Is Donald Trump Creating the Conditions for Another World War?

0:04Welcome to the political scene from the New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined as ever by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser. Hi, Jane and I, Susan. Hey, it's so great to be together. Good guys. So glad to see you. Happy New Year.

0:25Today, it is barely a week into 2026, and we're facing a changed world. There's no other way to put it. It's a world bound less than it was even one week ago by law and diplomacy than it is by the sheer force of one man's domination. In Venezuela, the administration of Donald Trump has embarked on an adventure of lethal force with little concern for international law. And on American soil, we've witnessed an extraordinary use of official force when an ICE agent in Minnesota killed a woman in her car, a shooting that was widely documented on video, which drew plainly false defenses from the White House and immediate street protests from the public.

1:06The history here looms heavily. Franklin Roosevelt in the days after Pearl Harbor warned, quote, there is no such thing as security for the nation or any individual in a world ruled by the principles of gangsterism. By contrast, this week, Donald Trump told The New York Times that the only limit on his global power is, as he put it, quote, my own morality, my own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me. Asked why he needed new territory such as Greenland, he said, ownership is very important because that's what I feel is psychologically needed for success, unquote. So in this episode, we're going to have a bracing conversation, I think it's fair to say, about the scale and the impact of this moment.

1:59What's the spectrum of risks when so much rides on the whims of one man? And where have we seen this before? What is history telling us about where this just may be taking us? Jane, Trump has suggested in the days since the assault on Venezuela that the U.S. could use our military to various effects in a whole range of other places. Greenland, of course, but also Cuba, Colombia, even Mexico. There are a lot of questions swirling around. And I'm wondering how you decide what to take seriously. What is signal and what is noise at a moment like that? This is the Dunro doctrine. You know, I think at this point you have to take it all seriously.

2:46That is one of the lessons here. I don't think it's just gaslighting us for fun. I think that what you're seeing both abroad and at home are completely optional conflicts created by the character of the president. The die is cast by who he is, and he sees himself as without any kind of restraints on his power. So I think you have to take this all seriously at this point. We've talked about this before. We've taken Greenland seriously here for a while. Susan, even before Trump came back to the White House, you were reporting and writing about Greenland, his preoccupation with this Danish territory.

3:29Well, I mean, look, just in the big picture sense, right, if the fear is gangsterism, what does it say that we're talking about America is the gangster, right? You know, that was a quote from FDR talking about the dictators of Europe. Now, the threat to the world, you know, and some level, the threat to our allies, Denmark and NATO is coming from the United States itself. When Harry Truman signed the NATO Founding Act, right, he could never have conceived of, nor could anyone else, a world in which the other NATO allies viewed the United States as the gangster. And, of course, Trump is the gangster in truth.

4:07I do have to say, as a former editor of foreign policy who was besieged with pieces constantly about this doctrine and that doctrine, I have a visceral allergy to proclamations of doctrines, especially something with the name, the Don Roe Doctrine. And let's just be clear on that. The thing that I think is remarkable that you're saying, Jane, that I agree with is Donald Trump is often mistakenly seen to have an ideology or an ism. You know, to the extent he has an ideology, let's be clear, we're talking about a form of almost narcissistic unilateralism, right? The people were wrong for years. Many of his fans cheered Donald Trump when he came to power in 2016 because they said they believed this idea of America first.

4:57And, you know, essentially they wanted a new era of American withdrawal from the world, American focus on within. And it's not isolationism that we've seen from Donald Trump. And those people who leaned into that, I think their analysis has been consistently surprised at the idea of what is going on with the leader since Donald Trump came back to office. And it's not even been a year, which I know is pretty stunning, right? Like, it's not even been a year since last January 20th. But we've aged by 10. Donald Trump has gone into and launched military attacks on seven different countries. I'm not aware of other presidents in our lifetime who've launched attacks on seven different countries, right?

5:39That'll be the trivia question is, can you name all seven countries, including the obscure Christmas Day strikes in Nigeria? Seven countries. So how's that compatible with America First? To me, it goes back to Jane's point about it's about one man asserting breathtaking power. That's the point I want to return to. Just linger for a second here, Susan, on this, the psychological effect on something as fragile as the NATO mindset. The idea this is let's remind ourselves is right at a moment when European allies had been trying to get the United States to put pressure on Russia to try to bring about a peace agreement.

