[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We have Jimmy Wales coming up on today's show, co-founder of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is turning 25 years old. We'll talk about political controversies surrounding it right now, like a lot of people on the right call it Wokepedia. Elon Musk even started an alternative AI version that he calls Grokipedia. Jimmy Wales is going to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Wikipedia and talk about his new book that's somewhat of a history and somewhat of a blueprint for restoring trust in the world, which is one of the missions that he sees for Wikipedia. The book is called The Seven Rules of Trust. Jimmy Wales coming up. Also, later, we're going to have a call in on what you do when you quit social media, even if you just quit it temporarily. Jay Caspian Kang wrote about this in The New Yorker. He's going to join us. One of the things he was interested in is whether people read more books when they take a social media holiday. We'll take your calls and talk to Jay Caspian Kang about that later, but we start here. There has been yet another act of war, I think it's fair to call it, between the Trump administration and Venezuela, and another act of culture war by the Trump administration toward Europe, which matters domestically, too.

Regarding Venezuela, President Trump announced that the US has seized an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast. He said, "It was seized for a very good reason." We'll see if we can figure out what he thinks the reason is." About the oil, he said, "We keep it, I guess." Venezuela called the seizure a bare-faced robbery and an act of international piracy. Interestingly, and maybe complicating your thinking on this, this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, is in Oslo, Norway, where the peace prize ceremony was just held.

The New York Times says Ms. Machado has been a steadfast supporter of President Trump's pressure campaign against Mr. Maduro, whom the Trump administration has accused of flooding the United States with drugs and criminals. Today, Ms. Machado dodged a reporter's question, The Times says, about her views on the threat of US military action in Venezuela, but she repeated the Trump administration's talking points on Maduro's government, comparing him to a criminal mastermind engaged in a vast array of illegal activities in partnership with America's adversaries. That's part of the Venezuela story.

Then, the release of the Trump administration's national security strategy last week that Americans and the rest of the world are still digesting, Fred Kaplan on Slate calls it, among other things, rah-rah supportive of European ultra nationalist parties that oppose immigration. We'll talk to Fred in just a minute. One example of that, though, there's a section called Promoting European Greatness, which says Europe is facing "the prospect of civilization erasure". Civilization erasure. It warns that many of its countries will "become majority non-European". The president reinforced that in an interview with Politico this week.

President Trump: Europe is a different place.

Dasha Burns: What do you mean by that?

President Trump: If it keeps going the way it's going, Europe will not be-- In my opinion, many of those countries will not be viable countries any longer. Their immigration policy is a disaster.

Brian Lehrer: Immigration policy. The document, though officially a national security strategy assessing threats from the outside world, also aims related culture war slings and arrows domestically, with lines like a stated goal of the "retention and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health", which includes "strong traditional families that raise healthy children".

On the healthy children part, we might note that it says nothing about their cuts to SNAP benefits and health insurance coverage. Presumably, the traditional families part of that section is the point. With us now is Fred Kaplan, who writes the War Stories column for Slate and is author of The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, and many other books about US military and foreign policy. Fred, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Fred Kaplan: Good to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with the national security strategy document, and then we'll get to Venezuela. What does the security strategy tell you about how the Trump administration sees the world?

Fred Kaplan: If this document didn't exist and we went through talking about what Trump believes about this, that, or the other thing, we've come to the same conclusions. What makes it different is that it is all written down on 30 pieces of paper. It's a 30-page document. A lot of foreign governments tend to take these kinds of documents--

As one person I know who used to write these kinds of things put it, they tend to read them a lot more carefully than we write them. They look at these as statements of doctrine and draw conclusions from them. To the extent that there are contradictory things within them, as there are in this document, they often focus on the parts that are most worrisome to them, and they outline some of those very things.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. On this alleged civilization erasure, as the document calls it, that Europe is allegedly headed for, it also says, "We want Europe to remain European," which you call a barely disguised euphemism for we want Europe to remain white. Does it make or even try to make any serious case that has any relevance to US national security?

Fred Kaplan: No. This goes back to Vice President Vance's speech at the Munich conference last year, where he really quite explicitly made a campaign plea for the far right, it really is no exaggeration to call them neo-Nazi, parties in Germany. He criticized the German government for trying to put limits on their position in the government, on the banning of literature that we would call Nazi.

