Transcript
Fareed Zakaria (0:02)
This is gps, the global public square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you live from New York. Today on the program, Iran on edge. Protests against the government have spread all over the country and the regime is cracking down. I'll ask an expert what this could mean for the Iranian people and the regime. Then Venezuela after Maduro. What is next for the nation following the capture of its longtime president? Trump says the US Will run the country, but how? I have a panel on the political future of Venezuela. Then President Trump set his sights on Greenland again, telling reporters, we need Greenland. From the standpoint of national security, is this bluster? And what should the Europeans do about it? I'll talk to Denmark's former foreign minister, Jeppe Kofar. But first, here's my take. Throughout history, the most powerful countries have often had a hard time finding friends. As a nation grows dominant, others tend to balance against it. Look at Russia's neighbors in Eastern Europe. Countries rushed into NATO the moment the world allowed it. Look at China's neighborhood in Asia, where Japan, India, Australia, Vietnam and others have steadily tightened their security ties with the US and each other in response to Beijing's rise. But then look at the United States, and the theory starts to wobble. America is the world's most powerful nation, yet many of the richest and most capable countries do not balance against it. They ally with it. They defer to it on core security questions. They host its forces. They integrate their militaries with it. That is not normal in the long sweep of modern history. In fact, it is close to unique. Why? Not because the United States is saintly, but because it has often behaved unlike a classic hegemonic for eight decades since World War II, it has usually tried to translate raw strength into something others can rules, institutions, and legitimacy. It built alliances rather than tributary systems. And it spoke the language of principle, collective security, self determination, open commerce, even when it fell short. Consider an episode often held up as the icon of American unilateralism, the Iraq War. I'm not defending the war's wisdom. I'm making a larger point about America's attitude to the international system. The Bush administration sought and obtained congressional authorization in 2002, and it went to the UN Helping Secure Security Council Resolution 1441. It also assembled a coalition of 49 countries supporting the effort. Washington felt compelled to make the case, to gather partners, to look for rationales that were broad and accepted by others. That effort to translate power into legitimacy is the hidden pillar of America's primacy. When the US acts like a rule maker rather than a shakedown artist, it buys something more valuable than free fear, consent. Consent is what turns hegemony into leadership, and leadership into a system that other states find preferable to the alternatives. It's also what keeps the balancing impulse from igniting. And it is precisely what the Venezuela episode now puts at risk. It's not the raid on Maduro itself, but rather the utter disregard for law, norms, alliances and diplomacy that marked this break in American foreign policy. In a CNN interview, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller declared flatly the United States of America is running Venezuela and dismissed international niceties, insisting the world is governed by strength, force, power, the iron laws of history. President Trump, for his part, said the US would run Venezuela until a transition and take its oil. This is explicitly a naked act of aggression to benefit America's coffers. If you're a Canadian, a German, a Korean or a Mexican, Miller's words will land like a chill. Not because America is about to invade Ottawa or Berlin, but because the logic has changed. The argument is no longer that American power is used in service of broader principles. Others can embrace democracy, collective security, a rules based order. The argument is that power entitles it rules because it can. That is exactly the kind of great power behavior that produces nervous neighbors. Trump has invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify the operation. It's worth remembering that the Monroe Doctrine was often seen after 1823 as anti imperial, aimed at preventing colonial style interventions by Europe in the Western Hemisphere. It was only later, especially with Theodore Roosevelt's corollary in 1904, that the doctrine mutated into a license for US intrusions across Latin America. That flourish of American imperialism, did not last long and did not end well for the region or for America's reputation. Over the last four decades, Republicans and Democrats forged a new bipartisan approach to the region. It encouraged Latin American countries moves from juntas to a democracy. It fostered trade, investment and support for institutional reform, and worked with countries to deal with drugs and migration. Mexico is the emblem of that shift. A country once defined by deep suspicion of Washington became one of America's closest economic partners, bound by dense supply chains and daily law enforcement cooperation. And by the way, net migration of Mexicans into the US has been close to zero for much of the 21st century. This strategic capital built over decades is now being squandered and in the long run, an America that behaved like an utterly self interested predator on the world stage will not grow stronger. It will grow lonelier. Allies will hedge, partners will search for options. Neutrals will inch away. And the balancing that history predicted all along may finally arrive, not because America became weak, but because it forgot the real source of its strength. The Trump administration's aspiration seems to be to have America act like Putin's Russia, an aggressive state that nakedly pursues its own interests. And Miller is right to note that that's how the strong have acted through much of history except America. The United States, fitfully and with many mistakes, followed a different path for the last eight decades and built a new world, one that is now being recklessly dismantled. Go to fareedzakhariya.com for a link to my Washington Post column this week. And let's get started. Nationwide anti government protests have swept the streets of Iran in recent days. At least 162 protesters have been killed in the crackdown, according to a U S based Iranian human rights organization. The protests were triggered by the deepening of Iran's currency crisis when the real plunged to an all time low against the dollar two weeks ago. Joining me now to discuss is Holly Douglas, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and the curator of the weekly newsletter the Iranist. Holly, let's get right to it. This seems like it's huge. It seems bigger than really anything we've seen. Maybe the green movement at its peak was like this and broad based. You know, this is not a set of specific demands like the woman life movement. But what, you know, there have been moments like this in the past and they have been put down. You wrote in the Times that you think this time it's different. What is the principal kind of evidence that this time this regime might actually be on the verge of collapse?