Is Trump More Rational Than We Think?

 By Sheerpost - Robert Scheer - May 30, 2025  

Journalist and writer Kit Klarenberg joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to discuss his latest article for MintPress News, where he talks about Donald Trump’s shift away from Israel and the cynicism behind these policy decisions.

Journalist and writer Kit Klarenberg joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to discuss his latest article for MintPress News, where he talks about Donald Trump’s shift away from Israel and the cynicism behind these policy decisions. Scheer and Klarenberg examine the shifting world order from a US-dominated unipolar globe to a multipolar one including the likes of China, Russia, India and the rest of the BRICS alliance.

The two posit that Trump’s shift away from Israel following his Gulf state visits is an indication that the administration recognizes this global order shift and would rather cooperate with the other major world powers rather than fight for supremacy.  

Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.

Robert Scheer

Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence and the intelligence comes from my guest, in this case, a journalist that I follow very closely, Kit Klarenberg. In fact, there’s an article by him on how the Russians got the edge there in the war with Ukraine, with the use of the drones and so forth that we have on ScheerPost. But the article that really got me, and he writes for everyone, what is your title anyway? The UK Greyzone editor and he writes for MintPress where he had a really terrific article, kind of overview a few weeks ago. 

And I want to talk to him because he has a complex view of what’s going on in the world. And I mean that in the most flattering sense, particularly at a time when Trump derangement syndrome as some have called it prevents us from thinking in a serious way about contradictions, what Leonard Cohen called the crack in everything that lets the light through. 

And there are some real contradictions with Trump or confusing aspects of him. His immigration policy is extreme and dreadful. As one can imagine, he will say odd things and appear odd and all that. On the other hand, in terms of foreign policy, I don’t know how to make sense of it, frankly. 

The things that Kit has been writing about, this time I want to really stress more Israel and what’s happening with Trump’s relation with Netanyahu, and that was a very good article he did for MintPress and all that. I want to introduce some complexity. How do we appraise, how do you appraise Trump? What are the unknowns? What are the confusing aspects? So take it away.

Kit Klarenberg

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think in a kind of interesting irony, when Trump was elected as the president who was going to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, and he was also elected as Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal preference, president who was going to give Israel a blank check to finish the job of totally genociding the Palestinians to make way for Gaza-Lago and he was going to get given a blank check to strike Tel Aviv’s regional adversaries, including Iran. 

But the opposite seems to have happened since he’s taken office. The Ukraine war is kind of limping on with limited US support compared to what came before under Biden, but it’s still there, even if Trump is selling weapons to Europe, which are then given to Ukraine rather than just giving them in bulk to Kiev as happened under Biden. 

But on Israel, he seems to have taken a very, very, very different line to what was widely expected. To the extent that it points to a cleavage between the US and Israel that I have not witnessed in my lifetime. Now, I’m someone who’s been campaigning, marching, demonstrating, handing out leaflets and writing about Israel since I was a teenager.

So this is certainly on the current state of play on that front is certainly unprecedented from my experience. Now I’m under no illusions that ultimately Israel is completely dependent on US financial and military succor to exist and that can be rescinded with the stroke of a pen or in the blink of an eye.

And that hasn’t happened. However, what has happened is that there has been a decisive rhetorical shift from his administration since taking office. There has been a substantive shift in how the Trump administration has approached the government of Iran. When they were first, before they even took office, Trump and his cabinet picks like Mike Waltz and Marco Rubio were talking a big game about bankrupting the Islamic Republic via maximum pressure, doling out worse punishment than they did in Trump’s first term. 

And actually they seem to be taking a constructive, dovish approach to negotiations with Iran. Trump has ruled out direct military action against Iran. He said, we just want a deal. We want to get this wrapped up. We want negotiations over. And that’s how we’re going to do this. Israel has been frozen out of those talks. 

There was also, in early May, Trump rather abruptly announced the end of renewed hostilities against Ansar Allah, which is the resistance group that runs Yemen. In the middle of March, the Trump administration renewed hostilities against Yemen after Biden waged a nine-month-long war to no avail against them called Operation Prosperity Guardian from late 2023 to the summer of 2024.

