The Imperial History Behind the Raid on Venezuela

Hello, and welcome back to On The Knows, the Jewish Currents podcast. I'm Ariel Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. On Saturday, January 3rd, President Trump announced that a military raid on Caracas had captured Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro along with his wife and brought them back to the US to face drug charges. The operation followed months of deadly US strikes against boats purportedly faring drugs from Venezuela. Trump has spoken explicitly of the US's interest in Venezuela and oil reserves, and the administration has said that they plan to control oil sales indefinitely. And yet it still feels difficult to fully explain the Trump administration's intense interest in Venezuela. Disturbing questions are emerging about what comes next under the Don Road doctrine, the administration's updated the 202-year-old Monroe doctrine, which was used to justify generations of US interventions throughout the Western hemisphere. On this episode of On The Knows, editor-in-chief, Peter Bynard speaks to Greg Grandin, a foremost expert on the tangled history of US involvement and interference in Latin America to help us understand the historical context of Trump's Latin American surge and what it may suggest about his military adventures going forward. Grandin breaks down the political situation in Venezuela and the history of its nationalized oil reserves and explains what Trump's new doctrine of pure power may hold in store for the US and the Americas. This episode originally appeared on the Bynard notebook on Substack. Without further ado, here's Peter Bynard and Greg Grandin. Thank you all very much for joining us. Usually we tend to focus more on Israel-Palestine here, but there are a lot of other very, very important things that happen in the world. But the news about Venezuela has, I think, been really extraordinary. So I'm really, really grateful that we're being joined by Greg Grandin, his conversation is being co-sponsored with Jewish currents. Greg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Yale. He's the author of among many books, "Empires Workshop, Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism." And then more recently, "America, America, a new history of the New World." Greg, thank you so much for doing this. Thanks so much for having me. I want to acknowledge that we don't have events, Wailen, here is my guest, but I think most of the conversation really is going to be less about Venezuela per se, than about the history of US policy, US empire in the Western hemisphere. But I thought just to situate things for those of us who don't follow this very closely, Greg, for someone who didn't know anything about Venezuela and didn't know anything about Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Modor, did not know anything about the political economy, about the history. What are the essential things that you think somebody would need to know? Well, in many ways, Venezuela was an exception to the standard history of Latin America during the Cold War. During the Cold War, most countries kind of devolved into polarization and on insurgency and right-wing terrorist states and death squad states. Venezuela, from about 1959 to the late 1990s, established something that the United States held up as a model of a modern pluralistic state in which political power rotated back and forth between two ideologically distinct parties, and then called PAY and UD-D and Democratic action and then called PAY. They were both mildly social democratic and was they that presided over the nationalization of oil as a lot of misinformation about Chavez nationalizing the oil, which was actually nationalized in the 1970s by a president Carlos Andres Perez and consolidated under a bureaucracy called PAY-D-VESA. And by the time you get to the 1990s, though, the two-party system, which was based very much on patronage, you know, each party had its followers, it was rooted very much in the oil economy, had begun to fall apart. There was vast numbers of new younger generations that were outside of the patronage system that migrated into the city. Venezuela is a very urban country and Caracas is a time in which the marginal neighborhoods around Caracas began to be built and developed and sprawling around. And this new generation or multiple generations by this point were really outside the patronage system. And then one of the two parties, under pressure from the IMF, agreed to an austerity package in 1989 and that led to about a week of rioting called the Caracasso. And it's unclear how many people died in that. It was put down very repressively and that was kind of the end of Venezuela as the model of stability and the two-party democracy that had somehow escaped the polarization that had gripped the rest of Latin America. And this is the context in which Chavez rose up. He was in the military and the military was very nationalistic and it was very kind of a social program and a social vision. It's often the case, not always, Latin American militaries are very repressive and particularly those that went through the Cold War and the National