Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS | YouTube
Landry Ayres: Welcome back to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I’m Landry Ayres.
The first year of Donald J. Trump’s second term as the president of the United States has been not only tumultuous for America but also the rest of the world. Just as he has at home, he has disregarded existing international institutions and standing alliances to chart a very different foreign policy course. He has threatened long-standing European allies with steep tariffs and military action—and traditional adversaries such as Russia with relative warmth and friendliness. Are there any broader theories guiding Trump’s actions? What are the aims of his MAGA advisors? And what does the Trump presidency portend for America’s standing as the champion of the liberal international order? If that order permanently collapses, what will replace it and how would that affect American interests?
The UnPopulist’s editor-in-chief, Shikha Dalmia, discusses these questions with Pulitzer Prize winning author Anne Applebaum, a historian. Anne, who writes for The Atlantic, has penned the most incisive—and prescient—analysis about the emerging alliance of global authoritarians, Russian disinformation campaigns, the Ukrainian war, and more.
We hope you enjoy.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Shikha Dalmia: Hi Anne, welcome to Zooming In. You, I should tell our listeners, are joining us from Warsaw. You divide your time between the United States and Poland, where your husband is foreign minister.
You and I have been talking about doing this podcast ever since Trump came back to the White House. And at first, his foreign policy seemed extremely contradictory, unclear, so we didn’t know where it was all going to land. Now, a year later, it seems we have a better idea of where he’s going with this. And it seems pretty evident at this stage that he has very little interest in maintaining what we know as the rules-based liberal international order, which the United States itself created and championed after World War II. And one way to describe this shift that Trump is engineering is that it’s some kind of isolationism, where he’s pulling out of traditional alliances, but has a strong defense, which he’ll use when America is directly threatened. That’s the kind of thing that his anti-war supporters were hoping they would get. But it doesn’t seem like isolationism quite captures what he’s up to, right?
It looks more like a complete retreat and also a tearing up of the liberal international order. How would you describe his foreign policy?
Anne Applebaum: So, first of all, I think it’s really important to understand that all of these attempts to characterize Trump as having a foreign policy doctrine ... What is Trumpism? Isolationism? Neo-Imperialism? All of these miss something pretty fundamental about him, which is that he personally doesn’t have a strategy and doesn’t think in strategic categories. So he doesn’t have a long-term plan; he doesn’t think about how the actions he takes in one part of the world will impact another; he doesn’t act consistently across space and across time. He doesn’t act predictably in any way.
And I think that’s not a reflection of some ideology—I think that’s a reflection of his personality. He has very clear instincts and whims. He’s very interested in tariffs and has been all of his life. He dislikes America’s alliances, both in Europe and in Asia, and has all of his life going back to the 1980s.
He admires leaders of autocratic states for their absolute power, and he has this instinct that he wants that kind of absolute power himself. But he can also be pushed in one direction or another by the moment, by a particular incident. He’s very interested in whatever is the moment, whatever is the conflict, whoever he’s talking to, that he emerges as the winner. He needs to win the situation or win the exchange, whether it’s with a journalist or with a foreign leader. And if you look for that in his actions, then you’ll see much more consistency than you see across foreign policy.
“The vision of the U.S. as a more or less stable and steady power whose foreign policy had some elements of predictability that dates, as I say, from at least 1945 to the present, I think this is permanently gone. I also think, from the European point of view, the anti-European and indeed anti-democratic elements of American society that support this administration are still there. They will still continue to produce members of Congress who play to that constituency and maybe future presidents. You can’t count that out. The U.S. now has a big constituency for authoritarianism. ... Europeans know that. And so I don’t think that the status that the U.S. once had, the automatic acceptance as the leader of the democratic world, comes back anytime soon.” — Anne Applebaum
Clearly, there are people around him who have ideas, and sometimes you see those playing out. I wouldn’t use the expression “liberal world order” anymore because I think that had been a decline for a long time. But he has no special regard for borders, for international law, for international institutions, for U.S. treaties that have held for a long time, whether it’s the NATO treaty or the North American Free Trade Agreement—it’s called something else now, but it’s the same idea. [He has] that instinct to break all the rules and that [belief that] he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants.
I don’t know whether he’s ever used the expression “liberal international order” and said to himself, “I want to destroy it.” But the effect of what he’s doing and how he’s behaving is that. He’s not the only one who’s doing this. I mean, Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, or even really the initial invasion in 2014, were also calibrated from the beginning to establish that Putin has the right to do whatever he wants, and he doesn’t care about the U.N. Charter or borders or norms or the U.N. Convention on Genocide or the Geneva Conventions on War. So he’s also been pushing in that direction for a while. There have been previous U.S. presidents who’ve also pushed up against this. Not all of this is new—but, yeah, it’s clear that Trump is willing to break all of that.
