#429 — The New World Order

Sam Harris speaks with Anne Applebaum about the erosion of democracy at home and abroad. They discuss the Sudanese civil war and the outside forces involved, America's retreat from global leadership, the impacts of USAID cuts, gerrymandering, the integrity of U. S. elections, the capitulation of Republican representatives to Trump, tariffs, what a post-Trump world could look like, JD Vance as a potential successor to the MAGA movement, Israel's actions in Gaza, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

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

• 0:06Sam Harris?

  Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

• 0:36Sam Harris?

  I am here with Anne Applebaum. Anne, thanks for joining me again.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Well, thanks for having me.

• 0:40Sam Harris?

  It's great to see you. Well, so you've just written a cover article in The Atlantic, titled online at least. I haven't seen the physical magazine, but the title online is "The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth." This is recounting your two trips to Sudan, which has been plunged into yet another civil war. And I want to use, as you do in the article, I want to use your experience of Sudan as a lens through which to look at the consequences of American retreat from the world, and this just this kind of general unraveling of the system of international law and international aid, which has really underpinned what we have come to call the liberal world order

• 1:23Sam Harris?

  for more or less as long as we've been alive, a little bit longer. So let's start with your experience in Sudan. What is happening in Sudan?

• 1:31Speaker 01

  So Sudan is engulfed by a civil war. The two main warring parties, and actually there are several others as well, but the two main warring parties are formerly components of the Sudanese military. One part is the Sudanese Armed Forces, the kind of main part of the army, and the other is a group called the Rapid Support Forces, who, older readers, or older listeners, rather, will remember as the Janjaweed. This was a group that was created a couple of decades ago by a previous Sudanese dictator, and it was used as a force against, there was, there's an ethnic conflict in Sudan. Western Sudan between Arab speaking nomads and non Arabic farmers.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Very old conflict resolved many times through intermarriage and so on. But in the modern era was juiced up by outside weapons, outside interests and so on. And that's a kind of, that's more or less a broader version of that is what's happening now. But anyway, the other, the rapid support forces are the other group. They are fighting for control of territory. There's some other groups involved as well, but they're the main two groups. And the, the hard thing about the war and the thing that makes it hard for outsiders to understand is that it's not ideological. It's not a war of ideas. It's not clearly an ethnic war either. It's really a war between two groups who want power, who want money,

• 3:00Speaker 01

  who want control of territory, who want gold. There are big and important gold mines in Sudan, who want other kinds of resources and who are not particularly concerned about Sudanese civilians. And the civilians have really borne the brunt of the war. I mean, it's of course always true that civilians bear the brunt of the war, but they're in the middle of the fighting and often the subject of the fighting in a way that's not always true in other places. So the, they're the focus of ethnic cleansing or of revenge or of, you know, they're, they're, particularly the rapid support, the RSF as they're called, have quite a lot of mercenaries in their ranks who've been told that they won't be paid, but they can take whatever they can steal. And so there's an immense amount of theft as well.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  So it's a very unusually ugly war. And I should say one other thing about it, just at the beginning, which is one of the other things that makes it unusually ugly is the number of outside powers who have, who are contributing to it, who are buying weapons, selling weapons, trying to, making deals with one side or the other, increasing the conflict. And they are, include the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Turks, the Egyptians. The Iranians are there, the Russians are there on both sides, you know, and, and others. And none of them right now have any. Any particular interest in ending the war. Instead, they're all seeing what they can get out of it. And that, that, you know, in the, in the way that the old conflict, you know,

• 4:29Speaker 01

  in Darfur was once juiced up by outsiders. This one really is too. And of course, now there are modern weapons, there are drones. The level of sophistication of, of the, you know, the kind of violence that can be done is now just on a much different level than ever before.

• 4:46Sam Harris?

