Ben Rhodes

There's not a record of a regime change supported by the United States through military force that made a place better.

And so I think what we have had trouble coming to terms with is we like to think, and a lot of people, frankly, that work in foreign policy, they sit in Washington, like to think that they can move some pieces around a board and sanction these people and they'll do something or bomb these people and they'll do something.

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.