Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Nicholas Grossman: Thanks, Greg. Great to be back.
“The fake news media refuses to talk about it because they hate and disrespect our country and want to interfere with the upcoming tariff decision, one of the most important ever, of the United States Supreme Court. Because of tariffs, our country is financially, and FROM A NATIONAL SECURITY STANDPOINT, FAR STRONGER AND MORE RESPECTED THAN EVER BEFORE.”
Grossman: Right, the tariffs in particular are weakening the country because, while maybe this is making him stronger personally vis-à-vis the U.S. democratic system, it’s making the United States weaker compared to other countries in the world. So tariffs end up being taxes on Americans, and there’s no particular way that taxing the American people more, taxing American businesses more, is going to make America stronger. But also because it is disrupting trade and disrupting the type of international relationships that have helped the United States become so strong and so wealthy—all to end up getting maybe more personal control for himself, but weaker overall for how the country actually operates with power in the world.
Grossman: No, he doesn’t seem to be. He seems to be treating them almost as the same thing—or that, with the tariffs, as if they are opportunities for corruption and they are people effectively paying tribute to him, or at least that’s how he’s presenting it: as if he’s a mob boss who’s getting a little taste of something.
And the U.S. ends up pushing countries more towards ones that are U.S. rivals, like China, where a lot of countries don’t want to deal with China. It’s authoritarian. It comes with a lot of strings attached, but at least they know that the Chinese are going to be consistent.
Grossman: Right, and destroying is easy. Maintaining and building is what’s hard. The reason why other presidents haven’t disrupted these relationships before is not because they were incapable of doing so, but because they correctly recognized that it was a bad idea, that it would weaken the U.S. rather than strengthen it. And they weren’t approaching this like a reality TV show character where bluster—of just showiness and yelling—is strength. There’s also a lot of strength in the world from things like quiet, from being stoic, from not flying off the handle at just a little poke.
Sargent: Exactly. And so, after Trump ordered the military action against Venezuela and U.S. forces brought its leader, Nicolás Maduro, to the United States, Trump kept up the threats. Listen to this.
Sargent: In addition, Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, tweeted a graphic of Greenland as an American flag with the word “Soon,” implying an American takeover of Greenland. Nick, this too is about creating the illusion of a certain type of strength. He’s depicting the seizing of Greenland as both a strong act in and of itself, but also as something that would strengthen the country. How seriously do you take the actual threat at this point? And is there any way that strengthens us?
And so that undermines the solidarity. And while it is a type of strength, I suppose—like in a Risk game or a video game, or it is definitely the way that the Russian government uses strength... that something like the U.S. side looks like they’re fantasizing about it in a way similar to how Russia took Crimea from Ukraine in 2014: try to show up, do it quickly, make it relatively bloodless. But it would not make the U.S. stronger; [it would] make the U.S. decidedly weaker. And because national security is not the sort of thing that can be decided upon immediately—it takes longer-term planning—Denmark and the Europeans are right to take it seriously because they can’t afford the possibility that it’s not.
Grossman: That’s the sort of thing that works only in a one-time interaction. You know, so I guess as a business person, he goes and he screws over some contractors that he’s working with. And there are so many contractors that there was always another one who would come along and be tempted by whatever offer he was making, and maybe they think they’re different or who knows what. A similar thing happened with banks where he would declare bankruptcy, he would stiff various loans, but then he went internationally, and this was part of how he got a bunch of business ties in Russia: by other banks not really willing to lend to him, but Russian banks would.
And while the United States is dealing with Denmark in that regard, who is the U.S. really competing against? It’s not a country like Denmark; it is large rival powers like, say, China or possibly Russia, or a smaller country like Iran or North Korea. Those are America’s competitors in the world, and working with Denmark against a country like, say, China, or working with a country like Denmark on a shared problem like terrorism, leaves the United States a lot stronger, more capable of dealing with those problems and of advancing its interests in the world than if it is the U.S. alone picking fights with everybody at once while still trying to compete with other countries like, say, China.
