La puissance et les principes des États-Unis

KEVIN MALONEY: Good evening, everybody. My name is Kevin Maloney, and I serve as chief public affairs officer here at Carnegie Council. I am pleased to welcome you all to the latest gathering in our Values & Interests event series, which seeks to examine the interplay between morality and power in the practice of geopolitics.

At Carnegie Council we evaluate this dynamic through a framework we call “ethical realism.” Simply put, ethical realism is the idea that power and morality are not mutually exclusive, but instead these forces must shape and inform one another, especially within liberal democracies.

Today we are living through a moment of significant recalibration for American foreign policy as new value systems are prioritized, related principles are developed, and novel means are deployed in pursuit of U.S. interests. From the Trump administration we hear language calling for “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” and it is not a stretch to connect such rhetoric to events on the ground, from operations in Venezuela to the ongoing struggle for control of the Strait of Hormuz.

To unpack this geopolitical moment, we are honored to be joined by Jimmy Story, former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, and a multi-decade veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service. Our moderator for this evening is Joel Rosenthal, president of Carnegie Council.

Before passing the program to Joel and to help frame the conversation a bit, I want to offer a short quote from renowned theologian and professor Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, whose work has deeply influenced Carnegie Council for nearly a hundred years. Writing in 1932 on the shifting dynamic between international relations and ethics, Niebuhr offered the following: “To mitigate and moderate the ultimately unrewarding struggle for powers by states, a moral consensus is required because no viable solution for international order exists which disregards moral considerations.”

With that, I will turn the program over to Joel.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Thank you, Kevin. It is always good to start with Niebuhr. You can’t miss.

I want to welcome all of you here in person and our global audience online. I know it is a very busy world out there, and we are truly grateful for the gift of your time and attention this evening, and I am delighted to host the discussion this evening with Ambassador Story. Thank you for coming all the way to New York.

JAMES STORY: Thanks for having me.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: All the programs at Carnegie Council are special, but some are more special than others. There are at least three reasons for the extra specialness of tonight. The first is you, Ambassador Story, bringing us your years of experience in the State Department and your willingness to speak.

Second, present in the audience tonight are the Carnegie Council trustees. They are in town for the Council’s 112th Annual Meeting tomorrow, so to the trustees out there, thank you for your service, and a special thanks to our new chairman, Max Angerholzer. Max, thank you for being here.

Third, there is the topic for this evening, “U.S. Power and Principle,” a timely and timeless topic if there ever was one.

We want to make this conversation as lively and interactive as possible, and I know a lot of you out there are coming with questions and maybe some statements. We also want to leave room for some online questions, so I am going to start off for about 20 minutes or so, and we will see how it goes, but I do want to open it up quickly, so please be ready when we come to you.

In all of our Values & Interests conversations we like to start off with the basics. I wonder if you would share with us a reflection on your own intellectual formation as it has informed your life and career in the Foreign Service. I did notice that you grew up in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. This has to be part of the story, and then on to the University of South Carolina and then Georgetown. To the extent you are willing to share with us, how did that formation inform the way you think about values and interests?

JAMES STORY: First of all, it is a pleasure to be here. I hope the trustees have not actually been working for 112 years but just a portion of that. Any time somebody from South Carolina gets to come to New York and talk to such an august group, I wonder what you all are thinking in inviting me, but it is an honor.

I did grow up in a small town of 5,000 people in South Carolina. You might wonder how you become a foreign service officer from that. That’s a good question and a long story that we don’t have time for; maybe upstairs over drinks I will give you that.

I was the first person in my family to go to college. Everybody in the family was in the military. That is how they served. My father grew up in a place called Hell Hole Swamp. That is a real name. He joined the Navy at age 17 to see the world, and they moved him to Charleston, 35 miles away, and put him in a submarine making circles in the ocean, so he did not see very much, as you can imagine, but he built in me a bit of wanderlust.

I was closing in on three decades of foreign service work. It was the best career for somebody who can’t hold a steady job, I would say. It was an incredible opportunity.

Going to the University of South Carolina and having those opportunities as a Carolina Scholar, living abroad, going to Georgetown to get my graduate degree, working abroad, and then going back to Georgetown to teach while I was waiting on my second embassy, which did not come to fruition, how did that form me as who I am, growing up in a very conservative place? Recognizing that the world is a big place and that you are only strong when you work with others I think is important.

I will tell you upfront that I am one of the last political radicals—I think I mentioned this outside—that you will find. I am a radical centrist, and if I say things today you do not agree with, I am glad for it because I rarely find myself in lockstep with anybody. I think it is a problem when you find yourself there, and I think we are seeing some of the results of being in lockstep with a political movement today in America.

I was formed by being raised a Methodist in rural South Carolina and then seeing the world and how all that fits into who I am. Nobody has asked me that question before, to be honest with you, so I appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit about who I am. Thank you.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Let’s see if we can connect it to current events in some way. Here at the Council we have been talking about the shift or what Prime Minister Carney called the “rupture” in our liberal world. We have gone from the liberal world to the post-liberal world, or however you want to describe it.

