Mark Weisbrot on KPFA Radio

Transcript  (January 14, 2026)

Sasha Lilley

As Congress considers a war powers vote, economist Mark Weisbrot places the Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela in the context of a long standing bipartisan campaign to undermine left-leaning governments across Latin America. He discusses the differing visions that Trump and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, have for the region, one focused on oil and the other on regime change, including in Cuba. 

From the studios of KPFA in Berkeley, California, this is Against the Grain on Pacifica video. I’m Sasha Lilley.

 Is Trump’s intervention inVenezuela promising as he has to run the country and open up its petroleum reserves to American companies? Is it simply about oil? Chevron, for example, has operated in Venezuela for years, including under the Maduro government. Or should the attack be viewed as part of an effort to remove Venezuela’s ability to bolster left-leaning governments in the region from the so-called Pink Tide to the present? 

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and has written about Venezuela for over 25 years. Mark, what is the legality of the US attack on Venezuela and the capture of its President, Nicolas Maduro. In terms of US law and international law, was the US within its rights to do this?

Mark Weisbrot

It’s completely illegal what they did, under so many laws and treaties. First of all, under the Charter of the United Nations. Well, even the blockade is a violation, it’s armed conflict, basically, and it’s illegal armed conflict. But all the other stuff that they’ve done, the military actions, the kidnapping of the President, all of that is illegal under the Charter of the Organization of American States, under the UN Charter, under international law, and under US law itself, partly because, according to our Constitution, when we sign a treaty, that becomes legally binding on the United States as well.

Sasha Lilley

Can you describe also, I mean, we’ll talk more about the attack on its aftermath, but I wonder if you could also describe the US government’s blockade of Venezuela and the legality of that, because, of course, the leverage that the US is mounting against Venezuela is not just based on whatever took place on January 3rd, but is part of a larger dynamic of coercion and intimidation.

Mark Weisbrot

Yes. Well, there’s no doubt about it, and they said that out loud, that they got leverage. And Trump accurately calls it a blockade. And that is, again, that’s illegal armed conflict, according to the UN, to use a blockade. This is a very important point because this is really what destroyed the Venezuelan economy. This is something that most people here don’t know. It was sanctions against Venezuela, and one of the most powerful and damaging sanctions that was implemented under Trump in his first term was to cut off Venezuela from its oil exports because that’s 90 percent of their foreign currency earnings. All countries need foreign currency, just about all, not the United States, but everybody else needs foreign currency earnings because it’s a dollar-based financial system. For Venezuela, they’re even more dependent on imports for their economy than most countries. Then there’s food and medicines and infrastructure for the water system. All of these things were cut off to varying degrees, but hugely, from the Venezuelan economy. What they’re doing with the blockade is just what they did with the sanctions that destroyed the Venezuelan economy from 2012 to 2020. The Venezuelan economy lost three quarters of its economic output and therefore income.

Mark Weisbrot

Imagine the Great Depression in the United States, how terrible it was. You multiply that by three, and that’s what Venezuela has suffered through. You don’t hear that here. I mean, rarely will you hear that. Most people don’t know it, and most economists in this country don’t even pay that much attention. But this is not in dispute. The other part of it that you can’t dispute is that it was mostly caused, the majority of that destruction and the lives that it took was caused by the sanctions. You can look at this data from three universities who were against the government, so they didn’t release it at first. They gave it to the United Nations, and the United Nations released it. So we have the data. And that data showed that in the first year of the Trump sanctions from 2017 to 2018, tens of thousands more people had died. It was 40,000, according to the survey data, through the increase in mortality. And it was at least that, most likely, because the death rates should have fallen because oil prices were recovering.

Mark Weisbrot

Again, that’s what the economy depends upon. That was a huge crime that was committed. The UN, again, has recognized this as well. Under the Geneva Conventions, that is called collective punishment, and it’s illegal. Now, the only technicality is that it’s not actually a war crime because there was no war going on, although now there is. It could be considered a war crime under various treaties as well. This is a deadly weapon that the United States has, and it’s become, in recent years, more powerful and more used than the military because they can get away with it, because most people don’t know how many people they’re killing. I’ll just add one more thing because it’s such a huge thing now, these sanctions, that just my colleagues and I, Francisco Rodríguez and Silvio Rendón and I, wrote an article in July. It was published by the Lancet Global Health. And we estimated how many people are killed by the unilateral sanctions, which are mostly US sanctions, each year. Over the last decade, it’s been 560,000 annually, that was our estimate, 560,000 people each year. And that’s as a result of sanctions. And it’s also comparable to how many die from armed conflict worldwide.

