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Michael Tracey and Lee Fang swap guest hosting tales, discuss free speech crackdowns against Israel’s critics and speculate about the possible outcomes for ending the Ukraine war. This conversation was recorded on Friday, March 7.
Lee Fang: My next guest really requires no introduction. He’s a friend of the show, European correspondent for System Update. Really, I’m taking his job. He should be here filling in. You've been replaced, Michael. How are you doing?
Michael Tracey: I think I might need to orchestrate another coup to reclaim my rightful role as the semi-regular System Update guest host, but I'm sure you've been doing a fantastic job in my absence, Lee.
Lee Fang: Yeah, it's been fun. I like the community actually, some of the feedback's been good. What's been your experience doing this? I know you've done it maybe a few times in the past. How has that been for you?
Michael Tracey: Yeah, well, one time I did it for like two weeks straight when I went to Brazil and guest-hosted from the studio. And then I've done it kind of intermittently, remotely. And then, most recently, last week, I did two shows from the Rumble studio or bureau in Washington D.C., where we aired some of the CPAC interviews that I did, I kind of narrate them.
I don't know, I mean, I guess I find it tolerable. I mean, if people like to watch me extemporaneously speak, then that's good. But I have to admit, I'm not the biggest fan of just sitting and absorbing monologues.
Lee Fang: Yeah.
Michael Tracey: But I guess that's how people process information now. So, you have to kind of cultivate it as a skill. Otherwise, you're going to be deemed irrelevant in our bold, brave new media landscape.
Lee Fang: Yeah, Glenn's very good at it. He's transformed his trial attorney skills…
Michael Tracey: Yes.
Lee Fang: He's like, he's given a deposition or something and he's just nailing you with like arguments when he's doing it. But then I don't even know how many people really like the Glenn style. I like the Glenn style, but I think most human beings, most consumers of media, want the TikTokerification of media. They want the like 15 second clips that are like interspersed with emotionally evocative bullshit. That's what everything's boiling down to. I'm writing these 3,000-word investigations and I'm looking at the click-through rates and people are opening my emails and closing them immediately because there are too many words.
Michael Tracey: That's the, you know what? I don't even, I try not to even look at those data. Maybe I should, because it would behoove me to know how much of my stuff is getting read or just clicked out of immediately, I almost find it's a bit like a cognitive distortion influence, to even be mindful of those figures, because I don't want it to, like, subconsciously influence me.
Lee Fang: Yeah, but you want people to listen to what you have to say, right? It's important. I mean the format, that's it just the way it is, I’m sure that there are other journalists who write for print and they're nostalgic for print. I've always been online. So, the transition isn't as radical for me, but I don't welcome this movement towards all-video, all-audio. So, it's kind of hard.
Michael Tracey: Well, I don’t either because I appreciate your commentaries, your occasional commentaries on this. One reason I think that I do, at least, partially lament whatever transition we're in is because there are just so many people who could like to be broadly construed as in the media of some kind, but they never do any journalism at all. Like I'm not saying I'm the most intrepid journalist in the face of the earth, I've done the most bombshell investigative stories, but at least I try to do some original reporting and have some original thoughts.
I just feel like if everybody is always just pontificating online and they can be like just lumped into this ever evolving category of media that kind of dilutes like, I think what the real purpose of the media is or like one of the most benefit the most beneficial purpose of the media which is to shine light on stuff that's otherwise not going to be covered. And if it's just punditry, again, I'm not going to claim that I don't engage in punditry…
Lee Fang: Yeah.
Michael Tracey: But it's just an overload and it's too much. It gets conflated and it like breaks everybody down, I guess, I don't know.
Lee Fang: I pointed this out on Twitter. I saw from some of the people who got the Jeffrey Epstein…
Michael Tracey: Yes, that was a great example.
Lee Fang: Yeah, I've never even heard of half of those people, and I looked them up and they all have over a million followers. It's like, what? And it's like this whole flimflam, these were documents that were already released I think over 10 years ago, including some of the flight log stuff that Gawker reported, a gazillion years ago.
Michael Tracey: That was like 2015, I think. But these people are influencers. Look, so not everybody has to be a journalist. I understand that there are different walks of life that one can pursue. But, like every now and then, it is actually useful to have somebody with a journalistic impulse to be examining government documents that are just being spoon fed to them. Clearly, this whole Epstein document release thing was engineered so, frankly, a bunch of dopey people who are just going to be awestruck if they were given this so-called access by the Trump administration, just kind of credulously regurgitate whatever it is they're fed. And I get it.
