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Before you listen to this episode of The Scene and the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
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Do check out Pulya Baazi hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Koteswane, two really good
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Kick ass podcast in Hindi.
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Has there ever been a democracy where whoever wins an election becomes not a prime minister
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or a president but a king?
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Until the next elections, he rules the country instead of serving it.
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He owns the damn thing.
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The people are his subjects.
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Well, thank goodness there are no countries that elect kings like this.
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The reason for that is that all modern democracies are set up to put the people in charge, at
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And whoever gets elected as prime minister or president or chancellor is governed by
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rules and institutions that are meant to protect the people from the arbitrary whims of any
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madman who might get elected to office.
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And those who get elected to power always want more and more power and the rules and
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institutions get in the way.
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And these days we have more and more authoritarian leaders coming to power across the world who
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want to undermine these rules and institutions and who want to be king.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Borma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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In recent years, we've seen the rise of populist authoritarians across the world.
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Trump in the US, Erdogan in Turkey, Orban in Hungary, Modi in India.
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What do they have in common?
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Well, the author Jean-Werner Muller wrote a book a couple of years ago where he pointed
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out a number of things that populists tend to have in common.
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I wrote a column on the book for the Times of India, which is linked on the page for
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One of the things he pointed out is that populists tend to try and consolidate their power by
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undermining the rules and institutions that otherwise act as a check on them.
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These rules and institutions are the subject of our show today.
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My guest on the show is Ameyya Naik, who is a lawyer and policy analyst, a graduate of
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the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a former research scholar of the Takshashila
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He also writes regularly for the magazine I edit, Pragati, at thinkpragati.com and is
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one expert on foreign policy I have a lot of time for.
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But before I get to my conversation with him, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Ameya, welcome to the Scene in the Unseen.
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Hi Amit, it's good to be here.
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Ameya, you know if you ask young kids at the age of 10, what do you want to be when you
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grow up and they'll say all kinds of things, you know they want to be astronauts or they
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want to be rock stars or they want to be even engineers or doctors if they're too influenced
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Very few people kids say hey I want to grow up and be a policy analyst and I want to specialize
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in international relations.
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How did you get into all this?
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So if you ask me at 10, I'm guessing my answer would have been something like I want to be
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And I did go to law school, I'm a lapsed lawyer, I've never practiced.
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In part because the kind of law I specialize in is public international law which means
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not people but states are parties.
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I guess I read a lot of like it's like thrillers but more about negotiation and diplomacy than
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about spies and shooting.
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That was one part of it.
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So like not John Le Carre but Morgenthau.
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Yeah, there's fiction to be had in the diplomacy space as well.
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I did a bunch of like debates and model you and some things in school and I remember just
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being you know the experience of playing diplomat for a day was fascinating enough that I was
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like this might be what I actually want to do with my life.
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In India that's not necessarily the easiest thing to do because you sort of have exactly
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one professional path which is get into the foreign services.
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And so I sort of spent college and law school trying to do that and didn't quite make it.
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And then I had to look around and be like okay so now if I want to study this professionally
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and find other ways and other places to do it, how do I go about that?
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That's where an international law focus and sort of policy analysis as a field grows in.
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And you know when you started studying say international relations and international
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law and so on and so forth and you look through the last term from the time India has been
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independent and all of that, what are the kind of coherent themes or strands that emerge?
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Well especially given the episode we're going to do, there's obviously a strand around the
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development of a liberal institutional order.
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Especially post-World War II, you really can't escape nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament
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as a theme and it's a big one, both in its successes and its failures.
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You know if you want the jargon term for it, hegemonic transition is the third one.
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So how the US rises from the ashes of the British Empire, a superb book you can read
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about this by the way is called Safe Passage by Corey Schake on precisely the peaceful
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transition of power from the British to the United States, peaceful within courts because
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you know world wars and now potentially with China rising, what might the next hegemonic
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And you know what we're talking about obviously is a sort of innocence impelled by the rise
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of authoritarian leaders like Trump and Orban and Erdogan and to some extent Modi and I
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once written a column last year about populism which looked at Jan Werner Muller's book about
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populism and he identified seven or eight things that populist leaders had in common
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and one of them which all of these people we named have in common is that they immediately
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start attacking and eroding institutions and it's almost as if you know guys like Trump
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believe that democracy is all about elections and that's it, you win that particular beauty
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contest and you're king for five years and nothing else matters.
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But actually democracy is a lot more than that as much as the act of the people expressing
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themselves through voting, it's you know the rules and institutions matter a great deal.
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How did this understanding evolve that rules and institutions matter?
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How do we design a system of government?
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That's a great question, first of all you're absolutely right that democracy is a lot more
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Voting is a lot more than just voting, there's a whole bunch of systems around on you know
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who gets to vote and how much each vote counts for and how the votes are counted, public
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choice theory, whether it's machines doing them or humans and so on and so forth, none
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of those are trivial decisions but zoom out to sort of the big philosophical question
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In a sense what you're asking is do we need governments and why do we need them and I
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would say yes we need them and we need them because there are a set of problems that individuals
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acting in their own best self-interest unfortunately are not able to solve.
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I think we all kind of agree that we need them but then the question is how do they
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evolve and how can they be designed?
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You know if you take as a given that basically the goal of a government is to solve collective
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action problems right, is to solve situations where each individual person finds themselves
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in what you know what game theory would call a prisoner's dilemma.
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If everybody cooperates you're going to do better but really you have a higher payoff
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right now for defecting rather than cooperating.
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So again phenomenal book you can read, this one's old, it's by Robert Axelrod, it's called
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the evolution of cooperation.
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The evolution of cooperation, one of my favorite books and one of my recent guests Matt Ridley
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talks about as well and Ridley in fact was, I did a recent episode with him where he was
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talking about the evolution of government and he said that all governments or the state
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essentially first began as a protection racket and then they evolved to other things.
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So what you're talking about you know all this collective action and looking after rights
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as classical liberals would say and all that, it's kind of post-facto rationalizations,
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it begins as protection rackets and then we've you know figured out how do we rationalize
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it and then how do we bring it under control.
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I mean one of the great dilemmas of any society is that you want the government to serve the
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society instead of the other way around.
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So this is a famous school in political science and political theory, right, best developed
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by Charles Tilley in politics and Manker Olson in economics, Tilley's essay is famously war
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making and state making as organized crime and it's right, it's sort of the function
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that it served was hey I'm a feudal lord, I'm going to stop other feudal lords from
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And Olson's book in fact was called stationary bandits.
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So let's make a distinction here between sort of the historical reason that governments
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And the theoretical function that rules or institutions serve, right.
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And so on the latter, on the theoretical function that they serve, it is precisely that if you
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let the guy in power do whatever he or she wants, then that person is going to do things
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that are good for them and not necessarily for the people in whose interest they are
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supposed to be acting and the reason that Axelrod's work is just so defining of the
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field is because he shows that if you actually play out that game and by the way he did this
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by mailing a version of that game to a bunch of people and asking them to play it, there
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is a clear superior strategy that emerges.
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That strategy is what he calls nice tit for tat, right.
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Start by assuming the other guy will play by the rules.
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If they don't punish them, as you go on punishing them, that sort of devolves into a situation
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where clearly you're not able to work together.
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If they do continue cooperating and as that builds up, it goes beyond the point where
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you're just building trust between those two people related to that interaction.
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That trust itself becomes a valuable commodity that can be used to do other things.
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And if I remember correctly, he termed it reciprocal altruism.
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I mean, the piece of this that I find most fascinating, right, is at some point of time
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after you've had the good experience of somebody abiding by the rules for a number of turns,
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One, those rules themselves take on a sort of existence of their own.
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This is this famous experiment.
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This has been done on the negative side, but this famous experiment of like five monkeys
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in a cage and every time they try to walk towards the ladder in the middle that leads
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up to the fruits, they get doused with cold water, right.
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And then one of the monkeys is taken out and a new monkey is put in.
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This new monkey has no idea about this cold water thing.
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That monkey starts walking towards the ladder because hey, fruits, the other four will jump
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and pull it back before it gets anywhere near the ladder because they know what's going
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Then you have three old monkeys, two new monkeys, two old monkeys, three new monkeys, four,
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five new monkeys, none of which have experienced cold water.
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And yet they pull each other back.
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But they know that there's a rule.
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The rule is if you go close to the ladder, something bad will happen.
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We don't let that happen.
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And you know, and conservatives would love this because it tells you that rules evolve
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for the reason traditions evolve for the reason.
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And you know, it might not be as blatant as you will experience something unpleasant if
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you try to go and grab that reason may not always be a nice thing here is you want to
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avoid cold water, but you know, you have other kinds of impulses and instincts, but the insight
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is that there are some things that we don't mess with because we know that there are going
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to be negative consequences.
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And a game that's played out long enough with enough trust builds out.
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The rule actually takes on that sort of existence of its own.
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You know, if you read like Fraser's work in sociology and like the evolution of religion,
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for instance, it's precisely that first it's the divine that's sacred.
