The Strength of Trump’s Foreign Policy

28:18And she doesn't get a day off the whole year. And you've got a German birder taking the month of August off and driving a station wagon down to the south of France. And again, as a 48-weekend, work with the rest of the week, the rest of the year. Now, look, I'm all for the Germans doing that. That's great. And it's great for the German workers. But it's not fair that some schoolteacher in Tennessee is bearing the burden of that. You know, that just fundamentally isn't right. We'll be back after a short break.

28:51What if you could explore places in the news like a reporter does? I'm Nicholas Wood, a former journalist with the New York Times and BBC. And 16 years ago, I created the travel company Political Tours. Our small groups are led by top correspondents around the world. In the next few months, we're off to Mexico, followed by South Africa, Japan and the French presidential elections. Come and join us. Go to politicaltours.com. That's politicaltours.com. This September, Independent 20th Century presents more than 130 artists at the legendary Broyu building at 945 Madison Avenue. The show will fill four floors of the modernist landmark on Museum Mile.

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30:16And now back to my conversation with Robert O 'Brien. One of this is not an American alliance, but it's an incredibly important relationship and relation that I think many people would like to see grow into an alliance in the coming years. Your successors, Ash Kieradvisor Jake Sullivan, wrote a piece advocating that in foreign affairs a few months ago. That's the relation with India. This has been, I think, one of the most perplexing developments, one of the surprising developments, frankly, in the Trump to foreign policy is the rift with Prime Minister Modi. They had a great relationship last time around.

30:47Strategically, it seems to make a lot of sense. How do you explain the India rift other than this kind of strange series of events and effective diplomacy by Pakistan and strong egos, strong personalities on both sides? What's driving this? Well, the first thing, I like Prime Minister Modi a lot. I spent a lot of time with him. He's one of the foreign leaders that as national security advisor, I spent time with both in America and India and also in summits in Bangkok and other places. is he's a great guy, very smart, very tough guy. And I wrote a piece last year when President Trump was first coming into office, in which I said, look, there's a lot of Trump and Modi.

31:27Modi's an India first guy. He's an Indian nationalist. He wants to bring manufacturing to India. And he's got the chance of a lifetime. He's got the chance of a generation. I've told this to Dr. Dushankar, his foreign minister, and Ajit Duval, who's his national security advisor, who has similar background to me. He was the hostage negotiator for hijacked planes back in the days of hijacking and got a lot of people free before he became national security advisors. So he and I have a lot in common. And I love those guys. We had a great trip to India. We had several great visits by Modi to America.

32:03We had the Howdy Modi event down in Houston at the basketball stadium, which was packed for President Trump and Prime Minister Modi. And look, the two of them got along very well. They used to compare who had the most Twitter followers and the most Facebook fans and all that sort of thing. And I think Modi has a once-in-generation chance with companies de-risking and de-leveraging China. You've got companies like Apple and Facebook and Google moving to India, manufacturing moving to India. This is an opportunity that India has that truly wants a lifetime for any leader. And so I think Modi wants to take advantage of that.

32:44And the alliance makes sense, the partnership makes sense between the U.S. and India. We're far away from each other. We've got no claims within each other's territories. We've got no rivalry. And yet we've got China butting up against both countries and, in India's case, brutally killing Indian soldiers on the border. I mean, you know, abusing their bodies and mutilating them and doing terrible things, throwing them into crevasses. I mean, just a terrible bully in the region. So when that happened to India, we were there for the Indians in a very quiet way and supplying them with the down jackets they needed and the down sleeping bags so their troops could stay in the mountains over the winter.

33:27We supplied them with intelligence. And so the relationship makes a lot of sense. Now, what the heck happened to that relationship? It was genuinely friendly between Trump and Modi. I mean, what happened? I think two things happened. I think the Indians have traditionally been very – well, one, they're very good negotiators. I mean, people don't realize how tough the Indians are when it comes to – they negotiate over everything. And they're very stubborn and they're very effective. They're smart. They're motivated. And they're tough negotiators. on trade, especially the Indians are probably the most in the whole world, are the slowest negotiators.

