It's kind of a mafia polar world that is shaping up. You cannot understand Trump in isolation without also understanding Orban and Putin. It's about might makes right. It's about if you have nukes, then if you're the dominant power in your neighborhood. You get to do what you want. The U.S. and the U.K. have allowed Israel basically to burn down the Geneva Convention's international humanitarian law as we know it. The alternative is the law of the jungle or the mafia code. Basically all...
people do in response to Trump and Putin is buy more weapons. It's not a surprise, is it, that if America goes full on nationalist, then yeah, the neighbors, Canada and Mexico, those countries are going to get nationalist too in response. I think we're seeing a pattern of countries becoming more like Trump in the name of fighting Trump. Right. We've been kind of playing defense when we should have been playing offense on.
Not just democracy, but as you say, multilateralism. How do we respond to the fact that This international world order, you know, humanitarian, at least the humanitarian side of it, has never existed in the first place. I'm Naomi Klein. And I'm Mehdi Hassan. And today we're going to get unshocked about Trump blowing up the world order. Blowing up the world order, Naomi, starting with where you are. You're finally in a place that is relevant to the rest of the world, dare I say, Canada.
i know who would have thought people actually are interested in the fact that we might be annexed by the united states annexed invaded economically bombarded all i've been hearing about in recent weeks is tariff, tariff, tariff from Donald Trump, who calls it the most beautiful word in the English language, in the dictionary. Not that he's very familiar with the dictionary. Well, he's got a new word. Yes, it's a new word. What is the mood in Canada right now? Do you feel like you're under siege?
There are a lot of hockey metaphors and maybe I have to tell you, it's a little tough on me just as a non-hockey person, like the elbows out, which, which, yep. And the gloves off. There's a lot. We're in full sort of. hockey fight mode, I suppose. There's a lot of Canadian flags everywhere. There's a lot of by Canadian. There's a lot of people. canceling their holidays in the United States, canceling book tours. So there's a lot of economic nationalism and there are
belated debates happening about more sophisticated ways that we might respond beyond just a straight up kind of mirror of America first with Canada first. But no, I think people feel very, very vulnerable. um it has come as a shock uh it's just suddenly realizing that this country that we have kind of gambled everything on um is treating us like an adversary dreaming of sort of if not
completely taking us over than maybe redrawing the border around the Great Lakes. So all of our fresh water is on the US side. You know, I kind of came of age in the free trade era. I have this vivid memory of, you know, I was still in high school when the first... election was fought over the free trade agreement with the United States. And it was between the Conservatives and the Liberals. And there was this very famous ad where the border between Canada and the US was erased.
and this was a liberal attack ad on the Conservatives, that this is what they want to do. They want to erase the line between Canada and the US. So this has always been the kind of Canadian nightmare, to be honest.
And it is frightening, especially as we see, I mean, as I know you're a proud US citizen, but the degeneration of the United States, I mean, you know, I'm not a particularly... a nationalist person but there are things that set our countries apart like the fact that we have universal public health care like the fact that we invest in our public broadcaster not nearly as much as we should and and so this idea that that
that we could lose these sort of precarious differences that are nonetheless really important. I think we need more of it. You know, we need more investments in our public sphere, not less. So so, yeah, it's it's it's a frightening time.
And it's not just being annexed by America, as you say. It's Trump's America. It's not Obama's America that's trying to annex you. It's Donald Trump's America term two. And it's so funny that you talk about it being a nightmare because I don't think Canadians were up, you know, losing sleep. Even if Trump won, this would happen. This has almost come out of nowhere, his obsession with Greenland and Panama and Canada. It wasn't really there on the election.
campaign trail. He didn't talk a lot about it while he was, you know, holed up in Mar-a-Lago. It wasn't a big turn one thing. But now, as part of this kind of economic war that he thinks he's launching, this nationalist agenda. Yes, as you mentioned, the New York Times reports in a call with Justin Trudeau on February 3rd, Trump told Mr. Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid.
I mean, that's out of nowhere. I've never heard Trump or any other American nationalists say that. Even the excuse that he's giving for these Paris tariffs today of fentanyl is completely bogus, completely. unjustified, completely false. So we actually have to fold back on the one thing he has said repeatedly, that what he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy.
