Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Pentagon Papers, Why Nobody Wants Venezuelan Oil, and Answers to Your Questions

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

The story you didn’t know: The Pentagon Papers. Politics Professor Casey Burgat tells us about the government lies, coverup, and the reporters who exposed all of it. Then Sharon talks with economist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman about the lies you often hear about immigration and its effects on the economy, why American oil companies actually don’t want Venezuelan oil, and his predictions for the 2026 economy. Plus Sharon answers your most pressing questions: What Happens Now with Venezuela? Was Removing Nicolás Maduro Illegal?  Can the US take Greenland by force? If you’d like to submit a question, head to thepreamble.com/podcast – we’d love to hear from you there. And be sure to read our weekly magazine at ThePreamble.com – it’s free! Join hundreds of thousands of readers who still believe understanding is an act of hope. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson (00:00:00) The Pentagon Papers with Casey Burgat (00:16:55) Interview with Paul Krugman (00:30:48) Q&A To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Preamble Podcast. This week we have a special guest, Casey Bergat, with our lead story. Casey is a politics professor at George Washington University and is a regular contributor to our preamble newsletter. This week, he's covering the Pentagon Papers. I'm guessing it to subject you've heard of, but might not know the whole story behind. He's going to tell you about the government lies, the cover-up, and the reporters who exposed it all. And ahead, I talk with famed economist Paul Krugman. He's a Nobel laureate and wrote for the New York Times for nearly 25 years. We talk about immigration and its effects on the economy. Why American oil companies actually don't want Venezuelan oil?

And his predictions for the economy in 2026. Plus, I will answer your questions. What happens now with Venezuela? And can or will the United States buy or take Greenland? That's ahead. I'm Sharon McMahon, and this is the Preamble podcast. Here's Casey. The Pentagon Papers.

The leak that put truth and the free press on trial. In the summer of 1971, Americans woke up to front-page headlines that exposed decades of government secrecy. The New York Times had obtained more than 7,000 pages of a classified Pentagon study, formally titled, The Defense Department History of the United States decision-making on Vietnam. You probably know it by another name, the Pentagon Papers. What the study contained was undeniably explosive stuff.

Commissioned in 1967 by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the classified review traced U.S. involvement in Vietnam across five presidents, Truman through Johnson, and revealed a story the government had never dared, to tell in public. A story the government had actively lied about. Among other revelations, the Pentagon Papers showed that senior government officials knew the war was unwinnable, expanded military operations in secret, and misled Congress, and the American people, about why American troops continued to die in Southeast Asia. The country was stunned. The Nixon

White House, in power when the study was on page A1 of the times, was furious. And the free press itself was put on trial. But the story of the Pentagon Papers isn't just about a leak. It's about how far ordinary people were willing to go to reveal the truth, and how their actions push the Supreme Court into issuing one of the strongest protections for press freedom the country has ever seen. And the contrast hits differently

when compared with the circus that is the Pentagon Press Court today, with figures like Matt Gates and Laura Lumer posturing his journal. not to inform the public, but to reinforce and promote the administration's narrative to its supporters. The Pentagon Papers were journalism. Much of what passes for access today is theater. Let's go back to where it began. By 1967, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the Ford Motor Exec, turned JFK Cabinet Secretary, no longer believed his own optimistic briefings.

privately, he feared Vietnam was spiraling into catastrophe. Publicly, he continued to defend the mission. Trap between his beliefs and his perception of duty, McNamara ordered something unprecedented, a full classified autopsy of every major U.S. political and military decision that had led America into Vietnam. He assembled what became known as the Vietnam Study Task Force, an elite group of 36 analysts, historians, military officers, and policy experts.

The group was led by Leslie Gelb, then a rising star in the Defense Department, as director of policy planning and analysis. Gelb later became a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for, wait for it, the New York Times. The task forces charge was breathtaking in scope. Reconstruct the story of the war, not as the politicians told it, but as the document themselves revealed it. For nearly two years, the task force operated out of a secure suite in the Pentagon, sifting through an ocean of classified material. Thousands of documents pulled from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, State Department telegrams, CIA assessments,

Joint Chiefs memos, covert operations files, presidential communications, and raw intelligence cables spanning five administrations from Truman to Johnson. They built a history no outsider had ever seen. 47 bound volumes, more than 7,000 pages, meticulously cataloging the steady, deliberate expansion of American involvement in Vietnam, often in direct contradiction of the government's public statements. One of the analysts on the project was Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine-turned-Rand-Corporation strategists who had served in Vietnam and returned deeply troubled by the White House.

