Checks and Balance: Aid, and a bet

Hello and welcome to Checks and Balance. You're listening to a free episode. To listen every week, you'll need to be a subscriber to sign up to Economist Podcasts plus, click on the link in the show Notes or search Economist Podcasts. The Economist in high school history lessons, Henry Clay is known as the Great Compromiser. The 19th century Kentucky Congressmen tried to hold the country together in the years before the Civil War. But in Venezuela, Clay became known as the Apostle of Fraternity. As speaker of the House, he had made a series of speeches supporting South American countries as they sought independence from Spain. Simone Bolivar, South America's independence hero, wrote to Clay that all America owe you our purest gratitude for sustaining our cause with a sublime enthusiasm. In 1921 Plaza, Henry Clay was christened in the heart of Caracas. Congress sent a statue of him for the center, the first of an American citizen ever presented to another country. Now another speaker of the House may end up surprisingly well remembered abroad, with 192 days to go until the 2024 election. Charlotte I'm Charlotte Howard and this is Checks and Balance from the Economist. Each week we take one big theme shaping American politics and explore it in depth today. What does the foreign aid deal mean for House Speaker Mike Johnson and for the world? Until last week, the $95 billion aid deal looked like it was going nowhere. In the House, Ukraine desperately needed the support, but an inexperienced speaker with a narrow majority looked unlikely to get the bill passed. Now the first billion dollars of aid is being rushed out. How did the bill get through and what does it mean for Ukraine and for American leadership? In. This week, I'm joined by James Bennett in Washington and by Idris Calhoun, who's here in New York with me. How are you both?

I'm well. I'm glad to be sitting two feet away from you and looking forward to dissecting Taylor Swift's new album with you.

James, I've been thinking about you this week because you are in Washington at the moment, but you live right next to Columbia, which has been completely engulfed in protests, and you've been writing about college protests this week. So what was the reason why it was such a big week on college campuses, not just at Columbia, but around the country?

Obviously these protests have been building for months. I think the spark that created this real burst of turmoil in the last week was the Columbia president was testifying on Capitol Hill last week to a House panel that's been investigating anti Semitism on campus and unfortunately, I think fanning the flames rather than trying to calm things down. And the pro Palestine protesters at Columbia, I think, used that as a moment to set up a new tent encampment on the campus, which the New York City police then came in and took down and arrested dozens of students. This has convulsed the campus and I think it brought a new wave of a protest at Columbia that has then spread to other Ivy League campuses, in particular across the country.

Yeah, I have to say I've not read your column yet because we're recording this as the Economist itself goes to press. But I'm really looking forward to doing so. This week we're going to talk not about those protests, but about this enormous aid package that seemingly against all odds was passed. So it's $95 billion, 61 billion of that is for Ukraine. Then there's 14 billion of military aid for Israel, another nine and a half for humanitarian aid, not just for those in Gaza, but around the world for people who are in conflict zones, another $8 billion for Taiwan, and then this requirement that ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, sell the app or have it banned. And so to make sense of all this, I spoke with Adam o', Neill, our Washington correspondent, who's been following it.

All closely for the six months or so that this has been an on off discussion in Washington. When will we pass the next Ukraine aid bill? And, you know, later Israel and other components were added. But throughout that whole process, a lot of people on the Hill, whether senators, members of the House, staffers, whatever, would always tell me if there is an important issue that a strong majority of Congress supports, eventually it's going to pass. Then I would ask, okay, well, how is this going to pass? And no one ever quite had an answer. What this came down to was, would Mike Johnson allow a vote to happen? And despite voting against Ukraine aid several times when he was a lesser known member of Congress before he was elevated to the speakership in October, he finally came to the decision that we're going to make this happen. And so he relied on Democratic support and Republicans were about 55, 45% against it. But together that forms a very strong bipartisan majority, at least on the Ukraine component. And although most Republicans voted against it, Steve Scalise, who's the number two House Republican, is quoted as saying, the vast majority of our members wanted this addressed and brought up, even though some that voted no wanted to bring it up. And that's basically another way of saying that there were a lot of Republicans who voted no, but knew that it was the right policy. They just didn't want to face the wrath of their voters.

