Pod Insights Odd Lots Greg Grandin on how the Monroe Doctrine Became the Donroe Doctrine About this episode In some sense, the arrest of Maduro is nothing unusual. For over 200 years, the US viewed the entirety of the Western hemisphere as its legitimate domain for intervention. And of course, there's a long history of the US getting involved with Latin America specifically. But what is the Monroe Doctrine? And how does Trump's foreign policy fit into it. On this episode, we speak with Greg Grandin, a professor of history at Yale and author of America, América. Greg has extensively researched American activity in Latin America across his career. He explains the historical patterns of when America asserts its dominance in the region, and how that fits into other American policy priorities both abroad and at home. Read more:Post-Maduro 124% Rally Stuns Venezuela’s Battered Stock ExchangeTrump’s Team Orders Big Oil Into Venezuela: ‘Do It for Our Country’ Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript 7,082 words · 10 speakers
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2:07 Tracy Alloway? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
2:11 Joe Weisenthal? And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
2:13 Tracy Alloway? Joe, I love doing American history episodes, in part because I feel like my own knowledge of American history is fairly simplistic. And I do remember a huge culture shock when I went from high school to college. And I think I told this story before. So I went to college, university in London. And I had always heard the American Revolution described as the American Revolution, right? And then as soon as I got to the UK.
2:44 Joe Weisenthal? What did they call it? What'd they call it?
2:45 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, they call it, I think, the American War of Independence, which has a different tonality to it. But it definitely demonstrates just how subjective tensions, conflicts, and policies can actually be in history, depending on who you're talking to. And we are going to talk about not just a pretty subjective American policy, but one that has been reinterpreted and amended many, many times in the past.
3:13 Joe Weisenthal? Right. So obviously, for us, this has been a Venezuela week. And there's all sorts of immediate questions that are sort of most directly relevant to, we've been talking about the market elements mostly. We talked about oil. We talked about the sovereign debt, etc. But then there's all these questions, of course, about international law and what is legitimate and what is illegitimate. And I mean, I couldn't even believe the headline when I saw it that we had arrested. I was flabberg. I just, the idea that that we'd arrested a head of state from another country is just absolutely gobsmacking. And then people talk about international law. And then they say, does international law even exist and so forth? And what it feels like, to some extent, truly uncharted territory here.
3:58 Tracy Alloway? Yep, uncharted territory. But people are drawing on a parallel, which is the Monroe Doctrine.
4:04 Joe Weisenthal? Yes.
4:05 Tracy Alloway? The Monroe Doctrine of, I think it was 1823, I want to say, basically said that America would assert its dominance over the entire American region. And since then, it's changed a number of times. But the way it's being talked about now is
4:24 Tracy Alloway? As the Trump corollary, or the Don Ro doctrine, which was described in the national security strategy document that the Trump administration put out back in December. And that one's a little different. So we keep seeing these amendments to the doctrine. By the way, I should just say, do you remember back in 2013, John Kerry explicitly said that the Monroe Doctrine was over. It was dead.
4:51 Joe Weisenthal? I don't remember that.
4:52 Tracy Alloway? And now it's back. It's arisen.
4:55 Joe Weisenthal? Some version of it is certainly back. You know, it's very interesting because the US clearly has a longstanding history of various operations, overt and covert, of involving itself, shall we say, with the politics and domestic affairs of our neighbors, particularly in South and Central America and so forth. I suppose any country is naturally going to have some security interest in what's happening in its proximity. I don't think that itself is particularly weird. I really like this term, the Don Ro doctrine, because there's two things. There's this longstanding history that the US wants to have a role to play in everyone else's politics among our neighbors. But then there's this other
5:40 Joe Weisenthal? element with Donald Trump specifically, where it feels like a lot of our policy and principle is essentially, he's the president and what's in his head and his ideas are legitimate because they're his ideas and he's the president. So yes, there's precedent, there's norms and so forth. And then there's this sort of novelty that everyone's trying to read his mind. And we're in this very, very strange situation, which has come up on our last two episodes, in which you have the president talking about oil and
6:12 Tracy Alloway? Explicitly, yeah.
6:13 Joe Weisenthal? And yet people are skeptical. It's very strange. It's a very strange situation because you have, typically, it's like, oh, he admitted it. It's about oil. And yet everyone's like, is there something else at play beyond here? It's the total inversion for how people have talked in the past about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of how we involve ourselves internationally.