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Then it's the rules that you have to follow and interacting with the divine that becomes
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Eventually, you know, the divine is forgotten, but the rules and the people who enforce them
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still have sacred authority.
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You could substitute government for sacred authority there if you like the church is
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one form of government in itself and the government is one form of religion in itself as well.
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So as I said, one thing that happens is that the rules take on a life of their own.
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The other thing that happens is that there is a sort of social and political capital
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that emerges and somebody who's a reasonably talented political entrepreneur can say here
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is this other risky area where we haven't really solved this cooperation problem yet,
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but you know that you can trust me from this other arena.
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So come let's try and do this here as well.
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And this is a development of alliances as a concept over a period of time.
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And so what you get is you get these rules that stand on their own and then you get these
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institutions that are built on a shared understanding of the rules and on a shared set of values
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that are the philosophical equivalent of we don't go near that ladder.
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So your insight really here is like, you know, when I read Axelrod first and I read about
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all of this work and Robert Rivers work and so on and my sense was, okay, this really
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explains how society works or cooperation within society works.
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But what you're putting out is that these rules that emerge lead to institutions and
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then whatever government forms, whatever the state is, they have to abide by these rules
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in these institutions and at some point they get codified and they become part of the law
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or the constitution or whatever.
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And these are the rules of the game and that they evolved first and the state came later.
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Is that sort of a correct understanding of it?
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Again, I mean, let's keep the conceptual apart from the historic, right?
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If you're going to look at the timeline, they probably evolved co-evilly at the same time,
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you know, and they didn't evolve in silos, right?
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Like not every country had to go through the collapse of the Soviet Union to decide that
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fully planned system of government was not necessarily a bright idea.
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And so there is an element of vicarious learning that goes on as well.
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But certainly if you're going to talk about laws, I think that that timeline holds, that
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they were rules and norms and sort of soft customs or something before eventually somebody
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codified them and they got formal sanction behind them and they became laws.
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And if you just look at the foundation of the United States of America, for example,
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there was this value, for example, for individual freedom, for the pursuit of happiness, all
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the things laid out in the Declaration of Independence were already values that were
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being articulated by the people.
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And that led to a system of government where you had those rules and institutions in place
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to protect the citizens from the state, which is, you know, a key purpose of the rules and
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For example, you had the constitution that was really your set of rules and you had the
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first amendment protecting everybody's free speech and blah, blah, blah, all the way down
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the line and all of that kind of falls into place.
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But in sort of other states across time, like if you look at India's formation, what we
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really did was we adopted a hodgepodge of rules and laws from everywhere.
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We kept a lot of the colonial rules that had been formulated in the first place to suppress
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And you know, the rules and institutions for that reason in India aren't so robust and
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aren't so liberal, as for example, they are in the USA, evolved differently in different
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So what are those sort of, do those processes move in a particular direction necessarily?
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And can we pass a value judgment on the process?
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What if the rules that a constitution sets merely reflect the norms of that particular
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So, you know, the first half of that question of like, do these processes move in a specific
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direction or predictable trajectory is an easy one.
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It really is too generic.
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It really is, you know, each historical case sort of has to be dealt with on its own merits.
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So there's no necessary, there's no arc of history here, which always goes in the same
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I mean, I wish the answer was yes, right, but I mean, so again, the caveat is that more
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and more as we get into the 19th century and the 20th century and the 21st century, states
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are not evolving and societies are not evolving in isolation, right?
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The most closed societies on the planet right now are North Korea and Eritrea.
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Even those states are not sealed off from the world, right?
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Part of how Eritrea makes its money is by taxing overseas citizens.
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They are able to collect that tax because they threaten family members of those people
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who are still within the country.
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But protection racket in its simplest form, right?
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But international, right?
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And so the more that the world itself is interconnected, the more that these institutions are interconnected,
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there's something like a tipping point that comes about, right?
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So the way that the institutions and the rules will evolve is still distinct within each country,
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but the range of possibilities that it can hold are getting progressively constrained.
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They're falling within a certain band of things that other countries share and especially
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post the creation of the UN that they have formally stated a commitment to sharing, right?
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There is a declaration of principles that starts the UN charter as well.
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The first of those is that every country is a sovereign equal and nobody shall intervene
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in its domestic matters.
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But historically, even that is quite the exceptional commitment for a country to make, right?
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And clearly many countries have failed to abide by it even since the adoption of the
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UN charter, but it's no longer really open to a country to say, you know, as part of
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our constitution, we're going to say we espouse the virtue of territorial conquest.
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That's because there are rules at the international level also now.
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And like, let's use that softer term rules to mean a lot of fuzzy things and a lot of
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hard things, but yes, there are, right?
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And you know, so to kind of cut to the present day.
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So what we've always sort of had is that we have a bunch of these safeguards.
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Some of these are in the form of these rules embedded in the constitution or the laws or
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whatever which restrain a government.
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And we have this bunch of institutions and limits to the sort of interplay between them
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to make sure that no one institution gets too powerful or domineering.
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So in India, you know, you'll have your, in the U S you have your Congress and you have
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the Senate and the president only has so much power and he can't really be an overlord.
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And by and large, have there been U S presidents in the past who have, because power always
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corrupts anyone who comes to power will want to be as powerful as he possibly can.
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And therefore the urge is always going to be to push back against these institutions
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and against these rules.
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And what's that process been like in America?
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So, so two things, right?
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One is I'm going to sort of contest the power always corrupts rule.
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Just my, my training in, in base is I'm a psychologist and there's fantastic research
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on how when you increase power distance between two people, what's happening is not an abandoning
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of values or principles.
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When that happens, it actually happens on the person who's on the low end of the power
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The person who's on the high end of the power scale, what happens is a weakening of communication
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And so John Galton was sort of the father of peace research, this is really great quote
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that says power does not corrupt power obscures, powerlessness corrupts.
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What power does is it separates you from the consequences of your actions.
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And the way that that actually happens, which leads to a kind of moral corruption in a sense,
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So what happens for a lot of people is even if you believe in theory that the, you know,
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the ends do not justify the means, if you can't actually observe the impact that the
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means are having, why would you believe that there's a problem with the means?
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I immediately thought of demonetization.
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And so what happens is, no, actually that's a great example because what happens is that
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people who manage to hold a certain amount of power hypothetically can have two somewhat
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competing goals, right?
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They can have specific policy goals and outcomes that they want to achieve and they can be
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invested in the health of the institution and the system itself, right?
#
Not every powerful person is, but many are.
#
And in wanting to pursue or achieve a particular policy goal and in sort of gathering the amount
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of power and doing the things that are necessary to see that happen, they might find that they
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have undermined the institutions and in fact done, you know, a lot more harm than they
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originally thought possible or set out to do.
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The more isolated from reality, the more separated from the experience of the daily life of the
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average person, the leader, is the easier this is to happen.
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And so in fact, demonetization is a great example because it's precisely...
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Like I talk about how Modi probably never went to a grocery store to buy something himself
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for the last 20 years and therefore he had no idea that a 2000 rupee note is actually
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used by the common man.
#
To him it was a store of value as it indeed was in 1978 and therefore only black money
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holders must be using it.
#
But actually everybody used it and he had no idea because like you said, he was so insulated
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from the common man that I mean it was an error in knowledge.
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So I think that's a process that we can generalize.
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We can say that a lot of people who don't necessarily say, listen, like my goal in life
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is to become the Shahenshah, still walk that path because they find that to achieve the
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specific policy goals that they want, they end up having to centralize power.
#
A recent American history, there is no sort of, you know, Shakespearean tragicomic hero
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that illustrates this better than Barack Obama, who as a constitutional law professor himself
#
cannot have been ignorant to sort of the institutional ramifications of what he was doing.
#
But at the same time was a political leader confronted with another branch of government
#
that was held by the opposing party and said that its stated objective is to undermine
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everything that he does.
#
And so it's funny because this guy, this guy who again is like a balance of powers, enthusiast
#
becomes one of the strongest practitioners of executive power, becomes one of the most
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frequent users of executive orders in recent American history because he's like, I can't
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get anything done otherwise.
#
Can you elaborate on that a bit?
#
So for instance, Obama, when he was still a candidate and was running for office, was
#
deeply critical of the wars that his predecessor Bush had started.
#
And he had this very lawyerly critique of them, which was that within American domestic
#
law, the authority to declare war is actually vested in the Congress and not with the president.
#
The president has authority to command the military and to take actions that are necessary
#
in defense of the country.
#
But the president cannot declare that the country is at war with another sovereign power.
#
That's actually for the Congress.
#
This is extremely important part of US history called the War Powers Resolution.
#
And this actually tells you how an institution acts as a check on the overreach by any one
#
Because in Congress, it would take a vote as opposed to like an executive decision.
#
And so he's sort of very, as I said, very nerdy critique of the US wars in Iraq.
#
Not so much Afghanistan, but Iraq was that we don't actually have proof that the party
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that we went after in Afghanistan is present in Iraq or that there's any connection between
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Hence, the legal document, it's called an authorization for the use of military force
#
that pertains to Afghanistan, really can't be transferred easily to Iraq.
