The Age of Empire Strikes Back: Stephen Kotkin on Trump, Wrestling, and the Use of American Power | GoodFellows | Hoover Institution - GoodFellows: Conversations from the Hoover Institution

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(00:00):
[MUSIC]

>> Bill Whalen (00:08):
It's Monday, February 10th, 2025.
And welcome back to GoodFellows, a HooverInstitution broadcast examining social,
economic, political andgeopolitical concerns.
I'm Bill Whalen,I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow.
I'll be your moderator today, joinedby two-thirds of our usual compliments.
Sitting next to me,the historian Sir Niall Ferguson.
Sitting next to Sir Niall,the economist John Cochrane.

(00:28):
Now, normally joining us for our showsis Lieutenant General HR McMaster.
I'm a little concerned aboutthe general at this hour.
We were texting him duringthe super bowl last night.
HR is a son of Philadelphia, huge Eaglesfan, and we texted during the game.
He's vanished since the game ended, soI don't know if he's out celebrating in
New Orleans, if he got pickedup on Broad street for riding.

(00:49):
What do we think HR is at this hour?
Any guesses?

>> Niall Ferguson (00:52):
Partying on, but he deserves it.

Let's focus on the very positive, and that is in HR's absence.
We are honored to have joining ustoday back by very popular demand.
I kid you not, we get a clamoring forhim constantly.
Hoover Institution senior fellow,historian all around,
very smart guy who's gonna correctus all on the errors of our ways.
Please welcome Stephen Kotkin to the show.
Dr. Kotkin, good to see you.

>> Stephen Kotkin (01:14):
Same. I'm no substitute for hr, but
I understand the Philadelphiateam is green.

Well played.
Well played.
So, Stephen, on our last show,we talked about the Trump presidency and
we talked about the flurryof executive orders, but
one thing we did not get into wasthe concept of American power and
how American power operatesin this new presidency.
You and I had a conversationa few days ago about this, and
you shared a belief that America isnot a power in decline right now.

(01:45):
And you shared some figures onconsistency in America's gdp,
America's role in the world,and so forth wealth.
But sitting next to me, this rogue,he has what is called Ferguson's Law.
And I'll read you what Ferguson's Law is.
Any great power that spends moreon debt service interest payments,
on the national debt than on defensewill not stay great for very long.

(02:06):
So you say America is great.
You say American greatness isperhaps doomed to failure.
To borrow a line from one of your books,what's the answer here?

Yeah, why don't we just start with that?
That's a great idea.
So there's never been a powerlike America in recorded history.
There's never been a country this powerfulacross as many dimensions as America is.
You've got 25% of global GDP,roughly since 1880.

(02:43):
So that's spectacular,almost 150 years of 25% of global GDP,
that's with only 5% of global population.
Then you've got the military,America's roughly 50%
of global military,which is also spectacular.
And then you get the quality issuesof the American military and

(03:06):
its expeditionary power.
Then we can get into issues of soft power,
America's attractivenessto places around the world.
That's why our borders are under siege,
in part because we havean attraction to other places.
We could get intothe innovation ecosystem,
which is right here outside our door.

(03:27):
I think rather,it's the envy of the world.
All power is relative, soone has to account for
American power vis a vis others,not just on its own terms.
And so there, there could be shiftsin the degree of American power.

(03:48):
If another country comes along witha series of attributes that match or
exceed American power,that would obviously change the equation.
But by and large,it's a story that has held for
a really long time through thick and thin.
One administration, anotheradministration, one political party,

(04:09):
another political party,one tax regime, a different tax regime.
So policy has not created this power and
policy has not been ableto suppress this power.
Policy and politics havetremendous effects, obviously,
we all understand that.
But there is a bigger storyhere that transcends those

(04:31):
conjunctural issues of whetherthe taxes are higher or
the taxes are lower under anyparticular administration.
We have our preferences.
We can all argue fora better policy or worse policy.
But you've got somethinghere that's amazing.

(04:51):
The question is,is it going to go forward in the same way?
And that, I think, should bethe topic of our conversation today.

Well, there's lots that Steve Cochrane's just said that I
agree with, but it's worth asking whetherFerguson's law is going to kick in.
It only just happened last year that for
the first time the US was spending moreon interest payments than on defense.

(05:19):
So I think it's possiblethat all of that is true.
But we're now in a relativelylate inning of the game.
I could, if we'd had this conversation100 years ago, I could have said to you,
there's never been a power likethe British Empire and it's been in this
dominant state since the 1780s andit withstood the loss of its American

(05:40):
colonies and it came back and it'sthe dominant economic force in the world.
It has the dominant military in the world.
It has an innovation ecosystem like noother and all of that would have been
true then, but it was kind of nearthe end of the game, it turned out.
One important point about this fiscalconstraint that I'm talking about,

(06:01):
and this is where we canbring Professor Cochrane in,
is, is that in the history ofthe United States, there have been
very few periods when the debt burden,the federal debt, has been so large.
We haven't seen the debt burdenabove 100% of GDP since a period
immediately after World War II.
And there's never been a time thatthe United States was spending

(06:23):
more servicing that debt than it wasspending on its national security.
And the other point I would make,which is exactly right,
when Steve says it's all relative,if you face an adversary like
China that is economically comparable,that can match you in most
of the technological domains,the risk that you run is a collision.

(06:48):
Britain collided twice with a rival power.
Germany failed to deter,had to fight two world wars.
By the end of the second of those wars,
it was no longer possible to sustainthe economy, the technological leadership.
And that's the story of British decline.
And there's nothing at the moment, itseems to me, that rules that scenario out

(07:08):
for the United States,the scenario where there's a collision.
If there were a collision over Taiwanat any point in the next few years,
the United States would be ina very precarious position.
If it had to fight a war againstChina in the Indo Pacific,
it might lose that war, orit might only win it at immense cost.
So nothing that Steve says convincesme that the United States is not in

(07:32):
a somewhat similar opposition tothe British empire in the 1920s, and
therefore vulnerable to the kindof collision that could bring this
whole happy story to a painful end.

John?

>> John H. Cochrane (07:43):
Well, I'll take the middle of the road position,
seeing as I'm on the middlebetween my two historian friends.
Power is a strange thing, andgreatness we want prosperity,
I think, and power is a means to that end.
And I think Steve is right.
Our own problems are substantial, butif you're thinking about military or

(08:05):
confrontations, the stateof your enemies matters.
China's economy is not doing great.
Russia's economy is in terrible shape.
This is not US versus 1930s Germany,
where we were actually didface a larger military threat.
The tendency forgovernments that spend more

(08:26):
on their debt service than theirmilitaries to wind up in trouble.
I've challenged Niall a little bit.
Is this a law?
Is it always and everywhere?
Is it sometimes?
Is it a correlation?
Is it a dictum?
I think I'll call it a syndromebecause it doesn't always happen.
And not all countries that getinto trouble face Ferguson's law.

