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EMERGENCY POD: Liberation Day with Tanner Greer of Scholarstage

Today is April 4th. Two days ago, we had Liberation Day, a tariff salvo that doubled as a bid to completely reshape the global economic order. Simultaneously, we had Laura Loomer walking into the White House and firing completely competent NSC staff who were MAGA enough to serve in Trump 1.0, but apparently not MAGA enough for her and the president. What is going on in the Trump administration and what does it mean for America’s relationship to China and its future place in the world? Thankfully, we have the great Tanner Greer of the blog Scholar Stage, who has written a guide for the perplexed. His new report entitled “Obscurity by Design, Competing Priorities for America’s China Policy” is the product of dozens of interviews and hundreds of hours reading the thinking of key Trump policymakers that will define America’s geopolitical and economic posture for years to come. We’ll explore the different strains of thought informing this administration and the longer-term implications of Trump’s policy management style. Nicholas Wells, longtime China Talk editor, will be co-hosting.

Tanner, what a day. Great to have you.

Thanks for having me on. Yes, it’s – when we originally agreed to have this podcast about the report, I knew it was relevant, but I didn’t know it would be this relevant.

All right, Tanner, let’s start with tariffs. How did we get here and what does this tell us about the Trump administration? This is what I spend the first part of my report talking about: how do we kind of model Trump’s behavior-making, decision-making, and why is it sometimes so difficult to predict what he’s going to do? I say there’s two reasons for this. The first is that Trump wants to be unpredictable. I think by disposition or personality type, he enjoys being somewhat impulsive and difficult to deal with. But over the course of his life and especially his first presidency, he came to realize that the less people know what he’s going to do, the better off he seems to do. I mean, whether or not that’s true for the country as a whole, but at least for him personally, there are a lot of advantages that accrue to being this kind of unpredictable, crazy machine where inputs come in and we don’t know what’s going to come out the other side. He believes this gives him negotiating leverage. He believes that this makes his strategies surer and more likely to succeed. There’s something self-serving about this, but he has taken this maybe disposition and elevated it to an official philosophy.

Totally, Tanner. In an interview in the lead-up to the 2024 election with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, he told them that there’s no way that she was going to invade Taiwan because, quote, “she knows I’m fucking crazy.”

Yeah, that was his exact quote. So, when it comes to the Chinese in particular, but world leaders generally, he wants them to think he is crazy. He wants them to think he could do just about anything. You can understand a lot of his behavior as acting in such a way to make that belief credible. He’s not the only president who’s ever thought that. Nixon had the same idea. If I’m mad enough, I’ll be able to make things happen in the world. The enemy’s rivals will be more likely to do what I want. This is a key part, in my view, of why Trump does what he does. He actually believes that if he nails himself down, if he ties his hands by explaining, this is what I’m going to do, this is how I’m going to do it in any detail, that will work against him. People will commit him to promises he doesn’t necessarily want to keep in the future, and it will remove his negotiating leverage. He often views international relations as a set of iterated negotiating patterns, as opposed to like, you’re charting a big long-term strategy, trying to get from A to B, and here are all the little inputs we’re going to plug in to get there. Instead, he views things much more iteratively: I’m trying to improve my position, you know, tomorrow, the next day, the next week, and so forth.

We’ve got a lot of competing impulses, right? You have these visions that have populated the GOP, where big tariffs need to happen in order to raise revenue, do better negotiating, revitalize manufacturing, and decouple us from China. And then you have this iterative game that Trump enjoys playing. I think the kind of mess of, you know, a lot of these tariffs seem to kind of be, even though this is a thing that Trump has been focused on for a very long time, it seems pretty slipshod, the way this was rolled out, as opposed to something like the progressive squeezing of Ivy League universities and law firms, which does seem to be a lot more cogent with it.

It’s interesting to me that tariffs, which is clearly something he has been focused on for a very long time, the rollout has not been a cogent one, but has been a much more sort of flat, you know, ADD craziness. I think there are essentially two reasons for this: One is kind of what I said, that Trump believes that increasing the uncertainty ratio of what will happen next, what he will do, is to his strategic advantage. He clearly believes this on an international sphere.

But there’s also a management style problem involved here. Trump doesn’t view it as a problem; he views it as the way in which he should do things. His strong preference is to have a team with conflicting opinions. He wants personal loyalty. But as long as he has loyalty, he prefers to have strong personalities who have, in some ways, widely divergent opinions on what should happen and how it should happen. His management style is to pit these people against each other, pit these factions against each other, and then act as the kingmaker, who swoops down and chooses the winner of these various discussions. You can think of it as his way of solving the principal-agent problem.

How do you keep a bureaucracy in line when it has its own interests? Well, if you can pit other parts of it against each other, that’s how he likes to do it. This style, I mean, has some advantages. Multiple people who I interviewed as part of writing this report, I interviewed more than 30 former Trump officials, people involved in this process from the cabinet level down, point out that this is in some ways very different from how Condoleezza Rice ran the NSC when we were in the lead-up to Iraq, where there was this attempt to find a consensus position and present it to the president instead of allowing the arguments to go directly up to the top. If you are a Republican whose goal is to not repeat the George W. Bush experience, you can understand why that might be attractive, even to some people in the administration itself.

So, the weakness here is twofold. The first is that it’s difficult to do long-term planning. It’s difficult to have long-term coherence, you know, month to month, day to day, over time. The second is that you run the risk of having competing priorities, competing ideas of what you want to accomplish, get bound up into the same policy. Because the president is not starting out by saying, we want to go this way. Instead, he’s letting things kind of come up to him. He’s not always making decisive decisions between the various options given. So, you’ll end up with a situation where multiple people will be supporting the same policy for conflicting reasons. I suspect when we look at how the tariff situation has gone from the start of the administration to today, that’s part of the story here.

There are multiple different groups who have different rationales for what tariffs should be, what they hope to get out of economic policy, especially regarding China, but economic policy broadly. I don’t know if the administration has been successfully able to integrate all these different views into a coherent policy. It seems at least plausible that ChatGPT outputted their formula for determining reciprocal tariffs, like they’re people supporting the tariff idea, but for conflicting reasons. They settle on this formula, which is simple enough, but it’s not how one would normally calculate a tariff rate that another country imposes.

Is this policy how you get that kind of outcome, or is something else going on? There’s certainly been for a long time this idea, and many people have been saying this for months and months, years, that one, you need something like reciprocal tariffs and that lots of countries are doing things unequally. But also two, that you need to like have something else in addition to those reciprocal tariffs, to have it be truly measured because countries will have all kinds of restrictions and their own industrial policies and things like that, that don’t make the playing field equal.

And that’s plausible enough. The question is, if you are given a deadline to calculate the entire world’s kind of on a bespoke basis, all those different policies that might make trade advantages or might make trade relations less advantageous or less fair in some way. I think that’s quite hard to do, and I don’t have any special insight on how the process for creating these happened this week. All I can say is that I’m pretty sure it happened this week.

Yeah. Media reports from a week ago.

Which is just a wild thing. And it comes back, I think, like, you know, we have all these competing theories of what’s going on and how they’re going to revitalize manufacturing or whatever. But there’s this famous note that Trump wrote to a Sherpa at a G7 meeting where he goes, trade is bad. The concept of a trade deficit being America is losing and getting cheated is something that has been a longstanding theme of his intellectual arc.

Aside from the whole, did ChatGPT come up with the formula, like, basing it on trade deficits as the thing we are trying to correct for does actually kind of line up with Trump more than it lines up with any of these big 3D chess, we’re going to remake Bretton Woods type thought processes that we’ve seen come out of the GOP ferment over the past few years. I think that’s in some ways correct. I think, though, that if you look at these tariffs, they’re actually not that far from what Trump said on the campaign trail he wanted to do.

So Trump said two things on the campaign trail very persistently. First, he said, I want something like 10% tariffs across the board. Second, I want something like 60% tariffs on China. Those were two things he said on multiple occasions.

Yeah. If you look at the numbers that we have, so China effectively between what they did earlier and what they’re doing now has effectively a 60% rate that’s being added to it. Then if you look at everybody else, more or less what you have is you have 10% applied everywhere. You have, on top of that, this reciprocal tariff stuff that, in some cases, has really kind of large numbers, like Vietnam; some countries are much smaller.

My guess, and this is just an educated guess; I haven’t talked to anyone in the administration in the last week. They’re all too busy right now to have this conversation with me, and I’m not going to pester them. Steve Besson, you’re welcome to come on China Talk. I don’t think it will be fun. I would not recommend it, but, you know, the offer’s open.

Is, I suspect, if I had to guess, the logic, even Trump’s logic, is something like this 10% is going to stick no matter what. Then all those other numbers are maybe negotiating leverage. Now, negotiating for what? This is an interesting question, to which, again, I’ll come back to my earlier point. What are you actually trying to achieve? There are multiple different answers to that. But I suspect that what Trump wants to have happen is to have all these world leaders come and kowtow and say, okay, what do we need to do to get closer to that 10% and not be at whatever?

For some countries, like Cambodia, I don’t know what they could do, really, in a trade sense. They could maybe say something like, well, we’ll also kick the Chinese out of the Siem Reap naval base or whatever. If that’s the sort of thing that Trump cares about, if that’s the sort of thing that USPR is willing to muddy the waters with. But I think they’re probably just in trouble.

Whereas a country like Japan has a lot more room to do that sort of negotiating back and forth. Here’s the thing, though, Tanner. You do something like this, and you expect everyone to play the game that you want to play, right? Trump wants this to be an iterated game, and he wants to have a lot of fun calling folks and cutting deals left and right. But there is a point where you do this enough times and people get sick of you and don’t want to play anymore.

Is there a breaking point? At what point, if ever, do countries just say they’re no longer interested in being on America’s global ledger from a geopolitical and economic perspective if this is the way that they’re going to be treated? I mean, the question is, is that even possible?

If you’re Japan, to take an example here economically, is it possible not to be on the American ledger? Militarily, is it possible not to be on the ledger? I don’t know if it really is. If you’re a country like Vietnam, militarily, geopolitically, I think, yes, it is easy to balance that way. Economically, it’s much more difficult.

I just think a lot of these countries, if Trump’s calculation is that we, because we have the consuming power, because our economy is so essential to the world economy, that a lot of these countries will have no option but to face the music. I think in the short term, especially, that’s somewhat true. The question is more in the long term, does this basically create conditions where lots of countries over the 10-year term say, okay, maybe we should look towards something more like autarky for ourselves? Or maybe we should balance away towards some other version?

I can see that as maybe a realistic response from some of these countries. But in the short term, I don’t think there’s a, we’re not going to play with the United States anymore. I don’t think it’s possible. I think in a 15, 20-year scope, maybe. Because, you know, there were some expectations that you could make about America, you know, really post-1945, right? That this is a country that is excited to trade with you and help make you rich.

Insofar as Trump’s idea that trade is bad and other countries are ripping us off and we have no interest in, or that it is not at all a part of America’s strategic vision that the countries that we’re friends with should also succeed economically, that is a very fundamental shift. Yes, on a 10- to 15-year calculus, it may make you really question some assumptions.

I think I would actually rephrase what the problem is. I anchored this first part of the discussion talking about how Trump enjoys and finds strategic value in uncertainty. In my mind, the truth is, when you look at most foreign countries, what they want from the United States—those who are in our alliance system, as well as those who are major trading partners—the vast majority of what they want from the United States is just actually certainty. They want to know what will happen, at what speed, in what way, so they can kind of prepare.

It’s like, you know, there’s the phrase about how it’s no fun to be a mouse among fighting elephants. If you’re a mouse, you really want to know where the elephant is going to be stepping. Trump believes that he has a lot of advantages to not letting anyone know where he’s going to step. I think that if you’re an American ally, I actually believe that the ability of American allies to accept a lot worse conditions relative to what they’ve been given is actually pretty high.

What I think will be much harder for them to do is to not know what conditions they can accept at any point in the future, right? Which kind of goes back to your question, like when do people decide they want to leave the game? I think that if they’re not given some actual sort of enduring deal that they believe, this is what the new reality is, and they can assess those terms and say, okay, this is the new reality, we do this or we do, you know, the Chinese way or whatever, and they can make that decision.

If the way is, okay, the Chinese are very stable in what they want, but the Americans are all over the place. We don’t know what they’re going to say, not just administration to administration, but month to month, year to year, that’s going to be a bigger problem.

That will be even more than just treating the allies as if they’re not treasured allies that share values and all these other nice things. I think that this sort of capriciousness or arbitrariness, if they perceive it to be as such, if it doesn’t seem to come from any principles that they can discern, predict, and act upon, that will cause issues in the long term.