  Hmm. Yeah, the list of outsiders from your article I found genuinely surprising to me. So you just listed some, but I'll just read you from your article. The Turkish, Egyptian, is Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Russian, Iranian, Ukrainian, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Kenyan, South Sudanese, Chad, Libya, Central African Republic, and the Chinese hovering in the background. I mean, maybe I don't know enough about the history of whatever the 500 civil wars that have been fought in the last 200 years. But that sounds like a pretty novel and awful contribution of outside powers.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  There, and there are really novel elements to it. I mean, the Ukrainians, for example, this is one of the big surprises for me. I have a special interest in Ukraine and I told a Ukrainian friend of mine I was going there. And he sort of turned pale and he said, oh, be really careful. You know, I know some people there and I'd be, and Ukrainians are there too. And they're there to kill Russians. So in a way, they're not there, they're not fighting on one side or the other. They're there attracted by the anarchy itself. You know, that this is a place where they can harm members. Basically, it's members of the Wagner Group, that Russian mercenary group had, has had a long involvement in Sudan and the Ukrainians attacked them there. And so the fact that they're there, you know, is from pretty far away,

• 6:04Speaker 01

  tells you how, how much of a vacuum has been created by the war and by really, you know, and I'm sure this is the next question, by the absence of any. Outside power or organization or institutions who are able to help end it.

• 6:24Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, well, so you just used the word anarchy. And as I was reading your article, it put me in mind of of Robert Kaplan's very famous article from over 30 years ago, The Coming Anarchy, which was also in The Atlantic, I think, probably the most read article for at least a decade in the magazine. And his prediction there, I think, I think in the final analysis of of did not come true. He was imagining the the unraveling of international order and kind of all of us being pitched into a kind of crime planet as a result. But in reading your article and in, you know, now posing the question

• 7:03Sam Harris?

  I have to pose for you, I began to worry that that you're this is sort of the an echo of his prediction there. And it's now we're on the cusp of something that is, you know, that of bearing out that prediction that because I mean, we really are witnessing a just the consequences of a vacuum of leadership. And I mean, there was there's one quote from your article that really struck me as quite poignant and fairly arresting. I'll just read it to you because it you say, "A Middle Eastern ambassador in Port Sudan thought I was joking when I suggested that the US might no longer care that much about Africa. That was beyond his imagination and beyond the imagination of many other people

• 7:48Sam Harris?

  who still believe that someday, somehow, American diplomats are going to come back and make a difference." And I mean, that to me, that really speaks to the brand damage that our country has suffered. I mean, it seems to me we've Trump and Trumpism and this American, America first, know nothing ism has really, at least on the international stage, ruined the very idea of America. And so I just wanted you to just reflect on that and tell me what you noticed and what you continue to notice. I mean, you live overseas most of the time, so you have a very global view of our current moment in the States.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yep, I'm in Poland right now, in fact. I'll start with saying that Robert Kaplan, you know, I agree, the meltdown that he described didn't happen, but you can find on the planet now a number of places where, you know, there used to be order and there isn't now. Sudan is one, Libya, Yemen, Syria is on the cusp, could go one way or the other. And all these places are also places where this role of these so-called middle powers is very important, where there's no, you know, there's no US, there's no UN, there's nobody else. And so you get these competition between between other countries. And I would say that the, you know, some of what people say about the US is maybe even nostalgia for something

• 9:09Speaker 01

  that never was. I mean, it's a, it's more of an idea of America, that there was such a thing as, I don't know, it's, you know, Camp David, or either the Dayton Agreement, you know, that there could be an America that would come in and bring all the warring parties and make them sit down at the table and have a conversation. I mean, maybe that didn't happen as much as people like to think, and maybe when it did happen, it didn't work as well as people remember. But there is a, it's, it's almost a, you know, it's kind of reflex, like, when are they coming back and why have they gone? Of course, you do also increasingly have people who are angry, or don't care, or have tossed America into the group of, you know, irrelevant sort of countries that are just as nihilistic and

• 9:54Speaker 01

  just as transactional as everybody else. And so, again, I don't know whether, how much of the longing for a different America was, is some, based on something real and based on an ideal, I don't know. But it is going to be gradually replaced by an idea that, oh, America is just another, you know, what's the difference between America and Saudi Arabia and Russia and Iran? I mean, they're all just a bunch of greedy transactional countries, whose leaders are looking for personal wealth and...

