Trump's Foreign Policy | George Galloway, Mark Leonard

[Music] we're talking mainly about Trump who I'm sure lots of people in this tent think is a bit of a buffoon but paradoxically perhaps his foreign policy is actually achieving something and we're here to question whether perhaps playing the strong man on the world stage and being unpredictable might actually make the world a safer rather than a more dangerous place who knows and we're going to be arguing about that does that sort of policy a strongman policy unpredictable slightly crazy policy make the world safer or more precarious so first of all we're going to start with George Galloway George I'm sure you know he's been a Labour MP an MP for respect his own party and he's the author of I'm not the only one and the Fidel Castro handbook George and the Neil Lennon story don't forget that ah sorry celtic France the brochure asked can a belligerent foreign policy lead to stability in the world like we've never tried that before in fact the world is in chaos precisely because of a belligerent foreign policy and sometimes the belligerents are mad like Donald Trump bad like Tony Blair imbecilic like George W Bush but they were all exponents or of and practitioners of a belligerent foreign policy and the results are there for all to see the question seems premise on the assumption that we have had a non belligerent foreign policy at any point in modern history in fact since the United States was born it has been a war all but one year all but one year in its entire lifetime and the last time Britain had no soldiers fighting abroad and only briefly was in 1779 so we have had not just a lifetime of but centuries of foreign policy belligerents and it doesn't flow from any psychopathic character necessarily although some like Richard Nixon in his belligerent foreign policy was undoubtedly psychopathic like his foreign policy guru seems to have been the guru to many including the aforementioned Tony Blair Henry Kissinger were undoubtedly psychopathic but it doesn't necessarily require that it requires a view of the world that the rich and powerful have the right to dictate to the less rich and less powerful the the people who can do if you can conquer other people's countries in the past or conquer their economic reality if not their territory as happens more often nowadays if you can you do and that's why we have chaos and violence and the threat of truly unbelievable levels of violence in front of us today you asked Mary Ann about Trump and his foreign policy let's review it Trump has unilaterally withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal signed Salomon binding by his predecessor and the permanent 5+1 and the Islamic Republic of Iran and impeccably I'm using the words of the IAEA impeccably observed by Iran Trump has unilaterally with from it begun a raft of ever deep and punishing economic sanctions against Iran and yesterday a major terrorist atrocity was carried out by Saudi sponsored which means American sponsored terrorists in I was in Iran which killed 26 people now not just soldiers but old soldiers paraplegic soldiers members of the public in the crowd and journalists covering the event we are headed potentially to cataclysmic conflict again in the Middle East what could possibly go wrong Iran will undoubtedly respond extremely violently against Saudi Arabia at any minute certainly not long delayed that will be get a response and so the spiral towards war will twist Pompeo the US Secretary of State the former head of the CIO CIA this week threatened actions against Venezuela they've already got sanctions almost uncountable number of them now it's us actions against Venezuela that we can expect in the next few days and the elephant in the room the morass of the Syrian war some of you know me from my stand against the Iraq war I'm here to tell you that the involvement of Western countries in the Syrian war is the worst thing we have ever done ie worse than Libya worse than Iraq our belligerent foreign policy of arming financing propagandizing for Isis al-qaeda and the alphabet soup of Islamist fanaticism in Syria is the worst thing that we have ever done and notwithstanding that the war is almost over we may very well be about to double down to double our bets on the catastrophic conflict in Syria so can a belligerent foreign policy bring about peace and stability in the world not bloody likely [Applause] thank you George Wright mark Leonard here is a political scientist and he's the co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and is the author of why Europe will run the 21st century I nearly read ruin over to you mark so I agreed with the last sentence that George uttered but I do think that there's a fundamental problem with the way that he laid out his case which is that he's normalizing Donald Trump and just putting him into a continuum of Western foreign policy over the last few decades but I think the reason we're having this debate is that something quite fundamental is happening there is a fundamental disruption in Western foreign policy which is deeply troubling and deeply worrying and one of the ways that you can see how much the world is changing and how quick the chaos which Donald Trump has unleashed is going through our our political systems our international institutions is the fact that even Donald Trump jokes getting out-of-date very quickly during the election campaign in Conan O'Brien quipped the 70% of Americans we're deeply worried about the idea of a trump presidency and 30% were becoming Canadian but if he was making the joke now he'd realized that the last thing anyone want to do is to become Canadian because Donald Trump seems to have a particular animus against America's northern neighbor and sees it as