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| BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Hello, everyone, and welcome to “Amanpour.” Here’s what’s coming up. Trump touches down in Tokyo, with trade and security top of the agenda. We’ll have the details on what to expect from the second leg of the president’s Asia tour. Then — (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: I’ve always had a great relationship with Vladimir Putin, but this has been very disappointing. (END VIDEO CLIP) GOLODRYGA: — U.S.-Russia relations get icy. As Moscow tests its nuclear missiles, I asked former U.S. ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith how the West should react and we discussed Ukraine’s ongoing fight for survival. Also, ahead — (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) BETH MACY, AUTHOR, “PAPER GIRL”: Public schools which are the foundation of our democracy are in really rough shape. (END VIDEO CLIP) GOLODRYGA: — a portrait of poverty in America. Journalist Beth Macy speaks to Walter Isaacson about “Paper Girl,” her new memoir documenting the decline of her Ohio hometown. Welcome to the program, everyone. I’m Bianna Golodryga in New York, sitting in for Christiane Amanpour. President Trump is halfway through a whirlwind week of diplomacy in Asia that has so far seen him strike deals with four Southeast Asian countries during his visit to Malaysia. He’s now on his second stop, Washington’s crucial regional ally Japan. And following a warm royal welcome from the emperor, Trump will meet with the nation’s newly elected prime minister Sanae Takaichi who will look to set a positive tone for future relations in her first big test as leader. But she must contend with a challenging backdrop. The U.S. has already won a $550 billion investment pledge from her debt-filled nation in exchange for respite over crippling tariffs. Also at stake is Japan’s security in the face of rising threats from Chin, which has agreed to a framework for a trade deal with the United States. This ahead of Trump’s expected meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday in South Korea. Joining me now to dig into all of this is David Sanger, national security correspondent for the New York Times. David, it is good to see you my friend. So, The Economist has called this trip one of Trump’s most important weeks of diplomacy since returning to office, it’s also been called one of his most perilous as well. He’s going from Malaysia to Japan and culminating obviously with that meeting in South Korea with President Xi. Do you agree with that assessment at the high stakes here from this trip? What really is at stake? DAVID SANGER, NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: I think it’s high stakes, Bianna, but I don’t think it’s high stakes necessarily for the reasons that they’ll be talking about the most publicly. The president obviously is focused mostly on trade and tariffs and obviously those are important to them. You mentioned at the opening there that the Japanese had to sort of do a deal where they agreed to spend $550 billion basically to avoid high tariffs. And now, they’re in the situation where the president himself may be deciding where that money goes instead of the Japanese politicians. That’s a hard thing to explain in Japan. But the really central issue throughout the region is trying to contain China’s growing power. The South China Sea, its claim on lands in the Philippines, obviously Taiwan. And the president has very little of that on the agenda. He’s spoken barely at all about it because he is so focused on the trade deal which is fine but only one element of the broad military and technological and financial competitiveness with China. GOLODRYGA: Before we get to China, I do want to stay in Japan for just a moment as we have that meeting tomorrow between President Trump and their new — the first female prime minister in the country’s history. SANGER: Yes. GOLODRYGA: And these two have not met in the past. This will be their first meeting. They really don’t have a shared history except that this is a conservative prime minister and she was closely aligned with Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister who was assassinated, and arguably the closest contact to foreign leader of President Trump’s during his first term. And your newspaper wrote about it this way. Ms. Takaichi, a dyed-in-the- wool conservative, is seen by some officials and analysts as Japan’s best shot at building chemistry with Mr. Trump and warding off his punishing instincts. As we noted, she already walked in with a laundry list of to-do items, the $550 billion fund, which I would imagine she’s trying to at least put in her voice as to how that fund will be allocated here in the United States, as well as trying to negotiate some sort of tariff deal that would not be as crippling and punishing as those initial figures were. SANGER: So, she’s got some things going for her. Obviously, she was a mentee of Prime Minister Abe, and that’s already put her in good stead with the president. I think there’s a chance that she could develop the kind of relationship that, say, Prime Minister Meloni has of Italy with the president, which is to say that they share a sort of a view of the world that President Trump can embrace. I think what she’s got going against her is that from his days as a real estate developer, the president has had issues with Japan that basically are a bit outdated. They’re based on an era in the late ’80s and early ’90s when the fear was that Japan was going to overtake the United States in a series of technologies. I knew that era well. I was the Times’ bureau chief in Tokyo in the early ’90s and covered that period of time. I think the president’s been slow in making the shift to understanding Japan as sort of an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific, as one of its former prime ministers used to refer to it, that can be central to the China strategy. And you know, the president doesn’t do alliances really well. And I think that’s probably the area where he could make the most progress. GOLODRYGA: Right. And we should note, that Japan is boosting its defense spending to 2 percent of GDP. And as we noted with that $550 billion investment project in the United States, already trying to cater to President Trump as well and establish closer relations between the two. Let’s move on now to China in this anticipated meeting on Thursday between President Xi and President Trump. Over the weekend, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed a U.S.