611. Fareed Zakaria on What Just Happened, and What Comes Next | Freakonomics Radio

hey there it's Steven Dubner and I would like to invite you to come see freec conomics radio live in San Francisco on January 3rd and in Los Angeles on February 13th for tickets go to freecomic shows one word I'm told that tickets are going fast so you might want to do this soon I'm also told these tickets make an excellent holiday gift again that's fre economics.com shows January 3rd in San Francisco February 13th in La I'll be there and I hope you will [Music] too on January 6th of 2025 vice president kamla Harris will certify this year's election results and officially named Donald Trump as the nation's 47th president she will do this in her role as outgoing Senate President but also of course as the presidential candidate that Trump just beat he is only the second president in US history to lose the White House but went it back later the other was Grover Cleveland in the 19th century this is one of many ways in which the 2024 election was a historic one and a dramatic one the kind that generates a lot of bloviating from a lot of people so you may have had your fill of that I was thinking you might want to hear a different kind of conversation about the election with someone who isn't a bloviator someone very smart and thoughtful with a wide perspective someone who maybe has a PHD in political science and is maybe an immigrant all of that describes Our Guest today fared Zakaria we had him on the show earlier this year to talk about his book the age of revolutions progress and backlash from 1600 to the present Zakaria is host of a weekly CNN show called GPS or Global Public Square and he writes a column for the Washington Post in the conversation you are about to hear we will talk about the election results Trump is not a spasm it's not a One-Shot thing this is a deep enduring change and what that deep enduring change may look like I worry that we're in a situation where this whole world order can unravel very quickly but if you were someone who didn't vote for Trump and you're thinking about leaving the country zakar has something to say to you too if everybody who loses an election abandons the watchtowers that's not going to help democracy and you don't want to hurt democracy do you we once ran a contest on free economics.com soliciting new six-word motos for the United States here is the one that got the most votes our worst critics prefer to stay that was a while ago does that motto still hold true [Music] today this is Freakonomics radio the podcast that explores the Hidden Side of Everything with your host Steven Dubner [Music] I spoke with fared Zakaria on the 8th of November just a couple days after Donald Trump won a second term in the White House bracketing his four years of Exile the Republicans also won firm control of the Senate while the outcome for the House of Representatives was still up in the air and this was before Trump had made any significant appointments in his administration other than choosing Susie WS as his chief of staff but as we publish this episode the appointments are coming thick and fast Tom Homan Elise stefanic Marco Rubio Lee zeldon probably quite a few more by the time you hear this I asked Zakaria for his first impressions of the election what I've been struck by is the degree to which the kind of things that I talked about in my book age of revolutions have been borne out that is that we're in the midst of a huge backlash to all the economic change the technological change the cultural change that has been roiling Western societies and really societies everywhere for the last few decades we thought that these changes get digested or maybe there's a spasm of a backlash but we're in a long period of reaction to these forces and we're developing almost a kind of New Politics around it what you're seeing is a major realignment of politics around the idea that we've gone too far we have to rethink the entire way in which we have been approaching these massive forces of structural change economics globalization information revolution cultural change I'm not saying that I agree with that bad reaction and backlash in every case but it's deep and it's not a spasm and it's plainly not just here if you look at the incumbent party getting tossed out it's example after example after example right Austria Japan probably Canada next year do you see that as further proof that we're living through as you put it in the book of yours the most revolutionary period in recent history this is the first year in which every major country that has held an election has seen the incumbent party tossed out or substantially weakened in some cases like France macron is still president but his party was decimated so we're clearly at a moment of enormous backlash and reaction now sometimes it takes on a weird form in Britain it became a backlash to the Tories because the Tories were seen as the incumbents who had prided over the period of turmoil and inflation but for the most part it is a backlash against what I call the policy of openness open trade open information open migration even open politics in the sense of people doubting very much whether democracy can deliver let's press a little bit further on what constitutes openness I going to read you a couple things I've read this past week one is from n Gingrich former house speaker and an informal adviser to Trump said the elites cannot come to grips with how alienated they are from the country there's a professor of communications and journalism at Stonybrook University named Musa Al garby who wrote the rise of populism tensions over identity politics and the crisis of expertise are all facets of a deeper struggle between knowledge economy professionals and the growing number of Americans who feel alienated from the social order we those professionals preside over so that's a bit of an indictment of you me a lot of people you and I both know what's your feeling about that I think it's broadly correct now how you solve it is the bigger problem the PO industrial nature of modern economies the move from first of all a manufacturing sector to a service sector which is happening in every Advanced industrial country and the further effect of the information revolution has been to privilege knowledge workers to privilege people whom Robert R once described as symbolic analysts meaning if you manipulate symbols code images language for a living and think of every profession we get you know lawyers accountants software program is you've just described our entire Audience by the way right you're going to be doing well in that economy you're going to be rewarded and you have pricing power over your