A (9:38)

All right, our second story. Iran's supreme leader vowed today Friday that the government will, quote, not back down in the face of protests that have rocked the country in recent weeks, accusing demonstrators of being vandals who are trying to quote, please, President Trump. On Thursday, Iran was plunged into an Internet blackout as demonstrations demanding the ouster of the government spread and grew in size. The protests, which began in late December, have turned deadly. On Thursday, three international groups documenting these events said at least 40 protesters and bystanders, including children, have been killed by regime forces. President Trump said last week that the United States would come to the aid of protesters in Iran if the government used lethal forces against them. The initial demonstrations were led by merchants protesting the plummeting value of the Iranian rial, but they have since spread to cities across the country amid broader anger against Iran's theocratic government. Walter, is this news or fo news?

B (10:40)

It's incomplete news. We will know sooner or later. Sooner, perhaps rather than later. Either the revolts are going to gain enough momentum and enough of the forces loyal or ostensibly loyal to the regime are going to change allegiance or dissolve. Either that's going to happen and we move toward regime change in Iran and another Iranian revolution, or the government will use its military forces to crush its opposition, and a lot of blood may flow in. The opposition will then kind of realize they can't win and begin to decay. I think at this point, nobody from the Ayatollah Khomeini to a man everyone is now calling the crown prince of Iran, who nobody was really calling a crown prince a couple of weeks ago, none of these folks know how it's going to come out. That's the nature of these big historic revolutions. So you can argue, okay, it's new. I think last week, most people looking at the situation thought this was just another one of the many, many tragic attempts by Iranians fed up with the madness of this government, to change, but that this would ultimately sputter and peter out as the others had done. But over the last couple of days, there has seemed to be a kind of a more of a sense that, well, we don't really know this has now moved. It may still be more likely than not that the old government manages to hang on, but there's more uncertainty now than in the past. There's also, of course, the question of Trump, having said, if there's a lot of bloodshed, the US Might intervene in some way, and that's gotta be complicating the factors, the calculations of the regime loyalists. There's also the possibility of Israel doing something with American backing, which might be a little more complicated in terms of Iranian internal policies, but maybe not. Maybe if the Israelis launch some strikes very, very specifically at not only regime targets, but targets that were sort of hardcore, you know, like the training ground of the most radical wing of the IRGC or something of that nature, or, you know, given the level of the intelligence that Israel seems to have in Iran, you couldn't Take out, you know, somehow removing the ayatollah or some other key figures from the equation that arguably would lead to Iranians to rally around the flag. Well, we hate this government, but the only thing we hate more than our government is foreigners thinking they can tell us who our government should be. Or would they say, fine, thank you and let's get up. Now that they're weak, let's really move ahead. Nobody knows the answers to any of these things, and yet everybody's having to make a lot of decisions on the fly.

A (14:02)

On that last point, I do remember one quite widespread prediction in the run up to Operation Midnight Hammer was that kind of regardless of how hated the regime might be, if the US Used military force against its nuclear program, it would create a rally around the flag type effect and shore up Iranian civilian support for the regime. It doesn't seem like it's happened. I mean, how do you kind of evaluate Western or American understanding of these types of internal dynamics in Iran? They seem to be quite bad and.

B (14:35)

