Chapo Trap House - 985 - The Murder Inc. Doctrine feat. Greg Grandin (11/10/25)

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

As we inch closer to war with Venezuela, historian Greg Grandin returns to Chapo for a history lesson about the War on Drugs as well as Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. We also talk about the US��s long-running economic interests and petty feuds in Latin America, particularly regarding the region’s oil supplies. We then briefly speculate about just how bad and chaotic a regime change operation against Venezuela might be for the US and Latin America.

All I'm going to be able to be a joke. All I want to be is a joke. We need problems and places. Hello, everybody. It's Monday, November 10th, and this is Your Chapo. Just off the top of the show, I will say, no more talk about New York City. I know you've been sick of it. No more talk about New York City. But for today's episode, basically, over the last couple weeks, when we've seen a massive military built-up in the Caribbean and the open threat of a U.S. invasion of Venezuela. and basically, when I began to hear Trump supporters begin to justify this or promote a possible war with Venezuela by invoking the Monroe Doctrine, I knew I had to get this guest back on the show.

So to offer a historical perspective on the United States and Venezuela, please welcome back to the show, Greg Grandin. Thanks for having me, Will. So, Greg, like I said, I just want to begin first with, like I said, we're sending an aircraft carrier group to the Caribbean. but like this is all in the context of like this this kill spree that the Trump administration has going on blowing up these fast boats in the Caribbean just killing people and then sharing the snuff film with the media to promote what they're doing supposedly as a war on narco traffickers which are linked to Venezuela you gave us a little preview of an article you wrote that's coming out where you described this as sort of government by murder incorporated

So just to begin here, to what extent are we already at war with Venezuela? And what do you make of, like I said, this murder spree? Well, if you look at the U.S. war on drugs, the U.S. has always been at war on drugs, well, I always been fighting with war on drugs at least since 1973. And, you know, the thing about, you know, Trump is that he's insisting it's not a metaphor, that it actually gives him extraordinary powers to do whatever he wants. And the thing about Venezuela and the attacks on the go-for, fast boats, which have started September 2nd and have accelerated in, you know, like any good

serial killer. They, I think forensic psychologists call it when serial killers start to decompose. They start going quicker and quicker in their kills. And that's what's happening. The hits are getting, are getting more frequent, and they're expanding out of the Caribbean into the Pacific. And what's interesting about it is that, is that the first one on September 2nd, was really designed, I would argue, by Rubio and what one could identify as a war party within the Trump administration that sees Latin American very ideological terms that wanted to preempt. I don't want to say a moderate party within the Trump administration, but certainly there was a sector in the Trump administration that thought they could do business with Maduro, and Maduro would certainly sign any contract at this point that Trump put in front of him if it just calmed things down.

Richard Grinnell, who's Trump's special envoy for special missions, I wish I had a special envoy for special missions, basically represents Chevron. And Chevron is a company that kind of went along with Chavez. Remember where Chavez back in the day is nationalization. Exxon rejected it all cloth and pulled out and moved its operations to Guyana, British Guyana. But Richard Grinnell, just two weeks before that attack, got a variance against the sanctions in which Chevron could start pumping oil. And it did start pumping oiling and sending it to Ford Arthur to be refined. And those attacks, those cold-blooded, premeditated murders on innocent people who had no charges board against them, no allegations, no evidence was Grubio's bid to preempt. the people who thought that they could make a deal with Maduro and normalize relationships.

So, I mean, the bigger picture is, you know, America's versus don't think the United States should superintend a global world order based on free trade, that the world should be broken up into spheres of interests with different power centers. And those power centers would exert their authority over their hinterlands. And obviously, Latin America is the United States is interland. So the Trump administration has to get Latin America into order. But there's a lot of ways you can do that. You can, you know, okay, we'll just deal with the web is there. We'll sign contracts and we'll just, you know, get them down. Or we could see it the way Rubio and all of those Republican congressmen in Florida see it as an ideological project to take out then as well,

take out Nicaragua, take out Cuba, and basically eventually isolate Brazil. Because if you don't have Brazil, you don't have Latin America. Right. And like you bring up Chevron. And obviously the U.S. has been more or less at war with Latin America under the guise of the war on drugs. But where does Venezuela fall into this war, especially considering that they don't actually produce very many illegal narcotics that find their way into the United States of America? Is it just the oil or is it like, as you just said, they could easily just sign contracts

with Maduro to get the oil anyway. So like, how do you, could you speak a little bit more on this broader ideological mission? Yeah, it's easy to say, you know, the United States just wants oil. And it's true. They do want the oil. But they could get it other ways, right? You know, you could get it by you, you know, there are other ways in which the United States can get as well as oil with that. But, but it is, you know, you can't separate interests out from ideology, right? Interests are always ideologically defined. And they want, and they basically want to put an end to Venezuela. And they want to put an end to Venezuela, I think, as the first step in bringing down Cuba. Cuba is the real prize, obviously, the real obsession, going back to

