A Country That Shall Not Be Named

- Sorry. - 'Cause Zuntite, was that sneeze? What was that? - That was a cough, I'm like. - That was a cough? - I think I'm like, I don't know, getting a little allergies or something. - You should get a whoop, but it'll tell you if you should go to ER. - Yeah, yeah, should I just take a break and do a quickie KG, just to make sure I'm okay? (laughing) - Now I completely lost my train of thought. Thanks man. - I mean, frankly, it wasn't that important. - Something about alliances, I mean, it's relatively incoherent if I'm being honest. I think you were saying alliances, something something. - Something about alliances, right? - I was checking my email, but I think you said alliances. - Hi everyone, welcome back to Teap Talk. My name is Jeff Kaplow. I am an associate professor of government here at William & Mary. And joining me, as always, is my esteemed colleague, Marcus Holmes. Hello Marcus. - Hey Jeff, how's it going? We are recording this on October 1st. We have formally turned the calendar page over to October. I think we're like full into fall now. It's great, the weather's changing a little bit. Very excited to be here with you once again. And also, October 1st, 2025, we have a government shutdown. Meeting the US government was not able to come to any type of resolution that would continue operations. A lot of the United States government would continue to spend money. And it's actually amazing when this happens. Like within like a few minutes of hitting midnight, like they like essentially like run out of money and they can't pay people to do stuff. And so basically non-essential employees, many of which, you know, there are many in the government, non-essential services just effectively stop. And so yeah, we are approximately 12 hours into a government shutdown, Jeff. What do you think about this one? Do you think it's gonna be a longer shutdown, a shorter one? Like what's your expectation? - I think this one might be on the longer side. I don't know. I just didn't feel the same flurry of activity, urgency just before the deadline that you sometimes see as everybody's kind of like desperately trying to pull something together. This one seemed like everyone thought it was gonna happen, it did happen. And I was going over to some of the prediction markets with my class yesterday and the chances of a shutdown were sitting at like 85% or something like that. So even the betting markets thought this was a foregone conclusion. So because of that background, it's like hard to see exactly where the resolution comes from here. - Right. Yeah, normally with these things, I think the idea of sort of negotiation ripeness makes a lot of sense where like, you know, imagine like a fruit that's getting like riper and riper as you get closer and closer to the deadline that you have to reach. And so, you know, as you get closer, it's becoming more ripe for agreement. It didn't seem like that was happening this time around. If anything actually seemed like the fruit wasn't ripening at all or very slowly. And when they did start to kind of get serious about talking, it was like almost too late. Like there was too many things to figure out and they weren't able to do it. So I agree with you. This one doesn't seem to have the sense of urgency. You know, Jeff, I've seen some analysts in the last few hours from an international politics perspective, a foreign policy perspective, kind of come out with some hot takes about what this means for international politics. Normally when we talk about a government shutdown, we are thinking about, you know, sort of domestic level stuff. So what it means for the national park service or what it means if you, you know, need to get a passport or something like that. Like, you know, delays and offices are shut down and, you know, non-essential workers being furloughed and things like that. But we often don't really talk about it in the international context. And, you know, some of the things that I've seen, people say, I just kind of, I want to get your take and I'll give you what I think. One is that this shows dysfunction, right? So one of the things that you might sort of take out of this is that allies, perhaps more importantly, adversaries, look at this and they say, okay, this is a country that's got a lot of polarization. This is government weakness. You know, they can't get their act together. They can't, you know, just do something as simple as pass legislation so you can continue paying the bills. And what that does is it sort of undermines the idea that the United States is a functional government, undermines the idea that we have an effective system, effective democracy, and might also undermine the idea that we can be a reliable partner, right? So if we can't even pay our bills domestically, like, why would anybody believe that we could do anything internationally that when we say that we would, right? So it's like a sort of commitment problem. You know, credibility kind of depends on, you know, the interests, the economics, the power, but also just sort of like perceptions of political stability. So if the United States isn't stable, then we're not credible. And so, you know, that could have ramifications both in the short term. If you're thinking about what that might mean for a country like Ukraine, let's say, and commitments that the United States will make towards it, or just more broadly kind of long-term, you know, China looking at the United States and seeing dysfunction and political polarization, they might sort of infer disimplies and stability. And maybe that affects their calculus with respect to how they approach us. My take on that is that that's all kind of wrong. Like, I think that that's, you know, sort of overdone. I mean, my sense is that, yes, it's likely that countries look at this and see a little bit of dysfunction just as Americans do. Like, I also look at our current system and see a little bit of dysfunction. But because this happens so regularly, I'm not, it's not clear to me that countries are inferring a whole lot from it, right? So if it was the case that the government hadn't shut down in a hundred years, and it was like this monumental kind of development, I could see adversaries really taking note of it. But my sense is that some of this sort of instability is already baked into the way that adversaries look at the United States, and they're kind of used to this type of dysfunction. And so I'm not really sure China or Russia or Ukraine like learns a whole lot going from, you know, yesterday into today when they couldn't pass a deal. And Mike, what do you think about that? Is that right? - Oh yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, there's no knowledge that comes from this. About like the lack of efficiency in the US system, that's very clear to everyone. Whether or not there was like a last minute deal to a vert a shutdown or not, doesn't affect anybody's perception of the ability of the United States to govern. So I mean, I think we all have a, well, whatever opinion we have on that. And it was already priced in, as you said. So you're right. I think that that take is a little bit overdone. - The other one is that this gives an