#
Okay, there's a separate authorization for the use of military force in Iraq.
#
That really can't be transferred easily to Syria or to like wherever else we think or
#
like Somalia or Mali or wherever we think that this group is cropping up.
#
Obama, as president, oversaw a vast expansion in the number of military actions, not just
#
in Afghanistan and Iraq, but in Syria, in Yemen, in Mali, in Somalia, in Niger.
#
That's just the countries I know about now.
#
I'm sure that when records are declassified, there will be even more.
#
One of my favorite law professors is Rosa Brooks at Georgetown Law.
#
And she wrote an op-ed about this somewhere at the midpoint of the US presidency, which
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So she smushed together AUMF and OMFG.
#
Just to say, how far are you going to stretch this authorization to like you're in 17 countries
#
when you said that it shouldn't even be two, right?
#
And Obama's sort of dodge on this was, I'm going to authorize drone strikes, but I'm
#
So have you heard the phrase boots on the ground?
#
I'm not going to deploy boots on the ground and you know, this got roundly mocked in Washington.
#
There were like cartoons of like, you know, people doing like Tom Cruise mission impossible
#
style hanging from a wire and like my boots are not touching the ground.
#
And it's just an example of there were probably more productive ways to handle whatever threats
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there were to American national security at that time, right?
#
But they would have required the executive and the Congress to work together.
#
But Obama found himself in a situation where having once said, no, look, it's within my
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power to decide you gave me the authorization.
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I'm going to target these guys, whatever these guys are.
#
If he walked that back, he'd have to walk back everything else he wanted to do as well.
#
So he's no longer in his interest.
#
He became a strong executive power theorist.
#
I mean, if he makes the same principled argument in 2007, he doesn't become president because
#
he's for the war on, you know, then he can't criticize George Bush at all on the grounds
#
So I, I, my sense is that the criticism that he made of the views that he espoused as a
#
candidate were genuine and principled at the time, at the time.
#
And then he was confronted with the reality of having to enact security policy with especially
#
post the midterms, uh, a split government healthcare was originally introduced by executive
#
Like massive healthcare reform in the United States with like the largest, I mean, by financial
#
value, the largest healthcare industry in the world.
#
And you're going to reform that by fear, like, you know, running roughshod over the institutions
#
which were there for a reason, like forget about the effectiveness of it, right?
#
Just as a matter of political strategy, it's so much weaker to be in that situation.
#
And in fact, his successor has done his best to undermine it on precisely that basis, right?
#
And so there were a lot of people who even in let's say 2010, 2012 were already saying,
#
listen, we're comfortable surrendering a bunch more executive authority to this guy because
#
We know that he's a constitutional law professor and we know that like he agonizes over these
#
things and like, look, his hair is turning white thinking about them, uh, literally.
#
And, uh, but if we're not ready to do it for any other precedent, then, you know, we should
#
really be careful about how much ground are willing to give this guy.
#
And what that kind of seems to illustrate is that the Obama who's campaigning and the
#
Trump who's campaigning are entirely different creatures.
#
But when in power, the imperatives of power, the incentives of power, what I would call
#
the corrupting influence of power, though you've, uh, I mean, not in a direct way in
#
terms of, but the kind of moral corrosion that happens, uh, they're all the same.
#
Uh, so that would be true of anyone before Trump.
#
And, and that also leads you to a dilemma that, you know, we discuss the importance
#
of rules and institutions, but the argument that say Obama could have made is that look
#
with, with the kind of gridlock that there is with the Congress and the Senate, and they're
#
not cooperating with me on anything, I can't get anything done because of these rules and
#
So therefore I have to go past them.
#
How does one answer that?
#
I mean, regardless of whether that's Obama saying that or Trump saying that, because
#
it's the same thing being said, you, it's a mistake to look at the one guy or, and it's
#
hypocritical to approve of one guy saying that and disapprove of the other.
#
In principle, either one agrees with it or one doesn't, I mean, one draws a line and
#
says that, you know, the rules and the institutions are this important and no more or no less.
#
So how does one reconcile that?
#
No, I mean, again, so I like my, about half the classes I took in graduate school were
#
about negotiation and negotiation in like, quote unquote, intractable and wicked problems.
#
Do you care about the policy goal?
#
Do you care about the health of the institution?
#
Because if you constantly fail at delivering policy goals, the institution is going to
#
be undermined in a different sense.
#
Even if you're sort of complying by the rules at some point of time, the electorate is going
#
to be like, these are stupid rules because nobody's able to do the things that we need
#
Give me a concrete illustration of this.
#
I mean, thought experiment way, not something that has happened, obviously, but yeah, cause
#
I don't necessarily have one off the top of my head.
#
I mean, you can imagine that actually, so most countries that have like a split executive
#
and legislature have rules on the adoption of any law.
#
And they require that a certain majority in one house and a certain majority in another
#
house, then the executive gets to either sign or reject.
#
If the executive rejects, typically the legislature gets to give it another pass.
#
If the legislature sends it back, then that has to be passed.
#
If you think about it, if the outcome of this was basically that for like eight years, no
#
I can imagine that people would sort of be like, okay, this is no longer working.
#
We need to change this.
#
We need to either like mess with the majority margins that are involved, or we need to make
#
one or the other party be bound by the decision of the other, right?
#
But the thing to keep in mind there is that even within the existing rules about sort
#
of, you need this much majority and you need this sequence of approvals, it's not like
#
people are taking each policy issue as an individual thing and being like, no, but this
#
is the exact thing that I need to happen on this.
#
And this is separate from the rest of the world and the rest of politics.
#
No, people are trading off their priorities on competing legislations, right?
#
I mean, this sounds bad in practice because you're like, you know, oh, if I like let you
#
export onions, then you will let me allow children with disabilities to be adopted or
#
I, you know, a hypothetical example, but not implausible.
#
And so, you know, we don't like to think about policies being formed with this sort of like,
#
you know, bizarre style trading of whose interests are what, but that's a democratic government
#
functioning as designed.
#
In fact, in public choice areas, there's a term called log rolling, which is about how
#
different interest groups, very disparate interest groups come together to increase
#
their bargaining power in this political marketplace, pretty much the same process playing out.
#
And so you're seeing it play out even now where Trump is basically saying to his entire
#
Congress, I want money to build a wall at the border and I'm going to hold anything
#
and everything that you all want done hostage to this.
#
And it sounds like it sounds, uh, deeply odious to us because the particular thing that he's
#
holding the stuff hostage for is this ridiculous border wall, but he's far from the first president
#
to say I'm going to hold proposals hostage to like my pet policy thing that you all have
#
Obama also tried this with healthcare.
#
Congress was like, nope, we're like, it's a bigger priority for us to make sure that
#
your health care reform does not pass than that anything we want to pass does pass.
#
And so actually no longer a hypothetical because for a number of procedural votes within the
#
U S government, they actually did change the rules to overcome this sort of logjam.
#
They actually did change the levels of majorities that you had to get in the Senate on a bunch
#
of things to do with like appointments and budgets precisely because the institutional
#
logjam was causing damage and the existing distribution of seats was leading to a complete
#
So, you know, we'll take a quick commercial break.
#
And when we come back, we'll get to the orange hair giant himself, uh, Donald Trump, a quick
#
Hello, hello, hello, everybody.
#
Welcome to another great week on IVM podcast.
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If you aren't following us on social media, please make sure you do.
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We're IVM podcast on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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If you guys want to catch Cyrus's rant on Cyrus's live, you can definitely check out
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We're going to finish that live every time we're doing it on Tuesday afternoons.
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Make sure you check in for that.
#
Actually, we had a really great guest, Roshan Abbas.
#
Roshan talks about a wonderful career spanning radio, TV, live events, entrepreneurship,
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and now he's an author too.
#
It's full of funny stories and I think you guys will really enjoy it.
#
On Simplify, Chuck, Narendra Shree, at Simplify, the central banks and RBI, how they work
#
and why they've been making the news off late.
#
On the 19th, ninth episode of The Scene and the Unseen, Amit is joined by a lawyer and
#
policy analyst, Amaya Naik.
#
They talk about the rules and institutions that keep populist readers in check and how
#
they are being meddled with.
#
On Varta Lab, Akash and Naveen have a fun and insightful chat with Nikhil Uduppa and
#
They're the founders of 4x4 experiences and have created Control All Delete, India's largest
#
crowd-sourced live music gathering.
#
On the first three episodes of The Habit Coach, Ashwin talks about dopamine, fidgeting, and
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Episodes are out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
#
Give it a listen to improve your habits.
#
On Football Twaddle, the boys discuss Chelsea beating Manchester City, the Raheem Sterling
#
incident and the Aubameyang incident.
#
On Geek Fruit, Dinkar and Jishnu get into the holiday spirit by discussing the best
#
Christmas movies of all time and their favorite Christmas songs.
#
And with that, on with your shows.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Ameya Naik about the importance of rules and institutions with specific reference
#
to the August figure of Donald Trump.