Because that'll make it easier to annex us. We will never be the 51st state. But yeah, he can do damage to the Canadian economy, and he started this morning. But he is rapidly going to find out, as American families are going to find out. that that's going to hurt people on both sides of the border. Americans will lose jobs. Americans will be paying more for groceries, for gas.
for cars, for homes. You mentioned that Canadians are getting very patriotic and, dare I say, nationalistic. It's not a surprise, is it, that if America goes full on nationalist, then, yeah, the neighbors, Canada and Mexico, where Scheinbaum has been the president, has been drawing huge crowds. Those countries are going to get nationalists too in response. Yeah, and we're definitely...
Taking on Trump seems to be very good for any politician's fortunes. I mean, we're seeing this with Starmer's poll ratings. We're seeing it with Zelensky. Even Trudeau, who just a few weeks ago, people couldn't wait to see. see the back of him. There's been a lot of appreciation for him in his final days in office. So yeah, I think this is the great irony of the way Trump is uniting countries against him, uniting the world against him.
but we we do you know it should be a real wake-up call for canada you know just thinking about the This is a model of economic integration that many of us opposed in the first place precisely because it made us vulnerable to these types of shocks, like being dependent on a single trading partner for so much of your. or even being dependent, in the case of Canada, we're so dependent on raw resource exports, for instance, right? Or car parts, not the finished.
the finished cars right um so all of this makes a country not resilient um very vulnerable to um you know in the past it's mainly been focused on price fluctuations but now what we're seeing is it's also very vulnerable to quixotic presidents who have a new shiny idea. And in the case of Trump, I
I wasn't as surprised as a lot of other people, because unfortunately, I do still listen to Steve Bannon a lot. And this idea has been rattling around in mega media for a while. And at the center of it, I think is that. Trump knows that he cannot fulfill the economic promises he made to his base in any way, shape or form, especially if he's going to deliver on the tax cuts to the rich.
He has this idea that tariffs are this easy way to bring in money in the same way that he has this idea that mass deportations are the best way to create jobs. Right. So these are really, really kind of cartoonish. ideas for how to stimulate the US economy. It's not going to work as we're seeing. It's much more likely to create a recession.
But this is where we are. But I watched this idea take form in Steve Bannon's brain, I have to say. They started calling it the external revenue service a couple of months ago. And sure enough, it's Trump's big idea. It's interesting that you call it cartoonish because, of course, the left has always had a critique of free trade, as you mentioned, going back to NAFTA and now the USMCA. There is a case.
for tariffs and protectionism, many on the left would argue, for domestic industries, for industries that need to be protected. That's not what Trump and MAGA are doing. He is wielding it, as you say, as a blunt economic tool, as some weird revenue raiser, even though Americans are going to pay the tariffs. you know,
Jobs could be lost in the U.S. and car dealerships and all sorts of industries as a result of these tariffs. And he's using it basically to bully and bludgeon his way to get his way. And I do want to talk to you about Ukraine later in the show and what he's doing there with the minerals.
front it is just a way of economic nationalism and bullying and using America's might or leverage to get its way but as with Trump you know there's a great Rick Wilson book title which is everything Trump touches dies and The Conservatives in Canada were about to win the election by a landslide. Justin Trudeau was super unpopular.
And now the liberals actually have a chance of winning. They've narrowed the gap because the conservatives are seen as too close to Trump. This guy, Pierre Polyev, the right wing leader, is seen as a Trumpist. And Canadians in their nationalist moment don't want to be close to Trumpists. And we even have a new Liberal leader, Mark Carney, former banker, who could win the next election. I will work day and night with one purpose, which is to build a stronger Canada for everyone.
It's not a done deal. I mean, I am wary because I think we're in a little bit of that early sort of Kamala bump sort of phase of just... Maybe the party isn't left for dead. Maybe they have a chance, a big bounce. But there's no doubt that there's been, as they call, a vibe shift, right? You know, people may have seen clips of him eating an apple, for instance, that went viral a little while ago, like full of sort of what Mark Zuckerberg calls masculine energy.
