From Erectile Dysfunction to the Iran War

A conversation with Sanho Tree on the illegal blockade of Cuba, Trump's buzz from Venezuela, and how Trump lit every fuse at once.

If you want to understand why the world feels like it's on fire in six different places — and why those fires are not as unrelated as you might think — there no better guide than Sanho Tree.

Sanho is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a former World War II historian, one of the most consistent voices on drug policy and U.S. foreign policy in the Western hemisphere, and an irreplaceable follow on Bluesky. He's been sounding the alarm on Cuba, Venezuela, and the drug war's role in driving migration for years, long before any of it became unavoidable news.

In this conversation, we cover a lot of ground — and it moves fast — but there's a through line connecting all of it: the fentanyl lie.

From day one of Trump's second term, the administration used the lie of fentanyl smuggling to justify tariffs on Canada and Mexico, boat strikes in the Caribbean, and ultimately a series of moves — against Venezuela, against Cuba — that have nothing to do with fentanyl and everything to do with seizing resources, toppling governments, and projecting power without any of the institutional guardrails that used to slow these things down.

The experts are gone. The interagency process is gone. What's left is whatever the Mad King wants to see when he turns on the TV.

We talk about Cuba's collapsing power grid, its oil blockade, and the very real possibility that if the government falls, ten million Cubans will have nothing keeping them from crossing ninety miles of water into Florida — the exact outcome Stephen Miller would hate most. We talk about Venezuela and why seizing its oil could ignite an insurgency using the same fiber-optic drone tactics refined in Ukraine. We talk about Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and why insurance actuaries — not Trump's words — will determine when global shipping returns to normal.

And we talk about the deeper history: how drugs built the Western hemisphere through colonization, slavery, and empire — and why the people we criminalize today for growing coca are doing exactly what European empires were celebrated for doing for four hundred years.

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