Perry Bacon: And so we’re going to talk about three different nations that Trump is threatening or dealing with—Cuba, Iran, and Greenland. I’ll start with Greenland only because it was off my radar screen that Trump was still thinking about taking over Greenland.
So let me jump back and start with the—I don’t remember. I’ve covered four or five presidents. Was there a push to change Greenland with Bush or Obama or Clinton or Biden that I missed, or even in Trump’s first term?
Bacon: OK. Yeah.
So yes, Trump talked about it in his first term. But this has been another level—although it seems like the crisis over Greenland, and I would say it was a crisis during the Davos meeting in Switzerland in January—it already feels 100 years ago.
But Greenland was a real crisis. We’ve subsequently learned that the Danes took it very seriously, and the troops that went to Greenland, ostensibly for prearranged NATO military exercises, had pints of blood go with them—the kind of steps that you would take if you were expecting there to be a fight. And that is just almost unthinkable between NATO allies. I think that was truly the final—if anybody else in Europe needed waking up, that woke up the deepest sleepers, I would say.
Bacon: Not Trump’s.
Bacon: Let me repeat my question, though. Besides Trump, the U.S. government’s point of view was not previously we have to take over Greenland—with either Republican or Democrat, right?
But if the U.S. wanted more troops and bases in Greenland, the Danes would undoubtedly be happy to negotiate that in good faith—and probably would welcome it, because the Arctic is now very much a front in the conflict with Russia, and with China, as the ice melts and you can transit the Arctic more, and so forth.
I think that having had the Greenland crisis, it will be that much harder to try to get back basing rights that we had in previous administrations. But previously, most administrations have recognized—at least since the end of World War II—that it is actually far better and cheaper, in the sense of not just money but the cost in forward deployments and risks and not having to govern.
So administrations previously have recognized that negotiating deals with our allies to have military bases—and they’re not perfect deals, and there’s not perfect behavior on the part of the U.S., as we know, in places like Japan and so forth—but that is efficient for the United States within an alliance.
Bacon: What’d you make of him sending the governor—I guess they made the governor of Louisiana the envoy, and he’s—what’d you make of that? Because he has no foreign policy knowledge that I know of that could have been comforting to Greenland or Denmark. Was that a move to show we don’t care what you think, basically? Or what do you make of that?
Bacon: One would hope.
But I think it’s yet another sign that they don’t invest at all in real diplomacy—which has shown up in all of these conflicts and made everything harder. Again, you could have made a deal with Greenland, even including some of the mineral raw materials. That might have been more contentious, but you could imagine skilled diplomats getting around to that, because at a minimum, they would want to make the deal with the U.S. and not with the Chinese.
Bacon: We’re going to talk about Cuba and Iran in a second. But this June 14th day—I hadn’t really thought about that until I read the piece. Do we think that—
Bacon: Flag Day. Do we think that—whatever the country is—part of celebrating Donald Trump’s birthday or America 250 is going to be that we invade someone? Is that something you think is serious or not very serious?
The only country I can think of that regularly chooses to do what it sees as aggressive moves on American holidays—not even the Dear Leader’s birthdays—is North Korea, which is famous for shooting off missiles on things like Columbus Day. Things that it thinks are super important to every American—big national holidays that are no longer really that salient to most people.
Saunders: The comfort I think the Danes can take is simply: we are so militarily overstretched right now. Just before coming on air with you, I saw that apparently we’ve told the Europeans that we’re taking some strategic bombers out of Europe—which doesn’t make any sense for European security, even if you want them to do more for themselves, because that’s not something they can replace.
Bacon: Eat your own caveats, as we know. As we know, nothing is predictable.
Bacon: So in terms of Cuba, this feels like the most analogous to Venezuela. You have this indictment against—I guess they arrested Maduro and did the charges at the same time—but this sort of targeting a leader, indicting them.
Saunders: Yeah, I do. And I think, of all of the words you just said, the most important one is Rubio—because this has been his pet project for pretty much ever. And so I have wondered about Rubio’s silence in the Iran war debates. If you believe—I think we talked about the New York Times tick-tock article. Not that TikTok, but the journalistic tick-tock piece.
Saunders: He doesn’t really do anything to try to stop Trump.
So I have wondered—when he talks about Iran now, he talks about a deal. And when he talks about Cuba, he says, The president wants to make a deal, but it doesn’t look like that’ll happen. Again, just guessing—but he is the national security adviser, and he’s also the nation’s top diplomat, and he’s not really involved in the Iran negotiations. All the talk he’s been saying in the last week about Iran has been from India, and now I think he’s in Azerbaijan.