-China framework deal that would defer an announcement that really not only shocked the United States, I would say shocked the world, when China threatened to institute an export control on all of their rare earth minerals. Now, that appears to be delayed at least for another year. They may be renewing U.S. soybean purchases. U.S. tariffs would then go down. What kind of a deal is this? Is this something significant that you think the United States can work with going forward or is this just a stopgap? SANGER: This is a deal to buy time. So, on the soybean element of it, I mean, the president is resolving a crisis that the president helped create with his own tariffs. He did the tariffs. The Chinese then turned around and cut off the soybean production, soybean purchases. The soybean farmers then went to the White House and said they’re one of our biggest customers in the in the world. If they’re not buying our stuff, the U.S. government’s going to have to step in and save the soybean farmers at a cost of billions of dollars. So, of course, the president has to resolve this. And the Chinese knew it. On the rare earths, who started this kind of technique? It was the United States when, for many good reasons, it cut off the Chinese from our most advanced semiconductors and from the equipment produced largely in Europe to produce those semiconductors. So, the Chinese looked around and said, what do the Americans really need that we have? And the answer was these rare earths needed in automobiles, needed in batteries, needed in defense products. They cut it off. The president then, of course, went and declared new tariffs and so forth. So, what he’s doing is undoing the blowups that he had earlier in his — the past few months. Now, the question is, does any of that amount to a real resolution? And I think the president has recognized that when you get into a war of cutting off vital supplies with the Chinese, the Chinese usually can win that one. GOLODRYGA: Yes, it’s not just the U.S. that would be impacted from an export control from China cutting off access to rare-earth minerals, and we saw sort of a shock heard around the world from other countries. And I’m wondering, because some analysts have said that Xi Jinping may have overplayed his hand here if he had been trying to build China up, especially in a Trump 2.0, as the more stable, reliable trade partner, as opposed to what many have described as a more erratic President Trump and relationship with the United States. Did he unintentionally perhaps hurt himself and the position he was putting his country in? SANGER: Well, he certainly was showing that he could cut off these rare- earths, and he’s done it before. He did it to Japan about a decade ago when they got into a dispute over territory and the arrest of some Chinese fishermen and so forth. And he cut Japan off for a little while and ended up getting the Japanese to back down. So, he recognizes this is enormously powerful. China controls about 80 to 85 percent of these rare-earths, not only because they’ve got the material, but because they have the refining capability there, and we don’t. So, President Trump’s got a long way to go before he can combat that issue. The best thing the Chinese have going for them right now is the president picking fights with Canada and the European Union and others who previously had aligned with the United States on a contain-China strategy, and who are now rethinking that, because they recognize that if they can’t trust the U.S., then trusting the Chinese, while not ideal, is at least as good a bet, or at least they need to hedge. GOLODRYGA: Yes, and we’ll talk to our next guest, Julianne Smith, about this very issue and how we’re starting to see trends where U.S. allies are, for the first time, trying to circumvent perhaps the United States and develop their own separate relationships and alliances because of the question of U.S. commitment. I do want to ask you about something else Donald Trump said over the weekend, because he told reporters he expects a deal on everything, from soybeans, maybe even nuclear, maybe even, he said, de-escalation with Vladimir Putin. Here’s what he said. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: We’ll make a deal on, I think, everything. I think we’re going to make a deal on soybeans and the farmers. I think we’re going to make a deal on maybe even nuclear. You know, President Putin, in his call, mentioned to me about nuclear, where we do a de-escalation, and I’m fine with that. I think it’s good. I think it’s a very appropriate thing. (END VIDEO CLIP) GOLODRYGA: OK. And then just, I believe it was today, Russia tested a nuclear-powered missile. On the issue of China and its role in supporting Russia and its war in Ukraine, President Trump has also said that perhaps this is an issue that he can raise with Xi Jinping. Do you think he will, and do you think that it will be perhaps an effective conversation, and now, three and a half years into this war, finally putting more pressure on China and not just India or other countries where we’ve introduced sanctions for buying Russian oil? SANGER: So, Bianna, the most interesting geopolitical development in the past four or five years, to my mind, has been the coming together of Russia and China, and to a lesser degree, Iran and North Korea, in not an alliance, but a pretty effective