Robert Kagan and Marianne Williamson: Slipping Into Dictatorship
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back a contributing writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at Brookings. His most recent book is Rebellion, How Anti-Liberalism is Tearing America Apart Again. It's Bob Kagan. How you doing, Bob? I'm good. How are you? I am well. I should have mentioned at the top we got a doubleheader today. We got Marianne Williamson in segment two. You know, it's kind of just natural, a natural pairing, Kagan and Williamson. People have been saying that to me. I want to start with your latest in the Atlantic. It is titled America vs. the World. I guess the thesis here is about how Trump and his cronies are openly celebrating the end of the post-World War II grand bargain and talking about how unfair that was to us and how we wasted so much money on it and it was too expensive and we're going to take advantage of and they have a new plan and a new plan that we're going to come to regret.
How's that for the thesis? Does that sound right?
Yeah, that's about right. I mean, they are reflecting, I think, a broader American sort of ignorance about how unusual the role the United States has played in the world since the end of World War II, how unusual the way other powers have responded to the United States. in the sense that they've been willing to let the United States be the strongest power in the world to place their security in American hands. That's just unprecedented in history. And it made for a very special kind of international environment and one very beneficial to the United States. And where Trump is now taking us is back to a world that looks a lot more like the world that existed before World War II or leading into World War II, you know, a multipolar world where everybody's fending for himself.
And that's a much more dangerous world for the United States.
Let's do that little history lesson because I was intrigued by that in your article. There's the period of what they called the long peace in Europe where we had some version of what they're talking about with a more multipolar world. And that peace wasn't quite as peaceful as the peace that we've had in the post-World War II, I guess. Yeah.
Yeah, you can read a lot of articles by sort of Trump sympathetic writers in foreign affairs these days about, hey, we can go back to a nice, you know, the concert of Europe and the multipolar world and the great powers all work it out. And and the problem with that analogy is that if you actually look at the 19th century, yes, it was a as these things go is a better managed multipolar world than, say, the beginning of the 20th century. But it was still the case that practically in every single decade of this long peace, there was a major conflict involving two or more great powers, you know, conflicts that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and disrupted economies. There was the Crimean War.
There was the Franco-Prussian War, etc., And if we were actually to replicate that kind of world today, we would be having major wars involving Russia, China, maybe Japan, Germany, the United States, pretty much once every decade. And I just think, again, people are so used to the broad peace among great powers that we've enjoyed since the end of World War II that they just don't realize that a normal world is one where great powers are frequently in conflict.
The pitch that's coming in those – I kind of even hate to give them the credit that they're writing in journals because it's kind of like monkeys throwing poop at a letter on the chalkboard. And we're saying, wow, very impressive. It's not deep intellectuals in the MAGA foreign policy movement.
How does Bob Kagan define the threat to the post–World War II global order?
But basically their pitch here is that we have a spheres of influence type situation where we get to – take more influence over what's happening in Central and South America. And the Chinese have their sphere of influence in Asia. It's unclear exactly what the Russian sphere of influence is and where Europe fits into all that. But let's kind of play that out and what that looks like in your vantage point if that actually came to fruition.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:13–3:47
2
How does Bob Kagan define the threat to the post–World War II global order?
3:47–21:44
3
What would a Trump pivot to ‘spheres of influence’ mean for U.S. allies and global stability?
21:44–54:11
4
How could China and Russia exploit U.S. retreat or chaos?
54:11–1:08:41
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Bulwark Daily
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