labor if you manipulate physical things for a living you do not have pricing power and that reality has become more and more intense and it's been an easy sort basically people who are college educated versus people who are non- col educated people who live in urban city centers versus people who don't and so so these divides stack upon each other so you end up really with two countries one Urban educated secular Multicultural and the other one rural less educated more white more religious and that creates a much greater Chasm than we have ever had if you go back 50 years what you notice is the steel worker made more than the accountant or even sometimes the junior lawyer there were were lots of blue color professions and lots of blue color towns which were thriving Detroit was one of the richest cities in America that world has gone away that's the fundamental structural push which is creating this alienation I very much dispute the idea that the elites are looking down on this great unwashed I think that's a nice way to indict them but look at Joe Biden Joe Biden as president has done more for blue collar workers for manufacturing for rural counties than any president really in history I mean you could say it Lyndon Johnson but the attempt to Target the infrastructure Bill the chips act the IRA all towards what were really red counties was extraordinary it didn't help him politically at all because the issues causing this divide are as much cultural as they are economic I'm curious to know how surprised you were by the outcomes did you predict a trump Landslide and a red wave because other than some of the betting markets I haven't heard from many people who did I thought he would win I didn't say anything publicly about it because I've always thought it was close enough that it was almost a guessing game I would have preferred if kamla Harris had won but I thought Trump would win but it's not as much of a landslide as people are making it out to be you know 175,000 votes in those three blue wall States and the Electoral College would have flipped and kamla Harris would be president she would have won like Trump did in 2016 he would have won the popular vote but she would have won the Electoral College the Striking feature of it is how you saw movement toward him among pretty much every group The most significant ones were Hispanics but everywhere you saw some movement and I tend to think that is part of this larger realignment that I'm talking about the country is coalescing into two groups the party of that wants more openness at some level and the party that wants more closed borders closed trade closed technology you know it's a big divide and you're seeing these new alignments where Hispanic workingclass people are voting more like workingclass people than like Hispanics so ethnicity is giving way to Social and economic class Molly Hemingway who's a conservative pundit writes for the Federalist said this is the absolute end of the old Republican party new GOP is more durable more working class with a brighter future your thoughts on that I think she's dead right I think that the old Republican Party The Party of the Chamber of Commerce of the upper class of the affluent white professionals that party is gone the party of Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney what Trump figured out was that that party was a minority party it had not been able to win the popular vote for 25 years almost with one exception what what he has found his way to is a new Coalition which is almost the inverse the base of the party is working class it is a more durable majority or at least a larger Coalition for the Democrats the challenge is that if the Great Dividing line is college education you've got 40% versus their 60% because college educated people only make up about 40% so you have to supplement it with something the Democrats old answer was we're going to supplement it with minorities and blacks are still very reliably voting Democratic Jews actually interestingly are still very reliably voting Democratic right the exit polls which aren't totally reliable showed that Harris won a bigger share of the Jewish vote than any Democrat in 24 years correct again what that tells you is that their social economic class by which I mean college education trumped religion and ethnicity there is an old Democrat party itch which is that we've got to be a working-class party as well you hear that in Bernie Sanders the problem is no matter what policies they' pursue and as I say Biden has been the most pro- workingclass president in decades the workingclass is abandoning them they don't see the Democrats as part of their world they see the Democrats as this affluent Elite Urban Cosmopolitan World Tony Blair said this to me when people feel deeply insecure they don't move left economically they move right culturally because your instinct is not to say oh my goodness I feel like my world is being upended I need this government program no their impulses to say I need a return to the world I knew that's why the politics of nostalgia are so powerful it's a return to something comfortable that feeling trumps economics if you think about gender issues you're seeing on the one side a lot of women feeling like they need to have their rights protected but you're also seeing a lot of men who feel like politics has gotten too feminized that they are being forgotten and that in a post-industrial world women do better than men there is a kind of male backlash just take me back to before all this was happening take me back to that world where a man was able to be a man and was the dominant player in the family and in society I find that whenever you know workingclass people do this liberals get so frustrated and they say I can't believe these people are voting against their interests meaning you know they're voting for a party that isn't going to do something for them economically and yet these same upper class liberal professionals are voting against their interests they are voting against the party that is going to give them tax cuts and they are voting for the party that is going to tax them more why because even for upper class liberals it turns out that culture and social issues can often Trump economics although their argument would be well I've got mine I'm comfortable and therefore I'm looking out for people who don't right they would say that but I would argue that what's going on is that in their world it would be seen as so offensive to be voting for Trump and what makes it so offensive it's all these cultural issues it's not that people in our world think it's massively offensive to give a 3% cut in taxes no it's a abortion and it's about deportation