Is a Post-American World Inevitable? A Conversation With Kurt Campbell, Rush Doshi, and Mark Leonard

23:31Mark Leonard:And we'll just give you a few examples, right? So I mentioned earlier in the 1950s, we had a Suez crisis, right? The US essentially threatened to sink the British pound over British foreign policy. We forget that, but that was an enormously consequential action. Again, in the 1960s, you have France essentially withdraw from NATO's unified command and expel a large number of American troops. Nothing like that has happened this time around, even though we've had big problems. In the 70s, it's now forgotten, but the U.S. Congress multiple times almost voted to cut U.S. forces in Europe by 50 percent.

24:00Mark Leonard:That was the Mansfield Amendment. And the Nixon administration, of all administrations, had to fight back against the amendment to kill it. And Mansfield kept pushing it. Later, of course, a famous statesman and diplomat. But at the time, somebody wanted to bring the troops home. And that's on the security side. But if you look at the economic side again, And just a few examples, right? I mentioned earlier going off the gold standard. That was not coordinated with allies and partners at all, arguably a more significant international economic decision than these very loophole filled tariffs, which have then have been overturned by the courts.

24:28Mark Leonard:And yet we overcame that problem too. And actually, when we went off the gold standard, we put a 10 % tariff on everybody. And still the economic system kind of endured. Plaza in the 1980s is very unique, right? We pushed Japan and Germany to revalue their currencies. The amount of effect that had on Japan's exports was far larger than the current tariffs we have now. I mean, the appreciation of the yen was multiples more than the tariff change even today. So what's the point of all that? The point is the history of alliances has often been a little acrimonious. There's been protests like over the Pershing II deployments in which millions took to the streets.

25:03Mark Leonard:And the hedging behavior we're seeing now in many cases is a departure not from long historical norms, but from a relatively recent trend of very close interaction. And not all that hedging, as Mark mentioned, is bad. Some of that hedging is good. So let me give you a quick example. Take the military share going to American companies of European defense spending. Until recently, that share was like 50%, right? From 2022 to 2024, post-Ukraine. Half of all European spending went to American companies on defense. Let's say that number goes down from 50 % to 40 % or 35%. Is that a catastrophic decoupling or de-risking from the US?

25:37Mark Leonard:Or is that sensible resilience? If you look at the European effort, especially the German effort to build up defense industrial capacity, a lot of that is financed by American capital. A lot of that is with American companies playing important roles, American parts. The substructure of European military weaponry is still often things like American command and control, link systems like Link 16, et cetera. On the economic side, I feel like Europe is hedging for sure. They're doing more of these agreements with other middle powers. But look at the trade statistics, right? Like the biggest trend in the last five years is that European exports to China have fallen by like 30%.

26:11Mark Leonard:They've gone up to the United States by 15%. And the same is true of Korea and of India as well. So it's a European and an Asian story. Japan is a bit of an exception. So on the economic side, there's no choice. If you're facing an existential challenge from Chinese excess capacity, as Germany is losing 10 ,000 workers a month, the American market may be your only hope. So you may do some de-risking. But in the end, there's also greater reliance on the U.S. to be your source of high margin demand. And finally, on tech. You know, there's definitely efforts by the French and others to stop using Microsoft Office or Zoom, and those are important.

26:42Mark Leonard:But even as they unwind the dependencies of the past, new dependencies are being built around cloud and AI. And some of that's two-way, right? I mean, the US is highly dependent on European companies for the AI build-out. There's no possibility of it without the Dutch or the Germans or the Japanese or the Taiwanese. So again, I think there's a bit of a de-risking and decoupling in some places, but a recoupling in others. And let me end with one other point, if I may, just a polling point. I think what Mark paints is a very important picture. There is real anger and grievance. And I think Mark's organization, ECFR, had a fantastic series of polls across many European countries that are extremely dire, right?

27:18Mark Leonard:When you see the statistics, you know, countries think of America as an enemy. We can't disregard that. But I saw one extraordinarily fascinating finding, and you hear it in Asia as well. And that's that across, I think, 15 countries polled. In all 15, either a majority or a plurality of those polled thought that, quote, essentially, this too shall pass. That the challenges that we have in the Trump era are a product more of a personality of this one man than a fundamental changes in the U.S. approach to foreign policy. Now, that's an optimistic hope, but it's shared by a lot of publics. And I was genuinely shocked when I saw that finding.

27:49Mark Leonard:because I think what it shows is people understand, perhaps, that down the road, you know, once we turn the page on this era, and this is what the poll captures, the damage is not necessarily permanent. So is there hedging? Yes. But as Kurt mentioned, some of it could be capacity enhancing. Some of it is not out of step with historical norms. And not all of it is necessarily going to depart from what we mentioned earlier, the very real convergence of concern about the China-Russia challenge.

28:13Kurt Campbell:I found much of what Mark said persuasive and clearly the feel of it. I myself was a student in Great Britain during Reagan's presidency when we were putting nuclear systems in Europe. You know, I was a young guy, but I had real questions about whether the special relationship would survive. Every weekend, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating tremendous sense of dismay, lack of trust, the major titles on the bestseller list. I remember a book called The Disintegrating West, How It Would Never Survive This Period. That was the animating view. And of course, we made that through and have seen much more strategic cooperation going forward.