Sometimes, like the more mainstream media, oftentimes the more mainstream media does go way overboard in kind of dwelling on petty things to nitpick Trump on. So, I get that there’s been, there needs to be some correction, but this seems like an over-correction where now you could just delegate core functions of the media to essentially just partisan influencers who don't even pretend to be engaged in any critical scrutiny of what it is they're being provided with. And that's why it blew up in their faces. It was like...
Lee Fang: Yeah, and that's to the credit of the broad audience. I think everyone's kind of disgusted by this, even people who are loyal followers of these influencers. But it just kind of gets me back to something I was talking to a friend about the other day. I've been critical, I write about money and politics. It's one of the main beats I do. But one thing I'm critical of is these corporate PACs, the kind of big money, lobbyist fundraisers that most of the folks in Congress rely on. It's kind of obviously a quid pro quo. You at least get some favor by engaging this type of thing with the industries that donate. But as we've seen the gravitation away from that to small dollar donations, now you have this huge incentive for members of Congress to become influencers, to go and do dances on the Capitol Hill steps or engage in conspiracy theories or do these theatrical outbursts in committee hearings that don't make any sense. I've seen them happen live where it's so obviously scripted. It's not something that is an organic outburst of anger towards Trump or Biden, depending on which member of Congress you're talking about. And it's all just geared to get these small dollar donations. It's like, well – I don't want the Goldman Sachs, Northrop Grumman PAC-dominated world, but I don't want this either. Be careful what you wish for.
Michael Tracey: Yeah, like the workhorse legislators are probably not going to be the ones who are getting the small dollar donations because they're not entertainers.
Lee Fang: Yeah, exactly.
Michael Tracey: And I'm not even trying to glamorize the workhorse legislator necessarily, because it all depends on to what end they're legislating toward. But let's say like, theoretically, there was something productive that you want to see get accomplished legislatively. The people who are going to be in the weeds of those issues generally are not the ones who have been primed to kind of fashion their public profile around this endless race to the bottom for small dollar donations. And I mean, I'm sort of like you, I was optimistic when this small dollar model seemed to be at least gradually supplanting the older model, which was much more reliant on donor insider access, but, as we see, it's never really black or white and there are some pretty significant pitfalls.
And you see this incentive structure replicated in the media itself. Like it's almost like the politicians and the so-called media are operating within the same structure here.
Lee Fang: Yeah.
Michael Tracey: So, like somebody goes on Joe Rogan, I'm not trying to even bad mouth Joe Rogan, I've been a long-time listener, but, like, somebody goes on and he says, by the way, pizza gate actually was never debunked. And I'll give you just this like scattershot list of facts that seem to maybe add up to some indication that there's something…
Lee Fang: Yeah, I just watched it. Yeah.
Michael Tracey: Don’t you remember that pizza gate. I don't even want to even litigate pizza gate, but it's just like that kind of – that's the kind of – I guess – “intrepid journalism” that gets rewarded in this ecosystem.
Lee Fang: Yeah, it's bottom of the barrel. It's kind of like the Alex Jones’ dynamic where we don't have to get deep into Alex Jones but…
Michael Tracey: Let's go. Let's get deep into Alex Jones.
Lee Fang: Well, it's like he takes a real issue, a very serious issue, exaggerates, adds on other issues that are not well-founded or completely fabricated, and then brings attention to it. And then this issue that is often something that's kind of on the sidelines, that's a little bit more of a niche subterranean topic, and then he by being so bombastic, he delegitimizes discussion of the very real issue – I'll give you one: the famous clip of him saying they're putting chemicals in the water, they're turning the frogs gay...
Michael Tracey: Turning the frogs gay? I knew exactly where you were going.
Lee Fang: I've written about Syngenta. The herbicide company has put so much of their herbicide into crops and it's water-soluble. If you drink water in Iowa or Illinois, you're drinking atrazine, their herbicide, in a very interesting kind of dynamic where there's a professor at Berkeley who discovered that if you give frogs a relatively small amount of atrazine, it changes their sex. It completely changes their hormones. They basically trans the frogs. I mean, this whole story around transgenes is incredible because they hired private detectives, they hired people to harass this professor at Berkeley. It became a whole kind of, one of those corporate intimidation campaigns where they suppressed his science. They did everything they could to try to delegitimize the research he was doing and to intimidate him. And this is something that is not well known. This is a problem around a lot of pesticides that are very common in everyday American agriculture, that are affecting the biological environment, animals, insects, and possibly humans. But then how do people act? Do people know the real story? Do they know the Alex Jones version that is mostly bullshit.
