US Grand Strategy & the Revenge of Geopolitics | Edward Luce

In Episode 477 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/us-grand-strategy-amp-the-revenge-of-geopolitics-edward-luce of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Edward Luce, columnist and US national editor at the Financial Times, about the history of American Grand Strategy and the revenge of geopolitics in a new age of multipolarity and great power competition. Kofinas and Luce trace the decline of American grand strategy back to the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a more risk-averse, process-oriented era in US foreign policy. They then discuss how the Trump administration has upended many of the practices that defined that era, introducing new risks to America's policy in the Middle East and its relationships with European and Asian allies, before turning to the administration's China strategy ahead of the Trump-Xi Summit now less than a month away. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 04/17/2026

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up everybody? My name is Dimitri Karafinis and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Edward Luce, columnist and U.S. National Editor at the Financial Times, who has written several books on matters of politics and policy, including a biography of former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose life and times inform much of today's conversation. Edward and I begin our discussion by tracing the decline of American grand strategy back

• 0:41Demetri Kofinas?

  to the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a more risk averse, process-oriented era in U.S. foreign policy. We then discuss how the Trump administration, in upending many of the practices that defined that era, has introduced new risks and complications in the field of international relations and geopolitics, and then apply that framework to Operation Epic Fury, American Policy in the Gulf, U.S. Grand Strategy in Asia, and how to think about the Trump administration's China policy, ahead of the upcoming Trump-She summit, set to take place in a little less than a month. If you want access to transcripts and intelligence reports for this and other episodes, which include summary sections with key takeaways, you can access those by subscribing to our

• 1:24Demetri Kofinas?

  Super Nerd tier at hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this interesting and timely conversation with my guest, Edward Luce.

• 2:08Demetri Kofinas?

  Ed Luce, welcome to Hidden Forces.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  It's great to be with you, Dmitry.

• 2:13Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, Ed, I was reflecting on this right before we turn on the microphone, which is that your colleague, John Bern Murdock, was recently on the podcast. And it might seem to the listeners that the two episodes are somehow connected because I've never, to my knowledge or recollection, had two journalists on back to back, let alone two FT journalists. Although in fairness, I've had a lot of journalists from the Financial Times on the show over the years, including Gillian Tett, your former editor-at-large. So maybe something subconscious going on here. But in fact, you and I have been in correspondence for some time, and I've also been a reader of your columns in the FT for many years. But beyond that, I don't really know much else about you. I know that you were a speechwriter during the Clinton administration for Larry Summers, but that's about it.

• 2:58Demetri Kofinas?

  So maybe the best place to start is to learn a little bit more about you. What's your, what's your deal? What's your life story? How did you get into journalism?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Well, I'm British and went to, I'm really bad at describing myself. I think I'm quite good at describing other people.

• 3:15Demetri Kofinas?

  Why do you think that is?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  I suppose I still have, even though I'm economist now, I still have that reportorial gene, which tells you the story is not about you. But so, yeah, I'm British. I mean, I'm from, essentially, I'm from London. And I've had a fairly dull career in terms of jumping around. Most of my career has been at the Financial Times. You're right, I was speechwriter to Larry Summers when he was Clinton's Treasury Secretary, so the end of the 90s, 2000, first 20 days of 2001. And I did start out with The Guardian as their Geneva correspondent in this, sort of early to mid 90s. And I've written a bunch of books.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Taught a little bit at universities, but by and large, I've been Financial Times and Financial Times based abroad for most of the time. So although my accent, it continues to sound very BBC, I've spent more of my adult life in the United States than I have in Britain, here in Washington DC, most of it.

• 4:19Demetri Kofinas?

  How do you like DC? How do you think it compares to London?

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Well, it's a village, really. I mean, it is a small town. It's also a company town. Although Northern Virginia does have, you know, quite a few non-defense industry-related private sector investments nowadays, it's still basically a government town. And it is fashionable to hate Washington. I have to admit that, I mean, I'm fortunate enough to live in Georgetown, which is a gorgeous neighborhood, you know, it's one of the best neighborhoods in the world, in my opinion. And unfashionably find Washington continually interesting, particularly nowadays. It's kind of a Chinese curse level of interesting, but and a very beautiful city. It's also an immensely frustrating, transactional one, but so is London.

• 5:07Demetri Kofinas?

  It is absolutely transactional. I lived for a few years in DC and it's also beautiful. So Ed, I don't know if you know this, but I've been recording a number of these one-hour-long conversations since the outbreak of Operation Epic Fury to mainly to keep myself, but also my listeners up to date on the war, how it's going and its ramifications for both the global security picture and also the global economy. This interview was originally scheduled with that in mind, but I think because you've written so many books and even more articles, including one that comes readily to mind that I mentioned to you before we turn on the microphones about former national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, whose careers both offer, I think, some really interesting contrasts

• 5:51Demetri Kofinas?

  to the current crop of diplomats and strategists. I think this will invariably be a much bigger picture conversation where the war is concerned. Now, just from my recollection, you've written four books, is that right?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 6:04Demetri Kofinas?

  So your most recent one is on the life and times of Zbigniew Brzezinski. Other books include The Retreat of Western Liberalism, In Spite of the Gods, which was a book about the rise of modern India, and Time to Start Thinking, which was a book about America in the age of what you call dissent. When it comes to writing books or articles, how do you decide what you want to write about?

