The U.S. in Venezuela: The International Community and the Donroe Doctrine (Half the Answer #58, with Mark Copelovitch)

Caitlin and Trent speak with Mark Copelovitch, a political science professor from University of Wisconsin–Madison. They discuss the problem of a world power going rogue, the lack of viable responses for countries like Venezuela and Denmark, and the costs to international trust when the US is so unreliable.

Half the Answer can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Resources:

https://polisci.wisc.edu/staff/mark-copelovitch/

https://www.markcopelovitch.com/

https://bsky.app/profile/mcopelov.bsky.social

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfXZxn2z8U0

https://archive.is/OriWG

Transcript

**Caitlin Green [00:00:30]**
Well, understanding a question is all the stuff, and I'm so excited. My name is Caitlin Green. I can't do the normal intro. Happy days, are they? Are they happy days?

**Trent Nelson [00:00:49]**
Happy days may not be here right now. My happy days—

**Caitlin Green [00:00:55]**
Well, desperately searching.

**Trent Nelson [00:00:58]**
Well, Caitlin, my name is Trent Nelson, and I'm one of the hosts of this program, and that's Caitlin Green, and she's going through an existential crisis. This is Half the Answer, where truth is not relative—or perhaps it is, who knows, relatively speaking. Of course, Caitlin, well, again, it's the New Year. Happy New Year. And yet, is the year happy, as you sort of alluded to? Does it seem like happy?

**Caitlin Green [00:01:27]**
Happy New Year and happy—what? Happy Birthday? It's about to be my birthday. This is fun.

**Trent Nelson [00:01:35]**
Well, we're happy about that, but we're also happy because we've got a really special guest on the show today. And well, you know him, just like we do—perhaps worse, perhaps better. His name is Mark Copelovitch, and he does so many wonderful things. I'll have to read them off. He's a Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs and the Director of European Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Go Badgers.

And well, Badgers, exactly. We're a Big Ten friendly podcast here, Mark, to be sure. Sir, you do so many wonderful things—educating the children, making sure that everybody knows that we are but one house in an international community of houses. It's how I like to draw the idea.

And yet, right now, it seems as though one of our neighbors—I guess us—we have house-invaded somebody. We just ran up in there, in this spot, and well, that's not usually good business, sir. Let's just jump right into it. What is an international community? What is this thing that we all do in terms of one nation living next to other nations?

**Mark Copelovitch [00:02:58]**
Hypothetically speaking, right?

**Trent Nelson [00:03:01]**
If we still lived in a society, right? If we still lived in a world where that was applicable. What's it like, sir?

**Mark Copelovitch [00:03:07]**
Right, right. Well, I mean, it is interesting times to be a professor of international relations, and I'm just about to start teaching Introduction to International Relations to 300 freshmen in a couple of weeks. So I and my colleagues who do this are all joking about shredding the syllabus and starting over.

But in many ways, we are living in unprecedented times, and also there is a lot from history, and there's a lot of what we know about international relations which helps explain what's going on. So the big thing when you look around the world right now—the way we think about international relations is that it's an anarchy, which means there's no ultimate political authority, right? And we contrast that with domestic politics, where, at the end of the day, there's the national government, there's the Supreme Court, there's the law. In international relations, there's no world government.

And what we have is a set of nation states that have come together and cooperated a lot through international institutions like the United Nations, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, European Union, those sorts of things. But the principle, the bedrock principle of international relations, still is the sovereignty of territorial-bound states. And it's been that way since 1945 and the setting up of the United Nations system and the Charter of the United Nations.

And on the one hand, you can look and say what's going on now with Putin in Ukraine, with us invading Venezuela—these things are unprecedented and breaking the norms and the rules of the international system. On the other hand, there have been violations, right? You have rules, and there have been violations of sovereignty. And this is not the first time the US has violated the territorial sovereignty of another country.

So what's more unprecedented right now is that the US, for all of our errors and all of the things that we did that went against the rules of what people often call the liberal international order—at the end of the day, we mostly supported it, right? We stood by and we called out the worst violations of it. It's only a few decades since a Republican President led an international coalition under the auspices of the United Nations to throw Iraq out of Kuwait for violating the territorial sovereignty of that country, just because they decided they wanted to.

So what's different is that we are—the current government is on the side of what Saddam Hussein did in Kuwait, what Putin is doing in Ukraine, what people think Xi Jinping ultimately wants to do with Taiwan. And that's the concern, right? When people talk about the world order being transformed, it's collapsing—the US was the bedrock, right? Or the US and the rich Western countries.

