← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Special Episode: After Maduro’s Ouster, What Are Trump’s Plans for Venezuela?
00:45:22
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- [00:06]
A
Welcome to a special episode of the Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker. Over the weekend, US Forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro along with his wife in a dramatic raid and bombing campaign. In the aftermath, President Trump declared that the United States will now, quote, run Venezuela and give US Oil companies favorable access to the oil. What any of that means in practice and for how long it'll last is still being worked out. In the meantime, the administration did not rule out more strikes or the potential deployment of U.S. troops. The operation against Maduro was the culmination of a months long pressure campaign on Venezuela by the United States. This took the form of a massive military buildup, threats and controversial strikes on small boats in the Caribbean which the administration claimed were ferrying drugs. But now the reality of regime change in Venezuela raises enormous and pressing questions about what could come next. I wanted to talk to the New Yorker staff writer John Lee Anderson, who has written extensively about Latin American politics and is deeply sourced in Venezuela. He even interviewed Maduro back in 2017. I spoke with John Lee on Monday afternoon. Hi, John Lee, thanks for being here.
- [01:29]
B
Hi Tyler. Great to be with you.
- [01:31]
A
I have to admit that I am still reeling from this story. It seems way crazier to me than the US Bombing Iranian nuclear facilities last year. It even seems crazier than the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in the sense that this involved a large scale air and ground assault on a capital city and the live capture of a sitting head of state and his spouse. Is there any other modern military operation that compares to what the US Just did in Venezuela?
- [02:01]
B
No. It was an incredible moment and I think we're all reeling from it. It's very surreal as well as pretty grotesque because of the justification for the raid and the capture of Madura and his wife. The only modern similar operation that comes to mind is the is the overthrow of General Manuel Noriega in 1989. Right at the end of the year 1990. And his capture and humiliation. He was shown, you know, a handcuffed something like Maduro and being boarded onto an American military plane. He was flown to the United States where he was ultimately convicted of a series of crimes, including drug trafficking, which again, based on informants and so on, was never, I would say, incontrovertibly proven. He was a despotic figure. And he ended up spending nearly 30 years in jail. So that's the only precedent for this other than the overthrow and eventual capture of Saddam Hussein, curiously enough, like Noriega, another American proxy gone rogue. So I would say that what we're seeing is a kind of mashup of what's come before. And I would draw a parallel that I haven't entirely been able to kind of to reach the frontiers of the thought yet. And it's that those two operations which were within a year of one another, not the capture, eventual capture of Saddam Hussein, but the first Gulf War in which he was humbled but allowed to stay in office. Interesting, right? So you leave the regime in place. In that case, they left Saddam in place and eventually 13 years later, overthrew him and saw him hanged. But those two operations, which were 35 years ago roughly came just as the Cold War was ending. We didn't fully know it at the time, but the Berlin Wall had come down. Soon the Soviet Union would crumble. And George H.W. bush took those two military actions to effectively rein in American proxies, American Frankensteins from the Cold War. And I've always thought of them as also messaging by that White House to the world that was emerging from the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Cold War as ways to signal America is still here, it has military power, it can do war. These were the first military interventions on any kind of scale that the United States had done since Vietnam. There had been the brief grenade invasion, 1983 under Reagan. It was a week long affair. And these were much more visible and surprising, I think. So in that sense, what we're seeing with Venezuela, there's a parallel. And not only is it a mashup in terms of capture of a sitting president and so on and so forth, but it's also about Donald Trump laying the lodestone for his new national security strategy. That is to say that the Americans are the hegemonic power of the Western Hemisphere. And this is what we'll do if you get out of line.
