Selwyn and I are back the podcast. we hoping to go to a subscription model soon, running one show a month. We hope our listeners will see value in subscribing.
The podcast is here: A View from Afar: Define A Way Forward When the World is in Chaos. It discuss the death knell of liberal internationalism and a whole lot more. Please tune in.
As I think about how to frame the opening episode of the relaunched “A View from Afar” podcast next week, I find myself wondering about silver linings. The current international moment is very dark and the end of the liberal order is nearing, but surely there must be some good shining amid the gloom. I think I have found one such glimmer, perhaps not of hope but of honesty in how one country represents itself before the world–and perhaps by extension, how the West sees or should see itself.
Readers may remember that last year I wrote about Trump believing himself to be the “Great Disruptor” and agent of change in the world. His advisors and acolytes seized on this self-perception to whisper chaos theory-based sweet nothings into his ears about carving out spheres of influence (for the US, in a Western Hemisphere that extends to Greenland) that he is willing to divide up with Russia and the PRC. He believes in annexing the sovereign territory of other states (including Canada), renaming international geographic landmarks (like the Gulf of Mexico), authorising the murder of civilians on the high seas and kidnapping of the authoritarian president of a foreign state on trumped up drug charges while leaving even worse dictators unscathed because they are “friendly,” blockading an island State out of ideological spite, and interfering in the elections of foreign countries by using direct foreign aid as a weapon of reward or retaliation. It does not matter if the view is simplistic, wrong in its theoretical grounding and practical application, and ultimately more of a fever dream than a practicable reality when extended over time, but however deluded it is his belief system and he acts upon it with the complicity of the MAGA/GOP establishment currently in control of the US government. And because the US government wields extraordinary coercive powers, both economic and military, it is dangerous.
It is apparent that Trump’s mental abilities have diminished considerably in recent times, but his advisors continue to blow sunshine up his skirt and oil him with grandiose ideas that are designed to stroke his ego, promote his brand and enlarge his bank accounts while serving their overlapped agendas (Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Peter Navarro are notable in this regard). From what I can discern, they encourage him to free range when it comes to speaking at domestic political rallies and campaign events, but then urge his caregivers to lace him up with the mother of all pharmaceutical cocktails when he has to give speeches to serious audiences such as foreign diplomats, business magnates and international statesmen in global fora. When compared with the stream of consciousness rants that he uses on domestic partisan audiences, with some exceptions his tone at these international meetings becomes more subdued, he speaks in a monotone, behaves semi-civilly and generally gives the appearance of situational detachment from the realities of the moment and consequences of what he is saying. If only we were to have access to his medication list and schedule!
Returning to the glimmer of light, it begins in darkness. It turns out that the US is indeed the core of the international system and Trump is the vortex that is drawing the old order into the black hole of systemic dissolution. One only needs to see the Trump ripple effects–he is the rock thrown into the centre of the global pond–to acknowledge his impact on domestic politics and international relations across the world. He is a malignant, evil force but he is also an irresistible object, a rip tide of ignorance, banality, self-interested corruption and narcissism using US power as the current against which all other global actors must now sink or swim. Fortunately, although undeniably strong, his hubristic ignorance weakens the US gravitational pull on the world scene.
There is good in this. For nearly a century the US has claimed to be the leader of the “free” world, the champion of democracy, upholder of human rights and defender of the innocent, weak and powerless. The reality is that it is a nation-state founded on racist beliefs standing on stolen lands by white property (and slave) owning men, using laws and institutions that promoted patriarchical heterosexist privilege over everything else. It took a civil war to abolish slavery and then another century to enact the Civil Rights Act that granted “equal” status to African Americans. It took over fifty years before females of age earned the right to vote, and long after that restrictions on the franchise remained in place (like poll taxes, residency and language requirements, forfeiture of voting rights due to criminal convictions even if for minor offences, etc. ). It systematically discriminated against waves of immigrants, be the Italian, Irish, Asian, Mexican and now those coming from the African and Latin American diaspora. It pushed indigenous tribes off their lands and onto reservations. Forced segregation was replaced by self-segregation, which is still a thing in many places. So is socioeconomic class stratification, gerrymandering, voter suppression (much more than fraud) and deliberate dumbing down of and distraction from obvious social contradictions on the part of the public majority. One percent of the population control eighty percent of the wealth. Christian nationalist-fascism, long thought to be on the wane, has a stranglehold on one side of the US ideological divide and skews public debates about cultural mores and social ethics. And yet the US public still believes, or at least until Trump entered office, to be living in the land of the free and home of the brave.
