Phillips O'Brien on Venezuela and More

And why America wins battles but loses wars

I talk again with my favorite military historian/analyst about the regime change that wasn't and why America wins battles but loses wars. Transcript follows.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Krugman: Hi, everyone. Paul Krugman again. I have Phillips O’Brien, who’s kind of a regular on my Substack now. For those who haven’t seen my previous conversations with him—O’Brien is a military historian based at Saint Andrews in Scotland, although he isn’t Scots, as you will tell when he starts talking. I was immensely educated by his books long before any of this current stuff happened. He stresses getting away from the romantic notion of wars as decided by great battles and much more on logistics and production, which is the stuff that really matters. He’s been incredibly useful and far better than most of the strategic community on Ukraine.

So I thought it would be good to talk after this Venezuela…. whatever it was, and a bunch of related issues, including some other things he’s been writing about. So, hi again.

Phillips O’Brien: Thanks for having me back, Paul.

The Venezuela stuff is just extraordinary. I wrote a Substack about it this morning, Can You Do Regime Change Without Changing A Regime? That seems to be what the Trump administration has done. They have gotten rid of the dictator, but left the dictatorial system almost undisturbed. You could even argue, in some ways, strengthened because Maduro’s gone, and he was the problem. The U.S. can say all it wants about “we are in control.” But they’re clearly not in control, and in some ways they’ve reduced their ability to control the situation. So it’s quite extraordinary what’s happened. I don’t know quite what to make of it, but I think the U.S. is going to find out once again that it doesn’t have the ability to control things that it thinks it does.

Krugman: It was pretty amazing that they got one guy. We’re talking on Tuesday, and events might happen between now and when this goes out. But as of Tuesday, it’s clear the Chavista machine is still fully functional. The paramilitaries are arresting journalists and protesters and it’s all business as usual, except possibly strengthened.

O’Brien: Yeah, I think it’s strengthened. Also the opposition has been weakened. Corina Machado, who was the leader of the opposition, came out with a really pathetic—not in that she was pathetic but what she said was pathetic—interview yesterday which said that she has no contact with Trump. He’s basically not contacted her since she was given the Nobel Prize. She gets the Nobel Prize, he then cuts her off: “I’m not having anything to do with you.” So someone who could be an opposition leader who actually represents regime change in Venezuela is being stonewalled by the US president out of pique. So the opposition has been weakened by Trump, and the regime has been strengthened because they got rid of Maduro, who was a problem for the regime and now lesser known figures are fighting for control. The United States can’t do this again. It’s not like they can keep snatching presidents. You can do it once. You can’t make that a policy.

Krugman: There’s a real question about what actually happened. This was suspiciously easy. Not based on any direct evidence, but it sure has the look of a setup.

O’Brien: Absolutely. The sources weren’t named—there were sources that were saying the U.S. had connections in the Venezuelan government, and they clearly knew exactly where Maduro was. They knew how his security worked. They were able to get in and out very quickly. For all we know, it could have been even the sitting vice president or someone like that who helped. We really don’t know. But all we know is that it was someone who knew, someone who understood the system, passed that along and helped the US in, and that could strengthen the new regime coming in. But right now, there is no sign that anything but a Chavista government will stay in power. There will probably be fighting among the ministers, but it was fascinating to see the new president Delcy Rodríguez hugging the Russian and Chinese ambassadors.

Krugman: Literally hugging them, we’re not talking metaphorically here.

O’Brien: A physical hug.

Krugman: I remember Iraq and the desperate attempts by the Bush administration to have a democratic opposition they could elevate. There really wasn’t one, there was this guy Chalabi—if I remember—who posed as leader of the Democratic opposition but actually had no base at all in the country, and here there’s the opposition that actually won the 2024 election, and Trump will have nothing to do with it.

O’Brien: He did make one comment about freedom for Venezuela, but his heart wasn’t in that. What’s interesting is that they don’t even play along anymore.

Krugman: Last conference I actually did a count, Trump didn’t use the word democracy once. He did use the word oil 27 times, which is kind of interesting.

O’Brien: But even then, how does the United States seize these resources? Clearly Trump believes they can or seems to think they can, but it doesn’t change the basis of where these resources are. It would take American oil companies a long time to start pumping from them anyway, to build up the new infrastructure.

