Loading summary
Transcript103 lines
- [00:04]
A
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
B
Some drink champagne, some die at first.
- [00:15]
A
The way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, Expect the worst, hope for the best.
- [00:24]
B
This emergency edition of the Commentary magazine daily podcast Emergency because it is Saturday, January, what is it? January 3rd. We're recording this at four in the afternoon, not our usual eight o' clock in the morning. And of course, we're doing this because the United States did a two hour invasion of Venezuela last night, arrested Nicolas Maduro and his wife and it brought them to the United States for arrest, have already been arrested but to be tried on the indictment of Maduro that was first brought down in 2020. So, John Pot Hordes, the editor of Commentary, with me as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:12]
A
Hi, John.
- [01:13]
B
Social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:15]
C
Hi, John.
- [01:16]
B
And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
- [01:19]
D
Hi, John.
- [01:21]
B
So, you know, I did not have us invading Venezuela on my, you know, bingo card ever, ever, ever, ever, including the fact that we have been seeking to do something about the illegitimate regimes of Hugo Chavez and Maduro pretty much since 2012, but that we would actually take military action. It involved boots on the ground in the capital of Caracas, beyond my imagining. So here we are, it's happened and we have, I think, three things to discuss, one of which is the military and strategic message that was delivered by this action. The second is the political fallout or benefit that will be gathered by Donald Trump, his team, the Republicans, or by the Democrats. And third, a sense of the strategic picture of the globe in the wake of this remarkable action, which I think has potentially astounding ramifications. So I just want to start with the military because the thing that blew me away this morning in the long press conference statements by Trump and by Pete Hegseth and by Marco Rubio, and then particularly was the statement by General Kaine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in describing the mission. And his description of the mission was awesome and awesome in ways that I think have very that have major ramifications. I keep using the word ramifications. 150 aircraft were involved, many of them flying 100ft above the ocean surface in order to evade any detection. Apparently we knocked out, Trump said we knocked out electricity in Caracas through an ability we have, he said, quote, unquote. And they landed at 1am or something like that. And they were out basically with Maduro.
- [03:44]
D
Maduro's compound around 1am not quite clear.
- [03:47]
B
When they got, but it was like two and a half hours and Maduro was taken and his wife was taken and arrested and they were out and they were landing on, you know, American ship to be taken to Stuart Air Force to Stuart Airport in northern Westchester county to be brought to the. Apparently to Brooklyn, I think either Brooklyn.
- [04:17]
C
Via Gitmo.
- [04:18]
B
Via Gitmo. Thank you. Yes. Okay, so 150 aircraft. Total strategic surprise. Astounding. This is the second jaw dropping, astounding American military mission in the last eight months or even shorter. I can't even, I can't even remember when the Iran strike was. Now maybe six months. Also total strategic surprise. Complete wild success of the mission itself as defined precisely for the day of the mission. So we obviously have unambiguously a military that so far surpasses anything that anybody else has on earth that we need to just take a moment to step back and say, wow. I wrote a piece in June called We are awesome, which was really about America and why people should not be anti American. But I mean, we are awesome. This was awesome.
- [05:21]
C
But particularly, look, it's the Night Stalker is the helicopter group that you described. The, the Delta Force, which we should also always remind, remind ourselves is incredible. But we also obviously had a CIA asset very close to Maduro to, to coordinate with those military assets so that we knew exactly where he was and where he could be picked up with the, with the least loss of life, not only for our own soldiers, but for those surrounding him. It really was extraordinary.
- [05:46]
A
You know, but I should say this reminds, reminded me that the US military was awesome long before this, like under any president. If you recall the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Unbelievable intelligence gathering. Unbelievable. Modeled doing it on a fake structure for months in advance. Went in, knew the layout of the place, in, out, got him, dumped him at sea. No American casualties. And again, by the way, no American casualties in this. These things done in hours now. Hours, not days. When the US invaded Panama to get Noriega, that took days. There were a little fighting.
- [06:43]
C
He fled in a Hyundai with his mistress and stopped at the Dairy Queen. And then they got him and they had to blast guns and roses at.
- [06:49]
B
Him for the five days. That was 19, right? That was 1990. That was literally or the end of 19, early 1990, almost exactly to the this anniversary date.
- [07:01]
A
Right.
- [07:02]
D
I think your point is important because this wasn't just a military feat. It was like a dazzling partnership of our intelligence capabilities and our military capabilities. And Cain, I believe, talked about monitoring Maduro for months. This wasn't an in and out, but they were monitoring his Movements and watching where he was, who he was with and what his patterns of life were for for months. And then in the days before the operation, waiting until conditions were right. Now, I don't quite know what they meant by that, but Rubio said we couldn't have notified Congress because we didn't know when this was going to happen. And it would have risked operational security to give notification when it could have been any. Within a two week period. So it really was this perfect marriage of intelligence and a military operation.
