The Strength of Trump’s Foreign Policy

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Ambassador O’Brien, thank you for doing this.

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Great to be with you, Dan. Thank you.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s a lot to talk about, including your couple of essays in Foreign Affairs over the past couple of years, so let’s get right into it. When I look back at your tenure as national security adviser from 2019 to 2021 and really much of Trump’s first term, the shift to a much tougher approach on China was a central feature of that period of American foreign policy and the Biden foreign policy, for that matter. Trump’s second-term approach looks fairly different to most of us watching from outside the administration, and exactly what the strategy is this time, what the theory of the case is, is not entirely clear. How do you understand Trump’s second-term China policy and in what ways does it look different from what we saw the first time around?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

The situation’s changed and unfortunately we lost four years with Joe Biden and, look, the Biden folks did something. They carried on a number of our policies from the first term and I always gave them credit for doing that and I thought the CHIPS Act was a good start. The way it was executed didn’t work out super well, but the idea of bringing manufacturing of high-end chips back to America was important and so I think some good things were done. The real problem we had, though, is the rare-earth mineral situation. We were making great strides towards refining capacity and extraction capacity under the Trump administration and that basically was all suspended because of environmental concerns in the Biden years. And so again, we see it even further that the rare-earth element monopoly to China and China has wielded that tool very effectively in the trade negotiations and the trade crisis.

If automobile manufacturers don’t have access to rare earths—and put the defense part of it aside—if the auto industry doesn’t have access to those rare-earth elements, I mean, the American automobile industry shuts down. So the failure to develop alternate supply lines over the last four years, I think, was very difficult and I think President Trump is trying very hard to rectify that situation. You’ve seen on the ASEAN tour, the mineral deals with Malaysia, with Papua New Guinea, with Australia, a lot of those didn’t get picked up, but the focus on Greenland and the work with Denmark, which is ongoing, to make sure we’ve got access to the rare-earth minerals that we need is important. But Dan, it goes beyond that. The issue, it’s not just extracting the rare earths. Once you extract them, if you can’t refine them and if you can’t process them and if the only country with capacity to do so is China, we’re in the same boat.

And so I think we need to now focus on a refining capacity and a processing capacity. That’s tough because it is a very dirty business. I mean, some of the technology is a hundred years old. It’s difficult for the workers, it’s difficult for the environment where the processing plant is located.

The Chinese use Uyghur slaves, and so they don’t care about their workers and they pollute without concern in China. We’re different from them. We are not going to enslave people to work in a rare-earth manufacturing plant, a refining plant, and we’re not going to destroy our environment. So it is a little harder for us, but I think we’ll get there.

I also think that President Trump’s got a lot on his plate. He’s got to rebuild the military. He’s got to close the southern border. We’ve got a very difficult situation in Ukraine. We’ve had occupying us the Gaza-Iran situation: Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, all in one big ball. And so putting a trade war or a cold war with China on the plate is something I think everyone, including President Trump, wants to avoid. And as long as the Chinese stay out of Taiwan and don’t invade Taiwan and hopefully don’t invade and take over Scarborough Shoal and invade the Philippines, I think we could probably get along with the Chinese. And I think President Trump feels that he’s got a good enough relationship with President Xi. And President Xi knows that Trump is mercurial enough that if he invades Taiwan, that there truly is strategic ambiguity now again restored. And so I think President Trump feels in his gut that Xi Jinping will not invade Taiwan and want to invade the Philippines while he is in office and he can hopefully deal with some of the other problems we have and we’ll be in a better position for the next president to do what needs to be done.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That’s fascinating. So it’s almost an American version of “hide and bide” or a certain kind of detente: keep things stable with China while we deal with other problems. Is that a fair way of characterizing it?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Yeah, I’m not sure it was a plan. I think it’s just how it’s evolving because of the situation around the world. And look, I think that is to the benefit of China, as well, because Xi Jinping has got a difficult situation with his economy. It’s overheated. They’ve got—still have—a terrible real estate bubble. He’s got the problem of, while he’s got rare earths and processing capability, he needs to bring most of them in from overseas. He needs to bring most of his oil and gas in from overseas, from Russia and through the Gulf and the Strait of Malacca. So I think both leaders are looking at the situation and don’t want a conflagration with each other at this point.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

On the rare earths point, listening to senior members in the second Trump administration, I’m not sure I’ve heard this from the president himself, but listening to Marco Rubio and others, they seemed almost taken aback by the ferocity and effectiveness of the Chinese response, the Chinese weaponization of the rare-earth supply chain and other related products. Do you think it was a mistake to go that aggressively on tariffs before shoring up our own vulnerabilities on rare earths?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Well, we needed a new supply chain for rare earths on both the extraction and the processing side. There’s no question about that, Dan, and I think we all knew it. The thing about the minerals is it’s a relatively small portion of the trade between the countries. It’s a billion dollars and yet it’s so important to the defense industry and the automotive industry that it gives the Chinese a lot of leverage. I think the Chinese are using a hundred-year-old technology very well to leverage it against our cutting-edge chip strategy, but at the same time, they may have overplayed their hand. And unless those export controls were designed to buy them a window to take Taiwan or to invade the Philippines, I think they’ve basically created a situation where there is going to be a competitor. And the idea that . . . I think the Chinese have always in the past, whenever we’ve started to close in, the Japanese or others have started to close in on the rare earth issue, they’ve undercut the new companies and those new suppliers and dumped product and basically maintain their monopoly through a combination of dumping and exorbitant pricing when they eliminate their competitor.

