America’s Lonely Future: David Frum on Trump’s “Predatory” Foreign Policy

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Well, with Trump’s inauguration on the horizon, pressing conversations continue around the president-elect’s policies, both at home and abroad. David Frum is a political commentator and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. And in his latest piece for The Atlantic, “America’s Lonely Future,” he warns that the U.S. could become a global bully. He joins Walter Isaacson to discuss.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: And, David Frum, welcome to the show.

DAVID FRUM, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Thank you.

ISAACSON: 80 years ago, at the end of World War II, the United States helped set up a world order that was involved with economic cooperation coming out of the Bretton Woods Agreement. It was a defense alliance against tyranny, like NATO, and international order, as in the U.N. Now, in your Atlantic piece, you say all of that is threatened. What worries you the most?

FRUM: Well, Donald Trump is often described as an isolationist, but that’s not really true. And that’s not the way he’s different from all of his predecessors, from Franklin Roosevelt through Ronald Reagan forward. Trump isn’t an isolationist in the sense that he’s indifferent to the rest of the world, or he doesn’t have business dealings in Azerbaijan. He’s very much involved with the rest of the world. The difference is, since the Second World War, since the Great Depression, American leaders have understood that America finds its own prosperity and its own security by cooperating with strong allies. The Trump view is essentially predatory. It’s a predatory view of the world, not an isolationist view. Allies — the United States should have — not allies, but subject nations. They should pay tribute instead of cooperating. He’s very clear. He talks to other countries, I want you to pay me. And of course, instead of free and open trade, we should have high tariff walls protecting American markets in order to forcibly force move industries of the future from friends to the United States.

ISAACSON: But part of that notion, as you say, with having high tariff walls and move industries back to the United States, it does seem that a criticism of this world order was that globalism gutted the manufacturing and the jobs of this country. You say in your piece that trade mutually benefits all nations, but sometimes it doesn’t, it seems to me, that after China gets into the WTO, we lose our industrial base. Why am I wrong on that?

FRUM: Well, first, China is — let’s bracket the China case a little bit, because the argument that was used about China was used before that about NAFTA trade with Mexico, about trade with the eastern rim with countries like Taiwan and South Korea. Through all the years since World War II, there have been constant complaints we’re losing things because we trade freely with others. And yet, over that time, the United States has become astonishingly richer in all kinds of ways and we have become richer in tandem with others because they have become richer, too.

ISAACSON: Well, let me halt there because you say we’re astonishingly richer, but a lot of people got rich in the finance industries and everything else. But people who went to the early morning bus to go to work, they got left out of this.

FRUM: You know, I don’t think people have good memories of how poor this country was until very, very recently. We didn’t become poor when Americans left the farm for the factory, and we don’t become poor when people leave the factory for the office, and we don’t become poor because Americans are not mining coal underground. Donald Trump often — one of the reasons he appeals to older voters is his vision of the economy is from 50 years ago. It’s tires, it’s rubber, steel, cars. Those are the industries that are always most present to him. That’s one of the reasons he’s so mad at Germany, is because Germany totally dominates nowadays in the industries of the 1970s and 1980s. Now, if you talk to actual Germans, they will tell you our biggest problem as Germans is we are totally dominant in the industries of the 1970s and 1980s. We’re not doing so well at medical imaging and artificial intelligence, but we’re — you know, we’re all there or whatever it was that made Henry Ford rich. And I think one of the things that we are all in danger of in the aftermath of Trump shock is indulging myths that Donald Trump has sold. And when we try to tell people these myths aren’t true, we’ll be told, well, many people believe them and you can’t contradict the myths that people have that the United States is poor and going backwards and that there’s something magic, there’s something magic about making steel ingots and a country can only be prosperous if it is prosperous in the way it was prosperous in 1975.

ISAACSON: Then explain to me why there’s been a backlash, a populist backlash, not just represented by Donald Trump, but around the world against this system of globalism that left a lot of workers behind.

FRUM: Again, I don’t agree with you at all, and I won’t take time with facts and figures about why it is not true that workers are left behind, but there’s — you are certainly right, there’s been a backlash against globalism across the developed world. So, one of the questions you have to ask, and I challenge people all the time, if you’re trying to understand why in every country there’s this backlash? You need a cause that is common to every country. Germany, which has been a powerhouse of exporting manufactured goods, also has a reactionary populous movement. So, if exporting a lot of manufactured goods was the way to prevent having a nationalist populous movement, you’d expect there wouldn’t be one in Germany. But there is one, a powerful one. What all the developed countries have in common are, I think, three things. First, the aging of the baby boom generation, that huge generation born after the Second World War. They began entering their ’60s in 2010, which is exactly when these movements began to get going, because these people came to the retirement force. And then here’s the second cause, they came into the into retirement at exactly the moment there was a global financial crisis that left many of these baby boomers poor in their 60s than they thought they would be before the financial crisis. And the last thing, and this is the thing that we have in common, unlike the trade balance in common with every developed country is migration on a scale that has never been seen in the history of the world. And that has started again 2010. And that’s a product of global prosperity too. Now, the reason so many people are on the move is not because there are so many more desperate people, it’s because there’s so many more people who can afford $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 to pay a human trafficker to bring them to a place where they could — as a rational investment, try to get a better life. And if a few of these highly motivated people come, it’s better for them and better for the receiving country. But if a lot of them come, it becomes very stressful. And that’s the thing that the United States, Britain, Germany, Canada, France, all the countries have in common, is the migration experience, not the trade experience, which varies so much from place to place.

