Podcast: Not infallible: Russia, China, and US democracy with Tom Nichols & Anne-Marie Slaughter

Transcript

Listen: From the largest European land invasion since World War II in Ukraine to the essential “coronation” of the world’s most powerful person in Beijing, to one of the biggest political comebacks for Democrats in Washington, 2022 has been quite the year. Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, and Tom Nichols, staff writer at The Atlantic, join Ian Bremmer on the GZERO World podcast to look back at the remarkable power shifts of 2022 and what it might mean for the year ahead.

Were fears about US democracy in peril overblown or justified? Did China's Xi Jinping gain more power, or was his regime "cut down to size" when the zero-COVID policy finally caused massive protests? Russia's invasion of Ukraine upended the geopolitical balance around the world, but where will the war lead - especially if Putin really has no endgame?

TRANSCRIPT: Not infallible: Russia, China, and US democracy with Tom Nichols & Anne-Marie Slaughter

Tom Nichols:

I don't know how the international system finally heals from the reality that one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council is a nuclear armed rogue state. This is the thing that kind of keeps me up at night, that there is no real exit for Russia, even in the medium term. Even if Putin were to leave the scene tomorrow, there is a reckoning here.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and on this episode, we are looking back at the remarkable power shifts of 2022 and what it might mean for the year to come, from the largest European land invasion since the second World War, to the effective coronation of the world's most powerful person in Beijing, to a big political comeback for Democrats in Washington, it's been quite the year. Before we go dunk our heads in the eggnog bowl, let's talk about what it all might mean for 2023. I'm joined by New America's CEO, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Tom Nichols, author and staff writer at The Atlantic. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Tom Nichols, thanks so much for joining us on GZERO World.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Great to be here.

Tom Nichols:

Thanks for having me.

Ian Bremmer:

So I want to start with the war in Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky has just been named TIME's "Person of the Year." It changed immensely how we think about the global order, this war. Anne-Marie, start me off with your most unsparing take on what you think this invasion means for the world.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

So this war has simultaneously dramatically sharpened the geopolitical great power politics are back view of what is wrong in the world, and at the same time led us to focus a lot more on the global challenges of energy shortages, climate more broadly, food security. If you think about the Biden national security strategy issued in October, they said for the first time these two sets of challenges are equal, equally important, and both of them are dramatically sharpened by the Ukraine war. I will say, I think longer term this war will mark a high point in the willingness of nations to stand up for the world of the UN charter, but it will also be a turning point in where nations get their energy and will speed us to a green transition.

Ian Bremmer:

Tom?

Tom Nichols:

I don't know how the international system finally heals from the reality that one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council is a nuclear armed rogue state now. This is the thing that kind of keeps me up at night, that there is no real exit for Russia even in the medium term. Even if Putin were to leave the scene tomorrow, there is a reckoning here. I mean, Russia got the benefit of the doubt after 1991. After 70 years of communism, the rest of the world said, "Bygones, World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, a lot of bad things happen. We understand. Now this is Russia's chance." Well, 30 years later there isn't another chance. I mean that Russia's not getting the benefit of the doubt the second time around, but we are stuck with all the institutions in which Russia is going to punch above its weight in every way.

Even China, for all of our conflict with China about, you know in the Pacific as a rising power. The Chinese have gone out of their way to appear like they're committed to international institutions, that they're a good citizen at the UN. They have managed this very artful way of abstaining from very controversial things like the Gulf Wars. But this is different. This is now one of the most powerful countries in the world, at least by measured in mega tonnage, deciding that it will obliterate its neighbors at will. And I'm not sure, I wish I could say I see the long term here, but I'm not sure how this ends with the international system that we once knew intact. I think, I want to be optimistic and say I think the international institutions are going to prevail, that Russia will be the part that has to change over time. But this is something that I just didn't think I would see 30 years after the end of the Cold War. And maybe that was a lack of imagination on my part.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, I mean Anne-Marie, you talked a little bit about where this is going longer term in terms of the Europeans getting their energy from someplace else. That's pretty clear. And we can say that Ukraine's been invited into the EU, and all 27 member states have supported that. Okay, that's pretty clear. But this point that Tom just made, the broader point, which is that we've got this land war. We don't see any end to it. The Russians have 5,000 plus nuclear warheads. China's still their friend. In fact, China's planning on developing the same number of warheads that the Russians are. Is this world fundamentally and dramatically more dangerous on a permanent basis going forward? Or is there some way that institutions prevail as Tom hopes, and what does that look like?

