Donald Trump believes that U.S. economic and military might are all he needs to become a benign dictator and achieve unilateral control over America's allies — what will the effects of this policy be?
Couldn't listen to the whole thing, too late. However I saw Mearsheimer just recently on another show and he stated that Trump's agenda was to get along with China and Russia, while too hell with NATO, so I'm a bit confused. He is the one who wanted to get along with Russia during his first term, while the democrats pushed the lie of Russia-gate to undermine him. The neocons in the Biden administration had a different agenda for Russia which I believe started with the coup in Ukraine.. Does he suggest that in his talk with Hedges? I thought during his first term it was a relief that there were no new wars, although he certainly did things I thought were stupid and unhelpful. Stabbing Iran in the back has been on our agenda for decades, and it is Israel who is motivating that now more then anyone, and not to mention the toe hold they have on our political system. I'll listen to the whole thing tomorrow.
Thanks, Mr Hedges, great interview. You guys take a clear-eyed view of the absolutely horrific potential disasters confronting us, but just because of the clarity of your vision, I feel better. The dangers inspire fear; the clear-eyed looking them in the face reduces the fear.
Gentlemen, have you discounted the role FDR and his New Deal reforms played in breaking the back of our first Gilded Age, lifting up and defending labor, thus preventing revolution? FDR realized he had to betray his own class in order to save the country. Trump has nowhere the political skills of a Roosevelt, and that profound an insight is beyond him.
FDR's character was tempered and shaped by the Republican (Great) Depression, World War II, and his physical disability. Trump's character was tempered and shaped by double-dealing, branding, and exploitation. FDR was capable of profound insight, honesty, and compassion. Trump has shown he's incapable of anything other than self-adoration and self-enrichment.
The wealth gap in America is greater today than it was in the Gilded Age, and it's growing wider. At some point populist pressure will increase to the point that the wealth disparity becomes unsustainable. You can't go on forever with hundreds of billionaires coexisting with millions of people, more every day, who don't know how they're going to make it to their next paycheck. I wonder sometimes if ICE and the concentration camps will turn out be more of a wealth defense industry designed to deal with desperate angry mobs of people who can't afford to live, rather than an immigration and customs enforcement industry.
Great it’s like a weatherman looking at a world map and there’s storms brewing everywhere.
I’d like to know more about Mamdami and Trump followers being similar - there’s economic resentment but one wants to work together and the other employ Gestapo? Ugh dark times.
JUst a guess, but I see two differences. Mamdani's people are big city folk and younger than many in the Trump camp. There, I suspect you find older white men, rural folk and the under educated....more religiously alike, more white, rural......traditional.
New York is a great melting pot.........and in an article I read recently, his Communications director actually argued Mamdani's support for Palestine helped him. People who had never voted could see it was a genocide and decided a politician brave enough to say so, was likely an honest man.
I doubt that would be the case to the same extent in small town America.
John Mearsheimer is a brilliant, articulate, intelligent, insightful analyzer of international affairs who regularly provides insights about what is happening in the world, who I have listened to many times with great enjoyment and delight. He should be Secretary of State instead of Marco Rubio, which would result in a more peaceful, better world!
"Fascism is always the product of bankrupt liberalism."
Liberalism in America was bankrupted when the Democratic Party started suckling at the super PAC teat. The DNC rationalized it by contending that it was the only way they could compete with the Republican Party. After all, the Democrat's primary source of campaign contributions, organized labor, had been decimated. Therein lies the bankruptcy. The party sold out American workers. Rather than fight for them and their jobs, rather than fight for the welfare of American workers, they took super PAC political "donations" and provided for the welfare of corporations instead.
Every Democrat who refuses super PAC money is a crusader for ordinary Americans. Every Democrat who accepts super PAC money is a crusader for corporate hegemony, shares in the guilt for bankrupting liberalism, and shares in the guilt for the rise of fascism in America.
Every party and most corporations sold out AMerican workers when they moved their factories to places where workers could be more easily exploited. Americans forget why Steve Jobs and his type left America for China, Bangledesh, India etc. etc.
Consumers forget why the crap they buy is so cheap..........nor do most of them care who gets starvation wages so they can have those 'smart' phones cheap.
