4100 Venezuelan Refugee Crisis | Joseph M. Humire and Stefan Molyneux
While many Americans are concerned about the influx of refugees and third world immigration, few understand the significant dangers that exist related to the Venezuelan refugee crisis. Joseph M. Humire joins Stefan Molyneux to explain the striking similarities between Syria and Venezuela, Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America, the rising presence of Hezbollah, the surprising Islam/Socialism alliance and much much more!Joseph M. Humire is the executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society, a recognized expert on matters of national security and counter-terrorism – and editor/contributor of the book "Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America.”Book: http://www.fdrurl.com/Irans-Strategic-Penetration-Latin-AmericaTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/jmhumireWebsite: http://www.securefreesociety.orgYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
I'm here with Joseph M. Hugh Meyer.
He's the executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society.
He's a recognized expert on matters of national security and counterterrorism, and is the editor and contributor of the book, Iran's Strategic Penetration of Latin America.
Yes, it kind of came out of nowhere for me, too, but we're going to dive into this.
The Twitter account for Joseph is twitter.com forward slash jmhughmeyer.
That's J-M-H-U-M-I-R-E. And the website is securefreesociety.org.
Joseph, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Pleasure, Stephan. It's always a privilege and thanks for inviting me on your show.
My pleasure. Now, well, let me rephrase that.
It's essential to know whether it's a pleasure or not remains to be seen by the listeners.
But let's start with DACA. So the way, of course, it's portrayed is there are these wonderful dreamers, these children who were dragged to America by their desperate parents and now must be given a path to citizenship because that is all that is just and humane and wonderful.
I did kind of have the feeling that Americans may have been played a little bit on their sympathies, may have been not exactly sold a correct bill of goods.
And you have talked about DACA being one of the most dangerous forms of a path to citizenship, one of the most dangerous forms of illegal immigration.
I wonder if you could help people understand that perspective, why you hold it.
Yeah, so one of the things that I think me personally, but also at my center, we've been looking at a lot are the networks that exist around the world.
They're involved with transnational organized crime, terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
And what you've seen over the years is that these networks have converged.
Basically, they're using the same pathways, they're using the same airports, the same facilitators.
And what you're seeing in Latin America, which is a region that we specialize in, is that all these networks are converging and they're moving north.
They're literally going from south of South America through Central America and Mexico on into the United States.
And the problem with that is that there's a push-pull factor to this, right?
So the push factor comes from some of the nefarious elements in the Middle East, Iran, other places that they're trying to literally infiltrate their subversive operatives into the Western Hemisphere and up into North America.
But the pull factor is U.S. policy.
We actually incentivize this on many levels.
I think when you mentioned DACA, some of the immigration programs, that's part of it.
But there's actually other parts of it.
I mean, we're involving humanitarian assistance, refugee assistance, and different parts of Latin America.
And it's basic economics for anyone that studied economics.
If you incentivize For refugees to come to certain countries, you will get more refugees.
If you drive the incentives for more of that, you'll get more of it.
So basically what we've created is typical types of moral hazards in different parts of Latin America where they're concentrating in – Northern Triangle, Central America, Colombia.
And it's becoming a problem particularly because of Venezuela.
I mean before that, maybe it was already kind of a problem.
It's untenable. There's 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
With the Venezuelan refugee crisis exploding to the levels of Assyria, refugee crisis is going to be untenable for us in this part of the world.
So let's talk a little bit about, as everyone's attention has been over there in the Middle East, a lot of issues have been brewing south of the border, as you say, from South America through Central America into North America.
And the failed state of Venezuela is just astonishing how little attention that's getting in the mainstream media.
Well, I think that's partly because they're kind of lefty in the mainstream media.
They don't want it to fail. And they were all very big on Chavez and others like him and I guess his successor.
But that's a huge issue.
I mean, this country is spiraling down into economic decay and destruction, and people aren't just going to stay home and starve to death.
No, when I said that Venezuela is a Syria-esque crisis, and what I meant is that it's not just emulating what's happening in Syria, it's directly connected to what's happening in Syria.
So if we were to define the crisis in Syria, In one sentence, it's a humanitarian crisis that exacerbated a tremendous amount of refugees—we're talking about upwards of 10 million refugees annually—that has a heavy amount of presence of Islamist elements, ISIS, Daesh, Hezbollah, controlled primarily by Iran and Russia.
That definition now fits Venezuela.
It's exact to the T, to the letter.
It's Venezuela. And what you came to find, what we came to find through our research is that that connection isn't by coincidence.
There's a reason why the vice president of Venezuela is a gentleman named Tarek El-Isamy, which is not a very Venezuelan name.
It's a Syrian Lebanese name.
Because if you look at the networks that have been developed...
Over 50 years, this predates Hugo Chavez, there has been a pipeline that's been developed that snap-links these two countries that are used as proxy wars to destabilize their respective regions of the Middle East and Latin America, but most importantly, to attack the United States, to get us involved in foreign interventions, because they learned a lesson with Vietnam, they learned a lesson with Iraq.
If they get us entangled in these conflicts, it bleeds us from blood and treasure, And it distracts us from the bigger priorities that are to our US national security, which are right along the border and within our country, actually.
So Venezuela is designed to do that.
It's designed to delegitimize the United States and provoke intervention on behalf of the United States.
And here in Washington, where I sit, you're already hearing the rumblings of that.
You're already hearing the rumblings among the policy crowd of trying to get, you know, help the poor Venezuelans and get involved in humanitarian programs, refugee programs.
And what we don't understand is that it's a booby trap.
We're literally walking into an ambush.
And how would that ambush play out?
It'll probably play out in the form of some type of military action in Venezuela on behalf of the Venezuelan military.
I mean, I don't blame them.
They're in dire need.
I mean, the country's completely collapsed.
Whether anyone supported Hugo Chavez or Venezuela in the past, I think no one can support it now.
I mean, it's one of the highest countries in the world in terms of inflation, highest countries in the world in terms of crime and violence and murder.
And literally, it's a conflict zone.
So what's going to happen is that the military has become anguished through this process.
It's going to take action at some point.
And the regime is going to provoke that action, and they're going to incite that action.
And when that clash happens, a quote-unquote civil war will take place, much like Syria.
And then you're going to see the refugee numbers go from 2 to 3 million where they're at now to 10 million to where they're at in Syria.
And when those refugees move out, there's established clandestine routes, which in the intelligence community they call rat lines.
And those rat lines will be activated, and then they're going to destabilize the rest of Latin America.
Bolivia, Nicaragua, these are two countries that are connected to Venezuela that are designed to essentially provoke the same kind of crisis in those countries.
So they're going to remake the conflicts that we had in the Middle East, and they're going to bring it right to 1,500 miles from our border.
I spent a lot of time in Latin America, travel to the region quite a bit.
They're not ready for it. Their laws aren't ready.
Their authorities aren't ready.
They don't understand this threat.
And our US policymakers are finally starting to wake up.
There is some good news. The Trump administration is acting on this, but they're playing catch-up.
They're trying to literally go through almost 30 years of bad policy and trying to fix everything in a matter of three months or six months, and it's a lot of work.
Let's talk a little bit about one of the elements in your book, Joseph, that I kind of suspected and there were hints of and I saw scattered around here and there, but you concentrate this into a very focused narrative, and that is the relationship between, you know, hard-left, atheistic, internationalistic, totalitarian communism that is based on class and Islamism, which is, of course, a theocracy.
