Writer Christopher Caldwell joins us to discuss the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the rise of a “New Right,” and the fate of the West.
Writer Christopher Caldwell joins us to discuss the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the rise of a “New Right,” and the fate of the West.
*The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Peter Slezkine: I'm Peter Slezkine, Director of the U.S.-Russia-China Trialogue Project at the Stimson Center. Since the middle of the 20th century, relations among the United States, Russia, and China have had an enormous impact on each country separately and on the world as a whole. The purpose of the trialogue is to better understand this extraordinarily complex and consequential relationship by directly engaging with experts from all three countries.
My guest today is the essayist and author, Christopher Caldwell. Caldwell has been an editor and opinion writer at every publication possible, including The Weekly Standard, The New York Times, the Financial Times, the Claremont Review of Books, and Compact Magazine. He is the author of two books, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West and The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. Chris, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:55] Christopher Caldwell: Nice to be here, Peter.
[00:00:56] Peter Slezkine: So, to start, perhaps, I could ask you to define or at least describe the intellectual movement known as the New Right. Is it a label that has any coherence? Are there any useful parallels or continuities that can be drawn with neoconservatism on the one hand or the New Left on the other?
And I feel like I can ask you this question because you worked for The Weekly Standard once upon a time, a neoconservative publication founded by Bill Kristol, you wrote a book about the New Left and its political consequences, some of them unintended, and you are now a doyen of the New Right, probably not a self-described title but a label that I've heard applied to you.
[00:01:45] Christopher Caldwell: Well, that's very nice. I'm not sure that I'm as familiar with this term “New Right” to describe what's going on now as you seem to be. It's an expression that gets applied a lot. Particularly in France in the 1970s, there was talk of a New Right that was supposed to emerge from the disrepute into which the French right had fallen due to its fecklessness in World War II.
I think that a lot of people called William F. Buckley and the group around him in the 1950s a New Right. That description was applied to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. But really, I haven't heard it applied to the group of conservatives now. So, let's try and figure out what a New Right would be in this circumstance and whether that's what we have now. I really have a hard time describing what Donald Trump is, for instance. I mean, most obviously, he's got an economic policy.
[00:02:45] Peter Slezkine: You know, before we get to Donald Trump, there is an interesting intellectual cohort associated with particular publications, also with certain segments of the internet. Many are quite young. They're prolific as writers, they're voracious as readers, and they have a certain set of common interests and objectives. And you contribute, I think, to some of these same publications and are looked up to by many of these young fellows. So, if we could separate first this kind of intellectual movement from the Trumpian political phenomenon, which is broader and more complicated.
[00:03:21] Christopher Caldwell: That's very flattering. Thank you. It's nice to hear. It's still not getting me any closer to really understanding what we mean by right. So, let's talk about some of these specific magazines and outlets. There’s the quarterly review for which I write, the Claremont Review of Books, that comes out of a group of academic political philosophers.
And at Claremont University, almost all of them are influenced by Leo Strauss, the great exiled German philosopher of the mid-20th century, but a particular current of Strauss, the one led by Harry Jaffa, who was an interesting kind of syncretist, he took Straussian styles of reading philosophy.
Don't ask me what those are because I'm an immigrant to Straussland, okay? And he mixed them with a lot of lessons from the American founding and wrote very productively and prolifically about Abraham Lincoln, okay? So, these are some of the obsessions that you will find at the Claremont Review of Books.
[00:04:27] Peter Slezkine: Which was founded when?
[00:04:28] Christopher Caldwell: Well, the Review was founded 25 years ago, just about exactly. So, in the year 2000. It's edited by a young student of Jaffa's and of Harvey Mansfield at Harvard named Charles Kesler. And the editors, they are interested very much in the American constitutional tradition and its antecedents. They're interested in the Civil War. They're interested in the founding documents, I would say the Declaration of Independence more than the Constitution.
So, it sounds idiosyncratic, but in the last few years, it's become a really, I think, lively part of the conservative intellectual scene.
