Trita Parsi

is Russia.

I mean, it's such an ambiguous term.

And to have that as the basis of what you have to defend is the opposite direction of restraint, in my estimation.

I mean, it was noteworthy, because there's no mention of anyone else contributing to the United States.

Now, of course, in his defense, he's saying this to an European audience, trying to console them and reassure them that the United States still is there, which, again, I think is contradictory in many different ways, because the message was supposed to be, you have to understand, you have to stand on your own legs.

Rubio gave with this type of reassurance is another bite at the illusionary apple for the Europeans to think that there still is an ability for them to rely on the United States without actually taking full responsibility.

Despite the fact that he keeps on saying Europe has to step up, et cetera, et cetera, the way this whole thing landed in Munich was that this was the opposite of Vamps.

And as a result, they can go back to the old illusion that they lived in, in which they can just rely on the United States.

I agree with most of what you said there, Sagar, and I don't think it is freelancing.

I think this is an effort by a former neocon to essentially try to co-opt much of the restrainers within the administration by appealing to some of their conservative values, which tend to lend themselves to this idea of this civilizational discourse.

And as a result, make sure that he gets a neoconservative at its root policy in the clothes of something that is supposed to sound to certain conservatives as restraint.

I mean, keep in mind, he talked about the Western century.

A colleague of mine pointed out that this is the exact same language of the neocons in the 1990s when they talked about the new American century.

Mm-hmm.

So to me, it sounded that this was a very clever, and I have to say, you know, though I strongly disagree with a lot of elements in that speech, it was a brilliant speech for his purposes.

I think it's very important here to make the connection to Gaza.

The United States has had an embargo on Cuba for decades.

Even when the Obama administration had the opening with Cuba, they did not touch the embargo because the embargo goes through Congress and Obama essentially chose not to do that.

He only lifted executive orders.

Never in that embargo