 Hey, we're back. We're live with Global Connections with Carlos Suarez in Mexico. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Catching Up with Carlos on all manner of things around the world. Welcome back to your show, Carlos. It's great to connect Jay and Aloha and bienvenidos, saludos from Mexico. As you just mentioned, they're just want to reconnect as we do often and sort of maybe take a quick snapshot of Panorama. We live in interesting times, of course, and there's no shortage of things happening in the world. But of course, the real challenge today is we've got a President Trump who is now facing just tremendous, tremendous pressure. I go back to the fact that when he, the election night, I don't think he expected to win and he certainly didn't plan to win and didn't have anything ready for the beginning of his presidency. Here we are now, gosh, approaching three years, is it? And we are just living in interesting times. Very scary. As some people say, the sauce is slipping off the linguine. But here I'm seeing in some ways from the outside. I spent a lot of time here in Mexico trying to clarify and explain foreign policy, American politics, the inner workings. We are definitely at a very interesting time. Even though I want to just maybe refer a couple of months back, the Pew Research Center, a well-known place for a lot of survey analysis, they looked into sort of how Americans feel about the future. And it's a pretty grim scenario. And then of course, under some of these trends have been going on long before Trump, of course, but he's come in and almost grinding us deeper into that. And it's the reality that today, the majorities of Americans see a weaker economy in the near term, a growing income divide. That's a hot issue, of course, for the election, degraded environment. Here we are with rampant development and inability to come together, at least from the U.S., and support climate change initiatives. And finally, a broken political system. We've seen the U.S. in crisis now for seriously, since the moment Trump came in office. And democracy is taking a few steps back. We have a constitutional crisis now, don't we, the President challenging the other co-equal branch of government that in other way he sees it has no right to investigate him. And so it's a showdown. Obviously we're going to see a play out, and it's in the court of public opinion. It'll possibly continue in the courts, as it has been. And from the outside, it just looks very bizarre. Appreciate that, for example, in Europe, most of the countries there have parliamentary systems that whenever there's a presidency who comes under our leader, if you will, that comes under tremendous pressure. There are other ways of squeezing them out. For the U.S., it's a tremendous hurdle, the impeachment process. And we still have yet to see how that's going to play out in the coming days. Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, the press was wondering what his defense was going to be, what his next move, strategically, was going to be. And then we saw a few days ago, this eight-page letter, which really doesn't hold water. The only people who agree with that letter are the Stooges that always say yes to him. And talking about the people in his White House staff, he's managed to fire or relieve himself of all those people who are rational. And now everyone on his staff, in fact, his secretaries in his cabinet, they're all yes men or women. And so what we have is a guy running a sole proprietorship government in the United States who, as you said, he's created a constitutional crisis with co-equal branches of government not functioning. And it's all his fault. He's now stopped Congress. He's effectively stopped Congress. So I don't know where we go from here, but it's not a good place. We're in a tight bind, of course, a continued uncertainty. But here, as someone who I've studied and taught about and lectured about transitions to democracy, and that is how countries go from authoritarianism to democratic. Today, not only in the US, but in many parts of Europe and South America, what we see is a retrenchment from democracy or some version of it, some variation towards authoritarianism. And it's quite interesting, when we often look at, let's say, military regime crises, maybe the situation in Venezuela, the uncertainty there, the cards are in the hands of the military, the moment that they don't continue supporting whoever that leader might be today. It might be Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. But what I want to say is that for Trump, the cards, his military is basically the Senate Republicans. Until enough of them, what is the number about 20, to allow them to join all the Democrats can agree to an impeachment, the president could well survive it. And I mean, it's horrible to think, but there is a scenario where he could overcome this, the House could impeach him, the Senate could hold off, and he muddles his way into the election next year. So the cards are in the hand of, and we're seeing a few of them breaking off in recent days. Look at what happened in the past week or two with Mitt Romney, with a few others that are kind of tentatively coming forward. And then you add to the complexity. I mean, you were describing what is this strategy. I mean, you can see it throughout his whole life. It's like throw chaos up in the air and become the victim, accuse everybody, use the court system and public media, social media in his case, as best you can. But boy, when you look at the most recent decision of Syria, his decision to pull out