Guerrilla History - Coups, Oil, and Oil Nationalization: Supplement w/ Alexander Aviña & Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

This supplemental episode is the recording of a Twitter Space we just recorded with our friends, Professors Alexander Aviña and Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt.  What was originally supposed to be a pretty informal meeting became a nearly 1 hour and 40 minute discussion of coups, oil, and oil nationalization!  Enjoy! Alexander Aviña is historian at Arizona State University, and is author of the book Specters of Revolution:  Peasant Guerrilla in the Cold War Mexican Countryside (Oxford University Press, 2014, https://alexanderavina.com/specters-of-revolution/ ).  Listen to the episode we did with him on Cold War Latin America here: https://guerrillahistory.libsyn.com/alex-avia  Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt is a historian at California State University, Stanislas.  You can (and should!) get The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq from Stanford University Press https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26330 .  Listen to the episode we did with him on Coups, Oil, the CIA, and Arab Nationalism here: https://guerrillahistory.libsyn.com/coups-oil-the-cia-and-arab-nationalism-in-iraq-w-brandon-wolfe-hunnicutt  You can support Guerrilla History by joining us at patreon.com/guerrillahistory, where you will also get bonus content!

Hello, guerrilla history listeners. This is one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki. What we're bringing for you today is the audio recording of a Twitter space that we just hosted with two of our friends, Professor Alexander Avina, who, of course, has been on the show several times, and we have plans for more episodes with Alex. Do not worry. As well as Professor Brennan Wolf Honeycutt, who was the latest guest on guerrilla history, talking about his book, The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy,

oil and Arab nationalism in Iraq. If you haven't heard that episode yet, I would highly recommend you going back and listening to that previous episode. It's the last episode in the feed before this with Brandon talking about his book. The episode is about three hours long and it's an incredibly interesting episode.

But after that episode came out, Alex and Brandon had gotten in contact and said, you know, they wanted to meet with each other. And we figured, well, what better way to meet each other than having a Twitter space and also having some audience questions with it. It was originally supposed to be a pretty informal thing.

I was the only host that ended up being able to make it as you'll hear during the recording. But what ended up happening is we had almost an hour and 40 minutes of a conversation that was really fascinating. And so we wanted to bring this, what was supposed to be an informal meeting, to everybody to be able to hear because there is some really interesting things that happen in this space.

The only other preface that I'm going to make, make before we get into the space is that because it was recorded as a Twitter space, we were all only able to record from our phones. We weren't able to use any good microphones or anything like that. So the audio quality is not going to be quite as nice as what you're hearing now, as well as what you're used to with guerrilla history. But rest assured, the audio quality is fine. It's just not quite that, you know, top tier audio quality that we do try to get. But it's totally understandable. You just might hear some spurious. clicks and pops in the background as we're shuffling our phones around talking into it.

But we should, it should be fine. So, without further ado, we present to you our Twitter space that we hosted with Professor Alexander Avina and Professor Brandon Wolf Honeycut on Coos, Oil, and Oil Nationalization. Okay, welcome to the second guerrilla history Twitter space. We had a guerrilla history Twitter space recently with Mikey from Oahu water protectors to talk about the ongoing crisis at Red Hill and the naval contamination that's taking place there. And this is our second one. Unfortunately, it seems like I'm going to be the only guerrilla history host at this space as well.

Brett is currently on a plane back from France to the United States, and Adnan is presenting at a conference in Istanbul. So very international guerrilla history, as usual. You know, Brett being from the United States, Adnan and Canada and me in Russia. Well, today it's France, Turkey, and Russia. So very interesting combination. But we'll make do with just me being the host because we have two excellent guests today. We have Alexander Avina, who guerrilla history listeners, I'm sure, quite familiar with,

as well as Brandon Wolf Honeycutt, who guerrilla history listeners will recognize from our latest episode on Coos, Oil, the CIA and Arab nationalism in Iraq, which has been getting very good reviews, I might add. So if you haven't the latest episode yet, I encourage you to do so. So Alex, Brandon, it's nice to have you both here. I know that we've been talking about bringing you two together for a little bit of time now. And we are still planning on having a full episode with the two of you. But I thought that this would be a little bit of a fun way for us to kind of introduce you to each other. So, you know, welcome. Alex, why don't you just briefly tell who you are to the audience?

And then, Brandon, you can tell the audience who you are if they haven't heard those episodes yet. Thanks, Henry. And Brandon, it's great to, quote unquote, meet you in this virtual world. I've listened to, like, two or three of your podcast recently. So this is very cool to finally have the chance to converse. And I look forward to reading your excellent work in the near future. My name's Alex Avine Mae, a history professor of Latin American and Mexican history at Arizona State University. University. Yeah, I do research, right now I'm currently doing research on stuff on dirty wars and drug wars and political terror in Mexico. And oil has actually like a pretty interesting role to play somewhat in the 1970s, Mexico. So that's one of the reasons why I'm really interested amongst others in Brandon's work and the topic. Excellent. Now we'll turn it over to Brandon. Brandon, can you tell the listeners who you are?

Yeah, sure. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, you're coming through great. Okay, wonderful. Well, pleasure to be on. Thank you, Henry, for the invitation. And thanks, Alex. I'm a huge admirer of your work. And it's a good, it's a great honor to be able to share this Twitter space and get to meet you virtually. So, as Henry said, I teach U.S. and Middle East history at Stan State University in California, Central Valley. It's kind of a broad array of classes, history of Islamic civilization, as well as more special. Classalized classes and modern best history, especially Cold War history. Paranoid style was the first book, and I'm eager for the opportunity to talk about it or whatever else comes up. Yeah, great. So, like I said, we have two episodes with Alex already on guerrilla history. The first one was Cold War Latin America, which is, I believe, our second or maybe third most popular episode we've ever put out.

So listeners, if you're interested in hearing about what the context of Cold War Latin America was like, go back. That was a relatively early episode of ours, but people really, really do seem to like that episode. And then we also had an intelligence briefing with you, Alex, about the beautiful game. And I know planning on doing a follow-up in preparation of the World Cup and Qatar this year. And as I also mentioned, Brandon is our latest guest on guerrilla history. Just last week, we released our three-hour-long episode. so featuring Brandon and his work. And again, really great reviews have been coming out. So what I want to turn to first, I know that we have this titled Coos, Oil and Oil Nationalization.

I'm going to stick with Coos first because in the news recently, is then within the last about 24 hours, we have none other than the walrus, John Bolton, himself, saying that he has personally organized coups, which probably doesn't come as a great surprise to many of the listeners here. However, we have other former CIA spooks, as if one can be a former CIA spook. John Seifer going on Twitter and saying that this is a bunch of hogwash, and John Bolton has never been involved with a coup because the U.S. doesn't do coups anymore. This is what John Seifer, CIA spook, says. The U.S. doesn't do coups anymore.

This is something that the U.S. did decades ago. And now the U.S., when it goes for regime, change takes very overt courses, like we did in Iraq, like we did in Afghanistan, like we did in Libya, like we have been continuously attempting in Venezuela. So these are, you know, more overt things. And Cypher says that this is all the U.S. does. There's no more covert coups that are taking place at behest of the United States. So before I get into the more history-related things, I'm just curious of each of your take on the latest goings-on of Mr. Bolton saying that he was involved in the organization of coup d'etaz, as well as John Sefer, CIA spook, saying that this is poppycock. Go ahead, Rand. You want to jump in first? Well, I thought it reminded me of that joke I'm sure you're familiar with from Latin America.

of, you know, why has there never been a coup in the United States? Because there's no U.S. Embassy there. I thought it was funny, but there's kind of a long history of like, you know, even right after 1953, Alan Dulles went in like Life magazine or one of those magazines and was almost like bragging about having toppled Mossadegh. Kermit Roosevelt wrote a book the same thing. So there seems to be a history of sort of bragging about overthrowing foreign governments as a way. to sort of secure valor or something. So I thought it was interesting. I question that John Seifer, that cannot be his real name.

Like I saw people responding to it. Like there's no way this guy so cold, as you said, Henry, once you're CIA, you're CIA, right? It's blood in blood out, but his real name cannot be John Seifer. That's too perfect. All right. But yeah, I think it's interesting, right? Like, I think usually as historians, particularly those of us who are interested in researching or teaching U.S. involvement in regime changing coups in the global South, like, usually we have to wait 20, 30, 40 years to get like the declassified documents that reveal the extent of U.S. participation in these different coups.

