06/12/08 – Greg Grandin – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, Santa Award Radio Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, thanks for listening.
Our next guest is Greg Grandin, he wrote this article, Losing Latin America, What Will the Obama Doctrine Be Like?
It was originally written for Tom Dispatch, but boy, Google that title and you'll find it's been reprinted in every web publication on Earth.
Quite an accomplishment, quite an important topic.
He's a professor of history at New York University, he's the author of Empire's Workshop, Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and the Last Colonial Massacre, Latin America in the Cold War.
Welcome to the show, Greg.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Alright, so let's get to it here.
The Monroe Doctrine, that's where we start.
President Monroe said, alright, that's it, European powers, you're no longer allowed to mess around in the Americas, this is our territory.
Yeah, well, Spanish America was becoming independent, and the U.S. was flexing its muscles a little bit and trying to make sure that no part of the Americas was recolonized.
It was a warning, basically, to Russia more than anything else.
To Russia more than anything else?
Well, to Russia, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and Britain to a degree.
And so then there was the, I'm trying to remember, the Theodore Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, right?
Yeah, well, you know, it was, like many of these doctrines, it was announced, but it was, the U.S. was still quite a young nation, it didn't have the muscle to back it up, and so presidents would invoke it throughout the 19th century, but it wasn't really until Theodore Roosevelt issued his Corollary, which basically claimed for the U.S. the right to go into Latin America to restructure their politics and their economics in a way that suited the United States.
So in some way that expanded the initial justification of the Monroe Doctrine, so any kind of political turmoil that may be going on, that may have been going on in the Caribbean nation, particularly at the time the Dominican Republic, the U.S. would be now able to invoke the Monroe Doctrine in order to justify going in there, even if there was no threat of an immediate European attempt to extend its influence into the Americas.
Now, you know, I saw a list one time, compiled by the U.S. Navy, I think it was, of every U.S. intervention abroad, and it was, I believe, 173 of them, although the list was only current up until 1993 at the time, I think, but there were so many interventions in Central and South America, it was absolutely unbelievable.
We're talking about, you know, if this was a college history textbook, each of these ought to get its own little subheading or something, and they just don't.
Nobody's ever even heard of the history of American intervention in Latin America.
Well, no one in the United States has ever heard of it.
Right, Latin American.
Well, it goes even beyond that.
I mean, you can think of it in different phases.
So basically you have the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, up until the Spanish-American War, 1898.
And there was a number of military interventions, but actually the U.S. Navy issued a report, a study, of its own involvement in Latin America in, I think, 1897 or something like that, and it listed over 5,900 kind of dispatches of gunboats into Latin American ports.
A lot of these weren't military interventions, they were just flexing muscles and going in there.
This was just between, say, the 1830s and 1889, and it was a great title of the report.
It was called an Index of Informal Empire.
But then, of course, in 1898 was the big inauguration of U.S. empire in the Caribbean and the Philippines and in Central America, and not just the Spanish-American War in which the U.S. took over Puerto Rico, the Philippines, informally took over Cuba, but also kicked off three decades of serial interventions and occupations of Central America, of Mexico, the Caribbean, occupied Haiti, occupied the Dominican Republic, occupied Cuba, occupied Panama, occupied Nicaragua for extended periods of time during this period.
In some ways, Central America was the functional equivalent of what the Middle East is today for the Bush administration during the 1920s, 1910s and 1920s, a place where serial interventions not only didn't pacify the region, but led to extended waves of radicalization throughout Latin America, rising what was called anti-Americanism and opposition to U.S. militarism.
And in Central America, insurgencies against marine occupation in Nicaragua, famously with Augusto Sandino, but also in Dominican Republic and Haiti.
And then, of course, then there was a brief period of the good neighbor policy where they worked out what I talk and what I call an empire's workshop, these informal mechanisms of control.