(08:48):
But I'm not as worried as Niall is.
From his historical examples,
we are spending something like2 to 3% on debt service of GDP.
In real terms, we're spendingsomething like 3% of GDP on military.
And the question is we're crossing those.
Our debt is large, but countries have hadlarge debts like after the Napoleonic War,

(09:11):
the UK Ferguson syndrome, in my view,starts with economic decline.

Somehow it sounds worse, actually, if you put it like that.
By the way, it should be made clearthat this is not Niall Ferguson's law or
syndrome.
But Adam Ferguson, the greatenlightenment writer whose essay on
civil society inspired this idea.
He was one of the first people tounderstand that public debt could
be a trap for a great power, that youcould get into deeper and deeper debt and

(09:38):
that would catch you.
That was really the idea.

All great Scottish thinkers are named Ferguson,

Alex Ferguson,

except the ones
that are named Smith>> Niall Ferguson: or Hume.
But I just wanted to clarify thatthis is not egomania on my part.

So we're the, you know, we're in the, you know,
2 to 3% range of debt.
Our fiscal problem is social spending,not military.
Right now, military is cheap atcurrent levels of threat, you know,
3,5% of GDP by historical standards,and you'll correct me,
is a wonderfully peacefulamount of military spending.

(10:15):
30, 40 in Europe,50% of GDP on social spending.
That is the out of control problemcombined with nobody's having any
children to pay this off.
That is where Ferguson syndrome mayget us into trouble in the future,
but not yetbecause military spending is so expensive.

(10:36):
So I'll stand in the middle.
Now where are we going to go?
I see stagnation as the central problemand the stagnation of economies,
the stagnation of institutions.
Are we able to innovate, to grow,to do new things, to do things better,
not retreat around a wall andmode of protectionism,

(10:57):
which is Another temptation thatmany failing states have had.
Protect what you have andthen gradually get worse.
Looking around right now,there's a vibe shift.
This is our one great chance.
Our institutions are certainlybeing poked and deflated.
Can they be reformed andcan we return to vitality?

(11:19):
I'm much more optimisticright now that the US
still has one round of great vitality.
Institutional reform,economic growth ahead of us before,
like all empires before us, we kindof fall into that trap and on we go.

Yeah, maybe.
But you know what?
So America's a demographic superpower.
We have a huge population.
We have a highly educated population,a talented population.
And we're constantly gettingmore people who are educated and
entrepreneurial in addition to others whoare less educated and entrepreneurial.

(11:57):
Britain never had the scaleof our demographic power.
We're an energy superpoweracross the board.
Energy in the United States isrelatively inexpensive compared
to some of our competitors andunbelievably abundant.

(12:18):
And that's in all forms of energy.
Whatever way you come down onthe spectrum of which energy you prefer,
we'll be good at all of them and
will be better than other places,generally speaking.
So we have so many dimensions of power.
In addition, our government system, for

(12:40):
all its failings,is a superior form of government.
Limited government,limits on executive power,
whereby there are corrective mechanisms.
The market is a greatcorrective mechanism.
And our system of government is also.
I've been alive andAmerican decline has been

(13:04):
the principal topic ofconversation in academia, more or
less, with a few exceptions,my entire adult life.
Now, I don't go back to 1880.
I don't know Theodore Roosevelt.
The same way that, for example,
some of the professors atHarvard recall him fondly.

(13:25):
But I have to say that I remember the 70s.
I was in the US in the 70s.
And you want to talk about decline.
Nixon's presidency andthe resignation over Watergate,
the loss of the war in Vietnam,which was horrific.

(13:46):
The whole war andlosing the war, the Rust Belt
with the oil shock andthe Rust Belt disco, it was grim.
The 70s were unbelievable.
American soft power was in the toilet.
And look what happened after the 70s.
So there's this not just vitality,but ability to come back.

(14:09):
The thing about your analogy,Niall, and you'll come in now,
is the UK's decline was a problembecause of the US's rise.
The US was looming onthe Horizon already in 1900.
Still not a dominant force in globaleconomics because of the domestic market.

(14:31):
Right.In 1900, trade is what, maybe 5% of U.S.
gDP, as opposed to what it would become,but it was looming, it was coming.
It was clear that the US wasthis big dominant force.
And soif the UK didn't get its act together,
it could be nudged aside politely orimpolitely by something really big and

(14:52):
more powerful on the horizon thathad additional dimensions of power.
And so that's kind of what happened.
I'm not sure that there's anythinglike the US on the horizon
now to take that full advantageof US vulnerabilities and
self inflicted harms that you know well,

(15:13):
including the fiscal insanitythat you've written about.
I'm not sure there's anypower on the horizon.
That doesn't mean the US is going toget away with this because implosion is
always an option.
But coming out of the 70s and seeing whatwe did after that, and seeing the all
of the dimensions of American power,some of which the British lacked,

(15:38):
and seeing nothing on the horizon,that's a superior alternative.
You know, when I go to Europe,there are two things that happen.
When I go to Europe.
They tell me, you know,you Americans are barbarians.
That's the first thing they say,you're barbarians.

They don't say that to me.
That'd be personal.

You're not in the same, >> John H. Cochrane
you're British.
But the other thing they say is you're barbarians, but
God forbid you abandon us.
The demand forAmerican power is off the charts.
The problem in the world is there'sinsufficient American power.
Every conversation you have is notjust that you're barbarians, but
you must rescue us.

(16:17):
You must do this, you must do that.
Let's bring Ukraine into NATO, let'sdo a security treaty with the Saudis.
Every single conversation is about,we need more American power than we have.
This USAID fiasco thatwe're undergoing right now,
this rounding error in the budget,that's a small and

(16:38):
easy target if you'regoing after government.
It turns out that they do so many thingsthat people need as a global public good.
For example,they keep the global famine statistics.
And so people who work in foodinsecurity are now up in arms

(16:58):
because they can't collectstatistics on global famine.
And I'm thinking,
how is it that there's no one otherthan USAID that's doing stuff like that?

Hang on, let's join all this together for a moment,
why is USAID being shut down?
The answer is because a new administrationthat scares the living daylight,
so of Europeans has just come in committed
to doing something aboutthe fiscal problem of the Fed.
That's important because we mustn'tpretend that we're in some kind

(17:32):
of elegant continuity fromRonald Reagan to Donald Trump.
Right now, the US Administrationis committed, according to
the Treasury Secretary, to reducingthe deficit from 6% to 3% of GDP and
getting rid of USAID is just a first step.

Niall, if an army comes over the hill.

