In short
Margaret Macmillan argues the U.S. under Donald Trump is “going it alone” by undermining alliances—especially after the short-notice Trump–Putin summit and related pressure on Ukraine—echoing historical patterns where concessions embolden aggressors and erode the post-1945 taboo against territorial conquest.
Guest background
Margaret Macmillan is a renowned historian and Oxford professor, known for writing about “grand alliances” of the 20th century and the world wars.
Key claims
Trump’s alliance behavior is unprecedented and self-defeating; it accepts Russia’s interpretation of the Ukraine war; “land swaps” would legitimize conquest; sanctions rhetoric has faded; trust and long-term relationship-building are being replaced by ad hoc, leader-driven decisions and a “business deal” view of motivation.
Notable examples
Munich 1938 and Czechoslovakia/Sudetenland; Trump–Putin optics in Alaska; tariffs and treatment of allies like India and Canada; broken recognition of conquest (Crimea 2014); broader erosion of sovereignty norms (e.g., Manchuria, Ethiopia, Taiwan risk).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Consequences of Trump's Approach to Alliances
0:45 to 3:54
Discussion on how Trump's behavior towards allies challenges historical norms and might lead to dangerous shifts in international relations.
“His approach, she writes, does not suggest a clever Machiavellian policy to enhance American power.”
Understanding Recent U.S.-Russia Relations
3:54 to 9:20
Analysis of the recent summit between Trump and Putin and its implications for U.S. foreign policy and Ukraine.
“But we won't know, I suppose, until after meetings have taken place.”
Historical Context and Lessons from the Past
9:20 to 13:54
Exploration of historical alliances and how they have been formed, maintained, or broken over time.
“depends on the preferences and whims and changeable attitudes of one man, and that is the president.”
The Role of Personal Relationships in Alliances
14:00 to 28:00
Explore how personal dynamics between leaders can influence international alliances.
“That alliance might not have worked so well.”
The Uncertain Future of American Foreign Policy
28:00 to 28:19
Explore the implications of current shifts in American foreign policy.
“So I think it's going to be a very interesting period in American foreign policy and in fact in international relations, because it's not at all clear how this is going to play out.”
The Role of Personal Relationships in Alliances
28:19 to 28:48
Explore how personal dynamics between leaders can influence international alliances.
“of the season and experience historic modern art from around the world and one of New York's most iconic spaces, September 24th to 27th.”
The Role of Personal Relationships in Alliances
29:05 to 29:17
Explore how personal dynamics between leaders can influence international alliances.
“That's foreignaffairs.com slash spotlight.”
Reflections on the Trump Administration
29:18 to 31:21
Analyzing the impact of the Trump administration on democracy and international order.
“I wanted to ask you about your previous piece, which was a longer essay you did in the magazine right after the U.S.”
The Erosion of International Norms
31:22 to 33:58
Discussing the breakdown of international norms and its consequences.
“And I think Europeans are sharing some of the same concerns and bewilderment.”
Historical Precedents of Conflict
33:59 to 36:54
Examining historical moments that led to conflicts and the breakdown of order.
“that yes, we will remain in NATO, but we're going to make other arrangements.”
Show all 15 chapters
The Shift in Territorial Integrity Norms
36:55 to 38:32
Discussing the implications of changing perceptions of territorial integrity.
“And I think we will see other nations beginning to do that as well.”
China's Rising Assertiveness
38:33 to 41:48
Understanding China's increasing assertiveness in international waters and implications for Taiwan.
“all of this provides more of an opportunity for China?”
The Use of History in Political Justifications
41:49 to 42:05
Analyzing how leaders use historical narratives to justify their actions.
“And for some reason, we seem to think of history as this gray-bearded, probably gentleman sitting there saying, you're right, you're wrong.”
History as Justification in Global Politics
42:05 to 43:32
Explore how history is used as justification for political actions and narratives.
“When people say history will judge, that seems to me a very dangerous idea.”
Reflections on the Conversation
43:36 to 43:50
The hosts reflect on the discussion and anticipate future developments.
“Margaret, this has been a wonderful conversation.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00I'm Dan Kurtz-Felan, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
0:05Margaret MacMillan:If any relationship is going to work, you need to understand what it is that motivates the other. And it's not always just naked self-interest. I mean, I think too many around President Trump, and I think the president himself, seem to think that everyone is motivated by economic gain. It's all a business deal. And that really doesn't get at what motivates people in many cases. Throughout his second term, Donald Trump has railed against the United States' closest allies. He has imposed tariffs, threatened to upend security commitments, and openly challenged the borders of Canada, Panama, and Greenland.
0:39Historians often look to the past for insight about the present and future. But although alliances have collapsed for many reasons over past centuries, Margaret Macmillan argued in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs that Trump's current behavior towards allies has little precedent. His approach, she writes, does not suggest a clever Machiavellian policy to enhance American power. Rather, it shows the United States acting against its own interests in bewildering fashion, undermining one of the key sources of that power. A renowned historian and a professor at Oxford, Macmillan is one of the greatest chroniclers of the grand alliances of the 20th century and the world wars they fought.