I think now governments realize—Australia, Japan, the United States, at a minimum, realize—that we will probably have to do some tax instead of some subsidies, and we’re going to have to have a rare earths industry. And as a Republican, I hate to talk about industrial policy or state-subsidized industries, but we may have to have that for the rare earths, given the Chinese have weaponized, in a way, to try and maintain the monopoly. And by the way, I think it’s going to happen. I think it’s going to happen within three years, and I think the Chinese are going to lose a lot of their bargaining power they had. So they played the card, they played it very ruthlessly and effectively, but they may have created a backlash more than they needed to.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to linger on your fascinating point about the new approach to China and the reasons for it. It does seem like a pretty major change from Trump’s first administration. You wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs in your last month as national security advisor where you wrote, and I’m quoting you here, “The Trump administration has spoken with candor and shown the spotlight of transparency on the CCP’s true character and will continue to do so.” And then you, again in 2024, writing in your piece called “The Return of Peace Through Strength” on Trump’s foreign policy, you criticize Biden for saying, “we’re not looking to hurt China,” and you called for seeing China as an adversary. I mean, is that still the fundamental reality of this relationship in your view, even if we need to put a pause on some of the tensions?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Yeah, look, Dan, I think that’s a fair characterization. I don’t think the CCP has changed its stripes. I mean, it’s still a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian power. The way they’re treating Christians; the way they’re doing exit bans, especially on dual citizens of the United States and China; the way they’re still abusing the Uyghurs; the vast territorial claims that they have, not just on Taiwan but against the Russians, against the Indians and other countries in the region, I mean, none of that has changed fundamentally. But I think we’re in a situation where we’ve got a very big foreign policy plate and we have to rebuild the military. We have to get ourselves in a position of independence with rare earths. We need to restore energy dominance for the United States. And I think all those things, militate for a pause in maybe the hardline approach, although again, I don’t think that the actual export controls and customs controls and sanctions have changed fundamentally since we left office, since Biden left office. And then in the current Trump administration, everything’s still pretty much in place. It’s just that the tariffs that we put in to deter the fentanyl trade and the tariffs that we put in place to protect American manufacturing have come down as a result of the truce and they’re supplying some rare earths. So I think it’s more of a trade dispute now. And again, I don’t think the fundamentals of the relationship have changed dramatically.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You note that one of the key American tools there is export controls on advanced technology, especially chips and chip-making equipment and other parts of that supply chain. Your former deputy, Matt Pottinger, one of the key architects of the hardline approach on China, has been fairly critical of the decision to give China access to a greater number of chips or more advanced chips. Do you see that as a major concession in the trade war? That was a big part, of course, of the interaction between Trump and Xi a couple of weeks ago.

ROBERT O’BRIEN

I still talk with Matt regularly and I’m a big fan of his, and he’s a super smart guy on China, no question about it. And he played a key role in the first administration, both as my deputy and as the president’s deputy national security advisor. And look, I don’t think there was anyone who’s more hawkish on China than I was. I brought Matt in as deputy and hired him and got that policy going. But we have had a little divergence on this issue and the divergence that we’ve had is on this issue of legacy chips because the chip-making is moving so fast. And when I was in office—I mean this was four years ago, five years ago—five nanometer chips were the cutting edge. We’re now down to two nanometer, and the companies are talking about one-and-a-half nanometer chips. Some people are talking about using atoms and putting circuit boards on atoms. It’s just beyond my comprehension, having a political science degree and not a real science degree. So it’s moving very quickly. And so things that were cutting-edge a few years ago, we are now starting to call commodity or legacy chips.

Now, it’s important for us and for our industry and for our defense manufacturing folks to have access to those chips, and certainly the Chinese want them, but as long as they’re not the cutting-edge chips, my feeling is—I’m going to be very careful how I say this—I’d rather have U.S. chips in Chinese military platforms than Chinese chips in American military platforms, and I’ll just leave it at that. I’d much rather have the tech stack around the world for AI and for machine learning and for quantum being made with American chips and American design chips, than Chinese chips.

When I came into office—you remember this, Dan—Huawei was about to take over the 5G industry in the whole world. They have a hundred-percent monopoly. Even in America, we were told, “We’ll encrypt around the Chinese people. Yeah, they’ll get all the 5G communications, they’ll store it all. They’ll have access to every communication in the world, but we’ll encrypt around it. Well just let them have that.” And we said no, and everyone said that was a fool’s errand and we wouldn’t be able to stop it. We started with Italy and Australia and Japan, and the United Kingdom came along, and pretty soon the free world, for the most part, had a non-Huawei 5G network or platforms.

But the funny thing is, Dan, was I didn’t have an American product to sell. I was basically an unpaid spokesman for Nokia and Ericsson, selling Scandinavian cell phones and towers because we didn’t have the product. I mean, Microsoft was working on a product and then we had some other American companies working on a product, but we weren’t involved. So I was basically out flogging the Europeans’ goods. We need to make sure that we don’t find ourselves in that situation again. So I’ve had a little divergence with Matt. We don’t fundamentally disagree on policy, but I think on the issue of what constitutes a legacy chip and what constitutes a cutting-edge chip, we’re probably a little farther apart.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Matt, of course, wrote a controversial piece in our pages with Mike Gallagher, former congressman from Wisconsin, Republican, arguing that it should be American policy to weaken and eventually change the nature of government in China. Do you share that as an ultimate objective for a strategy, even if the short term looks a little different?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

You take me down memory lane. So Mike Gallagher is a great American. He was another good friend and someone who I fundamentally agree on the issues with him, like I do with Matt. But look, as a baseline, I grew up in the Reagan years, Dan, a little older than you, and we believe in individual freedom and free markets and the striving for liberty among people. And so I’m always going to side on the side of those seeking freedom and liberty, who don’t want the secret police knocking on the doors or burning their church down or arresting their pastors or imprisoning people because of their race or their religion, and all that’s happening in China. So I personally believe China would be a much better place if they had freedom and the world would be . . . Can you imagine how amazing the world would be right now if China was free and it had free people and weren’t involved in trying to take over their neighbors and spent their time doing good instead of trying to build up the military to defeat the United States? We could have not just a golden age of America, but a golden age of the world.

