Quincy Institute's co-founder and executive vice president of programs Trita Parsi debated Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies today on CSPAN's Washington Journal program.
The two sparred a bit over today's presidential elections in Iran, the nuclear deal and U.S. sanctions on Tehran. They also took call-in questions. Watch below:
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The passions of exile politics have long shaped South Florida. However, when local officials attempt to translate those passions into foreign policy, the result is not principled leadership — it is dangerous government overreach with significant national implications.
We see that in U.S. Cuba policy, and more urgently today, in Saturday's "take over" of Venezuela.
In Miami-Dade County, a distorted political culture has taken hold. Individuals convicted in U.S. courts for acts of anti-Castro terrorism are still celebrated as heroes by local officials and influential media voices. For decades, journalists — some of whom also served as contributors to the government-funded Radio Martí — treated these narratives as untouchable, dismissing legal and ethical constraints as inconveniences rather than guardrails.
This culture rests on a revisionist version of American history. President John F. Kennedy is portrayed locally as responsible for Fidel Castro’s survival: first, for not escalating the Bay of Pigs invasion after CIA-trained exiles were defeated, and later for refusing to bomb Cuba and further risking nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In this telling, Cuban Americans are cast as victims of American betrayal, despite decades of extraordinary U.S. support for refugees and exiles — support that often exceeded, and in some cases stretched, international legal norms.
From this grievance narrative flows a radical conclusion: local officials should make their own U.S. foreign policy, particularly toward Cuba. That logic is not merely misguided. It is harmful to American national interests.
Miami-Dade County Tax Collector Dariel Fernández, for example, has recently embodied this impulse. Just before the year-end holiday season — when many Cuban Americans legally travel to Cuba or send remittances to support family members — Fernández launched a campaign threatening to revoke the right to do business in Miami-Dade County for companies he claims are engaged with the Cuban government. His personal political judgment, rather than the determinations of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, is treated as decisive.
This is not how the American government works.
Federalism is a cornerstone of the American republic, but it has limits. The Constitution assigns foreign policy — and the use of international sanctions — to the federal government. When local governments attempt to impose their own sanctions regimes, they do more than exceed their authority: they undermine the rule of law. Worse, they create a climate of intimidation in which Cuban Americans who favor engagement, families who send remittances, and businesses facilitating lawful travel face bureaucratic retaliation for exercising federally protected rights.
Sanctions themselves deserve scrutiny. Decades of empirical research shows that broad sanctions rarely achieve their stated political objectives, especially against entrenched regimes. Instead, they tend to entrench ruling elites, distort domestic economies, encourage black markets, and impose disproportionate costs on civilians. In the Cuban case, sanctions have not produced a democratic transition, but they have contributed to economic hardship, migration pressures, and family separation — outcomes that run counter to U.S. strategic and humanitarian interests.
Secondary sanctions against Cuba have generated a growing list of tensions with American allies, prompting some countries to adopt countermeasures or shift to alternative currencies as a response to perceived overreach in the restrictions on the use of the U.S. dollar. These developments ultimately undermine U.S. economic leverage and complicate international cooperation, producing outcomes that are counterproductive to American strategic and financial interests.
Extending this already ineffective tool from Washington to local governments does not make it smarter; it multiplies its failures.
This is not merely a political dispute; it is a legal and moral one. Local efforts to restrict travel and remittances interfere with federal authority and raise serious constitutional concerns, including violations of the First Amendment’s protections of speech and association. Preventing families from visiting loved ones or sending financial support inflicts real human suffering — suffering imposed not by law, but by political theater.
American history offers a different model. As Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy wrote in a memorandum to then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1963 that even during the Cold War, respect for legal process and individual liberty — including the freedom to travel — was not a weakness, but a strength. Today, lawsuits challenging local overreach on Cuba policy continue that tradition, reaffirming that American libertarian values — economic freedom, personal autonomy, and limits on government power — still matter.
One bad policy toward Cuba is already harmful. Two — one federal and another improvised at the local level — multiply the damage. They impose unnecessary economic and emotional costs on Cuban families while eroding America’s constitutional order.
