America Under Occupation: Truth, Power, & Imperial Decline | Jonathan Kirshner

27:21It's our interests that are both eternal and perpetual, and it's our duty to follow those interests. And so when thinking about that, every country has a set of national interests, and generally they are, they begin with security, both from invasion, but food security and the sanctity of the population and all these kind of things, which are very easily defined and simply understood, I think. Then you have to throw on a layer of the personalities involved, who are from time to time changed, but they're all supposedly carrying out those same perpetual interests. So I think what I'm struggling with at the moment is that I had this feeling that if we are going back to a period where national interests are the primary driver of all this thing.

28:11It should therefore make things easier to understand because the interests are perpetual and eternal and so therefore definable. And yet, in an age of us going back supposedly to national interests, we are inundated with complicated personalities, complicated short-term, what feels like personal rivalries, which are kind of pulling at these interests. So I'm kind of struggling for a way to think about this that recognizes the ultimate ends are pretty clear to understand. But right now, the means by which they're achieved or the path that we take to reach them is almost impossible to define. I think there's a question in this somewhere, even if it's what the hell do you think about all that nonsense, but it's one of these things that I'm wrestling with.

29:05There's a great question in there, and I think it's a two-part question. So let's start with your Palmerston quote, which is a very attractive realist quote. And what he was referring to was the fact that what is Britain's national interest in this geopolitical setting? And what it was was that no single country come to dominate Europe. Because if a single country could dominate the entire continent of Europe, it could then pose a significant military threat to Britain. If there was a division of power on the continent, then they would be busy balancing against each other and they would not represent as significant a threat.

29:52And Britain, you know, just off the continent as an island would be very secure. And again, security is job one. I think states want more than security. I think states are ambitious, but security is job one. And so all he was saying in a nice realist way was that our policy in preventing one power from dominating the continent is to sort of team up with whoever seems weaker in the coalitions that emerged on the continent at that time. And so in that sense, it sounds like, you know, we have no permanent friends. We only have permanent interests. But I think that was smart. I think it was right.

30:29I think it was a very attractive articulation of a thoughtful and well thought through grand strategy. Boom, look at this, you know, which are often hard to define. But I would hate to see that be used as an excuse for other actors in other settings saying, we are just transactionalist. We may be your friend today, but tomorrow we won't be. Because I don't think most of the time for most countries, that's a good way to run a railroad. Because if you're going to have relationships with countries, especially sustained alliances, your alliance partners need to have some sort of confidence that your word is good, that it is more than simply, well, you know, we'll do this for six months and then for all you know, I'll just be your enemy in six months.

31:16In most settings in international politics, that's not going to be the best way to advance your interest. So that's the first part of your question in which I want to genuflect before the grand strategy of Britain in that period and how it was articulated. But I want to acknowledge its contextualized limits and not build permanent rules based on that. But I also want to take issue with your phrase, we're returning to an era of national interest, or to use a word you didn't use, an era of the naked pursuit of the national interest in a way that was different than before. I don't think that's the case.

31:53I think that's just sticking with the U.S. for a moment. And the U.S. is kind of the elephant in the room of international politics and of change. In my assessment, the United States right now is not pursuing the naked national interest for the first time in more than 100 years. The national interest is debatable. It is contestable. And as I said, it can be pursued in a variety of ways with different foreign policy dispositions. So there's variation there. But nevertheless, it is the national interest. So every president, I'm going to say from Wilson, but this probably applies to Teddy Roosevelt as well.

32:39So it's going back a while. What they thought they were doing was saying, here is America. Here is America's place in the world. Here's my vision for what I think would be good for America. And here's how I think we should therefore orient our foreign policies to best advance those interests. Even the isolationists in the 30s thought, however misguidedly in my view, that they were doing what was best for the American national interest writ large. And so we've already talked about variations in American Cold War policy during the Cold War, right, from 1945 forwards. And we say, well, you know, it was a Cold War, but you still saw shifts in foreign policy behaviors across the U.S.

33:25during that time. Well, that was because different presidents and administrations had different visions, even within the context of understanding that the Cold War was sort of the main thing as to how to best advance the American national interest in the context of the Cold War. And I think that held true all the way up through very recent times. Again, even presidents who pursued, who made foreign policy choices that I thought were profoundly misguided, I think nevertheless thought they were pursuing the American national interest. Let's take an easy one. I really think that LBJ, who made a series of catastrophic errors throughout the waging of the Vietnam War, I think he thought he was doing what was best for the American interest, you know, with a twist of domestic politics mixed in, certainly.

34:16But, you know, presidents are politicians, and so that's true. What we have today in America, for the first time, you know, in memory, is something closer to the pursuit of a foreign policy that looks like the way a personalist authoritarian would pursue a foreign policy. And so it's no longer the national interest that's being pursued, but it's the interests of the ruling clan and its intimate affiliates, and very commonly the economic interests, the material interests of the ruling clan and its intimate affiliates. And so if you look around the world and see the behaviors, they're less consistent with what we would understand as the pursuit of the quote-unquote national interest.

35:06And we're seeing more and more the pursuit of some version of a personalist type interest. I think it's radically new. Now, you can wrap it up in language of thuggishness, selfishness, transactionalists, naked pursuit of power, but I don't think it is properly defined as the pursuit of the quote-unquote American national interest.

35:26Demetri Kofinas:I want to play devil's advocate here, Jonathan. So first of all, just to clarify here, is the pursuit of the national interest, since we don't all agree on what the national interest is, is the litmus test for determining whether or not a state is pursuing the national interest, whether or not the ruling party or the head of the country has articulated what he or she thinks that interest is and then pursues policies that are consistent with it? Is that how we're defining the pursuit of the national interest? So this is a great question. And as I've emphasized, and I'm not trying to weasel out of this, the national interest is contestable.

36:02And also it's rare for presidents to address the nation and say, and here now is the national interest. So what I would say is the national interest is something that can be identified by outside observers looking at a country and examining its place in the world and having the ability to articulate what international environment would be the most conducive to its thriving and how it could plausibly pursue efforts at thriving. But again, the problem is because we do not have a singular theory of how world politics works, and we never will, two well-intentioned people, each eager to pursue the national interest, may have different theories about how to achieve those ends, even if they agreed exactly on the ends they wanted to achieve.

37:02So you can't really look at the behavior and say, oh, that's the national interest behavior, and that's not the national interest behavior, although there are behaviors you can look at and say, wow, that was not in the national interest. Nevertheless, there are a kind of broad range of behaviors that could be consistent with it. What most important element of the national interest, what distinguishes the national interest is that it cannot be reduced to a collection of individualist interests. It has to kind of transcend that. So secure borders is an example, and here I'm talking about military invasion, of a kind of national interest in which everybody behind the wall, everybody behind the border of a country benefits if that border is secure.

37:46It's not that, you know, nuclear deterrence, the same thing. If I'm enjoying nuclear deterrence, chances are you're enjoying nuclear deterrence. And so these kind of broad-based benefits that a nation can enjoy reflect the interests of the nation as a whole and can have historical and geopolitical elements to it. But again, people can disagree about how best to define the national interest. And the more you tug at the thread of the national interest, I think the more easily it can unravel. I'm going on and on a bit here, but if you look at the interest of the United States in the 19th century, was that the national interest?