Benjamin Franklin. But yeah, so Venezuela is a significant amount of oil. And the way it's actually playing out now is, you know, there's a border dispute between Venezuela and Guyana, British Guyana over, you know, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of heavy crude in that area. So Exxon is already starting to drill, and Chevron kind of wants in there. And so in some ways, in some ways foreign policies being played out as a proxy between these two competing oil companies who maybe on some abstract level have the same interest, but historically have been rivals, you know, within, within that region, the northern north-south america like is there a certain level of like institutional memory

and score settling uh going on here like it goes back to the hugo shavez era like and hugo shavez and maduro's government like how are they seen by uh policy planners in dc well less dc than florida right rubio's from southern florida and and you know it's funny Cuba has been a thing for over a century. They have, you know, the anti-Cuban revolution institutions have been built up and reinvigorated recently, but they're there. They exist. They're like lobby groups. The anti-C Chavez, you know, and of course Chavez is dead to stipulate, but the anti-Chavez groups are more vocal, right? they're more hysterical in some ways.

Not that Cuba really isn't ultimately, I think, the main prize, but they really think that Venezuela is on the cusp of collapse. I mean, I don't know if it is or isn't. As to your question about drugs, Venezuela produces very little drugs. It's always been a transshipment point from Colombia and from Bolivia. And most of those drugs, anyway, come in from the Pacific now, you know, Ecuador and up the Pacific coast, not through the Caribbean. There's certainly no fentanyl coming from Venezuela. And this has been going on for a long, long time. Venezuela is very, you know,

it produces very little drugs. And the idea, you know, they've come up with this total fiction that the justification is that Venezuela doesn't have a state, it's being run by a drug cartel, the cartels de los soles, because the military has a son, a soul, on the insignia on the thing. You know, at best, it's corruption. You know, they look the other way. They probably take bribes. But the idea of describing the whole state as a not, as basically not a state, but an anarchist state is just pure fiction, pure manufacturing. You could say the same thing about El Salvador, you could say that you could certainly

say the same thing about Ecuador, and you could have always said the same thing about Columbia when we were feeding billions of dollars into Colombia, which only served to make the problem worse. I've noticed that the cartel of the Sun thing, that's been around in sort of like, whatever you would call like the successors to the original neocons, the people who were media figures who were like very involved in, you know, the Syrian eye. opposition and Ukraine after that. In about 2014, that's when you started seeing the cartel of the sun stuff.

And of course, like the reasoning that like more, the more like Trump-aligned people use that like the military and the cartel they both use son insignia, it is like, it's like fucking Nancy Drew reasoned it. It's like how Nancy Drew solves the case. Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt this corruption. And there's no doubt there's probably, you know, just like in the United States. I mean, take a look at Ford Bragg if you wanted to shut a country down. Right, right, right. That's the thing. It's the, like, Trump's specific aspect of it.

And they've done this with like a few countries that they targeted in Trump one that it would usually end when Mnuchin or someone said, hey, I have money there. it's this idea that like if a country if they export drugs at all if one guy has ever sold drugs to an American there it's a narco state the cartel runs their fucking government which like okay if that's true I have bad news about Israel for you guys yeah I mean you know and of course it's the it's the history of it I mean what we know is the modern cartels in Mexico what created after Nixon may establish the DEA in their first major operation was in northern Mexico with the Mexican military with this militarized assault on poppy and this Mexico started growing poppy to feed the market for the returning veterans from Southeast Asia. But it was dispersed and it was

peasant. It was small production. It was peasant production. And it wasn't a, you know, it wasn't a highly capitalized industry. The relentless, militarized assault of the DEA and the Mexican military launched in Mexico, which turned northern Mexico into something that looked very much like Vietnam, just as Vietnam ended, you know, going after small peasants, disappearing peasants, disappearing peasants, disappearing peasant activists. It had the effect of creating the first cartels. Like the very first cartels were created as a result of the United States' drug war. And now we're fighting those cartels.

And then, of course, a different episode, like Planned Columbia, all that, that had the effect of, that didn't do anything to stop cocaine coming from Columbia. Twice as much cocaine is grown in Columbia than at the beginning of Planned Columbia, and twice as much land is dedicated to cultivating coca in Columbia than at the beginning of Planned Columbia. All it did was break up the transportation cartels that were relatively stable. I'm not saying they were pacifists, but it wasn't insane. same violence. But when you break up the transportation cartels, you put a high premium on gangs in Central America and Mexico and would-be cartels to establish territory and routes through these spectacular acts of violence. So new cartels emerge more violent that emerge out of that phase of the war on drugs, the Planned Columbia War on drugs, which fed $9, $13 billion into what

was undoubtedly a Colombian state that was interpenetrated by drugs much more than Venezuela or as it is even. I mean, this raises an interesting point. And in the article you sent to us, you give a brief history of the war on drugs, which at this point might as well be the American 100 years war. And it may seem counterintuitive, but like, to what extent has the goal of the American-led war on drugs been to facilitate? facilitate the steady flow of narcotics into the United States by empowering most of the people