• 10:20Speaker 01

  You know, who aren't really bothered about anybody's well being. And, you know, I should say, the United States, I mean, it's complicated because the United States has behaved badly in so many places over so many years. But it was always that the bad behavior was often balanced out by other things, by USAID, especially maybe by American health, you know, the contribution that Americans made to ending AIDS, to ending pandemics, working on Ebola, working on on child healthcare all around the world. I mean, people knew all of that as America too, whatever they thought of American foreign policy at any given moment. So there was an idea of American benevolence, you know, that is, I think, really gone or is disappearing fast.

• 11:04Sam Harris?

  When I think about the the damage to our reputation and just the now the the failure of of leadership, I'm thinking much more in terms of those ideals against which we measured ourselves, even in our failure. I mean, we do have a lot to apologize for in how we've behaved historically, but our failures have always been measured by the ideals that we really did stand for on our best days. I mean, like, we, you know, for as long as we've been alive, America could credibly be thought to care about whether other nations cared about human rights or, you know, through their journalists in prison or treated women like chattel.

• 11:46Sam Harris?

  I mean, like, those are, you know, we stood for something. But as you say, now we seem to stand, I mean, we seem to have announced to the world that none of that really matters and we just want our president and his rapacious family to get a hotel deal in your capital city. I mean, so it really, it is just a, just the corruption is not even hidden and it's just been shamelessly advertised and. It really, it makes me very sad to think that the ideals themselves now are understood, I think erroneously, but you know, all too plausibly, they are understood to have been bogus this whole time. I mean, we are just like Saudi Arabia in some basic sense.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  So one other thing that's happening, this isn't the subject of this story, although it's something I am going to write about in the near future. The US is also dismantling a lot of small institutions. This is much smaller than USAID, or trying to dismantle, I should say, because they're all fighting back. But the administration is trying to dismantle. For example, we have foreign broadcasters who broadcast in a lot of languages, you know, Russian, you know, many Central Asian languages, Chinese, the Uighur language, actually, which almost nobody else broadcasts in, Arabic, obviously, Persian, and so on. And we have broadcasters, and a lot of them have real important followings, and they have listeners in around the world. And the Trump administration has been trying to cut them, or trying to

• 13:16Speaker 01

  end them, and their work for a long time. And you know, for a lot of the world, that's how they know us. I mean, they listen to Radio Free Europe, or Radio Liberty, or Radio Farda, or Radio Free Asia. And that's how they knew about America, and that's how they learned about us. And also, that's how they learned alternative stories to the ones told them by their own propagandists, you know, by their own regimes. And they would listen to, you know, US radio. And often, it was, as I said, it was US-backed radio, but the radios was done by nationals of those countries and those places. So it felt to them like it had a local element as well. And a lot of it has already gone off the air, or there's

• 13:57Speaker 01

  already, because they've had cuts to their funding, that it's disappearing. And when that disappears, you know, it's not as if, you know, the US stops doing that and nothing happens, you know. The US will stop those broadcasts if that happens, which I hope it doesn't. And Chinese, and Russian, you know, and Cuban, and Iranian information will come and take their place. There isn't, you know, there isn't ever a vacuum, you know, in the world. I mean, the vacuum is always filled by somebody. Right. And there are already examples, for example, of, Voice of America had a number of Chinese language programs that have disappeared to be replaced by Chinese state media. There was a specific example, The Wall Street Journal found of, there was a Thai program

• 14:41Speaker 01

  that used material from Voice of America. Voice of America's now disappeared. That's been replaced by its Chinese equivalent. Over and over and over again, every time we disappear, the stories that we used to tell, the ideals that we used to have, we used to talk about, you know, the information that we were able to provide is simply gone. And so it's very ironic, given how many people who back this administration, or claim to back it, who talk about fighting censorship and that they believe in free speech. And it may turn out, I mean, very soon, that one of the biggest impacts of this administration is to undermine and degrade people's ability to speak and to hear real information all around the world.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  So it's not just aid, it's also the end of those kinds of programs, the small, small support that we often gave to Democratic leaders and movements, but also to independent press, independent lawyers, all those things that were, again, really tiny amounts of money by compared to what we spend on the military or what we're about to spend on ICE. And cutting those means that people won't even hear about this Democratic ideal or the free speech ideal anymore, because it simply won't be available to them. And, and the, the shortsightedness of that, you know, the, the, the lack of thought about what that means, you know, for the future, kind of flabbergasts me.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Particularly given there's still China hawks kicking around and there's still people in, in and around the White House and certainly in Congress, who understand that the United States is in competition with other countries, not only economic competition and military competition, but also kind of war of ideas competition, and that the United States would just give that up, is extraordinary. And I'm, I'm amazed there isn't louder reaction. I know that there's some in Congress are trying to help and trying to save some of these, some of these programs, but the, but the administration seems to be not interested at all.

