Frank Bruni: It’s great to be conversing with you again, Bret, and I look forward to our exchanges this year, when President Trump will apparently Make Venezuela Gush Again. I refer of course to oil and to his desire to extract what he wants from wherever he wants as a show of might and a means to (greater) riches. Please, please tell me I have it all wrong and should calm down.
Bret Stephens: First of all, happy new year. Second of all: Calm down!
Frank: Have you met me? Calm is not my forte. I’m still searching for my forte — and still wondering how to pronounce it. I’m also still interested in having you tell me that the Trump administration’s adventures in Venezuela reflect more wisdom than folly and won’t turn out disastrously.
Bret: The real disaster was Venezuela over the past 25 years, which went from being one of the richest countries in Latin America to a socialist hell-on-earth, with more than a quarter of the population fleeing the Maduro regime. Much of the country starved, elections were stolen, and America’s enemies in Moscow, Beijing, Havana and Tehran found a friend. However it turns out, Nicolás Maduro’s arrest was truly justice served. And, with a bit of luck, Marco Rubio will steer Trump away from his oil mania and toward insisting on new elections, which are very likely to bring a freedom-respecting and pro-American government back to power.
Of course I could be wrong, and this could all be a precursor to Trump invading Greenland, Mexico and maybe St. Pierre and Miquelon while he’s at it.
Frank: You say Rubio needs a “bit of luck”? Have you met Trump?
Bret: I have, actually. The line that went through my head was, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”
Frank: Hah. Well, I’m focused not on “Star Wars” but on this war, or whatever the hell we’re calling it, and while all you say about Maduro and Venezuela is true, that is not why Trump ordered this mission. It’s not even a significant factor in it; most of Maduro’s accomplices and cheering squad remain in place, including his vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, who is now Venezuela’s acting president, strong emphasis on the “acting.” And if the prompt for sending troops into a country to depose and snatch its corrupt, cruel, incompetent leader is the corruption, cruelty and incompetence of a country’s leader, well, the American military has a very long to-do list ahead of it. How is this justifiable or even sensible in that larger context?
Bret: Imagine a burglar goes into a house and discovers there’s a starving kidnapped child in there, whom he frees. On the way out, he pockets $1000. On balance, I’m grateful for the burglary. As it is, Trump is soon going to discover that Venezuela’s oil riches are more of a liability than an asset, and that the best course of action is to steer the country toward an election in which the good guys win, the bad guys become the political opposition, American forces remain safe and offshore, and Venezuelans finally emerge from their national tragedy. I’m going to freak you out and say that I hope the same thing finally happens in Cuba, too.
Frank: So you’d like to see an American military excursion in Cuba?
Bret: Indudablemente.
Frank: Where else? Can you articulate a philosophy — a set of guidelines — that limits our invasions, that’s consistent and coherent, and that doesn’t have us wildly overextended and acting in an imperialistic, hubristic manner that further erodes our remaining moral standing in the world? The Donroe Doctrine sure isn’t it. On top of which, bringing Cuba into the equation again suggests, wrongly, that this is about liberation and justice, that the administration has humanitarian motives. What I hear in the remarks coming from Trump, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller is a hunger to bully the world for our own material gain, and that’s not a version of America that serves us in the long run — or that I can stomach.
Bret: If we could liberate Cuba from its rulers as swiftly as we deposed Maduro, I’d do it in a heartbeat. It’s an atrocious dictatorship that has imposed a rain of ruin on its own people for going on 70 years, all the while causing various multiple domestic and international crises for the United States — one of which nearly started World War III. I guess my “doctrine” would be this: If you can advance America’s core national interests in a way that also advances America’s core national values, and do so at an acceptable cost, you should do so. Obviously the question turns on just what that “acceptable cost” is.
Now you’ll tell me where I’m wrong ….
Frank: I’ll tell you that you sound very idealistic to me. For example, you rightly note that we deposed Maduro “swiftly,” making it all sound so easy-peasy. ” But what happens tomorrow? A month from now? Six months? Be it Venezuela or Cuba or Iran or wherever else Trump turns his fickle gaze, are we giving ample consideration to whether we’re creating — and then left with — a situation even worse than the current one? Are we doing any planning? Even the most finely honed doctrine — the Bret Tenets — is irrelevant in the hands of this administration, whose motives can’t be trusted and who care much more about crude power (double entendre intended) than about the fine points.
Bret: A valid objection. We’ll see: In a year’s time, we’ll have a verdict as to whether Venezuela is better off or not. My modest bet is that it will be considerably better. But feel free to serve me crow if I’m wrong.