who produce and traffic drugs in Latin America. Yeah. I mean, the war on drugs is, I mean, there's lots of different motivations for it, right? There's always been a very close association between both drug production and drug interdiction with right-wing politics, with anti-communist politics. This goes back to Hoover and the FBI using drug interdiction to discredit. And discredit, you know, what they imagined to be subversives or the police morality and, you know, and whatnot. But then under Cointel Pro, it became explicitly directed at the peace movement, at the civil rights movement, at the black power movement, you know. And then, of course, in, you know, there was the intertwining of drug production within Latin America

with drug interdiction. So it was a common dynamic is that repressive military governments would use the CIA to come to power, then they would facilitate the cultivation of coca, and then they would start taking DEA money in order to fight the drug war at the same time. So you had a very tight kind of intertwinement. And this really took off after the Cuban Revolution, when Castro and the Cuban Revolution ended Havana's nodal function in the Caribbean. as, you know, which would brought together this, you know, an international drug trade routes,

which went from Istanbul to, you know, through the Middle East and Italy, you know, it was all set up by Lucky Luciano. And after World War, after World War II, when it was working with the CIA and Santa Cuyah, just to stop the communism coming to power in Italy in 1948. But when Castro ended, you know, all of, he had the effect of broadcasting these gangsters. all into Latin America and into Florida, where they were incorporated into the CIA.

I mean, you can really fall down a deep state rabbit hole here. But it's all true. I mean, it's been documented by people like 60 Minutes and Bill Moyers as well as, you know, more marginal reporters, at least vis-à-beer establishment. You know, like the specific character of the war on drugs in terms of like the drugs that are being imported changes. And like for, you know, cocaine to heroin to crystal meth. the big thing is fentanyl. And opiate addiction obviously has led to a great amount of death in

this country and a great amount of like, you know, despair and demoralization as like we see more and more communities succumb to the effects of it. Like to what extent are like, like these speedboat murders that are happening in the Caribbean, kind of an attempt by the Trump administration to direct people's anger at what they regard as like as the killing of. As the killing of America by drug dealers to sort of like identify a target for it and say look we're doing something about it yeah i mean the drug war was always part of the culture war and it was always i mean right from the beginning with nixon i think it was john earlick was it john earlick who gave that interview he said where you know they they came up with drugs as a way you couldn't outlaw people's

political beliefs or the skin color but you could outlaw drugs and and and that's the way they they came up they they did it intentionally they go after black communities and destroy black And so it's always been part of the culture war, but what you see with the rise of the opioid addiction in areas that are the Republican white rank and file base, you see people like J.B. Vance, you know, irresponsibly but persistently ginning up a sense that their pain and their suffering is the result of the betrayal by elite elites. And certainly the, you know, know, the idea that we're going to murder at will, even though obviously the people piloting those Go Fast boats aren't globalists, they're not George Soros's son, but still, it's the idea of like what we're avenging, you know, the suffering of, you know, of Appalachia to the opioid addiction. I mean, they're not bombing the Sackler family house, that's for sure. And they're not, and, and also, you know, it's a, it's a degree of empathy that,

nobody's ever shown for African-American communities, you know, during the worst of the crack epidemic. Another thing I've noticed about, like, this latest iteration is that you said that Trump more or less views the war on drugs not as a metaphor, but as a literal thing that empowers him to, you know, go to war, even without the express approval of Congress. I mean, he has made comments recently that he's saying, well, I don't think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing. drugs into our country. Okay, we're going to kill them. You know, they're going to be like dead. And in addition to that, this is just something from the Atlantic here.

It says here, in addition, U.S. officials reportedly told the New York Times last month that the Trump administration had secretly authorized the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela. Doesn't this sort of undermine the whole point of secret covert action when you go in? Usually the New York Times has to like work pretty hard to break that story, but it seems now that they're just being told by the Trump administration that they are undertaking covert action in Venezuela. I know, I know. I know it's as if they put out of flash, you know, in 1972. We've authorized covert action in Chile. We've authorized covert action in Guatemala in

1953. No, I know. It's all part of the spectacle of it, I think, you know, and the attempt to build a legal case. I mean, the irony of it is that, you know, Trump's predecessors have built the legal case. It was George W. Bush that united the war on drugs with the war on terror and claimed that the authorization for the use of military force gave him the right to use the military to go after drug, you know, for drug interdictions. There's been no shortage of using the U.S. military for drug. I mean, you know, Trump is doing nothing new. The speedboats are new. The murder and then the passing around the snuff films in form of the video things. That's new.

And that's all part of the spectacle. But every president before him declared that, you know, use the military. I mean, like I said, the DEA in Mexico was waging, you know, Vietnam's second act in late 1973. You know, a couple of months after the last combat troop was pulled out of Vietnam. You know, the DEA was, you know, running a scorched earth campaign in northern Mexico with the Mexican military. So, you know, a lot of this stuff isn't new. It's, but Trump does what Trump does.

