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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Interview with Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Interview With Professor And Author Jessica Stern; Interview With Former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired December 21, 2025 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:03]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you from New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Today on the program, year one of Trump 2.0. What has gone right and what has gone wrong?

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Disrespectful.

ZAKARIA: I will ask that question to Joe Biden's secretary of state, Antony Blinken.

Also, the horrific shooting during the Hanukkah celebrations at Australia's Bondi Beach was inspired by Islamic State ideology, according to the Australian prime minister. I'll talk to an expert.

Then, Sudan, the Palestinian territories, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Haiti. These are the places where people are most at risk in 2026, according to the International Rescue Committee. I'll talk to that organization's president, David Miliband, about how the drop in aid from America and others makes these desperate situations much, much worse.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

If there's a slogan that could be attached to the Trump administration's new National Security Strategy, it's simple. Make America a regional power again. The document begins by lambasting decades of American foreign policy that saw America as a global hegemon, tending to its interests around the world, promoting globalism, embracing global institutions, and shouldering global burdens.

Instead, we are told that the U.S. should define its interests much more narrowly. While the NSS concedes a few interests in Europe and Asia, it says America's fundamental interests should be in its neighborhood, the Western Hemisphere, where it invokes the Monroe Doctrine and the Trump corollary, which sounds a lot like the Roosevelt corollary announced by PRESIDENT TEDDY Roosevelt.

Marco Rubio recently explained to FOX News that America First means first paying attention to the region we live in, the Western Hemisphere.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARCO RUBIO, SECRETARY OF STATE: You start with your own hemisphere, where we live.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: It all sounds logical, but it isn't. The United States is the most powerful country in history, and that power has actually grown in the last three decades as its companies and technologies dominate the globe. It can't limit itself to what is going on in its own backyard without massive consequences, both for itself and the world.

It's important to understand the error when President James Monroe declared his eponymous doctrine in 1823. The United States was a small agricultural republic of about 10 million people, with 24 states, mostly east of the Mississippi River. Its share of global GDP was 2.6 percent, about a 10th of what it is today. It had armed forces so small that it would not rank in the world's top 15 in number of military personnel.

Monroe was recognizing the independence of several Latin American countries that had broken free of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and warning Europe's great powers not to intervene to recolonize them. He was advocating a doctrine of anti-colonialism and anti- interventionism.

It seems absurd to limit the U.S. to that perspective today, when America is an international behemoth with interests spanning the world. Prioritizing America's backyard makes Washington focus its attention on one of the least important areas of the world economically. The data shows this clearly.

America's goods and services trade with all of Latin America, besides Mexico, amounts to around $450 billion in 2024.

[10:05:07]

Its trade with the European Union was more than three times that number, at $1.5 trillion, and its trade with Asia was more than $2 trillion. Canada and Mexico do trade massively with the U.S., but those three economies are now so intertwined that they count in some ways as a single North American economy.

When formulating the strategy of containment that won the Cold War, the diplomat George Kennan argued that there were five centers of economic power in the world. In those days the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and finally Japan. Kennan thought that the U.S. had to ensure that the other three non-Soviet centers stayed friendly to Washington. Today, one would tweak that list, adding China and probably lumping

Britain and Germany into a European whole. But the basic strategy would be the same. Keep the major centers of economic power friendly.

The NSS instead yokes American strategy to a peripheral part of the global economy. One caveat, the NSS is a disjointed document, patching together sections that are seemingly written by different authors and frequently contradicts itself or espouses banalities. It notes President Trump's foreign policy is pragmatic without being pragmatist, realistic without being realist, principled without being idealistic, muscular without being hawkish, and restrained without being dovish. Whatever that means.

There are sections that seem more willing to play an international role, but the main thrust is as I describe it. What the Trump administration is proposing is not so different from what the isolationists proposed in the 1920s and 1930s. Stay out of Europe's affairs and crack down on immigration.

