Ben Rhodes

The kingpin strategy is criticized as kind of showy.

And you remember all those years where the number two and number three of Al Qaeda kept on getting killed and replaced the week later?

That's right.

And today I saw the number two of the Nubat Hanyanasyan was killed today.

And I thought, yeah, OK, here we go.

But the reality is that when strategies like going after...

I'm not kidding.

Their HR departments, the recruiters, that works.

Going after their money works better than anything else.

So complicating the business side of the business where we have some skill and not just us, like other regulators, other governments have skills at doing that kind of work.

That does work.

It's boring.

It's not as exciting as putting a, you know, launching a rocket and flying

and blowing up a you know a drug site but the truth is they're in this for business and if they're the I'd say actually one of the real risks is I let's say that I don't think that they will manage to significantly reduce the supply of drugs moving into the United States but if they do

The businesses will turn to other markets.

And just as they're doing, frankly, Asia and Europe are booming for the cocaine trap.

And we're awash in more cocaine than we've ever seen.

Like we're at historically high levels of cocaine production.

That's not coming to the U.S.

or at least not in vast quantities.