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Opinion
The Case Against American Intervention in Venezuela
There is no strategic, legal, or moral justification for surrounding Venezuela with the most lethal naval assets on Earth.
Dec 13, 2025
As the USS Gerald R. Ford—the largest aircraft carrier afloat—casts its shadow along the Venezuelan coast, the United States must confront an uncomfortable question: What national interest is being protected by threatening a country that poses no military, territorial, or existential danger to the American republic?
The answer, made clear by an array of respected American scholars, former officials, and ex-military insiders, has nothing to do with security. Instead, it arises from a familiar mixture of ideology, geopolitical control, and the old reflex of imperial overreach. This is not defense. This is theater—one part provocation, one part political opportunism, and no part necessity.
Among the clearest voices cutting through the rhetoric is professor John Mearsheimer, perhaps the most prominent American realist in international relations. He does not mince words: Venezuela is not a threat to the United States. Its military lacks both the capacity and the intention to project power beyond its borders. Suggesting otherwise is “laughable,” he notes, because the true irritant is ideological. Venezuela’s Bolivarian model—imperfect and embattled as it is—represents a deviation from Washington’s preferred political order, a deviation the US has repeatedly sought to crush in Latin America for decades. For Mearsheimer, even if one entertained the fantasy of using force to change the regime, the idea collapses immediately under logistical absurdity and moral bankruptcy. Invading a nation of 28 million people, and then attempting to occupy and “stabilize” it, would be catastrophic in cost, chaotic in outcome, and impossible to justify.
The national security pretext collapses further under the testimony of Sheriff David Hathaway, a former Drug Enforcement Administration supervisory agent with firsthand experience in Latin America. He dismisses the drug-trafficking narrative not just as false, but as deliberately false. Cocaine originates in Colombia and Peru, not Venezuela, and the US fentanyl crisis has nothing to do with Caracas. There is no vast Maduro-led drug conspiracy, Hathaway explains, only a political fiction designed to mimic past excuses for intervention. He is blunt in stating that Washington has repeatedly used narcotics accusations as camouflage for intrusion, sabotage, and coercion. This is not about drugs. It is about dominance.
To continue down the present path is to invite disaster: another needless conflict, another wave of human suffering, another blot on American history.
Even those once inside the system acknowledge this. Jordan Goodro, a former Green Beret involved in the ill-fated 2019 coup attempt against President Nicolas Maduro, offers a rare insider glimpse into the dysfunction and deception behind such operations. The effort to remove Venezuela’s government was pushed aggressively by the Trump administration and then sabotaged internally by divisions within the American intelligence establishment. Yet despite that spectacular failure, the narrative is being recycled again—complete with the same exaggerations and the same hollow slogans about protecting freedom. Goodro’s own admission is unambiguous: Venezuela poses no military threat to the United States. Repeating failed strategies does not make them more credible; it merely exposes the compulsions driving them.
If the military and narcotics arguments fail, the economic one becomes impossible to ignore. Professor Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s most respected economists, calls out the interventionist posture for what it is: a resource-driven gambit. The aim is not humanitarian aid, nor national security, nor democracy—it is control over one of the world’s largest oil reserves. Sachs warns that the moral veneer placed over this pursuit is dangerously thin. To blockade, bomb, or invade a sovereign country under such distortions is not simply misguided; it is, in his words, “the epitome of gangsterism.” The cost would be human suffering on a mass scale—suffering already amplified by years of sanctions—and the benefits would accrue not to the Venezuelan people, but to those seeking to reshape the hemisphere for profit.
While these foreign provocations unfold, an equally disturbing drama plays out at home. A number of Democratic lawmakers—many with backgrounds in the military or intelligence services—issued a sober warning to US service members: Illegal orders must not be obeyed. They reminded the armed forces that loyalty lies first with the Constitution. Instead of engaging that foundational principle, President Donald Trump responded by accusing them of sedition and musing that such dissent might warrant the death penalty. No president who respects the rule of law speaks this way. Such rhetoric is not an expression of strength; it is a hint of despotism.
The irony is that the Americans telling the truth about Venezuela are not radicals or fringe theorists. They are sober-minded public servants and scholars—people like Sachs, Mearsheimer, Hathaway, and Goodro—whose assessments reflect America at its best: skeptical of power, loyal to constitutional principles, and unwilling to manufacture enemies where none exist. Their voices stand in stark contrast to those who believe that power confers moral exemption. Trump’s saber-rattling does not embody American values—it betrays them.