So it would be great if China was free, but look, I was also in the Bush administration and I saw . . . I spent years of my life working on rule of law in Afghanistan, and it is very tough to change a regime, and I think we have to be modest as Americans about our ability to change regimes. We should always be the shining city on the hill. We should always be the beacon of liberty and support democracy and personal freedom. But I think we’ve also got to be very modest in how we exercise our power to change regimes. And so as much as I’d like to see a free China, I don’t think America can afford, either militarily or economically, to get into that sort of a contest of China about trying to change out the CCP.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

With apologies for bouncing around geographically, I want to jump to Venezuela because you mentioned regime change. The administration has, of course, started these strikes on boats, which are alleged to be drug-smuggling boats in both the Caribbean and Pacific. It has made noises about striking targets in Venezuela and called for President Maduro to go. How do you understand the strategy in Venezuela? What do you think they’re up to?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Well, so this is a continuation of part of what we did in the first term. So when COVID hit, Dan, one of the first things that I took away from it on the national security side is we had very good intel and [former Attorney General William] Barr and I went to the briefing room and disclosed it and said what we were going to do. We had very good intel that the cartels were going to try and stockpile cocaine and fentanyl in America and take advantage of COVID to do so, and then sell it for the next several years, having moved it all up when they thought our defenses were down. And so against [former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s] wishes, because he didn’t think the military should be involved in that, we got the Navy, we got the Coast—

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Secretary of defense in the latter part of the first term.

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Correct. And he took a very narrow view of what the military should do, and certainly didn’t get along well with the president, unfortunately. But Bill and [former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo] and the president, we all agreed that we got to stop this cocaine and fentanyl coming into America. So we had some huge drug busts, massive, stopping them, and Bill Barr wanted to go even further. Bill Barr wanted to start using Hellfires to take out processing plants in Mexico, in Colombia and Venezuela. We didn’t get there at the time, but it was certainly something that was considered.

I was concerned about the sovereignty issue of Mexico because even though the relationship can be sometimes difficult with the Mexicans, we’re blessed to have them as a partner and an ally. We don’t want to turn the Mexican people against us. We’ve had a history of doing that and we want to keep them onside and encourage them to bring the strength of their government to bear on the cartels. Very hard to do for the Mexicans. It’s a life-or-death situation for the political leaders because you can be killed very easily by the cartels and it takes a lot of courage to fight them, but we need to bolster them. But the idea of really ratcheting up the war against cartels to stop the 50,000 deaths a year that we’re experiencing from fentanyl and from cocaine and other drugs was something that was important then and is important now.

I think that’s driven some of the China talks as well. I don’t think the Chinese took it as seriously as President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who’s very engaged in this issue, given his background and what he’s seen growing up in Appalachia. The Chinese fentanyl precursors coming into Mexico, I think one of the reasons the Chinese may have agreed to take a harder line on that is that they saw us taking out the drug boats. They don’t want to see us taking out Chinese ships and aircraft.

I really do think this is about the drugs and not about the Maduro regime, but unfortunately the Maduro regime has gotten so in bed with the drug traffickers that there’s maybe a distinction without a difference, and I think he’s playing a very dangerous game. I don’t think the president went into the office. I mean, [special presidential envoy for Special Missions Ric Grenell] went down and had a couple of good meetings with the Venezuelans, brought some hostages home. Things seemed to be going pretty well. So I don’t think it’s just an ideological rift between Grinnell and Rubio. I think that there was an effort to bring Venezuela on site when Maduro sided with the cartels and refused to take the Tren de Aragua immigrants back and gave sanctuary to the cartels. I think that he really lost President Trump and certainly Marco Rubio, he had lost from the start. So I think he’s put himself in a dangerous situation, although I still don’t think the policy is regime change, but I think the president’s going to do whatever it takes to stop the drug imports. And if that means Maduro has to go, it means he has to go. But I truly believe this is driven by the drug situation.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you think it would be a mistake to turn this into a regime change operation?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

It may be a regime change operation as a result of taking out the drug cartels, and I think we have to wait and see what’s going to happen. Frankly, I don’t advise foreign governments, and I don’t advise Maduro, but if I was Maduro, the guy’s got like a billion dollars, supposedly, in cash stacked up. He ought to pull a Ghani and put him on a helicopter and get the heck out of Dodge with his cash and go live in exile in Cuba, or I’m sure we’d make some arrangement for him to go to Qatar or to Abu Dhabi or somewhere he could take his money with him and get out and let [opposition leader Maria Corina Machado] and the Venezuelan people have their country back and bring the United States in to help them get rid of the cartels. I think it’s kind of like self-deportation, right? It’s kind of self–regime change. I think Maduro would be much better off at this point, he and his family and his friends leaving for Moscow, Beijing, maybe cut a deal to go to one of the Gulf sheikhdoms, but it’s time for him to leave Venezuela, I think.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Going back to the China strategy conversation, one of the places where those of us in the foreign policy establishment or the blob, as it’s sometimes called, get most exercised is around the question of alliances. It’s, of course, been a centerpiece of American global strategy for almost 80 years. It’s, I think, pretty widely seen as a massive advantage that the United States has over its competitors, that we have this enormous network of alliances. Trump has taken a different approach, I think it’s fair to say, that has, as you point out in your recent piece for Foreign Affairs, yielded fairly substantial gains in defense spending, first and foremost among NATO allies, but also increasingly in East Asia and elsewhere. There is a price to that over time. There’ll be less deference on the part of allies when it comes to American interests. And you do hear from lots of officials in allied governments a kind of sense of abandonment by the United States, a sense that they won’t trust us in the same way. How do you weigh the upside of more defense spending against some of those concerns about reliability and I think what’s hard to deny, that there is a change in a sense of American commitment both among America, European, and Asian allies over the last several months?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

I agree with you on the strength of our alliance system and the advantage that gives America. I mean, we have countries and nations as allies that truly share our values. They’re not rent-an-ally like Pakistan and North Korea. The Chinese, I don’t think have an ally, right? I mean, they rent them when they need them. They go with Belts and Road and suborn a corrupt leader in Africa to fill this bank account in Geneva. And those aren’t real alliances. I mean, when you look at our alliances within the Asia-Pacific region, for example, Indo-Pacific, our alliance with Japan, our alliance with Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines. I mean, these are long-standing true alliances between democracies and countries that have had many shared experiences together, in war and peace. And so that’s fundamentally different, as you point out, and the blob would point out. The only thing better [inaudible] is the blob. But those alliances are important, but an alliance has to be a two-way street.

