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Language: en
The US recently invaded Venezuela and
arrested their sitting president in
[music] the dead of night. If someone
did that to us, I guarantee we would
consider it an act of war. Many in the
international community have said this
is without question an unprovoked act of
illegal aggression. But what's really
going on? How does a country with fewer
than 30 million people become the
obsession of the most powerful country
on Earth? Is this really about drugs as
Trump claims or even oil as so many
others around the world are saying? The
answer is obviously not. America already
produces more energy than we use and we
are already currently exporting our
unused energy. So doing this for oil
would make no sense whatsoever. And
Mexico sends us way more drugs than
Venezuela ever will. The real reason we
invaded Venezuela is far simpler than
people realize and far more dangerous.
To understand what's really happening,
we've got to go back in time and
understand just how dramatically the
world is changing right now. While
everyone is focused on AI as the agent
of change, [music] we've lost sight of
the real shift. Namely, the postworld
War II era of peace and prosperity has
ended. [music]
We're now back in the doggy dog world of
great power politics, which we haven't
tasted in any real way since the Berlin
Wall fell. But we're back in the thick
of that now. And Venezuela's
catastrophic collapse under socialism
turned it into a sacrificial pawn in
[music] the life and death chess game
between the US and China. The how of it
all is going to shock you. But if you
don't understand what comes next is
going to catch you completely offguard.
And that is something that none of us
can afford right now. Back in the 1970s,
Venezuela, the country that's currently
in the middle of one of the largest
humanitarian crises ever as people fled
the country long before the US came.
They used to have the fourth strongest
economy in the world when measured on a
per person basis. now. Well, in 2023,
after nearly 25 years of socialism,
their poverty rate skyrocketed to over
80%. Between 2013 and 2021, Venezuela's
real GDP fell by more than 75%,
one of the largest peacetime collapses
on record. Venezuela also suffered one
of the world's highest hyperinflation
rates with Reuters reporting the IMF's
official projection of their 2018 levels
at a staggering 1 million%.
All of that catastrophe made them a very
compelling target for China's Belt and
Road initiative. [music] And in 2018,
Maduro officially signed on, effectively
inviting China into the US's backyard.
To understand the level of aggression
that this move ultimately triggered,
however, we have to go back even further
to the 1960s and talk about what
happened in Cuba. It was a literal
bloodbath that walked us all up to the
brink of nuclear annihilation and showed
the world just how far America would go
to protect its sphere of influence and
keep a rival from having weapons in its
backyard. In 1961, Cuba had just fallen
to Fidel Castro, a revolutionary who
promised land reform and freedom. And
like all socialist dictators before him,
delivered nothing but poverty and
oppression. But what really triggered
the US was that he aligned himself with
America's mortal enemy at the time, the
Soviet Union. So the CIA came up with a
plan that seemed simple. train a small
army of Cuban exiles, land them on a
beach, spark a popular uprising, and
overthrow Castro. And in April 1961,
they launched the invasion at a place
called the Bay of Pigs. It was a
spectacular disaster. Castro's forces
were waiting. The Cuban people did not
rise up, and within days, the invasion
collapsed. [music] The rebels were all
killed or captured. And Castro not only
survived, he became convinced the United
States was going to try again. So he
asked the Soviet Union to protect him,
and they were all too eager to comply.
Just one year later, in October of 1962,
American spy planes flying over Cuba
spotted something [music]
absolutely unthinkable. Soviet nuclear
missile sites were under construction
just 90 miles from Florida. With a
flight time of only minutes, they could
strike New York, Washington, or Chicago.
For 13 days, the entire world held its
breath as the two nations escalated
towards nuclear war. The US Navy
blockaded Cuba. American forces went to
Defcon 2, which is one step away from
nuclear war. Soviet ships steamed
towards the blockade line. Nuclear
submarines lurk just beneath the waves.
Multiple times, individual commanders on
both sides were just seconds away from
launching preemptive strikes that would
have ended civilization. Finally,
through public and private negotiations
between JFK and Kruev, a deal was
reached and both nations stepped back
from the brink. Despite the fact that
disaster was averted, historians
overwhelmingly view the Cuban missile
crisis as one of the clearest modern
examples [music] of what's known as the
Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine is
the rule that no rival superpower can
have military or strategic footholds
[music] in the Americas. And the US will
enforce that rule violently if
necessary. Listen, at the time of the
Cuban missile crisis, the United States
was already living under the threat of
Soviet nuclear weapons. Missiles in Cuba
did not radically change the balance of
power. But superpowers take their
spheres of influence very seriously, and
they will not tolerate a rival
establishing a strategic foothold in
their own hemisphere. Since the Berlin
Wall fell in the early 90s, however, the
US has been a solo superpower. [music]
So, for a long time, we've just turned a
blind eye to the strategic moves that
China has been making in the Americas
with their belt and road initiative. But
those days are now over for many. This
is going to feel like a very confusing
new frontier. But the reality is this is
just a return to normal. Most people get
lost in the slogans of the day that
we're living in right now. America
first, make America great again. But the
honest answer is those are just the
surface level slogans that politicians
use. What's really at play is that the
world is already and always has been a
very dangerous place. And when two great
powers collide, lines are drawn. There
are no referees and actions are [music]
taken. At least when you have
actionoriented leaders and love or hate
Trump and Gi, they are both men of
action. To actually understand what's
happening now, you have to understand
something absolutely terrifying about
history. Peace is the exception, [music]
not the rule. For most of human
existence, the world has been defined by
conquest, slaughter, and power struggles
between rising and falling empires.
