Tim Snyder’s warning: Israel depends upon a functioning US. Trump and Musk are destroying it

I had been trying for several weeks to arrange an interview with American historian Timothy Snyder. I wanted to speak to him in particular about a bestselling book he wrote, “On Tyranny,” that offers “Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” that might help prevent the collapse of democracies.

The short volume includes advice about not making it easy for leaderships who are bent on authoritarianism by preemptively consenting to their goals, defending targeted institutions, remembering professional ethics, and not confusing dangerous nationalism with commendable patriotism. One of the many memorable epithets from the text that stuck in my mind was: “A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best… A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals.”

Not everything in the book has obvious relevance for an Israel whose democratic institutions are under attack by the coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But much of it has — certainly with regard to the growing concentration of power in the hands of a single leader and the ongoing attempts by his coalition to radically constrain the judiciary.

As it turned out, the date we set for the interview, February 20, coincided with the return by Hamas of what it said were the bodies of four slain hostages — Oded Lifshitz, Shiri Bibas, Ariel Bibas and Kfir Bibas — and we were speaking as Israel’s national forensic institute was in the process of establishing whether Hamas had indeed sent home the four bodies it had promised. It had not.

The sheer volume of breaking news since that day meant I only found the time to write up the Snyder interview now, a week later. And the news keeps moving, of course: As I was reading over this piece before publication, US President Donald Trump was publicly berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office — a staggering confrontation that, as you read on, you will gather would have dismayed but probably not surprised Snyder.

A professor at Yale specializing in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and the Holocaust, who sits on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee of Conscience, Snyder has been to Israel and has lots of friends here, but took pains in our interview to stress that he is not an expert on Israel and its current affairs. “It doesn’t make sense to ask me about detailed Israeli things,” he said, but “what I can do is apply different kinds of knowledge to the predicaments that you describe.”

Our conversation wound up not focusing very much on the Israeli coalition’s judicial overhaul and, indeed, took several unpredictable turns — to the point where, at the end, Snyder noted that “It may not have been what you were looking for, but I hope it was of interest.”

Indeed it was.

I found his warnings that Israel stands to be deeply harmed by the Trump administration’s embrace of dictatorships and by what he believes to be the Musk-Trump assault on the fundamental functioning of the United States to be important and worrying.

And I was intrigued by his suggestion that Netanyahu might be among the world leaders most capable — if not the best-placed of all — when it comes to trying to talk Trump out of policies that are not in the American interest and, by extension, not in Israel’s interest either. If Netanyahu is trying to humor the president and scared of crossing him, “I would find that worrisome,” he said. Israel’s leaders, he elaborated dryly, might want to “counsel the United States that it’s not a good idea to disassemble your national security apparatus… or to fire your best generals.”

“In terms of the long structural relationship, Israel depends upon a functioning United States,” Snyder stressed. “More important than the particular goodies that Trump might give you right now,” he said, “is whether, in 2030, the United States is actually going to be capable of doing basic things.”

In that vein, he also talked about Zionists having looked back at thousands of years of Jewish history and accurately recognized that “there has to be a state.” By contrast, “the people who are now running my country,” he said, are engaged in “the self-destruction of American state capacity.”

The Times of Israel: It’s an awful day in Israel because they returned four bodies of hostages, including the Bibas family. I assume you’ve followed a bit. They’re just waiting to confirm the identities of them. 

I know you’re incredibly busy and I appreciate that you found some time. I want to set up the context in which I wanted to speak to you. Forgive me if I’m telling you stuff that’s really obvious to you.

This is a country that’s been in a war for 16 months after an invasion by Hamas terrorists, and 1,200 people killed, and hostages abducted, and there are lots of people around Israel trying to murder us and, in many cases, to wipe out Israel. And they have lots of support internationally. We’re facing an incredibly oppressive region, as has always been the case.

