Latest / The Fourcast / Russia Ukraine: will Trump’s peace plan just lead to more war? | Timothy Snyder

Transcript

Russia Ukraine: will Trump’s peace plan just lead to more war? | Timothy Snyder · The Fourcast

0:00
Hello, and welcome to the forecast.
0:01
So Donald Trump has read out a letter from Zelensky saying
0:05
Ukraine is ready to negotiate and says he's getting strong
0:08
signals from Russia that they are ready for peace, too.
0:11
But if that deal boils down to freezing the front lines,
0:14
Ukraine surrendering its lost territory and American mining
0:17
companies extracting minerals from Ukraine, is that a real
0:20
peace and one that might hold in this new world of strongman
0:24
politics? Has Ukraine been bullied and
0:26
Russia indulged? And what does all of this tell
0:29
us about Trump's new world order?
0:31
Joining me today, the American historian and writer Professor
0:34
Timothy Snyder, an expert on Ukraine, Russia and Eastern
0:38
Europe, who's written hugely acclaimed books on tyranny and
0:41
freedom. Tim, thanks for joining us now.
0:44
I'm very. Glad to be with you.
0:45
You you know Zelensky well. In fact, he gives you the top
0:48
blurb on your your latest book on freedom.
0:52
What do you think is actually going on here?
0:54
Because after the bus stop in the White House and then the
0:57
freezing of American aid, the halting of U.S. intelligence
1:01
sharing, here we have Zelensky thanking the Americans, saying
1:05
he wants to work under their leadership and negotiate peace.
1:08
Is he being dragged to the table?
1:10
I think he's doing what he has to do, as they've been doing
1:14
since October, by the way. I mean, the Ukrainians have been
1:16
non-stop thanking non-stop for praising non-stop trying to find
1:20
ways to speak to Trump since before the election.
1:23
And it's only rational that they tried to do so.
1:26
On the other hand, what one can't smooth over is the fact
1:30
that peace won't be meaningful for Zelensky and for Ukrainians
1:34
unless the deal, and I really hate that word, unless the deal
1:38
actually involves some sort of treaty in which Ukraine gets the
1:42
chance to integrate with the West, in which there are some
1:44
kind of security guarantees. In other words, there's no way
1:47
to just kind of clap your hands together and imagine that
1:50
because we acknowledge that Trump has an important role,
1:53
which of course he does, that everything is going to be sorted
1:55
out. So is this a peace process?
1:58
No, it is not a peace process yet so far it's a war mongering
2:01
process. I mean, so far what we have is a
2:04
rush to which has invaded Ukraine in 2014, two, 1022.
2:08
We have a new American administration which in every
2:12
important dimension so far has made things easier for the
2:16
aggressor. Cutting off Ukraine from
2:18
intelligence, cutting off Ukraine from weapons, taking
2:20
NATO off the table, suggesting that Ukraine will have to make
2:24
territorial concessions, not being able to say that Russia
2:27
was the aggressor. These are all huge concessions
2:30
which shouldn't have been made or should have been kept from
2:32
the negotiating table, which puts into question whether
2:35
actual negotiations are in fact intended.
2:38
Thus far what we see is Trump making easier for Putin to carry
2:42
out a war. And so I really hesitate,
2:45
although it seems hard to use the word peace for this process
2:48
at all, because thus far it's essentially 1 friend making it
2:52
easier for the other friend to carry out a war.
2:54
What are those friends being America and Russia?
2:57
No more. Personally, I don't think that
3:00
Donald Trump has a notion really of the United States or its or
3:03
its interests. That's why I used the word
3:05
friend. I mean, I think it's Trump and
3:07
Putin personally. And that actually came out in
3:10
that confrontation last Friday in the White House where Trump
3:14
made it clear that Putin had hold of his heart.
3:17
He believes that he and Putin have gone through hard times
3:19
together and this has brought them close together personally.
3:22
And that this, it was clear that this actually moves him
3:25
emotionally more than, let's say, American interests, let
3:29
alone Ukrainian interests or the stability of the world.