1:17She joined editor-at-large Hugh Aiken on August 18th to discuss the normalization of conquest and the war on Ukraine, how U.S. allies are calculating their next steps, and what America's approach to its alliances will mean for the future.
1:40Margaret, it's been wonderful to have your series of pieces over the last couple years, bringing historical perspective on tectonic events happening. I should say we're recording on Monday morning, August 18th, and some of the events we discuss may even evolve in the coming hours and days. I want to get right away to your most recent article about alliances and how they end. But before we do so, I thought we might start with what has happened this weekend. Alaska, here we have a U.S. president welcoming a Russian adversary on the red carpet. And now today, as we speak, European allies rushing to Washington to try to pick up the pieces.
2:31How should we think about this?
2:34Margaret MacMillan:I think it's a question we're all struggling with. Very little has come out about what was actually said, although there have been rumors and some leaks, I think. But it was a very strange occasion. It's unlike, I think, most summits I've ever been able to think of. It was not prepared. It happened at very short notice. And usually, summits take a great deal of preparation. They take experts. They bring along people who really know the subjects. And this seems to have had a very ad hoc flavor to it. And the optics were really, I think, striking. I mean, President Trump greeted President Putin as a long-lost friend, The aircraft flew overhead.
3:12Margaret MacMillan:He shook his hand several times. He took him off in the car. That is an extraordinary way to greet someone who started a war unprovoked in Ukraine. And then the press conference at the end I found very weird. The meeting didn't go as long as it was scheduled for. There was very little at the press conference that was said about the meeting. And President Putin spoke first, which is unusual. Normally, the President of the United States would be in charge of the meeting. And Putin spoke for much longer than President Trump was going to speak for. So what does it all mean? It's very, very difficult to understand.
3:46Margaret MacMillan:I mean, I have a very nasty feeling that this is going to turn out like Munich in 1938 and result in the betrayal of Ukraine. But we won't know, I suppose, until after meetings have taken place. There'll be subsequent meetings in Washington and perhaps elsewhere. So the outlines will emerge, I think, fairly slowly. And a key point here was coming into this summit, we had the U.S. president saying we have to have a ceasefire. And this was the sort of starting point. And we have emerged, at least at this point, in which that position has been entirely given up. And there is a call for what Putin has said.
4:23Let's have a comprehensive agreement, which could be months and months of negotiation buying Russia at the time that it wants. How does this compare to 1938? What was it that happened at Munich that we sort of have this idea in our head of appeasement?
4:40Margaret MacMillan:What happened at Munich was an attempt, and I don't think it was a dishonorable attempt, by the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, with support from a lot of his own cabinet and the British public, and also support in France, to avoid another catastrophic war in Europe. I I mean, these were people who had come through the First World War. They'd seen what had cost Europe. Many of them had lost family members. Some of them had actually been injured in the fighting. So they knew what war was like, and they were doing their best to avoid it. And unfairly or not, they were prepared to sacrifice a part of Czechoslovakia.
5:11What Chamberlain thought he had got was appeasing the appetites of the German dictator Adolf Hitler.
5:18Margaret MacMillan:And he came back to London bearing this infamous bit of paper in which the British and the Germans pledged never to go to war with each other again. and of course he didn't get it but what he was also doing to be fair to him was upping British defenses he didn't trust Hitler he thought this was a last chance to try and make peace but he was understanding that he was dealing with someone who was untrustworthy and that of course turned out immediately to be the case in 1939 when Hitler in spite of his promises annexed what was left of Czechoslovakia and so I think it was a meeting in which a lot was given away but it was I think more of a careful meeting and a worry about what would happen next and preparations being made for that.
5:56A more direct parallel, it seems also, is the question of territory and the indication or intimation from the United States that it's prepared to have the Ukraine give up territory in the supposed interest that this will resolve the conflict and give up territory that it has fought valiantly for for more than three years and which Russia has been unable to conquer on the battlefield, which may seem astonishing. Is there a history there that we should be concerned about?
6:25Margaret MacMillan:I think we should be very concerned. And in fact, the Czechoslovak example in 1938 is a good one, because what Czechoslovakia gave up when it gave up the Sudetenland, which was in the western part of the country, was extremely well-prepared defenses against a possible German attack and a great deal of its very efficient arms industry. And if Ukraine gives up the territory that Russia is demanding, some of which Russia is not even occupying. It's also giving up well-prepared defensive positions, and it's giving up territory which has, pre-war, included a lot of Ukraine's natural resources and industries.
