"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 85

In this episode: What Can You Expect From President Trump’s Foreign Policy?

January 14, 2025

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 85

Episode 85: What Can You Expect From President Trump’s Foreign Policy?

Financial Times columnist Ed Luce says President Donald Trump might love trade wars, but he’d rather not engage in military ones. While he acknowledges there’s a lot that’s unpredictable, Luce is cautiously optimistic that with unpredictability there can also be opportunity, including for peace deals. So, what might U.S. foreign policy look like over the next four years?

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Peter Bergen: Are we on the verge of World War III?

Ed Luce: World War III, gosh, I really would hate to be the sort of headless chicken who predicts World War III…But there is a lot of risk about, and there are also crises of legitimacy and trust and self confidence in our systems.

But I would suggest that where Trump can really bend norms and sort of pose a threat to what we consider to be sort of ordinary freedoms is at home much more than it is abroad.

Financial Times columnist Ed Luce is pretty clear. He doesn't think President Trump intends to get the United States involved in another war.

At least not on purpose.

Ed Luce: I don't think Trump likes wars or wants wars.

While Ed Luce hails from the United Kingdom, he's lived in Washington DC for two decades, where he’s been observing and making sense of the United States, its presidents, politics, and its foreign policies at the Financial Times.

In a recent column, Luce wrote the following: “Fascist leaders tend to lust after other countries’ territories. By that measure, Donald Trump is not a fascist. Trump loves trade wars, but is generally scornful of military ones.”

Ed Luce: I do think he's sincere in being against war like boots on the ground kind of stuff. I think that's a pretty sort of deep affinity he has with the base on that point.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: They said “he will start a war.” I'm not going to start a war, I'm going to stop wars.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: I will end every single international crisis that the current administration has created.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: We are ending the era of endless wars. It is not the duty of U. S. Troops to solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands.

Ed Luce: If nothing else, the unpopularity of the so-called forever war I think will keep him, in quotation marks, honest, on that front.

Luce will tell you he became a journalist because he wanted a window into the world — a way to understand how power actually works and how people in power actually operate. And he's learned a thing or two about how American presidential power operates around the globe. Which is why I wanted to talk to him about how Trump’s second term might impact global politics.

Trump has made it clear that he believes U.S. foreign policy needs fundamental changes. So I wanted to ask Luce what he thinks another Trump presidency will mean — for U.S. relations with China, with Europe, for international agreements on things like climate change. And, of course, the wars in the Middle East and between Russia and Ukraine.

While Luce doesn't think Trump has any intention to deploy more U.S. troops overseas, he is worried about the uncertainty that will come with President Trump and the risks that kind of uncertainty might pose.

Ed Luce: There is a broader waterfront of potential accidents than I can ever remember.

And he's also very concerned about some of the policy changes Trump has threatened to make domestically in the U.S.

Ed Luce: What keeps me awake at night is what's going to happen to the rule of law in the United States. You know a further backsliding in U.S. liberal democracy is bad. It does have a global impact.

But Luce is also cautiously hopeful — partly because of what we know about Trump, which is after all quite a lot.

He's no champion of global rules. He's transactional and unpredictable, and that, Luce believes, could produce some welcome surprises.

Ed Luce: There is a sort of unstable factor to Trump precisely because he thinks the world is a jungle and America is just the biggest beast in the jungle. It's not ethical. He doesn't have any sort of attachment to human rights, democracy promotion, to global rules. He's transactional and that means great danger. But it also means unexpected opportunities too, where deals could get done.

I'm Peter Bergen. That's next on In the Room.

(Theme Music)

Perhaps nowhere do things seem more unstable these days than in the Middle East. Syrian rebels recently toppled the Assad regime; and it's unclear yet what kind of government will emerge in this critical part of the Middle East. The war in Gaza, now in its 15th month, has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and injured more than 100,000. Israeli hostages remain in captivity in Gaza. And while Lebanon and Israel agreed to a ceasefire, it's unclear if it will hold.

During his first term, Trump’s administration helped negotiate the Abraham Accords, which established diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab states but didn’t give anything to the Palestinians.

In his victory speech on election night, Trump promised he'd stop wars. And he's pledged to end the Gaza war which he’s repeatedly said would never have started in the first place, if he’d been in the White House.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: I want to see the Middle East get back to peace and real peace, but a peace that's going to be a lasting peace. And that's going to happen and I believe it's going to happen soon.

But his nomination of Mike Huckabee, an especially staunch supporter of Israel - to be US ambassador to Israel - suggests the American position might not be to support the kinds of concessions that often accompany peace agreements.

