InFocus featuring discussion on Venezuela

From the 22 News Plus studio, this is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Barry. Hello everyone, and welcome to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host, Patrick Barry. And today we are talking about Venezuela, the takeover of Venezuela by the United States a week or two ago. And then we will also morph into some other global concerns that sort of play a role with the Venezuela conversation. Joining me today across the desk on the left side is Jamie Rowan. She is a director of the Center for Justice and Law and Societies at UMass Amherst. Thank you very much for joining me today. And then off to the right is Alex Theodoridis. He is Associate Professor of Political Science at UMass. Alex, thank you for joining me today. I'm excited to have this conversation because you both bring a specialty to this conversation. Jamie, I want to start with you because this is your specialty. What happened, let's go back to the basics. What happened with the, it's not even an invasion. I don't even know what you would call it with Venezuela and the removal of the Venezuelan president. Well, we have to go back to 2020 if we actually want to start more recent. I could go back further. But in 2020, the Department of Justice, which is the branch of the United States government that prosecutes people for federal crimes, indicted Nicolas Maduro. And what that means is that if Nicolas Maduro were arrested, he would be brought to trial. The problem is courts in the United States do not have jurisdiction over individuals that are in foreign countries. What typically happens if the United States issues an indictment for somebody in a foreign country is the person can stay there, actually. People flee. This is what people do. This is why some people are detained prior to trial because if they flee, they are not going to necessarily be extradited, which is the term for when another country sends a person who has been indicted or previously arrested back to the United States. So let me interrupt you there for a second, because if I understand correctly, Netanyahu from Israel, he has, there have been countries who have charged him. It's a similar situation, right? This is such a good question. So what you're thinking about, I believe, is the International Criminal Court. The International Criminal Court is a treaty-based international court that can indict leaders. And one of its weaknesses is it can't arrest them. Countries have to turn over their leaders, or if those leaders travel to another country that's a member state, the member states are obligated to arrest those leaders and hand them over. Now, that doesn't happen. This has been famous in the case of Sudan, for example, with the leader flying to Uganda and not being turned over. And that was one of the breaking points of the International Criminal Court. It doesn't have a lot of power because it can indict, but it has no police force. Well, interestingly, the United States legally doesn't go into other countries and arrest leaders that it's indicted. It has done this once before with Manuel Noriega in Panama. In that case, the administration wrote a very detailed legal memo explaining why it was lawful to go into Panama and extract Noriega and use the military to do that. That's the only parallel. We also might think of killing Osama bin Laden, which is going into another country and killing, but we had a congressional authorization. But he wasn't a leader of a country. No, but that's an example of the United States going into a foreign territory without their consent and using the military, which is a violation of that country's sovereignty. So, complicated ideas of domestic and international law. I've totally drawn a brain freeze on the, was it Iraq, the guy in the tunnel? Was it Saddam Hussein? No, was it? It was, yeah. So, they had, was it Iraq? It was Iraq, right? Okay, so, and it was Saddam Hussein? Yeah, do I have the name right? So, the US- Well, that's toppling a leader and- Right, so, and that's sort of my point. Is that same thing as Maduro? Nothing like it. Okay, so we've- That is express war. So, that is the authorized use of military force in relation to the war on terror. Congress authorized the executive branch of government to use military force necessary in the war on terror, which was in response to 9-11. This, and this is why this is such an interesting case. This is completely different. The excuse for what we did with Maduro is that there was an indictment and a warrant out for his arrest. And we couldn't arrest him because he was in Venezuela. So, the only way to arrest him would to be actually to cross the territory of Venezuela, which is a violation of its sovereignty. And we had to use the military to do that because the forces that were going to arrest him needed protection. And so, that is what happened. We basically used the military to enforce an arrest warrant in a foreign country. Again, except for Panama, and that has its own history, this has not been done before. And so, the idea was go into Venezuela, arrest Maduro and his wife, who had also been indicted on drug trafficking charges, and bring them forcibly to New York to face charges. That is what happened on January 3rd. Okay. So, the United States military goes in, they extract Maduro and his wife. Was it really because of drugs, or was drugs sort of, hey, the American people will buy