one of the the worst foes of the American system and I think the reason for that is that he has a fundamentally different worldview from President Obama President Bush Bush the father Clinton Reagan or any of the other presidents that have been in power at least in the last 100 years and I think there's three things which are uniquely worrying about Trump as president the first is that he is the only u.s. president in my lifetime who has seen the International order as something which undermines rather than enhances American power in the world and I don't think that he thinks that that order doesn't benefit the West and benefit the US but he does think that it benefits others more in particular China and his starting point is that if he does nothing at all he will be the president that oversees the relative decline of his great nation and that China will become the most powerful country in the world because every year China becomes stronger and richer and the US in relative terms even though it grows is becoming smaller and he but he thinks that the entire establishment and the elite is so wedded to this ordering this way of doing things that it's incapable of reforming it and therefore what I think he's trying to do is to launch a process of Schumpeterian creative destruction where the first instance is to blow everything up with a view then to renegotiating the order on terms which he thinks are more beneficial to the US because he thinks the paradox of the status quo is that America is paying a lot of money is losing a lot of lives in order to sustain an order which is helping China more than America and that's why he's blah the jcpoa vrr nuclear deal which George was talking about why he's trying to blow up the World Trade Organization why he's threatening NATO why he's withdrawing from almost everybody that you can think of in the United Nations it's because these are part of an order which he thinks the u.s. is trapped in which constrains it and above all in his very zero-sum mind these are all institutions which empower the week over the strong and America is the strongest than the most powerful country in the world so therefore any institution which brings countries together to negotiate with the u.s. is one which in relative terms weakens the US and strengthens other countries against it and that's why these institutions need to be destroyed that's why he talked about the European Union as a foe and even though we are the closest allies of the US and have been for decades because he thinks that the you as it was designed to weaken the US and to strengthen weak European countries and then I think stage two in this process of Schumpeterian creative destruction is to try and renegotiate an order on bilateral terms where the US deals with every single country on a one-to-one basis so it can do it from a position of strength and make the new order cheaper and less constraining but the impact of that is really to to destroy all of the advances which have been made in the last few decades and I find George's characterization last few decades is very strange like my mother is a German Jew she was born in exile in in France most of her family were wiped out in concentration camps my father is British but his earliest memories of being evacuated as an eight-year-old during the Second World War his father got gassed in the First World War the fact that my generation and my kids who are sitting in the front can look forward a sort of world where the idea of war between European countries is unthinkable where they can travel without showing their passports from one country to another and where we have law-based controlled ways of dealing with disagreements between countries it's an incredible advance I don't want to minimize the catastrophe of the Iraq war or all of the other mistakes and belligerent act of Western foreign policy over the last few decades but we live in a completely different world it's a world that is being threatened by Donald Trump and by what's happening at the moment and that brings me to the second threat of Donald Trump as president which is the fact that going back to my Canadian example the people that he feels the greatest animus to our American allies because they're the ones who are propping up the system the most so he thinks that they are the number one enemies in his process of disrupting the global order that's why he's much more comfortable dealing with Vladimir Putin or Kim jong-un than dealing with Angela Merkel and the fact that he's undermining US alliances means for every single part of the world where order has been based on alliances with the United States is becoming much more unsafe that's true of Europe it's true of Asia it's true of the Middle East and what's happening is two things are going on as American alliances become questioned and people don't know whether they can count on normal Trump to back them up the American allies are having to hedge against being abandoned by the United States so they're having to rethink their options to rearm and to up their military spending at the same time the enemies of the United States its rivals also wondering whether the u.s. is going to back up their allies so they're testing out how far America will stand by its allies and they're also encouraged to rearm and to behave in belligerent ways so in every theater of the world what we're going to see over the next few years and new levels of instability new levels of violence and the the problems which George Galloway was talking about in the Middle East and not about Western foreign policy and us arming relatively dysfunctional groups in Syria it's about the fact that there was an order which was guaranteed by Western powers which has now disappeared and that's created a space where