Huckabee has made several public statements supporting Israeli expansion into the West Bank - which he does not call the West Bank, the internationally recognized name for this Palestinian territory.

ARCHIVAL Mike Huckabee: There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank, it's Judea and Samaria. There's no such thing as a settlement. There are communities, there are neighborhoods, there are cities. Uh, there's no such thing as an occupation.

Huckabee has also shared his opinions on what a two-state solution might look like.

ARCHIVAL Mike Huckabee: The two state solution, if we mean two governments holding the same piece of real estate, is irrational and unworkable. If there is a two state solution, the Palestinian state needs to be outside the boundaries of the nation of Israel. There's plenty of land in the world that we could find a place and say, okay, let's, let's create a Palestinian state.

But Luce says this is a case where Trump's transactional nature could actually yield some surprises when it comes to the Middle East. As Luce sees it that would depend on whether Trump can get the Saudis to agree to normalize relations with Israel.

Ed Luce: He did produce the Abraham Accords. Perhaps the least worst hope for Palestinians right now is Saudi Israeli normalization. He likes the Saudis. They share a sort of bling-House of Saud-House of Trump sort of aﬃnity.

And then of course, there’s Iran.

In his first term, President Trump pulled the United States out of the Iranian nuclear agreement and imposed more sanctions on the country. Since then, Iran has only accelerated its production of enriched uranium, a material needed to make nuclear weapons.

The U.S. estimates that Iran’s “breakout time” — that’s the time necessary to assemble a nuclear weapon — is now down to just one or two weeks.

Peter Bergen: They have enough fissile material for multiple weapons. Trump has threatened maximum pressure campaign, more sanctions than we've been sanctioning the ayatollahs for almost half a century without any change in their behavior I mean, it's basically been a fool's errand but how do you anticipate what Trump would do - obviously I think Trump has sort of gestured towards maybe I would do a deal with Iran. What the hell would that deal would look like, I don't know, and would the ayatollahs even trust him or trust the United States in general.

Ed Luce: Iran’s a sitting duck right now. You know, its air defenses have been knocked out by Israel. Its missile production has mostly been incapacitated. It's lost its shield, um, in, in Hezbollah, which is decapitated and Hamas is basically decimated. So all they got left in terms of the sort of proxies is the Houthis who are very limited sort of geographic range.

Peter Bergen: Right.

Ed Luce: The Iraqi militia is acquiescent So we're at a point of really quite acute vulnerability here with Iran before Trump's inaugurated.

The Middle East is not the only active conflict zone that Trump will have to take a position on. When it comes to the war between Russia and Ukraine, Luce will tell you that this is one of those cases where Trump’s unpredictability and transactional approach has the potential to yield a surprise.

Luce says things could go horribly wrong. The United States could decide to completely abandon Ukraine OR Trump might be able to get Putin to negotiate some kind of peace deal.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled. It will be settled quickly. [APPLAUSE] And it will take me no longer than one day.

Peter Bergen: So will he, will he feel empowered by Trump's presence, we have a report in the Washington Post that Trump had a call with Putin, which has been denied by the Kremlin, but I tend to believe the Washington Post more than the Kremlin, that Trump sort of said, you know basically back off on Ukraine.

Ed Luce: So I think you, implicit in your question is quite a skepticism about this widespread assumption that Trump's simply going to sell Ukraine down the river.

Peter Bergen: Right.

Ed Luce: I don't think when advisors, when Rubio or Mike Waltz, his national security advisor says to him, do you want to be like LBJ with Vietnam or like Bush with Iraq? Do you want to be the guy who lost Ukraine? No, he's going to want to get a reasonable deal or reasonable looking deal.

Peter Bergen: Yeah.

Ed Luce: Biden has given him the tool Zelensky, the tool to have long range targeting inside Russian territory, which Trump can use as a lever to get Putin to the negotiating table. I do think though that it's reasonable in Europe to think, well, look, Russia is not a land threat. It only got so far in Ukraine. It doesn't threaten us in a conventional way.

It threatens in a more sophisticated sort of gray zone disinformation, sabotage, assassinations here and there, just disrupting force. Not quite a terrorist state, but it doesn't really pose a conventional military threat. I think that the Ukraine war, whatever the outcome, does demonstrate the limits of Russia's military menace.

Peter Bergen: It's also worth recalling that it was Trump who gave Javelin missiles, anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainians.

Ed Luce: Correct.

Peter Bergen: Something Obama did not do. Also, Trump had the opportunity to block the biggest tranche of aid the United States has given Ukraine, which was 61 billion dollars, part of an aid package that also sent aid to Israel. If Trump had said to House members, I'm against this. This thing would not have passed.