The best articulation of this so far came from the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, when he said [in Davos] that what we’re watching in foreign policy isn’t so much a transition from one system to another, but really a rupture. The speed with which Trump has shown that he just doesn’t care about any long-term effects or deep relationships is remarkable, and it has been very much noted by America’s allies wherever they are.
Dalmia: You’re right. I mean, he may not have a worked out ideology or theory of foreign relations, but he does have a mentality, as you pointed out. He likes to do what he wants to do. He wants to dominate. He wants to control the world, not play by the rules. That’s something he has in common with Putin.
But there is an internal logic that mentality leads you towards. And some people have described it as “spheres of influence,” where each country that’s dominant in a region dominates that region. And the great powers make deals to stay off each other’s territory and also collaborate and have partnerships. [Steve] Witkoff, [Trump’s special envoy of peace missions], and Steve Miller [have] definitely been talking about something like that: That the U.S. is going to dominate the Western Hemisphere and they may leave China to dominate the East, and Russia, certain parts of Europe.
“[Trump] admires leaders of autocratic states for their absolute power, and he has this instinct that he wants that kind of absolute power himself. But he can also be pushed in one direction or another by the moment, by a particular incident. He’s very interested in whatever is the moment, whatever is the conflict, whoever he’s talking to, that he emerges as the winner. He needs to win the situation or win the exchange, whether it’s with a journalist or with a foreign leader. And if you look for that in his actions, then you’ll see much more consistency than you see across foreign policy.” — Anne Applebaum
So even though he may not be intending to go there, do you think the world is now going to fall into these “spheres of influence,” with great powers dominating their sphere?
Applebaum: So, two or three things to say. One is that the idea that the world is divided into three spheres of influence is a Russian idea. And there’s a kind of Russian fantasy about the world divided in this way. And even a weird fantasy about Putin and [Chinese Premier] Xi and Trump meeting together to divide up the world and creating some kind of new Yalta agreement—a new division of the world.
I heard someone expound and explain this idea very early on, not that long after the election, as a prediction of what would happen. And this idea, of course, originates with Russian propaganda. The Russians love this idea because it puts them on par with the U.S. and China, which they aren’t. The European economy put together is 10 times as large as the Russian economy. So there is no world in which Russia dominates Europe or has a sphere of influence like that.
It is clear that there are also people in Trump’s entourage—I mean, the authors of the National Security Strategy, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth. There have been several people who’ve used language that make it sound like the U.S. should return somehow to the Western Hemisphere. And sometimes the implication is that the U.S. would then also more or less abandon Europe and let the Europeans do their own thing and also more or less abandon Asia and let China do its thing and let the Japanese and the South Koreans and maybe the Indians and Filipinos worry about their own problem. So there is that tendency as well.
Again, as I said, I don’t think Trump himself has worked any of this out, but there are people around him who are pushing hard in this direction. Some of them have pushed very hard for the U.S. to stop aiding Ukraine, and the U.S. has actually stopped sending weapons to Ukraine except for those that are bought with European money.
You know, there were a couple moments over the last year when actual weapons that were on their way that had already been sent by the Biden administration were blocked from inside the Pentagon. Again, this is from [a] group who believes the U.S. should now withdraw from everything. So there is that.
That is, of course, in tension with Trump’s interest in Iran. There’s tension with Trump’s ongoing interest, for example ... he was very loud about and sounding angry about a recent E.U. trade deal with India. Also, I think he made some comments about Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, also visiting China. He hasn’t seemed to abandon the idea that the U.S. should have interests everywhere, but there is some kind of focus on the Western Hemisphere as well.
If I’m sounding inchoate and unclear, that’s because I think the policy is inchoate and unclear. So, yes, there are some people who envision this spheres of influence world. Trump himself sort of buys some of it. He likes the idea of U.S. domination of its hemisphere. This very strange couple of weeks when he made it sound like he was ready to invade Greenland seems to have been a product of that. Somebody around him saying that Greenland is in the Western Hemisphere and also that it looks very large on the Mercator projection ... that seems to have interested him. But then when there was both a market reaction and a diplomatic and military reaction against it, he pulled back very quickly. So, yes, I think that’s part of his thinking, or not really his thinking, it’s part of his administration’s thinking. But it isn’t very clear how exactly it would work.
Dalmia: Well, he has articulated what he calls the Donroe Doctrine, which is a riff off the Monroe Doctrine.