6:17And instead, what you have is now European allies condemning the U.S. president because of this assault on Venezuela. And now the almost unthinkable prospect of the United States taking territory from a NATO member. Let's remind ourselves, Denmark, after all, came to the U.S. defense after 9-11, you know, sent troops to Afghanistan, lost lives in defense of American strategic interests. What does it mean? Set aside the idea that we would even go into Greenland. What does it mean to be talking about taking territory from an Indian? No, I think you and I'm sorry I didn't answer that question before because it really does get at the heart of why this is dangerous.

6:56You know, people have underestimated Trump again and again, including, by the way, our European allies who didn't take this seriously. until, you could argue, far too late. NATO, the entire premise of NATO is undergirded by this idea of mutual defense, a sort of all-for-one, one-for-all principle, Article 5. And essentially, that relies upon the credibility of that. Yeah, exactly. It's not just a piece of paper. Is there anyone in the world after this week, with Trump having done and said what he's done and said, who believes in the credibility of the United States' commitment, which, by the way, is a treaty commitment.

7:34That means it's passed by Congress, signed into law for decades, that the United States would come to the defense of our NATO allies, say, forget about, you know, this threat to Denmark, our NATO allies just literally across a little river border from Russia in the Baltics. Yes, and so just on Greenland, the thing is, is that Trump has not just said, oh, I'd like to buy Greenland, which was a source of, you know, ridicule, shock, horror, amazement in 2019. Now he has escalated, and that's the story of the second term, and said, if you don't hand it over, I may attack you. Yeah, nice little country you got here.

8:15Militarily. Well, I just think that getting back to Trump's id, basically, you've got somebody who doesn't know history, has never served in the military, doesn't understand the risks here. I mean, I think you could call this, remember, he got five deferrals from the Vietnam War, which was the war of his time. him, he sees this as simply cost-free ways that he can impose his power on the world without understanding any of the risks that it puts the rest of the world in, as far as I can tell. I mean, we could call it, we can give it our own doctrine, and we can call it the bone spur foreign policy for the bone spur that got him out of the Vietnam War.

8:55And I think it's interesting also, if you look at the New York Times interview with him, despite this, or maybe because of this, what he's projecting is a sense of insecurity and anger and resentment that he's not getting his due. Beneath the surface, this is someone who's constantly trying to impose himself as a winner on the world. His father always told him, you need to be a winner. And yet he feels like people are treating him like a loser. That's underlying a lot of this, I think. Yeah. And look, we know that the psychological dynamics of leadership matters in geo strategy. You can't talk about a place like China, for instance, without saying how much does it see its own history and its future through the lens of the fact that it hasn't fought a war since 1979.

9:46The last war was against Vietnam, a war that it lost. I think a lot of people this week in my world of China watchers were saying, oh, how is China responding to the vision of the United States just going into another piece of territory, deposing its leadership, running the country? Does this mean that they're now going to see that this is open season for Taiwan, for instance? Well, do you think it does? I actually think it doesn't affect their internal calculations because in the end, China's decision making around Taiwan comes down to how it perceives things like its own military readiness, whether or not it has civilian control of the PLA.

10:22As long as they are still bouncing out senior generals, which they're doing fairly frequently, that's a sign that they don't feel like they have that control. The bigger issue, though, it's not just about Taiwan. The bigger issue is that they now see from the United States actions that almost perfectly enact the Chinese worldview of how the globe should be organized. Everybody in my world this week was remembering a comment, this incredibly indiscreet moment in 2010 when the Chinese foreign minister at a conference said the quiet part out loud. He said, China is a big country and there are small countries.

11:01That's a fact. That's the Donald Trump worldview. And now China is looking out and saying, oh, OK, I guess we're dividing up the world by that logic. It sounds a lot like Stephen Miller, right? It does. The way of the world. He has a bright future in Chinese politics.

11:18We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll untangle the domestic threads here. The political scene will be back in just a moment.

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12:20Stephen Miller, who's of course the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, who has had a heavy hand on domestic policy, particularly on immigration, is now being heard on foreign affairs. There is an absolutely immortal quote that he gave this week on CNN's Jake Tapper show. Let's listen to it. We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.

13:01The jungle, man. You know, it's the jungle. And I think people have been correct to seize on this as sort of, you know, the most sort of snarling but revealing explanation of the worldview that is now governing the United States. And we're right to seize on this because it's a world of might makes right. It goes back certainly to the psychological explanation of Trump. And, you know, Jane, I agree with you about Trump's feeling of weakness and need to compensate. And Stephen Miller, in this appearance, has specifically been asked about Trump's desire to take over Greenland. And this quote is specifically in response to questions about why.