6:33 Tracy Alloway? That was part of the original Monroe Doctrine as well. There was this weird tension between like,
6:39 Tracy Alloway? Pro-democracy, anti-colonialism, keep the European powers out.
6:44 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:44 Tracy Alloway? And America basically kind of creating its own informal colonies. That tension has always been there and we should talk about that. We should talk about whether or not there might be, you know, different strategies at play in Venezuela, different goals. And I'm happy to say, we do in fact, have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Greg Grandin. He is a professor of history at Yale and the author of the new book, America, America, A New History of the New World. So Greg, welcome to Odd Lots. Thanks so much for coming on.
7:18 Speaker 05 Oh, thanks for having me.
7:19 Tracy Alloway? How important has the Monroe Doctrine actually been in the history of American policy and development?
7:28 Speaker 05 Well, it's certainly been influential and it's certainly been cited repeatedly over the years. I mean, first, I think we need to back up and say exactly what makes it a doctrine.
7:37 Tracy Alloway? Yeah.
7:37 Speaker 05 It was never voted on, no court ratified it. It didn't actually assume the status of doctrine until a couple of decades after it was pronounced. In 1823, when James Monroe was president at the time, and this was around the time that most Spanish-American nations were breaking from Spain in their successful wars of independence, which were much longer and dragged out than the US war for independence. By 1823, it was fairly clear that Spain was going to lose its empire and the United States finally decided that it was going to issue a statement. And you have to understand that the doctrine itself, or Monroe's statement,
8:19 Speaker 05 it's really just a kind of, you know, four or five non-contiguous paragraphs in the State of the Union address of 6,000 words. You know, you have to kind of cherry pick through the, through the State of the Union address to find what is the doctrine. And it's hesitant, it's cautious. The United States wasn't really sure where it wanted to land on, on any given issue. And there were obviously tensions and differences of opinions within Monroe's cabinet. I mean, to put it in more modern terms, you had isolationists, you had internationalists, you had unilateralists. So you had different people thinking of different ways on how the United States should. Address and deal with, on the one hand,
9:03 Speaker 05 these new republics that were coming into being in South America and in Central America and in Mexico. And on the other hand, their former colonial rulers in Europe. And so it was actually written by John Quincy Adams, who was Monroe's Secretary of State. And as I said, it was inserted in different parts. And it's true. It is a bit of a contradictory document. On the one hand, it announces that the United States considers the independence of Latin America, or at the time, Spanish America, to be irreversible. And that it was recognizing a number of states that had established effective sovereignty and unbroken with Spain.
9:48 Speaker 05 And it warned off Europe, not just Spain, but any country Spain might recruit to help them, or the Holy Roman Empire, or Great Britain, against trying to conquer or reconquer the Americas, any part of the Americas. So that's the kind of anti-colonial part of the doctrine, again in quotation marks, the doctrine. Then other paragraphs said that the United States and Spanish America, being of the Western Hemisphere, shared certain special interests and ideals, although it didn't specify what those interests and ideals were. But people kind of presumed they meant the difference between monarchy and republicanism.
10:31 Speaker 05 But at least there was a kind of gesture to a kind of shared fraternity of nations that had common interests. And so that's another part of the Monroe Doctrine. And then there was the part that was referenced, that it didn't exactly grant the United States much power in terms of policing the hemisphere. It was a vague sentence that said the United States would... Interpret events that happened anywhere in the Western Hemisphere on how they bear on the quote peace and happiness of the United States. It was. So, so it was a document that could appeal to a lot of different constituencies within
11:13 Speaker 05 the United States, like Thomas Jefferson's expansionism, this notion that, you know, the new world was shared a certain unity of purpose. John Quincy Adams was a famous isolationist and unilateralist, and so there was this notion of the United States could act if it wanted, if it saw a threat. And you have somebody like Henry Clay, who imagined a kind of large American system, a mercantile system, in which the US would be a great manufacturing base, and Latin America, Spanish America would supply resources in order to rival the United Kingdom and the empires of Europe. But the point being, it really wasn't much of anything.
