The Ambassador

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i would like to begin this episode with two quotes from American presidents.

You might try to guess which presidents they're from.

The first,

good leaders do not threaten to quit if things go wrong.

They expect cooperation, of course, and they expect everyone to do his share, but they do not stop to measure sacrifices with a teaspoon while the fight is on.

We cannot lead the force of freedom from behind.

And the second presidential quote, we must begin by acknowledging the hard truths.

We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.

There will be times when nations, acting individually or in concert, will find the use of force not only necessary, but morally justified.

The first with the memorable line about not measuring sacrifice with the keyspoon while the fight is on, was spoken by my namesake, President Harry S.

Truman, in a 1951 address in Philadelphia at the dedication of the Chapel of the Four Chaplains.

He had brought American troops into combating Korea.

a controversial decision to stand up to communist aggression only six years after the end of World War II.

The second presidential quote about nations being morally justified to use force is more surprising.

It was spoken on stage in Oslo, Norway in 2009 during Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

Donald Trump's America First Isolationist Cry echoes the America Forces of the 1930s, who wanted to stay out of what they called Europe's war even as late as 1941.

Refusing to defend Ukraine against Russian invasion has many parallels to the U.S.

staying out of World War II until Pearl Harbor.

Harry Truman learned the lesson.

As he said in Philadelphia, you fight small conflicts to avoid big wars.

Evidence of the good that can come from military intervention starts with South Korea, a thriving democratic ally, and North Korea, a prison-camp nation.

From the Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America.

I am Gary Kosparv.

Terms like intervention and regime change are practically dirty words in U.S.

politics since the disastrous occupation of Iraq.

But when aggressive dictatorships like the Soviet Union in the past or Vladimir Putin's Russia today go on the march, words alone do not stop them.

My guest today, Ambassador John Bolton, would agree with both of those presidential quotes.

Also, like me, he did not find much else to agree on with Obama during his eight years in office.

Bolton has strong opinions on American foreign policy and the use of force.

At a time when the new American right sounds like the old American left, his thoughts are critical.

John Bolton, you have had many distinctions and titles in your career, including Ambassador to the United Nations, National security advisors, and many others.

I will add one more.

You are the only guest to join us in both seasons of this show.

Thank you for doing it.

Glad to be with you.

And by the way, I see the chess board in your office.

Do you play chess?

I do.

You know, that was given to me by Nikolai Petrushev, my opposite number,

when he was...

He was the Russian National Security Advisor, and it is interestingly made out of Karelian wood from the Finnish territories.

And it was checked out by the Secret Service before I accepted it.

Do you think that the chess rules apply to this current geopolitics, or it's more like a game of poker?

Well, I think I wouldn't argue with you about the rules of chess.

I don't think people like Vladimir Putin care about the rules.

When people talk about the rules-based international order, the prime malefactors didn't get the memo.

They don't believe in it, and they don't act like it's there.

And for us to believe that it's there, I think handicaps our ability to defend ourselves.

I want to talk with you about how American power should be deployed in the world in service of democracies and against autocracies.

But I want to start with what seems to be the ever-changing meaning of American first as a foreign policy rationale.

How do you interpret that term based on what you're seeing in the second Trump's administration?

Well, I think Trump himself has basically given us the answer on America first, make America great Again, whatever his slogans are, they are exactly what he says they are at any given moment.

They don't reflect

an overarching philosophy.

They don't reflect,

in this case, a clear national security grand strategy.

Trump doesn't even really do policy as we understand it.

I don't think to this day that he really appreciates that the words America First

were initially used in the run-up to World War II to be the slogan of the isolationists, those who did not want to be drawn into the European war.

He doesn't see, he never saw the background of that or the concerns about anti-Semitism that lurked in that America First movement.

And I think from Trump's point of view,

because to him everything is transactional, it means he just makes the best deals in the world.

And

he doesn't necessarily distinguish among the terms of the deals he's making.

It's the fact of making a deal that shows who's in charge.