3:32
I mean, what people say, who's spoken to Trump world leaders
3:36
say, is that he he passionately wants peace, that the killing
3:40
disturbs him and he wants it to end.
3:42
If this amounts to effectively a forced ceasefire, what is the
3:48
difference between that and peace?
3:51
OK, so let's let us, let's, let's call that the naive view.
3:55
And I don't mean that insultingly.
3:57
I just mean let's, I mean it in the sense of let's assume that
3:59
Trump is naive as as as opposed to malicious and all of this.
4:04
So the naive view would be something like, you can get
4:07
peace by making the weaker power stop resisting the stronger
4:13
power that's invading it. So let's let's say that Trump
4:15
actually believes something like that.
4:19
Of course, it's easier for the United States to put pressure on
4:21
Ukraine than on Russia. But Russia has not actually
4:25
indicated that it's interested in anything like peace.
4:29
The Russians, by the way, don't use the word.
4:31
They talk about negotiations. They talk about access to the
4:34
Americans. They talk about American foreign
4:36
policy aligning with theirs, but they don't talk about peace.
4:40
And their war goals the entire time have been very ambitious
4:43
things like replacing Zelensky, overthrowing the Ukrainian
4:47
government, setting up their own people in power.
4:50
And so if Trump, and again, this is a naive view, but if Trump
4:53
really believes that all he has to do is to get the Ukrainians
4:56
to stop resisting the invasion, he's not going to get peace from
4:59
that. He's going to get a wider war, a
5:02
war in which Russia is more successful in Ukraine, but also
5:05
a wider war in the sense that other potentially aggressive
5:08
powers will see this example and have no reason than not to start
5:13
wars themselves. So I don't think Trump is that
5:16
naive. But if we take, if we take the
5:18
naive view that Trump just doesn't like bloodshed and that
5:20
he just kind of wants it to stop, if he just tries to make
5:23
Ukraine stop shooting, what he's going to get is a lot more
5:26
bloodshed. His supporters argue that it's
5:29
too early to talk about security guarantees because this is a
5:32
negotiation, it's a deal, and the security guarantees come
5:36
right at the end. I mean is that is that more
5:39
naive view in your in your opinion?
5:42
I mean, I find it really hard for anyone to take that
5:46
seriously. And I honestly, I don't think
5:49
anybody does look by the terms of the break up of the Soviet
5:55
Union, but by the terms of the the main Russia, Ukraine
5:59
treaties, by the terms of their border agreements, by the terms
6:04
of Russia's basing agreements way back when, by the terms of
6:07
every agreement that Ukraine and Russia have made, by the terms
6:10
of all the cease fires. Russia's violated it all.
6:13
Every last thing, every single piece of paper has been
6:17
violated. So it doesn't, I mean, it's just
6:20
not logical to tell the Ukrainians, take our word for it
6:24
this time Russia won't invade it again.
6:27
Especially when Russia has made it essentially transparent that
6:30
the way they understand any ceasefire or any paper agreement
6:34
is we want the Ukrainian army to demobilize.
6:37
We want the Americans to go away.
6:39
We want the Europeans to get distracted so we can invade
6:42
again. So that the the notion that you
6:45
can separate a ceasefire or a peace from security guarantees
6:50
just doesn't make any sense, not in this real conflict as it's
6:53
actually happened over the last decade and more.
6:57
And the idea that the Ukrainians should just Trump should just
7:00
trust Trump, that up his sleeve, he has some idea of security
7:03
guarantees that you wouldn't really want to trust anybody to
7:06
say that. But Trump in particular, who
7:08
thus far has given away, given away to the Russians on every
7:11
serious point. I mean, it's not that they don't
7:14
have, it's not that they have particular animus about Trump.
7:16
It would just be a little bit odd for them to believe that
7:18
he's going to do that when there's no sign that he's going
7:21
to do it. Again, that they will always
7:23
come back and say, well, what's the alternative?
7:26
Where's your idea for peace? What would be a real peace
7:30
process then? Yeah, I mean, why?
7:32
Would Russia join it? Well, if so, here's the thing.
