The Future of Europe

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

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I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

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AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

The leaders of Western European nations are dealing with a lot.

Bruising political fights over how to approach migrants and refugees, negotiations over what Brexit means, a wave of populist movement sowing discord across the continent.

And then there's Donald Trump.

This week, all the heads of NATO gathered in Brussels for their semi-annual summit.

The U.S.

president's commitment to arguably the most successful military alliance in history is, shall we say, tenuous.

Are the biggest threats to NATO coming from inside Europe or from Europe's best ally?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

With me in studio here in D.C.

is my esteemed co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Jeff, hello.

Hi, Matt.

And Jeff is the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic.

Don't you forget it.

My boss.

With us here in D.C.

is our colleague, Kathy Gilsonen.

Hi, Matt.

Runs international coverage for The Atlantic.

Hello, Kathy.

Hi.

And calling in from California, although she is ordinarily based in our London Bureau, is our colleague Yasmeen Sirhan.

Hello, Yasmeen.

Hello, from this side of the pond, your side of the pond.

I just wanted to warn you all that unfortunately, I do have a guest with me.

His name is Cosmo.

He is a dog.

And despite my best efforts to quiet my surroundings, he's the one factor I cannot control.

So, if you do hear barking, whining of any of the kind, I'm so sorry.

He just has a lot to say.

Listen, the Atlantic has long needed a canine correspondent, so we welcome Cosmo's presence in the conversation.

Thank you.

We are talking this week about NATO.

If you were stunned by the cliffhanger left hanging after the G7 summit back in June, then you are expecting fireworks this week.

NATO's leaders are convening in Brussels for their semi-annual get-together.

The last time this group, well, several of this group were together in Quebec, it was a pretty tense affair.

Do you all remember that photo of German Chancellor Angela Merkel facing down Donald Trump?

Or Donald Trump facing down Angela Merkel, depending on where you're at.

Depending on your vantage point.

Yeah.

Well, this time, there's not just conflict with Trump to worry about.

The politics within the EU are getting ever more intense.

But before we get to that, Kathy, catch us up.

What is happening this week, and what are the stakes?

So as we speak, Donald Trump has wrapped up a NATO summit meeting in Brussels.

These are ordinarily sort of snoozy affairs, as you mentioned.

There were a lot of fears ahead of this summit that Trump could do something drastic.

And we're not done with his world tour yet.

And we'll get into that a little bit more later, I imagine.

But, you know, at this one,

he

Trump has a long history of calling into question the value of the NATO alliance.

And at this one, he did it to the faces of members of the NATO alliance.

He was at a breakfast this morning with Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, in which he called NATO countries delinquent on their spending.

He has a long-standing record of,

as have previous presidents before him, of insisting that NATO countries need to spend more on their own defense, that the U.S.

is shouldering too much of the burden.

And then

at the end of the summit, he verbally insisted that where he had been advocating they spend 2% of their GDP on defense, now they needed to spend 4% of their GDP on defense, which even the United States does not do.

These sound like pretty small differences.

Yeah, sure, totally.

But on the other hand, he did sign on to this 79-point joint declaration that did things like, you know, affirm the commitment to collective defense and condemn Russia for its activities in Ukraine.

And so

he

rhetorically spanked members of the alliance, but so far we haven't seen anything reflected in policy that is actually physically damaging to the alliance.

But again, the trip isn't over yet.

So by the time you hear this,

this may be as obsolete as NATO.

The whole international letter could be blown up.

Now, remind us what happened at last year's NATO summit.

So they, you know, they meet yearly, as alliances are wont to do.

And Donald Trump came on the scene having expressed long-standing skepticism about America's traditional alliances.

So it was already going to be an unusual amount of nail biting ahead of that NATO summit.

And he did not disappoint.

I remember the day of the summit, the New York Times reported that Trump was expected to reaffirm the Article V commitment to collective defense within NATO.

Which is like a standard thing that the president does.

An attack on one is an attack on all, right?

