May 28, 2025 • 17 mins
American debt is growing, fast. As we record this, the United States federal government has borrowed about 36.2 TRILLION American dollars in order to cover its expenses. But, by the time you hear this - that is, less than 24 hours since recording - it will have shot past this.
OK, I can hear you asking: So what? Why should we care? What does it matter to us if Donald Trump has a bill passed that will add another three trillion dollars to that debt, as he’s hoping?
Because these figures point to an empire in decline, according to international and political editor Peter Hartcher.
Today, he joins me to discuss what it would take to pull the American empire back from the brink. And what it all means for the rest of us if the United States ceased to be a great power.
Subscribe to The Age & SMH: https://subscribe.smh.com.au/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:02):
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Selinger Morris. It's Thursday,
May 29th. American debt is growing fast as we record this.
The United States federal government has borrowed about 36.2 trillion
(00:24):
American dollars in order to cover its expenses. But by
the time you hear this, that is less than 24
hours since recording, it will have shot past this. Okay,
I can hear you asking. So what? Why should we care?
What does it matter to us if Donald Trump has
a bill passed that will add another $3 trillion to
that debt, as he's hoping, because these figures point to
(00:47):
an empire in decline, according to international and political editor
Peter Hartcher. Today, he joins me to discuss what it
would take to pull the American empire back from the
brink and what it all means for the rest of us.
If the United States ceased to be a great power. Okay, so, Peter,
(01:11):
let's start off with a bang. Why does it matter
if America's status as a global superpower is waning? Like,
what's the risk here?
S2 (01:19):
Well, the first step would be to make the point
that almost everything we think is normal in the world
is not normal. The stability and the prosperity that has
dominated in the world for most of the post-war era,
post-World War II era is unusual, historically unusual. So the
risk is that without a dominant hegemon that has both
(01:43):
the power and the will to enforce stability and the
systems that create that stability, you end up with an
unstable world. Now, you might say, but we already have
an unstable world, which is true, but the stability had
always been contained. So, for example, and Trump is not
the first American president to start wrecking the system that
(02:07):
America itself created. American strategic credibility started to slide under
Barack Obama. That was when he told the Syrian president
not to use chemical weapons against his people. And if
he did, he'd come after him. Obama did nothing. Are
all the other dictators in the world took note. And
(02:29):
that's why, shortly thereafter, Vladimir Putin invaded for the first time,
Crimea and other parts of Ukraine. And then that's escalated
because they could see the US had lost its will
and its ability to do anything about it. Now that's accelerated.
And you've seen the full scale war now that Putin
(02:50):
is waging against Ukraine and threatens to wage against all
of Europe. So without a dominant and able and willing
American hegemon, that sort of thing you could expect to
break out more often. More and more widely across the world.
S1 (03:09):
That sounds bad, Peter.
S2 (03:10):
It is bad. I hate to break it to you, Samantha,
but it's also the systems of prosperity. So here's a
great example. Um, the World Trade Organization was set up
by the US after World War two to create a
uniform system of rules. Um, Communist countries were shut out
during the Cold War when 2000 hit. Bill Clinton said, look,
that Cold War stuff is nonsense, I like China. Let's
(03:33):
bring the Chinese into the system. And they did. The Americans,
together with the other members of the WTO, admitted China.
That was the take off point for the Chinese economy.
Access to essentially free trade throughout that system by admitting
China allowed China to trade its way. The Chinese did
(03:54):
the hard work, but it got access to a system
it had been shut out of. And it's that turbocharged
the Chinese economy. So there's another example of a system
that that only the US was able to create and maintain.
And now Trump, of course, is vandalizing it.
S1 (04:09):
Okay. Well, let's turn to recent events then, which, as
you've written, show that Donald Trump is vandalizing this, that
America's superpower status is on the wane because a main
part of it is based in economics. So explain this
to us.
S2 (04:21):
Well, the essence of it is that quite apart from
the trade madness and eroticism which has unnerved markets and
governments all around the world, we now come up to
a different problem, which is that the Americans are borrowing
so much money to finance their government deficits that world
markets have come to the point where they're wondering if
(04:44):
that debt will ever be repaid. And that's a big problem.