7:38
If Russia has given no sign of joining a peace process, now,
7:44
that's the important. The fact that Trump uses the
7:46
word peace over and over again or that Americans go on
7:49
television and say words like peace process doesn't mean that
7:53
there is a peace process going on.
7:55
That the Americans have gone to Saudi Arabia and they've
7:57
negotiated with Russians. That's not the same thing as a
8:01
peace process. The Americans have made it quite
8:03
clear that they have other things they want to talk to
8:05
Russians about, and the Russians have done so as well.
8:07
So we can't start from the premise that there's a peace
8:09
process under way now, because there isn't.
8:12
There's an invasion of Ukraine going on now.
8:14
If you want to get to peace, the obvious basic logical thing that
8:18
you do is you create incentives for Russia to negotiate.
8:22
That means making the war harder to fight for Russia, which of
8:26
course the United States could very easily do.
8:29
We could have tougher sanctions. We could help the Ukrainians
8:32
more than we're helping. We can make it harder for Russia
8:35
to fight the war. And that would create the
8:37
incentive structure for Russia to come to a serious negotiating
8:40
table because they look at the future and say it's worse than
8:42
the present, unfortunately. So that's not my idea.
8:46
I mean, that's just logic. Like that's just basic political
8:49
science, game theory and military history.
8:52
It it's it all points in the same direction.
8:54
If you want an aggressor to come to the negotiating table, you
8:57
have to make it harder for them to carry out aggression.
9:00
The problem is that thus far, literally everything that
9:04
Washington has done under Trump has made it easier for Russia to
9:09
carry out the war. They're not being incentivized
9:12
to come to the negotiating table.
9:13
They're being incentivized to carry out the war.
9:16
And they make this quite clear themselves.
9:18
If you look at if you look at their media and their official
9:20
statements, they are saying what I am saying, which is that Trump
9:24
is making it easier for them to carry out the war.
9:27
You you spent time in Ukraine and you've written about it in
9:31
in the book. I mean, if in order to bring
9:35
somebody to the table, you need to make the future look worse
9:38
than the present. And that is what Donald Trump
9:42
has done to Ukraine, isn't it, right now.
9:45
So what would you also have to make Ukraine think it can't win
9:50
and that the future looks bleak? Well, I think with Ukraine, the
9:53
calculation is a little bit different because of course, the
9:56
list logic is the same. But the future that Ukraine is
10:00
looking at is having to fight Russia without the United
10:03
States, because that's the future that we've now given
10:06
them. We haven't offered them a better
10:09
future than the one that they've now got, right?
10:12
What we're offering them at the moment is a worse future.
10:15
We're saying you should concede to Russia now.
10:19
You should concede our mineral rights to the United States,
10:21
your mineral rights to the United States, and you should
10:24
stop resisting Russia in exchange for nothing at all.
10:31
And So what we're promising Ukrainians is a worse future,
10:34
not a better one. If you want to get the
10:36
Ukrainians to negotiate seriously, you would promise
10:38
them a better future, IE number one, make it easier for them to
10:42
resist Russia and #2 offer them security guarantees so they can
10:46
believe that a war won't happen again.
10:48
And #3 have the Europeans, the British and others come in and
10:52
say there'll be lots of private investment, lots of government
10:54
supported recovery, membership in the European Union, and so on
10:58
down the line. That's the better future you can
11:00
offer Ukrainians. And again, all of that is well
11:02
within the the, the policy instruments that the United
11:05
States and other countries have. But giving them is cutting them
11:09
off and giving them a series of threats and setting up for them
11:12
a future in which Russia is just going to overrun them is not the
11:15
same thing as offering them a better future.
11:18
Now, you, you mentioned what other countries might take from
11:21
this kind of example. Could you just flesh that out a
11:23
bit? I mean, what, Why?
11:24
Why would this be so bad for the wider world if Donald Trump, in
11:29
his terms, stops the killing in Ukraine?
11:32
Yeah. I mean, I'd be very.
11:34
I mean, first of all, let's that just on that last phrase, if the
11:40
Russians actually stop killing Ukrainians, that would be a
11:43
major change. And of course, one that we
11:45
haven't seen. the United States has made major concessions to
11:50
Russia, I mean, of the sort that you would usually hold back for
11:54
very serious matters, major concessions.
