Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:02:57 · Walter Russell Mead, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:02:57] S2: of us and our role in the world today. It's a really interesting time because on the one hand, the Pax Americana that we kind of developed after 1945 and then refurbished in 1990, the end of the Cold War, is really in crisis, but if you step back a little bit, American power is not in crisis. The networks that we built up, the way of dealing with the world, the institutionalized relations with Europe and so on, those are all burning or crumbling, but The United States as a power, it seems to me, is if anything, thanks to the information revolution and sort of this extraordinary raises in productivity that I believe we have experienced and are about to experience, I think we're still charging ahead. It's this odd picture of a dynamic country in a collapsing world system. The Trump presidency has kind of exaggerated a lot of the disruption. I'm optimistic about America's position medium to long term. I do think we're in rough waters right now. [00:04:02] S0: What do you mean by collapsing world system?
00:04:02 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:04:02] S0: What do you mean by collapsing world system? [00:04:04] S2: Well, you think about the World Trade Organization, we used to have this rules based system for trade. Now your tariff is more or less what President Trump wakes up in the morning and thinks it should be. As a country, we exercise more of our power through institutions, the NATO alliance, the UN even at times, and we're not doing that. Since World War II, it's been sort of a principle of American foreign policy that we want to be steady, predictable, you want everybody to know where America's red lines are, you want everybody to be able to rely. If we made a commitment in 1955, unless we announce with great fanfare that it's changing, it's still there. So we're trying to provide this bedrock of solidity in the world, and we're obviously not trying to do that anymore for President Trump. I think he believes he maximizes his advantages by being completely unpredictable and also crossing a lot of lines so that past presidents probably would not have said things like, Okay, if you don't raise your defense budget, we're going to double your tariffs, or something of that kind, and try to solve problems through channels. Trump would make the argument that didn't work, and so he's now completely trashing the institutional networks that for a very long time were the vessels of American power, and I think he's doing it in a way that's going to be very hard for his successors to rebuild.
00:05:39 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:05:39] S0: How would you teach someone else his method? You've written a lot about this. I'm very curious how you framed it. He's an interesting president, no doubt whether you're for or against what he's been doing. How would you teach his method to somebody that was curious to learn how he operates? So distinctive. [00:05:55] S2: He really is a genius. He's discovered, I think, one of the secrets of power in the contemporary world, which is he's managed to turn fame into power, drama into power, and to do it in ways that leave him completely free to act. If you lie enough, the marginal cost of your ten thousandth lie is nothing, while the marginal law of your first, second or third, the marginal cost is very high. All of the normal constraints on political figures, reputational and so on, he does not pay. In some ways I think President Clinton first discovered that shame only matters if you let it. Shame is an emotion that exists in other people's minds. A lot of people thought when the Monica Lewinsky thing came out, he would have no choice but to resign, this was so overwhelming, so dreadful. He basically realized, no, if you just keep putting one in front of the other, you just pass through it. The dogs will bark, but the caravan will move on. Trump has deployed that concept industrial scale. [00:07:09] S0: You talk about this notion of speech and spectacle. Can you say more just about what you mean there?
00:07:09 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:07:09] S0: You talk about this notion of speech and spectacle. Can you say more just about what you mean there? [00:07:13] S2: The Donald Trump show is the most compelling entertainment, infotainment spectacle that humanity has ever seen. Since the dawn of time, no living human being has occupied the amount of bandwidth of the human race that Donald Trump does, and we can say, global media and so on, but you know, it's very hard to think ever of a single ruler who just dominated everything. Anywhere you go in the world today, I don't care where it is, what you hear is Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Some people hate Trump, some people love Trump, some people laugh at Trump, some people are astonished by Trump, some people spend their lives thinking about their contempt for Trump, but he remains the center of everything. And he sees that as the key to his unique power. A lot of people thought that when he lost in 2020, it would go away, that that was it. He was just about as dominant out of office as he had been in office. At what he does, he is as good as Napoleon was at what he did. I observed that Napoleon also lost at Waterloo and ended in exile, so this is no guarantee that it will be what Trump would consider a happy ending to the whole spectacle, but he is a major historic figure who has developed a new understanding of how power works in an era of mass communications and social media, and the rest of us are just trying to deal with it. [00:08:43] S0: How do you think the world is or will be the most different because of his role in it?
00:08:43 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:08:43] S0: How do you think the world is or will be the most different because of his role in it? [00:08:49] S2: Well, I think he has vastly accelerated the disintegration of this post World War IIpost Cold War structures. They're not going to be the same. He's not the only one who's done this, but I think we're entering an era of much more personal and much less bureaucratic politics. That is, I think for a long time in the twentieth century people got into the habit of thinking one person rule or a central figure should be downgraded and we should be run by institutions and bureaucrats and committees. I think that one of the impacts of the internet is that people want to be ruled by people again. So that in India you see a Modi, we saw Abe in Japan, Bibi in Israel and Erdogan in Turkey and Trump in The United States. Trump is sort of the greatest of these, the most globally impactful of this new wave of Putin, Xi Jinping. We're back to an era of personal politics. [00:09:52] S0: If you think about the broader, longer arc of dominance or power leading up to this moment, I love the historical context. You're an amazing historian. Talk about why, whether it's maritime dominance or other major reasons that you think The UK and America up until, let's say, you know, the end of the Cold War or something had such an incredible run?
00:10:12 · Walter Russell Mead
[00:10:12] S2: Let's just start with The US China rivalry today. And what you see is the sort of two sides. One is a land based continental empire, China, which believes that it can match the technological and therefore military strength of the other power without all that political liberalism and messy democracy. Okay, great idea. The first, I think ruler in modern times to really embrace that was Louis the fourteenth, who thought that his technocratic government of the experts in France could beat those pesky English with all of that ridiculous, you know, every twenty years they kill the king or kick him out or who knows what they do. But it's utterly chaotic. The French idea was we can do that with a strong centralized system. From the time of Louis the fourteenth right up until now, you could sort of argue the dominant theme of global power politics has been this rise of this English speaking maritime commercial liberal order and then it's been contested successively by a series of great power continental states, France under Louis the fourteenth, again with Napoleon, Germany, Prussian World War I and then World War II, The Soviet Union, and that these contests have been incredibly difficult. There have been moments in every case where the technocratic centralized land power looked like it was just walking away and the ridiculous, confused, commercial English speaking maritime alliance was muddle lost, crazy, and yet somehow in the end, the hobbits keep winning. I should say that we stole our global strategy from the British, they stole it from the Dutch, who had been doing this earlier in the seventeenth century. And God and Gold, one of my books, I say that you could sum up the last three hundred years of modern history in 10 letters, UP, United Provinces, to UK, to US. Now obviously that raises the question to question mark question mark question mark. I don't think China has it in it