If I can finish.

If an army comes over the hill.

An army might come over.

And it's got Social Security and it's got Medicare and
Medicaid, andit's got all these gigantic forces and
you go after USAID, which is this ant.

Well, that's exactly the point.
That's exactly the problem.
The United States has a huge fiscalproblem that it can't easily solve
because, as John rightly says,
the drivers are entitlement programsthat date back to the 1930s, the 1960s.
Our demographics are deterioratingbecause of an aging population,
low fertility we'rereliant on immigration.

(18:23):
This is not a particularly stablepolitical economy, particularly because
there's a political consensus that youcan't touch Social Security or Medicare,
possibly Medicaid.
Therefore, you're left withdiscretionary spending.
About half of that is the military.
So there are inexorableforces at work here.
On one side, the rising debt andthe costs of servicing that debt.

(18:46):
On the other, the difficulty ofmaintaining your defense budget at a level
sufficient to deter your enemies.
The United States has not been doinga good job of deterrence in the last
four years.
Didn't deter the Russians from invadingUkraine, didn't deter Hamas and
Hezbollah from attacking Israel.
If it fails to deter China frommaking a move against Taiwan,
that will be the moment of truth.

(19:07):
And what I'd suggest here is,is that empires don't gradually decline.
What tends to happen is at some pointthey collide with a hostile force.
And if they haven't got the capabilityto deter that hostile force,
they end up having to fight it.
And the problem for the United Statesis there's a non trivial probability
of a showdown over Taiwan at somepoint in the relatively near future.

(19:30):
And we all know, certainly everybodyin the Department of Defense knows that
the United States is not ready forthat showdown.
That's a very dangerous situation fora great power to be in.
What we're seeing at the moment,is a rather frantic
attempt to reengineer the federalgovernment as if it were Twitter.
The Department of Government Efficiencyis running around frantically trying to

(19:53):
figure out where the money goes.
But the reality is that the money mainlygoes to Social Security, Medicare and
Medicaid and they're off limits.
So there's not gonna be a quickfix to the fiscal problem that
the federal government faces.
The defense budget is gonna getinexorably squeezed relative to GEP and
that's the moment of truth.
If the United States has to face a majorchallenge in the Indo Pacific region.

(20:17):
Steve, what's going to happen?

So I wanna, as long as you brought up USAID and Doge,
this is not about saving money.

Obviously.

USAID is not about how do we balance the budget in the long
run Social Security.
This is about politics.
What we learned with USAID is that yes,some money eventually goes
to good purposes, butthat the way USAID runs is it sends money
to nonprofits who send money toNGOs who send money to foundations.

(20:48):
Everybody takes a 50% cut off the top.
No US employee actually does anything.
Eventually somebody doessomething either good or
really ridiculous as manyof the USAID think things.
But, but the, the rottenness ofthe political system where we send money
around to all these institutionswhich are most of them political.
That is what is,

(21:09):
is being imploded by this brillianttechnique of simply going after the money.
But the point is the politics of this one,not the saving money.
I, I'm, I brought up to Neil the Analogyof Thomas Cromwell who did this for
Henry VIII.
He went after the British monasteries andhow did he bring them down?
He looked at the account books.

(21:30):
His point was religious reform andsome geopolitical snubbing your nose at
the Pope as well as in that caseactually getting some of the money.
That's the way to understand usaid.
They'll get to otherparts of the government.
But this is reforming a rotten institutiondespite some of the great good
that it's done.
Much of it has gotten rotten now.
Just a couple of others on these.

(21:52):
Actually fixing our socialprograms is not that hard.
If you put your mind to it andare willing to take the political heat,
which I think will come soonerrather than later, I'm going to be.

No, it'll come later rather than sooner.

Well.

[LAUGH] Just to be clear.

Because it comes near.

This is the question.

Will we live to see?
Well, I doubt it.

We have reformed Social Security once in the early 1980s.
Does America have the vitality, have theinstitution repairing ability to sooner or
later solve this problem beforeit takes us down The UK decline.
I'll be interested on your view.
I don't think it was debt.
I think it was socialism.
At the end of World War II, UK put in likemost of Europe put in highly planning,

(22:34):
focused socialized policies.
George Harrison's wonderful song,One For You, 19 For Me.
[MUSIC]
The Beatles faced a 95% tax rate and
they were very unhappy about it.
You want to know why you're gettingeconomic stagnation, it's not,

(22:56):
it's not England after the,after the battle of Waterloo.
How do we pay this down?
Let's have a result,a industrial revolution and free trade and
open markets and grow like crazy.
Boom, down goes the debt and
very low interest ratesbecause we're a great credit.
That debt could have been paid off.
That it was the stagnation,the US is power.

(23:19):
Power needs ability and will.
So far, not running up against China andTaiwan.
The question has been the will,not the ability.
I cannot imagine a time in historythat a great power had a greater
inequality of ability relativeto Russia over Ukraine.
We could have won this thingin a week if we wanted to.

(23:41):
The Romans would have won itin a week if they wanted.
With that enormous disparity of ability,
the question forAmerica until now has been the will.
Taiwan, that's gonna bea question of means.
Let's hope we can do deterrencewhile we get it better.
And one last point, energy,you're exactly right.
And this is an example of someof the vitality that's coming.

(24:02):
Just two little executive orders andTrump, whatever you like or
don't like about him otherwise,in two executive orders, he said,
we are not going to kill our economyon an altar of European climate
policies that don't do anythingto save any carbon, by the way.
And we're not going to kill AI as a babein the crib before it gets going the way

(24:24):
the Europeans have.
So just here's two little reforms of we'renot going to commit suicide that we had
been on the way to doing.
So I think that's part of the case forthe potential for economic vitality.

Today marks three weeks into the Trump presidency.
So I'd like to bring up just feelslike just three weeks, three years,
just a spurt of information.
I'd like to bring up three items and
I want you to tell me what they sayabout Donald Trump and the use of power.
Number one, Gaza, orMara Gaza as we call it now,
Trump holds a conference in the WhiteHouse, a meeting with Benjamin, Yahoo and

(24:58):
Netanyahu, and then he says the followingquote, will own it, referring to Gaza.
We're going to take over that,nice that piece, develop it and
create thousands andthousands of jobs, and
it will be something the entireMiddle East could be proud of.
He goes on, I envision the world,people living there, the world's people.
You'll make that intoan international unbelievable place.
I think the potential inthe Gaza Strip is unbelievable.

(25:18):
And it could be the Riviera of the Middle East.
What kind of power is this, Stephen?
Is this hard power,soft power, economic power?

You ever seen World Wrestling Entertainment?
World Wrestling Entertainmentis known as WWE and
it's this amazing show that has atremendous following in the United States.
They have these fantastic characters.