Non predictive, I hope, although I don't know that in our intelligence agencies and, you know, the sort of rather small number of real experts, serious experts, there is maybe a little bit more, you know, finally nuanced understanding of and detailed understanding of realities on the ground. I think no matter how deep your understanding is, prediction in circumstances like the current ones is virtually impossible. But I do think one of the ways that the kind of Western educated class reveals its inner idiocy to the world is the extremely poor modeling, mental modeling that it does about the ideas, the motivations, the psychology of people in other lands and in other countries. You know, particularly among good natured, center left, progressive, you know, Americans been to all the great schools, have all the great credentials. They've actually been kind of schooled into a monoculture where anybody who thinks differently from what you, your friends and your professors think isn't just wrong, they are actually evil. Now, it would be racist to think that other people are evil. So one has to assume then that one assumes out of almost human duty and good nature that people in Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, South Africa, Brazil think the same way you do. And that if they dislike Trump, they dislike him for the same reasons that you do. And if they like him, they are themselves examples of evil racists in their society. In just the same way you see Trump supporters in this society as evil, racist. This mindset is almost completely disabling when it comes to the ability to grapple with international events in a serious way. You could hear some echoes of this when after the capture of Maduras, you heard people saying, oh my goodness, now that America has done this terrible thing, Russia and China will lose all their inhibitions because the power of our moral example, you know, has been lost. These are two fundamental things that these idiots, and I do mean idiots, didn't process, weren't seemed unable to process, was that number one, the Russians and Chinese and many, many others around the world don't actually see us as moral. They don't have the same flattering image of American actions, American history, American values, that sort of progressive Americans have kind of absorbed as second nature. So they already think we are evil. Insanely ambitious and greedy hypocrites who, no matter what flowery phrases come out of our mouths, have this, you know, have unbelievably selfish. We'll say to Gorbachev, oh, Mr. Gorbachev, let's have a piece of equals. Then we rape your country under Yeltsin. You know, this is, that's how they see us. And you argue, are they right or are they wrong? Is there a more complicated picture? Fine. But they are not sitting around hypnotized by the spectacle of morality that the United States and Western Europe like to present to themselves to the rest of the world. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is that they actually are much more into real politic than we are. So even if they thought we were moral and they don't think we are particularly moral, by and large, they would not feel constrained by that example to do things. They would be entirely about power. So Xi Jinping doesn't invade Taiwan because America hasn't invaded Venezuela or Cuba. And if we do that, then, oh my goodness, you know, all bets are off and, you know, chaos will reign.

A (19:04)

No, no, we've provided them a roadmap that was the right.

B (19:09)

Right, exactly. Themselves, the poor heathen idiots, they couldn't develop a roadmap. Only the Americans can teach them to be evil. This is narcissism dressed up as international relations theory. And what it actually causes around the world is a mix of rage at the sort of what they see as the unbelievable arrogance, humor at what they see as the unbelievable stupidity and then opportunism as they think about ways that our blindness can be manipulated to serve their own purposes. You know, what a mess is all I can say.

A (19:52)

All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. All right, it's been hard waiting this long to discuss the Maduro operation in detail with you, Walter. But let's let's approach it from the angle you took earlier this week about the potential reactions we might expect from the other members of the revisionist axis, whose diplomatic prestige and also on the ground resources have been invested in Venezuela, in the Maduro regime, China, Russia, Iranian proxies like Hezbollah, Cuba. You said that just as Trump has identified weak points or vulnerabilities in the access to attack, like Iran's nuclear program and Maduro's hold on power, the axis itself will likely probe for American vulnerabilities to exploit, which could conceivably include anything from terror attacks to Russian attacks on European targets to escalations in the cyber realm, et cetera. So I guess first just give us your reaction to Operation Absolute Resolve as it unfolded last weekend and then elaborate on this point about how our enemies might try to make sure it turns into a quagmire for us.

B (21:05)

