One thing that’s been on my mind is we’ve not been covering Israel and Gaza or Ukraine and Russia nearly as much as we did in 2023 and 2024. But frankly, as much as I think we should be. Often when we’re covering these conflicts, what we’re really covering, implicitly or explicitly, is the American position on them. How are we going to use our might our money, our weaponry, our leverage to bring them to some kind of close or settlement. And early in Trump’s second administration, where he was basically filled me with despair. If you take the people, the Palestinians, and move them around to different countries, and you have plenty of countries that will do that. President Trump shared an AI generated video on social media showing Gaza being rebuilt into a resort style destination, complete with a Trump Gaza hotel and a gold statue of the president. Well how I feel about the Gaza Strip. I think it’s an incredible piece of imported real estate. Americans just befuddled with the extraordinary clash between President Trump, Vice President Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. You don’t have the cards right now. With us. You start having cards, playing cards right now you don’t. Are you playing cards. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which this could have gone worse. This seems to be a dream come true for Vladimir Putin, but things have been changing a bit. Other parts of his America first foreign policy have been coming into more focus. So what is Donald Trump’s foreign policy. What at this point. Can we actually say about it. How has it been evolving over the course of his still young second term. To help me think that through, I want to bring Emma Ashford back on the show. Emma is a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. She’s the author of the forthcoming book first among equals, and she’s a foreign policy analyst who is more of a realist. So I thought she would be a good person to bring onto both Steelman what she thinks Donald Trump is trying to do, or what the people around him are trying to do, but also how it’s actually playing out on the ground and how it might play out in the future. As always, my email at nytimes.com. Emma Ashford, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me back. So how would you at this point describe Donald Trump’s foreign policy. If you want a one word, phrase, or a two word phrase, America First is about as good as any. It actually describes a lot of what he’s been doing privileging US interests. But, I mean, I think in a slightly longer form, the Trump administration’s foreign policy has been this interesting blend of realpolitik, kind of Nixon style reshaping US foreign policy with a lot of Trumpian idiosyncrasies, right wing culture war stuff. So it’s definitely a blend of different themes. US interests defined how. That’s also a good question. I mean, I do think, I’m wrapping that up in the phrase Trumpian idiosyncrasies, which is a polite way of saying things like, Donald Trump likes people who give him gifts, including foreign leaders. See, that doesn’t feel like a US interest to me whether or not Donald Trump gets a plane. Yeah, exactly. It really doesn’t. At the same time, a lot of what the administration is doing is actually geared around, I think, US interests in an actual national interest sense now in a very conservative way of interpreting those. Protecting the border would be one example. But burden sharing or burden shifting to European allies. Donald Trump doesn’t get anything personally out of that. That is a policy that is being driven much more by the perception of those in the administration and what they think of as US interests. They very much value US sovereignty. They want to think about American interests in terms of the people, the prosperity and the security of the people that live inside the United States and maybe to a certain extent, Americans abroad, but not necessarily US allies, not necessarily partner states. The Biden team, in many ways went to the extreme in the other direction, saying that the interests of US allies or even of partners like Ukraine. Those are synonymous with US interests and there is no daylight, which, I mean, that’s a very extreme proposition, and it’s not really true. The Trump administration, as far as I can tell, seems to take that to the opposite extreme. So we’re making it sound like the Trump administration has a singular view. But like in any administration, there are different camps, different factions. How would you describe the big camps on foreign policy inside Trump world. One of the interesting things when we compare this administration to let’s say, Trump one, is that there is less internal fighting on a lot of these issues. The big schism in Republican foreign policy. He has. I mean, basically all the way back to that George W Bush administration. The big schism has been should America be fundamentally Wilsonian out there trying to reshape the world, spread democracy, et cetera, or should the US be more insular, more focused on its own interests. Pat Buchanan. So these are the two threads of Republican foreign policy that conflict with each other in Trump won. That former viewpoint tended to win the day, but there were a lot of internal arguments over it. This time around. I think we can say the personnel and the policies seem to more consistently tend towards that second point of view. It’s been interesting to watch some of the personnel movement on this. So there are people who, as the Trump second administration started up, seem more like the representatives of that older, dominant Republican establishment position. I would put Mike Wallace in that category. I’d put Marco Rubio in that category. Mike Wallace seems like he’s been sidelined. Made you an ambassador. And I think, do not rate the UN so highly as a center of influence. Marco Rubio, who seems fairly central, has really been pulled into following what Trump wants. It does not feel like there is daylight between Trump and Rubio. It does not feel like Rubio is standing up to lead a different faction in the way that Rex Tillerson often felt like he was, or HR McMaster felt like he was in the first administration. We’ve seen different people fired or purged who seem like they were more from the Republican establishment. It does that seem like a fair description of the way the power struggles are playing out to you. I think yeah, it’s been the case that almost everybody who’s been a senior appointee in this administration is very loyal to Donald Trump, right. But the difference has been whether they are willing to completely subordinate their own views to Trump’s on many issues. And I think we’ve seen Marco Rubio has in many ways seems to have passed that test. He has largely dropped his previous neoconservative leanings and seems to basically align with Trump on everything now. Mike Waltz, on the other hand, was ideologically informed policy just out of step with the president and lasted for some time, but then managed to eventually he put a foot wrong once too many times, disagreeing with Trump, this time on Israel and Iran, and ended up, as you said, sidelined. So I do think the personnel has been shifting again, just more in the direction of that, not traditional Republican foreign policy. How do you think about the interaction between the Trump administration and Trump that there are even more so than most presidents. I think that the people around him are often much more ideological and consistently so than he is, and he is more relational