Ross Douthat

Is the post-Cold War era over? This week on Firing Line.

 

TRUMP: I return to this chamber tonight to report that America’s momentum is back. Our spirit is back, our pride is back, our confidence is back.

 

But there are signs that confidence in Donald Trump – and his slash and burn approach to governing  – is waning.

 

DOUTHAT:  The Trump administration is in a position of much greater vulnerability today than it was at the start. 

 

Conservative columnist for the New York Times, Ross Douthat writes about politics and religion. His latest book is called “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious”. In a week in which the Trump Administration praises our former foes…  

 

SOT TRUMP IN OVAL OFFICE: Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt.

 

…and criticizes our traditional allies…

 

VANCE IN MUNICH: The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. What I worry about is the threat from within.

 

…what does conservative columnist Ross Douthat say now?

 

‘Firing Line’ with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, Cliff and Laurel Asness, The Meadowlark Foundation, and by the following… Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc.

 

INTERVIEW

HOOVER: Ross Douthat, welcome to Firing Line.

DOUTHAT: Thanks so much for having me, Margaret. It’s great to be here. 

HOOVER: President Trump delivered his first address to Congress this week and declared that he had accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplish in four or eight years. The fact is, the economy is showing some flashing signs. His approval rating is lower than any modern president at this point in his term, and his alliance with Elon Musk is deeply unpopular. How do you assess the opportunities and the real risks of the moment we’re in?

DOUTHAT: I mean, I think what you’ve just said is basically correct that the Trump administration is in a position of much greater vulnerability today, a month into his presidency, than it was at the start. And some of that just reflects the normal pattern of American politics, where presidents tend to be unpopular. But I think the way to look at the Trump situation is, you know, we in the media don’t think of Trump as the candidate of normalcy, right, because he’s obviously such an abnormal, over-the-top figure. But I think for a lot of American voters, there was a sense that actually Trump’s first term felt more normal than Biden’s four years. Biden’s four years were: more war and military conflict overseas, the highest inflation that we had seen since the 1970s, early 1980s. So I think there was clearly a way in which a lot of people who voted for Trump in 2024 were essentially voting to get…

HOOVER: Back to normal.

DOUTHAT: Yeah. Not the pandemic back, not the pandemic, but 2018– Yeah, 2018, 2019 back. I think there was absolutely a constituency for getting the border under control, absolutely a constituency for anti-woke, anti-DEI stuff. But there wasn’t, I think, a clear constituency for revolution, right? And the difficulty that Trump has already run into is, you know, the combination of, you know, trade wars against Canada and Mexico, which are off and are on from week to week, right, depending on what’s going on, with the Musk style of, you know, making cuts to federal agencies…

HOOVER: Slash and burn.

DOUTHAT: Well, some of the slashing is popular. It’s interesting that Musk is much more unpopular right now than DOGE, right? So there’s still plenty of support for efficiency in government.

HOOVER: Yeah.

DOUTHAT: There’s less confidence that Musk is the guy to do it. So I’d say Trump is in a place where his approval ratings haven’t sunk that much, but he could use a dose of stabilization, right? Which is not the Trump brand. It’s not the Trump brand.

HOOVER: And yet, now, a month into his presidency, there is a new normal. You wrote, after Trump won in November, quote, “the post-Cold War era has ended, and we are not going back.” Since taking office, Donald Trump has aligned the U.S. in some ways more closely with Russia than it has been aligned since, you know, since after the Cold War; imposed these tariffs against American allies and adversaries. Again, off-again on-again.

DOUTHAT: And China. 

HOOVER: And, yes, and adversaries. You know, retreated from the world in humanitarian spaces, which you’ve opined about. How do you define– This is not a dose of normalcy. This is a new world order. 

DOUTHAT: Right. Well, and–

HOOVER: How do you understand that?

