I think it’s useful to actually think about Russia and Putin in that regard. In some ways, Putin was an outlier before Trump 2.0 in terms of his territorial adventurism, for example. The invasion of Ukraine and really the aspiration to seize the entirety of the country, that’s something Putin had done before Trump came back. The attempted annexations in the West Bank that you’re seeing from Netanyahu, and these other kinds of extraterritorial smash and grabs — I’ve actually been wondering if Trump, in some ways, has been emboldened either by the broad failure to stop or in the case of Israel, a kind of indifference to the moves that have been happening.
It’s probably a little bit of both, but I think that we’re living in a world that Trump is both shaping and also taking opportunity of himself.
Kristof: Yeah, I think that President Trump is fundamentally not particularly ideological. He’s a transactional bully, and the truth is that bullying sometimes does work. He has been able to, in some limited ways, advance American interests: threaten Panama, and Panama is going to cave and try to transfer management of one of the ports to American interests; you threaten Colombia, and it is going to take people returned from the U.S. And so, in very limited ways, a bully can accomplish things.
But I think more fundamentally, what we’ve seen is Trump really dismantling the entire post-World War II architecture and a system that had very much supported American interests. And by abandoning any kind of commitment to human rights, as Lydia suggested, I think, that has paved the way for Israel to behave more recklessly in the West Bank and in Gaza, for the United Arab Emirates to behave more recklessly in Sudan — not that it was particularly well-behaved before.
If the point of foreign policy is to make your country safer, then I think that Trump has, here and there, created some benefits, but overall we are less safe now. And by rewarding aggression in the case of Russia and Ukraine, I think, he’s created increased risk of the very worst thing happening, which would be a war in East Asia involving China.