- [07:59]
B
Okay, I think we should defend, I think we should start here. I mean, we've already started, but I mean, we should completely dispense with the notion that what happened here was an illegal action by the Trump administration. This follows a pattern that presidents have used for more than 40 years, dating back to the Grenada invasion in 1983, to Panama in 1989, to Bosnia in 1998, to the Abbottabad raid, to presidents who want, who need to, to the Libya action where we led from behind. Presidents who need to act and need to do so with operational security act without prior notification of Congress. Now, if Congress were a different organization, and we are all very upset that Congress does not take a larger role in insisting on its prerogatives as the, you know, as really the prime mover in American political life. But nonetheless, if Congress is going to be an irresponsible body and nobody can trust that, if you brought four people in to tell them what the hell was going on here last night, say you'd invited them to the White House last night. They happened to be in Washington last night. You invited the heads of the intelligence committees of the House and the Senate and the minority, and the minority leaders of those committees and of the Armed Services Committees or whatever, and said, come into the White House. We are informing you that we are doing this. We need you to stay here until the mission is over. All of that. A, they weren't there. B, they cannot be trusted. Now that everybody has a phone and everybody has. They cannot, you cannot trust that somebody is not going to leak. And Trump said that literally, he said Congress leaks. And you got to say that in total convention of what the first Trump administration was like. This administration does not leak. The Trump administration, the first year, 2017.
- [10:12]
C
It was like, I mean, the Hegseth situation notwithstanding.
- [10:16]
B
Right, okay, but that was inadvertent. That was. No, but I mean, I'm talking about leaking for the purposes of, ooh, I got a fun piece of information. I just gotta call Maggie Haberman and tell her right now. Because it's burning a hole in my tongue.
- [10:29]
D
Or I mean, in the first Trump administration we saw leaks to undermine colleagues. It was people or, or to undermine policy ends. So people who didn't like each other would leak against each other or people who oppose the policy ends of the administration would leak for that purpose. And we didn't see any of that here. And this is where I think Rubio's role is important because he's a former senator and he understands what the concerns of his colleagues, not just Democratic colleagues, but we did see Republicans speak out and express concern. In particular, Mike Lee, the senator from Utah, said we should have been notified. And then he got back on and said, I've just spoken with Marco Rubio and everything that happened is okay. But I think Rubio is sensitive to those concerns and was able to obviously speak to them directly to his former colleagues. You know, he has a good relationship with, with Republicans and Democrats on the Hill. He was confirmed by wide margins, etc.
- [11:24]
B
I mean, look, obviously there's been leaking all year in relation to Ukraine, but those are Polish, those are leaks that are intended to deal with long term policy questions and try to get things out or confuse the story or something like that. What I'm talking about is. Yeah, the sort of undermining things or what. It's just people who are new to politics or new to the White House or new to something who are just so excited to have the phone numbers of the, of the lead reporters of the New York Times and the Washington Post and Politico and all that and like could not keep their mouths shut. They couldn't bear if they had, if they had something not to tell people about it. And so this, obviously there's a maturity here in the ability to keep. Trump pretty much says what he's going to do just doesn't say when or he kind of fudges about when he said we were going to take out the Iranian nuclear program and we did, we were just like, eh, he's doing what he always does, which is he says he's going to, you know, give a plan in two weeks. He doesn't do it. But he did it. He said Maduro was going to be out of there one way or the other. So he actually doesn't hide his intentions. Yeah, but the operations they actually do manage to achieve. At least when things are deadly serious, like you're taking out a nuclear program or you are going to arrest the sitting, you know, dictator of a, of a foreign country, you got to do that with as much sophistication and security as possible. And they have met that challenge twice now in very high level ways. Right. The only thing anyone ever knows now is whether or not there's a spike in the pizza ordering at the Pentagon, which is one of these funny things that now pops up on Twitter. Oh my God, somebody's calling for pizzas at 11 o' clock at night at the Pentagon. All over Arlington. That must mean that something is happening. But that's not a leak, obviously. That's just sort of like a funny little piece of business.
- [13:35]
C
But now the difficult work begins of figuring out who's actually going to run the country. Because that to me was a little alarming in the press conference after Trump, you know, took up, took a sort of bow about how well operationally they pulled this off, sort of shrugging and saying, well, you know me, the guy standing behind me, we'll all just figure it out. Now that's actually where I think Congress is going to have to start being more aggressive. People should ask questions. He, he, you know, he sort of made a swipe at Mikado, the exiled Nobel Prize winning opposition leader who has come out already and endorse the current opposition person in Venezuela, whose name is escaping me right now as someone who should be considered a leader. The former the vice president is still calling herself an interim president and still supporting the now arrested leader. So there's a lot of confusion about who's actually going to pick up the pieces here. And that's where I think Donald Trump has tended to lose focus and become distracted. So I am, I am grateful that Rubio seems to be taking the lead on this one and seems to have some ideas along that score and has talked to reporters already about some of this. But that's the big challenge now.
- [14:47]
A
Yeah, and there's, there's a, there's a basic information gap about what Donald Trump means when he says the US Is going to run Venezuela. You know, you run a corporation. And he no doubt has commercial ambitions, American, you know, related commercial ambitions having to do with energy extraction involved in this. But we have no idea what run Venezuela. The Americans are going to run Venezuela for now. Boots on the ground. He said he's not afraid of boots on the ground. But what does that mean? How are you courts going to run or, you know, what's. But given that this is still a decapitated Maduro regime, what's the US Relationship with the Maduro underlings who are now in charge? It's so many questions.
- [15:50]
D
Yeah, yeah, I think it Leaves. That was the open question from the press conference. And we should get to some of the. I mean, there were some amazing moments, especially when he said, there's a $50 million bounty on his head. And then he turned to Rubio and said, don't let anybody claim it. We get to claim it. Like, nobody gets to claim the $50 million bounty. But the open question from the press conference was, what exactly did he mean by we're going to run Venezuela? But I do think, okay, we'll have a lot of time to discuss that in the coming days.