34:09I mean, they held up GATT rounds. They held up WTO rounds. There's one country holding up the entire world and just dragging out negotiations. And so when they showed up after Liberation Day to get their deal, and I think there was and is a deal in the making, I think that they had a year timeline, which they thought was fast. And they clearly didn't understand that we were talking about days, not a year. So that got everyone starting off on a very bad foot on the trade negotiations. And then, look, I think the president did something prior to Alaska that, again, this is just, I haven't talked to President Trump about this.

34:48This is my take on it. It's very easy to sanction China for buying Russian oil. When you take a country that we're as close to as India and say, look, you're buying You're not just buying Russian oil to survive like the Hungarians, but you're buying Russian oil and refining it and selling it to third parties. You can't do that, and we're going to sanction you. Basically, going into the summit in Alaska, President Trump did two big things. He deployed the National Guard into the streets of Washington, D.C., and he shot massive sanctions at a close strategic partner. I think both those were messages to Putin, kind of like Reagan firing the air traffic controllers.

35:29said, look, we're serious about this. We're willing to take heat from a friend to show our displeasure with what's going on in Ukraine, not just from China or not just from Iran or North Korea. We're willing to hit India. I think the Indians were taken aback by what happened. I think it was the dual nature of the Putin summit and also their stance in the trade negotiations. I think, you know, I'm not claiming any credit for this, but I put a tweet out saying, look, I tweeted a picture of Modi and Trump. I said, look, these guys are great friends. And the trade negotiators are getting back on track with the trade negotiations.

36:12You mentioned President Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska. This has been part of the rather dramatic saga of the administration's approach to Ukraine, at least as it looks from the outside over the course of the last 10 months. How do you understand the strategy? What is Trump's plan for ending the war as you see it? Well, look, I think he laid out the strategy pretty clearly early on. And I think he thought it would be resolved very quickly. And to be honest, you know, I thought that the war would be resolved very quickly, both before and after the election, President Trump's election.

36:45I thought this was going to be one of the easier things to resolve. To use a term from the Bush administration, I misunderstood Vladimir Putin and his commitment to the war. When you look at what President Trump basically offered him from the outset, and Trump was criticized for this heavily, we'll give you a du jour recognition of Crimea. Fine, Crimea is Russian, it has been forever. It got moved over to Ukraine in administrative action under Khrushchev and the Soviet Union. but Russia and Crimea have always been associated. All I'll give you is your recognition of that. And this is my understanding from public statements, right?

37:28We'll do a de facto recognition of the Donbass, Luhansk, and Donbass City control, at least the February 14th lines. And that will freeze that kind of like a North Korea situation. We will not allow Ukraine to join NATO, which you're concerned about. But we'll put NATO peacekeeping troops in. We'll put a Polish armored brigade or French or British air wing. I put serious security forces in Ukraine but not call it NATO and not call it an Article 5 situation. And then we'll rebuild Ukraine. And for Russia, I think the additional incentive was we'll remove all sanctions. You can return the world economy stopping Rhodesia and you can be part of the world economy again.

38:21I mean, so it was a very generous package for the Russians, you know, I thought. I thought it would be very difficult for Vladimir Putin to reject it. Yet he did, and he continues to war. What I'm saying now is that he'll fight to the last Dagestani or the last Chechen to take Ukraine back because you see very few, you know, Russian kids from St. Petersburg and Moscow being drafted or being conscripted into the fight, but he's putting the Dagestanis and the Chechens and the other Russian minorities through the meat grinder in Ukraine. He's using North Korean troops and not very good effect, but he's showing no inclination to end the war.

39:02So what I've come out and said, and Larry Kudlow's joined me in this, President Trump's economic advisor in the first term, put massive sanctions on the Russians. We've started, but we need to sanction the Russian Federation Central Bank I mean, we need to go, I'm calling it full road to use your sanctions. I mean, we use sanctions, but we don't use them effectively. We don't use them, we use them like Syriotum with sanctioning individuals and entities and banks and that sort of thing. We need to cut the Russians down to the world economy. We need to take them off the SWIFT system, maybe kick them out of the ITU, kick them off the mobile phone system, stop letting the Russian people travel freely to the West or Turkey or Cyprus.

