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- [00:04]
UBS Narrator
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- [00:38]
Chris Chermack
You're listening to the Globalist, first broadcast on 24 December 2025 on Monocle Radio. The Globalist in association with U. Broadcasting from Midori House in London. This is a special Christmas Eve edition of THE Globalist. I'm Chris Chermack. Coming up on today's program, a look at the year that was through the lens of geopolitics. And it would be hard not to start with a certain American president. Among the highlights or lowlights of this year was this.
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Charles Hecker
You're right now not in a very good position. You've allowed yourself to be in a very bad position and he happens to be right about it. From the very beginning of the war. You're not in a good position. You don't have the cards right now.
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Chris Chermack
The war in Ukraine continued this year despite Donald Trump's best efforts to turn the tide and bring Russia back into the fold. We'll assess just how much has changed with Julia Jenkins after that. Israel will fight and Israel will win. We will bring our people home and.
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Oscar Guardiola Rivera
We will destroy Hamas.
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Chris Chermack
We'll discuss the Middle east and whether the war in Gaza is finally behind us and at what cost to Israel's reputation. And finally, the year for Latin America in the news, also thanks to Donald Trump and his Don Roe doctrine and a shift in leaders towards the right end of the spectrum. All that right here on the Globe List with me, Chris Chermak. A very merry Christmas Eve to all.
- [02:29]
Of our listeners who celebrate. Happy holidays to everyone else, good to have you with us for another year here on the Globe List. We're going to start this show. He would be happy to hear with the man who's been at the center of the world's attention for pretty much all of the past year. Donald Trump has been busy reshaping the US and the world order since his inauguration in January. And I'm delighted to say that here to walk us through what a year it's been right here in the studio is Charles Hecker, author, Russia analyst and associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute Rusi here in London. Charles, great to have you.
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Charles Hecker
Merry Christmas, Chris. It's Great to be here.
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Chris Chermack
We love having you. You've been a regular on Monocle, so I should add that to regular Monocle contributor. Who better to try and walk us through what this year has been like? And I wanted to start with just this concept, that Trump and his administration have been on a mission this year, whether we like that mission or not.
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Charles Hecker
That's right. I mean, there was a time, Chris, when the U.S. presidency and the United States was the guarantor of stability and tranquility, not just in the United States, but, but around the world. And that the United States was in charge essentially, of supporting a post World War II order that has given us 70, 80ish years of relative stability, growth and prosperity. And what Trump 2.0 has done is it has taken that role and turned it on its head. And Washington, D.C. now is the center of global and national disruption. Trump 2.0 has given us a very, very bumpy 2025. And I should probably point out that Trump 2.0 and the 2025 presidency actually started even before he took office. President Trump hit the ground running thanks to a document called Project 2025, whose existence he denies, but was essentially written as a blueprint while he was essentially president in waiting in the interim. And not only by using Project 2025, but also by being perhaps most himself, more than ever before, he has completely remade the American presidency.
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Chris Chermack
Most himself, and also allied himself with people who support his mission and perhaps were the ones that were implementing Project 2025, whether Donald Trump himself read it or not.
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Charles Hecker
That's right. If we're going chronologically and we're looking at the very beginning of the presidency, Trump's selection, his cabinet and his advisors, his diplomats and his envoys are all people who were chosen for their loyalty to President Trump rather than for their particular skill, experience, or expertise at the role that they were assigned to. And so if you compare the beginning of Trump 2.0 with the first Trump presidency, that was the time when we were talking about adults in the room or grownups in the room, the people who were restraining the president or preventing him from being himself too much, those people are gone. They have been replaced with people who really don't apply the brakes.
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Chris Chermack
And at the same time, to look at the other side, if we compare it to the first Trump term, there was a loud, vociferous opposition. There were protests in the streets. All of that because of what Donald Trump represented in that first term. That, too, has kind of gone away. Those guardrails, if you will, have allowed opposition we just haven't heard that much, either from Democrats, frankly, or from the people. Is that fair to say the opposition is reeling?