It didn't, it didn't, in the FDR, Franklin Roosevelt's agreement to the non-intervention principle in which the U.S. gave up its right to intervene in the political affairs of nations didn't lead to a loss of U.S. power, but actually consolidated and allowed the U.S. to kind of project its influence free of the burdens of direct militarism.
Yeah, you say in the article that during the New Deal, they sort of practiced how they would set up the global American empire after the war.
Yeah.
I mean, nobody really talks about the good, the good neighbor policy.
Everybody thinks the good neighbor policy is basically just Washington's promise to respect Latin America and, you know, and not be racist and all that stuff.
But actually it, it was a fundamental revision of international diplomacy in which the U.S. as a great power voluntarily, of course it was forced to because of the Great Depression and because of all of these military insurgencies against marine occupations, but it voluntarily gave up the right of intervention, which was unheard of in diplomatic protocol.
And that, that became the foundational premise of liberal multilateralism, how the U.S. diplomatic order that after World War II, the U.S. put into place elsewhere.
So Latin America was really in some ways the, the kind of training ground providing the blueprint for how the U.S. projected its power in its fight against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Well, so you're saying then that FDR actually did change the intervention from outright military intervention all the time to more of a diplomatic control, I guess is what you're saying?
Diplomatic control and based on the notion of multilateral agreement.
So he gave up the right to intervene.
He acknowledged the absolute sovereignty of other nations within the Americas, but basically throughout the world.
And the U.S. during the Cold War did obviously intervene in Latin America, Guatemala most famously in 1954, Chile in 73, but also many other times.
But it always did so through the guise of multilateralism, but it got agreement from the Organization of American States in much the same way the U.S. justified the Korean War through the, through the UN.
So it was, it was, it was diplomatically different even when the U.S. was using military, the military and armed interventions.
So it's sort of like renaming the British Empire or the Commonwealth, huh?
A little bit, a little bit, but I do think it was significant in the sense that the rise of the neoconservatives and the religious right and the kind of underpinnings of the new imperialism really did seek to sweep all of that away.
And again, it was in Latin America that they turned to just like the New Deal, the New Dealists did in the 1930s, the new right turns to the new right, which I'm defining as the neocons, first generation neocons and the religious right turned to Latin America as a way to sweep away that multilateralism and re-institute militarism.
Now let's break this down a little bit, the old and the new, well, I won't call them the old right because they're certainly not, the old right is something entirely different, but the, the older right in this case, the Rockefeller Republicans, the Henry Kissinger detente style policy versus the Reaganites, basically the, the neocons and, and the kind of nationalist right wing, the religious conservatives that you talk about.
In the article, you say that the somewhat less violent policy of the Carter years actually only sort of set up for the backlash of the Reagan years and the bloodbaths that came with the covert wars in the 1980s.
Yeah, I like to think of it as, I mean, what, what you just identified as the older right, I guess I would call corporate liberals or corporate liberalism, the kind of a liberal establishment in the US.
The typical, you, you identify them in the article, the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission, Eastern Establishment.
Yeah, basically the, the, the, the people who ran you, the US, you know, it used to be called the establishment, right?
And you know, these multiple crises throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam, the global economic crisis of Keynesianism, the loss of authority of the US through Watergate, other scandals, the rise of anti-militarism linked to anti-Vietnam War protests, the rise of the third world and national and economic nationalists and socialists of the third world all led to a major crisis of the New Deal order.
And the way I tried to lay it out in that article is that the first attempt to respond to that crisis came out of the corporate establishment, the liberal establishment, the Rockefellers and the Kissingers and, you know, on, on the Republican side, but then also the trilateralists like Carter on the, on the democratic side, and they basically wanted to ratchet down the Cold War rhetoric.
They wanted to de-ideologize US foreign policy, maybe even, you know, decrease military spending as a way to kind of jumpstart the US economy.
They thought detente and rapprochement and normalization of international relations would open up Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to US corporations and revive the US economy.
And the way I see it is that that failed, it failed for a number of reasons.
One, Europe and Japan were not being cooperative in stabilizing the US dollar, the oil crisis.
