Two people who held one of the most powerful positions in the world at different times - National Security Advisor to the President of the United States - sat down together for the first time on the World Class podcast at Stanford University. H.R. McMaster (first Trump administration) and Jake Sullivan (Biden administration) discuss six breathtaking weeks of 2026: the arrest of Maduro, the Greenland crisis, mass killings in Iran and the prospect of strikes, the bargaining with China, and the future of Taiwan. Despite their disagreements, both converge on the key point: the new U.S. National Security Strategy describes the world not as it is, but as the White House would like it to be - and that is dangerous. For Ukraine especially: McMaster says outright that Putin dreams of pushing unacceptable ceasefire terms through Washington and splitting the Western alliance.

Colin Kahl: You are listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I am your host, Colin Kahl. I am excited to pick up the mantle from Mike McFaul, both as FSI director and as the host of this podcast. It is hard to believe we are only six weeks into 2026, and yet there has already been a year's worth of foreign policy developments. In early January, U.S. military forces swooped into Caracas to capture Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro and bring him back to the United States. Then President Trump started making military and tariff threats in an effort to acquire Greenland, causing a major transatlantic crisis and prompting Canada's prime minister to declare that there had been a rupture in the international order. Meanwhile, mass protests have rocked Iran, shaking the pillars of the regime and prompting the deployment of U.S. military assets to the Middle East and renewed threats from President Trump to strike the regime. Just a few days ago, Trump officials traveled to the Middle East to meet with Iranian officials in an attempt to negotiate a new nuclear deal - just a day after meeting with representatives from Russia and Ukraine to try to settle that devastating conflict. In other words, 2026 is off to a breathtaking start with widespread geopolitical consequences. I cannot think of any better guests to help us understand these developments and where things might be headed in the remaining 46 weeks of 2026 than my good friends H.R. McMaster and Jake Sullivan. H.R. is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General who served as the president's national security advisor in the first Trump administration. He joined us here at FSI as the Bernard and Susan Liautaud visiting fellow in 2018, and he is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. You can catch him on his podcast, Today's Battleground, on all major platforms. Jake Sullivan was national security advisor for all four years of the Biden administration. He is now the Kissinger Professor of Practice of Statecraft and World Order at the Harvard Kennedy School and a senior fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He also hosts a podcast alongside John Finer called The Long Game. You will notice that both Jake and H.R. have their own podcasts, so if you like what you hear today, please go check them out. And if you don't, you can blame me - and you should still go check them out. H.R., Jake, it is great to have you on the pod.

H.R. McMaster: Colin, great to be here with you and Jake.

Jake Sullivan: Really good to be with you guys.

National Security Strategy: What Has Changed

Colin Kahl: Both of you served as national security advisors. That job is often dominated by crises of the day, but the national security advisor also plays an important role in shaping U.S. grand strategy, including by producing a congressionally mandated document called the National Security Strategy of the United States. I wanted to start our discussion by zooming out from current events to look at the big picture captured in these documents. H.R., I was hoping to start with you. When you were national security advisor during the first Trump administration, you and your deputy Nadia Schadlow produced, I think, a really excellent 2017 National Security Strategy. What was most notable about that document was that it was really a hard pivot away from the post-9/11 framing of national security. It recognized that threats like terrorism and rogue states still mattered, but that the biggest challenge to the United States was resurgent great power competition with China and Russia. It is interesting to note that the Trump administration in its second term has released a National Security Strategy - back in December of 2025 - and it has a much different tone on great power politics. It doesn't really describe Russia as a threat. It prioritizes strategic stability. It doesn't even talk about China until page 19 of a 30-page document, and it largely frames the China challenge in economic terms as opposed to an omnidirectional challenge. Do you think there has been a meaningful shift in how President Trump in his second term is thinking about this issue?

