Which country will Trump strike next?

0:02Daisy Mcandrew:This is a Global Player original podcast. I will say this about Greenland. We need Greenland from a national security situation. It's so strategic. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. And Denmark is not going to be able to do it, I can tell you.

0:26Lewis Goodall:Nicolas Maduro, formerly president of Venezuela, hasn't even stood trial yet, though he is in New York. But already, President Trump is speculating about who might be next, apparently punch drunk on his Venezuelan success.

0:43Daisy Mcandrew:So where does the American flag get planted next? Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, Panama, Canada. The list goes on and on. And it might be fanciful to talk in those terms. But right now, is it really? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:09Daisy Mcandrew:It's John. It's Lewis. And it was something slightly mesmerising, watching the pictures being fed in of Maduro, his arse being pushed into a prison van, as he is taken to a courthouse to be arraigned on charges of drug trafficking and the rest of it and being a narco-terrorist when three days ago he was in the presidential palace in Caracas, a world leader on the world stage.

1:39Lewis Goodall:I didn't think we'd get the word arse in so early into the new year. You could use a culo, of course, the Spanish equivalent. It's culo being handed to him. Well, very good. You see, you're just showing off your Spanish. I'm just, I'm in Emily's chair, so I'm sort of being inhabited by her spirit.

1:53Daisy Mcandrew:Her linguistic abilities. And he is on trial. And, you know, that is remarkable in itself and should kind of detain us hugely. But it's hard not to look over the horizon and think, well, what on earth is next? And as we heard in that clip there, Donald Trump opining on why America needs to plant the stars and stripes on Greenland and that Denmark can't be trusted to have it. And you think, is this a joke or is this actually deadly, deadly serious?

2:24Lewis Goodall:Events over the past, well, since Saturday have been dizzying, even by sort of Trumpian standards. They've been dizzying. The entire world has been shocked by what happened and not just by what happened. As we talked about in our special episode on Saturday, there is a pedigree and there is a lineage for American presidents getting involved and removing, even removing by force leaders or trying to leaders of countries in latin or south america but how trump has described it and what he is suggesting they will do next it feels to me is different not least because and i've been thinking so much about that astounding press conference on saturday when we recorded on saturday we just watched it but you know him being flanked by marco rubio the secretary of state and sort of american military top brass and Pete Hegseth, the aptly named Secretary of War.

3:12Lewis Goodall:And, you know, I was thinking so much about it in the sense that what I think the world sort of expected to hear from Trump was for him to say, look, we've done this. Maduro is a bad guy. He was a bad guy. He was a narco-terrorist. You know, this has happened before. It happened with Noriega in Panama under President Bush in 1989. We've taken people out. And now it's up to the Venezuelans to decide what happens. But he wasn't saying that. And he hasn't said that since. He said that the US will be running Venezuela. He said that it is quite explicitly about oil. And also, even though since then, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, has been trying to sort of take some of that back a little bit in terms of saying, no, we're not going to be running it.

3:54Lewis Goodall:We're going to be coercing it. It does feel to me that what has emerged over the last 48 hours is remarkable in that what we've seen is not so much regime change, i.e. an American president coming in saying there's going to be elections, we're going to move to a democracy. But instead, what Trump appears to be saying is they're going to run it via coercion. They're basically leaving the vice president, who is now President Rodriguez, in place, but only so long as she does what they want. And if she doesn't do what they want, then they'll just go in again and take her out and replace her with somebody different.

4:28Lewis Goodall:And this is what is, again, so remarkable.

4:30Daisy Mcandrew:I made the comparison on Saturday with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, where they got rid of Saddam Hussein. And I said then, you know, and look what happened afterwards. It was absolute frigging chaos. I mean, there are similarities between 2003 and the bold adventure that we can, you know, depose a leader and then impose democracy. But Donald Trump is not talking about imposing democracy. Donald Trump is not talking about free and fair elections. The difference here is that it may have been misplaced kind of ideas of democracy and spreading democracy to the Arab world. Here, Donald Trump doesn't mind there being a hard leader, a hard man, although it's a woman in this case, Delcey Rodriguez.