Let’s get to your experience in Venezuela. How do you read the events in Venezuela as represented by let’s say the capture of Maduro and what has happened since. Are we back to 19th century gunboat diplomacy and spheres of influence? Is that the right way to think about the world we are in, or is there something else going on or a better way to explain it?

JAMES STORY: We were speaking ahead of time, and this is something I struggle with. Outside of Venezuela and the Venezuelans themselves I am probably the person most gleeful I would say, most happy to see Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia in jail. I could not be happier about that outcome. I could not be happier about an outcome that was such a tremendous tactical success, but I am worried about the strategic failure I see unfolding.

We should talk about the boat strikes. I used to run counter-narcotics in Colombia and across the Americas. It is one thing to have this maximal lethality, but whether or not you actually have a good outcome from that lethality, and this is a case where we do not; it is a net negative on the policy.

I am very excited and happy I should say with Maduro being brought to justice, but the question I have struggled with is, does this mean diplomacy failed? My efforts were first under the Trump administration with maximum pressure and later under the Biden administration where frankly I helped put together the idea of, “Okay, let’s take this pressure and use the leverage to negotiate.”

People currently in the U.S. government say that we failed. I would say demonstrably that we did not, because María Corina Machado participated in a primary and won it. It was a lot of hard work to get there, and it was a fact that we were actually negotiating with a regime that allowed them to make a mistake, which is that they allowed an election to happen, and a guy named Edmundo González won that election in July 2024. Outside of his household, no one knew who Edmundo González was, and he won the election clearly.

I think that shows the power of diplomacy, engagement, and understanding the other side of the table, but there comes a time when diplomacy reaches its end, and I think you got there in the case of Venezuela, where we had done everything: People had gone out to the streets to protest, people had abstained from elections, participated in elections, won elections, asked us to do responsibility to protect (R2P), reached out to the international community, and even after they won an election this criminal organization masquerading as a government stayed in power. So what are you supposed to do?

Then again, are you supposed to do that every time? That is the big question I have struggled with, and I appreciate the opportunity to unpack it with you all today.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: We are staying in the macro picture here, but this is also in the context of the president talking first about Panama, then Greenland—

JAMES STORY: Mexico.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Cuba, so there is that rhetoric, but then you also raised the issue of the boat strikes, so it is more than just, okay, what is happening in Venezuela, we get to the end of this dictatorship, something needs to be done. I can see that in alignment with some traditional ways of thinking about American foreign policy, particularly in the Western Hemisphere.

I guess my question is this: Is something else going on, and is Venezuela the signature case of that? How do you sort that?

JAMES STORY: I have a couple of different thoughts on this, and I hope I get to exactly what you are trying to drive at.

First, I agree completely with the president that the National Security Strategy that was released has a focus on Latin America. Nowhere affects the United States more, and I was blown away by the number of people even at Georgetown University who were unencumbered by the knowledge that Mexico is our number-one trading partner. It matters what happens in Latin America, so I am glad that we are focused on Latin America. I think drugs, thugs, and the rest of it is probably not the best way to go about it. I think free trade agreements and what-have-you are.

Having said all that, does this mean an abdication of responsibility elsewhere? I think that is the fundamental question. Are we walking away from the post-World War II institutions that have led to unparalleled prosperity worldwide just to focus in on our hemisphere?

That is what I thought we were doing, and then Iran happened. I think what happened there was what Stan McChrystal, with whom I served in Afghanistan, put well recently in a podcast. He said, “All presidents become enamored of three things: covert action, special operations forces, and air power.” You could tell by what happened in Venezuela that the president woke up and said, “Wait a second.”

Also, Operation Midnight Hammer, I don’t know who comes up with these names. It is what it is.

I think he thought this was going to be quite straightforward. Most of us think the question you should always ask is, “And then what?” I try to make my money, as we say, pretty far down the alphabet, not A to B. I am thinking eighth-order effects. I am down the alphabet.

We all knew they were going to close the Strait of Hormuz. What that did was decrease the leverage we had over Delcy Rodríguez of Venezuela because now we need the natural gas more than the oil to flow, and now we are releasing sanctions on Iranian fuel and Russian oil. What are we doing here?

If you walk away from an ethics-based foreign policy, what you have is primordial democracy and human rights because I believe—this is kind of Carter Doctrine, if you will, and about Clinton, who was the last “Republican” president we had; I’ll prove it over drinks upstairs—we are an aspirational nation and you understood what our foreign policy was about, and now it has become quite transactional, and I think that is dangerous: What signal are we sending to China when it comes to Taiwan? What signals are we sending to Russia when it comes to the Baltics?

I have served all presidents the exact same way. As a professional diplomat, you provide optionality to the chief and you work for the president as the Second Article branch of government, not the First, which has abdicated its responsibility, but you provide optionality, and once the decision is made you do it or you quit. That’s how it works.

