The Trump Corollary: “My Own Morality, My Own Mind”

The Trump Corollary: “My Own Morality, My Own Mind”

Salim Mansur:
So the question is the United States can do anything it wants. The United States can do anything it wants. It is a superpower. It is the most armed nuclear power. It was a leading Allied member during the war that brought about this international system that has been at play.

It can do that. Or what it has done, it has dialed back America to pre-1776. Donald Trump is not following the footsteps of George Washington. Donald Trump is now the George III of America.

Robert Vaughan:
With the invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of its murderous dictator, Nicolas Maduro, now would be a good time to ask the following questions. Are international laws only just for us little guys to keep us in line?

Can Russia, China, the United States, France, the UK—all the five members of the Security Council—do whatever they want because they have veto in the Security Council?

Let’s start off by going through some of the history with my guest Salim Mansur from Western University who knows more about international law and the history of the United States than I ever will.

But just to put some things into context, Salim, if you allow me here, when the United States was founded, 1776, shortly thereafter, within a living generation, John Quincy Adams came out and said something that you and I have been saying repeatedly over and over again.

He said America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. That was 1821. Two years later, 1823, you get James Monroe, the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine basically said the Western Hemisphere is closed to further European colonization or interference. You guys stay over on your side of the pond. This side of the pond is ours.

That planted a seed, the Monroe Doctrine, a seed that the United States sees itself as the father figure on these two continents, North and South America. Then in 1904, you have the Roosevelt Corollary, Teddy Roosevelt. The United States possessed the right, according to Teddy Roosevelt, and the responsibility to intervene in the internal affairs of Latin America and Caribbean nations in cases of flagrant and chronic wrongdoing or impotence.

So there’s Teddy Roosevelt, a swashbuckler on the horseback saying, this is the United States. We control what goes on in North and South. Even if it’s a matter of Spain coming over to Venezuela trying to collect on a debt, you can’t. We control what goes on here.

And now, 2025, just in November and then in December at the anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, President Trump came out and created the Trump Corollary. That’s a name given to it by the White House administration. And it asserts the U.S.’s intent to restore and enforce American preeminence in the Western hemisphere by denying non-hemisphere competitors, primarily China, but also Russia and Iran, the ability to position military forces, establish threatening capabilities, or own or control strategically vital assets in the region.

Now we talk about Venezuela and heavy crude, because China has spent $5 billion trying to extract and to negotiate with Venezuela for that heavy crude.

So there’s a lot to unpack, Salim. But why don’t you take it from where you like to take it, international law or American history and what’s led from the Monroe Doctrine to the Trump Corollary? The floor is yours.

Salim Mansur:
Well, first I want to say thank you, Robert, to invite me for this discussion. I think it is a very important issue that we are faced with. At some point in our conversation we’ll come to Canada, I suppose, because the Monroe Doctrine, if you go with Donald Trump’s corollary, the Don Roe Doctrine, it has I think, impact on our destiny as an independent sovereign country.

You began with a little discussion laying out the historical background of the Monroe Doctrine. I just want to flesh it out a little more and then we move on to your questions about both international law and the US Constitution vis-à-vis what is happening.

What John Quincy Adams says, the question is, has it become revoked? Revoked by whom?

It was a guiding light that was put on that America is not going to be engaged in exporting it’s Republican Revolution of 1776 and the making of the Constitution and its ratification in 1789. And also 1821 follows the 1812 war, the British American War that Britain as an imperial power launched against the breakaway 13 colonies from Canada.

So the Monroe Doctrine was not simply about stay on your side of the pond, we on our side of the pond. The critical point in my reading of Monroe Doctrine is that there should not be any further colonial interests put forward in the New World. What exists exists and the people of the New World will determine their own destiny.

However, they warned. And so the American Republic in that sense was the expectation of the founding fathers, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams and others that the role of America would be to be what Reagan almost 200 years later talked about the city on the shining hill, to be emulated, not to be imposed because the imposition of America on the rest of the Americas would be just a reiteration of the colonial principle.

And none of the founding fathers ever stepped out in that direction, that they’re going to go and impose it. So all of the 19th century that we go through, through the Civil War, through manifest destiny, the expansion in the West, the Louisiana Purchase from France, all of this comes later as American colonies spread across below the 49th parallel and Rio Grande. Some of them were by conquest, the Mexican American wars and others were purchase. But there was no mounted attack southward until we come to the Spanish American War of 1898.

Whether it was triggered by a false flag, or it was a genuine attempt by the Spanish to have a war because America was looking towards taking over Florida and Cuba. And so whether the sinking of the USS Maine was a false flag operation, we don’t have to get into it. But that was the beginning of America breaking away from the original concept of James Monroe.

That’s the point I wanted to basically lay down and emphasize because after the 1898 war, Spanish American War breaks out, America then expands, not only southward, Cuba falls into this sphere of influence of America, Florida is taken, but other acquisitions take place, America is expanding into the Pacific Ocean, Philippines follows, later Hawaii follows, and America is much broader in that sense through conquest.

By the way, after the end of the Civil War, Russia and America, the United States, they negotiated the Alaska transfer. So America did acquire territories beyond the 13 colonies in this period, 19th century.

And so you come to what you pointed on 1904, the Roosevelt Corollary. And if they are in a law court, I think the plaintiff and the defendants would be arguing this would be litigated. Whether this is a corollary or Theodore Roosevelt was putting up his own doctrine. But the reference to the Monroe doctrine is that Theodore Roosevelt’s sort of aggressive action, particularly following the sinking of USS Maine, was an aggression. And that had to be, in a sense, a fig leaf had to be put over it. And the fig leaf was the Monroe doctrine, to hide the naked act of aggression.

And if you put that into context and understand it, there has been a departure, a very significant departure from Monroe doctrine that happened with Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary.

There will come in the interwar years, World War One and World War Two, Franklin Roosevelt’s four term presidency, a very significant presidency with all sorts of new developments that will take place from New Deal to the war and so on. In the context of Latin America, South America, Roosevelt laid out his own doctrine, and that doctrine was called the Good Neighbor Policy.

And the principle that was established in the Good Neighbor Policy was non-intervention in the internal affairs of the American States. One. Two, mutual respect, that means equality and territorial integrity and sovereignty. And number three, reciprocal relationship, that is diplomacy.

It laid the foundation for, subsequently, the Organization of American States. Now, the Good Neighbor Policy was, in a sense, written down and adopted by an all American conference.

Canada was not there because Canada was not participating in international affairs on its own. So in 1933, there was the Montevideo conference of American states, and they adopted the Good Neighbor Policy, that there would be mutual respect and so on.