Iran and Saudi Arabia and others who were held together in place by a system and now testing out their power and fighting death and nobody cares about what they're doing and no one's trying to stop them and there are no limits on the instability which can happen as a result of that and the third thing which I'd like to end with about Donald Trump which is something which I don't think we should normalize either it's not him as an individual his unpredictability his misogyny his racism and all the horrible and disreputable functions of Donald Trump but it is the philosophy which he embodies which he's a symptom of the idea of trumpism and that is cancer which has taken hold in all Western developed societies where a large number of people who feel that they've been left behind by established politicians and by established political parties who do not feel that they've benefited from the advances which I described earlier and actually rather than seeing a world of greater opportunity they feel threatened by a lot of the infrastructure of the globalized world whether it's free movement free trade and they feel nervous about their nature the culture of their communities changing the economic circumstances their job security being changed in a world where the West and the developing that developed countries feel that they're being kind of marginalized by a rise of of others and that that's coming into our own societies and that plays to a politics of what is called the political scientist called the threatened majority when the people who felt that they're in power now worried that every other kind of minorities being mobilized against them and that therefore a ripe for manipulation by political figures whether it's Faraj in this country Donald Trump in America marine lepen in France the IVD in Germany and if these political forces succeed to work together as we've seen happening with with salvini in Italy and all-bad in Hungary they're not just going to turn our own countries into much less safe and and comfortable places to live but they could actually join Donald Trump in dismantling this global order which has made my lifetime much more comfortable much safer and much less threatening than that of my parents or grandparents it looks like I gonna have to play devil's advocate here so if you are America and you have been the leading member of NATO for the past whatever it is sort of 60 odd years Santiago and you have spent twice as much of your GDP sometimes three times much of your GDP on defense and you've watched the other European members of NATO free-riding on your defense expenditure don't you have a right to say come on guys shape up pull your weight absolutely I mean I think the Europeans need to take responsibility for their own affairs we have achieved incredible things in our own continent in the last few decades and it's only been possible because this remaking of the European order has been done under an American security blanket which Europeans have not paid for I think in the early years and decades after the the the Second World War as someone from a German Jewish background I think it was probably healthy for Germany not to be spending five ten percent of its GDP on defense but I do think in the long term it's obscene for three hundred and fifty million Americans to be paying for the security of five hundred million Europeans that were as rich as them and our interests are not the same and Trump's actually showing how dangerous it is for us to put our security in the hands of the incumbent of the White House not because America is a uniquely evil or dangerous country in fact you know if any country was going to be a superpower of velocity decades I think we America was definitely the one that I would most have wanted to be in that position but we're seeing whether it's over the Iran nuclear deal whether it's about Jerusalem as capital of recognizing Jerusalem as capital of Israel whether it's how we deal with Turkey our interests are not identical with American interests and if we don't take responsibility for our own affairs then we'll find ourselves unable to to do things which are which are right for our societies or and also to stand up for the kind of rule-based order which Europeans believe in so I agree with the critique that Europeans should spend more on European defense so we need a more kind of grown-up relationship with the US where we're dealing with the more as equals but I think that the amount of money the US has paid for towards NATO the last few decades is very cheap compared to the amount of money that American citizens taxpayers have to pay to get involved in World War one in World War two or during the Cold War where they were dealing with Europeans being kind of belligerent being at each other's throats and having more kind of militarized societies so I'm not sure that that his solution to the problem is is one which will actually be in America's long term interests but I do hope that Europeans take this as a wake-up call because the world is very very fragile at the moment it's not just Trump it's Xi Jingping in China it's a Diwan in Turkey it's Putin in Russia there is a universalization of this kind of strong man foreign policy and the world around us is becoming much much more unsafe and if we really believe in what we managed to achieve over the last few decades then we need to stand up and and be willing to defend it and that can't just be with great speeches or even by taking out economic sanctions against people who are threatening that order I think ultimately we have to have the full range of tools and that includes military power George well as half an irishman I'm entitled to see as the irishman apocryphally did when asked the road to London I wouldn't have started