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Aug. 31, 2024 - Epoch Times
01:06:56
The Power Players Behind the Scenes in Venezuela: Joseph Humire
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Time Text
This is probably the biggest electoral fraud in the history of Latin America, at least in modern times in the 21st century.
To understand Venezuela's disputed election and the bigger picture of what's really going on in the region, I sit down with leading security expert Joseph Humeyer.
Russia, Iran and China, these three actors start to form their alliance and start to create Venezuela as a platform to attack the United States from all throughout Latin America.
He's executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society and visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
This is the ace under the sleeve of Nicolas Maduro.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Joseph Himayer, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I'm honored.
We were going to talk about China encroachment into South America.
We were going to talk about the Iran nexus.
But really, the thing to talk about is Venezuela.
We're going to have you back on those things.
Right?
I mean, it's a remarkable situation.
We have an election at a time where there wasn't supposed to be one.
And it's an election that's highly contested.
And we don't actually know what's going to happen.
Yeah, it's uncertain.
Break it down for me.
Yeah, so a lot of things, and I'm going to try to distill this into kind of a shorter explanation, but Venezuela's already gone through 25 years of socialist rule, autocratic rule, and has been devolving throughout that time.
They've held many sham elections in the past.
You can go back to at least 2013, some go back even further.
to where the elections were fraudulent.
And this has been verified by observers, it's been verified by multilateral organizations.
The most recent one was in 2018, was the National Assembly election that was done fraudulent.
Both the organization American States and the Carter Center had called that as a fraudulent election.
And so most of the Venezuelan people kind of lost hope.
And they said, you know, after 25 years, they said, you know, we're not going to ever get out of this kind of tyrant's grip on our country through an electoral process, through a democratic process.
And then came a woman named Maria Karina Machado.
So Maria Karina Machado, and I can explain who she is, but she basically has done the impossible.
She's regalvanized the Venezuelan population.
She's giving them belief and hope that they can actually get out of this.
Maybe not just through an election, but it starts with an election.
And that they could figure out a way how to liberate themselves and regain their freedom.
The message that Maria Karina Machado has given to all the Venezuelans is freedom.
Regaining your freedom.
What the situation is today is the Maduro regime did what everyone expected them to do, was hold another sham election, another fraudulent election, but this time the fraud was so big.
I mean this may be, and I've seen a lot of electoral frauds in my time in Latin America, this is probably the biggest electoral fraud in the history of Latin America, at least in modern times in the 21st century.
The difference of what we're talking about is not in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands.
It's in the millions of votes.
Depending on who results that you're going to listen to.
Whether it's what Maduro is saying that he won by a margin of about 7,000 votes.
Or whether it's what Maria Carina has shown through the evidence that she's put forth on a website that shows that they won by almost 4 million votes.
So now we're at this standstill because I think everyone knows that the fraud was committed.
But the international community is being very slow to react and Maduro is buying time to make his next action.
How is it that Maria Carina Marcato has such confidence in the fact that she has four million plus votes that weren't accounted for?
Explain that to me.
So she prepared for this.
I mean, she's not naive to what the regime is.
In fact, she's probably been the most consistent opposition leader in calling the regime for what it is, which is a criminal state.
And she's been saying that for many years.
So it didn't just dawn on her that the regime was going to actually try to cheat in this election, especially when they've cheated in all previous recent elections.
So what they did is they created kind of a local system, a strategy, to basically verify the vote.
And the way that they created this strategy was both to use the popular will of the Venezuelan people and have highly vetted selected observers that were going to go to all the local precincts and get the actual ballots from the precincts before the regime was going to be able to shut them out.
I don't know how many precincts, but there's hundreds of precincts, maybe thousands of precincts throughout the country.
And so she employed a civil society network that went to all the precincts of Venezuela and very early started to verify the vote.
in some cases got kicked out.
Her observers got kicked out of these voting centers because Maduro started to pick up what she was actually doing.
But in other cases they may have got kicked out but they came with the file.
They actually saw the ballots and the ballots are done through a machine.
They're scanned and so there's a file that comes out and by law those files are supposed to be presented to both observers.
The observers of the two candidates that are contending in the election.
In this case a lot of her network was able to get those files and then store them on an outside website.
This is actually a fascinating element, because every country has its own electoral rules.
But here, you're basically telling me that all the ballots are, in theory, accessible to people that are involved with one of the two presidential candidates.
Yes, by law, you're supposed to submit the ballots, verification of the ballots, to the election observers that are sent by either one of the political... So they actually have the ballots, I mean, in many, in most of these precincts.
That's what you're saying.
They did.
And so what happened is, as Maduro figured out that this was what was going on, he actually sent his thugs to actually destroy the evidence.
So they closed many of the voting centers early.
Maria Carina wasn't able to get the ballots of all the precincts.
And in some of the precincts, they destroyed the evidence.
In other precincts, they cut off the transmission.
And in other precincts, they literally just took the ballots back away from Maria Carina.
But she was able to get an overwhelming number of them.
According to the website, she was able to get at least 80 percent, which is a significant number of the vote tally.
And based off those results, which is publicly available, you can go to that website.
It's called Restore Venezuela, in Spanish.
I forgot the name of the website, but it's a website that's out there that's publicly available, and you can go there and actually verify the vote tallies.
According to her information, it wasn't close.
It was 70% of the vote was for Edmundo Gonzalez, and a little over 30% was for Nicolas Maduro, a difference of about 4 million votes.
So there's these international observers you mentioned, like the Carter Center, Organization of American States.
They perhaps have their own stakes in this.
I mean, what I'm trying to get to here is obviously these different parties, Maduro, Maria Karina, and her presidential candidate for the party, they're highly incentivized to suggest that they won, right, obviously.
You know, Maduro, Obviously.
And then these international observers have their own interests.
And so the question is, how do you tease apart what the reality is through all of this, right?
Sure.
A couple of things.
Because one, yes, obviously, if this was just a statement, Maria Karina and Mundo Gonzalez, they're going to say we won, right?
They have all the incentives in the world to say that they won.
But it's not really their saying that they want.
And the key of what they did and their strategy was transparency, was to make it public.
And they were trying to do this very quick.
They actually wanted to make this website public on Monday.
It got shut down, and so they moved the server to another location, and they were able to get it back online.
And so the whole strategy is adding transparency, because obviously the regime's going to add zero transparency.
Matter of fact, to this day, the National Electoral Council of Venezuela, which is controlled by a regime crony in Venezuela, They still haven't put out any evidence that backs up the claim that Maduro won by the number that they say, which is 51% for Maduro and 44% for Edmundo Gonzalez.
So the first is the transparency of the vote.
People can go and verify it themselves just by going on the website.
The second part to this I think is important, and I think your question alludes to it, is the conditions of the process.
And that's one of the things that this is not a fair election.
All the conditions, whether it's the acceptance of the international observers, the date of the election, the candidate of the election, all the conditions were dependent on what the Maduro regime was willing to accept, what Nicolas Maduro himself was willing to accept.
So he set the conditions.
He rigged the election 100% in his favor.
I think the thing that he didn't expect was, one, the voter turnout.
Because he was expecting the Venezuelans to be as apathetic as they have been in many recent years.
They lost faith in this process.
They lost faith in the opposition leaders.
So they underestimated, in many respects, the popularity and kind of the energy which Maria Karina Machado was going to bring to the people.
And the second thing is I think that they overestimated their ability to drive a narrative.
