The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: Trump's hard power doctrine alienates allies and sets a destabilizing precedent

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

To listen to the full episode consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $50 annually, or $1.00 per episode. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Rudyard and Andrew react to Trump's 2025 national security doctrine being put into action this past weekend with the US military operation in Venezuela and the abduction of its president Nicolas Maduro. Both hosts agree this was not about restoring democracy. Trump's use of hard power while dismantling the country's soft power and sources of genuine American strength is a backward, simplistic and adolescent view of American power. It is a foreign policy that supposes the 19th century great power competition model is most conducive to American interests. Rudyard and Andrew unpack different public reactions to this military raid - specifically from the leaders of Mexico and Denmark - and explain why it is in Canada's interest to draw a line in the sand and stand firmly against our southern neighbour. In the final moments of the show they discuss Pierre Poilievre's political future as he continues to trail in the polls behind Mark Carney. Will his lack of discipline and vocal support of Trump's military raid hurt his leadership aspirations? Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It is isolating America and it will find that its military power on its own is not enough. If you have the whole world against you, you're going to discover the limits of American power pretty quickly. Welcome to the Monk Dialogues with Andrew Coyne. I'm Roger Griffiths, chair of the Muck Debates, joined in studio by journalist and best-selling author Andrew Coyne. Andrew, happy 2026. Nice to be with you. The year started off with a bang. think back, Andrew, to our conversations in 2025 last fall where we felt that a shoe was to

drop, that there were dynamics within the Trump administration. There was the release of that national security strategy document. Those words seem, Andrew, have they not to be put into action in a very concrete and explicit way in the context of this week's invasion of Venezuela. How do you rate the significance of the last 72 hours? It's potentially huge. I think people need to be careful about not, as far too late to say this, but not rushing into print or online with instant analyses of what is going on, much is still to be determined.

Certainly I think people should be wary of attributing too much global strategy geopolitical analysis to the Trump administration, and certainly to Trump himself. In my experience, Occam's razor, as it applies to Trump, is you should prefer the stupidest and most venal possible explanation before all else. And ordinarily, one would not say that, but when you were dealing with the abundance of evidence involved here. So to me, I mean, you see people trying to say, well, there's some game here with Cuba. This is meant to be a sort of a knock on the door of Cuba, or this is a large scheme to warn off China and Iran and Russia and to deprive them of a client state, or, you know, none of which I think really fit the

fact pattern of how Trump thinks. Certainly, I don't think it's anything to do with restoring democracy. I think we know that now. A few people rushed online to hail the advent of freedom in Venezuela, who should have known better. They're basically just sticking with the same regime, but with a different face on it. I would be skeptical. It has anything to do with drugs, really. It may have something to do with oil, but not in any serious or coherent basis.

We can get into that. But it seems to me the most plausible explanations I've seen is, A, he saw Nicholas Majuro dancing in a provocative way and felt offended by that. B, Machado, the Democratic leader in Venezuela, won the note. bail peace prize and he didn't and he was ticked about that. C, he and Putin may have done some deal back in 2019.

Fiona Hill, the U.S. foreign policy analyst, I think, has argued persuasively. In fact, there are receipts on this that Trump and Putin cooked up some sort of thing where Putin would stay out of the Western hemisphere, Trump would stay out of Ukraine. We'll see whether that pans out. But these to me are the more plausible explanations than that there's some giant cosmological scheme. I will say, probably some of the fanatics around him may have differing ambitions and may feel they can play at being amateur geostrategists. That would be a lot more persuasive and a lot more encouraging if they had give any evidence of any clue of what they're going to do after day one of this. I think Trump was persuaded

this would be fun and dramatic and exciting which is a big part of what animates him as well but if you're going to do something like that A, it helps you if you have some kind of underlying rationale for it but certainly you know

do you have the first clue of what you're going to do the next day and we've heard these explanations of how you know Stephen Miller is now going to run Venezuela or you know the Venezuelan regime will still run it but they'll be kept in control through the use of an ongoing blockade of oil, which already seems to have been broken. There's reports that a half a dozen ships have now made a simultaneous dashboard.

