(Adnkronos) - "La special relationship non è più con Londra ma con Roma". Nello studio vodcast dell’Adnkronos, Giorgio Rutelli dialoga con James Carafano (Heritage Foundation) e Paul McCarthy (International Republican Institute) sui temi centrali della politica internazionale e delle relazioni transatlantiche. Dalla seconda presidenza Trump al ruolo di Giorgia Meloni, fino alle sfide globali su commercio, sicurezza e leadership economica.
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00:00Welcome from DNA Kronos. I am Giorgio Rutelli and today with me there are two very special guests who come from America.
00:09I am James Carafano, welcome, from the Heritage Foundation, one of the most important figures of the Heritage Foundation, which is an American think tank.
00:18And we have Paul McCarthy from the IRI, the International Republican Institute, another very important think tank with an international projection.
00:28We're going to switch to English now because our guests have just arrived from the United States.
00:35They have been traveling also through the Balkans and I'm going to ask them first what's their impression after Trump's inaugurations and Trump's first days in office.
00:47He has signed already many executive orders, he has given already the direction of his presidency, but a lot of it is still to be understood,
00:58especially by Europeans who are kind of waiting to see what's going to be the impact of his second presidency on European Union and Italy in particular.
01:11I have this vivid image that defines the whole thing for me.
01:17In America we had these very serious kind of race riots in 2020 following the death of this individual, George Floyd, that was arrested by the police and they were all over the country.
01:28And they were protests in Washington that really were – didn't really stop.
01:37And they smashed – because it's a typical downtown, it has lots of big plate glass windows and they smashed them all and they're all covered with plywood.
01:46And I remember I even went to President Trump's first term when he announced his reelection, which they did on the White House lawn.
01:54And then afterwards we went out, there was a massive crowd in writing.
01:57And after that, literally every time people were worried, the businessmen would come out and they would plywood over everything beforehand.
02:05It looked like a war zone.
02:09Even on election eve in 2024, everybody plywooded up their stuff.
02:17Well, it was really interesting because I left town the day before the inauguration.
02:22But what was really interesting is I was around downtown that weekend.
02:25Nobody plywooded anything.
02:28And that I think shows that the country is in a different place than it was in 2016.
02:36Trump really has amassed a massive political force in the United States, which is the majority of Americans, which wasn't true in 2016.
02:49And it's not – and I think people are much more pragmatic.
02:53It's not the Trump of 2016.
02:55I think that's the most important thing for people to realize.
02:57This is a very, very experienced leader.
02:59This is somebody who was president for four years, was in the game all the four years he was out, was tremendously well prepared on how to take over the presidency, which is why we've had this absolute tsunami of action on the first day.
03:14Hiring people, orders, stop this, end that, all I think very predictable.
03:20But on the other hand, and I'll just – it's the same Donald Trump.
03:26And when you – I know people get so consumed in the rhetoric.
03:30And the answer is take – you take the rhetoric seriously, but not always literally.
03:38Many times when Trump says things which – they are intentionally provocative.
03:43They are intentionally out of the box.
03:45A lot of times it's I want your attention.
03:50It doesn't mean to dismiss it as rhetoric, but it means I'm serious.
03:56It doesn't necessarily – it literally means that is what I'm going to do.
04:00And I think that's my problem with Europe.
04:05So many – and I don't mean Europeans because in general I find most Europeans tending more conservative these days and starting to look more like conservatives in America.
04:15But to be honest, among European elites, it's like they have this fixture in their head of the Trump of 2016 that was wild and crazy and they didn't understand.
04:23And they've never moved on from that.
04:26Is that fair, Paul?
04:27No, absolutely.
04:29I agree with everything that Jim said.
04:32You really get the sense that – and what Jim – something Jim said which is very important is that Trump hasn't changed.
04:41The country has come to him.
04:44And maybe in 2016 Trump was ahead of the curve and there were a lot of forces arrayed against him now.
04:53Many of those have now been defeated.
04:56And the country, the majority of the country is behind him on issues like immigration most of all.
05:03And I would say immigration number one.
05:07Also unleashing the economic –
05:10Which is a new thing for a presidential election to have immigration so high in the minds of voters and in the political agenda.
05:17It was not like that.
05:18But it was like this, for instance, in Europe in the years from 2015, 2016, in the years in which Trump became president.
05:26That was the issue in Europe.