Ed Luce: Would not have happened. And Trump just basically just said nothing and that gave permission I think, for like 100 Republicans to vote for this. However, the Ukrainians must know that with the Republican dominated Congress, the days of large scale aid is over to Ukraine, I think.

Ed Luce: I think it would have been right if Kamala Harris had been elected too, that it would have been very hard for her to get 60 billion new dollars out of the Hill.

So I think the Ukrainians and others in Europe have been planning on 2025 being an attempt at some kind of settlement and it's by no means clear that that settlement would be worse under a President Trump than it would have been under a President Biden or Harris.

Peter Bergen: I think, I agree. What are the terms of the deal? Broadly speaking, I agree, and I'm understanding there's going to be some pain points for Ukrainians, you know Russia will keep Crimea,

Ed Luce: Yes.

Peter Bergen: Ukraine may be able to get bits of eastern Ukraine back. There's no universe in which Ukraine becomes a member of NATO any time in our lifetimes. But they maybe get security guarantees like the Japanese have with the United States or some kind of face-saving security guarantee.

Ed Luce: Yeah, and you would probably, though, need some kind of outside participation on the demilitarized zone line.

Peter Bergen: So that would be like U. N. peacekeepers.

Ed Luce: Yes. since Ukraine would not be able to get NATO membership. Or even the future promise of NATO membership, which they would anyway given past history be very skeptical about. They're going to need some kind of guarantor on the ground.

President Trump has made no secret of his disdain for NATO. The US Congress tried to Trump-proof the American relationship with NATO. Congress passed a law in 2023 that requires any presidential decision to exit NATO would need to have two thirds approval by the Senate or be authorized through an act of Congress.

(Music)

Peter Bergen: I think there are a bunch of Republicans who actually do want to remain in NATO.

Ed Luce: Hmm. Mmhmm. I agree. [Peter laughs]

Peter Bergen: Even if Trump is in charge of the party. So, you know, Jim Mattis, Trump's former defense secretary said it's the most successful alliance in modern history. I don't think he was wrong.

But Trump can basically sabotage NATO by his public statements because if the commander in chief of the leader of the alliance says, you know, I'm not going to come to the defense of - pick your Baltic country.

Ed Luce: This is a shock and a panic moment for the Europeans. You can't sort of Trump proof Trump being elected. I won't use the word existential, but it is a deep, deep shock crisis in Europe, this, and if anything were to galvanize higher European defense spending and more importantly closer defense industrial base integration between European states, including ones who've left the European Union or never joined it, like Britain, um, now would be it.

I would expect some of that. So there is a, you know, that's a kind of silver lining because everybody, Democrat and Republican, has been asking Europe to step up.

(Music)

Peter Bergen: There's a phrase that people use, when America sneezes, the world catches a cold. And I was thinking, you know, in a way, that's also true of foreign policy. So on climate change, I mean Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, which is an agreement, not a treaty, uh, several months into his first term, I mean, what do you anticipate on climate?

Clearly there's going to be a very, uh, accommodating environment for oil and gas in the United States. But the Biden administration didn't advertise this fact, but the United States was producing more oil and gas during the Biden administration than at any time in American history.

So - I mean, would there be a significant difference on that?

Ed Luce: I think the spur behind intergovernmental attempts to, like we saw the COP 29 in Baku, in Azerbaijan which is the annual meeting of countries to decide what to do about carbon emissions getting not that not that far because the wealthy countries are not prepared to pay the unwealthy countries enough subsidy to transition, to forego the cheaper fossil fuels that are available to them. We're going to get that whether you've got an American president who believes that climate change is real or an American president who doesn't.

The reality is although the stock of carbon comes from us, the flow is coming from China and Indonesia and so we've got to even though we might have more moral responsibility for the climate change, if we're going to prevent it from happening, we need to bribe people to move to clean tech. And the good news is there is a lot of clean tech getting cheaper and cheaper chiefly thanks to China. The bad news is we're planning to go to a trade war with them over that and it's going to be a mega trade war but technology could where politics will and is failing us on climate change technology is actually potentially providing quite a rapid, not solution, but at least mitigating sort of factor here that, you know, there, there is a rapid potential transformation happening anyway.

So perhaps we’ll see some solutions to address climate change even if they don’t come from an international agreement. Maybe Trump’s unpredictability will yield a breakthrough in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Luce will be watching.

Then, there’s China. In his first term, Trump took a far more combative approach to China than any modern president before him. As I see it, the Trump administration abandoned the fantasies of previous U.S. administrations that somehow as China grew economically, it would liberalize politically. Instead, Trump started treating China as a rival and doing things like slapping tariffs on a wide range of Chinese goods. It's no secret that Trump wants to impose even more tariffs.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff. And it’s my favorite word.

