President Trump appears ready to cut a deal that could end Russia’s war in Ukraine without ever consulting Ukraine. In this episode, the deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy talks to the Opinion columnist Tom Friedman about Trump’s unpredictable approach to foreign policy.
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Patrick Healy: This is “The First 100 Days,” a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America.
I wanted to talk to Tom Friedman this week because we seem to be on the cusp of a major international realignment. Secretary of State Marco Rubio just met his Russian counterpart to talk about ending the war in Ukraine without Ukraine there, and without the rest of Europe.
This came right after Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave speeches in Europe that boiled down to: What are you guys good for?
And then there’s Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin acting thick as thieves. Are the presidents of the United States and Russia playing a giant version of that old board game Risk, with the future of the West hanging in the balance?
Tom, thanks for being here.
Thomas L. Friedman: My pleasure, Patrick.
Healy: OK, Tom, you’ve written about Trump, how he sees himself as a disruptive figure, as someone who thinks that his stock in trade is to be a great negotiator, a great deal maker. And yet, he’s a guy who doesn’t do his homework. And I find myself wondering what Trump is really up to with these moves.
I mean, he can’t actually think that he can move all of these people out of Gaza. He can’t actually think he can wave a magic wand and end the Ukraine war. Is something bigger going on with him when he makes these radical ideas in the foreign policy space?
Friedman: You know, what concerns me about Trump, Patrick, is that he’s got a real upside. The upside is that he is ready to shake up the game board. And the game board sometimes really does need to be shaken up. Why are we still talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Why are there still Palestinian refugees 75 years after the birth of Israel? Why is this Ukraine war just dragging on as a war of attrition?
So I think there’s something actually quite healthy about going back to basics and asking those questions. But Trump, at the same time, is a chump. And what’s troubling is his combination of being ready to ask really radical questions and then, when it comes to the answers, just buying everything Putin says.
Healy: Buying it all, Tom, exactly. And Bibi Netanyahu and Putin — all of it. That’s the thing, that when I said “thick as thieves,” I don’t understand how Trump sees these guys who are clearly acting in their own interests, not in America’s interests.
And it makes me wonder, for a President of the United States, does he think about America’s interests or is it just Donald Trump’s interests, whatever those are in the moment? So, I want to run my theory by you and have you slice and dice it.
Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Bibi Netanyahu: I think Trump looks at these figures as people who are the strongmen of the world. And then there are all these weak societies and weak people. He looks at something like Europe and he sees it as a collection of failed economies and open borders and weak national identities. And he basically sees the world as up for grabs, as available to be carved up by the strong people, and I find myself wondering, in two years, if we’ll have a situation where the U.S. takes Greenland, Putin has done what he’s wanted in Ukraine, Netanyahu has a free hand in Gaza, in the Middle East, Xi does what he wants in Taiwan.
I’m just wondering if this flows from a big assumption that Donald Trump has about the world where, in this day and age, we’ve reached the point where societies are so weak that the strong must prevail and reorder the world.
Friedman: I think that’s a fair description of how he looks at the world. He looks at the world really like it’s the retail section in a Trump Tower. You know: Hey, Mr. France, you’re not paying enough rent for your baguette shop.
Everything is purely transactional in that sense. What is he missing? You described a dog-eat-dog world of survival of the fittest and the strongest. We had that world, actually, before World War II. How did that work out? We have had the most remarkable long run of global peace and prosperity, all relatively speaking, since World War II. And during this 75-year period of relative peace, absence of great power conflict, we’ve seen more people come out of poverty faster than any time in the history of the world. We’ve enjoyed a remarkable degree of global stability. Yes, there have been wars in between, but they have not been world wars, the kinds of things that overturn everyone’s life.
You’re going to miss that period when it’s gone.
I want to say a few words about Europe in particular. I happen to believe that the European Union may be mankind’s greatest creation, a continent known from time immemorial for religious, tribal and sectarian wars. The last two of which — actually, the last three of which, if you count the Cold War — we had to come over and help quell and intervene. This same Europe builds the biggest center of free markets, free people, the rule of law and human rights. That is a remarkable thing. The E.U. is the other United States of the world.
Healy: But Tom, I think Trump sees the E.U. and these countries as chumps in their own right. He sees that collection and those shared values and he wonders: OK, what can I get from them? How do I realize that?
Friedman: Well, he sees them as a trading block that can exercise more leverage on the United States than he’d like. So he’d like to break them up and then negotiate with each one individually. But he has no clue about the cost of that. If the E.U. were to break up, the instability it would bring. The E.U. is our wingman in the world.
Let’s take a conflict I know a lot about, the West Bank conflict. E.U. aid is what keeps the Palestinian Authority basically operating. If the Palestinian Authority collapsed, Israel would then actually have to run all the civil and administrative affairs of the West Bank. You find E.U. projects all over the world, not to mention the stabilizing effect on Europe. But of course Trump isn’t thinking in those terms at all. That’s what really concerns me.