I guess the question is, Tanner, can you come back from something like this? We had big fights in Trump 1, and then we had USMCA, and that was his vision of the greatest deal since sliced bread. You talk a lot about how the sort of constellation is ever-changing, and there are winners and losers, and they don’t necessarily happen for policy reasons. They often happen for personal reasons. But I mean, if this is the most fun thing for him, is playing these games, having negotiations, and three months later reopening it and trying to get more—like, is this just the base case for the next four years?

I don’t necessarily think so. I mean, I don’t know. This is an interesting case because one of the—we have a lot of data on how Trump ran the last administration. That was a whole year, I mean, sorry, four whole years of how it worked. One of the interesting questions is, have the way things have worked for the last three months been more predictive than how things worked in the four years previous?

There are some discontinuities. A big one, like taking these tariffs. When Trump announced the China tariffs in the first administration, they were in installments. They started small. They were well in advance. It was known it was going to be at this level, this level, this level, this level, going up as we had kind of graduated pressure against the Chinese. It was not 25% tariffs on this country tomorrow.

One of the questions you kind of have to ask is, so, okay, what’s the difference between the two administrations? Why did the first one have this kind of more measured response whereas the second one does not? Even if you’re kind of playing the same game, I think the markets responded much better to the first one because they had time to plan and prepare.

You could say a few things. Bob Leitzinger isn’t here right now; he had an extremely respected individual. He had Trump’s ear. He was good at talking to Trump, getting Trump to say what he wanted to do. He was very much of the mind that if we’re going to do a tariff schedule, we’re going to do it above board. It’s going to be completely legally nailed down so that the courts don’t challenge us and bring it down. We’re going to go slow. We’re going to go measured. But we’re going to do it.

I’m not sure that the corresponding figure on trade policy in this administration seems to be Howard Lutnick, and he doesn’t seem to have that same sort of slow and steady wins the race sort of personality. This is just an outside observer. I don’t have special insight on how it is, but just based off of what I’ve seen him say, media reports say, it seems like he wants to push maybe faster than USTR did in the previous administration.

There’s like a version of this where, okay, well, if he leaves, then maybe things shift somewhere else. I could see that. The whole idea is like you just apply a new coefficient of shitty staff work to all the policymaking. You have, like, the Trump madmen, I want to be on the phone hustling people, and you have, like, poor execution. So whatever outcome you’re trying to get, you can just apply like a 20% discount because you’re going to do stuff like tariff penguins.

When you have an exemption for semiconductors, you’re going to put it on CPUs instead of GPUs. They clearly wanted to have some carve-out for AI, but they just did it wrong. The last-minute staff work, so that you’re blowing up Madagascar’s economy, and it’s not like America is going to grow vanilla beans in the U.S. anytime soon to compensate. If you are going to let Laura Loomer fire people, are you going to get better staff and better execution out of it? Probably not, right?

So that seems like a constant you can hold. If this is a question just about, like, is the Trump administration version 2 going to be competent, I mean, I think that’s a slightly different question from what it is they want to do, right? Or what is it that people inside it want to do? I’m sympathetic to the argument that what they want to do doesn’t matter if they can’t do it well. Especially if you’re doing something like trying to rejigger the global trading economy.

In preparation for this, I reread the council, the guy, Stephen Morin, who’s the Council of Economic Advisors Chair for the Trump administration. He wrote this big thing in December about how we should— it’s like a 40-page paper, all kinds of academic citations about how we should use trade as leverage to redo Bretton Woods, redo the existing financial trade order to be more in favor and more sustainable, more in favor to American manufacturers, more sustainable for American budgets, so on and so forth.

I think it’s a pretty smart and very interesting approach. But what struck me in reading it now is how he talks a lot about how when we do this, we need to be cautious and careful. When we do this, we need to be slow and graduated just like we were during Trump 1. He says it a lot. He says it just like we were during Trump 1. We need to do it that way, just more ambitious.

Obviously, not everybody has his same agenda. He’s not in charge of any; he’s not in the cabinet. He’s not on a decision-making authority. That’s a consultative body that he runs. But it does kind of point to the weaknesses of some of these approaches. If you were doing this in a measured way, I wonder if the responses would be the same throughout the commentariat or if they would be different. I suspect for many people it’d be the same. They’d be just as upset no matter what.

But I think the markets would probably respond differently. I don’t think you’d have the big run on the markets today that you’ve had if there was a slower, measured, more carefully articulated version of what’s happening. This idea of temporal claustrophobia, something we’ve covered in China Talk in the context of, like, Japan bombing Pearl Harbor, Hitler invading the Soviet Union, is this idea that sort of the walls are closing in on your strategic ability to realize your strategic vision. Every day you wait lowers your percentage chance of making the world you want to live in.

Then you end up blundering into some of the worst strategic errors in world history. I do find it interesting how Trump and JD and a lot of other folks talk about what they’re doing on the economic and geopolitical side as the clock really being almost about to run out. We need to act big. We need to act fast now. Otherwise, America’s fiscal health is shot. America’s ability to sort of throw its weight around the world is a wasting asset, and we need to use it now while we still have the chance.

Thoughts on that, Tanner?

Yeah, I think you can look at this at different levels of analysis. At the level of individuals who have programs, one of the things my report emphasizes is that historically, Trump administration has been very much; Trump goes through people quickly. What is policy today will not necessarily be policy tomorrow as these people change. This does incentivize individuals with a program to, one, implement that program as soon as possible and, number two, to implement it in ways in which it’s hard to reverse.

This is one reason why you might have a penchant for drastic actions. Say something like, let’s just get rid of USAID on questionable legal grounds. But let’s just get rid of it so that when people with other opinions come in later or when Congress gets their act together, there’s not going to be a chance to really reverse the situation. In some ways, these tariffs look a bit like that. That’s one way to look at it.

Another way is to look at Trump personally. This is his last administration. This is his last chance if he’s going to make—I mean, people keep talking about, oh, he’ll try to do a third or whatever. But I don’t think—like, the fact that he’s moving so fast in my mind is actually evidence that he doesn’t see it that way. He wants to make the changes he wants to make, and he believes it will have impacts. Impacts need to be seen soon. That’s true too.

Then there’s this kind of broader question that if you are really interested in upturning the global trade order, the global political order, the national federal government’s way of working, I think a lot of people fear that if they do things slowly, all they’re doing is giving ammunition to enemies and giving veto points, like, people who might have veto points in the process, giving them the chance to activate it. You need to move before that world of resistance is summoned.

I think that’s probably a direct lesson learned from the first administration, where all the time, the first things the first administration wanted to do were frustrated, sometimes for good reasons, often for completely crazy reasons, right? You would have things all over the place, kind of very slow and frustrated. I think that leads Trump and a lot of people around him to be like, okay, we can’t be like the first one. We have to just go in and do things. Screw staff work, right? This needs to be done.

It’s more important to do the big thing and get directionally in the right direction than it is to look like we’re doing the right thing, but never actually have it happen. Because there’s enough chance if we go slowly for veto points in the bureaucracy, Congress, and so on to react. That probably goes back to Trump’s whole philosophy too: I’m much better off if people don’t know what I’m going to do. If I just act and everyone has to react, that’s how he prefers things.

Doing things slowly, doing things in a measured way, forces you to react to others just as much as they react to you. There was this one, you know, the Trump put, right? Of, like, okay, the market goes down enough, Trump will stop being crazy. That was like a breaker that you saw for the first administration, which is basically gone now. Or we’ll see. This is our first real test, I guess.

The sort of psychological shift manifested in that in particular, I think is a really interesting one. I think it’s mostly gone, although it will depend a lot on how the markets look over the next six months or so. I think Trump earnestly believes that there’s going to be a period of problems that will be, but not forever.

If we have a recession that lasts two years, I think there’ll be a lot of rethinking on his part. Assuming there will be rethinking is one of the assumptions of that. Well, no, I don’t predict which way that rethinking will go. I think there will be rethinking on his part because that’s constantly been one of the truths of Trump in power. He’s always rethinking. He’s very, very—he doesn’t stick to ideas or people.

He sticks to some very big level ideas: immigration, trade, not so great. But he has a lot of flexibility in his persona, and his base lets him get away with a lot of flexibility in what he wants to do. I think that the expectation that what he does now is exactly what he’s going to do in two years is almost certainly false. The uncertainty for everybody else, though, is like, in which way will it diverge?

And there are many paths.

Yeah. I mean, okay, so I had a very off-color comparison. I was rereading Ian Kershaw’s Hitler biography last night, particularly the last 200 chapters. It’s April 1945. The walls are closing in. This is Ian Kershaw writing about Speer’s memoir, saying, Hitler at the time gave an intimation that the German people might not deserve him, might have proved weak, have failed its test before history, and thus be condemned to destruction. It was one of his hints, whether in public or private, I mean, the continued outpourings of optimism about the outcome of the war that Hitler indeed contemplated, at least momentarily, the possibility of total defeat.

So, I don’t—like, okay, you’ve talked me out of this, Tanner, but I do see a world in which there is a King Lear-Trump polling at 10% in 2027, just like, “Fuck it, I want to burn the whole world down” timeline, which we shouldn’t entirely discount.

I think that’s not the thing I would be worried about. The trouble of Trump running at 10% in 2027 is not that the world needs to burn down. It’s that he’s going to worry that if he loses the next—if a Republican doesn’t win the election afterward, he’s going to jail. That’s going to be his worry.

I think the difference between someone like Hitler and Trump is that Hitler was extremely ideological, right? Trump—like, Hitler has this whole thing of, like, “Oh, the people don’t deserve me and my brilliance.” Trump—I don’t think Trump thinks like that about himself. He’s much more of a—I mean, it’s kind of like, you know, saying P.T. Barnum doesn’t—if people aren’t going to his show, being like, “Oh, it’s obviously because they didn’t deserve the goodness I was about to show them.” No, he’s more like, “Oh, I played my hand wrong. They didn’t believe my game.”

I think Trump is much more…

And he’ll just find a new act.

Yeah. Well, I mean, he might not be able to. He’ll also be older and all this other kind of stuff. But I think that this sort of messianic thinking is certainly there on the right. There are certainly people on the right who think that way.

Yeah.

I don’t think Trump is that guy himself. It just doesn’t mesh with anything I know about his character, where he thinks—I mean, he thinks, yeah, he probably does think, “I’m somewhat God’s gift to humanity. God saved me in some sense.” But I don’t think he thinks that, “Oh, I am the embodiment of an abstract ideology that the people just weren’t ready to receive yet and weren’t ready to purify themselves for in the grand struggle.”

You know, that’s—I don’t think that’s how Trump thinks of the world at all.

All right. Fair enough. You’ve convinced me, Tanner. For the record, I did ask ChatGPT for better analogies, and it didn’t have one that I liked. Let’s talk about actual things that people in Trump world believe. I mean, I guess maybe Laban’s wrong. But anyways, let’s focus on the economic dimension. We have two axes that you chart Trump world economic thinking on. One focused on industrial renaissance versus emerging technology advancement. And another axis that is focused on—that believes that the administrative state can do things. And another that thinks the administrative state is, by definition, weak and ineffective and not a useful tool for changing the world. Tanner, talk us through this quadrant of thinking. Maybe assign some human beings to better populate our four corners for us.

Yeah, sure. I think the first thing to emphasize here is that there are certain things that every MAGA person kind of has some consensus on when it comes to the economic vision they want for the future. And as I frame it in the report, especially the economic vision with China, because the way people frame it when they’re talking about China is that we need to win the economic competition with China. And what does that winning mean? It usually means some sense—a word that comes up a lot is some sense of independence. There’s this sense that the United States is too dependent on the world abroad, and it’s not free. Or, to use Trump’s word from earlier this week, it’s not liberated. He said this himself, that this is going to be a new Independence Day declaration.

And the idea there is that all these ties with foreign countries mostly just tie down our hands, mostly just make it so that we are dependent for basic goods, for basic things that are secure to our national security, that are core to the future of our economy, that we can only have these if we treat other countries properly. And that we want a world in which American strength and American wealth is not dependent on the goodwill or the good graces of foreign countries, but rather the reverse, where foreign countries’ prosperity and security are dependent on our goodwill. That’s more or less the unifying vision. So the question then is, like, well, how do you get there? And what does that mean specifically?

