This is a supplementary post following up on my piece on the situation in Venezuela yesterday. The concluding parts of my series on escaping the tyranny of Trump will both drop tomorrow, so thank you for your patience for those waiting for these.
I said in the preface to my piece yesterday that it will be a little while before we begin to see the consequences of Trump’s reckless invasion of Venezuela. There’s much noise on social media as once again, the left hand the narrative to the right to accuse them of supporting Maduro, who is a thug and the worst thing to happen to Venezuela in recent history.
The right has run a very compelling liberation narrative that has largely managed to deflect from several key points that the adults in the room should have been focusing on, rather than the ‘kidnapping’ narrative they decided to run with. It’s a hard sell, eliciting sympathy for a corrupt thug who has terrorised and starved his people, not to mention stolen an election. The claim should merely have been that the US broke international law by entering Venezuela’s sovereign territory and ‘CAPTURING’, not kidnapping Maduro. Sadly, when rage posting is the game, common sense goes out of the window.
These should have been the focal points.
Innocent civilians were killed in this reckless adventure. The number of dead ranges from 40 to 80, with no confirmation of how many were civilians. I’m sure we'll learn more as the days pass. For reference, please feel free to read the New York Times piece I have gifted, so it’s not behind a paywall.
This is not regime change; it is a geopolitical decapitation which saw a hated figure performatively removed by US Special Forces. Excellent optics for driving Venezuelans who don’t live in Venezuela onto the streets of cities around the world to celebrate. My question is simply, what are they celebrating? The regime has gone nowhere. Maduro’s deputy is now in charge, and the military leadership is precisely as it was. Trump has simply rolled a turd in glitter.
If this were about liberating the Venezuelan people, why did he not mention the word ‘democracy’ once during the long self-congratulatory ramblings that followed? If the focus were on democracy, he would have had María Corina Machado at the press conference with him, ready to introduce her as the interim President until elections could be held. Instead, he said, and I quote, “I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.” Machado’s opposition party’s chosen candidate, Edmundo González, won the 2024 election with 67% of the vote. Machado herself was banned from running in the election González won, after winning a primary in which she secured over 90% of the vote. To be clear, these were verified results in both cases, the latter leading to the US and many of its allies formally recognising Edmundo González as the rightful president of Venezuela.
Trump claims his choice for interim president is Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s second-in-command. Daughter of guerrilla fighter Jorge Antonio Rodriguez, who founded the revolutionary Socialist League Party. He was famous for kidnapping an American businessman. In Trump’s own words, “She’s willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.” Since then, of course, she’s appeared on TV, having been installed as leader by the Venezuelan Supreme Court, as is required under their constitution.
Trump did NOT select her as he would have everyone believe, I think that was evident in her address to the nation, in which she attacked Trump for the illegal invasion and abduction of her president. Trump has, of course, since threatened her to do as he says or suffer a fate worse than Maduro. What a lovely man he is. It’s also a little odd after he had said: “We want peace, liberty and justice for the great people of Venezuela”
Beyond self-congratulation and laughable ‘hard man’ rhetoric, in which he hilariously claimed the capture of Nicolás Maduro as spectacular, extraordinary and “an assault not seen since World War II.” Tellingly, most of Trump’s subsequent liberation focus was on the liberation of oil, not the Venezuelan people. He repeated the claim that:
“We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us during those previous administrations. And they stole it through force. This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country.”
In another excellent piece of journalism by Tiago Rogero in the Guardian, he noted that many analysts conclude:
US companies never owned the oil or the land in Venezuela. They held exploration concessions, which confer temporary operating rights, not permanent ownership. Under international law and the UN principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources established in 1962, sovereign states have the inherent right to control and dispose of resources within their territory.
US companies have drilled for oil in Venezuela since the early 1900s, and over the past century, firms from other countries joined them, including Italy, France, Spain, China, Russia, the Netherlands and the UK.
The key reason I highlight this is that he played heavily on rebuilding the infrastructure required to ramp up heavy crude oil production. One statement he made during his justification for seizing the country’s oil was:
“We’re not spending money; the oil companies are going to be going in, they’re going to spend money. We’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago. A lot of money is coming out of the ground; we’re going to get reimbursed for all of that. We’re going to get reimbursed for everything we spend.”
If I were an international lawyer representing Venezuela in this matter, this would be Exhibit 1. In this one statement, Trump is spelling out the details of the crime he is about to commit. The Venezuelan government has not attacked the US, regardless of how Trump wants to dress it up. What Venezuela did in the past, including the expropriation of assets, was LEGAL under international law, and any dispute is a matter for the courts, not Trump. Indeed, this very issue is currently the subject of legal filings from 2014, with proceedings still ongoing. The US has absolutely NO LEGAL RIGHT UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW to do what Trump is threatening to do.
