← The David Frum Show
The David Frum Show
Why Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Such a Clown Show
00:57:39
David Rothkopf on how the Trump administration’s contempt toward planning all but ensures a mess in Venezuela. Plus: Donald Trump’s predatory worldview and Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional.”
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- [00:01]
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- [00:40]
David Frum
Hello and welcome to the David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at the Atlantic. My guest today will be David Rothkopf, broadcaster, businessman, journalist, author, but for our purposes today, the preeminent historian of the National Security Council and the foreign policy process in the United States, author of the 2005 book Running the A History of the Creation and Development of the National Security Council. And we'll be talking about the breakdown of that kind of judicious, careful guiding of American policy under Donald Trump, the emergence instead of a kind of clown show of whim and unpredictability and not thinking things through that is responsible for whatever it is that the United States is doing in Venezuela and and for so much that the United States is doing around the world. My book this week will not be a full book. It will just be a single poem. The poem is Recessional by Rudyard Kipling, and I'll be discussing it after the discussion with David Rothkopf. I hope you'll stay to join. But before getting to the dialogue and the poem, some opening thoughts about the events, the dramatic events of this week. The United States finds itself having committed some kind of military operation in in Venezuela. Exactly what has been done and why and to what end remains extremely murky. Many, many stories are being told, but the president has given us an insight into his own particular thinking. And although it seems almost unbelievable that a person could think in such a way, we need to take it seriously, because this is the President of the United States. And probably what is in his mind actually drove this much more than any of the better or more rational reasons for hearing from more subordinate people in his administration. Donald Trump sees the dictator of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, now flying him to New York to stand apparently trial, because he has an idea that the United States can take the oil of Venezuela, notionally the largest oil reserves in the world, although there's a lot of question marks and doubts about how big those oil reserves really are, but he thinks the United States can seize them and enrich itself. This has been a consistent theme of Donald Trump's. His big criticism of the Iraq war led by President George W. Bush, was that the United States failed to take Iraq's oil. And now he seeks to correct that mistake by starting some kind of conflict, maybe war with Venezuela and in order to seize Venezuela's oil. It's a reminder that while Donald Trump is often advertised as a great business leader, people who liked him in 2016 said a lot, said often, and even later people said sometimes he thinks like a businessman. Donald Trump does not think like a businessman. Donald Trump thinks like a Marxist. Donald Trump thinks that wealth is something that exists, that is the product of exploitation, and that it can easily be seized and redistributed by one person to another. And this is a false way of thinking, in my opinion, but it's especially false when applied to natural resources and to oil. There is nothing less natural than a natural resource, and especially not to oil. Oil is the product of human investment, human knowledge, human labor, and all of those things have to be paid for, regardless of who is the sovereign over the territory where the oil is found. And Donald Trump's idea, I mean, it's factually wrong, however big the oil reserves are. And again, don't believe the headline, because a lot of that is hype. But however big the oil reserves are, everyone agrees Venezuela's oil sector is in terrible shape. It will take an enormous amount of investment to bring oil back onto line, and not just in the oil wells. You're going to need roads and pipelines to the places where the oil is found. You're going to need tankers to take the oil away. You're going to need an electrical power grid in order to power the machines that run the oil extraction. You're going to need all the human apparatus. You're going to need schools because the workers have to be trained. You're going to need courts because there are going to be disputes. Who is going to take a dispute about Venezuelan oil to a judge picked by the Maduro regime? There's got to be an apparatus of honest law enforcement, honest conflict resolution. There's going to need to be proper Internet. How is that to be developed? All of this will cost an enormous amount of money. And after the investment is made, it has to earn a return. As we discussed with David Rothkop today, the price of oil today, as I record this, at the beginning of January, is in the high $50 a barrel range. That's a price at which many people in the oil business are barely breaking even. The United States is the largest producer of oil on Earth. It's the largest producer of natural gas on Earth. It's the largest exporter of natural gas on Earth. But it is a relatively high cost producer. And at 58 or whatever it is, the number as I speak, many American producers find it difficult to break even, certainly to make a profit or return on their investment. The idea that they would agree that the United States suffers from this terrible shortage of oil and we need to go around the world stealing and robbing.
- [05:27]
David Rothkopf
In order to get more of it.