So there was the whole question is the recognition by Washington of sovereignty, autonomy, territorial integrity, equality of all the various emerging South American countries.

So what happens after 1933, that is, that this issue is tested? The Cuban missile crisis, that’s where President Kennedy called out for the Monroe Doctrine, but he discussed it with the OAS states, Latin American states, when he put the quarantine around Cuba for Russian Soviet ships, eventually Soviet ships turned around and went back and all of that was negotiated and settled.

And then, vis-à-vis Latin America, President Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps thing. So again, President Kennedy was a Democrat, President Roosevelt was a Democrat, President Truman was a Democrat.

Their attitude or their policy was built upon Good Neighbors, respect, the three principles that Roosevelt established.

So where we arrive right now, I’ll cut off, is with Donald Trump, he is picking up on Monroe Doctrine, following the footsteps of Theodore Roosevelt, if you can say that, and this is an aggressive action that will be repudiated by the Latin American countries. We can already see the repudiation has begun with the response of Colombia, the response of Brazil. Argentina has a president that is supporting Donald Trump, but I don’t think the Chilean, the Uruguayan, and of course the Central Americans are going to keep quiet about this because the question has now become, after the kidnapping of Maduro, what next? Will it be Cuba? Will it be Colombia? Will it be Panama?

So this has implication far beyond the immediacy of Venezuela in a historical term. The legal side of it is the American constitution and international law within the UN system, not rule-based order that you do what I say, that is what has become the issue in American attitude towards dealing with the rest of the world with the emergence of unipolarity after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So we need to discuss that within that context, keeping in mind that does unipolarity gel with the original concept of Monroe Doctrine?

Robert Vaughan:

In researching a lot of the history to get this at the top of my head for this discussion, I go through things like why did the United States not join the League of Nations after World War I? Why did it join the United Nations? And behind all of this, the Monroe Doctrine, the Corollaries, interference in other nations throughout the world, I believe this is probably number 84 as far as regime changes go, that the United States has either been involved in or instigated.

It’s in the 40s as far as Latin America goes. At the heart of it all is this notion that the United States is exceptional, and it is exceptional, in that it was the first nation at a time when nations were just starting, we’re just starting to get that concept of nation states into our heads collectively. The first to have a written constitution, the first to form itself on the basis of we the people, and not monarchs, not elites, but we the people. And to the Americans at the time, that was a very precious, and still is, a very precious notion, idea, that they have tried to make sure that it is protected, and they’re doing anything to make sure that that is protected, and not imposed. At the beginning of it, they tried not to impose it on anybody. Hence you have John Quincy Adams, and the sort of, it was a very watery, the Monroe doctrine was not a very forceful statement, other than a warning, if you will.

And but then it all seems to change. Then you start to get very much more of a proactive interference in the affairs of the world, so that now the United States has over 750, 800 military installations around the globe, not in the States. These are just extraterritorial stations, quarter of a million men and women in uniform throughout the world, not in the States. And so is this a notion, we’re going back to international law here. Should a nation built on we the people be involved in the United Nations? I know it’s not part of the International Criminal Court, it is a member of the International Court of Justice, by virtue of being a member of the United Nations.

But would the United States be best served by not involving itself at all in international law, because it is a threat to the sovereignty of we the people, which is unique among all nations. Canada does not have we the people. Parliament is supreme in this country. India had we the people, but it established a socialist state in their constitution saying we the people create a socialist state, so it’s not even a state that defends individual rights, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, property. So the United States is exceptional. Why does it have to be subject to the laws of nations which are, which include nations that are despotic? I’ll leave that open.

Oh, okay. In 1776, by the way, this will be the 250th anniversary, right? There was no United Nations, no League of Nations. What there was, and what was in a sense now looking back retrospectively, the beginning of with the American colonies winning their independence through a revolutionary war, the beginning of the emergence of states in terms of territoriality and sovereignty and people, those are the three essential components of any state, that would have to then provide a basis of what it represents, the foundational basis. That’s why we say the constitution is the foundational document of a state. So that was established in a sense by the actions of what happened in 1776 and thereafter. Now, if George Washington had been given the crown and he had accepted it, then America would be no different than any of the old countries in Europe, right?

It would be a continuity of the same principle. Then somebody is anointing George Washington if he had accepted the crown the people offered him. I mean, it’s the same story going back to Caesar in that famous speech of Brutus through Shakespeare, that Caesar was offered the crown thrice and thrice he refused it. In other words, what Caesar did afterward was a betrayal of his own refusal.

So in the case of George Washington, there was no offer made and George Washington wouldn’t accept it, I suppose, given the way he conducted himself. And so the ground rule had to be created. And the people, since you open this issue, the people who were the founding fathers were all in that sense. We talk about left, right politics.

In 1776 what is the left, right politics that is reflected in the Federalist paper, the left, right in 1776 and thereafter up to the writing and ratification of the Constitution is those who are Federalist. That mean they want a strong centralized government. And those who are democratic, who want to maintain an autonomy from the central government of their own particular history and culture Viginia different from Connecticut, Connecticut is different from Pennsylvania and so on and so forth.

So Jefferson was a Democrat. George Washington with his aide-de-camp Hamilton, Hamilton was his aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary Wars were Federalists. And that would be the tension that would be there in the discussions that would take place in the period 1783 to 1789. Why 1783? Because that’s the Treaty of Paris that ended the war, Britain withdrew, America became an independent state. And now the Americas have to define what sort of state is going to be. And that’s the discussion that happened.

So in terms of politics, this period is where America defines itself for itself, for the rest of the world. And the principles that are laid down after argument, discussion, and consensus arrived at is one of enlightenment values. So when you read it, we the people, the whole notion coming out, it is a rejection of monarchy.

And that’s fascinating that when one goes into the Federalist paper, how the arguments are rejected, because the old continent, in that sense, the forerunner of America, are Christian, Christian monarchs, whether they’re emperors, kings or queens, their legitimacy comes from the whole notion of sovereignty through the crown of Peter and so on and so forth. So the whole discussion has to change. And that change is we the people principle. But we the people exist apart from other systems of government, principally, the monarchical system of government doesn’t mean that the we the people have fallen off the planet. We have to coexist with others.

So, you have to demarcate, what will be acceptable, what will not be acceptable. But at the end of the day, it is we the people, the people through their representative will demand and acquire what they want. My point is that in the founding documents and in discussion, the idea of exceptionalism is not there, because America is an immigrant society.

