Donald Trump is back in the White House and the artificial opposition is again on the agenda for the Western media and the Democratic Party. Whether it’s about criminalizing migrants, maintaining the “soft power” of the USA through USAID, downplaying antidemocratic power seizures, or trivializing the Hitler salute, the Mid-East establishment seems to be quite content with normalizing Trump or even surpassing him from the right.
There is no area where there is more consensus than in the imperial grand strategy of the USA, from leading a genocidal war in Palestine to the re-colonization of Washington’s “backyard” south of the Rio Grande. According to the anti-imperialist economic expert Ali Kadri, the accumulation of wealth through the devastation of the societies of the Global South by carpet bombings and/or economic blockade wars is the top priority.
Venezuela is no exception to this multifaceted attack. And the leading medium of the US empire, the New York Times (NYT), proudly leads the assault and recently advocated for the ousting of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “through diplomacy of coercion, if possible, or force, if necessary”.
High up on his own (imperial) throne
In a column with the combative title “Depose Maduro” (Remove Maduro), the NYT columnist, Bret Stephens, openly called for a US military intervention to topple the Venezuelan government on January 14. He described this textbook aggression as “overdue, morally right and in our national interest”.
For the self-described “warlike neoconservative”, this last point is of great significance. Especially, he claimed that the “national interest” of the USA requires “ending a criminal regime that is a source of drugs, mass migration and Iranian influence in the Americas”.
The irony that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the 1980s, in the framework of the Iran-Contra scandal, eased the cocaine trade in black communities of the working class, went unnoticed by the NYT columnist.
Then and now, the most important drug routes into the United States flow more over the Pacific than over the Gulf of Mexico. A DEA report from 2017 found that less than 10% of the cocaine entering the USA was transported through the eastern Caribbean corridor of Venezuela and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) came to a similar conclusion in a 2020 study.
Not only does the majority of the drug trade flow through countries allied with the USA, but the US government itself is largely involved in the maintenance of the multi-billion-dollar smuggling, as shown by its support for narco-puppet regimes in Afghanistan and Honduras.
In stark contrast, the USA has charged high-ranking officials from Caracas with “narco-terrorism” and even set a bounty on Maduro without presenting even the slightest evidence, as western media take the word of US officials at face value (BBC, 10.01.2025; NYT, 10.01.2025; Washington Post, 10.01.2025; AP, 10.01.2025).
Stephens lamented that the economic sanctions of Washington “had not worked” and his bounty “would not work” either. The columnist ignored the fact that the one-sided coercive measures, described as “maximum pressure” by US officials, had indeed been effective in weakening the Venezuelan economy, resulting in the deaths of at least tens of thousands of people and the migrant exodus, which he cited as a justification for his planned military adventure.
Such omissions regarding the responsibility of the USA for the Venezuelan migration are now a standard part of the reporting of the mass media (NYT, 31.01.25; PBS, 31.01.25; CBS, 02.02.25). Indeed, the support for Washington’s economic terrorism against Venezuela has been consistently united across the political spectrum of the USA for years.
Among the common tactics is to describe the sanctions as only affecting Maduro and his allies, or to portray their consequences as mere opinion of the condemned head of state.
The Iranian bogeyman
It is also no surprise that in Stephens’ casus belli, Iran appears, alongside the familiar conservative clichés of Latin American migrant hordes and drugs, which threaten the (white settler) US policy.
Stephens’ fixation on the Iranian bogeyman is remarkable, if not new. Western media have in recent years spread unfounded rumors about Iran’s secret military aid to Venezuela and the NYT has particularly disseminated fact-free claims about the Hezbollah’s alleged involvement in the drug trade through the Iranian-backed Hisbollah.
In the latest ente, Stephens claimed that Iran had “reportedly established a ‘drone development base’ on a Venezuelan air force base”. This story, however, originated from the rabid anti-Chavista Infobae on January 10, which didn’t even bother to describe its anonymous source. The report simply stated that “there are information” about this alleged base.
Regardless of whether the alleged defense cooperation between the two sovereign nations is true or not, the perceived threat, in accordance with the late Edward Said, is symptomatic of the ongoing obsession of Western imperialism with the “loss of Iran” since the 1979 revolution. Just as the Chinese Revolution was later to be portrayed as a global civilizational threat, the Islamic Revolution in Iran is still depicted as a never-ending “civilizing mission” to be imposed on the Global South.
But the effort to actualize the “axis of evil” with a reworked occupation of villainous states from Venezuela to Iran serves also to generate support for a military aggression against Tehran, which has been the ultimate dream of significant parts of the US political class and intellectuals, including Stephens, for decades.
Over elections and “tropical despotism”
It is remarkable that the script for Stephens’ Rambo sequel is over 35 years old: Stephens called for a US military intervention of the kind that in 1990 had quickly ended the regime of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, who was not coincidentally a former CIA agent involved in the Iran-Contra affair.
The depiction of the intervention by the highest warlord of the NYT is incredibly selective and omits the fact that the Central American nation was already occupied by US military bases and that the brutal bombing of the Afro-Panamanian neighborhood of El Chorrillo transformed it into “Little Hiroshima”.
But the cold reality is that Venezuela is not Panama.
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Armed Forces have been preparing for a “long, protracted people’s war against the US empire” for a quarter of a century and this includes the doctrine, organization, equipment and training.
If the USA and its Zionist colonial outpost have not been able to defeat the heroic Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip after almost 500 days of a genocidal war, a asymmetric conflict with a significantly larger and stronger military force on a territory more than 2,000 times larger is likely no serious undertaking.
Yet, it is the duty of all inhabitants of the imperialist center to bring the industrial killing machine of Washington to a standstill once and for all. This overarching strategic goal requires the systematic dethroning of the Goebbels-like propaganda of the NYT.
Ricardo Vaz is a political analyst. Lucas Koerner is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Caribbean History at Harvard University. Both work in the editorial board of Venezuela Analysis, an English-language online medium with news and analysis from and about Venezuela.