Michael Tracey: I would even broaden it out a bit, like Alex Jones in his earlier days of influencer kind of popularized this notion of globalism as being something bad, right? And there are legitimate critiques of "globalist institutions,” like the Economic Forum or different international financial organizations. There's obviously overabundance of material to rational critique there, but when it gets layered on to just kind of this baseline, almost like quasi-theological conspiracism, it kind of limits the amount of rational critique you can do on the subject that actually does call out for it. And so, if there's always like a layer of like dot connecting that has to come into every discussion of every legitimate issue. So, it's turned now in certain sectors, the term globalism into like an insult, with maybe it ought to be, but I feel like people should have like a more rational understanding of why they're objecting to these globalists…
Lee Fang: No, I think that's exactly right. I mean, same dynamic could be applied to deep state. I mean, this was not a partisan concept…
Michael Tracey: I've stopped using that term.
Lee Fang: This is an unelected bureaucracy that's very heavily in the intelligence, national security space that basically operates independently of whoever is in power.
Michael Tracey: Here's a great example. Here's a great example.
Lee Fang: Yeah.
Michael Tracey: So, I stopped using the term deep state earnestly, like in 2017, the minute Sean Handy started using it. Because the minute he started using it, you knew that it just became a Republican that it was just like a rep talking point, there was obviously a legitimately existing permanent bureaucracy or national security state apparatus that had arrogated unto itself levels of autonomy that are probably inconsistent with what the founders would have envisioned, right? Or what people who just want a minimum democratic response would advocate. So that's a huge issue. I mean, that was definitely a totally legitimate issue. But now it's gotten to the point where DOGE, you'll see DOGE proponents supporting moves like totally crippling the Consumer Protection Financial Board by saying, “Oh, we're getting rid of the deep state. So, they're like, this is the deep state.”
Lee Fang: Yeah.
Michael Tracey: It's always, it's ever shifting what they can classify as the deep state. Like some National Park Service.
Lee Fang: Air traffic controllers.
Michael Tracey: Yeah. Those are the things. So, it's gone so far beyond the bounds of what would have been, at one point, a rational critique. And I don't know about you, but I haven't seen much sign yet that they've shuffled out a lot of personnel, obviously, from the security state agencies. But are they reducing the power of the security state agencies? Maybe there's some stuff that I missed, and it could be coming. They've only been in power for like six weeks. But that would be the real sign that the power or influence of the so-called deep state is actually being genuinely curbed…
Lee Fang: Right.
Michael Tracey: Not just firing a bunch of people who work in national parks.
Lee Fang: And we don't want FBI agents or people with incredible reach inside the intelligence agency. Intelligence agencies swapped out for other partisans with their own kind of extremely narrow agenda.
Michael Tracey: Like, Dan Bongino, why am I supposed to be thrilled that Dan Bongino, who's a hardcore Republican partisan, which he's entitled to be, I'm not even begrudging that, there's a big market out there for that, apparently. Is this the alternative to the so-called deep state that we're all supposed to be clamoring for? I'm not sure.
Lee Fang: Yeah. No, I think this, I mean, this is an issue that is TBD. Like so far, we haven't seen it. Maybe there's going to be, I mean, this is one of the things I'm holding out some optimism for, but. Yeah. I mean, I will…
Michael Tracey: People get mad at me up on these kinds of subjects, I pledge to strive to keep an open mind. But it's hard to keep an open mind when, for example, today, the administration announces they're carrying forth Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s big free speech initiative, which is to crack down on so-called antisemitic speech by using the coercive power of the state to compel basically the prohibition of certain forms of political speech that RFK Jr. and Linda McMahon deem unacceptable pursuant to an executive order that was issued by Trump, which actually drew on an executive order from his first term, in 2019, that mandated that the federal government agencies start employing the so-called IHRA definition of antisemitism, which is the most expansive possible definition of antisemitism. And so, if you can be accused of “applying double standards to Israel,” that means you're antisemitic.
And now under this current framework, you could be subject to legal penalties. And they just canceled like 700 million or something or $300 million of federal contracts or grants to Columbia University on the basis of antisemitism, which obviously as Glenn covered earlier this week, the government is not permitted to condition expenditures that otherwise would have been making on the political speech of the recipient. Like that's basic first amendment case law. So, on the one hand, I do think a lot of what JD Vance said when he went to the Munich Security Conference and castigated European countries for their own free speech infringements. A lot of that was substantively correct. It's true, as you know that Romania just kind of like randomly abrogated an entire presidential election through judicial edict because they claimed that there was some interference over TikTok. So that was true, but then what standing now does JD Vance have when he goes around pontificating about free speech, sometimes validly, if it's being totally disregarded domestically in the United States. That's why in my life, I struggle to keep an open mind.