opportunity for adversaries, particularly like China, Russia, Iran to have kind of propaganda. And in this case, it wouldn't be disinformation that the United States is sort of chaotic. It would be actually like, real information, right? So it gives them an opportunity to sort of like, you know, convey actual facts about the United States to its people and, you know, broadly on the internet. And that might have some effect in the sense that, you know, they can exploit Washington as being, you know, unreliable. Whereas, you know, these other regimes like sort of more authoritarian regimes are actually quite stable, right? So, you know, China might get a lot of, you know, attention for being sort of authoritarian in nature. But they can reply by saying, yeah, but look at the stability we provide to our people, the stability we provide in the international system. You don't see China, you know, sort of like shutting down its government. And so therefore it's a more stable kind of partner, if you will, for countries that might be like, sort of out there shopping for new alliances. Maybe you want to go with the stable China versus the unstable United States. I also think that this is wrong. I don't really think that there's a whole lot that even just everyday people are gonna learn about the United States necessarily from this chaotic nature. I think most people understand democracies, you know, can't be messy. And so you have, you know, these sort of, you know, factions and political parties that often disagree. And I don't think that sort of the states that might be shopping around for alliance partners are necessarily thinking about the domestic politics in the United States from this perspective. They might worry about who the president is and what party is in, you know, power of Congress. But the fact that they couldn't pass a resolution to keep the government open, I don't think is actually really all that relevant in the decision making for states. - That makes sense to me too. To me, the biggest impact on the shutdown on U.S. foreign policy is just a further diminishing of U.S. capacity to handle things in the world. Because when you shut down, yes, some people are deemed essential. Yes, the U.S. military is still functional. But fewer people are able to respond to any kind of crisis that's out there. I mean, you know, there are some people who won't be there to help. And I think that we're already kind of stretched pretty thin when it comes to U.S. government personnel because many of these foreign policy agencies have been affected by the quest for government efficiency that led to a number of people being fired. And so they're short staffed. And so further hurting the capacity of the U.S. government to respond to international things is not great when it comes to the U.S. ability to do what it wants to do in the world. The other piece of this is that the Trump administration has threatened to fire additional workers as part of a kind of bargaining position, I guess, with Senate Democrats to try to get them to agree to a budget that they didn't otherwise agree with. The argument was, well, if you don't do this, we're gonna fire these additional workers. So you should do this. But I don't, I ultimate, I don't really understand that threat because, I mean, clearly the administration has no problem firing workers regardless. So if they wanted to fire workers, they seems like they have shown they can do that. That really isn't something that needs to be necessarily negotiated with the Democrats. But in any case, if the Trump administration did follow through on that threat, that's a lot of people at some of these agencies that we rely on to deal with foreign policy. And so that also would have a pretty substantial effect, I would say, on the US ability to, you know, do what it wants in the world. - I agree with that. I mean, the other area where I think it has the potential to have an effect, and this doesn't happen every time, and it'll depend on how long the shutdown goes for, but it does sometimes change diplomacy. So back in 2013, there was basically a two week shutdown under the Obama administration, where he actually canceled a trip to Asia. So he canceled his trip to the APEC summit in Bali, and then also the East Asian summit in Brunei because of the shutdown. He didn't go, he sent John Kerry instead. And I think this was actually pretty consequential in the sense that this was the moment, or one of the moments where Obama was trying to do the pivot to Asia, as we sort of remember that, like sort of get less out of the Middle East, or get more out of the Middle East, more into Asia and focus on China and our alliance with South Korea, Japan, and so on. And by not going, that sort of undermines, I think the, at least the optical sort of presence of the United States at those meetings. And I think that that does have a symbolic effect. Xi Jinping was there, and I remember some of the reporting at the time, like he sort of took advantage of that situation and sort of had a bigger presence of those meetings that he probably would have if Obama had been there to kind of like counterbalance. And not that John Kerry's not a great person to send, and I'm sure he did a great job. It's still not the president of the United States. And there's work that we've discussed on the pop before by Rosa McManus and others that countries do pay attention to who travels, whether it's the president, whether it's the secretary of state, like these things do kind of make a difference. So I think on the margins maybe, you know, you can make an argument that this was, this has some type of effect, if only symbolically. And then if you want to dig into it, perhaps more substantively, you know, China might have been able to sort of have a stronger presence and sort of argue for its interest in a way that they likely wouldn't of if Obama was there. Again, you'd have to look into the details of how it went down, but I think that that's one possibility. And the last Trump administration shut down in January of 2000, I guess it went from December 2018 into January 2019, which is a long one. That was like over a month. There weren't any sort of like major summits that he skipped out on, although he did not go to Davos, which is like one of the, you know, sort of more economic focused kind of meetings that take place, and the Chinese representatives did. So they were very present there. And again, like, does that matter in terms of the big picture of U.S.