38:27I mean, the U.S. was very sectionally divided in terms of its political economy and its political distribution in much of the 19th century. And the grand strategy or the foreign policy pursuit of the national interest of the United States in the 19th century may have reflected northern industrial interests more than southern agricultural interests. And so, again, you're asking for trouble when you pull really hard at the threads of the quote unquote national interest. However, I'm sticking with my story that we can distinguish between countries that are pursuing what we as outside observers can understand to be the national interest versus countries that are pursuing a narrowly regional interest, a narrowly clan interest, and the interest of some sub-segment of the society, or most notably of a ruling regime, especially when you talk about regimes that stay in power through draconian authoritarian measures, oftentimes their foreign policy will be rooted in the domestic security of the regime itself.

39:40And that's not really the pursuit of the national interest, that's the pursuit of regime security. So we can distinguish that. But to actually be able to map out on a piece of paper, if they're doing this, that's the national interest. And if they're doing that, it's definitely not. Again, there'll be examples where you can do that, but there will be too many times when variation in the strategies proposed by well-intentioned policymakers will diverge from each other, even if they each favor what we would agree is a vision of the national interest.

40:14Demetri Kofinas:So this is consistent with my initial objective when I started this line of questioning, which was to play devil's advocate. So it seems to me if I had to do my best right now to articulate what US foreign policy was, in the period between the end of the Cold War and the 2008 financial crisis, or shortly thereafter, it was essentially to create a world in which the citizens of the United States could thrive, even if the United States was not the most powerful actor or most powerful state in that world, and a world that could increase wealth primarily for Americans, and obviously for a particular group of Americans, and for the world at large.

40:51Demetri Kofinas:And bolstering international institutions was a big part of that. It seems that if I had to articulate what the foreign policy or grand strategy is of the Trump administration, so that was an affirmative vision of the world. The Trump administration's vision seems to be very much built around ripping that down. And that's articulated with words like, America is no longer going to be ripped off, ripped off by basically paying the premium to support the building out of this panoply of institutions that everyone else is able to benefit from, but we're not able to benefit from. And it's also expressed in the form of bilateral trade deals with nations where the United States can point to specific income that it's able to generate from these individual bilateral trade deals and also the closing of borders.

41:40Demetri Kofinas:Can we view that as a legitimate foreign policy that's in the national interest? And if it's not, why is that not in the national interest? So again, I want to break this down into two parts. I think after the end of the Cold War, and I think we're in a moment that's similar to the moment after the end of the Cold War, there was a period of confusion. And I don't think it's surprising that it was the 1992 presidential election that first saw insurgent outsiders make progress, a thing of Patrick Buchanan and the Republican Party, but then obviously the Ross Perot movement. And we saw that again in 2016 with almost revolutionary movements within both major political parties, because when the game or when the rules as we understood them were changing, there was space for reassessment.

42:31And so from 1992 to 1994, I think the US was scratching its head about what its national interest was and how best to pursue it. And it did pursue ultimately, and I think overreached in many ways, what you describe, but what I would describe as a globalization project, that it would pursue policies that would advance the development of economic globalization, assessing that the US would thrive in that environment and that potential peer competitors would not. And part of that toward the end of the 90s was a hopeful bet that China's economic liberalization would also contribute to China's political liberalization, which was a very reasonable bet to make and which didn't turn out that well.

43:21And again, there was a lot of hubris and overreach in that project. And it had to do with the fact that the US was so incredibly powerful. They stopped calling it a superpower, I started calling it a hyperpower, and that led to things like the Iraq War and not unrelatedly, in my view, to the global financial crisis. And we are now, again, in my view, living in a world defined not so much by the global financial crisis, but by the aftermath of the global financial crisis, in which a lot of people very reasonably felt that the system was indeed rigged against them. And really, it was in how the distribution of the pain of the post-global financial crisis era was distributed, to repeat myself.

44:11And that in which the people who caused the global financial crisis, they ended up being just fine. And the people who had nothing to do with the global financial crisis, they were fed the long and stubborn Great Recession. And this fueled populist backlashes in both political parties. In one political party, that backlash completely overturned it. And so you had the emergence of Trump and Trumpism. And that was to some extent a bottom-up phenomenon, but there was importantly charismatic leadership associated with it. What we are seeing now, however, is I want to be cautious here because I'm going to use words that sound irresponsible.

44:59But in my own view, as a professional analyst of world politics, it would be irresponsible, in fact, to try and normalize what we're seeing. And so in my view, this populist backlash that has led to the emergence of what Martin Wolf at the Financial Times very accurately, in my view, called Pluto populism, which is plutocrats kind of masquerading as populists, in the figure of a person who is untutored and mercurial. So the policies you described do not seem to me to be part of a thoughtful and coherent foreign policy vision, but rather the mercurial and often individually, perhaps plausible, but collectively incoherent policy kind of bouquet, which, when seen collectively, will not make America better, stronger, prouder, safer in the world.

46:10Let's go back to my original comment about how the currency of international politics is political influence. Are these behaviors increasing or decreasing the global political influence of the United States. My own view is we are witnessing collectively in these policies a geopolitical self-immolation of the type that I have difficulty finding precedent for. So that in my assessment, contra being able to understand this Copernica of policies as a version of the national interest. Rather, I see them as undermining of almost any possible conceptualization of what the American national interest is.

47:00It's so interesting, Jonathan, because I think a lot of us, I thought the use of the word mercurial was both perfect and carefully considered. I don't think that's going to inflame anybody. But again, as an observer of what I'm seeing in the United States now, I can't help but feel as though international interests, there is an awful lot of confusion about what Donald Trump and the agenda that he is pursuing. And I would just say as a sidebar that we, all of us, I think, we put this confusion and this mercurial behavior onto one person. But there are a lot of people involved in this administration.

47:40And I'm pretty sure that this is not just a whole bunch of people who are given marching orders by Donald Trump, and this is all he's doing. So one would like to believe that somewhere there is a plan formed by a group of people, the collective IQ of which is high enough to be making such decisions, but maybe we shouldn't pursue. However, it does seem to me as an observer from outside that on a domestic policy basis, at the very least, one would have to say that Donald Trump is pursuing and executing upon things that his base demanded and things that he promised them. One can argue about the manner in which he's achieving these goals and the manner about which he's setting about attaining them.

48:30But it feels to me there is a clarity about domestic policy and an awful lot of confusion about the international policy. And I'm not sure if the interests should align or shouldn't align, but I can't see a through line that allows me to understand the two of them. I either have to choose to notice the, I'm going to use the word, even if you didn't, the chaos of foreign policy, but admit to seeing the logic of domestic all the other way around, but I can't see a through line for both. I think that's fair. I want to take issue with small parts of that. Please do. I've never been disagreeing with so politely.

49:10I'm enjoying every minute of it, so please carry on. But with regard to whether or not the US has some thoughtful people constructing a thoughtful grand strategy vision for the United States. I immediately thought of the last line of Hemingway's, the sun also rises, right? Wouldn't it be pretty to think so? I think the president, his instincts are somewhat isolationist and xenophobic. I think he views the world in very zero-sum ways. I don't think he's a sophisticated foreign policy thinker. And so I do think foreign policy here is the residual of domestic policy. I think I agree with you in that regard.

