Odd Lots - Greg Grandin on how the Monroe Doctrine Became the Donroe Doctrine

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

In some sense, the arrest of Maduro is nothing unusual. For over 200 years, the US viewed the entirety of the Western hemisphere as its legitimate domain for intervention. And of course, there's a long history of the US getting involved with Latin America specifically. But what is the Monroe Doctrine? And how does Trump's foreign policy fit into it. On this episode, we speak with Greg Grandin, a professor of history at Yale and author of America, América. Greg has extensively researched American activity in Latin America across his career. He explains the historical patterns of when America asserts its dominance in the region, and how that fits into other American policy priorities both abroad and at home. Read more:Post-Maduro 124% Rally Stuns Venezuela’s Battered Stock ExchangeTrump’s Team Orders Big Oil Into Venezuela: ‘Do It for Our Country’ Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthor. Joe, I love doing American history episodes. In part because I feel like my own knowledge of American history is fairly simplistic. And I do remember a huge culture shock when I went from high school to college. to college, and I think I told the story before. So I went to college, university, in London. And I had always heard the American Revolution described as the American Revolution, right? And then as soon as I get to the UK...

What did they call? I never... What did they call it? Yeah, they call it, I think, the American War of Independence, which has a different tonality to it. Definitely. But it definitely demonstrates just how subjective tensions, conflicts and policies can actually be in history depending on who you're talking to. And we're going to talk about not just a pretty subjective American policy, but one that has been reinterpreted and amended many, many times in the past. Right. So obviously for us, this has been a Venezuela week, and there's all sorts of immediate questions that are sort of most directly relevant to we've been talking about the market elements mostly. We talked about oil. We talked about the sovereign debt,

etc. But then there's all these questions, of course, about international law and what is legitimate and what is illegitimate. And I mean, I couldn't even believe the headline when I saw it that we had arrested. I know. I was flabberg. I just the idea that we had arrested a head of state from another country is just absolutely gobsmacking. And then people talk about international law. And then they say, does international law even exist and so forth? And what it feels like to some extent, truly uncharted territory here. Yep. Uncharted territory, but people are drawing on a parallel, which is the Monroe Doctrine. Yes.

The Monroe Doctrine of, I think it was 1823, I want to say, basically said that America would assert its dominance over the entire American region. And since then, it's changed a number of times, but the way it's being talked about now is as the Trump corollary or the Don Roe doctrine, which was described in the National Security Strategy document that the Trump administration put out back in December. And that one's a little different. So we keep seeing these amendments to the doctrine. By the way, I should just say, do you remember back in 2013, John Kerry explicitly said that the Mondro doctrine was over. It was dead. I don't remember that. And now it's back. It's arisen. Some version of it is certainly back. You know, it's very interesting because the U.S.

clearly has a longstanding history of various operations overt and covert of involving itself, shall we say, with the politics and domestic affairs of our neighbors, particularly in South and Central America and so forth. I suppose any country is naturally going to have some security interest in what's happening in its proximity. I don't think that itself is particularly weird. I really like this term, the Don Roe doctrine, because there's two things. There's this longstanding history that the U.S. wants to have a role to play in everyone else's politics among our neighbors. But then there's this other element with Donald Trump specifically where it feels like a lot of our policy and principle is essentially he's the president and what's in his head and his ideas are legitimate because they're his ideas

and he's the president. So, yes, there's precedents. There's norms and so forth. And then there's this sort of novelty that everyone's trying to read his mind. And we're in this very, very strange situation, which has come up on our last two episodes, in which you have the president talking about oil and explicitly. And yet people are like skeptical. It's very strange.

It's a very strange situation because you have a torpically, it's like, oh, he admitted it. It's about oil. And yet everyone's like, is there something else in play beyond here? It's the total inversion for how people have talked in the past about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of how we involve ourselves internationally. That was part of the original Monroe doctrine as well. There was this weird tension between like pro-democracy, anti-colonialism, keep the European powers out. Yeah. And America basically kind of creating its own informal colonies.