it's about all those issues so the main story being told now is pretty simple that the haris campaign focused primarily on Trump as a villain voters however were primarily focused on two things inflation and immigration which by the way were two major Trump talking points and that resounded much more apparently than the Trump the villain story does that narrative sit about right with you or do you think it's more complicated than that I think that's about right and I would add you can't do that much about global inflation because a was Global and secondly it had already come down but people were living with the effects of it I think part of what's going on is that there is a lagging indicator and that people feel the pain of inflation more than they feel the benefits of these very powerful positive indicators that the US has by far the best large economy in the world one variable that you you could do something about was immigration immigration is the rocket fuel that is feeding right-wing populism because in a way it is the visible manifestation of all these revolutionary changes that are upending Society how do you see or perceive or feel massive movements of capital around the world you don't even trade is an abstraction information revolution these are all abstractions but what's real is that you see these people on TV and they look different and they sound different and they're changing the visual character of your country the sense you have of what it means to be an American all your anxieties get latched onto immigration and so not realizing that this is a seismic issue was a big mistake one element that the Trump campaign seemed to be incredibly successful with was getting even first generation Americans and immigrants to also turn against especially illegal immigration can you just talk about how the campaign did in organizing its real collage of constituencies the main issue was the reality on the ground and they understood it better look I'm an immigrant and I have very very mixed feelings about all this crisis at the border the breakdown of Asylum it took me 10 years of very patient legal steps to become an American citizen to see people come to the border and essentially game the system by saying the magic words I have a credible fear of persecution which then gets you in gets you two court hearings gets you to stay for seven years you disappear into the system and you can work illegally all of that offends people at two levels one it's the sense of this is a violation of rule of law this is not what a country should be but the other is I waited my turn I stood in line I did all these things I jumped through through all these hoops or my parents did and you guys are getting in for free so I think that they understood that the breakdown in Immigration particularly around Asylum was a very different thing they realized that there was a real collapse at the border the Democrats will say well we had this legislation teed up ready to go bipartisan supported and then Trump spiked it by persuading sitting Republicans to not move forward on it so that he could come in and fix it that seems to be not a very disputed story even those on the Trump side seem to admit that he's the one that's ready to come in and March with it is that unfair to the Democrats did they propose a proper solution and it was scotched or should they have found a different way to do that it is the correct solution for the Democrats politically the problem is it's not completely true substantively what really happened is Biden comes in he reverses everything Trump did on immigration some of those things were terrible he was making it more difficult for legal immigration it was making it more difficult for even business visitors but they also overturned all the Asylum stuff they then get an inflow part of it was postco and they don't do anything about it and it's only three years later that they do what you were describing so it's disingenuous for them to claim that their solution was timely it's disingenuous because they do it three years later they're doing it after they see that the problem is spiraled totally out of control and that they are paying a political price for it but politically even then they should have been making that case that look we we waiting for a bipartisan Congressional solution and then from vetoed so let's say that you are sitting around a table this morning with a bunch of Democratic Party leaders and you look at your standard bearers of the past bunch of years and they're really really old they're not a little old they're really old and then you've got kamla Harris who just lost an election how do you think about the next couple years if you're the democ ratic party I think that it would be a mistake to overinterpret some of these things the Democratic party did reasonably well in a year that was profoundly anti-incumbency kamla Harris ran a reasonable campaign there are a few lessons that should be taken that are not about this larger political realignment for example the media environment has completely changed and you have to have candidates who are very comfortable in the New Media environment kamla Harris in some ways is a very old school candidate she's very good at the stuff that works on network TV the teleprompter clearly we in an age where people want long form podcasts they want authenticity so somebody like Pete budded works really well in this new format he could go for three hours he could go for five hours with Joe Rogan or you because what people are trying to get a sense of is who is the real person and I think what they love about Trump is he is authentic you can tell when he's up there he actually hates the teleprompters he can't wait to get off them even that moment when he starts to play his Spotify playlist I think what people loved about it is it was authentic he was tired he was bored he said guys let's just take a break and hear some music Democrats are still a little too form Bound by an older world when somebody asks you a question which involves an awkward reality you don't answer it so that became her word salad and instead of that you need a real answer on something like would you do something different than Joe Biden would be look in retrospect we should have shut down the Border much faster much sooner and I'll tell you what was going on we didn't want to be as cruel as we thought Donald Trump had been and we were trying to solve it in a bipartisan way because really legislation is the only way that you can durably solve this but we probably waited too late and in retrospect I would have shut it down fast and hard it was a mistake now in conventional political terms that's seen as the wrong answer