At the same time, we have a very problematic, divisive government that, it seems to me, is battering away at the pillars of our democracy. As you probably know, we don’t have a constitution in Israel. We don’t have a strong, independent legislature because the majority coalition controls parliament. We only, therefore, have the executive, really, and the judiciary. The judiciary is pretty feisty and independent, but the current coalition is trying to undo that. It’s trying to oversee almost the entire process for choosing judges, and to limit the capacity of the Supreme Court to intervene on anything. Basically, the only thing protecting any individual rights from the political majority is the judiciary, and they’re under assault.

So that’s the context. And I wanted your insights, echoes, and lessons we might learn from other eras and other parts of the world.

Timothy Snyder: It’s best to ask me about the general issues, because I pay attention to Israel — and I don’t mean this in any insulting way —  less than I do to Belarus and more than I do to Venezuela. It’s not a country that I know particularly much about. I have lots of friends. I visit. I go there. My way of seeing Israel is very much an East European way. I essentially see Tel Aviv as like Warsaw 1926 with better weather. So it doesn’t make sense to ask me about detailed Israeli things. What I can do, I can apply different kinds of knowledge to the predicaments that you describe. But I’m not an Israeli expert, and it’s really important that I don’t pretend to be one.

No, I understand. I wasn’t turning to you with that expectation. I’ve read up a little about you, and I figured that you would have concern and some affinity, but I know it’s not your area of expertise.

That is fair, yeah.

Let me ask you in the more general sense: I haven’t read everything you’ve written, but I’ve read some of the relevant things I think you’ve written, and I think there are lessons that Israel might learn. You’ve written in the past about “defending the institutions.” We are concerned about the independence of our judiciary, and it’s under threat from the duly elected political majority. How do you go about protecting institutions in that context?

Israel is subject in exactly the same way as all other countries to the basic laws of political gravity. And one of the things that worries me the most about Israel is something that I see in America, or at least used to see in America — the idea that we’re exceptional, we’re special, we have some kind of history, we have some kind of special foundational moment or whatever, or we’re a special people, which means that we’re exempt from everything else.

And I need to begin this by saying I think Israel is a totally normal country in this sense. Israel has very typical problems. It has a very typical leader. And the things that I’m about to say are completely applicable to pretty much any country.

It’s never right that the interests of the nation are the same as the interests of the political survival of a single person

The first thing is that you have to morally value things like checks and balances. The people who want to defend those things have to treat them as moral or ethical commitments and not let all the normative language be on the side of the people who are trying to consolidate power. And that goes particularly for the notion of patriotism, because the people who are trying to consolidate power inevitably try to monopolize the language of patriotism and the language of national consolidation.

And that is always wrong. It’s never right that the interests of the nation are the same as the interests of the political survival of a single person.

The second thing, which is incredibly important, is to treat the institution that you’re trying to preserve as being made up of 100 or 1,000 little parts. So in the case of judiciary, it’s judges, it’s cases, it’s the various levels of the institution. And Israeli has been doing this for years, of course. But one has to try to protect actively the judges, the justices; one has to be concerned about individual cases rather than seeing it as a kind of abstraction.

Do you have precedents? We have weak and not terribly effective political opposition. We have a dysfunctional government as well as a contentious and, I think, democratically threatening government. We have a very serious civil society, which especially since October 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded, filled the role of lots of government ministries — looked after people, evacuated them, provided food for them. Do you have cases where effective opposition was able to rally and mobilize, and roll back efforts to undermine and threaten democracy?

The divided opposition plus strong civil society combination is very familiar from Eastern Europe. That is basically what anti-Communist resistance looked like in Poland, and it is exactly what the Ukrainian political situation looked like until the late twenty-teens and the election of Zelensky. Ukraine was much stronger as a civil society than as opposition, and civil society is what has pulled Ukraine through this entire time, up to and including the war. So I just want you to know that that pattern itself is not all that unfamiliar.

Are there examples? Yeah, of course, there are examples. Poland is a very recent example of an improbable coalition finally getting its act together and finally winning an election in a decisive fashion. That happened.

Slovakia has gone back and forth, but Slovakia is another example of where it seemed like things were going terribly badly and then an election went the right way. It then went the wrong way after that, in fairness.

Generally, it seems to require two things — an improbably broad coalition, and some catalyzing event.

