| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The Trump family crypto business also looks like a political accident waiting to happen. | ||
| And they note this, that when Mr. Trump issued his meme coin days before his inauguration, he said the point was to have fun. | ||
| As we noted at the time, the venture creates political risks and ethical conflicts. | ||
| Bloomberg News last week reported that all but six of the top 25 holders of the Trump coin that have registered on the website's leaderboard have bought the coins using foreign exchanges that claim to exclude U.S. customers. | ||
| And the price tag worth about $300 billion, according to news reports, or the profit on paper for the Trump families. | ||
| Then there is also this in the Washington Post. | ||
| They take a look at this story this morning as well. | ||
| Small-time buyers of Trump coin have seen big losses, at least 67,000 newspapers. | ||
|
unidentified
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You can continue to watch this at c-span.org. | |
| We're going to leave it here for a conversation on the Trump administration's policies toward Europe, including trade and defense. | ||
| This is hosted by George Washington University. | ||
| And also the Wittenschaften Centrum in Berlin. | ||
| He's the author of no less than no fewer than 50 books on Russia, the European Union, and various presidents and prime ministers. | ||
| And he has recently authored two books, so you can get their flyers that you can collect outside the room if you didn't get one coming in. | ||
| First of all, European Security from Ukraine to Washington. | ||
| And the second book, European Public Opinion About Security: Who Could Help Us in a Threatening World. | ||
| So Professor Rose will share some of his reflections based on the research that he's been doing for these two books. | ||
| And I'm also delighted that our own Professor Hilary Silver of Sociology here at George Washington University will moderate the discussion. | ||
| She also is one of our leading Europeanists. | ||
| So we look forward to a great discussion. | ||
| Thank you all for turning out and on this very lovely spring day. | ||
| So let me turn things over to Professor Rose, and then we will open things up for discussion. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, thank you for turning up when it's not the exams are over, but the problems are still here. | ||
| So we're not out of work. | ||
| My perspective is that, because I've written on presidents and prime ministers, comparatively not personalities, but institutional. | ||
| And in fact, I had breakfast yesterday with a bunch of retired budget examiners of Pentagon and CIA, and she brought along her male friend who was the Defense Department budget. | ||
| So it's that kind of perspective on trade-offs. | ||
| And this is where security immediately means global economic security. | ||
| It comes down to tariffs immediately. | ||
| Because there's a long-term institutional relevance to what's in the post of the New York Times this morning, a C-SPAN. | ||
| And military, which means Ukraine. | ||
| I would distinguish two Europeans. | ||
| One of those are the 27 countries that are member states of the European Union. | ||
| And Brussels, shorthand for European Union, has exclusive powers on tariffs and trade. | ||
| It has a vice president for security and foreign policy, military security, who comes from Estonia, if you know where Estonia is, and a DG Cabinet Secretary for Defense and the President of the Commission, Enaltic, | ||
| is a German former defense minister. | ||
| The one thing they lack is an army. | ||
| And that was 1954, when NATO had just got started. | ||
| And the idea was to have a European defense community which would arm the Germans with the French, because the French knew who had the stronger army, because they'd all been invaded two or three times. | ||
| Schumann wasn't French for the first 30 years of his life. | ||
| And that was defeated in 1954 by the French National Assembly. | ||
| So the Germans came into NATO, and the Germans are very happy in NATO, because, of course, they can look to Washington. | ||
| And the conference I was at, Philippe Genschel, used the term bellicosity, a tendency to think in military terms. | ||
| And on a bellicosity scale, we agreed Germany was at one end and Poland at the other. | ||
| So this is the world we are in. | ||
| The UK is outside the EU, but it's inside NATO. | ||
| And it can work both sides of the Potomac. | ||
| I wanted to call my book from the Black Sea to the Potomac, but nobody knew, because that would bring into the Pentagon and the CIA, where the Queen has long-standing relationships. | ||
| So we're talking about a very real, let's say Washington is complex. | ||
| When you talk about Europe, you have to, what you're referring to depends. | ||
| And in terms of military, the EU doesn't exist. | ||
| You have several powerful military states. | ||
| Now let me deal briefly with terrorists. | ||