That tension has always been there. And we should talk about that. We should talk about whether or not there might be, you know, different strategies at play in Venezuela, different goals. And I'm happy to say we do, in fact, have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Greg Grandin. He is a professor of history at Yale. And the author of the new book, America, America, America, a new history of the new world. So, Greg, welcome to Odd Lots. Thanks so much for coming on.

Oh, thanks for having me. How important has the Monroe Doctrine actually been in the history of American policy and development? Well, it's certainly been influential and it's certainly been cited repeatedly over the years. I mean, first, I think we need to back up and say exactly what makes it a doctrine. Yeah. It was never voted on. No court ratified it. It didn't actually assume the status of doctrine until a couple of decades after it was pronounced. In 1823, when James Monroe was president at the time, and this was around the time that most Spanish-American nations were breaking from Spain in their successful wars of independence, which were much longer and dragged out than the U.S. War for Independence.

by 1823, it was fairly clear that Spain was going to lose its empire, and the United States finally decided that it was going to issue a statement. And you have to understand that the doctrine itself, or Monroe's statement, it's really just a kind of, you know, four or five non-contiguous paragraphs in the state of the union address of 6,000 words. You know, you have to kind of cherry pick through the state of the union address to find what is the doctrine. and it's hesitant, it's cautious.

The United States wasn't really sure where it wanted to land on any given issue. And there were obviously tensions and differences of opinions within Monroe's cabinet. I mean, to put it in more modern terms, you had isolationists, you had internationalists, you had unilateralists. You had different people thinking of different ways on how the United States should address and deal with, on the one hand, these new republics, were coming into being in South America and in Central America and in Mexico. And on the other hand, their former colonial rulers in Europe. And so it was actually written by John Quincy Adams, who was Monroe's Secretary of State. And as I said, it was inserted in different parts. And it's true. It is a bit of a contradictory document. On the one hand, it announces that the United States considers the

independence of Latin America or at the time Spanish America to be irreversible and that it was recognizing a number of states that had established effective sovereignty and unbroken with Spain. And it warned off Europe, not just Spain, but any country Spain might recruit to help them or the Holy Roman Empire or Great Britain against trying to conquer or reconquer the Americas, any part of the Americas. So that's the kind of anti-colonial part of the doctrine. And again, in quotation marks, the doctrine. And other paragraphs said that the United States and Spanish America, being of the Western hemisphere, shared certain special interests and ideals, although it didn't specify

what those interests and ideals were. But people kind of presume they meant the difference between monarchy and republicanism. But at least there was a kind of gesture to. a kind of shared fraternity of nations that had common interests. And so that's another part of the Monroe Docton. And then there was the part that was referenced that it didn't exactly grant the United States much power in terms of policing the hemisphere. It was a vague sentence that said the United States would interpret events that happened

anywhere in the Western Hemisphere on how they bear on the quote. peace and happiness of the United States. It was so it was a document that could appeal to a lot of different constituencies within the United States, like Thomas Jefferson's expansionism, this notion that the new world was

shared a certain unity of purpose. John Quincy Adams was a famous isolationist and unilateralist. And so there was this notion of the United States could act if it won, if it saw a threat. And somebody like Henry Klee, who imagined a kind of large American system, a mercantile system in which the U.S. would be a great manufacturing base in Latin America,

Spanish America would supply resources in order to rival the United Kingdom and the empires of Europe. But the point being, it really wasn't much of anything. Latin Americans did like it. I mean, they had a lot of time to read. It was a different period. There were no iPhones. You know, people read closely and said, oh, that's an interesting paragraph. And what they read and liked mostly was they thought it was a, they read it as a kind of amicus brief for their own anti-colonialism.