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Ian, I'm going to sing from your songbook here a little bit. I don't agree with Tom that there's this dramatic change where suddenly one of the great powers, one of the permanent members of the Security Council is a nuclear rogue state. I agree that that may be the way the Europeans see it more than they ever have before, maybe the Americans.

That is not true of the rest of the world. I think the rest of the world, starting with India. Let's just take India, whom we have courted six ways from Sunday. India basically says, "I'm not about to give up relations with Russia. Russia supplies a lot of our arms, and frankly, you remember that Iraq thing? No, you are not a nuclear rogue state, but you have flouted Article 2(4) with equal abandon."

I really think many, many other nations in the world are looking at this war and saying, "This is a North war. This is an East-West war. It's not our war." And the biggest changes I see in the international system are all those countries. An Indian recently said to me that instead of talking about the Global South, we should talk about the global majority. All those countries are demanding their place at the global institutional table. And that means still not quite G-Zero, Ian, but a lot of turbulence in lots of different parts of the system.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, Tom, if the institutions do hold, does that also mean that the Americans are continuing to provide the same level of support that the US has in the first year, that the Europeans hold together and provide the kind of dramatic increase in rebuilding capabilities that the Ukrainians need? Or is there a real and proximate danger that that alliance starts to fragment?

Tom Nichols:

If the institutions hold, we will have no one to thank more than Vladimir Putin. This was, I mean, this is proof again that Vladimir Putin is a terrible strategist, because the Russians were getting what they wanted. Institutions were weakening, norms were, with the election of Donald Trump, norms had kind of gone out the window. NATO was... I keep thinking of NATO being kind of where it was in the late 70's. Well, we have this alliance, how do we manage its decline?

And suddenly, I mean 32 nations in NATO including Finland and Sweden, the European Union actually acting like a transnational union that has common interest. The Russians have created exactly the world they thought they were going to forestall. I wanted to make a comment on in that regard on Anne-Marie's point about the way the Global South or the global majority views this. They may not view Russia as a nuclear rogue state, but that's because they're not Ukraine.

Russia is still participating in these institutions. I mean, they're not North Korea. On the other hand, they are basically saying that all the rules of the post World War II system are off, that if you are large enough and powerful enough and have local military superiority, you can change borders and literally talk about genocide, I mean, just as though it's just a common thing on your nightly television shows, and suffer no consequences. And to say that other nations may not look at that as rogue state behavior, that may be because other nations have irridentist and border claims of their own, and maybe they're hoping the Russians shatter those norms.

So if the institutions hold, what that means to me is that we return to a world that says the default setting is that you do not change borders by force. That the large countries and the permanent five actually have some interest in solving these by negotiation and by mediation. Right now we have a UN that's functionally absent one permanent member even more so than say during the early Cold War when Gromyko used to... I always loved telling my students that a walk in baseball for a while was called a Gromyko, because Gromyko was always walking out of the UN. But they're functioning now even, I would say even less capably in the UN than they were in the 1950s.

Ian Bremmer:

So Anne-Marie, I'm going to push back a little bit just in a second on this Global South point, and it's not that I disagree, it's more that at the same time that the developing countries see this as a North war, the impact of this war and what the Russians have done on the South economies in terms of the availability of food and fertilizer, has been far more dramatic than any of the wars recently that have been fought in the South. Why do you think that that reality has not driven more antagonism or hostility towards Russia, more demands from the Global South that this war end?

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Well, in part because it's the US and the European sanctions that are creating the food insecurity, and to some extent the energy shortages. And that's exactly where we're saying, "Look, this is this fundamental principle at stake here. We just have to bear this burden."

And so the global south is in first saying, "Yeah, you are not bearing this burden. We are bearing this burden, and you didn't take us into account at the outset." That's a very important point that now frankly the US government's scrambling a bit to say, "Yes, absolutely we are thinking about these energy and food issues just as much as we're thinking about pushing Russia out of Ukraine."