If we call the Polish example, it also seems to involve a leader who doesn’t just seize the moment but who actually becomes a populist in the good old sense of listening to the people. I think the Polish case is the most important recent one.

In the case of Poland, Donald Tusk, who had been essentially the leader of the European Union, spent two years going from town to town, person to person, and building himself back up as a particular kind of politician. But anyway, yeah, it can be done. It can happen. It does happen.

I want to ask you a Trump-related question, and I’ll explain why. If Israelis had voted in the American election, we would have voted more strongly for Trump than any single state, as far as I know. That wasn’t the case two elections before, when Israelis thought they knew where they were with Hillary Clinton, thought Trump might be better for Israel, but he was an unknown quantity.

In his first term, he moved the embassy to Jerusalem. He actually opened an embassy in Jerusalem. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. He recognized Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights. He took a firm stance on Iran. He pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, actually. He brokered peace accords, normalization accords, with the UAE and with Bahrain and with Morocco. These are very, very mainstream popular policies.

How worried are you as a scholar in America about what Trump is doing in America? And what we should make of Trump, therefore, who is being very supportive of Israel at the moment.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. There are relationships where one person gives the other person everything they want, and that’s not necessarily a healthy relationship because maybe we shouldn’t get all the things that we want. I think Gaza here is a good example, where Israelis might think, okay, well, Trump is showing his general sympathy by saying that he wants to ethnically cleanse everybody from Gaza and build a bunch of hotels.

You could read that as general sympathy, or you could just read it as someone who has crossed over from pro-right-wing Israeli political instincts into absolute madness. And that if something like that were actually attempted, it could not possibly be understood as pro-Israeli. Not that it is going to happen, by the way, because these are all just fancies. But if something like that actually happened, that would break precisely the Israeli Arab reconciliations that have happened over the course of the last 15 years or so. That’s the one thing.

The other thing is that the Israeli-American relationship has always depended upon the American state capacity to do various things. But the crucial story of the Trump administration so far is the self-destruction of American state capacity.

So if Israelis in the future are expecting things like arms deliveries in crucial times, or they’re expecting the ability to broker peace talks or whatever, the Trump administration has essentially fired everybody who has the confidence to do that kind of thing, and the prospects are for more of that.

Trump is making the United States dysfunctional. And at that point, it becomes a little bit academic whether he’s pro-Israel or anti-Israel or whatever, because there isn’t going to be the capability anymore

This sort of … libertarian-style America is going to be dysfunctional and not capable of the things that Israel has been used to, whether we’re talking about 1967 or 1973 or whether we’re talking about 2023. I don’t think this America is going to be capable of those kinds of things. I would suspect that’s the thing about Trump which maybe hasn’t reached Israel yet: that he’s making the United States dysfunctional. And at that point, it becomes a little bit academic whether he’s pro-Israel or anti-Israel or whatever, because there isn’t going to be the capability anymore.

But if you’re asking me, as an American, what I think: I think it’s bad for Israel that the United States is now taking the side of dictatorships around the world. That’s not going to create an environment which is going to be helpful for Israeli democracy. And I take democracy to be in the interest of Israel.

Elon Musk is the most powerful person in the United States now, not Donald Trump

You’re describing a Trump, who I’m sure you were troubled by in 2020, as, nonetheless, a very different and more dangerous president now?

There are two basic differences to start with. Number one, Elon Musk is the most powerful person in the United States now, not Donald Trump. And we didn’t have that factor in 2016. We didn’t have somebody who was determined to neuter American public administration or the American civil service. And we have that now. We have somebody whose life’s mission essentially is to make American government dysfunctional. That’s something which is new.

And the second thing that we didn’t have the last time around is that we didn’t have a Trump who was completely surrounded by people who would actually do the things that he says he wants them to do.

There’s no one around Trump, apparently, who’s telling him that Putin started the war in Ukraine. There’s nobody around him who is telling him what the war in Ukraine is actually like

Is Trump more pro-Putin this time than he was eight years ago? I don’t know. But there’s no one around him, apparently, who’s telling him that Putin started the war in Ukraine. There’s nobody around him who is telling him what the war in Ukraine is actually like. So he and [Vice President JD] Vance and Musk are off on this completely alternative reality trajectory, in which they say these things which are completely untrue, which then are the license for a very, very different policy than we had under him the last time around.

