On the Brink of Global Recession

27:04If you go from decent inflation, no Fed tightening, to high inflation, Fed tightening, that's the kind of swing you're talking about. If you're looking at the global economy and the trade war, what we emphasized at the Peterson Institute, what other mainstream responsible economists emphasize is what I tried to convey a minute ago. that the direct effects of the tariffs were bad, but they're somewhere closer to the policy you said about just it's stupid. It affected 10 % of the value of 18 % of the economy, and it affected it part by distorting the prices, not by wiping out availability. So you're talking about something that takes two or three tenths of a percent of growth off in terms of making steel so much more expensive, aluminum so much more expensive, shortages of various goods from China.

28:06It's real money. It's in the hundreds of billions of dollars, but it's not an absolutely enormous number. The problem is when you get these things interacting. So the rest of the world is making less money. The rest of the world is more nervous about the dollar. American business is less willing to invest. And investment usually is about 15 % of the economy. Investment is usually about 40 or 50, excuse me, four to five trillion dollars a year. See, I get the numbers confused. And if investment flatlines outside of AI, that means you're only doing$2.5 trillion of investment a year. So arguably, the tariffs ended up costing us a few percent of GDP because we skipped the investment.

29:03And more importantly, it costs us down the road because we don't get the benefits of that investment we skipped. So they're different animals. The oil shock is what happens now, what happens over the next two years. The tariffs and the anti-migration policies are a business confidence shock, and that spreads over more years. So let's focus very specifically on the energy shock. The United States is a net exporter of oil and gas. It imports some primarily from Canada. It exports others. Oil is not one product. It's got many different versions. And We're all going to, unfortunately, have to learn a lot more about this than we knew before February 28th.

29:46But Americans have an idea that, at least the president has an idea, that the United States is insulated from the world economy because it doesn't import on net very much. It imports relatively little and it exports more. So the United States is fine. And indeed, a lot of Americans are going to make money because those Americans who do produce and refine and sell oil will enjoy higher prices. So that's good news for people in the fracking industry. That's good news for Texas. Or is it? It's good news in the short term for a few people, yeah. I mean, you know, it's just like one can say, well, if there's a war, the munitions makers may end up making some money and may end up selling their munitions at higher prices.

30:26And, you know, is that a justification for putting the whole economy for a wringer? No, it's just something when you're realistically looking at things, you take that into account. So the U.S. does export energy. As you pointed out, David, it's important, the different types of petroleum, the different ways of exporting natural gas, because it's not totally interchangeable. Certain places are only set up to receive certain kinds of oil and gas. But essentially, you have one global market in natural gas and one global market with a little bit of this differentiation in petroleum for fuel. And in the end, if there's a shortage, the countries who have money and need the stuff, meaning Western Europe, Japan, Korea, China, and to a lesser degree, India has enough money because it's so large, they will bid up the price of energy.

31:28Some of that becomes a windfall for American producers, but other pieces of that spill out into things like higher food prices, higher helium prices, higher opportunity costs for what you can do with your money. And so at the gas pump, the consumer is still going to be hit. And then again, that brings us back to what are you doing to one small part of the economy versus what are you doing to inflation and then interest rates and then growth overall? Well, this is a point that President Trump really seems unable to process because he will simultaneously say, he will reassure Americans the United States is net self-sufficient in oil and gas, so no problem.

32:14And then he will say to the rest of the world, come buy our, you know, we have lots, come buy from us. And then it's, well, if the money comes in and the oil comes out, then you're going to equilibrate the American price with the price on the rest of the planet. The only way you have the self-sufficiency turns into low prices is if you can somehow stop your export economy. Maybe that's why the president does have a very statist vision of the economy. Maybe he has in mind something like that. There'll be kind of not only import barriers, but export barriers. But the export barriers have to be pretty tough to prevent energy from moving.

32:46And if you don't have those kinds of export barriers, if you are selling to other people, then you import their price along with the energy you export. Exactly. And so the only, and just to take it further, I've been visiting with European officials recently, and they're very worried about President Trump putting export controls on the U.S., I mean, on U.S. energy and using it for political purposes vis-a-vis Ukraine or Israel or Iran or whatever. And so they're not only saying, oh, my God, if we buy from the U.S., they're going to jack up prices. They're saying, oh, my God, we don't want to be dependent on the U.S.