And he's really more of a J.D. Vance type of character, just strangely angry all the time and has been picking up steam with this slogan, Canada is broken, right? And so you can imagine in a moment where we are, the country is feeling as vulnerable as it is to the United States and a bully next door, that having a leader nationally who's can't stop talking about how terrible your country is, is not really going to be hitting the mood.
That explains why Polyev's fortunes are dropping. Whether Carney is the messiah that people hope he is, I'm not sure, right? I mean, it is a gamble because he is a... banker. He's headed up a couple of central banks. He headed up the Canadian central bank, the UK central bank. He's also never been elected to anything. I believe he's not a member of parliament.
Right. And there is a populist backlash against the so-called globalists. And he is kind of like like what you see when you look it up in the dictionary. Right. So. But he is, there is clearly some appeal around just a kind of, you know, guy in suit, reassuring. in a moment of crisis and shock. And so there is hope there. And he also is somebody who... has done a lot on climate. Now, what he has done is something we could devote an entire episode to. He's all been about getting these...
banks in particular, to adopt voluntary measures, emission reduction commitments, which they have all basically abandoned in recent months, because this is now being dismissed as woke capitalism. But You know, I think that for people who recognize that, yes, Trump is a crisis, but he's not the only crisis like climate change is still happening.
you know, we need to multitask in a time of polycrisis, you can see why Carney, you know, has picked up the sort of momentum that he has. And he just got a huge majority. What did you make of Mike Myers on SNL as Musk? Not just as Musk, making fun of Musk, but he also at the end of the show came on wearing a T-shirt with the slogan, Canada is not for sale. He mouthed elbows up the mantra you mentioned.
Did you ever think you'd see that on SNL? Mike Myers never used to be very political, famously stood next to Kanye quietly while Kanye called George Bush a racist during Katrina. Oh, my God, I forgot about that moment. Yeah. So you can see the fight.
Yeah, you can see the fight. You can see why Canadians are more drawn to... um politicians who are you know making them feel better about themselves and saying you know we we can do this instead of just saying we're broken you know we're terrible um so yeah i thought that was a kind of amazing moment but um and i like the idea of not being for sale the trouble is many that what's actually happening on the ground in canada is um
kind of a wish list for our domestic corporations right so we're saying you know we're not going to sell ourselves to the united states but we are going to allow the oil and gas companies to have their wish list in the name of fighting these tariffs right so we have seen you know, not to repeat myself.
but it's kind of an example of the shock doctrine right so the shock is the u.s the u.s tariffs and lo and behold the wish list appears right we want more deregulation we want fewer environmental protection so all of these um uh mines pipelines that have um you know that that have either been defeated because they were seen as violating indigenous rights or coming at too high of a climate cost, are now suddenly back on the books in the name of, well, if we can't ship to the United States.
States. We have to ship to China. We have to, you know, it's a little bit incoherent. It's a little bit the way the oil and gas um a sector responded to the invasion of ukraine right where you remember like like they immediately took advantage of of that to say well this is why we need to frack like crazy domestically so we're dealing with that in canada
But we are also starting to see a more sophisticated pushback, which is saying, no, actually, what we need is to stop being a resource colony for anyone. We need to have more manufacturing, more value added, as they say. instead of just like changing who we ship raw logs to and gas and oil and iron ore or whatever it is. So let's hope that that's actually what comes out of this moment. You mentioned Ukraine and.
I want to talk about Ukraine because you said you've been... By the way, Mehdi, I know a minute ago you were saying that Canada was interesting, but now that I'm talking about iron ore, I'm pretty sure you've reconsidered your life. I'm going to move this up quickly to Ukraine.
I do want to talk about Ukraine, but before we get to the specifics of Ukraine, you mentioned that you listen to a lot of Bannon media. How surprised were you? Because I spent a lot of last year saying if Trump wins, he's not a dove, he's actually a hawk. He's a guy who likes war, likes bullying people. Watch out for war with Iran. Watch out for escalation with China. I didn't expect he would be picking a fight with Canada, with Denmark, with Colombia and Panama.
And Ukraine, obviously, we knew that the Republicans were, you know, turning on Zelensky in Ukraine, soft on Putin. But even I have never seen anything like that now infamous Oval Office meeting between Zelensky. Vance and Trump. You're not in a good position. You don't have the cards right now.