| The easy thing for Brussels, the European Commission, is the withdrawal of the United States from being the leader, the predictable leader in a global economy. | ||
| I say predictable and the leader and getting into deglobalization, whatever you call it. | ||
| The EU has exclusive monopoly on tariffs, a very large internal market of 300 and about 400 million people, stable rules, regulations, too many people say. | ||
| It has all the human capital financial. | ||
| It has a central bank, and it is getting the power. | ||
| It used to have Graham Rudman and German Schwarz-Newell, and the Germans respect regulations, but they're finding their way around budget deficits, and they have German printing presses, and they can guarantee bonds. | ||
| So it's in a deglobalized, fragmented global economy, and it has less dependence on China. | ||
| Anything I say, you can fit your favorite example into. | ||
| If you can't, it's my fault, not yours. | ||
| But I'll leave you to ask the questions to fit things in on. | ||
| It is attractive to other continents like Latin America. | ||
| It has a lot of experience in Africa one way or the other. | ||
| I mean, Nigerians are second or third in emigrants to Britain. | ||
| They prefer that living in the Queen's land rather than their native land. | ||
| And they can finance the reconstruction. | ||
| They will have to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine. | ||
| My book from Ukraine to Washington ends with two key points. | ||
| The first is there won't be a Marshall Plan for Ukraine. | ||
| There will be a Monet plan. | ||
| Because Monet is the symbol of Europe. | ||
| Ukraine wants to get into Europe. | ||
| There are many assets. | ||
| Its main liability has two liabilities. | ||
| One of them is agricultural products, better soil than Poland and lower prices. | ||
| And Eastern European agricultural member states of the EU are lining up against foreign agricultural imports. | ||
| It also has two kinds of investment opportunities. | ||
| One, they could sell state-of-the-art, inexpensive programs for drugs. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But, and there's money to be made in that, because the demand exceeds the supply. | ||
| On the other hand, they have social investment, which is putting roofs on school, where the payoff will take time, and also getting it habitable enough so that 10% of the population, heavily women and children, will want to come back to Ukraine. | ||
| And this can start with what happens to family relationships. | ||
| The family was split because the men couldn't leave. | ||
| So it's, but this is a problem of member states, the migration, and of the European Commission. | ||
| And like everything else, there will be a positive outcome. | ||
| It won't suit everybody. | ||
| The World Bank won't design it. | ||
| It's hard regulations. | ||
| The basic rule about the EU and the economy is they take years to bargain a decision, but because of that, once they make it, they won't open it up for the UK. | ||
| And Starman Downing Street doesn't recognize this. | ||
| David Cameron, Brexit didn't recognize it. | ||
| And this means, of course, that any US trade representative dealing with Europe isn't going to get a lot of American agricultural products and other things, which puts a strict limit on what you can do with US-UK trade. | ||
| Now on the military security, as I pointed out, it doesn't exist. | ||
| The interesting thing was in the survey, I don't believe in replication, I believe in original questions. | ||
| So I asked eight countries a reasonable enough opportunistic sample, because it was other people's money that I got a module. | ||
| Three forms of security, economic, military, climate, one immediately, the war was on in Ukraine for 11 months. | ||
| Four of the countries were close enough at the Belarus, which counts as Russia. | ||
| And who can help us? | ||
| The interesting thing is, and the options were the EU, which Brussels likes, NATO, the USA to guard against anti-American or pro-American, the UN for climate change. | ||
| 78% of Europeans wanted it a lie. | ||
| Only 49% for military. | ||
| Only 49% wanted it to lie for economy. | ||
| They were like James Carville. | ||
| They wanted a national government to deal with the economy in Brussels and the Central West, etc., etc. | ||
| And that includes the Greeks and the Hungarians and everything else. | ||
| So the problem is, of course, that the Europeans thought that the U.S. would be with them. | ||
| The word, well, as Biden was halfway through. | ||
| So existentially, a big political problem in Europe is that the German Chancellor, the French president, the British Prime Minister, have got to explain we can't rely on the Americans. | ||
| Whose fault? | ||
| Everybody is anti-Trump. | ||
| You don't need to explain. | ||
| They don't understand what's going on in this country, which is that to get money for Europe, to define. | ||
| Look, I went back and saw Greece and Turkey and how Truman got it through. | ||
| But remember, Truman was drinking with the Speaker of the House when he was told he was president. | ||
