 "Why western media acts more pious than the Pope on Venezuela raid when even Trump insists that it’s all about oil")
It has been fascinating to observe American media cover the US raid on Venezuela. The CNN, for instance, has no love lost for Trump. This White House and the legacy media journalists share a seemingly hostile relationship. The current US president frequently calls channels such as CNN, MSNBC or New York Times “fake news”, and the administration has been notably aggressive in limiting media access to the state apparatus.
And yet, since the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, the so-called liberal media outlets have been running countless stories on how the Venezuelan President is a devil incarnate, implying that the POTUS was morally justified in violating Venezuela’s sovereignty and decapitating the country through a show of military force.
The US military operation, codenamed ‘Operation Absolute Resolve’, involved bombing military installations across Venezuela, its naval and air bases, killing approximately 80 people and forcibly removing Maduro and his wife from Venezuelan territory without congressional authorization or UN Security Council approval.
While the audacious violation of sovereignty of a major South American state has drawn widespread condemnation from world leaders (never mind the squirming Europeans) who have characterized the raid as a show of latter-day imperialism without a shred of moral or legal authority, American media has been busy employing a range of rhetorical strategies that recasts the abduction of a foreign head of state and the planned loot and plunder of Venezuela as a ‘law enforcement operation’ under the long arm of America’s exterritorial law.
The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal calls it “an act of hemispheric hygiene,” pushing the imagery of disinfection, dehumanizing the Venezuelan president and comparing him with disease-bearing bug. The implication is that by toppling Maduro, Trump has done Venezuela and the region a favour.
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View AllWith admirable brazenness, the WSJ goes on to write, Maduro’s “capture is a demonstration of Mr. Trump’s declaration to keep America’s enemies from spreading chaos in the Western Hemisphere. It’s the ‘Trump corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine… All of this makes the military action justified, despite cries from the left that it is illegal under international law.”
‘Donroe Doctrine’, that WSJ refers to, is the dubious iteration of the 19th century Monroe Doctrine that sought to prevent European interference in American backyard. This new version is an attempted institutionalization of US muscle flexing in the Western Hemisphere. Trump wants a free hand to bully and extort smaller countries in the region under the guise of this new dodgy ‘doctrine’. The White House, in fact, has been quite unapologetic.
An official handle of the Trump White House has been posting on social media a cartoon of Trump holding a club that says “DONROE Doctrine” as he is stomping on the Western Hemisphere. There is no space for ambiguity.
And yet, while the US President has been acting like a Mafioso, more-pious-than-the-Pope American media has been at the forefront in attaching strategic legitimacy to the extortionist behaviour of a gangster regime in the White House. The spectre is fascinating!
If you think Trump’s leader-change operation through raw coercive force in Venezuela is a flagrant violation of all international rules and laws, WSJ columnist Walter Russell Mead is here to tell you that heads of states, at least those in the Western Hemisphere, should get used to the fact that they have no agency or sovereignty, and are nothing but seat-warmers until Trump politely asks them to leave. According to Mead, resisting Trump is not only futile, but a serious mistake.
“Operation Absolute Resolve demonstrated again that the worst mistake a world leader can make is to underestimate Donald Trump. Immured in his Brooklyn cell, Nicolás Maduro will have ample time to reflect on how much better his life would have been had he taken Washington’s warnings seriously and slipped into a luxurious exile. In Cuba, Nicaragua and beyond, other leaders will ask themselves whether the time has come for a graceful retirement.”
Trump is adamant that he wants the oil. He has long been eyeing Venezuela’s vast energy reserves. He cares two hoots about political correctness. In a press conference post the raid, a triumphant Trump told reporters, “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground” and the money made would go to American oil companies and “to the United States in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”
But the media insists otherwise. WSJ editorial writes, “Mr. Trump talked about ‘the oil’ far too much, which sends a message that the US purpose is largely mercenary. Venezuela will benefit if US oil companies modernize the country’s decrepit oil production facilities. But the US doesn’t need Venezuelan oil.”
The American media has no compunctions with Trump’s imperial gangsterism. It probably feels a slight discomfort at his blatant explicitness. Take the oil, just don’t talk about it too much. Trump insists he wants nothing but the oil, but WSJ would persuade us otherwise. “The greatest benefit of a democratic, pro-American Venezuela is what it means for freedom and stability in the region,” says the editorial. One must doff the hat at the unbridled shamelessness. To give Trump his due, he is at least more honest about his purpose.
Whatever objections have been raised are mostly procedural, without calling into question the act of colonial aggression displayed by a predatory US President who talks and acts like a mafia boss. It is a spectacular curving of narrative to confer legitimacy on a patently thuggish and illegitimate raid that violates several UN charters and even American laws. And yet on to the American media has fallen the heavy task of relentless propaganda to sanitize the operation and frame it within the context of national security.
They must, because Trump himself has no moral compunctions over his smash and grab tactics to steal Venezuelan oil or abducting Maduro. In his long and controversial career as a real estate magnet, a reality TV star and a debauch whose name has been inalienably associated with a paedophile, Trump has led a uniquely amoral life unrestrained by ethical considerations, feelings of guilt, regret or moral discomfort.
