Podcast: Can the US get its act together? Susan Glasser & Peter Baker on "the world’s greatest geopolitical crisis"

TRANSCRIPT: Can the US get its act together? Susan Glasser & Peter Baker on "the world’s greatest geopolitical crisis"

Ian Bremmer:

Hello, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended interviews with the newsmakers that I talk to each week on my public television show.

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are looking ahead to the 2022 US midterm elections with two of Washington's top, top reporters, DC power couple, Susan Glasser and Peter Baker. Yes, they date. And they're also out with the best-selling new book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021. And as you'll hear in a minute, I spoke with them in front of a live studio audience at Chelsea Factory, a nonprofit art space in Downtown Manhattan. Very funky. There's a lot to cover, so let's get to it.

Announcer:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, places clients' needs first by providing responsive, relevant, and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

In a world upended by disruptive international events, how can we rebuild? On season two of Global Reboot, a Foreign Policy podcast in partnership with the Doha Forum, FP editor-in-chief Ravi Agrawal engages with world leaders and policy experts to look at old problems in new ways and identify solutions to our world's greatest challenges. Listen to season two of Global Reboot wherever you get your podcasts.

Ian Bremmer:

Friends, Romans, divided Countryman. Please help me in welcoming Susan Glasser and Peter Baker. So you wrote a book about Trump.

Peter Baker:

Yeah

Ian Bremmer:

It's doing incredibly well. The audience doesn't want to hear more about Trump. I keep hearing people saying they don't want to hear more about Trump. You're giving us more about Trump. Do people not know what they want?

Peter Baker:

Yeah.

Susan Glasser:

I mean, have you ever been on a highway when the car crashes? People say they don't want the traffic jam. Why do they stop the car and look at the accident? I'm sorry, but you need to read about it. You need to understand what happened.

Ian Bremmer:

When you started this book, and you said this in acknowledgements, well, that was very interesting, you were planning on actually leaving the United States to become foreign correspondents. And you chose not to when Trump was elected. It's that's because the US felt like more of a foreign country to you at that point anyway?

Susan Glasser:

Well, Peter had been a White House correspondent, going all the way back to Bill Clinton. And I think the concept was that if somebody's going to be blowing up the White House, you probably want to have, if you're the New York Times, the person there who understands what's normal crazy and what's crazy crazy in the White House.

So yeah, we moved back to Washington a few months after Peter and our son moved away from Washington. We had to get a whole new house. And so we got to be foreign correspondents in our hometown.

Ian Bremmer:

And if you're being foreign correspondents, are you explaining the United States and the Trump White House to a whole bunch of readers that don't understand him? No, it's not just they don't like him, but they don't relate to him, they literally think he's from another planet. Is that what you're basically saying?

Peter Baker:

Well, I mean, he is from another planet, in terms of Washington. He was like no other president we've ever had. And so that was the job. The job was to try to understand how different this White House was, as Susan says. Not just the normal, okay, Republican, Democrat, but normal president versus not-normal president. He fits in the not-normal president category. And so it was important to find out what is going on there as best we can.

Ian Bremmer:

Now you say it's like a car crash, but I mean, to be fair, if you told me the car crash that I'm about to see is literally the same as the car crash I just saw a mile ago, I might speed up a little bit. This is a different book. What is it that is particularly unusual new novel, in not 20 minutes, that you're saying, "No, here's something. Here's why our take together really matters on this really over-covered guy."

Susan Glasser:

Right, except that it's not. I mean, the truth is that there actually hasn't been an actual history of the four years of the Trump administration. And there's been a lot of great journalism all along the way, these are important moments. But if your kid or your grandkid 10 years from now is like, "What the heck? Donald Trump was a president?" We really wanted to write a book that would put together and show that January 6th and the catastrophic ending of the Trump presidency in 2020, it was not some crazy outlier that you can just look at what happened at the end. But that really, you have to go back and look at all the four years to really understand. And then you see very clearly, by the way, that this was not some extreme bizarre event at the end, but a four-year war on American institutions. Every presidency, you're going to have a book like this that comes out that's a full history. That's going to happen with any White House.

