STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
All right. We heard Quil mention Iraq and comparisons to Iraq. Our next guest served four tours in the U.S. military in Iraq. Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts is on the line. Good morning.
SETH MOULTON: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: What do you think the president's goal is in Venezuela?
MOULTON: Well, we really don't know. It seems to be regime change, something that he has said repeatedly he's against. He's against regime change wars, and yet he seems to be absolutely obsessed with Maduro to the point where he's putting a lot of U.S. service members' lives in potential danger here, trying to push him out of power, a country that's not even a national security risk to the United States.
INSKEEP: A couple of things to follow up on there. First, I can name one data point. In the recent Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, it got attention for other things. But there is a description of a meeting with the president on November 4 of this year, and part of the agenda was, quote, "forcing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from power." So we don't have a public statement by the president, but we have a description of a meeting in which this is what he wants to talk about.
MOULTON: Well, it sounds like Iraq 2.0 to me.
INSKEEP: What do you mean?
MOULTON: You know, a president who's obsessed with just getting a foreign leader out of power and assembling or concocting a rationale to do so. Of course, we had faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that draw - drew us into Iraq. In this case, the president has literally created weapons of mass destruction by declaring fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction and thereby trying to justify what he wants to do here.
INSKEEP: Let me follow up on another thing you said. You said Venezuela is not a national security threat to the United States. I get it in the sense that we're not worried about Venezuela's military, but it would not be hard to find ways that Venezuela's misgovernment has harmed the United States. It seems to have created a massive refugee crisis. A lot of the refugees have ended up in the United States with huge social and also political effects, even damage for your party. Why is that not a national security threat?
MOULTON: Well, by that rationale, you could invade half the countries in the world. The point is that this is about priorities, and China is the major national security threat to the United States of America. And by assembling this huge armada, as Trump describes it, he's taking pressure off China, which makes it more likely they'll start a war.
INSKEEP: What do you mean by taking pressure off China? Just because we're distracted?
MOULTON: That's exactly right. And it's a concern I've heard echoed from people who are focused on China throughout the globe, including talking to military commanders whose job is it is every single day to deter and prevent China from starting a war in the Pacific that could literally become World War III. Not to mention that Putin seems very intent on invading other countries in Europe. We got to keep pressure on Putin so that American troops don't get involved in a war there. So there are a lot of places in the world where our presence is trying to deter and prevent wars. Trump seems intent on starting a war right to our south.
INSKEEP: I want people to know that you've introduced legislation that blocks the president from using federal dollars to engage in military action in Venezuela. But as you know very well, that goes nowhere without Republican support. Do you have any sense that any of your Republican colleagues are concerned?
MOULTON: A lot of Republican colleagues are concerned. A lot of them have been publicly against regime change wars, against what happened in Iraq. But they're all just scared of Trump. I mean, this is political cowardice at its peak, and, of course, it starts with Speaker Johnson, whose job is to actually follow the Constitution and have a vote on going to war in Congress because that's our constitutional responsibility. Instead, he just does whatever Trump wants, which in this case, seems to be supporting his efforts to start a new war.
INSKEEP: When you hear analysts look at the various moves of the administration and see a new foreign policy orientation, which, in a sense, is an old foreign policy orientation, where the United States focuses on the Western Hemisphere and tries further to dominate the Western Hemisphere even more than the U.S. already has, while perhaps leaving a little more space for Russia and China to do what they want in their areas of the world, that is one way that Trump's foreign policy has been perceived. Do you think that's correct and do you think that's wise?
MOULTON: It's wrong and it's dumb. And that's why every administration, including Trump's first administration, had a totally different national security policy that recognized that the world is a complicated and interconnected place, and China may seem far away. Russia may seem far away, but they present real threats to us, to our allies and to our American service members. So rather than push American service members into a war we don't need in Venezuela, he's taking - he's not doing enough to prevent wars where our adversaries actually really want to start them. So this is a massive change in policy from what previous Democratic and Republican administrations have done.
INSKEEP: Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, thanks very much for your time. Good to talk with you again.
MOULTON: Thank you so much, Steve. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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