Trump's First 100 Days, With Carla Anne Robbins and Matthias Matthijs

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies distinguished senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Tomorrow marks one hundred days since President Donald Trump took office. It certainly has been a busy fourteen weeks. Because so much has happened, we decided to ask our listeners what questions they had on the Trump administration's foreign policy. To help me answer them, I recruited my good friends and CFR colleagues, Matthias Matthijs and Carla Anne Robbins.
Matthias is a senior fellow for Europe at the Council and the Dean Acheson associate professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. Carla is a senior fellow at the Council and faculty director and professor at Baruch College's Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. She was formerly the deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times, and before that, the chief diplomatic correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. Matthias and Carla, thank you for joining me on The President's Inbox.

ROBBINS:
Thanks for having us, Jim.

MATTHIJS:
Yep, great to be back.

LINDSAY:
As I mentioned in the intro, Carla and Matthias, we asked followers of cfr.org on Instagram what questions they had about Donald Trump's first one hundred days. We got a ton of great suggestions. I want to go through as many as I can in the time that we have, but first, I'd like to start with your overall assessment of Donald Trump's first one hundred days. What stands out about Trump 2.0 to you, Carla?

ROBBINS:
We all wrote before he came back that he had learned a lot from the first term and mainly that he wasn't going to be constrained. He wasn't going to be constrained by the adults in the room. And I just don't think, as many times as I wrote it and as many times as I said it, I just didn't think that it was going to be this intense.
Every single place you look, starting from the people that he chose for his cabinet, to the plans to slash the State Department budget, to the firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to all the top military lawyers, to the talk, potentially, of closing the Africa Bureau at the State Department, to shutting down AID, the Voice of America, I mean, this is disruption on steroids and it is partly utter chaos and partly with huge intent. It is far, far more intense than I ever could have expected.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, I wrote a lot about how Trump's foreign policy would be disruptive, but it's one thing to write about it and I think quite another thing to actually see it in practice. Matthias, what's your reaction?

MATTHIJS:
Yeah, I'd agree with the chaos and the disruption, right? So, I think we can all agree that Donald Trump promised a lot of things during the campaign, and I think we also can all agree now that, clearly, campaigning comes easier for Donald Trump than governing and making policy.
That said, the first few weeks, we saw this frenetic activity from deportations and dealing with illegal migrants to very quickly came to trade tariffs that were stacked and gotten amplified, but if you actually look at the end of one hundred days, I mean, the conclusion you have to come to, he actually doesn't have that many results to show for, right?
I mean, he's already paused much of his tariffs. He's even hinting vis-a-vis China where he wasn't going to pause them, where he was going to play hardball, that he won't do that. It's also clear that Elon Musk's time at DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, is coming to a rather premature end well before the July 4, 2026 date they had set for themselves.
And even when it comes to Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who he was going to fire because he doesn't want to lower interest rates, he now can stay. So, I feel like, in just the last few weeks of April, it was becoming clear that he does face real constraints, not as many of his thoughts from his personnel, but from things like the bond market and from the risk of empty shelves in Target and Walmart.

ROBBINS:
Yeah. Unfortunately, the bond market doesn't care about what happens when the United States slashes all funding for malaria and the bond market doesn't care when all money for AID disappears and when children are starving in Sudan. I mean, the remarkable impact that we're already seeing on the world's poor and the world's ill and on public health funding and on development aid, these are not...
As much as Elon Musk is referring to this as waste, fraud, and abuse, we're seeing the impacts almost overnight because we were not only the main funders, we were the overwhelming funders of these things, which really mean the difference between life and death. And it is a remarkable thing even and I blame my colleagues in the press that we write one story about it and we move on. And that, too, is a phenomenon of the first one hundred days. There's so much chaos out there that it's really hard to figure out which way to look.

MATTHIJS:
Absolutely right that the bond markets don't care about many things that are doing real damage, but it does strike me that the first one hundred days of Trump's office in office were mostly felt in Washington D.C. and not so much in the greater American heartland, right? And it does seem to me, if higher prices hit shelves or empty shelves happen, then that's definitely something that is disciplining him, even though, absolutely, what we're seeing happening in the federal government and in foreign policy is potentially hugely consequential and already has been.