(25:49):
They wear these great costumes,they have a lot of face paint,
they have great nicknames, and they runaround the stage pretending to throw each
other on the floor or kick each other inthe head and the audience is mesmerized.
So, yeah,that's what kind of policy we have now.

(26:09):
We have this fantasticability to mesmerize people's
attention with this incredibleshow by a guy who's just
non-paral in his ability toattract people's attention.
And so we got these characters,that's what they are,
who are now sent over to institutionsto be the nominal head of them.

(26:33):
But somebody's got to run the government.
We need a budget.
When was the last time the United Statesactually had a budget?

Sometime in the 1970s, I would guess

it's been a really
long time.
We don't have one this year andthe next year budget is coming.
I believe the cliff is in March,potentially for
the government running out of money.
So first of all, we need a government.
That means we need a functioning Congress.
We need a budgetary process.
I understand the show, the WWE and

(27:05):
it's remarkable how amazing ithas been in terms of ratings,
in terms of knocking everybody elseout of the people's attention span.
And I know some of the charactersare fabulous in terms of
their face paint and costumes.
But I'm looking for competence.

(27:27):
I'm looking for follow through.
I'm looking forthe ability to actually get things done.
I know that you can break a lot of stuff.
I've studied revolution for too long.
What happens when you break thingsis when you try to rebuild.
You're rebuilding withthe shards of what you broke.

(27:50):
And often unwittingly,you rebuild what you think
is something new, butis actually the old system.
We all have read Tocqueville on the oldregime and the French Revolution.
So I get it that you can hatehard leftist cultural politics.

(28:11):
You can see USAID as a practitioner ofthat self defeating hard left cultural
politics which undermines American powerin the world rather than enhances it.
I get that.
I get that they don't care aboutthe fiscal health of the United States.
Niall cares, John cares,Bill, myself, we all care.

(28:37):
The voting public caresat a certain level.
I'm not sure the people whoare attacking the political hard
left policies of governmentunits care that much about this.
The experience of Twitter is quitesobering in terms of value creation as
opposed to transformation ofthe political spectrum there.

(29:01):
I'd love for them to care about the stuffthat John Cochrane and Niall write about.
We'll see.
The rubber is going to hitthe road with the budget.
We're going to see whathappens with stock markets.
We get a 20% plus correctionin the stock market.
Correction is a euphemism.
We get some inflation,we get some world events and

(29:25):
we'll see how much of this WWE cancontinue in the same vein going forward.
Sure, let's knock off USAID.
Let's knock off the Department ofEducation if they go after that.
Next, let's knock off all the thingsthat conservatives have had a bee
in their bonnet about for a while.

(29:45):
But I need not just a smaller government,I need a better performing government.
I need a government that not only doesless, but what it actually does, it does
well and so rooting out certain politicaltendencies, as John eloquently put it.
I see that as understandable,desirable, necessary.

(30:10):
But I need a lot more than that.
I need Niall's vision of a fullcorrection of the fiscal insanity.
But who is going to do that?
And how are they going to do that?
And how are they going to do thatwhen they've gone after things and
spent their political capital on USAID?

(30:31):
Once you run through a bunchof political capital and
your approval ratings never hit 50% and
begin to decline because some things youtarget are popular with some people,
even if the overall targeting makes sense.
I'm concerned that you blow your wad onlittle things that make you feel good.

(30:55):
And the big stuff, that's really hard.
When does that happen?

But isn't there a kind of tension between your views here, Steve?
On the one hand, America's powerful andit's powerful regardless of politics.
On the other hand,the politics disturbs you.
And it seems to me that this isreally how we can resolve our debate,
that in the end we can go back tothe enlightenment for guidance here,
since all the good ideas were hadin Scotland in the 18th century.

(31:23):
And the observation would be, yes,there are all these sources of dynamism,
there are great reserves of energy,there's the ability to import talent,
but if the institutions ofthe Republic have become WWE,
then there's a distinct risk that someversion of Ferguson's law kicks in.
Or maybe it's Smith's Law.

(31:45):
Maybe the laws of economics will taketheir revenge because protectionist
policies, John would argue,are bound ultimately to be self defeating.
And my sense is that what's veryinteresting about the historical
process is that you can have all thethings that Steve describes, and yet if
your political institutions malfunction,you'll end up self-sabotaging.

(32:06):
Now, I can't really tell at thisearly stage, three weeks in,
if WWE is going to be the dominantfeature of the new administration or
if one looks behind the wrestling andbehind the face paint, there's actually
a serious attempt to redress some of themistakes of the previous administration.
Let me take a positive line of argumentthat behind the memes there's in

(32:31):
fact significant progress towardsa reordering of the Middle East.
Israel surprised everybody with itsvictories over Hamas and Hezbollah.
It's actually gained a huge amountof ground with the collapse of
the Assad regime in Syria.
And Iran is at its mercy.
And at some point this year that may welllead to a decisive move against Iran's

(32:55):
nuclear facilities,
which the US will quietly allowto happen and tacitly support.
I'll carry on being positive.
Everybody thought Ukraine was goingto be handed by President Trump on
a plate to Putin.
That isn't happening.
On the contrary, it seems to me thatUkraine has a decent shot at a ceasefire,
probably not a peacethat leaves it intact and

(33:15):
allows it to be the South Koreaof Eastern Europe.
So maybe behind the wrestling and the facepaint there is a grand strategy and
it will turn out to be as good asthe Reagan administration's turned out
to be in the 1980s.
We don't know it's three weeks in.
But the question is, if you're right,it is just wrestling and face paint.

(33:37):
How far can in four years,a republic sabotage itself?
That's the key question.
I'm optimistic.
I actually thought the lastadministration did immense amounts of
harm to American credibility, more or lessbungled deterrence in every major theater.
But I come back to the problem of Taiwan.

(33:58):
In the end, Gaza is a trivialissue compared with Taiwan,
an island that China says is its,which we more or less acknowledge it is,
but which produces nearly all the mostsophisticated semiconductors,
more than 95% of those thatyou need to do AI at scale.
If China blockades or quarantines Taiwan,doesn't need to invade it.

(34:24):
It throws down a gauntlet tothe United States, which seems to me very,
very hard forthe United States not to pick up.
And I'm concerned that in that scenario,
this administration is going to finditself with an impossible dilemma.
The choice will be between World War 3 orcapitulation.
There won't be much in between.

(34:45):
How do you think about that, Steve?
Because it seems to me American power isgoing to be tested at Some point by China
in the way that British power was testedby Germany, we might prevail, but
at such a cost that it might be very,
very hard to maintain the kind of powerthat you talked about at the beginning.