that drugs is the issue, when really there were other underlying issues and reasons for taking Maduro out of the country? Maduro is an illegitimate leader. He is, since 2014, he has run Venezuela into the ground. It has 8 million people who have left. The GDP has dropped 80%. And increasingly, because he's unpopular, he uses the military and force to repress people in Venezuela. And the criminal enterprises, the extractivism in that country, meaning taking resources, drug trade, whatever types of criminality have entered the government, he is a hated leader. He still has 30 to 40% of support in Venezuela, similar to President Donald Trump in this country, right? So, not everyone in Venezuela hates him. But he is hated. There's a good reason for human rights reasons to take this man out. But the problem is that the excuse is actually not only an excuse. We had legal justification to arrest him. It does look, and I trust the DOJ on its drug trafficking charges. It does a very good job with transnational crime. He very likely profited and engaged in trafficking, according to the DOJ indictment. But why would the US use the military and do such a spectacle to go into that country? What people who are trying to understand the situation are saying is that it's a confluence of interests of the people next to President Trump. So, you have Stephen Miller who's interested in migration control. And Venezuelans are a huge population that has been migrating, as I just said. And so, a large number of Venezuelan migrants came to the US under Biden. They were given temporary protected status. And in this push to kick out migrants, Venezuelans get targeted. You also have concerns in the United States about fentanyl and drug use. That has nothing to do with Venezuela. Venezuela may be involved in helping traffic cocaine from neighboring Colombia. But that is seeming confused to people. That's not actually our big drug crisis. That seems more like an excuse to get the Americans behind this invasion of Venezuela. Well, that was sort of my thought on that, was this is what the Americans... The drug crisis has been a problem in this country for many years. And I think that was the line that Americans would buy that we need to control. We need to control the drug trafficking into this country to save American lives. We tried that. I think Trump and his administration has been trying to push that, the drug trafficking. I'm not sure how much the Americans buy it, but they have been trying to conflate the fentanyl crisis with Venezuela, which is not factually accurate. But you also have Marco Rubio there. And if you read insider reports about what's gone on in Venezuela, there was negotiations with Nicolas Maduro earlier in this year to get him to open up the oil to the United States. Because really, what Trump is interested in is resources. And oil is a resource that Venezuela has. It has the most oil reserves in the world, really. And it's not being pumped. And so all of this oil is sitting under decrepit infrastructure in Venezuela. And the United States would like that. And that would get in the ear of President Trump. Marco Rubio, in his position, did not want to negotiate with Nicolas Maduro because he is Cuban and he is against communist dictatorships. And he has a personal agenda against the Venezuelan leader, just as seeing it similar to Cuba. And so what insiders are saying is you've got these different voices that are convincing Trump that this is a good target for him to make a display of military force, to be able to maybe extract resources. And all of these other things like drugs are really just distractions from possibly what Trump is really interested in, which is a display of force and American power and might. We are up on our first commercial break. You've given me a lot to consider. So stay with us, folks. There's plenty more to come. We're back in a moment. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Barry. Welcome back, everyone, to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host, Patrick Barry. On your left is Jamie Rowan. She is the director of the Center for Justice, Law, and Societies at UMass Amherst. And on your right is Alexander Theodoridis. He's an associate professor of political science also at UMass. Thank you both for joining me. Jamie has blown my mind with a lot of information. But Alex, I wanna switch to you very quickly to talk about everything that we just heard about. Is it drugs? Is it oil? Is it other minerals that Venezuela has? The divisiveness that that's bringing to home politics. What are you seeing from polling numbers, from the research that you're doing? How is this playing back home in the 50 states? Yeah, I would say, Jamie, the way she put it, I think, is perfect. You had this confluence of interests in Trump's inner circle. Marco Rubio, obviously, because of his, and the connections of Venezuela to Cuba, specifically. And obviously, the connections between the Cuban population in Florida and the Venezuelan population in Florida, both of which are Republican bases. And then obviously, Stephen Miller and Trump himself, it sort of, it worked really well in terms of the bingo card there. It's not so clear outside of that group in the Republican Party, there do seem to be some divisions. Those divisions, to some extent, were already there, but you do have like Marjorie Taylor Greene's and others who are kind of saying, hey, wait a