TRASHFUTURE - Black Bag Diplomacy ft. Jana Silverman

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Professor of International Relations at UFABC Brazil and DSA International Co-Chair Dr. Jana Silverman joins us to discuss, based on history, what we can now about the recent American crimes and outrages in Venezuela. Also, this raises some questions as to the legitimacy of the FIFA Peace Prize.   Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here!   TF Merch is still available here!   *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I'm so annoyed that we started 2026 by I was relaxing and then a bunch of guys rolled into my secret cave where I play Crusader Kings 3 all under heaven. And then they blackbagged me and they drag me back to the TF studio where I'm now being forced at gunpoint to record a podcast. All of us have been blackbagged, flex cuffed, and then dragged in front of our podcasting microphones back to work after the holiday. And I have to condemn this as an unprecedented violation of international law that will surely make the world less safe. Well, that's how they're bringing people back to the office. They're just like, you know, if we have to do it, we're kidnapping you and putting you in your cubicle. I'm a tier one anti-work-from-home operator You think that they're joking, no, I'm even on this fucking episode

We're all in the goddamn detention, so We're all wearing our, like, yeah, we're all wearing our Nike tack Kind of a surreal video podcast That we're doing when none of us can see anything Because we all have blindfolds on But we've got those stupid, the great big microphones Every podcast ever has Yeah, exactly

I mean, the worst part for Riley was they put him in the grey Nike sweatsuit And he was like, I would never wear this voluntarily They like zip up the Nike jacket on you and you're like thrashing against the restraints I'll tell you how you think The worst part of course is that I was hoping that we would get taken By the Lib SEAL Special Forces

But we got taken by the Chud Delta Special Forces You and I were talking about this beforehand This is like Maduro Which is we're going to spend the whole episode talking about Maduro got taken by Delta Force partially because like Trump likes them more and, like, it's interesting, right? Because the Navy SEALs obviously also Chuds,

but under the Obama administration, they were able to sort of market themselves upwards very effectively as like, you know, here is your elite surgical philosopher king strike package, sir, right? Which is extremely funny if you've ever encountered Navy SEALs, which I have because, like, they're basically, like, the best way I could describe it is, what if the Khmer Rouge were surfers?

But they were able to, like, clean themselves up for kind of, like, in order to sell themselves, like the guys to do that stuff. And now, of course, it's a different era. Woke has gone. And with Hegseth and with Trump in office, it's now DELSA, the army guys, being like, look how many push-ups these guys can do.

Well, yeah, because Hegseth basically has more or less the same amount of military experience that I have, except I'm not be like, I'm the fucking warrior king and I'm going to be a secretary of defense. I'm just a random ass dude, fucking who knows how to use microphone preamps. And it's, he's also a alcoholic and a psychopath and a violent abuser.

And I, but it does make sense. I hadn't thought of that. But it does make sense that I'm Team Army, thus I use Team Armies, cool guys, thus I use SFOD Delta as opposed to. I think it's also funny, right? Because although those two units might be sort of culturally, broadly interchangeable, it's really, one of the funniest outcomes of this to me would be embedding a kind of like partisan American janissary class where it's like,

seals are the woke special forces unit and delta is the chud one and so if you're if you're like you know at 1 a m waking up in a cold sweat hearing helicopters you have to listen to see whether or not they're playing we are charlie kirk out of the loudspeaker or if there's a little sign attached to the side that says in this black hawk we believe i mean to be honest with you if you want the real annoying military like internal commentary at the time the bin laden raid was absolutely not seal sort of domain. Like, in terms of what Delta is and what they were designed to do,

it's 100% that. It's just that there was a guy who was a former SEAL at the head of J-Soc at the time. Like, if you're going to send people in to do like a direct action raid like this and then immediately egress, like, that's 100% Delta. Like, the politics of it are fucked to the point where like, I'm, I'm like, this is the most shameful call

of duty level I've ever watched in my life because it seems so fucking surreal, but it's real and it's like an absolute moral crime. And I'm mortified by it. We're not going to get woke too, but we might get like NeoLib too. And if we do, I look forward to being blackbagged by the, the Lib special forces where it's a bunch of guys with plate carriers and Columbia quarterzips underneath. It's like, boost on the back of my neck and I'm like feeling the tread pattern. I'm like, are those sparries?

Well, actually, they're actually going to be, they're a little happier and thus less likely to do some kind of like absurd abusing detainees to you because at least they got to leave Fayetteville, North Carolina to go on this mission to blackbag you. we need to be egressing to the Deloitte Pride float at 0700. It's like at least I'm not in southern pines right now. I can do something cool. I can go to Glasgow and raid a tower block like that Indonesian Kung Fu movie. So in a second, we're actually going to be talking a little bit about the history, context, and likely future of American intervention in South America with Janice Silverman, who's a professor of international relations at UFA in Brazil and on the DSA International Committee co-chair as well.

Yeah, that's what we store all this like, serious stuff if you're like, why aren't they doing serious analysis of this? Why are they doing bits about seals wearing quartersips? Yeah, that's coming. But first, we just want to extend the Felford again award of the podcast to, of course, Maria Corina Machado. That is right. We talk about it on the interview, but like the two most cucked groups in all of this being the kind of Venezuelan dissident democracy pro sort of overthrow movement and Europe. And I appreciate that a great deal. So, uh, but this is, this was a quote.

This was actually published by the Nobel Prize Twitter account while like Mike Vining Jr. was flying over Karakis in a helicopter. While a bunch of guys are like fast roping directly onto Maduro's bed, the Nobel Peace Prize Twitter account is like, uh, Fearless Girl. Or JPEC. Yeah. This is the, this is the quote. Freedom is not something we wait for, but something we become.

It is a personal choice. And the sum of those choices forms the civic ethos that must be renewed every day. Yeah, this is the same as my college application essay where it's like, if I tell them I'm gay, I'll definitely get in. Save the world, my final message. This is, this is a level of like, soy in the face of like preposterously epic operator guy. I last saw at the end of the movie Sicario.

Soi in the face of danger is such a great concept. Oh my God. So this is, I guess, Maria Carita Machado in realizing, Washing that, yeah, in realizing that, like, because Trump got the FIFA Peace Prize and she got the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump saw her as upstaging him and therefore was like, get her out of here. Only the FIFA prize winner is allowed to invade Venezuela. The Nobel means nothing. Now, she's just like on whatever Kamala Harris was on. Like, whoever opposes Donald Trump is doomed to talk like that. So, yeah, this is actually from the FT. Mr. Trump had never warmed to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Machado who'd organized a presidential campaign in 2024, earning her the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

Since Mr. Trump's re-election, Machado has gone out of her way to praise him, calling him a champion of freedom, mimicking his talking points on election fought in the United States, and even dedicating her peace prize to him. It's just, it's so fucking sad to be like, yeah, I want to be, I want to be president, and I want to get rid of the dictator.