So staying on the unifying vision for a second, it’s this vision of, you know, that’s an autarchic dream, right? No, I don’t think it’s necessarily autarchic. It can be autarchic, but the point there is, like, who is depending on the good graces of who is more or less the argument there, right? Like, is everybody—so, I mean, as an abstract idea, America in 1946 is the entire world’s economy, has a lot of trade relations with the whole world because basically the whole world is buying our stuff. I don’t think any Trump person looks at America 1946 to 1955 on the economic side and says, oh, yeah, like, that was terrible. They, in some ways, look at that and say, no, that’s great. If we could have that world where America is the world’s factory and everyone’s buying from us and they can cut off us, but we can’t cut off them, then they’d all be fine with that.

And I think the question there then becomes what level of autarky is needed in a world in which other countries are richer? What stuff do we need to replicate at home? What stuff can we maybe get abroad? But generally speaking, all quarters basically agree that globalization reduces America’s field of action. And in particular, this is dangerous because globalization is mostly redound to the benefit of China. And not only have we—it would be one thing if we were giving up all this capability to Japan and the EU, which a lot of them view as a big problem. Even worse, if it’s going to China, which is mostly what has—the lion’s share of the story of what has happened is that China is the one that has gained a lot of these capabilities that America is now dependent on.

And so if you have a geopolitical rival upon which you are economically dependent, that is a problem in their mind. Are there some 1930s vibes of that? Yeah, a little bit. But I don’t think the vision is complete autarky. In each of the four quadrants that you have for economic policymakers in Trump’s orbit, what is the limiting principle in each of those? Like, I think maybe dynamists, people in the lower right quadrant, people who are skeptical of the administrative state’s capacity and want tech revolution, they might say, you know, we need to reshore manufacturing of critical national security things like chips.

And then people on the other side of the spectrum might say, like, I don’t know, we need to reshore tons of manufacturing capabilities. Like, is the limiting principle, do we need to reshore t-shirts for American national security as well? Like, where does each camp draw the line as to what we need to bring back to America? I think that’s a really good question for kind of getting at the divides between the camp, right? Especially this kind of question I have. So, like, my first axis that kind of divides the group is the people who view winning the future, securing American national security, taking control of the currently heights of the 21st-century economy in terms of developing new technologies or being at the leading edge of new technologies versus those who, like, want a much wider spread industrial renaissance.

And you kind of think of it as a spectrum with extremes on each end. So, at the most extreme version is going to be the guy who basically thinks the only thing that matters is AI. Like, nothing else really matters. But if America wins AI, then everything else just kind of falls into place. And there’s nothing that really needs to happen for AI except for us to make sure, you know, OpenAI has the money and the energy that they need. Or Anthropic or whatever. And then on the complete opposite side, you’re going to have someone who’s going to be like, we need everything, including t-shirts.

In reality, most people are not on either of those extremes. But that’s kind of the spectrum, right? And so, I tend to find that people on the right half, people in my right two quadrants, or the leading tech side, they tend to, I would say, either come from national security backgrounds or come from tech investment backgrounds. Sometimes finance as well. And their model of the world, the way they think about this problem—we’ll start at the bottom right corner, the dynamists in particular, who, like, you know, this is somebody, like, to choose a very prominent example, someone who’s outside of the administration, who’s written very publicly. Someone like Marc Andreessen, I would definitely put there.

And there’s lots of people from his circle who’ve kind of gone to the administration, and you can kind of see where they’ve done. But they look at American success over the last 30 years, 40 years, and they say that the successes of that time need to be replicated. There’s this chart that went viral on tech Twitter a few months ago that showed the productivity gap between the United States and Europe between 1990 and now. And it basically shows that the Europeans have not had very much gain in labor productivity, whereas the Americans have almost tripled it. And this is one explanation for what has happened to the American economy, why it’s been much better than the Europeans. In the year 2000, people thought the EU might be up at the American level, and it just hasn’t been.

And the answer these people will give is, well, it’s because America had the most important firms and the most important technological advancements of that time. We had Apple, we had Meta, we had Amazon, and we have Silicon Valley. And Silicon Valley, as focused on specific firms, they often think about this in terms of firms. They want to make sure we have the winning firms for the future. They’re going to implement the next round of a technological revolution. And if those firms are Chinese, that productivity gap that you see between the EU and the United States, that’s going to be China and the United States. And so we need to make sure our firms are it.

And the rest of the story doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if we have, you know, t-shirts. It probably doesn’t even matter if we have steel. We can import that from somebody else. What matters is that the firms that will capture the largest percentage of global growth in the future—and those are going to be the ones at the forefront of new technologies—those ones need to be us. And so when they look at what these suite of technologies will be, obviously AI. There’s concern about things like semiconductors and stuff like that, especially if in the future the Chinese might cut us off or something along those lines. There’s things like quantum computing, things like automated systems, things like robotics, UAVs, new energy, aeronautics, and space. That’s the realm in which these guys kind of think.

And the guys on my top right, I call it the techno-nationalists, they have a very similar perspective, but they’re even more national security oriented. Like, their argument is less about we need to have the firms that have the most economic growth and more about we need to have the technologies that will have military applications in the future. And we need to make sure we’re pouring national resources into that. And then on the two left quadrants, the people who are in favor of an industrial renaissance, you write in your report that people in those camps see Silicon Valley not as this model of productivity success, but as a cautionary tale.

So, there’s a national security oriented way in which they see them, and there’s a more economic and political way. Let’s kind of start with that. The economic and political thing is Trumpism in some way starts out because certain parts of the country feel like they’ve been left behind by this fantastic economic growth that we just described that happened between 1990 and then 2015. If you are a person in West Virginia, Buffalo, New York, Winesburg, Ohio, places like that, the vast increases in American productivity and the lowering of consumer prices haven’t been sufficient to offset what you’ve lost in the deindustrializing of your areas.

And so, as a practical political matter, these guys point out that if we don’t have an economy that meets the needs of these people who live in these swing states and are at the core of our movement from its very beginning, then we’re doing something bad. There’s the economic, and then it will just create even worse populist eruptions in the future if we can’t meet this need. There’s the economic argument on top of this, which is that a lot of these guys look at China and say, if you look at China’s economic advances, there was this idea that you could, in the past, have American companies doing design.

And then you could export the middle tier, the hard-tier construction, off to countries like China. And then you would still be able to be a leader in design and in software, you know, the user end experience and the design experience; all the middle stuff, we can take to a country like China or other countries that are in the middle of industrializing. And that will make things cheaper, and we don’t really have to worry as long as we’re at the leading edge. A lot of people who are studying the Chinese economy now, and if you read a magazine like American Affairs or you look at American Compass, you’ll see a lot of this stuff kind of percolate up.

They make the argument that this is really not true, that actually, if you are doing really well at the production, you will soon have the skills needed to not only produce but also to design and engineer and develop the backends. And that’s what’s happening in China right now. That’s more or less their argument. And so if we follow this Silicon Valley way, where we just focus on, like, Apple focuses on the user end experience and the design, but then exports the hardware part to foreign countries because it’s cheaper, we’re going to end up where you have, you know, Huawei and Xiaomi and all these little companies that are leapfrogging America and developing new technologies because they have both design and engineering experience. And that’s the story of EVs or whatever. That’s kind of the logic there.

So that’s how we go from Vivek saying, you know, we should tariff the hell out of China, but it’s okay to do friend shoring and we also need 50% tariffs on Vietnam because those factories should be in America and not in these countries that don’t even like us anyways. Well, that’s right. And I think it depends on the particular thing. I mean, some countries like Cambodia or Vietnam, I mean, that’s producing t-shirts half the time. Right. Especially a country like Cambodia or Laos or whatever. And that’s probably the hardest argument any of these people have to make.

But if you’re talking about major industrial electronics or things like steel, these guys will say you need to have this. They like to use this phrase, like, a functioning industrial ecosystem, right? Where you have overlapping companies, overlapping supply lines, engineers inside your country that will develop these new technologies. And then they’ll add a national security point on top of this, which is that if there is a war, especially with China, it’s really dangerous not to have, like, even basic things like steel and aluminum not being produced inside our own country. If it’s being produced far away, that can be targeted in a war.

If it’s being produced in China itself, then we won’t have access to it. We need to have this capacity at home. And so that’s kind of the people on the left-hand side of the argument is that we need to have much more of this stuff here. Otherwise, we’ll have bad effects in developing new technology and meeting the political and economic needs of average people across the country and in secure national security.

Nick, let’s say you’re an old-school Republican and you still really like the ideas of free markets and tax cuts and deregulation. If you want to get in, if you want to be influential to Trump, which camp are you going to affiliate yourself most with to try to be in his orbit? If you’re an old school free marketer, probably the group that you have the most easiest affiliation with is probably the bottom right corner, which I call the decentralists. So as a reminder, like, the top and bottom of the graphs, this is basically people who believe that government should be used for conservative ends versus people who believe that they’re really skeptical that government can be used that way.

And people on the bottom right, like, they believe in this new technology paradigm and they also believe that the government mostly just needs to get out of the way. And so their program is, like, we can have a lot of economic growth and develop these new technologies if we just get rid of regulations. If we do all this, like, abundance NEPA reform stuff, it’s kind of in line with what a lot of these people say. Certainly, it’s in line with, like, a lot of what the DOGE people think and have been doing. That really the big problems that we have are inefficient bureaucrats, and we have all these DEI things holding down the economy, holding on foreign companies, that we have, you know, kind of crazy 1970s environmental regulation rules.

We’d obviously have nuclear power plants everywhere already if we didn’t have that stuff. And so that’s kind of their tech. And a free marketer can find some work, can work with them pretty easily. Although I think in terms of, like, personalities, they would often clash because a lot of these guys kind of come from tech perspectives where they’re very not old school in their way of thinking and talking. But in terms of, like, actual policies envisioned, I mean, that’s where someone like Vivek is at, right? And he says, yes, we should have tariffs, but only for the perspective of reshoring key national security stuff. Otherwise, our goal is just to take the government out of the economy.

Are we looking at a post-free markets America for the foreseeable future? Or is there going to be a swing back? I mean, there’ll probably be a swing back in time, especially if, like, I don’t know, we have a Great Depression-style thing. I mean, a lot of time, free market swings are the result of, like, swings in the reverse, right? They’re reactions. And if liberalism—and I mean, like, economic liberalism—seems very outdated to people, it usually doesn’t once it’s not being tried. So I think that that’s a certain possibility.

I think in Trump world, there’s not a coherent answer to this, partially because you have all these different positions, right? So on the top half are the people who believe that actually Republicans have been wrong since Reagan times and that we need to have some sort of much more serious intervention in the economy in support of building the new economy in the future. And there’s generally two precedents that are cited for this. People in the top right corner, those kind of national security hawkish folks, those techno-nationalists, they’re very apt to look back at, like Cold War-style interventions in the economy for the sake of creating new technologies.

And they know there’s a lot of those. A lot of technologies are basically the marriage of government and the private sector for national security needs. They say, well, if it worked for us in 1950, why wouldn’t it work now? People in the top left corner also believe that. I call them industrialists or industrial policymakers because they are strong believers in a big industrial policy across the board. This is kind of like Oren Cass is maybe a leading figure of this. I think J.D. Vance is certainly in that camp. Marco Rubio is in that camp.

And they would like to see the full suite of policy tools used to not just advance American technology but also to try and build American factories and make a much more equitable—although they won’t use that word—distribution of economic goods across the United States. And these guys, this top left industrial policy camp, my personal read at this point in the administration is they are not having too many big wins. They have a lot of intellectual wins. And they support tariffs. So if you consider tariffs a win for them, then they’ve got something. And there’s not a lot of appetite in the administration thus far for the sort of spending that these guys imagine.

And that’s maybe the weakness of their approach is that if you’re going to do hard-level industrial policy, it’s hard to do without also raising taxes or raising the deficit. And Republicans are very allergic to both of those. And so that gives you three of the four camps. I’ll just say one more thing just about the bottom left camp, which is the trade warriors, because there’s something about this that’s not obvious to people.

A lot of people who are attracted to tariffs are often critics of industrial policy, rich, large. They, like, say, didn’t like the Chips Act. And they actually are in their own way, like, they’re critics of the administrative state. They don’t believe that government can do this well. But they nevertheless believe that tariffs might be able to. And this kind of seems like a contradiction in terms, but it isn’t necessarily. Because if you think about it, tariffs are extremely, although high impact, they’re low bureaucracy. USTR has, like, 200 people. Maybe they need to sign, like, 100 people more on to have negotiations with every country in the world right now.

But if you want to basically have the sort of industrial policy that you could run on, like, a night watchman state, the sort of state that America had in the 19th century, well, that’s how America did it in the 19th century. It used tariffs as your lever. And so if you want to kind of do the DOGE thing where you’re tearing down the federal government without reducing the ability to bring back this industrial renaissance, you’re often very attracted to the tariff position.

