I think a lot of this is right, especially noting that the US (practically the world’s ’rule based order’ police in and of themselves) have set the standard now that they can not only just coup or kidnap any foreign leader in their hemisphere and get away with it, but that such a blatant violation of these so called ‘western values’ can fly on the international stage as long as it’s them
Like literally look at all these other American aligned countries scrambling to say “well I’m not going to say I support this completely, but I’m sure he had his reasons and let me just speak to Trump and see—”
If anyone’s seen the press conference with Trump and his administration on the event they make it 110% obvious what this is really about, and take a guess because I’m telling you right now its main reason is really not the oil no matter how much they wave it in your face
America already has a fuck ton of natural oil and resources, already heaps more profitable and easily refined and extracted oil than Venezuela with their lack of infrastructure
His administration called this operation “peace by force”, it’s not really about any natural oil laying dormant in the country.
Everyone on that podium was talking about American imperialism on the world stage. It’s about shoring up allies in an increasingly militarised world, making sure that countries that have been a thorn in their side since the early 2000s (Venezuela and Cuba especially) are tamed going into a pre-war period. No longer will countries just right across from their shores be on good terms with imperial rivals like Russia or China, if they were then America hasn’t done its imperialist job very well
They’ve been wanting to regime change Venezuela since Chávez, and for all the disagreements I have with him and his politics for being sort of a military nationalist, at least he had the public support back then to have a literal mass movement of people backing his project, it meant America couldn’t risk something like this without major backlash at the time so they didn’t
Maduro has none of this under his wing, he literally had people in Venezuela ratting him out, and I’m sure there are probably quite a few people thankful he’s gone, but not at all like this
America isn’t against dictators because they work with them and put them in power all the freaking time. Think the Sha in Iran, or Suharto from Indonesia, or currently Sisi in Egypt, it just always depends who they’ve decided to ally with
Also listen to this if you want to have an aneurysm, literally two Iraq war criminals critiquing this like they weren’t tyrants from their own crime time 😒
gummygunk
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