Timothy Naftali

They're the ones likely, and the tech bros, they're the ones likely to benefit from this.

So we don't just have, this is, to use the term from Broadway, this is a musical crap game that is going from conflict zone to conflict zone.

And the president is using this as a way to enrich himself and his allies.

There is no precedent for this.

And because there is no country as powerful as the United States,

No authoritarian leader in the world has the opportunities for enrichment that Donald Trump has at the moment.

And you know, one of the things that students of the Cold War, some, missed was that we did not engage in our Cold War crusades in search of resources.

In fact, the area where we were most, the quagmire area was Vietnam and there were at the time no resources whatsoever.

We were in the business of regime change and regime construction because we were contesting the world with the Soviet Union.

And we were also worried about the credibility of our alliances.

When we were dragged into some countries, we were dragged in because of the weakness of our allies.

And Iran is a perfect example.

We topple the government of Iran because the British have been pressing us to do this.

I'm bringing this up because what the president is doing, our president is doing now, is what weak countries do, not strong countries.

The British...

were weak and they needed to control the oil refinery in Abadan in Iran.

And they did not want the Iranians to have a better share of the money that was really theirs.

And so the British put pressure on us to help them.

And we knew how weak the British were.

So it's absolutely true that the mercantilist Trump vision of how states are powerful is a vision of a weak country, not a strong one.