The flimsy moral pretext today is the fight against narcotics, yet the real objective is to overthrow a sovereign government and the collateral damage is the suffering of the Venezuelan people. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is.

The  United States is dusting off its old regime-change playbook in  Venezuela. Although the slogan has shifted from “restoring democracy” to “fighting narco-terrorists”, the objective remains the same, which is control of Venezuela’s oil. The methods followed by the US are familiar:  sanctions that strangle the economy, threats of force and a US$50 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as if this were the Wild West.

The US is addicted to war. With the renaming of the Department of War, a proposed  Pentagon  budget of US $1.01 trillion, and more than 750 military bases across some 80 countries, this is not a nation pursuing peace. For the past two decades, Venezuela has been a persistent target of US regime change. The motive, which is clearly laid out by President  Donald Trump, is the roughly 300 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath the Orinoco belt, the largest petroleum reserves on the planet.

In 2023, Trump  openly stated: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil… but now we’re buying oil from Venezuela, so we’re making a dictator very rich.” His words reveal the underlying logic of US foreign policy that has an utter disregard for sovereignty and instead favours the grabbing of other country’s resources.

What’s underway today is a typical US-led regime-change operation dressed up in the language of anti-drug interdiction. The US has amassed 

© Pearls and Irritations