The choices we make at home and abroad have consequences—and eventually, those consequences come back to us.
We started this conversation talking about consequences, and that turned out to be a much bigger subject than we expected.
We spent a lot of time talking about USAID, soft power, disease prevention, international relationships, war, Iran, Iraq, Ukraine, religion, history, and even ancient mythology. On the surface, those subjects don’t seem to have much in common.
But they actually do.
They all come back to one question: How do we choose to show up in the world?
One of the things that struck us was the discussion around USAID. Whatever someone’s opinion is about how much the United States should spend overseas, there is a fundamental difference between deciding not to continue a program and simply ripping the program away without considering what happens next.
When people and institutions have built systems around American funding, those systems don’t magically disappear without consequences. Early-warning programs, disease prevention, human-trafficking efforts, community development, and other international programs exist within networks of cooperation.
And that’s what soft power actually means.
It isn’t just being nice to other countries. It’s building relationships so that when something goes wrong, people want to work with you. It’s creating enough trust that another country will pick up the phone when you need help.
We don’t live in a vacuum.
That became particularly important when we started talking about public health. Whether we’re talking about infectious diseases, vaccines, or the lessons of COVID, the basic principle remains the same: you cannot dismantle the systems designed to protect people and then act surprised when those protections disappear.
You can’t play Jenga with institutions that people’s lives depend on.
And that brings us to something even bigger: foreign policy.
America has spent generations trying to influence the rest of the world. Sometimes we’ve called it spreading democracy. Sometimes it’s been about strategic interests, resources, military alliances, or economic influence.
Whatever language we use, other countries notice.
They remember when we help them. They remember when we abandon them. They remember when we make promises and then decide those promises no longer matter.
Ukraine is one example we discussed. Whatever someone’s position on the war itself, there is a larger question about what happens when the United States makes commitments to another nation and then expects the rest of the world to trust those commitments.
The same thing applies to our history with Iran and Iraq.
The history is complicated, and it is not flattering. We have supported governments that later became adversaries. We have provided assistance that was later used in conflicts we came to oppose. We have intervened in other countries and then acted surprised when those countries developed deep resentment toward us.
And if we refuse to remember those mistakes, we’re almost guaranteed to repeat them.
That may actually be the biggest consequence of all.
Self-deception prevents learning.
We talked about how uncomfortable history can be when you actually look at it honestly. Ancient civilizations, religions, wars, colonialism, treatment of Indigenous peoples, slavery, foreign interventions—none of these subjects fit neatly into the stories nations like to tell about themselves.
But history isn’t supposed to make us feel good.
It’s supposed to teach us.
If we only teach the parts of history that make us proud, then we’re not teaching history. We’re teaching mythology.
And that’s where the conversation about religion and ancient mythology unexpectedly fit into everything else. When you start studying different cultures, you begin to see recurring stories: floods, creation myths, gods, heroes, death and rebirth. Stories that people in different parts of the world developed independently often have striking similarities.
That doesn’t require us to dismiss anyone’s faith.
It simply requires us to recognize that human beings have always tried to understand the world through stories.
And perhaps we should apply the same intellectual humility to the stories we tell about ourselves as a nation.
America is powerful. That much is obvious.
But is power the same thing as greatness?
We don’t think so.
Greatness has to mean something more than the ability to force other people to do what we want. It has to involve how we treat people, how we treat our allies, how we respond when we’ve made mistakes, and whether we’re willing to learn from them.
There are two ways a powerful country can interact with the rest of the world.
We can try to dominate it.
Or we can try to build relationships within it.
We can spend billions fighting wars and creating enemies, or we can spend some of those resources helping other countries become stronger and more stable—and build relationships that make them want to work with us.
That isn’t weakness.
That’s strategy.
And ultimately, that’s what this entire conversation came back to: consequences.
When we cut programs, people are affected.
When we abandon relationships, people remember.
When we make promises and break them, trust disappears.
When we refuse to acknowledge our history, we lose the ability to learn from it.
And when we treat the rest of the world as though it exists merely to accommodate us, eventually the rest of the world gets to decide whether it wants to cooperate.
We have a choice about what kind of country we want to be.
We can be the country that demands obedience.
Or we can be the country people actually want to help.
But whatever we choose, we need to understand something that seems increasingly easy to forget:
Our choices have consequences.
And eventually, those consequences come home.
ChatGPT was used to transcribe our saved transcript into a blog-post format.