- [16:25]
B
Yeah. So I think that's an important point, which is it is. We are speaking, you know, hours after the thing happened. Things are very confused. The vice president, who is now the president, says that she, she demanded the return of Maduro, who was, you know, illegitimately kidnapped, after Trump said that Rubio had talked to her and that she had said, I'll do whatever you need. So we don't know what the hell is going on. And that'll clarify itself. Some of that will clarify itself in the next 24 to 48 hours.
- [16:57]
C
Yeah.
- [16:57]
D
I mean, the big question seemed to me is, are they going to be okay with Maduro's underlings remaining in place, or are they going to try to more thoroughly clean this out? And Trump did in the press conference seem to me to understand exactly the problem where he said something to the effect of we don't want to be involved with having somebody else get in and having the exact same situation if it's just his number two. That's not much of a change is what he said. And yet he didn't say, so this is our plan. Like, we're not going to allow that. But he suggested he understands the problem without having an explicit plan to combat it. So I think he does get that. But I also think it's worth talking about. Like, you know, I recall I was remembering our conversation about the National Security Strategy and my own comment that, like, these things don't really use usually matter that much. They're just words on paper. And I went back to read it today and thought, like, geez, I was so wrong. Because the National Security Strategy that came down in November 2025 has explicitly a mention of a Trump corollary that reads, the United States will reject outside powers efforts to displace the United States in the Western Hemisphere and defend regional sovereignty against foreign interference. And it explicitly mentioned, you know, we seek the cooperation of other powers in this hemisphere to combat narco traffickers and so on. And I think this is going to have massive implications not just for Venezuela, but also for Cuba and for Iran.
- [18:35]
B
Colombia.
- [18:36]
D
And Colombia.
- [18:37]
B
And Colombia. He meant, he said, yes, that the President of Colombia has to, quote, watch his ass because he said the President of Colombia is manufactured, is making cocaine and sending it to the United States. And he's just seen what we did to somebody we claim has been distributing illegal drugs in the United States. And so he better. And so that has teeth. That has a lot of teeth. All of a sudden you don't just. He now has actual action to back up the hollow through what has always sounded like hollow threats. You better not do it or we're going to be blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know, it's like, that was fun. Let's do it again. We'll do it and we'll do it in, you know, we'll do it in Bogota. Fine.
- [19:25]
D
So does tweet protesters in Iran that we're going to do everything we can to support them. And by the way, it does appear that American military forces engaged in some kind of a firefight with Maduro's Cuban security. So there's already been some engagement with, with Cuba here as well.
- [19:44]
B
Right. Okay. So that, so that I think so. Trying to figure out where we're going with this is very big. But the larger, the larger thing that is of importance to us institutionally is that MAGA is dead. MAGA foreign policy is that it's officially dead.
- [20:03]
A
Oh, I don't think that's the right.
- [20:05]
B
Way to put it.
- [20:05]
C
I disagree.
- [20:06]
B
Really? Yeah. Okay. Not maga. MAGA is not the right way to put it.
- [20:10]
C
Well, the punditocracy that tends to have most of its viewership and audience on YouTube, the Tucker Carlson, you know, the very online MAGA foreign policy folks who have very little foreign policy knowledge. Yes, but look, this strategically, long term, I went back and looked at that security strategy to Eliana great minds today. And what worried me a little bit more long term, again Donald Trump, not a long term thinker, is that everyone's going to, I think in the immediate aftermath of this, say the short term message to Iran, to Russia, to China was look, we do, we say what we are going to do and then we do it. And there was a Chinese delegation in Venezuela just a few days earlier talking to Maduro. So that was obviously also important. Obviously this sends a message to Iran, it sends a message to Russia. Russia, that great ally, sent a very firm firm letter which I thought was hilarious, decrying this. But long term, if we care about The Western hemisphere. Where does that leave Europe? And there is. There was another story over the last few weeks about the MAGA foreign policy of which Vance is is the likely future dealing with Ukraine, dealing with Europe, how we will exercise our influence outside of our own hemisphere. And that is where China is super important here. And I'm not sure that this is a strong enough message to send to China if the long term effect is we play in our backyard and you play in yours and that's how the world should work.
- [21:36]
B
Okay, I got to disagree with you on this because the first thing that he did in major foreign policy terms was take out the Iranian nuclear program. This is the second thing. So he's actually acted way, way far away from our shores and not in our hemisphere. The Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine which is clearly very important to him and I think means that we should.
- [22:03]
D
Don row doctrine terrible means.