33:27So we got to stockpile energy. We got to switch to other forms of energy. We got to try to cut out the U.S. and buy from elsewhere. And so over the long term, meaning the next few years, the U.S. share of energy markets is going to go down on top of everything you said, David, which is ultimately, unless the president really does go Chinese communist style and set up barriers around the whole U.S. economy, which would be insane and require huge police presence, it won't work. On that point about the European fears, I think you have to have a bit of memory here to understand how amazing this is.

34:04So Russia escalates the war in Ukraine to a full-scale war in February of 22. And preparatory to, in order to put pressure on the rest of the world, in the month before the war, in the winter of 21, 22, Russia began turning off gas exports to Europe. Gas, of course, has to move through, or typically moves through pipelines. That's the cheapest way to move gas. It's a gas. You have to encase it in a pipeline and flow it through. And a pipeline can't go up in a day. Gas has to follow along certain routes like electricity. You can't just move it, put it in a boat and move it the way you can with oil.

34:42Europe was very dependent on Russian gas. Russia turned, and they had a big energy crisis in January, February of 22. And a lot of people thought that this was going to be a catastrophic event. I wrote a lot about it for the Atlantic. And through amazing acts of both technology and solidarity and planning and self-sacrifice, the Europeans actually got through the crisis. But one of the things that helped was the United States under President Biden said, we've got gas in the United States. And while we can't build you a pipeline, what you can do is put the gas in a giant machine and smush it and make it into a liquid and then put it in a boat, keep it cold and move it around the world.

35:23And the United States invited the Europeans to invest a lot of money in building plant facilities to receive liquid natural gas from the United States. And everybody thought, well, what a better world it is when Europe no longer has to depend on authoritarian, corrupt, non-transparent Russia for pipeline gas and can instead import liquid gas from democratic, reliable, NATO-friendly, Europe-friendly United States. And it turns out, oh, wait, one's almost as bad as the other. as a supplier. One is this capricious and arbitrary and corrupt, well, I shouldn't say as, because that's not true. No, no, but you go from being oblivious about the risks of depending on Russia.

36:05You went from thinking you could trust the United States as a supplier to saying, oh, well, it's better than Russia, but it's not good. Right, which is a pretty huge reduction in the dependability of the U.S. And so you just got to think about this. If I'm a German or, let's leave the French out of it, a British or a Japanese official. And, you know, in the Japanese case, I have such a national security dependence on the U.S. that, you know, it's like the kids say ride or die. I have to stick with it. But if I'm the Germans or other Europeans, I have to, like you said, I can make other adjustments.

36:40I can increase the diversity of places I build pipelines with. I can decrease my dependence on natural gas. All these things have costs. All these things take time. But if I'm worried I'm going to be cut off at any moment, then yeah, I'm going to do those things. Yeah. Well, maybe when you're thinking about the long-term costs of this war, one of them is changing the way the whole planet thinks about energy supplies. Because I think the way many people would have thought about this problem four years ago is too much of the world's oil comes from places that are unstable, either because they're unstable themselves, like Russia, or because they have bad neighbors like the Persian Gulf.

37:20And the goal of sound energy policy is one, to get more non-oil and gas energy sources so those are more predictable and reliable. No one's turning off the wind. No one's turning off the sun. And Angela Merkel turned off nuclear, unfortunately. But if you can reconstitute an update to nuclear program, it'd be more self-sufficient. And anyway, gas comes from the United States and you can trust them. And gas can come from lots of different places beside the United States. But we now have an image of an energy market in which almost all those sources look unpredictable. And maybe the conclusion that everybody takes is this is the moment where you do need to make the top choices to reduce dependence on oil and gas, because North America is not to be trusted either.

38:06But let's follow that logic, David, because it's affecting not just energy immediately right now, but it's affecting a whole host of things, right? So think about Canada. I was in Canada shortly before the election of Mark Carney, you know, 14 months ago, 15 months ago, when the fight between Trump and Carney was just starting up. And you had Canadian officials saying, oh my God, we suddenly realized we're entirely dependent on the U.S. for internet access. All our cables run through the U.S. or through U.S. satellites. It could be turned off by the U.S. at any time. What the bleep do we do? You have people in U.K.

