Three experts on how to understand the USA

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week what does the world get wrong about America?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, CEO Editor, Semafor: It's a remarkable, maybe unique combination of fragility and resilience.

Robin Pomeroy: At the Annual Meeting in Davos, everyone was talking about where the US - and the world - was headed in 2025. We asked three experts there how we might better this 20th and 21st century superpower..

David Rubenstein, co-chairman, The Carlyle Group: Nothing continues forever. And if something can't keep going on, eventually it won't. But right now, the United States seems to be in a fairly dominant position, certainly in the Western world.

Robin Pomeroy: When Donald Trump says Make America Great Again, what does he mean, and what should we understand by it?

Walter Mead, Professor of Strategy and Statecraft, University of Florida, Fellow, Hudson Institute, columnist, Wall Street Journal: The qualities that make America great, the qualities that made it the lead industrial leader in all of these technologies that enabled American society to leave sort of feudalism and other things behind. Their nostalgia is also future-centred.

Robin Pomeroy: And what should we make of the comeback president who appears politically stronger than ever before?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: The new president is feeling very emboldened. I think he's feeling quite unleashed and certainly not bound by previous conventions that have played a big part in the country's resilience.

Robin Pomeroy: Follow Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts, or visit wef.ch/podcasts.

I’m Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum, and with this look at what we misunderstand about America…

Walter Mead: American policy is like a kaleidoscope, you know, You keep turning it and new patterns appear.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos

The Annual Meeting in Davos this year coincided with the inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term, and many of the conversations there were about what the world should expect from a newly emboldened Trump 2.0.

In the weeks since Davos, we have had a flavour of that, but, as I record this, there are still huge uncertainties about what of the huge number of policies Trump has announced - many of them quite radical - will really come to pass, and what impact they will have on the world.

In a bid to better understand America in 2025, we spoke to three experts in Davos, and they had plenty of enlightening things to say to help those of us on the outside to see the whats, whys and hows of Trump’s US.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson is a British journalist who has spent decades covering the US, as a correspondent and news editor for the Financial Times, and now as ‘CEO Editor’ for the news platform Semafor. I asked him what he has learned about the US that most of us outside that country perhaps don’t realise.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: I think the way I put it is it's a remarkable, maybe unique combination of fragility and resilience.

I think when you look at the divisions in the country now, you have to think there is something quite fragile about the American project and about the institutions of government. They've been very heavily tested in recent years, and there's very little confidence in them, increasingly among the population. It's a very, very split population.

When I first moved to America 25 years ago, it felt like it was a country that was unified by a story. It was held together by the founding ideals in a quite unique way.

But at the same time, in the time I've lived in the United States, I've lived through 9/11, I've lived through the global financial crisis, I've lived through the Covid pandemic, lived through those divisions that polarization has highlighted. And every time you come across one of those, you think, is this it? You know, can America come back from this? And America has an extraordinary record of coming back from that.

What I would say is I think we're in for a new test of those fragilities. I think the new president is feeling very emboldened. I think he's feeling quite unleashed and certainly not bound by previous conventions that have played a big part in the country's resilience.

I interviewed David Rubenstein of Carlyle at Semafor House here in Davos this week, and he said he believed no president or maybe no person had ever had as much power as Donald Trump has now, with the possible exception of FDR and World War Two.

So this is an extremely powerful president. He's already put three justices on the Supreme Court before he starts his second term. He has both houses of Congress. He knows where the levers of power are and certainly knows how to use them and has a strong desire to use them. And I think, again, as David Rubenstein said, we should expect him to use that power both at home and around the world.

Robin Pomeroy: Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, CEO Editor at Semafor. He mentioned businessman - and podcaster - David Rubenstein - and we have our own interview with him later in this episode.

But before that, Walter Mead is a Global View columnist at The Wall Street Journal, professor of Strategy and Statecraft at the University of Florida, and fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank that, in its own words, promotes “American leadership for a secure, free, and prosperous future”.

We had a wide-ranging conversation and he had some interesting things to say about US foreign policy. We also spoke about the meaning of "Make America Great Again". And I asked Walter Mead if the rise in support for Trump in the US was to do with the middle classes feeling the American dream was leaving them behind.