So, yeah, for those two reasons alone: Musk is destroying the capacity of the United States to carry out systematic policy. And Trump, whether he’s a different person or not than he was eight years ago, he’s much more separated from reality than he was eight years ago, just in the sense of having counter voices or people who would say no. There are no longer such people.

Let me play devil’s advocate in the Israeli context. There’s an argument that says Trump knows that his Gaza vision is unworkable. He may have had the king of Jordan in the Oval Office talking about taking 2,000 sick Gaza kids, but Jordan would be radically destabilized if a large number of Gazans were moved there. The same goes for Egypt. But the very fact that he unveiled this vision has the Egypts and the Jordans, and the UAE, and the Saudis trying to formulate some kind of plan where they were pretty lethargic until now, and therefore, maybe this is actually ultimately productive.

Yeah, there is that kind of reasoning about Trump. I’ll give you a similar example. When Trump says he wants to annex Greenland, then people say, Oh, yes, this is good because it’s finally got Denmark to pay attention to the Arctic. And then you realize, no, actually, he’s just thinking about annexing Greenland. You realize, in fact, he’s just a completely unpredictable person.

You can always, if you have a certain kind of intelligence, affix a tactical motive to what he’s doing, but then there’s no follow-through to it. So there’s not the follow-through that you want.

Canada is another example. He talks about invading Canada, and people say, Oh, well, he doesn’t really mean he’s going to invade Canada. He’s just trying to soften them up for some kind of trade thing. But then it turns out he is actually just hostile to Canada, and the trade war that he prosecutes is totally incompetent in its essence and has no purpose, and he ends up getting faced down by a lame-duck Canadian prime minister in the trade war. And even if he doesn’t get faced down, the whole thing makes no sense.

Without having local expertise on the Near East, I would just say: I’ve heard that before, that tactical fantasy around Trump, that he’s saying something radical to soften other people up. That’s what people always say. People also said that about Ukraine. People said, Oh, well, he’s just saying these wild things because he’s just trying to shuffle the deck and create a situation where negotiations are possible. But, you wait a few days and it turns out that, in fact, he just really likes Putin, and he really likes authoritarianism.

Maybe Israel will be the great exception where Trump actually has focus and the things that he says are part of some larger tactical plan. But I don’t think that would be consistent with what we’ve seen.

Our Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on hearing this Gaza plan — I think probably didn’t have all the details of it before Trump presented it on his visit to the White House — has said, It’s a great vision. It’s the only plan that I think can work. It’s on the dot, he said the other day.

We in Israel are very dependent on this relationship with the United States, in terms of military and diplomatic support. I mean, almost existentially dependent. Do you think for leaders like Netanyahu there is a terror of crossing the president — that you cannot defy him, you cannot even try to steer him. You just have to go along with it?

I wouldn’t want to judge Benjamin Netanyahu personally because he’s not a figure who I follow with any great attention. But certainly, in general, there is that fear. The problem with that fear is that, as the Europeans have already discovered, you can humor him for a while, but then, when it turns out that he actually is going to do the thing that he’s talking about doing, where are you with that?

Who in the world, if not Netanyahu, is going to tell Trump that things maybe don’t make 100% sense?

Again, I wouldn’t even want to begin to judge what I think Netanyahu is doing here or how he wants to manage his relationship with Trump. But there is a question about who, in fact, if not Netanyahu, who in the world is going to tell Trump that things maybe don’t make 100% sense?

Because Netanyahu is certainly in a stronger position than most of the people who talk to Trump, I would have thought. If Netanyahu is [trying to humor the president and scared of crossing him], I would find that worrisome. But the general problem is that there’s nobody telling Trump what doesn’t make sense.

There’s nobody domestically doing it. They’re in their own information box right now. And Trump is listening to Musk and he’s listening to Putin. It’s not clear that he’s listening to anybody else.

