Tracking the Wars Trump Is Promising to End and Threatening to Start

0:00If you are yearning for the era of George W. Bush style regime change, but mixed in with a little of Nixon's failed war on drugs, I bring you Trump's flirtation with war in Venezuela. What's really behind the president's military buildup in the Caribbean, as well as the other hotspots around the world that the president is vowing to fix, even as he ponders these strikes on Caracas. This country was stone cold dead. From Newsweek headquarters at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City. I am Carlo Versano, and this is the 1600. It's hard to keep up with the wars. President Trump is both threatening to start and promising to end.

0:35That last weekend, Trump threatening military intervention in Nigeria. That's a new one. That's, of course, coming amid the significant military buildup in the southern Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela. With me now to dig into Venezuela and Nigeria and Gaza and everything else going on around the world is Derek Davison. Derek is a writer and analyst. Derek specializes in foreign affairs and U.S. foreign policy, and he publishes the very popular substack known as Foreign Exchanges, which is one of my go-to reads every morning. Derek, welcome to the 1600. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

1:09Good to be with you. So let's start with Venezuela. The USS Gerald Ford is currently steaming towards the Caribbean. After Trump redirected the Ford from the Med about a week ago, I think the last ping from this carrier was crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. So it's going to take it probably a week or two to get down to the Caribbean where it's headed. This is the biggest, baddest aircraft carrier group we got. You don't send these guys halfway around the world to do whatever it is we're currently doing in the Caribbean, like blowing up speedboats. Blowing up speedboats, yeah. Right. Is this – what's going on here?

1:43Is this a message to Maduro? Is there something else at play? I mean, I think it's the prelude to military conflict. I don't think that Trump has the appetite to invade Venezuela and try to overthrow Maduro. But I think airstrikes, as you say, you don't go to the time and expense of deploying the Gerald Ford and its carrier group to the Caribbean, pulling it away from things that are ostensibly, you know, we would like to have carrier groups in other parts of the world that are now going with it. Without, sad for them, I guess. You don't do that unless you're going to use it somehow. And to think that they need this much firepower to interdict some alleged drug smugglers on some alleged speedboats that are allegedly carrying drugs is silly.

2:35I think that we know they've been talking about strikes on land, not just in Venezuela. There was just a piece at The Intercept about this a couple of days ago. They've expanded their target package already. They haven't even started strikes on land, but they've already expanded to Colombia and Mexico. So, you know, I think I think that's probably a foregone conclusion at this point. How far that goes, I can't I can't say, obviously. Yeah. So NBC reporting last night that Trump has given the go ahead for the CIA to move into Mexico, presumably to do some sort of counter counter terror operations if you could even call it that against the cartels well i mean the way we define terrorism now which is is meaningless you could say that yes right so he's saying so trump is saying that he's designated one of the first things he did in office was designate these cartels as terrorist groups right which i guess in theory is the fig leaf that they are using to uh to carry out these attacks as they're not These are not combatants, right?

3:38I mean even when Obama was droning people in the Middle East, you could make the argument that these were – or at least the targets were enemy combatants, right? These were members of al-Qaeda or at least alleged members of al-Qaeda and their associates. These people that we're hitting in the Caribbean are not – we're not at war with them to my knowledge. Right, exactly. I mean, the administration has adopted the same language that, you know, the Bush administration, the Obama administration used to use to basically kill whoever they wanted in Al-Qaeda. You know, again, alleged Al-Qaeda or alleged, you know, later on Islamic State, which is the term unprivileged belligerence.

4:24but this is a legal term in theory at least within the government that defines a combatant who is not afforded, doesn't need to be afforded the same rights as say a soldier in a war they're considered outside the scope of state authority and therefore there's more things you can sort of get away with doing to them But again, it's a term that requires there to be a conflict, and there isn't one against the drug cartels, no matter how much tortured language the administration wants to use here. It's just not the case. And so to apply these concepts, I would argue that we're already stretched beyond belief in the OG war on terror.

5:17To apply them to the war on narco terror, this construct that we've created to mash up the war on terror and the war on drugs, is silly. Two of our great successes, Derek. Yeah, obviously. I mean two great tastes that taste great together, yeah. Right. Right. So back to I should probably spend some more time on these drug these drug boat interdictions. We've now killed from my last check on this, which was a day or two ago. There may have been more. I don't even know about. But we've killed something like 50, 55 people on a dozen or so of these little. I think it's it's higher than that, but that includes the strikes in the Pacific.