You said, and we all suspected, that Trump was not aware about the true meaning of America First, because he is not, no matter what he says,

a good scholar of history.

But assuming he knew that America First meant isolationism back

then in 1939, 1940, and a clear distinction of anti-Semitism, Would he care?

I don't think he would care.

And I think

he views

truth in a very relative way.

People say Trump lies a lot.

I actually don't think that's an accurate description.

I don't think he cares much about what's true and what's not true.

He says what he thinks he would like the world to be and as it benefits him at any given time.

And if pressed on that point about anti-Semitism in particular, I think he would just brush it away.

So you've written that Trump's decisions are like an archipelago of dots that don't really line up.

And that advisors in the first term, you included, would try to string good decisions together.

Now, what about second administration?

What is happening now?

Well, you know, even just about six months in, I think you can see the difference in personnel selections pretty clearly, certainly in the national security space.

In the first term, he had people who largely shared a Republican philosophy, a Reaganite approach to foreign policy.

Obviously, there were many disagreements on tactics, on priorities, on a whole variety of things, which is perfectly natural in any administration.

And Trump, not knowing much about international affairs,

could often buy one argument one day and another argument the next day.

But eventually

he got frustrated, I think, that his visceral instincts weren't necessarily automatically adopted by his advisors who were trying to give him the best advice, trying to get to

the optimal outcome.

So to avoid the problems that he saw in the first term, in the second term, I think he has consciously looked for people who act as yes men and yes women.

They don't say, well, have you considered these alternative options?

Have you looked at these facts?

He wants people who will listen to what he says and then go out and implement it.

Now, in the first term, people said his advisors tried to constrain him, tried to really make the decisions in his place.

And I just,

I think that's wrong.

I think I can speak for many others.

We're trying to make sure that he made the best decision possible, and giving our advice was part of our function.

My title was National Security Advisor.

I don't know what else I'm supposed to do other than give advice in that job.

But

in the second term, he wants not loyalty.

I think loyalty is a good word.

I think it conveys

a valuable commodity.

He wants fealty.

He wants people who are going to say, yes, sir, and do it really without thinking in many cases, without trying to improve or suggest modifications.

I think that's, ironically, It's going to be harmful to Trump.

It's certainly going to be harmful to America, but that approach ultimately will hurt Trump, too.

How so?

Well, if a president is making decisions in a very narrow focus without understanding the broader implications, the additional risks, the additional opportunities,

he's going to miss a lot of what the rest of the world will see.

And then contingencies will arise that he simply won't be prepared for.

So that even what was a reasonably good decision can go bad because you don't take into account the second and third order consequences.

And I hesitate to say this with

Gary here, but in chess, you have to think a couple moves ahead.

Maybe some people think lots of moves ahead.

Trump plays it one move at a time, and that is dangerous.

Yeah, it's not a very rosy picture.

So it seems that his cabinet now and all people who are supposed to give him advices, they are not going to contradict him.

You know, I have to say, contrary to the first term, there haven't been so many leaks out of this White House in the early months.

So I don't have confidence we really know how the decision-making is going.

But to the extent we do, my impression is

that while there's a lot of discussion about the optics of how you present a particular decision, the kind of background politics, how it makes Trump go look, in terms of strategic thinking,

by people who understand international affairs, there's not an awful lot of that.

And indeed, even in some cases that might seem unusual,

people who disagree get excluded.

I mean, it appears Tulsi Gabbard, who opposed, from all we can tell, the strikes against Iran's nuclear weapons program, was just cut out of the picture.

And I have to say, in the short term, I'm delighted by that.

It probably contributed to the right decision.

But what that means more basically is that Trump made a fundamental mistake appointing her, because you want people who will give their best advice,

and it helps the president, should help the president make a better informed decision.

You mentioned Tulsi Gobert.

What about other advisors?

Who you find the most worrisome?

Well, I think Secretary of Defense Hagseth really is in over his head in this job.

I think his comments in public about comments and criticisms that people made about the outcome of the bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites demonstrated that.

It's fine to defend the president.