You wouldn't imagine these to be particularly...
Good bedfellows, but I guess like Hitler and Stalin, they make common cause in opposition to freedom.
And this relationship between communism and radical Islam is really fascinating and, frankly, a little terrifying.
Yeah, you're right.
It's an uncharacteristic alliance.
It's not something that has historically been a alliance in the course of the last century.
But really what happened is after the end of the Cold War, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Iran was one of the long-standingest revolutions after the Soviets collapsed.
And they literally took it upon themselves.
And they wrote, I think it's documented in the book, they wrote letters to the Russians and Soviets that were leading at the time.
And they said, listen, with the End of the communist revolution, you should look at us because we're going to lead the anti-imperialist movement throughout the world.
And that's the common denominator. The common denominator is Iran doesn't just view themselves as an Islamic theocracy, which is what they are in the Middle East, but they view themselves as the leader of what they call the resistance countries.
They view themselves as the leader of the anti-imperialist movement or New World Order, however you want to call it, in the world.
And they're trying to change the system.
This is what puts them in alliance with Russia and China.
That triangle, Russia, Iran, and China, is also not a natural alliance.
I mean, Russia and China were historic adversaries during the Cold War.
I think Russia, I believe, took some territory from China, so they really shouldn't be the best of friends.
But lately, they have been, and the linchpin has been Iran, because Iran provides a printer on oil to China.
It receives a lot of armament from Russia.
So it's created a strategic accord, a strategic triangle between those three countries.
With the sole intent purpose of bringing down the West, and particularly the United States.
So that's the common cause.
The old adage of the enemy, my enemy is my friend.
That's what brought this alliance together.
And in Latin America, it's where it's taking place.
I think when you see that convergence the most is in Latin America.
And it makes sense. I mean, if...
If you're Iran, right, or Russia or anybody, and you look around your borders, you see the United States.
You see them in Iraq, you see them in Afghanistan, you see them in Ukraine, you see them in Japan, South Korea.
So these countries make these calculations and they say, you know, they're in our backyard, so we got to go in their backyard.
And they realize that they have a geographic disadvantage.
That was the whole purpose of the Monroe Doctrine.
We have oceans separating us.
So they're not going to be able to do what we do.
They're not going to send carriers to the Caribbean and kind of just permeate the Gulf of Mexico.
They're going to do it asymmetrically, subversively, through covert methods.
And I think that's what you're saying, particularly Iran.
And close to the United States, not just on the southern border, but also on the northern border in Canada.
They have a tremendous presence in Canada as well.
And they literally have surrounded us to the point that we know that if there's a conflict that erupts either directly with the United States or indirectly through Israel, that they're going to light it up.
And I believe our intelligence community knows this.
They're just trying to figure out how to react to it.
And there is or there does seem to be this alliance where in a relatively free country and to me one of the great heartbreaks is Argentina that up until like the 1930s had the same per capita GDP as the United States and has since decayed away as have so many of the other countries around it and the idea is if you destroy the free market then you destroy the support for the government you create a crisis of starvation lack of medical care and then what happens is people panic they either flee or they revolt it destabilizes The entire government.
And then what happens is, through that chaos, you might be able to grab the reins of power.
And from that standpoint, I've heard the similar stories with Iran, that it was a lot of the leftists and the trade unionists who helped destabilize the existing government in the 70s.
And then it was the Islamic extremists who took over.
And this destabilization of the free market, this destruction of Of the capacity of the country to flourish in any peaceful manner then creates both destabilization and a power vacuum that can well be exploited by people who have a totalitarian bent.
No, absolutely. And you hit on something, Keith Stephan, and I want to kind of highlight that.
You hit on basically these destabilizing elements that aren't Islamic.
They basically just hate capitalism.
They hate free markets.
They hate free trade or whatever. And they make a lot of noise in their country.
So let's talk about Argentina, for example.
In Argentina, there's a group called El Cabracho.
Anyone that goes to Argentina or reads Argentine politics, they know about it.
Whenever you see the news in Argentina, you see a bunch of people with pots and pans banging and creating a lot of disturbances.
That's them. That's the Cabracho.
And so the Cabracho had a tremendous amount of influence during the period of the last administration, which is the president – the former president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who is a communist, socialist sympathizer, Chavez-like, kind of a dictatorial president in Argentina, who also, by the way, signed an agreement with Iran.
When you go to the – when you go to the wiretaps that the Argentine prosecutors had done to – when they were examining some of the evidence since the terrorist attack that they had in the 90s, And you follow the evidence of all the wiretaps and the intelligence that's been provided to the Argentine government, you find out that the Quebrachos are not only financed, controlled, commanded by Iran.
And they have nothing to do, like if you look at them on the surface, they have nothing to do with Islam.
They don't talk about Islam. They don't preach Islam.
They preach anti-capitalist messages in Argentina.
But the leader of the Quebracho, Fernando Esteche, was somebody that was on the bankroll of Iran.
And so Iran's very astute in what I call building surrogates.
They build out surrogate states, they build out surrogate actors, and they work in the shadows.
And that's why our intelligence community got confused because they don't see them.
They're looking for the Yemen situation or Syria situation where the Hezbollah operatives parachute in and they're running around and you actually visibly see them engage in these kind of operations.
In Latin America, it doesn't work that way.
They're much smarter than that. They build relationships with some host nations.
They use the diplomatic connections, the cultural connections, and then they infiltrate these operatives, and they build these networks much the same way we do.
I mean, our Green Berets are designed to do this as well.
They can go to other countries, work with indigenous groups, and kind of stay in the shadows and push back on certain conflicts.
The problem is Iran has done it much better in Latin America than we have, and there are certain countries where this is kind of You wouldn't believe you would say this in the 21st century.
There's certain countries where Iran has more influence in Latin America than we do.
In Venezuela, Iran has a tremendous amount more influence than the United States.
Nothing the United States can do in or around Venezuela is going to make a difference in that country, but Iran can make a difference in that country.
Same to be told in Bolivia.
Same to be told in Nicaragua and some of these other countries.
And so what I've seen and what I think relates to your point is that when we look at some of these It's all connected.
It's connected to what's in the Middle East.
It's connected to what's in Asia and Europe.
So the same challenges we're facing around the world, we're facing in Latin America.
But if we lose in Latin America, and this is the argument I've made here on The Hill and others, if we lose in Latin America, we lose everywhere in the world.
Because that is part of the United States in terms of our hemisphere, in terms of our culture, in terms of our connections.
We can't afford it.
If they take over Mexico the way they took over Venezuela, it's game over.
Well, it is an astonishing phenomenon and one of the great fog of war realities, especially this asymmetric warfare that you talk about in the book, Joseph, that to some degree Iran is like, fine, you destabilize countries around us, we will now destabilize countries around you.
And it's not something that your average reporter and it's, I mean, I've read into this stuff for a long time and this is relatively novel news to me.
And when you go start mucking, In countries and regions and stabilities on the other side of the world, well, it's a two-way street.
Everyone seems to forget that when it comes to foreign policy.
No, there's absolutely some element of that.
There's an element, you know, when you start to get more involved.