Moving on, you've mentioned Compact. I was about to talk about Donald Trump and how I think that he's, kind of, a syncretic figure. I'm not really comfortable saying that he's on the, you know, right or the left. But Compact was a magazine that was founded. At the outset, they just called it a radical American magazine and they wanted to have people from both the right and the left writing for it.
To some degree, they've succeeded. You have Slavoj Žižek, who, you know, is on the left. You have a number of writers from the New Left Review who have written for them, like Wolfgang Streich would be one of them. And the two editors are Sohrab Ahmari, who has left to go to UnHerd Magazine, which is a London-based magazine, not too dissimilar, and Matthew Schmitz, who's now the guy who runs Compact. Where they've wound up, I think, is, let's say, in a more nationalistic space that's open to both right and left, is also open to religion, is open to hostility, and to capitalism. And they've got a number of very colorful writers.
Well, then what else do you have? There are other magazines like Free Press I would describe as a website for people who are used to reading the mainstream media, whose usual news diet was, maybe, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and in the days of television, CNN, say, but who may still think of themselves as being, kind of, on the left but are really profoundly fed up with political correctness. Let's say that's a less right-wing strain.
And then there are strains of the right that are really on the Internet. And that would be the group of people that you used to describe as the alt-right. And that can mean a lot of things. I mean, the way it's often written in the newspapers, it means the right that is, sort of, beyond the pale and extremist. But I think a better definition of it would be the right that, up until 2016, did not find a place for itself in the traditional Republican Party, which was a lot of the right.
So, you would get people there like Curtis Yarvin would be the classic example of a writer like that. You know, he's a software engineer who did quite well in Silicon Valley. Now, I don't know where he went to school, but he's an autodidact style of intellectual who knows a lot about a lot of things. He's written a lot of books, but he hasn't published them with publishing houses. He's just posted them online. And that's... I don't know. Now, how's that for a, sort of, like, a tour d'horizon of what is on the Right now?
[00:08:07] Peter Slezkine: Very useful. And almost exhaustive. Where does the Catholic strain fit in? You are Catholic. I don't know how important that is. There is the Notre Dame circle. Patrick Deneen has been a central figure in some of these debates and written a book about liberalism and its problems. Then there are converts to Catholicism, Ross Douthat at the New York Times and, more prominently, JD Vance is a very recent convert to Catholicism. So, is there, sort of, a logic to this Catholic strain in right-wing thinking?
[00:08:45] Christopher Caldwell: I'm not really sure. A lot of people ask that. I think Vance's prominence and the importance Catholicism in his life and the fact that he has courted controversy and actually wound up at odds with the Vatican over the Ordo Amoris, that's, kind of, interesting, but I don't think...
There are certain countries where... If you go to a European country, Catholicism is, sort of, part of an ancient system of order and hierarchy, and it has a natural affinity with the right. In the United States, it's, kind of, part of immigration and manual labor and, kind of, has a natural affinity with the left. I'm not sure how well it fits into either the right or left at this moment.
I think it is its own thing. I would mention one really very interesting magazine which is called The Lamp. It's a magazine that's available online. It's edited by a really terrific writer named Matthew Walther, who lives in Michigan. It's very literary. I'd say it's very Evelyn Waugh-like. It's got a very stylish sensibility. People have compared it to the old New Yorker, but that is a new-style Catholic publication.
There's also First Things. Now, First Things is not officially Catholic. It's doctrinally heterodox, I think. It was started by a guy named Richard John Neuhaus, or at least he was the towering editor of it in, say, the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. It's now edited by a guy named Rusty Reno, who I would call a conservative, and he is a Catholic. But it has Jewish columnists, too. Its general outlook, its general mission, has been to write about, as they call it, religion in the public square. It's about Catholics, Jews, and Protestants, and probably, to a lesser degree, Muslims and Orthodox people.
[00:10:44] Peter Slezkine: So, there are many strands. It's, sort of, an eclectic landscape. Can you think of a moment when, all of a sudden, these writers and publications became more high profile?
[00:10:57] Christopher Caldwell: Yeah. I regret to say, I wish that I could say that the public at large has a real yearning for ideas. And sometimes, the pulse of intellectual life becomes so intense that these writers just emerge, but in fact, the process goes a little bit differently. And I remember when The Weekly Standard started. I was not among the people who founded it, but I was there when the magazine published its first issues.