And that obliges me to, like, hang out with Donald Trump and be like, yeah, the fucking Somali daycare fraud or whatever is very bad, Mr. President. And then after all that, he still doesn't respect you because weirdly Trump respects strength, and this does not project strength. He should have tried being a handsome man. That's the only thing he cares about. Yeah. Yeah. It's not too late. Maria Machado. There is still time. There is still time, Maria Machado. You could be president of Venezuela. You know what you must do. We're about to find out in real time whether or not T-boy swag is enough to work on Donald Trump. This is the worst Pedro Maldovar movie I've ever

seen. We're going to talk with Dr. Silverman just now. And then we're going to be back in a little while to do a little bit more sort of speculation on the maga-cremlinology. Look at different world leader responses and wonder what the fuck's going to come next. So, do that any further ado, I throw to us. So I'm going to take us into the interview portion of our segment by welcoming Jenna Silverman, who's the professor of international relations at UFABC in Brazil, DSA International Committee co-chair, and all around, nowhere more about of all of the things that we're going to be discussing here on the podcast today. Jana, welcome to the show. Hi. Great to be here. Thanks, everyone. Live from perhaps the most remote place we've ever talked to a guest before. To kick us off, I want to read from an article. This is actually from November 19th in the New York Times entitled, Trump said to authorize CIA plans for covert action in Venezuela. And I think the two paragraphs in this article are essentially the essence of what's happening. And we could use that to go into a little bit of history. Here are the paragraphs. While Mr. Trump emphasizes Venezuela's role in the drug trade,

or illegal immigration when he discusses the issue in public. He's discussed in private the country's huge oil reserves and American companies gaining access to them. Venezuela officials have told Americans that Mr. Maduro may be willing to step down after a transition of two to three years, according to people briefed in the matter. However, delay in Mr. Maduro is giving up power is considered a non-starter with the White House, which continues to build up in the region. So let's just starting from there, right? We have resources. We have, I'd say, a blatant power grab for those resources, the managing, the direct management of the governance and other country by the United States. Let's seat this a little bit in history. I think before we started the

show, Jana, you mentioned the 1989 ouster of Noriega in Panama. We've also been talking about gunboat diplomacy in the 19th century, some compradore regimes in the 1920s. Let's put like the American perception of itself as the main electoral force, if you like, in South and Central America in a historical context. Sure, of course. So obviously it all goes back a little bit further, right? know, 1823, which is the December 1823, James Monroe announces his famous doctrine, which again, there's a lot of controversy about it, about how much it really called for direct intervention by the United States in Latin America at that time, or it's more just asserting the fact that it was under a sphere of influence and trying to keep out other European imperial powers of the time,

namely countries like Spain, well, Spain was already there, but, you know, France, Britain, etc. Fast forward a little bit and you start seeing a sort of more aggressive interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine over time, especially after the United States passes through its own internal conflicts in the 1860s during the Civil War, right? So this is where you see, again, these famous cases of gunblot diplomacy, which again tend to happen more in the areas with more geographical proximity, the United States, right? So we are talking about the Caribbean. We're obviously talking about Mexico. We're obviously talking about central. American, and we're obviously talking about Venezuela, you know, and when we mean democracy, and literally diplomacy, sorry, it literally meant, you know, the United States sending warships either directly as a government or privatized through other, what they called at the time filibusters. I know today we used filibuster that has a different meaning, right?

But literally filibusters were, you know, these sort of private agents who came in and, you know, invaded countries. This literally happened in Nicaragua, and I believe it was in the 1870s, where it was governed by an American for two years, and I believe it was the TAP government that actually recognized it diplomatically. So this happened in Venezuela, and again, it's also important to mention that it wasn't just the United States that was doing this. Britain did this quite often, mostly to make good on debts, sovereign debts that these countries held. is again, going back a little bit further again, in the early 19th century, 1810s, 1820s, that's when all these countries were having their wars of independence.

You know, Venezuela played a particularly important role. You know, it was the home of the birthplace of Simon Bolivar, which was the, you know, the liberator of most of South America, right? But these countries entered, these newly independent countries in the 1820s, the 30s, entered into massive debt, you know, to be able to pay their armies, you know, establish working governments, you know, hire police, those kind of basic functions, set up schools, et cetera. So, again, depending on where these countries were located geographically in the region, some had stronger ties, financial and political ties with Britain in particular, like we're talking Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, and then the ones close to the United States, like Venezuela, like Mexico, like Central America, had their principal ties with the United States. States. And then, fast forward a little bit more, we get to the 1890s. So who comes into the scene Eddie Roosevelt, right? And he creates the infamous, I would say, Roosevelt corollary, which basically

states very clearly that the United States now gives itself the right to preemptively invade countries and take political control over Latin American countries if they discord with the way they are governing themselves, either politically or economically. And that takes its material expression in the Spanish Civil War, right? You know, which is, you know, what I think it lasted about two, three months, where the United States comes in, kind of does this trick.

It tries to say that it was allied with the Cuban independence forces. What in reality, it wants to take, you know, wants to get the Spanish out and obtain more direct political and economic control over the island. And you have, so that they win the war very easily, quickly,

and like I said, in about three months. And Cuba becomes nominally an independent country. And there's also an interesting story about that, you know, Cuba could have been, you know, the 51st or whatever number of state it wouldn't have been at the time. But there was a lot of backlash by U.S. politicians at the time because they felt that there were too many Afro-Cubans in the island. And it would mess up this quote-unquote racial balance in the United States to incorporate Cuba as a state. So that's why it was not incorporated, became an independent state nominally. but you had the Platt Amendment, which was incorporated into the Cuban Constitution, I believe it was 1902, 1903, which basically said that the United States had a right to, again, directly intervene in Cuban politics, Cuban affairs if they discorded with the way that the government was handling things, even though Cuba was, again, a nominally independent state. And so that's when Puerto Rico becomes a colony, in addition to Philippines, Guam, etc. So all that to say that, and this is again, skipping over Mexico, which would be a whole, you know, our podcast in and of itself about the history

of U.S. Mexican intervention, right? That's all that to say that U.S. presence, uh, in the region, in this sort of aggressive, you know, sort of unilateral, uh, perspective has been very, very obvious, you know, I would say since the mid-19th century. So what they're doing in Venezuela, you know, long story short, is nothing new. It struck me that in some ways, this kidnapping had more in common with the sort of 19th century earlier. 20th century interventions than the sort of later 20th century ones. As far as I can remember, it's the first time in many decades that the U.S. has intervened directly in South America as opposed to Central America rather than through

using sort of those own countries' militaries or the CIA sort of overtly, like overt American military action. It's sort of like testing my memory for anything this sort of brazen and this resource focus. Do you think that's fair to say? Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, again, if we get to the, we take, you know, again, fast forward again, to the mid-20th century, you know, we're at the height of the Cold War,

and that's when you see a series of very aggressive U.S. interventions. But again, not all those U.S. interventions are explicitly or entirely military. This all starts in the 1950s with the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenes, who was the sort of left, the second lap leading, you know, leaptleading of the country. of Guatemala. It was sort of a test of how the U.S. would intervene in years to come in places like Indonesia, Iran, and then later Brazil, Brazil becomes the next test in 1964. And what you do is you get this kind of combination of, you know, they set up military cooperation.

They set up these sort of think tanks to sort of spread this idea of, you know, anti-communism among the intellectuals, among the population in general. And so what you have, and the United States actually goes to the point of actually. stationing large gunboats out, you know, right outside of Rio de Janeiro, the day of the coup, which happens again on April 1st, 1964. But they don't actually have to go in and militarily intervene because the Brazilian Army does it for them. And this is kind of a similar pattern that then repeats in places like Uruguay in 1973, Chile in 1973, Argentina, 1976, etc. Right. So you are right. You don't see as much, you know, again, it's not that there isn't military intervention. It's just

not troops on the ground per se. And to be to Sarah, that's not what we saw either, right? You know, we saw this sort of, quote, unquote, surgical strike happening, which I would say is maybe more akin to what we thought in the operation against Osama bin Laden than a full-scale military invention, you know, compared to what we saw in Nicaragua in the, you know, 1870s, right? It's interesting to me as well in that if you compare it to the sort of interventions of the 60s and 70s, there isn't a sort of a Cold War block there, the kind of threat

that Venezuela could pose to the U.S. that's been confected of sort of like drug trafficking or sometimes it's sort of stretched to Iran and Hezbollah as well, there's not anything as sort of like as proximate as there was with, you know, with Cuba or with Chile or anywhere else. And it really seems so much more, I don't know, distracted in some ways. It seems so much more like there's no kind of need to legitimize this or claim any kind of legitimacy for it, which is that's the part that feels like a kind of a throwback to me. To me also, I'm reminded of 1983 in Grenada just because of the fact that that was seen as, I mean, if I recall correctly, even the United Kingdom government privately expressed displeasure at Reagan for having