#
Trump fits that classic populist mold that John Werner Muller wrote his book on under
#
the refer to of a populist who's come and he shares all the things that populists tend
#
to have in common through the ages and in the world today in the sense that they have
#
this sense of victimhood and they are ranting against the elites and they are constructing
#
all these simplistic narratives and they are breaking down institutions.
#
And the interesting thing about Trump is that this works at two levels.
#
One it works at the domestic level where there are so many institutions and there is this
#
constant interplay and like you pointed out, he's not the first person to have tried to
#
push those boundaries, but it's also more worrying at the international level because
#
the US is simply still the reigning superpower in the world.
#
And you know, one mad guy on top who is trying to undermine all the international institutions
#
and rules which do a lot of good is extremely dangerous for all of us.
#
You know, I think we can sort of deal with each of those sequentially.
#
So, yeah, it is important to keep in mind that Trump's political beliefs don't necessarily
#
make him unique, especially in the US political spectrum.
#
There are other people who have those same views.
#
His views on the US role in the international order also don't really make him unique.
#
There's a smaller chunk of people that have those views, but they exist.
#
I mean, John Bolton was the United States ambassador to the UN in a previous administration
#
I mean, there have been isolationists and there have been anti-free traders and all
#
of that isn't really new.
#
There are two things that make Trump unique.
#
The first is just the fact that he actually got elected, right, because generally people
#
who have these views haven't actually gotten into the most powerful seat in the country
#
slash the world because the nature of democratic politics is to generally privilege moderation.
#
You need to build a broader coalition to build a broader coalition.
#
You need to sort of tone down your rhetoric.
#
That's a median voter theorem where basically all parties during the general election sort
#
of go towards the middle and therefore there is an acceptable spectrum from which all leaders
#
tend to emerge and then they do the same crappy things because power corrupts, but they emerge
#
from that limited spectrum and Trump is just way out.
#
He's an outlier in that sense and that's why I said, you know, he's also the exception
#
to like the people campaigning within the median and then like do extreme things.
#
He campaigned on the extremes, right?
#
He campaigned saying, you know, openly racist things about Mexicans.
#
For instance, he campaigned accusing a judge of Mexican heritage of being biased against
#
And bringing crime and bringing drugs, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So yeah, he's unique in that he did that in one which I currently have to think of as
#
a historical accident and which I sort of hope is a historical accident.
#
The other thing that makes him unique is that or at least unique in like modern history
#
in the US is that he is so blatantly out to enrich himself.
#
So you know, we said that there are institutions, there are rules, some of the rules are formal.
#
So their laws, others are just norms and customs.
#
If you ask sort of why do all of these exist, they exist so that people in power will serve
#
And so sort of the, you know, almost rule zero of government is avoid conflicts of interest.
#
Trump is like Trump actually shares that opinion about we should not have a conflict of interest,
#
but he's, you know, he's flipped it on its head.
#
So he comes in saying, what is the conflict?
#
I'm going to pursue my own personal interests, national interests be damned.
#
And it's, it's pretty amazing.
#
Like we have a number of actual or wannabe autocrats, right?
#
Some of whom have been elected.
#
Others have gotten power in other ways.
#
Trump is a wannabe kleptocrat much more than he's a wannabe autocrat.
#
He's not fixated on, well, I take this back.
#
I was going to say he's not fixated on power so much as he is on wealth.
#
I'm not sure that that's a meaningful distinction in his head.
#
So, but, but you know, he's the way that he thinks about power and the way that he thinks
#
about interest is the accumulation of basically money for himself and his family.
#
And I think in a way I see him as this megalomaniac duffer who was winging his way through life
#
and all of this shit just happened.
#
And in that sense, he's both an accidental autocrat and an accidental kleptocrat.
#
This shit just happened.
#
It's not like he had a grand plan and he made, I mean, he was actually expecting, perhaps
#
even hoping to lose the election by some accounts and simply, I mean, he didn't have a transition
#
He didn't expect to be president and he's kind of been winging it all the way.
#
Well, so, I mean, there's, there's multiple pieces to, by the way, before I get into that,
#
right, can I just say, you know, I told you, I'm, I'm a psychologist by training, right?
#
And the last like century plus in psychology has basically been pushing back on this like
#
great person theory of leadership, you know, even like, let's not fixate on the personality
#
of the person in power because the situation and like sort of the exigencies and the constraints
#
and historical currents are what they are, are a much bigger.
#
And so it's really frustrating to me to have to spend this much time analyzing the personality
#
of this guy because it sort of cuts in the exact opposite direction of what I've been
#
But again, he actually did get into power and he, he does believe that everything is
#
shaped by his singular interests and personality.
#
And at that point of time, I mean, it's, it's who Louis the 14th who said, I am the state
#
Trump shares that view, but for the time being, temporarily, he's kind of right.
#
No, and the interesting thing is, it's not as if a leader like him was a historical inevitability.
#
Honestly, you take Trump out of the picture.
#
I don't see anyone in the political landscape who's remotely like this, you know, yeah.
#
I mean, yeah, Ted Cruz would have appealed to many of the same people and could have
#
come to power and all that.
#
But he was essentially also a guy who believed in these rules and institutions to some extent
#
and accomplished lawyer himself.
#
And you know, you wouldn't have a complete madcap guy like Trump in power, no matter
#
Again, there are other countries that have been led by small time crooks who then become
#
But in the current American context, it's kind of hard to imagine anybody except Trump
#
And so this is why Trump is so, so corrosive to institutions, right?
#
Because the sort of, again, the sort of virtue zero of all institutions in the public spaces,
#
no self-dealing, no conflicts of interest.
#
And he demonstrates time and time and time again that he does not share that value.
#
He does not understand the reason or the purpose or the virtue of that.
#
And so every time he interacts with any institution, he's doing it out of some sort of just very
#
blatant, very crass self-interest.
#
And he almost acts aggrieved and behaves as if this is unfair.
#
It's like, hey, the people elected me and now I'm the king.
#
And you know, who was anyone to be a check on me?
#
I have sort of ultimate authority.
#
And also isn't this what being president means is that I give orders and people follow them.
#
And of course, as every previous president could have told him and probably did tell
#
But the man is determined to behave as if it actually is right.
#
And so there's just so many ways that this plays out in the domestic space, right?
#
So the most obvious one, again, has to do with just making money.
#
There is a clause in the United States Constitution that has suddenly sort of like nobody used
#
it, nobody heard about it.
#
And then in the past couple of years, it sort of made its way back into public discourse.
#
It's called the emoluments clause of the Constitution, right?
#
It's roughly the same as like the Office of Profit Act that India had.
#
It basically said if you are a functionary of government, you should not be making money
#
The emoluments clause is a little more specific.
#
It says you should not be accepting money or anything of value from a foreign government.
#
But foreign government is pretty broadly defined, right?
#
Like it's also agents and representatives of a foreign government, counters from a foreign
#
Things of value is also fairly widely defined.
#
It's not literal money, can be various things that would be useful.
#
This is why there are like protocol vetted and approved gifts for state functions, right?
#
And this is why any senior, like an ambassador or whoever or whatever, if they receive anything,
#
they have to like report the gifts that they get.
#
If it's above a certain value, then it's actually, I mean, confiscated is too harsh a word, right?
#
They voluntarily surrender it and it's either like given to a museum or something, or it's
#
put into this big auction and the proceeds are used towards, you know, whatever, like
#
an overdose and orphans fund or something.
#
Trump owns multiple commercial properties around the country, around the world.
#
He actively promotes them.
#
The shining example is the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, which was renovated
#
and reopened right about when he became president and which has been booked out by foreign governments
#
And of course this is money going into the president's pocket.
#
Of course people are like booking large venues and like keeping it booked in to like stay
#
He has golf courses around the country.
#
He has whatever that holiday resort is in Florida that he keeps escaping to as well.
#
The name escapes me for a second.
#
But where like they were actively like, they hiked up membership fees after he became president.
#
They were selling spots at like an adjacent table to him at like the holiday party or
#
When I say he does it in a really crass way.
#
I'd pay a premium for that seat.
#
Though I don't have any money, but if I did, I would.
#
I mean, I would pay a premium for it and then like, you know, install like that bloated
#
Trump baby blimp there or something maybe.
#
But it's just really, really obvious that he has commercial interests that are benefiting
#
from his being president.
#
The norm, but not the law that previous presidents have followed is to either divest their assets
#
or put them under a blind trust.
#
The point of the blind trust, of course, is then you don't know what that person is doing
#
and you don't know how the policies that you're working on might affect those outcomes.
#
Jimmy Carter famously had to sell his peanut farm before he became president.
#
Hopefully not for peanuts.
#
And Trump has refused to do this and it's a norm and not a law.
#
And so every time he's sort of like, but there's nothing that says I have to do it, technically
#
But starting from, I mean, that's exactly where the corrosion starts.
#
The second thing you can look at for the sort of Trump's domestic corrosion of institutions
#
is the people that he's put in charge of different offices in government, different ministries,
#
different departments, different secretaries.
