This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
uOne thing that’s been on my mind is that we’ve not been covering Israel and Gaza or Ukraine and Russia nearly as much as we did in 2023 and 2024, frankly, as much as I think we should be. There have been two reasons for that.
One has been that President Trump’s second administration has felt, in many ways, like a domestic emergency, and it has pulled much more of our focus here. The other is that often, when we’re covering these conflicts, what we’re really covering — implicitly or explicitly — is the American position on them: How are we going to use our might, our money, our weaponry, our leverage to bring them to some kind of close or settlement?
And early in Trump’s second administration, he basically filled me with despair. He seemed to have little interest in Gaza, except for potentially building hotels there. Beyond that, he seemed perfectly happy to let Israel annex whatever it wanted. On Ukraine, he was at odds with Volodymyr Zelensky, and his main interest seemed to be his relationship with Vladimir Putin.
But things have been changing a bit. Other parts of his “America First” foreign policy have been coming into more focus. So what is Trump’s foreign policy? What, at this point, can we say about it? How has it been evolving over the course of his still young second term?
To help me think that through, I wanted to bring Emma Ashford back on the show. She is a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. She’s the author of the forthcoming book “First Among Equals,” and she’s a foreign-policy analyst who is more of a realist. She’s in fundamental ways more sympathetic to some of the motivating impulses of Trump’s foreign policy, even if she doesn’t always agree with how that’s carried out. So I thought she’d be a good person to help me steel-man what the administration is doing and think through whether that’s working or has a real chance of working.
One thing we don’t get to that much in this conversation is that what is happening on the ground and in the politics in Gaza, in the West Bank and in Israel has really changed over the past couple of months, and we’re going to have some more episodes that get into that soon. As always, my email: [email protected].
Ezra Klein: Emma Ashford, welcome back to the show.
Emma Ashford: Thanks so much for having me back.
How would you, at this point, describe Donald Trump’s foreign policy?
If you want a one-word phrase or a two-word phrase, “America First” is about as good as any. It describes a lot of what he’s been doing: privileging U.S. interests. In a slightly longer form, the Trump administration’s foreign policy has been this interesting blend of realpolitik, kind of Nixon-style reshaping of U.S. foreign policy, with a lot of Trumpian idiosyncrasies, right-wing culture war stuff. So it’s definitely a blend of different themes.
“U.S. interests” defined how?
I’m wrapping that up in the phrase “Trumpian idiosyncrasies,” which is a polite way of saying things like: Donald Trump likes people who give him gifts, including foreign leaders.
See, that doesn’t feel like a U.S. interest to me, whether or not Donald Trump gets a plane.
Yeah, exactly. It really doesn’t. At the same time, a lot of what the administration is doing is geared around U.S. interests in a national interest sense. Now, it’s a very conservative way of interpreting those — protecting the border would be one example. But burden sharing or burden shifting to European allies — Donald Trump doesn’t get anything personally out of that. That is a policy that is being driven much more by the perception of those in the administration and what they think of as U.S. interests. So they very much value U.S. sovereignty. They want to think about American interests in terms of the people, the prosperity and the security of the people that live inside the United States — and maybe to a certain extent, Americans abroad — but not necessarily U.S. allies, not necessarily partner states.
The Biden team, in many ways, went to the extreme in the other direction, saying that the interests of U.S. allies — or even partners, like Ukraine — are synonymous with U.S. interests and there is no daylight. That’s a very extreme proposition, and it’s not really true.
The Trump administration, as far as I can tell, seems to take that to the opposite extreme.
We’re making it sound like the Trump administration has a singular view. But like in any administration, there are different camps, different factions. How would you describe the big camps on foreign policy inside Trump world?
One of the interesting things when we compare this administration to, let’s say, Trump 1, is that there is less internal fighting on a lot of these issues. The big schism in Republican foreign policy, basically all the way back to the George W. Bush administration, has been: Should America be fundamentally Wilsonian out there, trying to reshape the world, spread democracy, etc.? Or should the U.S. be more insular, more focused on its own interests? You know, Pat Buchanan. These are the two threads of Republican foreign policy that conflict with each other.
In Trump 1, that former viewpoint tended to win the day, but there were a lot of internal arguments over it. This time around, I think we can say the personnel and the policies seemed to more consistently tend toward that second point of view.
It’s been interesting to watch some of the personnel movement on this. There are people who, as the Trump second administration started up, seem more like the representatives of that older, dominant Republican establishment position. I would put Mike Waltz and Marco Rubio in that category.
Mike Waltz seems like he’s been sidelined, made U.N. ambassador — and they, I think, do not rate the U.N. so highly as a center of influence. Marco Rubio, who seems fairly central, has really been pulled into following what Trump wants. It does not feel like there is daylight between Trump and Rubio. It does not feel like Rubio is standing up to lead a different faction in the way that Rex Tillerson or H.R. McMaster felt they were in the first administration. We’ve seen different people fired or purged who seem like they’re more from the Republican establishment. Does that seem like a fair description of the way the power struggles are playing out, to you?
Yeah, it has been the case that almost everybody who’s been a senior appointee in this administration is very loyal to Donald Trump. But the difference has been whether they are willing to completely subordinate their own views to Trump’s on many issues. Marco Rubio seems to have, in many ways, passed that test. He has largely dropped his previous neoconservative leanings and seems to basically align with Trump on everything now.
Mike Waltz, on the other hand, was ideologically just out of step with the president. He lasted for some time but then managed to eventually put a foot wrong one too many times, disagreeing with Trump this time on Israel and Iran. And he ended up, as you said, sidelined.
So I do think the personnel has been shifting again, just more in the direction of that not-traditional Republican foreign policy.
