This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 25th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Does the Trump administration's strong support for anti-Meduro forces in Venezuela

actually help Venezuelans? And why is the Trump

administration so concerned about human rights in Venezuela, but seemingly less

concerned about human rights in, say, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Turkey, and the Philippines.

Cato's John Glazer comments on the latest tumult in Venezuela and the U.S. role in it.

Over the past several years, particularly since Hugo Chavez died and sort of appointed

his successor, Nicholas Maduro, things that really slid downhill. So as a result of lots of bad

socialist economic policies, hyper-inflation, and increasing authoritarianism from the government of Maduro.

There's widespread economic strain, people are not getting food,

there's massive outflows of refugees from Venezuela and there's unrest there's

massive amounts of protests against Maduro's government. Now what's weird about the Trump administration's policy is

that pretty early on, Trump made some pretty outlandish comments about

Venezuela that seemed at the time to be out of left field.

He was talking about, you know, using euphemistic phrases like all options are on the table

to deal with the unrest in Venezuela, which everyone knows is kind of code for we still might use US military action.

This of course very much pleased

some of the Hawks in Trump's administration,

Pompeo and Bolton, John Bolton, have been very, very eager to

ramp up the tensions with Venezuela. A few months ago, John Bolton made a speech in which

he identified the Troika of tyranny, the countries of Cuba and Nicaragua and Venezuela, as a kind of implicit allusion to the Bush administration's axis of evil.

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