They thought that because they controlled the media in Venezuela, they have all these different connections abroad, they thought they were going to be able to drive a narrative that was going to actually legitimize the fraud.
What we're seeing today is the narrative isn't completely won.
There's a lot of countries that have already said that this is a fraud, but there's a lot of countries that are playing an ambiguous third line.
They're saying, "We don't know.
We need to see the evidence." And those countries, like Brazil, like Colombia, like Mexico, are providing oxygen to the regime and allowing them to buy time so they can fabricate the evidence. - So we're filming on Thursday, I think on Friday there's something that's supposed to come out from Maduro's side, right?
Do I understand that right?
Well, theoretically, the lapse, the date, the time frame in which the National Electoral Council is supposed to put forth the evidence has already passed.
So theoretically, we're already in this gray zone where they've already passed the time window in which they're supposed to put out the verification of the results at the precinct level.
But, you know, the international community negotiations that are happening in Colombia and other places said that they're going to give Maduro until Friday to be able to put out the results.
We'll see if that actually happens.
But the thing is, this is now four, maybe five days after the election.
And, you know, with the level of machinations that the Maduro regime has at its disposal, which everything is from printing fake ballots to creating fake transmissions to creating fake reports, the National Electoral Council is controlled by them.
The tribunal, the judicial system is controlled by them, which is the Electoral Court.
So they have all this control inside the country that I think they might have had enough time to really fabricate it.
But here's the trick.
No one's going to believe them.
Maduro is not going to be able to convince people that he won this election.
The Venezuelans know who they voted for.
I mean, these aren't close elections.
This isn't a matter of, you know, 51-49.
70-30?
It's hard to fake that.
You just feel that and see that on the streets, which is why we're seeing all the Venezuelans basically protesting.
And there's the message that I think the Venezuelan people are sending right now is that they're tired of this whole Chavismo project.
The tearing down of statues of Hugo Chavez is a direct message to Nicolas Maduro that it's not just you that we're tired of.
We're tired of your whole ideology.
We're tired of the whole Chavismo project.
There's even burning of Cuban flags.
The Venezuelan people know that it's not just Venezuela and Maduro.
There's external actors that are supporting them.
I wouldn't be surprised if they start burning Russian flags, or Iranian flags, or Chinese flags.
And I'm not advocating for any of this, but what I'm saying is that the Venezuelan people know who they voted for, and they know they're being robbed, and they're reacting to that robbery.
The picture you're painting here is this re-energized, people are thinking, maybe we can make a positive change.
People come out.
If we believe the results that you mentioned, it's overwhelming in one direction.
And people know that, and now there's people on the streets.
And how has the Maduro regime responded to this?
So they have been repressing.
There's been already deaths.
There's been a few dozen deaths of Venezuelan people that have been protesting.
And obviously the Maduro regime is going to say these are terrorists, they're attacking, and we have the right to defend and protect the public property in the country.
But I see two scenarios playing out here, and I think there's precedence for these scenarios.
There's what I call the Nicaragua scenario, which is basically the Maduro regime decides to completely, brutally repress the Venezuelan people.
He has all the tools to do that.
And a lot of people look at the military and say he's going to use the military to repress it, but if the military stands down, then he's not going to have a tool for repression.
Well, that's only half correct, because he has a plethora of armed non-state actors, militias, colectivos, that can do the repression, even if the military doesn't want to.
And he also has the ability to import repressive apparatus from abroad.
Cuba's Vispas Negras, the Black Wasp, is a paramilitary unit, has done repression in Venezuela in the past.
The Wagner Group of Russia has helped Maduro do repression in the past.
The Bashis from Iran has helped Maduro do repression in the past.
So he has many tools of repression that he can use to completely squash the Venezuelan people.
But by doing so, he closes himself off from the entire international community.
Basically saying, as long as I have Russia, China, Iran, I'm good enough.
I don't need to have any legitimacy from anywhere else in Latin America.
That's what Nicaragua did in 2017 to 2018.
And now Nicaragua is pretty much another Cuba, another communist-controlled country that's completely closed off from the rest of the region.
So he has that option.
That's one option, the Nicaragua option.
Hopefully he doesn't do that, but it's definitely within the cards.
The second option I call the Bolivia option, and this is a little bit more tricky to explain, because if we go back to Bolivia in 2019, Evo Morales, who's the kind of Maduro-like figure in Bolivia, was president at the time, held the fraudulent election.
The people rose up, knew that he committed the fraud.
He did get a little bit of repression, but very little, not much at all.
The military stood down, and then he resigned.
But he resigned without using his full repressive apparatus.
He has the same repressive apparatus as Maduro.
He has the same external allies.
He has his own militias, his own colectivos, but he didn't use it.
And the question is, why did he not use that and resign and actually went into exile in Mexico and later Argentina?
Well, I believe he went into exile in 2019, Evo Morales, in Bolivia because he was trying to rebrand the socialist communist regime in Bolivia.
He was trying to give them a new image.
And by doing that, he was able to empower them so that a year later they came back to power with more legitimacy, with a weaker opposition, and with him more in control.
And that's what happened in Bolivia.
So Maduro might make that option.
I wouldn't be surprised if he resigns.
And, you know, let's the process play out, but only to subvert the transition, manipulate the international community, and then to come back later after the opposition is dismantled with more legitimacy and sanctions lifted.
You're basically painting a picture.
This is what, you know, a lot of people would like to see happen, right?
Yes and no, because the Bolivia situation, obviously, you know, Maduro goes is good for everybody, but it's a necessary but insufficient condition.
And this is where I think a lot of people have it a little bit confused.
Maduro is just one node in a criminal network that is within the Venezuelan state apparatus.
There are many people that can replace Maduro.
There are even opposition members that can replace Maduro.
Not Maria Carina, but others that can do that same apparatus, advance the Bolivarian revolution with a different face.
So I would say yes, everyone wants Maduro to leave, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the conditions are going to change drastically enough that Venezuela is going to be a free country.
So now I want to talk about how we got here.
But before we do that, why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself and how you've come to know a lot of this very nuanced information about the region?
See, you know what's funny?
So a lot of people think that I spend a lot of time looking at Venezuela.
I look at all of Latin America, and I look at the world, but I spend a lot of time looking at Venezuela.
And people think I do that because I must have a personal relation with Venezuela.
So first they think maybe I'm Venezuelan.
I'm not.
My parents are from Bolivia.
So I do have a connection to Latin America through my family.
But I really don't have any connection personally to Venezuela.
Or some people think maybe my wife is from Venezuela.
She's not.
But the bottom line is, the only reason I focus so much on Venezuela is because that's where the threat went.
So, if I go through my own career, you know, I started as a U.S.
Marine.
I was a Marine in, you know, from 98 to 2006.
I spent the formative years of the Marine Corps in combat in Iraq.
I was in the invasion in 2003.
I went again.
My only time I actually did anything in Latin America was a naval exercise called UNITAS, which is basically a circumnavigation around Central and South America, and got to train with a lot of Navy counterparts in those countries.
And when I got into the world of think tanks, one of the first countries that I visited was Venezuela to attend a conference.
And when I went to Venezuela back then, there was actually a retired admiral that spoke to me.
And this is in Caracas, circa 2008, 2009.
And the only thing he was talking to me, he talked my ear off about how there's Iranians that are in the Ministry of Defense of Venezuela.