- [05:28]
David Frum
All will strike a lot of them as far fetched that they must be taxed to pay for the cost of a military occupation and foreign aid. But even after the oil is produced in Venezuela, should that happen, in the unlikely event the United States can't just appropriate it to itself, that oil has to meet other needs. Just one example. Venezuela is one of the largest sovereign debtors on Earth. Some of the oil is owned. That money is owed to many people, to Americans and Europeans who had their assets confiscated by the regime. But it has a big debt to China as well, measured in the billions of dollars. Is the United States, as the new imperial overlord of Venezuela, planning to default on all of those debts? Some of them. And if it's going to pay them, that's going to take the have the first claim on this oil wealth that Donald Trump proposes to develop in Venezuela at God knows whose expense. Donald Trump thinks of capitalism as the way its worst critics do, as a system of exploitation and predation and seizure and confiscation and redistribution. When actually what you would like to see any American president think, and maybe especially a Republican president, is to understand that markets are systems of cooperation. Markets are system to entice people to part with their savings, to entrust their savings to some productive purpose in hope of earning return, of directing savings to their best and highest use, of finding ways to reduce costs and increase revenues through the application of human know how to technical problems. This is what the free market system in which we think we believe, in, which I believe should stand for. But Donald Trump thinks, like its worst critics, that capitalism is about robbery. And he's now proposing, and rather than refute that argument, or rather than saying that's an argument against capitalism the way the socialists do, since it's a system of robbery, therefore let's try something else. He says, since it's a system of robbery, let us use the mighty armed forces of the United States, paid for by the taxes of the American people, to go around the planet Robbing people so that I can deliver some windfall to the people who have paid for a breakfast table at Mar a Lago and have put poison in my ear about who I should rob first and who I should rob next. As I say, it's going to fail. Because the problem with this way of thinking is not just that it's invidious, not just that it's demeaning, not just that it belittles the extraordinary achievements of the free market system that has made the wealth of the United States and the developed world together. It's also false. It's also just not going to work. The United States is on its way either to finding that it's achieved nothing in Venezuela. And that may be not one of the worst outcomes. It's kidnapped somebody, put him on trial. He's a bad guy. Maybe he deserves it, maybe he'll be convicted, maybe not. But anyway, no question, he's done a lot of bad things and he ought to be held to account for them. That's fine. But if they're going to transform Venezuela, that is a big undertaking and one that the Venezuelans are going to have a large voice in, whether it succeeds or not, whether it's received peacefully or not. And it's their country, they get a voice in what happens there. And when people are denied a voice, they can resist, and they will resist, often with violence. That's been the story of many imperial adventures all over the world, American and other peoples as well. We need to have a better way of thinking about how wealth is produced and how energy wealth is produced than we are offered by the United States government. It just seems that we are being led by people who are at best childish and at worst robber, like in their attitude toward the economy, toward the planet. The United States is not a nation of robbers. It's a nation of cooperators. It's a nation that exports ideas of freedom. It doesn't steal other people's wealth and import it to the United States. There's no shortage of wealth in this country. It's the richest country ever in the history of the world. It doesn't need to take somebody else's portion that ought to be somebody else's endowment, someone else's heritage to build their wealth and take it for America. If it would work, it would be a shame, and it's not going to work. And now my dialogue with David Rothko. But first, a quick break.
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- [10:08]
David Frum
David Rothkopf is a man of so many accomplishments that it is impossible to do justice to them all, yet potentially stingy to select only a few. But at the risk of being stingy, let me hit some highlights. David is the host of the Deep State Radio podcast, which has developed into a network of related programming on the Deep State Network, of which he is the founder. He is the author of more than 1000 articles which appear these days, most often at the Daily Beast. He was a managing director at Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm, and then founded a consulting firm of his own. He served in the Commerce Department of the Clinton administration, promoting international trade and commerce. He is the author of Running the the Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American power, published in 2005, in my opinion, I the definitive history of the development of the central bureaucracy of national security decision making. He's superbly qualified to discuss the topic of our program today, which is why is the Trump foreign policy process such a clown show? And fittingly, as a man of the world, he is speaking to us from Paris. So David, let me set a stage for you and draw on your deep knowledge of the National Security Council and its history. The United States has undertaken this military operation in Venezuela. It has seized the former dictator and sent him to New York, where he will apparently stand trial. And a series of explanations are being offered for this action, which are pretty hysterically contradictory, that this is being fought to do justice, to curb drugs, to stop illegal immigration, to restore democracy to Venezuela, although we're leaving the dictatorship regime intact, that it's about oil. An ominous possibility occurs to me that the reason there's so many different explanations is not just that this administration doesn't tell the truth, although they don't. But actually they never sorted out why they're doing what they're doing because they've broken the mechanism for doing that, which is the National Security Council. And last point, that Trump appointed a national security advisor at the beginning of his administration, Michael Waltz. Waltz was Separated from it's. Trump says it was a promotion. In May 2025, he was sent over to the United Nations. Supposedly the job is being done by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but that means probably no one's doing the job at all. So tell us a little bit about what the National Security Council is supposed to do and why it seems to be malfunctioning in this administration.
- [12:34]
David Rothkopf
Well, the National Security Council has two main purposes. One is policy development, policy coordination, and the other is overseeing policy implementation. It's been referred to in the past as the policy hill. You get all the agencies of the United States government working together to make some recommendations to a president. The president evaluates the recommendations, and then when the president makes a decision about how to act, the same agencies use the same mechanisms to ensure that the implementation is consistent both with the president's desires and the proposals as they've been laid out. Problem here is Donald Trump doesn't really want recommendations. He doesn't like expert perspectives, he doesn't listen to expert perspectives, and frankly, he doesn't really want any filtering between his direction and the implementation of his guidance. And so the nsc, which has grown over the years from a smallish group in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administration to, you know, in the last couple administrations of an agency that was several hundred people in size, it's now shrunk back down to 30 or 40 professionals, the size it was under Henry kissinger in the 70s. And frankly, as you say, there's nobody running it, really. The experts aren't actually being listened to. And it's kind of like the appendix. It's a vestigial organ that is primarily there because it existed in prior administration.
- [14:18]
David Frum
So it's obviously confusing and a little suspicious when an administration can't explain why it's done a military action which may have large consequences, but explain how it would be actually harmful to the interests of the United States. That we don't know whether this is about bringing a malefactor, an alleged malefactor, to justice, whether it's about curbing drug trafficking, whether it's about curbing illegal immigration, whether it's about bringing Venezuelan oil back to market, whether it's about restoring Venezuelan democracy or whether it's about keeping the Maduro system intact. But without Maduro at the top, why does it matter that we. We don't know what we're doing?