Trump tried this again, seems to have quickly lost interest and given up on it and then signed a peace deal with Ansar Allah, which Israel was again completely cut out of. Israeli officials allegedly only learned about this from TV. Now, since then, Trump and his team have conducted their first official tour of West Asia. They have not visited Tel Aviv. They have completely frozen out the Israelis and they are focused on the Gulf states. 

Now, this is quite, from my perspective, very substantive. And of course, you know, Trump isn’t doing this out of a particular, I would say, personal affinity for the Palestinians, let alone the Gulf states, or a liking for a preference for peace for peace sake. But I think that his administration does understand that there are major geopolitical shifts which are going nowhere, which includes the emergence of the multipolar world and the inexorable rise of China. 

So, you know, that’s a key factor in American decision making. It is often forgotten that, I believe it was in May 2024, it might have, I might be wrong on that, it might have been earlier, that China brokered a peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia that caught a lot of people, including people I know in West Asia itself, off guard. 

They did so without any reference to the Americans. It ended eight years of US sponsored and encouraged conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims throughout the Middle East, which was the root cause of so many different conflicts in the region, including the Syrian civil war and the war of Yemen, which raged for eight years. 

But China brokered a deal which caught the US by such surprise that then CIA Chief Bill Burns flew to Riyadh to ask what the hell was going on and why didn’t you consult us about this? So I think that Trump understands that, well, in order to maintain relations with the other countries in West Asia, he has to at least give the illusion that he’s not pursuing an Israel first policy as many people predicted he would when he was re-elected president. 

But the fact of the matter is, is that the multipolar world and China’s inexorable rise as a military, economic, and political superpower with enormous respect for Beijing and ever-growing respect for Beijing throughout the Arab and Muslim world, that steps have to be taken to prevent China completely taking over America’s patch, so to speak. 

Now, it is an age-old story, in fact, the recognition of senior U.S. officials that Israel is a major liability. If you go back 15 years, you can find that General David Petraeus, was a senior Pentagon official who oversaw the rather bloody troop surge in Iraq under Obama and then headed the CIA until he quit due to having an affair and corrupt activities around that…

Robert Scheer

Well, he turned over, he let the woman who was having an affair with see the presidential briefing books that were supposed to be top secret. So yeah. But if I could just interrupt you for a second, because what you’re saying as in your writing, and why I like it so much, I like your journalism so much, is you’re willing to discuss Trump in what I would consider more serious and complex terms.

For most people now, that becomes an apology for Trump. You know, don’t you understand fascism is here and this is an attempt to destroy everything in the world. Clearly, that’s not the way a lot of other people in the world, you know, whether they’re in Saudi Arabia, whether they’re in Russia, whether they’re in China or India or so forth, see it. 

And I want to advance a notion here that maybe Trump, for all the talk about making America great, really accepts the idea of the BRICS alliance that it has to be recognized as a multipolar world, which means that China has to get along with India and Russia has to cooperate with Saudi Arabia. And ideology and nationalism really have to take a backseat to this reality check. 

And I think that includes Trump’s supranationalism of America first. And I know it will be judged naive on my part, but I actually ended up interviewing Nixon at the end of his life and I followed his opening to China. I’d actually gone to China just before Nixon did when the Cultural Revolution was still on. And the shock of which Nixon actually had announced in an article in Foreign Affairs before he ever met Kissinger, before he became president, that it was time for a more realistic view of China that you couldn’t ignore it and so forth. 

And, you know, let me go out on a limb here that there’s a method to Trump’s madness and that what he really wants is not the idea of American hegemony over the world, which would be an absurd proposition. He knows that and sort of leading business people in the world, but rather to get America a significant piece of the action and influence despite whatever gaps we have a great country, great resources, still basically underpopulated. And what he wants is a deal that allows him to, if we take Confucius as an inspiration, the advice to an emperor, not to be alienated from your own people. 

That good jobs and better trade arrangements and so forth has to come. Okay, I don’t know if you see it that way, but this is what sort of I got out of your, I don’t know, the last six or seven articles of yours that I’ve read. Is that pushing it too far?

Kit Klarenberg

No, not at all. I mean, I think that you’ve got to bear in mind that Marco Rubio not long after Trump took office gave quite an extraordinary speech in which he stated that the unipolar US led world is over. It is never coming back. It was a historical aberration, a situation in which the US had completely unrivaled military and economic power. And that’s true. 