H.R. McMaster: Colin, I think there is a meaningful shift in the composition of the administration overall and maybe the president's mentality to a certain extent as well. As you know, the new National Security Strategy prioritizes more hemispheric defense - the Western Hemisphere, North America in particular, in terms of missile defense. This is why President Trump was so fixed on Greenland as important to defense and Arctic security. Well, I want to say: Canada is pretty important to that too, so maybe we should stop kicking them in the ass. The other aspect is the emphasis on industrial base - a lot of the president's economic agenda is all through it. But here is what is interesting, and I would love to hear what both of you think about this. Venezuela was a lot about Russian, Chinese, and Iranian influence in the hemisphere. Arctic security - well, who is that about? That is about competition with China and Russia. Whose missiles are we worried about coming across the Arctic cap? Russian and Chinese. So in practice, the competition is continuing. I think this National Security Strategy fell into the trap that previous ones had fallen into as well, which is describing the world as we might like it to be. It was more aspirational - that maybe we don't have as big of a problem with these two revanchist powers on the Eurasian landmass. And this is maybe in part to get the big trade deal that the president wants with China - which, by the way, I don't think he is going to get. Anyway, the big difference is the shift back to a document that describes the world as some people in the administration might want it to be.

Colin Kahl: Interesting. Jake, picking up on that - you oversaw the writing of the 2022 National Security Strategy. There are obviously a lot of differences between the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, but I think there is a lot of strategic continuity on the great power competition issue between the document that H.R. oversaw and the document that you oversaw. H.R. is on to something when he notes that there is an element of great power competition in what the president appears to be doing in Venezuela or with Greenland, but it really frames the challenges from China or Russia largely in hemispheric terms and homeland defense, as opposed to an omnidirectional challenge that we have to deal with in the Indo-Pacific, in Europe, in the Global South. How much divergence do you think there is here? Does it reflect a shift in grand strategy - towards a spheres of influence model or something else?

Jake Sullivan: H.R. makes a very good point that implicit in the rationale for both the Monroe Doctrine, this hemispheric doctrine, and in the attempt to take Greenland is great power competition with Russia and China. The Trump administration has tried to retrofit his obsession with actually getting dominion over Greenland through the lens of the threat of Russia and China. But fundamentally, when you step back from the most recent National Security Strategy and ask: who is the biggest enemy, what is the biggest threat facing the United States? This document seems to say basically it is immigrants, it is migrants. And not just with respect to the U.S. - the intersection of migration and drugs. It also says it with respect to our closest allies in Europe: the biggest threat to Europe is not Russia invading Ukraine or looming over the rest of Europe and our NATO allies. It is migrants - people coming to engage in what the document calls "civilizational erasure." I think this is a huge shift. It is the first time I have seen in a National Security Strategy in the modern era a thumb on the scale - maybe a whole fist on the scale - with respect to political preferences in allied countries. It specifically calls out "patriotic parties," i.e. right-wing parties in Europe, needing to be ascendant. This essentially writes down on paper what JD Vance spoke in his speech at Munich last year. And the second really big shift: the strategy that H.R. oversaw and the strategy that we carried forward in the Biden administration really saw the competition with China as an all-encompassing competition across all domains - military, technological, economic, diplomatic, you name it. The Trump administration really does seem to telescope the China challenge chiefly down to an economic lens - that we can have a good relationship with them on everything else if we can work things out on the economics. This raises enormous questions about things like U.S. policy towards Taiwan and U.S. policy towards allies in the region. On paper, the Indo-Pacific section looks pretty similar to what our strategy looked like. But in practice, President Trump seems to really be saying to Japan and other countries: I am not going to have your back to the same extent vis-a-vis China as previous administrations. So I think there is a huge amount of divergence here, a totally different way of looking at the world, and it chiefly comes back to what they perceive to be the biggest threat to American security. A lot of it has to do with this fusion of migration as both a domestic and foreign policy issue.