Europe was much better positioned to take advantage of the opening up of Eastern Europe than the US was.
And so what you had was this rising new right that ultimately becomes the real, you know, the historical coalition, which responds most fully to the crises of the 1970s.
And for a while, it's, you know, the Reagan revolution is the solution, the restructuring of the US economy, the restructuring of US diplomacy towards militarism becomes the, becomes the solution to the crisis.
Now I think we're living at a, at a moment in which that solution is beginning to unravel.
Well, and the people of Latin America certainly paid a price in the 1980s.
I mean, you can even read, you know, a Bob Woodward style retelling of that era, his book, Veil, The Secret Wars of the CIA, for example.
And well, basically what you have is a bunch of machete wielding butchers on the US payroll going around killing women and children.
Yeah.
And it's all in Central America.
And this is the point I try to make in Empire's Workshop.
This is what focuses on Empire's Workshop.
Central America, Reagan's foreign policy in Central America becomes the place that brings together the two main constituencies, you know, that ultimately come back again together after 9-11 under the Bush administration, but it brings together the two main constituencies of the new imperialism.
And that's the first generation of neocons who provide the new militarism with its legal and intellectual legitimacy and, and the religious right, which brings a new militarism.
It's, it's, it's kind of grassroots energy.
And Central America is key because, because it is so unimportant, right?
You know, it's not like Vietnam.
Vietnam had two superpowers that the US was lined up against.
Soviet Union obviously had nuclear weapons.
The Middle East was a powder keg.
Central America was squarely within the US's backyard.
It had no consequential allies, but it was also embroiled in all of these revolutionary movements that had been building, you know, for decades in Central America.
And they had all been coming to a head.
The Senatistas won, took power in 1979.
The left-wing insurgencies were, seemed like they were going to take over in El Salvador and Guatemala.
And just at the moment, this was when Reagan gets elected.
And, and I have a great quote in the book by a staffer from Jesse Helms' office, Jesse Helms, a Senator from North Carolina, was largely responsible with vetting foreign policy appointments, particularly when it came to Latin America.
And he said, they, meaning movement conservatives, can't have the Middle East.
They can't have the Soviet Union.
They can't have Western Europe, all are too important.
So they've given them Central America.
So the, the history that Bob Woodward's book, Veiled, talks about is basically the history of the Iran-Contra scandal.
And Iran-Contra, a lot of people have trouble figuring out what it exactly was.
But in essence, it really was the kind of coming out of this alliance.
If you look at who was involved, was exactly this kind of first generation neocons in alliance with these kind of soldier of fortune mercenaries and these religious right, new right groups, which were getting much more involved in foreign policy.
Yeah, there was even a great Seymour Hersh article where he talked about how they held a little reunion, Elliot Abrams and Dick Cheney and all these guys palling around, I guess, I don't know if it was in the White House or wherever they held this little party.
And they sat around discussing the lessons learned from Iran-Contra.
Yeah, lessons learned.
I read that.
And that's why John Negroponte, that's when he decided to give up, that he was involved in Iran-Contra.
He was a, he was ambassador to Honduras and he was involved in all sorts of ways.
And at the time of that lessons learned meeting, according to that Hersh article, he, you know, he was the head of the, you know, now the combined intelligence agency of the U.S., but he, that's when he made the switch to the state department.
Apparently, according to Hersh, he said he didn't want anything to do with any replay of what happened in the 1980s.
I mean, that may be giving him too much credit, but it's kind of interesting.
Well, and he did come out and say, oh, Ryan, they're at least 10 years away from a bomb and things that would tend to thwart, you know, Iran-Contra too going on up there, it would seem like.
Yeah.
Yes.
You know, he's potentially no less bloodthirsty, but he's a little bit more rational.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Becoming a realist somehow.
Realist doesn't necessarily mean libertarian.
And now the lessons learned were, you don't use the CIA at all.