And then abroad, what you have is the allies, for as long as they can, trying to appeal to Trump, telling themselves various stories, until it doesn’t work anymore. In the part of the world that I pay attention to, which is Europe and Ukraine, essentially, the Ukrainians and the Europeans, until a few days ago, were both saying, Yes, Trump, you’re very strong. We know you have a plan. We’d like to take part in that plan. They’re being very polite and deferential, until Trump basically makes that impossible by sending Vance to Munich to tell them that they should all be Nazis and by claiming Zelensky is a dictator.

They were all trying this very thing, is what I’m trying to say. It didn’t work out. This pattern of people humoring Trump and it not making any difference is one of general concern.

What would you be telling the American Jewish community? There’s only two large Jewish communities in the world. There’s about seven million Jews in Israel. And perhaps close to that number in the United States. They’ve tended to vote very strongly Democratic, in the 70% range, and they did this time as well, which is interesting because, of course, like I said, in Israel he was incredibly highly supported in polling, at least.

We’re seeing rising antisemitism in many, many places, certainly in the United States. I’m troubled by that. The American Jewish community is very troubled. There is an American Jewish leader named Abraham Foxman, who was the head of the Anti-Defamation League until a few years ago, who described Trump in an interview I did with him in 2021 as an inadvertent enabler of antisemitism.

I can’t directly answer the question of what I would tell the American Jewish community. If people ask, I answer that there is no American Jewish community [that you can generalize about]. People are very divided, not least politically.

You can say with great confidence about the United States that the vast majority of antisemites voted for Trump

Let me try to answer the question on a different level, which is that if I’m worried about antisemitism, then I don’t vote for Trump. Because the antisemites vote for Trump. And you generally don’t want to vote for the person the antisemites vote for. You can say with great confidence about the United States that the vast majority of antisemites voted for Trump. I don’t think it’s even vaguely close.

You can ask American Jews whether they would agree with that assessment of mine, but that would be my very strong sense. The man is Nazi-adjacent. The man has had dinner, he’s had personal conversations, with people who are unmistakably fascist. Again, the most important person in the United States government now is a quite retrograde South African who seems to have a model of Apartheid at the level of the solar system as the way to run things. If I were an American Jew, I would find that troubling.

Musk has tilted his platform to favor the voices of Nazis, and he has himself amplified the voices of Nazis. So if I’m concerned about antisemitism, I would be quite concerned about precisely that.

If antisemitism is your main worry, I think it’s pretty reasonable not to vote for the guy who said before the election that if he didn’t win, it would be the Jews’ fault

You’re asking somebody who’s not an American Jew what he would say to American Jews. I talk to individual American Jews all the time. I’m not sure if I have a message for all of them. But in my view, if antisemitism is your main worry, I think it’s pretty reasonable not to vote for the guy who said before the election that if he didn’t win, it would be the Jews’ fault, and they would hold special responsibility, which is something Trump said. I think it’s pretty reasonable not to vote for the guy who’s Nazi-adjacent, which Trump is. The longer he’s in power — it’s only been a few weeks — the more concerning is the conspiratorial rhetoric that comes directly out of the White House.

Again, I’m not an American Jew. You have to, in some sense, take that into account. But I think it’s reasonable that American Jews didn’t vote for Trump. I don’t think he’s an inadvertent antisemite, by the way. I think he’s just an antisemite. He’s not the worst of the antisemites, but I don’t think there’s anything inadvertent about it.

And yet here he is trying to find ways ostensibly to crack down on anti-Israel, antisemitic activism on American campuses?

Yeah. That’s a complete sham. That is the actual antisemites using antisemitism to suppress freedom of assembly. That’s fundamentally what’s going on.

That’s, by the way, one of the issues, where when I do talk to Israelis with whom I’m sympathetic, I can see how the thousands of miles of distance matter here.

I was on those campuses. I know those students. I have a very vivid personal sense of what was actually going on. What was not going on was some incredible upsurge of antisemitism which justified banning protests across American campuses, which was a terrible thing.