13:47Why would the United States do such a thing? It has these treaty obligations. And so it's not just some generally unsettling statement. It's a specifically terrifying statement, I think, because it says the United States, the leader of the United States, rejects all the commitments that the United States actually currently has to its partners, to its allies, and to a vision of the world that is governed by laws and not by, you know, men wielding, you know, clubs. I remember we were exchanging messages, the three of us, when the Venezuela operation came out. We were texting each other. And Jane's like, you know, we're pirates now.

14:24We're pirates now. Basically, we're seizing the oil. We're selling the oil. Donald Trump says he's personally taking charge of the oil. And, you know, on Greenland, right, this fixation on Greenland. I know people will say, well, it's because of resources. There's all these minerals locked under the surface. Or it's because of national security. We don't want China. Russia engaged in the Arctic right now with global warming, which, of course, the administration doesn't acknowledge exists. But putting that aside, you know, this is a more important place. Those are all factors when you talk to why somebody like John Bolton was interested in pursuing this.

15:00But Donald Trump is very interesting. When we were doing our book and doing reporting on why this fixation on Greenland, he said something to us. This was back in November of 2021 in his exile that I think kind of sums up this worldview Stephen Miller's talking about. We said, why Greenland? And Trump says, well, it was my idea, which by the way, our reporting wasn't necessarily the case, but it's actually one of his businessman friends, Ron Lauder. Why don't we have that? You take a look at a map. So I'm a real estate developer. I look at a corner. I say, I got to get that store for the building that I'm building, etc.

15:39You know, it's not that different. I love maps. And I always said, look at the size of this. It's massive. And that should be part of the United States. He added, it's not different from a real estate deal. It's just a little bit larger, to put it mildly. Donald Trump wants to write his name into history on the map of the world. Obviously, in big gold letters. You know, he wants to be the William Seward of this era acquiring Alaska. He wants every single person in the world to have to, you know, exchange their map for one of the United States that looks different, that looks bigger, and that everybody for all eternity will say Donald Trump did this.

16:20And that's, by the way, what Vladimir Putin has done. He's chosen what he sees as historical glory to be the restorer, the in-gatherer of the Russian lands, to go for restoring Ukraine. And you asked me that question before. I think it's right on. It's China, but it's also Russians who've been cheering statements like Stephen Miller's saying, well, this is exactly the way. We're still retweeting them, correct? Absolutely. Kirill Dmitriev, who's in the middle of the talks, who's been Putin's envoy to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Kirill Dmitriev is cheering this on because how is that statement from Miller?

17:02How was the White House official statement this week saying any different than what you would see out of a Russian, out of a Kremlin apologist? It strikes me as the most un-American possible thing to say, because every other, we've had plenty of foreign interventions and many that you can argue were foolish, but they were under color of ideology and idealism of some sort or another, usually trying to make the world safe for democracy. And there's no pretense here of this being about anything beyond, particularly with Venezuela, the oil. We kept the regime in place. It's not regime change. It's regime extension with our getting their oil.

17:43And I don't know. I mean, I still Susan and I've been sort of sparring back and forth about how important it is that the businessmen, whether it was Ron Lauder in the beginning or Trump's friends later. And there are plenty of businessmen who are right at his elbow who are really looking forward to developing. Because of rare minerals and things like that. I want to talk about the domestic side of this for a second, because one of the big surprises here, frankly, is that, you know, the story that was told about Trump coming back to office was partly that you had people like J.D. Vance, the important figures within the MAGA firmament who were, you know, said we're done with these wars of adventure and misadventure.

18:23We're going to focus on America first. We're going to invest that money at home. And here we have him going off. How is it possible that the MAGA movement accommodates itself so swiftly? And I know there's an easy answer, which is they'll do whatever Trump says. But are they actually imagining that they want to be a part of this? Well, I mean, there's a split is what we've seen. I mean, and so there's beginning to be some pushback from the right about this. I mean, it's Marjorie Taylor Greene, of course. Liberal icon. I always need to point that out now. Yeah, I'm saying, is this America first?

18:58This is exactly what we didn't want, you know, useless foreign wars. And so there is beginning to be some split over this subject. There's also, I would say, if you want to talk about domestic politics, I think importantly, some split quietly within the Democrats who are, as usual, unable to figure out where they want to be on this particular subject in any unified way. So you've got the condemnations of the violations of the Constitution and you condemnations of international law coming out of the liberal minded members of the Democratic Party. And then you've got others who kind of focusing on, well, Maduro is a bad guy, you know, and they're they're just not quite able to speak with one voice and have a powerful opposition.