Sasha Lilley

Mark, I assume that number is not just Venezuela, but the deployment of that tactic of sanctions around the world.

Mark Weisbrot

That’s right. This is for all the countries that are under unilateral sanctions around the world. But it’s huge. I mean, it’s like armed conflict. It’s a giant weapon that is used by the United States. You’ve had people like Jim McGovern, who was Chair of the House Rules Committee when he wrote this letter to Biden saying: you’ve got to get rid of these sanctions against Venezuela because they’re killing people. And he basically showed it in his letter, too. He said it, and everybody knows it, the sanctions are targeting the civilian population. And that’s what Rubio is saying when he says, we have this leverage against Venezuela. That’s the leverage. It’s not against the government so much as it’s against the population of the country. And that is, as McGovern said, and many other people in the UN have said, that is how sanctions actually work. And that’s why they’re really illegal.

Sasha Lilley

So given what you said a moment ago, that the blockade itself now is in the context of military aggression against Venezuela, as, of course, was the attack on Venezuela that led to the abduction of Nicolas Maduro, the President of Venezuela. Given then these acts of war, can you just remind our listeners what the War Powers Act was and is and its relevance right now?

Mark Weisbrot

Yes. Well, that’s another great question because that gets to what anybody in the United States can do about this. And fortunately, we have members of Congress, especially the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the house. But we have senators now, too. And there’ve been four of these War Power Resolutions, five actually now, introduced since October 8th, I think it was. And this is the Congress using the 1973 legislation that has the same name, so it gets confusing. That is called the War Powers Resolution. But the legislation that they introduced to use it is also called a War Powers Resolution. But this is something that Congress legislated in 1973, and it makes it clear what the Constitution says: that the Congress has the power to decide whether the US military can participate in hostilities and armed conflict. This is an act that provides methods for the Congress to assert this power, which they’ve always had. But this makes it procedurally a little better. For example, a member of Congress can introduce it, and it’s not as easily squashed by the leadership. 

Mark Weisbrot

You have these bills, and why are they important? Because everybody thinks, Well, Trump doesn’t care about the rule of law. He vetoed the one that was passed by both houses for the first time, actually, in 2019. Both houses passed a resolution saying that the US had to cease its participation in the war in Yemen, which had already killed tens of thousands of people at the time when this resolution was introduced. So Trump vetoed it. And so people think he doesn’t care about the rule of law, which he doesn’t. We went through with the abduction of a head of state, which the whole world thinks is atrocious. But the thing is, it really does work to a certain degree because Congress has political power. And so Trump may not respect the rule of law, but he and his crew really do worry about Congress. Now, why is that? And that’s a really important part of this whole problem and trying to resolve it. It’s because Congress has to worry about if things go bad, which they do in most of our regime change wars and other wars that don’t have anything to do with US national security or anything, which is almost every war that I’ve lived through.

Mark Weisbrot

The President and his allies like Rubio have to worry that they’re going to get blamed for something that goes wrong. If the Congress is already coming out against it before that happens, that’s really bad for them because that means that they’re much more likely to get blamed for any terrible things that happen as a result of the military actions that they’re participating in. That’s extremely important. That’s why you see, first of all, in 2019, to take that one, the successful act. Even though Trump ended up vetoing it, he – actually, the Pentagon– stopped aerial refueling, midair refueling of Saudi planes when they were bombing Yemen and killing all these people. And they killed more people, really, in the tens of thousands from the famine that they created there. Again, this is a sanctions thing, right? They cut off the main port, Hodeidah, where most of the food comes in and everything they need for water as well, or most of everything. And so a lot of people were dying. And so because of this thing, Trump did it before the War Powers Resolution passed, they cut that off, and that led to a de-escalation of the war, which also saved more lives.