The US Department of Justice under Pam Bondi has been stitching up an elaborate fable to bring criminal charges against a foreign head of state, but Trump hasn’t bothered with any justifications. Venezuela possesses world’s biggest oil reserves, about 17%, and Trump wants to control the trade. And for good reason.
The US possesses a clutch of heavy-oil refineries along the Gulf coast that have fallen on hard days because they were meant to process dense crude, the likes of which abound in Venezuela. America’s shale oil is lighter and doesn’t need such processing, which is why America, being one of the largest oil producers in world, has had to import heavy crude to feed its refineries. Not anymore.
As The Guardian notes quoting an energy expert, “Most of Venezuela’s crude supply is heavy, sour oil, which if you’re a US refiner is one of the most ideal grades of crude you could ask for.” Trump’s raid on Venezuela and extraction of the unctuous, semi-solid tar could be just what the doctor ordered for the struggling refineries.
Trump’s logic is simple.
He wants the oil, and if the new Venezuelan president doesn’t give him “total access” to “oil and to other things in their country”, then acting President Delcy Rodríguez will “pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
As Trump said the other day, “We’re going to have our very large US oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so…”
Trump told Fox News that “we have to do it again [in other countries]. We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us… There’s nobody that has the capabilities that we have.”
He feels that since the US is the most powerful country in the world and boasts of the world’s most capable military, there is no reason why he shouldn’t raid Venezuela and seize its resources. Trump doesn’t think that it is illegal, illegitimate or forbidden to consider oil within Venezuelan or other countries’ territories in the region as America’s. Since he wields the biggest stick, Trump feels justified in grabbing what he wants.
By dint of that ‘principle’, he thinks it fit to divvy up control of Venezuelan oil fields to American companies who received prior information of the raid even though lawmakers in the US Congress were kept in the dark.
Trump considers the Western Hemisphere as America’s de facto property, and countries within the region devoid of political independence, territorial integrity, right of self-determination, the right to choose their alliances or claims to their own resources. The trigger for Trump’s coercive action was ostensibly Maduro’s attempt to strike oil deals with China. Accordingly, Trump ‘reserves’ his unfettered right to dismiss any government that does not do his bidding, incarcerate any leader that dares to defy him and exert control over any sovereign country’s resources.
Asked whether he may have led America into a quagmire as George W Bush did in Iraq, Trump told an interviewer that “the difference between Iraq and this is that Bush didn’t keep the oil. We’re going to keep the oil.”
While Trump himself is crystal clear about his predatory and extortionist motives – he is now planning an imperialist invasion of Greenland – the media in America spins it as a “narco-terrorism indictment” or frames the forceful removal of a head of state as a ‘triumph of the American legal system’.
As The Washington Post writes in its editorial, “Maduro’s removal sends an important message to tin-pot dictators in Latin America and the world: Trump follows through.” The newspaper also sounds triumphalist over America’s military prowess. “What happened in Caracas was a clear reminder that America’s military, intelligence and cyber capabilities are second to none.” As if muscle flexing against a chronically weak opponent will send a chill down the spines of more capable adversaries.
But there’s an even more interesting revelation. The Post editorial reveals that the “Trump administration says it did not give anyone in the legislative branch a heads up because of concerns about leaks…” Whether the legislative branch had any idea or not of the impending raid, some American media outlets were reportedly aware of it, and in an extraordinary display of consensus over issues of national security, the New York Times and Washington Post “held off publishing details of the ‘secret’ US raid on Venezuela to avoid endangering US troops”, reports Semafor.
As the Semafor report points out, “for all the strain in the relationship between the Trump administration and the news media, the decision by several major US news outlets to hold the news reflected the time-honored deference that some major news outlets afford the White House regarding secretive US military operations.”
Such coordination amid hostility is unthinkable in most countries. This unstated coordination has also been evident in the way the American media has dutifully – even when such deference wasn’t needed – held firm onto the Trump administration line that the raid was allegedly against narco-terrorism and drug trafficking even when Trump was adamant that it was a mercenary pursuit of oil.
The question to ponder is why the American media, that fashions itself as a guardian of liberal values, liberty and human rights around the world, falls in line at home as it did on several occasions such as Iraq war (amplifying the bogey of WMD) or the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Regardless of the immorality or illegality of Trump’s predatory foreign policy, it is evident that the western media will inevitably take on the role of the ‘guardians of the Empire.’ The hostility to Trump is real but constrained to matters that don’t threaten fundamental power structures. We have seen this macabre drama play out through history. Even if they dislike the person in the White House, they believe in the primacy of American power. To them, Maduro is a ‘dictator’ and the US is the “global policeman.”
Criticizing the raid itself would require the media outlets to challenge the very idea of American exceptionalism and militate against their ideological framework, and more importantly, corporate structure. The corporations that own these outlets are part of the same elite financial circles that benefit from US global hegemony.
It is, of course, different when it comes to Russia or China, who are framed as ‘strategic rivals’ and going after them is intrinsic to the idea of American primacy. India is often criticized on internal issues like human rights or secularism because it allows western media the chance to assert America’s “moral superiority.” The double standard toward India and China is not hypocrisy but strategy: undermining rivals while legitimising American power.
It’ll be interesting to observe the spin when Trump eventually invades and snatches Greenland.
(The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)
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