from here the exceptional ization of Donald Trump to which you've just been listening is absurd Donald Trump's been the president of the United States for less than two years did the chaos in the world start less than two years ago it's utterly ridiculous the crooner your idol nice soup Barack destroyed Libya and turned it into a slave market and a jihad market for at least seven heavily armed different Islamist groups wasn't Trump that did that was Obama that did that you have the goal to pray and eat George W Bush is somehow better than Donald Trump George W Bush and your other hero Tony Blair killed a million people in Iraq and rising spawned Isis cascaded across the world you see how happy how smug you are about the rules-based society that we had before Donald Trump 23 months ago 22 months ago where was the rules-based order in the invasion and occupation of Iraq and utterly illegal act the consequences of which will still be feeling in a hundred years from now where was the rules-based in the destruction of Yugoslavia no international law no United Nations Security Council unilateral use of Western power deployed by the people you're trying to persuade us were better than Donald Trump Vietnam was leveled bombed back to the Stone Age drowned in chemical weapons by Richard Nixon and by Lyndon Johnson they were a part of this rules-based complacency of which you speak and in age of your argument you draw attention to the fact that populist SAR coming to power the populist Tsar coming to power precisely because of the failure of your international order precisely because of the failure of your orthodoxy it's because neoliberal politics totally filled in Italy that you have the government in Italy you have ditto in Hungary get all the rise although it's stopped now you may have noticed that melon shone with whom I agree in every particular is now the most popular politician in France not lepen she's gone off for psychiatric treatment the the rise of Trump the rise of Corbin the rise of the right and the populace in Italy are all because of the failure of this order which you so smugly wish to return us to I don't think it was about foreign policy charge to be honest the reason these populist have been so successful is because of domestic discontent separate economy average voter on the doorstep who's voting for Donald Trump is not talking about Syria they're talking about jobs in fact really the reason for the rise of the populist in Italy is why because the country has been flooded by millions of refugees from the wars begun by your heroes first of all let mark defines himself first all as long as I think you're both getting a very fair crack right now I might spike him for longer but I wasn't accusing you of worshipping heroes that you didn't worship so maybe I can sort of try and take a step back from your very powerful rhetoric and say first of all the fact that we can talk about breaches of the rules-based order like what happened in Iraq is because you called it a mistake no it's a breach it's a million people dead for God's sake well who died sanctions beforehand according to people who were who were criticizing it before Saddam Hussein killed many many people I was against the war in Iraq and I'm still against the war in Iraq nothing has happened over the last 15 years to change my mind about that but I think is the very fact that there was an order that we can recognize that as a breach of the order now what makes me slightly uncomfortable about your rhetorical flourish is that you put all of these different things that are quite different on the same level you know what happened in Vietnam will happen in Iraq being put on the same level as intervening to stop genocide in Kosovo I find strange they're not you know not every type of use of violence I think using violence is always bad but sometimes it's the leaf bad option I think the second world war was justified given what Hitler stood for I think intervening in Kosovo was justified in order to stop a genocide and where lots of innocent people were being what you send in Libya well I was not particularly being war I think with hindsight what we can see is genocide and Libya genocide and Qasim okay I'm not sure exactly if everything's genocide then it basically normalizes the idea of genocide for me you stopped talking about that well because where genocide once about my family that was actually wiped out there's no general say that costume right there was ethnically and people because no general sight well yes thank you so you got a microphone on you don't need to shout okay so I I do think that it's important not to toss words like genocide about green it's also important not to put every single foreign policy decision that you disagreed with on the same level there there is the fact that there was a rules-based order means that we can see the breaches of that order and that is what's being destroyed and to see I I hated George Bush he was my least favorite American president until Donald Trump was it was elected I was absolutely disgusted by I wrote a whole book against Bush's foreign policy back in 2004 but at the same time I do think that he was a fundamentally different figure from Donald Trump because he basically believed in the existence of a rule-based order and he was pushing to change it Donald Trump wants to blow the whole thing up and to bring us to a stage of Ag of Anarchy where the only thing that matters is the law of the jungle and where the strong decide what happens and the weak have to do what they tell them to do and I don't want to live in in that world and I think if you can't see the difference between those two situations and you just normalized Trump and put him into some kind of continuum of betrayal which goes back you know