DOUTHAT: Some of what– some of what Trump is doing is totally understandable in the context of a world that just doesn’t look like the world in 1995 or 2010. Right? So if you look at foreign policy overall, the United States is just not in the position it was in the early 2000s. Even more importantly, our allies are not in the position they were in, right? Western Europe, Europe as a whole, is just a weaker player in world affairs than it used to be. China and India are much more important. And any president who’s serious about dealing with this world is going to have to do something different than just be a kind of foreign policy maximalist, where you say, ‘We’re all in for, you know, democracy all the way to Russia’s border. We’re all in for war with Iran if we need to have a war with Iran. And by the way, we’re also containing China and preventing them from taking Taiwan.’ In fact, the United States needs to make a set of different strategic decisions. And the Trump goal of— the official goal of the Trump administration is; get Europe to take more responsibility for events that happen in European theaters, which means having an armistice in Ukraine and having Europe bear the burden, more of the burden, for sustaining Ukraine. I think in the landscape that we’re in now, that’s a broadly defensible goal. And I think it’s probably the goal that even a Kamala Harris administration would have ended up seeking, probably after a couple more years of war. Now, does that mean that Trump, you know, going around and saying, ‘Zelensky is a dictator and Putin’s been really badly treated like me’ is a good plan? No, obviously it’s not a good plan. But you have to understand Trump in the context of a world where just repeating the formulas of the immediate post-Cold War era, when the US was basically unchallenged, is not going to work.

UKRAINE

HOOVER: During the speech this week, President Trump read to the joint session of Congress a letter from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stating, quote, “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer.” Is there a case to be made that Trump’s approach to the conflict is actually working?

DOUTHAT: I think there’s a case to be made that the broad approach makes sense. I think we don’t– we can’t say whether it’s working until we actually see the armistice that is eventually negotiated. I think Trump is right that after multiple years of war in which the last Ukrainian offensive failed, and now we’re in trench warfare and a stalemate, the government in Kyiv has to be prepared to enter into some kind of negotiation, even though Vladimir Putin is untrustworthy. That’s just sort of the nature of that reality. So in that sense, yes, it’s a success for Trump getting Zelensky to agree to some kind of negotiation. But the two questions ahead are: one, is Putin really interested in good faith negotiation that could lead to a settlement? And two, if you do that kind of negotiation, can you figure out a postwar settlement where two things are true at once? First, the United States is under no circumstances going to give Ukraine a NATO-style guarantee. There’s no world in which we’re going to promise to go to war for Ukraine. But given that, what are the guarantees from Europe, and from us, in terms of military aid and in foreign aid, that can make Ukraine sort of permanently defensible? That’s the test of a successful deal.

HOOVER: And given the untrustworthiness of Vladimir Putin and the difficulty of negotiating with an untrustworthy partner, how do we think about negotiating peace without appeasing him?

DOUTHAT: I think you think about it in terms of, one, how strong– how strong is Ukraine in a postwar environment? Right. So what you were trying to do is leave Ukraine in a position where their nation is intact, which it is, right? They have been– If you ran back the clock to the initial invasion and you said, well, the end of the invasion will be that Russia has, you know, has a hold on the Donbass and–

HOOVER: Crimea.

DOUTHAT: – and Crimea, you know, most people expected Russia to roll over all of eastern Ukraine, right? So you can say it’s a big victory for Ukraine to retain national sovereignty, lose some territory to Russia, as long as it’s in a position where if war starts up again, Putin just can’t immediately roll through, right? So that– and that’s where Zelensky’s view is totally reasonable. He wants something from not just Europe, because Europe is—  perhaps they’ll grow stronger, but they are weak right now— but something from the Trump administration beyond just, you know, a pat on the head and a pen to sign the treaty. And it’s reasonable for him to want something. He’s just not going to get a NATO-style guarantee. And that was always fake. Like, there was a reason that the Biden administration didn’t give that, right? Like, the U.S. is never going to put itself in a position where it’s willing to get into a direct military conflict with Russia on its immediate Ukrainian border.

ZELENSKY: From the very beginning of the war…

TRUMP: You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now.