than they are. So how do you think of that relationship. I think this is a big difference from the first Trump term. I think what we saw then was, I mean, basically an open attempt by different factions of advisors inside the administration on particular issues to just capture Trump. He would agree with whoever spoke to him last in many cases. And so policy was a matter of getting to Trump and making him say your point of view. This time around, he does seem to be more in the mode of final decider. And he wants people around him who will support his decision even when they disagree with it. He wants to be presented options and decide. And I think we see this again in that leaked signal chat where we had the vice president, Secretary of Defense, we had Marco Rubio. They’re all in there and they’re saying, well, I really do disagree with this decision to bomb Yemen or I agree, but then even in a private chat here, by the end, they’re saying, O.K, but the president says we’ll do it. We need to do it. And that strikes me as how this administration runs this time around. And is that Trump imposing more discipline. Is that Trump coming into more alignment because he is surrounded now by people like JD Vance and others who he trusts, Don Jr. who now have a more consistent ideological view. Do you understand that as Trump changing the people around him changing, or is it a bidirectional process. I think it’s a process of a viewpoint kind of cohering, right. I think Trump himself always had these instincts. We definitely saw that in the first term. But he was very open to persuasion, didn’t have a lot of experience in foreign policy, surrounded by people that were on all sides of different issues. And this time, I think there’s much more coherence among the advisors, among the principals, the secretaries, even the vice president. And maybe they don’t agree with Trump on absolutely everything, but what they are doing is helping him build an intellectual scaffolding around this enterprise. And that’s making for a more consistent policy overall. You can see where the administration wants things to go. One place where there does seem to be real division inside the administration is over Israel and Gaza. How would you describe the competing views. Israel is always a really I mean, an interesting issue inside the Republican Party, because there’s this very strong tendency to be incredibly supportive of Israel in everything that the country does, and Republicans even have that reputation. But in many ways, historically, it’s actually been easier for Republican presidents to say to Israel, no, you’re going too far, or we’re not going to do that. And we’ve seen leaders like Reagan do that historically. And so the debate inside the Trump administration seems to be, we don’t really want the war in Gaza to continue. We want to get American hostages out, but we also want the conflict to end because we want a more peaceful Middle East. We will support Israel. But only so far, and we seem to be getting to the limits of that toleration. And so even the voices inside the administration calling for unfettered support of Israel, I think those voices are not as loud as they used to be. What is your sense of where Donald Trump falls personally on this. I think he’s very supportive of Israel again. I think he likes Netanyahu, but I don’t think he likes getting taken advantage of. And this is one of those areas where sometimes I think being a political scientist is less useful than I should have been a psychologist. But Donald Trump really doesn’t like it when other countries, take the US for a ride. So I think Trump is getting frustrated. He’s getting frustrated that he sends Steve Witkoff over to Israel to negotiate, to get a deal, and that the Israelis won’t follow through with these things. And so I think for him, this seems to be much more about the process of deal making. And than anything else, it’s not about deeply held convictions about the state of Israel. It’s more about he wants to get to an end state here. And he increasingly, I think, sees that he can’t quite get there with Netanyahu. There has been, even compared to the horrible state of affairs two or three months ago, a pretty profound aid disaster unfolding in Gaza caused by Israeli blockade. Tell me what it is, but also what the Trump administration’s response has been. So Israel has basically had the strip under blockade since the ceasefire failed, that they have proposed that instead of the UN Relief and Works Agency that traditionally would distribute aid in the strip, that they’re going to set up some new private entity with us mercenaries helping to secure it, and that they would do so in a way that as I understand it, that humanitarian groups basically say is almost unworkable. So Yeah, the starvation in the Gaza Strip is getting significantly worse. It’s not clear the Israelis are going to allow in enough aid to make a difference. So, I mean, this is a significant humanitarian crisis and one that US weapons are helping to prolong. What’s interesting, though, is that I do not really see that as the thing that is motivating the Trump administration on this question. I think they are not indifferent to human suffering. But unlike the Biden administration, right, which supported Israel wholeheartedly but would publicly complain about aid or undertake things like the very high profile installing a pier off Gaza to try and send in some aid. That never worked. I don’t see the Trump administration, particularly pushing on the humanitarian question. Certainly the US government doesn’t even have a US Agency for International Development anymore. Ever since DOGE came around. So I don’t think, again, that this is a US government initiative. The one place where I think there is some dubiety on that question was when Trump was speculating about the US helping to rebuild the Gaza Strip. And there’s been a lot of disagreement and debate about whether that was a genuine offer or a genuine thing he intended. And he stopped saying it recently. Or was it a tactic to try and get the Arab Gulf states to cough up more for reconstruction. And I don’t actually think we know the answer to that one. Trump went to Saudi Arabia in mid-may, and he gave this big speech in Riyadh. And I want to play a couple of clips from it. And I want to begin with the way he describes his hosts. I want to Thank his royal Highness, the Crown Prince. I’ve known him a long time now. There’s nobody like him. And it’s a tremendous honor to return to this beautiful Kingdom and be welcomed back with such extraordinary generosity and warmth. I’ve never forgotten the exceptional hospitality shown to us by King Solomon, whose just. We talk about a great man. That is a great man. That is a great man, a great family. He keeps coming back to themes like that throughout the speech. He really likes the leaders of Saudi Arabia, but it feels to me like that matters. I mean, you said he likes Netanyahu, but not like he likes them. No, that is true. Look, I think we know from first time around that Trump does really well with leaders who flatter him, tell him he’s doing great. Try and frame their own policy preferences as things that fit with his worldview. We saw Emmanuel Macron, for example, being very successful first time around doing that. The other example, obviously, of this from the first time around was Shinzo Abe of Japan, who basically managed to I mean, become friends with Donald Trump. And, even after Shinzo Abe’s death, apparently Trump will talk to his widow