Podcast: Victoria Nuland and a Lonely Europe

TRANSCRIPT: Victoria Nuland and a Lonely Europe

Victoria Nuland:

I do worry that the constant barrage of illiberalism coming out of the White House makes us numb and we forget that as citizens we have to fight for what makes us unique and special as Americans, what makes us a beacon for everybody else, what gave us historically the authority to lead a community of free nations. If we don't defend it at home, how can we expect anybody else to want to live freely?

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, I'm Ian Bremmer and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. I'm host of the weekly show "GZERO World" on public television. In this podcast, we share extended versions of the big interviews from that show. This week, I sit down with Victoria Nuland, CEO of the Center for a New American Security and former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. Victoria is an expert on Europe, and today I'll ask her about Russia, NATO, and the transatlantic relationship. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

Victoria Nuland, delighted to be with you.

Victoria Nuland:

Glad to be with you, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

So we've now had the big summit meeting between the two presidents. A lot of people had some pretty strong reactions to that, I'm interested in hearing yours. What were your first thoughts when they sat down together in Helsinki?

Victoria Nuland:

I was in favor of the meeting. The way Putin runs his government now, nobody below his level is empowered to make any kind of strategic decisions. So if you want to solve some of these problems, you have to sit down with Putin himself. But I was in favor of using the very, very strong hand that President Trump had to be very strong with Putin about solving these problems. We have a defense budget that's growing. Despite the President's extreme ambivalence about the value of NATO, we have NATO budgets that are growing. We're very strongly deployed in Eastern Europe. We have a good deterrent presence. We have a very strong economy, and Putin does not.

Victoria Nuland:

So there was an opportunity there to say, "Let us work together on a settlement of Syria that allows the people of Syria to live together in peace and keeps Iran out and protects Israel. Let's work together on getting you out of Ukraine. And let's work together to assure that we're not going to interfere in each other's politics. And by the way, if you're not willing to engage with me, I'm going to increase the pressure on you," the same way that he certainly is clear to allies that he's willing to increase the pressure on them. Why isn't he equally clear with adversaries?

Victoria Nuland:

So I wanted to see a summit, but I wanted to see a summit where the president was very clear that these problems had to be solved if Russia wanted a normal relationship with us, not a summit where the president seemed to take Putin's side in whether the Russians had interfered or not in our politics, rather than listening to the American intelligence community...

Ian Bremmer:

American intelligence community.

Victoria Nuland:

... and to Mueller.

Ian Bremmer:

John Brennan, former director of the CIA under the Obama administration, referred to Trump's behavior as treasonous. Would you accept that?

Victoria Nuland:

I'm not going to put a fancy label on things. What I want to see is the elected president of the United States defend American security against any foreign actor that wants to manipulate our elections or wants to impact our security. So it's time for President Trump to start defending America.

Ian Bremmer:

Big picture, for a long time, the Americans are fighting the Soviets and it's an ideological battle and we win. And there's a view then that, okay, we're kind of done with that now. And yet liberal democracy around the world is facing a lot of challenges right now. And certainly when you think about the American struggle today, whether it's against the Russians or it's against the Chinese or it's with some allies, like Erdogan in Turkey, there's a big problem. You're not able... The conversation is not about trying to convince them to become more like us. It's more how do we coexist? How do we live together? Is that a... How do you deal, as a policymaker, how do you deal with that kind of challenge as opposed to we're trying to defeat the Soviets because we're not trying to defeat the Russians are we?

Victoria Nuland:

I think, I'm not going to say anything here that's cosmically new or insightful, but it's incumbent upon democratic leaders to ensure that the open, free trading system produces for average citizens and that they see that the pie is growing and that their life is improving. Because otherwise, in every generation, you're going to have demagogues and strong men who come along and say, "I can do better for you," and who play on grievances rather than increasing opportunity and increasing the perspective of optimism. And...

Ian Bremmer:

Now, that's not just a Russian story, obviously.

Victoria Nuland:

It's not just a Russian story. It's a story here, I think. If you think about the difference between Ronald Reagan, who was the first president that I worked for in the '80s, and the way our current president approaches things, Ronald Reagan was all about morning in America. He was all about our infinite possibility as a polity, as a system, creating opportunity for people. There was an optimism that Americans gravitated towards. What I worry about is we're all about now that we've been ripped off, that we can't compete, that somebody else is taking advantage, and that it's zero-sum in terms of friends and allies rather than all of us together working to create more opportunity and more peace and security for everyone.

Victoria Nuland:

So I think when people feel left out, they gravitate towards this sort of easy, angry fix. I think that the tide will turn again, but not until... I think it might be hard without the United States playing its traditional role as a beacon of those values and that kind of optimism about human progress and about prosperity and openness.

Ian Bremmer:

So if you're the Europeans, what do you do in that environment, the German foreign minister saying that they can no longer rely on the White House? That's a pretty startling statement. How do the Europeans without the same level of leadership from the United States make their way effectively?

Victoria Nuland:

Well, if you think of where Germany and France were at the end of World War II, as completely battered and broken nations that had to be rebuilt and where they are now as a result of their investment in free markets and democracy and the European Union and working together as a liberal family, they're among the richest, most successful countries on the planet. It's time for those leaders who are benefiting from that, who still believe in it, to stand up and preach its benefits, demonstrate its benefits to their people, and pose it as a successful alternative to all this autocratic talk and all this talk about the media being the enemy and independent judiciaries being the enemy. And if we are not going to do it, I hope that other liberal leaders will do it.

Ian Bremmer:

We've had Macron in power for two years now. We've had Merkel in power for a lot longer than that. I feel a bit from the way you're talking that you are not satisfied with what they're doing presently.

