'If You Can Keep It': How Trump Deals With Foreign Adversaries

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0:25The U.S. has a long history of getting rid of foreign leaders it doesn't like, but a new pattern has emerged in the Trump administration's dealings with adversaries. In January, President Trump ordered a precision military operation that seized Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and brought him to the United States. Last month, in cooperation with Israel, the administration launched a high-powered bombing campaign against Iran, killing the country's supreme leader and dozens of top officials. Now finds itself trying to negotiate a ceasefire after the Islamic Republic seized the Strait of Hormuz, rocking the global economy.

1:01In both cases, Trump has said the country's spate is ultimately up to its citizens. That's a striking change from the nation building during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, President Trump has his eyes on Cuba, telling the president there he must go. I'm Jen White. And I'm Todd Zwilich. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Today for our weekly politics series, If You Can Keep It, we ask what Trump's military actions in Venezuela and Iran mean for how we fight wars and what comes after. We'll be back with more after this short break. Stay with us.

1:35This message comes from Babbel. Babbel's conversation-based language technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash npr. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash npr. rules and restrictions may apply. Welcome back. Let's get into our discussion and meet our guests. Joining us here in studio is Vera Bergengruen. She's a national security reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

2:18Vera, welcome back. Thank you. And Kelly Grieco. She's a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center, where her work focuses on U.S. foreign policy and military strategy. Kelly, welcome. Thank you for having me. And we want to hear from you. Do you think the U.S. should try to remove leaders it views as hostile to U.S. interests? If so, what is our commitment to promoting democracy abroad? And if you've lived in a country where the U.S. has intervened or tried to influence political change, we'd love to hear about your experience. Email us at 1a at wamu.org.

2:51Alvira, in a recent Wall Street Journal piece, you wrote about a Trump administration strategy for foreign interventions. and a State Department official you spoke to called it decapitate and delegate. Just explain what that means. That's right. I mean, they're a new idea and it's important to, you know, the Trump administration really thinks they've developed a new playbook for this. They think that they can get rid of the very top of the government and then the people will rise up and do the rest of the work. And it's supposed to be a big contrast to the nation building we saw or the nation building efforts we saw in the Middle East, where, you know, the United States had to commit a lot of troops, a lot of money in order to, you know, basically establish some kind of, you know, some kind of democracy that they could live with.

3:33In this case, it's supposed to be a much more pragmatic approach. And it's supposed to, you know, they're willing to work with leaders they still kind of find impalatable in order to get what they want. It can be oil. It can be, you know, a different kind of transition. But the idea is you get rid of the very top of the government and hand it over to the country and get a more friendly government to the United States. Is this doctrine now? I mean, that's what happened in Venezuela. We have an example of one. We mentioned Iran where there was decapitate and clearly we're still ongoing without the ability to delegate because there has been no rise up.

4:09We don't know about Cuba yet. We'll talk about all of these countries. But after an example of one in Venezuela, is this now doctrine? I think we've gotten to the decapitate part. We are seeing it, as you mentioned, in Venezuela and Iran. and we are about to possibly see it in Cuba, the delegate part still is very much up in the air. I mean, Venezuela is still being run by the same regime that was there before, except it's cooperating with the United States. And, you know, as you mentioned, Iran, I mean, is still very much run by the same government. So we haven't quite gotten to the second part of that yet.

4:37And Kelly, just give us some insight into whether this idea to remove the leaders and let others take over, whether that holds up as a strategy. Yes, you know, it's remarkable. you know, having this idea that it's a new strategy, it's a new approach, they've discovered something new. It's remarkable because it's 100 years, this has been sort of the, you know, most enthusiastic people around air power have always made this kind of case that this could happen. We now have 100 years, though, of air power history, and there's not a single example when air power alone has actually succeeded in bringing about regime change.

5:14It's always required a ground force, whether that's an intervening force or local actors. We just don't have a single example of this working, and yet we keep trying it. Well, let's hear from President Trump speaking from Florida. Look at Venezuela, how well that's working out. We are doing so well in Venezuela with oil and with the relationship between the president-elect and us. And maybe we find somebody like that in Iran? Maybe we find somebody like that in Iran, the president says. Vera, not so far and not by a long shot. Not so far. And even, you know, there's been these discussions of finding the Delce Rodriguez, who's, of course, Maduro's vice president of Iran.

5:58And yet the president a couple of weeks ago basically said we've actually killed the two or three people we had in mind. He mentioned that again today. So, you know, it's clearly not as organized a strategy as they had in Venezuela, where it was in place when they went and took out the leader. And, you know, it's really kind of hard to imagine that there'd be any incentive, given what's been going on for the last three weeks, for such a regime insider to work with the United States. Kelly, President Trump has long criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and has promised not to repeat the mistakes of those forever wars.