- [14:53]
David Rothkopf
And why, other than the fact on its face that if we don't know what we're doing, it could produce a problem if we don't have objectives, it produces a problem. But look, you know, in a good advisory process, you're going to have people telling you things that may be salient, right? Like it would be illegal to arrest Maduro. It would be illegal to invade Venezuela. It would be illegal to seize the oil assets of Venezuela. The oil assets of Venezuela will take many, many billions of dollars to restore to any kind of productivity. Although Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, the. The oil that the country produces, a lot of that oil is a dirty or kind of sulfuric oil that costs more to produce that the United States didn't really have. The claims to that oil that the president asserted that we did, that while we might get Maduro out, there are many factions in Venezuela who would press back against Trump, whether they do it immediately or they do it more slowly. There is the faction that was elected in the last election, including the Nobel Prize winner Machado, who Trump apparently did not want to take over the country because she had the audacity not to refuse the prize and, you know, step aside in favor of him getting it. But it's not just the political factions. Even within Maduro's own party, it's not really clear that the army is lined up, you know, alongside the former vice president. The former vice president has some strange ties to Russia, which we're not quite sure of. We're not sure what the Russians will do, we're not sure what the Iranians who have close ties will do, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so, you know, these are the kind of things that a president who is concerned about the long term success of an operation might want to know about, and that Trump has just sort of swept aside. And even in the past 48 hours, every single one of these things has manifested itself as a potential problem for what comes next in this operation.
- [17:07]
David Frum
Well, you allude to one which is the most obvious, immediate, pressing problem or not the biggest one, which is Trump has this fantasy that he's somehow going to get by. He's going to save money by stealing other people's oil, with no idea that first, stealing is not a route to wealth and riches. And this oil is going to be very, very expensive. And by the way, it's Venezuela's oil. So if they do succeed with not billions, but hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, because you have to invest not just in the oil wells, but in the roads, in the electrical system to supply the power to get the oil out of the ground, it's a big, big investment that has to come from somewhere. Venezuela already has a giant sovereign debt. So they haven't thought any of these things through. And as you say, I mean, one of the things that may happen is they've brought Maduro in front of an American court. It's not clear that he won't be able to come up with defenses in front of an American court. What happens if he's acquitted? Has anybody thought about that?
- [18:00]
David Rothkopf
Well, I don't know that they have thought about it. And of course, there are a lot of reasons that he might be acquitted. You know, the court might say it doesn't have jurisdiction. The court might say he was illegally kidnaped from the country. The court might take issue with some of the points in the indictment. You know, part of the case against Maduro is that he's the head of a so called or alleged cartel called the Cartel Delos Solis, which isn't actually a cartel. It doesn't actually exist. It's a little like antifa. It's kind of a zip code for a bunch of alleged bad actors. Who knows how well the case has been put together. We've seen a lot of cases put together by the Trump Justice Department falling apart because they've been mishandled from a legal perspective. So that could happen. But you know, just to go back to your other point, you know, there are stories now coming out that oil companies are a little reluctant to go in and take on the task of the spending of the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars it's going to take to restore the Venezuelan oil industry. There are a lot of reasons for that. One is that hundreds of billions of dollars is a lot of money. But another is there's no assurance that the next government of Venezuela is not going to come in and say this stuff was illegally seized, we want it back. And that you could go and spend hundreds of billions of dollars. And the day after you're finished, the Venezuelan government goes, it's not yours anymore, buddy. And they'd have a pretty good case.
- [19:26]
David Frum
Well, there's nothing which is oil is trading right now at approximately $58 a barrel. And if you're an oil company, say the price is low. Right now I'm barely breaking even if I have $100 billion to invest. I'm not sure I want to invest my money in oil. And if I'm going to invest my money in oil anywhere, I'm going to invest it anywhere the United States or Canada where it's safe. And with the United States being the largest oil producer in the World, North America producing 28% of the world's oil supply. Why wouldn't you say, let's just spend a small amount of money and put it in Texas and I'll go to, you know, stay in nice hotels in Houston.
- [20:05]
David Rothkopf
Right, right.
- [20:06]
David Frum
But you know, the Orinoco jungle.
- [20:08]
David Rothkopf
Right, but, but also, particularly if that jungle is filled with gorillas or other people are saying this isn't your oil and they're blowing up things along the way. But you know, think about how this is going to sit with Trump's friends in the Gulf or Trump's friends in Russia who are all in the oil business. And if he comes and brings this oil on stream and the price of oil goes down further and further and they get further and further away from their break even point, it's going to be bad news for them. And also, does Trump want to enter into OPEC? Is that, you know, is that the future for U.S. energy policy? You know, whatever Trump may be doing, the rest of the world has come to the conclusion that alternative forms of energy are cleaner and safer and also cheaper. And so, you know, he may want to perform mouth to mouth resuscitation on the fossil fuel sector, but he may not be able to pull that off either.