5:51So if you just go in the Caribbean, it's it's like 55, 56, something like that. Right. So, I mean, these to the extent that this was supposed to be a deterrent, I guess. I mean it obviously hasn't been, right? Because the alleged drug boats or whatever these things are still – I think they're deterring fishermen in Venezuela from going out to sea, but I'm not sure that they're deterring the drugs now. And I saw that the government of Trinidad even told its fishermen don't go out there because you are basically sitting ducks for the American military apparatus. So the pretext of this whole showdown is that Venezuela is the main source of drugs that are being smuggled into the United States.

6:30I think you could – that's not true, right? I mean but you could make an argument that – and I think basically anyone probably would make the argument that the drug situation in this country is very bad, right? Nobody wants to see people dying of fentanyl overdoses, the cocaine trade. None of this is new though. And to my understanding, Venezuela – the drugs don't come from Venezuela. They come from Mexico, Colombia and to an extent China, at least the precursors to the fentanyl. The precursors to fentanyl, yeah. Right. So what does Venezuela have to do with anything? Nothing really. I mean this is part of the reason why, as I said earlier, they've already expanded the target list because they want to create at least the impression that this is really about the war on drugs and not about trying to force the ouster of an unfriendly president in an oil-rich country in Latin America.

7:22they've already expanded the target list to include targets in Mexico and Colombia because those are the places where the drugs come from. Ecuador, if they really wanted to get serious, Ecuador is the main transshipment point, I think, at this point for cocaine coming to the United States. But Ecuador is run by a rich right-wing president who is very obsequious to Donald Trump, so we're not going to bomb Ecuador. The logic of bombing Venezuela, particularly to take care of the fentanyl trade, and this has been the thought, if you can call it that, behind Trump's claim that every one of these boats they destroy saves 25 ,000 lives.

8:03That's based on the idea that they're all packed with fentanyl. There's no fentanyl that comes to the United States from Venezuela. It all comes from Mexico, virtually. I mean, if there's any that comes from south of Mexico, It's an infinitesimal amount. It comes over the land border. Right. It comes over the land border. So these things are just not true. They can say whatever they want. They're just not true. But there is no targeting. There's maybe a few spots along the Venezuela-Colombia border where there is some coca production, maybe some facilities. Those parts of Venezuela near the border are probably the most lawless parts of the country in terms of just being outside government control.

8:51So you could strike those targets, I guess, as part of a more comprehensive package of anti-drug targets. But to say that they're – I mean the targets that we've seen them be discussed or seen bandied about like airports, airstrips, seaports, those are military targets. That's the kind of thing you do when you want to overthrow a regime. OK. So that's where I'm getting. Before we get to Maduro and what seems to be actually going on here, one last thing on the boat strikes because this – I still have trouble understanding this. The New York Times reporting this week that the White House held a Republican-only briefing on the Hill for senators.

9:30This is quoting from the New York Times here. Pentagon officials said that they needed to prove only that the targeted people were connected to designated terrorist organizations, even if the connection is, quote, as much as three hops away from a known member, end quote, of a designated terrorist organization, Intercept. So basically, why the secrecy? I guess I'm sort of answering my own question here, but why isn't the administration being more forthcoming about who's actually on these boats that if it even knows who's on them? Because they don't know. Yeah, they don't know. I mean, this is the reporting.

10:06Again, I'm cribbing from The Intercept, but they don't – they're telling people in Congress that they don't know who's on the boats. They can't identify them. They think they're connected with the cartels. they believe that they have the authority to kill anybody as you said who's like uh their term the term i saw was affiliated with the cartels but they won't put a floor under affiliated so you don't really know what the limit to that is that could theoretically apply to you know just about anybody i guess um if you're a drug if you're a drug user you are yeah i mean you know when are when are the drone strikes coming yeah like look up uh because it yeah it's it's um

10:51the notion or the, yeah, the idea that they have any real idea who's on these boats when they blow them up is apparently fanciful. I think you may recall there was one attack, I think there's been a couple, maybe one or two more since then, but there was one attack fairly early on in this string where there were two survivors. and rather than pick them up and bring them in for prosecution the administration repatriated them one was i think to ecuador the other one was to colombia and the reason it did that is because it's i mean they've told people they've told people in congress in briefings that they didn't have the evidentiary basis to try them for anything right so if you don't have the evidentiary basis to try them for anything, why are you summarily executing them in the open sea?