and basically create a vacuum for the Turks to come in, that's giving some heavy criticism from some of his current allies. Is that going to be enough or will we need to see more of these Syrians before that can happen? Well, I want to go around the world with you and catch up with you on your thoughts about these various places, problem places, hot spots that he has created, that he is allowed to happen either way. And see what you think, but also with the people in Mexico that you deal with, think of people at your university, how they think and so forth and get feedback on that. Because I think that what he does as a leader of the free world, and I use the term very loosely, has an effect on people everywhere. And it's not only that he is reacting to a problem in a given place. It's that he's in reacting, he's exacerbating the problem. So it's a spiral down to greater fragmentation and who knows violence. Let's talk about Syria first. From your point of view, Carlos, from an international relations point of view, what's going on with him and Syria and Russia and Turkey all together now? Yeah. Well, these are just taking that snapshot of Syria. This is a very complex geopolitical geostrategic, many players. It's the Cold War, new version. But interestingly, when you look at American foreign policy or American negotiating styles, many of the things Trump's does have always been there, maybe in different degrees, different elements, that he has managed to take them all to the extreme. And what I want to say here is, for example, American relations in the world, foreign policy, one of the characteristics or one of the ways they negotiate is in a sort of business-like transaction-like. It's a tip for the pad. It's using inducements and sanctions and pressure. Well, Trump, again, does that, but he does it to an extreme and to a way that it begins linking things that are, you know, look what happened here. I mean, he's pissed off a lot of who see him as betraying our longtime allies, the Syrian Kurds. And what does he go? He tries to rewrite history, explain, well, they never showed up on Normandy or something. Because of course, some of these Syrian Kurds are coming from Europe. They are children of immigrants who've gone there or grown up in the West. But anyway, his distortion of history is just mind-boggling because the reality is that suddenly now we've created the possibility of prisons being broken out with, you know, ISIS troops, more and more massive suffering and refugees, and even Erdogan in Turkey threatening to send them all to Europe. And so, you know, we were here talking, Jay, some what four years ago when we had the massive crisis in 2015 of refugees. Today it's been managed. This Syria intervention, or not intervention, I'm sorry, the latest twist and Trump's sort of giving the green light now to Turkey to take over that northern part. Now, in a strictly rational point of view, you can understand Turkey's enters. They want to seal their border. They want to control it. But the net effect is going to be massive destabilization suffering. And again, the US having fought against ISIS now is sort of letting this slip away. And that's why his own national security team, State Department, Defense Department have all been flabbergasted by the impulsiveness of this. A phone call that he made to Erdogan. And then suddenly announces over Twitter, you know, that we're out against the advice of his own key players. And obviously, so it is obviously it shifts the narrative a bit. And maybe that's his own thinking. If he even has that, if we give him that much credit, he's sort of muddying the waters with shifting some attention away from the impeachment inquiry to suddenly the Middle East. So dangerous. It's so dangerous. I mean, compare notes with his Joint Chiefs of Staff. He didn't talk to the State Department. He didn't talk to Congress. It's the danger. It's the most powerful tool the President has to, you know, both affect sort of violence and war. And sometimes we do that by not acting or sometimes we do that by looking the other way or like in this case, because the reality is the US presence there was minimal. We didn't have we don't have a big force, but it's there as a stabilizing force. And the simple decision to say, OK, now we're gone that quickly caught catching everybody off guard. What's it going to leave for those, you know, future allies that we're going to be looking for in terms of the loss of credibility of our, you know, our word, the trust? Oh, they don't think terrible thoughts about us. One piece I caught is that there were ISIS prisoners being held, I guess, by the Kurds. And all of a sudden they were separated and nobody is responsible for them. So Trump has turned his back on those prisoners. As far as he's concerned, let him go back into the wild. Let him go back and fight. I mean, what a reversal of fortune for them. But Britain came in Britain with the one with all the trouble about Brexit. They came in and they're saving Trump's bacon, saving our bacon by taking over the responsibility for the prisoners, which is a real statement about what they think about the leader of the free world. No, you know, again, and we have to reiterate that even before Trump arrived, the U.S. role in the world is credibility, and especially after, you know, the events in Iraq and Afghanistan for so many years have begun to, you know, erode a lot of, let's say, trust towards the U.S. There's always this healthy skepticism today. It's real. And I guess, you know, maybe to kind of put it again from the perspective of how do people