Victoria Nuland:

In terms of standing up for liberalism, I don't think that they understood that they needed to at such a level until recently and maybe until the culmination of the G7 summit and the NATO summit where President Trump called into question all of these fundamental things. Have they understood that if they don't defend these things, they can't count on us to do it?

Victoria Nuland:

So I'm optimistic, but they're going to have to speak louder and they're going to have to speak to their publics, and frankly, they're going to have to speak to our public as well. Is this making America stronger or is it just bringing us to a place where we are alone and potentially causing more problems for our own workers by cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world with high walls and tariffs and arguments among family when we should, as a family, instead be working together against the real threats like Putin, like a China that wants to also petition for different rules of the road?

Ian Bremmer:

So what's happening among the democracies right now that gives you some cause for greater optimism?

Victoria Nuland:

After the G7 summit when the president, our president, declined to sign up for all these rules of liberalism, the rest of them said...

Ian Bremmer:

The communique. Yeah.

Victoria Nuland:

The communique. The rest of them said, "But we do believe in these things and we think they make us stronger." The fact that despite all the unnecessary drama and questioning of the NATO institution that the president put out there on the first day, we nonetheless issued a statement among the 29 countries that spoke of increasing our strength to resist autocrats and to hold up our values and to deny Russia the legitimacy of incorporating Crimea and all those kinds of things. And that when the president tried to add on to that, Germany and France and the UK stood together and say, "Nope, this is what we agree on."

Victoria Nuland:

We'll see how they do. But the fact that Germany remains prosperous, that France remains prosperous, that there's a better conversation now across the channel about Brexit, gives me hope. I'm an optimist anyway, but I could also paint this pretty darkly for you, Ian, that if our going to war with our most important liberal trading allies over, and adding tariffs and this and that, begins to affect their economies, begins to affect our economy, we could drive the liberal family into a renewed recession. And who does that help? That doesn't make America great. It doesn't make anybody great.

Ian Bremmer:

When you look at all of these Western institutions and know that there are many people inside them that are questioning them, if you're going to focus on where you think the principle challenges to those institutions are right now, which of those institutions feel to you like they need the most bucking up? Where's the identity crisis at its greatest? You would say what?

Victoria Nuland:

It's not about the institutions right now. It is about the very idea that the United States leader seems to be more comfortable with autocrats and despots than he is with allies. And the risk then is that the US will be left alone and will allow liberalism to atrophy, free markets to atrophy. And that not only will we not be shoring up the family of nations that have brought us to this level of prosperity and security and the institutions that undergird them, but our ineffectiveness therefore also with the dictators will provide more opportunity for those folks to change the rules of the global order in their favor.

Ian Bremmer:

You think that Trump, if he had a choice, would prefer authoritarian systems to democracies around the world?

Victoria Nuland:

He's made that clear. He's made that clear. The free press is a hindrance. The independent judiciary is slowing his role. He's taken on the fundamentals of the US Constitution and our own values head-on inside the United States in a way that is very similar to the rhetoric and tactics used by autocrats. I think it's really worrying.

Ian Bremmer:

Some, of course, have been successful over the past years. Democracies don't always save democracies. We've talked about Turkey, Hungary a little bit. Do you wonder that after four years, after eight years perhaps of a Trump administration, that some of these institutions are not going to prove so resilient?

Victoria Nuland:

So far, the courts have been pretty resilient. So far, the free media has been energized by the attacks that the administration puts on it. But I do worry that the constant barrage of illiberalism coming out of the White House makes us inert. We're almost numb and we forget that as citizens we have to fight for what makes us unique and special as Americans, what makes us a beacon for everybody else, what gives us or gave us historically the authority to lead a community of free nations. If we don't defend it at home, how can we expect anybody else to want to live freely?

Ian Bremmer:

Do you worry that by focusing so much not on the institutions and the structures, but on the man, Trump, and his predilection towards authoritarianism, given that the challenges of illiberalism are not just in the United States, they are in lots of other countries too, and Trump's only in the US, that we lose sight of a lot of other significant challenges?

Victoria Nuland:

I think almost all of the significant challenges that we have, whether they are inside the United States or whether they are challenges to the liberal, open, free system that has benefited us so much, require us to stand up to authoritarian tendencies and to support openness and to solve problems with innovation, to solve problems with increased collaboration and cooperation, not the building of walls and the slamming of doors and the raising of tariffs. That's going to leave us alone and it's only going to benefit the richest of us.

Victoria Nuland:

So from that perspective, I think the two pieces are interlinked, that yes, it's important to call this moment what it is, which is a challenge to liberalism from the top of the American system, but also to strengthen those institutions that are standing up to and that are required to maintain the opportunity of liberalism.

Ian Bremmer:

But do you think that that challenge to liberalism is really only coming or primarily only coming from the top of the American system?

Victoria Nuland:

Oh, of course not. Of course not. This is the problem. You've got an alliance of autocratic tendencies that is increasingly offering an alternative that is a really dangerous track to go down. So when Trump and Putin and Xi Jinping and Erdogan and Orban all use the same language about needing a strong leader who the press can't question, who the courts can't take on, who doesn't have to be transparent about his finances, who can operate to the benefit of a small group of people rather than everyone, that's the danger, Ian, is that we're starting to look like the folks that Trump's own national security strategy says are the greatest danger to the United States.

Ian Bremmer:

Victoria Nuland, thank you very much.

Victoria Nuland:

Thank you, Ian.

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That's our show this week. We'll be right back here next week with Jared Cohen, CEO of Google's ideas lab called Jigsaw, and an expert on tech, national security and cyber warfare. Don't miss it. In the meantime, if you like what you've seen, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

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The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company places clients' needs first by providing responsive, relevant and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.