My concern here is that toward the end of this presidency we are going to see ourselves walking or running away from all of those post-World War II institutions, and things such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and maybe the United Nations, which is not something they care for much in this administration. That concerns me. It concerns me that we are going back into gunboat diplomacy and power politics, and I think we should have a foreign policy that is predicated upon higher values.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: You are saying the trajectory is moving away from those institutions.

JAMES STORY: To me it is quite clear that it is.

Venezuela is an interesting case, though. Imagine for a second, if you will, 80 million Americans leaving tomorrow. That is what has happened in Venezuela. That 8 or 9 million Venezuelans, 25 percent of that population, has a destabilizing effect on the region.

Most of these people are decent people. I want to be very clear about that, but you have Colombia coming out of a 52-year civil war and now they have 3 million more mouths to feed. That has a destabilizing impact across the region, including in our country.

I think there was a reason — it was not drugs. That was never the case. I was very clear when I did 60 Minutes and some other things. Maybe 10 percent of the whole drug flow goes through Venezuela. It was about migration and it was about our strategic competitors having access to the natural resources that are going to fuel the 21st-century economy.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: When I was reading some of your commentary, something specific struck me. This goes to how America is perceived in the world but also specifically in Venezuela, and you mentioned the image of the American flag. How is the flag looked at in Venezuela today? Does it represent liberty, the idea of liberation, or does it represent imperialism? I know it is a very general question, but I want to get to the idea of how it is being perceived in Venezuela by Venezuelans, and then we can talk about how America is being perceived globally.

JAMES STORY: Specifically in Venezuela, they are clinging to the idea that we care about democracy and human rights, and I have seen nothing to indicate that we do. I have another piece coming out on press freedom for World Press Freedom Day on May 3. I have been clear on this: You cannot have economic recovery without democratic transition.

I do work for private equity and I do stuff like that. They might make some money, fine, but the money it is going to take to really rebuild that country is not there.

The Venezuelans are hopeful that we have a strategy that will yield an electoral event at some point in time. I hope so. I also have hope. As I liked to say in Afghanistan: “Hope is not a course of action.” I like to know what the strategy is.

I think María Corina Machado needs to go back and these kinds of things. Maybe we will have an election, the end of next year is my best guess, but to your question, right now, today, it is liberty. Give it three months.

Words matter. Delcy Rodríguez is not the president-elect. The president continues to call her that. She is not the president-elect. She was not elected at all. She is the president designate. We designated her.

I want to be very clear. When I went back three years after I was kicked out, I was negotiating for the release of American hostages with Delcy Rodríguez and Jorge Rodríguez. If I am negotiating with you about something, it probably implies that you had something to do with it. I would not negotiate with you to open up a Chick-fil-A in Folly Beach, where I live, unless you are in the Chick-fil-A business, which you could be. They make a great chicken sandwich.

The issue here is that it is the same exact regime that was there before, the regime that stole tens of billions of dollars from these big companies. If we continue to go down the line of, “Well, this is about resources,” I have a feeling the bloom will come off the rose eventually over that relationship. More broadly, I think the position of the United States has already taken a massive hit.

I had the great pleasure at the College of Charleston to sit on a stage like this with Joseph Nye and talk about soft power before he passed away. That’s gone. How long it takes us to get that back is anybody’s guess. That is for the next generation to fight.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Do you think it’s retrievable?

JAMES STORY: I believe in a couple of things when it comes to America. I believe in the promise of America and I believe we have an ability to reinvent ourselves. I have moments when I think, Goodness gracious, I would like things to go in a different direction—Citizens United and extreme gerrymandering and all these things I like to talk about when I do public presentations.

I do think it is retrievable and I think our place in the world is retrievable because we have been seen as this “shining city on a hill” or what have you, but we have to have a foreign policy and engagement with others that is based on some morality and ethics and higher purpose than merely might makes right. If we continue to do that, then, no, it is not retrievable.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: You mentioned María Corina Machado and some of the opposition leaders. What is your sense of their sense of the state of play? Are they optimistic? What is the feel?

JAMES STORY: There is never a dearth of optimism in Venezuela, and I think that is a good thing. Venezuelans know how to do elections more than anything, and when people attack the opposition for being divided, I like to say, “Guys, first of all, how lovely a democratic process do you have that people don’t agree with everything they say.” If you agree with everything, that is autocracy, so it is good that they have these disagreements internally.

Politics is a contact sport. I am not a politician, God help me. I am not interested. You have to be on the ground, and I have made the case for María Corina to go back. I know her well. She is very heroic. I believe she will be back in the next couple of months, and I believe it will discomfit the president greatly because once she is back on the ground you will have a reason for people to go into the streets.

Right now they have a guy named Juan Pablo Guanipa, great guy, funny guy, great politician. He is doing some of it. She would create a boom on the streets if she wanted to, and I think they need it.

If you are just an armchair analyst to what is happening in Venezuela, you might say to yourself, “Well, I guess everybody agrees with what we are doing,” and they don’t. They are scared of this regime. Eighty-seven people have been arrested for political reasons since January 3; 500 political prisoners are still in jail; you still cannot get CNN en Español on television there. This is the same regime.