28:57Kurt Campbell:I would make one other point. Russia's examples, they're all good ones, but they're from Europe. We've had a similar dynamic play out in the Indo-Pacific. The period of greatest loss of trust of the United States didn't come from misbehavior from our chief executive, but failure on the battlefield in Vietnam. In the aftermath of that, many of the countries of Asia felt bereft, absent of hope. Some countries departed on secret nuclear weapons programs. In Taiwan and South Korea, President Nixon gave a speech with very little context, the so-called Guan Doctrine, which basically required Asian partners to do much more.

29:39Kurt Campbell:In some ways, it's kind of a precursor to some of the sentiment that President Trump has described. Several years later, with the arrival in power of a different president, President Reagan, with a determined and clear outlook, a very strong revival in our partnerships in the Indo-Pacific. So this is not unique to the transatlantic relationship. We have faced these challenges more generally. I would just say one thing, Dan, and I want to commend foreign affairs for this. Our larger proposition here is one that, frankly, Rush alluded to just at the end. I think our belief is that after these elections in the United States, we're going to see, I think beginning in the fall and winter, a dramatic resurgence in discussion, debate, hope, and frankly, optimism about what comes next.

30:34Kurt Campbell:And there's going to be a lot of discussion about looking two years ahead. I can't imagine anything worse for President Trump than to be overlooked as people are anticipating the future. But that is exactly what is going to happen. And And the hope is with these essays and engagements that we animate that debate. And our own belief is that in many respects, we have agency. And some of this is self-fulfilling. I know what Mark is speaking to. There is almost an inverse relationship. If your interlocutor from Europe believes that you are a supporter of Europe and a supporter of alliances, he is much more likely to say the most harsh and horrible things about how this is unrecoverable.

31:21Kurt Campbell:And so there is that ironic dynamic here. I do believe that Europe has, in public opinion, polling is on to something that Rush laid out in which they are already anticipating the future and they see this leadership as increasingly personalistic and that more and more the subtle signaling, although sometimes pathetic, from Republicans and others is that we're not on board for seizing Greenland. In fact, much of what President Trump is involved in is really not about an agenda for the future. We'll return to my conversation with Kirk Campbell, Rush Doshi, and Mark Leonard after a short break.

32:13Kurt Campbell:Mark, I want to focus on a point that is in some ways at the center or at least a starting point for your essay and also relates to the point that Kurt just made. And that's really about the United States. I think if you're not going to say it this uncharitably, but I think one way of applying the argument in your piece to the hopes that a lot of people in the American foreign policy world have for the future of what American policy might look like might look to you like delusional, magical thinking that, you know, you may be able to see us from the outside better than we see ourselves. You argue in the piece that the U.S.

32:48Kurt Campbell:is not going to come back as a kind of guarantor of order. It's not going to support allies in the same way. Why do you see that change as enduring or permanent? And how do you trace the kind of systemic effects of that when it comes to the order more broadly?

33:03Rush Doshi:So I think that when people talk about world order, they often start with Henry Kissinger, who kind of argues that you have these sort of two pillars for it, which is a commonly agreed set of rules about what states can and can't do, which people might not love, but are at least willing to live with. And then a balance of power, which can somehow enforce them and ensure that they take place. And if we think about the order that we've had over the last period of time, we did have those two things. And the U.S. was the kind of central glue, which both helped to develop those rules and then also to enforce them.

33:40Rush Doshi:And America isn't going away. It's still the preeminent military, economic and technological power in the world. But it is changing in quite a fundamental way as the balance of power in the world changes. And I think it's increasingly clear that Washington has lost its ability to prevent conflicts, to ensure the free flow of commerce around the world. It can't even open the Straits of Hormuz. It's struggled to get the Houthis into line in the Red Sea. And, you know, there's always been asymmetric challenges to American power. You know, Kurt talked about Vietnam earlier. We saw what happened in Afghanistan and places like that.

34:25Rush Doshi:But I think there are a series of technologies which have emerged which make it easier for weaker opponents to create a lot of disruption, as Iran is kind of proving on the one hand. And there's also, you know, has been a diffusion of power in the world. So America is still a lot more powerful than China and Russia and all the middle powers are at the moment in many domains. but they never really accepted the legitimacy of a lot of these rules and they now have more of an ability to thwart them and to push back on them so you have this sort of power transition on the one hand and then what i think is an absolute killer is the way that the u.s itself has responded to that power transition and that is essentially to go from seeing itself as a systemic power that stands for something larger than its own interests and is about upholding a system and playing a kind of hegemonic role towards being a kind of selfish, powerful state that is pursuing its own interests on the world stage.

35:30Rush Doshi:And it's been really striking how Donald Trump has managed to launch a sort of revolution against the American order and to present the US as the biggest victim of that order. And, you know, he's delegitimated all of the different pillars of it, starting with the alliance system, which we've been talking about, but extending to the way the economy works, to other kind of areas of life. And, you know, I very much hope that the Democrats come back at the next election, that you'll get a different president. But I think it's unlikely that you're going to see a new president emerging who stands on a platform of making the US into the world's primary provider of public goods, its police officer, its champion of free trade.

