For a long time, we were the defenders.

We helped create the world system after World War II.

We defended it, we promoted it, we got other countries to agree to it.

Now we are seen as one of the challengers.

And does that create a mission structure for other countries to challenge it as well?

Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer and today I am trying to make sense of American foreign policy one year into Trump's second term.

Because this time around already looks a little different from 2016, when America first meant securing the border and letting the world solve its own problems.

Now President Trump boasts about other people's wars that he's ended.

He wants to turn Gaza into a beachside resort.

He's talked openly about colonizing Panama and Greenland.

He bombed Iran, well that one he's done before, and he even captured Venezuela's leader.

Remember that?

This is not a president retreating from the world stage, but rather one determined to remake it in his own image.

And the question is, will he succeed?

Joining me to discuss all that and more, former U.S.

Trade Representative and current President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Michael Froman.

Don't worry, I've also got your puppet regime.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Olympic Games are now over.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

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And... [♪♪♪] For much of the past century, American foreign policy has looked a lot like this.

Go ahead.

Make my day.

Uncle Sam is a young Clint Eastwood, a hard-boiled, squinty-eyed global policeman, staring down his adversaries, just daring them to make America's day.

[Gunfire] Sure, that dare didn't always pay off.

You can't see Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan, but American presidents from FDR to Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama made it their mission to solve the world's problems.

One year into President Trump's second term, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the United States foreign policy resembles instead an older crotchetier or Clint Eastwood.

Get off my lawn.

I'm talking about his America First foreign policy of a secure border and of ICE raids in cities quite far from that border.

I'm referring to his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord while allowing the START nuclear treaty to expire.

And of putting an end to NATO free riders while resurrecting century-old tariffs on adversaries and allies alike.

Yes, you'd be forgiven for thinking the United States was stepping back from the world stage, but you'd be wrong.

Take Venezuela.

In green lighting a stunning U.S.

military raid that captured Venezuela's president, Trump demonstrated his raw power, what he's referred to as a "Don-roe Doctrine," where he alone sets the rules, especially in America's own backyard.

Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.

Won't happen.

President Trump is trying to replace 80 plus years of a rules-based order with the law of the jungle, with the US of A at the top of that food chain.

Far from stepping back, President Trump is digging in.

And make no mistake, America's allies are getting the message.

Europe must be responsible for its own security.

This is not longer an option.

This is a must.

The middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu.

You know who else is listening?

America's adversaries.

China's President Xi, whose country depends on free trade and economic stability, has become all too happy to broker new trade deals that exclude the United States.

Roughly one year into his second term, President Trump has become the kind of global leader he once spurned.

But instead of assuming the mantle of global policeman, he's thrown out the rule book altogether.

Joining me to discuss all that and more, former US Trade Representative and the current president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Michael Froman.

Mike Froman, thanks for joining the show.

Thanks for having me.

We talk about big global issues, and I guess I wanna start with the, what is surprising you most now from America's foreign policy in the world that you really didn't think you would have been saying just a year ago?

I'm surprised by how much the world is adjusting to Trump's view of globalism and they are incorporating it they're not happy necessarily about it but they are adjusting and they are responding to the Trump administration's exercise of power.

Exercise of power in a more transactional and unilateralist way?

Yes, exactly.

And how do you see them responding?

Well, I think right now Iran responding by engaging further in negotiations with the U.S.

with the threat of further military action.

Even if you look back at the trade wars of 2025, U.S.

imposing very significant tariffs on the rest of the world, then as a starting point for negotiation.

But the rest of the world, with the exception of China, maybe a little bit Canada, didn't retaliate, sort of adjusted to it.

And I found that they were more concerned about the relative tariff rates than they were about the absolute rate.

So Malaysia cared a lot about not having a significantly higher rate than Vietnam.

- Which is a fair thing for them to be concerned about.

- Absolutely, absolutely.

But I think, had you asked me a year and a half ago, I would have said, if the US imposes somewhere between 10 and 50% tariffs on other countries, we're likely to face a lot of retaliation.

And the reality was, China just had to show that they could retaliate, and the US backed down, and the other countries didn't really retaliate, they adjusted to it.

And is that because the United States is just so big and credible and hitting you unilaterally that if you're not China, you feel like you've got nowhere to go?

I think President Trump established credibility.

That he was willing to use tariffs as much and as often and as far as he needed to.

And if they were welcome to retaliate, he would just raise the tariffs even further and they would become prohibitive at some point.

So, I mean, Mike, before running the Council on Foreign Relations, like I knew you, right?

- Way back when.

- As US trade rep, right.