That's what cabinet members should do.

If you get tired of defending the president, you should resign.

But that's not your only job.

Your job is also to explain and justify

the conduct that you've ordered on behalf of the president, not in a partisan way, but in a way that helps the American people understand leadership here is in large part education.

And that's not what they're doing.

They're doing a kind of attack partisan politics.

Again, it makes Trump feel good in the short term, term, but in the longer term, he will not be well served by that kind of approach either.

Now, a strategic question, our allies in Europe.

J.D.

Vance went to Munich, Munich Security Conference back in February and chastised European democracies for many things, among them being afraid of the far right and suppressing democracies at home.

So what's your take?

Well, there are a lot of interesting things in that speech.

Number one, you know, Vance

is really on the quasi-isolationist side of the political spectrum.

And he and people like him have been very critical over the years of the neoconservatives for their constant emphasis on human rights and similar concerns.

And yet, at Munich, what he gave was a neoconservative speech, although he was criticizing the Europeans for their democratic failures.

I would have felt better if he had included Russia and China as part of his critical analysis, but he was doing exactly what he criticized the neoconservatives for doing.

This is, I think, a measure of

how really

partisan these kinds of approaches are from a domestic American point of view.

He's scoring, Vance there is scoring points against the neoconservatives, against liberal internationalists, against a variety of people that

I'm not part of, so I didn't take it personally, but it was carrying on a domestic U.S.

political debate in an international forum.

I think that Trump himself doesn't understand alliances.

I'm not sure Vance understands them any better.

In Trump's case, he looks at NATO, for example, and

he sees it as the United States defending Europe.

We don't get anything out of it, and they won't pay.

Well, if I thought NATO worked that way, I probably wouldn't be very enthusiastic about it either.

But the whole point of a collective defense alliance is that the security of all the members is enhanced when they live up to their obligations.

And

I think NATO remains the most effective politico-military alliance in human history.

There are members who are not pulling their fair share.

That's right.

I think Trump was right to criticize that.

What's not right is to break the alliance up over it.

And I think we are, notwithstanding the recent NATO summit where everybody smiled and seemed to be happy.

I don't think we're past the danger point of Trump potentially withdrawing the U.S.

from NATO in less happy times.

Oh, that's interesting.

So can he withdraw from NATO unilaterally without a vote in the Senate, Congress approval, whatever, or just totally in the hands of President?

It's my very firm view that the Constitution does entrust that authority solely to the President.

In the case of NATO,

Ironically, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and some others passed legislation a few years ago that said President could not withdraw from NATO without the consent of the Senate.

I think that provision is unconstitutional.

I don't think you can limit the president's authority.

So if Trump decided to pull out and he issued an executive order doing that, that might be challengeable in litigation, but it would take years to resolve.

And in effect, Trump would would have withdrawn by the time the case was decided by the Supreme Court.

Do you think it's realistic that he will go that far?

You know, I think he, as I say, he doesn't understand the alliance viscerally.

He doesn't like it.

He has said, and his advisors have said, things like, well, we'll only defend NATO members that are meeting what used to be the 2%

threshold, 2% of GDP spent on defense, now 3.5%,

five with infrastructure.

Well, that's a statement that the NATO alliance is like a piece of Swiss cheese.

You can't defend this country and then not defend the country next to it because it's not at 2%.

It's just not viable militarily.

But that kind of thinking has not left Trump's mind and has not left the minds of his advisors.

So I remain very worried, notwithstanding this recent NATO summit where things seem to go well,

this is deep within Trump that he distrusts the alliance, thinks it's part of America getting a raw deal.

But I think that all countries that might be in danger, countries that border Russia or just, you know, in the vicinity of potential Russian aggression, they already are almost at a 5%.

They spent a bigger percentage of GDP than the United States on their defense.

Does it mean that America will defend them?

Well, we certainly should.

But I think this is an important question about Trump the man faced with a crisis situation like that.

Let's say Russia invades the Baltics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Not impossible.

Certainly something the Baltics fear very much.