second, what happened to America first? Now, their argument internally would be, this is America first, this is putting American interest first and shoring up our hemisphere here and our interest in the hemisphere and making sure that nothing's happening in the hemisphere that's not serving American interest. And so obviously, America first is, as we knew from the beginning, is kind of a Rorschach test. It's whatever you want it to be, you can define it however it is, but certainly there are those, again, MTG, Tucker Carlson, other people who are defining America first differently and pointing to this and saying this is a departure from that principle. In terms of broader public opinion, there's a lot of skepticism right now. I think most of the polling I've seen suggests that it's pretty polarized with Republicans mostly being supportive, but mostly it's not like the really, really high numbers Trump gets on other things and on Republicans, like 65% approval. Democrats very much not in favor of what we did. I think there's a general sense out there that there's been a lack of explanation, so it's unclear exactly why we're doing this. I tend to agree with you there. I don't think there's been a clear message given to the American people about why, what happened. There's so much confusion out there. Right, yeah, I mean, there certainly are different angles that have been pursued. What's interesting, and I think what Americans find confusing about this is that none of the sort of justifications that have been put out there, that this was a drug trafficking thing, that this is an immigration-related thing, that this is a literally just explicit sort of saying this is our oil, our oil companies were owed this because of work they did in the past, and we're gonna take it and sell it at market rates and put it to use for the US and for Venezuelans. Those are the types of reasons that people have suspected in the past that we went to war. What they're used to hearing is, no, we believe in democracy and advancing the cause of liberty and helping the Venezuelan people, et cetera, and that's not really what we're hearing at all. We're hearing, okay, if we can work with this illegitimate leader as opposed to the last illegitimate leader, and when we say illegitimate, Jamie, I think, wasn't explicit on this, there was an election that, by most accounts, Maduro's party lost, but that doesn't make the vice president, who's now taken over, any more legitimate, right, because she's from that same party. So I think that that's one of the sources of confusion is that we're used to being romanced a little bit more when it comes to reasons to engage in military conflict, and the romance has really been sort of set aside in this case. Well, and Trump, first term and current term, he doesn't sugarcoat anything. He tells it bluntly, so to your point, we were romanced about this is what it is, or he doesn't do that. I mean, he's known for not doing that, correct? That's certainly one of the things that some people find refreshing about him, some people find horrific about him, and in this case, yeah, I mean, he's much more willing to just say, now, when we say he doesn't sugarcoat things, I mean, it may not be, a lot of times, there are lies that are not actually sugarcoating it. It doesn't sound any better, but it's still not true, and I think that's partly the case, obviously, in this situation and in general when it comes to this administration, but no, I mean, there certainly isn't any pretense that what we're doing here, at least in the medium term, is some sort of liberation or pro-democracy altruistic effort, right? I don't think that's sort of part of this administration's vocabulary. So one of the things you mentioned was America protecting American interests, protecting this hemisphere. That goes back to the Monroe Doctrine, if I understand correctly, right? You're shaking your head over there. So talk to me a little bit about, because the Trump administration has said the Monroe Doctrine, the Monroe Doctrine. How does that play into where we are with Venezuela? Well, you know, I grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, where James Monroe was from, but Jamie knows a lot more about this, so she's the one who should talk about that. Well, I'm glad you don't know James Monroe. We're talking about 1823. We're talking about the era in which the scramble for Africa was occurring and European powers were trying to assert as much influence as they could on land that they didn't have claim to except through force and were carving up Africa into different domains so that they could extract resources from there. And they didn't want the U.S. interfering with that. And there was a deal that the U.S. would interfere with European colonialism there and also in Southeast Asia, where the French primarily were and a little bit of the Dutch and Portuguese, but Europe wouldn't then come into the Western hemisphere and interrupt U.S. interests. And one of the things that Americans may not be as familiar with is our history of interfering with governments in this hemisphere really up until very recently. And so what has happened over the course of the last 200 years is a very close relationship between the U.S. and governments in Central and South America as those governments were declaring independence from Spain, right? Spain was the colonizer in Portugal and Brazil in South America. And as those