#
Betsy DeVos, who's his education secretary, has massive commercial interests in charter
#
And of course, the way that he argues is that she is a prominent educationist, so of course
#
But you are putting the person whose entire business model is dependent upon students
#
leaving public schools and going to charter schools in charge of public schooling.
#
I don't think I need to spell out the rest of that.
#
His secretary of the interior, I think, a guy called Ryan Zinke, is the subject of,
#
I don't even know how many like ethics and misbehaviour investigations, it's like in
#
double digits and like 40 plus or something at last count.
#
And remember, they've been in power for less than two years.
#
So these are all things that either he's done or that have come to light in the period of
#
like the last 18 months or something, which is like, you know, a new infraction every
#
So we kind of look at this and we say that, okay, you know, he's running roughshod over
#
all these rules, but they apply to the executive branch and surely the other institutions in
#
the US government will prevent too much damage from happening.
#
In theory, yes, it could still happen.
#
I mean, Zinke, for instance, I said he faces investigations.
#
He is being investigated.
#
Part of the problem is that by the time they stopped, some of the damage is already done.
#
There's no automatic process that means that because we think that the way that you did
#
this was shady, hence whatever you decided to do is now reversed.
#
Again, that would be a normative or a customary way to approach that question, but there isn't
#
necessarily a black letter law that makes it that way.
#
People who saw value in preserving the institutions would act that way voluntarily to say, no,
#
I want to avoid even the appearance that there is a conflict here.
#
So clearly not this group of people, added to that is the fact that politically and electorally
#
the Republican Party lawmakers who currently hold the majority in the upper house and until
#
a couple of weeks ago held the majority in the lower house as well, believed that their
#
political success and their political survival depended on being seen as sort of sticking
#
close to Trump and not frustrating his agenda.
#
The late Senator John McCain famously torpedoed Trump's effort to repeal Obama's healthcare
#
law and like got tons of hate mail for it, which is pretty exceptional because the guy
#
is sort of like a folk American hero, right?
#
A former prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, legendary law, like senator in his own
#
You spoke about how there's no Shakespearean drama, but I'd say just the fact on how his
#
own people turned on John McCain in the winter of his years is a Shakespeare tragedy in itself.
#
Kingly or in DC, I guess.
#
Whether or not you agree with the guy, that's irrelevant.
#
I'm not, I'm not trying to eulogize John McCain as such.
#
I'm just saying he was a politically popular figure.
#
And fighting Trump on healthcare cost him a lot of that.
#
And a lot of Republicans looked at that and said, do I want to be that guy?
#
So another Senator, Jeff Flake sort of started walking that path, but has been quite silent
#
since then and has not actually voted against his party on issues where he says Trump is
#
doing the wrong thing, right?
#
So here is a term that I will generally not use because I think it gets abused a lot,
#
but I'm going to use it to Jeff Flake is virtue signaling.
#
He really is because he has the ability to work differently, but he sort of furrows his
#
brow and says this is a very sad thing and then he votes for it and he's not even running
#
His seat has now been taken over by somebody else or will be, sorry, his seat is falling
#
vacant and somebody will be appointed to it in the near future.
#
So Congress is a check, iffy, right?
#
With the Democrat party taking control of the lower house may start being more effective
#
So the judiciary has been being a check in many ways, absolutely.
#
The problem, so there's a little bit of a tangent, right?
#
But if there are listeners who are sort of interested in the comparative legal system
#
between India and the U.S., one of the biggest differences between the U.S. and India when
#
it comes to litigation, especially litigation against the government, is that the U.S. has
#
extremely strict rules on standing.
#
Standing is who actually has the right to bring a lawsuit.
#
So we have phenomenally lack sort of PIL-style standing, right?
#
If somebody somewhere is harmed, you as a civic-minded citizen can sort of approach
#
the court saying, look, somebody is being harmed, violation of fundamental rights, please
#
And different judges over the years have sort of had their own attitudes towards this.
#
In the U.S., the rules are a lot stricter.
#
You have to typically show that you, the person bringing the suit, are experiencing some kind
#
And it can be even more complicated.
#
You might have to show that, say for instance, you're not actually a national of the country.
#
You might have to show that even though you're not a national, you actually have the right
#
to approach that forum because the nature of the harm that you're facing offends the
#
right that is not guaranteed just to nationals or just to citizens.
#
It's guaranteed to all people who happen to be within the entirety of the country or something.
#
So you could bring a freedom of speech action even as a non-citizen because that's not limited
#
It's guaranteed to everybody in the country.
#
You might not be able to bring a right to bear arms action, right?
#
And so suing the federal government in the United States is actually a lot harder than
#
suing the central government in India.
#
That said, a number of Trump's policies have landed up in court, right?
#
He revoked a reporter's press pass a couple of, what, last week?
#
We were recording this on November 20th, by the way, the CNN guy, Costa, I think is his
#
And interestingly, Fox stood by CNN in that, which was refreshing.
#
I think the entire White House Correspondence Association was like, wait, you can revoke
#
a pass for people being rude to the president?
#
Like none of us is going to get to get in here eventually, right?
#
And the court stated it's a stay.
#
It's not a final ruling.
#
It's an interim ruling.
#
But generally speaking, in matters like this, if you can win the interim relief, you have
#
a pretty good shot of winning the final thing as well, right?
#
Because the basis for winning the interim thing is that you were experiencing harm while
#
that thing was in effect.
#
And so it needs to be stopped.
#
If the judge has basically already considered that you're probably facing harm, yeah, it's
#
A bunch of executive orders he signed around immigration and deportations, famously the
#
bans that he wanted to sign, all of these things were challenged successfully in court.
#
Which is therefore sort of a sign of hope that, you know, the rules and institutions
#
Or you'd qualify it, obviously.
#
I mean, so this is why I really like that we started with like the game theory of this
#
and like the evolution of cooperation in this, right?
#
There are the formal institutions and the formal laws, and they will to some extent
#
jealously guard their powers and their emits and like see to their enforcement.
#
But then surrounding all of that are these entire sets of norms and customs and beliefs
#
that if left to run in a positive feedback cycle, start guiding people towards greater
#
trust and greater cooperation.
#
That stuff is being damaged.
#
That stuff is being harmed.
#
You know, again, let me not be so sort of ahistorical as to put the blame or to put
#
all of the blame on Trump, right?
#
But as the guy in power who is constantly sending out the message saying the institutions
#
don't matter, the rules don't matter, what I want matters, that's, I think, doing sort
#
of a, it's doing a degree of harm that is not necessarily visible now, but that is actually
#
going to outlast his presidency by a long time.
#
So that's what my question is about.
#
I mean, there's one view of Trump that, look, this is an accident of history.
#
There's one mad guy who's gotten to the presidency, but hey, the rules and institutions are robust
#
and we'll outlast this and we'll have a sensible president next time or at least a time after
#
that and things will be back to normal and there'll be no lasting damage.
#
But your point is that there can be lasting damage out of all this, all of this mansion
#
anagons, which would indicate that the rules and institutions weren't strong enough to
#
I mean, if you, yeah, sure, like I'll sign onto that.
#
They weren't nearly as strong as we like to imagine they are.
#
They look strong when like somebody who already believes in them is operating them.
#
So what is the lasting damage?
#
Is it a lasting damage to, for example, the norms that govern conflict of interest and
#
you can't do anything with personal profit or is there greater damage than that?
#
So it's hard for me to answer that question basically because it depends on what US lawmakers
#
US lawmakers can say, Hey, we used to have all these norms and we were happy with their
#
functioning because people are abided by them.
#
And then we elected a guy who has been destruction testing them.
#
And now that he's actually breached a bunch of them, we're going to reinforce them.
#
We're actually going to turn them into laws, right?
#
In which case though, the potential damage will be greatly mitigated.
#
But if they don't, right?
#
The next chap who finds himself in that situation and for some completely unrelated reason decides
#
it's going to be embarrassing for me to release my tax returns.
#
And there's a precedent for not doing so suddenly, you know, no longer has to lift this great
#
burden of being the first person to do so.
#
And what Trump has also done is in a manner of speaking, he's already caused lasting damage,
#
not specifically to the US, we can't say that yet to the institutions and rules, but he's
#
demolished the Republican party.
#
The Republican party today is a different beast from what it was the way I see it.
#
And that morally corrosive effect that power can have on one person has in a manner of
#
speaking spread through the party.
#
Yeah, I, again, it's a very chicken and egg question around sort of who started turning
#
more extreme first, right?
#
And there are really three parties here.
#
It's not as if who between Trump and the Republican party is between who between Trump, the Republican
#
party and the voter base that they traditionally appeal to.
#
And yeah, I mean, look, the question gets broader and broader every time we take a stab
#
Like, oh, there are actually 17 parties.
#
No, the core point is just that...
#
Bad behavior gives permission for future bad behavior.
#
That's the lasting damage.
#
And that's a vicious cycle, I mean.
#
Well, and the things that are most vulnerable to it are precisely the things that are not
#
actually written up into formal law.