That seems to be a very succinct explanation of congressional dysfunction, if I ever heard it. I want to ask you about Mike Johnson himself and his change of heart here. He said that history judges us for what we do, and that would seem self evident for people who hold public office. But nevertheless, in this day and age, it sounds completely radical. Is it correct to see this as a case of principle overcoming politics for Mike Johnson, or is something else at work here?

I think like is so often the case when it comes to Congress, it's a mixture. Right. Shortly after he took office, he started to say, look, we don't want Putin to win in Ukraine. He completely changed his rhetoric versus what he had been saying before about how we need to focus on the border and so forth. But he took office in October. It's been a while. And what helped him get there was one, a sense of urgency that was created as the situation on the ground in Ukraine began to deteriorate. And he was getting more intelligence briefings. He was getting pressure from not just Democrats, Chuck Schumer in the Senate, Biden in the White House, but also Mitch McConnell. And as far as the politics went, Mike Johnson, it should be said, he, he went to extreme lengths to try to placate hard right members of Congress. For a long time he was saying, we're not doing any of this until we've resolved the border crisis. And when Trump stepped in and killed the negotiation over including a border component, Johnson kind of said, all right, well, we're not going to do that. And eventually, I think he realized that there are some members of Congress who, no matter what, if they completely shut down the border, if they eliminated the national debt tomorrow, if they did everything that they asked for, things that would never happen, they would still vote against Ukraine aid, that he should do what he thought was right, which is to help Ukraine in this moment.

So you alluded to the interaction between House Republicans and Donald Trump, and for a long time it seemed that Congress practically was led not by the people who were in the Capitol, but by Trump. Right. So what is the dynamic between Johnson and Trump on this issue of Ukraine aid in particular? And do you see that dynamic changing more broadly now going forward?

Well, Johnson did a good job here of getting Donald Trump to not put his thumb on the scale on this one. And I think a lot of people are quick to say that Donald Trump is anti Ukraine. But I think that's conflating Trump with some of his more ardent supporters. And Donald Trump is certainly not the Republican establishment. But there's also space between Trump and someone like J.D. vance or Josh Hawley, who are very much further down the road on isolationism than Trump. So a combination of going to mar a lago, buttering Trump up, explaining to him, also frankly making a very practical and self interested case, which is frequently very helpful to Trump. He said, look, you don't want Kyiv to fall like later this year and have Russia taking over Ukraine being something you have to deal with right when you're back in the White House in January. And I think that also spoke to Trump as well.

So you just laid out a spectrum that I think is pretty helpful to think about as we consider the shades of Republicanism in the era of Trump. And one thing that has been completely lacking in recent years is any kind of reality bipartisanship, at least from my observation though I'd be keen to hear if you disagree. And I'm wondering whether within that spectrum of Republicanism you now see more opportunity for collaboration on any issue, or was this a one off that will be looked back on as a complete aberration from the norm, both what came before it and what came after.

So specifically in this Congress, there's just not a lot left to do, right. I don't think that this is going to be leading to a bipartisan tax reform or another major infrastructure push. One place you have seen bipartisanship aside from this issue is on China. And you'll notice the vote totals ran a lot higher in favor on the fourth component of the legislation that passed, which included, for example, a ban on TikTok. But I don't think you're going to have a large bipartisan push. This isn't the beginning of an era of good feelings. One thing to watch though is that you'll recall it took six months of short term spending bills before they finally agreed on a long term bill to fund the federal government and avoid a shutdown. But that only goes through the end of the fiscal year, which ends in September. One question is going to be whether the hardliners on the Republican side try to find some way to force a high stakes government funding negotiation six weeks before the election or several weeks before the election. That would be very politically stupid. But that's also something you could expect from some people who aren't the most politically adept operators on Capitol Hill.

I want to start with a little background on Mike Johnson. So this is a guy who in part became more prominent because he took Trump's argument that the 2020 election results were invalid and added a kind of aura of legitimacy to them. He wrapped them in this official seeming legal analysis. But despite that, he also is pretty well liked, including by some Democrats. So, Adris, can you give us a potted history of Johnson?