And he was showing me pictures and he said, we have Iranians here that are like controlling everything.
And it boggled my mind.
I had spent time in the Middle East.
I actually was, when I was in Iraq, I was in the southern part of the country.
I spent time looking at the Iranian networks in southern Iraq.
And I knew what it meant to say that you have Iranian military or intelligence operatives in your country.
So I began there.
I started doing research on Iran and Venezuela's connection.
That took me to other countries.
That then later made me look at Russia's connection, the largest weapons supplier of Venezuela.
And then that led me to looking eventually at China, who's the largest debtor to Venezuela.
And I started realizing that there was kind of this authoritarian axis, Venezuela, Russia, Iran, and China, that at my center, Secure Free Society, we call the VRIC, V-I-R-I-C.
Not the BRIC, the Goldman Sachs term, but a real military security intelligence alliance that's forming around the world, what they call a multipolar force, which is Russia, Iran, and China, and Venezuela, or as we call them, the VRIC.
So that's pretty much how I got into this.
And I think our think tank has been on the cutting edge in the forefront at looking at what we call the Venezuela Threat Network and how that expands throughout the entire Western Hemisphere.
When we first met, you told me something, or you said something that kind of boggled my mind as well.
You said there's 350,000 Venezuelans in Syria.
I was thinking, what?
1,000 Venezuelans in Syria.
And I was thinking about, what?
What is that?
How does that work?
Okay, yeah.
So that data point is really meant for that purpose, to kind of get you to think.
I think the way I describe it is to say there's more Venezuelans today in Syria than there is in Brazil.
So there's about 270,000, 280,000 Venezuelans that have fled the country into Brazil, and there's more than 350,000 that are in just one part of Syria in the southwest of the country called Al-Sawida.
Why is that important?
Well, because one of the things that we had to do, and I mentioned I've been looking at Venezuela for such a long time, was about 2017 we had to go back to the drawing board.
Because we had done all this analysis about the network, about, you know, we were one of the first think tanks to expose the passport fraud that they were doing to giving passports to suspected terrorists.
We were one of the first think tanks to look at how the Russians were providing high-end weaponry to Venezuela.
So we had all this analysis of the network, but the big question was, like, so what?
Like, what are they trying to do?
What do they expect to accomplish with all these weapons and this fraud?
And then in 2017, and for those that don't follow Venezuela, they had an uprising.
Maduro closed the legislature, the National Assembly, the people rose up, and they had a brutal repression.
And it was top of the line in the news for a few months.
And everyone was asking, what's going on?
And so I really didn't understand what was happening, even though I had looked at Venezuela for several years.
So I went back to the drawing board with my team and I said, you know what?
Let's look at how the origin of this happened.
Where did this whole Bolivarian revolution begin?
It took us to the 1960s.
When did you call it Bolivarian?
It's what they call it.
Simón Bolívar is what they call the liberator of Venezuela.
He's the one that liberated Venezuela from Spanish conquest.
We could get into that a little bit.
He was the liberator of Venezuela, but he isn't the one that actually fought the battle to make Venezuela a republic.
That's another gentleman by the name of Jose Antonio Pais.
Jose Antonio Pais, General Pais, which is the first actual real president of Venezuela, actually was like the George Washington of Venezuela.
Simon Bolivar was actually someone that came to work.
He did Venezuela, but then he went all throughout Latin America.
My parents are from Bolivia.
The name of the country Bolivia is named after Simon Bolivar.
He's a popular figure, and so what Hugo Chavez did is he used it as a symbol, and he said that Simon Bolivar is the liberator of Latin America, and now I'm here to liberate us again.
So you're taking us back, not to 2017, but all the way to the beginning?
Yeah.
Okay, I see, I see.
Now I understand.
So they call it the Bolivarian Revolution, named after Simon Bolivar.
So, in the 1960s, let me start with this.
The number one premise, I think, that most people have, even experts and analysts about Venezuela, is that it's a narco-state controlled by Cuba.
The Cuban regime has a heavy hand on Venezuela.
Well, let's go back to that.
So, after the Cuban Revolution, they absolutely immediately focused on Venezuela.
They knew where the oil was.
So, they said, if we capture the oil, we're going to be able to finance the revolution, not just in Cuba, but throughout Latin America and the world.
So, we're going to capture Venezuela next.
So they sent a bunch of their guerrilla warfare into Venezuela, created a bunch of insurgency groups, guerrilla warfare groups.
One was called the Fuerza Armada Liberación Nacional, the Liberation Army of Venezuela.
And they started even working with the FARC back then.
But they failed.
By 1964, the heads of all the Communist Party of Venezuela were in prison.
Because Venezuela was a bigger country with a more professional military.
It wasn't an island like Cuba with a weaker military.
So the guerrilla warfare tactics of ambushing the military and using propaganda to delegitimize them didn't work in Venezuela.
But then in 1967, the heads of the Communist Party of Venezuela were liberated.
They were broken out of prison.
Who broke them out?
It's actually a Syrian refugee, a gentleman named Nehmet Chagin Simon.
We had to search very carefully to figure out who this person is.
In the Venezuelan books, he's known as Simon el Arabe, Simon the Arab.
But no one really knew who he was.
He was kind of this phantom figure.
So we actually went to libraries in Jordan and Syria to figure out his identity.
He's actually a Ba'athist intelligence operative that was trained in the Soviet Union and sent to Venezuela in the 1960s, not just to break out the Communist Party from prison, but indoctrinate them on the new ways of warfare.
So what he did, and others from the Ba'athist movement did, was they trained Venezuela on insurgency, which is different from guerrilla warfare.
They said, don't ambush the military, infiltrate the military.
Be like us.
Lieutenant Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Use the military in your favor to be like the Arab nationalist states.
And so that's what inspired the whole movement.
And it was the Syrians that came into Venezuela and indoctrinated them, trained them on the ways of insurgency and asymmetric warfare.
And that led to what's called the Bolivarian Continental Movement, which began inside the military, which tried to do a coup in 1992 but failed.
And that was the rise of Hugo Chavez.
So there was Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chavez that came from that movement.
So understanding that history, I knew that the Middle East played a very central role in Venezuela.
And I'm going back to now what this admiral was telling me when I was in Venezuela in 2009, showing me all these Iranians.
It started to explain to me why Iran was there.
Which goes more than just looking at an authoritarian socialist country and just picking one and saying, No, they knew that there was a deep, embedded power network inside Venezuela that wasn't communist per se.
It was Syrian, Lebanese, and a couple of other nationalities from the Middle East, but fundamentally tied to the Middle Eastern networks and their near abroad.
And Iran knows a lot about that.
They know a lot about the networks in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen.
So they were able to build bridges in ways that other powers like Russia and China couldn't, and in essence ended becoming much more powerful in Venezuela to be able to lead to what we're at today. - I mean, this is a fascinating insight.
I don't know how many people, frankly, know of this particular nexus that you're describing.
Just to close off the Syrian piece, how is it that there was this huge Venezuelan interest in Syria?
What are they doing there?
Well, we have to remember the Ba'athists, I'm talking about the pan-Arab nationalist movement, dominated conflicts in the Middle East for the better part of the 20th century.
This is before the Iranian revolution, this is before Hezbollah existed, this is the 50s and 60s into the 70s, created civil wars both in Lebanon and Syria.
And what ends up happening here is that they realize that they want to become a global power, a global movement.
Uh, and the Ba'athas were also socialist, and so they also looked at socialist networks throughout the world.