widening gap between government rhetoric and reality. The more Ellsberg read, the more devastating the truth became. By 1969, he had reached a moral breaking point. The documents showed not a series of innocent misjudgments, but a pattern of conscious deception, administrations that doubted the war privately but escalated it publicly, officials who misled Congress about troop levels and bombing campaigns, and intelligence assessments buried because they contradicted presidential speeches. Ellsberg became convinced not only that the war was unwinnable,

but that the government knew it was unwinnable and had chosen to hide that belief from the American people. And so he made a decision that would alter American history. Ellsberg began secretly copying the report in a homemade operation that now feels ripped from a political thriller. He snuck a few classified pages at a time out of his office under his shirt or inside his jacket. Careful never to create a big enough bulge to be spotted by security.

But even after he got the documents outside, he still needed something almost no civilian had in 1970. A photocopier. The machines were rare, bulky, and tightly controlled. Ellsberg asked a friend whether he knew anyone with access to one. By sheer luck, the friend's girlfriend worked at a small ad agency that had a copy machine. The staff went home at night, the office was dark, and that would become the first location where the Pentagon Papers were

copied. Soon Elspurg developed a more systematic operation at Rand, and he didn't do it alone. According to transcripts of Ellsberg's interviews with Times reporters, he sometimes brought his 13-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter into the Rand offices after hours to assist in the work. They acted as sentries at the hallway corner, whispering warnings if anyone approached, while Elspurg fed top-secret documents into a clattering Xerox machine that echoes through history. And then came the closest call of all. One night, Ellsberg's son was copying documents while his younger sister sat on the floor cutting the words top secret off each page so the stack would look less suspicious.

Suddenly, police officers burst into the office responding to what was later considered a false alarm. The officers looked around, saw nothing out of place, and left. Ellsberg and his children kept on copying. By early 1971, he had assembled a full, illicit, duplice, duplice. copy of the 7,000-page report and begun offering the documents to members of Congress, none of whom chose to publicize the bombshells. Ellsberg then turned to New York Times reporter Robert Rosie Rosenthal, then only six months

into his first reporting job. He was called by a Times editor and told not to come into the newsroom in the morning. Instead, he was to go to room one-one-one-one of a Hilton Hotel. Don't tell anyone where you're going, Rosenthal said, and, bring enough clothes for at least a month. Rosie did just that, and for the next month, he and a team of fellow reporters went through the documents, verifying their authenticity and growing more and more stunned at the scope and scale of the government's long-standing deception about what was really actually happening

in Vietnam. Finally, on June 13, 1971, the first front-page story dropped. Vietnam archive, Pentagon Study traces three decades of growing U.S. involvement was the headline of a story the government never intended or wanted the public to see. Drawing directly from the 7,000 pages Ellsberg had smuggled out one handful at a time, the Times revealed that presidents from Truman to Johnson had escalated the war even as they privately believed victory was unlikely, a through line documented extensively in the Pentagon study, that the U.S. had secretly expanded operations into Cambodia and Laos, years before those actions were acknowledged to Congress

or the American people, and that Congress had been repeatedly misled about troop levels, bombing campaigns, strategic objectives, and the scale of military commitment. This wasn't a policy disagreement. It was a documented pattern of systematic deception at the highest levels of government. The public reaction was instant and seismic. The Times phone lines were swamped. Members of Congress demanded hearings. Veterans wrote letters saying the revelations confirmed everything they had suspected. And inside the West Wing, the Nixon administration went into full crisis mode, but not for the obvious reasons. The Pentagon Papers didn't cover the Nixon years, and Nixon and his team weren't directly connected to the Vietnam deceit of his largely Democratic predecessors. Nixon believed the

paper's publication made Democrats look incompetent and untrustworthy, and yet still moved quickly to stop their publication. Why? Nixon feared obsessively that his government had been infiltrated by liberal leakers set out to destroy him, and if they could leak this information, they could do the same to his administration. Within 48 hours of the first story, the Nixon Justice Department raced into federal court, seeking an emergency injunction to stop the times from publishing any further installments of the papers. And in a move almost without precedent in American history, a federal judge granted the request. For the first time ever, the United States government successfully imposed a prior restraint on a newspaper.