Lee Fang: This area is sensitive, because even though it's a winning, I don't know if it's a winning, but it's a very potent area for criticism for Democrats. They could be raising this. No one talked about this during his confirmation hearings. No one really raised these issues, even though now it's very clear that because HHS oversees billions of dollars in grants to universities. He actually has these kind of levers to pull with research institutes and really basically any major university in the country, because they're so reliant on federal research dollars. But Democrats won't touch it for, I guess, political reasons. And same in Europe. I mean, this is a great way for any kind of Eurocrat to poke back at JD Vance or the Trump administration saying, you have no free speech on Israel issues, except that maybe there's the worst in Germany and most of these other countries. They don't actually have free speech either. So, there's no kind of platform for them to stand and…
Michael Tracey: It was so funny, when I was at CPAC and people might have seen this if they've been following the channel, but I interviewed a member of the European Parliament with the AfD, the Alternative for Germany, the so-called far-right party, I don't even know what that descriptor means anymore, but they're widely labeled that and then came in second in the German federal election. And I asked, this came up, Vance's hectoring or lecture or scolding of the European countries. She was inclined to agree with it. But then I brought up, what about Germany's attitude toward pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel protests, which have been ruthlessly prescribed, much more wantonly in Germany than I think would even be possible in the United States, as much as some people would like to.
She had this whole rationale, Christine Anderson was her name, people can look up the interview. She had this whole rationale for why that actually was not protected speech. It wasn't even like a coherent rationale. It was just like they don't even evince that they've made any attempt to try to reconcile their broader critique of like the liberal bureaucrats genuinely oftentimes infringing upon speech of conservatives with this giant exception that they've all decided on for speech critical of Israel.
I mean, Trump came into office in the second term, like one of the first executive orders he signed to much fanfare was basically something to the effect of free speech is back. The government shall not infringe on free speech. And then, like within a couple of weeks, we have this intergovernmental initiative spearheaded by Bobby Jr. – let's not even dwell on him because – I mean, I get people wanna always be like belabor the vaccine issue. To me, it seems like there's a disproportionate emphasis on that with respect to him as evidence now by his first big initiative being an intergovernmental campaign to liken antisemitism with racism. It's almost like he's copying and pasting one of those corporate mea culpa things from 2020. Target and MasterCard and all these companies had to...
Lee Fang: Yeah. There's a template for how to do this now.
Michael Tracey: Yeah, yeah, they had to apologize for racism. Now, like, we're randomly getting this new variant of it in 2025, but antisemitism is the big new disease or pestilence, as RFK said, that everybody now has to take accountability for. And that means, I guess, withholding grants to universities that don't comply with the speech restrictions that RFK would like to see imposed.
Lee Fang: Yeah, I think there's part of the general conservative mindset here. I would be open to critiques of this. There's such a hatred for universities that universities, you look at the donations, all the professors and administrators give to Democrats, they're all registered Democrats. We've seen like 10 years of conservatives being shut down. I think there's just a nihilism here.
If you want to compare it to something, it's like you get these leftists in a room a few years ago and they kind of get each other so excited because of their hatred for police, because of certain viral videos or other, like, books that inspired them, that you started asking them, it's like, well, wait, what are we gonna do about public safety or what happens when there's a crime?
It didn't matter. It wouldn't matter if you had to destroy the institution. And there's an obsession with destroying universities and higher education to the point where principles don't matter. I think a lot of conservatives do genuinely care about free speech. But then you kind of dangle the keys of, “Hey, what we could destroy universities over this kind of fabricated or at least exaggerated antisemitism issue.” They get so excited, they kind of lunge for it.
Michael Tracey: This goes back decades, though, right? I mean, Richard Nixon campaigned against the pointy-headed academics from the rivalry towers.
Lee Fang: They’ve been primed for generations on this…
Michael Tracey: Yeah, I mean, I saw the first time I saw JD Vance speak was in 2021 at a so-called National Conservatism Conference. He just could have copied and pasted Richard Nixon speeches from the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, just in terms of his attacks on academia and the corrupting influence on the youth, etc. And trying to pit middle America against the elites, which has recurring resonance in American political life. So, I'm not arguing it's an ineffective tactic. It's not a new phenomenon, for sure. And so yeah, I mean, I do think there is a nihilism. They just would like to burn down the left-wing universities.