And so if I think about that role in the Obama administration, are you looking back on Trump now and saying, "Geez, like, because you were thought of as a fairly tough guy.

The Japanese, I remember when they were talking about Froman, they're like, 'He's hitting us really hard.'"

Are you looking back and saying, "I didn't actually beat these guys up nearly as much as I should have"?

- Well, I think back then we were focused on what could we get through negotiations?

And I was hitting them hard, and previous USTRs hit them hard in terms of what our demands were of them and the hard things we wanted them to do.

This administration is hitting them hard by hitting them hard and raising tariffs.

And I sometimes joke with my successors that it would have been a really easy job to be USTR if I could have used tariffs like this with credibility and to impose them on other countries because they have successfully brought them to the table.

And that was something you wouldn't have even considered.

- Correct.

- Because?

Because we had international obligations.

In some of the cases, we have bilateral free trade agreements and we're raising tariffs on those countries.

In other cases, we have, well, in all cases, we have World Trade Organization, WTO commitments, and we've broken those commitments and raised tariffs on other countries.

And so, yeah, the Trump administration has basically said they're willing to break agreements, break commitments to use tariffs as a tool for just about everything, for trade purposes, talk about fentanyl, to talk about migration, to talk about political issues, to retaliate against European countries, potentially for sending a small contingency of military forces to Greenland to shore up NATO's role in Greenland.

- So my presumption is that you are challenged by these strategies, if we can call them that, because you think it's gonna cause a lot of damage long-term.

- So I think that there have always been a rule for tariffs when, for example, there've been unfair trade practices, and you go through the process of determining what those unfair trade practices are, what the level of retaliation ought to be, and impose them.

The Trump administration has ignored all that and just jumped to using them whenever they needed any degree of leverage over another country.

- And not just on economic issues, on any issue, on a political issue, on a security issue, you name it.

- How Bolsonaro's been treated, how India buying Russian oil.

It could be any number of issues.

It is the president, he made that clear, is the, in his words, the most beautiful word in the English dictionary, and a tool that he can use for just about any purpose, because it's easy to ratchet up and ratchet down.

You don't have to think about going through dispute settlement processes and getting an outcome from the World Trade Organization or from some panel of experts, you just ratchet it up or ratchet it down as you see fit.

Now, the question is, to your point, long term, what are the ramifications of this?

I think most trade experts worry that, well, we've created a permission structure, more generally, for countries to act unilaterally, regardless of their international obligations.

Sometimes that might be through the use of tariffs or other trade actions.

Sometimes that might be through the use of military force, as we've done vis-a-vis Venezuela.

And what kind of world will we live in if other countries, in fact, copy our approach?

Because for a long time, we were the defenders.

We helped create the world system after World War II.

We defended it.

We promoted it.

We got other countries to agree to it.

And when countries would try to challenge it, we would take action to ensure that the rules were upheld.

Now we are seen as one of the challengers.

And does that create a permission structure for other countries to challenge it as well?

- So Mark Carney came out during Davos.

You and I were there.

We were in the same room with him on several occasions with the whole rupture speech.

Now French President Emmanuel Macron has gone farther, right, talking about the United States directly as an adversary, wants to basically dismantle Europe.

Again, if you were a European leader today, if you were a Canadian leader today, would you see the United States as an adversary?

- Look, I think Prime Minister Carney was right to call it a rupture because it is a big disruption of everything we have known for the last 80 years, purposefully, to raise questions that heretofore have been closed, that we thought were solved.

And now we have to wrestle with those questions again.

I think President Macron probably goes too far.

Yeah, he does go too far to view the U.S.

as an adversary.

The French, the Europeans may not like everything that this administration is doing, but their national interests, including their security interests, are still quite well aligned with the United States.

And I think countries are willing to hold their nose, come to Washington, work with the United States, because it's in their national interest to do so.

They're not doing it to do anybody a favor.

They're doing it because they recognize that they need to reduce their dependence on China as well.

Now, we've talked a lot about comparative economic power.

We haven't talked as much about some of the geopolitical conflicts that we're seeing in the world right now.

There's so many to discuss.

I want to leave Greenland aside.

But I do want to ask, for example, about Venezuela, about Iran, about Russia, Ukraine, maybe go through them quickly.

Venezuela, so far, only a few weeks in, seems to be going OK for the Trump administration.

Is that reasonable to say?

- You know, I think that is reasonable, because we can analyze whether it was worth devoting this amount of military activity.

First of all, we should commend the military for incredibly successful action, really an awesome use of force and on the ground and creative ways, innovative ways of using cyber attacks and other ways to execute this without the loss of any American soldier.