What is good is that Trump has ripped the veil off of that foundational myth. He has revealed the US for what it is even if he and others do not want to admit it: a venal, bloated, self-absorbed authoritarian husk of a democratic Great Power. It never was any of things that it claimed to be but for a while it at least tried to improve or pretended to be better than it was, harking to the idealism of some of its founders who held a belief in the perfectibility of humankind. It took time and struggle, but the myth tells us that the US was getting better as a society and as a political construct. But it never was and now certainly is not a truly liberal democracy. Yet it took Trump to debunk the myth.
The myth was, if not a lie, more of a pipe dream than an achievable reality. So it is good that Trump has exposed the true nature of US society and better yet, rendered transparent the contradictions and fractures that undermine its increasingly brittle institutional edifice. Or to paraphrase my father, “when the wanna-be dictator starts naming everything after himself and painting everything in gold leaf, he reveals his true intent.”
The same applies to US foreign relations. It is the core of the international system, but that was the OLD liberal internationalist order that is currently being destroyed by the gravitational pull of the Trump dark hole. Again, the US used to claim that it was the “leader of the free world” etc., but today it is anything but. It is a neo-imperialist declining Great Power, once hegemonic after the Cold War but now more like an old athlete shouting “I used to be somebody” into the winds of time. The US has broken the global order but it is incapable of dominating what comes next. It is more akin to the death grasp of a drowning man, locked into a hopeless situation beyond its control and overcome by circumstance of its own and other’s making. So it thrashes about as it slips under, pulling anything it can get a hold of down with it. It now has the liberal internationalist order in its grasp.
Over the short term, as I have written at some length before, a declining Great Power is dangerous. It is more likely to start wars in order to preserve its position in the global status quo. But declining powers may be able to start wars but then are unable to finish them on their preferred terms. Instead, they are defeated by rising powers or, in what appears to be crystallising at the moment in response to Trump’s foreign policy adventurism, a polycentric constellation of established and emerging technopoles rooted in the Global South that use soft power as a counter-weight to US bullying. This is more than the BRICS and although critical minerals are the new gold of world technological economies, it is knowledge economies, knowledge production and commodified knowledge accumulation that will fuel the growth of the Global South and the ascendent Great Powers coming from within it.
The US is too socially divided, too inward-looking, too partisanly governed, too corrupt and too incompetent as political managers to meet the challenges of the emerging polycentric technopolar world. It lives on grievance, internal culture wars, fabricated problems, selectively applied situational ethics, denial of responsibility, contrived outrage and clickbait self-absorption in a culture where “influencers” are given more respect than neuroscientists and astrophysicists, and where modern bread and circus acts have replaced the fine arts as the currency of popular culture. All of this is epitomised by the MAGA regime.
Thanks to Trump, all of that is now made transparent. There is no pretence of “public interest” or “commonweal,” just naked self-interest, transactional bartering, bullying and opportunism posing as government for both domestic and foreign audiences. We finally see the US, or at least that part that is MAGA in orientation, for what it really is.
So it is that with Trump lifting the veil of hypocrisy from the self-proclaimed US position, we can now fully see that it is a two sided coin where the domestic side is marked by increased prejudice and avaricious authoritarianism and the foreign side is overtly neo- imperialist. There are certainly many decent people fighting against this in the US, but the dye has been cast and neither the US or the international system will be the same once Trump has left the scene. That should give the rest of the world pause to reflect on what might constitute a post-liberal world order and perhaps for some in the post-imperial West to draw parallels between themselves and the giant in its decline.
“A View from Afar” podcast relaunch: Monday February 23, 12PM noon NZ time/Sunday February 22, 6PM US East Coast time.
For those who may be interested, my buddy Selwyn Manning and I have decided to revive the “A View from Afar” podcast next week.
There is so much going on in the world the days, most of it bad sad to say, but our geopolitical angle perched down in the deep South Pacific may be different than some other perspectives for those who live in other parts of the world (and perhaps surprising to some who live in this neck of the woods)..
The show airs Monday February 23 at 12:00PM NZ time and Sunday February 22 6:00PM US East Coast time. It streams live on YouTube and various streaming platforms and then will be on demand. Just look for the title of the show wherever you listen/watch podcasts.
