This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 26 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
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.
There was a story in The New York Times on the 18th—Greenland politicians have circled a date on their calendars to be wary of: June 14th, Trump’s birthday. They’re worried about some kind of invasion that day. And I guess the talks are that the U.S. wants some kind of military arrangement to ensure troops are in Greenland indefinitely, and they also want to have effective veto power over any investment deals Greenland makes.
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?
Elizabeth Saunders: He did talk about it in his first term, actually.
Bacon: OK. Yeah.
Saunders: And we edited a piece—published a great piece by a political scientist named Jeff Colgan, who studies climate politics. He pointed out that buried under the ice, which is now melting, is a lot of nuclear and toxic waste. So be careful what you try to annex as U.S. territory, because it comes with some very thorny problems.
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.
It was already one war ago, right? It was between the intervention in Venezuela—which resulted not in a major military operation but a one-day seizing of the president, Nicolás Maduro, bringing him back to the U.S. to face trial—and the Iran war, which started about a month later.
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.
So Greenland has been going on the whole time—just like we have foreign policy with all these countries that doesn’t make the news every day. The Iran war has been dominating all the news, so it’s not that surprising that it fell off everybody’s radar.
Bacon: Not Trump’s.
Saunders: Not Trump’s. His radar—you could write a whole book about what he decides to put and keep on his radar.
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?
Saunders: No. And I think when the Greenland crisis happened in January, a lot of people pointed out that we had a tremendous number of bases in Greenland. We had gone down to only one, as part of, I assume, the post–Cold War peace dividend.
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.
So I don’t—I think that if Trump really only wanted basing rights, this is not how you would go about it.
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.
What would it mean to take over Greenland? Are we going to be running the policing and the courts? All those things come along with annexation. And they don’t want to be annexed, which creates a whole host of other points of conflict.
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.
It benefits both sides. And it is far preferable from the U.S. point of view. Leaving aside the moral problem with trying to annex. anybody’s, but most certainly your ally’s territory—just in the coldest, most cynical cost-benefit view—it is much, much more efficient to negotiate deals for bases.
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?
Saunders: It’s an insult to everyone around, because presumably he also has duties as governor of Louisiana, right?
Bacon: One would hope.
Saunders: I’d be pretty pissed off if I were a resident of Louisiana and my governor was spending all his time in Greenland. I think it’s yet another—yes, it’s a sign of: we’re not sending somebody serious about diplomacy. We’re not sending somebody for whom this is their primary job. We’re sending somebody who is loyal to Trump, and I can’t even begin to understand why this particular person for this particular mission.
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.
But once you burn all your diplomatic capital threatening to take it by force—the diplomacy—it’s like starting with a time penalty in the biathlon, those things in the Olympics where you’re down a certain amount because you missed a shot. It’s self-harm. It’s diplomatic self-harm. It just makes the task that much harder.
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—
Saunders: Also Flag Day.
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?
Saunders: I wouldn’t dismiss it entirely if the Danes think it’s true. But first of all, the U.S. military doesn’t usually announce—even Venezuela, that everyone knew was coming—we were all shocked. I spoke to you that morning after the operation, and nobody expected it to be that night. And the Iran strike—same thing, big buildup and then—I’d be shocked if we actually did anything military on his birthday that was pre-announced in that way.
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.
Bacon: So what do you think is going to happen? Predictions are bad, but what’s your sense of where this is heading? More bellicose rhetoric? Because this is still ongoing—the Danes have to deal with this. Trump has to get a win out of this, right? So something has to happen along those lines.
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.
The stockpiles of munitions—maybe we’re going to do something in Cuba, but we cannot take on three fronts. It’s just not how it works. So I always say nothing surprised me anymore. I would be very surprised if we saw military action in Greenland. I’d be even more surprised if it happened on June 14th. But I will happily come on air and eat my words if it happens.
Bacon: Eat your own caveats, as we know. As we know, nothing is predictable.
Saunders: But I do think there comes a point where the military hardware becomes its own constraint. And hopefully the military brass is giving some straight talk to enough people. Hardware is hardware.
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.
There’s been a lot of military buildup around Cuba, with the U.S. sending more planes there, making clear they’re talking about it. Rubio has had some very bellicose, ranty rhetoric. So that feels like the place where we might see something next—something very aggressive. Do you agree?
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.
Bacon: Yeah. It was Rubio sort of—it implied Rubio’s not that supportive of the Iran mission, but also not being that opposed to it either.
Saunders: He doesn’t really do anything to try to stop Trump.
And I have to assume that he is in the camp of people who could look one step ahead and see the closing of the Strait of Hormuz as the very logical next step that people have always—at least for 20 years—known would be the next thing the Iranians would do in a situation like this.
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.
And these are important—it’s important for him to be talking to allies and partners and countries around the world that are affected by the war. But if making an Iran deal was the highest priority, you would not expect the secretary of state to be in a third country that is not one of the mediating countries—and in fact is the enemy of one of the mediating countries. India, of course, in an adversarial relationship with Pakistan.
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 of course, the other thing is: we have been blockading Cuba since right after, or thereabouts, the Venezuela operation. And that’s technically an act of war.
