What Trump and the American Right See in Foreign Autocrats

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• 00:00

  I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.

• 00:05

  We have an election which actually somewhat unusually for US history has pretty clear distinctions about how the US is supposed to behave in the world and what US foreign policy ought to be,

• 00:19

  and I think people care about that.

• 00:23

  When Donald Trump praises foreign autocrats from Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un,

• 00:28

  to Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, the typical reaction is shock and dismay.

• 00:34

  And that is just one of the unsettling features of American civic life today that has a more prominent place in our history than most observers would like to think.

• 00:42

  But in fact, Beverly Gage points out in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs,

• 00:46

  such admiration is not uncommon in American politics.

• 00:49

  Gage, a historian at Yale, spoke with my colleague, Kanishk Therur,

• 00:53

  about the historical parallels that help us understand today's fraught politics as well as what sets this moment apart.

• 01:06

  Beverly Gage, it's a pleasure to talk to you.

• 01:09

  Thanks for having me here.

• 01:10

  We're speaking just a few weeks before what promises to be a very momentous election day here in the United States.

• 01:18

  There's this supposed truism that US presidential elections are never about foreign policy.

• 01:25

  That's not entirely true.

• 01:26

  I think there are many cases in which understandings of America's role in the world have influenced the outcomes of elections.

• 01:33

  We can think of Eisenhower in 1952 or Nixon in 68,

• 01:37

  Reagan in 1980, maybe even Obama in 2008 and so on.

• 01:41

  This election is taking place at what seems like an incredibly fraught moment in geopolitics with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East,

• 01:50

  the rising competition with China.

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