Alex Horton
speaker
618 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 3 Dec
Alex Horton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
The real target of Trump's war on drug boats by Jonathan Blitzer.
The reporting seemed to suggest there was a through line between Trump's actions in Venezuela and his actions here at home.
So I called Jonathan to learn more.
There have been elements of the Republican establishment that have wanted Maduro ousted in Venezuela.
And they've wanted him ousted for a bunch of typical sort of establishment reasons on the kind of hawkish neocon right.
Mainly that if you lose Venezuela, if the regime in Venezuela collapses, then there is a kind of domino effect among other socialist regimes across the region in Cuba, in Nicaragua, and elsewhere that would fall because they depend in many ways on the strength of the Venezuelan regime.
They get oil from Venezuela.
And they've kind of all been sort of oriented around Venezuela going back decades now.
And so for people like Marco Rubio, who obviously during Trump's first term was just a senator, there was a kind of axiomatic view among these types that you had to pressure Maduro to leave Venezuela.
And that the way to do it was to impose sanctions.
It was to threaten military action.
And interestingly, during the first Trump term,
The administration itself wasn't willing to go much farther than issuing threats.
So nothing much happened.
And Trump himself was someone who, it seems fair to say now, was not comfortable with the idea of a kind of direct military intervention.
He was into making all kinds of threats.
He was into the rhetorical side of it, but wasn't quite ready to face the music of what an actual kind of military engagement would involve.
And so what changed then from the first term of Donald Trump, where he was unwilling to kind of make that next step, to this next term?
Is it just that Marco Rubio has a bigger role and he's now the Secretary of State?
Well, that's what's so interesting, as I see it, in terms of what's happening right now.
Showing 501–520 of 618 · page 26 of 31
← Previous
Next →