David E. Sanger

The president engaged on this, but I'm not sure he'd given it a huge amount of thought before we started discussing it.

And at some point, Tyler Pager jumped back in to bring the topic back to the central question of Venezuela.

One of the things that we all really wanted to know was, what would it take for the president to actually send American forces back on the ground in Venezuela?

Because the U.S.

has really never tried an experiment like the one that we're seeing play out now, which is a kind of virtual or remote control occupation.

Running a foreign country kind of by phone.

Or by having an armada floating just offshore.

Would you do it if you couldn't get at the oil?

Would you do it if they didn't kick out the Chinese and the Russians?

But President Trump insisted to us that right now he's getting from the Venezuelan government, which is essentially all filled with Maduro's appointees, everything that he wants.

And most of what he wants is access to the oil.

I think this is one of the most fascinating windows into the way President Trump thinks.

Because as you just heard there, he views the only check on his power to be his own moral compass.

And that outside institutions, whether they're the U.N.

or an international treaty, only means what he interprets it to mean.

And that tells you that he wants to operate as a leader with fundamentally no check at all because he thinks he's a good person and therefore the world can rely on his good judgment and his good heart.

And so we thought we'd sort of stress test that by turning to Greenland.

What he's essentially saying is the U.S.

holds all the cards, has all the power, and NATO's not going to have a choice because there is no NATO without the United States.

And therefore, if the price of keeping the alliance together is handing the U.S.