The lessons learned were, you do everything through the vice president's office, you don't tell the Senate Intelligence Committee is a damn thing, and you make the whole operation as illegal and off the books as possible.
That way, it can't really be traced back to the legitimate government of the United States, if you want to call it that.
Yeah.
There were tons of lessons learned.
That was one of them.
I mean, Iran-Contra really was the way in which these kind of second-tier militarists and hawks, you know, in all of these diverse departments and agencies, created a kind of interagency war party that was able to bypass, figure out ways to bypass moderates, so-called moderates or realists, whatever you want to call them, in the State Department, in the CIA, build support for the war, or at least neutralize potential opposition to the war and policy.
And all of this happened in Central America.
All of this stuff that we're seeing with the message multipliers of the Pentagon, you know, and all of the manipulation of domestic opinion, that all happened with the Office of Public Diplomacy.
It was set up in 1983, which operated out of the White House.
It was first headed by Cuban exile Otto Reich, and then it was taken over by the neocon Robert Kagan.
And it was basically described by a congressional Iran-Contra investigation as a domestic covert operation run on domestic soil.
It used public money in order to illegally and clandestinely manipulate public opinion, bringing together these so-called nominally grassroots organizations, you know, but things like the kind of conservative watchdog groups, which were basically being mobilized at the Office of Public Diplomacy in order to go after critics of Reagan's Central American policy.
So in some ways, it was the origins of swift voting you see happening there.
Yeah.
Very interesting stuff there.
How all these things tend to lead back, I mean, where we even have Ledeen and Ghorbanifar meeting in Rome, plotting regime change against Iran, as Iran is using them to get regime change in Iraq, and all these things.
It's funny how it all ties back together.
Yes, yes.
The Iran-Contra really does kind of co-elaborate all of these different strands, these anti-communists, these militarists, these neocons, it kind of unites them all into a common crusade.
At a moment when there wasn't much else for them to do, you know, after getting kicked out of Southeast Asia, a lot of these mercenaries were demobilized.
There was the Clark Amendment, which prohibited aid to anti-communist insurgents in Africa.
So Central America really was a kind of resuscitated all of these different militarist currents and channeled them into a common crusade.
The other thing that happens in Central America is that you really do see the ideological heart of the Bush Doctrine, not just the willingness to use militarism, but the justification of that militarism in ever more idealistic terms.
You know, that kind of vaulting language of democracy and spreading democracy to the world, that had long been the property of the Democratic Party, from Woodrow Wilson to John Kennedy.
Republicans as a party tended to be very nervous about that.
They didn't really support Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, which was sold in similar terms about completing the Revolution of the Americas and all of this as a way to kind of provide an alternative to the Cuban Revolution.
But it was in Central America where Reagan really claims that moral high ground in justifying the Contras.
And that's the kind of that ideological core of the Bush Doctrine, not just the willingness to use violence and militarism, but to justify that violence and militarism and vaulting rhetoric.
Now, let's talk about actually, you know, kind of fast forward to where we are now.
It seems like this whole unipolar world and the new American century and screw multilateralism will have the National Security Council decide instead of the U.N.
Security Council and so forth.
Seems like that era has come and gone.
Yeah.
I know.
It's amazing.
You know, like that Fareed Zakaria, who I mentioned in the piece, you know, Newsweek editor just five years ago, he was running around talking about how it's the unipolar moment and the world has to get used to it.
And U.S. power, you know, across the board in every realm is, you know, uncontested and unmatched.
And now he has a new book out called The Post-American World, in which in every realm except military, the U.S. is on the ropes.
And we're only supposed to listen to the people who have a record of being wrong about everything.
Nothing succeeds like failure.
I know.
I know.
I have to tell you, and I hate to turn every interview I do into this.
And for the regular listeners, they must be getting sick and tired of it.
But it seems to me like some giant hand from the sky ought to reach down and scoop up all these pundits and news people and, you know, throw them in a garbage bin somewhere.