How do you think about the interaction between the Trump administration and Trump? Even more so than with most presidents, the people around him are often much more ideological — and consistently so — than he is. And he is more relational than they are. How do you think of that relationship?
I think this is a big difference from the first Trump term. What we saw then was basically an open attempt by different factions of advisers inside the administration to just capture Trump on particular issues. He would agree with whoever spoke to him last in many cases, so policy was a matter of getting to Trump and making him say your point of view.
This time around, he does seem to be more in the mode of being the final decider. And he wants people around him who will support his decision, even when they disagree with it. He wants to be presented options and decide.
I think we see this again in that leaked Signal chat, where we had the vice president, secretary of defense, Marco Rubio — they’re all in there. And they’re saying: Well, I really do disagree with this decision to bomb Yemen, or I agree. But then even in a private chat, by the end they’re saying: OK, but the president says we’ll do it. We need to do it. And that strikes me as how this administration runs this time around.
And is that Trump imposing more discipline? Is that Trump coming into more alignment because he’s surrounded now by people like JD Vance and others who he trusts, like Don Jr., who now have a more consistent ideological view? Do you understand that as Trump changing, the people around him changing, or is it a bidirectional process?
I think it’s a process of a viewpoint cohering. Trump himself always had these instincts. We definitely saw that in the first term, but he was very open to persuasion. He didn’t have a lot of experience in foreign policy and was surrounded by people that were on all sides of different issues.
This time, I think, there’s much more coherence among the advisers, among the principals, the secretaries, even the vice president. And maybe they don’t agree with Trump on absolutely everything, but what they are doing is helping him build an intellectual scaffolding around this enterprise. That’s making for a more consistent policy overall. You can see where the administration wants things to go.
One place where there does seem to be real division inside the administration is over Israel and Gaza. How would you describe the competing views?
Israel is always a really interesting issue inside the Republican Party, because there’s this very strong tendency to be incredibly supportive of Israel in everything that the country does, and Republicans even have that reputation. But in many ways, historically, it’s been easier for Republican presidents to say to Israel, “No, you’re going too far” or “We are not going to do that.” We’ve seen leaders like Reagan do that historically.
The debate inside the Trump administration seems to be: We don’t really want the war in Gaza to continue. We want to get American hostages out, but we also want the conflict to end because we want a more peaceful Middle East. We will support Israel, but only so far.
And we seem to be getting to the limits of that toleration. So even the voices inside the administration calling for unfettered support of Israel — I think those voices are not as loud as they used to be.
What is your sense of where Donald Trump falls personally on this?
I think he’s very supportive of Israel. I think he likes Netanyahu, but I don’t think he likes getting taken advantage of. And this is one of those areas where sometimes, being a political scientist is less useful and I should have been a psychologist, but Donald Trump really doesn’t like it when other countries take the U.S. for a ride.
So I think Trump is getting frustrated. He’s getting frustrated that he sends Steve Witkoff over to Israel to negotiate to get a deal and that the Israelis won’t follow through with these things. For him, this seems to be much more about the process of deal making than anything else. It’s not about deeply held convictions about the state of Israel. It’s more about he wants to get to an end state here and he increasingly sees that he can’t quite get there with Netanyahu.
There has been — even compared with the horrible state of affairs two or three months ago — a pretty profound aid disaster unfolding in Gaza, caused by Israeli blockade. Tell me what it is and also what the Trump administration’s response has been.
The situation in Gaza is that Israel has basically had the strip under blockade since the cease-fire failed. They have proposed, instead of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency that traditionally would distribute aid in the strip, that they’re going to set up some new private entity with U.S. mercenaries helping to secure it and that they would do so in a way that, as I understand it, humanitarian groups say is almost unworkable.
The starvation in the Gaza Strip is getting significantly worse. It’s not clear the Israelis are going to allow in enough aid to make a difference. This is a significant humanitarian crisis and one that U.S. weapons are helping to prolong.
What’s interesting, though, is that I do not really see that as the thing that is motivating the Trump administration on this question. I think they are not indifferent to human suffering, but unlike the Biden administration — which supported Israel wholeheartedly but would publicly complain about aid or undertake things like the very high-profile installing a pier off Gaza to try and send in some aid that never worked — I don’t see the Trump administration particularly pushing on the humanitarian question. Certainly the U.S. government doesn’t even have a U.S. Agency for International Development anymore, ever since DOGE came around. So I don’t think, again, that this is a U.S. government initiative.
The one place where I think there is some dubiety on that question was when Trump was speculating about the U.S. helping to rebuild the Gaza Strip. There’s been a lot of disagreement and debate about whether that was a genuine offer or a genuine thing he intended — and he’s stopped saying it recently — or was it a tactic to try and get the Arab gulf states to cough up more for reconstruction? I don’t think we know the answer to that one.
Trump went to Saudi Arabia in mid-May, and he gave this big speech in Riyadh. I want to play a couple of clips from it, and I want to begin with the way he describes his hosts.
Archived clip of Donald Trump: I want to thank His Royal Highness, the crown prince, for that incredible introduction. He’s an incredible man — known him a long time now. There’s nobody like him. Thank you very much. Appreciate it very much, my friend. [Audience applause and cheers.]
And it’s a tremendous honor to return to this beautiful kingdom and be welcomed back with such extraordinary generosity and warmth. I’ve never forgotten the exceptional hospitality showed to us by King Salman, who’s just — we talk about a great man — that is a great man. [Audience applause and cheers.]
That is a great man, a great family.
He keeps coming back to themes like that throughout the speech. He really likes the leaders of Saudi Arabia. But it feels to me that that matters. I mean, you said he likes Netanyahu but not the way he likes them.
No, that is true.