ISAACSON: Then do you feel that maybe we let in too much asylum seekers and migration, whether it be in France, England, United States?

FRUM: For sure. I think one of the reasons that the Democratic Party in particular has turned toward protectionism, and it must be stressed that while Donald Trump was the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover, Joe Biden was the second most protectionist. It’s because — when Democrats confronted the real problem, immigration, they didn’t want to face it. So, they chose a problem that made them much more comfortable, trade. Because trade allowed them to — the remedies for trade were things that many Democrats liked, a much more statist economic policy, more protection, more government investment. They love doing that. And so, if that was the problem, then they have the answer. If the problem was immigration, they didn’t like it.

ISAACSON: Let me read you something from your piece. You say that other great powers, China, India, Russia, face suspicious and even hostile coalitions of powerful enemies. And then you say the United States is backed by powerful friends. And yet, as I look at it now, we’ve done something that we’ve avoided for 50 years, which is push Russia and China into more of a partnership. And India seems to be leaning in that direction, and Iran. We have some of the biggest countries in the world aligned against us now. So, why has this order something that Donald Trump should protect?

FRUM: Well, the India, Russia or Soviet Union military lines goes back to the 1960s. This — it is not a new thing, but there’s been a lot of defense cooperation between India and Russia, or this predecessor, the Soviet Union. And that has very little to do with the United States and a lot to do with the fact that India and China fought a war in 1962 and the Indians lost. And ever since then, they have looked to China’s other powerful neighbor, first, the Soviet Union and now Russia, as India security partner. And it’s an example of all these countries have very unfortunate geography. India has Pakistan, it has China next door. China is surrounded by — of course, there’s no country in the world the same size as China, but countries that mistrust China from Vietnam to — on its naval borders, the Philippines, Japan, of course, the Soviet Union and Russia above. And it’s not true that the United States pushed India — sorry, China and Russia closer together. Russia decided all by itself to engage in a massive act of aggression against its neighbor Ukraine. The worst act of aggression on the European continent since 1945. Vastly bloodier than even the Yugoslavian civil wars of the 1990s. That aggression has been checked, not completely successfully, but surprisingly successfully. And in desperation, Russia has turned to another great power adversary of the United States, China. What all of this demonstrates is the ever-greater importance of the relationships that the United States does have.

ISAACSON: You talk about the need to protect this international order. You were an adviser to George W. Bush, and you’ve been a long-time part of that Republican wing that was very internationalist, and in the sense of President Bush, the younger, in favor of promoting democracy as part of it. And yet, it got us into wars like Iraq and other places that some people, especially voters these days are saying, well, calling them forever wars. Explain to me how you would defend that.

FRUM: You know, you will never come up with a valid judgment on anything if only do look at one side of the books. If you only look at the debits and never the credits. So, the most important achievement of the United States in the past — in foreign policy, in the past three decades has been something that not a person thinks about until I remind you right now. When George H. W. Bush came to office in 1989, his over — as the Soviet Union was cracking up. His overwhelming, overriding concern was that the 50,000 nuclear warheads in the Soviet Union would come loose and would end up in the hands of rogue states or terrorists or be used by a desperate, failing Soviet Union or Russia. And the United States, with allies, used an enormous amount of resources to create a post-Soviet regime that was so secure that not one of the 50,000 warheads went astray. It was the most astonishing success in American foreign policy since the Marshall Plan. The former weapons of the Soviet Union were converted into fuel for nuclear power plants, not just in the United States, but in France and other allied nations too. And they — and the allied nations wrote the checks to employ those scientists and to secure those nuclear weapons. And it’s completely forgotten. After 9/11, the United States embarked with many allies to try to bring security to Afghanistan and Iraq. And those endeavors were not successful. And that’s — you know, that’s true. And that’s something that, you know, we should study why it wasn’t successful. Were we overambitious? Did we under deliver? What exactly went wrong? And it’s really worth pondering. And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about those questions. The fact that some of our international commitments did not go well should not make us forget the other international commitments that went so well that they are the most important things in American history since the Marshall Plan.