But to Tom's point, remember Russia did this in 2014. Russia marched into Crimea, which was part of Ukraine, which had voted to be part of Ukraine and took it over. And everyone in Ukraine and around Ukraine said, "Russia is completely flouting the rules of the global order and this is a fundamental change." We did nothing. And frankly, if Russia had been able to take over Ukraine in the way it expected, Kyiv in two weeks, this story would've been very different.

What is true here is that where are people are willing to stand up, it's evident that the nature of war has changed. It's evident that the Russian military is much weaker than we thought it was, and thus that we can in fact support that people. I think that is a lesson many other countries will look at.

But again, the overall point to me here is that our institutions were tenuous to begin with, because in 2045, very hard to be ruled by the world, the victors of 1945. And Ian, as you say, the sort of global fallout from this war is sharpening the awareness on the part of so many countries that they don't even have a say, but they have to take the consequences.

Ian Bremmer:

So before we move on to our next topic, one more question, Tom, to you, which is given that Zelensky is been seen as the hero in many ways of 2022 and he's gotten plenty of praise for it. What's the biggest mistake, miscalculation that Zelensky has made so far?

Tom Nichols:

I think most of those were at the beginning and just before the war, of saying things like, "Stop saying we're going to be invaded. Don't cause a panic here." And so I think to take a guy who's, primarily had been in the entertainment industry, had some experience in local and regional politics maybe, but not as a national leader, those are pretty forgivable mistakes.

I haven't seen a whole lot of mistakes since. In part, as Anne-Marie said, the horrendous performance of the Russian military is making the Ukrainians look pretty good by comparison. There is, now and then I think his frustration leads him to lash out about, you're not sending enough and it's not fast enough as though western countries have no other interest in the world but Ukraine. But I think that's to be, the guy's hunkered down in a war zone. I think that's pretty forgivable.

There was one other point, when we're talking about the impact of sanctions and the global suffering here. I think that's a really good point. But I also think, it is amazing to me that the Russians keep kind of deflecting that. Because their diplomacy is not nimble. In 2014... I don't want to say 2014 was different because I was one of the people whose hair was on fire about 2014 saying, "The Russians have to pay for this. We can't just let it slide."

But there was a significant difference between saying, this was always a contested part of the old Soviet empire. The borders were drawn and there's a whole backstory that all of us here know about with Khrushchev deeding Crimea back and forth from Russia to Ukraine. But that's different than saying, "These people do not exist as a people and we are going to erase them from the map."

That's when it became a kind of 1991, 1990 kind of a Iraq-Kuwait situation. It's one thing to say we have a border dispute. It's another thing entirely to say this nation literally does not exist and its people are actually Russians,, and we are going to blow them right off the map and erase any knowledge that they were there and commit a slew of war crimes while we're doing it. And I think that that changed the way the international community views. And I'm glad that there's actually a bit of a hangover and some regret that 2014 wasn't dealt with more actively.

Ian Bremmer:

So Russia's in a dramatically different position, as Putin is going into 2023 as he was going into 2022. China of course, also is looking a little different, not because of the Russian War so much, but rather, I mean this was a country, we're all talking about the enormous power of Xi Jinping, the success of zero COVID, the greater influence they have all over the world. Yes, the Russia relationship, but also many more.

And now of course, yes, Xi has had this incredibly successful Party Congress, but China's economy's looking a lot more dicey. There's a lot of freezing of China's industry that's been occurring from all the state intervention. And of course we saw all these big demonstrations, not massive demonstrations, but still unprecedented in recent years in China. And now they are suddenly saying, "Oh, the virus has changed. No more zero COVID." Not going to be easy to pull off. How do you think China and Xi are positioned globally as we look ahead to 2023? Start with you, Anne-Marie.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

I think it's going to be a rocky year for China. I really do. For one thing, the zero COVID policy fed on itself, because as people stayed locked down and they didn't get vaccinated, and people will look back and say, "Why on earth didn't the Chinese government with all its power simply insist on vaccinations, even with a less effective vaccine?" But once you've done that, you've got a population of course of over a billion people, including many, many old people who are not vaccinated.

And so now we are going to see deaths. And the question is how many, how fast? But that will have its own fallout both socially and economically for Xi, and in addition to just navigating the overall shift in policy. On the other hand, he himself is now traveling. It is really striking to me that he is in Saudi Arabia talking to MBS and essentially kind of cementing an autocracy side of the ledger in Biden's democracies versus autocracies. But I still think both economically and socially, it's going to be a turbulent year.

