“I want to get at a bigger picture point that reflects the oil, the drugs, the socialist leader of Venezuela and the Marco Rubio domino theory about Cuba. And this feels like a war, or an operation, whatever you want to call it, out of the ’80s, out of a time when the big drug is cocaine, out of a time when the global economy is dependent on oil, as opposed to moving to renewable energy supply chains, which China is racing ahead of us on. and Trump is devastating in America. When there’s more fear that socialism might be on the rise and be an attractive ideology to people. Nobody was looking at Venezuela as a successful country that might inspire a lot of imitators — that I can run through the constellation of arguments being made in favor of this, but they all have this quality of being adjacent to reality as it is now. Like, there’s an energy argument, but the energy argument is the one that would have made sense in the ’80s, not the one — nobody thinks that. First, we are a huge energy exporter at this point. America is not dependent on others. We do not have an energy independence problem. And to the extent we do have a problem with the future, it is that China is wrecking us right now on things like the solar supply chain, and the expectation is not that the future will be won by whoever has access to the deepest oil reserves. Again, fentanyl, not cocaine, is the drug problem. There just isn’t a huge problem with socialist strongmen taking power all over Latin America. I mean, it’s a disaster for the Venezuelan people, but that’s a somewhat different issue from at least the American perspective, there just seems to be something slightly out of time about it. I know, it’s a great observation. I mean, the ’80s overlay is particularly striking to me, too. When you think about also immigration policies coming out of this administration, I mean, the hostility to immigrants in general in many ways is an attempt to rewrite some of the policies written in the 1980s, the 1980 Refugee Act. That’s been all but gutted. I mean, the idea of asylum, refugee practice — gone. One of the great ironies to me, in Trump’s new view of alliances in the region, is his alliance with Nayib Bukele, the authoritarian president of El Salvador. I’m thinking particularly, among other things, about how when the administration first invoked the Alien Enemies Act, it sent a group of some 250 Venezuelans accused, really, in almost every case without basis or evidence, of belonging to this Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison. The Salvadoran government got $5 million to hold them for an indefinite period of time. They were brutally tortured. They were held incommunicado. To someone like me, who spends a lot of time thinking about the long sweep of American foreign policy and immigration policy and how they’re intertwined over time, it was incredibly striking to see after years, particularly during the first Trump term, of villainizing immigrants on the basis that many of the Central American immigrants who arrived in the United States in recent years were somehow members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13, which, never mind that it began in the United States, was a kind of scourge that defined the region in the early 2000s and led to large numbers of people showing up at the border during the first Trump administration. Now you had Venezuelans being accused by the government of belonging to a Venezuelan gang. The target had just changed. And now the ally in prosecuting that case, just as it had been in the ’80s, was a hard-line Salvadoran regime in the region that I think in some ways Trump really wants to emulate. I mean, in some senses, it’s ridiculous to suggest that the president of El Salvador right now is a model for Trump, given just his kind of unrivaled power on the world stage. But one of the things that the Salvadoran government has done in recent years has been to basically suspend the Constitution and run the country for month to month in what’s been called a state of exception. That is almost exactly what the Trump administration fantasizes about in ways both literal and figurative. So I think in terms of why that kind of mode of thinking still seems to appeal to Trump and to some of his hard-line ideologues, I can see it as a throwback to an era of American interventionism. Unbridled demonstrations of force and power. There’s been reporting about the fact that Maduro, as a kind of attempt to placate the administration, basically offered his country’s oil up to the administration. The administration refused it, which again raises the question of this being more about a show of force. It’s a very strange thing. But I think you’re right. I think a lot of the ideological thinking around this has a kind of hoary, ’80s-era element. And if you poke it a little bit further, particularly in the context of Venezuela and this domino theory almost in reverse, of if you topple a socialist regime in the region, then others will fall. You really start to see the radicalism of this old hard-line Rubio position on Cuba, which he has not really budged on in his time in public office. He has always been utterly hard-line and stubborn on the question of needing to overthrow the Cuban government. And, again, that’s a very old- world, backwards-looking — I mean, this is not to defend the abuses of the Cuban government, which are obscene, really, in every sense. But, again, it is a mode of thinking that is, as you say, it’s very dated.