The first show highlights the death knell of the liberal international order and the US role in ringing that bell. Here is a summary tease of what is in store:
“The sad fact, though, is that the US is the center of our earthly geopolitical universe, serving as the first rock to drop in the global pond whose ripple effects are extensive, negative, and washing up in unexpected and unforeseen ways. That rock, in fact, is a black hole sucking the remnants of the rules-based order into oblivion, or if not oblivion, irrelevance in a new age of power politics (might makes right, etc.). It is a dark force from which things as they exist cannot return.”
See you then!
No, this is not what you think. It is not about morality or ethics, as in taking the “high road” or “low road” in partisan debates. I am more of a “politics is war by other means” type of person so my adherence to the Clausewitzian axiom reversed perspective pretty much dictates how I view the situational ethics involved when it comes to political cut and thrust. But that is a discussion for another day.
Instead, this is a tale of two stories. One immediate and material, the other a blast from the past by way of tactical advice.
More immediately, after years of living comfortably with older gadgets and machines, in recent years I have bought a modern car and a smart phone. I used to drive manual transmission vehicles that could accomodate my sporting gear (wagons and 4WDs, mostly). But I married a person who does not drive but wants to, so we traded in for an automatic transmission vehicle. I hated it but she felt that it would make her learning to drive easier. That proved somewhat true but I always felt a sense of loss of control because I could not downshift and clutch brake as I had done for many years. In any event, within the last year our family vehicle needs expanded what with the pre-adolescent in the house, so we bought a newer 4WD vehicle with all sorts of gadgets–rear cameras, proximity sensors, all sorts of screens, switches, dials and settings, self-adjusting mirrors and lights, multi-positional electronic seats, etc. It is all fine and dandy, but as I said to the automobile salesperson, I feel like I am in an airplane cockpit at times. In fact, I get distracted by instrumentation that did not exist 15 years ago. All to just get from point A to point B (my racing car enthusiast days ended many moons ago). In any event I am getting used to the amenities even if I still do miss the old pedal press-and-shift days.
Even more recently I was forced to buy a smart phone. My service provider, and in fact most all NZ service providers, are moving away from 3G networks and to 4-5G systems. My old 3G compatible circa-2000 phone, which was only good for text and calls and which did not even have an operating GPS, had to be replaced by the end of next month. Now I have a gadget that talks, changes colours, offers reminders and gives directions, takes videos, surfs the internet, offers me a zillion absolutely mindless “apps” as well as a few useful ones, and is, as I am sure you well know, a hand-held computer. If I could only get my pudgy fingers to accurately hit keyboard keys and links I might be able to actually use the darn thing for more than–you guess it–calls and texts. Because that is all that I needed.
The salesperson whom we dealt with to upgrade my phone said it was more a museum piece than a functional gadget in this day and age. That was exactly the point of having it. Let me explain.
At a time and a place long ago I held a position in a government security agency that had a keen interest in a hostile country (truth be told, the hostility was more ours than theirs). As part of the job , my duties included analysing intelligence streams about that country from assorted dedicated agencies, including what are known as “signals and technical” (sigint/techint) intelligence agencies. These agencies use various technologies to acquire information from designated targets, including infrared and thermal signatures, satellite imagery, acoustic eavesdropping, electronic tapping and hacking and a number of other non-human acquisition platforms (I was more connected to the human intelligence side of things due to my non-technical expertise but in that particular job was the consumer of signet/techint flows because it played a policy-making role).
Signals and technical intelligence collection happens from space to the seafloor. It is quite literally a full spectrum, multi-dimensional enterprise. It covers tapping/hacking into bulk data flows like those in undersea fiberoptic cables now being targeted in the Baltic Sea (such as via the PRISM program exposed by Edward Snowden) to individual cell phones and laptops possessed by targeted people and agencies (be they public, private, non-governmental, religious, etc.).
When I assumed that governmental role I was briefed on its intelligence capabilities in that country. What I found was interesting, to say the least. At that time, all of the human intelligence agents in the country had been revealed to be working as double agents for its government, so we were being fed bogus information while they received precise and detailed information about networks, sources and methods. That problem took years to rectify and led to some spectacular sequels years later.
With no reliable human intelligence (known as “nonofficial cover”) assets in the country, we were forced to rely exclusively on signet/techint capabilities, of which we had many of high degrees of sophistication, both near and far from targets. Among these were acoustic sensors and intercepts designed to pick up conversations by the senior leadership of the country. The leadership was a very small circle of confidants and insiders led by two people in particular, so we put a lot of effort into listening to them. We were pretty good at that, and I got to know waaaaay too much about the bathroom and bedroom habits of some of those targeted individuals.