But a lot was put at risk to arrest somebody.

We've left the regime largely in place.

And the regime is the same criminal regime, corrupt regime that existed before.

What we have done is get control of their oil exports.

And if that's the limited, if the mission is defined as arresting Maduro and taking their oil exports to where we want to get them, we will sell them.

- There's some broader political leverage as well, clearly.

- Yes, but I think in terms of moving them towards reform, domestic reform, democracy, it's a longer term project.

Secretary Rubio has laid that out.

He has said that.

And by the way, I think that's not unreasonable.

They didn't want the de-Ba'athification of Venezuela.

Whether they did enough or whether they empowered or disempowered the opposition, I think time will only tell.

But hopefully over time, we'll see Venezuela return to a real democracy and the Venezuelan people will have an opportunity to speak and to vote and take their country in the direction that they want to take it.

So there's a lot more work to be done.

But for right now, Maduro's in jail, oil is being controlled, and thus far, I think I agree with you that the Trump administration's limited short-term objectives are being achieved.

- So let's then go to Iran, where, I mean, it seems to be a little bit more urgent for the Trump administration right now.

In the last few days, if you just listen to Trump, it seems like he is getting more optimistic about negotiations bearing fruit.

Many administrations have found that that's more challenging than they've initially thought.

Right now, does it look like to you that we are heading towards military action?

- Well, on one hand, he's expressing optimism.

On the other hand, they announced, I believe, that they're considering setting a second-- - Considering.

- Second carrier group there, because if the negotiations don't proceed sufficiently well, they wanna be prepared to take whatever action they're planning to take.

Look, I think that there's an existential issue for the Iranian regime as to whether they are willing to give up enrichment completely.

They weren't willing to give it up before.

If they give it up now, they are admitting that they have, their strategy and their allocation of resources for the last 30 years has been mismanaged.

And that's going to further undermine the credibility of the regime.

Maybe they're under such threat of military action and their proxies are weakened.

They have no air defenses.

Their missile program has been hurt.

They were blown up last year.

Their nuclear program has been attacked.

They've shown that the United States and Israel are willing to take action that previously had not been taken.

They may feel so much under pressure to consider something they've never been willing to consider before, but they may not be.

And if the agreement turns out to be not much better or more than the JCPOA that Trump tore up, then one's going to ask, "What was this all for?"

So, your best guess right now, do you think it's likely that there will be a negotiated agreement, or that it's going to be a military action?

My guess is there may be a limited military action.

I mean, I'm sure I'll be wrong about this in one form or another, but my best guess is there may be a limited military action, not to decapitate.

But to create more leverage.

But to create more leverage.

At some point, there may be an agreement.

I'm wondering what the face-saving measure on enrichment is for the regime.

And I'm not sure what that looks like, whether there is some Gulf enrichment mechanism or something that they're able to offer that allows them to save face.

- Okay, Russia, Ukraine, only been going on for almost four years now.

Continued efforts primarily by the United States to get to a ceasefire.

Trump is now saying, "Gotta be done by June," which is not quite the 24 hours he initially thought.

- Or the two weeks that it always seemed to be, two weeks away.

- So he's kicking the can.

It's getting harder, obviously.

- It's getting harder.

- He's getting more frustrated.

He's sharing that frustration publicly.

The Ukrainians are having a harder time fighting.

They're having a harder time raising resources.

The Russians should have a harder time fighting, given what they're throwing at it.

So far, it doesn't seem to be affecting them domestically.

Do you think that we are heading towards an inflection point or is it just generally grinding on and grinding on for the foreseeable future?

I think week by week there will be continuing to be huge casualties, particularly on the Russian side, but on both sides.

I think you're right, the Ukrainians are tiring of war.

They very much want to reach a peace agreement.

They've wanted that for some time.

And I think they're quite willing to make territorial compromises de facto, if not de jure, to secure a real peace, provided they've got the necessary security guarantees that have credibility on the other side.

I think this mechanism that we have in place where the Europeans use the loan against the Russian frozen assets to buy American equipment to provide to the Ukrainians is a pretty good one.

It's sort of a win-win-win for the United States.

No American taxpayer dollars.

No American taxpayer dollars, good exports.

I guess we're reducing our trade deficit in that regard, you know, and support for our military industrial complex as well, and support for the Ukrainians, very importantly.

But whether or not that's going to secure any real change on the ground remains to be seen.

You said the Russians seem to have really quite a strong appetite or ability to absorb pain.

So the sanctions aren't having necessarily the debilitating effect that I think the West had hoped.