Mark Weisbrot

This is important. How do we know it’s still important now? Because we can see what the administration is doing. There’s a lot of fierce rhetoric you can see, and they blew up, killed all these people in boats for completely false reasons, the fentanyl they talk about, doesn’t even come from South America. But they still are worried about the War Powers Resolution because, I think it was November 5th, Rubio and Hegseth and the White House [Office of Legal] Counsel went to the Senate and had a private, classified meeting. Nobody knew about it when it was happening, but the press, CNN reported on it. You can see what they did. They went and they said to the senators: don’t vote for this war powers resolution that’s coming to a vote tomorrow. It was a procedural vote; this vote is not the one that’s going to pass it, but it’s going to allow it to get to the floor for a vote that can approve it. They argued with them not to support it, and they made promises. They said: we’re not going to have land strikes in Venezuela. We’re not going to have war in Venezuela. The White House [Office of Legal] Counsel even told them, according to the press reports from people who were there, they even told them that they didn’t have a legal justification for doing this.

Mark Weisbrot

You can see that shows how worried they were about this vote. They succeeded on that one. That was the last one before the one we had on Thursday. They succeeded on that vote, and it was only by two votes. Again, this is how much they really do worry about this. This is the main weapon that we have. I’ll add just one last thing on this. The fact is that the blockade that they’re doing in Venezuela, people are going to be starving from that pretty soon, if they’re not already, because they’re cutting off the source of  foreign exchange. If that continues, things are going to get worse. And so the blockade itself, according to the UN, is illegal armed conflict. And so this is a way that Congress is, by approving this War Powers Resolution to go to the floor, and it’s supposed to be voted on soon, the final vote to see whether it’s approved because five Republicans supported it this time for the first time since October. That’s going to be Congress really weighing in on the sanctions as they haven’t done before.

Sasha Lilley

Economist Mark Weisbrot is my guest. He’s co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. I’m Sasha Lilley, and this is Against the Grain. So, Mark, Trump has been very forthright about his intentions to take control of Venezuela’s oil industry and to open it up to US oil companies. Yet this seems a mixed blessing for oil companies since the price of oil on the international market is low right now and Venezuela’s crude oil is dense and harder to process. What do you make of the designs of the US government on the oil? Can this attack on Venezuela be framed simply as an act of aggression for oil, or is that too narrow?

Mark Weisbrot

Well, that’s a complicated question because Trump is really interested in oil. I mean, look, I’m really cautious about speculating about the motives of anybody because we don’t know what’s in their minds. And Trump, of course, is even worse because he changes his mind from one day to the next more than any president we can probably find in the world. But I think Trump has, let’s just say it seems like Trump seems to be really interested in the oil. You can see this in a lot of the press reports that have talked to people in the administration, and they’ve reported on the back and forth between Rubio and Trump, because Trump wants the oil. Rubio is a very strong neoconservative from Florida, Cuban-American, and his lifelong dream, as they reported in the New York Times, seems to be to get rid of the government of Cuba. And he sees getting rid of the government of Venezuela as a step towards that. So he’s going for both. But Cuba is the main thing. So he wasn’t always winning because Trump wanted to get the oil and was trying to negotiate, for example, with Chevron, who’s been there 100 years.

Mark Weisbrot

And has been still exporting oil to the United States or still all the way to the last year. And so Trump wanted to expand this commerce, oil, with more oil companies, or at least Chevron. And Rubio would push back, and he would push, and it seemed like he was telling Trump, again, this is a bit speculative, but it seemed like he was saying that the way to get the oil, if that’s your main priority, is to get regime change. And of course, Trump didn’t really go for the full regime change because that could very likely have ended in a real war where they would end up with troops getting killed. He’s trying to avoid that because he’s got no excuse for any of this either. I mean, it’s so 19th century, ”we’re going to take your oil”. For those of us who talk about this stuff, one of my colleagues said this the other day on the air, we’re used to having to refute these arguments that the United States is fighting for democracy or something like that. There’s nothing there with Trump. He doesn’t even try to say it has anything to do with democracy, it’s: we want the oil. He says ridiculous things about how it’s our oil, which has no basis in history.