LINDSAY:
I should also just add on that. There's nothing that requires a president to deliver accomplishments in the first one hundred days. I understand that Donald Trump, on the campaign trail, made it sound as if everything would be easy and happen quickly, but in his defense, some of these policies or the success that he hopes to come from them could still happen. But let's turn to audience questions. So, let me begin with the first question, which surely a broad-based question, Carla, and it comes to us from @christian_morelli. And Christian asks, "What is Trump's doctrine 2.0? Does he have a strategy?"

ROBBINS:
I don't so much see strategy so much as we're not going to be taken advantage of. American power can bully and insist on getting what we want. American exceptionalism means not just America first, but America unconstrained, doesn't believe that allies are a force multiplier. I think those are all pretty fundamental things. We saw them testing that out in the first term.
But the one thing that I suppose that I least understand that perhaps one could put into, I don't know if it's grand strategy or petty strategy, I'm not sure where this fits in, they seem to have this idea that they're going to make a great compact, not with European allies, not with NATO allies, not with the structure that we stabilized the world with in the wake of World War II, but instead with a revanchist Russia.
They seem to somehow want to make a deal with Putin's Russia. And as far as I can tell, other than nuclear weapons and oil, I can't figure out what he has to offer, but they seem to want to make a deal with Russia and make beautiful music with them. That seems to be the biggest strategic change that Donald Trump is offering right now.

LINDSAY:
Matthias, I want to break up Carla's point just now because there's a question about allies and there's a question about what we traditionally called adversaries, and we got a lot of questions from our listeners about Donald Trump's approach to allies. Let me just read a couple of them. @marcylee2000 put the question really in a positive format.
She says, "Does Donald Trump hope to make any new allies?" Marin Dodd-Fresca came at it with a more negative spin. She asked, "Why is the intent on alienating current U.S. allies?" And a sharper form of that question came from @alexisv7 who asks, "Help me understand why we're pushing away Canada and Mexico as allies." So, how do you think Donald Trump thinks about friends, partners, and allies?

MATTHIJS:
Yeah. I mean, a lot of analysts, I think, rightly see Donald Trump's approach as very transactional, right? It doesn't matter whether you have the same values of democracy and freedom rule of law. What matters is what America can get from you. So, it's a very zero-sum view of the world, meaning what I win, you lose. So, they have to be losers for me to win, which is like how the New York real estate market works, right? I mean, you want to buy a building, that means other people didn't buy it. You bought it. You got a good price. You got a good deal. You move on.

LINDSAY:
And if they get it, you don't.

MATTHIJS:
Exactly. While traditionally, the United States, especially since World War II, has thought of, "No. Allies are growing. That means we grow, too, right? We can both win. We can both trade. Whatever you import, I export. And we're doing it because it makes sense," so all the good principles of comparative advantage. He does seem to have his spheres-of-influence view of the world, right?

LINDSAY:
Break that down for me because I know for those of us who have PhDs in political science, international relations, we get very excited talking about spheres of influence, but what do you think it means or how it shapes what it is that Trump is doing?

MATTHIJS:
It's what we think of as a realpolitik view of the world, meaning the strong nations do what they can and the weak accept what they must. I think that's...

LINDSAY:
Credit to Thucydides right there, and it gets back to the point that Carla made about pricing power, raw power.

MATTHIJS:
Yeah. So, he looks at Xi Jinping, he looks at Vladimir Putin, he sees strongmen who are firmly in control of their country. In a way, he likes to think of himself as a businessman who's in firm command of the Trump organization and now of America Incorporated. So, he wants to give orders and he wants everybody to follow them. That's how he's created his cabinet, based on loyalty rather than expertise. So, Europe doesn't fit neatly into this. It's annoying for him, right?
The European Union, it's twenty-eight countries, twenty-seven countries. They have this common decision-making. It takes forever. He wants to give an order, he wants to make deals, and he can't do that. Canada, I think, he sees as the fifty-first state. He's not joking about this. That's why he also wants Greenland. And that's why he wants to control the Panama Canal. So, the Western Hemisphere, North America mostly, he wants under complete control of the United States.
And if that's the case, he's very happily willing to let Eastern Europe to the Russians and let the Indo-Pacific be controlled by the Chinese. Well, that's a very different approach for a Republican president compared to, let's say, Ronald Reagan or even compared to his democratic predecessors.
And it's left many allies confused and angry to some extent because they don't quite understand why they're the ones who always are at the receiving end of Trump's ire and seen as free riders of American power when many of European allies, Denmark is a good example, which is the Greenland is part of Denmark, because they've supported American military campaigns in the past. They spend a lot on defense. They're good soldiers in that sense.