The difference with Donald Trump is that this is a, as we put it in the introduction, an active crime scene. It's not just history. This is the present day of American politics, and maybe even its future. So there's an urgency to it. And what we found is that actually, in many examples like this, it's not just the clown show or the tweets. That can often be the public theater of the presidency that we saw so much. But when you go back and you look into it, many of the things that we didn't take seriously enough were real attacks. For example, pulling out of NATO. We were told by multiple officials, Trump was much more serious about this than I think the reporting on it contemporaneously had us to understand.

Ian Bremmer:

He said it was obsolete. He said, "These people aren't paying. Why do we bother? Why is it worthwhile?" But then of course, I thought one of the interesting things about NATO was it was the one time I remember Trump saying publicly that he was wrong about something. He initially uttered that it was obsolete. Then he said, "Well, yeah, but I was a real estate guy. I talked to my generals. The generals know more about this stuff, and they said it's not. And now I believe my generals." What was behind that? I remember when he said that.

Peter Baker:

Yeah, well, because they were waging this war to basically keep him from blowing up the alliance. And I don't think he ever actually really changed his mind.

Susan Glasser:

Yeah, he didn't change his mind.

Peter Baker:

I don't think, I think he still-

Ian Bremmer:

He did say that.

Peter Baker:

He did say it.

Susan Glasser:

He said that.

Peter Baker:

I think he still believes it was obsolete because he kept saying again and again to his staff, "Maybe we should just get out. Let's just get out." And they kept saying, "No, sir, let's not do that because it would just destroy our relationships with Europe." And that's actually kind of important to the United States. Imagine, of course, if we had Putin invading Ukraine without the United States being part of NATO, what a difference that would make.

Ian Bremmer:

This brings me to two different sorts of points. The first is, Biden becomes president. NATO today is considerably stronger than it was, not only under Trump, but before Trump.

Peter Baker:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

So does that mean to you that actually those four years of Trump presidency don't actually have the same impact that you might have thought they would have at the time that you were in the middle?

Peter Baker:

Yeah, but now you need an invasion to make it go away? I mean, that's not exactly the right-

Ian Bremmer:

Well, but even the perspective on the United States once Biden came in. Suddenly you saw those numbers in the Pew surveys from all the European populations, that had sunk to these incredible post-war lows, and they just bounced right back up. It just felt like people were just ready to turn the page and move on. Do you feel that way?

Susan Glasser:

I mean, look, Ian, you work internationally with a lot of world leaders. What do they think about the word of the United States right now? They don't think it's very good, do they? The United States as a leader in the world, would you make a deal with the United States that was controversial and think that it was going to stick forever, or maybe just for the next two years? I think that the damage done to American credibility when it comes to making deals is very, very serious.

Ian Bremmer:

If he comes back or just general?

Susan Glasser:

Just generally, because the prospect that Republicans could take over Congress. And even if it's not Trump, the party has been remade in his image in a way that I think would lend anyone to question, if you had another international climate accord, how much stock would you put in the United States' long-term willingness to commit to a course of action right now?

As long as the US remains this polarized and this divided, the greatest geopolitical crisis in the world is right in Washington. It's right in our midterm election, and I think that's going to be the case for the foreseeable future. The foreign policy crisis is not about NATO per se. It's about the United States and whether this superpower can get his act together, and there's no sign of that happening.

Ian Bremmer:

You brought up midterms. I want to talk more about foreign policy, but I'll ask about midterms directly, because we've just seen in the Washington Post that a significant majority of Republicans that are actually running for office in the House are actually election deniers, or at least have said that publicly. What does that mean to you in how the Republican Party is potentially turning and what we're setting ourselves up for 2024? Given, again, everything that you are spending your lives on right now. Peter, over to you.

Peter Baker:

Well, it's all about Trump. It's about his dominance of the party. It's about currying favor with the king. They know that they can't say anything other than that because then they pay the price, and they know it because they've seen it happen. What happened to the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him over January 6th? Gone. Lost their primaries, were forced out, decided to leave out of frustration, what have you, and the rest of them saw what happened.

So they all say they agree with former President Trump about the election, whether they do or not, because that's the price of admission. You don't get into the party unless you say that.

Ian Bremmer:

So let me move on to where we think Russia is going. And I say that because you wrote a book on Putin and this is-

Peter Baker:

We write all the fun characters.