Today, we might talk about immigrants in a different sense, which is what the Americans are doing, to the extent that recently what happened two or three days ago, an American woman was killed by an ICE police, an open killing. I mean, I’ve seen the videos, there was this woman was not going to do anything. She was just stopped and

Robert Vaughan:
Well, not entirely accurate, Salim, but let’s not get into the legality of that, because the man was in front of her, the vehicle was moving. It’s up to a judge to determine what happened.

Salim Mansur:

What I’m drawing at is the we the people is the ultimate reference point for whatever America does. That is the because the we the people express themselves through their institution, through the institution that had been established and its rules provided for in the Constitution.

Robert Vaughan:

Speaking to that point, I don’t mean to deter you from your train of thought, except I wonder if you couldn’t incorporate the recent speech by Rand Paul, was it? Just recently where he’s talking about that declaration of war, when we went into Venezuela, the Trump administration in Venezuela, there could be no clearer example of a war than bombing the capital city of another nation killing about 80 people in the process, taking abducting their president and taking him back to our soil. And yet here we are in the Congress, we didn’t declare war, even though that’s what our Constitution says.

Salim Mansur:
Well, that’s exactly the point I was driving at whether the issue of war on peace or whether it is, buying territories, that Jefferson did by putting down 14 million or something like that money, which is of course the taxpayers money, through the Congress approval to Napoleon, purchasing Louisiana, what is called the Louisiana purchase. So, so there is all sorts of things that happens. But the reference point is where does your legitimacy come from to act on any of these issues. And so on the question of war, the difference between and this is this is discussed at great length in the Federalist Papers.

If my memory serves me. Federalist paper 69 down to something like Federalist paper 80 is a discussion about this. And the bulk of it was written by Alexander Hamilton, who was as I just said, a Federalist, a strong government.

And it was supported by Madison, who represents Jefferson, which is a Democrat, and yet they came together and then the ratification take place. And so it is, it is the issue of war, that is, to initiate a war and to declare war is completely the jurisdiction of the Congress. That is the people, we the people that is electing members to the Congress and members to the Senate. And that’s in Section 8, Article 1, Section 8 says, to define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas and offenses against the law of nation to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal and make rule concerning captures on land and water.

This is the Congress shall have the power to lay and collect and so on tax duties requirements and everything else. It is, it is not the President can do that.

Robert Vaughan:

It is not we’re not just talking about a violation of international law. We’re talking when it comes to the Venezuela incident, a violation of the Constitution of the United States domestic law.

Salim Mansur:

Well, it would bother involved, isn’t it? Robert, because the first thing is, where did the President get the right to send special forces into Caracas and pull out the President of Venezuela? Who gave him the right? Who gave him the authority? The President claims that he has the authority because he’s the commander in chief of the army of the armed forces. That goes all the way back to George Washington, but President is not making a claim based upon George Washington, as a commander in chief that goes into war. He’s making a defense of his position on the basis of Monroe Doctrine.

And as I’ve discussed that the Monroe Doctrine evolves, so this is a matter of litigation. The principle issue is that the last time that the American Congress initiated a war and declared a war, I think you’re referring to Senator Rand Paul’s presentation in the Congress couple of days ago during the debate on this question of Venezuela. The last time the Congress voted to go to war was Pearl Harbor. Then all the subsequent wars that America has been involved in, beside the point, after Pearl Harbor, you have the Korean War and then all the other wars in the global south, the third world.

Of course, the most striking one is Vietnam, which raged for almost 15 years, and then come the wars of the 21st century, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, on and on and on to where we are now Gaza. None of these have been debated in the Congress and none of them have come up with a war resolution act. Where is the authorization?

So if the Congress, that is, the institution within the Constitution, there are three legs that exist as three separate institutions as a separation of power, but they all co-equal and the responsibilities have been demarcated, enumerated. So the Congress abdicates its responsibility. Then what has happened? The Constitution is suspended or in the process of going comatose because it’s like a car. One of the critical parts of the car stops functioning, the car will either stop or you’re going to burn down the machinery, right? So, in the 20th century post 1945, coming into the 21st century, 80 years. If the American people are sleeping, if they have been doped sufficiently, or external powers have intruded into American politics, and by whatever means have basically decapitated the Congress from performing its constitutional responsibility, then where lies the problem? It lies with the American people because if you talk about we the people, it is the we the people have to demand.

If something that is not demanded, if I have a promissory note from the bank and I let it die in my pillow and somebody else picks it up and the date is gone, I can’t go back and get the bank to pay for it. It has to be done. It has to be kept alive. It has to be sustained. So the constitutional argument has to be litigated because

Robert Vaughan:
So you’re separating out de jure from de facto. De jure, yeah, there’s a constitution that says only Congress can declare war. De facto, presidents have been doing it for the last 80 years with no real objection, with no real consequence domestically. Maybe for an election or something, but not legally. Supreme Court hasn’t chimed in on it. So therefore, de facto, this is the new way of things. This is the new law, if you will, through precedent, the president can do these things.

Salim Mansur:
That’s right. So again, talking within the context of the American Constitution, we have to step out and look at it from the point of view of the international system, that is international law, but from the perspective of the American Constitution, if the Constitution is not being followed on any number of issues, but this is at the heart of the issue, war and peace issue, and in the Federalist papers, if you go and look at it, the argument that is put forward, because people discuss this matter. When people discuss, what is the difference between the president and the monarch? Because that was the living issue that they were discussing.

The president is the chief executive, the monarch is the chief executive. And so what is the difference?

Robert Vaughan:

Well, the president can get kicked out in an election, the monarch cannot.

Salim Mansur:

Precisely. All of those points are put down by Hamilton, the whole is a list of issues that the president cannot make treaties on his own. Monarch can make treaties on his own. The president doesn’t have complete immunity, because he can be impeached, he can be removed. The monarch cannot be impeached, cannot be removed.

He has complete immunity. If you’re going to go against the monarch, that’s a rebellion. And if you go against the monarch, you better be sure that, you’re going to get the monarch, otherwise, you will hang. That’s what happened with Cromwell, that he made it pretty sure. And Charles I was, the one who was executed, not Cromwell.

So all of those things, and that history is recounted, because the American people were fresh in their minds. The question now, was the difference between the American population of 1776 and the American population of 2025? I will say the American population of 2025 has drunk the Kool-Aid so much, have taken the Hollywood cotton so much, Daffy Duck and Donald and all of that Mickey Mouse, that the American people wouldn’t know what is the difference between the monarch and the president.

So this is all listed, but the critical point that it comes to on the question of what you have just asked, war and peace, the monarch declares the war, and the monarch goes to war. He initiates it, he declares it, he organizes it, and he goes to war.