And it had been evident for quite some time that the country had become, under Reagan, a very conservative country. The university was not particularly conservative, but that was all the more reason why conservatives would need a magazine. They didn't have the ordinary places to congregate that people on the left had had. And yet, that magazine never came about until after 1994 when the Republicans took the House. And then, suddenly, everyone was talking about how conservatives need a magazine of their own.
And so, The Weekly Standard was founded to be, kind of, like, a new republic of the center right. And both those magazines were very close to the center, I would say. And looking back, a historian might find them actually hard to distinguish, but at the time, those nuances, I mean, it was not a time of great disruption like today.
And those nuances, whether you were a little bit to the right of center or a little bit to the left of center, were really important to people. I mean, you had an election in 2000 that was between two practically identical candidates, Al Gore and George W. Bush. And I've never seen people more passionate about—well, not until recently—about a presidential election.
[00:12:44] Peter Slezkine: Yeah. I was in middle school then. And I still remember children in the classroom drawing the butterfly ballot on the whiteboard.
[00:12:52] Christopher Caldwell: Oh, boy.
[00:12:53] Peter Slezkine: Well, so, let's compare then the current context to that moment when The Weekly Standard was founded because, in some sense, on the Right now, there seems to be a fondness for the Reagan years, for Reagan himself, for that kind of muscular American self-confident nationalism. On the other hand, since it's been so long since that was the establishment and there's been a very different establishment until... well, who knows what we have, now there is more of a radicalism and anti-establishment logic to the right that does seem to echo the New Left in some respects.
The American Empire, for example, is a project that many on this New Right or whatever we want to call it seem to disapprove of. And there are some people like your colleague, Tucker Carlson, from The Weekly Standard, who have made this turn from, sort of, neoconservative to now leading voice of the New Right, who is against the various appendages of the American Empire. So, is that the crux of the transformation?
[00:14:02] Christopher Caldwell: I think there are, actually, a lot of things going on here. And you've described a couple of them. One is the centrality of Reagan on the American right. I mean, Reagan appeared to be set to become a figure, kind of, on the right, like FDR was on the left. And indeed, you could argue that, in a minor way, he did become that.
Reagan was really sacrosanct. I mean, Grover Norquist, an activist in town, led a campaign to get National Airport named after him. You could buy, you know, like, gold coins cast in the shape of Ronald Reagan's face in the back of all these magazines. And he was the one thing every conservative agreed on. He bound together the three things that conservatives seemed to care about in the wake of the Second World War, which is military strength, small government and favorable treatment of business, and Christianity.
So, I think that one of the key things that's happened is that that picture of Reagan is very much an eclipse. I think a new picture of Reagan has emerged in the last ten years. And, you know, I think, to really make sense of it, you have to consider what brought Ronald Reagan to power. I think that a lot of people looked at him as the person who was going to resolve the, let's just say, the tumult and the revolution of the 1960s by undoing them.
I think that a lot of people, they didn't like the way America had lost in Vietnam. We'd lost. We can't let that happen again. They didn't like the outcome of the Civil Rights Movement, which seemed to be crime and just all out destabilization. And they were getting impatient with things like trade unions. And they also felt that the country was, let's just say, drifting from its moral moorings. And they want it all changed.
I mean, I think that the end of the 1970s was probably the most reactionary period since the turn of the 20th century. And Reagan certainly got the country on its feet again, but not in the way that people had expected. All of the cultural experimentation of the 1960s that people were uneasy with, racial, sexual, cultural, those all went on full steam ahead. The economy was fixed, but not in the way that people thought it would be fixed, and at a high price.
It was fixed in a highly inegalitarian way. I would say the inegalitarianism of the economy, which is one outcome of Reagan, and the, kind of, muscular assumption that America is the global paragon, those two things have really come back to damage the United States in the 21st century.
And I think that Reagan's reputation, as a result, has really suffered. The loss of manufacturing jobs is not what people thought they were going to get with Ronald Reagan and the loss of the war in Iraq and the loss of global prestige that brought. I think that, too, is a distant legacy of Reaganism. And people are not happy with it. So, that's one part of the answer to your question.