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Very good question. I mean, the first book I did wasn't, I didn't imagine it to be the first of many. I just thought I had to write a book about how India was changing. And I was the Financial Times Bureau South Asia Bureau Chief in New Delhi for five years. I had been very immersed in India before then. My first wife, I'm remarried, but my first wife, or what we call in Washington, my previous administration, she's Indian and the mother of my daughter is Indian. And so I'd sort of been very involved in India. And I felt that what continues to be true, that the West overlooks the geopolitical emerging importance of what is now the largest, most populous country in the world. And it deserved a book. And so that's how I sort of began on that track.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  And in spite of the gods, The Strange Rise of Modern India was, it gave me a taste for longer form, much, much longer form writing. The book did very well. It continues to sell. Weirdly, I just did an event about it yesterday at George Washington University. So that gave me a taste for it. But I think the crisis of Western democracy, you know, was my next two books, variations on that theme through an American lens. You know, that they just sort of compelled themselves as really, really urgent topics about which I felt I had something to report and to say. And then, thank you for raising my last book. My last book is not journalistic. I would say that the first three are.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  My biography of Spagni of Brzezinski is a full life biography with goodness knows 60, 70 pages of end notes. You can't really cut too many corners or be impressionistic with a full life biography. You either do it properly or not at all. And that, I think, to date, is my most significant single work and the one I'm proudest of.

• 8:19Demetri Kofinas?

  So in anticipation of this conversation, I was reflecting on

• 8:24Demetri Kofinas?

  What has been for me in the last five years or so, an evolving, I suppose, state of mind, which is that I no longer feel at home in the world. Now, I don't know how much of this is just normal. Like, as you get older, the past feels more and more like it was where you belong, and the present feels more foreign. I suppose that's certainly part of it, and pop culture, I'm sure, plays a role there. But our politics has changed so much, the quality of our leadership, the nature of our discourse, all of those things. I don't know to what degree that factors into what you've written about in your books about the age of dissent. But I'm curious, if you had to tell a story about when things began to change or go off the rails, what is that story you tell?

• 9:09Demetri Kofinas?

  I mean, I often reach for 9/11, that's really for me, when things began to change. But that's also, again, when I was 18, 19, in college. So I don't know how much of that is a personal bias. I'm curious, from your perspective, is there a date? Is there a time? What is the story that you tell about when things began to go wrong in the West?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  It's a very interesting question, and you're right. The age we are and what sort of forms our, you know, memories, sort of definitive early, formative years memories, is definitely interlaced with any answer anybody would give to a question like that. And my, I guess, equivalent, same age, but 12, 15 years earlier, defining moment was the end of the Cold War. I was 21, I was studying at Oxford University as an undergraduate, and I was 21 when the Berlin Wall fell on November the 9th, 1989. And that day, it was an incredibly exciting historic event.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  And that day, I got four other friends, students. We got a train to the south coast of England, to Hastings, took a ferry. From Hastings to Zeebrugge in Belgium, rented a car in Zeebrugge, drove along the German, West German, then autobahn, which now as then does not have speed limits. Germans and cars are a whole, somebody should write a book, I'm sure there are many books, but anyway, got to Berlin in time to join what I felt was described as this sort of orgy of historic vandalism. We rented pickaxes and joined thousands of

• 10:49Speaker 01

  others and just laid into the wall, got pretty drunk like everybody else. And I think that how we responded collectively, the West, and in particular the United States, to this moment of triumph was seminal in what is going wrong today. We got drunk on hubris and on the belief that history was over and that there was one way of doing things. And we were at the top of the ladder and we can help you climb up the ladder, but there's only one ladder and there's only one destination. And we stopped doing what I think we did very well during the Cold War, which is learning about others, adjusting

• 11:32Speaker 01

  perspective, thinking strategically. And so I think the 1990s, somebody I think perhaps a bit unfairly described the Clinton administrations as holidays from history. Now, I think, you know, Clinton, that sells them a little bit short. But the 1990s, I think, by and large, squandered the extraordinary advantage we had in the West to reach out to other parts of the world and forge new partnerships, reform the global sort of institutions to adapt to the emerging sort of 21st century world. And we didn't do that. And then, of course, nine 11 happened. And we went really dangerously, and I think we're still heading

• 12:14Speaker 01

  dangerously in the wrong direction, alienating other great powers. On the original post-war, Cold War supposition, the geopolitics, great power rivalry is over, that somehow it's a thing of the past, and a tremendously naive misreading of the recurring folly of human nature and human history. We're not escaping that. And I think we're paying a price for continuing to think that we can.

• 12:43Demetri Kofinas?

  So you kind of preempted my next question, but I'm gonna maybe reformulate it and take a quote from that article that I mentioned where you talked about Brzezinski and Kissinger. And Kissinger, apparently you interviewed numerous times for that specific book. I don't know if you interviewed him in other instances. So here's the quote. You write, "The question is whether Americans can ever understand that we are living in a continuous experience that has no end, and that you can never segment life into different problems," Kissinger said. "As Europeans, we knew that we were living in a continuous history. It never comes to an end." He might also have quoted the great American novelist, William Faulkner, who said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." How does that speak to what it

• 13:27Demetri Kofinas?

  is that Americans get wrong about the past, and in particular, our post-war history? And is that endemic to the American experience? Is that part of, is that especially unique to American culture? In other words, is it only an American culture that would have produced an end-of-history-type document like that, which resonated so much, written by Francis Fukuyama? Or do you think any empire would have fallen into this trap?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  I think to some degree, the British might overlap with the Americans in this regard. I mean, and you know, there are still some strands of Britishness in America's DNA. And, you know, I grew up, it became a joke when I was growing up, but it wasn't originally the idea that God was an Englishman because the sun never set, you know, and there was a joke. I think it's apocryphal, but it might as well be true. Some newspaper headline in the 1920s, 1930s, "Fog over the English Channel, continent cut off," meaning, you know, the center of everything is London, and they've been cut off from us. So I think

• 14:33Speaker 01

  there is a certain sort of, within the semiotics, if you like, of the English language, there is a certain arrogant universalism, the beliefs that we created this world, it's in our language, and we have proclaimed the universalist ideals to which everyone else should aspire. And by the way, I do subscribe to most of those ideals. What I'm questioning is our grasp of what it takes for both others and ourselves to realize those ideals. Brzezinski and Kissinger were...