11:58 Speaker 05 Latin Americans did like it. I mean, they had a lot of time to read. It was a different period. There were no iPhones. You know, people read closely and said, oh, that's an interesting paragraph. And what they read and liked mostly was they thought it was a, they read it as a kind of amicus brief for their own anti-colonialism. Spanish Americans were very much vocal in their idea that the doctrine of conquest was no longer valid, the doctrine of discovery was no longer valid, there was no undiscovered land in the new world waiting for Europeans to stumble upon and claim as their own. And they read the Monroe Doctrine as largely supporting that position, especially in the
12:39 Speaker 05 part that warned Europe against trying to reconquer any countries that had claimed their independence. But over the years, it was interpreted in a different way. Politicians and diplomats, particularly in skirmishes with, with, with Europe, say, Great Britain, when Great Britain wanted to. Build a canal through Central America. That was around the time that those kind of vague scattered remarks were elevated to the level of doctrine. And it became the Monroe Doctrine or the Doctrine of Monroe. And from that point forward, it was progressively incorporated into something we might call customary law.
13:24 Speaker 05 I mean, again, what makes a doctrine a doctrine and who gets to enforce it, it really is just a question of power. It goes to what you were talking about in the introduction about what is international law and, and, and how is it enforced? I mean, most countries have statements of principles. The United States gets its own doctrine.
13:42 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it? Because like to some extent, when I think about American involvement, it's like all around the world, at any time, we sort of feel the need to fight against communists, right? That seems to be a very common thing and fight for democracies or any country that sort of has something similar to our, we have government or something like that. We seem to be on principle, we have to be the ones or we feel compelled to intervene. And then here is this geographical element that seems very different. Can you talk a little bit about the intersection of the geographical impulse to sort of exert your influence among your neighbors and how that intersects with this other, I don't
14:25 Joe Weisenthal? know what we call it, principle, doctrine, et cetera, where there are just certain kinds of leaders that we don't like. And when they're in power, we do what we can to eliminate them.
14:36 Speaker 05 Yes, and this goes to the history of the United States, its relationship to its own hemisphere and the power that it has exerted over Latin America and Spanish America and Brazil. And then its efforts at times to go global, to become a more global superpower. There's been, you know, there's long different iterations of this in which the United States kind of tries to escape the boundaries of its hemisphere and become a world power at different moments and then, and then it falls back to the Western Hemisphere. This has happened over and over again. Happened with the Great Depression. It happened in some ways with, you know, after Vietnam, the United States turned back to Latin America.
15:20 Speaker 05 It happened after the, certainly after the catastrophic war on terror. I mean, in many ways, what's happening now with Trump is an example of this, this kind of, you know, Trump is his own problem and a lot of the things that are wrong is of his doing. But he did inherit a country that was in profound crisis as a result of catastrophic war on terror, the financial crisis, the inability of politicians to deal with corporate wealth and inequality. And, and so there is a kind of turning back to Latin America. And we can get to this a little bit later if you want, but Trump's actions in Venezuela are a perfect example
16:01 Speaker 05 of what happens when, you know, the United States, you know, its bid to go global fails and it has to return to its hemisphere. And that's why the Monroe Doctrine is so important. Latin America is the first place in which the United States got a sense of itself as an overseas power. You know, was able to project its power, its financial power, its cultural power, its military power beyond its own borders. And even saying that is a little bit tricky because the United States borders were always changing. I mean, the United States borders, the expansive nature of the United States, where it actually took Texas and took Mexico. So it wasn't just that it was dealing with Latin America. It was literally gobbling up Latin America on its way to the Pacific.
16:47 Speaker 05 But setting that aside, working within the hemisphere and learning how to deal with other nations. Latin America is absolutely central to that. And that's one of the reasons why the Monroe Doctrine rises in importance, because it supposedly provides a kind of. Guideline for that. Now, over the years, the Monroe Doctrine itself has expanded, presidents explicitly expanded over a boundary dispute in Venezuela and Guyana, in which the United States was supporting Venezuela and Great Britain was supporting British Guyana. Grover Cleveland declared that the Monroe Doctrine granted the United States absolute sovereignty over the whole Western Hemisphere. That's a, that's a pretty
17:31 Speaker 05 big jump from, you know, we're going to interpret any event that happens somewhere on our peace and happiness. There's a peace and happiness to, by fiat, our will is law in the hemisphere. And then in 1904, along similar lines, Theodore Roosevelt, when he was president, he expanded the doctrine with his own corollary to what he called international police power to suppress chronic wrongdoing in Latin America. Now, I must say that most of that chronic wrongdoing was provoked by US banks and US mercenaries and US oil extractors. And, you know, there's a long history of like forcing loans on countries that they
18:16 Speaker 05 can't pay off. And it leads to all sorts of instability, then civil war, and then the US government is called in to settle the problem that these private interests created. So Roosevelt expands the Monroe Doctrine into a kind of standing universal police warrant that will allow the United States to act whenever it will and whenever it wants.