- [21:06]
David Frum
Okay, so we identified some problems here. And this is what interagency processes exist to do. And not always to say no, but just to say, Mr. President, have you thought about your scheme to take steel oil? None of us of course will criticize that because you are the president. But it may turn out to be a money loser. Your scheme to seize and abduct this bad actor in Venezuela. We all agree he's a bad actor and bring him to trial in New York. He might be convicted. He might sue you afterwards. If he is acquitted, there might be a lawsuit from the Maduro family about unjust detention. And have you thought about that? Have you thought about thing X, Y and Z? There's a process to think about that. And that's the thing that's broken that we're missing. The United States has tried at various points in the past to do without a national security advisor. Most famously, Henry Kissinger, like Marco Rabiot, was simultaneously Secretary of State and National Security Advisor at the same time. Tell us a little bit about how that Henry Kissinger experiment worked or didn't work, bearing in mind that it's Henry Kissinger a person of extraordinary talent.
- [22:07]
David Rothkopf
Well, but Henry Kissinger was an active advisor who sought to be the Primus Enter Paris among the advisors as opposed to President who doesn't want to listen to any advisors. And so, you know, Kissinger did this power play. So he ran the NSC and the State Department at the same time.
- [22:27]
David Frum
What years were those?
- [22:29]
David Rothkopf
It was during the Nixon, in the beginning of the Ford administration. And then, and I spoke to Ford in doing one of my books, and you know, he said the single most important thing he did was to put Brent Scowcroft in charge of the National Security Council and break the job up so that it was not all Henry Kissinger. And you know, that goes to one of the core points, right? When you have advisors, you want to have multiple points of view. Kissinger wanted the President to have one, one point of view. And you know, Ford, Ford wanted a little bit more fair play among his advisors. And Scowcroft, the only man to serve as National Security Adviser twice, had a big advantage in that he was seen as, you know, the term of art that has emerged as an honest broker. Right. He was seen as the guy who would present all the viewpoints of the cabinet to the President so the President could fairly decide among them. And of course, Scowcroft did this then again for George H.W. bush and was seen as the model for doing it right precisely because he, he had lived through the period when it was being done wrong.
- [23:39]
David Frum
Well, Scowcroft, an Air Force general, career military, was an intensely self effacing man, but who had a great ability to develop intimate relationships with the presidents he served into relationships of trust. But what happened, if I didn't, correct me if I have this wrong, when Kissinger was doing both jobs, he was a national security adviser first and foremost, who also happened to occupy the State Department, a bureaucracy he disliked and distrusted. And he was trying to neutralize the State Department so they didn't get in the way of his National Security Council. That was his main job. What seems to be happening with Rubio, who is both Secretary of State and theoretically national Security Advisor, is he's just being Secretary of State and no one's being National Security advisor. Because the deal that seems to have been struck, and at least based on what I read in the funny papers, is that Rubio gets to run Latin American policy and some other things as well. Trump is running Russia and Ukraine policy himself with the aid of some people, Steve Witkoff and other people. And so the deal for Rubio's power is if he agrees to accept that he's in charge only of part of the world, he can be both Secretary of State and not have to worry there's some national Security advisor who's going to circumvent him. But there isn't someone doing that job of bringing everything in front of the president, including such basics as, you know, Maduro might be acquitted.
- [24:54]
David Rothkopf
There are a few things I would take issue with in the characterization. First of all, Kissinger was attracted to the prestige of the office of Secretary of State, moved his office over to the State Department, had his, some of his closest aides doing the work for him in the State Department. He was trying to negate voices that contradicted his voice. But he later would complain that by moving his office out of the West Wing primarily, or some of the time out of the West Wing, that diminished his influence. And he, he famously said to me, you know, that in, in the posse world, like in real estate, what matters most is location, location, location. And being down the hall from the president mattered a lot. Rubio's deal is technically as you describe it, except in reality, what's emerged is this. Witkoff is the Secretary of State for Ukraine and Russia. Witkoff is the Secretary of State for the Middle East. China policy is now being run by, of all people, Stephen Miller, who is the deputy White House Chief of Staff for Domestic affairs, but also happened to be lurking in the background during the press conference we saw on Saturday and has a oversized role in the administration. I think it's important to remember that even with this division of the world. And by the way, Rubia is also the head of USAID and the archivist of the United States, by the way, just to throw that into his portfolio. But Trump doesn't take anybody's advice, even in this case. It is being reported that in the wake of this carefully planned military operation, on Saturday, Trump walked out and said, we are going to run Venezuela. And then somebody said, well, who? And he said, well, these people up here on the stage. And Rubio has spent the past couple of days backing off of that because there was no plan to run Venezuela. This was the president improvising and there still is no plan to run Venezuela. Rubio is trying to say, well, you know, the way that we're going to do it is that we have influence and we can stop oil flows and the military will threaten them. And, you know, that's how we are going to exert our power. But of course, that's not how you run a country. Even in the past when the United States has gone in on oil wars or trying to nation building, we've had a terrible track record, even when it was extremely well planned. And in this particular Case they are just riffing, making stuff up, and mostly kind of cleaning up on. I'll Trump. Trump will say something, and these people then have to scramble behind him to clean up the mess.
- [27:37]
David Frum
Well, there are millions of refugees or exiles from Venezuela, many of them in Colombia, other Latin American countries, some in the United States. Not only Americans, but many of Venezuela's neighbors would like to see those people go home. Many of those people would like to go home. They're needed at home. What's the plan to get petroleum engineers back to Venezuela to help their country?