| So he knew how to, he got Vandenberg, who is a Republican. | ||
| Those times are gone. | ||
| That's ancient history. | ||
| But Europeans, they either dismiss, they're not anti-American, but they don't understand, and they have to have it explained to them by the national government, because you have negative discretionary money to spend on defense. | ||
| You either have to put up taxes or cut something else. | ||
| Interestingly, the term uncontrollables doesn't exist in European political discourse. | ||
| It certainly exists there. | ||
| The Health Service is a line on the button in Britain. | ||
| So are pensions. | ||
| And they have a, and they're both inflation-proof. | ||
| Starmer was dumb enough to give a 7.5% pay rise to public employees, the largest blocs, without any conditions to avoid a strike. | ||
| Starmer, the British Prime Minister, has no understanding of the economy of defense. | ||
| He was a lawyer, English law, and a prosecutor, but he started out as a liberal lawyer defending on popular place, sort of ACLU in American terms. | ||
| But he then became, he got his knighthood prosecuting people, but he doesn't understand big things. | ||
| And the Chancellor got a degree at Oxford. | ||
| Instead of going into Goldman Sachs or something, she went off to Meeds to get a Labour seat. | ||
| So she doesn't understand. | ||
| Though they bet on growth, but they don't understand what makes growth. | ||
| So I feel that as a British taxpayer and an American citizen, I've got a bad deal because the government is well put to lead for Europe, | ||
| but the France will be lucky to get a moderate into the second round because in former times anyone who could get in against the Gopen would be president with up to 80% of the vote. | ||
| It's not clear who could get in because if you think a moderate from the Penn sign is unacceptable, try the left. | ||
| The socialists are dead. | ||
| They're really left-wing Trumps. | ||
| You labor the left with the French left and strikes on pensions and all that, you know. | ||
| France won't have a stable president for about three years, maybe, or maybe not, because they have a way of dealing things. | ||
| Metz has got more fiscal scope. | ||
| The good news is that he can spend money on defense. | ||
| It will be spent, Rhein Mettel, the biggest manufacturer, has trebled its share price. | ||
| So that will help the German economy that's sagging. | ||
| The German car makers that were doing bad are already looking for something to do. | ||
| They can return. | ||
| Iga Mattel is the biggest union. | ||
| So Mertz does a lot of things for putting money into defense equipment. | ||
| Now what do you do with defense equipment? | ||
| You defend your country, but that you have the soldiers and everything else. | ||
| It's very striking, all of the discourse, I'm talking Times Financial Times, which is a much more cosmopolitan than the Wall Street Journal, even though the Brits, subjects of the Queen own it, or certainly no directing it. | ||
| But it's all about aggregate money, which is there, or going up, because it can't go up that much because you can't absorb it. | ||
| There isn't a supply, and you're not going to buy Boeing in the present situation. | ||
| But it's not about more boots on the ground because most of the armies are, the big armies are understaffed against their authorization, their retention. | ||
| Recruitment isn't a good sell for the kind of high-tech with full employment broadly. | ||
| But it's about what do we spend money on. | ||
| Then the key thing is that's lacking is a European defense community which is integrated in NATO. | ||
| There are a lot of European voices in NATO in uniform too and bases. | ||
| And in fact the U.S. Africa has met as monitor and I learned yesterday from Germany. | ||
| I mean there's a lot of them most of the American troops in Germany are feeding American foreign policy, not defending. | ||
| They're to defend Ukraine. | ||
| So you get this situation, but the critical thing is you don't have a political structure, you don't have a commander-in-chief of the resources that are there. | ||
| And what it would take is an agreement between Britain, France, and Germany, who are not frontline countries. | ||
| What you do have, and what I find interesting, living on the Atlantic with nuclear submarines about seven miles away, I can see them when I go out shopping sometimes. | ||
| Pasain, one of the two bases of Europe, is joint expeditionary forces of the Baltic. | ||
| Now, the Baltic is the northern flank of Europe, as the Black Sea is the southern flank of Europe. | ||
| So you need to be concerned. | ||
| Belarus is sort of the Midwest of the Western Front of Putin's Europe, from some Putin's blocking. | ||
| So what you've got is Pogan, the three Baltic states, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the UK, they do joint exercises together. | ||
| There is a NATO base in western Estonia, which I've been at. | ||
| It wouldn't stop. | ||