He turns it into spectacle. And other presidents have claimed all of these powers to fight the war on drugs. So, you know, but they present it as if, you know, that's the title of the essay that Tom Dispatch, you know, with Great Tom Dispatch is sending it out on Thursday, I think, but is, you know, escalating the escalation. You know, every president escalates the war on drugs. Trump is just escalating, you know, a perpetual escalation. Going back to like Venezuela and the Monday,

Roe Doctrine. As a historian, I mean, what do you think when you hear the Monroe Doctrine being invoked in the 21st century?

Is this just like, once again, stating out loud what's already been taking place from the last century or so? Yeah. Or just like

when politicians or people in the media, they always refer to like Central and South America as America's backyard, very euphemistically. Like it's a big fucking backyard.

Yeah. I mean, a quick history less, the Monroe Doction was proclaimed in a, in 1823 by John Monroe in a state of the union dress and really had to do with Latin America getting independence. And it's a very wordy, many clauses, complicated, contradictory statement

that could be broken down into two parts. And the one part, it's an anti-colonial document. Europe, keep out. No part of the Americas that have achieved independence are eligible for reconquest. Latin Americans like that part. They thought that Monroe was affirming that. own anti-colonialism. But then other parts of the doctrine claim that any event that happens within the Americas that has a bearing on U.S. interest, the U.S. has a right to take action. It didn't say it that clearly, but more or less is something along those lines. And that's obviously the part of the Monroe Doctrine that deepened and became basically a standing universal police warrant for the United States to act at will.

Monroe Doctrine basically became a symbol of mandatory power within an informal empire. And it was adopted by other countries. Other countries claimed they wanted their own Monroe Doctrine. Japan wanted a Monroe Doctrine for China after World War I. Britain won the Monroe Doctrine for Africa. Hitler claimed a Monroe Doctrine for Eastern Europe. it came to symbolize American power. It's especially important for American firstings.

As we talked about earlier, hockoning back to this idea that the world is now organized around a fractured sovereignty of superpowers or regional powers that are administering their spheres of influence. And the United States as a minister is getting Latin America in order and hence the invocations of the Monroe Doctrine. You know, and it's also a rhetorical thing that gets played out over and over again.

Whenever, like, the United States, whenever there's a president that, like, is pulling back a little bit from direct intervention, people proclaim the Monroe Doctrine is over. You know, during Chavez and Lula's first go-round, you know, there were multiple articles about how, you know, the Monroe Doctrine is over. Latin America is now independent. you know now we've snapped back to the you know the trump american first is a nationalist and now everybody's talking about the monroe doctrine that's you know and it's interventionist when i see it being invoked it's being invoked as a way by a kind of like the america first

and more like nationalist part of trump space to sell to uh the american people to their supporters the idea that like oh like the u.s invading Venezuela that's not like Iraq because it's in our hemisphere and this is the Monroe Doctrine. It's based. It's cool. It's nationalists, but it's nothing. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. It is, it's because, you know, despite the often use of the word isolationists, isolationists were never isolationists in the United States. They were always in favor of intervention in Latin America. And Latin America in some ways is a kind of, you know, crucible. It, you know, it is the United States's entrance into the world. It turns isolationists into internationalists. So during world, on the run

up to World War II, even isolationists who wanted to stay out of the war, realized the United States had to how to set up defenses in Latin America. And it was a short step from that to being a full on isolation, internationalists. But it is. It's a doctrine that's very much associated with the anti-internationalist wing of foreign policy, with the national. With the nationalist, chauvinist, American first wing, because they assume that that Latin America belongs to the United States. And, you know, this goes back to taking Texas, taking Mexico. It all gets deepened in the need to build a canal. You know, it actually Monroe doesn't even be, it doesn't even take the name doctrine until the 1850s when the United States

are starting to look for a site to build a canal in Central America, and it's competing with the British show where that canal will be. And then all of a sudden, what was like a couple of random paragraphs in an 1823 state of the union address became the Monroe Doctrine. Right. So going back to like the history of Venezuela in particular, like the Maduro, the Maduro government and Chavez before him. They view themselves as heirs to the Bolivarian Revolution, and like the Bolivian military is often referred to as the Bolivarian Armed Forces.

So, like, how does Simon Boulevard and his War of Independence from Spain, how does that history shape the context of the current government of Venezuela and its relations to the United States? Well, Bolivar became a symbol, right? And Belvoir was born in Venezuela. He was one of the first, first revolutionaries. Latin American independence took place. There were multiple fronts, multiple wars, multiple independence movies in Mexico, in southern South America. But Bolivar led the one in what's now Venezuela and what's now Colombia and what's now

the Northern Andes. And he's associated with, you know, finally driving the Spanish out. So he's a national hero in Venezuela. obviously a hero among Latin American. It's in general. And Chavez, you know, was very astute at invoking him as a kind of what, I guess, Ernesto LaClaue would call an articulating principle. You know, you could bring a lot of different ideas into liberation, theology, Marxism, socialism, a sense of, you know, a sense of a kind of larger nationalism. So, and there is this, deep affection for Bolivar, just like there is for it's, you know, a certain kind of patriotism.