People are scared to go into the streets, and they don’t know if they need to. If María Corina goes back, they will want to, which is much different, and the fear will go away. But if you are looking at it now, you’re like, “Well, I guess nobody’s clamoring for elections,” but there is no unifying thing. I think she will go back sooner rather than later.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I want to come back again to think regionally about what is going on, specifically Cuba. How do you think about the region and America’s role? I know we are preoccupied in Iran right now, but Secretary of State Rubio has some perspective on this. How do you think that is all going to play out? Do you see them as separate cases?

JAMES STORY: They are separate cases, but the road to Havana always went through Caracas. Now we are in the Caracas piece, and now we have the Havana piece.

When Secretary Rubio was a senator, I met with him 15 or 16 times, and I have a lot of respect for him. I think he is very smart. Coming from a guy who went to public schools in South Carolina, maybe I don’t know what smart looks like, but he is certainly intelligent. He is a super-smart guy.

I believe that his internal moral compass is such that he will find it very difficult to run for president if there is not an electoral path in Venezuela, and he would find it impossible to run for president if he got in bed with Raúl Castro’s grandson. Nobody knows who that is, but they are evidently talking to him.

I don’t think you can replicate the Venezuela model in Cuba for lots of reasons, and I don’t think Rubio can run for president and win if he gives a pass and what we do is create a more profitable dictatorship either in Venezuela or Cuba. I think it would be very difficult for him to run for president.

Look at what JD Vance is doing. I spent so long overseas, 22 out of 27 years. I look at the United States and analyze it like I analyze other countries. I look at JD Vance, and he is like, “I’m not touching that.” He doesn’t want to own it. They are already positioning themselves. It is going to be a fascinating final two years to this presidency based on that.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: You spoke a little before about to be strong you need allies. Maybe you could talk about what our policies are doing from your perspective as a former foreign service officer about the relationship of the United States to our allies and how it is playing out. Again, are some of these things retrievable or irretrievable?

JAMES STORY: They are retrievable, but it is the second bite of this poisoned apple that has especially the Europeans questioning the longevity of the relationship.

Look, Trump was exactly right in Trump 1.0 that the rest of NATO was not spending 2 percent of gross domestic product. He was exactly right. He went about it in a way that got results frankly when nobody else had been able to get results. He was exactly right.

I think Obama messed up with Crimea in 2014, and we could have done more, but where do they see us now? We have gone from being the indispensable nation to the unreliable one. That is where you find Carney with his extraordinary Davos speech and the rupture, running off to China and doing some deals.

You have the Europeans. I know people who worked for American defense contractors that lost hundreds of millions of dollars of defense articles to Spain because they decided they would rather start doing their own business internally or buy from others, and that is a big export. I am not Nick Cage in Lord of War up here or anything, but it is a big export of America, and suddenly we find ourselves a little on the outs.

In particular, I spend a lot of time in Brazil, and Brazil is a big, important country that absolutely nobody in the U.S. government understands. At one point, I was one of the two most senior people who spoke Portuguese and served in Brazil. That is insane to me, at the tender age of 55 now. This is when I was 52, a young man. I didn’t have so many gray hairs in my beard. It is now all gray.

We need them for critical minerals. We need Peru for that. We need Chile for that. Instead of admonishing people not to do business with China when we do it, this is an “and” world, and our approach has been such that we have isolated and infuriated in some cases and in other cases we get the head nod and they do whatever they want to do. You don’t build the kind of hemispheric solidarity that I think we need, with Brazil in particular. Brazil is a very complicated place.

I tell this story. When I got married in 1998—if it’s before 2000, you have to say nineteen-hundred—my wife to this day says that I picked out the wedding china. We all in this room know I did not. We all know I didn’t, but she planted the seed.

How do you maneuver with a place like Brazil that is so important to us economically? They are going to have other relationships, and it is okay that they see other people, but we cannot have a positive agenda item where we are focused on whether or not Bolsonaro needs to be under house arrest or what is happening in the next election.

I put a piece in the newspaper Folha de S. Paolo saying that we should just focus on critical minerals, for the love of God. Let’s just do some projects here and have a positive agenda, and you cannot have a positive agenda if you are constantly creating this kind of negative interaction.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Zooming back out again, big geopolitical picture, how do you think about, coming back to Venezuela and its role in the geopolitical scheme, China, its relations to South America, Latin America? There has been discussion about the whole oil business that maybe moving on Venezuela and Iran is a way to deny China a certain kind of influence. What do you make of this way of thinking?

JAMES STORY: No, they’re fine. That is not it at all. This idea of four-dimensional chess, whatever people say, I am like, just slow your roll a little bit. No. They can get all the heavy oil they need from Russia, and they are going to continue to pay below market rates.

Venezuela was producing 800,000 barrels a day. In a world of 90 million barrels a day, 800,000 barrels is not significant. It does not move the needle. They will be lucky to get 1.3 million this year, which I highly doubt, in Venezuela. Well, North Dakota does 1.5 million or whatever it is. It does not matter. So they were getting cheap oil. They are still getting cheap oil from other places.