He's a Louisiana congressman who wasn't particularly well known. You mentioned his role in stirring up Republican congressmen who opp the counting of election votes that would have given Joe Biden the presidency. That's probably his most famous turn before this. And when Kevin McCarthy was elected and then deposed, no one had ever heard of Mike Johnson. And when it turned out that Republicans couldn't agree on anyone to replace Kevin McCarthy, they tried Jim Jordan, they tried Steve Scalise, they tried Tom Emmer. They all settled on Mike Johnson, which prompted a flurry of diplomats in Washington trying to furiously Google who is Mike Johnson? And I think that for a few months, we didn't really know he didn't have that much political experience running a caucus, particularly one as fractious as this one. He seemed to struggle with balancing the necessity of keeping the government open and other must pass legislation with the reality that the Freedom Caucus that had gotten rid of Kevin McCarthy could have also gotten rid of him. And it wasn't until now that we've really seen him put his foot down and try to do a different thing from what Kevin McCarthy would have done. He's decided that he's going to go down swinging on this issue. And so we have this result.

I think the idea of him going down swinging is probably right, but also I kind of question whether it's purely that he wants to do what's right here. I mean, the real sweet spot of political motivation is to advance policies that you think are for the good while elevating your own personal prospects. And they're clearly Republicans who already a, don't like this decision and b, think he should go. So Marjorie Taylor Greene is among those who wants to oust him as soon as possible. But James, do you think that's right, that this decision is really at odds with his personal interests? I was struck by how effective he was in dealing with Trump on it.

I do think, and maybe I'm being sentimental here, but I do think this is an unusual case of a guy growing pretty rapidly in office and coming to believe the intelligence briefings he was getting. And as Idris was saying, he's kind of an accidental speaker who wound up in this after only having served three or four terms in Congress, that a lot of depth of experience and it's just possible the weight of the responsibility is something he's taken, that this is a morally serious person and he's taken that seriously. I do think the easier path politically for him would just been to rant about the Biden administration's reckless foreign policy and entangling us in an unwinnable war, the kind of case that other Republicans are making. But instead, you know, he, he did stick his neck out to get this deal done.

One thing that's notable about this package is that it includes a lot of different things, but it doesn't include anything on the border which had been a stated priority for Republicans.

Yeah, one of the reasons this took so long is Republicans said that they wouldn't pass all of this aid money unless there were a deal to tighten up policy on the southern border. And they spent months negotiating this. They had a Senate deal put together that combined basically all of these provisions with a Republican approved bipartisan deal. Some of them objected to it. Most critically, Donald Trump did. And what ended up happening is basically all of that got stripped out and Republicans passed a clean foreign aid bill. There's some other things added to it, like the TikTok for sale. But Republicans had a better deal at hand a few months ago. And so their dithering has not just cost the Ukrainians time and probably land, but it's also cost them politically in terms of getting what they want.

Yeah, it's interesting because if you were to look at the past several months of Mike Johnson in the House, I think you'd see this real moment of, as you say, moral clarity. James, you'd look at his ability to compromise with Democrats on a big spending bill. But those two big and important decisions sit within a broader group of incoherence that it's not clear what the real strategy has been or whether it's been effective. I think it will be interesting no matter what happens in 2025. For whoever writes the definitive profile of Mike Johnson and his time as House Speaker. I think it may actually be one of the most interesting periods that we've had in the past few years. There is this motion to vacate filed by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's seeking to boot Johnson out as soon as possible. Is that likely to go anywhere? Adris?

So she has filed it. She hasn't made it a privileged motion, meaning she hasn't forced a vote on it at the moment. It is unlikely that a vote called would result in Mike Johnson being forced out of his office because Democrats would do the extraordinary thing and back him and we also saw, this is kind of a wonky point, but ahead of this bill passing, Democrats on the Rules Committee, which controls basically the operation of the House floor, also went along with Johnson, even though his party opposed it. So it's an extraordinary effort. You never see things like that happening on Capitol Hill. So I suspect that unless Johnson does anything soon to get rid of all the goodwill he's built up with Democrats, maybe going along with the Biden impeachment inquiry, for example, they're going to keep him in office because they think that he deserves to stay in after what he's done.

