Transcription
Bad Bet. Ukraine made a bad bet. Europe made a bad bet. Again, it's not a surprise to me. I've been saying this for many, many years. Europe needs its own foreign policy. Can it have it? Of course it can. Europe is a 20 trillion dollar market. Europe has nuclear weapons deterrence with France. Europe has 450 million people. Europe has some of the greatest technology and, of course, the highest living standards on the planet. But Europe needs to get its act together. It needs to end the Russophobia. It needs to end the dependency on the United States. It needs to understand that Europe has to be one of the great power regions of the world, independent of the United States. I hope it can come to that.
Right now, Europe is just in a state of shock and confusion. He killed our people, and he didn't exchange prisoners. We signed the exchange of prisoners, but he didn't do it. What kind of diplomacy are you speaking about? What do you mean? I'm talking about the kind of diplomacy that's going to end the destruction of your country, Mr. President. Mr. President, with respect, I think it's disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media right now. You guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict. You've been to Ukraine, you say what problems we have? I have been to Ukraine. I've actually watched and seen the stories, and I know what happens: you bring people on a propaganda tour, Mr. President. Do you disagree that you've had problems bringing people into your military? Do you think that it's respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?
A lot of questions. Let's start from the beginning. First of all, during the war, everybody had problems, even you. But you have a nice ocean and don't feel it now, but you will feel it in the future. God bless you. Don't know that. God bless. God bless you. Will not have. Don't tell us what we're going to feel. We're trying to solve a problem. Don't tell us what we're going to feel. I'm not telling you because you're in no position to dictate that. Remember, you're in no position to dictate what we're going to feel. We're going to feel very good. Feel influence. We're going to feel very good and very strong influence. You're right now not in a very good position. You've allowed yourself to be in a very bad position, and he happens to be right about that from the very beginning of the war. You're not in a good position. You don't have the cards right now with us. You start having cards right now. You don't. You're gambling with the lives of millions of people. You're gambling with World War I. You're gambling with World War III. And what you're doing is very disrespectful to this country, this country that's backed you far more than a lot of people said they should have. Have you said thank you once this entire meeting? No. In this entire meeting, you said thank you. You went to Pennsylvania and campaigned for the opposition in October. Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who's trying to save your country, please. You think that if you will speak very loudly about the war you can... He's not speaking loudly. Your country is in big trouble. Can I wait a minute? No, no. You've done a lot of talking. Your country is in big trouble. I know you're not winning. You're not winning this. You have a damn good chance of coming out okay because of us.
Mr. President, we are staying in our country, staying strong from the very beginning of the war. We've been alone, and we are thankful. I said thanks in this cabinet. In this cabinet, we gave you, through this stupid president, $350 billion. We gave you military equipment, and you men are brave, but they had to use our military. If you didn't have our military equipment, this war would have been over in two weeks, in three days. I heard it from Putin: in three days. This is something maybe less than two weeks, of course. He has... It's going to be a very hard thing to do business like this. Tell you to say thank you. I accept that there are disagreements, and let's go litigate those disagreements rather than trying to fight it out in the American media. When you're wrong, we know that you're wrong. But you see, I think it's good for the American people to see what's going on. I think it's very important. That's why I kept this going so long. You have to be thankful. You don't have the cards. You're buried there. Your people are dying. You're running low on soldiers. Listen, you're running low on soldiers. It would be a damn good thing, and then you tell us, "I don't want a ceasefire. I don't want a ceasefire. I want to go." I look, if you could get a ceasefire right now, I tell you, you take it, so the bullets stop flying and you men stop getting killed. Of course, we want to stop the war, but I'm saying you don't want a ceasefire. I want a ceasefire because you'll get a ceasefire faster than a degree. Ask people about his fire, what they think. That wasn't for you; that wasn't with me; that was with a guy named Biden, who was not a smart person. That was with Ob... It was your pres... Excuse me, that was with Obama, who gave you sheets, and I gave you Javelins. Yes, I gave you the Javelins to take out all those tanks. Obama gave you sheets. In fact, the statement is, Obama gave sheets and Trump gave Javelins. You got to be more thankful because, let me tell you, you don't have the cards with us. You have the cards, but without us, you don't have any cards.
One more question to the vice president. I'm sorry. So if I were to ask you to, you know, take a crystal ball and gaze into the future for Ukraine, let's say six months from now, you're saying it's going to be a country that will probably have 20% less territory than before the war began. There is no guarantee of NATO membership; in fact, I think that's pretty much off the table. That Ukraine is never going to be a NATO member, nor will there be any form of security guarantees from NATO. You foresee that sort of a future for Ukraine? That's correct. But I think that there can and should be security guarantees from the United Nations Security Council. I would like to see a final arrangement secured in the UN Security Council because we should be aiming to make collective security in the world… The UN is very weak right now, but it could be strengthened if the US drops its unilateral veto all the time and if it comes to understand that in a multipolar world, we need a multipolar governance system. By the way, one of my favorite initiatives is to get India into the UN Security Council as a permanent member because that would make it a much, much stronger body, a much more legitimate body. But that's the place where guarantees and agreements should be secured, not in bilateral treaties.