39:44This war and the killing and the attacks on the Ukrainian civilians has put them outside of the civilized world. We need to treat them that way economically and culturally. And that might put enough pressure on Putin to end the war when his oligarchs can't go use their yachts in Turkey. They can't go to Dubai for vacation. And Russian oil sales drop from$10 million a day to$7 million. And that takes the cream that's keeping society afloat and then making the war easy for them. That takes it away. So we're never going to stop all Russian oil sales. I'm not that naive. It's a fungible commodity.

40:24But we can limit them and take the ability of Putin to ameliorate the economic crisis for his people. And northern Russia, take that away from him and make the war costly. I think it's time. You say that you misunderstood Putin. Do you think Trump misunderstood Putin as well? He seemed to have the expectation that Putin would take this deal and he didn't. And I would note that both of your predecessors as an extra security advisor in Trump's first term were quite struck and spoke out publicly about, you know, what H.R. McMaster called Putin's hold on Trump and John Bolton said something like, Putin thinks he can play Trump like a fiddle.

41:03So there does seem to be a pattern of this over both this term and the previous one. Yeah, well, Well, it's just disingenuous for Bolton to say that. I mean, you know, Trump didn't have a personal relationship with Putin. He was cordial with him. They had like one meeting in Finland. They've had a couple of phone calls. I was on the phone calls with Trump and Putin. There's no love between Trump and Putin. He's cordial. He gets along with them, as he should. I mean, Putin's got 2 ,500, you know, tactical notes pointed in Europe and 1 ,300, 1 ,250 strategic notes. and the delivery systems pointed at the United States.

41:38You want to have a relationship that you can talk to a foreign leader even if you're an adversary. So trying to conflate the ability to talk with a foreign leader and you've got some sort of sympathy for their cause is just ridiculous. And so I just don't think that's the case at all. And look, I like HR. He's a smart guy. And I think HR is taking a different tack than Bolton did. But look, I was with Trump for two years, three years if you count my time as an awesome boy. I didn't see any of that. And we had a lot of deals with the Russians. I dealt with Patrick all the time. That's just nonsense.

42:17But going back to the surprise, I don't think Putin has a hold on Trump. I think that a lot of smart people, including a lot of people who wanted the Ukrainians to make no concessions to the Russians, thought that Putin would take the deal that Trump offered. Because it was a good deal. But Putin obviously has motivations beyond getting a good deal. He obviously wants to reconstitute at least Ukraine into the Russian Empire. And what does he get from that? He gets land, of course, but he also gets demographics, which the Russians face a major demography problem. The problem Putin has is I don't think anyone's explained to him.

43:02So the Ukrainians don't want anything to do with the Russians. I mean, maybe the 10 % of Russian speakers who are over in Crimea and Donbass. You know, the last time I was in Crimea was in 2014 for the Postmate observing the election. And as a U.S. observer, no one in Western Ukraine wanted anything to do with the Russians. And the problem I've got with Zelensky is that at that time, a lot of Ukrainians were saying, let's just give the dynastomal hands back to Russia and get them out of our polity and not have them elect Russian speakers to our parliament. I mean, all the problems, all their corruption was coming from the east.

43:44But the Western Ukrainians, which is 90 % of the population, they're looking to Prague and Warsaw and Vienna as their home, not to Moscow. They don't have any affinity with them. And I don't think that anyone's explained to Putin that these guys aren't a Russian minority that want to be reunited with Mother Russia and are being held up by a couple of fascists, which the idea that these people somehow could be coerced into reuniting with Russia or want Putin to be their leader is just ridiculous. And so I don't know if Putin's just purposely blind to it or people aren't explaining to him the situation, but he needs to change his war aims pretty quickly because eventually Europe and the West are going to get fed up with it.

44:33It's going to be very bad for Russia. It's going to be nothing more of a vassal state to Beijing and Xi Jinping. Do you anticipate that President Trump will follow that path and escalate military support to Ukraine as well as economic and other kinds of pressure on Russia? Look, I think there's definitely going to be an escalation of economic pressure. He had put in a little love tap in the Alaska engagement when he overflown with F-35s and a B-2. I mean, that was not to honor you. Everyone saw smiles about that, honoring Putin. That was trying to prove that that's what just took out the Iranian – Operation Good Night Hammer, that just took out the Iranian facilities in Florida and the TANS and your presidential bunker out in Moscow could be taken out before you knew it.