19:45I want to stay with you, Jane, for a second on the domestic side. I mentioned just briefly at the top this shooting in Minnesota, which in a strange way feels like it's very much an extension of the same thing we've been talking about, about this kind of vision of power, of unchecked, unbounded power. It is. You're so right, Evan, I think. I was thinking about it that these kinds of conflicts allow Trump and his administration to declare emergency law and do things like invoke the Alien Enemies Act and take extra powers that are afforded the executive during times of war, put troops in the street, as we're seeing.

20:26So, I mean, there is some method to the madness here. I mean, what you're describing is this, and this ties into something, Susan, you were saying before. You know, we've gone from this period when, for the years since World War II, essentially, you know, there was an understanding that the world would be governed by ideas, by trust, by compacts, by the mutual knowledge that we would be at greater peril if we allowed ourselves to succumb to a world of iron and bone and blood and soil than we would by ideas. And both on the domestic side here and on the foreign side, we've seen that essentially unraveling over the course of the last week.

21:06Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. You know, we can get big picture here and talk about, I think it's really the protracted crisis over what is the world order after the end of the Cold War. I mean, I take your point about the end of World War II, but, you know, look, there were a lot of grubby, dirty, self-interested, awful wars fought after World War II. But there was a framing, you know, reference for the world, right? Like there was a sense of existential threat that came from having these two nuclear superpowers essentially pitted against each other, right? And I think that the world has been in a couple decades of crisis over, you know, the identity.

21:46How what's an international system that works in the post Cold War era? And we kept talking about, well, is this Cold War 2.0? Remember, you know, with Russia, is it that I think we've now gotten rid of that framework and we're moving towards something more like this revamped 19th century vision of a kind of tripartite great powers. right? The United States, Russia, China, spheres of influence. That's where Donald Trump is leaning in. That's, I think, the framework that we're looking at here that people are very uncomfortable with because it gets rid of a lot of the institutions and ideas that were created to prevent another world war.

22:25It basically jettisons all that. And in fact, to that point, it didn't get as much attention this week because we were so focused, understandably, on the United States just kidnapped a world leader and, you know, brought him to trial and, you know, a lot a very specific news event. The United States this week withdrew from more than 60 international organizations and institutions of exactly the kind of fabric. A huge moment that was kind of ignored. It's unraveling. The fabric of international cooperation is unraveling that was established in part as a bulwark against future world wars and in part in the context of this Cold War competition after World War II that people were desperate not to become a hot war between the great powers.

23:09Now, Trump is just saying, let's just get rid of that framework. We're building a new framework. I do want to talk about what does that mean politically here at home, just for one sec, because I think Jane is really onto something. There's discord and division within both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, a kind of a lack of leadership. Obviously, Donald Trump is not going to be the kind of leader who coherently, you know, describes and therefore brings into being this new world order, right? It's just something he's doing while watching TV and sending out, you know, true social posts.

23:40I will point out in the New York Times interview, he didn't exactly empower the younger generation. He called Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance kids. So do you see one of the kids standing up and taking up the mantle? To the point, absolutely. That is a sign that we're living in a gerontocracy when the people in their 40s and 50s are called the kids. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, look, the divisions are important because I think there are still these sort of tribes in Washington that haven't caught up to where the power is. And that's a scary thing. But, you know, for Republicans, you have definitely the America Firsters, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

24:16We don't know where J.D. Vance is. They literally left the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, out of the planning, according to newspaper reports this week for the Venezuela operation because she's been a public critic of intervention in Venezuela. Can we just interject with what the DNI now stands for, apparently? Do not invite. Do not invite. Exactly. I saw that. But, you know, there's another camp as well that has, you know, still some refracted energy here in Washington, what's left of the Republican establishment. And those are the senators who have spoken out this week, both with qualms about Venezuela and also really serious concerns about what's happening with Trump and Greenland.

25:00People like the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mitch McConnell. So you have, you know, you have on the far right the kind of Steve Bannon types who are worried about this, J.D. Vance types. Then you also have the old Republican guard that's worried about this. And there were nine Republican senators so far who have spoken out and said, basically, please, you know, pump the brakes on Greenland. This is crazy. This is not who we are. We're supporting NATO. Nine Republican senators. Then you had five Republican senators joining forces with Democrats on a measure that actually passed the Senate saying in the future, any additional Venezuelan military action needs to be consulted with Congress as per the War Powers Act.