11:58
And that has not altered the Russian war drive in Ukraine at
12:02
all, not one single bit. So I'm just going to say, I'm
12:05
just saying that premise of stopping the killing, right,
12:09
isn't holding up yet. And, and, and they're not even
12:12
really trying yet. But the if we get to a bad
12:17
piece, which is how I understand your question.
12:19
If you get to a situation where Ukrainians are in effect, given
12:24
the deal that American power and Russian power will overwhelm
12:28
them unless they accept what is in fact a surrender.
12:31
If you get to that solution, here are the precedents you're
12:34
setting. Number one, you're setting the
12:36
precedent that national sovereignty and the legal world
12:39
order don't mean anything because Russia invaded Ukraine
12:43
in a very straightforward violation of the most basic
12:45
principles of a national law. The second, the second precedent
12:49
that you're setting is that the aggressor will come out ahead
12:53
and you'll be setting that precedent in dramatic fashion
12:56
because at the moment American policy seems to be, and I would
12:59
love to be wrong about this, but it seems to be to reward Russia
13:03
with things that Russia's not capable of getting on the
13:06
battlefield on its own. And the third thing and perhaps
13:10
even more significant is that you're encouraging nuclear
13:13
proliferation. Because if we get the outcome of
13:16
the war where Ukraine is forced to surrender, then every medium
13:20
sized country is going to draw the conclusion they need to have
13:22
nuclear weapons to prevent a Russian style scenario.
13:25
And that of course will be a much more dangerous world.
13:28
It's also by the world, a world in which Russian and American
13:31
power is much diminished. But I don't think that the
13:34
Americans you've gotten that far yet.
13:35
I. Mean in, in this world in which
13:37
I suppose you'd be, you'd be living in a world of strongman
13:40
politics, You know, as you say, what wouldn't every country
13:43
think that the only way to respond to that is to have
13:48
populist strong men leaders or strong women?
13:52
I mean, let's let's take a step back from that because I think
13:55
there's something really interesting going on
13:57
structurally. I mean, not positive, but
13:58
interesting, which is that what the US is doing is it's, it's
14:04
draining power from the system. So as as a, as a set of
14:08
alliances and relationships and friendships, the United States
14:12
plus the UK, NATO, the EU, European partners, Canada,
14:16
Japan, South Korea and so on. That's as as a set, there has
14:21
never been an assemblage so powerful in the history of the
14:24
world. What Trump is doing with the
14:26
strongman politics is that he's breaking up that power structure
14:31
and he's creating a situation in which essentially everybody in
14:34
the West, but also including us, including the US, is less
14:37
powerful than we were a month ago.
14:39
So he's draining overall power from the system and he's but
14:43
what remains is like as the system drains away, what remains
14:46
are these rocks like these things that stick up that were
14:48
buried by the water before the the strong men, right?
14:51
So Russia's now relatively more powerful than it was.
14:55
China is a relatively more powerful than it was because
14:58
Trump has chosen to drain power from the system.
15:01
So I it doesn't follow from this that being a strongman makes you
15:06
stronger, is what I'm trying to say.
15:08
Being a strongman makes people around you weaker and therefore
15:12
it might make you feel like you can bully them, but it's not
15:16
making the US stronger. And so Europeans would be, I
15:19
think, quite, quite wrong to draw the lesson that a strong
15:23
man has made America stronger because it hasn't.
15:26
And I mean, in so far as Europeans are going to make it
15:28
through this, it's going to be because the European democracies
15:31
react to this. Yes.
15:34
I mean that's what I'm trying to get at in terms of how Europe
15:37
responds. You know, is Europe also in
15:40
truth weaker because it is still sticking to the ideas of a rules
15:44
based system, a world of order, a world with convention and a
15:48
world based on democratic principles?
15:51
You know, and will it find that as time goes on, in a world
15:55
dominated by Trump, Putin and XI and Modi, perhaps in India, that
16:00
trying to stick to the rules doesn't get you very far?
