This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 16 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined this morning by Matt Duss. He’s a fellow at the Center for International Policy, and he was also Bernie Sanders’s top foreign policy adviser during his presidential runs. Matt, thanks for joining me.

Matt Duss: Glad to. Good to see you.

Bacon: So I want to talk broadly—we have a lot of foreign policy news. Let me ask you two questions, just to think about them broadly.... I’m not a foreign policy expert, I assume a lot of our viewers are not, listeners are not.

Why did the U.S. decide to go into Venezuela and remove its leader? And why are we talking about invading or taking over Greenland? These are not things Joe Biden was talking about doing. They’re not things Mitt Romney would have done, I don’t think. So talk about, just generally, what is motivating these two actions.

Duss: They’re also not things that Donald Trump talked about doing.

Bacon: Yes. Correct.

Duss: He ran for president—he ran for president proclaiming himself as a pro-peace president. Ran in many ways to the Democrats’ left on issues of national security. Going back to 2016, he opposed endless wars.

Now, his first term certainly didn’t reflect that, but I think what we’ve seen since June—since the Israeli war, which Trump joined in June against Iran—we’ve seen a number of interventions, so he’s certainly not an anti-war president. What he has been is an anti–long war president.

But to answer your question, I think there’s a number of different constituencies in the administration and in Washington who have different goals here. If we’re just focusing on Venezuela, if you look at all the different justifications that were offered—Is it about drugs? Is Maduro a narco-terrorist? Is it about terrorism? Is it about immigration? Is it about corruption? Is it about boxing China and Russia out of the Western Hemisphere? Or is it about the oil?

Now, for Trump, he’s been pretty clear. It is about the oil. Which is, in many ways, refreshing. I don’t want to treat it too kindly, but one of the things about Donald Trump in general is the way he just makes subtext into text. So it’s just straightforwardly about the oil.

Bacon: You say there are multiple justifications, but if the president is saying it’s about oil—I think Marco Rubio has his own views about Cuba and dictators and so on. But ... do we think this is a multifaceted issue? Or do we think Donald Trump—because Donald Trump is the one person, his view does matter the most—but we don’t really think he’s driving policy in that exact way.

Duss: He’s the one who has to call the shot when it’s time to send troops in, and also support the preparations. And there were extensive preparations for the operation to, essentially, abduct Maduro.

I think it’s about the oil, but also with Trump, it could be any number of things. This is what he said. It’s clear that he was just annoyed by Maduro essentially trolling him, constantly. Like, making these defiant statements. It’s hard to say how much that stuff mattered, but we know with Donald Trump; in the moment, he can become obsessed with something very quickly.

But no, this is not something he just decided overnight that he was going to do. This took a lot of preparation. So this was clearly an administration-wide—there was support for this, as you noted, [from] Marco Rubio. For Marco Rubio, it’s basically about Cuba, cutting off an important ally and supporter of the Cuban government.... Marco Rubio, as a Cuban American who came up from this community, this has been his obsession for a long time.

It’s the obsession of the South Florida community that enabled his own political rise. And then you’ve got just, again, other parts of the administration and the kind of Washington foreign policy establishment for whom this serves different purposes.

Bacon: Talk about Greenland. Why are we, what is going—that one is even more bizarre on some level.

Duss: Again, multiple arguments. There are folks like Tom Cotton and others who have been arguing for a long time: We need Greenland. It’s in our national security interest to control this massive piece of real estate. Control of the Arctic ... is becoming increasingly important.

Or just, for someone like Trump, I think he just likes doing big things. So the idea that he could just expand the geographic footprint of the American empire and be remembered as the president who did that—as far as I can tell, that’s argument enough. Who knows how deep into the weeds Donald Trump actually gets [as to] what Greenland actually does for us. He’s just like, Wow, Greenland’s big. I’d like to grab it.... But Denmark, as a member of NATO, this would ... if not end the NATO alliance, it would do really mortal damage to it.

So there are lots of things being floated: We’d like to buy it. Denmark has made clear that no one is selling. People who actually live in Greenland are like, We have no interest in becoming part of the United States. I think that, for any reasonable person, should pretty much end the debate. But we’re talking about Donald Trump and Washington hawks here. So these are not reasonable people.

Bacon: Is one of the goals, though—we’ve talked about Trump and Russia for all this time, and some things have been proven and some have not.

But one of Putin’s goals is to destroy NATO. Is that—does that drive—I agree with you that if the U.S. takes over Greenland for no reason ... and no one did anything about it, that does make NATO weakened, maybe ruined.... So is the goal here NATO, we think? Or are we not sure?

Duss: Yeah, the U.S. violating the sovereignty, essentially invading another NATO member … it’s tough to call that a functioning security alliance when that happens. Now, yes, of course, I think Vladimir Putin has made clear that he sees NATO as a threat.

Rightly or wrongly, he—and not just he, I think elements of the Russian political and security establishment have for many years, going back to the nineties—sees the expansion of NATO closer and closer to Russia’s borders as a source of real concern.

Now, I don’t think that is the overriding driver of what we’ve seen Putin doing, especially in Ukraine. But it’s clearly a part of that.........

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