It's a big problem, not just for the Americans, of course.
If they're forced into a default, that would be nothing
new in the world because dozens of countries have. But
if you are the center of the global financial system
and you default, Then we all have a problem. The
(05:05):
US Treasury bond is the risk free asset that the
whole global financial system depends on and trades on. If
that's under assault, then you have a global market chaos
with with unpredictable outcomes. But probably none of them very good.
And that's the point where approaching right now, with the
(05:26):
combination of reckless borrowing by successive presidents now fomented and
accelerated by Trump, if he gets his new bill through
the US Senate, as he's hoping to do.
S1 (05:41):
Okay, well, we're going to get into his so-called big,
beautiful bill. I mean, only Trump could call it that, right?
But anyway, we'll get into that in just.
S2 (05:48):
Especially one that's so ugly.
S1 (05:49):
Yeah. That's right, that's right. But first, you've written that
Trump is also on the cusp of surrendering a really
unique source of U.S. power, perhaps the single most. And
that's America's full faith in credit. That is, the ability
to borrow cheaply, to spend lavishly and to enjoy the
exorbitant privilege of issuing the global reserve currency. Now, for
those of us like myself, who don't really know what
(06:11):
the global reserve currency means, like, what is the significance
of America losing that status as the default global reserve currency?
S2 (06:18):
Yeah. Well, it's been really vital to the Americans because
they can do any transaction they want in their own currency.
So at the moment they've got a huge deficit, seven 8%
of GDP, which is just wildly out of kilter for
its annual budget. And that's under threat of going up
even further. And they can finance that readily because they
(06:42):
can do it in their own currency. You don't have
the risk that they won't be able to raise the
funds at their currency will collapse, and they can't attract
enough foreign investment to bulk it up. It's all done
in their own currency. So it reduces a lot of
the risk to them, but it also gives them the
benefit that the whole world is transacting in their currencies,
(07:04):
the entire commodities trade in the world. All of our
iron ore and coal exports and all the rest of
it goes in US dollars. It lubricates the whole system.
So if that's gone, the world will suffer but can adjust.
America would be the big victim.
S1 (07:18):
But why? What would happen to America if the, you know,
the default currency was no longer the American dollar?
S2 (07:25):
They would have trouble funding their deficit. In fact, it
would probably provoke. If they can't finance their existing levels
of consumption, it would provoke, at the very least, a recession,
but quite possibly a more disorderly and deeper economic disruption
to that whole country. And the risk is that that
(07:47):
would suck much of the world's economic and financial activity
down with it. If we take a step back from
all of this, Samantha, the really big significance of what
we're talking about here is we are witnessing in the
Daily News the implosion of an empire. We are witnessing
the end of the American empire that has stood like
(08:13):
like a colossus across the globe since since World War two.
It's coming to an end. Donald Trump is accelerating it.
And day by day by day, these developments we're talking
about are all details in that larger pattern of decline.
Like Mark Twain's death. It's often been the death of
the American empire has been exaggerated. It's often been pronounced
(08:34):
in the last 30 years, and it's never, never come about.
But it's pretty hard to find anybody who will argue
that now.
S1 (08:45):
We'll be right back. Okay, so you did mention the
bill that might pass through Senate. It hasn't yet. So
tell us about Trump's so-called big beautiful bill and why
if it does get passed by the Senate, this would
be a case of fiscal vandalism that is either contributing
to what we're talking about or maybe even worsens it.
I don't know, you tell me.
S2 (09:05):
No it does. It would worsen it. So the domestic
politics of it are ugly enough. This big, ugly bill
and that is that the poor, the poorest, would have
about $1 trillion cut from their government entitlements over the
next ten years. They are principally food stamps. Food stamps
are for people who can't afford to buy food, obviously.
