling a rabbit out of a hat that no one

expected. Nobody in the history of the human race has occupied as large a share of the mental bandwidth of our species as Donald Trump has, no living person. And that's a feat. And the Trump show, which you keep thinking, oh, well, the people are going to get tired of it, it's going to fade away. He's been going strong since 2015 in the political realm. And I would say, your choice of 10 years makes some sense. He's been, whether in the White House or out of it, the dominant figure in American politics and in world politics for a decade. That is quite an accomplishment. And so I, so the, the people I know who want to just sort of dismiss Trump and say there's,

there's really no there there. And you know, you got, you got to, you got to accept that in certain ways there is a kind of a political genius going on here. Now, when I say that word. Well, that's what I want to probe with you. Yeah, no, you use it advisedly. I understand. And I want to probe that with you. We're not here so much as to, you know, say he's fabulous. So say he's terrible. We really, I think we really want to understand, because you've watched this for so long, how he does what he does. And I watched your speech that you gave at the London School of Economics not too long ago. And you had a line in that, apropos of what you just said. You said, it's about drama, not achievement for Trump. It's about commanding attention. He commands an enormous amount of bandwidth. He believes there's no such thing as bad publicity. And I guess I want to ask you, are these good qualities for a president to have? Well, again, where there I can say, all I can say speaking personally is I've never yet had the happiness of being able to vote for Donald Trump.

Perhaps that'll change when he runs for his third or fourth term. I don't know. I don't know if you're being facetious when you say that, are you? Well, I thought of the third term. Interesting. I don't think, by the way, that that's going to happen. Look, Trump is, he has broken the mold of standard politics in all kinds of ways. And he has in a way that Reagan did, but Trump has sort of done it on steroids.

He's taken the entertainment industry into politics. And he has, you got to understand with somebody like Trump that a lot of it. his career, he spent in New York real estate, in the casino business, and then doing reality television show. All three of those are professions that don't give you a lot of respect for either the idealism or the intelligence of the human race as a whole. And so there's a kind of a cynicism based on the way he's encountered the world and the paths that he's taken to success that both make him incredibly effective, obviously in certain political ways, but also limit what he can achieve.

And we'll be back right after this. Well, let's take, again, an open-ended look at this thing. And I'm hoping I'm not putting any sort of prejudgment in my question here. But the institutions that the West has spent 80 years building since the end of World War II are now very much under assault by Donald Trump. And I'm wondering if you believe any good can come of that. So what I would say there is that I think the wrecking ball method is not going to be. You don't fix something like NATO necessarily by taking a wrecking ball to it. On the other hand, it is true that for 20 years, American presidents have been saying very nicely and politely to a range of European, and I may say Canadian leader, saying, you know, you're not really doing enough to support NATO.

And that if this doesn't change at a certain point, there'll be a turn for the worse. And I think it's more important to see Donald Trump as the long prophesied turn for the worse, rather than as some sort of. spontaneous eruption. When America was being nice and doing the right thing, I think people just blew us off. And, you know, Europe is now spending more money. Japan is spending more money. Both are taking their defense more seriously. Do I wish Trump had found another better way to get us here? Yes. Do I think there's some real costs to the, the strategy? that he's used absolutely. But the truth is that the other methods tried by a range of American presence going back

really to Bill Clinton just did not do, did not work. It's interesting you picked that example because I was interviewing the former deputy prime minister of Canada, John Manley, just not too long ago. And he was the deputy prime minister when Jean Crechan was the prime minister. and he said that whenever the check came after dinner, you know, Canada always ended up in the bathroom and was quite open about the fact that we have not pulled our weight in a long time. So he agrees with you to the extent that, you know, Trump has managed.

I mean, we may not like the way he's done it, but he has managed to get Western nations to pull up their socks when it comes to playing defense. Now, how about this? Again, in this London School of Economics talk that you gave, you said, we are in an uncharted world. world with a man who doesn't believe in charts. That's a great line. I hope you came up with that line. That's a great line.