And so when I talk about NATO, and I wrote about this before I was in the Trump administration, when I was a former Walker, Romney guy and Bush guy who had no plans to go to the Trump administration—not that I didn’t want to, but didn’t think I’d be asked. I wasn’t part of his campaign and he was generous enough to ask me to come on board, first as hostage envoy and then as national security adviser and now [inaudible]. But I wrote about this one before joining this campaign or before joining the administration after the campaign, that every presidential candidate—I went back and looked at the little campaign brochures and pamphlets from every candidate, Republican and Democratic candidate going back to 1972, in Nixon/Govern, on through Carter/Ford and Reagan/Carter—every candidate on both sides had part of the platform and part of their pamphlets that Europe had to pay their fair share, Republican and Democratic. It was a bipartisan concern. And Europe never paid their fair share. No president ever got them to pay their fair share. And Trump took office and even before he started rattling the cages, the defense spending for many countries started [inaudible] because they realized there was a new sheriff in town. This president who believed in “America first” required the alliance to be a two-way street.

I mean, I think NATO is the most effective alliance in the history of the world. The only alliance that may have been better or compared was the Roman Latium alliance, right when Rome did the fighting, but the Latium people, the Italian people, supplied the soldiers. But again, even that was a two-way street, right? Rome [bore] the brunt of the strategy and the cost of the wars. But the Latiums supplied the Latin soldiers, the people, and eventually were given citizenship in Rome. And it all worked out pretty well.

But it’s always a two-way street in the alliance. And up until Donald Trump, it was a massive one-way street. I mean, the Europeans couldn’t defend themselves to any extent. The British army, which was kind of the pride of Europe, was down to 55,000 soldiers, much smaller, a third of the size of the U.S. Marine Corps or a fourth of the size of the U.S. Marine Corps. I mean, we were bearing the entire burden. So I think President Trump is coming to revitalize the alliances. And granted, there’s going to be pushback for that, because look, it is great not having to spend on your own defense and have Uncle Sam take the burden for you. But the world’s changed with the rise of China, with the Indo-Pacific commitments that we have, with the rise of Russia. And our debt, I mean, a 50 trillion debt or whatever it is—We just can’t, the American taxpayer can no longer bear the burden, the entire burden, of defending the free world.

And I used to tell my German counterparts . . . I talked to a teacher in Tennessee who’s working as a school teacher and then goes on the weekends to the Amazon fulfillment house and works at an Amazon plant for two days a week or two and a half days a week, and she doesn’t get a day off the whole year. And yet you’ve got a German worker taking the month of August off and driving a station wagon down the south of France, and it is a four-day weekend work week the rest of the year. Now look, I’m all for the Germans doing that. That’s great, and it’s great for the German workers, but it is not fair that some school teacher in Tennessee is bearing the burden of that. That just fundamentally isn’t right.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One of these is not an American alliance, but it’s an incredibly important relationship and a relationship that I think many people would like to see grow into an alliance in the coming years. Your successor, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, wrote a piece advocating that in Foreign Affairs a few months ago. That’s the relationship with India. This has been, I think, one of the most perplexing developments, one of the surprising developments, frankly, in the Trump Two foreign policy, is the rift with [Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi]. They had a great relationship last time around. Strategically, it seems to make a lot of sense. How do you explain the India rift, other than this kind of strange series of events and effective diplomacy by Pakistan and strong egos, strong personalities on both sides? What’s driving this?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Well, the first thing: I like Prime Minister Modi a lot. I spent a lot of time with him. He’s one of the foreign leaders that, as national security, I spent time with, both in America and India and also in summits in Bangkok and other places. He’s a great guy, very smart, very tough guy. And I wrote a piece last year, when President Trump was first coming into office, in which I said, “Look, there’s a lot of Trump in Modi. Modi’s a “India first” guy, he’s an Indian nationalist. He wants to bring manufacturing to India, and he’s got the chance of a lifetime. He’s got the chance of a generation.

I told this to Dr. Jaishankar, his foreign minister, and Ajit Doval, who’s his national security adviser, who has a similar background to me. He was the hostage negotiator for hijacked planes back in the days of hijacking and got a lot of people freed before he became national security adviser, so he and I had a lot in common, all those guys. We had a great trip to India. We had several great visits by Modi to America. We had the “Howdy Modi” event down in Houston at the basketball stadium, which was packed for President Trump and Prime Minister Modi, and the two of them got along very well. They used to compare who had the most Twitter followers and the most Facebook fans and all that sort of thing. And I think Modi has a once-in-a-generation chance, with companies de-risking and de-leveraging China. You’ve got companies like Apple and Facebook and Google moving to India, manufacturing moving to India. This is an opportunity that India has that is truly once in a lifetime for any leader. And so I think Modi wants to take advantage of that.

Look, the alliance makes sense, the partnership makes sense between the United States and India. We’re far away from each other. We’ve got no claims within each other’s territories. We’ve got no rivalry, and yet we’ve got China butting up against both countries, in India’s case brutally killing Indian soldiers on the border, abusing their bodies and mutilating them and doing terrible things, throwing them into crevasses, just a terrible bully in the region. So when that happened to India, we were there for the Indians in a very quiet way and supplied them with the down jackets they needed and the down sleeping bags so their troops could stay in the mountains over the winter. We supplied them with intelligence. And so the relationship makes a lot of sense.

Now what the heck happened to that relationship, which was genuinely friendly between Trump and Modi? I mean, what happened? I think two things happened. I think the Indians have traditionally been very . . . Well, one, they’re very good negotiators. I mean, people don’t realize how tough the Indians are when it comes to . . . They negotiate over everything. And they’re very stubborn and they’re very effective, they’re smart, they’re motivated, and they’re tough negotiators, on trade especially. The Indians are probably the most in the whole world or the slowest negotiators.I mean, they held up [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] rounds, they held up WTO rounds. It is one country holding up the entire world and just dragging out negotiations. And so when they showed up after Liberation Day to get their deal—and I think there was and is a deal in the making—I think that they had a year timeline, which they thought was fast, and they clearly didn’t understand that we were talking about days, not a year. So that got everyone started off on a very bad foot on the trade negotiations.