36:18Rush Doshi:And I think that it would be irresponsible after Trump's elected twice for other countries to assume that that's going to happen, which is why we have the hedging behavior that we talked about. So I think the US is no longer going to played a sort of systemic role that it's done beforehand, both for internal reasons and because of what's happening in the world. And what that means is that there is a sort of structural change from a much more hegemonic role for the US, where you can have the sort of central role that we've been talking about earlier, and you can think about there being an order towards a world that is characterized by an absence of order.

37:02Rush Doshi:And in the piece, I kind of talk about three big trends which are reshaping the international system and which mean that it's very unlikely that we are going to see order in the near future. And they are what I call fragmentation, contagion, and strangulation. And you're seeing that in lots of different domains. But basically, the fragmentation is very clear. Alliances, as we've been discussing, are kind of splintering in new ways. It's not just Western alliances. If you look at the GCC in the Middle East, if you look at what's happening to the global trade system, if you look at what happens -

37:42Kurt Campbell:The GCC, since American officials have been getting this wrong, is the Gulf Cooperation Council, not the Gulf Coast Council, which is, I think, what the vice president said at some point.

37:50Rush Doshi:Yeah, sorry about that. I should have made that clearer. But anyway, we're seeing a lot of fragmentation of alliances, we're seeing a fragmentation of the global economy, but not into neat blocks. Instead, it's quite a messy thing where you've got lots of different operating systems which are coexisting and often competing with each other, whether it's over technology, whether it's over trade, whether it's on what we're doing on the energy transition and climate change. And you're also seeing a degree of economic nationalism and protectionism, which Trump has obviously been pushing out of Washington, but being replicated in all the other great powers around the world.

38:34Rush Doshi:So you're seeing much more friction emerging. So the kind of identity of interests that, you know, that sort of substructure on which the political superstructure of the West and the alliance system was based is also starting to kind of disappear to an extent. And then on top of that, and maybe most dramatically, you have, you know, what maybe a slightly highfalutin way of putting it, but you could call epistemic fragmentation, the fact that we don't even share common idea about what's going on in the world. We're not just arguing about different interpretations about what's happening. There are just fundamentally different facts in different places.

39:11Rush Doshi:And that obviously has an impact within our societies, but it has an even bigger impact when it comes to international relations. So you don't have a common basis of reality on which to build international law, diplomacy, and cooperation.

39:29Kurt Campbell:Kurt and Russia, I want to pick up on the China dimension of this, both because the convergence around the perceptions around the challenge from China and Russia to a lesser degree are part of the key sources of alliance cohesion in your argument, but also because as you note, coalition splitting, breaking up these alliances is one of China's key priorities. How do you think China is playing this moment? Is it doing an effective job of that?

39:55Mark Leonard:Well, first, let me just pick up on something Mark said and then bring in your question directly into that. I mean, Mark correctly notes that order itself is fraying because the U.S. may not be as powerful as it used to be. And that's true. That's a fact. One of the implications of that fact is that we don't know exactly where the world is going to go. It could go in a few different directions, right? It could go towards what some call multipolarity, every great power for itself. That can be very Habesian. It can lead to war. Another possibility that's a little tamer is maybe we have regional spheres of influence.

40:25Mark Leonard:You know, each great power monopolizes its region, and they all agree to divide up the world. That has a lot of problems, but it's also not stable. Every time that's been attempted, great powers fight over the boundaries of their spheres, as we softer Yalta. And then a third possibility is we could get a concert of power. All the great powers get together and figure out the rules like they did after the Napoleonic Wars, and that preserves the peace. But right now, that seems hard to imagine. There's so much change in the world and there's so much disagreement on everything from AI to climate that it's just hard to do.

40:55Mark Leonard:But here's the most important point. This gets to what you said, Dan, that all of those three alternative worlds assume a relative quality among the great powers that might not be coming. Right? If you look at the great powers, I think one of them is more great than the others in particular, and that's China. And China's scale, as we've talked about in the past, is enormous, right? We're talking about more than twice the share of global manufacturing that the U.S. has greater than the next nine countries combined in global manufacturing, dominates industry after industry, leading in technology, fastest military and nuclear buildup in many ways in history.

41:27Mark Leonard:This is not a great power that is equivalent to Russia or Germany or France. This is a great power that is unique and exceeds the U.S. on many foundational metrics of power. And so when you think about those different worlds, the other world we could imagine is a world where China is more powerful than the other powers. And it's a world of partial Chinese hegemony or partial Chinese preeminence. And that's why the need for allies to work together is probably greater. Because in a lot of the areas we care about, take industrial capacity, we're not going to be able to bring back some of those industries like pharmaceuticals or biotechnology or robotics or heavy forges on our own.