There is no strategic, legal, or moral justification for surrounding Venezuela with the most lethal naval assets on Earth. The Gerald R. Ford is not defending American shores; it is intimidating a smaller nation whose only “crime” is political independence. The United States must withdraw its fleet. It must halt its reckless rhetoric. And President Trump—whether sitting in the Oval Office or aspiring to return to it—must apologize to the lawmakers defending constitutional duty and make unambiguously clear that illegal orders will not be tolerated.
To continue down the present path is to invite disaster: another needless conflict, another wave of human suffering, another blot on American history. The case against intervention is not complicated. It is not partisan. It is not abstract. It is moral—and it is overwhelming.
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Trump: American Nero
Sex and sexuality are important ways to understand both Nero’s and Trump’s uses and abuses of power, but the parallels (and the abuses) don’t stop there.
Dec 13, 2025
As more of the Epstein files are released, reminding us of President Donald Trump’s close association with Jeffrey Epstein and the young people he abused and trafficked, as well as the president’s ongoing array of misogynist insults and actions (like calling journalist Catherine Lucey “piggy” and name-calling Marjorie Taylor Greene to the point where she jumped ship), what keeps coming to my mind are the sexual exploits of authoritarians throughout history. As a scholar of the New Testament and the origins of Christianity, I have a special interest in the lives of the Roman emperors—in particular, the notorious Emperor Nero.
According to historians of antiquity (trigger warning here!), Emperor Nero was known to use and abuse many people, especially women, allegedly murdering two of his wives and his aunt while sleeping with a Vestal Virgin and—yes!—his mother before he killed her. Roman politicians and historians held back remarkably little when considering Nero’s excesses. Perhaps the most famous of those writers, Tacitus, shared how Nero “polluted himself by every lawful or lawless indulgence.” Cassius Dio, author of 80 volumes of Roman history, describes Nero skulking around Rome at night “insulting women,” “practicing lewdness on boys,” and “beating, wounding, and murdering” others. And Suetonius, the most famous biographer of the Caesars, claimed that Nero had invented a perversion all his own. At public games he was hosting, he would put on an animal skin and “assail with violence the private parts both of men and women, while they were bound to stakes.”
While such vivid horrors may be particular to Nero (and his own sense of depravity), Donald Trump’s posture on gender and sexuality does all too grimly echo that of many powerful men throughout history, including those Roman emperors. His sense of comfort in objectifying and demeaning women, whether through his “pussy” dig from the 2016 election or his comments about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” is definitely well-documented.
As Soraya Chemaly, feminist writer and author of All We Want Is Everything: How We Dismantle Male Supremacy, pointed out at Salon: “Right after the grab ’em by the pussy tape, we should have [had accountability]… and that’s not what happened. And then after the more than two dozen women came forward with detailed stories that were similar, we should have seen it grind to a halt. But the fact is we don’t care about that kind of predation… we just don’t care. And that’s a function of sexualized violence as a tool of male supremacist oppression in the home, in the street, in politics.”
Sex and Authoritarianism
The behavior of Emperor Nero and President Trump may be reminiscent of each other (and, for that matter, of so many other kings and tyrants throughout history) because using and abusing sex by those in power has been a pillar of past authoritarian systems. Full stop.
Bring up the way sexual predators tend to act with impunity, and you don’t have to go far to find examples. In recent years in the US, there was the genesis of the #MeToo movement—the sexual harassment perpetrated by those in the entertainment industry, higher education, Supreme Court justices, and politicians. And such leaders have learned from the best of them. Scratch under the surface of any authoritarian ruler, in fact, and you’re likely to find cases of harassment and abuse.
Rather than condoning the actions of any tyrants, including the man who today is eager to be one in Washington, DC, the Bible talks about pulling them down from their thrones and lifting up the lowly.
For Rome, those in power dominated the people and nations they subjugated not just economically, militarily, and politically, but sexually, too. Rape and prostitution were central aspects of what it meant to be conquered by Rome. And just as that empire used sexuality (depicting in public art and monuments distinctly gendered conquered nations) to expand its control and territory, the Caesars themselves regulated the sexual behavior of those they had already conquered as a way to further consolidate power. They passed or upheld marriage laws, naming and regulating who could (and could not) marry whom in an effort to promote what they considered proper social order. Although Nero himself broke some of those laws (especially when he castrated someone enslaved to him and proceeded to marry that person, and when he dressed as a woman and married a freedman, violating laws against men marrying men and anyone marrying someone of lower status), it was clear that such laws were easily circumventable by those in power, even while still being fiercely enforced for Roman subjects. (Doesn’t such a double standard still hold true?)