A legal order forbidding journalists to print true newsworthy information prior to its being published. The free press was no longer just reporting the story. It was now on trial itself. And then something extraordinary happened. While the Times was legally gagged, the Washington Post obtained its own set of the papers. Inside the post-new room, panic met principal. Editors and lawyers warned that running the story could trigger federal prosecution. Publisher Catherine Graham, still relatively new to the job and ironically a close personal friend of Defense Secretary McNamara,

understood she could personally face criminal charges. According to journalists reporting from the era and accounts preserved by the Miller Center, the meeting lasted hours. The room was split. But then Graham made a call that changed the history of the record. journalism. Let's go. Let's publish, she said. Unbound by the injunction, the post began to print. So did the Boston Globe, and the public kept reading while the legal battle escalated to the highest court in the land. Just 15 days after the first Pentagon Papers headline ran, the Supreme Court

agreed to hear the case of New York Times Co. versus the United States. At issue was a constitutional question as stark as it gets. Can the U.S. government silence the press before publication. On June 30th, 1971, in a terse 6-3 decision, the answer came back a resounding no. The First Amendment does not permit such censorship. The court ruled that the Nixon administration had failed to meet the heavy burden of proof required to justify a prior restraint. Justice Hugo Black put it bluntly in his concurrence, writing that allowing the government to muzzle the free press would, quote, make a shambles of the First Amendment, end quote. He continued, quote, in the First Amendment, the founding fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its

essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government, end quote. With that single decision, The court reaffirmed one of the strongest protections for press freedom in American history. It wasn't just a win for the Times of the Post. It was a ruling that preserved the very idea of investigative journalism in a democracy. But while the legal fight ended that day, the political fallout was only beginning. The Pentagon Papers triggered a paranoid collapse inside the Nixon White House.

In the Oval Office, Nixon raged that the country was being sabotaged by leakers. He ordered his aides to stop the leaks, telling them, quote, I don't give a damn how it's done. Do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks and prevent further unauthorized disclosures, end quote. To satisfy the president, a new and secret White House unit was established to plug leaks, a team soon referred to as the plumbers, and their tactics were less than above board. After learning of Ellsper's role as the Pentagon paper source, the plumbers burglarize the California office.

of Ellsberg Psychiatrist in hopes of finding incriminating and embarrassing information. They came up empty. After the failed Ellsberg operation, the plumbers were folded into the committee to re-elect the president, creep, where their mandate expanded to political sabotage. The same men who broke into Ellsberg Psychiatrist's office, Howard Hunt, G. Gordon, Liddy, and others soon planned a more ambitious burglary, the nighttime break-in in the Democratic National Committee headquarters, at the Watergate complex.

What began as an effort to punish a whistleblower grew into the Watergate scandal, triggering congressional investigations, televised hearings, and ultimately Nixon's resignation in August of 1974. The Pentagon Papers didn't end the Vietnam War. They didn't restore trust in government, but they did establish that the public's right to know outweighs the government's desire to control the narrative, and they reaffirmed the constitutional backbone journalists rely on every single day, which is why the contrast with recently unveiled rules for press access within the Department of Defense is so jarring. Among the changes the new guidelines require that all DOD information be approved for public release by an appropriate

authorizing official before it is release, even if it's unclassified. Inside the same building where Ellsberg's leak triggered a constitutional showdown, even unclassified information, details that have never been secret, now requires pre-approval before anyone inside the building can share it with the press or the public. The rules further restrict who is allowed to speak to journalists, what counts as authorized communication, and when reporters can access subject matter experts at all. These are not minor procedural tweaks. They are a blueprint for controlled government-approved narratives. They also create a system where government officials can handpick which stories get told, when and by whom, which is why reporters, like Matt Gates and Laura Lumer, are freely roaming

the Pentagon's press areas and asking questions of public officials, while outlets like the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Reuters are barred until they sign on to the Pentagon's new rules. And that is the precise opposite of what the Pentagon Papers taught the country back in 1971. A free press is only as strong as a public that can tell the difference between truth, and spectacle and insists on that difference. Are illegal immigrants taking away jobs from Americans? Are they getting access to health care? And are you paying for it?

I discuss that and so much more with economist Paul Krugman next. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. The new year doesn't require a completely new you. It can simply be an opportunity to feel less burdened. Therapy provides an unbiased perspective that helps identify what may be holding you back, whether it's stress, self-doubt, or challenges in relationships. Understanding these patterns can make it easier to move forward with clarity and intention. BetterHelp makes starting therapy simple. All therapists are fully licensed in the U.S.