Security doctrine. But there is a tradition of militaries that saw themselves as having a kind of social vision of the nation. And that was the case with Venezuela. And this was the context of which Chavez grew up very poor in the high plains of the country, the Yarnos of the country rose up. And he was associated with a left-wing movement and he staged a coup, a failed coup in 1992. And he was enormously popular, enormously charismatic. The coup was in many ways a response to the repression that was carried out against that uprising against the IMF austerity. And then he ran for president in the late 1990s at a moment when the two main parties were absolutely discredited in terms of corruption. Chavez and somebody like Lula in Brazil are often compared with Lula coming out more favorably as someone who's more moderate, more democratic, more institutional. But Lula came rose up through a political system that was pretty much intact, a complex society that had collapsed. Chavez won his election in a system that had created a complete political vacuum of legitimacy. And one of the things that Chavez represented was the kind of massive incorporation of the people who had been outside of politics into the public sphere and to the political realm. And race is not necessarily a major category in Venezuela, but it is implicitly wealthy oligarchic Venezuelans are white. And they look white and their servants are dockskinned. And Chavez's supporters were overwhelmingly dockskin. So all of a sudden there was this intrusion of the idea of race and what it meant to have a massive new voting block that was gathering around Chavez. Chavez got it out mostly as a reform and he's cited John Kenneth Goldbrath, each cited made in Keynes. He talked about the millennial goals of the UN, but he wanted to get control of what had become effectively an autonomous, even though the oil was nationalized as it become an autonomous entity that granted self as if it was a private company. And so they began a long struggle over whether the president of the country had the right to control the nationalized entity of Venezuela. And that was the beginning of the struggle and the oligarchic reaction to Chavez. And you know, you can look at it in lots of different ways. You can say that the authoritarian impulse was already present from the beginning or you could say that the process of radicalization was a dialectical working out of oligarchic intransigence and the demand for reform and the sudden emergence of new voters demanding a more a say in how the constitution worked. Now Chavez was very out there. He was saying he was charismatic, but he won elections. Now he's playing by the rules of the game between his first election and the late 1990s and his death in 2013. He won 11 out of 12 elections. The space of support was about 60%. You know, these were recall elections. These were referendum elections. This was an election to ratify the new constitution. And also his re elections. And when he lost one election, which was to allow him to run against president, he accepted the results. It really was a they had a family good electoral system that was hard to jig. The way it worked is that electronic voting. You voted for your candidate. You got the votes. little piece of paper that said the name of the person you voted, you dropped it in a box, and then at the end of the day they would do about 20% hot-boughter's random orders to see if the the name's matched. It was almost impossible. The point of matter is that Chavez had both electoral and rhetorical legitimacy, and he also had a lot of money because oil rent started to raise. I guess the main criticism is that instead of trying to take on the state and rebuild the state, he just did parallel institutions, right, instead of reforming the health care system because of the entrenchment of the medical profession, he created all these missing things, and his al-Dentro, which is, you know, local hospitals and medical clinics. You know, every social problem, he just created a parallel system. So in some way, so you still had the state and then you had the parallel system. And he was enormously popular, and then he died in 2013. He died of cancer. So then Nicholas Maduro came to power, oil prices crashed, he didn't have the charisma of Chavez, and I'd say he actually did win his first election, but he only wanted by a couple of points. So to the degree that Chavez had managed to socialize the bourgeoisie into accepting the legitimacy of the reforms that he was trying to carry out, Maduro had to start from scratch, right? The protest started again in transigence, and yes, I think Maduro, by this point with oil collapsing, relied more and more on the military, embarked on a very draconian austerity program, where Chavez was very much connected to the democratic social base of Chavezmo, Maduro had suppressed it. So I don't think Maduro was anybody to celebrate or defend. And to my mind, the election in 2024 was probably stolen. I want to get to the question of US policy, but I mean, it does seem, I mean, I haven't seen public opinion, but if you look at the news reports of people doing in the street interviews in New