With us, you start having cards. We went to Pennsylvania and campaigned for the opposition in October. Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who's trying to save your country. the question is did you see this coming did you see the complete abandonment of ukraine and a lot of people have a lot of theories about why
But isn't that really what's shocking us? It's that he's come to power and he's not just picking fights with the usual American enemies. He's picking fights with longstanding allies. Yeah, I mean, I can't say I saw it coming. you know just to continue a little bit more on you know beyond that oval office meeting right we heard a follow-up from vance saying um well there could be no better security guarantee
than having American economic interest in Ukraine, right? Like if you sign the minerals deal and you'll be safe forever, which I would just say, have a look at Canada because our resource sector is. dominated by u.s companies i mean if you go to calgary the skyline is shell exxon mobil you know all the big american mining giants uh you know i have a free-for-all in canada
And that has not protected us from being threatened with being forcibly turned into the 51st state. So I'd take a pass on that deal if I were him. I think what we're seeing is, for a long time on the left, and I know we've both heard this in the context of Syria, in the context of Ukraine, this idea that really what the goal should be is a multipolar world, right? And I am all for dispersals of power.
democratic world order. And, you know, I don't think it's safe for anyone for the US to be the dominant power that it is in the world, you know, have there be a single poll. for precisely the reasons that we have seen and now are seeing in accelerated form with Trump, right? But the idea of just having a multipolar world. is not any kind of end in itself, as I think we're seeing with the Trump-Putin alliance. It's kind of a mafia polar world that is shaping up, right? Where I know it's...
Some people want to argue that this is all just about Trump being Putin's stooge. I think it's much more about a common theory of power where it's about might makes right. it's about if you have nukes um then if you're the dominant power in your neighborhood you get to do what you want right you aren't governed by any kind of international uh rules-based system the entire
post-second world war international humanitarian order, forget it. You can invade countries if you have the ability to do so. So I think that they have a common view. of power. And I think that they also understand that we are entering into an era of increased instability. I think the idea that any of them...
actually don't believe climate change is happening is ridiculous. They know. And so they're fortressing their borders and they're trying to get what they need inside those borders. That's why Trump is interested in Canada's Great Lakes. It's why Putin is interested in Ukraine's agricultural land. I mean, they're trying to take what they need. And I think Asia is much more complicated because you've got India and China battling over who's going to be...
the dominant power. But I think this is what, yeah, I've been thinking it's not a multipolar world. It's a mafia polar world. And it's, it's, it's not what we. It's not what we should be striving towards. And this is why we actually have those rules in the first place. It's convenient.
for trump to be part of a mafia polar world because he comes from a very mafia background having done construction in new york for all these years we know he's interacted with mob bosses we know he's had lawyers who worked for the mob and we know that he likes that approach to power of the nudging and the
thinking of the trading of favors and threats, the settling of scores. He is very much a mafioso president. And you're applying that globally and saying, well, he's looking around and saying, we're sure Putin should be able to do what he wants in his neighborhood.
In his turf. And I should be able to do what I want to do on my turf. And who knows what Xi Jinping can do on his turf. And I've been saying this for a while. We've said it on this show before. I've been saying it for years. You cannot understand Trump in isolation without also understanding Orban.
and Putin and all of the rest of them, the MBSs, the Xi Jinpings, et cetera, the Netanyahus, who are doing similar things. I mean, Israel is also extracting resources from its neighbors who it occupies in different ways. And I think you're right to highlight that. comes from a left perspective. I hear a lot of progressives, a lot of leftists say, it's fine if he's doing it for the wrong reasons. The end goal is something we share. This idea of...
tearing it all down. You hear this phrase all the time in domestic American politics, burn it down, right? People hate the establishment, whether it's the domestic political establishment in DC or the global establishment of the IMF, the World Bank, etc., etc. Where does... How dangerous is that line of thinking in your view? What are we tearing down exactly? You know, I think people are... Just to be clear, Elon Musk is on the record.
the top guy in the US government, some would say the shadow president, saying now we should pull out of the UN and NATO. Now, I know the left has its mixed views on NATO, but the UN? Yeah, and they pulled out of the World Health Organization and the Paris Accord. I withdrew from the corrupt World Health Organization. And I also withdrew from the anti-American U.N. Human Rights Council. You know, I get why people are cynical about it. Right. I mean, the climate.