Unfortunately, one of the patterns in speech infringements is that obviously undesirable targets are used as the introduction to start restricting speech more broadly.
I think the case with Alex Jones, like when Alex Jones was purged from social media in 2018, that was like the canary in the coal mine for an expansion of the so-called content moderation policies that ended up being de facto government censorship, because the government was incentivizing or pressuring the social media companies to take these sensorial actions, whether it was because social media companies were endangering public health with COVID allegedly or abetting foreign interference in elections and so forth. But Alex Jones, that was like an example where people think he's kind of kooky. So maybe sure, he's somebody who we can justifiably throw off the platforms…
Lee Fang: One area that a lot of the Trump kind of intellectual, the brain trust, the folks that were at the America First Policies Institute and some of the think tanks that kind of incubated a lot of the personnel and the ideas for the administration, they basically set out to abolish the wing of the Department of Homeland Security that was involved, known as CISA, that was involved in the pandemic censorship, the 2020 election censorship that they claim is the reason they lost that election. A lot of the kind of interference coordinated with the FBI that led to content moderation that they claimed was partisan motivated and some of it definitely was, but here's I think this is where it's all going to boomerang. So far, they have not shut down this wing of the Department of Homeland Security and God only knows how this could be used, this could be weaponized to suppress speech critical of Israel. I mean they could use the exact same kind of government bureaucracy, the same mechanics that they have spent the last four years criticizing. And they could really apply it, again, on these kinds of Israel issues. I don't think it's going to stop at private universities. I mean, I think this is going to expand very rapidly.
Michael Tracey: And the Trump executive order that he issued really 10 days or so into the presidency, is not at all limited to college campuses. It applies to all Americans in terms of his ordering the attorney general to double down on investigating antisemitism, again, as defined by the IHRA definition. So, even if you have no affiliation at all with universities. You are potentially implicated by that. And there was also talk about how this might be limited to just like foreign students on a student visa or something…
Lee Fang: On a student visa or something.
Michael Tracey: Right. But it goes way beyond that as well, because obviously, everybody, people impacted by this Columbia decision are not solely foreign students. But even the text of the executive order did not at all circumscribe it to just apply to students. So are foreign students. So, you can't even justify it on like, oh, he's cracking down on immigration violations or whatever.
Yeah, I mean, the CISA thing is interesting. I mean, I'm almost positive that that stems from – I forget Chris Krebs. He was the CISA administrator in the 2020 election.
Lee Fang: Yeah, that's right.
Michael Tracey: And his statement that the 2020 election was the most secure election in American history was constantly cited by the media to argue that, like Trump's own claims were being refuted by his own administration.
Lee Fang: Right.
Michael Tracey: So, I think it's as simple as they're going to get rid of the guy who got rid of the agency that caused him that disturbance, right? I don't know how principle that is. Like even today, I don't know if you saw it, but there was an executive order, maybe it was yesterday, he's issuing executive orders to go after individual law firms now.
Lee Fang: Speaking of fruitful broad-based policies before you have to go. I want to ask you about why you're in Europe. You attended this European Council summit. Could you just explain what you're doing there? What you saw and what are the kind of reverberations from these last weeks? Zelenskyy's press conference kind of catastrophe like, has that changed the mindset? I mean I saw one thing that I also want to ask you about is just this news report from The Wall Street Journal that the Germans are even now open to developing nuclear weapons and kind of taking their defense budget and giving it new rules, so they can go past their old deficit constraints. So, it seems like even with the drama between Zelenskyy and some other European leaders and Trump, they're actually engaging in a lot of the goals of having NATO in Europe be more self-sufficient as Trump has intended.
Michael Tracey: Yeah. So, I'm in Brussels, Belgium, which is where the European Union, European Parliament, European Council, all these interlocking European institutions that a lot of people who are in them don't even really seem to know what they do are. Like there's a European Council president who's one guy but then there's also Ursula von der Leyen who is the – I forget even what her title now is like I can't even keep them straight – but it's just a very confusing series of institutions like in this supranational structure.
And so, yeah, there was an emergency summit that was convened yesterday, where they would be basically declaring collectively to rearm more expeditiously than they had declared in previous instances when they've done variations of this. But I do have to say, it does seem like they are taking tangible steps to facilitate this mobilization now.