-China relations and all that kind of thing? Probably not a whole lot, but optically and symbolically, I think countries do take note when the U.S. president is not at these, you know, pretty high profile meetings, particularly when they normally do go, or at least often go, and when they're not going because it's a government shutdown. So I think most of these takes are kind of overblown, but I think you were right about that one area. And then about on the diplomacy side, I think you can make the argument that this might matter, at least a little bit on the margins. - Well, if you have more thoughts about the shutdown, Marcus, save 'em, because I have a feeling we could probably, we'll be able to revisit the shutdown over the last little, next little while, because I don't think this one is ending any particularly soon. So Marcus, we had an email from a listener, Chiara from Newberry, Massachusetts writes, "I love the podcast, but sometimes it seems "like all you talk about is the U.S. and Russia and China. "Are these great powers really all "that international relations is about?" Chiara has some ideas about how these other kinds of powers should factor into our calculus, but I thought maybe this is a good point that our podcast has been really focused over the last little while. We've always been focused on what the U.S. is doing, but there's also a lot of China and Russia kind of in the mix. And I remember a time, maybe even on this podcast, when I was pushing back on this shift on the international relations theory to everything's all great powers all the time, the return of great power conflict and this kind of thread in international relations thinking. And I remember kind of being against that and saying, I don't think this is the way we wanna go, but now maybe four or five years later, I've kind of fallen victim to this myself and maybe the theorists who are pushing in that direction were right that this is what the world is looking like these days. So I thought maybe we could spend a little while talking about non-great powers and how they play into the international system. I don't really know what to call non-great powers. Like, we should maybe talk about that briefly. - That's the first question, right? - Yeah, like in the literature on this, and there is, I should say, there is a big international relations literature that tries to deal with this issue of like, what role do countries other than the US and Russia and China play in international relations generally? And so there are different ways to talk about this. Sometimes these are called small states, small powers or weak states. And part of the middle powers is another way of putting it. Like we don't wanna talk about, not talking about Aruba, but you're also not talking about China. You're talking about like some country in between, Poland, South Korea maybe, right? These are powers, but they're not the great powers. So all of this is there's a tricky kind of terminology issue and part of it depends on who you're comparing them to, because some countries are weak, everybody's weak compared to the United States, right? Or pretty much everybody. The vast majority of countries are far weaker than the United States, but maybe compared to Belgium, you know, Aruba's not doing so bad. So you have to kind of think about what you're comparing them to when you call them weak powers or small powers. So I don't know. I think we just wanna talk about someone other than the U.S., Russia and China. - Yeah, I mean, Jeff, I think, not to get too in the weeds on this, but I do think it's important, right? Because like one of the things going on here is that there's a conflation, I think, between a couple of different concepts. So, you know, most sort of like the realists that you were talking about before, the people who are arguing like great power politics is like those are the ones that really only matter. I think they're thinking about it largely as like, power as some type of capability, right? So it's how many weapons you have, maybe it's how big your economy is, but it's sort of like what you have the capacity to do. Like what can you, who could you go to war with? Who could you beat? You know, all that kind of stuff. But there's also a couple other things that get tied into this, which is power is sort of like status. And one of the things in international politics that realism in particular has not really paid a whole lot of attention to is this more kind of like ideational piece, which is, you know, it's actually the status hierarchy, not sort of capabilities per se that really matter, right? So you might, you might have like a relatively small military capability, but you kind of punch above your weight in other areas that make you more likely to be viewed as a peer. So I think of like a country like Singapore, for example, right? Singapore doesn't have a tongue going on in terms of like military capabilities. Like if you were thinking about this in like billiard ball terms, their ball would be relatively small compared to China, the United States, et cetera. But for some reason, over time, they've gained like relatively high status among peers, I think, of doing something special, right? So they have technology, they have finance. They have things that have kind of given them a leg up relative to their, you know, everybody else in the region because they're viewed as, you know, capable and they're viewed as having high status. And that's why, for example, they're able to host summits like the Trump and Kin summit. Like they are a real player in international politics despite having, you know, not a whole lot in terms of military capability. And then the third dimension is also this, you know, sort of component that's increasingly ideational, which is like soft power, which is, you know, your ability to kind of attract the attention of others. And I think that's tied to the status argument a little bit, but it's more just generally, you know, about your, your sort of like the perceptions that others have of you, not necessarily in terms of a status ranking, but like how much they want to do business with you and how, you know, how much you are appealing to them in the international system. And you can have states that have really strong, you know, soft power. I think it would stay like Norway, for example, right? They, you know, are associated with peace. They have a lot of, you know, the Nobel Prize comes out of there. They have peace negotiations, Oslo Accords. Like all that kind of stuff is attractive, I think, to a lot of countries who think of Norway as like peacemakers or deal makers. And so that can be another way of thinking about their power, quote unquote, not in military terms, but in more ideational terms. So my point is, I guess, it's like, it's actually really difficult to know like what it is we're talking about here. Like I think everybody knows what the great powers are. But then when we start talking about other types of power and what those countries, you know, are, you know, sort of organizationally from a classification perspective, it's not at all clear like how we should do this. So I like your idea. Let's just not talk about Russia or China or the United States, maybe India, include them. You know, we'll talk about other countries today and see where we get. - This idea that you're raising that power isn't like a single thing. That there's this multi-dimensional way to think about it and that countries might trade off across different dimensions of what you might call power. So like, okay, my military is weak, but I punch above my weight diplomatically, right? Or something like that. So there are some interesting studies actually in this literature that talk about like where some countries play a stronger role than others. And it's because of this multi-dimensional nature of power. So I think that's right. Like we should reject. It's just the number of tanks you have. That