6:59Margaret MacMillan:And what strikes me about what the American position seems to be as it's emerging is that it's really accepting the Russian interpretation of the war and prepared to go a long way to meet Russian demands and seeing Ukraine as something of an obstacle in the road to some sort of peace. And President Trump a while ago was saying that he was fed up with Russia and he was going to put sanctions on. And that talk seems to have disappeared. And he seems to be accepting, and his administration seems to be accepting, the idea that somehow the war just started or that somehow it was Ukraine's fault. When it was an open act of aggression by Russia against Ukraine.
7:33Margaret MacMillan:And even this talk of land swaps, you know, there's nothing to swap. What Putin has done is take land that belongs to Ukraine. He violated internationally recognized borders. So there's no swap here. What it would be is simply confirming conquest by one power over another power and seizing that power's land, which is a very, very dangerous precedent for the rest of the world. I think this brings us directly to your wonderful piece of about a month ago, Making America Alone Again, in which you were exploring the sort of astonishing reversal of a way of dealing with allies and the Western alliance that has endured for 80 years.
8:13I would love to understand the current events in light of your analysis. And it seems that not only the Russia summit, but we have a spat with India, another ally that five administrations have cultivated assiduously, now being trashed with higher tariffs, I believe, than China, which was the original source of the supposed reason for having a tariff war. Or how do we read this new era in which allies are treated in this way? And what are the sort of implications?
8:48Margaret MacMillan:It's not difficult to work out where it's coming from, but to understand it, I find difficult. I mean, part of it, I think, is an impulse to reassert American power and make the United States central in the world, the dominant power in the world, on which all other powers have to depend or all other powers, including China, have to deal. It's part of the Make America Great Again. I think there's a strand also of American isolationism in there. We don't need other nations. We can pick and choose who we deal with. We won't be obliged to deal with anyone. But I think also, and this is what makes it particularly confusing, I think a lot of it depends on the preferences and whims and changeable attitudes of one man, and that is the president.
9:25Margaret MacMillan:The whole sudden switch about India is extraordinary because the United States, as you pointed out, has spent at least 20 years trying to gradually detach India from its friendship with Russia, and suddenly they're casting it back into Russia's arms. The Indians have just announced that they're going to be trading with Russia more, getting more Russian oil. And this is presumably not a result that a lot of Americans, even the MAGA Americans or the isolationist Americans would want. And I speak as a Canadian. We are absolutely dumbfounded. I mean, we have been a very reliable ally. Of course, we've had our differences.
9:57Margaret MacMillan:Allies do have their differences because they have different national interests. But we've been very reliable. We've fought with the United States in a number of wars. We joined in the coalition in Afghanistan, for example. We fought in Korea. You know, we have been, I think, a loyal ally. And we're absolutely bewildered by this. Why alienate this when you're already getting from us what you need? And we would, of course, negotiate on tariffs because we have to. But you're getting our raw materials. You're getting access to our water. And so it's really extraordinary. I mean, I have not been able to think, and I've consulted all my fellow historians who I've talked to, about another example where power gets rid of dependable allies.
10:35Margaret MacMillan:so cavalierly, and we all do. We get rid of people we don't trust anymore. We no longer count them as allies. But to get rid of ones that you can trust seems to me really damaging to the United States. I mean, it's going to need friends. It still is a great power, perhaps not as great as it once was and not as dominant as it once was, but it's going to need friends. It's going to need other countries to work with. And it seems to be making it more and more difficult for that to happen. The history here is so interesting. And this was sort of the starting point of your piece, that there weren't historical examples that could sort of make sense of these current moves by the United States.
11:10And it really asked one to look more closely about how alliances are formed and what is their purpose and why do they endure. And many of these lessons appear to be ignored right now. But just walk us briefly through some of the historic examples which show alliances have broken over time when they no longer serve a purpose.
11:35Margaret MacMillan:Alliances, I think, I mean, if you think of it in terms of human relationships, they're rather like any human relationship, like a friendship or like a business partnership. They rely on a certain amount of trust. They rely on a certain amount of melding of objectives, even though each party will have different long-term interests. but they can be sometimes brought together and countries and individuals can work together, even if they have differences over where their interests lie. I mean, alliances, I think, in the past and in the present come together often to provide common defense against an enemy.
12:09Margaret MacMillan:I mean, it's not always about war. Alliances come together for other purposes. They come together to try and prevent wars from happening. They come together to try and keep control over a troublesome nation that is threatening everyone. And so you get different sorts of alliances, but the most common, I think, in history has been an alliance, defensive alliance against a threatened enemy. And if and when that enemy is defeated, then the alliance does sometimes fall to pieces, but not always. I mean, when there's been a very great conflict, I think people in an alliance do begin to worry about what next.
12:41Margaret MacMillan:They don't want another conflict like this. I mean, the Napoleonic Wars, the Grand Alliance that defeated Napoleon gradually transformed into the Congress of Europe, which tried to smother revolution, you can disagree or not with that, tried to deal with issues that could have caused war because they had just come through a war and they didn't want to have another one. And the same thing happened after the First World War, when the victorious allies tried to set up a new international order, set up the League of Nations with the hope that it would prevent conflict like the war that had just come through.