For one thing, you mentioned Germany. Germany has tended to be much more scrupulously fiscally conservative, like resistant to acquiring debt and so forth. But now, they are in favor of an EU-wide instrument being adopted so that debt can be used to finance these increases in defense spending. So, that was a big historic break for Germany. A lot of the Eurocrat hawks have been demanding this of Germany for a while, like accusing them of hypocrisy for like rhetorically suggesting that Europe needs to enter a new historical phase in its rearmament, but then not changing its fiscal policy to enable that, but so now they apparently are doing that.
And so, yeah, I mean, to the extent that the European states can facilitate anything amongst themselves in a cogent way. They seem committed to this. And I have to question this like unflinching consensus behind how it's like just an obviously great thing for Europe to rapidly rearm…
Lee Fang: Militarize, yeah.
Michael Tracey: Yeah, rapidly remilitarize. Like, remember when people were cheering because Germany may be sending tanks to attack Russia or something. People overuse historical analogies, but there might be some historical sort of omens to at least be mindful of. And the whole reason that the European Union and the European Council – the European Union is like a parliament, the European Council used to be just an informal body where the EU heads of state or heads of government would congregate and deliberate and issue statements, now it's more of a formalized deliberative process that's supposed to be binding on the member states but isn't always in practice.
But anyway, a reason why a lot of these institutions came about was to kind of institutionalize the demilitarization of Europe after decades of endless conflict. That's why they've had to do some things that are outside of their nature, especially over the past three years, because the EU is not set up as even really contemplating. The EU was not originally contemplated to have any jurisdiction over collective military affairs, really. So, they've had to invent that stuff on the fly. The European peace facility is like the EU instrument that's now very ironically named, that was invoked in 2022 to start providing EU-specific military provisions to Ukraine. So, they're ramping that stuff up. And I just don't fully understand why.
Trump is also obviously encouraging this. I mean, one of his big grievances is that the U.S. gets ripped off. We gave, according to him, $350 billion to Ukraine, which I don't think is quite right. I mean, I don't know how he's tabulating that exactly. And Europe only gave $100 million, so they better equalize. That's the term he's used. Well, can we stop and have someone explain why we should want Europe to equalize?
One of the big problems with having militaries of a large size, as Madeleine Albright once said in the ‘90s, “if we have this big, beautiful military, what's the point of having it if not to use it?” Like that changes the incentives in how states act. So, do we want like a radicalized Poland like that and now they have to take up the mantle to oppose like the legacy of Soviet aggression because they're still all crazed about having admittedly been under pretty unpleasant Russian control for decades? I just don't think people have thought through the implications of this should it come to fuller fruition, which seems to be at least preliminarily in progress.
Another issue is that they had what they declared to be a background briefing, which I didn't agree to, so I don't know why I would be on the hook for that. Like I just walked into a room and said, okay, as you all know, this is a background briefing. But I guess for decorum sake, I won't name the guy but it was an advisor to Macron. And obviously, Macron's been trying to lead the charge in fulfilling his Charles de Gaulle fantasies of an autonomous Europe led by France.
Macron has given a big defense speech this week about the need for, again, Europe to rearm even more quickly. The issue of an American backstop came up for a potential negotiated settlement in Ukraine, whereby if there was a cessation of hostilities, what Ukraine and the European countries, most of them anyway, other than Hungary, seem to want is for there to be a European military force deployed to Ukraine, mainly British and French. And so, this advisor was asked, again, “on background” what about the American backstop to that, to provide a security guarantee? And for all the fanfare around Trump's rhetorical unkindness to Zelenskyy and Ukraine, the Europeans, as this guy explained, are operating under the assumption that it's been conveyed to them that yes, the U.S. will be providing some kind of backstop in the event that these European troops are deployed to Ukraine.
So, now, do we want a situation where we have multiple layers of a “security guarantee” cling to what seems like, if it's achievable at all, would be a fairly fragile cease-fire scenario in Ukraine and potentially have the U.S. on the hook to back up some of these more audacious European countries that are saying they're going to put troops on the ground.
I think there's a lot that's pretty ominous here that I just don't understand why it's not more widely discussed. But then, again, I often have that response to things that go on in the world.
Lee Fang: Well, there's this mainstream discourse, and it's not just like, okay, in The Economist or the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. It's literally every major newspaper. It's virtually every think tank in Washington, every single house defense committee or budget committee or any of that congressional leadership, everyone basically just not in the same bombastic way, not in the same kind of severing ties potentially with NATO or ending kind the post-Cold War consensus but the actual meat of what the substance of the echo chamber is that NATO countries need to spend more. They need to hit that 5% GDP defense spending number that was their obligation, but I guess it's not in the treaty.