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Frank: Bret, I’m a serious food guy. A veritable gastronome. I’d never serve you crow. I’d go with duck. Maybe even pigeon.
Bret: Nah: If I’m wrong on a call this important, crow is what I’ll definitely deserve. With a side of prairie oysters and chicken feet. Let’s switch to domestic politics. What will the Democratic Party do without Tim Walz?
Frank: Put the memory of 2024 even farther behind it? Walz seems to me a very lovely man who has been a deeply flawed governor — and I say that with a knot in my stomach, because Walz now finds himself in combustible circumstances in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis by an ICE agent. We’ll learn much more in the coming hours and days about precisely what happened, but regardless, this seems to pit local and state governments against the federal government in a very scary way. It’s a horrifying turn of events.
Bret: I’m going to refrain from having an opinion until I have a better grasp of the facts.
Frank: I actually find myself thinking more and more about a man less lovely than Walz, a Democrat whom we’ve previously discussed — and disparaged — but whom I find more and more compelling. Get out your hair gel, Bret. We’re about to revisit Gavin Newsom.
Bret: Funnily enough, I think both governors have the exact same problem.
Frank: Lemme guess — they’re too cowed by the woke mob?
Bret: Not exactly. Their problem, and the Democratic Party’s problem more generally, is governance — or rather, incompetent governance. Minnesota, as the Somali fraud story that felled Walz illustrates, is a badly governed state. So is California. And they’re badly governed in ways that are unique to Democrats — high taxes, poor services, bureaucratic neglect and high costs. Democrats want to make affordability their rallying cry, but the 10 states with the highest cost of living, according to U.S. News and World Report, are all blue (with California the worst offender), while the states with the lowest costs are all red.
Democrats need to find leaders who embody the message they’re trying to adopt. Neither of those guys is it. Maybe a Democrat from North Carolina instead?
Frank: Three things. One, often a state ends up with a high cost of living because it’s a desirable place to live. High cost does not equal misgovernance and may in part reflect the opposite; some of those low-cost red states have cheap housing because no one’s clamoring for it. Two, the North Carolina Democrat you’re thinking of is our former governor, Roy Cooper, and he’s running for the U.S. Senate this year and we need him fully focused on that race and on flipping a red seat to blue, thank you very much.
Bret: Why not for president? Anyway, go on …
Frank: Three, there may be particular methods of misgovernance at which Democrats excel, but Republicans more than hold their own on misgovernance generally, and the Trump administration takes the trophy. In any case, it’s not Newsom’s governing record that impresses me. It’s his sheer determination and dynamism. Read Helen Lewis’s terrific new profile of him in The Atlantic — which fully considers his smarm as well as his charm, to crib her framing — and tell me you don’t think to yourself: He’s matured into a fearsome political gladiator. And while I’d love the post-Trump to be all cuddles and compassion, maybe another flamboyantly coifed brawler with substantial measures of naughtiness and nastiness is the winning ticket.
Bret: Ugh. Please. No. The state of California — by which I mean the condition of California — is what JD Vance and other Republicans want to run against in 2028. Please, Democrats, don’t do them the favor.
In the meantime, Frank, any reading recommendations?
Frank: Indeed. As you know, Bret, I’m a huge N.F.L. fan who usually pays little attention to college football, but I couldn’t help noticing and being moved by the unexpectedly spectacular season that the Indiana Hoosiers just had. In an excellent examination of their ascendance in The Washington Post, Chuck Culpepper asked: “How did Indiana go 501-717-46 across 136 years through 2023 and then 24-2 across Coach Curt Cignetti’s first two seasons, including 13-0 and ranked No. 1 in this one?” The answer is that he and his players planned meticulously, practiced intensely, sweated the details — sweated, period. Preparation beats peacocking any day of the week.
What about you, Bret? What moved you?
Bret: Our news-side colleague Raymond Zhong, a friend of mine since our Wall Street Journal days, is chronicling his seaborne trip to Antarctica to look at the effects of climate change. Ray has been a marvelous prose stylist since he was fresh out of college, and he outdid himself describing what he saw early one morning from the bridge of the ship:
The edges of the floes were rough and polygonal, almost like the plates of a turtle’s shell, but their surfaces were pillowy and pristine, with soft-sculpted contours like frosting on a cake. Filling the cracks between the ice was a messy mix of slush and seawater and broken icy bits. Lounging on top was the occasional seal, as apparently unimpressed by our ship as it was by the magnificent scene around it.
Nice to work for a newspaper with the best writing anywhere. Hasta la proxima, Frank.
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