Like, for example, recently I was involved in a meeting here in Washington where we're talking about Iranian influence in Yemen, right?
We know that they're supporting the Huwati rebels.
And so basically a civil conflict is taking place in Yemen.
And we're trying to stabilize that part.
But my question is, and I'm sitting back listening just as I'm getting the briefing.
My question is, why do we care so much about the outcomes in Yemen, but we don't care about the outcomes in Mexico?
I mean, that makes no sense to me.
Like, you know, the Iranians are in Yemen, and everyone's going up in arms, and we're investing a lot of resources to send military troops over there.
But they're perhaps also strong in Mexico working through the cartels.
That, to me, is a bigger challenge.
That's a bigger problem. That's something that we need to really prioritize.
The Yemen thing, I'm not saying it's not important, but there's got to be a level of priority, especially geographically as they relate to American citizens, US interests, and whatnot.
To your point, I agree with that.
Some of these conflicts we don't need to be in, to be honest with you.
We don't need to be in every civil conflict in the Middle East and in Africa and around the world.
Some of these have diminishing returns when it comes to getting involved.
There's things that we can do and there's things that we can't do.
But in Latin America – and I want to be careful how I say it.
I don't believe that we need to get involved in every single conflict in Latin America either.
But I do know that once the networks hit this side of the world, the same Hezbollah networks that are causing problems in Iraq and Syria, when they hit this side of the world, it's more challenging for us.
Because we don't have the peer-to-peer relationships in Latin America that we used to have.
Hugo Chavez did quite a bit of work.
He did quite a bit of work at gutting our embassies, gutting our DEA, gutting our foreign military presence, and basically taking us out of the region at a point that China's coming in.
And China's a bigger trade partner in Chile, in Brazil, than the United States.
And so they've developed a connection that outpaces us.
So in my opinion, I think there needs to be a refocus of US foreign policy and national security.
And at the top of the list should come the Western Hemisphere.
Now, let's talk a little bit about how these cartels deal with things like DACA or illegal immigration, because there does seem to be both soft and hard signals from Washington that teenagers are going to be not deported, they may not even be incarcerated, which creates a protected class that can be exploited as drug mules and other criminal elements by the cartels.
And the cynical way in which the cartels, as you describe it in one of your articles, say, well, you know, the Western justice system, it's got a soft stomach.
It's very sentimental.
It's not going to go against illegal immigrants and kids and dreamers.
And we've got the Democrats pumping up the sentimentality to befog Western clarity of vision.
So how are the cartels exploiting the weaknesses in the southern border to help escalate the opioid and drug crisis?
Yeah, Steph, I think first we have to kind of understand...
What is a cartel and kind of the criminalization of it?
So, you know, I think perhaps from the American view or definitely from the U.S. government view, you know, these are networks that are involved in illicit activity and therefore we should just disregard them from any kind of policy framework that we have in this part of the world.
But the thing is, in Latin America, it's a little different.
The optic on it inside the region is a little different because, frankly, it has to do with the society.
In many of these countries, particularly in Central America, it's not so much that everybody runs to the cartels because they watch Narcos and they have this dream of being this famous Pablo Escobar or anything like that, but it's more because the incentives are aligned that way.
In any given society, you have free enterprise, the formal enterprise that we all engage in on a day-to-day basis.
In Latin America, you have a lot of informal enterprise.
You have an informal economy that is not really regulated or engaged in it, and it's done in a very ad hoc manner.
But at the extent of that, you have the illicit enterprise.
That's the criminal enterprise. And so whenever these countries have weak institutions, lack of rule of law, lack of protection of property, when they push the incentive, the basic economic incentives, more for predation in the illicit enterprise, it takes away from production, and the cartels know that.
So the cartels, I mean, another word for a cartel is an entrepreneur.
Some of those guys are very entrepreneurial in understanding how to get their products across.
So they look at U.S. policy and they look at all of the vulnerabilities in U.S. policy and they exploit those policies, not for better or worse or for political sympathy, just for the reason that they want to get their products across.
So they have all the incentive in the world because, I mean, cocaine in itself is a $365 billion global industry.
So they have all the incentives in the world to want to do this.
And so what they do is they look at programs like DACA.
They look at vulnerabilities on our border.
They look at vulnerabilities with our U.S. asylum system, particularly in Canada, actually.
They have quite a bit of connections with the – the cartels have quite a bit of connections in Canada as well.
They look at all these vulnerabilities and they exploit them to make their bottom line.
And I think in the US perspective, we look at this from a very political perspective, but we're not from that pragmatic perspective.
At the end of the day, is this incentivizing cartels or is it de-incentivizing cartels?
And a lot of these programs, what they do is they just create bigger incentives for them to move their illicit networks.
And it's not to say that every DACA member is a member of MS-13 or is connected to a cartel or anything like that.
But it could even be – I don't know what the numbers are.
But say it's even a small percentage or a small minority.
And this is true with terrorist networks in Islamic neighborhoods and stuff.
Even if it's a small number, it takes very little to do a lot of damage.
And they've proven that with the opioid crisis in New England.
I mean there may be – You know, less than 1% of those networks that are involved, that are actually Mexican cartel miners, are involved in the distribution of the opioids.
But look at the damage that's being done.
I mean, the damage that's being done is tremendous.
Because once it gets out of control, it gets out of the hands, the networks are established, the distribution centers are created.
I mean, then, you know, it's just a matter of time before it just takes over society.
So the same thing that's happening down there is not happening up here, and that's by design.
And so much of anti-U.S. Sentiment and activities, particularly with regards to asymmetrical warfare, appears to be designed to basically destabilize the US and drain its treasury.
I mean, obviously, the wars in the Middle East are costing Americans a lot more than they're costing the guys in flip-flops in the back of a pickup van, as one of my recent interview guests noted.
And this idea that you destabilize a country, that you nationalize industries, that you debase the currency, that you destroy people's capacity to survive in a modern economy, then that, of course, you try and channel those refugees going north.
And then they pour into America where, you know, a lot of them are going to end up in welfare.
They pour into the schools.
They pour into the health care system, a lot of which is paid for by the American government.
And it seems it's almost like a war on the sustainability of the U.S. dollar.
And there is some of that that's just hatred of America because it's relatively free, because it has a free market and so on.
But also it is just, well, if America runs out of money, then it can't be an imperialistic power anymore.
Well, there's definitely an element that is, you know, trying to provoke conflict that the U.S. gets involved in and spends.
I mean, it rocks the Just a shining example of that right now.
I don't know how much money we've poured into Iraq, but that conflict, the benefits that we receive from that conflict, or getting involved in that conflict, or provoking that war, is much smaller than the cost.
The costs are tremendous, both in blood and treasure.
But I want to unpack something.
You mentioned the term asymmetric war, and it's something you hear a lot, both here in Washington and around the academic community.
So for your audience, so they can fully understand what that means, right?
Warfare in and of itself is just compulsion.
That's all it is. It's compulsion.
If you could compel your adversary or your enemy to bend to your political will, you win.
And you don't have to use military force to do that.
You can use any kind of tool or an instrument of national power.
Asymmetric means just it's a disbalance, right?
There's an asymmetry to a relationship.
So asymmetric warfare is a strategy.
It's a doctrine.
In military terms, it's called fourth-generation war.