Mostly in Africa, but also in Latin America.
And they looked initially at Latin America like a refuge.
Like, if things go south for us here, we're going to be able to literally go south and hide out.
The Nazis did the same thing.
After the Nazis collapsed, a lot of them went into South America into hiding.
So, but they established, well as they established, they used what's known as a rat line, which is basically when you have refugee networks throughout the world, unfortunately, you usually have clandestine routes that are established within that are called rat lines.
So, the wave of Middle Eastern migration to South America, which is actually not very well known, but it is very robust, goes back to the late 19th century, when the Ottoman Empire was collapsing.
A lot of the Maronite Christians that were being persecuted fled and went into South America, and some of them went to Central America.
Then there was the Armenian Genocide, same thing, fled into South America.
Then there was the civil wars in Lebanon and again fled to South America.
So through all these periods, there was a refugee route that was established to South America and then clandestine actors that established a rat line behind it.
So they understood that there was a bridge that they could use.
So they had the bridge, they had the networks, they had the diaspora, and all they needed to do was connect.
And so they did that.
And then I think they realized at one point, if we empower these socialists and communists in Latin America, we could actually help them achieve much more than what they're achieving today.
So that's what was the desired intent by the Ba'athists.
Now, as we know, the Ba'athists then collapsed, but the Iranian revolution picks up the pieces and starts to implant what they're trying to do.
Okay, so now we're going back to the main line here, right?
How did we get to, you know, obviously Chavez gets elected.
Just give me kind of the short version.
Yeah, so really I think he should go to 92.
He tries to do a coup, a military coup through this military network.
And the thing is, Chavez goes into the military just to infiltrate it.
He doesn't go to actually be a real patriot serving the military.
He creates a network.
That network eventually tries to carry out a coup in 92.
They fail.
He goes to prison.
But by going to prison, he becomes kind of a martyr.
And he exposes a lot of the deficiencies in the Venezuelan government, the corruption.
And he gets released from prison and then runs for office.
He becomes a politician, a political candidate.
In 98, there's the election in Venezuela.
In 99, he wins the election and then he becomes the president of Venezuela.
And what he immediately does, and his lines shifted because when he was a candidate, he talked a little bit more moderate because Venezuela wasn't as socialist.
It wasn't where it is today, so he had to present himself.
And they were actually a close partner of the United States, both on energy and on the military.
So he had to present himself a little bit more moderate in the beginning, but he started to show his hand very early on, and then he basically tried to take over every state institution inside the country.
So from 99 to 2002, he basically started taking over the institutions in the country, but almost got deposed because there was an uprising in 2002 and a short-lived coup inside Venezuela that he then was able to topple and come back to power.
And once that happened, he pretty much wiped out the Venezuelan opposition at the time.
Then from 2002 to 2004, he created a regional network.
He started financing using the oil money of Venezuela, political candidates in Bolivia, in Nicaragua, in Argentina, in Brazil.
And that's where you saw what they call the pink tide, the socialist wave in Latin America.
Pretty much from 2004 to 2010, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, the first period of Lula da Silva in Brazil.
And so Hugo Chavez basically financed that using the Petro dollars.
It was called Petro Diplomacy.
And he was able to bankroll a lot of the campaigns of these socialist candidates and help them come to power.
He created something called the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas.
That at heyday was about 13 countries.
I think it's reduced to about 9 or 10 today.
But it's the most authoritarian countries in the region.
Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, and at one time Ecuador.
So, he creates a regional network, but most importantly, he starts to develop a new geopolitical vision for Latin America that aligns it away from the United States and closer to China, Russia, and Iran.
Venezuela becomes the most indebted country to China.
They took out more credits and loans than any other country in the world, $60 billion worth from China.
So China literally props up the Chavez and then Maduro regime.
Russia sees a great opportunity to send their armament and their weapons.
And Venezuela becomes the largest recipient of foreign military sales from Russia.
So most of Venezuela's armament is Russian, upwards of $12 billion of weapons.
And then Iran, as we were discussing earlier, Iran doesn't provide weapons or money, but provides the network and the know-how.
And they come in, the Iranian embassy becomes very robust.
And so these three actors start to form their alliance and start to create Venezuela as a platform to attack the United States from all throughout Latin America.
So that's kind of the short story.
This is the part that I find fascinating.
Because, on the one hand, Maduro is the president, right?
And that is recognized as such by, I think, most states.
On the other hand, in the U.S., I think there's a $15 million bounty of sorts.
How does that work?
Well, a couple of things.
For one, I'd say it's important.
Yes, he has the title of a president.
They have ministries.
They have ministers.
But Venezuela doesn't function like a democratic nation state.
They don't function like a sovereign state that we would think of.
They don't function like Switzerland or like France or Germany.
They're a criminalized state.
So while Maduro has the title of president, he's not the only powerful person inside the country.
And I'd argue he's probably not the most powerful person inside the country.
In 2007-2008, Chavez restructured the geography of Venezuela and broke it up from a typical country with provinces and states and municipalities to eight regions.
And he put his military in charge of each of those regions.
They're called regional defense integrated zones.
In each region is powered by a form of illicit economy.
So like if you're on the west of Venezuela, you probably have illicit oil smuggling or contraband as a main illicit economy that's powering that part of the country.
If you're on the east, it's probably illegal mining or piracy or contraband as well.
If you're on the north, it's drug trafficking.
Or if you're in the south, southwest, it's drug trafficking.
So he created a motor that embedded transnational organized crime.
with the Venezuelan state based off this geographic structure of eight regions.
So you can argue that Venezuela doesn't operate as a state.
It operates as a network.
And that network doesn't recognize borders, and it doesn't recognize boundaries.
So it actually exists in Colombia.
It exists in Brazil.
It exists in Panama and its surrounding territories.
So that's the complexity of Venezuela because there's an anti-fragility to it that even if you smash it, it kind of expands.
And that's the way it was done by design.
So Maduro, that's what I was saying in the beginning, if Maduro, you know, for whatever reason resigns and recognizes that he was a fraud or whatever, gets kicked out, however it happens.
It's a good thing.
It's, I think, a necessary condition to be able to move to another chapter.
But it's not sufficient because the network remains.
The criminal state exists.
So that's really just the beginning of trying to help liberate Venezuela.
And I argue you couldn't do it unless you're going to have external support.
Because the level of interest by Russia, by China, by Iran, by these kleptocratic economies to maintain this power structure in Venezuela is too big for just the Venezuelan people to do it by themselves.
Yeah, there isn't a lot of appetite these days for that kind of help, partially because of a lot of such help failing in the past and causing arguably bigger problems.
I don't know what your thoughts are about that.
Yeah, I mean, well, so let me take us back a little bit to 2019, right?
Because this was the other period was very tense with Venezuela, and it had to do with President Trump's maximum pressure campaign, right?
So President Trump had a policy of maximum pressure, acknowledging that this is a criminalized state, acknowledging this illegitimate regime, they don't function like a democracy, and they're aligned with most of America's adversaries around the world.
So there was a pressure strategy to essentially weaken the regime and look for opportunities that the opposition could liberate the country.
It didn't play out the way it was supposed to play out, but part of the reason of that was because there wasn't enough of a bandwidth within the U.S.
government that really understood Venezuela.
Even the things I'm talking to you about, Syria and those, you know, countless briefings I've had with our military and our intelligence community, and they did not know any about this, and they had not studied Venezuela.
