At least 80 people have been killed in 21 separate US strikes on Venezuelan boats, the most recent of which came only this weekend. The White House says they’re trafficking drugs to the United States - but whatever the purpose of the strikes, it’s very clear that something big is happening. The US has sent the world’s biggest aircraft carrier to the Caribbean Sea, where it joins a whole fleet of warships in the biggest military build-up for almost 40 years. What many of Trump’s supporters can’t imagine is how attacking Venezuela can possibly be reconciled with ‘America First.’ And critics on both sides worry about the long precedent of US presidents using war as a distraction. Piers Morgan discusses whether America is heading for war with former CIA operative Mike Baker, former US ambassador to Venezuela James Story, author, journalist and co-host of ‘Breaking Points’ Ryan Grim and Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: OneSkin: Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PIERS at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod Tax Network USA: Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit https://TNUSA.com/PIERS to speak with a strategist for FREE today ExpressVPN: Right now you can get an extra four months of ExpressVPN for free. Just scan the QR code on the screen, or go to https://ExpressVPN.com/PIERS and get four extra months for free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Chasing Money in Venezuela00:14:40
They want regime change in Venezuela, but I don't understand why the United States would have to wage their war for them.
And I'm most interested in chasing the money in the organizations now that are building apartments in Medellin and buying apartment buildings in Miami.
Why are migrants coming to our shores?
It's because of the coup program that virtual ambassador and coup manager Jimmy Story oversaw, which brought Venezuela's economy to its knees by 2020, reversing all the gains they had made when Ugo Chavez slashed extreme poverty by 50%.
Well, apparently I forgot to wear my tinfoil hat for the panel today.
At least 80 people have been killed in 21 separate U.S. strikes on Venezuelan boats, the most recent of which came only this weekend.
The White House says they're trafficking drugs to the United States, although we only have their word for that.
And whatever the purpose of the strikes, it's very clear that something big is happening.
The U.S. has sent the world's biggest aircraft carrier to the Caribbean Sea, where it joins a whole fleet of warships in the biggest military build-up there for almost 40 years.
Venezuelan dictator, Nicolas Maduro, has urged Trump to change cause and channel John Lennon instead.
What many of Trump's supporters can't imagine is how attacking Venezuela can possibly be reconciled with America first.
And critics on both sides worry about the long precedent of U.S. presidents using war as a distraction.
So is the U.S. really heading for war?
We're joining me to discuss all this is Mike Baker, the former CIA operative, host of the President's Daily Brief.
Ambassador James Story, the former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela, Ryan Grimm, the drop site co-founder and co-host of Breaking Points, and Max Bimental, the editor of The Grey Zone.
Welcome to all of you.
Mike Baker, I want to start with a clip of Donald Trump talking on Air Force One on Sunday night.
Hi, Venezuela, sir.
You've had a lot of meetings on Venezuela.
I know you can't tell us what your next steps will be, but can we say, have you made up your mind on what you'd like to do as far as action?
I don't have made up my mind.
I can't tell you what it would be, but I certainly did.
What do you say to some of your supporters who might not be excited about another foreign campaign?
We'll see what happens.
I mean, I can't tell you what it is, but we've made a lot of progress with Venezuela in terms of stopping drugs from warring here.
Well, to go with that, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a statement on Sunday announcing that the U.S. intends to consider the group Cartel de los Sols, a foreign terrorist organization from November 24.
The U.S. alleges the group is led by the Venezuelan president, Maduro.
So Mike Baker, what do you make of this?
What is happening here, both in the attacks on these boats, which the administration says are all drug smuggling, and also the wider buildup of the military, which is pointing to an altogether more serious military engagement with Venezuela?
Yeah, there's a lot of elements here.
It's a lot of moving parts, but I think what we're seeing is a couple of things happening at the same time.
One, obviously, they've stepped up their counter-narcotics operations.
I can't speak to the legality of all of this, the legal issues that surround knocking these vessels out of the water and killing over 80 people.
I was from an operational perspective, you can talk about the credibility of the intel.
You know, from my perspective, I don't have insight on that, so it's speculation.
But I would like to see, I can tell you, I would like to see a little bit more transparency to the degree that you can from the administration to say these are the have been the targets.
These are this is why we are going after them specifically rather than just some blanket statement saying they're narco-traffickers, they were on a narco-trafficking route, uh, whatever it may be.
So, they need to, I think that's a real problem for them.
