Martin Wolf of FT and Paul Krugman - America and the World

(Substack article and video posted by P. Krugman)

I wasn’t able to do a fresh interview this week, so here’s a link to a talk I had with Martin Wolf for the FT. Transcript below.

TRANSCRIPT

Wolf: Paul, good to see you and talk to you again.

Krugman Good to see you, too, Martin.

Wolf So according to a new National Security Strategy document released by the White House last week, I appear to be living on a continent that faces civilisational erasure. I must say, it doesn’t feel like that.

Krugman Yeah, the same document says that we’re going to help Europe correct its current trajectory by helping, among other things, patriotic parties, which I think basically means parties like Germany’s AfD.

Wolf So Paul, there really is only one place to start, and that’s with America’s new National Security Strategy. So let’s go over its main points and what you make of them. Let’s start with something pretty fundamental.Does the absence of a liberal values mission in the NSS indicate the end of US exceptionalism, or at least US moral endeavours in the world, as a foreign policy principle? Is this all gone?

Krugman Oh, it’s more than gone. I mean, this document goes beyond dropping the historic US commitment to liberal values, democracy, whatever you want to think of as being the distinctive, exceptional American contribution to the world to sort of actively opposing it. I mean, quite a lot of the document is meandering boilerplate.

Some of it reads as if it was translated from the North Korean, with effusive praise for Dear Leader. But it is crystal clear on Europe, which it basically says, Europe better stop adhering to these liberal values, better stop admitting people from other places, or else.

Wolf So John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s famous ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ at the Berlin Wall is now absolutely ancient history?

Krugman Oh, very much, and even Ronald Reagan, not one of my favourite presidents. But Reagan said: ‘We are a shining city upon a hill.’ And that’s definitely not the message that we’re getting from this document.

continued
https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/america-and-the-world