Okay, Tanner, a challenge for you. Let’s use Laura Loomer as our hinge to explaining Trump world’s views of geopolitics. Well, maybe, I mean, do we need to give background for people who don’t know what happened with Laura Loomer? Maybe you should tee it up first. I think not everyone will have seen that piece of news in the middle of all the tariff stuff.

I don’t know if I can, like, tee up Laura Loomer, but all right, I’ll try. Okay, so. Yeah, I mean, why don’t you, can you explain her in four sentences? I feel like you have a better sense of her mind space. I’m sure. Laura Loomer is a media personality slash activist on, I would say, the MAGA right. And she was influential in the election, and she was a constant ally of Trump during the election.

She stayed with him during the primaries. And one of the things she’s been big about is policing Trump world to make sure that rhinos, Republicans in name only, do not get important administrative posts in this new administration because the theory is that a lot of the stuff that Trump wanted to do last time around didn’t happen because he had people who were working against what Trump wanted. I dispute this theory, but we can talk about that in a minute.

The key thing here is that the other day she came to the White House with a dossier of people. That she had evidence of some sort that they were never Trumpers at one point in their life and were disloyal to Trump’s current program. And they need to be let go. And it looks like Trump let go several of them. Importantly, the people that have been let go by my count, there were three people in the National Security Council. This morning, it was released that the head of the National Security Administration or agency, sorry, the NSA and the number two of the NSA were also both let go, presumably because of whatever Laura Loomer was presenting in this dossier.

But on the flip side, not everybody that she’s targeted has been let go. There are people like Alex Wong or Ivan Cappanathy on the NSC who she’s targeted many times in public who still have their jobs. So that’s basically what happened. She came in, gave a briefing, people got fired. Try as she might, though, Laura Loomer will have a very difficult time firing once-never-Trumper Vice President J.D. Vance. So good luck to her.

She’s also a member of the tribe and has a huge bone to pick with Elon, particularly for the China connections that he has. Which is interesting because this is not really something that’s come up all that much. And she’s not the only one from that faction, right? Like Stephen Bannon also has gone on the warpath against Elon for months for very similar reasons. I mean, so there’s two ways you can look at what happened. You can look at it kind of as the way you were suggesting in the very beginning of this podcast, which is, oh, isn’t it crazy that we have far-right Internet personalities firing people in the National Security Administration? I mean, in the National Security Council.

Obviously, we’re not going to look at this as a fight within the Trump administration itself between these different factions that I’ve kind of identified. And I suspect the second is the right way to look at it. I suspect that Loomer is just as much an agent of these forces or of these people inside the administration that she wants to help as she is a completely outside force. And this is a way for people who dislike some of the policies these people might be pushing for to bring it to Trump’s attention that doesn’t seem self-serving in their own way.

I don’t know if that’s true, but if true, it’s very clever. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that, like, there are people in the administration who helped tee this whole thing up. Because where does Loomer learn all this stuff in the first place? How does she know, you know, the long details of what David Fyfe thinks or not? She doesn’t, she’s not part of that sphere. But there are people who are part of that sphere who know Laura Loomer. And so that’s my guess at how this actually happened. It’s a hit job.

We’ve got people paying libs of TikTok and other influencers to dig up dirt. It’s like internal cancel culture. It’s beautiful. Well, you know, it’s not that new or unusual, frankly, in like the long history of American politics for people to do this sort of thing to take—I mean, it’s just not that different, actually, from leaking something to The New York Times to discredit somebody internally. It’s just the difference is Trump doesn’t care about what The New York Times thinks, whereas he will give an audience to Laura Loomer.

And the dynamics are not that different. And make J.D. Vance and other cabinet officials sit there while she berates them, which is kind of wild, which is another level of wildness, I think. But did J.D. Vance mind? I mean, for all I know, he was one of the people who was he’s on the opposite side of these debates from the people that released. So in some ways, like, this is to J.D. Vance’s benefit, assuming he’s actually, you know, he cares about the political program that he wants to do, which I think is true. I think unlike Trump, he’s more of a true ideological believer.

Maybe Vance could say that thing that you had Hitler saying in the bunker one day in the future. But I like he’s enough of an ideologue to actually believe in ideas as such. For sure. There was this quote from Time magazine. Vance had an interview there back in 2021. Vance told Time, Trump is the leader of this movement. And if I actually care about these people, like his constituents and the things I say I care about, I just need to suck it up and support him. So that’s 2021 Vance, I think. Yeah, I’d agree. I think it’s very consistent with how he is now.

He does have a definite ideological vision. I mean, I think the two consistent things with Vance in this time are, number one, he views his job as vice president to be the prime public defender of Trump, period. Kind of like how Nixon was to Eisenhower. The idea being that Eisenhower could say about the fray and Nixon would do all the hard stuff. Trump doesn’t necessarily want to stay above the fray all the time. But I think it’s a very similar sort of dynamic.

And the second thing is, like, when it comes to personnel or people and influencing policy that is one level below where Trump is at, you see his concerns manifest. He definitely has a project. I will say, I know you dismissed earlier the sort of quality of staff work, but there is not a deep bench for this stuff. And, you know, if you want to press a button as a president and have it create a certain outcome, like, you are going to need people to cross I’s and dot T’s. And the more this happens, the more you have to resort to more and more junior people who are just not going to know how to fly the plane.

So, I mean, if I was dismissive of that, I didn’t mean to be. I think it’s a real concern. And it’s a real problem. Look, the Trump administration has what might be called a red and experts problem. If you know, you’re going to go to 1930 Stalin as well. So I’m glad we’re on the same level, Tanner. I’m going to give you I have an essay that I’m writing about this, then you’ll eventually see it. And it’s going to be called Red and Experts. And I’ll give you a non-totalitarian example of this, though, once I introduce the idea of people who don’t know.

Red and Experts is the phrase that basically has been used in communist systems, especially in China. To describe the problem, like the kind of people that Mao wanted to have running his systems. You know, communists come into power. They have a problem. The median person in the bureaucracy belongs to the bourgeois class that they’re trying to overthrow. They believe rather strongly that the preferences of people from this class are orthogonal to the program they want to implement. So what do you do? Do you have these, you know, bad class element experts in charge? Or do you have reds who don’t know what they’re doing but are believers in the program?

Ideally, you can get people who are both red and expert. But otherwise, you have to find a way to triangulate this program. And this has been a consistent problem throughout much of human history. Whenever you have one group take over. The example that comes to my mind as a very compelling example of this is when Republicans first came to power ever. When Republicans took control of Congress and the executive branch in 1860. It was after a period in which Democrats controlled it for a very long time. Most of the military was Democrats.

Half of the military seceded to the South. Most of the rest of the military voted Democrat. And you had Republican after Republican in Congress drag these generals through hearings and protests to Lincoln all the time. Saying the reason that we’re not winning this war, the Civil War, is because we are not putting in power people who believe in the program. We keep putting in power these people who are sympathetic to the South. Who like the old Southern buddies. They are fighting in the war. Who don’t want to get rid of slavery. If we put those guys in power, they would fight the war much harder. They would do the tough stuff that needs to be done.

And Lincoln tried it in a few cases. And a lot of those generals who he did try to put, like John C. Fremont, didn’t do very well. It turns out that the generals who ended up doing the best for the Union were often people like Sherman. Who, before the war, did not want it to happen. Who was teaching in the South at the time. Who, on his first meeting with Lincoln, came away thinking, oh, this guy’s an idiot. He says it in his memoir. I hated him when I first met him. I thought he was an idiot. It was his fault this war was happening. But Sherman liked to fight. Grant liked to fight. They were very good at fighting.

And if you could get out of their way and let them do their job, which was killing people and burning things and stuff like that, you can have a lot of success. And so if you look at the class of generals and admirals who kind of won the war, Farragut and Meade and I guess Sheridan was very Republican. But if you look at this group of people as a whole, it’s not an extremely ideological group. What matters is their competence. And there was a problem in the U.S. Army in 1816 is there was a lot of incompetent generals who hadn’t been fighting in a war.

And so if the Republicans were looking at the current government now and saying the problem is that we have too many incompetent people who have not had the pressure, like, you know, wartime pressure sort of things to raise to the top. And what we need to do is just find the people who will be very good and will do what we tell them to do. And they will do it well because they’re American. If they cared more about that instead of these loyalty tests, I suspect they would do better. I think the general history of this Red and Experts problem is that you only really do well when you learn to have Reds who can be in charge of experts.

We do have a two-hour Civil War history show which will be coming out soon, I promise, guys. But the dynamic that Tanner is talking about is written up absolutely beautifully by Bruce Catton in his book Glory Road. It’s part two of a three-part trilogy about the Army of the Potomac. And yeah, I mean, like, when I was reading that, it felt very much like Stalin 1930s of there are all these snakes in the grass who are not, you know, down with the program. And I mean, we’ll do Hitler again. Like, my generals are betraying me. Like, they did Operation Valkyrie. So, of course, they were always against me from the beginning.

Like, this whole, like, I am losing because I don’t have loyalty in my people who I want to do the things is a great sort of psychological excuse for losing on other dimensions. But in fact, like, there are lots of human endeavors where you actually need the person with the PhD or the person with the 15 years of experience as opposed to the person with the right ideological orientation. I don’t want to diminish this. People can make a good argument that say, like, George McClellan in 1860 prosecuted the war with less ferocity than he should have because he was sympathetic to the South. People have made that argument. It might be true.

I think over human history as a whole, there are lots of examples of people in the bureaucracy, not loyal, subverting a program. But in my mind, this is less an argument for, okay, you need to just, like, replace everyone in the bureaucracy with loyalists and more an argument for, you just need to get people who are good at getting bureaucracies to do what you want. Right. I mean, like, Don Rumsfeld had a Pentagon full of people that he did not—had a Pentagon full of people who didn’t agree with his program. And he was very good at getting them to do what he wanted anyways.

And that’s the sort of thing that you should be selecting for. And I do think they probably overestimate or underestimate the number of people who are not necessarily Trump voters, but who will just do what they need to do because they believe in doing what the government says. There’s actually a lot of people like that. But here’s the thing.

And this comes back to the beginning of our conversation, Tanner, where if we don’t actually have a vision, if the vision is, I am Trump, I like negotiating, I like keeping my cards close to my chest. The people who are not down with that, oh, let’s just defer to this guy. It’s hard to point a Donald Rumsfeld in a particular direction because that guy’s going to get pointed in a different direction two months from now. I mean, that’s fair. Although, the problem with Donald Rumsfeld, too, is that in some ways he had his own vision that wasn’t matching up with Bush’s.

So, especially at that top level, I’m a bit more sympathetic. Trump feels like, especially at the level of his principles, that various principles of the National Security Council are, and this is the level of Rubio or Waltz or Hezgeth. These people are not pursuing something in contradiction of what I want to do, which is what he thinks about Mattis and stuff at that time. I have a lot of sympathy for him saying, okay, I need people in my decision-making council to at least not be pursuing their own programs, but bringing the decision up to me. I have sympathy for that.

I’m not sure that’s what happened here with this Laura Loomer thing. I’ve seen no evidence that David Fythe was off doing his own thing. I think it was more just a pure loyalty test sort of thing, where at some point between 2020 and now, he must have said something that was never Trumpy sounding. And you’re going to kind of cut him off. He doesn’t get the J.D. grace.

Yeah. That’s right. Well, should we talk about quadrants? Do we have time? Let’s do quadrants. Do you guys have time? 30 minutes on Laura Loomer. I love it. Dude, I’m so happy we got to the Civil War.

All right. Let’s get back to our geopolitical quadrants. We have one axis that is optimism for American power and capability, as opposed to pessimism. And one is power-based viewpoints versus value-based viewpoints of how America should think about and interact with the world. The first and most important of these axes is just how do you feel about American power? Do you feel confident that America is strong, that its potential is underutilized or unrealized at the moment? Or do you think that America is basically in trouble culturally, fiscally, politically, militarily, unable to do what it once was able to do?

This matters, especially when it comes to China, because it impacts how you think about what kind of posture America can afford to take towards China. If you think America is fundamentally weak, you think that the range of possible outcomes that we can have with China is much constrained. On the flip side, if you believe that America is fundamentally strong, you are often much more willing to seek kind of maximalist solutions with China. You are often more likely to think that there are not trade-offs between China as a problem and other problem spots across the world.

We don’t necessarily have to go all the way out of Ukraine in order to focus on Taiwan because we have the potential resources to do both. We just aren’t using them smartly enough or we’re not having enough defense budgets. But that defense budget is not a law of the universe. It could be changed. What Trump wants to have happen will happen. So let’s get him to make our defense budgets bigger. That’s one axis.