And I think that, I mean, it’s certainly been a theme of my writing recently, but European powers are really struggling to wrap their heads around this because for decades, particularly over the past three, I would say, have due to a mixture of kind of US pressure and bullying, but also due to their own submission, they have facilitated and supported the unipolar world.

They have moved in lockstep with some exceptions with whatever it is the US is doing. They have supported one way or another what the US is doing. Europe lacks economic and political and military autonomy. It is drowning under the weight of US soldiers. And there was an expectation that the US would, well, we can leave our industrial bases and militaries to rot because one day the American cavalry is going to come and to the rescue if we’re ever in trouble. 

That was literally the title of a recent political article stating the US cavalry isn’t coming. And it talked about how all of Europe’s infrastructure had been built around the idea that if they were attacked by Russia, say from the east, that the Americans would come sailing over and flying over the ocean from the west and then they would go straight to the front line. 

And you know, now they are seriously considering the prospect of that not happening. I don’t think that was ever likely. But there was a period, which is now a long time ago when the US was completely unchallenged in any major sphere of its international operations. That’s no longer the case.

And you know, simply getting to grips with that might account for some of Trump’s behavior. On, as I say, on Ukraine, he has been very inconsistent and seems to change his mind on an hourly basis about whether he wants to keep this going, whether he wants to force a peace, whether he’s washing his hands of Zelensky, et cetera. 

So it’s difficult to get a handle on that. But I think that that could well in itself reflect the fact that we live in quite a volatile and uncertain world where the past is no guide to the present let alone the future, you know, like the effort to foment proxy war against Russia. This is something that the British and the Americans have been wishing and willing and planning for for well over a decade and they thought I’m sure that by imposing all these sanctions on Russia and giving Ukraine all of this weaponry that they could actually defeat the Russians. 

I’m sure that the more kind of lunatic fringes of the Imperial brain trust like actually believe this and they thought it was plausible. And, you know, they’ve hit a brick wall there. Russia’s not backing down. They’re not retreating. They’re advancing every day. And we’re getting into a situation where the West, let alone Ukraine, hold no cards or bargaining position and peace terms will be dictated by Russia, probably after a decisive battlefield defeat, it seems like they’re gearing up for a massive summer offensive. 

So we’ll see what happens with that. But yeah, I mean, as I say, we live in a highly uncertain world where a lot that, say, even three years ago seemed certain and concrete, is up in the air we have seen across Europe. There is a rising tide of anti-war sentiment. There have been elections of anti-war kind of not even necessarily pro-Russian, but pro-sovereignty governments in Central and Eastern Europe. 

You know, this is a part of the world where throughout the 90s and the 2000s the US spent an incalculable amount of time and energy and money trying to turn every single government into a pro-US one. Extensive civil society penetration, media operations, the setting up of NGOs, all sorts of other infiltration and propaganda projects in order to get countries behind the NATO and EU program, when in many cases they were not so enthusiastic about that.

And we’re seeing, as I say, a resurgence of anti-EU, anti-NATO sentiment across Europe, which is not to say that the power of the EU and NATO and the US is naught. We saw at the end of last year in Romania, there was a kind of upstart anti-establishment outsider called Călin Georgescu, who was en route to becoming Romanian president. 

Authorities simply overturned the election, held a new one, and banned Călin Georgescu from standing in order to ensure that he didn’t win. Romania is in a very important geopolitical chess piece, which is next to Ukraine. It faces the Black Sea. At present, the EU and NATO is not going to allow an anti-war, anti-sanctions, pro-sovereignty candidate to emerge victorious there, but I do think this is more kind of death throes rather than a reassertion of power.

Robert Scheer

Yeah, what I’m trying to do though is Trump is obviously an awkward, odd, scary figure to be trying to see some rational outcome from this. But if I think again of the Nixon model, now people look back at Nixon and he seems quite sane and so forth. But at the time, mostly people I knew or the newspapers I read thought that Nixon was not just playing the madman, he was the madman. 

And, you know, and the fact is he saw the limits of American power. You have to give him a lot of credit for that. And this is a theme, it’s very odd because Trump is, of course, the great cheerleader of Make America great. We can do anything. But underneath it all, there seems to be an acceptance that no, you can’t just do what you want. 