13:15Margaret MacMillan:And so alliances can exist to project into the future the vision of a world that you might want. And they can exist sometimes to try and prevent the causes of a conflict. And so they are, I think, very important. And yes, they do fall to pieces. And there will always be differences. And there will always be tensions. And even Canada and the U.S. or the U.S. and Britain, which have been very close allies, have had their moments. But the alliance has lasted. And probably, I mean, I always think it's like, again, another human relationship, like a marriage, for example, or a partnership. You have to work at it.
13:47Margaret MacMillan:You can't just say, now we've got an alliance and we can relax. It's all going to be okay. You keep working at it. You keep trying to understand each other. You keep building those links, which is so important. And you have some great examples of this. And one could imagine a world that didn't have Churchill and Roosevelt, but two other leaders. That alliance might not have worked so well. The U.S. was very isolationist coming into the war, and it took a lot of effort to bring all of that about. And these human relations are maybe part of the kind of question around the current moment where we don't see a lot of that between the current U.S.
14:24president and the core allies in Europe or Canada or Mexico or, for that matter, the Asian allies.
14:32Margaret MacMillan:Yeah, I think human relations can be very important. I mean, sometimes I think alliances depend too much on human relations because you'd like to think the alliance is strong enough that it will be carried forward by all sorts of people and by mutual respect between countries. But they can be extremely important. And I think Winston Churchill, who was the prime minister of Britain from 1940 onwards, a relationship with Franklin Roosevelt, who, of course, was the president for so much of that period, that relationship was critical. and the two of them managed to deal with issues that came up between them because they trusted each other.
15:07Margaret MacMillan:I mean, often there were big disagreements over which theater of war they should deal with first. Should they deal more with Japan and defeat it first or should they defeat Germany first? How should they deal with both those countries? What should the strategies be? How should they deal with the war at sea? All of these things. How should they deal with Joseph Stalin who became a new ally to them when Germany invaded Russia in 1941? And so that personal relationship, I think, was very important. The two men corresponded a lot. They talked to each other. Churchill laid himself out, as he said, to woo the American president.
15:39Margaret MacMillan:He said, like a suitor. And he did. He understood just how important it was. And Roosevelt responded to it. He always played his cards very close to his chest. But I think he did establish a relationship with Churchill. And I think it was a very important relationship. And we can think of so many of those pairings throughout the late 20th century. And Kissinger and Joe and Lai or Thatcher and Reagan. And here in our current moment, I think of an interview that President Trump gave to the BBC, I think a month ago, in which he said, I trust almost no one, which I think was a quite candid comment of where he sits in these relations.
16:19Is this part of the essence of alliances that we are losing now, that there is this breakdown in trust? And you do see the European allies making this effort to establish some kind of rapport or Mark Ruta of the head of NATO or your Canadian prime minister. So we have these efforts on one side, but can an alliance work where it's not mutual?
16:46Margaret MacMillan:It's very hard, I think. And it's not just the leaders who count. It's the people who work in state departments, foreign offices. It's the business people who work with each other. I mean, I've been talking to a lot of Canadians and we've always, for obvious reasons, laid ourselves out to get on well with the United States. We have to. You're much bigger and more powerful than us and you're right there on our borders. And I think there's a feeling that in Washington, with what's been happening in the State Department or the National Security Council and elsewhere, those who understood Canada and had relationships with Canadian diplomats and Canadian business people have been fired or have been marginalized.
17:26Margaret MacMillan:And I think that is going to be costly, perhaps more to Canada than to the United States. But if any relationship is going to work, you need to understand what it is that motivates the other. And it's not always just naked self-interest. I mean, I think too many around President Trump, and I think the president himself, seem to think that everyone is motivated by economic gain. It's all a business deal. And that really doesn't get at what motivates people in many cases. I mean, I don't think President Zelensky of Ukraine is motivated by looking for a good business deal. He's motivated, as many Ukrainians are, by a desire to save their country.
18:02Margaret MacMillan:And that's very different. And I think without that knowledge and understanding, which you can't develop quickly, it develops over the years, it makes it much more difficult to have good relations. I mean, even simple misunderstandings. I mean, when the British and Americans first started having to really deal with each other in the Second World War, the Americans felt the British were being snobs and looking down on them. And the British probably were snobs, but also felt the Americans wouldn't listen to advice. I mean, these things caused tensions and they were gradually worked out and they got to know each other.
18:32Margaret MacMillan:But you can't just do it overnight. There's such an interesting example here with Canada itself. And I thought maybe you could talk about this. There was a survey this summer that had this astonishing finding that I think close to 60 % of Canadians now viewed the United States both as the most important ally and the country they fear most. And this kind of paradox, I believe, is also true now in Mexico in the same survey. And one can imagine the Danes coming to the same conclusion and perhaps, you know, Germany and the UK as well, certainly in terms of how the United States is dealing with Ukraine.
