In surveying a possible answers to the question “Why does Venezuela matter of the United States?”, it is difficult to come up with an answer that does not begin with the word “oil”. Because Maduro has mostly completed the ruination of Venezuela’s economy – especially the oil sector — so ably begun by Hugo Chavez, U.S. oil companies probably are pushing the Trump administration to intervene and create a U.S.-picked Venezuelan president and regime to repay what U.S. oil corporations are owed, and so that the companies themselves can pick up the remnants of the Venezuelan oil industry ‘s facilities for pennies on the dollar.
When the oil industry is calling the tune, all U.S. presidents and vice-presidents must dance its dance. But they cover their lapdog-obedience with rhetoric about the “illegitimacy of the Maduro regime”, the “need for new elections”, the “vast sufferings of the Venezuelan people”, and, of course, the “need to reinstall freedom and democracy” in that country. Whenever the leaders of the national government are trying to persuade Americans that the republic needs another unnecessary war, they wheel out the language of values and abstract theories, neither of which have any legitimate role to play in the formulation of an effective America First foreign policy.
The plain fact is that the United States is cordially hated throughout the nations lying south of the Rio Grande. And why is that, one may ask? The answer, naturally enough, is more than 150-years of unnecessary U.S. government-conducted overt and covert political, economic, and military interventionism in the region. The reason current South American leaders are applauding Vice-President Pence’s appallingly non-America First rhetoric is that Chavez and Maduro have been royal pains in the butt for much of South America, and the leaders of the impacted countries want American blood and money to end their pain. If that is done, they will soon return to America-hating, a tradition of many decades standing.
Beyond that reality, however, is the fact that Spain once ruled almost all of the territory south of the Rio Grande as a colonial empire, plus a good deal of land north of it. As night follows day, the Spanish proved to be horrible governors who were always armed with a chronic inability to govern as anything other than authoritarians. This style of dictatorial rule was left behind for the locals to employ when the fading Spanish empire retreated to Europe. And employ it they have, to the point that, today, there is no reason to believe that South Americans will ever be capable of self-rule and thereby stop the endless stream of strong-man rulers the citizenry either elects or submits to, then suffers under until a new strong man comes along, gains power, and abuses them, and then the cycle begins again. (NB: On this point, see the new governments in Mexico and California.) This seemingly genetic lack of talent for self-government, frequent preference for a rule-by-strongman, and patent inability to understand the workings of democracy and the rule of law, are precisely the reasons that the United States needs very few – if any — immigrants from former Spanish colonies anywhere in the world.
But what will follow the crocodile tears caused by speeches from Vice-President Pence, Secretary of State Pompeo, National Security Adviser Bolton, and other Neocons about Venezuela’s hungry and suffering people, their ruthless leaders, and its ruined economy, all of which were meant to jerk tears, sympathy, and support from the parents and spouses of America’s soldier-children who would be killed and maimed if the Trump Neocons militarily intervene in Venezuela? The answer to what is next on tap is both obvious and pathetic: invoke the Monroe Doctrine
Murmurings about this sainted policy already are being heard, and they gradually will rise to a crescendo. The citizenry will be told that Chavez and Maduro have allied with the regimes of America’s deadliest enemies – Russia, China, and Iran and its Hezbollah surrogate — and that Maduro is preparing to allow them an undefined “physical presence” in Venezuela, beyond their current diplomatic establishments. After these likely-to-be-unverifiable assertions, Pence or the lamentable John Bolton will claim that a larger presence of Russia, China, and Iran/Hezbollah constitutes a direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine, and thus to the United States and all of the Western Hemisphere.
Now, it is correct to say that the publication of Monroe Doctrine in 1823 was meant to warn Europe against further attempts to colonize or recolonize South America. Succeeding U.S. administrations applied it against would-be European interlopers until the Carter administration ignored the Monroe Doctrine, gave the Panama Canal to Panama, and knowingly allowed the start of that country’s evolution into a Chinese economic colony.
But since Carter’s hapless presidency, what can be said about what U.S. administrations have done to ensure the world knows not only that the Monroe Doctrine is still in force, but that it will be enforced? The evidence seems to show that the answer is nothing
While Vice-President Pence and his Neocon brothers wail about the horrors of Maduro’s rule and the danger it poses to the United States, all post-Carter U.S. administrations have done nothing to enforce the Monroe Doctrine against the informal economic, political, and religious colonies that Russia, China, Iran, and the Gulf Arab tyrants have set up in Latin and South America.