Spanish Americans were very much vocal in their idea that the doctrine of conquest was no longer valid. The doctrine of discovery was no longer valid. There was no undiscovered land in the new world waiting for Europeans to stumble upon and claim. as their own. And they read the Monroe Doctrine as largely supporting that position, especially the part that warned Europe against trying to reconquer any countries that had claimed their independence. But over the years, it was interpreted it in a different way. Politicians and diplomats, particularly in skirmishes with Europe, say Great Britain, when Great Britain wanted to build a canal through Central America. That was around the time that those kind of vague, scattered remarks were elevated

to the level of doctrine. And it became the Monroe Doctrine or the Doctrine of Monroe. And from that point forward, it was progressively incorporated into something we might call customary law. I mean, again, what makes a doctrine, a doctrine, and who gets to enforce it, it really is just a question of power. It goes to what you were talking about in the introduction, about what is international law and how is it enforced. I mean, most countries have statements of principles. The United States gets its own doctrine. Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it?

Because to some extent, when I think about American involvement, it's like all around the world, at any time we sort of feel the need to fight against communists, right? That seems to be a very common thing and fight for democracies or any country that sort of has something similar to our way of government or something like that. We seem to be on principle. We have to be the ones or we feel compelled to intervene. And then here is this geographical element that seems very different. Can you talk a little bit about the intersection of the geographical impulse to sort of exert your influence among your neighbors and how that

intersects with this other, I don't know what we call it, principle, a doctrine, etc., where there are just certain kinds of leaders that we don't like, and when they're in power, we do what we can to eliminate them. Yes, and this goes to the history of the United States, its relationship to its own hemisphere and the power that it is exerted over the Latin America and Spanish, America, and then its efforts at times to go global to become a more global superpower. There's been, you know, there's long different iterations of this in which the United States, States kind of tries to escape the boundaries of its hemisphere and become a world power at different moments and then and then it falls back to the western hemisphere this has happened over and over again

it happened with the great depression it happened uh in some ways with um you know after vietnam the united states turned back to latin america it happened after the certainly after the catastrophic war on terror i mean in many ways what's happening that Trump is an example of this, this kind of, you know, Trump is his own problem. And a lot of the things that are wrong is of his doing. But he did inherit a country that was in profound crisis as a result of catastrophic war on terror, the financial crisis, the inability of politicians to deal with corporate wealth and inequality. And so there is a kind of turning back to Latin America. And we can get to this a little bit later if you want, but Trump's actions in Venezuela are our perfect

example of what happens when, you know, the United States, you know, its bid to go global fails and it has to return to its hemisphere. And that's where the Monroe Doctrine is so important. Latin America is the first place in which the United States got a sense of itself as an overseas power. You know, it was able to project its power, its financial power, its cultural power, its military power beyond its own borders. And even saying that is a little bit tricky because the United States borders were always changing. I mean, the United States borders, the expansive nature of the United States, where it actually took Texas and took Mexico. So it wasn't just that it was dealing with Latin America. It was literally gobbling up Latin America on its way to

the Pacific. But setting that aside, working within the hemisphere and learning how to deal with other nations. Latin America is absolutely central to that, and that's one of the reasons why the Monroe Doctrine rises as an importance, because it supposedly provides a kind of guideline for that.

Now, over the years that Monroe Doctrine itself has expanded. Presidents explicitly expanded. Over a boundary dispute in Venezuela and Guyana, in which the United States was supporting Venezuela and Great Britain was supporting British Guyana,

Grover Cleveland declared that the Monroe Doctrine granted the United States absolute sovereignty over the whole Western Hemisphere. That's a pretty big jump from, you know, we're going to interpret any event that happened somewhere on our peace and happiness. There's on our peace and happiness to buy fiat our will is lore in the hemisphere. And then in 1904, along similar lines, Theodore Roosevelt, when he was president, he expanded the doctrine with his own. corollary to what he called international police power to suppress chronic wrongdoing in Latin America. Now, I must say that most of that chronic wrongdoing was provoked by U.S. banks and U.S. mercenaries and U.S. oil extractors. And there's a long history of forcing loans on countries that they can't pay off.