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Refugees, exiles from the interbellum sort of bloodlands of the first half of 20th century Europe. Kissinger from Bavaria, Brzezinski from Poland, both of whom washed up as children, or a young adolescent in Kissinger's case, in 1938 on North America's shores, just in time to avoid the coming maelstrom. And although they were great lifelong rivals, frenemies, as the word goes, they did share a couple of really important characteristics. And one is that sense of slightly flinty old world realism that I think was exhibited well by that Kissinger quote you just read out, Demetri.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  And another was that when they came of age, and really in the 1940s, and started becoming luminaries in the academic world, in the early sort of days of the Cold War, there was huge demand in the United States as this new sudden colossus that really had the world in its hands, but faced a deadly ideological rival in the Soviet Union. There was massive demand, thirst for knowledge and welcome, Matt, to immigrants, to scholars, to luminaries from all walks of sort of life, you know, from nuclear physicists, of course, you know, to sociologists, to historians and political scientists as well, like Kissinger and Brzezinski.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  And therefore, you know, this for them was a pretty much unique moment in history. And it's pretty much, this is where America is very different from Britain, pretty much unimaginable that Britain would have had a similar sort of welcome. Okay, you've just arrived. We need your expertise. We need your knowledge. You don't care what your name is, how difficult it is to pronounce. You're smart. We need you. Sign up here. I mean, that is a very American thing. I think that's in jeopardy today. And I think that America, even more today, is in need of strategic thinking and debates and brains, because today we're facing a multipolar world, which is considerably more

• 17:16Speaker 01

  complex and volatile than a bipolar world that we saw with the dawn of the Cold War. And yet, the appetite for that seems to have...

• 17:27Speaker 01

  And this is where the hubris thing comes in, seems to have waned. So I mean, that's a rather long answer to your very good question. And that, of course, also answers a potential other question you might have, which is, why did I choose to write a biography of Spik Brzezinski?

• 17:44Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, why don't you take that question? Because that was one of my questions. I mean, both, why did you choose to write a biography about him? And what were the notable things that you learned in the series of interviews? Well, actually, you didn't, had he passed away by the time that you decided to write the biography?

• 17:58Speaker 01

  He had, he passed away in 2018.

• 18:00Demetri Kofinas?

  Okay, but had you had a chance to interview him before, or to speak with him ever, or meet him before? I know you spent quite a bit of time with his family, but...

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got to know him reasonably well. But I mean, I had no idea that I was gonna, when he was alive, that I would end up writing his biography. But I used to meet him for lunch. I mean, he was as a sort of reporter in DC. You know, he kind of stood out in terms of his ability, whether you agreed with him or not, his ability to cut through the noise and the sort of extraneous detail to what is it, what is this sort of core geopolitical trade off we're facing here? I don't know with the Iraq surge, say, or you know, the Libya. Well, whatever the issue might be that I wanted to ask.

• 18:40Demetri Kofinas?

  Which he was opposed to, if I remember correctly. Wasn't he opposed to the Iraq war?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  He was. He was very much opposed. And he felt that the global war on terror after nine 11 was mishandled and created a sort of boomerang effect. He made himself pretty unpopular on the right, having been weirdly quite popular with conservatives when he was Carter's national security advisor. He was known as Darth Vader in those days because he was hawkish.

• 19:05Demetri Kofinas?

  And he also, didn't he also, he was a primary architect of the US strategy to support the Mujahideen against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, was he not?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Yes, he did, which is a very controversial chapter in his, you know, there are a lot of controversial chapters. I mean, he advised Carter on how to handle the Iran hostage crisis, you know, in terms of, terms of history never being dead, the past not being past. You know, that, that sort of kind of commends itself. But so does the Russian war on Ukraine. You know, these are things he dealt with, NATO expansion. But I guess the reason I sort of chose to write this is because the family offered me these amazing diaries that he kept as national security advisor, which he sort of spoke into a dictaphone on the car on the way back from the White House to... Virginia, he's home in Virginia every evening and he spoke in fully formed paragraphs

• 20:00Speaker 01

  and they're very comprehensive, extremely interesting, hitherto untapped, mostly untapped diaries. He hadn't shared them with anybody when he was alive. And once the family agreed that they couldn't redact anything and they couldn't edit or see my book before it was published, then I got just too intrigued. I couldn't stop reading.

• 20:21Demetri Kofinas?

  So I went to, as I mentioned, I went to college between 2000 and 2004. One of my majors was in political science with a focus on international relations and foreign policy. And so I came of age during a time when international relations as a discipline had become formalized and technocratic in what was then the post-Cold War era. And there was a sense that there was a correct way to engage in international affairs. And this involved working in procedural steps through multilateral frameworks and institutions that seemed to differ noticeably from the way in which statecraft and diplomacy was handled in the pre-Cold War era. And for

• 21:03Demetri Kofinas?