Applebaum: So, I mean, someone put that in his head, too. May I just say that the Monroe Doctrine was originally—to remember what it was in history—a doctrine that European imperial powers shouldn’t be allowed in the Americas. That was the original idea. And what he’s saying is, “No, I get to dominate the hemisphere.” But again, what that would mean systematically is not that clear.
Dalmia: Well, I mean, the big difference between the Donroe and the Monroe Doctrine is that Monroe Doctrine actually visualized that the smaller countries in the Western Hemisphere would get to protect their sovereignty from rapacious European powers, whereas that’s not what Trump has in mind. I mean, look at what he’s done in Venezuela. [It’s] this weird kind of meddlesomeness combined with some weird isolationism. He went in, toppled Maduro, brought him to the United States to stand trial. But he’s left that regime essentially in place. And the best we can tell is because they are playing ball with him when it comes to the country’s natural resources and especially oil interests, right?
So he’s got this idea he can dominate whoever he wants in this hemisphere and they just have to suffer. I mean, like the old Thucydides quote that “dominant powers will do what they must and the weak will have to suffer as they should,” or some version of that. I’m mangling that quote, but it is very much what he’s done in Venezuela and what he wanted in Greenland: This mentality of domination.
Applebaum: So, Venezuela is a peculiar story because, of course, there was a popular democracy movement in Venezuela, and they did indeed want Maduro gone. And they were not sad that he was gone, in other words. So there was a lot of hope on that day when he was first captured that this would lead to a regime change, and you’re right that it has not. Clearly, there are divisions in the administration. There was even one moment when Marco Rubio gave the legal reasons why this was justified. Maduro had been condemned by a court in New York, and he was being held on trial for violating the law. And then Trump very clearly said, “No, no, no, it’s all about the oil.”
“The idea that the world is divided into three spheres of influence is a Russian idea. And there’s a kind of Russian fantasy about the world divided in this way. And even a weird fantasy about Putin and [Chinese Premier] Xi and Trump meeting together to divide up the world and creating some kind of new Yalta agreement—a new division of the world. I heard someone expound and explain this idea very early on, not that long after the election, as a prediction of what would happen. And this idea, of course, originates with Russian propaganda. The Russians love this idea because it puts them on par with the U.S. and China, which they aren’t.” — Anne Applebaum
So this is, again, Trump’s instinct, his transactionalism, his feeling that what we want out of other countries is not to benefit the citizens, not to create a better government, not to create a better democracy, or a more legitimate government, or a more just government in Venezuela. The point is just to take their oil and use it to benefit companies. And it’s already emerging that there are companies that will be the immediate beneficiaries who have some relationship with Trump or his family.
So another element that’s really important in his foreign policy is personal financial interest. It’s not as clear in Venezuela, but in Russia, for example, it’s very, very clear. So we know, and we know both from things that Steve Witkoff, the main negotiator in Ukraine, and Jared Kushner, and also from reporting, especially in the Wall Street Journal, but also the Financial Times, we know that the negotiations he’s conducting in Russia over Ukraine, there’s a dual set of negotiations, and there’s also conversations about U.S.-Russia business relations. And there have already been concrete offers to specific American companies, including some with links to Trump and his family. So what we’re looking at is completely unprecedented—I should say, in American history—and this is why we don’t have a name for it or an “ism,” or a way of characterizing it. We see Trump and people around him using the power of the American state—[including] the tools of American foreign policy—to benefit specific people in the entourage of Donald Trump. And that’s probably the case in Venezuela. It’s very clear in Russia.
There are also big Trump family interests now in the Middle East, in Saudi Arabia. And it’s naive to imagine that those don’t also affect U.S. foreign policy in that region as well. So, you know, we see the immense power and might of the United States being shaped by private interests of the president. And that’s not happened in America before. That’s an aspect of it. I think it helps explain Venezuela—[though] not entirely. I think it helps explain some of the Middle Eastern policy. And I think it also helps explain the policy towards Russia and Ukraine.
Dalmia: Especially Ukraine, right? I mean, the parallels between Ukraine and Venezuela are in this respect quite striking: that the peace deal, not the latest one, but last February, but even this one, what America was asking Ukraine to do in exchange for any kind of protection was taking over essentially the country’s oil reserves, rare earth metal reserves into perpetuity. Fifty percent of Ukrainian resources were supposed to be handed over to the United States. It’s just not a deal that Zelenskyy could go for.