Migration as a Geopolitical Weapon

H.R. McMaster: I just wanted to point out the geopolitical dimension of the migration problem that Jake is alluding to. This is a big issue in Europe. I believe that Putin deliberately weaponized migrants - we have great evidence of this in specific countries such as Finland. What he did by perpetuating the serial episodes of mass homicide in the Syrian civil war was create a huge migration crisis in Europe. Governments like Angela Merkel's didn't deal with it very well, and that allowed Putin to accelerate his campaign of political subversion in Europe by supporting both far-left and especially far-right parties, creating centrifugal forces that diminish European will to stand up to Russian aggression. We saw a similar dynamic here in the Western Hemisphere, with Venezuela to a certain extent weaponizing migration and illegal immigration in particular, and the cartels really benefiting from that tremendously as they went heavy into the business of human trafficking. So there is a huge legitimate national security aspect of migration, and it traces back to some of these larger geopolitical competitions.

Colin Kahl: You have both hit on some really important things. There is no debate that enormous amounts of irregular migration can be potentially politically destabilizing in any country that is the recipient. The rise of populism in the United States and in Europe can be directly traced back to anxieties about migration flows. But what is striking to me is that previous National Security Strategies largely framed democracies as our team and were critical of autocracies. The most recent document doesn't criticize autocracies at all but does criticize fellow democracies, especially in Europe, largely by externalizing our own cultural and political conversations over wokeness and what defines Western civilization. That is a notable shift.

China: A Big Beautiful Deal?

Colin Kahl: But let me get back to the China piece. Jake, the national security documents that you and H.R. oversaw defined China as the most consequential strategic competitor - the only country in the world that can challenge the United States across the board: militarily, diplomatically, technologically, economically. Russia can blow up the world, but they cannot dominate it. China can dominate the world. But as you said, Trump seems to be particularly focused on the China challenge through a political economy lens. Last year we saw a high-stakes game of chicken between the United States and China over trade. Trump threatened 100 percent tariffs but then walked the average back to around 47 percent after Beijing choked off the supply of rare earths essential for our defense industrial base. We have also seen reversals on technology export controls, including ones that started under the Trump administration and escalated under the Biden administration - most recently with Trump greenlighting exports of advanced Nvidia H200 AI chips. It looks like Trump and Xi Jinping are going to meet for a summit in April in Beijing, and they will probably meet again at the end of the year at the G20 here in the United States. My sense is that Trump is really angling for a big beautiful trade deal with China and that he may be willing to go even softer on tech and maybe even Taiwan in order to get it. Where do you think things are headed on the U.S.-China front?

Jake Sullivan: He would like the big beautiful trade deal with China. I think he is going to get a small, less beautiful trade deal. There will be some accommodation reached with respect to tariff levels and purchase commitments, all aimed at his objective of reducing the trade deficit. But I don't believe it is going to address a lot of the underlying structural issues that China presents to the United States and the rest of the world - their industrial overcapacity that is flooding the world with products on a non-commercial basis and undermining the ability of workers and businesses in the West to compete. Nothing he does is going to get at that problem. So I think you are basically going to see some incremental and relatively tactical gains. On the Chinese side, they don't want to put all their chips on President Trump because they recognize he is in his second term, he only has so long to go, he is unpredictable - they can only bet on him so much even within his term. So I would expect something more modest, more tactical, more incremental this year. The big question for me - and I alluded to this in my previous answer - the Chinese are interested in getting President Trump to say something different about Taiwan than previous presidents have said. Something about peaceful reunification or opposing independence - some formula that moves the needle in their direction. And I think President Trump might be tempted to do that. There would be reverberating impacts on the confidence of our partners in Taiwan and the confidence of our allies in the region. That is something for all of us to watch very closely. I should also note that I am hearing from contacts in China that they actually expect the possibility of up to four meetings this year: the Trump trip to Beijing, a Xi trip to the States disconnected from the G20, then China hosting the APEC summit, and the United States hosting the G20. So there is actually the possibility of four separate leader meetings in 2026 alone - a lot of opportunity for everything I just said to be proven totally wrong.