  the purposes of this discussion, in particular, the era, the eras of Kissinger and Bruschinsky. How would you say that those great grand strategists, as you've referred to them, differ from the crop of international relations technocrats and think tank intellectuals that have run US foreign policy in recent decades? And I'm thinking now of people who populated administrations of folks like Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, and even Joe Biden.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  It's a good question, quite a difficult one to answer. Because, you know, I don't want to short sell, you know, some of the foreign policy brains that are around, both the think tanks in DC and, you know, universities. I think there are a lot of very smart, very educated people in the United States, some of whom speak Chinese, you know, some of the scholars and all Russian or whatever, and, you know, who are world-class. I don't think the climate is as receptive to strategic debate in Washington. So I don't think this is a supply problem necessarily. I think it's a demand problem. I think.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  For the most part, if you, I don't want to idealize the Cold War era, there were a lot of very partisan disputes, there was McCarthyism, you know, there was the sort of whole debate and controversy around détente in the seventies. Of course, there was the massive falling out over the Vietnam War in the sixties. But broadly speaking, politics stopped at the water's edge when it came to defining what America's overriding challenge was, which was the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. And this was a global rivalry, and we had never had that before in history. And so therefore, there was a lot more space

• 22:52Speaker 01

  and demand for strategic debate. It's hard to sort of imagine now, but in the seventies, Kissinger is national, a very controversial, deservedly controversial, national security advisor, and then Secretary of State as well to Richard Nixon, that Brzezinski is seen as the Democratic Kissinger. And the aspiring hopefuls, White House hopefuls, on the Democratic side, nineteen seventy-two, then seventy-six, courted him. They wanted him to be on their team. And Carter eventually won, which was a very improbable choice, Brzezinski. He bet a rank on a rank outsider, is the way I put it, who goes on to win the Derby. And

• 23:37Speaker 01

  I really like people like, I don't know, Jake Sullivan. I have great respect for Jake's capabilities, but it's not like Democratic candidates go around sort of seeking their Jake Sullivan or their whoever it might be. And as I say, no disrespect to them. It was a different era. And the rewards to being entrepreneurial, controversial, to thinking big, to risking being branded as a not a team player, the rewards to that were quite high and the risks were much lower. Today, you've got to be a team player. And I think it's no accident that the term the blob. Which I think Ben Rhodes coined, the blob does capture something which is a sort

• 24:17Speaker 01

  of, I think systemic risk aversion amongst so-called think tankers. They don't want to stick their heads up above the parapet too much. And it's a different climate. That's not a very satisfactory answer, but I think it's a description of how different Washington is today than it was during most of the Cold War.

• 24:37Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, it's interesting that you brought up Jake Sullivan, because I remember having a conversation with someone who worked in the Biden administration. And they essentially spoke about the obsession with process as being detrimental to foreign policymaking. And that, I think, is kind of what I was trying to get at, which is that the world after the fall of the Soviet Union, and this remained true to some extent in the Biden administration's own thinking, was one in which rules and processes had become so formalized that the bureaucracy was essentially impeding the changes needed to adapt US foreign policy to what was and what became a radically different world. How much of that change do you think coincided

• 25:22Demetri Kofinas?

  with Trump's election in 2016? And how much of it reflected a process that had already been underway and that Trump was largely, therefore, a symptom of a deeper set of underlying causalities?

• 25:37Speaker 01

  I mean, I think Trump's both a symptom and an accelerant. But I mean, just to pick up on, I think, your very well-observed point about what is essentially the bureaucratization of foreign policymaking and the interagency, the sort of strung-out sort of quality, particularly with democratic administrations, of the interagency, the lawyered-up nature of American foreign policymaking, to which Trump is a reaction and a cure worse than the disease. There is no interagency process. There isn't really a national security council. There aren't really sort of interdepartmental policy sort of options prepared by deputies. None of

• 26:20Speaker 01

  those sort of procedures are in place anymore. And I think, you know, that is worse than having the excessively slow-moving, cautious, lawyered policymaking that you get with, you know, or you certainly had with the Biden administrations, for sure, to some degree, perhaps with the Clinton administration. But that has been getting worse. Partly, this is a function of the growth of the imperial state. You know, I mean, it just sort of gets more and more sunk into precedent and into procedure and into, you know, it's like a barnacles gathering on the hull of a ship. It just slows its passage through the water. And, you know, you get a lot of lawyers who are there to tell you what you can't do, not what you can do.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  And so partly it's just the passage of time. But I mean, I do think there are, there are certain sort of quirks here. Let's, so let's look at Jake Sullivan and Joe Biden. Now, Joe Biden, forty years older, or not quite, maybe thirty, thirty something years older than Jake Sullivan. He's old enough to be a sort of fairly elderly father.

• 27:23Demetri Kofinas?

  Oh, he's a member of the silent generation, in fact.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  He's a member of the silent generation. Brzezinski was like three, four years younger than Carter. Kissinger was about a decade younger than Nixon, but they were broadly the same generation. And they both in very, very different ways, because they were radically different personalities. But they were both able to change their president's mind. Or, you know, in Brzezinski's case, he had stand up arguments with Carter. There was a sense that they were intellectual equals and there was a sort of confidence about arguing with them. Very difficult for Jake Sullivan to do that with Biden with that age gap. And the, the fact that Biden, you know, I mean, Biden with his various characteristics, I genuinely think he's a likable, decent human being, Joe Biden, don't get me wrong.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  But he's also kind of thin skinned about the fact he didn't go to an Ivy League school. And, you know, the generals always sort of, always spoke patronizingly to him when he was vice president. So he's kind of a bit chippy, as, as they say, and therefore not, pretty stubborn when he makes a decision, even if it's a bad one, like let's pull out of Afghanistan overnight. Or, you know, let's just sort of give Netanyahu as much leeway as, as he wants. I mean, pretty hard for Jake Sullivan to overcome a president who's stubborn and more than three decades older. And so that's a sort of quirky thing that could have happened in the seventies. It just happens to describe the last administration. And I do wish to double underline that for all the foreign policy questions.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  About what went wrong and what went right in the Biden administration. I think their China policy evolved into a pretty good one, to be fair. I think Jake Sullivan is a high caliber person, so this is no reflection on Jake.