- [05:17]
A
So I want to talk more about what that means and just the idea that we could see the US Going after Cuba and Colombia and other nations next. But first, I just want to go back to this raid and kind of how unprecedented it is. So, Pete Hegseth, our so called Secretary of War, has described this as the most sophisticated, most complicated and most successful joint special operations raid of all time. Now, I think we're all used to Trump officials making statements like this. You know, they said the same thing about the bombing of Iran last year. But do you think that in this case the statement is true? I mean, we're talking about a raid with no reported US Casualties. Although, although I should mention that Venezuela is reporting that at least 80 people were killed in, including military personnel and civilians. But it does kind of seem like in military terms this was relatively seamless.
- [06:09]
B
It does, it does seem relatively seamless. I mean, the operation which ultimately resulted in the death of Bin Laden was pretty impressive as well and involved years of intelligence work and planning. There was, you know, a last minute screw up, as there often seems to be. There wasn't in this case a of a helicopter crashing and so on. But this was incredibly seamless. I mean, it's sort of a, made for a Reagan era heroic TV drama, you know, Red dawn or something, you know.
- [06:42]
A
And what does that seamlessness suggest to you? Like. Cause I read about this and I immediately think, well, there had to have been some kind of cooperation inside of Venezuela in order to pull off something like this. Like to what degree, and I know we're just kind of speculating here, but to what degree did people in Maduro's regime have to kind of look the other way to enable this to happen? Whether it be the fact that U.S. officials were able to figure out what compound he was staying at. I believe he was rotating, you know, amongst a, you know, variety of different kind of safe houses to the fact that the air defenses went down so quickly.
- [07:17]
B
Yeah, there's many questions and depending on your, you know, inclination, you, one would take one side or another of the suspicions. You know, I just spoke to a friend who knows the region very well. He's from the region and he thinks that Maduro cooperated with the Americans to be brought out. It does seem that there had to have been some, obviously some plant, some informer in the inner ranks of Maduro's security operation, his security cordon, for this to have come off the way it did, for them to know exactly which house he was in that night. Of course, signals intelligence with high tech has increased hugely in the past few years. So it's again speculation that there was an informant. And of course, when we hear that kind of thing leaked out of a source near the President or in the White House, that can also be psychological warfare that could also be black propaganda. In other words, you can't believe everything you're hearing, especially in the early days, because it makes us look better, makes us look good. So I'm keeping my counsel on this. Look, Venezuela is and has been for a long time a very polarized nation. People close to Chavez, who was Maduro's predecessor and close to Maduro over these past 25 years have pulled away, have fallen out of favor. Some have been jailed, some have gone into exile. That includes people in the military. So I have no doubt, and I do think that it wouldn't be surprising that there would be an adversary within someone who perhaps found the incentive of $50 million, which was the bounty that Trump put on Mado's head, something worth considering, especially in a place where the revolution has been threadbare for some time.
- [09:09]
A
Absolutely. I want to talk about what's going to happen next with Venezuela, but first I want to talk about what's going to happen to Maduro. So the Trump administration is framing this as an extradition related to the narco terrorism charges that he faces in the US and he was arraigned today in New York City. I believe that he, you know, when asked how he was going to plead, he said that, you know, he was kidnapped, that he is the rightful leader of Venezuela. He talked about his wife and bruising on her wrist and alleged that they hadn't received medical care. The entire thing was incredibly sort of just shocking and dramatic. And it just strikes me the fact that he's about to. I guess I don't know exactly when the trial will be, but the fact that Maduro will eventually go on trial in New York City, there's something strange about how you have this incredibly complex, intricate military operation that at the end of the day, it seems like its success is sort of contingent upon a jury of 12 New Yorkers deciding to convict. So do you think we're looking at a straightforward trial here? Like, is there any world in which Maduro isn't convicted or traded?