H.R. McMaster: That is exactly what the president wants - the phase two trade deal he didn't get in Trump one. If you can picture Xi Jinping as the Peanuts character Lucy and President Trump as Charlie Brown, I think that is what is going to happen again - Xi is going to move the football. So really, I think you are going to see President Trump ultimately backing into the kind of competitive approach that he adopted in Trump one, and that was an element of continuity between the Trump and Biden administrations. What is different from Trump one to today is that a lot of the people who were actually pretty productive interlocutors for us - like Liu He in Trump one - they are gone. Xi Jinping has really, with these purges inside of China, surrounded himself with hardliners who - especially because of Wang Huning and some of the people around Xi - truly believe that the West is in decline, that we are weak, that we are decadent, that we are divided. So when President Trump goes there in April, Xi is going to feel like this is President Trump going to supplicate to the emperor, and the visuals will be designed to do that - which I don't think President Trump is going to like on the back end. A lot could happen with these meetings and in between these meetings, but ultimately the president will be disabused of this idea that China will significantly curtail its unfair trade and economic practices and the form of economic warfare it is waging against us.

Jake Sullivan: I want to reinforce this really important point H.R. just made. The Chinese leadership has this phrase: "The East is rising, the West is declining." By the East they mean China, and by the West they mean the United States. They really believe that the U.S. is in secular decline and that a lot of that has to do with our political dysfunction and their view that democracies simply cannot succeed in the 21st century. It is interesting that last year, in this episode of Trump slapping on the tariffs and China responding with the rare earth export controls, the lesson that Xi Jinping took from that is that China holds the high cards - that America has vulnerabilities, that China has a lot of leverage. So you have both at a tactical and a broad structural and strategic level a real confidence emanating from Beijing right now. Combine that with the fact that they are uncertain about exactly where Trump is going to go - and H.R.'s point that Trump could easily shift from a more conciliatory to a more competitive position between one meeting and another, between one year and another. All of that adds up to China feeling it doesn't have to give a lot. It also doesn't want to give too much that puts it on the hook for an unpredictable president. Where I am not sure I agree with H.R. is I am not sure that Trump wants to move into a really competitive posture here. It seems to me that he is going to accept something short of phase two, declare victory, and say: "I have made peace with Xi, China and the U.S. are good, I am reducing the trade deficit." I am not as convinced that he is going to move to the same kind of competitive strategy he pursued when H.R. was in the seat.

Alliances: Cracks or Reconstruction?

Colin Kahl: One other continuity in the approaches embodied in your two National Security Strategies was the recognition that in today's day and age, foreign policy is increasingly a team sport and that we need our allies alongside us. It doesn't mean they don't need to be spending more on their own defense, and it doesn't mean there aren't complaints about them not doing enough. But every single problem we face, we typically do it alongside our closest treaty allies in Europe and Japan - not the least of which is trying to think through the China challenge, negotiating with China from a position of collective strength. What is the health of our alliances right now? We have already talked about Greenland and the civilizational erasure issue. Jake, starting with you and then H.R.: how bad are things right now in U.S. alliances? Is there a meaningful difference between Europe and Asia on that scorecard?

Jake Sullivan: It feels pretty bad in the transatlantic alliance, at least at the level of mood and vibe. Whether at the level of structure - the reality of our shared interests and the reality of our interdependence - it has been shaken so badly that it is irreparable, I am less convinced of that. A lot of damage has been done, but there still is the reality that we are deeply tied to our European allies. Asia is an interesting case because, both in words and by and large in practice, what you see from the administration in terms of how it tries to sustain those alliances with Japan, Korea, Australia, and the Philippines, there is more continuity. But there was one episode that really stood out to me as concerning. When the prime minister of Japan, the "Iron Lady" Takaichi, made a comment while testifying before the Japanese parliament about how the situation around Taiwan is an existential threat to Japan, China freaked out about it and imposed a bunch of coercive responses. And rather than President Trump calling up Japan and saying "we have got your back" - as I think President Biden would have done, or maybe even President Trump in the first term - President Trump called Xi Jinping and said: "Hey, what do you make of all this?" Xi said: "You better call the Japanese and tell them to cool it." And Trump did that. So in Japan right now, they read that as some lack of confidence that the U.S. will have their back, and there is concern in quarters in Japan that they are going to have to make their own accommodation with China over time. That is a dynamic for us to watch. It is by no means a foregone conclusion - we could end up seeing a quite robust allied strategy under this administration in Asia - but it was a warning sign. Does he see the whole approach to allies as being China first, allies second, or the other way around? I think only time will tell over the course of 2026.