If he doesn't believe in charts, what does he believe in? Trump is very much, I think, an improvisational player. And this is one of the big differences between him and many of his fellow world leaders and, in fact, between him and much of the political and intellectual establishment, that really ever since World War II, we've tried to conduct foreign policy in the sense of predictability. You know, on the one hand, with nuclear weapons, you want to make sure that there's credible deterrence, which means they've got to believe that if the other side does X, you will do Y. And on the other hand, you have to be very clear about, you know, where the line isn't.

You don't want a lot of confusion over what the United States is or isn't going to do or what NATO policy is or isn't. Or even in something like Taiwan, you know, how forward leaning is the United States. President Trump has just does not think that way. He actually thinks that he has that only a sucker would tell the other people what you're going to do. You know, we can see this in the current situation with Iran. You know, on day one, he signs an MOU and half the country and half the experts are up in arms. Oh, you're giving Iran so very, very much. Two weeks later, he bombs them again.

Sanctions come off. Sanctions go on. Sanctions are off again or now they're on again. Trump wakes up every day. and makes decisions in the moment based on what he calculates to be his most advantageous move in the moment. It is a completely different way of managing things. And as you referred to earlier, Steve, he thinks of drama as the core to power rather than achievement. And what do I mean by that?

Your typical Western politician says, okay, the way to get votes is to do something that the voters like. So if I cut their taxes 5%, or I improve their schools or I fix the pothole in front of their house, that's the way I get elected. Trump seems to think that actually the way I get elected is I compel everyone's attention. all eyes on me, I become the greatest reality television star in the history of planet Earth, and they simply won't take their eyes off me. And they'll renew me the way that people renew their Netflix subscriptions, because they have to see what the next episode is going to bring.

And I... Does it get... Go on. No, does it get to a point, though? where you say to yourself, this is not effective anymore, and it's not all that entertaining anymore, because we've seen this movie already, and we know it's got a lousy ending. Do you think the American people are closer to that than his version of events? Well, he's certainly running low in the polls. And, you know, I think at the moment his support is very much down to the kind

core support that just likes Trump and likes almost everything about him. You know, there's sort of 35 to 40 percent of the American population are what I would call Jacksonians. And I've written about this. And I think you and I have discussed this and some of our past interviews. And that's a plurality. There isn't another single group that's bigger, but it's not a majority. And so Trump has now united a lot of.

folks against him. However, first of all, he's not running for anything at the moment, and he can't run for president again. He's even admitted this himself. So what is the point of poll standing for him at the moment? You know, what are what are his incentives? I think as time goes on, he will want to make sure that he is succeeded by a like-minded successor. So he's going to want the Republican, he's going to want two things, one to control the selection of the next Republican presidential candidate and then make sure he wins because he does know that if the Democrats get in, he's going to be, you know, investigated, tried. He is entire administration, his family, everybody he knows is going to be kind of subjected

to a pretty longstanding attack. And yes, the president can pardon himself. That doesn't cover civil lawsuits. It only covers, by the way, federal crimes. The president can't pardon people for state crimes. So in that sense, he's going to want a successor who will do for him what Vladimir Putin did for Boris Yeltsin. You give me to the keys to the Kremlin and you and your family can go happily off into the sunset and no one's going to ask any questions.

That's what he wants. Do you have any insight into who that might be? He wants to reveal his successor, if he could, the way Elizabeth I first revealed hers. That is, on her deathbed in a whisper. Because the minute the successor has emerged and it's clear, whoever it is, power starts to pass from the old king to the new king. And Trump really wants to delay that moment as long as possible. And I think a lot of his foreign policy, you have to understand that as sometimes he'll, you know, for a long time, everybody thought, oh, it's obvious Vance is going to be the, the 2028 nominee. There's nobody else.

And I don't think Trump liked that. And so Rubio started coming up. And Trump started saying things that that were hinted. It's going to be Rubio. But then it seems to me a few weeks ago, the conventional opinion had swung far enough in the Rubio direction that Trump is now, you know, Trump's, well, I don't want this Rubio boom to get out of control, and he's kind of tilting toward Vance. Honestly, I don't think Trump knows who he's going to pick.