(09:28):
And the other is Medicaid, which is a program of
free health insurance to the poorest. About 80, 85 million
Americans and about 9 million of those would lose their
eligibility under this bill. And now, combined all of the
cuts to these very basic assistance programs to the poorest
(09:48):
of the poor would save the budget a trillion. And
then Trump is saying and the the House of reps
that's put this bill together has said, but we want
to spend 3 trillion on stuff for things that we
actually care about. So don't worry about the poor. Don't
worry about our fellow citizens. We want to spend this
money principally on extending the tax cuts that Trump put
(10:10):
in place in 2017, because they're about to expire, and
they are for people with high incomes and corporations. So
that's pretty ugly. That redistribution away from the poor and
in favor of the rich. And it might come as
a surprise to some of the people who voted for Trump,
the MAGA crowd who thought he was going to look
after the the little guy.
S1 (10:29):
So it's like an anti Robin Hood scenario. It's exactly
what it sounds.
S2 (10:32):
Yeah, it's the Sheriff of Nottingham.
S1 (10:33):
Yeah it's the Sheriff of Nottingham okay. And great.
S2 (10:36):
And uh that's so that's their country their problem. It's
it's bad. But you know, your problem where it affects
the rest of us is that it would add somewhere
between 3 and 4 trillion, depending on the shape of
the final bill dollars to the federal debt over the
(10:56):
next ten years. And investors have started saying, well, we
think you've already got too much debt, 122% of GDP,
and you're going to do all this and look at
all these crazy erratic policies you're announcing all the time. Um,
you know, the American dollar, and there's been a sell
off of the US dollar and US bonds going on
(11:16):
at a at a fair clip ever since, uh, so-called
Liberation Day, April 2nd.
S1 (11:21):
Okay. What does that mean? A sell off of US bonds.
S2 (11:24):
It means that investors. And it happens. You know, you
get bonds bought heavily one day and sold heavily the next.
The unusual factor is that you're getting bonds sold off
and the US dollar sold off at the same time.
This is a this is a walking away from America
as an investment prospect. That is unusual and usually presages
(11:45):
a crisis.
S1 (11:46):
So tell us what historian Niall Ferguson has said about this,
because he has sort of rung the bell of alarm,
I guess.
S2 (11:53):
Yeah. He published a paper in February proposing what he
calls Ferguson's law. And Ferguson's law states that if you
look back through history, an empire begins to decline When
it is spending more money servicing its debts than it
is spending on its military. And that last year, 2024,
(12:15):
the US crossed that line for the first time in
a century, almost a century. So, according to his logic,
and he goes back to the Habsburg Empire through to
the British Empire. He traces this pattern. You can't an
empire can't cross that line and recover. But if it
(12:35):
stays beyond that line, spending more, just paying for its debts,
then it does for its military. His thesis is that
an empire is finished.
S1 (12:44):
And I believe he also said that it essentially leaves
the power increasingly vulnerable to military challenge.
S2 (12:50):
So, yes, and to internal fragility as well.
S1 (12:52):
So essentially what we could see is America become a
target for enemies, really, for the first time in a
very long time. Like, is that the sort of pointy
end of what we're discussing?
S2 (13:01):
Uh, yes. And you see it already in cyber attack.
You see it in the sort of gray zone warfare
of cyber attack, but also the cutting of undersea cables
that connect the internet around the world, and 95% of
communications around the world Chinese and Russian proxies are doing
this week in and week out. You see it in
(13:22):
the attempts to not only conquer Ukraine but to dismember NATO,
which is a US led, US based alliance. And you'll
see you see it in the Pacific, where Chinese friends
are busy trying to claim, well, are actually successfully claiming
maritime territories from the Philippines, which is a US treaty ally,
(13:45):
while the US does nothing. So you would see that
move from the fringes increasingly to the center because the
US has its has it still has a very powerful military.
It just doesn't seem any longer to have the willpower
or the judgment to use it well or wisely.