38:50who are completely dependent on the U.S. for various kinds of military supplies. And, you know, as whatever the pluses and minuses of it, the idea that the U.K. was this incredibly close ally that was boots on the ground next to us in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as many other wars, was totally dependent on the U.S. for spare parts and intelligence. And then they see what's happening in Ukraine, and they see what's happening elsewhere. And they see Trump turn from, oh, I love you, I want to have a state dinner, to, oh, you're idiots, you've got to pay me money. And similarly, so now we've got the so-called Eurofighter, and we've got the joint Italian, and Japanese-British development of a fighter plane to be an alternative to the F-35.

39:37So it's happening right now in energy. You can't avoid it. It's terrifying. But it's important to understand the U.S. is causing even allies, or one would argue especially allies, to have to rethink their dependence on the U.S. And that is huge foreign policy as well as economic implications. And this maybe goes to your core beliefs and the core work of the Peterson Institute, which is we've developed a way of thinking over the past 30 years about the world economy, which is to say, if you could build enough trust between countries, if you could eliminate the kind of state, potentially annihilation of state competition that was the Cold War, and build a world that was more stable and predictable, then you could have more trade.

40:25You could have more specialization. You could, and it wouldn't matter that your, the screws came from one place and the nails came from somewhere else and the plates came from a third place and the batteries from someplace else and that they were assembled. You could do that all efficiently, capture all of these incredible gains for standard of living. And that's, that was the story of the 1990s. The world got very rich, very fast because it could do business in a more efficient way because there was less fear of country upon country. And if in the story of the 2020s is when people use terms like deglobalization, what we really mean is more fear, more fear.

41:00And therefore, if we feel fear, we pay a price for insurance. Well, we have to make all our own screw factories because we are afraid to depend on foreign screw suppliers. And the screw, I remember this was one of the points that Howard Letnick used to make. you'd hold up the iPhone and, and complain that little screws at the bottom of the iPhone were made in China. Um, and, uh, as they were, um, and so how do you get little, little tiny iPhone screws made in America? You need to have a big tariff wall to encourage, and you need to leave it there for a long time to encourage people to invest in building tiny factories to build tiny screws in the United States to go into iPhones.

41:39All of that costs money. All of that reduces efficiency. All of that means each, instead of one screw factory supplying the entire earth, you have lots and lots of screw factories for each relative economic block relevant economic block and we all get poorer faster in the way that we all get faster basically yeah and we this whole thing goes and i i remember seeing this this chart that explained the origin of great depression by tracking um the shrinkage of world trade between 1929 and 1933 as a kind of spider inner spiral it's a famous chart by an economic historian named charles kindleberger And what he said was, obviously, the start of the Great Depression was the, going back to things we were talking about a couple minutes ago, the stock market crash and the Fed reacting in the wrong way and a collapse of the banking system.

42:28But then you couldn't get out of it because everybody in the world started cutting off everybody else. And so the lack of trust you were talking about, which obviously had a basis in a lot of things that had geopolitical reasons, not economic reasons, undermined the purchasing power of everybody because the little screws suddenly had to be artisanal, locally developed little screws. and you had to pay people less because you had to get an American or a Brit or a German to screw in the little screws instead of somebody out in the colony somewhere who was paid much less. And so suddenly everything became much more expensive and everybody cuts back when everything becomes more expensive.

43:15And the key point I want to go back to, David, is what you said is the word insurance. So what I argued in Foreign Affairs last fall, I talked about what I called the new economic geography. And the basic point was that the U.S. had been providing all the insurance to allow that kind of commercial integration you were talking about. They provided safety on the seas so you could ship the ship, the screws. They provided property rights so everybody knew who was getting what. There was various forms of cheating, and there was particularly from the Chinese. but basically the U.S. collected various forms of premium payments from people and provided lots of insurance including a market in the U.S.

43:58you could sell into including a treasury market that was very liquid. The Trouble administration took it from being insurance to being a protection bracket. They walked around cracking their knuckles and telling people you have a nice economy there would be a shame if anything happened to it so therefore you should pay me and that's a very different business model. And then that leads to people wanting to get out from being in the protection racket. So it's a very much scarier world, which just reinforces your point, that the trust breaks down and then you get these spirals. When something bad happens, people pull back more.

44:32They pull back more, things get worse. Yeah. And you said something that I don't think gets said enough, which is the United States gets benefits from the system. That Donald Trump offers Americans a vision of the world in which he says, okay, the United States provides security, provides all these rules. And that's just where the United States is just being terribly taken advantage of, because what does it get back in return? And as you know, it gets back a lot of things. They're not always advertised because Americans, when they set up this system, which was good for everybody, everyone benefited.

