Gordon Carrera

rock music to try and get him out, but eventually it works.

That's a kind of wild way of doing a capture operation.

Yeah.

Which I think goes back to the point we made right at the start of this two-part series, which is the operation itself

was flawlessly executed and incredibly effective at doing what it wanted to do.

But where it leads to and what happens next is much less clear.

And I think that's where the tricky bit comes because it's one thing to carry out that operation, but until you know what's going to replace Maduro, until you understand the consequence of it, it's a lot hard to say that the overall outcome

policy is a success.

And I think that's perhaps where we should end up, is where does this new doctrine and new policy take us?

Yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, to some extent, the Russians are already trying to do that, and they tried to do it in Ukraine.

So it's not like they could be more emboldened, but they might see it as an opening.

But I agree, if China feels like that is the new way of the world, if this is the nature of power and the exercise of power, and that the US is less likely to intervene over Taiwan, then yeah, you can certainly see that as plausible.

So I think in the short term, definitely a loss for China and Russia in terms of

the battle for influence.

They've lost an ally.

If you're Russia, you've lost Syria as an ally.

You've now lost Venezuela.

If you're China, who are trying pretty actively to build influence in Latin America, this also potentially is a loss.

But as I said, I think it's still too early to know how it's going to play out, isn't it?