Getting their ships together: America in the Caribbean

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. And I'm Rosie Bloor. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:24For nearly half of his life, Salman Rushdie has been, in effect, sentenced to death. In 2022, a zealot with a knife very nearly carried out that sentence. Our correspondent sits down with him to discuss his newest book and the subtle power of being funny. And this one is pretty special. My colleague played me a song, its lyrics were filthy, then she blamed the whole thing on a machine. Listen in to find out how AI does satire, and why we might even learn to love it.

1:02But first...

1:10This morning, the USS Gerald R. Ford, the biggest aircraft carrier in the world, slipped out of the Mediterranean and set a course for the Caribbean. It'll join, by now I guess you'd call it a flotilla of other American naval hardware in the region. Destroyers and cruisers and amphibious transport dock ships. All this while America has carried out an intensifying campaign of airstrikes on vessels that it alleges are full of drugs and drug peddlers. Let's get right to breaking news. The Secretary of War is announcing a new deadly strike on suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. At least 10 strikes, shoot first, ask no questions at any point, have killed an estimated 43 people.

1:52America is throwing its weight around in the Caribbean, particularly off the coast of Venezuela, more than it has in decades. Leaving quite a lot of people inside and outside the region wondering why. There are a few possible explanations for this huge military buildup. Shashank Joshi is our defense editor. Speaking on CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday, President Trump was very clear about Nicolas Maduro, who is Venezuela's president. On Venezuela in particular, are Maduro's days as president numbered? I would say yeah. I think so, yeah. But what was interesting, I thought, is that Trump played down the prospect of an imminent war.

2:35And this issue of potential land strikes in Venezuela, is that true? I don't tell you that. I mean, I'm not saying it's true or untrue, but I wouldn't be inclined to say that I would do that. But there's a lot of naval muscles still in the region. And any conflict, I think, would be really profound for American military strategy and for the region itself. Before we get into that possibility, though, let's get a snapshot of the Trump administration and its views on Mr. Maduro. This is already a long-running story. Well, to put it simply, they don't like him. He's Venezuela's leader. He lost the 2024 election but remained in power.

3:13There's no doubt he's an autocrat. But for the Trump administration, it's not just that. They also accuse him of fueling the border crisis. Most importantly for this, they accuse him of secretly being the leader of a drugs gang. That claim is, how do I put this, viewed with some skepticism by most experts. The fact is Venezuela just isn't that pivotal to America's drug problem. Most of the fentanyl that goes into America is produced in Mexico, not in Venezuela. Venezuela is a transit point. A lot of the cocaine in Venezuela, I think, goes to Europe, not to the United States. So the drugs link is tenuous.

3:47But of course, it comes amid this escalating, possibly very illegal campaign of airstrikes against alleged drug smuggling boats. And adding to that, there is a lot of, well, basically hardware moving into the region. Huge amount. And if you look at all of the naval firepower in the region right now, I think it's the biggest accumulation of military force in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis. Even by the beginning of October, so that's a month ago now, more than 10 % of all deployed American naval assets were located in an area controlled by the Pentagon's Southern Command, SOUTHCOM, which is basically the bit of the Pentagon that oversees operations in this region.

4:24And we have the USS Gerald Ford. It was in Croatia until a week ago. Now it is on its way to the Caribbean. So if you look at all the firepower on board this armada, I guess you could call it, we're looking at once the Ford arrives, maybe 180 Tomahawk cruise missiles. So if America decided to attack Venezuela, there's a huge amount of firepower. And that, by the way, before you get to the B-1, B-52 bombers that have already been flying these rather ominous looking missions off the Venezuelan coast. So the actual motivation here has been in question since this buildup actually started. What's your view on the ultimate aim at this point?

5:01Well, as ever, Trump likes to keep us guessing. And there are different advisors within the administration who have taken divergent approaches to Venezuela. You have Marco Rubio, the National Security Advisor Secretary of State, who's quite hawkish. You have Rick Grinnell, who's the envoy to Venezuela, and he's been a lot more cautious. There is one possibility that Trump wants to do a little bit of regime change here. He wants to go in, invade Venezuela, overthrow Maduro by force. That's possible, I guess. I think that's fairly unlikely given what we know about his and his advisor's appetite for these kinds of big missions.