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Charles Hecker
That's right, Chris. We're having this conversation more than a year after the elections. And, you know, every election features a winner and a loser. What's happened to the losing party, to the Democrats, in the aftermath of the election was absolutely catastrophic. And I'm not even sure, given how much time has elapsed between this broadcast and the elections themselves, that the Democrats have yet recovered. You're absolutely right to point out that there hasn't been a unified, strong or vocal voice to counter what President Trump is doing. I mean, it's really only, I would say, perhaps at the tail end of this year that you've had some people like Illinois Governor Jay Pritzker, California Governor Gavin Newsom, both of whose states are under siege from the Trump administration, who are beginning to sort of stand up and push back. There are some new governors taking office shortly that won in off cycle midterm elections in Virginia and New Jersey. They will be opponents to President Trump once they take office. But you're right, I would say the first six months of the Trump presidency was marked by the Democrats being in an absolute tailspin.
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Chris Chermack
Now we are going to focus on.
- [07:44]
Geopolitics on this show. Trump permeates all of that. So I won't get into it in this bit. I wanted to focus on a couple of other more domestic or economic aspects. And we have to start, I think, with immigration as well. We knew that Donald Trump would be deporting people. He promised this, this would be the biggest deportation exercise in American history. What surprised me maybe, is that he has also transformed legal immigration. And I think that's an important point to make because there were those who voted for him saying, I didn't want illegal immigration. Well, he's changing legal immigration as well. Is he changing what it is to be an American, a nation of immigrants?
- [08:25]
Charles Hecker
Well, in fact, he is trying to do exactly that. And President Trump, upon assumption of the chair behind the Resolute desk, in the resolution desk, in the, in the Oval Office, said that he wants to change what it means to be an American by eliminating birthright citizenship, which currently says that anybody who is born on American soil is automatically an American citizen. And he is in the process of trying to take that away. This is an issue that will be going to the Supreme Court, I'm certain, in 2026. Immigration is a vote getter. It's a vote getter in the United States. It's a vote getter in the country that we're sitting in today, Chris, and in lots of other countries around the world. The first thing that the president did was he rammed shut the southern border. The second thing, and well, in no particular order, is that he dispatched ice, one of the United States now most feared agencies of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE into cities and towns around the United States. Not coincidentally, many of those cities were Democratic strongholds. And then the president went further by changing how high skilled individuals migrate to the United States in the highly skilled visas that most prominently Silicon Valley issues to immigrants from all over the world, but particularly from India, making those visas harder to get and vastly more expensive than they have been in the past.
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Chris Chermack
Just finally, Charles, and we will be talking about Ukraine in the next segment. But I did want to get your take as a Russia analyst as well on the relationship between the US And Russia, because that has been such a big element. And aside from Ukraine and efforts to reach peace there, what have you just made of this desire almost of Donald Trump to bring Russia back into the fold?
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Charles Hecker
Yeah. Well, a few things. First of all, we've seen over and over again, from the very beginning, from the very first few weeks of the Trump presidency up until today, we've seen over and over again sort of attempt at a rapprochement diplomatically between Washington and Moscow. We've had phone calls, we've had meetings, we had a summit in Anchorage. We've had shuttle diplomacy in Washington, in Moscow, in neutral points in Europe in between. So the Trump presidency has very seriously reengaged with Russia. And you're right to point out that the RE engagement is not just diplomatic. In fact, it might be diplomatic secondarily, if I can invent that word. The primary driver of Trump's RE engagement with Russia is commercial. They are talking about doing deals. They are talking about business. And Trump has said that reintegrating Russia into the global economy should make it less of an enemy. The only problem with that is that we've heard exactly those words literally word for word more than 30 years ago, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia's entry into the global economy as the world's newest emerging market in the 1990s and look where we are now. So, you know, you can put diplomacy in the backseat, but sooner or later, it will always, at least with Russia, it will always trump business.
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Chris Chermack
Charles Hecker, we'd love having you on. Happy Christmas to you.
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Charles Hecker
Thank you. Happy Christmas to you too, Chris.
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Chris Chermack
CHARLES hecker, RUSSIA ANALYST and currently with RUSI as Well, this is the globalist.