Okay. Well, I mean, I think like a lot of our listeners, I was amazed at the success. You know, this was an extremely skillfully planned operation. Now, let's be clear. The Venezuelan armed forces are not one of the world's greatest assemblages of experts. We're looking at a government whose essential health and power more than anything else, is linked to the productivity of its oil industry. And this is a government that by packing the oil industry with corrupt and incompetent cronies, you know, and, you know, a complete lack of any managerial experience, has managed to trash its own chief source of income in ways that leave it vulnerable in all kinds of ways. So, so these are not people who are very good at understanding and acting on their own interests or taking effective steps in the face of complex problems. I think we have to assume, well, again, they're quite focused on maintaining domestic order and so on with their security forces. We have to assume that their armed forces are full of the same corrupt, incompetent, sleazy, backstabbing, you know, brothers in law and, and so on that, that everything else in the Venezuelan state is about. I think this is one reason they actually have relied as much as they do on kind of Cuban mercenaries for the really important security operations, because they, they know as well as anyone that they really, they are bumbling fools who can't do the job that they have managed to get the power to keep anybody else from doing, which is to say, govern Venezuela. In that sense. The United States was not fighting, engaging with a peer enemy in, in Venezuela. And you have to imagine that if we wanted to penetrate their security apparatus, whether it's with Hument or Sigint, they were pretty vulnerable. So, okay, it was an easy target in some ways. It was still a really difficult operation. A lot of moving parts had to work. And actually the ways in which the administration had assembled military force, had sort of used diplomacy and statements and other things while conducting this back channel operation with Maduro, you know, let's say it was. It actually, you know, was, was effective and worked well. Now, whether this is Secretary of War Hegseth's strategic genius and organizational brilliance, or whether there are a lot of people lower down in the Pentagon who in a sense can move, whether in that sense Hegseth was as irrelevant to the capture of Maduro as Tulsi Gabbard was, who they actually kept out of the meetings, apparently. I don't know. But it does mean that Hegseth's department is capable of carrying out sophisticated, risky military missions with real success. We saw it with Midnight Hammer. We see it again. Now that is something we've got to take into account. That was my first and initial response to what was happening. And obviously it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. It also became very, very clear that Trump had offered Maduro ways to an easier exit, which again, I think was the right move. And maybe for Maduro's sake and everyone else, I would not have been unhappy had he accepted it. Our first goal should not be in this world to convict and punish sinners, but rather to get the sin to stop. If we again beyond that, then though, you immediately begin to wonder, okay, what next? And it is absolutely clear that both, I think because of some of its own MAGA and America first theory, but also because of what it looks as what's happened in places like Iraq and Libya in the aftermath of these strikes. You can see the administration is trying to steer between, say, the silla of Iraq, where the US just gets involved in micromanagement and long insurgent war that ends not well, or on the other hand, the Charybdis of Libya, where you just take out the top guy and then leave. What other forces are there on the ground to do whatever the heck they want at which you end up with, you know, the humanitarian. What is it the right of humanitarian intervention or the duty of humanitarian intervention ends with slave markets established in Tripoli and jihadis all over the continent awash in sophisticated weapons which they continue to use. So those are two huge examples of bad management of the aftermath of a strike. And what you can see is the administration is trying to figure out how can it do the how can it maintain sort of enough control over events in Venezuela to get its core needs met while utterly minimizing the risk of being drawn into Venezuela for a quagmire? And they've figured out, in a way, and give them credit, this is intelligent. They've figured out that America's ability to control how much oil Venezuela can put on world markets is the leverage that can give them enough control. Maybe not to turn Venezuela into a beautiful Bolivarian democracy in a real sense, you know, into Switzerland or Denmark. Well, maybe we don't use Denmark anymore as a good example because they are viciously oppressing the poor people of Greenland every day. But that was sarcasm, by the way, in case anybody's wondering. In any case, that looks like a possibility. So you say, okay, you're not going to help Cuba, you're not going to help terrorists. You're not going to become a spy platform for Russia. You're not going to become an economic or geopolitical asset for Cuba. You're going to stop economic policies that are so insane that they drive, you know, measurable percentages of your population out of the country every year, destabilizing all your neighbors and causing us problems. All of that is off the table now. Otherwise, you know, you're kind of on your own. We're not going to. We're telling you what we want you to do and what we will do to you if you don't do it, but we're not telling you how to do it, or we're not demanding that we decide who will do it. All right? And so they are hoping that this, that the leadership in Venezuela will be both competent and rational enough to say, okay, this is our best path. And then that would allow the situation they would hope to develop in better ways and the thing might become more stable. That's the idea. And if you want to talk about the history of imperialism, and I know sort of some of our audience will jump on me for using, for saying, oh, how can. You can't say that MAGA is imperialist and whatever. And the other half will say, imperialism was good, you jerk, and why are you saying something bad about it? And others will just be shocked that I'm talking about it at all. In a way, I suppose the third half, I don't know. But the thing is that in the history of European imperialism, British imperialism especially, they moved from the idea of, okay, we're going to, like, conquer and annex everything to know what we're going to do is we're going to go through Local rulers. So we will have, you know, there'll be a Maharaja of Gwalior. There will be, you know, a Nizam of Hyderabad. We will rule in Nigeria through Sharia councils and the hereditary leaders. And as long as they attend to the things that we lay down as our key interests, we will not get in their hair. And that was, you know, that is a lighter touch, lower cost form of, if you want to be mean about it, imperialism, you want to be a little bit nicer about it, of international influence, shall we say. So that seems to be what they're trying to do. And it's interesting. I mean, I can't say I would favor following Obama's example in Libya or that the entire United States is desperately hungry for Iraq war, only this time in our own hemisphere. So I get it. And I also get it that this would be a model of American diplomacy that might work better