Venezuela hadn't reached the priority level at the U.S.
government so that our best and our brightest within the intelligence community or defense community actually was providing the resources to really unpack this problem set.
And what I've argued is Venezuela is not just a Venezuela problem.
It's a hemispheric problem.
You want to solve the crisis on the southern border?
You've got to tackle Venezuela.
You want to stop the drugs smuggling and drug trafficking problem?
One-third of the world's cocaine comes from the Colombian-Venezuelan border.
If you want to stop all this democracy and election fraud, you've got to tackle the Venezuela problem.
It's a hemispheric problem, and by extension it's going to require a hemispheric response.
The United States needs to have a regional strategy.
We need to have a renewed Monroe Doctrine to be able to tackle this problem.
We're not going to be able to do it by just looking at the internal factors inside Venezuela.
So where do things stand now?
I mean, you gave us some suggestions about the mid-range direction, but what about imminently?
So let me unpack this two ways.
Let's look at the international community, and more specifically, the Latin American community, because I think that's where the battle is happening right now.
And we'll see if, by the time this comes out, if Nicolas Maduro or the Electoral Council actually publishes anything of evidence that substantiates the electoral results that they purported.
The regional community is divided pretty much into three groups.
There's at least 10, if not more, countries in Latin America that have already denounced the fraud.
President Malay, probably at the top of the list, immediately tweeted, said, this is a legitimate election.
We don't recognize these results.
We don't recognize this dictator.
And then there's other countries, Paraguay, Uruguay, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Panama, 10 countries that have said that this is fraud.
There's a handful of countries that have legitimized the fraud by immediately recognizing Nicolas Maduro as an ex-president.
Those are the ones that we expect.
Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua.
Honduras, which shouldn't have been like this years ago, but under the new president of Xiomara Castro, has become more aligned with these autocratic movements in the region.
And so those countries are saying, this is what Maduro says it is.
He's an ex-president and we're going to recognize him.
But then there's what I call an ambiguous third line.
There's countries, important countries, like Brazil, like Colombia, like Mexico, that have decided to take a stance of saying, well, we don't know.
It may be fraud.
It might not be fraud.
We need more evidence.
And that stance, what it's allowed to do is buy time for the Maduro regime to fabricate that evidence.
And that's the position we're in today.
We're in the position today where Maduro hasn't presented one piece of evidence to suggest that the results were what he said they were, 51% to 44% in his favor.
By the time this comes out, we'll see if he puts forth that evidence.
But the reality is that evidence will be fabricated.
That evidence will probably have all kinds of errors and mistakes.
It will probably be scrutinized.
But those three countries, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, will have to change their positions if we're going to actually see a regional consensus on Venezuela.
So that's the rate we're at today in terms of region.
But internally, in the meantime, Venezuelans are gonna die.
They'll keep dying because they're fed up.
They've had scarcity of food, of water, of electricity for many years.
They had at one time the highest inflation in the world, not in the thousands, in the millions.
They've had all kinds of shortages of all kinds of consumer goods throughout the country.
The Venezuelan people have suffered right up there with the Cuban people.
It's probably the most suffered in the history of Latin America.
And they're just tired.
So they're going to take to the streets.
They are taking to the streets.
And we're going to see how brutal the repression of Venezuela is going to be.
And that goes to what those scenarios I was talking about.
If he goes full dictator, full totalitarian, full tyrant, he can repress the Venezuelan people.
He can even incarcerate Maria Karina Machado.
He can even assassinate some of the political opposition.
But then we'll see what the international community is going to respond.
I've argued for a long time that Venezuela is a conflict that's not just constrained in Venezuela.
It's at the minimum a regional conflict and could even be an international conflict.
And it will require international community to react to be able to figure this out.
What about these international observers at this point?
What is their role?
Do they provide any weight here, like this Carter Center?
The OAS wasn't invited.
They were denied by Maduro for being an observer.
The OAS usually does the Organization of American States, which is the leading multilateral Latin America for democracy.
They're usually involved in elections as observers.
In this case, Maduro didn't trust the OAS, so he didn't invite them.
The Carter Center was there.
It's not clear to me how many people were there.
They put out a statement that basically said, we don't think there's irregularities.
We don't know what the result is.
It was kind of an ambiguous statement that they put out.
They're supposedly going to, I heard rumors that they're going to go back to verify some of whatever results that the Maduro regime puts forth through his electoral council.
But the reality is, I think what we're talking about here is legitimacy, right?
And I think if you look at what the Foreign Minister of Argentina did at the Permanent Council meeting in the Organization of American States just recently, look at her speech, and it is very, very convincing, where she says, we have to be clear.
We're at a moment of defining what a democracy is in Latin America.
Those that want to question this, want to prolong this, want to kind of muddy the waters with all this technical talk about vote verification and ballot certification, are giving oxygen to the regime.
We need to stop this, and we need to stop this now, or else we're going to have a bloodbath, as Maduro promised, on our hands.
And if you listen to their statement, that's leadership.
That's what the region needs.
They need leadership.
They need people to stand up to this.
Because on the other side, Maduro, Diaz-Canel from Cuba, Ortega, Morales, They're united.
They're not going to budge.
They're going to keep doing this until someone stops them.
This election happened in the first place because of negotiations with the U.S.
government, right?
So how does that relationship play into this?
So that's a great question, because you're right.
This is not a normal election.
This wasn't on a legislative calendar.
I'm sorry, on a presidential calendar of Venezuela.
It's a special election, a date that Nicolas Maduro himself picked.
As a day for the election, mostly because he was in negotiations with the United States to lift sanctions.
The problem is that the United States, I think, gave too much carrots at the front end of this negotiation.
So, I mean, I'm not an expert on negotiations, but I think anyone that understands the basic premise of negotiations is leverage.
And if you give up your leverage too early, you end up losing your ability to influence the end result of that negotiation.
And so, what the Biden administration had done was put easing of sanctions, releasing of prisoners, including a major money launderer and facilitator from Maduro named Alex Saab, providing all these carrots to the regime for a promise to say, you will then hold free and fair elections because we're giving you these carrots, we're showing you our goodwill.
And what happened is not only did it not work, but it in some ways created like a perverse incentive so that the Maduro regime says, you know, we could get away with whatever we want.
And the more we do, the more they give us.
And so you create this perverse incentive to incentivize bad behavior.
You shouldn't be surprised when you get more bad behavior.
And so what do we get?
We get the most fraudulent election that Venezuela has ever carried out.
And he's carried out fraud in the past, 2013, 2018.
But this one, this is egregious fraud.
But it happened.
Yeah.
Right?
So, I mean, I can't help but think that the fact that it happened, the election happened, right, is probably a positive thing, right?
Well, you know, that's a good point, and I would say that it all depends on how this plays out, right?
Goal, which is to have an election, I would hope that there's a second, third, and fourth step after that election takes place.
And that's what we're waiting to see.
What's the next step?
OK, we had the election.
We all knew he was going to do fraud.
Great.
What's the next step?
Now what's the next step?
And if we don't see a next step, and time is clicking, you're just going to have Venezuelans dying.
We're going to repeat this cycle.
We call it the cycle of sham elections in Venezuela.
You have a sham election.
The people protest.
The repression happens.
Negotiation happens to stop the repression.
We go back into a cycle, hold another election.
We don't want to go through that again.
If that's all we did here, then that was a waste of time.