York or whatever, it seems like many Venezuelans are happy. Do you think that's a misperception? Do you think that's a correct perception? Which Venezuelans do you think are happy, which are not? And how do you make sense of that? I mean, I think obviously there's a base, you know, it's divided by class, obviously, the same people who hated Chavez, hated Maduro, and many of them live in the United States. But life got hard under Maduro. I mean, how many millions of Venezuelans fled the country under dangerous conditions and coming up the Darian gap just because they couldn't survive in their own country. So I mean, I think that in some ways it transcended politics. I mean, I think there's probably a core base of support of organized groups that still exist, you know, maybe 30, 40% that still understand themselves as Chavistas, as revolutionaries. They understand the intervention in political terms, in historical terms, as a violation of sovereignty. And then there's a lot of people who just thought Maduro was a dictator. Life got bad. Life was good under Chavez. Life got bad under Maduro. And probably happy that he has been deposed. So to think about this in the terms of the history of US farm policy in Latin America, which you've written about so much, there's been a lot of talk about this as a return to some previous earlier era of gunboat diplomacy, whatever. What do you think is new in what the Trump administration did, you know, and literally going and kidnapping this guy? What is new and different and what is old? How do you put this into a framework of the way America has historically operated when it comes to Latin American regimes, particularly those that we don't like. Yeah, everything old is new again. First, let me say that the question of whether Maduro was good or bad or legitimate or illogical, there's one question. Another question is the question of sovereignty, national sovereignty and who gets to decide it. And a good part of Latin America's history with the United States going back well into the 19th century is a demand on the part of Latin American statesmen that the United States do not intervene, that they recognize the absolute sovereignty of Latin American nations. FDR in 1933 finally conceded that point and recognized that this really laid the foundation for what we think of as international law that no nation has the right that unilaterally decide that the sovereignty of another country isn't valid. And so acts like this, you know, in which the United States unilaterally decide that Maduro has to go regardless of support. It's really a turning point, it's really a violation of that ideal. The ideal of sovereignty is cherished. I mean, Latin America is a country that has had Texas taken from them. But half of Mexico, you know, Panama was shaved off of Colombia to build the canal between 1898 and 1992. The United States carried out 42 successful coups and those weren't even the ones that weren't successful. In 1898, the United States border rico seized Cuba. It occupied Haiti, Dominican Republic and Nicaragua for extended periods of time. And it bombed Varikruz and invaded Mexico. I mean, there's a long, long history of US intervention in Latin America. The thing that this operation most closely resembles as two things. One, I think most everybody knows or assertive is Manuel Noriega. And in 1989, Operation Just Cause, where it was built as a police action and George H.W. Bush sent about 30, thousand troops into capture, Noriega. And then it was worked back to the United States. And he was tried. Noriega was a CIA asset in the 1980s. He was key in Iran Contra. He was an ally of George H.W. Bush. But he had served his purpose when, especially when it was found out that he was playing both sides. He was selling information to the Cubans. He was working with Mossad. He was working with the CIA. You know, it's Panama. Panama is like that crossroads. And so he's that imporium section of the world in which like information is traded. And Noriega was key in that. And so the United States brought Noriega back, tried him and found him guilty and he died. I think the, I don't know if it was released or he died in the US jail. I'm not trying to remember. But the other one, of course, is Jampa Trin, Irocedean Haiti in 2005. Another coup that was organized, not directly by the United States, but by democracy promotion groups that were associated with the United States funded by things like AID and the National Endowment for Democracy. US Marines went into Haiti, put a gun to Irocedean's head. Irocedean, of course, being a former liberation theologian priest who became president of Haiti twice and flew him to the Congo. Give him a minute to pack his bags and flew him to the Congo. So that's another example of the US. The other way that Haiti also plays out analogous to this is that even before that, Irocedean was the victim of a previous coup under George H.W. Bush. And he was restored by Bill Clinton to the presidency, but only on the condition that he accept a series of neoliberal economic reforms that some Haiti doesn't have oil. You know, it barely has rice, but Clinton insisted that Haiti open up its economy