You’ve got to go to Saudi Arabia and make nice to them. Because what screwed up the whole attempt of the Biden administration to isolate Russia is that Saudi Arabia wouldn’t open the taps to the oil. And so Russia had the means to continue their economy and then keep whatever you think of what they’re doing in Ukraine. They were able to keep their own population pacified, certainly as consumers.

So what I’m trying to get again at the method to the madness, and it seems to me Israel is a very good case in point that yes, emotionally in the United States and to get elected, you back whoever’s running Israel, even if it’s a figure who now is being denounced by some very important Israelis, you know, former prime minister, the leader of what remains of the Labor Party and so forth. It’s an embarrassment.

We know in France and Germany and so forth and England, serious questions are being raised. The sort of thing that can get you fired from a teaching job in the United States are actually being said by many people around the world that Israel and how Netanyahu has really gone beyond anybody’s red line. 

And here is Trump. And while, you know, yes, there was, you know, the Netanyahu people and the right wingers and it’s hard to talk about more right, but they are around them, they thought this was going to be their time. And clearly in his opening to Saudi Arabia, to the Emirates and to, you know, talking about all the great trade deals and so forth, this is a huge shift because what they have made clear is they’re not going to sacrifice the Palestinians. 

They’ve never really made any great effort to help the Palestinians. But at this point in history, they’re not going down that road. And as you mentioned, even now the Sunni-Shiite split has somehow been healed. And that goes even, you know, both India and China. India, for instance, was one of the main reasons Putin could survive. They continued to buy their oil from India. And so what we’re seeing is a world in which the ideological divides, the religious divides have disappeared as operative forces. 

I mean everybody forgets that Putin is the anti-communist in Russia. He’s the guy that defeated the remnants of the Communist Party. Yet China is a communist country. Yet China only now has opened up railroad freight since the pandemic, took all this time with Vietnam and is actually getting close to a fellow communist country that it has been at odds with. 

Everybody forgets when we had our ignominious defeat, US had in Vietnam. The result was not that Vietnam or China attacked the United States, that Vietnam and China went to war over border issues as they now have tension over. So I guess what I’m trying to get at is the big picture here that most of the language we have used, the perspective we’ve used of, again, ideology. After all, China now, just today, Chinese, I was reading in the South China Morning Post, they’re going to ensure business even more that they won’t be threatened by local municipalities, that they will be secure and so forth. Because the way to deal now with their situation is to have a secure environment for private business. 

So I guess I’m asking you for the big picture here. And so when I read Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy magazine, there seems to be very little recognition of that. As a case in point, let me ask you specifically, what is the economic significance of your native country of England? Other than that, we’ve got a financial system that somehow gets to play big games. I mean, they can’t make an electric car. They can’t do anything. They can’t make the TV screens.

I don’t want to put down the skills, but the fact of the matter is when you talk about Western Europe, Germany is successful only to the degree that they can get along with China and the French. They have a big delegation going in July to China to make sure that things don’t get broken. Let me just ask you, isn’t the real issue here is this Western centric world built around American exceptionalism, it’s just over. You know? Am I naive?

Kit Klarenberg

No, I mean, I don’t think you are. again, the past is no guide to the present or future. So it is uncertain how the US empire will recede. You know, the British empire collapsed because they pretended, they continued maintaining fantasies of being a global independent power when they lack the wealth or the muscle to do it. 

And they were rather embarrassingly turned back in the Suez Canal upon US orders in 1956. It’s difficult to envisage something like that happening with the US, but I mean, it is certainly the case that I do think that Trump represents a significant break with who he replaced and given all of the recent revelations about how Biden was always mentally a mess and was effectively just reading things off scripts and cue cards even in private meetings book. 

It’s such was his cognitive decline, which raises very obvious questions about who was actually in charge and who was making decisions. You know, I do think that yes that he is taking a very different approach to what came before now to give you an example and I mentioned this in my piece what I thought was extremely significant and this has been rather lost in perhaps due to Trump derangement syndrome. 

When Trump flew to Saudi Arabia and signed all of these record breaking deals, on May 13th, he gave this remarkable speech in Riyadh where he effectively said that he understood that the present context, which is to say the Gaza genocide, meant that Saudi Arabia’s recognition of Israel as the avowed center of the Arab and Muslim world was off the cards. 