Indeed, in the ways that an emphasis on morality and family values as an ideology helped establish and maintain the social climate and political and economic order of the Roman Empire (while those in power often acted so differently), there are uncanny parallels to the United States today.
Fiddling While America Burns
Sex and sexuality are important ways to understand both Nero’s and Trump’s uses and abuses of power, but the parallels (and the abuses) don’t stop there. Nero is infamous for burning Rome to make way for new building projects and blaming the fires on a marginalized population of his time (Christians) in what may be one of the earliest recorded forms of scapegoating. In Trump’s case, you hardly need look far to find poor and marginalized communities he’s scapegoating: immigrants, trans youth, the unhoused, and the list goes on (and on and on).
Back to Rome, though. Accounts tell us that, while the city burned, Nero sang. (From that, of course, came the phrase that classically describes people in power abdicating all responsibility for helping others in the midst of a crisis: “fiddling while Rome burns.”) While I haven’t heard of Donald Trump singing or playing an instrument recently, certainly destroying the East Wing of the White House to build a “presidential ballroom” while cutting tens of millions of people from food assistance could be considered a modern equivalent.
And a charge against that particularly corrupt emperor that has stood the test of time is that the reference to 666 (sometimes known as the devil or the anti-Christ) from the Book of Revelation is actually a code for Nero, indicating that in biblical lore he was a central adversary of the Jesus movement. Therefore, when President Trump or any of the Christian nationalists in power today try to liken themselves to the protagonists in biblical stories, we should stop in our tracks and remember that, if there are such parallels, it’s certainly between the Caesars and Trump, the emperors and tyrants of thousands of years ago and today’s all too rich and ever more authoritarian ruler.
After all, rather than condoning the actions of any tyrants, including the man who today is eager to be one in Washington, DC, the Bible talks about pulling them down from their thrones and lifting up the lowly. Have you seen the T-shirts at some of the Chicago immigrant-justice protests in recent weeks with quotes from Mary’s Magnificat, that hymn of praise from the gospel of Luke? They’re amazing! (And their quotes from sacred texts and traditions to call out the powerful and defend the immigrant, heal the sick, and feed the hungry are historically and contextually aligned with the arc of the Bible.)
What the Bible Says About Sexuality
Bishop William J. Barber II poses this powerful question about the use and abuse of religion in our day: “Why is it that some who call themselves Christians are so loud about things that the Bible says so little about and so quiet about the things the Bible says so much about like justice and kindness?” Indeed, Jesus and the Bible really had very little (in some cases nothing) to say about issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. It is a fact, however, that when there is a message in the Bible’s text about sex and sexuality or gender expression and moral values, that message is always about justice, inclusion, and love.
For instance, the Apostle Paul’s letters are often used these days to prop up homophobia and misogyny—messages like good Christians aren’t LGBTQIA or don’t enjoy sex or that people are all too often poor because they’ve had too many babies, or that they’re lazy or drug-addicted, and so are sinners. As it happens, though, what’s truly sinful, according to such Biblical passages, is not homosexuality, or being transgender, or having consensual sex, but greed and exploitation, the unholy alliance between the wealthy and those who make laws to deny people their rights. Yes, Paul’s letters are indeed among a few biblical texts often quoted to condemn abortion or deny the rights and bodily autonomy of people. So, consider it a distinct irony that, at the core of Paul’s writings aren’t the behaviors of the poor or women or LGBTQ people, but the vices of empire.
Indeed, if there is a biblical critique of sex and sexuality, it’s one to be levied against the wealthy and powerful, the Trumps and Epsteins of this world.
One Greek word the Apostle Paul is concerned with is sarkas, usually translated as “works of flesh.” Paul defines such fleshy “works,” however, as: sexual immorality, lewdness, idolatry, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, envy, gluttony, and the like. At first, it may indeed sound like a list of personal behaviors and characteristics. But notice that idolatry, hatred, discord, and gluttony are not just individual behaviors, especially not those of the poor and powerless. Instead, they are acts of an unequal and exploitative world that actually uses and abuses the poor and marginalized.