Indeed, then as now, skepticism about American engagement with the world went hand in hand with anti-immigration sentiment as nativists worried that these aliens would not be able to assimilate and enacted massive restrictions on immigration. The people, by the way, who were unassimilable then were the Irish, Italians, Southern Europeans and Jews, all people who seem to have assimilated quite nicely.

The Trump NSS is obsessed with immigration as a national security threat, and comes close to arguing that the gravest threat that the U.S. faces today is migration into its own country and migration into Europe, which it says poses the prospect of civilizational erasure.

The global situation is much like the 1920s. The United States is the only country in the world with the capacity to keep the international system stable. Its withdrawal from the world will create power vacuums, which other less responsible powers will fill. Then America refused to shoulder its burden, and the international system collapsed, leading to World War II.

Today, there are many other stabilizing forces in the world, but an America that looks mainly after its backyard will leave the world rudderless, unstable and chaotic. Let's hope we will not have to learn that lesson again.

Go to FareedZakaria.com for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week, and let's get started.

For more on America's place in the world today, I am joined by Anthony Blinken for an exclusive interview. He, of course, served as secretary of state under President Joe Biden.

Welcome, Tony. Pleasure to have you on.

ANTONY BLINKEN, FORMER U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: Fareed, great to be here.

ZAKARIA: So I know you're going to tell me that, you know, you don't like what's been happening under the Trump administration. But tell me, of all the things that have happened this year, what is the thing that you think is likely to leave the most lasting effect? What, you know, what is the thing that you think will reverberate?

BLINKEN: I think we've got two challenges with the administration's approach. One is the one that you just talked about, and it's in the National Security Strategy, and it reflects the worldview that they're bringing to what they're doing.

You know, Fareed, I worked on National Security Strategy during the Clinton administration, during the Obama administration, during the Biden administration. We used to joke that rarely have so many worked so long on a document to be read by so few. This is maybe the one exception, and it's gotten a lot of attention.

But this worldview that takes us away from what had been the animating principles of our foreign policy for 80 years, with lots of mistakes along the way. But a basic foundational premise that enlightened self- interest was the way to go, that the success and strength of other countries could be our own, and that the investments that we made in that would redound positively to us.

[10:10:05]

New markets for everything we wanted to sell, new partners to deal with all sorts of global challenges that no one country can deal with alone. New allies to deter aggression. We've moved away from that. And this tripolar world that the administration seems intent on establishing, the United States, Russia, China, with spheres of influence, I understand the motivation for it, but I worry very much where it leads because, you're a student of history. So am I.

We know in this 19th century view of the world where great powers get to do what they want, and everyone else has to suffer what they must is not a recipe for stability. It's not a recipe for peace. The big powers in their spheres inevitably want more. And the elbows get sharp. And then they're keeping down people in their own countries, or people in countries within their sphere. People rebel against that. They push them down again. Conflict inevitably boils over.

ZAKARIA: What do you think happens in Ukraine? What is the most realistic outcome now?

BLINKEN: So first, let's remember why it's so important to begin with. Because of course, none of us like to see a big country beating up on a smaller one. But this was always about more than that. The aggression that Russia committed against Ukraine was also an aggression against the very principles of the heart of the international system. Principles like you don't go and change the borders of a neighbor by force. You don't go and dictate the policies of another country.

So now where are we? My own estimation is left to its own devices right now, the line on the ground, on the map, is not going to move very much. The Russians have been inching out at horrific cost, just a little bit of territory. I think they've taken about another 1 percent of Ukraine over the last year at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, hundreds of thousands of wounded.

The real issue I think if we're going to settle this, at least for some period of time, is making sure that there is a sufficient deterrent in place so that Russia doesn't simply rest and repeat at some point in the future. Security guarantees. What are we going to provide? Now, it's critical that the United States be a central part of that. I have to say, the credibility of America's word is something that people will think twice about, but that's important.

