Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Afri.
[00:00:00] Speaker B: I'm Afshin Ratanzi and welcome to a brand new season of New Order. We're broadcasting around the world, including to nearly 1 1/2 billion on RT. India. New order explores how India and its allies are helping define the geopolitical landscape of the 21st century.
The war in West Asia is no longer concerned. Contained by geography. What began as a regional conflict has now spilled into the arteries of the global economy, reshaping energy flows, alliances and the politics of neutrality. This week in Washington, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a Senate hearing that the Trump administration wants to end the license allowing countries such as India to continue buying Russian oil as soon as possible. The timing is exquisite. Prime Minister Modi has confirmed he will visit Moscow later this year for the annual India Russia summit. And in less than two weeks, Modi heads to the GC in Evian, France, for what could be his first face to face with Trump since February 2025. With Russian oil tariffs and the Strait of Hormuz all on the agenda, from energy security to war in West Asia, from sanctions regimes to the rise of BRICS diplomacy, the question is no longer whether the world is becoming multipolar. It's whether multipolarity can survive contact with power politics that still expects obedience at its core. At the end of the show, we'll be joined by New Orders, Zahra Khan to answer questions from you, the viewers. With me now, though, is the former director for European Affair on the US National Security Council under both Clinton and Obama. He was also special assistant to President Obama. Professor Charles Kupchand is now senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's the author of the End of the American Era and the forthcoming Bringing Order to Anarchy, Governing the World to Come. Professor CHARLES Kupchand, welcome to New Order. You know, it's been just over a year since I spoke to you, and now you're penning pieces for Council on Foreign Relations with quotations from the founder of the Italian Communist Party.
How does, how does Gramsci inform your understanding of what we're seeing in the Strait of Hormuz, let alone what's going on in the United States?
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Well, Gramsci, when he was sitting in prison, thrown there by the fascists, he wrote what we call the prison notebooks. And one sentence that he wrote in 1930 really speaks to me about our moment, and that is, he wrote, the old is dying and the new cannot be born. And in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
I think that's where we Are Afshin. The old is dying, and that is the liberal international system that was anchored by the United States and its democratic allies in some ways peaked in the 1990s, the era of what we call unipolarity. Pax Americana. That era is coming to an end, and we haven't even begun a conversation about what comes next. In many respects, I think Donald Trump is the demolition man who's taking a wrecking ball to that old order. But he's not an architect. He's not going to take us to the next order, to something that, as you put it, multipolarity meets power politics. So right now, we're in this weird historical hiatus, if you will, between the old order of the 20th century and a new order for the 21st century that we haven't even begun to imagine.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: I don't know. Donald Trump would probably reject your remark that he's not an architect. He's busy building lots of things in Washington, D.C. including the reflecting Pool, of course. But Gramsci himself, he actually, he wrote about the importance of Gandhi, of nonviolent resistance. Is the US Prepared for its empire to go the way of the British Empire as its client states revolt against the imf, World Bank, CIA interference, as it's now widely being described as openly?
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Well, you know, I think the United States now is going through a period of what I would call schizophrenia.
On the one hand, you have the traditional foreign policy community, what we call the Blob, if you will, and they're still committed to American hegemony. They're still committed to a world anchored by the dollar and anchored by American military power, which still, after all, remains unchallenged, even though its superiority is waning over time.
And then you have the MAGA movement that Trump at least seemingly heads, which has kind of said, been there, done that. This is not our problem anymore. In fact, you have a line in the 2025 National Security Strategy that says very explicitly, we are done being the atlas of the world. We are going back to the Monroe Doctrine. We're going to focus on the Western Hemisphere and Donald Trump as a candidate and when he first came to office, basically said, hey, we're going to look to our allies in Europe and in Asia and the Middle east to carry their own water.
This is not fair to us.
No longer are we going to fight these forever wars that don't produce much good. The problem is that Trump himself has fallen into the same dark hole as his predecessors, launching a war in the Middle east that is not proving to be very effective. In achieving its goals.
And so in that sense, I really think we're seeing a tug of war here. An America that, if you will, does not know its own mind. And that is in part because the domestic political situation has fractured. There used to be a bipartisan centrist coalition behind a steady American role in the world.