| Southern Bridge is what you would get in Reinstein, that the Pentagon has in Germany. | ||
| But there is a political concern. | ||
| You don't have to explain to the Finns. | ||
| I've done five, six surveys in the Baltic. | ||
| I mean, I know I'm one of those who knows his way around the Baltic. | ||
| I've done merge coasts in the Baltic, but it's very important. | ||
| And Narva is the Crimea. | ||
| And it's part of the European Union. | ||
| And Narva, I take it you may be in Estonia, is 90% Russian. | ||
| And it's closer to Petrograd, which is where Putin comes from, than this is the Supreme Sput, if you can put it in political terms. | ||
| But the Finns and the Swedes are up to porn. | ||
| The Brits are not going to fight for Narva, but they've got, you know, it's interesting because the talk is air and water defense of Ukraine. | ||
| You know, that's the minimum, the key effort. | ||
| But they have to get a, first of all, they don't get NATO. | ||
| Secondly, Poland, member states of the EU plus the UK have a vested interest in Ukraine fighting a proxy war for their defense, starting with the Buddhist Republic, right? | ||
| Which is the lowest umbrella cosity. | ||
| But a starting point on the Ukraine side is to have air defense in Poland and the Baltic and the Finns and then the Baltic, | ||
| keep Russian submarine, Russian, Russians with wire, undercutter, underwater wire cutters that are cutting off various cables. | ||
| It's the Russian war on the underwater cables in the Baltic, which replaced Russian gas. | ||
| So these are the places to go to that I think are the important points to be built. | ||
| So terrorists are important, but economies are just and Europe can handle that and it's not as critical as security. | ||
| Putin has a window of opportunity of a few years before European states that I've been naming can match, get operational what they've got. | ||
| And it's a five, ten-year plan, but why not stop, start there? | ||
| questions. | ||
| Well, thank you for that. | ||
| How provocative. | ||
| So I have a few points to add to the discussion. | ||
| I guess the first kind of broad question that came to mind when I saw the title of your presentation was, is this really the end of the post-Cold War world or post-Cold War order? | ||
| That to a certain extent NATO was set up to address the post-World War II Cold War, but since 1990, a variety of new security arrangements were put in place for the post-Cold War confrontations with Eastern Europe and with Russia, right? | ||
| But does this withdrawal of the United States from a secure and from a certain response to provocations or even a military attack? | ||
| Does that mean that this is the end of the understanding from the end of the Cold War, right? | ||
| The role of Russia since 1990 has changed considerably. | ||
| And the Ukraine war is what is One obvious indicator of that. | ||
| But there are others, provocations from Russia. | ||
| You mentioned in the North Sea with respect to underground cables and communications, which brings me to other kinds of IT provocations, particularly cybercrime, misinformation and meddling in democratic politics in Europe and the like. | ||
| So you might want to address some of that. | ||
| Perhaps it's a new kind of warfare which doesn't require not just manpower of armies, not just drone manufacturing, but a new kind of warfare that's taking place in the digital and AI world is something to contemplate as we move from what we thought was a post-Cold War order where NATO still included the United States. | ||
| Second of all, going to some of the larger countries, it's true, yes, I have been in Finland recently now that they've joined NATO. | ||
| But the question here of Europe's boundaries are particularly important. | ||
| I mean, you mentioned there being two Europs, right? | ||
| One being economic and one being military, including NATO. | ||
| But along the edges of what we think of Europe 27 is Brexit, is Britain, and questioning its role, particularly France is constantly poking at Britain. | ||
| Macron has an image of a united defense policy for Europe that would exclude or at least make British participation contingent in various ways, not simply on the economic front, but also military. | ||
| Then there's also at the other edges of the periphery that doesn't confront Russia directly, there's engagement with Turkey, Turkey being again the eastern flank of NATO, which has, and Turkey has also been engaged in provocations in another region of the world, the Middle East. | ||
| And that's a region that's confronting mass migration from, right? | ||
| So there's all sorts of deals that are going on at the periphery of Europe. | ||
| It's also true in Libya and other North Africa, you just heard about Libya and Trump, right? | ||
| You wanted to send people to Libya, but that's where the Europeans were sending them to North Africa already. | ||
| So there's a politics of Europe that addresses peripheral states and defense challenges of other kinds that don't just have to do with the confrontation with Russia and great powers, nuclear, if you will, politics. | ||