I was saying to you earlier, Patrick, that to me, the single most underestimated force in international relations is actually stupidity, that leaders are just doing stupid stuff.
What Vladimir Putin did in Ukraine was just flat-out stupid. He thought he’d be in and out of Kyiv in a few weeks and install a new government. He got it completely wrong. He couldn’t have gotten it more wrong, and he got it wrong because he was uninformed, misinformed and just making a stupid bet.
Healy: So how does that Tom Friedman theory of stupidity apply to Trump’s steps toward Putin right now in terms of what he’s doing with Ukraine — really elevating Putin, caring more about what the Russians want to do — in an endgame? How does that kind of theory apply here? How could it even backfire?
Friedman: Well, let’s put Trump in his own world. He’s trying to buy a casino. He finds out that the guy who owns the casino he wants to buy has one foot in receivership and one foot out. He’s run out of cash. The bank doesn’t want to lend him any more money.
And Trump comes in and says, “You know what? I’ll pay double your asking price.” So basically, what Putin wants is for Trump to come in and save him from the battlefield failures that he engendered. This is a colossal failure. He’s got 21 percent interest rates, his economy now — everything’s going up in price with inflation because he had to shift so much production capacity to the war. He didn’t have the people and capacity to take care of the housing, cars, eggs that people need. So prices are going up there. This guy is playing an incredibly weak hand. And Trump is basically saying: Let’s see. I’ve got four of a kind, but I think I’ll fold.
Healy: Why? Why is Trump throwing him this lifeline, Tom? What is he up to here?
Friedman: I think it operates on three different levels. One is ignorance. But also, if Vladimir Putin were an American party, he’d be a Proud Boy, a white Christian nationalist who’s super anti-immigration and super anti-diversity, anti-L.G.B.T. Because, again, Trump and Putin both think that the greatest danger to their countries internally is wokeness and immigration.
So Putin’s a Proud Boy, he’d be a Trump voter, he’d have been there on Jan. 6. Trump feels a certain cultural affinity with him that he certainly doesn’t feel with Volodymyr Zelensky, an authentic sort of Democrat. So I think that’s going on at the cultural, political level.
At the geoeconomic level, I think Trump’s Ukraine strategy is all about his midterm election. Trump thinks: If I can actually end this war and lift sanctions on Russia, Russian oil will swamp the global market, it’ll drive down the price of gasoline at the pump and I will win the midterms.
Just Trump saying he talked to Putin for 90 minutes, drove the global benchmark crude oil price down at one point. So you can see where the market is going. They smell this. What is Trump doing with both the Russians and Putin? With Putin, he basically said: Well, no NATO in Ukraine, and you’re going to be able to keep some of the territory. Who goes into a negotiation for a casino by saying I’m going to let you keep this part of the land that you need even though you’re going bankrupt and I’m going to hire all your staff?
Healy: No, man, you’re slipping them cards left and right.
Friedman: Exactly. So basically, in Trump’s own terms, this is not a way to negotiate with pre-emptive concessions. Also, to tell the leverage you have on your side, Zelensky and the European Union, “I got this, you guys stay home.”
Healy: Tom, I really wonder if part of Trump and Vance’s worldview is actually that history doesn’t repeat itself. That if you have the right strongmen in power, that somehow you can take a country like Germany, and if you have the right populist leaders in place, you can keep a lid on the really dangerous neo-Nazi elements, as long as you have everyone in your thrall.
It feels like a command and control approach, but you know, you’ve been covering international relations for more than 40 years. It feels like the story, doesn’t end well, if you just ignore history, if you just believe so much in yourself as a kind of a godlike leader who could control events, to your point, you end up in World War I.
You end up in places that you really don’t want to be.
Friedman: Well, there were three major leaders on the world stage who wanted to be president for life.
Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Xi managed to make himself president for life. Putin managed to make himself president for life. We stopped Trump from doing it, thank God. And how did it work out for China? How did that Covid thing work out? In a low information system where no one wants to tell the top guy the truth? Eventually, he changed course, but at great pain for the Chinese people.
Russia has a similar low information system. Very little bad news ever gets to the guy at the top. That’s the only way someone like him could have invaded Ukraine.
Low information systems are always dangerous. They’re particularly dangerous in a world where we have rapid change.
Look, if Trump’s tariffs and his simultaneous removal of subsidies for green vehicles, if he’s able to implement that, our car companies — particularly Ford and General Motors — could get crushed. This is not a small thing. It’s just math.
I’ve kind of given up on politics when dealing with Trump because at least until the midterms, there are no levers to pull. The Senate is all in on him. The House is all in on him. The Supreme Court is all in on him. His media ecosystem’s all in on him. I’m now entirely betting on physics, on the hard realities of things. You cannot move 2.2 million Palestinians from Gaza physically. And you are not going to get Ukraine to just surrender to Russia because you bat your eyes at them.