- [10:22]
B
You know, anything's possible with this Trump regime, isn't it? Look, in that same courthouse just three years ago, was it. Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former Honduran president, was also brought in shackles and he was sentenced to 44 years in prison, I think it was, and sent to a supermax. This is during the Biden administration for basically being the Sinaloa cartel's man in Honduras during the eight years he was president and prior to that, when he was head of the National Congress. His own brother, who had also been a senator, I believe it was, had previously been extradited, convicted and sentenced to prison in the United States. Juan Orlando Hernandez was pardoned by Trump about a month ago, out of the blue. And the argument that Trump used was that he was framed by the Biden administration, by the Democrats. Now, I actually did a story for the New Yorker on Juan Orlando Hernandez. I was in Honduras, and it was very strange. To me, at the time, he was still president sitting there. Nobody wanted to talk about what they knew about him. He had been photographed next to Trump in Trump's first term, and he remained in office. Everybody knew that he was culpable, and there was an indictment that was sealed that would be unsealed the minute he left office. And that's what happened. But the US didn't move against him while he was in office. Weirdly, on the apparent basis that that's not done, well, that was just thrown out the window, wasn't it? With this raid on Venezuela, again, as with these narco boats that Hegseth has been attacking, and over 100 people have now been killed in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, there's been no proof presented to the American public that any of the boats were carrying drugs. They may have been, but while his Pentagon is killing people, our coast guard is going around in some cases, trying to save them and also arresting actual drug traffickers and showing to us the evidence of their seizures. Now, in the case of Maduro, the point I'm making is that it's rather similar to these narcoboats. Earlier this year, you know, he was accused and indicted of being a drug trafficker, amongst other things. There's no proof of it. There's no proof of it. He talks about him being a narco terrorist, the head of a cartel, the Cartel de los Soles of the Suns, which by all accounts, and I mean, I've covered the region in Venezuela for years. I've inquired about the Carta de los Odes. Nobody can tell you for sure that it exists. It's a name. I don't know. It's like saying people from Hollywood, Hollywooders, I don't know. It's a name you come up with. Is there thuggery? Is there gangsterism? Is there drug trafficking in Venezuela? Yeah, and there is in plenty of other countries in the region, including American proxies. There's also drug trafficking in the United States. Does that make Trump the leader of the Fentanyl cartel? No. Nor does the fact that some of Colombia's cocaine that comes to the United States or Europe through Venezuelan territory make Maduro a drug trafficker. It just doesn't.
- [13:49]
A
How much of this is about oil, you know, like, I feel like that's when you look at, like, kind of the hypocrisy with Honduras and Venezuela, it seems like part of it just stems from the fact that Venezuela has these significant oil reserves that Honduras doesn't. And, you know, I feel like it's not even speculating that much because when Trump gave his celebratory press conference about the raid, he openly admitted how interested he was in Venezuela's oil and use that as a justification for the US Running Venezuela for a while. So I guess how does that factor into the way that we should be absorbing this story and what comes next?
- [14:25]
B
I think there's no doubt that it's about oil. I think, you know, Rubio then came out and sort of gave a slightly more intelligible but equally aggressive sort of interpretation of the invasion. He didn't. He, first of all, he's denied that it was invasion. He said it was a police action. This was an indicted individual. We brought him out. As for the oil well, Trump, the way he says it is, that's our oil, they took it away from us. He's talking about a nationalization that happened 50 years ago, long before China, Chavez and Maduro, as many other nations around the world did post colonial nations back in the mid 20th century. It became a thing to nationalize their property and finally in some cases disastrously, because they didn't know how to run their economies. But it was important for the national sovereignty of those countries in the mid 20th century. The fact of the matter is, after a period of time, successive Venezuelan regimes actually including Chavez and Maduro, invited back in some majors, including the U.S. american companies, but they didn't have the whole shebang. And I think Hegseth has come out and said something very similar, echoing Trump today, basically saying, that's our oil and we're taking it back. So this was an operation aimed at one, on the surface, getting rid of a noisome regime that spouted anti