I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
If any relationship is going to work, you need to understand what it is that motivates the other.
And it's not always just naked self-interest.
I mean,
I think too many around President Trump and I think the president himself seem to think that everyone is motivated by economic gain.
It's all a business deal.
And that really doesn't get at what motivates people in many cases.
Throughout his second term, Donald Trump has railed against the United States' closest allies.
He has imposed tariffs, threatened up end security commitments,
and openly challenged the borders of Canada, Panama, and Greenland.
Historians often look to the past for insight about the present and future.
But although alliances have collapsed for many reasons over past centuries,
Margaret McMillan argued in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs that Trump's current behavior towards allies has little precedence.
His approach, she writes, does not suggest a clever Machiavellian policy to enhance American power.
Rather, it shows the United States acting against its own interests in bewildering fashion,
undermining one of the key sources of that power.
A renowned historian and a professor at Oxford,
McMillan is one of the greatest chroniclers of the Grand Alliances of the 20th century and the World Wars they fought.
She joined Etter at Large Shewakin on August 18th to discuss the normalization of conquest and the war on Ukraine,
how U.S.