The US 4th Fleet has been activated in the Caribbean and Bolton has been preparing to deploy thousands of US ground forces in neighboring Colombia, which incidentally continues to pose a far greater threat to US national security by its cocaine production and exports than Venezuela has ever done.
But why are they doing it? Venezuela’s vast oil supplies certainly make a tempting target. But previous US efforts at regime change, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven woefully incompetent in securing control of their victims’ strategic resources, much less organizing them for profit.
The British Empire – which seized and ran Iran’s oil resources for more than 40 years from 1911 to 1953 and Iraq’s from 1918 to 1958 – proved vastly more efficient in its day at arranging such matters.
However, it is clear that Trump was sold a bill of goods and that Bolton and Pompeo are energetically pushing for mission creep to eventually insert major US military forces in Venezuela to topple legitimate President Nicolas Maduro.
Pompeo and Bolton appear to have successfully sold the Venezuela adventure to President Donald Trump on the grounds of eliminating Russia’s main friendly nation in the Western hemisphere that has hosted flights by Tupolev 160 supersonic “White Swan” nuclear strike aircraft, the best strategic bombers in the world.
The United States is preparing a military invasion of an independent state.
The transfer of American special operations forces to Puerto Rico, the landing of US troops in Colombia and other facts indicate the Pentagon is reinforcing its troops in the region in order to use them in an operation to remove Maduro from power.
Are Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton and (farcically titled) Special Envoy for Restoring Democracy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams agents of influence for Russia and China?
The sudden obsession with provoking a full-scale military confrontation with Venezuela does not fit this ambitious agenda: Instead it subverts it and guarantees US failure and defeat.
Most of all, such a war would weaken the US armed forces and distract them from what is now supposed to be their primary strategic goal, as set out by the Trump administration itself of focusing on great power competition, primarily with Russia and China.
US forces remain overstretched and exhausted, caught up in major unending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and sucked into highly dangerous commitments in Georgia and Ukraine and the Baltic States.
The US armed forces desperately need a time of peace and retrenchment such as they enjoyed under President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950’s and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s to rest, recover and re-equip themselves.
But Bolton, with his usual explosive cocktail combination of recklessness, gambling and hard-charging ignorance is not giving them that. It is a classic case of strategic overstretch and dissipation of effort.
Strategic Culture / ABC Flash Point War News 2019.
