TRANSCRIPT: Trump, Ukraine, and The Future of Geopolitics with Sam Harris and Niall Ferguson

The goal of Trump 2.0 is to shrink the federal government as you come out of the post-COVID boom. So it’s a kind of New Deal but with the sign reversed. That’s how I think about it and so far I think that’s been a good framework. There are other analogies, but that’s the one that strikes me as most relevant to the first month.

Global Reactions and Foreign Policy

SAM HARRIS: And how do you think the last month, month and a half, has seemed to our allies and our adversaries on the world stage? I mean you can take it in whatever order you want, but in particular with respect to adversaries, I’m thinking about Russia and China and I’m wondering how you think they view this barrage of change.

NIALL FERGUSON: I asked a quite large audience in London earlier this week if anybody could say confidently that they understood the foreign policy of the Trump administration and not a single person raised their hand. It was a quite international group, but I think if I had asked the same question in Berlin, I’d have got a similar response. In Paris, a similar response. People are baffled, they’re bewildered and at times I have been too.

I was certainly pretty baffled last week when President Trump called Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, a dictator, suggested he had a four percent approval rating, suggested that Ukraine had started the war that began three years ago. That was pretty bewildering to me. Up until that point I thought that there was a rational strategy to end the war.

I’ve felt for some time that it’s not in Ukraine’s interests for this war to be prolonged. I felt that in fact in 2022 and I thought the rational strategy which had been articulated by a number of people in the administration, including Vice President Vance, was to apply pressure, economic and potentially military pressure, to Russia to get to a deal. The Ukrainians had more or less acknowledged that they would not get their territory back in the short run but that they would accept that if there were security guarantees.

The outlines of some kind of armistice at least were apparent and I couldn’t understand why Trump suddenly rounded on Zelensky and appeared to concede to President Putin of Russia many of the things that the Russians probably hoped they would get at the end of a protracted negotiation such as no NATO membership for Ukraine. So that was a little bewildering.

I think my role as an historian is twofold. First of all it’s to try to put this in some kind of broader perspective using analogies to help us get a better sense of where we are. The other role is to be humble. You can’t do history in real time and always be right and some of the things that are especially difficult about this moment will not prove to be right or wrong for years.

Moscow, Beijing, and European Reactions

But let me try to make sense of what we’re seeing and also to answer the specific question you asked, how did they see this in Moscow, how did they see it in Beijing? I think in Moscow they’re feeling good but not completely relaxed because they have to some extent handed the initiative to the President of the United States and that means that to some extent their fate is no longer in their hands.

In Beijing they’re doubtless looking on with some amusement at the divisions that have opened up between the United States and Europe but from the point of view of Beijing this is not the main event. Ukraine is not the main event and nor is the Middle East. The main event is Taiwan and more broadly the South China Sea.

From the point of view of America’s European allies the bewilderment has rapidly turned into resolve and let me try this thought out on you. Presidents since Richard Nixon, so for 50 years, have been trying to get the Europeans to pay a greater share of the cost of their own security without success. The Europeans have consistently allowed the United States to bear the lion’s share of the costs of NATO but Donald Trump appears to have achieved what eluded successive presidents since Nixon, namely the Europeans in the last few days finally realized that they do in fact have to take responsibility for their own security and the days of free riding and allowing the United States to provide their security are over.

So if you wanted to try to rationalize what just happened by saying such outrageous things about Ukraine, Trump has succeeded in making the Europeans realize that the post-1945 international order is over and they will now have to stop talking about strategic autonomy and actually doing it. And the sign of how successful Trump has been was what Friedrich Merz, the Christian democratic leader in Germany said just after winning Sunday’s election which was in effect, I now understand that the US backstop for European security is over and we are going to have to get serious about increasing our defense spending and taking care of our own security.