Colin Kahl: H.R., do you think it is mostly about vibes, or is there something deeper and more structural going on in terms of tensions and fragility within our alliances?

H.R. McMaster: I agree with Jake that the structural factors are still in favor of the strong alliance. Who is going to lead Europe without the United States? France? I don't think so, man. Who is going to sign up for another European country leading Europe? Nobody will at this moment. But what you are seeing are subregional, tighter groups within the alliance emerging - between the Nordic and the Baltic states and Poland - and a lot of that coalescing, as well as increased defense spending up to 5 percent, with 3.5 percent going to hard military capabilities, is based on some doubts about U.S. reliability and an associated erosion of trust. That is not good. The reason it is not good - and the reason why not backing up Takaichi-san is not good - is that it is the perception of weakness that is provocative to our adversaries. President Trump was right to demand more defense spending. But when it comes to the gratuitous insults, the failure to back up Takaichi, the mixed signals... Meanwhile the $20 billion arms sale to Taiwan is going through now - that is a really important thing to track, and the delivery of those capabilities to Taiwan. And that is why Ukraine is important. What Putin wants, what he thinks he can get, is for the United States to support terms for a ceasefire that are unacceptable to the Ukrainians and the Europeans, and to use that gap to break apart the alliance. This is what Putin is dreaming about. So I don't think we should do anything to encourage him or to encourage Xi Jinping vis-a-vis Taiwan. I am an optimist. We could wind up with Europe spending a heck of a lot more on defense, taking more responsibility for their defense - like Japan is now, like South Korea is now - and then rebuilding that bridge of trust. It could be the best of both worlds. I hope, maybe even beginning here in North America with a better relationship with the Canadians. I hope the president will be convinced that it is the perception of weakness - in our alliance, here at home with the vitriolic partisan discourse - that provokes our adversaries and could transform them into enemies and lead to war.

Colin Kahl: H.R., before we make peace with Canada we have to beat them for the Olympic hockey gold, and then we can...

H.R. McMaster: Hey, the women's hockey team did a great job!

Jake Sullivan: That is true, they shut them out. Not that I want to rub anything in with my Canadian friends right now. I am sorry I even mentioned it.

Colin Kahl: H.R., you did use that word "trust." I think for our listeners, at some level America's extended security commitments to our allies have always been kind of irrational, because it basically commits the United States to be willing to commit national suicide to defend other countries. There is a kind of fundamental irrationality at the heart of that, and what solves that problem is trust in the United States. This is actually where the vibe and the mood matter - not just because it erodes trust in the moment, but because I worry that we are getting into a place where our allies will think they cannot trust the United States for any longer than four-to-eight-year increments based on who is in power. That is a really different mindset than the confidence that there was a bipartisan commitment underlying our alliances.