Um, but the buildup that's out there, if you're just looking at a kind of narcotics operation, it doesn't make any sense, it's outsized, right?
So, having a carrier strike group out there along with all the other uh support assets and uh vessels that are there, that doesn't make sense from a just a pure counter-narcotics operational perspective.
So, I would look at that then and say, well, there's another track here, which is the effort to influence Maduro to move out of the way.
And, you know, again, it's speculation as to whether they intend to get involved in a kinetic effort on the ground inside Venezuela to actually affect regime change, or whether they're saying, Look, we think we can exert enough pressure to create change internally.
Maduro either deciding to step down, I don't think that's going to happen, or his closest advisors or the senior military telling him that's going to have to happen.
Okay, Ryan Grimm, um, you posted uh cartel de lost souls is the most obvious CIA made-up name for a cartel ever.
No cartel names itself like that.
This is a Langley creation, so finding the leaders shouldn't be hard.
Uh, explain what you mean.
So, the CIA is based in Langley, so that's what I mean.
If I was being a little obscure there, uh, if you know, if they want to find out, you know, who's responsible for creating this cartel, uh, just you know, pull out your waves or your GP, you know, GPS and find your way out to CIA headquarters.
I think Max could probably tell you more about the specific uh details of how this cartel came about, but it was effectively this like bizarre creation where like you've got the Defense Department, the CIA involved in some uh, you know, counter, uh, you know, they're where they're trying to basically overthrow a government and they need some like narco-terrorists uh for whatever play they're using.
And so, they kind of fabricate this cartel of the sun and call it cartel of the sun.
It's like, what are you, what are you even doing?
No, this is not even serious.
Like, give us like at least something that is like plausible that we can cling to.
Like, what happened to the days where like you're like, okay, maybe Saddam Hussein at one point did have weapons of mass destruction.
He didn't then, but at least like it's plausible.
Like, there's so little respect for the American people now that when they're trying to march them into war, they don't even give them something that they can even pretend to believe.
So, what do you think they really want to do here?
Well, I think the Rubio wing, and I think we need to distinguish between President Trump and Rubio in this case.
Rubio has been boxed out of Ukraine, has been boxed out of Gaza.
So, he's got his little Caribbean sandbox here.
And what he is doing is playing out the fantasies of the Cuban right over the last couple of decades.
And they want regime change in Venezuela, and they think that that'll have the knock-on effect of creating regime change back in Cuba.
That's fine if the Cuban right wants to do that, but I don't understand why the United States would have to wage their war for them.
The same kind of pressure was applied to President Obama when it came to Libya.
And unfortunately for us, for Libya, for the region, Obama capitulated to that.
And we now have this disastrous situation that the entire world is living with.
I think Trump is aware that this kind of attempt to just decapitate a regime is likely to lead to another Libya situation.
And so far, I think Trump actually deserves credit for standing up to this war hawk wing.
And in fact, if he does stand them down and resist a war, I'd almost say you would give him credit for stopping a war because to have a hawkish element, you know, this committed to regime change and to be able to stop that even as president is not that simple.
Ambassador Story, I don't think politically that Trump is in a great place right now with his base because of the Epstein scandal, because of the Israel mass war.
to go and try and affect regime change in a place like Venezuela.
I just think never mind the sort of military operational side or even the ethics of it, just from a purely political perspective, it would seem to me to be an entirely self-harming act, wouldn't it?
Yes, and I think Trump understood.
Sorry, sorry.
That was actually...
Sorry, Ryan, that was for Ambassador Story.
Well, I'd be delighted if you wanted to answer the part on the Epstein files, to be honest with you.
I'd rather say that I'd like to go back to why, what's the cause's belly here?
What do we actually know to be the case?
And this isn't an invention that the Croctel de los Soles exists.
You can talk to Clever Acala, who's in jail.
You can talk to Poyo Carvajal, who's in jail.
You can talk to the nephews of Celia Flores, who's married to Maduro, who were in jail.
This is a criminal group masquerading as a government.
And regime change already took place.
It took place in July of last year when there was a vote overwhelmingly against Maduro by the Venezuelan people themselves.
So does the president, what is the president's intentions?
Certainly, our first panelist today said that this is much more than counter-narcotics.
That's correct.
It's pressure on the Maduro regime, on the dictatorship.
It's additional pressure that that which the Venezuelan people gave when they, again, they voted overwhelmingly to get him out of office last year.
Now, where we go from here, what's the next step?
That remains to be seen.