I think we know from the first time around that Trump does really well with leaders who flatter him, tell him he’s doing great, frame their own policy preferences as things that fit with his worldview. We saw Emmanuel Macron, for example, being very successful the first time around doing that. The other example from the first time around was Shinzo Abe of Japan, who basically managed to become friends with Donald Trump. And even after Shinzo Abe’s death, apparently Trump would talk to his widow on the phone. So there was this personal connection that they managed to build.
Again, that’s not an unusual thing for presidents. We saw the Obamas had great relations with the British royal family, for example. They just got on very well personally.
Jimmy Carter had a very, very strong relationship with Anwar Sadat.
Exactly, and sometimes that can really help with diplomacy and things. The last time that Trump was president, his first international trip was to Saudi Arabia. So I think Trump has that soft spot or that recollection that they supported him when others wouldn’t.
Then you tack onto that that the Saudis are a very welcoming, hospitable people. Trump also tends to like states that are authoritarian, where he doesn’t have to see protesters. I think he’s built good personal ties, and those pleasant recollections from the first time around really, really help with that.
There’s also something interesting in his speech when he is talking about the way other presidents have treated the Saudis. He says, basically: Look, a lot of people have come here and judged you, that American presidents see it as their role to come here and tell you what to do, how to build your country, how to act morally.
There was — I think, correctly — a real chilling of American relations with the Saudis after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. And Trump comes and says quite explicitly in the speech, to them and to others in the region: That’s not what he’s here to do. He’s here for American interests. He is not here to act as a moral judge backed up by American power.
As a statement of principles, that struck me as quite stark, differentiating him not just from Joe Biden or Barack Obama but also from George W. Bush.
Yeah. I mean, I think this administration is basically locking in what is quite a significant shift in Republican foreign policy. Trump made a comment that was something like — I’m paraphrasing — “Looking out at this wonderful city” — whether it was Doha or Riyadh — “we see that the development and progress and innovation don’t come from American military intervention. They come from economic progress.”
He’s basically saying: We want the whole region to be like the gulf states. We don’t want it to be like the Iraq war. And that’s a repudiation of George W. Bush’s legacy. I mean, Trump has been repudiating it personally for a long time, but for an American president to go to the region and say that — that really is a shift.
Then there was this part of the speech, which, if you’re thinking about the future of the Middle East and what Trump might want from Israel, struck me as genuinely important.
Archived clip of Trump: It’s been an amazing thing, the Abraham Accords, and it’s my fervent hope, wish and even my dream that Saudi Arabia, a place I have such respect for — especially over the last fairly short period of time, what you’ve been able to do — but will soon be joining the Abraham Accords. I think it’ll be a tremendous tribute to your country and it will be something that’s really going to be very important for the future of the Middle East. I took a risk in doing them, and they’ve been an absolute bonanza for the countries that have joined. The Biden administration did nothing for four years — we would’ve had it filled out. But it will be a special day in the Middle East with the whole world watching when Saudi Arabia joins us.
First, can you remind us what the Abraham Accords are?
The Abraham Accords originated in Trump’s first term. The goal was to try and normalize relations between Israel and some of the Arab gulf states that already had either very implicit or, in many cases, secret relations. These states didn’t recognize one another at all, but they were cooperating on intelligence matters or military matters, so the idea was to try and bring this out into the light.
During the first Trump term, they did succeed in normalizing relations between, in particular, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. This was a big step forward, in terms of legitimating Israel in the region, among Arab states. The problem is that the emirates did not insist on significant progress on the Palestinian issue as a condition — the Saudis did — and then that progress was never able to be made. So the whole thing has basically been derailed by the Oct. 7 attacks and the war in Gaza.
Is it that why Saudi Arabia hadn’t joined, that there had not been enough political movement with the Palestinians put on the table?
If you go to Saudi Arabia or you go to the gulf — I’ve been a couple of times since Trump’s election — what you hear from the people is that they are just absolutely appalled at what’s been happening in Gaza. Some of this is that they’re basically seeing this play out live on Al Jazeera across the region. And there’s always been a lot of sympathy in the Arab world for the Palestinian cause. But with what’s happening now — the civilian casualties — public opinion has turned really quite aggressively against normalizing with Israel. And even in a regime as dictatorial as the one in Saudi Arabia, they do not wish to get out that far from their public and normalize relations with Israel.
Brett McGurk was trying to negotiate that the U.S. would give a security guarantee and the Saudis would join the Abraham Accords before Oct. 7, but that door pretty much shut on Oct. 7, in the absence of a Palestinian state, progress toward that goal.
I think a lot of us have despaired that after Trump’s election, it seemed to be the end of any possibility of American political pressure on Israel to come to any political deal with Palestinians and that it’s just become carte blanche for annexation and occupation.
I heard Trump in Riyadh talking about the Abraham Accords, which were central to his foreign policy legacy. If he’s ever going to get the Nobel Peace Prize that he wants, it’s going to be for something like the Abraham Accords and the expansion of them. And without being overly optimistic — because it’s Donald Trump, and I’m not overly optimistic — but when I heard him talk about the Abraham Accords that way, I saw how much he wanted that, describing it as his dream. And I thought, “Maybe between the relationship he has with the Saudis and the desire to get the Abraham Accords completed, there is a deal that he’s going to want to try to make here.” Do you think there’s something to that?
The administration is basically pursuing two very opposing policies in this space. On the one hand, the Trump administration loosened weapons restrictions on selling weapons to Israel. Trump talked about taking the population out of Gaza and effectively letting Israel annex it — or maybe the U.S. would annex it ourselves.
On the other hand, the cease-fire in Gaza, the one that was signed right at the end of the Biden administration — that would not have happened without Donald Trump sending Steve Witkoff over there to say: Do this now. He was able to put pressure on the Israelis. They’ve started to work around Netanyahu on some issues.