- [22:06]
B
That means that the means that Greenland is back on the agenda. Everybody thought the whole Greenland thing was hilarious. It's not hilarious. If I were Denmark I would start figuring out how to price Greenland and sell it because he's going to take it. I don't see why not. He wants it and he's going to take it based on that doctrine. But that's put that to one side. The person in the world who is the most frightened person right now is the Ayatollah Khamenei. Because he is blind, he is powerless. He does not have anti aircraft weaponry. He does not have any defensive or much offensive military technology that we are aware of that was not largely destroyed. He does not have a second strike capability. There is a gigantic revolt going on inside Iran right now. Who's to we Israel has astonishing intelligence it can share with us about what is going on inside Iran. Who's to say that you are Khamenei and you are not now worried that he will drop into your compound and take and arrest you two? You are considered an international global terrorist according to American law. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been designated as such. He is the head of the Iranian whatever the Iranian Guard Corps. I can't remember the ijrc. He is very much in potential gun sites and that would obviously be astonishing. What we now know is that they are running sophisticated long term planning. That's what Kaine told us. They spent months planning this mission. Months. 150 aircraft from all over the place. Different helicopters, planes, seven different kinds of planes, different elements of the US military. Air Force, Marines, army, all of that. So who's to say They've not been doing similar gaming with Iran and what to do about the regime there. I mean, it's an obvious second strike thing for him to do, having blinded Iran and having weakened Iran to maybe take the final steps. I don't know. But I don't think you can stand here and say that. My saying that at some point in the next two months, he might go in and try to decapitate the Iranian regime is like a crazy person talking. Yeah.
- [24:50]
A
I mean, what you could certainly no longer. No one can credibly say that Trump makes threats that he doesn't back up. We've seen it now twice, very spectacular ways. And he's given two casus belli regarding Iran now, currently. One is, well, really three. One is if they, they are building up intercontinental ballistic missiles, period, because if they can build up enough that to overwhelm Israeli air defenses, it would be an enormous problem. Not as an enormous problem as a, as an Iranian nuke, but a really enormous problem. Two, if they are working on reconstituting their nuclear program elsewhere. And three, this is a surprising, more surprising one, he said if the Iranian Basij and other internal repression forces fire on the Iranian protesters, as they're likely to do, he's something like, he said something like that in his truth social post, the US Is going to be there to defend them, to start to stop that. That's pretty extraordinary. And he's also simultaneously threatening essentially to knock the hell out of Hamas if they don't actually disarm the easy way.
- [26:28]
B
Right.
- [26:30]
D
One thing I thought was really revealing from this, from the press conference was that Trump put this strike, or the seizure of Maduro, however you want to characterize it, the operation in line with three other operations that he has overseen. And I think it gives a window into how he views military operations and how he views foreign policy. He compared this operation to the assassination of Soleimani, the assassination of Al Baghdadi and the strikes on Iran, Operation Midnight Hammer. And those were essentially all things where he came and announced them. They were amazing feats that came and they were announced to the American public after they were done. But they're not limited to the Western hemisphere. They're not, you know, Trump, they're not geographically limited. And they do show, John, as you said, that he's willing to go around the world doing these sorts of things. And the other thing is, with regard to the Trump corollary, corollary, I mean, this is related to Venezuela, is related to Iran. It was serving as a foothold for Russia, China, Iran, Hezbollah, which is Iran in the Western hemisphere. So I do think that they are directly related. And if you go read the indictment of Maduro, that indictment from 2020 makes very clear that the narco trafficking wasn't just an enrichment scheme for Maduro, but at least the government argued. And Bill Barr, who was overseeing the DOJ at the time, made a compelling argument that the narco trafficking was a bid to wage war on the United States and to flood the country with drugs and kill its citizens. And that was the explicit strategy of this cartel de Los Solis.
- [28:28]
B
Okay. Also very important was the effort that Trump made to connect what happened here with domestic crime and law enforcement. So which, which is striking because of course, the justification, the reason that we would be doing this legal narco trafficking is that drugs are flooding the United States and killing Americans. And he then said, look what we've done in D.C. we went into D.C. there is no crime in D.C. anymore. That may or may not be true. No more. There have been almost no murders. This is what he cited. He talked about L. A. He talked about various things that he has done to say there are real world, there are reasons that every American domestically should think that the Venezuela mission is a direct effort to help the United States deal with the flood of drugs coming from outside our borders. Generally speaking, the intelligentsia and I think properly, rightly says, problem with drugs is that people want to use them. And so we have a problem inside, it's not an outside problem. We've been spending 50 years on a war on drugs, trying to, you know, destroy poppy fields in Afghanistan and to raise the cost of this and do this and do that. But the problem is the American hunger, the limitless American hunger for illegal narcotics. And he's saying, I want to stop the flow and, and raise the price and make people who are doing this stop doing it. So I'm going to try that. That has not been a centerpiece of our, we're on drugs for more than 30 years and we'll see what happens with it. But it is an effort to bring the American people into the raid on Venezuela and say, I'm doing this for you. Right? It could say it about, it could have said about Iran. It was not entirely. I mean, it's of course true that we don't want nuclear proliferation. Iran's a bad actor, it hurts a lot of people and, and, you know, does terrorism and it's terrible. And it deserved to have its nuclear program eliminated. But connecting that to the ordinary day to day life of Somebody in Oklahoma is not really quite there. This, he is trying to say is about you. I'm doing this the same way. I'm trying to deal with crime on the streets in cities that have gone crazy with crime.
- [30:59]
A
And I think he's alluding to the oil in the same way. In the same way. You know, like one of his, one of his longstanding criticisms of the war in Iraq was that we didn't take enough from the, from, we didn't take the country.
- [31:15]
B
Yeah. We didn't take the oil. Right. Yeah.