because you just said you made a mistake you said something bad about Biden I think it would have actually worked because what people are looking for is look we all know that this ended up spiraling out of control why can't you just be a human being and admit it do you think Joe Biden in his heart of hearts thinks it was a mistake to step aside do you think he thinks he could have won of course every person is a hero in his own movie for better or worse I happen to know a lot of people in their 80s who are very rich billionaires who run companies I have not noticed any one of them thinking I'm too old to be doing this Warren Buffett doesn't think he's too old to be running Berkshire Hathaway Rupert Murdoch doesn't think he's too old so it isn't that surprising that a politician who is at the top of his game holding the most powerful job in the world one he's wanted since he's been in his 20s thinks he could keep doing it almost certainly Biden is looking at this and thinking I should never have stepped down I could have made it happen I don't think that's true the problem for Biden was he looked and felt and sounded old in the world of politics that all matters after the break Donald Trump is going to the White House this time with more experience and more leverage fared Zakaria tells us what that may look like I'm Steven Dubner this is free economics radio we will be right back one of Trump's biggest victories in his first term was appointing three conservative justices to the Supreme Court which led to the overturning of roie Wade in this election voters chose to protect abortion access in seven of the 10 states where it was on the ballot but on many other ballot measures Progressive causes failed California voters rejected rent control measures and minimum wage increases and they voted in favor of harsher penalties for theft and Drug offenses marijuana legalization failed in all three states where it was on the ballot and in Massachusetts a ballot measure to allow the legalization of some psychedelic drugs was defeated another big loser was ranked Choice voting even though many Americans express frustration with the two-party system ballot initiatives on rank Choice voting Andor open primaries failed in seven states although they did pass in Washington DC and in some other cities I asked fored Zakaria what he thinks about this rejection of ranked Choice voting I think our bitterly divided parties agree on one thing which is to maintain the two- party duopoly and to do everything they can to avoid any challenges to it rank Choice voting makes a lot of sense it just translates voters preferences more efficient i l and intelligently into the political system but until you get one of the parties to see an advantage to doing it and having one of the charismatic politicians explain it you're not going to get there so besides Donald Trump himself who do you see as the biggest winners in this election whether it's individuals constituencies Industries countries ideas who comes out winning the biggest winner in a sense is the idea of a new ideology focused on the closed agenda because it becomes clear that Trump is not a spasm it's not a one-hot thing that this is a deep enduring change the Republican party is now completely remade in personal terms JD Vance comes out of this the best because while a lot of politicians went along with Trump because of his success Vance is one of the very small number who is genuinely ideologically a believer in this kind of closed agenda now he has a slightly different version of it than Trump Vance in some ways represents the ideological underpinnings of Maga and so I suspect that Vance will take this opportunity to really lay out that idea and to purge the Republican Party of the remaining libertarian elements people look at him and say well he worked at a hedge fund so he must be Pro markets he's certainly a capitalist but I think he's a very particular kind of capitalist he really is in favor of massive industrial policy he's in favor of much less trade and much more targeted trade he's in favor of Lena Khan the Biden Administration official who is basically anti- big Tech anti- mergers the second Trump term looks like it will be quite different from the first Trump term in a number of ways including probably a much quicker and smoother transition he's used to to the way things work he's also laid down more of a wish list that might be more concrete this time around so how do you see the Republicans planning their legislative priorities for the first year there's plainly too much to take on all at once so if you look at the broader menu tax cuts immigration reform perhaps repealing the inflation reduction act or the chips act what do you see as the first moves there's one whole basket of things which is about reducing the power of the deep State there's a much deeper anti establishment impulse that these last few elections have shown that I think they understand and they're going to act on if you think about it over the last 20 years the politics of the era has been dominated by two Outsiders Donald Trump and Barack Obama that's not an accident I think that's all a legacy of 08 and the Iraq War then you get to the core promises that were made the economic agenda is really the most difficult because Trump has said he's going to extend his tax cut Cuts he's got a bunch of new promises the central one of which is no taxation of social security income now if you take the first one the extension of the Trump tax cut that's $2.5 trillion when you say extension this is a 2017 it would just remove the suns setting it would continue it not necessarily amplify correct correct but in budgetary terms the Assumption has been that it sunset so if you think about budget projections that is an additional $2.5 trillion of lost Revenue then you have no taxing of Social Security which is an additional $2.5 trillion of lost Revenue you're adding 5 trillion dollar to the debt those two things alone are just so big in budgetary terms that the question will be will Senate Republicans go along with that how would the markets react if they were to do something like that and you haven't even brought up tariffs yet which most economic minded people think will not accomplish what it's meant to accomplish I agree though I don't think it produces a short-term crisis look I'm very much a free Trader I think it's a bad idea and I think it takes the world down a bad path of mercantilism and protectionism but it's not going to produce a huge crisis look 85% of the American economy is a domestic economy we are one of the countries in the world that could survive a higher tariff World Europe gets really screwed ironically us and China