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19:50 Tracy Alloway? So didn't FDR also reinterpret it? But it didn't last long. Another Roosevelt reinterpretation.
19:56 Speaker 05 No, not really. But FDR actually reversed course 180 degrees.
20:02 Tracy Alloway? Yeah.
20:02 Speaker 05 In 1933, he renounced the right of the United States to intervene. There's longstanding demands by Latin American jurists and politicians and diplomats to give up the right of conquest. I mean, the United States continued to hold on to the right of conquest throughout the 19th century. Basically justified the war with Mexico, Indian removal. The right of conquest was taught in US textbooks up until the 1920s. Latin America had revoked the right of conquest with its independence because Spanish-American nations came into the world together already a league of nations. Seven nations that had to learn to live with each other on a crowded continent.
20:45 Speaker 05 The United States came into being a single nation on the eastern coast of a great landmass that it imagined as empty. Obviously, it wasn't empty. There was Native Americans, there was Mexicans, Spaniards. But the United States, there was no doubt that the United States was going to reach the Pacific. And it held on and used the doctrine of conquest in order to justify taking all of that land. Latin America was constantly trying to force the United States to accept that the doctrine of conquest was abrogated, was void. And it wasn't until 1933 that it did. And it was Roosevelt who did that. And he recognized the absolute sovereignty of Latin American nations, and he gave up the right of intervention.
21:27 Speaker 05 And that was an enormous turnaround in US power. It didn't weaken US power by any means. It actually strengthened it because it focused it. It taught the United States how to exercise power more efficiently and it organized Latin America. It was 10 years of goodwill that really got Latin America kind of on board for the coming war against fascism. There was a lot of fear among strategists within the Franklin Roosevelt administration that all of Latin America could have gone the way of Spain. I mean, a lot of the sociological variables that led to the rise of fascism or phalanxism in Spain were present in Latin
22:10 Speaker 05 America. There was a large group of servile peasants, a small group of landowners, patrician conservative Catholics, increasingly militant unions and peasants threatening the power of the landed class. You know, that was Spain, but it was also Latin America writ large. And if Latin America fell to phalanxism, then, you know, the United States would be kind of cornered between Nazism, fascism, and phalanxism. Roosevelt's conceding to Latin America's demand to give up the right intervention basically tilted the playing field to the left in Latin America. You know, Roosevelt tolerated economic nationalists.
22:55 Speaker 05 He let revolutionaries in Mexico nationalize Standard Oil and appropriate massive amounts of US-owned property. And it created enormous goodwill and set the stage for the United States' entrance into World War II from a position of strength and continental unity.
23:13 Joe Weisenthal? So you mentioned, okay, various times, the jurists in Latin America, they push back against this notion of American absolute sovereignty and these fights. This gets to a question. I see it debated on Twitter a lot. What do you say to someone who says international law doesn't exist? What is international law? Does it exist? And how is this term useful or not useful?
23:37 Speaker 05 Well, I'm an historian. I'm not a lawyer or a jurist. So I tend to see things in terms of power relations. So I think I see law as a moral venue that is created that creates a set of normative principles in which people can fight over. So, you know, obviously, the international law doesn't exist in some void in which absolute justice is going to happen, you know, the most powerful country decides the exception. And, you know, the United States, to the degree that countries like the United States submit to a system of international law, it usually was during moments of weakness, like when Roosevelt did it in nineteen thirty-three at the height of the Great Depression and with fascism on the rise.
24:22 Speaker 05 But it does create these norms and these principles that people fight and argue over. And so, yes, and the liberal international law order that has supposedly governed the world since the creation of the United Nations in nineteen forty-five, the hypocrisies and the variances and the exceptions are many. And there's always workarounds and the United States and the Soviet Union certainly found ways to skirt, you know, any kind of limits that were placed on them by international law. But it does kind of create a venue, right? A moral arena in which right and wrong could be understood and argued over.