- [31:17]
A
To his thinking, the US should directly benefit, should, should, should take the spoils, you know, of, of, of, of a victorious operation. But you know, there's a very real point here which is that Venezuela really is a playground for all sorts of larger, serious enemies of the United States and that allows them to get in proximity to being able to cross the border, which I'm sure many of them have. You know, when you talk about Hezbollah, Hezbollah is in such trouble since the Israeli dismantling of its leadership and its headquarters and its beeper strikes. And it needs money, it needs a place. There's been an influx. Maduro has welcomed Hezbollah fighters with open arms. Come to Venezuela. We'll furnish you with a new passport. What you're going to do here is help with the narcotics trade or launder money for it. That's how, that's your new job. And it puts you in proximity to the US and this, this is an.
- [32:33]
B
Important point and it's not just a sort of like right wing think tank, hawkish talking point, which is Politico did a huge expose this in 2017. So did CNN, something that people have been talking about for this passport, this thing of importing people from Iran into Venezuela, giving them passports and sending them north to cross the border when the border is open. And this, this predates Maduro. It goes back to Chavez, Hugo Chavez, the original communist dictator who died in 2013 or I can't quite remember when he died and Maduro took over from him. But Chavez was the, was the guy who kicked this off. Also introducing an element of extreme anti Semitism into what was a reasonably philo Semitic country in the north of South America with weird, you know, so weird valences of that sort of left wing antisemitism axis with Russia on the one hand and Iran on the other, even though he was a communist and not a, you know, not a Muslim, but that this was a long standing plan to help destabilize the United States in some way or other. As an ideological matter, he was allied with Cuba. Chavez was a, was a disciple of Castro's. And this has been a 20 year goal or, you know, sort of effort on the part of the Venezuelan regime. What remains striking about this is for 60 years or 70 years, the United States has warned and threatened regimes all the time and says, stop doing this and stop doing that. And the implicit threat is always, oh, you know, we can do things to you, we really can. And for a while that was the threat of assassination. And then we kind of dropped assassinations as a, as a tactic. You know, I don't know when 50 years ago, we stopped thinking that that was really a viable way to try to change policy. So we yelled a lot, we screamed a lot. And then a couple of three or four times we actually did go in and decapitate regimes, right? We did in Panama, we did it in Grenada, we did it in, you know, Iraq in 2003. We did it in Afghanistan in 2001 with mixed results. Trump is saying basically, you know, everything is on the table and, and, and the threats are bad. Like, I'm going to say things like don't do this and don't laugh, but to stop laughing.
- [35:34]
C
But this is where I, this is where I'm going to push back again, because he does say that, and he has said that to Iran, which isn't in our hemisphere because he cares and is a great ally and supporter of Israel. But he will be out of office in three years and whoever comes next is unlikely to be as much of a supporter of Israel, both if it's Vance on the MAGA coalition or if it's anyone from the Democratic Party. So my concern going forward is that he needs to start sending those messages globally. So if China, which is already making moves to invade Taiwan, invades Taiwan, will he do something similar? Will there be a similar sort of expression of you we don't allow this? I don't think so. And we've obviously seen a lot of back and forth with Ukraine, and we know there's been a sort of secondary foreign policy being run out of state by Colby and others who are provance and, you know, not exactly pro Russia, but really don't mind that Russia is doing what it's doing in the region and obviously the total abandonment of Europe. So I'm not saying we have to. I just feel like sometimes Donald Trump sounds like he's running a Cold War playbook. And when he talks about the oil companies and he talks about the regime change, but we are not in a Cold War century anymore. And there are all kinds of different polarities globally that I don't think we can dismiss out of hand, even if he has been, and I think, thank goodness, has been very tough on Iran and a very good ally of Israel.
- [36:54]
B
I totally agree with you. And I think that the inconsistencies in the policy in relation to, to Ukraine are very problematic because they do muddy the waters and they, they introduce a note of uncertainty about American resolve. Not, not even about we should support. You know, it's not even about democracy. You know, Zelensky is democratically elected and Putin's a dictator and all that, which you could go to. He doesn't want to go to that. It is this country was invaded illegitimately in the center of, you know, not in the center of Europe, but like, you know, on the European continent. First war on the European World War II, that wasn't a civil, you know, nation to nation. And so you then act like that's not a big deal, you're not going to support the country that was invaded. That's a weird message. It doesn't make sense. It's low cost, it's high return. They're fighting for themselves. And then China, again, you bring up China. It's very important because of course he started talking to about China at the beginning of the first administration, changed the way America thought about China in a lot of ways, and now just announced the intention to allow them to have very powerful AI chips at will to buy them with America getting a cut of the proceeds. That makes no sense either in relation to his own stated foreign policy, even in the national security strategy. So I'm not saying that. That what we have here is a foreign policy that you can read globally and we should. And it would be better for him. He doesn't think so and we're not going to be able to talk him into it. But there is one thing that we have to say, and that's why I said this thing about how MAGA foreign policy is dead, which is it's not MAGA foreign policy because he's maga. So that that was a misstatement. It is the idea that the United States makes a mistake whenever it uses military force, which has essentially become the default position of people on the right since the Iraq who turned on the Iraq war. And they have decided that American military might is.
- [39:08]
C
And much of the left for a.