It’s just not clear what exactly beyond his idea that somehow we will control the resources, how they plan to make this work. I just don’t get it.

Krugman: So by the time this interview runs, I probably will have put this up on my Substack, but there’s something I didn’t know, which is that we talk about how Venezuela has enormous oil reserves, and it turns out that the oil reserves tripled under Chavez, not because there were actually any new discoveries or anything, but because they reclassified a bunch of basically crap oil as reserves, and the oil companies are not interested.

O’Brien: I’ve talked to some oil executives, and I don’t want to say I know the industry really well, but they’re very skeptical of this. Again, as you say, this is really heavy, dirty, crude. It’s expensive to refine. Particularly with the price of oil so low, the chance of having it be profitable in the short term is pretty small because this is not the oil you want. The idea that, with crude prices declining, people are going to throw billions into Venezuela in oil fields to try and pump out this oil is, I think, really quite skeptical. The oil companies seem to be playing along with the Trump administration because everyone’s terrified of offending the Trump administration. But I’d be very surprised if we had major investments in the short term.

Krugman: So, it’s pretty strange, but we have a regime change that wasn’t a regime change. “Emperor’s new regime change,” or something like that. As of the time we’re having this conversation, I don’t think anyone reading The New York Times would have a clear sense that we just basically left the same gang in power. The only place I’m seeing clear reporting is in places like Bloomberg. The business news seems to be clear about the nature of the problem.

O’Brien: They’re always better—the business reports were really good on Trump sanctions on Russian oil. If you read a lot of the press, you’d think, “oh, Trump was being tough on Russian oil.” He would read the oil press and they’d go, “actually, prices of crude are declining because the market doesn’t believe you’re going to make any real difference.” So that’s often the case. You can find out a great deal in the more specialist press, which understands the economic behavior behind the actions, than you can looking at what is being said. I think this is really worrying, how Trump has really cowed the press and he can say batshit stuff. He can say any old thing about, “I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that,” and he has no ability to necessarily do any of this. Yet it’s repeated widely that only the United States now will control Venezuela. But that’s simply based on the president of the United States saying he is going to do that and that we allow these things to go, I think, unchallenged too much.

One thing that also particularly bugged me is now people are reframing the Monroe Doctrine by saying the United States believes it can always interfere in the Western Hemisphere whenever it wants. It was far more complex than that. There’s always been a debate about it. And yes, there have been parts of it like that, Theodore Roosevelt. But there was also Franklin Roosevelt and the Good Neighbor policy that openly rejected that. So the Monroe Doctrine was never what Trump says clearly it is—or the “Donroe Doctrine,” is the way he called it the other day. But we seem to just have dumbed down everything to live in this Trump world where we just take what he says and say, “okay, there must be something to that, because the president of the USA says it.”

Krugman: It’s an amazing thing that we have this crude “we’re going to seize resources” view of the world, on the part of Trump, which is well over a century out of date. This hasn’t been the way the world works since the Industrial Revolution got seriously underway, and yet here we are.

One of the things that you wrote about that I thought was really interesting—it’s pre-Venezuela—you’ve been writing about how people and particularly Americans misunderstand war in general. Can you talk about that a bit because I think it’s very interesting.

O’Brien: The Venezuelan intervention was almost a textbook case. What I have been trying to say is that Americans get excited by operations or battles; the US military is actually brilliant at winning battles and pulling off operations. There’s probably no other military in the world that could have abducted Maduro as effectively as the US military did. That is what the US military does well: it has an object, it usually blows it up or it seizes it, and then goes home. The problem is that there’s a huge disconnect between doing that and achieving your strategic goals or winning a war. The United States didn’t lose a battle by any standard in the Vietnam War. They won every engagement with the Taliban in Afghanistan. But they didn’t win the wars because they were too obsessed with the engagement, with the operational brilliance, to see what they were actually doing—”how is this actually achieving our aims?” I think the U.S way of war is upside down. It does the granular really well, but it absolutely fails in looking at the bigger picture, and this is typical.