on the phone. So there was this personal connection that they managed to build. Now, again, that’s not an unusual thing for presidents. We saw the Obamas had great relations with the British royal family, for example. They just got on very well personally. Jimmy Carter had a very, very strong relationship with Anwar Sadat. Exactly and sometimes that can really help with diplomacy and things. And the last time that Trump was president, his first international trip was to Saudi Arabia. And so I think Trump has that soft spot or that recollection that they supported him when others wouldn’t. And then you tack on to that the Saudis are a very welcoming, hospitable people. Trump also tends to states that are. Authoritarian, where he doesn’t have to see protesters. And so I think he’s built good personal. Ties and those pleasant recollections from the first time around really, really help with that. There’s also something interesting in his speech when he’s talking about the way other presidents have treated the Saudis. And he says, basically, look, a lot of people have come here and judged you, right. That presidency, American presidents see it as their role to come here and tell you what to do. How to build your country. How to act morally. There was, I think correctly, a real chilling of American relations with the Saudis after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. And Trump comes and says quite explicitly in the speech to them and to others in the region. That’s not what he’s here to do. He’s here for American interests. He is not here to act as a moral judge, backed up by American power, as a statement of principles that struck me as quite stark, not just as differentiating him from maybe Joe Biden or Barack Obama, but also from George W Bush. Yeah I mean, look, I think this administration is basically locking in what is quite a significant shift in Republican foreign policy. I mean, Trump made a comment that was something like, I’m paraphrasing, but basically, we see looking out at this wonderful city, whether it was Doha or Riyadh. We see the development and progress and innovation don’t come from American military intervention. They come from economic progress or something like that. And so he’s basically saying, well, look, we want the whole region to be like the Gulf states. We don’t want it to be like the Iraq war. And that’s a repudiation of George W Bush’s legacy. I mean, Trump has been repudiating it personally for a long time, but for an American president to go to the region and say that really is a shift. Then there was this part of the speech, which if you’re thinking about the future of the Middle East and what Trump might want from Israel struck me as genuinely important. It’s been an amazing thing, the Abraham Accords, and it’s my fervent hope and wish and even my dream that Saudi Arabia, a place I have such respect for, especially over the last fairly short period of time, what you’ve been able to do. But we’ll soon be joining the Abraham Accords. I think it will be a tremendous tribute to your country, and it will be something that’s really going to be very important for the future of the Middle East. I took a risk in doing them, and they’ve been an absolute bonanza for the countries that have joined. The Biden administration did nothing for four years. We would have had it filled out. But it will be a special day in the Middle East with the whole world watching when Saudi Arabia joins us. So first, can you remind us what the Abraham Accords are. So the Abraham Accords originated in Trump’s first term. And the goal was to basically try and normalize relations between Israel and some of the Arab Gulf states that already had very either implicit or in many cases, just secret relations. These states didn’t recognize one another at all, but they were actually cooperating on intelligence matters or military matters. And so the idea was to try and bring this out into the light. And during the first Trump term, they did succeed in normalizing relations between, in particular, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. And so this was a big step forward in terms of legitimating Israel in the region among Arab states. The problem is that the Emirates did not insist on significant progress on the Palestinian issue as a condition. The Saudis did. And then that progress was never actually able to be made. And so the whole thing has basically been derailed by the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza. So is that why Saudi Arabia hadn’t joined that there had not been enough political movement with the Palestinians put on the table. If you go to Saudi Arabia, you go to the Gulf. I’ve been a couple of times since Trump’s election. I mean, what you hear from the people is that just absolutely appalled at what’s been happening in Gaza. And some of this is, they’re basically seeing this play out live on al-jazeera across the region. And there’s always been a lot of sympathy in the Arab world for the Palestinian cause. But with what’s happening now, the civilian casualties, public opinion has turned. I mean, really quite aggressively against normalizing with Israel. And even in a regime as dictatorial as the one in Saudi Arabia, they do not wish to get out that far from their public and normalize relations with Israel. Brett McGurk was trying to negotiate. The US would give a security guarantee and the Saudis would join the Abraham Accords before October 7. But that door pretty much shut on October 7 in the absence of an actual Palestinian state, progress towards that end goal. So I think a lot of us have despaired that after Trump’s election, it seemed to mean the end of any possibility of American political pressure on Israel to come to any political deal with Palestinians, that it’s just become Carte Blanche for annexation and occupation. I heard Trump in Riyadh and without being overly optimistic, because as Donald Trump and I’m not overly optimistic. But when I heard him talk about the Abraham Accords that way, and those were his central foreign policy legacy, if he’s ever going to get the Nobel Peace Prize he wants, it’s going to be for something like the Abraham Accords and the expansion of them. I saw how much he wanted that, describing it as his dream. And I thought maybe between the relationship he has with the Saudis, with the actual desire to get the Abraham Accords completed, there actually is a deal that he is going to want to try to make here. Do you think there’s something to that. The administration has been really, basically they’re pursuing two very opposing policies in this space. I mean, on the one hand, you have the Trump administration actually loosened weapons restrictions on selling weapons to Israel. Trump talked about taking the population out of Gaza and effectively letting Israel annex it, or maybe the US would annex it ourselves. But then, on the other hand, right, the ceasefire in Gaza, the one that was signed right at the end of the Biden administration, that would not have happened without Donald Trump sending Steve Witkoff over there to say, do this. Now, he was able to put pressure on the Israelis. They’ve started to work around Netanyahu on some issues. So I actually do think that there is more prospect under Trump for some kind of I mean, maybe not a good end state here, but something that improves the situation. And again, this was a message that I heard often when I was in the Gulf from people even before the November election was, well, maybe Trump will be worse, but there’s not