governments became independent, there's always a relationship between security and economic interests. And what was happening is that those governments were trying to figure out how to have economic stability because that goes along with political stability. And the United States was investing in those countries and investing in their resources. And over the years, when those investments have been threatened, the United States has gone in and changed regimes. And so it was not uncommon for a president to be elected, say, in Guatemala that wanted to nationalize the banana industry. This is where the term banana republic comes from. And the United States didn't want the banana companies that were influencing the presidential administration said, we need that president, that newly elected president, democratically elected president to be out of power because he's going to take our assets and distribute them to the Guatemalan people. And so they instead would put in generals, they would support military coups. And so those governments were then run by the military that was more aligned with U.S. economic interests. That happened up really through the 70s. And it happened in countries like Argentina and Chile. And at the time, what's interesting is there was a move against communism, especially in the 30s and 40s. And so you could justify that to the American public by saying we're fighting communism because there was a large amount of communist sentiment in these countries. But what happened under Reagan, interestingly, is a negotiation with these military dictatorships to say the people in your country no longer want to be oppressed like this. We want to support democracy. We're fighting the Russians and their left-leaning autocracy. And so we are going to support you in the name of human rights. And even though we are doing so in ways that really also violate human rights, we're going to talk about democracy and human rights and act as a beacon of light and police the world with an agenda towards human rights and at least give lip service to that. So even when people think that there's basically an oil interest in Iraq that leads us to military engagements in 2003, the language that the government used was one of human rights and even of international law. Even though we're going to violate the international legal order that we helped construct after World War II, we're going to claim that this is self-defense. And so we give lip service to the law even as we're basically breaking it. None of that is happening right now. One of the things that we're not noting is that Trump is saying oil, okay. But really, if you listen to his words, he just did a very long interview with the New York Times and he described his interest in Greenland, which is where the sites are next. And he said, I have a psychological need for this. And so that really struck me. It's, okay, maybe it's for oil. I think that's just trying that on even. It really isn't clear. What is the United States agenda in interfering with foreign governments right now? We are up on our second commercial break. Still plenty more to come. Stay with us. We're back in just a moment. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Welcome back everyone to this edition of In Focus. We're talking about the situation started out in Venezuela. Now we've transformed to the Monroe Doctrine. We're talking about Greenland, but it all sort of plays together because all these stories seem to be happening simultaneously. Alex, we talked, actually, you know what? I'm going to come back to you, Jamie, because you were talking about the Monroe Doctrine, but you said something in the break there about the Monroe Doctrine was from 1823 and it was superseded basically by 1945 agreement among countries to leave sovereign nations alone. Did I boil it down to one sentence? Yeah, I think that's a good way to summarize. Okay, that's been the overarching theme, but that hasn't really been what's happened in practice, correct? So we had two world wars in the first half of the 20th century that claimed many lives. And the colonial powers at the time were talking about Great Britain and France and Belgium. They are still maintaining control over their colonies, but there is a move to realize that actually independence and self-determination are really important. Although you also have Russia now moving into Eastern Europe and taking over, wow, that's happening. So you end up with these sort of two worlds, this Cold War divide. But what happened at the end of World War II was a decision among these great powers that it was not now going to be the rule to invade other countries and try to extract resources. That is what Germany was doing, and that led to world wars. And so in order to save lives and resources, because Europe was plunged into poverty and it felt unnecessary to the people there, they said, we have these nation states, we've established these nation states, they have borders, we are going to respect those borders and we're going to do something new. We are going to create a rule among these different nations that we don't violate each other's territorial sovereignty. We don't invade to resolve our policy differences. Instead, we use diplomacy and we're going to create international organizations where representatives from the different countries can come and talk out their policy differences. And if there is a threat to international