And the one difference is that in the last peace plan that they proposed, they want Zelenskyy to hold elections after a hundred days, whereas they are allowing the corrupt Maduro remnants to stay on. And the difference is, in my view, that Zelenskyy is not playing ball in the ravaging of his country in a way perhaps that Maduro …
Applebaum: … I don’t think that’s the reason. I think the reason is that this is something that Putin wants because Putin’s big goal in Ukraine hasn’t changed. And so the big goal is to undermine the Ukrainian state, to put a puppet regime in place. He’s failed to conquer it militarily, but to have a kind of Ukrainian regime in place that will be somehow more compatible with Russia. He wants to remove Zelenskyy and he has convinced the Americans to help him remove Zelenskyy. And that’s his goal with the elections.
And then you would see play out in Ukraine what you saw recently in Moldova and Romania and elsewhere: you would see a kind of Russian campaign. I’m not saying it would work, but they would certainly try to run an election campaign that would benefit Russia. So I think that’s the purpose there.
I mean, you’re right that the U.S. pressure on Ukraine, both for the minerals and that crazy deal that was presented at the beginning, initially as a kind of fait accompli, a piece of paper was given to the Ukrainians, and they were told to sign it as if it were legal somehow, as if the Ukrainian president could sign away the country’s mineral wealth in perpetuity. But the current negotiations are putting pressure on the Ukrainians to give up territory that Ukraine controls. And that is also a Russian demand, and it’s a Russian demand because the Russians also believe that this would weaken Ukraine and make Ukraine harder to defend. So that’s why the Ukrainians are resisting it.
“Another element that’s really important in his foreign policy is personal financial interest. It’s not as clear in Venezuela, but in Russia, for example, it’s very, very clear … the negotiations he’s conducting in Russia over Ukraine, there’s a dual set of negotiations, and there’s also conversations about U.S.-Russia business relations. And there have already been concrete offers to specific American companies, including some with links to Trump and his family. So what we’re looking at is completely unprecedented—I should say, in American history—and this is why we don’t have a name for it or an “ism,” or a way of characterizing it. We see Trump and people around him using the power of the American state—[including] the tools of American foreign policy—to benefit specific people in the entourage of Donald Trump. … We see the immense power and might of the United States being shaped by private interests of the president. And that’s not happened in America before.” — Anne Applebaum
But you do see the U.S. playing along with Russian demands almost all the way through these negotiations, somehow hampered by European interventions, maybe by Zelenskyy himself. The U.S. hasn’t yet in any way fully aligned itself with Russia, but you do see some alignment happening. There are many reasons for that. I think that same element inside the administration that talks about spheres of influence wants to give Ukraine to Russia or doesn’t care in any case. But then I think there’s also this business interest that others around Trump also have.
Dalmia: I mean, the other remarkable thing about that peace deal that was offered was that Ukraine was supposed to permanently give up its aspirations to be part of NATO and also scale back its military troops by a certain amount without any real security guarantees from the United States. It was just absolutely astonishing that they thought they could offer this to Ukraine.
Applebaum: So the point about Ukraine is that the war isn’t over until the Russians understand that they can’t win. In other words, the Russians have to say, “Okay, Ukraine is going to remain as an independent state. We can’t conquer Ukraine. The imperial colonial project didn’t succeed.” When that moment comes, when the Russians understand they won’t win the war, then it’s over. But what’s happened over the last year is that the Trump administration has constantly given Putin reason to believe he might still attain his goals. He might through negotiations, through U.S. pressure, through the manipulation of Donald Trump, which is very effective. A photograph of Putin and Trump that Putin gave to Trump has now been put up on the wall at the White House, for example. So they think that through all of this they will gain territory and they will eventually gain dominance in Ukraine that they can’t win by themselves. That’s what’s happening.
And the Ukrainians know that any ceasefire under these circumstances is temporary unless there is ... and it’s not only temporary, but could be damaging because a Ukraine where there’s a ceasefire but no guarantee that fighting will stop permanently is not a stable country. Who will invest there? Who will want to stay there? Will the Ukrainian refugees come home? Nobody’s going to come home to a country that’s about to go to war again—and maybe under worse circumstances. So that’s why the Ukrainians, really since Zelenskyy’s first visit to the Oval Office last year, the notorious visit, keep talking about security guarantees. Because they know that without some reason to believe that the war is really over, then it’s not over. And that’s where we are right now.
Dalmia: Moving on to Europe and America’s relationship with Europe. Trump’s Davos speech a couple of weeks ago was full of bluster and self-congratulation. That was also the time when he was still pressing Denmark to hand over Greenland to him. He’s mercifully, as you pointed out, abandoned that plan for now.