42:04Mark Leonard:Indeed, a lot of that capacity is diversified across the allies. And so you've got to work together to create resiliency and industrial capacity. That's a new form of cooperation that we haven't had in the past. The way that China would like to proceed, and if you look at the history of how states that are aspiring for preeminence respond, the goal is to divide up the balancing coalition that might be growing against them or that kind of cooperation we're talking about. That's the question. Can you divide and conquer the other forces that are aligning to create order. And so China's ambition is to use economic instruments like rare earths, political instruments like, you know, information, politics, as well as perhaps even in Asia, some military instruments to get everybody to basically deal with them bilaterally and not to work together.

42:47Mark Leonard:And in fact, if you work together, they say that's containment, even though they're too big to contain. So how well is that going for China? I don't think it's going super well because facts are stubborn things. And the fact is that everybody around the world is seeing what's happening, that China's sheer capacity is eroding the industrial bases everywhere, that technologically there's new dependencies on China that are emerging, and militarily there's new threats. So they have not played, I think, this moment as deftly as they could. They're about to enter perhaps a trade war with Europe. They've got the Japanese and Koreans terribly afraid of the future, and the Indians by all rights should be cooperating with China on industrial matters and aren't.

43:21Mark Leonard:And that suggests, I think, that they are going to do what they tend to do, which is overreach, misplay their hand, be a bit overconfident, and that will potentially give space for allies to work together. But if we fail to build that kind of allied alternative to those other four worlds, the result might be Chinese preeminence, and that's a world that's worse for everybody. So I agree with Mark that order is fracturing, but the alternatives to the kind of order that Kurt and I might propose we build together are significantly worse for everybody.

43:48Kurt Campbell:The tragedy is at the very time that Europe is wanting to have a constructive, substantial dialogue about a coherent strategy for how to deal with China in both the security and economic realm, the Trump administration is absent. And I believe with him off the stage that there will be a strong bipartisan consensus in the United States that engaging in that very dialogue and working together is very much in the strategic interests of the United States. The idea of working with Europe is not some lefty, crazy concept. It is based in the most credible elements of conservative and Republican policymaking over generations.

44:37Kurt Campbell:As you spend a lot of time reading Chinese analysis and Chinese discourse, how are they talking about the alliance system right now, as you read it?

44:45Mark Leonard:Well, look, and we've seen this movie before. Back in the Trump first term, the Chinese were ecstatic that the possibility of U.S. alliances being broken by President Trump was a godsend to them. They understood that our biggest asymmetric advantage was our alliance system. And you can read Chinese scholar after scholar and even officials celebrate America's alienation of those allies. Now, that proved to be premature. You know, the subsequent administration pulled those alliances back together. Even the damage in that first period was perhaps slightly overstated. And in the second period in the Biden administration, China understood, wow, these alliances may be more resilient than we thought.

45:19Mark Leonard:Once again, though, with Trump's second term, there is great joy in many ways in strategic circles about the American destruction of the alliance system. They are cheering on the idea that the fatalism may be right because that would be good for them. Division among the West, among the U.S. and Japan and Korea and Europe and Canada and Mexico and India, that's good for China. But again, as Kurt mentioned, they have not been effective and nimble in calibrating coercive and consensual instruments. They lean very hard on threats and coercion on reverse, even against Europe and Japan, when adept or touch might be more effective in pulling these allies and partners towards them and away from us.

45:58Mark Leonard:So the irony of the situation is they've got a moment of opportunity to consolidate their gains, to basically wedge open the allied system. They know it, they've known it in the past, and both times they've failed to fully seize that opportunity.

46:11Kurt Campbell:Mark, let me go to you on the China question that we've been discussing. You've written for Foreign Affairs and others about how China approaches changes in world order and how Chinese strategy seeks to respond to them. What is your assessment of how well Chinese policymakers are managing this moment when it comes to their own interests, this kind of broader collapse of order and the Trump opportunity, if you accept Russia's framing more precisely?

46:36Rush Doshi:I think that China thinks that it's done an exceptional job of handling Donald Trump and the US. And it's certainly true if you look at the balance sheet on the trade war, that things have not panned out the way that the Trump administration hoped it would have done. The balance power has obviously shifted in China's favour. And I think the way that they've used rare Earths and other coercive instruments is something which was the product of years of investment and of thinking about how to create new tools and instruments. And there's a whole cottage industry in China at the moment looking at how you can broaden the leverage that they've managed to get out of Rare Earths recently to other choke points in the global system and to use that against the US and against other powers.

47:26Rush Doshi:I think that has led to a degree of hubris about Chinese power and could very well lead to them overplaying their hand when it comes to other powers. I think that they've done a very poor job of handling Europe, for example, where Europeans and European countries, particularly Germany, really very much on the front line and see themselves as being de-industrialized as a result of Chinese excess capacity. and the debates about China shock 2.0 have reached fever pitch in European capitals. And I think you could see European countries taking actions which would have been unthinkable even a few weeks ago, let alone a few years ago, against China.

48:10Rush Doshi:And I think it's partly because they've over-interpreted how successful they were at handling the US and also treated the Europeans as if they were completely analogous to China when it came to how to respond to tariffs, whereas obviously Europeans have got other interests at play and therefore much more constrained in terms of what they could do on tariffs because they were worried about Ukraine and security issues. But where I think they have been successful, and this is something which I've written about both in this piece and in earlier pieces in Foreign Affairs, is in understanding how the dynamics of global politics are changing and where to position yourself for a world that is going from one which had an order, which had a system, towards one which is going to be much more chaotic where there is kind of fragmentation.