My understanding is that Taiwan had been part and parcel of China for four hundred years, and that the communists were prevented from reabsorbing Taiwan after their victory in the civil war mid 20th century by the entrance of the US Navy into the Straight, blocking the mainland from the island.
Do we really and truly want to continue our intervention in the Chinese civil war, and prevent the mainland from tying up the very last loose end of that conflict? Do we actually think we can prevail against a country possessing three times the manufacturing base and ten to twenty times the ship building base as we do, in a conflict six thousand miles from our shores?
I think we ought to let the Chinese solve their own problems their own way, using whatever good offices we retain to urge a peaceful resolution. Yes, it may get ugly, but we Americans have done plenty of ugly things in the Third World over decades past, using the president’s private army, the CIA.
You know, if reunification knocks us back a peg or two, maybe that’s just too damn bad. Our power is limited, and that would be a conflict we would resoundingly lose. Time to pick and choose our battles.
My intuition tells me that decisions concerning the battles we pick and choose are made in the boardrooms of military industrial complex corporations, among others. Perhaps I'm overly cynical.
No, you are not overly cynical. The expansion of NATO was supported politically by defense industries who made a ton of money as the countries entering NATO upgraded their militaries to NATO standards. I don’t trust the five big defense contractors at all. Neither would President Eisenhower have trusted them.
Who knows? It might even be time to stop looking for battles period.
Watching some 'progressive' American tv channels now..........My Canadian sensibilities continue to be amazed by how Americans can turn on a dime from damning Trump for his attacks in the Caribbean, and then off handedly say "everyone knows Maduro was a bad man", or "Maduro is a thug"...........
Both statements being utter none sense........more indicative of the American assumption you can intervene anywhere knowing best as you do........than any sound knowledge or research. Maduro won the election of 2018, by over 60% of the vote. Observers say he squeaked through with around 52% in 2024
Americans may have grown up learning to bash 'communism' wherever a country wants to run its own affairs........but the rest of the world knows better. It might be a good thing if you did go for America first for a decade or three and let the rest of the world mind its own business.
AND YES....Taiwan traditionally belongs to China....but whatever happens there, isn't up to Americans. Being the most powerful country on earth means you could do a great deal of good.......if you stopped imagining there's only one way to peel an orange....or run a country....and tried cooperation rather than bellicose competition all the time.
I don't think so. My experience with Mearsheimer is he's a rationalist........its pretty easy to see how America needs an enemy to keep its people in line. They always pick that enemy from their chief competitor..........ideological or marketeer.
Imagining Cooperation between the nations...what we're going to need to turn the global warming danger around.........seems to be beyond American exceptionalism. In your country....everything is a contest that must have winners and losers.
In our family we call the winners of our board games and such weiners. Just to keep them from believing they've ganined any status in the competitive ideology killing so much of the living world.
That's not how I read him. I hear him painting the Big Picture of America's foreign policy...having been at his game for years, he's 78, he's seen the pattern in America's search for an enemy.........and that search is usually either market competition based, or ideological.
Heaven forbid any country should contemplate investing in their people instead of American corporations that extract value for America. China is doing very well economically....she's also helping other countries. That scares the pants off American warmongers.
American governments always see success for others as a threat to them. Competition works like that.
Hilarious LO.............in one line you imagine you've shot down an academic with a lifetime of research behind him.............but news flash: thinkers don't come in 'colours'..........that's ideological fantasy at its finest.
Professor John Mearsheimer and Chris Hedges have been my heroes for a long time, exemplifying individuals who stand for truth despite opposition from powerful, profit driven forces.
In particular the closing remarks, which echoed the question that has been paramount in mind for the past year: what might (soonest) change the course of the current trajectory?
And the answer being economic de-stabilization.
The question following that one then remaining: "What direction will result from the overall reaction of the American public, further to the right, or a change to the direction of the left?"
I got your substack comment, but for some reason, couldn't reply there....but thanks for your complements.......I love Mearsheimer......he's so rational and impartial.
We listened to this discussion last night and were very impressed.....it is refreshing to hear views on Trump's policies that are measured, and at the same time ask us to imagine what many find intolerable........that just maybe, NATO will be destroyed by the very power that has used it to such great effect in asserting American dominance.