But what was striking is his criticism of NATO and Europe in that speech didn’t simply echo the usual American gripes that European countries are freeloading, not providing enough for their own defense and those usual kind of critiques. It actually echoed something that has been laid out in the administration’s National Security Strategy plan that was released last fall. Tthe document doesn’t just accuse European allies of under-investing in their defense and all that. It goes further. It portrays Europe as an adversary engaged in what it calls “civilizational erasure.”
What does this administration mean by that term and how is this civilizational critique going to play out in U.S. policy towards Europe?
Applebaum: So, we’ll see. I mean, this actually began also almost a year ago with JD Vance’s speech at the last Munich Security Conference. The next one’s coming up soon. Apparently, he’s not coming. At least that’s what I’ve been told for the moment. The idea that liberal European countries—and by “liberal,” I mean center right [to] center left European political parties—are somehow the enemy of America, or really they’re the enemy of the MAGA movement, has been in circulation for a long time. And this is really a domestic argument that maintains that by simply existing—by maintaining liberal democracies, by maintaining liberal institutions, by maintaining freedom of speech and independent courts and independent media—these European countries are a threat to the MAGA movement because they show that there is still an alternative. I mean, they dislike those countries for the same reason they dislike the Democrats in the United States. They see them as political enemies. And not unlike the way Putin sees them as political enemies, because they have an ideology which is different from theirs. Again, I’ll be a little inchoate because I don’t think everybody in the Republican Party thinks this. And I don’t think even everyone in the administration necessarily thinks this. But there is a group of ideologues—you could include the vice president; you could include some of the team at the State Department; and others around Donald Trump who do believe this.
They think that a Europe, which is liberal-democratic ... they also focus on immigration, failing to recognize that actually immigration in Europe, despite all the news and drama, is lower than in the United States. There is no European country that is likely to be majority immigrant anytime soon, whereas there are U.S. states that will be. They’re transplanting American’s obsessions to Europe.
“So the point about Ukraine is that the war isn’t over until the Russians understand that they can’t win. In other words, the Russians have to say, ‘Okay, Ukraine is going to remain as an independent state. We can’t conquer Ukraine. The imperial colonial project didn’t succeed.’ When that moment comes, when the Russians understand they won’t win the war, then it’s over. But what’s happened over the last year is that the Trump administration has constantly given Putin reason to believe he might still attain his goals.” — Anne Applebaum
What it will mean in practice is very interesting. I mean, actually, there has already been both U.S. tech companies and U.S. political support for European far-right and autocratic populist political parties’ attempts to help them win elections. We know U.S. internet platforms have also participated in attempts to undermine sitting prime ministers and governments and to promote the interests of kind of MAGAfied European parties that are more aligned with Trump.
It’s a little too close to home for me in Poland, but the current Polish president [who is a right-wing figure] did get direct support from Trump during the Polish presidential election campaign, [and] continues to do so now in a way that’s unusual and different in American foreign policy, as opposed to the actual government of Poland. Poland has a prime minister who actually runs the government, and his president is a constitutional figurehead.
So you see the U.S. beginning to push its so-called MAGA allies in different countries. The question over the next year—and this is something I’m going to follow pretty carefully—is to what degree the tools of U.S. foreign policy do get used in this way? Will U.S. public diplomacy money or, I don’t know, the CIA, or other tools of U.S. foreign policy that have traditionally been used in authoritarian states, be used in Europe to seek to overthrow or change European governments or alter European public opinion? I don’t know. We’ll see.
I mean, to some degree, these things don’t always work. Trump’s attacks on Canada were why Mark Carney got elected. He came from the Liberal Party that had been doing very badly, and it revived thanks to Trump. Medha Fredrickson, who’s the Danish Prime Minister, has seen her political party’s fortunes revived by her decision to stand up to Trump in Greenland and prepare for what they thought could be a military attack. There’s a few other examples like that. It’s also the case that Trump is beginning to make himself very unpopular in Europe. So this kind of policy might backfire. I mean, it’s very interesting in the last few days, a couple of European populist, far-right parties have also distanced themselves from Trump, especially his comments about NATO soldiers not fighting on the front line, which is just a lie.
The pressure on Greenland bothered both the French far right and the German far right. So it’s possible that this won’t work. But it’s clearly part of the thinking of some people at the State Department, maybe some people in the intelligence agencies and—I’m just speculating—some people around Trump. So the idea is to undermine European centrist leaders and to somehow replace them with MAGA parties instead. And that clearly is already a part of U.S. foreign policy.
Dalmia: Well, you know, Musk has been out there supporting the AfD [Germany’s far right party] and the Swedish prime minister has said this talk of civilizational erasure is to the right of the far right in Europe. So this is pretty out there.