much that could be worse than Biden. And so maybe this will be better. And I think it’s an interesting we could apply that philosophy, I think, to a lot of the things that Trump is doing from Ukraine all the way to Israel. Well, when I talk to people involved in the Gulf, one thing that I heard was that their frustration was Biden just would not put real pressure on Netanyahu. And on some level, they didn’t any more think he could or would. The actual reason for it was never truly known. And I guess, similar to you, the only point of optimism I’ve heard from anybody involved is that if Donald Trump came to the view that he wanted this, he would be more likely than Biden would and more politically able than Biden was to exert pressure that it’s more in his nature and in his politics than it was for Joe Biden. He’s certainly been willing to put the screws to I mean, even close us friends and allies, even leaders that he likes, on things like tariffs and trade, on immigration. So, Yeah, I think he would be I do think the other issue that Bears talking about here, though, is the Iran question, because the other big point of divergence between Trump and the Israeli government is the Israelis really want the United States to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. They do not want the ongoing nuclear negotiations that the Trump administration restarted. They don’t want those to succeed. But Trump is quite determined to actually get to a deal on that point. And that is, I think, a growing point of tension between the two governments. So I think if something actually forces or pushes Trump much more towards differentiating himself from Netanyahu, it actually is probably going to be Iran rather than the Palestinian question. I have been surprised how much Trump seems intent on a deal with Iran, that he really seems to want it, and he seems frustrated by the Israelis getting in the way of it. Now, the blind items coming out, the anonymous quotes are that there are talks towards a framework and the talks are going well. And who knows, by the time this comes out, we might have more information. What does the Trump administration want here. I think Donald Trump wants to not have a war with Iran. I think one thing that he learned from his first administration, and that we all observed from the first administration was he was persuaded by folks around him to take a very hard line on Iran. The idea being they persuaded him to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal, maybe some targeted strikes assassinate Qasem Soleimani of the IRGC. And if you do all of that, this maximum pressure campaign, it will bring the Iranians back to the table. And you’ll get a better deal than Obama got. And I think this really appealed to Trump’s sensibilities. He liked bashing the JCPOA. That’s the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iranian nuclear deal. But at the end of the day, it turns out that none of that actually brought the Iranians back to the table, and there was no better deal on offer. And so I do think what we’re seeing this time instead is Trump saying, fine, maximum pressure. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t really. But let’s at least talk to the Iranians and try and get some kind of a nuclear deal, because that did not keep them further away from a bomb. And so, again, this is a real difference in personnel rather than some of the Iranian anti-iranian hardliners we saw. First time around in the administration, now it’s folks like Steve Witkoff who are more than willing to talk to the Iranians if they think they can get a deal. If Trump is able to reach a deal with Iran, do you expect it to be meaningfully different than the one that Obama reached. If I say that it is not meaningfully different, that diminishes the chances of us getting to a deal, which I think is a problem for a lot of folks that the advocated for the deal the first time around. It will be slightly harsher. In some ways, I think there will probably be tighter restrictions on enrichment, not zero enrichment, but there will probably be slightly tighter restrictions. It will be looser in some ways because the Iranians have actually progressed in enrichment technology, how far they’ve enriched the uranium, the weapons research they’ve done. So it may be looser in those areas because you can’t put the genie back into the bottle, but I think in large scope it’s going to be a meaningful, a meaningfully similar deal. It’s going to restrict Iran’s enrichment natively and include harsh verification and inspection in exchange for sanctions relief. And that fundamentally was what the JCPOA tried to do. Is there a dimension of this where Iran has a lot of reason to try to come to a deal right now. I mean, they have watched a lot of their proxies in the region get basically destroyed by Israel. Trump is very dangerous to them. And if he did decide to partner with Netanyahu on a series of bombing runs, a lot of what people feared in terms of their reprisal through Hezbollah and other forces seems less likely. They’ve been kicked out in Syria. Now how do you think about their negotiating position compared to what it was in Trump one or even under Joe with Joe Biden. I mean, this is the other thing that’s changed since Trump won is the international environment is just very different. Iran’s proxies are very much on the back foot. The Arab Gulf states have been pursuing detente with Iran. The last time around, they were very gung ho for military action against Iran. So the situation has changed. I do think the Iranians very much had the incentive to come to the negotiating table now, but I don’t think they have an incentive to sign a deal under any conditions necessarily. They’re also in somewhat of a position of strength, right. They know that even strikes against their nuclear facilities will probably only set them back. I mean, best case scenario, five years more likely, maybe one to two years. And so they’re also in this position where they can say, well, there are limits to what you can do to us. So I think both sides have an incentive to strike a deal this time around Last time. It just wasn’t there. There’s been a fair amount of reporting recently that Trump and Netanyahu had a tense phone call and it was over Iran. And Donald Trump said publicly that he has warned Netanyahu off of an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, that he wants a deal. He talked about wanting that deal in Riyadh. He says, I don’t believe in permanent enemies. I am different than a lot of people think. I don’t like permanent enemies, and I want to make a deal with Iran. If I can make a deal with Iran, I’ll be very happy. If we’re going to make your region and the world a safer place. They are trying to execute some restraint again in public with Israel, which is interesting. And also, I think, reflects that the Netanyahu Trump relationship has always seemed a little tricky. Also worth noting that Mike Walz, the National security advisor for the first few months of the term, the thing that got him pushed aside into the UN ambassador role was apparently that he had been coordinating with Israeli officials on what joint US Israeli strikes on Iran would look like. And he was doing that without Trump’s permission. So yeah, I mean, I think this relationship, everybody assumed it would be very much hand in hand. Trump and Israel. And I think that is not what we’re seeing in practice. In practice, there’s more friction than there was with Biden, something Trump keeps saying. He