And I think there was clearly at least a tacit, if not a secret, explicit deal made that if he brought Ukraine to the floor, that the Democrats were gonna, in some way, by walking or by voting for him, help him retain the gavel before we move on.

Because we're gonna spend the rest of the episode talking about the implications of this package both for long term foreign policy setting and for the countries that are at the heart of this bill, Ukraine in particular, but also Israel and Taiwan. There's this TikTok provision here, which is something that's been fiercely debated in recent months. James, can you say a bit about that? Were you surprised that this actually went through and what does this mean for TikTok going forward?

I was surprised that it got through. I mean, we knew that there was pretty broad support for this idea in both parties, and really opposition to China is one of the biggest areas of kind of bipartisan agreement on the Hill right now. And there's been tremendous unease with TikTok. That said, I just thought the lobbying effort against it was going to be so intense, and blocking things is ultimately so much easier in Washington these days than actually accomplishing anything that it didn't seem like the odds of getting it through were that high. But in the end, it kind of has sailed through, and it's a remarkable thing that they're doing now. You know, most likely this will be tied up in litigation for a very, very long time, I think, before it's actually resolved.

Okay, we'll leave TikTok for now. I'm looking forward to your TikTok videos, James, going forward, but we are going to go back to another time when America used its economic might abroad. But first, what are each of your recommendations from our coverage recently? James?

I'd point people to the Chaguan column in the new issue. Our colleague David Rennie astonishes me every week with his ability to kind of penetrate this seemingly impenetrable increasingly closed society. And he takes us this week to China's what he calls its first tropical spaceport and paints the scene there and uses it as a way to explore the growing alliance between China and Russia.

I agree. People who don't read Shogun regularly really should, and they should also seek out David on our sister podcast Drum Tower. Idris will about you we did a.

Review of Judith Butler's new book which we said much of it is surprisingly lucid. We then said other not as nice things, but I thought that that was more charitable than I expected.

It doesn't sound like a compliment to me, but anyway, moving. America has long tilted between isolationism and interventionism throughout its history. How and where to send military aid has been the subject of bitter debate. In the wake of the Second World War, questions about the new world order and America's role in it were especially urgent.

And this is Athens. The camera bears witness to another Greek tragedy. Rival parties in the Balkan capital Shells were fighting for power after the German oppressor had been driven out. And British soldiers were given the unhappy task of killing some of them to prevent far greater bloodshed.

In 1944, the Nazi occupation of Greece was ending, but a new civil war began. Communist rebels fought British backed Greek government forces through much of the country.

Greek politics are far too complicated to permit easy judgments of right or wrong. But we must take warning from this upheaval that there may be plenty of shooting even when Hitler's war is done.

By the close of 1946, Britain was ending its support to Greece. The Greek prime minister visited Washington to appeal for assistance. President Harry Truman was eager to give it. In March 1947, he spoke before a joint session of Congress.

The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men led by communists. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

He rejected America's interwar isolationism and laid out what would become the Truman Doctrine that the US should support democracies threatened by communist insurrection or Soviet forces. Through the language of free peoples, the President tied it to the fight against Hitler just two years earlier. Briefed by Undersecretary of State Natcheson on the risk of a domino effect expanding Soviet influence in Europe, Republican congressional leaders agreed with their Democratic president. They approved $400 million of American aid for Greece and Turkey, including 150 million for the Greek army.

Even closer support and encouragement is being given to the Greeks by the military branch of the American mission. Chief of this branch is General James Van Fleet and expert in infantry tactics. He and his officers are authorized to give tactical advice to the Greek army.

American military funding and supplies gave government forces the upper hand.

A forward battalion moves up and there goes the signal for the attack. Every type of modern weapon is brought into play as the bitter warfare surges back and forth over the desolate mountain passes.

But not all Republicans approved. Senator Chapman Rivercomb from West Virginia argued that giving aid risked drawing America into a direct conflict with Moscow. He called the program a definite step toward a third world war. And it wasn't only Greece that needed help. Much of the post war world was facing starvation, revolution, or both. In 1948, Congress passed the Marshall Plan and in the next four years appropriated more than $13 billion to help rebuild post war Europe. But Republican Senator Robert Taft worried that attention to Europe alone risked ignoring problems elsewhere.

