Some Thoughts and a Letter
I’ve been thinking about and trying to figure out what explains the Trump regime’s attacks on boats in the Caribbean which have now killed 87 people in 22 strikes. And further, its larger threats of war on Venezuela and its foreign policy in general. Below are some thoughts and questions and a letter a friend wrote to me when I posed the questions below.
Some in Congress, even some in the GOP, have raised questions after a report came out that Pete Hegseth ordered a second strike on an alleged “drug boat” in the Caribbean to “kill everyone” on board. The strike blew apart two sailors in the water clinging to the boat which had already been destroyed, 9 occupants killed, in the first strike.
The regime and the direct commander of the operation Admiral Bradley denied a direct order by Hegseth, but have absurdly tried to justify the second strike by claiming the survivors were trying to contact a “mother ship” to continue their effort to smuggle drugs, threatening American lives. . Head of the Senate Intelligence committee Tom Cotton took the murderous absurdity to another level, claiming video of the strike shown to select Congresspeople showed the two survivors “trying to flip a boat” (which was destroyed and on fire), and “load it with drugs” before they were killed.
The strike is clearly illegal, even by military law and code. Any neutral observer would see it as clear and unjustified murder.
Beyond this, the entire operation is either a war crime or simply just mass murder. Not a single shred of evidence has been produced by the regime that any of the boats destroyed or people killed were actually narco-traffickers, or even if so, that they were headed for the U.S. Or, for that matter, that anything links them somehow to causing the eventual deaths of people anywhere.
Blowing up of boats in international waters that pose no risk to the U.S. would be a war crime under circumstances of actual war, but is just plain murder when done not in context of a war. No matter the claims of war by the regime, a war is only a war if both sides are fighting one, and no stretch of the imagination would lead to a conclusion that Venezuela is waging war on the U.S.
I’ve been reading different views on what is the U.S. current imperial policy related to Venezuela and beyond. One sees the threats of U.S. war on Venezuela as attempts to destabilize or remove Maduro in order to shore up the U.S. position in South America, back other fascist governments there, and threaten social democratic governments and the people of the region.
Another piece I read from I think Foreign Relations said there is an imperial agenda related to destabilizing and getting rid of Maduro and seizing Venezuelan oil perhaps as a goal, which Trump has mentioned.
A Truthout piece by Jonathan Ng on NATO and Trump analyzes that the U.S. has reasserted it’s control and leadership within NATO-demanding they pay more for arms and more or less brought them in line with U.S. hegemony. This seems at odds with a view I was tending to- that Trump has only succeeded in destroying U.S. alliances. Instead, this view is that under him the regime is somewhat succeeding in bullying alliances under terms more favorable to itself.
The above on imperial concerns seems in contradiction to what I’d come to think that the U.S. is less concerned with global empire at least as a strategy and more concerned with yes, an extension of fascist power, but more as a way to demonstrate power and strength as well as personal aggrandizement and corrupt profiteering by interests aligned with the regime. Obviously, there is a backing of fascist ‘birds of a feather” in Argentina, Russia, Hungary and elsewhere, an ideological unity and approach to rule held in common. But is this deriving from a thought-out position of U.S. global hegemony and a plan to achieve it similar to previous thought in U.S. ruling circles?
Heather Cox Richardson has a Facebook post on many of the problems the regime is having both internationally and domestically in relation to cracks in their base, the Epstein case, defection among some GOP Congresspeople, declining support in population. She also analyzes some international moves re. Ukraine, and what Trump is out to do. Selected snippets below.
“On Friday evening, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the Trump administration’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine that illuminated the administration’s approach to the world at home, as well as overseas. Authors Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove, and Joe Parkinson explained that the administration’s plan for peace was a Russian-led blueprint for joint U.S.-Russia economic cooperation that would funnel contracts for rebuilding Ukraine, extracting the valuable minerals in the Arctic, and even space exploration to a few favored U.S. and Russian businessmen.
Many of those business leaders have close ties to the White House.
The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites use the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain. It permits virtually unlimited theft while the head of state provides cover for his cronies through pardons and the uneven application of the law.