And that these executives would have to go, I guess, trolling through the archives of Antiwar.com and Tom Dispatch to find some reporters and pundits who actually have known what they're talking about all this time and up until and including now.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
I know.
I love it.
And then even when they do admit it, like Michael Ignazio's, you know, apology about the war, he somehow still has to swipe against like people like Chomsky, because even though they were right, they were right for the wrong reasons.
Oh, yeah.
Because they hate America so much and so forth.
They were right, but because they were knee-jerk rather than considerate or thoughtful, like they were.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
See, I'm a libertarian, and there's one thing that I take real personal in all this, and that is Republicans calling their, frankly, fascist enterprise the free market.
Yeah.
We're here to give you free market reforms with a 40-inch gun pointed at your head from the battleship offshore.
It's a Stephen Kinzer called the American door policy, the kick-open-the-door policy.
And this is not free trade, and this is certainly not libertarianism.
And yet it seems to me like the average citizen in any South or Latin American country has got to look at capitalism as some dangerous enemy of their freedom, and it's pushing the South towards socialism, which I personally believe is the wrong direction.
But that is certainly the reaction that we get now all across Latin and South America is populist leftists being elected to power.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, there's a lot there.
I mean, yeah, we're definitely what they call the free market.
I mean, look, we talked about Teddy Roosevelt, and he was the one who really did the most to align emerging corporate class with U.S. government and create what was in effect a corporate-as-foreign policy.
And that continued, obviously, through the New Deal and the New Deal coalition, a kind of East Coast block of export-driven corporations that were very much invested in having a strong state back them up in the world.
And I think that's what emerged, the Rockefeller class that I talked about in the Business Roundtable, I think were very much of that vein.
And what you start to see happening as their solution to the crises of the 1970s fell is that they turned much more militarist and much more willing to make their peace with this rising militarist new right that's very much invested in what they call free markets.
But I don't think it is free markets.
It's very much, you know, it's certainly not libertarian where they believe in a very strong state, in a militarist state, and increasingly understand the fulfillment of biblical prophecy as linked to the fortunes of this re-militarized state.
So what you see in the 1980s is a kind of coming together of a bellicose, a very threatened and increasingly aggressive corporate class making their peace with the chauvinist base of the Reagan revolution.
And I think that leads to the power of the new right.
What you see now, and a lot of that stuff gets, I think, codified under Clinton, you know, through the WTO and all of these things.
But you know, Latin Americans, I think there's a lot of, you know, it's complicated.
People in Latin America, they've lived under what has been called free markets and free trade, even if it hasn't been.
So their reaction to it is kind of understandable.
Right.
I mean, it's hard to call it free trade when, you know, Nixon overthrows Allende in 1973, you know, on the behest of ITT and Anaconda Mining Corporation.
That's hardly free trade.
Right.
And well, now, like the FTAA, for example, I mean, this is where we get to the practical consequences even for the American imperialists.
The FTAA, I remember back in 1998, 1999 saying, oh, no, look at this thing.
They want to have it complete by 2005 and they're going to call it free trade.
But it sure as hell ain't.
Well, I believe you're here to tell me the FTAA is dead.
The FTAA, I think, is pretty dead.
You know, it all depends on Brazil.
Brazil's objections to the FTAA had mostly to do with the subsidies that the U.S. continued to give to its agricultural sector and the tariffs it placed on agricultural products coming in.
It also had to do with these intellectual property rights laws, which tended to favor U.S. corporations or Latin Americans interpreted as favoring U.S. corporations.
I mean, you know, they didn't necessarily think of the FTAA as free trade.
They thought it was a particular version of free trade that Washington was imposing.
I mean, what a lot of these leftists in Latin America are doing are actually totally within the terms of, they're not really challenging what they call neoliberalism, they're just diversifying it somewhat and trying to court capital from Russia and from Asia and from the Middle East and to diversify their markets and not rely so much on the United States.
But there does seem to be a move, you know, the Council on Foreign Relations issued this long report on how the U.S. could recoup its power in Latin America.