Most recently, he said he'd impose a 25% tariff on all goods coming from Mexico and also goods coming from Canada, along with an additional 10% tariff on goods coming from China.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: President elect Donald Trump threatening to impose new tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China on his first day in office.

And when it comes to China and US China relations, well, this is one of those power relationships where Luce is worried about what Trump might do: both intentionally, like with the tariffs, but also unintentionally.

Peter Bergen: As you know, President Xi has said that the People's Liberation Army needs to be ready to take Taiwan by 2027. And in fact when you wrote a book about Trump's - essentially in response to Trump's first victory, you have a whole scenario in the book about going to war with China in 2020 with Trump in charge, obviously that didn't happen. You know he's got isolationist instincts. On the other hand, he doesn't want to be a loser.

Ed Luce: He’s more unpredictable.

Peter Bergen: So can you sketch out where some conflict does arise because obviously the biggest problem in the world would not be a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, it would be a conflict between the United States and China.

Ed Luce: Well, there's an old saying that when countries stop trading goods, they start trading blows. And so people tend to silo trade conflict from military conflict, but actually in great power relations, one spills onto the other. And what we've got now is a China that's quite vulnerable.

Peter Bergen: Right.

Ed Luce: Growth has stalled. People, there's a lot of economic disaffection in China and the legitimacy of Xi Jinping and the Communist Party. They're always nervous about that. I don't see too many signs of sort of public unrest, but they're nervous, more nervous than normal about that. So this is a point of maximum American leverage over China.

Peter Bergen: So is a declining China, I mean with a declining population, uh, very negative views of China globally compared to where it was a decade ago, just a, a very bad economic outlook for them. Is that a more dangerous China or hard to tell or a less dangerous China?

Ed Luce: So a China that is once again claiming to and with some substance be wanting to uphold the traditional global trading system and Trump giving the middle finger and therefore their overtures being spurned is one where that stagnation and lack of growth gets more and more problematic for Xi Jinping.

And the temptation to invade Taiwan goes up and then the unpredictability of does Trump give a damn about Taiwan or do the hawks around him actually prevail and you know, the conventional one China policy, you know, is upheld and therefore you get into an accident — there's some kind of incident. We had it in 2001.

This incident he's referring to back in 2001 was a pretty big deal.

A few months before the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush found himself in a potentially deadly standoff with China when a Chinese fighter jet and a US Navy spy surveillance plane collided in the sky over the South China Sea. The Chinese had been tailing the US plane.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The U.S. says the sophisticated reconnaissance plane was on a routine surveillance mission in international airspace over the South China Sea when two Chinese F-8s intercepted it.

The Chinese jet crashed and the pilot died. The US spy plane made an emergency landing in China. And for 11 days, the Chinese refused to release the US crew, effectively holding them hostage.

ARCHIVAL Newscast: Chinese military forced the Americans off the plane at gunpoint.

Eventually diplomacy prevailed and the U.S. crew was released. This incident COULD have led to an even more dangerous conflict with China. But it didn’t.

ARCHIVAL George W Bush: Our approach has been to keep this accident from becoming an international incident. We have allowed the Chinese government time to do the right thing.

Peter Bergen: Because of 9/11, we've kind of forgotten, but that plane going down - an accident like that could precipitate larger effects.

Ed Luce: Absolutely. It's all too imaginable and particularly in this sort of fog, not of war, but of Trump's rhetoric is they're calculating, Well, where is Trump's red line? We have no idea And I doubt he does too. So it could be very easy to make a misjudgment.

(Music)

When the Congress of Vienna met between 1814 to 1815, it set out to establish a balance of power in Europe that would put an end to the endless wars and conflicts that preceded it. And while of course there were still some smaller wars, things were relatively peaceful until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 - a century later.

Peter Bergen: Humans are fallible. You basically summarized it, that this situation is less stable than you've seen since what? The fall of the Berlin Wall or since when?

Ed Luce: That’s a really good question. I mean, people domestically, if they, if they see the glass half full, domestically point to the late 60s. I mean, you have no idea how chaotic it was. All these people being assassinated, cities burning.

Peter Bergen: Yeah. And I understand that. I think that domestically, it's far more, it's a far deeper structural problem with the public's confidence in democracy.

But internationally, the Cold War after the Cuba Missile Crisis, was mostly stable. There were some hairy moments, the invasion of Afghanistan was one of them, the near-invasion of Poland in 1980, ‘81 was another, but for the most part from 1962 the Americans and the Soviets so frightened each other that they understood each other's nuclear grammar. They could finish each other's nuclear sentences. And they had very open lines of communication.

