The military incursion and kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro shows how normalized the outrageous has become<\/p>\n
After five months \u2013 really two-and-a-half decades \u2013 of ever-escalating preparations by increasing diplomatic, economic, and clandestine warfare, the US has finally executed a full regime-change invasion in Venezuela. The final attack, focused on kidnapping the Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from the capital Caracas, was short. But the campaign has certainly not been bloodless. While we know little about what exactly happened on the ground, Washington\u2019s perfectly criminal strikes on alleged smuggling boats at sea which served as the core of the attack\u2019s preparatory propaganda barrage, have already killed over 100 victims, not to speak of the overlooked victims of sanctions.
\nThen, what American officials have called a \u201clarge-scale strike\u201d against Venezuela in the early hours of January 3 targeted not only Caracas but several locations throughout the country. For whatever reason, resistance to this \u201cdark and deadly\u201d (in President Donald Trump\u2019s words) operation, seems to have been minimal. In view of the long and very visible military buildup, as well as psychological warfare campaign that preceded these night raids, it is hard to believe that they came as a surprise. Betrayal, subversion, and secret, nasty deals may well have played a role.
\nWhile such things will probably remain murky for a while \u2013 or forever \u2013 other, more important aspects of the US invasion of Venezuela are unambiguously clear: It is absolutely, irredeemably illegal, a massive and open breach of the UN Charter\u2019s prohibition of wars of aggression. Even some of America\u2019s most loyal ‘Atlanticist’ vassals in Europe have to admit that much, for instance, a recent op-ed in Germany\u2019s ultra-mainstream Die Zeit newspaper.
\nWashington\u2019s pretexts are, as so often, flimsy insults to everyone with half a brain. Venezuela and Maduro are not contributing anything significant \u2013 if anything at all \u2013 to America\u2019s very own and never-ending drug problems, neither with regard to cocaine nor fentanyl. And Maduro\u2019s election in 2024 may have been fair or not. The decisive, conclusive point is that such issues must be dealt with inside a sovereign country and can never justify military intervention from outside. Or who is going to be next? Germany for the extremely dubious way (polite expression) its mainstream parties have locked the New-Left BSW out of parliament in what may well amount to a cold coup?
\nBizarre ramblings, also heard recently, about Iran and Venezuela, are pretexts as well. But indirectly they do point to some actual truths.\u00a0Maduro has been punished for daring to openly stand up for the Palestinian victims of the genocide that Israel and the US are currently committing together. And Israeli politicians, always the absolute bullies, have already taken the opportunity of Trump\u2019s attack on Venezuela to threaten Iran with similar violence. Trump, meanwhile, has made a point of putting his assault in the context of the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and the equally criminal assault on Iran during \u201cOperation Midnight Hammer.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Trump demands \u2018total access\u2019 to Venezuelan oil: LIVE UPDATES<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not hard to understand the real reasons for the American onslaught on Venezuela, partly because American officials, including Trump himself, have spoken openly about them. Venezuela has the single greatest national oil reserves in the world and, in addition, significant deposits of gold, rare earths, and other raw materials.
\nTrump has claimed that many of these riches somehow really belong to the US and its companies (same thing for him anyhow) and promised to reconquer them, which he is doing now. Greed, plain and simple, is a main driver of this dirty Blitzkrieg against a militarily de facto helpless victim. As Trump himself has admitted, this is about \u201ca tremendous amount of wealth.\u201d
\nBut greed isn\u2019t all. There also are geopolitics. Like Washington\u2019s recent electoral interference in Argentina and Honduras, the ongoing pressure on Brazil (currently receding a little, but who knows for how long), Colombia (which Trump threatens with a fate similar to Venezuela), Nicaragua, and Cuba. Add in the shameless pardoning of a real drug-kingpin-politician from Honduras, the assault on Venezuela is also an application of what has been termed the \u201cDonroe Doctrine.\u201d The meaning of the latter is, in essence, simple: it\u2019s the bad old Monroe Doctrine \u2013 going back over 200 years now \u2013 but even worse.
\nMarco Rubio, former Trump disparager and now obsequious consigliere and enforcer (as both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, a combination not seen since the evil days of Henry Kissinger, war-criminal-extraordinaire) made a point of underlining the threat against Cuba in particular. Apart from Trump, US foreign policy is in the hands of an absolutely ruthless man with a personal axe to grind in the Caribbean, and Latin America in general, and ambitions to be Trump\u2019s successor as president.
\nAs just spelled out in the new US National Security Strategy, Washington will focus special attention on its long-suffering southern neighbors and victims. A \u201cTrump Corollary,\u201d deliberately echoing President Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s old imperialist \u201ccorollary,\u201d aims to cement US domination by all means and secure the American empire\u2019s\u00a0‘backyard’\u00a0ever more tightly by installing and propping up puppets and suppressing resistance.