So that’s probably the single most important thing that’s happened in the last week. The Europeans have been talking endlessly about strategic autonomy for years. I’ve heard so many European leaders give speeches about it. I remember just a few years ago Bruno Le Maire, French minister, gave a speech I was present at in which he said Europe is a superpower and it will have strategic autonomy and the audience clapped enthusiastically, got the biggest round of applause for an entire conference and it was all completely empty words. None of it happened. The European defense budgets barely moved in the case of the Italian budget didn’t move at all. Now the Europeans have finally got the message. They didn’t get it in the first Trump term. They thought Joe Biden would save them and now there’s no longer any more delusion possible. They have to deliver strategic autonomy and fast if they’re to be secure from a fascist regime in Moscow.

A Troubling Moral Decline

SAM HARRIS: Well it seems to me strange if the only way to get the Europeans to not free ride and take their investment in hard power seriously would be the moral collapse of the United States on the world stage. I mean to rewind to the deranging moment you just referenced with Trump blaming Ukraine for the start of the war and claiming that Zelensky is a dictator. I mean this is just, it’s not only upside down, it’s obscene to characterize what has happened these last three years in that way.

Putin has not only launched a war of aggression against Ukraine and killed who knows how many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people there, stolen tens of thousands of children to Russia and repatriated them. He’s all but threatened the U.S. with nuclear annihilation for our support of Ukraine. I mean certainly his proxies have on state television. There’s been widespread torture of Ukrainian POWs. I mean this is not, he’s not a normal actor on the world stage and

SAM HARRIS: Yet we have an American president not only failing to criticize Putin as a dictator but criticizing his victim as a dictator, putting the moral onus of all of this chaos and destruction on the victim. It’s so disgraceful just as an American citizen to see what should have been the moral and effective leadership of our country—what would have been under almost any other president—to see that vacated so fully. I get that there’s one possible silver lining: it has so terrified our allies that they now are going to take more responsibility for their own safety and security than they have in the past. But surely there was another path to that outcome.

NIALL FERGUSON: Churchill used to say that the United States would do the right thing when all the alternatives had been exhausted. I think successive presidents have tried just about everything else to get the Europeans to pay their share, so one begins to ask after 50 years what else could possibly have worked.

But let me suggest another way that we might understand this moment. You’ve made some moral remarks there and used the word “disgraceful.” From a realist perspective, which Vice President Vance certainly says he represents, none of that matters. You’re just engaged in liberal histrionics. In the world of great power politics, you can’t be motivated by those moral considerations because what matters is national interest and power.

SAM HARRIS: But don’t alliances matter? I mean, isn’t much of our power historically the result of being a shining city on a hill to aspiring democracies and being a reliable friend to our allies? And now we’re some kind of shining sewer on X.

American Power: Idealism vs. Realism

NIALL FERGUSON: I hate to shatter your illusion, Sam, but not many people outside the United States have believed that stuff about a shining city on a hill for a very long time. I wrote a book called “Colossus” back in 2003 which had as its subtitle in the original hardback edition “The Price of America’s Empire,” and that was a book that was highly skeptical about the neoconservative enterprise that we embarked on after 9-11 to try to transform politically Afghanistan and Iraq and what was called for a time the greater Middle East.

I think one has to look at American foreign policy in its historical context with a little bit more of a hard stare rather than through rose-tinted spectacles. The back and forth between idealism and realism is in some ways a preoccupation of journalists and academics. In reality, administrations—Republican and Democratic alike—have tended to be quite ruthless in their treatment of both allies and adversaries.

There’s an old Henry Kissinger joke about only one thing being worse than being America’s foe, and that’s being America’s ally. The South Vietnamese can tell you a thing or two about how it goes when the United States backs a country—not always well. So I think we need to be a little bit skeptical about the idea that suddenly the United States is betraying its legacy as a shining city on a hill. That’s not the history of American foreign policy as anybody outside the United States thinks about it.

But let me suggest this: one way of thinking about the Trump administration is that it is not only realist in an academic sense but in a very practical sense that at least some elements within the administration have a very clear understanding of the limits of American power.