with some other countries, small countries that we have beefs with, you know, so the concept is not necessarily empty. But, okay, you have to understand that we won't be the only people swimming in this swimming pool. That there are lots of figures that, you know, the. The Venezuelan leadership is extremely factionalized to begin with. They're certainly not held together by any ideological principle. And you have narco traffickers, you have agents of Russia, you have agents of China. You have people who bet everything on the Cuban connection. You've got domestic opposition, which itself is very factionalized, which tends to win elections or get more votes, but never able to take power. All of these things are at work, plus millions of people just trying to get through the day and get what they need to feed their families and so on. And so you are counting on the ability of, first of all, the sincerity of your chosen instruments or partners, we could say more euphemistically your chosen partners, to actually control this situation in the face of all of this. This. Right. And on their sincerity, like, oh, honest, Mr. Trump, now that I've seen the light, I know Venezuela's best course, and my best course is to cooperate with you entirely. So I am with you 100%. Well, maybe they mean that and just possibly maybe they don't. So you are not. There's no one you you can trust. You have a very strong offshore mechanism. But meanwhile, also, I don't think Russia and China, or even in its current pathetic state, Iran, not to mention Cuba, are just saying, okay, well, I guess our play in Venezuela is over. There's nothing we can do. Trump has now let his will be known and we can only comply. No, they are going to be looking for ways to make this harder and more expensive for us. They don't want it to work in Venezuela. And they also don't want the United States to develop a sort of a toolkit that can be applied in other places. They don't want that to happen. So they're going to try to make this a mess. And in addition to. And again, it may, you know, we'll see. But I think they've got lots of. There are lots of people in there that would be willing to help them. We'll see how all of that works. But meanwhile, too, we look outside of Venezuela and we think, again, it would be bad for Russia, bad for China, bad for Iran, bad for North Korea. If the US Instance gets to make a move that clearly undercuts their power and somebody they promised to help is rotting in an American jail and there's nothing they can do about it, then everybody else they promise to help starts like, you know, checking just how far am I from a place where the Americans can operate and so on. And so they don't want this to happen. They don't want Trump or his successors to think, oh, that was great, let's do it again. And they want everybody else to think, oh, the Americans won't do this. They tried this in Venezuela, it was a terrible failure. So I can go on doing whatever the heck I'm up to without really worrying. All the Americans can do is write mean notes to me. So they're going to be working hard to raise the price of this intervention for Trump. Now, what that will be, I don't know. I don't think an invasion of Taiwan would be it, because frankly, for the Chinese, if they thought they could do it already and get away with it, they would do it. And if they're not doing it, it's because they think the risk reward profile just isn't right. Nothing about what we did in Venezuela changes that. So nothing about what we did in Venezuela is going to change the Chinese calculus on Taiwan in terms of Russia and Ukraine. Again, I think Russia has a course that it's on. Nothing about, you know, they're not going to, like, be extra mean to Ukraine or extra stubborn in the peace negotiations as a way to try to punish Trump over Venezuela, because it's just too important to them for them to, like, let some external thing drive their policy. Ukraine is more likely to drive their policy toward Venezuela than Venezuela would drive their policy toward Ukraine. Okay, so what does that leave? Well, we've seen a real, this gray zone Russian warfare in Europe between sabotage, cyber attacks. I think Berlin is out of power. Now the Germans are freezing in the dark because of what a lot of people are saying is a Russian cyber attack of some kind. I don't know, vessels that accidentally drag their anchors over undersea cables and interfere with European communications, et cetera. The Russians keep doing this stuff and they keep not getting responses from Europe that are strong enough to tell the Russians this is a bad idea and you shouldn't do it again. Well, something like the Venezuela thing might make the Russians think we need to show, you know, demonstrate some counter power. The downside for that is the more threatened the Russians are to the Europeans, the more they drive Europeans into dependency on the U.S. so if America ever were to get Greenland with European pained acquiescence, it would be because they were scared of Putin, not because they were convinced by Trump's arguments about why this was a good thing. So that makes it complicated, the Russians. But are there other places they could act and things they could do? I think we will see them looking at the list of possibilities and trying to pick a few. Chinese the same. Although the Chinese are probably, honestly, Venezuela is probably less important to the Chinese than it is to the Russians. They don't want to lose money in Venezuela. But you know, amid everything else that's going on in China and the size of the Chinese economy, that's not going to drive Chinese thinking. The oil they get from Venezuela, fine. But you know, there's other oil running around and the price of oil, thanks to Trump's policy, is low. And so Venezuela is not disrupting world oil markets or Chinese supply chains necessarily in ways that, that actually matter. So for China, it's kind of more about prestige than it is about and perceptions of power than it is. But I think Venezuela for Russia is a financial loss and they've been more deeply invested. Cuba, that would be another place. Again, the Chinese. It's amazing how little the Chinese have done with Cuba over the decades when you think about how much we've done with Taiwan. And you could definitely, you know, any Chinese would have to think, okay, look what America is doing with our annoying little island. What can we do with their annoying little island that would make them really regret messing around with us? And so far the Chinese have really not found much to do. And the problem is because the sort of clap out, decadent, ideologically empty, economically inept Cuban leadership, it's such a leaky bucket that you just, you can't pour water into it. You can't raise the level of water in the Cuban bucket. So their options are not that great. And again, the Western Hemisphere is a place where we are strong and they are weak. I wouldn't be surprised, but I think it will make the Chinese double down in places like Southeast Asia. Very, very inept. American policymaking is sort of allowed in the Burmese civil war. The Chinese are, like, gaining points with the junta and gaining points with guerrilla groups. There are other places, I think, you know, that China, China will be determined, even determined, to try to make it look as if 2026 overall is a better year for China than it is for America. And so the better things turn out for America and now Iran, perhaps, the harder they would try to find something that goes in their win category that could match it.