And it leads to all sorts of instability, then civil war. and then the U.S. government is called in to settle the problem that these private interests created. So Roosevelt expands the Monroe Doctrine into a kind of standing universal police warrant that will allow the United States back whenever it will and whenever it wants. On April 4, 23, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16.

So, didn't FDR also reinterpret it? But it didn't last long? Another Roosevelt reinterpreted. No, not really, but FDR actually reversed course 100. 80 degrees. In 1933, he renounced the right of the United States to intervene. It is longstanding demands by Latin American jurists and politicians and diplomats to give up the right of conquest. I mean, the United States continued to hold on to the right of conquest throughout the 19th century. It basically justified the war with Mexico, Indian removal. The right of conquest was taught in U.S. textbooks up until the 1920s. Latin America had revoked the right of conquest with its independence because Spanish American

nations came into the world together already a league of nations, seven nations that had to learn to live with each other on a crowded continent. The United States came into being a single nation on the eastern coast of a great landmass that it imagined as empty. Obviously, it wasn't empty. There was Native Americans. That was Mexican, Spaniards. But the United States, there was no doubt that the United States was going to reach the Pacific, and it held on and used the doctrine of conquest in order to justify taking all of that land. Latin America was constantly trying to force the United States

to accept that the doctrine of conquest was abrogated, was void, and it wasn't until 1933 that it did, and it was Roosevelt who did that, and he recognized the absolute sovereignty of Latin American nations, and he gave up the right of intervention. And that was an enormous turnaround in your way. US power. It didn't weaken US power by any means. It actually strengthened it because it focused it taught the United States how to exercise power more efficiently. And it organized Latin America. It was 10 years of goodwill that really got Latin America kind of on board for the coming war

against fascism. There was a lot of fear among strategists within the Franklin Roosevelt administration that all of Latin America could have gone the way of Spain. I mean, a lot of the sociological variables that led to the rise of fascism or phalanjism in Spain were present in Latin America. That was a large group of servile peasants, a small group of landowners, patrician conservative Catholics, increasingly militant unions and peasants threatening the power of the landowners. class. You know, that was Spain, but it was also Latin America writ large. And if Latin America felt philangism, then, you know, the United States would be kind of cornered between Nazism, fascism and phalanchesism. Roosevelt's conceding to Latin America's demand to give up the right

intervention basically tilted the playing field to the left in Latin America. You know, Roosevelt tolerated economic nationalists. He let revolutionaries in Mexico, Nationalized Standard Oil and had appropriated massive amounts of U.S. own property. And it created enormous goodwill and set the stage for the United States' entrance into World War II from a position of strength and continental unity. So you mentioned, okay, at various times, the jurists in Latin America, they push back against this notion of American absolute sovereignty in these fights. This gets to a question. I see it debated on Twitter a lot. What do you say to someone who says international law doesn't exist?

What is international law doesn't exist? And how is this term useful? Well, I'm an historian. I'm not a lawyer or a jurist. So I tend to see things in terms of power relations. So I think I see law as a moral venue that is created, that creates a set of normative principles in which people can fight over. So, you know, obviously the international law doesn't exist

in some void in which absolute justice is going to happen. You know, the most powerful country decides the exception. And, you know, the United States, to the degree that countries like the United States submit to a system of international law, it usually was during moments of weakness, like when Roosevelt did it in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression and with fascism on the rise. But it does great these norms and these principles that people fight and argue over. And so, yes, and the liberal international law order that has supposedly governed the world since the creation of the United Nations in 1945, the hypocrisies and the variances and exceptions are many. And there's always workarounds and the United States and the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union certainly found ways to skirt, you know, any kind of limits that were placed on them might. international law. But it does kind of create a venue, right? A moral arena in which right and wrong

could be understood and argued over. You know, there's other very little recourse for poor and weak nations to defend themselves. I mean, we can go back to lucidity's, right? The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. And the conceit that there is such a thing as international law that is somehow transcendent of power relations is, you know, it might just be a conceit, but it still at least creates terms on which nations could deal with each other. And, you know, and again, Latin America in the United States is absolutely a perfect example of that. For Latin America's commitment to sovereignty and to cooperative relations was largely forged in relationship to living under what was becoming the most powerful nation.