I know he wants to pick it as late as possible. And I also know he wants everyone looking to him. He doesn't want an independent power center in the Trump administration. So we're in for, and I think we have to understand that for him, stuff like this, generally speaking, matters more than foreign policy. He is more. It's like an episode of The Apprentice. You know, it's the ultimate, you're hired, you're fired, you're fine. fired. Exactly. And again, making that a big public show, it keeps the eyeballs on the show,

on the spectacle, but it also centers Trump. He's the decider. Every, the whole show is about what will Trump do? The NATO summit, by the way, this week has been exactly the same. What will Trump do? Yes. Will he invade Greenland? Will he help Ukraine? Will he bomb Iran? Well, some he does, some he doesn't do, but everybody is waiting to see. And usually what he'll do is he'll surprise you.

So if he'd been saying nice things about Europe for three months, he would suddenly turn around and just, you know, absolutely, you know, run them down. Or alternative. He did that, right? Yeah. Well, actually, the end was very positive. It was like, you know, oh, he didn't say anything about Greenland. He was very nice.

I'm going to help Ukraine. Again, the surprise ending, you can't be predictable. So you have to understand a lot of the Trump presidency. And this to me has nothing to do with whether you like it or not. Just how does this thing work? is that it is a ratings-seeking, not a policy-seeking machine in a lot of ways. Not in every way, but in a lot of ways. My hunch is after that World Cup soccer game the other day,

the Belgians ought to be looking over their shoulders because who knows what. But I was going to raise that issue of Vladimir Zelensky with you, because we remember the last time they famously met in public, you know, you don't have any cards. You have no cards. and he got a completely disrespectful welcome in the Oval Office. And this time, Trump is saying, hey, great to see you again.

You're doing a wonderful job. You want to use our Patriot missiles to attack Russia. Be my guest. We'll help you out with the patents. We'll let you have the copyright, whatever it is. How is the world supposed to take seriously a guy who can make those kinds of Volt Fosses with no shame whatsoever? Well, I will say that actually, if you look at it,

at world history, the world has treated a lot of leaders who do this with enormous respect. The name Napoleon Bonaparte comes to mind. For that matter, the name Joe Stalin comes to mind, that actually the capacity, was it an Italian prime minister once it, Italy will astound the world, dash, by ingratitude. You know, that the capability to turn on a dime and surprise people is actually one of the elements that leads to success, historically speaking. Now, you can do it too often. You can so alienate people, as Napoleon did at the end, that people who don't agree on anything else agree,

they've got to get rid of you. So it's, you know, it's like the two examples you gave, Bonaparte and Stalin. It didn't end well for either one of them. Well, Stalin died in bed, which is about as good as it gets. It didn't end well for anybody else. No, fair enough. Fair enough.

He kept power until death. And I have to say that probably both Putin and Trump only would like the same thing. And we'll be back right after this. Welcome back to Gloves Off Season 2, eight brand new episodes about the threat to Canada's sovereignty and how middle powers can thrive in the New World Disorder. I'm Stephen Marsh. Last season, the show was about surviving. Since then, Canada has emerged as a prominent global force. And that's why the question this season is what cards do we hold and how do we win?

The gloves come off on Canada Day, July 1st. Get it wherever you get your podcasts and watch on YouTube. Well, maybe you've had this experience. I want to share one with you and you tell me if this makes any sense. I know a lot of people who in Canada like Donald Trump. I know lots of Americans who do, but I know lots of Canadians who like them too. And when I say, you know, he is a bit of a despicable human being. He's a bit of a maybe the all-time leading grifter in the Oval Office.

He has never demonstrated any empathy for anybody else. He really doesn't care at all about Democratic guardrails. And they will say, oh, yeah, I know. But, you know, he's good on ABC and D. And more importantly, you know, he hates the Democrats. And thank God he kept the Democrats out of power. And I guess I want to know why don't more people care about all of the downside that comes with Donald Trump, and they're prepared to forgive so much.

And that is always interesting. And I think this is where I come back to Trump's victories are only possible against the background of an extremely decadent political intellectual establishment. You know, when you've got sort of people testifying before Congress that they can't give you a definition of a woman, because this would be so offensive to certain trans rights groups or others to the average voter. And even to actually a number of fairly sophisticated people, this seems like such insane nonsense, such craziness that in comparison to that, someone who simply uses insider knowledge to make a lot of money on stock trade, doesn't actually seem that horrible.