In principle, Americans should be free to travel and send their money to whomever they choose. Governments — local or federal — should not act as political nannies deciding whether citizens may visit their country of origin. Sanctions are among the most serious tools of foreign policy, often described by scholars as an alternative form of warfare. If they are to be used at all, they should be designed, monitored, and enforced by accountable federal institutions — not improvised by local officials driven by unresolved political traumas, demagoguery, or decades-old grievances.
Fernandez already joined the Miami celebration about Nicolás Maduro’s recent capture, mentioning the episode as a symbolic accelerant for the pro-sanctions lobby. The Miami tax collector denounced New York Mayor Zoran Mandani's “ignorance” about Venezuelan affairs, and highlighted Trump’s image as a decisive leader in international coercion, one who should now be called to do to Cuban leaders what he did to Maduro: “Now the time has come for Cuba. They are the root of everything that has happened to Venezuela, Nicaragua, and now Colombia.”
The most radicalized sectors of the Cuban exile welcome Maduro’s capture with an instrumental view of both international law and the U.S. rule of law itself. Law is no longer understood as a binding framework for managing political conflict and promoting the public interest, but as a tactical asset — useful only insofar as it speeds an overriding political objective: the removal of Cuba’s government.
The policy implications are clear. Courts must clearly assert federal powers in designing, monitoring, and implementing international sanctions, dissuading factional, ethnic, or local agendas from advancing parallel foreign policies through informal pressure and subnational authorities. This is precisely the danger the Supreme Court sought to preempt in Zschernig v. Miller and later in American Insurance Association v. Garamendi, which held that even well-intentioned state or county initiatives cannot intrude on the federal government’s exclusive authority to speak and act for the nation abroad.
This debate matters far beyond Cuba. If county officials can weaponize local offices to pursue personal foreign-policy agendas today, other communities may face similar abuses tomorrow. The lesson should be clear: foreign policy can and should be debated vigorously — from the grassroots to the national level — but its adoption and implementation belong in Washington.
The rule of law must be respected, and moral obligations to real human beings must not be sacrificed for political spectacle. One bad policy toward Cuba is more than enough.
The Trump administration dramatically escalated its campaign to control Greenland in 2025. When President Trump first proposed buying Greenland in 2019, the world largely laughed it off. Now, the laughter has died down, and the mood has shifted from mockery to disbelief and anxiety.
Indeed, following Trump's military strike on Venezuela, analysts now warn that Trump's threats against Greenland should be taken seriously — especially after Katie Miller, wife of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, posted a U.S. flag-draped map of Greenland captioned "SOON" just hours after American forces seized Nicolas Maduro.
Trump caused further shockwaves when he said in an Atlantic magazine interview that "We do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense," adding erroneously that the island is "surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships."
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded quite categorically. "I have to say this very directly to the United States," according to an official statement on Sunday. "It makes absolutely no sense to talk about the United States needing to take over Greenland. The U.S. has no right to annex one of the three countries in the Danish Kingdom."
This came after she used her New Year’s address to signal a hardening stance against Washington’s ambitions, declaring, “Never before have we increased our military strength so significantly, so quickly.”
Trump keeps insisting that the U.S. needs Greenland for national security, even threatening to use military force or economic pressure to get it from Denmark. He has also threatened steep tariffs if Denmark doesn’t hand it over, claiming “people really don't even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up.”
This isn’t the careful diplomacy America used to practice. Trump’s approach has triggered protests from Denmark, and for the first time ever, Denmark’s intelligence service is labeling America a possible security threat.
Trump has appointed Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry as his special envoy to Greenland. Landry called it an honor to help “make Greenland a part of the U.S.” Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen called the appointment “deeply upsetting” and Landry’s comments “completely unacceptable.”
The administration is working every angle to influence Greenland. In January 2025, the president-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr., visited Greenland to shoot video for his podcast. He said he was just a tourist, but many saw it as part of a pressure campaign.
Danish media noticed that a lot of Trump supporters in his videos and photos were actually homeless and “socially disadvantaged” locals who’d been offered free meals and MAGA hats if they’d appear on camera. “They are being bribed, and it is deeply distasteful,” one Nuuk resident said.