probably can survive this kind of a world a lot of people although they're mostly academics and good government Watchdogs they've been concerned for years about what they call government capture Industries and firms and lobbies having too much leverage over government even the regulatory bodies of government I mean if you look at private Equity the government's rules have essentially been written by the industry thanks to the revolving door between industry and government now we've got Elon Musk who helped Trump win the election and plainly has his ear and musk has a whole lot of business that could benefit from looser regulations with Tesla SpaceX even X the former Twitter so how do you see the relationship between government and Commerce in this upcoming Trump Administration you can see it in what happened a day after the election results became clear you got a flurry of tweets from every major CEO in America every major Tech CEO every Bank CEO faing over Trump congratulating him and telling him how much they wanted to work well with him I think that this is a very sad development that's happened it's not entirely because of trump but we have politicized the economy in America all this industrial policy these tariffs these bans what that does is it suddenly makes Washington a very crucial Arbiter to the success of business you add to it Trump who personally loves the idea of finding caterpillar for doing this and harleydavidson for doing that and Chase for doing he views it as his job as president to literally Dole out rewards and punishments to companies depending on whether they do what he regards as the right thing or the wrong thing it's deeply saddening to me as somebody who grew up in India where you know this is business as usual every business had to slavishly bander to whoever the prime minister at the time was and you see it in musk Tesla stalk in the two days after Trump won was up 20% or something like that adding tens of billions of dollars to Elon musk's net worth nothing fundamental in the economics had changed for Tesla there was just an expectation now that he was a friend of Trump's that he was going to somehow be showered with Federal laress you know there's a guy in India called adani who's modi's best friend and his stocks trade at multiples 10 times that of every other Indian company because everyone assumes that at the end of the day being most 's best friend is worth a100 billion or something like that it's probably a pretty safe assumption it's a safe assumption in India what's tragic is it might even be a safe assumption in America but it's not what the American economy was supposed to be about and I think it's a very sad Trend what do you think immigration itself and immigration policy looks like in the next year or two I think you're going to see a very severe Crackdown on immigration in every form I think you're going to see a shutdown of the Asylum policy I think Trump might even invoke National Security so that it gets through the courts and they'll just shut the border some kind of massive immigration reform I think is unlikely it's a very complicated issue in which everybody has different objections to different problems Trump doesn't seem to enjoy doing big compromise legislation it's politically unsatisfying so what he's going to end up just trying to do is the Border stuff and shut it down the deportations are the most interesting issues his people like Vance and V ramaswami have even said we were going to deport 24 million people if you start to try to do that the scale of it is so breathtaking the use of police power you would need is so large and the economic effects would be so negative that you wonder whether Trump will do it because he doesn't like bad headlines all his Wall Street friends whom he still talks to and admires are going to tell him this is bad this is one of the tightest labor markets in 50 years even deporting 2 or 3 million people would probably Spike inflation it would probably cause enormous economic dislocation to me that's going to be the bright line he has promised this is not Vance this is not ramaswami he has promised the largest deportation in American history he's going to have to do something big one could imagine that he could pick a place let's say it's New York or California places that voted against him and say okay let's start New York York City and let's send in the military and let's Deport everyone that's not here legally how would you see that playing out let's say that you know armed forces are sent to New York City what options would the mayor have what options would the governor have we haven't been in this situation since the late 50s and the early 60s when Governors like George Wallace would talk about interposition and nullification essentially saying that the states had the ability or the authority to resist federal police power I think it would be very hard to resist Federal Authority on this the Civil Rights era settled that issue the federal government does Trump the states the challenge remains it is hugely economically disruptive so even if you pick New York and California remember these are the two most vibrant economic centers of the country and it's going to have a spill over economically tell me what you think the second Trump Administration looks like it strikes me that there is a totally different vibe around the incoming Administration than there was in 2016 the shock was much greater back then one of the biggest complaints was that the administration was just not professionally run that Trump didn't act like a president which maybe some of his supporters like but most of his staff did not like it was just chaotic and there was all kinds of infighting and firings and just a lack of ability to move the Machinery in Washington I wonder if you think it'll be substantially different this time the first term was unusual in that first he didn't expect expect to win they come to it very quickly without a lot of planning he makes two or three decisions one is to go along with the Republican establishment in many ways so the legislative priorities were largely those that were outlined by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and what were those that was to prioritize tax cuts and repeal Obamacare over things like infrastructure which Trump had been more in favor of the second is to use the Republican establishment to staff the administration if you remember his first chief of staff was Rance Prius the chairman of the RNC who he barely knew and finally you notice he loved generals and so he appointed lots of generals so I suspect all three of those things are not going to happen anymore the priorities are going to be determined by Trump