The craziest thing, of course, is we're talking about invading a NATO ally. Trump has threatened to take Canada. He's threatened to take Greenland. And that's sort of an even further order of magnitude different. It's not just we're invading Grenada or Panama or Iraq or Afghanistan. These are our closest allies—the ones we have a treaty commitment under Article Five of NATO. If any of them are territorially attacked, we are supposed to come and defend them by international law, which is a signed and ratified treaty in the United States. So it's part of US law as well.

So that's the thing. War and violation of sovereignty is not new. What's new in the last 100 years is that we were the guys on the side of defending that order when the chips were down.

**Trent Nelson [00:07:10]**
Right, right. Okay, so we've done what we did in Venezuela, and what are the mechanisms that are supposed to kick in in response to that?

**Mark Copelovitch [00:07:25]**
Yeah, I mean, this is a big gray area, because Maduro was an illegitimate leader in the sense that he wasn't elected and had seized authority. So this is the tension with the principle of sovereignty in international relations—going in and invading another state and effectively kidnapping their leader and bringing them back to another country is not really something you're allowed to do, right? The fact that another country is an authoritarian regime—there are lots of authoritarian regimes that are members of the United Nations.

So it's a real gray area. I mean, we did this with Noriega in Panama in the 1980s, and the argument there was that Noriega also wasn't a legitimate leader. So there aren't really mechanisms to kick in, because we're not supposed to be doing this in the first place.

There were lots of debates in the 1990s after the Rwandan genocide about the responsibility to protect and when can you violate sovereignty because genocides are happening and things like that. And you can make legitimate arguments, which we made in the case of Iraq and we made in the case of Afghanistan, that there are national security reasons and self-defense reasons why we're violating sovereignty—we're going in to get Osama bin Laden, right? Or the bad faith arguments about weapons of mass destruction in 2003. But those were at least arguments that there is a vested national security and international community interest to violate the bedrock principle of sovereignty.

There's no argument in that sense that the US can just go in and pick a leader that they don't like and kidnap him. Zelensky was joking the other day in a press conference—well, now that we know we can do this with authoritarian leaders, basically the US should go in and get Putin, right?

But that's basically the argument. If the Chinese decided that they wanted to go in and they didn't like the leader of Vietnam or Cambodia, and they offered an excuse like this, we would be out at the United Nations screaming that this was illegitimate. And so it's not really a question of what are the mechanisms, because the mechanism is you don't do this, right?

But that's back to the principle of anarchy. The United Nations is not world government. It's an international institution. And at the end of the day, if we're not going to abide by the rules as one of the veto members of the Security Council, we can get away with it unless somebody stops us.

**Trent Nelson [00:10:15]**
Well, I again, as I try to explain to people often, there are invisible restraints all around positions of power, right? So from a domestic standpoint, presidents don't go after their political enemies for various different reasons, but one of them being that when your political enemies are back in power, they might now have the ability to go after you in that same way. And we see this in international relations as well. We should not do A because then perhaps somebody we don't like will do A, and where will our recourse be?

Well, this administration seems to think of themselves functioning in a vacuum without any other shoes to drop, so to speak. And so I guess my next question is, sir, now that we have done this, what is the point of us getting mad at China for going into Taiwan, and what is the point of us defending Ukraine? And I mean that from obviously the theoretical—we've given this up. This is no longer something that we care about, clearly. So an anarchic world only seems as though it might become more so, no?

**Mark Copelovitch [00:11:47]**
Yeah, I mean, it makes it harder for us to make these cases. I mean, Trump very clearly, and Stephen Miller the way he's been talking in the last 24 hours—they very clearly view the world in a very old school way. Great powers have spheres of influence, and there's a set of countries that just do what they want.

And my view about Trump is he doesn't have coherent foreign policy—there's not like a Trump doctrine in that way. He doesn't think that way. He's in it for him and for the grift. But the people around him—Hegseth, Miller—very clearly think about this post-World War Two liberal order of sovereign states where the great powers self-constrain themselves.

And the way we think about this is the US, the Europeans, the Japanese, the Chinese have effectively constrained themselves and given up power through international institutions or shared it with smaller, weaker states, because we actually get to control those institutions and they serve our interests. The US, American power and influence in the world is actually magnified by the fact that we basically get everything we want—95% of what we want in the International Monetary Fund, in the World Bank, in NATO, in the United Nations, etc.

So one way to think about it is you're going back to the world of 1815 to 1945, which is balance of power, great power politics. Or much older—we could go back to Thucydides in the History of the Peloponnesian War and the Melian Dialogue, where the Athenians come in and tell the Melians, "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." So that's the classic old school way to think about it. If you read further in the History of the Peloponnesian War, that doesn't end well for the Athenians.

But to your question—we don't have the soft power or legitimacy or the ability to make the argument that we always have, that we always used to say: what Putin is doing is illegitimate, that Taiwan should enjoy sovereignty, that Xi Jinping can't go in, that we fought two world wars to make sure that this stuff doesn't happen. It makes it harder.