Mark Weisbrot

That’s why the answer is a little complicated because it’s a mixture of their two motives which are somewhat conflicting. But if you look at the whole 21st century, the United States has been trying to get rid of not only the Venezuelan government, but at least eight other governments that were just left of center and independent in their foreign policy, which is the main crime. But Venezuela has been the most important target of regime change since, really, 2002 or even before that.

Sasha Lilley

Well, I definitely want to talk to you about that history and also more broadly, the way the US has tried to destabilize, undermine, and overthrow other governments in the region that are seen as being left of center. But I wanted to ask you if you have a sense of how the oil companies in the United States are viewing this entanglement with Venezuela. Do you think that the oil companies are pushing for this? I mean, putting aside what you’re saying about the difficulty in trying to parse out actually what Trump thinks, and that may vary from day to day, and then, as we’ll return to, a different orientation than his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. But what about the US oil companies themselves? Do we have a sense of how they’re viewing all of this?

Mark Weisbrot

I can’t really say that I have a lot of inside information on that. I think it’s mixed. I think they would like to make some money there. I mean, Chevron, for sure. Like I said, they’ve always been able to get along with the government. This is something that I think a lot of people have misunderstood in the last 25 years. They’ve always thought that oil was the main motive for what the US was doing there, and I don’t blame them because Venezuela is sitting on the largest oil reserves in the world, 300 billion barrels of oil. That’s, by the way, why they never would have gotten so destroyed by any recession or depression, because they could always borrow against that, except the sanctions cut them off. That is how they destroyed the economy, right? They also created hyperinflation. But the question about what the oil companies think, I think there’s oil that can be produced within a reasonable amount of time. Of course, Chevron will do what they can, and some others might as well. Then there’s others that will take more investment. The whole thing is ironic because, as I was saying, people always thought that we were trying to get oil before. But really, the main goal of regime change for the 21st century, and it included all the presidents that we’ve had here, was really because Venezuela had power as an oil producer.

Mark Weisbrot

At one point, Venezuela was giving more foreign aid to Latin America than the United States, with an economy just a fraction of the size. You had all these countries that had left governments. It was the majority of the region governed by left governments. And so they created organizations like the CELAC [The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States], which was basically like the Organization of American States, only without the US and Canada, so that they could make decisions and talk, at least, without having the United States there, which was always trying to get rid of their governments. And Venezuela created Petrocaribe, to help other countries with oil. Then there was UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations. I was part of a commission of UNASUR, and that was all of South America at that time in 2016. There was a commission of economists that UNASUR sent to Venezuela to try and figure out how they could revive their economy when oil prices had fallen and they already had sanctions, not the broad economic sanctions. They had sanctions that were hurting them. It started under Obama in 2015. And so, again, these governments did all these things that were cooperative and were building a new regional force in the hemisphere, which wasn’t radical or anything.

Mark Weisbrot

It was just to preserve their self-determination against a government, a whole series of governments in the United States  that really didn’t respect their right to choose their own governments. That’s what really most of the regime change was about. It wasn’t really about oil. You could see that Chevron, of course, wanted to leave Chávez alone. Exxon for at least, I think, seven years was in the same camp. They were making money. That’s what’s the deep irony is here, because here’s Trump acting as though he’s got to force Venezuela to cough up the oil. But they’ve been more willing for many years to have more US oil company investment there and take their cut. They just couldn’t do it because of the sanctions.

Sasha Lilley

What you’ve been laying out is that there has been a bipartisan effort, Democrats and Republicans, over multiple US administrations, trying to undermine the Venezuelan government. But in this most recent incarnation that we’re seeing right now with Trump at the helm, but Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, you were saying that there are these twinned visions, if we can call them that, on the one side, whatever Trump thinks, and oil seems very central to that. And then Marco Rubio, who is more concerned with power and regime change. What do you think Marco Rubio’s vision, if we can call it that, is for the Americas?

Mark Weisbrot

Oh, it’s pretty dismal. I mean, first of all, he wants real regime change in Cuba and Venezuela, and he’s very unlikely to get that without violence. And he doesn’t care… although he has to care because Trump is worried about his presidency. But I think that’s part of it. But it’s more than that because there’s other left governments that they want to get rid of. Brazil is one of them, too, by the way. And that’s for sure he would want to get rid of Brazil, the Brazilian government, the Mexican government. And they’ve intervened in all of these countries. In Brazil, Lula has even said this on TV. It’s quite obvious that by actions that the various administrations took, including the Obama administration, against first Lula–

Sasha Lilley

Of the left-leaning Workers Party.