So that's my take on it is it's more of the usual chaos. Yeah, no, I think that's a good way to put it. It's interesting, Andrew, if we connect this attack to the attack on Iran and its nuclear program that the president seems to like again low comparatively low risk high visibility great great photo ops and you know opportunities for all kinds of chest thumping could we and or trying to be hopeful here in the early days of 2026 could we see that as a tell in a sense that that there really isn't much intestinal fortitude on the part of this president administration to, let's say, take on a Cuba, let alone a Greenland, let alone Canada, because the reality is that these two operations

are, you know, the military parlance is surgical, the political parlance is, I think in their view, high, high reward, low risk. I'm thinking now that line of Edward O. Wilson's about, you know, mankind today. We have, you know, what is it, primitive emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technologies. And Trump is maybe the fullest extension of that. You clearly see the American military's capacity. I don't think anybody can dispute that both of those operations were extraordinary successes on the, day of the operation. That's got nothing to with Trump or anybody around him. It's the skills and

technology of the American military. But the... Well, you spend a trillion dollars a year on something for a decade or two. You'd hope you'd have some capacity. It doesn't always work out that way. So it's reassuring in that sense that the Americans do seem to be able to pull off these things. But as you were saying, it's always for the easiest possible take and never involves any kind of long-term strategy or long-term willingness to absorb pain. So it's of a peace with his tendency to threaten America's allies rather than its enemies. He's not going to do any hard work or anything to commit American troops, let's say, or even American treasure, to the fight against Russia and Ukraine.

He's not going to do anything. He's showing less and less willingness to do anything to stand up to China over Taiwan. So he won't take on any of the real major significant enemies of democracy. sees, America as it used to be envisaged. But he's really good at threatening people who can't possibly fight back or people who are supposed to be on America's side. So to see him and his acolytes seizing on this and saying, well, Greenland, you're next, is just extraordinary.

I mean, but as you say, even something like that, if they're stupid enough to get into it, they will discover it's going to come back and bite them. This is going to come back to bite them, I think, in all kinds of ways that they have not foreseen, particularly events in Venezuela itself. I've seen scholarly arguments that if you want to see an absolute petri dish for insurrection and guerrilla warfare, Venezuela has all of the ingredients. Right. And factions. And highly opposed. And high stakes, people willing to fight when their backs are against the walls, et cetera. So even this is going to, but if you start breaking up NATO, which as long seemed to be Trump's game, but if it's, you know, it's a particularly

spectacular way to do it, is if you start attacking a NATO ally, the blowback and the events that that will want set off in terms of American interests are hard to calculate. Two things we're not talking about. We're not talking about the Epstein files. And we're not talking about the failure of what now is the third time around the Mulberry Bush, Andrew, on a Ukraine-Russia peace. deal. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, again, there would be an Occam's razor argument that wag the dog would be very explanatory for Trump. It's certainly possible. What's interesting is,

if you look at the early polling, he's getting no bump. It's almost a, you know, wholly writ in America that any time a president launches any kind of military operation, people tend to rally around the president, and they tend to ask questions later. And they, there's, to date, Well, maybe there'll be more in subsequent days, but the early polling on this shows no support for it, I mean, some support, but majority against it in the public. So even as a wag the dog operation, how much delay does this buy him in the face of the inevitability that the Epstein stuff is going to come out at some point? All of it is going to come out eventually.

And the inevitability that's least inevitability in conventional terms that they're facing an election in November, which on current polling data is going to be an utter total catastrophe for the Republicans, assuming they actually hold free and fair elections. Recently, the Monk debates hosted a fascinating debate about the two-state solution. But 90 minutes on this contentious topic can also barely scratch the surface. After all, Israel is a hotbed of conflicting ideology. identities, interests, and historical narratives. Even for experts, that's a lot to keep up with.