and his hardcore group of advisers they are not going to rely on the Republican establishment very much and he doesn't like generals anymore because he realized that the generals push came to shove were more more loyal to the Constitution than to him personally and for Trump nothing is worse than disloyalty so I think what you're going to see is a much more intense ideological vetting and personal loyalty test do you see this being in some ways a more typical Administration or do you see Trump believing he has a mandate to do exactly what Trump wants to do will be even more unorthodox I suspect it'll run better A lot of the tension came from Trump giving orders that people would try to undermine because they disagreed with them my guess is he's going to have people around him who agree with him more who will willingly carry out those orders I mean he's always run a small mom and pop real estate operation and he approaches everything like that so that he can change his mind and he can go off script I don't think that's going to change that much Donald Trump especially when he's campaigning says a lot of things that he later says he didn't really mean this is part of what he calls his weave part insult comedy part bragado doio part old-fashioned sloganeering it all adds up to a highly unpredictable mode of communication so how will this kind of communication go over on the global stage in Donald Trump's second term if the US walks away and disengages from the world we will quite possibly return to a world of real politic and the law of the Jungle I'm Steven Dubner this is free economics radio we're speaking with fared Zakaria and we'll be right back so far we've been speaking with fared Zakaria mostly about the election outcomes and what a second Trump term might mean domestically but zakaria's deepest expertise is geopolitics in in a recent Washington Post column he argued that the world is facing quote the most dangerous moment since the Cold War as tensions spiral in the Middle East he writes keep in mind that this is only one of three Arenas in the world where revisionists are trying to upend the international order in Europe a war continues to rage and in Asia a perilous new Dynamic is at work so I asked Zakaria why he sees so much danger in this moment and how Donald Trump May intersect with that danger if you step back the world we've lived in for the last 75 years is a world system that was largely created by the United States after 1945 and it has as the institutional architecture of it the UN and the World Bank and the IMF but what really is is a kind of open world economy rules-based system some concern to Norms like acquisition of territory by force and largely speaking these Norms have held there aren't a lot of cases of aggression in which land was acquired absorbed into a new country and it was ratified by international law if you look before 1945 that happened every year so it's a world that is distinctly different from the one we've lived in for many many centuries it's largely the creation of the United States it's one that has produced peace and prosperity on a scale unimaginable I think and it is now threatened because of in some sense waning American power and waning American willingness to be the underwriter of this world and so you see Russia mounting a classic military aggression in Europe you see Iran in its own way trying through asymmetrical means using all these militia groups to upend the security system there that is largely American created with you know the moderate Arabs and is playing the role of regional policemen and in Asia China slowly but steadily trying to replace the United States as the dominant power now Trump will react to each one of them in an ad hoc manner in some ways perfectly fine and other ways probably not but what I worry about is that he doesn't understand the larger picture which is that the United States really has created a new world that that world has been largely beneficial to the United States and enormously beneficial to the rest of the world and that there are huge Stakes here that if the US walks away and disengages from the world and Retreats to isolationism nobody can fill that role and that this world is not natural and self- sustaining and that we will quite possibly return to a kind of 19th century world of real politic and the law of the Jungle that's not in America's interest and that's not in the world's interest I don't think Trump hears the music on that because from his first full page ad in the New York Times times when he was a real estate developer he was just berading the Japanese for taking advantage of economically berading the Europeans for free writing on American Security he's always looked at that world and said all our allies are ripping us off so if he brings to it that mentality I worry that we're in a situation where this whole world order can unravel very quickly let's go through some countries one at a time let's start with Russia a big one a problematic one one in a war right now with Ukraine we've learned about Trump having several private phone calls with Putin since leaving office it's also been reported in the Wall Street Journal that Elon Musk a trump Ally has also been in regular contact with Putin How do you see the shape of the US Russia relationship moving in the next year or two clearly Trump has a soft spot for Putin I think it's probably just he likes strong men he admires what Putin has done and what worries me about that is not that he'll try to do a deal on the Ukrainian War I think there's a deal to be had I think it is time to find a way to end the hostilities the problem is the easiest way to do that would be to force Ukraine to accept Russia's terms and therefore effectively lose its independence and so Trump could easily go to zalinski and say look here are my terms which are you know not that different from Putin's terms you accept these or we stop sending you weapons it's very difficult to see how zalinski can resist American pressure and so what you end up with then is a morally bankrupt piece which is really just a Ukrainian and Western surrender to Russia Putin is able to be victorious that Norm of no aggression is destroyed but more importantly it still leaves Europe deeply unstable because all the countries around Ukraine are going to be scared and nervous and insecure and Ukraine is itself will largely implode Because unless you have a security guarantee that comes along with the end of the war the Russians are just going to wait and even if they don't come back in they will be able to exercise leverage by wielding that threat so Ukraine becomes a basket case Eastern Europe becomes insecure it's a terrible idea and the