Secretary Marshall is apparently uninterested in saving China from the communists at a very reasonable cost. While advocating billions for Western Europe. It is most unfortunate that there was not a word of encouragement in the President's message for those fighting against communism in China without ammunition and with their backs to the wall.

At the time, the Economist described Senator Taft as a political salmon swimming against the current. Despite his best efforts, the current didn't change course. By 1949, as billions of dollars poured into Europe, the Chinese nationalists had lost. America had shown both the transformative power of its aid and the limits on deploying it. It's really striking to go back to that moment in history because so much of what we're thinking about today is the result of policies that were set in the immediate years after the Second World War.

Yeah, Charlotte, I was really struck listening to that package. You know, it was just a year later that Harry Truman took a very brave decision. He overruled the State Department and insisted on supporting the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish homeland in the state of Palestine. So as you say, in so many respects, we're kind of living now in the world that Harry Truman helped bring forth in the wake of World War II.

Right. And that decision not to do anything in China, of course, is enormously consequential for China's history. And also now as we think about American prioritization and the attempted pivot to Asia to deal with China.

Truman was actually very defensive about his China policy. His Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, put out a really long, several hundred page defense of their China policy called the White Paper. Which said that they had spent billions of dollars actually on helping the Kuomintang in their civil war battle against Mao and basically saying that there was no way for them to have changed the tide of history. But to James's point, so much of what Truman set out is the world that we're living in. NATO was created around that time. The containment theory promulgated first by George Kennan, the domino theory, you still see that invoked when we're talking about why it's important for Russia to be stopped in Ukraine. The idea that Russia would then go off and bite off pieces of Moldova and then threaten Baltic countries like Estonia and Latvia and then force provocation with NATO. That stuff all kind of originates from this era.

Yeah. It's interesting because I think if you look at each of those elements that you just described, whether it's the Truman Doctrine itself or the White Paper from Acheson, you could spend a very long time debating those policies and finding inconsistencies within them. But generally, I think on a very high level, there was some coherence right to the Truman Doctrine. And one of the things that I am thinking about is among the current Republican Party, I'm not sure it's entirely clear that you can articulate a clear approach. It's often described as isolationist, but I don't think that's quite right. If you look at the vote for this bill that was just passed in the House and Senate, in the house in particular, 101 Republican representatives voted for the bill, 112 voted against. So those 112 members are not just Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, it's a broader group. And I don't know, James, if you can describe what their foreign policy approach is, is it isolationism? How would you characterize it?

I really agree, Charlotte, that it's hard to see what the coherent framework is that contains all these different elements of the sort of emerging Republican Party. It still seems the foreign policy is still so much a function of the impulses of Donald Trump. But I think what you see as the through line is real suspicion of the idea of international institutions and the rules based international order that grew out of World War II, and that the United States has been central, the central architect and defender of throughout the 20th century into this century. Donald Trump is much more preoccupied with what he sees in the moment as the American national interest. And so he's much more interested in bilateral than multilateral arrangements and tends to deal with things crisis by crisis rather than within, I think some sort of a larger framework in The Senate, more.

Republicans voted for this bill than against it. It was the inverse of the House. The group that opposed the bill included Josh Hawley and J.D. vance, who I think have actually been quite clear right. In the way that they would articulate their foreign policy priorities.

There's certainly more doctrinaire about Ukraine. When JD Vance describes the prospect of another dollar going to Ukraine, he frames it as another dollar that's not being spent on addressing Fentanyl or addressing the southern border and basically says that not one dollar more ought to go to Ukraine. And Trump has never said, as far as I can tell, anything quite that extreme. He said things that are heartening, like I would settle this on day one, which presumably means Ukraine giving up a lot of its territory. But he permitted basically passively for this deal to go through. So he's not as far as Vance. Vance put out this interesting memo a couple of months ago where he tried to justify why it was important for America to help Israel and to stay focused on China, but not to help Ukraine. I think that saying that China is the great superpower that America must contend with, and therefore it is priority number one and all other things are not important, I think that has an intellectual coherence that I might not agree with, but I certainly respect. I think trying to do all three of those conclusions at once, I don't find that I can make heads or tails of that.