One of its recommendations was that Washington should drop its protectionism in order to win over Brazil.
And if they win over Brazil, that'll weaken Venezuela and it could create a whole new realignment.
So it's dead for now, but it may be revived with the next president.
Yeah.
And it's still at Pratt House where most of this policy is formulated then.
What's that?
I'm sorry?
It's still at the Pratt House.
That Council on Foreign Relations headquarters there in New York is where most of this policy is formulated.
Well, with them and, you know, obviously they have much less influence than they did in the 60s and 70s, you know, there has been a, you know, there are these other centers of intellectual production, but I think they're still pretty influential.
They do definitely represent a certain corporate current.
Now, I'm sorry, because this was supposed to be a big part of this interview and now it's going to be the last little bit of it.
Barack Obama, where does he stand on all this?
Is he here to save the empire from itself?
Well, obviously he's the, he's the person I think that's being tapped in order to re-stabilize the U.S. empire.
Now, whether the crazies, you know, whether, you know, whether the religious right and the neocons will actually allow him to kind of, you know, I don't think that he's going to reign in U.S. power.
I think he would be the equivalent of somebody like FDR, I think, that would stabilize it and temper it a little bit and put a softer face on it.
Whether he's allowed to do that, just like Jimmy Carter was supposed to do that in the seventies, but he wasn't, you know, he was swept away by the new right.
Whether he's able to do that or not is another question.
In the article, I just speculated that it's hard to imagine that he would elicit the kind of backlash that Carter did, mostly because the new right is the movement in decomposition rather than a movement on the march and ascension that it was in the 1970s.
And there's no real reason for them not to let him have a chance of doing this.
I mean, he's saying he's not going to decrease the military budget.
You know, he's not really dissenting from any of the major premises of the Bush doctrine.
He just didn't, you know, as it relates to Latin America, he just endorsed Colombia's right to strike across its borders, which, you know, which it did a few months ago when it got every other Latin American country upset and enraged.
And now Colombia, the Uribe, I don't know how to say his name, his government is the most right wing, America friendly government in South America, right?
Yeah.
And it's just that I mean, it's the one place where the Cold War has effectively continued.
It's where the war on where George H.W.
Bush announced the war on drugs in 1989.
It's and you know, it's where every president has increased military aid in the name of fighting first drugs.
And now and now, you know, insurgency, the Farc insurgency.
And so it's no coincidence that that's the one country where the U.S. continues to have influence, the one country where it's pouring billions of dollars into it as a kind of wedge against this movement left, you know, all in the Indies.
So and Obama just announced his, you know, unwavering support for Colombia in some ways is the functional equivalent of Israel.
You know, it's the way the U.S. is able to project its influence to a region where it's quickly losing it and, you know, in other countries, you know, he was just saying to Barack Obama saying, yeah, we're going to part of his thing about Colombia.
I don't remember the whole thing, but the part that stuck out of me was the.
Yeah, we're going to get rid of the right wing death squads at the same time, the same breadth as we're going to increase our support for Uribe there.
Yeah, and extend and basically endorse the Merida Initiative, which is an attempt to apply the Colombia solution to Mexico and Central America.
Wait, wait, what's that initiative again?
And who came up with that?
Well, the Merida, it's named after a city in Mexico, M-E-R-I-D-A, Merida Initiative.
And basically it was just passed, I think, in the House or the Senate, but at a reduced amount.
And Mexico is in trouble with it, with drug related violence.
But that's not a but it is a fact that there is a major crisis there.
A lot of that has to do with the criminalization of drugs and the war on drugs in general, which which which creates this kind of violence.
But setting setting the causes of it, it obviously is a problem.
What's going on in Mexico?
They think that Colombia represents a possible solution to what's going on in Mexico.
It's it's kind of frightening.
Yeah.
And then you quote Barack Obama saying we need to push this further south as well.
Yeah, it was a kind of cryptic remark in his speech.