25:06 Speaker 05 You know, there's very other very little recourse for poor and weak nations to defend themselves. I mean, we can go back to Thucydides, right? The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. And the conceit that there is such a thing as international law that is somehow transcendent of power relations is, you know, it might just be a conceit, but it still at least creates terms on which nations could deal with each other. And, you know, and again, Latin America and the United States is absolutely a perfect example of that. Latin America's commitment to sovereignty and to cooperative relations was largely forged
25:47 Speaker 05 in relationships living under what was becoming the most powerful nation in world history, as it moved across the Pacific, as it took Texas, as it took Mexico, as it took Cuba, as it took Puerto Rico, as it took Panama. You know, so you had these jurists like writing law books and coming up with these legal principles. And the way they get implemented, though, often is really about power. So, you know, Argentine legal theorists, for instance, Luis Drago, for instance, at the early twentieth century. When Italian and British and German warboats were showing up at Venezuela trying
26:28 Speaker 05 to collect debt, debt that had gone back to the colony that European banks were claiming that Venezuela owed because the Spanish Crown contracted loans in seventeen seventy-six and whenever they did. Luis Drago issued a principle, the Drago Doctrine, that you cannot use coercion to collect debt. Now, the United States collected plenty of debt through coercion, and we could look at Donald Trump and what's going on in Venezuela right now. But the United States kind of liked the Drago Doctrine because they didn't want Italian and German and British warships flitting around the Caribbean, bombing the coast of Colombia
27:09 Speaker 05 or Venezuela, trying to seize hold of the custom house to get the receipts. They thought that, okay, so we'll support the Drago Doctrine. This will give us a leverage in keeping Europe out of our backyard. So you kind of see the back and forth between law as a kind of moral principle that transcends social power, but then it's obviously subordinated and implemented through social power.
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28:21 Tracy Alloway? What's your sense of the actual goals behind the Venezuela move? Because if you look at the National Security Strategy document, they talk about the US reasserting its preeminence in the Western Hemisphere. And I don't know how you measure preeminence, right? That seems a pretty broad term. Meanwhile, Trump has talked very explicitly about Venezuelan oil belonging to the US. There's no regime change on the horizon. They're not pressing for that. So what is the ultimate goal of all of this? What are they aiming for?
28:56 Speaker 05 Well, you know, it's hard to say. As I said earlier, Trump is doing what a number of his predecessors have done during moments of US kind of recession of US power in the world. They turned back to Latin America. But in some ways, it's pure Trumpism, right? It's just this theatrical spectacle. You know, he said it was about oil. Well, first it was about immigration, then it was about gangs, then it was about fentanyl and drugs, and then he landed on oil, getting our oil back. Oil is trading at an all time low, maybe not an all time low, but it's pretty low. The market is filled, glutted with oil. And to get Venezuela back online is going to cost an enormous amount of capital investment.
29:39 Speaker 05 And it's not a lot of oil companies that are rushing, are going to rush into Venezuela and do that. You know, I think Trump there was just playing to his base. I think he was, you know, I think his base likes the idea of Trump as a pirate, Trump as a colonial plunderer, you know? And yeah, yeah, we'll get our oil back. You know, just like with the Iraq war in 2003, there's always ways to get oil, right? There's many ways to get oil. Like, you don't have to start a global war on terror in order to secure Iraqi oil. You could have just, you know, made a deal with Saddam Hussein and got the oil. You could have did the same thing with, you know, so material interests are always understood to a prism of ideology.
30:21 Speaker 05 And so part of it was that Venezuela has been in crisis for a long time. And that's a whole nother story for a whole nother show. And you know, a hegemon like the United States can't have that kind of crisis. I mean, millions of Venezuelans were fleeing the country. I mean, you don't have to be carrying water for Trump's nativism and his border policies at all to say that that kind of disruption and that kind of chaos can't go on forever in a regional hegemon's hinterland. And so you have to kind of do something. The question is, what are you going to do? And Trump seems to like these targeted attacks, right? Whether they're in Iran, whether they're in Nigeria, you know, these one and done attacks. And I think he was sold on the idea that, you know, if they just took out Maduro and
31:05 Speaker 05 left the Maduro state intact, because it is very much ingrained and embedded in Venezuelan society. I think there were a couple of intelligent people in Marco Rubio's State Department that didn't want to see a repeat of 2003 with what happened after de-betification in Iraq, the complete chaos. So Trump was convinced that, you know, you do this one and done thing and then you just kind of continue to threaten the country in order to it. It corresponds to his way of being. There's no morality. There's no normative sense. There's no idealism. You know, normally when presidents turn back to Latin America to kind of regroup or rebalance
31:50 Speaker 05 after global crises, they kind of come up with new kind of worldviews to widen their electoral base, to deepen their coalition, to, you know, they try to create a sense of hegemony, right? So you had FDR using Latin America to put forth a kind of social democratic continental New Deal. Then Reagan, after Vietnam, a kind of muscular anti-communist liberalism, but understood in moral terms, sort of kind of reassertion of American purpose, American sense of itself as a defender of world freedom, you know? And, and these become kind of governing ideologies that are durable.