S1 (14:02):
So are we seeing this play out with what happened yesterday,
when Donald Trump threatened Russian President Vladimir Putin over social media,
writing that Putin was playing with fire by refusing to
engage in cease fire talks with Kyiv. And then the
Kremlin hit back. Maybe you can just tell us about
that and whether this is sort of, I guess, a
manifestation of what we're talking about, which is this is
not a strong empire anymore, which is going to keep
(14:22):
us safe.
S2 (14:23):
Exactly. This is an exact manifestation of a country that
has no strategic credibility. Vladimir Putin is laughing up his sleeve. Likewise,
Trump announced 145% tariffs on China just a couple of
weeks ago. And China said, well, here's our counter tariff
on you. And five days later, Trump says, okay, okay,
(14:45):
I you know, you be nice, I'll be nice and retreats.
Takes it back again temporarily at least the Chinese haven't budged.
The Chinese have called his bluff and he's back down.
So wherever you look, nobody is taking the US as
seriously as it used to. As I said, Trump's not
(15:07):
uniquely responsible for this. Barack Obama started this. I should
also add that the Americans haven't always used their great
power very wisely. Some of the most atrocious, unjustifiable, and
unjustified wars have been American projects Vietnam, Iraq, terrible misjudgments
with terrible consequences. The difference was then that Samantha, there
(15:35):
were predators in the world. There was Russia. There is
increasingly China. There is also America. America has always been
a predator, but it's been our predator. And it's because
we're its ally. Yes. And that has helped protect our interests.
What's happened now is that there are these predators stalking
the globe, and we don't seem to be able to
(15:58):
trust any of them.
S1 (15:59):
But beyond that, we're looking at possibly the end of
the American empire.
S2 (16:02):
Well, no great empire dies without death throes. And, uh,
that's what you would see.
S1 (16:11):
It really. It sort of leaves you jaw dropping. So
thank you so much, Peter.
S2 (16:15):
Always a pleasure, Samantha.
S1 (16:22):
Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by myself
and Josh towers, with technical assistance by Tom Compagnoni. Our
executive producer is Tami Mills. Tom McKendrick is our head
of audio. To listen to our episodes as soon as
they drop, follow the Morning Edition on Apple, Spotify or
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(16:44):
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Subscribe and to stay up to date, sign up to
our morning newsletter to receive a summary of the day's
most important news in your inbox every morning. Links are
in the show. Notes. I'm Samantha Selinger. Morris. Thanks for listening.
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Selinger Morris. It's Thursday,
May 29th. American debt is growing fast as we record this.
The United States federal government has borrowed about 36.2 trillion
(00:24):
American dollars in order to cover its expenses. But by
the time you hear this, that is less than 24
hours since recording, it will have shot past this. Okay,
I can hear you asking. So what? Why should we care?
What does it matter to us if Donald Trump has
a bill passed that will add another $3 trillion to
that debt, as he's hoping, because these figures point to
(00:47):
an empire in decline, according to international and political editor
Peter Hartcher. Today, he joins me to discuss what it
would take to pull the American empire back from the
brink and what it all means for the rest of us.
If the United States ceased to be a great power. Okay, so, Peter,
(01:11):
let's start off with a bang. Why does it matter
if America's status as a global superpower is waning? Like,
what's the risk here?
S2 (01:19):
Well, the first step would be to make the point
that almost everything we think is normal in the world
is not normal. The stability and the prosperity that has
dominated in the world for most of the post-war era,
post-World War II era is unusual, historically unusual. So the
risk is that without a dominant hegemon that has both
(01:43):
the power and the will to enforce stability and the
systems that create that stability, you end up with an
unstable world. Now, you might say, but we already have
an unstable world, which is true, but the stability had
always been contained. So, for example, and Trump is not
the first American president to start wrecking the system that
(02:07):
America itself created. American strategic credibility started to slide under
Barack Obama. That was when he told the Syrian president
not to use chemical weapons against his people. And if
he did, he'd come after him. Obama did nothing. Are
all the other dictators in the world took note. And
(02:29):
that's why, shortly thereafter, Vladimir Putin invaded for the first time,
Crimea and other parts of Ukraine. And then that's escalated
because they could see the US had lost its will
and its ability to do anything about it. Now that's accelerated.
