At my age, I should have known better: Expecting the worst from idealistic American liberal Democrats will always prove you prescient and wise. But giving them the benefit of the doubt or expecting any decision from them that is decent, humane or simple common sense will blow up in your face every time.

On December 10, I suggested in these columns that President-elect Joe Biden might at least improve on the wicked, hypocritical, repressive and ruinous U.S. policies towards Latin America that he inherited from his predecessor Donald Trump. Biden, I suggested, could end Trump’s embarrassing and truly witless efforts to topple the repeatedly democratically elected government of Venezuela and replace President Nicolas Maduro with the worthless and more than slightly sinister Juan Guaido.

This should have been a no-brainer even for Biden since Guaido had been personally handpicked as Washington’s latest jaw-jutting, fake leader and favorite boy toy of the moment by then-national security adviser John Bolton, a figure so extreme, stupid and incompetent that even Republicans were embarrassed by him.

But no, Biden, showing exactly the same legendary independence of mind and intellect that has characterized him since he first became a United States Senator 48 years ago, is boldly going exactly where Bolton insisted on treading. He is doubling down on backing Guaido and maintaining the embarrassing fiction that he is the true president of Venezuela.

Biden could easily have quietly dropped the ridiculous Guaido – who has also been enthusiastically championed by such Democrat bogeymen as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and Senators Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham – right wing Republicans all.

Biden’s decision is at least totally consistent with his patterns of behavior in decision-making throughout his long career, past and present. After all, he signed on to the U.S. economic war to impoverish and ruin the people of Venezuela with the first imposition of economic sanctions in 2014 by his then-boss, President Barack Obama.

Biden’s eagerness – without losing a second’s sleep – about the morality of toppling the democratically elected leader of an independent nation halfway around the world from Washington was already clear in his equally enthusiastic support for the Maidan coup that to violently tippled democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014 in what Wikipedia now farcically calls “The Revolution of Dignity.”

And now, of course, Biden is even, insanely, trying to meddle in the internal political affairs of a thermonuclear superpower by lecturing President Vladimir Putin on what to do about Akexei Navalny, whom Biden and his foreign policy clowns (sorry – I should have written “team” I suppose) have clearly chosen as their Guaido clone to dismantle Russia.

Biden, like the 19th century fast-fading last Bourbon kings of France, in Talleyrand’s famous epigram, has remembered nothing and forgotten nothing. Only last week, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Oxford University personal favorite Myanmar Prime Minister Aung San Suu Kyi was toppled by the country’s armed forces after a shamelessly manipulated election “victory.” Perhaps Biden felt a particular personal empathy with her.

But not all of “the indispensable hyper-power’s” irresistible powers of influence and persuasion nor all the shining example of perfect democracy it continues to provide to the rest of the human race kept Suu Kyi in power for an extra minute. And not all of Washington’s huffing and puffing looks remotely likely to restore her to her old pretensions of office.

Guaido, Suu Kyi and Navalny are all so high on their opium dreams of democratic righteousness, global acclaim and coming total power that they will likely never wake up to the simple reality that betting on Joe Biden to dynamically propel them to victory is like booking a steerage class sailing ticket on the “Titanic.”

However, Biden’s typically anal-reactive decision to passively go on backing Guiado (sort of) may have wider and serious implications across South America.

First the continued economic and diplomatic war on Venezuela will continue to lock nations like Colombia, which have enormous problems of their own, locked into continued sterile and self-destructive isolation and confrontation with Venezuela, Biden and his secretary of state Antony Blinken will not allow them to have it any other way. Blinken’s phone conversation on January 30 with Colombian Foreign Minister Claudia Blum served notice of this.

Second, President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, a figure so personally reckless and inept an that he and he and his entourage even spread COVID-19 to Trump’s own inner circle on a visit to Florida, looks likely to be tolerated or even encouraged by the Biden team as he continues to run the great nation of Brazil and its 200 million plus people into the ground.

Under Trump, U.S. political puppeteers negated the freely expressed will of Brazil’s people – the largest democracy in the history of South Latin America – in four honest, transparent free and fair elections that they wanted to be ruled by two successive social democratic presidents who preferred close association with Russia and China to the embrace of the United States.

But now Bolsonaro is openly and shamelessly manipulating upcoming legislative elections in Brazil to lock the political infrastructure of his dictatorship into place for a new term. So far Biden has not uttered a breath of disapproval about these outrageous moves.

Early signals from Washington strongly indicate that Biden and Blinken will push for a fig leaf of “responsible” environmental promises to slow down the destruction of the Amazon rain forest in return for going ha long smoothly with Bolsonaro’s officials on everything else.

Of course, as long as modern suburban and city “Green” Democrats are concerned, hundreds of millions of real human beings can be fed to the wolves without regret every day as long as their environmental fantasies are still fed.

Only little Bolivia, boldly reasserting its genuine democratic heroic recent achievements under President Evo Morales and his worthy new successor Luis Arces, former minister of economy and public finance, looks like holding out in the short term against Biden’s malign upholding of Trump’s hemispheric status quo.

For the rest of Latin America, the outlook remains bleak.

Spun out by the US Congress and Wall Street Journal, the cynical deception is part of an assault on Venezuela’s legislative election, in which even opposition politicians were sanctioned for participating.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US corporate media declared Venezuela’s legislative elections a “sham” before results were even announced, opening a new front in the propaganda war on the besieged country and its leftist government.

Among the most blatant distortions deployed against President Nicolas Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) was a claim first advanced by Leopoldo López, the far-right, US-backed opposition leader who recently fled to Spain.

On Twitter, López tweeted a deceptively edited clip of Constituent Assembly President Diosdado Cabello addressing an election rally, and accused Cabello of “blackmailing the hungry people with food to force them” to vote for his governing party.

Los culpables de la catástrofe humanitaria que vive Venezuela, son tan miserables que en su desesperación por validar el FRAUDE del 6D, chantajean al pueblo hambriento con comida para obligarlos a ir al engaño pic.twitter.com/xNnJWkxbVg

— Leopoldo López (@leopoldolopez) November 30, 2020

López’s assertion was propagated by the Wall Street Journal’s Ryan Dube, who claimed in an article about Venezuela’s “sham” election that Cabello “threatened to withhold food handouts in a country where millions are going hungry.”

A bipartisan US congressional letter condemning Venezuela’s election as a “sham” also echoed the opposition leader’s dubious interpretation, stating, “the regime has threatened to withhold food from Venezuelans who do not vote in the sham elections.”

In their haste to shape a narrative delegitimizing Venezuela’s legislative elections, the US government and its loyal pack of corporate media stenographers have relied on López, a lead participant in at least two military coup attempts and a series of violent right-wing riots, as their house interpreter.

But the full statement by Cabello in its actual context tells an entirely different story. The complete speech, which López conveniently omitted, can be seen here.

Below is an English translation of the relevant section of Cabello’s speech, which followed a competition between men and women over who could shout the loudest:

The women won. Women always win, women always win and women are going to be at the forefront of this battle. I know that it is so. I know that it is the woman who is going to get up early and say at home, ‘Hey, get up and go to the [Carabobo voting center] because you have to go vote!’

Of course, and those who do not vote, do not eat. For those who do not vote, there is no food. Whoever does not vote, does not eat, a quarantine is applied there without eating. But the woman is going to be there because the woman is going to say to the son: ‘Look son, you did not live what I experienced. You have not suffered what I suffered when I was young.’

Here, the youth and workers, and the working brothers, correct me if it is true or a lie: Here they had no life at all, they were persecuted. More than 11,000 dead, there are still 3,000 disappeared (…) there was no peace with misery, there was no peace with men, with women.

A close review of Cabello’s comments reveals both the devious nature of López and the cluelessness of Washington.

In addition to serving as the president of Venezuela’s Constituent Assembly, Diosdado Cabello is the host of Con El Mazo Dando, a popular Chavista broadcast variety show that serves as a platform for his unique brand of off-color humor.

With his story about Chavista women warning men that if they do not vote, they will not “eat,” Cabello was making a sexual double entendre that would be familiar to most Venezuelans. In Venezuelan culture, “comer” not only means “to eat,” but is also slang for having sex.

Thus Cabello was not threatening to withhold food to anyone; he was conjuring up a humorous and hypothetical scenario about revolutionary women denying sex to their husbands and boyfriends if they refused to vote.

His appeal was a Chavista-style blend of the Aristophanes play Lysistrada and the cringeworthy “Get Your Booty to the Polls” ad campaign Democratic Party supporters rolled out during the 2020 presidential election.

“This is a classic Diosdado [Cabello] provocation,” explained Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan journalist and political analyst who has contributed to The Grayzone. “His joke about those who don’t vote not eating has a double sense, because ‘no comer’ also means to not have sex with your partner. Diosdado always talks in these terms, so it’s funny to see it getting spun all week.”

Cabello’s rhetoric about the politics of food contained multiple layers of meaning. In his reference to mothers admonishing their sons to vote by reminding them of their country’s history – “Look son, you did not live what I experienced. You have not suffered what I suffered when I was young” – the Chavista leader was invoking the pre-Chavez era of neoliberalism when Venezuela’s poor and working class experienced abject misery, exclusion, and repression.

Cabello’s comments also represented a clear warning to his party’s base about the right-wing opposition’s plans for a program of massive economic privatization that would deprive the country’s most vulnerable sectors of basic provisions in the midst of a pandemic.

Indeed, nearly all of the opposition parties have campaigned to end the government’s CLAP program, which provides millions of Venezuelans with heavily subsidized food and sanitary supplies for little to no cost.

The US State Department has imposed sanctions on CLAP, and has kidnapped and allegedly  tortured one of its key architects, Alex Saab.

The meaning of Cabello’s actual remarks therefore represented the precise opposite of the deceptive interpretation put forward by López, the US government, and its corporate media mouthpieces. Beyond the humorous double meaning of his yarn, he was warning poor and working class Venezuelans that the opposition – not his government – would impose policies of economic deprivation if they achieved power.