11:43That's just the logic of that is completely twisted around. The standard of evidence for putting somebody on trial is higher than the standard to just kill them because you decided. Right. I mean, that to me was the tell, right? When they repatriated these guys back to their countries rather than bring them here to try them, right? Because, I mean, if you got – they're talking about how they're trying to make this connection that these cartels are the new al-Qaeda or the new ISIS. If we got some ISIS guys in Syria or something, we would – I mean presumably we would have tried them or we at least would have sent them to some black site where the CIA would have ripped their fingernails out, right?

12:26Right. Right. So back to back to what's really, you know, sort of the bigger thing that I think is happening here that the I think we probably agree that the drug war is kind of a fig leaf for. I agree with you that I don't think Trump actually intends to put U.S. boots on the ground in Venezuela for the reasons that you said. Also, I mean, Venezuela is I don't think people really understand this. First of all, it's twice the size of Iraq physically. it's it's one of those countries that's like it's almost like it was designed in a lab to be like to have like amazing natural defenses right it's got you know mountainous deterioration it's got highly densely urbanized coastline it's got jungles it's got heat and humidity that'll rip up the machinery it's just not the kind of place you want to get dragged into a quagmire not to mention the fact that we don't even have any bases like the way that we have you know in the middle east we could at least you know have forward operating bases in kuwait or right cutter we don't have any of that down there.

13:20So we would have to stage whatever it is we're going to do, presumably from the Ford or whatever else we have offshore. But okay, so back to Maduro. Do you see him? I mean, if this is about scaring him into leaving, is there any evidence that that's going to happen? I haven't seen any defections in his regime. And that's usually one of the precursors, right? Yeah, I think he's pretty well coup-proofed his whole apparatus there. I mean, he's been around long enough and Hugo Chavez before him that I don't think there's any chance. I mean, the thing that would really scare him is if there's a movement within the Venezuelan military to say, you know, we can't tolerate this anymore and something's got to change.

14:04And I don't think, I think he's got, you know, all pretty loyal people in the upper echelons of the Venezuelan military. So I wouldn't expect him to feel compelled to leave power Or, you know, there's unlikely to be, you know, and this is always, I guess, the dream of US foreign policy in these situations, that there's going to be some kind of grassroots uprising to get rid of him. But funnily enough, if you're bombing a country, the people don't tend to rise up and support your cause as you're doing the bombing. or when you're sanctioning people brutally the way the United States has sanctioned Venezuela over the years.

14:45People tend not to have terribly high opinions of you for some reason. So I don't see an internal scenario where Maduro is compelled to leave, particularly if there's no negotiation on what happens to him afterwards. If he fears that he's going to wind up being picked up for the whatever it is at this point,$25 million bounty or whatever is on his head in the U.S., or if he fears like he's going to be somehow captured and there's going to be some repercussions for his crossing the U.S., I mean, why would you leave at that point? The record is pretty clear that you should stick around as long as possible.

15:30That's the safest move for somebody like that. So I don't see it happening even if or when the bombing starts. It's kind of – we're coming on the air to talk about this in the wake of the death of Dick Cheney who, of course, what – our grand misadventure in Iraq was sort of the – exactly what you're talking about. You know, that would show somebody like Maduro that it's best to, I guess, you know, hold out or that there's not going to be some grassroots coming to, you know, to overthrow you after the Americans start bombing. But I mean, back to what I was saying about Cheney, what I meant to say was, you know, I've been burned by enough manufacturing consent for disastrous regime change wars in my life, as I'm sure you have.

16:16And so I'm starting to get a little bit of these like acid flashbacks. You know, when I watched 60 Minutes last weekend or weekend before last weekend, they did this big piece about Venezuela, Maduro is the great, you know, the great evil. And they had, you know, Rick Scott coming in there and talking about how, you know, Maduro needs to leave. It really did give me flashbacks to that 2002, 2003 period where, you know, we had been attacked and all of a sudden we just watched the pivot sort of happen organically in the media where Iraq becomes the big baddie. Is that what's happening now? Right.

16:48I mean I think Maduro's been a second tier or third tier baddie for a long time as far as the US foreign policy establishment is concerned. What's changed maybe a bit is that you have one of the devoted supporters, one of the most devoted supporters of regime change in Venezuela, all across Latin America, Cuba, Venezuela, now maybe Colombia, in Marco Rubio, who has monopolized both of the premier foreign policy positions in the administration. He's secretary of state and he's acting as national security advisor. So, I mean, I think he's he's in Trump's ear quite a bit. And this is a pet project for him and his political base.

