By Wayne Allensworth
For context and background:
- Parsing the “Golden Age” (Is This What You Voted for?)
- We Can’t Vote Ourselves Out of This (American Resistance)
- The More Things Change (Trump and The Epstein Files)
- The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Would Jesus Do?
- Globalist Hawks Want the Ukraine War to Continue
- The Global City and our Future: Organic Communities or “Last Men”?
The second Trump administration, which ran out of steam after its first hundred days, is rapidly becoming a disaster. For us, for the world. I wake up each morning wondering just who “we” will be bombing this week. The striking thing about Trump 47 is not the administration’s differences with its predecessors, but the continuity, especially, but not only, in foreign policy, which is very much in line with the globalist administrations of presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. I could go back further to President Bill Clinton’s bombing Yugoslavia or George H.W. Bush’s regime change operation in Panama in 1989. Just remember that Panama’s Manuel Noriega was a corrupt narco-gangster long before the Bush administration declared him so. He was a CIA creature who stopped taking orders from his masters. And, as Glenn Greenwald has observed, the flow of drugs to the U.S. did not stop or even slow down after his removal. Bush I was a former CIA chief and the Panama operation was about maintaining American hegemony in the emerging globalist “New World Order” he proclaimed. The biggest difference between Trump and the others is chiefly one of style, not of substance. He has embraced the regime-change wars he once condemned and appears to be all in for “nation building” as well, saying that the U.S. will “run the place;” that is, Venezuela.
Regime change has only produced long term disaster and nation building — witness Iraq or Afghanistan–is a utopian globalist project. Nobody asks the obvious questions: What comes next? And can Washington, which seems indifferent to serious problems at home, really manage the whole world? What happened to “America First?” What happened to Trump promising no more wars? Is America any safer, more stable, or better off because of these wars? And what happened to policing our own house?
Think about this: Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro is under arrest. But nobody who was involved in Jeffery Epstein’s network of high-level contacts is under arrest. Are “we” going to bomb England and take Prince Andrew into custody? The heavily-redacted Epstein materials released by the Justice Department in December are an insult to Trump’s own base, which wanted the truth — and justice done. But recall that Trump called those who wanted full accountability a bunch of stupid losers. Losers whose support he didn’t need.
Has anyone involved in Russiagate been jailed? Former FBI chief James Comey? Former CIA Director John Brennan? Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper? What about Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both of whom were behind an attempt to mount a political coup? For that matter, nobody who lied us into the Iraq war, or who kept the war in Afghanistan going long after the Pentagon knew it wasn’t winnable, has been held accountable.
As for blowing things up and killing people, “Dubya” is directly responsible for at least hundreds of thousands of deaths in the disastrous Iraq war. He destabilized the entire region. Obama signed assassination orders in the Oval Office, including for at least two American citizens. Did toppling the regime in Libya make the world a better place? Yet no one answered for those disasters as well. I could go on and on. The two-tier justice system is a major cause of public discontent — and something Trump promised to end, but didn’t because it serves his ends as well. Venezuela is a distraction, with Trump playing the role of the sheriff facing down the “bad guys,” while he protects criminal elites, Israel’s role in the Epstein saga and its genocide in Gaza. A lot of people are not going to buy his narrative.
Trump has been thumping his chest about stopping narcotics trafficking, behaving as if Venezuela was a major source of the drugs that have been killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. That’s a lie and plenty of people know it. The cocaine that has come out of Venezuela and Colombia, and is produced in other South American countries, is not the major killer. Those are opioids, and the epidemic began with doctors working for Big Pharma over prescribing them. Opioids have devastated the rust belt, something J.D. Vance chronicled so well in his autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy. Nobody in Big Pharma is in jail. Fentanyl is a major problem today, but the source is China via Mexico. Meanwhile, Mexican cartels are growing and shipping their products on and from American national parks. Open drug markets thrive in American cities. And so-called “NGOs” have been passing out needles to drug addicts living on the streets. A tunnel system under the U.S.-American border is a major channel for drugs. That’s not to mention drugs flowing over the Canadian border. If Trump wants to fight a drug war, the homefront is the most important one. Yet nothing has been done. Drug cartels operate across the country. Droning some narco-camps in Mexico would be nice, but the pivotal battleground is here.
