Trump’s Coup in Venezuela

The root of the US’ continued addiction to imperialist rule is articulated through the notion of “US interests”. Like any of the old colonizing powers, and following the same colonial logic, the US installs “interests” like others installed settlements and garrisons—and any threat to these real or virtual, concrete or abstract “interests” is then used as a trigger to authorize intervention. “Interests” plus actual human bait—US travellers, US diplomats, or US agents and military forces—can also be sacrificed to justify intervention. In Venezuela, the US is travelling on both of these freeways.

US intervention in Venezuela will result in what US intervention has almost always produced: a widening, an Americanizing, and a militarizing of what was previously a local, domestic conflict. In fact, even the phrase “civil war” now needs to be used cautiously, since any events that follow will be conditioned by this same foreign intervention, transforming the “civil” war much more into an international war.

The manner in which foreign powers, primarily the US, so eagerly walk down the path of the 2011 Libya model, shows more than just a refusal or inability to learn, but outright stupidity joined with malice. As for Trump’s 2016 proclamation that, “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with”—that was apparently opportunistic rubbish (note to translators: in the US the politically correct word for opportunism is “transactionalism”).

See more at:
https://zeroanthropology.net/2019/01/24/trumps-coup-in-venezuela/