| One of the big things that I've been reading, The Economists and others talk about quite a bit, is how Putin can benefit from disunity among Europe, finding ways to divide European resolve. | ||
| And as you know, the last couple of days there were meetings of what they call the Coalition of the Willing. | ||
| This is an interesting workaround from the need for unanimity in the European Union, where Orban keeps vetoing various unified action. | ||
| And of course, Orban certainly sympathizes with Russia in spite of what's happening in Ukraine nearby. | ||
| The Romanian election was pretty iffy. | ||
| The Czech election was pretty scary. | ||
| On the other hand, Poland has joined the coalition of the Tusk is back and has joined the Coalition of the Willing and has many Ukrainians living on its soil at the moment. | ||
| So it has a lot of skin in the game with respect to the Ukrainian, well, the confrontation with Russia. | ||
| So one of the things might be to address is to think how Europe can hold together and act as a unified agent in security policy when Russia is doing its very best to pick off various states within the European Union. | ||
| I just read a thing that somebody's saying that I was just in Spain. | ||
| Spain and Portugal don't really care. | ||
| They don't worry about Russian invasions the way that Germany and Ukraine are doing. | ||
| So there's various ways in which they can peel off different countries that may not be willing to invest either their manpower, their troops, or even more so their wealth when they're trying to, you know, the southern periphery in particular is trying to develop. | ||
| Which brings me to Germany for a moment, since you're interested in Germany. | ||
| Before, yeah. | ||
| So when Schulz was elected, the Social Democrats had a very clear, with together with the Greens had a clear way forward for economic growth in Germany. | ||
| And as you know, it's been a very stagnant state, really been in recession for the last two years. | ||
| And the politics were such that there were it was difficult for the state to stimulate investment, right? | ||
| So they worked through the European Union. | ||
| It was one way to get capital for that. | ||
| So they got capital partly through the European Union because of this thing, this odd thing of the debt break, right? | ||
| And Merz won, saying he was going to respect the debt break and then promptly within a week agreed to increase expenditures for rearmament to what part of what you were describing with respect to a transition towards a military infrastructure, which they didn't have really. | ||
| Their army was really antiquated. | ||
| So now they have a stimulus for the economy, which will hopefully bring the sleeping giant of Europe's economy to bring them awake. | ||
| But at the same time, just as in France you mentioned Macron's political problems, Meritz's problem is that since the election and his breaking the promise about debt, the alternative even for Deutschland has gotten even stronger. | ||
| The latest polls show that it's actually pulled ahead of the Christian Democrats. | ||
| So I don't know whether this particular coalition will even be able to govern. | ||
| So one of the things that the original Schultz government had promised was an energy, was the energy transition. | ||
| And so you mentioned climate being one of the three kinds of security, which is global in the UN. | ||
| But in European terms, a lot of it has to do with investment in alternative energy. | ||
| And you see it throughout Europe. | ||
| So the question now it's not exactly guns and butter, but it is a certain kind of way in which resources and capital investment that was supposedly supposed to be for the green transition is now going to be going to military investment instead. | ||
| So these are just some of the things that your talk brought up for me. | ||
| Well the interesting thing is that my book has a chapter, Gorbachev Creates a New Europe by Breaking Up the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, which I think came a year before NATO, which was, you know, people who've been in uniform from Moscow. | ||
| So, but the theory of Cobden and Brei, free trade leads to the peace in the world. | ||
| And for Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, to sign on to that, I still have a turtle, what's his name, the creep socialist with four wives. | ||
| The chance. | ||
| I mean, I could understand who took a directorship from Putin. | ||
| That's one thing. | ||
| But Merkel, that's striking. | ||
| But it was the idea that war, it was Fouquet Frank, Fukuyama in a sense, the end of war. | ||
| Secondly, that Hillary's point, in a sentence, European states, member states of the European Union, think of the countries I was naming as big Texas, Big California, with the National Guard being more important. | ||
| You know, it's a coupling Gary Marx, it's interdependent, vertical integration, interdependence. | ||
| But geographically, it's the near abroad. | ||