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UBS Narrator
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- [12:45]
Chris Chermack
To Ukraine now, which in two months will have been suffering four years of a full scale war. And while the military side of the conflict has moved at something of a snail's pace over the past year, the diplomatic wrangling between the us, Russia, Ukraine and Europe has been dizzying and disorienting. Faced with the Trump administration limiting its support for Kyiv, the country's president and its people have been forced to reckon with just what kind of peace they can accept, which red lines they must abandon, and whether to keep fighting even without American support. Joining me now is Monocle writer and Ukraine expert, Julia Jen. Julia, great to have you here in the studio. Hi Chris, nice to have you. On Christmas Eve, which is where I wanted to start, just give us a little picture of how Ukrainians celebrate. Obviously used to be more the Orthodox calendar. It is shifting towards the Western calendar and the 24th and 25th.
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Julia Jen
Yeah, well, I think a super busy day of cooking, preparing the table, because Christmas Eve for us is the most important night of Christmas tide.
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Chris Chermack
Just like us Austrians.
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Julia Jen
Exactly. Well, yes, Europeans, we're all united in that, which is lovely. So lots of preparation in the day and then watching for the first star in the night sky. Because then when that comes, then you call out the window to scare away Father Frost or whatever, scare him away from any of the coming years sort of harvest or from destroying any of our food. And then everyone sits down at the table and you share your sort of hopes and wishes for the year ahead and you tuck in to 12 dishes, no less.
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Chris Chermack
12 dishes.
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But I love that, I love that idea of sort of wishing away the frost. Is that soning? So it's sort of a moment where you also reflect essentially on how the year has gone and what you want for the next year.
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Julia Jen
Yeah, absolutely. And you want sort of peace, prosperity, you want a good food supply. You know, Ukraine is a very sort of agrarian culture, still a very agrarian country, still very strong connection to the land, which maybe, you know, has been lost in other European countries, but that's still very much something in Ukraine. People growing their own food, keeping their own livestock. So holding onto that Connection to the sort of agrarian calendar, which makes this.
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Chris Chermack
A good point to ask before we even get into the politics and the diplomacy and everything that's happened in this past year, just what is ordinary life like in Ukraine at the moment? Just give us a sense of that daily life.
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Julia Jen
Yeah, well, it depends on where you are, really. I mean, if you're in the east, if you're in eastern cities, then of course, life is more difficult. You have the issue of drone strikes. I mean, we've seen very striking images coming out of Kherson, Ukraine's southern city that is, you know, just across the river. We've got Russian troops stationed there, and they'll send FPV drones. These are tiny little drones, and, you know, into the city. And one thing we saw from this year was really the global community waking up to this human safari that's happening in Kherson. So FPV drones going and hunting civilians down. And so in Kherson now, all the streets are lined with fishing nets, most of them from France, actually, French fishermen. A lot of those have been sent over by the French to protect from those drones. Not every city has such a harsh reality. Over this Christmas time, we've seen people gathering for carols in western Ukraine, will see people making the rounds around their villages in the snow, in the quiet of Christmas Eve, singing carols to one another. So I think it's very varied. There are issues with electricity, with heating, but there's a real sense of wanting life to carry on and the magic of Christmas to carry on.
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Chris Chermack
Taking a look at some of the politics as we move into 2026, I did want to go back to start with perhaps February, because I just think that was such a moment for Ukraine, where I imagine really setting the tone of this year, this meeting that Donald Trump had with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that went completely off the rails. How much of a shock to the system was that for Ukrainians? When you look back on this year, was that kind of the moment that Ukrainians realized this year would be different?
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Julia Jen
I think a year ago, we were having a conversation about what had been in the year for Ukraine and what was coming up next. And there was a feeling among Ukrainians that I myself sadly fell into, which was, Trump is unpredictable. We don't know which way he'll turn. Perhaps he'll even be good for Ukraine. You know, Ukra, Ukrainians were clinging onto this idea that he was actually the first American president to give them lethal weaponry, to give them Javelin missiles, which ended up being Absolutely crucial in the battle for Kyiv, in the defence of Ukraine's capital. Then we had that February Oval Office meeting, and I think that that moment for Europeans and Ukrainians was so pivotal, and yet there seems to be a feeling that it was almost forgotten. Trump backtracked. JD Vance backtracked in some ways, and in some ways that sense of urgency was taken away. And the Sen idea that Europe really has to stand on its own two feet, almost, that rug was kind of taken away, and that sense that Europe was really coming together. And so lots of commentators are saying in Ukraine and outside of Ukraine, so much time has been wasted this year where Europe could have been recolliborating, kind of repositioning itself, really making use of those months, those precious months and weeks that we have ahead of any sort of confrontation, if there is such a confrontation to be, that is coming with Russia. And now, you know, towards the end of the year now with this big diplomatic push by the American side again, I guess we have that kind of ugly truth that we really saw on our TV screens in February. We have that rearing its head again now.