And it wasn’t reasonable or realistic to expect them to recognize Israel anytime soon. Now, successive US administrations have made that an absolute centerpiece of their West Asia policy to the extent that the Biden administration was, right up until it left office, openly threatening Riyadh that it would end its defense guarantees to Saudi Arabia, which is, I mean, this is the kind of the very foundation of the US empire was an agreement between Roosevelt and the then King of Saudi Arabia that the US would have exclusive access to Saudi Arabian oil. And then you have the creation of Aramco, the Saudi state oil company in the early 1940s.

Now, Trump effectively backtracking on recognition and saying to Saudi Arabia, well, you know, you’ll do it in your own time without any inducements or even dangled implied threats. I mean, that’s a huge shift. And I mean, you know, I mentioned Petraeus earlier, but, I mean, he, 15 years ago, he was talking about how the US-Israeli relationship is deeply problematic for the US regionally and internationally, and it’s only getting worse. 

So it has been well understood for a long time, I think, that a shift away from lockstep support for whatever Tel Aviv is doing, its endless wars against its neighbors in the name of security, its ethnic cleansing of Palestinian lands, its seizure of territory from neighboring countries, there is an understanding that this can’t continue if the US is to maintain any global soft power whatsoever. 

I mean, Israel is a global pariah. If you look at polls throughout the world, overwhelmingly people hold unfavorable opinions of Israel and that those figures are growing all the time as their attacks on the Palestinians intensify. So, you know, the shift might not actually be as abrupt. It’s just taken a few years or well, in this case, more than a decade for US political leaders to get to grips with what is clear to the national security community, the intelligence community. 

I also, another thing I’ve written, this is something else that I wrote about from MintPress, is I think that the composition of Trump’s cabinet is very interesting. It’s like, again, he appointed Mike Huckabee, who is this evangelical, far right, ultra conservative, pro-Israeli lawmaker who openly stated that he would be referring to Israel as a promised land and he stated that Jews have a God-given right to plunder Palestinian territory. 

When Israel expressed anger and outrage that they hadn’t been consulted about the US’s deal with Ansar Allah over the Red Sea blockade, Huckabee announced publicly, well, we don’t need Israel’s permission to cut any deal, which was, I mean, very, very stern words to be uttered publicly by any politician, let alone Mike Huckabee. 

So someone who’s always interested in me is Tulsi Gabbard. Now Tulsi has shifted away from her erstwhile left-wing positions on pretty much every issue and she’s now a Republican rather than an independent Democrat as she was previously. She of course tried to get the, she ran in 2019 for the Democratic nomination. 

But yeah, she became director of national intelligence. Now she is someone with a history of, intense skepticism about the claims of intelligence services. So for instance, she publicly at the time has since reiterated doubt that the Assad government was responsible for chemical attacks in Syria, which we know due to leaks were staged by the opposition with the help of British intelligence. And so with her in that position, which is a highly influential position, which effectively oversees the work of the CIA and the NSA and the FBI and the DHS and the rest of America’s alphabet super intelligence agencies, she was clearly not someone who was going to be easily manipulated or bounced into signing off on whatever. 

And this view was greatly reinforced from my perspective that a large number of British, former British military and intelligence high rankers, including Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6 who was instrumental in generating the black propaganda used to lay the foundations for war in Iraq. 

People like him and other pro-regime change Atlanticist voices in Britain raised very grave concerns about her appointment to this post, which to my mind, I saw as a really positive thing. It’s like if these people are concerned about her getting this role, then that is kind of an indication that it’s a good thing because in many cases, these are individuals who, yes, as I say, were responsible for bouncing the US or assisting the US in some of its worst foreign policy blunders in history. 

It’s not just Iraq. It’s Syria, Libya, another total disaster. Sorry, go ahead.

Robert Scheer

We’re going to run out of time here. mean, because I always promise myself we don’t go on endlessly, but I could. And I’d like to talk to you again in the future as these things go. But I want to throw one final idea here. And maybe to make sense of Trump or to try to understand, maybe he actually believes in some kind of notion of American capitalism that can succeed, can actually concede in a competitive landscape without the overwhelming military presence. 