imperialists, anti Yankee left wing ideas. Two had allowed itself to become a sanctuary or a safe zone for actors that the US doesn't like, Russia, China and Iran amongst them. I should point out that Chevron is pumping oil in Venezuela as we speak. Again, one of the very surreal dualities of all of this. So I think what we're looking at is Trump coming up with a kind of grab bag of justifications in the world's most oil rich nation. By all accounts, Venezuela's reserves are the biggest in the world and they don't want the Chinese anywhere near it. So they're laying down turf, they're laying down a minefield, and they're making Venezuela pay the price for what could be coercive action elsewhere and to vouchsafe and guarantee American hegemony from the Arctic to the Antarctic. That's why that's the talk about Greenland, Canada, Panama Canal, that's ours, we're taking it back. Venezuela, that was our oil, we're taking it back and all the way down. At the moment he doesn't have to intervene in either Chile or Argentina because in Argentina he has Javier Milei whom he's bailed out to the tune of $20 billion. And shortly there will be the right wing president of Chile and he's, he's on board with Trump, so no problem there. But Venezuela, Cuba and maybe Nicaragua, nobody talks about it, but, but Cuba is problematic for and clearly the apple in the eye for Marco Rubio especially. It's a 700 mile long island that's on the ropes, has a communist government and really has no solutions anymore to provide for its people. It has depended on Venezuela for years, 20 years for its energy supplies. Those are going to end now, as we know. It had long been a kind of rumor, we now know for sure that Madura's security cordon were Cubans and 32 of them were killed in this operation. So presumably the Americans will also have collected evidence that they will use against Cuba and indicting Cuba or maybe Cuba's leaders in the same way that they have done against Maduro to justify maybe a blockade to asphyxiate the island. Let's see, let's see what they do. But I think it will be something along those lines.
- [18:36]
A
No, I'm eager to talk to you about that and just kind of like future operations that you can imagine happening. But first we're gonna take a quick break and then when we return, I actually wanna talk a little bit more about this idea of the US kind of running Venezuela for a while and how in the world that is actually supposed to work. This is a special episode of the Political Scene from the New Yorker. We'll be right back.
- [19:04]
B
Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlemagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [19:43]
A
So when you heard Trump say at the press conference that the US Was going to be running Venezuela for a while, what was your reaction to that? Did you think that that was what the next step here was going to be. Or were you expecting that he was then going to say that the next leader was Maria Carina Machado?
- [20:00]
B
I guess, yeah, I probably expected that. Or else that he would say, I'm gonna run Venezuela from now on. And I'm not kidding. It's rare to hear him talk in the collective. So, yes, I was pretty shocked by that. Of course, we're used to sort of his crassness, his blatancy. And so in the hours that passed, that bizarre press conference in which he said that and that we're going to come in and we're going to develop the oil, our great American oil companies are going to come in and do it. We're going to restore those oil companies that have been ground down and everybody's going to make money, the Venezuelans too. And then he talked about Del C. Rodriguez, Maduro's vice president, and he didn't talk about the military or the intelligence service who had been the repressive arm of the Madonna government. And he said that Maria Corina Machado was a nice gal, but she has problems or something like that, Right. So basically he shouldered aside the globally renowned civic and political opposition to Maduro and left them in the lurch. And he effectively said, this ain't regime change, it's leadership removal and we're leaving the regime in place. And he also said, if they don't behave, we'll come again hard, much harder than we did. So the message he was sending to the Venezuelan, the rump regime, Dulcio Rodriguez, Vladimiro Padrino Lopez, the head of the army, and Diosdado Cabello, the quite radical Chavista, quite radical anti American, now head of the intelligence services with his own paramilitary force. He was saying, delsey's Our lady, we are going to talk to her. If you don't behave, we'll bomb you. And the same thing that happened to Maduro can happen again, can happen to you. So they've laid down a coercive environment in which these leaders have been told, keep your jobs, but if you step out of line, we're snatching you. We'll come in hard and for the time being, we'll keep this woman, Maria Corina Machado, whom you despise because the Maduro crowd really hates her. She's a kind of right wing Catholic and charismatic and a populist. And they've long seen her as the ultimate