Another Regime-Change War Will Accelerate America’s Slide Into Authoritarianism
The New York Times has just published an excellent editorial on the dangerous direction in which America is headed under President Trump. It is entitled “Are We Losing Our Democracy?” The editorial lists 12 factors pointing toward America’s slide into authoritarianism. I highly recommend reading it.
Trump and the U.S. national-security establishment are now accelerating America’s slide into authoritarianism with their violent and deadly regime-change operations in Venezuela. Using the federal government’s decades-old drug-war racket, Trump, the Pentagon, and the CIA are illegally killing innocent people on the high seas, engaging in CIA interventionism inside Venezuela (including, no doubt, state-sponsored assassinations), and now threatening to launch direct military bombing attacks on Venezuela itself. As Randolph Bourne pointed out, “War is the health of the state.”
Meanwhile, after flipping back and forth on the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump seems to have finally settled on the side of Ukraine. No doubt the Pentagon played a major role in influencing Trump in this direction, given that it’s the Pentagon, operating through its Cold War dinosaur NATO, that is the entity that is actually waging war against Russia by using Ukraine as its proxy.
Why do I bring up Ukraine in the context of addressing what is going on with Venezuela? Because it’s ironic that ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials and their supporters in the mainstream press have condemned Russia for its “unprovoked” war of aggression against Ukraine, ignoring completely the role that NATO (i.e., the Pentagon) played into intentionally provoking Russia’s invasion.
Why is that ironic? Because those same U.S. officials and many of their mainstream-press acolytes are now non-plussed by the U.S. aggression against Venezuela! It’s as if the U.S. government’s aggression is no big deal while supposed Russian aggression reflects an attempt to conquer the world. (To its credit, in its editorial the New York Times condemns Trump’s and the Pentagon’s extra-judicial killings in the Caribbean as “defiance of U.S. and international law.”)
Trump’s and the Pentagon’s illegal killings in the Caribbean and the CIA’s paramilitary interventionism in Venezuela are bad enough. But make no mistake about it: If Trump launches direct military attacks on Venezuela itself, this will be one more illegal U.S. war of aggression against a country that has not attacked the United States. That’s important because that’s the type of war that was condemned as a war crime at Nuremberg. Moreover, it will be a war that is illegal under our form of constitutional government, given that the U.S. Constitution requires a congressional declaration of war before the president can wage war against another nation state.
What about the much-vaunted U.S. war on drugs? Doesn’t the U.S. government wield the legal authority to enforce its drug war against other nations?
Absolutely not! Every nation on earth has the authority to adopt its own drug policy. No nation is legally required to follow the U.S. government’s dictates on drug prohibition. If Venezuela decided to legalize drugs, that would be its prerogative. By the same token, if the Venezuelan government has drug laws but declines to enforce them, that too is its prerogative. If the Venezuelan government decided to do nothing about drug cartels and drug gangs producing, selling, and exporting drugs, that also would be its prerogative. No nation-state has the legal duty to adopt the U.S. government’s decades-old racket of drug prohibition.
Thus, President Trump’s, the Pentagon’s, and the CIA’s use of their crooked, corrupt, deadly, and destructive drug-war racket to attack and bomb Venezuela will be as illegitimate as President Bush’s, the Pentagon’s, and the CIA’s bogus use of WMDs to attack Iraq. No nation-state has the legitimate authority to attack another nation state — and kill innocent people in the process — in the purported attempt to enforce its own morally bankrupt policy of drug prohibition.
As I pointed out last July —before Trump took steps to concoct the Venezuela crisis — Americans had better brace themselves for another foreign war — as a way to quell the MAGA rebellion over the Jeffrey Epstein files. If that was, in fact, why Trump concocted this crisis, his strategy has worked brilliantly. Excited over the prospect of a regime-change war against Venezuela, Trump’s MAGA supporters have forgotten their Epstein rebellion, and, for all practical purposes, their rebellion is over. The Epstein files will remain secret.
And make no mistake about it: If Trump uses the drug war to launch a regime-change war against Venezuela, America will slide even further into authoritarianism. But of course, that’s what some people would call making America great again.