LINDSAY:
I have to ask you, because you grew up in Europe, how would you describe Europe's reaction to Trump 2.0?

MATTHIJS:
Well, look at the numbers. Tourism figures from the UK and Germany, two of the most reliable partners and allies of the United States, are down year-on-year in March by close to 20%. The Europeans are voting with their feet. They're not quite banning American products the way the Canadians started to do in the beginning of the Trump administration, but there's a huge sense that America is no longer a reliable ally protector. And I think it does help European elites to make the case that the European Union needs to move on and create its own independent thinking, strategic autonomy, sovereignty, whatever you want to call it.

LINDSAY:
Well, the Trump people would say that's what they're trying to do. My question to you is, is that good for the United States?

MATTHIJS:
It would have been good for the United States if it was done in a structured friendly manner, right, with American support, but now, what worries me is that, and I'm sure we'll talk about this in a minute, that this could be a fundamental rift in the transatlantic alliance and that Europe will basically take a very transactional approach to the United States and reassess it every four years depending on who's president.

LINDSAY:
Well, Carla, how do you respond to the point that Matthias just made? Do you think this is just another kerfuffle in the transatlantic relationship, we seem to have them every ten years or so, and people in our business wring their hands about the end of the transatlantic relationship, or is there something about what is happening under Trump 2.0 that really is fundamentally different that really does have the potential to break the relationship?
I mean, the incoming German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, on night of his election said that, quite bluntly, in essence, the Germany had to act on the assumption that the United States cared nothing about European security. We've seen Mark Carney, the new prime minister of Canada, talk about how, essentially, Canada, the different relationship with the United States and the rest of the world. Is this all hothouse talking or do you think we're witnessing something more significant?

ROBBINS:
I think the Europeans have been talking that way for a really long time, but it's always been aspirational, when they've talked about having their own pillar, when they played with the idea that they were going to take the responsibility for Bosnia and then blow it big time. They play that game for a really, really long time and then they blow it. They really have never had the capacity to do it.
They've never been willing to spend the money to do it, but that's always been aspirational. Now, it's out of desperation. And they're seeing what the rest of us are seeing, which is even if, four years from now, a different president comes in, whether it's a Democrat or it's an internationalist Republican, the disruption of American institutions, if we walk away from NATO, if we cede Ukraine to the Russians, if AID is completely destroyed, if we no longer have any soft power left in the world because we've been—

LINDSAY:
And you think this is what's happening?

ROBBINS:
It seems to be what's happening, but it's only been one hundred days. It's remarkable how much can be dismantled in one hundred days. You can imagine if this continues on this trajectory for four years. They're seeing what we're seeing. It's hard to rebuild what you can take apart so quickly. And they're seeing what we are seeing on this. On a certain level, you can say, "Wow, it's about time that the NATO allies finally take responsibility for their own defense," but as Matthias said, that needs to be done in an orderly way, not in a desperate way.
And so, you can say that there's a loss of soft power, there are all these other things, but we are dismantling structures, and they are very aware of that. And so, this is not orderly. This is out of desperation and fear. And lots of bad things happen when desperation and fear happen.

LINDSAY:
So, my takeaway is the aphorism that applies is that you cannot unscramble an omelet?

ROBBINS:
There'll be a lot of scrambling, but that omelet won't be unscrambled.