Then came Vice President JD Vance’s visit in March. Second Lady Usha Vance planned to attend a dogsled race. U.S. representatives went door-to-door, asking if Greenlanders wanted to meet her. The answer, everywhere: “No, thank you.”
After local businesses and residents backed out from meeting with the Second Lady, the Vances had to limit their visit to the remote Pituffik Space Base, far from the rest of the population. There, Vance accused Denmark of failing to protect both Greenlanders and U.S. troops from “very aggressive incursions from Russia, from China and from other nations.”
Things got uglier in August. Danish media reported that American operatives were running “influence operations” in Greenland, trying to promote secession from Denmark. That prompted Denmark’s foreign ministry to summon the U.S. envoy for a dressing-down. A White House official said, “We think the Danes need to calm down.” U.S. intelligence agencies had reportedly been ordered to step up espionage in Greenland in May.
Meanwhile, the U.S. consulate in Nuuk is hiring interns who speak Danish and Greenlandic to help “communicate U.S. foreign policy priorities to Greenlandic audiences” on social media. Basically, they want Greenlanders to sell U.S. policy to their own communities.
Greenlanders aren’t having it. In a January 2025 poll, 85% said they’re against joining the U.S., while 6% were in favor and 9% undecided. Most Greenlanders do want independence from Denmark though, about 84%, but nearly half say only if it doesn’t hurt their quality of life.
The March 2025 parliamentary election in Greenland felt like a direct response to Trump’s rhetoric. The center-right Demokraatit party, which has strongly criticized Trump, won. Its leader, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, called Trump “a threat to our political independence.” According to Danish expert Ulrik Pram Gad, the election results showed that Greenlanders “are pushed away and more reluctant to engage with the U.S.”
After Trump's comments Sunday, Nielsen said in a statement: "When the President of the United States says that 'we need Greenland' and links us to Venezuela and military intervention, it's not just wrong. It's disrespectful."
America’s legitimate security and economic interests can be better served through respectful partnership than aggressive acquisition. Thanks to the 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement, the U.S. already has broad military rights there.
This framework gives the U.S. access to Pituffik Space Base (previously Thule), a crucial missile-defense area. But when Trump talks about Greenland, he keeps lumping the whole island together with the base, insisting the only way to keep Pituffik safe is to own the land beneath it.
Crucially, Trump's argument for seizing Greenland shows a misunderstanding of Arctic security. When he says, “Russian and Chinese ships are all over the place” along Greenland’s coast, he’s mixing up different parts of the Arctic. Russia and China do send ships into the Arctic, but those ships are nowhere near Greenland. They’re way out in the Barents and Bering Seas, thousands of miles away.
The U.S. Coast Guard has encountered Chinese and Russian warships, bombers, and coast guard vessels operating together off Alaska’s coast. That’s where American attention would be better applied when it comes to Arctic security, not Greenland.
Instead of threatening force or coercion, Washington should focus on deals that benefit both sides and respect Greenland’s right to govern itself. That means treating Greenland’s government as a partner, not a prize.
Denmark’s intelligence service points out that America’s unpredictable approach pushes countries to cut deals with China instead. Ironically, Trump’s push to buy Greenland to counter China could backfire, making Beijing seem like a more stable and reasonable partner compared to Washington’s existential threat.
The administration needs to drop the talk of annexation. Instead, it should work within current agreements, support Greenland’s own development goals, and show that America leads by building strong partnerships, not by issuing ultimatums.
If the U.S. wants access to Greenland’s critical minerals, it can get there through honest business deals and joint ventures that let Greenlandic communities benefit. Greenlanders have made their position clear: “Greenland is open for business but not for sale.”
Within hours of U.S. military strikes on Venezuela and the capture of its leader, Nicolas Maduro, President Trump proclaimed that “very large United States oil companies would go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
Indeed, at no point during this exercise has there been any attempt to deny that control of Venezuela’s oil (or “our oil” as Trump once described it) is a major force motivating administration actions.