I want to be very clear about this. That was a terrible thing to have happen. Because whether you agree or not with the reasons why people are protesting, having a blanket ban, essentially, on protests, in the 21st century, is going to lead you down bad roads because there will be other things to protest about. And in fact, there are other things to protest about, and now it’s going to be much harder. The momentum behind getting students not to protest in the US had nothing to do with stopping antisemitism.

I’m sure there are a few people who are concerned about antisemitism who legitimately were on that side, and I understand their concerns, but I think it’s making a mistake. If you look at the people who are pushing for those bans, these are generally right-wing people, and they’re not the people who have a strong record of caring about the rights of Jews.

It’s very convenient to have protest bans on American campuses if what you’re aiming for is some kind of right-wing regime transformation in the United States

There, I don’t see any contradiction whatsoever. It’s very convenient to have protest bans on American campuses if what you’re aiming for is some kind of right-wing regime transformation in the United States, which is where these guys are.

It’s totally consistent that these guys want to ban protests. And unfortunately, Jews and antisemitism were hugely instrumentalized in all of this. On balance, it clearly hurts the Jewish cause to have so many people talking about antisemitism who weren’t serious about it, which is what happened in the US last year. Antisemitism was basically taken over by people who didn’t care about it, as a reason to suppress freedom of assembly. That’s bad news for Jews.

I hear what you’re saying, and from a long way away, but also from our reporters who are in New York and other places, it was incredibly troubling to see what was happening on campus, and it seemed to be significant antisemitism, and a failure of the heads of the most esteemed educational institutions, with some of them having trouble in taking a stance against incitement to genocide.

There were protests to divest from Israel, and an effort to make sure America didn’t arm Israel in the wake of an invasion by a terrorist government that was saying it would keep doing it again if it could. That’s where I’m coming from. That’s why I asked you the question that I did. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand what some of the motives may have been in a wider crackdown, but the problem [of antisemitism on campus] was much more serious than I hear you thinking that it was.

Let me try to be clear. I think that antisemitism is a much bigger problem in 2025 than it was in 2024. I think antisemitism in 2025 is a much, much bigger problem in the US and around the world than it was in 2020. I think we’re in an age of terrifying, bold antisemitism. I also agree that antisemitic things were said and done during these protests. That is, of course, absolutely true.

But the two specific things that concern me are that the cause of suppressing these protests was largely the cause of people who didn’t care about Jews or antisemitism in American domestic politics. That ought to be worrying if you were Jewish and if you care about antisemitism.

The second thing that specifically concerns me is the blanket ban and the de facto consensus on the issue that students are not allowed to protest. That’s really a very bad thing, because if students aren’t allowed to protest, whatever the origins of that, if students aren’t allowed to protest, then who is going to protest in American society? That’s where we are right now. That is, unfortunately, a very bad thing as we head into all the other problems that we’re going to face in 2025.

What is the motivation to try and render America’s government dysfunctional? Because then what happens? What’s the goal there?

That’s pretty straightforward. If you’re Musk, you’re trying to control as much capital as you possibly can. The only force that could hold you back is the rule-of-law state. So your strategy then is to get inside rule-of-law states and make them less functional.

If you look at the specific things that Musk has targeted in the first few weeks of this regime, there are very often areas where he has business interests, or there are regulatory powers which are holding back some of his projects.

The question assumes that the people that we’re talking about are working within a framework of US national interest. That’s the premise which I would just reject. I don’t think either Musk or Trump is working within a framework of US national interest. I think they’re working within a much more 19th-century East India Company, colonial-style framework, where what really matters is the big company, and the government maybe gets dragged along. But the important thing is the big company.

Trump is very comfortable in the number two role. It’s a natural fit for him. Trump plays a strong man on TV. He’s an actor, but he’s not the director. He’s not the scriptwriter. That’s what Musk is

And Trump is largely his dupe, or he’s empowering him because he sees his own interest there?

Trump is very comfortable in the number two role. It’s a natural fit for him. Trump plays a strong man on TV. He’s an actor, but he’s not the director. He’s not the scriptwriter. That’s what Musk is.