05:27It wasn't in the United States, but it is now.
05:29And so it's still there.
05:31And you can see this in the executive orders.
05:34Also the war against woke was a prime mover of Trump for many years, but also the electorate as well coming to him.
05:45It wasn't always like that, but Trump put woke on the map as a problem to be defeated, and he did just that.
05:54And on Europe –
05:56Well, I mean, no.
05:58I mean, so this is really interesting.
06:00So if you look at the list of things that – which may be mainstream conservatives or always on their agenda, but really attracted this larger coalition.
06:10He made inroads in every demographic.
06:14The only demographic that Harris actually made gains in is very rich white people.
06:23So what were the issues that kind of brought this massive coalition together?
06:29Immigration.
06:30Energy.
06:31People want reliable, affordable –
06:33Cost of living.
06:35I call it the good life, right?
06:37People want to be able to say, my children are going to be more successful than I am.
06:41I'm going to be richer in a couple of years.
06:44I'm going to own a home.
06:46All the woke issues.
06:49But also what we call – sometimes we call it lawfare or rule of law or political warfare that's using the system to beat on your political enemies.
07:00Concerns about China.
07:02I mean, everybody agrees, but what do we do about that?
07:06What's really interesting and definitely something that definitely wasn't there last time, anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism.
07:14This kind of explosive Jew hate that Americans are just appalled by.
07:19What's really interesting for me, traveling a lot, is when I go to Latin America and Europe, I often hear the same thing.
07:30And we all call ourselves different things.
07:31Center-right, classical liberal, nat-con, free-con, whatever.
07:38But it's amazing how many just everyday people in Europe and Latin America and the United States kind of have that same list of what they want in their lives.
07:49And I think Paul's exactly right.
07:52Trump put together a much, much broader coalition than he had in 2017.
07:59And people came to him not because of who he is but because of what he promised to do.
08:09This is the term populism.
08:11And when people use that, they normally mean it in a pejorative way, in kind of the 19th, 20th century way.
08:17Like, he's a populist.
08:19We elect this very popular, glitzy leader, and then we do exactly what he says.
08:23This is completely different.
08:24This is the people saying, we want leaders who are going to do what we want.
08:28It's very, very different.
08:29You mentioned this populism idea, which, of course, Steve Bannon, for instance, has talked about populism in good terms.
08:38But he is now kind of at odds with part of this coalition that you talk about.
08:45And this is quite interesting from the Italian and European point of view.
08:49Because we have seen and we have thought of the Republican Party as a monolith for many years.
08:55And sometimes there was, of course, the neocon side of it that had a doctrine, that was thinking about exporting democracy, etc.
09:03But then for the rest, we have seen a Republican Party that was more or less on the same page on many issues.
09:11And now we see a very diverse, not only the Republican Party, because it's not only the party.
09:17It's a diverse base of people.
09:19And now there's the contrast between Steve Bannon that says we should stick to the MAGA movement and the grassroots movement.
09:30And we should not let the tech oligarchs become so influent in this.
09:36And we see Elon Musk and Steve Bannon fighting, for instance, on the fact about high-skilled workers' visas, for instance.
09:45And so how is Trump going to work and try to keep these different souls together?
09:55He – I don't know, Jim.
10:00I mean it's hard to keep a political coalition together.
10:07But I think this – and we were just talking about this as we were walking over.
10:11I think there's staying power in this coalition.
10:14One thing we didn't mention is that he brought ethnic minorities in.
10:20Blacks and Hispanics and so forth.
10:23Into the coalition for the first time.
10:26It was the highest black vote for a Republican candidate since Richard Nixon in 1960.
10:33Yeah, he even captured a lot of the Muslim vote.
10:35So I'm glad you brought up Steve Bannon.
10:39And I wanted Paula to talk first because IRI, this is their bread and butter, right?
10:44They go around the ward and they work with these political parties to help strengthen the democratic institutions.
10:51And a lot of times that is – they may have great ideas, but they don't understand the dynamics of politics.
10:56How do you get to a majority?
10:59And then when you have a majority, how do you service them and govern?
11:02So they're the real experts on that.
11:04So I think the magic of Donald Trump is – well, two differences.
11:12One is the Republican unity of the Reagan era, which is kind of the first time Republicans really came national prominence,
11:20was achieved by essentially bringing together three groups of voters which had never kind of coalesced before.