\nLast but not least, the US will also escalate the old policy of depriving Latin American countries of their own foreign policy \u2013 yet another essential element of sovereignty \u2013 by punishing them for building relationships with\u00a0‘outsiders,’\u00a0most of all now China, but also Russia. That was one of Venezuela\u2019s many ‘sins,’\u00a0and no one in the region will have missed the vicious lesson that Washington has just meted out.
\nTrump cannot imagine failure. He has declared that \u201cAmerican dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again. Won\u2019t happen.\u201d But, of course, in reality, failure is a real possibility for him no less than for other hubristic mortals. In the long or not-so-long run, his violent hyper-imperialist strategy may well fail. It may even provoke a devastating backlash. Yet, as so often with the US, its fiascos leave its victims in ruins too.<\/p>\n
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Venezuela names acting president<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, even the reliable US imperialism booster Hal Brands has warned that Trump\u2019s methods may backfire in setting a precedent, for instance, in how China may one day decide to deal with Taiwan. The comparison is deeply, demagogically flawed, since Beijing has a plausible claim to Taiwan, while Washington has none to Venezuela or to snatching Maduro and his wife, as Brands embarrassingly tries to pretend.
\nAnd to be honest, even if Brands has failed to notice from his Henry Kissinger Chair perch, the US has long delivered one precedent after the other for breaking all laws, all rules, and all basic moral norms, such as in co-perpetrating the Gaza Genocide with Israel. But the onslaught on Venezuela does add yet another facet to American lawlessness.
\nIronically, some wanna-be-friends of Washington will never grasp the absolute selfishness and immorality of American policy. Two such comically maladjusted figures are Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine and Maria Corina Machado from Venezuela.
\nZelensky used to post about \u201cspotting\u201d Russian operatives in Venezuela, trying to ingratiate himself by making a personal contribution to the US siege of the country. By now, as an obstreperous and increasingly useless ‘client,’ he may well be a target of American regime change himself. \u00a0Machado, who has bent over backwards indecently to impress on the Americans just how ready she is to obey them and sell out her country and its resources, has just been discarded like a used doormat by Trump. In his triumphalist press conference, the American president mentioned her in passing \u2013 as someone who does not have what it takes to lead Venezuela. So much for the wages of treason and sucking-up. Stop pitching, Maria, you\u2019ve just been fired. Jolani made the underling cut, you didn\u2019t.
\nIronically, Machado\u2019s scandalous receiving of the Nobel Peace Prize may have served her badly in the end. Trump is a jealous man, and it is certain that he felt the prize should have gone to him instead. And, in a way, he even has a point. While he doesn\u2019t deserve it at all, one really cannot argue that Machado deserved it more. The Nobel Peace Prize has long been a sick joke. But its use as part of an invasion-preparation campaign still stands out as particularly heinous. Time to do away with this disgraceful farce.<\/p>\n
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\u2018She has no support or respect\u2019: Trump trashes Venezuelan Nobel winner\u2019s claim to power<\/p>\n
In general, the American president\u2019s press conference was a genuine Trump performance, with his usual grandiloquence on full display. Taking personal credit for the \u201cspectacular\u201d assault on Venezuela, he praised it as \u201cone of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence\u201d and a feat the equal of which has not been seen since World War Two. Trump was too busy boasting to notice that his own revelations about the operation implied a less heroic scenario: \u201coverwhelming\u201d US force was used, and not a single American soldier or even \u201cpiece of equipment\u201d was lost. Whatever this was, it was not a great \u2013 or fair \u2013 fight.
\nThe US president mostly confirmed what we know already \u2013\u00a0The US wants basically all of Venezuela\u2019s stuff, but oil is at the top of the wish list. Washington feels that it should \u201crun\u201d the country until a \u201cleadership transition\u201d can be engineered, that is the installation of a puppet regime, obviously. In other words, a frank application of might-is-right, with only minimal rhetorical fluff about how ordinary Venezuelans will benefit and \u201calso be taken care of.\u201d If that sounds unintentionally ominous, that\u2019s because it is. And all of it under the shadow of the same US armada that has just assaulted the country and is on stand-by to do so again, whenever Washington feels like it. Gangster politics 101.
\nIn its own way, the president\u2019s presser did represent something important about this war. Namely, how strangely normal the absolutely anomalous has become. What Washington has just done is a horror of criminality, greed, and arrogance. But it is also what was to be expected. The same is true for the ludicrously hypocritical reactions from its NATO-EU vassals who feel the best they can do is \u201cobserve.\u201d Good luck with that!
\nIn a more normal \u2013 if far from perfect \u2013 world, everyone would finally understand that the single most dangerous rogue state in the world, by far, is the US. That is true whether measured in capability or as sheer moral insanity, corruption, and brutality. In a more normal world, even the worst antagonists would find a way to cooperate to contain and deter this geopolitical Godzilla-on-speed. But, as of now, such a world is not yet emerging. Multipolarity alone will not be enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The military incursion and kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro shows how normalized the outrageous has become After five months \u2013 really two-and-a-half decades \u2013 of ever-escalating preparations by increasing diplomatic, economic,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-environment","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}