Trump Has No Plan for Venezuela

23:05Your scheme to seize and abduct this bad actor in Venezuela, we all agree is a bad actor, and bring him to trial in New York. He might be convicted. he might sue you afterwards if he is acquitted. There might be a lawsuit from the Maduro family about unjust detention. And have you thought about that? Have you thought about thing X, Y, and Z? 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 advisor. Most famously, Henry Kissinger, like Marco Rubio, was simultaneously Secretary of State and national security advisor at the same time.

23:40Tell us a little bit about how that Henry Kissinger experiment worked or didn't work, bearing in mind that it's Henry Kissinger, a person of extraordinary talent.

23:48David Rothkopf:Well, but Henry Kissinger was an active advisor who sought to be the primus inter Paris among the advisors, as opposed to president who doesn't want to listen to any advisors. And so, you know, Kissinger did this power play. So he ran the NSC and the State Department at the same time. What years were those? It was during the Nixon in 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.

24:29David Rothkopf:And that goes to one of the core points, right? When you have advisors, you want to have multiple points of view. Kissinger wanted the president to have one point of view. And, you know, Ford wanted a little bit more fair play among his advisors. And Scowcroft, the only man to serve as national security advisor twice, had a big advantage in that he was seen as, you know, 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.

25:11David Rothkopf: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. 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, when Kissinger was doing both jobs, he was a national security advisor 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.

25:48That was his main job. What seems to be happening with Rubio, who is both secretary of state and theoretically national security advisor, is he's just being secretary of state and no one's being national security advisor. Because the deal that seems to have been struck, and 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 advisor who's going to circumvent him.

26:26But there isn't someone doing that job of bringing everything in front of the president, including such basics as, you know, Maduro might be acquitted.

26:35David Rothkopf:There are a few things I would take issue with in the characterization. First of all, 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 from the president mattered a lot.

27:20David Rothkopf:Rubio's deal is technically, as you describe it, except in reality, what's emerged is this. Whitcoff is the Secretary of State for Ukraine and Russia. Whitcoff is the Secretary of State for the Middle East. China policy is now being run by 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 is 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.

28:07David Rothkopf:You know, even in this case, it is being reported that in the wake of this carefully planned military operation on Saturday, Trump walked out and said, we're going to run Venezuela. And then somebody said, well, who? And he said, well, you know, 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. El Rubio is trying to say, well, you know, the way that we're going to do it is that we have influence and we can stop oil flows and the military will threaten them.

28:45David Rothkopf:And, you know, 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 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 Isle Trump. Trump will say something, and these people then have to scramble behind him to clean up the mess. Well, there are millions of refugees or exiles from Venezuela, many of them in Colombia, other Latin American countries, some in the United States.

29:27Not 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?

29:40David Rothkopf:I mean, the one in Trump, Trump has said in the past day, well, I've talked to the oil companies. They're eager to do it. We're going to leave it to our great American oil companies to handle that. Of course, the oil companies have a different story. Part of the plan, part of the problem goes back to what you're talking about as the core issue here, which is Trump has one reason for doing what he's doing, which is oil. Rubio has another reason for doing what he's doing, which is sort of, you know, 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 because of its ties to Cuba.

30:17David Rothkopf: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. 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 going to 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.

31:34David Rothkopf: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 for? 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, you know, they are unleashing a lot of problems out of the Venezuelan Pandora's box and nobody has thought through what the consequences may be. Well, one of the things that you would think at a policy process would happen is somebody would say to President Trump, you know, it's true that the present president of Colombia is an unhelpful person.

32:22And 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. Obviously, they have to be, if you can just keep your mouth shut until May, Colombia is 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.

32:58But 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 going to steal a lot of money. In fact, 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 is 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 the 2020s, they are going to have needs.

33:29And 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. Yeah.

33:37David Rothkopf: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 want to have our way in this hemisphere, how much leeway are we going to give the Russians or parenthetically the Chinese for having their way in this hemisphere?

34:25David Rothkopf:If we decide we're going to 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 going to 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 going to sanction the U.S. China's already the number one investment partner and the number one trading partner of almost every country in the Americas, South America.

35:09David Rothkopf: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, almost anybody out there. And that is another of the countries mentioned in the past 48 hours by Trump, Mexico. You know, Trump has said some really outrageous stuff about Mexico and saying that President Sheinbaum is not actually in charge of Mexico. The cartels are in charge of it. And he's going to have to go in and clean up the cartels. Well, Mexico is, you know, 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.

35:58What happens if he alienates one of our closest partners in the world?

36:04David Rothkopf:Not to mention, you know, your native Canada. 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.

36:42That Mexico's, her approach to Trump has been total appeasement. 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 want to, including Stephen Miller, whom you mentioned, and the vice president who are on record. He's calling for American unilateral military strikes inside Mexico with or without the consent and knowledge of the Mexican authorities.

37:09So that's a big set of adventures that may, the danger here is that you collapse the Mexican state.