Having forces on any line that is established so that it's a tripwire, and Russia can't simply go back in. Providing for Ukraine's defense industry, making sure that we continue to provide intelligence and weapons. All of those things are critical.

ZAKARIA: When you look at what's going on in Ukraine and on that border now, the Trump administration's strategy does seem to be force the Ukrainians to make a bunch of concessions. Those concessions should be enough to mollify, placate the Russians. And at least we'll have a deal and we'll end this horrific fighting. Is that likely to work?

BLINKEN: Short answer is no, for two reasons. One, it's awfully hard to tell the Ukrainians to demand of the Ukrainians that they voluntarily give up more territory, that they reward the aggression that they've been on the receiving end of since the initial invasion. Second, I actually don't think absent really giving wholesale into what Russia wants that it's going to satisfy Putin. And whenever we've seen the Ukrainians say, OK, we can get behind some of this.

The ball is in Russia's court. Russia has not taken a swing at the ball. Putin is not interested. He still thinks that he can get what he wants by force, and he's willing to sacrifice a tremendous amount to stick it out.

ZAKARIA: What do you think he wants?

BLINKEN: What does he want? In the first instance he certainly wants all of the Donbas. In the second instance, he wants Ukraine one way or another. He wants to neutralize it as an independent country. He wants to make sure that it's beholden to Russia in some form or fashion. That's the goal. Whether he can get that in one bite, maybe not, but that's the intent. That's why it's so critical that if there is even a timeout, a ceasefire, it's something that can endure because what's built into it says to Vladimir Putin, actually I can't get away with doing this again.

ZAKARIA: Stay with us. Back in June, Tony Blinken wrote that Trump's strike on Iran was a mistake, but one he hoped would succeed. I'll ask the former secretary of state whether he still thinks it was a mistake and whether it did succeed.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:19:02]

ZAKARIA: And I'm back with more of my exclusive interview with the former U.S. secretary of state, Anthony Blinken.

Tony, you wrote an article where you said Trump's Iran strike was a mistake. I hope it succeeds. Would it be fair to say that it did succeed and that you were wrong to oppose it?

BLINKEN: I think the jury is out. Yes, I very much want it to succeed because we -- this is a problem that we need to deal with. But, again, press rewind for a second. Of course, we had the nuclear agreement with Iran under Obama, and it put its nuclear program in a box. And in particular, it ensured that for some extended period of time, Iran would not have the ability to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon without taking a lot of time to do it a year or more.

And if it chose to break the agreement and start making fissile material for a weapon, we'd see it and we'd be able to do something about it. And we bought at least a decade, probably 15 or 20 years, different provisions of the agreement, as you know, lapsed. They could have been extended.

ZAKARIA: But the bombing has set back their program in a similar way.

[10:20:02]

BLINKEN: Well, the reason I bring this up is we, of course, had the same thought or opportunity. We wanted to deal with -- we were determined to deal with the problem. And the question is, what's the best way to do it? The problem that we had with bombing the program was that, yes, you could set it back and depending on your assessment, a year to two years. But if, and this is why I say the jury is still out, if Iran made the decision to rebuild but to rebuild deeper underground, in places that we couldn't get to, we'd wind up with an even worse problem a couple of years down the road.

The diplomatic agreement bought us 10, 15, 20 years and kept the option down the road to use force if we have to. So the jury is out because I don't think we know what Iran is going to do. Now I'm hoping that it will conclude, no, we shouldn't pursue this program, but I fear that, in fact, they will. And at some point, they'll rebuild and in a way that will be more dangerous.

ZAKARIA: On the left, you have been criticized, the Biden administration but you personally, about Gaza, about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and the sense that the Biden administration did not do enough to stop Israel. When you reflect on the issue, do you think that that criticism is right?

BLINKEN: Look, let's start with the proposition that how can anyone, starting with me, not wish profoundly that we could have brought an end to the conflict a lot sooner, that we could have alleviated more the suffering of people who were caught, young women, men, children who were caught in this horrific crossfire that Hamas initiated on October 7th? And I'll probably think that for the rest of my days.