45:06And there are many people who benefited more than Americans did proportionally to the small size. But that's not at the expense of Americans. That's the point. But they also, the United States didn't like to talk about what it got as benefits because those are, that's not to draw attention to them. But the fact that countries hold their wealth in United States dollars, which allows the United States government to borrow more cheaply, that's a product of the system. Exactly. The fact that Americans, by and large, don't need to learn a second language. which is it would be good if more did, but they don't in a way that people all over the planet have to learn English.

45:37And just think of what is the benefit to you to not need to learn a second to spend that time doing something else where your German or Japanese or even Chinese counterpart has to learn some amount of English to function in the world economy. No, no. There's a laundry list. And all those you mentioned are very real. And in particular, I just want to emphasize the fact that everybody felt, with the exception of a few sanctioned oligarchs, that they could put money into the U.S. Treasury market. And when you wanted to go get it back, it would be worth the same amount. No one would discriminate against you and no one would notice was a huge thing that meant that our country and our people were paying much less for our Treasury bills, much less for our government activities.

46:22We had, in addition, all the things you mentioned - Which fed through and therefore paying much less for mortgage. I mean, 30-year mortgages are a uniquely American product. And similarly, one of the things we got, and to our benefit, was standard setting. So when there were industries, we didn't necessarily directly control it, but because the U.S. was the provider of insurance and safety, U.S. got to pretty much say, hey, you know, here's this kind of chemical and you don't like it. That's your business. But this is the way we're going to decide how things get used. Hey, this is the way for property rights and motion picture agencies.

47:00Yes, there's a lot of staff, but we're going to prosecute it. And most of the world is going to pay Hollywood when it's time to buy movies. It was just a huge number. And then there were all the things Joseph Nye used to call soft power, all the cultural things that people believed in the U.S. and therefore wanted to buy U.S. cultural products, wanted to pay universities to be educated or to get qualifications, wanted to have the kinds of foods and cars and even cigarettes that the Americans wanted. All of these things went together. And so you hit the core point, David. Trump has sold people on the idea that the U.S.

47:37was getting ripped off. The U.S. wasn't getting ripped off. It was running a very good business, running an insurance, a non-insurance racket, a genuine insurance company. We were getting premiums. If we thought the premiums were a little low, we could have offered to ask them to slightly increase the premium. But you don't turn from that into being a gangster because then everybody isn't interested in seeing you lose. Yeah. Well, this is, as we move to the end, this is the vision that most haunts me about how American power ends. Yeah. Because the story of, ever since there is kind of a world system, going back 500 years or so, that at any given moment, there's a strongest power.

48:21And once it was the Habsburgs who were based in Spain and Austria, and then it was the Bourbons based in France and other people, they're different number one powers. But the number one power was stronger than any other power, was never stronger than all the other powers. And what would happen was anyone emerged as the strongest power, all the other powers would combine to tear down the strongest power because they perceived it as a threat to each of them in turn. And the coalition against the strongest power would always win and the strongest power would always lose because the combined strength of powers two through ten was greater than the power of number one.

48:56And when the United States emerged as the world's strongest power, and you can date that whenever you want, but 1945 conveniently, when the United States emerged as the world's strongest power, it cracked this puzzle by saying, well, what if we use our power in ways that are not threatening to powers two through 10? But at least power, actually, in those days, power number two, deeply threatening to power number two of the Soviet Union. But three through 10, the power protects you. And so three through 10 combined with one against two, instead of two through 10 combining the other against number one.

49:28And the United States, through this generous system, also bought itself safety against envy and attack. And the thing I worry about most is when Donald Trump says the United States is going to behave more like a traditional great power, that he doesn't think through. And that means he's going to unleash the kind of reaction that is traditionally unleashed by the world's great power when it acts alone. That is, it frightens people and causes them to combine with one another. Now, China for the moment remains such a bad global actor that I don't think they're going to have a lot of success getting people to combine with them against the United States.