However, we could never get a bead on the private conversations of the two main leaders even though we had their offices under acoustic and visual surveillance (the latter can be used for lip-reading purposes, among other things). That baffled us until we began to more closely study their daily routines and habits. Among them was a weekly, sometimes more than weekly, lunchtime walk by the two main principals to plazas within walking distance of the main government building where their offices were located. Once at these locations they would sit on park benches a few dozen meters across from each other while their security details discreetly cleared space around them. They cleared space not so much as a crowd control exercise because although my government saw these leaders as the enemy, their people did not (at least at that time). So it was not unusual for members of the public to walk up to the leaders and hug them, shake their hands and engage in conversation with them. The leaders usually left time for that, but at some point they needed quiet and space in order to have their own private conversations. It was a type of hiding in plain sight exercise.
Once the security guys moved people away from their respective park benches (and that was not hard to do since this walking routine was familiar to residents of the streets around the government offices and had become an accustomed sight), the leaders would take out cheap walkie-talkies sold as a children’s toy and speak to each other that way about highly sensitive matters. Since we had no lip reading assets in their vicinity (who would have been uncovered anyway), and out signing/techint means did not extend to or pick up the frequencies of the walkie-talkies in those locations, we remained deaf to their chats for years.
Which brings me to the moral of this story. When I asked the signet/techint agency specialists why this was an effective counter-intelligence tactic, they responded by saying that “when we go high tech, they go low tech.” They explained that if you really want to keep something secret in this (then!) day and age, you have a conversation and commit it to memory, not paper and certainly not to digitalised data. A note or letter that can be destroyed is a second-best option, old fashioned land lines are a third best option (because the tap on the phone line had to be physical and relatively close to the phone in question), and then resorting to what is known as espionage tradecraft (dead drops, unwitting messengers carrying information in different guises, etc.), would have to suffice. But the latter is not apt for official government communications unless that government is under serious siege (perhaps like Venezuela or Iran recently).
A an aside, some of the idiocy that is now on display in Washington DC is apparent in the lack of communications security awareness by senior government officials. The use of apps like Signal and Telegram by such people displays a grotesque disregard for basic common sense, much less situational awareness of the perils of using social media to conduct business about matters of State. I guess walkie talkies are not available at their locations.
My old cell phone was one such low tech device. It could not be followed, it could not geo-locate, it could not accept apps, it did not do email or internet. In a word, it was a”dumb” phone that I held in my hand. I liked it that way because even though I do not have State secrets to share, I do not like the idea of commercial actors like telecommunications companies acquiring and then selling my personal data just because I need to use the bloody phone and require use of their devices in order to do so. As it is, I am already getting bombarded by advertising and links suggestions just because I added my social media accounts (just two of them) to my new phone. That sucks.
Which brings me back to the original purpose of this post. Whether your approach to politics is to go high or to go low, when it comes to modern day telecommunications, take a tip from that old adversary of my former government by keeping your most sensitive thoughts off high tech platforms no matter how convenient they are (this is true for those who use VPNs as well, as that only partially disguises address and data flows but not the entirety of communication patterns for those with the knowledge and capabilities to decrypt or decode them). It may seem quaint, but if you must save things in writing, best to write a poem or letter on paper instead. Because file cabinets and desk drawers can still serve a purpose other than as computer stands or old junk repositories.
In the end convenience comes at a cost, and that cost is measured by the price of your privacy being made publicly available by the owners of the technologies that now control our daily routines.
As a follow up to my previous post (and harkening to a regular theme in my writing), consider this:
Used as the basis for authority, repression obeys a form of Newtonian Law: it wanes over time. You cannot repress the same amount of people with the same amount of force forever. Their numbers will grow and your ability to repress will drop unless you further increase the use of force. That only aggravates the situation. If the only response to dissent is more and wider repression, then less people have something to lose, even if it is their fear.
Repression must be justified ideologically and accepted by the majority for it to work as an instrument of social control. In other words, using mass repression without commensurate public consent is a brittle club. Despots try to shape narratives via lies, disinformation and propaganda in order to alter that inescapable fact, but the truth is that partisan spin or silence may obscure reality–what our eyes have seen and our ears have heard–but they can never replace it. It forms a memory that cannot be erased even if suppressed or delayed in its activation. It is the memory of what is and was real that forms the conscious basis of mass contingent consent (contingent because we do not give consent once, forever, to any given leader, government or administration).