But we had two things that I think are worth pointing out. One is, of course, to start where we finished. We did finish with a ceasefire. That's exactly what we handed over. We did finish with tens of thousands of trucks poised to go in. I wish we could have gotten sooner, but a lot went into getting there, and that's at least what we handed off. Second, we had three big challenges that were sometimes in conflict. Make sure October 7th doesn't' happen again and so deal with Hamas's capacity to perpetuate another massacre, a massacre of Jews not seen since the Holocaust.

Second, and this is something that gets discounted. Avoid a larger war. I think one of the things that people forget is that we were right on the precipice, especially in the early days and early weeks of this being a much broader war with Iran looking to get in, with Hezbollah looking to get in. The Houthis eventually did, but especially Iran and Hezbollah. And had that happened, had we not prevented that, had we not preserved Israel's deterrent, so that it said to these groups and countries, don't do it, and put our own deterrent in place, we would have had a wider war, more death, more destruction, and it would have prolonged Gaza.

And then third, of course, was looking out for the people who were caught in the middle. The people of Gaza who were caught in the middle. And I can tell you, Fareed, I worked this every single day trying to help.

ZAKARIA: But it's hard to look at the devastation there. 90 percent of all buildings destroyed and not think it was a failure.

BLINKEN: Well, failure --

ZAKARIA: Just for the people of Gaza. I mean, they're living in a hellscape.

BLINKEN: For the people of Gaza, there's no question that this was a tragedy of historic proportions. There's no question about that. But the question is, what to do about it, what could have been done, what should have been done, and what did we do? And as I said, we had to juggle all these things.

Now, we believe strongly that the quickest, most effective way to get to an end of the war was to get a ceasefire, to get a hostage agreement, to get a ceasefire. And that's what we worked on. But two things continuously kept pushing that off. One was Hamas's conviction that the cavalry was going to come to the rescue, that the Iranians, Hezbollah and others would get in. Until they were disabused of that notion, which didn't happen until really the summer and early fall of 2024, after the Iranians attacked Israel and were rebuffed, Hezbollah also had its problems, they kept saying to themselves, and we know it from the information we had, we can pull back. We don't need to -- we don't need to do a deal.

The other thing that motivated Hamas, and we saw this in the information we had as well, was whenever they saw daylight emerging between Israel and its primary patrons, the United States, they would also say, we can pull back. So when there were ICC indictments in early '24 of Netanyahu and the defense minister, when a number of European countries recognized Palestine, or -- this is early on in 2024, when differences between the United States and Israel over Rafah emerged more publicly, we saw it. They pulled back. So one of the challenges we had was the disconnect between what we

were saying and pressing the Israelis on in private and what we were projecting publicly so that this gap didn't appear and that Hamas didn't walk away from the table and actually got to a deal.

[10:25:10]

ZAKARIA: Tony Blinken, always a pleasure.

BLINKEN: Great to be with you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, the Hanukkah shooting at Bondi Beach was inspired by Islamic State ideology, according to authorities, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Last Sunday, antisemitism reared its ugly head once again, this time in Australia, where two gunmen opened fire at a Hanukkah event in Bondi Beach, killing more than a dozen people and injuring many others. This was Australia's deadliest mass shooting in nearly 30 years. Australian authorities say that the alleged perpetrators of the attack were motivated by Islamic state ideology.

Here to tell us what we need to know about ISIS around the world is Jessica Stern. She's a professor at Boston University and the author of the book "ISIS: The State of Terror." Jessica, welcome.

Tell us, you know, why is it that we've noticed this occasionally over the last few years when you do have these kind of terror attack it does seem that the Islamic state inspires, or radicalizes these people more so than al-Qaeda, which seems to have kind of disappeared. What is it about the -- about ISIS and the Islamic state that seems to be more -- you know, have kind of greater staying power?