I think something that we’re seeing in Venezuela, and what the U.S always does, is downplay the important role of allies; that’s hugely important, working with other countries. In fact, I can tell you there is only one rule for an intervention that has any chance of success. The only way an intervention has any chance of success is if the people on the ground are going to fight for you. If you have allies who are willing actually to fight—like say, the Ukrainians—then you have a chance of success in an intervention. If you’re going to do the fighting, if you’re going to go into Afghanistan, Vietnam and infantilize the people who might support you, you’re going to lose that war. But that’s how the U.S. way of war operates, it infantilizes other countries, demeans them, says the U.S. can do everything, and then the U.S. ends up winning battle after battle and then losing the war because they can’t keep it going. This could be something we’re going to see in Venezuela if we keep seeing these kinds of interventions. We don’t actually have any support in Venezuela, we’re alienating the Venezuelan opposition with our behavior and we’re alienating a lot of other countries in the region. I think these countries are looking around and saying, “what the heck? Who’s going to support this?”

Krugman: The US has—at least up till some potential conflict with China—had overwhelming superiority in armament. As you’ve written, the US can do logistics like nobody else can, but as you said recently, people don’t pay enough attention to things like logistics because they look at the U.S wars, and the U.S is completely on a different planet when it comes to that, and nobody else is, but that doesn’t translate to winning wars. In Iraq we invented allies who didn’t exist, and in Venezuela we actually had people who were desperate to have the U.S. as an ally and got blown off because Trump was feeling peeved.

O’Brien: There’s so much there, Paul. But the logistics one; it’s one of the things people forgot about logistics and war because the U.S. did it so well. The U.S. has the ability to pick up something and move it around the world very quickly with the kind of lift capacity that no other state does, so we forgot about it. When we looked at a Russian invasion of Ukraine, people simply assumed the Russians could do the logistics because no one had thought about logistics as a serious problem for a long time, because the U.S. military had seemed to have solved it. Actually, when we look at Russia and Ukraine now, we are seeing a logistic struggle, this war is being determined by logistic flows: “who can make things and where can they send them?” They’re operating in a much more real world than the US did. The US operated in this war-gaming-high-school-boy war where you would fight the battle assuming everything would get to the place for the battle. So, that is absolutely one of the key problems with the US way of war.

But then when we look at it and we focus on the battle, what we have done also in the hemispheric way is assume no one else matters. So when we talk about this new Western Hemisphere obsession—the State Department even calls it “our hemisphere,” which is absolutely bonkers—what the United States is doing is saying “we have no allies, we have no friends. We have our power and our power alone will determine what we do.” By the way, that’s never worked out for the United States. The United States was founded through allies. You might say its diplomacy helped win the Civil War and helped the country survive. It triumphed in the First and Second World Wars because of allies. Now it seems to have this weird notion that it can go and do whatever it wants, and no one will stop it because it hasn’t thought about these things in realistic terms, it’s just thought about them in this American echo chamber. But I do believe the country is heading for a very serious fall.

Krugman: Random thoughts: I ran across one of these people who was into the whole we-are-the-new-Roman-Empire sort of thing, and who made the horrifying discovery that the secret of the Roman Empire, the secret of the rise of the Republic wasn’t that the legions were the best troops on the planet. They might have been, but not that much better than others. It was that Rome had a genius for cultivating alliances, and expanded citizenship.

O’Brien: Right. What Rome did is it welcomed other people.

Krugman: At some point they welcomed immigrants to Rome itself. Then they also converted the allies into citizens.

O’Brien: They expanded the citizenship first up and down Italy and then into Gull. So that Rome was not Rome. It was actually a real multi-ethnic polity. But by 50 A.D., it was a huge area with citizenship that expanded all the way from the English Channel down into the Mediterranean.

Krugman: Mary Beard’s book, SPQR, it’s one of my favorite books of all time. She ends it sometime around the early third century, when basically everybody became a citizen, because they just kept on expanding it.

O’Brien: Another thing, you might understand the politics of it: how anti-immigrant became so powerful when economically, it’s so disastrous. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see this happening ten years ago. I knew there were issues with immigration and certain people felt scared, but I never thought it would become such an overriding concern that people would do things that could economically damage the country.