- [27:58]
David Rothkopf
I mean, the one end Trump. Trump has said in the past day, well, I've talked to the oil companies. They're eager to do it. We're going to leave it to our great American oil companies to handle that. Of course, the oil companies have a different story. Part of the plan, part of the problem goes back to what you're talking about as the core issue here, which is Trump has one reason for doing what he's doing, which is oil. Rubio has another reason for doing what he's doing, which is sort of, you know, he's from a Cuban American family. He's got a long standing bone to pick with Cuba. He certainly wanted to go after Venezuela because of its ties to Cuba. Of the scores of people who were killed in this operation, by the way, a bunch of them were Cuban military. Taking the oil away from Cuba, the revenue that goes through Venezuela away from Cuba could put pressure on Cuba. So Rubio has a slightly different agenda. Obviously, the Justice Department and the people involved in drug interdiction have another agenda. Stephen Miller and the people involved in refugees and immigration have yet another agenda. And none of that stuff is being coordinated. None of the conflicts are being worked out. If I can, if I may, one additional thing. In the course of the presidential press conference on Saturday or the past 48 hours, the president and his aides have also sequentially threatened the president of Colombia, who Trump said needs to watch his ass. The. The president of Mexico, who Trump said did not control Mexico and he was going to have to go after the cartels, the government of Cuba, which Rubio said he'd be worried if he was in the government of Cuba and the government of Denmark and all of NATO, because Trump said, yeah, we need Greenland and we're going after Greenland. And so yet another set of issues that you might get discussed in a normal politician policy process is, well, what happens if it's not just one illegal takeover and the chaos that causes the unintended consequences? What if it's four, what happens with all of that as your alliances are blowing up and the price of oil is blowing up and drug cartels are waging war against the US Government and so on and so forth. So, you know, they are unleashing a lot of problems out of the Venezuelan Pandora's box and nobody has thought through what the consequences may be.
- [30:32]
David Frum
Well, one of the things that you would think at a policy process would happen is somebody would say to President Trump, it's true that the present president of Colombia is an unhelpful person and many people in Colombia would head the cue to say it, but he is leaving power in 2026. Colombia has been a longtime, very faithful security partner of the United States against both drugs and terrorism. There's probably after May of 2026 going to be a Colombian president much more willing to cooperate with the United States. That's where the largest group of Venezuelan exiles are. Obviously they have to be. If you can just keep your mouth shut until May, Colombia is going to be a potentially extremely crucial partner. And when you say things like our American oil companies are going to solve the oil problem in Venezuela, first that's a fantasy. But second, everyone else will say, I guess that means your European Union allies are off the hook for any reconstruction expenses because Trump with his predatory attitude thinks he's going to steal a lot of money. In fact, Venezuela should there be a true regime change, not just a swap of one dictator for another, but a true transition to something democratic. Venezuela is going to need a lot of help. And maybe down the road at some point they will be self sufficient because of oil. If the world is still using oil in the 2000s and 2000s, by the 2000s, they are going to have needs. And is the United States signing up to meet all of those needs? Because if you exclude your partners, you're also saying the bill falls entirely on the American taxpayer.
- [31:55]
David Rothkopf
Yeah. And again, geopolitics is about knock on effects. Right. Fiona Hill six years ago or seven years ago now talked about how there was a perception in the Russian government that maybe a swap could be done where Russia could get Ukraine and the United States could have Venezuela. And there are going to be connections between whatever America's Venezuela policy is and whatever might happen in Ukraine on several levels. And one of them is if the US Is involved in a big rebuilding effort here, which might happen, how much can we spend on a big rebuilding effort in Ukraine if we want to have our way in this hemisphere? And how much leeway are we going to give the Russians or parenthetically the Chinese for having their way in this hemisphere? If we decide we're going to take Greenland as part of this whole thing and we alienate all of NATO, which we are trying to have, bear the burden of the issues in Ukraine, what is the consequence of all of that going to be? And so on and so on and so on. And, and by the way, you know, if you go after the Colombians and you go after others in Latin America and you try trigger among at least some of the countries of Latin America a desire to move together and counterbalance the United States, what happens when they say to the Chinese, you know, something we'd rather deal with you, we're going to sanction the U.S. we're, you know, China's already the number one investment partner and the number one trading partner of almost every country in the Americas, South America, what happens when they open the door more to China? Know, we've seen that in a country and I, I, I'd be interested frankly in what you have to say about this that you've written better about than a lot of the people out there and almost anybody out there. And that is another of the countries mentioned in the past 48 hours by Trump, Mexico. You know, Trump, Trump has said some really outrageous stuff about Mexico and, and saying that that President Shanebaum is not actually in charge of Mexico. The cartels are in charge of it. And, and he's going to have to go in and clean up the cartels. Well, Mexico is, you know, one of our top trading partners, top trading partner of, of China, deeply involved in all the immigration issues we have to deal with, has a lot of other issues with the US what happens if he alienates one of our closest partners in the world, not to mention, you know, your native Canada?