But the president certainly has a number of options at his disposal.
But you don't believe it's purely a war on drugs.
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
I ran counter-narcotics in Colombia for two years.
I ran counter-narcotics in the Western Hemisphere for three.
I can tell you that these are the types of resources and military hardware that are frankly a little heavy-handed when it comes to counter-narcotics.
Generally speaking, we use white hulls.
Those are Coast Guard vessels.
We judicialize the cases.
And frankly, the kind of unilateral action we're taking in the region will have knock-on effects, negative knock-on effects, undermining intelligence sharing across the region with our partners.
Out of Key West, Florida, we have Joint Interagency Task Force South, and that has 20 liaison officers from the region as well as from the UK, France, and the Netherlands.
The intel sharing will dry up.
And I'm most interested in chasing the money in the organizations down that are building apartments in Medellin and buying apartment buildings in Miami.
And I think that going it that judicialized route gives us more intelligence, helps us shore up our regional relationships, and is a better approach.
Certainly, this will have an impact on drug trafficking, but drug traffickers are transnational.
They don't pay attention to borders.
They also aren't democratic, and they don't work by committee.
So they will change their route.
And before I go to Max, I just wanted to ask you on the legality of these attacks on the boats, which the administration say are drug smugglers.
They're not getting any prior approval from Congress for this.
They're not providing much information in terms of what evidence they've had to justify what they've done.
In your opinion, is what is happening here with these boats legal?
Listen, I think that if you look at going after foreign terrorist organizations, as we did under many of the prior administrations, going back to Bush, and you can look at Obama, and you can look at Clinton, you can look, there was a methodology by which targets were assessed and went through a preview process, and then the president had the ultimate decision.
I don't know what the process is here.
What I can tell you is what the impacts will be for our cooperation regionally, and that's a negative impact on our cooperation.
So, and certainly the Congress has a role to play with AUMF, the authorized use of military force.
To the extent that Congress is back in session and wants to take up this issue, they may indeed need to do so.
Okay, Max Playmental, a lot to unpack here, obviously.
First of all, on that point about the attacks on these boats, there'll be a lot of Americans who'll say, well, if they are drug smugglers, happy days.
Why should we care?
There are not a lot of Americans who believe that only 29% of Americans, according to a recent Reuters Ipsos poll, support these murderous attacks on supposed drug boats without due process that have killed citizens of Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Colombian citizens, and cause British government to suspend intelligence cooperation, as the virtual ambassador James Story just acknowledged.
This is all based, as Ryan pointed out, on a series of WMD-level lies that haven't even been explained to the American public, which is why only 21% of the American public, according to that poll, supports this criminal regime change war in the making, which will negatively affect them.
That's what Story meant when he called, when he referred to knock-on effects, meaning more mass migration.
The big lie of this war is the Cartel of the Suns.
As Ryan said, the Cartel of the Sons was literally created by the CIA, also known as the Cocaine Import Agency, to ship 22 tons of drugs into the United States in the early 90s through its main point of contact in the pre-Chavez Venezuelan National Guard, General Ramon Guillen Davila.
And he wore a patch on his arm that was a sun.
And so they just called it the Cartel of the Suns as cover.
And they thought that they would use these.
This was also during the 80s under Reagan.
They thought they would use these drug shipments to gain intelligence on drug traffickers in the U.S.
It wound up poisoning our own society.
The CIA for doing that should be classified as a narco-terrorist organization.
Then there's Trende Aragua, the supposed gang that Nicolas Maduro is said to control by the Trump administration.
That's another WMD-level lie that U.S. intelligence exposed in a declassified April report from this year.
The Cartel of the Suns00:07:47
And you know what happened?
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard came out and fired, presided over the firing of the two officials who exposed the lie that Maduro controls TDA and is invading the United States.
Why are migrants coming to our shores?
It's because of the coup program, the regime change program that virtual ambassador and coup manager Jimmy Story and other U.S. foreign policy apparatchiks oversaw, which brought Venezuela's economy to its knees by 2020, reversing all the gains they had made when Hugo Chavez slashed extreme poverty by 50%.
This caused mass migration, and it's not just according to me, it's according to Thomas Shannon, who was undersecretary for the State Department in Donald Trump's administration, who said U.S. sanctions reduced Venezuela's economy to dust.
He told this to the Washington Post, and it caused out-migration.
So if Donald Trump is going to fall into Marco Rubio's selfish Gusano games, we are going to see another massive wave of migration to the U.S.-Mexico border.
