Anne Applebaum

Ukraine is pretty remote to a lot of people.

But I still think, and this is something I know because I've seen surveys about this, Americans still like to think about their country being a good country.

You know, we like to think of ourselves being a positive force in the world.

I mean, reasonable people can disagree about what that means, you know, and maybe not everyone's definition of good is the same.

But they don't like the idea that the main, you know, in the big issues and in the big arenas, that the main motivation of the United States of America is the wealth of a few people who are close to the president.

I just don't think Americans are going to like that.

And I don't know that it would be the main issue in the midterms, but I think it would be something that would certainly affect people's perception of Trump and maybe of the Republican Party.

That is literally the Russian, that is exactly the Russian system.

I mean, the Russian system is that you have companies like Gazprom, which are nominally private, but which are really owned by people who also run the country.

And they use, you know, their Russian foreign policy has been

kind of commercial and diplomatic and political, all mixed up for a long time.

And the purpose of a Gazprom investment in a foreign country would be partly to make money for the people who run Gazprom, and partly it would be to achieve some goal, you know, for the Russian state.

And, you know, and particularly in oil and gas, but not only, you know, Russian companies have been inseparable from the state for a long time.

And it's created, you know, this ugly system where all of government and all of foreign policy is really just designed to benefit this kind of ownership class.

And we are really very much at risk of that in America, that everything, you know, the government isn't for everybody.

It's not for everybody.

to make all of us rich and prosperous.

It's not to project a set of American values into the world, which has been true at least some of the time of American foreign policy, certainly since the Second World War, but you could argue further back than that.

And instead of being this, you know, the kind of outward representation of us and our values and our desire for prosperity and a good life, it's actually just designed for those people.

And that's really how the, you know, I mean, Russia is maybe the most prominent example of this, but you can look at other autocratic states and say the same thing about them.