HOOVER: After last week’s dramatic blow out in the Oval Office between President Zelensky and President Trump, you wrote, quote, “His first-term foreign policy succeeded with the president playing the heavy while his appointees offered normalcy, and his second term to date, needs more of that balance—

DOUTHAT: Yes, 

HOOVER: –someone to twist arms and someone to smooth feathers, someone to speak frankly and someone to keep the frankest truth-telling off-camera.” 

DOUTHAT: Yes. That seems right.

HOOVER: That’s what you wrote. And yet it seems implausible to the casual observer, or to the studious observer of Donald Trump, because he—personnel is policy—he has not chosen to have four-star generals with credibility, like General Mattis or General Kelly or General Milley, around him. 

DOUTHAT: Well, I don’t know. I mean, I think when Trump announced his foreign policy team initially, people looked at his national security advisor and his pick for secretary of state and said these are normal Republican foreign policy hands, right?

HOOVER: So then why aren’t they striking that balance right now? 

DOUTHAT: Well, I think, as to your point, it’s hard to do, right? Trump feels more empowered. And he is. He’s in a much stronger political position for the moment — give it a few months, we’ll see – but for the moment, than he was in the past. He feels like he was vindicated. And, you know, you see this with tariffs right? I think in Trump’s first term it was easier, not to talk him out of tariffs, right, but to talk him into delay and you know make it smaller and, you know, do it incrementally and so on. And now it’s like he’s– he thinks, ‘I’m the winner. Why shouldn’t I do it my way?’ And the same thing in foreign policy.

TARIFFS

HOOVER: You recently described Trump’s threats of tariffs on trading partners other than China as, quote, “unsettling markets and displeasing voters for the sake of minimal returns.” You’ve questioned whether he’s trying to get– what he’s trying to get out of countries like Canada. Hours after the latest tariffs on Mexico and Canada took effect Tuesday, the stock market plummeted, wiping out most of the gains that had been made since November. Is it clear to you what the endgame is here?

DOUTHAT: I mean, Trump likes tariffs. Trump in his heart believes in a very traditional 19th-century American view of what tariffs are for. They are to encourage people to build factories and build things and sell things in the United States. Right? And there’s a version of that argument in the 21st century that makes a certain kind of sense that says, look, it doesn’t make sense in this multipolar world to have all our supply chains integrated with the People’s Republic of China. It doesn’t make sense to have, you know, to offshore all of our manufacturing. The problem is one, tariffs are a very blunt instrument for accomplishing that kind of policy shift. And the style in which he’s pursuing them doesn’t seem to be designed– You know, it’s not part of, say, a broader, you know, industrial policy type move of the kind that the Biden administration sought to make. The other thing is, he can’t quite decide on what the official justification is, right? So putting on tariffs in order to bring back industrial capacity to the U.S. is very different than putting on tariffs to get Mexico and Canada to police fentanyl smuggling more completely. Like, those are just completely different methods. And I think Trump is sort of– Trump wants tariffs. People around him are sort of trying to fill in different justifications, I would say… 

HOOVER: Right. 

DOUTHAT: …but it doesn’t look like a, sort of, coherent, long-term policy plan. 

HOOVER: I want you to take a look at this clip from Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state from 1992, as he talked about free trade and the power of free trade in the Americas. Take a look. 

KISSINGER: The most exciting development has been the evolution towards democracy and market economics in Mexico and in other parts of Latin America. If we look at a world in which economic blocs are developing, the United States has an obligation and a necessity to try to form a relationship with its neighbors to the south based on democracy and free markets which enables them to flourish and which will enable us to compete so that if there are blocs, we should be part of a bloc of democratic free market nations with which we can then bargain if things get more– get very difficult. Thank you. 

HOOVER: You’re critical of the tariffs against our allies in North America.