- [39:10]
B
Long time, I'm not even right. But here I'm talking specifically about this. We published a piece by Jamie Herchy about the American Conservative magazine which he called neither American nor conservative. A lot of that is about not only its views on Israel, but about, about its stance on foreign policy. Its editor Kurt Mills again this morning went ballistic about the Trump move on Venezuela. So this line is very much in place and to the extent that people have had thought that they were speaking for Trump, that is clearly not the case. Trump is creating a new kind of foreign policy, very nationalistic, very militaristic, very much a believer in the prosecution of power using American force. But is it a long term play? No. He likes the day, he likes to 37 hours in the Iraq mission, you know, however long this was, five or six hours in Venezuela though there are still people on the ground there. But you know, so the, so the Taiwan thing is of course a whole, a horse of a whole different color because that's having to confront a major power and a rich country with a very, very aggressive military and which is.
- [40:31]
C
Making incursions into the Arctic right now by the way which come starts to come a little closer into our.
- [40:36]
B
But one last thing. I'm sorry Gabe, go ahead.
- [40:39]
A
I just want to say one thing to look for here when it comes to the American conservative crowd and the, and the all military action is a mistake. They're hoping now that with talk of a follow up attack on Iran and who knows what happens next in Venezuela, they want two messy regime change change challenges on Trump's plate because they want to be able to say see we told you this was not the in and out. We're now we're talking about going back in we don't know into Iran. We don't know what's going to happen next in Venezuela and that's one, that's, that's another, that's going to be another one of those like the Epstein files. Dissident right meets the New York Times.
- [41:32]
B
Yeah.
- [41:33]
A
In promoting the narrative of.
- [41:36]
B
Yeah right. But talk to, but to bring up China and why this matters and the larger gigantic ramifications. One of the things that we learned over the last two years or two and a half years since October 7th is that Iran was a paper tiger. We believe that Iran was a powerful military force and had that this was a very risky thing to engage Iran militarily and it turned out that it wasn't and we, it is possible And I think Abe, you said this to me in a text. We overestimate the military capabilities of the other countries in the world because we have a military that is so remarkably effective and pinpoint accurate and with so Much remarkable technology, even though we're not spending enough and we're not replacing enough of our munitions, and there's all kinds of problems.
- [42:32]
C
It takes us far too long to do the replacements that we need for the technology.
- [42:37]
B
Readiness is a problem and all of that. But technologically and in planning terms and in understanding how to use weaponry, every indication that we have is that our military is a generation ahead, just like Israel's. Maybe a general. We don't know anything about China's capability.
- [42:57]
C
China hasn't tested its military.
- [42:59]
B
It hasn't. And that's my. That's the point. Yeah, but that's a problem, you see, because they haven't tested their military. And we may. We have. We chronically overestimated the power of the Soviet Union. That was one of the great lessons in the last 15 years of the Soviet Union's life. When Team B, a secondary opinion structure built within the CIA, said, you know what, the Soviet economy is likely half the size that we project it is, and the Soviet military is old and tired and its weaponry is bad, and if it engages in foreign adventurism, it is going to fail. And it turned out that the Soviet GDP was half what it was and that when they went into Afghanistan, they did not have the capability to control and contain the country. And the opinion of the dissidents was correct and the opinion of the conventional wisdom was not. And often we may look at, we should treat China as though it is as powerful as we worry it is, because that will guide us to make sure that they don't out equip us. But they may. I'm just saying, if they are who they might be, they're looking at this and going, I just, these guys, I, you know, when Trump says don't go into. The best way for them to worry about going into Taiwan is for him to decapitate Maduro. That's a positive, not a negative, in terms of the message that it sends to China.
- [44:33]
C
See, I disagree. I don't think he sent a strong enough signal in this second term to China about his willingness to behave in that way, in the same way that he did consistently with Maduro. And the third, the third thing here, though, that's different is the ability, the, the internal sense of will and purpose. The reason some of that stuff worked in the Cold War. Cold War isn't just that we were outspending them. And, you know, Reagan's rhetoric about how we would continue to do that. We were going to win the space that we're going to win everything. And we built up, even if we were spending more than we needed to. In retrospect, it was the sense of American purpose and will and a kind of internal fortitude that this country no longer has, unfortunately. And that internal dissension which, which foreign countries have now weaponized in forms of propaganda and social media. We've talked about this many times on the podcast. That's the other thing that I think has to be taken into consideration when we talk about. That's why I worry about Trump's long term messaging. I think that matters now almost as much, if not more, than it did during the Cold War. For that reason.
- [45:34]
A
Okay, it's a very important point because the incoherence is what people bring up in criticizing all this.
- [45:41]
B
Right.
- [45:41]
A
They say, well, if this is about attacking narco terrorist rings that are flooding the US with drugs, why did Trump just pardon a cocaine kingpin Latin American leader a few weeks ago? And you could also, if Trump were so inclined, but he's not, you could make the case, I mean, when you talk about, we're taking kinetic action in Iran and in Venezuela, these countries are part of the axis that includes Russia and China.
- [46:14]
B
And China.
- [46:16]
A
So you could make a larger, I think, very convincing, but who knows, case that we're doing this to stave off this axis that's getting a little too confident about what it can do both in our hemisphere and to our allies.