Ian Bremmer:

Now Anne-Marie, you'll remember at the beginning of the pandemic of course, and it did start in China, there were lots of deaths in Wuhan that the Chinese government never admitted to, right to today. Do you think as we start to see these deaths, we're going to see huge obscurants from the Chinese in terms of what's happening on the ground once again, and can they get away with it in your view?

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

I certainly think there's going to be plenty of obscurants. That's what the Chinese government does. But it is very striking that right after this Congress where Xi is supposedly at the apex of his power, you see successful demonstrations, right? He is changing his policy. That means he thinks he can't just maintain it. It also means that notwithstanding probably the most repressive apparatus in the world, or certainly one of them, he couldn't stop these demonstrations. They went from city to city.

There are small demonstrations that are local all the time in China. It's one of the ways in fact that the Chinese government lets Chinese blow off steam and figures out how to adjust policy. But if you see anything like the deaths that we saw in the first four or five months of the pandemic, and it's not going to be possible to shut that information down. And at the very least, his infallible leader who is guiding China toward 2049 when it will become a middle income country and be recognized as the great power that it has always deserved to be, that narrative is going to be badly dented. And again, you're going to see economic fallout as well.

Ian Bremmer:

So Tom, how big a bump in the road is this for China's role on the global stage?

Tom Nichols:

In the short term, I find it really striking that before the pandemic, because we were heading into this, the narrative that China, the ascendant power, 10 feet tall, super. I mean, maybe I'm not being a China expert. I'm maybe bringing too much memory of the Cold War to this, of the Soviets were 10 feet tall and the Soviet system was better than ours. And we kind of played that all over again, that China has really poised to overtake us.

And what's really striking about this is how the Chinese regime has been revealed to be, has been cut down to size as just another government that has to deal with a bunch of problems that governments have to deal with, like a pandemic. And there's even, to me, again, it feels like a little bit of a cold war echo. If only they weren't using their own less effective vaccine. I mean, suddenly people are comparing and saying, "In the United States we have our problems, but we're all walking around. Businesses are open, New York is thriving, Los Angeles is open for business." And in China-

Ian Bremmer:

A million people died.

Tom Nichols:

Yeah, a lot of people died, and a lot of people died in China. But a lot of people died early in the pandemic, and now primarily are people who are not dying because they are not vaccinated, but because they refuse to be vaccinated. Whereas in China, we're sitting here having this conversation about why aren't they going on a campaign of vaccination. And the idea that the Chinese could just clamp down on dissent and could continue their role as an economic superpower and maintain all of that kind of facade of invulnerability. And I think that's frankly a good thing, that that facade has been kind of pulled down a bit. I'm sorry for the loss of life and the loss of productivity and all the other things that have happened from the pandemic, but I think we were kind of convincing ourselves of a narrative that the Chinese government could do almost anything.

Ian Bremmer:

What you seem to be saying, Tom, and I take the point, but I want to frame it the other way. Chinese demonstrations, they're running a failed policy. And on the back of those demonstrations, they recognize and decide that they actually need to change their policy to be more effective. Is that a sign of Chinese weakness or is that actually a sign of Chinese strength? I mean, you're not seeing that in Iran, you're not seeing that in Russia. I mean other authoritarian states where people demonstrate and they're clearly, those demonstrations are in favor of policies that would be better for the country and the government is completely unwilling to budge at all. In China it's very different. I'm wondering, do you actually see this as weakness or should we see the strength?

Tom Nichols:

Well, first I reject the binary choice of weakness or strength. My point is that it has pulled down a facade of Chinese omnicompetence and invulnerability. But I want to take issue with you. The Iranians and the Russians are making changes. The Iranians have, even if it's temporary, and we don't know how long this will go, but they've suspended this whole approach with the morality police, and claiming they're getting rid of it in the wake of these.

Putin has claimed his mobilization, which was a disaster, is now over even though it did nothing. And he's on television at least pretending to meet and share the pain with Russian mothers, and just gave a speech where he said, "Hey, we're not crazy. We know what nuclear weapons are. We're not going down that road." So I disagree with you. I think that these regimes that try to project the image of invulnerability and rigidity have in fact had to step back.