6:30What lessons from those conflicts do you see applied or misapplied here? Yes, what's remarkable about it is not so long ago, So the administration released its national security strategy, its national defense strategy. These are documents that are required by Congress. And in it, it really does make a very explicit case against the last 30 years of U.S. foreign policy, criticizing a grand strategy of primacy. That essentially the United States has been overly ambitious in its objectives of trying to change regimes and remake societies. And what I think is interesting is that it sets up this rejection of primacy.

7:08But I think the administration itself doesn't recognize that it actually is not taking its own advice and it subscribes to a different version of primacy. That in some sense, their objection to the past 30 years is more the way we went about primacy, that we were conducting these large ground operations. And so they think they figured out a way to do primacy on the cheap by relying on air power, predominantly air power, to carry that burden. And the problem with this is that this is always going to be a fool's errand in the sense that it would always get us into trouble because air power is very powerful.

7:43It can do a lot. But there are real limitations about what it can achieve. What are some of those limitations? Why is it necessary to have either an external force coming into a country on the ground or to have a popular uprising within a country for there to be significant change? Yes. So air power is very destructive. That's its purpose. It can find targets. It can destroy them like launchers, you know, leadership places. It can even, you know, find leaders and kill them. We've seen that with, you know, 40 plus taken out in the early days. What air power cannot do, though, is reshape politics inside a country.

8:21And that requires really actors on the ground generally a mobilized organized armed resistance movement that is willing to place pressure directly on the regime to take territory and essentially hold it. What's different about Iran vis-a-vis Venezuela? I mean, we heard the president in his own words this morning on the tarmac in Palm Beach. Look at how great Venezuela went. We have a cooperative president elected, so fantastic, oil, wonderful. Iran has not gone that way. Iran is different. Iran has a different regime with a different set of incentives, with a different role in the economy. I'm not sure if the Americans and the Israelis thought that through or not.

9:01We can get into it. But what is fundamentally different when we talk about air power and decapitation between Venezuela and Iran? That's something actually a lot of people around President Trump bring up, that, you know, it's really hard to overstate how emboldened he is based on the example of Venezuela, which is incredibly unique. You know, when it comes to Iran and later Cuba, but speaking about Iran, you know, in terms of having an organized civic society, an opposition movement that is organized and allowed to operate elections. I mean, in Venezuela, even though Maduro ended up staying in power, there were elections and there was, you know, there was an actual campaign and there was organization and they have a very recent history of democracy.

9:40That's not true in this entrenched theocracy in Iran. And you can't just, you know, import that and you can't just make that happen out of nowhere. So, again, the idea of delegating regime change in a country that is several generations removed from that muscle memory is really, really impossible if you speak to experts and officials. Well, and what about the threat of violence as well? We saw the recent protests in Iran, the regime's willingness to kill tens of thousands of its own people. How does the administration take that into consideration when asking people to lead a popular uprising against its government?

10:18That's a great question. I mean, we've seen in January, Trump said, he said, help is on the way. I mean, some people could argue this is the help that was on the way, but not before thousands of protesters were killed. And there hasn't been, you know, when he announced this campaign, he also said, you know, the United States is behind you. Take to the streets. We haven't, you know, really seen what that would look like. of, you know, they're being bombed themselves. There doesn't really seem to be a lot of credibility to the U.S. vow to stand behind them and not to the extent that given that this regime is really tightening its repression, that would really allow people to go out and do this kind of fantasy version of a popular, you know, uprising.

10:58We got this from John in Ohio, who says, since when was Trump elected president of the world who gets to decide who lives and who dies? His uncontrolled power needs to be checked and restrained ASAP. As we said, Kelly, this approach to regime change is not new for the U.S. What is it about U.S. policy that shapes our approach to hostile governments in this way? Yes, you know, that's a great question. It's one that we really need to wrestle with probably as a country. You know, I think some of this is our own ideology. In the past, you know, that we tend to divide the world into democracy and autocracies.

11:33The Biden administration itself used that language a lot. And this idea that we seem to construct is that we're only going to be safe if we eliminate the autocracies around the world. When in reality, the world's a lot more complex than that. And the Cold War history was certainly more complex. We were allied with many autocracies. But to have, I think, greater faith in deterrence and deterrence working. But it also means we need to compromise, including on things like deals, you know, nuclear deals with Iran, that we're not going to get everything we want, but we need to be able to compromise and be able to tolerate some level of manageable threat.

12:09Well, we have to take a quick break. But coming up, whether this strategy can actually work in places like Iran or Cuba. Stay with us.