H.R. McMaster: There is this movement toward retrenchment that actually cuts across both political parties. The frustration among many Americans that President Trump tapped into was the fact that we were covering Europe's defense bills - and Europe really accounting for about 19 percent of the world's GDP and 50 percent of the world's social spending. American taxpayers are asking: why are we underwriting defense and covering their defense bills and thereby indirectly underwriting their social programs? And then there are the deep frustrations associated with the unanticipated length and difficulty of the wars in Afghanistan and in particular in Iraq - and the belief that we really can't achieve good outcomes abroad anyway, so we should just focus on our stuff here at home. That sentiment is not going away. What is necessary is for American leadership to explain to the American people how problems that develop abroad can only be dealt with at an exorbitant cost once they reach our shores - and how much cheaper it is to prevent a war than to have to fight one. We need to make those arguments for investments in active foreign policy and diplomatic efforts, but also sustained commitments to capable U.S. forces abroad operating as part of these alliances, which have prevented great power conflict for 80 years. Why do we want to get rid of that? The three of us are internationalists. The MAGA people will call me a globalist - I am really not a globalist. Maybe you guys are, but I am not for sure. But we cannot take that argument for granted anymore. We have to make it as clearly as we can to the engaged American public.

Iran: Strike or Deal?

Colin Kahl: H.R., you mentioned American public exhaustion with the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As we speak, Trump is marshaling what he describes as an "armada" - also known as a single aircraft carrier with a second carrier on the way and some air defense and strike assets - moving into the Middle East to put coercive pressure on Iran to cut a deal. My own view is there is probably a deal on the table, a narrow nuclear deal, one even that Trump could frame as better than the deal that the Obama administration got. Do you think there will be a deal? Something that covers Iran's ballistic missiles and its proxy activity? Bibi Netanyahu was just in Washington this week to try to convince Trump not to buckle and accept a bad deal.

H.R. McMaster: Colin, I don't think there is going to be a deal with Iran. The Trump administration will not accept anything short of no enrichment, probably giving up the 60 percent enriched uranium that they already have. It will have to cover missiles for sure, and it will carry over to support for proxies and the terrorist organizations they have been supporting. The real downside of the 2015 deal was the degree to which it allowed the IRGC to fill its coffers and to double and in some cases triple its stipends to the terrorist organizations and armed groups across the region - really building up that ring of fire around Israel so they could light it on October 7th. A lot of people in retrospect look back to the 2015 deal and say: we helped the Khamenei regime get back on its feet. I think that kind of argument is going to prevail among Trump's advisors. And as you know, what Trump really tries to do is always try to get a deal first. This is what happened before Operation Midnight Hammer - he gave them 60 days, didn't get it, struck. He sent Grenell to Venezuela - didn't get a deal, then took action to arrest Maduro. I think that is the way it is going to play out. These guys just murdered 30,000 people in 48 hours. What I would love to see is a lot more diplomatic effort to isolate those bastards - kick out every Iranian embassy in the world, show that we cannot tolerate that degree of mass murder and the horrors inflicted on their own people. I think there is going to be a series of strikes aimed at diminishing the regime's capacity to repress its own people, going after the efforts to reconstitute the missile and nuclear programs, and maybe preemptively taking out what the Iranian regime would use as a response - IRGC Navy, drone locations and factories and that sort of thing. I think the chance of that happening is probably about 80 percent.

Colin Kahl: Jake, you obviously have your own personal experience with diplomacy with the Iranians. What is your view?