Michael Tracey: It used to be two, it used to be two, then it went up to three, and then Trump blew everybody out of their seats a few weeks ago and upped it to five, which would be extraordinary.
Lee Fang: And no one's going close to that. I guess Poland has had the quickest increases. I wonder because you talk about like an American military backstop, it's like, look, if French or British troops are being killed by Russians, there's already a nuclear backstop. I mean, we're talking about a NATO alliance that's already backed up with weapons that kill us all. What does this actually mean?
I was just talking to Leighton earlier in the program, the pivot to Asia, there's this huge talk about new long-range bombers, new submarines, new cutting-edge naval vessels to keep pace with China but if there's a kinetic war between the U.S. and China, would we only be using conventional weapons, it will never reach the nuclear weapons standpoint? That part just doesn't make sense to me. I wonder if there are other factors at play. It's like you look at how Russia had the fastest growing economy in Europe last year. It has not truly suffered in the way that was expected from these sanctions because they've kind of engaged.
Michael Tracey: Because it's a war economy.
Lee Fang: Yes.
Michael Tracey: It's like why the United States was through faster than World War II.
Lee Fang: I think if you're one of these economic planners in France or Germany, especially Germany, which has had a sagging manufacturing base over the last two years, there's a broad appeal in rejuvenating the economy through defense spending. This is not actually about Ukrainian defense or creating this European army that can replace the Americans because at the end of the day, the only true threat is potentially Russia. And if it does come to all-out war with Russia, I don't think this is going to be solved with more German tanks. It'll be something much more cataclysmic than that. So, I just feel like the pandering, the discussion, the rhetoric, doesn't actually peel back to what does this actually mean?
Michael Tracey: I sometimes fall short on this in terms of getting too engrossed in the Trump rhetoric because sometimes you just have to, like, marvel at it and like wonder about what the implications are. But if the results of his bluster toward Ukraine and his bluster, to some degree, toward the European countries is that they are in fact going to accelerate their military spending, then what is achieved is like whatever this consensus view had already been, right?
I mean, this is a genuine consensus view. Republicans may have a different view on Ukraine at this point than Democrats, like in the Congress or whatever, but in terms of wanting the European member states to spend more on the military, there's no disagreement at all. Everybody just thinks that is total garbage…
Lee Fang: Complete uniparty.
Michael Tracey: And if that's what Trump is achieving, then maybe the rhetoric isn't quite as significant as that. I'm also kind of bewildered that there's not more cognizance of the apparent conditions that could potentially be placed on Russia pursuant to some negotiated settlement and whether those are even achievable. Like Lavrov, the foreign minister and others have said repeatedly that this notion of a European quote-unquote “peacekeeping force” deployed to Ukraine is a total non-starter because obviously those would be NATO troops and even if they're not there under an explicit NATO mission, NATO missions can always broaden, it's not like it's a hard and fast legal kind of technicality around like what constitutes a NATO mission and what doesn't.
In the Libyan war in 2011, there was initially a NATO mandate, and if memory serves, they decided to eventually rescind the NATO mandate once they got to the regime change phase of the operation, or there was some technicality that I'm not recalling exactly as to whether that was constituted a full-fledged whole of NATO mission. I don't think it did. I think it was just three member states, primarily the U.S., U.K., and France that were collaborating with one another using NATO operational kind of capacities, but we're not embroiling the entire NATO block.
So, I mean, there's a lot of ambiguity around what does it even mean to be a NATO mission. But the fact is, if there was a British and French troop presence there with some kind of “backstop” from the United States, that's functionally a NATO presence, right? So how is that gonna be reconcilable? And Trump endorsed this concept. I mean, that's why the blow up with Zelenskyy was so odd. He had the perfect runway to have a meeting where they would consecrate this so-called minerals deal. Macron and then Starmer, who were both there, who were both leading the charge on this European peacekeeping deployment – quote-unquote “peacekeeping.”
I think Trump even called it “a so-called peacekeeping mission,” which kind of raises some questions about the veracity of that mission title. And then, Zelenskyy was about to confirm that the U.S. was going to just basically acquire Ukraine as a quasi-colony or something. I mean, people should read the text, I don't know if you did, of that so-called Minerals Agreement. It goes well beyond rare earth minerals.
Lee Fang: Oh, it’s just you know, I haven't. I should check that out.