12:20This message comes from Babbel. Babbel's conversation-based language technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash npr. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash npr. rules and restrictions may apply. Let's get back to it. We're continuing our conversation about what some in the Trump administration are calling decapitate and delegate.

13:01Now, this is the notion that the U.S. can remove hostile foreign leaders and rely on others to take things from there. We got this question from Brian in Ohio. Should foreign leaders actively work for and advocate the removal of the leadership of the U.S. that poses a threat to their nation or doesn't serve their national interests, whether in their own nation or elsewhere around the world. We also heard from Dave in Michigan, who says, for a president who campaigned on no more foreign wars, Trump sure does stick his nose in a lot of other people's business around the world, doesn't he? Well, I want us to take a step back to January and what happened in Venezuela with the Trump administration's extraction of Nicolas Maduro.

13:40Vera, in your reporting, you say the success there really emboldened the administration. Here's Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a Senate hearing in January defending the plan to seize Maduro and hand power over to his vice president, Delcy Rodriguez. He was an impediment to progress. None of the things we're talking about now, not the release of political prisoners, not the transition of the oil industry to a legitimate oil industry, not the erosion of Iranian, Russian, or Chinese influence. None of these things would have been possible as long as Maduro was there. Now, first, Vera, just how much has changed in Venezuela since Nicolas Maduro was arrested by the U.S.?

14:19To an extent, it depends who you ask. But, you know, the Trump administration, as Rubio just laid out, will say that, you know, they are opening up their economy to the United States. The United States oil companies are able to go back in. There's the release of some political prisoners, not all. And that, you know, Rubio ultimately has basically given up the maximalist demands for a slow transition. And they say that it's a more realistic, pragmatic way to go about it. you slowly basically squeeze out the regime but extract a lot of concessions from them. You know, when you speak to Maria Corina Machado, the opposition leader, or to all the people around her, and a lot of people in Venezuela, you know, the same regime, again, is still in power.

15:00A lot of the repressive architecture is still in place. And, you know, there hasn't been anything but a bit of lip service towards future democratic elections. There's no date for it. And, you know, it's clear Trump is not making that a priority. They're not really going to press for that as one of the concessions. So that demands the question then of what has changed on the ground if you're Venezuelan, your daily life, right? What are we exporting with the extraction of Maduro? And economic concessions, as you've clearly laid out, access of U.S. companies to Venezuelan crude, have we exported any democracy there?

15:34Are we even pretending that that's a thing anymore? Again, there's a little bit of lip service because they want to do it. But when you actually look beneath, there is no real there isn't really a framework in place in order to start moving that way. They've told the opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, whose movement won the 2024 election, according to most international observers, not to go back, you know, according to our reporting. And that's partly because having her show up when Trump is, you know, every single day praising Maduro's former vice president and how collaborative she is would just mess everything up.

16:08It would really complicate the current plan. So, you know, from our reporting and everything you can see, there isn't a real movement yet towards a democratic transition. But when you speak to Trump officials, they say, you know, first we have to stabilize the country and that's going to be a later phase. We got this from Sue in Pennsylvania who says, Have we forgotten so soon that Trump's original military actions were because he accused Venezuela of being responsible for cocaine trafficking into the United States? Is there any evidence that there is less cocaine coming into our country? Now, of course, Nicolas Maduro was charged with narco-terrorism, but I think the messaging, as in Iran, has become a little muddy over time around the goals of that extraction.

16:52But Vera, what do we know about drugs coming into the U.S.? And we should note here that Venezuela was not a country that was a major trafficker of the drugs Trump was accusing them of. They were coming from other places. But what can you tell us? I mean, exactly like you said. I mean, it was never really a major place where a lot of it was a transit point to an extent. But it's really hard to measure because it was never big enough for it to really make a huge difference. Obviously, these the U.S. military strikes on some of those alleged drug carrying vessels did see fewer vessels going by sea.

17:25But, you know, it's just it's it wasn't really it was one of the many justifications. And they never really spoke much about it again ever since they've taken out Maduro. Around the same time, they started talking more about oil, more about regime change. And something else that I find pretty interesting is that, you know, Trump has also often tied Maduro to some of these election conspiracies about him losing the 2020 election. So Maduro was almost a catch-all for a lot of different things that Trump wanted to do in Venezuela. But that's a very good question because, you know, again, they haven't really mentioned the drug issue since then.

17:59Well, that's the example of Venezuela. Let's now shift to Iran and see how, if at all, the principles from Venezuela actually apply there in the current war. Here's President Trump assessing the state of the war and Iranian leadership there on Friday. Their leaders are all gone. The next set of leaders are all gone. And the next set of leaders are mostly gone. And now nobody wants to be a leader over there anymore. We're having a hard time. We want to talk to them, and there's nobody to talk to. We have nobody to talk to. And you know what? We like it that way. We like it that way. But then this morning, the president said or wrote that the U.S.