And I think with China, it is really shocking to see these kinds of demonstrations and people cutting the bolts on fences. Because remember, here in the United States, there were a lot of people who thought that somehow China had managed to handle this with a much more complacent population. And I think also there's an issue here again of, about western science, that the Chinese are... And this is actually, I bring this up because people, kind of ordinary folks who are not news junkies like us, have actually asked me out of nowhere, which tells me that it's getting in into the public consciousness and a question I can't answer, which is why won't the Chinese just use a better vaccine like we do? Which struck me as a very kind of western sort of response.

Ian Bremmer:

I agree with you that the Russians and Iranians have responded in an official way. I just think it's symbolic and not actually a change in policy, where in China they are changing policy. But I take your point completely that this does show cracks in the facade. There's no question about that.

Anne-Marie, the other big conversation that's happening around China right now is to what extent there is and or there should be a level of economic decoupling between the West and China, both on the national security side, but also in terms of more investment at home, more focus on domestic workforces. All of these things very different than the globalization arguments of course that dominated the global economic conversations for so many decades. How do you feel about this in the China context?

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

There has been some decoupling and there will undoubtedly be more, but it has to be limited. I think it will be limited simply because for whatever is happening to China and Chinese growth this year, it has still been the fastest growing economy, the 100-pound gorilla or 800-pound gorilla on the global stage in the last 20 years. And so we're shifting things to Vietnam, we're shifting manufacturing back home. Some degree of that, absolutely. The pandemic showed us that we were too dependent.

But I look around at US business and global business. I look at the European Union, and again, the EU is China's greatest trading partner. We are not moving to anything remotely like not only full decoupling, even 50% decoupling. I think you're looking at 10 or 15%. That still has an impact given how big the numbers are. But I think it's worth remembering China is far better governed than either Russia or Iran.

China really has delivered a far better standard of living for its people. The Chinese government is broadly supported. There is absolutely dissent, but I think it doesn't make sense to compare it to Iran and Russia given economic policy, social policy, even health policy, even with all these difficulties. So overall, China's a force. We have to continue to engage with them.

And then going back to where we started on the global challenges, so food security, energy security, water, climate change, pandemics. If there's another pandemic and there will be, we have to work with China. We really need China. So full decoupling, even if it were possible, or even limited decoupling in areas like scientific cooperation, exchange, students, environmental working together, we need all that because without China, we really don't have a chance of addressing these really big global threats.

Ian Bremmer:

And as you say, Russia and Iran, there is a much greater level of decoupling that's happening with those economies and the US and its allies in China. It is, at least so far, much more constrained for many of the reasons you say. Okay. One more big topic, got to get to the United States. I want to ask Tom, given what we just saw from the midterms, were people too overexcited about how much trouble American democracy is in?

Tom Nichols:

Oh, no. I think we're still completely underestimating how much danger American democracy is in. The midterms, I wrote a piece for the Atlantic where I referred to them as cemocracy's Dunkirk. We had a narrow escape. Had some small margins gone the other way, we would be in a world of trouble right now. I mean, do the counterfactual in your mind of election deniers and various other kind of kooks and weirdos taking over state offices, because I think one problem is we still concentrate too much on the big picture of who's the president, who controls the Senate.

But when you look at things like secretary of state, state legislative chambers, governorships and so on, we had a narrow escape. People who have basically said, "We are trying to get elected, but through the democratic process so that we can therefore never have to suffer the vagaries of the democratic process again." When you have a guy running, like in Wisconsin who said, "If I win, the Republicans will never lose another election." Well, that's as unAmerican and anti-constitutional as it gets.

Ian Bremmer:

The good news is that at least you couldn't remember his name, so he didn't have that much stickiness.

Tom Nichols:

Right. Tony, it was Tony...And I can't say, and his name went out of my mind. That just may be age on my part, though.

Ian Bremmer:

No, no, it's because you just decided, you willed yourself not to remember that name. And I think that's good. We can do that.

Tom Nichols:

But we've had a narrow escape, and it's not done. I mean, they're all coming back for another bite of the apple in 2024. So the idea that we're somehow overestimated threat to democracy. If anything, I think we are way too complacent. I think especially young people whose turnout was... We're all patting each other on the back for youth turnout being 27%, which is abysmal. This is their future. This is what we're voting on, but we're still too complacent. We're still too unwilling to really pay attention, especially to midterm voting. So no, I don't think democracy's out of the woods here in the United States by a long shot.

