Which country is next? Quagmires ahoy! Yabbering about his next move is what the 79-year-old US reality TV president loves.
While attention seeking with grandiose incoherence is on-brand for the Home Alone 2 cameo actor, the distraction is certainly welcome.
Jeffery Epstein won’t disappear, and the US economy isn’t improving.
If the US media did their job, his lie that Venezuela traffics the opioid drug fentanyl to the US would be dispelled.
And pressure would be applied around why he pardoned former Honduran President Juan Hernandez in November, who was found guilty, and was serving time for conspiring with drug traffickers and using his government position to help hundreds of tons of cocaine enter the US.
Venezuela
Venezuela is home to 28 million people, around the same as Australia. Since 1958, it flirted with the idea that it could organise itself with democracy, and by 1976, it nationalised its natural resources. And that hurt the US and benefited China.
The ‘West is Best’ narrative, by the likes of Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, says that Venezuela couldn’t manage itself under socialism, so it needed to be toppled.
Latin American states have actually done better (in the long run) after a good ‘ol US invasion, he reckons.
The other perspective is that under gruelling sanctions by the US, any country would eventually find itself a ‘failed state’.
And all that oil can’t go to waste now, can it?
The US National Security Strategy
The US National Security Strategy was released last November at www.whitehouse.gov, and is only worthy of note because there isn’t a lot of Trump policy in writing.
It’s a 33-page document which outlines how great they think they are, and how important it is to preserve US interests above everyone else’s.
The justification for foreign invasions is on page 9.
It starts with a preface that ‘America’s founders laid down a clear preference for non-interventionism in the affairs of other nations’, yet argues, ‘for a country whose interests are as numerous and diverse as ours, rigid adherence to non-interventionalism is not possible.’
What’s the message for Australia in there?
There’s actually not much.
On page 23 it reads, ‘Given that one third of global shipping passes annually through the South China Sea, this has major implications for the US economy. Hence deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.
‘We will also harden and strengthen our military presence in the Western Pacific, while in our dealings with Taiwan and Australia we maintain our determined rhetoric on increased defence spending’.
Will Australia do as it’s told?
Hans Lovejoy, acting editor
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