Krugman: The question is, actually how many are there? For what it’s worth, polling shows the public opinion has thermostatically swung quite pro-immigrant again. To a large extent, we’re talking about the personal obsession of Trump and a few people around him.

Let’s talk for a bit about Ukraine, and then I want to talk about the bigger picture. A month ago there was another spate of the usual stories: There’s been a regular rhythm of unstoppable Russian juggernaut stories in the press. You’ve been pretty caustic about that.

O’Brien: 2025, Russia mobilized over 30,000 new troops a month, that’s a big mobilization. They were generating 400,000 or so plus new troops, they expended almost all of them. So, if you’re going to look at this year, the Russians probably lost what they generated in troop numbers, and they took 0.8 of 1% of Ukraine. By any historical standard, we would be saying the Russian army is in a massive quagmire. By the way, they’re probably not going to be able to raise that number of troops this year, or they will struggle to raise that number of troops this year. So the trajectory of what the Russians are able to do is not a positive one. They were able to make advances in certain areas, because they do not care about their soldiers’ lives. They’ve been able to go farm field to farm field, take advantage of bad weather, but they were never going to break through because you can’t build up forces near the front. You can’t build up vehicles, you can’t build up depots. So the idea that you might make a breakthrough and send tanks into it is just fanciful, it’s not going to happen. The Russians are stuck fighting this form of warfare.

My own view is had Kamala Harris won, or a Biden policy continued, the Russians would actually be close to defeat, that Trump has saved them to a certain degree and provided them with a great deal of support and protection that the Biden administration would not have done, and would have put them in a much more difficult diplomatic military situation. But Russia is still there, partly because they’re now being protected by Trump and allowed to fight the war that they want to fight with very few repercussions. But they’re still not doing well by historical standards; they’re in a disastrous situation.

Krugman: For what it’s worth for viewers who may not have seen our earlier discussions—the business about depots, about reserves behind the front is one of those things that is really kind of revelatory to me. I think I learned from you that overrunning a position is one thing—opening a gap in the lines—but you have to have stuff close at hand. You have to have armored divisions. The armored divisions rush through the gap and carry out these grand envelopments and all of that. But in this drone age, you can’t have supplies. You can’t have reserves, anywhere close to the front line, or they just get shattered.

O’Brien: The big depots, the ones that you would want to support a major advance, are 50 miles or so behind the lines, so they can’t keep those anywhere near the front. These are the big ones.

Krugman: Which means that by the time they can be brought up, there’s no chance of exploiting a breach. None of the stuff that has happened the way the war used to work, works anymore.

O’Brien: They have to fight to even get to the front line. By the way, the Ukrainians are adjusting to this war by taking people away from the front line. Again, this is the American way of war, where I think they just get it a bit ass backwards. You have people like John Bolton saying, “oh, the Ukrainians need to draft all the young people and send them to the front line.” No, the Ukrainians need to keep doing what they’re doing, which is to reduce the number of troops in the front line, save their troops in an operational reserve, and let the Russians waste their own forces on fighting, because being on the front line is incredibly dangerous. The chance of you being found and killed is really high. What you want to do is do is as little human fighting as possible and as much machine fighting as possible, because you’re not going to deal with a breakthrough. The Russians aren’t going to be able to send hundreds of tanks through a gap in the line. So you don’t have to worry about that. That’s adjusting to reality as opposed to our wargaming view of what war is.

Krugman: And what that means, in terms of practical stuff, is that it’s not that Ukraine is winning exactly, but the idea that they’re going to fold up and collapse, even with U.S. aid cut off, seems to be all wrong. I was just looking at the Ukraine aid tracker, basically the U.S. cut off all aid in the summer.

O’Brien: It’s gone, yeah. The U.S. is not providing any aid at all. They are selling very small amounts through Europe. So the Europeans are paying full fare. In fact, probably inflated figures to pass on some U.S. weaponry to Ukraine. But we’re talking single digit billions. When the Biden administration gave 140 billion, so this is a tiny amount. Even then there are reports that the Trump administration regularly slows down the supply even of things that the Europeans have purchased. They’re trying to make it as difficult as possible without losing all leverage. The Trump administration wants to maintain some leverage over Ukraine and leverage over Europe, that’s why they’re continuing these very small number of sales.