49:50Again, I want to get back to my issue of personalism and the personalist regime. I'm reminded constantly by furious people that Jimmy Carter, poor Jimmy Carter, was forced to sell his peanut farm because the idea that the president of the United States would have an economic interest that was part of his life while he was president was inconceivable. And yet now the president is kind of nakedly selling, you know, access to the White House or traveling abroad and promoting his own personal business. Like so many things in the United States, this would have been simply inconceivable for any previous president.

50:27And these presidents were not saints, right? You could scratch at a lot of these presidents and say, oh, you look underneath the surface there, there's a little bit of corruption down there, and that was really wrong and maybe even criminal, but it wasn't the way the business was conducted, right? I mean, they knew that if these things were revealed, it would have been catastrophic in the end of their career, as opposed to business as usual. And so I do not think, I do not think you can see coherence in this foreign policy over and over again. You know, one very smart scholar has said, well, he's really a spheres of influence guy.

51:01And what he wants to do is have the US dominate North America and let the rest of the world's great powers dominate their regions. And that's a vision, man. And we may not think it's wise, but that's what he's doing. Well, but he's also subverting U.S. relations with Canada. I mean, if you want to dominate your hemisphere, picking a fight with, you know, the ally with whom you've had the warmest relations in international relations history. One of the things that has made the U.S. so fortunate as a great power and the precedents, again, are hard to think of, is its uncommonly warm and close relations with its nearest neighbors.

51:37And the president has managed to undermine that. Go to Canada, ask around. It's shocking, the differences. And also picking a fight unnecessarily, in my view, with Brazil and other countries in the region, and also with his economic policies. And this is really where we get to the question of coherence. If the US either wants to dominate its sphere of influence, then it would not be inviting China and the European Union to swoop in and make a kind of economic compacts with the countries of South America, undermining American influence there. You know, Trump is essentially defriending, as we would say, the countries of the Western Hemisphere one by one, and they will search for friends elsewhere.

52:24So I don't buy the whole spheres of influence thing. And then you say, well, Trump is engaging in the pivot and wanting to gear up for an understanding that China's the new bad guy. And so we have to orient our foreign policy towards wariness of Chinese power. But then again, you have the tariff policies that are just slamming the key countries who would have to be part of any political coalition that would want to be pushing back against China's political influence. You know, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, India, you know, even the small nations of Southeast Asia It's just raining down tariffs on laws for reasons that are hard to figure out.

53:01So when you say coherent foreign policy vision, well, you know, the tariff hand seems to be undermining what the China hand would be thinking. And I think if you go around the world from location to location, you don't see that coherence. You know, Europe, again, another very strange example. You know, one would have thought there's a really good debate to be had among serious people as to how committed the U.S. should be to Ukraine in its war against Russia. But there was very little debate as to which side the U.S. was rooting for in that war. And when the Trump administration comes to power, suddenly it's like, well, I don't know, which, you know, that changes now on a weekly or monthly basis.

53:44That's, again, back to chaotic, back to mercurial, back to bizarre. I cannot see the world in which we can look at the sum total of the foreign policy and say there is any vision there other than a general tendency to want to enrich the ruling clan slash give a finger to people they don't seem to like abroad. So I agree with you, however, that we are seeing the primacy of domestic policy. I would just want to remind everybody that this is bifurcated, that the Trump administration is delivering to its so-called base on culture war issues, but not explicitly not on economic issues. And so if you look at the big, beautiful bill or whatever the heck it is they call it, that is a wealth transfer up from the working class to the wealthiest.

54:45And I don't think that is really delivering what the base wanted on the economic front. So, yes, you definitely have the full promised payoff on the aggressive pursuit of culture war issues and that there the goods are being delivered. Personally, they're not my goods. But, yes, you know, those are the goods promised. Those are the goods delivered. But this is where I think I want to return again to Martin Wolf's book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, in which he, I think, invented the phrase plutopopulism, in which plutocrats use culture war issues instrumentally in order to provide cover for their economic agenda, which is redistributive away from the working class toward the wealthy.

55:37And on a totally tangential note, many of those policies are not going to make the U.S. stronger in the long run. Trump's war on science, Trump's war on universities, 10, 15, 20 years from now, will the U.S. be stronger or weaker as a result of those domestic wars? It seems obvious to me the U.S. will be weaker. And the metaphor I used elsewhere is if you think about the auditoriums full of Nobel Prize winning scientists who came to the United States in the 50 years, say, after the Second World War, that it was a magnet for the talent of the greatest brains in the world and that those contributed to American strength in very tangible ways.

56:33Those auditoriums in the next 20 years will be empty.

56:38Demetri Kofinas:And not just after, during, as you know. Yes. Importantly during the war. And so in a sense, when you talk about the American national interest, is America going to be stronger as a result of these policies? You know, my answer is no, it will be weaker. This is, again, in issue after issue, we are seeing a purposeful self-harming of American in power and interest. So I just can't buy into the idea that there's some alternate grand strategy out there that we're just not hip enough to understand and that they're pursuing it aptly and thoughtfully in some coherent way. So Jonathan, I'd like to first validate something you said, then I'd like to share a very quick opinion and then ask a question about a historical comparison that you and I've talked about in your appearance on Hidden Forces several years ago, which is pre-World War II France, and maybe get an update on your opinion about to what extent today's America resembles France in the 1930s.

57:36So first of all, I couldn't agree more.

57:38Demetri Kofinas:I find myself trying to constantly normalize the Trump administration's policies or to find a charitable interpretation of the things that Trump does, but it feels much more procedural. I don't know that I actually buy it. And in fact, recently he was asked about Puff Daddy and whether or not he would pardon him. And he said, well, I don't know, maybe, but he did say some bad things about me. And we're all sort of forced to pretend that this is just normal. And obviously it isn't. And I think that what motivates Trump, to be honest with you, I've always, not always, but I've come to this view and I've expressed it openly.

58:12Demetri Kofinas:And I'm always sort of wincing at the feedback I get from people that think that I'm somehow biased or I hate Trump, is that it's showtime. For Trump, this is season two of the Trump presidency, and it's got to be action packed. There got to be more explosions. There are going to have to be just more things happening, more sources of entertainment, because what matters most to Donald Trump is attention. He's very attuned to whether or not he's dominating the headlines. And what I would say, we cannot look just to Trump to understand this phenomenon. We also have to look to his supporters. And his supporters are looking, among other things, to be entertained.

58:50Demetri Kofinas:And it isn't just his supporters. I mean, the broader Trump coalition finds him entertaining. Even I find him entertaining. And so in some sense, part of what has, I think, supported his presidency and his political success has been his capacity to entertain. And America is in this moment of sort of, it does feel, and many people feel this, it isn't just me, it's also Trump supporters that we're in a place of late imperial decline. And this fits into the bread and circuses analogy. So my question that I was going to ask you about historical comparisons is the comparison between pre-World War II France and America today.