invaded Grenada and overthrown the government and then left, if I remember correctly, not too long after. I also was reminded of Honduras in 2009 where the military, military arrested Manuel Zelaya, but it wasn't the U.S. military, even though the U.S. does have a presence in Honduras. It was the, you know, the Honduran Supreme Court said that Zelaya's planned for a constituent assembly was illegal. And then, then the military came into his house and arrested him at gunpoint and put him on a plane. And that to me, it's like, it's, but I agree with everything you're saying that, like, it's strange to see the U.S. do this, uh, specifically against the head of state out of nowhere. And the times that it's happened in the past,

like, uh, like you were saying, John, it's more like what happened when, where in, you in Pakistan in 2011 versus something that we've seen in the United States, you know, in recent decades. It's just kind of, there's just something very surreal about it, but I definitely feel like there's this kind of rhyming precedent, if that makes sense. Yeah. If we're going to look at U.S. interventions, you know, in Latin America, and again, military and non, you know, sort of overtly militarily, right? You know, because I think that was great, Nate, that you just mentioned, you know, the first, I would say, kind of U.S. act coup, because let's call it what it was, even though that was during the, you know,

quote, liberal Obama administration in 2009 in Honduras, you know, let's remember shortly after that 2012, you had a very, you know, sort of strange parliamentary coup that lasted for 24 hours to ouster the only left-leaning president in the history of Paraguay, Fernando Lugo. That happened. And then, you know, shortly after that, you have the coup against Dilma Rostep in Brazil, which was, you know, the most shocking, right? And then after that, you start seeing this series of, you know, what we call law fair, right? Which, you know, where are they learning this from?

You know, the Department of Justice. And again, this is not conspiracy theory. You know, there were all the, you know, the leaked text and information that was uncovered, you know, years ago by Glenn Greenwald showing the direct illusion between, you know, the judge that ended up prosecuting Lula and involved directly in the sort of political movement to Alas Gilma in Brazil with the DOJ, right?

So again, I would say, you know, on one level, you know, that the business attack against Maduro was shocking because it was a directly military attack on a certain level, right? On the other hand, you know, it's not shocking at all, right? Because they've been doing this, you know, basically for all of U.S. modern history under different guises. And getting back to, you know, the issue of motives, right? I mean, I would say, and again, maybe being an academic, sometimes we tend to overthink things. I think there is a sort of ideological underpinning. I think that's why Marco Rubio in particular is so, you know, gung ho on this, and that's why he's got his sights on Cuba next, right?

Even though, you know, the main countries that actually export drugs into the United States, you know, obviously Mexico was a stopping point, but the main producers of drugs, in addition to Colombia, are Peru and Ecuador, which are both ruled by right-wing governments right now. So I think there is an issue about, you know, U.S. hegemony, being weakened, right? You know, Bao has been as well survived over the last nine years of, you know, after being heavily sanctioned and basically being outside of the sort of the world financial system because of U.S. financial sanctions, they've survived because of Russia and China, right?

What is the number one trading partner of literally every country in South America right now? It is China. So I think, again, maybe it's not so ideological in this idea, you know, battle of ideas between capitalism and quote-unquote communism, but it is about hegemony, right? It's about the ascension of the brick, right? So it isn't just, you know, obviously, narco-trafficking, it's just their grasping and straws. It's about oil. I think on a certain level, it could also be about, you know, immigration, you know, in Venezuela. Over 8 million Venezuelans have migrated out of the country, again, in the last 10 years or so

because of the economic crisis caused in part by sanctions. So that's definitely something to keep an eye also looking at Cuba and Mexico, but I'm saying it's certainly not about democracy, right? We all know, you know, Venezuelan democracy is shun as flawed as, you know, lots of other partners in the region. And your U.S. partners like El Salvador, like Peru itself, right? You know, never mind, you know, places in other regions like Saudi Arabia, et cetera, et cetera. This is like a very quick question on my part because I'd like her opinion. I really like to hear her opinion about like why are like establishment, like media outlets kind of like saying that this is, you know, this at least part of it is like

as it is a sort of attempt to kind of restore democracy or bring democracy when like everyone in the administration is basically overtly saying no it absolutely isn't like we are very clear about what we want and also like I did see a very compelling case which I'm not saying is true but it would be very fitting for this administration to be like yeah they went for Maduro because like he kept doing the Trump dance um and kept mocking him and his drip was too fresh his girl his girl was too bad etc like that's you know I'm not actually, like, unconvinced that might be one of the reasons why they were just like, fuck this guy. You know, there are lots of other reasons for doing it, but like the final straw was him doing the Trump dance better than Trump.

Well, I just watched that Trump dance last night and I have to say it is pretty damn cool. So what I would say about that is like on one level, right, you know, Trump's foreign policy when it, yeah, when it's totally concentrated in him and making these big decisions, it's completely unpredictable, just like all of his policy, right? you know, like I think a lot of it has to, you know, again, a lot of it is based on sort of his own personal reactions and opinions, you know, like let's, you know, another example is certainly a lot less drastic, right? You know, what, four months ago, you know, United States had slapped a ton of tariffs on Brazil, right? You know, the Latin America's largest economy. And then, you know, two months later, yeah, for Trump and Lula hook up at the UN General Assembly meeting and suddenly they're like best buddies and, you know, less a few weeks later, you know, almost all the tariffs are gone. So again, you know, I wouldn't completely discount the Trump dance theory, right? You know, but in terms of like his decision to like pull the trigger, right? You know, but I think obviously in the lead up to it, like that was not the factor, right? You know, they can, I mean, let's let's say, you know, like on a certain level, the United States has been planning this literally for years, if not, you know, over a decade,

you know, like, and again, talking about not necessarily militarily again, like talking about interventions by USAID and Ned funded programming, you know, to undermine, you know, the Chavista project, you know, you know, obviously the economic sanctions causing chaos in the country. Like, these are all things that led up to, you know, this sort of last straw, right, which was the direct military intervention. But again, you know, I think it's more to me, you know, again, this isn't going to solve anything regarding narco-trafficking. It's certainly not going to bring back political democracy in Venezuela, even though, you know, You know, again, I totally agree a lot of like sort of legacy media has been like repeating that as well as the European Union, right? It's it's about the United States reasserting its control of America and saying this is still our backyard, you know? I definitely think it's more about, you know, the Don Roe-Marctrine than it is about, you know, like they're using narco-trafficking to kind of appease domestic audiences, but it has nothing to do with it.

Yeah, I was thinking about this the other day because like when the inauguration, as in the Trump inauguration happened, like one of the things that he had said in his. speech that I think it's like really telling of just what this current administration is like, but something that was kind of overlooked was just like how resentful he was about like what he sort of perceived to be all the ailments of like his movement and the fact that he was blaming other people and blaming other countries. This was like very much at the heart of the heart of like his governance like in this time, which is about oh, other countries and other institutions and like secret forces are sort of undermining like American dominance, American hegemony. And the only way that you can solve them is through force. And so what we're going to do is like we're going to try stuff like sanctions, but that will be the last straw in terms of like non-military intervention. And like if the sanctions didn't sort of, you know, as you mentioned, like, you know, the sanctions were basically unworkable for the most part. They've like harmed Americans and they've harmed like, you know, I think it probably has had a really big impact on like his domestic kind of popularity even among his own base. And so I do wonder whether the end were the next step of like, you know, being guided by this resentment is not like is now just like, okay, all the options to do.

like a non-violent bullying. That's off the table. And now we're just going to use like all the, all of like American military power, which has been built up like, you know, over the call. You know, this is not a sort of Trump project in and of itself. Like, you know, as you sort of mentioned, like Obama and Biden have kind of paved the way for this. But it would make sense for someone like him to be like, okay, well, we just have like all this military power and no one can really stop us. So like, why is no one using it? Like it's a completely rational like Trump response to like the tariff's kind of not yielding the benefits that he necessarily wanted too. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think about, like, how does the U.S. like, maintain its

quote, unquote, exceptionalism, right? You know, for years, it's maintained it through economics, right? And that clearly, like, that's slipping and it's not coming back, you know, obviously, you know, the sort of competitive advantage that China has due to a number of reasons, not just, you know, low cost of labor, but also, you know, their advances in research and development, you know, like they spend so much more on science and technology, you know, per capita than the United States does, right? You know? And then other forms of U.S. degemony, soft power, right?