[00:17:24] Peter Slezkine: So then, let's jump from Reagan to Trump. Reagan, as you described him, was an attempt to put a lid on the revolution of the '60s. At least that seemed to be the political mission. Maybe it had other effects and was carried out in different ways. Trump now, in his second term, seems to be leading a revolution. That is a term that they used themselves. So, how do you make sense of something that is superficially a conservative movement that is, at the same time, revolutionary? What is being destroyed? What is being built?
[00:18:01] Christopher Caldwell: Well, I guess the question is, is it a conservative movement? And I think that the answer is probably no. I think what you have is, in the Reagan era, conservatism was associated with a class of people. If you look at the electoral map, you know what I mean, you could call them White Christian men from the South and the West, okay?
And those people were really riding high under Reagan. I mean, as a Californian, you will have an idea of, like, the mid to upper-level corporate employee for an arms company in Orange County who he was born in Kansas, he goes to a, you know, a Baptist or a Presbyterian church in Irvine, and he's made a lot of money, and he's going to retire comfortably. And that's your Reagan voter. That class, I think, has not done terribly well in the intervening 30 or 40 years. And that guy's son is not living quite so good a life as that.
So, it's that same class of people, but they're not oriented towards the political system in quite the same way. They are a little skeptical about this America-is-the-greatest-country-in-the-world stuff. They're a little skeptical about American values. After the Iraq war, they're really skeptical about spreading American values, either with the army or by sending arms to other people.
And so, they just have a different perspective on the world. And I would say that it's not conservative. It's not about conserving this world we have. They don't want to protect and uphold the institutions of, like, all-gender bathrooms, okay? They want to tear some of this stuff down. So, yes, there is a revolutionary [crosstalk 00:19:53].
[00:19:54] Peter Slezkine: They're tearing something down in order to restore some golden past that could be dated to the '80s, the '50s, or the 1890s, depending on who's talking.
[00:20:04] Christopher Caldwell: It might be. I think any reformation has an antecedent idea of what is right.
[00:20:11] Peter Slezkine: Well, that's a reformation as opposed to revolution.
[00:20:13] Christopher Caldwell: I'm sorry. I'm talking about the reformation, not about revolution.
[00:20:15] Peter Slezkine: No, no, I know, but the reformation, clearly, was going back to some unsoiled original moment. The French Revolution also looked back to classical Republicanism, but you can say that there's another form of revolution that is purely the product of enlightenment rationality that is entirely forward looking.
[00:20:32] Christopher Caldwell: Okay. Right. So, we're distinguishing between two kinds of revolutions. There's Luther's and there's Lenin's. This is like this is Luther's revolution. It's not Lenin's. It's not an enlightenment, sort of, utopia.
[00:20:43] Peter Slezkine: So, how then does that fit with the American projects abroad? Because you mentioned that there is considerable skepticism toward it now among the Trump coalition and on the left as well, Liz Cheney notwithstanding. So, what are the limits of that critique? How far do you think the American empire might shrink? And is this more or less forced upon us by external circumstances to which we are finally adjusting, or is there a sense in which the American voter never really bought into the mission or has grown tired of it now regardless of whether it's possible to execute?
[00:21:26] Christopher Caldwell: It's a complex question. And what makes it complex is that Ronald Reagan had a great soaring imperial rhetorical style, but he did not do much empire building. He barely used the army abroad at all. He invaded Grenada, and he sent troops to Lebanon. And when a couple hundred of them were killed in a suicide bombing, he brought them home rather than get stuck in a quagmire. And so, he was a very temperate president.
He's really one of only two we've had. The other was probably Obama. And Trump has a chance to be one if he gets to the end of this and doesn't fulfill all his campaign promises. It's tough to tell what people wanted because Reagan's rhetoric conflicted with his actual record. When we won the Cold War, or when the Cold War ended, or when Mikhail Gorbachev declared an end to the Cold War, however you want to view it, the United States was in a position where it could influence the course of the development of the world.
