The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 11 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Vladimir Putin has seen a lot to celebrate in Donald Trump’s first moves as president. He has expressed glee about Trump’s threats toward Canada, and Russian leaders have expressed excitement about Trump’s efforts with Elon Musk to gut the U.S. Agency for International Development. Now Trump is signaling that his designs on Canada, his stated ambition to turn it into a “fifty-first state,” is very real. Whether that’s true or not, that’s going to make Putin even more excited.
These aren’t just examples of Trump saying crazy things and Putin delighting at them. Trump is signaling a genuine realignment of the U.S. position in the world, and it’s this realignment that Putin is so happy to see. We’re talking about this today with international relations professor Nicholas Grossman, one of our favorite guests, who recently argued for The Bulwark that Trump’s alienation of allies like Canada is a sign of a much deeper set of changes than is commonly appreciated. Good to have you on, Nick.
Nicholas Grossman: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: During his Super Bowl interview, Trump stressed that his designs on Canada are “real.” He was on Fox News, and he was asked by Brett Baier about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent claim that Trump’s ambitions are a real thing. Listen to what happened.
Brett Baier (audio voiceover): The prime minister said this weekend to a group of Canadian businessmen; he was at private meeting, he said that your wish for Canada to be the fifty-first state is a “real thing.” Is it a real thing?
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Yeah it is. I think Canada would be much better off being a fifty-first state because we lose $200 billion a year with Canada, and I’m not going to let that happen. It’s too much. Why are we paying $200 billion a year essentially in subsidy to Canada? Now if they’re a fifty-first state, I don’t mind doing it.
Sargent: Nick, the idea that we subsidize Canada is a complete fiction. He doesn’t understand how trade deficits and trade surpluses work. That aside, what do you make of this?
Grossman: The surplus thing is really ridiculous. It’s worth mentioning that the reason why the United States has that with Canada is not a subsidy; it’s because the U.S. buys some stuff from Canada, especially Canadian oil that gets refined in U.S. refineries and then sent on and sold to other people. It is profitable for American companies. It is not in any way a loss—in the same way that when I go buy groceries, I don’t have a bad trade deficit at the supermarket, I have an exchange of money for goods that I want and we’re both happy. That’s why we do it. And the same thing: American and Canadian companies do this business with each other because they both make profits. It’s a market system, they benefit from it.
To refocus on the “fifty-first state” thing, on the question of if it’s real—it seems so absurd and almost trollish at first, and nobody totally knows if it’s real or, say, how far it would go. Is the Trump eventually going to order the U.S. military to invade Canada? I can’t say it’s impossible, but I doubt it. And yet, just by threatening them like this, by having a bellicose relationship, by introducing all of this ambiguity—what does he really mean? Is he really going to attack Canada or hurt their economy on purpose in some manner to try to get something from them?—[it] undermines all of the great benefits of the relationship. The U.S. has gotten so much more out of Canada from having a open, friendly, free-exchange-of-information, and trusting relationship than [it] could potentially get, even in the best possible scenario, from Trump conducting some negotiation with threats. There’s no way it’ll get the U.S. anywhere near as much as what the U.S. gets from a positive relationship.
Sargent: I want to get into that in a bit. I want to bring up first that recently Putin commented on Trump’s threat of tariffs toward Canada and Mexico. Putin said that Europe will “stand at the feet of the master” due to the tariffs, seemingly meaning that Europe will submit to Trump due to the tariffs. Clearly, Putin sees that it’s a positive for Trump to be threatening our allies. The Kremlin spokesman also seemed gleeful about the “tensions” that Trump’s threats are unleashing. Why do you think Putin and the Kremlin are so happy about all this, Nick?
