How Trump’s targeting of Venezuela and South Africa appears supremacist

The White supremacists pushed out Barrister Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi from a train compartment in South Africa in June 1893 for being an Indian and despite holding a valid first-class ticket. In 1915, he returned to India as Mahatma and inspired the “Third World” to decolonise itself.

Without the two World Wars (1914-18 and 1939-45), which crippled the West, given a chance, the Whites would have probably still been ruling their colonies. For these colonies served as their captive markets, and their natural and human resources funded their Industrial Revolution. According to renowned economist Utsa Patnaik, for example, Britain extracted $45 trillion (in today’s terms) worth of resources between 1765 and 1938 from India alone.

Although many still refuse to admit it, being politically incorrect, the societal undercurrents of this strong White bias against the Blacks, indeed all ‘coloured’ people including the Hispanics, continue in most Western countries. America is no exception. Look at how US President Donald Trump is firing on all cylinders against immigrants and others.

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Trump is trying to re-establish the White supremacy worldwide—he is Making America Great Again (Maga)! Europe and Nato no longer count as much as they did earlier. White supremacism and Black subjugation, besides the recolonisation of former colonies, are apparently emerging as key policies in the US-led West.

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Ironically, Abraham Lincoln was, in 1860, the first president of the Republican Party Trump leads now. It became an anti-slavery party, opposing the expansion of slavery into new western territories of the US.

That trend has reversed. Now the Democratic Party has more Black leaders.

The Black population in the US now stands at nearly 50 million (15 per cent of the total 342 million), mostly supporting the Democratic Party. The Trump administration is an almost all-White dispensation. The only two high-ranking exceptions known are Scott Turner, US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Susie Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff.

Trump, grandson of a German immigrant, is particularly peeved at an independent South Africa, which was the worst example of a Western supremacist-cum-colonial mindset. Apartheid became its official policy in 1948 until Nelson Mandela, after a 27-year-long imprisonment, became its first Black president in 1994, ending the Afrikaner rule.

Afrikaners emerged as a Southern African ethnic group descended from predominantly Dutch settlers who arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th century, along with smaller numbers of French Huguenot, German, and other European immigrants. They developed Afrikaans, a West Germanic language originating from Dutch, spoken primarily in South Africa and Namibia, and it is one of South Africa’s 11 official languages. Slowly, they dominated South Africa’s politics and economy. The Afrikaner-led government implemented the apartheid system of racial segregation until 1994.

In the colonial era, the West simply colonised the “Third World” to exploit its resources for its own development. Might was right. No arguments. No questions asked; no answers given.

In the 21st century, however, a new strategy for colonisation—or recolonisation—has emerged. As the phrase goes, ‘Give a dog a bad name and hang him,’ the West is trying to recolonise its former colonies or scout for new exploitable targets by defaming them with a beautiful wordplay—this word, beautiful, is a Trump favourite!—before hanging them.

As part of this evolving design, the US-led West needs resources and is looking for issues and sacrificial lambs. Alleged ‘violations’ of human rights, or even terror favour, are outdated bogies—or Trump would have hanged Pakistan first!

This is what the West did when it invaded Afghanistan (2001) looking for ‘terrorists’ it had funded and trained and Iraq (2003) under the guise of finding “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD). It is a long list; the West toppled several unfavourable regimes—democratic or dictatorship—by inventing reasons. The US is trying to recontrol the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan for the same reason.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also falls in this category of ‘recolonisation.’ Even after the fall of the Soviet Union (1991), for example, Nato continued its Cold War strategy to encircle Russia and enrolled Ukraine for it. This alerted Russia, and it tried to resuscitate the former USSR minus Communism in a new format.

Eastern Ukraine is resource-rich, and control over these valuable assets is a significant strategic and economic factor in Russia’s ongoing aggression. The regions currently under Russian occupation or near the front lines contain vast deposits of crucial minerals and energy reserves. Since its February 2022 invasion, Russia has seized control of over $12.5 trillion worth of Ukrainian mineral and gas assets—and is refusing to give up.

This year, China also proved how a monopoly over rare earths and critical minerals can force other countries, including the US, to fall in line. Since Xi Jinping became president in 2013, China has laid debt traps, floated the transcontinental Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) plan, enrolled around 150 countries, and sought to take control of natural resources and other assets across continents.

This is what Trump is also doing.

As soon as he returned to the White House in January 2025 for a second presidential term, he targeted Panama, Greenland, the Gulf of Mexico, Canada, and more. Writing in The New York Times (November 17, 2025), Jack Nicas called this policy the “Donroe Doctrine,” after the famous Monroe Doctrine (1823) that warned European powers against further colonisation or interference in the Americas.

In a similar fashion, in the current context, South Africa (though in Africa and in the Eastern Hemisphere) and Venezuela fit well as potential targets into this sharp shift in US foreign policy.

When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the White House in May 2025, Trump ‘complained’ about Pretoria’s failure to act against those who allegedly tortured the Afrikaners. Trump even gave him ‘evidence’, which were merely print media clippings! Ramaphosa rejected his claims.

Then the US President used the bogey of the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Johannesburg (November 22-23, 2025) to arm-twist Ramaphosa, announcing that he (Trump) would boycott the event. Moreover, he did not even invite South Africa to next year’s G20 event scheduled in Miami.

In a post on his social media handle, Truth Social, Trump wrote, “The United States did not attend the G20 in South Africa because the South African Government refuses to acknowledge or address the horrific human rights abuses endured by Afrikaners and other descendants of Dutch, French, and German settlers.”

“To put it more bluntly, they are killing White people and randomly allowing their farms to be taken from them.”

Clearly, he tried to elicit support from the Dutch, French, and German people as well!

Pretoria’s other crime was its support for suing Israel in the International Criminal Court (ICC) on the Palestinian issue and ‘crimes against humanity’.

South Africa’s natural resources include a vast array of minerals like gold, platinum, diamonds, iron ore, coal, manganese, and uranium, making it a global mining powerhouse. It is also rich in resources like timber and sugar, with significant agricultural and energy resources, particularly coal, which forms the backbone of its energy sector.

Venezuela is another favourite Trump target. America’s next-door Latin American neighbour has the world’s largest proven oil reserves of over 305 billion barrels, followed by Saudi Arabia (267 billion barrels) and Iran (206 billion barrels). In comparison, the US’ oil reserves are only 55 billion barrels, placing it ninth in the pecking order!

By accusing Venezuela of various ‘Trumped’-up charges, such as drug cartels, the US is trying to control it, directly or indirectly. If drug production were the biggest threat, Trump would have gone against Myanmar, Afghanistan (opium and heroin), and Columbia (cocaine). Of course, Venezuela is a major transit country for Columbian drugs. But Mexico, the Golden Triangle (Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos), and the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan) are likewise.

Initially, Trump also blamed Canada and China for the drug issue but has now cooled off! The two countries have also relented a bit—waiting for Trump to leave the White House for good in 2029!

(The author is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)