Certain aspects of the First Amendment, it might not be the best thing to apply to a country that's been through all the hell that Germany has been through over the past couple of hundred years. One should allow a certain amount of suppression of certain ideas because they're quite live and easy to rile. In the meantime, really, Vance, Trump, the whole lot have no business talking about freedom of speech when Trump says just the other day that it is an act of treason for The New York Times to publish questions about his health publicly. He really did say this. The double standards are just-- Appalling doesn't begin to summarize them.

Brian Lehrer: I keep coming back to immigration. Why are those domestic cultural references in there, domestic ones, retention of US cultural health, including strong traditional families, if this is supposed to be a national security document, which presumably looks at threats from the outside world?

Fred Kaplan: I think to the extent that it is a foreign policy document, in some ways, it's to express rather strongly a measure of identity with those far-right-wing parties in Europe. like, "Yes, you guys are on the right track. We want to head that way, too." On the other hand, it's also very much a domestic political document. The whole introduction-- and this kind of thing has never been stated even mildly in any national security strategy document that I've seen. The whole first section is a chest-thumping exercise in praising all the great things that Trump has done. It's self-boosting. It is a boosterish document. I think a lot of the business about traditional families and so forth is to be read in that context.

Brian Lehrer: I guess, but I think it's more than that. This foreign policy document, as I say, I think it reveals something about his domestic immigration policy. To that point, I want to play another clip of the president that I've never thought has gotten as much attention as it may be deserved, relevant to tying these two strands together, US place in the world, and domestic immigration policy. This is from his UN General Assembly speech in September.

President Trump: Proud nations must be allowed to protect their communities and prevent their societies from being overwhelmed by people they have never seen before with different customs, religions, with different everything.

Brian Lehrer: That was in September. I'm going to add to that that on this week on Tuesday at his rally in Pennsylvania, which was purportedly about the economy, he confirmed the remark that was reported during his first term that he never admitted before, that he called many countries in Africa and elsewhere s-hole countries and asked, why can't we have "nice people", he said on Tuesday, like from Denmark and Norway? Fred, he's literally saying the quiet part out loud now, isn't he?

Fred Kaplan: More recently than that, he said he's basically banned refugees from coming to this country, with the notable exception of white Afrikaners in South Africa, whom he says are being subjected to genocide. Even many white Afrikaners in South Africa have disputed that allegation. No, you're right. The thing that's remarkable about Trump is that he very rarely has to resort to what we call dog whistles. He says it out loud at frequencies that we can all hear. It remains remarkable to me, the most remarkable thing, and not just in foreign policy, but about every aspect of this administration.

I'm not surprised by very much of what he has done or said. I am surprised by the lack of resistance within the Republican Party, which was not always a monomaniacal pro-MAGA party, and I think if you have private conversations with many Republicans still isn't. There's this fear of the kind of thing that really shouldn't take much conscience at all to stand up and object to. We're not seeing it. We're not even seeing that much systematic of it within the Democratic Party. That's the part of American politics that is really stunning me the most these days.

Brian Lehrer: We did a segment this week about data that shows only 5% of the immigrants detained by ICE this year have violent criminal records, and nearly half don't even have criminal charges against them. Taking that, plus his s-hole countries remark and this national security document together, it seems like we should stop pretending the immigration debate is about crime, which we used to hear a lot, and have the national conversation about what it's really for, resisting too much racial and cultural change.

Fred Kaplan: You're right. The other thing, Brian, is that this shows such an ignorance of American history, and even an American history of which Trump's family is a part. A couple of generations ago, his family came from Germany. The kinds of things being said about people from s-hole countries, as you put it now, are remarkably similar to the kinds of things that were said 100 years ago about Italian immigrants, Irish immigrants, Jewish immigrants, German immigrants. We weren't always white, Brian, you and I. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: That's right. Although we had a listener who sent us a text on this historical point the other day when we were doing that immigration data segment that said at least people like you and I, people from Eastern and Southern Europe, could eventually be taken into the category of white, people from Africa, a lot of darker skinned people from Latin America, some people from parts of Asia will never have that luxury.

Fred Kaplan: That's true, but I think there was always a tendency to accept, at least out loud in public, that these people could become Americans.

Brian Lehrer: Right, as Ronald Reagan did, by the way.

Fred Kaplan: Ronald Reagan had that great comment.

Brian Lehrer: We don't care where you come from. You want to be an American, we want you here.

Fred Kaplan: Yes. He said if you immigrate to France, Germany, whatever, you're never really going to become French or German, but if you come to America, you can become an American. That was Ronald Reagan. I don't think I'm being sentimentalizing about this. I think, to some extent, not as much of an extent as we would like, maybe, but to some extent, this used to be true.