But there were questions ahead of time whether Trump was truly committed to this.

You know, a bunch of people were reassuring a bunch of European leaders.

No, no, no, he's going to do this.

And then he gave the speech and he left it out.

He just didn't say it.

And so the New York Times felt silly.

All these European leaders felt silly because

they had to try and sort of put lipstick on this non-commitment pig and say, no, no, no, we still trust the United States.

Thereafter, you had Angela Merkel saying oblique things like, Europe is not going to be able to rely exclusively on the United States anymore.

We got to take our future into our own hands, kind of thing.

So, yeah,

that was the prequel to this summit.

So, they gather.

After last year's summit, the future of NATO hangs in the balance.

Now, let's fast forward and move off of the NATO summit.

We'll come back to that later in the conversation, but I want to turn to what has been happening over the past few weeks in Europe.

Just, Kathy,

set the table for us on what different European leaders have been grappling with in their own countries before

they gathered in Brussels this week.

Let's start with Angela Merkel in Germany.

Sure.

So Angela Merkel just survived another crisis in her government.

She's been a bit of an escape artist, as Yasmin actually noted on the site recently.

And this latest one was also about migration, as previous ones have been.

But basically, she got in a feud with her interior minister over a proposal he put forward to turn away certain asylum seekers from Germany if they had already applied for asylum in another EU country.

So basically, Merkel opposes this.

However, her interior minister, by definition, is in her government.

He's threatening to cause the collapse of the government.

They come up with an 11th-hour deal to basically

tighten the borders a little bit, but not do the full shebang that this guy was advocating.

Aaron Powell, Merkel is challenged by the politics of Germany's borders.

Take us around to the UK.

Yasmin,

what has UK Prime Minister Theresa May been grappling with as she comes to the NATO session?

So it all comes down to Brexit again.

The UK has kind of been contending with its own also domestic issues surrounding its exit from the European Union and the disagreements within Theresa May's own cabinet over how that exit should look.

This week, Theresa May saw not one but two cabinet ministers quit.

Their Brexit Secretary David Davis resigned on Sunday night and that was quickly followed by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson the next day.

This was over Theresa May's proposed plans the week before for how the UK should leave the EU.

She proposed sort of what they call a softer Brexit that would see the UK maintain close regulatory alignment with the EU after it leaves.

Some kind of hardline Brexiteers like Johnson and Davis don't think that's good enough.

They think that if they're going to leave the EU, it should be a hard, clean break.

So they left.

But it was a particularly bad time, not just to lose a Brexit secretary nine months before the UK actually plans to leave the EU, but to also lose their foreign secretary in a week that's quite crazy.

Not only is England contending with the death of a woman who was exposed to Novichok, the poison known for getting both the foreign Russian spies Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia back in March,

but also they have to contend with the Trump visit that's coming up later this week, as well as the NATO summit.

So it's a pretty bad time to be without a foreign secretary.

But that's, that's, yeah, that's what May's dealing with.

And meanwhile,

the whole continent is greeting a new leader in Italy who brings a different vantage point to this whole affair.

Yeah, so the most...

probably

the most interesting and vocal figure in Italy on this issue is the Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini of what used to be known as the Northern League Party, which has rebranded itself as many far-right parties in Europe have.

This one has rebranded itself as the League.

It started out as this very fringe separatist party that advocated the secession of the north of Italy.

And because migration became such a big issue, it wanted to, it was able to appeal to voters further down south where a lot of the migration is happening.

And so Salvini, this formerly sort of crazy, unthinkable party, ended up

getting not the most votes, but ended up with the most power just because of the way Italy's coalition politics works over this migration issue specifically.

And it's an issue that resonates with

a lot of Italian voters.

And voters across the continent, it seems like.

Yeah, and voters in the United States.

I mean, pull back and just, yeah, tell us what...

What is happening with migration?

into Europe at this moment.

Last summer, we saw lots of headlines, lots of images, and had a big refugee migrant crisis that European leaders were contending with.