Well, it's interesting that the fight is not over within the Republican Party over the direction of its foreign policy. And we've seen to a degree that surprised me the kind of, again, in the person of Mike Johnson and the fairly broad support for this bill, the resurgence of much more of a Ronald Reagan era foreign policy. And they're using language that was supposedly discredited by the disastrous interventions in the Middle east under George W. Bush, but of the idea of an axis of evil. The axis of evil is now Russia, China and Iran. And that's the language that Nikki Haley was using when she was running in the primary. And it's not the way Donald Trump talks, but there's still a lot of Republicans that respond to that message.

We're going to talk next about what this money actually means for Ukraine, for Israel. But first, this episode of Checks and Balances, free to listen to, but usually to join us, you need to have a subscription to Economist Podcast plus, that is to listen to Checks and Balance, but also all of our other weekly shows like Money Talks, as well as special series like the Prince about Xi Jinping. To sign up, please go to economist.com podcastsplus or you can just search for economist+podcasts. To understand what this aid bill means for the battlefield in Ukraine. Earlier this week, I spoke to Anton LaGuardia, the economist diplomatic editor, who often is flying around the world with the State Department, but in this instance happened to be in Washington. I started by asking him how desperately Zelensky needs this aid.

I think he needed it very badly. In parts of the front, the shell ratio has been as bad as 17 fired by Russia for every one fired by Ukraine. The second bit of it is that the air defense has also thinned out substantially. So you are seeing on video Russian jets operating close to the ground, much closer than they used to, and drones being found as many as 10, 20, 30 kilometers behind Ukrainian lines. In the past, they would have all been shot down. And we've also seen it in the repeated attacks on Ukraine's infrastructure, where they have lost a large part of their power production capacity because, again, the defenses against missiles and drones has failed. Thinned out perilously.

So now that this enormous bill has been passed, there presumably is a lag between when the effect is actually felt on the ground. How long could that lag be?

President Biden, who signed the bill into law this week, says they've got stuff stockpiled and ready to go. Even in Europe, it'll take some days to get to the front, and it has to be moved in a way that doesn't get interdicted by the Russians. Air defenses may take longer because the stuff is, I think, held further back, and it also needs to the production tempo is lower than for shells. But the important point, I think, is that the effect will be felt right away in that the Ukrainians will feel more confident about fighting and firing off the weapons that they have that until now they have been holding back for fear of running out.

How stretched is America at the moment? It's supplying weapons not just to Ukraine, but to Israel, which is part of this package as well. So do we have a sense of America's production capacity and how close we are to reaching the limit?

It's difficult to tell because stock and readiness levels are not divulged in public. But first of all, the rate at which the Ukrainians have been firing artillery, particularly during the counteroffensive, far exceeded the capacity of both the Americans and the Europeans to produce 155 millimeter shells, which is the standard NATO shell. That said, the Europeans have been increasing their production capacity, as has the United States. Then you have the question of well, are there multiple demands in the same arsenal? The answer is yes and no. Yes, because all countries need artillery and Israel has been firing some. No, because the wars in Ukraine, in Israel, and God forbid in the Indo Pacific, should it ever come to that, are different. In Ukraine, it's mainly a land war, very artillery heavy, very air defense heavy. In Israel, there are a lot of planes, there's a lot of precision guided weapons which the Ukrainians are not using. However, in the domain of air defense, everybody's discovering that there isn't enough around. Western countries have been used to fighting with complete mastery of the sky. That era is ending. The age of drones and missiles is making extremely difficult. And Western armies, if they ever fight, will have to fight in the knowledge that they will not be immune from attack from the air.

Among America's allies and enemies, how does this episode read? It took six months for this bill to pass. Is the perception already set that this is a superpower that is bogged down by partisan infighting and congressional dysfunction? And the rest of the world increasingly needs to figure out how to, if not fend for itself, at least develop a very strong contingency plan should American support waiver?