partnership. And you saw that in the celebrations for the end of World War II that were held in Beijing, where you saw President Putin come to Beijing. You saw the Iranians and North Koreans there as well. And the question is, can the president find a way to insert himself to separate China from Russia and these other authoritarian states? And so, far, I haven’t seen a concerted strategy to go do that. The Chinese do not want Russia to lose the Ukraine war, and they are providing them with technology, and I think they will probably continue to provide them with that. They like buying the oil that they’re getting from, and gas that they’re getting, but mostly oil, from the Russians at low cost. And while I think they may cut back for a bit, I don’t think they’re going to completely cut them off. So, the issue that the president faces is in some ways the issue that Kissinger and Nixon faced in the late ’60s and early ’70s, which is, how do you design a way to keep Russia and China from coming together, to exploit their own differences? And we have not heard the president express that strategy yet. Maybe he can begin to negotiate on nuclear weapons issues, and we have not heard the president express that strategy yet. Maybe he can begin to negotiate on nuclear weapons issues. The Chinese have the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal on Earth right now, but I’m not sure if I was the Chinese that I would take my foot off the pedal until they have matched what the U.S. and Russia have. GOLODRYGA: Do you think, though, that if he wanted to, President Trump could effectively pressure China with perhaps additional tariffs, I don’t know what other measures, that would make it clear to him that it’s not in his interest to continue to support Russia the way they have been thus far? SANGER: I’m not sure that President Xi can be pressured particularly on this issue. I think he may back off tactically for a bit. But let’s face it, the reason that President Xi and President Putin have developed this relationship, they’ve met more than 70 times since the two of them were, you know, in leadership positions, and Xi came in nearly 15 years ago now. And the reason that they have come together is they want to design an alternative system to the American domination of the Western trading systems and the Western alliances. And they know they are more powerful doing that together. Now, does that mean they completely trust each other? No. Are there divisions we can exploit? Certainly there are. But, you know, the president lives — President Trump lives in the world in which he thinks that everybody will act only in their economic interests, that if you threaten sanctions, if you threaten cutoff of markets, that’s going to change behavior. Well, it didn’t stop Vladimir Putin from taking Ukraine, even though it was clear to him that there would be sanctions. It hasn’t stopped the Chinese from expanding their claims in the South China Sea, in the Philippines, in threatening Taiwan. Sometimes there are national interests that outweigh your economic, immediate economic gains. GOLODRYGA: Yes. So, perhaps this friendship for life between Russia and China will live to see another day or — SANGER: Or at least for now. GOLODRYGA: Yes, at least for now. All right. David Sanger, good to see you. Thank you. SANGER: Wonderful to see you. Thanks for having me. GOLODRYGA: Well, next to Russia, which has tested, as we just noted, its first nuclear-powered missile and is preparing to deploy it, so says President Vladimir Putin in a show of strength against President Trump, who scrapped a summit with him and imposed direct sanctions on Moscow for the first time in his second term. Meanwhile, the Kremlin is accelerating its offensive in Ukraine in an apparent bid to maximize leverage ahead of any negotiations. And Kyiv is striking back however it can, including a wide-reaching drone attack overnight. Struggling to broker a peace deal, Trump is now hoping his visit to Asia could provide an opening. Take a listen. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: Well, I’d love China to help us out with Russia. We put very big sanctions on Russia. I think those sanctions are going to be — you know, they’re very biting, they’re very strong. But I’d like to see China help us out. I have a good relationship with, as you know, President Xi. Very good. We’re going to be meeting. We’ll have a good meeting. I’m pretty sure we’re going to have a great meeting. Maybe a great meeting. (END VIDEO CLIP) GOLODRYGA: Well, our next guest has her own ideas about how America should respond to Russia. She lays out in a new article for Foreign Affairs, “The New Eurasian Order.” Julianne Smith served as President Biden’s ambassador to NATO, and she joins me now from Washington, D.C. Julianne, it’s good to see you. Your piece goes on to say, America must link its Atlantic and Pacific strategies. I want to first get you to respond to the news that I had just discussed with David Sanger, how President Trump just over the weekend said that they could possibly talk about nuclear weapons between he and President Xi and even Vladimir Putin at some upcoming meeting. And now, we know Russia has tested a nuclear-powered missile, presenting it as a direct threat to both the U.S., Ukraine and the West. How seriously, first of all, should NATO be viewing this announcement? JULIANNE SMITH, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO NATO: Well, no doubt this was the big headline of the day over at the NATO alliance. This alliance monitors very closely all of the activities in Russia as it relates to their strategic forces. This alliance was designed 75 years ago to defend NATO territory against Soviet and now Russian aggression. So, I suspect they probably were in emergency session if they didn’t already have a North Atlantic Council meeting scheduled. And this will be a topic for the alliance, no doubt, in the weeks ahead to think through any additional