I've never believed Russia was the threat Americans had to believe it was........it runs counter to so much evidence on the ground. I still can't believe that Europe is going to further bankrupt itself by pretending 1. Russia isn't winning that war or 2. That Russia intends to invade Europe.
There's so much conspiracy fiction thinking in the world just now, its refreshing to listen to two people discuss the reality of our situation....which is dire enough without the hysteria.
On China and her rise. Is it absolutely necessary to get into another cold war competition over that? Or might it be time for America to learn to run her country better and stop imagining she can fix whatever she thinks is wrong in Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, or south east Asia??
Given the reality of climate change........doesn't the human race have a comment enemy now, and all we can handle getting our own world destroyers in line???
We aren't far from that come to Jesus moment where economic disaster forces us down a certain direction. Neither the leftists nor the rightists can be the answer. It took China after Mao many years to understand that and to synthesize an entirely new state guided market economy that benefits its people despite certain weaknesses. We have a lot of catching up to do in terms of creating equitable economic growth but unlike China we have inferior minds to do it.
Maybe it’s time to start prosecuting from the bottom up? That’s how we proceeded when I was a middle school guidance counselor, responsible for investigating incidents of HIB (harassment, intimidation, bullying). Outcomes were best when we focused on the underlings instead of the kingpins. It didn’t take long for the house of cards to collapse.
I’ve learned of an additional option: State-level criminal charges for “Misprision of Treason.” 47 can’t pardon state-level charges (even for Miller, Wiles, Hegseth, etc.) and they don’t have 47’s presidential immunity.
“Anyone with knowledge of treason who fails to report it can be charged with misprision of treason, punishable by up to seven years in prison.”
This criminal charge applies to misprision of treason at the state OR federal level. You DO NOT have to be a resident of those states to file formal complaints. I urge readers to consider contacting the following Attorneys General immediately. They need to take action while we still can.
Virginia (§ 18.2-482): Class 6 felony for failing to report known treason within a reasonable time. Email: mailoag@oag.state.va.us
Rhode Island (11-43-3): Explicitly prohibits the misprision of treason: ag@riag.ri.gov
This was a fascinating discussion, and I have wondered how European countries could commit economic suicide as they have done. There is so much in this meeting of two brilliant thinkers that I will have to watch it again to fully absorb it.
Barbara Tuchman wrote The Guns of August before German historians unearthed previously-unknown primary source evidence that Helmuth von Moltke, Germany's Chief of the General Staff between 1906 and 1914 and others in the high command, desired preemptive war with Russia.
Why? Because Germany, being largely shut out of the race for overseas colonies, sought to expand territorially to the East. It was feared that if Russia was not decisively defeated in the 1910s, it would become too strong to beat. But Germany needed the right pretext, which became the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The plan was for Austria-Hungary to quickly deliver a knock out blow to Serbia, thereby solving the problem of Slavic nationalism threatening the empire, and then join Germany in the fight against Russia.
But Austria both moved too slow and was actually given a blood nose by the Serbs, as you pointed out, Chris. The delay gave the conflict time to spin into a much larger war von Moltke et al didn't want but were prepared to fight via von Schlieffen's memorandum (not a fully developed operational plan) addressing the contingency.
The main secondary sources for this are Anna Mombauer's Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War and David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?
Trump is indifferent to whether he is a benign dictator. He simply wants to be a dictator.
Couldn't listen to the whole thing, too late. However I saw Mearsheimer just recently on another show and he stated that Trump's agenda was to get along with China and Russia, while too hell with NATO, so I'm a bit confused. He is the one who wanted to get along with Russia during his first term, while the democrats pushed the lie of Russia-gate to undermine him. The neocons in the Biden administration had a different agenda for Russia which I believe started with the coup in Ukraine.. Does he suggest that in his talk with Hedges? I thought during his first term it was a relief that there were no new wars, although he certainly did things I thought were stupid and unhelpful. Stabbing Iran in the back has been on our agenda for decades, and it is Israel who is motivating that now more then anyone, and not to mention the toe hold they have on our political system. I'll listen to the whole thing tomorrow.