I do think that there is more prospect under Trump for maybe not a good end state here but something that improves the situation. And again, this was a message that I heard often from people when I was in the gulf, even before the November election: Well, maybe Trump will be worse, but there’s not much that could be worse than Biden, so maybe this will be better.
I think we could apply that philosophy to a lot of the things that Trump is doing, from Ukraine all the way to Israel.
When I talked to people involved in this in the Persian Gulf, one thing that I heard was that their frustration was that Biden just would not put real pressure on Netanyahu. And on some level, they didn’t anymore think he could or would. The actual reason for it was never truly known.
Similar to you, the only point of optimism I’ve heard from anybody involved is that if Donald Trump came to the view that he wanted this, he would be more likely than Biden would and more politically able than Biden was to exert pressure. That it’s more in his nature and in his politics than it was for Joe Biden.
He’s certainly been willing to put the screws to even close U.S. friends and allies, even leaders that he likes, on things like tariffs and trade, on immigration. So yeah, I think he would be.
The other issue that bears talking about, though, is the Iran question. Because the other big point of divergence between Trump and the Israeli government is the Israelis really want the United States to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. And the ongoing nuclear negotiations that the Trump administration restarted — they don’t want those to succeed. But Trump is quite determined to get to a deal on that point, and that is, I think, a growing point of tension between the two governments.
If something forces or pushes Trump much more toward differentiating himself from Netanyahu, it is probably going to be Iran rather than the Palestinian question.
I have been surprised how much Trump seems intent on a deal with Iran. He really seems to want it, and he seems frustrated by the Israelis getting in the way of it.
Right now, the blind items coming out, the anonymous quotes are that there are talks toward a framework and that the talks are going well and — who knows? — by the time this comes out, we might have more information. What does the Trump administration want here?
I think Donald Trump wants to not have a war with Iran. I think one thing that he learned from his first administration — and that we all observed — was he was persuaded by folks around him to take a very hard line on Iran. The idea being: Withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal, maybe some targeted strikes, assassinate Qassim Suleimani of the I.R.G.C., and if you do all of that — this maximum pressure campaign — it will bring the Iranians back to the table, and you’ll get a better deal than Obama got.
This really appealed to Trump’s sensibilities. He liked bashing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the J.C.P.O.A. — that’s the Iranian nuclear deal, but at the end of the day, it turns out that none of that brought the Iranians back to the table, and there was no better deal on offer.
What we’re seeing this time instead is Trump saying: Fine, maximum pressure — maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t — it didn’t, really — but let’s at least talk to the Iranians and try and get some kind of a nuclear deal, because that did not keep them further away from a bomb.
Again, this is a real difference in personnel. Rather than some of the anti-Iranian hard-liners we saw the first time around in the administration, now it’s folks like Steve Witkoff, who are more than willing to talk to the Iranians if they think they can get a deal.
If Trump is able to reach a deal with Iran, do you expect it to be meaningfully different from the one that Obama reached?
If I say that it is not meaningfully different, that diminishes the chances of us getting to a deal, which I think is a problem for a lot of folks that advocated for the deal the first time around. It will be slightly harsher in some ways. I think there will probably be tighter restrictions on enrichment — not zero enrichment, but there will probably be slightly tighter restrictions.
It will be looser in some ways because the Iranians have progressed in enrichment technology, in how far they’ve enriched the uranium, in the weapons research they’ve done. So it may be looser in those areas because you can’t put the genie back into the bottle.
But in large scope, I think it’s going to be a meaningfully similar deal. It’s going to restrict Tehran’s enrichment natively and include harsh verification and inspection in exchange for sanction relief. And that, fundamentally, was what the J.C.P.O.A. tried to do.
Is there a dimension of this where Iran has a lot of reason to try to come to a deal right now? I mean, they have watched a lot of their proxies in the region get basically destroyed by Israel. Trump is very dangerous to them, and if he did decide to partner with Netanyahu on a series of bombing runs, a lot of what people feared in terms of their reprisal — through Hezbollah and other forces — seems less likely. They’ve been kicked out in Syria now.
How do you think about their negotiating position compared with what it was in Trump 1 or even with Joe Biden?
This is the other thing that’s changed since Trump 1: The international environment is just very different. Iran’s proxies are very much on their back foot. The Arab gulf states have been pursuing détente with Iran; the last time around, they were very gung-ho for military action against Iran. So the situation has changed.
I do think the Iranians very much had the incentive to come to the negotiating table now, but I don’t think they have an incentive to sign a deal under any conditions, necessarily. They’re also in somewhat of a position of strength. They know that even strikes against their nuclear facilities will probably only set them back, best-case scenario, five years, more likely maybe one to two years. So they’re in this position where they can say: Well, there are limits to what you can do to us.
I think both sides have an incentive to strike a deal this time around. Last time, it just wasn’t there.
There’s been a fair amount of reporting recently that Trump and Netanyahu had a tense phone call. And Donald Trump said publicly that he has warned Netanyahu off an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and that he wants a deal.
In Riyadh, he talked about wanting that deal, where he said: I don’t believe in permanent enemies.
Archived clip of Trump: I have never believed in having permanent enemies. I am different than a lot of people think. I don’t like permanent enemies.
And: I want to make a deal with Iran.
Archived clip of Trump: I want to make a deal with Iran. If I can make a deal with Iran, I’ll be very happy if we’re going to make your region and the world a safer place.
They are trying to execute some restraint — again, in public — with Israel, which is interesting and also, I think, reflects that the Netanyahu-Trump relationship has always seemed a little tricky.
It’s also worth noting that Mike Waltz, the national security adviser for the first few months of the term — the thing that got him pushed aside into the U.N. ambassador role was apparently that he had been coordinating with Israeli officials on what joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran would look like. And he was doing that without Trump’s permission.