5:09Daisy Mcandrew:What he wants is it to be his person, his person doing his bidding in Venezuela so that America can be the beneficiary of the oil coming out of the ground. And it will be America making money out of Venezuelan oil. Nothing to do with drugs at all, as we were saying then. And so what you're getting is not any move towards a new democracy, because if you were going towards a new democracy, you would have had Mario Carina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, who was seen the leader of the opposition and a conservative right winger who would be the person naturally to be imposed. or you would have had Edmundo Gonzalez, who was widely seen to have won last year's election or 18 months ago's election in Venezuela.

5:56Daisy Mcandrew:Instead of which, Donald Trump has obviously rung up the deputy president, said, right, you can be president as long as you do my bidding in Venezuela.

6:04Lewis Goodall:You could say, if you're being generous, that the Trump administration is learning from those comparisons with 2003. You could say that the problem with 2003 and the military adventures under the Bush administration and others as well is that you're trying almost that your ambitions are too grand, that you're trying to impose a democracy where none exists. The Maduro regime has been there for 12 years. It was preceded by the Chavez regime before that. This is a regime where all the sort of organs of the state, the judiciary, the civil service, you know, it's based on graft. It's based on corruption.

6:43Lewis Goodall:This regime has sort of been long established and just remove it, potentially risk chaos. And you could say that that is better than what happened in 2003 and elsewhere when you basically try and impose a democracy, hope for the best. And imagine that civil society and democratic society is going to evolve and that is not going to happen. That said, it is an extraordinary sight to see an American president basically say, which is what he has said and hinted at, that so long as the officials of the regime as it currently exists, because that administration, save for Maduro, is still there. As I say, the vice president is now the president.

7:21Lewis Goodall:The defence minister is still there. All of that administrative state still remains. Basically, what Trump has been saying is if you do what we want and you allow us to coerce you, we'll allow you to stay in place. And not only that, we'll send our oil companies in. We'll start to get the oil out of the ground. We'll start to make money. And you can have a bit of that money as well. Again, as we were saying on Saturday, some of this stuff has always kind of happened and the American state has kind of manipulated and offered these sort of bribes and a bit of graft and worked with regimes that they didn't like.

7:53Lewis Goodall:But to see it so transparently out in the open from via sort of basically early 20th century or late 19th century gumbo diplomacy is a sight to see. Yes.

8:04Daisy Mcandrew:And this is why it is so different from other examples. Some people are saying is the reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, which was, you know, 200 years ago when the colonies of Spain and Portugal were being kind of kicked out of Latin America. And America wanted to stop Europe from reasserting itself in that part of the world and said, look, this is our backyard. Donald Trump is doing more than that. He's doing much more than that. He's doing I can kick anybody out. I can have anything I like. And so when we talk about what's happened in Venezuela, we've also got to consider what could happen in Panama, which Donald Trump has already spoken about because he thinks there is too many Chinese interests there.

8:45Daisy Mcandrew:And he wants to see Panama kicked out. He's also talked about Colombia. And we can hear him now on Air Force One talking about what should happen there. That's good for our country. We have a very sick neighbor. It's not a neighbor, but it's close to a neighbor. And that's Venezuela. It's very sick. Colombia is very sick, too, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States. And he's not going to be doing it very long. Let me tell you.

9:11Lewis Goodall:What does that mean? He's not going to be doing it very long.

9:13Daisy Mcandrew:He's not doing it very long. He has cocaine mills and cocaine factories. He's not going to be doing it very long.

9:20Lewis Goodall:So there will be an operation by the US.

9:22Daisy Mcandrew:It sounds good to me. So there you have it. Yeah. Yeah. Regime change in Colombia next. Yeah. Why not? That would be a good idea. Cuba. I mean, Cuba, he's not that interested in because he think it will fall anyway. But Marco Rubio, the secretary of state whose family originated from Cuba, fiercely anti-communist, fiercely hostile to the Cuban state, would be delighted to see Cuba so much weakened because heavily dependent on Venezuela. And, you know, Cuba has said that 32 bodyguards, I think, who have been protecting Maduro were killed in the operation to lift him by the US Delta Force. So, you know, Cuba's fate is very dependent on Venezuela.