59:25Demetri Kofinas:And of course, France collapsed spectacularly in the face of the German invasion. In fact, I think it was maybe 10 days of the German invasion that they had already partitioned the country. The German army went all the way to the English Channel, a remarkable collapse and occupation of France. And this was at the time quite a shock. And when I read in your book, and I'm going to quote two passages here from your book, two quotes, one of Raymond Aron, who was a classical realist, and one of William Schreier, who of course, he was one of Edward R. Murrow's boys, and he wrote The Collapse of the Third Republic.

59:57Demetri Kofinas:I wrote both of these in our conversation together on the Hidden Forces podcast, but I want to read them again for those who need a refresher, and also for all the people in Grant's audience who may have not heard that episode. These are about pre-World War II France. People will understand why I'm reading them. And I'd like to ask you coming out the other end of this, how this comparison holds today. So the first quote by Raymond Aron is, quote, in essence, France no longer existed. It existed only in the hatred of the French for one another. And the second quote by William Schreier, which he wrote in The Collapse of the Third Republic, An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940, he wrote, and of course, William Schreier, by the way, people don't know, he lived in Germany during the 1930s, during the rise of Hitler.

1:00:39Demetri Kofinas:And he wrote famously, the rise and fall of the Third Reich. And Schreier writes, quote, I loved and worked in France for a good many years, beginning in 1925 when the country was not only the greatest power on the continent of Europe, but to me at least, the most civilized and enlightened. In the ensuing years, I watched with increasing apprehension the Third Republic go downhill, its strength gradually sapped by dissension and division, by incomprehensible blindness in foreign, domestic, and military policy, by the ineptness of its leaders, the corruption of its press, and by a feeling of growing confusion, helplessness, and cynicism in its people.

1:01:19Demetri Kofinas:Even when I read that now, the hairs on my arm stand up. And I don't know if other people in the audience are having a similar reaction. So I read these passages to you two and a half years ago when we did our episode on Hidden Forces Together, and I saw those similarities to American society then. I see them now. And I'm just curious as a historian, have we moved more in that direction in the last two and a half years? What would be the updated perspective that you could provide here? Well, once again, I want to break your comments down into two parts. The first part about Trump's behavior and his followership.

1:01:53And that I think is relevant to my answer to your second question. Because I do think you're right. You used the word entertainment and you didn't use the word followership, but again, those who find Trump appealing. Trump's charisma is obviously lost on me, but he is a very charismatic figure, okay, for many, for a very large number of people. And this is a different governance style. It's not really the American way where a charismatic leader dominates the apology. And what the leader says and does is what matters. So if the leader says A, then everybody agrees it's A. And then if the leader three weeks later says not A, then everybody agrees, of course, it's not A.

1:02:41That level of charismatic leadership, I mean, we have had charismatic leaders in the past in the country, but we have not been defined by the presence of a charismatic leader as our governance for. And I think that's important to observe because the one thing that has surprised me about the second Trump administration more than the president's authoritarian tendencies, which means that is more than the presence of someone who wants to be an authoritarian, is the presence of how many people are willing to participate in authoritarian followership. I did not think that was something that Americans were really about.

1:03:23And I'm wrong about that. There are a large number of people out there who are content to be authoritarian followers. Now, that's not irrelevant to my answering of the question you built up to, which is France in the 1930s. I do think the analogies hold distressingly, but I'll be very on brand here. I think if anything, it's worse than that now. So that if we used to be France in the 1930s, a nation kind of so polarized that we were unable to behave in a purposeful way because we were so locked in to these polarized domestic political conflicts. Now, and I had not given this any thought until this conversation, until right in this moment, so I reserve the right to withdraw this comment at any time.

1:04:16Now, if anything, the U.S. seems more like France in the 40s. France under occupation. France that has rolled over. In that, for me, another shocking thing, and it turns out that I'm quite naive, is the extent to which the Republican Party has rolled over. So that the institutional prerogatives of the House and the Senate, the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader, these institutional bodies used to be led by people who saw as part of their mission, a defense of the institutional integrity of their branch of government.

1:05:00Demetri Kofinas:They were institutionalists. Yes. And, you know, Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, they would all agree, you know, you don't tell the House what to do or you don't tell the Senate what to do, right? We are a co-equal branch of government. And if you want to govern, you have to engage with us as well. Both houses of Congress are now under Republican majorities and the Republican Party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the president. And so, again, this fundamental check on presidential authority is absent. The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the president's man, serves at the pleasure of the president.

1:05:44I'm not an expert in Congress, but I find it very hard to think of another moment in American history in which that was the case. Coincidentally, we are in a setting of great judicial permissiveness of certain types of exercise of executive authority. So there were other periods with regard to the Supreme Court, again, conservative or liberal, left or right, in which there would have been more institutional pushback against the exercise of presidential authority. And this was directed against both Democrats and Republicans. And now I think partially just by circumstance, we have a supermajority on the Supreme Court that is very permissive of presidential power.

1:06:29And so we are now living in a world that looks a lot like, again, to use my phrase, personalness authoritarianism. And so, yes, I think we got here because we used to be like France in the 1930s. But now, we're much closer to a situation where we're a country that is willfully collaborating with the occupation. So again, if you thought I was gloomy about America being similar to France in the 30s, I'm even gloomier now. Okay.

1:07:05Demetri Kofinas:Who is the occupier? Who is occupying the White House? I don't mean the individual that's inhabiting the presidency. I mean, what is the coalition? What is the power structure that is occupying the United States, in your opinion? That's a great question. And as I said, I have formulated this theory six minutes ago, so I don't really have a fully formed answer to your question. I think it is a new collection of moneyed interests. Yes. But that's what I was going to reach for, a new collection of moneyed interests. And again, back to that word plutocracy, that we are drifting towards some sort of autocratic, oligopolistic autocracy and plutocracy.

1:07:46But what's more shocking to me about that is the tolerance for it in a critical mass of the American public. You know, I do a lot of stuff with film, and I just want to invoke one of my favorite filmmakers, Jean-Pierre Melville, who fought as a member of the French resistance and made some films about it. And he was lauded for this. And he said, don't forget, there were more people who weren't in the resistance than who were. And so France's unhappy history extends from the 1930s into the 1940s with the docility of their humiliating collaboration with their occupiers. And so I do think we're drifting into a period in which we're seeing an adequately critical mass of Americans being permissive about a governance style and governance policies that are a noticeable breakpoint from anything we've experienced in the country.

1:08:51I mean, I can really only go back to 1898 in terms of my understanding of American history. So maybe they say, oh, it's just like Andrew Jackson. Well, okay, maybe, but I can't really speak to Jacksonianism with that kind of expertise. But this is different and I believe unprecedented and I think more shocking in its followership than its leadership. And I do think it is oligarchic money plutocracy as Demetriou suggested. Jonathan, it's interesting because again, as an outsider, I've noticed all that in the UK where I am at the moment, we have a a whole set of problems around over here, believe me.

1:09:27But the one thing I've noticed in America, which has really struck me because of my love for America that is born from a deep-seated appreciation of what it stood for, how it was founded, and essentially the document which governed its development, you know, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights are extraordinary pieces of work. And I have been truly shocked that you use the term permissiveness. And as I've watched it, and I have no dog in the hunt, and depending on what I say, I get accused of being pro-Trump or anti-Trump, which is just the way of the world these days. But I try just to observe it because I find it fascinating and concerning at the same time.