Indeed, if there is a biblical critique of sex and sexuality, it’s one to be levied against the wealthy and powerful, the Trumps and Epsteins of this world, not teenagers and their families seeking gender-affirming care, women seeking abortions, or transgender people seeking a place in sports or the military. And it’s surely not a polemic with same-gender loving couples or poor trans love.
Trump’s Distorted Morality
Since taking office (and as part of what catapulted him into the White House in the first place), President Trump has been continually raising alarms about the supposed moral crises besetting this country and the need for a strong man to resolve them. In this, he’s been following in the path laid out by the Nero-like authoritarians and tyrants of history. He’s been issuing regular executive orders aimed at doing everything from banning transgender women in sports and transgender troops in the military to punishing the unhoused and immigrants, while cutting families in need off from lifesaving food.
And his executive actions are only the tip of the spear of a significantly larger legislative attempt to target and scapegoat others (while distracting attention from the Epstein files and other controversies surrounding him). This year, 1,012 anti-trans bills have been introduced in American legislative bodies at both the state and federal levels. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” cut millions of dollars in food and healthcare, but included $45 billion to detain adult immigrants and their families, as well as an additional $32 billion for immigration agents to pursue enforcement and deportation policies.
Trump’s attacks on abortion, same-sex marriage, and trans youth in the name of family values and “morality,” his efforts to cut welfare, healthcare, wages, and other life-sustaining programs, and his emphasis on policing and militarizing communities (allowing guns to proliferate) while talking about peace and security, may be covered by Christian nationalism but they are not in any sense biblical.
After all, the Bible’s authors, living through the world of imperial Rome, agreed that there was a moral crisis occurring. People were losing their land, had turned away from the God of liberation and justice, and were generally complying with a system of subjugation and oppression. Meanwhile, the emperors were trampling on all too many of their hopes and values, including by sexually exploiting them. And none of that was to be tolerated.
There is a similar moral crisis occurring today, and Donald Trump is at its very heart. Jackson Katz, creator of the 2024 film The Man Card: 50 Years of Gender, Power, and the American Presidency, raises the ultimate “moral” question about Trump’s complicity in sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses and what will come of his own sexual predations, then and now. He writes, “It’s still far from clear whether Trump ultimately will be held accountable for his actions—or inactions—over the course of his long friendship with the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, our era’s most notorious and prolific sexual abuser of girls. Will this finally be the moment when Trump pays a real price for his misogyny?”
If we are to channel the Apostle Paul and the message of Jesus, time’s up. As the gospel tradition makes all too clear for Emperor Nero (aka the anti-Christ or Satan), President Trump, “Your kingdom must come down!”
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We Have to Create a New Form of Society
Our job is to recognize the problems are real and to put the finger on the real cause of the problem, which is the greed of the oligarchs in this country.
Dec 13, 2025
Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered these remarks at the How We Win conference over the weekend of December 5 in New Orleans. They were originally transcribed and published by Jacobin. The conference was organized by the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, Jacobin, the Nation, and others for democratic socialist elected officials and their staff.
Thank you for inviting me to say a few words. Let me begin by thanking all of you for having the guts to run for public office. It’s a lot harder to go out and knock on doors to represent constituents with the problems they face seven days a week, so I want to thank you very much for that. Despite the horror in the White House right now, they’re out there all across this country. We’re seeing strong progressive growth. It is not just Zohran Mamdani in New York or Katie Wilson in Seattle. From coast to coast, you are seeing progressive democratic socialists standing up, taking on the establishment, and winning elections.
And one of the great secrets of the corporate media is that right now in the House of Representatives, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has about 100 members, including dozens and dozens of very strong progressives. That is the result of the hard work all of us have done over the last number of years.
I’ve been asked to give you some advice. What I’m gonna tell you is probably what you already know. No. 1, here is a radical idea: Do your job that you were elected to do. Now, I’ll tell you a story. I was elected to be mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and won it by 10 votes way back in 1981. We had a strong foreign policy. We had exchange programs. We dealt with national issues. But I’ll never forget, there was an article in the local newspaper, and the report asked some guy, “But what does it mean? What do you think about having a socialist as your mayor?” And the guy said, “Well, I don’t know much about socialism, but I do know they’re getting the snow off of the streets a lot faster than they used to.”
The struggle is going to be between the Trumpists of the world—right-wing extremism—and a democratic socialist alternative, which recognizes the problems that we face and provides concrete and real and bold solutions for working families.