said it in his second inaugural. He said it again in Riyadh, is that he sees himself and he wants his legacy to be that of a peacemaker. And he says it enough that whatever else you think of him, I believe it is his self-conception. And we’ll turn to this on Ukraine in a second. But one thing I see with him on Israel also, for that matter, on Hamas is a real anger when other players don’t won’t let him just step in and settle the conflict. He wants to be a person who settles conflicts, expands Abraham Accords. He does seem quite resistant to New wars starting. He would like an Iran deal that there’s something. And I don’t feel this was as true with him in his first term. He didn’t talk like this as often. I’m curious how you view that. Do you view it as evolution. Do you view it as different forces around him. Do you view it as a real thing or just rhetoric that he has come to saying about himself. What’s your sense of Trump as peacemaker. He’s always had a dovish streak, right. You can find cases or evidence of him. I mean, going all the way back to the 80s, talking about the risks of nuclear weapons and things like that. Not consistently over that period. Not with a real focus on the issues. But he’s always, I think, had this inherent sense that war is bad. That doesn’t mean he’s not willing to use force. We saw he’s perfectly willing to use force when he thinks it’s good for the US or good for him. But I do think there is something that has changed from first to second administration. And the way when I listen to him talking, what it feels like to me is that this is a man who’s starting to think about legacy more so than anything else. And he remembers, I think, that the one thing that everybody praised from his first administration was the Abraham Accords was bringing. I mean, technically, bringing peace between Israel and some of the Arab states. And so for him, I think building on that achievement or finding peace or deals, in I mean, it doesn’t just have to be Ukraine. It doesn’t just have to be Israel. They’ve also been involved in the Balkans and in Sudan. I think for him, he sees this as a legacy thing that brings us, I guess, to Ukraine and Russia. Let’s start here. What is your best description of Trump or the Trump administration’s view of America’s interests in that war. Far more limited than the Biden administration, certainly. I think what we can say is that many people around the president inside the administration may not necessarily have opposed sending weapons to Ukraine originally, but are increasingly concerned or became increasingly concerned about the costs of that war of the fact that Ukraine was not winning whether we can continue to do so over the long term. And so there are some folks, I think, on the New, who would have been happy to just never be involved in the conflict in the first place. But I think there’s a lot more people, even traditional Republicans, who are saying, well, we didn’t get anywhere with it. It’s time to call it a day. So I think there’s a general sense among Republicans and in the administration that it’s time to try and end the conflict. And how you do that is the question they’re asking. What are the different factions in the administration on Ukraine. So inside the administration, there has been far less debate on Ukraine than there has been on Israel and particularly on Iran. Almost everyone in the administration, I think, is willing to go along on the question of trying to find peace in Ukraine. There are some folks that are more concerned about defense stockpiles. So, for example, Elbridge Colby, the new Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, that’s been his major concern about the war. Do you want to describe what that is, that concern. So this is a concern that started coming up about a year ago. The Pentagon started making this point to anyone who would listen that sending a lot of our weapons to Ukraine, particularly things like air defense systems, Patriot missiles, stuff like that it was actually depleting US stockpiles. We don’t produce that many of these weapons per year, and we have limited stockpiles. And so that concern, I think Colby shares that concern. And so do many others in the administration. And that’s another reason, I think, why they would argue, maybe it would be better for the US if Ukraine were to go all the way and win this thing. But the costs of getting there are just too high. So everyone, I think, knows about the Oval Office showdown between Trump and Vance and Zelenskyy, but they did sign the mineral deal after that. So what’s your sense of what that relationship is like now. The minerals deal is actually a really fascinating insight into of the dynamics of Republican foreign policy in the Trump era. The deal actually originated in Congress. And the idea was if they could persuade Trump that Ukraine had significant deposits of rare Earth minerals that maybe then he would switch and be more supportive of Ukraine. And of course, that’s not at all what ended up happening. The Ukrainians, the Trump administration then wrote up a version of this that was basically just stripping Ukraine’s resources and taking them. Ukrainians refused to sign it. We get the Oval Office dust up where we ended up is the Ukrainians have signed a watered down version of this that is effectively money for reconstruction will come from critical minerals and go into a joint fund for Ukrainian reconstruction. And then the US will get some of that if there’s enough. In exchange, the US has made absolutely no concrete commitments to Ukraine. So I’m not saying there’s nothing there, but it is basically a confidence building measure rather than anything practical. So on the other side of this, Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin seems to have hit a rough patch. I think it’s fair to say. On Truth Social, he posted. I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He’s gone absolutely crazy. He is needlessly killing a lot of people. And I’m not just talking about soldiers. Missiles and drones are being shot into cities in Ukraine for no reason whatsoever. I’ve always said that he wants all of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right. But if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia. What was behind that post and what did you make of it. I mean, I think, again, we can see here just a little bit that’s inherent dovish streak that Trump has. He doesn’t like seeing civilian casualties. And we’ve had all these visuals, these videos of missiles and drones striking Ukrainian cities night after night. If we go back to the first administration and remember the reason he launched missile strikes against Syria, against Bashar al-assad, was because Ivanka showed him pictures of dead children from a chemical weapons attack. So he doesn’t like this stuff. And I think even though he’s very keen to see a peace deal in Ukraine, he is getting pressure from more traditional Republicans who say, well, the only way you’re going to get to a deal is if you dial up the pressure on Putin. And so there are sanctions bills under discussion. There are tariff being proposed that might be, pressure on Putin and others are trying to push Trump to say, well, let’s pass more aid for Ukraine. So I mean, that’s the pressure that the president is under, even though the talks on Ukraine between Russia and Ukraine actually are continuing. One thing you said there is that Trump doesn’t like civilian casualties, that he’s moved by pictures of dying children, that he’s got this