11:26Evangelical Christians, which were a rising political force.
11:29So those are kind of social conservatives.
11:31The national security conservatives, many of whom were like the neocons that you talked about.
11:35And fiscal conservatives, right?
11:37And that was called fusionism.
11:39And they all voted for the same people.
11:41And interestingly, Reagan actually brought in a lot of voters who weren't Republicans.
11:46That model began to break down in the 1990s for a couple of reasons.
11:52One is our political parties became less ideologically and geographically diverse.
11:57So in the old days, you know, from the end of World War II up to the 1990s,
12:02you could look at a Republican Party and see liberals and conservatives, doves and hawks.
12:06You could look at a Democratic Party and see liberals.
12:08And so you could always get bipartisan because you could pull from both sides.
12:12So what happens in the 1990s is the two political parties begin to diverge.
12:16And today, it's culminated in essentially the Republican Party is a conservative party.
12:22The Democratic Party is a liberal party.
12:24If you want to vote for conservative, essentially, you have to vote for Republicans.
12:29If you want to vote liberal, you have to vote for Democrats.
12:34And the old fusionism really doesn't work anymore because so many of these competencies really intertwine.
12:40How do you talk about security and not talk about the economy?
12:43How do you talk about whether you should have tariffs or not and not talk about how that impacts on people's jobs?
12:49How do you talk about life issues and other issues?
12:52And so you can't unite the party by not talking about the things you disagree on.
12:59It's the opposite.
13:00You unite the party by focusing on the things you disagree on to get to something.
13:05And we're talking over here, for example, on the life issue, how there are different views across the movement.
13:12Trump came up with a position that everybody could live with, right, that was in the left and right guardrails.
13:17He just did it again on the visa issues on H-1B.
13:21And the magic to that is exactly how my good friend Steve Bannon gets it wrong.
13:27The future of conservatism is not by defining an orthodoxy.
13:31That's not going to work.
13:33You're never going to become a mass political party.
13:36And more importantly, you're never going to solve the issues that most people care about in governance that are going to bring the good life.
13:45And so it's about not defining an orthodoxy, but giving voice to people who feel like they haven't been hurt.
13:53And so, for example, if you look at the Trump cabinet, it reflects the diversity of the conservative movement.
14:00It's the president's statement that everybody gets a voice at the table.
14:05And it's not diversity like Biden diversity.
14:07It's not I want a man, I want a woman, I want a man that looks like a woman, I want a woman that looks like a man.
14:11It's diversity in terms of the needs and wants of the American voter.
14:17Okay.
14:18So let's go to Italy.
14:20You're here to participate in a very important event that's going to take place tomorrow.
14:25This event is organized by your two organizations, Fare Futuro, which is the think tank by Minister Urso, who is going to be there.
14:33Tajani, Minister of Foreign Affairs, is going to be there.
14:37And a lot of Italian members of parliament.
14:40So it's a very big event.
14:42It's organized by the Atlantic Committee, the Italian Atlantic Committee.
14:46And so we go and we talk about Giorgio Meloni and Donald Trump and their relationship.
14:51And we know that Giorgio Meloni was the only European leader present at the inauguration, the European head of government.
15:00I mean, there were a lot of political leaders.
15:02And I found that very interesting as well.
15:05But so this is a different time also in diplomacy and international relations.
15:14And I find a lot of commentators and analysts a little bit in – they have a difficult time because they are trying to apply old rules to a new playground.
15:27And Giorgio Meloni, it looks like she understood that there's new rules and she's not listening to the ones that says, but this is not protocol.
15:35This is not – this is unheard of.
15:38This is not part of the – what has ever been done until now.
15:44So do you think that this is going to give a real advantage to Italy?
15:49Do you think that Italy is in a position of advantage compared to other European countries?
15:59How is Italy going to use this advantage if it has?
16:02Well, I'll let Paul talk a bit about the conference.
16:05To be honest, IRI played a real leadership role in bringing this together and really doing it, I think, at exactly the right time.
16:12But I'll just say – and this is not hyperbole.
16:15I truly believe this.
16:17In future years, people are going to look back and they're going to talk about Malay, Meloni, Musk, Trump, and Modi the way people talked about Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul.
16:34And they are the transformational leaders of their time.
16:37They're the leaders who have broken the code on how do you – understanding what everyday voters really want, how do you build a coalition to get into power, and how do you deliver governance which actually delivers on the agenda that people want.
