Transcription
We want to move right in here now to our first guest, who we're very, very honored to have here on the show. And that is Dr. VJ Pashad, the executive director of the Tricontinental Institute. VJ, as always, thanks so much for being with us.
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a strange day today.
It is. It is. And I think Rana, I, I don't know. I think you wanted to play a clip for VJ, I believe, to to open and ask a question. So I'll kick it to you.
Well, yeah. Hello. Hello VJ. From what you call the other side of imperialism. Um, as everyone knows, I am, I'm based over here in Lebanon, um, which has been the subject of a lot of US bombs over the last couple of years. And now I'm watching the US do it to Venezuela. We warned about this. We've talked about this. It's now it's happening. They've kidnapped the president of Venezuela. It's quite insane to witness all this insanity. Um, but Trump got even more insane. BJ, I'm sure you watched the press conference that he gave addressing the nation over what he and his administration just did. And he made some claims about what he planned to do. I want to play that clip and then, um, I want to ask you some questions about it.
VJ, we're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. So, we don't want to be involved with uh having somebody else get in. And we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.
And it has.
So there you have it. We're going to run the country. But Trump has yet to give any clarity about what that means. The press did a terrible job of asking for clarity about that after him and his uh administration officials spoke. I mean, I'm just sitting here, VJ, watching that. You know, you've you've covered so many US wars, including the occupation of Iraq. If you want to run the Venezuelan government, run a country of 30 million people, you're going to have to put tens of thousands, if not like a hundred thousand US soldiers on the ground and occupy it, because Venezuela is full of millions of people who are pro-revolution, who are Chavistas, and who certainly won't roll over and just allow Trump or America to run their country or, you know, give them their oil for free. So, I'm just curious your thoughts on the idea of the US running the Venezuelan government, as Trump said, and staying, he used the word staying, until a safe transition has been reached.
Well, the most important part of that statement is the acknowledgment that the preferred heir, Maria Corina Machado, who was given the Nobel Peace Prize last year, is not ready to take over. I mean, that that is a real slap against the Venezuelan opposition. And one of the interesting bits of timing is the Venezuelan National Assembly is to reconvene on the 5th of January. The election was held in May last year. That assembly sits from 2026 to 2031. And the opposition in the assembly is led by veteran opposition politician Henry Capriles. I think there's an understanding that when that opposition comes into the assembly, Capriles dislikes Maria Corina Machado, the opposition once again is going to fray. The United States not prepared to risk its fortunes on a fractious opposition. So Mr. Trump is saying something that he said, in fact, in criticism of George W. Bush at the time when the United States overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. What he said was, was why didn't the United States just go in and take the oil? Why didn't the United States go in and run the country directly and just pay for the occupation with the oil money? I mean, that was his criticism of George W. Bush. People misunderstand that, saying Mr. Trump was against wars. Um, you know, no American president has been against a war. The legal justification, and I use the word legal really very, very ironically, not in a, in a, in a, in a way that's, you know, alongside international law, but the US legal justification for all this was set by Barack Obama in 2015 when he signed an executive order on Venezuela. So Mr. Trump is basically just saying, "I'd do it. I'd do Venezuela, which Barack Obama has basically said is legal for the United States to come in and do what it wants. I'd do it better than George W. Bush did it in Iraq." Now, you asked a very important question. Does the United States have the the the internal ability to actually send enough people to go and then colonize, um, you know, Venezuela? I think that's the history has shown us. United States very good at bombing countries, indeed very good even at going in and snatching a leader. It's not the first time in Latin America. They did that already with Manuel Noriega in 1989 in Panama. The United States very good at destroying countries. Very bad at governing them. It showed that in in Afghanistan, showed that in Iraq. United States didn't even try in Syria. Handed it over to al-Qaeda. Didn't even try in Libya. I doubt very much they'll try in Venezuela. I think these are empty words for Mr. Trump. But I, I have to be very cautious about saying that because a lot of things Trump says sound like empty words and then he goes, goes ahead and does it anyway. So they may try to govern, um, Venezuela, but it'll end up a worse fiasco for them than Iraq.
You know, BJ, I think you bring up a lot of really important points. And one element is that, yeah, of course, this has happened before in terms of the US going in and snatching presidents, but actually doing direct military strikes on South America is unprecedented. Um, and even in the military buildup that we saw since August, the strikes on boats in the Caribbean, it still seemed like they won't, they won't actually do something against, you know, a land strike against Venezuela. That they have. And it, it is an unprecedented moment. Why Venezuela and why now? And for you, what is next? Does this open the door to more attacks like this?