So one read—and it’s only a read—is that Rubio has been trying hard to stay on side with Trump but wants to get out of Iran, as Trump does, and focus on Cuba. And I don’t know whether he really intends to get Trump to launch a regime-change intervention. But he put a tremendous amount of pressure—the reporting suggests—to do something military in Venezuela, and undermined some of the deal-making that Trump was actually kind of going down before he turned more hawkish on Venezuela.
And the Cubans are out—Cuba as an island is out of fuel. The suffering we are inflicting on Cuba is immense, and of a scale that I think if we didn’t have the Iran war and so many other [things]—Ebola, even, or the renewed Russian assault on Ukraine—I think we would be hearing a lot more about it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not immense. It’s a huge toll.
So what do you do if you need a win? If I were Trump—trying as hard as I can to put myself in his mind—I’d be receptive to a good-sounding SOUTHCOM plan to seize somebody in Cuba and try to bring down the regime. It worked once. Didn’t work so well in Iran. Again, thinking like Trump.
Saunders: I highly doubt it. Cuba’s—and I’m no expert on Cuban policy. But in Venezuela, we just went to Maduro’s number two, who had been secretly talking to the U.S., right? So maybe that’s been happening.
It’s been this way for—what, 60 years or something like that? And what our intelligence is in Cuba is hard to know. Although, we said that about Iran, and the Israelis helped a lot with that—they had exquisite intelligence about Iran. So I don’t know if they have someone in mind. But then there’s also the expatriate community, and Rubio very much is part of that.
Bacon: What a terrible idea.
Bacon: Moving to Iran. When we talked last, you argued that Trump’s choices in Iran were confrontation or capitulation. I think we’re really seeing that play out.
Bacon: You said that, right? You said humiliation. That’s correct. And it’s interesting, because each time we get close to some kind of formal agreement, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, all these people have basically announced this deal is too weak—in other words, they’re telling Trump, You will be humiliated if you do it. And then Trump cannot accept that.
Saunders: I don’t think a lot has changed. I think the fundamentals of this are just extremely difficult for a president who initiated a war and got us to this place.
So that is not really going back to the way it was—freedom of navigation. That’s one thing.
Bacon: What do we think he means? What do we think he’s referring to?
Bacon: Yeah. Who knows? That is my thought initially.
I could see some kind of deal. I think the nuclear issue is, weirdly, more possible to deal with than Hormuz is. And I think Hormuz has given Iran so much leverage that maybe there’s a way you could figure that out. But it’s not—the regime is even more entrenched right now.
And so this is a little bit like saying you’re down by 30 points in a basketball game—just to pick a random example. Let’s go Knicks. And you hit one three-pointer, and suddenly you’re close to—the gap here is very wide, and one team has the momentum and home-court advantage. The Strait of Hormuz, as I think I’ve said before—maybe not here—is literally between a rock and a hard place. And you can’t make a deal about geography.
But the one thing I will say is this: both sides so desperately seem to want a deal. Trump is more desperate, but the Iranians really want a deal. And so we struck some—we shot down a plane, we hit some boats yesterday, last night, and the Iranians have threatened retaliation.
Bacon: Let me finish by asking—Cuba, Iran, and Greenland don’t have much in common. They’re not in the same regions. In terms of U.S. foreign policy doctrine, we’re not talking about imperialism, authoritarianism, democracy promotion—I’ve heard lots of ideas. But when you put these things together, what is Trump trying to do, from your vantage point?
So I definitely don’t think it’s democracy promotion because we aren’t promoting democracy in the autocracies. In fact, we’ve entrenched autocracy in Venezuela and especially in Iran. But also, we’re being aggressive against a democratic ally in Denmark. And whatever everyone thinks of Greenland’s relationship with Denmark, that’s between them. And Greenland certainly does not want to become part of the U.S. So it’s definitely not democracy promotion.
Bacon: Or colonize, or something.
Bacon: Why these nations—why these particular crises, as opposed to others? Other parts of the world we could try to annex.
He will remember things about trying to deal with Cuba and Iran—the Iran-Iraq War would have been very salient to him. So there is this feeling of, I can be the one to fix it. Not I alone can fix it in that way, but I’m going to finally—
Elizabeth Saunders: Yes. And beware U.S. presidents trying to use military force to solve a problem once and for all. That’s a theme that goes back—the Iraq War, we’re going to solve that once and for all. Goes back all the way to the Korean War, when they tried to go past the 38th parallel and unify Korea.