One irony here is that even as the White House is proudly embracing fossil-fuel imperialism in global oil, the markets are vastly different. Back in the 1970's and again in the early 2000's, the U.S. was the world’s biggest oil importer, leading to vicious spirals of higher crude prices and a weaker dollar as oil exporters feared they were being paid in a rapidly depreciating currency and sought other assets.
However, the U.S. is now the world’s biggest producer, and the world is sufficiently awash in oil so much that the price of benchmark Brent Crude was close to five-year lows late last week at about $60 a barrel. Conversely, the spike in oil prices to $120 per barrel right after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 saw the dollar strengthen dramatically against the yen and especially the euro. Markets reasoned that besides geopolitics, greater self sufficiency in energy also favored the U.S. over its developed market peers.
In other words, the U.S. geoeconomic position in energy has come a long way since the early 2000s and already has many of the attributes that control over Venezuelan oil would supposedly bolster.
Meanwhile, the combination of supply-demand dynamics in global oil markets and the scale of investment required to restore Venezuela’s oil production has made major oil companies wary about the opportunities supposedly being handed to them. They are unsure about the economics of sinking tens of billions of dollars over several years to restore dilapidated drilling infrastructure in a country that might have the world’s largest oil reserves, but this oil is also expensive to extract and process.
One report has suggested that the administration is telling oil companies that if they want compensation for assets nationalized by Venezuela, they will have to commit to making substantial investments in restoring the country’s oil infrastructure. In effect, private U.S. oil majors are being asked to act in Venezuela more like the state-owned-enterprises elsewhere that play a huge part in global oil production, often disregarding near-term profitability in the service of maintaining or expanding production for political, fiscal, or geopolitical goals.
But it is unclear how much tolerance Wall Street would have for such a posture from energy firms, particularly after the shale industry’s cumulative losses in the 2010s ran close to half a trillion dollars. In this decade, financial markets have been looking for “capital discipline” from oil companies.
More broadly, it seems as though the geopolitical and economic goals of the administration might not be entirely consistent, particularly when it comes to domestic and foreign oil markets. It rejoices over low gasoline prices, and hopes that the overthrow of Maduro in Venezuela will eventually lead to increased production anchored by American companies in that country. At the same time, the White House wants domestic U.S. oil production to rise as well, as expressed by the “drill, baby drill” slogan.
However, good prices for consumers are not necessarily the same thing as good prices for commercially motivated producers, who may react by curtailing investment, i.e., by planning to drill less rather than more. For such producers, the critical threshold is the “break even price,” which has been estimated at an average of about $60 per barrel for American shale. All this is occurring against a backdrop of global oil supply growing faster than demand, with the International Energy Agency projecting global supply increases of 3 million barrels a day in 2025 and a further 2.4 million in 2026, against demand increases of only 830,000 barrels in 2025 and 860,000 in 2026.
The events in Venezuela also suggest other issues that stem from the widely remarked centrality of the Western Hemisphere in the administration’s National Security Strategy. One of the administration’s goals is to install friendly regimes in resource-rich countries (the latter is a description that applies to much of Latin America) to enable both privileged American use of resources and the ability to deny those to competitors.
But this is where issues of the political economy of South America may come into play. The region has in the last few decades seen democratic alternation between left and right wing populisms in several countries, spurred by popular discontent at long-term economic disappointment punctuated by intermittent financial crises. This is arguably in good part a result of excessive reliance on commodity exports (something undoubtedly true of Venezuela, where oil is practically the only export), and the boom-bust cycles associated with the sector.
Electoral cycles in the region currently appear to favor the right (or parties more congenial to Washington), as seen in Bolivia, but there is little guarantee of a structural break in this political pattern as long as the structure of South American economies does not move beyond a dependence on commodity exports. Thus, it is possible that even a “successful” removal of Maduro does not deliver the economic and political transformation needed for the longer-term stability that American investors seek. And the Trump administration’s approach to Venezuela (and the region at large) seems to show little recognition of this.
The economic motivations behind the military intervention in Venezuela thus seem contradictory, grounded in a misunderstanding of America’s role in global energy markets, and oblivious to a central problem of political economy in South America — the continent’s commodity dependence.
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