And so Alexander Hamilton points out that no, but giving the monarch, that is the president, the power to declare and initiate war, we would be turning the presidency into a monarchy. The responsibility is with the people. And so the president has to get the authorization from the Congress, from the House of Representatives and the Senate.

What we have right now post Vietnam War is a blanket statute, not a constitutional amendment, a blanket statute authorization to use military force, AUMF, under which the president have gone with it. It was Panama in 1989, kidnapping Noriega, or 2003, going into Iraq on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction when there was no weapons of mass destruction and no authorization from anybody, either the United Nations or the Congress. So the thing that you raise is precedent. Yeah, there is a precedent. And that’s where as Senator Rand Paul was pointing out, it is the fecklessness of the Congress. We cannot blame anybody else. It is the fecklessness of the individual members. Now they might all jump upon Senator Rand Paul or Congressman Thomas Massie or Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, because only a handful, not even a handful, four or five people in the Congress standing up and speaking. And the rest have become populace. They are all hanging behind the monarchy because they have turned the presidency into a monarchy.

Robert Vaughan:

It is no longer we the people. It is now I the president.

Salim Mansur:

I the president, and if you go against me, I’m going to take you down. That’s the threat that is hanging over Thomas Massie and Rand Paul and Marjorie Greene, because he’s going to primary them. He means the GOP will primary them.

But this might be the Rubicon that we are heading into because there have been now I have noticed two or three congressmen. One is Thomas Liu, by the way, an American Chinese American who has come out and stated on the floor of the Congress on the floor of the House that we will take note that this president is acting without any authorization. And those who defend him, we will take note of who they are. And in other words, we’re going to take them out or we are going to mobilize against them.

So but the irony is Tom while Thomas Liu is speaking like this and Thomas Massie speaking like this, one Republican, one Democrat, there has been a bipartisan issue on the question of authorization of use of military force which has not been revoked and the war powers resolution according to section eight of article one of the Constitution has not been used since 1941.

So if this develops that argument, if this catches the imagination of the young generation, because it’s after all the young generation that has to go to war and pay the consequences, especially if there is going to be a draft brought in, conscription brought in for whatever reason given the amount of use of force that has been deployed in the 21st century, the American army is running very thin, Ukraine, China and so on so forth. National security strategy of 2025, the whole argument is a pivoting into the Western hemisphere based on Monroe doctrine, Don Roe doctrine to consolidate the Western hemisphere before dealing with the Indo Pacific area that’s China. That is mentioned, and of course, the Ukraine war continues. What is the future of that? Continent is going to be all of that is up in the air.

But the written document is being abused by presidents, by each of the presidents who have been in office since 1945. The only exception I can make in my argument would be President Kennedy when he made the gesture and started moving towards Detente with the former Soviet Union, with the first treaty that he got through the Congress that is the limitation of the Test Ban Treaty that opened up the whole issue of Detente and negotiation diplomacy. And then he was assassinated, murdered.

Not getting into all of the issue, but there is a particular dimension connected to what is happening right now when the Russian leader, former president, Dmitry Medvedev, officially in his capacity as a member of Russia’s Security Council, noted after condemning the actions that have been taken place as a violation of international law that where we are headed now, it is the nuclear weapon is the only safeguard against this sort of rogue action and all the countries around the world now has to decide whether they’re going to be nuclear or not.

So that’s the situation is exactly what President Kennedy was trying to prevent, because it was he who initiated the discussion of non-proliferation treaties which led to his entanglement with the Israelis and their rejection of President Kennedy not openly because they couldn’t openly do that, but basically they were not going to come into negotiation with the president on the question of where is or what is Israel’s position on nuclear weapons because Israel was working secretly on it and one of the argument is that the Israelis were in that way involved in the subsequent assassination murder of President Kennedy. So of 13 people that have occupied the White House after Franklin Roosevelt, we have only one president you might say with an asterisk that has tried to live up to the constitutional requirement.

Every other president including President Eisenhower ironically, but though he did not initiate the war in Korea, he was saddled with that war, but he did not come forward and say, we have to get any future action if you go into, because in Central America there were actions like in Guatemala, it has to be approved, it has to be directed by a congressional resolution and he didn’t call for that. So that’s the problem that the American people have to do.

The flip side of it is the international law that is looking into the United Nations. Now the United Nations, if the argument is, well other presidents have not been checked, if other presidents did not abide by the United Nations, again the most significant example is that the Vietnam War that was fought for over 15 years had no authorization, neither of the United States Congress nor of the international law that is coming out of the United Nations Security Council.

The fact that it didn’t happen doesn’t negate the law, it only goes to show the degree of lack of enforcement or impotence on the part of the institution and that will then take the argument into the other side, because one has to look whether it is a single president in the case of United States or in the case of Russia or in the case of China, Xi Jinping, Putin have to look at the consequences of their actions that they’re taking in the name of the country, that is national security, they have to deal with that or in this case international law, the United Nations, that is the collective body of the UN member states and I think it is a very simple Occam’s razor answer that I see, that is the cost of enforcement can only lead to further conflict, a conflict especially in the age of nuclear weapons that nobody can say how it is to end.

That example was given in 1962 and that example was violated in the lead up to the Russian action with special military operation in Ukraine because the understanding was that if you’re going to talk about hemispheric sphere of influence, Monroe doctrine and President Kennedy raised that issue in response to when the intelligence brought him the information, the high flying U-2 plane brought the photographic evidence of the location of missiles and the possibility of those missiles getting armed with nuclear weapons, and President Kennedy went public, and that’s the time when he talked about Monroe doctrine, that this would not be acceptable, 90 miles from the borders of American heartland.

Now, that was understood. The history is there. It was negotiated peacefully. The world came to a brink of eyeball to eyeball on nuclear war, but it all was handled with a great deal of statesmanship and prudence, and the war was averted and a new set of principles was laid down. And to conclude that example, after the Soviets withdrew their missiles and the nuclear heads, America withdrew after a period of time, that means it was all arranged with Moscow and Washington between Moscow that the Americans will withdraw their nuclear weapons from Turkey, and they were withdraw, so that issue of the United Nations international law hangs, it is, the question is whether the we the people will listen to it.

When the law is abandoned, and law cannot be enforced because of the unintended consequences that might come about, the cost of enforcement might be too steep and too high, especially where the great powers are concerned, then it is not that the law is no longer there, it’s simply that the law has been violated, and the actor is a rogue actor. With whatever way that the actor, the rogue actor, wants to dismiss it, still in the eyes of the institution and the rogue actor is present, the rogue actor is one who violates international agreements

So the agreement that has been violated is Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, and Article 2, I mean Article 1 is about peace and security, Article 2, here it is, let me quickly read it to you, Robert, article 2, section 4. All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

Well, the very words that are being used, territorial integrity, political independence, are the words coming out of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Montevideo conference where he established the good-neighbor policy.

