Ben Rhodes

That's the mindset that has failed.

I'd like to introduce sanction to this conversation.

The most heavily sanctioned countries in the world by the United States in the 21st century have been Cuba,

Iran, North Korea, Russia, have those, has that worked?

Are those places better?

I think we're all friends now, aren't we?

We are.

And their governments are less, the governments are more repressive and more adversarial to us.

So I think we should be open to radically different approaches where you may look at Iran and say, you know what might work better?

And again, this will be really controversial.

I just want to try to stretch the conversation here.

It might be better to lift sanctions on these people because putting sanctions on this government has made it more repressive, has empowered the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that knows how to trade in the black market and have revenue.

It's Iranian people that get screwed.

And so this is connected to Libya because it's that fallacy that we can engineer the politics of other countries because we're America.

Better to do that over time by setting an example and following international law and trading and conducting diplomacy, the ways that most countries try to influence other countries.

That tends to work better, but America gets impatient.

And we're like, we don't like what you did.

We're going to sanction you or bomb you.

And there's just not a track record of that working.

But to be honest – but here's where we got to be honest about Crimea too.