On this episode of The Time of Monsters: Trita Parsi on why Donald Trump’s retrenchment doesn’t go far enough.
Donald Trump speaks in front of US Navy personnel on board the US Navy’s USS George Washington aircraft carrier at the US naval base in Yokosuka, Japan, on October 28, 2025.(Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)
Donald Trump claims he wants to be the peace president and has even lobbied for a Nobel Peace Prize. But his foreign policy has been wildly contradictory. While the United States is clearly retrenching from many parts of the world, violence against hemispheric neighbors is increasing. I talked to Trita Parsi, cofounder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, for a wide-ranging discussion on why American hegemony is declining but also why the push for retrenchment hasn’t gone far enough.
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Journalist Eoin Higgins was recently sued for defamation by a fellow journalist Matt Taibbi, who is subject on criticism in Higgins’ book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. The case was briskly dismissed by a judge and is now on appeal. The lawsuit was manifestly frivolous and is filled with irony, since Taibbi likes to present himself as a free speech champion. I spoke to Higgins about it and the larger tendency of wealthy right-wing figures, including Donald Trump, to use lawsuits to intimidate critics.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.