Walter Mead: I think if you look at the decades after World War Two, which kind of retrospectively looked like a period of great stability in Western politics, what you saw then was the rise everywhere of middle class standards of living based on mass manufacturing. The large numbers of people either work in blue collar jobs in a factory or lots of clerical jobs. Information processing wasn't done by computers. It was done by clerks and people with adding machines and all of these things.

You put those two kinds of employment together, clerical and manufacturing, and as late as the 1970s in the U.S., over half the workforce was in those jobs. I think now we're well under 20% of those jobs.

The idea was you would graduate from high school and then you would get a job at an employer. You would stay with that employer throughout your career, getting gradual raises over time and would retire, hopefully, with a defined pension that would last you the rest of your life.

Today, you don't work for the same employer, so you need a different kind of pension. Industries rise and fall. So if you had a great career at Blockbuster videos, you know that doesn't help you very much.

There's much more anxiety. Everybody wants the jobs of the 1950s, but nobody wants the products of the 1950s, back when there was a phone company monopoly, and you know, and the cars, yes, they were cheap, but they were pretty crappy. We have a more dynamic society, but that's a more insecure society. And between automation eating at the demand for blue collar labor on the one side, and outsourcing, where factories move to countries where there are lower regulations and cheaper labour on the other, people do feel that that a lot of things that they used to be able to count on just aren't there.

Robin Pomeroy: And would you say that is the primary reason that people vote in the US and Europe and elsewhere for what some would call populist candidates.

Walter Mead: I think that's one of them. I don't think you can take out migration. As a result. I've tried to study a little bit about the history of immigration in the U.S. because it's been so central to our history.

I think at this point in time we've got something like 15% of the adult population was born outside the United States. We were about that high in the 1910s and 20s. When that happened, immigration became the biggest political issue in many ways in the US. It sparked a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which was dead at that time, not only in the south, but in the north, as an anti-immigrant movement. And politics was really consumed with this question.

And the U.S. ultimately passed a law that cut migration by 90% into the U.S. And it was so severe that even in the face of the Holocaust, people were unable to get refugee applications because these laws were so popular. And this didn't change until the 1960s. Then we introduced new laws and we're now back up at this relatively high level of foreign born population. And it's having a similar effect on our politics.

And in Europe, you can see similar things.

I think here people forgot, yes, immigration is good. And I believe that in America we benefited enormously from immigration and continue to need it. But that doesn't mean that more is always better. You know that if if a million immigrants a year's good, 10 million would be ten times as good. It doesn't work that way in the real world.

And many of the elite sort of opinion makers and so on, on both sides of the Atlantic, just did not think this stuff through very clearly.

And so you have a public which for a long time has been saying this is too much, this is not working. They've just been met by sort of, oh you're xenophobic, you are a bad human being for questioning my noble political ideals.

Robin Pomeroy: What do you think people get wrong, Europeans or anyone else around the world. Those among them, and he has his supporters, many around the world, but there's a lot of people who just don't get Donald Trump and don't get MAGA. What are people getting wrong about it?

Walter Mead: I think people have not seen the populist movement in the United States that has kind of crystallized around Donald Trump. They see it as a purely reactionary movement. That is it's, you know, no to immigration, no to this, no to that. And that is, you know, there is some of that there.

But there is also something, American populism has always had this kind of odd pro-enterprise pro-capitalist streak. So it's not that bizarre in some ways that Elon Musk and the sort of the tech lords and the MAGA people are coming together, because, on one of the great questions of our time, should we be accelerationist about the development of new forms of IT and AI and all of these things, or should we be restrictionist and limit their development out of the cautionary principle?

I would say both MAGA and Musk are accelerationist and that there is a there's an actual modernizing agenda as well that is in this Trump movement. And it's very important to try to understand that and to realize that these are people who are looking for more opportunity rather than people who are simply trying to freeze the status quo in place.

Robin Pomeroy: That's interesting because the phrase Make America Great Again has within it, we're going to go back to re-create this thing.

Walter Mead: But what was great about it in the first place was opportunity.

You see that American conservatism is actually kind of radically innovative at its at its core. The qualities that make America great, the qualities that made it the industrial leader in all of these technologies that, you know, enabled American society to leave sort of feudalism and other things behind. Their nostalgia is also future centered.

Robin Pomeroy: Obviously, Trump 2.0 is very different from the Biden administration, both domestically and internationally. How much should the world see this is a new America coming now. How much should we just see this is the swing of a pendulum that we've always seen through the last 100-200 years

Walter Mead: I do think that reading the history of, say, Andrew Jackson, who was a president in some ways quite similar to Trump, other ways different, would help people see how much the the Trump movement is grounded in American history.