That coalition, that center, is no longer in existence. And that's why I think you see the United States oscillating between two incompatible visions of its role in the world.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you're a special assistant to Obama. I don't know whether he would have done what he was told by the Israelis in the same way that Trump has done so before. Because as you say, Trump came to power as a person who was America first. Obama, famously, the person you served, was arguably behaved like a neocon, if you, if you're a Libyan right now or an Afghan.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: I think that President Obama wanted to be the pivot president. He wanted to be the guy who moved to the next world. I think he understood the importance of avoiding over commitment because he had witnessed what happened in Iraq and in Afghanistan. But he had a very hard time holding back. And I think he got pushed into Libya, pushed into Syria, pushed into increasing the commitment in Afghanistan, in some respects against his better instincts.
So I think in some ways he could have been the president who pivoted the United States to the next grand strategy, but it didn't work. And in some respects, that set the stage for Donald Trump coming to office on what he called an America first agenda. You know, I don't think that Trump does what he is told by the Israelis. In some ways, I think right now it's the opposite. I think it's Trump telling the Israelis what to do. My own view as to why Trump invaded Iran is that he was thinking about his legacy.
He had had successes in using military power in Venezuela, in various countries in the Middle east, including the airstrikes against Iran last year. And he wanted to go down in history as the American president who had the guts to do what none of his predecessors would do, topple the Islamic Republic. Well, guess what? It didn't work. That war went sideways. And Donald Trump is now figuring out how to get an off ramp and end a war that has caused huge disruption to the global economy and skyrocketing oil prices and food prices here in the United States and all around the
[00:08:48] Speaker B: world, notably fuel prices affecting India and the global South. Of course, obviously, I would say the Lebanese would then start to blame Trump for what's happening in Lebanon. If he has any control over what's happening here in West Asia, he's uniting the BRICS countries. He's uniting China and India, arguably by his policies. So you have no sympathy with the idea that there is actually great power strategy behind Trump in that these are attacks on China.
The kidnapping of Maduro was an attack on China. Venezuela being a source, of course, of resources for China, and of course, obviously, China being Iran's biggest customer. The attack on Iran is also an attack on China.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: No, Austin, I don't think that's what's going on here.
I think it would be a fool's errand to try to identify some clear strategic vision that is guiding Donald Trump.
This is a president who's acting on instinct, not on strategic thinking. He has around him a very small inner circle. He is not sifting through the advice that's being provided to him by the intelligence community and the State Department and Defense Department. He's really sort of flying by the seat of his pants, if you will. And that's why I think you see such inconstancy and unpredictability in American foreign policy that where, for example, his justifications for attacking Iran seem to shift multiple times per day.
I do think on China, we've seen a shift from a president who in his first term, I think was decidedly confrontational, resorted to tariffs of various sorts and ramped up confrontation with China, which then increased during the Biden presidency. But I do believe that most recent trip to Beijing, where he attempted to be nice to Xi Jinping, was really a sign of a different approach, where he's challenging an American foreign policy community that is in many respects, very hostile to China and saying, no, I want to find a way to work with Xi Jinping. I want to lower the temperature, I want to fashion various kinds of trade deals. Whether the Chinese are now prepared to reciprocate, we'll have to wait and see.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: Yeah, they're making threats, if anything. So where does that leave the Council on Foreign Relations where you work and scholars who work there, because presumably they're always scrambling every hour to find out what's going on. But you will be back to advising a future president, because Trump's time is very limited now.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: Well, you know, I think that there has been a shift here in the United States during Trump's first year. There was very, very little pushback.
Little pushback from civil society, from the courts, from Congress, from the media.
Companies were taking a knee.
And now I think you really have seen an inflection point where not just Democrats and disaffected voters are starting to stand up and speak up. But you're beginning to see the courts push back. More decidedly, you're beginning to see Congress push back, really. For the first time in his presidency, Republicans are beginning to distance themselves from Donald Trump.
They're beginning to take steps such as hemming him in on the Iran war that we haven't seen.
So it feels as if the Trump presidency has peaked, that the system is finally working to hem Trump in and to push back against his claims to extending executive authority.
We don't really know where the midterms are going to go or where the 2028 presidential elections are going to go. But judging by where we are today, judging by a president who promised to ease the affordability crisis, but has only made that affordability crisis worse, I do think we're going to see the pendulum swing back toward the Democrats.
Do the Democrats have a plan that's ready to go? I think no. The Democrats are ideologically divided. They're not sure whether to move to the center or move to the left.
So we're in a country that I think will be divided for quite some time. And when we have elections, I think in general, the voters will throw the bums out because nobody seems to have the answers to the problems that are confronting the American electorate. And this is a phenomenon that we see in many democracies today, where I think what we're witnessing is the impact of technological change on automation, on workers, the decline of the middle class, the hollowing out of the political center. This to me is a feature of our current moment that I think explains a lot of what's going on.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Professor, we'll continue after the break. Keep watching New Order.