It's the most modern element of warfare that allows you to use different kind of tools to bring down a more powerful military.
So when you have a more powerful military, you're not going to attack them with a military.
It doesn't make any sense. That's why everybody's looking at Iran for their nuclear weapon.
Their nuclear weapon, quote-unquote, is actually probably in Latin America and it's not an actual missile.
It's the network. And so what are the central elements to win an asymmetric war?
Well, there's two. At the end of the day, there's just two.
Political legitimacy and public opinion.
If you're losing on those two grounds, you're going to lose the asymmetric war.
And the question that we have to ask ourselves, is the United States growing in public opinion?
Are the values of the West growing in public opinion?
And is it establishing more legitimacy, not just around the world, but also in our country?
Are more people running towards the free market system and embracing those values?
And adopting them both into their policy – their votes for politicians?
Or are they going more towards the kind of a protectionist and socialist-like status model that some previous governments have implemented in the past?
And I'd argue that we're in a crossroads.
I mean America was built on these same values, the Western values of protection of life, liberty, and property.
So I think those values are still here, but they're being challenged.
And they're being challenged from abroad, and they're being challenged from within.
And the Russians, the Iranians, they know this.
And so they're going to exploit every aspect of that, including—and this is something that I've come to recently.
On the drug stuff, just to kind of bring it back to that, I have a question.
There's a lot of discussion, and I've done a lot of work on Hezbollah's ties to the cartels.
But I have a question, and this would be a question I would pose to the intelligence community.
Is Hezbollah's involvement with drug trafficking just for profit?
So they're just trying to make money so that they can fund their efforts in Syria and in Lebanon?
Or are they using this strategically as a destabilizing element to not just destabilize Latin America, but to also move that destabilization into the United States?
And it reminds me of something a Quds Force operative said.
The Quds Force is the Special Operations Division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of Iran.
Something a Quds Force operative said just last year in a statement he said before some of his troops.
He said that it doesn't matter what the United States does in the Middle East because we have the networks in the United States to counter that.
And even if they deport them, it doesn't matter because we have the networks in Argentina and Mexico.
He actually pointed out Argentina and Mexico because we could bring them right back.
So when he said that, it was kind of illuminating to me because that's asymmetric warfare.
That's, by definition, asymmetric war.
I don't think you're going to see Iran attack us from a military, kinetic level.
But you will see them attack when they start lighting up all these networks.
And you might not even know it's them. This opioid crisis, I mean, how did that all happen?
How did that get from nowhere to, in three years, get to tremendous levels of distribution and consumption to things we haven't seen in more than a decade?
So these are questions I would ask to the intelligence community.
Well, it's a strange thing when you think about it, how much effort and blood and treasure and lives had to be spent by communism in the Vietnam War, where you had millions of North Vietnamese destroyed with a bombing campaign that concentrated more bombs in one small country than were dropped in all of World War II in order where you had millions of North Vietnamese destroyed with a bombing campaign that concentrated more bombs in And of course, to drain a lot of American treasury and to stimulate an anti-war movement that had a lot to do with communism as well.
So think of the amount of effort and blood and treasure that had to be spent to fight Americans in Vietnam.
And now, and this was of course over many years, now in one single year you can kill more Americans with drugs than the entire Vietnam War cost.
And not only are you not spending millions of lives, you're making billions of dollars doing so.
And you can't win against those kinds of incentives in the long run.
I can't imagine, Joseph, how that's even possible.
So that's an interesting point because why don't we – so let's take that, right, for – at least as a hypothesis.
Let's say that drug trafficking is usually more than just a profit-making mechanism for cartels.
It's also being used strategically by our enemies to basically destabilize our society.
Let's take that. So this makes a lot of sense to me in terms of what the regimes were doing getting involved with the cartels in Latin America, particularly the Venezuelan government.
So Hugo Chavez, in the period that he was president for 18 years in Venezuela, he pretty much completely co-opted the institutions of his country, particularly the armed forces, the military, and he put it in bed with the drug cartels from throughout the region, the Mexicans, the Colombians, the Bolivians, and everybody else.
And he created – there's a term for it.
They call it the Sun Cartel because the military officers wear sun insignias on their uniforms.
So he created this Venezuelan government military cartel.
Right? So everyone looks at that, okay, there's just another drug trafficking element.
Okay, this one's part of the military, but whatever.
It's still doing the same thing.
It's building main profits for a broke government.
But what if the purpose of Hugo Chavez wasn't necessarily to build it as just a revenue-generating form from illicit revenues for his government, but he was looking at to tie it up with Hezbollah and Iran as a way to attack the United States.
And this makes strategic sense to me because I think there's a complete, and here in Washington, a complete miscalculation as to who Hugo Chavez was and what that revolution that he created was all about.
And I tell the story to kind of get people, and I give a lecture to different militaries around the world, and I gave a story to get people to connect these two, and I talk about a military officer who had political ambitions Who became president and used his power of presidency to nationalize resources,
get in bed with drug cartels, and then to use oil as a way to buy out other countries around the neighborhood under the name of nationalism and under the name of creating a revolution around his region that redefined the identity, social culture identity, of the people in that region.
So I give that story.
And in Latin America, everyone's always talking about Hugo Chavez.
No, I'm talking about Gamil Abdel Nasser.
That's what the Nasserist movement was.
That's what the Pan-Arab Nationalist movement was.
And what Hugo Chavez, in his self-proclaimed Bolivarian Revolution, was an extension of Pan-Arab Nationalism.
More than anything, an extension of Socialism.
It had all of that, but it was definitely an extension of Pan-Arab Nationalism.
It was a way to bring that military insurgency into the United States.
It's a very strategic thinking.
It's asymmetric warfare.
When Hugo Chavez said, I'm an enemy of the United States and I'm going to attack and bring down the United States, no one took him serious.
No one took them seriously. Here in the United States, nobody said that that was a credible threat, except for a handful of folks that were in the Department of Defense.
And I believe those folks were right.
And now we're seeing the dividends of that.
Because now what Venezuela's become, at the top of the conversation with the connections in Syria and everything, is a strategic element.
On behalf of Islamist movements, particularly by Iran, to basically create a way to put a forward operating location that attacks the United States.
And we're going to feel that pain.
I was involved in a meeting last year as Venezuela's, you know, the protests and everything were at a high point.
And this was a meeting with folks inside the White House.
And somebody said, if Trump is not careful, this is going to be his Iraq.
This is going to be the point of inflection where he's going to have to decide, do I send military forces to dwell this or do I find another way?
And I think if we get there, we're way too late.
And I appreciate you talking about it and others talking about it because this is something I think this is like a sleeping giant literally on our doorstep.
And let's talk a little bit about, you've written that Iran's efforts to export the Islamic Revolution and destabilize all of Latin America are centered around the crisis in Venezuela.
Now, the crisis in Venezuela, you know, the communists always, or the socialists, or the leftists, the central planners, the collectivists, they always come to power saying, Well, we just want to help the poor and we just want to make everyone richer and we want to help everyone get a good education and so on.
It's never true because every single time it's tried, it ends exactly in this kind of disaster.
And anybody who tries this kind of collectivism knows exactly where it's going to lead.
It is an excuse to destabilize and to radicalize because when people can't eat, they tend not to think very rationally and they tend to react to the most powerful sophist and rabble rouser in the neighborhood.