Even the Trump saying we want Greenland, this is territorial expansionism, is not alien to the American past.

And that will help, I think, also in terms of what he's likely to do and likely not to do.

I think Trump is sincere when he says he does not want war. Partly politically, he doesn't think war would be good for him politically. But just it's a waste. It's terrible. It eats everything. And he doesn't want it. This is important.

And they talk about the differences between taking him seriously and taking him literally. What what does it mean to try to understand? So, yes, I think there's a lot to be learned from history.

That said, President Donald Trump is a unique individual. In the history of American politics we have seen people who had his kind of command. Teddy Roosevelt would be one. Andrew Jackson is another. But he has taken over the Republican Party. He has moved American politics in a in a direction that it didn't expect to go. And I think in the whole history of the world, I don't think any living human being has dominated as high a percentage of the of the mental activity of the entire human race as Donald J. Trump.

This guy, in that sense he's like Napoleon as a figure who just leaves behind all of his conventional competitors and operates on a different plane. Now we know that Napoleon lost in the end. So this does not mean he's going to get everything he wants. But we have to start looking at Trump as a historical figure who has achieved things that no human being in the past has achieved.

Robin Pomeroy: He says he wants to bring peace. There's always been a threat in American politics of isolationism, and there's been this kind of conflict between Americans who want, you know that's your war over there Europe. Obviously I'm thinking of the world wars in Europe which America was forced into. We tend to see, history judges it that they were on the right side of history by joining the Second World War.

Do you think Trump and this administration represents a return to that kind of more isolationist thing? Obviously there's the Ukraine situation. It's Europe's war, isn't it? It's not America's war, you could say. But on the other hand, there are values that are more American. And there are value that maybe are Russian. So there is an interest, at least philosophically, if not economically and geopolitically, for America to be involved there. But do you see that kind of isolationist thing, or is it something different?

Walter Mead: I wrote a book, came out in like 2001, about four schools of American foreign policy that have been around for a long time.

And one of them is the Wilsonian school, you know, does see America's destiny in foreign policy in terms of creating worldwide institutions in support of democracy and human rights. And Donald Trump is not a member of the Wilsonian school. And I think he feels that, whether you think about Bush's attempt to create democracy in the Middle East, or, for that matter, Obama in Libya. While democracy around the world might be a really good thing, Americans don't have the slightest idea how to do it.

And, if you add to that, why should an American mother's kid die so that a Bosnian kid can vote in a free election? If you put those arguments together, it gets very tricky. You're incompetent. And it's not clear that what you want to do is fair to Americans in the first place.

That's a pretty deadly combination. And so the Wilsonians, who've been really fairly dominant in American foreign policy discourse since the end of the Cold War, even since the time of Ronald Reagan, I think are going to take a bit of a time out. They'll be back. American policy is like a kaleidoscope, you know, you keep turning it and new new patterns appear.

But Trump's coalition is a mix of Jeffersonians who are isolationist because they think getting involved in other people's quarrels reduces American freedom - so we support Israel in the Middle East, Al Qaeda attacks us, and then we pass the Patriot Act and allow the government to snoop on everyone and we have huge military expenses. And so let's not do that. Let's stay at home. That's the Jeffersonian approach. And that's in Trump's coalition.

But you also have, and I think somewhat probably ultimately stronger in Trump's coalition, the Jacksonian thing, which is don't go looking for trouble. Don't be the missionary trying to change the whole world. But if somebody comes at you or one of your allies where your honour is really engaged, then you got to whack them and whack them as hard as you can and teach them the lesson like you taught the Germans and the Japanese in 1945. Never do that again.

Robin Pomeroy: I guess time will tell which elements of that coalition come to the fore.

Walter Mead: Exactly.

Robin Pomeroy: Academic and Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Mead.

David Rubenstein is a co-founder and co-chairman of the private equity firm The Carlyle Group. He’s also a broadcaster and commentator and we thought, rightly, that he'd have plenty to say on the subject. My colleague Gayle Markovitz asked David Rubenstein first how he saw the state of democracy around the world in 2025.

David Rubenstein: Clearly, we saw in the United States a political comeback, the likes of which we've never seen before. A man who had been president but was indicted many times, had lots of legal problems, managed to win the election. And as we talk, he's being inaugurated today.

