On the verge of undertaking military action against Venezuela last month, the Trump Administration was delayed by the reported failure of a U.S. Navy ship to get through the Panama Canal and into the Atlantic in time for the operation. As a result, the attack had to be delayed, but apparently not cancelled. The recent sinking of a cartel drug-boat in international waters is something the Navy should have been doing for the last 30 years. It is a self-defense action and not an act of war when done in international waters.
As has also been noted , Washington has turned down a very favorable deal with Venezuela on the oil purchases, access to rare-earth minerals, and, perhaps most important, significantly accelerating the eviction of Venezuelan illegals – including cartel criminals — from the United States.
There is, moreover, a feature of current U.S. plans for Venezuela that is always detrimental to the U.S. taxpayer, namely, an effort to establish a new democratic government in Caracas. U.S. representatives are in discussion with Venezuelan dissidents in an effort to identify individuals who would help to build such a regime. The country’s president – Nicholas Maduro – also has been offered a chance to leave the country without punishment, but with a gang of money to ensure ease and comfort for the rest of his life.
In America’s post-1945 history, this script has been used multiple times, to say the least. It has a record of never working out – in any way – and ending in enormous expenses, prolonged American involvement, and, far too often, combat involving our military services.
A troubling adjunct to the current episode is that Venezuela has successfully approached for help the largely irrelevant and often anti-U.S. Organization of American States (OAS). Sadly, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the bait and appears ready to support the involvement of the OAS in the search for so-called “peace and democracy” in Venezuela. Readers may recognize this process as identical to that which has been a standard U.S. practice for decades, and has seldom, if ever, succeeded. Often, such efforts have ended very badly for the United States, demonstrating that U.S. diplomats are chronically unable to recall that diplomatic successes are most often arranged through secret, bilateral, and backstage efforts, seldom by public diplomacy, and never by international organizations. This U.S. mode of operation has been, since the era of Woodrow Wilson, a wretched failure.
None of the foregoing is meant to deride those who are simply following the orders of President Trump and his foreign-policy makers. This is an American-made script that has been used unsuccessfully in many areas of the world. Intended to remove political oppressors and install democracy peacefully, the policy seems not to understand that not all people are capable of establishing an enduring democracy, apparently not even Americans. Even those who have long been oppressed are, when liberated, faced with a choice between democracy or personal or group advantage, and as often as not, simply choose to become the new oppressors, thereby putting themselves in the driver’s seat and so able to extract revenge and wealth from their predecessors. There must be a point where a much-honored but always disastrous U.S. foreign policy plan can be seen as such and rightly consigned to history’s ash heap.
Overall, a U.S. foreign policy, designed to build democracies or support countries that falsely claim to be democracies, has been an abject and century-long failure at home and abroad. Perhaps it would be more useful for the American people if their leaders sought to try to restore the crumbling U.S. democracy, remove to prison the foreign-paid U.S. politicians who have been systematically destroying it since the 1960s, and put end to the NATO alliance that now features multiple governments clearly intent on eliminating their native populations, turn their nations over to the violent dregs of the Third World’s population – to some extent copying U.S. governments in this regard — and seeking war with a superpower that could put the entire European community out of its intensifying, self-inflicted misery in short order.
Finally, we seem to be coming to the point where no one in power in Washington has any genuine concept of what the execution of an America First foreign policy means. To take the best example of this fact is Trump’s decision to allow 600,000 Chinese students to enter America to attend university. These are not today’s mediocre and often drugged-up U.S. university students. The Chinese students are individuals who have been indoctrinated with Communist theory and discipline since birth both at home and then in schools once their education began. They have also learned via television of the savage brutality China applies to those who do not behave according to the regime’s demands. These so-called students will do well in our universities because they have been well-trained in China’s expectations of them, and because not only they but their families are in danger if they fail to graduate and bring home with them a degree and as much intellectual property as possible. The Trump administration, by allowing this madness, is not just letting the camel stick his nose under the tent, it is permitting 600,000 of Beijing’s intelligence operatives into an already unstable republic.