49:02Rush Doshi:And the US for a long time tried to talk in Cold War terms to other parts of the world and talked about aligning with America and alliances and made it look like they were going to get countries to force to choose between America and China. And the Chinese, I think, were very deft at turning their absence of alliances into a source of strength and to attack Cold War thinking and to try and position themselves as defenders of sovereignty of other players. That is ringing a bit more hollow now as a result of what they're doing on rare earths and as a result of the China shock in different places.

49:42Rush Doshi:But there's still many parts of the world that have seen China and its emergence as one of the ways of emancipating themselves from reliance either on former colonial powers like the UK and France or the US in the Western Hemisphere. And I think China's also done an amazing job of preparing for a world where you have a much more weaponized global economy. You know, both developing offensive instruments like rare earth, but also building up its resilience and its security. Xi Jinping has this holistic approach to national security, which basically means the securitization of everything. And if you look at the kind of vast amount of energy that's gone into making China more self-sufficient and resilient on energy when it comes to chips and high end computer products, when it comes to food security.

50:36Rush Doshi:it is extraordinarily impressive how much they've managed to achieve in quite a short period of time and how successful they've been at getting around the restrictions which have been placed on China and at hedging and making themselves more resilient in a world which is increasingly seeing choke points being used, whether it's physical choke points like the Straits of Hormuz or choke points like the control of chips and export controls. And I think that the third way that they've been very successful is about looking at the parts of the world which are going to be important in the future and their kind of focus on the global south their understanding that as we kind of go into the 2030s 2040s 2050s and beyond that these countries which are very populous which are increasingly assertive and looking at playing a different role on the world stage are going to be crucially important.

51:35Rush Doshi:And they've really invested in that, again, I think, partly from a position of weakness, because they didn't have relationships with advanced democracies, which America had. But whereas during the Biden administration, there was a real convergence around the G7 and around advanced industrialized countries, China has doubled down on the countries of the future. And that has been done in very creative ways by creating new institutions, doing bilateral things, but also expanding the BRICS, expanding the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Seen from a Western perspective, I think in the past, people tried to see these as a kind of counter Western order, you know, to look at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an anti-NATO, to see the BRICS as an anti-G7.

52:22Rush Doshi:But I think actually what China's been doing with these institutions is much more interesting than that. They're not trying to create a parallel order that is doing what the U.S. is doing, that's providing public goods in that way. But it's more trying to position themselves as friends of sovereignty and status seeking by countries who felt excluded or not necessarily well represented in the old Western based system. and they have a series of relationships which have been absolutely central to the hedging strategies that I described earlier, which they've developed with these other countries. And I think that what brings all these things together is the fact that China is expecting what Xi Jinping calls great changes unseen in a century.

53:06Rush Doshi:In other words, a world of chaos and confusion rather than a world of order. And they've been basically trying to put themselves in a position where they can benefit from that, where they have the right sorts of relationships, access to markets, to raw materials, where they're hedged in as many ways as they possibly can. And it's very different from Western powers that have either been trying to preserve the old order, or in Trump's case, to rip it apart without thinking about putting in place a new set of relationships which might replace it.

53:43Kurt Campbell:Thank you, Mark, for that. Just a couple of things, just maybe slightly contrast. One of the things that I've learned from my colleague and friend Rush Doshi, who has probably more than anyone else helped us understand some of the language of Xi Jinping. And when he says, changes unseen in a century, a hundred years, he's not talking about a coming disorder, Mark. He's talking very clearly about his belief of a rising East and a declining West. He sees a different kind of order that it's China-led. He is not prescribing or believing that the coming period is going to be marked by disorder. That's the last thing that China wants to see on the global stage.

54:26Kurt Campbell:The second thing I would just simply say, you are right. They are investing in some of the institutions that involve the global South. But I would say where President Xi has really doubled down is on his relationships with countries like Russia and North Korea. And that is unambiguous. And it creates deep anxieties, not just in Europe, but elsewhere. And so I don't think there is as much deft placement of the foot on global politics here as one might see. We work with countries in the global south. They have deep misgivings about areas of the United States. That also extends to China as well. The China promise of manufacturing and engagement in places like Africa has been largely unfulfilled, like other periods in the past of British, American, other countries' engagement as well.

55:18Kurt Campbell:It's been largely driven by export of unrefined products and metals and the like. I will say, though, Mark, the more I listen to your piece, I find myself largely in alignment with some of your diagnosis. But I think what we've tried to do is build on some of that diagnosis, a set of prescriptions about where we think the world will go. And I think we just believe there is more momentum and capacity and ballast in the boat of the alliance system that will take us through this very rough stretch of seas. Mark, can I go to you on the prescriptions that you start to get at in your essay? And one of the kind of striking contention is that for all the talk of, you know, rupture that we heard from Mark Carney at Davos, the Canadian prime minister most famously, but from any other sense, is that for all that talk, they don't in fact really get it.

