Is there a danger, though, that this will entrench the current interim government?

I think there is that danger because, uh, Trump has about two, two and a half years to go.

If he wants a government in Caracas that will absolutely keep this deal, that is the government that's there now.

If you have a free election next year, uh, it may well be that whoever is elected, uh, will say, "This is a bad deal.

It was never agreed to by an elected government.

It was never approved by the National Assembly.

It's unconstitutional." Uh, so that gives the president, President Trump that is, uh, an incentive to try to keep Delcy Rodriguez in place.

I mean, there is the danger too that it may get overturned by a different US administration in a few years.

So Elliot, after everything we've witnessed since January, the January uprisings, the massacre, the war, the blockade, and now a supposed ceasefire where there's still military strikes happening, what has Washington actually learned?

Oh boy, what has Washington learned? I think we've learned that the policy making was sloppy.

Right now, the old fashioned interagency process is not working.

So you have to ask yourself, for example, Did the president not fully realize that Iran might try to close the Strait of Hormuz, for example? Did he not realize the desire of Iran to link Lebanon with the Iran conflict? What was in his mind at each of these stages in January and February and March? I think we've learned generally here that Iran, first of all, happy to close the Strait of Hormuz, unconcerned about the impact of that on other economies around the world, not just from petroleum, but from fertilizer, for example, on food supplies.

We've learned that though there were some countries on the other side of the Gulf, primarily Oman and Qatar, that thought they were friendly with Iran.

Iran was absolutely willing to hit them and hit them hard, as well as hitting the other countries in the Gulf.

Even though they had not attacked Iran, they got attacked.

Why? Why does he really? What can he achieve? Why does he want a deal? Yeah, what could he achieve that would be different than what was already achieved?

Uh, does this make them more formidable?

Yeah, it does.

I mean, I think, [clears throat] I think in the old days, the right-wing military regimes learned from each other, and they helped each other.

And I think that's true now too.

Um, it's, it's literally true if you think of, um, Venezuela under Chavez and Maduro and Cuba.

They not only learned from each other, they, uh...

I mean, Venezuela gave free oil and discounted oil to Cuba, so it was direct support.

Today.

Okay.

Um, I think the Egyptians have, uh, shown themselves in this crisis to be feckless, useless.

They've contributed nothing to their Sunni brethren.

Um, if I were advising General Sisi, I would have said, "Day one of the war, you must announce and you must call, uh, the, the MBS, MBZ, the, the, the sheikh, the emir in Qatar, and you must say, 'The Egyptian Air Force is at your disposal, and we will put troops on the ground.

And if you are short of this munition or that one...'" It's all meaningless, except symbolically it would have shown what side they're on.

Now, they did in, in the end send some planes to the, the Emirates, too few, too late.

So I don't-- I'm not worried about, about them really.

What do you think could and should have been done differently?

Um, why is it the UAE specifically that this particularly close relationship develops, even within a broader con-- I would assert, I'm curious if you agree, within a broader context of, of warmer Israeli-Gulf relations in general, that this is the particularly close one?

I think the UAE is, is unique in a couple of ways.

They made a decision years ago, uh, to modernize, uh, the economy and society.

If you go to Dubai or Abu Dhabi, you see it physically.

That is, you see the, the skyscrapers, you see the, uh, international community that's there, you see the prosperity, um, you see the economic modernization, you see the, um, decreasing dependence on oil.

They make more money now from their immense sovereign wealth funds than they do from, uh, if you will, merely, um, the sale of oil.

Um, and they differ from the Saudis, who are also trying to modernize, in that they don't really have much of a domestic population.

Where does all that stand, and where do you think it might go?

How stable is the regime right now? How popular is the theocracy?

Well, first, I wonder if it's still reasonable to call it a theocracy.

It certainly was, I would argue, under the two supreme leaders, Khomeini first and then Ali Khamenei, who was recently killed.

Today, the so-called supreme leader is, first of all, absent, and there's no real reason to think he's gonna make an appearance.

People say he's disfigured, but that would not presumably prevent him from, say, a radio address.