You gotta do your job. If you’re on the city council, the school board, the state legislature, you gotta do it. And if you do your job well, people will give you the latitude to talk about many, many other issues. But don’t lose focus regarding the job that you are elected to do.
Second of all, establishment Democrats have the brilliant idea that the only people they can talk to are establishment Democrats. They literally have lists of people: “Don’t knock on this door; don’t knock on that door. Only on these.” I strongly disagree with that suggestion. Knock on every door in your district. And what you’ll find when you do that is you’ll have the right-wing people slam the door in your face. You’ll have some unpleasantness. But by and large, what you’ll find is that there is a lot more commonality of interest than you might have appreciated. In my view, the reason Donald Trump is president of the United States today is not because people voted for a trillion dollars in tax breaks for the 1% or massive cuts in healthcare. He is the president of the United States because of Democratic establishment candidates’ failure to provide a real analysis and agenda that meets the crises that we face today.
Establishment Democrats believe that you can tinker around the edges, you can tell the world how terrible Donald Trump is, and that’s fine. But right now, what the American people understand is that übercapitalism—an oligarchic form of society, which is what we have today—is a disaster for the working class of this country. We don’t have to tinker around the edges. We have to create a very new form of society.
So for just your average person out there, you are in many cases going nowhere in a hurry. You understand that with real inflation accounted for, wages are basically the same as they were 50 years ago, despite a huge increase in worker productivity as a result of all of the expansion of technology. And almost all of the gains of that new technology have gone to the 1%. And ordinary workers know that there’s something wrong with 60% of our people living paycheck to paycheck while Elon Musk owns more wealth himself than about the bottom 52% of American society. They know that.
They know that there’s something wrong when we have a campaign finance system that is totally corrupt and allows billionaires in both political parties to buy elections. That’s a broken system. I say these things because you’re gonna have Republicans who understand this as well. They understand if you look at the basic necessities of life—just think for a moment: You’re living in the richest country in the history of the world, and it cannot even provide the basic necessities of life for working people.
Just take a look at the healthcare in your community. Talk about healthcare. Everybody will tell you that despite spending twice as much per capita on healthcare as any other nation, the healthcare system is totally broken. Everybody knows that. The educational system is largely broken, and the childcare system is a disaster. Kids can’t afford to go to college, or they’re leaving school deeply in debt. Public schools are under enormous pressure. Teachers are underpaid. They’re dealing with all kinds of disciplinary issues, kids who come from troubled families or are acting out in school. We are dealing with a situation where our food system, just nutrition... we are the most obese and unhealthy nation on Earth because you have a food industry that makes huge profit by selling our kids crap, and the price of groceries is soaring.
People understand that. I flew in from the National Airport in Washington; there was a four-hour delay because they couldn’t figure out how to deice the plane. All over the country, you are looking at basic problems people are struggling with. The system is failing. Our job is not to run away from that reality but to offer a real alternative. Because in my view, what the future is gonna be about isn’t establishment Democrats. All over Europe, for example, the establishment parties are fading away. The struggle is going to be between the Trumpists of the world—right-wing extremism—and a democratic socialist alternative, which recognizes the problems that we face and provides concrete and real and bold solutions for working families.
So what Donald Trump does is go, “Yeah, we got a lot of problems. And the problem is undocumented people, the problem is the trans community, the problem is that we have Somalians who are ‘garbage.’” That’s what demagogues do. They take the problems that we face—often that they cause—and then they blame a powerless minority. Our job is to recognize the problems are real and to put the finger on the real cause of the problem, which is the greed of the oligarchs in this country. So that’s where we’re at now. And it ain’t gonna be easy. Especially with Trump in the White House.
To summarize, the American people know the system is broken. They are hurting. They can’t afford groceries. They can’t afford health care. They can’t afford education. They can’t afford a lot of things. And at the same time, the billionaire class has never had it so good. The establishment Democrats cannot talk about these things because, very often, they’re getting funded by the billionaire class. So what we have gotta do right now is get out into the streets. We gotta talk to our people—all people, not just people within our zone of comfort. And we’re gonna be providing real solutions to the crises that we face. So once again, what you have done is extraordinary. I thank you so much and congratulate you for getting out on the streets, for winning elections, and for standing up for working people.