Well, the past six months have not strengthened America's image as a reliable ally, but it is still the only superpower around that European and key allies in the Indo Pacific can call upon. So I think that countries will hope that Donald Trump doesn't win, will hedge and prepare for that possibility by trying to get close to him, and they will hope that he turns out to be less bad than they fear. And this move by Congress, by Mike Johnson, with tacit support from Donald Trump, will give some the hope that Donald Trump is still someone that is tractable, that you can talk to, that in his first term, he may have spoken rudely about NATO and threatened to pull out. But in the end, it was under his presidency that the eastern flank of NATO began to be strengthened. My own suspicion is that a second prompt presidency will be more radical, more vindictive, more organized, and therefore more unsettling of allies. And the key question will be whether the people around him retain a degree of internationalism or the Congress can apply sufficient pressure to keep the US on track. But alliances are a delicate thing. They rely entirely on trust. You trust America to come and help you. And this is nowhere more acute than in the question of nuclear weapons. America has extended its nuclear deterrent to allies, and they in turn have agreed not to develop nuclear weapons, partly because America felt a world with lots of nuclear powers would be a bad place. If trust in America's protection declines, then I think automatically people will start to discuss whether they need to get their own nuclear weapons. And that is potentially very destabilizing.

So hanging over this conflict in Ukraine is a question of, of course, how long the fighting will drag on. And part of the reason why Marjorie Taylor Greene and others oppose further support is both because they think that money could be directed to the border or to problems domestically, but also because they just assume that Ukraine is going to lose. So in some ways, it's maybe a more succinct version of Acheson's white paper that China was always going to fall anyway. So American efforts are best directed elsewhere. And that shows, I think, kind of a remarkable complacency about the effects of Russian expansion through Europe. But there is this question of American appetite for continuing and continuing to send money to Ukraine. Idris, what do you make of that political will?

Is it there to give credit to Marjorie Taylor Greene, which is not something that I imagine myself saying.

It's not often that we compare her to Dean Acheson.

No, but the objection that she makes is that this is an open ended commitment. It's not going to end with this latest tranche of money. When does this stop? What's the objective here? And on that, I think she has a point. When I've talked to congressmen who are favorable and support Ukraine, they compare this conflict to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which took 10 years for the Russians to leave. There is a sense that America is going to be in this for the long haul. I think it should be. I think that it is still important, but that is the objection. And I think there's also one provision of this bill that flew in a bit under the radar that might turn out to be important is a requirement that the Secretary of State and the Secretary of defense within 45 days come up with a plan for laying out America's strategic interests and how long they think this conflict is going to take and how long they expect America's outlays to be. And I think the disclosure of that report, depending on how it's constructed, could convince maybe more Republicans that actually America ought not to be spending as much money on this as it currently is.

So one effect of that uncertainty, as Anton discussed, is that other countries are increasing their military investment. And during Trump's first, and perhaps only. But during Trump's first term, he long made the case that America's allies weren't paring their fair share and America was getting a bad deal. And this to many seemed like destabilizing talk. And I'm wondering, James, do you think he now has been proven right?

Yeah, I think he has. And, and by the way, he was also right to provide lethal aid to Ukraine, which Barack Obama did not do because he feared it would be too provocative to the Russians. So in some ways, Donald Trump is in a position to take a big win here. He was also right that the Germans were too reliant on the Russians for their energy. So I think it's important for us to acknowledge that. And look, we don't really recognize the areas of continuity in foreign policy between the Trump administration and the Biden administration. The China policy is very similar. Biden basically followed Trump's timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden has tried to build on the Abraham Accords in the Middle east that Trump put in place. There's a big difference with regard to NATO and Europe. And there we just don't know what Trump really intends. Is he serious about the threat to withdraw from NATO? I think the problem with it, in some ways, Trump's destabilizing quality is effective in foreign policy, but it's terribly, terribly damaging in the sense that Anton referred to, which is that our allies no longer know if they can count on us.

The other very important part of this bill, or one of the other very important parts of this bill that was just passed in, is the aid for Israel and that $14 billion in military aid. It's important to piece apart Republicans position there. Right, because much as many Republicans fervently oppose assistance for Ukraine, they're all in for continuing to back Israel. What do you make of that, Idris?