bugbear. So this is the way we're going to keep the place stable. So a lot of people said, what does that mean, boots on the ground. Americans are coming in. I immediately thought, no, what they're going to do is they're going to come in with those American oil companies, most of which are in rural or far flung areas, and they'll probably have maybe some contingents of special forces, but certainly private military contractors used to be called mercenaries, perhaps including the one that extracted Maria Corina Machado a month or so ago for her Nobel Peace Prize, Remember? What was it called? I don't know, Gulf Bear or Golden Dawn, I can't remember. Anyway, one of those. And they'll be around. And of course, I don't know if they'll keep the Iwo Jima or the Eisenhower, whatever the aircraft carrier is called out there, but they will continue to have a military force arrayed around Venezuela that can do, I suppose, drone strikes, snatch and grab operations, missile strikes, whatever they want, as long as they want. And they are saying that there will be a transition. We'll decide how long it's going to be. But he never talked about democracy, really. And it became clear that, of course, this is Trump. It's not about democracy, it's about oil, it's about making money. And I think that's. And it's about keeping the Chinese out, especially the Chinese. It's really about keeping the Chinese out. If it has to be dressed up and given some kind of geostrategic justification, it's about keeping the Chinese out.
- [24:00]
A
What can you tell us about Delsey Rodriguez? Like, I guess it seems like she's communicated that she's ready to play ball, but it doesn't seem like she really has any other choice. I mean, Trump's going around threatening, you know, he told the Atlantic, if she doesn't do what's right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro. So it's not like, you know, she's necessarily cooperating voluntarily, but given that she was such a Maduro loyalist and also that she herself was not, like, democratically elected vice president, like, how do the people feel about her? What can we anticipate in terms of, like, her actions going forward? And just who is she?
- [24:37]
B
Yeah, sure, I've met her. I know. I know her somewhat. And her brother Jorge, who is also a key operator of the regime. Jorge is the head of the national assembly, effectively the president of Congress for Maduro. The two of them have been interchangeable pieces in the senior apparatus for some time. I think Dulcie previously was, for a time, foreign minister. She may have also been president of Congress. I Can't remember. She's had many jobs. I think she's also oil minister or energy minister at the moment as well.
- [25:10]
A
That's apparently why the Trump administration likes her, is that they were impressed by her sort of ability to, you know, deal with the oil industry.
- [25:18]
B
She's, she's kind of a nerd. She's very. Not really. I mean she's bright. I know people who knew her in college as well and you know, she and her brother are interesting. They are the children of a, an urban guerrilla, Marxist guerrilla who was involved in the kidnapping of an American businessman back in the 70s and who himself was murdered or killed, whatever the case may be, in an operation I've heard orchestrated by the CIA. So they have a reputation for being bright and quite resentful of, at least in earlier years, personally quite resentful of the US and quite ideological. And they are the kind of brain, the duo of brains around Maduro. They have university educations, they're fairly sophisticated people. Yeah, so that's DLC Rodriguez. She's something of a black box actually in the end. Prior to this current period, her brother Jorge was the guy that was the go to guy for American senior, American State Department or other envoys who needed to deal one on one with somebody close to the Chavez and then close to Maduro to extract American hostages, propose negotiations. That was Jorge Rodriguez. They would meet in Qatar or Mexico or other places. And more recently I gather it's been Delsey and I gathered that intermediaries for the White House established a line to Delsey some time ago and have been talking with her. And there have been various blandishments offered to Maduro which I gather she was the courier for and which he turned down. Was she a traitor? Did she betray Maduro and did she know that this was coming? I have no information about that. I don't think so. What I've also heard is that Maduro himself was, was in his own security bubble, so they didn't necessarily see each other all the time. It is worthwhile noting of course, that she as the Vice president, in light of his, the vacuum of power constitutionally, you know, becomes the president. So on the surface of it, what she did is what was she was legally required to do. And in a way she has no choice but to on the one hand denounce the capture and extraction of the man she served Maduro, and on the other hand try to prevent a further military attack and tell the Americans much like every other president in the