And it chose to do much more than that. I mean, suddenly, something happened during the Clinton administration that has really, kind of, been unexamined, but it comes from Clinton's philosophical position, which is still with us today, that there's something about globalization that had eroded the distinction between domestic and foreign policy. And that permitted the Clinton administration to just embark on a lot of things that were not traditional foreign policy.
I should say that the first step in that was taken in the very last days of the George H. W. Bush administration when we invaded Somalia for no other reason than to stop a famine just because it would be nice. It would be nice to save those Somalis. And we failed. And we got a lot of soldiers killed. We got a huge influx of Somali immigrants.
And then Bill Clinton became president. And all sorts of foreign policy goals began to crop up that didn't really seem like anything people understood to be foreign policy. I mean, Hillary Clinton began to speak of a feminist foreign policy. She went to conferences in Egypt and Beijing about getting more women in the workplace. And it's not really a question that ever crossed the mind of anyone who thought about foreign policy up until 1992, but it became like the core of our foreign policy.
And that inability to distinguish between domestic policy and foreign policy just grew without stopping, I would say, until January 20th, 2025. I mean, the fact that Hungary didn't have gay marriage was a major obstacle in American diplomatic relations with Hungary and over the last presidential term.
The fact that Russia had laws against teaching homosexuality to grade school children was something the United States nearly boycotted the 2014 Winter Olympics over. And I think that a lot of people thought, like, "Holy cow! If this is foreign policy, this is not the sort of thing that I want my child to be killed on a muddy field 6,000 miles away for."
[00:24:52] Peter Slezkine: Do you think these domestic moral concerns were truly transferred to the international arena, or are these excuses for the United States to intervene in certain areas? I mean, the Russians certainly don't believe in the sincerity of these moral claims and assume that America is acting in its own interest in covering it with rhetorical niceties. And of course, there are laws preventing gay marriage in many parts of the world, but only some of them gained headlines in the last decade.
[00:25:25] Christopher Caldwell: I think the Russians are half right. I think that the Americans were using it as a pretext to spread their power around the world and that they were also, at the same time, perfectly sincere in thinking that they knew better than everyone else. That's an easy thing to be sincere about. I think most people in most nations feel that way; but fortunately, most nations don't have the ability to, sort of, act on that. And then the other problem with the Empire, obviously, was revealed with the Iraq War. And that changed everything.
[00:25:55] Peter Slezkine: So, to what extent is this an American arc that the United States became the most dominant actor in the world after World War II and reached its greatest extent after the collapse of the communist bloc and now is retrenching somewhat to more manageable boundaries? And to what extent is this a longer arc in the story of something called Western Civilization?
[00:26:24] Christopher Caldwell: Well, I think the premise of the first part of your question is, is this a retrenchment that can be easily addressed? Yes, it is. The population of the world has grown. We make up a smaller percentage of it. And we're less economically special than we used to be. There are other people who...
[00:26:43] Peter Slezkine: Well, we, the United States, or we, the West?
[00:26:44] Christopher Caldwell: Yes. We, the United States.
[00:26:45] Peter Slezkine: Both, presumably.
[00:26:45] Christopher Caldwell: We, the United States. Both. That's right. So, there are other people who can do what we're doing. And so, our relative share of the world economy is shrinking. That's true of the United States. It's extra true if you count in Europe, where the population is even weaker, the ability to absorb immigration is weaker, and the economic innovation is weaker.
So, between them, the United States and Europe need to have a less imperialistic view of what's going on in the world. I do not think that means an end to Western civilization. Certainly, the West had a huge impact on the world throughout the age of Empire, but Empire is not the only element of Western civilization. It's certainly not the best element of Western civilization.
[00:27:35] Peter Slezkine: But can the West cohere without a dominant imperial entity in a modern world where other powers have grown in stature and weight? In other words, we were talking before a little bit about the sociology of the New Right, the alt-right, the Trumpian coalition that is, of course, eclectic in the U.S. And then it gains in its eclecticism if you look internationally.
And there are clearly connections between publications here and those like UnHerd that you mentioned in Britain. Orbán and Meloni come to Conservative conferences in the U.S. and Americans on the right travel to Hungary on pilgrimages. Vance implicitly and Musk explicitly support AfD in Germany.
