← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Cold War 2.0: How Venezuela Became a Pawn in a US-China Power Struggle
00:21:46
Tom Bilyeu dives deep into America's dramatic invasion of Venezuela, unraveling the real motives behind it, the escalating US-China power struggle, and what history can teach us about the dangerous new era of global politics.
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On carvana pickup fees may apply the us recently invaded venezuela and arrested their sitting president in the dead of night if someone did that to us i guarantee we would consider it an act of war many in the international community have said this is without question an unprovoked act of illegal aggression but what's really going on how does a country with fewer than thirty million people become the obsession of the most powerful country on earth and is this really about drugs as trump claims or even oil as so many others around the world are saying the answer is obviously not america already produces more energy than we use and we are already currently exporting our unused energy so doing this for oil would make no sense whatsoever and mexico sends us way more drugs than venezuela ever will the real reason we invaded venezuela is far simpler than people realize and far more dangerous to understand what's really happening we've got to go back in time and understand just how dramatically the world is changing right now while everyone is focused on ai as the agent of change we've lost sight of the real shift namely the post world war two era of peace and prosperity has ended we're now back in the dog eat dog world of great power politics which we haven't tasted in any real way since the berlin wall fell but we're back in the thick of that now and venezuela's catastrophic collapse under socialism turned it into a sacrificial pawn in the life and death chess game between the us and china the how of it all is going to shock you but if you don't understand what comes next is going to catch you completely and that is something that none of us can afford right now back in the nineteen seventies venezuela the country that's currently in the middle of one of the largest humanitarian crises ever as people fled the country long before the us came they used to have the fourth strongest economy in the world when measured on a per person basis now well in twenty twenty three after nearly twenty five years of socialism their poverty rate skyrocketed to over eighty percent between twenty thirteen and twenty twenty one venezuela's real gdp fell by more than seventy five percent one of the largest peacetime collapses on record venezuela also suffered one of the world's highest hyperinflation rates with reuters reporting the imf's official projection of of their twenty eighteen levels at a staggering one million percent all of that catastrophe made them a very compelling target for china's belt and road initiative and in twenty eighteen maduro officially signed on effectively inviting china into the us's backyard to understand the level of aggression that this move ultimately triggered however we have to go back even further to the nineteen sixties and talk about what happened in cuba it was a literal bloodbath that walked us all up to the brink of nuclear annihilation and showed the world just how far america would go to protect its sphere of influence and keep a rival from having weapons in its backyard in nineteen sixty one cuba had just fallen to fidel castro a revolutionary who promised land reform and freedom and like all socialist dictators before him delivered nothing but poverty and oppression but what really triggered the us was that he aligned himself with america's mortal enemy at the time the soviet union so the cia came up with a plan that seemed train a small army of cuban exiles land them on a beach spark a popular uprising and overthrow castro and in april nineteen sixty one they launched the invasion at a place called the bay of pigs it was a spectacular disaster castro's forces were waiting the cuban people did not rise up and within days the invasion collapsed the rebels were all killed or captured and castro not only survived he became convinced the united states was going to try again so he asked the soviet union to protect him and they were all too eager to comply just one year later in october of nineteen sixty two american spy planes flying over cuba spotted something absolutely unthinkable soviet nuclear missile sites were under construction just ninety miles from florida with a flight time of only minutes they could strike new york washington or chicago for thirteen days the entire world held its breath as the two nations escalated towards nuclear war the us navy blockaded cuba american forces went to defcon two which is one step away from nuclear war soviet ships steamed towards the blockade line nuclear submarines lurked just beneath the waves multiple times individual commanders on both sides were just seconds away from launching preemptive strikes that would have ended civilization finally through public and private negotiations between jfk and khrushchev a deal was reached and both nations stepped back from the brink despite the fact that disaster was averted historians overwhelmingly view the cuban missile crisis as one of the clearest modern examples of what's known as the monroe doctrine the monroe doctrine is the rule that no rival superpower can have military or strategic footholds in the americas and the us will enforce that rule violently if necessary listen at the time of the cuban missile crisis the united states was already living under the threat of soviet nuclear we missiles in cuba did not radically change the balance of power but superpowers take their spheres of influence very seriously and they will not tolerate a rival establishing a strategic foothold