- [46:37]
B
I was also struck. One thing I wanted to ask you guys about is he essentially endorsed the Colin Powell rule on Iraq in saying that we were going to take over Venezuela. He was like, we're not going to leave it just sitting there. We're going to. It's going to be better that, you know, we broke it. Essentially, that was the right. You break it, you own it. He said that was the Pottery Barn rule or the Crate and Barrel rule or something like that, which, by the way, is neither the Pottery Bar nor the Crate and Barrel rule. So I don't know where Powell got that. Obviously he never bought a piece of furniture anywhere. But that idea was very much present in how he was describing how he wasn't just going in, taking Maduro and then leaving, which is what you might expect him to say. It's essentially what he said when he did the Soleimani Raider, when he struck after the, the first strike in 2017 on Syria. Like that's what you expect. He's like, I did this thing and I'm leaving. I went in, I'm out, I'm done, we're done. He didn't say that this time he's like, we want to make this better because we need good neighbors. He actually went back, I was gonna point that out.
- [48:00]
D
So that was really interesting and I think does relate to what was in the national security strategy. And Trump was actually, I mean, he was reading prepared remarks, but I don't think we quite know how serious he is about this, like, you break it, you buy it thing. And we'll see in the next few weeks, like, how serious, how deeply involved is the US Going to be? But he was asked in the press conference, how is it MAGA to invade Venezuela or why is it MAGA to invade Venezuela? And he pushed back hard. And it was with precisely what you said. He said, well, it's MAGA to want to surround ourselves with good neighbors, to want to have stability in our hemisphere and to want to have energy in our hemisphere. That's maga.
- [48:45]
B
So that's an interesting definition, redefinition of maga. Yeah, because MAGA was.
- [48:51]
D
And he could have said, and we don't want Russia, Iran and China in the hemisphere. He actually didn't say that, but Rubio did.
- [48:59]
B
Rubio. Rubio. And Rubio is not Trump. So it doesn't matters way less. But Rubio in his really quite wonderfully fluid off the cuff remarks, said, look, we told him, we told. Gave Maduro lots of ways to get out. We offered him very generous deals to get out. He wouldn't go. Wanted to be. He wanted to play big boy. And you know, Trump says what he means and he means what he says. And he was giving out passports to terrorists so they could come into the United States and wreak havoc. And we're not gonna have that. And no one else did anything about it. And Trump did. So he did explicitly bring Iran in. Rubio did, Trump didn't. And maybe Trump, except in that he.
- [49:51]
D
Put it in the line of the Soleimani and Al Baghdadi strikes on Iran. And he said, this is in keeping with that. And the other thing I would note is. Sorry, I forgot what I was going to say, but it was related to what you were saying.
- [50:05]
B
I'm sure that happens. Look, it's late. We usually do this in the morning, so we're.
- [50:10]
D
Oh, you know, John. No, this is what this is what I was going to say is that you said that when he talked about the Soleimani raid or the Al Baghdadi raid, it was in and out. Well, they weren't the head of, you know, they weren't saying they ran the country. Maduro was the illicit, like, leader of this regime. And so I think it is, it does stand to reason that it is more incumbent on us. Like he would, he really would open himself to criticism. And he talked about precisely what the criticism would be if he yanked Maduro out of the country, put him on trial in the United States and his vice president took over. And that actually would not solve the problems that he has articulated, which are the flood of migrants into the country, the flood of drugs into the country, and the problem of Russia, Iran and China, like, take, you know, taking hold in Venezuela. And so I think he's acutely aware of those problems and that it's not that you break it, you buy it, you rule. It's the, are we going to solve the problem we went in there to solve?
- [51:14]
B
Look, Abe, you were very rattled. You were very rattled listening to the press conference at him saying that Machado, she looks, she's a very nice lady, but I don't know how much support she has in the country. That is the opposition figure who fled the country and won the Nobel Prize this year. And why wouldn't he follow her lead or let her be the figurehead of the post Maduro, Venezuela. And I will leave it open, at.
- [51:45]
A
Least say, you know, it's too early now. She's, she's, she's great. She is, in fact, very popular there. He said she's not popular there. Yeah, she is popular there. Let's see. We got a lot, there's a lot of contingencies to deal with, you know.
- [51:59]
B
Right. Well, I, I mean, so Elliot Abrams was on the, My brother in law was on the free press live stream. Elliot said that the failure to back Machado or if he doesn't sort of move toward Machado will open him up to the idea that he really isn't interested in democracy whatsoever, that she represents a democratic future for Venezuela. Like, she, she, this is a free elections. Her view is the elections were stolen. The people's will was not followed by that. Maduro, you know, Maduro and Chavez, but Maduro in particular has now, you know, without question, stolen two or three elections in a row. Let the people decide. And that his unwillingness or his resistance to her may be a sign that, you know, he really doesn't care about democracy, even though he says people, they, people need to be treated better.
- [52:58]
C
And if he cuts a deal with this interim vice president who's like a weird Venezuelan doppelganger of Kamala Harris's biography, because, like, she's the, she's the daughter of A Marxist sort of revolutionary. And like, her brother is involved in the Maduro regime. Like, she's, she's obviously her brother, I.
- [53:12]
B
Think, is the head of the General assembly or something.
- [53:14]
C
I mean, yeah, I mean, she, she's, she's pretty embedded. But if he cuts the deal, if he accepts that she claims she'll work, you know, do some of what they say and cuts deals with the oil companies that will make this look more like a developer's deal with the oil companies and not like a real effort to oust a dictator.
- [53:30]
A
I think that is what he would prefer. I think both, both as, both as a practical matter and for the optics. Because after going around the world saying we're not going to tell you what kind of government you should have, he doesn't want to be the democracy promotion guy.