56:13Kurt Campbell:If leaders like Carney or, you know, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, sorry for the profusion of marks on this podcast. But, you know, if leaders like that really understood how deep the changes are, in your view, what would they be doing differently? What should they be doing differently?

56:28Rush Doshi:Yeah, so I think that a lot of what's happening is more grief management than strategy. So people had an enormous amount vested in these institutions in this order that we've been talking about and finding it very hard to let it go and to accept that that's happening. And the kind of more, you know, extreme examples of that are what happens at NATO summits and the kind of abject self-abasement of Mark Rutter and other people like that who are clinging to a kind of nostalgic idea of how NATO could work. and putting on a kabuki theatre where people pluck random figures out of the air for spending, which have got nothing to do with capabilities, and then go through this ritual in order to impress Donald Trump in the hope that he won't withdraw troops from Europe or further undermine Article 5 by things that he's going to say.

57:28Rush Doshi:But there are all sorts of other ways where people are still cleaving to old institutions and hoping that the rule-based order can somehow be kept alive, whether it's on trade, whether it's a two-state solution on Israel-Palestine. I mean, there are a whole series of things which were very much part of the consensus about what order should look like for the last couple of decades, where the gulf between the reality of our world and what is codified in these documents and strategies is becoming unbearable. And rather than adjusting to the way that things really are, there's often an attempt to try and keep these things alive.

58:10Rush Doshi:And that's true in different areas. So, you know, on security, I think it is essential that European countries accelerate the process of working out to defend themselves without America. You know, it's pretty difficult for me to explain to my kids why 350 million Americans should be paying for the security of 500 million Europeans, you know, in 2026, let alone in the future. And they should be decreasing their dependence on the US in the technology area as well. The fact that the American president could cut off European access to fable and to mythos and things like that, you know, it shows that it's an extremely dangerous thing to have to rely on operating systems which are increasingly being nationalized and where decisions are being made which are beyond your control you need to build up your capacity to engage in economic statecraft in a way that is much more unilateral if you're the european union than you have in the past because it's clear that when the us and china come to blows with each other nobody's fighting for european interests in these things and actually even when the Biden administration was in place on those big structural issues to do with economic imbalances and the relationship between China.

59:28Rush Doshi:It's largely a bilateral one. And the cooperation is only at the margins on different areas. There are areas where there's a complete overlap between European and American interests. And I think we should always work together when that happens. But there are also quite big divergences. I think that there's also a tendency to think about creating bodies and institutions which are universal, which everyone's going to be part of and which are there for a very long time. But I think part of the Chinese genius has been about, you know, being much more experimental, trying different things out, messing around with the membership of different things, not thinking so much about the institutional logic behind any kind of institution, but being more sort of opportunistic about how you bring countries together and do different things.

1:00:19Rush Doshi:And Europeans and Asians and other countries need to do a lot more of that. But I think, you know, where I think Mark Carney is right is to think that middle players can play an important role in helping each other hedge in a world without order, where you're facing coercion from Donald Trump, from Xi Jinping, from Putin, and you can kind of help each other a little bit. But what you're not going to be able to do is to create any kind of system. And where I think the main divergence between Kurt and Rush and myself is, is not that we disagree that alliances are going to be super important and be around in the future.

1:00:56Rush Doshi:But it's whether there's going to be any system which is underpinned by these alliances. I think we can have loads of alliances, probably even more alliances than we've had in the past. but they're going to be much thinner than the kind of alliances which characterize the cold war and the post cold war they're going to be much less load-bearing and much more transactional and you know probably a lot messier and i think that is like a rational response to a world without order that you try and work with others where your interests coincide with each other and then you can build real much thicker communities in a region like the european union i think the european Union is something that's going to become more integrated and stronger and more values-based.

1:01:38Rush Doshi:But the relationship between European countries and the US and Japan and other places is going to be important. It's going to have a very different nature from what gets done within a regional alliance like the European Union.

1:01:51Kurt Campbell:Before we close, I want to press all three of you to consider what might change or subvert the arguments at the core of your analysis, We're, I guess, about halfway through Trump's second term. As you imagine the next couple of years, what will change the outcome that you expect based on what Trump does and how allies respond over these couple of years? I think Kurt and Rush, this is really about the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy you've worn of. And then, Mark, I'm interested in how you see a path to a somewhat less dire outcome than the picture that peace paints. Kurt and Rush, let's start with you on what might lead us to a worse place when it comes to alliances.

1:02:29Mark Leonard:Well, look, let me just make a few quick points. I think, first of all, if there is some kind of use of force against an ally, like in Greenland, that would be catastrophic to the alliance system. It may be unrecoverable if that occurs. I don't think that's likely, but, you know, it's not impossible, but it's quite unlikely. President Trump said he wouldn't do it. Leaders of the Republican Party have suggested that they think it's a bad idea, that they wouldn't support it. And so I think we often talk about that incredible example, but it is highly personalistic and highly anomalous. Put that example to the side then.