The idea of, like, using this cultural soft power, you know, above and beyond, like, Hollywood, right? Like, you can do that through foreign aid, right? And Trump completely dismantled U.S. aid, right? And other forms of ways of showing, you know, how the U.S. is like this nice, you know, benevolent hegemon, right, in the world. Although it is important to mention that, you know, even though 90 or something, you know, over 90% of USAID's programming was completely dismantled, the programming in Venezuela in Cuba was not entirely, right?

That was put back on the table just explicitly by remarkable Rubio. And then so what is left? You know, if you lose, and then political hegemia. Again, U.S. is losing its political hegemony through the brick, right? Not necessarily, you know, not because we're necessarily seeing a return to some kind of multilateral

world, but certainly bilateral, you know, again, with the extent of China. And so what is the U.S. left with? Military hegemony. And that's the only sort of type of power that, you know, uncontestedly, that the United States still has an upward advantage on than any other country in the world.

And so I think I totally agree. Like, you know, we can't win over their hearts and minds so let's just bomb the hell out of them. I'm curious as well, what you make is the sort of various little reports that have emerged here and there of this kind of process of negotiation that maybe was happening at some level, either with Maduro or with other elements of the Venezuelan government, and that is now kind of happening else in public

where the White House is trying to. sort of coerce Maduro's vice president into into sort of like doing what they want, which seems mostly to be oil focused. And that sort of reminded me, again, very sort of like 1920s, 1930s sort of Comprador stuff. And I just wonder what you make of it. Yeah, no, I think that was real. Again, to what level those talks were held and advanced is another question. But let's keep a mind also, you know, I want to say about three, four years ago. at 2021, early 2022, when the United States was

kind of confronting really high oil prices or really high oil prices for the United States, you know, I mean oil in the sense of gasoline at the pump, right? You know, what consumers are paying. You know, Biden, the Biden administration entered into talks with the Venezuelans, right?

It was interestingly brokered by the Katari, which is, again, another, you know, we could talk about that later, why them, you know, this sort of niche they've carved out for themselves. Exactly. right. But so, and it actually had some progress, right? You know, like they, they increased the amount of oil that this well, it exports the United States to kind of alleviate the pressure, you know, the price pressure at the palms, right? But then, you know, again, the sort of, once that problem gets, quote, resolved, you know, Biden clamps the sanctions back on. And obviously, you know, Trump's continued that. But is that, you know, even though there aren't official diplomatic relations with, you know, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. and the United States for quite some time now.

These informal, you know, channels do exist. I do believe there was some back channeling. And, you know, I think maybe Maduro kind of overplayed his hand or assume that there would be greater popular resistance or military resistance to any attempt at, you know, military intervention by the United States. It's just, it's striking to me on a sort of a personal level that I feel a little bit aggrieved, right? And I'm not doing the kind of like two things can be true at the same time thing here.

But if you look at, you know, other leaders that, you know, the U.S. has deposed, if you look at like Aende or if you look at Avent, you know, to put Maduro, who by my estimation was like, especially in the last few years, always kind of a joke in their company now by default is really like there's something farcical about it to me. And I don't know. Do you think I'm sort of justified in that? Well, again, we're living in the post-truth world right now, you know, obviously sort of, you know, this idea of, you know, Maduro is certainly to call Maduro's regime sort of democratic socialists. I would consider it a post-truth, right? You know, if it was. But at the same time, you know, again, and this is sort of me stepping back and taking more of a political approach as, you know, a leader of the International Committee of the Democratic Socialist of America. I mean, I don't think it's our role as, you know, socialist within the American Empire to be kind of like criticizing or analyzing very deeply, you know, kind of these regimes, right? Like our role is to, you know, stop the intervention, stop the sanctions, you know, have solidarity with the working classes of these of these countries, of countries around the world, right? But I mean, yeah, clearly you can't put it on the far with agenda, you know, like he literally, he, you know, developed autonomous working class power, right? You know, like Venezuela. I think, again, under Chavez, there was huge advances made in social programs, poverty reduction, you know, minimum wage increases, even food sovereignty issues. But what happened, you know, Chavez also didn't set, you know, didn't kind of prepare the conditions sort of materially for when the, you know, the commodities boom would end, right? And literally two years after Chavez died in 2013, commodities boom and, you know, the stanchions start getting slapped on. And so, you know, the Pedevesa, which is the Venezuelan nationalized oil company, can't get access to, like, the parts and the machinery they need to keep, you know, ramp up production more to compensate for the drop in oil prices.

And then everything, you know, that was kind of based on, that wasn't based on ideology, but was based on sort of just this capacity of the Venezuelan government to materially provide better poor citizens that completely collapsed. And so then Maduro, you know, he starts, you know, I think, I think, again, a lot of the Venezuelan people still, don't follow him legitimately because of this sort of political memory of how their lives materially improved under Chavez in particular. But at the same time, like, he's not trying to, you know, create independent working class power in the same way that agenda did, you know, without a doubt. So what I want to talk a little bit about with the time we have left is the day after. So what is the, what do we think, just based on understanding two things,

understanding American intervention in Latin and South America on the one hand, and also understanding American attempts at, I'm not going to say necessarily nation building, because they may just end up governing via the vice president, for example, like the state may stay somewhat intact. We don't actually know yet, really. But what do we think the likely day after looks like for Venezuelan society having just had its government removed? Well, I would say two things. First of all,

we've already seen the day after, right? And what we've seen so far is actually, it's surprisingly calm, right? you know, like I think there was, you know, there was a lot of sort of these right wingers wishcasting that the so-called Democrats of Venezuela inside the country would rise up and, you know, overthrow the entire Chumista regime, including the vice president. That certainly hasn't happened. And we've seen obviously how, you know, what Trump feels about, you know, our wonderful Nobel Peace Prize winner, according to Machado. And then on the other hand, like, yeah, I think, you know, it's still really an open question what can happen next, you know, sort of, and then the next week. And then the next week,

weeks or months or even years to come. Unfortunately, as we're talking about the recent history of Latin America, there's also this trend, right, of kind of vice presidents completely sort of abandoning the political projects that they were elected under, right? This obviously happened by Michelle Tamer,

who was the vice president who led the coup against Joe Moro's death in Brazil in 2016. But that also happened, you know, one or two years later in Ecuador, you know, Len Moreno, who was Rafael Correyes, the left wing, Raphael Cordia as vice president. He gets elected

once Rafael Correa can't run again due to term limit. And he completely and literally in the space of we, turns on a dime and implement liberal policies and a lot of Rapal Perez tries to indict for himself under corruption charges

etc. So all that to say like, you know, even though Delci Rodriguez the current acting president in Venezuela has impeccable Chavista credential. right, you know, she has never in any moment whatsoever shown to not be loyal to the regime, right? But anything can happen, right? And she has a boot on her neck, you know, very literally, Trump has made it very clear that we'll work with her if she does what we want her to do.

So I think there's a lot of difficult choices that, you know, her administration right now is going to have to face. I think the reality is, even though Maduro was, you know, arrested, was under a flagrant breach of international law and is going to be tried in the United States in a way that completely undermines any concept of what we call

a sovereign immunity for heads of state for crimes that are not considered you can only basically try a sovereign head of state for free crimes, right? You know, when they're in office which would be war crimes,

crimes against humanity, or genocide. That's why it would be possible to try someone like Netanyahu right now. But you can't try Maduro, especially in a foreign court, for crimes committed supposedly in his own country. You know, like we're talking about, you know, possession of arms, possession of firearms. That's not a crime in Venezuela, right? So, I mean, he's not even a crime in America, right? And that's why I don't live in the United States anymore, among other reasons.