#
And the benchmarks go lower and lower, so I can easily see, you know, if the future
#
president from the Democratic party can easily resort to whataboutery anytime he's questioned
#
and say, but hey, look what that guy did.
#
And the benchmarks have then just come down a long way.
#
So this is a live debate within the Democratic party this instant, right?
#
And you know, a number of my friends who are about our age, so they're not necessarily
#
active in terms of being representatives, but they are very active in terms of being
#
campaign workers, in terms of being staffers, in terms of being fundraisers, in terms of
#
It's a very, very live debate about whether the Democratic party having gotten a measure
#
of power should respond to Republican or Trump hardball tactics in kind, or whether they
#
should sort of model a different kind of behavior.
#
I would say Obama tried this as well for a while, right?
#
He tried to model sort of a consensus model of decision making.
#
And at some point he was just, I think he said something to the effect of like, you
#
know, you can't dance without a partner or something like that.
#
And at least on a certain set of issues, stop trying.
#
So yeah, one possible outcome is that all the general nature of politics in the United
#
States becomes coarser and more divisive and more aligned to groups and more aligned to
#
what some theorists, although again, I disagree with this characterization, but what some
#
theorists will describe as identity politics.
#
It's possible because it's the classic, it's the domestic political equivalent of the security
#
You chose to escalate one step more.
#
I can either escalate to match you, or I can put my faith in the existing rules and institutions
#
to prevent you from getting away with it.
#
And that could take me further behind.
#
And in the short term, that's almost guaranteed to put me further behind, right?
#
If you abide by the rules while somebody else is undermining them, you can be modeling good
#
You can also be losing so much power that then the other person is able to completely
#
ignore the rules at some point of time.
#
And thankfully it's not my job to decide where that light is drawn.
#
This is in a sense a classic game theory problem.
#
Do you take that step back now to take the high model ground, or do you say, I got to
#
play as dirty as the other guy, fuck the rules and the institutions?
#
I mean, again, I think that the smart strategy for the Democratic Party, at least, to do
#
is to say, we're going to play by the rules.
#
But that also means that we're going to crack down pretty hard on people who are messing
#
It's a hardball strategy of its own, but it's not hardball on the same field or on the same
#
arena as the Republicans are, right?
#
You don't necessarily respond to the same sort of provocations on issues of identity
#
You do have your own set of things that you want to hit.
#
And again, I'm sure I'm not saying anything that's not in some Democratic politician's
#
script book or playbook already, right?
#
But yeah, I think that even with that strategy taken, even then, there is something being...
#
I'm not familiar enough with the history of US politics to say whether the Republican
#
and Democratic Party shared sort of a history of working together on progressive causes,
#
I know they did on like certain sort of pure economic causes, but if at all they did, or
#
if there was the potential for such a thing, I think it's largely gone now.
#
And in a sense, I think the opposition in India faces the same dilemma when it comes
#
to Modi, that do we take the high moral ground or do we get as down and dirty as him?
#
And it's something I lament constantly that the Congress, in fact, has completely rejected
#
And on social media, for example, their IT cell is as vicious and bad as a BJP IT cell
#
I mean, I've been targeted by both.
#
And even the kind of soft Hindutva which they are going for and the identity politics they're
#
I mean, of course, in India is ubiquitous and I disagree with you and say that even
#
in the US, I think identity politics is a massive growing problem.
#
But leaving that sort of aside before we move on to the international arena and what Trump
#
is doing there, if I had to ask you to say, outline within the domestic arena, a worst
#
case scenario and a best case scenario for how the country will look, say, to elections
#
from now, let's say into, you know, 2028, you know, what would your worst case and your
#
The worst case is easy.
#
The worst case is that Trump has already won reelection for the second term and flouts
#
the constitution to stand for a third.
#
And like at that point of time, the institutions are undermined to the extent that he makes
#
Ivanka Vice President and then dies and she becomes president.
#
I mean, it's, you know, choose your specific nightmare ending, right?
#
I think that's pretty far-fetched, right?
#
I think that like a full-blown constitutional crisis is not likely to happen because there
#
are not actually that many people who are willing to serve like the personality cult
#
But if it happened, then we'd have to like strike out the wannabe, right?
#
Like then he would be genuine autocrat, genuine sort of, you know, Central Asian or like Georgian
#
head of state or something, like between crime and government and business, there's very
#
blurry lines, that would definitely be the worst case because again, this is like the
#
country that sort of stands as a historical example of like we can build honest politics
#
out of a criminal past.
#
New York politics used to be criminal in every sense of the word, right?
#
Chicago politics used to be criminal in every sense of the word.
#
They've built something better out of it.
#
So it would be very sad to see it regress.
#
Last case scenario is that he loses in the next election and I don't care about graciously
#
but concedes defeat, doesn't sort of raise this entire stink around like questing the
#
And then one election later is a non-issue in whatever is being campaigned, right?
#
Like it's almost, you know, irrespective of what sort of codifying of norms actually happens
#
By the time it's time for whoever's Trump successor is to stand for reelection, the
#
They're not able to use the plank of like, would you rather have Trump in the election
#
than, I don't have the information to sort of put a probability estimate on this.
#
It's just sort of, this is what I would like to see happen is continuing with democratic
#
transitions of power and basically whatever Trumpism is, it's sort of shoved out of the
#
marketplace of ideas by better, more compelling things.
#
And now moving on to the, you know, the international domain and there is kind of more worrying
#
because in the US you have all these checks and balances, like you said, you have a strong
#
judiciary which has been, which has acted at times as an effective check on him.
#
You have all of that happening.
#
I mean, despite the erosion of norms, institutions are still kind of standing up to some extent,
#
but internationally there really aren't that many checks and balances.
#
The US is a huge superpower with huge clout and every decision that Trump makes, especially
#
with those regarding trade, for example, affect billions of people literally.
#
So this is where it's hard to find a silver lining, right?
#
The international system or the international order as we know it in its current form is
#
only about 70, 75 years old.
#
The UN was formed right after World War II and the sort of in that period of time, it
#
has not been able to develop to the extent that there are strong institutions or independently
#
There is a field called international law, but there are also people notably in the United
#
States and in law schools in the United States who will even now write articles arguing that
#
there is actually no such thing called international law because there is nobody who can enforce
#
And your response to that would be?
#
Just because it doesn't look like domestic law doesn't necessarily mean that it's not
#
And equally as somebody who's trained as a lawyer, I promise you that both enforcement
#
issues and variation are very much a part of domestic law as well.
#
The last thing that a lawyer will find convincing is if you say, but it's the law, they're like,
#
They're like, that's where my job starts, right?
#
But because there isn't necessarily like an overarching institution to sort of be the
#
guarantor of the rules or to punish bad behavior, it's international law is still very much
#
a system that largely follows the wishes of the most powerful and military and financially
#
And so this is why Trump is just this grand experiment, right?
#
And I say that because I don't want to say anything more despairing.
#
You've taken someone who is fundamentally opposed to the principles of the international
#
Who's opposed to the idea of long-term cooperation, who's opposed to the idea of treating states
#
as equals, who is opposed to the idea of any sort of constraint on the power of the powerful
#
and who sees the world fundamentally in a zero sum way.
#
And you know where everything is transactional and if you win, I must be losing and you know,
#
doesn't understand the positive sumness of international relations.
#
Well, so Trump is like, he's truly the worst kind of like zero sum theorist, right?
#
Like he's a megalomaniac simpleton.
#
He's a zero sum theorist with the ability to flip over the gaming table.
#
You know, he's the, he's the, and that's incredibly scary.
#
Because in this case, he really has the ability to like ruin the game by walking away or by
#
like as seems more likely, you know, using it as a weapon as opposed to a sporting implement.
#
So the post-World War international order was built upon largely the willingness and
#
the impetus and the enlightened self-interest of successive US government leaders, right?
#
This is not to detract the role that literally everybody else in the world has played, but
#
to say that the fact that the US was willing to play along was a necessary condition.
#
Only then were we in a place where it was conducive for these things to develop.
#
And like Trump's inaugural speech was from now on, it will be America first, right?
#
And his national security advisor is literally the most famous, most vehement anti-international
#
law American diplomat that there is John Bolton of the flamboyant mustache, who in his time
#
as the US ambassador to the United Nations was the most hated man in that building.
#
In Bush's time, he was one of Bush's most hated operatives, which is saying a lot.
#
So he was, I mean, he was hated by his own colleagues in the White House, right?
#
And he was hated by diplomats in the UN.
#
It says something to his skills as like a bureaucrat and a maneuverer that he was able
#
to actually keep his position for that long.
#
And by the way, he's one of those few people that I have not heard accused of like crime
#
or dirty dealings, right?
#
There's no argument made that the man is corrupt.
#
Bolton genuinely believes that like anything that detracts from the sovereignty of the
#
United States is the equivalent of like an attack on the United States.
#
And he firmly believes that any treaty automatically detracts from the sovereignty of the United
#
And so you have you have like the guy who's saying from now on, it will be America first.
