I'm going to tap foreign policy for a bit here. I thought one of Harris's strongest debate moments was around Ukraine. And when she said, yeah, Donald Trump might end that war faster by ceding it to Vladimir Putin. That also got at a real change. It's actually happening, seems to be happening in the Republican Party towards a much more isolationist strain than we've seen in a long time. I think with Trump, it was sort of instinctual. With someone like Vance, it's becoming more ideological, right, on Ukraine funding. Among young conservatives, there is a skepticism of different kinds of aid, including on Israel. There is the Chicago Council on World Affairs Survey. For the first time in nearly 50 years, a majority of Republicans prefer isolationism. When do you make this turn? Well, I think a lot

of it is contingent. It's a specific result of the roller coaster that Americans have been on when it comes to foreign policy, including, you know, again, the defining experiences that our generation would have seen of America's involvement abroad, largely involving policy failure. The Iraq war, which I view as a failure in its conception, and then the experience in Afghanistan. That doesn't change the fact that supporting Ukraine is the right thing to do. And it's especially concerning that in J.D. Vance, you really could not have found a running mate more visibly aligned with the

anti-Ukraine, more or less, side of the party. Yeah, he's not just been in isolation, he's been contemptuous of Ukraine. Yes. It's a different... That's right. It's a different emotional tone of it.

That's right. And it is jarring, for those who remember as recently as, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, there being a sense that it was actually Republicans who were too stuck in views about Russia that had formed under the Soviet Union. Although I think another thing for us to think about as Democrats is how naive we may have been about any democratic tendencies in Putin's Russia all along. There's

a lot of mocking of Mitt Romney for saying Russia was our great geopolitical threat. Not saying they, not saying I ranked them first, but it doesn't look as crazy as it did when he said it. No,

it's true. It's true. Because it's only a few years after that that a Russian influence operation really affected and harmed our country, right? So I don't know how to make sense of it other than to say that, you know, one of many things that I think might be possible if there's a decisive defeat of Trump and importantly, a decisive defeat of many members of Congress who were aligned with him in swing districts, is the prospect, again, I don't want to sound too optimistic, I know it could go many different directions, but at least the possibility of a normal Republican Party in the future, by which I mostly mean one that is no less committed to democracy than the Democratic Party, as we would have expected of both parties until a few years ago. But I also think that means one where we can debate exactly how America makes good on our values as well as our interests abroad, but less disagreement over whether we should. Is

there a danger in Democrats becoming too big a tent on this? I was thinking about this when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris. And thinking about the same history you're describing, right? I am not on the George W. Bush revisionism train. I think we're still dealing with a wreckage of the policy failures and disasters that he and Dick Cheney created. But people, you know, as you say, there is a widespread agreement. Iraq was a disaster. Afghanistan was ultimately something of a disaster. And the obviously withdrawal very, very difficult in part for those reasons. I think people feel very uneasy about what we can achieve in the world we're arming ukraine but is a really a path to any kind of resolution there are we just throwing money dollars weaponry into a stalemate we have been behind israel and gaza but you know people are mixed on what they want to see happen there, but not this, right? This does not look good to anybody. And I think there's a feeling that what we're doing abroad is just not working, that the world feels in disorder, that we're funding it but don't have a clear pathway through it. And then, like, here comes Dick Cheney to endorse a Democratic nominee. So on the one hand, yeah, I'm not where Donald Trump is. I'm not an isolationist. But I also wonder about whether or not Democrats are getting themselves into some trouble here by, I don't think, not all that clearly articulating what stability looks like or what the goal is beyond we're pro-democracy? What is democratic foreign policy trying to achieve? Well,

part of how I try to square the circle here is that a huge part of the problem with Bush-Cheney foreign policy was this idea that there was good and evil. We were good. The countries that they wanted to attack were evil. And that was how policy worked. And if we, the good, came in and blew away the evil, everything would be better. Obviously, that was a disastrous way to think about U.S. foreign policy. What you have with Trumpism is not a reasoned response to that. It's more saying, basically, right and wrong don't matter. At best, it's right and wrong don't matter. At worst, it's we should actually be doing the opposite of believing in democracy. We should be aligning ourselves with dictators or would-be dictators or at least authoritarian and authoritarian-like leaders. A commitment to democracy is wildly important for America at home and abroad. Without it, we are just country out there. We've never been a perfect democracy, but democracy is the most important thing about us, and we remain the most important democracy. And I believe that continues to have to be at the core of how we engage around the world. Doesn't mean we get to dictate how other countries work. It does mean that we promote the values that go with that and a set of values that it turns out, even if you're not a democracy, you can buy into in the name of some universal commitments, which is a rules-based international order where it matters if you follow the rules. That's part of what's at stake in Ukraine, as well as regional security concerns, as well as the importance of standing up to the kind of aggression that is trying to change an international border through force in Europe. And the strategy that the Biden-Harris administration has has been one of finding ways to stand up to that without a single American troop being sent into conflict, partly in the view that if we don't, we might make it a more dangerous place where more American troops will be sent into conflict. So I think the answer isn't to throw up your hands in runway screaming and say we can't do any good by engaging, even if we've been humbled by foreign policy misadventures from Iraq back to Vietnam and more. But it also certainly can't be one where we are amoral or worse, which is the direction that Trump has led us in. Going

back to your theory, though, that you build trust by showing gain. I think that gain can be ideological. I don't think everything in politics is material. One thing that has not been all that clearly articulated to me, in my view, is, well, in these two conflicts that the Biden administration has committed itself to, what are we looking to have happened here? We're calibrating Ukraine very carefully what kind of weapons we give them, and in their view, such that it is possible for them to survive in the war, but not necessarily possible for them to win the war. And similarly, in Israel, it's a little hard to say what the end game is here. We've not demanded they do these ceasefires or they don't get our weaponry. We don't have a pathway there to a two-state solution and there's none coming from their leadership. I think one reason support for some things is beginning to drain is people think, I don't know what I'm even supposed to be hoping for here. This just seems like we are now in a grind. So when you think about that,

what does success look like? Well, I don't think you can look at either of those or any of those in terms of a glorious victory. That's not what this is about. Sometimes it's about facing terrible things that are happening and preventing a bad outcome or preventing a worse outcome. And certainly in the case of Ukraine, the right outcome is for Russia to go home and leave and leave Ukraine alone. on the Ukrainians themselves. But also what happens there and in so many other places depends on whether a freedom-loving world stands with them. Not because it will kind of easily or automatically lead to some simple outcome that anybody would have asked for. Remember, Ukrainians didn't ask to be the symbol of world democracy. They actively work to avoid the struggle that they are in. This is not something that we created or wanted to create. It's when that happens, what do you do? Especially when it tests your values. There's a test of our values

and we have to meet it.