Trump’s attack on Venezuela was a blatant and unapologetic act of imperialism. But it didn’t come unattended by a long history of US aggression against its world neighbors near and far.
From the outset of the republic and even earlier as settler colonies, the control of existing land and human resources had been usurped by the ruling elites.
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Trail of Tears that followed brought forced relocation and ethnic cleansing. With the end of the Civil War, the taste of imperialism and territorial expansion resumed and led to the invasions of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898 and an “American century” of hemispheric and global hegemony that followed.
Trump’s jackboot assault on Venezuela summons to memory Woodrow Wilson’s arrogant teach the Latin American republics to elect good men!” What were Wilson’s motives in invading Tampico and Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico (renamed by Trump the Gulf of America)? Both cities hosted US oil interests, and Wilson was not going to permit nationalization – which eventually did occur during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas in 1938. As Trump now sees it, as if to turn back the clock, Venezuelan oil belongs to the US, not to one of those Latin American republics. Is Mexico the next petroleum grab? Perhaps Iran?
Wilson refused to recognize Huerta and sanctioned Mexico with an arms embargo, which helped bring down his government. He intervened steadily in Latin American affairs – in Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, with long military occupations, and again in Mexico in 1916. Trump’s kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro was clearly illegal under international law and the Charter of the United Nations, of which the real estate president is as educated as an 8-year-old. Indeed, he has good company as an international pirate, following the tradition with the arrest of Philippine independence leader and president Emilio Aguinaldo (1901), Panama’s president Manuel Noriega (1980), Iraq’s president Saddam Hussein (2003), and Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (2004), all undertaken by Trump’s Republican predecessors.
One shouldn’t think that these crude forms of “gunboat diplomacy” were primarily projects of one party. The Democrats have been at least as aggressive in foreign relations, the five million deaths in Indochina coming largely at the hands of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and the savagery of the “police action” in Korea was led by Harry Truman. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded prematurely to Barack Obama, who went on to engage the US in seven different wars during his two terms in office (2009-2017). Perhaps Trump’s demand for the Prize is not so outrageous given such a precedent.
Outright overthrow and kidnapping of foreign presidents is but a subset of America’s militarist behavior abroad. An academic Lindsey O’Rourke documented 64 covert regime change attempts made by the US during the Cold War period alone (1947-1989), in addition to six overt actions. Democratic-spirited motives had little to do with these covert and overt offensives. O’Rourke found that “only 12.5 percent of America’s covert Cold War interventions sought to promote a democratic transition in an authoritarian state.”
US military interventions abroad from 1945 to the present numbers over 200, according to a Tufts University Military Intervention Project study. Another noted study found that from 1946 to 2000, the US covertly or overtly intervened in the elections of 81 foreign elections, making the allegations and the outrage against Russia for its supposed interference in the 2016 US election, especially by the Hillary Clinton branch of the Democratic Party, quite duplicitous.
Regime change was institutionalized as state policy with the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) by the Reagan administration in 1983. It is a little-known entity funded by Congress, even while claiming to be a “non-government organization” but without congressional oversight. Its principal organization members are the international wings of the two major political parties, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, together with the Center for International Private Enterprise (affiliated with the US Chamber of Commerce), and, originally, the anti-communist Free Trade Union Institute, affiliated with the AFL-CIO. For many years, the AFL-CIO was known in the Global South as the “AFL-CIA” for its support of pro-US, anti-leftist trade unions.
The NED was formed in response to the 1970s’ congressional investigations of the CIA’s rogue behavior that included destabilization, covert propaganda, coups, and assassinations. A co-founder of NED, Allen Weinstein, became famous for his stark admission to the Washington Post in 1991 that “A lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” The NED represents a neoliberal adjustment in that it is essentially a public-private operation, which receives funding from both sectors.