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Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash Sharon. That's BetterH-E-L-P.com slash Sharon. I'm joined now by economist Paul Krugman. I'm happy to have you with me today. You've written an article recently about this concept of immigrant derangement syndrome. What is that? Is the entire United States afflicted by this new malady? I actually know.

It's a minority of the population. So immigrant derogment syndrome, what I meant when I wrote that substack, was attributing everything that you don't like to immigrants. Crime is immigrants. High prices. It's immigrants. lack of affordable housing as immigrants. J.D. Vans actually had a post which listed everything that bothers you in each one is because

of the immigrants, which is crazy. So I live in New York City, which is 40% immigrant. Also, the safest it has been as far back as we have records. But there is this tendency to believe that immigrants, particularly non-white immigrants, are the source of all problems. And there was a brief period when there were a lot of boarding crossings under Biden and also, of course, when Trump was highlighting the issues, when anti-immigrant sentiment was kind of high, it has receded now. And the extreme stuff that we're seeing right now, this is really a small number of people, but a certain number of people in high political positions who are promoting this. It's an odd thing. You would think that it was populist position, but it's not. It's an obsession

of Donald Trump, Steve Miller, and a few other people. I want to hear you talk a little bit more about immigrants when it comes to the economy because one of the prevailing sentiments is that all of these undocumented people living in the country are taking the jobs that could go to what some people in the current administration refer to as heritage Americans and of course heritage is a substitute for white.

What actually is the impact of immigration on the U.S. economy? Okay, so now I'm really, I'm much more comfortable ground. wearing my economics professor hat. So let me tell you, there's not a fixed number of jobs. More people come to the United States. They spend more, it creates more demand.

It's not that there's a fixed pot of jobs out there. What is true is that workers with a particular set of skills do compete with each other. And once upon a time, economists, myself included, used to believe that immigrants who, I hate the term low skill, because actually a lot of manual work is not a low skill, but low education, low formal education, that immigrants enacting. class were competing with U.S.-born workers with similar credentials so that blue-collar workers were facing competition for immigrants. It turns out, and this is the result of a lot of careful looking at the evidence, that even when they have similar credentials, immigrants take different jobs.

So there are certain fields, construction, agricultural labor. The agricultural labor force was dominantly immigrants, meatpacking, things like that. Immigrants take different jobs. They don't really even compete with native-born workers head-to-head, really at any level of education. So what we've really basically got is people coming in who are complementary to the native-born workforce. They're adding something that those of us born in the United States don't bring to the table. So it's almost all good. The federal government, what it mostly does is it levies taxes on working-age people to support us in retirement. Social Security, Medicare, and a lot of Medicaid is all really about older people.

And immigrants who come here working age and pay into that pot as the native-born population gets older and older are actually really critical even more so than normally now. So immigration has been a tremendously positive force

for the U.S. economy. What about people who claim that immigrants are coming here, getting free health care, getting free food, free housing? This is the prevailing sentiment especially about places like California. They're putting

their children into U.S. run schools, they're having anchor babies, and that they are coming here and draining us of our resources and not contributing into this resource pool. What would you say to that? I'd say that mostly these alleged programs don't exist. There's not a lot of free health care being given out to immigrants. Legal immigrants are entitled to, for the same programs, mostly, that U.S. citizens are, but not entirely. It's true that immigrant children come to the schools. It's also true that taking care of children. Schooling, health care, is cheap. You know, the expensive people are people like me.

You know, people in their 70s, they cost a lot of tax pair of money. So by any reasonable accounting, because they come relatively young, the amount that immigrants pay in taxes greatly exceeds whatever burden they place on public services. It's not even close. It's just all mythology. What about undocumented immigrants? People seem to think that if you don't have a social security number, you can't pay into the tax system. Oh boy. No, it's actually kind of the opposite because if you have a job, then you and your employer pay into Social Security, even if you don't have a number. What you can't do if you don't have a valid Social Security number is collect benefits. So in some ways, undocumented immigrants are kind of the ideal because they pay into the U.S. tax system. I mean, most blue-collar workers in the United States, their main tax is not income tax. It's FICA. It's the Social Security and Medicare tax. Immigrants pay that.