| So you bring in the Baltic and let the Italians worry about the Mediterranean. | ||
| Well, the Italians will worry about Libya and North Africa. | ||
| Whereas as you go east, the Greeks have a very, Greece has a very high military expenditure for protection against Turkey. | ||
| You then move on, and Turkey's interest is not in the Middle East, it's in Kurdistan. | ||
| So we're getting all of these what you might call the near abroad as a category. | ||
| Because for Finland, the near abroad is Russia. | ||
| For Lithuania, it may be Koriningron. | ||
| Where does Europe end? | ||
| In Königsberg, when Königsberg becomes Koriningron. | ||
| Because that's where Immanuel Kant is. | ||
| These places have ceased to exist, but they all, the territory is there. | ||
| The concern is there. | ||
| The Bosphorus and Turkey has more interest of is looking for friends in Baku and Tashkent rather than Moscow. | ||
| And the biggest army in NATO is Turkey. | ||
| And TECO presents what used to be the Franco problem. | ||
| Does NATO defend democracy, values, or does it defend territory? | ||
| Do you hit them over the head with, well not Russo, the French Enlightenment, the encyclopedias, and you'd hit them over the head with Turkish brigades, divisions. | ||
| Frankly, I'm a book type, but I'd rather go for the Turks. | ||
| So I think the real problem in a number of these discussions is the simplification of language, the need for shorthand terms. | ||
| But the biggest thing is for some people, including the Philadelphia academics, well, I'm happy to be in East Europe, under the Habsburgs of Double Eagle Rule, is flexibility. | ||
| Monet had an economic, a political and a military community in mind. | ||
| He had three, not one. | ||
| But people see this as an opportunity for European integration. | ||
| Who in his right mind would want to be integrated in a stronger state that doesn't have much revenue and no military? | ||
| And when you look at the strategic autonomy of foreign policy, strategic autonomy used to be a code word for getting the French launch to keep America, operate free of the US. | ||
| But when you look at what they're doing, the closest they get to Europe is Kosovo or something. | ||
| But Africa, Senegal, the Sahel, whatever. | ||
| Greenland, of course, is an interesting problem of Europe because you might let Narva, Greenland will be harder to let go of than Denmark saying it has nothing to do with the Narva. | ||
| Though Estonia will be a harder seller to the family, perhaps. | ||
| I mean, we can discuss this different frontiers of Europe. | ||
| And Britain, of course, has the sea entrance to the Baltic. | ||
| It has, I mean, Scotland, 40% of the opinion polls, 45% voted for independence in 2014. | ||
| On the one hand, the Scottish government of the state of Scotland, I mean, the regional capital is in nationalist hands and will probably win the next election. | ||
| The British government has become less interesting. | ||
| But the Scottish government is anti-nuclear and pro-wind power. | ||
| So you get all of these intricacies that are not just what you put in a textbook, but what you put on the table. | ||
| Because it used to be what would Scotland do for money? | ||
| Now it's how does the SNP tell the NATO bridge to close down? | ||
| Well, one of the biggest unions in Scotland has a couple of thousand employees. | ||
| It's a source of revenue. | ||
| I mean, it's a, it's a Rube Goldberg, I mean, it's a complicated instruction, which has, I can smile because of the Rube Goldberg peculiarities, but I would, I would underscore what you say and, in fact, the need for people understanding these countries. | ||
| like Romania. | ||
| What do you expect? | ||
| I mean, look, I was in on the enlargements that I had data. | ||
| I'm also an honorary advisor for Transparency International on corruption at BOI. | ||
| And whoever it was who was the lead for the commission, you know, having letting Anne, instead of waiting for Bulgaria and Romania to get rid of corruption, which was not imperialist, but it was in their own goddamn interest. | ||
| I mean, if you were, I hope most of you would want to, if you lived in the country, Pipitin, I mean, I know people who live there, and they fight corruption. | ||
| So, but you get all of these things snowballing together, and it helps to understand them. | ||
| You may not gain an influence, but at least you'll understand why you know more than the people making the decisions. | ||
| Maybe you want to take some questions from the audience now? | ||
| Yes. Yes. Yes. | ||
| Anybody open it up? | ||
| I mean, I'm happy to ask one. | ||
| So I guess you've researched both the security dimension as well as public opinion dimension in lots of countries. | ||
| Now, I guess I'm interested in, like, if you take the coalition of the willing, as they call themselves, or other countries, right? | ||
| I mean, how do you think their publics would respond to some of the things that they are talking about possibly doing, you know, such as sending troops to Ukraine to operate as security guarantors or something like this? | ||