1:03:00Mark Leonard:The other more likely path to a problem is that that fatalism we talked about sets in. The conventional wisdom becomes the alliances are unrecoverable. The hedging has gone so far that the alliance system will never be reconstituted. Nobody will ever trust the U.S. again. And that therefore we shouldn't try to find new ways to work together. That argument, I think, is dangerous. And I think it's wrong. And I think it misses that reality matters. Yes, obviously. But reality is also shaped in part by perceptions, which is kind of a tricky inversion of the normal relationship between the two. Our shared views on what's possible and what the future will bring can become a reality themselves.

1:03:34Mark Leonard:And so when we say the alliances will change, the answer is obviously that that's correct. When we say we can't go back, that's correct. But the question of what comes next shouldn't be, ah, it will be thin and weak and pathetic and pointless because the challenges that the alliances are facing are quite significant, existential even. The world that we're going to see might end up being Chinese partial preeminence means there's more reason to get together. And let me end with this, Dan. I think it's not so hard to believe there's a path to get there. You asked Mark, what are his prescriptions?

1:04:03Mark Leonard:Here are some of ours, right? Whatever happens in the midterm elections, there's going to be a conversation about what comes next. Part of that conversation is going to be how do we turn the page on this period of tension? Part of that answer is going to be trying to rebuild trust, reassuring Europeans that what they saw, and Asian allies, I should clarify, alike was anomalous and maybe the product of a personality more than a sustained policy. And I think that that's an argument that can be credibly made depending on how the election turns out. But the second piece, which we haven't talked as much about, is that I think to Mark's point, we may not have a brand new system we're able to, you know, take out of the bag and remove the wrapping paper.

1:04:38Mark Leonard:And here it is, right? I mean, it's ready to go. I think we're going to have to build things iteratively and humbly and modestly. What does that mean in practice? I think it means a lot of smaller sectoral agreements and areas where we want to see cooperation. It might be in some industrial areas, some areas where China has advantages. It might be choke points like rare earths or pharmaceuticals. It might be in future technologies like, you know, the drone industry or electric batteries. Is it so hard to believe that a handful of countries in a plurilateral fashion could get together and work together to be able to bring capacity online in those spaces?

1:05:09Mark Leonard:I don't think that's that hard to imagine. And there's similar arguments you could make on the security side. It's true. The trends in warfare towards precision, lethality and range and autonomy all make it easier for Iran to disrupt the strait, but they also make it easier for Ukraine to resist the Russians or for Asians to resist a massive amphibious invasion or air power from China. And so there's many opportunities for collaboration on the future of defense technology. Could we see sectoral cooperation there? Yes. And if we have enough small wins at the sectoral level, we can do bigger things.

1:05:38Mark Leonard:So the agenda of the future, I think, is in large part figuring out where we can get those quick wins, where we can build on those quick wins, what the politics is going to be domestically to ensure alliance momentum, if we are able to make these deals that are mutually beneficial and that also create mutual dependency. Again, it's not the case purely that Europe is dependent on the U.S. in all manners. In many ways, the U.S. is also increasingly dependent on Europe. The same is true for Japan and Taiwan. There is no high-tech American AI build-out without this allied ecosystem. And the same is going to be true in other sectors like biotechnology, where the U.S.

1:06:14Mark Leonard:doesn't have the capability that, you know, the Koreans might have in some areas or that Eastern Europeans have in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Let me end with one other thing. I think, as Kurt mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, the U.S. is currently calling on allies from Europe to Asia to do more, but reasonably, the U.S. will also have to do more. The view is America doesn't have the resources to do more, therefore it won't. But in many areas, doing more doesn't necessarily mean expending more resources. It means doing better coordination. It means breaking down barriers between each other on technology transfer or industrial cooperation.

1:06:47Mark Leonard:And that kind of positive-sum vision for the alliances, I think, is quite reasonable. It's necessary. It's essential. And the failure mode there, I think, is largely our own unwillingness to seize it.

1:06:57Kurt Campbell:The things that would really concern me, I think we are starting to see even a more erratic and, in some ways, you know, absolutely dramatic set of rhetorical claims on the part of the president that are often not followed up on. So threats and then nothing. He's oftentimes talked about pulling out of NATO, but we've seen very little actually practical that comes thereafter. If he actually took steps to withdraw the United States from NATO, that would be a very hard thing to recover from, like a potential military action against an ally like Greenland. I would also say I do worry that the continuation of the conflict in the Gulf creates larger concerns.

1:07:50Kurt Campbell:This is not the first time that the United States has embarked on a exotic military campaign. Far from it. Mark talked about Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The surprising challenge here is that President Trump made very clear that he was not going to entertain military adventurism of the kind that he's involved in directly right now in Iran. But if anything, he is underestimating the consequences of this. We've been able, because of larger reserves that have built up over time, and fertilizer and petrochemicals, sulfur and a variety of other things, helium, that we'll be able to continue with these disruptions.

1:08:34Kurt Campbell:That is not the case. The global economy is basically kind of teetering right now. If the conflict continues, the shortages will start to really play out on the global economy in a way that could be very difficult for us. And we have a lot of things to grapple with, but a global recession at this juncture would just complicate all of our endeavors going forward. Then Mark, let me ask you to close to try to imagine reflecting back on this stretch from, let's say, 10 years in the future. If things are not as dire as you assume right now, what might you have gotten wrong?