- [18:18]
Chris Chermack
Is that something that at this point has dawned on Ukrainians, that the reality is a different one a year on, as you said, there sort of looking at the Trump administration, kind of understanding where Trump stands, what does that do for Ukrainians? When you look into 2026? I mean, do you think about kind of what you're able to accept in this rather depressing reality that we live in? Has there been a reexamination of kind of red lines, all of that stuff, in terms of what is possible?
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Julia Jen
Absolutely. In the last few weeks, we've seen that Zelensky has given up NATO membership as an option for Ukraine. That can't be understated, that sort of red line, I guess, for Ukraine, that was absolutely a red line.
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Chris Chermack
In the Constitution.
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Julia Jen
In the Constitution, absolutely. So we don't know how the Ukrainian public will react to this. We don't know if this will make its way into a final peace deal, if there is such a thing that is to be signed between Ukraine and Russia. But I think there is definitely an understanding that there is such immense pressure now from the American side for Ukraine to be giving up different, you know, things, different bits of land, for example, different sort of economic opportunities, different security guarantees. And when there's such immense pressure, it's very hard to know what the next day will bring, because you don't quite know what this side that is supposedly a neutral negotiator, what they will Demand from you from the next day.
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Chris Chermack
And meanwhile, the battlefield continues and has continued through this year, although, as I mentioned at the outset, there is this rather strange disconnect that even if Donald Trump may give this perception that Ukraine is losing, in reality, not much has actually changed on the battlefield. Is that something you expect can continue, will continue in 2026? What's the morale like, frankly, for Ukrainians at this moment on the front lines?
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Julia Jen
I think there's a really big debate happening in Ukrainian society now that has sort of been bubbling along. You know, we've had soldiers who have been fighting there for four years straight. They haven't really had a proper break. They haven't really had time to see their families grow. You know, they've had children born in that time that they've been away, and maybe they even haven't seen that years is a very, very long time and there hasn't been a proper system of rotation set up. I think what Ukrainians are craving in the new year is really to pivot towards army first. We take care of our soldiers. They're paid properly. So many soldiers now are really struggling with pay in terms of finances in Ukraine. There's going to be a big reckoning in February, and we're going to see if the European Union can really get that act together in terms of unfreezing these Russian assets, handing them over to Ukraine, so that Ukrainian society can really carry on being financed properly, because that really is at a breaking point. And we'll see that in February if nothing happens. You know, it's a job. That's what it is. At the end of the day, defending your country is a job and it has to pay. So I think that for Ukrainians, for lots of Ukrainians, that really is the focus. And of course, as always, bringing children home who've been abducted and making sure that any prisoner of war still left in a Russian camp, they come home next year.
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Chris Chermack
Well, Julia, I wish you a very merry Christmas. Despite all of that, hope you can celebrate with you and your family.
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Julia Jen
Thank you, Chris.
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Chris Chermack
Thank you, Julia. Jen from Monaco, thank you very much for joining us. You're listening to the Globalist on Monocle Radio. After more than two years of an extremely deadly conflict, 2025 was the year that a ceasefire was finally put into place, ended the war in Gaza, even if that ceasefire remains shaky at best, and the broader question of Palestine remains far from resolved, maybe even further away than ever. Well, to look back on the year, we are joined by Julie Norman, associate fellow at Chatham House and Co Author of the book the Dream and the Nightmare. Julie, great to have you on this Christmas Eve.
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Julie Norman
Lovely to be here. Thank you.
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Chris Chermack
Well, Julie, I wanted to ask you personally as well, because you spent a lot of time this year in the Middle East. You were not able to enter Gaza, but you were in Israel, the West bank, probably more than at any other time in your career. What was that like? How easy was it to travel, to move around?