You're watching New Order. Professor Kupchan, you were talking about the new order and the new order to be on how the world is changing.
Let's just take sanctions, for instance. I'm not sure what the views are in the Washington think tank world are about sanctions. I mean, an often quoted recently, very much quoted by people like Jeffrey Sachs, for instance, is the 38 million killed by US sanctions between 1970 and 2021 in the Lancet Medical Journal.
India just ignored post Ukraine conflict NATO nation sanctions. Do you think sanctions will ever play the role that they have done, they played under the Obama administration, which you served.
Do you think it's the end of the United States sanctioning so many countries all around the world as an attempt to try and influence policy?
[00:15:34] Speaker A: No. I think you're going to See, sanctions remain on the shelf as a go to policy in part because it's easy. Right? It doesn't.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: Not for the 38 million that were killed, obviously.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: No, I'm talking about politically easy for the United States. It doesn't involve sending out boots on the ground and aircraft carriers. It doesn't involve running the risks of military force. So it's a sort of go to way of expressing displeasure. But I do think, Afshin, that we've seen time and again the inability of sanctions to achieve their goals, especially in today's interdependent and globalized world.
Right after the Russians invaded Ukraine, the Europeans, the United States effectively unplugged Russia from the western economy. Well, what did Russia do? It just looked to the east and to the south. It moved its supply chains.
Iran has been hit by biting sanctions for years now, including a US naval blockade in the Gulf of Oman.
Has that succeeded in toppling the Iranian government or convincing Tehran to back away from policies seen as destabilizing by the United States? No.
So it's very difficult to find clear examples where sanctions succeeded in achieving their goal. And I think that's simply going to be the reality that we live in today simply because countries have so many options when their ties to the US economy or the US banking system are cut off. And that will be increasingly true, Akshayan, as we see alternative payment systems emerge. The Chinese are pushing out their payment system. The BRICS are developing their own internal BRICS payment system. This is a way of facilitating de dollarization and moving away from the ability of the United States to impair transactions that are dollar denominated. So I do think that increasingly over time sanctions will become a less effective tool.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: I mean, there are clearly people in Washington that don't share your view about the imminence of a new order.
I don't know, maybe you can give me an indication of how prevailing is your view and perspective. But you want the to take the lead in quote, fashioning a new consensus.
Do you think though after the US support for say the genocide in Gaza, the US obviously war on Iran, that anyone in the global south or say at the BRICS summit in September in New Delhi will be thinking the United States should have any role in fashioning the new consensus?
[00:18:37] Speaker A: You know, has the United States damaged its brand?
You bet.
Is American democracy now underperforming? You bet.
But I don't believe that this is the new normal. I do believe that once we figure out how to rebuild the American middle class, how to build an employment and Education ecosystem for the digital era.
Democracy will again prove that it can deliver for citizens better than alternatives. And so I do think that the United States will come back to being a country that is out there putting ideas in the hopper about how to organize global governance. And I do worry that others are not contributing to that effort, at least for now. Right. What are Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin saying?
They're saying we want multipolarity, we want the end of American hegemony. They know what they don't want, Right. Which is the old world order, Pax Americana. But they don't really know what multipolarity means. They don't have proposals for governing a world of multipolarity.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: So I think that we're discussing in Delhi at the meeting.
It's taken a while, obviously it took a while for the British Empire to be destroyed.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: Well, good luck to them. I hope that at that summit they come up with some good ideas. But in the end of the day, it's going to take conversations across geopolitical and ideological dividing where the United States in this.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: I mean, I don't know whether there's going to be a representative in Delhi for the BRICS conference. And in fact, I asked Jim o', Neill, the famous banker who came up with the term brics, whether he could envisage the United States joining brics.
I mean, is that something you think should be on the table, the United States joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and brics?
[00:20:41] Speaker A: Well, to the best of my knowledge, the United States is not invited, and I'm not sure it would join if it were invited. But in the end of the day, what we will need are groupings that cut across these dividing lines. We have one, the G20, right, where you have BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organization members meeting with the G7 and NATO members. The problem is it's fly in, fly out summits, it's anodyne communiques. I think what we really need are sustained dialogue among these key players with the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, talking to the Europeans, to the United States, to other countries from the global south, that's not happening yet. We're still, I think, in some ways trying to manage the decline of the old order. But this conversation, Afshin, the conversation that hopefully will happen at the BRICS summit, that's exactly the kind of direction that I think we need to head in.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: But isn't the United States just too poor to participate? If the dollar, as you say, is gonna reduce in its importance as a global reserve currency, if you just look at literacy rates.