- [34:28]
David Frum
Yeah, well, the Mexico part worries me a lot. It's not wrong that there are large parts of Mexican territory where the authority of the Mexican state does not govern and where cartels are in charge. That is an enormous problem. That's not something to use as an argument. That's something that both countries should be very, very worried about. And Claudia Sheinbaum, although she comes from the Mexican far left and comes from an anti American ideological tradition, has in fact worked with the Trump administration to an almost politically self endangering degree that Mexico's, her approach to Trump has been total appeasement. The United States is flying drones over Mexico, which they originally did, I think without Mexican knowledge or permission. They got the knowledge or permission after the Fact, the drones are supposedly unarmed, but who knows whether that's true. And there are a lot of people in the Trump administration who want to, including Stephen Miller, whom you mentioned, and the Vice president who are on record is calling for American unilateral military strikes inside Mexico with or without the consent and knowledge of the Mexican authorities. So that's a big set of adventures that may. The danger here is that you collapse the Mexican state.
- [35:34]
David Rothkopf
Well, that's also not the first time that Trump's done this. You know, and Trump, during the last Trump administration, floated the idea of shooting at Mexico, launching missiles at Mexico. And, you know, it took the Secretary of defense at the time, the head of Homeland Security at the time to say, no, Mr. President, you, you can't actually attack Mexico. But he doesn't have people who will say that to him this time. And that's what makes this pretty scary.
- [36:00]
David Frum
So let's, let's talk about how the National Security Council might have worked. One of the things I was really struck by was this, this new national security strategy, which theoretically emanates from the national security adviser, although again, there isn't one. There is an archive of all the past reports. I won't pretend I've read all of them. I noticed there were seven issued by the Clinton administration, which is a lot. Normally it's one to an administration, or so it seems. So I read the one from Trump one from Biden, and then from Trump two. So the one from Biden is just a giant blurry committee report in which obviously written by, you know, no single person could write anything this dull. It took a team of highly trained professionals, and it's mostly about not saying anything that'll cause that, that, that's untoward in any way. So that's not very useful. Trump 1 was a basically normal document. It was issued by national security adviser H.R.
- [36:50]
David Rothkopf
Mcmaster.
- [36:51]
David Frum
Basically normal, some, some spicy jalapenos in it, but basically pretty normal. This one reads like it's written by people working for a very right wing college magazine.
- [37:00]
David Rothkopf
Yeah. Or, or the Kremlin. Because the, you know, this core, the core concept behind this last national security strategy is the idea of viewing the world through this idea of spheres of influence, which is this Putinesque idea, which is essentially bully states get to determine what happens near them. And so Russia can have Ukraine, China can have Taiwan. The United States can have whatever it wants in the Caribbean, Central and South America. And Trump has really bought into that idea. And that's what, you know, within the document there is the so called Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. I, you know, I'd love it if somebody asked Trump who Monroe was, because I'm pretty sure he doesn't know. But Trump does like the fact that people are now referring to it as the Don Row Doctrine. You know, I think people are making fun of him, but he doesn't realize this. And he made a reference to it during the press conference. And, you know, the Donroe Doctrine essentially is we not only, you know, will defend our hemisphere, it's that we wish to dominate our hemisphere.
- [38:12]
David Frum
That's not even new. There was a thing called the Roosevelt, meaning Teddy Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Right. And Teddy Roosevelt asserted a right of the United States to use the Monroe Doctrine to intervene in the affairs of the smaller nations of the Caribbean and the north shore of South America. And although Roosevelt himself was not an enormous interventionist, he seized Panama from Colombia or encouraged a revolution in Panama against Colombia. But under his next successors, under Taft and then Wilson, the United States became, and under Harding and Coolidge as well, became a very aggressive military presence all over the Caribbean. So that was tried for a third of a century, and it led to a lot of pretty catastrophic results. It was also expensive. So Franklin Roosevelt's Good neighbor policy was a repudiation of the Teddy Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. So we're not doing this anymore. We're going to support friends, but we're not going to use direct American military intervention except in the most extreme circumstances in this hemisphere. Now, again, there are deviations, Lyndon Johnson in the Dominican Republic and some pretty nasty and usually counterproductive in the long run CIA interventions. But this Don Row Doctrine was originally tried by Teddy Roosevelt and tried, tested, rejected.
- [39:30]
David Rothkopf
Yeah, it was. Again, it comes out of that period of history where, you know, McKinley, President Trump really likes, was flexing the United States imperial muscle for the first time. But it was quite limited. And typically throughout that period, we were looking for certain kinds of traffic justification for what we are doing, which we, you know, are not really doing under, under Trump. Although it is important to note, as you did, that this period did exist and that a lot of what we were doing in that part of the world was on behalf of US companies, not oil companies at the time, but, for example, banana companies in Central America. And it really rubbed the American military the long way that they were wrong way that they were. They were being sent off to fight wars in these countries on behalf of American corporate interests. And you start to see the rumblings of that Here. And I think this is going to be a source of some of the pushback that Trump is going to get here. And of course, this is anything but America first policy. And it is already starting to alienate many in Trump's base, which, by the way, is something that a policy process would, in a parallel process, address among perhaps the political advisors to a president. And that isn't happening either.