And whether you're on the right or the left, you do not want that and you cannot fall for another WMD series of lies that will produce a Libya in the Western Hemisphere.
Okay, Mike Baker, your response to that.
Well, apparently, I forgot to wear my tinfoil hat for the panel today.
There's nothing I can say that it's going to change Max or Ryan's position.
talked with folks like this before who, you know, great.
I don't know where to go with that.
I would say that, you know, from my perspective.
Well, what do you know about what the CIA is?
The problem here is the problem here is, as is usual, is a lack of transparency.
And whether it's from the Trump administration or previous administration, I am a big proponent of transparency here on something like this.
This is a serious matter, right?
I'm also a big proponent of counter-narcotics operations.
I spent a lot of time in the drug wars.
And one thing that I think we need to insist on from the current administration is more explanation, right?
I'm not comfortable saying with a blanket authority that, yeah, sure, we're going to trust the credibility of the intel on these various targets.
I'm not talking about legality.
I'm not talking about, I'm not just not going to go into the things that Max and Ryan are talking about because from my perspective, that just lends it credibility if I try to refute that.
It's like, you know, when was the last time you beat your wife, Senator?
So I think, you know, I would argue that there's two things happening here.
They're operating on a dual track.
They are going after narcotics.
This ambassador is absolutely correct.
Colombia has already shut down intel sharing.
This will have ramifications that I don't think the State Department or the White House understand.
And I think at the same time, they are pressuring.
There's no doubt about it.
Look, are they after regime change?
Sure.
That should not be a goal here.
I think if we can pressure internally the advisors around Maduro to say it's time for you to step down, that would, in fact, I don't know whether Max and Ryan agree with me, but that a change in government in Venezuela, I'm not saying regime change.
I'm just saying if Maduro stepped down, that would be a wonderful thing for the Venezuelan people, I think, unless they're big proponents of the form of socialism that Maduro is pushing.
Anyway, that's what I got.
Ambassador Story, obviously the United States doesn't recognize Maduro as the president after the outcome of that last election in 2024.
It's being dismissed widely internationally as well and by the opposition in Venezuela.
The opposition leader of Venezuela just got the Nobel Peace Prize, which many think was not a coincidence.
That election is deemed to have been neither free nor fair.
And they believe the opposition party won the election, but the Maduro government stole it.
So you have that as the backdrop to the legitimacy of the Maduro election.
But history also shows us that when the United States tries to enforce regime change anywhere in the world, it's rarely anything but a bit of a mess, often with extremely bad repercussions.
You know, is it not better?
I mean, Trump's instincts have always been America first, fewer foreign wars, don't go and rattle hornets' nests.
He's got the Israel-Hamas war, which is thankfully now reached a point of ceasefire at the moment.
He's getting nowhere in Ukraine.
I just don't think that his instincts will be telling him that going in there mob-handed to effect regime change would be anything but a potential disaster, maybe not militarily, but politically for him.
Well, I want to kind of turn your, you asked like five questions in one here, and I want to try to pull it apart a little bit without going after the ad hominem attacks by one of the other panelists.
I think we need to recognize a couple of things here.
One, this is a criminal group masquerading as a government, without a doubt.
Two, this is a group of people, Maduro and company, who have crimes against humanity charges against them and the ICC.
They have narcotics trafficking indictments in the United States.
They are responsible for the mass migration, which started in 2017, before the oil sanctions began to be even instituted.
Therefore, 9 million people have already fled that country because they're fleeing torture, dictatorship, and death.
What happened to Captain Acosta Arevalo?
What happened to General Bauduel?
What happened to Fernando Alban?
And what we have, we have people who continue to make excuses for a murderous regime because they don't like the politics of the current administration in the United States.
Now, the president has a number of options.
I do not believe that Maduro will end in Haiti or Libya or Iraq.
That's simply not true.
Now, Maduro likes to talk about Afghanistan and Vietnam, and it will be, we're going to enter this terrible moment.
It's not true.
And it's not true because they have the resources to rebuild their country.
They don't have the same level of sectarian or ideological divide.
Heck, most of the people from the leadership of the opposition to the leadership of the Maduro regime, they went to college together.
They're first cousins.
They know each other.
This is a country that's set to be, once it regains its democracy, really an economic engine for the whole region.
I have a much more optimistic view of the ability of the Venezuelan people to create a transitional government, fix the institutions that have been destroyed, and become a normal part of society again.