More to the point, nobody is asking why there is such a big market for those drugs in the US. This country is gripped by a spiritual, economic, and social malaise that is in part closely connected to the gutting of American industry, the hollowing out of the industrial heartland, and the sense of despair and hopelessness that came with it. “Deaths of despair” are a reality. Trump promised to restore the U.S. industrial base, but his haphazard policies, or the lack of an industrial policy or strategy, hasn’t moved the dial. The tariffs may have positively affected some areas, but the trade deals Trump is so quick to claim as “wins ”— he’s all about perceptions, optics, and spin — are questionable at best. Trump can’t stay focused long enough to follow up on anything. Well, almost anything, but I’ll get to that.
Mass immigration has depressed wages and culturally fractured the country. That’s not to mention the vast number of illegal-alien grifters who have walked into this country and drained off benefits from state and federal budgets. Witness the debacle of Somali immigration to Minnesota. Trump has taken some very salutary moves to curb illegal immigration and deport illegals. But the battle with illegal immigration has distracted us from an even larger problem: legal immigration. Trump has betrayed us on H1B visas, which bring in foreigners to replace Americans in the tech, but not only the tech, industries. And the Americans they replace are forced to train them. Not only that, but Trump has gushed about the necessity of allowing in 600,000 Chinese “students” — China, a source of deadly narcotics, well known for stealing technology and using students as spies — into American universities. Our children are forced to compete with the whole world and Trump ignores it. Trump treats America as a business enterprise that holds no loyalties beyond its immediate needs, like cutting out more expensive American employees or pulling in tuition-paying foreigners.
While I’m on the subject of immigration, Trump’s Venezuela misadventure’s biggest cheerleaders are the “Venezuelan community” and the “Cuban community” in the U.S. Their loyalties are divided at best. At worst, they see the U.S. as a vast Sam’s Club they hold memberships in. Now the Cubans want Trump to order regime change in Havana, which poses no threat to the US. And he just may do it, in hopes of another “win.” But those groups are small potatoes next to Zionist Jews and their Ziocon enablers in America. One place Trump doesn’t lose focus on is the Middle East and guarding Israel’s interests. Trump blabs a lot about Israel, his pal Benjamin Netanyau, and his campaign contributor Miriam Adelson. Uber Zionists Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin love him for it, with Levin calling Trump the first Jewish president. Said Trump: “It’s true.” I’ve written about Trump’s Jewish family ties and loyalties before. “America First” is just a slogan. It’s Israel first and last.
Trump’s idea of American greatness amounts to maintaining superpower status. It had appeared that he was ready and willing to pragmatically deal with other great powers in a multipolar world as relative American power declined. Venezuela has been a target of the CIA, which, by the way, reportedly maintained ties to the very drug traffickers Trump is characterizing as “narco-terrorists,” as did Democrat and Republican administrations since a U.S. puppet regime was replaced by Hugo Chavez in the 1990s. Thus, Maduro is a billed as a communist boogeyman. U.S. oil company facilities were nationalized as the Venezuelans claimed the oil as their own. So Big Oil and the CIA have eyed regime change ever since. The neocons and neoliberals saw Venezuela as a challenge to global hegemony. Chinese, Russian, and Iranian political and economic ties to Venezuela have alarmed the globalists and Ziocons. So, Venezuela was targeted, not so much because it presented a clear and present danger to the U.S., but because in the global great game, the BRICs countries presented a counterbalance to the West’s and especially Washington’s hegemony. The Venezuela regime change operation is a warning to Moscow and Tehran.
Former intelligence officers Larry Johnson (CIA) and Scott Ritter (Marine Corps) discuss Venezuela, CIA actions and connections there, drugs, Iran, and Russia:
Globalists of all stripes, neocon and neoliberal, as well as Ziocons, need America to remain a base of operations and financier for their grand projects. None have any use for a real America First agenda or a more humble and realistic foreign policy that recognizes real limits on American power and a first responsibility to care for actual Americans. The Venezuela operation keeps the military machine oiled and ready for their use. War is the health of the Deep State.
Part II to follow.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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