At least presidents would try to put forth rhetoric that at least made it seem that they accepted the ideal. Trump is quite explicitly saying, "No, we're not about that. If you feel that way, you can express it openly. You don't have to crawl under a rock and churn your racist views privately. You can talk about it right up front, and you can act about it, too." That's one of the horrors of this era.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your comments or questions for Fred Kaplan, who writes the foreign policy and military-oriented War Stories column from Slate on Trump's national security strategy or military actions toward Venezuela, which we'll get to. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. As some pushback to some of the things we've been saying and some of the things that a lot of critics in this country, not to mention how they're freaking out in Europe, I saw that the headline in Le Monde in France, after they released the national security strategy here, was Trump declares war on Europe. That's an indication of the reaction there.

There's a New York Times op-ed by Christopher Caldwell, who leans right, called Trump Is Not Attacking Europe. He's Attacking Something Else. He acknowledges that the document refers to becoming non-European. Then he goes on to quote another line, "As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world or their alliance with the United States in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter." That's in the document, too.

Christopher Caldwell concludes or argues the administration is not arguing that people of this or that national origin are better than others. It argues that the nations of Europe are actual places with distinct cultural and civilizational qualities on the basis of which they make peace and go to war. He's arguing that there are, at least down the road, potential national security implications for the United States.

Fred Kaplan: The irony of this is that for a variety of reasons, the European nations are doing more now to boost their defense budgets, to do serious on-the-ground operational military planning, actual calculations about how many tanks, how many rounds of ammunition do we need in certain scenarios, rather than viewing the defense budget as strictly a theatrical.

Brian Lehrer: Which, by the way, Trump wants them to do.

Fred Kaplan: Yes, and they're doing it.

Brian Lehrer: These countries that he's afraid won't be allies, at the same time is asking them to build up their militaries.

Fred Kaplan: Yes, and they're doing that. Comparing this with the willingness of the Europeans to subordinate themselves to American will back when the NATO charter was signed in 1949, that's a rather high bar. Europe was still flat on its back from the damages of World War II. They had no choice. In fact, they had no choice but to do whatever the United States wanted. Actually, they were fine with that, given the still quite present Soviet threat on the other side of the Iron Wall, the Iron Curtain.

Look, I understand what he's talking about. Look, there is a distinction between patterns of immigration where there is a fairly rapid absorption of American or European cultural pattern. Assimilation is quite rapid and willing, and there are certain kinds of immigration today that are not. Part of this has to do with air travel. Any immigrant can go back to the native country quite often, and language barriers persist, whereas before, anybody who came here learned English quite rapidly.

I can see why some people are disturbed by this. The fact that it might have as much to say about our ability or certain European, especially France's, ability to absorb immigrants and to make them feel at home, than it does about the character of the people coming here. There was a story in The New York Times the other day about how a lot of people from Latin America are now immigrating to Spain instead of the United States.

They fly to Spain, they overstay their visas, and then they apply for residency. The government in Spain, which is quite left wing toward this subject, gladly takes them. Now, the same time, Spain is not granting similar benefits to Africans trying to enter the country by boat. We all have our problems in this respect. When you have ICE agents arresting people because of the way they look and that's all, how can you expect recent immigrants or even non-recent to feel like they too are Americans and should conduct themselves accordingly?

Brian Lehrer: Jack in Coney Island, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jack.

Jack: Coney Island. Welcome to Coney Island. My name is Jack. I grew up here all my life with Coney Island, Seagate, and of course, Trump Village. My brother-in-law worked for Trump Organization for 36 years. He died three years ago. We have to understand that Donald Trump's dad, he, he was a racist. He got dragged into court back in the early '80s because he didn't want to rent to Black people. Reluctantly, I have to say this, but like father, like son, he's a racist too, because Trump is Germanic, Irish, mixed, whatever, just like all the presidents. Even Obama's mama was Irish. They're all mixed. They forget that they committed genocide.

When Henry Hudson came to Coney Island-- Coney island is called Coney Island. It means the Raccoon island through Henry Hudson when He came in 1622. He bought Manhattan for $25, what about they did. Look at it. Where are the natives? That's the point. Europeans are great, but the problem is they cannot forget that to be an American, you have to repent and realize that even the amigos, the Mexicans, they've been here for 12,000 years or more.