For Venezuelans old enough to remember the 1989 massacre that the Venezuelan military carried out to crush the poor people’s uprising known as El Caracazo, the fear of a return to neoliberal governance is very real. This painful event was the culmination of a period of brutal repression that Cabello invoked when he recalled “more than 11,000 dead” and “still 3,000 disappeared.”

Throughout the pandemic and its periodic quarantines, Venezuela’s government has continued to supply its population with food and sanitary supplies through the CLAP program. The Grayzone has published several on-the-ground reports about the life-saving impact of this program, including with a visit to food fairs that municipal governments hold on a regular basis across the country.

The idea that the Venezuelan government could halt the CLAP program in the middle of a pandemic and crushing US economic blockade is simply unfathomable, and would likely lead to the kind of social unrest that the US government has tried and failed to provoke.

Did you know that in Venezuela,the government of The President @NicolasMaduro has ordered the home by home deployment of the #CLAP (a social program of subsidized food distribution) to serve the population during the #totalquarantine by #Covid_19?

#Venezuela. #COVID2019 pic.twitter.com/5wtInGdUWd

— ConsVEHongKongRAE (@ConsulRBVzlaHK) March 20, 2020

To complement the information war waged against Venezuela’s legislative election, Washington has worked to intimidate opposition politicians into boycotting the race. So far, the US State Department has sanctioned Luis Parra, a right-wing opposition leader and former ally of Guaidó, along with an array of other opposition politicians including leading members of the traditional social democratic party, Democratic Action.

Their crime? According to Mike Pompeo’s State Department, by simply participating in the election, these opposition figures were guilty of “rob[bing] the people of Venezuela of their right to choose their leaders.”

The State Department has simultaneously praised coup leader Juan Guaidó and the US-funded extremist factions for boycotting the elections, branding them “Venezuela’s champions for democracy.”

On election day, Guaidó urged Venezuelans to “Stay at home,” exploiting a Covid-19 safety hashtag to enact a naked campaign of voter suppression.

#QuedateEnCasa
Hoy será la mejor forma de rechazar el fraude

— Juan Guaidó (@jguaido) December 6, 2020

Washington has worked to undermine Venezuela’s election while President Donald Trump and his allies are still painting recent US election results as fraudulent.

The Congress, for its part, has gone months without authorizing any support for US citizens going hungry during a runaway pandemic.

And as lines for food assistance grow longer around the US and Trump increasingly retreats from public view, President-elect Joseph Biden has condemned what he called government “handouts” for desperate American citizens.

Watch Max Blumenthal’s report from the closing rally of the PSUV party in Caracas: 

Alan MACLEOD

AUnited Kingdom court has handed the Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro a major win today, overturning a previous ruling from a lower court that legitimized the British government’s decision to freeze Venezuelan government gold reserves held in the Bank of England. The English Court of Appeal ruled that the Conservative administration of Boris Johnson’s position that Juan Guaidó is the country’s legitimate ruler was far from equivocal, potentially paving the way for some $1.95 billion of the Central Bank of Venezuela’s gold to be accessed.

Following President Trump’s lead, in July, the U.K. government took the extraordinary step of derecognizing President Maduro in favor of the self-declared Guaidó, despite the fact that for nearly six months, he had not even been a member of his Popular Will party, let alone its leader. The move was labeled “highway robbery” by supporters of the Venezuelan government.

A nearly unheard of politician before his ascension to the role of head of the Venezuelan National Assembly (a post given out on a yearly rotational basis among all parties in the institution) in January 2019, Guaidó shocked the country by using his appointment to unilaterally declare himself president of the country. He then led a series of coup attempts throughout 2019 and 2020, the last of which involved paying Trump-linked American mercenaries to shoot their way into the presidential palace. However, the plan ended in complete disaster, with the Americans subsequently sentenced to 20 years of prison time.

Guaidó based his claim to power on Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution, which allows a president to be removed if he “abandons his position” or becomes “permanently unavailable to serve” for whatever reason. Maduro, however, had clearly not left his post. Regardless, if he had, Article 233 states that the vice-president would take charge until a new election by universal suffrage was held. Guaidó’s party was not even registered to stand in elections, having boycotted them the year previously under U.S. orders. The Trump administration had attempted to organize a total boycott from opposition parties, thereby undermining the process’ legitimacy, even threatening to sanction opposition presidential candidate Henri Falcón. Despite the partial boycott, turnout was relatively high. A larger percentage of the total electorate still cast their ballot for Maduro than Americans did for Trump in 2016 or Obama in 2012. The U.S. government is currently trying the same tactic in the upcoming December elections to the National Assembly, the State Department releasing a memo in September declaring that all opposition parties taking place were considered “puppet parties” participating in an “electoral charade,” and would therefore be sanctioned.

The United Kingdom and the United States have been leaders in a years-long economic and political campaign to oust Maduro from power, hitting the country with sanctions and attacking it politically. When Maduro attempted to use the impounded gold to buy humanitarian aid from the United Nations to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, the Johnson administration blocked it. Meanwhile, American sanctions, declared illegal by the U.N., have been responsible for over 100,000 Venezuelans’ death. The U.S. government is also continually provoking Venezuela militarily. Last week, it sent a warship — the U.S.S. William P. Lawrence — into the Caribbean, just 16 nautical miles from Venezuela’s coast. Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino described the action as “erratic and childish,” implying Trump was attempting to foment an “October Surprise” conflict to boost his reelection chances.

While the Maduro administration is very unpopular, the opposition has had little success shaking their image as elitists interested only in returning Venezuela to its former status as a U.S. client state. Guaidó is presented in Western media as a breath of fresh air and a break with that tradition. However, as the privately-educated son of an international airline pilot, and somebody who attended George Washington University (an impossible task for those who do not come from the elite), he has had little success persuading his countryfolk to get behind his vision for the country. A recent poll found that 3 percent of Venezuelans recognize him as president. Despite this, he has received virtually unanimous support in Washington and London. However, there is no doubt that today’s court ruling is a loss for him and a win for Maduro.

mintpressnews.com

Ben NORTON

Since the United States initiated a coup attempt against Venezuela’s elected, internationally recognized government in January 2019, the gang of far-right opposition activists the Donald Trump administration recognized as the country’s unelected representatives have racked up a series of embarrassing scandals.

Top aides of the US-appointed “interim president,” Juan Guaidó, blew hundreds of thousands of dollars of humanitarian aid money on luxury hotels, swanky clothes, and wild parties in Colombia. Violent pro-Guaidó coup-mongers then burnt USAID trucks in a failed putsch on the Venezuelan border, while falsely blaming the fire on the actual president in Caracas, Nicolás Maduro.

Guaidó’s coup gang subsequently set the stage for North American corporations to liquidate Venezuela’s most valuable foreign asset, Citgo. And in another bizarre PR stunt, Guaidó even tried to scale the fence outside of Venezuela’s National Assembly, after refusing to pass through the main entrance.

Nearly 18 months into the failed coup attempt, the scandals keep coming.

This July, the representative that the Venezuelan coup regime appointed to the United Kingdom, Vanessa Neumann, threatened several American and British journalists who criticized her on social media.

Neumann’s corporate consulting firm claimed to have reported these journalists to the FBI, and even baselessly accused them without a scintilla of evidence of being “part of an indicted transnational criminal network with a price on your head.”

These threats came just after Neumann’s official Twitter account declared, “Death to Nicolás Maduro.” Neumann subsequently claimed her profile was hacked, while intimidating the journalists who reported on her incendiary tweet.

How a deranged right-wing fanatic like this ended up as the person the British government recognizes as Venezuela’s official representative deserves some investigation.

Neumann’s bizarre tactics are part and parcel of a much longer pattern that has played out in British tabloids well before she was known as a faux diplomat. She is the product of a life of endless entitlement and a climate of right-wing zealotry that is characteristic of Venezuela’s powerful oligarchy. The parasitic class of business owners she hails from once controlled the oil-rich South American nation’s government and economy, and are desperate to wrest back control of the state from the leftist Chavista movement.

Neumann got her start working for companies owned by her plutocrat grandfather. She then established herself as an oil lobbyist, a corporate consultant, and a conservative pundit who shuffled through an array of American and British think tanks and media outlets that are hellbent on overthrowing Venezuela’s socialist government, subordinating its independent foreign policy to Washington, and re-privatizing the country’s substantial natural resources.

Her extensive work with large corporations and her elite position in Venezuela’s oligarchy is precisely why the country’s right-wing opposition tapped her in March 2019 to be the Guaidó coup regime’s official representative to Britain.

In her newfound position, Neumann has openly called on the UK to help overthrow Venezuela’s leftist Chavista government.

“We want Britain to help us liberate out country from tyranny. And we want to build a long-term relationship,” she stated bluntly in her capacity as coup ambassador. She added enticingly, “You could say there is a wonderful post-Brexit opportunity for Britain.”

In August 2019, Neumann went on to hold a friendly meeting with neoconservative US National Security Advisor John Bolton, celebrating the Strangelovian war hawk as “our ally in our fight for freedom.”

This investigation shows how Neumann’s career was carefully cultivated by hawkish Western government-funded think tanks and neoconservative groups which have worked to dubiously link Venezuela and other leftist forces in Latin America to the global drug trade, organized crime networks, and Lebanese Hezbollah.

A deep dive into Neumann’s almost cartoonishly elite past says it all about who exactly the United States and the European countries that recognize Guaidó want to restore as the rulers of Venezuela, and what their real priorities are.

Vanessa Neumann, scion of one of Venezuela’s most elite families

Vanessa Neumann is a dual citizen of the United States born into one of the wealthiest, most powerful families in all of Venezuela. She has spent much of her life outside of the country.

Neumann first entered the international limelight as the ex-girlfriend of Rolling Stones vocalist Mick Jagger. British tabloids described her as a “well-known socialite in London during the 1990s,” where Neumann earned the moniker, the “Cracker from Caracas.”