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Julie Norman
There's been a lot of time in Bethlehem over the years and was just back there this summer. And Bethlehem, of course, is in the west bank, in the Palestinian territories and it's a quite vibrant city still in its own right, with a substantial both Christian and Muslim population there. But I would say two big things of late. One, the separation barrier that Israel built back in the 2000s has really split Bethlehem almost down the middle. And that has really hurt Bethlehem since its construction. And of course, in the last two years, there just haven't been any tourists. And Bethlehem relies a lot on those pilgrimages, on tourist traffic. When I was there this last summer, it was very, very quiet in the areas around Manger Square, around the Church of the Nativity. And you could just see the impact of that on people trying to just live their daily lives there.
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Chris Chermack
And do we imagine even if, as I mentioned, there is a ceasefire in place at this point, that Bethlehem still this year is not going to be back to what it might have been in the past?
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Julie Norman
I think it's going to take a long time for both Palestine and Israel, the tourism levels. And just in the west bank right now, the overall economy is in such a dire state, it's going to take a very long time.
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Chris Chermack
Now, you did mention you were in Bethlehem. You've been all over the region for much of this year because you also wrote this book about Gaza. What was it like to do that in such an extraordinary year that we've had?
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Julie Norman
Yeah, obviously this year was very much consumed for me and for much of the world on watching Gaza and the war took many different turns over this year. We're at least ending on a quasi positive note with the ceasefire. But that was after, I think, descending to depths of atrocities and horrifying images that even just last year at this time we didn't expect to be seeing. So it's been a very emotional year, obviously for people in the region, but also for all of us watching or for trying to keep in touch with our interlocutors and our friends and contacts there. But I would say there's a sense of what is this Next year going to bring. Now is this very fragile ceasefire going to hold or are we going to get sucked back into something yet again?
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Chris Chermack
That is absolutely the question. But also on a personal note, I'm just curious, when you were traveling around the region, what was that even like in the past year? How did you get around? How did you get into Gaza, the West Bank? What was that like?
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Julie Norman
Yeah, so I should be clear that no one was able to access Gaza for the most part this year. So I was not able to go directly there. Though I spoke with a lot of Gazans either remotely or externally. Those who are, you know, in Cairo or international traveling around Israel in the west bank this year, I would say was it was okay in the west bank though, you really see how much things have changed in even just a very short amount of time. For those who are familiar with the west bank, travel there has never been easy. But I would say in these last several years, the extent of checkpoints, the extent of settlement development, construction, just the constraints on movement, especially for Palestinians, but even for internationals, have, has become much more significant.
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Chris Chermack
Do you hope, is there a possibility that you might be able to go to Gaza next year? Is that something that you're looking into?
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Julie Norman
I mean, I personally hope so. I think many of us who either study the region, research it, or of course journalists are very much hoping to be able to access the Strip. But of course, more importantly for people there to be able to have that freedom of movement that has been denied for them so long is of course the priority.
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Chris Chermack
I did want to ask a few broader questions about this conflict at the moment. Obviously over the past year it spread. It wasn't just in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, all of those linked also to Iran for that matter. Was this the year that in your mind, the balance of power tipped? Maybe once again, militarily speaking, we can talk about diplomacy in a moment, but militarily in Israel's favor.
- [26:17]
Julie Norman
Yes. So I would say regionally this year there was definitely a big shift and actually one thing that did disrupt my travel this year was the Iran, Israel 12 day war, so to speak, at the end of June. But this was a year when Israel I think really just flexed all muscles possible and again in this aftermath of October 7th, trying to reassert their dominance and I would say did have a lot of military and tactical victories, so to speak, but have not really taken the step to translate that into longer term diplomatic strategy. And I worry about that for the future and what that means for the region.
- [26:49]
Chris Chermack
Well, absolutely, because the question is at what cost? Some of these military victories came at both within Israel and without, because presumably, even if its military might is stronger than ever, its diplomatic prowess, its reputation on the world stage is at its lowest ever.