But if there's another step that we're not seeing and something else, another play here that's going to allow this to move in a positive direction, then we all invite that.
I think that would be a positive step.
And in that sense, you're right.
The election was worth it, even if it was a sham election, because it started the process.
But we need to see it.
What about these other players that are not Obviously, there's this Syrian tie, there's this Iran tie.
Right now, Israel appears to have killed a Hamas political leader in Tehran.
Iran is very much in play.
How is Iran working with Venezuela?
I'm going to go in a different direction with this.
So this is the ace under the sleeve of Nicolas Maduro, and this is what actually at my center we've been focused a lot on.
So the elections is one thing, right?
And we talked a lot about that, and we're going to see what's going to happen.
But what Maduro has been building, at least for the last year, if not for the last two or three years, is military capabilities to invade his neighbor, Guyana.
Those military capabilities, very specific, are provided mostly by Russia, China, and Iran.
In fact, the whole military escalation begins after Nicolas Maduro returns from, I believe, a week-long visit to China to host a talk with Xi Jinping.
In fact, Xi Jinping missed the G7 to stay and talk with his friend Nicolas Maduro.
This is in September of last year.
When Nicolas Maduro comes back from China to Venezuela, he starts talking about something called the Ezequivo.
What is the Ezequivo?
So the Ezequivo is a disputed territory between the border of Venezuela and Guyana, which is a very big chunk of land.
It's about two-thirds of the landmass of Guyana.
And it's essentially what the Venezuelans believe was unjustly taken away from them.
So I could bore you with the whole 150-year history of this border dispute, but what really matters on this is Venezuela, Maduro, started to use this border dispute to basically create a national sentiment around recovering the Essequibo through force.
So along with the political rhetoric, he created a military buildup along the border of Essequibo, both on the land border and on the coast and the maritime border.
And what I'd argue, and I've argued this in an article I recently wrote, was the most important part is the maritime dimension.
Because Guyana, if it's not known for many people, it may be known because it has the largest offshore oil discovery in the 21st century.
11 billion barrels of oil were discovered in 2015, and in 2019-2020, some of that oil started coming to market.
So, what does Maduro want to do?
He wants to push the maritime border to capitalize on that oil discovery.
How is he going to do it?
Well, the armament that's been coming to Venezuela in recent years is of Iranian manufacturing design.
It's the Houthi tactic.
It's the same way the long-range piracy of using drones, fast attack craft, radars, precision-guided munitions and missiles to attack vessels to clog up shipping lanes and to steer maritime traffic.
And that's what Maduro has been preparing to do.
And I can say with complete certainty that not only is he prepared to do that, but he's practiced potentially doing this in recent months.
And so that's the ace down the sleeve, because as the election stuff starts playing out, and let's say he starts repressing, gets more condemnation from the international community, he can just attack Guyana, and he steals back the leverage, 'cause then the conversation becomes about that, not about the election.
The Guyana conflict to me is probably the most important thing that's happening in Latin America because it's connected to all the other conflicts, whether it's Ukraine, whether it's Israel, with potential incursion on Taiwan, because it has everything to do with changing the maritime domain, changing maritime security, creating alternative shipping because it has everything to do with changing the maritime domain, changing maritime security, So what did the Houthis actually accomplish?
By clogging up the Red Sea and shutting down the Baba Mandav Strait.
We're pushing maritime traffic around South Africa.
But once you go around South Africa, you connect to the South Atlantic, and to connect to the Caribbean, you pass through Guyana, Venezuela.
So they're connecting this.
That's why Russia, China, Iran have been giving Maduro so much support.
And they don't care if Maduro leaves.
Let's say, Armando Gonzalez comes in.
Fine.
He will do the same thing.
And that's the only way they will allow him to hold on to power.
So you're saying the VRIC is kind of making a play to control global shipping lanes.
This is what's happening.
Yeah.
I think it was Sir Walter Raleigh who said, if you control the sea, you control the world.
And so I think one of the things that China particularly has understood is how United States projects strength around the world through trade is maritime security.
Because we're the only military force in the world that actually protect security and the freedom of navigation of both oil vessels but also military vessels that are responding to humanitarian crisis and other things that happen.
throughout the world.
But being able to change that, you have to create conflicts.
Conflicts that bog down specific shipping lanes and conflicts that open up alternative shipping lanes where you believe the United States can't control and you can substitute it.
And the South Atlantic, in my estimation, is one of the bodies of water throughout the world that has the least amount of control by the United States.
We have the least positioning in maritime security.
If you think about it, like if we have a crisis in the South Atlantic, you have to call three different combatant commands, you have to call a bunch of bureaus at the State Department.
We don't have an Atlantic division, right?
It'll be getting very muddied.
And not to mention, it's a part of the world that has heavy transnational organized crime, drug trafficking back and forth.
A lot of, actually, international terrorist networks operate through there.
It was back in the day a slave passage that was moving slaves from Africa into the new world.
So this is a part of the world that I think China has studied and to me it's one of the reasons they're supporting Iran's aggressions in the Middle East to push that traffic there.
Why they supported Russia's incursion on Ukraine because it pushed through Azerbaijan and other supply line into India and they're actually looking to develop new trade routes.
And so that to me is a geopolitical play.
It's a big play.
And the Latin America is just a proxy of that.
They're not the ones controlling that outcome.
And so everything that we see in Latin America, whether it's the big port on the Pacific or the space stations in Argentina and other parts of South America, is all designed to be able to control the way international trade works.
Well, now we've kind of wandered into the area that we were initially going to talk about, right?
So you call it the VRIC, but really we're talking about China, ultimately.
Because that's where the money and that's the player that, if it were to exit that relationship, it's a completely different ballgame, from what I can tell from what you're telling me.
Well, China's the only actor, global actor, that has both the economic leverage and to some level the political legitimacy to carry out these kind of maneuvers.
But they work through their partners.
And in Latin America, the one I like to highlight a lot is the Sino-Iranian alliance.
Because Iran is very powerful in Latin America, but not politically and economically.
They're powerful through these networks.
Like in Bolivia, there are over 100 Iranian so-called diplomats in the embassy in La Paz, Bolivia.
They're destabilizing Peru, Chile, Argentina, and the rest of the neighborhood.
And that's not even talking about what they're doing in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
And China is also one of the biggest debtors to Bolivia.
So, why does China have this alliance with Iran?
Well, beyond the fact that the original Silk Road passed through the Persian Empire, so they understand the old trade routes, but they understand that Iran has very little political legitimacy, therefore has very little to lose.
If Iran gets caught creating a conflict with Guyana by giving missiles to Maduro, or gets caught plotting a terrorist operation in Brazil or in Argentina through their network in Bolivia, Yeah, it's a bad thing, but what do they lose?
Nothing, because nobody expects much from Iran.
If China gets caught with their fingerprints anywhere near any of that stuff, they can lose trade relationships, commercial endeavors, political leverage, so they are very careful not to ever get their hands dirty with those kind of destabilizing operations, but they're happy that the Iranians are doing it, because it provides them the ability to catapult themselves into Latin America above the United States.
So it's an alliance that's functional on different levels and for different outcomes, but fundamentally to end up favoring Beijing.
I want to comment on something that just occurs to me as you're describing all this.
One of the ways in which the Chinese Communist Party, the regime, subverts other countries, actually democratic countries, They have this kind of relationship between different groups that isn't necessarily obvious, but they're actually working together.