And the casualties don't seem to be having the political ramifications that you alluded to.

And that happened in the Afghan war, ultimately, that led to Russia's withdrawal from Afghanistan.

And so it's a little hard to see how any of that is going to change Putin's calculation.

And that's the remaining issue, is that Trump is increasingly realizing that Putin doesn't really want to end this war anytime soon, and is willing to sacrifice men and treasure and the state of the economy and his standing in the world to keep it going.

Which creates the really saddest conclusion, which is that President Trump, recognizing that is now putting much more pressure on Ukraine because he sees that they're the weaker ones that are more likely to capitulate, irrespective of how courageous or how unjust.

Of the meritocracy, the merits of the arguments.

Absolutely.

- No, I think that's right.

And look, I think Ukrainians are willing to make certain compromises.

I think it's gone on so long that, and there's been so little progress on the battlefield, so little positive progress, if anything, they're losing a little bit of land each week or each month, that they are willing to make certain compromises if they can get the security guarantees.

So I think the, now I think the burden shifts to Europe and the United States to make those security guarantees as meaningful and as credible as possible to help the Ukrainians get to a position where they're willing to compromise on territory.

So, end with the big kahuna here, which is the US and China.

Obviously everyone's excited in the Trump administration about the upcoming trip to Beijing.

They've just announced that Xi Jinping is going to come to Washington by the end of the year.

Most challenging, most fraught, most important bilateral relationship seems to be more stable for now.

- Correct.

- How short is the for now in your view?

I think there's an interest on both sides for extending it as long as possible.

You know, get through this year, maybe get through the next year.

I think on the U.S.

side, having realized how much leverage China has in its choke points over critical minerals, and that's just really one of several sectors where they have pharmaceutical- - Critical infrastructure, you name it.

Yeah.

- Yeah, exactly.

And so keep things on as steady a path as possible on the on the economic side.

And you saw in the national defense strategy, words like balance of power, good, strong economic relationship, all sort of really relatively positive language about where they wanted to see the U.S.-China relationship go, emphasizing stability, even as they reinforce the defense of the first island chain and stated that the U.S.

was committed to that.

So no change of policy in that regard.

But the language towards China has evolved quite substantially from it being the pacing threat for our U.S.

military, or even as the Trump administration characterized it in the first term as a potential adversary.

So there's a pretty significant evolution there.

And I think China has every interest in maintaining stability as it continues to build out its military, its economy is doing just fine.

It's got a $1.2 trillion trade surplus with the rest of the world.

It's exporting less to the United States, but it's managed to make up for that and more in other markets around the world.

And so it's feeling pretty confident right now.

And so when you think about the longer-term Taiwan question, where do you go?

I think China would rather not have to attack Taiwan in order to absorb it, but I think we have to take President Xi as it were, to take him seriously, that he wants this resolved during his tenure.

You've got a lot of China hawks in the administration, whether it's Secretary Rubio, Elbridge Colby, others who have long been strong defenders of Taiwan.

The US president is not one of them.

He's not been out there in the same way.

His rhetoric has been quite subdued on the subject.

And I worry that at some point when the issue of a grand bargain comes up, that the US might be willing to evolve in its language about what its commitment to Taiwan is, and provided that it gets either something else very significant on critical minerals or on exports, or that it gets some secure access to semiconductor chips over the long run.

Mike Froman, thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

And now to puppet regime, where the Winter Olympics are in full swing and President Trump is handing out the hardware, or is he?

Roll that tape.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Olympic Games are now over.

But sir, they're still going on.

Incorrect.

We are launching a new Olympics, the Gold Games, run by me.

What's wrong with the Olympics?

The US always wins.

Totally world garbage.

They let so many ungrateful countries in.

Except, apparently, Russia, which is a little unfair.

What are the events going to be?

Well, we'll have very many strong new events.

This winter, a lot of ICE.

Ice hockey?

Not until we take Canada.

Our ICE events will focus on abducting and shooting.

They call it a "biathlon."

Are you keeping any of the old events?

Possibly the Nordic combined.

We'll be combining the Nordics into the U.S.

very strongly.

Any other questions?

Well, how can countries win?

By presenting Trump with all of their medals, or else.

But what's in it for that?

Well, you can ask the lady from Venezuela about that.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

What?

♪ Public Russian ♪ That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, but you have your own global order to append, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

(upbeat music) - Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

And by... Cox is proud to support GZERO.

The planet needs all of us.

At Cox, we're working to seed the future of sustainable agriculture and reduce plastic waste.

Together, we can work to create a better future.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by... Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... [MUSIC]