Transcript: Why Trump Overthrowing Venezuela’s Government Was Crazy

So I wrote a whole book called The Insiders’ Game, which is about how basically elites make decisions about war and peace, and the public sort of looks at what the elites are saying about it, and if there’s not much disagreement, they go along. It wouldn’t surprise me if that happened here. But I do think what happens on the ground in Venezuela is clearly ... I think what was shocking about this morning is there was no prospect that America would be entangled in the aftermath. It could be horrific for Venezuela on the ground—repression, we don’t know what’s happening. But when Trump started saying, “We’re going to run it,” that just raises the specter of a huge range of outcomes from, “Nah, we’re not going to get involved” ... I keep waiting for the reporting, the background walk-back.

Bacon: The walk-back? Yeah, I think it’s probably coming. Yeah, because he’s—let me ask, because in terms of what happened on Friday night—it was unprecedented. On the one hand, there are a lot of precedents of the U.S. doing regime change. On the other hand, I think we were surprised by this, because this is not exactly—there was a long discussion about what would happen in Iraq, and how, and so on. This feels different. So do you think this was weird and unprecedented, or not really?

Saunders: So on the one hand, there’s a really long history of this in Latin America in particular. It goes back to ... as far back as when the U.S. acquired the power to project power into other regions. So late nineteenth century, and we intervened in Cuba, in Dominican Republic, several times. You can’t even count them. There have been so many, and that’s before you even get to the Cold War interventions that are quite notorious. The precedent I think people are pointing to is Panama and Noriega. But ... I don’t have a problem with making these analogies, but I do think that there’s a limit to how much the precedent really matters because we are in a different universe right now.