16:04
It, I think it, I mean, I think the lesson honestly is quite the
16:07
opposite. If, if the United States had
16:11
stuck to the rules, we'd be, we'd be more powerful than we
16:14
are. And of course, it's we're less
16:17
pleasant to deal with, and we will be so long as Trump is in
16:20
charge. But that doesn't mean that we're
16:22
stronger. We're weaker than we were and,
16:25
and, and Europe precisely has a chance to be relatively more
16:28
powerful by sticking together and by not allowing this to
16:32
continue. So if we do the thought
16:34
experiment, if Europeans draw the conclusions that they need
16:38
little Trumpian strong men, those little Trumpian strong men
16:41
will break up the European Union.
16:43
Those little Trumpian strong men will spoil bilateral
16:46
relationships. Those little Trumpian strong men
16:48
will will spoil trade relationships because that's
16:51
what Trumpian politicians do. And at the end of that, you'll
16:54
be much weaker. I mean, a very specific example
16:57
would be Elon Musk's interventions into European
17:00
politics, where you see that this specific idea is to find
17:05
clients, subordinate partners inside Europe who can do the job
17:10
of breaking up the rule of law inside Europe.
17:12
And, and obviously what Musk is after is not a stronger Europe,
17:15
He's after a weaker Europe, a more pliable Europe.
17:19
Could could we then just turn to what Trump is doing within
17:23
America and within American democracy?
17:27
He, he is thriving at the moment on an idea that he is liberating
17:32
America in some way, that he's making people more free.
17:36
He's freeing them of government restrictions, of government
17:39
spending, of waste of, of, of cancel culture and all of these
17:45
things. I mean, again, there is he in
17:48
your analysis. Does he make America more or
17:51
less free? And thanks for asking that,
17:54
because this is something that I'm, I'm thinking deeply about
17:57
in the book. And I think the way that
18:00
Americans think about freedom open the way for Trump and also
18:04
for mosque. Because we set a bit of a trap
18:07
for ourselves by defining freedom as just the absence of
18:10
government and as defining freedom as just opposing the
18:14
government. Because of course that's wrong.
18:17
Sometimes you have to oppose the government, but sometimes the
18:19
government creates conditions for your freedom, as with health
18:22
care, as with roads, as with public schools, as with
18:26
preserving the peace. The government creates
18:28
conditions which allow us to be eccentric, unpredictable human
18:31
beings when you have the right kind of government.
18:33
And so the real answer is not that freedom is for or against
18:36
government, it's that government is for freedom.
18:38
You have, you want to have the kind of government that allows
18:41
people to be free. But the logic that that Trump
18:44
and especially Musk can follow to the end in the US now is that
18:47
government's always the problem. Therefore it's always legitimate
18:51
to destroy government no matter what it's doing right is always
18:54
on your side if you destroy it. And that's mistaken.
18:58
I mean, logically, if you clear government out, then you don't
19:03
get some kind of tabula rasa. What you get instead is
19:06
oligarchy because the oligarchs were there.
19:08
And now, you know, as we were talking about earlier in Foreign
19:11
affairs, like if you if you if you drain the power of law from
19:14
the system, there's still things that are left.
19:16
There's still these rocks that are sticking up.
19:18
And then American domestic politics, those are the
19:20
oligarchs. So what Trump and Musk are doing
19:23
at home is a bit like what they're doing abroad.
19:25
They're draining power from the system.
19:26
They're draining functionality from the system.
19:28
And that favors the people who never like the functionality or
19:32
the law in the 1st place. So we're Americans are are less
19:36
free in the sense that they they don't or they have ever less of
19:39
an ally defending them against the corporations and the very
19:42
wealthy people who wish to exploit them and treat them as
19:44
objects. But also in perhaps in the much
19:46
more immediate sense that we're now having infectious disease
19:50
outbreaks, we're now having airplanes crash into each other.
19:54
We're, we're now, we're now seeing all, we're seeing the
19:56
very beginning of what's going to happen when we don't actually
19:59
have a government which, which works to service.
20:01
And I think that makes us clearly less free.
20:04
I mean, and that's leaving aside the whole political part of
20:06
Trump, which is an important part of Trump essentially
20:09
declaring that he's above the Constitution and so on, so.