One such structure is described as the unholy trinity.
You'll have Chinese state security working with the triads, with organized crime, working with the wealthy business tycoons who are just Here to do business, right?
But in fact, these three groups are actually all working very much in concert to achieve particular outcomes.
And if you look at it from that perspective, you suddenly see what the play is.
But if you're looking at each individually, you're not seeing the activity.
And what you're describing here strikes me as a similar type structure.
It is, and I think it's also kind of couched on their understanding of warfare.
The West has this kind of perspective on war that has to get kinetic before the war actually begins.
We have to have people shooting and dying, and that's a war.
Everything else is just politics or whatever it is.
It's not warfare.
Well, China's view of warfare, going back to Sun Tzu, all the way up to Unrestricted Warfare and what the PLA published in the turn of the century, has to do with the shooting only happens at the end of the war.
Like, everything else is the war.
And if you think about warfare from a very classic sense, and warfare could be complex, and I've been in wars, and it can be complex.
But it can also be simplified into one word.
Warfare is compulsion.
If I compel my adversary to bend to my will, I win the war.
That doesn't require military force.
If I can trick them, if I can coerce them, Maybe I persuade them.
It's still war, if warfare is defined as coercion, as Sun Tzu initially has defined it.
This is beyond Klausowitz, right?
And so I don't want to get into a whole theory of war, but fundamentally, I think China's understanding of warfare is fundamentally different, and it includes using non-state actors, state actors, multilateral institutions, all the levers of power that they can control, coerce, or influence to move towards their strategic objectives.
So their whole plan is not to fight the United States in a kinetic war.
If it comes to that, they might have to do that.
But they actually want to get the United States to submit, to give up, to give in to their world order that they want to lead without actually getting into a clash.
That would be the preferred method and the way their strategy is developed.
And that's particularly evident, I think, in Latin America.
So, given this close relationship that you described with Maduro and Xi Jinping, that's an astonishingly close relationship.
I hadn't realized that this delay had to do with that specific visit.
What are the implications for the Venezuelan situation?
Well, I mean, I think that's one of the things that took a little while for the Venezuelans to realize.
I think for a long time, the Venezuelans were kind of in this very narrow vision of what's happening in their country.
They thought it's, you know, drugs and these cartels, and they have a thing called the Sons Cartel, the Cartel de Los Soles, and the Foro Sao Paulo, which is a communist network, or it's Cuba and all this brutal repression that they do.
But those are all true.
All that's there and all that's happening.
But the problem with limiting your perspective to just those regional actors, is you're acting like Venezuela is an island isolated from the rest of the world.
And if you pay attention to everything that Hugo Chavez has done or said and what Nicolas Maduro is doing, he's geopolitically aligning Venezuela and at this point has already geopolitically aligned Venezuela towards a new world that they want to build with China, with Russia, and with Iran.
The end state of that new world is where China becomes the main provider of security for Venezuela and all of Latin America.
That Russia becomes the main pursuer of anti-narcotics and anti-money laundering in Latin America.
And get this, Iran becomes the main partner for counter-terrorism in Latin America.
That's the world that they're trying to create and trying to build.
And they're trying to do it through influence networks throughout Latin America.
But basically you're talking about a world where they get to function with impunity.
Correct.
There's a world where the United States no longer has the power to stop them.
And so the whole idea, and Chavez said this, his whole project is to push the United States out of Latin America.
He said, green goes, go home.
That was his message.
And he did it in Venezuela.
Our embassy doesn't function anywhere near what it used to function 20 years ago.
U.S.
presence and influence in Venezuela is very mitigated to the point that we have to negotiate over political things as opposed to being able to have a real strategic defense relationship.
And he hasn't just done it in Venezuela.
They've exported this to Nicaragua, same scenario, same conclusion.
Exported this to Bolivia, same scenario, same conclusion.
And then the Cuban dictatorship provides all the intelligence for all these countries to do the same.
They're currently trying to do this in Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Brazil, and they won't be content until the United States is pushed completely outside of Latin America and to the point there's not just danger for the United States to operate in Latin America, but it's dangerous for Americans to travel to Latin America.
That's what Chavez said.
He said, I'm going to change Latin America by changing geography and pushing the United States out.
And so I think in many respects we underestimated it.
We thought it was, you know, it's just this, I think they called him a buffoon or a clown or whatever they called him back in the early 2000s, and they said he's never going to be able to achieve that.
If it was just him, he might not have been able to achieve it.
But he aligned himself with bigger powers.
And now where the world is in today, we're on the verge of perhaps a world war.
And as world wars tend to go, nobody knows the outcome of a potential conflict at that magnitude.
And Venezuela is a part of that.
There seems to be, you know, there's obviously a number of very significant conflicts that are... We don't know how Iran is going to... Maybe by the time this airs, we'll know how Iran is going to respond.
to the attack, the Israeli attack in Tehran.
And so the Russia-Ukraine war is still raging.
The Houthis are doing their thing, despite this also recent targeted Israeli attack, which arguably is sending a message to Iran.
And now we have this situation.
Let me weave all this together for you, because I think I know where you're going.
Whether it's Ukraine, what's happening in Israel and the Middle East, even what potentially could happen with the South China Sea, the Philippines and Taiwan, the second and third order effect, outside of the kinetic aspects of those conflicts or potential conflicts, is economics.
And I think that's where we have to focus.
So what's the second and third order effect of the Ukraine war?
It isn't the Ukrainians or Russians that have died in that war.
That's egregious, that's horrible, but that's where we tend to focus.
But the second third effect of that war is food insecurity, is the price of wheat and fertilizers.
You know, with 12% of calories consumed worldwide coming from the wheat and fertilizer that's either produced and exported out of Russia or Ukraine, it's created food insecurity in places like Africa, in places like Latin America.
Matter of fact, Latin America has the highest food insecurity in the world at 44% of food inflation.
Africa's had, you know, historically low famine and food insecurity, and that's actually created political instability where governments have been toppled in consecutive fashion.
So that's the real geopolitical element of the Ukraine war.
What's the geopolitical element of the war against Israel?
Well, it has 100% to do with collapsing Egypt through the collapsing of the Red Sea.
So like the Suez Canal, if the traffic doesn't reopen to the Suez Canal, Egypt's economy is going to hit between 40% to 60%.
That's enough to collapse Egypt and remember the Muslim Brotherhood's right there waiting in the wings to take back power.
It delegitimizes Israel diplomatically because they can't provide the humanitarian assistance that they have been providing historically to the Palestinians.
And it creates an instability throughout the maritime domain all the way from the Gulf into Africa and into the Mediterranean and diverts it throughout the South.
So that's the economic effect of the Israel conflict.
And so all those, and then we could talk about what could happen potentially with Taiwan and what happened in Latin America, the Guiana and everything I was mentioning, but all that's designed to weaken the world.
And I think that that's what we have to think of because when we think of power, we think of conventional economic power and military power, but there's only two ways to really kind of directionally look at how power is gonna project.
One is growth, right?
If the United States grows, if Latin America grows, if Europe grows, then they can project power.
But the other way is to collapse.
And that's, I think, what China's looking at.
They're looking at having the world collapse so that they're not going to grow much.
They know that.
They have a lot of economic situations that you probably know a lot more than I do about what's happening in the mainland.
But if the rest of the world collapses, China looks like it's stronger and then can project power.
That has to do with economics.