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Trump's Fascist National Security Strategy Is Full of Hemispheric Menace
The document promotes white supremacism, xenophobic nationalism, militant patriarchy, and takes a brazenly imperialist approach to Latin America.
Dec 13, 2025
On Thursday, December 4, the White House released a new National Security Strategy, a document that lays out the Trump regime’s “America First” designs on the world order.
The Trump regime’s new United States National Security Strategy (hereafter the “T47NSS”) is a significantly fascist as well as classically imperialist document.
Channeling far-right racist “Great Replacement Theory” and the notion of creeping “white genocide,” the T47NSS claims that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure” because of loose immigration policies. It commits the US to “promoting European greatness” by aligning with “patriotic European parties” that want to keep their nations majority white.
This is a call for US to promote racist and xenophobic nationalist, blood and soil, neofascist, white-nationalist parties like German’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), Vox (Spain), Austria’s Freedom Party, the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom, the Swedish Democrats, the Danish People’s Party, the Brothers of Italy (Lega), France’s National Rally, and the like.
It is... an appeal for the US to drop egalitarian and missionary pretense while unabashedly pursuing nothing but raw profitable advantage in dealing with other nations.
The T47NSS calls for the US to “deepen ties” with “the healthy nations of Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe,” by which the administration means nations where authoritarian, racist, nativist, and patriarchal parties hold power.
Not satisfied to promote just 2 of the 3 great pillars of neofascism—white supremacism and xenophobic nationalism—the document makes a full-throated cry to the third—militant patriarchy—by declaring that the Trump regime wants to create a new American “golden age” that “cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong traditional families.” That is not-so veiled code language for the rolling back of women’s, gay, and trans rights in the US—a curious thing to be advocating in a foreign policy document.
Along the way, the T47NSS channels the fascist cult of personality with laudatory references to President Donald Trump and his supposed superior vision, which is said to be bringing about a “course correction” steering the US away from what Trump calls (in a cover letter at the front of the document) “disasters and catastrophes” rooted in the “weakness” imposed by the “extremism” of “radical gender ideology” and “woke lunacy.”
Contrary to myth, fascism is imperialist, not “isolationist.” The T47NSS’ much ballyhooed call for a retreat from supposedly democratic US-America’s supposed democracy- and freedom-promotion in Russia, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America is not at all an argument for US global retreat. It is instead an appeal for the US to drop egalitarian and missionary pretense while unabashedly pursuing nothing but raw profitable advantage in dealing with other nations.
The T47NSS takes a brazenly imperialist approach to Latin America. It calls for the US to “enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere,” “protect… our access to key geographies throughout the region,” restrict Latin American immigration, prevent non-US companies from winning business contracts in Latin America, and “enlist” pro-US and pro-business governments across the region in support of US regional dominance.
That makes for some darkly interesting reading as the US commits cold-blooded extrajudicial executions of Venezuelan and Colombian people in the Caribbean and prepares for a possibly imminent regime change war on Venezuela. The T47NSS’ call for the US to shift its global military footprint more heavily onto the Western Hemisphere—away from more distant “theaters whose relative import to American national security has declined”—suggests that the Trump fascist regime’s ongoing war crimes and ominous military buildup in the Caribbean will continue and indeed intensify. The document is rightly seen as menacing by Latin Americans and most especially by the people of Venezuela and Colombia.
The T47NSS calls for the US to sustain America's “military overmatch” of China to deter its chief competitor state in the Western Pacific. That contradicts not just the notion of the Trump regime as isolationist but also the notion that the regime is content to grant China unchallenged dominance in its own regional sphere of influence.
Trump’s NSS cover letter is darkly amusing. It says that “America is strong and respected again and because of that we are making peace all over the world”—this as the Trump regime is shown to have criminally executed more than 80 mariners and boat passengers in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific over the last three months and as the Trump Pentagon assembles massive military assets for a likely criminal regime change war on Venezuela. So far the Trump regime’s aggression against Venezuela has graduated from the criminal serial killer boat strikes to declaring the air space over that country closed to flying fighter jets over the nation to seizing a Venezuelan oil tanker just off the nation’s coast, an act of brazen piracy capped by trump claiming the US will “keep the [interdicted ship’s] oil.”
Trump is also threatening to attack Colombia, saying this about that nation’s left president: “He’ll be next soon. I hope he’s listening, he’s going to be next.”
It is likely that the US is more disrespected around the world than it has ever been under Trump47.Keep ReadingShow Less
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