implications for NATO deterrence, whether or not posture needs to be moved further into Eastern Europe, what more the United States and the other nuclear powers in the alliance can do together. GOLODRYGA: We’ve seen almost daily incursions by Russia sort of testing that strength and unity of that NATO alliance. We’ve spent quite a few weeks covering it recently, clearly no accident from Russia really trying to test how far it could strike into NATO territory. I’m just wondering, from your assessment now that you’re no longer in that role, how is the alliance holding up? SMITH: The alliance is in great shape, considering that it’s 75 years old. Of course, we have the new commitment by all allies to spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense, that is a major step forward for the allies. NATO continues to enhance its deterrence. It continues to support our friends in Ukraine. But I will tell you this. When it comes to those gray zone or hybrid challenges, like the drones flying into Polish airspace or an undersea cable being cut, or even those Russian jets that flew into Estonian airspace a couple weeks ago, those do occasionally present dilemmas for the alliance because it’s less clear which tools the allies should be using and whether or not NATO’s Article 5 commitment, an attack on one is an attack on all, actually applies to some of these situations. So, the alliance is building out a toolkit to cope with these types of gray zone challenges. It’s getting stronger to defend itself, for example, against cybersecurity attacks. But Russia likes to use these types of tactics. It prefers those gray zone tactics. It’s a little cloudier, and they believe that they can drive a wedge right through the alliance. To date, NATO unity is still strong. Its resolve is strong. I know that. I talk regularly to our allies. But those gray zone tactics, I’m afraid, are going to keep coming from Moscow. GOLODRYGA: And that has led President Trump, for the first time since he’s returned to office, to sanction Russia’s oil industry. And unlike the sanctions that we saw on oil companies in the Biden administration, which I think sanctioned the third and fourth largest Russian oil companies, President Trump went after the two largest, that then led the economic envoy from Russia to travel here to Washington, D.C., for talks. How meaningful was that sanction from President Trump in your view? And how do you think Russia has responded internally to this new threat? SMITH: I think those sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil were absolutely critical to get — getting Putin’s attention. I do not believe that the summit in Alaska really triggered any concrete actions on the part of the Russians. I think President Putin believed that he could play for time and avoid moving towards some sort of ceasefire as it relates to the war in Ukraine. But this step, this step that the Trump administration has taken to go after those two very large oil and gas companies in Russia, will, I think, show the Russians that now the United States is taking a different position. I wish we would have had this position months ago, but I’m glad to see the president applying pressure. We should have applied pressure at the beginning of the Trump administration, but here we are. And I think the fact that Russia sent someone immediately over to start engaging in a conversation signals to me that Putin now knows that he does not have the upper hand and he cannot play around anymore and try to have these summits without committing to a tangible and concrete result. GOLODRYGA: Well, let’s hear from that envoy himself and what he said, I believe, in an interview with CNN. This is Kirill Dmitriev. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) KIRILL DMITRIEV, KREMLIN SPECIAL ENVOY: Russia really wants not just a ceasefire, but the final solution to the conflict. And actually, President Trump made the Truth post about this, because ceasefire can always be broken. It’s really a temporary solution. Many people can use it to do all sorts of rearmament and preparation for continuation of conflict, whereas I believe Russia and the U.S. and Ukraine are actually quite close to a diplomatic solution. It’s a big move by President Zelenskyy to already acknowledge that it’s about battle lines. You know, his previous position was that Russia should leave completely. So, actually, I think we are reasonably close to a diplomatic solution that can be worked out. (END VIDEO CLIP) GOLODRYGA: Are these just nice words meant to cater to a receptive, at times, White House looking to hear this, that Russia is eager now to talk and also speaking to CNN, to an American audience or do you think there’s more — something substantial here this time around? SMITH: I will believe that they are serious about an end to the war in Ukraine when we hear it directly from President Putin. It’s great that they sent someone over, and I think that does signal that we’ve captured their attention and their understanding that the White House is shifting its position on this entire war. But we really need to hear directly from President Putin that he’s ready to talk in concrete terms about a ceasefire in Ukraine. This is a war that Russia started. They could stop it today if they so desired. And so, I will take it seriously when we hear directly from Putin about what he’s actually willing to do to end this war. GOLODRYGA: Yes, and we should note President Zelenskyy welcomed these new sanctions from the Trump administration, but also went on to say that Ukraine continues to need long-range weapons and missiles, especially as the winter months are quickly approaching. It’s interesting in your piece, Julianne, you bring up exactly a year ago where a group of South Korean intelligence officials warned NATO officials of something that they were shocked to see, and that was North Korea entering the war in its support for Russia in Ukraine by sending in its own troops to the battle. This has been now a year where we’ve been reporting on this new alliance between North Korea now and Russia. