Donald Trump is back in the White House, and faux opposition is once again the order of the day for the Western media and the Democratic Party. Whether it comes to criminalizing migrants (FAIR.org, 1/25/25), maintaining U.S. “soft power” via USAID, downplaying anti-democratic power grabs (FAIR.org, 2/4/25) or whitewashing Nazi salutes (FAIR.org, 1/23/25), the centrist establishment seems quite content to normalize Trump or even outflank him from the right.
There is, of course, no area of greater consensus than U.S. imperial grand strategy, from waging genocidal war in Palestine (FAIR.org, 1/30/25) to recolonizing Washington’s “backyard” south of the Rio Grande. Accumulation by laying waste to the societies of the global South via carpet bombing and/or economic siege warfare is, according to anti-imperialist political economist Ali Kadri, the name of the game.
Bret Stephens (New York Times,1/14/25): “Ending Maduro’s long reign of terror is a good way to start [the Trump] administration—and send a signal to tyrants elsewhere that American patience with disorder and danger eventually runs out.”
High on his own (imperial) supply
In a column belligerently titled “Depose Maduro,” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (1/14/25) made an overt case for U.S. military intervention to topple Venezuela’s government. He hailed this textbook crime of aggression as “overdue, morally right and in our national security interest.”
For the Times’ self-described “warmongering neocon,” that last point is characteristically paramount. Specifically, he asserted that U.S. “national security” requires “putting an end to a criminal regime that is a source of drugs, mass migration and Iranian influence in the Americas.”
The irony that during the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency actually facilitated the trafficking of cocaine to working-class Black communities in the context of the Iran/Contra scandal (FAIR.org, 12/29/24) was evidently lost on the Times columnist.
Then as today, the principal drug routes to the United States cut across the Pacific rather than the Gulf of Mexico (FAIR.org, 9/24/19). A 2017 DEA report found that less than 10% of U.S.-bound cocaine flowed through Venezuela’s eastern Caribbean corridor, with WOLA reaching a similar conclusion in a 2020 study.
Not only does the bulk of drug trafficking flow through U.S.-allied countries, but the U.S. government itself is broadly complicit in the perpetuation of the multi-billion dollar contraband, as evidenced in its support for narco puppet regimes in Afghanistan (New York Times, 7/27/08) and Honduras (FAIR.org, 3/20/24; Covert Action, 3/14/24).
In marked contrast, the U.S. has levied “narco-terrorism” charges against top Caracas officials, going as far as to place a bounty on Maduro’s head, without providing a shred of evidence, since Western outlets are happy to take U.S. officials’ word, no questions asked (BBC, 1/10/25; New York Times, 1/10/25; Washington Post, 1/10/25; AP, 1/10/25).
Stephens lamented that Washington’s murderous economic sanctions “didn’t work” and that its bounty “also won’t work.” The columnist conveniently ignored that the unilateral coercive measures, described aptly by U.S. officials as “maximum pressure,” were quite effective in deliberately gutting Venezuela’s economy, in the process killing at least tens of thousands, and spurring the migrant exodus he pointed to as justification for his proposed military adventure.
Such omission regarding U.S. responsibility for Venezuelan migration is by now a staple of corporate media coverage (New York Times, 1/31/25; PBS, 1/31/25; CBS, 2/2/25). Indeed, support for Washington’s economic terrorism against Venezuela has been fairly uniform across the U.S. political spectrum for years (FAIR.org, 6/4/20, 6/4/21, 5/2/22, 6/13/22).
Common tactics include describing sanctions as merely affecting Maduro and allies (New York Times, 1/6/25; NPR, 1/10/25; Al Jazeera, 1/6/25; Financial Times, 1/31/25) or portraying their consequences as merely the demonized leader’s opinion (New York Times, 1/31/25; BBC, 1/10/25; Reuters, 1/27/25).
The Iranian bogeyman
Stephens cites a story (Infobae, 1/10/25) about an Iranian “drone development base” in Venezuela that offers as its only source for the claim that “there is information” about such a base.
It is no surprise, either, that in Stephens’ casus belli, Iran appears alongside the familiar conservative tropes of Latin American migrant hordes and narcotics threatening the U.S. (white settler) body politic.