10:06Daisy Mcandrew:Cuba must be feeling very, very vulnerable right now.

10:08Lewis Goodall:Yeah, indeed. And I do think actually, just as a sort of aside, an intriguing subplot of a lot of this stuff is the kind of prominence right now of Floridian politics in the court of MAGA and in American politics. You know, Floridian politics, I think, has seldom or have never been more important, really, in the psychology of a United States government. You know, obviously Donald Trump is from New York, but has lived in Florida for a long time, telling that he, you know, he wasn't in the White House Situation Room at the weekend, which is where you might expect him to be. He was in Mar-a-Lago when he gave that press conference.

10:36Lewis Goodall:Marco Rubio, like you say, John, Secretary of State from Florida. You know, an unusual degree of interest as a result of the kind of genesis of that politics in Latin America, South America. American presidents have always been interested in, but they have a particularly hawkish view, which to some extent emanates from Rubio. And I think there's a very clear sense, certainly in the reporting that I've read from Washington, that this is very much partly Rubio's project, that this is Rubio's baby and the success or failure of it will determine much about his political future potentially as well.

11:05Daisy Mcandrew:Yes. I mean, it is worth a little diversion because we need to consider the global aspects of this, but into internal American politics and into internal Republican politics, because you have got Margot Rubio, who has put all his chips on the Venezuela operation. And you can be absolutely sure that if it goes to shit, Marco Rubio will be kicked out of the State Department so fast, the blame will be hung around his neck, and Donald Trump will have nothing more to do with Marco Rubio, and his political future will, you know, will lay in ruins. On the other hand, you've got J.D. Vance, who wasn't at Mar-a-Lago this weekend, who seems to have kept a distance.

11:44Daisy Mcandrew:I mean, yes, tweeted supportively, but has previously been very wary about the idea of trying to remove Maduro from power and saying, well, my bet is that America first doesn't mean interventionism like this. America first means minding our own business and just looking after America's interests. And so you've got the two potential front runners for the presidency in 2028 rubio and jd vance with very different bets now and presumably jd vance kind of has got a vested interest in this operation not succeeding i've been thinking a lot about how

12:23Lewis Goodall:you know if you're part of elite manga and the psychology of elite manga about how you reconcile america first with this very interesting novel sort of turn towards highly interventionist politics right because obviously it is not something it would have been unimaginable i think in trump one for sure and even with all the speculation with the new incoming second trump administration i think this is at the maximal end of where people feared it might be or thought it might go and i think the difference that they come to is precisely in a way and this is what is sort of distinctive by comparison to the early 2000s or even before i think one of the differences is and the way they would justify it is to say that they would see no contradiction between an America first doctrine and the way in which they are imposing intervention.

13:13Lewis Goodall:Because their problem, as much as anything, what did Trump always say about Iraq? Trump, number one, said, actually, never used to argue so much against Iraq, so much as saying we should have taken all the oil. That's what he said about Iraq, right? It wasn't so much that the principle was wrong or trying to impose democracy was wrong. His problem was a more mercantilist one, which is simply, Why do we spend all that money and not get any of the oil? And of course, American companies did profit from it, but not in the way that Trump clearly thought they would. That is profoundly different to what we're seeing when Trump is being completely open that he wants those oil resources.

13:46Lewis Goodall:And also, right, it is very clear, as we're saying, they are not talking in sort of grandiloquent language or idealistic tones or with any greater philosophy of the imposition or the spreading of democracy. Obviously, a lot of this more mercenary stuff was lurking behind the Bush interventions and indeed interventions we saw in the 1980s and before that as well. But I think it is true to say that let's take the Bush era as a sort of contrast. It is true to say that there were people in the Bush administration who both wanted the commercial interests of all of this sort of stuff and the raw geopolitics that came with it, but also genuinely had ideas and a sort of philosophy that they thought they could spread democracy around the world.

14:25Lewis Goodall:Trump ain't interested in any of that. It is pure strongman politics. It is purely about how they see basically shoring up American power in an era of other great rising powers. Right. And so I think their justification for it, the way they sort of square the circle is to say, we're not interested in all the airy fairy stuff. We're not interested in kind of, you know, spreading sort of, you know, milk and honey around the world. We are purely interested in American power and we are exercising it mercilessly for our own national interest.