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.
And I have a hard time seeing what the endgame is here other than military force or some kind of operation like Venezuela, because the moment for regime change to take place of its own accord—clearly that hasn’t happened. And I don’t see any likelihood that it will happen quickly, and Trump is not very patient.
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.
Bacon: Do we have someone we would install—do we have a way to have a one-day invasion and install someone we like in Cuba? Do we know?
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.
But Rubio—this is just a really different situation. Venezuela was an electoral or competitive authoritarian country far more recently than Cuba was anything other than what it is now.
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.
And there is a Venezuelan expatriate community, but I don’t know that they—the politics are just quite different, I think. So maybe they do. But it turns out that there’s been reporting that the plan for Iran was to originally install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So if that was the plan for Iran—of course, he was famously, aggressively anti-American, anti-Semitic. The collective response of Iran watchers to that news was, Oh my God, no way.
Bacon: What a terrible idea.
Saunders: Yeah. So who knows what—I think I agree with Dan Drezner’s assessment this morning in his column: why should we trust the administration to even have a plan for the day after?
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.
Saunders: Humiliation or escalation.
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.
So are we going to keep going down that road, or do you think anything’s changed since you said that a month ago?
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 what are the fundamentals here? Iran will not accept anything that permanently takes away even the threat of the Strait of Hormuz closure again. Even if the strait opens—which I think is looking increasingly likely in the medium term, maybe—what does that actually mean? It means that the world cannot unsee the Iranian closure of the strait, which required very little active effort on their part. Just the threat and a few mines was enough.
So that is not really going back to the way it was—freedom of navigation. That’s one thing.
The second thing is the nuclear issue, which—the Iranians obviously have shown that they are willing to make nuclear deals. But why would they trust Trump? And also, he said yesterday on Truth Social that the Atomic Energy Commission will supervise this, maybe. The Atomic Energy Commission went out of existence in the 1970s, I think. That was the first atomic… So we’re not dealing with someone steeped in the specifics. OK. And his team is not.
Bacon: What do we think he means? What do we think he’s referring to?
Saunders: The Department of Energy? The IAEA?
Bacon: Yeah. Who knows? That is my thought initially.
Saunders: But he got “Atomic Energy Commission” from somewhere—it was a real thing. It oversaw the U.S. atomic program. It was a U.S. agency. So who the heck knows.
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 then you have the unfreezing of assets. We all remember when Republicans cried a flagrant foul over Obama releasing, in the single digits, billions of dollars to Iran. There was some money that Biden released for a prisoner swap. The amount that Iran is demanding is enormous.
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.
So I think the problem here is that Trump is trying very hard to find a way to make a deal and call it a win. But this is about as hard a task in that category—declaring victory and going home—as any I can think of. The risks going forward are so high, the trust is so low—of the Iranians of us, and of us of the Iranians.
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.
But CENTCOM went out of its way to say, “The ceasefire is not over.” The more that stuff happens and we don’t get a major escalation—that’s both sides saying, Come on, we really want a deal. It’s almost like we’re in mercy-rule territory here—just to carry the analogy further.
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?
Saunders: I would first add Venezuela to that grouping—because I don’t think you get Iran without Venezuela, the perceived success.
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.
I think there is an imperialist streak in him, but he doesn’t obviously intend to acquire Iran.
Bacon: Or colonize, or something.
Saunders: Yeah. So I think mostly it’s just toughness, throwing his weight around, and—most importantly—not having anyone who will say no to him.
Bacon: Why these nations—why these particular crises, as opposed to others? Other parts of the world we could try to annex.
Saunders: I think Latin America is a combination of Rubio and the fact that it’s next door. The one other thing that—not so much Greenland and Venezuela, but Cuba and Iran have in common—is that they’ve been problems bedeviling U.S. presidents for decades. Many decades. And he is a creature of the Cold War era.
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—
Bacon: I’m the only person in the room who understands this. Yes.
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.
So that’s one thing. But I also just think these are the places that popped up on his radar. I don’t know that Iran was on his radar until the protests in January. I think that was opportunistic in a weird sort of way. And then I think what you’re seeing is a dictatorship—at least in foreign policy—that is acting impulsively, on whims, and has no constraints even inside the White House to stop him.
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?
Saunders: I think you can’t even get to talking about more multilateralism until you get your own house in order. The guardrails in foreign policy have been in terrible shape for decades—that’s not a totally Trump thing.
Bacon: Meaning Congress is not involved.
Saunders: Congress has not been involved. But a lot of my research has been about the constraining effect that advisers and others in the executive branch and the military can have on presidents, in addition to or alongside—or even in lieu of—Congress.
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.
Now even those guardrails are gone, and we’ve moved into all sorts of issues of corruption. The State Department is decimated. I think Rubio has helped him and abetted in the destruction of the diplomatic apparatus. Witkoff is negotiating with all these major figures.
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.
So all to say: the first thing that has to happen is we’ve got to reimpose some guardrails on any president in foreign policy. And I don’t think you can even go into what we should be doing with that foreign policy until that gets reestablished.
Bacon: And guardrails means—you should appoint normal people to good jobs, or Congress should be involved? What do you think that means?