region has done, we'll cooperate with you, don't do this, don't do that to Trump. Right. And I guess she's expected to keep the heads of the military and the intelligence services from doing any power grabs or displacing her. But there may be mutual suspicions there. So it's a kind of a knife edge situation. And meanwhile, let's talk about the Venezuelan people for a minute. They expected to be liberated. They expected those who voted for Maria Corina Machado. And she is popular in the country with people who don't like Maduro, the middle class, upper middle classes, and not only also in the popular classes, in the slums. But she isn't coming. I mean, maybe they'll allow her to stand in elections that will be held at some point in the future. But one explanation I was given by someone close to some of this was that the calculation, I presume it wasn't a calculation by Trump because I'm not sure he calculates, but probably by Rubio, that the calculation was that if they flew Maria Corinna Machado in like the Evaporon or something, the Avenging angel, they would be almost immediately fighting that she is so despised by significant numbers of Venezuelans that there would be immediate fighting and jostling for control and it would immediately get violent. And that by keeping her offside and keeping Delsey in place, they could manage the situation. So manage it until the oil can be up and running again and then it's up to you guys. I think that's kind of what Trump's saying.
- [30:24]
A
Yeah. I mean, speaking of Rubio, what do you think is his vision for Venezuela? You know, the Washington Post recently referred to him as the Viceroy of Venezuela because of his role in masterminding Maduro's ouster, as well as his role in what comes next. So in addition to being Secretary of State and acting National Security Advisor in the US he is going to be helping to run Venezuela and he's going to be divvying up its oil assets and helping usher in a new government, according to the Post. So we know that Trump is interested in the oil.
- [30:55]
B
He speaks Spanish. That's probably how it happened. Trump says, you speak Spanish, you can do that.
- [31:01]
A
But I think the other thing is it seems like Rubio was kind of getting everything he wanted. Right? I think the idea that the US Might go for Cuba next, I guess I'm just wondering if you think that Venezuela is like part one in a much longer Rubio plan or kind of what you think his interest is here.
- [31:20]
B
Look, at the end of Last year and the beginning of this year, I spent quite a bit of time in Miami and I also went to Cuba and Miami again in the spring and summer because I felt for sure with Rubio in this White House and it being such a Miami based White House, and also because of the way Trump had behaved with Cuba and Venezuela before in its first term, where he also tried to oust Maduro but failed, that there was bound to be a campaign to get rid of these socialists once and for all. And early in the year it was a little unclear how it would develop. I don't think they had a plan, but that's clearly evolved over this last year. Yeah, I do think they're going to go for Cuba. I'm not sure how they'll do it. They don't have to do much. What Trump, I think might have been belying there when he said it'll fall of its own accord is that right off the bat, the oil subsidies that Cuba has been getting from Venezuela for years will immediately end. And they don't have the money to buy oil from anybody else. So they already have rolling blackouts of up to 18 hours a day. It's terrible in Cuba at the moment, has been for many months. They have food and medical shortages. There's no jobs. It's really bleak there. There's also a series of viruses that are spreading through the population. Chikungunya, which is this awful mosquito borne one that has effects similar to arthritis and it's quite painful on you. And that's clearly because of a lack of nutrition. And a lot of people have it. And this is something of the last couple of months. So I think what I'm hearing, I talked just before we spoke with a Cuban friend and he says he thinks they're going to go for it. And he speaks to people on various sides and he says that he thinks that the Cubans know that they could be next. Some people are beginning to be worried on behalf of Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia as well, who's been very mouthy with Trump and Trump has. He was in fact the very first leader to stand up to Trump early in the year. And it was the sort of humiliation of Petro via Truth Social and announced sanctions and so on. That caused Petro to back off, but also became the model of behavior for everyone else in the region. The Panamanian president and all of the others realized, oh damn, Trump's really going for it this time. And Petro over the years, he then kept his own counsel for a while. But in the last few months, and especially since the killing of people on these boats, which have included Colombian citizens, again, not proven that they were anything, he began mouthing off again, as he's wont to do on Twitter or