We did not have any crisis nearly that dangerous in the first term.

COVID was a crisis, but it was a health crisis played out over a long period of time.

So, what would Trump do if the Baltics were attacked by Russia?

I don't know the answer to that question, and it's legitimate for the Eastern European countries in NATO, in particular, to be worried about, because Trump does not like decisions where he can't reverse himself the next day.

And obviously a decision to comply with Article V and defend countries invaded by Russia would be a decision that would be irrevocable for a long time until the military struggle played itself out.

So what do you expect

to happen in Ukraine?

Again, Ukraine is fighting this war, and many of us believe

it's shielding the free world against Russian aggression.

And

Ukrainians and many Europeans, especially neighboring countries, they are disappointed, I would probably say shocked, by Trump's administration's policy in the region.

Can Ukraine survive on its own, or basically can Europe provide enough for Ukraine?

And

how long will America take this neutral stand?

Well, I'm afraid the answer is the rest of Trump's presidency.

I think it's going to remain undecided.

My guess is in the near term, which may be the remaining three and a half years of the administration, Trump is not going to go back and make a major effort to seek a diplomatic solution.

I think he was burned by the failure of Russia to show any conciliatory impulses at all when he tried in the last few months.

And I think he sees it as a failure to live up to his campaign boast that he could solve the problem in 24 hours, which, of course, was never realistic.

So the real issue is: will he allow the continuation of U.S.

military assistance at approximately the same levels: weapons, ammunition, and to my mind, most important of all, military intelligence that's so critical to the Ukrainians on the battlefield?

And to the question you've raised: can the Europeans make up the difference?

I don't think they can on the intelligence.

I just don't think they have the capability.

It could be they can make it up in hardware.

I would hope they could, but

it just won't be the same if Trump really does cut off the aid.

Now

about another crisis or another war.

It's the Middle East.

How do you rate Trump's actions there?

Attacking Iran, then offering the olive branch, and again, some say in the desperate search for Nobel Peace Prize, Trump's policy vis-a-vis Israel, Palestinians.

Right.

Well, I think he's not going to get the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing peace to Ukraine, that's for sure.

So he's looking for another opportunity.

I find myself myself to a certain extent satisfied, but to a certain extent frustrated.

I think it was the right thing to do to order American military attacks on some of the key Iranian nuclear weapons facilities.

There's been a huge and kind of intellectually arid debate about exactly how much damage was done by those attacks, which we don't know because we were not close enough to get a full assessment.

But I think Trump cut off U.S.

military action too soon.

I don't think that there will ever be peace and stability in the Middle East while the regime of the Ayatollahs remains in power.

I'm not saying that requires extensive U.S.

involvement.

It certainly doesn't require boots on the ground.

It could involve assistance to the Iranian people.

I think the question is, will they have the courage to try to take advantage of the splits and tensions within the regime that I think are pretty obvious across the world now and see if this is not the moment to rid themselves of the Ayatollahs.

We'll drive back.

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Let's move from the world of practicalities into the world of idealism.

What could be an ideal world if we could have, you

our wishes granted?

So how should American power be deployed in source of democracy?

So what are the tools to use and where to use them?

Exporting democracy, military interventions, regime change?

Well, I think where American interests are at stake, there are a number of things we could do.

I think regime change

doesn't obviously have to involve American boots on the ground.

There are all kinds of ways that regime change can take place.

We tried that in the case of Venezuela in in 2018 and 2019

that would have allowed the Venezuelan people to take control away from the Maduro, really the Chavez-Maduro dictatorship.

We would have at the same time pushed the Russians, the Cubans, the Chinese, the Iranians out of positions in Venezuela, very advantageous to them.

It didn't work, but it was worth the effort.

If we had succeeded, I would have said basically to

the people of Venezuela, congratulations, it now belongs to you.

You figure out what you're going to do with it.

I have never been a nation builder in the sense that some people have been, but I don't shy away from regime change.

