FM: John Whitbeck
While Donald Trump's hostility toward Venezuela and his
incentive to kidnap President Maduro and his wife appear to
have been primarily motivated by oil and, as always for
Trump, money, it should be clear that the 25-year-long
American effort to regime-change Venezuela was originally
motivated by the same hostility that continues to motivate
the 65-year-long effort to regime-change Cuba and that
motivated the relatively brief and "successful" American
efforts to overthrow the democratically elected governments
of Guatemala and Chile in 1954 and 1973 and replace them
with military dictatorships.
The common motivation of these efforts in the minds of
American élites has been the conviction that any government
in the Western hemisphere that even claims to
prioritize the interests of its own country's poor over the
interests of its own country's rich and the interests of
American companies cannot be permitted to succeed, since its
success would constitute an impermissibly dangerous
precedent which other governments might be tempted to
emulate.
Accordingly, the people of any such country must be
immiserated by crippling sanctions and other means so as,
ideally, to incentivize them to seek to ease their pain by
overthrowing their government and, in any event, so as to
discourage the people of any other country in the Western
hemisphere from seeking to pursue and develop a more just
society along similar lines.