How does that that look now, a year on?

Well, one of the really interesting things about these politicians is that the politics is sort of lagging the reality of migration.

And it's a little bit, although not perfectly parallel to what's happening in the United States,

that sort of even as you're seeing an actual decline in some of the numbers

coming up to the border,

in

Europe broadly, according to Europe's own statistics, since the peak of the migration crisis, which was a couple of years ago,

migration to Europe is down something like 90%, 96%.

Wow.

But because, but the fact is that, like, Europe is still contending not so much with new newcomers, but they do have these people there that they now need to absorb.

And this is creating all kinds of societal tensions.

Yeah.

So the whole, I mean, the EU is a weird thing.

Let's just acknowledge it.

To be sure.

Right?

It's a

new quasi sovereign thing i mean it's a it's an entity that is both a complete entity unto itself with its own border uh and also a bunch of different sovereign nations that have to contend with uh their own internal politics so yasmin you quoted um the founder of a german think tank um

uh saying that It suddenly turns out that it's actually impossible to control a border unilaterally if your neighbors don't agree.

Aaron Powell,

yes, I think what they meant is that, as the German case kind of demonstrated last month, is that it's difficult for just one individual European government to decide that they are going to close their borders or alter

their borders in some way because of the nature of the fact that the European Union is open internally.

It's, you know, once you're within the Schengen zone, you can go from one country to another country quite easily.

And that's one of the hallmarks of what makes the EU what it is.

Aaron Powell, I think that point about internal borders is a good one.

And this is part of what makes the peripheral countries like Italy and like Austria so important.

If we were talking, if we were having this conversation a couple of years ago even, who would think that

Italian politics would be such an enthralling thing but for a few

handfuls of specialists or Italophiles.

And who would think that it would matter very much to the future of Europe who became the Chancellor of Austria?

What, to Yasmin's point about whether you can unilaterally control these borders, the point is that if you're on the periphery of Europe and you're letting in migrants, then the rest of Europe naturally has to deal with it just because of the way that Europe is set up.

So the point is that these

leaders in what used to be countries that were not necessarily core to the European project is actually helping decide the fate of the project as a whole.

Yeah.

So what options do they have, Kathy?

What types of answers to this problem might different leaders settle on?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, I think one, I mean, I think the key answer that people, the most important issue that they need to solve now, again, given that the new arrivals have dropped to such an extent, is how do you integrate the people that are already there?

And so, there are different, and

to your earlier point, that the EU is this large sort of conglomeration of semi-unified countries that also have different national systems and sort of a patchwork of different

regulations and governing structures.

They all also have different approaches toward how they integrate these newcomers.

So, that's one challenge.

And then the other challenge, of course, is how you control the external borders.

Interestingly,

the external borders of the EU.

The external borders of the EU, correct.

And Merkel was actually forced to harden her stance a little bit when she famously threw open Germany's borders and said, you know, we can do it.

We can integrate these people.

Yeah, she was Mother Merkel.

Yeah, she was Mother Merkel.

And

has tried to stay pretty much on that side of the issue,

but has actually gotten pulled right by Sebastian Kurtz, among others,

to say, you know,

they reached a compromise at an EU meeting that basically sets up detention centers at borders to vet asylum seekers to see whether or not they can in fact be allowed into the country.

So wait, set up detention centers?

That sounds pretty familiar sitting here in the U.S.

weeks after we've had conflicts over the Trump administration's zero-tolerance border enforcement policy.

To be sure.

So international law, as I understand it, requires you to hear out somebody's case for asylum.

If they come to your country and claim asylum, you have to hear them out.

Now, typically, what's happened in the U.S.

is that people have been claiming asylum from places like Syria that require,

you know, it requires actual flights to get to the United States.

It's very hard to just cross the border into the United States from places like that.

So the United States has traditionally vetted these asylum seekers in refugee camps and like places that are not actually in the U.S.