I think everybody assumed this relationship would be very much hand in hand — Trump and Israel — and that is not what we’re seeing in practice. In practice, there’s more friction than there was with Biden.
Something Trump keeps saying — he said it in his second inaugural, and he said it again in Riyadh — is that he sees himself as and he wants his legacy to be that of a peacemaker. He says it enough that, whatever else you think of him, I believe it is his self-conception.
One thing I see with him on Israel — also, for that matter, on Hamas — is a real anger when other players don’t or won’t let him just step in and settle the conflict. He wants to be a person who settles conflicts and expands the Abraham Accords. He does seem quite resistant to new wars starting. He would like an Iran deal. I don’t feel this was as true with him in his first term. He didn’t talk like this as often.
I’m curious how you view that. Do you view it as evolution? Do you view it as different forces around him? Do you view it as a real thing or just rhetoric that he has come to like saying about himself? What’s your sense of Trump as peacemaker?
He’s always had a dovish streak. You can find cases or evidence of him going all the way back to the ’80s, talking about the risks of nuclear weapons and things like that. Not consistently over that period, not with a real focus on the issues, but he’s always had this inherent sense that war is bad. That doesn’t mean he is not willing to use force. We saw he’s perfectly willing to use force when he thinks it’s good for the U.S. or good for him.
But I do think there is something that has changed from the first to the second administration, and when I listen to him talking, what it feels like, to me, is that this is a man who’s starting to think about legacy more so than anything else. And he remembers that the one thing that everybody praised from his first administration was the Abraham Accords and technically bringing peace between Israel and some of the Arab states.
For him, I think building on that achievement or finding peace or deals in — I mean, it doesn’t just have to be Ukraine or Israel; they’ve also been getting involved in the Balkans and in Sudan. I think for him, he sees this as a legacy thing.
That brings us to Ukraine and Russia. Let’s start here: What is your best description of Trump or the Trump administration’s view of America’s interests in that war?
Far more limited than the Biden administration, certainly. What we can say is that many people around the president inside the administration may not necessarily have opposed sending weapons to Ukraine originally but are increasingly concerned or became increasingly concerned about the costs of that war and the fact that Ukraine was not winning and whether we can continue to do so over the long term. And there are some folks on the New Right who would have been happy to just never be involved in the conflict in the first place. But I think there’s a lot more people, even traditional Republicans, who are saying: Well, we didn’t get anywhere with it. It’s time to call it a day.
There’s a general sense among Republicans and in the administration that it’s time to try and end the conflict, and how you do that is the question they’re asking.
What are the different factions in the administration on Ukraine?
Inside the administration, there has been far less debate on Ukraine than there has been on Israel and particularly on Iran. Almost everyone in the administration is willing to go along on the question of trying to find peace in Ukraine. There are some folks who are more concerned about defense stockpiles. For example, Elbridge Colby, the new under secretary of defense for policy — that’s been his major concern about the war.
Do you want to describe what that concern is?
Yeah. This is a concern that started coming up about a year ago. The Pentagon started making this point to anyone who would listen that sending a lot of our weapons to Ukraine — particularly things like air defense systems, Patriot missiles — was depleting U.S. stockpiles. We don’t produce that many of these weapons per year, and we have limited stockpiles. Elbridge Colby shares that concern, and so do many others in the administration.
That’s another reason I think they would argue: Maybe it would be better for the U.S. if Ukraine were to go all the way and win this thing, but the costs of getting there are just too high.
Everyone, I think, knows about the Oval Office showdown between Trump and Vance and Zelensky, but they did sign the mineral deal after that. What’s your sense of what that relationship is like now?
The minerals deal is a really fascinating insight into the dynamics of Republican foreign policy in the Trump era. The deal actually originated in Congress, and the idea was if they could persuade Trump that Ukraine had significant deposits of rare-earth minerals, that maybe then he would switch and be more supportive of Ukraine.
Of course, that’s not at all what ended up happening. The Trump administration then wrote up a version of this that was basically just stripping Ukraine’s resources and taking them. The Ukrainians refuse to sign it, and we get the Oval Office dust-up.
Where we ended up is that the Ukrainians have signed a watered-down version of this that is, effectively: Money for reconstruction will come from critical minerals and go into a joint fund for Ukrainian reconstruction, and then the U.S. will get some of that if there’s enough. In exchange, the U.S. has made absolutely no concrete commitments to Ukraine.
I’m not saying there’s nothing there, but it is basically a confidence-building measure rather than anything practical.
On the other side of this, Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin seems to have hit a rough patch, I think it’s fair to say. On Truth Social, he posted: “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY! He’s needlessly killing a lot of people. And I’m not just talking about soldiers, missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever. I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!” What was behind that post, and what did you make of it?
We can see here just a little bit of that inherent dovish streak that Trump has. He doesn’t like seeing civilian casualties. And we’ve had all these visuals, these videos of missiles and drones, striking Ukrainian cities night after night. If we go back to the first administration and remember the reason he launched missile strikes against Syria, against Bashar al-Assad, was because Ivanka showed him pictures of dead children from a chemical weapons attack.
He doesn’t like this stuff. And I think even though he’s very keen to see a peace deal in Ukraine, he is getting pressure from more traditional Republicans who say: Well, the only way you’re going to get to a deal is if you dial up the pressure on Putin. So there are sanction bills under discussion. There are tariffs being proposed that might put pressure on Putin. And others are trying to push Trump to say: Let’s pass more aid for Ukraine.
That’s the pressure that the president is under, even though the talks between Russia and Ukraine are continuing.