His speech was dominated by one phrase, ‘reimbursement’, which he repeated over and over, implying that no one would receive any money until the US had been reimbursed for what he deems to be historical losses. To be clear, there is NO legal justification for this assertion. In terms of investment, given the period during which Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) was the world’s largest oil exporter, capital investment had long been recouped. So this ‘reimbursement’ ploy is simply another word for future extortion, for which, of course, he has form. In any event, he will likely have left office or fled the country before any oil starts pumping at scale.
One thing you must NOT lose sight of, though, is that it is likely that Trump will provide massive taxpayer subsidies to the oil companies to get them to invest in Venezuela. Rest assured, taxpayers will be on the hook for eye-watering subsidies.
Let me quote his own words once again for the sake of clarity:
“We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition”
First of all, you cannot ‘run’ a country without boots on the ground. This ludicrous suggestion that he can run the country as a remote dictator, like he’s running the US from the golf course and by proclamation from the Oval Office, is nonsense. He believes that by abducting Maduro, he can rule using the threat of a second invasion if the remaining administration does not comply with his criminal demands. This is pure comedy hour diplomacy. Does he think that by removing one man, Venezuela is now suddenly not one of the most dangerous countries on earth?
It remains a largely lawless country, with a corrupt military and politicians in the pockets of gangs, drug cartels and kidnappers. It will likely take THOUSANDS of troops to secure the required infrastructure, even before extracting oil. While the level of government corruption in Venezuela is comparable to that of his own government, these criminals are certainly not loyal to Trump. Every bit of this screams HUGE miscalculation. You can’t have ‘occupation lite’, and I can say without fear of contradiction, if he proceeds with this reckless and dangerous plan, he will very quickly become mired in an insurgent war that will cost the lives of many American servicemen and women.
The only way he even stands a vague chance of success is if he flies in pallets of cash to pay protection money to the gangs that run the country in partnership with the military. It should be noted that many of these gangs extend throughout South America. Oh, and one other thing, China and Russia will be arming rebel factions to disrupt his plans, too. This venture into Central and South America presents every opportunity for it to become a 21st-century Vietnam-style conflict. It is utter madness.
Threats to Colombia, Mexico, Cuba and, once again, Greenland are beyond my comprehension. Does Trump think Venezuelan and Colombian gangs will stay on their own patch to fight the US? They already have criminal networks throughout the US. Where does he think their weapons come from? There is no question that they could cause absolute havoc if they decide to retaliate on civilian targets on US soil. These gangs, like himself, have no respect for the rule of law. However, unlike him, they have absolutely nothing to lose.
It really is time Republicans in Washington woke up to the reality of the security threat that Trump represents as a result of this dangerous foreign policy adventure. It will leave the US with no friends but many enemies. The real tragedy is that Marco Rubio has enough foreign policy experience to know that this is beyond reckless and will likely endanger the lives of Americans across the nation, if not the world. Yet, he continues to allow this to happen. I hope he, along with other cabinet members, have got their exit strategies planned, because they are all going to need to flee the country at the end of this or face life in prison.
Before I conclude, I want to briefly touch on threats against Greenland, which some may find fanciful, but I take very seriously. Indeed, if I were Denmark, I would be asking the US to remove its presence from Greenland, because I’m pretty sure that Trump believes international laws don’t apply to him. I also think every European and neighbouring country should form a coalition task force to defend Greenland from the very real threat posed by its so-called primary ally. Trump clearly intends to leave NATO, so it’s time to either put up or shut up as far as NATO allies are concerned, because this threat is VERY real.
The level of geopolitical arrogance on display is breathtaking. If America wants to own these countries, then have the balls to occupy them and back yourself against their populations. I can absolutely assure you that no military on earth can beat the insurgent army of a population fighting for the preservation of their homeland. The Viet Cong proved that beyond doubt for two decades up to 1973, as has the Ukrainian military against Russia, and that’s before we talk about Iraq. Let’s face it, the US has never won a war on its own EVER, not even the War of Independence, when without their first ally, France, King Charles would now be in charge.
The US has now made so many enemies around the world that aside from dictators, global nations would not pee on Trump if he were on fire, so deep is the level of anger that now exists towards him.
Does he think Venezuela is just a big oil field and drilling rigs? There are 28 million Venezuelans, they aren’t going to capitulate to whatever puppet government Trump imagines he can set up just because Marco Rubio says they are liberators, not invaders. How did it get to the point that no one in the Administration could foresee the consequences and/or blunt Trumps worst impulses?
Thanks for sharing your wisdom and perspective. This is catastrophic.