Best of Deep State Radio: We are Swimming in a Sea of Imbecility (07/22/26)

The DSR Network

This episode of Deep State Radio features a critical discussion on America's declining global standing amid rising trust in China, exploring the

Key takeaways

• Global trust in the United States has declined significantly, with recent polls showing it ranked below Iran in some measures.
• China's rising global approval is driven by its investment in renewable energy, open-source technology, and non-interventionist foreign policy.

Main topics

• Declining U.S. global influence
• Rising Chinese geopolitical power

Notable quotes

"We are swimming in a sea of imbecility."

Conclusion

Despite current dysfunction and declining global trust, the hosts express cautious hope

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) As the DSR Network takes some time off as we head into Labor Day, we are excited to bring you some of the best episodes from the past year of shows such as Deep State Radio, Words Matter, The Daily Blast, Need to Know, and more. We look forward to seeing you again with new episodes soon. 12, 10, 28, 2... Speaker 1 (0:33) This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super-secret studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of SNARK in Washington, D.C., and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to Deep State Radio. I am David Rothkopf, your host, and this week we are joined by two of our best friends and two of the smartest people we know. Ed Luce of the Financial Times. You're just returned from like the mountains, aren't you, Ed? Just down from the Rockies, although, you know, flying to and from the Rockies is getting even more difficult with Canadian wildfires. I can just imagine. Were you at Aspen? Were you? Speaker 1 (1:21) Hobnobbing, did you gain some insight that we should all know? I gained the insight that all these sort of aging boomers or Gen Xers suddenly are experts in football, soccer, because they were crowded into all the games and commenting on tactics and stuff. Well, maybe they're just getting ready for their retirement. We can only hope. And we are also joined by Max Boot, Council on Foreign Relations, columnist for Washington Post. How are you doing, Max? Hanging in there and offering commiserations to Ed over England. Speaking of soccer, England failing to make the final yet again, although obviously they did a ton better than the U.S. team did. US team had Trump working against them. The England team only had its manager working against it. Speaker 1 (2:22) Yeah. Yeah, well, Trump got a real nice send-off, though. Trump in gold glitter with Infantino. Has ever a more appropriate picture been taken? Well, and also Trump trying to get his picture taken on the stage with the Spanish team and being let off, and it's now led to a million memes of Trump in places he didn't belong. I suppose most notable among those places, of course, the White House. And Ed, you just did a column on sort of America's standing in the world. There have been some recent polls released that show the United States, I think the U.S. ranked like 42nd among the countries of the world, edging out Iran. But, you know, as we fall, others gain. And you pointed out China gained. Speaker 1 (3:16) And I thought one of the interesting things in your column was that you talked about that this is not all attributable to Trump. Some of this began earlier. And I thought maybe you could start there and explain just where you see the origins of this shift. Yeah, I mean, I don't normally, you know, write about polls, but the Pew Global Opinion poll, you know, it's been going since 2002. They poll quite deeply across a lot of countries. So it's a great time sort of range to make comparisons. And the reason I picked up on it is because it's so strongly aligned. Speaker 1 (3:57) with my experience of talking to foreigners, whether they're foreign government officials or just sort of ordinary anecdotal, you know, exchanges with people when I'm abroad, which isn't just that America's standing is falling, but China's is rising. You know, those two lines are both changing and they've crossed each other quite decisively in a majority of countries. I think a lot of it, probably most, is attributable to Trump and therefore his removal. assuming he's replaced by somebody vaguely sane, his removal would improve that. But it wouldn't dramatically alter the picture because China's approval ratings, its trust, and specifically people polled in these countries were asked, which country would you trust on the geopolitical stage to do the right thing? You know, China's trust level is rising. Speaker 1 (4:57) And that's, you know, I think more complex than just Trump, although Trump is the worst feature and Operation Epic Fury and his epic incompetence is front and center of people's minds. I think it's also to do with things like open source AI, which is, of course, China's model. And therefore, it's much cheaper than America's models, which are closed. for the most part, and is therefore getting picked up a lot more in the global south. I think it's also to do with China's heavy investment in clean energy. It's still going strong on coal and everything else, but it is providing the platforms around the world to switch to renewable energy in a time when America is steaming coal-steamed ship full speed in the opposite direction. These things matter more and more. Speaker 1 (5:51) around the world. And then finally, you know, whatever you think of China's surveillance state, and it is a surveillance state, and I wouldn't dream of living there. And whatever you think about its autocracy, and it is an autocracy, it's really a one man autocracy. It is not, so far, a country that is willing to risk wars of choice to gamble on military adventure. And America remains a military at a militarily adventurous country. And that's not just down to Trump. You know that they have more closed-circuit TV cameras in the UK than anywhere else. Yeah, I'm always wiping it myself. Yeah, I just wanted to point out when you're talking about surveillance states. But, Max, you know, I'd be interested in your comments on what Ed's talking about here. But specifically, you know, when it comes to trust, part of it has to do with reliability. Speaker 1 (6:52) And one of the problems is that when you swing from Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump to the, you know, Democrats to Republicans and each group tries to undo each other's policies, I have to. I have to say, is there a way out for the United States? Or are we, by virtue of our system and our sort of cultural divides, consigned to a role of permanent unreliability, or at least unreliability for the foreseeable future? And it's certainly possible to make the pessimistic case. There's a lot of evidence for it, which you just cited. In order to maintain what tenuous hold I have on sanity at the moment, I'm choosing to be slightly more optimistic. And I actually wrote about this over the July 4 holiday, looking back on my 50 years in America, since Ed and I are both immigrants. I just got here a little bit. Speaker 1 (7:59) earlier than he did in 1976 from the Soviet Union. And I was just reflecting on how, you know, the country has changed since 1976. And I think the surprise for a lot of younger people, folks, my kids' generation is, in a lot of ways, the country's changed for the better. I mean, I just remember, you know, there have been such tremendous advances for minority rights in the last 50 plus years, you know, for African Americans. Speaker 1 (8:28) LGBTQ, so many other groups that have been such huge advances for women's rights. And of course, you can say, like, aren't things going in reverse? And in some ways they are, sure, with the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and rolling back the Voting Rights Act. But I think we're still in a better place than we were in 1976, which was, you know, a mere 10 years after the beginning of the dismantlement of American apartheid and why we were still in the midst of... Speaker 1 (8:54) battles over busing. And remember, this was a time when we were recovering from defeat in the Vietnam War. We were dealing with an energy crisis, which should seem familiar today, or dealing with inflation, which should seem familiar. But there was, I mean, America in 1976, as you guys are old enough to remember, was not a happy place. The country was very battered. And yet, we came back, we survived. We're actually much wealthier today than we were in 1976 in many ways. Speaker 1 (9:22) freer than we were in 1976. And America is still the number one power in the world, despite all of our attempts to sabotage ourselves. So, you know, I think if you just look at like the last decade, you start to pull your hair out, as you see, I've already done that. But if you take a slightly longer run view, I think maybe like the last 50 years, you can say, well, you know, we haven't done that badly over the last 50 or so years. And maybe there's some hope for the next 50 years. At least that's what I choose to believe. Well, I appreciate the optimism and the thought that we haven't undone everything that we've gained in the past 50 years. The question is whether we're trying to undo it. And Ed, one of the ways that it appears to the world that we're trying to undo it Speaker 1 (10:09) Well, you know, I