Stephens’ Orientalist fixation with the Iranian bogeyman is notable, if hardly novel. Western media have in recent years circulated baseless rumors of Iran covertly shipping military equipment to Venezuela (FAIR.org, 6/10/20), and the Times in particular has promoted equally evidence-free claims of drug trafficking by Iranian ally Hezbollah (FAIR.org, 5/24/19, 2/4/21).
In the latest whopper, Stephens cited Iran having “reportedly established a ‘drone development base’” at a Venezuelan air base. However, this story comes from rabidly anti-Venezuelan government outlet Infobae (1/10/25), which did not even bother describing its anonymous source. The report only vaguely stated that “there is information” about this purported base.
Regardless of whether there is any truth to the alleged defense cooperation between the two sovereign nations, the perceived threat is, following the late Edward Said, symptomatic of Western imperialism’s enduring obsession with the “loss of Iran” in the wake of the 1979 overthrow of the Shah. Like the Chinese Revolution before it, Iran’s Islamic Revolution is still decades later portrayed as a global civilizational menace.
But the effort to update the “axis of evil” with a revised cast of rogue states from Venezuela to Iran also crucially serves to manufacture consent for military aggression against Tehran, which has long been the ultimate dream of significant segments of the U.S. political class and intelligentsia, including Stephens (FAIR.org, 10/25/24).
On elections and ‘tropical despotisms’
In Stephens’ tropical gunboat diplomacy redux, there was something for everyone, even bleeding-heart “liberals” horrified that Venezuelan President Maduro supposedly “stole the election, terrorizes his opponents and brutalizes his people.”
As always, U.S. imperialist intervention ideologically hinges on denying the Bolivarian government’s democratic credentials, most recently regarding the outcome of the July 28, 2024, presidential vote (Venezuelanalysis, 8/22/24, 7/29/24). However, Washington’s blockade ensured that the elections would never be free and fair. As the main factor driving economic hardship and migration, U.S. sanctions meant Venezuelans headed to the polls with a gun to their heads, not unlike Nicaraguans in 1990.
It is the height of hypocrisy for U.S. officials and their corporate media stenographers to claim the right to arbitrate other sovereign nations’ democratic legitimacy, even as they advance fascism at home and genocidal war across the globe. That sectors of the Western “compatible left” echo Stephens and his ilk, caricaturing the Maduro government as a “corrupt” and “repressive” regime, is unfortunate but not surprising (Ebb, 10/3/24).
Extra! (1—2/90): “In covering the invasion of Panama, many TV journalists abandoned even the pretense of operating in a neutral, independent mode.”
The core racial assumption, going back to the 19th century, is that Global South states that refuse to bow to Western imperialist diktat constitute “tropical despotisms” to be toppled in a never-ending “civilizing mission,” with its anti-Communist, “war on terror” and neo-Orientalist mutations.
Demolishing the Death Star
It is noteworthy that the script for Stephens’ Rambo sequel is over 35 years old: Stephens argued for “U.S. military intervention of the sort that in 1990 swiftly ended the regime of the Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega.” Formerly U.S.-backed narco dictator Noriega was, not incidentally, an ex-CIA agent involved in Iran/Contra (Extra!, 1—2/90; FAIR.org, 12/29/24).
The New York Times warmonger-in-chief’s rendering of the intervention is fantastically selective, forgetting that the Central American nation was already “pre-invaded” by U.S. military bases, and that the savage bombing of the Afro-Panamanian neighborhood of El Chorrillo transformed it into “Little Hiroshima.”
But the sober reality is that Venezuela is not Panama. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Armed Forces, alongside other corps, like the Bolivarian Militia, have spent a quarter of a century preparing for a “prolonged people’s war of resistance” against the U.S. empire at the level of doctrine, organization, equipment and training.
If the U.S. and its Zionist colonial outpost failed to defeat the heroic Palestinian resistance in Gaza after nearly 500 days of genocidal war, an asymmetric conflict with a significantly larger and stronger force, across a territory more than 2,000 times as large, is not likely a serious proposition.
Nonetheless, it is the duty of all those residing in the imperialist core to grind Washington’s industrial-scale death machine to a definitive halt. This paramount strategic objective demands systematically deposing the New York Times’ Goebbelsian propaganda.