Europe being sharing borders with some of these places doesn't have that, you know, hasn't had those kinds of systems in place and has done a lot of the asylum processing internally with people already in the country.

So the point of this new system that is being proposed is to make it so that that processing doesn't happen within the country.

Aaron Ross Powell, so Germany's been among the most welcoming of the EU nations to refugees and other migrants.

How have other countries held back migrants from entering their borders?

And what approaches might Germany be choosing from?

Well, one of the more dramatic examples of recent days was

under Salvini in Italy, where you had a migrant ship coming from Libya that

under a previous government would just have docked in Sicily.

But Salvini said, no, just leave them there.

They can't come here.

In the water?

Yeah, just leave them in the water.

So they were in the water for, I think, a couple of days before Spain said, okay, fine, we'll take them.

But so, and this is an interesting, I mean, it's a social science experiment that's being conducted on real human beings, as I guess most social science experiments are.

But this being a very severe one, that is, you know, Salvini's really encouraging burden sharing of the migration issue in a very dramatic and urgent kind of way.

So that's one approach.

I mean, there are approaches such as, you know, Hungary closed its borders at one point.

You know, Kurt of Austria has also helped with some of those border tightening initiatives on some of those peripheral countries.

And

I think those have been the main approaches.

Wow.

So we've been talking about the politics within European countries.

Necessary context for the gathering of NATO's leaders this week in Brussels.

All of Europe's leaders are grappling with a really shifting environment environment of politics within their own countries, pressures from refugees pushing on their borders, or refugees and immigrants that are already in these countries that their leaders now have to grapple with politically.

But

now for the next part of the conversation, let's turn to the gathering in Brussels, the main event, the NATO summit, and Donald Trump's questionable commitment to arguably the most successful military alliance in the world.

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So, Jeff,

what is NATO?

Donald Trump, our president, has been calling variably

over the past few years, he's called NATO obsolete.

He's gone back on that.

And he has arrived in Brussels this week with several sharp words for European leaders and the Secretary General of NATO itself.

So I wanted to step back and ask the question, is NATO obsolete?

What is it supposed to do?

NATO is supposed to do what it's done for as long as it's existed.

It's one of the most successful military alliances, and not only military, it's a cultural alliance as well.

It's a democratic alliance.

An alliance of democracy is one of the most successful alliances and durable alliances in history.

What does the president mean by NATO is obsolete?

The president's foreign policy doctrine, if you will, rests on a couple of principles.

The first is that we have no,

that allies are a burden, our traditional allies are a burden.

The second is that

he mistrusts multilateral alliances.

He believes that allies, whether allies singly or allies organized into alliances, broader alliances, are all ripping us off.

And so he has a deep mistrust of anything other than a bilateral relationship.

And even a bilateral relationship is strictly transactional to him.

And of course, and this is salient to this conversation, the third leg of his doctrine, if you will, is

a weakness for, or let's say, an excessive understanding for the plight of authoritarian figures.

He has a weakness for authoritarianism.

Obviously, NATO is

the foremost gathering of nations in the world that are organized around principles of democracy, individual rights, freedom, market capitalism, free press, so on.

Apple pie.

Apple pie, baseball.

Mother dog.

Do they eat apple pie?

Cosmo the wonder dog.

Cosmo the wonder dog.

And so, of course, Donald Trump is

alienated from many of these concepts.

He also believes, and this is where

Trump's foreign policy is not a break from Obama's foreign policy, but a continuation or an intensification of it.

He is right to say that NATO countries and Europe, especially,

should pay more for the common defense.

That's not wrong.

And President Obama has said that.

President Bush said it before him.

But his critique is not about the budget.

His critique, it seems, is really about the nature of the alliance itself.

NATO is for, if you want to get very, very specific, NATO is there to defend, free Europe from first the Soviet Union and then Russia.

Obviously,

the only time NATO has actually

activated as a common defense alliance in real warfare has been in defense of the United States in Afghanistan.