And you've seen the full scale war now that Putin
(02:50):
is waging against Ukraine and threatens to wage against all
of Europe. So without a dominant and able and willing
American hegemon, that sort of thing you could expect to
break out more often. More and more widely across the world.
S1 (03:09):
That sounds bad, Peter.
S2 (03:10):
It is bad. I hate to break it to you, Samantha,
but it's also the systems of prosperity. So here's a
great example. Um, the World Trade Organization was set up
by the US after World War two to create a
uniform system of rules. Um, Communist countries were shut out
during the Cold War when 2000 hit. Bill Clinton said, look,
that Cold War stuff is nonsense, I like China. Let's
(03:33):
bring the Chinese into the system. And they did. The Americans,
together with the other members of the WTO, admitted China.
That was the take off point for the Chinese economy.
Access to essentially free trade throughout that system by admitting
China allowed China to trade its way. The Chinese did
(03:54):
the hard work, but it got access to a system
it had been shut out of. And it's that turbocharged
the Chinese economy. So there's another example of a system
that that only the US was able to create and maintain.
And now Trump, of course, is vandalizing it.
S1 (04:09):
Okay. Well, let's turn to recent events then, which, as
you've written, show that Donald Trump is vandalizing this, that
America's superpower status is on the wane because a main
part of it is based in economics. So explain this
to us.
S2 (04:21):
Well, the essence of it is that quite apart from
the trade madness and eroticism which has unnerved markets and
governments all around the world, we now come up to
a different problem, which is that the Americans are borrowing
so much money to finance their government deficits that world
markets have come to the point where they're wondering if
(04:44):
that debt will ever be repaid. And that's a big problem.
It's a big problem, not just for the Americans, of course.
If they're forced into a default, that would be nothing
new in the world because dozens of countries have. But
if you are the center of the global financial system
and you default, Then we all have a problem. The
(05:05):
US Treasury bond is the risk free asset that the
whole global financial system depends on and trades on. If
that's under assault, then you have a global market chaos
with with unpredictable outcomes. But probably none of them very good.
And that's the point where approaching right now, with the
(05:26):
combination of reckless borrowing by successive presidents now fomented and
accelerated by Trump, if he gets his new bill through
the US Senate, as he's hoping to do.
S1 (05:41):
Okay, well, we're going to get into his so-called big,
beautiful bill. I mean, only Trump could call it that, right?
But anyway, we'll get into that in just.
S2 (05:48):
Especially one that's so ugly.
S1 (05:49):
Yeah. That's right, that's right. But first, you've written that
Trump is also on the cusp of surrendering a really
unique source of U.S. power, perhaps the single most. And
that's America's full faith in credit. That is, the ability
to borrow cheaply, to spend lavishly and to enjoy the
exorbitant privilege of issuing the global reserve currency. Now, for
those of us like myself, who don't really know what
(06:11):
the global reserve currency means, like, what is the significance
of America losing that status as the default global reserve currency?
S2 (06:18):
Yeah. Well, it's been really vital to the Americans because
they can do any transaction they want in their own currency.
So at the moment they've got a huge deficit, seven 8%
of GDP, which is just wildly out of kilter for
its annual budget. And that's under threat of going up
even further. And they can finance that readily because they
(06:42):
can do it in their own currency. You don't have
the risk that they won't be able to raise the
funds at their currency will collapse, and they can't attract
enough foreign investment to bulk it up. It's all done
in their own currency. So it reduces a lot of
the risk to them, but it also gives them the
benefit that the whole world is transacting in their currencies,
(07:04):
the entire commodities trade in the world. All of our
iron ore and coal exports and all the rest of
it goes in US dollars. It lubricates the whole system.
So if that's gone, the world will suffer but can adjust.
America would be the big victim.
S1 (07:18):
But why? What would happen to America if the, you know,
the default currency was no longer the American dollar?