And this is, and the sense that a sort of derangement of the establishment is leading normal governance off into an increasingly dysfunctional and ultimately a tyrannical zone makes a lot of people much more willing to over. to overlook Trump's faults. So I think if we had not had, you know, I mean, in this country during the COVID pandemic, you know, to say that the COVID started in the, in a lab in Wuhan was, you know, for a while, you would be silent. You would be people try to drive you out of public life for things like that.

And then later it kind of turns out, well, actually, maybe there's some good evidence there. So, you know, this sense that the establishment has somehow, you know, gotten itself into an enormous pickle. And the only way to fix it is to have somebody who's willing to go in there and break things. That is driving a lot. And may I say, on the far left, too, we see it. People say the whole system is so corrupt. Money rules everything. The system is sort of hardened in its indifference to ordinary people.

The mainstream press, everybody is just aligned in this sort of propaganda machine. The far left is willing to entertain figures and ideas that 25 years ago would have been completely marginal. So to a lot of my friends in the establishment, you know, the message I would like to say is, you know, don't just sit around talking about all the things you don't like about Trump. I mean, I have my own list. It's easy to do. Try to think about why a lot of ordinary American voters who don't normally vote this way got themselves into such a state where, after two terms and all kinds of issues, 35, 40% of them are still solidly backing Donald Trump.

Look in the mirror and think. This is the message I wish more people would pay heed to. Oh, that's a great point. I wonder, you know, people who do what you do for a living try to find patterns in decision making of presidents over the years. And they tried to connect the dots. and come out with some kind of doctrine, you know, the Truman doctrine of containment or whatever. Have you been able to discern a Trump doctrine as it relates to foreign affairs?

Well, there's not one Trump doctrine, but I think there are some pretty consistent patterns that we can see in his activities across both terms, really. One is that he wants to maximize American and his power in every negotiation. So, you know, historically, American president since World War II said, we're going to have trade negotiations over here, security negotiations over here, and they will never cross. we will do NATO with Europe like there's no trade issues and we'll do trade issues like there's no NATO. Trump thinks that actually it's better, oh, and I should say that organizationally and bureaucratically in governments, this works with the way governments are set up. So you have a commerce department in the U.S. that focuses on trade. And the Pentagon is doing NATO and the State Department is doing other things.

So dividing up the foreign policy agenda into these bureaucratically distinct areas kind of became the norm. Trump says America's power is maximized when the people looking at you as you talk about security issues know that you can dump a lot of tariffs on them at any moment. And on the other hand, when people talking about trade, know that you can take your soldiers home. and they're totally exposed to their enemies. You actually want to combine those things. So no more silos. Everything's on the table all the time.

That's the way he likes to do things. And it clearly, you know, again, we can, I think the costs, as I've said already, several times in this program and otherwise is high, but you can't deny that to a certain extent he has been able to get what he wanted that way. to an extent. Yeah. One of the intriguing things that has really significantly changed during the second Trump term, most significantly, is warfare.

And we have seen successful asymmetrical warfare as we probably have not in decades and decades. And I want to just read a short quote to you here. This is from a recent article in Foreign Affairs called Losing the War of the Future. And I don't know if you know this guy, Paul Schar, who is a former Defense Department. official for George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who wrote the technological dominance that the U.S. military has long counted on to give it an advantage over competitors is waning. Unlike in past eras when the United States maintain major leads in stealth and precision-guided weapons, the current age will not afford the United States an advantage in the technologies that are now

transforming warfare, drones, and artificial intelligence. What do you think of that observation? I do think that the pace of change in warfare has accelerated enormously. You know, I've been to Ukraine three times since the war started. And each time I've, you know, had the good fortune of being able to talk directly with a lot of the people engaged in Ukraine's evolving approach to military production strategy. And you can just see that, you know, in World War II, maybe there were one or two technological cycles in the whole war, new weapons that changed, that were something like radar that changed the nature of air war. In the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the new cycle comes about every six months. And I wouldn't be surprised if the time is decreasing. that is that changes the context in which you think about things like technological superiority and it means

