Like other US regime-change operations, the current one against the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is rife with hypocrisy. After all, what is the main complaint that President Trump and other US officials have against Maduro? It is that he is a socialist whose socialist programs and policies have brought misery and suffering to the Venezuelan people. Thus, by initiating a regime-change operation against Maduro, US officials are portraying themselves as good-hearted, compassionate conservatives who are just trying to help the Venezuelan people.
One big problem with this position, however, is that President Trump and his interventionist cohorts, including such Cold War dead-ender advisers as John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, and Mike Pompeo, are socialists too and embrace socialism here in the United States. For example, like all other Republicans and Democrats, they support Social Security, Medicare, public (i.e., government) schooling, farm subsidies, and other welfare-state programs, all of which are core elements of Maduro’s socialist system in Venezuela. For that matter, they are also core features of the socialist system in Cuba, where Trump and his Cold War dinosauric advisers are still obsessed with bringing regime change, notwithstanding more than half-a-century of failure.
Another big problem is that Trump and his national-security state regime-changers actually love communists, at least those who are deferential to them. Example: The brutal communist dictator of North Korea, with whom Trump fell in love on first sight. Another example: Vietnam, which is ruled by a brutal communist regime. That’s where Trump chose to have his most recent encounter with the North Korean communist dictator with whom he is now so enamored. Vietnam has also been embraced by the Pentagon, notwithstanding the fact that Vietnam’s communist regime killed more than 58,000 American men during the Vietnam War.
A third big problem is that Trump, the Pentagon, and the CIA have knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally added to the misery and suffering of the Venezuelan people with economic sanctions. In fact, the very idea of sanctions is to target the citizenry of a country with death and impoverishment in the hope that this will encourage the citizenry to revolt, or that it will encourage the Venezuelan military to effect a coup, or that it will encourage Maduro to abdicate.
The fact is that, like with previous regime-change operations, US officials couldn’t care less about the well-being of the Venezuelan people. All they care about is ousting Maduro and replacing him with a pro-US regime, preferably a military one, one that will bring “order and stability” to the country. If Venezuelan citizens have to be sacrificed to achieve that goal, so be it. The mindset is that the survivors will be better off for it. That’s why US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright stated that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions the US government enforced against Iraq in the 1990s were “worth it.” In other words, no price is too high to pay in terms of the lives of foreign citizens to achieve regime change.
What is the real beef that Trump, the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and the Cold War dead-enders have against Maduro? It is that he, like his predecessor Hugo Chavez, is independent of the US worldwide military-intelligence empire. He refuses to take orders from Trump, the Pentagon, or the CIA. He doesn’t defer to them and do what they want. He doesn’t bend the knee to them. In fact, like Chavez, Maduro isn’t reluctant to criticize the US national-security establishment and its police of foreign interventionism, something that sends US officials into a rage.
Of course, that is also why they hated Cuban leader Fidel Castro. No, not because Castro was a communist or a socialist or because they loved the Cuban people but because Castro stood up against the United States and declared Cuba’s independence from US control. That’s why they went after him. That’s why they targeted him for assassination.
In his Fourth of July speech to Congress in 1821, John Quincy Adams stated that if America were ever to abandon its founding foreign policy of non-interventionism, the US government would begin behaving as a worldwide dictator. The US government’s regime-change operation against Venezuela is just the most recent confirmation of how astute Adams was.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