see it or read it? It's more unpredictable than usual. However, you know, from the outside world, the United States, here we go again. It's a hegemonic role. It's a, you know, bullying. I mentioned earlier there's like a business-like maybe mindset about the U.S. There's also hegemonic superpower. And, you know, the U.S. is in a new world today. And some people understand that it has to be more nuanced, more maybe, you know, cooperative, if you will. For others, we're still living in a world that maybe in Trump's worldview of the way it once was, where the U.S. did call the shots, had respect, and, you know, was listened to. Today, I think it's fair to say that, increasingly, we are not, and while we remain a player there, we are not able to call the shots the way it was done in previous times. He's a laughing stock in Europe. He must be a laughing stock for all this. He didn't consult with them either. And they're definitely parties to the problem, and maybe parties to the solution, but I didn't even talk to them. So my question to you, Carlos, is, you know, what happens now? And this is a very hard question, because he's unpredictable, and he's still a feature in the environment about what happens. But you have all these other players, and now it seems to me like it's anybody's guess, what kind of violence and, you know, destruction we're going to see in Syria going forward. What do you think? Do you have any expectations? You know, there was a comment made in the press, and I think today Trump addressed it that he is saying that, well, they all want to go to Europe. Let them go to Europe. Well, you know, it's not that simple. Obviously, if there are, you know, people getting out of prison that have been, you know, had an interest in harming us or our allies, it hurts all of us. Beyond that, I would just say this, here we are almost three years now into the presidency. And I think as people from the outside world see, and when I'm speaking of there, maybe elites or political leaders, they both sometimes understand, but often don't, the U.S. electoral cycle, the calendar, and that's a whole other story, because nowhere else do we see basically campaigns for, let's say, our presidency that go on for what seems like years. We've had this ongoing primary, the election is still more than a year away. And yet, maybe a sense for some, from some adversaries I'm thinking here, whether it's China, maybe Mexico, maybe others in Europe, there's almost a sense of, well, do we wait it out? Do we wait to see? And here the uncertainty today is this current crisis of the impeachment. It could happen very quickly. It could be a matter of weeks, and maybe Trump resigns, or he manages to survive it and muddle his way through to the election. You know, people are continually asking, do you think he'll win? Well, again, it's anybody's guess. There is certainly a potential scenario where he could get reelected. But I have to guess that what he's doing in most recent days and his own temperament, he can't be winning new converts. So it's how deep that so-called base is, and will they show up to vote? Will they mobilize? I just can't imagine that he's gaining more support. Again, when you even look at the reaction of many of the Republicans, the number of Republicans who are leaving Congress and choosing not to even run, and in some cases potentially losing more to the Democrats. Well, again, so from the outside, even though not everybody understands, let's say that calendar, there is an awareness that somehow it's a process that, you know, you could wait out. And again, I'm just thinking of a trade negotiator. Do you really put all your eggs in and make this massive deal? Or do you somehow write it out and see what's going to play out in the next few months given the current political crisis? Yeah, when you talk like that, I think there's really no way you can predict anything anymore. It could happen any time. You just know it's not going to be good. Let's talk about China for a minute. You can say that they were taking advantage of us for a while and all that. But Trump has exacerbated the relationship, undermined any possibility of a future relationship with them beyond recognition. We're in a trade war, except it's only him doing the war. And my feeling is we should be concerned because China is reacting and China is getting ticked off at us. And the man in the street in China who used to like Americans doesn't like Americans anymore. We're heading through a cold war with China. Yeah. Well, it is. And this is a war of Trump's choosing the Chinese in some ways, taking the long, long horizon view. And also, curiously, almost paradoxically, such a different world today. Imagine a generation ago or we recently celebrated 70 years of the People's Republic of China. Certainly, a Chinese person that's 70-year-olds today has lived through quite a bit of change. And what I mean there is that today, China in 2019 is essentially the defender of the free trading modern international system, while Trump is the chaos master of just destruction and breaking, whereas the Chinese are the ones that are the even keel. Now, having said that, the reality too is that they are also deeply, deeply engaged everywhere else in the world. And in a way that is eating our lunch, that is in Africa, in South America, in Australia, they are the primary sort of development player and obviously extracting the resources they need. But they are taking on a global role that's quite interesting, whether we call it a state-led imperialism or what, I don't know. But they are today, and I often tell this with my students, because over the last 30 years that I've been both teaching and seeing maybe delegations of Chinese. 