For most of the past decade, US power in Latin America has been discussed as if it were fading – diluted by neglect, overtaken by China’s economic reach, undercut by political dysfunction at home.
But now? As US President Donald Trump likes to say: “Daddy’s home.”
The US’s audacious, out-of-the-box operation in Venezuela has changed the rules of the game – for good and bad.
China’s aggression towards America in the past two decades has not been outright threats of violence. Instead, Beijing has systematically and successfully chipped away at Western interests around the globe and embedded its influence in key ports, communications networks, financial systems and critical supply chains. All the while trying to undermine the US dollar.
Washington has slept. So too have many Western nations, from Australia to Germany to the UK.
But the gloves are starting to come off, not just in the US.
In this podcast, award-winning journalist Robyn Curnow attempts to answer two questions:
1. How has Trump’s Venezuela message to China changed Beijing’s calculus towards Taiwan?
2. Is Trump’s anti-interventionist and isolationist MAGA base feeling betrayed by the operation and the nebulous post-Maduro “plans”?
Robyn Curnow’s podcast, “Searching for America”, examines the US from her outsider perspective – as a South African living in the American South.
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