The second axis is whether or not you analyze American foreign policy primarily through the lens of some sort of realpolitik hard power. Or if you think there are other values-based things that matter. The top half of my diagram is these realpolitik people. They’re very easy to understand. I think they’re a pretty easy model. You think that force is the most important thing in the world. And what matters is whether or not America has it and whether or not alliances contribute or take from it, that sort of stuff.

The people on the bottom quarter, they’re a little bit different. The two different camps of values-based perspectives actually differ in the kinds of values they’re assessing. Can you describe how those two camps differ?

Yeah, that’s right. They’re a little bit less parallel than the top ones. The top ones, more or less, if your calculation of American power changed, you would go from one camp to the other. Right. But for the bottom people, they have a similar way of thinking about the world, which is that the international order and the international environment has a sort of feedback relationship with the domestic order, domestic values that we have.

And just like domestically, statecraft should be informed by a positive vision of what we want to do in the world. It should be informed by a positive vision of the good. Likewise, there’s no reason that’s not true in the international sphere. People at the top say it’s not true. All that matters is really kind of power stuff. And that other stuff is a distraction or it takes away from the different logic that operates in the international sphere.

The people in the bottom two quadrants, they disagree with that. So what do they say? I mean, I think the people in the bottom left corner, who I label crusaders, think that you need to forcefully defend things like democracy and liberty as abstract ideals on the international stage. That by defending them on the international stage, you’re enshrining them at home. And that things like China pose a threat to them at home. They often look at things like influence operations and stuff like that.

They often view things like influence interference operations as the big problem that China poses for the United States. And then the guys will kind of have the reverse version. A paramount guy here would be someone like Miles Yu, who believes strongly that things like democracy and human rights, these aren’t just good ideas, but they are potential weapons that should be used against the Communist Party of China. Where the communists say all these things are meant to undermine us. All these ideas, these things in the international order are eroding our internal regime. Someone like Miles Yu would say, that’s great. Let’s do it consciously instead of unconsciously.

All right. And then, I don’t know, do you have a question for the other side? Or, you know, let’s see. You say that’s not what J.D. Vance thinks. I mean.

Yeah. And then, okay, let’s go to the other side of that. The people who are values-based but pessimistic in American power. I noted, in sort of a preview of this report back in October, you called this quadrant restrainers. Now you call them culture warriors. Can you describe what the restrainer slash culture warrior people think?

Yeah. I don’t call them restrainers anymore because I’ve realized that this word was getting confused a little bit too much. Restrainers is like a long academic tradition of people being like, the United States needs to come home for all these strategic reasons. We need to be more isolationist. It would be better for the whole world if we were to be that way. And a lot of people in the culture warrior camp think that, but they get there through slightly different logic. Their main concern is winning the culture war. Their main concern is recreating the American economy, the American politics, American culture, along grounds they find less hostile to their worldview.

They have like a thousand little divisions. We don’t have to get into it now, like what those divisions are. The main point is that they don’t like the kind of standard progressive liberal orthodoxy, which inhabits most of the American bureaucracy, American academia, NGOs, and much of the corporate world. These guys tend to view the liberal international order as an extension of the same progressive order at home that they’re fighting against. They view it that way in two ways. One is that the national security bureaucracies that maintain this order, they view as strongholds of the worldview that they oppose, right? CIA, FBI, even the military officer corps full of progressives.

And the second sense is, again, they view there’s a sort of feedback relationship where the complex of maintaining the international order encases a set of values that is weaponized against them at home. And so there’s no real reason to try and sacrifice American dollars, American blood, for upholding a system that they believe is trying to squash them out of existence, squash their cultural commitments out of existence. So that’s their basic belief.

I mean, you could add to this maybe like a third subset, which is that traditionally Republicans are elected, they believe, to kind of roll back certain social, cultural conditions. This never happens because Republicans always get so concentrated on foreign affairs. And so we need to turn down the dial on foreign affairs so that those things can take precedence. That’s kind of the logic of these folks.

Tanner, why don’t you connect this quadrant to caring about defending Taiwan? Hmm.

So what does Taiwan mean to these four quadrants? The Taiwanese, for the last few years, have been very big into describing how, oh, we are like a democracy. We’re a liberal democracy in Asia. They’ve often said things like, we know we’re the only liberal democracy in Asia that has gay marriage allowed under normal ways.

Things like that. This is not only not convincing to these people, it’s an anti-signal. It’s an argument against their defense. And so a lot of these guys, for sure, would not be willing to go to Taiwan’s defense for the sake of values, which they don’t necessarily hold. They’re often going to look at something like competition with China and look for off-ramps for it. They’ll view competition with China as a problem only in as much as China has a hostile relation with the United States because we need to do the necessary stuff on the trade side.

And so they want to have a military guarantee so they can do kind of crazy stuff in the trade world and not have the Chinese escalate to military options. This is kind of how they’ll say it sometimes. Right. Otherwise, they don’t feel like the United States has a huge vested interest in fighting a war with China. They would rather cut and run in that sort of situation. They don’t, especially if we’re over Taiwan. Some of them might say there’s a bigger question about how much power China has over us, if they’re going to do things that will give us independence. They have an interest in that.

But they don’t necessarily see the defense of all these allies all over the place as being the fast route to protecting American independence and often use it as an excuse that the national security state uses to increase its own power relative in the coalition and increase its position in American society. Can we map Taiwan policy onto the remaining three quadrants? We got prioritizers, those skeptical of American power, power-based viewpoints.

And then I think in particular, can you help spot the difference between a primacist, someone who’s power-based, optimistic, versus a crusader, someone who is optimistic, value-based? Because I think, yeah, primacists, they’re not going to say, I don’t care about democracy at all. Like, they’re in America, they’re probably going to say things that sometimes sound like crusaders, even if it’s not as explicit as someone like Miles Yu.

I think the restrainer types, they do care about democracy as majoritarianism for America. They care about freedom of speech in America. And so they often view these national security stuff as being something that harms those things they care about in America. And so someone like Mike Lee, to choose a very prominent senator in this world, constantly talks about how those two things, democracy and liberties, are being sacrificed at a foreign policy that doesn’t need it.

Or someone like Ross Vogt, who’s now head of OMB, who more or less makes the same argument that this focus on foreign policy has come directly at the expense of these things we care about doing at home. So, they’re also skeptical of American capability and power. They also are somewhat doomer on where America might be. And this affects what they think about Taiwan and China. Most of them, their standard position, the position that seems to be encoded in their stronghold at the moment is the office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. A lot of these guys have been stalked there.

And I don’t know if you guys saw the Washington Post report from a few days ago that went through the memo that was released. They basically, there’s a new memo that says that Taiwan must be the organizing contingency for the entire United States military. That’s not a very restrainer way of looking. That’s not a very culture warrior way of looking at the problem. The prioritizers, their view is basically those things that they care about what the stuff the culture warriors care about. But they think that those guys are a little bit too blasé about what happens if the Chinese become the global superpower.

The only place they can stop being stopped from becoming a global superpower is Taiwan. And thus, everything else needs to be stopped in order to focus on this. We got to get out of Ukraine. We got to get out of the Middle East. We got to focus everything we got on this Taiwan thing because America is in such a weak position that unless we do that, there’s no chance of victory. Or deterrence.

You make this point at the end of your paper where you tie domestic success on culture war-type DEI fighting stuff to America’s ability to think it can do things on the world stage and project power and win wars and whatnot. Expand on that for us, please.

Okay, well, just think of it this way. If the number one difference between the different camps and the policy approaches you’re taking is, how strong do you think America is? What are the inputs that are going into this function where outside is like, you know, people’s internal, okay, America’s strong or not? And this will change from person to person. Some of these things are very obvious things, like the number of ships we have, the number of ships they have. Some of the things are more intangible. A lot of the rumorism on the Trump side is that they honestly need to make America great again because America is not. Because America is culturally falling apart; it’s becoming progressive.

It’s becoming a sort of culture that is disintegrating where people don’t feel loyalty. They will not be willing to sign up to fight for the military. There’s no longer this martial spirit inside the military. There’s no longer this cultural coherence outside of it. We can’t get the bureaucracy to do what we need. And so if there is a contest, we’re going to be fighting against ourselves the whole time. Things like that will go into calculations that people have over whether or not they believe that America is sufficiently strong enough to deter a war with China or to do anything else. This is important and very underemphasized.

I recommend people look up an essay written by Michael Anton in 2021 for The American Mind called, or maybe it’s for The Federalist, called Why We Should Not Defend Taiwan or something of that. Regardless, remember, Michael Anton is now in the State Department as at the head of policy there. And he lists all these reasons why we shouldn’t defend Taiwan, and most of them are about lack of American strength to do it. But if you see why he says we’re not strong, he points out the normal things about shipbuilding numbers and stuff. Then he says things like, and we keep crashing our ships. And we have pride flags everywhere.

And we have a military where Mark Milley cares more about transgender troops than about readiness. He goes through a whole list of things, which I think most analysts of American foreign policy, be they abroad or at home, do not really view as something separate from foreign policy. And for a lot of Trump world, that’s simply not true.

Well, here’s where I kind of see the Nero decree energy coming back into it, right? If the woke people seem like they’re winning in 2027, then I think that the sort of the Taiwan commitment, I imagine, would be a little less clear. You know, yes, I think that there’ll be more forces for restraint in a world in which the Trump people feel like all the things they’ve wanted to do, Doge tariffs, remaking the global order. If all this stuff turns to crap, you know, maybe there’s the argument like, oh, they’ll look for a way to have a war because I’ll make him look strong and people will trust them more than Democrats or whatever.

Like, I suppose it’s a possibility. But my intuition is that if we look like Trump has been in power for two or three years and America is in a worse position culturally, economically, politically than it was when he came into power. Then this will translate into a larger percentage of Trump people around Trump, feeling like America is not capable of standing up to China. Or that it needs to compromise and regain strength before it can do so. Hide and bind, per se.

You note in this paper, Tanner, that they’re playing half court tennis, thinking about China’s aims and ambitions and second-order consequences of what Beijing would do if they went this way or that way. It was never the sort of first layer of thinking that got all these people to all their different quadrants, both from the geopolitical and economic side.

I asked all these people about what’s your ideal China policy. What do you want to have happen? You know, what does the world look like after you’ve done this? What are the tools you want to use? And everybody had lots of answers on these questions and expanded freely on them. But when I asked the question, OK, so when you do X, what do you think the Chinese will do Y? First of all, no one ever brought that up on their own. Some of them were able to get pretty good answers when prompted, but they all had to be prompted to kind of view this as a we do this, they do this, we do this, they do this sort of thing.

And in some ways, this is almost kind of the opposite of Trump himself. Right. Trump is a super tactical guy who just wants to go from one thing to the next, whereas everybody else has these very big plans. They have these, you know, here’s the end state we want with China. Here’s this program of things we want to do to help us without thinking, OK, well, what’s their response going to be? Whereas Trump almost is the opposite, where he’s thinking, OK, what’s their response going to be? Let’s do the thing where they’re going to respond to us.

And I do think that’s probably a problem. It’s a problem both in that it probably means that branching from or bridging Trump’s way of doing policy to what these guys want to do will be difficult. Even if they weren’t all trying to do different things, it would be difficult. And then the Chinese will do stuff. And so I would feel better if more people had thought through what they think the Chinese response would be, especially on the economic side.

On the economic side, I think a lot of the people, whether or not China existed, they would have many of their similar economic ideals. For some of them, China is a convenient boogeyman. For some of them, China is a good piece of evidence to use as to how American economic policy could be better. But very rarely is China the reason they got to where they were so much as just a case study in what they want to do. And I suspect that there might be a few surprises when we act and the Chinese act in return.

Well, let’s close on that then.

Okay. Tanner, Tanner Greer, Mandarin speaker, guy on the scene for the Council of Foreign Relations doing the open translation project. Translation, one more time. How the hell are they going to make any sense of this?

Well, so the first question, and I don’t know the answer to this, is how much discernment do they have of the intricacies that I’ve kind of described? If they were very smart, they would try to look at these different factions and play in such a way that they would strengthen some over another. I doubt they will be able to do that. I don’t think the Chinese have a very good track record of understanding kind of American politics and manipulating it in a way that works in the era of Xi Jinping.

I don’t think Tanner is going to be consulting anytime soon. This podcast is all you guys are going to get. I know. I guess they could read my report. It’s out in the public. I mean, they will be filled, like, whatever little intern at the embassy reads my report, it getting filtered up to Xi Jinping, I think those steps probably matter.