1:10:13But there's this, as you say, you use the term permissiveness. I've watched things happen, which to me, the sensible reaction to would be, hey, come on, you're our guy, but that's not how we do things here. There are limits. And yes, you're our guy, but America comes first. And the idea of America comes first. And we want you in there, but you got to do things the right way. And in my experience of America, as I say, I have a deep love for the country that goes back to the first time I went there as a nine or 10 year old child and just found the place to be awe inspiring. It's always been that way.

1:10:59And whatever was happening at home in the UK or wherever I was in the world, in all the various places I've lived around the world, you could kind of always rely on America no matter who was in that seat. that there were guardrails. It's like being in the bowling alley and you pull the rails up. And it just seems like those rails have now been put down. And the argument that, hey, you're our guy, but this is America, has been changed around. So it's now, hey, you're our guy, so. And I, for one, find that deeply troubling because it's not just a general thing that I've observed in news stories and heavily biased media trying to paint events in a certain light and the other side of the media countering it.

1:11:48It's people that I know and respect who I would expect a different response from. It's people who I always believed would be, you're our guy, but. And they seem to have gently turned into, you're our guy, so. and they're two very simple words but and so but the weight that they carry between them I've found to be truly astonishing and remarkably confronting and at the end of the day for me personally deeply upsetting yes all I can say is you're pouring my heart out here you know I agree with 98 % of what you just said and I'll give you another story because I'm something of a storyteller I mean, what we are witnessing, in my view, and what you articulated, is the collapse or vanishing of what could be called a certain type of American civic nationalism.

1:12:48And I would define American civic nationalism as what you were talking about. The idea is that there were certain ways that, you know, you're on this team, you're on that team, you're my guy, you're not my guy. But we all agree that this is the way in which we are supposed to behave. And my story here is one of Barry Goldwater. Now, Barry Goldwater is a very, very conservative guy, way more conservative, certainly, than I am, and known as Mr. Republican. And at the time he did this, perhaps the senior representative figure of his party. And it was he who finally told President Nixon that he had to go.

1:13:28And there were two beautiful moments in which this occurred. One is when then Nixon's chief of staff, Al Hay, called Goldwater on the phone with some information and Goldwater responded with the line, tell the president he has lied to me for the last time, which I thought was a pretty good line. And then there was a meeting of Goldwater with some senators in which Nixon is trying to assess his chances of surviving an impeachment trial in the Senate. And Nixon says something like, how many votes against me are there? And Goldwater responds with something like this number, and then he said, including mine.

1:14:09And we don't have that anymore. There is no Barry Goldwater.

1:14:14Demetri Kofinas:So first of all, I'm going to state this. It's not a question that I want to see how either of you feel about it. The politicians are just taking cues from the electorate. I think the reason that this has happened is that we've impoverished our citizenry. I don't just mean that people have less money today. They're culturally and mentally impoverished. And we're a democracy. So we depend on uninformed citizenry to be able to operate our government. Do you agree with that, Jonathan? I think, first of all, let me say I passionately believe in democracy and I don't believe that there's any other plausible system of government that can replace it.

1:14:51I just want to be very clearly on record as saying that first, because I'm about to say this, which is, recent events have certainly exposed the limits of democracy. I mean, so yes, I do think this is a bottom-up phenomenon and reflects a collective failure of the functioning of American democracy.

1:15:10Demetri Kofinas:And the moral character of the citizenry. So much so that I would say a significant number of people don't even seem to share common ethical standards around what would have once been considered permissible for people in public office or any office for that matter. Yeah. Realists are very cautious about calling moral balls and strikes, but it's not a good look for the country. I will agree with you on that. So let me go to the question I had. First of all, I think there might be an opportunity here to explore another historical comparison, which is that between Britain or certain Brits within elite circles of British society during the 1930s and Nazi Germany.

1:15:48Demetri Kofinas:And the choice that I think you've talked about that many of those people made between whether or not they'd like to live in a Nazi dominated world or risk the possibility that the USSR could gain influence over Europe and what that meant for their own economic standing. I want to though point out something specific that's happening now, which is that for the first time, the Trump administration is experiencing a scandal. And I'm not talking about, yeah, no, it didn't happen with grabbing them by the pussy or the meme coin or any of that stuff didn't work, but the Jeffrey Epstein situation. And I think also to a certain degree, the support of Israel by the administration, that I think also is in many ways rides along the Jeffrey Epstein story, which is really the more important one.

1:16:35Demetri Kofinas:I think the Jeffrey Epstein story I think is important because there does seem to be. And I think this is where we can learn some things about what matters to the MAGA base and where their values are independent of the president's personality. And I think that has to do with transparency and sunlight. There is a deep desire among those who support Trump to bring transparency and sunlight to the quote deep state. And I think what Trump's response to and sort of words and policies and actions and statements around the Jeffrey Epstein story have done is they have splintered his coalition. And we are seeing people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others.

1:17:17Demetri Kofinas:Now, I can't remember all the people I've seen, but people that were vociferous advocates of the president, it has made them openly opposed to his policies. So I'm curious if this to you may be a sign that things aren't all that lost, that there is an independent sense of an independent moral grounding in the country and in the citizenry that is independent of the head of the party? I don't know. And I'm reluctant to speak confidently to some of these situations. As a non-expert outside observer, I guess my instinct would be if part of your success was in convincing people that their appreciation for bizarre conspiracy theories was right, and that you were going to be the savior of those who were the victims of these elaborate conspiracy theories, whatever they may be, and there are endless amounts of them, then if you act in a way that seems to be inconsistent with that, it would probably rub that subset of your following that kind of signed on for the whole, you know, you will save us from bizarre conspiracy X thing.

1:18:34And so I can see why that would weirdly be the one thing that would dent the president's Teflon. But literally, there have been a hundred things in which a friend of mine or my mother-in-law or somebody would say, oh, my God, now that this has happened, that's the end. No politician could survive the exposure of this thing to them. And yet, the president survives. And so I'm very reluctant to say, ah, well, now he's been tripped up, maybe hoist on his own batard, because there's a certain type of black magic here that is incomprehensible to me. Trump has survived the exposure of things, scores if not hundreds, that would have ended the political career of any other national figure in American history.

1:19:33And merrily he goes along. So I just don't know. Is that perhaps because he doesn't really have a political career? I mean, he doesn't have a political, but I mean, he doesn't, right? His political resume is basically president. That's it. It's extraordinary when you think about it. But Jonathan, I want to go back if I can some 40 minutes ago to something you said when we were talking about national interests. And that was this idea of being a reliable partner on the world stage. And the kind of angle of both Dimitri's and my podcast primarily, it has a financial bent to it. And so I'd like to talk about an event in the financial world that I'd be curious to get your view as a classical realist on.