whatever. And Trump has fired back that he's a narco, too. He sanctioned him and his family. And most recently he said he could be next, better watch his rear end kind of thing. So there's a lot of nervousness amongst the people I know in Colombia. And I'm not saying the Americans are planning it, but I would guess that they would want to reassert full military to military relations in Colombia, which they always had before Petro. There's an election within the next year. Petro can only serve out this term. Will Trump try to get him out before then? It's possible. At this point, it depends on what happens in Venezuela, I guess. But then they could always. They could probably also just do things unilaterally if they want. It's not a good look. And I know that sort of Latin American Democrats and people to the left of center, even some people right of center, are concerned about what this means for national sovereignty, rule of law, quite beyond the fact that most of them had no love laws for Maduro. This sets a really ugly precedent. And of course, many people, and not just in Latin America, are saying this sends a message to Putin and Xi that they can kind of do what they want, one in Europe, the other in Asia.
- [35:53]
A
More with John Lee Anderson after the break. This is the political scene from the New Yorker. So I feel like I saw that initial reaction that the US has lost its moral standing and now it can't criticize Putin's invasion of Ukraine or try to stop China from invading Taiwan without seeming hypocritical. But it's not like American moral consistency is what is going to stop China from invading Taiwan. Right. So, like, when we talk about this actually getting in the way of the US Being able to take a moral stance against other violations of nation's sovereignty, like, what does that actually look like? Like, is it alienating Poland and other allies who would have been tempted to side with us if not for the fact that we're kind of alienating them now.
- [36:55]
B
I think you make a really good point. Yeah, I tend to agree with you. I think China and Putin are very clear beginning going back to Trump's first term, but also what he said in his inaugural speech, territorial expansion, Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, Greenland, Canada, Panama Canal. And he went off about the Venezuelans and they were the first people he deported, the vilification of Maduro, they could see this coming. So if I'm Vladimir Putin, I'm sitting in Kremlin saying, God, he's copying me, he's emulating what I'm doing. And I think there is an element of emulatory behavior here. Xi, of course, has yet to strike out as other than in Qinqian with the Uyghur people. But, you know, China has been involved in its internal consolidation, well, the party in chi of power, economic prowess abroad. It's only in the last few years that we've begun to see a China with a military buildup and imminent expansionist ambitions. And it's obvious that Taiwan is the hope diamond in the tiara just off the Chinese coast that will consecrate China as a globally ambitious power that will seek to compete with US power in the Pacific. It has already compromised the neighboring states in Southeast Asia. Burma, Cambodia. These are Chinese at this point. They're Chinese vassal states under Biden. The Philippines was arrested back. Japan remains an American vassal state. North Korea is China's wild card. You know, who, who could go nuclear. And he's his kind of, you know, the kind of the bastard son who you can't really control, but of course operates with China's approval. So China is, is on the verge of becoming an expansionist power. The Americans know that and so do the Europeans. They're less concerned because China doesn't have territorial ambitions in Europe at the moment, but Russia does. So this is the carve up of the world, really. I mean, I'm not the only one saying this. And Trump is dusting off. And really it goes back to the 18th century of imperialist mercantilism and the carve up of territories, the seizure of colonies really, that we're witnessing now with Trump. He's treating both rhetorically and in his actions, other nations, whether they're allies or adversaries, as pieces to control, to dispense with, to own, to punish. All of that 20th century, well, it started earlier diplomacy, didn't it? All of this hand wringing about human rights and constitutional order and multilateral behavior and blah, blah, blah, has been thrown out the window. USAID was the first very it was substantive but also hugely symbolic. The United States does not any longer help those needy, miserable people out there, those spongers. And as for the people that took what we initially gave them, Venezuela's oil, et cetera, we're going to take it back and we're going to get rid of all these People that have come here to sponge off of us and thus the deportation policy. You said that they were talking about Rubio as the viceroy. But I've heard today that Stephen Miller, that delightful individual, is also being regarded as a candidate for governing Venezuela. Can you imagine?