I mean, what is the case for—Putin speaks about Ukraine the way every Russian leader back to Catherine the Great has spoken about Ukraine: it's our territory. I spent a year in Berlin two years ago. You can go to the Soviet War Memorial in the eastern part of Berlin and read Stalin's quotes about Ukraine during World War Two, and it's exactly the way Putin talks about it: this is ours, and we're coming to liberate it.

So what's the argument if Greenland is our sphere of influence, if the Monroe Doctrine means we can go in anywhere in the Western Hemisphere? Well, the Russians can say that about Eastern Europe. China can say that about the South China Sea and Taiwan. And yeah, we don't really have the moral high ground anymore.

And again, you can go back and you can say, well, that's true—the US was responsible for a bunch of coups in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and we invaded Iraq and we shouldn't have in the 2000s, so we've been doing this forever. So I do push back a little against "it's totally unprecedented." The aspect of it that's unprecedented is the disdain for the international institutions and the fact that we're now threatening our closest allies with exactly the same thing.

I mean, if you go to any Latin American country, their response to Venezuela is like, right, the Americans have been doing this forever. But you understand then, like, the Danish Prime Minister is up in arms about this. And Mark Carney—I'm a native Canadian. I've joked that Donald Trump is the greatest Canadian liberal since Wilfrid Laurier. It went from "the Conservatives were going to win this election overwhelmingly" to Trump threatens to invade Canada and suddenly Mark Carney is Prime Minister.

The fact that the leaders of the other major NATO countries yesterday felt like they needed to issue a joint statement that basically said it would be the end of NATO if we attack Greenland—that's the unprecedented, bonkers, "we're in uncharted territory" part of it.

**Trent Nelson [00:16:57]**
Well, right, yeah. What are their options? So for a country like—I guess Venezuela, let's start there, because we apparently did start there—what are their options to defend their sovereignty?

**Mark Copelovitch [00:17:14]**
I mean, it's interesting. I'm not an expert in Venezuelan politics, but it seems like they pulled out Maduro and they left it—the rest of the officials from his government are there and are basically saying they're not going to go. And we've basically seemed to have said that we're going to be involved without an occupation, of course.

So it's hard to even know what self-defense means, because we didn't depose the regime, and we don't seem to be promising to conquer the territory. So we're in this weird position where we got Maduro, Trump is saying the officials are saying there needs to be a new, more legitimate government that works in our interests, but we haven't gotten rid of the rest of the officials. We've said that the possible alternative is not acceptable.

So Venezuela doesn't, in some ways, need to have Brazil or Argentina or some group of countries come to defend its territory. There seems to be still a civil war transition conflict for what the next government is going to be, which is very common when you have these types of foreign powers go in and depose a regime and don't think about what's going to happen afterwards. I mean, that's Iraq and Afghanistan in a nutshell.

So it seems like there's going to be a protracted debate and struggle domestically for what the next Venezuelan government will be, which is a continuation of what's been going on since Maduro seized power illegally. While at the same time, if they were to do something that Trump doesn't want, maybe we're going to attack them again.

And I don't have a good answer, because it's not clear what we're doing. It was clear in Iraq, whether or not you disagreed with it—we were going in, we were overthrowing the regime, we were installing a new, ostensibly democratic government. It failed. We were going to do that in Afghanistan as well. It failed. But at least there was a—it's not just like the neocons didn't think about what comes the next day. It's we didn't even think about what the point of going in was in the first place.

So that part, again, when we're thinking about what's new and what's unprecedented—that's the unprecedented part. They can't even agree on what the stated goal was. Was it to get rid of Maduro? Was it the oil? Was it because of the Monroe Doctrine? It depends who you talk to and who's on Twitter and who's in front of Fox News by the hour.

**Trent Nelson [00:20:19]**
Yeah. And we brought this up during our discussion with Marissa, actually—you're hearing from across the administration "narco-terrorism," "illegitimacy," "thinking about the Venezuelan people," "they're suffering," all of these things. But if you actually zoom out and you look at, well, how is he talking about Greenland? How's he talking about Canada? How's he talking about Mexico? It smells much more like a sort of naked imperialism.

It sounds as though there is some desire, some urge, some feeling that we're just going to take this. And like Marissa said, we'll see how it all plays out. And from the media standpoint—as that was the topic of our particular discussion—she noted that it's playing out great. You've got CBS running cover for him, Fox and Newsmax and all those are obviously running cover for him. And yeah, you throw out enough reasons why, and it's like a grab bag. There's something for everybody. There's something in it for the people who are frightened of drugs. There's somebody who thinks that we should be doing good for other people. "Communism is bad," right? All of these things. So I mean, what is your take on that, sir?