Robert Vaughan:

It also comes from Monroe when he, in his address to Congress where the Monroe doctrine was enunciated to Congress, he basically told Europe that these independent states, those who have declared independence, some of them are still colonies like Canada, these independent states have declared their independence and they must be left alone to flourish on their own. So it’s not just Franklin Roosevelt, it goes all the way back to 1821 and Monroe.

Salim Mansur:
Absolutely, and it is the Americans that have violated their own principle both in terms of the Constitution and in terms of international law. Rand Paul, again, framed the issue which is the populist issue that the people, as we read the people’s opinion in the social media, there is a huge segment in America who are all gung-ho and say, look, this is the man, he can do it, and it was done so with such skill that there was no casualty and so on and so forth, they brought him out.

Robert Vaughan:

No American casualties.

Salim Mansur:

No, no American, that’s the point. And they are standing up cheering for this man and that’s it.

Robert Vaughan:

Those kinds of people, I can understand it, but they’re thinking superficially if I could be allowed because I could see why they would like that. It was a masterful stroke, no doubt about it, even though it did require internal espionage to pull it off and I understand bribery and payments to people who were around Maduro. But Maduro, it has been estimated, has killed 18 to 20,000 Venezuelans in extrajudicial executions and the putting down of uprisings by the people. So, yeah, I can celebrate the loss of this man as well.

But you and I step back and we breathe a little and then we take in history and we say, okay, what are the ramifications of this? Is this the prudent thing to do, given the Constitution, given international relations, given how it may affect China and Russia, given the fact that Paul Singer just bought Citgo a few months before and now he’s got all of this heavy crude to put into his refineries in Louisiana and Texas. These things don’t enter into the consciousness of those knee-jerk people who are saying, yeah, good for Trump, look at him taking on this dictator, all well and good.

But the people of Venezuela are still under the thumb of a Maduro-type regime. Nobody else has been. The judges are still there. The culture of Venezuela is still there. And as Breitbart said, politics is downstream from culture and you’re not going to get a free Venezuela unless you change the culture.

So, just to your point about the people lauding this, I can understand it, but you got to dig deep to really understand the long-term implications as we’re trying to do here.

Salim Mansur:
Well, that’s the role of the journalist newspaper. If there is a free press to pick up the cheering for that segment of the people in an independent country, Canada, United States, Europe, so on and so forth. And express either support or concerns or opposition. And then both sides has a debate about this.

I mean, the premise behind the argument you made, I believe, is that the people are all with their high-testosterone worked up on this matter. They become, in a sense, cheerleaders for the warmongers. And this has always happened in history.

That’s exactly the point that Alexander Hamilton was making. The monarchs will draw the people, whether it is the Crusader Cross or the Jewish Star of David or the Muslim Crescent or what have you. Because they are appealing to whatever is the binding force of that society. So, and anyone who questions that and oppose that will be denounced as treasonous. And there will be no opposition or a very weak and terrified opposition when the mobs rule. I mean, what is the history of people cheering very often, most often, for the wrong things?

Because they get some sort of a pleasure out of it. And so in the Roman times, it was bread and circus, people being fed to the lions or what have you, and people cheering. And now it is war, calling war. Whenever there is a difficulty, raise an issue and go and knock the heads of weak people, weak people that is the opponent. And the people will cheer.

So taking out Maduro or taking out anyone like Maduro, because this has happened in Panama with Noriega. We can now see, and that’s what a free press should be able to do, what you and I are doing, bringing together the arguments. So the cheering crowd can be confronted by a reflective crowd. That is the modus operandi that we have seen in the age of unipolar hegemony that America has gone on the road.

You and I talked about this a few months ago, the Project For a New American Century. In age of the unilateral declaration, we’re going to dominate the entire spectrum. We’re not going to tolerate any second power emerging that is going to challenge our hegemony. We will create a new Pearl Harbor as a pretext, or if it happens, it doesn’t happen, we’ll create it.

And all of that is being laid out. And so what we can see now, this use of sanctions, again, not authorized by the UN, and cripple the country, whichever country they want to sanction and cripple. So Venezuela was sanctioned way before Maduro came to power. It began with the collapse of the previous quote unquote democratic government of President Perez, Carlos Perez, who was then replaced by Hugo Chavez with the Chavismo Revolution.

There was an attempt to overthrow him. In fact, they overthrew him. There was an overthrow of Chavez, but the people rallied around Chavez. Chavez was not kidnapped and taken away and Chavez was brought back. In the case of Noriega, we saw, he was brought to America and he died in an American prison and so on and so forth.

Iran is another case. You cripple the country. That’s the case was at play in Russia. So we haven’t even got into the whole domestic issue because the argument of Donald Trump, President Trump was narco terrorism.

And again, this will be litigated. But that was the argument as the Americans bombed fishing boats and without again providing any evidence, if they were so sure that those boats were engaged in narco terrorism or narco trafficking drug trafficking, then the Coast Guard is there. They could have surrounded those boats and boarded those boats and brought the evidence to court. None of that happened. Instead, we saw what happened was again going into the granular.

Maybe we don’t have the time, but it was a clear violation. You might not like I might not like whoever it is might not like what is the internal disposition of a country. But according to the UN Charter, you have no business to go inside the country.

You like it or not and do what was done. And so to that issue, Senator Rand Paul made the argument on the Senate that those people who talk about dealing with the threat. Yes, America is prepared to deal with the threat. That was 1941.

There was a threat. Congress passed the resolution. 1917 after the president has said, No, we are not going to take America to war when the war was going on in Europe. And then three months later, after getting elected, he flipped over right with the whether it was a false flag operation with the ship Lusitania, or it was bribes and money. Bribes and money has been going on from the beginning, politics.

And as Madison said, if people were angels, we won’t need a government. And if angels were to rule us, we wouldn’t need a constitution. So that was exactly the point is it’s up to the people, but we are not angels, and so all these checks and balances.

So that problem exists. And we have to take it into account to say that America or Russia or China or whoever India has the right to go into another country and dictate the values of that country was a principle before 1776.

You laid down the significance, which I completely agree we entered a new world. The concept of Constitution was not there before 1776. We the people concept was not there. And other people have now started they started to emulate that concept and the violation of that concept ironically, with the violation by the American leadership, whether it was in Latin America, whether it was in Asia, whether it was in Africa. So it is the people and the character of the people simply, putting on labels and words and paragraph that we are exceptional. We follow the law and but the action is completely different or there’s suspicions of different. Those words doesn’t matter.