45:24so i like i i but again that military escalation is always dangerous for the russians i'm always concerned about that because they do have you know they've got the potentially in the in the world and uh you always have to be cognizant and careful that when you're at the highest levels of of government and people may may take it take it lightly but uh i've never met one of my former colleagues who was national security advisor and had the back of nuclear codes in the safe in your office and had the briefings, it was never taking that anything other than with the utmost seriousness. And I think presidents are the same way.

45:59I think Biden did. I think Trump did. And Trump does. And so we've got to be careful with that. But I had careful going up the escalation ladder. You know, it's one thing for the Ukrainians and Russians to fight. It's another thing for Americans and Russians to fight. So we've got to be careful there. But on the economic front, Russia is entitled to be part of the Swiss system. They're not entitled to be part of the world banking system. And so, you know, I think those are the levers that could put a lot of pressure on Putin to settle this war. You mentioned the strikes on Iran in June. So let me take us to the Middle East before we close.

46:32There were 12 days of Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities. The United States joined for a couple of days. The Iranian program has not entirely gone away. The IEA reports that most of the highly enriched uranium is still in Iran, still has not been destroyed and still accessible. Do you see a return to negotiations with Iran and return to some kind of deal? Or is there some other path to really eradicating this problem for good? We thought the Iranians would come to the table in the first term with the maximum pressure campaign. And frankly, I thought they'd come to the table after the strikes.

47:10I think the Israelis wanted a few more data strikes to maybe ensure the regime was eliminated. I think that's Again, I don't think President Trump, like President Bush and like other presidents, you know, into the first Gulf War with Iraq. And I think there's a national reticence to get into a policy and regime change around the world. I think Trump shares that reticence as well. But at the same time, he said, and he said this in the first term, he said in the second term, we're not going to allow the Iranians to have their weapon. And these are the same people that have threatened to kill him and produce very slick videos of the assassination of President Trump on the golf course.

47:52So, I mean, the Iranians have no love lost for Trump. But the thing about President Trump is he's so willing to put the country first that even if it's to his personal benefit to take out the Iranian regime, if it's better for America to negotiate and have them actually give up their nuclear weapons voluntarily, at least kind of the way South Africa did or Libya did, then he's willing to do that. So I think the Iranians have an open partner for peace if they want to give up their weapons. I think, unfortunately, their mentality is a little more like Kim Jong-un, who said he would but didn't. And I think that's the problem, or Hamas giving up their weapons in Gaza.

48:34I think the Iranians are just very reticent. They believe that nuclear power gives them some staying power as a regime and sort of about regime survival and they're not going to give up their nukes. But they could negotiate and they could get a settlement with President Trump if they wanted to. I'm convinced of that, even though it wouldn't be necessarily Trump's personal interest. Gaza is, of course, another theater where there is a degree of ambiguity about where things stand and where Trump is going. There's, of course, a ceasefire that is holding somewhat tenuously right now, thanks at least in part to pressure from President Trump on Netanyahu last month.

49:15How do you see Trump pushing this from here? This 20-point plan talks about a fairly traditional approach, as I read it, to a two-state solution and a peace process. But where do you imagine this going? Well, look, I think the first thing that happened that President Trump did that was so incredibly useful and saved lives, and he's all about saving lives, is getting the hostages home. The 20 Israeli hostages. I'm actually surprised that the Hamas love Gobe because it was the ultimate leverage for Hamas to stay in power. And, you know, God bless President Trump and Marco Rubio, Steve Likov and Adam Boller and J.D.

49:50Vance, the whole team that got that deal done. I've been in touch with the families since October 7th. Even getting the remains home, Dan, is important. I mean, not so important for the Jewish religion, Dan and Barry, but just for the family to have closure and to allow their loved ones to rest in peace in Israel. And if they're IDF, like Hayter Golden, who came home, and I've been working on Hayter Golden's case since I was hostage on board for many years, to get him home and bury in an Israeli military cemetery in Jerusalem on that great holiday. They can go to their son's grave and Leah and her husband can go to the flowers in their son's grave.

