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Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello and welcome to start your week from The Bunker.

Before we begin, as always, a big thank you to all of you who listened to us over the last year and who are here into the new year.

We very much appreciate all of you.

And another reminder that if you do want to help keep the podcast

going, you can support us on Patreon, where you'll get episodes as free and early. Search Bunker

Patreon podcast or follow the link in the show notes. I'm Jacob Jarvis. And joining me today is

Guardian columnist Raph Bear. Hi, Raff. Hi. Ralph, happy new year. I think we're just about in the, we're in the realm of where we can say that, aren't we? Oh, absolutely. Happy New Year. Happy 2026. Everything's going to be fine. It's going to be brilliant. Nothing bad will happen. Yeah, that's the, I think that I fear that that is the only positive bit of the podcast for a little while we're going to have. So yeah, let's start with Venezuela and what is happening there.

So, yeah, let's start

with Venezuela and what is happening there. So yeah, capturing Majuro. The word unprecedented gets

used a lot. Is this an instance where it's kind of fair, fair to use? With Trump, everything has

its own inflection, doesn't it? But actually, I mean, sort of US foreign policy massively overreaching to meddling the internal affairs of Latin American countries is definitely in the realm of the extremely precedents.

And there is actually a very specific precedent that's been cited a few times recently, which is Panama and the removal of General Noriega in, I think, 1989, but also engineering

coups in or helping facilitate, who's in Chile in the 1970s, Iran, 1950s, in Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo.

You can look at the Iraq War.

There's nothing especially new about America asserting this kind of power, but there is something

about the immense brazenness of going in and kidnapping the head of state of a sovereign country

in this way.

...