**Mark Copelovitch [00:22:01]**
Yeah, I mean, so look, I'm 50 years old, so I'm a child of the Gulf War in '91, when my social studies teacher, who was a Vietnam POW, rolled out the TV, and we start watching wars in real time. And you saw the media loves covering the tactics of a war. They don't cover "is it legal?" "Is it a good idea?" "What's the long-term strategy?" So this is the fifth or sixth time we've done this now in my adult lifetime.

So yeah, I mean, it goes back to this—thinking about it in terms of the liberal order in the post-1945 world order I was talking about versus a neo-Monroe Doctrine. International relations professors can sit here and say it's illegal to assassinate civilians in boats in international waters, it's illegal to do what we're doing in Venezuela, it's illegal to threaten to invade Greenland. This violates all of our treaties and commitments, and it's bad for national security. I think that's all true.

But if you do view the world in this Monroe Doctrine—the Western Hemisphere is ours—then from that perspective, it's all domestic territory. So yeah, it isn't that you can think about it as an empire, but we're not going into international waters off the coast of Venezuela. We're not going into international territory in Greenland or Venezuela. We're taking what belongs to us as a powerful, sovereign state in a world of anarchy.

So again, that's both unprecedented in modern times, and then that's like what the US did in the 19th century. So it's going back to this pre-1945 world, which is a world we set up to lock in our power.

And in my research—I study the politics of international finance and the role of the dollar in the global economy—and I'm thinking about how, in spite of everything in American domestic politics, we are unprecedentedly powerful, even though people have been predicting the end of American hegemony since I was a kid. And the reason why is because this system of institutions that binds us and all the other countries serves our interests and magnifies our power.

And so the Trump administration and Trump have this idea that you can get rid of all the constraints on our sovereignty and all these institutions and just act tough and macho. And so Pete Hegseth—Hegseth views the world in foreign policy the way Miller views domestic policy: we can be a prosperous American economy with getting rid of all the immigrants. Those things link together. They can tell themselves a story that's going to work. And there was a glorious time where we were unconstrained by international institutions, and we didn't have any non-white immigrants, and America was great.

Just objectively, as a social scientist, when you look at the data of when was America great economically, and when were we most powerful—it was basically 2016 was like the apex of American prosperity and power. And that was 70 years after we set up this international order that served our interests.

And so that's—I mean, that's the only way I can currently rationalize it—they view the entire Western Hemisphere as American domestic territory by right, in which case none of the international constraints bind. It's just we can control this militarily, and we can do within this territory anything we want, as we're seeing in the case of, we're sending the American military illegally into cities in the United States. So if we can do that domestically, why can't we take Greenland?

**Trent Nelson [00:26:12]**
Right, right. And that's as fair a rationale as I've heard, to be sure.

**Mark Copelovitch [00:26:20]**
Yeah, I mean, I think it's fundamentally illegitimate. But if I'm—and again, I'm reluctant to give the current administration and Trump credit that they have a coherent philosophy this way—but that's as close as I can get.

The other way to think about it, as you think about in authoritarian regimes, is you have bureaucratic infighting. So Hegseth wants one thing, Miller wants another, and Rubio wants this to be the stepping stone to Cuba. And Trump doesn't coherently have a long-term goal. He's being played by bureaucratic infighting, which is common in authoritarian regimes—who has the ear of the autocrat in the current moment? And so policies cycle.

One of the other reasons we have democracy and democratic institutions is to avoid the wild, personalist cycling of policy because of this.

**Caitlin Green [00:27:17]**
So are there economic sanctions or other consequences that other countries can impose if they so wish, to kind of discourage us, punish us—I don't know?

**Mark Copelovitch [00:27:28]**
This is the tough part, right? We are always the powerful country that solves the collective action problem and gets the allies together to impose sanctions on people. The Biden administration, for all its faults on Ukraine and other things, did that pretty strongly with Russia in 2022—coordinating the Europeans and the G7 and the Japanese and the Swiss. "We're going to have strong financial sanctions."

So that would really require the European Union to basically step up and substitute for American hegemony. And the EU has enough trouble—the Germans and the French have enough trouble solving their own internal collective action problems and moving European policy forward. They're moving, by European standards, incredibly fast on investing in security now and providing aid to Ukraine. It's not a full substitute for the US, but by the standards of how European politics goes, it's actually going very fast.

But they're scared because they still need NATO. Europe, the Germans, the French, the rest of the EU have not developed independent military capacity to the point that they could repel the US if we invaded Greenland, or that they feel like they can defend Europe territorially against Russia—maybe in 10 years they could do that.