to Florida and Alabama rice and Arkansas rice and devastated Haiti's peasant economy. So there's another example of this kind of using the threat of coercion in order to force economic reforms that benefit the United States. So yes, oil is important and obviously part of the calculations of why the United States was concerned with Venezuela, but Haiti didn't have any oil. What I hear you saying Greg is that in some ways, as shocking to a lot of people as what Trump is doing, it's not necessarily fundamentally different than what the United States has done not a hundred years ago, but just a few decades ago under presidents who are not considered widely to be as lawless perhaps. So is there anything in particular that or should we really just understand this is basically the continuation of a very long history of the US deposing leaders in Latin America didn't like kind of a year that never really has ended. The US is basically always just continued to do it and what Trump has done is nothing particularly new here. Well, this is the question, right? This is the question about Trump. How much of it is continuity and how much of it is innovation and something radically new? Behind most of his outrageous stand-alone history of policies made by bipartisan administrations before him. I mean, the drug war itself, which Trump at first used to try to isolate Maduro before just directly going to oil is 50 years old and has been funded by every president, democratic or republican ever since. And there's been plenty of outrageous. They tend to be kept in the background though, right? You You don't really hear about the DEA killing for under and pay. in 2019 or he had much about penishese involvement in the cocaine trade. I think what Trump does is he turns it into spectacle. It strips all the pretence away. And this is of course not just in Latin America. This is his historical role, right, to strip the pretence of liberal internationalism away and reveal pure politics and pure power politics, whether they be transactional or coercive. And so that I think is what is unique about Trump. I think it's a sign of imperial weakness. I don't think that you go and do the kind of action that you do in Venezuela. And even the openly boasting that it's about oil, that we're getting our oil back, it's our oil. You know, there's lots of ways of getting oil, right? You know, they could have made a deal with Maduro and there were sectors with the NIS administration that wanted to normalize relations and just establish economic interests are always ideologically determined to some degree. And so when Trump says it's about oil, that in a way is a new thing, right, that I'm not going to hide behind the liberal dressing of the rules based order. I'm just going to talk about it in pure power. And I'm going to cosplay it being a colonial plunderer. But I think it has more to do with wanting to establish a show of dominance. In the United States has explicitly said under Trump that it has given up its role as the kind of superintendent of a global liberal order in which all countries play by a same set of rules concerning property relations and trade relations and whatnot. And Trump, it's written down in his latest national security strategy document, I said, those days are gone. The world is now organized by a kind of fragmented balance of power in which regional hedgehogans, be it China, Russia or the United States, are responsible for organizing their hinterlands. So Russia is the former Soviet republics and Ukraine, China. It's the South China Sea and the United States. It's Latin America. So this is part of Trump's first bid at getting Latin America in order. And the subhistory of this, you know, a secondary history, of course, is greater, flierter, and the obsession with Cuba and Marco Rubio being the secretary of state. They see the taking down of Venezuela as the first step, you know, to the real plumb, which is ending the Cuban revolution once and for all. And we'll see. And that may very well happen. Cuba is in bad shape. There's rolling blackouts. It's population is leaving. It's young people are leaving. It's unclear what the future of Cuba is going to be. But I know that the people in Miami think that Venezuela was the first step towards Cuba. If one way of understanding this is that the US policy hasn't really changed that much, but the way in which America justifies its policies has changed. I mean, if we just say I think Noriega had overturned an election, maybe there was maybe a little bit more justification there. But if we basically see that there's a fair amount of continuity in action, but that that Trump is really doing something different in the way he doesn't try to come up with any overarching democracy oriented or international law oriented or human rights or whatever, he basically just says, yeah, I'm a pirate basically. I'm a colonial plunder. What does it say about America today that you can get away with that politically? Or can you not get away with that politically? Is it actually it going to be a source of political weakness for Trump that he doesn't have some American some kind of higher order story that he's telling the