Gordon Carrera

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?

Yeah.

I mean, you start bombing drug factories in Mexico.

You put pressure on the Colombian leader.

You try and squeeze Cuba.

It doesn't sound like they want to invade Cuba, but they hope they can kind of... It's a weak enough regime.

They can kind of push it over and collapse.

You have this kind of attempt to use coercive diplomacy effectively against these countries to say, you know...

do what we want or else, which works so long as Venezuela doesn't unravel or things don't go wrong to some extent, doesn't it?

And I mean, before anyone points it out, the Brits may have known a thing or two about gumbo diplomacy as well, as the Chinese may tell us over the opium wars.

and various other things.

But if we go back to the kind of present day, I mean, you'd be worried if you're Greenland.

And you could see the last day or two, Denmark has been suddenly realised, well, actually, when Donald Trump has said, we're going to get Greenland one way or another, and he talks about Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place, you can see that now, suddenly, if you're the Danes, you're thinking, he may be serious about this.