Like, for instance, I think one of the most important coup that in terms of setting the script for the MO of future American coups was occurred in Brazil. 1964. And like, we still don't have most of the CIA documents declassified in relation to that coup. So it's really interesting for me as a historian. When you read, when you read the media and the press or 19, U.S. media and press in 1963, 1964, right? It's interesting to see the extent that some of these major newspapers cover U.S. involvement. And then always, it's a 20, 30, 40 years later, we find out, oh, actually the U.S. was heavily involved in this coup. And then here comes John Bolton along to just kind of just let us know in real time that he's actually involved and he has been involved in planning real coups and I wish he had just kept talking and I wish he

had had a different type of person across him questioning him as opposed to you know this this idiot Jake Tapper so I think for me it's always like oh he just like it's that meme right oh my god he admit it like so just keep talking it and let us know it so we don't have to wait in decades on decades on end, you know, finally, Freedom of Information Act, we can get, you know, this drip of documents that are then usually heavily excised to be, you know, to end. Yeah, and in the context specifically that he brought it up, it's that organizing coup d'etazza is deceptively difficult. And then, of course, the speculation then arose, what Coos is he talking about, you know, because the CIA line, the State Department line, the U.S.

government line, you know, more generally, is that the U.S. doesn't carry out coups anymore. This is something that we did back in the golden era of American espionage, but this is not what we do anymore as a nation. We don't carry out coups. So the speculation was, well, what countries is this taking place on? We know many examples of where the U.S. is exerting influence to try to foment regime change, but in what specific instances is he talking about a coup? And a lot of the speculation that I've seen has been focusing on Venezuela and the attempts to install Juan Guaido as the leader there, you know, the guy who any time he shows his face in public gets plastic lawn chairs thrown at him. So, you know, I don't think that, Jake Tapper says

that organizing a coup d'etat is very easy. John Bolton says it's very hard. Maybe it wouldn't be so hard if Juan Guaido was your choice to, you know, be the figurehead of the coup d'etat government. I'm not sure. But I thought that's an interesting statement. And I'm curious also, as as to your thoughts of, like, potentially other countries that we should be looking at that John Bolton may have been involved in, because, of course, there's many countries that, as I said, the U.S. is trying to foment regime change, whether it's Venezuela, whether it's Bolivia with Iran since 1979. There's a myriad of examples. I'm just wondering if you have any speculation on what countries Bolton might have been involved personally.

well one thought i had that's a pardon if it's a little trivial but there was some like back and forth they saw that they're making fun of them for saying um kutataz instead of kuz de atta or you know that he had not used the plural properly but i think there's something interesting he didn't use the plural he said i planned kutatat he said it in the singular which to me suggests like he's thinking of like a kutatat is kind of like an ideal an ideal form like it's a it's an imperial practice i planned kutatahs i've planned kutatat is like a kind of like an ideal form Like, it's an imperial practice. I planned coup d'etat. It's like it was a weird construction.

I didn't plan kuz de ta or kudataz, but, you know, as if it's a, I don't know, I don't know, I think it was an ideal form. But it also raised the question that I sort of thought about, like in the book, in my book, I talked about kudataz as being an exercise in covert empire or covert, you know, as Priya's term, covert empire. covert empire meaning that the state does these things because they have to do them in secret because they would not withstand the light of public scrutiny that you have to do these things in secret because they would be considered illegitimate if they were revealed

and it's always kind of I've always thought it interesting about whether or not these kind of secret operations regime change operations whether they enjoy domestic legitimacy whether So they, if the people knew, would they object, right? Because I think that kind of goes to whether John Bolton, there's a school of thought that says the people at the top, they don't know anything. Like, these are bureaucrats. These are people that go on, you know, they have the I am, the Walrus mustaches. They go on Fox News.

They make noise. The propaganda agents. But the whole point of like the way the CIA operates is no agency knows what the other agencies are up to and all information is compartmentalized. And it's a bunch of cowboys on the ground doing whatever they want to do. And so I think it's a propaganda thing, right? Like, you know, I don't think he was really revealing any trade secrets or whatever. He's boasting.

He's bragging. He's trying to, like, build up his cachet or prestige by boasting or bragging about having Venezuela or overthrown Bolivia or whoever he was trying to suggest. But it goes to the larger question about how the American public feels about these kind of operations. There's that Jack Nicholas line from a few good men, right? You can't handle the truth. People don't want to know what these national security bureaucrats and, you know, state planners are doing supposedly on behalf of the public. And it just kind of raises the general question in my mind about how the public feels about these covert operations.

Yeah, I mean, I think Brandon's right. I think he's, yeah, it's more, he's expressing a script. or a mood or just the ability to say, like, we have the power to do these type of things and I've been involved in them. And I think the broader, the context of that conversation is interesting because they're talking about January 6th, right? So for someone like Bolton,

it's the immediate way from going, you know, going back to Brandon's retelling of that old joke read about whether no coups in the U.S. I mean, I think he's responding to that type of sentiment, right? That there's no way that a coup could ever happen in the U.S. And what happened on January 6th was just the, this, you know, this thing that's radically different from what he has done in other places, right?

And I think that's also interesting. And I think just the broader conversation and media stuff that's come out over the coverage of the January 6 meetings, right? I think it's revealed a lot of these type of, it's revealed a lot of the assumptions that the U.S. domestic audiences will accept here, but they won't accept here within the United States, but they will accept if it's done in other places around the world. So, yeah, so Bolton was most likely talking about Venezuela in 2002, right, which we still don't have a lot of, like, hard evidence that there was extensive U.S. involvement in that attempt to that brief moment that removed Hugo Chavez from power. The fact that, you know, the U.S. I think might have been the only country to recognize this short-lived regime. I think that's pretty strong evidence. But I think that's probably the one that he's most directly referring to.

And I can't, and I'm trying to think back to his participation in the 80s and 90s. in the Reagan, if he was involved with the Reagan and the George H.W. Bush administrations. But again, it doesn't matter. The partisan differences really don't matter. Like, one of the things that when I teach my U.S. Empire class at ASU, the one thing I really try to, one of the main points that I try to convey the students is that when we talk about these political party differences that we deem so important domestically really don't matter internationally. So it could have been Samantha Power up there instead of John Bolton admitting to, you know, she wouldn't have used the word coup change. She would have used a, like, a

softer euphemism to describe regime change. But they're doing the exact same thing, right? So they're these imperial continuities in terms of what, in terms of the mindset and the justifications and the presuppositions that the people that work within the U.S. national security state will use to launch these, in the end, to launch these regime change operations that cause this massive suffering around the world. So part of me, obviously I was on Twitter joking about it, but I still don't. like step back and think about like the not funny part about this is that this has caused like

just mass devastation around the world and it's not just in the immediate it's not just during this regime change operations or in the immediate aftermath these are things that will last decades right so if you look at a country like wata mala like the aftermath of the coup against hakobar bands in the early 1950s like the whatamala has the worst most tragic cold war history and even beyond cold war history and and just hundreds of thousands of people killed a genocide against mine, indigenous peoples in the 80s. And now you can all trace that back to that coup that the CIA successfully launched in 54, right?

So these coups have like long-lasting effects, tragic, like human effects that I tell myself to keep in mind as we see some of these jokers on U.S. media saying these type of things. Yeah, if I could, go ahead, go ahead. Just if I can respond to that one point real quick, it reminds what Alex just said reminds me of that old saying, you think an old Greek saying, you know, boys throw stones in jest, but frogs die in earnest. Like these clowns that sort of do their stuff, they don't take it seriously, they don't understand the gravity of their action, they don't understand the consequences, they don't understand the ripple effects, they don't understand the, you know,

historical, a kind of like, you know, domino effects of the, of the processes they said in motion, but, you know, Alex speaks eloquently to, you know, the other side of that equation. So the boys throw stones in jest, but frogs die in earnest that came to mind as Alex was speaking. Yeah. I think we need to mind. Well, I'll just say one quick thing is that it also calls to mind something that our friend Vijay Prashad said in his book, Washington Bullets.

It's right at the very beginning of the book. And just listeners, if you haven't listened to it, Vijay Prashad talking about Washington Bullets was the first full episode of guerrilla history. So if you want to listen to our interview with him about that, just go all the way back to the second. episode, which is the first full episode of the show, and you can listen to that. But his point at the beginning of this book is that, you know, how much does a bullet cost? A bullet is quite cheap to produce. But in terms of the human cost that a bullet can cause, you know, if you just

kill a random person that doesn't have any sort of, you know, quote unquote significance in broader society, that person is still either a husband or a wife, a child, a loved person from friends. But on the other hand, if it's somebody that actually is doing what they can to advance the material well-being of people within their society, that, again, as you just mentioned, Brandon and Alex, that ripple effect of that individual dying can be devastating for an entire society. The material cost of that individual bullet is quite small. You know, you can get the bullet for whatever. I don't know the price of bullets these days. We don't see here in, you know, rush on the street all the time.

But, you know, if you kill a leader of a country who has materially changed the country significantly for the better, and then you have it replaced by, you know, Pinochet or something like that, yeah, the bullet cost was quite low, but the human cost is astronomical. Anyway, go ahead, Alex. Oh, man, I totally, no, I was sucked into what you were saying, Henry. Now I kind of lost my train of thought. But I think one of the interesting things, too, is we need more.