And then, look, I think the president did something prior to Alaska that again, this is just . . . I haven’t talked to President Trump about this; this is my take on it. It is very easy to sanction China for buying Russian oil. When you take a country that we’re as close to as India and say, “Look, you’re not just buying Russian oil to survive like the Hungarians, but you’re buying Russian oil and refining it and selling it to third parties. You can’t do that and we’re going to sanction you.” Basically, going into the summit in Alaska, President Trump did two big things. He deployed the National Guard on the streets of Washington, D.C. and he shot massive sanctions at a close strategic partner. And I think both those were messages to Putin, kind of like Reagan firing the air travel controllers, that, “Look, we’re serious about this. We’re willing to take heat from a friend to show our displeasure with what’s going on in Ukraine, not just from China or not just from Iran or North Korea. We’re willing to hit India.”

I think the Indians were taken aback by what happened. I think it was the dual nature of the Putin summit and also their stance in the trade negotiations. I think . . . I’m not claiming any credit for this, but I put a tweet out saying, I tweeted a picture of Modi and Trump. I said, “Look, these guys are great friends, and I think the trade negotiators are getting back on track with the trade negotiations.”

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You mentioned President Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska. This has been part of the rather dramatic saga of the administration’s approach to Ukraine, at least as it looks from the outside, over the course of the last ten months. How do you understand the strategy? What is Trump’s plan for ending the war, as you see it?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Well, look, I think he laid out the strategy pretty clearly early on, and I think he thought it would be resolved very quickly. And to be honest, I thought that the war would be resolved very quickly. Both before and after the election, President Trump’s election, I thought this was going to be one of the easier things to resolve. To use a term from the Bush administration, I mis-underestimated Vladimir Putin and his commitment to the war.

When you look at what President Trump basically offered him from the outset—and Trump was criticized for this heavily—we’ll give you a de jure recognition of Crimea. Fine, Crimea is Russian. It has been forever. It got moved over to Ukraine in an administrative action under Khrushchev and the Soviet Union. But Russia and Crimea have always been associated. I’ll give you a de jure recognition of that—and this is just my understanding from public statements. We’ll do a de facto recognition of the Donbas, Luhansk and Donetsk, give you control, at least the February 14 lines. And that will freeze that, kind of like a North Korea situation. We will not allow Ukraine to join NATO, which you’re concerned about, but we’ll put NATO peacekeeping troops in. We’ll put Polish armored brigades, or French or British air wing, put serious security forces in Ukraine, but not call it NATO and not call it an Article 5 situation. And then we’ll rebuild Ukraine. And for Russia, I think the offer was—the additional incentive was—we will remove all sanctions. You can return to the world economy, stop being Rhodesia, and you can be part of the world economy again.

I mean, so it was a very generous package for the Russians. I thought it’d be very difficult for Vladimir Putin to reject it. Yet he did, and he continues to war. What I’m saying now is that he’ll fight to the last Dagestani or the last Chechen to take Ukraine back because you see very few Russian kids from St. Petersburg and Moscow being drafted or being conscripted into the fight. But he’s putting the Dagestanis and the Chechens and the other Russian minorities to the meat grinder in Ukraine. He’s using North Korean troops, to not very good effect, but he’s showing no inclination to end the war.

So what I’ve come out and said, and Larry Kudlow has joined me in this—President Trump’s economic advisor in the first term—put massive sanctions on the Russians. We’ve started, but we need to sanction the Russian Federation Central Bank. I mean, we need to go what I’m calling “full Rhodesia” sanctions. I mean, we use sanctions, but we don’t use them effectively. We use them seriatim, with sanctioned individuals and entities and banks and that sort of thing.

We need to cut the Russians out of the world economy, we need to take them off the SWIFT system, maybe kick them out of the [International Telecommunication Union], kick them off the mobile phone system, stop letting their Russian people travel freely to the West or Turkey or Cyprus.

This war, and the killing and the attacks on the Ukrainian civilians, just put them outside of the civilized world. We need to treat them that way economically and culturally. And that might put enough pressure on Putin to end the war. When his oligarchs can’t go use their yachts in Turkey, they can’t go to Dubai for vacation, and Russian oil sales drop from ten million barrels a day to seven million, that takes the cream that’s keeping the society afloat and then making the war easy for them, that takes it away. So we’re never going to stop all Russian oil sales—I’m not that naive. It’s a fungible commodity. But we can limit them and take the ability of Putin to ameliorate the economic crisis for his people and northern Russia, take that away from them and make the war costly. I think it’s time.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You say that you mis-underestimated Putin. Do you think Trump mis-underestimated Putin as well? He seemed to have the expectation that Putin would take this deal and he didn’t. And I would note that both of your predecessors as national security adviser in Trump’s first term were quite struck, and spoke out publicly about what H.R. McMaster called Putin’s hold on Trump, and John Bolton said something like, “Putin thinks he can play Trump like a fiddle,” so there does seem to be a pattern of this over both this term and the previous one.

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Yeah, well, here’s the thing. It is just disingenuous for Bolton to say that. I mean, Trump didn’t have a personal relationship with Putin. He was cordial with him. They had one meeting in Finland. They’ve had a couple of phone calls. I was on the phone calls with Trump and Putin. There’s no love between Trump and Putin. He is cordial. He gets along with him, as he should. I mean, Putin’s got 2,500 tactical nukes pointed at Europe and 1300, 1250 strategic nukes and the delivery system’s pointed at the United States. You want to have a relationship that you can talk to a foreign leader even if you’re an adversary. So trying to conflate the ability to talk with a foreign leader and you’ve got some sort of sympathy for their cause is just ridiculous. So I just don’t think that’s the case at all.

And look, I like H.R. He’s a smart guy, and I think H.R. has taken a different tack than Bolton did. But look, I was with Trump for two years, three years, if you count my time as hostage envoy, and I didn’t see any of that. And we had a lot of dealings with the Russians. I dealt with [former Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev] all the time. That’s just nonsense. But going back to the surprise, I don’t think Putin has a hold on Trump. I think that a lot of smart people, including a lot of people who wanted the Ukrainians to make no concessions to the Russians, thought that Putin would take the deal that Trump offered because it was a good deal. But Putin obviously has motivations beyond getting a good deal. He obviously wants to reconstitute at least Ukraine into the Russian Empire. And what does he get from that? He gets land, of course, but he also gets demographics, and Russia is facing a major demography problem.