So how are we going to talk about a situation, a lifestyle, a culture and a civilization that ultimately, as I have argued, in which the minority is ultimately the individual and that individual is not protected. The laws are to protect the individuals, not the police officer. The laws are not there to protect Donald Trump.

The laws are there to protect you and me. That’s the guardrail. That’s the Constitution and then you Mr. Trump or whoever you are, Mr. Nixon and whatever Mr. Carney, if you’re going to go past the guardrail, then you’re going to be held responsible. We have constitutional mechanism to make you accountable, right? But it is the monarch with his praetorian guards. They come and shoot us up then. We can’t even open our mouth. So where is the first amendment rights?

So you see the complication of all of this thing that comes in and the founding fathers as political philosophers as people of the Enlightenment age who were deeply, deeply involved in those studies. Definitely Jefferson was Adam was Hamilton was Madison was these people.

They thought through these things. The fact that our generation of people don’t think through these things means their inadequacy to be the representative of the people forget about the people themselves being inadequate. If you go into a classroom and a teacher or the professor is inadequate to teach the subject of which the students are coming in. We say, the students are inadequate. That’s what they have come into the classroom to study.

But if the professor is inadequate, then what is the remedy? We are in that situation and we haven’t yet gone into the internal dynamics of this thing. Where is narco trafficking? Because now it has all become oil, and when we look into the matter of oil, we can see this is extortion.

Just a few leading points I put on the table. Venezuela’s official reserve, oil reserve, whatever the quality of oil is sour, dirty or clean and pure. That is the Saudi there’s a vast difference and all of that goes into the engineering side of it. And that’s not my discipline. But the simple numbers says over 300 billion barrels of oil. Let’s put it in a simple math, $100 a barrel that amounts to $30 trillion.

This is our oil, Trump says. So that becomes a collateral on the ledger of collateral credits, assets and liability. The deficit is the liability. The debt is the liability. The American debt is $40 trillion. Venezuela’s oil is our oil. That’s $30 trillion. Immediately, you wipe out $30 trillion of your deficit because now you have the asset.

Robert Vaughan:
Well, it’s unquestionable that this was all about oil. At the beginning, you would take the president at his word. This is about the term narco terrorism, which is almost a nonterm and when machine guns, remember, you can’t have Tommy guns. This is all 1934 again, National Firearms Act.

And or it’s about liberating the people of Venezuela well be found out that that’s not true because the same government is in power with no position to change it. Then you have what’s his name is Stephen Miller. Deputy Chief of Staff who said, quote, we are in charge. They need our permission to sell their oil. So basically it’s ours.

But here’s something a question for you, Salim. The United States has always treated its companies who would go abroad and explore for things like oil and minerals. And it’s American companies who discovered the oil in Venezuela, who extracted the oil from Venezuela, originally, who benefited from that oil. And then when Perez nationalized the oil production in 1976, I think it was, he gave them a pittance for a compensation, about a billion dollars at the time, which to you and me is a lot of money. But to the amount of money that these companies invested, it was a pittance. And so now this is almost payback from 1976 till now about 50 odd years close to. So Trump is going back saying that this oil belongs to us because our companies developed it. Our companies extracted it.

I see a point there. But if a company, let’s say you or I set up a company and go off to Botswana or Uganda and find minerals, and then the governments there say, no, you can’t have them. We’re going to nationalize your company. Should we have a leg to stand on because we’re foreigners in a foreign land? American companies are foreign to Venezuela on a foreign soil. And if Perez wants to nationalize it, not a good thing, by the way, an immoral act. But if they do that, why is it that the United States seems to be the only country to say that, no, you can’t do that. And we’re going to use military force to stop you from doing that.

Salim Mansur:
It’s a good question, but the answer is embedded in the legal system that has been established. And it has been established with the full concurrence and participation of America that is in the international law within the UN system. A country A goes into country B to engage in what you have described in this case, searching geologically for presence of fossil fuel, gas, whatever, minerals. But it hasn’t gone into country B by an act of invasion. It has gone into country B by an act of agreed negotiations and contract. And then country B has an internal change of government or revolution. And the incoming government says we are going to nationalize, which is what you’re talking about.

And the matter is over. Whatever debt was negotiated by the previous government is null and void. Well, country A, oil companies, they are private companies, I suppose, they have the right to file their cases with their own government, which then that government will take it up at the international arena, and go into litigation, arbitration, and the whole jing bang of it.

There is the Bank of International Settlement, which is part of the UN system, so possibly they will be referred to that bank. And then, it will be litigated and presumably the decision will come down. And if it has to go through various levels of appeal process, ultimately, the highest court is the International Court of Justice, the decision will come down.

And let’s say the decision is in support of the people who brought the plaintiff, the people who brought the case against country B, the defendants. Then the country B will be obliged to respond accordingly, that is, they have to meet the decision and live up to the decision of the international, because they are also a member of the system.

And if they don’t do that, then the UN Security Council will have recourse to enforce the decision in manner in which they feel most appropriate. But it is not up to country A to unilaterally void the system and the requirements of the regulation.

In Article 2, which is from where I read to you, this very point is raised. It doesn’t matter what the sort of government you’re dealing with, it is not none of your business. Each of the member states have their own history, own culture, own values, and they will have the type of government that suits their interests, the people’s interests.

The only thing that matters is those member states by signing the UN Charter and becoming a member of the UN will abide by the rules of international law that UN represents. And if they don’t, then there will be enforcement if any judgment goes against certain states.

Robert Vaughan:
Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? The enforcement aspect of it. You can have a UN resolution of condemnation. But when it goes to the Security Council, perhaps to enforce, the United States has a veto. Russia, China, UK, France all have vetoes. So there can be no enforcement from them or is there another mechanism which sends it back to the General Assembly for enforcement?

Salim Mansur:
Well, I mean, in the case, the example that you set up and then I can move from that example to the real example in history. That is the post-1945 history, this is the example you set up. Country A, in this case of

Robert Vaughan:

Venezuela. You keep saying Nicaragua for some reason. I’m not sure why, but it’s Venezuela.

Salim Mansur:

This is the issue right now on play, right? So the country B is Venezuela and that in a sense the assumption, the premises, because it hasn’t been litigated and there has been no judicial decision on this matter. Country A is United States and let’s hypothesize the matter goes all the way to where you were saying Security Council and the veto. The only country that would veto a decision like that would not be the United States, maybe China, maybe Russia, maybe France, maybe Britain. And so the question will be those countries, those five permanent members, the one that vetoed it, that country will be setting a precedent against its own interests, because the same thing can happen the other way.