most worrying part about it is JD Vance outlined a version of a peace deal it was essentially Putin's peace deal it was in fact a version of the deal Putin has put on the table in quote unquote peace negotiations in Turkey let's move to the sight of a couple other Wars Israel is still fighting a war in Gaza fighting kind of a war in southern Lebanon how does a trump election change those Wars but especially the relationship with BB Netanyahu and Israel generally the truth is the Biden Administration has been so supportive of Israel and so supportive broadly speaking of BB Netanyahu that there isn't going to be that much difference there isn't that much more that Trump can do the Biden people tried to restrain Netanyahu in the manner in which he conducted the war in Gaza you know don't go into certain civilian areas make sure you have provided for humanitarian assistance and Tents when you displace people but those were things you know kind of on the margins of the fundamental issues people say Trump will give a green light but what would that mean well Trump has said he wants to make rescuing the Israeli hostages a priority for instance so theoretically that could lead to a different phase of the war in Gaza ironically the big obstacle to that has been bib Netanyahu all the people I've talked to who've been involved in these negotiations including the Karis who have been brokering them say that the big obstacle initially was Hamas but then Hamas came to agree to certain terms and then BB netan didn't want to agree to those terms because those terms would have probably enraged the two members of his government who are on the far right and his government might have had to collapse and everything I read is that Netanyahu is Prosecuting the war in this direction mostly out of self-preservation do you buy that I think I bought it initially I think he has maneuvered so well and gotten lucky in Lebanon at this point his poll numbers look very good he's probably in a situation where he could actually even go to the polls and win Donald Trump will certainly give BB Netanyahu a green light to do whatever he wants to do in Gaza but honestly there isn't that much more to do 75% of Gaza has been destroyed Hamas leaders have been killed hamas's infrastructure has been decimated the interesting continuity you're going to see which I think is one that Biden and Trump have both been comfortable with is what Israel is doing in the north the war against Hezbollah and the attacks on Iran and there I think the Israelis have very shrewdly and effectively reest established deterrence they were in a circumstance where Hezbollah was launching rockets at them Israeli citizens had to flee Northern Israel they worried about Iran unleashing its missiles and what the Israelis decided to do was to take this moment and really push back and what they found was Hezbollah was a paper tiger Iran was a paper tiger that Israel is much much more powerful than both of them I think it's actually been a force for stability the Biden admin ation has supported it the Trump Administration will support it so I think what's going on in the north is very different from the issue of Gaza which is more about what Israel does with the occupied territories is there any possibility Palestinians get political rights that's almost a separate issue but in the north just from a regional stability point of view I actually think what Israel has done has been remarkably effective last time we spoke I remember you talking about Iran maybe not necessarily as a paper tiger per se but is certainly less wealthy less influential than it likes to present itself as on the other hand in the last few months I've been reading about how much money Iran has been making by selling oil to China for instance and other ways so it seems like they are at least very well dug in to sustain the status quo for a long time unless there's unrest from within or from outside so Trump says that he'd like to exert what he calls maximum pressure on Iran I also have read that Iranian agents reportedly tried to assassinate Trump and given how any of us might respond to that you can imagine there's a little bit of personal thinking going on there so how aggressive do you think Trump is willing to be with both Iran as a potential nuclear power itself Iran is a spreader of terrorism through all these proxy groups that you've been naming and some others militias and Syria and Iraq and so on so Trump talks about a maximum pressure campaign on Iran but the truth is the United States has had a maximum pressure campaign on Iran for 35 years Iran is under crippling sanctions you can tell how badly Iran is doing when you notice that a year ago the president of Iran and the foreign minister died in a helicopter crash because they were flying in a 1979 American Bell Helicopter for which they didn't have spare parts or maintenance that is the military hardware being used by the president of the country imagine what the average Soldier has Iran's formal budget which I believe is inflated because they want to buff their chests up I think the Israeli defense budget is three times the size of Iran's budget yes Iran is an oil exporting country and as we learned with Russia they're never going to go bankrupt because the world needs oil but they are massively dysfunctional corrupt if you look at their Armed Forces they've been unable to achieve anything of any significance so I think that Iran is very much on the defensive and these latest Israeli strikes have rendered them completely defenseless literally because what Israel did was they took out all their air defenses Iran's in a very weak position the question that Trump will face I think if he was to think about this seriously is do you want regime change in Iran do you want to push for some kind of internal revolt and Revolution we've tried that before we've tried that before we also know that regime change in the Middle East does not end well think of Iraq think of Libya think of Syria these things are massively disruptive chaotic bloody and often end up with results that are worse than what you started with so I would caution against trying to do something like that partly because Iran is an oil rich country the regime has plenty of means of repression to stay in power if you don't want to do that to me the intelligent way to think about Iran is keep the pressure on but also think about what incentives are you giving them for changes in Behavior if you put a country in a box where the four walls are so tight and there's no door out it has no incentive to change its behavior I'm not saying Iran would but I'm saying any serious strategy has to have lots of sticks but also a few carrots and at