Most of them don't make enough money, even on the document that they don't end up paying income tax, not because they're immune, but because they're not making enough money. But they're definitely paying into this fund, and yet they cannot actually collect the benefits. So, no, I mean, in a more rational world, we'd be trying to get those people in here as second-class residents of the United States, paying taxes and not collecting benefits. We don't do that deliberately, but in terms of them being a burden on the country, it's exactly the opposite. I want to talk a little bit more about Venezuela, because, This obviously is a top of mind story for many people. Setting aside the seizure of Maduro and his wife,

so many people believe that what was really driving this seizure of the sitting leader, regardless of whether or not he was legitimately elected, most people would agree that he was not. Most people believe that a big driving force behind it is oil. And the United States' acquisition ability to acquire inexpensive oil, that American oil companies, as President Trump has said, American oil companies are going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into Venezuela's crumbling oil infrastructure. This is going to result in, you know, record profits for American oil companies, perhaps cheap oil for Americans.

What are your thoughts on this? Is this really about oil? Does this put Americans in a better position economically in the long run? So this is a little bit funny because, you know, I've been around, and I remember the Iraq War, and everybody said that that was about oil, which I don't think it actually was. But in this case, why would people think that this was all about seizing Venezuela's oil?

Well, the answer might be that when President Trump held a press conference, he never mentioned democracy or freedom, but he mentioned oil 27 times. So that would kind of lead you to think it's about oil. But, and this is where it gets interesting, the one group of people who really don't seem especially excited about Venezuela and oil are the oil companies. And the reason is that it's not sitting there ready to be seized.

Venezuela's oil sector is a mess. Their infrastructure is a shambles. And most, although they have officially huge reserves of oil, that's a really kind of dubious number. You know, not all oil is the same. Venezuelan oil is heavy, which means that it's expensive to extract, expensive to process, highly polluting.

It's not oil that is especially desirable. And oil is cheap in the world, these days, large because of U.S. production, because of fracking. So it's not like there's some great prize here. And the oil companies themselves have said, you know, we think it's going to cost $150 billion to get the Venezuelan oil industry back on his feet. We're not going to lay out that kind of money unless we get guarantees from U.S. taxpayers. So I think Donald Trump imagines that there's a lot of money there. He's been saying that. He says it'll all pay for itself. It's great. We can get all this stuff. But it's more his illusion about Venezuela.

as a wonderful source of cheap oil, than it is the reality. It's not a venture that people who know anything about oil would go into. Do you think the United States will prop up American oil companies in an encouragement to go rebuild Venezuela's oil infrastructure? Do you see taxpayer money on the line? It's hard to know. If there was a vote in Congress, it wouldn't pass, not a chance. No way.

Even a Republican Congress, even with all of their deference to Donald Trump, they would not agree to put taxpayers' money on the line. So the question is whether there's some dodge that the administration can use, some legal dodge basically to bypass congressional approval. One of the things that I know people are wondering about is what's going to happen with interest rates, what's going to happen with the housing market. Trump, of course, has really pushed hard for interest rates to come down. He has pushed hard against the Fed.

He doesn't like Jay Powell. And what he wants is a dramatic drop in interest rates so that he can really get the economy rearing and be able to sort of have that as a notch in his belt. Is the Fed likely to continue to bring down interest rates? Is that going to help the economy? And what is that going to mean for the housing market? It's a little bit touch and go because the Fed has a dual mandate and it has two targets. It wants to control inflation, but also wants full employment. And sometimes those are in conflict with each other, as to some extent they are now.

Because we've got an inflation hit, not a huge one, but significant because of tariffs. But we also have a weak labor market. So on the one hand, the Fed is reluctant to cut race because they're worried the economy will inflate, that it will overheat. On the other hand, they're worried about jobs. And I think what's going to happen is going to hinge a lot more on how the economy develops than on Donald Trump's pressure. You know, he's going to appoint a new Fed chair

and the next Fed chair will probably be highly deferential. But interest rate decisions are not made by the Fed chair. They're made by a committee. And most of the members of that committee will either have been appointed before Trump or actually coming from regional feds like New York Fed or the Philadelphia Fed.

And they are not going to go along with a radical monetary change, not right away. And I think it's really going to hinge on this state of the economy. As for housing, the real surprise has been that housing has been as resilient as it has been, given how much mortgage rates have gone up, they will come down largely based upon what happens to the economy, based on what's happened to housing itself. If housing really starts to crumble, then that will be a signal for them to come down. Last point to make there, the Fed sets short-term interest rates. The rates that matter for anything real,

like mortgage rates are determined in the market. And they're kind of based upon what bond investors think is going to happen to short-term rates over the next 10 and 15 years. So if Trump really weren't able to bully the Fed into drastic interest rate cuts, mortgage rates might well go up rather than down because people would say, oh, that's going to be inflationary. And after a year or two, the Fed's going to have to reverse course and raise interest rates even higher than before to control inflation.