- [27:06]
Julie Norman
That's right. I mean, it's almost like two lines moving in, coinciding opposite directions, where the stronger that Israel has become in the region, I would say, the worse its perception around the world. And of course, very much correlated with those images from Gaza that we saw over the past year. But still to this day, I would say in Europe, still, through much of the global south, really still through much of the world, Israel is still seen as, you know, a very problematic, if not a pariah state by many. And that's going to be something that I think Israel is going to be kind of reckoning with in this year for them that has elections, what direction is Israel going to go? Can they recover their international image in some way, or is this going to be a long lasting effect on them?
- [27:45]
Chris Chermack
And when it comes to Israel's domestic politics, what are you expecting from Israel's elections? Did you sense any shift within Israel itself based on everything that's happened, how the politics have changed, how the population views, what's happened?
- [27:59]
Julie Norman
Sure. So the elections will need to happen by next fall, so there still can be a lot of time before then. And there's a lot of, obviously still so much anger from October 7th. There's a sense that there hasn't been accountability from Netanyahu for what happened. For many Israelis, the fact that the hostages are mostly home now is certainly a great sense of relief, but this is not closing that chapter yet. And so I think Netanyahu is going to have a lot to answer for. And yet Israeli politics always has as the hazard that it's very difficult to form a coalition. And even though there's many opposition parties, they haven't really coalesced in a way yet that I think is going to be a slam dunk for them in this election.
- [28:38]
Chris Chermack
And when it comes to the Palestinian side, obviously that was the other big diplomatic movement this year. There were already a majority of countries that did recognize a Palestinian state. But you added some major European players to that. Did that shift anything, frankly, when you look at the landscape there, does it shift anything to have a recognition of a Palestinian state that does not, for all intents and purposes, exist on the ground?
- [29:02]
Julie Norman
Yeah, I think it's still a little early to say, but it was for me very notable that the uk, France, Australia, Canada, other major states took this move. I do think it helped usher in the ceasefire was not the only thing. But I do think those moves helped regional partners push for a ceasefire. I think the question is what will those states now do with that decision going into this next year? Was that just going to be a one off, we did it or is this actually going to translate into some changes in policies into how to actually try and further that statehood and try and move towards a two state solution that sees a Palestinian state alongside a secure Israeli state?
- [29:38]
Chris Chermack
Julie Norman, we'd love having you on this show and across all our shows. It's always great to get your insights. Thank you so much for joining us on on this final look back for this year. I'm sure we'll have you back many times in 2026.
- [29:50]
Julie Norman
Always a pleasure to be here, Chris. Thanks.
- [29:52]
Chris Chermack
JULIE Norman, author, co author of Gaza the Dream and the Nightmare thank you very much for joining us. This is the globalist.
- [30:11]
Charles Hecker
Foreign.
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Chris Chermack
Let's turn to Latin America now, a continent that has grabbed the attention of Donald Trump this year like no other and has been shaped by its own mostly rightward shifting political dynamics. From Javier Milei in Argentina, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Chile's new president Jose Antonio cast elected in the last month. Here to walk us through all of it is Oscar Guardiola Rivera, professor in international law and International affairs at Birkbeck College. Oscar, great to have you in the studio. Happy Christmas Eve.
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Oscar Guardiola Rivera
I love to be here. Happy Christmas to you. And to talk about Latin America, we're gonna need large quantities of mulled wine.
- [30:57]
Chris Chermack
I feel like we need that for most of our segments on this show. To be fair, everyone needs a bit.
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Of mulled wine to get through the.
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Year that it has been in geopolitics. What has it been like for you? I'm curious. I mean, you obviously focus on Latin America for a living and you're from can you remember the last time that it was so in the international news.
- [31:19]
Oscar Guardiola Rivera
And headlines, you know what they say, when the US Of A sneezes, the whole world catches the flu. Well, this year the US Of A has been screaming rather than sneezing and the whole Western hemisphere is catching fire. So yes, we need large quantities of mulled wine and probably some other spices to not, not just summon courage to go through what this year has been like, but to envision the possibility of a new day. It is Christmas. It is almost the end of year. So we need to be optimistic despite everything that seems to be pointing in the other direction. And this year in Latin America, everything seems to be pointing in the other direction.
- [32:07]
Chris Chermack
What do you make when you say Western hemisphere and the US Sneezing Western hemisphere catching a cold? What do you make of the, this spheres of influence idea? Because that's been one of the themes certainly of this year. When you look at Trump, the sort of renewed Monroe Doctrine, this idea that.