Because after all, coming out of World War II, we had the only economy that came out of the war, super strong, stronger, everyone else was shattered. And we went through an illusory period that we somehow had the best engineers, the hardest workers.

And we do have a great piece of real estate, a lot of resources and so forth. But the real challenge in the world is, whether you’re a small nation or a big nation, is there a place for your people? OK, what can you do? And the whole hysteria about China is they’re stealing everything. They said that about Japan before. They don’t really know how to make cars. They’re stealing everything. The fact of the matter is, engineers in India or marketeers or anything, and China and everywhere. And by the way, in Israel, they have very good scientists they can do. 

If you had a world in which these countries all could use their advantage of their skill set, their people, and also care a lot about their own market, one of the good things about Trump’s challenge to China is the Chinese are finally seeing their own market as something that has to be catered to. 

You know, people have to have more consumer power. They have to pay people more. Maybe they’ll even let them organize into real unions and so forth, you know, because this is your market. Now, if you can’t sell your EVs in Europe as easily or you put high tariffs, well, we got a big market here in China to do and we have the network, electrical network, and people could, you know, and we can turn robotics to our advantage, so forth.

Now, so I, this will really sound Pollyannaish and so forth, but I’m wondering whether what we really have is a test of whether capitalism can function in a modern sense without imperialism. That clearly, and you’re getting this from all over the world, it just happened with China and Xi’s visit to Indonesia, not Xi, but the Prime Minister where the new leader of Indonesia was talking about welcoming China as an anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist force. 

And if the dynamic going forward is that we are actually going to let countries compete economically without the rigged game of the market or the international organizations and so forth. And you’re seeing that with Brazil and China. You’re seeing that everywhere. 

That maybe this is something that Trump and some of the key people, particularly the business people around him, even Elon Musk, understand. After all, Musk makes more than half of his Teslas in China. And he knows all about that market. He knows they’re just not stealing stuff that they’re damn good at what they do. Might that not be the bright spot in this whole thing?

I’m not someone who has spent much of my life celebrating capitalism. But if you take it seriously as a competitive economic system with some kind of consumer input and so forth, it’s a hell of a lot better than an American hegemony and trying to impose an imperial structure on the world. Might not that be the real contest now?

Kit Klarenberg

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that, I mean, you yourself mentioned it. I mean, this was a point I myself made at the very start of Trump’s presidency. But bear in mind is that, you know, the US for all of its many faults, it still has an enormous amount of natural resources. It has an enormous amount of land, which is, you know, uninhabited, fertile. 

It also has an entire quote unquote backyard to knock into line if it wishes. It can retract from the world stage as it were without too much damage. It has managed to effectively be the dominant power in Europe without being a European country ever since the end of World War II. 

In some ways it doesn’t need to compete with China. And in many ways I don’t think that actually it could or would seek to compete because what China is doing all over the global south is yes, building infrastructure and helping countries in that region make their own goods rather than just be sites for resource extraction and markets for goods made elsewhere, whether that’s in the US or Europe. 

So I can’t really see the US ever seriously competing without all or wanting to. Equally though, I think that in terms of winning hearts and minds, that particular objective, it may well be over from the US perspective because it’s a lot of effort for potentially not much gain. 

I mentioned the enormous amounts of energy and time and money invested into trying to turn countries all over Europe, let alone in Africa and Asia, into pro-Western colonies effectively with pro-US government. I mean, A, that’s a very difficult thing to build and maintain and it’s very expensive and time consuming and energy draining.

But also, I mean, you know, it’s a bit much of a muchness. I mean, does it really matter if, like Slovakia, which has a population of about three million people and is a state in Central Europe, which, you know, is not particularly on anyone’s radar as a major power in any regard. Does it really matter if they have a pro-U.S. government or not?

Like, is it really worth losing sleep and, yes, pumping vast resources into ensuring that this tiny speck of a country, which could fit inside America probably more than 50 times, has a doggedly pro-US administration in place? The answer is no, it isn’t.

And I also think that what the Chinese with the Russian assistance are trying to do is they’re not trying to supplant American power. They are creating a kind of parallel system where it is quite possible for countries to be signed up to both agendas without much in the way of conflict. So to give you an example from my neck of the woods, in my adopted home of Serbia, for instance, just to finish the point, the government of Serbia is pro-Western, but it has extensive economic relationships with the Chinese. These two things can peacefully coexist, as hard as that is to believe.