1:20:18And that was the move by the Treasury to sanction Russian central bank assets back in February of 2022, when the Russians crossed the Ukrainian border. Because that move, you know, at the time, just to take us all back there, there were sanctions being thrown every day to try and ratchet the pressure up, hopefully to find the breaking point that would de-escalate things without any success whatsoever. And then this move happened where the Treasury sanctioned the Russian Central Bank assets in the SWIFT system, essentially freezing$300 billion of sovereign assets. And at the time that happened, I was a surprised it got as little coverage as it did.

1:20:57The importance of that act didn't seem to register, certainly with the mainstream media, which I understand to an extent, but also the financial media, I thought were pretty scant in covering it. And my contention at the time was that act was an absolute game changer, because to your point about being a reliable partner, no matter what's happened in the past, sovereign reserves were sacrosanct, as they realistically should be, particularly given the construction of the global financial system and the importance that SWIFT plays in it, the United States has its thumb on the scales of every single country in the world and their reserves.

1:21:33So for them to make that move so quickly without flagging it, without doing anything, I thought was a massive overstep and a potentially fatal error because now the incentives have completely changed for every single central bank in the world that holds dollar reserves, which is every single central bank in the world. I'd be curious as to your thoughts on that. I don't know how close you followed that. I feel certain that you understand it better than most. So I'd be very curious as to your thoughts on that move and the potential ramifications for it? So this is a subtle and sophisticated point.

1:22:10And it would have been, I think, a lot more important in normal times. And I do want to respect it because I think for students of international relations, it's something that has come up actually a lot. It did come up in the 1930s. It came up with the sanctions against Rhodesia during the 60s and 70s. I think it came up during the Iran hostage crisis. And even before the episode that you mentioned with Russia's central bank assets, the question of whether the U.S. was overreaching with regard to its position in the SWIFT system and the ability to interrupt countries' access to international finance.

1:22:56And many people expressed what you expressed in all of those episodes and in this one as well, which is you really have to understand that that must be separate from normal politics, because if you try to introduce normal politics into the functioning of the international financial system, then you will undermine the credibility of that system and it will stop functioning. Or, you know, let's say you can do it once and then that will be the end of it. That is a debate worth having. I don't know if it hasn't been superseded by several other things. People like me, not with my classical realist hat on, but with my student of international money and finance hat on, have been anticipating the erosion of the international dollar order for a very long time, and we've been serially wrong.

1:23:50So I'm kind of gotten out of the business of being a gloom and doomer about the dollar simply because at a certain point you have to say, well, you've been glooming and dooming for decades, and yet there the dollar still is. And so you have to respect the fact that you got that call wrong. And I think that's a very important thing to do. This relates to your question in that, as with so many other things, the Trump administration seems to be doing everything it can to undermine the international role of the dollar. And I think that the episode you're talking about nested in that larger phenomenon does suggest to me, with the qualifier that I've always been wrong on this issue, that we see more factors contributing toward at least a demand for alternative money and payment systems globally.

1:24:43And that would be to the detriment of the international role of the dollar. So I think that that point that you raised about the Russia episode was an important one and things that international relations scholars could argue about, yes or no, on the other side of it. But I see it more as nested into this larger question of the future of the international monitoring financial system and the role of the US and the dollar in it, which I do think as with everything else is being purposefully, if foolishly dismantled by the Trump administration.

1:25:16Demetri Kofinas:So I want to bring us back to this conversation about Epstein and conspiracies, Jonathan, and to explore a larger point. So I feel like, first of all, let me point out something that we have seen some of the largest media figures on the American right speaking about and exploring and rehashing and rethinking all sorts of historical events around which we had pretty firm narratives. 9-11 is one example. Building 7 has come up quite a bit now in popular discourse. Tucker Carlson recently had on someone just a couple of days ago, this episode aired. I haven't watched it yet, but I look forward to watching it.

1:25:59Demetri Kofinas:And it has to do with the bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh. And were there other people collaborating with him? Was the FBI involved? Was the CIA involved? What's the real story? The Trump administration was elected, promising to bring more transparency to RFK and JFK to release the quote files, the CIA's role and involvement in Martin Luther King's death, Russia gate, Iraq, Vietnam, even World War II, and who was the principal villain in World War II. What I think is interesting here, what I think sort of ties this all together is first of all, let me make an observation, which is to say that almost everything that we know or think we know, we don't actually know.

1:26:39Demetri Kofinas:We know it because we've taken it on authority. And when people's trust and institutional authority breaks down, their sources of canonical truth also dissolve, and they begin to reach in different places for a new truth. In fact, there's this interesting theory that I have the book sitting on my shelf. I bought the book some years ago. I think it's called Rape of the Mind. And if I'm not mistaken, the theory is essentially about how people become radicalized. And it has to do with trauma. The trauma of an experience, let's say like 9-11, where your entire notion of safety gets it's upended. And because the framework that you have to operate in the world collapses, you cannot live in the world without some sense of order in your mind.

1:27:24Demetri Kofinas:And so you reach for something else. And in those instances where people's worldview is upended radically, they become very vulnerable to a new framework or a new way of viewing the world or a new villain that they can pin an explanation on. So I think first it's important just to recognize that, that most of what we think we know, we don't actually know. And so I think part of what's happening here is that all of these conversations about quote conspiracies just really reflect people's lack of epistemological understanding about whatever it is that is being discussed. And that what we're really experiencing here is a new collective myth-making process underway.

1:27:59Demetri Kofinas:The question of what happened, what happened on 9-11 is really a question about give me a new story that helps me make sense of the world. And then the next question that follows that is, who am I? And that's where also the scapegoating is part of the process. I mean, I think at the end of the day, in order for us to get through this, there needs to be some sort of scapegoating mechanism. And what we're seeing in the sort of Epstein, OKC bombing stuff is the attempt to try and scapegoat some kind of, quote, deep state or elite sort of group of people that are responsible for the Iraq war. And so I think that's actually what we're seeing.

1:28:36Demetri Kofinas:Now, putting aside what really happened on 9-11 or what really happened to get us into Vietnam, I'm not interested in necessarily debating that. I think there's interesting conversations. I don't know that we can ever really get to the bottom of who actually killed JFK or what really happened if it wasn't just Oswald. But I'm curious, as a historian, when you view what's happening here, do you have a nuanced sense of other historical examples where societies underwent something similar? And what conclusions or further insights can you draw from those examples? So I don't have direct historical parallels for you.

1:29:14This all goes back to, in America, Richard Hofstadter's famous essay on the paranoid style in American politics. So without, therefore, answering the question you wanted me to answer, I want to make two observations, one that essentially is in accord with what you said, but one that I think pushes back against part of it a little bit. But one that's in accord with what you said, I think, is that what's fascinating about conspiracies or conspiracy theories is that they are comforting. And they are comforting for the reasons that you suggested, which is if I'm walking down the street and horrifying things can happen for no reason, that's very psychologically unsettling to me.

1:29:55But if actually the reason why that horrifying thing happened is because there's an identifiable evil force out there that perhaps someone can expose for me. And actually, it wasn't just a random and inexplicable thing, but part of some deep and sinister project. That's actually very comforting. You know, that I can understand. And that actually is protective of me in a certain way. Because if horrible things happen totally randomly, then I'm very vulnerable. But if horrible things happen because there's a nefarious cabal of people who are executing these horrible things, well, then A, that probably won't happen to me.

