WAS VENEZUELA JUST THE BEGINNING?

He's on a roll.

Photo by Sebastian Barros

"O, it is excellent / To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant," wrote Shakespeare in Measure for Measure. What an appropriate commentary that is, regarding Donald Trump’s imperialistic aspirations. It looks like Venezuela was just the beginning.

Following last Friday night’s ouster of Nicolas Maduro, Secretary of State Rubio said on a Sunday news program, “We’re not going to tell anyone our plans but it's no secret we're no fan of the regime in Havana." Senator Lindsey Graham, traveling with the president on Air Force One, then echoed his sentiment saying, “You just wait for Cuba… Its days are numbered.” Trump then agreed with him, saying “Cuba is ready to fall.”

So are we going to invade Cuba now?

President Trump once again reminded reporters that "we do need Greenland." It doesn’t matter to him that the Danish Prime Minister protests, saying Greenland’s future is for Denmark and Greenland to decide.

So are we going to invade Greenland now?

Now Colombia is on the President’s hit list, as well. Trump told reporters on board Air Force One that Colombia’s President Petro is “a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.” He continued, “And let me tell you, he’s not going to be doing it very long.”

The President says a military operation in Colombia “sounds good” to him, prompting Colombia’s Foreign Ministry to state that Trump’s comment represents "an undue interference in the internal affairs of the country, against the norms of international law." Well, we know how much that matters to Donnie. President Petro told Trump he should stop slandering him, saying Latin American countries should not be treated by the United States as “servants or slaves.” Petro indicated that should the United States come after Colombia next, his country would be prepared to take up arms.

Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Spain all condemned the US action in Venezuela as a “dangerous precedent for peace and regional security,” but such statements make little difference to the Trump administration. President Trump says he’s been in touch with Venezuela’s new President, Maduro’s former Vice-President Delcy Rodriguez, and told her she’ll pay a big price if she doesn’t go along with what Washington wants.

The hot water continues to boil.

Continuing to act on what some now call the Donroe Doctrine, President Trump also warned Mexico “to get their act together.” He wants Mexico’s government to take more action against the drug cartels and keeps hinting that if they won’t do it, he will. Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum reminds him repeatedly that American gun manufacturers heavily arm the drug cartels, and if he really wanted to limit the power of the cartels he would limit the power of American companies to sell them guns. The violence this spawns has ben a large contributing factor to waves of migrations at our Southern border, by the way. But Trump is as loathe to take on the power of American gun manufacturers as Sheinbaum is afraid of taking on the drug cartels.

If this was ten years ago, all of the above would be part of a comedy sketch on Saturday Night Live. But at this point, none of this is funny. What should be evident to everyone by now, of course, is that Donald Trump isn’t kidding. He doesn’t just bluster. He makes very real threats and to the extent to which he’s capable, he makes good on them. He feels constrained by nothing (except possibly Melania). The latest, and most frightening thing of all, is how he says he isn’t afraid of putting boots on the ground… in Venezuela, or anywhere else.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer says his main concern is that Venezuela transition to democracy as soon as possible, which seems almost silly considering that neither Trump nor Rubio have mentioned the word “democracy” even once. The President said “You can’t have an election. We have to fix the country first.” In other words, you can either have American oil companies and their surrogates in DC running a country, or you can have democracy; you can’t have both. Trump seems as concerned about democracy in Venezuela as he is about democracy in America, and that isn’t much.

One of the worst parts of this imperialistic playbook - and it is a playbook, almost sickeningly repetitive - is how they never want you to think there will be meaningful opposition to what they’re doing. They mythologize the power of the U.S. military to create the impression that nothing could possibly match its might. Rather, we should all feel secure in the knowledge that the U.S. will get its way, easily, no problem. After all, we’re the most powerful military in the world!

I remember Dick Cheney saying we’d be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people, which in fact we were for a short while before everything fell apart. I also remember Candy Crowley, then chief political correspondent and anchor for CNN, saying that Special Forces could take care of things no problem, that regime change in Iraq would take six weeks at most. She said that while rolling her eyes at then Congressman Dennis Kucinich for saying that if we invaded Iraq, we’d see hand to hand combat on the streets of Baghdad. She turned out to be wrong, of course - the war lasted eight years and killed anywhere from several hundred thousand to a million people - and Dennis Kucinich was right. The simple truth is that hard power isn’t everything. The U.S. has been good at breaking things, but terrible at putting them back together. The war in Afghanistan lasted 20 years and ended up with the Taliban back in power. But America’s war machine views success and failure differently than you and I. What you and I would call things going wrong, in many ways for them are things going right. “Boots on the ground,” by the way - as horrifying as it might sound to us - is simply the sound of money to those who are behind all this. Where war is a humanitarian disaster for some, it is a profit center for others.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how our military-industrial-technology complex works. They’re everything they have always been, plus technology giants have now gotten in on the game. Do not expect any of this to turn out well.

Last year, the President ousted any military leaders who might question his agenda. In General Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and venture capitalist (you can’t make this stuff up) he has found a soul brother in going after his imperialistic agenda. He basically intends to turn Latin America into a U.S. corporate empire. It’s much like the covert CIA operations that messed with Latin American countries for decades during the last century, except that this time they don’t even pretend not to be doing it. Trump seems to have grown tired of pretending to be anything other than what and who he is. His administration’s response to any criticism now - from citizens, or even from Congress - is simply, “Get over it.”

America has not always been good - far from it - but at our best we’ve at least tried to be. It totally shifts everything that as long as this administration is in power, the United States is a rogue country with no allegiance to a rules-based world order. It’s hard to overestimate what this means not only for the United States, but potentially for the entire world. The U.S. Dept. of State posted a meme today with the words, “THIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE,” but there are millions of people in Latin America and Canada who would disagree. It is theirs as well. Latin America has roughly twice the population of the United States, by the way. We’re being led by fools who have no idea the razor blades they’re tossing around the room.

The rest of the world have taken notice of all this. Should the madness continue, we will not be given a pass.