1:09:13Rush Doshi:Well, I don't necessarily think everything's dire. What I'm talking about is a world in transition, right? The way that things have been done for the last period of time are coming to an end. And in its place, people are going to develop new ways of working. And there could be some very bad and scary things. And in the piece, I kind of talk about some of the scary things that might happen as a result of fragmentation and contagion and strangulation. And you can imagine the world becoming much more dangerous. you know we've seen the kind of hollowing out of a lot of the rules of engagement where civilians are being targeted in different conflicts and there's a kind of expansion of territorial wars and there isn't much of a desire to come up with cooperative solutions to to problems that cross borders but at the same time what i'm positive about is that countries are kind of slowly waking up to the fact that these trends have been around for a while and they're developing responses to it.

1:10:18Rush Doshi:And some of the things that if you have a kind of old fashioned way of looking at the world look really bad, might actually look quite good. So one very good area that is proliferation, for example, where there's been a sort of norm against proliferation before. We thought that a world with more nuclear weapons would be a less safe one. But actually having some sort of managed proliferation where, for example, if Germany and Poland work with France and the UK to develop capacity to deter Russia, that's not a kind of terrible thing. If there's a bit of proliferation in Asia with Japan and Korea relying less on the US, it's not necessarily going to be a kind of catastrophic thing to have a bit more resilience from that perspective.

1:11:01Rush Doshi:I think that there's a lot of overlap between what Rush was saying about the future of the alliance system and where I kind of end my piece because I say that we need to move from thinking in grand architectural terms where you have big blueprints towards thinking more like artisans you know trying different things out in different areas and seeing what works and that you could have a kind of a whole tapestry of different plurilateral arrangements between different players in different things. I think it's less tidy and maybe suboptimal compared to having a perfectly functioning global system.

1:11:38Rush Doshi:But it's certainly better than total anarchy and chaos. And I think there are going to be more and more things like that that are emerging. I do think that there are also positive things that come out of this new mindset, which a lot of these countries that were very reliant on the US and are now having to do things for themselves. There could be positive geopolitical implications that come out of those things. I think it's very important that we develop a new European security order. And one of the most disastrous things that has happened recently is the fact that Europeans have been unable to work out what their model for a kind of post-war Europe looks like and have been relying on, you know, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and J.D.

1:12:28Rush Doshi:Vance to negotiate with the Russians on their behalf and to try and work out what a European security order should look like. But I think if Europeans both developing more capacity and therefore Russia is forced to take them more seriously and they can develop their own conversations with the Russians and the Turks, you're more likely to have some kind of stable and durable peace that comes after the end of this tragic war in Ukraine. I think in the Gulf, one of the very positive things that's happened in recent times as the US has withdrawn from playing the role that it did earlier was to see new diplomatic relations emerge between the Saudis and the Iranians.

1:13:12Rush Doshi:And I know Jake Sullivan got in a lot of trouble for writing an essay for you, Dan, just a few days before the 7th of October, where he was talking about how the Middle East was becoming kind of more orderly. But actually, one of the reasons why things haven't been as catastrophic as they could have been with this war is because Saudi Arabia and Iran have maintained channels and have got ways of working together in different ways. And I think if different American allies and regional players develop more responsibility for their own security and build up a set of relationships with each other, rather than simply relying on the US to be the providers of order, that is something which could be quite positive as well.

1:13:58Rush Doshi:But, you know, there are lots of things that could go disastrously wrong. And the biggest thing, I think, is to do with domestic politics everywhere. And I think that's one of the things that, you know, we've talked about who wins the elections in the US and what happens in the midterms. But you've got a lot of politics in every other part of the world as well. And certainly in Europe, you know, you've got far right parties, which are leading the opinion polls in most of the big countries. You've got quite scary political trends taking place in many other parts of the world. And I think that one of the big questions is how this much more chaotic and dangerous international order intersects with more fragmented and polarized national political systems.

1:14:46Rush Doshi:And unfortunately, you know, they're both pushing us away from cooperative, long lasting institutional responses to the things which are going on in the world and making things more volatile and more dangerous. And I think the most dangerous thing is if you get this kind of negative feedback loop between a much more dangerous and scary world and then you know ethno-nationalist parties coming to power in great powers and that could really take us into a much more tragic situation than where we are at the moment fair we almost ended

1:15:20Kurt Campbell:on a note of uh glowing transatlantic allied convergence but uh i suppose that's just uh just not where we are but thanks to all three of you guys that was a really rich conversation Both essays are a fantastic. Kurt Rush, How Alliance Survived, Mark Yours is, The Abandoned Order, both well worth reading in our new issue and on our website. So thanks so much. Thank you so much, Dan.

1:15:41Mark Leonard:Thank you, Dan.

1:15:48Kurt Campbell:Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com. This episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Elise Burr and Connish Klerur. Our audio engineer is Christopher Cook. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Arena Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.

1:16:31Matthew