Mark Weisbrot

Yeah. And for the impeachment of Dilma [Rousseff], they supported that, and they made it clear that they supported that by things they did in public. In 2018, yeah, what Lula says is, and it’s pretty clearly true, is that they helped, and he names the FBI and the Justice Department, they helped put him in jail so he couldn’t run for President. He left office with an 87% approval rating. He would have won that 2018 election, and you’d have a different story in Latin America right now, too. Again, I could go through more of the regime change efforts that they’ve had, of the ways in which they’ve tried to get rid of governments. This is what Rubio wants. In 2019, there was a military coup in Bolivia, and the US played a huge role in that through the Organization of American States. They basically helped put forth this plan or this idea, which the OAS supported right after, immediately after the election. It was completely false. I mean, it was arithmetically, it was shown to be false. You didn’t even need the statistical analysis, which we did a bunch of them anyway, because some other economists tried to use them.

Mark Weisbrot

But basically, the election was fair. The last 16% of votes came in more pro-Evo because they came in from more pro-Evo Morales areas. That was all that simple, something you can see on CNN elections all the time. They tried to say that was evidence of a stolen election, and the military intervened and forced him out of the country, the first Indigenous President of a majority Indigenous country, and someone who was very successful, by the way, in economic terms, in land reform, and pensions. This is the kind of thing that they did. They intervened in other countries as well, three times since 1991 in Haiti. This shows that it isn’t necessarily about even the resources because Haiti didn’t have anything. But they see an opportunity. It’s like a chess game to them. Haiti is a pawn and they can take it. They had their first democratic election in 1991. It was a President who wanted to change things and make it better. They got rid of him. The CIA was involved in that coup, and then they got rid of him again because Clinton was forced by the Congressional Black Caucus to put him back.

Mark Weisbrot

The Black Caucus in Congress forced Clinton. They told him that they weren’t going to support his health care reform if he didn’t put Aristide back. It was the first time we had someone that the United States overthrew was put back by US military force, in 1994. But then he was overthrown again by the Bush administration in 2004. They put him on a rendition plane and took him to Africa. That’s just one-third of the regime change efforts that I could go through. Argentina, they’ve always been undermining the government of Argentina. That’s another story that shows both what happened positively in the 21st century… Argentina returned to growth with the Kirchner government starting in 2003. They drastically reduced poverty and extreme poverty after the IMF had caused a depression right before that, from 1998 to 2002. Then all the way since then, the United States was trying to undermine the government. The real kicker was in 2012 when a New York court ruled that Argentina could not pay its creditors, bondholders, that it was paying, like 80 or 90% of them. They couldn’t pay them. That is why we ended up, if you want to follow the whole story through, that is, I think, one of the main reasons that we ended up with Milei. 

Sasha Lilley

The right wing head of Argentina now.

Mark Weisbrot

Yeah. And, of course, the United States intervened in the most recent election as well by getting him tens of billions of dollars. Again, you can go through more of them. Ecuador has a right-wing government that’s strongly supported by the United States right now. This is Rubio. This is the short answer to what Rubio’s goals are – right wing governments in the region. He wants that. Trump, I don’t think, cares about that, really. He’s not necessarily going to want to take the same risk, and he’s going to move in some different directions. Like right now, they are, and I don’t know that they’ll stick to this, but they are proposing to eliminate some sanctions on Venezuela in order to allow for the export of oil. But it’s not that clear how they’re going to do that. They’ll still have their blockade, and they’re also trying to tell the Venezuelan government right now that you can’t export oil to Cuba. So it looks like they’re going to keep the blockade. So this is going to cause problems. If they’re really trying to get rid of at least a significant part of the sanctions, that’s going to be a problem. But it is something that I think would worry Rubio quite a bit because, again, he’s going for regime change in both countries. And so the control over Venezuela’s oil is extremely important to Trump.