Krugman: I hadn’t really thought of that. I was wondering why there was still some leaking through.

O’Brien: Because they want to force Ukraine and Europe to take a really bad deal. If they cut everything off, then they would have no leverage whatsoever. I actually think we underrate the Trump administration because what they do is understand the psychology of the people in Europe who desperately want the U.S. to be what it was. They want the U.S. to be pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia: to support them. The Trump administration throws them crumbs. Every once in a while Trump says, “I’m mad at Putin. Oh, yes, Ukraine is doing a little bit better.” But this maintains their leverage so when it comes time to make a deal, they can force them to take as bad a deal as possible. I think we saw that perfectly in October, November. Remember, this is when Trump did this bit of the public pivot to support Ukraine and said he was anti-Putin and all of that. But at the same time, that’s when they worked out the 28 point deal with Russia. So behind the scenes they were dealing, they were working out a drill, basically were taking a Russian plan and saying “okay, we’re going to make this the U.S. plan.” Whereas publicly they were pretending to fall out with Putin. So I think that that was the great example of how they’re operating. They know what they’re doing and they’re taking advantage of very naive hopes in Europe that they might change their mind to maintain their leverage while protecting Putin, because ultimately what they’re doing is giving Putin the gift of time.

If the Europeans and Ukrainians won’t take a deal Putin wants, this allows Putin to continue the war, knowing the U.S. isn’t going to be his enemy, which provides him a great deal of freedom. So the U.S is doing a real service to the Russians right now. I know Americans don’t want to admit it, but that’s the reality of the war.

Krugman: It’s always interesting to wonder why: what the motivation is.

O’Brien: Money and actually long term business relationships. Trump has been doing business with them since the 80s, I think. In some ways, these are his people, he knows them. In the world where he trusts very few people, he knows they always come up with the money. God knows what else they might have on him. I always thought it was interesting—last week, the reaction when Putin just told them this nonsense story that the Ukrainians had attacked his palace. And Trump doesn’t question it. He doesn’t go to U.S. intelligence and go, “is this true?” At the next press conference, he goes, “look, Ukrainians attack Putin, and I’m angry. How could they do this? I’m really upset.” It just showed how the Russians really control his thoughts and how it was an emotional reaction to the idea that the Ukrainians might attack Putin, and that was unfiltered.

Krugman: Something actually sincere. This was Trump really having feelings. But it’s funny because he doesn’t appear to have empathy for very many people, but he does seem to have a lot of empathy for Putin, which is always just kind of mind boggling.

O’Brien: It’s fear. He seems to crave his affection. Which is weird—I don’t understand narcissists to that degree—but as a narcissist, you’re not supposed to fully crave that. But maybe every narcissist has their Putin. You’re the one person they need to prove that they are the greatest person in the world. And Trump needs Putin to convince himself of that.

Krugman: I actually met Putin sometime before the first invasion of Ukraine. There was a conference in Yaroslavl. I shared a stage with him, and I had a terrible cold. And, despite all the medication, I was coughing and Putin made fun of my cough. Nasty little man. (laughs)

O’Brien: Of course, now he’d probably have you shot for getting him sick.

Krugman: Oh for sure.

The kompromat story: that the Russians have something on Trump. You just have to wonder, given what everybody already knows about Trump, how could this matter? So I think it has to be something more emotional, that Putin is his emotional support animal or something like that.

Sorry, I’m going to backtrack for a second. The United States cut off aid, except for this trickle, which is, as you say, for leverage. So the Ukrainians have been fighting naked in that sense, since last summer at least. And yet, as you say, it is tiny if you look at the map, that nothing has moved significantly there. I’ve seen speculation, or even some alleged reporting, that Putin is also being fed misinformation, he’s being told about battlefield triumphs that exist only for his consumption.

O’Brien: He seems to be told a few things, he’s being told outright lies that the Russians control parts of the line: they don’t. We know that because he came out and claimed, “we have taken Kupiansk.”

Krugman: That’s right.