And it is happening right now because the Chinese were shipping oil out of Venezuela and the vessel, the tanker, was chased by the Americans all across the Atlantic, and boarded because it was flagged as a Russian vessel. And then there was also ships that were not allowed to sail beyond Venezuelan waters into international waters.

So that whole issue hangs. The point is, and this is, I’m coming to it, maybe I should have said it right in the beginning. The point is the action that America have been doing and has done and Venezuela seems to be the tipping point that we have reached over the 21st century is that America, that is the founding member of the United Nations that drafted the charter and then got it ratified, which means the rest of the world signed on to it according to the requirements of how many numbers had to sign on to it to become the charter at that time 1945. And then subsequently any member any state, new state, emerging state joining the United Nations would have to sign on to it.

So here we have a situation, the country that was responsible for drafting and ratification. And therefore, living up to the very principle that it had laid down is the one that has violated the UN Charter in the life of UN Charter for the last number of decades, not one or two years.

Right. So who do we hold accountable. So the question is, the United States can do anything it wants. The United States can do anything it wants. It is a superpower. It is the most armed nuclear power.

It was a leading Allied member during the war that brought about this international system that has been at play. It can do that. Or what it has done, it has dialed back America to pre-1776. Donald Trump is not following the footsteps of George Washington. Donald Trump is now the George III of America. So George IV.

It is completely taken back the situation. I read you the Section 8. It was the law of the seas being mentioned by the people writing the document in 1780s, because there was no air power at that time.

It was the secretary of Navy and the secretary of the land forces. So the word piracy is used. America has become a pirate. America has become a violator of all civilized laws that evolved or was evolving in the terms of history. 1776 is only 250 years. 10,000 years has been the age of brutality without any principle except the principle might is right.

It takes time to develop, but somebody who is putting these things on the table has to live by that or has to be held accountable by that so that the others can be held accountable. And what has happened in the last eight years? America has gone down the road by defending not only for itself, but for its satellite country, its ally or satellite or the best ally that we have, which is the talking point of both Democrats and Republicans, is Israel. A country, the only country that was created on the basis of UN resolution. It has no other basis of its existence.

And Israel, after it was established by the UN, has gone around breaking in the last 70 plus years every single principle of the United Nations. And instead of enforcing the due requirement, the remedy, the punishment, according to again the United Nations, America has shielded Israel from that remedy.

Robert Vaughan:
But isn’t that part of the system? I was talking to you about this before in a phone conversation that if the system is set up that the United Nations can make a resolution, then for enforcement it goes to a body within which there are states that can veto it and one of them vetoes it. That’s the system.

So you could say in a sense that the system might be working for the state of Israel, the system might be working for the superpowers, which brings us back to my introductory question to you, was that are these rules only for these superpowers and their satellites?

I mean, are these rules for not these people because they seem to be able to do whatever they want? Are they for Canada? Are they for Venezuela? Are they for Bolivia? Peru? Because they’re not superpowers, they have to abide by whatever the UN says as long as it’s supported and enforced by a security council.

Salim Mansur:
Yes. But again, context, context, context matter and the mechanism that is in place matters, that is in the case of the United Nations. So your assumption in this hypothetical argument is the system was created in such a manner that the security council, which is the arm of enforcement of the United Nations principles.

That’s what is laid out in chapter seven of the UN Charter. Provides for veto to the five permanent members. It doesn’t stipulate how or when the veto must be used. It is left to the discretion of the five permanent members to veto whatever resolution comes down from either the General Assembly or the Security Council itself.

So yes, that’s the manner in which it was set up. But it was not set up in the way that there is no remedy for this sort of a situation where a permanent member will keep on using its veto power to bring the decision to block the decision of the majority of member states of the organization. That was tested in 1950 because the Soviet Union found itself that it was the only member defending the interests of not only the Soviet Union, but the allies of the Soviet Union that became the Warsaw Pact countries.

I know some people might step back and say, oh, they’re communists, but the United Nations when they drew the, they didn’t talk about communists, fascists, monarchists, and they talked about member states.

The internal characteristic of the member state was not a matter for the United Nations to go and wrangle with. So, Soviet Union found itself alone to defend its interest. And so, Soviet Union started when the Korean situation evolved and led to a conflict on the peninsula.

And again, there’s a vast history behind it because if you want to step back and look at it, we have to go back to the war, Second World War that happened, the defeat of Japan and so on, and how the allied powers had to deal with the peninsula. And Soviet Union did not have the numbers and the votes. And a conflict broke out. And Soviet Union started vetoing the resolutions that was coming through to impose a ceasefire to stop the aggression by the north on the south and so on and so forth. So what did the United Nations do? That is, the members do?

The members then took up the resolution in the United Nations Charter called the Uniting for Peace option and voted on it. And the Uniting for Peace option talks about when there is such a deadlock, then the General Assembly can move in. And the resolution moved into the General Assembly for enforcement. And that is what happened. And the majority voted for an armed enforcement of UN resolutions in Korea.

And that is what was done. The war was brought to ultimately a ceasefire, negotiated ceasefire. In the Eisenhower administration, in the Truman administration, it broke out in the Eisenhower administration. President Eisenhower worked to bring about the ceasefire and the ceasefires held ever since, because both the sides agreed to police, to monitor, and to make sure that the ceasefire was effective. Otherwise there would be war again and again, but there hasn’t been, at least on the Korean Peninsula, because I’m referring back to how to break the deadlock, whether there’s such an option that exists or not.

So my argument would be that no, the United Nations has provided mechanism. The mechanism may not be satisfactory to everyone, but that is how laws are made. It has to come to a consensus. Otherwise it can never, one have everything that suits everybody be agreed upon, because there are divergent interests, divergent history, and nothing will converge.

But it did. Because the negotiation in the birth of the United Nations was Roosevelt and Stalin. Roosevelt was speaking for basically what came to be known as the free world in the Cold War years, the great democracy, the great republic, and people looked up to it. France was brought in Britain was brought in, but France and Britain by itself would not have won the war. So it was won by the arsenal of democracy that is Roosevelt’s United States and by the manpower and the sacrifice made by the Soviet Union. Roosevelt understood that very well. He went all the way to Yalta in his last months of his life to get Stalin’s firm indication that yes, he’s on board.

So when he was on board and got on board, it’s a different history we are getting into then. Roosevelt died and Truman comes in and the great ally becomes the great enemy. There’s nothing in the provision of the United Nations that the Soviet Union is an enemy.

Robert Vaughan:

That is quite the quirk of history, isn’t it?

