- The United States of grift?

This week on "Firing Line."

- To the victor belong the spoils.

- [Hoover] President Trump addressed world leaders at the United Nations this week, as tech CEOs flew to the White House for a state dinner with China's leader, Xi Jinping.

- American foreign policy should be about benefiting all Americans.

When it's designed to enrich a few people who have some kind of contact to the administration then it's not good for America.

- [Hoover] Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, sheds light on what she sees as an unholy alliance between ideologues and kleptocrats shaping Trump's second term foreign policy.

- They don't want the United States to promote democracy or be seen as a kind of beacon of liberal democracy itself.

This is really hard even to explain how radically different this is from the way most American administrations have thought before.

- [Announcer] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, and by the following.

(energetic instrumental music) - Anne Applebaum, welcome back to "Firing Line."

- Thanks for having me.

- In his speech this week at the UN General Assembly, President Trump said he faced a choice to make a deal with Iran or to quote, "annihilate the Islamic Republic."

At this point in his presidency, how do world leaders know which threats to take seriously?

- The difficulty with analyzing President Trump's foreign policy is that Trump himself doesn't have a strategy.

So he says what he wants to say at any given moment.

And saying you're going to annihilate them actually probably helps the regime because it makes people inside Iran afraid.

It makes people inside Iran feel they need protection.

You know, I think another important point is that Trump has not reached out to the Iranian people.

He did sort of at the beginning.

- Yeah.

- He talked about regime change, but he hasn't done so since.

He doesn't talk about Iranian democracy.

He doesn't talk about improving life for Iranians.

He doesn't talk about building prosperity in the Middle East.

None of the goals that once characterized US foreign policy are audible in anything that he says.

And that doesn't give Iranians anything to hope for or wish for or imagine they could get from the United States, and you know, what he's doing is polarizing the situation and reinforcing the rhetoric of the regime.

- Divorcing ourselves from whether it is possible, what would a victory for the United States look like at this point in the Iranian conflict?

- I mean, there are different victories.

I suppose a victory would look like, we go back to the status quo ante.

We go back to where we were before and the Strait of Hormuz is a free shipping lane.

You know, a real victory would be a change of government in Iran or, you know, a more humane regime, one that wasn't a theocracy.

You know, a regime that was designed, rather, to promote prosperity of Iranian people.

And that would be a real victory for the region, you know, for Iranians and for everybody else.

But the U.S.

doesn't have a strategy to achieve that and apparently never did and there wasn't an idea for how to help, you know, a different kind of country emerge from the conflict.

- You make your case in the latest cover story of "The Atlantic" that the second Trump administration's foreign policy is akin to a revolution built on an unholy alliance between ideologues from the right wing and kleptocrats.

You quote Karl Marx, "Revolutions are the locomotives of history."

What makes the people in the Trump administration now revolutionaries rather than simply a group of opportunists who happen to temporarily hold power?

- So it's clear that the, you can see this in both domestic and international policy, that these are people who, exactly as you say, they don't think of themselves as people who are temporarily in charge, who will lose an election next time, who are maintaining and carrying on an American tradition that goes back many decades.

They're people who see their job as smashing or breaking what they call the administrative state and which the rest of us call the American government.

- Mm-hmm.

- They want to smash and destroy America's relations.

They don't see the United States as the natural leader of an alliance of democracies around the world.

They don't want the United States to promote democracy or be seen as a kind of beacon of liberal democracy itself.

They have an idea of America as an ethnic nation, kind of white Christian nationalist civilization, and they would like to promote that civilization all over the world, but especially they're interested in Europe because they see Europeans as their ethnic kin.

And this is really hard even to explain how radically different this is from the way most American administrations have thought before.

The United States has acted in the world, at least, you know, since in the 20th century, as a force for, as I said, democracy and especially the rule of law and international trade and recognizable rules and so on.

- And cultural and religious pluralism.

In your reporting, you observe that American foreign policy is no longer represented overseas by trained diplomats, by reliable officials, but instead, quote, "by informal envoys, privileged companies, online grifters, and hardened ideologues promoting their own business and ideological roles."

Who are the ideologues and what do they believe?

- So the ideologues are people who believe in America as a white nationalist Christian nation, as a nation which is derived from a founding group of people and their descendants, and that's its essence.

And the civilization of those people is the thing that the United States should promote, and we should also seek to acquire allies who believe in that same version of the world.

I should say a corollary of this, an addition to this, is that they also believe that this civilization should be dominant, especially in its hemisphere.

And you know, they promoted a number of colonial or imperial projects towards that end, so whether it's in Canada, whether it's in Greenland, and whether really most spectacularly in Venezuela.