19:13What happens when the leader of an alliance, of course, the United States being the dominant power, not just building these alliances, but really running them through the post-war era, what happens when that leader becomes an antagonist within the alliance?
19:30Margaret MacMillan:Hugh, that's what we're all asking ourselves. The feeling in Ottawa, I've heard from people, our capital city, is one of complete shock that everything we had based our foreign policy on, all the assumptions we've been making has suddenly gone away. It's ground shifting under our feet. And I think we're really bewildered by it. I mean, I think there's a lot of thinking going on and there's certainly a lot of discussion, but where do we go and what do we do? And I think what gets us particularly nervous is the unpredictability. And again, I think it comes from the president, but there are others again around him.
20:04Margaret MacMillan:I mean, and then we don't know who he's taking advice from? Is he taking advice from Laura Loomer? Is she suddenly deciding that Canada is something she doesn't like? We just don't know. It's very hard to make policy when you don't have any assurity that agreements are going to be kept. You don't know where things are going to happen. I mean, we've been doing trade negotiations with the United States for many years. And over the years, we've developed great respect for American trade negotiations because they've known their briefs, as we have. And now it's not clear who's in charge and who's doing the negotiating and how much they actually know about the issues.
Read the full transcript
20:39Margaret MacMillan:And so I think we do see the United States as an ally, but we also see it as one that increasingly we just don't know where it's going. And that's a very uncomfortable position for us, certainly. Maybe not for the United States, but it certainly is for us. You have this wonderful line in your piece, I think you said, Canada has never been a threat to the United States except in hockey. And there is a sense that where does this animosity come from? But we see that over and over again with other allies. And here, I think, comes back to your point that alliances are built on more than just a particular strategic goal, that the ones that endure have something else.
21:20And here, the paradox is the Western alliance is one of the most successful in history in this regard, that there was more to it than just power. There was this ideal of Western democracy, values, we might say. And I wonder if you see, are we in an era now where this idea of values is really declining, that there isn't a shared, at least obvious shared system of values that are governing the current decision making or direction in which the United States seems to be leading its interests? Yes.
21:56Margaret MacMillan:It's very hard, I think, at the moment for those of us who are outside the United States to know what it is that the United States wants the world to be like. From various statements that are made, it seems to be that the administration is thinking in terms of a new world of spheres of influence, where three or four dominant powers dominate their own surroundings and somehow, goodness knows how, deal with each other in a way that doesn't lead to war. But it's not, I think, a formula for a very stable international order. Spheres of influence have always, in history, tended to lead to clashes, and the spheres of influence are going to have different interests, and they're going to compete to gain, in the borderlands, the shatter zones, as historians often call them, in the borderlands, they're going to try and establish dominance or protect themselves.
22:45Margaret MacMillan:And there'll always be the uncommitted countries who may swing between one or the other, or be wooed by one or the other, which will also lead to instability. But it's very hard to see any sort of coherent vision. I mean, there's a series of statements, you get tweets, they don't really explain what the policy is. I mean, you only have so many characters, and they seem to be more statements or headlines than substantive explanations. And so I'm not sure, and I don't know how sure you in the United States are about what the United States vision of the world actually is. As I say, it seems to be some sort of spheres of influence and dominance by great powers.
23:22Margaret MacMillan:If so, I think that is potentially a very dangerous way of adding the world up. Another perhaps different historic strand to this that you also pointed out in your piece is that the United States does have a particular history in coming late to the world of alliances and European diplomacy and, you know, because of its geography was able to survive much longer into the modern era as, you might say, isolated power. And that belated emergence, I wonder if that plays into this strand of American thinking that continues today to be isolationist, skeptical of entanglements. Do you see that as part of the dynamic now?
24:10Margaret MacMillan:Yeah, I mean, I think that countries, much like individuals, have memories. And we have visions of ourselves, and we have ideas about where we came from. Maybe not always very coherent ones, but we do. And I think the United States has a very strong isolationist strand. I mean, you go back to the famous warning of George Washington against entangling alliances, and the fact that the United States was born in an act of rebellion against a European power and a suspicion, which was there and I think continued to be there, of Europe and its machinations and its attempts to get back the rebellious colonies.
24:44Margaret MacMillan:I think that has shaped American attitudes towards the world. The growth of American power has made it possible for the United States to need the world less than other countries might. I think you also have geography, that Canada, on the whole, has never been a threat. I mean, the United States has been a threat to us. We remember a few invasion attempts from the United States, but we have never really threatened to invade the United States. Mexico has not been a threat, not really, to the United States. And those two huge oceans have kept the United States safe. And so I think geography plus history have played a part.
25:18Margaret MacMillan:It's not the only strand in American thinking, but it's certainly a very important part. But the development of technology, the changes in armaments, the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and now increasingly first subsonic and supersonic missiles, the use of space, means that the relative isolation of the United States is much less than it was. And that while the United States or people in the United States may prefer to disregard and ignore the rest of the world, the rest of the world is not going to disregard and ignore them. And I do think that's something that in the future is going to matter more and more to the United States.