Let's talk a little bit about the Trump second term. I know he's barely been in office for a month, but a flurry of executive orders, which have both domestic as well as foreign policy ramifications… How do you see these three weeks that President Trump has been in office in the second term? Well, it is extraordinary. There are some very positive developments. The most important is the normalization of relations with Russia that we've just been discussing. There's basically an assault on the US governance institutions internally, a dismantling of the regulatory apparatus, a dismantling of the federal civil service. This is very concerning. It is one-man rule. It's not by Congress; it's not by law; it's not by a budget vote; it's by executive decree. What we see is a remarkable deterioration of American institutions. We're a democracy hanging by a thread. We have certainly some institutional trappings of democracy; we have elections, but other than that, Congress is dysfunctional. It has no say in what's happening. We have one unelected person who happens to be the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, essentially dismantling the civil service, and this is something astounding to behold. I don't think that this is a good approach for a sophisticated nation to dismantle its institutional apparatus this way. I actually don't think we need that kind of revolution inside the United States. What we need is rationality, plans, organization, explanation. We're not getting any of that right now. We're really getting a wave of noise, of tsunamis. We don't know exactly what, but what strikes me overall is that it's one-person rule because it's all on the basis of executive decrees. Whether the court holds… Yeah, sorry, sorry.
Where do you see the opposition to this arising from? Is it going to be from the opposition party, the Democrats? Is it going to be through elections, but those, at least the midterms, are about a couple of years away? Or do you see it from the courts effectively staying this kind of executive orders? It's a little hard to know. If the Supreme Court says, "Well, the executive has all the power," the Supreme Court could hand over essentially the institutional apparatus to the president. This has happened in history. There was a Roman Republic which became a Roman Empire. I'd say the United States Republic is on very shaky grounds right now. There is no internal consensus about any of this. The Democratic party is in an utter state of shock. I don't know if it's essentially the same as the state of Congress in India, but it's a party that messed up so badly in the United States, governed so badly, that it is very weak right now. Our system has so many deterrents to third or new parties. This is one of the weaknesses. We have a duopoly of power that doesn't really mean very much, and we have a Congress, a Parliament, that is so corrupted by campaign finance that it can't even think straight anymore, can't even defend its own prerogatives, which are in the Constitution versus the executive branch. So this is an adventure for the United States. The rest of the world should watch with concern, but this is to a large extent an internal matter. What matters for the rest of the world is how the United States acts visa-vis the rest of the world, and especially if it acts peacefully or not peacefully.
I want to talk about the ramifications for the rest of the world twofold. One, I want to talk about this whole business of reciprocal tariffs. Trump, in the barely one month that he's been in office, has already announced tariffs against Canada and Mexico, which he put on pause. He's announced and implemented tariffs against China, 25% straight-up tariffs on aluminum and steel across the board, and of course, last week he announced reciprocal tariffs across the board again for anyone who trades with the United States. How do you likely see the rest of the world responding to this? Well, the rest of the world should do, or will do, two things. One is the rest of the world will put measures against US trade on a bilateral basis. So there will be a response. There will be a response from China. There will be a response from other countries. In other words, the US will become more isolated in international trade. The second thing is the rest of the world should continue to have an open trading system. What Trump is doing makes no sense economically. It's not somehow favorable for the United States. It's not somehow the US gaining and hurting the rest of the world. This is self-damage of the US. It's going to make the US poorer. It's going to make the US less dynamic. It's going to make the US less connected with the rest of the world. It's no advantage for the United States. It's just a mistake. It's based on frankly 17th-century ideas of mercantilism, that if you have a trade deficit, something is wrong. It's simplistic, and that's where we really are right now. But for the rest of the world, stay open, continue to trade. This is why economic growth is rapid. This is why India is growing rapidly. I was just in Ethiopia for the African Union Summit; they're achieving 8% per year growth. Southeast Asia is growing rapidly. China's growing rapidly because of open trade, and so the United States is turning protectionist because it's confused, it's wounded, it is upset that its unipolarity has been shown to be a myth. Well, okay, those are all psychological debilities of the United States, but they're not a reason to dismantle open trade and finance for the rest of the world.