1:30:28And B, well, maybe I can be in the business of exposing them. So conspiracy theories, I think, are popular, again, because they bring order to disorder. I mean, the world is a radically uncertain and disorderly place. Humans do not like that. Humans prefer a tidier and understandable world. And weirdly, crazy conspiracy theories actually provide a logical coherence to the world. And so I do think that that's why they tend to be so attractive, especially in American politics, but I suspect in many other places. But I want to, again, as is on brand, put a darker edge on the question of some of the stories you told about media figures pitching bizarre new theories of this or that.

1:31:17But here, I do think, this argues against what I was saying earlier, I do think there is a coherent project involved. And that is the project of undermining truth claims. You know, this gets us back to Orwell, one of the great anti-authoritarian thinkers of the 20th century. If you undermine people's belief in the existence of a truth, then anything goes, right? And this is why what seems like an inside baseball thing of Trump firing the head of the statistics department for reporting a statistic he didn't like, that is a very Orwellian moment. So if you can remove from people their belief that there are relatively inviolable truth claims, then you've really got them by the political throat.

1:32:12And again, this is, I want to go back to the Nixon administration again. Nixon, you know, I'm not, I was not a fan of Nixon. He's actually the man I love to hate. He was a very fascinating character. So I'm not, you know, I don't want to speak of him reverently. Nixon was a liar. Nixon was a epical liar. Nixon was a Guinness Book of World Records liar. But Nixon knew the difference between his lies and the truth. And when Nixon got caught in lies, he understood that he was getting caught in lies. He did not make claims that the truth did not exist. And I do think that the claim that the truth does not exist is a very important part of the authoritarian project.

1:32:59And so I do think that that is the common thread that weaves its way through much of what you're saying when you're talking about media personalities trying to undermine our beliefs in the received wisdom about what we would have thought was what we used to call in the old days, settle the science. For example, the Nazis were the bad guys in World War II. I mean, I don't consider that to be a really complex question. Right, right. Jonathan look before we wrap up I'd love to to get a sense from you perhaps of how because I the more people I talk to the more people will preface a conversation with something like well look I'm a realist but and the fact that we now have proven through this conversation there is a definition of being a realist and a set of characteristics traits and principles that surround it I'd be grateful if you could give people a little help in how to think about this and how to think about the change that we're feeling, about how to, I don't want to say remain sane, because that might be beyond you, me, Dimitri combined, let alone putting all of you on your own.

1:34:08But to give people some kind of framework they can use to pass the information that's coming out. Dimitri and I's mutual friend, Ben Hunt, gave me one of these a long time ago, where he just said to me, you know, whenever you're reading anything in the newspapers or seeing something on TV, ask yourself, why am I reading this now? Or why am I seeing this now? And that simple exercise has been a godsend to me, and it has profoundly changed the way I view the world. So if you could help the people listening and give them any tips as to how to think about this in a true realist way, that would be incredibly helpful.

1:34:45Well, I don't know that I have quick and easy tips for people. But I think one of the cornerstones of realism writ large is the acknowledgement that there are a range of possible things that could be going on. That you can't necessarily, you have to be open to the idea that things that happen may be inconsistent consistent with your worldview. And you have to be prepared to acknowledge that. So realism requires, I think George, all the realists say it, but I think George Kennan said it, or perhaps it was E.H. Carr said it first, which is realism is about seeing the world as it is and not as you wish it was.

1:35:32So I think that's an important rule of thumb for all schools of realism. You really need to acknowledge what is happening. And I think that that also means I live in the academic world. The academic instinct is to normalize and contextualize. But there are moments in which things are not normal. And again, I think it is academic malpractice to try and normalize the abnormal. So what I would urge people who wish to think as a realist does is to recognize that there are things that are happening that are outside of the realm of what we would normally consider the possible. And to try and desperately shoehorn them into some sort of logic or normality or comfort is a mistake.

1:36:34We are in a period of astonishing flux. And these periods, you know, the world is always changing, but it's not always changing in a fundamental way. Things are very different. And I would urge people not to allow themselves to be lulled into the comfort of normalization.

1:36:56Demetri Kofinas:I don't know if you guys noticed this. I've got a cup here of all sorts of presidential slogans and campaign slogans. My favorite is a return to normalcy, which was Warren Harding's campaign slogan during his first term. He didn't survive, unfortunately. So I just want to just make a couple of points before we wrap this up, guys. First of all, you and I never talked about Peter Pomeratsev's book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. Did we, Jonathan? No. Have you read the book? Are you familiar with his work? I have not, no. I highly recommend this because this speaks exactly to what you were talking about with the undermining of truth claims.

1:37:32Demetri Kofinas:And it's a historical reflection of Peter's time in Russia during the period in which Putin consolidated power. I will acquire it. It is an incredible book. And so when you do read it, please send me an email because I'd love to talk to you about it. So I do think we're seeing an unraveling of narratives here and truth in the form of narrative structure, because that is the way in which we understand most things. Very few people actually put in a significant amount of work to understand things more epistemically. I just wanted to make one point before we wrap this up. And it goes back to this, let's just take the example of World War II and the claims that have been recently circulating from both a Joe Rogan interview and a Tucker Carlson interview of Daryl Cooper, who I've met, by the way, very nice guy, where he came on their show and he claimed that it seems, again, And to be honest, I haven't sat to sort of investigate the claims very clearly, but it seems that his claim was that Churchill may have been the chief villain of World War II.

1:38:29Demetri Kofinas:And if that's in fact what he said, obviously, I think that that's ridiculous, I think is the way I would describe it. But I think though, there's this sense on the right, and it's very unfortunate that very popular figures, people like Joe Rogan have, and Tucker Carlson, of course, makes this argument that this is just about free speech, guys. We're genuinely just investigating. We're just asking questions. We're investigating these truth claims. And there's nothing wrong with investigating truth claims. But I think there's also a kind of gleeful celebration that you see among folks on the right when it comes to their irreverence for some of these founding mythologies.

1:39:07Demetri Kofinas:So there's a reason why we feel the way we do about the stories that we have surrounding World War II. It's not simply a matter of, well, let's revisit this. Maybe in fact, it turns out Churchill was the primary villain. I guess my point is that, and this goes back to my larger point about we're sort of in this place of genuinely we don't know who we are. And one of the things that I think is so dangerous about a time when you don't know who you are is that someone else is in a position to tell you who you are. And I think that these myths are important. They do matter. They're not just mythologies.

1:39:37Demetri Kofinas:They're not just narratives that we just made up. I mean, there's substance behind them. And it's just like, for example, I mean, not to go far this road, but it's also like people that nitpick how many people died in the concentration camps, as if the point is to decide whether the number is accurate and not the intentions behind what was going on and the evil that was being perpetrated and the darkness that descended on the world. So anyway, I think these stories are important. They matter to me. My grandfather fought in World War II. He fought in the Greek resistance to the Nazi occupation.