Okay, now I remember what I was going to say. You know, in the 70s and 80s, there was maybe three, four, five publications and even a really famous documentary in 1980, in which, like, ex-CIA, it's kind of like turned, you know, went against their former employer and kind of revealed all the dirty secrets of the CIA. So, like, Philip Agee, John Stockwell, Victor Marchese, and somebody, his co-author. author. And then there's that 1980 documentary about the on company business that you can get on on on on on on on on on on YouTube. And I feel like maybe I'm incorrect about this, but we need like a current like a, a contemporary example of a CIA agent who kind of goes, you know, rogue and starts revealing all the internal secrets. Because one of the things that these guys who are actually on the ground, this goes to brandon's comment, is that they're very they know what the impact and the consequences of their actions are going to be. Like they have this. very, almost like non-emotional, cold approach to the horrific violence that they're trying to provoke within these different countries that are deemed to be national security threats to the United States. There's a really infamous document that I share with my students from,

it's part of the broader CIA effort to overthrow our bands in Guatemala in the early 50s, where CIA put together a manual in assassination. And like, it's such cold language in terms of like how to actually assassinate someone who's deemed a clear and present danger to the United States. But there's a really interesting line in there where it says something, I'm going to paraphrase that like someone, someone who is morally squeamish should not attempt this type of operation. Like these guys on the ground know that what they're doing is like wrong. So then how do they justify it to themselves and within this broader institution that

is the CIA, right? And it's always like, this is the lesser evil than, you know, then what can come after if someone like our band is allowed to keep communists in his cabinet and carry through a successful aggray and reform program in Guatemala and then become a symbol for Latin America. Like these dudes know on the ground, they know what they're doing, what they're provoking. It's just that there's all sorts of justifications,

ideological justifications that they tell themselves to enable, to enact themselves to conduct these horrific operations. Something else that you see in Latin America again in Guatemala in the 60s, and to this day, I imagine, is there's a certain like racism and orientalism that that justifies what these torture workers are doing when they go to a place like what the mile in the 60s and they're teaching security apparatuses on how to torture and they'll say and they'll justify in terms of well you know these people are just innately violent they're racially inferior and that's what led to the bloodshed to the bloodshed to the bloodshunds and techniques and know-how and the and the material to be able to wage bloody dirty wars and counter surgeries against their own people so that to me it's always these these all that is that is like very ground level and it's disconnected from an idiot like John Bolton who can go on national TV and say those type of things. Yeah, fascinating. So what I want to turn to for just a second before we move a little bit more historical again is that, again, Seifer, the guy who, you know,

is the most perhaps fortunate or unfortunate example of nominative determinism in human history, Cypher said that, you know, the U.S. does not do coups anymore. We do over. regime change, but we don't do coups. You know, I find this to be obscene. I also think that a lot of the overt actions that the United States carries out are coups by another name. You know, we say that we're going in there to protect the people, but with the express intent of changing the regime. So, yeah, perhaps it's not covert. Perhaps it's not a coup in the traditional sense, but the attempt is still the same. You're trying to put in somebody that's more pliant to U.S. interests.

So the fact, he's saying that the U.S. hasn't coups and decades. This is just erred. You know, we have examples like Libya of, you know, attempts in Syria. We have Iraq. We have Afghanistan turning towards Latin America. We have Nicaragua time and time again. We have Bolivia. We have, you know, the ever-present example of Cuba.

We have Bolivia. You know, the U.S. was involved with Lavajato in Brazil. like the U.S. has its fingers all over these attempts at coups. And so I find it quite absurd when somebody says that the U.S. hasn't carried out coups for decades. Now, I know that both of you, you know, Alex, you focus on Latin America and Brandon, you look at the Middle East quite a bit, you would be able to speak a lot more on the absurdity of this specific point before we turn back towards the history a little bit more. I have a thought or a question, which is sort of where, like, where a coup, a coup d'etat fits within the, like, life cycle, the imperial

life cycle, like, is it possible to do, like, a type of coups? Like, when does the coup d'etat, something I mentioned, I think, before was, like, when was the first regime change operation? And even the phrase regime change operation, I think that's a reference to, like, a Straussian, like, political theory, the idea of a regime, because a regime change, you're leaving something in place, like you're just changing who's at the top of it, right? So I think there's something specific, and I wonder when, sometimes we think of Hawaii, 1893 is the first regime change operation. And then when Alex was giving that interview a few weeks back, he talked about maybe Texas

in the 1830s is maybe a precursor. And I kind of like wonder when, like, what are pre-modern coups look like? Did the British Empire do these? like, you know, intervene and leave the state in place, leave the administration in place, but just put a different, you know, ruler on top? And then, like, is there a beginning, a middle, and an end of this particular form of imperial state craft? Because I think there is something specific about the 20th century and the form that Kuditaz took. Like, the CIA as an organization, as an organizational form, was different in its early, you know, in its early decades.

And I think there was something historically unique or specific about the Cold War context, about the cloak and dagger, about trying to do this stuff in secret. You know, while the Soviet Union existed, I think that's a big thing. I think something qualitatively shifts once the United States can use its immense, you know, monetary power to sanction economies or, you know, I wonder if there's, if it would be worth kind of like sort of parsing out what a coup is. and when they began or what different forms they can take. Yeah, I think that's really good. I mean, I think, so usually when we think about Latin America, and here I'm really drawing on like the work of Brandon. And the way we think about just regime change more like broadly

and then you know, then kind of parsing it out whether it was a coup, whether it was like an overt military operation. The way that Brandon describes what happens in Latin America, after the Spanish-American War of 1890, up until a good neighbor policy of the 30s, is that the main modality that U.S. Empire used in the Caribbean Latin America was like overt military intervention, always sending, anytime there was a president of a Central American and Caribbean country that did something that unfavorable to U.S. business interests and to American political interests, geopolitical interests, they would just send in the Marines, right? And there's something like 34 military interventions from 1900.

to 1933-33-34, there's countries that suffer repeat intervention, right? So Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, gets invaded by the U.S. twice. Cuba gets invaded like three times after their so-called independence, after the U.S. forced them to include the Platt Amendment into their Constitution in the early 1900s. Nicaragua gets invaded multiple times. The U.S. I think one of the interesting ones that we tend out to think about is the U.S. invasion in occupation of Haiti that lasted from 1915 to 1934, which was the longest occupation in U.S. history until Afghanistan surpassed a couple of years ago. And then what Brandon says is that

because of the economic nationalism and the political nationalism, the constant U.S. intervention provoked in the region, in combination with the Great Depression, in combination with this alternative modernity across the world in the form of the Soviet Union, the U.S. essentially learned how to be like a soft empire in Latin America. And they started relying on bilateral treaties and military assistant treaties. And they promised not to invade Latin America. They promised to respect the sovereignty of different Latin American and Caribbean countries. Of course, that depended on like the relative power of each country in question.

So the U.S. could depend on, could support dictators in smaller countries, but they had to actually take seriously bigger countries in the region like Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. The turning point, as you mentioned, Brandon, you were gesturing toward is what happened. after World War II and once you get the Cold War beginning the late 40s and early 1950s and thinking about how to wage, how to continue to exercise U.S. imperial power in the region that it always considered as its own natural, quote unquote, natural sphere. And also keeping in mind the lessons of the 1910s, 20s and 30s, and this is where the CIA comes in as a covert, As an organization that's able to wage covert operations, cheap covert operations in places like Guatemala in the early 1950s, like, well, they tried to do something similar in Cuba, and it ended up in failure in the Bay of Pigs.

And then what happens in Brazil and Chile in the 60s and 70s. So actually, looking at Cold War Latin America, the direct military intervention tends to be really rare. And it's actually these covert agencies like the CIA who are much more active in place and in effect in trying to affect whether it's political destabilization, whether it's trying to determine the outcome of political elections or whether it's just outright regime change throughout the region. So I think there's very few examples of direct military intervention, even though that threat is always there. And there's someone like Daniel Imre War, who has a book, How to Hide an Empire will point out, something that helps the U.S. us accomplished this is all these little bases that it started to acquire all going all the way back in the early 1800s these guano these uninhabited guano islands that and all the bases that they were able to lease from the British during World War II those become like the points what he refers to

as the points of US empire and this is really the origin of these like 800 military bases that we have around the world so this dispersal of American covert and military power around the world also enables it to do this type of like secret. small-scale, cheap, regime-change covert operations in a place like Latin America and especially in the Caribbean. You know, I want to take that last thing that you were just talking about, Alex, and dig a little bit deeper. But one quick note before we get to that is that listeners, I just want to make the first

announcement that when we're getting close to the end, we'll take some listener questions. So do be sure to think of any questions that you would want to ask of Alex's end or Brandon. And also help us by sharing this Twitter space with people, because, you know, the more people that listen to it, the better. But Alex, you were just talking about, you know, what forms coups typically take. And this brings up something that we were talking about privately before, which is, you know, anatomy of a coup. And again, you study different historic, different geographic regions primarily. Alex, you focus on Latin America and Brandon, you on the Middle East.

And of course, the U.S., as well as other imperial nations, have fomented many a coup in both of regions. And I'm wondering if we can dive a little bit deeper, have each of you talk about perhaps the specific forms that coups often go through. And perhaps by doing that, having this parallel look at how coups in Latin America have often been carried out, as well as how coups in the Middle East are often carried out. We might find some parallels that show between these two different geographical locations that we actually see something of a playboy anatomy of these who's coming together. Yeah, I like Alex's points there about, you know, the shift from, you know, the shift to

covert operations, you know, plausible liability actually like written into the, you know, organic, the organic, the founding, the organic doctrine of the CIA, right, this ability to do things and deny responsibility for them. So there's something unique about, you know, the covert form of regime change, right, after the Marine interventions of the Cold War era. And then I wonder, you know, once the Soviet Union is no longer on the stage, whether that, you know, kind of opens the door back to more overt forms. So the question about, like, different forms that coups can take,

it kind of raises in my mind one of the, you know, I feel silly taking John Bolton's statements seriously. but I kind of wonder how well-planned are these coups, right? Like you think of Cuba, it's a total debacle, 1961. Alex could talk to Guatemala, 54, whether this is a well-oiled machine that's kind of like 1953 Iran seems to succeed mainly by, you know, luck and happenstance, and they all seem very shambolic and disorganized. So it'd be kind of interesting to know.