LINDSAY:
Or it's easy to break things. It's hard to build them. Matthias, let's talk a little bit about this issue of great power rivalry. @Eduardocurry asks, "Is creating a gap between Russia and China still a sought-after objective?" And I guess I would add on to Eduardo's question. Is Trump's approach to Ukraine fundamentally about creating what we call a reverse Kissinger or a reverse Nixon?
This is harkening back to the 1970s when President Richard Nixon and the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, engineered a rapprochement between Washington and Beijing. It was seen as a big move on the global chessboard by taking two big powers and aligning them against Soviet Union.

MATTHIJS:
I think if we wanted to make sense, rational sense, of what Trump is doing with Russia, that would be a potential explanation, but as Carla suggested earlier, it's not quite clear what we're getting from Russia, right, or what they can give us apart from...

LINDSAY:
Do you think President Putin is playing President Trump?

ROBBINS:
I think Trump wants a deal with Putin, and I think he does want to deal with Xi. And he's talked about this quite openly where he said, "We're going to do a beautiful deal with Russia. We're going to do a deal with Xi." And he actually said that if he got the two in a room together, he was not going to just talk about the limitation or the reduction of strategic nuclear arms arsenal.
He was also going to talk just about sizing down the Pentagon and slimming down the militaries because all this money they're wasting supposedly on military spending could be used to build beachfront properties or other things that people may want. And so, again, I think the one thing we've learned from Trump in the first one hundred days is to take him literally and seriously, unlike the first administration where many of us took him seriously but not literally or the other way around. It's not clear that he wants a reverse Kissinger because I think the U.S. is much more intertwined with China today.
And I think he's starting to realize this with his very high tariffs that this is not that easy to do to isolate China. And if he did want to do this, then he needed the Europeans on his side, right? And so, what he's doing with Russia means it's quite the opposite because that's driving the Europeans closer to China, quite one thing, but there's the added complication, of course, that the Chinese are supporting Russia in their effort in Ukraine.

LINDSAY:
Well, this gets back to the question from a listener earlier about does Donald Trump have a strategy, one of the hallmarks of having a strategy as you try to minimize the contradictions that are operating? And here, I think, a lot of what Trump is doing seems to be working against other parts of what Trump is doing. I was struck particularly with the offer to help Russia rebuild its oil and gas sector.
That would seem to run against Donald Trump's desire to want to increase and unleash America's oil and gas sectors because they are competitors in the global market. Carla, I want to come to you about this question of the reverse Kissinger, but also about how you view Trump's approach to China. Let me just ask you a question that listener at @gw_3737 asked, and it is, "What is Trump's plan with One China policy and Taiwan?"

ROBBINS:
This is... I honestly don't know. I mean, Trump has said a lot of things about Taiwan over the years. There seems to be, though, this through line of resentment toward Taiwan, much as if...

LINDSAY:
They stole the United States' semiconductor industry, said it time and again.

ROBBINS:
Yes, and also resentment that we are protecting them. We hear that again and again from him, not just toward Europe, but also toward South Korea and toward Japan. And Taiwan is on that list of why do we have to do this? So, that, of course, goes against a big part of the Republican Party.
And you remembered before, just at the time the Russians were about to invade Ukraine, there was a big debate inside the Republican Party about, should we do Ukraine? Is it going to divert resources and attention from Taiwan? Taiwan was almost an article of religious faith for a lot of hawks in the Republican Party itself.
And now, you see a big split in the Republican Party of people who say, "We shouldn't do anything anywhere." We should believe them also themselves, the people who still are the big Taiwan believers. And I think Trump is really... to go back to the transactional view of the world, I think he sees Taiwan as a burden. I'm not sure he's going to say it all that directly because there's still a lot of people on The Hill, Republicans he needs the support of when it comes to the budget and all of that, but I think that is his attitude toward Taiwan.

LINDSAY:
Carla, I would add to that, because it strikes me it's not just that Donald Trump resents Taiwan for its alleged sins of stealing America's semiconductor industry. It's also that he seems to be deeply skeptical of the wisdom of trying to defend Taiwan. He has repeatedly pointed out that Taiwan is very close to China and a very long way away from the United States. And again, this is someone who has campaigned about America's excessive use of the military, excessive military interventions. But all this gets me to a question, and it's the one surprise I have with this first one hundred days. I'm not sure what Donald Trump's China policy is.
I know what the policies are that people like Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, have articulated. I think they would proudly describe themselves as China Hawks. I'm not sure, at the end of the day, that's where Donald Trump is. And I think, to me, one of the interesting questions as we go beyond the first one hundred days is how does China policy evolve? Will Trump make these commitments to Taiwan that many of his subordinates want to make, or is it the case that he's just looking to do a trade deal with China? And if he can get a trade deal, and that's a big if, will he be satisfied with that?