30 years ago, they were pretty rusty and maybe newcomers to the world. Today, a negotiating team of let's say trade negotiators from the government or any number of other delegations that you see around the world, they are savvy, they are experienced, they know the language, they know the culture, they probably know more about the electoral system than Donald Trump does in terms of the dynamics. And even as the trade war goes on, they're playing the game that has long been US politics of targeting districts and obviously making sure the pain is felt so that the pressure can be on. So fascinating to see, again, this China of today, and of course, the US chaos and weakening and relative decline, it's not a, but it is definitely a trade war. We saw it play out. I haven't even read on GoFull because in the last few days with the NBA now, as an integral, usually sports are bringing people together now. It's creating an added tension to the US-China relationship. Yeah. Well, I think the operative thing is, you said that China was eating our lunch and I think it is eating our lunch or we're asking them to eat our lunch and they are eating our lunch. They want to do that. And one Belt One Road is an initiative that is really, it's all the way from Beijing to Spain. They're going to have a road there and shipping lanes there. As a result, they're going to have enormous economic leverage in every continent. So what's really remarkable is that we're not doing anything to countervail on that. Over time, and given their long view of things, over time they will dominate the world, they will dominate us. And maybe they wouldn't do it in such a moral way that we were doing it, to the extent we were doing it a moral way, but they will have power. So what's really tragic about this is that the sun is setting on the American empire and you can see it happening every day. And my question to you is, where does this all go? Because right now we're still crawling about our economy. We still have a low unemployment rate. We still have a lot of jobs that are coming online. The market is, although it's been volatile, it's still pretty much up there. And he crows about that. But bottom line is, and in discussion about recession, it ended. Everybody was all interested in recession in three weeks a month ago. Now he's just quiet as if you could hear the crickets. So what is going to happen here? It sounds like it's building up to a huge crescendo. And one day we're going to see the drums roll on the American empire, no? Well, yeah. I mean, it is, again, hard to say, hard to predict. And while we can speak of this rising China and its tentacles everywhere, and they are very strategic in that regard, but it's a very strategic sort of for building their pie, let's say. I think where we probably want to be careful, and I don't maybe pretend to understand fully the Chinese mindset and foreign policy, but I don't know that they have geo-political or maybe strategic interest in the same way of empire. It's a different kind. But most certainly, they're going to be a player to contend with. And in some ways, they are shifting the power towards them more and building these alliances and ties. But it's not easy, and it's not all positive. Even the very ambitious one wrote initiative you mentioned, it's also got a lot of criticism that China's interests are so focused and narrow, and they've taken a lot of criticism for treatment of different places where they've come in. And they're going to stumble along the way as well. But nevertheless, they've got both the long, long, long horizon and vision. They have the patience. They're not rushing. But if you look forward, let's say 30 years from now, yeah, they're going to be a key player. And the US will continually find itself having, at least right now, losing trust, credibility, legitimacy so that while it's going to have a seat at the table, it's not going to be taken as seriously as it used to be. And boy, we're going to have to eat some humble pie to be able to stay alive. You know, we could talk about Mexico, and we've talked about Mexico and south of the border before. It's actually a gruesome conversation. It never gets better. It always gets worse. He does things that are unethical, immoral, and outright, crazy unfair. And so I'm skipping that for this discussion, okay? I know it's pretty much the same as it was, but worse. What I would like to cover, though, is something you mentioned earlier. And that is Brexit and our relationship through UK and into, you know, Europe, continental Europe. Because I think that his position or maybe lack of position these days, his lack of engagement, his lack of helping anyone and only hurting them with his anti-nado talk and the machinations that he's engaged in in Ukraine only hurts American influence there and only hurts them, the Europeans. But can we talk about Brexit and what he's done or not done and what is likely to happen, both in the initial withdrawal from the EU and then, of course, in what follows? Yeah. And again, here we are waiting a few weeks for this drama. We've been spending a lot of time in the last few years trying to make sense of it. I think what we see in the case of the UK also is a very serious political crisis, a crisis of credibility, legitimacy. There was a time where traditionally the two leading parties, the Labour and Tory, had a pretty clearly defined agenda and maybe policy platform. And today that's also kind of eroding and, you