So this crisis, Hugo Chavez did not want To help the poor, he wanted to destroy Venezuela as it was, and therefore it ended up in this situation, which now is exploitable by anybody who wants to radicalize and weaponize the population.
No, absolutely. But you reminded me of a joke that once a former diplomat said when they said, you know, Venezuela, Hugo Chavez wants to help the poor in the narrative that he held about the oppressed and the impoverished in Venezuela.
He said, okay, sure, he wanted to help the poor so much he created millions more.
So he just expanded the poverty in Venezuela to the point that it was – no, but I agree with you.
I don't believe he cared about the poor.
It was a very Maoist-Leninist strategy to break down.
You would change direction. Sorry to interrupt, but if you really cared about the poor, when the economy began to fall apart, you would change direction, but they never do.
They always double down. No, and I think your point, I mean, it was a very Maoist-Leninist strategy to break it down.
To later, perhaps, build it back up.
It's a revolutionary strategy.
There was no secret that socialism was not going to work in Venezuela.
They knew it. We knew it.
Everyone knew it. He depended a lot on oil prices, and he knew that commodity wasn't going to last forever.
When oil prices spiked high artificially, they essentially just went on a spending spree.
And they spent not just in Venezuela but all throughout Latin America.
And they used the state-owned oil enterprise as basically a slush fund for all kinds of tin pot dictators around Latin America to build them up and prop them up into power.
But to your point, what I think is most important on that is that he did it very strategically.
And he aligned himself with some of the most powerful anti-U.S. actors around the world, not just the informal actors like Hezbollah and even Al-Qaeda and other elements of the Islamist movement, but also nation states.
Mainly Iran, but also Russia and China and North Korea and all these countries is a hotbed inside Venezuela.
But there's something that I've learned recently that makes me think – so I can tell people I think Iran is more powerful than all those other elements in Venezuela and people look at me a little bit twisted-eyed because they say, well, Russia has a lot of armament.
I mean the Russian military armament is literally on the streets of Venezuela.
China pretty much is their main benefactor.
They've bought all the oil and credits and loans.
But I said, okay, if you look at it from the Westphalian sovereign kind of perspective, yes, this is true, right?
On the way we look at a representative democracy, Russia and China are the big actors, Cuba's on the ground.
But if you look at it from how they look at it, which I don't believe they believe, they don't follow our laws, they don't follow our doctrine, they completely look at this in a different way.
The clandestine network that they developed inside Venezuela, it's not only a communist clandestine network, it's an aero-clandestine network.
And that aero-clandestine network, which is also socialist, But it's also Islamist, and it's also nationalist, and it's also other things.
It's tied to the Middle East.
This is why in Syria, for instance, I did some research in the Middle East last year.
In a small city on the southwest border of Syria along the border with Jordan, in the Assad-controlled region, there's a city called Asawaita.
Asa Huayda has 250,000 Venezuelan-born dual citizens.
It's 65% of the population of that city.
You go to that city, my researchers went to that city, you go there and they speak Spanish.
In the middle of Syria, they eat arepas, they dance salsa.
And so this is, I mean, that doesn't happen by, there's no tourism migration.
That's not a natural migration.
That's a clandestine network that's been developed between Syria and Venezuela to move people back and forth.
And Chavez did this. He let this happen under his watch because he knew strategically this is how he's going to bring down the United States.
And to your point, I don't think the socialist policies were by accident.
I think that they knew what that was going to do.
And Venezuela is right where Venezuela wants to be, which is in complete chaos.
But if you control the chaos, you're not unstable.
Everybody else is. And you create a situation, this bifurcation of society that has occurred, Joseph, where you have increasing numbers of people highly dependent on state handouts for their survival, at least as they perceive, and then you have this growing resentful class of people who are being forced to fund it all.
And this setting up of massive transfers of trillions of dollars through the armed might of the state creates a form of civil, civil war that often degenerates into real civil war when the money starts to run dry because you have...
Two groups of people, this is a big generalization, but I think it has value of two groups of people, one of whom is being forced to pay, the other feels that they must keep this money going in order to survive.
They must keep this money flowing.
And so you have people voting to keep their property.
You have people voting to take away other people's property.
They're no longer part of one society.
They are really on opposite sides of that sort of fiery moat of statist power.
Yeah, it's classic structures that were built over time, and you're 100% right.
He built a big population within Venezuela that's completely dependent on the Venezuelan government.
They used to call it the Bolivarian missions.
There were all these missions that were set, mission for housing, mission for health, mission for eye surgeries, mission for everything.
And so he created all these things and he did it very strategically because the core to all these missions was a thing called mission identity.
And mission identity required that all Venezuelans have a biometric ID card.
And what that does is that creates population control mechanisms.
The Cubans are great at this, to control dissidents, to control defectors, to be able to have pretty much a population under some type of technological control where you can track movements.
And so they did this in Venezuela.
Venezuela has now become a non-permissive environment for anyone that wants to go there and pretend they can play James Bond or whatever and figure it out.
And so what happens is when that structure breaks down, which is pretty much since 2014 and oil prices plummeted, the state structure broke down.
You create the conflict.
And then when you create the conflict, you create the divisions, you control different parts of those conflicts, and then everyone pushes out.
And that's why the refugee situation is something that was so important to them.
Because it's not just about what Venezuela wants, what the Venezuelan government wants.
It's also about what the Iranians want.
And what the Iranians, when they say they were going to export the revolution, what they literally mean is we're going to build clandestine networks and routes, and we're going to move subversive agents all throughout the world.
And in Latin America, that launching pad or that gateway is in Venezuela.
I mean, there's a couple of cases that I've been involved in with law enforcement that have to do with identities.
CNN did a documentary on this, but it actually was mischaracterized because they attribute it more to passports.
And they said that the Venezuelan government was issuing passports or selling passports to members of Islamist movement, particularly Hezbollah.
But it wasn't just about the passports because they were building birth certificates, national ID cards, property records, bank records.
And so they had folks that had Venezuelan surnames.
It could be Manuel Torres, but he was really Mohammed Ibrahimi.
But he has a birth certificate in Iraq, but he has a birth certificate in Venezuela.
And so when he comes to the Western Hemisphere, he uses the Venezuelan documentation.
And there's no database in the world that could figure that out because it's legitimized by the state government of Venezuela.
And so that's something that's a tremendous concern because I don't think what we're tracking I think our Homeland Security is tracking Islamist elements and they call them special interest aliens, folks that are coming from the Middle East or countries of interest that are coming into the Western Hemisphere and might be moving up corridors that could cross along our airports and borders.
But are you tracking all the Venezuelans that are moving around the world?
I don't – maybe I hope you are, but maybe you're not.
And in that sense, that becomes a tremendous counterintelligence challenge, human intelligence challenge.
I think we're good to go.
I mean, he's already sanctioned several of the top officials and most of the top officials in Venezuela.
He's pretty much relinquished any kind of rekindling of diplomatic relations with Cuba, who's kind of a mothership of all these networks in Latin America.
He's obviously gone after Iran and Hezbollah and in the Middle East.
And I think people like Ambassador Bolton and other folks, Secretary of State Moncompel, these are folks that have been informed on this over a lot of time.
So I believe they have the right intention and they're in the right frame of mind.
The question is, are we too late?