So Chavez was very good at, and he wasn't the first one. There was always a, there was long a kind of opposition between Bolivarism and Monroeism. One was seen as more, the first was seen as more humanistic, more universal, more emancipatory. The other was seen as interventionist and imperialist and enslaving. And so, you know, Chavez was tapping into that. And, you know, what Chavez basically was doing was resurrecting a lot of ideas from the 1970s associated with dependency theory and the new international economic order. And the idea that you can use oil as a tax on the first, as a tax on the first world to subsidize solidarity in the third world. and social programs, you know, all of his, all of his programs, a lot of them had antecedents going back

into the 70s. You know, Chavez was unbelievably strategic. He had rhetorical leggemony. He had electoral legitimacy for a long time. He, without doubt, won at least 13. Well, I can't remember the numbers now, but 11 elections absolutely fairly without, you know, the one election he lost, to amend the Constitution, he accepted. He accepted. But, you know, one could say he made a series of mistakes. You know, maybe he should have set up a sovereign wealth fund rather than just like spending the money. Like, he let everybody do whatever they wanted. He didn't, you know, and the state was very, I mean, the state both collapsed and was also a kind of nucleus of reaction and special interests. So instead of like presiding over revolution,

and creating a new state with monopoly power over the borders and over violence and force and coercion, Chavez basically created all these parallel institutions. Well, we can't deal with the medical establishment will just create medical missions. We can't deal with the universities. We'll just create a whole series of, you know, other educational power. It was parallelism. It was, you know, straight out building alternative things, except he didn't have to. Like, you know, if you had, because there was so much money and the money came largely because Chavez himself along with his oil the people who presided over his oil program worked to revitalize OPEC rebuild OPEC and get control of the national oil company and you know oil was trading like at seven dollars a barrel

when Chavez came into power you know and at its height in 2008 it was like five or six times that And I was largely because of what Venezuela was doing in trying to reorganize the world. It's little known that the United States's push for fracking. And Obama is, when Obama had taken credit, I did that about all the oil and oil he was pumping here and there and, like, turning the United States into a self-sufficient oil export. To a large degree, that was about, that was in response to Chavez. That was in response to Venezuela. And, you know, Chavez dies in 2013, and he annoyance Nicolas Maduro, his successor, which might not have been, you know, the best idea. You know, he didn't have his charisma.

Oil collapsed when he died, you know, and went down to $13 a barrel. And, you know, the United States began a full court press. And basically, Chavez socialized the bourgeoisie. through those elections and through his rhetorical dominance of the public sphere. And he forced opposition parties to fight on his terrain. In all of those elections, they were basically promising to be better socialist than Chavez was by the end of his life. But then Chavez dies.

Maduro wins the next election, but by a hair. And he doesn't have the tools or the skills to maintain the socialization, to maintain you know, the bourgeoisie's kind of, to keep, you know, the way that Chavez did, you know, he would have had to re-socialize the, his, is winning so close re-emboldened the opposition and re-embolded them to go on the offensive in a way that we're not, we're no longer, we're going to be better redistribute us, but then you are, we're like, you know, we're going to, you know, we're going to put, get the country back that we had. and you know it's been it's been horrific

how it's drop it well also like it's sort of a double-edged short because like if oil is such a great source of wealth and power and you make your whole state about oil well then things get really dicey when global oil prices take a dip and isn't that what happened with Venezuela I mean yeah without that Chavez was the last

the last leftist the last decent leftist decent human being that could that could credibly think that they were going to use oil to fund, you know, an internationalist progressive program, you know, and that, you know, that's, that is straight out of the 1970s. You know, when oil prices started going up, the whole new international order thought they were going to make a public energy bank in which the profits from oil would go into that and allow poor countries to take

out low interest loans in order to develop and also to, so they can know how, they can project what the energy cost would be over a decade, which is a central element of any kind of developmentalist project. But an energy bank isn't what happened. What happened was that Kissinger and Saudi Arabia and Iran before the revolution basically made a deal to basically cycle petro dollars into New York and Bonn and London banks and recirculate them both to pay for arms deals and to keep the U.S. military industry afloat after Vietnam, but then also lent as loans to third world countries. So Chavez's using of oil was a kind of hawking back to this earlier moment of the new international economic order, but it was quixotic, you know, and obviously,

you know, even setting aside climate change, you know, it can't just happen in one country. but yeah it was it was it was it was interesting you know and you and and maduro is just the kind of tail end of that that is you know that we're living with the consequences well i mean like obviously like uh the venezuela has been under sanctions for a long time i mean their economy has cratered we often hear about the the terrible deprivations caused by his government but it does seem like Maduro for better or worse has used the wealth and power that he has to shore up Venezuela's considerable military. Now, you could say, like, maybe he should be spending that money on his own people, but given, you know, their tenuous position and the repeated coup attempts, I can't say

I totally blame him because it seems like in spite of all of this, Venezuela still has a fairly strong and importantly loyal military. So what do you think explains this? Well, I mean, I think that they got rich. I think they got powerful. I think that they relied more and more on the military rather than social movements as, you know, even when Chavez was alive during some of his early elections, I remember being in some of them popular values and they were like, okay, now that this election is won, you know, now the real revolution begins. We're going to like create this. And of course, it never actually truly happens because of, I guess, you know, the geopolitics of having to rely on a strong military when you surround it.