Ian Bremmer:

You do. And I wonder, at the time that you were writing that ... Because clearly, I mean, your view of Trump has been fairly consistent over the course of the last four years. I'm wondering if your view of Putin has been very different over the course of the past, say, 15?

Peter Baker:

I think it'd be very consistent. If you go back, we were there for Putin's first term-

Ian Bremmer:

I remember.

Peter Baker:

... first four years in office. And I think if you look back the through lines from when he was starting, to today.

Now I don't think we would've necessarily said then he would invade other countries per se, but we knew that he was not some modernizer, some Westernizer, the way a lot of people in Washington thought or hoped he was. That he was in fact a KGB guy who wanted to restore central power at the very least, if not the old borders of the Soviet Union. I think what you see today is very much the logical outcome of what we saw for in those four years.

Susan Glasser:

Yeah, that's right. I mean, look, I think with both Putin and Trump, they're very different characters, but a similar rule applies, which is when somebody tells you who they are, you should listen. And when we were in Russia, preparing to come back to the United States, and this was early in Putin's tenure, what did he say? He said, the breakup of the Soviet Union is the greatest geopolitical-

Ian Bremmer:

Catastrophe.

Susan Glasser:

... catastrophe of the 20th century.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, he said that.

Susan Glasser:

A century filled with more than its share of catastrophes. And this was an incredibly revealing moment. It suggested that he was unsatisfied with the post Cold War peace. That he would do whatever he could, given his capacities at the time, to revise that, what he saw as defeat, for Russia and the Soviet Union. And he's basically, that's what he's done.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, right now we are in an environment where people are getting increasingly concerned about where this is all heading. People ask me, "What's the off-ramp?" Can you even talk about an off-ramp until you can talk about trying to stabilize the situation? We're not even at that point yet.

Susan Glasser:

Honestly, I find this off-ramp phrasing to be completely triggering of me.

Ian Bremmer:

I didn't mean to-

Susan Glasser:

No, no, no, no. But it's not you, it's not you.

Ian Bremmer:

But I did, apparently.

Susan Glasser:

Ian, how many times have you had US government officials in the last 15 years talk to you, with very great seriousness, about the various off-ramp proposals that they were going to offer to Vladimir Putin to get him to stop invading Georgia. To get him to stop annexing Crimea. To get him to stop intervening in Syria. Have you ever known Vladimir Putin to be a big fan of American created off-ramps?

Ian Bremmer:

No, not particularly.

Susan Glasser:

No.

Ian Bremmer:

Not particularly, no.

Susan Glasser:

And a lot of people were focused on when Joe Biden said Armageddon. The thing that really worried me about Joe Biden's comments were that he used this phrase "off-ramp," because that suggests to me that he is thinking about proposing something to Vladimir Putin that it's hard to imagine Vladimir Putin accepting.

Ian Bremmer:

Biden saying that this is the most dangerous time, this is the closest we are to nuclear war. Nuclear war, I mean, something that really scared us when we were young. We all remember the day after. I had nightmares for months after that, since 1962.

I don't think most Americans ... I think one of the reasons that Armageddon is a big deal is because most Americans were not ready to be propelled back into that reality. Do you think that's where we are right now?

Peter Baker:

Well, I think it's to take us seriously. In other words, there's a lot of reason to believe that Putin is just blustering. He tends to talk about nuclear weapons at times when he is weak, when he has had a setback of some sort. So it's his way of reestablishing dominance in a sort of Trumpian way in the international stage. "Pay attention to me. I'm strong, don't think I'm weak." It doesn't mean he's necessarily preparing to do it. Intelligence people would tell you they haven't seen any signs of moving of assets or resources that would indicate that.

But having said that, you can't assume that. What if you're wrong? What if that assumption is wrong? When somebody tells you, as Susan says, that they're thinking about using nuclear weapons, you ought to take that seriously. So that's when you hear a president say Armageddon. Yeah, it's alarmist language, but if you're not taking it seriously, then we're not doing it right.

Ian Bremmer:

If I want to take the two halves of this conversation and put them together, you were just talking about how former President Trump wanted to leave NATO. And he probably won't have the same guardrails on him in terms of the kind of cabinet if he wins a second time around. If you are right and Trump is going to run and gets the nomination, and is back on Twitter and back on Facebook, and that is the policy that he is driving, what happens?