Jake Sullivan: I am more like 60 percent. I think there is a higher percentage chance that Trump looks at a deal that is going to feel quite a bit like the 2015 deal in many respects and says: that is better than military action that doesn't necessarily have a very clear purpose to it. What is interesting to me is why are we even talking about the nuclear program right now in this way. It is because of a chain of events set off by President Trump going on social media and saying: if Iran kills its own people, I will hit them. And then saying to the protesters who went out into the streets incredibly bravely across every province of Iran: "Help is on the way." I talked to a Washington Post journalist who covers Iran, who made the point that no, they didn't go in the streets because of Trump, but they definitely saw what he said and thought that America was going to have their back. And then the regime, as H.R. just pointed out, absolutely brutally, on an industrial scale, massacred its own citizens and put it down. So now we are in this weird situation where the whole impetus behind military action was about supporting the protesters, and it has now shifted to being coercive towards trying to get a nuclear deal - which just goes to show you all of this is a bit mushy. And if we did take military action, you have to ask: to what end? We did it last year. President Trump said the nuclear program was "totally obliterated." Now we are talking about the nuclear program again six months later. We could hit them again, yes. We could degrade them. It is unlikely we are going to cause regime change through the air. So I am a bit confused about what this military action is going to accomplish other than just continuing to create a circumstance where every few months we have to go back with military force again and again. Whereas if you got a deal, you put the program in a box, you get verification, and you are not constantly in this position where you have to be lining up to take out enriched material or centrifuges or missiles. So I would hope that President Trump would look seriously at the diplomatic option. I think he might. Although if H.R. is 80-20 there will be strikes, I still think it is more likely than not there will be strikes, but I am closer to 60-40. The key question is that they have not resolved internally - and they certainly haven't shared with any of us - what the objective of the strikes would be. Would it be to degrade the missile and nuclear program? Would it be to hit the IRGC? Would it be to destabilize the regime? Or just punish them for the massacres - you did that and we are going to hit you for it? Emotionally I understand - who doesn't want to hit these guys for something like that? But strategically, that is a more questionable approach.

Venezuela: Governance by Joystick

Colin Kahl: If we don't know whether regime change is the goal in Iran, we do know that we have had not a regime change but a government and leadership change in Venezuela because of U.S. military action. Jake, any thoughts about the endgame in Venezuela for the Trump administration?

Jake Sullivan: I am very interested in what H.R. has to say about this. This is unusual - I am not sure there is a modern historical analog to replacing a leader, then getting the number two to step in and essentially agree to let the United States more or less call the shots from offshore under the threat of further military action. It seems like this is not ultimately a long-term sustainable trajectory, but it has worked for a few weeks at least. I think the reason it has worked is because we pretty much only asked them for one big thing: let American oil companies go in and exploit Venezuela's oil resources. And by the way, that works for the regime in Caracas quite well, because they will get their cut, and getting their cut will allow them to continue to entrench themselves in power. The question for me is: at some point, is the Trump administration going to say, "Hey, actually we need some kind of democratic transition here"? I sort of thought they would head in that direction, although the way they are putting down Machado, the main opposition leader, suggests they may just be happy with the status quo. It is occupation by joystick, occupation by remote control. So far they have gotten the regime to acquiesce, but I think that is largely because what they are asking of the regime suits the regime just fine and is quite limited. I just don't know if that is a tenable situation to play out over the longer term.

Colin Kahl: There is this old phrase "gunboat diplomacy" - this is a little bit of gunboat governance. H.R., where is gunboat governance going in Venezuela?

H.R. McMaster: It is not gunboat diplomacy as much as it is coercive diplomacy, or what the famous and fantastic late Stanford professor Alexander George called "forceful persuasion." We are testing the limits of coercive diplomacy - he has a great book also called The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy. Jake, we are asking them to do a heck of a lot more than just let the oil companies back in. It is to release political prisoners, kick the Cubans and the Russians and the Chinese out. This is Rubio's four points - a plan for a political transition. Now, will the Chavistas fire themselves? Probably not. But what it really has to be is the U.S. and other countries in partnership with the Venezuelan opposition. I was with members of the opposition last week - they are very optimistic about this. They really feel like it could work. What they are envisioning is kind of a Poland-type transition. After the cover of the Soviet Union was pulled back and the Warsaw Pact collapsed, you had the Solidarity movement, which had been bolstered and gained strength in partnership with the Catholic Church, who sat down at a round table with the communists and came to a decision on how to transition to a new form of government. In Venezuela, you have the benefit of the constitution still being there, to be resurrected, and you have a history of democratic governance. I think you are right to be skeptical, Jake, but there is a chance here if we stick to it, if we keep the pressure on. It might take more than we have got on the table now to convince the Chavistas to essentially fire themselves.