- [40:51]
David Frum
Yeah. When we talk about that document, the security strategy that as blurry as some of them have been, like the Biden document, they're an exercise in saying means and ends need to be brought into harmony. So here are a bunch of things you want in the world. Here are the means that the political process will accept that you use, both in terms of expense and in terms of trouble and in terms of reputational risk. So let's bring these, let's try to bring them into some kind of harmony. That means we have to have some definition of priorities, what's most important, what's must have, what's good to have, what we can live without. You know, the United States wants, or used to want to bring more democracy and more human rights to more places, but it can't do all places, all the time at once. There are better opportunities in some places. There's more demand, there are more effective partners. So can we work in a coordinated way? And that whole project of bringing means into ends, into harmony seems to be jettisoned. As I say, it reads like, I think even the Kremlin has made some effort to bring means into harmony with ends. That's why I said read like from something from a right wing school paper, is it just didn't. The whole point is called a strategy. It didn't do the strategic work of thinking, what are we trying to accomplish? How do we do it? What means we have available? If, if, if you're trying to assert a greater American residence in this hemisphere, what are you trading away? Who's going to help you? How much will you spend? How big a commitment are the American people willing to expend to get American oil concessions in Venezuela? The United States is the world's largest oil producer and the oil companies are barely breaking even on the oil they make here.
- [42:23]
David Rothkopf
Yeah, well, and, you know, another subset of the issues associated with. But you're talking about here that has been central to U.S. foreign policy, including in, you know, oil wars of the past that you may remember well is what about our allies? What about the rest of the international system? In the past, particularly in the first Gulf War, the United States really went to some length to put together a kind of international coalition because they felt that that was adding legitimacy. That takes a lot of work. The diplomacy involved in, as you know, is extremely complicated, involves, you know, lots of work by different agencies. All the countries have different issues involved and so forth. Trump has just tossed that aside as well. He does not really care what anybody else in the world thinks about us. Even at our most unilateral in the George W. Bush administration, there was at least some discussion about it. There is no discussion about it.
- [43:23]
David Frum
In the Iraq War of 2003, there was a big international coalition, many, many partners. Britain, Spain, Poland, others. I think Ukraine was there, if I remember right. But this gets to a point that I think I now am reproaching myself for not having raised earlier. Is one of the things that people need to understand about the National Security Council is it's not a body of mandarins who spend their careers on the National Security Council. There are some, but. But mostly it is people who are seconded from other agencies of the government. So if you're a president who thinks, I'm worried about climate disaster as a national security threat, you bring in lots of people from agencies with those expertises. If you were. It's 2008, 2009, and you're worried about international debt crisis, you bring in people from the treasury, and they serve on the National Security Council, although their salaries are paid by treasury or whatever other agency. And that gives you the. This kind of breath of circulating air. It means, among other things, that you're very likely to have people who have served in other countries, either in the military, especially in the military, but in diplomatic services and other services, may speak foreign languages, may have contacts, and they're at the center. There is a way to not succumb to this building syndrome, but to actually have a wider view of the world. And if you break that, then all we're hearing from are the interests of Trump's donors and who are willing to spend money at Mar a Lago.
- [44:41]
David Rothkopf
Yeah, and there's a corollary to that as well, which is that the Trump administration came in waging a war against what it called the deep state, which is the career professionals in all of these agencies who have this huge amount of experience and a long history of putting the interests of the U.S. the Constitution, first. But Trump didn't trust them. He wanted loyalists, and not just in the White House, but in all of these agencies. So not only, you know, in the national security process, you would have the views of multiple Agencies expressed. But before the agency, you know, said something in an NSC meeting, there were a bunch of meetings in the Pentagon or the State Department or the Commerce Department or Treasury Department to develop a view internally there. And particularly in a giant agency that, like the Pentagon or an agency like the State Department, those discussions were often extremely wide ranging, had a wide range of points of view. Well, do you think that's happening in Pete Hegseth's Department of Defense? Of course it's not, because Pete Hegseth doesn't trust people with differing views. Pete Hegseth is trying to suppress differing views. Even today, the day we're recording this thing, thing, Pete Hegseth is taken out after Mark Kelly, a senator, for having expressed a view from the Senate floor which was well within his rights to express, saying, oh, we don't, you know, a former military shouldn't have separate points of view and we're going to punish him by demoting him and reducing his pension. And he's fired generals and admirals because they had different points of view. And so you're getting not only the elimination of the nsc, but you're getting an elimination of the processes within each agency that enriched the ultimate policy discussion. We are having essentially on a, on a remarkably fast, wide ranging basis, a lobotomy being performed in the United States government at precisely the wrong moment. Because we have a president who is purely an impulse engine with no sense of history and who needs to be constrained by that kind of process which he is eliminating.
- [46:58]
David Frum
Well, one thing that this process is supposed to do is there needs to be somebody at the table who's there to ask the question, what if this doesn't work out the way everyone here thinks it will? And we all hope it will. We all hope it will all go fine. But what if it doesn't? What if there is a guerrilla resistance inside Venezuela? Have we thought about that? Do we have a contingency plan in case there is? Have we decided, is it worth whatever goal we are seeking? And we have four or five goals. Will that goal seem worth it if we find ourselves eight months from now, defeat, dealing with dead end remnants of the Maduro regime who've taken weapons and gone into the jungle. Is there a history, yes, there is of guerrilla resistance in Venezuela and Colombia? What would you know? Do we want to fight that? And presidents have to take risks. They often have to be prepared to face the risk of the worst case scenario. But they need to know what it is. They need to have someone there saying, here's what would happen if things go wrong. That's the story of the Iraq War. And the administration, which I served was. There was lots of planning, there was lots of thinking, but there was refusal to take seriously. What if our hopes don't come true? And the administration bet everything on best case scenarios? You can do it with 110,000 troops, resistance will collapse. The best case scenarios turned out not to be true, not to happen. Worst case scenarios happened. And no one had ever asked the question, would we do this if the worst case scenario were realistic possibility? And the answer to that is often, well, in that case, we probably wouldn't. It isn't worth it.