JESSICA STERN, CO-AUTHOR, "ISIS: THE STATE OF TERROR": ISIS was damaged severely with the attack in 2019 when the caliphate was defeated. But it persists, and it persists largely through its digital caliphate, which is very effective. So, I think that's the main reason we're seeing that they're much more savvy than al-Qaeda ever was in terms of their propaganda and how they try to appeal to alienated people, actually, in the west.

ZAKARIA: And they were much richer, right, than al-Qaeda? I mean, this was a much bigger operation than al-Qaeda ever was.

STERN: Right. ISIS established what it called a caliphate. It was in Iraq and Syria. It fulfilled many of the functions of a state for a time but it had a lot of money.

It was trading in foreign currency. It was -- and it had this aura of victory. It wanted to establish the caliphate immediately, whereas al- Qaeda had a longer term agenda. But the main reason it's much more effective at radicalizing people in the west is how sophisticated it is through its digital appeal. ZAKARIA: So, when you hear about what some of these people, you've studied them extensively who get radicalized, what's the profile? What is it that these people -- who are these people who kind of go on the internet and sort of somehow at the end of that process, end up terrorists?

STERN: Well, they're not well adjusted happy people. They are often people who are drawn to violence, a combination of personal as well as ostensibly political motives. When we've interviewed former terrorists, they often tell us -- former western, especially lone actors, they often tell us that their personal grievances, their emotional distress was at least as important as the ideals that a terrorist group claims to be promoting.

So, it's important to realize that the vast majority of people who are mentally ill or suicidal or deeply distressed, of course, do not become terrorists, but those people are quite overrepresented in our data.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that this reflects a kind of a rise that we should be worried about, a rising tide or is this a kind of one off?

STERN: I don't think it's a one off. ISIS persists, and it's important for us to realize that it still is able to attract alienated people who are looking for purpose, dignity, significance. And unfortunately, the people in our government who are supposed to be monitoring this many of them have been switched over to working on immigrants, migrants. And our government is largely hollowed out. We had a large number of people who are very sophisticated in their understanding of western recruits to terrorist organizations, and many of them have left, and some are now working on other things. I don't think we're ready for this.

ZAKARIA: Jessica Stern, always a pleasure to hear from you. Thank you.

STERN: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, what are the most dangerous places in the world to be a human being in 2026? I will speak with David Miliband, the International Rescue Committee's president, on just that topic when we come back.

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[10:39:35]

ZAKARIA: Sixty-one, that is the number of conflicts around the world today more than at any time since World War II. A quarter billion, that is the amount of people globally who need humanitarian aid. Eighty-three percent, that is the proportion of USAID funded programs that were canceled by the Trump administration this year despite that urgency of need. And it's not just the U.S. pulling back.

[10:40:01]

Germany, France and the U.K. have also drastically reduced their foreign aid budgets. All of those numbers were from the International Rescue Committee's 2026 emergency watch list, released this week. It highlights the countries at greatest risk of worsening crises in the coming year.

Joining me now is the IRC's president and CEO David Miliband. David, we all heard about the shutting down of USAID, and you know, the pulling back of all these programs. You guys operate in all these countries where you're trying to get humanitarian aid to people. What was the effect?

DAVID MILIBAND, PRESIDENT AND CEO, INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE: Well, overnight programs were closed, programs for Sudanese refugees in south Sudan, health programs closed, programs for livelihoods in Niger in the -- more in west of Africa, closed education programs in Afghanistan closed, programs in Yemen closed. Overall, there's been a 50 percent reduction in the total spend on humanitarian crisis response, down to about $12 billion in total this year, down from 25, 26 billion.

And just for my own organization, 2 million clients have lost access to services. Absolutely critical services. We continue to deliver --

ZAKARIA: So, this is like?

