I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source, getting our heads around the invasion of Venezuela

and what feels like a rough new rulebook for the so-called world order.

Q. Greg, you're the hemispheric historian who wrote that big book, America America,

just in time last summer.

And you gave us a memorable spoken version of it.

It seems to me now, Greg, that you saw a lot of this coming.

And very specifically, the invasion and the decapitation of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.

The big theme in your book was the very dicey business of sovereignty historically between

North and South America.

And Donald Trump has been teasing at that instability of borders and labels ever since he

renamed the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America.

He's teasing us again this week when he says

Cuba could be next, even Colombia, on the list for invasion or regime change. Where are we, Greg

Grandin? And just how did we get here? Well, I mean, like many things with Trump, you have to kind of

work backwards from the most ludicrous to the larger geopolitical and wonder which variable is most consequential in decisions reached.

I mean, most of the reporting kind of holds that Trump was opposed to doing any kind of military intervention in the long run against Maduro that he was

willing to make some negotiating deals and eventually Rubio convinced him. Apparently, the last

row was watching Maduro dance. That apparently was the trigger and he gave the go ahead. So, you know, there's a lot of things

that operate in Trump's mind. The larger picture, I think, is, you know, the U.S. always turns to

Latin America when it's big for global dominance fails. And if we're looking at this in the long

run, you know, the United States, as this administration

has said very clearly in its national security strategy paper, that the function of the United

...