20:12
What? What are the freedoms that
20:13
haven't been cherished if you like or have been or are being
20:16
allowed to let go? Yeah, I mean, the, the, the
20:21
that's, that's a wonderful way of putting it.
20:23
I think it's it's freedom in the sense of allowing to become
20:28
yourself. It's freedom in the sense of
20:30
being out, able to go out in the world and achieve things.
20:33
It's freedom in the sense of having choices in front of you.
20:36
When we define freedom just as opposing the government, I mean,
20:40
first of all, that's a kind of sad story where all you're doing
20:42
is opposing things. But secondly, what you end up
20:45
doing is you end up taking things away from yourself and
20:48
from other people. And very quickly, and this is
20:51
what's happened in the US, the story of being against the
20:53
government means actually a story being against other people
20:57
because you're saying, oh, well, they're benefiting somehow.
20:59
And I'm, I'm not benefiting. So now I'm against them.
21:02
And so if you're free, you're not trapped in some story about
21:04
US against them. If you're free, you're in a
21:06
world where you make choices that allow you to flourish and
21:09
you recognize that you're flourishing is consistent with
21:12
the flourishing of other people. That's what's being taken away
21:15
from us. All this bullying, all the sense
21:17
that might is right, all the notion you have to just repeat
21:20
what the powerful people say and you don't think for yourself.
21:23
None of that is freedom, of course.
21:25
And how, how do you explain then to people who say, well, if you,
21:28
if you want to hold on to these freedoms that in, in my terms
21:33
are sort of, you know, woke craziness and cancel culture?
21:36
What about my freedom to say what I think?
21:38
What about my freedom to, you know, only give rooms in my
21:42
hotel to people I morally approve of?
21:45
What about those sorts of freedoms too?
21:46
You know what was the answer to what?
21:50
One freedom, you know. Does one freedom cost another?
21:55
I think it, I mean, look, you're asking me now to describe a very
21:59
negative world and a +1 freedoms generally don't generally don't
22:03
run into each other. I mean, you can of course, you
22:05
can come up with examples, but in general, the job of
22:07
government is to create the gations where we can all be more
22:10
free. That's what government is for.
22:13
And so we can artificially construct these situations where
22:15
one person's freedom runs up against another's.
22:18
But but those things are going to generate conflict in a system
22:20
where you've already drained a lot of the functionality and a
22:23
lot of the freedom out of the system as as a whole.
22:26
As far as being able to speak your mind, of course, that's
22:29
incredibly important. But the freedom of speech rests
22:32
on the idea of having free speakers.
22:34
So free speaker is a person who's not afraid.
22:37
And if you look at the top of the American government now,
22:39
you're not seeing a lot of that. You're, you're seeing people who
22:42
echo the daily or the, the moment to moment pronouncements
22:47
of a leader as opposed to a president.
22:49
And I mean leader in the fascist sense, like they're orbiting
22:51
around him and saying the same thing.
22:53
And if you don't say the same thing, then you're you're
22:55
punished. And the word cancel culture
22:57
doesn't even begin to describe that phenomenon, right?
22:59
That's it's something much more violent and something much more
23:02
real than a sort of cancel culture.
23:04
And if in terms of thinking of being able to speak your mind,
23:07
it's very important to have a world around you in which you
23:10
can develop your own thoughts. And so if American policy, for
23:13
example, is to allow a few oligarchs to drive the entire
23:18
conversation with social platforms, then we have a
23:21
problem because then we don't have the local reporters, we
23:24
don't have the sources of education, we don't have all the
23:26
things which allow Americans to become free speakers, to have
23:29
their own, to have their own thoughts.
23:32
So that's that's how we see the issue of free speech.
23:34
Of course, everyone should have freedom of speech, but freedom
23:36
of speech is a positive, right? It means empowering people.
23:39
Yeah, I mean that that's really interesting.
23:41
I mean, the the people around Trump are clearly not free to
23:43
speak their mind or to challenge him at the moment and and
23:46
survive in their posts. I wonder how long or how far
23:50
away do you think that we are from a much more fearful
23:53
America? You know, we, we started to see,
23:58
you know, the immigration arrests.