50:32That's really important. So if nothing else comes with the Gaza ceasefire and the peace deal and the hostages and the remains being brought back to Israel, it's still a success. But, you know, there's the old saying that Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I think they've got the opportunity here to actually build a new Gaza and to have a two-state solution and improve the future of their people. They have to give up their weapons. They have to give up the terrorism. And it's just been so ingrained for so many years, starting with Arafat and PLA and PLO. And PLA has been a little bit better, but with Hamas, I mean, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Jihad with Abu Nadal.

51:20I mean, it's been such a history of terrorism for so many years in Lebanon and all the Levant and in the Mediterranean. I mean, for them to let go of that and embrace peace and a new future is going to be tough. But if they do, I have no doubt the Palestinian people can be very successful, very prosperous. Do you see Trump as committed to the creation of a Palestinian state? There'd be a lot in it for him and his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize and also his desire to help broker a regional normalization with especially a relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia. How does he see a Palestinian state?

51:56Look, I think he'd be open to it. He certainly, to get the Abraham Accords done, at the time we were going to file negotiations, Israel was talking about annexing our extended sovereignty over parts of the West Bank. The UAE said, if that happens, we're out. We had to deliver a very tough message to Bibi Netanyahu. The night before he met with Trump at about 2 in the morning, I gave him that message over at Blair House. and he would do the right thing and decide not to be the Israeli leader who was going to walk away from peace. And, yeah, every Palestinian leader has walked away from peace, no Israeli leader has.

52:34And so even though the Israelis right now are pretty tough on the two-state solution, that's probably ultimately the only way to get to some, you know, end point. So I think Trump would be amenable to that. And, you know, there would have to be obviously security guarantees with Israel that I can have a Palestinian state that has an army or as an air force or a navy or even a very big paramilitary force, police force, there'd have to be a lot of guarantees. But I think ultimately that's the way this thing is. If it's going to be resolved and if the Palestinians do want to have peace, at some point they've got to say yes.

53:10They've been saying no since 1948 when the UN gave them half in Palestine. Will Trump put pressure on Netanyahu to that, do you think? I think if the Palestinians were willing to accept a two-state solution and recognize Israel and guarantee Israel's security? Yes, but again, after October 7th and the massacres that took place, I was at Kibbutz near Oz and the music festival site after the massacres. You can't ask the Israelis to forget what happened. So there really has to be a new Palestinian attitude and real security guarantees for Israel, not just fake ones. I'll point to some Belgian peacekeepers on the border of Gaza and say that everything's okay.

53:53One of the most prophetic elements, I would say, in the piece you wrote in 2024 called The Return of Peace Through Strength was your call to resume testing of nuclear weapons. Trump picked up this call recently ahead of his meeting with Xi Jinping. He called for testing on an equal basis with Russia and China. What do you understand that to mean? What do you think he has in mind? Well, look, the first thing is, this is President Trump's idea, it's not my idea. And a lot of people, including on Fox, have gone to my article where I said this could happen. And so it's my idea, President Trump's idea, 100 percent.

54:29But, you know, it's something we've talked about from time to time. Look, what we saw, Dan, in the first administration is the Russians cheating on every nuclear treaty, whether it was the INF Treaty, the Open Skies, New START. I mean, they're just blatantly abusing them. And the Chinese were still in kind of one of the Russian cover, not bound by any of the treaties, to build up a massive nuclear force, both conventional or both short-range and long-range, tactical and strategic. So we had it in that. And then what we saw with Trump coming into power, and again, this is not how you deal with President Trump, at least in my view already, strong American leader, President Reagan, President Bush.

55:16When the Chinese rolled out the new ICBM at their military parade in Beijing for the anniversary of the Second World War, which, by the way, the nationalists won and we helped them, the Russians and communists. The communists basically set out World War II and did very little against the Japanese. For them to take credit with this massive military parade with Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin as the VIPs, that was a little ridiculous. But when they rolled out the massive new ICBM, that was a shot across the bow. When President Putin, days before President Trump made the announcement on the testing, said Poseidon is now IOP in its operation phase, the Russian version of IOP.