Trump is very comfortable showing his skills and his talents in public, and he’s very skillful. He’s very talented. But I think he’s essentially the frontman for what is, in fact, the Musk administration. I think that’s comfortable for him. People perceive Trump as being number one. Trump’s the one who gets all the adulation. Trump’s the one who has the popular movement. I think he sees Musk as the person who’s going to allow him to remain in power, or whatever you want to call it, in office, indefinitely.

There are a lot of people who think that Musk and Trump have to collide at some point, and I’m not among them, because I think the hierarchy is already structured, and I think it’s comfortable to both parties.

You believe there’s nobody prepared to confront him. You’re not a lone voice, but are you more dramatically concerned than most people?

There was a time when I was three years ahead of everybody. Then there was a time when I was three months ahead of everybody. Right now, I’m three seconds ahead of everybody. It’s reached the point where the things that I say are pretty typical, broad bandwidth opinion at this point. If anything, I think I’m having trouble keeping up with the reality.

What kind of a job is journalism doing in the States?

Taking a big step back, that’s maybe the fundamental source of all of our problems. There are so many things, and campus protests are a good example, where you just can’t figure out what’s going on unless there’s a lot of local journalism. I notice this at Yale — that a particular thing which happens can immediately have some international repercussion, but it didn’t happen the way it seems that it happened. Without global journalism, that thing just prevails.

The lack of local journalism is the main reason why we’ve gotten to the point that we’ve gotten to, where our debates about free speech are basically about, Do owners of social platforms have the right to reach half a billion people or the right to reach a billion people? Whereas freedom of speech should be about whether journalists and others have the right to speak truth to power, and the ability to speak truth to power. That’s basically gone in my country.

People used to know who was on the school board or whether the water was polluted. And nobody knows that stuff anymore because most of the country, most counties in the country, have no reporters, no human beings actually covering the news.

The whole information environment has changed. I think that information environment, that change, is behind where we are right now. A Trump and a Musk, it’s fine to criticize them personally, which I’ve been doing. But fundamentally, they are products of a structural change in the information environment. Both of them, in their different ways, know how to live in this information environment, are very talented in living in, and in Musk’s case shaping, this information environment.

What we’re left with is far fewer reporters than we ought to have. Some of them are doing a wonderful job. Wired is doing a great job. Mother Jones is doing a great job. ProPublica is doing a great job. The New York Times and the Washington Post are doing okay. There was some pretty tawdry and regrettable anticipatory obedience by the LA Times and the Washington Post last autumn [in not endorsing a presidential candidate].

Going back to this thing about Musk that you were asking me about, the disassembly of the federal government: We just don’t have the manpower to cover all of the things that are happening there. He’s sending bands of young people through departments of the US government, collecting data, disabling systems, and we are always several days behind.

The biggest story of 2025 in the United States is that. And to cover it properly, you need 10 times more journalists than we actually have, with expertise on the Department of Treasury or the Department of Commerce. The Department of Defense is next.

We need more journalists who know what it means when, for example, every single CIA agent gets a letter asking them if they would like to resign.

Going back to your initial question, one of the preconditions for protecting institutions is having lively journalism, which allows people to know when institutions are under threat, and I think we basically let ourselves down.

Do you think the rest of the world is onto this? I’m thinking, especially from an Israeli perspective, about Iran and Russia and China. Are they recognizing that America is heading in a very problematic direction for America, and potentially a very potentially beneficial one for them?

Yeah, they seem delighted.

My basic take is that Trump and Vance are cynical enough to destroy the networks and friendships and traditions that made America a unique power. But they’re too naive to actually make the United States number one in the colonial, multi-polar system that they’re now co-creating.

The United States is falling between two stools. We’re not going to be as good at being Russia or China as Russia and China are at being Russia and China

The United States is falling between two stools. We’re not going to be as good at being Russia or China as Russia and China are at being Russia and China. We’re going to fall in between. We’re going to lose the stuff we had before, but we’re not going to be as good as Russia and China in this multipolar competition.

That’s where we’re being led. Of course, the Russians understand it much better than the Americans do because the Russians are, to a very considerable extent, pulling us along toward their way of seeing the world. In last few days, particularly concerning this respect, pretty much everything that has come out of Trump’s mouth is familiar Russian disinformation. So yes, they’re very comfortable with it, and they’re going to profit from it.

