Jeffrey Goldberg: you and I both, during the eight years of the Obama presidency, spent quite a bit of time with him, listening to him talk about his doctrine, quote/unquote, of don't do stupid stuff, although it was a different word than stuff.

And, you know, that's looking smarter and smarter right now, the sort of don't rush in.

There's a downside to don't do stupid stuff, is that when you're thinking about third and fourth order consequences of actions, you'll never do anything.

But here we have a case where maybe the Trump doctrine is, don't think about even first order consequences.

David Ignatius: The Trump doctrine in part is, just do it.

It's like -- yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He's the Nike of presidents.

David Ignatius: just go for it.

And, you know, he does have this extraordinary belief in himself.

When you look back to President Obama, I remember as you do those conversations, he did plan carefully.

You look at the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear agreement that he negotiated, it started with secret meetings, careful secret meetings in Oman.

Bill Burns, you know, a classic shadow diplomat, Jake Sullivan went with him, you know, laid it out with intermediaries, long process, then the long negotiations about each detail.

The opposite of what you see with Trump, it's just a very thin team.

They don't have the background.

You know, in a sense, no wonder that they weren't able to pull this off.

They just didn't have the horsepower.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I suppose the question in my mind about Cuba is, does it look like Venezuela, which is the just do it and it works, or is it somehow Iran and we haven't thought about all the things that can go wrong?

I mean, we don't have to think about things that can go wrong in Cuba.

We do remember the Bay of Pigs.

David Ignatius: So, we have very -- I mean, we remember the Bay of Pigs, we remember the Cuban Missile Crisis.

If the Russians decided that they wanted to get -- interpose themselves in the Cuba situation, it'd be much, much more dangerous.

I don't think that's going to happen.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

David Ignatius: You know, I think Cuba's so close, there's so much money that Cuban Americans stand to make as the island opens up.

My expectation is that this won't last all that long or be that difficult, but I've been -- certainly, I've been wrong about -- Jeffrey Goldberg: Okay.

Let me ask you to wildly speculate now and say if Cuba works, that's a big supposition here.

Would he actually try to take Greenland in some way?

He talks about it.

He's preoccupied by it.

Just because it sounds absurd doesn't mean it's not going to happen.

David Ignatius: So, I think he's going to get something that he can call taking Greenland.

He'll get bases and sort of unusual language to guarantee the bases.

I don't think Europe is going to let him go further.

With Cuba, he's asserted the Donroe Doctrine, the kind of role in Latin America.

Europe is different.

And I think Europe is really now sort of dropped any willingness to accommodate Trump's bullying on Greenland.

I think that's over.

Europeans are just fed up with it, and they're going to push back.

So, Trump may come back and use the rhetoric but I don't see that going anywhere.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want you to listen to Trump on a couple of different occasions recently.

They're wildly different Trumps.

There are moments when he sounds like what we understand to be a president sounds like, what we think of as a president speaking about foreign policy.

Here's an example from his recent trip to China.

Donald Trump, U.S.

President: The American and Chinese people share much in common.

We value hard work, we value courage and achievement, we love our families, and we love our countries.

Together, we have the chance to draw on these values to create a future of greater prosperity, cooperation, and happiness, and peace for our children.

Jeffrey Goldberg: There he is doing the thing that presidents do, which is finding common ground with an important adversary, who's also an incredibly important economic partner.

That's in the normal bandwidth of presidential behavior.

Then there are moments like this when he's talking about the Strait of Hormuz.

Watch this.

Donald Trump: Nobody's going to control it.

It's international waters.

And Oman will behave just like everybody else or we'll have to blow them up.

They understand that.

They'll be fine.

David Ignatius: Oman will behave.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Oman will behave.

So -- okay.

So, you're an American adversary or you're an American friend, and you watch this president perform on the global stage.

Watching him, do you think that the United States, the world's largest superpower, most important superpower, is a stable, dependable country?

David Ignatius: No, and I think that's something that's really beginning to hurt President Trump and will affect the rest of his presidency.

He has been so erratic, so vacillating, announcing that he's won the war in Iran, you know, victory claims three times, saying he's going to exterminate the civilization, the recurring Greenland threats, threats to everybody, you know, cited the threat to Oman.

He does have his moments when he acts presidential, as he did in China, and that's exactly what you want a president to say, avoiding a war with not -- between the United States and China is the primary obligation of any good leader.

You can do that through deterrence, but also through talking to people.

But he just doesn't seem to be able to turn off -- and somebody really ought to take away his phone so he can't tweet because that erratic tweeting, I think, has undermined his ability to communicate.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, the biggest question of all right now may be this.

If you're in a place like Taipei, Seoul, Riga, Warsaw, Tokyo, will the U.S.

actually rescue us from the authoritarian states who surround us, who are our neighbors, or will we be on our own for the first time since the end of World War II?

I mean, if one of these leaders asked you today in any of those capitals, do you think the president will fulfill the American promise to our Democratic country to defend us from Russia, China, and so on, North Korea?

What would you say?

David Ignatius: So, I've had those conversations with some foreign friends who are really struggling.

It's hard to answer.

But I think there is a growing fear in the world that America's promises that it will sacrifice its own cities to save those of its allies, you know, the basic Article 5 promise that underlies NATO and underlies our support for Japan and other allies, people just don't believe it.

They don't think that we'd do that, and I think that's really dangerous, because people are beginning to have to look for other forms of nuclear deterrence.

So, Saudi Arabia's turning to Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons as a protector.

Europeans are turning to France, which has nuclear weapons.

Who would have ever imagined that Germany would turn to France and in effect discuss a joint nuclear strategy?

But that's a consequence, I think, of people beginning to lose faith in that American nuclear umbrella, which is part of what's kept the world safe.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And the danger comes from nuclear proliferation, or the danger comes from Russia and China feeling, oh, now is a time to make a move?

David Ignatius: So, I think there is a window in which while Trump is here and the world is so destabilized, that Russia might well make a move to demonstrate that the NATO umbrella is gone, that you're not protected.

Today, the Russians attacked a city in Romania, a NATO country.

What's the U.S.

going to do about that?

And I think the answer probably is not much, and the world will see that.

And, you know, I mean, the NATO umbrella's getting pretty tattered and I don't think Americans appreciate just how dangerous that is because other countries will go their own way.

Jeffrey Goldberg: In the last minute we have, I want to ask you about a column you just wrote.

You're arguing that China is not the inexorable juggernaut that some people think it is, and that the U.S.

is actually stronger than these conversations might suggest.

What's the 30-second standing -- David Ignatius: So, in this column, I imagined that I was a Chinese intelligence analyst, and I'd been given the -- Jeffrey Goldberg: He's only imagining, everyone.

David Ignatius: -- possible career-ending assignment of evaluating after the summit, you know, who's stronger, the U.S.

or China?

And my analyst ends up saying that China is probably a little bit weaker than it seemed during the summit, and the United States is probably a little bit stronger than it seemed during the summit, and I think that's the truth.

Jeffrey Goldberg: The strength comes from the American economy?

David Ignatius: So, the American economy, the momentum.

I wrote in this piece, America has a way of falling uphill.

Every disaster, we seem to survive and even be better off.

Jeffrey Goldberg: David, it's absolutely fascinating.

We are going to have to leave it there.

I want to thank you for joining us, and I want to thank you at home for watching us.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.