infrastructure, right, that the Paris Accord is part of, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, it has been a source of tremendous frustration because it is so weak, right? Because the agreements... are non-binding. They're basically voluntary. And the reason for that is that the U.S. has systematically opposed every time the majority countries of the world have come together and said these agreements need to be binding.
you know, the UN has tried to come together to stop the genocide in Gaza. And at every single turn, the US has used its veto at the Security Council. How do we respond to the fact that this international world order, at least the humanitarian side of it, has never existed in the first place, right? You know, I think of my friend and colleague Astra Taylor's, she wrote a book about democracy that she published several years ago called Democracy Doesn't Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone.
And that was a response to that burn it down impulse in the context of particularly American democracy. We know the United States isn't a real democracy, that it's rigged in so many different ways. And the impulse might be to try to burn it down. And her response is, let's try to have a real democracy. We should actually try it. We should try to make it better and live up to its stream.
And I feel the same way about the international humanitarian order. It doesn't exist. It was rigged from the start to provide a veto to these major powers that...
are on the Security Council and particularly the US. And there may be a moment now as the US um uh um recedes into into multilateralism withdraws into unilateralism forgive me um for the rest of the world or the to be a kind of coalition of the willing not everyone's going to participate obviously Putin's with Trump but to to try to make the what is left of the world that that might want to have
actual multilateralism try it try democratic multilateralism for the first time and organize around the united states so i think this is We're going to we already start to see some of this around Gaza with the Hague group of countries that's that recently announced.
You know, I think Canada and Mexico obviously have to coordinate their responses to the United States. That's only a matter of time. There's going to be a Congress about this that I'm going to be attending at the end of at the end of August. So maybe we'll end up with a more democratic multilateral system that the US at some future date might decide.
to join as one among many participants, not one with a veto and the ability to smash the whole thing. But I would argue strongly against burning the whole thing down. What about you Mehdi? No, something I worry about, because as you say, you'll miss it when we're gone, is I think about the Geneva Conventions in specifically where the US and the UK and Germany and France, to an extent, have allowed Israel basically to...
burn down the Geneva Convention's international humanitarian law as we know it, and set new precedents for what can be done in wars against hospitals and children. And the response to that can't just be, well, okay, everyone gets to do that now. I mean, that's a great rhetorical flourish in a debate.
But actually, you don't want China doing that to Taiwan. You don't want Russia doing that in Ukraine, et cetera, et cetera. You don't want India and Kashmir. Those rules weren't always followed, as you say, and they were often vetoed. but they existed as some kind of benchmark or aspiration.
And the alternative is the law of the jungle or the mafia code, which you mentioned, where it's just Putin, Trump and a few other strongmen deciding what isn't as acceptable based on, as you say, whether you have nuclear weapons. whether you have access to minerals and economic leverage. So it does really worry me, this idea that, yes,
We don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. We certainly don't have a perfect multilateral architecture or a perfect UN. And there's a lot of questions to be asked about the future of NATO. But the alternatives all on offer right now from Trump. And that's a problem for the left, right? We're playing a very reactive game. When Musk says something, so we react. Trump says something, so we react. Netanyahu does something, so we react. There is no real proactive initiative.
to build something or offer a vision of the future that is better. By the way, let's not use the phrase coalition of the willing as tempting as it is, because that's what George Bush used for Iran. Keir Starmer used it recently. I was like, no, no, let's not say that. It is true. What am I doing? I get it. I get it. But let's not say it. But look, you mentioned to me and I
I'm going to quote for you because I haven't read it, but you mentioned it to me before the show. Omar Barghouti, one of the founders of the BDS movement, wrote a great piece for The Guardian last year where he talked about actually rebuilding the UN, making the UN work.
As you say, elimination of the veto, a more inclusive representation, revamping the grossly inflated structure, making it more lean, less corrupt, less dependent on Washington money. Those are all good things that we should be proactively making the case for. And we haven't been. We've been kind of playing defense when we should have been playing offense on not just democracy, but as you say, multilateralism. It's not a word you hear very often.
