Josh Hawley's 50,000 Foot View

Plus: Gretchen Whitmer's bet on Trump voters, Sergio Gor, Steve Witkoff, Spain's blackouts, and the new D.C. Stadium clash

My full interview with Josh Hawley on the Senator’s view of Trump 2.0 at 100 days is here. An excerpt:

Ben Domenech: It seems to me that after this first 100 days, there isn’t an area of policy that has been more dramatically changed than the United States approach to foreign policy. As you look forward, what do you think is the outcome the next 100 days holds? Are you optimistic about the direction that Ukraine and Russia are taking? Are you concerned about the possibility of a strike on Iran? What’s top of mind for you as a foreign-policy issue that is going to come to a head in the next 100 days?

Josh Hawley: Well, hopefully where we’re headed here is towards a rebalancing of our focus. We have got to get into a position to resist further Chinese imperialism and expansion, and we’re just not in a position to do so. And we haven’t been serious about it economically. We haven’t been serious about it militarily. And we have got to get into position. And I hope and believe what part of what the president is doing here overall is he’s rebalancing us toward what is our greatest geopolitical threat in many ways, our greatest economic threat, which is the People’s Republic of China.

At the same time, what I also hope will come out of this with our NATO allies is a new understanding of our burden-sharing arrangement. We need our NATO allies. We need them, not least because we are the only country really situated and capable of dealing with the Chinese threat globally, and none of our European allies are. But our European allies are capable together of addressing the Russian threat on their continent. And so we need them to do that. And I think we just need to reach a new modus operandi here, a new understanding between us as allies that we’re going to ask them to do more in the conventional defense of Europe when it comes to countering Russia and we, in turn, are going to to bear the lion’s share of the burden when it comes to China, because we’re the only country that’s positioned to do that. That’s how we’re going to burden share for the 21st century. I think that is workable. I think that’s the only arrangement that’s workable. And I hope that that is where we’re getting to.

This is a lot of change in one sense, although in another sense, I really think you see the vector of change across administrations. If you zoom out, way up to the 50,000-foot view, this vector of change really has been headed in this direction back since probably 2008, 2009, 2010. As China has gotten so much stronger, we’ve been in this long position of trying to rebalance while we deal with the issues on our border, while we deal with Russia and their nuclear capabilities. So I hope that we’re in a rebalancing mode here. We have new threats, we’ve got a new major opponent. This is something else that you and I haven’t seen in our lifetimes. We’ve never seen a peer, a truly peer competitor in the military economic space. We have memories, maybe, of the Soviet Union in its dying days. They weren’t peer competitors. China is. We’re gonna have to rethink a lot of things in order to make sure that we are standing up for our national security, but also preserving liberty across the world in the face of what is a very real danger that China poses. So there’s a lot of work to do here, and I hope the next hundred days will see progress on all of those fronts.

Read the rest, on abortion, tariffs, tax cuts and more.