So if you saw the statements from Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor, Macron, the French President, and Starmer, the British Prime Minister—they were very milquetoast. And the statements from Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas, the leaders of the EU—very much "we condemn this, and also we want to see what happens"—in a way that, if it wasn't the United States doing this, they would have been invoking the United Nations Charter and sovereignty and "this is a violation of world order." And they're really scared because American relations are so fraught right now that they don't want to push it over the breaking point.

The one thing that people have talked about—it came up on Bluesky a couple of times in the last 48 hours—is a boycott of the World Cup and the Olympics. That, if you think about what would actually anger Trump and maybe get him to back down, because he loves the theater of being President—is a boycott of the World Cup. And I'm a huge soccer fan. I would hate to see that. But at the same time, that's the sort of thing.

I don't think there's hard economic sanctions. Also, we've been studying sanctions for almost 50 years in international relations, and they work as good domestic politics. They're a signal—"we're doing something"—to the public. They don't work on authoritarian leaders if authoritarian leaders really want to do something.

**Trent Nelson [00:30:38]**
This is what all of my essays have basically been about. Yes, they are useless in so many ways.

**Mark Copelovitch [00:30:46]**
Yeah, I mean, they work on—the theory behind them working is democratic accountability, right? You're going to cause economic pain, and that's going to make the public angry enough to constrain the leader to back down from policies. But an authoritarian leader like Putin doesn't really care about public opinion, and he's willing to destroy the Russian economy to achieve his goals. So we can raise the pain threshold.

**Trent Nelson [00:31:13]**
And he has a counter set of prevailing answers and reasons to push back. So they're all saying it's your fault, but actually, this is America's fault, this is the European Union's fault. Everyone has us in a bind. We got to combine together. And of course, that does essentially break apart eventually. But like I always like to say, if the goal of the sanction is to come to a quick response—as that's what it's always sold as—but it takes seven years.

Well, did it accomplish its goal eventually? I mean, I guess so. But was there eight years, nine years—that's eight, nine years of yeah, the people are pissed. Why are they pissed? Because they're starving. Because they are suffering. This is just sort of the siege by different clothes.

**Mark Copelovitch [00:31:51]**
Well, that's a lifetime in domestic politics.

**Trent Nelson [00:31:53]**
Right, exactly.

**Mark Copelovitch [00:32:00]**
Now you can imagine—imagine this worked, and the Canadians, the European Union, the Japanese, the Australians, all put sanctions on the United States. It would feed Trump's logic that the world is against us. And he was right about the trade war, and he was right about not liking the UN, and we're going to back out of NATO. And yeah, for domestic political reasons, he would invoke rallying around the flag and sovereignty, and the outcome is uncertain.

So yeah, hitting him on culture—this would be the international equivalent of the Kennedy Center cancellations. And this is where the media debate, the public opinion on this could shift. Would it drive home to Americans that we really, really messed up if none of our friends showed up for the World Cup?

Yeah, I mean, there's lots of people who care about the nitty-gritty of international relations, like political science professors. But the average voter, or the 5% that would tip an election by switching from not voting or voting for Republicans to voting for the Democrats, and have there be a landslide in 2028—maybe that activates something.

I've sort of given up on thinking about what is the thing that will finally activate 10% of the electorate to make there be a democratic landslide and move back in the other direction. But maybe that's big enough.

**Caitlin Green [00:33:54]**
Maybe it's when none of our friends come to our birthday party, right? That's what makes us too sad.

**Trent Nelson [00:34:00]**
Yeah, I mean, something that I'd like to pick your brain about as well—because we keep talking about the sort of disintegration of the post-World War Two international order, right? Which was—and please jump in and tell me that I'm wrong if you find so—this idea that nations left to themselves and by themselves exclusively, well, they are ripe for the picking from some larger monster, from some hegemon that perhaps doesn't respect order. So we need to sort of collectivize, in the sense of we need to have protection for Europe, and we'll be a part of that as America. And of course, we saw the Soviets create their own structures to protect themselves. And you see this across the world.

It's always struck me that the authoritarians want the disintegration of those types of conglomerates for the very reason that they were created. Because if Ukraine isn't a part of NATO, well, then who's going to stop us just rolling in and grabbing them? And I guess what strikes me right now is the sort of American hubris, that we're so strong that we don't even need to be a part of this ourselves. We're so strong that we can go into Venezuela and take what we want, and if anyone tries to stop us, they're impinging on the Monroe Doctrine.

But I think that plays right into Russia's hands. I think it plays right into China's hands—break up the world, because then it'll be super easy for us to march into Romania too, anywhere we want. What do you make of that?

**Mark Copelovitch [00:36:02]**
Yeah, I mean, I think you can think about it as it's the international equivalent of autocrats don't want democracy because they don't want domestic constraints on their behavior. This is the international-level equivalent.