It's a bigger question, and Alex would be able to speak to this too, it's like, you know, as area specialists, how we think about the relationship between internal and external factors. Yeah. Right. There's a tendency to kind of over-escribe agency to the external and to the imperial powers, which I think is totally valid and legitimate. And with great power comes great responsibility. United States has to fuck shut up and, you know, has to take responsibility for that. But often, I don't think a coup, I think we can kind of see the United States Empire is the unmoved mover of world historical. development and missed the ways in which the United States is responding in a reactive, ad hoc,

confused, frightened, you know, terrible and terrorizing way, but to events and initiatives that originate kind of on the ground. And so a big part of what I think about coups is that there has to be something going on. The United States can set the context using its immense financial power to, like, destabilize the Iranian economy before 1953, for example, right? But they can can't really, I don't think, at least like 1963 or 68, the ones I've looked at in Iraq, like I don't think they can kind of create these out of whole cloth or just materialize them, that there have to be factors in dynamics, class tensions within the societies at work. There has to be, you know, sectarian or some other sort of fissure, some crack that the CIA

can exploit and bribe one group against the other or arm one group against the other. So it sort of depends on what the materials in place are, right? If I understand correctly in Guatemala, 54, like, it was mainly a psychological operation, right? It was just creating the impression that there was an advancing army, right? And so each one maybe is different, which is kind of why I'm interested in it. If there is an anatomy or another way to think, is there a genealogy to go back before, like, what's the genealogy of coups, right? Because there's the Marine Corps over interventions. I think the British, while they were running their global empire, they must have, you know, they ruled through local, you know,

heads of state, so they must have had covert or imperial forms of intervention to, you know, bring one group or another to power. But I think the, I guess the bottom line I'm trying to say here is that what materials they have to work with really plays a high, has a highly determinative role. Like, what is the social situation in the society at that particular time and place. And it's, that's the key ingredient, I would say. Yeah, that's really smart. I totally agree. I mean, I think that's what we see. I think that's what the history of coups in, particularly in Cold War, Latin America, that's what they demonstrate. Yeah, your brand is totally right. They're not, the U.S. and the State Department or CIA, whatever, they're not inventing

these things on their own and then unilaterally implementing them in these different Latin American and Caribbean nation, right? You have to have, you know, intense political and social polarization that already exists. And as a declassified CIA document puts it from like 1970 Chile, their role is to quote, what was it? The direct quote is something like poor fuel. And that's really like a cheap way of regime change, right? Like you're just in there, you know, funding political party parties.

You're funding opposition media to continue to put out how someone like Allende or our bands are going to turn Guatemala in Chile into like Bolshevik or communist totalitarian. state's right when obviously that was not the truth um you cultivate in chile they cultivated um ties obviously with the chilean military they cultivated ties with a far right fascist group that that was that really liked attacking a yenda supporters on the street and like you know blowing up railways and and bridges and oil depots um so brandon's exactly right like i think and also i think we also have to keep in mind that coos always have a certain level of popular support right and i think this is really this also complicates our understanding.

Like when the Bolivian coup happened recently, like there was a sector of Bolivian society that supported the overthrow of Evo Morales. And there's a reason why Evo had to like on the solidarity of the Mexican president to take him into Mexico. Like this sector of Bolivian society wanted this guy dead.

So and even in 1953, Guatemala or 1973, Chile, there is a, there's, for coups to succeed, there has to be a base of popular support for it. It's never like a 100% anti-coop population. And these are all kind of like ingredients that covert agencies like the CIA depend on in order to foment solidical polarization,

street violence, all these happenings that will put pressure on the leader of a Pacific Latin American and the Caribbean country and that will create the conditions for a coup. And from a U.S. perspective, the cheapest, easiest way to have the military intervene. And this is what we see in Cold War Latin America over and over again. What they do in Guatemala in 1953 is, Brandon, is right. It was the psychological operation that was designed to primarily separate the military support from how Corvarence,

who had been a colonel in the Guatemalan military. They wanted to make the Guatemalan military believe that if they didn't stop supporting our vans, the U.S. was actually going to direct. And that's what scared the military. That's why the military pulled. their support of our Benz at the end, and that's why our Benz had to flee. A similar situation happens with Allende in Chile in 1973.

And the sick thing for me is that the CIA fundamentally bases its strategy or its strategy on the knowledge that these leaders will go away because they don't want to spark bloody civil in their own countries, which is what our Benz and Ayende both said. We did not fight and defend our revolutionary processes because we hope to avoid mass bloodshed. So that very, I think, admirable, morally and political position gets used by

the CIA against them to ultimately get them removed from power. And then the bloodshed still happens nonetheless, right? So yeah, I think to complicate our understanding of coups, I think we have to really keep Brandon's a really important smart suggestion in mind that there has to be something going on that outside agencies can work with to help provoke civil strife. And then also recognize that there's always a certain constituency within these countries that will support, for a variety of reasons, any sort of coup or regime change operation. Yeah, that base of local, you know, that local constituency for regime change is really important, I think, because it's in the nature of the modern world system and colonialism to generate a political

economy in which, you know, 5% of the population or 2% of the population or whatever it is controls 90-something percent of the wealth, right? I mean, that's just the way that colonialism works is it puts all the land and all the wealth and all the productive capacity in the hands of a very tiny, tiny elite. And then that tiny elite of landowners is backed up by the church and by the military. So then you have this natural constituency and you have a society that's primed for violent polarization and civil war because you've created such a wide gulf between the haves and the have-nots, which just makes the CIA's job just so much easier when you have a society set up that way that has so much, you know,

inequity built into the very structure the way the society is organized. You know, it creates the possibility of, of fishers, right? And so, yes, you know, the CIA kind of has to manipulate pre-existing conditions, but then, you know, the dialectical kind of back-and-forth goes even back far. Well, okay, in the way that these societies are set up through colonialism, through the expansion of the capitalist world system, it kind of creates the natural environment that's just all too easy for the CIA to exploit. There's always going to be a military or a landowner base. And oftentimes, right, this is the whole thing, especially maybe more in Latin America than the Middle East. I don't know.

But the landowners in the military, a lot of times they became one and the same thing, right? I mean, Yeah, it's like, you know, it's a, two of the three institutions. It's a Catholic church, the landowning elite, and the military. Those are the, in the Cold War, Latin America, those are the institutions that, that really supported these things. Sorry. That's a lot to work with. Yeah.

Yeah, thank you. I'm just, that's a lot to work with if you're the CIA. You've got the religious organizations. You've got the military. You got the landowners that control the peasants. Like, that's a huge advantage. And a big thing I, I talk about is like failing upwards. The CIA has so much immense material power that even if they have hairbrained schemes and they just have so much wiggle room for error.

They can fail. They can fuck up and they continue to kind of get their way. It's just when you have all the guns and all the money, you know, you can make mistakes and still get what you want, I think. Yeah, and I think, you know, I mentioned something you mentioned Brandon. Sorry, Henry. I was just going to go back to something. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Brandon mentioned just like some. And actually like what they, what happens in there. ran in 53 is kind of lucky, right? And it's the same, the same people who were in Greece during the civil wing horrific stuff will then be doing horrific stuff in 53. Then they will go to Guatemala and 54. And they win in each of these situations. And they think that they've stumbled onto a successful formula where they suffer a devastating

defeat that forces them to kind of reshift is the Bay of Pigs and Cuba in 1961. And if you go back and you look at like declassified State Department and CIA documents, As early as September, 1959, so just, what, seven or nine months after the M26 movement enters Savannah, like the U.S. is already saying, like, yeah, we don't like this guy. We're going to have to remove him from power. And they essentially use the same personnel from Guatemala in 54 to try to do the Bay of Pigs in 61, except there, what did they confront? They confronted a revolutionary government that was much more cohesive and had such a high level of popular support that it allowed them. to defeat the 1,400 Pellar militaries that were, that were landed on Playa, you don't know?

So, and that then forced them to kind of rethink their approach, and then how they deal with Cuba and then how they deal with Brazil in 1964 kind of reflects like a learning process, right? But that early luck, you know, took them a long way, and it led them to a certain extent to the Bay of Pigs. And to draw the connection is Che Guevara, right? whitfall of Arbenz and the coup against Arbenz in 54. He barely manages to flee with his life to the Arjunctan embassy. They'd ship him to Mexico, and that's where he meets the Castro brothers, right?

So there's also people involved in Cuba who had witnessed how these things played out and what they needed to do to prevent them for succeeding. Yeah, the CIA learns from each, and one of the things I did in my book was really try to trace the resumes of the coup makers, like, you know, try to find out, you know, Whoa, they were in the, you know, Iran embassy from 51 to 53. That's interesting. Oh, and before that they were in Syria in 1949. And, oh, look, if you kind of follow, they always seem to show up in a country just before its government gets overthrown.