- [53:45]
B
Although, as I say, I don't think Machado is that big a poll on that because she says, let's have free elections. Right, Right. So I guess if you have free elections and then, and then the communists win legitimately, you don't deny when you're.
- [54:02]
C
A homegrown Communist, by the way, has already scolded Trump for his Venezuela raid.
- [54:06]
B
Yes, he has. It's very wonderful that. Yeah, yeah. In his third day as mayor, Zoram Mamdani has already put his stamp on the world's foreign policy because of course, Maduro is going to be held here, here in New York City. And I guess he'll bring him a cake, you know, with a file in it, just to see if he can, if he can get out. Okay, so the last question is the political question. We're going into an election year. Does stuff like this. Is stuff like this going to matter electorally? And I think the truth is that it will. I think it can only help Republicans. I mean, obviously, if it's a disaster, it won't help Republicans. Let's assume it's not a disaster, that we, that it does demarcate. It will create a demarcation line between the Republicans and the Democrats that Republicans believe in strength, power, order, are opposed to drugs, are willing to take military action against the flow of drugs into the country, are willing to take military action against crime in the streets, are willing to do what is necessary, even if the courts yell at them to have these fights about immigration, all that. That's probably the Republicans best hope nationally. Assuming that although the economy, of course, had a very strong quarter, the GDP quarter reports were.
- [55:40]
C
Well, it had a weird quarter, I would say. I mean, some parts of the economy are strong, others are not. So I would say that's, I mean, you're talking about midterm elections. I don't think this matters at all unless he can consistently hammer home the immigration point, which continues to be something that his, his base voters, who you need to turn out in midterm elections care about.
- [56:00]
B
But he's, you know, I know this is the, this is where it's not optics. And generally speaking, midterm elections are not nationalized, but now all elections are nationalized. So he may go Democrats, this stuff may go Democrats into saying and doing things that are extremely discomforting to the American people about American power, American will, American force, our military, the use of our military and all of that. That might have some positive consequences for Republicans who don't seem to have, you know, a lot of running room on most things unless the economy shows a greater deal of strength. And I think we expect to as the tariffs increasingly bite, even if the tariffs haven't quite been yet.
- [56:56]
D
I'm all for the spend as well thing. I'm very pleased about it. Count me a skeptic that it's going to make a real dent in the midterm elections. Look, a, I think foreign policy just tends not to be something that voters cast ballots on. Us, we're, we're a rare exception. You know, we're the party of five people in the country, a very, very small minority here. Add to that, like we have a long way to go to November. We're in January, so we're 10 months away. That's just a lot of time. And look, something may happen in September, October, you know, later this year. That, that will be a big deal. I'm skeptical that this will matter.
- [57:42]
B
He is willing to take very bold steps on things and that's, you know, maybe those cancel each other out because some of them are too bold and some of them are crazy and they look crazy and he sounds crazy. And then some of them are bold and seem to be world changing and maybe very positive and maybe it all cancels itself out and it cast too large a shadow over individual Republicans and means that every vote that is cast in November will essentially be cast for or against Trump rather than, you know, in local elections, which is what you, what you would generally expect. But three or four things have happened since November that I didn't expect would happen on the planet Earth. And God knows what'll happen between that now and April. I mean, really, no, just, just on.
- [58:37]
A
The question of Trump's forward leaning military posture and popular opinion, if the Story remains Donald Trump orders successful operations against bad guys and no Americans are killed in them. And some of these operations even lead to greater energy security for the U.S. or an influx of trade deals for the U.S. if that's where that, where the story stays. I think it's, I think it's more than a blip.
- [59:14]
D
It won't hurt him.
- [59:15]
B
Yeah, right. Yeah, it won't hurt him. The question is whether it will help anybody else. And obviously the safe bet is to say this won't count. And so I probably online with Eliana and Christine, but I do think these things are very, it's very big like this, but things change because of things like this. World positions including this is why I said Christine thinks we're not sending a big enough message to China. We don't know what message China, how, what China hears and what China doesn't hear here. We think we do, but we don't. And as I say, if we are capable of staging these actions against rich, oil rich countries that theoretically, with regimes that are very stable and have protected themselves very successfully for many years, and we just snap our fingers and blow them away, you know, I don't know what Beijing thinks when it sees that it doesn't do that. It's never even tried to do that anywhere.
- [60:18]
A
I think the one, the leap here is the boots on the ground. That was the third rail.
- [60:24]
B
Yeah.
- [60:25]
A
You know, there was never any question about the US Putting boots on the ground for Israel and its fight in Iran, but yet everyone acted as if that was an inevitability and that was gonna happen. Yeah. This time, as Trump said, the press conference say there are boots on the ground in a very big way.
- [60:45]
B
Yeah.
- [60:46]
A
And we're not afraid of boots on the ground.
- [60:49]
B
That is very big. And you're right. I think we should end there because that is, that is the, that is his evolution. Yeah. Evolution is no American footprint, but we'll, we'll do it from the air. And now he has broken through to the idea that it's fine to have boots on foreign soil. At least, you know, as long until we seize the oil and get it and then they could. Okay, well, we'll be back Monday with the return of the regular Commentary magazine podcast. So for Christine, Eliana and Abe, I'm John Pot. Horace, keep the candle burning in 2020, 2016.