and world history as it moved across the Pacific, as it took Texas, as it took Mexico, as it took Cuba, as it took Puerto Rico, as it took Panama. So you had these jurists like writing law books and coming up with these legal principles. And the way they get implemented, though, often is really about power. So, you know, Argentine legal theorists, for instance, Luis Drago, for instance, at the early 20th century, when Italian and British and German warboats were showing up at Venezuela trying to collect debt, debt that had gone back to the colony that European banks were claiming that Venezuela owed because the Spanish crown, you know, contracted loans in 1776 and whenever they did. Luis Drago issued a principle, the Drago doctrine, that you cannot use coercion to collect debt.

Now, the United States collected plenty of debt through coercion, and we could look at Donald Trump and what's going on in Venezuela right now. But the United States kind of like the Drago doctrine. They didn't want Italian and German and British warships flitting around the Caribbean bombing the coast of Colombia or Venezuela trying to seize hold of the custom house to get the receipts. They thought that, okay, so we'll support the Drago doctrine. will give us a leverage in keeping Europe out of our backyard. So you kind of see the back and forth between lore as a kind of moral principle that transcends social power, but then it's obviously subordinated and implemented through social power. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now.

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reasserting its preeminence in the Western Hemisphere. And I don't know how you measure preeminence, right? That seems a pretty broad term. Meanwhile, Trump has talked very explicitly about Venezuelan oil belonging to the U.S. There's no regime change on the horizon. They're not pressing for that. So what is the ultimate goal of all of this? What are they aiming for?

Well, you know, it's hard to say, as I said earlier, Trump is doing what a number of his predecessors have done during moments of of the U.S. kind of recession of U.S. power in the world. They turn back to Latin America. But in some ways, it's pure Trumpism, right? It's just this theatrical spectacle. You know, he said it was about oil. Well, first it was about immigration, then it was about gangs, then it was about fentanyl and drugs, and then he landed on oil, getting our oil back. Oil is trading at an all-time low. Maybe not an all-time low, but it's pretty low. The market is filled, glutted with oil. And to get Venezuela back online is going to cost an enormous amount of capital investment. And it's not a lot of oil companies that are rushing. You're going to rush into

Venezuela and do that. You know, I think Trump there was just playing to his base. I think he was, you know, I think his base likes the idea of Trump as a pirate. Trump as a colonial plunderer, you know, and yeah, yeah, we'll get our oil back. You know, just like with the Iraq war in 2003, there's always ways to get oil, right? There's many ways to get oil. Like, you don't have to start a global war on terror in order to secure Iraqi oil. You could have just, you know, made a deal with Saddam Hussein and got the oil. You could have did the same thing with, you know, so material interests are always understood through a prism of ideology. And so part of it was that Venezuela has been in crisis for a long time, and that's a whole other story for a whole other show. And, you know, a

Hedgeaman like the United States can't have that kind of crisis. I mean, millions of Venezuelans were fleeing the country. I mean, you don't have to be carrying water for Trump's nativism and its border policies at all to say that that kind of disruption and that kind of chaos can't go on forever in a regional hegeman's hinterland. And so you have to kind of do something. The question is, what are you going to do? And Trump seems to like these targeted attacks, right? Whether they're in Iran, whether in Nigeria, you know, these one and done attacks. And I think he was sold on the idea that, you know, if they just took out Maduro and left the Maduro state intact, because it is very much ingrained and embedded in Venezuelan society, I think there were a couple of intelligent

people in Marco Rubio's State Department that didn't want to see a repeat of 2003 with what happened they have to de-batification in Iraq, that complete chaos. So Trump was convinced that you do this one-and-done thing, and then you just kind of continue to threaten the country in order to it. It corresponds to his way of being. There's no morality. There's no normative sense. There's no idealism. You know, normally when presidents turn back to Latin America to kind of regroup or rebalance after global crises, they kind of come up with new kind of worldviews to widen their electoral base, the deep in their coalition, to, you know, they try to create a sense of hegemony, right? So you had FDR using Latin America to put forth a kind of social democratic continental New Deal.