In Europe, we've also seen gigantic changes. The French government has had a change. The German government has changed. English government has changed. So Europe has seen a lot of changes in the last, I'd say, year. Canada is going to have a new government soon. Mexico has a new government. Argentina has a new government.

So there's a lot of change in the world right now, for sure. And I think democracy clearly has to work harder to make sure that people understand what it's all about and why it has some benefits for people.

Gayle Markovitz: And how do you think it can work harder?

David Rubenstein: Well, clearly, some people in the world don't think that democracy is a value or has the virtues that many people in the United States think it does. So I think we need to do a better job of explaining why letting people vote, letting people express their views, having freedom, equal opportunity, is a good value and are good values.

And I think that's going to be more difficult in the future because a lot of people don't hold those views around the world. And so if you're going to believe in democracy, you've got to work hard for it.

Gayle Markovitz: Do you think the global shift towards populism is a problem for democracy or do you think it's just just another phase?

David Rubenstein: Well, populism is not anti-democratic because populism reflects what people want, presumably, assuming you have fair elections.

I think populism does reflect the fact that there is frustration with some of what has happened in some democracies. So I think the fact that populism is rising in the United States, in Europe, is something that people should have pause about.

But people who are supporters of democracy should say, if people are not happy with what you're doing, you should try something different. Try to do a better job of explaining what you're doing.

Gayle Markovitz: And looking at history, are there specific moments where you've seen democracy facing existential threats, and and how were they overcome?

David Rubenstein: The principal existential threat to democracy was the Civil War in our country. And clearly, the country could have been divided into two, and that was a gigantic existential threat. Fortunately, from my point of view, the Union won and the country was saved.

We've also seen an existential threat to democracy around World War Two. Clearly, the German government was moving forward to take over much of Western Europe and then eventually England, and who knows what after that. And so that was a real challenge because in the United States, for many years, the United States did not want to come to the help of Europe and stayed out of the war until Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Gayle Markovitz: Do you have any thoughts on how America's going to look in, say, 30 years?

David Rubenstein: Well, I know it will be looking without me being there because I don't think I'll be around unless I have the good fortune to live up to 105 years old. But I think that 30 years from now, it's just too hard to predict where the world will be. Technology changes too much and people change too much.

So 30 years ago, from today, 1995, think about it. The world was just beginning to experiment with the Internet. We didn't have TV streaming. We didn't have so many things we have now. Artificial intelligence was a gleam in somebody's eye. We didn't have private companies doing space exploration. Much different world in 1995.

So 30 years from today, I think it's too difficult to predict. But clearly technology is going to be much more on the march than maybe we even anticipated in 1995.

Gayle Markovitz: There's definitely a sense that we are entering a different time where maybe the global order is shifting in a very fundamental way. Do you see the US dominance and especially its role in preserving the liberal world order continuing?

David Rubenstein: Nothing continues forever. And if something can't keep going on, eventually it won't.

But right now the United States seems to be in a fairly dominant position and certainly in the Western world.

Post the economic crisis of 07-08 and post COVID, the United States has moved forward and bypassed Europe in terms of economic growth, in terms of financial stability, in terms of, I would say, technology development.

So, for example, as much as everybody loves Europe and I certainly love Europe, it's hard to think of a European technology one needs to get through the day. But you need to get through the day with an American technology. Very few people get through their day without using an Apple phone, an Amazon product or service, maybe Netflix, Facebook or something for Meta or a Google search. American technologies have dominated the world in the last 10 or 15 years, and I think Europe has a long way to go to catch up, as does the rest of the world.

Gayle Markovitz: Do you think technology is going to be the driver of the geopolitical order as we move ahead? Maybe it already is.

David Rubenstein: In predicting the future, what people tend to do is extrapolate from the recent past. So it's easy to say, well, technology's been dominant the last ten years and change the world, so therefore it'll happen in the next ten years.

But the only thing we know for certain from world history is that things change in ways that people don't anticipate. So I can't tell you for certain that technology will be as dominant in the global economic sphere as it is today. But clearly technology's on the march. And I think companies and countries that don't recognize how technology is changing everything I think are going to be left behind.

Gayle Markovitz: Do you have examples of countries which are getting it right in terms of investment into technology?

David Rubenstein: The United States clearly has invested in technology in a way that really is beyond what any other country has done. I think China is also a place that's investing heavily in technology as well. I think China is not far behind the United States now in, let's say, artificial intelligence.