I mean, at the time, Colombia was hostile state, you know, and pressing in on Venezuela. And you had the Bush administration, then you had the quieter imperialism of the Obama administration, which placed sanctions on Venezuela. And then it was ratcheted up by Trump and then by Biden. It does enormous damage. And so there is this sense that, yeah, of course, anybody who knows anything about Latin America knows that you may be called on to defend yourself or to just give up, right? And if you have to defend it, and if you have to defend yourself, make sure that your officers are, I don't know, well taken care of. Well taken care of, but also was part of the, you know, the fact that, you know, everybody was, everybody was getting to do what they want.

The, you know, the peasants were, you know, building the cooperatives, the workers were organizing, you know, people were doing this and good people were doing that. And then the military was like making money and the Bolivarian, bourgeoisie was making money, a whole new middle class emerged. You know, it was, it was, you know, I made that joke that Brett Stevens keeps on quoting as an indication of the immoralism of the left, where I said Chavez, and his ability. In the nation, I said he wasn't, the problem was he wasn't, it wasn't that he was too authoritarian, he wasn't authoritarian. He wasn't authoritarian enough. What I meant by that is that he should have built a state. He should have built a state rather than a series of parallel institutions to a decayed state. You know, and, and he didn't, you know, and maybe in retrospect he should have used, he should have been like Norway and built a sovereign wealth fund and a little bit more. You know, but whatever. It was, you know, he was, people, people loved them. And he was spending money on, he was spending money on health care. And he was spending money.

And, but obviously it couldn't last. And, and it didn't. Thinking back to the, uh, the first Trump administration. Now, the last time Trump was in office, uh, there was that incredibly embarrassing coup attempt. We're like, the guys all got arrested and Maduro was like showing their U.S. passports on Venezuelan national TV. I mean, first of all, how are you going to send the guys to do your coup into the country with their U.S. passports? I mean, that's insane.

But like, do you think the memory of that embarrassment is like sort of, I don't know, kindling a lot of this bloodlust now that they want retribution for how badly they were humiliated on the last go-around? I don't know. I don't think Trump even remembers. Do you think Trump remembers that? I mean, so much. I think Michael Rubio does. I mean, Rubio might. Rubio might.

It doesn't seem. Nobody talks about it. It's like down the memory hole, right? Nobody even talks about it. I think they're just trying for part two of, you know, a continuation. You know, I mean, it was a circus. Remember the whole we're going to recognize Juan Guailleo and he's the president? You know, he's running around.

I was the motorcycle around Venezuela telling everybody he's the president. Nobody's listening to. You know, he's, you know, so then they give that up. I don't know exactly what the official policy of the United States is not I don't know if it still recognizes one well they have a new figure there's a lot there was so much craziness during that first term like I don't know what they remember I don't think they feel humiliated

Aguaito I'm sure has been forgotten about but there's sort of a new figure the the lady who just won the Nobel Peace Prize more or less for saying please Donald Trump invade my country I mean first of you have some background like who is this person and what do you make of her she's been involved in anti-chavez politics since the beginning. She's a symbol of oligarchic intransigence. She was involved in the 2002 coup, which, you know, of course, failed and had and had George W. Bush's backing. She represented a face

of the oligarch. Remember I said that there was a, you know, that Chavez socialized the oligarchy and its political expressions tried to kind of mimic some kind of democratic socialism. You She wasn't part of that. She represented the most intransigent and divisive. She was in polarizing just to get these chavismo. She was polarizing within the opposition. She comes from a wealthy family involved in, I think, electrical engineering and metal work and became a symbol of this kind of oligarchic opposition to Chavismo.

And then she's still, you know, and as the, as the opposition moved after Chavez died, and the opposition moved away from its early or more moderation and moved back toward Machalo's vision of a kind of, you know, of a restoration of the, of the rightful class, she, she became rose in power. And like a lot of these people, they rely on foreigners to prop up their power. mostly the United States. And that was always so shameful about why the, I don't really understand what the Nobel Committee was thinking, because you could find, I mean, setting aside like the doctors who work in Gaza or the women who are fighting not to be put in prison for having miscarriages in El Salvador, you can probably find more moderate faces of the opposition within within within Venezuela that could have that they could have given the Nobel Peace Prize to