That is why public acquiescence does not equal popular consent. That former is a short-term solution, born of silence and submission to superior physical force. The latter is the basis for political legitimacy and stable democratic rule. One is temporary, designed to break resistance to or reinforce a particular political project. The other is long-term in orientation even if contingent on material and social expectations being met.
Trump and co. appear to not understand this basic axiom and in fact seem blind to it given their slanderous and false accounts of the ICE murders in MN. This augers poorly for their longer-term prospects.
That gives me a basis for hope.
A long time ago I wrote a scholarly article about the use of state terror during the Argentine “Proceso” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2111080).
Seeing what is happening in the US, I thought I would reference a few things from that article. First: state terror thrives in cultures of impunity. That is, where government authorities believe that they are immune from prosecution for criminal acts that they order or undertake, especially when they occupy the justice system and control the courts. The good news is that such a sense of impunity often leads them to eventually over-reach and make mistakes that cause their downfall.
Second, as with all forms of terrorism state terror follows a target–subject–object logic. Individuals and groups are targeted with state violence. The subject is the larger audience that witness state violence either directly or indirectly (via the media, word of mouth, etc.). The object is to intimidate the subject audience into submitting to the State’s authority, however illegally it is exercised.
Specifically, the object is to atomise and infantilize the body politic and society at large. “Atomization” means the forced breakup of collective identities and solidarity bonds, where people retreat into their own personal lives rather than risk being targeted by the State because of their collective ties to other social groups. They mind their own business, look away, do not make waves and certainly do not publicly confront the agents of repression even by peaceful non-violent means.
“Infantilization” refers to the forced loss of personal agency, where people are psychologically reduced to the level of a child’s nightmare because of what they are living, where monsters are real and have impunity when committing monstrous acts.
It may seem a stretch to say so right now, but the state violence being meted out by ICE and other US federal agencies against both citizen and non-citizen members of the public seems to lie on a continuum that inevitably culminates in state terrorism. The MAGA administration’s double-down response to ICE killings suggests that is where they are prepared to go.
The only answer to this is mass collective resistance, using the legal avenues and social networks available to people in spite of official judicial and extra-judicial retribution. There must be a groundswell of authentic grassroots push-back in spite of the inevitable dangers this poses to people’s lives and livelihoods.
I do not think that the US has reached the level of the state terror experiment of the “Proceso.” No yet. But the mindset of those in power–the demonisation of opponents as “communists” and un-American/anti-American “wokesters,” the gaslight of the public by officials saying that what people have seen with their own eyes is not true, that victims of state violence brought it on themselves and perpetrators of state violence are justified in their acts because it is making the country safe from criminal “aliens” and their treasonous native-born supporters–is very much the same (and in the cases of Stephen Miller, Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem, might as well be right out of central casting for a movie about the 3rd Reich). To reiterate, the US is on a continuum of violence when it comes to its increasingly authoritarian trajectory, and state terrorism is the culmination of that continuum.
I hope that my US whanau think about this as they go about their lives far from the front lines of Minneapolis, Chicago and other blue front-line states (because ICE is focusing its repression on Democrat-supportive states and cities, not Red GOP-supportive electorates). Just because one is not targeted now does not mean that one will never be.
And as the saying goes, if you wait until they come for you, it will be too late.
Two things stand out in that crazy note that Trump sent the Norwegian Prime Minister. And no, it is not the reference to “the boat landing” and claim that there is a lack of formal documentation of any agreement about jurisdictional control of Greenland (it turns out that there is, including a 1917 convention swapping recognition of Danish control over Greenland in exchange for US possession of what were then known as the Danish West Indies–now the US Virgin Islands–and a 1951 “Defense of Greenland” pact granting the US exclusive military basing rights on the island).
Nope.
It is the fact that 1) Trump believes that the Norwegian government controls awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. Besides the unhinged obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize and the lies about ending eight (?) wars (?), Trump seems to think that because the Nobel Awards Committee is located in Oslo and committee members are selected by parliament, the Norwegian government somehow “controls” it. This is like saying that the US government controls the Academy Awards because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) is located in Los Angeles and receives (well, used to receive) federal funding. Then he goes onto say that because the Norwegian government did not give him the prize, he is no longer interested in peace. WTF?