We're tested now.
Our adversaries are testing us acrossthe board now and have been for some time.
We've been in this so called hybrid war orgray zone since before
Goodfellows started, butcertainly all throughout your Goodfellows.
But here's the other part that weneed to take into consideration,

(35:27):
including to your How's China doing?
They have infiltrated ourtelecommunications network.
They exfiltrated tens ofmillions personnel files.
They cornered the marketon drone manufacturing and

(35:48):
batteries that were dependent on allthe things that you know and write about.
And yet there's a lack of confidencethere that runs really, really deep.
They're afraid of their own people.
Every day is existential for that system.
The anti corruption purges have increased,not decreased,

(36:09):
even though Xi Jinping's been in power formore than a decade.
And that immobilizes a lot of people.
Taking initiative is dangerous in China.
Sticking your head out,doing anything is dangerous in China.
Reading the signals is really hard.
No communist system has survivedpolitical liberalization.

(36:32):
There's no reform equilibrium fora communist party regime.
It either has a monopoly or it's done.
They open up the system to havedebate inside the party and
people say, you know what,I'd like another party.
And the communists say, no, no, no,
we're having pluralism insidethe communist party monopoly.

It's like California really when you think about it.

Yeah, exactly, we know how that works.
And so,their ability to succeed domestically but
also foreign adventuresis not 100% guaranteed.
In fact,you could argue that their problems run so
deep that if they take risks, theirsystem could go down unintentionally.

(37:20):
And so they're kind of stuck.
That doesn't mean we don't have problems.
That doesn't mean this isnot a major challenge.
That doesn't mean we don'tneed to get our act together.
I would agree that all of those are true.
And I would agree that the Taiwanchallenge is not going away anytime soon.

So guys, I've got a whole notepad full of maragaza, USAID.

He's the only one who takes notes.

What's the grand strategy?
Well, I can't remember aswell as you guys do, so
let me take on thesebriefly as much as I can.
You may not like maragaza, but nobody elsehas anything to offer other than another
50 years of, of terrorism for the Israelisand suffering for the Palestinians.
We'll start the three party talks on talksabout talks to restructure under United

(38:15):
nations revolution, blah,blah, blah, blah, blah.
We're going nowhere here, right?
And Trump knows that.
So is it gonna be maragaza or not?
I don't know.
But at least he's willing to challenge anddisrupt that.
I think.
Actually, you know, the fact hereis Palestinians have not been.
Palestinians are not allowed out.

(38:36):
You don't have to resettle them by force.
You simply have to allow them,the ones who want to leave, to leave.
It's the beginning to simply blow upthe verities that are going to lead us to
nothing better than what we've had foranother 50 years.
Like USAID.
This particular attack in the first monthfrom the brilliant little Doge team,

(38:58):
that may not be where we end up.
But once it's all over,they have exposed what's happened.
The final once there's a congressional,once there's a law passed and so
forth, it will not looklike anything it did.
And remember, like Israel andThe Palestinians, for
50 years, attempts to reformthis have gotten nowhere.

(39:20):
There's a Congressional Budget Office,there's the Office of Management Budget,
there's oira, there's the Officeof Government affairs, there's,
there's Inspector Generals, there'saudits, there's Congressional Inquiries.
Where did that get on?
On fixing, even finding out whereUSCID was spending his money,
least of all fixing it nowhere.
So the system of do some blow up andthen there'll be pushback, but

(39:44):
where we end up is gonna be a lot betterthan just repeating the standard variance.
That's what they're after.
The budget, where do you go?
The budget.Well, he's a president,
he got elected withsome campaign promises.
You do stuff you can inthe first month and.
And then once you've built some success,I think their strategy is do well
in the midterms, then you are positionedwith the political capital to be

(40:07):
able to solidify it andmake those long term changes.
That's the hope.
Now it may not work, butthat's at least the hope.
Then finally on Taiwan,the point for Taiwan is deter.
Not which part of that is beready to fight it, but to deter.
Imagine a year from now,Mara-Gaza has worked.

(40:27):
The Palestinians who want to leaveare happily working in somewhere else in
the Middle East.
Gaza is getting rebuilt.
Hamas is no longer in charge.
Suppose Ukraine,one of the things they've done,
they've allowed Ukraine touse the long range weapons.
Finally my Twitter feed is full ofoil refineries blowing up in Russia,

(40:47):
a lot of those from droneswhich is where the main worry.
Suppose Russia collapses.
Suppose the Middle eastis being reconstructed.
Suppose Iran is no longerhas a nuclear program.
Suppose America is booming economicallynow how does China look at
the Taiwan question?
I think that that shift ofvibes would have a lot, a lot,

(41:09):
a lot of helpful deterrence forChina's calculation.

John, speaking of strategy,
is there a tariff strategywith this president?
And I want to read a line from the grumpyeconomist himself, quote, one intriguing
idea is the substitution of tariffs forsanctions in geopolitical strategy.

Well so I'm an economist and if I say tariffs are good,
they're going to take away my union card.
There are numbers of things that are onthis administration's agenda that are not
on the grumpy economist free marketagenda and tariffs is one of them.
As an economic tariffs are alwaysan answer in search of a question.
And if the question is improve the USEconomy, sorry, that's not the answer.

(41:50):
Maybe and you guys will help me here,there is some geopolitical game,
some dangerous game of all threat andtariffs and
I'll get stuff out of the otherpeople that I want to get them.
Sanctions are a geopoliticaleconomic thing we do.
Tariffs may be a substitute for sanctionsthat are in some ways better than

(42:11):
sanctions that don't undermine the dollar.
For example, as a trading,as the currency we use for
trading don't undermine our ability touse sanctions when we really need them.
I'm willing to listen at leaston tariffs in that sense.
That's the one place where as an economistI'm pushed out of tariffs bad,

(42:32):
which is sort of where westart is that kind of thing.
But it is very dangerous.
I'm going to threaten tariffs unless youdo something you better be darn clear on
what it is you need to do.
And I've seen this go badly many,many times.
Maybe you guys have somethingbetter to say about tariffs.
I'm just willing to move a little bit too,I'm willing to listen on geostrategic.

Dozens of your fellow economists, the ones with Nobel prizes,
wrote a letter last year saying that,they supported Kamala Harris because of
the disastrous consequences that wouldensue if Donald Trump was elected and
imposed tariffs and predicted,amongst other things,
that they would be inflationary.
I'll always take the other side of any betinvolving Nobel laureates in economics.