A (40:15)

All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Another listener request this week, Walter, this time from Nathaniel in Virginia, who wants to know if you have a favorite US intervention in Latin America throughout history. I have no idea whether that means the most interesting or the one that turns out the best or what, but I guess give us your, your favorite case study to read and think about.

B (40:46)

Well, I think you'd probably have to say it is the Mexican War in that it used to be Latin America and now it's California. And that was a very controversial war. Abraham Lincoln, for years was known as Spotty Lincoln because he was very much against the Mexican War on moral grounds. And he said, show me this spot on American soil where Mexican soldiers fired at the Americans, which was the reason given for why we had the war. You know, that was interesting. I suppose you could say that the seizure of Panama Canal was effective in more or less the same way. You know, even though we've given the canal back to Panama, sort of, it's still there and still doing what we wanted it to do and still really impossible for anybody else to use it against us. So all of that, those were good, but I guess most, most of them have not ended well. But my favorite, I suppose it's more my favorite story about Latin American interventions than. Than actual interventions that apparently at one point, while FDR was president, there was chaos in Haiti, a real shocker there. And Sumner Wells, I believe it was, under Secretary of State comes in and says, Mr. President, you know, we're just going to have to go down and intervene in Haiti. It's such a mess. And Roosevelt sort of, no, why, why do we have to go into Haiti, for crying out loud? What it was just. It's a real mess down there. But why, why can't. Why on earth can't they govern themselves? What is this? Why do I have to do this? And he says, well, he says, you have to understand, it's a huge mess down there. They don't even. They don't even have a constitution. At which point FDR says, nonsense. He says, they have an excellent constitution. I wrote it myself when Roosevelt was in the Navy department during, you know, during Wilson's administration, actually, U.S. had prepared a document. He had a role in it. So there it is, maybe the greatest anecdote connected with the history of American interventions in Latin America. But again, I would like to live in a world where we don't intervene in Latin America and Latin America is happy. That's. That's my world. But unfortunately, we don't seem to be there.

A (43:11)

All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producer, Josh Cross, thanks to Alex Fatanov at Hudson, and my co host, Walter Russell Mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week. And until then, please go rate and review us. This helps other people find the show.

B (43:23)

It.