Noel King

The conservative American emigre community, since he took office, has had Chavez before him.

They were seen as a new Cuban revolution, the Castro Chavismo.

And of course, you know, Trump is Mar-a-Lago, right?

And who is around him in Florida?

I mean, look at the panoply of characters that are there.

You have an extremely conservative political environment.

You have Colombian Americans, Venezuelan Americans, Cuban Americans, and others who have emerged, as we've all seen over the past X many years, as arch conservatives, very effective lobbyists on behalf of the political opponents to anything smelling of the left in Latin America to take an opportunity.

All right, President Trump wants Nicolas Maduro out.

How easy or hard would that be?

Who was it?

It wasn't Dick Cheney.

It was one of the Vulcans that promised that getting rid of Saddam Hussein and taking over Iraq, another oil-rich state, remember, would be a cakewalk.

Well, it certainly wasn't a cakewalk.

Now, I'm not suggesting that something similar would happen in Venezuela.

We're talking about a very different country.

Ethos, I guess, or mystique that permeates the self-proclaimed revolutionary left, such as it still exists in Latin America, around Venezuela.

But it has to be said that this government is military.

Chavez did a great deal to...

inculcate a new generation of soldiers and young officers with ideology that was anti-imperialist, therefore anti-American, anti-Yankee, that kind of thing.

And there has been, you know, Cuban advisors in and out of Venezuela for a very long time and they've worked effectively