clearly isn't the thing driving international influence. At least not on its own. And so it's important to look at power in this more nuanced way. The bigger question I wanna get to here is, do we think that these non-great powers, small and middle powers, whatever, do we think that they're like just kind of pawns in the great power game? Or do they have a way to set the terms themselves sometimes? What kind of role do these non-great powers play? Are they buffeted around by forces beyond their control? Or are they able to really like pull levers of some kind of power in order to get what they want in the world? And I think we have a kind of recent example from the podcast, while Chiara might be right, that we mostly talk about these other countries. We do bring in some non-great powers into the conversation every once in a while. And we were recently talking about Poland, right? And the drone overflights from a country that shall not be named into Poland. And how Poland responded in a way that seemingly was aimed at leveraging their power, their influence over NATO writ large to shift the overall policy of the alliance in a way that is, it's a great power kind of move, right? That they're gonna use the force of their persuasion to like create a new policy and turn NATO into an alliance that is pushing back more strongly against Russia. And I think that's the kind of thing that we don't always put forward. That's not always the first thing we're talking about when we talk about how countries behave in the international system, but it's an important dynamic. Sometimes countries like Poland can really pull on some strings that get them what they want. In this case, what's happening is, Poland really wants NATO to be more aggressive toward Russia. They use the overflights of drones to say like, "Look, this is Russia probing NATO defenses. And this isn't just what Poland wants. This is what NATO needs. We need a more robust response to these Russian, this Russian aggression." And they got that. I mean, I think they got a new policy, a new system set up within NATO to address these drones. They drew attention to the problem. They put into the mix the idea of creating a new fly zone over parts of Ukraine, near Poland, whether that will happen, I'm very skeptical, but it's at least like now part of the conversation in a way that it wasn't before. And these are all actions taken by a country we wouldn't put in the category of a great power. - Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, from my perspective, I think the reason that this worked for Poland is sort of twofold. One is you have other countries in NATO that are in similar kind of geographic areas, right? So you think of like, you know, Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania, like they are, they see themselves, I think, relationally a little bit like Poland in the sense of, well, if it could happen to them, it can certainly happen to us, right? And so if Poland is nervous about drones flying over its sovereign territory, then these other countries presumably are too. And so that gives Poland this sort of like relational kind of group power, 'cause they're not just doing it themselves. They're not just saying, like, this is something that affects us. They're saying, this affects us, but there are other countries that are gonna be affected by this too. And so by kind of bringing the attention to the problem, not just as a sole actor in NATO, but as like a collective, I think that this actually, you know, makes them more powerful and more effective. And there's some research that this is actually something that smaller states or middle states or whatever, you know, have done fairly successfully over time. One of my mentors at Georgetown, and I was getting my masters as a professor, JP Singh, who does work on international political economy. And at the time, believe it or not, I was actually interested in international political economy. I've since seen the air of my ways and have gone into more security domain and diplomacy. But at that point, I was like really interested in political economy issues. And he's got this fascinating work where he looks at the early days of, you know, what was the gap, the general agreement on trade and services, and then what became of the World Trade Organization. And his argument is that there were many countries in the global south that, you know, did not have a ton of power in the traditional sense. And as they were negotiating these various treaties that would affect them greatly, because this is gonna set the trading rules for the international system, what they were able to do was they were able to not approach this sort of like unilaterally, like one-on-one, you know, here, I'm advocating for my interests as country X, but rather they created a cohort. They created a group where they got together. They organized. They said these are the interests that we all share. And because they were, they had a sort of a core, you know, group of countries that were all on the same page, they were able to do a lot of things like agenda setting. They were able to sort of say, when negotiating with the United States and Europe, like here are the things that we need to have on the table. And because there were so many of them as part of that group, the United States and the Western Europe really didn't have much of a choice. They had to listen to them because they needed to ultimately get an agreement, right? So by approaching this as a sort of like an ad hoc, you know, kind of committee almost, they were able to, according to JP saying, and I think it's right, enact concessions that they likely never would have been able to get if they had done this sort of like on a one-on-one basis. So I think sometimes if you're one of these states that's in that kind of middle range of power, a lot of your power comes not from what you have just internally, but your ability to sort of network and make alliances with others who have similar concerns, similar issues, similar preferences, and then as a block, you know, use agenda-setting power and other techniques to enact concessions, you know, as a group. So I kind of get the sense that's what's happening with Poland here. It's like they're doing this not alone, but with other like-minded countries that are a part of NATO. - Yeah, this leveraging alliance point is interesting and I think is an important part of the story when you talk about these kind of middle states because, you know, alliances with countries like this that are right on the front lines of a conflict are fraught for everybody. And we talked about this a little bit last time. The United States really doesn't want Poland to drag it into a conflict with Russia. And so the United States wants to make sure that there are guardrails placed around its alliance ties with countries on the front lines so that they're not dragged into a conflict that they don't want to be in. The countries on the front lines, on the other hand, want to use their alliance with more powerful states to get what they want in the conflict that they're in. And so you have this kind of constant tension that various countries have tools of dealing with, but there's this tension