China has also spent a lot of time working in renewables, where we have decided not to work, so they don’t need as much as we need. I don’t think we are hurting anybody but the world economy and ourselves as a result.

In the case of Venezuela specifically, two things hit me when it came to China and Venezuela. The Chinese quit giving them money because they have been ripped off so many times. The second time I remember Maduro going to China he started in Shanghai and made his way to Beijing by train. Can you imagine a head of state starting in Miami and slowly making their way to DC, and then going home with zero?

They just made a billion-dollar investment in an oilfield because they think we are going to take it, but they are not giving any money to that regime, and they have actually stopped doing the debt diplomacy stuff they were doing because they are having a problem. They are overleveraged in the real estate sector and they have a demographic implosion that is happening there.

China is a big player and will be a big player. We are going to have to deal with them where they are, but I think we would position ourselves better first of all by competing. We don’t have a 5G that we do. We don’t build ports and highways. We don’t do any of that stuff. We don’t compete, so why are we going to get mad at Chile, when 42 percent of everything they export goes straight to China, most of it copper? Why be mad at them if China comes in and builds a port or builds a port in Peru? We’re not going to build it.

I think the case here is that China is a reality we have to deal with and manage and not something we win. I am going off and preaching a little bit here. I think we are comfortable, though.

Most people who are in positions of authority in the U.S. government came of age during the Cold War, when you had an enemy. It was a comfortable world to have this kind of bifurcation, where it was “us against you.” So we started out with the Allies versus the Axis, and there was the free world versus communism, and then it was capitalism versus Islamo-fascism, and now we are like we have to be against China.

We have to compete. We don’t need to create another enemy. We need to compete, and how do you compete? It is not by berating the other and it is not by attacking Claudia Sheinbaum, president of Mexico, your biggest bilateral trading partner. It is about working together, finding win-wins, and using your tools of diplomacy, commerce, and exchange in an appropriate manner.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: As part of this rupture or change we have also had it domestically as well. We started the Trump administration with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and it had some ramifications for the Department of State.

JAMES STORY: I got that fork email. That was fun. A “fork in the road.”

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Rather than look back, what is your view of the future of the Foreign Service? There have been some radical changes. It is hard to tell from the outside, but you were on the inside and are now on the outside. What should we understand about what has happened and where it is likely to go?

JAMES STORY: I want to start by saying the U.S. Foreign Service was always “male, pale, and Yale.” That’s what they used to call it. The fact that I was in the Foreign Service was weird. I did go to Georgetown for grad school, but I like to forget that. I went to a state school, South Carolina, go Gamecocks, and I got to be in the Foreign Service. Amazing. I am not the profile.

I think we went a little heavy-handed on the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) stuff—and I was saying this ahead of time—where our evaluation was based partly on whether or not we were upholding DEI principles, and we had to lay those out. Of course I believe in diversity. I was the only southerner in my A-100 class when I joined the Foreign Service. I myself am diverse in a certain way.

I believe in the strength of diversity. How do I quantify that again? I think we went too far, and I think there was a big negative reaction to it. Now I think we have gone way too far.

First of all, I firmly believe that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) needed to have a revamp and a restructure, not [PEPFAR]. Our competitive comparative advantage in the world is the $40 billion a year we spent on USAID. Do you think the Chinese care whether or not little kids in Africa are going to die from HIV? Uh-uh. And this is a George Bush program, [PEPFAR]. We saved millions of lives and we just walk away from it? It’s malfeasance.

Restructure, fine. Restructure the State Department. That is fine too. We are entering a new era. I am using artificial intelligence now, God help us. I am a little nervous. It does hallucinate, but I do as well, so I guess that’s okay.

You have to constantly reinvent yourself. I believe in kaizen, that whole process, but I do think because of DOGE and some of the rhetoric that a whole bunch of people left the Foreign Service who were just entering their prime.

I would submit to you that I am in my prime. You are looking at a prime diplomat who left the Foreign Service at age 54 and retired because I did not want to go back through another process to be renominated for another mission. I had already been ambassador, and now I am doing my private sector thing, and I get to come to talk to you, and nobody cleared this conversation. I am saying whatever I feel like saying. It is the most invigorating and liberating experience to be able to say exactly what is on my mind at any point in time. My wife does not like it as much.

I do believe people should still join the Foreign Service. This is one of the great meritocracies. There is an exam. You have to be 18 and a high school graduate and American citizen, that’s it, and you can join the Foreign Service.

I used to be a pianist, not any longer, but the Foreign Service is not classical but jazz. You get to create what you do as a foreign service officer. Nobody tells you how to “suck the egg,” as we like to say. They tell you, “This is what we are trying to achieve; this is the objective,” and then you get to be creative to get there. I think that is powerful, and what a fun thing to do for 27 years until it became not fun.