MILIBAND: Services like health -- services for refugees, livelihood support to help farmers stay on the land and adapt to climate change. Education programs, 300,000 boys and girls that we were going to educate in Afghanistan, not getting an education.

And so while we continue to have programs with the U.S. government, we're seeing a general rise in disorder in the abuse and the trampling of the rights of civilians to get aid. In fact, 50,000 civilians have been killed in those conflicts this year. And our warning in the watch list is that this is a dangerous trend, not just for those on the receiving end of these cuts, but for the rest of us, because all the evidence is, you know this very well, crises that start in somewhere like Sudan, the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, they don't stay there.

ZAKARIA: You know that people like Elon Musk say that these organization, like yours are, you know, they're scams. They have lots of administrative costs. They create a kind of comfortable dynamic where, in a sense, you don't want to solve these problems because part of the point of the organization is that it exists for these problems. What do you say about that?

MILIBAND: Let me take you to east Africa. Zero dose children who have no vaccination at all. That's a lifelong sentence not to get a vaccination. Weve delivered 21 million doses of vaccine to 2 million kids for $2.10, approximately a shot. That is such an investment. But that's also value for money.

That's not waste. That's not bureaucratic costs. That is 2 million kids who would have the life sentence of never getting vaccinated, getting vaccinated.

ZAKARIA: And your administration costs are very low, right?

MILIBAND: Well, yes. I mean, if you -- if you look at it, it's about 12 or 13 percent of the total is called administration. But remember that includes IT. Now, we're proud to be spending three percent of our total budget, total budget, about $1.1 billion. We spend about 3 percent on IT. Thank goodness we do. That makes us more efficient, not less efficient. So, let's really take this on.

As we -- as we know, and as you demonstrated, 250 million people in humanitarian need around the world today, that means they depend on non-governmental organizations and on the U.N. to survive, because their own governments aren't able to support them. It's imperative, not just as a moral reason, but for strategic reasons, to help those people.

ZAKARIA: What are the most troubled countries in the world? Where are people -- I always think that we talk about countries, but what you're really saying is this is where people, just ordinary human beings, are most vulnerable. They are going to die. They're going to get sick. They're going to get malnourished.

MILIBAND: Yes. Aid is life saving for people. Development, that's a bigger question for nations.

Let's go to Sudan. It's the largest humanitarian crisis in the world today and the largest humanitarian crisis ever. Thirty million people out of a total population of 45 million are dependent on humanitarian aid to survive. Twenty-one million people at the highest levels of food insecurity. That means hunger and, in some cases, starvation, the fifth level famine level conditions.

I was there myself in September. The east of the country, in the west of the country, in Darfur. 20 years ago, everyone was talking about Darfur. Now, it's very hard to get any attention to it.

The crisis is three to four times worse, and the response is maybe one-tenth of what it was. Out of El Fasher, we are working for people who fled from El Fasher.

[10:45:02]

There's 150,000 people gone missing. We don't know what's happened to those people. What we do know is satellites show bloodstains underneath and next to piles of bodies in El Fasher and women and girls coming out of that city, the capital of north Darfur, saying every single one of them has been raped on their way out of that crisis.

So, Sudan is an avatar for the modern global disorder. It's an avatar because it's a civil war in which all of the neighbors are backing one side or the other. It's an avatar because there's no end in sight. There's continued fighting in Kordofan. It's an avatar because the rights of civilians to life, never mind to aid, are being denied.

And finally, it's an avatar because the funding is being cut. It's only 35 percent funded. All of us should be thinking Sudan is a warning, not just a crisis.

ZAKARIA: Well, the IRC does extraordinary work and you're doing it under very, very challenging circumstances. David Miliband, thank you for --

MILIBAND: Thank you, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: What are the Trump administration's real goals in the escalating crackdown on Venezuela? It may be regime change there and somewhere else. I'll explain where that is next.