- [48:21]
David Rothkopf
There are, in the history of the NSC, which was created with the National Security act of 1947, example after example of where the policy process led us down. If, know, in Vietnam, it let us down in, you know, Central America during the Reagan administration, it let us down in the forever wars in the Middle east, it let us down, you know, in some other areas that we might talk about in climate policy or dealing with pandemics, whatever, it let us down.
- [48:55]
David Frum
But it, it's a whole heck of.
- [48:57]
David Rothkopf
A lot better than nothing. You know, when we're talking about, you know, you know, the Bush administrative, Bush 43 administration looking at best case scenarios, we're not even looking at those. A best case scenario takes you a few months down the road. We're not looking a few months down the road. And so our experience is that no policy process is perfect, but the absence of a policy process is infinitely worse than the presence of even a flaw policy process.
- [49:29]
David Frum
That's a great place to put a bookmark and to resume this conversation again. David, thank you so much for your time, for taking time away from your wonderful afternoon in Paris. So grateful to you and I recommend to everybody your book on the NSC is really an invaluable history of something that is to many of us, a closed box. And you opened the box and helped us see both what the NSC is, what it was, how we came to this place 2005, as relevant as ever, running the world. And I learned from it so much, and I think others will as well.
- [50:00]
David Rothkopf
Thanks very much and it's good to talk to you, Dave.
- [50:03]
David Frum
Bye. Bye. Welcome to our ugly home.
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David Frum
It's our 100th ugly house.
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David Frum
That is impressive.
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David Frum
I do.
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David Frum
Don'T get too close. You've seen the show. I'm scared of that.
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- [50:43]
David Frum
Thanks so much to David Rothkop for joining me today on the David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is not a book. It's just a single poem. The poem is Recessional by Rudyard Kipling. You will know Rudyard Kipling as the great poet of British imperialism. He lived from 1865 to 1936. He's gone very out of style because of his imperial message. But since the Trump agenda in South America seems so nakedly imperialistic about seizing other people's wealth and taking it for oneself, I thought it might be a moment to return to the poetry of imperialism and to hear sort of some warnings even from Rudyard Kipling, about what it is the United States has undertaken. Kipling was born in what is now India, in Bombay. He died in London. He lived for four years in the 1890s in the United States. He married an American woman and lived in Vermont. That's where he wrote Jungle Book, which became the famous Disney movie Other Stories too. Captain's courageous as well. He could be vainglorious and boastful and show all the ugly face of race arrogance and national chauvinism. He's probably most notorious for his line the White man's Burden, which is a line from a poem he wrote actually congratulating the United States on his acquisition of colonies in the Philippines. But Recessional, which was written in 1897 in time for Queen Victoria's 60th anniversary, her diamond jubilee. It also contains one of his most notorious lines, although this line is widely misunderstood. The line is lesser breeds without the law, which you will hear is not actually a statement of race arrogance, but is a criticism of Britain's Germanic opposite numbers during the arms race of the 1890s because he found them boastful and rude and arrogant. It was not an expression of racial arrogance, as you will see. It's an expression of something else. So I want to read two paragraphs from Recessional. It's a short poem and you can find it online very easily. But I want to read two paragraphs that I think of a lot when I hear the Trump administration talking, and especially the president and his secretary of Defense or secretary of War as he styles himself Pete Hegseth, with their endless invocations of how great the United States is, how tough the United States is, how it's not going to consider any anybody's interest ever, except his own. And these are the two paragraphs in the poem that I hear in my head a lot every time those men speak. The poem Recessional, of course, refers to the title, refers to the music that is played as a congregation exits a church after a service or a wedding or some other memorial. And you are to hear those kinds of that tone of exit and religion through this poem. Here are the two paragraphs. If drunk with sight of power we loose wild tongues that have not thee in awe Such boastings as the gentiles use, or lesser breeds without the law. Lord, God of hosts, be with us yet Lest we forget, lest we forget. For heathen heart that puts her trust in reeking tube and iron shard, all valiant dust that builds on dust and guarding Calls not thee to guard for frantic boast and foolish word Thy mercy on thy people. Lord, I think we're hearing a lot of frantic boasting and a lot of foolish words. And as the great poet of imperialism, with all its arrogance and racial feeling and wrong and crime attached to it, if he could warn us against conducting ourselves in that kind of way, well, that's a warning that ought to spontaneously to occur to everyone in a position of power in the United States. America has used its power so often as a force for good. It is a humiliation and a shame to see that urge to good be so dismissed, be so ridiculed, even by an administration that wields so much power on behalf of people, most of whom, I think are deeply embarrassed and ashamed of the way in which this administration conducts itself at home and in the world. Thanks so much for watching and listening today. As always, the best way to support the work of this podcast, if you're minded to, is to subscribe to the Atlantic. You can follow my work on social media on X Twitter David Frum Instagram David Frum I'll see you next week. Again, thank you so much for joining. Watching and Listening the David Frum show. This episode of the David Frum show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdes. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abayad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our Managing Editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening.