Why Venezuela?

15 comments

1. Missy Ryan, Vivian Salama, Michael Scherer, and Nancy A. Youssef: “President Donald Trump gathered top advisers and military aides around the Resolute desk early last month, then patched in Richard Grenell, his envoy for Venezuela. On Trump’s return to office, the president had given Grenell a clear mission: get a deal that would give U.S. companies access to Venezuela’s enormous oil and mineral wealth and force tougher action on gangs and drugs. Grenell had made some headway, securing the release of American prisoners from Caracas and the resumption of flights for deported migrants, by working direct lines he had established to President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s socialist strongman.

   “But Secretary of State Marco Rubio had been championing a different approach. The former senator from Florida, who also serves as the president’s national security adviser, has a long-standing abhorrence of leftist Latin American dictators and has advocated for Maduro’s ouster, a call backed by the legions of Venezuelan and Cuban exiles in Miami. To bring his arguments in line with Trump’s domestic priorities, Rubio has portrayed the Venezuelan leader as the head of a narcotics enterprise running drugs into the United States, as well as an agent of the destabilization that fuels migration.

   “As a justification for using military force, the drug rationale was awfully thin: Venezuela is not an important player in drug production, even though it allows cartels to use the country as a transit point. But by presenting a move against Maduro as a way to combat illegal trafficking, Rubio got the president’s attention. In early September, Trump began authorizing strikes on small boats off the coast of Venezuela and in the Pacific that were allegedly ferrying drugs or cartel members, so far killing at least 65 people in 16 attacks.

   “White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly told us that the strikes have been ‘against designated narco-terrorists, as affirmed by U.S. intelligence,’ and that the president was using his authority to do what was necessary to prevent drugs from reaching the United States. But the administration has offered little evidence to support its claims.

   “… The Pentagon has mustered the largest military buildup in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962, and the world’s largest aircraft carrier is headed there from the Mediterranean. The USS Gerald R. Ford will join eight other warships, some 10,000 troops, fighter jets, sophisticated drones, and a nuclear-powered submarine. The accumulation of such extraordinary firepower has worried some Trump allies, who argue that a military campaign to depose Maduro would be at odds with one of the president’s core campaign pledges.

   “‘President Trump ran on an agenda of “America First,’’’ one Trump ally who has been working on Latin American–policy issues told us. ‘Unfortunately, people in his administration are more focused on a “South Florida First” agenda.’

   “With a U.S. armada floating off Venezuela’s shores, Maduro now faces the choice of whether to stay and suffer the potential consequences or to flee. And the United States faces the prospect that Trump, who has criticized America’s past ‘forever wars’ and spent much of this year focused on ending major foreign conflicts, might be about to start one in his own backyard.”

   Read more: [https://theatln.tc/RInxMpsK](https://theatln.tc/RInxMpsK)

2. Porque es una dictadura..

   Digo..maduro no es popular

3. Probably won’t get many responses but my two cents on why Trump is going after Venezuela

   1¢: He is a terminally on-TV viewer. He’s likely absorbed a lot of news reports about Venezuelan gangs causing havoc in Colorado, so he unironically thinks we need to go after Venezuela to cut off the source. Consider, for example, his obsession with MS-13. I am 99% convinced he is interested in MS-13 because in the mid-2000s, there was a spate of programming about them hyping them up as one of the most dangerous gangs in the world. This was embellishment meant to sell programming, but many people believed it and never questioned why we never heard much about them after the credits rolled (Mexican cartels like Los Zetas and the CJNG would be more fruitful targets, but they don’t get nearly as much coverage because they don’t largely operate in the USA)

   2¢: He is a Boomer. And I’m not saying that to say he is old and conservative; I’m saying that he was born right on the cusp of the Cold War, so his first 45 years or so were spent with American foreign policy dedicated towards battling communism. The Soviet Union spread Marxism-Leninsm wherever they could, largely abandoning socialist movements that didn’t bow to Moscow, therefore most socialist states we’re familiar with followed that doctrine (and most socialist states we haven’t heard of were non-aligned). To combat this, we pushed *extreme* levels of anti-communist propaganda, making “socialism” out to be a borderline Satanic ideology that had to be routed everywhere it sprouted, and then eventually consuming ourselves trying to outdo ourselves in how not socialist we are, to the point we live in a period where the Democrats (not even Mamdani, I mean the rank and file standard types) are considered “radical leftist” in mainstream parlance, and Republicans who are insufficiently right wing nationalist are also considered “socialist RINOs” and yet somehow Democrats also find it fruitful to claim Trump is a ‘communist’ for trying to get government stakes in businesses and therefore we have MAGA communism. Well, cutting through that, the two most well known socialist states in the Americas are Cuba and Venezuela. We largely don’t do anything with Cuba, at least not publicly. But Venezuela, we watched them implode due to a combination of government corruption and trying to build socialism with a petrostate, which is already difficult enough with neoliberal capitalism or corporatism since the success of the economy relies heavily on the price of oil. Maduro has none of the appeal or charisma of Chavez, and he’s made blatant power grabs that left him unpopular, so presumably no one will come to his defense because the socialist experiment in Venezuela went bad. Presumably being the keyword. The context doesn’t matter, all that matters is “socialist government, breadlines, rampant inflation, see?” And this gives Trump both an easy to identify villain— those wacky commies took control of a beautiful country and ruined everything— as well as a potential way to harken back to the good ol’ days of the Truman Doctrine, battling socialism with the full weight of American military power. He obviously wants this against China too, largely unaware that Chinese communism is not Soviet communism, but the CCP calls itself communist and is even one letter off from the CCCP, so therefore it’s totally the second Cold War and the new theater must be in Venezuela.