(43:15):
If anything, it seems to me the likelyeffect will be disinflationary,
not inflationary, because you're creatinga lot of uncertainty around trade
policy by threatening and then imposingand they're not imposing tariffs.
And I the danger is notof an inflationary shock.
We saw in the first Trump termthe tariffs were not inflationary.
I think the danger, and I think Stevealluded to this rightly, is, is that this

(43:40):
administration comes in at the tailend of a boom, the post pandemic boom.
And the downside risk is actually biggerthan the upside risk on inflation.
There's a real risk hereof a bond market accident.
That's clearly a major preoccupation ofthe Treasury Secretary with good reason.
There's a risk that the equity marketcorrects, to use that euphemism,

(44:02):
it actually did at the last trade warwas down nearly 20% in late 2018.
But that was in the contextof Fed tightening.
We're not in that context now, but thereare lots of things that can go wrong.
But let's be honest,
the probability that things will go thatwell is relatively low at this point.
And it seems more likely to me that normalservice will be resumed in the post

(44:25):
euphoria period, Perhaps evenbefore 100 days have elapsed and
there will be meaningful economicheadwinds and the things that
the administration has set out to do willturn out to be harder than they look.
So I mean, my sense is that rather ashappened in 1981, there was a lot of glad
confident morning at the beginningof the Reagan administration.

(44:48):
Hostages were being released Then too,it looked like a new order was beginning.
And then there wasa really nasty recession.
81, 82 and things got tough.
It also turned out to be harder for DavidStockman to fix the budget problem then.
The budget problem's much bigger now.
So my sense is that,
despite all the vibe shift energythat we've seen since November 5th,

(45:10):
there's a bunch of stuff that's bound togo wrong in the course of this year, and
then we'll see if there's anythingbehind the wrestling and the face paint.
I think there is.
I actually think the administrationof what takes it as a whole is
full of some really impressive people andthere is some real strategy there.
There are just several strategies and
I'm not quite sure which onethey'll eventually settle on.

I just wanted to add that tariffs, much as I don't like them,
they are small.
So the world is going to end because oftariff stuff that Nobel Prize winning
economists think theyought to know better.
Tariffs are a tax on producers that'spassed along as higher prices to
the consumers.
Well, so are sales taxes,so are corporate taxes.
So the taxes they haveto pay on their labor.
We already got tons of those.

(45:53):
Tariffs are are mostly aboutmicroeconomic distortions.
Look out the window if you wantto see microeconomic distortion.
So to they're not great forthe economy, but
they are not the thing that's gonnareally cause an economic crisis.
You're always right, Niall,to point out events.
My dear boy, that's what comes.
And we're always in dangerof a big economic shock.

(46:13):
It won't be the tariffs.
Quotas are much moredangerous than tariffs.
That could lead to real trade problems.
Some sort of financial shock is alwayswhere somebody has lent a lot of money and
doesn't know how to pay it back.
Sovereign debt could be a problem.
You know,China blowing up could be a problem.
Some geopolitical eventcausing a financial shock.

(46:35):
Tariffs by themselves,much as I don't like them,
I don't like microeconomic inefficiencies.
They are not that sort of hugeeconomic shock that's really gonna
cause the problems.
And if I have to choose the Biden Harriseconomy with the full set of regulations,
the whole of government approachto various social policies and

(46:56):
all the rest of it, ora little bit of tariffs.
I can take the tariffs.

Yeah, I think if the deregulation agenda's going to be repeated
as it was in the first Trump term,that will be significantly positive.
I looked at the number of pages inthe Federal Register all the way back to
the 1930s.
There are two great spikes inthe history of that series.
One is the Obama administration,the other is the Biden administration.

(47:22):
There are two periods whenthe Federal Register shrinks.
The Reagan administration andthe first Trump administration.
So there's some significant positives andit won't get much coverage because
the deregulation didn't get muchcoverage in the first Trump term.
The tariffs get all the attention.
And I agree with you, John, at this point,they're not significant in their scale.

Yeah, but Millais chainsaw, but even if we don't deregulate,
just turn off the faucet.
That's good enough.
Sorry, Steve, we haven't let you in fora little while here.

I'm listening, I'd love to see a strategy.
I'm gonna hope that thereis a strategy behind this.
I see interest groups.
Why disparities in their aims?
I see a lot of opportunism,I see a lot of cross purposes.

(48:11):
I see a lot of people who don'treally know what they're doing and
then a whole bunch of smartpeople below the radar,
without nicknames,not wearing costumes and
face paint who are adults who'veentered the administration,
whether it's in treasury, the NationalSecurity Council, and we could go on.

(48:35):
And I want to know who's going to empowerthem to do what needs to be done.
So my view on this is Americanpower is very hard to wreck
because we try all the time andit's still there.
American power is very hard totake on because I got to tell you,

(48:55):
you can ask Hitler,you can ask the Japanese,
you can ask the Soviet Union,there are some constituencies you can
ask about how that works versususing American power in tandem,
being allied to American power,partnered American power.
You can ask a whole lot of people aboutthat, including post Hitler Germany,

(49:19):
post Hirohito's Japan,of course, Hirohito continues.
But the version of it that we had in thewar, and so that's the cause for optimism.
It's hard to ruin,it's hard to take on from the outside.
There are elements of dynamism there thatpeople can't explain that are astonishing.

(49:40):
And then we have the currentpickle that we got ourselves into,
which is depressing andwhich needs to be fixed.
And John's view of this is you breakeverything first because it's so wrecked.
All the attempts to fix it never worked.
So you might as well just break it andsee what happens.

(50:01):
Maybe you can fix it then.
If that turns out to be true, fabulous.
If that turns out to be false, then what?
In other words, if you break andbreak and break and then,
for example, I don't know,bird flu is in your egg supply,
or, I don't know,your airplanes begin to crash,

(50:26):
not just once or twice, but often.
And one could go on.
There are all these things that weneed government competence for.
Again, the size ofthe government is too big.
I'm interested inthe performance of government.
I'm interested in good government.
You're supposed to getthat from elections.

(50:46):
What we get from elections is 50,50 senates or close thereby and
then attempted revolutions, where you'regonna impose an agenda that's out
of step with the American people, and youthink that you have a mandate for that.
Again, Trump is not popular.
47% does not constitute popularity.

(51:10):
Some of the measures he's taken havebeen popular with his base, but
his base is a smaller number than 47%.
You know, Reagan got 59% of the votewith no conservative media.
Is anything like that on the horizonwhere you bring people together rather
than divide or rather than act on a nonmandate to institute revolutionary or

(51:34):
in this case,counter revolutionary change?
Again, I know what the Democrats did.
I get why they were punished bythe American people in the election.
That punishment was merited andit was delivered.
And that's why our system is good.

(51:54):
But they didn't necessarilydeliver a mandate for
a counter revolution inthe opposite direction.
And so you don't have a lotof political capital here.
And so if you break andeverything turns out to be fixable and
you fix it, John's view, wonderful.
If you break and it turns out that youget bird flu in your egg supply and

(52:15):
your kids in Trump country are dyingfrom a disease that the government can't
seem to fix because the government, oneof the great things about conservatives,
I don't know for how long now they've beentalking about how government is broken and
it turns out they're not.
They now have to break it,if John is right.
So it was somehow broken.