Then Reagan, after Vietnam, a kind of muscular anti-communist liberalism. understood in moral terms, a kind of reassertion of American purpose, American sets of itself as a defender of world freedom, you know, and these become kind of governing ideologies that are durable. They last. I mean, the New Deal coalition lasted for decades up until the 1970s. Reaganism lasted, you know, at least until Barack Obama, if not, if not even further in terms of the worldview. I mean, Trump isn't even true. trying to cobble together a new worldview, right? Trump isn't coming up with any kind of, you know, he's not doing it for freedom, he's not doing it for individual rights, he's not,

he's certainly not doing it for social democracy, you know, he's demanding tribute, right? He's just trying to turn Venezuela into a vassal state. But I think that speaks to the moral emptiness of him and his political movement. And Reagan and FDR are, over majoritarian movements, right? They won overwhelmingly at the electoral. You know, Trump pretty much is running a minority movement that is only in power because of the anti-majoritarian political structure of the United States and Trump's dominance of the Republican Party. So he doesn't seem interested in all in turning Trumpism into a governing coalition. He just wants to continue to stoke the culture wars, continue to, you know, stoke the grievances of tribal nationalism of the American firsters. And hence the Monroe Doctrine, you know, to bring it back to the Monroe Doctrine.

The Monroe Doctrine and American First Nationalism, there was always a strong kind of correlation between the two. American first nationalists, the pre-Trump ones, the ones from the 1920s and leading up into World War II, they liked the Monroe Doctrine because it wasn't university. It was an international law. It was customary law specifically related to U.S. power within its hemisphere. And so the Monroe Doctrine, it makes sense that Trump, as the standard bearer of today's iteration of America First nationalism, would latch on to the Monroe Doctrine as a kind of substitute for liberal internationalism. Yeah, I think this is maybe the most fascinating element of all. The complete lack of pretense, really, right? And obviously, you mentioned at various times, international policy has had some storyline.

We all know what the story, oh, we were going to turn Iraq into a democracy, and then that would spread throughout the Middle East, and then there would be other democracies, and then be rich, it would be stable, etc. There's some story. I think that is so striking about Trumpism, or at least this particular move, really just sort of of the complete lack of like a broader story. You mentioned also, of course, which I think is notable about Trump foreign policy, this appeal of these sort of one and done things because, okay, there seems to be post Iraq, this sort of national backlash towards, or certainly

post-Afghanistan, this backlash towards boots on the ground, long wars, forever wars, etc. But there also does seem to be this impulse of just, yeah, but we still want to do something powerful. We still want to show that we're tough. And so then the way that they solve the problem is by these one-offs, we're going to do one bombing run in Iran. We're going to arrest a foreign leader. Is there any precedent for that or is this truly like sort of feel uncharted territory when you think about these arcs of foreign policy? Yeah. Yeah. Well, in Latin America, there are two precedents. One is obviously Manuel Norega in 1989 when George H.W. Bush sent about 30,000 Marines in to capture Noriega on a warrant, basically to arrest him.

It was considered a police action, and that's how it was legally justified. Noriega was an ally of the United States. He was a CIA asset in the 1980s. He was very much involved in the complexities of Iran-Contra. But he played all sides against the other. I think he was selling information and intelligence to Cuba. He was also working with Mossad. And when the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall fell, his usefulness had largely come to an end and the United States decided that they were going to take him out.