25:53And the more important parallel here might be the British Empire in the 19th century, which, as you described, discovered the vulnerability of not having strong alliances. Can you just tell us a little bit about that?
26:07Margaret MacMillan:There's a very good phrase that Paul Kennedy, the international historian at Yale University, uses, and that's imperial overstretch. You build a great big empire, but that means you have a lot more to defend, and you have to spend a lot linking it up. You have to look after the supply routes. In the case of the British Empire, largely by sea, although later on air became important. And the United States, with its worldwide commitments, I think is feeling something of that burden, that overstretch. And understandably, I think a lot of Americans are saying, why are we doing all this? Why do we have troops stationed in South Korea?
26:38Margaret MacMillan:Why do we have troops in Germany? Why do we have all these bases around the world? Why are we propping up these countries and giving them assistance and so on. And I do think that empires reach a point where the burden begins to be too much, whether it's the psychological burden, people at home just don't want an empire and they don't want their children dying in its defense, and the financial burden that it gets to be or can be very expensive. Empires are not always profitable. And what the British were finding was that they had huge responsibilities and that they had stirred up resentment and opposition and that a great deal of the world didn't like them.
27:13Margaret MacMillan:and wasn't prepared to cooperate with them. They reacted by, in fact, building alliances and settling differences with some of their most prominent rivals. At the moment, the United States doesn't seem to be doing that, although I think President Trump hopes for some sort of relationship with China and seems to have some sort of relationship with Russia. So possibly what the United States will do is begin to try and look for allies to take some of the burden away from managing this very large global, it is in some ways an empire, but these very large global interests it has. And from the sound of it, he would like, and those again advising him, some of them would like to withdraw American involvement.
27:57Margaret MacMillan:Some have talked about getting out of NATO, bringing the troops back from South Korea. So I think it's going to be a very interesting period in American foreign policy and in fact in international relations, because it's not at all clear how this is going to play out. I mean, we're living in a time of great uncertainty and a time of transition, but we're not sure towards what. We'll be back after a short break.
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29:16And now back to my conversation with Margaret Macmillan. I wanted to ask you about your previous piece, which was a longer essay you did in the magazine right after the U.S. election. And this was, of course, before we had seen any of the second Trump administration. So you were raising a series of questions. And one of them, given all the focus at the time on the Trump administration, was, well, how will the order react? Will it withstand all sorts of new pressures? And I think, as you put it, a more important question may be how well American democracy and the international order can withstand the stress.
29:54And I can't help but wonder how now, seven months into the new administration, you assess that test has gone.
30:06Margaret MacMillan:It's always hard when you're in the middle of events, but I think I'm echoing a fairly common view that there has been much more change and more radical change, both within the United States and in its relationship with the world, than we had expected. and we knew I think that if Donald Trump was elected to be president for a second term that he would bring about change that he would try and do some of the things that he felt he hadn't been able to do in his first term but I think I speak for a lot of people I mean you you may have foreseen this I didn't that it would be quite so quick and quite so radical and that the federal government itself would have come under such attack and so many of its functions would have been compromised by very rapid change.
30:49Margaret MacMillan:I mean, if you want to speak to someone on a particular subject, it's not clear you can find them easily. They may have been moved, they may have been fired, there may be someone in the office who doesn't know anything. And I think the worsening relationships of the United States with its allies, again, has happened more quickly. Speaking as a Canadian, I don't think imagine that we would have an existential threat, which we take seriously. I mean, I don't think people say, well, it's just a joke when President Trump talks about the 51st state. That's not how we see it. And I think we are very, very concerned.
31:21Margaret MacMillan:You probably talked to other Canadians, but it's something we haven't had to face. And I think Europeans are sharing some of the same concerns and bewilderment. And I guess we're all wondering where next and what if. And that's, I suppose, partly why we go back to history, because history doesn't offer clear lessons. It never has done, I think. But what history offers is sort of what ifs, what is likely to happen in circumstances like these. There have been other examples in the past of moments of great transition of people saying the old order is dead. We had it after the Napoleonic Wars. We had it after the First World War.
31:58Margaret MacMillan:It is happening. I think a lot of the international institutions will not survive or survive in a very much weakened form. I fear that we're heading into a world where power matters. If you're a country, you try and get away with whatever you can get away with. And that seems to me a disastrous way of running the world because it will provide, as it is already providing, conflicts which go on and on and on. I mean, you know, we focus perhaps on what's happening in the Middle East and Ukraine at the moment, but there are all those other conflicts which are unresolved and show very little sign of being resolved.