In a book she published in 2017, Neumann boasted of a Hollywood-style upbringing in Venezuela. She proudly recounted her life as a former “Caracas socialite,” who “was featured in society pages, magazine covers, and even cinema newsreels.”

This was before the rise of Venezuela’s popular socialist President Hugo Chávez and his transformative Bolivarian Revolution, which Neumann lamented brought an end to the privileges of the nation’s tiny oligarchic class.

Flaunting her extreme wealth in the book, Neumann recalled that, in the halcyon days before socialism, rich Venezuelans “used to make fun of Americans as poor, and there were frequent shopping flights from Caracas to Miami: fly out in the morning, shop all day, return to Caracas at night.” (Like many rich Americans, Neumann simultaneously tried to downplay the enormous wealth of elites like her by calling them “middle-class,” but they were anything but.)

Neumann’s lavish lifestyle was made possible due to the enormous wealth of her grandfather, one of the top oligarchs in Venezuela.

Oligarch Hans Neumann, from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to Venezuela to a private island

Vanessa’s grandfather, Hans Neumann, was a Czech-Venezuelan plutocrat eulogized in his obituary in the Associated Press as “one of the most prominent businessmen and media and arts patrons in Venezuela.”

Hans’ daughter Ariana Neumann – the aunt of Vanessa – penned a memoir about her father, in which she described the family patriarch as a “leading industrialist.” She recalled how, in Caracas, “Billboards around the city advertised his businesses: paints, building supplies, juices, yogurts. People read his newspapers. Every hardware shop bore the logo of his paint factory, Montana. He also headed charitable institutions, spear-headed educational programmes and was a patron of the arts.”

Hans Neumann had immigrated to Venezuela from his native Czechoslovakia in 1949. Before World War II, the Neumann family was wealthy and owned a profitable paint factory. But because they were of Jewish descent, many of Hans’ relatives were tragically murdered in the Holocaust.

Hans, on the other hand, decided to remain in Central Europe throughout World War II. Instead of fleeing or fighting against the Third Reich, his strategy was to stay in the belly of the beast, adopt a fake name, and even become a collaborator with the Nazi regime.

His daughter Ariana explained in her book that Hans Neumann moved to Berlin in 1943, at the peak of the war. There, using a pseudonym in the capital of the Third Reich, he got a job as a chemist at a paint factory that, as the Times of Israel described it, was “crucial to the German war effort and run by avowed Nazi party members.”

In her memoir, Ariana wrote that the German company where her father worked “was the principal manufacturer of protective polymer coatings for the German war machine.” Hans’ employer “had been given priority status” by the Nazi regime, she explained, because the “paint technology that they were working on was critical in reducing drag, vital for effective aircraft and missile development.”

Ariana also revealed that, while in Berlin during the war, Hans Neumann was even forced to work as a fireman for the Nazi regime, and he put out fires caused by British bombing raids.

She found an old ID card that Hans Neumann had used in order to work in the Third Reich, with a stamp of Hitler’s face.

Hans Neumann returned to Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II, but he still didn’t leave. Instead he reestablished his family paint company. It was not until 1949, years after the end of the horrors of the war, when a new communist government came to power in Czechoslovakia and planned to seize Neumann’s lucrative paint factory, that he parted for Venezuela.

Vanessa Neumann wrote in her book that her oligarch grandfather had “escaped Soviet oppression.” He had lived through the horrors of the genocidal Nazi regime, but apparently socialists were too much for him.

In capitalist Venezuela in the era of the Cold War, under a series of US-backed military dictatorships and right-wing governments, Hans amassed a fortune dominating the paint industry, chemical sales, and food imports.

Within 10 years of Hans’ arrival to Venezuela, he sent his son Michal, Vanessa’s father, to study at the elite Millbrook boarding school in New York (which also produced notorious neoconservative godfather William F. Buckley). In the United States, Michal Neumann married an affluent “American girl he met through her godparents, who worked for Shell Oil in Venezuela,” Vanessa wrote in her book.

In 1976, Hans Neumann bought 60 percent of the shares of the Mustique Company, making him the majority owner of his own private island in the West Indies called Mustique, a home to several dozen elite oligarchs like him. The private island’s website heroized Hans as “the man who saved Mustique” and “one of Venezuela’s greatest industrialists.”

By 1993, Hans was moving into retirement. Vanessa boasted in her book that the “Neumann family business,” the massive corporate conglomerate Corimon, was “listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1993, one of the first South American companies to do so.”

Vanessa continued to brag about her plutocratic family’s business ties. “We and other Venezuelan business leaders set up an MBA program, one not only modeled on Harvard’s, but actually under the guidance of [a] Harvard Business School professor,” she wrote.

Millions of dollars in inheritance

Vanessa Neumann moved from Venezuela to the United States in 1982 when she was around 10 years old. Since then, she has spent most of her life in the US and Europe. On her personal website, Neumann describes herself as a “Venezuelan-American entrepreneuse.”

Neumann has personally benefited greatly from her oligarchic family’s wealth, inheriting millions of dollars. This is a matter of public record.

Hans’ first wife, Milada Neumann, passed away in 1990. Milada, Vanessa’s grandmother, had divorced Hans after they moved to Venezuela, but retained millions of dollars in her own massive private estate.

Legal records show that, in 1996, a US court found that Milada Neumann’s estate had not paid more than $2 million of taxes that were required by law.

The US court estimated that, at the time of her death, Milada Neumann had $20 million worth of assets, including valuable real estate and art works, located in New York, along with an additional $15 million in Venezuela, for a total of $35 million in wealth.

In her will, Milada had apportioned 50 percent of her estate to go to her son Michal Neumann, Vanessa’s father. Milada also gave 25 percent of her health to her granddaughter Vanessa, and the remaining 25 percent to Vanessa’s brother Ricardo.

This means that, before taxation, Vanessa was to inherit $8.75 million in wealth, from her grandmother alone – not to mention the additional, enormous riches that she may have also received from her grandfather and father.

Extensive work with Western corporations and government-backed think tanks

Before she was rewarded with a sinecure as an ambassador for Venezuela’s right-wing coup regime, which holds absolutely zero institutional power inside the country, Vanessa Neumann was handed opportunity after opportunity on a silver platter.

Neumann spent her most formative years in the United States, where she completed all of her higher education, including 11 years at New York City’s Ivy League Columbia University, from 1991 to 1994 and then again from 1997 to 2004.

Neumann’s first three jobs, according to her LinkedIn page, were at companies owned by her oligarch grandfather, Hans.

Vanessa’s first job was at The Daily Journal, Venezuela’s only English-language newspaper at the time – which happened to be the personal property of Grandpa Hans.

The Mustique company, which runs the private island that Hans majority-owned, approvingly noted that the oligarch created media outlets “to voice opposition to the government of Hugo Chavez.”

In her book, Neumann wrote openly of how her grandfather used his newspapers to spread anti-Chávez propaganda. “After Chávez was elected, my grandfather cofounded another newspaper, called Tal Cual,” she wrote. “Tal Cual was designed to counter Chavismo, as the ideology of Hugo Chávez came to be known, and to be distributed in the poorer, pro-Chavista areas. The newspaper’s cofounder and editor-in-chief, Teodoro Petkoff, was a former Communist guerilla, which made his rejection of the Chávez regime all the more powerful.”

Vanessa’s second and third jobs were as a planner and financial analyst for what she described on her LinkedIn page as the “Venezuelan petrochemicals conglomerate Corimon” – while failing to mention that this huge corporate conglomerate was owned by her grandfather.

Vanessa Neumann’s next position was as an oil industry lobbyist at Venezuela’s embassy in Washington, DC. There, from 1994 to 1995, Neumann boasts on LinkedIn that she “Lobbied US government for oil industry interests.”

Hawkish government-backed think tanks help Vanessa Neumann try to link Venezuela to drug trafficking

Vanessa Neumann’s next move was to transition into the world of academia, NGOs, and think tanks.

As a PhD candidate in moral political philosophy at Columbia University, she used her dissertation to criticize Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and advocate for his removal.

Fresh out of school with a doctorate, Neumann enjoyed a stint as a “security analyst” focused on Latin America at the hawkish British think tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

The IISS is closely linked to the UK Ministry of Defence establishment, and is handsomely funded by the governments and militaries of dozens of Western countries, the top corporations in the arms industry, fossil fuel giants, and repressive Gulf monarchies.

In her book, Neumann says that it was at the IISS where she started the work that she would later become most known for: trying to link the Chavista government in Venezuela to drug trafficking.

Neumann worked overtime to establish connections between Caracas and the revolutionary leftist guerrilla groups in Colombia, which she simplistically demonized as “narcoterrorists.” Neumann blamed the drug trade on the socialist militias the FARC and the ELN, not the central Colombian government and the far-right paramilitary death squads that Bogotá supported. Neumann also accused Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution of advancing “its own imperialist agenda” in neighboring Colombia.

The drug-linked regime in Bogotá rewarded Neumann for her work. In her book, she boasted that “the Colombian government (which is conservative, pro-American, and anti-Chavista) invited me to come to Colombia, twice.”

A rising right-wing media pundit and her chihuhua

In the 2000s, Vanessa Neumann sought opportunities at Anglo media outlets eagerly seeking a Venezuelan voice to slam the up-and-coming President Hugo Chávez.

She started writing articles on Latin America for the neoconservative publication The Weekly Standard, which Neumann proudly described as one “of the leading conservative magazines in the US.”

Next, she went to work as an editor at Diplomat Magazine, and  joined the board of directors of the Latin American Herald Tribune, a right-wing English-language Venezuelan website.

In her book, Neumann gloated that she used the growing right-wing campaign against Chávez to “launch [her] political commentary career,” regularly appearing on the BBC, Al Jazeera, and of course Fox News to blame all of Venezuela’s ills on Chavismo.