In the case of Iraq, which is the case that people point to again and again,

I give full credit to the people who tried to make the coalition provisional authority in Iraq work.

I think they did it out of the best of motivations, but it's not what I would have done.

In my perfect world, I would have given the Iraqi leaders, some in exile, some who had been in the country,

a copy of the Federalist Papers and said, good luck, call us if you have any questions.

We'll hold the ring around you, we'll protect you from Iranian and other external influences, but you need to do this yourself.

And I think that's really how you nation build.

You don't enhance people's political maturity by making decisions for them.

Even if you can make better decisions than they can, you enhance political maturity by saying you're going to make the decisions and you're going to learn by your mistakes.

It's not guaranteed for success, but I think that's a more solid way of nation building than for Americans to try and do it for them.

But let's be pressure on this issue, because you mentioned Venezuela, Igna, and Belarus.

In these countries, we clearly saw opposition winning elections.

Not

hearsay, winning elections, having a physical proof of receiving in both cases 70% of votes.

And both dictators, Lukashenko and Maduro, they stayed in power.

They didn't care.

They used force.

Lukashenko, we understand, he's too close

to Russia.

Putin was there.

The opposition stood no chance.

But Venezuela is just next door.

So recently we had these elections and Maduro basically ignored it.

He made a deal with the Biden administration, so some kind of relief of sanctions, but promising free and fair elections.

So he reneged on this promise.

Should America intervene?

Well, look, back in 2018 and 2019, I think we were at the point

where we should have been doing more.

But, you know, we didn't have many capabilities

in the Western Hemisphere.

Thanks to the Obama administration,

where we could have had

opportunities through our intelligence community and others to help Juan Guaido, the legitimate president of Venezuela.

The days are long gone by when we really could have done very much.

And I feel we didn't enforce the sanctions as strictly as we could have.

We made a lot of mistakes there.

The Biden administration didn't even try that.

They thought they could make a deal with Maduro.

It was a total mistake.

I don't see how anybody could believe he would honor any commitment he made.

I want to come back to Belarus, though, because I do think that

that was a situation where it was very much in our interest to see if there was any way at all to persuade Lukashenko to pull away from Russia.

So I went to Minsk in August of 2019, about two weeks before I resigned.

I was the first senior American to visit Belarus in a long, long time, just to see the guy and see if there were some hooks we could put in

to bring him away for his own safety's sake, but ultimately leading to popular government.

As I say, I resigned two weeks later, so I didn't carry through on it, but it was a case to me that suggested we could have some influence there.

And maybe, as in the case of Poland with solidarity, maybe there were ways to make that work.

But we never tried because Trump didn't really care about Belarus.

Trump asked in his first term, is Finland still part of Russia?

So to him, Belarus, Ukraine, they all look Russian to him, and it's hard to get him to focus on things.

We've talked now at lengths about the Trump's view of the world, such as it is.

Now I want to talk about the Bolton view.

So my experience of growing up in the Soviet Union during the Cold War instilled in me a great deal of clarity about good and evil in the world of geopolitics.

But there has been a terrible decline in American values after the Cold War and a new lack of clarity about the American role in the world.

So what

has that meant for how you see America's place as the global leader?

Well, I think we're seeing today play out in the Trump administration and among many people who are supportive of him

that this virus of isolationism, which isn't a coherent ideology itself, it's a knee-jerk reaction to the external world,

can go through a long period of being irrelevant and then suddenly reappear.

And I attribute this in part

to a failure in both political parties ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union to develop political leaders who thought about what it would take

from America to help

in the wider world create conditions of stability that would be beneficial to the U.S.

here at home, that would allow our economy to flourish, that would allow our society to flourish.

And so people at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, some were saying it's the end of history.

Others were saying, you know, we can have a peace dividend, We can cut our defense budgets.

Globalization will take care of everything.

It's the economy's stupid.

And we lost the post-World War II and Cold War generations of leaders who spoke very plainly to the American people, whether it's Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, many, many more, to say, look, safety for America

doesn't begin on the Atlantic and Pacific shores.