You know, so they're people who think they have a superior civilization.

It needs to, you know, return to power and they need to help others achieve it, and it should dominate others, especially in our hemisphere.

- You remark that revolutionaries have a need to spread their ideology outward internationally.

Why is it not enough just to win at home?

- They don't want to merely win at home because in order to stabilize the changes they are making, they need other countries also to accept them and agree with them and go along with them.

You know, so just as the Bolsheviks wanted everybody around them also to become communists because that would secure their power, the MAGA movement also believes that it needs other allies in other countries in order to maintain its power and its influence over the United States.

- You bluntly call the Trump administration a, quote, "predatory American regime" and the people around it, quote, "a clan of predators."

What is a predator clan and who are the predators?

- So every time you have a revolution, when you have people breaking up old institutions, you have other people looking to take advantage of it.

In the case of the U.S., you have a series of companies.

You have the tech companies, you have mineral mining companies, you have cryptocurrency who are really important because they're, almost every far-right party has links to cryptocurrency, and you have oil and gas companies as well.

So you have companies who are seeking now to use U.S.

power and influence to make money for themselves.

And also, you see people associated with Trump and his family doing the same.

And this is a pretty radical change in American politics.

The direct use, you know, of American foreign policy to enrich, for example, the president's son-in-law.

This is brand new.

- Yeah.

What is the international goal of the predatory clan?

- You know, the international goal of the predatory clan is to increase their own power and influence, to make money, and above all, to make sure that they are not regulated.

And this is especially clear in Europe where you see the tech companies, I mean, Elon Musk is the loudest, also seeking to support European political parties of the far right because those parties are opposed to the European Union because the European Union is the one body that's capable of regulating them.

- When President Trump spoke this week at the UN, he bragged about removing Nicolás Maduro and said in his address, "To the victor go the spoils."

Does that typify predatory ideology, this predatory ideology?

- This is a predatory ideology and predatory behavior.

I've just been to Venezuela, and what's becoming clear is that the Trump administration's relationship to the current Venezuelan regime, which by the way is the same regime.

They removed Maduro, but his vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, is still in power, and Trump met with her here in New York this week.

So the U.S.

is now working very closely with her.

And the best description I've heard of this relationship is that it's a, you know, it's a union of two corrupt oligarchies.

- Yeah.

- So you have two kleptocracies working together to do deals that will be of benefit, not to Venezuelans, not to Venezuelan democracy, which is what the U.S.

used to support in Latin America, but rather to businesspeople who are either close to the Rodríguez administration or close to the Trump administration.

- Why is it dangerous to redesign American foreign policy around an ideology like this and the personal benefit of those who deploy it?

- So American foreign policy should be about benefiting all Americans.

It should be to make America prosperous.

You need to create, you know, mutual relationships that will last for a long time, that will benefit U.S.

companies for decades, not just for the next year or not just for the next two years, but for 10 years.

When you have a foreign policy that's not designed to do that, that's instead designed to undermine or overthrow friendly governments, when it's designed to enrich a few people who have some kind of contact to the administration you know, at the expense of other kinds of long-term relationships, then it's not good for America.

I mean, and over time, Americans will feel the effect and you'll feel it kind of culturally and politically, but you'll also feel it economically.

I mean, we're feeling it already in states that border Canada have seen this drop in trade.

The kind of deference that was given to American companies and investors in Europe because America was the superpower, because America was the security guarantor, because America was the leader of NATO, a lot of that will go.

- There's a real consequence for American power.

- There will be real consequences.

- President Trump in the UN General Assembly said, again, reiterated his prediction that Cuba will fall and freedom will be coming to Cuba.

"The Wall Street Journal" reports that businessmen with ties to the Trump administration are already making plans for a post-communist Cuban economy.

Is Cuba the next case study for the alliance you describe between ideologues and kleptocrats?

- You know, my hope for the people of Cuba is that they have a transition to a better government, to at least, you know, a government with a modicum of democracy that allows them to have influence over what happens to them.

If the United States were able to encourage that, you know, I would be in favor of it.

What I'm afraid of, having just been to Venezuela and having talked to so many people who are there and who've been watching what's happened there is that a similar plan might unfold where you have another autocratic regime in charge of the island, which is somehow able to do deals with U.S.

business.

And that would be, I think, really tragic.

- One of the silver linings of President Trump's remarks this week in New York was President Trump's assurance that he will not be the next President of the United States, that someone else will follow him.

And the question is, what happens to Trump's revolution and his revolutionaries when a new individual comes to office?

Is the damage done or is there a way to fix it?

- First of all, it depends who the next president is.

- Of course.

- President JD Vance would, I think, push the revolution farther.