Grossman: Because Russia’s main foreign policy goal for many decades at this point has been to break up the Western alliance. Russia knows, pretty much all countries know. In fact, anybody who follows this stuff besides maybe Donald Trump and his inner circle seems to know that the U.S. is the world’s premier power—not just by having a large military and economy but by having a network of friendly alliances. Not only does the U.S. have the world’s biggest military budget, but in the list of the top 10 military spenders, most of them are U.S. allies or are close friends like the U.K. Canada also has a large military budget as far as countries go. It’s a force multiplier. For Russia, breaking that up—breaking up NATO, breaking up the European Union, breaking up the Western alliance more broadly—or even just adding tensions into it is greatly beneficial to them.
You can see in that statement Putin making the egotistical flattery of the way that Trump seems jealous of how much Putin is treated like this big tough guy that everybody bows down to or at least walks carefully around. So not only was he egging him on but also flattering him in that sense of what’s really going on with Europe is they need to bow down to Trump, when of course what had been going on for decades was U.S. and Europe and Canada and others working together to make sure that none of them had to bow down to Russia.
Sargent: Right. Putin is basically saying to Trump, You’ll be just like me if you keep this up.
Grossman: Yeah. And of course, Putin’s Russia is decently weaker as a country than Russia has been at other times. And the U.S. would be decently weaker if Trump continues following down that Putinist path, though he personally might be stronger within the country and more able to conduct things like financial corruption.
Sargent: Right. There’s a dark irony to this, which is that Putin is essentially telling Trump that continuing down this course will make him appear strong. But of course, in reality, it would actually weaken the U.S.
Grossman: Very much so. Yes.
Sargent: Trump had this really weird tweet that didn’t get any attention. He tweeted out an article about that Putin quote, about Putin saying that due to Trump’s tariffs, Europe will now stand at the feet of the master or sit at the feet of the master. Meaning Putin is celebrating that Europe will be subjugated by Trump’s tariffs. That’s what he means by that. For Trump to tweet it out is akin to Trump celebrating the fact that Putin is happy that Trump’s tariffs are rupturing the Western alliance. That’s pretty clear, isn’t it?
Grossman: Exactly. Yes. Trump is bragging that Putin thinks this is good and that it will damage the Western alliance. And based on some of his first term, especially his rhetoric in leading up to the election in 2024 and in the people that he surrounded himself with, it seems like this is a genuine goal. The leaders of the U.S. and the leaders of Russia both currently agree that if the Western alliance was, is crumbling or just gets weaker that that will be beneficial to the two of them, and that they will be proud about it together. So Trump is citing the fact that Putin likes it as a reason why it is a good thing, whereas in any conception of American national interest, as opposed to Trump personal interest, it’s a bad thing.
Sargent: Right. Trump is flaunting the fact that Putin is hailing his fracturing of the Western alliance.
Grossman: And he’s doing it at a time when Putin has been toying with him about the war in Ukraine. You had Trump campaigning for a long time about how he was going to end the war within 24 hours, and people that he’s close with—Elon Musk, for example—becoming increasingly sympathetic to Russia’s positions, in aping Russian propaganda on Twitter and elsewhere.
The Russian government recently had a formal statement about how they are not interested in making peace unless Putin’s demands are met, which are his original war aims of effectively getting a puppet in Kiev; having a puppet regime governing Ukraine; and having concrete promises from the U.S. that Ukraine basically belongs to Russia, is in Russia’s sphere of influence, and therefore will never be allowed to join NATO, and that the U.S. won’t defend them anymore. It looks like peace in Ukraine is nowhere closer, in part because even the best version of it, Trump and company have been treating it as a Risk game where the U.S. and Russia just sit down and draw a line and it’s over. That’s not how it actually works.
Sargent: Putin is basically saying, Look, Donald, OK, you’re not going to be able to boast about fulfilling your promise to end the war with Ukraine in 24 hours. But I’ll tell you what, we’ll just say that you’re really strong if you impose tariffs on Canada.