• 29:11Demetri Kofinas?

  No, that's such an interesting insight, the age difference. Biden was also, and also, yeah, he was totally thin-skinned, although not all that uncommon. I mean, I can point to a number of presidents for whom this guy, including the current one, who really breaks all the records. But Biden was very good, and it seemed that he took himself and his place in history too seriously, far too seriously. He was very conscious of it and his own stage presence. And he performed well in certain instances, like both before and after Putin invaded Ukraine in a number of notable speeches, as well as when he arrived in Tel Aviv or wherever it was, Jerusalem, I don't know where, presumably it was Tel Aviv, after October 7th. He was very good in those moments, and you could see that those moments were very important to him, almost as though he was sort of cinematically processing them in his head.

• 29:56Demetri Kofinas?

  I want to go back to this point about process, because I had been speaking with another person who worked at the National Security Council, high up in the NSC. And he had said that, when I was asking him about the difference between the Trump administration and the Biden administration, he said, well, and I hope I'm not butchering what he said to me or misremembering, but I could swear that he said that the Biden administration had a process, but they didn't have an outcome that they wanted, or the clear outcome they wanted, whereas the Trump administration has an outcome, but they don't have a process. I'm curious if you agree with that. And my second question is, what would you say the outcome is that this administration wants? Because, quite frankly, I cannot tell.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  So I can't name this person, but it's an ambassador of a prominent country, not Britain. An ambassador's been here a long time and has known successive administrations. And he said, what is it with democratic administrations? It's like, you think you've got a deal and an agreement, and three years later, it still hasn't been implemented. Whereas with Trump... You know, though we disagree with a lot of things he does, it's like he says something happens, then it happens.

• 31:08Demetri Kofinas?

  Actually, there's a famous anecdote I was literally told recently at our Washington DC dinner, where apparently, this was during the recent takeover of Syria, and the Trump administration was debating taking sanctions off Syria. And then someone, whether it was Winkoff, I don't know, met with MBS down in Saudi Arabia, and he was essentially like, or communicated to the president, I know what's gonna happen, this is gonna take X number of years, and basically Trump intervened and they just took them off. So to your point.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  And there are many examples of that, more of them bad, some of them disastrous than good, but I mean, here's one good one, and it's not directly foreign policy. I cannot imagine Operation Warp Speed happening in the Biden administration. I can't imagine blowing through all the restrictions, all the lawyers' objections, all the sort of government procedures happening under a democratic administration. And the fact is that Trump did blow through it, there was probably quite a bit of brifting on the side, and certainly a lot of cronyism with Jared Kushner's sort of pals being involved, but it got us to mRNA vaccines at a scale way quicker than it could have been.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  And so, I mean, great irony, this Trump's never able to boast about his single biggest accomplishment, because so many anti-vaxxers support him. But the prime example to me of the Biden administration being too slow is Ukraine. I mean, broadly speaking, had the right response, which is to back up Zelensky's government, but just wasn't able to do obvious things quick enough, because every single thing had to be debated, as like, do we need this weapon? Would Russia respond by, where's its nuclear red line? It was essentially a process of a lot of second self-guessing going on, debating with, you know, imaginary Putins in their heads.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  And that, of course, you know, meant a lot of stuff that should have been, whether it was some HIMARS or whatever it might be, a lot of stuff that should have been getting. To Ukraine either didn't come or came months and months after it could have been decisive or very, very much more helpful. And this is a frustrating element to democratic administrations. I mean, this is something that, that needs to be addressed. Now, Trump, you know, going into Iran, which is, I think, you know, unfolding into a potential catastrophe that in some ways rivals the Iraq war disaster. This could only happen with no interagency process, you know, where the options are not

• 33:44Speaker 01

  given a chance to be properly vetted, debated, and then presented to a president who wants to read them. None of this happened. I don't think a properly due diligence oriented administration would have got into this situation.

• 33:58Demetri Kofinas?

  So I do want to end our interview or spend the rest of our time talking about Trump. I do want to revisit something you said, you use the term anti-vaxxer, and I know that's going to trigger a lot of people in the audience. We have a 19-month-old at home. We didn't follow the CDC immunization schedule for childhood vaccinations, doesn't mean we're anti-vax or against vaccinations in principle. But for example, my father's a perinatal doctor who deals with high-risk pregnancies. He's long had issues with the immunization schedule, the way in which many of these vaccines are administered and front-loaded at a time when a baby's immune system or a child's immune system is most vulnerable, or in some cases view some of these as totally unnecessary from a risk-reward standpoint.

• 34:42Demetri Kofinas?

  A good example being the rotavirus vaccine, which if you are a child living in a developed country, you're not at risk of dying from diarrhea. So I'm curious, like, when you use the term anti-vax, what is it exactly that you mean?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Well, in the context of COVID, I meant the people who believe that COVID, I mean, there were a lot of sort of RFK Junior adjacent sort of elaborate theories about this being actually a bad faith vaccination rather than not necessarily one. And I fully understand your dad and respect that position, where there could be under-appreciated or understudied side effects. This is one where, you know, you have people. With large audiences, spreading the view that, you know, these microchips are being injected into your bloodstream, you know, and Bill Gates is taking control. I mean, there was some pretty wild anti-COVID vaccine conspiracy theories that went around. Listen to somebody like Candace

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Owens, you know, who's a big, what was then a big supporter of Trump. Trump found it quite difficult to advertise the degree to which, you know, this mRNA vaccine or vaccines had come much quicker than otherwise. But I am not in any shape or form a medical expert. And I defer to people in that field to debate the pros and cons of the schedule.