American people? Yeah, it's a great question and it goes to the heart of the United States relationship with Latin America. I mean, pretty much every time the United States tries to go global and fails, it comes back to the Western Hemisphere to regroup and Latin America becomes key. So the great depression, FDR extends the new deal. It's a continent and new deal and comes up with new ideas of social citizenship and good neighbor policy and a new kind of moral worldview that really becomes a counter to the rise of the right. I talk about this in my book America, America, the good neighbor policy was more than just saying nice things about Latin America was working with Democrats, Socialists, Reformers, Economic Nationalists, Polarating Economic Nationalists in Latin America and really having a sense that when the war ended that the fight against fascism wasn't just to fight fascism but was to build social democracy and that became a kind of moral worldview that became hegemonic. It became the foundation of the new deal at home. It became the basis of how the United States justified its fight against the Soviet Union during the Cold War and then later when the new deal begins to unravel Reagan and Reaganism turns back to Latin America after Vietnam, after the energy crisis and they work out new strategies and they work out a kind of muscular anti-communism based around oceans of individual freedom and then that becomes a kind of hegemonic vision in which Reaganism presents itself as the country's governing coalition. Trump is returning to Latin America during a moment of global retreat, right, the disasters of the global war on terror and the economic meltout of 2007 and many ways Trump is following the same path that FDR and Reagan did but Trumpism has within itself the seeds not of a dominant hegemonia, a legitimate ideology that could present itself as universal but it has in itself the seeds of constant polarization and provocation. So sure, Trump could go around and do this and then as well and he's threatening to do it in Colombia and maybe he's going to take Greenland and then maybe he will end the Cuban revolution but at the same time you could see the strains within America First Nationalism, you could see how he's constrained. The reason why he's holding back in Venezuela is because America First Nationalism doesn't want to be involved in nation building in Venezuela anymore than it did in Iraq and the less thing they want to do is see the United States trying to remake Venezuela or remake Cuba. So Trump is a bit tied and really both Reagan and FDR will majoritarian movements where Trump is a minoritarian movement that's kept in power by political institutions that protect minoritarian movements and his dominance of the Republican Party. He and Othicky has the ability to use Latin America as a way to work out a greater kind of hegemonic vision of the general good that would turn Trump into a governing coalition. I think what we're in for is just more polarization and more culture war of provocations. One of the things that I've been struck about the Venezuelan conversation but you also mentioned Greenland and it seems like there are lots of people in American establishment circles are saying we don't have a problem with wanting cheap access to Venezuela's oil or wanting access to Greenland's whatever Greenland has but we don't need to invade these countries to do it. In fact, a lot of people are saying like oil is becoming less important. America isn't oil exporter now. Trump seems to have a view of economics and America's economic interests. It doesn't seem to me like it's not that his critics are more magnanimous but he seems to have an idea of what is an America's economic interest and how you secure resources which just seems out of step with most other people in the American kind of elite and yeah and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how you think he makes sense of this. Well, the EU just signed a trade treaty with Merkessor. I mean, that's the way we used to do it right. It's a trade trade rather than going I mean, it's unbelievable what they're doing in Venezuela. Basically the demanding tribute right? Trump is demanding like a tank full of oil every week or something like I mean, that's not that simple but it's kind of like the old Spanish colonial system where you were supposed to send the shipload of silver and gold to the crown. What's the year? Yeah, I don't think there's a big push for wanting but it's funny because this goes back to your question about continuity. What's new and different about Greenland? Trump just blerts out what people used to say kind of you know, FDR wanted Greenland. Nelson Rockefeller, one of his vice president, Ford tried to buy Greenland. It's not like a crazy idea that US is security, right? But just the way he does it and the way that he turns it into a provocation I think is what is alienating and what causes the backlash against him. I mean, it's amazing how much they're pushing for Greenland now and they're talking about the Monroe doctor and they're saying it falls within the Monroe doctor and that it's in the West and hemisphere. Can you say what the