ROBBINS:
If I had to bet, I think it would be that because if you looked at the way he talked about China in the first term, I mean, China was his major foil when he ran the first time around. He kept talking about how China was raping the United States. It was in the days when we still had political norms. Everybody was quite shocked when he used the term on the campaign channel, and then he used it again and again. He talked about currency manipulation.
He talked about all that resentment we began to hear toward everyone else was first focused solely on China, but at the same time, he was quite admiring of Xi and the strong man that Xi was. And when Xi... looked like Xi was suddenly breaking norms in China and that he was going to become president for life, you could hear him say, "Wow, I wish I could do that, too." So, if he admires Putin as a strong man, Xi's a much stronger strong man than Putin.
So, if I had to bet, I think, Jim, and I'm not a sinologist, I think, Jim, you're right. I think if he can get a really pretty trade deal, certainly, human rights are shutting down the human rights bureaus over the State Department. I don't think that's going to be a major thing. And I... whether he'll completely trade away Taiwan the way it looks like he's about to trade away Ukraine, we will see. I think there's more of a drag on that from the Republican Party, but I think if he can get a trade deal, I think that that's going to be the main focus.

LINDSAY:
Carla, to go back to a point you made earlier in Donald Trump's worldview, which is a dog-eat-dog place, also as Matthias pointed out, it's, "I win, you lose. If you win, I lose." It strikes me that he views Russia and China as the closest to peer competitors for the United States. They're the most powerful. And everybody else is almost a side player.
That's why when he begins to talk about spheres of influence, how the United States is going to dominate the Western Hemisphere, what seems to be implicit in that is that China has a legitimate sphere of influence and Russia has a legitimate sphere of influence, but the question always is, do we agree on what the borders of those spheres of influence are in what you are legitimately allowed to do? That's a bigger question. Matthias, I want to come to a set of questions that are in your wheelhouse in terms of the work you do.
And as you might imagine, it has to do with the most beautiful word in the English language, which is tariffs. And let me just give you a flavor of the questions. @ChristianIOliver asks, "What is the long-run goal of tariffs? What kind of world does Trump want to create?" And I'll pair it with another question from @Tushar.Buckets who ask, "Is there a more effective way instead of tariffs to address China's unfair trade practices?"

MATTHIJS:
It's an excellent question because, here, and it continues with the theme, I feel like that sums up this podcast, is that there's contradictions in Trump's goals here, right, in his strategy. On the one hand, the big prize for Donald Trump is reindustrialization, bringing those good manufacturing jobs back to America, making stuff again. And China is the big opponent there, the big foe.
And so, very high tariffs with China, in theory, should convince many companies in the world to invest directly in the U.S. so they avoid that extra tax from not producing in the U.S., but many companies are immediately saying, "Well, that needs to be a long-term commitment and it needs to be very high. It needs to be 50%, 60% for it to be worth it to come to the U.S."
But that's in direct contradiction with his second goal of his tariffs is that he wants the revenue, right? So, if you think about roughly $3 trillion worth of imports every year of goods in the United States, at 10%, anybody can do math well enough, that's $300 billion a year.
Now, let's assume that this, of course, hits imports because they're more expensive, so it falls to two and a half trillion, that's still two hundred fifty billion. Over ten years, that's two and a half trillion. And before you know, you're talking real money, right? And so, that then allows him to push for corporate tax cuts or permanent income tax cuts, which he wants to make permanent.

LINDSAY:
Or no tax on tips.