I think the rest of the world is still playing catch up. And I think in Europe, for example, while there are some really good technology companies, and my own firm has invested in them, I don't think Europe has the technology edge that it once had or that hopefully it will have in the future.

The United States is still a dominant technology country in the Western world.

Gayle Markovitz: Looking at history, and I know you've looked at history a lot, do you see any lessons that we can draw from the long trajectory of history? So even the fall of empires. Because there is definitely a feeling that something big is shifting. Do you think it's that big that we might see things like we saw, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago?

David Rubenstein: Clearly, civilizations come and go. It's not a given that the United States will be a dominant country in 100 years from now, for example.

The United States was not a dominant country until really after World War Two. After World War Two, the United States was 50% of the world's GDP, 50%. Today, we're roughly 18% with about 5% of the world's population.

It's not inevitable that some other country could come along. The United States population is still large, but there are countries are going to have much bigger populations than the United States and already have them. China and India as a good example. And in the not too distant future, it's likely that Nigeria could actually have a bigger population than the United States if population trends continue for the next 20 or 30 years or so. So you just don't know which countries are going to be dominant.

Clearly, the United States has a lot of edge, financial, technological, cultural edges and has the advantage of having a language that everybody around the world seems to speak.

But also, we have the only reserve currency in the world, and it's rare that you only have one reserve currency at a time. As long as the United States has the only reserve currency in the world, its economic problems are not going to be as great as some people think they might be because of our deficits and debt. But if our reserve currency goes away and that status goes away, the debt and the deficit we have will be real challenges for the United States.

Gayle Markovitz: I know you've interviewed many influential leaders. Is there a historical figure or someone you've interviewed who's really made an impact and you think is the right kind of person to guide democracy in the future?

David Rubenstein: The greatest person in the United States who ever lived in the United States, the greatest president and greatest human was Abraham Lincoln. He kept the Union together and therefore kept the United States as one country.

He also did it by freeing the slaves, which was a really terrible thing that we had in our country for many, many years.

He also did it with humility. He didn't brag. Look, I just gave a great speech. It's called the Gettysburg Address. Or I just won the Civil War. Why don't you pat me on the back?

So he had humility. He also was very sympathetic to the problems of of poor people. And I think he was a person that we're not likely to see somebody with all of his skills come together in one person any time soon. So he'd be the one person I'd want to interview. If I could interview somebody that's not alive today.

Gayle Markovitz: And from your perspective, which historical lessons do America's leaders need to draw on? What are the kind of, say, the top two lessons from history?

David Rubenstein: The top two lessons I think American leaders need to take from the past are, one, it's not a given that we will be a leader in every area in the world forever. And secondly, we need to listen to what other countries are thinking about, and listen to them intelligently.

It's important that you listen to what other people say, because if you don't listen to what other people say, you're not going to get the sense of where the world is going.

So I think to be a good interviewer, Oprah Winfrey once told me, it's a skill set really requires being a good listener. And the United States should be a good listener to what other people are saying.

Gayle Markovitz: One of the findings of this year's Risks Report was not just that inter-state violence was a big threat, but also intra-state violence, which reflects there is infighting within countries, and polarization. What do you think are the solutions for that? Because there's definitely a sense that the world is very, very polarized.

David Rubenstein: The world is polarized now between countries that value democracy and countries that don't value democracy. And obviously, in countries themselves, those that value democracy and those that don't value democracy, there are internal schisms as well.

It's not as if the United States, which values democracy, has no schisms inside the country. As I talk today, the new president of the United States is being inaugurated. He won a decisive victory. But there are many people who are unhappy with that decisive victory. So I think he's got a big job ahead of him trying to convince people that he's really working for the entire country. And I think he's going to try to do that.

Robin Pomeroy: David Rubenstein, speaking to Gayle Markovitz at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in January. You also heard academic and Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Mead and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, CEO Editor at Semafor.

There are plenty more great conversations across our podcasts, here on Radio Davos, and on our sister podcasts Meet the Leader and Agenda Dialogues - follow them all wherever you get podcasts or at wef.ch/podcasts.

This episode of Radio Davos was presented by me, Robin Pomeroy with editing by Jere Johansson and studio production by Taz Kelleher.

We will be back next week, but for now thanks to you for listening and goodbye.