You said American power has to do with alliances. No, it doesn’t. That’s peripheral to American power. American power has to do with the incredible strength of the U.S. economy, which has consistently been the largest economy in the world since World War II. It has to do with American technological leadership, and it has to do with the American ability to project military power—hard power—all around the world. That’s what really matters, and that is no longer an uncontested dominance in the way that it used to be.

The China Challenge and Shifting Power Balance

NIALL FERGUSON: I don’t want to bore you with statistics, but let me give you just one. In 2001, which was the year China entered the World Trade Organization, American manufacturing value added was more than twice that of China. Today, China’s is more than twice that of the United States. There has been a huge reversal of economic fortune. China’s economy on a purchasing power parity basis, adjusting for differences in relative prices, has been larger than the U.S. economy for at least eight years. So we inhabit a world in which the United States’ dominance can no longer be taken for granted.

In a sense, Trump has more in common with Richard Nixon than most people realize. I’ve been joking in recent conversations that Trump is Nixon’s revenge, both domestically and in foreign policy terms. Richard Nixon, when he came into the White House in 1969, had a very keen sense of the weakness of the American position, and his realism was actuated by that sense of American vulnerability. I think the same is true of Trump.

Here’s the thing that fools people: Trump talks a big game. He talks the monarchical imperial talk, but I think what actuates that, what motivates that very aggressive treatment of minor powers—”Hey, we want Greenland,” “Canada, you’re going to be the 51st state,” “Panama, we want the canal back”—what motivates that kind of behavior is a sense that in terms of geopolitics relative to the superpower on the other side of the world, America’s position is highly vulnerable.

I would go further. The preoccupations with Ukraine and the Middle East, with Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the efforts to support Ukraine and Israel are, in the eyes of a completely unflinchingly ruthless realist, distractions and drains of resources given the stakes in the Far East, in the Indo-Pacific region.

To give you a contingency example: if the Chinese decided today to start requiring all ships going in and out of Taipei to clear People’s Republic customs, what would the United States do? If they went a step further and imposed a quarantine, which would be kind of blockade light, what would we do? The reality is that the United States has very few good options if Taiwan’s autonomy is going to be contested by China because China has established meaningful military superiority in that theater.

So I would suggest that one way of coming at the Trump administration is that unlike back in 2017 when the challenge was to persuade Americans that there really was a Chinese threat—that was, I think, the main significance of the first Trump term—that was done and a bipartisan consensus emerged that China really was a problem and maybe we should even be in a cold war with China. Now the problem is adjusting for the fact that China’s in a position of real strength and that could put us in a very weak position if Xi Jinping decides to call our bluff.

The Value of Allies in Great Power Competition

SAM HARRIS: Well, everything you just said suggests to me that the importance of allies has almost never been greater, right? So when you say that Trump talks a big game and is bellicose in a way that people like myself find agitating, for the most part, all of that bellicosity is directed again at our friends, our erstwhile friends. So my concern is that the people who should be standing shoulder to shoulder alongside us in any hot conflict or nearly hot conflict with Russia or China are now thinking that we have some kind of maniac in charge who has decided as almost his first act of his new presidency to effectively attack Canada and Denmark and Mexico.

And again, he doesn’t talk a big game against our actual adversaries. He doesn’t say a bad word about Qatar that funds terrorism and harbors Hamas, et cetera, and has given tens of billions of dollars to American universities to spread their delusional anti-Western propaganda. I mean, if you wanted to dig into a defense of the West and a defense of the liberal democratic order and what actual realism could look like in a sustained conflict with the enemies of that order, it seems to me we need to get—I mean, coming back to what you briefly mentioned, J.D. Vance’s remarks at Munich—a wake-up call to the West is perhaps needed. But it seems to me that Trump and Vance are doing their best to fracture any kind of Western alliance against its adversaries.