I believe that the Foreign Service will survive. I believe that what we do abroad to represent America—I cooked pigs for the Venezuelans. I would get them together over whole pigs I would cook, a South Carolina trait. Linda Thomas-Greenfield talks about “gumbo diplomacy.” I do believe we bring and represent America, support American companies abroad, and that we are bringing good ideas. I believe there is always going to be room for that, and in looking forward there is ever more need for it.

I am concerned that we have lost so much leadership, and some of the decisions, such as putting a brand-new Foreign Service officer who had not been tenured yet as the acting director-general of the Foreign Service was a bit of a headscratcher. Usually you are a two-time ambassador or former assistant secretary of state, and then you do it, because you are the top diplomat in the entire State Department. They had to tenure the guy off-cycle so that he could take the job. Either you just don’t trust us, you don’t like us, you don’t believe in us, or you don’t think we’re worth the effort.

But I can tell that everybody I know in the Foreign Service always executed their duty regardless of who was in office. I have never given to a political campaign in my life. I don’t do it. I don’t have a political party; don’t care. I have thoughts. They stay in my head in the cluttered attic that is my brain.

I think people should join. I am mentoring probably 20 people right now to take the exam, and I believe that just like the rest of this we will weather the storm. I have nothing but respect for the capability of the American people to reinvent and move forward.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: We are going to open it up.

QUESTION: What a tremendous conversation, Joel, and ambassador. I am Leslie Vinjamuri, a trustee here at Carnegie Council.

I appreciate a huge amount that you recognize that you are relieved that Maduro is gone because I think there is a bit of a problem out there right now that people are so aggrieved at the process that they do not always recognize the morally reprehensible person who has been exited, and the Europeans interestingly stayed quiet on this one, partly for the moral reason but largely because it was not in their interest.

U.S. policy had not been working and international policy had not been working with respect to Venezuela, and there was a doubling down on a policy that was not working and having very bad humanitarian consequences, as you know better than anyone. What do you think the right approach should have been, given where Venezuela was? Is there any context in which you can imagine a removal of the kind that we saw that could have been the right policy if there was some other diplomatic or multilateral approach that surrounded it?

JAMES STORY: Tremendous question. Before January 3, I had four or five possible things that would happen, and the fifth and least likely was exactly what happened, just to show you what I know. I thought it was highly unlikely, but we could potentially do this. I am very surprised we did it. There were plenty of other ways.

There are two parts to the question: First, could January 3 be done a different way; and second, could we have done it with others? The second part has an easy answer, and the answer is no. No one was ever interested. The European Union in particular had been a little feckless for the last six or seven years. I worked on this for five years directly as chief of mission or ambassador, and they were not interested in doing much. They had sanctioned a total of like 12 people and just were not interested.

The Spanish government in particular has an outsized voice in what the European Union does when it comes to Latin America. They were not interested. Former President Zapatero is not a guy I am going to invite over to the house for crab cakes, let’s just say. He is in way too deep with this regime in lots of ways that are unsavory. I don’t think we could have done it multilaterally and certainly not with the Petro administration in Colombia, Colombia being the country that matters the most when it comes to Venezuela.

What should we have done? I hate Monday-morning quarterbacking because what we did was extraordinary. Now the question is this: We have left in place really bad actors. I was doing something with The Wall Street Journal the other day, and I said, “Look, if we are okaying some of these moves within the regime, then we are really off-axis here.” Who knew that Vladimir Padrino López, the guy who ran the Venezuelan military since Moby Dick was a minnow—he has been there forever, since the Precambrian Period—was secretly a farmer? Now he is the minister of agriculture.

I know that González López, who was the head of SEBIN and who is now in charge of the military, is a murderer. I know people he murdered. I was there when he killed them. If we are approving these moves, then we have problems.

What should we have done? There are certain people who need to be removed. I am not going to go into how they should be removed, because we might not align. I can be a little aggressive. Diosdado Cabello cannot be there and have any kind of democratic future or transition. González López is another one.

Actually, Vladimir Padrino López, the former head of the military, is somebody who is an institutionalist and you could probably work with. Instead we put a murderer who used to run their internal service in charge of the military. I don’t understand it, but I was advocating very forcefully before January 3, because I knew we were going to do something. I said, “This number of forces in the Caribbean is like cooking an egg with a blowtorch.” My favorite part of that is they did not ask the president that on 60 Minutes after I used it on 60 Minutes, which was great.

My concern with what we did and how we did it and who is still on the ground is that we have left in place—we did not do de-Ba’athification, which was what I was concerned about: Don’t de-Ba’athify. Instead we removed Saddam Hussein and put Uday and Qusay in charge, Saddam’s sons. It was a half-measure.

So now this phase one is over. Stability is over, and now we are doing economic recovery. If I am on the board of Exxon or ConocoPhillips and you have already lost $10 billion and you said, “Hey, I’m going to invest another $10 billion,” I would fire the CEO. They are not going to do it.