I mean if you know if they did if for whatever reason the Nobel Committee felt like Venezuela was the thing that they had to focus on but um but instead they just gave it to somebody who is like you know has now endorsed those those murders in the in the Caribbean and and and murders in the Pacific and and basically has endorsed the argument that Venezuela, is it a state run by a corrupt military government, but it is a state run by a, you know, a cartel and, and, and, and my daughter was a kingpin, and they could treat them that's the way they treated Manuel Noriega in 1989, except only Venezuela is bigger than Panama.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's quite a different kettle of fish than, you know, than Panama or Grenada, right, like Venezuela is a much bigger country and it has, you know, a considerable military. And I guess I bring this up. Dick Cheney died last week. And I guess I bring that up in light of the prospects. Morning of Mondani's election. Yeah. Every document of barbarism is a document of civilization. So Dick Cheney may be gone, but his shadow looms large. And I guess I I bring this up in light of the prospects of a U.S. invasion of Venezuela. And like with Iraq and Afghanistan,

I have no doubt that the U.S. military still retains considerable ability to kill large numbers of people, destroy infrastructure, and possibly topple Maduro's government. I don't think that's a given. But like, given where the United States is right now, like how is you, are we any better equipped now

to achieve an actual victory in terms of like a tactical, strategic, or political sense or deal with what is sure to be a grinding guerrilla war and counterinsurgency that is likely to arise should we actually put boots on the ground in Venezuela? I don't know.

I mean, look, what do I know? You know, it's much different. Panama was something akin to a surgical strike. It was the application of the Powell doctrine that we had to get in, know what we would doing, and get out. They sent 30,000 Marines who were already practically stationed in Panama in terms of the Panama Canal Zone.

They, you know, and they, and they had, they had allies within the Panama defense forces and Noriega didn't have a chance. And, and, and, and it was a small country. And, and, and they were in and out quickly and then Bush to, you know, that was the first, of course, that was the first step to the road to Iraq because what, it was the first real major intervention that was justified, not in the name of, of national security, but of, and not just in terms of, drugs, but in terms of bringing democracy to the people of Panama, then as well as a big country. Things are bad, though. People are hungry. You know, I don't know how much people are going to be

loyal to Chavez. I mean, I'm sorry to my daughter. You know, it's a big question. The United States, though, also seems a little bit enabbed. I mean, did you read about that Gerald Ford carrier that yeah, yeah, yeah, that was the nice thing I was going to bring up. and traveling a trail of like radiation well yeah there is an article I wanted to bring up about I mentioned that we're moving this

like a huge amount of military resources into the Caribbean including it including our our latest it down too I think I think they're not they're not getting that fast and Trump does seem like he's backed away a little bit from some of the rhetoric I mean it seems like they don't

know who they want to bomb Mexico Venezuela now to pick it on Columbia, right? I mean, you know, now they're trying to say that Petro is the head of a content in Colombia. I did want to bring up the aircraft carrier thing because one of the, one of the ships that they moved was the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is like the newest and latest iteration of the U.S. aircraft carrier fleet to replace the old Nimitz class.

And first of all, do you think it's funny that it's named after Gerald Ford? and the thing is like a lemon like the toilets don't flush and like basically nothing works. Like the Saturn Night Live scenes and tripping down the stairs. Yeah. Yeah, it was delivered a disaster apparently.

I mean, I don't know. I'm not a mechanical engineer, but the systems failures were big on every level from the weapon system to the radar to I guess the radiate, I guess the nuclear fusion that powers it. It's been one disaster. after another. And it's delayed the delivery of the second carry in this class to Kennedy,

which was, you know, and it was way over budget. And it just seems like a symbol of, I don't know, it seems like a symbol of what like Hegset intuitively knows is wrong with the U.S. military, but is he such a crazy Christian nationalist. He focuses on like, not, you know, shaving instead of, instead of reforming the procurement, you know, the procurement, you know, the procurement, sieges of major military crafts. You know, so it is a symbol, I don't, you know, they are, you know, they have battleships and they have, they don't have, they don't have enough troops to launch it on the ground invasion of that as well.

I think maybe they hope that the military will turn against, you know, maybe, maybe they'll bomb, I don't know, but, you know, I don't, I don't think there's going to be a lot of stomach for bombing, you know, any major civilian population. that strikes of military operations. I don't I don't think that Venezuela is a target rich country to bomb. It's not like they have a nuclear installation. They have to take out or weapons plant. So, you know, I don't I don't know what.

It does seem like Bush is backing away a little bit from from that, even though, you know, Trump, you mean. Yeah, my cat, it's all the same. Yeah, Trump. Well, yeah, it does seem because, like, Trump does, he, out of all, whatever, whatever skills he does have, he does seem to have some sort of instinctive capacity

to read the room. And that's why I think is like these fast boat attacks and their advertisement of it is him sort of nibbling around the edges and like his public statements are like, maybe I'll do it, maybe I won't. I won't tell you. I don't know. Yeah. But like, it does seems he has some sort of instinctive,

at least awareness that he doesn't want to be seen as a loser on the chances of like invasion of Venezuela and it going poorly and as well as the you know like the US populations rather I don't know that we don't want to see our own soldiers dying in a conflict like this like it seems he sort of boxed in a little bit like and he wants to just enough but like you know maybe maybe like it's not going to be Libya right yeah it's not could be Libya, you know, complete disaster. You know, there's any number of nightmass scenarios

