Niall Ferguson

Yeah.

We may get there, but I think it was never going to happen in a hurry after the bad experiences of Iraq.

Could Iraq be the wrong analogy?

Yeah, not perfect.

So what else could be said?

When Trump's national security strategy was published in November, was it?

Or was it early December?

Everybody was very preoccupied with what it said about Europe.

I said, that's not the interesting thing.

The interesting thing is the Trump corollary, because the Trump corollary was this allusion to the Roosevelt corollary of 1904, Theodore Roosevelt, I should say.

which said, not only is the Monroe Doctrine true, that Europeans can't interfere in the Western Hemisphere and Latin America and the Caribbean, but also we, the United States, reserve the right to change governments we don't like in this part of the world.

So we're back to that world.

And to go to your movie analogy, the movies back then never turned out that well.

The United States intervened in, let's see, Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico.

I'm sure I'm missing Dominican Republic.

And it, you know...

often ended up with, well, he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch, or it ended up with, ah, the revolution, think Cuba, and then you're really looking at a mess.

Can that be the story here?

I think that's the downside risk for the Trump administration, that if they repeat the history of American interventions post-1904, then you either end up having a nasty regime that you kind of own, or you end up with another revolution against it.

I think it'll be hard to avoid that because Venezuela has been very deeply and seriously damaged by the Chavistas.