Trump Has No Plan for Venezuela

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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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses the American seizure of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and President Donald Trump’s deeply flawed thinking about Venezuelan oil. David argues that Trump’s worldview of exploitation and predation is likely to doom his ambitions in Venezuela rather than secure them.

David is then joined by the national-security analyst David Rothkopf to examine the U.S. military operation in Venezuela and the Trump administration’s alarming lack of a coherent plan for what comes next. Rothkopf explores what it means for a president to sideline or altogether ignore the National Security Council before launching a major military action. Together, Rothkopf and Frum speculate about possible outcomes of the Maduro operation that Trump appears not to have considered.

Finally, David closes with his thoughts on Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional” and the poem’s warning about national boasting, overreach, and the perils of collective foolishness.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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 World, 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 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 dramatic events of this week. The United States finds itself having committed some kind of military operation 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 we’re hearing from more subordinate people in his administration.

Donald Trump seized the dictator of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, is 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 that 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 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 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 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 and whether 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 are going to need roads and pipelines to the places where the oil is found. You are 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 gotta 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 discuss with David Rothkopf 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, a 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 in order to get more of it will strike a lot of them as far-fetched, that they must be taxed to pay for the cost of a military occupation in 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. 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 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 a system to entice people to part with their savings, to entrust their savings to some productive purpose, in hope of earning a 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 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 oughta 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. 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, robberlike 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 oughta be somebody else’s endowment, someone else’s heritage to build their wealth, and take it for Americans. If it would work, it would be a shame, and it’s not going to work.

And now my dialogue with David Rothkopf.

[Music]

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 [DSR] Network, of which he is the founder. He is the author of more than 1,000 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 the book that inspired this discussion, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, published in 2005—in my opinion, 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: Trump appointed a national security adviser at the beginning of his administration, Michael Waltz. Waltz was separated from—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.

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 the Kennedy administration to, in the last couple administrations, 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 administrations.

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 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 don’t know what we’re doing and why?

Rothkopf: (Laughs.) 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, in a good advisory process, you’re gonna 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 oil that the country produces, a lot of that oil, is a dirtier 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 [Peace] Prize winner [María Corina] Machado, who Trump apparently did not want to take over the country, because she had the audacity not to refuse the prize and 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 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, etc., etc., etc.

And so these are the kind of things that a president who is concerned about the long-term success of an operation might wanna 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.

Frum: Well, you allude to one, which is the most obvious pressing problem, the biggest one, which is: Trump has this fantasy that he’s somehow 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, 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?

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. The court might say it doesn’t have jurisdiction. The court might say he was illegally kidnapped from the country. The court might take issue with some of the points in the indictment. Part of the case against Maduro is that he’s the head of a so-called or alleged cartel called the Cártel de los Soles, 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 just to go back to your other point, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 go, It’s not yours anymore, buddy, and they’d have a pretty good case.

Frum: Well, there’s another, 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 a hundred billion dollars 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 in 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 percent 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 all go to stay in nice hotels in Houston, rather than the Orinoco jungle? (Laughs.)

Rothkopf: Right, but also particularly if that jungle’s filled with guerillas or other people who are saying, This isn’t your oil, and they’re blowing up things along the way. But think about how this is gonna 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 onstream, and the price of oil goes down further and further, and they get further and further away from their break-even point, it’s gonna be bad news for them.

And also, does Trump wanna enter into OPEC? (Laughs.) Is that the future for U.S. energy policy? 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 he may wanna perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the fossil-fuel sector, but he may not be able to pull that off either.

Frum: Okay, so you 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 steal 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. (Laughs.) There might be a lawsuit from the Maduro family about unjust detention. Have you thought about that? Have you thought about thing X, Y, and zed? 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 adviser—most famously, Henry Kissinger, like Marco Rubio, was simultaneously secretary of state and national security adviser at the same time. Tell us a little bit about how the Henry Kissinger experiment worked or didn’t work, bearing in mind that it’s Henry Kissinger, a person of extraordinary talent.

Rothkopf: Well, but Henry Kissinger was an active adviser who sought to be the primus inter pares among the advisers, as opposed to a president who doesn’t wanna listen to any advisers. But Kissinger did this power play, so he ran the NSC and the State Department at the same time—

Frum: What years were those?

Rothkopf: It was during the Nixon and the beginning of the Ford administration. And I spoke to Ford in doing one of my books, and 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 that goes to one of the core points, right? When you have advisers, you wanna have multiple points of view; Kissinger wanted the president to have one point of view. And Ford wanted a little bit more fair play among his advisers, and Scowcroft, the only man to serve as national security adviser twice, had a big advantage in that he was seen as—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 had lived through the period when it was being done wrong.

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, relationships of trust. But what happened—and correct me if I have this wrong—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 adviser, is he’s just being secretary of state and no one’s being national security adviser, because the deal that seems to have been struck in, 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 adviser 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 Maduro might be acquitted.

Rothkopf: There are a few things I would take issue with in the characterization. First of all—

Frum: Go ahead.

Rothkopf: —Kissinger was attracted to the prestige of the office of secretary of state, moved his office over to the State Department, had 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 famously said to me that, in the policy 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 an oversized role in the administration.

And I think it’s important to remember that, even with this division of the world—and, by the way, Rubio’s 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. And so, even in this case, it is being reported that, in the wake of this carefully planned military operation on Saturday, Trump walked out, said, We’re gonna 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’s trying to say, Well, the way that we’re gonna do it is that we have influence, and we can stop oil flows, and the military will threaten them, and 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 do 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 Aisle Trump. Trump will say something, and these people then have to scramble behind him to clean up the mess.