Genghask Khan in the Mongol invasions
killed roughly 10% of the entire world's
population. That is a level of slaughter
so dramatic that global CO2 levels were
measurably reduced. In modern Russia,
Stalin created a famine that wiped out
entire generations. Not to mention all
of the people that he simply had
murdered, not to be outdone, Mao Jadong
instituted policies in China that led to
the deaths of more than 45 million
people. That's not even to mention the
tens of millions more that were lost to
war in the 20th century alone. Adolf
Hitler dragged the world into a war that
killed roughly 85 million people. And
Paul Pot managed to kill a staggering
share of his own country in just 4
years. History is a bottomless bottle of
black pills. violence, domination,
conquest, corruption, [music]
sabotage, murder, slavery, subjugation,
and a whole lot more. Great powers will
do whatever they think they can get away
with to advantage their own people. And
when two such nations collide, God help
us all. So, why are so many people so
confused by what's happening in
Venezuela right now? Because briefly
after World War II, something changed.
Historically, wars were limited in scope
by an army's ability to travel and the
rate at which one human could hack
another to death with a sword. Then
World War I hit and we saw just how many
people could die and [music] quickly.
Then that ended only for the troops to
bring home the Spanish flu of 1918,
which killed another roughly 50 million
people worldwide. Then just 20 years
after all of that death, another 85
million people were killed in World War
II. And that included hundreds of
thousands of people being instantly
vaporized by nuclear weapons. [music] By
the end of all of that, the world was
just tired and broken. anything for a
break. And so on the back of the US
coming out unscathed and with a
manufacturing base that turned them into
the world's strongest economy, the world
entered an unprecedented period of
stability and prosperity. Global trade
exploded. The US helped people rebuild.
And for a few generations in the West,
life got safer, richer, and more
predictable than it had [music] ever
been before. So predictable, in fact,
that people began to believe that this
was the new normal, that peace was
permanent, that prosperity was
automatic, that history itself had
somehow ended. But it hadn't. It was
just waiting for us to forget, and for
two great powers to once again collide.
It happened briefly in the 80s, but then
the Soviet Union collapsed and we all
went back to sleep. But now there's once
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[music]
Now, let's get back to the show. China
didn't rise on the international stage
with tanks and missiles. It used
factories, ports, [music] loans, trade
deals. While America fought wars in the
Middle East, outsourced jobs to China,
[music] deficit spent its way into
grotesque inequality and argued with
itself at home. China absorbed
technology, capital, and leverage.
Hundreds of millions were pulled out of
poverty. Supply chains were rerouted.
influence [music] was massively expanded
and slowly but surely China grew to
rival the US as a peer and Venezuela
became the new Cuba. Once you understand
that, Trump storming in and snatching up
Maduro and vowing to run the country in
a way that's advantageous to the US
stops looking like the lunatic move of
someone who wants cheap oil and a
violent end to drug smuggling and looks
more like the lunatic move to fend off
the only country that is a true threat
to our [music] dominance. For decades
after the Cold War, the US could afford
to look the other way as China gained
strength. We could and did tell
ourselves a story that prosperity would
turn China away from communism and make
it just as freedom loving as America.
But it didn't because [music] that's not
how value systems work. Make no mistake,
China is executing on a long-standing
plan to return them to a position of
glory and global influence. Their
culture [music] is one with rigid
hierarchies where they believe they were
destined to influence global politics.
You can't blame them. America is the
same as was England in its time, Holland
in its time, Spain in its time, and so
on and so forth. But while you might not
be able to blame them, you have to face
the fact that them exerting their will
will have consequences. As they say,
ambition grows in the Eden. And [music]
as China has grown economically, their
power has grown and so have their
ambitions. China refers to itself as the
middle kingdom. The literal translation
of China's name for itself, Jang Wo.