#
And the guy who's saying treaties are an unacceptable infringement on one team with the power to
#
do the things that they want to do.
#
And it's a complete misunderstanding of America first, because America first really means
#
you can only be first through cooperation.
#
Everybody benefits at the same time.
#
And this will actually take America backwards what he's doing.
#
But the greater problem is it'll take the rest of the world backwards as well.
#
I mean, this is exactly what Macron said, right?
#
By the way, there is a history to that slogan as well, to America first.
#
That history relates to sort of like the proto-fascist movement within the US itself.
#
And so it's not like Trump took like an innocent idea and sort of cast his own view on it.
#
By design or accident, I suspect accident, he tapped into exactly the vein of things
#
that he wanted to tap into.
#
Both Occam's razor and Hanlon's razor, I'd say probably by accident, I never ascribe
#
to malice what you can ascribe to stupidity.
#
But in his case, he's stupid and malignant, and so it's overdetermined.
#
This was Ben Widdes, I think, of Lawfare on Twitter at some point of time, who was like,
#
the only thing that tempers this administration's malignance is its incompetence.
#
Like, it's the living version of sort of like, would you rather have like a bumbling, well-intentioned
#
Sorry, would you rather have like an ill-intentioned, bumbling person or like an effective, ill-intentioned
#
Yeah, this is the worst of both worlds, you've got the bumbling, ill-intentioned person, right?
#
But I mean, just look at like the list of treaties that this administration, and again,
#
they've been here less than two years.
#
So this is quite the pace.
#
I was trying to like total these up on my phone on the way in, right?
#
The Paris Agreement on climate change.
#
Probably the only country left out, or like one of two countries left out at this point.
#
I forget which the other country was, but their argument was that Paris was not stringent
#
enough, which is why they were not signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, right?
#
Which was basically going to be the biggest trade agreement in the world.
#
And whose entire purpose was to contain China, whose stated goal, repeatedly stated while
#
it was being negotiated, was we need to have a counterbalance to China on trade, which
#
you would think would make it attractive to, but no, Trans-Pacific Partnership NAFTA, right?
#
The North American Free Trade Agreement, which is considered sort of like the landmark free
#
trade agreement for, and not to say that NAFTA didn't have negative effects, but for the
#
most part, those negative effects were exported to Mexico and Canada.
#
They weren't showing up in the United States.
#
NAFTA has now been renegotiated.
#
It is a new agreement called the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which, you know, you read reporting
#
from when the negotiation was going on.
#
And one of the conditions for whatever was supposed to replace NAFTA was that it could
#
Like this was a thing that the United States diplomats had instructions to make sure happened,
#
Which is like, again, it's sort of like simultaneously stupid and like really petty.
#
The Korea-US agreement was threatened.
#
I think they sort of worked out an arrangement as well.
#
But again, this is sort of one of those historic agreements.
#
It's been around for like 50, 60 years, chugging along, nobody has a problem with it.
#
Trump, somewhere in his head, like still has a memory of like auto tariff wars or something
#
of like US-Japan and US-Korea manufacturing wars, which is so completely in the past.
#
Neither of them is competing in that space anymore, really, right?
#
And he threatened it while there was like a North Korea-US-South Korea negotiation going
#
So it was just confusing.
#
The Universal Postal Union, which is literally like a 140-plus-year-old treaty that just
#
has to do with like, you know, like...
#
Like it's literally like, I think it's the thing on which the zip code system is built.
#
The idea that there will be a numerical code that designates a geographic location.
#
And here is like sort of the register of them and like here is the system.
#
You know, US, you get like code starting with these numbers.
#
Yeah, so something with basically no fricking consequence, just leave it alone.
#
But Trump believes that something in that treaty is allowing China to like send freight
#
cheaply within the United States or whatever.
#
And so he's like, we'll punish them by pulling out of it.
#
And like, you know, it's just...
#
And most egregiously, the trade wars he started with China, which of course, if China reciprocates
#
and you know, the entire world suffers the consequences of that, including India.
#
Hugely, so I mean, the only reason I haven't put the US-China trade war on this list is
#
because he hasn't literally like broken a treaty to do it.
#
Yeah, but it's just so wrong.
#
But it's just off a piece with the same thing.
#
No, and I'm very sure that the existence of a treaty would not have stopped him from doing
#
So, you know, yeah, the US-China trade war, right?
#
Which is just like the, I mean, it's sort of basic economics, right?
#
Like comparative advantage theory of trade.
#
I mean, I had an episode on this.
#
I mean, just again, it shows his zero-sum view of the world that he looks as a trade
#
deficit as something that is bad.
#
And no, fiscal deficits are bad.
#
Trade deficits are perfectly fine.
#
I mean, I run a trade deficit with my domestic help, you know, I pay them every month.
#
Both parties are benefiting.
#
It's a positive sum game.
#
And to sort of impose tariffs and all of that not just hurts the Chinese, it hurts your
#
I mean, this is the exact illustration of not just zero-sum, but also wrong.
#
Like it's, it's like, you think you're hurting China and you're committing a crime on your
#
No, and I mean, fundamentally, the idea that the way that Trump describes a trade deficit
#
is to say they are taking our money, right?
#
Which is kind of true, but they're selling you stuff back for it.
#
Like you're, you're getting the goods and you're getting the services.
#
Both parties are benefiting.
#
And I mean, can you imagine having a conversation with the head of state or you have to explain
#
Because like that's what White House staffers actually have to do and clearly they're not
#
And you know, it's unclear if it's because the man doesn't get the concept or it's just
#
too invested in this narrative.
#
But the other area also that, that we have to touch on when we talk about like dismantling
#
treaties and the trade wars is in nuclear non-proliferation, right?
#
And so the Iran nuclear deal that he's pulled out of, which was sort of the, the, you know,
#
the landmark achievement of non-proliferation of the past decade.
#
I did an episode for this with Pawan on the Prakriti podcast before, Trump basically pulled
#
out of it on the grounds, not that the deal was not working, but that it was not stopping
#
Iran from doing other things that he didn't want them to do.
#
So negotiation 101 is that you hive off issues and then you reach agreement on the things
#
that you can and you kick down the road, the things that you can't, and then you cooperate
#
on the things that you do and the trust builds up.
#
And then you're actually able to reimagine a solution to the things down the road because
#
now you trust each other more.
#
So it's not that you're kicking it down the road just because you have nothing better
#
But eventually it will become a non-issue if you keep cooperating.
#
Let's kind of divide it up and perhaps I'm being simplistic here and if I am, please
#
correct me, but let's kind of divide it up into let's say security implications on the
#
world and economic implications on the world.
#
Obviously the two are related and deeply intertwined, but what is the role that global institutions
#
play in each of these domains and what are the ways in which Trump is undermining them?
#
Two big things in security.
#
One the norm of non-aggression.
#
Non-aggression not supposed to conquer territory by war.
#
Russia broke this in Ukraine.
#
A very simplistic version is that Trump is going amazingly soft on Russia.
#
Again, apply Occam's razor, apply Hannan's razor, range of explanations emerge.
#
But the fact that territorial aggression is not being punished in other countries can
#
consider it hugely destabilizing and damaging again, not something that we will see play
#
out immediately, but potentially down the line, somebody else who decides that they
#
want to be adventurous has the Russians to point to and has the fact that the world sort
#
of acquiesced in that or has Trump's actions to point to as proof that the world has acquiesced
#
in it, which is not at all a positive development.
#
The other is non-proliferation and non-usage and like steps towards denuclearization independent
#
of any specific thing that's been done.
#
Let's just say this is the very last subject on which you want someone who is zero-sum,
#
short-termist and uninformed by science to be in charge of things.
#
The potential for disaster is enormous to the extent that actual proliferation does
#
continue, which is a very real threat because the North Koreans have shown that they are
#
extremely willing to sell nuclear technology.
#
They're an extremely poor country.
#
This is one of the most valuable things they can export.
#
If they get the opportunity, they try.
#
Anybody who's willing to buy nuclear science or material from the North Koreans is almost
#
by definition someone who should not be getting their hands on nuclear materials or science.
#
And if the US sort of has this blasé attitude towards North Korea of like, no, the president
#
and dear leader met and like they worked out a deal and they now they have a love story
#
or whatever it is, then it's going to be hard to keep track of those things.
#
So that's my two-for-security.
#
Economic I would split into, I mean, look, whatever we have to say about the trade war
#
Like it's just so harmful on so many levels.
#
I mean, Trump has turned it literally into a negative-sum game where all parties suffer.
#
It's not even zero anymore.
#
You know, those like fantasy novels where like to resolve a duel, each person will like
#
gash themselves with a knife and the person who gives up first loses the duel or whatever.
#
That's what we're playing now.
#
I have one limb left, but you have none.
#
Monty Python references.
#
Independent of the US-China angle.
#
I don't know what stance Trump has taken on WTO, but I like, I find it very easy to believe
#
that the moment something in the WTO goes against the US, he'll jump to undermine it
#
And the WTO is the basis of one of the rarest and most valuable kinds of things in international
#
law, which is an agreed forum for dispute resolution.