And yeah, we fought two world wars, and the lesson of that was we can't do this again—to have naked, unprovoked land grabs and territorial aggression—and so we're going to set up this system.

I think the even better analog, or way to illustrate that, is—I studied the European Union with one of my academic hats—that's where the EU came from. France and Germany fought three wars from 1870 to 1945. And eventually Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, the French diplomats after World War Two, were like, we can't ever do this again. We need to make sure that we're going to cooperate economically and pool our resources on coal and steel. And then that became the European Union over 70 years, because this idea that we're going to try and kill each other and steal each other's territories was so devastating.

So some people have talked about—part of the reason we're here is distance from World War Two. And there are just not a lot of people alive who remember the magnitude of the disaster. It's history now.

And yeah, the Soviet Union didn't like the United Nations. They wanted all of their republics to have independent seats because they knew what it was going to stand for. And yes, the US, again, as we talked about, systematically violated the UN principles over the years when we liked it. But at the end of the day, we always came back to supporting those institutions and aspirationally believing that the goal of international cooperation and peace and getting rid of territorial conquest—even if we didn't always walk the walk, we talked the talk. Now we're moving in the other direction.

**Trent Nelson [00:38:10]**
Yeah, this is a recurring theme on this program, sir—that there aren't enough people who have suffered in the thing, right? Whether it's not enough people who got smallpox anymore, still alive, to be like, "Hey, vaccines are really good." Or not enough people from World War Two, not enough people from certain civil rights moments. It's like—we have not, in this country at least, figured out a cohesive and positive way to sort of send those lessons down the line. It seems they get forgotten.

And that's why I brought up the Great Depression, because that might be the only way that we get that 10%—not enough people remember when the Republicans tried to destroy the economy, like the big one.

**Mark Copelovitch [00:39:05]**
Yeah, I mean, I think about it is it's the international equivalent of the damage of Ronald Reagan's nine words in domestic policy. For my entire life, the line from the right in American politics is the government is bad, spending is bad, public goods and investment are bad. And even people who are liberal articulate and regurgitate those ideas that the government is always inefficient and things like that. And so you see that in the vaccine mandates, and getting rid of NIH, getting rid of the Department of Education—no one gets angry, because at the end of the day, people have internalized that there must be waste in government.

So at the international level, I mean, both parties have done a terrible job over the last 80 years of making the case to the American public of the enormous return on investment from international cooperation.

So think about USAID. We're talking about, you know, you illegally dismantle USAID, totally unconstitutional and illegal. Hundreds of thousands of people in Africa have now died. We have data on this. The ROI on not only the material saving of lives in Africa, but the soft power benefit the US got for providing all of this aid for a rounding error in the federal budget.

The way I'm thinking about it—the entire spending on area studies and foreign language fellowships was $86 million in the United States. That's like what Trump spent on golf and security last year. And the massive benefit—you were talking about this, Caitlin—everybody knows that at the University of Wisconsin, you can study these languages. We have an international reputation for that, and it costs basically nothing to do that.

So you can think about international institutions that way. Trump thinks about them as everything is bad because they're constraints on sovereignty, and the weak are telling the strong what they have to do. The other way to look at it is we get everything we want out of Greenland anyway, because we're in NATO and the Danes let us do whatever we want—setting up satellite stations and things like that. And the return on investment from all of these international institutions and foreign aid and the soft power and all of this—it's so massive that it's the most efficient government investment we've ever made.

But have you ever heard a Democrat get up and basically say our investment in foreign policy and international cooperation and trade agreements is like the most efficient, effective government policy we've ever done?

**Caitlin Green [00:42:03]**
So I'm just always really struck by the story that came out fairly recently about the DOGE boys going into these institutions, going, "It's big government, it's bloated. There's probably people in there doing nothing for a salary for no reason." They get in there and they go, "Oh my god, everybody's working really hard. They're actually pretty efficient. I'm not finding any waste here." And they're just like, "Okay, I guess we just got to pull all the wires out anyway, because that's what we said we would do," right? But ultimately, these are the systems we have because they are the best suited for the problems that we're trying to solve.

**Trent Nelson [00:42:37]**
Yes, yes. And again, this whole notion that, as you noted, Mark—the right has been banging the drum on for just decades on decades on decades—private business is more efficient than public, than government institutions. I always make the joke that the only difference is that when the public institutions make a mistake, there's a transparency insofar as we get to see it. When the private institutions make mistakes, they're not going around telling you that all of these things happened, because that looks bad for business. So it's all kept on the down low.