MATTHIJS:
Or no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, all these sorts of electoral promises. But of course, if you want to make everything in America, that means you're not importing anything anymore. So, it's either one or the other, right? You either produce everything here at high cost, high labor costs, and much higher prices, also this is the guy who campaigned against high inflation and blamed Joe Biden for the higher prices since the COVID pandemic, or you want the revenue, but then you have to keep buying stuff from the rest of the world at not-too-high prices because, otherwise, you wouldn't buy it in the first place, right?
So, is there a better, more efficient way of achieving some of these goals? And then everybody who studied a basic international trade, a basic international economics course, will get, at some point, to the arguments of for protection section. And you'll go through all these arguments. And for national security reasons and other reasons, this is perfectly acceptable, but if it's purely you want to produce stuff in America again, then the Biden approach of subsidizing it or through tax breaks is actually much more efficient.
Why? There's a producer cost for sure, that's where the subsidy go, but for consumers, there's no higher prices, right? So, what subsidies do is there's no loss to the consumer. I mean, there's a gain to the producer. And of course, that is a transfer from the government to the producer.

LINDSAY:
But that's exactly opposite of the approach the Trump administration is taking. I mean, subsidies come in all shapes and forms. And I will note that one of the ways government can subsidize industry manufacturing or otherwise is by investing in basic research. And what we've seen is the Trump administration slashing support, particularly for colleges and universities, arguing that this is stuff that either doesn't need to be done or can be better done by the private sector.

MATTHIJS:
There's a very insightful quote from the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, when he was asked why are they producing these iPhones in China? Is it because of cheap labor? And he was surprised because he said, "Well, I would love to know where there's cheap labor left in China because let me know where it is and I'll go there." He's like, "The reason we're there is because of the engineers that can do this kind of work and that can put together these sorts of things."
And I think that's where, if there's a reason why Japan, China, and Germany are successful setup manufacturing, you have to look at their education systems, vocational training, very early on, technical colleges, and all that stuff. So, if Trump were serious about doing reindustrialization, you can achieve what he wants to achieve the Biden way through subsidies or tax breaks or his way through tariffs, but you have to put in place the research and development and the community colleges, the technical colleges, all these things. And that seems, to me, a dimension that's sorely missing from this strategy if indeed we can call it that.

LINDSAY:
Well, this comes back to a point you made earlier, that it is easier to campaign than it is to govern because on the campaign trail, you can promise sunshine and rainbows and you don't have to worry about whether you can deliver. And once you are governing, you have to make choices and things can come into conflict. Carla, I want to ask a set of questions that really goes to your wheelhouse, given the number of news stories you've written over the years about decision-making in Washington. It will come as no surprise to you that a lot of our listeners are really interested in how decisions get made in the Trump administration.
@IZoomBelow asks, "How much is Trump listening to his policy advisors? How much of his foreign policy is his own?" And there's also a question from oscarberry1, who, I have to let everybody know, is my research associate. He wants to know, "How different is the process of the Trump administration's foreign policy decision-making from previous administrations?" or as Hassan E. Taleb asked, "Why all the chaos?"

ROBBINS:
I have been struck at what a weak national security team he has. There are no major players around him. There's nobody who, as far as I can tell, can push back against the president. He has isolated his Secretary of State, the few moments in which Marco Rubio... Let's not forget, he dubbed him Little Marco, and he continues to treat him like little Marco. The few moments when Marco has stood up on his hind legs, if you recall, when Elon Musk actually got up and said, "AID is no more," and Rubio said, "No. Actually, it's going to be part of the State Department."
I thought it was actually a pretty slick move, thought he was going to save it, and the next thing you knew, it might have been part of the State Department, but it was still gone. Mike Waltz, we don't know what goes on inside the White House, but Mike Waltz, for a long time there, looked like a dead man walking because the Signalgate. And Pete Hegseth, boy, he's talking about someone who's really got a troubled life here. So, there are no Jim Bakers out there.
There are no major players out there who were talking... There's no Hillary Clintons. There's not even a Rex Tillerson out there to push back against Donald Trump on... certainly none of Mike Pompeo to push back against Donald Trump on foreign policy. So, as far as I can tell, it's all Donald Trump.
The other thing about it is I don't think, in the first term, there was much process. And I think... I suspect there's a lot less. We don't have a lot of insight into it, but what we do know, for example, in the first term is before he had his meetings with the North Korean leader, there were no principles meetings. He just went in there and winged it.
The idea that you give a dictator a meeting with the president of the United States and you don't sit down and figure out what you want for that meeting first because he's so confident about his ability to just negotiate, that is an extraordinary thing, that lack of process. Now, his level of self-confidence about his ability to negotiate, I suppose, is so big that he doesn't need meetings like that, but it does explain the chaos, I think, that we're seeing out there.