So it's not clear that there's going to be any real relief on that front. Okay, very quickly, on a scale of zero, meaning like another stock market crash like 1929 is imminent, to 10 being whatever the greatest economic period in U.S. history was in your mind. Where are we right now? Are we a two? Are we an eight? Where are we? We're certainly under five.

I mean, this is not a great economy, unless you believe that. and the messianic promises of the artificial intelligence guys. But aside from that, it is a troubled labor market. If you look underneath the growth numbers, they don't look too great. And that's with all of the AI spending that is making the numbers look big in a very small piece of the economy. But it's not catastrophe. This is not the Great Depression.

We're not in a recession yet. But things have been worse, and they've been worse often. But it's not great. Okay, here's my last question. What is one thing that you wish the average American underwent? about economics or the economy, but you find that they just really don't have a good handle on. I think just generally, the idea that there's a fixed pie that is all about sharing out pieces of this pie, and that's where they're coming back to where we started with immigrant derangement

syndrome, the idea that there's a fixed number of jobs. And if an immigrant gets it, that means a Native-born American doesn't. The idea that if we help people, that comes at our expense, which is often actually not the case. It turns out that, you know, particularly federal aid to children, Children's nutrition is a win-win across the board because those children will grow up to be productive adults if they have enough to eat when they're young. So the idea that it's about who gets their share of the pie, that is the preannual source of really bad economics. Thank you, Paul. It was a delight to chat with you, and I would love to be able to chat again anytime and appreciate your time today. Thank you.

Be sure to check out Paul Krugman's very popular newsletter on Substack. I know you'll enjoy it. When we come back, what is Congress going to do? about Venezuela? And will the U.S. take Greenland using force? What's Trump planning? And is anyone going to stop him? I'm answering your questions next. Let's get straight to your questions from this week. Here's the big question a lot of you are asking. What does the U.S. operation in Venezuela mean for America? And was it even legal? Let's break it down. In the early hours of January 3rd, U.S. forces carried out a dramatic overnight operation. Special operations troops captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro

and his wife Celia Flores in the capital city of Caracas. They were brought to New York and appeared in a U.S. federal courtroom two days later where they were arraigned on drug and weapons-related charges. President Trump has since said that the U.S. will, quote, run Venezuela until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. The president laid out his intentions during the press conference announcing Maduro's arrest. The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the Donro document. I don't know.

We sort of forgot about it. It was very important, but we forgot about it. We don't forget about it anymore. Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western atmosphere, will never be questioned again. The way the president describes the strategy, it sounds almost imperial. like the United States now sees the whole Western Hemisphere as ours. First, the idea of the Western Hemisphere being ours isn't a law, but it was a core U.S. foreign policy principle that has

evolved over nearly 200 years. It's called the Monroe Doctrine, and it was first invoked by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams during the Monroe presidency. It stated that the Americas were closed to European colonization and interference. The Roosevelt corollary added in 1904 by President Teddy Roosevelt expanded on the Monroe doctrine, stating that the U.S. would intervene in Latin American countries to prevent European involvement. During the Cold War, U.S. leaders put both the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary into practice to counter Soviet influence, most famously under JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In Trump's hands, this foreign policy approach has a new name, the Donroo Doctrine, a play on Monroe and Donald Trump's names, signaling a more assertive posture. This is not just a defensive posture aimed at keeping other forces at bay, but one that says we, the United States, will affirmatively intervene to enact the outcomes of our choosing. This shift has big implications beyond Venezuela. In the days since Maduro's capture, Trump has threatened other countries in the region, including Cuba and Colombia. Colombia is very sick, too, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States. And he's not going to be doing it very long, let me tell you. What does that mean? He's not going to be doing it very long. He's not doing it very long. He has cocaine mills and cocaine factories.

He's not going to be doing it very long. will be an operation by the U.S. It sounds good to me. And Cuba is ready to fall. Cuba looks like it's ready to fall. I don't know if they can hold it up. Trump's comments suggest the administration might use military, economic, or political pressure far more aggressively than recent U.S. presidents have.

