Heather Cox Richardson

Right.

They're going to say, we're going to make an agreement, a peacetime agreement.

It's not going to be that this is only going to happen during wartime.

We're going to agree to make treaties for peace.

And in those peacetime treaties, we're going to agree to cooperate in trade, for example, and we're going to maintain freedom of the seas, which we don't talk enough about.

Freedom of the seas is what has given us our extraordinary world trade.

You don't have to worry about

pirates coming after you, except on rare occasions, for example, off the coast of Somalia for a while.

And now, of course, this is something the United States is doing.

But there was freedom of the seas.

There was an international financial cooperative system.

There's all these different kind of organizations.

But key to that was the United Nations, in which its signatories agreed they would not challenge the sovereignty of another country.

Some of those same people put together the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.

And what NATO did, it was really the key to all this.

They said, hey, listen, anybody who attacks one of us attacks all of us.

So rather than using their power for, hey, we're going to run and get your oil or we're going to get your rubber or we're going to absorb your people in your territory and grab them into our armies the way Putin is doing right now in Ukraine.

Rather than doing that, we're going to band together so that we are a defensive organization.

Mm-hmm.

And what Trump is doing by going into Venezuela, for example, by threatening all these other countries, is he is disregarding that entire system, which has been the goal for a long time, as I say, of Vladimir Putin, because he doesn't want it.