How all of a sudden this ally to the United States, and if you go back further, Russia under the czars helped the North with the South in the Civil War. How that country became all of a sudden a great demon to be defeated. Sure, communism is bad, sure, as an economic system.

Sure, they killed tens of millions of their own people, but that’s an internal thing. But how they became even after the fall of the wall in 1991, now this demonized state is so perplexing. Unless you get into some history that some people would rather not get into. It is a perplexing history.

Listen, Salim, I wonder if you have something to wrap it up because you know something? I think that you and I could talk about this till the cows come home and there will be no UN resolution about it. But is there maybe a final point you’d want to make to mention about the Trump administration’s incursion into Venezuela that could wrap this up?

Salim Mansur:
Well, I would make it in this way. This is an ongoing thing. We are speaking of what was it on the third of January, Saturday, third of January, this event happened. What date is it today? 10th, I think it’s a week.

Robert Vaughan:

No, it’s the eighth.

Salim Mansur:

It is eight today?

Eight. So five days later after the events, we are speaking, it is too raw and it is still in motion. It finally reached some degree of understanding of what is happening and what has happened. But the story inside the United States, that is the President’s own comments, have left to, a divergence from what was the three months of talking point, narco traffic, narco terrorism, etc. To the issue of oil. It is he who made it come around to it. So the issue of oil, the oil belongs to us, the hemisphere and so on.

The profound contradiction in the President’s position. For instance, only two months ago, I believe it was six weeks ago, because there’s so many events happening, it’s just crushing us, and that’s one of the things. Even moving fast, people cannot keep track of it. You and I might try to do our best to keep track of it separately and historically.

But the general people, what happened a week ago is already ancient history to them. So what I’m going to say is that I was recalling six weeks ago or two months and eight weeks ago, the President pardoned the former President of Honduras, Hernandez. Who was charged, indicted and removed for drug trafficking. And he appealed to the President for pardon.

The President pardoned him. It is the DEA and the Americans themselves, that is the Congress, the Senate, the committee that is dealing with the problems of drug trafficking. I’ve been repeatedly saying that if you want to deal with drug trafficking, you have to deal with Mexico, you have to deal with Colombia, you have to deal with Central on the Pacific Coast, not on the Atlantic Coast. That Venezuela may be a transiting point, but Venezuela is not a drug producing country.

Robert Vaughan:
Venezuela, just to keep the record straight.

Salim Mansur:
So many countries. Venezuela is not a drug producing country. So there is those contradiction arising. There is the contradiction of the people who are going to make money or expected to make money that are the President’s friend.

It is only in November 2025, that is five weeks ago that Paul Singer, one of the billionaire donors to the GOP and to Donald Trump, purchased Citgo, which is Venezuelan subsidiary of the Venezuelan oil assets.

How did he purchase it? Again, back to the sanctions that cripple Venezuela’s oil industry. And Venezuela could not pay for the Citgo, the loan that they had acquired on Citgo. So there was a default on the loan payments that Citgo owed to its shareholders and to people in banks that they had borrowed from. So it was forced to put that up for sale because the court decided that Citgo should be up in the market. It was evaluated, the value, it was something like $18 billion worth.

And Paul Singer bought it, pennies for a dollar for less than $6 billion. So this guy buys it and the actions happen. Maybe there’s no connection to it.

Maybe there’s a lot of connection to it. That will be litigated. The lawyers for Maduro that Maduro has selected have a record of dealing with such case of the unilateralism and gangsterism of the United States. And particularly under Trump, for he was a lawyer for Julian Assange among other people, Barry Pollack.

So it will be very interesting and he has already mentioned that one of the things that is at the top of the agenda, because he was asked by the press, is the question of jurisdiction. The president of a sovereign state is immune when it comes to the state’s laws. It was the state of Venezuela, its national assembly under its constitution, nationalized oil or whatever else. There is no indictment within the Venezuelan state, unlike Honduras on Maduro that he was engaged in drug trafficking. He may be engaged in other violations, but he is the president and enjoys the presidential immunity.

Robert Vaughan:
Well, let me just jump in there because the presidential immunity in my reading only applies to actions he took as part of his official function as president. So if they’re charging him with something outside of an official capacity as president, then that immunity does not apply. In my research, that’s all.

Salim Mansur:
So in your research, what you open up is litigation. That’s exactly what Barry Pollack is saying because the indictment against Maduro has among them the indictment that he violated the gun laws. He had machine guns, which goes back to a 1934 statute in the American system. It has nothing to do with any other state, whether it’s Cuba, Venezuela, whoever.

Robert Vaughan:

These are what you would call trumped up charges.

Salim Mansur:

But this is what is going to be in the UN Charter. Again, I can open up and read to you the passage. The president enjoys, it is sovereign country. You cannot interfere. The jurisdictional matter will be the one that will be fought out. And the judge of the man who has been designated in the Southern District of New York to preside over the case is a 92 year old judge who was appointed to the bench.

The federal, this is a federal court appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton in 1998. He’s now 92. I think his name is Hellerstein or Hellerstein. And according to the press, this judge has shown a remarkable degree of independence, which some people might call whimsical. Still, other people might applaud as standing and defending the rights of those people who are overlooked. And the most recent decision that has been referred to in this judge’s case is that over Harvey Weinstein that was litigated in front of him. And the judge threw the case out because the DOJ and the FBI had put up the proposition that Harvey Weinstein owes $19 million to the victims of his sexual aggression. And the judge threw it out saying that $19 million is insufficient to pay all the victims of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults and predatory behavior.

So we don’t know. The judge is a judge and if he throws the case out then it will be up to again the DOJ to appeal it to a higher level, maybe going all the way to the Supreme Court. But in the meantime, the government in office is still Maduro’s government. He is being held under detention in America while his vice president is running the affairs. There’s been no change in the government and she has been appointed as the interim president by the National Assembly and her cabinet is the same cabinet of Maduro. And they have also, according to the Constitution, sworn their loyalty to the interim government.

So what has happened as a closing up? Trump is behaving and this is where the cheering crowd said this is what we want. And that would be another discussion if we have is because that segment of American population, it may be a majority or it may be again that peculiar group out there, just like those who support transgenderism and wokeism and so on. They stand for get America out of the UN. UN itself is the problem. It began before Ronald Reagan, but Ronald Reagan, in that famous bye bye UN, remove the UN from the New York, maybe American can do without it. But this issue is now resonating and it’s resonating in our backyard. What does it mean for Canada?

Robert Vaughan:
Fascinating discussion Salim as always. Thank you very much and we’ll talk again soon.

Salim Mansur:
Thank you. Thank you very much.