Robert Scheer

Look, you know, I’m just going to end this, but it’s really good to talk to you. But I happened to be in Indonesia, you know, at the time, there was just a great killing of Chinese nationals and racism and so forth. And to realize now that Indonesia’s main trading partner is with China, that they have a common interest, that they’re proclaiming common interest. One’s a Muslim country, one’s a country that does not have one of the religions that are supposed to divide the whole world, China. 

And somehow, I don’t want to have a kumbaya moment here, but sort of the ideal of the UN was really, you know, people going their own way, respecting their own tradition, their own history, and so forth. And that got smothered with a Cold War that was totally unnecessary, as I think most people probably agree now, maybe not, but certainly artificially created the tensions of the Cold War. 

There was never an international communist movement. was always nationalism in different cultures and different religions. And actually, they’re getting along better now in this post-Cold War period, have all kinds of, know, this BRICS is a perfect example of these people can get together on reasonable codes of behavior and pursue their own fantasies and dreams and needs or what have you. 

So I know it’s hard now to have a positive view. But what I sort of got out of your reporting, and I want to end this, I’m not asking for a comment now. We’ve covered a lot. But what I like about your journalism is I find the complexity of it and the range of it liberating because the other view depends upon caricatures, depends upon simplicity. There’s good guys, bad guys. There’s, you know, our way or madness or so forth. 

And I don’t think this is necessarily the most troubling times. It may also be the most promising because, again, contradictions reveal the failure of things. You know, maybe it’s time we woke up to the limits of an American exceptionalism. Maybe it’s time that people in China realize that communism doesn’t have all the answers or certainly Maoist. And you’ve got to get along with other systems. 

Maybe it would be great if Israel said, hey, we have a lot of scientists here. We know how to do a lot of stuff. Instead of developing stuff to spy on people or developing a center of one of the great arms exploiting industries, maybe we can also make good stuff and get along. So it’s a really weird thing. But this may be a time for capitalism to shine, not imperialism, but actually good old fair, what the claims were for capitalism. 

Anyway, that’s my, I’m not predicting that. I know madness is probably the more likely path, but all right, I’ll give you the last minute or two to wrap this up and then I’ll say goodbye.

Kit Klarenberg

Well, thank you very much for your kind words. Yes, I try not to take sides in my journalism. I just try and call it as I see it. And I do think that for a very long time, we have been on, at least on the precipice of very interesting changes in the global order, which are kind of unavoidable. 

I think this began in February 2022 with the war in Ukraine and slowly but surely the message that we’re living in a different world, a very different world and the old world isn’t coming back, is starting to filter through to people in positions of power. It’s taking its sweet time because hubris and delusion springs eternal in corridors of power. But yes, the promise of a different world structure and a better one and a fairer one, which with the capacity for dialogue and mutual benefit and collaboration, I think is in the offing. 

And I think the next few months, let alone years are going to be very interesting. Even though it’s a Chinese curse to say, may you live in interesting times, I actually think that this could be the dawn of something different and better. But again, I’m not one to make predictions. But thank you so much for having me on my friend and again for your extremely kind words.

Robert Scheer

Yeah, and before I let you go, I want to thank Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, for demanding that I interview you in response to those articles. I want to thank Diego Ramos for writing the intro and being the managing editor of ScheerPost, putting all these things up. Max Jones, who does the video. And I want to thank the JKW Foundation in the memory of a very independent writer, terrific Jean Stein, for giving us some support and Integrity Media and Len Goodman in Chicago for providing support for being able to do this. See you in the next show. And thank you. I’d like to keep in touch as we go forward and as these things evolve and see if we called it right this time.

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Robert Scheer

Robert Scheer, publisher of ScheerPost and award-winning journalist and author of a dozen books, has a reputation for strong social and political writing over his nearly 60 years as a journalist. His award-winning journalism has appeared in publications nationwide—he was Vietnam correspondent and editor of Ramparts magazine, national correspondent and columnist for the Los Angeles Times—and his in-depth interviews with Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev and others made headlines. He co-hosted KCRW’s political program Left, Right and Center and now hosts Scheer Intelligence, an independent ScheerPost podcast with people who discuss the day’s most important issues.