2) He seems to think that Norway either controls Greenland or has influence over Denmark’s policies regarding Greenland. Greenland is an autonomous (self-governing) territory of Denmark, like the Cook Islands are for NZ or New Caledonia is for France. Norway is not Denmark and has no control over Greenland or its relationship with Denmark.
That suggests that Trump is an ignorant buffoon of the highest order–maybe there is Legion of Honor equivalent prize for that, akin to a First Class Darwin Award–or he operates in a sardonic alternate reality-turned–parallel universe where he can make threats and issue ultimatums devoid of practical, diplomatic, legal or moral grounding. This has moved from being a case of unbridled narcissism into an instance of madness, be it a product of old age, medications, unchecked ego or a combination thereof, all enabled and encouraged by a coterie of cynical and sociopathic advisors, political allies and partisan media hacks.
Time to put him out to pasture, because any way you look at it, he ain’t all there. He has become a destabilizing danger to both the world system as well as to the US itself (I will refrain from commenting on his domestic policies here but they are also malevolently and destabilizingly nuts). Although JD Vance may step into the role of POTUS, he will not have the cult-like hold on the MAGA base that the madman has and will be challenged in any event by rivals who are already lining up to take a run at the presidency in 2028. Meanwhile, the current MAGA entourage will turn on each other and/or disperse like rats.
It could get bad, but it cannot get worse than what we have now.
Time for Article 25 and if not, impeachment yet again.
In light of the shooting in Minneapolis this past week of an unarmed woman by an ICE agent, I put on my formal “security analyst” hat for an on-line interview with Radio New Zealand on what the US security agency ICE is and does. I think that the RNZ explainer does a good job of outlining the basics regarding its scope of authority and powers. Let’s just say that they are broad.
I am a little late to the year end summary due to the Venezuela crisis but here are some stats for last year.
I wrote 45 posts, an average of 3.75/month. My busiest month was February with nine posts and my slowest was July, with none. Not sure why I was uninspired to write in mid-winter.
KP received 23.4 thousand views during the year, November being the busiest month and July the slowest for viewership. It attracted 14 thousand visitors and 193 comments. The number of daily readers varied between 50-100 people. The majority of viewers came form NZ, the US, Australia and the PRC, although the distribution was global. Besides search engines, the biggest referring sources were Kiwiblog, The Standard and X. Most of the comments were from regular readers, to whom I owe thanks for their support, with a lesser amount coming from occasional visitors and trolls.
As always, NZ related posts received the most views. An April post about the Green’s identity politics (520 views) and last month’s post about the Bondi shootings (395) received the most views., with other NZ-related posts occupying most of the following top ten spots (average of 339.2). The blog retains its niche in the political blog ecosystem but does not appear to be growing readership in any significant measure.
Overall KP remains in a holding pattern. I am the sole contributor and pay the bills (to Word Press and Dreamhost). I continue to ask that if anyone is interested in contributing, particularly those with a female/feminist and Maori/Pacifika angle, please get in touch. These areas are beyond my competence to discuss in depth, so any help in that regard, within the boundaries of humility and courteousness, is welcome. (I say this because past requests like this have brought about interest from egotists, polemicists and just plain malignant personalities).
On a positive note albeit tangental to this blog itself, it looks like the “A View from Afar” podcast will re-start in February. For those who may be curious, although my partner and friend Selwyn Manning was always prepared to continue, a combination of personal circumstances and ideological despair overwhelmed me after Trump’s re-election and subsequent events, so I decided to take a prolonged break. AVFA was humming along in its own niche, but I just was not up to putting in the prep and presentation time even if Selwyn was. He was very understanding and just told me to get in touch when ready to resume. We have now spoken and will do just that next month if things go as planned.
All the best to all of your for the New Year.
The lethal theatre of the absurd that has been the Trump administration’s sabre rattling performances in the Central American basin over the last few months culminated with the military attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president and his wife in the early hours of Saturday morning, Caracas time. The tactical precision of the special operation was excellent, efficient and low cost when it came to human lives. While the exact number of Venezuelan casualties are yet unknown (although there have been reports of dozens killed, including Cubans), US forces suffered eight injuries and although some of the helicopters deployed suffered shrapnel damage, all assets returned to base safely. From a military tactical standpoint, the operation was a success and a demonstration of capability.
Even so, the broader picture is more complicated and therefore less straightforward when it comes to assessing the aftermath. Here I shall break down some of the main take-aways so far.