Monroe doctorant is and the different ways it's been interpreted over time and whether Trump's understanding of it is actually consistent with the way it's been understood historically. Yeah. So my road doctrine, it was 1823, most Latin American nations were beginning to win their independence from Spain, effective independence from Spain, and the United States, which stayed out of that fight for a long time, decided that they had to make a statement. And President James Monroe, in his 1823 state of the Union address, which was like a 6,000 word document, included four non-contiguous paragraphs that we think of as the Monroe doctrine. And they were very calm, clogged, and hesitant, and not very specific because, you know, he was trying to end what he was saying. But basically, it came down to saying that the United States was going to recognize any nation it felt was effectively independent, and that independence of Spanish America was inevitable, and that no form of colony was subject to reconquest. So that was understood as a kind of doctrine of anti-colonialism, right? Latin Americans liked that part. They thought they heard echoes of their own rejection of the doctrine of conquest, of the rejection of the doctrine of discovery that all of the Americas was sovereign, and every nation in the Americas was sovereign. There were also paragraphs that were included in that state of the Union address that said that the United States will interpret any event anywhere in the hemisphere in terms of how it bears on its peace and happiness. It's not a very clear, it's not exactly a police war, it's not exactly called a war. You know, the United States is going to interpret events in light of its peace and happiness anywhere in the hemisphere. And that's the part of the doctrine that throughout the 20th century gets elevated as a kind of warring for the United States to intervene wherever it felt necessary, right? And what's interesting about the Monroe doctrine, it's evoked throughout the 19th century, first when Southern Slavis ran the foreign policy apparatus of the federal government, prior to the Civil War, and then when Republicans took over after. But the Monroe doctrine was very much affiliated and attached to American First Nationalism. To a kind of nativist nationalism, a tribal nationalism. There's the Monroe doctrine, they interpreted it as a doctrine of mandatory power, but the United States of sovereignty didn't stop at its borders. And there were different presidents at different quarrel areas. So Grover Cleveland in 1895 said that the United States' law is tainted the whole hemisphere by fiat. And then in 1904, Theodore Roosevelt said that the Monroe doctrine granted the United States policing power to put down chronic disorder, mostly in Central America and the Caribbean. So you can see how it's expanded, right? From their vague document and just a general sense that the United States was going to interpret events in other parts of the hemisphere in light of its peace and happiness, and all of a sudden it becomes a universal standing police warrant. And that the United States can invoke whenever it wants. So American First Nationalists like this. One of the reasons why the US failed in the League of Nations is because the American First Nationalists thought that the League of Nations was going to abrogate the Monroe doctrine, was going to override the Monroe doctrine. They wanted to maintain this. And even calling it a doctrine has a little bit elevated. I mean, it's a couple of paragraphs in the state of the Union address that was never ratified by a call at much less than international. And then the word fell out of use in the 20th century, even during the Cold War when the United States began intervening again on a more regular basis. Nixon had his own doctrine, Reagan had his own doctrine, but they didn't call it the Monroe doctrine. They called it the Nixon doctrine, the Reagan doctrine, the call to doctrine. So in recent weeks, the Trump administration has rolled out this new attention to the Monroe doctrine and the Trump corollary. And they've done so in very grouptized forms. They've really reduced it to meaning nothing but pure power. Like even when it was used in the 19th century, there was still a presumption. You know, Monroe also said that the nations of the West and Hemispath shed certain values. He didn't say what they were, but he said they said certain values and interest. There was a sense of commonality. And even when Roosevelt claimed police power, he claimed police power on behalf of all of the hemisphere, not in the United States, Trump has interpreted the Monroe doctrine in its most starrigan form that it's an assertion of US ability to do what it wants, where it wants within the West and Hemispath. It's an interesting kind of evolution of the doctrine and my sense is probably at its terminus point because I didn't know where we'll go from here. So it's interesting just to hear Hegg said and Trump and even his special envoy to Greenland now claim that Greenland is within the boundaries of the Monroe doctrine. How that's becoming in many ways it's the substitute for international law, right? International