Brute force sweeps away the rule of law |
No, it’s not just about the oil. Nor is it about the Monroe Doctrine, which has been used for two centuries by United States governments to justify their misdeeds in Latin America.
It’s (obviously) not about drugs either. It’s something simpler: Donald Trump is weak and aggressive (he said on Sunday that the United States “will govern” Venezuela), while his advisors are unscrupulous. The mini-Nazis he has surrounded himself with instinctively feel that the regime cannot last forever (John Bolton, his former National Security Advisor, said Trump “hasn’t got the brains” to be a dictator) and are rushing to deploy military power on three continents to mask their total failure on the domestic front.
Let’s start with oil: the world’s largest producer today is the United States, which extracts as much crude as Russia and Saudi Arabia combined. Venezuela has large reserves but ranks around 20th among producers, extracting less than one million barrels a day. Caracas’s oil industry was nationalized not by Hugo Chávez or Maduro but by Carlos Andrés Pérez, the United States’ best friend, in 1975.
Regime change by force in Caracas certainly fits into........