dovish streak. But we also mentioned he shuttered USAID, that there are good estimates and direct stories that children are dying from, that they will die from that. He doesn’t seem that moved by dying children in Gaza. They’re trying to get a bit of aid in through the nonprofit, as you mentioned. But he has not come out as a harsh critic of what is happening there. So resolve that tension for me. When does Trump care about dying children. I think he’s persuadable when it comes to things like conflict. But I think the process of shuttering USAID to him, I think that fits in a very different mental bucket. That’s about the US is sending all this money abroad and wasting it. And other countries should do more. And we’re being taken for a ride. And so, I mean, I think to the extent that there have been stories about how USAID being shut has impacted the lives of people around the world, I’m not sure that has really got through to him. One thing that it made me think of when you were mentioning that Ivanka had showed him these pictures of children dying in Syria. Is that who shows him what and who has an interest in showing him what. Probably matters here quite a lot that if there are not a bunch of people with a lot of sympathy for Palestinians around him, showing him photos or videos of what is happening in Gaza, that if the people who are telling him about USAID are telling him that it’s all corruption and DEI, that the question of who is putting the pictures in front of the president, who is trying to arouse his sympathy and who is trying to extinguish it, probably really matters. That’s been the case since the first term. And look, I don’t actually think it’s an accident that Trump became harsher in his language on Israel after his visit to the Gulf, because I suspect that not in public, but I suspect in the private meetings that the monarchs of the Gulf states talked to him about these issues, about the civilian casualties, about how it couldn’t go on and their populations wouldn’t stand it. So I mean, again, I think this is one of those areas where we see, he is persuadable, but the people around him in this administration have a much more coherent worldview. And so it’s more consistent. I’ll admit that I’ve been a little surprised that Putin is escalating in Ukraine, rather than using his better relationship with Trump and Trump’s relative favor, particularly after that Zelenskyy meeting to lock in a more favorable deal to deliver to Donald Trump some of the deal that Donald Trump wants, where I think Donald Trump would deliver quite a bit more to Putin than, say, other American presidents would. What’s your sense of his calculations here. The Russians are overplaying their hand, I think, quite badly. I don’t know necessarily why they appear to be perhaps more confident they can have further military gains than, I think circumstances on the ground really warrant. But, I mean, if I could categorize the Russian attitude right now, it seems to be a we’ll talk and see what we can get. And if it’s a good enough deal, great. And if not, we’ll keep fighting. Which again, to me strikes me as very shortsighted, because I think what the Trump administration is offering is not just the prospect of passable deal in Ukraine. For the Russians, it’s the prospect of reopening relations with the US and talking about other issues that really should, I think, be more attractive to the Russians. And I wonder a little from talking to folks in Moscow. I think they’re not sure how far they can actually trust that Trump really wants this, or whether it’s just something he’s saying. And he’ll change his mind again next week. Well, there’s a version of this where what Putin would attempt, and I think this is what most people expected was to play Donald Trump and to you treat him the way some of the other leaders who are successful here treat him with flattery. He’s a peacemaker. He’s the dealmaker. And that’s just not really seeming like Putin’s strategy. He seems to want to win the war, not win the deal. I mean, I think it’s certainly an indication of how important the Russians think Ukraine is, right. There’s been all these debates throughout the war about whether this an imperial conquest. Is this something that was a choice. I mean, I think, again, this is just a sign of how strongly Putin and the Russians in general feel about the war in Ukraine, that they’re willing to push forward on the ground even when they’re not really making particular gains when a potential deal is here on the table. I mean, I don’t want to oversell that because I do think the Russians are talking and what they’re presenting. They say they’re going to write a proposal, and they’re going to give it in Istanbul in a week or so. But the contours of that deal are actually not that bad for Ukraine. It’s not nearly as demanding as the Russians could be. So I think they are serious about talking. They just don’t seem to be, as you say, doing the flattery part of it particularly. Well, one thing I think a lot of presidents who are very involved in foreign policy, deal making believe and have evidenced in their behavior, is that it requires a huge amount of persistence and working with other difficult personalities. You think about how Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton were in trying to cut deals at Camp David. You think about even George W Bush. In a strange way, Trump wants deals. What I observe about him is he gets very frustrated when the other the counterparties that he’s working with don’t seem to want them, and his strategy is more to let them come to him like he’s not going to chase Vladimir Putin around. And he’s not going to fly back and forth from Israel and both. I’m curious if you think that’s accurate as a description of him, but also what you think about it on the merits that Trump positions himself a bit above the fray. It’s like, well, if you want to come to me, you can, but I’m not going to make America into the world’s negotiator or mediator. I would draw a distinction between the talks on Iran and the russia-ukraine talks, and I think it’s because genuinely, Trump sees America’s role in those conflicts differently, right. In Ukraine, I think he genuinely sees the US as a potential impartial mediator. I mean, we’ve absolutely been arming one side, and the Russians don’t see us that way. But that’s I think, how he sees this. And if he stands back and says, O.K, guys, if we’re not going to chase you, just it out, that’s fine. A little more persistence, I think, on the Iran case. I mean, I do think, for Trump and even for Steve Witkoff, who, after all, is, again, not a professional diplomat, very limited experience in this space. I do think one of the things that they’re learning is that diplomacy does take time and deals. Hammering out all the details of a deal can be quite difficult to do. We’ve seen, I think, a lot of progress on Iran, primarily because there was a pre-existing deal where a lot of those issues were hammered out. Things have changed since the JCPOA, but the issues are actually pretty clear to both parties. That’s not the case in Russia, Ukraine necessarily. I’ve also wondered, on the other side of it, if this reflects a bit of a way in which Trump doesn’t understand other countries in his frameworks for their behavior fail. Because I think he often expects everybody to be as transactional as he is. And when their morphological, when they’re more philosophical, when they’re committed to more ancient enmities, that the way he talks about them, it doesn’t