If you look at life expectancy rates, you just see the poverty of the United States. It just doesn't compare with what's happening in the rest of the world. Anacostia, D.C. 63 years is the life expectancy. In Cuba, it's 78. North Korea, 74. Venezuela, 76. Now in Gaza, it was 81, let alone Russia and China at 77, 79. And India within that kind of. Is the United States just too far gone. And as you said, the sanctions are continuing, so it's isolating itself to be able to be part of the new order.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: No, I think you are counting out the United States in an extraordinarily premature way. Right. The United States still has by far the world's largest gdp, still by far the most capable military with bases in just about every quarter of the globe.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: The military that still has the can't
[00:23:04] Speaker A: win war still has, despite Donald Trump's efforts, the best universities in the world, the best high sec sector and venture capital and entrepreneurship. That's not going to change. Right. So the United States is going to be at or near the top of the heap for decades to come. And when I look at China, I see a country that's doing well, but boy, does it have problems. A demographic crisis, a real estate crisis, growing popular discontent because younger Chinese, including those with the best degrees, can't find jobs.
Russia has made the terrible mistake of trying to invade and conquer Ukraine.
Putin is going to be paying for that mistake for generations.
And so a lot of different countries all have problems. Does the United States have problems? Yes. Is it likely to remain the most influential country in the world, probably alongside China, for decades to come? Yes, it will.
[00:24:12] Speaker B: Professor Charles Kupchen, thank you.
[00:24:15] Speaker A: My pleasure. Good to be with you.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: And now I'm joined by Zahra Khan with some of your questions. Professor Charles Kupchan, special assistant to Obama there, embracing the new order. Maybe he wants to come and work here.
[00:24:33] Speaker C: I think he might be gunning for my position here. So I have to make sure to get all these questions in from our audience as soon as possible.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: Council on Foreign Relations. They can come and work as our interns anytime.
[00:24:43] Speaker C: An open letter to them.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: They're opened by a new world Order. And the new order.
[00:24:48] Speaker C: So INTP1 has asked, has Trump given up on the midterms? Could the lobby not promise to protect him from impeachment votes?
[00:24:54] Speaker B: In any case, questions from the viewers already while we were away.
I've got to say, it looks like he's given up on the midterms if you look at the polls because the record lows, it's as if he doesn't care at all, 61% strongly disapproving of him, but he pretends not to. Kupchan said he hasn't given up on the midterms.
But as for the lobby protecting him from impeachment after he loses the midterms, which I think he definitely will look at Prince Andrew, the Israeli lobby, they don't protect people, do they?
They didn't protect Peter Mandelson, the British ambassador to the United States. Once they use you, the Israeli lobby, they throw you away when you're not in power anymore. And when Trump loses power, he loses importance for the Israeli lobby. So Trump has a very poor future ahead of him, arguably even he's done everything Netanyahu wanted to, regardless of people saying, like Charles Guptian that, oh, he told Netanyahu he was a crazy person, as he did in the interview earlier in this this week.
[00:26:00] Speaker C: But your prediction is loss in the midterms?
[00:26:03] Speaker B: I think I never make predictions, but I think that's pretty sure. Yeah. Senate needs 2/3 majority for its impeachment. Definitely the House will impeach him.
[00:26:13] Speaker C: Interesting. And the here Fordian has asked, is Israel a sovereign nation or is it an extension of US Foreign policy?
[00:26:20] Speaker B: Now that is a really good question, isn't it? I think it's full duplex. They both run each other, although if you were just to look at financial terms, 34 billion is the estimate for the genocide and for the Israeli war. It's $46 million a day coming from US people, a country where 43 million can't eat without federal assistance. All that cash being poured into mass slaughter of men, women and children in Palestine. And today in Leban, who wins out of this? I think it's a relationship both ways around. Both gain out of this terrible lack of humanity.
[00:27:01] Speaker C: Now, provided you don't get one of our guests to replace me, I'll be here next week with more questions from the audience.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Thanks, Zara Khan. And that's it from me. Also, Afshin Ratanshi. Remember to follow us on social media. And here's a question for you. Are secondary sanctions turning middle powers into frontline actors in great power rivalry? See if you can figure that one out before you answer it. Send us your answer on XewauerTV. Join us next Sunday as we continue to track shifting global power and where India sits in this new order.