16:56That's the kind of common thing that unites all of them.
17:00And Musk is not a religious leader like John Paul, but he's a brilliant thought leader.
17:08And much in the way John Paul was about – John Paul was – what he brought to that relationship was he envisioned a new world, a free Poland, an Eastern Europe that wasn't in the Soviet bloc.
17:24A world where things mattered, right?
17:29And Elon Musk, in his way, when he talks about space and human potential and the need to deal with the demographic crash we're seeing in many places in the world, he's playing that similar role.
17:40So, I don't think this is just politics.
17:45I think this is the transformational leadership of this generation.
17:51Absolutely.
17:52I think this is important.
17:54On the question – I'll talk a little bit about the event that we're having in the Italian Senate tomorrow.
18:00But on the question of Maloney's relationship with the new Trump administration, Trump 2, there's obviously a lot of potential.
18:11It is a special relationship.
18:14In fact, I think in many ways the relationship between Washington and Rome has replaced the relationship between – the historic relationship between Washington and London.
18:27And there's just a lot of things to be done.
18:31And what brings them together in thinking about what we were talking about earlier in this podcast was a flexible – ideology is too big of a word.
18:45A flexible ideology, which includes conservative values, particularly social conservative values, with combining that with something that the neocons believed in, which was America's strength on the world stage.
19:00And I think Maloney wants Italy to be strong.
19:04And she sees a partner in Washington and in Trump and Malay the same way, to bring their countries back from a position of weakness.
19:13And that's the way Trump felt about the United States.
19:16His inaugural address was focused on the problems that he was going to fix for America to get it back to where it once was.
19:27And this is important.
19:29With regard to the event that we're having tomorrow, the transatlantic conversation is going to be incredibly important.
19:35There are a lot of issues on the Trump administration's agenda, many of them domestic.
19:43Policies.
19:44What we would like to emphasize with the work that we're doing together, IRI and Heritage, is the importance of the transatlantic cooperation and the place that Europe fills for America in the new administration.
20:00Yeah.
20:01I mean, people kind of portray Trump as somehow a threat to the transatlantic community.
20:06I think that's completely wrong.
20:09Trump has way more friends in Europe than he had in 2016.
20:14We talk about Maloney the most because I think her vision for a future society that is free, safe, and secure most closely aligns with Trump.
20:27But there are so many leaders in Europe that not because of geopolitics but just because of feeling the trust and confidence to share together.
20:39Orban, Maloney, Abascal in Spain, Gert Wilders, Liz Truss, Nigel Farage, Duda in Poland.
20:50And what's interesting about all those people, they don't all agree on everything.
20:54Yeah.
20:55I was talking about this with a colleague of mine.
20:59And what would have not happened maybe a few years back was this international…
21:06Actually, Bannon tried to create something like that.
21:09It did not succeed because these leaders were wary of American…
21:14Right.
21:15And especially they were really, you know, they were attached to older maybe ways of doing politics even in their own countries.
21:25And so they said, we don't want to show to our voters that we are so close to the U.S., that we are not, you know, sovereignistic in a way that was depicted in the 2010s.
21:42But now I see this opening up, this relationship also with leaders that you would not have think except for Marine Le Pen.
21:49Marine Le Pen is the only outlier here because she stays in her – she keeps her position I think of mistrust regarding the United States.
22:01You know, to me that is a wall that just loses a brick every day.
22:05I mean she has I think really moved the party into – and I think in many ways learning a lesson from Victor Orban and Duda and some of the others is to have a strong relationship with Donald Trump and American conservatives, you don't have to agree on everything.
22:24But you have to be able to work together in trust and confidence.
22:27And on the issues you disagree on, you have to be able to be honest about the disagreements.
22:30So maybe she's not going to move to where, you know, American conservatives are on the life issue or – but on so many issues, we can all sit in a room.
22:42You know, I saw this in the United States.
22:44One of the things I did is –
22:45Maybe that is more of a French thing than Marine Le Pen thing.
22:48I don't know.
22:49No, I think that's changing too.
22:51I think the notion of kind of this – the French traditional view is changed.
22:59Look, we see this in Canada as well.
23:00I mean, you know, Canada is about to elect a very conservative leader.
23:03And they're not electing him because, you know, he's like Donald Trump.
23:06They're electing him because that's the leader Canadians want.