peace and security, we as an international community will agree that we can use military intervention and violence. And so for the past many decades, that has been the rule-based international order that the United States has led. And the reason it has worked better than the system before 1945 is because the United States was leading it. And so even as I said, we broke those norms, one could call them, in invading Iraq. We at least went to the United Nations and presented what was not real evidence of weapons of mass destruction. But we used the system and then invaded, all right? We did not do that with Venezuela. We didn't pretend to do that with Venezuela. And what the administration has said is we don't have to do that. And so that is a major break with the international rules-based order that according to most accounts have saved tens of thousands of lives. We had deaths from international conflicts at historic lows until really the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But there's that whole America first. And I think there's a subset thought process to that of, you know, to your point, America led that, you know, led that peacekeeping. We don't invade other countries. Diplomacy is the rule. But there's that America. I think the subset of that America first is enough of America doing that. Why isn't England stepping up? Why isn't Australia stepping up? So is that in either of your worlds? Is that a valid argument that part of that America first group is saying, you know, we need to focus on us. You know, let's, enough of that diplomacy stuff. Let other people deal with that diplomacy. We need to focus on us. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's a pretty garden variety, isolationist, you know, impulse, right? We've had them before in this country. Lots of other countries have them. It's, you know, from my perspective, I would say it's short-sighted in the sense that I think, yes, we were paying for a lot of stuff and we're involving ourselves in lots of things, both humanitarian, but also military. So gaining soft power, what's called soft power. And then obviously sort of using, leveraging a military force that put the United States in a pretty important position. There are a lot of ways in which all of these things that we've done, historically being part of the international, being this central part of the international order, were very beneficial and have been very beneficial to the United States. It's not just this, you know, giveaways that it's been presented as. And so I think one thing to sort of step back and consider about Trump in general, one of the things that, again, people who like him, love about him and the people who are not so happy with him, which he's not a popular figure. He has won elections, but he's never been particularly popular. One of the things that troubles a lot of people is that he doesn't seem to operate on the basis of norms that applies domestically, right? There are all these norms that he has just brushed aside and that we only just have realized were just norms for the most part, right? We're not actually laws or policies or in the constitution. And whether that's because he just wasn't aware of them or he just doesn't, his worldview is not that the world operates that way. He has, you know, time after time just said, no, no, that's not how we're doing things, right? I'm not asking Congress about this. I'm not going to concede the election just because it's been called against me. And now we're seeing the same sort of impulses applied to the international space, right? Things that we just considered that Democratic and Republican leaders in the past just considered a given that we operate within this NATO. Even though there were no laws in place. Yeah, I mean, there are international laws, right? And certainly we have treaties and all sorts of things. But more than that, more forceful than that is that we have just decades and in some cases, more than decades of just, this is how our, you know, our international elites operate, right? This is just the way we do things. And for better or for worse. And again, it depends on whether you like him or not. Trump is very much a bull in a China shop when it comes to things like that. And the people around him very much are, right? Stephen Miller is out there talking about how, no, that's not, the world really operates with might make right. And we're going to be just realistic about that. And the big question we have to ask is like, does that, I think for a long time, we've been able to think of ourselves in the United States as the good guys, right? In terms of what our objectives were for the world, in terms of the way we operated vis-a-vis other regimes, Russia, the Soviet Union before that, China, et cetera. And the question is, is the new standard that we're just kind of operating in the way that some of those regimes operate in terms of just doing what we want, what we have the power to accomplish and what suits our purposes. We are up on our next commercial break. Stay with us. We're back with plenty more right in just a few minutes. Welcome back everyone to this edition of In Focus. We're here in the 22 News Plus studios. On your left is Jamie Rowan and on your right is Alexander Theodoraitis. Thank you both for joining me today. We're having a conversation about, starting with Venezuela, we've moved to a few other things, but it really comes, I