1:40:10Demetri Kofinas:And I just think it's beyond reprehensible that we pretend as though it's no big deal. And even if you want to discuss these, I'm open to you discussing these topics, but the idea that it shouldn't be a big deal shows a real lack of appreciation for what the world experienced collectively in some of these instances. And I think that that's wrong. So anyway, I just wanted to make that statement. Let me just make one additional comment on that, because it helps with answering the question about what realists do. And I think what we also do is we stare the facts in the face, no matter how unpleasant they may be.

1:40:47And so they may undermine a myth or two, but we insist that they are the facts. And that's the difference between some of these stories that you've been sharing about people who are undermining myths. They're not undermining myths, right? They're undermining facts. And so again, on the one hand, yes, nothing can be sacred. You know, if new information comes to light and we find that information discomforting, too bad. We have to stare at it and we have to live with it and we have to process it. You know, this often happens when someone who we looked up to with reverence has found out to have done something horrible.

1:41:21That happens in history. And we can't pretend that that information doesn't exist. But that is a very different enterprise than trying to undermine the facts that are there. And so a lot of this nonsense about World War II, for example, is purposeful, and I think the word you used, gleeful, garbage, and it is designed to undermine the basis of truth claims.

1:41:47Demetri Kofinas:Well, and I just want to be clear, I'm not suggesting that these are just stories, but for example, there was one anecdote that was provided in a Tucker Carlson interview that the Nazis simply didn't have anywhere to put the prisoners of war. And maybe that was true for certain cases. The point is that that doesn't fundamentally alter the fact that there were specific projects to literally wipe people out, their entire nations off the face of the planet. That is a very different type of evil than simply occupying and putting people into camps. And so anyway, I don't want to necessarily go down this road, but I think that, and I made the point already.

1:42:21Demetri Kofinas:I think that there is something happening here. There's an unmaking going on, unraveling of stories that are central to who we are. I'm not suggesting by the fact that there are stories that there aren't facts tied to them, but they still are stories with a very powerful generative force behind them and an affirmative force. And if we just simply tear things down without replacing them with something new, then we create a vacuum in which other people can come in and tell the stories for us. And that's what's very frightening about the world we're in today. Yes. Amen. Jonathan, this has been an absolutely terrific, terrific conversation.

1:42:52I'm so grateful to you for taking the time to come and chat with us both today. I've enjoyed it immensely. That's been a blast. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you, Jonathan. It was really wonderful having you on. Oh boy, oh boy, D. That was so much fun and so thought provoking. I'm going to be lying awake thinking about a lot of that now. Thank you for that.

1:43:10Demetri Kofinas:Yeah, that was really amazing. I have to say, I get there are certain, when we venture to certain areas of these discussions, I do feel myself getting rather emotional. Man, I don't know how much of this also has to do with the fact that we've lost most of the World War II generation. Yeah, very possibly. Very possibly, which is what happens right it's only when you lose those generations that the stories die you know that's part of the problem that's why these fourth turnings happen every 80 years because that's right exactly way to bring it back to the pivot way to bring it yeah yeah right but that's it right that's why it happens that way it's it makes sense and you can see through time that when the stories die to your point earlier which you made so beautifully the vacuum is created for other stories to fill them.

1:43:51And, you know, I don't like the way our stories are going any more than you do. And this isn't a Trump thing at all. Although, sadly, I'm sure parts of that conversation will be framed that way. You know, people will make judgments based on a stance that someone takes against their guy, you know, and it's a shame. Because as Jonathan said, to be a realist, and I think most people would like to define themselves as that, even if they don't mean it in the clinical sense, you have to be able to hear other people's points of view and not take it as a personal affront and not take it as they're against me because they think differently to me.

1:44:30And that's one of the key things that we seem to have lost.

1:44:32Demetri Kofinas:Yeah. I mean, it's also important as I'm sure you'd agree that it matters whether the interlocutor you're facing is arguing in good faith. And I think that's also part of the problem that so much of these, again, the point I was making about the irreverence for the stories is that there is a kind of gleeful enjoyment that people have in stepping and trampling all over things that matter to other people. And this goes back to the way in which we, so many people can sit and listen to Trump pontificate about whether or not he would pardon P. Diddy because he didn't say something nice to him or, you know, did Sidney Sweeney, what did she say?

1:45:08Demetri Kofinas:Oh, I kind of like her. I kind of like her now. Or like, you know, the entertainment value, it's scary. It's like, it doesn't matter anymore. We don't have a view anymore of the presidency and the president's role being a sacred role and the seriousness of that role. It's like, oh no, he's just another stand-up comedian to fill my time. As if the system is just going to go on and on on its own. We're not going to pay the consequences for our lack of participation. Yeah. Well, look, we've spoken about this in the series before. It used to be the office of the president and now it's the president.

1:45:37And that's a big difference, because once you make it about the man and not about the office, the integrity that comes with the office reverts to being the integrity of the man and the integrity of different presidents is different. And so the integrity is not consistent. And that's something you need in something like the office of the president of the United States. Without it, what do you have?

1:45:57Demetri Kofinas:I'll tell you what though, I'm excited to hear the feedback for this episode. Yeah. Well, we'll put our helmets on and see you in the fetal position. I'm excited. I have more courage because I'm with you on this flight. Yeah, right. Thanks, funny. Save for your numbers. I'm easier to find than you. You know, I was, again, not to drag this out, but I was speaking with someone about courage. And for me, I define courage as the affirmation of love in the face of fear. Action affirmed by love in the face of fear. Because it's not necessarily courageous to sit and sort of fist punch a lion in the face if it's got its jaws wide open.

1:46:34Demetri Kofinas:That doesn't necessarily affirm your love, But throwing yourself in front of a moving car to save a child, that's an affirmation of something that means something to you. And so I think that at the end of the day, when it comes to these conversations, there are things that I'm willing to speak about because they're meaningful to me. And I'm willing to take a position because it means something to me. And we obviously don't see that with many of the cowards that inhabit political office. But I think that we all need to work on developing our courage and our willingness to speak out when something affronts a deeper affirmation that we hold.

1:47:07Amen. Amen to that. And that's the first stage of two, unfortunately. The second stage is being able to listen to someone challenging those things and listen in good faith as well and ultimately disagree if you want to, but at least hear them out and not just immediately shut down because they took that other stance. But more power to you, my friend. Well, look, that's it for another episode. We've got a lot more things to think about and a lot more people to talk to. Neither Dimitri nor I have any idea who's going to be next, but rest assured there will be someone because we've both got so many questions.

1:47:38Before we disappear though, Dimitri, just let people know where they can list all the awesome stuff that you're putting out.

1:47:43Demetri Kofinas:They can go to hiddenforces.io and they can find everything they need to learn about the show, the episode library, how to subscribe to the content, everything. That's exactly what they should do. And they will also find there your previous conversation with Jonathan Kirshen, which I really listened to the other day. And it's, again, just fantastic. What a wonderful guest he was then and what a wonderful guest he's been today. So again, thanks to Jonathan. Episode 298, that one. There you go. I have no idea how you remember all that stuff. It's extraordinary. You can always pull these numbers out.

1:48:10I'm good with numbers. I'm good with remembering numbers. It's weird. It's amazing. All right, my friend. Until next time, I'll see you again soon.

1:48:15Demetri Kofinas:Wonderful. Thank you, Grant. I look forward to it. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community. You can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.