32:35 Speaker 05 They last. I mean, the New Deal coalition lasted for decades, up until the 1970s. Reaganism lasted, you know, at least until Barack Obama, if not, if not even, even further in terms of the worldview. I mean, Trump isn't even trying to cobble together.
32:54 Speaker 05 worldview, right? Trump isn't coming up with any kind of, you know, it's not, he's not doing it for freedom. He's not doing it for individual rights. He's not, he's certainly not doing it for social democracy. You know, he's demanding tribute, right? And just trying to turn Venezuela into a vassal state. But I think that speaks to the moral emptiness of him and his, and his political movement. And Reagan and FDR resided over majoritarian movements, right? They won overwhelmingly at the electoral. You know, Trump pretty much is running a minority movement that is only in power because of the anti-majoritarian political structure of the United States and Trump's dominance of the Republican Party.
33:40 Speaker 05 So he doesn't seem interested at all in turning Trumpism into a governing coalition. He just wants to continue to stoke the culture wars, continue to, you know, stoke the grievances of tribal nationalism of the American firsters, and hence the Monroe Doctrine. You know, to bring it back to the Monroe Doctrine, the Monroe Doctrine and American first nationalism, there was always a strong kind of correlation between the two. American first nationalists, right, even the pre-Trump ones, the ones from the 1920s and leading up into World War II, they liked the Monroe Doctrine because it wasn't universalist.
34:18 Speaker 05 It wasn't international law. It was customary law specifically related to US power within its hemisphere. And so the Monroe Doctrine, it makes sense that Trump, as the standard bearer of today's iteration of America first nationalism, would latch on to the Monroe Doctrine as a kind of substitute for liberal internationalism.
34:44 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, I think this is maybe the most fascinating element of all, the complete lack of pretense, really, right? And obviously, you mentioned at various times, international policy has had some storyline. We all know what the story, oh, we were going to turn Iraq into a democracy and then that would spread throughout the Middle East and then Would be other democracies and then be rich would be stable etcetera. There's some story. I think that is so striking about Trumpism or at least this particular move. Really just sort of the complete lack of like a broader story. You mentioned also, of course, which I think is notable about Trump foreign policy. This appeal of these sort of one and done things because, okay, there seems to be a post-Iraq,
35:27 Joe Weisenthal? this sort of national backlash towards, or certainly post-Afghanistan, this backlash towards boots on the ground, long wars, forever wars, etcetera. But there also does seem to be this impulse of just, yeah, but we still want to do something powerful. We still want to show that we're tough. And so then the way that they solve the problem is by these one offs. We're going to do a one bombing run in Iran. We're going to arrest a foreign leader. Is there any precedent for that or is this truly like sort of feel uncharted territory? When you think about these arcs of foreign policy?
35:57 Speaker 05 Yeah. Yeah. Well, in Latin America, there are two precedents. One is obviously Manuel Noriega in 1989 when George H. W. Bush sent about 30,000 Marines in to capture Noriega on a warrant, basically to arrest him. It was considered a police action and that's how it was legally justified. Noriega was an ally of the United States. He was a CIA asset in the 1980s. He was very much involved in the complexities of Iran-Contra. But he played all sides against the other. I think he was selling information intelligence to Cuba. He was also working with Mossad. And when the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall fell,
36:41 Speaker 05 his usefulness had largely come to an end and the United States decided that they were going to take him out. There was a Cy Hirsch report in the New York Times that detailed his deep involvement in drug running and it couldn't be ignored anymore. And so they went in and they arrested him. So that's one precedent. A lesser discussed one is in Haiti. In two thousand and five, Jean-Patron Aristide was president of Haiti and there was a US-backed coup, but it was one of these coups that were kind of carried out by democracy promotion organizations that were funded by AID and the National Endowment for Democracy,
37:22 Speaker 05 that destabilized the country to the point where Aristide couldn't govern. And George W. Bush sent Marines in and basically put a gun to his head and flew him to the Congo, where he still lives now, where he's in exile. So it's happened before. I think what is unprecedented is this idea that we are just going to accept oil tribute from Venezuela, that we're just going to give these directives to the Venezuelan government and they're going to send. I mean, we talk about international law. All of this stuff is just unilateral US projections of its power. I mean, the United States placed sanctions on Venezuela.