Neumann’s growing interest in the press led to her eventual marriage to an influential British right-wing media mogul.

“In 2008 I married into a British family that was both political and journalistic,” she recounted in her book. “My father-in-law Bill Cash, MP, was a renowned Thatcherite Tory (a Conservative Eurosceptic); my husband, William Cash, was a writer and magazine owner.”

Never one for modesty, Neumann openly boasted that her “wedding reception was in the Speaker’s Palace of the Palace of Westminister, the UK Parliament, and was attended by the editor and owner of every single major UK publication, from the Financial Times to The Sun.” She added snidely, “except for The Guardian.”

Neumann’s marriage didn’t last. British tabloids reported that their relationship came to a disastrous end after just 15 months. The Daily Mail wrote that “Neumann – dubbed the ‘Cracker from Caracas’ after a fling with Rolling Stone Mick Jagger – fled on a one-[way] ticket to New York accompanied only by her pet chihuahua Pitoufa.” (Pitufo/a is Spanish for “Smurf“.)

The Mail added that “Neumann was already consult[ing] lawyers about a divorce and is planning to recuperate at her family home in Mustique” — a reference to the private island previously owned by her oligarch grandfather.

Neumann has referenced Mustique on Twitter, and has posted photos from the elite private island on her Instagram profile.

From Vanessa Neuman Inc. to Asymmetrica to a Petraeus stamp of approval

In 2010, the Venezuelan-American right-wing activist formed a consulting firm she named after herself: Vanessa Neumann, Inc. After a few years of work for corporate clients (which were “long-standing, legitimate, and huge,” she bragged in her book), in 2013 Neumann renamed the firm Asymmetrica, and declared “anticorruption” to be her new “personal cause.”

Neumann describes Asymmetrica on her publicly available LinkedIn profile as “specialists in strategic analytical risk reporting for Fortune 500 clients across sectors, covering: oil & gas, finance, manufacturing and consumer goods.”

She continues, explaining how her work was focused on bringing foreign corporations to Latin America:

“Asymmetrica’s Latin America division has a range of in-country specialists who empower us to bridge investment and partnership deals between Latin America and the world. Our extensive relationships across the finance and government sectors in New York, Washington, DC, Shanghai and Hong Kong enable us to bring foreign investors into Latin America and help Latin American businesses entering the North American and Asian markets to navigate the political, financial and regulatory frameworks in a complex global trade environment.”

On LinkedIn, Neumann touted an endorsement from former CIA Director David Petraeus, who complimented her for her purported skills in international relations.

Neoconservative think tank FPRI cultivates Vanessa Neumann’s career

One key constant that has remained in Vanessa Neumann’s career for nearly a decade is the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), a neoconservative Philadelphia-based think tank that is closely associated with the Republican Party and the US government’s so-called war on terror.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Neumann served as a “national security” senior fellow at FPRI’s Center for the Study of Terrorism from 2011 until recently. When exactly she stepped down is not clear, but it appears to be sometime in the past year, when she was kicked upstairs to her new position as the Venezuelan coup regime’s UK representative. FPRI played an outsize role in helping get her there.

Today, FPRI is funded by banks, corporate law firms, the Koch Brothers, billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and the government of Taiwan.

The think tank was founded at the height of the Cold War by avowed anti-communist Austrian-American diplomat Robert Strausz-Hupé, who served as a US ambassador for numerous Republican administrations.

For several years in the ’80s and ’90s, FPRI was directed by neoconservative activist Daniel Pipes, an infamous anti-Muslim demagogue and son of prominent former CIA analyst Richard Pipes. In a 1991 lecture at the conservative Heritage Foundation titled “From a Distance: Influencing Foreign Policy from Philadelphia,” Daniel Pipes described FPRI’s warmongering mission in frank terms:

“It may be helpful for me to make explicit the politics of FPRI. Put most baldly, we have always advocated an activist U.S. foreign policy; we have shared an abiding suspicion of the Soviet Union and other Communist states; and we have always maintained a strong interest in the promotion of democracy, free enterprise, and the rule of law. Perhaps most controversially, the professional staff is not shy about the use of force; were we members of Congress in January 1991, all of us would not only have voted with President Bush and Operation Desert Storm, we would have led the charge.”

FPRI was crucial in shaping Neumann’s career, helping her to market herself across the media as a purported expert on international crime networks and the drug trade.

In the 2000s, as leftist political movements won democratic elections throughout Latin America, in a wave known popularly as the Pink Tide, Neumann began to fashion herself as an expert on crime in the region.

Neumann was an early, prominent contributor to right-wing conspiracy theories, which have since become a popular weapon among conservative forces in Latin America, that try to link the socialist governments in the region to drugs and organized crime.

In her capacity as a FPRI senior fellow, Neumann published article after article, doing dozens of interviews on major media networks, claiming that the Chavista government in Venezuela was deeply implicated in international drug trafficking, in collaboration with leftist Colombian guerrillas, Iran, and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

This conspiracy theory was once fringe, repeated only by right-wing extremists in the Republican Party. But when Donald Trump entered the White House, and promptly surrounded himself with hardline hawks hellbent on overthrowing the leftist “Troika of Tyranny” in Latin America, the far-right fantasy was formally embraced by the US government.

In the past several years, an increasing array of corporate media outlets began citing Neumann as a supposed expert on global crime, and crime in Venezuela in particular. The Wall Street Journal relied on her for a dubious report on supposed Hezbollah money laundering in Latin America. CNN, Foreign Affairs, Al Jazeera, the New York Post, and the Council on Foreign Relations all quoted her as well.

Neumann became a regular fixture on Fox News, where she blamed all of Venezuela’s problems on socialism and argued Hezbollah is running ramshod across Latin America. When a violent US-backed coup attempt kicked off in Nicaragua in 2018, seeking to overthrow its democratically elected socialist government, Al Jazeera even brought on Neumann to point the finger at the leftist Sandinista Front.

With extensive links to explicitly partisan neoconservative organizations, Neumann worked her way up to a vaulted position as an advisor to the OECD Task Force on Countering Illicit Trade. Her consulting firm Asymmetrica even managed to get an endorsement from the UN Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate.

Neumann’s years of trying to link leftist forces in Latin America to organized crime culminated in 2017, when she published a book titled “Blood Profits: How American Consumers Unwittingly Fund Terrorists.”

This book was a straightforward product of her work at FPRI. The first line in the acknowledgements of the tome thanked the neoconservative think tank: “My earliest formation of the links between illicit trade and terrorist finance appeared in publications for the Foreign Policy Research Institute,” Neumann wrote.

Neumann rides Trump’s coattails to a faux ambassadorship

With the Trump administration in office and the State Department under the leadership of the right-wing militarist Mike Pompeo, Neumann’s work was finally taken seriously inside Washington’s halls of power.

In March 2018, a neoconservative group organized a conspiratorial panel discussion at the Rayburn House Office Building. It was titled “The Crime-Terror Convergence: Countering Hezbollah’s Growing Criminal Empire in Latin America,” and featured Neumann alongside former top CIA and DEA officials.

Then in May 2018, Republican Congressman Keith Rothfus sponsored another panel with Neumann’s corporate consulting firm Asymmetrica in the Rayburn House Building.

The event was held to mark the release of a new report Neumann had overseen called “Golden Hydra.” The study purported to explain how an elaborate $43 billion per year conspiracy involved Latin American drug cartels, the Chinese mafia, and Hezbollah. And, of course, Venezuela occupied a central role in the imperialist fever dream.

Neumann’s firm Asymmetrica received funding for the study from a neoconservative group called the Counter-Extremism Project, which Neumann thanked and listed as an event co-sponsor, along with the British-Venzuelan Society & Chamber of Commerce.

The Counter-Extremism Project was launched in 2014 as a spinoff of the anti-Iran group United Against Nuclear Iran, and featured a cast of the usual neocon suspects, including Senator Joe Lieberman and pro-Israel lobbyists Dennis Ross and Irwin Cotler. The organization has been funded by notorious right-wing billionaire Thomas Kaplan.

By 2019, Neumann seemed to be on the verge of achieving her ultimate goal of returning to power in Venezuela. The Guaidó coup regime and its patrons in the Trump administration awarded her with one of the most important ambassadorial positions.

And the conspiracy theory that she and so many other Latin American right-wingers had dedicated years to trying to prove had become the official line of the US government, which charged Nicolás Maduro and top Venezuelan officials with drug trafficking, and even went so far as to put out a $15 million mafia-style bounty on the president’s head.

Neumann also found an extremely sympathetic ear at the Organization of American States (OAS).

At an event back in February 2018 at the hawkish think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which is funded by a who’s who of Western governments and corporate arms manufacturers, Neumann met with OAS Secretary-General Luis Almagro. She lionized the coup-mongering OAS chief at the time as “our hero and liberator.”

Almagro later echoed the bizarre conspiracies that Neumann had helped fuel. In a maniacal speech for the pro-Israel lobby group the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in June 2019, the OAS leader claimed “Iran & Hezbollah, have a solid base of operations in South America in alliance with @NicolasMaduro’s narco dictatorship.” He declared that, if the coup attempt fails in Venezuela, “it’d represent a victory for terrorism, organized transnational crime, and antisemitism.”

Neumann gushed praise for Almagro’s remarks. “That’s exactly right, @Almagro_OEA2015,” she tweeted in response. “Iran & Hezbollah’s activities in Venezuela are of great concern to our friends in the Middle East, too.” Neumann then tagged the accounts of the Saudi embassy in the UK and the Saudi regime media network Al Arabiya, along with the UAE embassy and a Bahraini state media outlet.

By 2020, Neumann’s theories had earned a stamp of approval from NATO’s de facto think tank the Atlantic Council – which is funded to the hilt by the governments of the US and UK, the EU, Gulf monarchies, and the arms industry.