Because I’ve met or seen some of those people at the embassy before, and a lot of them are actually pretty savvy on American politics. So it makes me think that there’s something between the step of the guy on the ground in D.C. and see where things get messed up. Or there are other pressures in their own domestic system where people are doing things for reasons that aren’t just what the Americans will do back, right? There’s a mere problem here. What will they do?

My guess in the short term is they’re going to just position themselves as being the nice guys on the international scene in contrast to the chaos of the Trump people. If they’re smart, they’ll emphasize this whole predictability, unpredictability element I’ve mentioned already. You can see they’ve already started leasing propaganda, talking about how they’re all for trade and all for helping people out and stuff. They’ll continue doing that.

The more interesting question is, will they take a harder or maybe more accelerated view of the Taiwan question? And I suspect the answer, unless the Taiwanese do something different, is no. I think they’re going to look at the chaos going on in the United States and interpret this as reason for them to have some sanguinity about their previous proclamations that the East is rising and the West is falling.

The time is on their side. I think that’s probably my guess. They’re going to look at their, they’re going to say time is on our side. We just need to be the calm guys while the Americans are the crazy ones. And everyone will see who’s the better bet. Taiwanese will see we’re only getting stronger in military power. We don’t have to pull the trigger right away. But that’s just my guess. There’s lots of things that could get in the way of that.

What one last one for you, Tanner. So, you know, history is contingent. Trump is a unique figure. DeSantis could have won the primary. He could have gotten impeached in January. He could have gotten shot twice over the course of the election. What was and wasn’t baked in given a Republican president winning in 2024?

What has happened with Ukraine was not baked in. What has happened in Europe was not baked in. That’s the first thing. I think that the general trajectory on the geopolitical side of the department orienting strongly towards Taiwan was to an extent baked in. Now, the really interesting question is, what about tariffs and trade?

And I think that a larger reckoning with the current international trading order, I believe personally that this order is not sustainable as it has been. The costs, you know, I hear a lot of neoliberal people kind of talk about how we just need to kind of go back to Obama-era stuff. It’s all good. Like, you know, it’s fine. I think this is utterly insufficient, especially if you’re a liberal who doesn’t oppose, who doesn’t like Trump. You have to see that this order in some ways produced him.

And so I think that whether or not Trump died last summer, we would be having some sort of reckoning with what the order would look like. Would it happen this way? Probably not. But I think there would be, like, I think that this the era of the post Bretton Woods era, you know, the globalized era from 1970s to now, whatever we want to call this world, is coming to its concluding point, naturally, at this point.

And the question is just how much agency are we going to try and have over this process? And how much agency can anyone have over this process? I don’t have simple answers to that. I think that the Trump team’s divisions and Trump’s own kind of erratic personality, of course, make that a little bit more difficult to exercise some sort of control against the friction of the universe. But I don’t think there was a way where we go back to 2016 at this point.

All right. I think we’ll call it there. Tanner Greer, thank you so much for being a part of the show. Thank you very much.

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This is an experimental rewrite

Tanner: Today is April 4th. Two days ago, we had Liberation Day, a tariff salvo that aimed to reshape the global economic order. Meanwhile, Laura Loomer walked into the White House and dismissed several competent NSC staff members who were sufficiently MAGA for Trump 1.0 but apparently not for her or the president now. What’s going on in the Trump administration, and what implications does this hold for America’s relationship with China and its future place in the world?

Host: Thankfully, we have Tanner Greer from the blog Scholar Stage, who has written a guide to help us understand all of this. His new report, titled “Obscurity by Design, Competing Priorities for America’s China Policy,” stems from dozens of interviews and hundreds of hours of studying key Trump policymakers. This research will define America’s geopolitical and economic posture for years to come. We’ll delve into the various viewpoints shaping this administration as well as the long-term implications of Trump’s management style. Nicholas Wells, the longtime editor of China Talk, will be co-hosting today.

Tanner: What a day! It’s great to be here.

Host: Thanks for joining us!

Tanner: Yes, when we originally agreed to have this podcast about the report, I knew it would be relevant, but I had no idea it would be this relevant.

Host: All right, Tanner, let’s start with tariffs. How did we get to this point, and what does it reveal about the Trump administration?

Tanner: I spend the first part of my report discussing how to model Trump’s decision-making behavior and why it’s often difficult to predict his actions. I identify two main reasons for this unpredictability. First, Trump inherently wants to be seen as unpredictable. It seems to be part of his personality; he enjoys being impulsive and challenging to work with. Over time, especially during his first presidency, he realized that when people don’t know what to expect from him, he tends to do better, at least personally. Since he believes this gives him negotiation leverage, he views unpredictability as beneficial for his strategies. There’s something self-serving about this, but he’s escalated this idea to an official philosophy.

Co-host: Absolutely, Tanner. In an interview before the 2024 election with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, he even claimed that Xi wouldn’t invade Taiwan because, quote, “she knows I’m fucking crazy.”

Tanner: Yep, that was his exact quote. When it comes to China in particular, as well as world leaders in general, he wants them to see him as unpredictable and potentially capable of anything. A lot of his behavior reflects this desire to make that belief credible. He’s not the first president to think this way; Nixon adopted a similar strategy. The idea is that if you present yourself as unpredictable, rivals may be more inclined to do what you want. This aspect, in my view, is key to understanding why Trump behaves the way he does. He believes that clarifying his intentions would limit him, locking him into promises he may not want to keep and reducing his negotiating power.

Tanner (cont’d): Instead of pursuing a long-term strategy to reach specific goals, he approaches international relations as a series of ongoing negotiations aimed at improving his position in the immediate future.

Host: There are clearly competing impulses at play, right? On one hand, you have these views within the GOP that advocate for high tariffs to raise revenue, negotiate better, revitalize manufacturing, and decouple from China. Then there’s the iterative game that Trump enjoys playing. The rollout of these tariffs seems somewhat chaotic, even though it’s an initiative he’s been focused on for a long time. It feels less orderly compared to more systematic actions like the progressive pressure on Ivy League universities and law firms.

Tanner: It is interesting, isn’t it? Tariffs are something Trump has long cared about, but their rollout has been erratic, almost frenetic. I think there are fundamentally two reasons for this. First, as I mentioned, Trump believes that increasing the uncertainty surrounding his actions works to his advantage, and he clearly subscribes to this idea on an international scale.

Tanner (cont’d): But there’s also an issue with his management style. He doesn’t see it as a problem—he views it as how things should operate. He strongly prefers having a team with conflicting opinions and values personal loyalty. As long as he has that loyalty, he seems to enjoy pitting strong personalities against each other and acting as the kingmaker who decides the winner of these internal debates. Think of it as a way for him to navigate the principal-agent problem within a bureaucracy.

Host: How do you ensure a bureaucracy stays aligned with your goals when it has its own interests? Well, if you can pit different parts against each other, that’s how he prefers to operate. This style has some advantages, as multiple former Trump officials I interviewed pointed out. This contrasts markedly with how Condoleezza Rice managed the NSC during the lead-up to Iraq by seeking consensus before presenting it to the president. If you’re a Republican looking to avoid repeating the George W. Bush experience, it makes sense that this approach would be appealing, even to some inside the administration.

Tanner: The drawbacks here are twofold. First, it makes long-term planning and coherence difficult, complicating continuity from month to month. Second, it risks creating competing priorities and ideas for what the administration hopes to achieve, leading to tangled policies. Since Trump isn’t upfront about his preferred direction, he allows various ideas to surface, often without making decisive decisions among them.

Tanner (cont’d): Consequently, multiple people might end up advocating for the same policy for entirely different reasons. When examining how the tariff situation evolved from the beginning of the administration to now, I think this dynamic contributes significantly to the story.

Tanner (cont’d): Many groups hold different rationales concerning tariffs and their desired outcomes for economic policy, particularly regarding China but also more broadly. I’m not sure if the administration has successfully integrated these divergent views into a coherent policy. It seems at least plausible that their formula for determining reciprocal tariffs emerged from conflicting motivations among those supporting the tariff idea.

Host: So, is the policy responsible for such an outcome, or is there something else at play? A long-standing narrative suggests that reciprocal tariffs are necessary since many countries operate with unequal advantages. However, it’s also clear that something additional is necessary alongside those reciprocal tariffs to ensure fairness, given various restrictions and industrial policies that can skew the playing field.

Tanner: That seems reasonable. However, calculating the effects of all these different policies worldwide to level the trade field is a daunting task. I don’t have special insights into how the recent decisions were made or the processes involved this week, but I believe this occurred quite recently.

Host: Yes, media reports indicate these developments happened just last week.

Tanner: It’s wild! And it ties back to the numerous competing theories surrounding how to revitalize manufacturing. There’s this famous note Trump wrote to a Sherpa at a G7 meeting where he stated that trade is bad. His perception that trade deficits signify America is losing and being cheated has been a recurring theme for him.

Tanner (cont’d): Setting aside the question of whether ChatGPT created the formula, basing it on correcting trade deficits aligns more with Trump’s views than any complex strategies we’ve seen from the GOP recently—like reconfiguring Bretton Woods or other grand designs.

Host: That’s a fair point. However, looking at the tariffs, they aren’t too far removed from what Trump said he wanted to do during his campaign.

Tanner: Exactly! Throughout the campaign, Trump consistently emphasized two points: he wanted around 10% tariffs across the board and about 60% tariffs specifically on China. Those statements were made on multiple occasions.

Host: Right. If we analyze current numbers, it appears that China now effectively has a 60% rate added, while a general 10% applies elsewhere. There are also reciprocal tariff adjustments, with some larger figures for countries like Vietnam and smaller ones for others.

Tanner: My guess—though it’s merely an educated guess, as the administration is swamped right now and I won’t pester them—is that the logic even in Trump’s thinking is that the 10% tariff will stick no matter what. The other tariffs could serve as a sort of negotiating leverage. The real question is, negotiating for what exactly? There are many potential answers, but I suspect Trump wants world leaders to come to him, seeking clarity on how to get closer to that 10% rate rather than facing higher tariffs.

Host: If you take a country like Cambodia, I’m unsure what they could do in trade terms to affect this. Perhaps they could offer to remove Chinese military presence at some point, but is that something Trump cares about?

Tanner: Countries like Japan have much more room to negotiate back and forth. But here’s the thing, Tanner: Trump wants this to be an ongoing game where everyone plays along, making deals. But there’s a limit to how many times you can play before countries lose interest and stop wanting to engage.

Host: Is there a breaking point? At what moment, if ever, would countries choose to disengage from America’s geopolitical and economic ledger if this is how they’re treated? Is that even possible?

Tanner: For Japan, can it truly opt out of the American ledger? Militarily and economically, is that a feasible option? On the other hand, for countries like Vietnam, militarily and geopolitically, it seems easier to balance, but economically, it’s much harder.

Tanner (cont’d): I think many of these countries might adhere to Trump’s belief that due to the United States’ consuming power and pivotal role in the global economy, they will feel compelled to capitulate in the short term. That seems somewhat true now, but the bigger question is whether this creates a long-term environment where countries over the next decade consider a more self-reliant, autarkic approach or tilt toward another balance.

Host: I see that as a genuine possibility for some countries. However, in the immediate term, I don’t believe we’ll see a mass withdrawal from interaction with the United States—the stakes are too high. In a matter of 15 or 20 years, there might be a turning point. Post-1945, expectations were that the U.S. would engage in trade and support economic growth.

Tanner: Exactly. If Trump’s idea remains that trade is detrimental and countries are taking advantage of us, or that successful allies are no longer part of an overarching American strategy, that represents a fundamental shift. It could indeed challenge many assumptions over a 10- to 15-year timeframe.

Tanner (cont’d): I’d reframe the issue. Historically, my report indicates that Trump benefits strategically from uncertainty. In contrast, many foreign countries, especially those within our alliance and major trading partners, crave certainty from the United States. They want to understand what will happen and when, so they can prepare accordingly.

Tanner (cont’d): It’s akin to the saying, it’s no fun being a mouse among fighting elephants. A mouse really wants to know where the elephants might step next. Trump believes he gains advantages from keeping others guessing about his next move. However, I believe American allies would tolerate much worse conditions than in the past, but they struggle to accept uncertainty about future terms.

Host: Exactly. When do allies decide they want to bow out of the game? If they’re not presented with a solid deal they view as the new status quo, they may find it challenging to make informed decisions about the future.

Tanner: Right. If the scenario is that the Chinese government offers stability while the Americans are unpredictable, where circumstances change frequently under various administrations, that creates a more significant problem in the long run. Treating allies as though they are not valued will damage relationships.