I agree Trump wants to be a dictator and add he is placing himself as dictator in order to plunder and dominate.
Thanks, Mr Hedges, great interview. You guys take a clear-eyed view of the absolutely horrific potential disasters confronting us, but just because of the clarity of your vision, I feel better. The dangers inspire fear; the clear-eyed looking them in the face reduces the fear.
Exactly how we felt listening last night.....there is a calming effect to real clarity, regardless of the situation you might be facing.
Gentlemen, have you discounted the role FDR and his New Deal reforms played in breaking the back of our first Gilded Age, lifting up and defending labor, thus preventing revolution? FDR realized he had to betray his own class in order to save the country. Trump has nowhere the political skills of a Roosevelt, and that profound an insight is beyond him.
FDR's character was tempered and shaped by the Republican (Great) Depression, World War II, and his physical disability. Trump's character was tempered and shaped by double-dealing, branding, and exploitation. FDR was capable of profound insight, honesty, and compassion. Trump has shown he's incapable of anything other than self-adoration and self-enrichment.
The wealth gap in America is greater today than it was in the Gilded Age, and it's growing wider. At some point populist pressure will increase to the point that the wealth disparity becomes unsustainable. You can't go on forever with hundreds of billionaires coexisting with millions of people, more every day, who don't know how they're going to make it to their next paycheck. I wonder sometimes if ICE and the concentration camps will turn out be more of a wealth defense industry designed to deal with desperate angry mobs of people who can't afford to live, rather than an immigration and customs enforcement industry.
We fear that as well.
Great it’s like a weatherman looking at a world map and there’s storms brewing everywhere.
I’d like to know more about Mamdami and Trump followers being similar - there’s economic resentment but one wants to work together and the other employ Gestapo? Ugh dark times.
JUst a guess, but I see two differences. Mamdani's people are big city folk and younger than many in the Trump camp. There, I suspect you find older white men, rural folk and the under educated....more religiously alike, more white, rural......traditional.
New York is a great melting pot.........and in an article I read recently, his Communications director actually argued Mamdani's support for Palestine helped him. People who had never voted could see it was a genocide and decided a politician brave enough to say so, was likely an honest man.
I doubt that would be the case to the same extent in small town America.
John Mearsheimer is a brilliant, articulate, intelligent, insightful analyzer of international affairs who regularly provides insights about what is happening in the world, who I have listened to many times with great enjoyment and delight. He should be Secretary of State instead of Marco Rubio, which would result in a more peaceful, better world!
"Fascism is always the product of bankrupt liberalism."
Liberalism in America was bankrupted when the Democratic Party started suckling at the super PAC teat. The DNC rationalized it by contending that it was the only way they could compete with the Republican Party. After all, the Democrat's primary source of campaign contributions, organized labor, had been decimated. Therein lies the bankruptcy. The party sold out American workers. Rather than fight for them and their jobs, rather than fight for the welfare of American workers, they took super PAC political "donations" and provided for the welfare of corporations instead.
Every Democrat who refuses super PAC money is a crusader for ordinary Americans. Every Democrat who accepts super PAC money is a crusader for corporate hegemony, shares in the guilt for bankrupting liberalism, and shares in the guilt for the rise of fascism in America.
Every party and most corporations sold out AMerican workers when they moved their factories to places where workers could be more easily exploited. Americans forget why Steve Jobs and his type left America for China, Bangledesh, India etc. etc.
Consumers forget why the crap they buy is so cheap..........nor do most of them care who gets starvation wages so they can have those 'smart' phones cheap.
Mearsheimer is a US hegemonic warmonger setting his sites on China
My understanding is that Taiwan had been part and parcel of China for four hundred years, and that the communists were prevented from reabsorbing Taiwan after their victory in the civil war mid 20th century by the entrance of the US Navy into the Straight, blocking the mainland from the island.
Do we really and truly want to continue our intervention in the Chinese civil war, and prevent the mainland from tying up the very last loose end of that conflict? Do we actually think we can prevail against a country possessing three times the manufacturing base and ten to twenty times the ship building base as we do, in a conflict six thousand miles from our shores?