50:03But that depends on American behavior as much as it depends on Chinese behavior. And if American behavior continues to be not only unpredictable, but often kind of predatory and even sinister, you're marching down the path that the Habsburgs and the Bourbons took before the United States. basically yes and it starts being seen in the economic sphere before the military sphere because so many countries depended on exactly what you said david that the u.s wasn't a direct threat to them that sometimes we were liked sometimes we're not like but nobody viewed us i didn't say nobody none of the powers three through ten viewed us as a genuine direct threat And now, at a minimum, people are saying, no, I have to insure against the possibility the U.S.

50:51does pull out the raw gun from under me in terms of support for NATO or in terms of availability of natural gas or in terms of kill switches and the technology we buy. And once you start doing that, it starts unraveling down the path you're talking about. And I agree with you. That's when the U.S. ends up not only in trouble, but we end up losing the reason why we want the U.S. to be okay. Because then we become just another exploitive, bullying government. You know, the Americans of the period from the end of the Second World War to the Great Recession, let's say, I think did understand this.

51:32And some understood it more. self-consciously and articulately than others. But most people sort of sensed it. Because when you think, why did we know that for those period? Because there was this kind of memory of the trauma of the Great Depression and the two world wars and how all of this was caused by the fear of one country against another. And that if only you could find some way to a world system where there is more trust and mutual benefit, you wouldn't have to suffer what people suffered from 1914 to 1945. You would have the better world they enjoyed from 1945 onward. And passage of time, people forget those lessons.

52:07And I worry, is there any way that we can learn these lessons without the trauma? Can we read a book or something? Or do we have to go through, do we have to suffer directly in order to gain wisdom? I fear we're in the latter situation. There are an awful lot of books out there, some of them even quite good, well-written, others boring there are an awful lot of books out there making this point and there's i don't know if it's a majority of people but there's a politically effective plurality of people who have this politics of resentment convinced that the u.s was not gaining in its enlightened self-interest from the way it behaved after world war ii through the last 10 years.

52:49And I think that's wrong. And I think fear of China is causing us, it's part of this. But going back to where you started, we need a world where it's number one and numbers three through 10 facing together against China to the degree that's necessary and not a world where numbers three through 10, or for that matter, three through 90 say, well, I don't really want to choose between U.S. or China because they're both bad. Those are bad outcomes. Last question for you on the way out. What is our best case scenario of exit from the Iran conflict? What could happen? What do we hope for? I mean, combining the national security economics, the best case scenario is Trump declares victory.

53:40and somehow domestically in Iran, they get enough control on the dispersed Revolutionary Guard Corps to reduce the threat of anybody shooting missiles at ships in the Persian Gulf. And within a couple of weeks, shipping goes back to normal and energy prices start coming down, though they don't come down the full way. That's the best case scenario. And the war's legacy is in Iran that has fewer offensive weapons, but the price of oil is higher. Fewer offensive weapons, but everybody except the U.S. feels they have to self-provision. And that can be the UAE and Saudi and the other states in the region saying, I don't want to be dragged into war by the U.S., so I'm going to start hedging my bets more.

54:33It can be people in Europe and East Asia saying, I don't want to be dependent on the U.S. for energy. So some of that's good. I'll become more efficient. Some of that's bad. I'm going to stockpile huge amounts of energy. And then you get a bunch of developing countries going back to where we opened, which are like, hey, the U.S. just did this and caused a major recession and a huge decline in purchasing power and energy for my people for no clear reason. why did you do this to me? So it's not a good legacy, even before you get to the foreign policy. It's not a good legacy. And we don't have to specify the worst case scenarios because why depress everybody?

55:17Yeah, let's be true. The best case scenario is bad enough. Adam Posen, thank you so much for making time for me. Thank you for having me on the David Frum podcast, David. Bye-bye.

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56:33Thanks so much to Adam Pozen for joining me today. And now my book talk as recorded earlier in Washington, D.C. The book for discussion this week is on a related topic. The book is Ask Not, The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan, published in 2024. for. Ask Not is a heart-rending collective portrait of three generations of women born into or married into the Kennedy family and the tragic fates that often overtook them. We meet, for example, Rosemary Kennedy, the daughter of Joe Kennedy, the sister of President Kennedy and Senator Bobby and Kennedy was locked away in an institution for all of her life.

