Trita Parsi

It has strong support internationally to go in that direction.

But it was a very useful institution to the United States in the past.

But here's the more important point.

If we are going towards a multipolar world, and Rubio is the one who said it exactly a year ago, then not only is the world multipolar, unipolarity is an aberration, he said, which kind of contradicts what he said in the Munich speech.

But if that is the case, that means that the United States no longer has the power to constrain its rivals, such as Russia, China, future countries, in the same manner that it did before.

It still has the interests

of constraining them, but it doesn't have the same power any longer.

So there's a delta now between its interest and its power.

What alternative instruments do you have to be able to fill that delta?

Well, the obvious answer is international law, international law, these institutions who have served exactly that purpose for all other countries throughout this period and will increasingly play that role for the United States that no longer have the unipolar leverage and benefit that it did in the past.

To me, it seems to have been a complete leap away from restraint.

Restraint at the core was that we have to have a more narrow definition of U.S.

interests.

Instead of thinking that we have to defend everything outside in the world, instead of thinking that we have to think about alliances or the free world as the thing we have to protect, we go back to our national interest and narrow definition of it.

Not because we're against alliances, not because we're against a free world, but because those type of conceptions led the United States to constantly enter into war.

And if we have that type of a definition in which we believe that every corner of the world is part of a U.S.

vital interest, then we will be at war somewhere all the time.

And that is the history of the last 20 or plus years.

Here, you have a massive expansion of the US interests, because he's not only talking about an alliance system, he's not only talking about the free world, now he's talking about Western civilization as the core of what the United States needs to defend, and without even being able to define exactly what is it.

I mean, is Latin America part of Western civilization, or is it part of the Global South, as many people in Latin America would define themselves?