AILSA CHANG, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Ailsa Chang in Culver City, California.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
And I'm Mary Louise Kelly in Washington, where the week's foreign policy developments so far have included this. Late yesterday, Attorney General Pam Bondi released a video of U.S. forces rappelling down from helicopters onto an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast. The seizure of the tanker is something I talked about with NPR's Greg Myre in our weekly national security podcast Sources & Methods.
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KELLY: Greg, catch us up. What do we need to know?
GREG MYRE: Sure. So on Wednesday, the U.S. boarded a very large oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela with Venezuelan oil aboard. This was mostly a Coast Guard operation with some help from the military. But it marks a major escalation in what we've seen with these attacks on suspected drug-trafficking boats and this large military presence of both naval ships and troops in the Caribbean.
KELLY: Although you just said something interesting - this was Coast Guard-led. That's a little different from the attacks we have seen on the alleged drug-trafficking boats, right?
MYRE: Absolutely. And of course, that's been one of the big issues - what is the legal rationale for these military strikes? This was a sanctioned oil tanker, so it's also part of sanctions that have been in place a long time - shadow fleet, mysterious tankers. So all of these things are coming together, and it really emphasizes the Trump administration's push in Latin America on multiple fronts - you know, military, economic, diplomatic - much more than we've seen. And again, the U.S. military presence in the region - 15,000 troops on - at sea and on land in...
KELLY: Yeah.
MYRE: ...Puerto Rico mostly - larger than anything we've seen in decades.
KELLY: Just one little detail in what you just said - this was a sanctioned oil tanker, meaning it was under U.S. sanctions. It had a history of oil going to Iran, evading sanctions, is that right?
MYRE: That's right.
KELLY: I mean, I mention it 'cause I guess that's - if you're trying to figure out what's legal and what's not, what distinguishes this from just stealing a boat full of oil is it was under U.S. sanctions.
MYRE: Based on what we know now, there seems to be a little more sound legal rationale for what was done there. You know, there were some sanctions. I'm sure lots of people may have different opinions on this. But there - but there's a bit of a legal history there, rather than all of a sudden, as we learned in September, that the U.S. military is blowing up boats in international waters in the Caribbean.
KELLY: The seizure of the tanker comes on the heels of the release of a new national security strategy - a strategy that takes the Monroe Doctrine and runs with it, the Monroe Doctrine being the 19th century warning to Europe not to interfere in the Western hemisphere. Trump took another shot at Europe this week in an interview with Politico.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think they're weak. But I also think that they want to be so politically correct, I think they don't know what to do. Europe doesn't know what to do. They don't know what to do on trade either.
KELLY: NPR's Eleanor Beardsley is tracking reaction to Trump's remarks from her perch in Paris, and she joined Greg Myre and me on Sources & Methods to talk about it.
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KELLY: Eleanor, just spell out for us how are Europe's leaders responding to commentary like this coming from the United States, their long-standing ally?
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY: I mean, people are just in a state of shock, Mary Louise.
KELLY: There's been a lot of telephone diplomacy this week, is that right - Starmer and Macron and Merz all on the phone with the White House?
BEARDSLEY: Absolutely. In fact, yesterday, we got a readout from the Elysee Palace. You know, it's a very, very fragile time for Europe, but Europe has got to step up and be strong. And they're also, at the same time, being attacked - their societies. The Trump administration with the NSS is trying to revive these, you know, nationalist parties and break apart the societies, you know, and put strains on the transatlantic alliance.
KELLY: To make this personal (laughter), French President Emmanuel Macron has tried - we've watched this, you know, for years now - has tried to build a strong relationship with President Trump. I was struck by a note in your morning pass-off today. These are the pass-offs that, you know, correspondents like you, who are all over the world, write in to tell editors what's going on in your patch. And you wrote something about how Trump is very unpopular in France, including with voters on the far right.
BEARDSLEY: He absolutely is. Like, 60% - we saw a poll - of voters on the far right do not like Donald Trump. They think he's aggressive, brash, impulsive and ignorant. So nobody is really supporting what the Trump administration has said about Europe, even the far right.
KELLY: That was NPR's Eleanor Beardsley in Paris. Earlier, you heard my colleague Greg Myre. You can hear so much more from our conversation about Venezuela and Europe and what might happen next in Ukraine on our weekly podcast, Sources & Methods. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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