Safety for America is having a broader place in the world, a forward defense posture with allies to guard against aggression and to try and deter aggression.

And that means a robust, strong America that sees its economic and political and social issues really involved all over the world.

Now, there's a cost to that.

There's a defense budget that has to be paid, there are allies that have to be dealt with, there are risks that have to be taken.

But to say we don't live in a perfect world, far from it, but the way to protect America is not to put our head in the sand, not to turn away from the rest of the world, but to deal with it in ways that are most favorable to us.

And I think one of the things we're seeing today,

you know, 35 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is we don't have much in the way of political leadership that can speak to the American people in these terms.

The Americans have always risen to the challenge when their leaders are straight with them.

And

the idea that we can't, we don't need to worry about the rest of the world, it's not a threat, it doesn't concern us, it's not going to affect us, is deeply uninformed.

I don't call it naive, it's almost perverse.

And yet, that's what we're dealing with.

If we could see political leaders emerge, most likely, I think, in the Republican Party, that can make that case to the American people, we could return to a Reaganite kind of foreign policy that was successful in the Cold War War and could be made applicable to the very different but no less threatening challenges we see around the world today.

Going back to 1991, 1992, the Soviet Union is gone

and I think Americans expected some benefits from the victory, phenomenal victory in the Cold War.

But eight years of Clinton's presidency brought no security.

It's prosperity, yes, but security, no, because

by the time Clinton left the office, al-Qaeda was ready to strike.

So something went wrong, terribly wrong, in the 90s.

So do you think that if a Bush 41 would have won the elections and stayed in the office, the Republican administration had a plan how to redefine American leadership in the new world?

No, I mean, I think there was a lot of uncertainty all around the political spectrum.

George H.W.

Bush talked about a new world order.

Well, it wasn't much order before, and frankly, there wasn't much order after, but what he was referring to was the collapse of the Soviet Union.

What we didn't see, because we were too optimistic perhaps, was that Russia would return to authoritarianism.

We thought, well, now they've got the chance, everything will be fine.

That obviously didn't work out.

We didn't see the turmoil in the Arab world.

We didn't see the radicalization, the effect of the 1979 revolution in Iran.

And we also, in the 1990s, didn't see China, didn't see that it was a threat, it would be a threat.

You know, we heard Deng Xiaoping say to the Chinese, hide and bide, hide your capabilities, bide your time.

We didn't realize what he was saying.

So this illusion that the end of the Cold War meant the end of history, that conflict was

no longer a threat to us,

led us to make grave mistakes about Russia, about China, about the threat of Islamic terrorism.

And we have suffered through all of those and are still suffering through them today.

So it was a catastrophic series of mistakes that there's a lot of blame to spread around here, for short.

And it's the Clinton administration bears a full share of it.

Whether George H.W.

Bush would have done better, I don't know.

I think so, because I think he understood the world a lot better than Bill Clinton did.

But it still sounds very disturbing that the same people, okay, Clinton replaced Bush, but the apparatus was there, you know, the CIA Pentagon, the so-called deep state.

And the same people, the same agencies, the same institutions that were instrumental in defeating Soviet Union in the Cold War made such huge blunders.

You said, missed Russia, missed China, missed Islamic terrorism.

Basically missed everything.

Every threat that we're dealing with now has been totally missed in the 90s.

What was that?

It's just kind of relaxation, we won, let's go celebrate, you know, let's uncork champagne bottles.

Look, I think it was escapism, and I think it was the desire to think, okay, so in the 20th century, we've had three world wars, two of them hot, one of them the Cold War.

We're past all that now.

That's what the end of history means.

And

it was a delusion.

It was a detour from history.

It really was.

And

we've paid the price.

We're still paying the price.

And one reason is we're not spending nearly what we should on defense.

The 5% commitment that NATO made, we're not approaching.

The Trump budget for the next fiscal year is only a small nominal increase over the current budget.

It's not going to do nearly enough.

We're setting ourselves up for, I think, a very risky future if we don't change that.