57:10We meet Jacqueline Kennedy, who was so betrayed during her lifetime by President Kennedy and then introduced after his death for her second marriage to Aristotle Onassis. We meet Mary Richardson Kennedy, the wife of Bobby Kennedy Jr., who was driven to suicide. We meet Carolyn Bessette, the wife of John Kennedy Jr., who, along with her sister, died in a plane crash caused by her husband's carelessness. We meet Joan Kennedy, the wife of Ted Kennedy. We meet the young women in the White House of President John F. Kennedy, who are preyed upon in a way that often came to the verge of rape by a president who seemed to regard the women around him as his entitlement, his right, his prerogative, with no regard for them or for his oath to his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy.

57:55And maybe most excruciatingly of all, we meet Mary Jo Kopechny, the brilliant young aide to Robert Kennedy, so important to his 1968 presidential drive, who made the mistake of getting into an automobile with Senator Kennedy in 1969. Ted Kennedy drove the car off a bridge, flipped it over. He made good his own escape, but left Mary Jo Kopechny while Kennedy made no effort to gain help to save her life, a life that might have been saved had he acted in a speedier and left selfish manner. The book also serves as a collective portrait of the Kennedy men, of the common themes that we meet the same kind of behaviors again and again and again.

58:34And they remain relevant to our own time because one of those men is in the cabinet of President Trump. Ask Not is an exquisitely researched book and excruciatingly written. It is a powerful book, and it often hurts to read because the stories are so heart-rending, especially those of the very youngest women, some of them still alive, who are trying to make sense out of what happened to them, of how they were used and how they were betrayed. The book, you might have thought, would have gotten a big response at this time when we are increasingly alive to the rights of women and increasingly prone not to blame women for the way that they are taken advantage of by rapacious men.

59:09It didn't get that response, or it seems to me, I don't want to do an injustice to the book, but scanning the reviews, it didn't get the response it might have because there's a strong whiff of conservative politics about Ask Not. Maureen Callahan, the author, is a columnist for the Daily Mail, and she made one of her very first media appearances to promote the book on the Megyn Kelly podcast, where Megyn Kelly gloated over the unquestionably terrible behavior of the Kennedy family. I think a lot of people might have thought it's kind of strange in the year 2024 to be paying so much attention to the Kennedys when with President Trump, we have a adjudicated, a civilly adjudicated sexual assailant in the White House with cases of credibly attested sexual assault allegations against him over many, many years.

59:57And I think that's an impulse that I can understand, but that needs to be put aside. I don't tell a story about this. On the night that Congressman Eric Swalwell resigned from the House, I happened to be in a Trump-friendly space where there were a lot of television sets. The space was noisy, so I couldn't hear what was on the television sets, but I didn't need to because I could see the gloating faces of the Fox News House in the eight o 'clock hour as they devoted the first quarter of an hour of the newscast to Swalwell and his fall. You would not know from watching the program that a Republican Congressman Tony Gonzalez had resigned that same day over his own and heinous allegations of sexual misconduct.

1:00:37And of course, you would never know that Fox News had defended President Trump against credible allegation after credible allegation, going back for many years of his outrageous behavior. There was a strong mood of, this is one for our team. Our team has scored one. We nailed one of the other guys. We brought them down. Yay us, boo them. And the question I found of myself thinking about is, is the fair and decent treatment of women, is that a matter of morality or is that a matter of convenience? Is that an important part of how we judge people in public life or not? If it is, then like cheating on your taxes, like drunk driving, like any other kind of moral outrage, it's something that needs to be assessed equally to all people.

1:01:19And without response to, without regard to whether or not our team or their team is the affected party. That's not how we often do it, but it's the way we should do it. It should be possible to say, you know what, the Kennedys and the Trumps, both bad. And not bad in every respect. I mean, who would deny that the Kennedy family made great and important contributions to the politics of this country? And there was not that there was not much to admire, especially in President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, less in Robert Kennedy Jr., by whom there's not much to admire. But it is important to note in the ledger the terrible things they did and the terrible suffering that they inflicted on people they purported to care about or people they just used and tossed away.

1:02:01And if you're going to do that for them, you can do it equally for everybody. Thanks so much for joining me today on the David Frum Program. Thanks for watching and listening. As ever, the best way to support the work of this program, if you're reminded to do it, is by subscribing to The Atlantic, where you can see the work of myself and all of my colleagues. I hope you will consider liking and sharing this podcast on social media. It does propitiate the algorithm gods. If you press that little button, it really makes a difference to bring the work of the show to more and more people. Thank you so much for watching and listening this week.

1:02:31See you next week on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

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