that can happen. I mean, I don't think there's going to be like an insurgency in defense of Maduro, you know, a kind of thing. But, you know, there could be total chaos in setting up an alternative government because the opposition hates each other. So I don't know who they think they're going to put in charge. And, you know, they might declare victory quickly if Maduro Falls and some other general takes his place that's less aligned with the boulebarian movement but yeah maybe they'll just

still kill just continue to kill fishermen in the Caribbean and the Pacific you know poor you know those boats those boats weren't coming from Venezuela to the United States they can't they can't make it across the Caribbean they were going to they couldn't get to Florida from where there were

watching from you know and and and and they were probably carrying migrants and I mean, Bush, Trump obviously, like you said saying, but Trump obviously keeps on, likes the show of dominance and he likes to be able like, how dominant is it to use the, the U.S. Navy to blow up like a couple speedboats. Like this is, isn't this like, isn't this just like a, rather than a demonstration of dominion, isn't this just kind of like, if this is what we're advertising to the world is like,

the U.S. military has the capability of blowing up a boat. Like one I mean it's like The logic of Gaza It's a firm You know On a smaller scale Affirming the logic of Gaza

Impunity Asymmetrical power You know No accountability But um But also again It was the very It is Trump

But it's also Rubio And it was Rubio's bid To preempt You know The moderates Who seemed like Richard Grinnell Who's

also an American first. He's an ideologue. He's a Trump's supporter. But he wanted, you know, he wants to make deals with Maduro on behalf of Chevron. And, and Rubio, you know, really sees it and more, sees Latin American more ideological terms. He wants, you know, and now that, you know, Millet has won his, his, his congressional election and this election coming up in Chile, it seems like, you know, an old Pinnishay supporter, Miguel Kest, is going to win. because, you know, a communist, I can't remember first name, but last name is Hara is running, is running for the left. She won the left primary, and she's the most popular single politician, but it seemed, but there's two right-wing politicians in Chile and

once it goes to a second round. So they'll have Chile, they'll have, they'll have, Argentina, you know, Rubio wants Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, and, you know, And of course they have El Salvador and they have Ecuador. But like I said, they don't, they don't have their sphere of influence organized if they still have Lula. And like you said, they don't have Brazil, Brazil, which is the mega, that's the big one. Especially Brazil under Lula, you know, who beep back Bolsonaro and beep back push Trump's attempt to stop the prosecution of Bolsonaro, right? All of those coup plotters are in jail. and they beat back Musk's attempt to somehow present keeping fascists off of rumble is a violation of free speech.

You know, for some reason, Glenn Greenwald, who's good on a lot of things, is a little out of his mind on that topic when it comes to Brazil. And so, yeah, so they don't have Brazil, but not only not only not have Brazil, they have Brazil, and Brazil's led by Lula, who is organized. the bricks, right? He's, he is one, he's a symbol of, you know, an attempt to build an international fact check against Trumpism and, and the tariffs and the power of the dollar and all of that. And they don't have Mexico, right? And Mexico and Brazil, all Latin America's two major economies. Um, my last question for you is like, I guess from a domestic political perspective. Like, uh, Trump is more or less openly threatening to go to war with Venezuela. And also Nigeria, too, has been added into this. They're going to protect Christians in

Nigeria. Obviously, like, there's always some, uh, Congress will always say, oh, you have to ask us before we give you the authority to do this. But like, look, the Democrats just had a good election, good election night last week. But like, what does it say to you about the fact that, like, the issue of Donald Trump's promise of invading two additional countries now is entirely absent from political debates in this country in terms of like the Democrats as an opposition party. What does that say to you? Well, what it says to me, it's to the degree that liberals are still very much lead the discourse in terms of in terms of what constitutes opposition to Trump.

It's still very much domestic focus, still very much. I mean, this is nothing new. right like when they wanted to impeach richard nixon they tried to get a couple of articles of impeachment there about the illegal war in cambodia and they and and and the jacksonian democrats the scoop jackson that jackson's jackson how many scoop jackson yeah the democrats the cold war democrats basically uh forced those articles of impeachment out and made it a totally domestic affair you know it's nothing it's nothing new it goes back your foreign policy is it's a you know it's the insanity of the United States, the schizophrenia that the United States is totally

structured by its foreign power, its ability to project outward, where so many times hegemony, a conception of how the world works and how it should work, is forged in foreign policy and forged in expansion and creating markets and wars. And yet, when it comes to domestic politics, nobody ever thinks about those things because, you know, they're so you know this because it's it's just there's so much crap to deal with that home i mean you know it's as simple as that it's like who could keep track you know even like sure let's throw let's throw opposition to a war in venezuela into the mix but you know you'd not have a conception of the united states that's different than most people

have most people you know politics all politics is local you know all right well we'll leave it there for today. Greg Grandin, thank you so much for your time and your perspective on Venezuela and Latin America. As always, thanks for joining us and please check out Greg's book, America, America. Thanks, Will. It was always great. Always great speaking with you guys. All right, everybody. That does it for today. Till next time, bye-bye. Thank you.