Tom Bilyeu

Between 2013 and 2021, Venezuela's real GDP fell by more than 75%, one of the largest peacetime collapses on record.

Venezuela also suffered one of the world's highest hyperinflation rates, with Reuters reporting the IMF's official projection of their 2018 levels at a staggering 1 million percent.

All of that catastrophe made them a very compelling target for China's Belt and Road Initiative.

And in 2018, Maduro officially signed on, effectively inviting China into the US's backyard.

To understand the level of aggression that this move ultimately triggered, however, we have to go back even further to the 1960s and talk about what happened in Cuba.

It was a literal bloodbath that walked us all up to the brink of nuclear annihilation and showed the world just how far America would go to protect its sphere of influence

and keep a rival from having weapons in its backyard.

In 1961, Cuba had just fallen to Fidel Castro, a revolutionary who promised land reform and freedom, and like all socialist dictators before him, delivered nothing but poverty and oppression.

But what really triggered the US was that he aligned himself with America's mortal enemy at the time, the Soviet Union.

So the CIA came up with a plan that seemed simple, train a small army of Cuban exiles, land them on a beach, spark a popular uprising, and overthrow Castro.

And in April 1961, they launched the invasion at a place called the Bay of Pigs.

It was a spectacular disaster.

Castro's forces were waiting.

The Cuban people did not rise up.

And within days, the invasion collapsed.

The rebels were all killed or captured.

And Castro not only survived, he became convinced the United States was going to try again.

So he asked the Soviet Union to protect him, and they were all too eager to comply.

Just one year later, in October of 1962, American spy planes flying over Cuba spotted something absolutely unthinkable.

Soviet nuclear missile sites were under construction just 90 miles from Florida.