Venezuela killed the U.S.
In the history of the US’s relation with Latin America, what just happened in Venezuela is hardly unique: in the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. government has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times, with direct intervention occurring in 17 of the 41 cases.
What is unprecedented however is the brazenness, the unabashedly predatory nature of the intervention.
Trump is not pretending this is about anything else than resource extraction. He explicitly stated "we're going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground" and that this wealth would “go to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country."
Stunningly, the US isn’t even insisting on regime change. They’re quite happy for the Chavista government to stay in place under acting president Delcy Rodríguez as long as she “does what we want,” said Trump, vowing to bomb the country again if she didn’t.
In other words, there is absolutely zero pretense there: submission to the U.S.’s will is the only variable that matters. This is about regime capture, not regime change, for no grander purpose than “doing what the United States wants”. It’s imperial extraction in its purest form. No pretense of bringing anything to the subject country. Simply: comply or be destroyed, and give us your wealth.
Never before in its entire history has the U.S. been so nakedly… bad.
This might sound almost trivial. “So what if they admit they’re bad, at least they’re not hypocritical about it anymore,” you might tell yourself. Some might even find that refreshing in its honesty.
Quite the contrary. The story a nation tells itself is not trivial - it is everything.