that at any moment across a whole range of issues somebody new is going to come popping up with some capability that that other people don't have and if you throw in cyber and as I'm afraid we will before too much longer biological warfare of various kinds. I think you're going to see that potential growing. But you have to sort of think about it less as, okay, are you going to dominate one or two, themselves dominant technologies on a stable basis forever? Or are you going to, on average be the one who is making the most changes in the most areas and updating your doctrines and your organizations to do it. I would say that the United States is very far from being, having the competence that you would like to see. But I think when I look at even the Russian

military, which has been learning a lot in the Ukraine war, and certainly the Chinese military, I would say we're probably still ahead in terms of our ability to internalize the need for innovation and roll that out through the ranks. Xi Jinping's approach of what was it that they did, the British did with their admiral in the 18th century, as Voltaire said, they shot one in order to encourage the others. of this sort of wave of purges across the Chinese military with a lot of people going to jail and even some of she's protégés getting in trouble does not encourage a lot of independent thinking well it's just been astonishing to watch in the Middle East for example a 300,000 drone boat can cripple a navy warship worth hundreds of millions of dollars and the small kind of clever powers have figured out now that the bigger, you would think, hyperpowers

who should be winning their wars easily, but can't. Do the bigger powers understand, in your view, that we're at a moment here where they could be, I'm not going to say obsolete, but everything that they've, everything they thought they knew about war is kind of out of date now, isn't it? Well, I think, well, I think the second part is true that everything we thought we knew about wars out of date. But I don't actually think the shifts in the balance work quite as simply as you're suggesting. Because, okay, take the Iran situation. Or, you know, it's clear that the U.S. Navy is not going to be operating a lot inside the Strait of Hormuz, at least for the moment. But on the other hand, it's also clear that the U.S. Navy can stay hundreds of miles off the coast of Iran,

and effectively block as many Iranian oil tankers as it would like to. Because the technology, which the same technology, it makes it very difficult for navies to operate close to onshore, actually hugely improves the capability of a Navy to mount a blockade over an extended area. So if you were trying to blockade somebody in the old days, basically your sailing ships had to be able to see the ships that you were trying to enter,

predict. While now with radar, with your own drones and so on, you can actually control thousands of square kilometers of area. So, and this, we've kind of seen this in the Iranian case, the U.S. can't go in there and just force a clearance of the strait. On the other hand, it can't deny Iran the use of the strait. So we have, that's one of the factors, I think, in the same. standoff. Or we think about China. In this case, it may benefit the United States that it is much harder for China to think about sending a huge invasion fleet across the Strait of Taiwan to land and to bring an army on shore on Taiwan. And China's investments in denial of, you know, to bring an army onshore on Taiwan. and China's investments in denial, area denial, to keep the U.S. Navy out of the strait of Taiwan in the case of a war is less important if the U.S. Navy can sit 300 miles, 500 miles away and still enforce an economic blockade of China should, God forbid, some kind of crisis develop.

So, you know, the technology doesn't take a side. It just forces everybody to rethink. In some ways, I think the thing that we're going to see the most of that I find the most horrifying in a way is that we're going to see sort of the diffusion of these technologies. So while African civil wars used to be fought with Kalashnikovs, which were bad enough, we will now increasingly see them fought by much higher tech and much more destructive weapons. We should have a word about Russia here. And to that end, I think it's fair to say that a lot of people have considered Trump a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin over the years. And that press conference they had, I can't remember where now.

is it Norway or anyway, which wherever it was. That was pretty embarrassing that the president of the United States was taking the word of the Russian leader over 17 of his own intelligence services. But be that as it may, then he's, then he does something like he just did at the NATO summit in Turkey, in which he's buddy old pal, my pal Vladimir Zelensky, and sure will help you beat Russia. Can you help us understand where you think Trump is on Russia now? Yeah. Well, look, I think I think Trump's critics by and large have grossly misunderstood his approach to to Russia and to Putin right from the beginning. And it's not, you know, it's not that there aren't reasons. You know, the fact is that people sense, and I think correctly, that Trump really doesn't care much more about sort of ideals and things than Vladimir Putin really does. And that, you know, Trump, Trump has the same innate. attitude about democratic guardrails and so on that Putin does. And he certainly doesn't see, you know, Trump does not see himself engaged in some kind of, you know, moral conflict with Putin.