centuries like you did beforehand and everything is genocide and every military campaign is equally bad then it's impossible to have a serious discussion about what we're trying to do in this world I do think that they've been all sorts of mistakes made over the last few decades I'm a Social Democrat I'm not a neoliberal I think that a lot of these populist parties are coming to to power because of a failure of domestic politics I think some of the leaders like Jeremy Corbyn are there because the failures of foreign policy there would be no Corbin if there hadn't been an Iraq war that is clear to me but I think it is important to try and hang on to what matters in these things because if you're not you end up in a kind of nihilistic place like where everything is equally bad and where the solution is where you just sort of have nothing constructive to say about anything because everyone is a war criminal everyone is equally evil everyone is is is kind of genocide or and that completely undermines any critique that we have of what's happening at the moment which I think it's really worrying and scary and needs to be stopped can we talk a bit more about what what's happening at the moment in relation to North Korea which is something we haven't mentioned yet so some people are saying okay a few months ago three or four months ago we were worried about a nuclear war in North Korea now we've got Kim jong-un meeting with the president of South Korea deciding to bid to host the Olympics together agreeing to denuclearization and that that is down to Donald Trump's tough foreign policy know what I mean I think his foreign policy has worked incredibly well on one country in the world and that's China I was in China a few weeks ago and was very struck but they see Donald Trump in completely different terms to how he's seen in the West most of my American friends and all of my European friends see Trump as you described it at the beginning as a kind of buffoon who's self-defeating and kind of destructive and doing all sorts of things which which undermine American interests and I do a kind of fundamental level as I said I'm first answer but at the same time in China they think that he he's both their kind of master strategist and a master tactician but he basically pushed they think that he's been declaring war on them on kind of three fronts on an economic front on the kind of political front and an ideological front and they use North Korea as the kind of prime example where he ups the ante creates a real sense of crisis puts the Chinese government under so much pressure to introduce sanctions that they shift their position six or seven times he they get to the point where the North Koreans almost see the South Koreans has kind of sworn enemies their closest allies with the only country that they have a treaty relationship with and then when he realized to say he's run out of Road he shifts tack basically tries to do a deal and and then opens up a new front with the Chinese entree which we're now on at the moment and I think actually you know having seen various different presidents and lots of Europeans fail to make any headway on the Chinese there is some kind of logic in terms of how he's handling with China is he helping on North Korea and I think it's much too early to tell I'm happy that they're talking rather than him threatening to you know tweeting about Rocketman and threatening pre-emptive nuclear strikes at the moment but I do worry that as a result of mistakes in in Western foreign policy of lost few decades we created very perverse incentives for the for the North Koreans having seen what happened to Saddam Hussein to Gadhafi I think it's quite difficult to see why North Korea wouldn't want to have nuclear weapons and why North Korean leader wouldn't want to have nuclear as a white trust Western assurances that we will not try and change the regime if if they get rid of their nuclear weapon so I'd be amazed if they really do do that and then it ripping up the Iran nuclear deal exactly the moment that you're trying to do a deal with the North Koreans on nuclear weapons seems like a inexplicable and sort of catastrophic decision so we'll see what happens I also worry that if this fails as it's quite likely - it will then empower the Hawks like John Bolton within the administration who want to go back to using military solutions against North Korea and I think that is the the scariest thing so I do think we have every incentive to try and make this work as much as possible I think that you have very wise leadership being shown by the South Korean authorities that have been trying to handle and to manage Trump but they're in a very risky position because they exposed themselves enormously and Trump is totally unreliable and unpredictable and that could be another big casualty of this affair but I think you know the time to make pass judgment on his on his North Korean diplomacy is probably in sort of five or six years time rather than the yeah okay so George we've heard a very passionate denunciation from you of the rules-based international order can you tell us what you think should replace it and and don't shout please because you've already got a mic mic on and I think it's just too loud for everybody kindly let me decide the tone of voice in which I well it has my ears we don't want another half-life of a conflict between you and I the Donald Trump is an unpredictable unstable person it's not strong and stable genius he's a bull in a china shop and to mix the metaphor even a stop clock is Right twice a day and he was right to meet with the North Korean leadership and he was right to encourage a rapprochement between North and South Korea and it's going swimmingly in fact it's practically a love-in the Koreans