S2 (07:25):
They would have trouble funding their deficit. In fact, it
would probably provoke. If they can't finance their existing levels
of consumption, it would provoke, at the very least, a recession,
but quite possibly a more disorderly and deeper economic disruption
to that whole country. And the risk is that that
(07:47):
would suck much of the world's economic and financial activity
down with it. If we take a step back from
all of this, Samantha, the really big significance of what
we're talking about here is we are witnessing in the
Daily News the implosion of an empire. We are witnessing
the end of the American empire that has stood like
(08:13):
like a colossus across the globe since since World War two.
It's coming to an end. Donald Trump is accelerating it.
And day by day by day, these developments we're talking
about are all details in that larger pattern of decline.
Like Mark Twain's death. It's often been the death of
the American empire has been exaggerated. It's often been pronounced
(08:34):
in the last 30 years, and it's never, never come about.
But it's pretty hard to find anybody who will argue
that now.
S1 (08:45):
We'll be right back. Okay, so you did mention the
bill that might pass through Senate. It hasn't yet. So
tell us about Trump's so-called big beautiful bill and why
if it does get passed by the Senate, this would
be a case of fiscal vandalism that is either contributing
to what we're talking about or maybe even worsens it.
I don't know, you tell me.
S2 (09:05):
No it does. It would worsen it. So the domestic
politics of it are ugly enough. This big, ugly bill
and that is that the poor, the poorest, would have
about $1 trillion cut from their government entitlements over the
next ten years. They are principally food stamps. Food stamps
are for people who can't afford to buy food, obviously.
(09:28):
And the other is Medicaid, which is a program of
free health insurance to the poorest. About 80, 85 million
Americans and about 9 million of those would lose their
eligibility under this bill. And now, combined all of the
cuts to these very basic assistance programs to the poorest
(09:48):
of the poor would save the budget a trillion. And
then Trump is saying and the the House of reps
that's put this bill together has said, but we want
to spend 3 trillion on stuff for things that we
actually care about. So don't worry about the poor. Don't
worry about our fellow citizens. We want to spend this
money principally on extending the tax cuts that Trump put
(10:10):
in place in 2017, because they're about to expire, and
they are for people with high incomes and corporations. So
that's pretty ugly. That redistribution away from the poor and
in favor of the rich. And it might come as
a surprise to some of the people who voted for Trump,
the MAGA crowd who thought he was going to look
after the the little guy.
S1 (10:29):
So it's like an anti Robin Hood scenario. It's exactly
what it sounds.
S2 (10:32):
Yeah, it's the Sheriff of Nottingham.
S1 (10:33):
Yeah it's the Sheriff of Nottingham okay. And great.
S2 (10:36):
And uh that's so that's their country their problem. It's
it's bad. But you know, your problem where it affects
the rest of us is that it would add somewhere
between 3 and 4 trillion, depending on the shape of
the final bill dollars to the federal debt over the
(10:56):
next ten years. And investors have started saying, well, we
think you've already got too much debt, 122% of GDP,
and you're going to do all this and look at
all these crazy erratic policies you're announcing all the time. Um,
you know, the American dollar, and there's been a sell
off of the US dollar and US bonds going on
(11:16):
at a at a fair clip ever since, uh, so-called
Liberation Day, April 2nd.
S1 (11:21):
Okay. What does that mean? A sell off of US bonds.
S2 (11:24):
It means that investors. And it happens. You know, you
get bonds bought heavily one day and sold heavily the next.
The unusual factor is that you're getting bonds sold off
and the US dollar sold off at the same time.
This is a this is a walking away from America
as an investment prospect. That is unusual and usually presages
(11:45):
a crisis.
S1 (11:46):
So tell us what historian Niall Ferguson has said about this,
because he has sort of rung the bell of alarm,
I guess.
