By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
“For those who have followed Venezuela closely in recent years, there is an inevitable sense of déjà vu in U.S. foreign policy toward the South American nation, because Washington’s strategy of regime change there is almost identical to the one it has adopted in Latin America on numerous occasions since World War II. It is a strategy that includes the application of economic sanctions, broad support for the opposition, and destabilizing measures to create a degree of human consternation and chaos that justifies a military coup or direct U.S. military intervention.
That is the introduction that Canadian writer and researcher GaryLeech makes to the readers of his most recent essay entitled “Business as Usual: Washington’s Regime Change Strategy in Venezuela” (GreanvillePost, 23/11/2018).
“Because of how well the strategy has worked for the United States for more than half a century, our elected leaders see no reason not to use it with respect to Venezuela. In other words, from Washington’s perspective, their policies of regime change toward Venezuela constitute the coda of a business that is already customary in Latin America,” Leech says.
This strategy of regime change does not take into account whether it is a democratically-elected government or the human rights consequences of such interventions. Virtually all the Latin American governments that the United States has successfully overthrown in the last 65 years had been democratically elected.
Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti (2004) and Manuel Zelaya in Honduras (2009) have been democratically elected leaders who have been ousted by coups d’état using such methods. Washington pressured all these leaders with economic sanctions and destabilization campaigns that created the economic chaos and humanitarian crises necessary to justify a military solution in their nations.
The common denominator in all these cases has nothing to do with democracy or human rights, but with the fact that the scaled-down governments prioritized the interests of their own people over U.S. provisions.
This was demonstrated by the attitude of CIA director George Tenet during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in February 2002, when he declared that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez “probably does not have the interests of the United States in mind” and two months later, Washington promoted a military coup that attempts to overthrow the Venezuelan leader.
That was the first of many failed U.S. attempts to overthrow Chavez after his electoral victory in 1998. After that failure, Washington multiplied its efforts to install a government in Caracas with its heart set on the interests of the United States.
It increased support for opposition groups by increasing funds for USAID programs dedicated to the goal of turning the population against the government. Wikileaks published a classified headline sent from the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela to Washington in 2006 that clearly stated that USAID funding for local programs sought to influence community leaders by slowly moving them away from “chavismo” and stated that the embassy’s broader goal should be to “isolate Chávez internationally.”
In 2015, President Obama signed a presidential order designating Venezuela as an “extraordinary threat to national security” and explained that U.S. law requires his administration impose sanctions on detractors of his country. On that basis, two years later, Trump declared that he would not rule out a “military option” against Venezuela.
The major U.S. media have played their propaganda role with a narrative aimed at demonizing a Venezuelan government and calling Chávez and Maduro authoritarian, anti-democratic and even dictatorial. They have also focused their attention on food shortages and an alleged humanitarian crisis that would lead Venezuelans to ignore the extraordinary social advances made in education, housing, poverty reduction, participatory democracy, and to abandon their homeland.
In foreign policy, it reproduces measures successfully implemented in past decades that overthrew governments that did not have “U.S. interests at heart.
The strategy of undermining democracy and imposing economic difficulties to achieve regime change worked in several Latin American countries, but this time, with the Venezuelan people, Washington might have run into the last of their shoes.
November 29, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
In geopolitics, it is rare that events are what they seem to be. This is especially true when we look closely at the strange “war” launched by Trump this spring under the guise of a trade war “to make up for the enormous annual deficit in the U.S. trade balance, the most extreme of which is that of China.”
The real motor force for Washington’s tariff war attacks on China can only be understood when we look at it through the prism of the U.S. Administration’s most recent report on the industrial base of US defense industry.
That’s how F. William Engdahl, a strategic risk consultant and U.S. professor based in Germany, understands it.
Coming out of the work of a special group charged with it a year ago, by a little-known Presidential Executive Order, the report is a detailed analysis of the sufficiency or incompetence of the industrial supply chain that feeds the vital elements of the U.S. armed forces.
The declassified version of the report cites 300 vulnerabilities or gaps in the nation’s military industrial base. It reveals in great detail that the national economy can no longer provide the basic essentials of national defense as a consequence of globalization and industrial outsourcing.
He details the dramatic shortage of skilled workers in areas such as machining, welding, and engineering. Vital machine-tools are imported, mostly from Germany, a country with which Washington does not have the best relations at present.
Many small suppliers of the main sub-components are specialized from a single source, many of whom are on the verge of insolvency due to U.S. budgetary uncertainties in recent years.
The defense industry depends on China for virtually all of its rare earth metals, as the set of naturally scarce metals that are vital to various technological applications of the military industry are known.
Since the 1980s, domestic metal mining in the United States has virtually collapsed for economic reasons, as suppliers moved to China in search of cheaper sources.
Today, 81% of the rare earth metals needed by military equipment, superconductors, smartphones and other high-tech applications come from China.
The report says that in many cases, the only remaining producer of critical materials is on the verge of shutting down its U.S. factory and importing lower-cost materials from the same foreign producer that forced them to abandon domestic production.
It highlights the alarming potential bottlenecks from dependence on a single source for the propeller shafts of navy ships, cannon towers for tanks, fuel for rockets and space-based infrared detectors for missile defense, among others.
The report is the most comprehensive critical look at the military industrial base that has been made since the early Cold War years in the 1950s. It blames U.S. arms companies for relying on vital components outsourced to China, which it sees as the United States’ greatest strategic threat.
Today Asia produces 90% of the world’s printed circuit boards and half are made in China. Beyond relying almost entirely on Chinese suppliers of rare earth metals, the Department of Defense contracts the acquisition of weapons with the largest consortiums. These in turn subcontract in their supply chain to the most efficient, which are often those of China.
It is claimed that the US defense industry depends on Chinese producers for 100% of its rare earth materials. A report by the Government Accountability Office in 2016 described the issue as fundamental to national security.
The main conclusion of the report is that “China poses a significant and growing risk to the supply of materials considered strategic and critical to U.S. national security.”
This also explains why the focus of the Trump Administration’s current trade war against China is, in fact, to press China to abandon its Made in China 2025 agenda, which aims to bring China to dominate advanced technologies in the coming decades.
The report states that “China’s dominance in the market for rare earth elements illustrates the potentially dangerous interaction between economic aggression against China, guided by strategic industrial policies, vulnerabilities and gaps in the U.S. manufacturing and defense industrial base.”
November 26, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
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