32:32You could say, well, the United States hasn't withdrawn from NATO. It's forced the other members to cough up much more. NATO defense spending by country is higher than it's been ever. The president, for all his blester, really does want peace deals. He covets the peace prize. Maybe something good will come of all this disruption and chaos. Is there a merit to that? Certainly there were issues within the existing order. Things could have been better. NATO members could have spent more on defense, could have been more prepared for an invasion of Europe. Is there another way of looking at this moment of uncertainty?
33:11Margaret MacMillan:Well, there is that argument. Yes, but say what you will, President Trump has done this and done that. I agree that NATO was in trouble because its members were not spending enough on defense apart from the United States. Although a lot of American defense expenditure was on things not connected with NATO. Americans have other interests around the world than just merely NATO. You can say that it is important for NATO to have spent more and that President Trump has pushed them in that direction. But I think it comes with a cost. I think there were other ways of pushing NATO members to up their defense spending.
33:43Margaret MacMillan:But what has happened, I think, the way he has done it and the public way in which he has, I think, unnecessarily in my view, but of course people will disagree with me, unnecessarily alienated longstanding allies, has left its mark. And I think a lot of European nations are thinking, and Canada is thinking, that yes, we will remain in NATO, but we're going to make other arrangements. We're going to make agreements among ourselves. We have realized that we can no longer count on the United States. And so you can agree with the goal of getting NATO to increase its defense spending. But the way in which it was done, I think, has been needlessly harmful.
34:20As we enter what could perhaps be an era of a post-alliance world, in which the alliance, maybe it continues, but in a less manifestly strong way. So it's just existing the way the United Nations or other international institutions that have far less power. What would that world look like? And are there other moments in history where you could say, well, there really wasn't a strong order contributing to whether it's more conflict or other kinds of competition?
34:49Margaret MacMillan:There are other examples. I mean, I think the power of example or precedent is very important. So if you have a world order in which, for example, you don't attack your neighbors unprovoked, then if people start attacking their neighbors unprovoked, then others will do it. To give you one example, before the First World War, this notion of a Congress of Europe where the great powers got together to try and maintain peace and stability and order, which had lasted for most of the 19th century with some exceptions, really broke down just before the First World War, when in 19, I think it was 1911, Italy, unprovoked, breaking an international understanding, attacked the Ottoman Empire and seized territory in North Africa, which eventually became Libya.
35:36Margaret MacMillan:And that encouraged Balkan nations also in 1912 and 1913 to attack the Ottoman Empire and seize territory from it. And so a very important taboo, if you like, was broken and others were encouraged by this. And we saw the same thing before the Second World War, once you got the aggression by Italy, unprovoked attack on Ethiopia, or Japan making an unprovoked attack on China and seizing Manchuria, and then of course Hitler himself seizing Austria and then seizing Czechoslovakia, this all encouraged the dictators to think they would get away with it because the rest of the world complained and said this is not very good, but did in fact very little.
36:15Margaret MacMillan:And I think what we're seeing now is the idea, and it was a very strong idea and a very strong taboo, if you like, in international relations since 1945, that a country that seizes land from another country without any justification, without any reason, well, they may give reasons, but not good reasons, that seizure will not be recognized by other nations. It will not be accepted as legitimate. And that's now been broken. Putin got away with attacking Ukraine in 2014 and took Crimea, and that has more or less been recognized. You could argue it was broken before when China seized Tibet. But for the most part, since 1945, the idea that seizing territory by force would not be recognized was illegitimate, held, and now it's gone.
37:01Margaret MacMillan:And I think we will see other nations beginning to do that as well. Why not? In fact, could you argue that we're already seeing this effect? Of course, we have the talk about the Panama Canal, Greenland, Canada. This was all rhetoric from the administration. But in these last six months, we have Israel in the Golan. Rwanda has entered Eastern Congo. There's been a border dispute in Thailand, Cambodia. It's hard to say how much these are connected, but it does seem that there is a new understanding of, I mean, Ethiopia has made claims about having a seaport again on the Red Sea. Do you actually see this issue of sovereign boundaries, this taboo, as you call it, sort of already eroding?
37:48Margaret MacMillan:Absolutely. Absolutely. There's been a lot of public rhetoric about this. I mean, President Trump, again, has said that the border between Canada and the United States is artificial. It was drawn badly. We should rectify that. And I do think we are seeing the emboldening of those who want to use military force to get what they want. And they're not going to pay a penalty. I mean, Russia, well, yes, there have been sanctions and the rich Russians haven't been able to buy some of the luxury goods that they want, although they've, I think, found ways around that. But I don't think Russia has really been slapped with serious sanctions.
38:22Margaret MacMillan:Its tankers sailing under false flags are still shipping oil around the world. And I think others will think, you know, that the international order is toothless. And increasingly it is. And if you're Xi Jinping in China, do you think that all of this provides more of an opportunity for China? Do you see that the Taiwan question becoming more acute in this era of declining sort of understandings and rules? But China has already been pushing quite aggressively in the seas around Taiwan and in the South China Sea. It's apparently ordered an American warship out of those waters, even though they're international order just fairly recently.