- [41:01]
A
Yeah, so many good options. You know, I guess to conclude, like, and this is probably just going to elicit a very, you know, upsetting response, but I'll go for it anyway. Is there anything that you think can rein in this kind of behavior from Trump? I mean, I didn't even bother asking a question earlier about, like, whether any of this is legal because, like, you know, it doesn't really seem like legality, you know, approval from Congress, that that's something that's being taken into account here and it doesn't really matter, right, if it's illegal, if, you know, it's like, Maduro has been captured, he's in the United States, it's happened. And so. And so I guess I just wonder, like, it seems like the capture of Maduro went so seamlessly that that has just emboldened Trump. And I guess we can assume that we're going to keep seeing that kind of behavior as long as these operations are successful or as long as they are popular with his base. I don't know how many people in the US Were like, dying for Trump to go and do this, you know, right after Christmas. But I guess I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the outside factors that might, you know, temper some of these impulses, if they exist.
- [42:12]
B
I mean, it's been an oft repeated kind of idea that because of Marjorie Taylor Greene getting upset with Trump for actually going to becoming a war president, that that's somehow betraying his base and, well, it's certainly betraying his campaign claims, but that's all they ever were. Trump was never against foreign intervention. I seem to recall that he was on board for the Iraq invasion of 2003. And I don't recall him voicing an opinion one way or another about the previous ones. I think this idea of him as this non interventionist and of course he really went to town with that, didn't he, during the campaign and in his quest, naked quest for the Nobel Peace Prize, that he was some kind of man of peace. One, I've never believed it. I don't think it's real. And anybody who knows Trump and anything he says can only regard them as hollow claims. And two, I don't think his base cares one way or another. I don't think the MAGA base is anti intervention. Were they in their youth, were they on the streets protesting Vietnam? Were they out there holding hands and singing Kumbaya when the Iraq war went down, you know, 20 years ago? No.
- [43:36]
A
Yeah. They're not hippies.
- [43:37]
B
No, they're not hippies, no. So I don't, I don't believe that for a second. I don't really see what stops Trump at this point, but let's see if the Democrats are able to wrest back control of one of the houses in, in the midterm elections, that will begin to be a way to curtail some of this behavior. But this is a man without any guardrails whatsoever. He has the Supreme Court, he's got both houses, he's got the White House. He does what he wants. And he's got a party that had become his mayor domos and a lot of economic power at his disposable thanks to the Tech Bros. And a huge part of the public plaza, or whatever it's called, where they're going after the traditional media and silencing and neutering a lot of them and taking over the airwaves with their social media. So it's a, it's a biggie, this one.
- [44:41]
A
Yeah. Not to make light of things, but I was kind of fascinated by one of the photos of kind of like Trump's, I guess it was the situation room that they built in Mar a Lago. And you can see in the background of one of the photos, it's like a bunch of men sitting at a table and then there's kind of like a blown up computer screen and you can see that someone has searched for Venezuela on X and they're looking through the posts about Venezuela on X. So that's what's guiding our foreign policy these days. Thank you so much for being here, Tyler.
- [45:14]
B
It's always great to talk to you. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
- [45:18]
A
John Lee Anderson is a staff writer for the New Yorker. You can find his latest piece, Regime Change in America's Backyard in our show notes and@newyorker.com this has been a special episode of the political Scene from the New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggit. This episode was produced by John Lemay with mixing by Amar Lal and engineering by Pran Bandy. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Thanks so much for listening.
- [45:55]
B
From prx.