17:38So, you know, I think that's part of the reason why Venezuela is now become, you know, Maduro's profile has risen under this administration compared with where it was under Biden, for example. So let's let's play a little devil's advocate. Right. So I think if you know, if you're a Trump supporter, if you're you know, if you're MAGA, if you're somebody in the Rubio sphere, you would probably say, you know, this there's a grand strategy at play here that Trump is doing. Right. Some this this sort of hemispheric reengineering, which I believe is what Thomas Barnett writing in Politico called it last week, basically making the point that, you know, this is part of the Trump doctrine, the Don Roe doctrine, if you will, where we refocus on our own hemisphere.

18:26Right. We're out of Eurasia. We're out of the Middle East. I mean, we're not, of course, but that's the you know, that's the narrative. If we're going to be a superpower wielding influence, why not do that in our backyard rather than in the snake pit of the Middle East? There's a bigger game at play here. This has to do with China. This has to do with Russia, Iran. I mean how would – I don't necessarily agree with – I mean I don't agree with that. But that's the – take down that argument for me. Well, I mean the first thing I would say is that that doesn't usually work out well for the people of Latin America because the US has tried this before.

19:02And, you know, it was death squads in El Salvador and Contras in Nicaragua. And, you know, it was not good. It was not good for the people of the region. So that would be my first and primary concern. The second thing I would say from the standpoint of kind of keeping China out of the region or keeping, you know, competitor, peer competitors from meddling, I guess, if you want to call it that, in Western Hemisphere affairs. Like, how useful is this? Unless you're planning to do regime knockoffs in every single country in the region, the people in one place are going to look at what you're doing to the people in Venezuela, or they're going to look at what you're doing to the people in Colombia, and they're going to say, well, we don't want any part of that, and our lifeline here is China, so let's elect a president or a government that can establish friendly relationships with China as at least a counterbalance.

20:02the United States, which is what we've seen happen in the region over the last 20 years or more, that those relationships have been growing. And when all you have to offer is belligerence, I guess, when all you have to offer is either knuckle under to what we want, or either the bombs are going to start coming, or the 50 % tariffs are going to start coming, or the sanctions are going to start coming. Like it's all stick, no carrot. It's a lousy way to try and compete for that – to jockey for influence. Yes, the hearts and minds. Exactly. Right. Exactly. Last thing on Venezuela before we move on because I want to get your take on some of the other hot spots that we're talking about around the world right now.

20:50I've always – I always thought it was sort of a reductive argument when people during the Iraq War would be like, why are we doing this? oh, we're doing it for the oil. Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, right? We talked, you know, Maduro is a bad dude. I don't think anybody would disagree. But to your point earlier, there's plenty of bad dudes out there, right? There's no shortage of autocratic strongman dictators in the world. Why are the ones who are sitting on oil always the ones that catch our attention? I mean, unless they sell, you know, unless they cut us a good deal on the oil, They keep the oil flowing stably.

21:25I mean, you know, it's sort of funny how obviously transactional the U.S. has been at times with Maduro. I mean, Biden, you know, was very willing after the Russian invasion of Ukraine to relax sanctions on Venezuela in return for getting the oil to market. so I mean clearly that's a top of the mind concern it just winds up being we're never quite happy unless we control the oil not necessarily directly but more closely than we get to do with some of these I guess the people who get designated as rogue actors like Maduro and I think also to your point about oil, there is some consideration about Maduro's kind of claims over Guiana, which also is pumping a lot of oil these days, or getting ramping up to pump a lot of oil in Venezuela.

22:26Which is next door. Right, it's next door, and Venezuela has a historic claim on the western half of the country, which is where most of the oil is. So I think that's probably a minor point here, but one that I think you have enough elements that are within this administration that are either talking to people that, you know, let's say Exxon, which I think is the company exploiting Guyana's reserves, or are, you know, related to it in some way, that that's probably a consideration as well. A minor one, but I think probably still relevant. Yeah, no, that's a fair point. Okay, let's move on for a moment, if we can.

23:03Gaza. Gaza, obviously, in the news recently, President Trump, I mean, I gave him a lot of credit, he did to the extent that there is a ceasefire in Gaza. He did orchestrate it. We've been reporting here at Newsweek and elsewhere that this ceasefire has been holding between Hamas and Israel. But in the same breath, I notice a lot of us, a lot of my colleagues in the mainstream media say the ceasefire is holding, but Israel also is continuing these targeted strikes against Hamas in Gaza during the ceasefire. Now, the Israelis would say that these bombings are because Hamas attacked first. It's sort of irrelevant to me, frankly.

