Rich Lowry

Yeah, so Maduro is a terrible person, terrible leader of Venezuela, allied with all the enemies of the United States.

But by the standards of when the Monroe Doctrine was really in its heyday.

Every aspect of this regime would have been unacceptable.

The disorder is spreading in the hemisphere here in the United States via the mass migration it's caused, the criminality and the drug running, the allied with our enemies.

None of that would have been acceptable.

So, look, I agree with what you were saying yesterday.

This is pretextual, the idea that it's just a law enforcement operation.

It was an act of war to topple the head of state there.

But in terms of what we've seen,

and other interventions the U.S.

has undertaken in the last 20 years, this is so minimalistic, right?

This would be the equivalent of a snatch and grab against Saddam Hussein, then having a Ba'athist general take power, and then hoping you can influence him to do what you want.

So there are all sorts of ways this can go sideways.

There are all sorts of risks.

But the way he's done it so far is calculated to minimize those risks, I think.

Yeah, so the Monroe Doctrine is the idea that we have supremacy in the hemisphere, right?

So the strategic purpose of it is to

exclude European nations because they represent a significant threat to us, potentially geopolitically.

And then what happens after its initial enunciation, you get the Roosevelt corollary and the Lodge corollary, which basically kind of flip it in its head in some respects.

So instead of excluding others from intervening, we assume a right to intervene when there's disorder such that it's a threat to us or it might