| Is this something that's possible or kind of what are the responses that they would have to deal with at home to take those actions, given that maybe the differences between public opinion and what elites can do and the ability of the elites to persuade the publics? | ||
| Well, it's the public opinion will follow intra-elite conflict. | ||
| The way I would put it is you have three groups, which is pro-Ukraine, would recognize that we're not Ukraine, but wouldn't question the government saying we must support the Ukraine. | ||
| You don't want to fight, do you get them to I mean, if I were Ukrainian, I would shut my mouth and ask for more from people who know if you want me to fight for you. | ||
| Give me the tools and we'll finish the job. | ||
| We have no choice but to do it. | ||
| And the same would be true of the Finns and the Estonians. | ||
| They have no choice but to fight, but to resist, unlike Denmark in World War II. | ||
| So you get an anti or a pro-Moscow or a pacifist. | ||
| There's not much in the way there's an acceptance that the government must have a military. | ||
| It's not anti-cut the military to spend on health, invest on education. | ||
| There's an acceptance of it. | ||
| I've underscored that most member states are, the median EU member state is Sweden and Portugal, eight to ten million people. | ||
| That would get, what, eleven members in the house, nine members in the House, slightly bigger than Missouri, where I'm from, I think, but it's not a big deal. | ||
| There's a lot of small countries, so they accept it. | ||
| The question, there are two issues here, because as Hillary and I were each making related points, it's not boots on the ground, because after all, the Russians have got a limited number of boots on the ground, and are willing, I mean, Putin is a breaking point, which is some other, | ||
| I'll sit in the audience and listen to somebody talk about when Putin has to start sweating. | ||
| I prefer an armistice and announced victory. | ||
| Do you follow me? | ||
| So you've got, it's the way in which you, proper leadership, let's say Macron, of the three, Macron understands this and has a disposition to say it. | ||
| The trouble is he's going out the door. | ||
| He's, you know, he's a lame fighting eagle or something because it's all about the next president of France, because all of these things are multi-year. | ||
| Secondly, Matt's problem is he's a chancellor of a state which has done too much of war. | ||
| The, I don't know, other people in the room, but the Germans are the most fiercely democratic. | ||
| And don't, I mean, my wife lived in Kent. | ||
| She saw the men coming back from Dunkirk. | ||
| She didn't like war. | ||
| My father-in-law was a Glynnipami. | ||
| I never met him. | ||
| He died down. | ||
| I mean, the generational turnover. | ||
| But the Germans, oddly enough, have kept the reaction against, the reaction against the French and the Germans are both well aware that the two world wars were European wars that the Germans beat the French. | ||
| And the Germans, even more than the French, don't want to do it a third time. | ||
| And the whole, I mean, the reunification of Germany, Meetron, and all that. | ||
| And coal. | ||
| I mean, the German identity is European. | ||
| It's not German. | ||
| I mean, you know, folk clubs in Berlin are not German. | ||
| My wife likes things, but, you know, my granddaughter is in forgiveness. | ||
| You know, there's French folk clubs. | ||
| It's called cosmopolitan. | ||
| But the mention of of war, it's very interesting when you go around things. | ||
| You know, the great museums, I happen to be interested in these things. | ||
| But they put on, you know, I live in accommodation of Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm University, which I think was still, I have dinner with an anti-Nazi Catholic who was warned to leave in February 1934. | ||
| Because he was first on the list, having been a student activist. | ||
| I then knew it as Karl Marx University. | ||
| Now it's named after Humboldtus Humboldt Kern, who would have been a Nobel Prize winner in the 18th century. | ||
| I mean, these museums, the monuments, you know, how they handle the third, you know, how you see school kids, I read these very carefully. | ||
| They don't hide their history. | ||
| Whereas the real problem is the U.S. is rethinking this. | ||
| It would be an interesting point to consider, get a speaker who had his or her feet on the ground to talk about a post-Trump American foreign policy. | ||
| Because half of Trump is fantasy. | ||
| Trump is one-third fantasy. | ||
| It doesn't happen. | ||
| Wait next week. | ||
| It's one-third building on the Tilt of Pacific, which is Chapter 7, which starts with Obama. | ||
| And in fact, nine of the eleven senators who voted against NATO represented states that voted for Trump. | ||
| In other words, you know, the Vandenbergs are scarce in this liberal Republicans. | ||