this point I don't see where Iran is supposed to go let's move to China what should we expect now with Trump as president especially given the pretty interesting relationship he had with she in his first term Trump will almost certainly try to do something with China on tariffs he's always viewed it as an economic Predator state that takes advantage of America some of what he says is true China would probably be more than happy to work out some deal he and she were able to have those kind of conversations the Chinese like managed trade they like the idea that they can cut some kind of bilateral deal in which they reduce some of their obstacles and return it's difficult to tell with Trump how ideologically committed he is to a tough stance on China I suspect that you're going to see a more workable relationship with China Than People imagine just listening to his ideology that's because he's practical he listens to businessmen and don't forget the central role of Elon Musk here musk has really become such a central figure in the Trump World and Elon Musk needs the Chinese market for Tesla to succeed in becoming the most important car company in the world the way things stand now they're all kinds of restrictions on what Tesla can do in China my guess is musk is going to try to be a kind of intermediary between the US and China and who knows he might succeed with Trump these things are so transactional there's so much personality involved it is possible to imagine that us China relations under Trump are actually less hostile than they were under Joe Biden so let me ask you there are a lot of people who voted Dem rat this time around and are very frustrated some of them are frightened a lot bitter I've read reports about how many people are planning or hoping to leave the US for Canada and other places of course you read that same story every time there's an election especially when there's a Conservative Republican elected if you could take a step back for people who didn't vote for Trump who don't like uh Republican consensus in Washington what do you say to that population how do you see the next few years playing out I think when you have a high Stak election where you have somebody who is very much out of the traditional mainstream getting elected it's understandable that there is a kind of reaction it's almost like a flight from reality it's a desire to just avoid all that to watch an old movie to get away from it all to seek solace in your private life and I understand that reaction I think first of all it's not going to be as bad as people think in the sense that this is a country with a lot of checks and balances you have three branches of government I understand they're all under Republican control but you know Mitch McConnell is not the same as Donald Trump secondly you have institutions you have bureaucracies you have laws you have rules these can't all just be willy-nilly dispensed with you have courts you have States many of them Democratic states and by the way even some Republican states that are not going to easily accept everything and anything and most of the things that you live with on a day-to-day basis are determined at the state level so Robert Kennedy might advise states to get rid of the fluoride in their water systems he can't force New York City to take the fluoride out of its water system there are many many more layers and checks and balances and there will be a back and forth but the biggest thing is you can't take the attitude that you're going to abandon the country every time things don't go your way like Biden said you can't love your country only when you win but it's more than that you have to be willing to stay and participate and engage in Civic terms and fight the good fight for the things you believe in and oppose the things you don't believe in because that's what makes democracy work in a sense loving your country and believing in it and wanting all these good things for it mean that even more so when things they haven't gone your way in one election you have to stay to try to help keep the things you believe even alive I certainly have never you're not moving to Canada I've never entertained those kind of fantasies first of all I'm an immigrant I made my choice techly with all its flaws with all the problems the United States is the most amazing country in the world I mean it's economically the most dynamic it's socially the most open it's an amazing place you're not going to keep it amazing and you're not going to allow it to continue to maintain this kind of exceptional quality it has if you leave or even if you Retreat into private life you have to stay engaged that was fared Zakaria you can find him on CNN his show is called GPS his most recent book is the age of revolutions and I'd like to thank him for this conversation it's hard to think of any topic that's gotten more coverage than this year's election but I still walked away Having learned a lot from fared if you feel the same way or if you didn't let us know our email is radi freecomic and we love feedback also a reminder to come see Freakonomics radio live in San Francisco on January 3rd and in Los Angeles on February 13th for tickets go to freecomic shows meanwhile coming up next time here on Freakonomics radio there is an annual event that is deeply beloved that is witnessed in person by 3 million people and by many millions more on TV it's an event that has become part of the fabric of America I'm talking about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and we got to wondering how much it costs why do I need to know how much Li can cost to produce we don't really get into the cost I can't tell you that that's oh like can't say how much they pay could try we tried to answer the question anyway the cost of the parade and how much it earns from that massive TV viewership we also got to wondering if with traditional retail continuing to shrink if maybe the Macy's Parade is more valuable than Macy's unfortunately Macy's doesn't stand for anything today it's a first in a two-part series called can the Macy's Parade save Macy's that's next time on the show until then take care of yourself and if you can someone else too Freakonomics radio is produced by Stitcher and renb radio you can find our entire archive on any podcast app also at freecomic where we publish transcripts and show notes this episode was produced by Teo Jacobs our staff also includes Elina colan Augusta Chapman Dalvin abagi Elanor Osborne Ellen frankman Elsa Hernandez Gabriel Roth Greg rippen Jasmine kinger Jason Gambrell Jeremy Johnston John schnars L bouic Morgan Levy Neil kth Rebecca Lee Douglas Sarah Lily 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