56:04We can send a nuclear propelled torpedo that has a nuclear warhead on it, a double nuke and create a tsunami and take out the naval base of Norfolk or take out New York City, you know, that's pretty provocative. And so you're going to draw a response from President Trump. And he responded by saying, look, we have to start testing nukes again. And, you know, we've all talked about it. Hopefully it didn't have to go there. But, look, we can allow our adversaries to rattle the nuclear saber and put themselves in a position to blackmail us on the nuclear front. I think more important than testing is what President Trump is doing with the modernizing of the triad.

56:45We're going to probably build 100 plus B-21s. Huge. We're modernizing the old Minutemen with the Sentinel program. Northrop also has, and he's done a good job on that. And we're going to start cranking out Columbia-class submarines. So I think that sends a message. I'm just even more than testing. The nuclear want crowd has responded to calls for return to testing nuclear weapons with the argument that, first of all, we don't really need to. It doesn't gain us that much. And second, that returning to that kind of testing would advantage Russia and China more than it would us. Do you see that as wrong?

57:24Look, President Trump has said, we'll do the testing. And we don't have the money and program it for live testing you have from Congress. the Secretary of Energy has pointed that out. So there's a lot of testing we can do short of exploding a bomb in a drill hole in Nevada. We may get to the point where we have to do that to show that the physical material still works and it's still effective. So we may get there. But I think right now is testing delivery systems, doing computer testing. testing we can test a lot of the system without actually exploiting a nuke so I think we're going to do a lot of that but at some point the president has made it clear if these guys keep rattling the nuclear saber and threatening us with nuclear weapons we're going to have to go back to how it was and spin our own centrifuges and doing live tests Russia and China may do the same but Look, I trust an American-built missile, bomber, submarine, SLBM, submarine-launched ballistic missile, hypersonic missile that's got a nuclear warhead from us.

58:38I trust our delivery system to work better and our warhead to work better than anything Chinese or Russian. That's not to say that the Russians and Chinese are damn smart. They've got space programs. They know what they're doing. But I trust our kit more. Let me end on a couple of especially nerdy questions. One is about national security process. I mean, when I look back at the process you were running as national security advisor and Nat Ponter, deputy national security advisor, it looks fairly typical, you know, more or less typical, at least compared to where we are now. Now there seems to be nothing resembling the traditional askerty-making process.

59:14How do you see Trump II policymaking, and how does it differ from one which surely has implications for policy if that process is so different? Well, look, what I said the first day I was National Security Advisors, that I was going to re-implement the Brent Scowcroft model, which the Obama NSC did not really use. I mean, they had many State Department and many Pentagon and many Energy Department and many Commerce Department, Treasury, all over the EOB. I mean, they had so many people there. It was probably a fire hazard to get out of the building because they wanted all the power consolidated at the White House.

59:50I think that was the way to run a national security process. And I don't think it didn't empower the agencies and the departments of the federal government, which are supposed to. The Pentagon should be running war policy and defense policy. The State Department should be running the policy and the Commerce Department should be running commerce policy and export controls and the Treasury should be doing Treasury stuff. We shouldn't try to recreate all that over at the White House and run it from 16 out of Pennsylvania. And so my goal was to downsize the NNC, to streamline it, but then have a very effective policy process where we had regular deputy committee meetings every week, principal committee meetings every week.

1:00:31and if you were the principal and you weren't on travel or the funeral or in the hospital, you were going to be there or you were going to you couldn't send a deputy or an undersecretary and have your department have a send the policy and so we empowered the agencies and said you're going to run the policy in the departments but you've got to participate, you can't just have one half and not the other half so if you want a real Scowcroft model, you've got to participate. And I think Matt and I did that. The first couple of meetings, when the Pentagon sent over some colonel to a deputies committee meeting, Matt told them to sit on the back chairs of the situation room, and they could listen and take notes, but weren't going to speak.

1:01:18I think they got the message pretty quickly how it was going to work. And so we had a good process. I think what's changed is that The president has had a full first term, and so this isn't a new president who doesn't know where the levers of power are. President Trump is very, very aware of where all his levers are. He had a well-formulated policy that he was going to implement. And Marco Rubio, I spent time with Marco one-on-one talking about the roles he had to say in the sex state. He's an incredibly effective guy, and he's starting to be far more impressive in both roles. than I thought it would be.