Brian Grimm, a lot of people think the big play here is that the United States, under Donald Trump, they want to get their hands on Venezuela's resources.
Max actually posted on X last week, Trump has folded Dick Cheney's fake war on terror into Ronald Reagan's phony war on drugs to justify a war to steal Venezuela's resources.
Do you share that view that this is the bigger picture here?
And how do you argue when you try and sort of argue against any action against Venezuela?
How do you argue that much of the international community does believe it's an illegitimate government?
There shouldn't be an office to start with.
Protecting Your Digital Privacy00:02:06
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Well, yes, I think Trump himself has been pretty transparent and open that the main objective here is Venezuelan resources, Venezuela, in particular, Venezuelan oil.
Confronting Presidential Illegality00:10:08
I don't think, I don't even think that he would deny that.
I'm sure you ask him that directly.
He'd be like, yeah, that's precisely it.
On the question of their, you know, you know, elections and, you know, human rights abuses, yes, sure.
Like, I'm glad to hear that our fellow panelists uphold the virtues of the International Criminal Court.
I hope he agrees with applying those standards universally to other countries that are committing genocides and human rights abuses as well.
But, you know, Gaddafi, I don't think it was anybody's favorite person around the world, but going in and launching a regime change didn't benefit the Libyans, didn't benefit us, didn't benefit the rest of the world.
So, yeah, I just don't think that it would be the cakewalk that people are suggesting.
Well, Max, that is certainly the concern, isn't it?
I mean, if you look at actually a lot of the regime change that happened during that whole frenzied sort of Arab Spring period, you know, a lot of unrest was caused by it.
A lot of deaths came as a result of it.
It's hard to see that much stability was brought through it.
You know, the Iraq war was pretty well a disaster and so on.
You know, I can understand people's concerns that just barreling into Venezuela, whatever the reason, whether it's to affect regime change, whether it's because of the drugs, whether it's because of the oil, is probably a bit of all of that.
I mean, it could just turn out to be another quagmire.
Well, I think Americans are sick of regime change wars for plunder.
That's why this is so unpopular.
And just to quickly respond to two points the other panelists made, Mike Baker accused me of wearing a tinfoil hat.
The truth about the cartel of the suns being okay, fine.
I just want to point this out for viewers.
The truth about the CIA founding the cartel of the suns to ship cocaine in the United States was exposed to a national U.S. televised audience by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes in 1993, back when 60 Minutes reported on the CIA and not on behalf of the CIA.
And just quickly to respond to virtual ambassador Story, who accused me of ad hominem attacks, you are a government official.
You are a veteran coup plotter.
And it is legitimate for a journalist to scrutinize the activities of a coup plotting government official who in February 2021 hosted a insurrectionist summit at the Marriott Hotel in Bogota, you with Leopoldo Lopez, the U.S.-backed coup leader who staged multiple failed military coups and led violent riots that saw Afro-Venezuelan citizens burned in the streets.
Check out Orlando Figuera.
And Carlos Vecchio, the fake ambassador to Venezuela, who is actually the lawyer for ExxonMobil, which seeks to regain its control of Venezuelan fields.
This is one of the most deeply anti-democratic opposition movements led by Maria Carina Machado, who has led several coup attempts in Venezuela.
I mean, it's basically like January 6th, again and again, with the sponsorship of the U.S. Embassy, violent riots that have killed hundreds.
I personally watched Maria Carina Machado attempt to take over La Carlota air base in Caracas while the U.S. was trying to ram aid trucks into Venezuela, which the Venezuelan opposition subsequently burned and blamed on Maduro.
This is a corrupt opposition that stole millions of dollars from Citco after the U.S. stole it from Venezuela.
This is a corrupt opposition that has paid millions to U.S. mercenaries like Jordan Goudreau, who I interviewed, who has personally described to me what the real agenda here is, which was for Trump Incorporated cronies to get their hands on contracts and to plunder Venezuela's rich mineral wealth and oil.
Ambassador Story revealed the agenda himself when he appeared on a straightforward propaganda piece for regime change on 60 Minutes and said Nicolas Maduro is a bad actor sitting on the world's largest oil reserves.
Well, that's why you consider him a bad actor because there's plenty of bad actors in the world and neither of you will condemn ICC wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu or call for his arrest, will you?
Neither of you will talk about Ecuadorian President Danielle Navoa's role in the international drug trade through Benita and his family shipping, his family shipping company.