It's like, well, you know, what's up with that? Right. So there's learning that the CIA does from case to case. But then I'm curious what Alex says about, you know, but then there's learning on the side of Che and on the other side. Like, isn't it true or am I correct that like one of the things that why Bay of Pigs failed? was that they'd learn from Guatemala and that they, that, that Cuba, um, knew the military, right? They got control. They got a loyal military or they purged the military or the, you know, you can't leave this big monstrosity of a military establishment that's tied to the landowners

with its power in place. Like, isn't that kind of what happened in Guatemala is ultimately, like you said, like Alex said, the, you know, the military freer, you know, bloodshed, but essentially if you don't have the, you know, maybe that's something that the Cubans learned was you have to maintain the loyalty of the military, otherwise they'll overthrow you. Or you just have to scrap the entire military

and start over. Yeah. All the successful revolution in Latin America, like, you're going back to Haiti. Like, that's like less than one. Like, we need to get rid of the pre-existing military police apparatus and then create something new, right? And it happens in Mexico. It happens in Cuba. It happens in

the San Dinsida, Nicaragua. Yeah. I want to throw one more wrinkle into what we're talking about right now. So I really appreciated the point that Brandon made about looking at the internal stripe that is present, because, of course, that is something that almost seems to a prerequisite for successful coups. You know, if you don't have any internal movements happening within civil society, some dissatisfaction taking place to begin with, the coup is not going to be very successful in the vast majority of the cases. So that was a very important point that I also wanted to underscore, as Alex did. But I really like where the conversation right now, but the wrinkle I want to throw into it is why there seems to be like a critical mass that the United States reaches when it decides that a country is worth cooing.

And why I say this is because, you know, the United States is not friends with every country in the world. A lot of the countries are subservient to the U.S., but there's also a lot of countries that are not subservient to the U.S. There's many countries that are openly antagonistic to the U.S. So the question is, when does it become viable for the United States to foment a coup? And when does the United States decide that this country is the country that we want to carry out a coup in? And as area studies specialists, I'm wondering if you have any insight into your specific areas that you specialize of when it is that the United States goes from just saying, well, you know, this government is not really our friend. You know, they're antagonistic to us. They don't, they're not subservient to our interests to all of a sudden it's, you know,

we have to get rid of this government. We're going to take a risk by putting ourselves out there, you know, either overtly or covertly, but there's always the risk that it's going to be discovered, right? You know, we're going to put ourselves out there and we're actually going to carry out this this Operation Institute regime change. What is that critical mass that seems to be reached when, you know, the coup not only is viable, this is what we were just talking about and, you know, also feel free to add that in there. You know, not only is the coup viable, but it's also maybe not necessary, but it is what is going to become the actual policy of the United States government.

Do you want to take that, Alex, or I'll jump in. I mean, I know a very, very like question and, you know, something that people could write multiple books on. And I'm asking it like, you know, a Twitter space of all places. But I am curious if there are, you know, things. What's the red line? What's the red line? When does it get crossed? When does the, the, the, so, and when do they, when do they spring into action? I think it's opportunistic. It depends on time. They're very opportunistic. When the opportunity presents itself, well, let's see. I also think, just if I may add one thing, I also think that this may also be somewhat area specific. That's why I'm also trying to figure out, you know, how these things compare between the Latin American context and the Middle East context, because both of these are geostrategically important.

for the locations for the United States. Latin America being the proverbial backdoor of the United States ever since the days of the country. Henry, we're the front yard now. Yeah, the front yard. Okay. We got promoted to the front yard by Biden. Don't forget. Oh, okay. That's right. And, you know, of course, the Middle East being very material, you know, rich natural resources, particularly oil, which we will turn to. But I feel like in other, in other locations, you know, that red line might be a much higher bar to reach because there's a, not the geostrategic interests that play. So that's why I'm trying to tease out, you know, in each of these regional specific contexts here.

Well, let me take this. Sorry. Go ahead. No, no, you go first. Okay. So let me take this opportunity to maybe float something. I've been turning, turn over my head and, and who knows if it'll work out. But I've been trying to, like, turn over the idea of what I'm calling an absurdist theory of state craft, right, which is kind of supposed to be an alternative to realism, which is usually driven by ideas of raison d'etat, like reasons of state, do things for reasons, right? But if you, like, the absurdist ideas, like, things happen without reason or meaning. They just sort of, like, happen.

Like, why does Camus' character shoot the Arab on the beach and the stranger? Like, it just should happen. People do. Things don't always happen for reasons is kind of something I'm trying to get at, right? And the way I've wrestled my way into this way of thinking is that, like, in 1963 in Iraq, It seems like the, or in many of these cases, whether it's Iran, 1953 or Guatemala, 1954, there's this kind of classical setup in the literature about, well, was it economic interests or Cold War ideology that drove the motive? And then we have to separate motive. Like what motivates CIA agents to or administrations to act is different from causation. So the fact that the existed to overthrow such and such government does not necessarily mean that's the causal mechanism that caused that government to fall. So there's There's, like, there's motive and then there's the actual causal, you know, mechanisms. But what motivates the state?

Now, realism, the theory of realism is that the state is a unified and coherent actor that has a, you know, a coherent set of interests that are based on material power considerations. But what I see when I look at the state is that it isn't a coherent or unified actor. It's a, you know, a viper's nest of different agencies fighting amongst themselves. There isn't a level of elite, you know, you know, you know. consensus about the propriety of private property or whatnot, but like there isn't a well-coordinated or sometimes there isn't a, right, one, that old line about the Iraq war. Well, you know, Woflewitt says, well, the one thing we could all agree on, the bureaucracy could agree on was weapons and mass destruction, so we decided to go with that one, right? Like, is that the reason,

right, or is that just the rationalization? Is that the PR? Is that the, right? So there's a, so sometimes you see in Guatemala or Iran or even Iraq that Cold War ideology or quote unquote national security serves as a kind of like a stalking horse or a pretext for economic interests but then you know some people in the state are worried about one thing in national security something some are worried about economic interests some don't care about you or have less concern about the economic interest and so what I find in Iraq in 1963 is that that the economic interest, the nationalization, actually served as a pretext. Like, they didn't really care.

It didn't really, you know, this sounds kind of weird to say from a Marxist standpoint, but it didn't really matter who controlled the oil in 1963 because of the global balance of supply and demand, whoever, you know, had the oil was going to be compelled to sell it on the world market. And so the oil nationalization just served as a pretext because you had Arabists in the State Department saying, yeah, it doesn't really matter. matter. It's really important. And this is something maybe Alex can speak to is that there's this developmentalist New Deal tradition that actually sees import substitution industrialization is necessary

for a smooth functioning world economy. Like there's this idea going back to Mexico 38 that you have to allow a certain amount of internal market formation. Like otherwise the world economy doesn't function. You don't have trade partners. And so there was a whole argument within the State Department that this is necessary. This is the process of modernization. is taking over the oil company, using it to build up infrastructure and health care. And so there were people who were like, no, there's no problem with the oil nationalization. But that oil nationalization served as a pretext that the more regime change oriented elements within the state could use to argue for regime change. But again, so what I'm looking at is the idea that economic interest can actually be a kind of a pretext for a kind of Nietzschean will to

power. It's just a kind of ego drive to dominate in some cases, maybe, and that the economic interests are sometimes used as a post hoc rationalization more than a causal force or more than a motive. So that's a long, long answer. I don't know if it gets to the heart of things. Well, go ahead, Alex. I'm curious of your take on that. Yeah, no, I think that's great. I think Brandon is, I think Brandon's point about, you know, the U.S. state not being a monolithic entity is really important, right? So like in my current research on drugs and U.S. Empire and the 1980s, you see like the DEA and the CIA constantly fighting and they have different logics, they have different, you know, goals and they have different ways of

operating. They're constantly at one another, right? And then in certainnesses, you have State Department officials who are against both of these institutions and appalled by what's going on on the ground. So I think that's a really important point to keep in mind, because I think that might help us to determine what are the causes, kind of like the red line that you were asking about, Henry. I think in certain instances, and I see, we see it with Brandon's example of 63 in Iraq and in his book, and it's similar to what happens in Mexico in 38 after the oil expropriation and nationalization, is that business interests, U.S. business interests are pushed back by the U.S. government, right? And why is it, at least in the Mexican case, because

38 is kind of an important year globally, right? So have the Royal Dutch Shell and the U.S. Standard oil, I guess, was a U.S. oil company, really pushing the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration to institute a boycott of Mexican oil and even maybe think about some sort of military intervention. And Lazzarokartana, as a president of Mexico, started making moves that said, well, if you guys do that, well, I'll just sell oil to the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese, right? So it's just that, the contingency, the geopolitical contingency of the moment, force the U.S. state to not take that more radical route of aligning with business interests and doing some sort of direct or indirect sort of intervention

in Mexico. I think with Cold War Latin America, there's a couple of things that are a red line. I think whether a progressive, social democratic or socialist government represents a threatening model for the U.S. in terms of the broader region of Latin America and the Caribbean. So Guatemala in 54, what they were trying to do, which is essentially just a New Deal type, progressive capitalism, right, that a grain, the famous Grean reform program that took land away from United Fruit Company, that was a capitalist modernization program very close to what happened in Japan after World War II. And yet for Japan, it didn't lead to some sort of U.S. military intervention. If anything, it was a U.S. applying, implementing that program. But in 1954, there was a fear that, and along with the presence of communists in Haka-Waterbenz's cabinet, that this was presenting a dangerous model for the region. Like, other countries would follow this model, and that would not be good for U.S. geopolitical purposes and tactics in the region during the Cold War.