39:06Margaret MacMillan:And there has been talk, and Xi Jinping has made it clear that he sees reuniting, as he puts it, Taiwan with the rest of China as his legacy. It's always a dangerous moment, I think, when leaders begin to get a bit old, because they start thinking of history, and they start thinking of how they're going to be recorded. And this is, I think, on the whole, not a good thing. And I think as far as we can tell from Xi Jinping's public remarks. He really wants to get the Taiwan issue settled and is prepared to use military force. I mean, China has been making a great deal of military preparations, including building landing craft and including practicing seaborne landings, which would, of course, be necessary if they're going to seize Taiwan.
39:46Margaret MacMillan:And so, yes, I think we are in a period where China is asserting its relevance, its muscle, it's asserting its claims. And I think as far as China's concerned, the disarray in the Western alliance and the disarray among American allies in the United States and American allies in the Pacific is, from its point of view, a very good thing. When the United States falls out with Vietnam, for example, or falls out with India, which is a rival to China, this only, I think, is good for China. The idea about leaders and their place in history, it's interesting to think also now you do see this in the second Trump administration, more thinking about history, how the story of the United States should be told.
40:33We see this as a pattern among sort of strong leaders or autocratic leaders in other countries. Putin, of course, that this was the beginning of the Ukraine war, his historic manifesto about greater Russia. Xi Jinping, as you have just said. Is this something that has always happened in history that powerful leaders will want to shape not just the present but the past? Or are we in a kind of new moment of historical rewriting? One might never have expected this from a democratic country. And I'm just curious how you would read that.
41:10Margaret MacMillan:History has so often been used in the past. I mean, we know that. But it was used in the classical world. It was used in the Middle Ages. But in the past, I think there were also other sources of authority. History did not, I think, in the past have quite the dominant authority, which it seems to have now in justifying what nations are doing. In the past, people would use religion more, for example. When the Crusades were launched, the grounds for those were religious to recover the holy places in the holy land. Or simply dynastic claims were very important. But I think as other sources of authority have fallen away, I think religion is no longer, except by some fanatical religious groups, used as a justification for waging war.
41:53Margaret MacMillan:History has come to take its place. And for some reason, we seem to think of history as this gray-bearded, probably gentleman sitting there saying, you're right, you're wrong. When people say history will judge, that seems to me a very dangerous idea. History is not a judge. History is a record of the past, which we try and understand. And when people say, I want to be on the right side of history. There isn't a right side and a wrong side. There's right and wrong, but not a right history and a wrong history in that sense. And so I think history is being used more and more as justification. And I think we see this with the Trump administration, that they are calling on an American past, which is a very one-sided version of the American past.
42:36Margaret MacMillan:They're using it partly to attack their domestic enemies. They're saying there's been far too much wokeness in the history and far too much concentrating on the dark side of American history. We want to elevate American history. We want to make it glorious again. But I think it's also used as justification for the way in which the United States deals with the rest of the world. And you're right. I mean, Putin used history to justify his claims to Ukraine. I mean, I read that manifesto he wrote, which I think by all accounts, he wrote himself and took very seriously. And I'm a teacher. I've been a teacher all my life and I try and encourage students.
43:08Margaret MacMillan:So if I'd been grading it, I would have said, you know, you've done a lot of work, but you haven't really used the evidence and your analysis is pretty bad. I mean, it's a bad essay and the arguments are tendentious and he keeps making them, you know, that the Ukrainians, he did it in the press conference recently in Alaska, Ukrainians are our brothers. Well, tell that to the Ukrainians, you know, they don't see it that way. So I think history is becoming justification more and more because we have fewer other sorts of justification. Margaret, this has been a wonderful conversation. I can't wait for your next essay.
43:40I'm sure this story, as so many in history, will have another very unexpected chapter.
43:49Margaret MacMillan:Thank you, Hugh. And I'm sure, you know, two days from now, we'll be looking at things and saying it's all completely different now. Thank you.
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From the publisher
During his second term, Donald Trump has railed against the United States’ closest allies. He has imposed tariffs, threatened to upend security commitments, and openly challenged the borders of Canada, Panama, and Greenland.
Historians often look to the past for insight about the present and future. But although alliances have collapsed for many reasons over past centuries, Margaret MacMillan argues in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs that Trump’s current behavior toward allies has little precedent. His approach, she writes, “does not suggest a clever Machiavellian policy to enhance American power; rather, it shows a United States acting against its own interests in bewildering fashion, undermining one of the key sources of that power.”
A renowned historian and professor emeritus of international history at Oxford University, MacMillan is one of the greatest chroniclers of the grand alliances of the twentieth century and the world wars they fought. She joined Editor-at-Large Hugh Eakin on August 18 to discuss the normalization of conquest and the war in Ukraine, how U.S. allies are calculating their next steps, and what the United States’ approach to its alliances will mean for the future.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.