Bacon: So if you were with Pete Buttigieg and Josh Shapiro tomorrow, what would you tell them? What about foreign—what should the antidote to this be? What would be the reverse of this? More multilateralism, less impulsiveness? What do we want to see in foreign policy as opposed to this?
Bacon: Meaning Congress is not involved.
That actually worked reasonably well, by some standards, in the first Trump administration. You still had people willing to say no, willing to stop his worst impulses. He talked about annexing Greenland but didn’t do anything—nothing like what he did in January.
USAID is gone, which affects so many things, including hundreds of thousands of deaths, potentially. But it also means there’s less goodwill—the Ebola outbreak is not being contained quickly enough because the USAID was integral to those logistics. USAID was part of those logistics.
Bacon: And guardrails means—you should appoint normal people to good jobs, or Congress should be involved? What do you think that means?
But Pete Hegseth was manifestly unqualified. There were credible accusations. It at least should have been paused so those accusations could have been surfaced. You just can’t have completely unqualified people. So the vetting system and the confirmation system—you’ve got to start inside. And I think the promotion system in the military—you’ve got to have a way of—they’ve got to at least explain why they fire people when they start firing people, and the only reason that anyone can see from the outside involves gender and race.
Bacon: And it may be about gender and race, let’s not rule that out. That’s a possibility.
You need a commitment to some very basic—we aren’t even talking about legislation. Just: if this person is unqualified, both parties should be willing to say so. Start there. My standards have got to start somewhere, and that’s where I’d start.
Saunders: You’d be surprised, because of farming. The farmers lose a tremendous amount of money.
Saunders: Wisconsin is a big farming state. I was just there last week. But go ahead.
Saunders: Yes, I think so. I don’t know that it has to be part of a campaign, but it can be part of a vetting process in the parties. All of this goes back to the Republican Party—as Julia Azari has talked about—being unwilling to vet and coordinate against Trump in 2016, in the primary season.
In 2016, he was the only one who went to the Council on Foreign Relations to give the traditional Council on Foreign Relations presidential candidate speech. And I think he missed the memo that it no longer mattered politically, but I think that was emblematic of his prior willingness to do the establishment thing. A Nikki Haley—Nikki Haley doesn’t want to be president without a functioning State Department.
Saunders:. I don’t know about that, because—
Saunders: But the task of rebuilding the State Department and starting up USAID 2.0 from the ground up—that’s the task for USAID. The State Department still exists—it’s a shell, but it exists. That is going to be a design-of-institutions problem, and we want to future-proof it.
This is beneficial to everyone—to reinstall these norms and guardrails for future presidents. You don’t want a State Department that doesn’t trust the White House on some very basic—I’m not talking about bureaucratic suspicions, that sort of thing—
Saunders: Yes. I’m talking on a basic level here. And so I think rebuilding those norms is the only way. And I don’t know how you test for that in any sort of—it’s not going to be done on cable TV. It’s going to be done by party leaders, and that is a process that has just completely broken down, at least on the Republican side.
I’m not asking about your views on the Gaza policy stuff. What do you think about that as a decision—I’m just curious how we should think about that, as a person who thinks about foreign policy–making.
Bacon: Understood.
I think somebody had to keep the lights on in Trump 1.0 on China, which was not really a focus of—by the end, it was just not where the action was.
Saunders: Because policy differences are what we should be litigating in—litigating is not even the right word, because it’s not a legal process. It’s a debate. And it doesn’t necessarily happen in elections, either, as in foreign policy.
Bacon: Sure. Yeah.
Bacon: Obviously. Sure, yeah.
Bacon: We can—I’m not asking you to weigh in on that. I’m just curious what your thinking is about the question.
Bacon: Undermining democratic functionality.
Bacon: I’d love the debate, because I think we’re going to have the debate. I’m just curious where you think the parameters of it should be. This is coming up a little more because we’re going to start this democratic process somewhat soon—capital D, but also small d.
So I think that debate will happen. I think that is a far more productive way to deal with things than to start—because once you do that, other people can start to blacklist policies that you don’t think [should be blacklisted]. It’s a little bit like the filibuster—everybody has to refrain from doing that, because it could be done to you.
Saunders: Yes.
Saunders: Yes. Thanks so much for having me.
Saunders: Bye.
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