Well, one item on the agenda, it is said, is the shipment of American arms to Taiwan.

Yes.

There have been various shipments.

The latest under discussion is $14 billion worth of arms to Taiwan.

And President Trump, rather than say he'll do it, has said that's a good chip to use in my negotiations with China.

And that, again, made Taiwan and its supporters in Washington and the United States very, very nervous because it means that Taiwan's independence could be negotiable.

that Trump may negotiate it away, or at least he gave this indication that he would do that.

That a liberal Democrat could not have done that.

... diminishing resources part in, in many respects, right? Like-

Well, not in terms of water, not in...

Or soil or nutrients in soil.

I mean, and if you wanna look at what's happened in Niger, in Mali, in all these places, what...

You see a pattern, and it's a very Malthusian pattern, but not Malthusian in the sense that the experts and the elite who don't really know much about Malthus call it.

Um, it's Malthusian in the sense that drough- you know, there's drought.

They're short...

Mm.

Robert Kaplan, of course, on tomorrow's meeting.

I don't know there are gonna be surprises they're gonna cut tomorrow.

They're gonna announce, I would guess, they're gonna end the quantitative tightening.

Those aren't surprises.

I think the only possible surprise is, I think, uh, Jay Pal, uh, I believe should leave the door open to cutting in December.

Uh, the markets are pricing in that they're gonna cut in December, but he's gonna wanna leave some optionality just in case.

They're getting closer to neutral.

Right.

Maybe remind people just what Weimar was and what lessons we draw from it and, and why you think this is a good analogy for the globe.

Right.

I'm not interested in Hitler per se.

When people say Weimar, they think that it ended with Hitler.

It did, but that's not what concerns me with this analogy in this book.

Weimar w- is a town in central Germany where at the end of World War I in 1918, German constitutionalists, lawyers, politicians all met to draw up a new constitution.

Now, Germany had just lost World War I, millions of deaths, and the, you know, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who turned out to be a disastrous autocrat.

Mm.

Robert Kaplan on this moment for America and Persia.

People who are saying that this could l- this could lead to another, you know, a- a for- forever war, Middle East quagmire, they're making a mistake of category.

Iraq is in a dif- was in a different category, um, than Iran.

Iraq was in the category of Vietnam and Afghanistan and Korea, in the sense that it involved tens of thousands of ground troops, which got stuck literally in a quagmire.

Here, we're dealing with just air and naval assets.

The war could go in a number of ways.

There could be blowback.

Describe for our American audience today the Persian call for culture, the Persian culture extant since the theocracy of 1979.

Yes.

Um, Persia, Iran era- is not the Arab world.

It is not Iraq.

It is not Syria.

It is not Libya.

Um, Iran has been a nation state of sorts on the Iranian plateau for thousands of years.

What should be our strategic view?

Is that true of this war with Israel and Iran?

Yes, it is to an extent, because Iran is a long distance from Israel on the map.

But yet the Israelis and, of course, the Americans have condensed that distance through technology.

The American sent B-2 bombers all the way from the center of the United States, Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, to bomb Iran.

So that Iran is as close to America in operational terms as... you know, as Kansas was to the Indian Wars in the middle of the 19th century.

And let me just make one thing very clear here.

Yeah, people who are saying that this could lead to another, you know, forever war, Middle East quagmire, they're making a mistake of category.

Persia.

But Robert, you will have a longer

view.

I would say a few things about India.

India is the ultimate pivot state, the ultimate pivot state between China and the United States.

It's, I think, more consequential than the other members of the Global South.

And it's led by their first geopolitically-minded leader in their history since independence.

Because the Nehruvian prime ministers all had, well, somewhat of a chip on their shoulder because of colonialism, all of that.

What about the military?

In that context then, how worried are you about the democratic fabric of your country, of America? How worried are you that the impact of the Trump administration on institutions will be impossible to reverse?

In part of the book, I make the argument that all three great powers are in decline.

The United States, China, and Russia.

But all for different reasons and all very gradually.

And decline itself can be overrated because it can take place over centuries and decades.

But I do think that...

The United States is in decline.

The systems are weakening and the most dangerous time for an autocracy is when power is starting to fracture.

Help us understand the moment that we're in as we hear so much about what's going to happen here to the rules-based order, to the way things have been for so much time here as we see a President Trump returning to the White House and espousing the protectionist policies we first saw just a few years ago.

Oh, thanks for having me on.

I think we're at the end of the post-war order.

Post-war, I mean post-World War II, but also a few decades after the end of the Cold War.

We've had the same international order since 1945, essentially.

The United States has been an empire, you know, in reality since then.

And you see it not only with Trump's lack of interest, not just making demands on NATO partners, but his lack of interest in the alliance in general.

What comes after Trump? Have you framed out in your mind that this let's assume he's not going for an FDR three terms, but after President Trump, what next for our politics?

Who was von Papen?

Yes, von Papen was one of the last leaders of the Weimar Republic.

He was extremely superficial, unknowing, a true mediocrity who made a couple of moves that were instrumental in bringing Hitler to power.

He was completely in over his head.

And there was a great German historian, Golloman, the son of the Nobel Prize winner, Thomas Mann.

And Golloman wrote that if such a superficial, inconsequential character as von Papen can determine the history of the 20th century, because he helped bring Hitler to power, there's no meaning in history.

There's no, you know, everything is contingencies, essentially.

Explain who he was and how long did he live in Vermont.