I hope I answered your question. There are certain players who are there who should not be there and cannot be there, and if you don’t do the hard things now, do you think they get easier tomorrow? Diosdado Cabello leaving today is easier than leaving tomorrow. It is harder today than it was yesterday, and yet he is still there.

QUESTION: Thank you very much for this candid conversation. It is very refreshing.

I know a lot of us especially in the room are dwelling on a lot of the changes we are seeing to our systems and institutions. Some of them may be irreversible. Some of them are quite concerning, of course, to say the least, but I do want to ask you ambassador, if we put on a more positive—I know it’s a challenge—spin on what is happening right now just for a moment, and let’s say a few years from now there is a new administration and no way to go back to the way things were before, what do you think could be one or two positives in terms of what we are observing at the moment, the changes that we have seen, that perhaps, even though we may not agree with the means, could potentially be workable outcomes that will actually help us move forward with the way the world is evolving and there is no way to go back to the way things were traditionally?

JAMES STORY: I am going to try to be brief in my responses. I apologize. I get a little soap-boxy.

I think two things: One, a focus on the Western Hemisphere. George Bush tried to do it, and then 9/11 happened. I think we should focus on the Western Hemisphere. If we spent the money we spent in Afghanistan doing a “planned” Colombia-type program in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and other places, we would have a very successful, middle-class region.

Second, European defense. I think it is a good thing that they are taking it seriously for once, and they have not. That is on them. They have a problem. I think those are two pretty good outcomes.

If the dollar is no longer the standard international reserve currency, we have a problem. That is the negative part. I had to throw that out there.

QUESTION: Thank you, ambassador. I want to follow up on Venezuela and maybe push you a bit further. You very much agree with the success and you said it was very tactical but not strategic enough, and you talked about how you would have made other moves that would have been more long-term moves. In thinking about things more strategically and long-term, I have two questions for you: Historically, U.S. intervention through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s had significant collateral damage and blowback. My first question is, why do you think additional moves would prevent that?

Second, could you talk a bit more about if the United States had done the operations a bit more strategically and not transactionally or tactically, but nevertheless how is this operation being perceived throughout the rest of South America? How are we to develop better relations with Brazil and other countries and have that trade you have talked about when this just transpired a couple of months ago?

JAMES STORY: I think the closest example to what transpired in Venezuela is Panama but with less collateral damage and certainly fewer deaths. It was a much more surgical operation. What people forget when it comes to Panama is that the opprobrium of the region was broadcast, but quietly everybody was saying, “Thank you for getting rid of Noriega.”

This time around, there are very few people shedding a tear about Maduro being gone, even Petro, who is I guess a retired terrorist. He was part of M-19. I was just in Colombia last week, so I have it on my mind.

The region is actually quite thankful that Maduro is gone, and just like that flag representing liberty that flies over the embassy there, if in three months this is still a money grab by the U.S. government and does not go into a re-institutionalization of the country and a move toward democracy, then I think the region is going to sour on it.

A little nuance to your question. A class I created for Georgetown graduate school at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy was “The Rise of Illiberal States in the Americas.” What definitely concerns me is going back to, “Well, he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”—pardon my language—supporting false democracies.

What is happening in El Salvador? I have seen this movie before. We have seen it. We know what happens. We know how this movie ends and how it plays out.

I think we have to be clear-eyed: Do we want people to change their constitution whenever they feel like running indefinitely for president? Do we base our foreign policy on democracy, human rights, and equal access to justice, and these kinds of higher ideals? Or are we just going to be transactional and be happy with, “Well, our guy in Paraguay still recognizes Taiwan, so we are good to go.” My hope is that we will not fall into the same trap that we had in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, because that led to some bad outcomes.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Two questions real quick, although they are big. These are from online.

The first one is a little more tactical: “With the United Arab Emirates leaving the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), will this bring more instability to Venezuela and the United States?”

Second—this is the big one—should we seriously start to consider a post-United Nations world or at least a United Nations without the United States?

JAMES STORY: Wow. The first one, I don’t know how relevant OPEC is. Venezuela is a founding member of OPEC. We produce something like 14 million barrels a day; we consume 19. I don’t know if OPEC is setting the price. I am not so worried about that.

The second question? Yes, we should think about it. I want to say what is on my mind, even though this is going to get me later. The president, since way before he was president, when he lived in this city, loved to be on Page Six of the New York Post. He likes to set the agenda. He likes to be in the news.

At what point as a lame-duck president do you have to do things that are a little more out there in order to set the press and set the news? At what point will he feel as if he is being ignored because we are focused on whether or not JD Vance, Marco Rubio, or Josh Hawley, God help us, or somebody else is going to run for president, and if they start sucking the air out of the room? They already don’t like the United Nations.

I would submit it is an organization that does not get a heck of a lot done, but it is a great place for people to get together and voice their opinions, and some of its organizations, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Organization for Migration, and the United Nations Development Programme do great work.

When it comes to the Security Council, China is going to block us, we are going to block them, we all have the veto. Does the Security Council need to be expanded? Probably. The world has changed since 1947.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: The answer is that we should seriously start to consider—

JAMES STORY: I think we have to think about it because there are plenty of people in the president’s ear who may try to convince him this is a good thing and/or that he thinks it is a good thing. I don’t know. I am hopeful that is not the case.