In 1999, NED was put under the State Department, making it not simply a development program but an explicit instrument of foreign policy. Carl Gershman, president of NED, from its beginnings to his retirement in 2021, said at the early stages the anti-Yanukovych uprising in 2013 that of all its regime change operations, “Ukraine is the biggest prize.” Anticipating the coming anti-Russian US and European proxy war in Ukraine, he suggested that if Kiev’s connection to Moscow could be destabilized, “[Vladimir] Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”
Apart from the violent ground action in Kiev’s public square, the Maidan, which NED had been very active in instigating, the main architect of Viktor Yanukovych’s overthrow and proconsul for choosing his successor was Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs (2013-2017). At a presentation to the US Senate foreign relations committee in November 2013, she boasted that from the moment Ukraine became independent in 1991 to the eve of the Maidan demonstrations, the US had poured in more than $5 billion to steer the direction of the country into the US/EU/NATO orbit. In fact, it marked the beginning of the collapse of the Ukrainian state.
While NED has been active in over 100 countries by its own count, including its most important interventions in the Arab Spring, Yemen, Jordon, Algeria, Syria, Libya, as well as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Colombia, Hong Kong, and “a long-standing NED priority” Cuba, the “biggest prize” today is the Russian Federation.” Since its escape from the economic collapse and great humiliation Russia suffered under America’s “shock therapy” program during the period of the corrupt and authoritarian president, Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999), a succession of US presidents, starting with Bill Clinton, broke an agreement made earlier (February 1990) with Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.” This was conditioned upon Russia accepting the reunification of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) with the Federal German Republic (West Germany) and becoming part of NATO.
In the 1990s, a weakened Russia had to watch as Clinton brought Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO. George Bush, Jr. added seven more East European countries, Barack Obama, two more, Donald Trump another two in his first term plus two northern European countries in his second. Joe Biden further reduced the NATO-Russia buffer by supporting two more memberships in the region. On the matter of Ukraine’s membership, Russia drew a line in the sand. Meanwhile, Trump, who has little interest in international institutions, has been discouraging a coherent Europe by focusing on transactional relations that benefit elite American interests and most of all his own.
With respect to the UN Charter, in particular Article 2(4) which accords every member protection “from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Russia, reacted quite late in the defense of its territorial integrity to the threat that a hostile NATO expressed, post-1989, to its borders. Prior to the 2022 Russian invasion, the eastward expansion of NATO represented in Moscow’s eyes an existential threat to Russia’s sovereignty, especially the organization’s plan to also bring both Ukraine and Georgia into the military alliance.
Can Russia Be Regime Changed?
Moscow’s response was also provoked by acts of the Poroshenko and Zelinsky governments and the parliament (Verkhovna Rada) to ethnically cleanse Russian language and culture from newspapers, television, schools, public institutions, and even the Orthodox Church. This was particularly threatening in the eastern region, the Donbas, where Russian is a dominant ethnicity and/or spoken language, but it also was designed, in alignment with Western strategy, to encourage challenges to Russian culture and nationalist movements within the Federation itself. In the special case of Crimea, a Russian autonomous region or oblast for most of the previous 240 years, Putin acted to retain its military facilities in that strategic location and to protect its naval and commercial access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.
The Russian government and media leadership have argued that efforts to bring the war to an early close requires a peace agreement that includes Ukraine’s political neutrality and demilitarization as the basis for a lasting peace. As a number of observers in the West have argued, however, the collective West is bent on continuing a “proxy war” for reasons having to do with their individual economic weaknesses, perceived needs for military-industrial buildups as engines of growth (“military Keynesianism”), and irrational Russophobia that dates back centuries and reflects, among other things, the West’s poor memory about who saved Europe from their defeat by the Nazi regime.
In a discursive environment that focuses on militarism, it remains to be seen if some measure of peaceful coexistence can be restored and the policy of lawless regime change toward Russia can be put to rest. This requires a reshaped orientation toward strategic empathy, particularly on the US side. American leaders and influencers do not appear to understand Russian concerns for security or its political-cultural orientation shaped by a history of invasions of that country by the collective West. In this violent milieu, leaders like Trump, Starmer, and Macron are seeking to recover the glory days of transatlantic hegemony, a notion that outside of the Washington-London-Paris inner circles has been buried now and forever more.
Source: Global Research
Author: Gerald Sussman
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