guess, and correct me if I'm wrong, it boils down to the United States' role internationally. You pointed out, Jamie, for a long time, we were the leader. We were the go-to, the democracy that tried to instill human rights and democracy in other nations. But now we've sort of, we went against, to your point earlier, rogue nations. We went against rogue nations. Now it seems as if we have become the rogue nation. So do either of you have any insight on what the rest of the world is saying about the United States in the last year? People are scared of the United States. I mean, we had a lot of information coming out of Canada. They were taking U.S. threats to territorial sovereignty very seriously there. The Danes are writing nonstop. So I keep reading op-eds by Danish leaders begging the United States not to take Greenland and saying, we're friends. You have all the security in the world up there. We give you anything you want. Why are you going against a NATO ally, which the North American Trade Organization is basically the Western European plus the United States organization that provides mutual defense. And it was designed to prevent from Russian aggression, right? And so the United States has been criticizing NATO for many years and saying, why are we paying for Western Europe's protection? So you say the United States has been criticizing NATO for many years. This is before Trump. I mean, Trump is the person who really came to the fore, saying we're spending too much money for Western European defense. Now, the invasion of Ukraine put this all in stark relief because the United States is financing a lot of the arms that is going for Ukraine to protect itself against Russia. But I think what the American public needs to understand about democracy and human rights is that it didn't flourish by the United States leading it just because it wasn't an idea and that was almost religious in nature and goodwill based. It's economically in our interest, right? If you have peace and if you have peace and if you have more democratic regimes, you have an opening to our markets. And so there was an alignment between people promoting democracy and human rights and American corporate interests. And so the peace and stability of Western Europe was really to our favor and created a very favorable economic situation for us. Well, I look at it now. You guys are much more involved in this than I am. I look at it now as we were on the path of becoming a truly global community, both economically, everything. And now we just seem to be going backwards with the tariffs being implemented, Venezuela, the talk of Greenland. It just seems we're going backwards now rather than moving forward. There's a very good reason why many Americans do not like the expansion of the United States as a global hegemon. And this word that was brought up in the Trump administration and many MAGA supporters of globalization, because what ends up happening there is that American businesses take their companies to countries that have cheaper labor and the Americans lose out economically. And so the concern for America and becoming such a global power and all of these borders breaking down and the barriers between them is what does it mean for the average American? And I think that's a valid concern. I worry that we've conflated now the way that we have protected other countries and their human rights interests with the destruction of the middle class in the United States with free trade agreements. But I think that's part of what's going on in the U.S. psyche. And I think what's going on with Trump saying America first is that for the people who elected him, their concerns are mainly economic. And for Trump and this administration, the idea of returning to the age where the United States used its military might and expanded and took territory, right, that seems to be what this administration admires. Right. So now, Alex, based on that, what's the infighting among or is there infighting among Republicans to kind of counter what our president is doing? Or maybe there is no infighting. No, there certainly is. You know, and it's not just limited to this issue. I think there have been some divides related to Israel, related to anti-Semitism in the Republican Party that, you know, any party that puts together a winning coalition, there are going to be potential fissures. And so, and I think we see that. Right. So I think, you know, we mentioned earlier Marjorie Taylor Greene obviously is not really in the Trump orbit anymore, pretty explicitly expelled from that. She's been pushing back on, is this really America first? You have people like Dr. Carlson and others. But I would say most Republicans are sort of like they have tended to sort of falling in line with this is what we're doing. You know, the defections are sort of on the margin. So with each thing, there will be somebody different who sort of pushes back in a different way. But there's no question that this definition of America first and what it at least meant initially in terms of this Trump movement, there's no question there are different sort of points of view in terms of that. So is this just politicians saving face and protecting their role in government? Or do they, you know, I look at it as people aren't speaking out because if they speak out, then they aren't going to get the committee jobs, the leadership roles in Washington, D.C. They're just protecting