A very close friend of mine in southern California used to listen to Fox News pretty much non-stop. The Venezuelan Communists, according to Fox, were planning to invade the USA, he warned me. Hordes of savage Venezuelans were about to ravage the lovely coast of Southern California.
Was this before Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Taliban, and the wicked Iranians sacked California, I asked him? America’s enemies are everywhere, according to the alarmist far right. Today’s rightwing worrywarts are the children of the ‘reds under our beds’ crowd of the 1950’s.
But Venezuela? It’s a military pipsqueak and has barely enough money to feed itself. This nation is rich by nature but poor by government.
Venezuela does have one of the world’s largest reserves of heavy oil which needs specialized refineries to process. In happier days, Venezuela served as a basic oil supplier for US industry. But then the Venezuelans, led by their colorful Castro-inspired strongman, Hugo Chavez, came up with the heretical idea that the massive oil profits should be equally shared between Americans and Venezuelans.
Washington was outraged and damned Chavez a communist. Chavez loved being demonized by the Yankees and kept goading Washington rather like Libya’s bad boy, Muammar Khadaffi.
The Trump administration needed foreign enemies to excite its conservative base at home. There was not much the White House could do about inflation, so the war drums began beating over Venezuela. Cuba was too demolished to be seen as a threat so Venezuela, which few Republicans could find on a map, was picked as a new ‘Little Satan.’
So, a massive US armada was sent to cruise off Venezuela’s coast. Air strikes and land incursions are being threatened. Many Americans love to see countries of brown-skinned people beaten up by US military power. It’s a replay of the 19th Century’ s ‘gunboat diplomacy.’ America is very good at it.
The problem is that such bullying interventions sometimes turn messy. Yes, the US could vaporize Venezuela’s tiny navy and air force and demolish their bases, but the danger comes if US troops are forced to enter Venezuela and get involved in a ragged guerilla war. This is how ‘forever wars’ begin. The Trump regime is clearly hoping the Maduro government will be overthrown by a Washington-backed coup. What if it goes wrong? Or if Venezuelans really start to resist the invaders? This is what the national hero Simón Bolívar would have urged. There is a large statue of ‘the Liberator’ at 59th and Central Park South in my native New York.
It's curious to watch Trump jet around and try to collect support for his much-desired peacemaker award while trying to provoke war with a Latin American nation. Will Cuba be his next target?
Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2025