*(Top image: President Trump Visits with Juan Guaido. Credit: Shealah Craighead/ Official White House Photo)
When Donald Trump ran for president in the 2016 election, his criticisms of regime change presented a real opportunity for anti-war voices and organizations to demand an end to U.S. regime change wars abroad. That did not happen. In fact, the Trump administration has become even more bellicose amid the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. Anti-war forces in the U.S. made the mistake of believing Donald Trump would truly make a difference in the bipartisan war agenda. Venezuela is facing the brunt of the consequences.
Despite the economic and social devastation engendered by COVID-19, the U.S. warfare state has been working overtime to achieve its longstanding goal of regime change in Venezuela. On April 29th, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the U.S. embassy would reopen in Caracas and that the U.S. flag would be waving in the country very soon. He followed up these comments on May 1st with fresh accusations that the Venezuelan government transferred assets to Iran in a bid to enrich the Islamic Republic at the expense of the Venezuelan people. By May 3rd, the U.S. had set “Operation Gideon” into motion to violently remove Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro from his elected post.
Operation Gideon was a complete failure. Dozens of terrorists employed by SilverCorp, a private military contractor, have been arrested by Venezuelan authorities with the full cooperation of the Venezuelan people. All evidence points to the operation being led by U.S.-appointed coup leader and “interim” Venezuelan president Juan Guaido with possible backing from the State Department. According to The Grayzone, a leaked contract of the operation indicated that over 200 million USD was funneled from Guiado to SilverCorp to conduct a multifaceted coup operation which would have essentially empowered a private contractor to terrorize working class Venezuelans. The Trump administration has continued to deny any direct involvement in the coup.
Neither Venezuela nor the rest of the world has found any relief from U.S. military aggression amid the spread of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. As the United States rejected the U.N.’s proposed global ceasefire, the Trump administration was organizing its proxies to facilitate a bloody regime change war in Venezuela. Venezuela has received special attention from the U.S. since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Already labeled a threat to U.S. “national security” and reeling from a U.S.-backed rightwing terrorist movement, Trump has subjected Venezuela to harsh sanctions that have killed at least 40,000 people since 2017. In 2019, the Trump administration selected Juan Guaido to serve as the new president of Venezuela even though 80 percent of the country was unaware of his existence and not one Venezuelan had cast a vote for him in a democratic election. President Nicholas Maduro, fresh off surviving an attempted drone assassination in 2018, now has a fifteen-million-dollar bounty on his head courtesy of trumped up charges of narcoterrorism from William Barr and the U.S. Justice Department.
Venezuela is not the only country facing an increased threat of war from the United States since Trump assumed office. The U.S. has slapped tighter sanctions on Iran and is currently pressuring its allies to support an illegal arms embargo initially embedded in the JPCOA agreement that the U.S. left behind in 2018. The U.S. pursuit of an arms embargo against Iran brings the two countries dangerously close to a direct military confrontation. It comes after President Donald Trump threatened naval warfare with Iran over Twitter in late April and more recently vetoed a resolution that would have limited his ability to order military strikes on Iran without Congressional approval. Like Venezuela, Iran has received any respite from U.S. imperial aggression during the pandemic.
Venezuela and Iran are two examples of just how wrong many U.S.-based journalists and activists were about the anti-war composition of the Trump administration. While Donald Trump certainly spoke to war fatigue in the U.S. population, his policy maneuvers to remove U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan have been complimented by an escalation in bombing campaigns in the region. The U.S. dropped a record 7,423 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan alone in 2019. President Trump has also escalated tensions with Cuba and has used deadly drone strikes in nations such as Yemen with more frequency than his predecessor Barack Obama.
But the most damning indictment of Trump’s anti-regime change credentials is the fact that as Commander-in-Chief, his powers to roll back the war machine far exceed any other branch of government. His campaign promises to ease tensions with Russia have gone nowhere. U.S. military activity along Russia’s border remains a dangerous threat to world peace and is part of the Trump administration’s national security strategy of “Great Power Competition.” The doctrine also labels China as a threat to U.S. economic and military supremacy. Trump himself has been hostile toward China since he launched his presidential campaign in 2015. COVID-19 only further emboldened his anti-China cabinet to launch a deeply racist propaganda campaign that blames China for COVID-19 to justify growing U.S. military and economic hostilities directed at the second largest economy in the world.
Donald Trump’s first term as U.S. president has thus done little to curb the threat of global confrontation between the U.S. and major powers such as China and Russia. The Trump administration, far from a steward of peace, has escalated hostilities with Iran and Venezuela while the world battles a pandemic that has taken the lives of nearly 90,000 Americans and over 300,000 people globally. None of this should surprise anyone familiar with U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. military state is comparable to a deadly virus that causes death and destruction wherever it spreads. Conservative estimates of U.S.-induced casualties of war number in the tens of millions since the end of World War II but there has yet to be an accurate count which includes U.S. military’s proxy incursions over the last decade in Libya, Syria, and the Ukraine, to name just a few.
Some may point to the fact that Donald Trump has facilitated discussion with the DPRK’s Kim Jong-Un as a positive sign of his commitment to peace. Others may argue that just having a president willing to raise “regime change” in political discussion is a massive upgrade from prior administrations. Yet it would be mistaken to understand phenomena outside of their context. The people of Korea have struggled for decades to reunify the country and eject imperialism. Just as Obama was forced to ease relations with Iran and Cuba due to decades of work on the part of these nations to resist imperialism, so too was the strong impulse among the Korean people to mend relations a catalyst in Trump’s decision to make denuclearization of the Korean peninsula part of his foreign policy legacy. Trump’s Korea diplomacy should not cloud the fact that Trump and the U.S. military state stand united on key questions of foreign policy. Nor should it overshadow the massive amount of death and destruction imposed on nations such as Iran and Venezuela as a result of U.S. foreign policy under Trump.
Venezuela, Iran, and the rest of the world’s nations are no safer under Trump because war fatigue in and of itself does nothing to suspend the interests of the U.S. military state. No crisis is too big for the U.S. to consider scaling back its militarist regime. War is a key component of U.S. political economy. Not only is U.S. capitalism shrinking in scale, but U.S. corporations and monopolies also have every interest in cutting off competitors such as China from key resources in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. U.S. capitalism cannot compete with China economically and has thrown much of its weight into military expansionism to maintain global leadership. In this geopolitical context, Venezuela, Iran, and all national governments that resist the dictates of U.S. unilateralism and capitalist penetration must be overthrown and made in Washington’s image. Our only hope for peace lies not in a U.S. presidential candidate or political party but in the capacity of people themselves to demand that a new set of economic and political relations take hold in the United States, one that prioritizes the needs of humanity over the profits of a tiny few.
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