The problem that Putin has is, I don’t think anyone’s explained to him: the Ukrainians don’t want anything to do with the Russians. I mean, maybe the ten percent of Russian speakers who are over in Crimea and Donbass. The last time I was in Crimea was in 2014, for the post-Maidan, observing the election as a U.S. observer. No one in western Ukraine wanted anything to do with the Russians.

The problem I’ve got with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky] is that at that time, a lot of Ukrainians were saying, “Let’s just give Donetsk and Luhansk back to Russia and get them out of our polity and not have them elect Russian speakers to our parliament.” All the problems, all their corruption was coming from the east, but the western Ukrainians, which is 90 percent of the population, they’re looking to Prague and Warsaw and Vienna as their home, not to Moscow. They don’t have any affinity with them. And I don’t think that anyone’s explained to Putin that these are not some . . . These guys aren’t a Russian minority that want to be reunited with mother Russia and are being held up by a couple of fascists, which . . . The idea that these people somehow could be coerced into reuniting with Russia or want Putin to be their leader is just ridiculous. And so I don’t know if Putin’s either just purposely blind to it or people aren’t explaining to him the situation, but he needs to change his war aims pretty quickly because eventually Europe and the West are going to get fed up with it, and it’s going to be very bad for Russia. Then he’s going to be nothing more than a vassal state to Beijing and Xi Jinping.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you anticipate that President Trump will follow that path and escalate military support to Ukraine, as well as economic and other kinds of pressure on Russia?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Look, I think there’s definitely going to be an escalation of economic pressure. He gave Putin a little love tap in the Alaska engagement when he overflew him with F-35s and the B-2. I mean, that was not to honor you. I remember it was all smiles about that, honoring Putin. That was to show Putin that’s what just took out, in Operation Midnight Hammer, that just took out the Iranian facilities at Fordow and Natanz, and your presidential bunker out in Moscow could be taken out before you knew it.

But again, military escalation is always dangerous with the Russians. I’m always concerned about that because they’ve got the potentially [inaudible] in the world. And you always have to be cognizant and careful of that when you’re at the highest levels of government. And people may take it lightly, but I’ve never met one of my former colleagues who, as national security adviser and had the backup of nuclear codes and the safe in your office and had the briefings who has ever taken that anything other than with the utmost seriousness. And I think presidents are the same way. I think Biden did. I think Trump did, and Trump does, and so we’ve got to be careful with that, careful going up the escalation ladder. It’s one thing for the Ukrainians and Russians to fight. It’s another thing for Americans and Russians to fight. So you’ve got to be careful there. But on the economic front, Russia isn’t entitled to be part of the SWIFT system. They aren’t entitled to be part of the world banking system. And so I think those are the levers that could put a lot of pressure on Putin to settle this war.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You mentioned the strikes on Iran in June. So let me take us to the Middle East before we close. There were 12 days of Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities. The United States joined for a couple of days. The Iranian program has not entirely gone away. The IAEA reports that most of the highly enriched uranium is still in Iran, still has not been destroyed and still accessible. Do you see a return to negotiations with Iran and return to some kind of deal, or is there some other path to really eradicating this problem for good?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

We thought the Iranians would come to the table in the first term with the maximum pressure campaign. And frankly, I thought they’d come to the table after the strikes. I think the Israelis wanted a few more of these strikes to maybe ensure their routine was eliminated. I think, again, I don’t think President Trump, like President Bush and like other presidents, being in the first Gulf War with Iraq, I think there’s a national reticence to get into a policy of regime change around the world, and I think Trump shares that reticence as well. But at the same time, he said, and he said this in the first term, he said in the second term, “We’re not going to allow the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon.” And these are the same people that have threatened to kill him and produced very slick videos of the assassination of President Trump on the golf course.

So I mean, the Iranians have no love lost for Trump, but the thing about President Trump is he’s so willing to put the country first that even if it’s to his personal benefit to take out the Iranian regime, if it’s better for America to negotiate and have them actually give up their nuclear weapons voluntarily, kind of the way South Africa did or Libya did, then he’s willing to do that. So I think the Iranians have an open partner for peace if they want to give up their weapons. I think unfortunately, their mentality is a little more like Kim Jong Un, who said he would, but didn’t. And I think that’s the problem. Or Hamas giving up weapons in Gaza. I think the Iranians are just very reticent. They believe that nuclear power gives them some staying power as a regime and so it’s about regime survival. And they’re not going to give up their nukes. But they could negotiate and they could get a settlement with President Trump if they wanted to. I’m convinced of that, even though it wouldn’t be in Trump’s personal interest.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Gaza is, of course, another theater where there is a degree of ambiguity about where things stand and where Trump is going. There’s, of course, a cease-fire that is holding, somewhat tenuously right now, thanks at least in part to pressure from President Trump on [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] last month. How do you see Trump pushing this from here? His 20-point plan talks about a fairly traditional approach as I read it, to a two-state solution and the peace process. But where do you imagine this going?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Well, look, I think the first thing that happened that President Trump did that was so incredibly useful and saved lives—and he’s all about saving lives—was getting the hostages home, the 20 Israeli hostages. I’m actually surprised that Hamas let them go because it was the ultimate leverage for Hamas to stay in power. And God bless President Trump and Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff and Adam Boehler and JD Vance, the whole team that got that deal done. I’ve been in touch with the families since October 7. Even getting the remains home, Dan, is important. I mean, not just, it’s important for the Jewish religion to have them buried, just for the family to have closure and to allow their loved ones to rest in peace in Israel. And if they’re IDF, like Hadar Goldin, who came home, and I’ve been working on Hadar Goldin’s case since I was hostage envoy, for many years, to get him home and buried in an Israeli military cemetery in Jerusalem, where on that great holiday, they can go to their son’s grave and Leah and her husband can go and fly out to their son’s grave. That’s really important.