But anyway, you know, I think so Maduro, but I think all, despite all the, the blatant illegality, you know, he's not going to be coming back to Venezuela. anytime soon, maybe not at all. So I think the reality is going to be how is Rodriguez going to respond to the thread. How is she going to be able to kind of thread the needle, right? Is she going to be able to attend, you know, is she going to open up U.S. investment

in the oil sector, which is obviously seems to be, you know, the main interest. Is she going to try to do something in terms of flocking, quote unquote, illegal immigration of Venezuela to the United States? I think if she does those two things, then maybe the United States will kind of like just let her be, right, you know, but, and then the other open question, obviously, is like, you know, supposedly, you know, again, the left and Latin America thought for a very long time, oh, you know, Venezuela is the best prepared country to, you know, confront a U.S. military attack or any kind of attack because, again, they have the comuna movement. They have, you know, a lot of organized, popular social movement, unions, you know, women's groups, etc., community groups. But so far, you know, they take into the streets, but they weren't able to prevent the attack. They're obviously.

was probably some kind of leak that, you know, was able to get the, you know, get the CIA, get the DA in there to be able to, you know, abduct Chavez to effectively. So all that to say that, you know, I think, again, we're going to have to look at the sort of correlation of forces between, you know, popular approach of these forces versus the pressure of the United States and how Delsey Rodriguez is going to threat that email. I mean, do you, and I know we're sort of getting into speculation here, but one possible future outcome is, as you say, just sort of total capitulation by Delci Rodriguez, the sort of government carries on as normal. Total, total incoherence of like maga-communism. But also, like, for example,

there could be like an ongoing sort of low-level security crisis as like, let's say you haven't tried to take apart like Chevy's institutions. You haven't sort of destroyed a lot of these organized groups that could, for example, object in quite strong terms. terms to Chevron increasing its staffing from like, I don't know, like 3,000 people in country as was to 20,000, 25,000 to American oil companies taking much more control and much more profit and so on and so on, right? I wonder what the prospects are of, say, for example, a sort of ongoing low-level insurgency that gets funded by, you know, every side of it gets funded by different arms of the U.S. security state. And you end up like with, you know, the DEA's guys fighting

the CIA's guys in order to take territory from the DOD's guys. Turning, turning Venezuela into Syria, you mean? Basically. Yeah, I would say, first of all, I would say that's less possible to turn into Syria because, again, you don't have these, like, ethnic religious cleavages, et cetera, like you do see in countries like Syria or Lebanon, right? That lets the U.S. kind of go in and kind of exploit those differences. Second of all, I think this is where the ideology is going to come into play, right?

Like, are the Venezuelan people or the majority of Venezuelan people, you know, the 65% or so living in Venezuela that opposed U.S. military intervention, willing to, you know, put their bodies online, you know, against U.S. military, you know, further U.S. military intervention or economic intervention. I think that remains to be seen, right? Like we said, you know, we see protests in the street. We see the loyalists, you know, out there with them in, you know, social media, et cetera. But when push comes to shove, you know, like I think that that remains. to be seen, you know, what the reaction, not just of the government is going to be, but of the Venezuelan people themselves, especially those kind of organized in these comuna movements or union movements, et cetera. And I have my doubts, you know, because, again, on one hand, you know, I had the experience, you know, living in Brazil in 2018, has spent some time in the border region between, you know, where the northern part of Brazil shares the border with Venezuela and the state called Roraima. And I spent some time there talking with recent Venezuelan refugees, right, migrants. And, you know, most of them really weren't

very ideological one way or the other. Like, they were leaving the country because, like, you know, I was talking to teachers, policemen, you know, even, you know, petroleum engineers who are like literally their monthly salary because of hyperinflation was only like letting them buy, you know, three frozen chickens and some like cornmeal. And they couldn't have access to medicine, right? you know, so, you know, I would say, I would say people are really just looking to survive. Like, I think most people in Venezuela are looking to just kind of turn this page and, like, be able to have better lives within the country because there is a huge Mediterranean crisis that is undeniable, even though, you know, Maduro has tried to kind of like pay for over that.

So I think if, you know, this new sort of U.S. presence in whatever form it's going to be, you know, kind of mediated by Rodriguez, it starts to improve the material conditions of people, including access to food and medicine in particular, they're not going to protest against that. But again, this is all speculation, so we'll wait and see. And of course, obviously, just to be clear, the thing that would remove the crisis is that, of course, now that there is a friendly U.S. leader,

the U.S. would just let them back into the global economy, basically. Right. But unfortunately, you know, so far, no immediate sanctions have been lifted, and even the European Union has decided not to lift their sanctions, you know, in support of, quote, democracy until 2027. it. So, yeah, I think there's going to have to be movement on that. Yeah. It's just, I think the thing that's most remarkable about all of this and the thing that

makes it so unpredictable is that there is a kind of like established neoliberal playbook for regime change, which has just been, for the most part, completely discarded. And so you had this kind of like, sort of like democracy movement or whatever with Machado that is just now completely sidelined. The European sort of like pathway for all of this is also now kind of, kind of, at the mercy of whatever Donald Trump decides to do or whatever Marco Rubio decides to do and it's just

I mean on those two fronts I feel like it couldn't happen to nicer people but it just it's so bizarre from start to finish yeah I mean I would say like again you know

we can say we want about Trump but they have you know world leaders aren't dumb you know right they have the eyes open right they realize what the complete you know failure of the Arab Spring was like they see you know what Syria turned into, what Egypt turned into, et cetera, et cetera, right?

They saw, you know, the failure of the Cold Revolution's in places like Ukraine, right? They don't want another Ukraine. But I think this, especially the sort of neo-authoritarian right-wing governments like the Trump administration in particular, but obviously we can include that Maloney and the Orban and others. Yeah, they just want to cut to the chase. They want to just, you know, like let's get what we want. And, you know, this whole veneer of democracy is really, you know, or like popular participation,

maybe it's not necessary at all. At the time of recording, you know, Ruby, like, just to sort of bring this background, put a little button on it, and then transfer back to us. Rubio is saying, elections.

Oh, that's premature. No, no, no. Amidst both him getting his sort of like mandatory Cuba threatening in, but also Trump extending this in his own mind to Colombia, to Mexico, and maybe to Greenland. Yeah, and like,

when was the last time we had elections, Ukraine. Let's remember that too. Yeah, let's, if you're Mark Carney, you really should be kind of trying to get some technicals built. Mark Carney employing a bunch of Cuban special forces as bodyguards now that they're out of work. Yeah, but

one guy is just like, ah, my uncle was the previous guy. You took over from him. Anyway, Janice Silverman, I want to thank you very much for coming and talking to us a little bit about the history, local context, and likely future of one of the most shocking and downright confusing developments

in global politics today. Thanks. It was a lot of fun, and I hope I was able to shed a little bit of light on this very, very crazy and chaotic situation. Perfect. Absolutely. Thanks so much. And now back to us for some further speculation on what's going to be happening. See in a moment.

Wow, great job us. And this time, we actually do know about that because we already did that before recording this part, which is unusual for us. So, basically, one of the things I want to go back to is just a little bit of maga crumlinology. And there are lots of different ways to sort of thread this needle. There's so many potential actors here. You can do like Hegseth being like these guys that make me feel funny to do pull-ups with and deciding to like sort of really throw in heavily with. Delta. Or you can look at the kind of MAGA foreign policy, right? Because the kind of like ostensibly anti-war MAGA, like wing, that's out. That's washed. It's over. And instead,

it feels like the Patriots in control now are Marco Rubio, because he got what he wanted. He got a regime change in Latin America and he got to threaten Cuba with one. And it's very amusing, you know, to look at the reactions out of Miami. You know, we're in the morning, they're just like celebrating in the streets. This is beautiful, right? Because every news organization in the world sent reporters to the same like four blocks of Doral, Florida, right?