Well, I mean, if you read Trump's national security strategy, it's really laid out very clearly. Um, Trump basically says there that the rest of the world is going to be hard for the United States to directly control. But the Western Hemisphere, what they call the Western Hemisphere, must be taken in hand. And there Trump directly writes again, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the doctrine against Bolivarianism. By Bolivarianism, I mean the original Simon Bolivar, you know, the original fellow in in the in the 1810s. Um, the Monroe Doctrine said that the Bolivarian push across Latin America had to be put back in the bottle. And Trump in 2025 says that there's a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The Trump corollary is, use whatever force you want, whatever means you want, exercise the Monroe Doctrine. It's very interesting you bring up the boats in the Caribbean. You know, I, I was, uh, for whatever reason, awake at 3:00 in the morning, Santiago time, and I was texting with people in Caracas. In fact, somebody live-streamed the bombing with me. It was a very surreal moment, I would say. I, I felt very awkward about about seeing that, um, in that way. But at any rate, when I was watching that, the first thing that crossed my mind was my sense that when the United States announced that they had moved their E8 Growlers, E18G Growlers, uh, to Puerto Rico, these are electronic jamming aircrafts. When they had moved these aircrafts to Puerto Rico, I read that report in in one of the the Stars and Stripes magazines. And I thought, well, you know, that's interesting, but I wonder what's going on. Well, look, they have the most sophisticated electronic jamming systems, the ALQ249. That's the most publicly available one. It's very likely that the United States, whose military power is frequently underestimated, have the capacity to just paralyze all kinds of air defense systems. You know, I, I always found Seymour Hersh's article about the capture of Osama bin Laden in 2011 to be a little off. I don't really think that the Pakistani military allowed themselves to be so badly humiliated. I think the United States had jamming systems in place. They sent in those two Blackhawk helicopters, grabbed Bin Laden and and came out. Very similar operation here, by the way, except they did it with a lot more noise, a lot more distracting bombardments in different parts of the country. They knew exactly where Mr. Maduro was. They, they know exactly where everybody is. For God's sake, people wake up. The Israelis knew where all mid-level Hezbollah people were and they blew up their their pages. I mean, their electronic systems should never be underestimated. Imperialism has incredible power to destroy. Beyond that, um, you know, what they will do, one doesn't know. This is part of their their ability to exercise the Monroe Doctrine. They want to destabilize Venezuela. They would like this government to be weakened now. They would like to see some sort of transition. They would like to see this have a knock-on effect, which is that the governments of Nicaragua and Cuba sort of self-emulate without Venezuela in the picture. That's what they'd like to see. Already, you know, there are right-wing governments all across South America. Right-wing governments creeping up Central America, including in Honduras, by hook or by crook, uh, in Honduras and in the Caribbean. The very fact that the government of Trinidad and Tobago, um, you know, with a semi-center-right prime minister, then turns out in this last phase to be a complete imperialist, uh, is is an extraordinary moment. You know, we are seeing the death of the pink tide and in this case being killed off and the birth of the angry tide. Um, you know, imagine what you must feel like to be José Antonio Kast in Chile, waiting to be inaugurated, watching the United States do this in Venezuela. You feel like now in Chile, you can do anything. Nayib Bukele in El Salvador is watching this on television saying, now I can do anything. And there's elections this year in both Brazil and in Colombia. And I tell you something, people should not be too comfortable about the fact that Gustavo Petro is the president of Colombia. He cannot run again by Colombian law. But the next president of Colombia might well be Vicky Dávila. And God help the Colombian people. In Brazil, still people are feeling like, "Oh, there's no way that Lula can lose." I don't think you should be so confident that Lula can win. And even if Lula does win, the Senate will be captured by the Bolsonaristas. That means from as low down as the southern cone all the way up to the border of Mexico, you, you have a fire-breathing right wing in power. And getting rid of Nicolás Maduro in this brutal, brutal, illegal way is just one, one small way to move a piece on a chessboard. And Mr. Trump exercising the Monroe Doctrine through the Trump corollary is pushing US power in a way we haven't seen, at least not in my lifetime.