• 16:43Sam Harris?

  Well, you mentioned USAID. Can you tell me, what has been the effect of Elon Musk's compassionate and judicious and technically angel editing of that program?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  So what you need to understand about USAID is that it was, it represented, aside from everything else, whatever else it did, it was about 40% of international humanitarian aid. That means food and medicine, basically. It's nothing else, no other programs, nothing. But it was also a huge part of the logistics. So, you know, trucking contracts to bring grain around the world, or shipping contracts, or statistics, or payment systems. And as it turned out, there were a lot of international organizations that were somehow dependent on them and those systems that didn't necessarily even know it. And so one of the things, even when I was in Sudan in the spring, which was a little

• 17:37Speaker 01

  bit after the destruction of USAID, is people were literally just discovering that they, you know, they had a budget cut, or some institution they were used to relying on was going offline. And you had this sense of this complete disruption. And remember that when USAID ended, it didn't end in a way that, you know, we passed on responsibilities to someone else, or, you know, wasteful programs were cut, but in a careful way, so that programs that were useful were kept. No, it was shuttered. It was shut down. I spoke to a woman, she's quoted in the article, who didn't want her name used, because she's still technically there, she's still part of the humanitarian aid programs in the United

• 18:19Speaker 01

  States, and who said to me, I talked to her in February, and she had been cut off from her email, she had been kicked out of her office, she had been cut off from payment systems, and she was personally responsible for a group of refugees, I won't say in which country. You know, and that was like, her responsibility was to get food to them, or get payments to them, and she was unable to do it. She didn't know what had happened, she didn't know where the money or the food was going, she had no ability to track it, and it just disappeared overnight. And the consequences of that, you know, the chaos, the canceled contracts, the expense, a colleague of mine at The Atlantic reported a few... Recently, in the last couple of weeks, reported a story about a huge amount of nutritional

• 19:04Speaker 01

  food aid, there are these special products that are high calorie products that are made for people who are malnourished, that was in a warehouse. And because it hadn't been distributed, it was going to have to be destroyed. But of course, to destroy a warehouse full of food is also very expensive. So the cost of destroying it, the cost of this destruction is going to be with us for a long time. And there were other very specific moments. I mean, I met a doctor who was using exactly some of this kind of nutritional aid food for the malnourished children in the hospital where he worked. And these were, I saw the children, I mean, they were tiny babies mostly. They were very weak. They were lying down. Their mothers were also famished and lying down, and they were in a hospital ward. And

• 19:49Speaker 01

  he was almost, you know, he was saying to me, don't worry, you know, we don't waste it. I mean, he'd heard that Elon Musk or somebody in America is worried that they're wasting this food. And he said, no, no, of course, we don't waste it. We use it. And I, I had this feeling of shame, you know, that this man who's really on the front line of saving people's lives is justifying his use of, you know, of this product that Americans, you know, don't even care enough about to continue sending and would rather burn in a warehouse. I mean, it's a, it's a very dramatic moment. And people don't understand it either. They ask, you know, why? What's the reason? And it's very hard to explain, you know, why didn't you hand it off? Why didn't you, you know, if you didn't want,

• 20:32Speaker 01

  if you wanted to end it, why didn't you do it slowly? Why didn't you make sure nobody was going to starve or die because of what you're doing? And there's no explanation.

• 20:40Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm hard pressed to come up with any charitable framing of what happened. I mean, I, you know, I think the obvious callousness and ruthlessness and even cruelty and, you know, jubilation with which it was, this vandalism was accomplished, you know, going on to X and saying, I spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper when I could have been going to great parties. I mean, just the gloating and calling all the people in the field who have given their life to this kind of work, criminals. I mean, it's just a completely psychopathic exercise in the destruction of American soft power.