between how much support does the alliance provide and how aggressive can the individual states be within the alliance while still kind of keeping all the allies on board. And there are different dimensions to this, but one that's interesting with Poland is this conversation that's going on in the background about the potential for hosting more NATO forces, the potential for hosting even nuclear weapons at some point down the line. And this idea of nuclear sharing within the alliance has been a tricky political issue all throughout the Cold War and up to today. As we have countries like Russia putting nuclear weapons in Belarus, then you might have, well, do we want NATO nuclear weapons in Poland? And does doing that create the conditions for escalation out of control or the increasing the risk of a nuclear conflict? And so Poland, for its part, wants to use all the tools at its disposal to strengthen its position against this aggressor state, Russia. And for it, having nuclear weapons in country would be like a really nice thing for protecting Poland, but from the context of the overall alliance, it's much more fraught. So I think there's this constant tension as the smaller states try to get more from the alliance that will help them in the conflicts that they're engaged in. And we see this also in South Korea, right? Where we have a country that is on the frontline of an ongoing war sort of with North Korea. It's not an active war, but it's not a piece by any means. And you have North Korea building up its nuclear forces. And South Korea for many years has had kind of a latent nuclear capability, but has been willing to set it aside because the United States has offered all this other support. But as you enter a world where U.S. support is, I don't know, seen as more questionable, not a sure thing like it once was, and that U.S. alliances, traditional alliances become more transactional, and we've talked about this many, many times on this podcast. Well, countries like South Korea are gonna have to make a calculus. Is it better for us to build up our own capabilities outside of our alliance, even if it means alienating our alliance partners? So for a long time, the U.S. was able to tamp down on South Korea nuclear ambitions by saying, look, if you go this route, you're gonna lose U.S. support, and is that a trade-off you wanna make? And now, maybe that is a trade-off they wanna make. It's also not clear that this administration would pull support from South Korea if it tried to develop nuclear weapons. So we have kind of a different landscape shaping up, and the building up of these new capabilities, these new military capabilities, new ways of protecting power are one response that middle powers can have to changes at the top. As the United States decides to withdraw from some of these alliances in spirit, if not in word, then you have countries that are gonna have to take matters into their own hands, and that changes who we even put in the category of a middle power. If you're a nuclear weapon state, are you a middle power, or are you kind of automatically a great power? Yeah, I mean, one of the examples that I, or the sort of metaphors I use in class sometimes, is thinking about some of these middle powers getting caught in sort of like a monkey in the middle situation, or the sort of like donkey that's situated between two barrels of hay, and it can't decide like which way it wants to go. I think it's called Baradon's Ass is the, I believe that's right, we'll put it in the show notes. The idea basically like your stock, like between either geographically, economically, strategically, kind of wedge between rival powers, right? And so like, if you think about historically, a country like Austria or Finland, like these are countries that famously like been in this situation where they're kind of like, geographically in these cases, kind of like right next to one power, but they're also being sort of wooed, and there's strong ties to the other power. It creates kind of this like very awkward dual pressure, right? So you wanna potentially align ideology, from an ideological perspective, ideationally with one, but you also have a lot of economic, sort of interdependence with the other. So this means that, you know, you sort of stuck between these two choices, and sometimes you don't have to make that choice, all that explicitly, and sometimes you do. And so like the middle powers, Ukraine I think is actually can be viewed in this perspective, right? This is a country that has been, you know, on the one hand, sort of many elements within Ukraine and outside, trying to push it more into Russia's orbit over time, since the end of the Cold War, and then others in Europe and the United States, trying to obviously pull it more in towards the Western kind of liberal order. And so it finds itself, you know, in this, you know, call between these, this wedge between two different, you know, powers, and that can be very uncomfortable, and that can be, you know, leads to conflict, obviously, as we've seen. So I kind of, I look at South Korea, and I see somewhat of that type of situation, not as drastic, but on the one hand, they clearly are, you know, relying on the United States, at least for now, for its security, and they do all these, you know, military exercises and bases in South Korea and so forth. But they also have, you know, trade, significant trade deals with China, and China, you know, obviously is trying to kind of pull it ever more into its orbit over time, because it doesn't like the fact that South Korea is aligned with, you know, with DC, with Washington. So the United States wants to have a little bit of control over South Korea, and make sure they don't get a nuclear weapon, presumably, and then China is trying to, I think, you know, when it can, punish it, and move it more towards, you know, Beijing's kind of way of thinking. So the monkey in the middle, it's not a perfect analogy, but you can kind of visually see the sort of, like, the dilemma that these countries are in. It's like they have two powers, you know, sort of on either side of them, and it can be difficult to know what to do, especially when the powers change, and the Trump administration comes in, and now that, you know, power to the right of you looks a lot different than it did, you know, even a few years back. So making decisions under that kind of context, I would imagine, is very tricky and fraught with anxiety. - Yeah, so what do these countries do? I mean, like, we've talked about leveraging alliance ties as one tool in the toolbox of smaller powers that wanna get their way in the international system. But, you know, there are other tools out there. So one that immediately comes to mind for someone like me that studies international institutions, is that these countries often will try to work through international organizations to get what they want, and that has a number of effects. I mean, one thing that does is that it allows them to band together with other countries that are smaller, but that may not be shared like the same specific geographic interest, or the same particular, be part of the same particular crisis. But they kind of see the world the same