This January, the Atlantic Council invited Neumann to give a lecture called “Maduro’s ties to terrorism: Exposing the regime’s criminal network.” During her rant, Neumann wove an especially colorful conspiracy claiming Venezuela, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Colombian revolutionary guerrilla groups the FARC and ELN were all working together to oversee organized crime networks.

Vanessa Neumann’s Twitter account tweets “Death to Nicolás Maduro,” opposition promptly blames Maduro

Today, the UK government officially recognizes Vanessa Neumann as the ambassador of Venezuela – even though Guaidó and his coup gang control no institutions inside the country.

The Boris Johnson administration has thus rewarded the right-wing heiress not only for her viewpoints; it has protected her as she threatens American and British journalists with outlandish punishments.

On the evening of July 3, Neumann’s official Twitter account trumpeted “Death to Nicolás Maduro,” along with “the people will be victorious.”

Neumann’s Twitter account then chirped “They will never be able to silence the people.” The next tweet, in English, was “Anonymous in the house .”

The Venezuelan opposition promptly issued a statement claiming Neumann’s account was hacked. The Guaidó coup regime immediately pointed the finger at Nicolás Maduro, spinning an elaborate conspiracy without a shred of evidence.

“The attack on the ambassador is a response by the regime to the Government’s victory over the gold reserves in London,” Guaidó’s office tweeted from its official account. It was referring to a July 2 decision by a UK high court blocking the actual, internationally recognized Venezuelan government’s access to more than $1 billion worth of its own gold, which it had stored in the Bank of England, and which was effectively stolen from Caracas.

Neumann herself then doubled down on this conspiracy, immediately blaming Maduro. “We have reported to” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey that Neumann’s “account has been hijacked,” her company Asymmetrica tweeted. “This is being added to the file at the [FBI] for the threats to a US citizen from a wanted criminal with a $15,000,000 price on his head from @TheJusticeDept.”

Neumann’s consulting firm subsequently followed up, asserting that her account “has been kidnapped by agents or allies of Nicolás Maduro. This is being added to the file with the relevant authorities that is already open on threats against the US citizen by a criminal charged by the Justice Department.”

The Guaidó coup regime’s purported ambassador to Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, and Montenegro, Estefanía Meléndez, likewise claimed the alleged hack was a “cowardly attack from the dictatorship that won’t swallow the bitter drink of its defeat.” Neumann’s Asymmetrica retweeted this claim as well.

None of these Venezuelan opposition figures – Guaidó’s office, Neumann, Asymmetrica, and Meléndez – provided any proof whatsoever to back up their inflammatory accusations.

Vanessa Neumann’s consulting firm Asymmetrica threatens Western journalists

When Western journalists reported on Neumann’s tweet calling for the death of Venezuela’s president, her corporate consulting firm Asymmetrica sprung into action to threaten them with harsh punishment.

“Messing with @VanessaNeumann is messing with countries with strong intelligence agencies and rule of law,” Asymmetrica tweeted belligerently.

The Asymmetrica Twitter account clearly identifies Neumann as its president. Similarly, Neumann’s personal profile links to Asymmetrica, noting she is the founder. So it appears quite likely that Neumann was using the Asymmetrica page because she claimed to be locked out of her personal account.

Neumann’s consulting firm proceeded to melt down with a series of incendiary tweets threatening the journalists who reported on the violent tweet from Neumann account’s.

“Y’all ready for the consequences of being criminals?”, Asymmetrica tweeted, tagging the accounts of three journalists: John McEvoy, a UK citizen; Camila Escalante, a US citizen; and Pablo Navarrete, a British-Chilean reporter.

The Asymmetrica account exploded, claiming that it reported these three journalists to the FBI for being part of a supposed “criminal conspiracy against @VanessaNeumann, supporting” Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez.

“Welcome to the rule of law, guys,” Neumann’s Asymmetrica account tweeted ominously.

Asymmetrica’s Twitter temper tantrum was far from over. When the independent news website Venezuelanalysis criticized Neumann, her account shot back accusing the media outlet, along with journalist John McEvoy, of being “part of an indicted transnational criminal network with a price on your head.”

“Thanks for helping us nail you with the” FBI, it added.

Neumann’s consulting firm subsequently followed up on its threats against McEvoy, the British reporter. “You are now a target of the criminal investigation by the @FBI. Enjoy,” Asymmetrica tweeted.

“What’s the alleged crime? I’m genuinely intrigued,” McEvoy responded.

Neumann’s consulting firm then publicly accused the British journalist of “hacking” – once again, without even a pretense at providing proof for this defamatory accusation.

McEvoy called the baseless smear “laughable.”

“The @FBI don’t think it’s funny,” Asymmetrica retorted. “Have fun with your criminal buddies.”

McEvoy subsequently called the threats a “shameful, egregious, and frankly comical attack on journalism.” He also noted that Neumann has a history of threatening journalists and making outlandishly false accusations against them.

Vanessa Neumann hobnobs with global elites while presiding over imaginary Venezuelan institutions

Because the Guaidó coup gang governs no actual state institutions inside Venezuela (it even lost control of Venezuela’s National Assembly this January, when anti-Guaidó opposition factions voted them out), Neumann’s job in the past year has consisted largely of attending international conferences and meeting with right-wing foreign leaders and prominent oligarchs.

This January, Neumann and Guaidó met with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. On Twitter, Neumann echoed lavish praise for the conservative British leader.

A few days after this meeting, Guaidó traveled to Spain. Neumann joined him on the trip, where Guaidó also had a friendly meeting with the leaders of Spain’s neo-fascist Vox party. The president of this extremist neo-Francoist party, Santiago Abascal, publicly pledged to join forces to overthrow “the tyranny of Maduro and establish bonds against the Chavista mafia of the Sao Paulo Forum.”

Back in May 2019, Neumann posted a photo on Instagram showing her meeting with El Salvador’s new pro-US, social media-savvy President Nayib Bukele. They had gathered at the US State Department for the annual conference of AS/COA, a right-wing business organization that lobbies for the interests of US corporations in Latin America, and which is funded by those companies themselves.

Neumann has worked extensively with AS/COA over the years. The corporate lobby group has invited her to speak at events and promoted her book. Neumann has in turn publicly lavished praise on the organization for its undying support.

In September 2019, Neumann met with the ambassador of Kuwait.

Two weeks later, Neumann attended the elite global Concordia Summit. She posted a photo on Instagram standing with Cherie Blair, an influential neoliberal activist and former wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Neumann also met at the conference with Lilian Tintori, a major Venezuelan opposition activist and the wife of far-right coup leader Leopoldo López, the key political force behind Juan Guaidó and the founder of their extremist US-backed party Voluntad Popular (Popular Will).

In July, Neumann attended the Aspen Security Forum, where she met with her “teenage idol,” ‪‪Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state under President Bill Clinton who infamously declared that the death of more than half a million Iraqi children due to sanctions was “worth it.”

“Now I hope to glean some of her wisdom to help me fight for Venezuela’s freedom,” Neumann said of Albright.

When she isn’t posing for photo ops with prominent politicians, Neumann is active on social media, where she posts bizarre memes heroizing President Donald Trump and depicting Venezuela as his hair.

If an actual ambassador of any government promoted such a cartoon of their own country, they would invite ridicule and possible professional sanction. But most of the countries in the world don’t recognize Neumann as a real diplomat.

Though Neumann and her coup compatriots have failed entirely in their bid to wrest power from Venezuela’s current government, it seems she has fallen into an appropriate role.

The years that she spent as a wealthy socialite, hobnobbing with fellow elites in London and New York, prepared Neumann for her newfound role as the political equivalent: a star of a global reality TV show who has the opportunity to mingle with prominent political leaders, but without the burden of real power, and without the obligation to actually represent or govern a country.

thegrayzone.com

Diplomacy has been in the news quite a bit in late June. Yet it has still left many of us wondering if there is ever a real role for diplomats to play in this junk-news, social media-obsessed world which has reduced them to mere “waiters who are occasionally allowed to sit down” as Peter Ustinov once put it.

But Venezuela’s President Nicholas Maduro, who the West hates, has proved (contrary to my own thoughts) that diplomats are not entirely useless. Indeed, one could argue that they have a role to play – even a nefarious one – which is why he has thrown out of the country the EU’s own ‘ambassador’ in Caracas. Just recently the EU imposed fresh sanctions on 11 officials there, which follows an earlier ruse to topple Maduro, which involved an arms embargo enforced in 2017.

Maduro is simply getting tired of the dirty tricks that the EU is playing there which include recognising Juan Guaido as “interim president” despite no elections being held. Typically for the EU, any pretences of democratic leanings are dispatched into the long grass when Brussels doesn’t get what it wants – whether we’re talking about re-running referendums when the result is ’wrong’ or installing their own puppet as president in south American regimes which are aligned to their interests.

It was very good though of Maduro to arrange a plane for Isabel Brilhante Pedrosa though during a corona lockdown where all flights are cancelled. I wonder if this move will start a trend with the EU’s 120 or so diplomats around the world, who are mainly based in poor countries where they can bully local despots into signing up to their hegemony – and getting trade and aid in return.

In most cases though this won’t be the knock-on effect as local EU ‘ambassadors’ rarely hold their host countries to account on human rights atrocities. In Morocco where I live, for example, we haven’t heard a squeak out of the EU delegation in Rabat over a spate of journalists being arrested here on trumped up sex-related charges, or even the more sobering reports of the Moroccan government allegedly buying Israeli spy software and using it to bug journalists – denied firmly by Rabat of course.

The same can be said for the British ambassador here who is excremental in making video clips and arranging local media to interview him when the main subject is…himself. But not a word from Thomas Reilly on the local journalists. Given that Reilly hasn’t achieved a single thing for Britain in three years of extreme sycophancy of both elites in Morocco and the UK and is singularly incapable of pulling off one deal for UK businesses, one has to ask the question, what is the point of him?

Indeed, the Foreign Office in London have asked the same question and have concluded that he has to go in the coming weeks, cutting short his expected term by one year.