ISAACSON: You posted recently on X that we are headed toward a U.S. constitutional crisis vastly bigger than Watergate. Why do you say that?

FRUM: Well, the score, the center of the Watergate crisis was that President Richard Nixon got involved in a political scandal, either he ordered or people working for him, burglarized the Democratic Party headquarters. Now, this is not something that had never happened before in American politics. It had happened before. But when the Nixon people were caught, Nixon’s response was to try to mobilize the FBI and CIA to shut down the investigation of the burglary. That was Watergate, not the burglary itself. Other presidents have done similarly bad things but the — this mobilization of CIA and FBI for political ends, but it failed. It completely failed. Neither agency would cooperate. When Nixon tried to install a stooge as head of the FBI, the agency rejected him. And the deep throat leaks came from people at the FBI who said you can’t put a stooge director in at the top of this agency to protect you from your own wrongdoing. Nixon was unsuccessful. Nixon never got to see the tax returns of people he wanted to see. He asked for them. He never got them. The agent — the agencies refused to deliver them. So, when I say it’s bigger than Watergate, what Trump wants to do is take control of, especially the FBI, but also other security agencies and use them as arms of his personal power. Nixon failed. Trump is on the way to succeeding. Nixon did it secretly. Trump is doing it publicly. Nixon was opposed by his own party. Trump is supported by his own party. So, it is the same predicament we faced in the 1970s, but this time, bigger and more dangerous and more likely to succeed.

ISAACSON: You talk about, in your piece, the personal corruption of Trump’s family or the money that may be going to them. But explain to me now, is that undermined, that argument, by President Biden’s pardoning of his son, Hunter Biden?

FRUM: It’s not — the argument is not undermined, but his credibility is hurt for sure. Because when I’m trying to explain to people why it’s wrong that the president own a hotel in the center of Washington and ask every guest who comes into his Oval Office, did you stay in my hotel last night? And when the president refuses the FBI request to demolish its obsolete headquarters and replace it because there was a risk that the FBI headquarters would be replaced by a hotel that would compete with his, I can explain all of that, but it doesn’t help when the people defend who Trump and say, yes, but what about Biden and his son? Right? Yes, you can say, look, that’s not as bad. It’s a blot on an otherwise very honest career, but it doesn’t help. And that’s why it was so wrong for President Biden to do it.

ISAACSON: Your piece in The Atlantic is about something even larger than the things we’ve just discussed. It’s about what the idea of America is. And you talk about the great metaphor of a city on a hill. It comes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, but it’s also John Winthrop, when the pilgrims first come to America, he gives a sermon of, we shall be a city on a hill. And then, it’s Ronald Reagan’s trope throughout his presidency and to the end of his presidency. I think in his farewell address you quote him as saying, “How stands this city on a hill?” How would you answer that question?

FRUM: For millions of people around the world, whenever they’re — America’s criticized all the time, there are all kinds of things about American life that people don’t like from, you know, fast food to Mickey Mouse to, you know, many mistakes in American foreign policy. There are a lot of things to criticize. And yet, when the chips are down and people are in trouble, all over the world, they look to the United States as the answer. It is this golden light of what is possible, even if we don’t always live up to it. Because even when we don’t live up to it, we believe we should. And that’s Reagan’s metaphor. Reagan subtly changed the meaning of the city on the hill. When Jesus used it, when John Winthrop meant it, they meant because the city was on a hill, it was very visible. And therefore, everyone had to be on their best behavior at all time. Reagan had that suggestion of pride and beauty. But Donald Trump very much sees the United States as like other nations, only maybe worse. When his friend Bill O’Reilly in a TV interview asked him, is Putin a killer? Trump answered, we’re not so innocent either. Now, in some very, very deep way, that’s true, we’re not so innocent. In the United States, sometimes to protect the things that Americans have to protect, American presidents have done some rough things, and some of those rough things do not stand up to scrutiny. Other rough things do stand up to scrutiny. And yet, we still say they were rough. But they — the belief has always been when we depart from our ideals. We understand that we’re doing it and we don’t compromise the ideal itself. And maybe we apologize later, or maybe we make an excuse, but we understand this is where we fell short because this is — over here is where we’re supposed to be. Donald Trump is the first president since Roosevelt, maybe for a long time before that, who has no sense of the United States as owing anything to the rest of the planet. No sense of it being an example, no sense of it being something that should be admired. He wants to dominate through force and power. And the problem is no one, no one is that powerful to dominate the whole world. The United States has been strong because it is trusted. The United States is strong because it has friends. And if you become just another big empire like China, like India, like the way Russia was before Putin wrecked it in the Ukraine war, people may fear you, but they won’t respect you. They won’t trust you.

ISAACSON: David Frum, thank you so much for joining us.

FRUM: Thank you.