Trump’s attack on Venezuela was a blatant and unapologetic act of imperialism. But it didn’t come unattended by a long history of US aggression against its world neighbors near and far.

From the outset of the republic and even earlier as settler colonies, the control of existing land and human resources had been usurped by the ruling elites.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Trail of Tears that followed brought forced relocation and ethnic cleansing. With the end of the Civil War, the taste of imperialism and territorial expansion resumed and led to the invasions of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898 and an “American century” of hemispheric and global hegemony that followed.

Trump’s jackboot assault on Venezuela summons to memoryWoodrow Wilson’sarrogant teach the Latin American republics to elect good men!” What were Wilson’s motives in invading Tampico and Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico (renamed by Trump the Gulf of America)? Both cities hosted US oil interests, and Wilson was not going to permit nationalization – which eventually did occur during the presidency ofLázaro Cárdenasin 1938. As Trump now sees it, as if to turn back the clock, Venezuelan oil belongs to the US, not to one of those Latin American republics. Is Mexico the next petroleum grab? Perhaps Iran?

Wilson refused to recognize Huerta and sanctioned Mexico with an arms embargo, which helped bring down his government. He intervened steadily in Latin American affairs – in Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, with long military occupations, and again in Mexico in 1916. Trump’s kidnapping ofNicolás Madurowas clearly illegal under international law and the Charter of the United Nations, of which the real estate president is as educated as an 8-year-old. Indeed, he has good company as an international pirate, following the tradition with the arrest of Philippine independence leader and presidentEmilio Aguinaldo(1901), Panama’s presidentManuel Noriega(1980), Iraq’s presidentSaddam Hussein(2003), and Haitian presidentJean-Bertrand Aristide(2004), all undertaken by Trump’s Republican predecessors.

One shouldn’t think that these crude forms of “gunboat diplomacy” were primarily projects of one party. The Democrats have been at least as aggressive in foreign relations, the five million deaths in Indochina coming largely at the hands ofJohn F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnsonand the savagery of the “police action” in Korea was led byHarry Truman. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded prematurely toBarack Obama, who went on to engage the US in seven different wars during his two terms in office (2009-2017). Perhaps Trump’s demand for the Prize is not so outrageous given such a precedent.

Outright overthrow and kidnapping of foreign presidents is but a subset of America’s militarist behavior abroad. An academicLindsey O’Rourkedocumented 64 covert regime change attempts made by the US during the Cold War period alone (1947-1989), in addition to six overt actions. Democratic-spirited motives had little to do with these covert and overt offensives. O’Rourke found that “only 12.5 percent of America’s covert Cold War interventions sought to promote a democratic transition in an authoritarian state.”

US military interventions abroad from 1945 to the present numbers over 200, according to a Tufts UniversityMilitary Intervention Project study.Another noted studyfound that from 1946 to 2000, the US covertly or overtly intervened in the elections of 81 foreign elections, making the allegations and the outrage against Russia for its supposed interference in the 2016 US election, especially by the Hillary Clinton branch of the Democratic Party, quite duplicitous.

Regime change was institutionalized as state policy with the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) by the Reagan administration in 1983. It is a little-known entity funded by Congress, even while claiming to be a “non-government organization” but without congressional oversight. Its principal organization members are the international wings of the two major political parties, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, together with the Center for International Private Enterprise (affiliated with the US Chamber of Commerce), and, originally, the anti-communist Free Trade Union Institute, affiliated with the AFL-CIO. For many years, the AFL-CIO was known in the Global South as the “AFL-CIA” for its support of pro-US, anti-leftist trade unions.

The NED was formed in response to the 1970s’ congressional investigations of the CIA’s rogue behavior that included destabilization, covert propaganda, coups, and assassinations. A co-founder of NED, Allen Weinstein, became famous for his stark admission to theWashington Postin 1991 that “A lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” The NED represents a neoliberal adjustment in that it is essentially a public-private operation, which receives funding from both sectors.

Source: Global Research