NIALL FERGUSON: Let me take you back four years. Time travel is what historians do, but this is a short journey, and let’s remind…

NIALL FERGUSON: We need to remind ourselves of the things that were said in the first hundred days of Joe Biden’s administration. The adults were in the room. Alliances mattered again. Some were so adult that they were clearly no longer competent. That was the line that the Europeans took and many commentators in the United States took. It was also going to be a transformative presidency. You may remember this from people like Michael Beschloss who said it was going to be up there with Roosevelt and Johnson.

All of this struck me at the time as completely absurd, and sure enough my prediction four years ago that the Biden administration would be like the Carter administration, but with dementia turned out to be about right. What happened was they made a big inflation mistake by throwing a ton of money at the economy, which didn’t really need to be done because the pandemic was basically over.

They then did a series of things that completely antagonized the allies that were so happy to see them. They pulled the plug on the U.S. and allied presence in Afghanistan without really telling any of the NATO partners what they were doing. They did it in the most chaotic way possible. That sent a signal that was picked up loud and clear in Moscow and Beijing.

In 2021, they wholly failed to deter Putin from preparing an invasion, even when Putin signaled what he was going to do in July of that year, publishing an article on the historic unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, which was a declaration of intent to do Anschluss. They proceeded to do exactly the same in the following two years with respect to the Middle East, which they thought they’d somehow pacified on the very eve of the October 7th, 2023 massacre.

So the Biden administration, which I think broadly agreed with your terms of reference – allies matter, all that kind of stuff – were a disaster. It was a succession of failures of deterrence that produced two major wars that the United States seemed incapable of doing anything to stop. That’s an important setting for Trump 2.0.

The Divide Within Trump’s Foreign Policy Team

The real failure of whatever was left of liberal internationalism, the Obama foreign policy in its Biden-Harris incarnation, did create an opportunity for the new sheriff to say, you know what? The allies are weak and suck, and the bad guys are strong. We need to be careful. We certainly – I think this is – here I’m going to paraphrase what I think the Trump inner circle thinks. We do not want to be simultaneously in a fight with Russia, Iran, China and North Korea.

And I think that’s interesting because there are some people inside the administration who think we should be. Here is the central rift that I see within this nascent administration. Many of the people who’ve been appointed to key jobs, including Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, a bunch of people who are going to DOD, a bunch of people on the National Security Council think that there is an axis of authoritarians. China leads it. Russia is number two. Iran is number three. Little Rocket Man is number four. And we have to deal with this axis because if we don’t deal with it effectively, we end up rerunning the 1930s.

I think there are plenty of people in the administration as well as in Congress who would agree with what I just said. But what’s interesting is that the president’s inner circle, which includes people who don’t have formal jobs like Tucker Carlson, take a completely different view, namely that the axis is too powerful. It would be much better to at least conciliate the key members.

And Trump himself, even before he was inaugurated, was sending signals, particularly to China, that he intended to pursue detente. He invited Xi Jinping to come to the inauguration. He says he wants to go to Beijing himself and do a deal of some kind. We don’t know what.

So Trump, although he has quite a hawkish national security team, himself I think inclines towards detente, to use a word that has not been used for a while – particularly with China, but also with Russia. And he certainly wants to end these wars. And I think the motivation is not to shock and appall liberal Americans. The basic objective is to reduce American military commitments because they seem too great.

Ferguson’s Law and America’s Economic Constraints

NIALL FERGUSON: Can we talk about Ferguson’s Law, Sam?

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. Yeah.

NIALL FERGUSON: Ferguson’s Law, named not after me, but after Adam Ferguson, the great Enlightenment Scot, one of the great thinkers, not as famous as the other Adam, Adam Smith, but should be, argued back in the 1760s that public debt, though a very attractive device, was ultimately a source of weakness if it got too large.