So, to what extent is this a common project that has any positive unifying principle? Is it that they're all attacking, sort of, an old universal liberal Atlanticist order and then fragmenting, perhaps, into different national units or coalescing, according to some new principles, into a greater West?
[00:28:44] Christopher Caldwell: Yeah. Maybe in the Middle Ages, you had Christendom. You know, in Western Europe you had that One Church. That did not keep the West from shattering into separate nations, but you could say that there really was such a thing as Western culture. It was more elite. It was understood across a narrower social band than we understand it now.
Now, we have a more democratic idea of culture. But right now, what we have in place of Christendom is something that's a little bit thin and hard to be very impressed with. And people are really struggling to come up with names for it. And you see it in any time the European Commission meets. They all talk about our European values, but you can't really tell the difference between what they call European values and what other people call universal human rights.
And so, the question that naturally arises is, what's so European about your European values? And if there's nothing European about them, what are you doing there? I mean, why don't you just go to the United Nations? I mean, what's so special about you except your faded imperial ambitions?
[00:29:52] Peter Slezkine: Yeah. The contradiction of a clearly regional set of institutions and universal claims-
[00:29:58] Christopher Caldwell: Exactly.
[00:29:59] Peter Slezkine: ... which then leads to a NATO door that never shuts and immigration that knows no limits. It's supposed to spread to cover the whole world and also be able to swallow the whole world within itself.
[00:30:10] Christopher Caldwell: Yes. And we're getting a little too small for that, but so as these, sort of, like, unifying myths, these big umbrella myths, grow less impressive, I think that a growth in nationalism is the natural result. And it takes many different forms. And I don't want to define it, but obviously, what Trump represents is a kind of nationalism, what Zelensky and his part of the Ukrainian nation represent is a kind of nationalism.
The AfD is a, kind of, nationalism. There's Catalan nationalism and Scottish nationalism. There are other nationalisms that seem to be fading. I mean, the Irish, for instance, seem to have put their bet on the universal values. But in general, I think that people have been disappointed enough in the universal values that there is a retrenchment as people want to be with people who are accountable to them and to whom they feel comfortable being accountable.
[00:31:12] Peter Slezkine: So, you would bet, to the extent that these are alternatives, on a renationalization of the state over a reunification of Western civilization or what was once Christendom.
[00:31:28] Christopher Caldwell: Yes, yes. And I recognize that that, sort of, leaves Western countries, perhaps, more vulnerable. But you could look at a larger multinational area, like the Indian subcontinent, and you can say that the Indian subcontinent had a, kind of, unity. It was shattered by the Mughal invasions. Then you had the British Empire come.
And now, they've gradually tried to put themselves back together. But even in the moment of their shattering and in spite of the mutual unintelligibility of their languages and their different cultures, this is mostly a Hindu society and there is an overarching unity to it that they recognize now and they always have recognized. And so, I do think the West will persist, at least, in that way.
[00:32:16] Peter Slezkine: Well, India is complicated. It is internally fractured along many different lines, but it has a long unifying set of traditions and does make some sense as a civilization state, to use the term that they have begun employing. China, obviously even more so, Russia, the United States are large entities in their own ways.
So, would that not be a problem for a Europe that fragments once again along national lines that it was one thing for, I don't know, the Germans to unite and, under Bismarck, threaten every empire in Europe because you could achieve a certain scale mobilizing people according to ethnic allegiances? But now, that scale just isn't sufficient, that Bismarck or Hitler could come back tomorrow, and Germany would just be too tiny even if they mobilized every last man and machine.
[00:33:11] Christopher Caldwell: That's right. And you see this in the Russo-Ukrainian war, I mean, just how unable either side has been to really gain momentum. And that has to do with this contraction. These are societies of single-children and two-children families. And so, when a young man dies in battle, a very ancient family is extinguished. No one wants to fight when the stakes are that high. So, shrinking societies don't tend to be world-conquering societies.