23:09And they're not going to agree on everything.
23:11But there's a lot of alignment there.
23:13And, you know, Canada, for example, always was very kind of standoffish about its policy in the sense that it didn't want to cooperate with anybody in the Arctic.
23:25It was a sovereign issue.
23:26They didn't even like cooperating with us.
23:27That's completely changed.
23:28They look and they see the – Russia.
23:31They know they can't do that.
23:33They know they have to partner.
23:34I think the French get that too.
23:35The French have to partner.
23:37They just can't.
23:38You know, Charles de Gaulle could be Charles de Gaulle for the simple reason that he was, you know, 800 miles behind NATO's front line.
23:45And nobody was attacking France.
23:47He could do it every day.
23:48I'm all pleased.
23:49But today's France can't do that.
23:50So, we cannot not talk about Greenland since you mentioned the Arctic.
23:55And the fact that – this is something that came up many times when we spoke.
23:59The fact that we see Trump as an isolationist, somebody that as soon as he comes back to the White House, he's going to, you know, close the borders, only talk about internal issues, and that's it.
24:11And that never happens.
24:13It didn't happen the other time.
24:14It's not happening this time.
24:16So, what I'm asking is isn't there the risk that when Trump talks quite legitimately, for instance, about Panama, because it's definitely an issue that is of great concern for the United States.
24:30It's one of the main trade routes for the U.S.
24:34It's been absolutely taken by the Chinese.
24:39So, this is quite serious and not to be mocked issue.
24:44But even Greenland is a very serious issue.
24:46But isn't there the risk that if Trump says, okay, this is our quadrant.
24:49We're going to take care of our quadrant and expand our influence into these two different territories.
24:56Then that's going to encourage Russia to say, well, okay, so my quadrant is in Central Europe.
25:03So, I will keep on expanding in Ukraine or Georgia, et cetera.
25:07And then, of course, China with Taiwan.
25:09So, we all divide up our world in three different influence zones, and then that's it.
25:17Or is this maybe going to be a message to them that the fact that the U.S. is still active on the international front and maybe can deter their actions?
25:27I don't know.
25:28I don't know how to read this.
25:30It is a false analogy to equate what the Russians are doing in Ukraine and what China wants to do in Taiwan and U.S. policy.
25:37For the simple reasons, the objectives and the means and methods are very different.
25:42The United States is not out to create hard spheres of influence.
25:45We are not recreating the Cold War.
25:46We're going to have one big red circle, and that's all our stuff.
25:49And the other guys are going to have a big blue circle.
25:51The world can't be divided that way.
25:53Trump is way so experienced that he knows it's not true.
25:57On the other hand, you cannot allow your legitimate national security interest to be compromised by people who are out to get you.
26:07There is a perfect analogy between European concern about Ukraine, not just Ukraine, but where Putin might go after that as directly threatening their security, as there is about Greenland.
26:20Greenland has only been vital to U.S. interests since World War I.
26:27Ironically, because you hear a lot of Europeans get very nervous about this, but why is Greenland important to us?
26:34It's because Europe is important to us.
26:36The transatlantic crossing is the lily pads that tie the transatlantic crossing together, which are literally non-negotiable, are Greenland and Iceland.
26:46It's always been that way.
26:48During World War II, if we'd lost Greenland and Iceland, we could not have won the Battle of the Atlantic.
26:53It was that way when the Cold War ended.
26:55It was that way in the 1990s.
26:57We never talked about it, and we never did much about it because we never saw a credible threat.
27:04It was given for granted.
27:06The way that we were doing well with China.
27:08The thing is, if you talk to the Canadians or Greenland or Panama, they get it.
27:15I've talked to people in Panama.
27:17They get it.
27:18They get that the United States has a legitimate concern.
27:20Obviously, if China cuts the Panama Canal, that's equivalent to the Russians putting nuclear missiles in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
27:31That's just not going to be tolerated.
27:33The Panamanians know that this is an issue that needs to be addressed.
27:36I just talked to some of the folks from Greenland two days ago, or three days ago, or four days ago.
27:41I can't remember.
27:42Let's try Friday.
27:43Anyway, they get it.
27:46Again, I think this is a case where Trump's making the point that these issues need to be resolved just in the same way that we need to ensure that there is a free and independent Ukraine that can defend itself.