S2 (11:53):
Yeah. He published a paper in February proposing what he
calls Ferguson's law. And Ferguson's law states that if you
look back through history, an empire begins to decline When
it is spending more money servicing its debts than it
is spending on its military. And that last year, 2024,
(12:15):
the US crossed that line for the first time in
a century, almost a century. So, according to his logic,
and he goes back to the Habsburg Empire through to
the British Empire. He traces this pattern. You can't an
empire can't cross that line and recover. But if it
(12:35):
stays beyond that line, spending more, just paying for its debts,
then it does for its military. His thesis is that
an empire is finished.
S1 (12:44):
And I believe he also said that it essentially leaves
the power increasingly vulnerable to military challenge.
S2 (12:50):
So, yes, and to internal fragility as well.
S1 (12:52):
So essentially what we could see is America become a
target for enemies, really, for the first time in a
very long time. Like, is that the sort of pointy
end of what we're discussing?
S2 (13:01):
Uh, yes. And you see it already in cyber attack.
You see it in the sort of gray zone warfare
of cyber attack, but also the cutting of undersea cables
that connect the internet around the world, and 95% of
communications around the world Chinese and Russian proxies are doing
this week in and week out. You see it in
(13:22):
the attempts to not only conquer Ukraine but to dismember NATO,
which is a US led, US based alliance. And you'll
see you see it in the Pacific, where Chinese friends
are busy trying to claim, well, are actually successfully claiming
maritime territories from the Philippines, which is a US treaty ally,
(13:45):
while the US does nothing. So you would see that
move from the fringes increasingly to the center because the
US has its has it still has a very powerful military.
It just doesn't seem any longer to have the willpower
or the judgment to use it well or wisely.
S1 (14:02):
So are we seeing this play out with what happened yesterday,
when Donald Trump threatened Russian President Vladimir Putin over social media,
writing that Putin was playing with fire by refusing to
engage in cease fire talks with Kyiv. And then the
Kremlin hit back. Maybe you can just tell us about
that and whether this is sort of, I guess, a
manifestation of what we're talking about, which is this is
not a strong empire anymore, which is going to keep
(14:22):
us safe.
S2 (14:23):
Exactly. This is an exact manifestation of a country that
has no strategic credibility. Vladimir Putin is laughing up his sleeve. Likewise,
Trump announced 145% tariffs on China just a couple of
weeks ago. And China said, well, here's our counter tariff
on you. And five days later, Trump says, okay, okay,
(14:45):
I you know, you be nice, I'll be nice and retreats.
Takes it back again temporarily at least the Chinese haven't budged.
The Chinese have called his bluff and he's back down.
So wherever you look, nobody is taking the US as
seriously as it used to. As I said, Trump's not
(15:07):
uniquely responsible for this. Barack Obama started this. I should
also add that the Americans haven't always used their great
power very wisely. Some of the most atrocious, unjustifiable, and
unjustified wars have been American projects Vietnam, Iraq, terrible misjudgments
with terrible consequences. The difference was then that Samantha, there
(15:35):
were predators in the world. There was Russia. There is
increasingly China. There is also America. America has always been
a predator, but it's been our predator. And it's because
we're its ally. Yes. And that has helped protect our interests.
What's happened now is that there are these predators stalking
the globe, and we don't seem to be able to
(15:58):
trust any of them.
S1 (15:59):
But beyond that, we're looking at possibly the end of
the American empire.
S2 (16:02):
Well, no great empire dies without death throes. And, uh,
that's what you would see.
S1 (16:11):
It really. It sort of leaves you jaw dropping. So
thank you so much, Peter.
S2 (16:15):
Always a pleasure, Samantha.
S1 (16:22):
Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by myself
and Josh towers, with technical assistance by Tom Compagnoni. Our
executive producer is Tami Mills. Tom McKendrick is our head
of audio. To listen to our episodes as soon as
they drop, follow the Morning Edition on Apple, Spotify or
wherever you listen to podcasts. Our newsrooms are powered by subscriptions,
(16:44):
so to support independent journalism, visit The Age or smh.com.au.
Subscribe and to stay up to date, sign up to
our morning newsletter to receive a summary of the day's
most important news in your inbox every morning. Links are
in the show. Notes. I'm Samantha Selinger. Morris. Thanks for listening.
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