So my look at the geopolitical landscape of the world is that a lot of these conflicts are done in very coordinated fashion.
They're done with strategic intent and purpose.
That doesn't just have to do with the actual battlefield on the ground, but it has to do with looking at how they're going to remake the world.
And I think the part that we're not looking at is the part that I tend to look at, which is Latin America.
So no one sees Venezuela right now as a geopolitical conflict.
It's an election with a dictator and a brave opposition leader.
But what is that going to end up becoming?
What is that going to end up manifesting into?
And what I've been arguing for a very long time is that Venezuela is a geopolitical actor.
It's an actor, it's a platform that's used by Russia, China, Iran to change the geopolitical landscape of Latin America.
And if they're successful, we'll accomplish that and connect it to everything else that they're doing around the world.
Something is very interesting that came out of this discussion is sort of realizing that if you're a regime that lacks a lot of legitimacy, you can kind of, you're allowed to get away with a lot because people kind of expect you to be doing bad things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think that, you know, there's a sense that what Russia, China, Iran have done to the world, really polarizing it where they say, well, you don't really need international consensus.
Because as long as you have a small club of sanctioned states, of autocratic states, but we create mechanisms so that we continue to move money through illicit economies, through criminal networks, and we continue to be able to move in a coordinated fashion, then we don't care about the West.
Europe can do whatever it wants, the United States can do whatever it wants.
If they mess with us, we'll punch them back, or more likely we'll probably go into their countries and divide them and polarize them so they're inactive.
Because something the Chinese regime sort of excels at, aside from what you call subversion, united front operations, this kind of thing, is the use of this gray zone, very gray zone warfare, like exactly what's happening in the Philippines.
Is China aggressing on the Philippines?
Well, yes, obviously, but kind of in a way that doesn't require or doesn't sort of really allow for a strong response.
It's kind of a diplomatic response, right?
It's always kind of testing.
It's always happening somewhere.
They can use these regimes that lack legitimacy to perform all sorts of operations in effect.
Yeah.
Without it being, hey, that's nothing to do with us.
Look at these guys doing.
No, they're very adept at both understanding the nature of controlling two sides of a conflict, having high levels of plausible deniability, and fundamentally positioning himself as, you know, colloquially you could say arson and firefighter in most of these conflicts, right?
So I'll use the Venezuela-Guyana situation as an example.
So if that conflict erupts, you know, as I've been describing, It'll be Iran that'll be most looked at as the external supporter of, because it's their drones, it's their missiles, it's their radars, it's their fast attack craft that Maduro's going to be using.
And Maduro's going to be looked at as a tyrant that's attacking another country.
But China's not going to be looked at, even though China catalyzed this conflict, even though some of the missiles are China's as well, and even though the whole thing began with Maduro's trip to Beijing, that's going to be long forgotten.
And what's going to be purported by China through its allies in Latin America is our close relationship with Guyana.
And they are.
A lot of the infrastructure projects in Guyana are financed by China.
China is, I think, 20% concessions on that offshore oil that was discovered off the coast of Guyana.
So they have an actual economic positioning on the oil.
Um, and so they'll put it in the social media, look Guyana, let me help you solve your Maduro problem, knowing that they have a lot of leverage in Venezuela.
So they'll be able to play this kind of two-sided role to this conflict and towards a direction that legitimizes itself as the peacemaker.
And I think that that's how they're positioning themselves in Ukraine, in the Middle East, in Latin America, and they're trying to stoke a sense of legitimacy so that people will submit to their will.
And I go back to what warfare is, right?
That's just war.
They're using a different tactic.
They're using political subversion, economic coercion.
They're using different tactics, but they're fundamentally trying to accomplish the same thing.
Now, if they just invaded Guyana or invaded Latin America, Maybe they'll accomplish it, or maybe they won't.
And we argue their military is growing, but it's not at that level of strength.
They cannot project naval power the way the United States can.
We're not there yet.
But they can do it through other asymmetric means.
I know an inflection point for this.
This is based on what I think how this alliance really started to form.
In my opinion, it's 1991, right?
So many people think, oh, Cold War and everything.
No, no, no.
That was the Berlin Wall in 1989.
91 is the Gulf War.
And many people, the Forgotten War, right?
When the United States went to Kuwait and we repelled Saddam's army.
And you've got to think about where the world was at that time.
And at the time, the Soviet Union collapsed.
So they're no longer a major power.
Their military is fragmented.
It's not what it was.
Iran had just spent 10 years fighting that same army that we were able to repel in a matter of weeks.
So they're looking at us like, okay, these guys didn't, you know, three weeks, four weeks, well, it took us 10 years to come to a tie.
And China was not the power that it is today.
It was just trying to convince the world that it wants to grow into this new economic model and then eventually in 2001 got a session into the WTO.
So, in 91, I believe that these countries looked at the United States repelling of Saddam's army in Iraq, in Kuwait, into Iraq, and said, we're never going to fight these guys conventionally.
Like, we're never going to go bullet for bullet, bomb for bomb with these guys, because we will lose.
This is a very powerful military.
So they changed the doctrine.
And I think that that was the birth of the Jerusalem Doctrine in Russia, the Soleimani Doctrine in the IRGC in Iran, the Unrestricted Warfare and the Three Warfare Doctrine of the Chinese Military Commission in China.
And they started to realize that we need to create a new understanding of warfare and implement it within doctrine and then unite as an alliance.
So I think the 1991 conflict, unbeknownst to us, because I don't think America was trying to send that message to the world, or maybe it was, but fundamentally I didn't think we wanted to push Russia, China, and Iran together.
We were trying to defend a sovereign nation, Kuwait, from an invasion army, which was Iraq.
But we fundamentally sent a signal throughout the world through force that met a reaction.
And that reaction, I think, is through this multipolar first, what I call the BRIC, that I think was what we're facing in this present time.
I mean, this has been an absolutely fascinating discussion for me.
You may very well be right.
Any final thoughts as we finish?
Yeah, maybe I will end by, you know, we began with Venezuela by talking a little about Venezuela because, you know, we're in an election season in the United States and I think regardless of whatever happens in November, I believe one of the biggest foreign policy failures of the United States has been Latin America.
The fact that we haven't had a priority on this region, The fact that we haven't focused on the region, the fact that we haven't competed really against China and Latin America, is really just a failure of our own vision, our lack of vision in global affairs.
You know, it doesn't make any sense to me that you could have a grand strategy for every part of the world except the one in which you live.
It's almost equivalent to saying China has strategies for everywhere except the Indo-Pacific, or Russia except for Central Eastern Europe, or Iran except the Middle East.
It doesn't make sense, right?
Our adversaries prioritize their near abroad and then expand globally.
The United States is active globally and ignores its near abroad.
That's never going to work.
So I believe that regardless of whatever happens in the election in November, we need to put Latin America higher on the priority list of foreign policy and national security.
I'd argue probably next to Indo-Pacific.
Indo-Pacific is going to always be the priority because of interest and also because of the way we protect the Pacific Ocean.
But I think next to the Indo-Pacific, and actually arguably the other side of the Pacific, is the Western Hemisphere, is Latin America.
So I'd argue that it has to be very high in our priority scale, or if not, we're going to see many Venezuelans all throughout Latin America that will unfundamentally stop America's ability to grow and to thrive.
Well, Joseph Humeyer, such a pleasure to have had you on.
Absolutely.
It's an honor for me to be on.
Thank you all for joining Joseph Humeyer and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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