One thing you said there is that Trump doesn’t like civilian casualties, that he’s moved by pictures of dying children, that he’s got this dove streak. But we also mentioned that he shuttered U.S.A.I.D. There are good estimates and direct stories that children are dying from that and will die from that. He doesn’t seem that moved by dying children in Gaza. They’re trying to get a bit of aid in through the nonprofit, as you mentioned, but he has not come out as a harsh critic of what is happening there.
Resolve that tension for me: When does Trump care about dying children?
I think he’s persuadable when it comes to things like conflict. But the process of shuttering U.S.A.I.D. — to him, I think it fits in a very different mental bucket. That’s about: The U.S. is sending all this money abroad and wasting it, and other countries should do more, and we are being taken for a ride.
To the extent that there have been stories about how U.S.A.I.D. being shut has impacted the lives of people around the world, I’m not sure that that has really got through to him.
One thing that it made me think of, when you were mentioning that Ivanka had shown him these pictures of children dying in Syria, is that who shows him what, and who has an interest in showing him what, probably matters here quite a lot. If there are not a bunch of people with a lot of sympathy for Palestinians around him, showing him photos or videos of what is happening in Gaza, and if the people who are telling him about U.S.A.I.D. are telling him that it’s all corruption and D.E.I., then the question of who is putting the pictures in front of the president — who is trying to arouse the sympathy and who is trying to extinguish it — probably really matters.
That’s been the case since the first term. And look, I don’t think it’s an accident that Trump became harsher in his language on Israel after his visit to the gulf. I suspect that not in public but in the private meetings the monarchs of the gulf states talked to him about these issues, about the civilian casualties, about how it couldn’t go on and their populations wouldn’t stand it.
Again, I think this is one of those areas where we see he is persuadable. But the people around him in this administration have a much more coherent worldview. And so, you know, it’s more consistent.
I’ll admit that I’ve been a little surprised that Putin is escalating in Ukraine rather than using his better relationship with Trump and Trump’s relative favor — particularly after that Zelensky meeting — to lock in a more favorable deal, to deliver to Donald Trump some of the deal that Donald Trump wants, where I think Donald Trump would deliver quite a bit more to Putin than, say, other American presidents would. What’s your sense of his calculations here?
The Russians are overplaying their hand, I think, quite badly. I don’t know necessarily why they appear to be perhaps more confident they can have further military gains than I think circumstances on the ground really warrant. But if I could categorize the Russian attitude right now, it seems to be: Eh, we’ll talk and see what we can get. If it’s a good enough deal, great. And if not, we’ll keep fighting. Which strikes me as very shortsighted because I think what the Trump administration is offering is not just the prospect of a passable deal in Ukraine for the Russians; it’s the prospect of reopening relations with the U.S. and talking about other issues. That really should, I think, be more attractive to the Russians.
I wonder a little from talking to folks in Moscow, I think they’re not sure how far they can trust that Trump really wants this or whether it’s just something he’s saying and he’ll change his mind again next week.
Well, there’s a version of this where what Putin would attempt — and I think this was what most people expected — was to play Donald Trump and to treat him the way some of the other leaders who were successful here treat him, with flattery — he’s a peacemaker, he’s the deal maker — and that’s just not really seeming like Putin’s strategy. He seems to want to win the war, not win the deal.
I think it’s certainly an indication of how important the Russians think Ukraine is. There’s been all these debates throughout the war about whether this is an imperial conquest. Is this something that’s a choice? Again, this is just a sign of how strongly Putin and the Russians, in general, feel about the war in Ukraine, that they’re willing to push forward on the ground, even when they’re not really making particular gains, when a potential deal is here on the table.
I don’t want to oversell that, because I do think the Russians are talking. And what they’re presenting — they say they’re going to write up a proposal and they’re going to give it in Istanbul in a week or so — but the contours of that deal are actually not that bad for Ukraine. It’s not nearly as demanding as the Russians could be.
I think they are serious about talking. They just don’t seem to be, as you say, doing the flattery part of it particularly well.
One thing I think a lot of presidents who are very involved in foreign policy deal making believe and have evidenced in their behavior is that it requires a huge amount of persistence in working with other difficult personalities. You think about how Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton were in trying to cut deals at Camp David. You think about even George W. Bush, in a strange way.
Trump wants deals. What I observe about him is he gets very frustrated when the counterparties that he’s working with don’t seem to want them. And his strategy is more to let them come to him. He’s not going to chase Vladimir Putin around. He’s not going to fly back and forth from Israel.
I’m curious if you think that’s accurate as a description of him and also what you think about it on the merits, that Trump positions himself a bit above the fray, like: Well, if you want to come to me, you can, but I’m not going to make America into the world’s negotiator or mediator.
I would draw a distinction between the talks on Iran and the Russia-Ukraine talks. And it’s because Trump genuinely sees America’s role in those conflicts differently. In Ukraine, I think he genuinely sees the U.S. as a potential impartial mediator. I mean, we’ve absolutely been arming one side, and the Russians don’t see us that way. But that’s, I think, how he sees this. And if he stands back and says: OK, guys, if we’re not going to chase you. Just sort it out. That’s fine. A little more persistence on the Iran case.
I do think for Trump and even for Steve Witkoff — who, again, is not a professional diplomat, very limited experience in this space — one of the things that they’re learning is that diplomacy does take time and hammering out all the details of a deal can be quite difficult to do.
We’ve seen, I think, a lot of progress on Iran, primarily because there was a pre-existing deal where a lot of those issues were hammered out. Things have changed since the J.C.P.O.A., but the issues are pretty clear to both parties. That’s not the case in Russia-Ukraine necessarily.