The Europeans took Arizona, Mexico, but what I'm trying to say is there's a need for a correction of sin, both locally, nationally, and globally. The world has to get together. We have to create a sixth, a third, a fourth-- We have to create a third UN, not after a nuclear war. Germany is rearing its ugly head in those neck of the woods, and now they're starting to supply weapons, make weapons. Oh my goodness. This shows you that here we go for the third time. It looks like that's where it's going. The handwriting's on the wall. We're going to have a war, a convention war.

Brian Lehrer: I don't know if we're heading toward World War III. We'll get Fred's take on that, but, Jack, thank you for your call. I will say that you may be the only caller in the history of the show who entered singing.

Jack: [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much for your call.

Fred Kaplan: What [unintelligible 00:23:23], I think, by the way?

Brian Lehrer: I encourage it with other callers as long as you're not going to make people cringe too much. When he talks about the Trumps, there's so much in his call that we could discuss, and pick apart, and critique, and agree with, and whatever, but it reminds me that-- Was it Trump's father or a generation before that who changed the name to Trump?

Fred Kaplan: Yes, Drumpf.

Brian Lehrer: It was Drumpf, because they thought they were going to be discriminated against because they were German.

Fred Kaplan: Yes. They would have been. Yes, absolutely. The thing is that there's a lot of stuff, and there's a couple of passages in this national security strategy about this, too. Let's not talk about the dark side of American history. Let's talk emphasize the glories. There have been patterns to take references to slavery out of exhibits at the Smithsonian, because this just makes us feel guilty and we can't rise to our glories and so forth.

Brian Lehrer: Not only to slavery. Jack talks about in his phone call the stealing of what we now call the United States from the Indigenous people. Talk about civilization erasure, which the foreign policy document that Trump released warns Europe of, we can't even have Indigenous Peoples Day anymore in parallel with or replacing Columbus Day, according to the Trump administration, because it's too politically incorrect.

Fred Kaplan: I think what they miss, there is a way of discussing these things. In fact, I think there is a necessity to discuss these things without falling into patterns of guilt, and constant remorse, and self-abnegation. To be an American, just to focus on us for a minute, to improve our ability to meet the ideals that are laid out in the founders' documents and so forth, you have to address the shortcomings, the shortfalls, and how to narrow the gap between ideals and reality. That's part of what being a thinking American is, just as in Germany.

There are people in the far-right parties in Germany, which Trump, Musk, and Vance have celebrated, would say, "Oh, all these people who want us to have Nazi memorials and so forth, it just makes us feel bad. We want to ignore all of that," while, of course, actually absorbing Nazi ethos. No, Germany, especially Berlin, is a city that has addressed its nightmare histories in very creative ways. Most people in Berlin, for a while, some of these steps were quite controversial, but they actually view this with some pride of, yes, we are addressing this, we are acknowledging this, and by doing so, we can better move beyond it.

Brian Lehrer: One more call on this before we pivot to the seizure of an oil tanker by the United States off the coast of Venezuela. Monique in Tarrytown, you're on WNYC. Hi, Monique.

Monique: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. You guys have covered so many topics this morning, but I'd like to just bring attention to immigration. Actually, this is really about immigration. I just wanted to say that all this outrage is meaningless unless there's legislation, because you can have all the indignation that you want, but unless we do something as a democratic republic-- There is a legislation, which is the Dignity Act. It's bipartisan. It's getting absolutely no traction. My cynical view is that we don't want to solve this issue because that's what's driving our politicians on both sides. I just encourage everyone to look into the Dignity Act. I'd love for it to be featured in one of your--

We need solutions. All of this indignation without legislation is meaningless. If I can make a second point is that the whole idea of assimilation, before your program, the BBC was highlighting the carnage that's going on in Marseille. We need to think about the fact that there are certain core values that are in our constitution about respecting law, respecting life. Those just go back to the Ten Commandments, which is part of our Judeo-Christian tradition, which is it's not about your melanin, it's not about your sex. It's about an understanding of the human condition. That is, I think, beautiful about our country and our civilization. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Monique. Fred, one quick reaction to that. I don't know if this is where she was going exactly, but other countries have rebelled against US culture erasing national identities as a defense of global diversity and cultural uniquenesses around the world. Now, the US is arguing, Trump is arguing, that immigration at a certain scale threatens things that are culturally valuable here and in Western Europe. Fair or just racist false equivalency, if you have an opinion about that?

Fred Kaplan: Since the US is actually the dominant power in all this, it is a little bit misleading. Look, our country in some ways is a little different. Throughout our history, we have brought in and absorbed in many ways cultures. Some of the best things about our culture originated with people who are immigrants, starting with something that you and I have in common, the blues and jazz. If there weren't Africans coming to the United States, this would not have happened on our own, and many other things.