| I'm having lunch with one of them tomorrow. | ||
| You know, I'm all emotional. | ||
| No, you have to be careful how you raise serious interests, because they're carrying a burden. | ||
| They're a burden of liberal Republican history. | ||
| Where do we go after Trump and oppose Trump America? | ||
| We don't go back to Biden. | ||
| You know, I do think part of what you're saying, there is a question of what is Trump's imaginary in his image of this post-Cold War order. | ||
| And most of the analysts I've been reading imply that he's tilting away from Europe in part because he really sees a kind of tripartite empire, a world in which China has its sphere of influence in the East, and Russia can have Europe, in effect. | ||
| And the Americans have their sphere of influence in the Americas. | ||
| And so they overreact when they hear about China in Panama, and they want Greenland, right? | ||
| The idea is like, let's put this buffer around the Americas, and that's our isolation. | ||
| We'll be within that sphere, you know. | ||
| And China is our biggest rival, and it's in the East. | ||
| And so Russia can have Europe. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| Let the Europeans figure it out. | ||
| Yes, I would say different. | ||
| Look, you go back to Morgenthau, a realist perception. | ||
| The thing, when I wrote about the chapter on the U.S., you know, chapter three was the construct, chapter two was the Colgan Steel Community, | ||
| which was meant to be one 1951, which was a military political thing to deprive Prussia of the sinews of war to defeat France and march the gold back down into Bin Linden. | ||
| And Adenauer, who was a Catholic Rhinelander, was all for it. | ||
| I mean, these are the Europe's people. | ||
| But I like to give a speech too. | ||
| But, you know, in a calm, analytic voice, you can say, national interest. | ||
| The Germans, the Brits have a national interest, whether it links with Europe. | ||
| The Brits go back to balance of power. | ||
| You could bring that up. | ||
| Balance against Russia. | ||
| So we need allies. | ||
| We made a mistake balancing with the Tsar. | ||
| Well, anyway, we no longer have to worry about, you know, balance of power would be a national interest theory. | ||
| We're not Europeans. | ||
| We have no interest in defending France or Ireland. | ||
| We want to balance it. | ||
| America had an isolationist. | ||
| And the interesting thing, of course, is Tripod is a globalist Gerald L. K. Smith and Father Conklin. | ||
| And Al Smith, too, if you want a Democrat from New York. | ||
| I mean, you've got to go, is what is the America, in a nutshell, America has defined its national interests in global terms. | ||
| Europeans have defined them in European terms. | ||
| So you're halfway. | ||
| The question is whether the U.S. wants to de-globalize themselves. | ||
| And Latin America will tell you they're not going to let go of Panama. | ||
| They're adding on Greenland for reasons which I think is there's an empirical base. | ||
| So, but the U.S., a conservative, the next conservative administration, Republican administration in 2029, I'm going to frighten you, could have some people in there who are Western hemispheres. | ||
| But look, if you had the governor of California, my chapter on the tilt of the Pacific was that it used to be that it used to be European immigrants. | ||
| That's what my friends, the English-speaking union is about, and the National Liberal Club is about. | ||
| Those immigrants ceased to be the biggest. | ||
| Then it was Mexicans, then it was Latin Americans. | ||
| Mexico is a pass-through state as a fatal rush of NAFTA. | ||
| Now it's Asia and China and India are very big sources of immigration. | ||
| It was also interesting, I went to the Jefferson Memorial. | ||
| Yesterday, I saw hundreds of faces go by, zero taxis, one black and about three Indian families. | ||
| America is changing. | ||
| Governor Newsom, if he gets president, I'll text him for president. | ||
| They will have Ivy League professors who can build on what they learned from you all, some of the professors here, and put a different twist on it. | ||
| Oddly enough, the Brits don't teach national interests. | ||
| They teach diplomatic history much more. | ||
| I'm afraid we're going to have to wrap up there because we're out of time. | ||
| But thank you so much. | ||
| Please join me in thanking Professor Rose. | ||
| So again, you can get brochures about the books outside, European security, and European public opinion about security. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| This afternoon, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts will address the graduating class of Georgetown Law School in a conversation with the school's dean, William Traynor. | ||
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| Joining us this morning is Paul Salom. | ||
| He's with the Middle East Institute, the Vice President for International Engagement. | ||
| He's also the author of Thinking Middle East, the Substack newsletter. |