The strike on Venezuela was interesting because it was a hybrid decapitation and intimidation strike. Although US forces attacked military installations in support of the raid (such as by destroying air defence batteries), they only went after Maduro and his wife using their specialist Delta Force teams. That is unusual because most decapitation strikes attempt to remove the entire leadership cadres of the targeted regime, indulging its civilian and military leadership. They also involve seizing ports and airfields to limit adversary movements as well as the main means of communications, such as TV and radio stations, in order to control information flows during and after the event. The last thing that the attacker wants is for the target regime to retain its organizational shape and ability to continue to govern and, most importantly, mount an organised resistance to the armed attackers. This is what the Russians attempted to do with their assault on Kiev in February 2023.
That did not happen in this instance. Instead, the US left the entirety of the Bolivarian regime intact, including its military leadership and civilian authorities. Given reports of CIA infiltration of Venezuela in the months prior to the attack and the muted Venezuelan response to it, it is likely that US agents were in “backdoor” contact with members of the Bolivarian elite before the event, providing assurances and perhaps security guarantees to them (amnesty or non-prosecution for crimes committed while in power) in order to weaken their resistance to the US move. US intelligence may have detected fractures or weakness in the regime and worked behind Maduro’s back to assure wavering Bolivarians that they would not be blamed for his sins and would be treated separately and differently from him.
This might explain Vice President Delcy Rodriguez’s promise to “cooperate” with the US. That remains to be seen but other Bolivarian figures like Interior Minister Diosdaro Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez, notorious for their leadership of Maduro’s repressive apparatus, may not be similarly inclined given that their post-Maduro treatment is likely to be very different–and they still may have control over and the loyalty of many of the people under their commands.
Trump says that the US “will run” the country for the foreseeable future until a regime transition scenario is developed, but in light of the limited nature of the military operation, it is unclear how the US proposes to do so. What is clear is that the US had real time intelligence from the CIA and perhaps regime insiders that allowed them to track and isolate Maduro in a moment of vulnerability. Ironically, for Maduro this proved fortunate, because given the surveillance that he was subjected to, any attempt to escape Caracas could have resulted in his death by drone. Instead, he and his wife get to be a guest of the US federal justice system.
(As an aside, it is noteworthy that the Maduro’s were indicted on cocaine trafficking charges and possessions of machine guns. No mention is mentioned in the indictments of fentanyl, the justification for the extra-judicial killings of civilians at sea by US forces and one of the initial excuses for attacking Venezuela itself (the so-called “fentanyl shipment facilities”). Possession of machine guns is not a crime in Venezuela, certainly not by a sitting leader facing constant violent threats from abroad. So the US is basically charging them with unlicensed firearms violations in the US rather than in Venezuela–where it has no jurisdiction–even though they do not reside there while switching the basis for the kidnapping from a fictitious accusation to something that may have more evidentiary substance. But in truth, the legal proceedings against the Maduros are no more than a fig leaf on the real reasons for their extraordinary rendition).
Even if limited in nature as a decapitation strike, the immediate result of the US use of force is intimidation of the remaining Bolivarians in government. Unless they regroup and organise some form of mass resistance using guerrilla/irregular warfare tactics, thereby forcing the US to put boots on the ground in order to subdue the insurgents (and raising the physical and political costs of the venture), at some point the post-Maduro Bolivarians will be forced to accept power-sharing with or replacement by the US backed opposition via eventual elections, and as Trump has indicated, the US will take control of Venezuelan oil assets (in theory at least). In his words: “they (US oil companies) will make a lot of money.” For this to happen the US will maintain its military presence in the Caribbean and adjacent land bases, in what Marco Rubio calls “leverage” in case the Venezuelans do not comply as demanded. This is coercive diplomacy in its starkest form.
Put bluntly, this is an extorsion racket with the US military being used as the muscle with which to heavy the Bolivarians and bring them to heel. In light of Trump’s and the US’s past records, this should not be surprising. The question is, has the US read the situation correctly? Are the Bolivarians ao much disliked that the country will turn against them in droves and support an ongoing US presence in the country? Is the military and civilian leadership so weak or incompetent that they cannot rule without Maduro and need the US for basic governmental functioning (which is what the US appears to believe)? Have all of the gains made by lower class Venezuelans been eroded by Maduro’s corruption to the point that a reversal of the Bolivarian policy agenda in whole or in part is feasible? Will average Venezuelans, while thankful for the departure of the despot, accept abject subordination to the US and its puppets? Or will Cuban and Russian-backed civilian militias and elements in the armed forces retreat into guerrilla warfare. thereby forcing the US into a prolonged occupation without a clear exist strategy (i.e. deja vu all over again)?