Sasha Lilley

I’m speaking with economist Mark Weisbrot. He is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. I’m Sasha Lilley, and this is Against the Grain. So, Mark, you were enumerating the many, many attempts that the US government has made in the 21st century, and of course long before that, to destabilize or overthrow governments in the Americas. And I wonder if you could place those attempts, kind of step back historically and just remind listeners how a series of left-leaning governments, basically social democratic governments, came to power in the region. You’ve mentioned a whole number of them, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Lula in Brazil. But how that shift in the political wins in Latin America was taken to be a significant threat to the United States, at least from the viewpoint of the US government?

Mark Weisbrot

Well, this is another great question because it does reflect badly, I think, on a lot of the people who write and discuss and act in the politics in this country. Because if you think of what happened, in all these countries where you had left governments, look at Latin America, what happened to Latin America from 2002 to 2013, they reduced poverty from 44 to 28%. Now, that comes after a whole two decades, 20 years from 1980 to 2000, where there was no poverty reduction at all and very little growth. The Latin American economy grew about maybe 7% total, not annually, per capita income grew by about 7% from ’80 to 2000. It was the worst economic failure in a century. Of course, from ’60 to ’80, you had, it grew by 90%, it almost doubled. This is a huge difference because they could have kept growing like this. There was nothing in the world that would have prevented that. In fact, they should have grown at least as fast because there was better technology available, and there were all kinds of opportunities that didn’t exist prior. Imagine the difference for countries like Brazil. Brazil grew 147% per capita, like South Korea.

Mark Weisbrot

And South Korea, of course, went on and has European living standards today. Well, these countries could have had European living standards as well. And this was an intervention by the United States. It was more in terms of the IMF and the so-called multilateral institutions, the IMF, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development [Bank], and other forces. And they used the big debt that Latin America had, to force changes in economic policy. I can’t say it was all them, because people did get to vote and elect their leaders, but they didn’t have enough democracy, really, and independence to resist this huge neoliberal change that really was more than anything made in Washington, but also applied throughout the region. Imagine that difference. So what happened in 2000, when the left gets all these governments, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia? Well, they did extremely well, and they didn’t get to the ’60 to ’80 level of per capita GDP growth, but they got a good part of the way there in terms of their economic growth. As I said, they reduced poverty, and they became independent in really important ways. I can even use Venezuela as an example. I mean, Chávez, because he’s always demonized here, too, but they tripled the number of people who went to college.

Mark Weisbrot

They tripled the number of people with pensions who were over 60. They grew at a very good pace. Incomes grew. It was probably their biggest rise in living standards and reduction in poverty that they ever had in terms of what was accomplished during that time. They had democratic elections, by the way, under Chávez. In fact, Jimmy Carter said in 2012 that of the 92 elections that the Carter Center had monitored, he said, the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world. If you knew the process of those elections, you can see why he said that;  you can’t really steal them because you have a dual copy of the votes. You press a button on a screen, and then that’s your electronic vote, and then you get a print out and you put it in a ballot box. And under Chávez, at least, they had democratic elections, and the vote count was verified and observed by international observers and they were clean. It was real progress in the region, both politically and economically. And then, yeah, as you said, almost all of these governments, almost all of them, were demonized here and were portrayed badly and punished by the United States government.

Mark Weisbrot

This is probably the first time in history that you had this type of change for this many people happening at the ballot box. You would think that anybody who’s liberal or left of center would see this as a great historic step forward and want to make sure that it continued. But they didn’t.

Sasha Lilley

Mark, you mentioned the election of Javier Milei in Argentina and how the US ironically subsidized his right-wing libertarian presidency. How important has the US been for the ascendancy of right-wing governments elsewhere, including the recent election of Pinochet-supporting President-Elect Kast and the right-wing President-Elect in Honduras?

Mark Weisbrot

Honduras, they definitely intervened, as they did in 2009. They supported the military coup in 2009. And that was another example of a government that was social democratic; they reduced poverty. He [President Mel Zelaya]  raised the minimum wage. The government wanted a new constitution because theirs was from the dictatorship. And the US supported this military coup to get rid of him. The country has had trouble ever since. This is the real problem, too, that people think, oh, they have a coup, it can be reversed. But it causes permanent damage sometimes. So, yeah, so this last election, I won’t go through the details of it, but I think that the main result is that it was extremely close between the two right-wing candidates. And Trump picked the one that was farther to the right. The point is that he was able to decide who would win. And that election was extremely close. We don’t really know who won. So Trump really made the difference because he said out loud, he told the country, that it had to be Asfura. Trump announced that his candidate from the National Party didn’t win, that Honduras would be in trouble and they wouldn’t get money.