The invocation of Article 5, come to the common defense of members, occurred in 2001 when the United States was attacked, which is, of course,

given

there's a level of chutzpah here when the president of the only country in NATO to ever have benefited directly militarily from the alliance.

I mean, you could argue, of course, that the European countries have benefited passively militarily for the last 60, 70 years, obviously, the presence of American troops in Germany and elsewhere.

But in actual warfare, NATO went to war on behalf of the United States.

So it's a little bit galling for Europeans to be told that

NATO has no purpose or that NATO, other NATO members are ripping the United States off.

But look, here, the bottom line is if you don't believe that Russia is a threat today, or to take it one step further, and I'm not necessarily implying this, I'm just putting this out there.

If you believe that Russia is your natural friend,

then of course you as an American president are going to say NATO is a waste of time and money.

And that's where we are right now.

It's a rather unusual situation.

But what's also interesting is,

and I posed this question to you, Jeff, given your invocation of Obama's own feelings on this, which he told you.

Given my invocation of Article 5.

Yeah, your invocation of Article 5.

I mean, that's when other magazines come to the defense of the Atlantic.

An attack on Jeffrey Goldberg is an invocation of the.

It's an attack on all of us.

I've always believed that, but very few people around me go, oh man,

we're getting attacked a lot these days.

I reaffirm that commitment.

That's on mine.

That's Canada.

That's Canada in that case.

I would absolutely reaffirm it.

Thank you very much.

I think I'm Turkey.

I have some Democrats.

Canada in the free Trump understanding of Canada.

Can we count on Cosmo?

Is the key question here?

All right, enough of these hijinks.

No, but go on with a question.

So, Barack Obama, I believe, told you personally, vis-a-vis NATO, that, quote, free riders aggravate me.

Now, this is different.

Remember, and that counted in the old days as an extreme comedy.

That was huge news all over Europe the next day, in fact.

That was huge.

That was dominated by the United States.

That was counted as really blunt talk from a president.

This is exactly, yeah, this is exactly where I'm going with this, is that stylistically, of course, Obama saying that to you and Trump saying in front of Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, you all are delinquent.

You know, Russia owns the Germans.

Is this, how much though, is this merely a rhetorical difference?

And how much of this actually makes a difference as far as policy is concerned?

Look, this is the funhouse mirror version of what Obama said.

Obama said something that people have said on both sides of the aisle in American politics, which is like, hey, NATO, chip in.

You're rich now.

You know, when the alliance was created, Europe was on its back.

And so the United States represented half the world economy.

And, you know, but now Germany is different than it was right after the war, obviously.

So it's a difference in tone, but it's also a difference in kind.

Obama never questioned, no American president until this current president has questioned the efficacy, the value,

the importance,

not only the defense importance, but the

idealistic importance of NATO.

So Trump has found the Achilles heel in the issue, right?

American taxpayers can understand intuitively, hey, stop ripping us off, right?

But his critique is not limited to budgetary considerations.

His critique seems to be of the nature, his critique is of the Western alliance itself,

which is, I'm not saying he's consciously doing Vladimir Putin's bidding, but he's doing Vladimir Putin's bidding.

Whether or not they're coordinated is a separate question, but he is actually aiding Russia in its long-standing feud with NATO by weakening the alliance.

Two years ago, our colleague Uri Friedman kind of made this real.

He had an interview with a British general, Richard Sheriff,

who was one of the highest-ranking military officials in NATO,

and asked him about this one scenario.

What if Russia invaded the Baltics while Donald Trump was president?

In July of 2016, Uri asked this question.

What would happen if the Baltic nations were invaded by Russia?

And

I'm curious.

I guess that's that is where so I mean, this is a very basic question, right?

And President Obama, who was no fan of extraneous wars, or what he thought of extraneous wars,

and look, this is a critique from the McCain camp and even from part of the Hillary camp,

vis-à-vis Ukraine.

Ukraine was not in NATO, and there was obviously never an indication for Barack Obama that he would go to war on behalf of Ukraine against Russia.