are embracing each other with a warmth and vigor that no one could possibly have imagined and Donald Trump's predecessors would never have permitted this is important Barack Obama would never have met kim jeong-hoon and therefore the permafrost of north south korea relations would have continued so and not only would Barack Obama not have done it Hillary Clinton would not have done it and so if we are looking objectively at this thing you have to see that Trump was right about Korea and the others were wrong because Korea has been for decades a clear and present danger to world peace and and stability it's not I'm passionately denouncing the rules-based international order I am passionately denouncing the fact that there is no rules-based international order you just called lawlessness a rules-based international order with mistakes some breaches but how many breaches does it take to invalidate your thesis in the first place if you have what you call an international rules based system in the world which is not just breached not just mistakes but which kills millions of people and renders the whole world completely unstable how many times does that need to happen before your thesis is invalidated now for most people it long ago ceased to be credible to call it a rules-based international order and I refuse to accept your thesis that's all I haven't got a thesis I'm just asking you to what you think well you think this is that there is an international rules based all I see and and and my case is that it's abundantly clear that there has not been and that therefore attempts to exceptional eyes Trump which is the liberal mantra and nonsense he's only been in 23 months so if we have the world was in total chaos before he came so so if we hadn't had the United Nations and NATO set up after the Second World War do you think the world would have been a better place no because I believe in a United Nations with real authority but as long as you have veto powers it cannot possibly guarantee international order I support the United Nations it's it's Tony Blair and George W Bush that walked out of the United Nations and caused the Cataclysm which is being I think underappreciated here of the Iraq war not since the first world war did we take a decision that would so change the world as the decision to invade Iraq now the United Nations dicted the late Kofi Annan described that at the time as an indigo act and yet it was carried out by people who pretend that they are presiding over a rules-based international order lost lost point mark you know we're going around in circles a bit but what happens is that there's a certain point where utopianism becomes nihilism if you say that the order is not perfect that there all sorts of things wrong with it and therefore it's the same as have been no order at all that's a circular argument from my perspective I think it's better for us to have an idea about what kind of order we want to live in it's something which you have to fight for it you're fighting against the laws of history for most of human history there has been no such thing as the rule of law we've lived in the kind of jungle where might makes right and over the last century there in fits and terms they've been attempt to try and bring some kind of structure to try and regulate the relationships between countries it's not been a linear process it looked like there was a lot of progress a hundred years ago and then we had the Second World War and then the Cold War but after the end of the Cold War I think enormous advances were made in protecting human rights in setting up institutions to deal with the climate crisis to deal with genocide to make sure that you didn't have trade wars between different countries and it's imperfect and it still allows hypocrisy and it's easier for strong countries to get their way than weaker countries and there's racism and there all sorts of horrible things that have happened and I'm not defending any of them but I think that the attempt to do it is something which is noble and is worth while and is something that should be supported the fact that we are trying to do it also allows us to see where we fall short of those of those aspirations and there are lots of examples of it countless examples of it but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't keep trying and I do think that Donald Trump is not just somebody who's behaving outside of that system he's acting against that system and trying to destroy it and that's why he is a kind of unique threat to what has been achieved over the last few decades and I think he should be called out as that rather than just seen as part of a kind of history of lawlessness and to pretend that this project hasn't been there and that these institutions are not there even if they are often you know undermined and we don't live up to them but the very fact that you can talk about an illegal act means that there's a law if there's no law you can't talk about an illegal act thank you thank you very much to both of you thank you all for coming Arsen ideas her AI TV you

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

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Rating: 4.5242624 out of 5

Keywords: george galloway, george galloway 2019, george galloway news, donald trump foreign policy, donald trump news, george galloway latest, george galloway east, east vs. west, donald trump and china, new world order, george galloway debate, foreign policy, successful political leaders, is donald trump good for world peace, trump and nucleur, nuclear weapons iran, trump foreign policy, mark leonard, respect party, world politics, george galloway 2020

Id: xcyfVLMWqFI

Length: 42min 40sec (2560 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2019