Mark Weisbrot

When you see a country pretty close to you be destroyed by the United States, that’s the other way that the sanctions really work. They really intimidate people. Trump said it out loud, but other presidents have done similar things. And so, it was already a limited contest because both of those parties, the National and the Liberal Party, supported the 2009 coup. But the point is that Trump was able to determine the winner. So no democratic election there either.

Sasha Lilley

How serious do you think we should take the threats that Trump has made to multiple countries at this point, including after the US’s attack on Venezuela — Colombia, Cuba, which you mentioned that Marco Rubio would love to see overthrown, but also Mexico, not to mention, of course, countries outside of the hemisphere, Greenland and Iran?

Mark Weisbrot

Yeah, It’s very hard to say. What makes this so difficult is that, of course, Trump, most of what he’s done in the last 10 years for both campaigning and for governing has a huge emphasis on distraction. For a lot of these things, that’s a big part of the motivation. This whole buildup in the Caribbean and the bombing of small boats for no proven reason. It gave him a whole theater of operation to create all kinds of distractions. It’s very hard to predict what he would do. You can see he flips, too. He says he’s going to meet with President Petro not long after saying that Petro should watch his ass and that he [Trump] might bomb Colombia. Now he says it’s a great honor to have him at the White House. It’s very hard to predict what he will do. I think with Rubio, he’s going to follow the path of undermining left governments by whatever means they feel they can get away with. That part, I think, has been consistent. That is the thing Rubio has going for him. That’s been consistent with US policy for the whole 21st century, and of course, long before that. But Rubio also has a lot of allies in the so-called national security state, the 18 intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, State Department, and the Foreign Policy Committees of Congress.

Mark Weisbrot

That’s a big thing that Trump can’t even really control, but he doesn’t care very much anyway, as long as he gets the things that he wants, which are mostly just about him. He was very happy with this military operation, and he bragged about it, and he looked tough. That’s the kind of stuff that he likes. The oil, yeah, I think he has goals there, but I can’t say exactly. He is a president that has enriched himself more than anyone in US history and a great deal of world history as well through his presidency. So there could be some money there, too.

Sasha Lilley

Mark Weisbrot, let me end by asking you about how you see Trump in light of the Monroe Doctrine, which he has referred to refashioning it in his own name as the Donroe doctrine, the Monroe Doctrine, which in the 19th century asserted the right of the US to have power over the Americas, excluding other great powers. Do you see that what Trump seems to be doing, or Trump and Rubio seem to be doing, or their intentions anyway, are simply in line with a longer history? Is there something coherent that could be captured as the Donroe Doctrine, or is this just a more recent incarnation of something that has run through US history?

Mark Weisbrot

I think it’s mostly a recent incarnation of what we’ve seen even in recent history. But it’s all about saying the quiet part out loud. Hillary Clinton wrote in her memoirs that she helped make sure that the democratically elected president of Honduras couldn’t get back to the presidency. But she took it out of the paperback edition of her book. Other presidents and high officials usually don’t say these kinds of things that Trump would say. It’s more aggressively threatening, and it’s definitely more violent… bombing these boats. But in terms of overall damage, it’s still up in the air. I mean, think of the sanctions that killed at least 40,000 and probably over 100,000 people in Venezuela. That’s violence, too. What makes Trump different is really the violence on display. People like Hegseth and Trump, they seem to glorify the violence… The way he says, we killed the Cubans. Or people are dead, “like, dead.” That was Trump. So that’s a different aspect to it. And the open plunder of resources by the presidency is different from what you’ve had in recent decades. 

Sasha Lilley

Mark Weisbrot, thank you so much for your time today.

Mark Weisbrot

Thank you.

Sasha Lilley

Mark Weisbrot is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He’s the author of “Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy.” He’s been writing about Venezuela for 25 years. You’ve been listening to Against the Grain. I’m Sasha Lilley. Thanks so much for listening, and please tune in again next time.