1:01:59I thought very highly of him. I was very friendly with him as chairman of the intel committee, but you never know how someone was going to set in the SEC state job. But then to add the NSA job on top of it, I mean, they're both more than full-time positions. And Marco's holding up well so far. So the only person who's done that in the past is Henry Kissinger. And so he's got big shoes to fill, but right now he's filling them. And so I think the process is working better than people think. It's probably not as public, but they're vaccinating deputies, they're vaccinating PCCs and PCs and principal meetings.

1:02:38And so I think it's with Andy Baker and the other folks who are there, I think it's more normal than it may look because of the dual hat in a barco. And Marco spends half and half his day at Foggy Bottom and half his day at 6 ,900 Pennsylvania. He's not sleeping. The rest of the time is higher, first of all, with the president. He's working very hard. He's well-respected. He's got a good relationship with J.D. Vance and the other cabinet members. I think it's working better than people thought it would. You mentioned Trump's understanding the levers of power. That seems like the really striking change in both domestic and foreign policy from the first term.

1:03:19What do you think Trump learned? What is his sense of the power of the presidency that he didn't know last time around? Well, look, I think he understands that the American people elected him and that the bureaucracy and you can call the deep state or the permanent government or permanent Washington, they weren't elected to anything. And if they're going to stay out in the federal government, they've got to implement the policies of the president of the United States. which again they may not have his rhetoric but his policies are really pretty people don't understand this about Trump he's one of our least ideological presidents.

1:03:56I mean closing the southern border would not have been controversial even under Obama. Rebuilding the military would not have been controversial under any Republican president. Again our allies to be a fair share as I talked about before was a bipartisan goal. So So things that he's doing that people don't want to implement, he was elected by the American people to do that. He's confident in that mandate, and he's going to push it through. And a lot of the rubble don't play with this in the first term. And the outright resistance just isn't going to be tolerated now. And so, look, if people don't want to implement the role, the job of the policy of the president's lives are legal and lawful, and make it take off.

1:04:43They can go work at a think tank. You in your 2024 piece mocked the tendency of people in the foreign policy world to talk about the rules-based international order or the liberal international order. Trump certainly does not seem to be a fan of those concepts or that kind of language. Does he have a vision of the international system that you think all of this is leading to? Does he think about order in those terms? So Dan, that's a good question. I think what President Trump thinks about is democracy and sovereignty. And so when he goes to the UN and says, you're all great nations and you should pursue your own interests, he doesn't believe nations should be invading each other.

1:05:22He doesn't believe Russia should be invading Ukraine or China should be invading Taiwan or India or Venezuela should be threatening Guyana for that matter. I think he really believes in sovereignty and that the nation shouldn't interfere with the affairs of their neighbors. And I think that's the bedrock. And by the way, that's the whole Australian order. That's really the foundation of the West border. That's the foundation of the UN. And going back to the Treaty of West Australia, it's not controversial. It's just, it's not Davos. It's not the EU. It's not global governance. It's not Paris Peace Accord or Paris Climate Accords.

1:06:03And so I think that's a little controversial. I think the idea of this rules-based international order, which is based on Article 5 of the UN Charter and Article 50, the enforcement power, you don't invade your neighbor. That should be the foundation of the international order. Climate change treaties or trans rights in sports in the Olympics. Or Davos setting the agenda for the world. I think the idea is that every country has their own national interest and they're going to pursue them and they should do it pacifically and not use you know forces as the ultimate lever and you would include the u.s not invading canada on that list we're not going to be canada all right hey there'd be too many democrat voters if we took over canada if alberta wants to come on board that's great but uh well the canadians are good friends and then look I can't think of Canada and not think about the Canadians rescuing our diplomats in 1980 in Tehran.

1:07:11They're not like a cousin or brother that we have spats with, but we're going to get along from Canada. All right. Well, there's a lot more we can talk about in the world, but let's end on that note of affection for the Canadians. Ambassador O 'Brien, thank you so much for doing this and for your recent pieces. It's been fascinating, and we will look forward to more in the future. Thanks, Dan. It's a honor to be with you.

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