(52:36):
So I need better government andhow do I get that?
And I'd love it to happen, by the way.
I'm willing to allow time tosee what's going on here.
Like Niall, I don't know.
I see the wrestling and I'm looking forwhat's underneath the wrestling.

Stephen, 30 years ago we had a conversation in this country about
better government.
The Clinton's National Performance Review,i.e, reinventing government.
And that was all about basicallygovernment efficiency.
Al Gore going on TV and mocking the factthat the federal government had
very specific rules on how an ashtrayshould break if it falls on the ground and
things like that.

And what happened?

They did various things.
You go on the website, they'll showyou they got rid of 426,000 people and
they made various reforms andcut red tape, blah, blah, blah.
But there's somethingbigger going on today.
And I refer you guys to an editorialOp-ed in today's New York Times, quote,
Our Democracy is Under Siege.
The bi-alliance of five former treasurysecretaries, our democracy is under siege.

(53:34):
So when we talk about power, isn't thisreally what the conversation is right now?
It's a question of the power of whocontrols the federal government.

I mean, I think the interesting thing that Steve alluded to
is the extent to which we've endedup with a 50,50 political culture.
And I was struck in the course of the lastfew months by a resemblance between
our current political partisanship andwhat I grew up with in Glasgow, where
there were two communities hermeticallysealed, cut off from one another in

(54:04):
an antagonistic relationship to oneanother, Protestants and the Catholics.
American party affiliation ishardened into something sectarian.
One sees this, for example,
in the very small number of marriagesnow that cross the party line.
And everything hasbecome a partisan issue.
That's a sort of dysfunctional sign, inmy view, and a bad sign for the republic.

(54:28):
Republican institutions tend notto last very long historically.
To be within sight of 250 years isa historic record in the history of
republican constitutions.
One of the things that tends to go wronghistorically with republics is this
hardening of partisan lines raisingthe stakes of political defeat to

(54:50):
ever higher levels.
If one thinks back to the departureof Joe Biden from the White House,
the wild granting of pre-emptivepardons was a very unhealthy sign
of a political malaise withinour republican culture.
So I think we should all worry a bit aboutthe health of republican institutions

(55:11):
under these circumstances.
Gideon Rachman wrote a piece today inthe Financial Times saying the age of
empire is back.
I have some sympathy with this view,because what tends to happen with
republics is at some point theyimperceptibly slip into empire.
We should be aware of that risk.
There are other ways forrepublics to go than decline.

(55:32):
Steve could be right.
American power could bein a constant ascendancy.
But what if it gradually shades fromrepublic to empire, rather as Rome did?
Isn't that the thing that we ought toworry about when our political culture has
become so polarized, not a civil war,but the stakes seem increasingly high.

(55:54):
And that kind of editorial that you justquoted, Bill, illustrates the point.
The republic's in danger, the losingside will be persecuted by lawfare.
We saw lawfare used againstPresident Trump when he was out of office.
He's now clearly going to usesome version of it against his
rivals now that he's in office.
So my question for you, Steve,as a historian's question,

(56:16):
is are we seeing signs of a familiarpathology that certainly the thinkers of
the enlightened would have recognized?
Even although Americanpower is still intact,
is it going to stay a republicwith all this power?

Yes.
So I agree.
That's the question.
I agree that the governing institutions.
That's the question.
That's the key variable.
We can talk about human capital andits importance.
We can talk about infrastructure andits importance.
We could go on about energy,its importance.
But ultimately it's governance thatmakes possible successful performance

(56:52):
across the board for the longer term,even if it cannot affect anything as
deeply in the shorter term as we sometimesthink when we're in the time period.
Government is the one thingthat doesn't get reinvented.
There's no productivity curve ingovernment the way there is in other
spheres.
Government is more like education,it's more like health care,

(57:15):
where innovation is really hard andproductivity is kind of low.
But government is the worstperforming of those areas.
Again, elections are supposedto give you better governance.
It's supposed to give you responsivenessto the electorate, accountability.
And we've seen insufficientevidence of that.

(57:37):
You know,on the question of republic versus empire,
I've been hearing lately about howthe executive has all of this power.
And that's correct from ourfriends on the Republican side.
Now that the shoe's on the other foot,they're not so

(57:58):
worried about executive power.
They're enamored of executive power.
Students of history will tell you thatlimits on executive power are really
important.
And breaking limits on executive powerdon't end well because you can have
an enlightened despot in one epoch and
then you can have an unenlighteneddespot that can succeed that person.

(58:20):
You can have your party orconstituency or tribe in power and
you can increase the powerof the executive.
And then again the shoeson the other foot.
I think our problem is the Congress.
I think the Congress's failure to bewhat the Constitution says it should be.

(58:40):
Article one.
I think the malperformance ofthe Congress, non-performance,
underperformance, over a long periodof time has opened up space for
the kind of degradation that John isworried about in terms of the fiscal stuff
and others and that Niall is talking aboutin this slide from republic to empire.

(59:05):
And so that does concern me a lot.
Now, again, American history is fullof really bad stuff that's happened.
It's full of insanity.
What Philip Roth calledthe indigenous American berserk,
which now we have social media to show toourselves and before was less visible.

(59:27):
America has had epochs of tremendousviolence, not just the Civil War,
but in general, tremendous.
So America is an imperfect place, and yet
somehow 25% of global GDP since 1880.
So my question for the both of you is,
if the Trump administration achievessomething of what it intends,

(59:53):
or what you think it intends,but not everything,
how does that compare with previousattempts to achieve or not achieve?
After all, we had the Great Depression.
After all we had, and
then you can name whichever president youdetest the most in that administration.

(01:00:13):
We came through three termsof the Obama administration.
The voters rejected the fourthterm of the Obama administration.
Right.
And so I'm of the mind that there'ssomething going on that's bigger
than the political stuff, and yetthe good governance is the key variable.

(01:00:33):
So that's what Niall pointedout earlier in my conversation.

>> Niall Ferguson (01:00:36):
I mean, there are a couple of enterprises here that
are historically interesting.
One is you can see Trump as a reverse NewDeal, where he is essentially hitting us
with as many executive ordersper annum as Roosevelt in 1933.
But it's a New Deal with the signreversed, because the goal of the New Deal
was to grow the federal governmentto combat a depression.