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about China as well and Iran. A year out, do you think that the United States has, I would say, responded aggressively enough to this new dynamic in the playing field? SMITH: No, I don’t believe so. I do believe, as you heard your prior guest, David Sanger, talk about this, that the evolving relationship between China and Russia and increasingly North Korea and Iran as well is something that should concern all of us and certainly concern the current U.S. administration. This is a relationship that’s taking shape across multiple vectors. We see these four countries cooperating not just in Ukraine, but they often parrot each other’s messages. They send out the same disinformation. They use the same hybrid or gray zone tactics. They’re looking at cyber-attacks against the West, against countries in Europe, North America, and against our friends in the Indo-Pacific. So, as those four countries are assembling their team on the field. We need to assemble our own team of democratic allies. We need to work closer with our friends in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. This is something that the Biden administration spent quite a bit of time on. As NATO ambassador, I worked quite a bit to bring our Indo-Pacific partners into the alliance to work hand-in-glove with us on a variety of challenges. And the relationship was really in the process of deepening in some very constructive ways. As you noted, it was South Korea that came into the alliance and briefed us on those North Korean soldiers that were showing up in Russia to fight in Ukraine. But I get the sense that this administration would rather have our allies focus on their own regions. Europe does Europe. The Indo-Pacific allies focus on their challenges in their neighborhood. And increasingly, the United States looks at the Western hemisphere. I think this approach is short-sighted. I’d like to see the administration do more to bring democratic allies together so that we can fortify our defenses against some of what these four countries are throwing at us. That is the best way to proceed. And that is the way we can defend anything that those four countries will do in multiple theaters at once, using multiple domains. GOLODRYGA: Yes, your piece says that the U.S. is, quote, “focused on maintaining order in the Western hemisphere, defending the homelAnd and limiting commitments abroad.” And then you go on to argue that the U.S. must link its Atlantic and Pacific strategies, because Asia and Europe are no longer separate theaters right now. So, given that, how prepared are the U.S. allies and the alliance system right now for a multi-theater war? SMITH: Well, it was interesting. Initially, during the last couple of years, we were the ones, we the United States, we were encouraging our friends in Europe to sit down with our allies in the Indo-Pacific and look for greater opportunities to work together. AUKUS was one example, but there were countless other examples. I do think at this point, though, we see a situation where Europeans and our friends in the Indo-Pacific actually no longer need a nudge from the United States. We’re seeing some really interesting developments now, where countries in Europe and in Asia are reaching out and working in some ways around the United States. I’ll give you one example. There’s now a push by Italy and the United Kingdom and Japan to work on creating a sixth-generation fighter without the United States, without our technology, our innovation. And no doubt, if they were to create such a sixth-generation fighter, that would be in competition with some of the fighter jets that we produce here in the United States. So, assuming that many of these relationships, either across the private sector or across government relationships, continue, I think it’s in the U.S.’s interest to help shape these relationships, guide them, and ensure that American innovation can be brought into the picture, but also to the extent that they’re setting norms or first principles about A.I. or emerging tech, we can be at the table as well. I don’t always love the image of our friends around the world creating new webs of partnerships without the United States at the table. I think it’s important that we’re present and that we help guide those efforts. GOLODRYGA: And you’ve warned that allied munitions shortfalls could leave us vulnerable in any sort of simultaneous conflict. I’m just wondering, from the allies’ perspective here, and maybe even from what you’re hearing from sources in Russia and China, how they are viewing the U.S. new policy and shift to the Caribbean and narco-cartels and becoming increasingly more volatile there, perhaps sending more fighter jets and carriers to the region, as there are concerns of perhaps even regime change imminently. With the U.S. focus there, what has the reaction been in Europe, in Asia? SMITH: Well, a couple of things. First and foremost, our friends around the world, whether you’re talking about Japan or Germany, many of our allies around the world are increasing their defense budgets. And that’s great, because they do need to take more responsibility for their own security. But they all appreciate the security and defense relationships that they have with the United States, whether they’re hosting U.S. troops on their soil or they just have a great relationship with us through the NATO alliance or bilaterally with the United States. They want those defense relationships to continue. They believe it’s in their interest and our interest to keep locking arms and work in the area of security and defense. But when they see this heightened focus in the United States on the Western Hemisphere, certainly they don’t feel like they’re in a position to dictate where we apply our resources and our troops, but they want to make sure that those efforts in