Applebaum: Exactly. Nobody in Europe is talking about civilizational erasure. I mean, there’s no threat to European civilization, either from immigration or from slow economic growth. I mean, that’s just not the categories we’re talking in. And this extremist language is coming from the U.S. and from the U.S. far right, which, of course, thinks it’s fighting that war at home.
Dalmia: What was really remarkable about the NSS, the National Security Strategy document, is that it was in some ways radical in that none of the usual enemies of the United States were named as enemies. So the standard villains, whether you agree or disagree with it, are China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
Applebaum: And those are the countries that have sought to do harm to the United States.
Dalmia: Right, exactly. And for that reason, they’ve been listed as enemies. But they didn’t make much mention of that, except for China. And European allies have now been recast as adversaries.
With China, the relationship is ambiguous. It’s not seen as a geopolitical rival, but as a trade rival. So, to me, in some ways what this document showed was this uncomfortable amalgam of certain Trump transactionalism, where China and Russia are just business opportunities for him personally and for the United States. And the MAGA agenda, which is that they think Europe has now been captured by the woke left, it is too much in thrall of open borders and climate security—and those are all goals that they consider to be enemies in the United States. And, as you said, therefore, their foreign policy towards Europe is just an extension of MAGA ideology. There hasn’t been a document that has, to use Carney’s language, represented such a rupture from America’s own past thinking about foreign policy and foreign relations.
Applebaum: Yes, it was a rupture and it’s ... there is still a strange kind of dissonance because, if you ask any American general or admiral about their plans and how they think about the world, all of them still think in terms of alliances. There’s a big NATO exercise in Scandinavia coming up soon. All of that still goes on.
In other words, there the links are the sort of deep links between the U.S. and its allies [that] remain, and that’s part of what’s so confusing. But there are, as you say, now these ideologues at the top who want to end them, who don’t see the value in America having allies, and who instead see the U.S. as a kind of lonely player on the world stage that only acts in its interest when it wants to, and when it’s to the benefit of the president and his family. And that is a rupture with the way the U.S. has defined itself, I mean, really ever, but certainly most notably since the Second World War.
Dalmia: It seems that if the Trump administration is serious about pushing some of these anti-liberal forces within various European countries, then it’s in some ways doing what Putin has been doing in Europe, which is sowing divisions, building up forces that are in many ways anti-Europe within these countries. And you said this is to some extent backfiring because what that does is it actually makes liberal politicians more popular.
Applebaum: Sometimes—it depends on the country.
Dalmia: Yeah. But even somebody like [right-wing Italian Prime Minister] Georgia Meloni has been very upset by the tariffs on Europe. That’s the other thing that’s unifying a lot of these countries that might have been somewhat hostile towards the European Union and moving in a separatist direction [but who] are now sort of returning to the fold and seeing European interests as aligned against the United States.
“The idea that liberal European countries—and by “liberal,” I mean center right [to] center left European political parties—are somehow the enemy of America, or really they’re the enemy of the MAGA movement, has been in circulation for a long time. And this is really a domestic argument that maintains that by simply existing—by maintaining liberal democracies, by maintaining liberal institutions, by maintaining freedom of speech and independent courts and independent media—these European countries are a threat to the MAGA movement because they show that there is still an alternative. [T]hey dislike those countries for the same reason they dislike the Democrats in the United States. They see them as political enemies. And not unlike the way Putin sees them as political enemies, because they have an ideology which is different from theirs.” — Anne Applebaum
Do you think in some weird way that you will get a more united Europe? There has also been talk in at least some circles about a federation of European countries, sort of like the United States of Europe.
Applebaum: Well, that’s a very old idea, actually. So, the answer is maybe. I’ve given several talks in Europe in the last few days, and there are different futures for Europe. One future for Europe is that Europe becomes a kind of playground for Americans and Russians and becomes divided and the institutions fall apart and the American attempts to undermine the E.U. and the Russian attempts to undermine the E.U. succeed.
I should add one other aspect: the E.U. is the only body on the planet that’s big enough and powerful enough to regulate U.S. tech companies. [That’s] another aspect of this story I should have mentioned earlier. And so maybe the E.U. falls apart and the countries choose one side or the other, and we go back to a really weakened continent that doesn’t have any way of expressing itself, and all the governments become subject to outside influence.
Or, as you say, there is a revival of the European idea, maybe not just the European Union, but maybe a broader definition of Europe, certainly including the U.K., Norway, [and] others who are tied to Europe—I don’t know, Moldova?—and you see a revival of the European idea and a creation of new ways and new links and new connections.