14:56Daisy Mcandrew:And might is right. We have the power to come into your country and remove your leader and to take some of your oil. You'll get some oil as well. I mean, you'll get a bit wealthier, but we'll get wealthier as well. America, that's what we want. We want to be richer. And so we're going to take your oil. We couldn't have that oil possibly going into the hands of China or Russia, these countries that you've been flirting with. So we'll have it. And might is right with Donald Trump doing this. And I also think there's a sort of psychological thing that you've got to consider as well. Donald Trump sounded almost giddy with excitement when describing watching the operation unfold.

15:35Daisy Mcandrew:I mean, I watched it literally like I was watching a television show. And if you would have seen the speed, the violence, you know, they say that, the speed, the violence, they use that term. It's just, it was an amazing thing, an amazing job that these people did. Nobody else could have done anything like it. If you look back at previous American operations, they've often been met with failure. The Bay of Pigs fiasco trying to release the American hostages from Tehran when the helicopters crashed into each other and Carter failed and lost the election largely as a result of that. This operation was superb in terms of the efficiency.

16:16Daisy Mcandrew:And you can see Donald Trump thinking, look at this train set I've got to play with. I've got the full force of American weaponry at my disposal. Where do I go next? I quite fancy another one of these because the sugar rush that he was clearly on as a result of what's happened in Venezuela, again, could be applied to Greenland, to Panama, to Canada, to Cuba, to Colombia. Part of me thinks I'm being absurd, saying that this is what might happen next. And there's another part of me that thinks, why is it absurd? It was absurd that he would do this in Venezuela.

16:48Lewis Goodall:And we're not talking about Epstein and we're not talking or the American networks aren't talking about price inflation. They're not talking about the price effect. And, you know, there is a midterm election which will be with us before we know it. And we know as well that Trump is terrified and will be terrified of appearing to be a lame duck and appearing to most American presidents turn towards foreign policy to a greater degree in their second term anyway, because they've got more freedom and more power in order to be able to do that, even if their party controls Congress. So all of these things, it feels to me, are pushing Trump, not least because right now he feels has had a great success, towards greater interventionism.

17:20Lewis Goodall:And look, I think that, again, you can join the dots that we've seen over the course of the last year, right? So many connections. I mean, Trump's basic thesis, right, which is not completely wrong, basic thesis has always been. I think he in his heart has a complete lack of comprehension as to why it is that America has all this economic power and all of this military power, but it doesn't wield it. It doesn't always wield it in the maximal way that other great powers or other countries like Russia or China might do. And his interpretation of that is that we're being or other presidents have been weak and are weak and I'm not weak.

17:56Lewis Goodall:I'm going to do as I say. And of course, it is true to say that American power is such that, like, let's say with tariffs, it is true to say that American economic power is so vast and so significant that it can impose these tariffs with relatively little pushback from, say, European powers or trading partners. It can exact and use its military in this way, with relatively little pushback or consequence for itself from other powers, because no one can compete with them. But the reason, of course, that other American presidents have generally been exercised more restraint if sometimes I exercise that power of course but exercise more restraint is that they know that over the long term that there is a cost there is a cost to doing those things because yes America is powerful but it's not so powerful that it can resist over the very long term all of the changes that you will bring about as a result of acting so unilaterally i.e frankly you just burn through your alliances and other countries orient themselves away from you because they cannot and will not be able to rely on you in the way that they previously had.

18:59Daisy Mcandrew:But it seems at the moment that America knows that when there's a UN Security Council resolution, as there certainly will be, that if it's the permanent members of the Security Council, Britain is not going to vote against America. France is not going to vote against America. Russia and China have their own interests and can see that, frankly, if might is right, and you've got your own spheres of influence, then, you know, we're not too bothered about what happens to Venezuela as long as we still get access to their oil. And frankly, we don't really care whether we're paying America for their oil or Venezuela for their oil.

19:34Daisy Mcandrew:You can see that the international community sort of just being kind of rather timid in its response. And if you are Colombia and you're Panama,