28:01We need to make sure that Greenland is free of the capacity of the Chinese to threaten the United States or Canada or the people in Greenland, and same in Panama.
28:14That's just the reality.
28:15I see a new Monroe Doctrine taking shape, and there is a sphere of influence aspect to this.
28:23However, what's changed right now is Trump understands that the United States has to be strong in the world, not just in its sphere.
28:32So, Ukraine is going to remain important.
28:36I'll just add, in thinking about Marco Rubio coming on as Secretary of State, given the fact that he's a Cuban-American, we have to put Greenland and the Panama Canal in a broader context of America becoming a bit more forceful with regard to South America in particular and the leftist dictators that are making deals with China.
29:01Chinese influence is increasing in South America rapidly, as it is in Panama.
29:08And we're going to see the new administration pushing back on people like Maduro, for example, like Ortega in Nicaragua, and Cuba, indeed, now more pressure moving forward.
29:23And Marco Rubio fits very well into this new vision.
29:28But I agree with Jim that this doesn't mean that America is going to withdraw behind a wall, its quadrant, as you said.
29:35They're going to remain involved forward on Taiwan, forward on Ukraine moving forward.
29:44Actually, the better analogy is the free and open Indo-Pacific, the idea that Prime Minister Abe introduced for our partnership in the Indo-Pacific with India, Japan, and Australia working together.
30:03So, not the quadrant, but the quad.
30:06The quad, right.
30:07The quad rather than the quadrant.
30:08Well, that's exactly right.
30:09Because the idea is, what's the purpose of this?
30:11It's to keep these spaces free and open, not to close people out.
30:15And I think that's – people get the Monroe Doctrine wrong.
30:19The Monroe Doctrine was imposed by the United States to protect people from attacking the United States, right, to protect adversarial interests who, by the way, were oppressing many people in Latin America and undermining and thwarting their own aspirations for national liberty and sovereignty.
30:37I would be the first to admit the United States did a lot of meddling in Latin America over the centuries, and we could question whether that was smart or not.
30:44But that was not the objective of the Monroe Doctrine.
30:47And the new Monroe Doctrine is not about the United States imposing a wall around the Western Hemisphere.
30:53The new Monroe Doctrine is the United States and like-minded countries in the Western Hemisphere partnering together to keep out malicious actions of people who are going to undermine our peace and prosperity.
31:05And they are the Chinese, the Russians, and the Iranians.
31:08And honestly, that's no different than, for example, what the Europeans want in the Middle East and in Africa.
31:17They would like these places to be free of malicious influence, which could be used as a base to essentially threaten and undermine them.
31:24And remember, Trump's foreign policy is going to be America first.
31:30In other words, when looking at Latin America, he's going to be thinking of how this protects American national security interests.
31:37And we were talking earlier about how important immigration is right now.
31:42Having leaders like Maduro in Venezuela letting out their criminal element and other people to move north and come in illegally in the United States is very top of Trump's mind as well.
31:57So what does America first mean for a country that has global interests and global responsibilities?
32:04Well, obviously, first it means being secure in your own backyard, that an adversarial power cannot create a vulnerability to threaten even our own country.
32:14For example, we have the Chinese buying vast amounts of land near U.S. military bases.
32:18I don't think that's a good idea.
32:20If the Russians wanted to buy a big chunk of downtown Rome and put a base there, I don't think people would think that's such a good idea.
32:29We need a peaceful and prosperous and stable Western Europe, a peaceful and prosperous stable Middle East, and a peaceful and prosperous and stable Indo-Pacific.
32:42All three of those are important.
32:44So America first comes with a lot of responsibility.
32:49And it's not something that the United States can impose on the world.
32:55We never had that power.
32:56Even at the height of our – we never had the power to just tell everybody what to do.
32:59But it's also something that the United States cannot achieve by walking away from parts of the world.
33:06But I mean we can definitely say that the Trump wind is blowing quite strong in Europe lately.
33:12You can see – because it went through the Silicon Valley first and we saw the realignment and the change of hearts of many Silicon Valley leaders.
33:24But now we're seeing something happening in Europe as well.
33:27There's an EPP declaration of a couple of days ago that basically said let's stop all the Green Deal regulation for companies that are stifling companies' growth.
33:41And they are choking basically their ability to operate in many cases, especially if you're a small and medium enterprise.
33:50So we are seeing definitely something that is shifting and it's shifting quite fast.