5:31He has publicly acknowledged authorizing covert CIA operations against Maduro, including lethal ones. So it's possible here he trying to create conditions in which Maduro would step down through sheer pressure or in which there would be some kind of coup, some kind of revolt within his administration. In fact, the US has a $50 million reward for information leading to Maduro's capture. He could also, and I think we should be open to this possibility, conduct limited strikes in Venezuela on land, not against the regime, but against strikes associated with drug traffickers. That could be airstrips, that could be production facilities.

6:09I don't think that would make a big difference to the drug problem America has, but it would certainly make some big explosions in Venezuela, which may satisfy his need to be strong and act tough in this regard. What I think is interesting is that Americans are skeptical about the prospect of getting dragged into some kind of regime change campaign in Venezuela. But if you look at the statistics in Latin America, 53 % of Latin Americas would support a US military intervention to depose Maduro. And if you look at the Venezuelan diaspora in this recent poll, 64 % backed military action. So Americans wouldn't like it, but a lot of people in Latin America would be pretty content to see Maduro bombed out of office.

6:47But Shashank, we have sort of seen that movie before, the Americans trying to put pressure on the regime, hoping that perhaps a general would turn against Mr. Maduro. It hasn't happened, and to some embarrassment, I think, in the past. That's right. I mean, there was a poll issue around a coup in Venezuela five years ago. And these regimes could be quite resilient, even if they're despised, they can be quite strong. And I think there's a scenario in which the Trump administration conducts strikes on Venezuela in the hope that this rattles the regime. He scarpers, he flees, there's a coup, the generals take over, something happens.

7:19But that doesn't go that way. And then the administration has to decide, what does it do? He's in place. They've put all this muscle in the region. You can't keep it there forever, by the way, right? The USS Gerald Ford, this aircraft carrier is in demand all around the world. It's got a shelf life once it's in position. So I think there is a risk of mission creep. And it's striking that just a few weeks ago, we talked about that big speech that Pete Hegseth, America's defense secretary, and Donald Trump gave to these assembled American generals in Virginia, where Hegseth praised the Gulf War of 91 as a war with very clear aims, narrowly defined missions.

7:51And he criticized Vietnam as this example of mission creep. It's quite easy for me to imagine a situation in which once the bombing begins, you get a similar mission creep in Venezuela because the goals are so obviously murky and unclear, perhaps not even obvious to the administration itself. But again, this is an administration that came in promising no more pointless foreign entanglements. The whole business is a little bit odd. It is. And the great irony is, as you say, got this administration full of people who are veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Tulsi Gabbar, the head of intelligence, Hexeth himself, J.D.

8:23Vance, the vice president, who saw Iraq and Afghanistan as great follies of America, perhaps rightly so, and said, we need to focus laser-like on the big problem that confronts us, which is domestically at home and China in the Pacific. And despite that, you find that they are putting up this huge naval force in the Americas, in which they are bombing drug boats left and right, in which they have bombed Iran, in which just in recent days, as we're talking, Donald Trump has said he might bomb Nigeria to hit Islamists who were persecuting Christians. And if you were the poor people tasked with writing America's National Defense Strategy, which is underway right now, you would be having to put each draft into a shredder weekly, coming up with a new one and go back to the drawing board.

9:03Such is the level of strategic cacophony in Washington today. Shishong, thanks as ever for your time. Thanks, Jason.

9:25Quick word here about Economist Education, a division of our parent company, The Economist Group, and the course they've developed on international relations. They've worked with senior editors and journalists from The Economist, the same ones who appear on the show here, and with guest speakers from academia, business, and government. The course will give you a sophisticated view of the nuances of international relations and how they affect your organization. Get the means to act decisively, navigate uncertainty, and mitigate risk, and get it for cheaper by using the code intelligence at the checkout.

9:58Enroll before November 12th at education.economist.com slash intelligence and you'll save 15%.