And again, this is sort of the trick that they play. We talked about it with Lindsay Cormack before—you just keep hitting your points. Just keep saying that the Democrats go on and on about transgender people, go on and on about identity politics. Just keep it going, because that's going to play better than the alternative.

And that's what we're up against. We need some folks like that ourselves, saying the true thing over and over again, hammering the true thing repeatedly, saying, "Hey, invading Venezuela is not good." And if we were not invading Venezuela, the whole world would be like, "We need to do something about that country that just invaded Venezuela." This is super duper messed up.

And I guess, you mentioned, Mark, that there is, from the European standpoint, this desire to sort of, "Let's just get through this, and maybe America will return back to some sense of normalcy at some point, and we'll be able to have a good time again." But at what point does Europe say we got to do something here? The threatening of Denmark, Venezuela has already fallen. Granted, we don't love Maduro, but you can't just be junting people left and right. Do you have a sense of when that line might be?

**Mark Copelovitch [00:45:00]**
So, I guess there's two answers to that. One is, all of my European political science colleagues—and I think the European public more broadly—has already crossed that. We got our get-out-of-jail-free card with George W. Bush. We got another one with the first Trump administration. Biden being elected—and like, okay, lots of problems with the Americans, but they're sort of more or less back. It feels different now when you're in Europe and when you talk to Europeans—and again, I talked to European academics, so it's not a representative sample—but it feels different now. Like this is a structural break, and we can't go back.

And I think European leaders—when you see all the cooperation on defense, and the EU is now talking about issuing common debt for defense, which, by European standards, again, is fast and unprecedented. And there's lots of talk. And the Germans are fully rearming, which no one wanted. No one in Europe wanted the Germans to fully rearm. Even 30 years ago when unification happened, there were huge debates about that, and the French were deeply opposed. So now that's happening, but it will take time.

But I think there's still no long-term plan, because nobody thought we would ever be in this position. The Europeans could not imagine that the thing that would bring down NATO, or the thing that would bring down the international order, was the United States at the center going authoritarian and blowing it up. They thought it was going to be the Soviet Union. They thought the Japanese might supplant the United States, and the order would look Asian, and that would be different. Then we spent 15 years obsessing about China, and we still kind of do.

But nobody planned for this one. And so the plan for when China came to power was we were going to band together with the United States and use all these international institutions, bring the Australians and the Japanese and the Indians in and have an anti-China, new Cold War-type of coalition. But now you can't have that if the United States is the problem.

So I think the public opinion has shifted, but it takes time.

The other part of the answer, though, is if you look at every European country, the far right gets 20 to 25% of the vote now. So European leaders are worried about doing all the things we're talking about, because they're worried about their Trumps getting elected. Macron is worried about going out too far on this because the Front National—we're worried about the AfD, which is now the largest party in Germany. And every country in Europe has this.

I mean, you've heard me rant about this on Bluesky—it's actually the distribution of these opinions in the United States is no different. It's probably about 20 to 25% of the population really are true believers and supporters of this stuff. It's just we have minoritarian institutions that make that 50%. And a European parliamentary system where you have seven or ten parties, the far right is getting 20 to 25%, but that's enough that Friedrich Merz is worried in the next election. The AfD might be the biggest party, and he's going to get pressure to break the cordon sanitaire—the firewall that you don't cooperate with the far right—because half his party is leaning that way. And you look at what's happened with the Tories since Brexit and the Reform Party.

And so these center-left or center-right leaders—they know what they need to do, that the order may be different, and we need to invest in more European integration and invest in security, might need to put sanctions on the United States. But if they do that, that might strengthen the far-right backlash at home.

So at the end of the day—when we teach international relations, everything's about domestic politics, as much as it's about anarchy and international cooperation. What's really driving this behavior is domestic politics. There's just not enough public support. You couldn't guarantee, if I went the other way and said we need to triple defense spending in—even over what we've now done in Germany—and we need to have a European Union NATO replacement, it's not obvious there's public support for that, because there's been a backlash to European integration in Europe, just like there's a backlash to international cooperation in the United States. So they're stuck.

Again, the thing that they would love more than anything else is that a Democrat wins in 2028 and again the US comes back. But I don't think even then—I don't think the Europeans will believe us.

**Trent Nelson [00:50:28]**
No.

**Mark Copelovitch [00:50:30]**
We do have a credibility problem right now. It would have to be trust but verify. You'd still have to do all of this military cooperation and investment and catering to outside options. And what if it's the Chinese? And the Germans are very caught between this, because what credibility do we have in a knife-edge political system?

**Trent Nelson [00:50:40]**
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, as you just noted, all international is domestic. And I think that what we're going through right now actually starts, to very many degrees, with the credibility gap—with the domestic population ceasing to believe that what the President says is legitimate. And this goes back to Johnson. But the things that happened during the 60s and into the 70s—there was never a healing.