Now, Nick, if you just put aside whether Trump is actually serious about this or not, what you can see here in that response is that Trump’s own threats, which are spreading very real fears in Greenland and Denmark, are a weakening agent by itself. The fact that his threats will make our allies correctly more distrustful of us seems bad for America. I mean, I guess Trump thinks it’s good for our allies to be frightened of us. Can you talk about that?
Grossman: I don’t know if he thinks it is good for allies per se to be frightened, so much as he doesn’t really consider the concept of alliances as a serious issue or a serious benefit. That if he approaches the world as [if] everybody is totally selfish, everybody is always untrustworthy, everybody’s lying all the time and just advancing their agenda all the time, then everything is zero-sum, and then it’s just a question of whether I get one over on you or you get one over on me first.
It reduces the sort of trust that builds stronger alliances and leads to longer decision-making, and then prompts the type of zero-sum competitive thinking that Trump seems to approach everybody with. It gets countries in Europe, for example, or in East Asia or elsewhere, to start thinking things like: “Maybe we need to cozy up to a country like China, not because we like them, but because we need to hedge our bets.” Or: “Maybe we need to stop relying so much on American military equipment because we can’t trust [that] in the future, the United States will be there to help maintain it and help to send replaceable parts.” Or: “Maybe we need to stop sharing so much intelligence.”
Sargent: That last example is really important because, in the small minds of Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the fact that they’re just blowing up people in the Caribbean in defiance of international law is yet another sign of strength. It’s America forging its own way in the world. But here’s a case where we are denying ourselves critical tools and critical information against enemies, which just strikes me as almost the perfect encapsulation of, really, the fallacies at the core of MAGA. What do you think?
And this is in hard power: U.S. basing rights all over the place, and [as I] mentioned, intelligence sharing, and a lot of military partnerships. And where the U.S. hadn’t fought a war in a hundred years that didn’t have, for example, Australian troops helping out, and a number of other countries allowing flyovers and just other things that they... when it comes to, say, a country like Russia... where they reflexively say no, where they don’t allow it.
Sargent: So well said. There’s a new Washington Post poll, by the way, finding that only 40% of Americans approve of the decision to capture Maduro by military force versus 42% who disapprove, and only 37% say this was appropriate without congressional approval, while 63% say it wasn’t. And a plurality, 45%, oppose the U.S. taking control of Venezuela.
Grossman: No, I don’t think so. Those numbers are remarkably low. So if you want to contrast it, for example, with the lead-up to the Iraq War, that was over 60% approval and disapproval down in the 30s. You had almost two-to-one that was supportive of it. There was widespread support and praise when the United States captured Saddam Hussein. There was largely a positive sentiment in Trump’s first term when the U.S. killed the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.
By comparison, Americans often react negatively when Americans get killed abroad or when America has some sort of embarrassing failure tactically. And so to see so many people... such a close, almost 50-50, slightly negative reaction to this action in Venezuela shows how much Trump’s recklessness has changed the American perspective on this.
And if the U.S. ends up either having to follow on in Venezuela with more force, with any sort of occupation, or with just removing the head of state and creating destabilization without removing the actual regime and all its underlings... either way, that, yes, sure, that got rid of a bad guy, but it is destabilizing the situation, not benefiting it. And overall, [it is] ruining some of those relationships that the United States has, that will then lead to the U.S. being weaker, not stronger, just because this one dictator is no longer there.
Grossman: I think so. And it comes down to where bullying is not strength. Even in a school context people maybe think of the bully as kind of scary, but nobody really thinks of the bully as strong. The people that are stronger are the ones that others want to follow—that are stable, that have their shit together, that are making something that others want to join in, where it will actually build something, where it will actually last.
Sargent: Nicholas Grossman, that was all very beautifully said. I hope Democrats are listening. Really good to talk to you as always, man. Thanks for coming on.
Grossman: Same. Thanks, Greg.
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