I am an “America First” guy, by the way, but not “America Alone.” I have always been America First. This is my country, this is my passport, this is who we are. My family came here in the early 1700s. We have been around a while, but America First is definitely not America Alone, and my concern is that somebody has this bright idea that we don’t need to be in NATO, we don’t need to be in the United Nations, and that we need to walk away from all the multilaterals. We have already left UNESCO and these types of things, so it is not a stretch.

QUESTION: Thank you for being with us. Going back to the beginning, when we talked about power and morality not being two different things, some of our deepest traditions and ethics are about how ethically to use force. It was mentioned earlier about some of the speedboats that we are now routinely eliminating on their way to the United States. Obviously that option was available before it was instituted, so how does something like that become instituted, and then, what do you think the impact is of those kinds of actions on the ethos of our warriors, the young men and women who put their lives on the line for us and think they are doing it in an honorable and important way?

JAMES STORY: First, the policy is not going to age well. If the Democrats win the House, there is going to be hearing after hearing on this.

The very first boat that was struck had 11 people onboard. They were not drug traffickers, and I know that because I did this work. There are never more than four, usually three. You have a driver, the backup driver, a navigator, and somebody to put the gas in. That is how “go-fast” works.

There are people who have survived now who are starting to talk and certainly have talked to a lot of press about it, but the fundamental question is, what are you trying to achieve? Whether or not you agree with the policy, what do you want to achieve? You want drugs to stop getting to the United States.

Drug-trafficking organizations do not operate by consensus. They are like, “That doesn’t work; we are going to do it this way.” They just change the modality of moving the drugs north, so it makes absolutely no sense, other than to beat your chest and say you are doing something, to blow these boats up.

What concerns me, and maybe it is the Obama-to-today decision-making matrix of when to use force. When we used drones originally, that was a fraught process where the president gave final authority. President Trump is not making decisions on this. Maybe General Donovan at U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) is making final calls. Is it Hegseth? Who is making the final call when we hit the boats? My guess is the USSOUTHCOM commander.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Do you think the admiral who resigned had something to do with this, or do we not know this?

JAMES STORY: We don’t know. Were I him, he made the right call, because you own that policy. You don’t own foreign policy when you are a second-tour consular officer. You own policy if you are the combatant commander or if you are the chief of mission. You own that policy; you represent that policy. It is a different animal.

The biggest impact that nobody likes to talk about, but I have talked about it, is that we are not getting the same amount of intelligence that we used to. We get more intel from Colombia than we give to Colombia on these drug-trafficking organizations. Transnational criminal organizations by definition are transnational, and they cannot be handled by one nation alone, so it is ineffective, it puts us in a bad place, makes us look bad, hurts our relationships, and it is not going to age well.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: We are coming to the top of the hour and I want to be respectful of everybody’s time. For those of you here, we can continue the conversation informally upstairs, where we have a nice reception. For those of you online we can stay in touch virtually, but I am going to end with a hard question because you teed it up for me, and these are your words, so I am going to read them back in public.

This was your LinkedIn post earlier today. You asked yourself a question, and I think you were asking it to the audience, but I am going to put you on the spot one more time, and then we will continue the conversation informally. This is just so great. I want to make sure it is in the transcript; it is so good:

“As a retired diplomat, I believe in the power of diplomacy and persuasion. However, I also believe in universal truths and the principle of the Responsibility to Protect. Are we ending the Carter Doctrine of democracy and human rights as cornerstones of our international relations framework and moving to something new or regressing to the pre-World War II world?”

JAMES STORY: It is a big question. I wish I had an answer.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I am going to push you one last time: I can give you my view. I think we are going to something new. I don’t think we are going back.

JAMES STORY: I feel like we are going to something new that rhymes with something we have seen before, the results of which we understand to be a more dangerous world. A more dangerous world is a world in which the United States does not play a big role. We don’t have to be the biggest all the time. Sometimes it is better to play your cards a little differently.

Remember the china? “Oh, yeah, you picked out the china.” Maybe, and maybe I didn’t. Sometimes how you operate and how you engage—sometimes you ask the Brazilians to take the lead on an issue you really want to do, and then you trade off later. That is diplomacy at its highest, art-filled level, and what we are doing instead is ham-jamming everything in a way in which it is very transactional, and my concern is that all of these institutions that have provided this extraordinary period—I mean, this is like the enlightened age of the world right now; people live longer and healthier; the whole world is better right now because of how we have operated since World War II—as those fragment and fall away, people will wake up one day and say, “Well, I guess Santa Claus isn’t real,” and then we are in a world where might makes right and people make decisions based on something other than high ideals, and that is a much more dangerous world. We have seen that before.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: We know what our role is in this, and thank you for clarifying all that.

Thank you all for coming. Thank you, ambassador. This was a great hour.

JAMES STORY: Thank you so much.