I think we ought to let the Chinese solve their own problems their own way, using whatever good offices we retain to urge a peaceful resolution. Yes, it may get ugly, but we Americans have done plenty of ugly things in the Third World over decades past, using the president’s private army, the CIA.
You know, if reunification knocks us back a peg or two, maybe that’s just too damn bad. Our power is limited, and that would be a conflict we would resoundingly lose. Time to pick and choose our battles.
My intuition tells me that decisions concerning the battles we pick and choose are made in the boardrooms of military industrial complex corporations, among others. Perhaps I'm overly cynical.
No, you are not overly cynical. The expansion of NATO was supported politically by defense industries who made a ton of money as the countries entering NATO upgraded their militaries to NATO standards. I don’t trust the five big defense contractors at all. Neither would President Eisenhower have trusted them.
Who knows? It might even be time to stop looking for battles period.
Watching some 'progressive' American tv channels now..........My Canadian sensibilities continue to be amazed by how Americans can turn on a dime from damning Trump for his attacks in the Caribbean, and then off handedly say "everyone knows Maduro was a bad man", or "Maduro is a thug"...........
Both statements being utter none sense........more indicative of the American assumption you can intervene anywhere knowing best as you do........than any sound knowledge or research. Maduro won the election of 2018, by over 60% of the vote. Observers say he squeaked through with around 52% in 2024
Americans may have grown up learning to bash 'communism' wherever a country wants to run its own affairs........but the rest of the world knows better. It might be a good thing if you did go for America first for a decade or three and let the rest of the world mind its own business.
AND YES....Taiwan traditionally belongs to China....but whatever happens there, isn't up to Americans. Being the most powerful country on earth means you could do a great deal of good.......if you stopped imagining there's only one way to peel an orange....or run a country....and tried cooperation rather than bellicose competition all the time.
I don't think so. My experience with Mearsheimer is he's a rationalist........its pretty easy to see how America needs an enemy to keep its people in line. They always pick that enemy from their chief competitor..........ideological or marketeer.
Imagining Cooperation between the nations...what we're going to need to turn the global warming danger around.........seems to be beyond American exceptionalism. In your country....everything is a contest that must have winners and losers.
In our family we call the winners of our board games and such weiners. Just to keep them from believing they've ganined any status in the competitive ideology killing so much of the living world.
And you are a person of little understanding.
And you perhaps someone who can't type.
I was not replying to you.
Sorry
That's not how I read him. I hear him painting the Big Picture of America's foreign policy...having been at his game for years, he's 78, he's seen the pattern in America's search for an enemy.........and that search is usually either market competition based, or ideological.
Heaven forbid any country should contemplate investing in their people instead of American corporations that extract value for America. China is doing very well economically....she's also helping other countries. That scares the pants off American warmongers.
American governments always see success for others as a threat to them. Competition works like that.
There was a debate between Jeffrey Sachs and Prof M… he showed his true colors
Hilarious LO.............in one line you imagine you've shot down an academic with a lifetime of research behind him.............but news flash: thinkers don't come in 'colours'..........that's ideological fantasy at its finest.
And we should NEVER forget that THE STATE is a COERCIVE monopoly entity.
It ultimately has the power that TRUMP demands in the first place except for prohibitions by the law / Constitution .
And citizens do NOT directly control that too.
State democracy has been NATIONALIZED up to congress.
We only get to vote in elections for WHO and generally not WHAT.
Legal changes
The new world order ?
Professor John Mearsheimer and Chris Hedges have been my heroes for a long time, exemplifying individuals who stand for truth despite opposition from powerful, profit driven forces.
Thank you again.
One of Chris Hedges' final comments: "Great."
It was.
In particular the closing remarks, which echoed the question that has been paramount in mind for the past year: what might (soonest) change the course of the current trajectory?
And the answer being economic de-stabilization.
The question following that one then remaining: "What direction will result from the overall reaction of the American public, further to the right, or a change to the direction of the left?"
I got your substack comment, but for some reason, couldn't reply there....but thanks for your complements.......I love Mearsheimer......he's so rational and impartial.
But then, I usually agree with him as well.
Be well.
We listened to this discussion last night and were very impressed.....it is refreshing to hear views on Trump's policies that are measured, and at the same time ask us to imagine what many find intolerable........that just maybe, NATO will be destroyed by the very power that has used it to such great effect in asserting American dominance.