It is the system Russia’s president Vladimir Putin exploits in Russia, and President Donald J. Trump is working to establish it in the United States of America.
Unlike the robber barons of the late nineteenth century, today’s power elite is, as Anand Giridharadas of The Ink wrote on November 23 in the New York Times, ‘a borderless network of people connected not to nations or their fellow citizens but to each other. They exchange nonpublic information and capital to enable the members of that group to control events, disregarding the effects of their decisions on those outside their network’.”
So what is guiding Trumpian foreign policy, how is it best understood? How is it an extension of former U.S. imperialist policy and how a change of emphasis, or divergence or break with it?
I posed some of the above to a friend and received this letter in response which I found insightful and helpful.
“Yes, I think it’s a pretty complicated situation. There seems to be much perplexed speculation about US goals around the confrontation with Venezuela. Some say it’s the oil, noting that Venezuela has the largest know oil reserves in the world (news to me!). Others that it’s not the oil because the oil is “dirty oil”, requires large investment for refining, there’s an oil glut now (although that could change if Russian and Iranian oil suddenly isn’t available) and at this time Venezuela’s oil production represents only 1% of the world’s production and it would take much time and money to expand it’s decrepit oil drilling capacity.
Another motivation fits in well with a long-term strategic hostility, across all political parties, presidencies and media towards the Chavez/Maduro defiance of US hegemony. A particular aspect of that is that “taking down” Venezuela will weaken Cuba and fulfill another long-held goal of bringing down that regime. It’s said that Cuba, already economically stressed, will implode because it’s extremely dependent on Venezuela’s oil. Other widely held reasons for “regime change” in Venezuela is that it will weaken Columbia, which along with Brazil and Chile has some level of resistance to US hegemony.
And in the background, there’s always and everywhere the specter of China’s ever-increasing economic power, influence, and rivalry with US. So overall, there’s a pretty broad consensus that regime change in Venezuela is the final goal here.
On the other hand, there’s much dismay and worry among politicians and foreign policy pundits over the Trumpers’ strategy and tactics: concerns about “overreach”, heavy-handedness, more “forever wars”, driving Latin American countries into China’s arms, etc. Where does the hysteria and aggressiveness of the Trumpers come from? Blowing up the “drug boats” of course fits well with the macho, “warrior ethos”, i.e. with the fascist chest thumping that’s intended to impress the public. But more than that, the hysteria over “terrorist attacks by drug cartels” fits in well with frightening the public and then saving them, “saving American lives” which would otherwise be lost to drug overdose.
So there are two different approaches but one shared goal: preservation of US political and economic hegemony. Neither approach is driven primarily by immediate US economic or financial needs.
It’s true that Trump’s greed and megalomania are on full display here and at times motivate particular actions and policies which can undermine US strategy, but I think there’s a much more fundamental motivation. The Trumpers gain their strength directly from the crisis of neoliberalism, particularly the 2008 financial meltdown, the consequent recession, the relative impoverishment of many and the rise of the tea party movement. On the other hand, the Obama presidency responded to the crisis with business-as-usual policies: bail out the banks and corporations, allow homeowners to lose their homes, respond slowly, if at all, to increased unemployment and stagnation of real wage incomes. In short, stay the course of neoliberalism. For their part, the tea-partiers and want-to-be fascists responded with acknowledgement of the crisis but misrepresented it as a crisis of “western civilization”, “you’re losing your country”, pushing paranoid conspiracy theories, demonization of “other” races and cultures, etc. – the whole nine yards.
To many people, the fascist reaction seems irrational, illogical, without foundation in reality. But if one looks at the severity of the crisis of neo-liberalism then continuing with that neo-liberal strategy seems equally irrational. In the short term, another strategy that might seem viable is that of progressivism and social-democracy but these will clearly exacerbate the political crisis; their redistributionist goals are unacceptable to capital as are its democratizing political tendencies. So fascism for all its craziness is at some point the last best hope for US hegemony. Its level of desperation is matched only by the level of risk to which the entire world is exposed.
What are the moneyed interests to do in such a situation? Primarily, ally with one strategy or the other, preserve their political options, engage politically when advantageous, and continue to make money.”
Food for thought.
For the Planet and Humanity 