No, I think those are extraordinarily important points, VJ. And I think to talk about the geopolitical nature of it, not simply just an issue over resources, but the use and distribution of resources to help people. And how the US does not want that in any context. And, you know, I mean, maybe we can, I mean, they're dressing the whole thing up with the drugs thing. But I would say over the past couple months, they've been pretty open themselves. I want to try to bring up a tweet from Steven Miller that I think is important. You know, he says, "American sweat, ingenuity, and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." I don't want to give him too much air time. But the reason I wanted to bring this up specifically, VJ, is because this is the exact same argument that the British made about Mossadegh in Iran, that we built the oil industry in Iran and thus it belongs to us and they have no right to nationalize it. And, and I guess I just want your thoughts on that, what to me seems amazing, you know, confluence here of colonialist logic.
Well, firstly, it's very important to say that Hugo Chávez's first government did not nationalize the oil. I mean, it's important to say he wins the presidential election in 1998 with a mandate to improve the people's condition of life. They pass a new constitution in 1999 mandating improve the people's life. And then there's a democratic constitution, uh, democratic law passed in 2001, the Hydrocarbons Law, which says that Venezuela should have more say over the surplus based on on the oil extracted. Chevron understands that, you know, they're playing ball and decides to negotiate with the Venezuelan government. ExxonMobil goes nuts about this, you know, and and Canadian mining companies, Barrick Gold, led by Peter Monk. Peter Monk writes in the Canadian press saying Hugo Chávez should be overthrown. There's a coup attempt against Chávez in 2002, right after the Hydrocarbons Law. It's not a, you don't need Steven Miller around to say these things. Steven Miller is a [ __ ]. This has been a longstanding part of US policy that this oil is US oil. Why should ExxonMobil's oil have been taken? And remember, Trump's first secretary of state was Rex Tillerson, former CEO of of ExxonMobil. And and it was it was actually Rex Tillerson who engineered ExxonMobil's confrontation between Guyana and Venezuela over the Essequibo region. I mean, they've been angry about this for a very long time. They want that oil back. And it's important to tell people who are going to go and say silly things on social media, the United States doesn't need oil. It's an oil exporter. The United States wants to control the oil. The United States wants to control the oil. It's a supremely important resource. And also they don't want the Bolivarian revolution to be using the oil to improve the conditions of life for people in the Caribbean through Petrocaribe, which for a brief period of time helped the people of Haiti. They don't want the proceeds of the oil to be used to help left-wing movements across Latin America, indeed around the world. Don't forget that it was Hugo Chávez who in 2003 said, "We don't want no US imperialism." The first time after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hugo Chávez joining Fidel Castro in a global, um, you know, campaign against imperialism. Meanwhile, it was in fact about six, seven years later for us to listen to the Russians and the Chinese say, "We, we don't want a single master in the world." Chávez was saying this in 2003. Goes to the United Nations and says, "I can smell sulfur here" after George W. Bush has spoken. Now, it's important to remember that what Steven Miller tweets, "This is our oil, we want it back," has been the basis of US policy from the 2001 hydrocarbon law to the present, extraordinarily consistent policy that has gone from the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, blah, blah, blah.
Do you want to, Zoe, before we let VJ go, do you want to top that off with anything?
I mean, VJ says it all. And I think everyone, I really encourage everyone to read his report that he wrote with Taroa. Um, also VJ, your reports on the angry tide. I think we really have to situate ourselves in exactly what you're saying, in the fact that the region is changing rapidly. Um, and the politics of the region are changing rapidly, and we have to take it seriously.
I just want to make a quick plug for hyperimperialism, the study done by Tricontinental that I think gives critical background. So go to the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and check out all that work.
Well, it's so great to be with you guys again. What a day. Nicolás Maduro is my friend. I feel terribly for him. Uh, you know, when when he was told by Chávez, you know, Nicolás, you have to take over after I'm dead. Nicolás Maduro started crying and saying, "Nobody can take over from you. Please don't put this mantle on me." It's an extremely humble man. He was a, he, he enters politics as a union leader of the bus drivers. He himself was a bus driver. Then he goes off and becomes a politician because Chávez found him in the union movement, becomes a foreign minister. He is a reluctant politician. And I feel terribly for him as a person. There is nothing in his character that suggests this kind of of of treatment of him. And and I really want to say that, guys, because I know that lots of people on the left will turn their back on Nicolás Maduro tomorrow and Celia Flores. And I refuse to do so.
Yes. No, absolutely. And we appreciate everything you bring to the table, VJ, and everything that you all are doing at Tricontinental to help give us the appropriate context and also the immediate analysis, as it were.