#
So if that loses its effect, right?
#
To be fair, the US has a very spotty track record of actually complying with WTO rulings
#
and enforcement in the first place.
#
But I mean, this is the difference between Obama or some other president saying, I'm
#
going to find a loophole that lets me do this.
#
But they'd keep the optics right.
#
And they'd still be seen as upholding the role or the value of the institution.
#
And Trump just sort of being like, they took our money.
#
And so we're not going to.
#
I actually have to backtrack and add one to security, uh, NATO.
#
The fact that he's like so averse to NATO, that he claims that NATO is like taking American
#
money so that it doesn't spend on defense, which is not a implausible interpretation
#
of the collector defense agreement.
#
It's just that that agreement doesn't really mean that European countries have to pay money
#
to the United States, right?
#
To, to loop back to where we started.
#
It's not that kind of protection racket.
#
And Trump had to be honored into saying something that should be just like, like a casual statement
#
for any U.S. president, which is we believe in article five of the, the NATO treaty, which
#
is the assurance of mutual self-defense.
#
He fights every time because he doesn't want to say, I'm willing to come to the defense
#
of, in fact, he says the opposite.
#
He's like, why should I care if like X country in Europe is being targeted?
#
And like, of course it's not about X country, it's about the value of the existence of this
#
And to be fair, he's been very consistent.
#
The Trump, the president has been consistent to Trump, the campaigner, he used to say pretty
#
much the same kind of nonsense on the campaign trail, right?
#
He did target NATO even while campaigning on exactly these grounds.
#
The sad thing is that like, he's been corrected multiple times on this, right?
#
And again, he's, he's not willing to give up his pet narrative on it, but so on, on
#
economy, China trade war, WTO migration, right?
#
Like we, we should not lose track of the fact that one of the major ways that global flows
#
happen and that value moves around the world is through people, right?
#
And Trump is clearly trying to build fortress America that like people cannot actually get
#
into at multiple levels, whether that's like asylum and refugee policy, whether that's
#
like labor migration, whether it's migration by skilled workers, whatever.
#
And again, if he just does it in the United States, arguably like the people who could
#
have gone to the United States lose out, obviously the United States itself also loses out.
#
The danger is that other countries either retaliate or take it as a precedent, right?
#
Which is not implausible at all, right?
#
When he first brought those travel bans, one of the things that he said was these will
#
apply even to dual citizens who have one of their citizenships from these countries.
#
But if the other citizenship is France or the UK or something, I mean, technically under
#
like the letter of the diplomatic relations or the consular relations treaties, these
#
are subjects of reciprocity.
#
And if you're not allowing someone who's a French citizen into the country, you know,
#
in theory, the French are supposed to like suspend access for US citizens into France.
#
The French will obviously make a decision about whether they want to do this or not.
#
And they obviously won't because they're not led by a madman yet.
#
But you can see this starting to, not that we're at the situation where there really
#
is like global free movement of people, but there is at least global regulated movement
#
So this is sort of leading to a situation where like bits of that become islands that
#
don't speak to each other.
#
Like we're moving backwards on trade, we move backwards on.
#
So if we regress on migration as well, then that's another vector of the creation of value
#
and global flows that drops.
#
So, I mean, I was going to ask you about the worst case scenario and the best case scenario
#
in the international domain, but I think the worst case scenario is fairly obvious as nuclear
#
war and we all get wiped out, or are there less worse?
#
Oh, so I don't think that interstate nuclear war is actually sort of likely, right?
#
What is your worst case?
#
You know, it sort of strains credibility, but I have to, I mean, I have to believe that
#
a country that, well, many countries that currently have nuclear weapons, arguably even
#
including Russia, might make the enlightened choice to absorb a nuclear strike and not
#
Like there's again, there's really great game theory work on this on sort of like, what
#
Like after you've faced the first strike, but how does, how does sort of game theory
#
take into account an irrational fool like Trump?
#
No, that's why I said many, including even maybe Russia, but not the United States.
#
So I mean, I'd say Putin is much more rational than Trump for that matter, much more evil,
#
but much more rational.
#
No, one, one believes he's, he's the other, right?
#
He's the evil competent one.
#
No, my worst case in the nuclear space has to do with proliferation to like non-state
#
or rogue actors, which I think just like slips under the radar because the U S is not doing
#
the same good job of like global coalition building and enforcement that it does.
#
So like they set off a dirty nuke in Bombay and you and I are wiped out and the Delhi people
#
are laughing and saying, Hey, you said our air was polluted.
#
That would be terrible.
#
The worst part of that would be the joke, but yes, the best case again, I think is that
#
especially European leaders sort of lead a concerted effort to say, since we know that
#
these are the kinds of stresses and like variations that we have to deal with, let's invest in
#
building sort of more robust, more codified things against this possibility, right?
#
This is sort of not let a good crisis go to waste and actually improve the robustness
#
of your institutions in the process.
#
And sort of to move on from Trump right at the end of this episode, you know, Trump isn't
#
an isolated phenomenon in the sense that there are populists all over and we do have a populist
#
authoritarian in power right now in India, but Trump is very unusual in the sense that
#
you know, Narendra Modi at least is a conventional politician who's come up in politics for all
#
those decades and you could say that in certain ways, he's a rational player.
#
He's responding to political incentives and so on.
#
Trump was a pure freak of nature who is completely irrational, who doesn't lie as much as he
#
bullshits to use Harry Frankfurt's famous phrasing of it.
#
Is there a threat for you in that, for example, we could one day miss Modi, that there could
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be a leader in charge who is more like Trump, less rational or more willing to play to whatever
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extremes seem to work at the moment.
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And I mean, is there a cautionary tale there?
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Is there a lesson to be learned about say India's rules and institutions and how good
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they are or how weak they are?
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Not even to single out India, right?
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Actually there is a trend of established political parties usually growing more extreme, right?
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More reactionary elements sort of capturing or whatever, what do you want to call them?
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More purist elements capturing power within the party.
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Do you have any thoughts on why that is?
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Because typically like in public choice theory, what you learn is you learn the medium voter
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theorem, which is basically that even in the US you have the democratic and the Republican
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party every election in the primaries, they'll go towards the extremes to win the primary
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votes of the committed guys, but in the general election they'll immediately swing towards
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And you've seen that trend changing where more and more the voters themselves tend to
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swing to the extremes and that brings a guy like Trump into power and maybe Bernie Sanders
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would have on the other extreme would have given him a tougher fight than Hillary Clinton
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So why does the medium voter theorem no longer work?
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Two or three things I can think of, one, as with a lot of other theorizing in, especially
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in public choice economics, right, we should not assume perfect information or even unmanipulated
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Yeah, I mean there's rational ignorance and so on.
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There's one set of issues around basically who is able to get information out there,
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who is able to get their narrative out there.
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Trump visibly, I mean, if nothing else, you have to give him credit for completely hijacking
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the media's decision-making cycle, right, and for doing that masterfully, right?
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Perhaps unintentionally again-
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Oh, that's one where I think he knew the rules of that game and like he knew how to spin
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them to his favor, right?
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So one of his metrics was how much news I get, how much airtime I get.
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Yeah, no, and he, I mean, he's confessed in like other speeches since that like he basically
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decided what he would make his slogans based on what the crowd was responding to, right?
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So one to do with flow of information and media, one to do with especially in democracies-
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All of which are forever held though, they've held over the last few decades, imperfect
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information, rational ignorance, the tendency to prefer simple narratives over complex ones,
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and yet the median voter theorem held and now it suddenly doesn't.
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Now it's profitable for you to go to the extremes in the general elections.
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So I suspect, and I'm not very well read in this, so I sort of have to caveat, but I suspect
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that the development from earlier is the fact that the sources of information themselves
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have fragmented and tribalized.
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And that you're no longer arguing over what is a good response to an agreed reality, right?
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You're arguing over like a reality that itself is partisanly constructed and, you know, might
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not bear all but the most passing resemblance to what the other person sees, which I think
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would start leaning you towards greater- Polarization.
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There's an entire set of theories, at least within the US, around what kind of voters
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are more likely to actually go out and vote or not.
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And the fact that like, you know, it's the extremes that actually vote on either side
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or on each side of how many ever sided a distribution this is, and that the median actually tends
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to sort of assume that they don't have much of a swing capacity and not vote.
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And I've argued before in columns that social media has actually exacerbated this tribalism
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and polarization and this creation of alternative narratives.
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I may have taken a lot of your time today.
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And, you know, thanks so much for your patience and thanks so much for coming on the Scene
#
I learned a lot from you and I hope you'll come back soon.
#
I would love to be back.
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If you enjoyed listening to the show, do hop on over to Twitter and follow Ameya at kianayemma,
#
that is his name backwards, so it's K-I-A-N-A-Y-E-M-A. Curse him for choosing that, for making me
#
And you can follow me on Twitter at amitvarma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A, all the letters in the
#
For more episodes of the Scene in the Unseen, do hop on over to sceneunseen.in and thinkpragati.com.
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