in their own hemisphere since the berlin wall fell in the early nineties however the us has been a solo superpower so for a long time we've just turned a blind eye to the strategic moves that china has been making in the americas with with their belt and road initiative but those days are now over for many this is going to feel like a very confusing new frontier but the reality is this is just a return to normal most people get lost in the slogans of the day that we're living in right now america first make america great again but the honest answer is those are just the surface level slogans that politicians use what's really at play is is that the world is already and always has been a very dangerous place and when two great powers collide lines are drawn there are no referees and actions are taken at least when you have action oriented leaders and love or hate trump and xi they are both men of action to actually understand what's happening now you have to understand something absolutely terrifying about history peace is the exception not the rule for most of human existence the world has been defined by conquest slaughter and power struggles between rising and falling empires genghis khan and the mongol invasions killed roughly ten percent of the entire world's population that is a level of slaughter so dramatic that global co two levels were measurably reduced in modern russia stalin created a famine that wiped out entire generations not to mention all of the people that he simply had murdered not to be outdone mao zedong instituted policies in china that led to the deaths of more than forty five million people that's not even to mention the tens of millions more that were lost to war in the twentieth century alone adolf hitler dragged the world into a war that killed roughly eighty five million people and pol pot managed to kill a staggering share of his own country in just four years history is a bottomless bottle of black pills violence domination conquest corruption sabotage murder slavery subjugation and a whole lot more great powers will do whatever they think they can get away with to advantage their own people and when two such nations collide god help us all so why are so many people so confused by what's happening in venezuela right now because briefly after world war two something changed historically wars were limited in scope by an army's ability to travel and the rate at which one human could hack another to death with a sword then world war one hit and we saw just how many people could die and quickly then that ended only for the troops to bring home the spanish flu of nineteen eighteen which killed all another roughly fifty million people worldwide then just twenty years after all of that death another eighty five million people were killed in world war two and that included hundreds of thousands of people being instantly vaporized by nuclear weapons by the end of all of that the world was just tired and broken anything for a break and so on the back of the us coming out unscathed and with a manufacturing base that turned them into the world's strongest economy the world entered an unprecedented period of stability and prosperity global trade exploded the us helped people rebuild and for a few generations in the west life got safer richer and more predictable than it had ever been before so predictable in fact that people began to believe that this was the new normal that peace was permanent that prosperity was automatic that history itself had somehow ended but it hadn't it was just waiting for us to forget and for two great powers to once again collide it happened briefly in the eighties but then the soviet union collapsed and we all went back to sleep but now there's once again another superpower and we find ourselves in cold war two point.
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Zero hang tight we'll be back in.
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It china didn't rise on the international stage with tanks and missiles it used factories ports loans trade deals while america fought wars in the middle east outsourced jobs to china deficit spent its way into grotesque inequality and and argued with itself at home china absorbed technology capital and leverage hundreds of millions were pulled out of poverty supply chains were rerouted influence was massively expanded and slowly but surely china grew to rival the us as a peer and venezuela became the new cuba once you understand that trump storming in and snatching up maduro and vowing to run the country in a way that's advantageous to the us stops looking like the lunatic move of someone who wants cheap oil and a violent end to drug smuggling and looks more like the lunatic move to fend off the only country that is a true threat to our dominance for decades after the cold war the us could afford to look the other way as china gained strength we could and did tell ourselves a story that prosperity would turn china away from communism and make it just as freedom loving as america but it didn't because that's not how value systems work make no mistake china is executing on a long standing plan to return them to a position of glory and global influence their culture is one with rigid hierarchies where they believe they were destined to influence global politics you can't blame them america is the same as was england in its time holland in its time spain in its time and so on and so forth but while you might not be able to blame you have to face the fact that them exerting their will will have consequences as they say ambition grows in the eden and as china has grown economically their power has grown and so have their ambitions china refers to itself as the middle kingdom the literal translation of china's name for itself zhang guo china's name literally means central state or middle