Gunboat diplomacy
The US has a long and sordid history of military extortion. The latest example is Trump’s saber-rattling movement of Navy battle groups off the coast of Venezuela and the extrajudicial assassinations the administration has been conducting off the Venezuelan coast in the name of drug interdiction.*
Writing for the Boston Globe, Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University offers a cogent analysis of what’s really going on here.
Part of it is the classic right-wing pathology: Venezuela has huge oil reserves and a government unfriendly to the US. If Trump can depose Venezuela’s president and install a US puppet regime, it will flood the world market with cheap oil, lowering gas prices in the US.
The other part, Kinzer asserts, is that Venezuela is the only remaining benefactor of Cuba. Cut off that lifeline and Cuba folds, realizing the life-long dream of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Casual inspection of the history of US gunboat diplomacy doesn’t inspire confidence, but since when have history, facts and evidence deterred the right-wing fever dream?
*imagine if the cost of this were instead allocated to support healthcare for veterans.
What’s the real story with Venezuela?
Writing for the Boston Globe, Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University offers a cogent analysis of what’s really going on here.
Part of it is the classic right-wing pathology: Venezuela has huge oil reserves and a government unfriendly to the US. If Trump can depose Venezuela’s president and install a US puppet regime, it will flood the world market with cheap oil, lowering gas prices in the US.
The other part, Kinzer asserts, is that Venezuela is the only remaining benefactor of Cuba. Cut off that lifeline and Cuba folds, realizing the life-long dream of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Casual inspection of the history of US gunboat diplomacy doesn’t inspire confidence, but since when have history, facts and evidence deterred the right-wing fever dream?
*imagine if the cost of this were instead allocated to support healthcare for veterans.
What’s the real story with Venezuela?
Venezuela may have huge oil reserves on paper, but that’s only part of the story.
Venezuela has the world’s most oil: Why doesn’t it earn more from exports? | Energy News | Al Jazeera “the Orinoco Belt holds extra-heavy crude oil, which is highly viscous and dense, making it much harder and more expensive to extract than conventional crude. Producing oil from this region requires advanced techniques, such as steam injection and blending with lighter crudes to make it marketable.”
Like Ukraine, which has vast mineral resources, extraction may be infeasible for the foreseeable future.
So what’s Trump’s game here? Is he entranced by the false allure of El Dorado? Or has he decided to take out his need to bully by targeting Venezuela and Nigeria because Russia, China, and Iran are proving themselves intractable? TACO?