23:41I guess the question is, how can it be a ceasefire when the fire hasn't ceased? Yeah, I mean, there's always when the Israelis do any kind of ceasefire, and they've done it in Lebanon too, they leave themselves an out clause to say that if we see anything we don't like, we're going to keep bombing. The black humor of this is the joke is, you cease, we fire. you know it's the framework the I would push back against the notion that all of these things have been targeted because you I'm sure you saw last week they there was an incident where I think a couple of Israeli soldiers were killed and then they spent an entire day saturating Gaza again and killed 100 people 104 people or 109 people I've seen different figures So it's not all that targeted.

24:39It's not all that targeted, not necessarily all the time. And the other thing that we've seen a lot of is people getting killed simply for approaching or crossing the so-called yellow line, which demarcates the 50, I think, 8 % of Gaza that Israel is still controlling. I don't know how well that line is actually marked on the ground. They were talking about putting actual yellow bricks in place to warn people when they approach it. But I have no idea how far that's gotten. And a lot of these people seem to be doing things like trying to get back to what's left of their homes or trying to just see what the damage is, and they happen into the wrong place.

25:25And there's basically a shoot-on-sight order at this point for them, And no matter who they are, whether it's military-aged males or children or whatever, if it crosses that line, it gets killed. So, yeah, I don't know how targeted it really is at the end of the day. But they maintain this right to continue killing people when they feel it's necessary. Are there other ceasefires where that happens? um i mean lebanon it's still happening in lebanon like they're still blowing up you know almost almost a daily basis uh yeah i mean it's sort of ebbed a bit you know after last november uh when the ceasefire went into effect for a few months and was only kind of you know you'd hear about you know a couple of strikes a week but it's it's back up to like multiple strikes a day not not even daily anymore, like multiple Israeli strikes per day.

26:27And it always is, you know, well, this guy was with Hezbollah, and he happened to be in the wrong place, or, you know, this was a commander that we wanted to take out. And again, it's like, what's the point of the ceasefire, then you're just going to keep killing, killing people and, you know, creating more damage, more collateral casualties, you know, etc, etc. So it really is just like you cease, we fire. So the other part of the ceasefire, as it was at least sold to us a couple of weeks ago, is that aid was going to finally start getting into Gaza. Has that been happening? Yes, but not to the extent, not nearly to the extent that it was supposed to be happening.

27:10I think the authorities in Gaza said a couple of days ago that they had tracked around 3 ,200 trucks that entered Gaza. And these are commercial and humanitarian trucks. So not all of them are carrying humanitarian aid. Had entered Gaza between when the ceasefire went into effect on October 10th and the end of the month. That's about 145 trucks per day. There's supposed to be 600 trucks per day entering Gaza. That's not happening. It's not happening because the Israelis are throttling the aid. And they've said this on a couple of occasions. Like, they openly say these things. Like, you know, a soldier gets killed in some kind of exchange of fire, which, you know, we don't get a lot of detail about who's involved in these clashes.

28:03But, you know, they start with the bombing and they say we're also going to throttle the aid again. Like, they openly say this stuff. So, no, the aid is not coming in at nearly the levels required. And that's just thinking about it in terms of food and medicine. There have been only a handful of medical trucks, I think, have gotten in. Food is way below what is required. And as I said, some of that is commercial food products. So they're going to market. They're going on sale in a place where people don't have a lot of money to buy anything. So in terms of just pure aid to people who are starving, the figures are even less.

28:42the thing that's really not getting in that I've seen reporting about is shelter materials winter is approaching people don't have any place to go they need durable more durable shelters than the tents that they're currently living in and that stuff isn't getting in at all so in a place where all the structures or almost all the structures have been leveled you wonder what people are going to do over winter and preparations are clearly not happening because, again, not enough aid is being allowed in. Right. Right. If you go back to your house and the house doesn't have a roof, it's not really going to do you much good when it gets cold.

29:25Okay. I want to, I know we have you for a limited time here, so I want to continue our sort of trip around the world and go to Africa, which, of course, I know is not a country, is a continent, but there are a lot of flashpoints on that continent right now. Let's start with Nigeria. So the president, somebody got into the president's head that the U.S. should be more involved in whatever's happening in Nigeria. So give me the spark notes there first. What is going on in Nigeria? Yeah, I mean, Nigeria's got a lot of security problems, internal security problems. They've got a huge problem with jihadist groups in the northeastern part of the country, and that has metastasized into other parts of the country, as well, but the two main groups are Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa province, which is an offshoot of Boko Haram and sort of superseded it as the main threat.