• 36:07Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, no, I do too. And I just wanted to clarify that because I think it's, the debate's gotten very muddled on this and people have good reason to be upset with how much of this was handled. And of course, people were gaslit about the side effects of, I mean, I got the COVID vaccine. I didn't get any of the boosters. And thankfully, I haven't had any lasting side effects that I know of. But I know people that have, and I did have side effects. And so I think that this debate has been so unscientific on both sides, on those who are basically institutionalists, whatever the authorities tell me I do, whatever the standard of care says I do, anything else is stupid and you're all idiots and conspiracy theorists. And then people on the other side, which is basically, oh, now I don't believe anything. I'm just gonna believe some random

• 36:49Demetri Kofinas?

  influencer on YouTube. And I'm gonna follow whatever that individual says.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, can I just sort of add a point here? And I've written about this and annoyed people on what you describe as the institutionalist. I mean, I guess, for want of a better shorthand liberal side of this debate. Or not all liberals, though, of course, it's a bit more variegated, but which is, I think, that the whole follow the science thing. I think the Dr. Fauci sort of turning up on TV every other day and sort of changing guidance. I think what the CDC guidelines, the arbitrary, at one point, sort of recommending, and this isn't just about vaccines, that infants be masked. And then, of course, schooling. My daughter was then a teenager. She was out of school way too long and arguably shouldn't have been out of school at all. So I believe that

• 37:37Speaker 01

  the democratic sort of left liberal, whatever you describe it as well, still doesn't understand just how much harm this did to trust in them and in institutions. And this is a sort of underappreciated political event, how the epidemiological debate was conducted and the intolerance for dissent from it. But that is not a medical point I'm making. It's a communications point about how politics is conducted.

• 38:09Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, I agree. I think that what happened was essentially, it seems to me, the democratic left or the liberal left or whatever you want to call it, saw themselves as the sort of institutionalists and as the establishment. And the cohort that I'm describing here basically just believed anything they were told. And anyone who disagreed with them, they viewed them as idiots or attacked them. Meanwhile, what's happened is the other side of the political spectrum, there's a large cohort that basically disbelieves anything. And the same time, what they end up doing is you can't remain in a state of disbelief around everything indefinitely. So they've ended up finding new people to believe in, and they'll believe any some random doctor, some random quack or whatever it is. And

• 38:51Demetri Kofinas?

  so that's kind of where I think things have fallen. But what I wanted to make sure that we talk about before we end is, you know, when it comes to the outcome that this administration wants, I mean, they released their national security strategy document some time ago now. In fact, it probably wasn't that long ago, but it feels, everything feels like it was forever ago. I mean, we're not even, we're right around the same day as the liberation day tariff announcements, which is wild. And that's the pace. I mean, it's easy to forget what, I remember when Biden came into office, one of the things that many of us, myself included, felt was a sense of relief from the chaos of the four years of the Trump administration. And that's exactly what it feels like. Again, everything is chaotic with this president. And the document, you know, I know that there were a lot of people that interpreted the document as being advocating for spheres of influence. I never felt that it was that

• 39:36Demetri Kofinas?

  way. I felt very much like it was saying, no, yes, and, yes, to defending Taiwan, yes, to maintaining American preeminence in Asia, because we don't want any power to challenge us in the Pacific, but also, we want to dominate the Western Hemisphere. And it's hard to match the rhetoric and what comes out of the administration, because also there are so many different spokespeople, including the president himself, with what is being written or proposed as a kind of formal document. So it's still hard for me to interpret exactly what is the outcome here, what's driving policy here. I'm curious what you think it is. And I think, and I've also mentioned this, that the tough thing about having these conversations is both, and this especially true for you, Edward, because you're a journalist,

• 40:21Demetri Kofinas?

  you want to be objective, although you write a lot of op-eds, and you also don't want to be labeled as being TDS, which has become a derisive way of describing anyone that has negative things to say about Trump. And so oftentimes, I'll find myself trying to make excuses for the president, to try to find some kind of, you know, rational way to explain his behavior. But I wonder, at the end of the day, if a big part of this is just that the president is just not, I don't know, is a bit cuckoo, you know, to put it mildly. So I'm just curious, like, what would you interpret the outcome? How do you think about what this administration wants, what the president wants, and how that gets reflected in any kind of coherent policy?

• 40:57Speaker 01

  So the TDS accusation or label is one that I actually throw back on people who follow whatever Trump does, however capricious, unexpected, self-contradicting it might be. I think that is true derangement, because that is cult-like behavior. So I have some respect for, you know, the quotation marks, America firsters, who are now falling out with him. And I never thought I'd say this, but, you know, the Tucker Carlsons, to some degree, Steve Bannons, Megyn Kelly's, you know, at least sort of thought there was a sort of core principle there to the Trumpian worldview, which was not to get involved in wars of choice, particularly in the Middle East. And so I have some respect for them,

• 41:41Speaker 01

  although maybe they're being performative. You know, I think they were naive if they genuinely believed there was a sort of core philosophy. The core philosophy is what Trump does. And what Trump does, you read the national security strategy and the related sort of sibling national defense strategy that came out a few weeks later, I think they came out like November and December respectively, give you absolutely no guide whatsoever to what Trump is going to do. I mean, there are a couple of very brief pro forma sentences on Iran in the national security strategy. There isn't too much on Taiwan either. There's more in the national defense strategy. But again, I wouldn't really pay much attention to that at all because I don't think Trump did. I think this is a negotiation between