Michael Tracey: It’s basically the U.S. acquiring at least half of all earnings from Ukrainian extractable natural resources. So, hydrocarbons, oil, rare earth minerals. And then on top of that, the U.S. acquires ownership of Ukrainian physical infrastructure, like refineries and ports. So, this is basically the U.S. I don't know, maybe colonization is not the right word. I'm open to whatever the people think the correct terminology is.
It is essentially like the U.S. seizing vast swaths of Ukrainian state resources. And Trump had characterized this, and also Rubio and others were characterizing this as an effective security guarantee to Ukraine, because, according to Trump, this would mean that U.S. personnel of some kind would be on the ground in Ukraine.
If memory serves, Russia invaded Ukraine because they perceived Ukraine being turned into an American/Western outpost for anti-Russian hostility. So, is this like fortification of a U.S./NATO presence in Ukraine consistent with like the redress of the Russian grievances? I don't know.
So, in terms of like what the negotiations will look like, I think people are taking it a little bit too for granted that these conditions would be acceptable to the Russian side, notwithstanding the fact that I think is significant that they've resumed diplomatic contacts, but they haven't even addressed the essence of the conflict yet, as far as I know.
Lee Fang: I mean, from what you're saying, it sounds a lot like Trump is attempting to give the Russians no security guarantee for Ukraine, while in effect doing everything he can to provide a security guarantee, whether that's a backstop for European forces or so many European or American personnel and business ties in the region, that it becomes effectively, a quasi-American state that if it is attacked, we'd have to respond.
Michael Tracey: And another question is: it's also kind of just taken for granted that Russia would desire an immediate cease-fire or a freeze along the current lines. In 2022, Putin declared that four oblasts are eternal parts of the Russian Federation and Russia still does not control the entirety of those oblasts. So, would he be willing to freeze and basically concede that Russia does not control the territories that were declared to be eternal parts of the Russian Federation?
Again, I'm just not – is it possible that they could make a concession on that?
Lee Fang: Well, there's going to have to be some swapping of territory if it happens today, because there's still Ukrainian forces in Kursk, although they're having some severe losses right now. I mean, there's going to be some swapping, and you could imagine that would be part of the switch.
Michael Tracey: Well, apparently that was the logic behind the Kursk incursion, although – that's another good example: Russia now seems to finally have neutered the Kursk incursion, they cut off the supply lines or so. There was like a turning point in Russia trying to counteract the Kursk incursion. They're still generally making incremental gains in the main front line in places like Donetsk.
It's like, what incentive do they have now to just agree to a full…? Their economy is not collapsing. It doesn't seem like there's a crisis that they have to resolve at the moment.
So, are they just going to capitulate to Trump? I mean, I don't know if you saw it today, but he did threaten – he announced he's going to be threatening additional sanctions on Russia.
Lee Fang: Yeah, it seems like it's pretty clear only to negotiate because that's really the only olive branch, that's the only incentive for Russians to come to the table because if we just have the status quo, they're eventually going to win this as a military conflict. But if there's the kind of incentive to lift sanctions, I mean, that would probably be good for the global economy, good for Europe's economy and has a downwind effect on the U.S. given oil prices.
Michael Tracey: It would be ironic though, because there's a school of thought in Russia where they actually welcome – this is like the Dugin kind of philosophy, right? Glenn interviewed him recently, and I've spoken to him as well. (I don't think he's quite as brilliant as maybe Glenn does, but anyway.)
There's this whole theory now that it's a good thing that these sanctions have been levied against Russia because now Russia can purify itself. It can free itself of all of these external influences that are always looking to subjugate Russia. So, it's good that it's cut off from the world financial system. It's like an occasion, some kind of cultural regeneration, within Russia, also forcing them to revitalize domestic industry. You know, there’s China. So, like why would they just give up on all that? Yeah, there's actually, after all this fanfare over the past three years about how it was actually a good thing.
Lee Fang: The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article, I think from last year, about a kind of small train of thought in Iran that's similar, because in response to all of these sanctions, there's now a domestic refrigerator and microwave manufacturing industry that just didn't exist before, because they have no other way to obtain these kind of basic appliances, and some of these small, burgeoning domestic Iranian industries want to keep the sanctions, because it's actually to their benefit for jobs and for local commerce.
This conversation is pretty long, but I enjoyed talking to you. Thanks for taking the time.
Michael Tracey: You said we might go for 10, 15 minutes.
Lee Fang: Yeah, I think this was about 10, maybe 11 minutes. Oh, but yeah, thanks for joining Michael. Good to see you.
Michael Tracey: All right, yes, signing off from the Belgium Bureau.
Lee Fang: All right, take care.