[00:33:43] Peter Slezkine: On the other hand, you have parts of the world—I mean, the world population is shrinking overall, I suppose—but there are parts of the globe where the population is growing, and many people from those places are moving to the wealthier northern lands, Europe foremost among these destinations. So, is that an unstoppable force, or can you end up with an Orbán in every European country who reorganizes along national lines and stems the tide of immigration?
[00:34:12] Christopher Caldwell: The answer is you can wind up with an Orbán in every European country who stems the tide of immigration, but that doesn't mean that you will. I mean, the Europeans have been telling themselves throughout this era of human rights that migration is like hydraulics and once people want to move to your country, there's no way to stop them. I think they're getting very uncomfortable with that attitude towards the world.
And I think they realize... I mean, if you just look at the numbers, Africa is going to add a billion young people in the next 25 years. And that's twice as many people as living in Europe. And poor societies with, like, more mouths to feed don't have a great record of, like, high capital investment.
And that means that they're going to be short of jobs and, you know, some of them are going to be families that have, like, seven or eight sons in them all vying for prestige. And so, this is a very volatile situation. And I think that Europe is going to be constrained to take it very seriously. It's either going to take it seriously enough or it won't.
[00:35:22] Peter Slezkine: And if it won't, in Vance's words, this is an existential issue for the continent.
[00:35:30] Christopher Caldwell: Absolutely. This is a military problem.
[00:35:32] Peter Slezkine: Do you think the immigration for both the United States and Europe is the defining issue?
[00:35:37] Christopher Caldwell: Much more so for Europe because, actually, you say there are parts of the world that are growing. There's actually only one part of the world that's growing. There's Africa. There was a huge wave of Arab growth from the '60s until about a decade ago. That totally transformed the demographic balance in the eastern and southern Mediterranean.
And much of it washed into Europe. And it has changed Europe. But that moment has mostly passed. The moment of maximum demographic pressure has passed. And now, it should be possible to absorb that migration. That doesn't mean that it will be absorbed, but it should be within the realm of possibility. The same can be said of the Latin American immigration to the United States. Mexico is not gaining native population now.
It's gaining population, but mostly because it's becoming an immigrant country. There is population pressure on the United States from Latin America, but it doesn't come mostly from direct demographic growth in Mexico. And what's more, the cultural gap between the United States, the Western United States, and Mexico is much narrower than the cultural gap between Mediterranean Europe and Mediterranean North Africa.
[00:36:58] Peter Slezkine: Well, and the United States was not founded as an ethnic nation states-
[00:37:01] Christopher Caldwell: That's right.
[00:37:01] Peter Slezkine: ... to begin with, unlike post-war Europe, which came after massive population movements and were founded around ethnic identity-
[00:37:09] Christopher Caldwell: That's right.
[00:37:15] Peter Slezkine: ... as a basic principle.
[00:37:10] Christopher Caldwell: And we have other advantages including the fact that we don't have a welfare state that is particularly well-developed for migrants. In many ways, our welfare state resembles that of the Western European countries, but one big difference is that it's not very accessible to newcomers. And so, all of the newcomers...
[00:37:33] Peter Slezkine: And becoming less so, I suppose.
[00:37:34] Christopher Caldwell: Yes. So, all of the newcomers tend to impress the natives with their hard work and their American virtues. In a way, we are importing things that we want to have but that we've lost in our own life. So, the newcomers impress Americans with their hard work. And because they work, they're interacting with people and they're not disappearing into enclaves. So, the United States has, in an age of global migration, the United States has tremendous advantages that no other place has. And I haven't exhausted them. So, we're better off than Europe.
[00:38:10] Peter Slezkine: Well, so to keep on the subject of Europe's tenuous fate, Vance, in his speech in Munich, said that the greatest threat to Europe was immigration rather than Russia or China. So, what is the place of Russia and China in this new world and for the West and U.S. and Europe as its principal component parts? If Europe is to rediscover itself, to use Vance's framing and perhaps yours, does Russia have an active role to play in that?
[00:38:46] Christopher Caldwell: I would think so. I mean, Russia is such a geographic behemoth and has traditionally been a demographic behemoth and is culturally, in many ways, the most consistently formidable military power of the last 500 years. So, any European does well to keep it in mind. I mean, we can chuckle at the European Commission and things like that. The European default of worrying about Russia is quite understandable.