He doesn't see that. He just doesn't look at the world that way. And so people have extrapolated from that. Well, then obviously it's it's the authoritarian. Trump and Putin are allied and they're going or, you know, wreak holy havoc on the world and, you know, the sort of hair on fire, Russia gate, okay? I think this is, I think this is all just wrong, and it has obscured people's vision of the fact is that Trump's first term was not a good time for Russia. If, in many ways, what I think Putin would have liked would be a third Obama term, an America that is not rearming, an America that is letting environmental considerations stop its support

for developing more fossil fuel, an America that's not going to be renovating its nuclear arsenal. Those are, and an America that's not going to intervene in Syria against a government that's backed by Russia, those are kind of all from Putin point of view, win, win, win. And what you see under Trump is the United States is doing everything possible to increase the amount of oil and gas in world markets, while also increasing American control over those flows, which marginalizes Russia and is undermining, even as we speak, the price of oil is gone up a little bit this week because of the new fighting in the Middle East. But basically he's gone from $100 a gallon U.S. to 70 in a couple of weeks. That's not what Putin wants. You mean a barrel, not a gallon.

If you look at what Trump is doing in Central Asia, this big deal in Kazakhstan, it looks as if he's working on a pipeline that will connect Turkmenistan and the oil and gas from Central Asia will come out without going through Russia, which weakens Russia's hold in the former Soviet Union, which reduces its power over the natural flows of oil and gas. None of this is good for Russia. It doesn't mean that, again, that Trump has a kind of, you know, Tim Snyder-style crusading attitude toward, we must destroy the menace. it's more like two mafia dons sitting in a room. And, you know, Trump isn't going to insult the other one.

It's business, not personal. So, you know, if I have to kill your number two, I'm sending flowers to the funeral. It's business, not personal. But at the same time, he doesn't want the other guy to take over the drug trade in the South Bronx or whatever it may be. And he said, Trump, Trump is not. a sentimentalist. He doesn't admire Putin, particularly, I think. Trump never wants to be in a room with Putin where Putin is number one and he is number two. So I think none of this is romanticizes Trump in my view, but it does, I think a lot of Trump's critics have done themselves a terrible

disservice by sort of accepting some convenient myths that actually fail to get at the heart of what's going on in world politics today. You reminded me of Tesio at the end of the godfather there where he says tell Michael it was only business. I never thought of that as a template for foreign policy in the world today, but there you go. We're going to get one last word from Walter Russell meet in just a moment, but first we want to do a bit of housekeeping here. This is a free program. We intend to keep it free forever. We do appreciate people supporting the program, though. And if they want to, patreon.com forward slash the Paken podcast, we are very grateful for those who've decided to shell out a few bucks and help us with expenses and keep this thing going. And you'll get some web exclusive content there.

I think I referred to an interview I did with former deputy prime minister John Manley earlier in my discussion with Professor Mead. And that's on the site right now. John Manley's an interesting guy. he was our foreign minister, industry minister, what else? Finance minister. He was our borders are after 9-11. He worked very closely with American officials. He has a kid who lives in Seattle. He has American-born grandchildren.

And he has some interesting, complicated feelings about America at 250, which I think you might like to see, which you can if you join our Patreon community. All of these shows are archived at stevepeakin.com. Walter Russell Mead, one last question for you. if there was one thing about Donald Trump, you could change. You got him alone in a room for five minutes and you say, Mr. President, if only you'd change this about you, your life would be so much better, easier, saner, more effective.

What would that be? One thing. That is a tough one. I would say, because I think he's a, he's a, there was a, story about somebody who once said to Trump, who knew Trump, said, Ms. President, he says, there's some things about you that are just really great and some things that are just really terrible. I wish you could get rid of the bad things and just double down on the good things. And Trump supposedly responded to him by saying, it's all a package.

Well, ain't that the truth? It apparently is all a package. That's true. I want to thank you so much for spending so much time with us here. And before we go, I certainly want to. I wonder if I can show that the camera. There we go. I'm a subscriber and people watching this are listening to this should be too. What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead. That's his podcast in which he shares so much of his wisdom as well.

Thanks so much for joining us today and peace and love to everybody. Hey, thanks, Steve. And let's just hope that in spite of everything, American Canada will find a way to be the kind of friends that we should be all along. On that, we have agreement. Thank you, Walter. Bye.