But it is a valid question. What is the point of diplomats in this age? What should their role be when, in Reilly’s case, all it amounted to be was naked self-promotion to gentrify himself. And yet, even at that, he seems to have failed.

The answer seems to be that they do have a role. It’s just not the one which is sold to us. They are not there to help stranded tourists (the UK embassy’s failure in Morocco is legendary as there are still British tourists as I write stranded here); their role is not to oil the wheels of international business as Reilly’s track record is null. And their role is certainly not to improve relations between their host country and their own. Relations between Britain and Morocco are so bad that the foreign minister in Rabat won’t see – or be seen – with Reilly, who, in turn, doesn’t even rate the gentleman as worthy of an official visit.

A lot of smoke and mirrors. But when you see through the fog, you see that diplomats today have a more disreputable role to play, when required. Just look at the Madeleine McCann scandal which is surfacing once again and examine the role of the British embassy in Portugal whose ambassador initially went to the holiday resort where Maddie was snatched and did his own snooping – with the conclusion that he recommends in a letter to the Foreign Office in London in 2007 that the government should distance itself from the McCanns who he suspects are complicit in their daughter’s death. What followed was a tawdry policy decision by Tony Blair which challenges the Ambassador’s findings (inconsistent witness statements) and kicks off the most corrupt campaign to support the McCanns and to put as much government resources into the ‘abduction’ theory as possible (which supports their innocence). John Buck, the UK ambassador there at the time must have asked himself what is the point of being an ambassador (when London has almost no regard for his point of view whatsoever) while many British people would question whether it’s correct of diplomats to investigate murders.

London didn’t want Buck to do any work unless it concluded in their own political agenda of supporting the McCanns and smothering any possible scandal which could disrupt the EU’s expansion process of going on at the time, The Lisbon Agenda.

And even today we see more examples of diplomats neither helping their own citizens, nor supporting their own countries industries – let alone smoothing relations between their own country and their hosts – but more involved in dirty work.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the EU was aligning itself with the U.S. over China. In recent days though that informal policy has become formalised into what could only be called an EU-U.S. ‘gang bang’ against Beijing. Goaded on by Mike Pompeo and amid a few denials, it seems that both these blocks are tag-teaming to present a double barrelled policy towards China, post corona. I’m certain diplomats have their hands sullied by this on both sides where they work surreptitiously before cleaning themselves up the next day to do a zoom interview by a local useful elitist idiot who showers them with torrential bullshit about their achievements and presents them with a cake and a candle.

Have a heart for the Lebanese who treated ambassadors of EU countries like superstars, without realising how they were being duped. Now, via twitter, more and more Lebanese are coming to me and regaling me about the utter impotence of EU and – in particular – the British ambassador in Beirut. As now mere spectators to an economy which is heading towards the Venezuela model, as for the first time, bread queues make the headlines, along with middle class Lebanese having empty fridges – the Lebanese reflect on the role of these diplomats. What are they doing? What is the point of them?

How long before the angry crowds in Lebanon vent their anger towards EU embassies and even the EU ‘delegation’ office itself when their unreserved uselessness becomes more and more evident? As each day passes, diplomats there become richer and richer as the local currency crashes but the ambassadors continue to draw their hard currency salaries. Soon only the hyper inflated food in the super markets will be bought by these diplomats while humble Lebanese starve.

Will people think about the role of diplomats then? Will they then be allowed to “sit occasionally” and eat magre du canard while middle class Lebanese can’t even buy bread? Will the starving Lebanese then begin to think of them as supporting the corrupt elite and therefore part of the problem itself?

Ben NORTON

Since the United States initiated a coup attempt against Venezuela’s elected leftist government in January 2019, an estimated $24 billion worth of Venezuelan public assets have been stolen by Washington and member states of the European Union.

President Donald Trump’s administration has used at least $601 million of that looted Venezuelan money to fund construction of its border wall with Mexico, according to government documents first reviewed by Univision.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump insisted countless times that he would “make Mexico pay” to build a gargantuan wall covering all of the roughly 2,000 miles (3,145 kilometers) of its northern border.

Unable to force Mexico to fund his $18 billion pet project, which has already cost an estimated $30 million per mile in southern Texas, Trump has turned to other questionable sources of financing.

Univision reviewed US congressional records and court documents and found that the Trump administration tapped into $601 million of the Treasury Department’s “forfeiture fund” to supplement the wall construction.

The United States has seized at least $1 billion of Venezuelan public funds that Washington in turn claimed were supposedly being stolen by government officials, according to Univision. This is in addition to the billions more worth of Venezuelan state assets that have been illegally taken over by the Trump administration, the most important of which is Caracas’ crown jewel, the oil refinery Citgo.

“None of that money… has been returned to the Venezuelan people,” Univision reported. “Instead, most of the money is being collected by the U.S. Justice and Treasury Departments and held in special forfeiture funds used mostly to fund law enforcement investigations.”

Right-wing opposition upset Trump didn’t give Guaidó gang all stolen Venezuelan money

The Trump corruption scandal has been almost entirely ignored by mainstream corporate media outlets. Univision buried its own scoop deep in a report that advanced the talking points of Venezuela’s US-backed right-wing opposition and reffered to the elected government of President Nicolás Maduro as a “widely repudiated regime.”

Univision, the largest corporate media network in the United States that focuses on Latino issues, is owned by billionaire-controlled private equity firms, one of the most prominent of whom is the Israeli-American oligarch Haim Saban.

Based in Miami, the de facto capital of the Latin American right, this massive media conglomerate acts as a mouthpiece for conservative forces and corporate interests across Central and South America.

The Univision article, titled “Legal battle over Venezuela’s looted billions heats up,” refers to unelected US-appointed coup leader Juan Guaidó as the leader of the country’s supposed “interim government.”

Univision also absolved the US and European countries of stealing billions of dollars of Venezuelan public money, justifying the theft with allegations of Venezuelan government corruption.

However, the fact that the report saw the light of day reflects a growing schism between supporters of the Venezuelan opposition and their imperial patrons in Washington. Univision was clearly upset that the Trump administration had not given the self-declared “Guaidó government” the money that it stole from Caracas.

“However, when it comes to who gets to keep the money from those looted assets, the U.S. appears unwilling to relinquish the cash,” Univision wrote in frustration.

The Guaidó gang’s blatant corruption

What Univision did not mention in the report was that the Juan Guaidó coup administration had already been exposed for numerous acts of corruption.

Top Guaidó operatives spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of supposed “humanitarian aid” money on fancy hotels, nightclubs, dinners, and clothes during a US-led coup attempt on the Colombia-Venezuela border in February 2019.

The Grayzone’s Anya Parampil also exposed how Guaidó allies oversaw a scam to liquidate Citgo, Venezuela’s most valuable foreign asset, essentially selling it off to North American corporations.

As for the billions of dollars of Venezuelan public assets stolen by Western governments, there is no sign of that money ever being returned to the Venezuelan people.

In his new book “The Room Where It Happened,” former Trump administration national security advisor John Bolton boasted that the British government “was delighted to cooperate on steps they could take” to assist in Washington’s coup efforts, “for example freezing Venezuelan gold deposits in the Bank of England, so the regime could not sell the gold to keep itself going.”

The Bank of England still holds approximately $1 billion of gold that it stole from the Venezuelan government, and has refused to give it back.

Future historians, when conducting the messy autopsy on Clown Nation, will point to the first week of February 2020 as the moment when the greatest experiment in popular democracy entered into an inescapable death spiral. This implosion will probably puzzle many people because, as the Commander-in-Chief Donald J. Trump reminded throughout his SOTU address, times are good – indeed, as they so often are before an epic crash.

Don’t know how you got all these lucrative primary election contracts for a sub-standard app that a drunk college student computer science major could have designed better. But there should be an investigation into that.

— Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) February 4, 2020

Just below the surface of the scorching U.S. economy, however, lies a bubbling volcanic lake of political passions – personified by Nancy Pelosi’s unhinged behavior at the SOTU that was so outrageous it needs no further comment – will eventually blow its lid, freeze-drying the nation in its treacherous tracks like a modern day Pompeii.

In the week that foretold of impending disaster, the establishment suffered two major setbacks, first by failing to drive out the swamp killer, Donald Trump, and second by failing to name, in transparent and time-honored fashion, the winner of the Iowa state caucus. These tandem events are connected since there is no way the ‘deep state’ would have accepted two major defeats at the same time. Thus it was forced to derail an enemy potentially more dangerous to the Democratic Party than Donald Trump, and that is the ‘democratic socialist’ Bernie Sanders.

Here is where America’s democratic mask slipped, revealing the true nature of the beast. As the results from the Iowa caucus were being tallied live, Mayor Pete Buttigieg enjoyed an early lead. Eventually, however, the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders started to close the gap before surging ahead of the pack. It was at this precise moment that the results fizzled out, purportedly due to a bad app. Not until the next day were the results made public as Buttigieg was declared the narrow victor, although the small-town mayor had been boasting that he had won the contest before any results were posted. Now to many observers, it looked as though the Democratic Party, sensing the winds of political change in the air, took their ball and stormed home in the middle of the game. Sound familiar?

At this point, a person could either choose to buy the story that a new app for reporting the results simply went kaput, or they could register as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ by arguing that the dirty Democrats rigged the game when it became apparent that Sanders was heading for victory. There are many reasons for supporting the latter theory, namely because the Democrats had conspired against Sanders before, as WikiLeaks revealed in 2016 with the release of some 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails.

The apps “failure”: Des Moines Precinct 80:

Bernie’s group had 101 people
Pete’s group had 66 people

Bernie & Pete end up tied at 4 delegates following a coin toss.