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He wants to focus on the Americas.
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Is that what's happening? Is that how Latin America sees it?
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Oscar Guardiola Rivera
There is no question about that. The reference was, of course, to the recently published foreign policy strategy document coming from the White House. We all know that those documents are not to be taken as blueprints. I mean, for the most part of recent history, American presidents are defined in terms of the foreign policy by the unprecedented. George W. Bush had to deal with 9, 11, Obama had to deal with Syria, and Biden also dealing with the aftermath of the attack on the 7th of October. So it is.
- [33:09]
Chris Chermack
He's kind of creating by comparison, though.
- [33:11]
Oscar Guardiola Rivera
That's precisely what I was going to say, that in this case, this document seems to be all about creating or preempting the possibility of a crisis that looks manageable. And the emphasis here is on the order of appearances. This has less to do, much less to do with the reality on the ground. Of course, there are some incentives. There are the rare earths of the Bolivian Argentinian border. There is, of course, the massive oil reserves of Venezuela. Even taking those into account, one has to acknowledge that there is something else at play here. It has something to do with Donald Trump signaling his bases within the United States so that he appears to be doing something about the fentanyl epidemic that is really lighting the rust belt in the U.S. but I say the order of appearances because of course, to militarize the entire Caribbean and to kill, and that's the word, to assassinate people in the Caribbean and in the Pacific right now does little or nothing to solve that kind of crisis, that kind of problem. We know that Venezuela is not the main producer of fentanyl. We know that things get mixed up. So it's not just the war on drugs. It's also taking over an oil tanker and perhaps pushing for regime change. And as you pointed out before, if we were to have somebody like Maria Corina Machado in Venezuela to be added to in Chile, to mile in Argentina and so on, perhaps we will see the appearance of a network. But that's where Trump is the happiest, the most comfortable in the realm of a spectacle. The problem, though, is that this kind of thing means really bad news for people on the ground in Latin America that would be a disaster for the entire continent.
- [35:11]
Chris Chermack
Oscar, when you mention some of those other allies of, of Donald Trump on the continent, as you say, it's not necessarily good for the people of Latin America. And yet at the same time, we have seen this shift, like in the U.S. obviously, with Trump, we've seen a shift in Latin American politics. Is there support for maybe not necessarily what Donald Trump is doing to Latin America, but for his approach to politics in Latin America?
- [35:39]
Oscar Guardiola Rivera
Let me say that there is a sort of mimetic effect, sort of what Aristotle used to call my missus imitation, mixed with the knowledge that if you look up to Trump, he will be in your favor. And also sectors of the population within your countries would also feel that their alignment with such a powerful figure in such a powerful country would be to their advantage. But again, again, one should not take this as a measure of a political shift. The other truth about Trump that is perhaps not as familiar to European and other audiences is the fact that Donald Trump is a very familiar figure for us in Latin America. He looks like every other Latin American caudillo. We've gone through those guys. I mean, clearly he was inspired by Rios Mondo, by Alvaro Uribe Velez from Colombia, by Jair Bolsonaro, by Milei himself. And he has said so. He has said, oh, I love these guys. And the paradox is that at the same time, his rhetoric is also, to a certain extent, anti Latino. But this also plays to the latent extreme ideas and social forces that have been dormant in Latin America. Latin America has a long history of racism. It has a long history of internal and external colonialism. All that is coming back. A country like Chile, for instance, this is not really a return to Pinochetismo. Pinochetismo never went away. The transition was always too cautious. So cautious that it ended up, you know, making no real changes. It couldn't even change the constitution that had been written by Jaime Guzman during the Pinochet era. And because of that, it just paved the way to more of the same. So what we are witnessing, in fact, is that good old metaphor of the repetition of history. Only the first time was tragedy, and indeed, this time looks like farce.
- [37:51]
Chris Chermack
Oscar Guardiola Rivera, thank you for joining us today and throughout the year. That's all the time we have for this special edition of the Globalist. It was produced by Monica Lillis and our studio manager was Jack Jewers. There is a special edition of the Briefing coming up at midday in London. The Globalist returns at the same time tomorrow. I'm Chris Chermack. Happy Christmas Eve. Goodbye and thanks for listening.
- [38:28]
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