I’ve also wondered, on the other side of it, if this reflects a bit of a way in which Trump doesn’t understand other countries. That his frameworks for their behavior fail because, I think, he often expects everybody to be as transactional as he is. And when they’re more ideological, when they’re more philosophical, when they’re committed to more ancient enmities, it doesn’t seem, by the way he talks about them, that he’s trying very hard to understand where they’re coming from. It’s just like: Can we all get rich together here, or can’t we?
I mean, if other countries frame their concerns in terms of interests, he does pretty well understanding that. The ones that he really seems to struggle with are the European states, where they talk in ideological phrases and there are lots of shibboleths that you have to use in order to be in this policy space. You have to say, “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” the whole phrase. Otherwise, it’s not the right thing.
I think he struggles with that more than he struggles with someone like Putin or the Syrian leader that he met when he was in the gulf — someone putting their concerns and interests and even their ideology to him in fairly plain language. I think he does a lot better with that than he does with the very subtle, P.R.-driven language of some states.
What is your view on how the ever-shifting tariffs fit into the foreign policy?
This is the place, I think, where the administration has been the most inconsistent. I have heard theories of Trump’s tariff policy, ranging from “He wants to generate a bunch of revenue and replace taxes and kill the deficit” through “He’s just using the tariffs instrumentally to get deals on other issues.” I also think it’s pretty clear that folks like JD Vance inside the administration want to reindustrialize parts of America to the extent that’s possible using tariffs.
I am not sure Trump himself has a clear view, and I think that’s why it’s so inconsistent. I think on tariffs he’s persuaded — again, a bit like the first administration — by who he’s talking to last, so the policy’s very inconsistent.
How much is the policy inconsistent, though, because Trump himself has much stronger intuitions here? I mean, Trump’s view on what a final settlement between Ukraine and Russia or Israel and the Palestinians or even America and Iran is just weaker than his views on trade.
And the way the tariffs have worked out looks like this: He’s just making a lot of decisions himself. He gets presented options, and he has strong views. And sometimes the views are both or all of them, and then it changes two days later. And the incoherence reflects how much more that incoherence is centered in him and nobody can really tell the king he’s wrong. Whereas he’s going to be more dependent on advisers in these other areas, and he’s a little bit more willing to step back and act as a decider, as opposed to an operator.
To some extent, it’s the difference between the fact that tariffs are a tool and a lot of the other issues that we’re talking about are not tools. If he has an intuition that he says, “I want to get to peace in Ukraine,” and advisers go and bring back plans for how to do that, and he chooses between them, that’s great.
If he says, “Tariffs are good,” well, tariffs are not an end state. They’re not a strategy. Tariffs are a tool that you use to get to some strategy. So what do advisers do? They go and they bring him back what he could use tariffs to achieve. And there’s all these different options, and you hear Trump parroting the different theories of what he’s going to do with these great tariffs at different points. But I don’t think he himself knows. I think you’re right: It’s an intuition that tariffs are good, but that doesn’t get you to an actual policy.
At some point, it looked like where the tariff policy was cohering was really into a trade war with China. And now the tariffs are largely, though not entirely paused on China for 90 days as they try to work something out. Even on China, which I think is very central to Trump’s foreign policy thinking — and he has thought about China — I cannot really make a clear heads or tails of what the end state he’s trying to achieve is. What is your best account, at this point, of what Trump wants out of the tariffs or potentially the trade war with China?
I have to say not just on trade war but more generally, perhaps the thing I’ve been most surprised about is how incoherent the administration’s China policy is. I would’ve expected it to be much more hard line, very focused on undermining Beijing. And to the extent that the tariffs we’ve seen were — before they were suspended — extremely draconian, that was the kind of thing I expected to see. But we haven’t seen that, really. The tariffs are the only case. And even there, they’ve been dialed back a bit.
I get the impression that the folks inside the Trump administration definitely want to cut U.S. trade with China. They’re very indecisive about whether they care about reshoring those industries or whether they’re fine with them going to, say, Vietnam and Malaysia. And over on the military strategic side, I don’t see a particularly clear strategy toward China.
It’s really interesting. Even in the first Trump administration, tariffs were the one place where there was some consistency when it came to policy with China — setting up export controls, this kind of thing. There was a strategy with regard to China and trade; it continues into the Biden administration and gets bigger. Now in Trump 2, I’m not really sure what we’re doing,
But that gets you back to that question we were circling at the beginning: What does serve America’s interest, and what doesn’t? Because one version of serving America’s interest here, if you believe we’re in a very tense competition with China, is you want to isolate China to the extent that is practical. You want to restrain its expansion of geopolitical influence. And the way Trump is treating allies — the way he’s using tariffs, the way he is weaponizing the dollar, which is obviously part of an evolution of many American presidents weaponizing the dollar system — it’s pretty clearly angering our allies. If Elon Musk is going to be trying to elect the AfD in Germany, maybe you don’t trust various Elon Musk enterprises and you prefer to be dealing with Chinese enterprises. That seems to be a calculation some European allies are making.
That seems pretty central to a way of thinking about our interests and a place where — and I’m curious if you disagree with this — where Trump’s treatment of our allies and the way he’s weaponizing American economic strength seems shortsighted.
It is shortsighted. It’s also a continuation of something that’s been happening since at least the Obama administration, which is the increasing use of very draconian economic statecraft measures for U.S. foreign policy purposes. We start with sanctions, we advance to secondary sanctions, then export controls, and now we’re onto tariffs. We’re basically getting harsher and harsher as we go.
Yeah, but we weren’t aiming that at allies before in this way. That doesn’t seem like the same thing to me. You can look at an evolution of tools, which I agree with, but Trump’s treatment of traditional allies feels very different from Biden’s or, for that matter, Obama’s. Biden’s, in particular — the constant genuflecting before alliances. The really intense work to try to hold these things together and align American interests with them feels very, very different from what Trump is doing. For better or for worse, but different.