(01:00:57):
The goal here, as we come out of a boom,is to shrink the federal government, and
we'll see how easy that is.
I think that's part of the project,and success will be, I think,
measurable halfway in, becausethat'll be the end of Doge's mandate.
Will they have successfullyshrunk the federal government, or
will they just have broken it,which is Steve's fear.
The other question is, can Donald Trumprestore the imperial presidency?

(01:01:20):
At some level, it seems to me his goalis to take back to 1972, pre Watergate,
Nixon, when Arthur Schlesinger Jr. worriedthat there was an imperial presidency.
I think that's what Trumpwants to achieve, and
I think that's what some of the peopleadvising him are aspiring to achieve.
So those are the domestic projectswhere it gets more complicated is what,

(01:01:41):
as you said, is the strategy.
Is the strategy to contain China,to win Cold War two.
There are certainly people in the NationalSecurity Council who see that as their
objective.
I do not think it isPresident Trump's objective.
On the contrary, I think he, aspiresto some indeterminate deal with China.
Is the goal to combat an axis ofilliberal or authoritarian powers, China,

(01:02:01):
Russia, Iran, North Korea?
It is forsome people in the administration.
Others seem much more interested in.
In a hemispheric policy focused not juston limiting illegal immigration, but
deporting millions of people.
Right now, if one looks at the Trumpadministration, there are four or
five different strategies.
The foreign policies, plural,are in competition with one another.

(01:02:22):
I don't know which oneis going to prevail.
The voters will get to decidehow it's going two years in.
Generally, they hate on whoeveris in the White House, and
the president's party does badly.
If that's the case with these verymarginal congressional majorities,
the second half of this presidency will bea lame duck second half of a second term

(01:02:47):
like we've seen so many times.
So maybe it's 100 days,maybe it's a little less than two years.
That's not an awful lot of time to doall the things that I'm talking about to
shrink the federal government,to restore the imperial presidency,
to contain China, to.
And you've got less thantwo years to deliver,

>> John H. Cochrane (01:03:04):
which is why their
strategy is as it has to be,to try to build some momentum so
you can do these things.

>> Bill Whalen (01:03:10):
This will be the final word for the show.

Okay, so let me just wrap up a couple things.
Bird flu.
I'm glad you mentioned it,
because there's two great waysour next couple years could go.
We could unfold our politics, our plansagainst a fairly calm atmosphere,
or we could be responding to a crisis.
And bird flu in particular is beingpretty mismanaged, as far as I can tell.

(01:03:34):
And the complete loss of faith peoplehave in the scientific and public health
bureaucracy to manage an event like thiscould turn this into a horrible crisis.
And then,as George Bush did not go into saying,
I want to be the terrorism president,he wanted to do something else.
The entire history of what we'redoing will be something different.
Leaving that aside, when you hear whingingabout our democracy in the New York Times,

(01:03:58):
Haven't we heard enough of that?
Your first reaction is roll your eyes, butyou're exactly right, there is an issue.
The key of keeping our democracy,
a republic going is you mustbe able to lose an election.
And the lawfare of the lastadministration, what's coming out now,
what was a third of the FBI is onJanuary 6th and not on other things.

(01:04:22):
That's another case where the dozersI think are doing some good exposing
what's going on.
That, that is really the danger.
The stakes are sohigh you can't afford to lose an election.
We don't want to go there, Steve.
You want, you want good government, but Ithink the government is doing what it can.
There are, as you said,many smart people in the administration,

(01:04:44):
we know many of them.
They understand the need forSocial Security reform, tax reform,
health care reform, all those things.
If they tried to do that right now,
they would get absolutely nowhere becausein fact the majority them, they know that.
So they're doing whatthey naturally can do.
You do the small anddisruptive big picture things you can,

(01:05:05):
if you've managed to solidify power,they're ready to go on those larger
events when the political will to do itis there, which is what Roosevelt did.
If this fails, I am just as unhappy as therest of you are with executive overreach,
with government just by executiveorder that doesn't get consolidated.

(01:05:27):
And you know, the next Democrat willcome in and there will be a national
emergency and executive orders, thenational emergency on climate change and
gender equity and there will be executiveorders undoing these and doing those up.
That's what we want to avoid.
And then our one great chance toreform the institutions will be gone.

That cheerful.

>> Bill Whalen (01:05:50):
On that cheerful note, we'll leave it there.

I was going to say this is one last note.
This is, I'm still hopeful that this isnot just one more bing, bing, bing, bing,
bing, bing, bing where we deleteeach other's executive orders and
do something new.
There is the chance in what we've seenin the big shift of the electorate,
the vibe shift.
The vibe shift going around the world fromJavier Milei to Giorgio Maloney to Europe,

(01:06:15):
recognizing it's over-regulated itself.
This could be a moment when Harding,Coolidge put the bottle into the first
round of progressivism, when Rooseveltturned around in the other way,
or Reagan undid the malaise of the 70s andlet go some animal spirits of the 80s.
We are, I think at that kind of moment andthat larger underlying vibe shift.

(01:06:36):
This is not about Trump.
We keep saying it's about Trump asif some one person has come in.
No, Trump is a reflection.
He's an embodiment of a mood thatis coming, an imperfect one.
But that strong force,I think, remains with us and
gives me hope that it'll turnout better rather than worse.

>> Bill Whalen (01:06:56):
There we go.
Better ending.

>> Stephen Kotkin (01:06:58):
78 years old.

I said it's not about Trump.
He's a reflection of somethingthat's happening around the world.

Trump better not hear that part of the show that it's not
about him.
Better cut well before that last line.

>> Bill Whalen (01:07:13):
All right, gentlemen, great conversation.
You come to California more often.

Only too happy to be here.

All right, you boys. >> Niall Ferguson
to be here.

>> Bill Whalen (01:07:21):
You come on the show more often.

I provide the diversity.
I'm another old white guy.

We don't have to worry about that anymore,
thanks to the vibe shift.
All right, Well,I hope you enjoyed the conversation.

>> Bill Whalen (01:07:32):
I know we did.
On behalf of my colleagues,Sir Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane, Dr.
Stephen Kotkin, andthe absent Lieutenant General HR McMaster.
We're joking, by the way,HR had other business.
He didn't vanish somewhereafter the Super Bowl.
He actually, he's all good.
Anyway, thanks forwatching the show today.
We'll have a new episode foryou at the end of February, early March.
Till then, take care.
Thanks again for watching,and we will see you soon.

>> Presenter (01:07:58):
If you enjoyed this show and
are interested in watching morecontent featuring HR McMaster,
watch Battlegrounds,also available at Hoover dot.

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The Age of Empire Strikes Back: Stephen Kotkin on Trump, Wrestling, and the Use of American Power | GoodFellows | Hoover Institution

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Age of Empire Strikes Back: Stephen Kotkin on Trump, Wrestling, and the Use of American Power | GoodFellows | Hoover Institution