And then Reagan becomes the president, and he essentially tells everyone that that's true, that you should not believe what the government has to say. The government is not your friend. The government is not somebody that we should be putting all of our great hope into. And unfortunately, the Clinton era and the first Bush era didn't help either, because you just keep getting less credible, less credible.

And now on the international stage, we're, of course, without credit. I mean, Iran could never trust another JCPOA with the flip-flopping that occurs. Why would Europe trust that it's going to remain like it was, when we've seen over the last 12 years, eight years, where it's not?

**Mark Copelovitch [00:52:08]**
And I mean, the other thing that happened domestically is we spent 80 years building up these international institutions, but both parties domestically spent 80 years creating the imperial presidency. So the Democrats, arguably even more than the Republicans if you go back all the way to World War Two, and Congress abdicating its authority and creating an imperial presidency.

So everything about the tariffs under the National Emergency laws—these were all Cold War laws with a carte blanche clause written into them that neither party ever thought the President would use, because the norms of the two parties would prevent that from happening, and it would only happen if there was a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

But this is the long-term unintended consequences of—Article One of the Constitution has basically become totally non-functional as a constraint on Article Two. And Article Three is reinforcing that with the Supreme Court rulings that the President is a king.

So we're in this situation where the domestic institutions don't constrain the President at all. And again, Trump is different in all of the authoritarian ways, but every president of both parties has governed by executive order now for 50 years, rather than passing laws through Congress.

And the confirmation process doesn't work. The Senate confirmation process, if it can't weed out RFK Jr. and Hegseth, it's totally useless. So all of the legislative and judicial constraints that we have on illegal executive authority—and Elizabeth Saunders has talked about this, one of my IR colleagues at Columbia—what's happening internationally now is the international-level equivalent or extension of all this stuff happening at the domestic level, of the failure to have accountability on the executive.

So there's a trust issue domestically and the credibility issue internationally, but there's also just—it's a total accountability issue. We don't have institutions anymore that constrain a president who just backs out of international treaties for no reason, or a president who goes in and kidnaps the leader of another country that we decided we don't like for no reason, or the DOGE stuff.

The idea that just some random billionaire and a bunch of his lackeys can come in and do an end run around Congress and just dismantle the US government—the founders did not anticipate a legislature that would let that happen and have their power being stolen, even by somebody of their own party.

**Trent Nelson [00:55:00]**
No, they didn't. They didn't. And they also didn't know what an end run was. We're a little further ahead of them too.

Mark Copelovitch, Professor Mark Copelovitch—absolutely brilliant stuff. We have great discussions talking about the worst things on the planet, and we are grateful for that each and every time. We hope that you'll come back and do it again with us, to be sure. But before we let you go, will you let everyone know where they can read your rantings, where they can hear your work, or anything? Maybe they want to take some classes. Give us the details, sir.

**Mark Copelovitch [00:55:43]**
Yes, so thank you. It's a great discussion. I'm happy to come back. I am on Bluesky a lot. It started as personal therapy. It's somehow gotten big, because I guess there's other people who like my rants.

But I teach at the University of Wisconsin. I give a lot of public talks in Madison on various international policy issues because I'm jointly appointed in the policy school. I've written a couple of books on financial crises and the IMF, both published with Cambridge University Press. I have lots of boring academic articles on the political consequences of economic shocks and financial crises.

I'm working now on public opinion and media consumption and how that shaped people's views on inflation. Why does everybody think the economy is terrible when, in fact, it isn't? Or why they think it's terrible in the case of Germany, because it is, and their media consumption is different. So that's kind of the things I'm working on, and where you can reach me.

But I'm thinking more and more about these things. Like a lot of political scientists, we've all become scholars of democracy and authoritarianism, regardless of what we studied. I was a political economy scholar of trade and finance, and my security studies colleagues are all thinking about authoritarianism and democracy. I'm thinking about that now.

So that's sort of—given the way the world and the country have gone, the political scientists are all—the comparative politics scholars who wrote about democratic collapse, those are the people who are all saying "we were right, and you could have listened to us." We're all converging on their types of conversations. So that's kind of where I am and what I do.

**Trent Nelson [00:57:27]**
Well, shout out to them. They've done good work, maybe a little ahead of the curve, but we'll catch up. No big deal.

Well, Mark, sir, we appreciate you so much. And well, to our listeners and to our viewers, you know that understanding a question is half of an answer, and this is Half the Answer. And while happy days may not be upon us quite yet, we'll get there, and we'll catch you real soon.

**Mark Copelovitch [00:57:53]**
Thank you. Happier days. I hope the next time, happier days.

**Trent Nelson [00:57:57]**
Happier days.