O’Brien: There was no doubt about it, he had been reported. He said, “yes, the Russian occupation is now ours, Pokrovsk is now ours.” No, and then the next thing we know, Zelensky’s actually: The Ukrainians have pushed the Russians back from Kupiansk. And indeed, the Russians still haven’t taken all of the Pokrovsk, that’s more in the balance after being fought over for a year and a half.

So clearly Putin is being told geographically things that are not true, that the Russian army is taking areas they have not taken, which is not uncommon for dictators. This is often what dictators are told, and they believe it. The second thing is, he seems to be told the Ukrainian army is on its last legs, that is a regular theme of what he is saying, “Ukrainians are going to crack soon”. That certainly is the kind of thing we can assume he is being told, because that’s why his military leaders would say, “give me more, give me more, they’re about to go, they’re about to crack,” because the opposite is something they don’t want to face, which means they’re throwing away their own soldiers and actually not getting a lot for it. So the system’s probably providing Putin with really slanted information. But of course, he wants to be fed that information.

Krugman: Viewers who don’t obsessively follow this stuff may not know about Kupiansk. Battlefield victories are hard to find here, but this is a clear cut battlefield victory for Ukraine. The Russians seized part of it. We use terminology that talks as if they were clear battle lines and it doesn’t actually make sense anymore, but effectively the Ukrainians cut off the Russian force there and destroyed it. Wait, did Zelensky actually visit Kupiansk?

O’Brien: He visited. How they did it—I’ve been talking with Ukrainian officers and one in particular did talk me through what they do, it’s extraordinary. It shows you how the battlefield works. The Ukrainians operate with very few soldiers because the more soldiers you have, it just means the more targets you’re putting out. So the way they actually were able to push the Russians back from Kupiansk was by having very precise intelligence with very small numbers of troops who could operate very quickly. So honestly, they could say “for the next hour, we don’t see any drones in this area,” which means you now have to get moving right away and get from this point to this house. They have to know exactly where you are going to end up when the Russian drones are back, and therefore these have to be good troops, they have to be really experienced troops who could then follow that order. And they have to, by the way, be able to tell those troops exactly what’s coming up, because one Russian soldier they haven’t identified can ruin the entire operation. So how the Ukrainians did it was by being very trained, very precise and being able to do these exact maneuvers, something the Russians can’t do. The Russians are doing the opposite, they’re just throwing humans at the problem and hoping it takes care of itself. The Ukrainians are trying to compensate, but the fact that the Ukrainians could do that is, I think, a sign that they are adapting and still have by far the more adaptive and resilient military.

Krugman: Kind of brings me to another topic I want to talk about, which is the role of intelligence. As you said, when Putin claimed that his house had been attacked, Trump apparently didn’t ask the CIA or the NSA, “what’s the truth here?” In general, intelligence or remote signals intelligence is something that the U.S. and its allies used to be supreme at; Bletchley Park, and all that.

O’Brien: What we seem to have learned about intelligence is that the U.S. is great at collecting it and not great at analyzing it. They have this extraordinary collection system that they can go around the world and listen in on most conversations and they can gather intelligence incredibly well. By the way, they knew Putin was going to invade Ukraine in February 2020. They knew, they collected that. Where they fail is in the analysis of what they do with that information. “What does it mean that we have found out all of this,” but if their analysis says, “Kyiv is going to fall in a week,” or as we’ve just seen in Venezuela, their analysis was, “oh, let’s work with the Madurists.” That actually was supposedly the US intelligence analysis—that actually the best people to work with is Maduro’s own regime. We have a real analytical problem in our intelligence agencies. What the atmosphere must be like there with Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence. It’s got to be deteriorating and if anything, getting worse from a dangerously bad base. But the US is an intelligence superpower and an intelligence failure at the same time.

Krugman: Then you layer on top of that a commander in chief and the people around him who don’t want to know, who don’t ask. Trump himself posted pictures from the war room at Mar-A-Lago for the Venezuela operation.

O’Brien: Oh God, I missed those.

Krugman: Oh, you missed a great scene because you can see they set up the “secure war room,” which actually just has curtains around it. It’s not even a room. But what’s really amazing is that behind the people there, you can see a big computer screen which actually has Twitter on it with a search for Venezuela. So they have the world’s most powerful intelligence gathering system, and they’re basically looking at Twitter or X, it’s an amazing thing, but I guess it comes to: if you don’t want to know, then it doesn’t matter how much people could tell you, because you don’t want to know.