And it's not just Israel. The Middle East is changing fast. Alliances are shifting. New power centers are emerging and longstanding assumptions are being rewritten in real time. If you want to understand what's really going on, I'd like to invite you to join me on the Call Me Back podcast. I'm Dan Cienor, host of Call Me Back. Our mission is to give you the facts, context, and insights you need.

to make sense of Israel and the region. Our contributors include some of the best source journalists in Israel like Nadavail and Amit Sego and top thought leaders in the U.S. like Sam Harris and Scott Galloway. So if you're ready to go deeper, find me on Call Me Back wherever you get your podcasts. See you there. Let's talk about potentially the serious part of this, and it will kind of bring our conversation back around to Canada. It seems, Andrew, that in this action, there is, again, I don't, I take your point about imputing to it grand strategy, but there are grand consequences.

And the consequences, I would say, run something like this, that that national security strategy document set out a very clear PLV from the Americans that North America, the continent, and extending into South and Central America, is a sphere of influence, a sphere of influence within which the Americans will act for, as they said in the document, economic, security, and diplomatic political reasons. They, in a sense, declared a form of sultanary over the North American continent. And I guess my hypothetical that I present to you is, let's look at Taiwan. Let's look at a future Taiwan, six, 12, 18 months from now, surrounded by Chinese ships, ostensibly on the basis to stop American ornaments from arriving into Taiwan. The Chinese saying that those American ornaments would threaten mainland China. The Chinese swoop in and abduct the president, the prime minister of Taiwan.

Take them back to Beijing for a show trial. what leg do we have to stand on then given our actions now? Is there not, Andrew? In fact, even if there's an absence of grand strategy, there are potentially grand consequences that flow from the events of this weekend. Yeah, absolutely. And, of course, the answer to your question is we'd have no, the Americans would have no leg to stand on whatever.

Now, there's a school of thought that says, I mean, up to a point, it's absolutely correct, which is Russia and China are not going to be deterred by grand moral claims anyway. So all this is doing is just really recognizing reality, et cetera, et cetera. I say it's true up to a point, and the corollary of it is the only thing that will deter them is American military force, and it doesn't really, it's not really about America's moral standing. I think that is too simple. I don't think you can separate hard power and soft power quite so easily.

Part of what makes American military power realizable and operable is the degree to which it's perceived by other countries as legitimate. There's no doubt the Americans can just go and do things on their own if they choose to, and they have a history of doing that in the past. But this is particularly denuded of any kind of either international support or claims to legitimacy or legality. even in its worst in the Cold War, you could at least situate it in some kind of grand strategy, which was, look, we're up against a Soviet system that's bent on world domination, we've got to make some hard choices, some nasty allies to try to stop them. I'm not saying it was right, but at least it had some kind of basis in something. This has no such claim on it.

It is pure unilateralism. It is of the most base motivation. There's no, as I say, there's no claim that we're defending democracy here, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, we're potentially expropriating in the future Venezuela's national asset in the form of oil to pay us back for liberating the country. So as I say, if America wants to be able to use its hard power in effective ways, it's closely linked to its soft power. It's closely linked to the degree to which other countries, other powers, are going to look at it and say, okay, there's some basis to this. We're at least, where are they going to support it or we're going to look the other way?

And maybe they'll get away with it in this case because Maduro was clearly illegitimate, was so widely detested. But it's pushing the boundaries as far as you possibly can. And the degree to which it sets up precedence for the Americans, the degree to which it does fit into a larger vision of the world, where we just basically give Russia a free hand in Europe and we give China a free hand in the Far East, then it is absolutely bankrupt of any support among fellow democracies. That is not something that Japan is going to support

in the Middle East, that is not something that the Europeans are going to support when it comes to Europe. So it is isolating America, and it will find that its military power on its own is not enough. If you have the whole world against you, you're going to discover the limits of American power pretty quickly.

Yeah. Would there also, Andrew, be an additional challenge again in the midterm and longer term future, which is that a world of spheres of influence, if you look back through the sweep of the last 200 years of history, especially in the West, is a world often that leads to great power conflict because alliances between the great powers break down. their smaller powers begin to form alliances with other great powers to try to resist a great power who is pressuring them by playing them off against another one. In the case of World War I, in the case of the buildups to other larger global conflicts,