know, just the nastiness of it and the polarization. So where does that leave them? And on one hand, let's assume a scenario where they do leave and maybe it's bumpy or rough. Yes, there is an opportunity for the US, given the long-standing ties of the special relationship. But at the end of the day, I can't help but think that England, Scotland, Wales, they are so interdependent, interconnected with Europe that it can't be but a cost, a pain. In other words, no winners. Who are the winners? I mean, maybe some American firms can benefit over time entering more into the UK market, but that's not going to be easy or without its problems. Is the UK going to flood the US? Of course not. It's a smaller economy than, let's say the rest of Europe, where we get more goods from. So I don't know. I think just like in the US, we're going to be continuing a few more years of uncertainty in the UK. They're going to need to probably transition even to a post-borus world because while he's there now and he may survive this exit transition, the Brexit, I just, I don't see him as a prime minister for the next 10 years, like someone who's going to really boom, make the country boom. So they're going to be languishing along. There's going to be deep divisions internally. Scotland wanting again to split off or maybe what's going to happen with the Northern Ireland. It's almost like the easiest solution, frankly, would be just let them reconnect with the rest of Ireland and call it quits. But of course, easy for an outsider to say that. These are very emotional, sensitive issues there. But I also think that for the EU, it has been a crisis, but it also, I think curiously, it can present an opportunity. The rest of the 27 remaining can rally, redefine who they are. And I suppose, make sure that they will make it painful for the UK because you don't want others to suddenly defect. The Poles or maybe the Italians, it's not likely to see that. But I think there's a scenario where maybe the remaining EU 27 can coalesce and reaffirm and whatever, maybe with more modesty on one hand. But in the end, the UK was always a skeptical player, a skeptical member. It joined in the early 70s when it was always with like one leg out. And so my sense is for many other Europeans, it's like, well, get lost. You were never really in the inner circle anyway. But nevertheless, the economies are deeply intertwined and England and London in particular has always been a very important global international European city. But it is, I think the Brexit is damaging its overall economy, reputation, political system. And so it's a lose-lose. Nobody knows who's winning from this. One last thing we should talk about, and I think it's sort of overarching somehow, is Russia. Vladimir Putin is feeling a stride these days. He's creating trouble everywhere. His main purpose in life seems to me to undermine the United States in every way he can. And the claim has been made that Trump is his agent, works for him, that he has stuff on Trump that makes Trump a marionette for him. At the same time, he's having great success in fragmenting Europe, fragmenting NATO, and becoming a real global troublemaker. And I wonder, I wonder where that goes. I mean, we've had the Mueller report. We still have investigations going on about Trump's role in our elections and his strange, let me say it again, strange relationship with Trump. But where do you think that's going? Where do you think Vladimir Putin is taking us? And isn't he a global factor right now affecting just nearly everything? Yeah. Well, it is. And he very much has his own tentacles in different ways, whether it's through this sort of energy markets, or just as in the last 20, maybe now almost practically 30 years since the end of that Soviet Union, we've created a new class of oligarchs, these wealthy Russians who are spread out and they've got tremendous influence in the UK in particular, but other parts of Europe. And I think it's like everything, as long as those that have that power, the economic power, the political power, the connections there, they sort of feed themselves and then just continue this elite oligarchy. But I'm reminded as well, I can remember in the mid to late 80s, there was a pretty much a widespread prevailing view that the Soviet Union would never end. It was so powerful. And when it fell apart, it was like a thick cards very quickly within a matter of weeks and months. And you'll recall this coup and then Gorbachev disappears, comes back, it's gone. What I'm getting at there is that we have an image of Russia being very powerful and Putin the strong guy, but it's not inconceivable that some scenario, maybe of an economic or political crisis could suddenly bring that deck of cards down. Could it be pressure from below? I don't know. I have a feeling that that's kind of run out of steam in some ways. I don't see a big social movement making the change. It's probably more crisis at the top. But for now, we can expect probably continuity. But again, I'm just getting back to that. We can't assume that it's all going to be forever that there could be a real crisis there. A world of change and maybe in a funny way a world of decline. But talk about running out of steam, Carlos. We have just run out of steam. We're out of time. I so enjoy these conversations. I hope we can do it again in a couple of weeks and revisit the world as we'll have been changed from then till now. That's right. Never a dull moment in global affairs. We live in interesting times. Absolutely. Yes. Thank you so much. Carlos Suarez. Talk to you soon. Aloha.