Bob Kagan

It has nothing to do with strategic issues anymore.

It's sort of very strange.

I just don't see how we could go back to the way things were, put it put it that way, because I'm not even sure I would advise the Europeans to accept the level of dependence on the United States that they did accept for, you know.

so many decades because we just are unreliable.

Because even if you do get a sort of transatlantically oriented Democrat, assuming that we have a free and fair election in 2028, but assuming that you do, where will the Republican Party be?

It's not inconceivable the Republican Party will be, at that point, even more sort of thoroughly America first and isolationist than it is right now, which means that any alteration of power

goes from we're going to flip back and forth with each election between, oh, yeah, we're your allies, we're your allies.

Oh, now you can all go to hell, you know.

So if I were making long-range policy plans as a Japanese prime minister or a German or, more importantly, Polish government, I would not say, oh, thank God the Democrats are back.

I can throw myself totally back into the American alliance.

So that's point one.

Point two is...

Do we see the damage that Trump has done?

He's been in office a little over a year, three more years, three more years of this kind of behavior.

What can be done in the next three years, what has already been done is going to be much worse.

And I think what we're going to start seeing now, we're already seeing it, is it's going to be a very rapid transition to a post-American world.

You know, everybody right now is scrambling to form –

New relationships to become less dependent on our states economically, politically and militarily.

Look, if your goal was to make sure that the United States would no longer be a global power and would be fundamentally policing the Western Hemisphere and basically bringing us back to where we were circa like 1840, that goal is well on its way to accomplishment.

Yeah, I mean, sure.