And even if he becomes supreme leader, he is younger, he's not an ayatollah, and he is appointed due to the dynastic principle which this regime, the Islamic Republic, has railed against for decades.

So I think that he will be much less legitimate and much less powerful.

Elliott, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today?

So are you comfortable with that?

Well, I, I think you have to look at this not from March 2026 only.

The president, again, has just short of three years.

I really do believe that though they are not moving at all fast enough toward transition to democracy, there will be one, and there will be an election next year in Venezuela, and by the tri- time Trump leaves office, they will have restored democracy in Venezuela.

In the case of Iran, you know, um, if two years from today there is, um, an uprising and the regime falls, I think we will all say, "Well, this would not have happened if it weren't for the events of 2026 and the damage that was done to the regime and its instruments of repression." So yeah, if you look at it from this week, it may seem as if, well, that's not working.

But that's not the critical thing.

The critical thing is what happens now over the next months and years in Iran and when does the regime fall?

Do you think that this administration has its eyes next set on Cuba, and will Cuba, uh, collapse?

Remind us about how it happened in the '80s.

Well, uh, in, in the earlier period, uh, the United States did the reflagging of, uh, Kuwaity and other, uh, tankers, and Iran did not attack those American ships.

I don't think the president's going to do that, uh, now.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me, um, that that's too dangerous for the US Navy, and he, he is actually, uh, better off, I would argue, trying some other things like insurance, uh, for ships going through.

Uh, that's just money.

That doesn't then involve, um, American, uh, warships and the possible loss of life, uh, to American, uh, soldiers and sailors.

So I, I, I don't think we're gonna do that.

Again, why wasn't this factored in? And, and I have to say, I mean, Iran did telegraph exactly how it was going to respond.

And now, I, I don't, I don't know that most people even really have a good concept of what human rights are.

Well, I think that what the left was doing in the Reagan years was promoting, if you will, the left, that is, defending leftist regimes, whether it was the Cuban regime, which most leftist so-called human rights advocates wouldn't criticize, or the Sandinista regime, which most leftists, including leftist so-called human rights advocates, would not criticize.

All they wanted to do is to attack US foreign policy and defend leftist regimes.

I remember speaking, I guess it was at Colgate University a couple of years ago, and a student in the Q&A period said: "How can you sleep at night when you were part of an administration that gave US aid to the military junta in El Salvador?" And my answer to him was, "That's a good-- that's a perfectly fair question for a student to ask, but actually, it shouldn't be directed at me or Ronald Reagan.

It should be directed at Jimmy Carter." We didn't invent the policy of supporting that junta.

Jimmy Carter did.

He made the decision.

He would say all the time, "I'm not a neocon." [chuckles]

... what is the alternative approach to regime change?

Okay.

Let me just go back to what happened in the rest of South America years ago.

You do need a negotiation between the people in power and the democratic political forces, democratic parties.

You need to negotiate about a lot of things.

One of them is always amnesty.

Another of them is, what's the trajectory here that gets you, in the end, to a full democracy? When are there municipal elections, state elections? When's the presidential election? When does the opposition start getting full access to, uh, state-run media? There are, there are a lot of questions to negotiate.

We've already spent a year or so making those kind of approaches." How does that narrative compare to what you saw in 2016 to 2020 when obviously there was- there were efforts to achieve regime change then?

How did this happen?

He's been interested in, uh, Venezuela from the beginning of the first term and started putting more and more sanctions on, particularly in 2019 and '20, but the diplomatic and, uh, economic pressure wasn't enough to move the regime.

Last year, there was a real election in Venezuela and Maduro tried to rig it and he failed and lost in a massive landslide, and the administration is now saying, "Well, um, this government really has to, has to change." They don't use regime change, and I think Trump is not going to put boots on the ground.

Uh, but he does seem to have decided, "This is my hemisphere, this is our hemisphere.

We can't have a hostile regime like this engaged in criminal activities, uh, hooked up with Iran and Russia and China, and we're going to change it."

Wh- what, what am I missing in seeing this as, as... 'cause you got a lo- lot of red lights blinking here.

Well, this is not Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya.

First, those countries had zero history of democracy.