00:00Mick, is the president, has he been sold that this is an easy win?
00:05In which case, are we expecting a U.S. attack on Venezuela?
00:12That's hard to say. I don't know what an easy win looks like.
00:15But if the question is, is military action imminent, I think the answer is probably yes.
00:21As a friend of mine in the Pentagon pointed out a couple of weeks back,
00:23you don't put an aircraft carrier off of a foreign coast and not intend to use it.
00:28I think the issue then is what is the nature of that military action?
00:34Trump ran on a non-interventional sort of policy,
00:38getting us out of what he called stupid wars all around the world and so forth.
00:41He ran on that in 2016, 2020 and 2024.
00:45People ask me, you know, what was our biggest accomplishment in the first term?
00:49And one of the things I always point to is that we were, I think at that time,
00:53the first president during my lifetime who hadn't started a war during his time in office.
00:57So this was a big deal for Trump in the first term.
01:01He did get a little bit of a taste of what the American military can do on that bombing raid they pulled off in Iran.
01:09And it was extraordinarily successful.
01:11He was praised, I think rightly so, for it.
01:13And I think he's now wondering, OK, that doesn't, maybe that's not war to him.
01:18You know, maybe tomahawk diplomacy is not the same as putting American soldiers on the ground in a foreign country.
01:24I can absolutely see him at this point using the same type of strategic sort of or tactical sort of strikes inside a country.
01:33I still, however, cannot imagine he would ever commit American troops to set foot in Venezuela.
01:39It runs against everything that not only that he's talked about.
01:43Politicians change, you know, they go against what they talk about all the time.
01:46But this really goes against his very DNA.
01:49He is a non-interventionalist.
01:51He's not a pacifist by any stretch of the imagination, but he really, I can't imagine him committing American troops to invade a foreign country.
01:59And I think he would experience tremendous political pushback from his own base were he to do that.
02:06They'd be fine with some strikes, either through air or through cruise missiles and so forth.
02:12But I don't think that his folks would support him in putting troops on the ground.
Comments