Ian Bremmer:

Anne-Marie?

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Well, I agree in many ways. If you look at these margins, so Raphael Warnock won, we're still, by 1%, three quarters of a percent. These are tiny, tiny margins. They could have gone the other way. So at the very least, if it's a turning point, it's just barely a turning point. And I think it's only a turning point depending, and I agree with Tom, on people continuing to perceive that democracy really is at risk.

At the same time, to me, probably the most important part of the midterms is not Democrat versus Republican, but Republican versus Republican. It's the rise of DeSantis against Trump that is critical, I think, to ultimately isolating the Trump wing of the Democratic party. And DeSantis is actually proving that you can pursue Trump policies, but without Trump's willingness to just trash the system completely. Long term, there's still a danger there. But for my money, it's very important to rule out the most extreme, the people who are willing, exactly as Tom said, to simply stand against the Constitution and to claim that their views are more important than our democracy. And that's that split within the Republican party that I think we will see evolve in very important ways over the next two years.

Ian Bremmer:

Isn't it fair to say that the problem with Trump was primarily not Trump policies? I mean, a lot of Trump policies weren't that different from Biden policies on the foreign policy side, if you look at trade or if you look at China, you look at a bunch of other issues. On the domestic policy side, a lot of what Trump did was fairly standard Republican pro business, a lot of his appointments, the taxation policy, all the rest. But in terms of his willingness to break things, that goes well beyond anything we've seen from a President of the United States in history.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

No, I agree. And there is the view that says, actually you should be more worried if you're a Democrat about DeSantis because he's smarter. He's not going to generate the antibodies that Trump did, and he is going to put in the same policies. I still think that the Trump phenomenon of really being willing to try to break everything, and indeed Tom wrote a wonderful piece where he said, "To acclimatize the country to ghastly behavior, to unthinkable behavior, to calling the press the enemy of the people, to a narrative that meant you really, if you had your eyes closed, you could have been in a dictatorship," that that is deeply corrosive. And it isn't just a sort of superficial thing. It's something we have to take on on its own terms as well as, again, if you're a Democrat fight, many of the policies.

Ian Bremmer:

Now Tom, Trump is running for the presidency, though it's hard to see it in the sense that he's not actually campaigning yet. What do you think the likelihood is? Give me a percentage that he actually can get the nomination.

Tom Nichols:

Oh wow. If I had to pick right now, I'd say it's well over 60, 70% simply because he will, because the base is with him. And this is the one place, and I agree almost entirely with everything Anne-Marie just said, except for the way that this discussion I think is isolating Trump as part of the problem. The problem is that the GOP base wants these kinds of politicians. It's not just Trump. They want Kari Lake, they want Doug Mastriano. A million and a half people in Georgia thought that Herschel Walker should be a United States senator. I mean, it's almost like we, again, we've becoming inured to this like. Oh, of course Herschel Walker, somebody who would've been laughed out of the room. Doug Mastriano, somebody that would've been just ruled out of bounds by a better Republican party 10 years ago, suddenly gained millions of votes.

And so I think the problem here is that, and I'm going to steal a line from my colleague David Frum, the next time around, the velociraptors have learned how to work the doorknobs. And that it's not much of an improvement if DeSantis runs by basically grabbing the reins of the same base and then governing in the same way, but less offensively. I mean, if it's just Trump without the F bombs, it's not an improvement. If we just take the position that anybody but Trump, as long as Trump doesn't win, that GOP base is still there.

You still have incredibly course opportunists like Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis and all the others who will happily take that mantle and be as much of a threat, maybe in some ways more of a threat to democracy because they will do it without all of the fireworks. They will simply put their same cronies in. Because that's the other thing that happened during the Trump period that we didn't really think about of, that we had senior people in the defense department like Kash Patel, that we had all of these kind of third stringers and opportunists and general, Sebastian Gorka was wandering around the White House. That could happen again. And that's really, I think, incredibly dangerous. And that we never even think about.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

I think that's a very fair point. And the broader idea is really the politics of outrage, the politics of trashing, the politics of just anything goes because I'm so mad at those folks that I'm willing to just take them down and democracy with it. That's right. And to the extent that is still the base and that is who DeSantis or anybody else is going to play to. I think Tom does make a very important point. I was seeing something different, that DeSantis is finding a way back to something that looks closer to a traditional Republican party, but it may also be that this is a little like 1912 where really you're going to see a split in the Republican party that will really divide it, and a new Republican party will have to rise from the ashes, presumably after a number of election cycles.

