My Take | The United States returns to gunboat diplomacy, 21st-century style
China’s consensual approach and win-win multilateralism will, in the long run, prevail in Latin America over US militant bullying
Donald Trump doesn’t even bother to hide his true intentions. The propaganda, by active commission and omission, has been left to the mainstream American news media operating on autopilot.
The United States is going to be “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry, the president told Fox News after authorising the American military to launch a coup d’etat and kidnap its head of state, President Nicolas Maduro.
“We have the greatest oil companies in the world, the biggest, the greatest, and we’re going to be very much involved,” Trump said.
To understand Washington’s latest illegal act of war under international law against another sovereign country, you only need two words: oil and intimidation. More specifically, it’s all about exploiting Venezuela’s oil and intimidating its neighbours and others across the entire western hemisphere into submission. That also includes Canada, which Trump has repeatedly said should be America’s 51st state, Greenland, which he wants to take over from Denmark, and Mexico.
Contrast that with China’s friendly, consensual and non-coercive approach to business and diplomacy in the region, and you wonder who’s really destroying the so-called international rules-based order.
Venezuela holds the world’s largest oil reserves – or 17 per cent of global reserves – exceeding even Saudi Arabia, according to the London-based Energy Institute. That makes it strategically important, but also another example of the “resource curse”. The US was once its biggest oil buyer but following sanctions and bans, China took its place in the past decade.