country this term dates back over three thousand years initially referring to the central plains of the yellow river valley the cradle of early chinese civilization surrounded by less civilized peripheral tribes historically it reflected a sinocentric worldview china as the cultural political and moral center of the world surrounding regions were seen as tributaries or barbarians paying homage through a hierarchical system where the chinese emperor embodied universal authority it was more cultural and political than strictly geographical emphasizing china's superiority in civilization not literal centrality on a global map and china is now a peer competitor to the us making good on that promise they are a nation that is using its power with increased fervor all around the world not only are they building a gold corridor in south america as a part of a larger plan to create a gold backed rival to the us dollar but they've also taken over ports at both ends of the panama canal creating a dangerous choke point for us military and trade movements to anyone that believes we're still in the neoliberal kumbaya peaceful world order china's moves probably look innocent enough but if you put their moves in their rightful context of being a geopolitical chess match between two great powers who are on a collision course suddenly everything takes on a far more ominous tone remember twelve out of the last sixteen times a declining power like the us and a rising power like china have come into conflict war has been the result seventy five percent of the time war is what happens so the us cannot afford to continue to turn a blind eye to the strategic maneuverings of their most powerful rival from that perspective the invasion of venezuela is not impulsive it doesn't make it any more comforting but doing nothing is not an option not when there's so much at stake washington has decided that the cost of inaction is now greater than the risk of reasserting its power in a world where global trust and cooperation is once again being divided between two great powers what the us has done is going to have global consequences but in cold war two point zero countries are going to have to pick sides and there will be consequences regardless of which way people go the invasion and apprehension of maduro was a message to beijing and to all of latin america this is what it looks like to go against the us if you're squarely within our sphere of influence now i expect this to be deeply discomforting to people all over the world and lord knows i hope we avoid the unimaginable tragedy that is war but any country that is not prepared to defend its way of life against its adversaries will fall the question is where do we go from here trump has deposed maduro but maduro's vp has been sworn in as president trump has made it clear that america is in charge and a fate worse than maduro's awaits the new regime if they don't obey given all of that venezuela is now essentially a vassal state for the us but that's going to require a lot of management and for a president who ran on america first and who has plenty of problems to deal with here at home it may become politically difficult very quickly to apply the kind of focus on venezuela that it's going to require to keep them from falling into disarray or even civil war regime changes are at best hit or miss and at worst total catastrophes if we burn money and american lives in venezuela trump will see the populace turn on him even more than they already have everything now hinges on one does venezuela still remember democracy if there's still enough institutional memory competent bureaucrats engineers oil workers judges business leaders then there's a path forward a hard path maybe a painful one to be sure but a path nonetheless in that scenario the us can help stabilize supervise rebuild profit from and then eventually step back with a mutually prosperous relationship between the two countries if that happens this operation will be remembered as a brutal but decisive move that prevented china from locking in permanent influence in our own hemisphere but if that memory is gone if corruption is too entrenched in venezuela if trust is too broken if violence fills the vacuum or the us oil companies come in and enrich americans and leave venezuelans impoverished or if america simply doesn't know when to step back then this becomes something else entirely the other massive concern is that venezuela is just the first of a long list of countries that america plans to take over run and unjustly influence the rhetoric around colombia and greenland are already making a lot of people nervous that trump's aggression will overextend us and alienate our allies putting us in a weaker position people like historian neil ferguson have warned for years that empires have a long track record of overreaching miscalculating and ultimately financially bleeding to death by trying to fight everyone everywhere all at once and that's the danger but we're going to have to wait and see how this all plays out right now though one thing is clear the united states will enforce its sphere of influence again openly forcefully and without apology this will certainly slow china's ambitions in our own backyard but it may also destabilize the region and begin an acceleration of our financial woes or it could be a clean decisive victory that slows the flow of drugs reduces energy costs and reminds the american people that empires have their privileges it's too early to tell but history is clear on this one all empires eventually fall let's just hope it's not today all right if you guys are getting value out of this make sure that you leave us a five star review wherever you listen to your podcasts and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace there.
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