This is democracy??? #IACaucus pic.twitter.com/ZeekGiL6yM

— andthenwhat? (@NWcarol28) February 5, 2020

And then there is the company behind the app, happily named Shadow Inc, which has a very shadowy lineage indeed. First off, Buttigieg, who certainly profited politically from Shadow’s inconceivable incompetence, or expertise, depending on how you look at it, had paid the company tens of thousands of dollars ahead of the Iowa caucus. Second, many of the top executives at Shadow worked in the past for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, no small footnote considering that particular campaign’s notorious commitment to ‘fair play.’ Third, efforts by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to “vet” the Shadow app were rejected out of hand by the Iowa Democratic Party. Now with all of the talk over the past several years about ‘Russian meddling’ in the U.S. elections, wouldn’t allowing the DHS a peek at the new technology seem like the smart thing to do? Maybe Iowans, like so many other Democrats, never really believed the Russian “nothing burger” after all.

Finally, to round out the high creep factor, none other than George Soros, the global master of disaster himself, was the top investor in the dark company. Assuming Soros may have wanted some kickback for his investment, who better to see through his deranged global dream to fruition? The socialist stalwart Bernie Sanders, with his army of radical left-wing progressives, better known as the ‘Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse,’ or the malleable mayor from South Bend, Indiana? However, given that Buttigieg would likely to be eaten alive by Trump in any debate, the Buttigieg ‘victory’ in Iowa was probably just a pawn move in a far more complex game that will soon involve billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who will soon appear on the CNN debate stage together with Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer since the media mogul managed to have the rules of the game changed.

Meanwhile, Tulsi Gabbard, the Iraqi War veteran who is higher in the polls than Klobuchar, Yang and Steyer, got no invitation to the debates leading up to the New Hampshire primaries.

We sincerely regret the delay in the reporting of the results of last night’s Iowa caucuses and the uncertainty it has caused to the candidates, their campaigns, and Democratic caucus-goers.

— Shadow, Inc. (@ShadowIncHQ) February 4, 2020

From south of the border, the people of Venezuela must really be enjoying this American tutorial of democracy in action. In 2018, the United States declared the 2018 Venezuelan presidential elections, which saw Nicolas Maduro win reelection with 67 percent of the vote, “a sham.” It then moved to recognize Juan Guaido, previously a political stranger, the president of the South American country.

The arrogance of that meddling in Venezuela’s elections is greatly magnified when it is realized that the socialist country has some of the most transparent election technology in the world.

“Voters use a touch-sensitive electronic pad to make and confirm their choices,” wrote Eugenio Martinez in Forbes. “After confirmation, the electronic vote is encrypted and randomly stored in the machine’s memories. Voters audit their own vote by reviewing a printed receipt that they then place into a physical ballot box.”

In other words, chances of cheating in the Venezuelan elections, while not impossible, are exceedingly difficult. Americans, on the other hand, expect to get a receipt every time they buy a Big Mac at McDonald’s or a coffee at Starbucks yet receive zero ‘proof of purchase’ that they cast a vote in their increasingly shady elections. Thus, the comic timing of Guaido’s appearing as the poster boy for democracy at the SOTU, just one day after the Iowan debacle, was truly a spectacle far more revealing than Pelosi’s temper tantrum.

Ben NORTON

Max Blumenthal, the editor of the news site The Grayzone, was arrested on the morning of October 25 on a fabricated charge related to the siege of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC that took place between April and May.

A team of DC police officers appeared at Blumenthal’s door at just after 9 AM, demanding entry and threatening to break his door down. A number of officers had taken positions on the side of his home as though they were prepared for a SWAT-style raid.

Blumenthal was hauled into a police van and ultimately taken to DC central jail, where he was held for two days in various cells and cages. He was shackled by his hands and ankles for over five hours in one such cage along with other inmates. His request for a phone call was denied by DC police and corrections officers, effectively denying him access to the outside world.

Blumenthal was informed that he was accused of simple assault by a Venezuelan opposition member. He declared the charge completely baseless.

“This charge is a 100 percent false, fabricated, bogus, untrue, and malicious lie,” Blumenthal declared. “It is clearly part of a campaign of political persecution designed to silence me and the The Grayzone for our factual journalism exposing the deceptions, corruption and violence of the far-right Venezuelan opposition.”

The arrest warrant was five months old. According to an individual familiar with the case, the warrant for Blumenthal’s arrest was initially rejected. Strangely, this false charge was revived months later without the defendant’s knowledge.

“If the government had at least told me I had a warrant I could have voluntarily surrendered and appeared at my own arraignment. I have nothing to fear because I’m completely innocent of this bogus charge,” Blumenthal stated. “Instead, the federal government essentially enlisted the DC police to SWAT me, ensuring that I would be subjected to an early morning raid and then languish in prison for days without even the ability to call an attorney.”

Background to the embassy siege

In April and May, Washington-backed Venezuelan coup leaders began taking over properties in the United States that belong to the internationally recognized government of Venezuela’s democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro, in violation of international law.

A group of activists responded by keeping a vigil inside the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC, in order to protect it from an illegal seizure by the US-supported coup leaders. The activists formed what they called the Embassy Protection Collective. The internationally recognized Venezuelan government gave them permission to stay in its embassy, which is its own sovereign territory under international law.

In response, hordes of violent right-wing activists who support the Venezuelan opposition launched a de facto 24/7 siege of the embassy, preventing people, food, and supplies from entering the building.

The Grayzone reporter Anya Parampil and Alex Rubinstein, a contributor to The Grayzone, were embedded in the embassy with several peace activists.

Parampil and journalists including Blumenthal documented the right-wing mobs lashing out with racist and sexist invective as well as violence at Venezuelan solidarity activists who gathered outside the embassy to show support for the protectors.

The Secret Service is endangering the public with its dereliction of duty https://t.co/pMJIrj23Up

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) 8 мая 2019 г.

‘This ginned up claim… is simply false’

Court documents indicate the false charge of simple assault stems from Blumenthal’s participation in a delivery of food and sanitary supplies to peace activists and journalists inside the Venezuelan embassy on May 8, 2019.

The charge was manufactured by a Venezuelan opposition member who was among those laying siege to the embassy in a sustained bid to starve out the activists inside.

“I was not party to any violent actions around the Venezuelan embassy,” Blumenthal reiterated. “This ginned up claim of simple assault is simply false.”

According to court documents, Ben Rubinstein, the brother of journalist Alex Rubinstein, also participated in the non-violent and legal food delivery. Rubinstein was arrested over 12 hours later after the food delivery by Secret Service police officers.

He spent 20 hours in jail, alongside Gerry Condon, president of Veterans for Peace, who was arrested after being brutalized by Secret Service officers for attempting to toss a cucumber inside an embassy window.

“The opposition members made up these lies about Max and I know they’re lying, and they are obviously using the government and police as tools to get revenge,” Ben Rubinstein told The Grayzone.

Retaliation for The Grayzone’s reporting on the violent Venezuelan opposition

Max Blumenthal reported extensively from outside the Venezuelan embassy in May. He filed a story explaining how “the pro-coup mob outside turned violent, physically assaulting embassy protectors, and hurling racist, sexist and homophobic abuse at others.”

Blumenthal documented an opposition activist breaking into and subsequently vandalizing the embassy, in violation of international law. He also reported on opposition members destroying the embassy’s security cameras, while the authorities stood idly by.

To the left of the fascist is “Mohamed,” the right-wing vigilante who broke into the embassy two days ago and ransacked an entire room: https://t.co/eIEjlKj4M7@DCPoliceDept has taken no action beyond aiding and abetting this squalid mob https://t.co/RIQy5bkHZ2

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) 3 мая 2019 г.

The Venezuelan coup regime’s supposed ambassador to the United States, Carlos Vecchio, who is not recognized by the United Nations and the vast majority of the international community, helped to lead this aggressive mob as it besieged the embassy.

The Grayzone’s Anya Parampil exposed Vecchio to be a former lawyer for the oil corporation Exxon. The Grayzone has documented his close links to the US government, and has reported at length on accusations of corruption. Vecchio was a regular presence outside the DC embassy, appearing with his gaggle to stage manage the situation.

The Grayzone has also published numerous exposés on Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó, who was selected by the US government to be the so-called “interim president” in Caracas, detailing his extensive ties to Washington and his notorious corruption.

Blumenthal was arrested literally hours after The Grayzone published an article on USAID paying the salaries of Guaidó’s team as they lobbied the US government.

“I am firmly convinced that this case is part of a wider campaign of political persecution using the legal system to shut down our factual investigative journalism about the coup against Venezuela and the wider policy of economic warfare and regime change waged by the Trump administration,” Blumenthal stated.

If this had happened to a journalist in Venezuela, every Western human rights NGO and news wire would be howling about Maduro’s authoritarianism. It will be revealing to see how these same elements react to a clear-cut case of political repression in their own backyard.

thegrayzone.com

Let us contemplate what John Bolton, quondam National Security Advisor to US President Trump, had in mind for “restoring democracy” to Venezuela. We are familiar with the first phase: 1) accusations, 2) threats, 3) stunts, 4) “world community” recognition, 5) appeals for coup, 6) sanctions.

1) You know, Venezuela is one of the three countries I call the troika of tyranny. It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela. It’d be good for the people of Venezuela. It’d be good for the people of the United States. (January 2019)

2) All options are on the table. (January 2019)

3) After diverting aid needed badly by Venezuelans to Cuba last week (100 tons), and giving away billions of the Venezuelan people’s wealth to Cuba – now Maduro seeks aid from Cuba and China. All while denying the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis and rejecting aid at the border. (February 2019)

4) National Security Adviser John Bolton said on April 30, 2019 that what’s happening “is clearly not a coup” because the U.S. and many other countries recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president. (April 2019)

5) The FANB [Venezuelan military] must protect the Constitution and the Venezuelan people. It should stand by the National Assembly and the legitimate institutions against the usurpation of democracy. The United States stands with the people of Venezuela. (April 2019)

6) Bolton said the U.S. is “sending a signal to third parties that want to do business with the Maduro regime: proceed with extreme caution. There is no need to risk your business interests with the United States for the purposes of profiting from a corrupt and dying regime.” (August 2019)

Despite “corrupt and dying”, Maduro was still in power, still supported by the population, the “burning aid” stunt failed (when you’ve lost even the NYT…) and the Venezuelan military remains loyal. (Irony alert! Washington’s sanctions on Venezuela increased Russian oil exports to the USA and Europe!)