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[10:50:57]

ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. In the Trump administration's escalating, puzzling, and possibly illegal crackdown on Venezuela, many see the fingerprints not necessarily of Trump himself, but of his secretary of state, Marco Rubio. Since Trump's first term, Rubio has devoted himself to trying to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. But why is Rubio amid much more pressing crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, so interested in an isolated nation of fewer than 30 million people, more than a thousand miles south of Miami?

As the "New York Times" reports, part of Rubio's interest in Venezuela is really about that country's closest ally in the region, Cuba. Rubio is the son of Cuban immigrants raised in hard line anti-Castro Miami, and his ire for the Cuban regime is central to his political identity. He views Havana as a key player propping up Maduro and Caracas as a key lifeline for the increasingly cash strapped island nation. Many Cuba hawks believe that toppling Venezuela's leadership would deliver a death blow to Cuba's, as well.

The two regimes have a mutual commitment to the other's survival. As the Cuba scholar Richard Feinberg noted in a 2020 essay, the two countries have had ties since the independence struggle of the 19th century. But ties deepened a century later after a political earthquake in Caracas. In 1998, Venezuelans elected a charismatic left wing populist who raged against imperialism and corruption of the political elites. That man was Hugo Chavez.

In Chavez, Cuba's Fidel Castro had both the acolyte and the regional champion he'd long sought. There was a deep personal affection between the two men, a father-son dynamic. But the relationship was also pragmatic, particularly for Castro.

After the fall of the iron curtain, the tiny island nation lost the roughly $4.5 billion in annual aid that used to come from the Soviet Union. Cuba needed cash badly, and Venezuela had, and still has, vast reserves of oil.

Chavez began selling heavily discounted oil to Cuba. And by 2008, Cuba was receiving more than 100,000 barrels per day from its ally. Cuba refined and sold the surplus to other markets.

In return, Cuba sent Caracas its most valuable export, medical professionals trained for free in Castro's regime. At one point, more than 20,000 Cuban doctors and other medical workers fanned out to the poorest neighborhoods in Venezuela, serving as many as 15 million Venezuelans.

Venezuela's security apparatus is infiltrated by the Cuban government, though no one knows how many Cuban soldiers and spies remain in Venezuela. And Cuba hawks often inflate the figures. Many believe, however, that Cuban operatives are a linchpin to Maduro's survival.

Take the failed revolt in Venezuela in 2019. In January of that year, the opposition leader Juan Guaido. Amid massive anti-government protests and after the previous year's sham elections, had declared himself acting president. Rubio, then a senator, was reportedly key in persuading Trump to back Guaido. In April of 2019, the 35-year-old lawmaker tried to trigger an army uprising, but the military remained loyal to Maduro. The Trump administration believes that Cuban intelligence informed the Venezuelan dictator of the coup attempt, and Cuban soldiers helped him crush it.

Today, Maduro has expanded the ranks of Cuban bodyguards in his personal security detail. As the "New York Times" reports, citing a person close to Venezuela's military, he sees Cuban military and intelligence personnel as incorruptible. Still, the Cuba-Venezuela relationship has weakened.

[10:55:01]

As William Leogrande and Peter Kornbluh note in "Foreign Policy," Venezuela is crippled by its own economic crisis and punishing sanctions from the U.S. Reuters reports that between January and November of this year, Caracas was only able to deliver 27,000 barrels of oil per day to Cuba, roughly a quarter of what it sent a decade ago. There are also fewer Cuban doctors and soldiers in the country than there were at the apex of the relationship.

Perhaps that has led Rubio to be more daring, more ambitious in his approach to both countries. But he may underestimate the cost of success. As the Obama era deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes told the "New York Times," toppling Cuba's regime is unlikely to lead to democracy. On the contrary, he said, Cuba is far more likely to collapse and become a failed state.

The same may be true of Venezuela, with its many militias and factions. You'd think we'd learn the lesson. Twenty-five years of regime change have not gone so well in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and many, many other places.

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. Happy holidays to all and I will see you next week.

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