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?

Rothkopf: On the one end, Trump has said in the past day, Well, I’ve talked to the oil companies. They’re eager to do it. We’re gonna leave it to our great American oil companies to handle that. Of course, the oil companies have a different story. A part of the problem goes back to what you’re talking about is the core issue here, which is: Trump has one reason for doing what he is doing, which is oil. Rubio has another reason for doing what he’s doing, which is sort of 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 ’cause 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, and none of the conflicts are being worked out.

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 president of Mexico, who Trump said did not control Mexico, and he was gonna 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 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 U.S. government, and so on and so forth. So they are unleashing a lot of problems out of the Venezuelan Pandora’s box, and nobody has thought through what the consequences may be.

Frum: Well, one of the things that you would think in 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 queue 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. If you can just keep your mouth shut until May, Colombia’s 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 gonna 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’s 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 2030s and 2040s. By [in] the 2020s, 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.

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 U.S. 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 wanna have our way in this hemisphere, how much leeway are we gonna give the Russians or, parenthetically, the Chinese for having their way in this hemisphere? If we decide we’re gonna 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 gonna be? And so on, and so on, and so on.

And by the way, if you go after the Colombians and you go after others in Latin America and you 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 gonna sanction the U.S.? China’s already the No. 1 investment partner and the No. 1 trading partner of almost every country in the Americas, South America. What happens when they open the door more to China? We’ve seen that in a country—and 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.

Trump has said some really outrageous stuff about Mexico and saying that President [Claudia] Sheinbaum [Pardo] is not actually in charge of Mexico; the cartels are in charge of it, and he’s gonna have to go in and clean up the cartels—well, Mexico’s one of our top trading partners, top trading partner of China, deeply involved in all the immigration issues we have to deal with, has a lot of other issues with the U.S. What happens if he alienates one of our closest partners in the world, not to mention your native Canada?

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. Her approach to Trump has been total appeasement. And 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 wanna—including Stephen Miller, whom you mentioned, and the vice president, who are on record as calling for American unilateral military strikes inside Mexico, with or without the consent and knowledge of the Mexican authorities.

The danger here is that you collapse the Mexican state because—

Rothkopf: Well, it’s also not the first time that Trump’s done this. And Trump, during the last Trump administration, floated the idea of shooting at Mexico, launching missiles at Mexico. And it took the secretary of defense at the time, the head of Homeland Security at the time to say, No, Mr. President, 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.

Frum: Let’s talk about how the National Security Council might have worked. One of the things I was really struck by was 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 1, from Biden, and then from Trump 2.

So the one from Biden is just a giant blurry committee report, obviously written by—no single person [who] could write anything this dull; it took a team of highly trained professionals. (Laughs.) And it’s mostly about not saying anything 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. McMaster. Some spicy jalapeños in it, but basically pretty normal.

This one reads like it’s written by people working for a very right-wing college magazine. It’s just—

Rothkopf: Or the Kremlin. Because 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 Putin-esque 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. Within the document, there is the so-called Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine—I’d love it if somebody asked Trump who [President James] Monroe was, ’cause I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know. But Trump does like the fact that people are now referring to it as the “Donroe Doctrine,” which is—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 the Donroe Doctrine essentially is: We not only will defend our hemisphere; it’s that we wish to dominate our hemisphere.

Frum: That’s not even new. There was a thing called the Roosevelt—meaning Teddy Roosevelt—Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. 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, 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 [President William Howard] Taft and then [President Woodrow] Wilson, the United States—and under [Presidents Warren G.] Harding and [Calvin] 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 [D.] 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 are 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: [President] Lyndon [B.] Johnson in the Dominican Republic and some pretty nasty, and usually counterproductive in the long run, CIA interventions. But this Donroe Doctrine was originally tried by Teddy Roosevelt and tried, tested, rejected.

Rothkopf: Yeah, and, again, it comes out of that period of history where [William] McKinley, a 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 justification for what we are doing, which we are not really doing 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 U.S. companies—not oil companies at the time, but, for example, banana companies in Central America. And it really rubbed the American military the wrong way that 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 gonna be a source of some of the pushback that Trump is gonna 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 advisers to a president, and that isn’t happening either.

Frum: Yeah. When we talk about that document, the security strategy, 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 try to bring them into some kind of harmony. And 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. 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 [and] ends into harmony seems to be jettisoned. I think even the Kremlin has made some effort to bring means into harmony with ends. That’s why I said it read like something from a right-wing school paper. It’s 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 do we have available? 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? (Laughs.) And the United States is the world’s largest oil producer, and the oil companies are barely breaking even on the oil they make here.

Rothkopf: Yeah, well, and another subset of the issues associated with what you’re talking about here that has been central to U.S. foreign policy, including in 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 lengths 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 it, as you know, is extremely complicated, involves 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.

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, because 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 mostly, it is people who are secunded 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 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 this kind of breath of circulating air. And it means, among other things, that you’re very likely to have people who have served in other countries,, especially in the military, but [also] in diplomatic services and other services, may speak foreign languages, may have contacts. And 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, who are willing to spend money at Mar-a-Lago.

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. and the Constitution first. But Trump didn’t trust them; he wanted loyalists—not just in the White House, but in all of these agencies. In the national-security process, you would have the views of multiple agencies expressed, but before the agency said something in an NSC meeting, there were a bunch of meetings in the Pentagon or t