themselves, not really what's good for the country. Am I off base with that? Well, there's no question. This is Donald Trump's party, right? He has, whether it was intentional or accidental, he has gained control of the Republican party to a pretty remarkable extent. And some of that is because of fear, absolutely. Electoral reprisals, right? You know, why do people like Marjorie Taylor Greene step aside? You know, part of it certainly could be that a Trump-endorsed opponent in a primary in that kind of district is going to be a real problem. But even beyond that, I mean, you know, Republicans, you see Republicans who crossed Trump literally resigning early in their careers because they don't want their family to be swatted, right? There's violence out there. There is a group of supporters of Trump who if you cross Trump, you are going to get threatening messages. And, you know, in this political climate, it doesn't seem that outlandish that somebody might act, you know, some crazy person might act on one of those things. So, no. Well, we've seen that with Nancy Pelosi's husband. And who was it? Was it a Minnesota legislator? Yeah, there would be two. Multiple Minnesota legislators were attacked and killed in one of the cases. And then obviously Charlie Kirk. And there have been, I mean, there were threats on Trump's life. One of them, the more serious one, seems to have not been particularly political. But, you know, yeah. And I mean, there is threats of violence and violence permeate our politics today in a way that just wasn't true 10 years ago. And a lot of that is because of the polarization. But it's also specifically, I think, at the feet of Donald Trump, who has been willing to use what we call stochastic terrorism, this idea that you sort of say something like, you know, well, you know, Mark Kelly and these other senators record a video saying you don't have to follow illegal orders. And his reaction to that is to post that, you know, this is treasonous and punishable by death, right? So you put that out there enough and you've got some crazy people. It's a big country. You don't have to feel it's not hard to find a crazy person every now and then. We got a big country, a lot of guns, more guns than we have people. And so, yeah, you know, this, and it's not just, by the way, people, the elites, right, who you could say, OK, they're signing up for this. Your average person signing up to be a poll worker, you know, is now facing the possibility that they are going to be threatened, potentially threatened by people carrying guns. You know, if the election results don't turn out a certain way, because we have all of this, these conspiracy theories about electoral fraud that out there. And so, yes, there's all of the above, right? People are being politically savvy, right? Like, you know, if I want to be part of the Republican Party 25 years from now, I got to toe the party line. Now, do I need to cross Trump, you know, and do I, do I really, do I really want to take this on as something if it's going to lead to hate mail and my family getting doxxed and all of that stuff? And we're talking now just because Trump's in office, but you go back in time when the Affordable Care Act was passed, Democrats didn't want to cross Obama, right? So, I mean, and I use that as sort of, you know, a loose correlation, but there have been times under Democratic presidents where the democratically elected senators and congressmen don't really go against the leadership. Yeah, I mean, because they don't want. I think that was standard kind of party discipline. I use discipline, not in the, you know, like whip sense. Parties have to impose discipline in order to get stuff done, right? This is, this is taking discipline to the sort of literal, you know, term. I think more, more often. And look, we're seeing this. This is, again, this is a place where norms that we just took for granted for a long time get, you know, marched over by Trump. And I, and I think we just realized, well, that's, that was just a norm, a norm that you don't go after people in your own party, you know, to, to threaten to, to unseat them. You don't, you know, sick your followers on, on your co-partisans or even opponents, right? These are things, and this is one of the big things that we're, that we're going through in this country. Something we pull on quite a bit is like, okay, what is normal politics anymore? What's just normal politics? And when do you cross a line into something that is, you know, competitive authoritarianism or actual authoritarianism, you know, full authoritarianism? And, and when is something just kind of the way the game is played, right? Is it, is it, is it okay to threaten the, you know, the license of a TV station or a network that, that says things that you don't like or to try to get a show canceled that you don't like or to, you know, have, have the, use the need of a corporation to have a merger agreed to as a way to leverage things with that corporation. And the same thing is true in the international realm that we're talking about now. At what point is it okay to just sort of say, we've got the power and we're going to tell you how to do things or as Trump said, you're going to face a fate worse than Maduro, right? We are up on our last commercial break. Stay with us because we've still got plenty more to come. Welcome back everyone to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host, Patrick