But statutorily, or

by treaty, he was obligated to go to war on behalf of the Baltic states that had been brought into NATO.

And I have no doubt that had Russia invaded Estonia, Lithia, Lithuania, Latvia, the United States would have gone, used military action to defend them.

Under Obama.

Under Obama.

Now,

this is where, I mean,

this is a reminder.

It's an interesting moment to remind us that all of the crises in international affairs that we've had over the past, however many months it is that Trump has been president, 18, 20 months,

are self-created, right?

I mean, there's all this drama going on, but you want drama.

Just wait until Putin decides that now's the moment to start sneaking in his little green men into Estonia or Lithuania, Latvia, the way he did in Ukraine.

The NATO headquarters and much of the American foreign policy and defense elite, including the Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, will say, well, Russia's gone to war against our friend.

We are obligated to defend them.

And this is going to be a kind of an interesting moment to see what the President of the United States does.

Does he uphold America's historic obligation to members of the NATO alliance, or does he not?

But it's a question that was never

open.

It was not a question that would have been bothered to have been asked.

So, Jeff, you're going to have to leave us in a second to to do important editor-in-chief stuff.

Yes.

But I've got to ask, President Trump is about to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

That's very exciting.

Next week.

What could happen at that meeting?

What do you expect will happen at that meeting?

Have you ever watched Team America?

Anything could happen.

I mean, this is.

What's the worst possibility?

What's the best possibility?

The worst possibility is that 10 minutes later, we're all dead.

The best possibility is damage mitigation, right?

All of Trump's instincts tell him that Putin is not a threat.

Many of Trump's instincts seem to tell him that Putin is an admirable figure, tough guy.

One of the things that could happen at minimum in this conversation,

I would be afraid

to see this, but one of the things is that

Donald Trump can signal to Putin that our conflict with Russia over what Putin did in Ukraine, Crimea, is over, and that Trump could promise Putin to try to begin a process of lifting sanctions and bringing Russia fully back into the international community.

That is,

it's both unbelievable in ordinary times and also plausible

given this president's proclivities.

I don't know.

what's going to happen and maybe nothing, but you know, when he goes into these rooms alone with foreign leaders

really anything can happen it's it's it's exciting and terrifying at the same time one last question for you Jeff

in recent days

the former U.S.

ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro

had a widely circulated tweet storm because that's how foreign policy happens these days

saying

First, quote, I don't think we are fully grappling with the possibility that we could be on the cusp of a completely new era, a fundamental reshaping of the international order.

And I don't mean over the course of the Trump administration, I mean by next week.

What

I imagine from your familiarity with both Shapiro himself and the darkest imaginings of

what that new era could look like, what does he mean?

What could that new era, what could that fundamental reshaping of the international order involve?

No, we see the United States making a quick exit from the Western Alliance.

Not only quick exit, I shouldn't say quick exit from the Western Alliance.

The United States is the linchpin of the Western Alliance.

And if the United States, the present United States, decides that we're no longer playing the role that we've played since the end of World War II, well, that disrupts everything.

Look, the basic theory

of

America's stabilizing role in the world is as follows.

There are three regions of the world that are crucial to American national security interests.

East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, right?

Geopolitics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

So if the United States

exits from East Asia, that vacuum is filled by China.

If the United States exits in some sort of declarative way, Europe and the NATO alliance, that vacuum is filled by Russia.

In the Middle East, if we exit, the vacuum is filled by some combination of Iran, Shia extremism, and Sunni extremism, non-state actors like ISIS and al-Qaeda, right?

So

the new era could be

a multipolar world in which the United States really isn't playing the role of one of the poles.

Maybe in the Western Hemisphere, it's still one of the poles.

And it sounds overly dramatic because we've had a

remarkably stable run with obviously mistakes and bumps and terrible miscalculations and also great victories over the last 70 years.

But the rules of the road were written and enforced by the United States since the end

of World War II.

The United States, the steadfastness of the United States and its Western allies in NATO

brought about or outlasted the Soviet Union, led to the collapse of communism in Europe.