JD Vance is an ideologue.

He's somebody who has absorbed himself in the philosophy and thinking of the, whatever we're calling it, the new right or the far right.

And so he is very ideologically committed to that project, to the project both of changing and transforming and maybe undermining liberal democracy in America but also carrying that project overseas, and he's said so.

He talks about, he said so on some of his foreign trips.

- There are upcoming congressional midterm elections in the United States, in which it is not entirely unfeasible that the opposition party takes control of both houses of Congress, at least one house of Congress.

To what extent can the patterns you report upon be disrupted in that scenario?

- A lot depends on the numbers.

- Yeah.

- You know, how big control of the House, whether there's control of the Senate.

Certainly, Congress technically has the power of the purse.

It's able to stop things.

- Mm-hmm.

- I think that a lot of the focus of American policy and politics after the midterms is going to be domestic.

So I don't hold out huge hopes for transformational changes in foreign policy.

But it's true, if they want to, if they have the majority, if they have the numbers, then yes, Congress could begin to stop the president.

I mean, in a way, everything that's happened over the last two years, or year and a half, is a reflection of the fact that our political system, as it was originally set up to work, isn't functioning.

- Yeah.

- And having a different kind of Congress will help, but it doesn't end or solve the problem.

- Yeah.

President Trump hosted Xi Jinping at the White House this week.

Xi Jinping is one of the leaders of the global network of autocracy that you've written about quite a bit.

And "The Times" has reported that Xi is pressing Trump to continue to delay a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan.

What were you watching for as those two men got together?

- So what worries me about Trump's attitude towards Xi is that he frequently talks about Xi as someone whose power he admires and whose political system he admires.

You know, "Xi doesn't have to worry about journalists and courts and transparency, and nobody's paying attention to his family, you know, and how much money they earn."

You know, and so I'm afraid that Trump is maybe the first president in U.S.

history who sees himself as someone who, you know, he aspires to be like Xi.

- Yeah.

- That's what worries me is that Trump won't act like the representative of the American people, that he'll act like someone who's looking to, you know, he's speaking to somebody that he admires.

And in this, you know, and therefore in this scenario where, most worrying, of course, is Taiwan and whether the U.S.

commitment to Taiwan is diminished but also whether the U.S.

commitment to contest Chinese dominance of Africa or to- - How about China's funding of the Ukraine war?

- Right, or the Iranian war.

- [Hoover] Right.

- You know, China's relationship with Iran, China's relationship with Russia.

You know, is the U.S.

willing to contest those things and to understand that China is part of an autocratic network that challenges the United States?

Or is he simply going to say, you know, "You're somebody I really admire.

You know, let's just do business together."

- Xi Jinping was honored at a state dinner this week in which U.S.

tech executives, and specifically the CEOs of frontier AI technologies, were present from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman.

The gathering of AI CEOs comes on the heels of a round of alarmism about the possibility that AI might somehow annihilate humanity.

And I'd like to ask you, as a student of the Cold War and of Russia, that we have seen the US and its adversaries come together in the past to limit the spread of technology that can end human existence.

And in 1990, Ronald Reagan was a guest on the original "Firing Line" with William F. Buckley Jr.

discussing what negotiations with the Soviet Union looked like as they were working to withdraw intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe.

Take a look.

- We challenged the Soviet Union to a zero-zero concept.

They'd do away with theirs, we wouldn't put ours in.

They walked out of the meeting on zero-zero.

So we started sending Cruise missiles and another form of weapon to match the intermediates.

All of a sudden, the Soviets came back to the bargaining table and, believe it or not, they used our term.

They said, "Let's talk zero-zero."

Well, we got the treaty.

- To what extent is nuclear non-proliferation a useful model or framework to consider when we think about how the U.S.

and its adversaries, particularly China, could cooperate to contain a runaway technology?

- So it's not technically useful 'cause the technologies are so different.

You know, it's not about limiting the numbers of AIs, right?

- Right.

Right, right, right.

- I mean, which is how you- - Right, right, right.

- did nuclear negotiation.

- But on a broader level- - But on a broader level, thinking about how we work together with a rival power to establish rules or terms of business that will limit the possibility of damage, I think it is a reasonable comparison.

You know, you asked me what I'm afraid of in this meeting.

The other thing I'm afraid of in Trump's dealings with Xi is that he doesn't understand the threat.

That for maybe his own reasons, his family has investments in AI, or for other reasons, he's worried about the stock market, that he doesn't want to go there.

He doesn't want to talk about it.

He wants to dismiss the dangers of AI and move on.