You just mentioned Trump's budget and its nominal increase in defense, but it's a huge increase in ICE.

So, do you think it's a bit dangerous, yes, that it's the military force has been built in America under control of DOJ,

and

they already demonstrated very little respect for the Constitution.

Could it be a potential tool for terror?

Actually, Trump has come very close to achieving the goal he expressed of closing the border.

I mean, he had the border closed at the end of the first term

because deterrence works.

If you think you're going to walk through Mexico and get stopped at the Rio Grande, you're not going to leave your city or town or village.

That's been restored.

What he wants now is the deportation of the illegals.

And I think

he's going to have a lot of trouble with that.

But the immigration issue is part of, I think, the isolationist temptation that somehow the rest of the world is going to corrupt us.

I think with careful attention and screening of who comes in, we can minimize the risk of terrorists coming in, criminals, agents of foreign governments.

Nothing's perfect, but I think we can do a pretty good job of it.

I don't think that's what Trump wants to do.

He wants the issue of the fight with California, for example.

That's why he federalized the California National Guard and sent in the Marines.

Ironically, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, wanted the fight too.

It benefited both of them politically.

It was just the country that was hurt.

So do you think it's a real chance that Trump will do something totally unconstitutional in America to preserve his power or just to secure the desired outcome of the next elections?

Well, I think he tried that in 2020 and he failed.

You know, the system was stressed, but it held.

I think Trump is going to do, he did a lot of damage in the first term.

He will do more damage in the second term.

Some of it might be irreparable.

I think withdrawing from NATO would be irreparable, for example.

But

I have confidence in the Constitution and and the institutions.

This is not the late Roman Republic.

I don't think we're in danger of succumbing.

It does require more people to stand up and say we don't accept the way Trump behaves.

I'm disappointed more Republicans in the House and the Senate haven't done that.

I don't think this is going to be easy.

But I do think, for example, the courts are holding up pretty well.

I think their independence is critical to sustaining the Constitution.

And I think as time goes on, Trump's influence will decline.

Remember, he's not just a new president now, which he is.

He's also a lame duck president.

And as people begin to appreciate that more and more, I think his influence will wane.

So anything to be optimistic today?

Just, you know, give us just some hope that with Trump in the office, with the rise of authoritarianism, with the Iranian regime surviving, and with terrorism not yet being defeated.

What's the best case scenario?

Well, I think realistically, we've been through worse.

I mean,

it always seems you've got troubles unique to our time, but the U.S.

has been through a lot worse than this, including an incredibly violent civil war.

And we came out on top.

And I think one reason is that when you level with the American people, and it's going to take the next president to do it,

then

we do rise to the occasion.

I believe in American exceptionalism, and I think betting against America is always a dangerous thing to do.

So I think in the near term, we've just got to grit our teeth, make sure we do the best we can to minimize the damage that Trump will cause,

and try and get ready to meet the challenges we're going to face, the threats from China, from the China-Russia axis, from the nuclear proliferation, the threat of terrorism.

There are a lot of threats out there, and

it's going to take a lot of effort.

But I believe in the United States, I think we will prevail.

John, thank you very much for joining the show.

And let's see

if the future brings us more positive than negative news.

Thank you.

I certainly hope so.

Thanks for having me.

This episode of Autocracy in America was produced by Arlene Oralo and Natalie Breno.

Our editor is Dave Shaw.

Original Music and Mix by Rob Smersiak.

Fact-Checking by Anna Alvarado.

Special thanks to Paulina Pasparov and Meg Ringert.

Claudia Nebate is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio.

Andre Valdes is our managing editor.

Next time on Autocracy in America.

It is a historical norm that there is a king, that there is a ruler.

So authoritarianism historically is far more the norm

than liberal democracy.

Liberal democracy opened the door to the idea that people with very different beliefs could live together.

It is a great experiment, but it's a very difficult experiment.

If you believe that the way you should live is a moral imperative,

then it is very difficult to have a liberal democracy.

I'm Gary Kasporov.

See you back here next week.