I mean, you have seen already ... as I said, there’s been an E.U.-India free trade agreement, which seemed impossible a few years ago, mostly because I think the Indians didn’t want it, and now, of course, they do. So, you know, they also see themselves as a middle power that needs other kinds of relationships. There’s a E.U. negotiation with the Mercosur countries of Latin America going on. Canada has joined an E.U. defense pact, a European defense pact. You begin to see what Prime Minister Carney called the middle powers are beginning to reorient themselves and work together in broader coalitions. And that’s another possibility—that those countries begin to find ways of dealing with one another without the United States. [That’s] also perfectly, perfectly possible.
Dalmia: Perfectly cues up my next question: We know the National Security [Strategy] statement that they issued is bad for Europe. But you also called it the longest suicide note in American history. So what makes it a suicide note? Why is it bad for the United States?
Applebaum: Because America’s power and America’s prosperity in the last 70 years have derived from America’s alliances in the world. In other words, we weren’t a perfect superpower, maybe not always even a good one. But the U.S. was able to maintain, not through coercion or occupation but through soft power, these deep and close trading and political and military relationships with Europeans, with the Asian democracies, with Australia, with Japan, with South Korea. More recently with India—we began to have in the last few years a special relationship with India that we didn’t have before. And those relationships were the foundation of U.S. influence: of U.S. commercial influence, of U.S. prosperity, of U.S. ability to be the most influential country in the world. And without those powers, the U.S. does shrink, and it shrinks economically as our former allies jettison our, U.S. bonds or U.S. investments, as the U.S. loses markets, as the U.S. is eventually forced out of its military presence in different places.
All those things will begin to shrink and change. And there will be ... I mean, it will take a lot of time, and I sort of learned this with Brexit, that the U.K.’s withdrawal from the European Union didn’t create an instant economic crisis, but it created over time this malaise that the British can’t get out of because they lost their main trading partners, they lost their main allies, they lost their most important markets, and something like that will also happen to the United States if this goes through. The U.S. will lose its markets; it’ll lose its trade.
There are a lot of ways in which U.S. political power translates into economic success that most Americans don’t know. So if European country X is thinking about buying fighter jets or even building a big piece of infrastructure, say a nuclear power plant, all of them have choices about which companies to buy from. And they could buy from European countries. South Korea makes nuclear power. They have these choices and a lot of choices are often made because, “Look, we need a good relationship with the United States. The U.S. is our primary NATO ally. And so we’re going to choose the U.S. for this project.” That will come to an end.
If the U.S. is hostile, if the U.S. is an adversary, if the U.S. is seen as trying to undermine Europe, or if the U.S. is just no longer important, then all those kinds of decisions will shift. And the kind of automatic first place that American companies got and the automatic treatment that they received will end. It isn’t something that people will feel in one day to the next, and maybe not even during this administration, but it will happen. It will amount to a shrinking of American economic status, economic power, and influence.
Dalmia: The only thing that actually tames Trump is the market, right? So he gave up on Greenland when Europe started organizing its own tariffs against the United States and the market crashed the next day. The trouble is that right now the U.S. economy is going by about 5% almost.
Applebaum: Growing more slowly than others, but yes.
Dalmia: Well, faster than Europe. I mean, the the size of the U.S. economy has doubled since 2009, the financial crisis and Europe is essentially stagnant. I think that’s going to be a big part of it, that Europe really does need to get its economic act together.
Applebaum: Well, one of the things Europe might have to do is reject American technology and begin to invent its own, but that’s a lot longer. The Polish stock market went up something like, it was between 30 and 40% last year, which is higher than the U.S. stock market, so you need to make some differences.
Dalmia: I think you’re right. All I’m saying is, till the United States actually starts feeling the economic effects of its foreign policy, it is going to be hard to tame this administration and also a future MAGA administration. Trump sees this moment as just sort of monetizing these alliances, right? I describe Trump’s foreign policy and his approach to these alliances as one hand clientelist and the other hand predatory. So these are client states. Europe is a client state and it needs to pay for its security and what it’s worth. Or he wants to use it to get very favorable deals for the United States. So it’s one or the other.
“There’s no threat to European civilization, either from immigration or from slow economic growth. I mean, that’s just not the categories we’re talking in. And this extremist language is coming from the U.S. and from the U.S. far right, which, of course, thinks it’s fighting that war at home.” — Anne Applebaum
And it can’t stand—I mean, no self-respecting country is going to abide by giving up its sovereignty in this way. So it will at some point come back to bite the United States. My fear is that the U.S. has longer running room than I wish.
