Russia may gain more than lose from a US intervention in Venezuela |
The escalation of threats to Venezuela by United States President Donald Trump may be easy to dismiss as one of his random whims, but it is too closely linked to major confrontations to be seen as a regional affair with limited impact on the rest of the world.
Venezuela is turning into a bargaining chip in the game of global superpowers, along with Ukraine.
Check the opening chapters in Antony Beevor’s history of World War II to see how seemingly disparate conflagrations on different continents – the Nanjing massacre in China, Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia and the Spanish Civil War – played their roles in the build-up to the most horrible carnage in modern history.
This is not to say the world is necessarily sliding into a third world war – although the threat of it is always there. So long as the main characters in Russia-US relations, Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, are currently more prone to mutually beneficial transactions than confrontation, a global bargain feels more likely than a global war.
Not a major power at all, Venezuela still matters globally – not only as a country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves, but also as a political ally of China, Iran and Russia – countries the US-led West sees as its archrivals. Of these three, Russia is the one which finds itself in the most delicate position when it comes to Venezuela. The US-driven escalation poses risks for the Kremlin, but there are also potential gains to be made.
The main factor is the unexpected thaw which happened in relations between the US and Russia during Trump’s second term as........