There is the hard physics of things, and one of the physics is that our auto industry cannot survive in a world where the steel components it needs get tariffed by 25 percent and you basically crush the EV incentives. The physics of that, the math is not going to add up, and all you have to do is look at the Ford stock price to see it.
They say the market is a voting machine and then it’s a weighing machine. And when you weigh the weight of these things, they don’t add up. If this weren’t my country, Pat, I’d put my feet up, grab some popcorn and watch the show. What a show! But it is my country.
Trump is driving, we’re all in the back seat, and I think he’s heading into a wall.
Healy: Tom, transactions seem so central to Trump’s theory of power. He governs, in some ways, according to a balance sheet, and soft power is hard to quantify. So U.S.A.I.D. is off the table. He’ll get what he wants through a transaction or he’ll take it. What does that mean for world leaders looking to, I can’t believe I’m using this word, manage their relationships with Trump?
Friedman: Let me answer that in two parts, Patrick. First, why does he have that ability to do that? Because of the complete collapse of the Republican members of the Senate and House to do their oversight job.
Healy: Capitulation, Tom. Capitulation.
Friedman: I look at these people and I say to myself: You people clearly do not have mirrors, wives or kids. Because if I did what you did, such craven sycophancy, I wouldn’t be able to look in the mirror. And if I did what you did, I would come home and my mattress and my golf clubs would be spilling down the driveway. My wife would have thrown them out of the house and golf balls would be spinning down the driveway. My two daughters would not be talking to me.
I look at these Republicans and say: You people clearly don’t have mirrors, wives and daughters. How does it work? Are you living on some offshore island? You’re doing all of this for $185,000 a year and free parking at [Ronald Reagan Washington] National Airport? What the [expletive] is wrong with you,?
Beacuse the thing is, Pat, I actually don’t know anyone in my life who is that craven.
Healy: So if the tight circle isn’t standing up — and you’re the president of France or the chancellor of Germany, world leaders looking at this guy who’s so transactional — can you just stay to the sidelines and hope he doesn’t really send in the troops to Panama, or go for Greenland? Is there a way of managing Trump?
Friedman: It’s a very good question. And right now everybody’s afraid.
There’s so many C.E.O.s in America, and they know this tariff stuff is just crazy. But he was surrounded by buffers in his first term, and now he’s surrounded by amplifiers. He’s surrounded by bobbleheads, and that’s just really crazy.
I think Xi and Putin probably get more domestic pushback than Trump does now. Between the bobbleheads around him and then the echo chamber around them. And they’re all living in fear that Trump or Elon Musk, wait for it now, Pat, might tweet about them! Oh my God, did Elon give you an owie? And if they’re going to challenge you in the primaries, I promise you there are other jobs in the world than being in the U.S. Congress. And again, I say this as someone who is ready to see Trump disrupt things.
I supported him on the Abraham Accords without flinching. When he does the right thing, I want to support my country. I don’t want to be in the position we’re all being put in where we have to root for our country to fail so our political position can be redeemed. That’s a terrible position to be in.
I don’t want to root for the stock market to go down 5,000 points just so a dose of reality is imposed on this guy, but that’s the kind of position we’re in when people don’t do their jobs. The simple job of being in the House and the Senate is advise and consent.
So the first time around he broke the laws, and this time around he’s destroying the norms, and when we get done, there will be nothing left.
Healy: I just wonder, those world leaders who talk to you, do they see a future of Trump and Putin and Xi that really is kind of out of their control?
Friedman: Well, right now they’re afraid. They’re afraid of Musk. I mean, this guy’s the wealthiest man in the world and he has the Twitter [now X] platform. But it’s why I keep coming back to physics.
You may take Greenland, in which case Xi will take Taiwan. Then we’ll really be off to the races in the world. You think you just take Greenland and it doesn’t have an effect on others? Maybe Putin will then take a bite out of the Baltic States. Is that the world you want to be in? Let me know how that works.
Healy: Tom, I really wonder if that is the world Trump would be OK with.
Friedman: When the politicians responsible for being buffers don’t do their jobs, all I’ve got left Newton and the third law of motion: For every action, there will be an equal and opposite reaction. That’s all I’ve got left.
I’ve pretty much given up on politics, but I do believe in the laws of gravity. The apple actually did fall from the tree. It didn’t jump from the ground into the tree. And eventually, the laws of gravity will make themselves felt. Unfortunately, as I said, we are in the back seat and he’s driving.
Healy: Trump thinks he can pluck all the apples, but at some point, you know, one’s going to fall on his head. That’s the way it works.
Friedman: It’s all I can hope for, because I clearly don’t have politics anymore. But I got The New York Times, and, um, thank God for that.
Healy: Tom, thanks so much for joining me.
Friedman: Pleasure.
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