the Western Hemisphere don’t come at the expense of our important relationships around the world, particularly as China and Russia deepen their military relationships and are some of our important relationships around the world, particularly as China and Russia deepen their military relationships and are sometimes found now operating in tandem. GOLODRYGA: I do want to ask you, lastly, about a debate that’s now about as old as the war in Ukraine, and that is what to do with the $300-plus billion in frozen Russian assets. There had been more of a push to use that money to help fund the war in Ukraine right now, and it appears that at least for Belgium, which is holding this money, that there are some legal concerns that they have that are preventing them from green-lighting this. If this were to happen, how big of a game-changer do you think this would be, and what would it take for this money to be unfrozen? SMITH: This would be a huge shift and give Ukraine a tremendous amount of resources that they desperately need. Unfortunately, the U.S. is not providing the bulk of assistance to Ukraine right now, whether you’re talking about economic, humanitarian, or security assistance, and that puts enormous pressure on the 50 or so countries that continue to do so. Ukraine is going into a tough winter. It has some challenges on the battlefield. It has some mobilization challenges, but it also needs more equipment, most importantly, and it needs resources to keep the government running and keep the lights on during what will no doubt be a very, very tough winter, where the Russians will try to plunge Ukraine, as they always do, into darkness and into the cold. So, I was hopeful that when the European leaders met in recent days that they would finally take the decision to move forward with some sort of additional loan or unfreeze the assets to get those to the Ukrainians, and unfortunately that’s not the case. It’s delicate for the prime minister of Belgium. He’s in the middle of some tough negotiations at home, on their own budget. And so, I do hope the next time leaders meet that they can get this done. It’s critical. GOLODRYGA: Well, we’ll be following any developments on that front as well. A really provocative piece. I encourage everyone to read it. Julianne Smith, thank you so much for joining the show. Appreciate it. SMITH: Thank you. GOLODRYGA: We turn now to polarization in America, which is explored in a new memoir by author and journalist Beth Macy, who wrote the bestselling book, “Dope Sick.” Through her own childhood, town of Urbana, Ohio, Macy investigates radicalization and the struggling education system in rural America. She joins Walter Isaacson to discuss how these divisions have been stoked over the last decade. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Bianna. And Beth Macy, welcome back to the show. BETH MACY, AUTHOR, “PAPER GIRL”: It’s great to be back. Thanks, Walter. ISAACSON: So, your new book is called “Paper Girl.” Let’s start with the obvious question, what’d you learn from being a paper girl back in Urbana? MACY: Well, you can’t call in sick because they get really mad when their paper doesn’t show up. And so, work ethic. And also, I always say it was great training ground for being a reporter because you had to deal with all kinds of people and you had to negotiate when people didn’t want to pay you on collection day and just great skills all the way around. ISAACSON: So, you talk about those skills and that’s in the book in a way. You talk a lot about education, but you say education isn’t just about learning knowledge, it’s about learning those social skills. Is that what we’re failing to do now, especially in the towns like you write about? MACY: Yes. I mean, my first call to a school counselor 40 years after I left that school, when I say, what is the biggest challenge today with getting kids college ready or workforce ready? She tells me it’s they don’t know how to human. I said, what do you mean? They don’t have the social skills. They don’t know the basic skills that I learned from delivering the paper every afternoon. So, I thought I was going to write a story about — and I did, about how we don’t have the structure in place to allow poor kids to go to college, which essentially saved my life. But after spending two years in Urbana, it’s more a story about how our K-12 schools are declining such that people are dropping out. They’re not showing up. There’s a huge attendance problem, particularly after COVID. And our public schools, which are the foundation of our democracy, are in really rough shape. ISAACSON: One of the things that struck me when you talk about education is that people, kids, are not going to school in great numbers. They’re not showing up. When did that start and why? MACY: Well, it starts before COVID, but it really gets exacerbated in 2020 with COVID. And one of the main people I follow is a woman named Brooke Perry, who is the school attendance officer. And she put something like 150,000 miles on her car in a couple of years, traversing the county, picking up kids whose parents won’t send them to school. And one of the great shocks was how many families were, quote, “homeschooling,” not saying that they’re all not legit homeschooling, but because homeschooling in the State of Ohio has been deregulated. You no longer have to have teachers sign off on lesson plans. This was a new law enacted by the state legislature a couple of years ago. It’s possible now for a parent who just doesn’t want to get up in the morning, perhaps doesn’t have the capacity to get up in the morning, send their kids to school, to pull their kids out from school to avoid truancy charges and say they’re homeschooling. So, that was an unintended consequence of that law, I would say. And it was really shocking to shadow Brooke Perry and to just see the level of trauma that she sees on a daily basis. I mean, people seeking dogs at her, assaulting her, teenagers assaulting her. It really