The economic argument, of course, just doesn't seem to make sense as to why the Trump administration would go on this almost trade war with its biggest trading partners because ultimately prices increase in American consumers end up paying more. But the political argument, again, please feel free to correct or explain to our viewers why this political argument is flawed. The political argument is, you know, the industrial Midwest of the United States lost all its manufacturing jobs because China started manufacturing and India started manufacturing and all the rest of the world started manufacturing because of these open trading systems, and Trump and his MAGA base, his vice president, they all believe that if manufacturing has to come back to the United States, then they have to raise the walls and they have to become mercantilist or protectionist, as you said. Is there any truth to that argument? Well, this is the political argument, and it is the argument that put Trump into the White House two times because the swing states in American politics are the industrial Midwest: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, and Trump has won the industrial states by saying, "I'm going to bring back jobs." What he doesn't understand is a very basic point: the real loss of jobs is to the robots, it's to the artificial intelligence, it's to the… it's to the digital systems. You go to any factory—I tour factories all the time since I'm a development economist—there aren't jobs in factories in the kinds of industries that Trump is dreaming of. You go to an automobile factory anywhere in the world, by the way, anywhere, it has no people in it; it's got robots assembling the automobiles, and this is this is the future. So that's fine. People don't have to work in factories; they can work in other places and have a very good life and be very remunerative. Trump is trying to bring back jobs that don't exist. They don't even exist in China. You know, I went recently on an assembly line in China; there were 80 workers on an assembly line that was about half a kilometer long, but it was all robots, and I was told in this factory, which was an astounding factory, that they had more than a thousand workers on that line a couple of years earlier, but everything's been automated. So the idea that you're going to bring back jobs this way is just wrong. Trump doesn't understand it. He's picked people who are protectionist. The American psyche is wounded. It plays into politics. Anti-China is very resident in the United States; it is in India also, but I don't think it's correct or accurate personally. I think we need decent relations everywhere in the world. So the point is, it has worked politically, but it will not work economically, and the American people will come to see that. What Trump has on the agenda of dismantling the government, of pulling out of the climate agreement, of giving the green technologies over to China and India and others, this isn't going to lead to any kind of press for the United States.
And one final part, as we come to the concluding part of this interview, what's going on in Gaza? So you had Netanyahu, the first head of government to visit the White House in the Trump second term. Trump has said he wants to make Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East, no right to return for the Palestinians. He wants Egypt and Jordan to take in more of these Palestinian refugees. Do you see any of this going anywhere, or if you can sort of separate the sound and fury, and obviously this has caused a lot of outrage in the Arab world, what is Trump playing at? What is he trying to get? The situation is straightforward. There needs to be a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel. This is the only way to peace. Israel has become increasingly violent and militaristic to prevent a state of Palestine from emerging. American politics is completely in the hands of the so-called Israel Lobby, and it has been, no matter which administration, Democratic or Republican, for decades. In my view, the United States gave over its foreign policy to Israel. This is ridiculous. American interests are not served by perpetual war, violence, massacres, war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and increasingly, by the way, in the West Bank these weeks. Now, Trump, if he wants a successful presidency, should aim for peace, not only in Ukraine but also in the Middle East and in East Asia. It's not hard to achieve. The United States should change its veto of Palestine, which it vetoed last year in the UN Security Council, to a pro-vote, and then there will be a state of Palestine, there will be a state of Israel, and there will be a normalization of relations with Israel, which will give Israel real security. What we're watching right now and asking is, is Trump, like every other American president, simply in the hands of the Israel Lobby? We don't know the answer. If he has any sense, he'll save his administration and change direction as he has done with Ukraine. It's too early to say whether he will wise up or whether he'll do exactly what Biden did and what Trump did in his first term and what Obama did, which was do whatever Israel has said. I say that Netanyahu is the great wrecker of American presidencies because Netanyahu, to my mind, is a very violent person who makes no sense, and we ought to say no. There will be a state of Palestine, period, because the world does not want the war in the Middle East to continue.
The US foreign policy establishment went into overdrive with the idea that the United States now runs the world. It based policies on that unipolarity for the next 30 years. This was a very arrogant, unwise idea because the United States, after all, is only 4.1% of the world population, so it's hardly going to run the rest of the world. I think Trump is returning to a kind of realism that we are a multipolar world. The US and NATO are not going to defeat Russia in Ukraine. Ukraine has suffered terribly from, especially, the US provocations of NATO enlargement. I think Trump is going to do something quite constructive, which is just return to normal relations with Russia, and this is good. There are no fundamental obstacles to the US and Russia having normal relations.
What may that mean for the Ukrainians, though? The Ukrainians have been saying, "You know, we're not even part of the room where this conversation is happening. You're practically going to decide on our future, a war that we have fought for the last three years almost, and we're not even part of that conversation." So how could this likely play out with the Ukrainians? Ukraine is in a tragic situation, and I warned them of this. Henry Kissinger had a famous line that to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal, and I told the Ukrainians that they were going to end up like the Afghanistan of Europe. They didn't believe it. They put all their chips in with the US. No country should do that. This is a multipolar world. This is not a place where you put all your chips in with the US, especially if you sit next to Russia. So Ukraine could have had a much better deal for years and years and years. Now it's going to get a not-so-great deal. It's going to lose some territory. It will be neutral. That will be the essence of it, but it will continue. There will be a sovereign Ukraine state, a little bit less territory, but it's going to be neutral. It's not going to be a member of NATO.
How do you see the Europeans responding to this? We know there was a high-level meeting that President Macron convened. The Europeans are seeing this as a fundamental sort of break in the traditional cross-Atlantic relationship between the United States and its NATO partners in Europe. Two things: can Europe fill in the void when America retreats? And two, how does this fundamentally change the way the Europeans view their collective security architecture? Well, regarding the war in Ukraine, Europe cannot fill in for the United States. Even the United States plus Europe could not defeat Russia. So this is basically a war that was a terrible idea and is thankfully coming to an end. And whatever Europe says about continuing the war, this is stupid. They don't have any capacity to do that, and it makes no sense. But this is a basic change for European security and European foreign policy.