There are some interesting twists to the emerging story. Maria Corina Machado, the CIA-backed opposition figure-turned-Nobel Peace Prize winner, has positioned herself to be the power behind the throne for Maduro’s heir apparent, Edmundo Gonzalez, who most election observers believe won the 2024 presidential elections but was denied office due to Maduro’s clearly fraudulent manipulation of the vote count. But Trump says that she “is not ready” and does not have the ” support” or “respect” within Venezuela to run the country. This seems to be code words for “too independent-minded” or “not enough of a puppet” (or even “female”) for Trump, who seems unaware of how a close overt association between his administration and any potential future Venezuelan leader may receive mixed reactions at home and abroad. In any event, sidelining Machado could have some unexpected repercussions.
Then there is the issue of how the US and its Venezuelan allies propose to purge the country of foreign actors like Hezbollah, Russians, Cubans and most importantly from an economic standpoint, the Chinese. Rounding up security operatives is one thing (although even that will not be easy given their levels of experience and preparation); dispossessing Chinese investors of their Venezuelan assets is a very different kettle of fish So far none of this appears to have been thought out in a measure similar to the planning of the military raid itself.
Finally, Trump’s claims that Venezuela “stole” US oil is preposterous. In 1976 a nationalisation decree was signed between the Venezuelan government–a democracy–and US oil companies where Venezuela gained control of the land on which oil facilities were located and received a percentage of profits from them while the private firms continued to staff and maintain the facilities in exchange for sharing profits (retaining a majority share) and paying sightly more in taxes. That situation remained intact until the 1990s, when a series of market-oriented reforms were introduced into the industry that loosened State management over it. After Hugo Chavez was elected president in 1998 on his Bolivarian platform, that arrangement continued for a short time until 2001 when the Organic Hydrocarbon Law was reformed in order to re-assert State control and foreign firms began withdrawing their skilled labor personnel and some of their equipment when taxes were increased on them. By 2013 the oil infrastructure was decrepit and lacking in skilled workers to staff what facilities are still operating, so Chavez (by then on his death bed) expropriated the remaining private holdings in the industry.
This was clearly unwise but it was not illegal and certainly was not a case of stealing anything. Moreover, the Venezuelan oil industry limped along with help from Bolivarian allies like the PRC and Russia because it is the country’s economic lifeline (and cash cow for the political elite dating back decades). So it is neither stolen or completely collapsed. As with many other things, the complexities of the matter appear to be unknown to or disregarded by Trump in favour of his own version of the “facts.”
Regardless, the PRC and Russia have stepped into the breech and invested in Venezuela’s oil industry with people and equipment. They may resist displacement or drive a hard bargain to be bought out. It will therefore not be as simple as Trump claims it to be for US firms to return and “make a lot of money” from Venezuelan oil.
It is these and myriad other “after entry” (to use a trade negotiator’s term) problems that will make or break the post-Maduro regime, whatever its composition. In the US the word is that the US “broke it so now owns it,” but the US will never do that. It has seldom lived up to its promises to its erstwhile allies in difficult and complex political cultures that it does not understand. It has a very short attention span, reinforced by domestic election cycles where foreign affairs is of secondary importance. So it is easily manipulated by opportunists and grifters seeking to capitalise on US military, political and economic support in order to advance their own fortunes (some would say this of the MAGA administration itself). If this sounds familiar it is because it is a very real syndrome of and pathology in US foreign affairs: focus on the military side of the equation, conduct kinetic operations, then try to figure out what else to do (nation-build? keep the peace? broker a deal amongst antagonistic locals?) rather than simply declare victory and depart. Instead, the US eventually leaves on terms dictated by others and with destruction in its wake.
One thing that should be obvious is that for all the jingoistic flag-waving amongst US conservatives and Venezuelan exiles, their problems when it comes to Venezuela may just have started. Because now they “own” what is to come, and if what comes is not the peace and prosperity promised by Trump, Rubio, Machado and others, then that is when things will start to get real. “Real” as in Great Power regional conflict real, because launching a war of opportunity on Venezuela in the current geopolitical context invites responses in kind from adversaries elsewhere that the US is ill-equipped to respond to, much less control.
The precedent has been set and somewhere, perhaps in more than one theatre, the invitation to reply is open.
Stay tuned and watch this space.