To interview like the wealthiest and most obscenely fascist Venezuelan emigres they could find. This isn't to say that like everyone who fled Venezuela is, it's just these guys are and they're the ones they're talking to. They found the blondeest Venezuelans and they went, okay, what's up with this?

How are you feeling? In the morning, ecstatic. Fantastic. They're, you know, Trump is a great liberator, he's a great man. And then, as the penny drops, that they're not really going to do like a regime change per se. They just grabbed one guy and his wife, and then they're going to try and, like, kind of do an occupation by Zoom call. That reaction got more and more confused and a little bit betrayed. Funniest pathway to a Trump assassination is somebody who feels like they got Bay of Pigs about Venezuela.

We're just like a bunch of big blonde Venezuelans with German last names just like doing fucking like tire obstacle courses in like the Louisiana bayou. I said it was weird that Donald Trump got perfectly airholed by a car 98K, but you know, I guess they had that on hand for a normal reason. Well, no, I mean, yeah, there's there's a reason every now and again a guy named Juan Carlos Eichmann just happens to buy a long range rifle, you know? Like it doesn't matter. Yeah.

I think it's crazy that Juan Carlos Eichman went to go see. Avatar 4 immediately after doing Trump I don't think that makes any sense I think he's a patsy and he just revealed his location from his TikToks exactly it's like we can timeline

break it down by the seconds he enters into the door dash dark kitchen this log rifle yeah it's just curtains from there yeah so but late so we have this like this maga crumlinology where

I mean I think you can always say right like someone like Marjorie Taylor Green who is surprised and disgust by this surprising and disgusting action, is it always was a patsy that everyone who thought that MAGA was about quote unquote no more foreign wars was a patsy. Well, they're all cynics and they're stupid

at the same time, right? So she's kind of worked out that there's some, hey, she can make off of this, for like a kind of splinter, like, sort of right magaism, I guess, of of like sort of anti-interventionism. Which, sure, but like, she's out is the main thing.

She is out with the big guy. as the big guy seems progressively more frail, it really seems like you can kind of get some death of Stalin stuff by him a lot more easily. Which is, I think we can then say, well, what Rubio did? Because it was never like,

is he going to do something? It was, you know, because Trump is the fascist that he is, he is sort of like venal, he does love violence, he loves crime, but it's like which one, right? This could just as easily have been Mexico. That was one of the things that Hegseth was apparently big on

And I get the sense that it was Rubio who steered things towards Venezuela instead. And it's government by like, who's able to like befriend the dentist that Trump is golfing with that day? Yeah, navigate this adult, old man's crumbling mind palace, you know? Like, it's succession shit is what it is. I mean, it's also like, you know, this is, we talk about like Fourth Reich stuff. Like, this is what it would have been like trying to influence the, if you're like, you know, was like an ambitious young German officer. This is what it would have been like in like 1970s, Labensrom, Germany.

Sort of working towards the furor, absolutely. Also, like, we talk about, like, the love of violence. And I want to get also to, um, especially to the European reaction after this. Not to keep cutting you off here, I'm sorry. But like, the other thing about this, though, I think is funny. And partially why I had the thought of, like, woke seal team is, as much as we can talk about how this is, like, you know, as we said in the interview, it conforms to the long, history of like sort of American exercise

of military force, but it's different in that it's more brazen. Trump is kind of doing the Trump version of the same thing that Obama did, which is second term getting really enamored with special forces guys as just like, this is going to solve all my problems. And

it's sort of like where that energy gets directed and who buying is an interesting question. But I also think at this point, like, for him it's TV. He said that as much. He said that, you know, he was watching it like was on TV, which is something Obama did with the Osama bin Laden thing. And I genuinely think there is a way to make the world safe for America,

which is you just get Japanese airsofters to do fake Delta raids for Trump on TV. You give him a busy box. Those guys are really good at, like, replicating the, like, details of gear and stuff. Just have them do that. Give the Japanese airsofters a black hawk. And have them entertain Trump with it for the next three years. Truman's show where Trump basically is endlessly entertained by, I don't know,

Potemkin Delta Force. Basically, he'll be too enthralled. He won't be able to do anything else and make any more problems for people. It's a sort of total Bodriar victory, right? And all of this stuff is so choreographed and so stage managed and sort of like almost ritualized

that it may as well not happen as far as the guy's ordering it. I mean, like, seeing video grainy cell phone footage of MH60s over Caracas. I feel like you could just do the Dark Souls fought and wrote, right, total Boudriard victory on that. And it would completely

summarise the situation. So basically we have like, yeah, we have the Magochromonology, which is like as ever, right, the interventionists, the neocons are back in charge. The only reason Trump didn't like the neocons was that some of them he found to be personally unpleasant. Yeah, well, the

neocons have had to adopt sort of Trumpian methods, right? This is sort of something that like, it isn't necessarily the way they would have done it themselves, but it also seems for them to be working better than the old playbook. So in that sense, Trump is useful to them. But I want to also talk a little bit about someone you already mentioned, Nova, the hyper-cucked Europeans. The most washed continent on the face of the fucking planet. Yeah. Like, you might as well have the European Union Commission's seat

at the UN. It's the chair in the corner of a hotel room at this point. That's just what And to be clear, right, this isn't because Europeans are pussy. Well, it is, but, like, not in the sense that you have, like, oh, we're horrified by the abuse of international law, right? Europe loves breaking international law, same as everyone. But what it is is that there's a playbook for this stuff. There's a way it's meant to go. There's meant to be a kind of, like, credible opposition movement.

That's what the Nobel Prize was for. That's what they, like, there's a way you're supposed to do this that requires a certain amount of delicacy. And instead of doing that, Trump just kidnapped the guy into a flying black van. And so what you're left with is all of these kind of stammering statements of like, well, the United States is our strongest ally and were looking into whether or not it was okay that they did that. Probably it was. So, for example, I'll start with Starmer's statement. The UK has long supported a transition of power in Venezuela.

We regarded Maduro as an illegitimate president and we shed no tears about the end of his region. regime. I reiterate my support for international law this morning. I fucking foam finger. Law. It's nice to know that the sort of like center right has an equivalent to when leftists say solidarity

with X of just being like you're on your own. So we discuss the evolving situation with U.S. counterparts in the days ahead and we seek a safe and peaceful transition to a legitimate government that reflects the will of the Venezuelan people. The PM refused to say whether President Trump had broken international law saying he

needs to quote, establish the full picture. it's like, I know you have to say that, but it must be at least, I hope he feels at least a little bit embarrassed that the human rights lawyer prime minister of the UK watches like, as again, as we establish with Janet in the interview, just like radioactively illegal, kidnapping on on foreign soil for like thrown together like gun and drug charges. Like he's fucking like young thug. And then just saying, oh, we don't know. We don't know if this is actually, uh, breaking international law, we need to establish a little looking at the most illegal thing you've

ever seen and going, well, what is truth anyway? And that's why it's a total Bodriya victory is because now Europe is in this position of being like, well, the meaning of international law is highly subjective, you know? Can any of us be said to know something

truly? Maybe Stama really wishes it was him. Maybe he was like, I can also wear a track suit. I would support Stama being kidnapped by Delta Force. I think I But I was going to say, but, like, yeah, this is sort of an interesting moment because, like, there's a now a non-zero chance that, like, the US could just kind of, like, occupy Whitechapel as it believes that it's got a, like, responsibility to, like, take out grooming gangs or

whatever and, like, kidnap Kirstarmer as part of that process. They are going to kidnap Stama for, like, censoringX.com, the everything app. Or that, yeah, and then Kirstarmer can be like, well, actually, I quite enjoyed it. It was, it was, it was a very nice experience. They were very, um, Delta Force, they're very strong guys, you know, they're very, very, You'll actually find they're quite woke, but not too woke. They gave me a nice water on the plane. Stama being zipped into the mandatory punitive Nike track suit,

and he's just like, this is just like playing Fivocide, a thing I do regularly. They had adolescence in the in-flight video system, which I thought was very important. It fucking economy class gets worse every year, you know? So in the European Union itself, with people like Kajakalis or Ursula von der Leyen are also saying basically the same statement, which is, we support what you did, but we're worried about it.