law is meant to be universal and understood to be global. The Monroe doctrine is tribal and territorial and pertaining specifically to the West and Hemispath. It's almost like there's that new heritage American movement, right? That people want to claim some deep heritage. In some ways, the Monroe doctrine is a kind of heritage doctrine for them. It existed before the League of Nations, before the United Nations, before suffrage, before abolition, before civil rights, it's kind of almost a denic for people like Stephen Miller. It's like the doctrine that existed before everything went wrong. So I've seen a bunch of certain kind of reporting suggesting that this represents a new idea that Trump has that basically every great power gets to have its fear of influences. You mentioned this was kind of the idea of Roosevelt installing the four policemen basically right after we're literally there. You would have control of your part of the world. That would mean not the US did whatever it wanted in the Western hemisphere, but also gave deference to Russia and even more importantly China in their spheres, right? I mean, you can imagine the Chinese saying, okay, you've got the Western hemisphere. We've got our share of territory, which includes Taiwan and the Philippines. And do you think the United States, there's any evidence that Trump administration is actually going to make that bargain or is it going to be even more traditional, which is we get to control our area, but you don't get to control your area? Well, I think that's certainly a contradiction and confusion within the National Security Strategy document that I mentioned that was issued a couple of weeks ago where it implies that the sovereignty of the world is fractured and each hegemon has its own region as responsible for its own region and the United States has Latin America and whatnot. But it also at the same time makes clear that the United States reserves the right to act wherever it wants. So in some ways, it's affirming the Monroe doctrine in its traditional form as a traditional venue for the Western hemisphere, but a lot of the assumptions of the Monroe doctrine is then projecting out to the world. It's basically openly saying it's going to intervene in European politics. It's trying to pull four countries out of the EU. It's complaining that white people aren't having enough babies in Europe and one China exactly against taking Taiwan that the United States still felt obligated to defend Taiwan. I don't know how that will play out. And the whole point of the United States is re-intense interest in Latin America is to counter Chinese influence. So it's not like everybody's going to get to have their own sandbox and live harmoniously. The stillness notion of inter-imperial competition, which is fundamentally dangerous. I mean, it's precarious. Lots of things caused World War I and World War II, but certainly balance of power thinking is no, I can't think of any example in which organizing the world or a good part of the world, along balance of power, arrangements have led to a lasting peace. Last question, putting aside Greenland for a second. Is it possible that the United States actually, you think, couldn't move militarily on Cuba? I mean, didn't work out well in the Bay of Pigs. You think that that's actually something that we could see happening? And what would it look like? No, I think they probably hopefully waited out until maybe they'll be pro-dess or have food or medicine, and then pressure will be applied. I don't think the United States would, I mean, I think the Cuban military is still pretty formidable, but I don't think the United States would directly confront Cuba. It is an interesting question why the United States felt like it had to go through Venezuela first before it could, obviously, greater Florida wants Cuba, and that's what they want more than anything, and that's what they wanted for decades. And I don't know what that would look like. I imagine it would look like one of these protest movements that may be grossed strong enough to justify an intervention, some kind of intervention. But there is a strange country. People have a lot of respect for Cuba in Washington. It's weird. The foreign policy establishment, despite all of the hostility, treat Cuba, just cure the cooperates on things like migration and drugs and whatnot, despite all of the right era. And it's actually been a moderating force in Latin America over the last couple of decades. One story is that when that whole model is being out organizing his Coca-Cola movement and trying to figure out how to take power, he had a long meeting with Castro and Castro convinced him to organize a political party and run for election, that the days of armed insurgencies were over. So I don't know. It's a tragedy. Cuba is top-breaking. Yeah. Yeah. Greg, thank you so much for doing this. Thanks, Peter. Thanks for having me. Thank you, everyone, for joining us and thank you, Greg. I look forward to our next conversation. Bye-bye. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] This has been another episode of On the Nose. 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