seem he’s not trying very hard to understand where they’re coming from. It’s just like, can we all get rich together here or can we. I mean, I think if other countries frame their concerns in terms of interests, he does pretty well understanding that. The ones that really he seems to struggle with are the European states, right, where they talk in ideological phrases, and there are lots of shibboleths that you have to use in order to be in this policy space. You have to say, Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, the whole phrase, otherwise it’s not the right thing. And I think he struggles with that more than he struggles with even someone like Putin or the Syrian leader that he met when he was in the Gulf. You someone putting their concerns and interests and even their ideology to him in fairly plain language. I think he does a lot better with that than he does with the very subtle, PR driven language of some states. What is your view on how the ever shifting tariffs fit into the Foreign policy. This is the place, I think, where the administration has been the most inconsistent. I have heard theories of Trump’s tariff policy, ranging from he wants to generate a bunch of revenue and replace taxes and kill the deficit through he’s just using the tariffs instrumentally to get deals on other issues. Over to I think it’s pretty clear that folks like JD Vance and say the administration actually wants to reindustrialize parts of America to the extent that’s possible using tariffs. I’m not sure Trump himself has a clear view, and I think that’s why it’s so inconsistent. I think he’s persuaded by, again, a bit like the first administration on tariffs persuaded by who he’s talking to last. And so the policy is very inconsistent. How much is the policy inconsistent though, because Trump himself actually has much stronger intuitions here. I mean, what Trump Trump’s view on what a final settlement between Ukraine and Russia or Israel and the Palestinians or even America and Iran is just weaker than his views on trade and the way the tariffs have worked out. Looks like this is that he’s just making a lot of decisions himself. He gets presented options and he has strong views. And sometimes the views are both or all of them. And then it changes two days later. And that the incoherence reflects how much more that incoherence is centered in him. And nobody can really tell the King he’s wrong, whereas he’s more going to be dependent on advisors in these other areas, and he’s a little bit more willing to step back and act as a decider as opposed to an operator. I mean, to some extent, it’s the difference between the fact that tariffs are a tool. And a lot of the other issues that we’re talking about are not tools. If he has an intuition that he says, I want to get to peace in Ukraine and advisors go and bring back plans for how to do that. And he chooses between them. That’s great. If he says tariffs are good. Tariffs are not an end state. They’re a they’re not a strategy. Tariffs are a tool that you use to get to some strategy. And so what do advisors do. Well they go and they bring him back. What he could use tariffs to achieve. And there’s all these different options. And you hear Trump parroting the different theories of what he’s going to do with these great tariffs at different points. But I don’t think he himself knows I think you’re right. It’s an intuition that tariffs are good. But that doesn’t get you to an actual policy. At some point it looked like where the tariff policy was cohering spring was really into a trade war with China. And now the tariffs are largely, though not entirely, paused on China for 90 days as they try to work something out. Even on China, which I think is very central to Trump’s foreign policy thinking, and he has thought about China. I cannot really make a clear heads or tails of what the end state he is trying to achieve is. What is your best account at this point of what Trump wants out of the tariffs or potentially the trade war with China. I mean, I have to say not just on trade war, but more generally, perhaps the thing I’ve been most surprised about is how incoherent the administration’s China policy is. I would have expected it to be much more hard line, very focused on undermining Beijing and to the extent that the tariffs we’ve seen have were before they were suspended, extremely draconian. That was the kind of thing I expected to see. But we actually haven’t seen that really. The tariffs are the only case. And even there they’ve been dialed back a bit. So I mean, I get the impression that folks inside the Trump administration definitely want to cut US trade with China. They’re very indecisive about whether they care about reshoring those industries or whether they’re fine with them going to say, Vietnam, and Malaysia. And then over on the military strategic side, I don’t see a particularly clear strategy towards China. So I mean, really interesting. I think even the first Trump administration tariffs were the one place where there actually was some consistency when it came to policy with China setting up export controls, this kind of thing. There was a strategy with regard to China and trade continues into the Biden administration gets bigger. And now in Trump two, I’m not really sure what we’re doing, but that gets you back to that question. We were circling at the beginning of what actually does serve America’s interests and what doesn’t, because one version of serving America’s interests here, if you believe we’re in a very tense competition with China, is you want to isolate China to the extent that is practical, you want to restrain its expansion of geopolitical influence and the way Trump is treating allies, the way he’s using tariffs, the way he is weaponizing the dollar, which is obviously part of an evolution of many American presidents weaponizing the dollar system. It’s pretty clearly pissing off our allies. If Elon Musk is going to be trying to elect the AFD in Germany, maybe you don’t trust various Elon Musk enterprises and you prefer to be dealing with Chinese enterprises. That seems to be a calculation some European allies are making. That seems pretty central to a way of thinking about our interests and a place where and I’m curious if you disagree with this, where Trump’s treatment of our allies and the way he’s weaponizing American economic strength seems shortsighted. I mean, it is shortsighted. It’s also a continuation of something that’s been happening since at least the Obama administration, which is the increasing use of very draconian economic statecraft measures for us, for US foreign policy purposes. So we start with sanctions. We advance to secondary sanctions, then export controls. And now we’re on to tariffs. We’re basically getting harsher and harsher as we go. Yeah but we weren’t aiming that at allies before in this way. I mean, that doesn’t seem like the same thing to me. You can look at an evolution of tools, which I agree with, but Trump’s treatment of traditional allies feels very different than Biden, or for that matter, Obama’s. But Biden, particularly the constant genuflecting before alliances. The really intense work to try to hold these things together and align American interests with them feels very, very different than what Trump is doing, for better or for worse, but different. I mean, you’ve got to differentiate the rhetoric, the personality from the actual policy. And so Yeah, Trump is absolutely I mean, he’s rude. He’s dismissive. He belittles allies. But Trump’s