Grossman: Right. They’re both buttering him up and almost saying that the way you act strong is you hurt the economy of your allies, and you are then weak in the war against a rival when it is the exact opposite. The way that the U.S. would show strength would be by heavily supporting Ukraine, by giving them the military equipment that they need and a lot of diplomatic support in addition to sanctions on Russia, and to keep on doing this and to even increase the amount of support. And when the Russian military runs into difficulties on the battlefield, that’s the type of real strength that they recognize. If you are shooting your friends, that is not strength, that makes you weaker.
So with the Ukraine war, Putin and the Russian government are toying with Trump a bit because they know that he has this promise that he was going to end it right away, that he claimed it would be so easy, and that there are at least parts of his coalition, parts of his party that really would like to see an end to the war—and he is unable to deliver it. The Russians know that, but they can also egg him on as he is destroying the Western alliance on his own.
Sargent: There’s one other thing I want to highlight about that quote that we listened to earlier from Trump. Note that he says there that he’s really not OK with this “subsidy” to Canada, the trade deficit with Canada unless Canada is a 51st state. Which I think is actually a way of saying you’re going to get hit by tariffs unless you submit. Now, like you, I doubt that he’s going to send troops into Canada, but that’s still the message. Submit or you get hit by tariffs. On what planet is that a legal justification for them?
Grossman: It’s not legal either domestically or internationally. Legally, this is an abuse of power. And we’re being hit with so many abuses of power at the same time that it’s hard to pay attention to any one of them, but there’s a pretty egregious abuse of power. The president has the authority because the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate trade, then Congress had given the president in the mid-twentieth century the power to do emergency tariffs in the case of a national security emergency. And Trump is pretending that there’s some national security emergency with Canada, which there isn’t. And that fact makes it that it is at minimum stretching the law to do this.
It also violates various international trade laws. It violates the USMCA agreement that Trump negotiated with Mexico and Canada when he was in his first term. No one’s really asked Trump what was so bad about that agreement you signed, and if it’s so bad, why did you sign it? Why did you agree to it? And why did you say that’s good, and that that’s still the trade regime that’s governing it? But it’s against the law. Especially though with this one, it’s really bad strategy.
Sargent: Nick, it sure looks like we’re seeing a number of things from Trump that Putin is celebrating right now. There’s the threats of tariffs against Canada. There’s the threat to invade and take over Canada and turn into a 51st state. And then on top of all that, there’s this effort to gut the U.S. Agency for International Development. Russia is celebrating that because USAID funds pro-democracy and pro–rule of law organizations, among other things. In some cases, Russia has used language about USAID that’s very similar to Elon Musk’s—Musk being Trump’s partner in trying to gut USAID. Can you walk us through why Putin and Russia stand to gain so much if Trump and Musk succeed in just destroying USAID?
Grossman: Sure. USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, funds all sorts of projects in many different countries. And this has gotten the U.S. an immense amount of bang for the buck in terms of soft power, in terms of having better relations with various countries. One of the ways the U.S. has been doing it has been to use it as promoting American values, which also works a lot in terms of America’s strategic interests. This would include things like promoting democracy, free media, and funding things in authoritarian countries like Russia and China.
Those governments hate that because they are authoritarian and they are trying to suppress dissent, trying to control information. So the U.S. would help fund ways that would potentially undermine their regime—where those governments were lying to people and maybe a USAID–funded outlet would be telling the truth or would be gathering data in a way that they were trying to suppress—or many other ways that would try to advance U.S. interests while also doing things that were beneficial for people that had a strong moral as well as strategic argument.
So they really like that Trump and Musk are messing with it and are also lying about what it does. It is a small fraction well less than 1 percent of the federal budget, and the stuff that they’re cutting does not really save money, but they have been lying about it incessantly. There can be different speculation reasons, but broadly looking at it as really big picture, it’s because USA did a bunch of promotion of things like democracy, freedom, and rule of law, and Russia and China have hated those for a long time. And now the government of the U.S., at least most powerful people in it, are opposed to those things as well.