Barry. We're here in the 22 News Plus studios joining me once again across the desk is Jamie Rowan and Alexander Theodorides. Thank you both for joining me. We've covered a lot of ground in this, but I would be remiss, we've touched on it a little bit, Greenland. So I would be remiss if we didn't dig into that just a little bit more and how, how that plays into the Venezuelan situation that we're in. So if I understand correctly, there was an agreement between Denmark and the United States decades ago that the United States could put military troops in Greenland. They could put however many they wanted, right? So why is Greenland an issue now? If Denmark has said, pretty much put as many troops as you want and President Trump is claiming it's for the United States security, what's the whole Greenland thing? I don't think anybody could mind read. Well, sorry, someone would have to mind read to understand why Greenland because there isn't a reason that I see presented that makes any sense for the United States. The idea of security, as you just pointed out, as Denmark continues to point out, the United States and Denmark have the same security interest against Russia and China. That is the whole point of NATO. And so that, that on its face interest in security doesn't make sense. The resource issue possibly, but again, we created an international rules-based order so that we would not be invading territories to extract resources because that leads to wars. And we, as the United States after World War II, with the rest of the world after World War II said we don't want to have wars. And so if we're really turning our back on that and saying, actually we do, actually we do want wars. I mean, that might be, you know, one way to read into it. Another really cynical way to read into it is Trump has said NATO doesn't exist without the United States. He's not a big fan of NATO. It's not needed anymore. And I think Ukraine would disagree given it's the invasion from Russia, but there might be a sort of, we're going to weaken this alliance even more because as Europe is saying, if an ally in NATO, which is a mutual defense pact, if two people in the same mutual defense pact are now fighting each other, the defense pact dissolves. And so there doesn't appear to be a rational reason. And that's why I go back to Donald Trump's interview with the New York Times where in his words, he feels a psychological need for Greenland. And this goes back to that question about the Monroe Doctrine, when the idea of being a great nation was territorial expansion. And because that leads to war, that idea was scrapped, an idea of a territorially-based, rules-based order we thought would bring peace and prosperity. And that seems to be sliding away. So Alex, let me ask you, because this is your specialty, where do you see this, or how do you see any of this affecting midterm elections come this fall, if at all? Yeah, you know, unless things change substantially, I don't see these sorts of things really being, I mean, you know, on the margins, right? The foreign policy can have impacts. Obviously, if we're in a war and Americans are dying, that can have impacts on elections. Or if we've been attacked, like, you know, say after September 11th, there can be those effects. But generally speaking, this sort of thing is not going to be the straw that stirs the drink when it comes to the way the midterms will turn out. Generally speaking, that's going to be about perceptions of Trump, popularity of Trump, jobs reports, economic reports, people's perceptions, gas prices, grocery prices, exactly, those sorts of things. And just in general, you know, other than two exceptions, I think since 1936, the incumbent president's party has lost seats in the midterm elections. And so the sort of running expectation is that Republicans should lose a number of seats going into, and certainly that is not inconsistent with what we saw in Virginia and New Jersey and other places, what we've seen in some special elections, so in the odd year or off cycle. And so the expectation going forward is that the Republicans will lose seats, and obviously there's no margin to speak of in the House. The Senate is probably a tougher hill for Democrats, but if you've got a swing like we had in 2025 in those elections in Virginia and New Jersey, that could put the Senate in play. Certainly not anything like a filibuster-proof majority or anything like that. So, you know, I think the only way that this really closely relates is to the extent that these sorts of efforts are kind of efforts to do some stuff before we head to a point where there's a Congress that's in opposition, you know, or to kind of set things up and try to play kind of a wag the dog kind of, you know, thing that will distract attention from those other issues. I don't see any real reason to think that would succeed, especially in this polarized moment, but in general, I think it's been the case that unless there are American casualties in significant numbers- Not foreign soil. Yeah, foreign policy is not gonna be the primary driver of what we see happen in 2026. Fantastic. What a fabulous conversation. I can't thank you both enough for joining me today. It was wonderful, wonderful having you here in the studio and you both educated me and hopefully all of you viewers a lot on what's happening in Venezuela, Greenland, and around the globe. Thank you both. Thanks a lot.