Manuel Noriega

And it's just so obvious.

But it really does.

It goes to show that like the Cold War, I don't think it ever really technically ended like the wall falling and Gorbachev being like kicked out or, you know, taken out of his seat or whatever.

That's all.

It just went on and around.

It just went underground.

Putin's a product of the KGB.

He was a KGB spy.

This stuff never really ended, and it's all just proxy wars where America's funding one side, the Soviets are funding the other side, but now it's the Chinese that are sort of rising up and doing things a little bit differently with the Belt and Road Initiative, but they're still...

funding Venezuela at the moment.

Like, did you see the amphibious tanks that they gifted Venezuela?

I'm pretty sure it was China.

Like, dude, there are these wild tanks that just, like, there's videos of them, like, rolling off the beach, like, into the ocean and...

You know they're it's meant to like show like oh We you know if these us warships are really gonna attack us like we can defend ourselves like no the fuck you can't No way dude those things are like floating islands those things are like islands, right?

I don't even know, but not enough.

But it just goes to show that, and this is what I try to really highlight in the book, because even though this book is about Noriega, Panama, Iran-Contra, all of these very complex issues that nobody knows everything about, the book serves as a framework for how and why the CIA and the US government pick a foreign strongman, how and why they build him up and use him.

And then how and why they discard of them when they have no more use only to repeat the cycle and do it all again.

Like all over the world, so many different like uprisings have been funded by the CIA, just like we had spoken about, you know what I mean?

Like funding the Contras, like that was their intention was to put the Contras into power to have a US friendly leader in place that they could, you know, obviously have control, but if they ever like

wanted to put like US military bases there, they could, like trade is easier.