David E. Sanger

Your decision to capture Maduro and declare that the U.S.

was in charge for the foreseeable future, I think raised a question of whether you believe, as your aide Stephen Miller put it so clearly the other night, that international niceties are gone, that countries operate by strength.

I think he said governed by strength, governed by force, governed by power.

I think that left a lot of people wondering whether you believe you have the right, as the world's largest superpower, to go in and extinguish any threat or seize any resource you think is in the U.S.

interest, particularly in the Western Hemisphere.

For most presidents, military power is the very last resort.

After everything else, every form of diplomacy has failed you.

So I wanted to get the president focused on the question of what criteria he uses to exercise the most extreme and deadly form of American power, which is the military.

But also try to figure out how much of a motivation in Venezuela was the fact that it's sitting on the world's largest reserves of oil.

You've gone in in part to get a resource, which you just declared today.

That all this talk about a threat from drugs, from criminals and all that might be secondary to his true motivation here.

So supposing you're Xi Jinping and you've watched the events of the past few days.

And I wanted him to talk a little bit about the long-term implications.

of this, the precedent it sets.

You may also be thinking, if you're Xi, that you could use the same logic to decapitate and control Taiwan.

Or why couldn't Putin use that argument?

Same argument.

It's a threat to grab the rest of Ukraine or go beyond into other former Soviet states.

Have you created a precedent that you may come to regret later on?

that what happens if you're Xi Jinping and you're watching this thinking, boy, this is useful when I'm justifying going after Taiwan?