I think on Republicans, it is just the continuation of this feeling that Republicans ought to be lockstep with Israel kind of no matter what. You've seen that kind of persist over the last 20 or 30 years. And where you've seen the fracturing on America's generally steadfast support of Israel has been on the Democratic side. And you've seen that pretty starkly in the house. You saw 30 progressive Democrats vote against the Israel component of the bill. I believe in the Senate, Bernie Sanders voted against the entire package basically as a protest vote over the Israeli military aid component. And I think all the coverage of the campus protest that we've seen this week has really taken attention away from a seeming contradiction in Biden's policy. I mean, he went from just a few weeks ago pretty angrily attacking basically Benjamin Netanyahu over civilian casualties, particularly after the strike that killed seven foreign aid workers to now providing $14 billion in weapons. Now, some of that is defensive weapons to replenish the Iron Dome and Iron Beam. These are air defense systems that Israel uses. But some of it is also offensive weapons.

Foreign policy debates are taking up a huge amount of attention on college campuses and on the Hill. But it's unclear to me that a broader constituency of voters care about what's happening abroad.

I mean, polling certainly suggests that, as usual, Americans are not preoccupied with foreign policy. First and foremost. They're worried about pocketbook issues, they're worried about inflation, they're worried about crime. They're worried about the border. But I do think that there's kind of an ambient effect of what's happening in the world that could have a very significant impact. And here we see the echoes of 1968, you know, once again resonating in American politics this year with the kind of really paradoxical effect that, like just as Hubert Humphrey, whom the Democrats nominated in Chicago in 1968, the stalwart liberal from the Midwest, wound up being seen as the candidate of war because he was associated with the Vietnam policy of the Lyndon Johnson administration and. And also of disorder because he was surrounded by chaos in Chicago and there were uprisings in the street of America in that year. In the same way, Biden, I think, risks being seen as the candidate of war and chaos this year. And Trump, and this is really hard to wrap your head around, is able to present himself possibly persuasively, as a candidate of peace and order. And that's a real risk that's looming, I think, for Joe Biden right now.

Yeah, I agree with you on that. And speaking of power, I get to ask you guys quiz questions. This is the best part of filling in for John Priddo, that I get to be the questioner and not the quizzee. So there are a few extra questions this week so that I can wield my power indiscriminately. Earlier, we mentioned Republican Senator Robert Taft and the economist's description of him as a political salmon swimming against the tide. Taft's father, William H. Taft, earned the nickname the Walrus because of his mustache. So today's quiz is on nicknames. And they aren't just American. There are a few Europeans in there, too, who was described as a greased piglet.

This could be very offensive.

Wow.

Yeah.

We can't even know the era modern.

I'll give you some hints because I'm a wise dictator and benevolent one.

I'm scared to even make a. I know.

I know. Gorp chop.

This is so good. Okay, James, I've got nothing.

I'm sorry.

Who's greasy? Berlusconi.

Greece.

Piglet. The answer is Boris Johnson.

Piglet.

Piglet. You just describe him as so just taking insult and making it even more insulting. And who was described as a mad dog. Mad dog X. That's easy. I would have gotten that.

I think that was. That. That was a compliment, actually, but yeah, yeah, completely.

No, that's a. That's high praise. Who is Shrub?

Bush was referred to. George W. Bush was referred to as Shrub.

Yes.

Very good.

I didn't know the joke, being the.

Father was Bush, the son was Shrub.

Who was famously compared to a lettuce.

Liz Truss.

Liz Truss.

Yes. Well done, everyone, by our colleague.

It was Andrew Palmer, I believe, who coined that.

Did he see her at CPAC holding up an issue of the Economist saying that these people were the reason that she had been forced out of office? Us and our Deep State allies.

I mean, that talk about high praise.

It was really funny.

Wow.

It was extremely funny.

Let's leave it there. Thank you, Idris.

Thank you.

And thanks, James.

Thanks for having me. Nice to be with you guys.

This episode was produced by Julia Johnson and Stevie Hertz. David Crackles is our sound engineer, with thanks to Adam O', Neill, Anton LaGuardia, Hannah Marino, and Eric Brooks of the Henry Clay estate. If you like this podcast, which I hope you did, please let people know and leave us a rating and a review. You can get in touch with us by email. The app address is podcastseconomist.com. in the meantime, thank you for listening. We'll have more checks and balance next week.