way, or at least are similarly positioned in the international system, that they want similar things, or similar rules. And so you see kind of middle powers banding together in organizations like the UN, or the International Atomic Energy Agency, or even international financial institutions, to try to get outcomes that are better for powers at that level. And I think part of what's going on right now in the world is the general weakening of these international institutions, and what we used to call the International Liberal Order. And so as that starts to shift, you may see middle powers with less leverage in the world, because these were institutions that were kind of bringing a collective power to these groups. - Do you see things the same way, Marcus? - I mean, I think certainly the institutions that we've come to know and love post-1945 have recently been sort of diminished by many of the great powers, particularly decision-making in the United States. And that has affected the sort of overall, I think, legitimacy of the institutions to a certain extent, although I think they still have legitimacy, even if the United States is not involved as much. But maybe even more important the sort of ways in which these institutions can help. So without having the backing of the United States, for example, it's harder for countries or the institutions to do business, 'cause they lack resources and they need commitments from the great powers. So I do think you're right that the sort of decline of the Liberal International Order from an institution's perspective, thinking about something like the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization has been affected greatly by the United States kind of deciding that it doesn't want to play ball all the time without the World Trade Organization is doing. Institutions like that, I think, are affected, but when leadership at the highest levels kind of retreats a little bit. But this also does provide opportunities for what IR scholars would call forum shopping, right? So it doesn't necessarily need to be the case that the older institutions that we have, they're kind of like the ones that were stable are the only games in town. Like it's possible for the middle powers, the smaller states to get together to form new institutions, to form new arrangements. I haven't looked at this recently, but I remember reading some article about the proliferation of institutions over time. And it's just, first of all, like what an institution is, is a hotly debated topic at international conferences. But if you think about it sort of broadly, like institutions are treaties and sort of like alliances and organizations, I think these things have just proliferated like crazy because one of the things states realize is that they don't necessarily need to engage with the kind of quote unquote main institution in whatever area they're talking about. They can create a new one or they can join a regional one. And sometimes those regional ones are more favorable from what they have to give up to be part of it. And they can kind of create more bespoke kind of deals with one another and really focus on the challenges that if you're in Micronesia, for example, the challenges you're gonna face are gonna be very different than the ones in Scandinavia. So like you can kind of focus on what your concerns are security-wise and economic, economically. And then create your own institution. So I'm actually fairly optimistic about institutions generally. While I'm less optimistic about the sort of standard liberal order UN-based institutions that we've come to know and love over time, I think institutions are gonna be here to stay. And I think that the middle powers who are doing it right are continually like looking for alternatives to what the liberal order has provided. And that of course provides opportunities for a country like China to come in and say, well, okay, if the UN-led order is not meeting your needs, maybe we can help with your regional concerns. Or maybe we can help support your institution financially, other resources, et cetera. So as China has explicitly kind of called for a new kind of multipolar order, this is something that they have invested in. And so I think institutions will probably continue to rise. And we're gonna see, I think, more efforts by China to kind of carve out some of those institutions to be in this kind of sphere of influence. I think the more general perspective on this is that as a smaller state, I would prefer multilateral diplomacy over bilateral diplomacy because there's some safety in numbers there, right? And if you face me off head to head against the US or China or Russia, then I'm outmatched by most of the dimensions of power. But if we can band together and the great power has an incentive to see some consensus come out of an international meeting, then maybe I have much more leverage in that kind of a setting. - You know, Jeff, the other state that comes to mind when we talk about these smaller states that have like an outsized role in international politics, at least historically has been Cuba. So like that's one of the first ones I think about as somebody who's done work looking at the Cuban Missile Crisis. I mean, it's really remarkable. Like this is a country that has, I think like 10 million people. It's not obviously very large. They don't have on their own a very large economy or military capabilities. And yet somehow throughout the 20th century sort of appears over and over again as being a country that people care about to quite an extent, right? So it starts with Fidel Castro in 1959, revolutionary comes in with this like anti-imperialism agenda. And I think, you know, Cuba's a case where geography is really, really important, right? The fact that it's, you know, right off essentially right off the coast of Miami is one of the things that kind of gives it more, you know, sort of strategic importance. But you have, you know, a country that's close to the United States having a revolution, having this, you know, sort of like challenge to U.S. hegemony saying we're not gonna accept, you know, what the West is selling and we're gonna have this, you know, they become like a beacon for leftist movements in Latin America and other places. So they become like a really important, you know, sort of country in the Cold War because they have an ideology that is linked with other countries of import. It's not because Cuba itself has all this power. It's because they have a revolution and they're sort of attractive. I guess it's like a sort of soft power argument. They're attractive to other countries that are not the United States, not in the West, including the Soviet Union. So in 1962, when the Soviets placed these, you know, missiles in Cuba, it basically puts Cuba in the forefront of everything because this is the place where the world, you know, might essentially just be destroyed. There might be a nuclear standoff or there was a nuclear standoff, nuclear, you know, sort of annihilation because of Cuba's proximity to the United States. But it was because of that revolution that it happened a few years earlier and the ideology that linked with the Soviet Union that made such a thing