Ed Luce: And they had very open lines and the red telephone was, the hotline was very real. China refuses to conduct nuclear negotiations because it's behind and it wants to catch up before it negotiates.

Peter Bergen: Well, and that raises another really good point. The only nuclear arms agreement that is left is a treaty which expires in 2026. The cock up theory of history suggests that, you know, mistakes happen the more missiles you have, the more mistakes could happen.

And so, predictably, within Trump's term there will be a decision about like, what are we going to do we're in the middle of something there'll be almost no public discussion about which is the United States is spending 1.5 trillion dollars on renovating all its nuclear missiles, which maybe there's good reasons for, but if I'm the Chinese or the Russians I see 1.5 trillion dollars on renovating then the nuclear capability and also things like submarines that can launch nuclear missiles that we're going to start putting a lot of money in — that is inherently, if I'm sitting in Beijing or Moscow, would seem pretty unstable and I would want to respond to, even if it makes no sense. Because ultimately no one's going to win either a nuclear arms race or a nuclear war.

Ed Luce: Neither. I mean, China wants to get up to a thousand warheads. That's the sort of, and is thought within range of doing before 2030. So sometime during Trump's second term, we're going to get that, that sort of showdown. It's like, well, they're, they're at parity or they're approaching parity with us.

But Luce says this type of instability around nuclear weapons doesn’t necessarily serve China’s interests either.

Ed Luce: That nuclear question is something you know the ‘90s there were a lot of loose nukes and we did pin them down. We disarmed certain nuclear states. Ukraine agreed famously, of course, to cease to be a nuclear power in exchange for Russia guaranteeing its borders. Um Kazakhstan forwent nuclear weapons, South Africa, Brazil, lots of countries at that time were persuaded to give up nuclear weapons.

So Luce will be keeping an eye on China. And he's also keenly aware there's a lot that can't be predicted right now about where a potential threat or crisis might occur.

Ed Luce: There is a broader waterfront of potential accidents than I can ever remember. I don't use the word, I doubt you do either Peter, but I don't use the word polycrisis. It's like one of those buzzwords that sort of annoys me because it sounds really clever and then you try and define it. But there is something to that word. There are these separate discrete crises in many parts of the world.

Still, Luce says he’ ll be focusing a lot of his attention right here in the United States. First, on what will happen with the tariffs that Trump’s promised to impose just about everywhere. Luce is one of those observers who believes the tariffs, if they're put in place, will be disastrous for the global economy and for working class Americans.

Likewise, if Trump fulfills his promise to deport large numbers of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. labor force, he expects inflation to increase, and interest rates to go up.

Ed Luce: Last time Trump was in oﬃce, it was a zero interest rate world, it was a monetary paradise. Money was basically free. Now we're in a tight interest rate world. We have shifted paradigm. And the consequences of Trump's fiscal expansion and inflationary acts will be inflationary immediately. The tariffs, the reduction of the labor force, if you think bacon or eggs are expensive now, try removing the 20 percent of the workforce that are non-documented. If you think building a new home is expensive now, try removing the one third of the construction labor force that is undocumented, um, immediately inflationary.

(Music)

In that recent column I mentioned earlier, which is aptly titled “Where Trump Could Surprise on the Upside, " Luce reminded me of something else. Trump has nominated a cabinet full of America Firsters, including his vice president. People who will be focused internally. And there’s also the Department of Government Eﬃciency or DOGE, which has its eyes turned on reshaping the federal government.

Ed Luce: I think Washington does feel like Rome between the republic and its imperial phase. It does feel like oligarchy is really, we haven't talked much about Elon Musk, but if you look at the scale of the plutocratic support for Trump, and the plans to deregulate Washington this feels like the big oligarchic Roman families and there's a sort of emperor figure too.

And Luce suspects Trump will be much more focused on what he terms the enemy within...rather than the future of Ukraine or Gaza or anywhere else.

Ed Luce: There is a competence to Trump and there is a consistency to some of the things he's promised.

Peter Bergen: Yeah.

Ed Luce: But he's also very impulsive and, uh, he's also got quite a short attention span…Vigilance is, is, uh, always merited. I think it will be particularly merited with Trump.

(Theme Music)

If you want to learn some more about the topics we covered in this episode, we recommend The Retreat of Western Liberalism and Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent. Both are by Ed Luce. And both are available on Audible.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Alexandra Salomon with help from Holly DeMuth.

It was mixed by Bart Warshaw.

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Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Erik German, Luke Cregan, Nathan Ray, and Sandy Melara.

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