At the same time, we are in a special period for Russia demographically. And I think that you can see in Ukraine how Russia's ability to swallow land and occupy territory has diminished. I don't think that anyone believes that the Russians could pursue any kind of military operation that would take them across Ukraine at this point. So, on the one hand, Russia is less formidable as a military adversary. On the other hand, in a time of global competition, it seems absolutely indispensable as a source of energy and, to a lesser extent, food.
And I would say that China, as a fledgling mammoth economy, has been so valuable to Europe, particularly to Germany, as a market for the machinery that only Germany can make, that the loss of China, as a result of American insistence that Europe, you know, de-risk, as we call it, has been huge. So, I think the importance of China and Russia to Europe are vast. I think the risk from an engagement with Russia is traditionally substantial.
It is, under the present demographic circumstances, low. I think the risk of engaging with China is very low. It has to do with Serbia or Greece getting too much in debt from the Belt and Road Initiative. I don't think that there's a serious military menace from China to Europe.
[00:41:01] Peter Slezkine: But what if there's an appearance of separate technological and economic blocs in the U.S., who says, us or them, our networks are theirs, our cables are theirs, and then the Chinese, perhaps, present the same choice down the road, our artificial intelligence systems are theirs, DeepSeek or ChatGPT?
[00:41:20] Christopher Caldwell: Well, we're already seeing, kind of, a preview of that thing in the present competition since Donald Trump has come to office between the United States and China for the allegiance of Russia. And the United States starts from a great disadvantage because we haven't exactly dealt in a way that has built trust with Russia for about the last 15 years.
We start with many more advantages in Europe, but I think that the bargaining would take the same form. The United States is really formidable. We can supply a tech network, and we can supply energy, and we can supply food. So, the United States can make a real good bid for the allegiance of any country in the world if we feel inclined to form alliances and if we're not just going the autarkic road, which I'm not 100% sure of.
[00:42:16] Peter Slezkine: How important do you think is that autarkic strain?
[00:42:21] Christopher Caldwell: I think that the baseline culture of Washington, D.C. is not particularly friendly to Donald Trump's trade and diplomatic policy, so that doesn't look like a very smart thing to do from Washington, D.C. You know, there are developments that have been allowed to go too far that Trump is probably right to call out. And it's one of these, sort of, like, boiling frog situations where things happen by such small degrees that you don't react, and eventually you wind up in a position where you're seriously disadvantaged.
And one of them is the use of Mexico as a platform for, not just Chinese, but also European and actually American manufacturing. That really ticked a lot of Americans off when NAFTA was passed in 1993. And it ticks a lot of them off under the USMCA, which is the renegotiated NAFTA now. And this is a real challenge. It turns out to be very difficult to figure out the domestically produced content of something that comes over the border in a truck from Mexico. The logic at the time was that this would be a way to get cheap labor, and it would be great for American business, and things like that.
We didn't imagine that 15% of the Chinese manufacturing industry would move to Monterey and then just be sending stuff a couple hundred miles into Texas. So, I can understand the urgency that Trump brings to this. Obviously, his, kind of, bull-in-a-China-shop way of presenting the U.S. side and his unpredictability, which makes it hard, not just for our adversaries, but also for our citizens to invest, it's a little nerve wracking.
I think that, probably, I have the prejudices of a Washingtonian. And I hope that, eventually, this will settle into a, kind of, like, an orderly compromise between a little bit more Trumpian vigilance on trade, but a generally open-world market, but I'm not sure that's where we're going. I'm not sure that Trump is not just going to persist and persist.
[00:44:41] Peter Slezkine: Well, who knows? And we've got a relationship with Russia to tend to China with the world at large, not to mention all sorts of, perhaps, unexpected technological developments that might make all this moot. So, thanks for suffering with me for so long. This was a very exciting conversation for me to have.
[00:45:01] Christopher Caldwell: Likewise, Peter. Thanks a lot.
[00:45:07] Peter Slezkine: Thanks for listening to the Trialogue Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the show, so you don’t miss out on any episodes.
The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.