Host: That’s an important point, Tanner. Can you recover from these circumstances? There were major disputes during Trump 1, but then there was USMCA, which he touted as a historic achievement.

Tanner: I’m not sure. This is an intriguing case because we have extensive data on how Trump operated during his last administration—four years’ worth of information. A key question now is whether the dynamics we’ve seen in the past three months are more indicative than what occurred in the previous four years.

Tanner (cont’d): There have been some changes. For instance, when Trump initially announced the China tariffs during his first term, they rolled out progressively with advance notice. It wasn’t a matter of implementing 25% tariffs overnight.

Host: We need to consider what’s changed between the two administrations. Why was the first more measured in its approach compared to this second one, especially while ostensibly playing the same game? I believe the markets responded far better during the first administration because stakeholders had time to prepare.

Tanner: There’s been a significant difference, for sure. In the first term, Bob Lighthizer had Trump’s ear and understood the importance of executing the tariff schedule transparently and legally, so the courts wouldn’t challenge it. His approach was deliberate and methodical.

Tanner (cont’d): It seems that the current trade policy figure, Howard Lutnick, may have a different approach—one that leans toward a faster pace than what Lighthizer advocated. This observation comes primarily from what I have seen him say, along with various media reports.

Host: I understand that if Lutnick leaves, things could shift again. There’s a narrative that the Trump administration’s second term can be evaluated based on the quality of staff work involved. We’re seeing a blend of Trump’s unpredictable style and a level of poor execution.

Tanner: Exactly. Whatever outcome you’re aiming for can inevitably be compromised if the staff work doesn’t meet certain standards. If Laura Loomer is in charge of firing people, it’s unlikely that you’ll see improved staff quality or execution as a result.

Tanner (cont’d): If the question is whether the second Trump administration will be competent, that contrasts with an entirely different inquiry about what its goals entail. I sympathize with the argument that objectives might become irrelevant if implementation is poor—especially when attempting to reorganize the global trading system.

Tanner (cont’d): As preparation for this discussion, I revisited a lengthy report from Stephen Moore, who was Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors Chair. In December, he authored a detailed paper advocating for using trade leverage to reform the Bretton Woods system and adjust the existing financial trade order toward more favorable outcomes for American manufacturers.

Tanner (cont’d): What struck me in reading it now is his insistence on approaching these changes cautiously and gradually, akin to the methods employed during Trump 1. He advocated for caution but with ambitious goals.

Host: Not everyone shares this agenda, of course. Moore isn’t part of the cabinet and holds consultative authority. Yet, it highlights the weaknesses of such approaches. If a more measured method had been deployed, I wonder if the marketplace response would have been different or led to similar complaints.

Tanner: I believe the market reaction would have varied. The current tumult we’ve seen might not have occurred under a slower and more gradual approach. When we discussed temporal claustrophobia, akin to how pivotal moments drastically altered timelines—like Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor or Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union—it emphasizes the urgency of the moment in determining strategic vision.

Tanner (cont’d): Many commentators believe that the clocks are ticking fast for America, and there’s pressure to act quickly. They feel that if we don’t act decisively now, America could significantly lose influence, as its fiscal health deteriorates.

Host: What are your thoughts on that, Tanner?

Tanner: The analysis can be broken down through various lenses. At the individual level, one key point in my report is that historically, the Trump administration has rapidly cycled through personnel. Policies can change drastically when leadership shifts, and this encourages those with initiatives to act swiftly and in ways that are difficult to reverse.

Tanner (cont’d): For instance, consider a drastic action like eliminating USAID on tenuous legal grounds—it’s an approach designed to formulate irreversible changes. The way tariffs are being constructed seems to lean in that direction.

Tanner (cont’d): Looking at Trump himself, this is his final opportunity: his last chance to make a mark. Amid discussions about his potential future bids, I believe his haste indicates he wants to enact changes and see tangible impacts soon.

Host: Then there’s a broader perspective. If someone aims to transform the entire global trade or political order, they might fear that acting slowly grants opponents time to regroup or gain the upper hand.

Tanner: Yes, this urgency stems from lessons learned during the first administration—there were so many initiatives hampered by unforeseen delays or resistance. I believe this mindset prompts Trump and those around him to think, “We can’t afford to repeat that—we need to take action!”

Tanner (cont’d): Their focus leans toward executing major reforms rather than looking as if they’re merely pretending to improve, which may allow bureaucratic obstacles to flourish. Thus, from Trump’s perspective, maintaining unpredictability clearly fits with his preference to act rather than wait for responses.

Tanner (cont’d): The previous expectation was that market fluctuations would result in checks on Trump’s behavior; that rationale seems to have faded. Nonetheless, based on observed behavior, I conclude that this upcoming period will be our first real test of these dynamics.

Tanner (cont’d): The psychological aspects of this situation are intriguing, but given past behavior, I think it’s likely that some challenges will occur, though the outcome will depend on market conditions over the next six months.

Host: If we consider a possible future, I was recently reminded of Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, particularly his portrayal in April 1945—the walls closing in. Kershaw noted how Hitler intimated that the German people might not deserve him and contemplated total defeat.

Tanner: I get where you’re coming from, and while it’s essential to keep that kind of scenario in mind, the focus should remain on not entirely discounting the unpredictable. Tanner: I think that’s not the thing I would be worried about. The concern with Trump running at 10% in 2027 isn’t that the world needs to burn down. It’s that he’s going to worry that if he loses the next election, and if a Republican doesn’t win after him, he might end up in jail. That’s going to be his primary worry.

Co-host: Interesting perspective.

Tanner: The difference between someone like Hitler and Trump is significant. Hitler was extremely ideological. In comparison, Trump’s mindset is different. While Hitler might think, “Oh, the people don’t deserve my brilliance,” Trump doesn’t see himself that way. He’s more like P.T. Barnum—not thinking that if people aren’t attending his show, it’s because they didn’t deserve it. Rather, he thinks, “Oh, I played my hand wrong. They didn’t believe my game.”

Co-host: So, in that sense, Trump would just find a new act?

Tanner: Yeah, he might do that. But he will also be older and face other challenges. Still, I think this kind of messianic thinking exists on the right. There are definitely people who view things that way.

Co-host: Right.

Tanner: But I don’t think Trump sees himself as one of those people. It just doesn’t mesh with anything I know about his character. He might think, “I’m somewhat God’s gift to humanity,” but he doesn’t see himself as the embodiment of an ideology that the public isn’t ready to accept yet.

Co-host: Fair enough. You’ve convinced me, Tanner. For the record, I did ask ChatGPT for better analogies, but it didn’t provide one that I liked. Let’s pivot to discussing actual beliefs in Trump world.

Co-host: We have two axes that you chart Trump world’s economic thinking on. One focuses on industrial renaissance versus emerging technology advancement, and another differentiates between those who believe the administrative state can effect change, and those who view it as weak and ineffective. Tanner, talk us through this quadrant of thinking. Maybe assign some human beings to better populate our four corners.

Tanner: Sure! First, it’s important to note that there’s a consensus among MAGA supporters about their economic vision for the future. In my report, I frame it especially around the economic vision concerning China. Many frame it as a need to win the economic competition with China. But what does “winning” mean? It often relates to a sense of independence. There’s this belief that the U.S. is too reliant on foreign nations, which limits our freedom. To use Trump’s words from earlier this week, we’re not “liberated.” He even mentioned it would be a new kind of Independence Day declaration.

Co-host: Interesting take!

Tanner: The idea is that our connections to foreign countries tie us down and create dependency on basic goods essential to our national security and economic future. The goal is to ensure that American strength and wealth don’t depend on the goodwill of other countries; rather, it should be the opposite, where foreign countries’ prosperity relies on our goodwill. That’s essentially the unifying vision. The question is, how do we achieve it?

Co-host: So, staying on this unifying vision for a moment, is it an autarkic dream?

Tanner: Not necessarily. It can be autarkic, but it’s important to consider who depends on whom. For instance, in 1946, the U.S. was the world’s economic powerhouse, engaging in extensive trade because other countries were buying our products. I doubt many MAGA supporters view that era negatively. They might even see a world where America is the factory for the globe, as a positive one.

Co-host: Makes sense.

Tanner: The question becomes how much self-sufficiency is required as other countries grow wealthier. What should we produce at home versus what can we source abroad? Overall, there’s agreement that globalization limits America’s influence, which is viewed as a danger, especially since it benefits China most.

Co-host: There’s definitely a historical echo in that.

Tanner: Absolutely. Having a geopolitical rival that we are economically reliant on is a significant concern for this faction. Do they see parallels to the 1930s? Sure, to some extent. But I don’t think the vision reaches complete self-sufficiency.

Co-host: What are the limiting principles across the four quadrants you identified for economic policymakers in Trump’s orbit?

Tanner: Great question. The divide I observe involves those who focus on securing American national security and leading in technological advancement versus those who advocate for a broader industrial renaissance. At one extreme, you might find someone who thinks only AI matters. On the opposite end, you have someone insisting that everything, including t-shirts, is essential. In reality, most people fall somewhere in between those extremes.

Co-host: Understandable.

Tanner: Individuals in the two right quadrants generally come from national security or tech investment backgrounds. They view American success in the past decades as something to replicate. A viral chart recently illustrated productivity comparisons between the U.S. and Europe, showing the vast productivity gains the U.S. has achieved, largely due to major firms like Apple and Amazon.

Co-host: Got it.

Tanner: In the lower right corner, I’ll use Marc Andreessen as an example of a “dynamist,” someone advocating for a tech revolution focused on critical sectors. They believe if the U.S. wins in AI, everything else will follow. In their view, if these firms are Chinese, that productivity gap between the U.S. and China will widen.

Co-host: It seems they prioritize firms that will foster significant technological breakthroughs.

Tanner: Exactly. Rather than concerns over manufacturing shirts or steel, the emphasis is on leading firms driving future economic growth. So when they consider tech revolutions, they focus on sectors like semiconductors, robotics, UAVs, and new energy technologies.

Co-host: What about the techno-nationalists?

Tanner: Yes, they share a similar outlook but emphasize national security more. Their argument shifts from gaining economic advantage to ensuring we maintain technologies with military applications. They advocate for national resources to be directed towards those areas.

Co-host: Quite logical.

Tanner: In contrast, the left quadrants advocate for an industrial renaissance. They see Silicon Valley not as a success story, but as a cautionary tale. There’s a geopolitical and economic lens here, stemming from a belief that certain areas of the country have been left behind amid the incredible economic growth over the last few decades.

Co-host: These perspectives frequently arise in discussions about tariffs and manufacturing.

Tanner: Exactly. People in areas like West Virginia or Buffalo haven’t benefitted from the overall productivity increase, suffering instead from deindustrialization. They advocate for an economy that meets the needs of these areas. Economically, they argue that not addressing these issues could lead to populist backlashes in the future.

Co-host: Very true.

Tanner: On top of that, they’re critical of the belief that we can maintain leadership in design while offshoring manufacturing. They argue that if China excels in production, they’ll inevitably gain the skills for design and engineering, further increasing competition.

Co-host: It’s a valid concern.

Tanner: That’s how we end up with situations like Vivek’s comments—pushing for tariffs while advocating for friend-shoring. Some argue that we need to reshore essential manufacturing to protect against dependence on countries that don’t align with U.S. interests.

Co-host: Right, and in terms of lesser-value products like t-shirts, it becomes trickier.

Tanner: Exactly. It’s easier to advocate for resourcing vital industrial sectors. The argument for a functioning industrial ecosystem arises here, emphasizing overlapping companies and supply lines within the country—especially when considering national security risks associated with wartime situations.

Co-host: Great points!

Tanner: There’s significant concern that if essential goods are sourced too far away, we may find ourselves unable to access them during a conflict, which is why those advocating for a more significant domestic production emphasize the need for basic industries like steel and aluminum to remain within U.S. borders.

Co-host: Thanks for clarifying that, Tanner.

Co-host: If you consider yourself an old-school Republican who values free markets and tax cuts, which camp would you be most inclined to affiliate with in Trump’s world?

Tanner: If you’re an old-school free market supporter, you’d likely feel most comfortable in the lower right quadrant, which I refer to as the “decentralists.” This group believes in the new technology paradigm while generally viewing government interference with skepticism.

Co-host: Would these decentralized arguments resonate with how some see the economy?

Tanner: Certainly! They argue that economic growth and technological advances could thrive if the government stepped back. This group seeks to reduce bureaucratic hurdles, with personalities like Vivek advocating for tariffs mainly to ensure key national security elements are reshored.

Co-host: Is a post-free market America on the horizon, or will there be a rebound?