• 42:25Speaker 01

  underlings, Bridge Colby being very important with the national defense one, you know, various people had stated in the national security council for the national security strategy. But I don't think even in sort of normal administrations, they're brilliant guides to what's going to happen, but they at least provide a sort of blueprint of what the philosophical approach is. They don't very much with Trump. The one area, well, let's, to be fair, two areas where they do signal Trump's instincts and sort of build some scaffolding around it is Western Hemisphere. This is our hemisphere and, you know, essentially

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Monroe Doctrine 2.0. That is, I think, consistent with Trump. And the other is this idea of civilizational erasure happening inside European liberal democracies and that being a concern of the United, a civilizational concern of the United States, which wishes to defend and rebuild Western civilization in its own mind. And I think that's sort of something, and I think Trump wouldn't use that language, but that's something that he thinks broadly speaking is to sort of give a heuristic to how he thinks about Europe. It's essentially, it's all Berkeley. It's Berkeley campus. They're a bunch of liberals. You know, they're all vegetarians. They don't fight. They don't spend on weapons. They don't.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Mind having Sharia law in their capital cities, et cetera. I think that's kind of how Trump thinks. So those are the two sort of core impulses that it brings. But the sort of quicker answer to your question, that was a long, a longer one. The short answer to your question is that Trump's foreign policy is what Trump decides and Trump's very capricious. I think he's more and more cornered over this Iran situation. He wants to end it quickly, but he can't find an off ramp. And that's sort of putting psychological pressure on him. I don't buy into the school of he's suffering cognitive decline. I think he's always been like this. I think he, you know, he was in the eighties arguing we should take Iran's oil.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  And then the early 2000s, we should take Iraq's oil. He was called, I'm one of the journalists that have had, you know, I've got his cell number and I've had some calls with him. He was calling journalists in the late 1970s. He was doing, by his own count, 50 to 100 calls a day when he was Roy Cohn's so-called apprentice, talking to gossip columnists, page three people calling him to talk shows as Don from Queens. I mean, there are certain through lines to how Trump, to his habits and ways of thinking. And of course, he always loved tariffs and he always thought Japan was ripping his off and the USSR wasn't such a big problem. Japan was the big problem. There's a lot of through lines there into Trump's

• 45:20Speaker 01

  that make him more than just capricious. But for the most part, he's a guy who rolls the dice, goes with instinct and has suspicion of experts. And so that makes him volatile and unpredictable.

• 45:33Demetri Kofinas?

  So Bob Woodward had published a three-part volume of the Bush administration, which I read, which was okay.

• 45:42Demetri Kofinas?

  But I loved James Mann's book, Rise of the Vulcans. I thought that was the best book I'd ever read on the history of the Bush administration. I cannot wait till someone writes the equivalent historical work of this administration. I'm going to read it voraciously. I'm just going to be, there's nothing that I look forward to more, I can tell you that right now, Edward, than a history of the Trump years. When they're over, if we're still alive, if we haven't been converted into some kind of AI liquid soup or something. Look, so we're recording this on Friday, April 17th. The markets are just, oh, they've been yo-yoing now for, since this war began, and they're yowing. They're yowing way up today off the news that Iran is temporarily

• 46:25Demetri Kofinas?

  halting any attacks in the Strait. This being interpreted as the Strait is now open, but then the Trump administration also responds by saying, but we're still blockading the Strait. I mean, I've never really indexed too tightly to headlines. That's an understatement today. I mean, I don't pay any attention to them at all, but I also don't even know what that means. I'm curious what you understand about this recent headline or this recent news. And more generally, how do you think this is going? Where is this going to end up? Is there going to be some kind of permanent resolution? Or do you imagine this is just going to become a simmering conflict and that Iran will eventually look like post-war Iraq in 1991?

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Well, the explanation for record highs recently, or surges, or day gain, whatever it might be with this S and P index, and then, you know, a lowering of the bond yields corresponding, that I get is unsatisfactory. I hear people talk about normalcy bias in the markets, that they're just sort of geared more to good news because half the people trading don't remember 08, you know, there's no sort of memory of what real bears like. And then others say, well, look, the AI gold rush is real and the valuations there are driving this. And that's kind of unrelated to Iraq, unless Iran war.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  You know, metastasizes into a global conflict, then it's containable relative to the upside of this AI investment. So that's another explanation. Frankly, I don't find any of them fully satisfactory. I mean, the United States is more insulated from the blowback as a surplus oil and gas producing country. It's more insulated than, say, Europe or Asia for sure. And that might also explain some of it. Where Trump finds an off-ramp, though, it's a much more important question in a way, because can we psychologically have any confidence in saying, would Trump's pride stand doing a deal that is comparable to Obama's

• 48:28Speaker 01

  JCPOA, weaker on some points, maybe stronger on others? Can Trump's pride withstand that? Because he did pull out of that deal. It was described by him as a worst deal ever, and Obama's a fool, et cetera. If he's now forced back to, you know, agreeing to something along those lines, maybe with longer time periods, say 15 years as opposed to the 10 years that Obama had, or lower nuclear yields Obama had, you can enrich up to 3.67 percent. Does Trump get to 2.5? I don't know. You know, I'm not a nuclear expert. Does he have to release a lot more billions of dollars that have been frozen of Iran offshore accounts

• 49:10Speaker 01

  in order to get Iran to agree to this? I don't know. But his sort of pain point, pride point, is going to be a real key to answering how this ends. I cannot believe that there will be any deal possible in which Iran gives up its 420 kilograms of enriched uranium. Because if it has learned anything from the last six weeks, it wants to, and I think we can take this almost as an article of dark faith, is that it wants to get from zero to 60 miles an hour, from Tehran to Kim Jong-un, North Korea, kind of nuclear defense as quickly as possible. Because this is existential for them. It's a nasty regime.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  It's more hardline now than it was six weeks ago. It realizes there's no real middle way for them. It's not going to believe any Trump pledges that he's going to resume bombing six months from now, regardless of, there's no court that will enforce the contract of a ceasefire deal, a longer term settlement.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  So they're going to go for nuclear and I don't know how and how long it will take. But I do know that I only a revolution at home or a full scale sort of boots on the ground will stop it. And I don't think the latter is going to happen. A revolution is conceivable, but I don't think boots on the ground is going to happen because I don't think, I think the reason why, you know, ninety percent, well, eighty percent of Republicans continue to back Trump's Iran, Operation Epic Fury is because there's no body bags and Trump knows that. Trump's not going to get into a big body bag situation is my hunch. And so we're left with an Iran that wants to become a nuclear weapons state as its ultimate insurance policy. And I don't see any easy way to stop that.