What would Bolton have wanted to do next? (Easy speculation – we’ve seen it before.) A “coalition of the willing” (no matter how artificial), US aircraft attack key targets with “precision” “surgical” strikes; (more strikes added until, à la Serbia, bombing random bridges 200 kilometres away from the supposed target). The bombing and destruction would eventually force Maduro to leave. Enter the “liberators”, the “legitimate National Assembly” takes power, the “world community” recognises “Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president”. With “democracy restored” and “freedom returned” the next stage: “American oil companies really invest[ing] in and produce[ing] the oil capabilities in Venezuela“, privatisation and IMF austerity. Happiness all round: “good for the people of Venezuela… good for the people of the United States”. Is Maduro still resisting in the hills and jungles? A surge or two will take care of that; there’s  plenty of light at the end of the tunnel and the obedient corporate media will bleat that Maduro will soon be gone: March, April, May, May again, August, September (The Latin America version of the Assad Must Go Curse.)

That would have been Venezuela’s fate with Bolton fully turned on. But Bolton has been turned off. Maduro is still in Caracas and the story has tip-toed off the front pages. Although Hollywood leaps to obey its Master’s Voice and Jack Ryan will save us from a nuclear-armed Venezuela.

The war party is accustomed to blame its quagmires on someone else. Iraq was a success until Obama spoiled it:

because Hillary Clinton failed to renegotiate a status of forces agreement that would have allowed some American combat troops to remain in Iraq and secure the hard-fought gains the American soldier had won by 2009, [the Islamic State] was able to be literally conjured up out of the desert.

Afghanistan likewise: Obama’s Failed Legacy in Afghanistan. Libya is far down the memory hole: an MSNBC special on Libya as the gateway of migrants to Europe never uses the word “NATO”.

To tell the story of Libya’s escalating migration crisis, one must weave together the threads of instability left behind by a toppled dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, and the power vacuum filled by rivaling factions vying to take his place.

But Qaddafi didn’t just topple in a high wind, earthquake or other random phenomenon: NATO decided to topple him and did so – “We came, we saw, he died” cackled one of the architects. But MSNBC wants us to believe that the destruction was an inexplicable random event that nobody could have foreseen. And so, helped by the corporate news media’s goodthink, the war party slithers away from responsibility: Qaddafi “toppled”, we have a problem; nothing to do with us, or NATO, or Hillary. Bad stuff just happens. “The story of how Kosovo hosted an illegal market in human organs began to unfold today in a district court in the capital, Pristina” is so distant in time that only fringe websites talk about it. As to the Ukrainian disaster, news is starting to leak through the complacency membrane: Canadian officials honour Nazi collaborators in Ukraine, angering Jewish groups, Biden involvement, blowback.

With their excuses and deniability clutched in their hands, knowing the complaisant news media will back them up (CNN: Biden and Ukraine is a conspiracy theory), the war party rolls along. The wars start well, given the US military’s immense destructive power, and then bog down: US war-fighting doctrine is hard-wired for failure. Bolton’s Venezuela adventure, had it advanced to the bombing phase, would also have been pimped as a “success” – Guaidó inauguration, selected interviews, toppling of statues and the rest of the package. But Maduro and his supporters would not have given up and there’d be years of patrolling, “precision” bombing (eventually indistinguishable from “carpet bombing” – see Raqqa), door kicking, IEDs, ambushes, training failures. Iraq and Afghanistan again. They, in their turn, having repeated Vietnam.

But Bolton’s Excellent Adventure never got to that point because Trump would not sign off on the bombing stage and so his scheme failed in plain sight. Let us remember what Trump said while he was campaigning: everyone would be better off had President Bush taken a day at the beach rather than invade Iraq; the “six trillion dollars” spent in the Middle East would have been better spent on infrastructure in the USA; NATO is obsolete and the USA pays a disproportionate share; it would better to get along with Russia than not. Bolton, on the other hand, was all in favour of the Iraq war, believed one more war in the Middle East would have been good, thought NATO was great, and Russia terrible. (There’s a rumour that Trump was considering easing the failed Iran pressure and Bolton’s objections led to his firing.)

So why did he appoint Bolton in the first place? A theory: Keep you friends close but your enemies closer. The late Justin Raimondo agrees: “Instead of taking on the neocons directly, Trump embraces them – and we can see the knife go in as this whole scenario plays out.” When it’s clear that everything Bolton had a hand in was a spectacular flop, he’s tossed out of the tent with the knife in his back.

But Venezuela was not Bolton’s only failure in plain sight: his “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran turned out to be much feebler than Tehran’s “maximum”: the strike on Saudi oil production. Note that, despite billions of dollars of weapons, air defence, radars and the like, neither Riyadh nor Washington has any idea of where the attack came from. Whether Iran did it directly, indirectly, at a distance, supplied some or all of the weapons, was entirely uninvolved or any other possibility you can think of doesn’t really matter: it’s checkmate. Lots of entities in the region are friendly to Tehran and so we can know that:

The attack was an amuse-bouche for what Iran

and its many allies could do

if Washington attacked it.

Another Bolton failure. Read his How to Get Out of the Iran Nuclear Deal and note that he assumes that Tehran has no response. The greatest blind spot of the war party is its assumption that Washington always has the initiative and that its targets can only feebly squirm. But Tehran has been on Washington’s hit list for four decades and it hasn’t wasted that time. A war with Iran will, I am certain, be the Last War for the Imperium Americanum because Iran will stop the oil and the world economy will stagger and probably fall. It has outwitted Washington every step of the way. If Trump really is a reader of Sun Tzu, he should reflect on “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle“. The war party overestimates US power and underestimates the enemy’s will. Succumbs.

Returning to Raimondo’s theory, Trump is now in a position to tell the war party “see, we did what you told us to and it was a complete failure”. Will he appoint people in tune with his campaign thoughts? Apparently not, Bolton’s replacement is more of the same: “peace through strength”, US military dangerously weak, Obama “emboldened our adversaries and disheartened our allies” and the rest of the unreflective claptrap.

This is all part of the Mystery of Donald Trump: on the one hand he surrounds himself with the war party, on the other he hasn’t started any wars. (Bolton was fired in Trump’s day 963; by contrast Obama attacked Libya on his day 788 and called for Assad’s departure on day 940.)

But the war party has painted him into several corners.

(How can he get out of the corner? Easy – just blame his “bad advisors” and do it. The Trump haters won’t think any the worse of him and the rest of us will be glad to step away from the endless war and give him credit for deviousness in a good cause. Or, à la Macron’s suggestion, he can surrender while pretending to have won.)

The recent executive order signed by US President Donald Trump encompasses all entities that do business with Venezuela, thus creating an embargo that will further isolate the nation, even as the US moves to open a “Venezuela Affairs Unit” unit in its embassy in Bogota, Colombia. The unit would engage in diplomacy with the US-backed Juan Guaido, who is recognised by the Trump administration and its allies as the purported interim Venezuelan president. Its aim, according to US Special Representative to Venezuela Elliot Abrams, is in anticipation of “the day this regime falls”.

In a report titled “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela”, it is estimated that 40,000 people have died as a result of the US-imposed sanctions from 2017 to 2018. According to the US, Venezuela poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to its national security – unfounded claims as Trump continues with overt attempts to bring down Maduro’s democratically-elected presidency.

Political pressure against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is instigated by the US, yet there is a backdrop of support from its allies in the region and, globally, from countries that spout the democracy line, even if there is nothing democratic about foreign interference.  While mostly in the background in comparison to the US, Canada has facilitated support for the Venezuelan opposition. In Europe, countries which have not explicitly backed Guaido have assumed an allegedly neutral stance which constitutes tacit agreement in terms of opposition support. The EU criticised US sanctions on Venezuela but has also threatened the country with similar punitive measures, as the European Parliament expressed its support for Guaido.

The international community is dominated by discourse that promotes foreign intervention according to the undemocratic agendas of the so-called democratic countries. Venezuela is urgently in need of a unified political strategy that stands in political solidarity against imperialist interests.

BRICS has positioned itself as one such alternative in terms of economic prospects, international security and stability. Russia and China have repeatedly affirmed their support for Maduro. South Africa and India have likewise followed suit. On the other hand, Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro is preventing BRICS from promoting a political discourse that fully repudiates US interference in Venezuela.

Contrary to the rest of the BRICS countries, Brazil recognised Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president and it has expressed support for the international community to pay heed to “Venezuela’s cries for freedom”. Brazil has also adopting measures in line with the Lima Group, as well as prohibited Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials from entering Brazil.

At the G20 summit in Japan, BRICS stated it supported dialogue between Maduro and the Venezuelan opposition to reach a solution. Yet the call is marred by the political divide between Brazil and the other BRICS members. This lack of consensus, including the divergence in terms of recognition of who is Venezuela’s legitimate leader, weakens its political diplomacy in the international arena. As Brazil aligns with the US, although reportedly holding back from endorsing military intervention in Venezuela, It is moving away from one of the organisation’s main aims, which is to establish itself in opposition to capitalist and imperialist exploitation.

In a recent interview, former Brazilian President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva expressed his disappointment at BRICS not moving further politically. “BRICS was not created to be an instrument of defence, but to be an instrument of attack.” If this momentum is to be built, BRICS needs to find equilibrium in its politics, rather than allow itself to be swayed into a seemingly neutral position due to the US allegiances of Brazil under Bolsonaro. It is not enough to preach dialogue like the rest of the international community have done while weakening Venezuela’s autonomy. BRICS must evaluate its relevance, especially when it comes to one of its members demonstrating political opportunism that is contrary to the group’s aims.