Susan Glasser:

Well, I think you're right to suggest that the fraying of this very bipartisan consensus in Washington around support for Ukraine is likely to occur. Considering actually how disastrous it's been for Russia, Donald Trump has been a pretty vocal pro-Putin, pro-Russia voice throughout the conflict. He has opposed the major aid packages for Ukraine.

Ian Bremmer:

Briefly. Not from the beginning. Not at the beginning. He said, "I don't know who this guy is."

Susan Glasser:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

But then he came right back up.

Susan Glasser:

But then he said it was a strategic genius.

I mean, it's very hard to walk back "strategic genius" on the eve of Putin invading Ukraine. Not a move of strategic genius. So it's pretty hard to walk that back. He's also been publicly on the record as opposing the major aid packages that Congress has passed for Ukraine. And in fact, he and Tucker Carlson are leading, something really without much precedent in American politics, which is a pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party. Remember when the Republican Party was tough on Russia? It's a pretty big transformation.

It's a minority, but I think you're right that Trump, back as the nominee of the Republican Party, back in the middle of our daily discussion, I have to say, the idea that we're going to be back to writing stories about like, "In a series of early morning tweets, Donald Trump said," blah, blah, blah. I mean, I'm not personally looking forward to that, I want to say.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay, so before we close Peter, single thing that Trump accomplished over the course of his four years that most impressed you?

Peter Baker:

I will say this for him. He is the most transparent president we've had in modern times. Which is to say that when he has motivations to do things that other presidents would never admit, he tends to admit it out loud. When he says he doesn't want a cruise boat with COVID patients to come to our shores because he doesn't want his numbers to go up, he is telling us what his real motivations is. When he tells us that he wants the Justice Department to prosecute his opponents and spare his friends, he's not pretending it's for any altruistic reason other than he just wants his friends to be spared and his opponents to be prosecuted.

He, through four years, through Twitter, and his statements and conversations with the press, was as open about his motivations that we've ever seen. And it's remarkable, because he told us all the ways he was trying to manipulate and intimidate and bend the institutions of American government to his political will, to make them his instruments of political power, whether it be the military, the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies. So we didn't have to guess. We didn't have to sit there and say, "Well, he says he wants to do it for this reason, but he really wants to do it for that reason," because he always said he wanted to do it for that reason.

Ian Bremmer:

So that's something that impressed him. That wasn't something he necessarily did that was impressive. There were certainly accomplishments over the course ... Like a penal reform, like a-

Susan Glasser:

Yeah, he watched an insurrection at the United States Capitol.

Ian Bremmer:

That's an accomplishment.

Susan Glasser:

That was unprecedented in American history, Ian. That was something that never happened before.

Ian Bremmer:

Not one that you thought was a good thing.

Susan Glasser:

It was impressive.

Ian Bremmer:

Yes.

Susan Glasser:

It was impressive.

Ian Bremmer:

It had made an impression upon me, yes.

Susan Glasser:

He showed the incredible weakness of our institutions. He showed that people were willing to go where no one thought they would follow a leader pass the bounds of law and the Constitution. And one of the things he showed, I think, is that not just the sort of foreign policy world, but the policy world writ large, we tend to overstate the role of policy debates in our politics. We tend to overstate the role of ideology in our politics.

And the really interesting thing about a challenge coming from the president of the United States to principles of democracy is that it shows that these policy fights don't mean as much as we tend to think that they mean, because we care about them.

Ian Bremmer:

Susan Glasser, Peter Baker. Thank you all so much.

Peter Baker:

Thank you very much.

Ian Bremmer:

Many thanks to New York's Chelsea factory for hosting us in this wonderful space.

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Like what you've heard? Come check us out gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, signal.

Announcer:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, places clients' needs first by providing responsive, relevant, and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

In a world upended by disruptive international events, how can we rebuild? On season two of Global Reboot, a Foreign Policy podcast in partnership with the Doha Forum, FP editor-in-chief Ravi Agrawal engages with world leaders and policy experts to look at old problems in new ways and identify solutions to our world's greatest challenges. Listen to season two of Global Reboot wherever you get your podcasts.