24:00
You know, I, I, I wonder whether those sorts of images of people
24:03
being rounded up, locked up are going to start worrying other
24:07
people about their freedoms and how, you know, how comfortable
24:11
they feel. Well, that's, I mean, that's the
24:15
entire purpose of it. You know, the, the, the cruelty,
24:18
the cruelty here is the point. The, the, the idea is to, is to
24:24
make a deportation a spectacle. So it's going to be hard, at
24:27
least at first, for the Trump people to actually deport more
24:29
people than the Biden administration did.
24:32
They will. I mean, maybe eventually they
24:34
will, but for now, they're not. What they're doing is they're
24:36
making a spectacle of it. They're trying to show you that
24:40
the state can do this to you. And the way you're supposed to
24:43
react is either just say, oh, yes, I like this because it's
24:46
happening to those illegals or it's happening to people who are
24:48
different than me. Or as you say, you're supposed
24:51
to fear it. It's supposed to be one or the
24:53
other. Like that's that's the whole
24:54
point of deportation. Is this kind of spectacle of
24:58
spectacle of either, you know, of either of, of sadism or a
25:03
spectacle which generates, which generates fear.
25:06
And I think you're right that this is the important divide
25:10
that you if, if America is going to have a chance here, it's it's
25:14
going to be because thousands and thousands of thousands of
25:17
people take a little initiatives positively, not just to defend,
25:22
but to advance the things that they care about.
25:25
If Americans sit and wait for the next terrible thing to
25:28
happen, then the terrible things will keep happening and mounting
25:30
up and a certain point it will seem pointless, but it's
25:34
encouraging that we're not just a fearful nation at this point.
25:39
By by no means there are, there are quite a few federal
25:41
politicians, state level politicians who are saying
25:44
interesting and courageous things.
25:46
There are quite a lot of protests going on.
25:47
We don't see them because of the aforementioned lack of local
25:51
news, right? But but there are quite a
25:53
there's quite a lot of protests going on and quite a lot of
25:55
creative thinking. And there certainly is.
25:58
I mean, you see a lot of obedience among the people who
26:01
really support Trump. You see a lot of repetition of
26:05
of quite ridiculous things. But you don't see an entire
26:08
society which says, Oh yes, that makes sense.
26:11
On On the contrary, public opinion polls are actually
26:14
moving in a way which is, I think, quite rational and which
26:17
speaks to the condition that the President is creating in the
26:19
country. I mean, in Trump's first term,
26:21
and of course, you, you had your, your book on tyranny,
26:24
which was widely discussed and you sounded lots of warnings
26:27
about the direction America was heading in and the lessons from
26:29
history and the lessons from fascism.
26:31
And ultimately democracy kicked in.
26:35
You know, Trump lost the election, Biden was elected.
26:38
They rolled back a lot of the stuff and a lot of the trends
26:40
that it had happened in four years before.
26:43
I mean, do you think ultimately the American Constitution and,
26:46
and, and the sense of democracy that is instilled in America is
26:51
too strong to defeat? That would be a no.
26:56
So I mean, I'm not going to I, I know better than to try to draw
26:59
like a wave function with my hands on TV.
27:02
But if we imagine, you know, democracy, it's not like just
27:05
something just going up or just going down their, their bumps,
27:09
you know, their ups and downs. And of course, we got to a
27:11
pretty dark place by the end of Trump's first term where the
27:14
sitting president tried to overthrow an election which was
27:17
an, you know, an unprecedented event in the US and not that
27:19
common in general in the world, at least among advanced, wealthy
27:22
democratic countries. And he almost succeeded.
27:27
I mean, depending on how you look at it, he came within a few
27:29
minutes or a few or a few meters of actually succeeding at least
27:33
in throwing the country into constitutional crisis and
27:35
perhaps in changing the whole system.
27:38
And that that event isn't something which is just behind
27:41
us because of course, the big lie that Trump told that he won
27:45
the election of 2020 becomes a conspiracy theory or an
27:49
alternative reality that a lot of his followers still live in.