And you see something similar with Cuba, you see something similar with Chile in the 70s. There's always talking these declassified documents about how these governments are a dangerous model that other countries, in Latin America and even in Europe and in the global South will start to emulate them, right? So Chile's example of a Marxist achieving presidential power via the ballot box scare the shit out of the year. And you see Kissinger and Nixon and declassified documents talking about how this is, this is a global important event because it might even impact, you know, upcoming elections in Italy where the Italian Communist Party in the late 60s,

early 70s was demonstrating a certain level of electoral strength. And they didn't want the Chileans to be providing this alternative non-aligned peaceful road to socialism model that they didn't want other European countries to be following that model or global South nations. So I think that when they ascertain that a certain country is providing a subversive model, I think they tend to act. Another one, though, sometimes as a place is kind of far away and it's small and it doesn't matter, that makes it, and it's weak militarily, and there's a lot of political strife, sometimes that will entice the U.S. intervention. That's what we see in Central America in the 70s and 80s. Going back to

Brandon, he has this line, it was, it was something like the most important place in the world precisely because it was the least important. It was where the U.S. could unilaterally exercise power and not face a lot of pushback, particularly after the Sunniista revolution of 1979. Go back to Brandon's point about the state not being a monolithic entity. I think it's really important because sometimes we get really good information from actors from within the U.S. state, who are pushing back against these type of regime change operations or covert operations, right? So a really famous model example is what happened with the independence of Bangladesh in the early 70s. And you have, I think it was like 20-something State Department people who were based on the ground,

witnessing what Pakistan was doing on the ground. And they wrote this thing called the Blood Telegram, where they essentially accused Kissinger and Nixon of helping genocide, of enabling genocide where they were working. and you see other examples of that in different moments in Latin America as well. And it seems to be time or era specific too, right? Because the organizational form of the American state, it sort of shifts and changes over time. The role of the CIA within the constellation of agencies that is the state is different from one era to the other.

So there's like a, there's something specific about the 1950s when the organization was just taking shape. and the CIA was essentially the private fiefdom of Alan Dulles, right? And so there's a shuffling, you know, there's constantly like, what have there been like 14 or 15 new intelligence agencies created since 9-11? Like, so the state is an evolving bohemist, right? It's continually sort of shifting and power is shifting from the State Department to the National Security Council to the Treasury Department to, you know, it's like a, and so it sort of depends on time and place in the subtle balance of forces within the state in, you know, Bangladesh, 1970 might be different than Guatemala 1950 might be different. You know, the state is a different thing at different moments. And I think there's a lot to be said about sort of bureaucratic entrepreneurialism, right? That people

kind of like advance in their careers in these Washington agencies by sort of being ambitious or sort of forcing their being able to outmaneuver their rivals within government. Like in my case, It's really this guy, Robert Comer, who ends up being the, you know, the, quote, unquote, mastermind, if we can put it that way of the counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam, but it's the quote unquote mastermind of, you know, shaping American foreign policy in, you know, in the Middle East. And so sometimes it can be as simple as a ambitious, you know, official within a bureaucracy, just kind of getting the idea that by pushing their preferred, you know, initiative through, they can advance in their career, they can get the ear of the principle, or they can get the ear of the principle, or they can. And so I think there's some role to be played by, is it maybe bureaucratic entrepreneurialism or career ambition, careerism? And so sometimes, you know, just advancing a coup might, you know, we can kind of over ascribe a coherence and a strategic rationality. Oh, this served some greater interest in foreign direct investment or the balance of payment or in my book I call this, you know, I sort of make some fun of the whole idea of grand strategy. call it grandiose strategy. They have this very sort of expansive notion of how the world

as this grand chess board. So I think it kind of depends. As a historian, I found myself, you know, really kind of going to the, you know, what I call like a historicist move of, you know, emphasizing the specificity of time and place. Like I think there's value in finding models and general patterns, but a lot of times I really come down to, you know, looking at the particularities of a particular time and place and stressing the uniqueness of every single historical moment, which I guess you don't want to get too far into that, right? There are broad patterns, but I do think it varies, and it's good to be specific and looking at specific places and specific times and understanding the particularities.

Well, one thing I want to bring up before we get to the topic of oil, because I know that, Alex, you wanted to talk with Brandon about oil, and I will certainly let you do that before we get to the listener questions. And again, just here for the listeners. We will take listener questions for a little bit at the conversation. So if you have any questions for Alex and or Brandon, just keep them in mind and we'll open that up at the end. But before we get to oil, it's related to oil. But before I let you guys have a conversation about oil, Brandon, one thing that is, your book does an excellent job of, and this is somewhat the last point. The last point was talking about how institutions within the government aren't necessarily within lockstep on everything, and it's not this hegemonic, it is a hegemon, but it's not a unified unit, I should say, of where all of these pieces are working in unison and working together. One thing that a lot of us, especially on the left, I would say, we tend to have a very overly simplified view of how things work is the influence of corporations on the government and vice versa. So a lot of us, you know, we look at instances where corporate interests seem to drive what the policy is,

and we have plenty of other instances where government policy drives what corporations are doing. One thing, and we talked about this in the wrap-up section of our last episode about your book, Brandon, one of the things that I thought was particularly interesting in your book and that you did a great job of showing is that while the oil companies and U.S. policy in Iraq, in, you know, the period that your book is looking at, by and large, they were in lockstep. And, you know, there was a lot of people who had ties to the oil industry that then had large roles in the government and, and again, vice versa. But there were instances, which I found very interesting, where the interests of the big oil companies actually

was, you know, opposed to what U.S. policy, U.S. government policy was at the time. I'm just wondering, you talk about that for the listeners, before I turn it over for you guys just to have a chat about oil. Yeah. So there's an interesting, maybe specific point about the big oil companies, right? And Alex made the point earlier that when you look at, especially when you look from the global south towards the north, then, you know, know, a lot of it is scale. You can, you can zoom in on, on Washington and you can focus in on,

on, like, you know, partisan divisions within different agencies and whatnot, but when you're from the South, it's all kind of the same hegemonic, you know, actors. One, one level of just sort of the scale of magnification that you're looking at. And it's from, from the broad view, like, there's no difference between parties or administrations. And I think that's, that's true. But I also think that there are like, you know, um, there are historic blocks of capital that support one regime over another, right? Like, so think about, you know, Greg Grandin or before him, um, talking about like the New Deal coalition of interests, right, that, uh, um, supported, uh, FDR's, FDR's program. Um, so I guess what I'm trying to say is that the, the, um, there can be a difference between

Republicans and Democrats in that the Republicans tended to be very static to, um, the big oil companies, the international oil companies that the Dolos brothers represented in their private law practice, whereas the Democrats tended to be more sympathetic to the domestic oil companies, right? So the international oil companies get for sympathy and something like Thomas Ferguson will look at how the big oil companies maybe start to give their money to the Republican party and the domestic Texas-based oil companies will give their money or campaign contributions to the Democratic Party. And I try to sort of develop in the book that, you know, Lyndon Johnson, for example, his rise to power is by aggregating oil and gas money from the, you know,

Texas-based oil industry. So there can be, so I guess what Henry's, what Henry, what you're alluding to is like this economic or sectoral competition between the domestic economic oil companies and the international oil companies that wanted different things in Iraq and the U.S. State and the State Department has to kind of navigate between these different, you know, rival blocks of capital, right? Different, you know, sectors of the economy that want different things. And I focused in a lot on oil because as I started in, I wanted to think about the relationship between oil corporations in the state. And I kind of had a natural kind of predisposition to see the state as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie or the state, you know, is the carrier, you know, carries out

the executor of the interests of major oil companies. You know, that's, that was my, you know, natural inclination, but seeing, so I wanted to look for the strings being pulled by the oil companies. And I found a lot of tension between, especially between the Democratic administrations, the Kennedy administration and the Johnson administration, not being in a very tense adversarial relationship with the major oil companies. So that was somewhat surprising to find. And I sometimes wonder if, you know, I was looking in the, the oil section. I was looking for the influence of oil, but there are a lot of other, you know, interested parties and one that I think has not gotten enough attention. And if I, you know,

um, where to continue the study years, I think about where to, where to go next, it's really like, what about the arms industry, the defense industry? Like, um, sometimes I think, you know, uh, we ascribe, you know, causal force to the oil companies or assume the oil companies are pulling all the strings when I think that behind the shadows or, you know, in the shadows or behind the curtain, there are a lot of other, usually those big corporate interests are all kind of on the same page in the big picture, but they can have rivalries amongst each other. And I think that the military industrial complex and the defense sector's interests have gotten less, like if we think about the Middle East, for example, a lot of us think that

a lot that this is driven by what needs and interests of the oil companies are. And I think maybe we overestimate the influence or significant interests have and there are other sectors, especially defense. And so I don't know if that answered the question, but that was my best try. No, that was exactly what I was looking for. And I think that the listeners, if they heard the last episode where we didn't get to talk about that aspect of things with you, we'll find that to be enriching to the listening experience of that last episode. So, Alex, I know that you wanted to talk with Brandon about oil. Why don't I just turn it over to you to ask, you know, whatever you want?

I mean, I don't know. We've been going on for a lot, and I wonder if folks have questions. But I mean, I guess this will be the last question. Then we'll take audience to answer. Is oil really the devil's excrement? That's what I have to ask. Yeah, I think it is, right? No, someone said the comment the other thing, you know, that oil is maybe the opiate of the masses.