There was a Cy Hirsch report in the New York Times that detailed his deep involvement in drug running and it couldn't be ignored anymore. And so they went in and they arrested him. So that's one precedent. A lesser discussed one is in Haiti in 2005, Jean Petron Aristide was. president of Haiti. And there was a U.S.-back coup, but it was one of these coups that were kind of carried out by democracy promotion organizations that were funded by AID and the National Endowment for Democracy, that destabilized the country to the point where Irish steed couldn't govern. And George W. Bush sent Marines in and basically put a gun to his head and flew him to the

Congo, where he still lives now, where it's in exile. So it's happened before. I think what is unprecedented is this idea that we are just going to accept oil tribute from Venezuela, that we're just going to give these directives to the Venezuelan government, and they're going to send. I mean, we talk about international law. All of this stuff is just unilateral U.S. projections of its power. I mean, the United States placed sanctions on Venezuela. That's the United States. not international law. I mean, newspapers talk about it as, you know, Venezuela is trying to violate sanctions by finding workarounds to sell its oil. It's like, why not? It's their oil. It's the United States just putting the sanctions on just because it's not like it's not like the nations of the world

voted on putting sanctions on Venezuela. But in any case, I think what is unprecedented is what they're working out and they seem to be working it out on a as you go basis. It doesn't seem like they have a clear plan. You're right. They don't want it to be 2003. Iraq. They don't want boots on the ground. They know the rank and file of Trump has a very low tolerance for casualties and fatalities. And America First nationalism doesn't want to be involved in nation building. But what you're seeing is, I think, two distinct trajectories. On the one hand, they're imagining some system in which that is well it just continues to kind of pay a tribute. to the United States through oil.

But then when Marco Rubio talks about it, he says, well, we have these different phases of reconstruction and transition to democracy planned out in Venezuela. So that kind of suggests more of a direct role in pushing the country in a certain direction politically, not just leaving it as it is as long as it continues to send the ships, you know, just like during colonial times. I mean, the colony sent the ships filled with gold to Spain.

and sending the ships filled with oil to Port Arthur, Texas. All right, Greg, we're going to have to leave it there. But thank you so much for coming on all thoughts. That was fantastic. Really appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks so much for having it. Joe, that was absolutely fascinating.

The point that stood out to me was this idea of going into your own backyard to assert your dominance as a sort of replacement or offset to a decline of multilateralism elsewhere in the world. Like, that kind of makes sense. And it's very interesting that there's this pattern, this historical pattern in the United States that essentially Latin America is where we go to dominate when we're internally weak. And of course, I think people would agree that the U.S. is feeling particularly weak on a number of angles. There's obviously the sort of existential threat, anxiety about the rise of China, et cetera. So maybe it's this kind of thing, okay, we are not going to be, at least for the moment, the global power,

that we once were, et cetera, but in the absence of that, at least we can still establish that we get to decide who the president of various Latin American states. Right. Latin American dominant power. Yeah. By the way, have you seen the Marco Rubio meme where he's like covered in all these different flags from Latin America? I have not seen that.

Responsible for everything. I know. I have seen the memes about the various jobs that Marco Rubio is sort of defund. facto having to plan on this. Rubio strikes me as like a sort of interesting bridge figure between this sort of, because, you know, I think of him as sort of being like a sort of retro like Cold Warrior type and someone who does probably have like believes like, oh, we're going to like spread democracy throughout the world and wants to see Latin America sort of be, you know, run by liberal Democrats, capitalist countries and so forth. But obviously he's in an administration that does not have the same

impulse for that. And so, you know, to some extent, it feels like this operation, it's like, it's like they're going to like split the difference, right? So he gets to be involved in taking out a Latin American leader, which he finds to be hostile. But the idea that like it does not feel like this administration is going to have much follow through in terms of, okay, now we really want to set Venezuela on a new political course. Right. I mean, I guess we'll see ultimately what they prioritize there. But in the meantime, shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest, Greg Granton. He's at Greg

Grandin. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armin, Dashel Bennett, at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks. For more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Oddlots for the daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord. Discord.g.g. slash oddlots. And if you enjoy Oblots, if you found this conversation and our coverage on Venezuela to be useful, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes, absolutely ad-free.

All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening. I'm Francine Lacquah, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new podcast, Leaders with Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from Heads of State to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious, who are these people as leaders? I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine.

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