Hello, welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller, delighted to welcome back,

contributing writer at the Atlantic and senior fellow at Brookings. His most recent book

is Rebellion, how anti-liberalism is tearing America apart again. It's Bob Kagan. How you doing, Bob? I'm good. How are you? I am well. I should have mentioned the topic. We've got a double header today. We got Mary Ann Williamson in segment two. You know, it's kind of a just natural, a natural pairing, Kagan and Williamson.

People have been saying that to me.

I want to start with your latest in the Atlantic.

It is titled America versus the World.

I guess the thesis here is about how Trump and his cronies are openly celebrating the end of the post-World War II Graham Bargain

and talking about how unfair that was to us.

Now we wasted so much

money on it and it was too expensive and we're going to take advantage of and they have a new

plan and a new plan that we're going to come to regret. How's that for the thesis? Does that sound

right? Yeah, that's about right. I mean, they are reflecting, I think, a broader American sort of ignorance about how unusual the role the United States has played in the world since the end of World War II, how unusual the way other powers have responded to the United States in the sense that they've been willing to let the United States be the strongest

power in the world to place their security in American hands. That's just unprecedented in history.

And it made for a very special kind of international environment and one very beneficial to

the United States. And where Trump is now taking us is back to a world that looks a lot more like the world that

existed before World War II or leading into World War II, you know, a multipolar world where

everybody's fending for himself. And that's a much more dangerous world for the United States.

Let's do that little history lesson. I was intrigued by that in your article. There's the period of what they called the long piece in Europe where we had some

version of what they're talking about with a more multipolar world. And, you know, that piece wasn't

quite as peaceful as the piece that we've had in the post World War II, I guess. Yeah, you can read a lot of articles by sort of Trump sympathetic writers in foreign affairs

these days about, hey, we can go back to a nice, you know, the concert of Europe and the

multipolar world and the great powers all work it out. And the problem with that analogy is

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