00:00Right. I mean, 2026 got off to a pretty dramatic start, as we all know.
00:04And, you know, as we watch those scenes unfolding in Caracas, Venezuela's leader, Nicolas Maduro, is now in U.S. detention.
00:13I mean, that was a highly successful and carefully planned military operation.
00:18And I'm wondering whether you think that perhaps has fueled the appetite for the use of military force in places and in situations where perhaps there wasn't the appetite before.
00:29Do you think there's any any argument to be made there?
00:33Well, the action that President Trump took to capture Maduro reflects his broader strategy to protect the U.S. homeland, particularly the U.S. southern border, from flows of illegal migrants and criminal gangs and drugs.
00:47And to stop this, these inflows, he has to restore American leadership in the Western Hemisphere.
00:55Venezuela was disrupting stability in the region.
00:58We know a number of states, Iran, China and Russia, were establishing a presence in Venezuela that they were using to destabilize the region against American interests.
01:08I don't think this means that the president's plan on using military force more broadly.
01:12But I do think he decided, and this is in the national security strategy, to have a very aggressive approach to stop penetrations of our southern border by, as I said, criminals and drugs and illegal migrants.
01:26And to get to the source of this instability is in Central and South America, especially in Venezuela.
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