Now let's talk about oil, because this part really matters. Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. And since late 2025, the U.S. has been seized. Easing oil tankers tied the Venezuela under warrants from federal courts to enforce sanctions on the country's oil exports. And it doesn't stop there. The U.S. has made it clear it intends to not only seize individual tankers that violate sanctions, but also to take control of Venezuelan oil production itself. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the U.S. will manage the money from oil sales. We are going to take between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil. We're going to sell it in the marketplace at market rates, not at the discounts,

Venezuela was getting. That money will then be handled in such a way that we will control how it is dispersed in a way that benefits to Venezuelan people, not corruption, not the regime. China in particular has deep economic ties to Venezuela. Beijing has invested tens of billions of dollars in Venezuelan infrastructure and exchange for oil sold at a discounted price. Removing Maduro disrupts that relationship and sends a clear message that the U.S. is pushing back against Chinese influence in the region. And if you listen to our previous segment with Paul Krugman, you can understand more of the nuances of who actually wants Venezuelan oil. By and large, it is not United States oil companies, and it is unlikely that U.S. consumers will be the beneficiaries of Venezuelan oil at, say, a gas pump.

So who runs Venezuela now? Delsi Rodriguez, who was vice president under Maduro, is now serving as the interim president. Meanwhile, President Trump has suggested that. that Washington now has control. But the reality on the ground is far less clear. U.S. officials are exerting pressure on Venezuela and have told Rodriguez they want to see at least three changes. A crackdown on drug trafficking, the removal of Iranian, Cuban, and other operatives seen as hostile to the United States, and an end to oil sales to United States adversaries. Let's pivot to the second big part of this question. Was removing Maduro illegal? And doesn't matter. The short answer is that many legal experts and also foreign countries say yes, it was illegal under international law.

Under the UN Charter, countries are generally prohibited from using force inside another sovereign state unless it's a clear act of self-defense or they receive explicit approval by the UN Security Council. Venezuela did not attack the United States and no such approval was granted. So critics argue that the U.S. strike and Maduro's capture were violations of of international law and Venezuelan sovereignty. But Trump administration officials argue removing Maduro was legal because it was a justified law enforcement action since Maduro was indicted by the United States for narco-terrorism,

drug trafficking, corruption, and money laundering. Ravia Shamsani, chief spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, says the UN is deeply worried about the situation in Venezuela. It is clear that the operation undermined a fundamental principle of international law, that states must not threaten or use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The U.S. has justified its intervention on the grounds of the Venezuelan government's longstanding and appalling human rights record. But far from being a victory for human rights, this military intervention, which is in contravention of Venezuelan sovereignty and the UN Charter,

damages the architecture of international security. It sets a potentially dangerous international precedent. If one powerful country can send its troops into another to arrest a leader, what's to stop rivals like Russia or China from doing the same to us or to others? Congress has also raised questions. The U.S. Constitution gives only Congress the power to declare war, and Trump did not seek that authorization, though recent presidents have often used military force without,

formal congressional approval. In this case, the Senate has already advanced a war powers resolution that would force President Trump to get congressional approval before taking any further military action in Venezuela. The measure cleared a key procedural hurdle in a 5247 vote, setting it up for a final vote that, as of this recording, has not yet taken place. The resolution is a direct response to the surprise rate that led to Maduro's capture, which many lawmakers say went beyond the president's limited authority to act without Congress. Some Republicans have joined Democrats and warning that what happened in Caracas crossed that line. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul put it bluntly saying, make no mistake, bombing another nation's capital and removing their leader is an act of war,

plain and simple. No provision in the Constitution provides such power to the presidency. Whether the resolution ultimately passes, and whether it would meaningfully constrain the White House remains an open question. But the vote underscores a growing unease in Congress about how far the president can go and how long lawmakers are willing to stay on the sidelines. And what about Maduro's trial? Even if his capture was illegal under international law, U.S. courts have historically allowed such prosecutions to proceed. Courts generally have held that the way a defendant is brought into U.S. jurisdiction does not automatically dismiss the case, so Maduro is likely to face charges in federal court regardless of how he arrived into the United States.

Maduro's lawyers, though, are expected to challenge the legality of his arrest, arguing that he is immune from prosecution as a sovereign head of state. In a similar case in 1990, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega tried the same defense after the U.S. captured him in a military invasion, but it was ultimately rejected. In Maduro's case, his immunity claim is complicated by the fact that the United States does not recognize him as Venezuela's legitimate head of state, particularly after a disputed 2024 election. So here's what to watch next. Will Venezuela descend into instability or transition into a new political order? Will China and Russia push back harder in Latin America? And will the U.S.-based diplomatic or legal fallout for its actions?