I've never believed Russia was the threat Americans had to believe it was........it runs counter to so much evidence on the ground. I still can't believe that Europe is going to further bankrupt itself by pretending 1. Russia isn't winning that war or 2. That Russia intends to invade Europe.
There's so much conspiracy fiction thinking in the world just now, its refreshing to listen to two people discuss the reality of our situation....which is dire enough without the hysteria.
On China and her rise. Is it absolutely necessary to get into another cold war competition over that? Or might it be time for America to learn to run her country better and stop imagining she can fix whatever she thinks is wrong in Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, or south east Asia??
Given the reality of climate change........doesn't the human race have a comment enemy now, and all we can handle getting our own world destroyers in line???
I dont see any “backing down” from Trump that deserves a sense of relief. Why believe what a liar says who believes he can do anything he wants.
We aren't far from that come to Jesus moment where economic disaster forces us down a certain direction. Neither the leftists nor the rightists can be the answer. It took China after Mao many years to understand that and to synthesize an entirely new state guided market economy that benefits its people despite certain weaknesses. We have a lot of catching up to do in terms of creating equitable economic growth but unlike China we have inferior minds to do it.
Maybe it’s time to start prosecuting from the bottom up? That’s how we proceeded when I was a middle school guidance counselor, responsible for investigating incidents of HIB (harassment, intimidation, bullying). Outcomes were best when we focused on the underlings instead of the kingpins. It didn’t take long for the house of cards to collapse.
I’ve learned of an additional option: State-level criminal charges for “Misprision of Treason.” 47 can’t pardon state-level charges (even for Miller, Wiles, Hegseth, etc.) and they don’t have 47’s presidential immunity.
“Anyone with knowledge of treason who fails to report it can be charged with misprision of treason, punishable by up to seven years in prison.”
This criminal charge applies to misprision of treason at the state OR federal level. You DO NOT have to be a resident of those states to file formal complaints. I urge readers to consider contacting the following Attorneys General immediately. They need to take action while we still can.
Virginia (§ 18.2-482): Class 6 felony for failing to report known treason within a reasonable time. Email: mailoag@oag.state.va.us
Rhode Island (11-43-3): Explicitly prohibits the misprision of treason: ag@riag.ri.gov
Illinois: References misprision of treason in relation to state treason laws. No direct email address. Use this form. https://forms.illinoisattorneygeneral.gov/Forms/OAG_ContactUs
Additionally, federal law (18 U.S.C. § 2382) criminalizes the misprision of treason against the United States.
(The following states have Misprision of Treason laws but red leadership)
Louisiana (La. R.S. 14:114): Defines it as the concealment or failure to disclose treason, punishable by up to 10 years at hard labor.
Florida (876.33): Defines it as a third-degree felony to conceal treason and fail to report it to the Governor or a judge.
Nevada (NRS 196.030): Category C felony for concealing knowledge of treason.
Law is meaningless. Enforcement is the only thing that matters.
This was a fascinating discussion, and I have wondered how European countries could commit economic suicide as they have done. There is so much in this meeting of two brilliant thinkers that I will have to watch it again to fully absorb it.
Barbara Tuchman wrote The Guns of August before German historians unearthed previously-unknown primary source evidence that Helmuth von Moltke, Germany's Chief of the General Staff between 1906 and 1914 and others in the high command, desired preemptive war with Russia.
Why? Because Germany, being largely shut out of the race for overseas colonies, sought to expand territorially to the East. It was feared that if Russia was not decisively defeated in the 1910s, it would become too strong to beat. But Germany needed the right pretext, which became the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The plan was for Austria-Hungary to quickly deliver a knock out blow to Serbia, thereby solving the problem of Slavic nationalism threatening the empire, and then join Germany in the fight against Russia.
But Austria both moved too slow and was actually given a blood nose by the Serbs, as you pointed out, Chris. The delay gave the conflict time to spin into a much larger war von Moltke et al didn't want but were prepared to fight via von Schlieffen's memorandum (not a fully developed operational plan) addressing the contingency.
The main secondary sources for this are Anna Mombauer's Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War and David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?