- President Trump and President Zelenskyy met this week in New York to discuss an off-ramp for the war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has ramped up strikes on Russian oil refineries in response to attacks on its own energy infrastructure, and Trump has blamed those strikes for surging diesel prices, even though most energy experts point to the war in Iran.

Does Trump actually believe that Ukraine, rather than Iran, is responsible for high fuel prices?

- So, I doubt he really believes that.

I think what he's trying to do is deflect attention from Iran.

Look, the problem with negotiations that we've had with Ukraine since Trump became president for the second time is that Trump refuses and has repeatedly refused to put any kind of pressure on Russia.

You know, in order for the war to stop, Russia has to stop its invasion.

It is Russia who is pressuring forward.

It is Russia trying to take more territory.

It's also important to note, and this goes back to the earlier part of our conversation, which is that his envoys to Russia, you know, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, are not merely visiting Moscow multiple times and Kyiv once in order to negotiate an end to the war.

They are also negotiating business deals.

- You write this in your piece.

I mean, you talk about how Witkoff and Kushner are negotiating post-war energy and mineral deals for American companies with Russia.

Well, the White House denies that, but I mean, it sounds like the end of this war is for sale.

- So you said the White House has denied that.

I know that happened.

Witkoff has said to other Europeans, "Don't be surprised.

You know, I'm negotiating, you know, with Russia."

- And the White House has denied that.

- The White House denied it, but I've been told it by people who were in the room and heard it.

- So you know Witkoff to be lying?

Or, you know the White House to be lying?

- I mean, the White House denies everything, so, you know, we have to- - Right.

So not to make too much of that denial.

- I would not make too much of the denial.

- So the urgency to end the war is really the interests of American businesspeople and their colleagues.

- The urgency to end the war and to end the war on Russia's terms because, you know, Kushner has, in a recent statement that he made to a conference in Kyiv said, you know, "All Ukraine has to do is withdraw from territory and then the war will be over."

I mean, there's no evidence that that's true, first of all, but it also is a, it's a way of saying, you know, "We want Ukrainians to surrender so that we can end the war and so that we can all get on with doing business."

And I should also say it represents a really fundamental misunderstanding of what the war is about.

So Witkoff and Kushner look at this war as a kind of real estate disagreement, right?

- Do they believe- - Who controls the land?

- Do they believe the end of the war is for sale?

- I think they believe that if they offer big enough carrots, you know, everybody will say, "Well, we're all going to make so much money," the war will end.

- Yeah.

- [Applebaum] Russia wants to dominate Ukraine for different reasons.

- Right.

- It wants to dominate Ukraine for ideological reasons because it wants to destroy Ukrainian democracy because Ukrainian democracy challenges his form of government.

And it just seems that Witkoff and Kushner are not equipped to understand that kind of motivation.

So they think... They're businessmen.

They think in terms of business.

And they imagine that by talking in business terms, they can end the war, and so far, this has proved wrong.

- You have been very outspoken about the importance of the Kennedy Center to you, and you have said in your writing that Trump has forced it into bankruptcy out of sheer vanity.

That "watching the president," quote, "systematically destroy one institution after the next has probably radicalized" you.

Does President Trump's new ballroom tell us anything about the broader argument you make in "Empire of Grift"?

- Yes.

Look, the White House was built in the style that it was built for a reason.

It was meant to be a modest classical balanced building.

It was not a palace.

It was a modest home of a small-r republican leader.

Adding a gargantuan addition, if you've seen the sketches of what the ballroom are supposed to look like, that dwarf the original 18th-century house, this is a way of diminishing the original building as well as the ideas behind it.

- [Hoover] Yeah.

- You know, architecture is not incidental or accidental.

You know, it reflects who we are.

Our surroundings affect us.

The buildings of Washington are designed to express ideals of democracy and of liberty, and damaging them damages the ideas.

I mean, it's not at all trivial.

I mean, I think the destruction of the White House is a, it's Trump seeking to remake the institution itself.

It's not just the building.

It's changing what it means to be an American president.

You know, the White House is meant to be for every president, left, right, Democrat, Republican.

It's belonged to many people over the years.

You know, the monuments, the Smithsonian, those are for all Americans.

And Trump is saying, "No, they're for me."

- If architecture expresses political values, what should the next president of the United States do with the ballroom?

- Knock it down.

(laughs) - Really?

- Well, we could have a ballroom.

I'm not against the idea there's a ballroom, but it needs to be proportional.

It needs to be part of the White House complex.

It needs to look like it belongs to Americans, ordinary Americans, and not to oligarchs.

- So it needs to be rebuilt to reflect the- - American values.

- American values.

- American values.

Is that so much to ask?

- Anne Applebaum, thank you for joining me on Firing Line.

- Thank you.

- [Announcer] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, and by the following.

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