10:13Because of what happened to the satanic verses, because of the attack against it was not funny, it was assumed that the book couldn't be funny. and people stopped writing about me as if my writing had humour in it. For a 78-year-old man who's been stabbed 15 times by a frenzied zealot, Salman Rushdie is surprisingly chirpy. Robert Guest is a deputy editor at The Economist. A fading scar punctuates his cheek. A darkened lens obscures where his right eye once was. I recently sat down with the author in a British country house with bodyguards hovering seriously in the background to discuss his new collection of short stories, The Eleventh Hour.

10:59For nearly half his life, Sir Salman Rushdie has lived under sentence of death. A joyous Iranian ayatollah told Muslims all around the world that it was their duty to murder him for writing The Satanic Verses, a novel that allegedly insulted the prophet. He survived a very nearly successful assassination attempt in 2022. and lost the sight in his right eye. So Salman told me about meeting his attacker in court. I looked across the courtroom at him. I don't think he ever looked at me. And he seemed to be completely at ease with himself. I mean, he was about to be sentenced to 25 years in jail. This was the first time I saw the knife, because at the time of the attack, I never saw the knife.

11:38I was busy getting attacked by it.

11:44People forget how funny Salman Rushdie's writing is. He's a brilliant wordsmith, and it's not like one-liners and punchlines like that. It's a sort of cumulative humour that builds up through wordplay, through plot twists, through that kind of thing. This matters, not just because humour brings joy, but also because it's a weapon in the struggle against oppression. Humorlessness is a characteristic of narrow-mindedness. Very few humorous dictators. Humour gets up people's noses further than anything else. The new book's great. It's full of satire, mocking a range of targets from religious bigots to political charlatans to death itself.

12:25In one of the short stories, The Musician of Kahani, a secular Indian woman starts to feel a scrap of doubt about her husband's atheism. A doubt that would surge to the forefront of her thinking when he walked out of their marriage to follow a religious fraud. And his description of the guru is priceless. He says the guru preaches that money is more than okay. And money, happy to be given the spiritual thumbs up, flooded into his accounts. A lot of the satire is very personal. Sir Salman's life has been blighted by anti-enlightenment thinking. The notion that words, if they offend religious sensibilities, should be answered with steel.

13:07He was, what, 24 years old. So the question that he was ruining his, never mind what he was doing to me, he was ruining his life. The willingness to destroy your own life, let alone the life you are setting out to take, it's a mystery.

13:26The answer to that mystery may lie in the power of polarisation. For many people today, their tribal loyalty, whether it's to a political party or a religion, trumps their notions of morality, which leads a few of them to think that it's OK actually to kill people who say things that they disagree with. So Salman fears that free speech is in bad shape around the world. He says that the traditional sources of censorship, conservatives and authoritarians, are continuing vigorously to crush it. But he's also exasperated by the censoriousness of some progressives. The problem is when liberal progressive folks are also in favor of whatever the fashionable word is now, de-platforming kinds of speech that they disapprove of.

14:12Very hard to argue in favor of allowing late night comedians to be rude about whoever they want to be rude about. If you want to stop people saying things that you find rude. So not only is it objectively not a great thing to do to try and prevent opinion from being expressed, which happens not to be your opinion. But it also weakens your case.

14:35He says he sees some similarities between MAGA and religious cults. In both cases, followers compete to show their devotion to the leader and hatred of his enemies. In one of his short stories called Oklahoma, he describes a felonious king who surrounds himself with courtiers who flatter him and accuse his opponents of the crimes that he is guilty of. And the king also changes the meanings of words, so that when he marries two nieces, the word incest is struck from the dictionary. And over time, he redefines rape as love, horror as patriotism, bullying as good governance. It's not hard to see echoes of that in the news today.

15:21A lot of this book, The Eleventh Hour, is darkly comically bleak. He's aware of mortality, as you'd expect for someone who's been nearly killed. But there's also hope in it. There's one very lovely short story, actually a ghost story, set in an old college where the protagonist wakes up dead in the first sentence. And over the next 70-odd pages, the reader gradually realises that the protagonist is a kind of fictional mixture of E.M. Forster and Alan Turing, who both happen to go to the same Cambridge college as Sir Salman. And you get this revelation of how brutally society has treated him for being gay.

16:02And it's shocking and it's moving. But the story offers hope that bigotry can be overcome. And literature can help by forcing people to imagine what injustice feels like. So Salman argues that art can reread the world.