is it not, Andrew, precisely at this moment where we transition? And maybe that's in a sense what happens this weekend in a more explicit way. you know, events caught up to theory. And we're now in a world that looks more like the 19th century than the 21st century, at least the first 25 years of it, with this, with the events of the weekend. Oh, absolutely. And it's a bizarre trait. I'll give the fanatics around Trump credit for some sincerity on this. Their analysis of 1945 to 2020, is that this was a thoroughgoing disaster for America in which everything had gone wrong. It had opened its borders and all sorts of terrible things that happened,

and it had allowed free trade and all kinds of terrible things, and it had been involved in multilateralism and all kinds of terrible. What were the terrible things that involved unprecedented American power, unprecedented American prosperity, exercise and force-multiplied in intelligent ways through these international institutions. I mean, the cynical left interpretation of it had some validity, which was the Americans talked

to multilateral gain, but it was really an American interest. Well, that was a lot of truth in that. It doesn't have to be, the one doesn't have to be contradictory of the other. It was enlightened self-interest. What the Trump people seem bent on doing is proving the most obtuse campus-lefty theory about American power is absolutely correct, which is that they're just doing things for the most,

again, for the stupidest, most venal possible reasons. And to turn on their own empire, to dismantle the sources of genuine American strength, to trade it in for, well, we're just going to do everything through military might and all on our own. We're treated in for some clapped out oil fields in Venezuela. Well, exactly.

So, we're ready for five to ten years. Well, if then. If then, if ever. The cost estimates that I've seen. 100 billion. Range from 100 billion to a trillion. Right. To get up to any kind of level where this would have any kind of significant impact on world oil markets.

People get bedazzled by this phony claim of $300 billion barrels in reserve. The world's largest reserves. Which was all made up to begin with by the Venezuelans. even if it were true, reserves in the ground or under the sea are different than actual production, which is a million barrels a day at most. So even if it were venal enough to be about the oil, it makes no sense. So it is a peculiarly pinched and backward and simplistic and almost adolescent view of American power that thinks that the 19th century model,

is the model that is most conducive to American interests. And the post-war model emerged because of the war and because of an understanding amongst that generation of what the causes of that war were, which were spheres of influence, great power competition, regional alliances that broke down and became, in fact, the incendiary kind of underpinnings of the conflagration that engulfed the world from 1939 to 1945.

And it came with the cost. among many, of nuclear confrontation, nuclear competition between the Americans and the Soviets, which was terrifying but manageable. There were rational people on both sides. You know, it was largely contained to, you know, them, plus a few other nuclear powers emerged over the years. We are now in a situation where I think the lesson that several powers are going to be taken from this, is that they're going to have to go nuclear. I would not be at all surprised, for example, to see Japan go nuclear in the years to come.

You know, there's been talks in Europe about multilateralizing the use of the nuclear weapons that France and Britain have. These are maybe inevitable, maybe part of the price of the situation we're in, but again, kind of scary. I mean, I'm very keen, for example, that the Germans are building up their military might,

unless, of course, the AFD gets in. Yeah. in which point that becomes a bit scary. But let's hope that doesn't happen. But you're creating really destabilizing situations here. Or Le Pen, the Front National in France with nuclear weapons. And again, you know, who is the common theme in terms of all these deep stabilizing forces? It's Russia working through the weakness as the fault lines in the West.

democracies promoting the far-right populist right in each of these countries, including America. So it's at this point an extraordinary – I mean, people are debating about is this Venezuelan thing a gain or a loss for Putin? And you can say, oh, it's a loss in that – you know, he had a client state in the form of Venezuela. But in a larger strategic sense, getting the Americans to sign on to essentially a – a three spheres of influence view of the world is huge.

Huge. And the peace talks in Ukraine simply have gone away in the last 72. I don't know if that was a coincidence or... I'm not entirely heartbroken at that. That's going to sound callous. Obviously, one wants peace in Ukraine, but those peace, the details, the terms that the Americans certainly have been pushing. I mean, the Europeans are trying to rein it back into something reality,

but anything along the lines of the Putin-Trump, terms would be a disaster. Thank you for listening to the first half of Andrew Coins-Munk Dialogue. If you'd like to get the full program, consider becoming a monk donor. You can do that for as little as $50 a year, a buck a week. And you get access to our popular Friday program. Friday Focus with Janice Rose Stein. Sign up for all of your unique membership perks and privileges at Triple

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