possible. And then, you know, even beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis, lots of different, you know, sort of efforts by Cuba to send advisors and troops sometimes, doctors, to places in Africa, to Latin America and Gola, Ethiopia, places where they wanted to essentially spread the ideology, but also be a buffer, you know, strategic buffer against what they viewed as kind of Western imperialism. So I think that that's a country that really kind of jumps to the top of mind when we think about, you know, sort of a state that does not have a lot of, you know, military power, strong economic power, not a ton of, you know, geography other than the location making it an important, you know, country for the United States anyway, because it was right off the coast. - It's a question of how smaller powers, if they want to have leverage over the larger powers, how do they gain that leverage? And so for Cuba, there's the ideological or ideational connections to other countries in the world. And some countries, you know, are big players in international organizations, working through the international system. Some countries are strategically important by virtue of their location. And so we have a number of countries along those lines that like, okay, well, we're gonna lend you this military base in our country now, and that gives us some leverage in the relationship with the United States or Russia or China or whoever it is, right? And then others, it's economic, right? And you hinted at this before we were talking about Singapore, which I think one piece of Singapore's influence is related to its economic status in the world. But you have countries like Taiwan that combine a lot of these things, but one of the things that they do is produce like all the chips, many of the chips for the United States, right? So like these countries that wield outsized economic influence to have leverage in the international system. You see some of that maybe in the Middle East, the UAE or Saudi Arabia, where these are countries that by most conventional measures of power are not particularly powerful, but that seem to have outside influence by virtue of either some natural resource like oil or the way they're spending money in the world. And I think both of those things matter for some of these Middle Eastern countries where they're able to exert a lot of influence over what the great powers are doing, even though there's no military threat from these countries. They really seem to have a lot of autonomy in international relations, even though they're weaker by most conventional measures. - Yeah, I mean, you know, the other example we haven't talked about yet, but we have talked about in the pod is Greenland, right? Like, you know, there's a state that's small, you know, that's small from a geographic perspective, but small from a, you know, military perspective. Now, you know, it's like it's got, you know, the sovereignty's issues of its own. And it's sort of like there's, you know, connections obviously to Denmark. But, you know, the Trump administration presumably wants Greenland for a reason, and that is their, you know, sort of strategic importance in the Arctic and, you know, being able to have military bases there and so on. So you do see these moments where countries can step up and sort of be important to countries, sometimes unexpectedly so, precisely because they offer something to these great powers. And I think you're right, you know, the Taiwan example, like the sort of economic piece of this is really, really important. The other example I was thinking of while you were talking about economics is, have you heard of the Cod Wars? You familiar with these? - Yes. - The Cod Wars, right? So this was back in like the 1940s, 1950s. I think it was related to what Iceland was doing in terms of fishing, like off of its shore. And my understanding is that they had basically, you know, determined that fishing is incredibly important to their economy, and they extended kind of unilaterally the limits from the shore that you could fish in, right? So it used to be something like four miles and they pushed it out further so that they could get more fish. Now, evidently, the UK had fishermen like also interested in that particular area and didn't like this move and sort of like threatened Iceland and said, you have to stop this, you have to go back to where you were. And they dispatched, I guess, some boats to kind of scare Iceland. But the point is, is that at the end of the day, these were resolved from a, not because of the military strength that Iceland had, but because of their economic sort of necessity. So one of the arguments is that, you know, Britain had all this power. You know, why would Iceland, you know, ever win these confrontations? Well, one of the arguments is that they were able to show a lot of resolve because the fishing was such a big part of their economy, like 80% or 90% of our economy was based on fishing. So when they said, no, we're serious about this, you know, Britain had to take that seriously. And they had to listen. In addition, the United States was interested in Iceland from a strategic perspective in terms of having, you know, bases and things like that there. So they also kind of tacitly had the U.S. to support in that particular conflict. But it shows that, you know, when push comes to shove, it's not always the state that has more power, the kind of military power we were talking about before or economic power that wins. You know, smaller states can, if they sort of hold the line and can show resolve and show that they're taking this seriously that they're not going to back down. And it helps to have the backing of the United States, of course, they can win. They can actually, you know, come out ahead. So it doesn't, material inferiority doesn't necessarily mean bad outcomes, I guess would be the lesson of the Cod wars. - So we've talked about the, like some of the tools at the disposal of these countries, but I want to kind of flip this a little bit and think about what about the way the great powers position themselves vis-a-vis the smaller powers. I mean, I don't get the sense that there's a lot of like deep strategic thinking about how is the US going to approach like its next bilateral with Belgium? I think that that's probably not like top of the list of things that our foreign policy folks are worried too much about. But we do have kind of general policies toward countries at this kind of mid power level. And it shifted over time. And I think it's kind of an interesting question how these great powers engage with the smaller states. From the US perspective, I think we're seeing a change in how important the US things it is to have middle powers and smaller powers kind of on board with what the US wants to accomplish in the world. We've kind of shifted from a stance toward the world where the US founded advantageous to have these countries that weren't formally aligned with us, but that tended to support US positions in international fora like the UN General Assembly that the US could really count on as being like a supporter generally in the international system. And we've kind of shifted to a position where we're