16:28Okay, Rosie, so I am about to play you an interesting song. You ready? I'm ready. Okay, let's go.

16:39Pretty good.

16:45Drinking a beer and flicking my b***h, praying my daddy don't hear me b***h. Oh, wow. Living in the backwoods by the creek. Okay, I think I get the idea, Becca. Wow, what was that? That was filthy. Absolutely filthy. Can't believe you'd play such a thing. Okay, I should tell listeners they're listening to Becca Jackson, our Southern correspondent, playing me a completely filthy song there. Becca, you're playing it to me not just because country music's from the South, right? Exactly. Yeah, Rosie, I'm glad to be associated with this kind of filth, but maybe I'll tell you a little bit about what it is.

17:27So this is not just a hit country song. This is a TikTok trend. It is exemplary of the AI-generated music phenomenon, right? So these are country songs that are generated by people sitting down at their computers using these apps like Suno and Udio and basically calling on the bots to make dirty country music. I feel like we've filled the entire bingo list there of TikTok and AI and bots and all the rest of it. But Becca, what is going on? Why is AI making X-rated filth? So I think one of the interesting things is this just goes to show how good some of these AI platforms have gotten, right? any person, me, you, someone sitting in their parents' basement, a frustrated high schooler can sit down and open up one of these apps and they don't need that much experience with music, with recording things, with understanding how songs work.

18:29They can just sort of write in these prompts and get AI to generate songs that have the kind of Southern twang. You know, she had a good accent. It has the sort of strumming guitar instrumentals, but then they can say and have the words to be about whatever X-rated thing they wanted to be about. And you can imagine that for, let's say, a high school boy. This is just completely hilarious. And is it just high school boys who are listening to it? So it's one of those things. It's a giant TikTok trend. Some of these videos of these songs have 10 million views. So I suspect it's not just high school boys, right?

19:03This is a bit of a cultural phenomenon at this point. There are tons of people making AI-driven music right now. It's not just Beats by AI, which is the raunchy country group. Event This, one of these groups, has 650 ,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Velvet Sundown, which doesn't do country, they do sort of 1970s rock. They have 300 ,000 listeners. So basically, people are figuring out that they can make this kind of music really fast, put it out into the world, and they actually do have customers for it. So Becca, there's plenty of dirty lyrics out there. You don't have to look very far. So why are people actually listening to this made by AIs?

19:44So I think, first of all, one of the things that's important here is this is a parody. People like parodies because they make some kind of social commentary. I think these songs are particularly funny because when you start listening to the sound, you expect these kinds of country songs to be about whiskey and worship. And so the shock value here of hearing something that is so not like country music makes it kind of fun. And I think that's drawing people in. But also there's something more to this. I talked to an intellectual property law professor at Vanderbilt, and he said that this is actually the start of a revolution of people creating their own music content rather than sitting down at Spotify, opening up Apple Music and trying to find music that you want to listen to.

20:28You can just say, you know what, I'm kind of in the mood for something funny and chill and instrumental. and you can put all that into one of these apps and AI will generate you a song that perfectly fits your mood for any given situation. And I'm guessing that artists themselves don't find it quite as funny as you and I do. Yeah, I think that's right. We haven't gotten much of a reaction from country music stars to these parodies, but people like Elton John and Ed Sheeran, they've all expressed fears that AI companies are training on their work. And the problem actually goes further than that.

21:02There are fraudsters that are uploading music onto apps like Deezer and Spotify, and they're getting bots to listen to these songs and then raking in royalties from them. Deezer removed these tracks and Spotify recently announced that they actually removed 75 million AI-generated songs from their platform in September. They have a problem where there's all of this, quote, slop entering their ecosystem. So not everybody is happy about this. And what about listeners? Do they mind that machines are making their music now? So some people are frustrated, but overall surveys suggest that at least in America, one in three people say that they're somewhat or very comfortable with AI.

21:4030 % are happy for machines to write lyrics and 25 % say they're happy for the AI to actually perform the music. So I think given that people don't seem to have a huge aversion to this kind of music, and given how funny and fun it is, I'd say you should probably watch out for more of this kind of thing. Becca, thank you, I think, for introducing me to this genre. You bet, Rosie, and I gotta say, I'm sorry.