O’Brien: Or you don’t care what reality is, you just care how Twitter’s discussing it. And that could also be what’s going on. Trump’s reality isn’t reality. It’s whatever social media says it is or whatever he tells social media that it is.

Krugman: Yeah. And the social media themselves are not reality. Because it’s bots and Russians and Nigerians.

O’Brien: That really came home to be when Trump won the 2024 election, and then there was that purge of Russian bots. As soon as the election was over, I lost like 15,000 Twitter followers.

Krugman: I didn’t even count, but I had pretty much given up on Twitter, where I had 2 million followers. But it became toxic. I had to shut down replies entirely or they’d be overrun. Then according to the information I got, my account got hijacked by someone in Saratov, Russia, and I haven’t even tried to get it back. I don’t want to deal with Musk and all of that. So I’ve been shut out. Whoever hijacked it put up one post, pro-crypto, and then deleted it. The account has been silent ever since. I’m not doing enough. I should be on BlueSky more. But basically the Substack is where you kind of hear me now.

O’Brien: Substack, I have to say, there are the occasional Russian bots, but there’s not that many.

Krugman: Readers report comments that don’t look right but it’s only 1 or 2 per a day. And so far, so good. God knows, I had a conversation last week with somebody and we all kind of worried because Mark on Jason’s investment company has a large stake in Substack, and we never know whether it’s—when it gets enshittified, we should say “when”, not “if”, but not yet anyway.

O’Brien: God, I hope not.

Krugman: Well, I think part of the reason to build a base is so that you can actually pick it up and leave if necessary.

Back to the U.S. role in the world: can the U.S. ever get back to where it was?

O’Brien: No it cannot. Basically it was the leader of an alliance system and actually the guarantor here of the rules based order, which was flawed, entirely flawed. I understand that, but it was a rules based order where there were international courts and there were attempts to do trade organizations and all of that. I think that’s done because the US, first of all, we don’t even know if the U.S. wants to go back. I think that’s an important thing. We don’t know that the U.S. has any stomach to go back. But even if it did, the world’s moving on right now, so the people aren’t listening to the U.S., they certainly are not going to trust the AI. But I think the Americans thought the world might have disliked them.

But the world really relied on the US more than Americans understood. Europeans in many ways couldn’t live without the US. They had become utterly reliant on the US to do their strategic thinking, same with Japan, Taiwan. Many of these states were completely emotionally and strategically reliant on the US. That’s gone because they’ve suddenly realized by doing that they put themselves in a great deal of danger. So the U.S can’t wake up in three years and go, “I’m sorry, bad moment. Let’s go back to the way it was.” That’s just not going to happen. And I don’t see how you make these international organizations work again. How is anyone going to do the WTO now?

Krugman: That’s up my alley. The trading system, even pre-war, was one of the great successes of international cooperation. It was kind of a funny system, which didn’t necessarily ensure good policies, but we did have to have rules and the rules really mattered. This wasn’t a gloss.

I’m talking for .myself here, I spent one year in government, as a sub political level in the Reagan administration, although I actually wrote the 1983 economic report for the president. But anyway, I’d be in meetings where some proposal would come up and the guy from the U.S. Trade Representative, his office would say that would be GATT illegal, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which is the underlying framework. And that was it, even the Reagan administration did not do things that were in clear violation of the international trading rules, and it’s gone now.

O’Brien: It’s absolutely gone, you can’t put that back together, right?

Krugman: Well, give us another 30-40 years, we might be able to. So any concluding thoughts?

O’Brien: Concluding thoughts, boy. The big concluding thought is that the US is weakening itself. I think that’s the overriding thing that I don’t get, because it’s all this talk about “American strength” and “American power,” but it seems to be almost deliberately scaled to do the opposite, is it stupidity, is it deliberate? I don’t know, but the US is doing a great deal of damage to itself, and I don’t see any way to stop it in the short term.

Krugman: That’s an upbeat concluding note for our conversation. (laughs) Thanks so much for talking to me.

O’Brien: Thanks a lot.