37:15David Rothkopf:Well, that's also not the first time that Trump's done this, you know, 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. So 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 Advisor, although, again, there isn't one.

37:55There 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 one, from Biden, and then from Trump two. So the one from Biden is just a giant blurry committee report in which, obviously written by, you know, no single person could write anything this dull. It took a team of highly trained professionals. And it's mostly about not saying anything that's untoward in any way. So that's not very useful. Trump One was a basically normal document.

38:29It was issued by National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster. Basically normal. Some spicy jalapenos in it, but basically pretty normal. This one reads like it's written by people working for a very right-wing college magazine.

38:42David Rothkopf:Yeah, 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. And that's what, you know, within the document, there is the so-called Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. You know, I'd love it if somebody asked Trump who Monroe was, because I'm pretty sure he doesn't know.

39:28David Rothkopf:But Trump does like the fact that people are now referring to it as the Don Roe Doctrine. You know, 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. That's not even new. There was a thing called the Roosevelt, meaning Teddy Roosevelt, corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Right. 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.

40:08And 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 Taft and then Wilson, the United States became, and under Harding and 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 Roosevelt's good neighbor policy was a repudiation of the Teddy Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. So we're not doing this anymore.

40:45We're 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. Lyndon Johnson and the Dominican Republic and some pretty nasty and usually counterproductive in the long run CIA interventions. But, you know, it was this Don Rowe doctrine was originally tried by Teddy Roosevelt and tried, tested, rejected.

41:12David Rothkopf:Yeah, it was, again, it comes out of that period of history where, you know, 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, you know, 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.

41:49David Rothkopf: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 know, you start to see the rumblings of that here. And I think this is going to be a source of some of the pushback that Trump is going to 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 advisors to a president. And that isn't happening either.

42:32Yeah. 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.

43:08The 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. As I say, it reads like, 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. The whole point is called a strategy. It didn't do the strategic work of thinking, what are we trying to accomplish?

43:43How do we do it? What means do we have available? If you're trying to assert a greater American resonance 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? The United States is the world's largest oil producer, and the oil companies are barely breaking even on the oil they make here. Yeah.

44:05David Rothkopf:Well, you know, another subset of the issues associated with what you're talking about here that has been central to U.S. foreign policy, including in, you know, 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 is extremely complicated, involves lots of work by different agencies.

44:44David Rothkopf: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. 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 point that I think I now am reproaching myself for not having raised earlier, is 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.

45:26There are some, but mostly it is people who are seconded 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 you were, 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, either in the military, especially in the military, but in diplomatic services and other services, may speak foreign languages, may have contacts, and they're at the center.

46:07There 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. Yeah.

46:23David Rothkopf: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. So not only, you know, in the national security process, he would have the views of multiple agencies expressed. But before the agency, you know, said something in an NSC meeting, there were a bunch of meetings in the Pentagon or the State Department or the Commerce Department or Treasury Department to develop a view internally there, and particularly in a giant agency like the Pentagon or an agency like the State Department, those discussions were often extremely wide ranging, had a wide range of points of view.

47:21David Rothkopf:Well, do you think that's happening in Pete Hegseth's Department of Defense? Of course it's not, because Pete Hegseth doesn't trust people with differing views. Pete Hegseth is trying to suppress differing views. Even today, the day we're recording this thing, Pete Hexth has taken out after Mark Kelly, a senator, for having expressed a view from the Senate floor, which was well within his rights to express, saying, oh, we don't, you know, a former military shouldn't have separate points of view. And we're going to punish him by demoting him and reducing his pension and his fired generals and admirals because they had different points of view.

48:01David Rothkopf:And so you're getting not only the elimination of the NSC, but you're getting an elimination of the processes within each agency that enriched the ultimate policy discussion. We are having essentially, on a remarkably fast, wide-ranging basis, a lobotomy being performed in the United States government at precisely the wrong moment because we have a president who is purely an impulse engine with no sense of history and who needs to be constrained by that kind of process, which he is eliminating. Well, one thing that this process is supposed to do is there needs to be somebody at the table who's there to ask the question, what if this doesn't work out the way everyone here thinks it will?

48:48And we all hope it will. We all hope it will all go fine. But what if it doesn't? What if there is a guerrilla resistance inside Venezuela? Have we thought about that? Do we have a contingency plan in case there is? Have we decided, is it worth whatever goal we are seeking? And we have four or five goals. Will that goal seem worth it if we find ourselves eight months from now dealing with dead-end remnants of the Maduro regime, who've taken weapons and gone into the jungle? Is there a history? Yes, there is, of guerrilla resistance in Venezuela and Colombia. Do we want to fight that? And presidents have to take risks.

49:22They often have to be prepared to face the risk of the worst case scenario, but they need to know what it is. They need to have someone there saying, here's what would happen if things go wrong. That's the story of the Iraq war and the administration which I served was there was lots of planning. There was lots of thinking, but there was refusal to take seriously. What if our hopes don't come true? And the administration bet everything on best case scenarios. You can do it with 110 ,000 troops. Resistance will collapse. The best case scenarios turned out not to be true, not to happen. worst case scenarios happen.