Sargent: What is the end game here for Trump and Musk, do you think? We agree that they want to fracture the Western alliance to whatever degree they can. Maybe Trump has some bizarre conception of bending all these allies to his will and getting more out of them, I don’t know. Putting that aside, where does this end up? What is the world that Trump and Musk want?
Grossman: So that’s really hard to say, in part because they don’t really communicate it, and I don’t think they necessarily know. At least they have never expressed something that envisions some end state of that they’re trying to achieve in a clearly rational manner. A lot of it seems impulsive, a lot of it is self-interested and corrupt so that they would be able to get at a simple level more money and power for themselves and for some of their other friends. However, planned out or not, where their actions are moving things toward are one in which the world order that we have known it since World War II, and especially since the end of the Cold War, was being undermined.
And we’re seeing that again in something like support for Ukraine. Here was Russia violating the single most important post–World War II international law: Conquest is outlawed. You do not try to just take territory from somebody else by force and redraw borders. Russia is challenging that, and that’s clearly something that Musk and Trump don’t really have a problem with. By switching the U.S. from one that is supporting its democratic allies to one that threatens and sanctions or tariffs its democratic allies, that is undoing that bedrock. The U.S. used to be the one that, however hypocritically, said you got to uphold rule of law. Now it’s saying, No, you don’t, and we’re not going to either. And that is considerably more dangerous. That’s back to more of a pre–World War II international system.
Sargent: Right. I want to just pick up on what you just said there about the hypocrisy of the global order led by the U.S. Obviously, there have been all sorts of failures and excesses and the propping up of our own dictatorial allies and so forth. But it bears stressing that Trump and Musk aren’t operating out of a critique of that. We hear sometimes that Trump is somehow critiquing the excesses of the liberal international order. But they want to really just wreck it and replace it with something else. It’s not as if they’re operating from an actual vision of what’s wrong with it, other than its successes really, when it comes down to it.
Grossman: And at minimum, they really do not have the criticisms that people, especially like anti-imperialist left-wingers, for example, would have. So their criticism is not things like, Oh, the U.S. was wrong to violate human rights in the Iraq War. Their criticism is more that the U.S. is wrong to stand against Russia violating human rights in Ukraine.
Sargent: Right. And on top of that, their criticism is this is preventing the U.S. from being more rapacious in the world.
Grossman: Right. From being more aggressive, more dominant, from using force to get things like to get Greenland from Denmark and try to take it from them. It’s almost as if the president now doesn’t recognize that it is possible to have mutually beneficial relationships that help you together compete against somebody else, as opposed to having a always purely transactional one-on-one subject and ruler or dominant party relationships, where the fact that U.S. allies are doing this willingly and happily as opposed to having to say, We don’t want to, but the strong man forced us to do it. And so I guess he’s so great and so powerful. I guess we’ll do it.
It’s that extra element of submission that seems to really appeal to them, and to put on a show of the submission that seems to really appeal to them, as opposed to getting advantages for U.S. national interest for things like U.S. national security or for the U.S. economy.
Sargent: Just to close this out really quickly, this is all why Putin is celebrating all this aggressive talk about Canada, isn’t it?
Grossman: Yes. This is probably succeeding beyond Putin’s wildest dreams. You can hear him as far back as the late twentieth century where he’s talking about the fall of the Soviet Union was this great historical tragedy; and how a lot of these other countries had been part of the Soviet Union should really be a part of Russia; how they’re basically Russian vassals within Russia’s sphere of influence; and how it’s so unfair to Russia that the U.S. and its allies is opposing a lot of this stuff.
So ideally from Russia’s perspective, those alliances collapsing or at least just not functioning that well anymore—that has been Putin’s foreign policy dream for as long as he’s been in power. And it was something that he didn’t really think possible—thought something he could try to work toward but not actually achieve—until Trump became the U.S. president, especially the second time.
Sargent: Nicholas Grossman, it’s always good to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Grossman: Same. Thank you very much for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.