brought the mental health crisis into view. ISAACSON: Well, another aspect of the education crisis is people not being able to just seamlessly go to college or community college using Pell Grants and other things. Is that something that we could solve? MACY: Yes, if we invest in people, not corporations and billionaires. So, when I went to college in 1982, I went to a state college. It costs about two plus grand a year. The Pell Grant covered my tuition, room and board, my books. It gave me work-study jobs so I could have pizza and beer like everybody else. Today, that same student, I follow a young man named Silas, he couldn’t go to a four-year college because it would only cover 30 percent, right? So, his dear mentor, his band director, his teacher talks him into doing a welding program at a community college. He gets full scholarships for it and he doesn’t really understand the money. It’s rural America. So, if you live in a city, you might not know that we don’t have a bus that goes from Urbana to Marysville to Springfield to get Silas to his classes at the community college. And the kid goes through five clunker cars in the course of a 10-month program, four full-time jobs. I didn’t have to work full- time. And the odds — and then a family with so much trauma and chaos that they are a constant drag on his psyche. And by golly, the kid makes it. And it’s a great story. It’s a story of resilience. And when I shared a stage with him just about 10 days ago for the launch of the book, I said, Silas, what makes you so resilient? And he said, well, I didn’t have a family I could rely on. So, I created my own out of teachers, of counselors. It’s the school. He’s going to be a great success one day. But without a heartier education system, he’s a unicorn. ISAACSON: So, let’s talk about this kid, Silas, who’s one of the main characters in your book. His name is Silas James. And in some ways, you say he was the counterpart to you. You all were both in the bAnd that sort of thing. How did — tell me about his story, how you found him and why you made him the central character? MACY: Well, when I first started going home, I would cast about talking to teachers and counselors and the present band director, because I was looking for a young me that would help me illustrate this data that I was finding. And they all suggested Silas James, because it’s a small town. They all knew him. They had all helped him. And I just — the bAnd the marching bAnd I was president of the band in my senior year, is really what kept me out of jail, kept me out of trouble, and a great affinity for my band director, who’s long since passed away. And I saw that Silas had that with Mr. Sapp, who he has entered as David M. Dad in his phone. I mean, that’s how important. I had one stable parent. Silas had zero stable parents. I mean, for a time, he lived with a caregiver who molested him in his early teens while his mom was in prison for drug-related charges, and his dad was on his way to an overdose death. So, he really needed the support of these folks. And you know, when I met him, I thought, this is a kid that whose story really illustrates all the data that I’m finding on the ground. ISAACSON: There’s a sentence in your book that just, of course, hit me, as I think you would have expected. It’s, my family had once been proud of me. So, walk me through the family saga, and why you would write that sentence. MACY: Well, I was the first in the family to go to college. I’m much younger than my siblings. I was the midlife accident, and the only one to really move out of state, and we’re pretty different. And when I started achieving some success as a journalist, they were very proud of me. But, in the teens, during Trump’s first term, you know, my brother, who was my closest in age, who we’d been pretty close with, and he would come see my kid when they were in place, unfriended me on Facebook because of quote, “all the liberal crap you post.” And I’m pretty careful about what I post. I post fact-checked articles, typically from the New York Times or the Washington Post, including some of my own articles. And to sort of have my brother, you know, malign my profession, have my friends malign my profession, and say they hate the media, I said, well, Joy, you still love me, right? Yes, of course I love you. Well, I’m the media, too. And when I write a piece for the New York Times, they’ll assign some Ivy League graduate, young fact-checker on it, who will spend three days on an opinion piece, making sure that my opinions are based on real data. And you know, she came back to me with, well, who fact-checks the fact- checkers? And really angry, in a way I hadn’t seen before. Now, she later apologized. But, at some point, we have to be responsible for the truth that we believe. And you know, I was just, again, really shocked at the level of conspiracy theories just running a roughshod over my home community. ISAACSON: That notion of conspiracy theories done in the recesses of the internet also plays into your ex-boyfriend, Bill, who you decide to call out of the blue, I guess for the sake of the book. Tell me about that story. MACY: It was definitely for the book. Walter. I wasn’t trying to get back with my ex-boyfriend. No, but he was once the most liberal person I knew. And we dated, like, for a year in 1985 or so. And he was a journalist. And as he described it, a NPR tote bag — or PBS tote bag-carrying liberal. And a mutual friend who would come to my events when I would talk about my other books in Ohio said, wow, you wouldn’t believe Bill. He’s gone from Bernie to Jill Stein to Trump to, oh, he’s even behind Trump. I said, what do you mean? So, I got the idea. I texted him out of the blue. I said, I write books now. I’m doing this book on polarization. I’d love to talk to you about your shift in attitude. So, we set up — I must have 10 hours of recordings with him. And over the course of a year and a half, he just — I saw him get angrier and