LINDSAY:
Just on that point, Carla, I think that all presidents get the foreign policy team in the decision-making process that they want.

ROBBINS:
Oh, sure.

LINDSAY:
And it's pretty clear that Donald Trump's takeaway from Trump 1.0 is that he did not want senior leaders on his team acting as guardrails or constraints. He wanted people who would enable him to enact what he sees as fundamental to reorienting American foreign policy. And I think a lot of the stories, obviously, that are written on this about the tick-tock of what's going in or out and whether it's like past administrations or how it differs flies over the heads of most Americans because, at the end of the day, they're not interested in how the decision gets made.
They want to know if the decision is going to make their lives better. And I think we, right now, making all kinds of judgments about where we are after one hundred days of Trump, but I'll just point out that we have three and three-quarter years left to go. There are a lot more shoes to drop. And one of the interesting questions is going to be what kind of learning takes place? Does the administration decide to curtail or is it double down?
And Matthias just showed me a headline from The Economist, which tells me it's not just three and a half years. It's 1,361 days to go. I want to close, actually, by asking each of you, and I'll begin with Matthias first, what is it that you are looking for going ahead? Is there some decision you think is currently on the back burner, maybe it's teeing up and getting ready to be unveiled, that you think could be consequentially for the good or for the ill?

MATTHIJS:
It's a good question. Donald Trump's main strength and weakness at the same time is his unpredictability, right? So, in many ways, the fact that he keeps everybody in suspense keeps everybody focused on him. I have been amazed, though, I mean, if you just think about the first one hundred days and how chaotic they often were and how bad this is for business to not know what's next, how much a tariff is going to be, and so on, the International Monetary Fund, in its spring meetings, downgraded its expectation from 2.8% growth—

LINDSAY:
For the United States.

MATTHIJS:
... for the United States to 1.9. That is a number that Europe could only dream of, for example, right? So, despite all this, somehow, this country keeps humming along economically, right? And so, the question is, is that going to stay? Is he going to be sensitive to this? How much damage is he willing to do for the bigger goal of whether it's to reindustrialize the country, having allies spent more on defense?
I mean, he doesn't seem to have as many cards as he thinks because he seems to be caving left and right on the bigger issues including on China, including on the Federal Reserve, including on even DOGE. On the other hand, we also know that, every time there's a bit of good news, especially from a market point of view, the next few days, it can be a bit of bad news, right? And so, I wonder, at what point will this settle in some sort of more predictable pattern? And what worries me is that it won't.

LINDSAY:
Okay. Carla, let me ask you, what do you think our listeners should be paying attention to going forward?

ROBBINS:
People may be tired of it, but I think people have to watch what happens with Ukraine. I think it's incredibly important. This is the entire question of our relationship with our allies, and are we throwing ourselves in with Russia and with the autocrats, or are we going to stick with democracies?
Are we going to consider alliances force multipliers, or are we really going to retreat, as Matthias said, into this sphere of influence idea? And that's a pretty Hobbesian world of nasty, brutish, and short lives. So, you may think that Ukraine is really far away and it's not in NATO and what do we owe them and all of that. I think the future of whether or not we're on team democracy or whether we're on team autocracy is going to be decided in Ukraine.

LINDSAY:
On that sobering note, I'll close up this special edition of The President's Inbox. My guests have been Matthias Matthijs, Senior Fellow for Europe at the Council, and Carla Anne Robbins, Senior Fellow at the Council. Matthias and Carla, as always, delight to chat.

MATTHIJS:
Thanks for having us.

ROBBINS:
Thanks, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox in Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We'd love the feedback. A transcript of our conversation is available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Justin Schuster, with recording engineer, Eli Gonzalez, and director of podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.