rudeness about alliances and his attitude towards allies there is underneath that a core of policy that is actually a continuation of the way US policy makers have been talking for a long time. You, US policy makers, all the way back again into the Obama administration. But even before talking about European allies, free riding, Bob Gates said in 2011, when he was Obama’s Secretary of defense, that if European countries didn’t start contributing more step up and defense that NATO was going to go away in the future because it wouldn’t be able to hold together. You can even go back as far as Eisenhower and find him saying similar things about the US Defense relationship with Europe. So, I mean, again, I think I would not if it was me, go about it the way that Trump is going about it. But that’s because I think you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. But the policies that he is actually pursuing towards us, allies of trying to rebalance this relationship a little there are threads of that go back into previous administrations. Is that true on the tariffs. So I agree that’s true on trying to get the Europeans to increase defense spending. It’s more been the aggressive tariffs on allies that has struck me as interesting. And that if I were an ally, would make me wonder about the safety of being as highly exposed to the American economy as I am. Yeah I mean, this is a fairly American way of looking at it, because if you go to Europe and you talk to businesses, they’ll talk to you about secondary sanctions on Iran that made it so that European car manufacturers or energy companies had to abandon all their business and leave those places and other sanctions, cases like that, though Iran is probably the most obvious. The Europeans even tried to create a mechanism for circumventing US sanctions that would let them trade directly with Iran. So again, not at the scale Trump is doing it, not with the venom Trump is doing it. But the US has used these tools against its allies before. I think they understood that as using that tool against Iran and that they were said the Allies had to come along with them. It feels different to use a tool against the ally. The percent tariff that he might put on the EU feels different than we’ve sanctioned Iran. And to be part of our financial system, you can’t be doing business with what we now call not wrongly a state sponsor of terrorism. Does that not feel different to you. I mean, it does feel, I think, again, the scope of the tariffs. And the pointlessness with which they are being pursued that feels different to me. But again, I mean, I’ll call your attention to the EU’s blocking statute that they passed a number of years back. It was originally intended to shield European businesses from American secondary sanctions. So again, from the US point of view, again, maybe we see these things very differently as justified. But I think other parties in the world, other states have sometimes seen these as against their interests. So I’m a pretty strong Trump critic. But you’ve been a critic of American foreign policy, and the way it’s been practiced by the American foreign policy establishment for a while. And I think there are pieces of this that you’re probably more sympathetic to. So because it doesn’t usually get offered on this show, what is your best case for coming all together. If in three years, whatever else we think about. Or four years, I guess whatever else we think about Donald Trump, there’s a real case to be made that his foreign policy worked, that America First actually did put America first, and that it made America stronger and safer, and maybe the world safer, too. What would that look like. What does success here look like. That is a tough one. What I don’t see is a Grand vision for the future of even the US role in the world. But what I do see is an understanding of the problems with the way US foreign policy has been going and a willingness to act to try and handle those problems. And that, I think, contrasts very strongly with particularly the Biden administration, for whom, they understood many of the problems with America’s overextension in the world, but were so tied up in process that they basically couldn’t ever figure out a way out of this. So, I mean, my best case scenario for this Trump presidency would be that at the end of four years, maybe a few of these big problems have been resolved. Maybe, maybe we did get a peace deal in Ukraine or something like that. Maybe we got a nuclear deal with Iran and that’s great. But mostly what Trump has done is sever us from the existing things that are broken, maybe managed to pull back some troops from the Middle East, lift sanctions on Syria. There’s a potential success for you right there. Forced Europeans to spend more on defense in ways that position future administrations to actually make concrete steps in building something new. And the example that I’ve been thinking about really a lot lately is Richard Nixon. Nixon was I mean, everybody hated Richard Nixon. But in retrospect, the foreign policy choices that he took, they were incredibly dramatic. Taking the US off the gold standard, opening up to China trying détente with the Soviets. It didn’t all work during his presidency. It didn’t all even work during Ford’s presidency. But 10, 15 years later, he started the process of change that put us in a better place. And so that would be my best case for what Trump is doing right now. What’s your negative case. What does failure look like. I think failure looks like we try to open negotiations with a bunch of other parties. We find that is actually significantly harder than we thought, and that the US stays bogged down in a bunch of conflicts around the world, that China continues to make significant gains while the US messes about bombing Iran in the Middle East, right. I mean, I think that the Trump administration, again, first time around, very prone to distraction. Didn’t have a long attention span that seems to be a little bit better this time, but you could see effectively an ADHD presidency, right, where they just jump from crisis to crisis to crisis and they never actually really resolve anything. And so we end up in four years, slightly worse off, certainly not better off. And then always our final question, what are three books you recommend to the audience. Well, on the Nixon point, actually, I’ve been reading a great book, A Superpower Transformed by Dan Sargent, which basically looks at all of those overlapping changes that happened in the 1970s through Nixon, Ford, Carter. So if that’s a good model for this moment and maybe it is it’s a really good read. I think if you want to understand US Defense policy, it’s worth picking up A Strategy of Denial by Elbridge Colby, who is now at the Pentagon. This is his book on US involvement in Asia. How he thinks about Taiwan and its importance. It’s going to inform the National Defense strategy. So well worth a read. And then finally, I would say A World Safe for Commerce by Dale Copeland, which is this lengthy historical treatment of how the US and its foreign policy have been impacted by our trade with other countries, which, again, seems very relevant for the current moment. If our foreign policy, as he argues, has been driven by our ability to or wanting to access markets all around the world, and suddenly we’re not wanting to access those markets, well, that’s a really interesting question. So three really good books if folks are interested. Emma Ashford, Thank you very much. Great to be here.