angrier. And until finally, he emerges as the lead spokesperson for the anti-Haitian contingency in Springfield, Ohio, in the lead up to the ’24 election where, you know, Vance says and Trump says, they’re eating the pets, they’re eating the dogs. And there he is on PBS NewsHour. And there he is all over the news, on the front page of the Springfield paper. And he’s leading rallies. And he’s posting things on Twitter about — or X about the Great Replacement Theory. And in February, I had finished the book, but I had to rewrite some of the end because he didn’t believe in Obamacare. He was 61 when I first met him again. He didn’t have health insurance because he thought it was a racket on the middle class. And in February, he gets pneumonia. And he waits too long to go to the hospital. And he dies. And when I talked to his daughter some weeks later, she basically described the same thing Bill had described about how he felt the Democrats had turned on him. And then his community turned on him when he wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. And he found his community in the internet instead. He would watch — at the height of this, when I first met him, he was watching his news from Cyprus, a well-known Russian propaganda website. And he was so angry. And his daughter says, the internet killed my dad. ISAACSON: Your brother Tim is among those who unfriended you in Facebook. But one of the nice things about this book is that you finally have a reconciliation with him. In some ways, it’s a metaphor, perhaps, of how we can solve some of these grander problems. Tell me about that. MACY: Yes. Thanks for understanding that. Yes. We hadn’t spoken in a couple of years. And because I was going back regularly, I would spend — for two years, I would spend about a week a month in Urbana. And I would visit with my family and interview my friends and all these other people that I interviewed. And Tim and I started spending time together. And that’s really important. Like, I get, at every book event I do, people go, help, how are we going to get through Thanksgiving? And I say, you’ve got to spend time getting to know each other as people again. And what are the things in your family, you might disagree on politics, but what are the things in your family that you remember fondly, that you’re proud of? And with my family, we loved to fish. We didn’t have any money, but we could afford to, like, get our own night crawlers and go out to Muzzy’s Lake and go fishing. And that was something we did. So, a couple years ago, my husband and I bought this modest little cabin up in the mountains. And Tim loves to fish. So, I invited him up. We started spending time together. We started having these really moving conversations. Politics really factors in. At one point, I have a non- binary child named Sasha. Tim has never known a non-binary person before this. And Sasha’s a professional musician. And Tim has heard their music and really likes it. They’re in a band called Palmyra. And he starts coming to Palmyra shows. And he says, in a very tender voice, he says, tell me about Sasha. Do they still date girls? And because they asked such curiosity, I instinctively mirrored back his tone. And I said, yes, they’re dating a young woman now. And I mess up the pronouns too. So, meeting our relatives that might not have the same experience with diversity that we have, meeting them with grace, not just judging them or blowing up going zero to 60 like I did with some of my other relatives. You know, that taught me a lot. And Tim really helped me with that. And at one point, he brings up the fact that he’s going to vote for RFK. This is before Trump was, you know, the main candidate. And I just held my tongue. I said in my head, not my cup of worms, but I’m not going to say anything, because I’m loving this moment with my brother. And we got each other back. ISAACSON: Beth Macy, thank you so much for joining us. MACY: Thank you, Walter. (END VIDEOTAPE) GOLODRYGA: Such a powerful conversation. And finally, for us, legendary ballerina Misty Copeland was showered in applause and flowers at New York’s Lincoln Center last week. This as she took her final bow for the American Ballet Theater. Copeland is known as a trailblazer in the after making history in 2015 as ABT’s first black female principal dancer. She used her platform to raise awareness about the lack of diversity in the ballet community and highlight the challenges faced by black dancers. Take a listen to what she told Michel Martin in 2022, emphasizing the importance of spotlighting black artists, past and present. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MISTY COPELAND, AMERICAN BALLET DANCER AND AUTHOR: So, much a part of what drew me to ballet was being a part of something bigger than me, being a part of an incredible history and lineage and tradition. And then, finding out that black people have had a huge impact on the ballet community and culture for so long. It’s so important for us to know our history as black people, you know, that we’re so often turned away or told that we don’t belong in certain spaces or that it’s not for us because you don’t know your history or you don’t see yourself reflected. And our stories are often erased and/or not documented. And that’s been the case with so many black dancers and ballerinas and black women in particular. And so, I feel that it’s my responsibility with the reach I have, with the platforms that I have, for people to hear me and see me, for them to know that, yes, I’m the first black principal ballerina at ABT, but I am by no means the first black ballerina and the first black dancer. And I wouldn’t be here without all of the work of so many black dancers that have come before me. (END VIDEO CLIP) GOLODRYGA: Trailblazer is the perfect word to describe her and no doubt an influence for so many young black dancers that look up to her. Well, that is it for now. Thank you so much for watching, and goodbye from New York. END |