• 50:53Demetri Kofinas?

  What are the things that keep you up at night? Realistic concerns, ways in which the world could become more destabilized in the course of the next three years?

• 51:02Speaker 01

  We keep forgetting about, because the urgent drives out the merely important, as the phrase goes, we keep forgetting about the US-China relationship. And it is the most important one. It is the sort of the most critical geopolitical relationship to the future of the world. Trump has surprised me on two fronts. One is much more warlike than, you know, he surprised J D Vance too. He surprised Tucker Carlson, much more warlike than he was in the first term. The ease with which he's departed from that sort of anti forever war. And the second thing he surprised me on was China, incredibly dovish, almost submissive towards Xi Jinping. He wanted that summit from them, not even his inauguration

• 51:44Speaker 01

  from his election. He kept saying, I want a summit. Now Xi Jinping didn't concede that summit until Trump had climbed down from, you know, the tariff force with China. They agreed this off-ramp, what I call the spinal tap moment, where Trump said, our relationship is a twelve out of ten. And then Xi says, okay, we can have a summit and we've got a truce here. I'm releasing my chokehold on, stranglehold on rare earths and you're bringing tariffs down to a sane level. Let's have a summit. That summit's really important.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Will Trump remain fairly sort of dovish in his instincts towards China? Does China in this Iran situation see an opportunity with a weakening America that has lost its allies, that has alienated its allies, that is really quite dreaded by the global south? I think something that Americans do not sufficiently appreciate is when Hegseth gives his briefings is this is the ugly American, somebody glorying in violence and misquoting the Bible as justifying violence. I don't think America realizes just how many people are rooting for Iran, which is an extraordinary thing to say because it's the nastiest regime, or one of the nastiest on the planet.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  And just how much this for the generally patient, generally cautious Chinese leadership, how many temptations, geopolitical temptations this is presenting China? I worry about that. That ultimately is what would endanger our world. And I don't have any forecasts, except to say we are, as the cliche goes, we're living in the revenge of geopolitics. It's not going to go away. It's the natural state of human affairs. And this is the most important geopolitical relationship in the world. And it's, it makes me nervous.

• 53:39Demetri Kofinas?

  Last question. How do you think Kissinger and Brzezinski would advise the, not just this president, but the leaders today, the people in positions of influence to either influence foreign policy directly, or this administration or future administrations? How do you think they would advise them today? Do you think?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Differently to each other. You know, they had a fairly different approach to each other to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Now, Brzezinski, where Brzezinski differed from Kissinger was he believed the Soviet Union was a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption that was the last great European empire, albeit a Marxist one, but was resented by the peoples who were not Russian. And that we should weaponize that to sort of hasten the unraveling of their system. Kissinger believed it was around for keeps, that it was a permanent feature of the landscape, and that we should therefore find a way of living with them détente. So they had very different views to the Soviet Union. China, they had similar views.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  I mean, so Nixon opened to China and then Carter normalized. And they were both therefore fairly dovish towards China. But I think there is a big difference between China today and the Soviet Union then. And that is it's just going to be around. You know, there are on in its peripheries, there are people who do not feel Chinese and who feel oppressed, like the Tibetans, like the Gens of Xinjiang. But they make up a few percentage points of the Chinese population. And there is just no chance Tibet is going to be an independent entity. So there's no strategy here that involves regime change in China that does not involve World War III. And therefore, we have to, I imagine they would agree on this point.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  We have to find ways of, to use the rather blow dried phrase that Jake Sullivan, I think, coined is to cooperate, you know, where possible, compete where necessary, confront where, I forget the exact formula. But we have to base our strategy on the assumption the Chinese are not going to go away. And the regime's character is not going to radically change. We have to work on that assumption and find ways whilst defending our allies of also jointly confronting things like AI that have species level implications.

• 56:01Demetri Kofinas?

  Edward, it was great to speak with you. I've heard great things about the book. It's definitely on my reading list to read. So thank you so much for coming on the program. If people want to, I mean, obviously, if people want to read your work, they can go to the Financial Times. They could read your column. But how do they follow you on Twitter? And is there any other way that people can stay up to date with your thoughts and opinions?

• 56:19Speaker 01

  I mean, so I post all my stuff on Blue Sky and Twitter. I mean, I, you know, sometimes regret sort of putting unvarnished opinions on those sites. Social media isn't very good for the soul, the professional persona. But mostly I just post stuff I've written or stuff that by colleagues or other people that I think is worth writing. And it's at Edward G. Loose on Twitter. And it's something like it's Edward Loose B. Sky on. So that's where I post stuff by me and others.

• 56:48Demetri Kofinas?

  Wonderful. All right, thank you so much, Ed. It was great speaking with you.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Thank you, Dmitry. It was a great pleasure. Thank you.

• 56:54Demetri Kofinas?

  If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter @Kofinas and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.