Tanner: I think there will eventually be a reaction swing back, especially if we face economic downturns reminiscent of the Great Depression. Historically, shifts in free market philosophies often stem from reactions against earlier failures.

Co-host: That’s an insightful perspective.

Tanner: Considering Trump world, there’s no coherent answer due to its various positions. In the top half, you’ll find people arguing that Republicans have been mistaken since Reagan and advocating for a far more serious interventionist approach.

Co-host: So, the national security-oriented techno-nationalists…

Tanner: Yes, they’re apt to reference Cold War-style interventions as precedents for creating new technologies, suggesting if it worked in the past, why not now? Meanwhile, the top left consists of industrialists like Oren Cass, J.D. Vance, or Marco Rubio, who support comprehensive industrial policies—seeking more equitable distribution of goods without explicitly using that term.

Co-host: But have they had many significant wins?

Tanner: Not many at the moment. They support tariffs, seeing that as a victory, but their vision for larger spending initiatives has not gained significant traction within the administration. This may limit their potential for success.

Co-host: Interesting dynamics at play.

Tanner: As for the bottom left camp, the trade warriors, they often criticize industrial policy and may be generally skeptical of the administrative state. However, they see value in tariffs as impactful but lower in bureaucratic requirements.

Co-host: It’s an ironic position.

Tanner: Yes, it does seem contradictory. However, they argue that a simple tariff strategy provides a historical precedent for achieving goals without extensive bureaucratic intervention, similar to 19th-century practices.

Co-host: Moving forward, how would you tie this back to Laura Loomer’s role in Trump world’s geopolitical views?

Tanner: Right, we should begin by providing some context for those unfamiliar with Laura Loomer’s role. She’s a media personality and activist aligned with the MAGA right, who has consistently supported Trump and aimed to influence his administration by ensuring that disloyal Republicans don’t occupy key positions.

Co-host: Got it.

Tanner: Recently, she brought a dossier to the White House, claiming to have evidence against certain individuals, labeling them as “never Trumpers.” Subsequently, several people, including members of the National Security Council, were let go.

Co-host: And this was rolled out quickly?

Tanner: Yes, notable figures were dismissed, though not everyone targeted was removed. Some still retained their positions, like Alex Wong and Ivan Cappanathy.

Co-host: Context matters here.

Tanner: It certainly does. Loomer may be seen as an outsider waging internal battles within the administration, but she could also be working alongside some insiders serving as informants. I think that makes her role even more complex.

Co-host: Clever, somewhat of an internal push!

Tanner: It’s reminiscent of political tactics where internal factions seek to discredit opponents, similar to how leaks would discredit people in traditional politics. It’s just that Trump gives an audience to voices outside the political mainstream, like Loomer.

Co-host: Right, and she effectively critiques individuals while possibly being supported by allies within the administration.

Tanner: Precisely. There’s a strategic play at work—the potential for internal tensions to surface through her actions while still aligning with allies who share similar views.

Co-host: And that internal dynamic is quite fascinating to watch.

Tanner: It really is! It illustrates the complex web of influence and loyalty in Trump’s orbit, as well as the high stakes involved in navigating those relationships. Tanner: That’s exactly the kind of mindset you should be looking for. However, I think there’s a tendency to either overestimate or underestimate the number of individuals who aren’t necessarily Trump voters but simply follow government directives because they believe in doing so. There are actually quite a few people like that.

But here’s the crux of the matter. This ties back to the beginning of our conversation, Tanner. If we don’t have a clear vision—if the vision is simply, “I am Trump, I enjoy negotiating, and I like keeping my cards close to my chest”—then it becomes challenging for people to align with that. It’s tough to point a Donald Rumsfeld in a specific direction because he might quickly change course. That’s a valid point. Although, the issue with Rumsfeld is that, in some respects, he had his own vision that didn’t quite align with Bush’s.

Co-host: Right.

Tanner: I’m somewhat sympathetic, especially at that senior level. Trump seems to feel, particularly with respect to the principles of the National Security Council, that individuals like Rubio, Waltz, or Hezgeth are not pursuing agendas counter to what he wants. This is in stark contrast to his feelings toward Mattis and others at that time. I understand his desire for individuals on his decision-making council to at least refrain from advocating their own programs, choosing instead to elevate decisions to him. I can sympathize with that.

Co-host: So, do you think that’s what happened in this situation involving Laura Loomer?

Tanner: I’m not so sure. I’ve seen no evidence that David Fythe was operating independently. It felt more like a loyalty test, where he must have made some comments that sounded “never Trump” at some point between 2020 and now. So, he ends up being sidelined, unlike J.D. who seems to have been treated differently.

Co-host: Yeah, that’s an interesting observation. Should we discuss the quadrants? We have time, right?

Tanner: Let’s dive into the quadrants. It’s a fun topic!

Co-host: Fantastic!

Tanner: We have one axis that measures optimism regarding American power and capability against pessimism. The other axis differentiates between power-based viewpoints and value-based perspectives surrounding how America should engage with the world. The first axis is crucial: how confident do you feel about American power? Do you believe America is fundamentally strong, with unrealized potential? Or do you think it’s struggling culturally, fiscally, politically, and militarily?

This distinction matters significantly, especially in relation to China. If you perceive America as fundamentally weak, you’ll likely believe that the potential outcomes with China are severely limited. Conversely, if you view America as strong, you’re often more inclined to pursue aggressive solutions regarding China, feeling that managing multiple adversities is within our capabilities.

Co-host: Interesting.

Tanner: For instance, proponents of a strong America might argue we don’t need to abandon Ukraine in order to focus on Taiwan because we believe we have the resources for both endeavors. After all, it’s not like our defense budget is set in stone. If Trump gets his way, our defense budgets could increase. That’s the first axis.

The second axis distinguishes whether you analyze American foreign policy primarily through a lens of realpolitik or through a values-based framework. The upper half of my diagram consists of those who adopt a more power-centric view. It’s straightforward: they view military force as vital for assessing American influence and the role of alliances.

Co-host: I see.

Tanner: The lower quadrants have different kinds of value-based perspectives, and they actually differ fundamentally in the values they emphasize. Can you explain how those two camps diverge?

Co-host: Sure!

Tanner: They are somewhat less parallel than the top quadrants. If your perception of American power changes for the top quadrants, you may easily switch between camps. However, those in the bottom quadrants hold a similar worldview that sees a connection between international order and domestic values. They argue that, like domestic policy, the state’s actions abroad should be anchored in a positive vision of what we want to achieve globally. Those in the top quadrants deny that connection, believing that such perspectives distract from the core power dynamics at play internationally.

Co-host: Got it.

Tanner: People in the bottom left corner, who I call “crusaders,” advocate for aggressively defending ideals like democracy and liberty on the global stage. They believe that safeguarding these values abroad bolsters their strength at home, viewing threats from entities like China as discouraging influences.

Co-host: That’s an intriguing perspective!

Tanner: On the flip side, you have perspectives like Miles Yu, who argue that democracy and human rights aren’t just noble ideas but powerful tools against entities like the Communist Party of China. While communists perceive these ideas as threats, Yu suggests the U.S. should consciously wield these ideals.

Co-host: Interesting dichotomy there.

Tanner: Exactly. Now, let’s explore the other side of this value-based but pessimistic American power quadrant. In your previous report, you referred to them as “restrainers.” Has that classification changed?

Co-host: Yes, it has! I now refer to them as “culture warriors” because the term “restrainers” was causing confusion. Historically, the restrainer camp argued for a strategic pullback, advocating that the U.S. should become more isolationist for broader benefits. Culture warriors operate on a similar foundation but reach that conclusion through different logic. Their primary focus is on winning the culture war and reshaping American society—politically, economically, and culturally—along lines that align with their views.

Tanner: Makes sense!

Co-host: They appear quite divided across many subgroups.

Tanner: They certainly are! We don’t need to dive into every division now, but it’s essential to highlight that they oppose the dominant progressive liberal order in American bureaucracy, academia, NGOs, and corporate structures. They see the liberal international order as an extension of the domestic progressive order they resist.

Co-host: That feedback loop you mentioned is intriguing.

Tanner: Yes! They view efforts to uphold this international order as aligned with values that harm their idea of cultural conservatism domestically. Consequently, they argue against sacrificing American lives and resources for an international system they feel is designed to undermine them.

Co-host: That definitely underscores their motivations!

Tanner: Additionally, they believe that Republicans are primarily elected to push back against certain social and cultural conditions, yet they often focus heavily on foreign affairs, preventing progress on domestic issues.

Co-host: That’s a compelling point, Tanner.

Tanner: Now, regarding Taiwan and its relevance to these quadrants: the Taiwanese have emphasized in recent years how they represent a liberal democracy in Asia and have highlighted milestones such as legalizing same-sex marriage.

Co-host: How does that resonate with the camps?

Tanner: Unfortunately, these arguments are often more of an anti-signal for those in the bottom quadrants. Many would be hesitant to defend Taiwan’s liberal democratic values because they don’t share them. For some in these quadrants, the geopolitical relationship with China is primarily about trade dynamics and competition, rather than values-driven defense.

Co-host: So, they would prefer practical solutions rather than ideological commitments?

Tanner: That’s right. They might see military guarantees as a means to navigate trade tensions without directly escalating military conflict with China. The notion is that they’d rather avoid military engagement unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Co-host: Quite pragmatic!

Tanner: Absolutely. In this context, the prioritizers may share concerns about the culture warriors’ knee-jerk responses to global conflicts like Taiwan. They believe that without a united effort toward this one critical point, the chances of American success diminish significantly.

Co-host: It’s all connected!

Tanner: Precisely! In my paper, I also explored the relationship between domestic success in certain cultural issues and American power projections abroad.

Co-host: I’d like to hear more about that connection.

Tanner: Let’s break it down. If the primary differentiation among policy camps is how strong they believe America to be, this perception can be influenced by both tangible metrics, like military assets, and more intangible qualities. Many in Trump’s camp express a belief that “making America great again” is necessary because they see America as culturally disintegrating.

Co-host: And that perception affects military commitment?

Tanner: Exactly! Many believe that cultural discord weakens the country’s resolve to fight. If there’s a perception of internal disunity, people may not feel inclined to join the military, which further undermines readiness. This becomes a significant factor in determining whether they view America as capable of effectively deterring conflict with nations like China.

Co-host: Makes a lot of sense.

Tanner: You could refer to an essay by Michael Anton from 2021 where he discusses why the U.S. shouldn’t defend Taiwan. Most of his reasons revolve around an assessment of American strength, highlighting various weaknesses that most traditional analysts might not attribute to foreign policy.

Co-host: That’s a thought-provoking connection!

Tanner: Yes, many in the Trump world diverge from the consensus among foreign policy analysts, arguing that socio-cultural deteriorations impact policies.

Co-host: A fascinating angle.

Tanner: Now, here’s where I sense a resurgence of the “Nero decree” mentality: if the progressive agenda appears to be winning by 2027, it’ll impact views on commitments like Taiwan. There might be a shift toward seeking off-ramps, a strategy to present strength amidst chaos and rally support for nationalist agendas.

Co-host: It’s a cycle, isn’t it?

Tanner: Absolutely! If by the end of Trump’s term America is perceived to be in a worse state culturally, economically, or politically, many supporters may rethink the country’s capacity to face challenges like China.

Co-host: That brings a lot of clarity to understanding the future landscape.

Tanner: It’s critical to recognize how internal conditions will likely shape responses to external threats, suggesting a potential retreat rather than a proactive approach.

Co-host: An interesting prediction! You mentioned that players involved aren’t considering the intricacies of this dynamic—how the Chinese might respond based on American actions.

Tanner: That’s right. There seems to be a gap in strategic thinking. While various factions articulate their desired China policies confidently, they often neglect to consider Chinese counteractions to their proposals unless prompted.

Co-host: So, there’s a disconnect on anticipating responses.

Tanner: Precisely! It’s almost the opposite of Trump’s highly tactical approach. While he might consider the immediate reaction from China, his opponents are focused on their long-term goals without fully absorbing the cause-and-effect of their actions.

Co-host: That’s a significant insight into their planning.

Tanner: Yes. The economic side, in particular, is where motivations may not even hinge on China directly. For some, China’s presence serves as useful evidence for their broader economic ideals rather than a definitive focus for their policy outlook.

Co-host: It’ll be intriguing to see how these dynamics unfold!

Tanner: Certainly! The interplay of domestic perceptions and international realities will remain vital in shaping response strategies.

Co-host: Well, let’s wrap this up!

Tanner: Thank you for the engaging conversation!

Co-host: Appreciate your insights today, Tanner!

Tanner: My pleasure!