18:39is negotiating with Iran to end the war, declaring that the two sides had very good and productive conversations that will continue throughout that this week. We should add there has been no independent confirmation that Trump's statement that there are productive talks going on between the United States and Iran, that that's true in any way. There's just no way to know that yet. maybe by the time we go off the air. The Iranians have denied it. Yes, the Iranians have denied it. That there are any talks. Trump's statement came just two hours before the markets opened this morning. What do we know about these negotiations, Kelly?

19:14How they're going? Maybe they're not realistic, or even the state of dialogue between the United States and Iran right now, the off-ramp, if you like. Yes, I think this is the important question here, is what the off-ramp looks like. There's questions of whether these negotiations are happening at all or certainly intermediaries that may be trying. But what I think we see over time is that the United States, I think, clearly started with a goal of regime change, of trying to do something like Venezuela, decapitate and delegate, didn't work, which is remarkable, I think, to take in for a moment when you did kill over 40 leaders.

19:50It shows how resilient the regime is. It then substituted that goal with the sort of three military objectives that amount to degrading their, you know, military and nuclear capability and capacity. And I think now there's a third unspoken goal, frankly, which is how do we end this? I think that's become the goal itself is really how do we end it? And the problem for the president is that, you know, he can start a war, but it takes two parties to end one. And so even if the United States tomorrow goes out and says, okay, we're declaring victory, This is done. This is over for us. It doesn't mean that the Iranians are then going to immediately end the war themselves and open the Strait of Hormuz.

20:33What I think he's discovering is that they have a lot of leverage, partly because of geography, and that they're in a position to potentially continue this to increase pain for the United States and the rest of the world. Because they want to make sure, if you're the Iranian regime, that this war doesn't just end, but that the United States and Israel don't come back in six months or a year and do this again. Well, you say two parties, and again, we're really talking about three parties. We got this from Dawn in Massachusetts, who says, you're discussing why the quote-unquote new strategy of killing the leader and the people will do the rest is not working in Iran.

21:06You're comparing it to Venezuela. The difference is Israel. We are not calling the shots in the conflict in Iran. Israel is. is. I mean, Vera, what's your read on whether the U.S. and Israel are in lockstep in their goals in Iran, and how much of this is being driven by Israel's goals, and how much of it is being driven by what the U.S. wants? I mean, to an extent, they are in lockstep. It just depends on which goals they're emphasizing any given day, as we've discussed. I mean, President Trump at the beginning really emphasized regime change, then Israel kept emphasizing it after Trump stopped talking about it.

21:39And now with this, you know, this with the United States saying today or Trump saying today that they're going to stop targeting some of this energy infrastructure, you know, Israel is going to keep targeting what they want. So in a way, it's almost beneficial to both sides to be doing this. I think we're not going to really quite be able to untangle those two until a couple of months from now in retrospect, because it does feel like they are leaning on each other in order to accomplish whatever goal of the day they are deciding on. Kelly, your thoughts? You know, I think it's important to emphasize that this is sort of like all coalitions and that, you know, interests are overlapping, but they're not identical.

22:16And so I think that we see that at moments that there's significant overlap of interests. They're not identical. That's for sure. But I think it's important to not overstate, you know, the Iranian influence over U.S. strategy in the sense that, you know, the United States ultimately has a lot of leverage it can use with Israel. if it chooses to, including, you know, we have, you know, destroyers parked out near Israel to provide defensive protection, also to conduct this operation at the scale in the temple that, you know, the Israelis are currently doing in their bombing strikes. They really need U.S.

22:51aerial refueling capability and capacity. And so there are places where we have leverage if we want to end this and wind it down. And it's important to stress the United States and Israel did enter this war together, a war of choice, but the United States is responsible for the United States foreign policy and whether it stays in a war. Other countries are not responsible for whether the U.S. stays in. But, Jen, you spoke to Trita Parsi last week of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He explained how on-the-ground realities are complicating American expectations here, probably Israeli expectations as well, which we'll talk about, and why Iran isn't collapsing the way officials may have hoped.

23:30On the one hand, they are taking massive hits. The United States and Israel have bombed a tremendous amount of their industrial base. On the other hand, the theocracy actually feels itself to be stronger. Its base has been dramatically energized by the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei and the replacement of him by his son. And because of the manner in which they control the Strait of Hormuz, They have a tremendous amount of leverage over the global economy and threw that on Trump. And as a result, this is not a war Trump controls in the sense that he can decide when it ends. Even if he were to declare victory, it seems to me very likely that the Iranians will continue to close the straits until they get some concessions for agreeing to end the war as well.