China's name literally means central
state or middle country. This term dates
back over 3,000 years, initially
referring to the central plains of the
Yellow River Valley, the cradle of early
Chinese civilization,
surrounded by less civilized peripheral
tribes. Historically, it reflected a
synentric worldview. China as the
cultural, political, and moral center of
the world. Surrounding regions were seen
as tributaries or barbarians, paying
homage through a hierarchical system
where the Chinese emperor embodied
universal authority. It was more
cultural and political than strictly
geographical, emphasizing China's
superiority in civilization, not literal
centrality on a global map. And China is
now a pure competitor to the US, making
good on that promise. They are a nation
that is using its power with increased
fervor all around the world. Not only
are they building a gold corridor in
South America as a part of a larger plan
to create a goldbacked rival to the US
dollar, but they've also taken over
ports at both ends of the Panama Canal,
creating a dangerous choke point for US
military and trade movements. To anyone
that believes we're still in the
neoliberal kumbaya peaceful world order,
China's moves probably look innocent
enough. But if you put their moves in
their rightful context of being a
geopolitical chess match between two
great powers who are on a collision
course, suddenly everything takes on a
far more ominous tone. Remember, 12 out
of the last 16 times a declining power
like the US and a rising power like
China have come into conflict, war has
been the result. 75% of the time, war is
what happens. So, the US cannot afford
to continue to turn a blind eye to the
strategic maneuverings of their most
powerful rival. From that perspective,
the invasion of Venezuela is not
impulsive. It doesn't make it any more
comforting. But doing nothing is not an
option. Not when there's so much at
stake. Washington has decided that the
cost of inaction is now greater than the
risk of reasserting its power in a world
where global trust and cooperation is
once again being divided between two
great powers. What the US has done is
going to have global consequences. But
in Cold War 2.0, countries are going to
have to pick sides. And there will be
consequences regardless [music] of which
way people go. The invasion and
apprehension of Maduro was a message to
Beijing and to all of Latin America.
This is what it looks like to go against
the US if you're squarely within our
sphere of influence. Now, I expect this
to be deeply discomforting to people all
over the world. And Lord knows I hope we
avoid the unimaginable tragedy that is
war. But any country that is not
prepared to defend its way of life
against its adversaries will fall. The
question is where do we go from here?
Trump has deposed Maduro, but Maduro's
VP has been sworn in as president. Trump
has made it clear that America is in
charge and a fate worse than Maduros's
awaits the new regime if they don't
obey. Given all of that, Venezuela is
now essentially a vassal state for the
US. But that's going to require a lot of
management. And for a president who ran
on America first and who has plenty of
problems to deal with here at home, it
may become politically difficult very
quickly to apply the kind [music] of
focus on Venezuela that it's going to
require to keep them from falling into
disarray or even civil war. Regime
changes are at best hit or miss and at
worst total catastrophes. If we burn
money and American lives in Venezuela,
Trump will see the populace turn on him
even more than they already have.
Everything now hinges on one question.
Does Venezuela still remember democracy?
If there's still enough institutional
memory, competent bureaucrats,
engineers, oil workers, judges, business
leaders, then there's a path forward. A
hard path, maybe a painful one to be
sure, but a path nonetheless. In that
scenario, the US can help stabilize,
supervise, [music]
rebuild, profit from, and then
eventually step back with a mutually
prosperous relationship between the two
countries. If that happens, this
operation will be remembered as a brutal
but decisive move that prevented China
from locking in permanent influence in
our own hemisphere. But if that memory
is gone, if corruption is too entrenched
in Venezuela, if trust is too broken, if
violence fills the vacuum, or the US oil
companies come in and enrich Americans
and leave Venezuelans impoverished, or
if America simply doesn't know when to
step back, then this becomes something
else entirely. The other massive concern
is that Venezuela is just the first of a
long list of countries that America
plans to take over, run, and unjustly
influence. The rhetoric around Colombia
and Greenland are already making a lot
of people nervous that Trump's
aggression will overextend us and
alienate our allies, putting us in a
weaker position. People [music] like
historian Neil Ferguson have warned for
years that empires have a long track
record of overreaching, miscalculating,
and ultimately financially bleeding to
death by trying to fight everyone
everywhere all at once. And that's the
danger. But we're going to have to wait
and see how this all plays out. Right
now though, one thing is clear. The
United States will enforce its sphere of
influence again openly, forcefully, and
without apology. This will certainly
slow China's ambitions in our own
backyard. But it may also destabilize
the region and begin an acceleration of
our financial wos. Or it could be a
clean, decisive victory that slows the
flow of drugs, reduces energy costs, and
reminds the American people that empires
have their privileges. It's too early to
tell, but history is clear on this one.
All empires eventually fall. Let's just
hope it's not today. Right. If you guys
want to see me explore ideas like this
in real time, make sure that you join
the lives Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
at 7 a.m. Pacific time. I hope to see
you there. Until next time, my friends,
be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you
like this conversation, check out this
episode to learn more. Many people are
going to lose money in 2026 because of a
single mistake that most people are
already making. Right now, the world is
extremely unstable. There's a major land
war.