Saunders: I think you’ve got to start in concentric circles. First, you have to say you’re going to have serious vetting and not party-line votes on unqualified candidates. I really think that was—to me, the whole thing broke when Hegseth got through. People love to say 99 senators voted for Marco Rubio, but I thought it was a terrible idea and he would not be the savior. I was never in the “Marco Rubio is the sane one” camp. But there was not really a reason to vote against him—he had done a lot in this area, and it’s more of a disagreement-type thing.
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.
Because they aren’t giving any reason why these people with otherwise exemplary records—
Bacon: And it may be about gender and race, let’s not rule that out. That’s a possibility.
Saunders: Yes. But if there was a reason… the military is subservient to the civilians, and the president or the secretary of defense on his behalf can fire any of these people at will. That’s civil-mil 101. But I think what we need are norms again. The norms have been completely busted.
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.
Bacon: One other thing. You mentioned the State Department, USAID. I assume if you’re trying to win Wisconsin, saying I’m going to rebuild USAID is not going to win you a lot of votes. We probably do want the next president—
Saunders: You’d be surprised, because of farming. The farmers lose a tremendous amount of money.
Perry Bacon: Oh, OK. That’s interesting.
Saunders: Wisconsin is a big farming state. I was just there last week. But go ahead.
Bacon: We want the next president to rebuild the diplomatic corps and USAID, even if—but we’re not sure if that’s the best campaign idea. We want that to happen even if it’s not necessarily the best campaign idea, right? We want the next president to commit to that kind of stuff when they’re in office, at least.
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.
So the parties have to make a priority of picking somebody that is going to rebuild foreign policy. I would include the Republican Party—I think you can think of people. I would say Marco Rubio in his prior incarnation.
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.
Bacon: I’m assuming J.D. Vance or Rubio will be the Republican nominee, and they’ve already signed on to these things. That’s why I didn’t bother—I agree with you. I didn’t bother to ask for that reason. But hopefully I’m wrong
Saunders:. I don’t know about that, because—
Bacon: Yeah, hopefully I’m wrong.
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.
Presidents can point the bureaucracy in whatever policy direction they want. The civil service is equipped to help them do that—that is what elections are about. But the norms and the guardrails keep things more predictable for everybody. It engenders trust so that a new president from a different party can come in and change direction without people feeling like they’re going to be fired or sued.
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—
Bacon: There’ll be inevitable things in government.
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.
Bacon: Let me ask you one question a little out of left field, but I’m just curious what you think. There’s a push on the Democratic left to say John Finer, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken—people like that—should not serve in government because they should be blamed for the Gaza policy.
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.
Saunders: I’ll flip it around, because I’ve been asked a number of times—or I was asked a number of times at the end of the first Trump administration—if people should be blacklisted for having served in the first Trump administration. Like on China policy—should they be given cushy jobs when they leave office? And I’m not talking about the people who abetted January 6th—
Bacon: Understood.
Saunders: I’m talking about people who just worked in the Trump administration. And I’ll say what I said then—and I think the only consistent thing to say would be to apply it to the Democrats. I don’t think you can blacklist people for their policy views.
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.
Bacon: The idea is we don’t want to blacklist people because of what? Because we want to preserve the—
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.
But policy differences have to be allowed. And then it becomes a question of: what are—obviously some policies are just beyond the pale.
Bacon: Sure. Yeah.
Saunders: And you have to be able to say what those are. But before we blacklist anybody, I think you have to have some debate about what those are. You cannot say so-and-so cannot work for the government again without having some statement. Having a China policy in a Republican administration is definitely not a blacklistable offense in my mind.
Bacon: Obviously. Sure, yeah.
Saunders: Whether other things are is something—
Bacon: We can—I’m not asking you to weigh in on that. I’m just curious what your thinking is about the question.
Saunders: Yeah. So that’s my thinking. I think if you as a country decide that such and such a policy is beyond the pale, you can blacklist people. And I think people who abetted January 6th—because that’s not a foreign policy question, right? To me, that is over the line. No matter where you worked, if you were part of or encouraged January 6th—
Bacon: Undermining democratic functionality.
Saunders: —you just aren’t living in the same democracy that we want to live in. But policy is—you’ve got to have a very wide range of acceptable policies. I just firmly believe that. And I think the Gaza question is a really hard one, but I don’t think it should be for anyone to just say that is beyond the pale without some kind of debate.
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.
Saunders: But I also think what’s interesting about this is: sometimes these calls—the Overton window for what’s acceptable on policy toward Israel, I think, is changing in the Democratic Party. If you look just today, Chris Van Hollen had a very powerful op-ed in The New York Times about reckoning with aid to Israel and what it means—the Democratic Party can’t be reflexive. He’s hardly the most lefty senator.
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.
Bacon: Trump’s not a good example, but—let’s put it that way. That cat’s way out of the bag. But I see your point. That is true.
Saunders: Yes.
Bacon: Elizabeth, thanks for joining. It was a great conversation.
Saunders: Yes. Thanks so much for having me.
Bacon: Good to see you. Bye-bye.
Saunders: Bye.
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