33:54And we've seen this in financial markets.
33:59We've seen this on DEI policies, on ESG policies.
34:04There is one big issue that it's still a big red dot on Europe and it's defense spending.
34:14And this might be my last question today.
34:16So do you see that this shift that is already happening on different domains finally happens as well on that part?
34:24Because of course we have Poland that is spending more than 5% of its GDP.
34:28We have the Baltics that have been spending over 4%.
34:33But there's still Germany, Italy, Spain.
34:36There are countries in Europe that are way below the 2% threshold.
34:41And now of course Trump is talking about 5%, but in order to get at least to 3% maybe.
34:46Thank you. That's a great question.
34:51And it gets to the single most important priority of this president's administration, which is to deliver prosperity for the American people.
35:00That's going to happen by unleashing energy as much reliable, affordable, abundant energy, regulatory deregulation, a positive business environment.
35:13And Trump's answer to friends and allies is, dude, we're going to grow.
35:16We can grow with you or without you.
35:19But we're not slowing down for you.
35:21So like, dude, lace up your sneakers and start running.
35:24And I think that's what we're seeing here.
35:26You know, people raise, and even Trump says, well, we're going to impose all these tariffs.
35:29We're going to generate all this money.
35:30I got to be honest with you.
35:32I don't see us generating an amount of revenue through tariffs that is going to deliver the growth that America needs.
35:40So in the end, I think tariffs may be a great tool to get people to align their economies correctly, but tariffs, we're not going to tariff our way into prosperity.
35:51What has to happen is we need to link two issues together because if you want 5% GDP for defense, and this is inclusive of the United States, dude, you need a monster to grow your economy.
36:05And so we need to be talking about those two things as, yeah, sure, great.
36:09We should all go to 5%.
36:11Now, the first thing that I talk about is how we're going to open our economies to deliver the level of growth and wealth that allows us to get to 5%.
36:19And I would argue it's like the argument is not, well, we need growth so we can sustain the traditional welfare states and the things that we have that we all love that generate no value but people like.
36:36The idea that we need a lot of money so we can afford to do the things that aren't very good for us, that needs to stop.
36:41But we have to have policies that deliver growth if we're going to get policies that deliver the kind of defense spending that I think we all recognize is probably responsible.
36:51What's going to work in strengthening the transatlantic relationship is a more balanced relationship when it comes to numbers on NATO spending.
37:04Also, free trade is great, but fair trade is going to be emphasized between the United States and Europe.
37:12There's an imbalance.
37:14So the Trump administration is going to focus on these imbalances in the transatlantic relationship.
37:21Will it get to exactly where it wants to be?
37:24Probably not.
37:25I agree with Jim.
37:27Read the art of the deal.
37:29You go out big and you threaten your adversary so that you can come to a more middle position.
37:35I hate the term fair, though.
37:38Because actually, traditionally, when people said free and fair trade, fair trade meant all these kind of chains on trade that actually made it less efficient, less productive.
37:49Excessive labor regulations.
37:52That was their idea of fair.
37:54It's outcomes that matter.
37:57Trade needs to generate wealth.
37:59It's contributing to your economy.
38:01So quit telling me I have to be a free trader, have no rules, or I have to trade in a fair way if trade's not actually delivering wealth to my country and economy.
38:13So I think we need a different set of verbiage.
38:16We need wealth-creating trade.
38:18That's what we really need.
38:21I've got to say, I think Georgia Maloney has been such a leader on this because one of the things she's recognized is one of the key drivers and power of wealth is going to be these corridors.
38:32Connecting with Africa, the Middle East Trade Plan, Three Seas Initiative, IMEC.
38:36These are going to generate wealth because that is how the world has been connected for millennia.
38:43We need to bring those pathways back, and that is going to generate wealth.
38:46I think Italy has really been a very visionary leader in thinking creatively about how do we really start to drive wealth creation in Europe because Europe needs prosperity.
38:56Absolutely, 100%.
38:58Trump knows that, and that's why a lot of this is he wants you to be a better partner.
39:06He doesn't want to leave Europe.
39:08He wants Europe to stand up and do what's good for Europeans because in the end, that's going to be good for America.
39:15Thank you very much.
39:16Thank you, James, James Carafano, Paul McCarthy.
39:19Thank you to our listeners.
39:22We'll see you at the next ADN Kronos meeting.