Applebaum: Well, it might take a long time. I mean, as I said, what are we now, 10 years after Brexit, and now you finally have, not everybody will say it out loud, but it’s clear that it was a mistake and might take that long in the United States. I don’t know. Maybe the markets will go on. As you know, in the U.S., we have a very strange economy. We have an economy where the very wealthiest are getting wealthier and they power a huge part of the economy from restaurants and consumption and other things. And then you have a large part of a number of Americans ever more precarious, no access to health care, some very large number of Americans, if they got a $10,000 health care bill, would be unable to pay it, would be bankrupted by that. And so you have a strange moment for the for the U.S. economy where ...
Dalmia: ... Somebody described it as bipolar.
But moving on to the future. Mark Carney, as you mentioned, described what has happened on the world stage as a rupture in the international order. But is this a reparable rupture? In other words, Trump is getting quite unpopular. And if we get a Democrat in the Oval Office in 2028, and America once again gets serious about its alliances and the rules-based order, do you think America can recover its role as a champion and a leader of that order?
Applebaum: I’m not sure, partly because a degree of trust has now been broken that will never be recovered. Europeans know that U.S. politics will always be determined by 40,000 people in Wisconsin, and the U.S. could shift rapidly and dramatically in one direction or another based on a single election. The vision of the U.S. as a more or less stable and steady power whose foreign policy had some elements of predictability that dates, as I say, from at least 1945 to the present, I think this is permanently gone. I also think, from the European point of view, the anti-European and indeed anti-democratic elements of American society that support this administration are still there. They will still continue to produce members of Congress who play to that constituency and maybe future presidents. You can’t count that out. The U.S. now has a big constituency for authoritarianism, and we haven’t even discussed U.S. domestic politics, for the undermining of institutions. Europeans know that. And so I don’t think that the status that the U.S. once had, the automatic acceptance as the leader of the democratic world, comes back anytime soon.
Dalmia: Also, what might happen is these wild swings in foreign policy priorities. I mean, that National Strategy paper ... what is America’s national security threat, according to this administration? It is subversive foreign elements that are entering the country. It’s kind of like a Borders First mentality and national security consists of stopping the flow of immigrants and drugs into the country. Whereas a Democratic president is going to have very different priorities. Climate security was Biden’s stated priority along with defending the country from pandemics and energy security, food security. So from one president to the other, you’re going to get these wild swings in foreign policy priorities, which America has not witnessed before. It’s part of the general polarization.
Applebaum: It’s also the case, after Julius Caesar, the Roman Republic did not return. After certain things are broken, they become hard to fix. And, as I say, there’s a whole another couple of hours we could have discussing U.S. politics to decide whether that’s happened or not. But I think things are different from now on.
Dalmia: I don’t want to end on a down note. So here is a cheerful scenario for you. Tell me what you think about it. I have frankly always felt that a global order that is anchored in one superpower, even if it’s a liberal-democratic superpower, is inherently not desirable. I mean, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the U.S. has not been very fair, as we know, in how it’s implemented international rules and the special favors it has bought for itself and its allies. And also, America’s commitment to NATO, for example, has become more fragile in the last 20 years.
“There are now these ideologues at the top … who don’t see the value in America having allies, and who instead see the U.S. as a kind of lonely player on the world stage that only acts in its interest when it wants to, and when it’s to the benefit of the president and his family. And that is a rupture with the way the U.S. has defined itself, really ever, but certainly most notably since the Second World War.” — Anne Applebaum
Russia doesn’t pose the same kind of existential threat to America as it does to Europe. America is an ocean away. So it was never in my view realistic to expect that the United States was going to bankroll European security indefinitely. So given that asymmetry, do you now think we are moving towards a more symmetric world where the European powers are going to beef up their own defense systems and become more powerful within their own orbit? And, similarly, who knows, Japan may step up and strengthen its own military and become more of a superpower in Asia that’ll anchor liberal democracies in that region. And with some luck, if the United States recovers its commitment to liberal democracy, the U.S. can anchor the Western Hemisphere as a liberal-democratic power. So you’ve got several liberal-democratic powers anchoring different parts of the world. Is that a tenable scenario?
Applebaum: It’s possible. I mean, as we’ve just discussed, there is a good way out of this, where the middle-sized powers, the liberal democracies ,begin to work together, maybe even across traditional alliances. Japan, Australia, Canada, Europe. [This] could be made more real, especially if they focused on particular issues that they all agreed on and didn’t try to create another international institution. So there is a world in which those countries revive not just their military power, but their tech industries, and they begin to push in a different direction. And that is ... again, I talked to a lot of European audiences, and that is the most positive scenario. That’s the one that European leaders are beginning to think about. So yes, it’s possible.
Dalmia: Well, on that happy note, thanks a lot Anne. This was great.
Applebaum: Thank you so much.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