–China has been in this van of informal colonization through investment; monetary and military aid in the region; purchases of land and businesses; highly publicized visits by senior leaders; and repeated health-care dispensing and good-will building visits by the Chinese navy’s hospital ships.
–Russia, far less economically powerful than China, cannily has taken advantage of fleeting opportunities to put a needle in Uncle Sam’s eye by such actions as sending two nuclear-capable aircraft on a visit to Venezuela and, last week, warning the United States not to intervene in the ongoing process of self-determination in Venezuela. The only mistake Moscow made on this last point is its failure to know that, save for Dr. Ron Paul and, at times, Senator Rand Paul, no prominent American politician has any idea of what genuine self-determination means, nor of the enormous dangers and losses that have accrued to the American people because their government uses the concept as justification for U.S. military interventionism.
–Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, a dozen or more Iranian media, health, and agricultural organizations, and Hezbollah have been quietly active in Venezuela and across the region almost since the Shia clerics seized power. Although a pauper-state compared to China and Russia, Iran has built an effective and wide-ranging network of small economic, military, terrorist, commercial, propaganda, religious, and humanitarian beachheads across the region, perhaps funded via the narcotics trade in which Tehran regime and its military and intelligence services participate in many areas of the world.
–The Saudis and their fellow Gulf Arab tyrants have built a strong and loyal following among the region’s growing Sunni population, just as Iran has among the Shia population, via their humanitarian aid and proselytizing. The Arabs have invested heavily in the region and have built several of the world’s largest and most ornate mosques there. Both the Arab and Iranian regimes also bring considerable numbers of young Latin American Muslims to study in their religious universities. These men then return home to spread the faith and anti-Americanism; serve as eyes and ears on the ground for Iran and Saudi Arabia; and to help facilitate the covert operations of each.
The foregoing, on balance, are dangers to the United States that multiple U.S. administrations and politicians have nurtured without any credible attempt to cite and enforce the Monroe Doctrine, which, as noted, is the tool created to resist formal and informal foreign colonization in the Western Hemisphere. They also have kept silent about the Doctrine and its meaning while the Chinese and Russian regimes continue to use and expand their Cuba-based signals-intelligence collection facilities which target U.S. military, economic, banking, government, and political entities.
In addition, the same U.S. administrations have deep-sixed the Monroe Doctrine at home by supinely allowing China to create informal colonies inside the United States. Beijing is purchasing technology companies in the United States; placing branches of its own companies in America that are profitable and steal U.S. intellectual property; acquiring tracts of land in the continental United States; and making large donations to U.S. universities to support leftist and increasingly radical professors and the courses they offer to cultivate socialism and communism among U.S. students.
In the context of the untold amount of post-1970 national-security damage already inflicted on the republic by the U.S. government’s estrangement from the Monroe Doctrine, the manic, war-mongering statements by Pence, Pompeo, Bolton, and, now, Israel-First’s felonious clown-of-clowns, Elliot Abrams. about “America’s duty” to help hungry and oppressed Venezuelans are nonsense bordering on madness. These men are concerned with Venezuela mainly because the U.S. oil industry is eager to recoup its losses in Venezuela and to buy up — on-the-cheap — the remnants of that country’s decaying oil-producing facilities. The list of names also suggests that these men are pursuing some unnamed Israeli interest.
Venezuelans will have self-determination only if they choose to have it and are willing to fight for its attainment, a process likely to be arduous, long, and bloody. They will never have it via a U.S. military intervention, which will only yield a long-term U.S. military presence and bases in the country, further drain the already bankrupt U.S. treasury, kill more U.S. soldier-children, and again make Venezuela and the region safe for hating the U.S.government and its interventionism.
The Monroe Doctrine and the defensive shield it long provided are now shredded and dead beyond resuscitation. It was knowingly killed by the leaders from both parties that Americans have elected since 1970. Today, citizens must not allow themselves to be duped into believing that the corpse of the Monroe Doctrine is relevant, and that, to be patriots, they must stride down the path to intervention and war in Venezuela that is being paved for them by Trump’s growing crowd of reprehensible Neocon pukes, their lust for unnecessary wars, and their utter lack of concern about how many U.S. military personnel would be killed or maimed in a war wanted only by the U.S. oil industry and the anti-America-First, Neocon clique.