We support what you did because we know that, you know, Maduro is the designated enemy. Boo. Yeah. The most, again, like, I'm not a child, right? I understand that all international law operates this way, and this is just how states are. But it is a particular humiliation to sort of make Ukraine also be like, yeah, I guess That's crazy. Total support for the US, whatever they want, because they have to say that when, like,

the Russians tried to do this to Zelenskyy. That's what the Battle of Hustimel was, was them trying to do this and making the crucial mistake of not having sort of prior agreement from the rest of the Ukrainian government. And it didn't go so well. So, I mean, I guess that's the other kind of, on the list of like haters and losers here. Russian airborne forces watching this and being like damn it's much easier if you'd like ask first

huh? Yeah and on top of that as well right you can't ignore the fact that Trump emboldened by the great TV that this produced and the sort of most hawkish of his administration members the last movie he saw about anything and whose courtier's

power is mostly like exercised through which film to show him could be by inclination he's naturally like a musical guy, if you showed him like The Apartment or like a screwball comedy you would get a kind of a good natured Trump but instead somebody fucking showed him

Sicario and now we have to now we are all going to get black bagged every single one of us individually The DOD produced a musical version of Sicario In Colombia I worked as a prosecutor That was fucking illegal

They always made me do the part of songs at productions of Sicario it sucks I'm just trying to think of another Sicario musical line I think we're good on that one If you think of any more Sicario musical Please do just sing them Yeah but not Sicario too

Just Sicario one Yeah yeah Well Sicario too is the better musical Which the worst movie So but the other You know having seen now Sicario the musical Trump is

Or Trump allies like Stephen Miller's wife are doing the same thing about Greenland and once again she's posting American Greenland. There's nobody's a fucking black bag out there

like you're going to sort of like fly them out there they're going to crash one of the helicopters as is tradition and then like a bunch of guys are going to slip and fall on ice trying to black bag hold on one second

bear with me this is still them this is still them right Prime Minister of Greenland Yens Frederick Nielsen Yeah. Who I guess apparently is into narco trafficking or something. Yeah.

And it's the same line also that's been deployed against Canada, against Mexico. Jens Friedrich Nielsen, a serious badminton player, Marty Supreme Prime Minister. And then now the question is, you know, which of the, are you going to show Trump, the Bon Cop Bad Cop musical? Like, which musical are you going to show him that leads him to him to. They're going to show him Canadian Bacon. Yeah. God. They're going to show him Bob and Doug McKenzie.

We got to stop Bob and Tom. Doug McKenzie. Again, and this is sort of focusing on the utter strategic and increasingly economic irrelevancy that is the European Union, which is, what are you going to do about it? Because are you going to equivocate the same way when they do the same thing to Greenland? Is it, are you just going to allow Denmark one of the most historically atlanticist European countries to just get invaded and taken over because you don't know what else to do? I mean, probably. I can give me the answer to that. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that they are going to do that. Yes. That's

exactly what they're going to do. The Danes are going to cope and seeth, I believe, is the calculation. And again, because it's a sort of vulgar exercise of power, the White House knows this. And that's sort of one of the reasons why they're keen to do it. But then also the parallels are just, you know, too acute. Can Starrma resist the urge to have his own Falklands moment when he decides to recreate the Falklands by fighting America in Greenland? I don't know.

I think the funniest option is we go in on our other military. tradition of joining the Americans for no reason on their military adventures, and it's a joint US-UK invasion of Greenland for no reason in which like two paras get frostbites and we kind of like cover ourselves in glory that way. Yeah, and then we realize our power grid is down because the Danish had stuxnet on all of the offshore wind terminals. All the turrets just explode. They're like like dandelions, fucking tennel's going everywhere. Like no more wind power. It's like how's 2026 going? And I'm like, watching the, like, Danish hypersonic missiles going overhead, heading towards London.

Yeah, I also love the idea of, like, with Danish Taliban. Like, I want to know, I want to know what, like, Danish Nasheed sound like. Yeah, there we go. I was going to say, yeah. Oh, my God. The Danish Taliban, I think J.D. Vans 100% believes exists. Well, yeah, the problem is, I mean, just laughing about it, too, because it's just like, they'll try to, they'll try to stamp out of Zempic production, but they'll,

be able to set up labs in the tribal lands of Denmark on Jutland. They're growing all the precursors to make West Govian. You know, like, they'll keep funding terrorism that way. You know, and I wanted to, I just wanted to discuss one more thing before we sort of end off the first episode of the year. What are fucking stupid starts of the year? I assume this will continue. Yeah, is going back a little bit to some of the claim justifications, which we touched on

with Jenna, right, which was most of it is about like trying to. to oust Chinese influence from South America, like trying to remove them as primary training partners by force. I mean, one thing also to remember is that the last time the U.S. sort of engaged its Monroe Doctrine reflex, it was a growing and increasingly powerful economy that was still desirable to trade with if you were going to trade with anybody. I think as far as the Chinese angle goes, it's interesting to me. There was a Chinese delegation in Caracas set to meet with Maduro, and then the Americans just kidnapped him instead. So adding to the list of haters and losers, China once again falling for the eating the chess pieces strategy.

And I think like what this means for sort of like multipolarity, what this means for like Taiwan or whatever, doesn't have anything to do with international law because as we know, like any state will discard that the second they need to and nobody's kind of relying on the US obeying it. But I think you can't keep teaching all of your enemies, the world over, the only way to succeed is to act recklessly and unilaterally without some of them doing it. And I think that's going to be the big challenge in like Chinese foreign policy, whether that's like internally too she or just sort of like something that he incorporates into his own world view, is you have to just do it. Like much like the Nike tracksuit that they sort of non-consensually put you in,

You just, you have to do it. And if you're not that guy, you have to get someone who is. There's like a kind of high watermark of stupid and unpredictable that everybody, that everybody must conform to. Well, like, if you look at the kind of the Chinese policy of like coercion without violence of the like, in relation to Taiwan, of doing all of these exercises and being like, oh, I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you.

But no, but for real, you do have to do what I say, though. And then look at sort of what the U.S. is doing. It's got to be hard not to feel a little stupid, you know? We could have all these black bags. We make them. Yeah. But also I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the goals, right? Because oil is discussed very frequently.

I mean, it's discussed by Trump. Yeah, by Trump. Yeah, but also like the actual economic incentives to take over and scale up Venezuelan oil production on behalf of American companies are, are kind of odd. Yeah, they're not great because Venezuela has a lot of like heavy sour oil, which is difficult to refine. That's something the U.S. is good at.

Like this sort of business flow there is the U.S. imports your cheap, shitty oil and sort of refines it. But also after years of sanctions, the Venezuelan oil industry is sort of in pieces. And it's just, it's one of those things where if Trump is saying the war is about oil, you can believe him. But that doesn't mean that it has to make sense. economically. It's just something that he believes that can also be wrong. I saw this described, which I thought was very interesting as like mercantilism cosplay. Yeah, we're going to go there and

we're going to get the oil. And then you look at what sort of American oil companies feel about this. And the answer appears to be pretty ambivalent. Yeah. It's just like you work in Houston in like an entirely glass walled office that's being air conditioned to death. You're slowly sort of like dehydration yourself in there and then the federal government kicks your door in and goes, do you want to do the plot of mercenaries to say yes now? Like, what?

