Amanda Doyle

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Okay.

In the last days of February, we all woke up on a Saturday to find out that we were at war with Iran, having bombed them overnight, killing their Supreme Leader.

On January 3rd, we launched a military strike in Venezuela and abducted their president and brought him to the United States.

A couple of weeks later, Trump's son-in-law, a multi-billion dollar private equity fund guy whose biggest client is Saudi Arabia, named Trump's special envoy for peace, somehow announced a new master plan for

Gaza as a real estate development opportunity.

That same week, Trump doubled down on his threats to take control of Greenland, not ruling out the use of military force.

And just last week, Trump said of Cuba, against which the US has launched crushing oil blockades, creating a humanitarian crisis, that he would have, quote, the honor of taking Cuba.

He said, quote, I can do anything I want with it.

All of this got me thinking.

Well, a lot of things that I'm not going to say in case you want to send this episode to your mom, but it also got me thinking a lot about the United States history of regime change.

The process by which we go into a country either covertly through a CIA coup or overtly through military action and overthrow a government that is not doing what we want.

It got me thinking about why we say we do those things and then why we actually do those things.

And how often the justification is presented as, well, that leader we took out was a really, really bad guy.

Like in Iran, for example, yes, he was a ruthless dictator who massacred his own people.

In Venezuela, he was a cruel authoritarian guilty of horrendous human rights violations.

Yes and yes.