   Now I probably made that sound way more complicated than I actually think it is over in the Oval Office.

   **TLDR: “Fox News did reports about Venezuelan gangs, and Trump wants to roleplay as a Cold War president.”**

   That’s just my take, and it’s probably very wrong.

4. Oil market control.

5. Oil

   Edit:

   Venezuela is sitting on almost $25 TRILLION worth of oil. What is more expensive than what?

   And it’s DEFINITELY not more “expensive” than trading when you’re spending – government- money to hand control of aforementioned resources to – private- oligarchs

   Expensive for who? And who cares, as long as it’s profitable for the correct/intended parties? Another upward transfer

   WE pay for the absurd military budget, not the ones who benefit 😂 Yay imperialism very cool

   If you don’t think wars are about resources and hegemony I don’t even know where to start with you.

6. I mean the resources are nice (Venezuelan crude is shit tho)- I’d argue this is more about the corollary though

   This is about world order

7. Chevron recently got contracts to get oil from Venezuela, but Maduro is making it difficult. So again we go to war for oil. The oil companies pay or “donate” to politicians, and Americans fund and die in wars. Seems totally fair. Just like how Walmart doesn’t pay their employees enough so Americans have to supplement their ability to pay for food. So not only does Walmart get tax breaks, but we also have to pay so their employees can eat. Super duper fair./s

8. Oil.

9. If Russia and China are going to invade American allies that are within their spheres of influence in the multipolar world then the USA will do the same to their allies. It is classic mafia tactics, dissuade the other side from going after your friends by going after theirs when they do.

10. There’s a lot of reasons. It’s ostensibly because of drug related activity, which is certainly happening but also pretty obviously a pretext. They want access to Venezuela oil, sure. But I have read Wagner group and China have been active in Venezuela, with Russia training and arming the Venezuelan government. They are trying to gain a foothold in the western hemisphere and we are trying to lock down the western hemisphere so in the event of a conflict later we don’t have to worry about our own backyard. And US gaining access to Venezuela’s oil denies China access, which is a huge benefit in the event of a future conflict. I believe the goal is regime change in Venezuela to deny Russia and China access to Venezuela and its resources while keeping US troops off the ground there, but we will see.

11. This gives a good excuse for Russia or china to put boots on the ground in other South American countries. I wonder if this is related to trumps push for autocracy

12. All the people saying “oil” are flat wrong. We never go to war for oil. That has been and always will be the lazy, uneducated explanation for our wars in the middle east, and it will be the case here, too.

    We went to war in the middle east to try to spread democracy. We thought that we could liberate a people and produce long term allies who valued what we thought was self evidently valuable. Turns out they didn’t care, though, so instead of being cheered on, we wound up in more forever wars.

    What was the role of all the oil companies, then? They were vultures on the conflict, not its main point. Cheney used the war to funnel huge amounts of money to government contractors. In that sense it was almost more of a tax money laundering scheme: you can’t just hand money to your friends, so you have to wash it with these government contracts. This, however, wasn’t the point of the war. It was something that happened alongside it.

    If we had just wanted oil and didn’t care about democracy/having regional allies, it would have been far, far cheaper to trade with Iraq or Afghanistan. They like money, too. So does Maduro. As has been noted in other articles shared recently, we’ve had success negotiating with him. He has given into pretty much all our demands.

    If we wanted oil, we’d pry it out of him in diplomacy. Politically he has zero leverage. His people want him gone, and for good reason. This is about more than oil, though, and that will always be a substandard answer.

13. Why indeed. Oil is a long, risky, expensive payoff.

    You’d have to kick out the entrenched regime, then establish friendly oil extraction infrastructure, then occupy and hold on to power with a puppet government because an unhappy populace would kick you out. Once the oil is flowing the locals are going to wonder why they live in poverty while another country extracts their mineral wealth.

    All of that would make Afghanistan look like pocket change.

14. Nothing here on Venezuela passing legislation to claim 2/3 of Guyana their neighbour due to the oil in that region, and expressing intent to invade to seize it.

15. Oil,Rear Earth, more Oil

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