Ryan Knudson

The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.

Additional reporting in this episode by Rebecca Fong.

Thanks for listening.

See you tomorrow.

Our colleague Greg Ip, chief economics commentator, is a bit of a history buff.

And over the weekend, as President Donald Trump talked about why the U.S.

captured Venezuela's president, Nicolas Maduro, something in particular stood out to him.

In contrast, Trump has made it clear that a big motivation for carrying out his operation in Venezuela is because of a desire for a highly prized commodity.

The Trump administration says its primary reason for arresting Maduro was his involvement in drug trafficking.

In court earlier this week, Maduro pleaded not guilty.

But Gregg says the U.S.

action in Venezuela, and the way Trump has been talking about it, represent a generational shift in the way American presidents think about foreign policy.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Ryan Knudson.

It's Tuesday, January 6th.

Coming up on the show, Trump's new foreign policy doctrine.

All right, so Trump is charting this new course for American foreign policy that's very different from his predecessors.

Before we talk exactly about what that is and what it means, I want to start with the status quo.

It seemed like the primary force that drove American foreign policy since World War II was the spreading of democracy, exercising soft power.

Can you describe what that looked like?