He went, you know, a couple of weeks ago, he went down to Miami and he gave a speech to right wing Cuban exiles, the Cuban-American National Foundation.
And he basically ran to Bush's right, you know, kind of repeating a tradition that has been going on ever since John F.
Kennedy ran to Nixon's right on Cuba, effectively, you know, basically all but blaming Bush for losing Latin America, for not paying attention to it.
And in that speech, he endorsed Uribe's attack on Ecuador to get at the FARC and also this this merit.
And now let's talk about Venezuela here to wrap up real quick.
I'm not a personal fan of Hugo Chavez or or really socialism in general.
But my understanding of the situation in Venezuela is basically that the oil has always been collectively owned by the government.
And it used to be that all that money went to the few private people who own the government.
And now that it's Chavez in there, he takes that money and distributes it much more equitably.
But that basically in terms of the ownership of the actual oil, the partnerships with American companies and so forth are still basically the same as they were.
The only difference is that instead of investing all his extra petrodollars in American debt, he's now spending that money on the people of Venezuela.
Is that is that basically right?
And do you think that that Chavez is really a threat to American interests?
And if so, how so?
Well, you know, I think what he's doing with the money is a bit complicated.
And, you know, it's hard to tell.
I think that he has redistributed it in a much greater fashion than previous regimes.
And if you just look at the growth rate, you know, it can't all be attributed to oil because other other oil exporting countries don't have the same growth growth rate as Venezuela has over the last four years, three years.
I mean, it's off the charts in terms of its economic growth.
And I would say that that has to do with the fact that there has been real distribution going on, which has stimulated the economy.
And so, you know, it's in a haphazard, crazy way.
There is a lot of corruption, but no more corruption than there was prior to Chavez.
Whether I think he's a threat or not, I mean, it depends on how you identify the interests of the U.S.
I mean, obviously, he's a threat to certain interests.
If you identify the interests of the U.S. as being able to maintain its ability to project its power to Latin America, Chavez is trying to encourage an alternative to that and, you know, funding a fund, you know, providing credit and capital to other countries to develop and weakening the IMF and all of that.
But there's not even a threat that he's I mean, nobody even believes at all that he's a threat to, for example, the American corporations that work in those oil fields.
Yeah, no, of course not.
I mean, he's basically the thing, you know, whether you like it or not, what he's doing is totally within the bounds of what, say, economic nationalists did in Mexico in the 1930s when they nationalized Standard Oil.
It's actually even more moderate.
In Mexico, they just took over Standard Oil's holdings and, you know, nationalized the whole thing.
He's just he's just demanding, you know, more equitable, you know, share of the contracts and, you know, these joint he's trying to set up the joint joint operating agreement.
And what's often not talked about is Chavez is recognized as legitimate by every other Latin American country, and he's a close ally of most.
So the constant need to present him as a or Venezuela as a problem doesn't correspond to the way Latin Americans themselves see Venezuela.
So when Obama goes to Florida, on the one hand, he says, I'm going to have a policy that respects the opinions of Latin America, and then goes on to give a speech that basically identifies Venezuela as a problem that has to be dealt with.
Yeah, I mean, they talk about him in the same breath with Osama bin Laden and Ahmadinejad.
Yeah, I know.
So on the one hand, you're going to you're saying you're going to respect Latin Americans' opinion.
And on the other hand, so this raid that Colombia did into Ecuador just a few months ago, every Latin American country condemned it and lined up with Venezuela and Ecuador, but you wouldn't have known it in the US press with the US politician.
I'm sorry, Greg, I got to let you go.
We're all out of time.
Everybody, Greg Grandin.
He's a professor of history at New York University.
He's the author of Empire's Workshop, Latin America, the United States and the rise of the new imperialism and the last colonial master, Latin America in the Cold War.
The new article is at TomDispatch.com.
It's called Losing Latin America.
What will the Obama doctrine be like?
Thank you very much for your time today, Greg.
Thanks, Scott.
It's great to be here.