Jake Sullivan: Those are good points. I wasn't even really trying to express skepticism - it is just we haven't really tried something like this before, so it is interesting to see how it will play out, and I do think it is somewhat tenuous. Good point on the political prisoners - there has been positive news on that, although we have seen that movie before with Venezuela, where they do releases and then they round people back up. They are already doing that - prominent media arrests. So I am a bit more skeptical on how much of that is theater and how much is real. The democratic transition ultimately has to be a part of it - and the Solidarity analogy is an interesting one I want to take a closer look at. Pulling that off would be really challenging. I have been struck by the degree to which they have treated Maria Corina Machado as a nuisance as opposed to an ally in all this. That may be public posturing, and quietly they are doing things we don't fully understand. That to me is ultimately the test of how this will play out: does it move in that direction, or do we lock in a longer-term scenario where you essentially have a dictatorship sitting in Caracas doing resource extraction deals with the United States? I think there is a good possibility that is where we are a year or two from now. But let's see - it is definitely worth watching closely because it is a novel exercise, a novel model for the exercise of American power.

H.R. McMaster: I think we ought to say: it is a righteous endeavor, based on the nature of Maduro's regime and the Chavistas. They drove 8 million Venezuelans out of the country and destroyed that country. So let's hope. But those guys, all of them other than the top dog, they are all still there, wetting their beaks - Cabello and others.

Colin Kahl: And this is really the dilemma that we will have to see unfold in 2026. Things seem relatively stable by remote control now because essentially the same folks can continue to corruptly acquire rents off of economic activity - oil deals go through, they get their cut. But when you are talking about a democratic transition, suddenly some of these guys are going to face the prospect of going to jail. And a lot of these guys have guns. That is the dilemma the administration is going to have to deal with.

H.R. McMaster: They can go to Mexico and enjoy the hospitality of the Morena party, who they bankrolled for many years. Maybe they can do that.

What to Read to Understand the World

Colin Kahl: Well, listen, there are a bunch of other things we could have talked about. 2026 is going to be a big year for Ukraine, it is going to be a big year as it relates to the disruptive implications of artificial intelligence on the economy, and there are a lot of other things. I hope to have you both back to talk about those, not to mention whatever else crazy happens in the world between now and the end of the year. But I wanted to end my first podcast hosting World Class with a bit of an homage to Ezra Klein. Ezra Klein runs a great podcast and he always asks his guests for three book recommendations at the end - which is awesome because I am a professor and there are books all around me. But I don't have any time to read a single book these days, let alone three. So I am going to ask you a different question: what is one article you would recommend our listeners read to understand the world? Jake, you go first.

Jake Sullivan: I just recently read a piece in the New Yorker called "What Is Claude" - which is about how Anthropic is really actually trying to understand the nature of this artificial intelligence capability we are developing and trying to look inside the black box with all of these emergent properties. How do we characterize it? What is happening in there? What do we understand? What don't we understand? I think it is a pretty accessible way to get at some of the really elemental questions about artificial intelligence and what exactly we are dealing with here. I would highly recommend that to everyone - and a thousand other articles besides, but that is one.

Colin Kahl: All right, H.R., how about you?

H.R. McMaster: I would like to recommend an essay by my colleague here at Hoover, Stephen Kotkin, in the December issue of Foreign Affairs called "Weakness of the Strongman." If I can do my Kotkin impersonation: it is basically about strongmen being dependent on five things to stay in power. He talks about the five elements of authoritarian control but also explores how exercising those tools of authoritarian control create weaknesses that can be exploited. Great essay.

Colin Kahl: Awesome. Well, I encourage everybody to go check those two articles out. H.R., Jake, thanks so much for joining the podcast, and make sure to check out Jake and H.R.'s podcasts too. Thanks, everybody.

Jake Sullivan: Thank you.

H.R. McMaster: Thanks, as always.

Colin Kahl: You have been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you are hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, to stay up to date on what is happening in the world and why.