I mean, the list goes on and on.
I could spend the next 45 minutes talking about U.S. sponsored bad actors, but there are bad actors.
The reason Maduro is a bad actor is because he's a very important part of the world.
I think it's only fair.
It's only fair.
They're rather giving you another 45 minutes to expand on that.
Let me ask Ambassador Story for his.
I've got to give you a right of reply to that.
So respond.
I mean, of course, I mean, Max is often wrong and never in doubt.
That's his stocking trade.
And he will never say anything bad about Putin because that's where his finances come from.
If you actually look at the-I've been specifically talking about- U.S. official is lying about me being funded by Russia.
This is all they have is lies for supporting Democratic lies.
Nobody wants to talk about Fernando Alban being thrown off the 10th story of the La Coyde.
Nobody wants to talk about Captain Acosta Arevolo clearly, clearly near death in court, begging for help.
The human rights abuses, the killings, the destruction of institutions within Venezuela.
And then you have this Democratic opposition which shunned everything.
They've gone out into the streets and they've protested.
They've run in elections.
They've won elections.
They've negotiated military coups.
They've organized it.
At the end of all of this, they win an election, and that's still not good enough for people.
So I'm going to stick with the Venezuelan people.
And the Venezuelan people voted him out of office, and I believe he should be gone.
Okay, Mike Baker, I want to play you a clip.
This is Chris Murphy, the U.S. Senator on ABC, when he was asked about this last week.
Well, it seems pretty clear it's just an effort to distract people from the rising prices and from the Epstein scandal.
No one wants a war with Venezuela to the extent they're claiming it has something to do with the drug trade coming into the United States.
The majority of drugs don't come through the Caribbean.
They come via a land route, a land route that the president is ignoring because he is so focused on this absurd, illegal military campaign against Venezuela.
So I don't think he'll find much support amongst Republicans or Democrats in this country for it.
And by the way, it's wildly illegal.
The president can't start a war with a nation without a congressional authorization.
It's just another sign of how out of control and how lawless this president is and another signal to Democrats as to why we need to draw those firm moral lines in the sand right now to constrain his growing illegality.
It's interesting, it might be good to me to hear that, given that I don't remember Senator Murphy being quite so vocal when Barack Obama was dropping bombs all over the world or running what many consider to be illegal drone programs.
So his insistence on congressional prior approval for this kind of thing seems to be singularly related to the Republicans.
But given what he said there, do you believe there is perhaps an ulterior motive that Donald Trump wants to distract people's attention?
This is a good way to do it.
I mean, it's an enormously visible and costly way of doing it if that's the case.
I'm not saying it's not.
Look, I'm shocked that politics would play a role in here and that they would be looking for a reason to beat on the Trump administration.
Every party in power does the same damn thing.
I would pick up on something that Ryan said that I agree with 100%.
If anybody in the White House or anybody in the administration of the Pentagon or the State Department imagined somehow that a kinetic movement into Venezuela to affect regime change would somehow be a rather straightforward, they don't understand how complicated, how complex, and how messy something like that would be.
So I go back to my original statement, which I suspect, and I don't know, but I would suspect that their strategy, if there is one, within the White House on this issue is to exert sufficient pressure to get an internal change.
Again, I don't think it's going to come as a decision from Maduro, but from people around him in one way or another.
So again, is that a form of regime change?
Absolutely.
Does it ultimately, as the ambassador mentioned, would that benefit the people of Venezuela?
Well, one would hope so.
I mean, they were once one of the wealthiest nations in the region, and now they're a basket case.
I know that our other panelists say that that's because of U.S. actions.
And certainly the sanctions have impacted the economy.
There's no doubt about that.
Again, I can only speak to the operational aspects of this and the buildup there is outsized and doesn't make sense if all you're talking about is a counter-narcotics situation.
And yes, there are multiple routes for narcotics coming into the U.S.
I would argue that, you know, Mexico is target number one if that's the problem.
We should be going after that in a bigger way.
Yeah, I don't think, though, to go back to your question, Pierce, I'd have a hard time imagining that even the Trump administration, which sometimes seems operating in chaos, would look and say, you know what, we need a distraction from higher prices in the U.S.
So, you know what?
Let's do a massive military buildup in the Caribbean.
It seems like a bit of a stretch.
Yeah, I would say that's probably right.
We're going to leave it there.
A fascinating debate.
Thank you all very much.
I appreciate it.
Piers Morgan Uncensored00:00:25
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