You know, can we catch up?
Can we really? And I don't believe this is a challenge that the U.S. government has to do on their own.
This is something that society has to really get serious about because we all have a role in the national security of our country.
Well, this, of course, is one of the big problems of these endless wars in the Middle East, of course, is that by the time it comes to turning your attention closer to home, which is pretty much anywhere else in the world, but when you turn your attention closer to home, there is a war and conflict exhaustion.
That has set in to the American public to the point where they say, if somebody says, let's go and engage in Venezuela, I think people would be like, you know, we've just had the longest war in American history in Afghanistan.
Iraq was a disaster, and now Syria is a mess.
And there is this sense of war exhaustion, which is one of the horrible side effects of engagement in the Middle East, is that then they can begin to push for destabilization closer to home.
And when push comes to shove, there may not be a lot of shove left in the American spirit.
Yeah, and that's a good point.
That's what I was talking about when it comes to public opinion.
I mean, that is an advantage for the Islamist elements in the Middle East and in Iran.
I mean, they know that. They know that they're not going to support, the public won't support too much public or foreign intervention in Latin America.
They just don't have the appetite for it.
And so they can exploit that.
They can exploit that.
And I think you bring up a big grand strategy point on our foreign policy, which is Since September 11th, I think we've become a little too focused on the Middle East.
I don't want to say that – I don't want to diminish what's happening in that part of the world.
I think there's a lot of things that are important and there's things that are obviously directly impacting things like oil prices and US military presence and others.
We have to have some level of a doctrine for what we do on this side of the world, for what we do in the Western Hemisphere.
Because, you know, there was a former—the Monroe Doctrine is still technically valid and in there, but over time, it seems to be it was just a piece of paper because no one's really enforced it.
It's become the world's policeman nonsense.
Yeah, essentially. It's just become, you know, kind of a backwater of U.S. foreign policy.
And I think that that lack of focus— I used to be in the Marine Corps when I was in a previous life.
And when I was in the Marines, I used to do martial arts.
I was part of the martial arts instruction course.
And when you do kickboxing, boxing, or any kind of combat sports, you learn a central tenet in combat, which is it's not the hardest punch or the hardest kick that knocks you out.
It's the one you don't see.
The one you don't see is what knocks you out nine out of 10 times.
I believe in geo-strategically and geo-politically in the world, that punch and kick is being developed in Latin America because no one sees it.
No one cares about it. No one's looking at it.
The Monroe Doctrine is there, but no one pays attention to it.
Basically, the US and enemies of the United States around the world have made that calculation.
They've figured that out, and they're developing their capabilities.
Well, and if we look at the migrant crisis, which is I think really a crisis to a large degree of economic opportunism and a desire to suckle on the teat of the welfare state, it is of course easier to get from Central America to North America than it is to get from Africa to Europe.
And so I think while everyone's out there looking at the European migrant crisis, there is this gathering storm, of course, south of Mexico and, of course, within Mexico to some degree as well, where you may literally have, as you point out, millions of people swarming to the border.
And right now, a caravan that was tracked for weeks before it even got across was helped across.
And so is there any stomach to enforce borders along the southern border?
And if there isn't and the destabilization continues and the millions start pouring northwards, then that's going to be it for American sustainability, which is already hugely threatened by all these unfunded liabilities, this huge national debt, because those people pouring in are all going to need resources.
There aren't going to be enough.
And the population is going to turn on each other.
Oh yeah, the entitlement crisis is huge.
I mean, that's probably a different conversation, but if we don't get a handle of those unfunded liabilities, we're going to just bleed ourselves to death through Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security and welfare.
But just kind of to the point on Mexico, No, absolutely.
There's cases in the past that you can study that show you a little bit of how these networking operations move.
There was one case, for example, in 2011 or 2012.
It was a Lebanese cleric and imam who was based in San Francisco, one of these sanctuary cities.
His name was Rafiq Laboon.
He was arrested in Merida, Mexico because he was managing a human smuggling operation.
That was taking folks from the Middle East and changing their identity when they got to Belize, giving them Belizean documentation, and then moving on to Tijuana and to San Francisco.
The Mexicans caught him.
They extradited him. He's now in U.S. custody.
But he's just a drop in the bucket.
He's just one individual of a tremendous network.
But I think the border security – I support the president's initiative to create a stronger border security along our southwest border.
But that needs to be layered all the way down south.
I mean we've got to protect the border – not just us.
Us and our partners have to also do a lot of work to protect the border of the Mexican-Guatemalan border.
I mean, that's a very permeous border that, you know, that's, you know, if they get past that border, that's one step closer to getting the United States.
And even I say even go further back, go ahead and go to the Venezuelan-Colombian border.
We need to look at that border and see what's, you know, crossing through that border because there's a tremendous amount of refugees that are coming out of there.
And I can tell you, I can guarantee the Colombians don't have eyes on all of them.
Sorry, just to interrupt.
Let me ask you this question before I forget, Joseph.
Would you say that if America was able to secure its southern border, Mexico would have far less of an incentive to leave its own borders open?
Because if you're just the pass-through state from people going from Central America to America, If you're just a path to the state, it's less important.
And in fact, if you hate America, you might even, as I think they do, facilitate the passage of some of these refugees because you hate American imperialism, you hate American freedom, so however it is that that coalesces.
But if they can't get from Mexico into the United States, isn't that a great incentive for Mexico to seal up its own borders?
Well, you force them to pay attention to the problem, for sure, because they know – they're not ignorant.
They know that this is happening.
They seen – they knew – they arrested Rafi Klabun.
They know that these individuals are passing through their country.
This was actually told to me about once by a Mexican official who will remain unnamed.
But he said, you know, we know they're here, but this is not our problem.
This is your problem. You guys are – they're not after the Mexicans.
They're not trying to attack – The Mexican government, they're after the US government.
As long as they're not directly affecting our national security, then we don't see why we have to spend the resources to contain it.
So to your point on that, if we contain it, You force the Mexicans to deal with it because there's a famous attack in Latin America with Hezbollah called the Ami attack in Argentina in the 1990s.
What that showed us is that they will also attack Latin America to be able to destabilize the region and also attract the United States.
Latin Americans, they may think that they're pervolous to this threat, that it's not designed around them and they're not the center of the conflict.
But frankly, you know, the actors, the illicit actors don't care.
If they think that they have to do a terrorist attack in Peru because it'll have strategic implications that benefit their message or their efforts, they'll do that.
And I think the Latin Americans need to wake up on it.
That I work up quite a bit with our partners in Latin America is that the fact that in this part of the world, there isn't adequate legislation, anti-terror legislation.
I'm amazed. Brazil, you said in your book, there's no particular laws regarding terrorism.
There is now, as of 2016.
So the book was closed in 2014.
So they did patch one and actually saved them.
Because ISIS was going to attack them during the Rio Olympics, and that's a real operation.
ISIS was actually planning to emulate what they did in Paris, France in 2015, and they had communications that the French authorities intercepted that showed that they were implementing that same plan in Rio de Janeiro to attack the Summer Olympics.
But the fact that they passed that law in April of 2016, they arrested the operators in July of 2016.
They passed that law just in time To stop that attack.
So Brazil has it, but even, so there's about half the countries in Latin America have anti-terrorization, half the countries don't.