Especially because, right? Like, this is something we've talked about recently, which is guess where all the capital expenditure is going, especially in like power generation? It's going to like fucking data centers. It's like, hey, we're not doing data centers anymore. We're rebuilding the Venezuelan oil industry almost from scratch. And

guess what? You're going to do it. By the way, to do it, again, I was reading this as I so often am, is going to take the combined capital expenditure of three major American oil companies over a period of 10 years. I bet they're just thrilled about that, especially at a time of, you know what it is? Invading Venezuela for the sake of the American oil companies, that should have happened like, that's a zero interest rate phenomenon. From purely that perspective, it was like, where were you in term one doing this? Why didn't, why didn't Rex Tillerson take advantage of he was too busy doing the sword dance and so like the whole the whole thing is it is a crime it's a

stupidity it is making the world it's a farce it's making the world a profoundly more dangerous place and when i say for no reason i don't mean for no good reason as there was and cannot be a good reason for this kind of thing but not even for a reason that makes sense really when you when you look at like the hegemon state it's it's just libidinal it's it's tv you know it's it's it's it's a guy who kind of understands that oil is a profitable commodity to trade and the Venezuela has a lot of it and enjoys the kind of sadism of seeing a guy who he believes insulted him by stealing his Trump dance get kidnapped. Yeah, I don't know. It's weird for me because I'm so out of that world now. I mean, I've been out of the military for almost 12 years now.

And it's just, it's just hideous. It's just genuinely hideous. Like Caracas is one of the most densely populated cities in Latin America and the idea of them, you know, doing air strikes, probably air defense suppression strikes, but still like killing soldiers, killing civilians, doing this completely illegal thing. And that doesn't even, like, not that there could be a good reason for it, but like, that doesn't even accomplish anything but a spectacle. Like, it's, it's horrifying. It's genuinely horrific. And we joke because, like, that's one of the ways you cope with it, but that's not to downplay the seriousness or like the absolute moral hideousness of it, man. Like, I don't really have words for it other than like, like, I can't believe I'm seeing this.

And I said it to a friend. Like, it just feels like the recruits. theme of our lives, our adult lives is you wake up and you're like, oh, they did the fucking insane thing that I thought they weren't going to do because it'd be too crazy to do it, but they did it anyway. I have a vain hope where I'm like, I should be pessimistic about this, but I'm like, I can't wait for Donald Trump to be brought to

justice. I don't know what that looks like, but something. Zaron Montani's going to kidnap him. That's, well, that's my thinking. The long game is very much. We're building a New York army to kidnap him. Well, the problem is if you get kidnapped by New York Delta Force, they like non-consensually put a pair

of Thames on you? I was going to say, actually, I think it's the opposite situation is that Zoran Mimdani is going to exercise so much like, you know, charm and soft power on Trump that he's actually going to convince Trump to authorize a Delta Force strike on himself. I mean, really, man, like, you know, we kind of just got to

we believe in restorative justice, but you know, you kind of got to make amends and, you know, but do that in Zoran Maldani voice. And then Trump basically, yeah, like the fucking 160th sores dropping to the White House to carry his ass off to, I don't know, Slovenia, who never. Who knows? I'm taking, I'm taking accountability, and I'm not going to do a notes-up post.

Fire of my coordinates, danger close. DJT, calling in a strike on my coordinates, those are my initials. Well, yeah, like, you're completely right, just in the sense of, like, I think there was this more innocent time where it's just like, yeah, they can't be that insane. They won't do that. I mean, it's like, no, they are. And, like, so much of it is just kind of, I think, I think there's like a real, we talked about this in the interview a little bit. like my kind of feeling about or like my sort of understanding of kind of elite commentators who are desperately still trying to kind of convince themselves that like there was sort of a political

like objective to getting rid of Maduro and it was about like, you know, restoring democracy and look we don't kind of, you know, we see Maduro as illegitimate and look at all these like Venezuelans with like blonde hair who are really who are celebrating all of this is happening that we're sort of bringing justice to people. But the reality I think is just like, you know, I think the sort of flavor of this administration now, especially as it sort of reaches a point where it is like deeply unpopular, both internationally and like domestically, where so much of like the domestic policy that the agenda that they've had like isn't working, whether that's in terms of like bringing down costs of like food or costs of energy, you know, resistance to ice in various cities. I also, I mean, this is, this is, this may be a stretch, but I also kind of think that like the whole sort of like anti, the conservative anti-woke thing is kind of, we're going to see some interesting moments with that because, you know, the end point of last year was like a conservative split, which this intervention and this kind of continued, or this desire now to just like spread American war around South America will kind

of continue to ignite, which is, you know, a real schism among the American right over like Trump's ability to govern, but also like the objectives of the people around him. I think that's only going going to sort of going to get worse. And I think the point is being that like we are now going to see an administration that is much more guided, purely. by like zero-sum games, you know, of, like, how they calculate, like, who deserves vengeance and when and how, and, like, how severe, how willing are, like, countries, like, as a whole willing to submit to America and its power. And I think, like, the fact that, like, the international, well, the fact that what we've seen is, like, an international system of

governance basically never existed, or if it did exist, it just doesn't work anymore. But, like, what is, like, what is left? I guess, I don't know, I guess it comes back to a thing. We're in the time of monsters now. And that's cool, because sometimes monsters are, uh, and interesting. And I mean, all of this is going to get more intense after the midterms. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

It seems likely, you know, the Democrats take back the house. Trump gets kind of kneecapped domestically. And he just changes the channel to all Sicario all the time everywhere. Yeah. Greenland, I guess. Yeah. And so it's so in a very strange way, it'll be, it'll be just be like, okay, well, now the rest of the world. And like, unfortunately, unfortunately, the rest of the world does include us.

I think in the past it was very much like, yeah. Yeah, like the rest of the world is just, you know, Africa or it's like, you know, the Middle East or whatever, who cares? But it's like, no, it's, it's, it's, it's, I hope I get blackbagged by the woke special forces. I want them to respect my pronouns. Yeah. So, uh, any case, uh, I think what we're going to see as, as sort of just bringing it all back around, you know, this is, this isn't the first instance of government by what you want to watch on TV. And it certainly won't be the last. And I think that now, the people who are making the TV that they want to watch got basically

everything they wanted. I think we're going to probably see more of it in the next sort of six, 12, 24 months and that the European sort of just close your eyes and wait for Joe Biden to get Joe Biden's corpse to get reelected through his second term.

Three years. Yeah. Three more years of this minimum. Yeah. And I think also like it's worth noting too, but this isn't just like watching America it's, you know, this is now sort of given the, you know, this is given not that they sort of needed it, but like we're going to see a lot more, you know, countries with military for like, you know, try and do stuff that we initially thought was just like things that were likely to, like, things that was, like, could happen, but like were unlikely to. So like, you know, look at Taiwan, look at Kashmir. I think that's going to be like a very interesting thing to observe, especially as you have an India that is like basically on a much, like the same trajectory as America in terms of just like, why don't we use the military for everything. You know, Indian and Indian Delta, like Indian equivalent of Delta Force, like they, that's going to be fucking mental.

You know, Russia, I think, is another one as well. And, like, you know, the fact that, like, the Americans are just, like, very happy to just, like, admit that Ukraine, like, they just don't care about Ukraine anymore. And, like, the effects of that that's going to have on the European Union, like, this is a, I don't want to be hyperbolic, but I kind of, like, have to, this is fuck, this is going to be, this is going to be, like, insane. And I feel as if, like, no one's quite kind of prepared for that. And I think a lot of the sort of American, like, or the sort of intelligentsia commentators in. the States are still just trying to convince themselves that there is some sort of semblance of an international order. And all we need is like one election to like, you know, get Trump to be sensible, you know? Well, I think we're going to, we're going to see. We're going to give

odds and whether that's going to happen in the coming months. But, well, what a way to start 2026. And we'll see you in a few days on the bonus episode, which was planned for today. Just to be clear. All right. All right. Thank you, everybody. Of course, for listening and see you on the Patreon in a couple days. Bye. Have a good one. Bye.