Friends,
Trump’s brutal gunboat regime change kidnapping and attack in Venezuela will have uncertain impacts in Venezuela and across Latin America. We need to understand it as a military attack designed to terrorize governments across Latin America, and possibly as distant as Iran, to ensure that they click their heels and obey Trump/MAGA commands.
We also need to understand that this war for Venezuelan oil – the world’s largest known reserves – is not only about profits for Trump and his fossil fuel cronies, but it is a critical factor in the drive for regime change in Cuba. Venezuelan oil has been a critical lifeline for long embargoed Havana.
We need to understand that last night’s attack further rends the fabric of international lawmaking people and nations across the world more vulnerable to military attacks and gross violations of human rights by the United States and other powers who conclude that might is right. As Michael Cohen says in his posting today, “The Precedent Trump Just Set” – Michael Cohen, it serves as reinforcement for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and it will provide precedent should Beijing opt to reunify Taiwan by force. We can ask in what ways it differs from Hitler’s 1938 seizure of Czechoslovakia or Mussolini’s 1936 invasion of Ethiopia, both of which opened the ways for the worst horrors of the 20th century or Teddy Roosevelt’s seizure of Panama.
To oppose Trump’s brutal gunboat regime change is not to support Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator. Even as we see Trump as a fount of evil, corruption, and torment, few of us would support his kidnapping and the bombing of Washington, D.C. by a foreign power, or for that matter U.S. borne resistance.
For CPDCS
Joseph Gerson