Of the countries that do, only I think it's believed as six countries define international terrorism.
And of the six countries that define international terrorism, none of them designate Islamic terrorist networks.
Hezbollah is not considered a terrorist in any country in Latin America.
You could go into any country in Latin America and you could set up a store and you could call it Hezbollah United Front and no one will say anything.
They'll say, oh, it's They don't have that understanding of the jihadist movement.
The way we do here in the United States and in Canada and other parts of the West.
And I think they need to wake up to that.
And I think we can play a big role in helping them do that.
We can educate them. We can connect them.
And we can train them.
But there's got to be a prioritization and an effort.
And I'm involved in a case in Peru that actually involves a Hezbollah operative who was caught potentially planning a terrorist attack in that country that some of the prosecutors there believe was aimed at the UN. For a climate change conference that was being held in Lima, Peru in 2014.
Well, this operative, when he got caught, he did three things.
He admitted, I'm from Hezbollah.
He said, I have a fake passport.
Hezbollah gave me this passport from Sierra Leone.
I'm not from Sierra Leone. I'm from Lebanon.
They asked me to take 1,000 pictures of routes and airports and soft targets and embassies.
I don't know why they asked me to do it.
They asked me to take these pictures. And because of the laws in Peru, usually what that will require is just get deported.
Because the only real crime you've committed, because being Hezbollah is not a crime, taking pictures as weird as they are isn't a crime.
It's the passport, right? It's the passport.
So most of the time they just say, okay, get out of my country, never come back, and red flag it and go.
In the case of Peru, though, they do have a better bit stronger terrorism law, so they held them.
They held them on pretrial detention, and then they held up the trial.
But when they had the trial, the first question that the judge asked is, what is Hezbollah?
And they couldn't understand that he just admitted to becoming part of an Islamic terrorist network.
So I think there's a lot of work to be done in Latin America on that front.
And that's something the US could actually take a leadership role.
I think the Trump administration could take quite a role at educating this region and telling them, you know, you're part of this global war on terror as well.
Right.
Let's talk a little bit about, I don't know how it's pronounced, Sucre, the S-U-C-R-E.
This alliance, this virtual currency is really fascinating, not only for, of course, the desire to get out of the dollar reserve currency zoo, but also the money laundering possibilities, the access that Iran could get through these kinds of things into American markets.
It's one of these very kind of vague, soft, not really seen by the West stories.
Kind of alliances, but it strikes me as I think it strikes you as very central to some of the risks.
Yeah, the sucre is a term of, well, it's actually the former currency of Ecuador, and then they dollarized it, I believe, in 2000.
But it became now more recently into the term of an accounting unit, a virtual accounting unit that's being used among a certain set of countries in Latin America.
Throughout the whole entire conversation, what we're really talking about is a collection of countries, and they have a name.
They're called the ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance.
That's who they are. It was led by Venezuela and Cuba, but it also involved Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and several Caribbean satellites.
So Ecuador took it during the – I see about the period of 2009 to 2013, 2014.
They did quite a bit of effort at restructuring the financial architecture among these countries to be able to do trade where they don't have to use the US dollar if not needed.
They could do it through their own exchange houses, through their own local currencies and their central banks.
And what the Sucre was was a virtual accounting unit that would denominate that trade.
And what it did is it created pretty much – it made certain transactions invisible to the United States because our ability to monitor money laundering or threat finance is our ability to look at dollar-denominated transactions.
If they're not in dollar-denominated transactions, we have to rely on the host country to provide that information.
So in this case, Venezuela and Ecuador, it wasn't possible money laundering.
I mean, 25% or 20%, 20% to 25% of the foreign trade transactions that were done between these two countries, Venezuela and Ecuador, using the super system were complete laundered.
They didn't exist. It was just used in paper but never was any kind of commodity that was being transferred between the two countries.
And when I examined this structure, what I got really worried was not just the money laundering concerns, but I looked at a strategic angle because what I found out was the people that were bankrolling this effort was China and Russia.
And what that made me interested, because at the same time that this is happening in this collection of countries in Latin America, China is working on an alternative SWIFT system.
So SWIFT is the wire transfer system that we use to communicate through banking networks around the world.
But China is creating a system called CEPs, which is an alternative to the SWIFT so that they can do their trade transactions without using any of the US financial authorities.
Russia is creating cryptocurrencies.
They're creating their own state-backed cryptocurrencies, which, to me, defeats the purpose of a cryptocurrency.
If it's run by a central government, then it's not really decentralized.
And then that element was then modeled into building in Venezuela.
So Venezuela launched their own cryptocurrency called the Petro.
And I think this is—I don't know if this is completely in its final stage, but If you take these different elements, state-backed cryptocurrencies, alternative financial wire system, and in a virtual accounting unit, you can create an alternative financial infrastructure, basically an alternative monetary system that's completely in the shadows, that the US dollar has nothing to do.
And when you want to do it, China would just deplete its reserves and pretty much crash the US dollar.
So it has strategic implications of what they're doing, but I think it's things that I think are far beyond – I don't believe they're ready to implement this tomorrow, but I think they're definitely working on it.
Well, I think that the goal of cryptocurrency in Russia and in other places is simply to avoid the coming implosion of the US dollar, if at all humanly possible.
I mean, the fact that it's anonymous is nice for it.
There already are those solutions for cryptos, but I think everyone's just trying to get off the US dollar titanic.
Now, let's talk a little bit about...
What to do. And this is going to be surprising information to, I think, a lot of the listenership to this show.
And they're going to be like, oh, great.
You know, now Iran's in Venezuela and Hezbollah is coming across the border and Islamic extremism is taking root in Central America.
And there's going to be, of course, a sense of unease.
And the best way to deal with unease is proactive action.
So what would you suggest that people do who are the joyful recipients of this new information?
Yeah, so I think there's plenty of things.
I think one is we have to kind of have a back to the basics when it comes to U.S. foreign policy.
I mean, if you go through the history of U.S. foreign policy, I mean, kind of the Jeffersonian version of foreign policy, it wasn't to do with going to foreign adventures in all corners and pockets of the world.
It had a lot to do with the Western Hemisphere.
It had a lot to do with protecting your neighborhood, creating a safe neighborhood around the United States and around North America so that we can be able to prosper and have peace.
And I think that element has completely disappeared.
I mean our foreign policy is now pretty much focused in the Middle East, some interest in Europe.
It does seem to be a challenge to say no to Israel for a lot of American politicians.
There's a lot of interest in Israel. There's a lot of interest in pivots to Asia and things like that.
I think there's got to be a back to the basics of understanding what foreign policy meant, what was the strategy among the founding fathers for foreign policy, and why is Latin America, Canada, why is the Western Hemisphere important?
Not just to US peace, but also to global stability.
I think there's a reason for that.
So I think that's first and foremost.
Second is we have to be smart on Iran.
I think there's a lot of folks, and there's a lot of folks that just underestimate Iran's capabilities.
They think that Iran may just be kind of a quack revolution from back in the 1979s, 80s, and that they haven't done anything to dominate the Middle East.
But if you put it from this context, Shia Islam, which is, you know, Iran's a Shia-backed movement.
Shia Islam represents about maximum 15% of the Muslim world.
But control is probably 75% of the Middle East.