So if nothing else comes with the Gaza cease-fire and the peace deal and the hostages and the remains being brought back to Israel, it is still a success. There’s the old saying that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I think they’ve got the opportunity here to actually build a new Gaza and to have a two-state solution and improve the future of their people. But they have to give their weapons, they have to give up the terrorism. And it has just been so ingrained for so many years, starting with [Yasir Arafat] and the PLO. And the [Palestinian Authority] has been a little bit better. But with Hamas, I mean, Hezbollah, [Palestinian Islamic Jihad], with Abu Nidal, I mean, it’s been such a history of terrorism for so many years in Lebanon and all of the Levant and the Mediterranean. For them to let go of that and to embrace peace and a new future is going to be tough. But if they do, I have no doubt the Palestinian people can be very successful and very prosperous.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you see Trump as committed to the creation of a Palestinian state? There’d be a lot in it for him and his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize and also his desire to help broker a regional normalization with, especially, a relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia. How does he see a Palestinian state?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Look, I think he’d be open to it. He certainly, to get the Abraham Accords done at the time we were doing the final negotiations, Israel was talking about annexing, or extending sovereignty over, parts of the West Bank. The UAE said, if that happens, we’re out. We had to deliver a very tough message to Bibi Netanyahu. And the night before we met with [inaudible] at about two in the morning, I gave him that message of [inaudible] and he, Bibi Netanyahu, did the right thing. He decided not to be the Israeli leader who was going to walk away from peace. And every Palestinian leader has walked away from peace; no Israeli leader ever has. And so even though the Israelis right now are pretty tough on the two-state solution, that’s probably ultimately the only way to get to some end point.

So I think Trump would be amenable to that. And there’d have to be, obviously, security guarantees with Israel. They’re not going to have a Palestinian state that has an army, that has an air force or a navy, or even a very big paramilitary force, police force. There’d have to be a lot of guarantees. But I think ultimately that’s the way this thing, if it’s going to be resolved, and if the Palestinians do want to have peace, at some point they’ve got to say yes. They’ve been saying no since 1948, when the UN gave them half of Palestine.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Will Trump put pressure on Netanyahu, do you think?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

I think if the Palestinians were willing to accept a two-state solution and recognize Israel and guarantee Israeli security, yes. But again, after October 7 and the massacres that took place, I was at Kibbutz Nir Oz and the music festival site after the massacres. You can’t ask the Israelis to forget what happened. So there really has to be a new Palestinian attitude and real security guarantees for Israel, not just fake ones by putting some Belgian peacekeepers on the border of Gaza and say that everything’s okay.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One of the most prophetic elements, I would say, in the piece you wrote in 2024 called “The Return of Peace Through Strength” was your call to resume testing of nuclear weapons. Trump picked up this call recently ahead of his meeting with Xi Jinping. He called for testing on an equal basis with Russia and China. What do you understand that to mean? What do you think he has in mind?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Well, look, the first thing is this is President Trump’s idea; this was not my idea. And a lot of people, including on Fox, have gone to my article where I said this could happen and said it’s my idea. President Trump’s idea, 100 percent. But it’s something we’ve talked about from time to time. Look, what we saw, Dan, in the first administration is the Russians cheating on every nuclear treaty, whether it was the INF treaty, the Open Skies, New START, just blatantly abusing them.

The Chinese were sailing kind of under the Russian cover, not bound by any of the treaties to build up a massive nuclear force, both conventional or both short-range and long-range, tactical and strategic. So we had it in that. And then what we saw with Trump coming into power, and again, this is not how you deal with President Trump, at least in my view, or any strong American leader—President Reagan, President Bush—when the Chinese roll out the new ICBM at their military parade in Beijing for the anniversary of World War II, which, by the way, the Nationalists won and we helped them, and the Russians and Communists, who . . . The Communists basically sat out World War II and did very little against the Japanese for them to take credit with this massive military parade with Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin as the VIPs. And that was a little ridiculous.

But when they rolled out the massive new ICBM, that was a shot across the bow. When President Putin, days before President Trump made the announcement on testing, said the Poseidon is now IOP, in its operation phase, or the Russian version of IOP, we can send the nuclear-propelled torpedo that has a nuclear warhead on it, a double nuke, and create a tsunami and take out the naval base in Norfolk or take out New York City, that’s pretty provocative. And so you were going to draw a response from President Trump and he responded by saying, “Look, we have to start testing nukes again,” and we’ve all talked about it. Hopefully it didn’t have to go there. But look, we can allow our adversaries to rattle the nuclear saber and put themselves in a position to blackmail us on the nuclear front. I think more important than testing is what President Trump is doing with the modernizing of the triad. And we’re going to probably build a hundred-plus B-21s, huge. We’re modernizing the old Minutemen with the new Sentinel program, which Northrop also has, and has done a good job on that, and we’re going to start cranking out Columbia-class submarines. So I think that sends a message to our adversaries, even more than testing.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The nuclear wonk crowd has responded to calls for return to testing nuclear weapons with the argument that first of all, we don’t really need to, that it doesn’t gain us that much. And second, that returning to that kind of testing would advantage Russia and China more than it would us. Do you see that as wrong?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Look, President Trump hasn’t said what we’ll do with testing, and we don’t have the money appropriated for live testing yet from Congress. The secretary of energy has pointed that out. So there’s a lot of testing you can do short of exploding a bomb in a drill hole in Nevada. We may get to the point where we have to do that to show that the physical material still works and it’s still effective. And so we may get there, but I think right now is testing delivery systems, doing computer testing. We can test a lot of the system without actually exploding nukes. So I think we’re going to do a lot of that, but at some point, the president has made it clear, if these guys keep rattling the nuclear saber and threatening us with nuclear weapons, we’re going to have to go back to how it was and spin our own centrifuges and doing live tests. Russia and China may do the same, but look, I trust an American-built missile, bomber, submarine, SLBM, submarine-launched ballistic missile, hypersonic missile that’s got a nuclear warhead from us, I trust our delivery system to work better and our warhead to work better than anything Chinese or Russian. That’s not to say that the Russians and Chinese aren’t damn smart. They’ve got space programs, they know what they’re doing. But I trust our kit more.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me end on a couple of especially nerdy questions. One is about national security process. I mean, when I look back at the process you were running as national security adviser, and Matt Pottinger as deputy national adviser, it looks fairly typical, more or less typical, at least compared to where we are now. Now there seems to be nothing resembling the traditional national security making process. How do you see Trump Two policymaking and how does it differ from One, which surely has implications for policy if that process is so different?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

What I said the first day I was national security adviser was that I was going to re-implement the Brent Scowcroft model, which the Obama NSC did not really use. I mean, they had a mini–State Department, a mini-Pentagon, a mini–Energy Department, a mini–Commerce Department, Treasury, all over the [Executive Office Building]. I mean, they had so many people there, it was probably a fire hazard to get out of the building, because they wanted all the power consolidated at the White House. I didn’t think that was the way to run a national security process. And I don’t think . . . It didn’t empower the agencies and the departments of the federal government, which are supposed to . . . The Pentagon should be running war policy and defense policy. The State Department should be running diplomacy and the Commerce Department should be running commerce policy and export controls, and the Treasury should be doing treasury stuff. We shouldn’t try and recreate all that over at the White House and run it from 1600 Pennsylvania.