I wouldn't say it's the sigh of the oppressed creature, right? It doesn't have the same religious function, but, you know, if you think about this country, the cheap oil, right? As long as you can keep giving people, you know, jet skis and 90 cent gasoline, they'll never be a revolution. So long as like, you right, the idea that you can satiate, you know, the consumer wants is, I think it's the devil's X in a million and one different ways, you know, what it's doing to the environment, what it's, you know, a million to one different ways, but one of the most important ways is that it seems to have shorn this society's capacity for revolutionary or structural breaks. As long as everything revolves around delivering cheap gas, and as long as the state can continue to help deliver, you know,

cheap gas, it seems like we're going to be stuck in this situation. So I do think oil is, you know, at the base of some of our most problematic ways of being in this world. Yeah, maybe we can talk about this for that future episode, Henry, but I think, like, it's set, like, the social organization of the U.S. is so dependent on oil in a variety of different ways, right? Like, so I think that's why I was really, I think you made that point, one of the podcasts that I listened to you on Brandon, about how the, how, like, a nationalization of oil in the U.S. is, is, would be, like, almost impossible. But if it were to happen, it could have, like, these really profound revolutionary changes, precisely because so much more, like, physical, social, political infrastructure is

actually dependent on the consumption of what this Venezuelan oil minister referred to as the devil's excrement. Yeah, I mean, talk about base and superstructure, right? There's nothing more base. There's no more base than, you know, the raw input because every other input, you know, is based on the oil coming in. So really getting a handle on that, if you can nationalize and euthanize the oil sector and obviously make a, you know, address transition, especially for states that are trying to develop and feed their populations. Obviously, that's the direction we have to go in. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think that that would be a great topic to have for the future conversation that we'll have with the two of you for like a more full episode with my co-hosts as well. So let's put a pin on that topic then for that future conversation. Listeners, now is the time where you get the opportunity to ask a question to Alex or Brandon. And so if you would like to ask a question, request to speak. I believe that you have to click on the guerrilla history emoji within this space and click on request to speak or something along those lines. So if I see that, I'll give you the opportunity to ask the question.

And while I'm waiting for that, I will also encourage anybody that's listening to this. If you have the financial means to do so, please consider going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. All of your contributions are very valuable for us because we, don't have any advertisers, uh, we don't have any sponsors. Literally the only money that comes into the show is what comes in through our Patreon. And, uh, there's a lot of work that goes into it. You know, we have, uh, three hosts and a producer and we're always, you know, constantly getting new books and everything to research things for the show. So, um, it's not exactly cheap. But, uh, if, if you do have the financial means to do so, uh, again, go to patreon.com forward slash

Gorilla History and any contributions highly valued and you do get bonus content by signing up on there. So does anybody that's here have any questions for Alex or Brandon? I haven't seen any. I see somebody's giving me some emojis, but it's not asking to speak. So this person that's sending the emojis, I will give permission to speak and if they want to, they may. Well, what we're waiting, because I did send the request of this person to speak if they want to. Alex and Brandon, just in case we don't get any other live questions right now, because it's kind of the middle of a work day right now. Why don't you tell the listeners what you're working on right now

and how they can find you? That way, if we don't have anything else coming, we can just wrap it up then. I can answer that pretty quickly. I sometimes like things on Twitter, but I pretty much only got the book. I guess I'm working on I'm slowly making some progress I'm trying to put together essays on

kind of philosophy of history kind of thinking about theories of causation over the long dure so and I I do intend to get back to a monograph on following the history

of U.S. Iraqi relations forward past the oil nationalization so I'm kind of at the early stages of making some research on that. But other than that, I keep to a pretty quiet life. I don't have too much to promote other than the book. Maybe my kid's soccer. There you go.

I'll talk about my kid's soccer. There you go. I'm down with that. I'm down with that. All right, Alex, what can the listeners find of yours and what are you working on right now? And then I see that Swirley is raising their hand to ask a question. And any other listeners, if you have a question, please raise your hand or request to speak, and we can get you after Alex.

I am currently working on a monograph, book monograph, kind of like the political terror, dirty war, or section of drug war in Mexico in the 70s and 80s. I write infrequently for a substack called Foreign Exchanges, and I should be hopefully, I'm thinking, about writing something soon about migration, immigration, because it's political season, time here in the U.S., and that's when it comes up the most. But mostly, yeah, I'm on Twitter.

I have a website, alexanderavina.com. Yeah, and that's about it. All right. Swirley, unmute yourself. Let us see what kind of question you have for us. Hi, guys. Folks, thank you for that. I guess I just wanted to jump in, maybe to, mostly to encourage other people to jump in and to thank you all for your work.

I definitely really appreciate the podcast and I, you know, so I guess, you know, trying to set an example for everybody that there's no such thing as a silly question because I have yet to complete this particular, you know, episode of the podcast. but it is one of the areas of, you know, of history of geopolitical, I mean, one of the areas of the world in particular, largely, you know, the focus on the Middle East, in terms of the, you know, resource wars over there that is a little fuzzy for me. So, so I'll admit that I don't have all that much to say, again, not having gone through the entire space with you guys. So long story short, I guess my question would be, just a shot in the dark and hoping that you haven't already touched too much on this. What do you guys, or what do you folks see as what is next? I guess, you know, both in the Middle East or potentially in other places around the world, Latin America, Africa, even Russia, when it comes to, you know, this war over oil and over control. of natural resources. Of course, we remember Elon Musk in Bolivia talking about Kuang, whoever they want. Of course, there's been a lot of to info. There's a lot of changes in Colombia, Nicaragua.

I mean, someone of the Americas was obviously much more poorly attended this time. A lot of messages being sent. Again, I'm more speaking to Latin America, maybe because it's sort of, you know, I know maybe a tiny bit more about, again, other parts of the world, but on this issue of resources, maybe the question would be what happens next in sort of however you want to approach that? Well, I, for one, am hoping that Latin America rescues us, right? That's northerners who comes to our rescue here, rides to our aid, because I hope Alex would be able to speak to this much more, you know, authoritatively than I can, but it

seems like there are more hopeful or progressive tendencies and possibilities sort of arising out of the South. And I would hope that, I mean, you think about the way that we have so much economic integration post or other trade agreements that we all kind of live within one economy. It seems like there should be a larger kind of like bolivari and like hemispheric solidarity, political organization that could then like, you know, join in a spirit of international solidarity to address climate change, like I would like to see the U.S. sovereignty merged into a larger hegemonic formation that has a different, you know, organized around the Bolivarian

or the Cochabamba document, right, a different organizing principle. And so I'm hoping that revolutionary movements from Latin America can rise up and maybe inspire some change in the, you know, United States. in Canada seemed pretty hopeless, but hopefully some good changes can flow from the south. So that's what I'm looking for in the future, I guess. Latin America will have to save the U.S. once again. I'm just kidding. Yes, hoping.

Yeah. It's always dangerous to ask historians like what comes. Yeah, I think at least in Latin America, there's some really hopeful moves, right? I think what happened over with the summit of the Americas, with potentially, you know, the, the formation of some sort of transnational solidarity organized around issues of economic and political sovereignty. I think that's always the hope. And there's been earlier efforts to accomplish such a thing. And those past efforts have come and gone. But their examples, their ideas, their ideals continue to live on. So I think what the election in Colombia is super hopeful for me because just the role that Colombia has played in general is kind of like this bulwark of a certain form of,

of conservatism, domestic conservatism within the country, but also kind of as an outpost of U.S. military, covert drug operations, right? The fact that we have Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez there at the head, I think is really promising, even though they obviously face some really difficult challenge is working with the legislature there. But yeah, I think it's any time that there's some sort of unity within Latin America that tends to be better for the region, anytime the region goes toward what Eduardo Galliano wrote, you know, when it becomes an archipelago of idiot nations trained to dislike one another, then things are not good.

So, you know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to say this like another pink tide or whatever. I'm just going to say that any sort of like regional organization that at the very least pressures the U.S. government in a way that makes them uncomfortable, that's a start. I'll take it. because it's pretty dire, right? And I think some of the challenges that I think some of these governments

in Latin America face, and I hope some of them have learned some of the lessons from the first Pink Tide is that how do you maintain kind of like a vital, dynamic, vibrant relationship between social movements and elected governments? So how do you keep a vibrant, creative, dynamic relationship with social movements that put them in power to begin with?

But then how do you continue that relationship in a way that's not just based on co-optation? I think that's, that's always a challenge and that's what i'm going to be that's what i'm going to be like focusing on in the next couple years obviously the most immediate thing is for us since the the work against empire should begin at home so those of us who live within the u.s like you know doing whatever we can to get rid of sanctions particularly in venezuela and cuba that are just there to create mass suffering um i think that's like the immediate something immediate that that we should be working

toward them. Yeah, and again, listeners, if you have a question, please raise your hand or request to speak. Otherwise, we'll be wrapping this up. I'm going to throw something into the answer that's not going to directly answer the question, because this is what I do. But it's something that I try to bring up any time that the opportunity arises. So this is less of what I think is next and more towards what I think needs to be next. So we've been talking about, you know, the Middle East and Latin America. And one thing that we have to keep in mind, and this goes to the point that I think, Brandon, you made earlier with regards to if the oil is cheap and, you know, the gas prices

are low, people can get their jet skis. There's not an evolution in the United States. We need to continuously center anti-imperialism within our politics, and not just the explicit imperialism in the, you know, military sense, but also economic imperialism, which we will be having a conversation on a guerrilla history very soon with, well, I might as well spoil it. And one week from today, we're going to be talking with Richard Wolfe about economic imperialism and, you know, what the mechanisms behind that, how it works.

