CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Second Coming of Manifest Destiny

US ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson. Photo: State Department.

No one with the slightest respect for diplomacy would ever name Ronald Johnson ambassador to anyplace but Hell. Hiring him to be top diplomat is like hiring Jeffrey Epstein to be the recreation director at a girls high school. His appointment as ambassador to Mexico indicates a hard-line policy of force over diplomacy towards Claudia Sheinbaum and the Fourth Transformation.

Johnson is a retired Colonel, a “former” CIA agent, a super-hawk, an expert in undercover psychological operations and asymmetric irregular warfare, and a seasoned ex-Green Beret with extensive tours of duty in three imperial slaughterhouses – El Salvador, Afghanistan, and Iraq. His current role is to impose Trump’s national security agenda on Mexico, reducing it to a U.S. protectorate, which is what the U.S. means by “partnership.” He has vast experience in dissimulation and deception, espionage and counterespionage, otherwise known as systematic lying, as well as military intervention, which is the U.S. “solution” to drug-trafficking.

He graduated as a Green Beret with a master’s in strategic intelligence, and specializes in undercover operations and unconventional warfare. In the 1990s, he was dispatched to the Balkans as a senior military officer in charge of a team made up of personnel from the CIA, the NSA, and Special Missions Unit to arrest people accused of “war crimes,” which conveniently excluded U.S. and NATO officials committing large scale atrocities in the region at the time.

Johnson was appointed to get Mexico back in line with Washington’s to-hell-with-the-people agenda. Days after he arrived in the Mexican capital he was guest-of-honor at a far-right dinner hosted by Eduardo Verástegui, a wealthy far-right actor aligned with Bolsonaro, Milei, and Trump. He was also at another gala welcome with members of the American Society, an “independent” business group of which Johnson is the honorary leader, and which dedicates itself to blaming Mexico for drug-trafficking while ignoring massive U.S. involvement in the same trade, as though drug-kingpins weren’t well stocked with U.S. military grade weapons and nourished by its recreational drug culture, money laundering, distribution gangs, and CIA drug-running going back many decades.

Since his appointment, Johnson has been turning the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City into a C.I.A. operations center. Obviously uninterested in strengthening trade, investment for development, or even intelligence for legitimate security purposes, his priority is to prevent Mexico’s Morena party from remaining in power. For Donald Trump, allowing Washington’s “back yard” to be governed by a reformist government outside established imperial guidelines is an invitation to popular rebellion that must be crushed lest it ignite a regional conflagration. Morena’s slogan alone is deeply offensive: “for the good of all, poor people first,” which flies directly in the face of capitalist dogma putting rich investors first, last, and always, with trickle-down pieties for the poor and vanishing middle class.

Obviously, Johnson’s background and abilities go directly against the staples of diplomacy, which are courtesy, non-judgmental dialogue, and negotiation, all of them indispensable to sane international relations but useless for capitalist plundering. Thus,........

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