You’ve got to differentiate the rhetoric and the personality from the policy. Yeah, Trump is absolutely — he’s rude, he’s dismissive, he belittles allies. But Trump’s rudeness about alliances and his attitude toward allies — underneath that is a core of policy that is a continuation of the way U.S. policymakers have been talking for a long time.
U.S. policymakers all the way back, again, to the Obama administration but even before talked about European allies free riding. Bob Gates said in 2011, when he was Obama’s secretary of defense, that if European countries didn’t start contributing more and step up in defense, that NATO was going to go away in the future because it wouldn’t be able to hold together. You can even go back as far as Eisenhower and find him saying similar things about the U.S. defense relationship with Europe.
I mean, I would not, if it was me, go about it the way that Trump is going about it, but that’s because I think you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. But the policies that he is pursuing toward U.S. allies, of trying to rebalance this relationship a little — there are threads of that that go back into previous administrations.
But is that true on the tariffs? I agree that’s true on trying to get the Europeans to increase defense spending. It’s more been the aggressive tariffs on allies that struck me as interesting. And if I were an ally, that would make me wonder about the safety of being as highly exposed to the American economy as I am.
This is a fairly American way of looking at it because if you go to Europe and you talk to businesses, they’ll talk to you about secondary sanctions on Iran that made it so that European car manufacturers or energy companies had to abandon all their business and leave those places. And other sanction cases like that, though Iran is probably the most obvious.
The Europeans even tried to create a mechanism for circumventing U.S. sanctions that would let them trade directly with Iran. Again, not at the scale that Trump is doing it, not with the venom, but the U.S. has used these tools against its allies before.
I think they understood that as using that tool against Iran and that they said the allies had to come along with them. It feels different to use a tool against the ally. The 50 percent tariff that he might put on the E.U. feels different from “We’ve placed sanctions on Iran, and to be part of our financial system, you can’t be doing business with what we now call” — not wrongly — “a state sponsor of terrorism.” Does that not feel different to you?
The scope of the tariffs and the pointlessness with which they are being pursued — that feels different to me. But I’ll call your attention to the E.U.’s blocking statute that they passed a number of years back. It was originally intended to shield European businesses from American secondary sanctions.
From the U.S. point of view, again, maybe we see these things very differently as justified, but I think other parties in the world, other states, have sometimes seen these as against their interests.
I’m a pretty strong Trump critic. But you’ve been a critic of American foreign policy and the way it’s been practiced by the American foreign policy establishment for a while. And I think there are pieces of this that you’re probably more sympathetic to.
Because it doesn’t usually get offered on this show, what is your best case for it coming all together? If in four years, whatever else we think about Donald Trump, there’s a real case to be made that his foreign policy worked, that “America First” did put America first and that it made America stronger and safer — and maybe the world safer, too — what would that look like? What does success here look like?
That is a tough one. What I don’t see is a grand vision for the future of even the U.S. role in the world. But what I do see is an understanding of the problems with the way U.S. foreign policy’s been going and a willingness to act to try and handle those problems. That contrasts very strongly with the Biden administration, in particular, which understood many of the problems with America’s overextension in the world but were so tied up in process that they basically couldn’t ever figure out a way out of this.
My best-case scenario for this Trump presidency would be that at the end of four years, maybe a few of these big problems have been resolved. Maybe we did get a peace deal in Ukraine or something like that. Maybe we got a nuclear deal with Iran, and that’s great.
But mostly, what Trump has done is sever us from the existing things that are broken — maybe manage to pull back some troops from the Middle East, lift sanctions on Syria, forced Europeans to spend more on defense — in ways that position future administrations to make concrete steps in building something new.
The example that I’ve been thinking about really a lot lately is Richard Nixon. Everybody hated Richard Nixon, but in retrospect, the foreign policy choices that he made were incredibly dramatic: taking the U.S. off the gold standard, opening up to China, trying détente with the Soviets. It didn’t all work during his presidency — it didn’t all even work during Ford’s presidency — but 10, 15 years later, he started the process of change that put us in a better place. That would be my best case for what Trump is doing right now.
What’s your negative case? What does failure look like?
I think failure looks like: We try to open negotiations with a bunch of other parties and find that that is significantly harder than we thought; the U.S. stays bogged down in a bunch of conflicts around the world; China continues to make significant gains while the U.S. messes about bombing Iran in the Middle East.
I think that the Trump administration — again, first time around, very prone to distraction, didn’t have a long attention span — that seems to be a little bit better this time. But you could see, effectively, an A.D.H.D. presidency, where they just jump from crisis to crisis to crisis and they never really resolve anything. And so we end up in four years slightly worse off, certainly no better off.
And then always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Well, on the Nixon point: I’ve been reading “A Superpower Transformed” by Dan Sargent, which basically looks at all of those overlapping changes that happened in the 1970s through Nixon, Ford, Carter. So if that’s a good model for this moment, and maybe it is, it’s a really good read.
If you want to understand U.S. defense policy, it’s worth picking up “A Strategy of Denial” by Elbridge Colby, who’s now at the Pentagon. This is his book on U.S. involvement in Asia, how he thinks about Taiwan and its importance. It’s going to inform the national defense strategy, so well worth a read.
And then finally, I would say “A World Safe for Commerce” by Dale Copeland, which is this lengthy historical treatment of how the U.S. and its foreign policy have been impacted by our trade with other countries, which again, seems very relevant for the current moment. If our foreign policy, as he argues, has been driven by our wanting to access markets all around the world and suddenly we’re not wanting to access those markets, well, that’s a really interesting question. Three really good books if folks are interested.
Emma Ashford, thank you very much.
Great to be here.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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