Trita Parsi

And I really worry that that may be the only de-escalatory card that can be played right now, and they're not playing it.

You can go to my Twitter, which is tparsi, or you can go to the Quincy Institute's website or our publication platform, which is responsiblestatecraft.org or quincyinst.org.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much, Steve.

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Good to see you, sir.

Good to see you.

Thank you for having me.

Well, there's a couple of things.

One is just to look at the remarks themselves and then also the European reaction.

Here you have a Secretary of State that is decrying the end of the Cold War.

He's decrying the fact that the West is no longer expansionist, decrying the collapse of Western, non-American empires, decrying decolonization and the end of Western imperialism.

empires and gets a standing ovation for that.

I mean, there's so much to unpack here because at the end of the day, you could see that the Europeans by standing up and giving a standing ovation for this are willing to accept any basis

for a partnership with the United States, as long as they're allowed to continue to live in the illusion that they matter to the United States.

It didn't matter that the values that he was putting forward here are values that the vast majority of Europe already has abandoned decades ago.

But Rubio was going back to this era of empire, imperialism, colonization as something positive, and he got a standing ovation for that.

So I think some of these things that you mentioned obviously are true, but they're more recent developments.

This vast abandonment of international law, for instance.

Not to say that Europe always has been perfect or anything like that, but this is a more recent development.