27:52
And living in that big lie allows them to be angry at
27:54
everybody else. It creates this artificial sense
27:57
of grievance, which motivates a lot of potentially very negative
28:01
action. So I wouldn't say we just got
28:02
over it and Biden undid it, although Biden undid an awful
28:05
lot of terrible things from the previous four years.
28:08
And no, I don't think that anybody's negative sense of
28:11
democracy is, is, is that strong.
28:13
I, I think if you're, you know, if Americans want to prove that
28:15
they're exceptional, they have to prove that they're
28:17
exceptional. And the idea that it just comes
28:19
to you from your Constitution or your history or your capitalism
28:23
or whatever I think is not only wrong, but it's, it's actually
28:26
counterproductive because democracy requires you to be
28:29
active. There's nothing, you know,
28:31
there's nothing about the outside world or about outside
28:33
forces which naturally bring democracy.
28:35
Democracy has to be about people who want to rule themselves.
28:39
And what Trump is essentially bringing to the American people
28:41
is a proposition. You don't actually want to rule
28:44
yourselves. You actually want to have a
28:45
strong man. I'm going to give you that
28:47
chance. And so now we see right now, now
28:50
we see whether people like that or whether they don't like that.
28:52
But I don't think it's a foregone conclusion at all.
28:54
I think it's something that Americans have to prove.
28:56
I'm hopeful that they can prove it.
28:58
But it's going to be a matter of action, not a matter of
29:01
institutions or traditions or anything like that.
29:03
Do do you understand why so many people are buying it, given
29:06
you've pointed out all the reasons why?
29:08
This may be great for the rich and for the oligarchs, but for
29:11
the common people, there's there's, there's not a lot to
29:14
look forward to. Yeah, there are a lot.
29:17
There are a lot of reasons. I mean, first of all, one should
29:19
never. First of all, the man is a very,
29:21
he's a very talented, very intelligent and very charismatic
29:24
politician. The fact that Trump's wavelength
29:27
isn't the wavelength of everybody doesn't mean that he
29:29
doesn't have talent. He does.
29:31
He's, he's very talented. That's, that's, that's number
29:34
one. Number two is for me anyway, the
29:37
lack of social mobility, American social mobility has
29:40
basically been frozen for 50 years.
29:42
And in that situation, it kind of makes sense that your hero is
29:46
no longer the law abiding, you know, prosperity inducing
29:50
predictable person, but your hero becomes the hustler and the
29:53
criminal. You like that he's a hustler and
29:55
a criminal because you think you have to hustle and commit crimes
29:58
to get ahead. And so therefore it makes sense
30:00
to like, even if you're you're not going to do it yourself, it
30:03
makes sense that your hero is a hustler and a criminal like Mr.
30:06
Trump. A third thing which is going on
30:08
here is obviously race in complicated ways and America's a
30:11
complicated country. But Trump is, is, is saying to
30:15
some people that you can do better when other people do
30:19
worse. And it has to do with race, it
30:21
has to do with gender, it has to do with a lot of other
30:22
dimensions. But Trump is offering a kind of
30:24
politics where he's saying, well, look, maybe you could do a
30:27
little bit better, but in the meantime, let's watch other
30:29
people doing worse. And that kinds of politics of of
30:32
pain we know from history can work, can be appealing, that
30:35
unfortunately that that works, that works on humans.
30:39
So there there are some deep reasons why a phenomenon like
30:41
this is possible. And one could go down the one
30:43
could go down the list, but including like incumbency in the
30:46
two party system. But all of that said, it's not
30:51
really going that well for him so far.
30:53
I mean, they've been very ambitious out of the gate.
30:55
They've done a lot of damage to the American federal government,
30:58
but they're not getting a lot of acclaim for it.
31:01
And as, as the stock market continues to decline and as
31:04
people continue to get sick, and as we recognize slowly that much
31:09
of the rest of the world, including people who used to
31:11
regard us as friends, are seeing this very differently, I I think
31:13
they're going to have problems. Tim Snyder, thank you very much
31:16
indeed. My pleasure.
31:18
Thank you. That's it for this edition of
31:20
the forecast. Until next time, bye bye.