So my goal was to downsize the NSC to streamline it, but then to have a very effective policy process where we had regular deputy committee meetings every week, principal committee meetings every week, and if you were the principal and you weren’t on travel or at a funeral or in the hospital, you were going to be there. You couldn’t send a deputy or an undersecretary and have your department have a say in the policy. We empowered the agencies and said, “You’re going to run the policy in the departments, but you got to participate. You can’t just have one half and not the other half. So if you want a real Scowcroft model, you’ve got to participate.” And I think Matt and I did that and the first couple of meetings, when the Pentagon sent over some colonel to a deputy’s committee and Matt told him to sit on the back chairs of the Situation Room and they could listen and take notes but weren’t going to speak, I think they got the message pretty quickly how it was going to work. And so we had a good process.

I think what’s changed is that the president has had a full first term. And so this isn’t a new president who doesn’t know where the levers of power are. President Trump is very, very aware of where all his levers are. He had a well-formulated policy that he was going to implement. And Marco Rubio . . . I spent time with Marco, one-on-one, talking about the roles of the NSA and the sec-state, and he’s an incredibly effective guy, and he’s turned out to be more impressive in both roles than I thought he would be. I thought very highly of him. I was very friendly with him as chairman of the Intel Committee, but you never know how someone’s going to set in the sec-state job. But then to add the NSA job on top of it, I mean they’re both more than full-time positions. And Marco’s holding up well so far. So the only person who’s done that in the past is Henry Kissinger. And so he’s got big shoes to fill, but right now he is filling them.

I think the process is working better than people think. It’s probably not as public, but they’re back to running deputy committees. They’re back to working in [policy coordination committees] and [principals committees] and principal meetings. And so I think it’s with [Deputy National Security Adviser Andy Baker] and the other folks who were there, I think it’s more normal than it may look because of the dual hatting of Marco. And Marco spends half his day at Foggy Bottom and half at 1600 Pennsylvania and he’s not sleeping. The rest of the time, he’s hiring folks along with the president. So he’s working very hard, but look, he’s well respected and he’s got a good relationship with JD Vance and the other cabinet members. So I think it’s working better than people thought it would.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You mentioned Trump’s understanding of the levers of power. That seems like a really striking change in both domestic and foreign policy from the first term. What do you think Trump learned? What is his sense of the power of the presidency that he didn’t know last time around?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Well, look, I think he understands that the American people elected him and that the bureaucracy—and you can call the deep state or the permanent government or permanent Washington—they weren’t elected to anything. If they’re going to stay on in the federal government, they’ve got to implement the policies of the president of the United States, which again, they may not like his rhetoric, but his policies are really pretty. . . People don’t understand this about Trump. He’s one of our least ideological presidents. Closing the southern border would not have been controversial, even under Obama. Rebuilding the military would not have been controversial under any Republican president. Getting our allies to do their fair share, as I talked about before, was a bipartisan goal. So things that he’s doing that people don’t want to implement, he was elected by the American people to do that. He’s confident in that mandate and he’s going to push it through. And a lot of the rope-a-dope that got played with us in the first term and the outright resistance just isn’t going to be tolerated now. And so look, if people don’t want to implement the policies of the president’s, as long as they’re legal and lawful, then they can take off. They can go work at a think tank.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You, in your 2024 piece, mocked the tendency of people in the foreign policy world to talk about the rules-based international order or the liberal international order. Trump certainly does not seem to be a fan of those concepts or that kind of language. Does he have a vision of the international system that you think all of this is leading to? Does he think about order in those terms?

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Dan, that’s a good question. I think what President Trump thinks about is democracy and sovereignty. And so he goes to the UN and says, “You’re all great nations and pursue your own interests.” He doesn’t believe nations should be invading each other. He doesn’t believe Russia should be invading Ukraine, or China should be invading Taiwan or India, or Venezuela should be threatening Guyana, for that matter. I mean, I think he really believes in sovereignty and that the nation shouldn’t interfere with the affairs of their neighbors. I think that’s the bedrock.

And by the way, that’s the whole Western order. That’s really the foundation of the Westphalian . . . It’s the foundation of the UN. And going back to the Treaty of Westphalia, it is not controversial. It’s not Davos, it’s not the EU, it’s not global governance, it’s not Paris Climate Accords. And so I think that’s a little controversial. I think the idea that this rules-based international order, which is based on the Article 5 of the UN Charter, and Article 50, the enforcement power: you don’t invade your neighbor. That should be the foundation of the international order. It’s not climate change treaties, or trans rights in sports in the Olympics, or Davos setting the agenda for the world. I think the idea is that every country has their own national interest and they’re going to pursue them and they should do it pacifically and not use force as the ultimate lever.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And you would include the United States not invading Canada on that list.

ROBERT O’BRIEN

We’re not going to invade Canada.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Alright.

ROBERT O’BRIEN

There’d be too many Democrat voters if we took over Canada. If Alberta wants to come on board, that’s great. But Canadians are good friends. And then the thing about Canada, I can’t think of Canada . . . I’m not thinking about the Canadians rescuing our diplomacy in 1980 in Tehran. And so they’re a cousin or brother that we have spats with, but we’re going to get along fine with Canada.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Alright, well, there’s a lot more we can talk about in the world, but let’s end on that note of affection for the Canadians. Ambassador O’Brien, thank you so much for doing this and for your recent pieces. It’s been fascinating and we will look forward to more in the future.

ROBERT O’BRIEN

Thanks, Dan. It’s an honor to be with you.