Why is Trump, who has said a zillion times that the war between Ukraine and Russia would never have started if he were the President, training his guns on Maduro? That’s the question that is agitating many a mind around the world, including Venezuela.
There’s no doubt that the South American country is in Trump’s cross-hairs. He’s made it clear that he wants Maduro out.
Trump has sent an armada to Venezuela’s shores. There are 10,000 U.S. troops in position, most of them at bases in Puerto Rico, in addition to a contingent of Marines on amphibious assault ships. In all, the U.S. Navy has eight surface warships and a submarine in the Caribbean.
And what’s more, the U.S. just carried out a fifth missile-strike on a suspected boat, killing 6 more people off the coast of Venezuela. A 30-second video, which Trump posted on Truth Social, appeared to show a stationary vessel in a body of water being hit with a projectile before exploding. He said that the 14th October strike had been carried out against a designated terrorist organisation. He did not share details of the strike. It was the latest such operation in recent weeks as the U.S. builds up military forces in the region. The U.S. military has blown up five such boats so far, killing 27 people in all.
A day later, on 15th October, three B-52 bombers of the U.S. Air Force were spotted near Venezuela. They flew through the Gulf of Mexico, passing between Mexico and Cuba, before approaching Venezuela and circling over the Caribbean Sea.
Trump further heightened fears that the U.S. might be preparing for a full-scale invasion of Venezuela by saying that he is considering strikes targeting Venezuelan drug cartels on land.
“We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” Trump told journalists at the White House.
Trump also confirmed that he authorised the Central Intelligence Agency — the U.S. foreign intelligence agency — to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, marking a sharp escalation in U.S. efforts to put pressure on Maduro.
“I authorised for two reasons, really. Number 1, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. And the other thing [is] drugs. We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela”.
“I think Venezuela is feeling [the] heat. But I think a lot of other countries are feeling [the]heat, too.”
It is The New York Times that first reported the classified directive. It said that American officials have been clear, privately, that the end goal is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.
Just so you know, the U.S. has a long history of covert action in Latin America and the Caribbean:
— In 1954, the agency orchestrated a coup that overthrew President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala, ushering in decades of instability;
— the C.I.A.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 ended in disaster, and the agency repeatedly tried to assassinate Fidel Castro;
— that same year, the C.I.A. supplied weapons to dissidents who assassinated Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, the leader of the Dominican Republic;
— the agency also had its hands in a 1964 coup in Brazil;
— the death of Che Guevara and other machinations in Bolivia;
— a 1973 coup in Chile;
— and the Contra fight against the leftist Sandinista Government of Nicaragua in the 1980s;
That’s not all. In 2010, the then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued an official apology for a U.S.-funded syphilis experiment that took place in Guatemala during the 1940s. In the experiment, U.S. doctors deliberately infected hundreds of vulnerable Guatemalan people with sexually transmitted diseases without their consent.
Venezuela rejected Trump’s bellicose language. In a televised meeting with his military brass and supporters, Maduro blasted the U.S. for its failed forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
“No to regime change, which reminds us so much of the endless, failed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so on. No to C.I.A.‑orchestrated coups d’etat, which recall the 30,000 disappeared in the C.I.A.‑backed coups against Argentina. Pinochet’s coup, and the 5,000 young people who were killed or disappeared.”
“Listen to me, not war, yes peace, the people [of] United States, from the people [of] Bolivarian Republic,” he added for good measure, speaking this time in English.
Maduro has repeatedly alleged that the U.S. is hoping to remove him from power. In fact, the U.S. has put a bounty of 50 million dollars on Maduro — double the bounty on Osama bin Laden.
Maduro has since ordered more military exercises. State T.V. showed images of armoured vehicles deploying in a Caracas suburb.
The strikes indicate Trump’s efforts to use U.S. military power in new ways, from deploying active-duty U.S. troops in Los Angeles to carrying out counter-terrorism strikes against drug-trafficking suspects. But are U.S. actions legal, is the question? Some U.S. officials say that the legal explanations given by the Trump Government for killing suspected drug traffickers at sea instead of apprehending them, fail to satisfy requirements under the law of war. But Trump defends his actions by saying that taking “politically correct” actions has not helped in the past! He’s even joked about how the strikes are having the desired impact on the ground; how it’s making people nervous about venturing out to sea. “In fact nobody wants to go fishing anymore, nobody wants to go anywhere near the water,” he said in jest.
But, jokes aside, why is someone who calls himself The Peace President and Peacemaker-in-Chief spoiling for a fight with Maduro? It has to do with geopolitics — code for China. Venezuela sees China as a geopolitical ally. China imports large quantities of oil from Venezuela. A Chinese military blogger on the video platform Bilibili has analysed Venezuela’s importance to China in both strategic and practical terms. He says that the decisive factor is geography. Venezuela sits close to the Panama Canal, one of the world’s most vital shipping arteries, and only about 1,700 kilometres from the U.S. mainland, well within range of medium-range missiles. For Beijing, he argues, location is the real reason why Venezuela has become one of China’s closest partners. The blogger suggests that the U.S. sees Latin America as its backyard and cannot tolerate a defiant Venezuela trading oil outside the U.S. dollar system, which recalls the fate of Iraq’s former leader Saddam Hussein. Therefore, from Beijing’s perspective, Venezuela is a frontline partner for China in balancing U.S. influence.
That’s not all. Venezuela has the world’s largest, proven oil reserves. Enough to rival Saudi Arabia. As well as massive deposits of natural gas, bauxite and iron-ore. Also, coltan. Electronic devices rely on components containing elements that are extracted from coltan. From smartphones to laptops, a range of electronic devices have coltan as a fundamental building block. Add gold, lithium and uranium to the mix and what you have is a mineral jackpot!
Evan Ellis, a Latin America researcher at the U.S. War College, said that the fact that the U.S. ships sailing off the coast of Venezuela have soldiers on board, suggest that the U.S. might be planning some kind of escalation. Ellis would know, for he served under Trump during his first term.
So, is an all-out war imminent? Polymarket says that as of noon Saturday (0630 G.M.T.), there’s a 50 per cent chance that a direct U.S. — Venezuela military clash will erupt by 31st December. (Polymarket is a U.S.-based cryptocurrency-based prediction market.) It is in the news for correctly predicting that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize will go to Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado. Just putting it out there.