So You Say You Want A Revolution...
Trump's abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ain't it, chief.
“The government of the US launched an unprecedented military aggression against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. It constitutes a terrible stain on the development of bilateral relations through that military operation,” she said.
She added that Venezuela “will never again be anyone’s colony – neither of old empires, nor of new empires, nor of empires in decline”.
—Venezuelan vice-president/acting President Delcy Rodríguez
“The president offered multiple off ramps, but was very clear throughout this process: the drug trafficking must stop, and the stolen oil must be returned to the United States. Maduro is the newest person to find out that President Trump means what he says.”
—U.S. Vice President James David Vance
It was the last weekend of the holiday break for the world, and so, with all of us trying to enjoy a respite from the chaos of everyday life, Donald Trump decided it was the perfect time to abduct the leader of a sovereign nation, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. You will find no defense of Maduro here—the man is a thug who stole his last election and ravaged his country. He is fairly similar in many ways to former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, but lacked Noriega’s cunning. For example, Noriega had very openly shared in the drug money of the Colombian cartels in return for allowing Panama to be a banking haven and staging ground for smuggling flights, while simultaneously receiving CIA protection from DEA investigations because he would provide intelligence on the smuggling of rival cartels. Noriega had a secret police that not only ran amok on its citizens, but sexually assaulted American citizens and murdered American military personnel based in the Canal Zone. Furthermore, Noriega’s status as a paid CIA asset ($200,000 yearly salary) had allowed Noriega to buy time until the last days of the 1980s before President (and former CIA director) George Bush Sr. came calling with an overwhelming invasion.
What Maduro did do was tamper with an election that he had lost, as Noriega had, and possibly took a share of drug money from cocaine and marijuana being smuggled out of Caracas. Neither of these things, along with looting the rotting remnants of the Venezuelan economy, come close to Noriega’s actions. More relevant, however, is that those making the accusations about Maduro’s supposed leadership of the gang Tren de Aragua or of a drug cartel simply are not credible people, and everyone knows it.
For those pushing this regime change, like Marco Rubio, Trump and Vance, what really matters is that Venezuela sits on top of the largest oil reserves in the world. It was extremely telling that after braying on about supposed fentanyl smuggling by Venezuela (a complete lie—China produces the chemicals for it and Mexican cartels manufacture it), Trump got up at a podium Saturday morning and proclaimed it really was about the oil.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” he said.
Trump said it wouldn’t cost the U.S. anything to “run” Venezuela, pointing to the country’s oil production, saying, “The money coming out of the ground is very substantial.”
Later, he told reporters, “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”
J. Dickless Vance, who used to be against regime change wars and wars over oil, tweeted about Venezuela refusing to return our stolen oil (funny, I didn’t realize that oil underneath Venezuela belonged to us, especially since we tried to seize their oil tankers in the last two weeks). Reuters reported on how American oil executives were being told that if they want to get back money owed from Venezuelan seizure of their licensed oilfields, they have to put money into rebuilding Venezuelan oil production first.
So what does this mean? First, the United States has chosen to go the route of early-1900s imperialism, an age that was believed to have long passed its sell-by date in the wake of two world wars fought over imperialism. This has now made the entire world edgy about what America does next. Are we going to invade Panama and regain control of the Panama Canal just because Trump thinks it's 1966? Do we wreck NATO by trying to seize Greenland from Denmark because Trump has some weird fucking obsession with that frozen wasteland? Katie Miller, former administration official and wife of Stephen Goebbels, erm, Miller, seems to think that’s coming.
Secondly, we’ve also created an inherent permission structure for the other strongmen of the world to depose national leaders. What Donald Trump did here was to pull out the foundation of the rules-based order for the world, and declare a free-for-all resembling the Great Game of the late nineteenth century. Xi Jinping in China now has the excuse he’s always wanted to seize Taiwan. Vladimir Putin now believes he’s got a free hand to wipe out Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, or any of the leaders of neighboring nations Lithiuania, Latvia and Estonia—all of whom are NATO nations. NATO has a lot less firepower without the United States backing it, and Trump clearly finds NATO to be a burden, not our allies as they have been since 1949. That combination of factors might give Putin the opening he craves to complete his mission of rebuilding the Soviet Union’s power and landmass. Absorbing economies that are far more functional than Russia’s kleptocracy would automatically make it more productive, and causing NATO’s collapse would be a bonus. Does anyone believe Donald Trump would defend anything but his own interests? Does anyone believe that JD Vance, who is just praying that Trump croaks every single night so he can sit in the big boy chair, would defend Europe when he uses every opportunity to insult them?
That’s the world we’re living in now. I know that this administration of Koopa Troopas and Goombahs don’t think that far ahead, but that’s the truth of the matter. This idiotic imperial action, clearly driven by Lil’ Marco Rubio (more on that in a moment), makes the chances of world war increase tenfold. With the possession of nuclear weapons at an all-time high (do bear in mind that this doesn’t mean the total number of weapons, but instead how many nations possess the ability to launch a nuclear war), such a conflict would be certain to end in mass destruction.
Back to Marco Rubio, who holds the dual positions of national security advisor and Secretary of State (matching the feat of Henry Kissinger without the intellectual capacity of that conniving psychopath). He’s made it quite clear he wants to attack Cuba next. It was used-car salesmen like Rubio that tanked the rapproachement with Cuba that President Obama completed a decade ago, because they think the only way that we can have peace with Cuba is at the end of a gun barrel. This has been Rubio’s long-term goal in politics after his family was forced out by the Castro revolution in 1959—the same sort of Oedipal bullshit that drove President George Bush Jr to invade Iraq in 2003. It’s astounding that Rubio has gotten as far as he has with his low-wattage intellectual capacity, and even more astounding that he’s achieved the level of influence with Trump that he has after the 2016 presidential primaries, where Trump maliciously wrecked him so much that Rubio came close to losing his Senate seat as well.
I’m not sure whose memories are shorter at this point—members of Congress, the media, or the electorate, all of whom helped enable this moment where America completed the crossing of the Rubicon from “defender of freedom” to “evil imperial colossus.” So many of us warned about this for years, and we kept being ignored because egg prices were too high and 80 million of our fellow citizens loved having a bully as president because they remember a great economy (that he inherited!) during his first term, a million dead from COVID and an insurrection be damned. This will end poorly, and Trump will not live to see it himself. Why else is he rushing to splash his name on everything in D.C. that he can?
As the old saying goes, Everything Trump Touches Dies, and sadly, that now includes America itself. Happy 250th birthday. 😒