DOUTHAT: One thing that has happened with Mexico in particular over the last 20 years is that as we have become more and more integrated with Mexico, along the lines that Kissinger was describing, Mexico has completely failed to get its political system, its relationship to drug gangs under control. Right? It is effectively, to some degree, a narco state. And this has become this– that basic problem has then become integrated with the emergence of fentanyl, the opioid epidemic, and everything that’s followed from it. And it is a really big problem for the United States that, sort of, nostrums about free trade don’t adequately address. When you have free trade with a narco state, it’s a problem, right? So in that sense, Mexico provides a good place to challenge a paradigm that just says NAFTA was great and everything is great, right? But in order to challenge it, you actually have to have a coherent plan. You actually have to say, you know, ‘Here’s what we want from Mexico. We’re using tariffs as, you know, as a lever to get them to do X, Y, and Z against the cartels and so on.’ And I should say that something like that has happened, right? There have been reports that, you know, in an effort to sort of get on Trump’s good side, the Mexican government is going after the cartels more completely than before. And you do have to say that Trump’s southern border policy so far has been a complete success, right? It’s the, it’s the place where he really could legitimately say, “I made a promise that border crossings would fall dramatically. They have fallen dramatically.” That may not last, but it is a real success. So I wouldn’t put Mexico as, sort of, the first example of everything that’s wrong with Trump’s policy. I think it is a case where you could say tariffs are part of a pressure campaign to try to change the behavior of the Mexican government for the better. But it’s not a strategy to, like, re-industrialize America.

HOOVER: But what about Canada? 

DOUTHAT: Canada is the place where the tariffs just don’t seem reasonable and defensible, right? I think in Canada too, Trump has ended up empowering the liberals who are about to lose. Right?

HOOVER: And Justin Trudeau’s had a new life breathed back into him. 

DOUTHAT: Yeah, exactly. So the end game is probably a setback for Trump’s ability to have a good relationship with the Canadian government because he was about to get conservatives, and now he may not have them. 

REPUBLICAN PARTY UNDER TRUMP

HOOVER: One can’t have a conversation with you about, sort of, a populist turn on the right in America without pointing out that in 2008, you and Reihan Salam wrote a book which in many ways really predicted this Trumpian turn towards the working class in your book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. As we enter this new era and this new world order, where do you see the Republican Party, if it’s not conservatism? Where is the Republican Party in a year?

DOUTHAT: Well, the interesting thing about the Republican Party is that it has become populist rather than conservative, I would say, in ways that, yeah, Reihan and I, at least to some degree, anticipated. Its base is much more lower middle class, downscale, blue collar—multiracial, multiethnic blue collar, often—especially in the last election. But it still does not fully have a policy agenda that matches what those voters want, right? So that’s even– even under Donald Trump, the great populist, the big debate that Republicans are having in the House and Senate, right, is about how to sustain corporate tax cuts and to do so potentially while cutting Medicaid. Right? That combination is not something that anyone in Trump’s working class base is particularly supportive of. So in that sense, the Republicans have become a working class party without ever fully developing a clear working class agenda.

HIS BOOK

HOOVER: You’ve written a new book. 

DOUTHAT: I have. 

HOOVER: “Believe…” 

DOUTHAT: Believe. Yes. 

HOOVER: “Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” Who’s the book for?

DOUTHAT: The book– So I think we’re in a weird religious moment right now, Margaret, where America has gone through this big period of secularization. Religion has, institutional religion has been in decline for a long time, but especially in the last 15 or 20 years. And we have a lot of people right now, especially young people, but not only young people, who have gone through this period, aren’t really happy with where the culture is right now. Turns out that a less religious society is not a calmer society. There isn’t more trust in science. All of these things. And they– So there’s a kind of openness to religion, but that openness for some people comes with no knowledge whatsoever. And then there’s another category of people who are very smart, very well-educated, who think religion, it would be nice if it were true. It would be good for society if more people went to church. But a reasonable person can’t really believe fully in this modern world of ours, right? So the book is especially written for people in those two categories, people who are looking for an introduction, ‘What is this religion thing anyway? Why would someone believe in God, and what might it mean for my life?’ and people who are attracted to religion but think that fundamentally they have to check their reason and belief in science and everything else at the door. And I’m saying, in fact, you do not.

