Venezuela Readies for War while Biden Sleeps.

 I saw this article on "Bongino Reports" and I read it and some of the commenters criticized the article, I think for the politics rather than the accuracy.  I recognized quite a few things like the similarities between Saddam and Kuwait  and the invasion in 1990 that brought on Desert Storm and also The Falkland Islands and Argentina, where Argentina had a lot of internal issues and the junta there invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982 for  2 reasons, the first one was because they believed that the British wouldn't do anything because they were seen as weak and divided and the second was that Argentina had a lot of internal issues and wanted to use the invasion to distract the people and get them behind the Junta.  They failed on both accounts.  The Venezuelans see the United States as weak and distracted, and focused on Russia and Ukraine, and we have taken the eye off South America, and I believe that this will bite us in the ass.  What does everyone else think?

 

Venezuela Readies for War While Joe Biden Sleeps – The United States is a zombie empire abroad and a banana republic at home. On the world stage, Washington went from being the first among equals following the end of the Cold War; the sine qua non of the world system that it had helped to foster, to today being a cancerous growth to an international order trending toward multipolarity—specifically, a tripolar system in which China and Russia triangulate against the United States. 

Everywhere American decline, while still reversible (if a new American leadership can be elected in 2024), is seen and felt. Whereas the post-Cold War order was purportedly predicated upon the abandonment of territorial wars of aggrandizement and resource conflicts, the post-2022 world appears defined by such struggles. It began with Russia in Ukraine. The failure of the Western nations to either stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine or to find a peaceful settlement to the conflict has ensured that there will be no going back to the pre-2022 peace. 

Thanks to the listlessness of the Western powers and the dearth of decent leadership in those states (notably in America), every larger power that has a geopolitical axe to grind with its smaller, less powerful neighbors will seek to settle those disputes through the injudicious use of force. 

Using the Russian example in Ukraine (and possibly the Chinese example in Taiwan), autocrats everywhere are sharpening their knives as they ready to carve up their respective spheres of influence.

It is not just in the distant steppes of Eurasia or the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa where this terrible trend is occurring. It is right in the backyard of the United States. The kleptocratic socialist dictatorship under Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela has failed to thrive economically, politically, or socially. This, despite the fact that it possesses one of the world’s largest, easily accessible oil reserves. Heavily sanctioned by their American neighbor to the north and led by an incompetent ruling class, Venezuela has imploded. 

To arrest this implosion, Venezuela’s corrupt leadership wants to maximize their nation’s oil production output. Yet, PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil conglomerate, has proven unable to achieve the increased output quotas that the Maduro government has commanded of them. With the situation in Venezuela worsening for Maduro, the socialist dictatorship still has a large—and modernizing—military that it could deploy to change the outlook of the country’s oil production profile. 

No, this won’t be done by discovering new sources of oil within Venezuela’s borders. It will be accomplished instead by annexing their smaller neighbor, Guyana. 

The situation in South America looks eerily similar to the situation that had occurred in the run up to Saddam Hussein’s unlawful invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Just as in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, a larger oil-producing state (Venezuela, in this case), seeks to expand both its territory and its control over the region’s vast oil wealth. Caracas has set for itself this objective, as Saddam did, to break out of Western sanctions, to improve Venezuela’s economy, and to enhance Venezuela’s geopolitical bargaining power in the wider region. Just as in 1990, when few believed that Saddam would invade Kuwait, few are paying attention to the situation between Venezuela and Guyana. 

This is especially true in Washington, which refuses to accept that the United States shares a massive land border with Latin America, as well as cultural connections via immigrants from the region, and deep financial and trade ties. A succession of Democratic and Republican administrations and congresses have obsessed about Ukraine’s borders or the Middle East at the expense of America’s region of the world. 

During the last 20 years, Latin America has steadily destabilized. Many countries there have turned away from the United States and sought closer ties with US rivals, such as China, Russia, and Iran, too. These trends are now coalescing into a dangerous admixture where Venezuela has the time, resources, and willpower to invade their prosperous, smaller, and militarily weaker neighbor. 

In 2018, Brazil intercepted a detailed invasion plan that the Venezuelan military had concocted to take the oil rich Essequibo Island. The island is the crux of a major border dispute that has ripped at the heart of Venezuela-Guyana relations. Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro argues that Guyana has ceded control of this disputed, oil-rich territory to ExxonMobil. Caracas believes this is a violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty and risks depriving Venezuela of the oil it needs to create prosperity for its ailing economy. 

At the time that Brazil leaked the Venezuelan war plan, most in Washington were reassured that the Brazilians would make bold moves to deter any Venezuelan invasion of Guyana. But that was when the Right-wing, pro-American Jair Bolsonaro was running Brazil. 

Since that time, Brazil has been roiled by the economic and societal damage that the COVID-19 pandemic created in the region as well as by a recent controversial election in which Bolsonaro was kicked from office and replaced by his socialist predecessor, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. And under Lula’s command, there is little hope that Brazil’s sizable military could be counted on to stop a Venezuelan invasion of Guyana. 

In fact, given that Lula of Brazil and Maduro of Venezuela share many ideological beliefs, the Americans are going to find that they’ve got no partner on the ground in South America who could reliably intervene to prevent what will surely be a destructive invasion of a major oil-producing state, like Guyana. 

What’s more, Venezuela’s leadership thinks the Americans are distracted and weak. There will be little deterring Venezuela from initiating a territorial war for control over Guyana’s vast oil wealth.

The ramifications to the world from this pending war will be devastating. The new international system will be built upon competition and territorial aggrandizement by larger powers against their weaker neighbors. Any invasion of Guyana, a leading oil producer in the Western Hemisphere—especially by another global oil producer, like Venezuela—will cause the international price of oil to skyrocket. 

It will be yet another drag on the American economy as consumers feel the pinch at the pump at a time when our finances are already stretched. This will further empower Venezuela, a country that is both inimical to the United States and is disturbingly close to the Russian Federation. It will also likely bring both China and Iran deeper into Latin America—none of which bode well for American security in its own hemisphere. 

Washington must prepare for a Venezuelan invasion of Guyana. Other than the Colombians, the United States has no friends in the region upon which it can rely to prevent such a devastating conflict. And the Colombians are not powerful enough to prevent the coming conflict. 

More dangerously, with Washington overextended in Eurasia and the Middle East, it cannot even muster the resources needed to put the fear of God into Maduro’s forces. American leaders must refocus their attention to this region now before a major resource war erupts in our backyard. Unless the United States can rally an international coalition to deter Venezuela soon, a major war will have erupted right on the United States’ doorstep with catastrophic consequences. 

Is anyone in the Biden Administration paying attention? Maybe they could send Vice-President Kamala Harris to make another nonsensical speech that aggravates everyone and solves nothing.