I tried to formulate this more tightly in a piece that just appeared last weekend in the Wall Street Journal. The argument was if a great power is spending more on interest payments on its debt than on defense, it won’t be a great power for much longer. And I tried to show that this has been true all the way back to 16th century Habsburg Spain, one of the first great European empires. It was true also of the Dutch Republic, of 18th century France. It was true of 19th century Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, it was true of Austria-Hungary, and it was true of Britain in the 20th century, and now it’s true of the United States.

2024, last year, was the first year since 1934 that the United States has spent more money on interest payments on the federal debt than on defense. And I think that constraint looms very large in the minds of at least some people in the administration, which is why, for example, last week we had reports of Defense Secretary Hegseth talking about cutting at least part of the defense budget or shrinking at least part of it.

Trump himself talking about reducing defense spending mutually, the United States, Russia and China, a language quite different from the language of the first Trump administration, which criticized the Democrats for not spending enough on defense. We’ve really got a different set of priorities here because the world has changed, and at least some people in this administration think it has changed in ways that put the United States in a much weaker position than most people realize it’s in.

So that, I think, is how to frame this. The behavior that seems so outrageous to you, obscene I think you called it, is part of a realpolitik motivated by a sense of the limits of American power and the need to avoid a showdown in three places at once, because the U.S. military cannot simultaneously contend with conflicts in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe and in the Far East. That’s clear.

Concerns About Trump’s Appointments

SAM HARRIS: Well, there’s so many sides to this object that I’d like to touch. We’ll take the people who are in Trump’s inner circle, right, who seem to have his view of the situation as opposed to the traditional neocon or what is left of the vapors of neoconservatism, perhaps in the head only of Marco Rubio.

I mean it seems to me that he has appointed – I don’t even know if this is debatable – he’s appointed loyalists above all, right, and people whose CVs don’t really shriek their qualifications for the various posts to which they’ve been assigned. So you have people like Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel and this is kind of a rogue’s gallery of the unqualified, the compromised, the flagrantly conflicted.

I don’t know if we could drill down on any one of these. I think concerns about Tulsi Gabbard as some kind of counterintelligence threat don’t seem completely paranoid to me. Based on incompetence alone, but I mean this is like the RFK Juniorification of our entire government on some level, which is to say you point some ideologue who seems to have nothing but contempt for the part of government he is now – he or she is now overseeing in the role of authority there and see what happens.

Granted, the story up to the moment has been of the rampages of Elon Musk and DOGE and the gaggle of teenagers and young software engineers he has helping him in that task. But all of this just strikes me as so chaotic, so unvetted. It seems to present the greatest espionage opportunity for our enemies to be seen in perhaps several generations. There’s something so reckless about all of this and again, the messaging about it publicly is in many cases just patently insane. It’s just a tissue of lies.

SAM HARRIS: and active trolling and it’s just – it’s so unprofessional. I mean again, you can hear my level of allergy to all of this. Again, these are my liberal norms being traduced on an hourly basis. But I find it hard to believe that it’s just mere idealism on my part that is causing me to whinge to this degree. I think that being this cynical and transactional and so in the grip of people who obviously are just not – are more – I mean again, our president is – our president’s main qualification for the job apart from his prior presidency is that he was a game show host who convinced everyone that he was really a billionaire and now he’s managed to become a billionaire on the basis of that in some strange way. I just think we pay a price for this on the world stage and everything you’ve said suggests to me that we can’t go it alone but we wouldn’t have to go it alone if we recognize that Europe – you know, our EU partners, our EU allies I think have what? Tenfold the resources that Russia has. I mean the EU is a colossus compared to Russia in real terms. Russia has just proven that it can’t quite defeat Ukraine as a conventional army to everyone’s astonishment. A war that everyone thought was going to be won in days or weeks has dragged on for years because of Russia’s incompetence.

Evaluating the Administration as a Whole

NIALL FERGUSON: Well, let me stop you because we’ve now reached the point where I’ve got about three or four different things to address. I think when one’s assessing an administration one has to look at the whole thing and while I personally wouldn’t have appointed Tulsi Gabbard to that position, if one looks at the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent…

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