asking ourselves, well, what are these countries really doing for us in a material way? And this is exemplified, I think, by the US stance toward development aid, which goes disproportionately to smaller countries in smaller, less economically advantaged countries. And so, you know, when the US decides we're going to cut off all aid to everyone pretty much and shutter USAID, the organization that is supposed to be giving out aid to other parts of the world, that sends a strong message about the US sense of the importance of these other countries. And you've seen China go in a very different direction and ramp up aid to various parts of the world in an attempt to build up influence in those countries. And so I think it's an interesting question to ask, you know, what is the appropriate view of great powers toward the smaller powers? Is there something even materially there for the great powers to benefit from the support of smaller powers in the international system? And how do they engage with them? - Yeah, it does seem like the, especially in the second Trump administration, the United States has sort of adopted a position that, you know, the allies that we've had in the sort of middle power category, we've sort of taken for, or we do take for granted, and we don't really worry about kind of losing their support. So you think of like, even simple as like a country like Canada, right? It's like that would, I think it would be a middle power, most people would say, strong ally historically. And yet the Trump administration, you know, comes in and sort of like very antagonistic with it, calling it, you know, it wants to be the 51st state and, you know, things of that nature. And, you know, NATO countries too, like sort of setting aside the Russia-Ukraine war for a second, you know, NATO countries in Europe were sort of like part of that liberal backbone, I think that the United States has kind of relied on over time, post-1945. And, you know, the Trump administration again there has sort of suggested that, you know, these allies don't buy in enough or don't pay enough for defense, they're not, you know, they're not doing what he thinks is right vis-a-vis immigration, these countries are going to hell, like he said the other day at the UN and so on. So I think part of it is sort of like a disregard, in my view, a disregard for like the importance of these countries as being part of the alliance. I think the Trump administration just does not necessarily value what they're bringing to the table in terms of day-to-day international politics. I think that's wrong and we should be valuing that, but I think that it's pretty clear that he doesn't. I think one area though where the Trump administration still does care and sort of courts the favor of are these countries that you can kind of think of as like swing, not swing states in the domestic sense, but swing countries in the international sense. So like a country like Turkey, for example, I think the United States is still very interested in because it can kind of, it sees that as like a country that's situated between East and West, which it is, kind of contested by both the US/NATO historically and Russia and maybe even China to a certain extent. And so that's a country I think where, you know, they haven't sort of cut off as many ties as I would have expected. Now you could make the argument that that's because of Turkey's leadership and the sort of strongman personalities and the personalist diplomacy that Trump favors, and I think that might be part of it. But that strikes me as a country that could, the United States might view as kind of going either way in the international order and kind of wants to keep it more in its orbit. I think Indonesia is kind of like a similar country in that regard. It's a Southeast country that historically has had good relationships with the United States, but is also very much being courted by China and the United States wants to, you know, try to prevent that from happening. So it's, I agree that from a traditional allies perspective that, you know, Trump has been sort of, you know, taking them for granted. But I see a couple of these countries in that middle power counter is one that the United States still seems to be very interested in. It's just sometimes hard to tell if they're interested in those states strategically or more because of what's going on in their leadership. And Trump has some affinity, you know, for a leader in any particular case. - I don't anticipate a change in US policy toward these smaller states, but I think it's kind of interesting to look at the US view comparative perspective, like looking at the way China has ramped up its support for many smaller states over the last 10 years. And the way Russia, even Russia, has really worked to kind of build up relationships where it can, even in the midst of being kind of ostracized by the international community after its invasion of Ukraine. And so the US really seems to be moving in a different direction from the other, I guess, great powers at the moment. - Marcus, I think we should leave it there. Thanks so much for joining me today. - It's been great, Jeff. But, and by the way, we don't know what William & Mary thinks about our views. And we should say, and then this is where you say the thing. - The opinions expressed on this podcast are solely our own and do not reflect the policies or positions of William & Mary. They might, but they probably don't. We don't know. Folks, please subscribe to this podcast. You can do that on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast player of choice. Leave us a review while you're there. You can also check out our store at cheaptalk.shop where you can purchase a cheaptalk logo t-shirt, which is always nice to have around. Send us an email. We're at [email protected]. Let us know what you'd like to talk about. Thanks to Kiara for kicking off this conversation. We appreciate it. Whenever our listeners write in, we can't respond to them all, but we read them all. So please send us your comments and suggestions. Marcus, thanks again, folks. We'll see you next time. (beeping) - When you started talking, I just went to Wikipedia real quick and pulled up the Cod Wars page. And the first line is not to be confused with the Cold War. Which is one letter away. And I'm just imagining like, how many high school students every year produce an essay talking about the Cod Wars when they meant to produce an essay talking about the Cold War? - You could see it typing in the chat gpt. If you're just like a little quick, you know, it's like, give me an essay about the Cold War when you were supposed to do an essay on the Cod War. - Well, probably the worst way around, right? - Right, well, you could, you know, well, your finger, it depends if like, it's your thick finger could hit the bell. - You got some like 10th grade history teacher reading, like, what are they talking about? Fishing, the fishing fleets? Reckovic, what's happening? (laughing) - Well, Reckovic was important in the Cold War as well, but famous, famous-- - It was during the Cold War that this occurred. It's just, these are different things. Anyway-- - You can see why there'd be confusion.