Yeah, and I think that there, and the risk, of course, in a moment like this is that rather than going in that direction, basically all... people do in response to trump and putin is buy more weapons right and we're seeing some of this from the eu and and um you know i think that that's a pretty grim future it's just um that that that whatever whatever money is left over in in this world goes to AI and weapons and not to responding to the underlying drivers of crisis.
know you're talking about israel and i think it's really important and and you know and i know you've talked about this with anthony lohenstein It always markets itself as a laboratory for these technologies. Trump is now talking about not just an iron dome, but a golden dome so that we're accelerating very quickly. I know it's just too much. The national security initiative into gold.
like his freaking toilets in his apartment. Yes, gold cards instead of green cards. Mexico, like who's shelling us that the Iron Dome would protect. It's insane. But as you say, the laboratory is certainly there. And that impulse, as you said earlier, to fortress your country off very much is there. I don't think... I don't think Democrats for sure here in the US have quite struck upon that language that you use, which is identifying this idea of...
steal resources, build bigger and bigger walls and broader borders, pull in as much as you can. And there is this sense, isn't there, of like, well, Latin America has always been America's backyard. I didn't realize Canada was as well. And the Russians get to have Crimea and Donbas as their backyard. There is a symmetry there. And I guess Canadians and Ukrainians can feel some solidarity right now.
Yeah, I mean, and I think that there was huge support for Ukraine and Canada, in part because even though we weren't in quite as vulnerable... a position. I think we understood what it means to live next door to a nuclear superpower and what this precedent would mean. But yeah, I mean, I just want to stress that I feel like... You know, in moments of crisis, we forget about the climate crisis. We forget about climate breakdown. But I believe that the planet is a player in all of this.
And that this is a really important backdrop for us to understand a logic behind all of this. In the past, we've talked about Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, talking about Palestine as a as a preview. for what the global south and the poor of the world will face on the borders of the world, right? So this really is a choice point about whether or not we're going to go to this fortress model, overwhelmingly the richest countries in the world.
create their various kinds of iron domes and sort of do mass hoarding, right? During times of crisis, we buy bottled water and toilet paper and Donald Trump wants the Great Lakes, you know, and Greenland, right? I mean, it's the same kind of logic. And what multilateralism offers is... an actual mechanism for thinking about how we solve problems together. So I think it would be a terrible mistake to take a burn it down approach just when we need it most.
It's such a good line you said there, that the planet is a player, because I do feel it will intrude upon Trumpian realities. This idea that the Trump folks can just live an alternative universe until the planet intrudes, I'm sure you saw...
Pete Hegseth, the new defense secretary, ex-Fox host, saying the Pentagon doesn't do that climate crap anymore, is what he said this week. He went out of his way today, they're removing all climate references from Pentagon planning documents. The Pentagon actually was a big player in the climate debate in recent years.
He is pointing out the national security risks, the resource wars. And as you say, he can call it climate crap. But when U.S. troops are facing, when U.S. military bases are facing flooding and when U.S. troops are facing resource wars.
The climate is going to be very much part of what generals are planning for, even if Pete Hegseth is not. And it will intrude its way in. And Greenland is another example of that, where, you know, it's in the Arctic. The Chinese apparently have designed the Russians. Trump is now saying...
quite openly. And I was told, oh, by anti-imperialist left, Trump will be anti-war. He stands in his address to Congress and says, we're going to get you one way or another. We're just going to take it. Yeah. And I mean, by the way, a lot of this becomes more economically attractive and viable because of climate change, right? I mean, a lot of the oil becomes available because of melting sea ice. So whether or not it's on the website or not, or they're talking about it publicly.
They all know that's why there is the increased attention and interest in the north for resource extraction. I mean, and the other thing about this is that, you know, all these Silicon Valley players around Trump, Musk, I mean, Musk knows about climate change. He's the electric car guy. He's the one saying we need to colonize Mars because the Earth is probably going to become uninhabitable.
So it's not about whether or not they are denying it or not denying or naming it or not naming it. They absolutely know. And the question is, how are we going to respond to this age? of serial shocks and mass migration? Are we going to respond with fortresses, with more militarism, with allowing people to die in huge numbers on our borders or killing them ourselves?