So one thing that we have to remember is that we have the labor aristocracy in the United States. That kind of goes without saying. And we have to understand that as long as the United States is able to, to extract super profits from the global south, it's going to push down any sort of revolutionary potential in the United States, you know, for example, along with any of the other global north countries. So if we want to see the kind of change that we're talking about,

you know, in our hopeful predictions of what's next, that has to happen is that we have to have these global south countries resist economic imperialism, the exploitation and the extraction of these super profits, because until that happens, there isn't going to be any sort of, necessitated mass movement within the imperial north, and without a movement like that, the global north, especially the United States, is going to continue to try to be an imperialist. It's going to continue to act coercively, militarily or economically, particularly in the global south. So it's kind of a vicious cycle. Unless you have people in the global south stand up and prevent that

economic imperialism from happening, you're not going to have any sort of movements from within the United States because the living conditions for the labor aristocracy is, still going to be comparatively high. Only when you are, you know, threatening the comparative comfort of the labor aristocracy in the United States, this is my opinion. Only when that is threatened, is there going to be any sort of large mobilization that's going to fundamentally try to change the economic system of the United States and the imperialist nature of the United States? And until that changes, we're going to be in the same relationship that we are now where these super profits are extracted from the global south.

So it's not what I think is going to happen, but it is one of the things that I think needs to happen if we want to see the change that we're talking about. So we did have a couple of other people that can, as speakers, James, why don't I let you ask your question first? And then after James, we'll go to cell recital. Hey, everyone. I just want to say thanks.

The guerrilla history Rev. Left podcast family has like, that's been like very instrumental in my political education. So I just want to say I appreciate that. Um, just going back to what was being said about the, just kind of like our politics here and now, pushing for

an end to sanctions in Latin America, pushing an anti-imperialist politic. I know that this is much more just of kind of like a historically based discussion, but how does your average person do that beyond just speaking with people you know, bringing that up into political spaces? I'm part of the Starbucks unionization movement. So kind of like with my coworkers and in talking with like organizations for how I

want our policy to go. I've been just kind of trying to emphasize this. However we go about this, we need to make sure that the labor movement here is also going to have positive effects in like the coffee farming that is done for Starbucks, the farms that are owned by Starbucks in Latin America specifically. But yeah, just like how do how do we push that like, practically, I guess. You know, if you were going to build socialism, you wouldn't start from here, right? No. There are tough questions, and I guess, you know, we became historians.

There's an old saying, like, historian is a prophet looking backwards. We have enough trouble predicting the past that it's hard to say, you know, where things go. But I became a historian of foreign relations or U.S. role in the world because I think that we have an insular culture. You know, we broadly hear that it's very easy to sort of be blind to the ways, you know, people don't even know the sanctions that are applied around the world. They don't even know those sanctions exist, let alone how they affect Cuba or Iran or Venezuela or whatnot. And so I wish I knew what the immediate, you know, war of maneuver next step is. But I think kind of what the way I think about things is I'm kind of trying as a. as a history teacher, as an educator, to kind of help generate some greater awareness of U.S.

role in the world and to, it's so easy, I think, for Americans to sort of shut themselves their perception out and not be aware of how their actions affect the rest of the world. And so as a teacher, as an educator, I'm trying to help my students understand kind of, you know, how we exist on this planet affects other people and to be more cognizant. of our relationship to people and our non-human relations. And so I'm trying to work on the education front. I do think that there's a, you know, call it karma or whatever. There's a, the sanctions on Russia are, I think, a leading indicator that the United

States is abused at sanctioning power. At a certain point, you just start sanctioning yourself. And if we think that, you know, oil or if we think that, you know, grain prices are going to come back down or if there's a price level to return to, I don't think we're paying close attention to, you know, what's happening, you know, with the climate. And and so I think that, you know, prices are going to continue to go up, that, you know, the West, where I live in the West, we're running out of water, that water is going to, you know, impact the availability of energy and electricity and that we're basically coming in

for some really severe, you know, price shocks, right, and that the system of American hegemony is really breaking down. I don't, I mean, I'm not. I'm not. I mean, I'm not. I'm not quite the expert in Latin America, but I do wonder, you know, before that, the Columbia election, everybody was saying, oh, no, the right and center right are going to, you know, the left petrol will never win. And then they had that failed summit where nobody came and Biden just, you know, out of his element. And like, and then the very next week, Columbia votes and they have positioned to what the imperial hegemon wants. And so I do think that America's ability to sanction, America's ability to kind of habits will manifest in the world, that that's,

that's declining faster than many people I think are ready for. And I think maybe it's sort of like a tipping point. There's a moment where it all starts to collapse. And the Starbucks union and all the efforts that people are trying to do on the ground may be in a position to kind of respond in an agile way when the imperial systems that we've taken for granted for 50 or 100 or 500 years all start to kind of crumble. and then the question becomes we'll continuously respond to what's next and how can those organizations, you know, be effective to meet, you know, the needs of their people.

Alex, anything you want to add on that? No, thanks, James, for the wonderful question. Yeah, I don't have really much to add to Brandon's great points. I mean, I would say this is antwork, you know, this is like how to foster and propagate critical understanding and, and, and, you know, knowledge is antwork, and it's really from the bottom up, and it takes a long time, particularly when you're in the Imperial Court. So one of the things, and I'm really glad that within your Starbucks unionization effort, you're trying to connect global dynamics with what you all are doing within the U.S., right? And I think that's one,

and this is based on what Brandon said as well. I think one of the first things we can do in terms of fostering, like, critical thinking, understanding is to disrupt that, that boundary between, like, so-called foreign policy and domestic policy. And I think that's like a critical step. And thinking about issues that help us do that, right? So unionization in certain areas will help, probably all areas will help us kind of break down that boundary. For me personally, it's the issue of migration and borders that helps me kind of make those connections and then write about it and do podcasts and teach and just trying to like talk to whoever's paying attention. Right.

But that's like an initial first step. And it's tedious. It's like I said, it's ant work. It takes a long time. but it's probably the most lasting way and then hopefully that can also lead to organizing within pre-existing organizations or the creation of new ones, right?

Like one of the, for me, one of the most inspirational historical examples of people in the U.S. actually mobilizing to kind of affect or to pressure the U.S. government occurred in the 1980s over Reagan's Central America policy, right? And to read about how 150,000 Americans went to Nicaragua in the 80s, right?

To do literacy campaigns to provide medical support. And then domestically, you had hundreds of thousands of people organized around different churches and there are other civic organizations who protested and went on the streets and pushed, you know, talked to their representatives and senators and forced, you know, the Reagan administration to do some really illegal shady shit that ultimately didn't get them in trouble. But it did spark like a certain form of critical understanding that tied like questions of immigration to what U.S. Empire was doing in Latin America and Central America. So I don't know. that's just one example that I always keep in mind.

And actually, the person who's single most responsible for me, a professor was a professor that I had as an undergraduate professor, Mirna Santiago, and she, you know, her stories of going to Nicaragua in the mid-80s to help on these literacy campaigns just, like, captivated me, right? So how do we affect, create those, not just a transnational understanding with, you know, an anti-imperialist bet, but then how to connect, how to create actual connections with these places that are suffering U.S. Empire, I think is really important.

Yeah, tremendous. Unfortunately, we've lost Selvicidal, who was set to be the next, so we don't have any other outstanding questions right now. So on the way out, I'll just make a couple of announcements. If somebody raises their hand, we'll get them in very quickly. Otherwise, we'll wrap this up. You both mentioned sanctions. This will be the first time that we've mentioned this in public, so this is kind of the announcement for this series. But we've already recorded a couple of episodes of, and we're going to have a bunch of episodes that will be dropping periodically, like every. couple of weeks, between probably within the next month, it'll start and we'll be going over the course of several months about sanctions as war. And we'll be looking at both sanctions from a theoretical construct, as well as a bunch of different case studies of sanctions on various countries and how those sanctions impacted those individual countries. So we've already

recorded a couple of episodes of that. When we get probably one more episode of that series recorded, we'll start releasing the episodes simultaneously while we continue to record more case studies. So that's something that listeners should definitely keep an eye out for is that Sanctions as War, kind of mini-series. It's going to be about 10 episodes long or so, which really isn't a mini-series at that point, I guess. But the episodes that we've recorded have been incredibly interesting and in some ways very depressing. So, you know, be ready for some heavy listening as we go forward towards the end of the summer here. I also then just want to make an announcement personally. So I just, my wife and I recently started a show called Wuck. And we just released

an episode yesterday with Sina Romani from the East is a podcast about translation and how that, you know, who is deciding what is translated, the ideology behind translation, what decides what gets funding for translation and how that upholds hegemony. It was a very interesting conversation. So if anybody's interested in that, you can just look at the pin tweet on my personal Twitter, Huck, 1995. So seeing that there's no more people raising their hands to ask a question, I think that we'll get out of here.

So just final reminder, everybody, if you would like to support the show and help us continue doing what we do, go to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, guerrilla being spelled, G-U-E-R-R-R-I. I-L-L-A, so Patreon.com forward-slash guerrilla history. Any contribution really does allow us to keep doing the show. So Alex and Brandon, thanks for coming on the show. Hopefully you had fun. I'm looking forward to when we come back together again for a more formal, full episode.

I think that that'll be a lot of fun. For sure. Thank you so much, Henry, Brandon. Yeah, it was a pleasure to meet you, Alex. And thanks, thanks, everyone for tuning in. Absolutely. So we will have this recorded, and my plan is to release this on the general feed as soon as I can get this thing edited.

So be expecting this in your podcast feed soon if you want to listen to the whole thing again. So until next time, listeners, solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.