capture Manuel Noriega<\/a> who, in the 1980s during the late Cold War, was a CIA asset. Problem was also that he was deeply involved with a lot of drug running, as are a number of US allies during this period.<\/p>\nIt was important for a number of reasons. One, it was a showcase of Colin Powell\u2019s exit strategy doctrine that you had to have a clear idea of what you were going in for and what you were getting out for. And also it was the first that eventually was understood as an intervention to install democracy, to defend democracy, as opposed to national security or anti-communism.<\/p>\n
And it was a unilateral intervention. Everybody, every country in the OAS, the Organization of American States, was opposed to it. The United Nations was opposed to it. And so many observers see this as a kind of turning point leading to Iraq in 2003, in the sense that it was the beginning of the United States acting unilaterally or outside the channels of the United Nations or the Organization of American States.<\/p>\n
You know, I\u2019m old enough to remember Iraq. What I don\u2019t remember is the United States, its leadership being so explicit about the oil. This [past] weekend, President Trump came out and he said, we want the oil. That\u2019s why we did this. Did that surprise you?<\/p>\n
No. And I don\u2019t think \u2014 I\u2019m not one of these scholars who think that it\u2019s all about the oil. Obviously oil is important. Oil plays a factor. But there\u2019s lots of ways of getting oil, right?<\/p>\n
And the Trump administration could have negotiated with Maduro, as elements within the administration wanted to do. I think Trump\u2019s talking about oil was kind of a way of providing [a] fig leaf for his America First base.<\/p>\n
A lot of those nationalists, they don\u2019t want to do regime change. They don\u2019t want to rebuild world economies and have the United States superintend the global economy. But when you put it in tough guy terms, and when you put it in the terms of plunder and \u201cwe\u2019re going to take the oil,\u201d tou know, it resonates with certain sectors of America First nationalism and aggrieved nationalism.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou do not have to carry water for Nicol\u00e1s Maduro; you do not have to support or defend Nicol\u00e1s Maduro in any way to hold on to the ideal of national sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n
So I\u2019m not saying oil wasn\u2019t important, but I\u2019m saying Trump\u2019s move from immigration to drugs and then to oil was really just a kind of trying out different ways of justifying what they wanted to do. And it goes back to this idea of the Monroe Doctrine \u2014 that the United States will police the hemisphere.<\/p>\n
Let me ask you about an argument that I saw circulating this weekend. Nicol\u00e1s Maduro was in power in Venezuela for more than 10 years. During this time, as you know, the economy craters. Eight million people flee. They flee repression. They flee censorship, fake elections, people being disappeared into prisons and tortured. What do you say to the argument that this was just the right thing for the United States of America to do?<\/p>\n
You do not have to carry water for Nicol\u00e1s Maduro; you do not have to support or defend Nicol\u00e1s Maduro in any way to hold on to the ideal of national sovereignty. There is a system of international law which recognizes the sovereignty of nations \u2014 the absolute sovereignty of nations. It shouldn\u2019t be left to the judgment of one nation.<\/p>\n
International law is something that is always being destroyed. It\u2019s a phrase that people use: \u201cIt weakens international law.\u201d International law is always being weakened. But this certainly is a major step in that direction.<\/p>\n
The idea that the United States can claim for itself the sole jurisdiction and power to decide what country\u2019s sovereignty is legitimate, then to go a step further and then to kind of cosplay colonial plundering and say we\u2019re doing it because of the oil. We\u2019re not doing it because of democracy. We\u2019re not doing it because we care about human rights. We\u2019re doing it because we want to get the oil. I mean, I think that\u2019s what Trump brings to the table. He pulls out some of the implicit or repressed premises of the power dynamics of the international order and just says them out loud.<\/p>\n
A couple hours after this news broke on Saturday, I got a text from a Cuban American friend and the text just said, \u201cCuba next.\u201d And I watched the president\u2019s press conference and heard Marco Rubio speak, and a lot of people started saying that day, \u201cCuba next.\u201d What do you think is coming next?<\/p>\n
I do think the long game ultimately goes beyond Cuba, I think Cuba may be next. But what we see in the Trump administration is an attempt to bring Latin America to heel, not just Cuba, not just Venezuela, not just Nicaragua. but also what we might call these social democratic regimes: The Workers\u2019 Party governed by Lula in Brazil and Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico.<\/p>\n
These represent not so much confrontational challenges to the United States, but a kind of intolerable independence and autonomy. A country like Brazil is insisting on doing business with China, for instance, and finding ways to weaken US economic influence so it could diversify its trading partners. These are totally legitimate actions, but if we envision Latin America, as a place that Trump wants to show dominance, then they\u2019re intolerable.<\/p>\n
What it really is is about demonstrations of power and will. You know, Hegseth said the other day that nothing can prevent us from doing what we want in Latin America. And Trump said, effectively, the same thing. This is really about bringing Latin America \u2014 all of Latin America \u2014 to heel and bringing Trump allies to power. Latin America really is on a knife\u2019s edge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The fallout from the US capture and extradition of Nicol\u00e1s Maduro is radiating around the world. In a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":222366,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[54,44254,42,43,965,238,13265,40,38,41,39,17652],"class_list":["post-222365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-donald-trump","tag-explained-podcast","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-podcasts","tag-politics","tag-today","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-world-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222365\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}