38:06 Speaker 05 That's not international law. I mean, newspapers talk about it as Venezuela is trying to violate sanctions by finding workarounds to sell its oil. It's like, why not? It's their oil. It's the United States is putting the sanctions on just because it's. It's not like the nations of the world voted on putting sanctions on Venezuela. But in any case, I think what is unprecedented is what they're working out. And they seem to be working it out on a as-you-go basis. It doesn't seem like they have a clear plan. You're right, they don't want it to be two thousand and three Iraq. They don't want boots on the ground. They know the rank and file of Trump has a very low tolerance for casualties and fatalities.
38:50 Speaker 05 And America-first nationalism doesn't want to be involved in nation building. But what you're seeing is, I think, two distinct trajectories. On the one hand, they're imagining some system in which Venezuela just continues to kind of pay a tribute to the United States through oil. But then when Marco Rubio talks about it, he says, well, we have these different phases of reconstruction. And transition to democracy planned out in Venezuela. So that kind of suggests more of a direct role in pushing the country in a certain direction politically, not just leaving it as it is, as long as it continues to send the ships, you know, just like during colonial times. I mean, the colony sent the ships filled with gold to Spain.
39:35 Speaker 05 And now they're sending the ships filled with oil to Port Arthur, Texas.
39:39 Tracy Alloway? All right, Greg, we're gonna have to leave it there. But thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts. That was fantastic. Really appreciate it.
39:46 Speaker 05 Thanks. Thanks so much for having me.
40:01 Tracy Alloway? Joe, that was absolutely fascinating. The point that stood out to me was this idea of going into your own backyard to assert your dominance as a sort of replacement or offset to a decline of multilateralism elsewhere in the world. Like, that kind of makes sense.
40:17 Joe Weisenthal? And it's very interesting that there's this pattern, this historical pattern in the United States that essentially Latin America is where we go to dominate when we're internally weak. And of course, I think people would agree that the US is feeling particularly weak on a number of angles. There's obviously the sort of existential threat anxiety about the rise of China, et cetera. So maybe it's this kind of thing, okay, we are not going to be, at least for the moment, the global power that we once were, et cetera. But in the absence of that, at least we can still establish that we get to decide who the president of various Latin American states are.
40:55 Tracy Alloway? Right. Latin American dominant power.
40:58 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
40:58 Tracy Alloway? By the way, have you seen the Marco Rubio meme where he's like covered in all these different flags from Latin America?
41:07 Joe Weisenthal? I have not seen that.
41:08 Tracy Alloway? Basically, he's responsible for everything.
41:10 Joe Weisenthal? I know. I have seen the memes about the various jobs that Marco Rubio is sort of de facto having to play on this. Rubio strikes me as like a sort of interesting bridge figure between this sort of, because you know, I think of him as sort of being like a sort of retro, like Cold Warrior type, and someone who does probably have like beliefs like, oh, we're gonna like spread democracy throughout the world and wants to see Latin America sort of be, you know, run by liberal democrats, capitalist countries and so forth. But obviously, he's in an administration that does not have the same impulse for that. And so, you know, to some extent, it feels like this operation, it's like, it's like they're gonna like split the difference, right?
41:54 Joe Weisenthal? So he gets to be involved in taking out a Latin American leader, which he finds to be hostile. But the idea that like, it does not feel like this administration is gonna have much follow through in terms of, okay, now we really want to set Venezuela on a new political course.
42:11 Tracy Alloway? Right. I mean, I guess we'll see ultimately what they prioritize there. But in the meantime, shall we leave it there?
42:17 Joe Weisenthal? Let's leave it there.
42:19 Tracy Alloway? This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
42:24 Joe Weisenthal? And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at TheStalwart. Follow our guest Greg Grandin. He's at Greg Grandin. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armit, Dashell Bennett, at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks, at KaleBrooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, read the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.
42:49 Tracy Alloway? And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you found this conversation and our coverage on Venezuela to be useful, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.
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