49:53And no one had ever asked the question, would we do this if the worst case scenario were a realistic possibility? And the answer to that is often, well, in that case, we probably wouldn't. It isn't worth it.

50:02David Rothkopf:There are, in the history of the NSC, which was created with the National Security Act of 1947, example after example of where the policy process let us down. You know, in Vietnam, it let us down. In, you know, Central America during the Reagan administration, it let us down. In the forever wars in the Middle East, it let us down. You know, and some other areas that we might talk about in climate policy or dealing with pandemics, it let us down. But it's a whole heck of a lot better than nothing. You know, when we're talking about the Bush administration, Bush 43 administration, looking at best case scenarios.

50:49David Rothkopf:We're not even looking at those. A best case scenario takes you a few months down the road. We're not looking a few months down the road. And so our experience is that no policy process is perfect, but the absence of a policy process is infinitely worse than the presence of even a flawed policy process. That's a great place. to put a bookmark and to resume this conversation again. David, thank you so much for your time, for taking time away from your wonderful afternoon in Paris. So grateful to you. And I recommend to everybody, your book on the NSC is really an invaluable history of something that is, to many of us, a closed box.

51:29And you opened the box and helped us see both what the NSC is, what it was, how we came to this place. 2005, as relevant as ever, and running the world. And I learned from it so much, I think others will as well. Thanks very much. And it's good to talk to you, Dave. Bye-bye.

52:10fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology, and examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worzel onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors.

52:55If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. is thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

53:14Thanks so much to David Rothkopf for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is not a book, it's just a single poem. The poem is Recessional by Rudyard Kipling. You will know Rudyard Kipling as the great poet of British imperialism. He lived from 1865 to 1936. He's gone very out of style because of his imperial message. But since the Trump agenda in South America seems so nakedly imperialistic about seizing other people's wealth and taking it for oneself, I thought it might be a moment to return to the poetry of imperialism and to hear sort of some warnings, even from Rudyard Kipling, about what it is the United States has undertaken.

53:59Kipling was born in what is now India, in Bombay. He died in London. He lived for four years in the 1890s in the United States. He married an American woman and lived in Vermont. That's where he wrote Jungle Book, which became the famous Disney movie. Other stories too. Captain's Courageous as well. He could be vainglorious and boastful and show all the ugly face of race arrogance and national chauvinism. He's probably most notorious for his line, The White Man's Burden, which is a line from a poem he wrote actually congratulating the United States on his acquisition of colonies in the Philippines.

54:36But Recessional, which was written in 1897 in time for Queen Victoria's 60th anniversary, her Diamond Jubilee, it also contains one of his most notorious lines, although this line is widely misunderstood. The line is lesser breeds without the law, which you will hear is not actually a statement of race arrogance, but as a criticism of Britain's Germanic opposite numbers during the arms race of the 1890s, because he found them boastful and rude and arrogant. It was not an expression of racial arrogance. As you will see, it's an expression of something else. So I want to read two paragraphs from Recessional.

55:13It's a short poem, and you can find it online very easily. But I want to read two paragraphs that I think of a lot when I hear the Trump administration talking, and especially the president and his secretary of defense, or secretary of war, as he styles himself, Pete Hegseth, with their endless invocations of how great the United States is, how tough the United States is, how it's not going to consider anybody's interest ever except its own. These are the two paragraphs in the poem that I hear in my head a lot every time those men speak. The poem, Recession, of course, refers to, the title refers to the music that is played as a congregation exits a church after a service or wedding or some other memorial, and you are to hear those kinds of, that tone of exit and religion through this poem.

55:58Here are the two paragraphs. If, drunk with sight of power, we loose wild tongues that have not thee in all, such boastings as the Gentiles use, or lesser breeds without the law, Lord God of hosts be with us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget. For heathen heart that puts her trust in reeking tube and iron shard all valiant dust that builds on dust and guarding calls not thee to guard for frantic boast and foolish word thy mercy on thy people lord i think we're hearing a lot of frantic boasting and a lot of foolish words and it's the great poem of a poet of imperialism with all its arrogance and racial feeling and wrong and crime attached to it, if he could warn us against conducting ourselves in that kind of way, well, that's a warning that ought to spontaneously occur to everyone in a position of power in the United States.

57:00America has used its power so often as a force for good. It is a humiliation and a shame to see that urge to good be so dismissed, be so ridiculed even by an administration that wields so much power on behalf of people, most of whom I think are deeply embarrassed and ashamed of the way in which this administration conducts itself at home and in the world. Thanks so much for watching and listening today. As always, the best way to support the work of this podcast, if you're reminded to, is to subscribe to The Atlantic. You can follow my work on social media on X, Twitter, David Fromm, Instagram, David Fromm.

57:35I'll see you next week. Again, thank you so much for joining, watching, and listening to The David Fromm Show.

58:04This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live.

58:49Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.