And if this president, who is

quasi-isolationist and in some ways anti-democratic, gets his way, the United States will pull the curtain

on

the role that it's played to mainly good effect in the world.

And

that role will be assumed by other countries that are not democratic.

And so that's, I guess that's what he's talking about.

I mean, that's what everybody's talking about.

So I assume that's what he's talking about.

How do you assess the likelihood that Trump will get his way?

42%.

Okay.

Or at 27%.

I mean, I

American presidents have a lot of power.

True, but American bureaucracies also have a lot of power.

Well, you know, there's a cognitive dissonance here, right?

I mean, you listen to the Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, who is a stalwart alliance maintainer of alliances, stalwart believer that the American system and the American role in the world is a positive role, certainly more positive than the role played by China, Russia, and Iran, for instance.

And you have many people like Jim Mattis around the president.

But at a certain point, these are all people who just work for the president.

What the president has is not only the executive power located in him and the bully pulpit and all the rest, but

he has the acquiescence of a Republican-controlled Congress.

So,

you know,

there's a lot of power.

I mean, we always know, we understand that as the controller of the nuclear arsenal, he's a monarch, an absolute monarch, but he has monarchial power in terms of

creating new realities in the global order.

Well, Jeff,

thank you for giving us.

I have more to say.

I know you have more to say.

I would love to listen to this.

No, no, no.

Past the 20th century and the new 21st century international order from Jeffrey Goldberg further, but I know you've got to leave.

Thank you, colleagues.

Thank you, colleagues.

Bye, Jeff.

Thanks to Jeff for a tremendous history lesson and future lesson.

Around the world with Jeffrey Goldberg.

Absolutely.

There's a reason we keep that guy around.

But we will sadly have to let him go for Keepers, our segment in which I ask the question, what have you heard recently that you do not want to forget?

First, an announcement.

Next week is the anniversary of the launch of Radio Atlantic.

So to celebrate and to look back, we're going to do an all keepers episode.

We'll visit with past guests and look back on their keepers.

What have they held on to?

What is it that they've encountered recently that they do not want to forget?

And of course, we also want to hear from you.

What are your keepers of the year?

What has stuck with you?

Give us a call and let us know your keeper of the whole year.

2018 since our launch in 2017.

What do you not want to forget?

202-266-7600.

Leave us a voicemail with your contact information and your answer to the question, what do you not want to forget?

This week, we'll start with a keeper from our listener, John.

My name is John.

My wife and I just got married this past weekend.

And my keeper

concerns my wife's Oma, who is 93

and had hip replacement surgery not just a couple of months ago.

She told us the day after the wedding intersection that when she she went out to the dance floor, she felt the music take over her.

And indeed, we have video and pictures of her breaking it down with all of these 20-something-year-old people.

It was wonderful.

Uh, thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

That is wonderful, man.

Oh, my God.

I want to just keep that keeper.

Absolutely.

93.

So that means that in

1911,

well before.

I'm really not going to check your math on that one.

John Zoma was entering the world and now she's dancing with the kids.

John's Oma is still getting down.

Awesome.

Awesome.

John's wife's Oma.

I should probably correct, I think.

I think it's his Oma in law now.

Awesome.

Fantastic.

Yasmeen, what do you not want to forget?

So my, it's a little, well, so just prefacing before I tell you, at the moment Croatia is playing England and My Keeper has to do with the World Cup and they are in overtime, I think, and tied, so hopefully I'm not jinxing anything, but I'm going to keep My Keeper nonetheless, regardless of what happens.

So My Keeper is a song that I've had stuck in my head pretty much the last couple of weeks.

It's the 1996 single Three Lions by the Lightning Seeds, which is basically England's World Cup anthem, which kind of re-emerged in the last couple of weeks.

And it's it's basically a song about how seemingly outwardly pessimistic but inwardly hopeful English soccer fans tend to be.

And I think it kind of perfectly captures just how unexpected England's performance has been this year.