HOOVER: The question I have is in the subtitle, why everyone should be religious. Why should they? 

DOUTHAT: They should because we are time bound, finite creatures, you know, leading a life in a universe that has a set of features that indicate that it was made with us in mind. And some of these features are there at the highest level or deepest level of existence. There is some actual connection between human consciousness and the structure of the cosmos. And I think all of that suffices to say this is something that you should be interested in. 

HOOVER: So they should, because it is likely to be true. 

DOUTHAT: Yes.

HOOVER: You have written in the book and in your columns about a growing interest in UFOs…

DOUTHAT: I have.

HOOVER: …the supernatural. How does that trend fit into this notion of spirituality versus the old religions? 

DOUTHAT: So I think, yeah, I think there are a number of people in our society who are taking an interest in religion, not feeling any kind of commitment or attachment to a big old religion. And maybe they feel like God, like, you know, the OG, right, the Old Testament God is too implausible, too far out of reach, not someone you can imagine having a relationship with. So a lot of people, I think, are looking for inter– what you might call intermediate spiritual powers in this landscape, powers that are sort of spiritual in some way, but feel a little bit closer than Jehovah, Yahweh, God Almighty. Right. And I think, you know, there’s the vogue for astrology and tarot cards and the occult and so on fits into this category. And then the UFOs, right? If you look at, sort of, the people who are really into UFOs right now, sort of UFO culture, it has an intense mystical component. And I think that absolutely fits into a sense that people have of I don’t like being alone in the cosmos. I want some help. I don’t feel like I can ask the Christian God anymore. But I’m looking for someone to talk to. 

HOOVER: It is not your view that stand-ins for the old religions or for sort of the rituals, the sort of loosely used term spirituality, is sufficient.

DOUTHAT: No, I don’t think it’s sufficient. I think that it’s insufficient in sort of obvious practical ways where the discipline of going to church every week, having certain prayers that you say, having certain, you know, arguments that you can enter into that a traditional religion supplies, it’s just really hard to find that in purely individualized religions. Right? It’s hard to imagine. It’s like, you know, can you become good at sports without ever joining a team, just playing in your backyard? Maybe, but it’s probably not the right way to go. But then there’s also issues of, honestly, safety and danger involved here. And I think it’s quite dangerous, in fact, for people to just sort of wander around constantly opening themselves to spiritual influence. And I think this is not just a Catholic position. It is something that a serious Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist would say as well, that the old evolved religions are there to channel your spiritual energy in the correct direction and also to protect you from, you know, forces that might not have the good of the human person completely in mind. 

POPE FRANCIS

HOOVER: As we take this interview, Pope Francis is gravely ill. You have written about Pope Francis in a 2018 book, To Change the Church. You described his pontificate as a, quote, hinge moment in the history of Catholicism. A decade ago, you warned his alienation of theological conservatives could lead to a schism in the church. How do you assess his papacy now? 

DOUTHAT: I mean, I think one should be cautious about saying anything in a moment where the Holy Father is possibly on his deathbed. I would say very provisionally, I think that while the Pope has not, the Pope’s choices did not, in fact lead to the kind of schism that I feared, he does preside over a church that is bitterly divided, and where papal authority, the authority over either more liberal Catholics or more conservative Catholics, seems extremely weak. The other thing I’d say, though, is that so many of the debates of the Francis era were a kind of revival of 1970s era, post sexual revolution debates in Catholic life about married priests, and divorce and remarriage and, you know, these, these kind of things. I do think maybe we’re– not that those debates aren’t important anymore, but I do think we’re entering into a stranger new era where people may spend more time having religious arguments about the internet or the demonic or any, you know, any range of things than just having sort of culture war clashes. So my suspicion is that this is sort of the last pontificate of the post Vatican Two, post 1960s church, and the next one will be somewhat new in ways that neither liberals or conservatives will be able to predict. But that’s in God’s hands. 

HOOVER: Ross Douthat, thank you for joining me on Firing Line.

DOUTHAT: Thank you, Margaret, for having me. It was a great pleasure.