Ian Bremmer:

Nobody knows until these people actually govern, of course. But I mean, I would certainly argue that when you get outside of Trump and you talk about the major governors, whether it's DeSantis or Youngkin or others, that these are people that actually on the governance issues day-to-day in their states are trying to be capable. And they may have radically different political views than Newsom or Whitmer do in California and in Michigan, but they are, to say that they are even worse than Trump, I think both antagonizes people that support them and also is overly filter bubble-ish in terms of everything has become just tribal. And so that we're going to paint that together. That's a debate for another day.

Tom Nichols:

Not all of them mean. But I admit it when I look at somebody like Youngkin and I say, "The guy's just a conservative Republican governor. That's just how it is." And then he goes, and he campaigns with Kari Lake.

Ian Bremmer:

Right? Because I mean, they're going to-

Tom Nichols:

At some point the new Republicans have to say, "I don't support election denying conspiracy theorists," and they can't do it. So even somebody who seems as kind of mild mannered as Youngkin, I ask myself, "If you really are somebody who will govern according to constitutional norms," and I think most of these people still have that, it's part of our American DNA. But if you feel that part of the way you have to achieve power is to throw your arm around Kari Lake, or if you're J.D. Vance and you're sharing the stage with Marjorie Taylor Greene, I'm sorry, but at some point I question the constitutional fidelity of a man who gets on a stage with Marjorie Taylor Greene. I don't think that's overly bubble-ish or worrisome to say, "If you're on a stage taking the endorsement of somebody like Greene, I have concerns about your constitutional fidelity."

Ian Bremmer:

So final question, because we've been picking on the GOP side here. I want to ask Anne-Marie, if Joe Biden comes to you right now and says, "Anne-Marie, do you think I should run again?" What do you tell him?

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Right this minute, I'd say, yes.

Ian Bremmer:

You would. Why?

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

I would actually say yes, because I think he's accomplished a lot. Because he is, in fact, he was able, for many many reasons, this wasn't love of Biden, but he had delivered some real legislative achievements. And I think actually as the new House and some new senators try to sort themselves out, there may be at least slivers of opportunity for more bipartisan success, mostly because I do not see a democratic field that really can succeed him in a way that will not be deeply damaging in terms of innerness and fighting. And I think he is proving himself to be a good president.

Now, look, his health, sort of fitness, that's a matter for him and his family to decide and his doctors, but there's no sign right now that he really can't do it. And I actually, I look at this two years in and I think he's done a lot of very important stuff, and that actually is, I think, the strongest platform to run on right now.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay. Tom, Biden's your gladiator, your Caesar. Give me the thumb.

Tom Nichols:

I'm with Anne-Marie on this. I'm amazed that-

Ian Bremmer:

My goodness.

Tom Nichols:

I'm amazed that this is even a question, because if you just took Biden's kind of old guy ambience out of this and said, here is the record of a first term president, with all of these legislative achievements, holding NATO together during a major European land war, escorting the economy out of the doldrums, looks like we're starting to tame inflation, on and on and on. And a first term president with his party in the majority not only completely limits the gains in the House, but actually gains seats in the Senate. There would be nobody saying, "You know what that guy ought to do? He needs to step down." No one would say that. It's purely a matter of, because he's old. And yet Donald Trump is within a few years of Joe Biden's age. We're so used to Joe Biden back in his day being that kind of Jason Sudeikis sort of parody of himself, that now he's a 79-year-old guy and everybody says, "Yeah, he's lost the step."

Ian Bremmer:

Now you know the problem we have, Tom, is that the older you get, the younger those people look to you.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

That is true.

Tom Nichols:

Yeah. Well, I just had a birthday last week and I'm getting older, so Joe Biden doesn't seem that old to me anymore.I mean he became president 15 years from where I am now. So I want people to cut it out with all this old guy talk, because I'm thinking that's pretty cool right about now.

Ian Bremmer:

That's a tough talk from Tom Nichols. Now Tom Nichols, Anne-Marie Slaughter, always great to see you. Glad to bring you together on television for the first time.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

It was great fun. Thank you.

Tom Nichols:

Thank you.

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