And even though I'm not a huge sports person myself, there's something really nice about having like an exciting, unifying, and positive thing that kind of brings a country together, especially in a place like Britain, which politics for which has been kind of the opposite.

So yeah, I'm going to be listening to it for as long as I can, regardless of whether England goes to the final or not.

But hopefully, football does come home.

Awesome.

Awesome.

And let me take the opportunity to shout out a piece by our colleague Sophie Gilbert, who wrote a wonderful piece about hope in England in the wake of the World Cup, which we will drop into the show notes.

So thank you for that, Yasmin.

That was beautiful.

It was, in fact, beautiful.

Kathy, what do you not want to forget?

Well, I had one, but I'm switching it because John inspired me.

My uncle was recently hospitalized

and had a, it was for a normal surgery, but it turned out that his heart stopped for seven minutes.

Oh, goodness.

Yeah.

And it also turned out that.

he woke up and has bounced back.

And the first time, which is an actual miracle, the first time I got to talk to him after that happened, he, I was asking him, you know, I didn't know how his mental functioning was, and I knew he was going to be okay when he said, oh, yeah, you know, they have me on the cardiac diet.

Well, what's that, Uncle Ken?

Well, if you taste anything good, you have to spit it out.

Awesome.

That's my keeper.

Yeah, Uncle Ken.

I will go last.

My keeper is the book Educated by Tara Westover, which I recently completed.

If you're not familiar with the book, it's been getting all sorts of acclaim and for good reason.

It's a pretty extraordinary read.

It's a memoir about

Westover's upbringing in Idaho.

She

was raised

in a family under a patriarch, under a father who has a kind of

anti-government, crypto-Mormon ideology, and kept Tara and several of her siblings out of school

for

the formative years of their life, prevented them from several of them from being registered with the government, and generally raised them in an isolationist, nationalist, Ruby-ridgy kind of context.

Westover managed to

leave Idaho to get an education at some of the world's best centers of higher learning, places like Cambridge and Harvard, and ultimately acquire a PhD

and then write this tremendous book.

But the thing that I want to keep

is

just having just read Educated, it's a book,

it would be very easy to read this book and stereotype Westover's family, to come away with the sense of just, oh man, these rubes out

in the mountain somewhere

living out some weird crypto fantasy.

She doesn't do that and it's part of what makes the memoir powerful.

And if you read it, I highly recommend that you read past the epilogue to a note that she writes called a note on the text

where she says,

we are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell this is especially true in families part of what makes the book remarkable is westover reckoning with the legitimacy of the knowledge that she's come to acquire

the education that she's

that she's been given by these institutions of higher learning, by the likes of Harvard and Cambridge, and the sacrifice that it took in part of some of her relationships with people that she still, it's clear, loves dearly to acquire that knowledge, and whether or not the acquisition of the knowledge was worth it.

It's a

just striking book, and I will be wrestling with it and its implications for a good while.

So, Educated, Tara Westover, highly recommended.

And with that,

we've reached the end of another Radio Atlantic.

Here's hoping that the international order remains intact in the next seven days.

Yasmeen, thank you so much for taking time out of your vacation to join us.

Thank you so much for having me and Cosmo.

We both appreciate it.

Always glad to have Cosmo bring him back.

Kathy, thank you.

Thanks, Matt.

Once again, that'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

Our executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts is Catherine Wells.

Our theme music, as always, is the Battle Hymn of the Republic, as interpreted by the legendary John Batiste.

Thank you to my inestimable colleagues, Kathy Gilsonen and Yasmin Sarhan, for enlightening us this week.

And honorary shout out to Cosmo, our canine correspondent.

Thanks, as always, to my esteemed co-host, Jeff.

What is your keeper?

Once again, call us at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail with your contact information.

Check us out at facebook.com/slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com/slash radio.

Don't forget our show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, do rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and definitely subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

May you never have cause to question the fealty of your allies, whoever they are.

We'll see you next week.

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