You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense, and Foreign Affairs.

My name's Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. In this episode, I sat down with some old friends.

Frank Hoffman, who worked for many years at the National Defense University and is a legend in the world of

strategy making. Rebecca Friedman listener, currently of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Her last role in government was Vice President Harris's Deputy National Security Advisor,

and Justin Logan, who leads all things

defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute. We have a rollicking conversation on strategy going

through almost every region of the world. I think you'll enjoy it. It gets pretty spicy.

Thank you all for joining. We got a great group. Very excited to have you all on the show. Frank, I'm shocked that I've never had you on the podcast before, given you've been involved with War on the Rocks from the beginning.

This is actually my second podcast. It's been so long you've forgotten. You were on the show before?

On some show, I remember we had amber liquids in glasses. That's why Ryan doesn't remember. This was just been years ago. It was. It was a decade ago. Oh, okay. All right. Well, welcome back. Rick, I've had you on the show, although not for a number of years. It's been a while. I'm happy to be back. And, Justin, you were just on a few months ago, but I'm still happy to see you. Like a bad penny. I just keep turning up. Yeah. There's so much going on in the world. I'm not sure where to start. I think the broader idea I kind of want to get at is to what extent is there any kind of strategy or grand strategy in this administration, given all that's going on? Or is this a purely sort of personalistically driven set of policies that don't necessarily add up.

And I think one place where we can start with that is what's happening with Venezuela,

just to go around the horn, who here thinks we're actually going to attack Venezuela or try a regime

change operation, which I realize is sort of two different things.

Not to be Clintonian, but I'd ask you to define attack.

I think the administration doesn't want to go, but the problem is that you may push enough

forward that it becomes difficult to climb down.

So that's me not very casually trying to not answer the question.

I'd say if you asked me a week ago, I would have put odds on some form of military action,

Venezuela, but more recent statements

coming out of the White House make me think that they're actually looking for a way out,

and maybe we'll just see a continued campaign against the alleged drug trafficking boats

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