Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org. I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with Maduro and his wife's court appearance today in Manhattan,

in which he pled not guilty and claimed he was a victim of a kidnapping and is a prisoner of war.

Joining us is an expert on guerrilla war and terrorism to discuss his warning, he wrote, on X, that, quote,

Venezuela is primed for resistance to U.S. controlling the oil.

Perfect terrain for insurgency.

Plenty of armed groups already.

Far worse than Iraq, chaos is coming.

Robert Pape is a professor of political science and the

director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism at the University of

Chicago specializing in political violence and international security affairs.

He's the author of Cutting the Fuse the Explosion of Global Suicide

Terrorism and How to Stop it, dying to win the strategic

logic of suicide terrorism, and bombing to win air power and coercion in war.

Then we'll examine whether Trump, who clearly does not believe in democracy, is swapping

one dictator for another in Venezuela, and speak with Jacob

Harbrun, the editor at the national interest and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's

Eurasia Center and a columnist for The Spectator. His books include They New Though a Right,

The Rise of the Neocons, and America Last, the right century-long romance with foreign dictators.

He's also editor at large of the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune.

Then finally, we'll speak with Adele Stan, an independent journalist and longtime chronicler of the right wing of U.S. politics,

a winner of the Hillman Prize in opinion and analysis journalism.

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