These are open questions, and their answers will shape relations in the Western Hemisphere for years to come. Let's get to our next question. Can the United States take Greenland by force? You've probably seen the headlines. President Trump has been talking about acquiring Greenland. For some time, he floated both the idea of buying it and, yes, even using the military to take it. We need Greenland from a national security situation. It's so strategic. Right now Greenland is covered with Russia and Chinese ships all over the place.

We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. And Denmark is not going to be able to do it. I can tell you. Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. That means Denmark handles foreign policy and defense, while Greenland runs its own local affairs. It's part of NATO. So if the U.S. tried to take Greenland by force, we'd be talking about one. NATO member attacking another. That means President Trump's comments aren't just a scandal. They actually represent an existential crisis for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Danish Prime Minister says there's a lot at stake. First of all, I believe that we should take the American President seriously when he says that he wants Greenland. But I also want to make it clear that if the USA chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including our

NATO membership and thus the security that has been established since the end of World War II. The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom have lined up with Denmark in defending Greenland's sovereignty. They issued a statement saying the Arctic island belongs to its people. So let's just pause right here and talk about NATO. What if the U.S. makes a move to take Greenland by force? If a NATO country attacks another NATO country, say the U.S. going after Greenland, it would be completely unprecedented. There is no simple way to expel a member country from NATO. And the treaty doesn't cover attacks from the inside. NATO has only triggered the Article 5 portion of the treaty, which says an attack on one is an attack on all one time after 9-11. And that was for an

external attack on the United States. But this scenario is completely new. And it would force allies to scramble for new security arrangements while the post-World War II order they've relied on for decades falters. But here's an important reality check. The U.S. already has a military presence on Greenland. Under a Cold War era agreement signed with Denmark in 1951 and updated in 2004 to include Greenland's semi-autonomous government, the U.S. can construct and operate military bases, house personnel, and control landings, takeoff and ship movements across the island. In practice, that means the U.S. could significantly increase its military footprint if it wanted to with relatively little red tape. And an expert from the Danish Institute for International Studies says, the U.S. has such a free hand in Greenland that it can pretty

much do what it wants if it just asks nicely. So while Trump talks about buying or even taking Greenland, much of what he claims would require dramatic action is technically already possible under existing agreements. Apart from the potential international consequences, there's still the question of whether the U.S. actually could take over Greenland. In theory, Greenland's small population and limited defenses might make a quick operation possible. And in a recent CNN interview, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said that part of the equation isn't really a concern. Nobody's going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.

It has been the formal position of the U.S. government since the beginning of this administration, frankly, going back into the previous Trump administration, that Greenland should be part of the United States. The president has been very clear about that. That is the formal position of the U.S. government. The United States is the power of NATO. For the United States to secure the Arctic region to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests, obviously Greenland should be part of the United States. But in reality, it's much more complicated.

The U.S. would face major legal fallout, international backlash, and the possibility of Congress again stepping in under the War Powers Act. On the Senate floor, Republican Senator Tom Tillis of North Carolina bristled at Stephen Miller's characterization of the United States' stance on Greenland. You don't speak on behalf of this U.S. Senator or the Congress. You can say it may be the position of the President of the United States. should be a part of the United States, but it's not the position of this government because we are a co-equal branch. And if that were come to pass, there would be a vote on the floor to make it real. Not the surreal sort of environment that some deputy chief of staff thinks was cute to say on TV. Still, would this sort of pushback from Congress be enough to stop the Trump administration, which is

known to push boundaries? Time will tell. But what about buying Greenland? Trump has talked about that too. Legally any sale would need Denmark, Greenland, the U.S. Congress, and probably even the EU, to agree. It's a giant legal and political hurdle, but Greenland isn't for sale, and neither Denmark nor Greenland wants it to be. So what's the takeaway? What we're seeing is a power play by the Trump administration, signaling, negotiating, and testing limits. Greenland, Denmark, and Europe are watching closely. And for NATO, this is a reminder. Even friendly alliances can face unexpected challenges when politics and strategy collide. If you'd like to submit a question for me to answer on a future episode, head to thepramble.com slash podcast.

We'd love to hear from you there. And be sure to read our weekly magazine at the preamble.com. It's free. Join hundreds of thousands of readers who still believe understanding is an act of hope. I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. If you enjoyed this show, please like, share, and subscribe these things help podcasters out so much. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck Parks and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. I'll see you again soon.