• 21:18Sam Harris?

  But if we were going to come up with some charitable version of skepticism about aid to Africa or to anywhere in the developing world, what would you say to someone who would say, listen, Africa has been, you know, many of these countries certainly have been basket cases for as long as I've been alive. We've been giving aid there at whatever level continuously. Maybe there's some set of incentives here that need to be reexamined. Maybe this is, maybe aid is not really as helpful as we imagine. Maybe what these countries need is a dealmaker like Donald Trump to come in and, you know,

• 21:58Sam Harris?

  privilege economic interests over handouts and you figure out how to bring these countries into the 21st century under their own power, in some sense. I mean, is there any, again, I'm, you know, I'm casting a straw here, but is there some version of skepticism that would kind of demand a reset of, of the status quo in this area that, that would be anything less than morally insane?

• 22:24Speaker 01

  So you can meet people, and I know some of them, who worked at USAID and who've worked in the aid world and who would argue very strenuously for a different way of thinking about it, a different way of doing it. I mean, just for example, so in Sudan, one of the few really amazing positive stories is a movement called the Emergency Response Rooms, somewhat awkward name, but what it is, is a kind of Sudanese mutual aid organizations. And in a lot of cities, they've sprung up, they created, they raised outside money or they, they found access to food or medicine and they created their own networks. This is after the war broke out, their own networks to help people and so on. And some, they had a little bit of money from, from the outside world and some they

• 23:08Speaker 01

  raised themselves and so on. And there are, for example, ex-USAID people who think that that's the kind of, you know, organization we should help. So rather than helping, you know, large organizations or large charities or large...

• 23:24Speaker 01

  You know, these sometimes even for-profit companies who helped to move aid and food around the world, you know, we should, it should have all been much more grassroots and local. So there is a, there's a version that would make that argument. But that wasn't what Elon Musk did. You know, what Elon Musk did was just blow up the whole thing, as I said, in ways that were disorienting and costly. You know, it's also, you know, it's not true that there's no progress. Actually, there's a lot of Africa that's better off than it was, and a lot of, much of the rest of the world is more prosperous than it was, and lots of countries that were formerly consumers of aid, like India, aren't anymore. You know, so that, it's, you know, it's not, it's not true that it doesn't work, or doesn't help, or it never changes, or nothing ever, nothing ever alters.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  I mean, countries go up and down for, for, for different reasons. Sudan is a kind of, maybe is a special case because of the war. But also Sudan, you know, and one of the things I regret about the article, and in some ways, the story and the photographs and so on, is that, you know, you can see in Sudan, you can see in Khartoum, that there was a middle-class life there. I mean, there were apartment buildings and blocks and infrastructure and schools and universities. And I met a lot of people who had, young people who had been in university and studying something at the time the war broke out and then had to go home. I mean, there, it's not as if there was nothing. It's not, you know, or, or it's some primitive, empty place. I mean, it's very rich in terms of

• 24:52Speaker 01

  culture and in terms of, people are well-educated, they speak excellent English, they have, they know very, they know a lot about the outside world. You know, they're not as far away from us as we would like to imagine. And as I say, it's not clear that everything that we did there was a disaster and a catastrophe. But there were moments when the US did help, and there was a big north-south civil war in the past. That was the old civil war. Yeah. Which did have a more, it has a more of a religious component, because the north was Muslim and the south was Christian. And we did help to end that. And we did, we were part of the South Sudan, which had been part of the same country. We were part of them breaking off and establishing themselves as an independent state. That's a longer story, but there is progress and things do improve.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's just not true that, I mean, the kind of aid that I'm talking about is the aid that keeps people alive. So nutritional supplements, medicine, things like that. And I don't see any good argument for ending that. I can see good arguments for finding ways to get it to people in better ways. I can see, I can imagine, you know, changing the way it was distributed, but to cut it off from one day to the next seems like it was impossibly cruel and pointless.

• 26:04Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. I don't think we have good intuitions for how societies unravel. And this is, a lot of your work is focusing on how precarious democracy is and, you know, what happens when democracies turn illiberal.

• 26:22Sam Harris?

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