On her first point, it's instructive to remember that toward the end of the Biden administration, when Biden finally started to realize that the border was a serious problem, he put forth very strict legislation, and Trump, who was then running to be elected again, urged the Republicans in Congress to vote it down because it would take away one of his big issues in the campaign. They voted it down even though it actually met most of their demands. A lot of it is strict politics.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to do a Venezuela tag to this segment when we come back in a minute with Fred Kaplan with the breaking news about new US-- I guess you'd call it military action there, seizing an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, and what might come after that. Stay with us.

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. A few more minutes with Fred Kaplan, the War Stories columnist for Slate, covering military and foreign affairs. Let's talk about Venezuela. What do you know so far about why the US seized an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast?

Fred Kaplan: I should first preface this by saying there's quite a bit about this that is still not publicly known. I think it's a little bit misleading to refer to this incident as an escalation of the pressure toward war. It might be, and it might be used for that, but there has been cat-and-mouse operations involving Venezuelan oil tankers for quite some time. This ship that was intercepted the other day, there was, in fact, sanctions against that ship back in the Biden administration in 2022 because it was being used to provide oil to Cuba and Iran in violation of sanctions.

There have been a lot of incidents more recently as well, where Venezuela is engaged in prohibited operations of false flagging its tankers, of putting out radar signatures that are false. There was an incident just last month that wasn't covered much at all, except in maritime trading journals, of an oil tanker eluding a US destroyer that was tracking it off the coast of Venezuela. This has been going on for a while.

Brian Lehrer: Why would an oil tanker do those things? An oil tanker is conducting commerce.

Fred Kaplan: Yes, but it was conducting commerce with countries for which it was illegal to conduct commerce, for example, rightly or wrongly, Iran and Cuba, among others. Now, Venezuela does a lot of its business with those countries, and so to get that trade going, they have to behave deceptively. What I'm saying is an operation like this, it's conceivable. Again, we don't know everything about it, but it could have happened even if all the other stuff about Trump threatened-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Good context. Are you surprised that the opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, who is not only the opposition leader in Venezuela, she seems to support Trump so much on his policies toward her country, and she just won the Nobel Peace Prize, by the way. Almost everyone does think Maduro is an autocrat and economically disastrous for his country as well. What coalition do you see against his reign?

Fred Kaplan: Let's see. It's an interesting coalition. She won the election, and then he threw a coup, basically, to keep her out of office. On strict democratic grounds, there's a strong case for regime change. On the other, there are some people, and I think Secretary of State Rubio is among them, given the constituency among Venezuelan exiles in Florida, where he was a senator, who support action against Maduro on democratic grounds.

On the other hand, I know of a consortium of economic interests, of hedge funds, and others, which are planning revival of investment in Venezuela's oil and gas industries after Maduro leaves office one way or the other. They do have enormous oil and gas reserves, very, very little of which is being tapped now because of horrible economic inefficiencies and incompetence. You have that constituency, and then you have the America should control the Western Hemisphere, what is called in the national security strategy the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

You have lots of converging interests. Marie Corina Machado's interest, of course, is to get back in office and to restore democracy. I don't think Trump really cares that much about democracy, though, if it furthers the rest of his interests, that's fine. Now, one danger of all this, and this was also highlighted in a BBC show this morning, is that because Trump is so-- His rhetoric is so active about military action against Venezuela. We also have a carrier down in the Caribbean, a lot of troops, a lot of Marines, a lot of warships.

This is, in fact, silencing some of the more centrist and leftist opposition to Maduro in Venezuela, because if they start criticizing Maduro, they can be accused of supporting imperialist aggression from the north. There is a very long history of American intervention in Latin American countries, in fact, almost all of them, over the last century. When Maduro talks about the empire, which that's the way he always refers to the United States, there's a lot of historical resonance in what he's saying.

It's like I remember when Secretary of State Condi Rice under George W. Bush, they actively passed a measure providing $75 million to democratic opposition movements in Iran, this was a horrible thing because every democratic opposition group in Iran, all the members were suddenly arrested for being CIA agents. Some of what we do, especially when it's public, and voluble, and militant, can actually have counterproductive consequences as well.

Brian Lehrer: Fred Kaplan, who writes the War Stories column for Slate and is author of The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, and many Other books about US military and foreign policy. Thank you for joining us.

Brian Lehrer: Anytime.

 

 

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.