Something that Vance and Trump just haven’t thought about is that our allies are going to have to go somewhere.

That was my next question — from the Israeli perspective. For an Israel which, for decades, has depended on this relationship with the United States, what should our leadership be doing?

That’s a funny question. I can’t imagine your leadership asking you that question.

No, I’ve told you where they are going. But if we were trying to make sure this country was able to semi-guarantee a future in the medium term, where would it be building its alliances?

Yeah, that’s a wonderful question. Going back to an earlier question. I think in a very structural sense, like you said, Israel is more dependent on the US than, say, Belgium or even Canada. You can imagine a shift, and I think it may be happening, where the Canadians and the Europeans get their acts together, cooperate, maybe even help Ukraine, meaningfully. All of that I can see. It’s not easy to see how Israel shifts.

Israel doesn’t have a bunch of other friendly countries around that it can lean on more and express solidarity for it

Israel, unlike, say, Belgium or Denmark or Croatia, doesn’t have a bunch of other friendly countries around that it can lean on more and express solidarity for it.

No, really not. We’re in a truly toxic region, and we’re hanging in there just about, but America is a big part of that.

Yeah. I’m not saying things that I think your current government would do, but your government may be uniquely positioned to try to talk to the Americans about power.

I disapprove of the direction of US policy. But if I were the Israelis, I would be concerned most about the self-destruction of US power in an almost whimsical way, honestly, and in a way which seems to not understand how important words are and how important relationships are and how important predictability is. I’m trying to look at this very broadly, because I don’t approve of either of these governments particularly. But in terms of the long, structural relationship, Israel depends upon a functioning United States.

More important than the particular goodies that Trump might give you right now, more important than that, is whether, in 2030, the United States is actually going to be capable of doing basic things. If I were the Israeli government, I would be looking at the United States and trying to gently counsel.

An Israeli government might counsel the United States that it’s not a good idea to disassemble your national security apparatus… or to fire your best generals

On issues where Israel is, of course, very good, like intelligence, an Israeli government might counsel the United States that it’s not a good idea to disassemble your national security apparatus in the name of, essentially, a political win, or it’s not a good idea to fire your best generals, in the name of just partisan emotions, which is what’s happening.

That’s a kind of conversation the Israelis maybe could have with my government that other people certainly at this point cannot have.

So just to focus that point, you’re saying that this government in Israel, which I wanted to talk to you about how problematic it is, potentially needs to be, rather than humoring the administration, somehow trying to restore more sanity to the administration for America’s interests, which are crucial to Israel’s interests, and that it has a particular potential to do that.

I’m trying to do this in a very abstract way, because I don’t want to endorse the things that Netanyahu is doing. I don’t want to endorse the way that Trump has talked to Netanyahu or that Netanyahu has talked to Trump thus far.

If you’re a Zionist, you look back at thousands of years of Jewish history, and you draw the lesson: We need to have a state. There has to be a state. That seems to be precisely the lesson which has escaped the people who are now running my country. They don’t really have a notion of a state

I guess I’m making a point which is very fundamental, I would have thought, to people who regard themselves as Zionists, because Zionism is fundamentally about the necessity of having a state. That’s the central point.

If you’re a Zionist, you look back at thousands of years of Jewish history, and you draw the lesson: We need to have a state. There has to be a state.

That seems to be precisely the lesson which has escaped the people who are now running my country. They don’t really have a notion of a state.

They have a notion of personal power. They have a notion of corporate power. They have a notion of transactions, but they don’t really have a notion of a state. That’s slipping away. And so it’s at that level that I guess I’m trying to make this point.

Again, I say this with all the caveats of disagreeing with policy, which I do, but Israelis understand, I think, the significance of having a state — that, because history is fickle and difficult, you want to have durable institutions. And it’s the durability of institutions that I think is fundamentally under threat in the United States right now.

I hear you. Okay. Thank you for your time.

It may not have been what you were looking for, but I hope it was of interest.

Well, all the better for not being expected. I wish us all good luck.

Thank you very much. To you as well.