That's an interesting perspective, because the same thing that they've been doing in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Syria, increasingly in Yemen, now Turkey, to create the control of the Levant, the way they use that, that's an Iranian strategy.
And that same subversive strategy to take over the Middle East is now being implemented in Latin America.
Well, and they've got a lot of walkabout money from Obama.
Yeah, well, they got $150 billion in escrow accounts to get unfrozen from sanctions, really.
And I think they got $1.6 billion in cash, hard currency cash that got sent in pallets to the republic.
But no doubt, some of that money went back to Hezbollah.
And I guarantee some of that money went to Latin America as well.
Some of them paid back some of the patrons in the region.
But I think for your listeners and for everyone on a solution set, the most important is we have to get smart about our strategy with Iran.
It's not just all about their nuclear program.
It's not just all about their efforts in Syria and in Yemen.
Iran is a global revolution.
It's a global movement.
It considers itself the leader of the anti-imperialist movement.
It's connected to all the communist socialist networks around the world.
And we have to understand their capabilities and have a proper threat assessment, a non-politicized threat assessment, to be able to deal with it.
And then lastly, I'd say we have to get started on immigration.
I mean, it's going to happen.
It's not whether Joseph wants it.
It's not whether Stefan is warning about it.
It's already happening.
And the Venezuela crisis, whatever worries that we have because of the migration flows, the illegal migration flows from Central America, Mexico to the United States, now it's going to be in a magnitude of 100 once the refugee crisis in Venezuela really explodes.
Well, I also wanted to mention as well for a lot of the older people in the audience, It's a different kind of thing from communism because when communism took over in a country, it sealed its borders and you had to risk machine gunning and barbed wire and landmines to get the hell out of a communist country.
That's not how communism and that's not how destabilization is, not how socialism works these days.
The way that socialism works these days Is destroy the country, open the borders, and point everyone at the West.
And with the welfare state and with, you know, I think ridiculously, sentimentally overgenerous refugee and child refugee programs and so on, it is no longer that a totalitarian government takes over a country and creates a giant fiery moat filled with alligators and machine guns to keep everyone in.
Now it seems like the destabilization is in order to push people out because now human migration has become a weapon rather than a flight.
No. Nowadays, crises are designed to be exported.
They're not designed to be just contained within a country.
And I think that brings the point that these networks – the Southern Command, which is the military combatant command that's responsible for Latin America, they have a good approach to this.
They don't just look at this as like Islamist networks and criminal networks and drug cartels.
They call them just threat networks, transnational threat networks.
And I think that's the right approach.
We can't just look at this in one silo versus another silo.
And the government loves to compartmentalize.
So they have all these analysts that do different types of works and they never talk to each other.
So that's got to go. And they got to look at the problem just from a holistic perspective and look at all these networks and how they're moving.
And I agree to the point of, you know, The way this is being exported, and not just on a strategic level, but on a tactical level, is tremendously interesting, because it's not all just the people movement.
The ideas travel faster than people, and the ideology is actually moving much quicker into the United States through the internet and through other places, and it's radicalizing folks, not just for the Islamic side, but on all kinds of separatist movements, communist movements.
It's like a rebirth of radicalization that's taking place in the United States and in other parts of the world.
And that's happening in concerted with the movement of these people.
So it's basically an asymmetric approach to bring down the West.
Well, and I don't think it's too far to say, and this is certainly my perspective, I'd like to get your thoughts on it.
I believe that immigration is the most foundational national security issue that faces the West at the moment.
Yeah, well, immigration is where it begins.
You know, nothing, national sovereignty depend on national borders, and our ability to protect those borders determines if we're a sovereign state.
If we lose that ability, you're no longer a sovereign country and you're basically connected to both the good things that happen in the world, but also the bad things.
I think that's fundamental to any kind of national security strategy.
Open your country to people if your country is well-loved, if your country is well-respected, if people are moving to your country because they love the values that you manifest and so on.
It's quite another thing when you've been the world's policeman and caused the deaths of millions of people around the world, fomented revolutions, overthrown legitimate governments and so on, and now waged war in the Middle East for 17 years, then opening your borders when you're not well-liked.
It's one thing to throw a house party if you're popular.
It's quite another thing to throw a house party if you're not, and the outcome tends to be quite different.
You just gave me a visual of throwing like a house party in the middle of the worst neighborhood in Baltimore.
The KKK is opening its doors to Black Lives Matter.
It's going to be great. I mean, this is not how things can work.
So, Joseph, what is your major concern as things are really unfolding or unraveling in Venezuela?
What is the worst case scenario in your mind?
So, I think Trump is making a lot of good movements in national security on immigration and other places.
I mean, he's obviously not getting exactly where he wants his deal with Congress.
But I think there is a miscalculation happening around Venezuela.
And that miscalculation happens because the intelligence community, the law enforcement community, everybody that's involved with our national security has a premise that they believe that the Venezuelan government wants to maintain power.
That the whole design about the criminal terrorist element in Venezuela is just about keeping stable power so they could keep their dictatorship in the country.
And I don't believe that is the premise.
I believe that's a false premise. I believe Venezuela is designed to be a crisis and a war.
The Venezuelan revolution, the Bolivarian revolution, It wants to export itself, and it wants to create the conflict to do so.
And so if that's the case, if the case is that – Chávez proved this.
Hugo Chávez, if all Hugo Chávez cared about was being alive – He wouldn't have ran the stump in his last year when he was in full-blood stage 4 cancer, and he would have gotten medical treatment, proper medical treatment, and try to survive.
But he decided to sacrifice himself politically and then physically when he died to advance the revolution.
So when the Bolivarian Revolution explodes and the refugee crisis really takes numbers that are untenable, upwards of 5 million, Then I think everybody's going to realize that that was a conflict that was brewing in the making.
So in my opinion, the Trump administration, all the elements of national security, they have to prepare for that.
They have to prepare for the scenario where Venezuela explodes and it creates a flood of refugees similar to what Syria did to Europe, into North America.
And by that point, we better hope that the border security is solved.
Well, and I would argue that the Democrats, who seem to have as great a hatred for the traditional American system as many foreign operatives, are probably going to try and prevent any kind of war because I think in their heart of hearts, they desire the same outcome as Chavez.
You know, what would be sad is if the Democrats or whoever starts to basically understand that, you know, they look at the Venezuela as just a humanitarian situation and wants to basically incentivize to have more refugees coming to the United States.
I'm not against helping the refugees, but the refugees are victims of this.
It just takes one time.
That a terrorist attack anywhere in the world happens, and then you look inside the terrorist pocket and there's a Venezuelan passport.
That's going to destroy it for all Venezuelan refugees, and that's prepared to take place.
And if that happens, then we're going to be in worse problems than just a refugee program or an immigration issue.
All right. Well, I really, really want to thank you for your time.
I want to remind people to check out the book.
We'll put the link to the book below.
Iran's Strategic Penetration of Latin America.
It's, well, not for me, a very hair-raising read, but for obvious reasons.
But the Twitter account is twitter.com forward slash jmhumeyer, H-U-M. I-R-E. And the website is securefreesociety.org.
I really, really appreciate your time.
I hope you'll come back and keep us up to date on the progress because there does seem to be some movement on this stuff in the new administration.
Absolutely, Stefan. And pay attention to Venezuela.
I'll come back on your show and hopefully with good news on that.