Or are we going to come up with something else? I mean, this is really the sort of this is Rosa Luxemburg said socialism or barbarism. I say eco socialism or barbarism. That's where we're at. Basically, it is the existential question. And what is the choice? What is the response? Like you, and you said this earlier, like you, I'm worried about that all the wrong lessons are being taken by especially European governments. They still want to play a big role on climate. Yes.
But for example, take the aid debate, where Trump has basically dismantled USAID, taken the United States out of the aid arena. if I can use that phrase. And the response from the British in particular has been, well, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to up our defense spending and cut the aid budget.
Which is precisely the wrong lesson. I get it. You're worried about Putin. I get the idea that Europe has to be able to defend itself. It can't rely on the US security guarantee or nuclear. I get all of that. But the idea that at a moment when the US is retreating from foreign aid both as a moral
instrument and as a strategic weapon, why the rest of the world wouldn't try to step in and fill that gap? Because aid has two obvious roles. One is morally it's the right thing to do. But even if you don't care about morality, the idea that the EU, for example... could be the force that is winning hearts and minds in Asia rather than the Chinese.
and in Africa, where the Chinese have made huge inroads. Strategically, it makes no sense to withdraw from that part of the world in an economic, humanitarian, strategic way. I just find it insane that the lesson that Keir Starmer's Labour government has taken is to say, oh, yeah, we're going to cut aid to spend more.
That seems to me the precisely wrong lesson to take from the Trumpist approach. Yeah, I think we're seeing a pattern of countries becoming more like Trump in the name of fighting Trump. And I think we have a moment and an opening for some real international leadership. that would hold up other models. I nominate Claudia Scheinbaum, maybe Lula. Like, I think that there are some voices. Not your own new prime minister, the unelected banker. I'm shocked, man. Shocked. Not to you. Not Mark Cohen.
Yeah, I mean, like I said, I think I will be very grateful if he saves us from Polyev, but I wouldn't be looking. I wouldn't bank on the banker to be that alternative we all need and want. I wouldn't bank on the banker. One thing I would say is, you know, I always think about impending fascism and we haven't had a chance in this episode, we've been talking about kind of America abroad as we're taping it.
The big domestic story is the fascist impulse at home, where people on green cards are being rounded up by ICE agents. And I just think about the fascism at home and abroad, the choice between, as you say, eco-socialism and barbarism. And I think what will save us, obviously, is good leadership.
and the power of community and mass movements. But also what might save us, and you know this from listening to Steve Bannon, these people are just not very good at what they do. We started this show by talking about tariffs. I don't even know where we are with the tariffs right now because every day it's like tariff. Oh, no, pause the tariff. Tariff. Well, I had a phone call with the president. I'm going to drop the tariff.
So they're all over the place. He can't even get his narrative right. Tariff is a great economic weapon. No, it's not. It was a diplomatic move. It's about drugs. No, it's about this. And I just think that's what might save us, that even in term two. In fact, especially in term two, he's surrounded by a bunch of absolute incompetence, narcissists, grifters, sycophants, no one with any real vision to match the kind of autocratic and nationalistic impulses.
And I just want to mention this before we wrap because I did want to mention earlier, but I feel there's a perfect moment to mention as we try and look for hope. Kristy Noem, the secretary for Homeland Security, former governor of South Dakota. She went to the Vermont-Quebec border in January. And there's no video of this, sadly. We looked everywhere. But Daily Beast reports that she reportedly stepped up to the line, the border, the tape, and said with a grin, USA number one.
and then stepped across the line into Canada and said the 51st state and did this back and forth. We are governed by children. And I feel like that is what makes... It's like a demented game of hopscotch, yes. A demented game of hopscotch. I look at that and I think, idiots. But then I think, thank God we've got the idiots and not the really sharp...
strategic fascists of the Orban variety. Elbows up. We can beat these people at hockey, there's no doubt. I don't play hockey, but I'm happy to put that up. I have no idea what that means. Elbows up is definitely, I think the American left should also adopt it now. We're going to need more than elbows up. We've got armed ICE agents coming for us. So Naomi, on that note, elbows up with some hope in the demented hopscotches that are coming for us.
I do think we can get through this, but it's going to be very dark as this. I mean, you said it, the mafia polar world that we're heading into. You heard it here first.